Putting It All Together: Collaborative and Integrated Reading and Writing
Introduction
Scholastic writing used to be disconnected. From research: reading and writing took place in different spaces at different times. From other writers: writing was a solitary activity. From previous steps of the process: each piece of writing produced along the way was discarded. From a real audience: students wrote to prove something to a professor who claimed they were engaged in an imaginary “academic discourse.” From authentic purpose: writing ended up in the garbage can and all the student’s hard work, knowledge, insights and craftsmanship were wasted.
For some time, educators have stressed the importance of student-centered classes and active learning, but in actuality most of the traditional patterns of teacher-centered classes continue with little essential change. Teachers dump their knowledge on passive students and then students write for their teachers. The digital age, however, offers many new tools for integrated and collaborative research and writing, making the aim of student-centered learning an achievable reality. For the purposes of this paper, “integrated” refers to bridging out-of-class and in-class writing, combining reading and writing, and validating the various steps of the writing process. “Collaborative” suggests not only that writing has become a much more social activity, but, most importantly, that work has a real audience and therefore has authentic purpose.
The aim of this paper is to consolidate information and insights from classwork, class readings, a class blog and my own blogging experience during spring semester 2010 for Teaching Writing in the Digital Age, a class taught at San Francisco State by Kory Lawson Ching. I cannot hope to synthesize all the material we read and discussed, so I will focus on practical advice that I can carry away and apply to text-based classes of composition, literature or English as a Second Language. To limit the scope of this already-too-broad paper, I will not go into visual or multi-modal compositions or other kinds of new literacies such podcasts and gaming, although I think they can be adapted effectively to classes with a writing focus.
