Digital Writing Assignment Ideas!

This is my third post in a mini-series of posts I am writing on 21st century literacies in the modern high school classroom.  My first post explored the idea behind what it means for a student to be literate in today's post-high school environment, focusing on the roles of technology and globalization in current academic and career workplaces.  My second post focused on digital writing in particular, discussing the worth and complexity involved in rhetorically sophisticated digital composition as well as how those digital compositions can be used to teach writing in the classroom. For this post, I'd like to lighten up the heavy mental lifting for a bit and discuss some practical and accessible assignment ideas for bringing digital writing into the classroom.  I found several of these ideas in Joan Lange, Patrick Connolly, and Devin Lintzenich's article in the English Journal; their article stresses the idea that digital assignments "build essential skills for success in college: developing curious minds and an ability to analyze and synthesize ideas to communicate insights with an audience."  Their article focuses exclusively on the use of digital writing in teaching Shakespeare; however, their assignments are relevant for use with most readings!

• Text Message Paraphrases - This assignment asks students to select a portion of a play or dialogue in a novel and paraphrase the conversation into a text message conversation.  Emojis and gifs are fair game.  The goal is to have students connect with the literary dialogue and make it their own by putting the words into a conversational diction in which they are fluent and comfortable communicating.  This activity encourages close, careful reading of a text as well as exploration of tone and emotion behind the words being said.  It also makes sometimes removed or complicated texts feel real, personal, and relatable.

• Facebook Profile Page for a Literary Character - In this assignment, the teacher will have created or found a Facebook profile page template.  Students have to choose a character and create a profile as if they were that character, selecting which bands they like, their favorite quotes, a profile picture, and their bio.  Lange explains that "this exercise challenges students to emulate tone and diction associated with a character."  It also pushes students to insightfully analyze an author's characterization in order to make decisions and assumptions as to what that character would like or dislike, who their friends would be, or what they would sound like.  Jane Mathison Fife has actually written about how Facebook pages are fairly sophisticated meaning-making devices, making strategic appeals and communicating messages about an individual to a wide audience.  She holds that using Facebook as a classroom tool in order to get students thinking critically about the strategic, communicative functions of social media has the potential to connect the study of literature and rhetoric with their daily lives. This assignment asks students to perform a literary analysis of a character within the situational context of a popular and familiar social media site. (The esteemed Megan of Breaking Grad(School) has shared this perfectly suited Facebook profile page template for classroom use with this assignment!)

• Tweet a Summary - Any tweet on Twitter cannot exceed 140 characters.  This is a fairly limiting constraint; and yet, Twitter is frequently used to express complex political, philosophical, or social sentiments.  In this assignment, students are asked to summarize a recent reading in one paragraph.  Once this has been completed, students are asked to review their summary and condense it into a tweet.  This tweet would capture the main idea and heart of the reading in 140 characters. This asks students to identify the main message or purpose in a composition and put it into their own words in a conversational genre with which they are very comfortable and familiar.

Lange's article discusses many of these digital writing assignments as helpful pre-writing activities.  They encourage students to slow down, search for textual clues and connotations, elaborate on their ideas about a text, and develop complex, textually-supported trains of thought that they can then proceed to use in more traditional writing assignments.  When working with students who are not particularly comfortable with the text at hand, assignments like these, which rely heavily on literacies that students are fairly fluent in, can give students the confidence they need to wrestle authentically and connect with a new text.  These assignments also build digital and computer literacy, which, for high school students, is an increasingly invaluable skillset.  Not to mention, they just look like a ton of fun!

The Academic Value in Digital Writing

In my last post, I started a discussion on the 21st century literacies that modern students must acquire in order to be prepared for their post-high school lives.  These literacies require students to achieve flexibility and fluency with multimedia composition, technology, and collaborative writing.  In this post, I wanted to continue this discussion by taking a look at digital writing in particular.  Educating our students to read and write skillfully in digital forums equips them to meet the challenges of what the National Writing Project calls "our information-rich, high-speed, high-tech culture." Just so we're all starting on the same page, the National Writing Project defines digital writing as...

"compositions created with, and often times for reading or viewing on, a computer or other device that is connected to the Internet."  

This can include blogs, Facebook, twitter, emails, texting, and a wide range of social networking and media sites.  All of these forums I have just listed are entirely digital, but ask participants to engage in fairly complex and sophisticated rhetorical situations.  They are genres in their own rights, requiring students to think critically about their choices as readers and writers.  Despite the complexity of these digital writing genres as well as their increasing importance in today's career and academic spheres, they are often dismissed in the high school classroom as unimportant, nonacademic, and distracting.

I would like to offer up a few reason as to why I believe that digital writing should not be dismissed, but rather encouraged as a tool with immense potential to help equip our students with modern and relevant literacies in the 21st century.

1) As teachers, one of our goals is to get students writing or reading in their daily lives.  I have witnessed a wide variety of strategies and even outright bribes on the parts of teachers engaging in the very noble attempt to infuse their students' lives with reading and writing.  Meanwhile, seemingly unnoticed, reading and writing in the digital spheres has permeated adolescent life extensively.  A new study by the Pew Research Center found that the average teen sends 60 texts a day. Internet Live Stats has a live and running count of how many Google searches were performed each day and the number is regularly well into the 3-4 billions.  Facebook's Newsroom stats show that, in December of 2014, they logged approximately 890 million daily active users, all of whom were reading and writing social interactions.  As Kathleen Yancey points out, "Note that no one is making anyone do any of this writing." I'm not entirely sure anyone needs too much convincing on this front, but teens are reading and writing somewhat constantly in digital forms.  Let's harness that.

2) Despite the fact that faculty and students alike disregard digital and social reading and writing as recreational and often detrimental with regards to student literacy, most digital writing platforms actually provide particularly unique and complex communicative situations that have the potential to carry real value into non-digital genres.  Twitter's 140-character limit could be considered to be a fairly advanced exercise in precision and conciseness in composition.  Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook's hashtag culture provides a very unique glimpse into the function of audience in our composition and how awareness of that audience shapes our compositions.  The dialogical structure of emails and forum sites presents a unique opportunity to explore the social nature of writing.  Texting, which relies heavily on emojis and gifs, provides a very interesting glimpse into the flexibility and functionality of multimodality in our compositions.  All of these composition exercises are fairly advanced and, with correct channeling, can serve to enrich and deepen students' overall skills in composition and reading.

3)  One of the things that sets digital writing genres apart from traditional print texts is the incredibly collaborative community in which this writing takes place.  The previously mentioned Krista Kennedy has said, “the simple fact that digital spaces do not require human bodies to be present in the same place at the same time opens up additional possibilities for all collaboration types.”  Blog posts, social networking sites, and academic forums all engage in worldwide, collaborative writing.  Returning to the NCTE's definition of 21st century literacies from my opening post, students must be able to "build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively."  Digital writing creates an incredibly powerful platform from which to launch students' ability to work collaboratively and cross-culturally.

4) Teaching reading or composition using digital writing is not necessarily a departure from already existing reading or composition teaching methods; it merely offers a unique and effective tool to help students gain valuable experience in necessary modern literacies.  While the unique affordances of digital writing genres create new opportunities for creativity in composition and collaboration, the ability to assess a rhetorical situation, compose a response, and then engage in an ongoing dialogue is and remains a fundamental concept in the writing process.

The ways in which digital writing can be brought into the classroom are numerous and oftentimes more accessible that it first seems.  It would be unrealistic and overwhelming to suggest that ELA teachers everywhere overhaul their lesson plans so that they take place in digital realms.  Much more reasonably, current teachers could begin to slowly incorporate these increasingly necessary skills into their already existing curricula, adding a low-stakes digital assignment or a digital option for an assignment into their lesson plans.  The important point here is to start somewhere in helping align our classroom assignments and environments with the real world challenges our students are going to face.

An Exploration of Literacy in the 21st Century

As high school English teachers, one of our major goals is to create literate students, equipped with flexible and complex writing and composition skills.  We want students to enter colleges and workplaces with a certain competence in formulating and articulating their thoughts, responses, and ideas.  But, in our current era of digital, globalized communication and technological workspaces, what does writing even mean anymore?  What does it mean to teach composition to modern students in ways that prepare them to function expertly in today's society? In their 2013 position statement, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), took a stab at answering those questions by attempting to define what it means to be literate in the 21st century.  Their definition pays close attention to the ways in which technology in particular has complicated the idea of literacy for our students, creating a need for students with multiple literacies capable of meeting the diverse needs of today's diverse society and culture. Their definition goes on to explain that...

"Active, successful participants in this 21st century global society must be able to

• Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology;

• Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought;

• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes;

• Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information;
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts"

The overall theme here and elsewhere is that writing is becoming increasingly screen-based.  Creating literate students, skilled in writing and composition, in the 21st century necessarily involves incorporating technology and digital writing.  Understanding this more complicated view of modern literacy creates an infinite number of new possibilities for writing pedagogy in the high school classroom.  Krista Kennedy points out that "the need to create assignments that reflect the reality of contemporary writing environments remains a pressing pedagogical concern, along with the need to prepare students for workplaces that are increasingly reliant on digital, global communication, and collaborative labor."  As high school teachers developing curricula and assignments intended to prepare our students for their post-high school lives, we need to allow this evolving understanding of 21st century literacies to shape the pedagogical choices we are making.  Digital writing genres such as blogs, twitter, email, and forums are now academic and rhetorical composition situations with which a literature student must be comfortable and confident.  Our assignments must increasingly focus on developing discerning creators and interpreters of multimodal compositions, including composition using images, sounds, and video.  Regardless of our comfort level with the idea, literacy for today's high school students means something different than it has meant historically.  In order to best serve our students, we as teachers have to adapt our expectations and classroom designs to meet this new understanding of a literate individual.

Over my next few blog posts, I'm going to be exploring some possibilities as to what it looks like to bring this 21st century definition of literacy into the high school English classroom.  I am planning on posting some of my research and ideas surrounding digital writing in the classroom as well as a few of the multimodal projects I have been working on as part of my graduate coursework.  My goal is to share some of my exploration into what literacy looks like for modern high school students and to join in the ongoing conversation of educators who are working through the complications of this new and rich pedagogical landscape.  As always, please do comment, ask questions, criticize, and/or correct!

The Genre of Hip-Hop Literature

I work in an urban, ethnically diverse school system.  My students have a more difficult time than most connecting with canonical classics such as The Scarlet Letter, A Tale of Two Cities, and 1984 for a wide variety of completely legitimate reasons. It is no big secret that I harbor something of a grudge against the exclusive use of canonical texts in the American classroom; more on this in a prior blog post.  I am a massive supporter of bringing non-traditional, non-Western, non-canonical texts into the high school curriculum whenever possible; I think it is an extremely important issue.  In general, this is why I am so excited by and impressed with Lauren Leigh Kelly's 2013 article, "Hip-Hop Literature: The Politics, Poetics, and Power of Hip-Hop in the English Classroom." Kelly's article explores the merits of using hip-hop texts in a high-school English classroom not just as a gateway into more canonical literature, but as a "genre worthy of independent study" (51).  In Kelly's opinion, using hip-hop texts as nothing more than a stepping stone to bridge the gap between student knowledge and canonical texts only further isolates many students from accepted canonical texts while privileging the predominantly white, Western culture of the canonical texts over the diverse, multicultural nature of hip-hop music.  In order to teach literature students, particularly urban and low-income students, to recognize the power behind their own individuality, personal experiences, and cultures, Kelly holds that it is necessary to teach hip-hop texts as a literary form in their own rights without juxtapositioning them against the traditional, Western canonical works.  Kelly argues that to deprive modern students of the opportunity to analyze and study literature from this genre not only deprives some students of the opportunity for identification and creation of ownership in a text, but it robs all students of the opportunity to learn about a relevant and culturally diverse art form that plays a major role in modern pop culture.

I am a big believer in using genre awareness to teach literature and composition; I also believe that it is important for students to explore genres outside of those seen as traditionally literary.  In order to understand the social and cultural nature of genre development, it is critical to analyze both academic and well-known literary genres as well as modern, more recent genres that play a larger role in pop culture.  Kelly's assertion that hip-hop literature is a genre in its own right fits well with the definition of genre that I hope to incorporate into my classroom curriculum.

Kelly stresses at several points that non-white students often feel disrespected and isolated in classrooms that focus exclusively on texts from a white, Western literary tradition.  Hip-hop literature finds its roots in a much more culturally diverse tradition that has the potential to appeal to a swath of students that may otherwise disengage from classroom activities based on their cultural heritage and feelings of underrepresentation.  In my future classroom, I would like to incorporate texts that offer students of non-white backgrounds the opportunity to see their own images and cultures portrayed in a literary work while also offering white students a chance to broaden their expectations for and experiences with literature and cultural traditions.  Hip-hop literature provides a culturally relevant and accessible way to do this.

Finally, hip-hop texts encourage students to exercise and develop fairly complex literary skills while engaging with material that appeals to their authentic, non-academic interest areas.  I believe that it is imperative to construct unit plans in a way that helps students take what they learn in the classroom with them once they leave the classroom.  An essential goal in teaching genre theory as a gateway to literary skill is to help students understand the social and developmental nature of genres and be able to apply that understanding to genres they see in their day-to-day lives.  Analyzing the genre of hip-hop literature provides a way for students to practice literary analysis on a literary art form that they are already familiar with, have a respect for, and interact with in their nonacademic lives.

Pros and Cons

I work in a public school district, making this my February break.  I don't have to go to work this week!  This is a pro. I am a grad student taking 3 classes while working full time.  My vacations are spent entirely on homework.  This is a con.

I get to work on my homework in this coziest of spots with the most delicious of chai teas.  This is a pro.  Possibly two pros if you count the chai as its own pro.

Overall, the situation nets at least one pro.  Life is good :)