The New Writing Pedagogy

It's been almost 40 years since the teaching of writing in schools had its last major shift, a move to an emphasis on the "writing process," which still holds sway in most classrooms today. But with the advent of Web-based social networking tools like blogs and wikis, YouTube and Facebook, it may be that the next revision of writing pedagogy is upon individuals, one that emphasizes digital spaces, multimedia texts, global audiences and linked conversations among passionate readers. Research shows that students are flocking to online networks in droves, and they are doing a great deal of writing there already, some of it creative and thoughtful and inspiring, but much of it outside the traditional expectations of "good writing" that classrooms require. How educators begin to teach students to flourish in these more complex, online social spaces is a fundamental question many schools are beginning to tackle, not necessarily because they want to but because they realize the very nature of writing is changing. That change is spelled out clearly by the National Council of Teachers of English, which last year published "new literacies" for readers and writers in the 21st century. Among those literacies are the ability to "build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally," to "design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes," and to "create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts." In this article, the authors discuss the new shift of writing instruction and pedagogy which uses social networking tools to keep up with student interests.