I heard about this new report, Writing in the 21st Century, by Kathleen Blake Yancey,  from Yankel on his blog and am very grateful for the link. The paper traces perceptions of writing and theories of teaching writing (Yancey uses the term ‘composition’) through  the 20th century and into the 21st century.

One of the main points she raises is that writing has never been respected or emphasized in society (and education) like reading. An interesting reason for this is presented. Yancey suggests that this is connected to the use of reading to convey messages (social, religious, political…). Reading is associated with control, writing can be used for self control.

Another interesting point is the place reserved for reading in the family and the community. Reading is associated with warm memories of story reading, church gatherings etc and memories of writing are more likely to be associated with difficulty or loneliness. The historical connection between writing and the labour of text production is also discussed.

The place of writing in testing  and the role of testing in the teaching of writing are explored.

I like the way each part of the report concludes with a remark about writing outside school. Despite what happened (or didn’t happen) in writing classrooms, people continued to compose. The same is true today. One of the challenges facing us  as teachers is to learn from our students what they are doing with writing outside the classroom in social contexts a) in order to learn from them about what interests them and motivates them to write and b) to force us to search for writing projects which are based in social contexts and are relevant and exciting.

New models of teaching writing must see writing as an intellectual activity done in social contexts. If we use the technologies available to us and believe in ourselves as teachers and our pupils as developing writers, the sky is the limit. The author uses a term coined by Deborah Brandt, “self-sponsored writing”. I wonder how we can give this writing more attention in the classroom in order to encourage it, applaud it and allow it to motivate our students in their “school sponsored writing”.

As I experiment with blogging in the classroom, I am convinced that that has the potential to form part of a new curriculum which takes into account that writing has changed, is changing and that many of our students are actually writers.