Metablog on Metafiction

Acknowledging Out-of-Class Literacies Creates Continuity

Taken as a group, young people today are reading more than ever before: surfing the internet, playing text-based video games, reading blogs, zines and fan fiction. They are writing more than ever before: designing webpages, sending text-messages and emails, and writing for social-networking sites, discussion boards, and blogs. Yet some teachers complain about a decline in literacy, a new informality to writing, a slip in spelling and grammar, a lack of organization, an inability to focus deeply on one topic for extended periods.

Do these observations suggest a drop in literacy or a change in literacy? A gap is widening between the reading and writing students are doing in their personal lives and the reading and writing they are doing for class. Text has changed, is changing, and will continue to change, no question about it. If teachers wish to improve writing quality, if they wish to deepen and expand it, if they wish to help student-writers develop the literacy skills they will need and use in the real world, then instructors must first acknowledge the new kinds of writing that many student-writers are doing.

As a caveat to these broad statements, not all young people have access to computers. The digital divide continues, although discussions about it are fading. Of those who do have access to computers, most engage in some of these activities, but few are the overall techno-wizards educators sometimes imagine them to be. For those who do not have access or have not developed technological literacies, exposure to these tools is even more important so they can keep up in an increasingly digital world.

For our class blog, Lothlorien Watkins wrote a post called “Confessions of a Fanfic writer, D&D Player” in which she stated very clearly the importance of bridging out-of-class and in-class literacies: “If we accept as fact that the more literary events you engage in, the more literate you become, then isn’t it strange that we limit the variety of literary events valued in school? What if all acts of composition were at least encouraged and acknowledged? Think of the effect it might have on a student’s sense of agency and authority, as well as supporting the development of an understanding of one’s own ideological situatedness as a writer and a reader, and general textual savvy” (Watkins).

Lothlorien makes several important points here, first and foremost, that all writing is beneficial in developing literacy. As a parallel, imagine what would happen if we tried to limit the spoken utterances of a toddler. If we allowed only serious, articulate and meaningful statements, a child would never learn to speak. Unless the child can play with language and adapt speech to various contexts and needs, she will never be able to develop the skills needed to chair a meeting or give campaign speech. The same is true of beginning writers. They must be encouraged to experiment with writing in a variety of contexts for a range of purposes. Lothlorien also points out that acknowledging these new types of writing can give students a sense of “agency and authority,” or motivation and personal power, and can help them understand their “ideological situatedness,” or the culture, class, gender, religion and other background factors that determine in large part how they write and read.

Acknowledging the writing students are doing outside of class, creates continuity in agency, identity and voice. How will students be motivated if the writing they choose to do is ignored? The New London Group stated, “There is ample evidence that people do not learn anything well unless they are both motivated to learn and believe that they will be able to use and function with what they are learning in some way that is in their interest” (quoted in Anderson 40). Invalidating the forms of writing students are doing on their own undercuts or kills motivation in students who see academic writing as being utterly unconnected with the kind of writing they are interested in.

Alex Reid, in a blog post entitled, “What Composition is For and Why Digital Media is Integral to It,” wrote, “What we can know with a higher degree of certainty is that [students] will write for online spaces. Of course this writing is often very, very short and highly informal. But it is the one writing practice they actually elect to pursue. My suggestion is that by incorporating digital composition into [first year composition] we can make connections between their current elective writing practices and other writing practices that they might choose to adopt” (quoted in Ching). In other words, rather than invalidating the writing students are choosing to do on their own, incorporating it into a composition class can actually help students transfer this motivation to academic writing.

The New London Group also suggests that students must understand the applicability of education to their real lives, they must recognize that they “will be able to use and function with what they are learning in some way that is in their interest.” Why should students learn composition if they cannot see that they will ever use the forms being taught beyond the classroom? By including these other modes and genres, teachers can help students recognize that clear, exact, detailed, persuasive writing is beneficial in any form of text. Moreover, students must be shown how academic writing will help them in their careers, for many of them will have to write in a variety of forms such as memos, emails, and reports. Presenting composition only as a necessary tool for the university belittles the importance of writing.

Acknowledging the validity of out-of-class writing and, if possible incorporating it in the class in an honest and transparent way encourages the development of a holistic, but fluid writing identity. “Writing is related to representations of the self,” Viola Lasmana wrote in a post entitled “The Writing Self Being Written: Textual Beings in Online World,” “as students write and compose texts in online platforms, they also have to be mindful of how they represent themselves textually, visually, and digitally in the content and knowledge that they’ve produced online.”

The question of self-representation becomes more urgent online where the potentially limitless audience “creates a tension for the contending categories of private and public selves.” In other words, online writing navigates a tricky borderland between the private and public lives of an individual. Writing, if it is to have any authenticity, must arise from a person’s private self, yet a writer, especially online, must also create a public persona. Teachers should assist students in moving gradually from the private world to a public space. Continuity between everyday and academic writing will help students negotiate this complex shift of identity. Instead of separating personal and academic identities, inclusion of new media can help young writers create an “incipient sense of self in the discourses of one’s field,” as Geoffrey C. Middlebrook suggests in “Educational Blogging: A Forum for Developing Disciplinary and Professional Identity.”

Writers, however, are not just translating themselves into writing or shifting their private personas into a public realm, they are creating new identities. Identity in the digital age is open to experimentation, often blurring real and fictional identities. One blogger wrote, “I have an ongoing story. But I think we have several ongoing stories. I also think that if we bear in mind a particular audience, we change our story to suit them and this changes our notion of who we are according to our audience (Blogtrax 2005b)” (quoted in Davies and Merchant 178). This is an astute observation that a writer’s identity shifts depending on audience.

She goes on to say, “I am subject and object of the work; and interestingly because I am writing about blogging I sometimes do stuff so I can blog it. In this way the blog influences my life; it does not simply record aspects of it (Blogtrax 2005d)” (Davies 179). In other words, identity does not produce writing, but writing creates identity. In this case, Blogtrax’s real life is influenced by the blog she is writing, so writing precedes action. As writers experiment and play with identity online, Danah Boyd said they “write themselves into being” (quoted in Buckingham 10).

This authoring of identity is not a solo act either, in reference to social network sites, Chris Gerben states that “student-users are not simply co-authoring a text, by writing on each other’s profiles they are co-authoring each other” (Gerben 3). Traditional identities are less stable in the modern world; once based on culture, country, class, religion and gender, these categories are less limiting or defining. The internet allows more personal choice, as people connect with others from all over the world from widely different backgrounds, not limited by geography. Not only are new identities being created, but new communities and new affinity groups are coming into existence.

Incorporating new technology in classwork can also help students develop a personal voice, an aspect of writing generally overlooked by writing teachers. If academic writing is severed from everyday writing, voice will always be artificial. Often student-writers think that they must affect an artificial, academic voice that results in stilted, opaque prose. Acknowledging and incorporating new technologies can help students adapt their own personal voices to different purposes and even levels of formality while retaining their own unique sound. Perhaps the digital age is the time to change the tone of academic writing in general, which too-frequently arises from a “nobody” speaker, in a dry, emotionless voice, lacking rhetoric and style.

Writing for new media challenges traditional borders between the academic and non-academic by blurring “distinctions between the serious and the frivolous” (Anderson 169). Speaking of the kinds of writing that were most effective on blogs, Charles Tyron wrote in “Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First Year Writing” that “humorous forms of argument were often more successful than the professional discourse readers might encounter in other contexts” (Tyron 130). Teachers should encourage students to try out different voices, to write both seriously and playfully, to mix the serious and the frivolous, to play with the borderland between academic and non-academic writing. New media provides an open environment ideal for experimentation with voice.

The most significant reason to bridge in-class and out-of-class writing is to allow true learning to take place. Sugie Goen-Salter, in a talk about the Integrated Reading and Writing Program at SFSU, states that true learning can only be “acquired through existing frameworks or schemata.” Educators have long recognized that new knowledge can only be built onto older knowledge, it can’t be shoveled into students’ heads without connecting it to what they already know. What’s more, students must be able to “adapt existing knowledge to new situations” (Goen-Salter).

In other words, students must be able to transfer what they know to new academic contexts and they must know that what they are learning can be carried out of the class and applied to other situations. Finally, Goen-Salter suggests that for true learning to take place, students must able to reflect on the learning process, to practice metacognition. New media offers unique opportunities to keep stores of writing materials in a single, accessible site, so that students can look back over their writing and see what progress they have made.