Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Writing to "Build the Larger Conversation"

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So, Kathleen Blake Yancey has been an influence on my teaching for a good long time, all the way back to the mid 1990s when I was doing research on professional teaching portfolios during a sabbatical from classroom. Her work and ideas have been an important part of the conversation around teaching and writing, and her stature as former president of the National Council of Teachers of English makes her a well respected voice among those trying to understand the changes we’re all experiencing now. So it was a great treat to be able to do a virtual sit-down with her earlier today and talk about how the importance of reading and writing has grown, how these technologies are impacting our thinking of how to best teach literacy, and the very fun and at the same time complex moment in history we’re living through right now.

The one teaser point I’ll throw out here deals with why we need to think of the function of writing very differently. It’s not a new concept if you’ve frequented these parts, but it’s just so validating to hear someone like Kathi articulate it as well. It’s this: an important value of writing today is not simply to communicate but to get others engaged, to build a larger conversation around what we write. As she states in “Writing in the 21st Century” (a must read, btw) writing is now “newly technologized, socialized and networked.” And I wonder to what extent those currently teaching writing (which I think should be everyone in a classroom, btw) really get that on a practical and pedagogical level. As she says in the interview, none of us really know what the answers are right now, but we are at a tipping point of sorts at least in our recognition that something “large” is happening, and that it’s going to have some “large” effects on our teaching and learning lives.

Unfortunately, we had a couple of short drops from uStream in the middle, so the embedded videos below are in three parts. Also, here is the extremely engaging chat transcript that Sheryl was nice enough to capture. It’s all good stuff, and if you do invest the time to listen, would love, as always, to hear your reactions.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Comments

  1. Chris Pocock says

    I watched the beginning of the interview with Kathleen Blake Yancey on uStream. Thanks for embedding these clips. What an interesting shift in the utility of writing!

    I have started to digest Yancey’s “Writing in the 21st Century” and find it to be incredibly insightful. As a history teacher, I am engrossed with changes in writing style and purpose across historical periods. I am most interested in the progressive impact in the early 20th century and how science changed writing. It seems like we may be experiencing the same sort of scientific writing shift, but this time it is the medium.

    BTW-uStream is great!

  2. Carolyn Foote says

    School Library Journal had an article about NCTE’s work on writing. I have to confess I was interviewed for it, and what interested me was how writing has changed in the library. Students are writing all the time now, not just when they have a “research paper”–because they are writing on the internet, facebook, blogs, forums, email, etc. They think through their writing. In the library of 18 years ago, they wrote when they had to fill out notecards, or type up their papers. Other than that, their time in the library was spent talking or reading.

    So, I think there’s an argument for fluency there–that the way students fill their “downtime” in the school day is fundamentally different, and possibly more writing/reading is going on than before.

  3. Honor Moorman says

    Thanks so much for interviewing Kathleen Blake Yancey. I’m a fan of hers, too. I thought her Presidential Address at the NCTE Annual Convention last November was absolutely brilliant—two different slide shows running simultaneously to complement her remarks (available here).

    Your comment in the third segment that, “publication is not the end of the process any longer . . . it’s the conversation that occurs after we publish those things where that real networking and continued learning occurs” reminded me of a TED Talks video I stumbled across recently.

    In Johnny Lee’s “Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote” presentation, he concludes by saying:
    “more interesting than either of these two projects is how people actually found out about them. YouTube has really changed the speed at which a single individual can actually spread an idea around the world . . . Within the first week a million people had seen this work, and literally within days engineers, teachers, and students from around the world were already posting their own YouTube videos of them using my system or derivatives this work. So I hope to see more of that in the future and hope online video distribution to be embraced by the research community.”

    I’m really curious to see what will happen to traditional notions of scholarly research and publication in the face of all these new literacies—new, and often better ways, of sharing and building on each other’s ideas. With a faster rate of exchange and more people participating in the conversation, it seems the discourse is becoming more democratic and more dynamic.

  4. Honor Moorman says

    Thanks so much for interviewing Kathleen Blake Yancey. I’m a fan of hers, too. I thought her Presidential Address at the NCTE Annual Convention last November was absolutely brilliant—two different slide shows running simultaneously to complement her remarks (available here).

    Your comment in the third segment that, “publication is not the end of the process any longer . . . it’s the conversation that occurs after we publish those things where that real networking and continued learning occurs” reminded me of a TED Talks video I stumbled across recently.

    In Johnny Lee’s “Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote” presentation, he concludes by saying:
    “more interesting than either of these two projects is how people actually found out about them. YouTube has really changed the speed at which a single individual can actually spread an idea around the world . . . Within the first week a million people had seen this work, and literally within days engineers, teachers, and students from around the world were already posting their own YouTube videos of them using my system or derivatives this work. So I hope to see more of that in the future and hope online video distribution to be embraced by the research community.”

    I’m really curious to see what will happen to traditional notions of scholarly research and publication in the face of all these new literacies—new, and often better ways, of sharing and building on each other’s ideas. With a faster rate of exchange and more people participating in the conversation, it seems the discourse is becoming more democratic and more dynamic.