New Voices: The Internet Communication of High School Kids Who (Usually) Won't Write

When we were in high school, writing usually involved reading a fat textbook, taking a few notes as a teacher talked about a subset of what appeared in text, and then reproducing some portion of whole in a single page to be read and evaluated by teacher. We got savvy enough to present events in chronological order history teacher and to sprinkle quotations throughout our literature papers, but we were seldom bold enough to propose many ideas of our own. No fools were we, we did this writing so that our teachers could assess how much information we had acquired, not so that they could celebrate our fresh ideas or playful ways with words. Some among us became remarkably good at transcribing-as-writing. In traditional high schools-and as Tyack and Cuban (1995) reminded us recently, most high schools are traditional, most count on comfort of the familiar grammar of schooling (p. 106)-writing seems little changed from what we encountered years ago: Teachers provide topics writing and serve as audience to what is written. As Applebee (1991) noted, even in many classrooms where components of process-oriented instruction can be identified, emphasis is still on testing what facts students have acquired, not on expression of original ideas. A Different Sort of Writing Assignment: Swapping Narratives on Internet Dan Wilcox is a seasoned high school literature teacher in Santa Maria, California, someone who would be described by Brunner (1994) as a teacher who consistently engages in reflective activities of wondering, doubting, and questioning his teaching. Dan worries about students who, one reason or another, won't write in school. He has not abandoned all of his old ideas about writing, but he has decided recently to try something new in an effort to prod listless writers in his classroom into action, to promote a sense of self and story. He has encouraged his students to use vehicle of Internet to tell stories about themselves to age-mates in geographically dispersed classrooms. Who are Dan's listless writers? They are not, most part, kids who are recent immigrants from Mexico and Philippines. These students, despite their experiencing some predictable difficulties with idiomatic (especially spelling and syntax), are not unwilling to do oral and written work in classroom. In fact, during a reporting period that he discussed with us, highest grade among his ninth graders was earned by a student labeled both limited English and migrant ed. Most of listless writers-those who routinely fail to turn in assigned written work-are American-born students. Dan knows that adolescents have stories to tell. After all, they spend much of their out-of-classroom time at school in Santa Maria (and elsewhere) doing just that-telling other adolescents their stories about family, parties, work, and romance, counting on each other, as Brown (1996) put it, for care and support (p. 227). The problem is that traditional writing assignments, as we have said, are usually about book and lecture topics, not about drama in students' lives. And, those assignments are typically destined only red- pen treatment from a teacher, not response from a peer. Swapping narratives on Internet would be different, Dan reasoned, in both topic choice and audience. Dan contacted like-minded high school teachers in this country and in Brazil, England, Israel, and Japan to make arrangements Internet work. Then, at start of current school year, he outlined a fairly simple assignment to his classes: During first 4 weeks of school year, students were to write to other students-at least two messages a week, each one a minimum of 150 words in length. There was to be no vulgarity in notes, but there were no other content restrictions. Evaluation of work in these first weeks was very straightforward-basically, if minimum in messages and words was satisfied, grade was satisfactory. …