Kathleen Blake Yancey

As past president of NCTE, Kathleen Blake Yancey recently authored a report called Writing in the 21st Century. In that document, she explores how technology is starting to take writing in a different direction. The new methods of writing (email, text message, and blogs) allow people to engage in self-sponsored writing, something that belongs to the writer and not to any school or job. It seems that people have a desire to be heard, and technology gives them an outlet.

Yancey asserts that people not only write to share their ideas and encourage dialogue, they write to participate in society. Technology is taking the place of "the commons". Yancey's corollary idea is most fascinating. She predicts that in the 21st century, writers will become writers not through formal instruction, but through an "extracurricular social co-apprenticeship."

Yancey says we need to move past a sequential model of composition (spelling, then grammar, then writing) and away from our print-based models of writing to welcome the use of technology and encourage the development of complex thinking. This will be challenging, because it requires teachers to abandon many of their go-to classroom strategies and to question their practices. For instance, could there be a place for visual elements in a formal composition? Is there any need to use a red pen on a student's work? Could writing be a subject of its own, separate from English concerns like spelling and grammar?

Lots of ideas here. I'd like to know more.