Building Bridges From Classrooms to Networked Publics: Helping Students Write for the Audience They Want

Abstract

Research about adolescents sharing creative writing in interest‐driven online communities has suggested that teachers can play important roles in helping young writers realize the potential of online spaces. Framed by sociocultural notions of new literacies and a conceptual framework theorizing the rhetorical situation when sharing writing in networked publics, this instrumental case study examined the design and implementation of a high school elective course supporting students to critically analyze and participate in online creative writing spaces. The authors collected observation, interview, and artifactual data and then analyzed them inductively to generate testable assertions about how bringing together the potential audiences in classrooms and networked publics affected writing instruction and the writing act. Findings revealed how controlling the makeup of audiences raised privacy issues, cultivating interactions with audiences required persistence, and conceptualizing audiences affected these students’ writing. Suggestions for designing writing instruction to include networked publics and recommendations for classroom‐based research are shared.

Språk i skola, på fritid och i arbetsliv: Aktuella arenor för svensk forskning inom tillämpad språkvetenskap

“…olika sätt att använda skrivande, på fritiden har till stor del fokuserat på vad och i vilka syften ungdomar skriver (t.ex. Grover m.fl., 2016;Lammers & Van Alstyne, 2019;Vaughan, 2020). På fritiden kan exempelvis skrivandet vara ett sätt att knyta och upprätthålla sociala kontakter, men även ingå som en central del i ungdomarnas kreativa och identitetsskapande utveckling (se t.ex.…”

“…och fanfiction(Curwood m.fl., 2013;Lammers & Van Alstyne, 2019).Skrivhändelser i form av sms verkar däremot vara desto vanligare i ungdomars vardag. I en svensk enkätstudie av 300 gymnasieelever genomförd avBellander (2006) framkom att 39 procent av flickorna och 20 procent av pojkarna skickade sms dagligen, samt ytterligare 40 respektive 35 procent skickade sms varje vecka.…”

Broadening Student and Teacher Participation: Multimodal Projects in a Classroom Affinity Space

“…The digital nature of multimodal compositions makes them particularly sharable both inside and out side classrooms, giving students opportunities to com pose for audiences beyond their teachers (Hutchison & Colwell, 2014;Lammers & Marsh, 2015;Nash, 2018). In openly networked (Ito et al, 2013) classrooms in which teachers have connected their classroom spaces to on line affinity spaces, students shared their writing with wider audiences (Lammers & Van Alstyne, 2019). Other research has revealed that although students were able to share their writing with wider, online audiences, sometimes receiving constructive feedback, they pre ferred feedback from their classroom peers with whom they felt less vulnerable (Magnifico et al, 2018).…”

“…Online affinity space writing research has consistently offered implications for teachers to implement similar practices (e.g., Magnifico, Lammers, & Fields, 2018) with a reshaped notion of affinity spaces suited to traditional classroom settings (Bommarito, 2014). Yet, few studies have documented teachers actually implementing these practices (Lammers & Van Alstyne, 2019; Marsh, 2018).…”

“…When what counts as English language arts writing is taught as alphabetic composing to satisfy narrow academic requirements, student in terest and classroom participation can wane (Coppola, 2020). Although research has established that incor porating multimodality expands modes of knowledge representation and student engagement (e.g., Beach, 2012), opens opportunities for identity expression (e.g., Jocius, 2017), and allows sharing with audiences (e.g., Lammers & Van Alstyne, 2019), less is known about how these affordances work together to increase options for expanded participation in school based writing.…”