Dakota Writing Project

by Michelle Rogge Gannon, University of South Dakota

 
The National Writing Project held a conference entitled "Teaching Writing in the 21st Century: An Exploration of New Practices and Literacies" on June 17-19, 2007, in Baltimore. I was one of approximately sixty educators from around the country who accepted the invitation to attend. My immediate goal was to bring back to my site, particularly the teachers attending the DWP Summer Institute, ideas and information that might be useful to them for their teaching and their own development as technology users. A long-term goal was to think about how DWP currently fits into NWP's vision of teaching writing and technology and what that might mean for our future work.

Sunday night, at the opening cocktail reception and dinner for the conference, we discussed together an article published in Language Arts, "Exploring Freedom and Leaving a Legacy: Enacting New Literacies with Digital Texts in the Elementary Classroom." The article centered on a first-year teacher who worked with her fifth-grade students to create a CD entitled "Exploring Freedom," in which they explored a variety of complicated social issues, using various forms of technology.

It was exciting to read about what a savvy first-year teacher could do, of course, but the conversation that happened at tables around the room led to some interesting insights into this article. Our group talked a good deal about the use of language—what is meant by "new literacies" exactly? What exactly is meant by "spatial modes" and what does that term encompass that others such as "textual, visual . . . audio, and gestural modes" do not? Although we did not reach any firm conclusions, just asking these kinds of questions led us to think more deeply about the article and the work of this teacher. Even though we have been talking about technology in education for decades, we're still struggling to name things, which makes it challenging to discuss the work that's happening, as well as its significance.

Monday morning, I attended a case study entitled "New Bottles: Blogging in a Social Network" by Paul Allison. I found the session both fascinating and inspiring. Paul shared the weblogging work that he had done with his students, in grades six through twelve, at a New York City school. He carefully scaffolds their assignments, having them do preliminary writing in Google Docs, use others' blog and podcast entries to deepen their thinking and inspire further writing, and work through additional steps that involved revising, editing, and, eventually, publishing. We could see how one student started out with only a rough paragraph that eventually became a much more in-depth discussion of her topic. Below is an online version of the presentation that he did that morning.

Paul's presentation led me to rethink how I use weblogging and other forms of technology in my classes. In particular, I was impressed by 1) how he treated writing as a process, with some familiar steps (prewriting, drafting, revising), but involving new and different forms of technology and 2) how he worked within the communities established for some of the work (reacting to others' weblog or podcast entries, for example). It was, indeed, old wine in a new bottle.

The next morning focused on case studies with the theme of "Looking at Student and Teacher Networking." I was in the session in which a group of teachers from the Bread Loaf School of English presented their work, including Gail Denton, Dixie Goswami, Sel Sax, Mary Guerrero, Ceci Lewis, Brendan McGrath, and Marty Rutherford. They posed two key questions:

• How might teachers of writing in the twenty-first century help young people become effective, confident, and ethical users of new media and digital resources in and out of classrooms?
• How do new literacies build on traditional research, narrative, and critical analysis skills?

Presentation after presentation, each teacher emphasized how being part
of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network (BLTN) helped them with their
classroom work. Shel Sax, who is the Director of Instructional Technology at Middlebury College and the Director of Bread Loaf Teacher Network Technology, talked about Breadnet, an online community of Bread Loaf teachers and their students, that uses FirstClass software. Teachers and students are able to connect with one another in this online network. Teachers are also able to post lesson plans in an online folder, allowing teachers to share their ideas for classroom projects.

All of the presentations were wonderful, but I'll focus on the work of two of those teachers here.

Gail Denton, an eighth-grade Language Arts and English teacher at Riverside Middle School in Greer, South California, shared an article she wrote that discusses, among other things, how her students wrote poems inspired by their study of Robert Frost and the sonnet form. Her entire article, in fact, emphasizes how taking Bread Load classes served as a source of inspiration for the work she did in her own classroom. She also highlights the power of Breadnet, which provided opportunities for her students to share their writing beyond their own classroom.

Gail also provided a document called "Love That Online Poetry!" in which she analyzes her students' email and creative writing. As she comments on their email exchanges, she includes reflections that use the structure of "I NOTICE. . . . " and "I WONDER. . . . " With the "I notice" statement, she describes what she sees happening in the exchange. With the "I wonder" statement, she asks questions about what the students are learning and about changes she might need to make, such as having them change partners or getting the students to move beyond the comfort of their safety zones with reading and writing.

Finally, Gail shared an article called "Love That Dog," about a six-week project in which her eighth-grade students paired up with DeeAnne Kimmel's students at an elementary school for an online exchange . Students maintained a poetry journal,  discussed several assigned poems and poetic forms, and wrote their own poems. Toward the end, the students participated in a discussion about Sharon Creech's novel Love That Dog. High school students from Carolyn Coleman's creative writing class responded to exchange messages posted by the younger students. All in all, it was inspiring to learn about Gail's online work with students and teachers and how Breadnet helped in this process.

I was also struck by Brendan McGrath's presentation. He and his middle school students from Aleknagik, Alaska, created electronic portfolios of the students' work. They worked with Aleknagik elders as part of the project. They also worked with Bread Loaf teachers and other educational leaders on BreadNet. A highlight of this project: Brendan and twelve of his students from Aleknagik traveled to the National Museum of the American Indian In Washington, DC to share their work and present a book about their culture and school life. What is especially striking is how the Aleknagik people have long held a tradition of oral history publishing but have now ventured into new territory with this project, utilizing digital media and the online support of educators and others interested in the project. Of course, they also, in the process, created a worldwide audience for their work. You can read Brendan's article about this project, "Where is the Pinnacle," in the fall 2006 issue of Bread Loaf Teacher Network Magazine at http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/blse/breadnet/magazine.

In reflecting upon this event a month later, I feel that while we might be struggling to name and classify accurately various aspects of technology and how that technology changes writing, teachers and students are, nevertheless writing and creating in ways that stir the imagination. Students have larger audiences for their writing, and they're learning and writing in ways that just a few decades ago were not possible. To my way of thinking, everyone benefits--the students, the teachers, and any larger audiences they allow to experience the work they're doing.

The Dakota Writing Project is doing some of this same work as well. Educators in our project have been working online with students in spaces like Nicenet, Google.Docs, and various weblog spaces. In particular, I can see the power of collaboration that emerges when educators are able to work with other educators. Lil Manthei (Takini) and Dixie Linn-Norberg (White River), for instance, are two DWP teacher-consultants who worked online in Nicenet in a student exchange between Takini and White River. Karen Rahn (Rutland) also implemented an online exchange with another teacher using Google.Docs and is planning to do so again this coming fall. I like to think that Lil and Karen's participation in the DWP Electronic Writing Marathon helped to lay the foundation for these endeavors. I also recognize that DWP might want to consider how we can continue to support this work through online networking, to allow for these forward-thinking educators to reflect on their work, to take it to the next level, and to share what they're doing with other South Dakota educators.

I believe this will involve some careful thinking on our part about how we can grow and sustain such a community. While we do have a community of DWP educators, I believe that the very deliberate kind of reflection and discussion that happened at this conference also needs to be built in for DWP, particularly with respect to these new practices and literacies.