Yes, students should learn to write for a variety of purposes and audiences, as it says in our writing standards, but the options for various audiences at school have always been limited by the social environment. Ah, but we have the internet now, and I’m thinking about how my students’ development as writers can be nurtured when ‘audience’ has so many new possibilities, and when topics aren’t constrained by traditional authority structures.

In order to reach an understanding of writing for a digital age, it may help to look at the traditional models of writing development in order to gain a historical perspective. Alternative Models of Writing Development, by Arthur N. Applebee from Perspectives on Writing (Roselmina Indrisano and James R. Squire, editors) offers a good overview of the traditional approaches to writing instruction.

Applebee found that conventional writing development involves a combination of four different instructional strands:

  • purposes for writing,
  • fluency and writing conventions,
  • the structure of the final product,
  • strategic knowledge.

When looking at purposes for writing, we need to recognize that school writing has traditionally included both literary and expository texts, each of which leads to different ways of making meaning. Expository writing begins for children at an early age with their natural expressive language, and becomes increasingly formalized as they get older, when writing is used to satisfy curricular goals.

Fluency, regardless of purpose, is another common instructional focus for writing in school. Grammar, punctuation, and spelling are all components of written language that fall into this category.

Emphasis on structural patterns have guided writing instruction as well, and have addressed various forms such as compare/contrast, comment and elaboration, the five paragraph essay, and genre studies. Applebee mentioned Australian Genre Theory in this context. Explicit instruction in text genres has been linked to concerns for social justice, and democratizing pedagogy, under the assumption that the explication of various genres is key to success in schooling, since it might enable writers from disadvantaged cultural backgrounds to master written forms that are considered requisite for attaining positions of power in society.

Strategic writing, the subject of my previous post, is sometimes known as process writing. Instruction in “the writing process” commonly emphasizes the various steps toward a final product that a writer might use, which typically (from an instructional standpoint) include prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing. There are also meaning and decision-making strategies that include more than just writing, and which were the subject of my earlier thinking about the kinds of knowledge writers use.

In general, getting students to use strategies for any official purpose has been problematic, since it requires unconventional assignments to stimulate creative decision making. Applebee speculated that ordinary tasks, such as those required on school assessments, don’t present students with challenges that are compelling enough to induce them to use composing strategies. In my experience, students don’t use these writing strategies voluntarily because they don’t see them as strategies, but as hoops to jump through to satisfy the teacher and complete an assignment.

A limitation common to all of the traditional instructional models, according to Applebee, is that they are implemented outside of an authentic context. He proposes an alternative model for writing instruction situated in social action which may prove fruitful in guiding us toward an instructional stance which is relevant to contemporary needs. He summarizes this position as a matter of learning how to take action within a domain:

Taking action within a domain involves learning the genres that structure it as well as all of the kinds of knowledge previously discussed—fluency, appropriate uses of language, structural knowledge, and strategic processes. It also requires, however, knowledge of content and procedures appropriate to the domain—that is, knowledge of what is interesting and important and relevant in order to partake in the ongoing conversation about significant ideas….If we want students to participate in important conversations, then we must help them write in ways appropriate to those conversations. And we must judge their development as writers in terms of their ability to participate with increasing effectiveness in an increasingly wide array of culturally significant domains for conversation (Applebee, 1996).

So, the challenge is to develop and maintain conventional writing skills, and to help students understand how to “write in ways that are appropriate to those conversations” that we want them to join. Those conversations are to be found in the traditional disciplines of academia, but they are also to be found in the transit of cultures that the internet so effortlessly allows. Our job as teachers has never been more richly promising, because we’ve gained the capability to effortlessly bridge both time and distance.

Our job as teachers has also never been more frustratingly confounding because students will have to be freed - at least occasionally - from their role as students, and learn to assume other points of view. They can also be citizens sending emails to politicians, as product reviewers, as movie critics, as screenplay writers, as comedians, as historians, or as social activists for their pet causes. To understand the relevant conversations, students are going to need to both read and write as they monitor a variety of information sources, to listen and speak, to plan and report in ways that encourage independent thinking.

What are the literacy practices that make sense for students now? I’m looking for the most basic basics. They will emerge, first and foremost, out of the oral text that is the core of all learning, the discourse of the classroom. Tom Hoffman’s suggestion for a theoretical model is appealing because it’s language-based, rather than method, or technology dependent, and I believe that writing grows out of our natural expressive language. Honest purposeful expression is always a form of social action.