Author(s): Lammers, Jayne C., Judith H. Van Alstyne
Published: November 2018 in Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy
URL to article
Research Focus Area: Opportunities for students to create authentic work for real audiences beyond the teacher
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.
Research Question(s):
How does bringing together the potential audiences in classrooms and networked publics affect writing instruction and the writing act?
Methods:
Interview, Intervention
Setting:
an independent school serving nursery to 12th grade in the U.S. Northeast This study was conducted in the last three weeks of the school year when the school offered a menu of classes from which secondary students chose three to take concurrently. This allowed the researchers to take the course to self-selected high school students for a short term.
Key Findings:
- Classroom activities helped students understand the practice of writing for particular networked publics.
- The researchers found that incorporating networked publics into the classroom
- challenged teachers and students to negotiate privacy issues
- disrupted assumptions about the audience interaction available in online writing communities.
- Assertion 1: Controlling the makeup of Audiences raises privacy issues
- Networked publics are spaces where writers can remain anonymous and choose when and whether to share their writing. Honoring the practices of such spaces in classroom settings means grappling with issues related to privacy.
- Adolescents often appreciate the anonymity afforded by networked publics, and students expressed strong desire to keep their writing private.
- Assertion 2: Cultivating audiences requires persistence
- Instant feedback may be possible in networked publics, but it takes time to cultivate an audience.
- Although tesearchers often tout access to an engaged audience as a benefit of networked publics, most the students in the study experienced little to no audience engagement in their online spaces.
- Assertion 3: Conceptualizing audiences supports the writing act
- When students examine the quality of writing shared and the modes and content of feedback available in an online space, they gain valuable insights about the networked public.
- Writers’ analyses of their potential audiences informed their choice of space and their strategies for participation within that networked public.
- Tensions arise around what to share with whom as students decide how much of themselves to reveal in their networked writing. Teachers must negotiate such tensions as they consider how to honor the practices of both networked publics and school-based assessment.
Implications:
The researchers recommend that literacy educators find opportunities to incorporate the values and expectations of networked publics in assessing students’ networked writing. They make the following suggestions. Educators should:
- Expose students to different online spaces, such as Fanfiction.net, Wattpad, and Archive of Our Own, and guide their analyses of the networked publics.
- Have students create profiles in networked publics, and design opportunities to support students’ networked writing throughout the year.
- As part of a semester- or year-long literacy class, facilitate frequent revisits of this topic by
- encouraging students to continue reading, writing, and reviewing in their online spaces
- soliciting students’ reflections about their experiences;
- offering creative writing assignment options for individual or group work throughout the year
- welcoming students to share fanfiction they find based on texts read in class or other self-selected readings.
- Provide minilessons on audience, feedback, copyright, parody, remix, creativity, and other topics to inform students’ networked writing.
- Use Google Forms, or another anonymous means, so students can request help with writing mechanics on their personal writing. Review corrections with the class when it is something that all can benefit from; otherwise, respond somewhere (e.g., a class website) so any student can refer to it, if desired.
Limitations:
This study was conducted over a short amount of time and all participants were self-selected.