"I think contributing our own perspectives, on different topics, to see our generation's point of view will help the audience connect more." A student in my high school dual credit English 101 course declared this on an exit ticket after we had brainstormed and discussed ways to engage the world with our writing. Writing for authentic audiences is nothing new, but the explosion of digital publishing platforms means students can now do more than write letters to a friend, relative, or state representative.
As a class, we were going to build an online magazine to host the content that students generated throughout the year. This digital magazine, which students named Millennial Mentality, was a way for us to authentically practice the skills of locating textual evidence, evaluating arguments, and synthesizing information. It wasn't even the second week of school, and we were excited to create something together that was real and would motivate us to keep writing, revising, giving each other feedback, and publishing so that the world could hear our voice and have an invitation to respond.
When teachers and students work together to design a course around a shared set of educational values—writing for an authentic audience, leaving space for all voices in the conversation to be heard, and purposefully engaging many of the controversial issues of our time—the class becomes so much more than a repository for learning content and skills. Instead, it is driven by a shared purpose: to communicate with others, consequently expanding the opportunities for writing across the disciplines. Digital literacy facilitates this drive to communicate.
Call and Response
I was in my first couple years of teaching in a one-to-one district, where every student had her own laptop, when I read Troy Hicks and Kristen Hawley Turner's article "No Longer a Luxury: Digital Literacy Can't Wait" (2013). In it, they argued that "digital literacy is no longer a luxury, and we simply cannot wait to build the capacity in our students and colleagues, as well as ourselves." They called on teachers to "have the courage to take on new roles," and to "dump the dittos, throw out the workbooks, and remix our teaching for a digital age." It was a call to action that inspired me to imagine ways to revolutionize my classroom—to do class differently than it could be done without the devices.
I started by having students create their own blogs, but I found that quite a bit of class time was taken up with questions on how to design the blog (not necessarily a negative, just not the focus of my class). Students would ask how to create a blogroll or add features to their blog instead of discussing author's purpose or argument construction. I had to try something different. I decided to create an online magazine so that the class could publish content together and focus on the writing, not the design of the magazine. To facilitate this focus, we settled on using medium.com for our magazine. The features of the site are standardized, so writing the articles was the priority, not designing the magazine. We were on our way to creating texts that not only changed the way my class functioned but also changed the way my students interacted with writing in school. They grew to see themselves as a community of practicing writers, working together with a shared purpose for composing.
This shift must occur in our classes. Especially now, with the Common Core State Standards calling for students to approach technology with critical eyes, students must learn to negotiate "the strengths and limitations of various technological tools and mediums" so that they "select and use those best suited to their communication goals" (National Governors Association for Best Practices, 2010).
There never seems to be a loss of topics for students to write about, but last school year was particularly filled with headlines that my students were ready to learn about and critique: Ferguson, Islamophobia, immigration reform, gun control, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, college admissions, gay rights, and gender. Implicit in this, of course, were assignments designed to give students both the freedom to explore the issues they were interested in and the opportunity to improve through revision and think about how to shape texts for the web versus for teacher review.
Adopting a Millennial Mentality
Starting a digital magazine for the class resulted in students taking their traditional academic papers and remixing them for the web, learning what it means to digitize a text in the process. For example, students learned to connect with readers by using images, relevant hashtags, and links to resources that extend the topic. Recently, I heard from a former student who is pursuing a journalism degree at Marquette University. She told me how she was using skills learned in our writing class to publish for university students. In fact, she had just published a piece that built off a paper she remixed for Millenial Mentality. For her, the freedom to research and write about topics of interest, for an authentic audience, sparked a curiosity that continues to grow. "The class allowed me to become more informed about a ton of topics I'm interested in," she noted. If we seize the opportunity to revolutionize writing practices in our schools, turning our attention toward writing for authentic audiences and freeing students up to respond to the issues of our time, students will deepen their digital literacy and be prepared for any writing situation they encounter in and long after they have left our classes. This will require difficult conversations among colleagues across disciplines, but the lasting changes will be worth the effort.
