COMPOSING IN PUBLIC By Anne Heintz A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Special Education 2011 ABSTRACT COMPOSING IN PUBLIC By Anne Heintz The central premise of this project is that researching student communication and composing actions in light of audience will illuminate particular features of student composing processes in 21st century interdisciplinary contexts. Students in this study took part in a six-week inquiry unit about their local area. Data generated included student interviews and collection of student work. Data analysis used themes from the organizing frame for research, audience theory, along with emergent categories to determine patterns of student action. This study discovered that during networked composing an enduring audience of peers influences how students draw upon their personal experiences, interact with and address and audience of peers, and imagine and interact with distant audiences. This study demonstrates how educational drama, which also takes place within an enduring audience of peers, is a tool that can be used to demonstrate effective principles of composing in light of 21st century audience needs. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Bill Hart-Davidson and Doug Hartman for providing me with excellent example of how to lead a research team; Gary Troia for mentoring me through editing scholarly work; Janine Certo for following her passion and encouraging my work in the arts and writing; and Punya Mishra for giving me work within the field of educational technology and encouraging me to do research that represented me as a whole person. And, I would like to thank Mary Juzwik for being my rock throughout my doctoral career: providing me example and instruction in research, teaching, and scholarship, and in being an all around great human being. I would like to thank the members of my research club over the years: Denise Ives, Mike Sherry, Bim Chusanochti, Christine Dawson, Marini Lee, Deb Van Duinen, Jiang Pu, and Carlin Borsheim for their delightful collegiality and insightful reflections on our work as educational researchers. I would like to thank Jinjie Zheng, Paul Morsink, Susan Florio-Ruane, Leigh Graves Wolf, Andrea Francis, and Betsy Ferrer for talking with me about ideas and helping me to grow as a thinker. I thank Celina Ramirez and Jeanne Heintz for their careful reading of this manuscript; Susie Heintz for her careful attention to the presentation; and Julia Koestner, Eileen Koestner, Ann MacEachron, and Vari Sheppard for their assistance. I thank my parents for their love and example of how to do your best every day. And most of all, I thank my husband, Jim, for supporting me through this process with heart and mind. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES vii INTRODUCTION TO PROJECT 1 CHAPTER ONE Introduction Theoretical Framework: Audience Theory Curriculum: Inquiry Unit Student Actions: Communicating and Composing Context for Participation: Enduring Audience of Peers Context for Participation: Networked Context for Participation: Drama Research Questions 7 7 7 14 16 18 19 24 34 CHAPTER TWO Introduction Narrative of Origins of Research Structure of Research Site and Participant Selection Program Curriculum Data Generation Data Analysis Study Limitations 30 30 30 31 33 36 38 41 49 CHAPTER THREE Introduction Types of Composing within Webplay Occasions for Dramatic Composing Occasions for Online Composing Biographies of Focal Students 51 51 51 52 55 57 CHAPTER FOUR Introduction Theoretical Framing Key Terms of the Study Relevant to this Chapter Data Analysis Interest Memories of Events and Interactions Remembered Events Remembered Interactions with Others Interplay of Interest, Remembered Events and Remembered Interactions Conclusion 60 60 61 64 64 66 69 70 75 77 85 CHAPTER FIVE iv Introduction 87 Theoretical Framing 88 Key Terms of the Study Relevant to this Chapter 90 Curricular Background: PALS Computer Lab Time Routines 91 Curricular Background: Thinkquest Week One Participation 93 Data Analysis 95 Findings-Broadstroke 101 Findings-Student Descriptions 102 Reflection: How Student Appropriation Upended Teacher Work, Fulfilling the Original Curriculum’s Provisions 112 Conclusion 115 CHAPTER SIX Introduction Theoretical Framing Key Terms of the Study Relevant to this Chapter Data Analysis Findings Related to Visual, Networked, and Pencil-and-Paper Composing Findings Related to Dramatic Composing Conclusion 117 117 118 121 121 123 130 136 CHAPTER SEVEN Introduction Theoretical Framing Key Terms of the Study Relevant to this Chapter Curricular Background: Audience Conversation Curricular Background: Conversation with Mr. Williams Curricular Background: Guidebook Composition Data Analysis Findings-Broadstroke Findings-Student Descriptions Conclusion 138 138 138 141 141 143 145 145 153 155 170 CHAPTER EIGHT Introduction Audience Theory Revisited Students Interact with an Audience of Peers Students Address an Audience of Peers Students Invoke Distant Audiences in the Presence of a Peer Audience Drama and an Enduring Audience of Peers Conclusion to Project 171 171 175 178 183 186 190 195 APPENDICES 197 APPENDIX A: Glossary of Key Terms 198 v APPENDIX B: Interview Protocol 200 APPENDIX C: From Theory to Data: A Snapshot of Researcher Process 202 APPENDIX D: Webplay Curriculum 207 REFERENCES 211 vi LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Focal Participants 35 Table 2: Interviewed Focal Participants 39 Table 3: Student Week One Thinkquest Contributions 96 Table 4: Thinkquest Week One Coding 100 Table 5: Student Week Six Thinkquest Contributions 146 Table 6: Thinkquest Week Six Coding 152 Table 7: Communication Code Applied to Week One Thinkquest Contributions 203 vii INTRODUCTION TO PROJECT “He tricked me! He tricked me!” a voice calls out. A group of kids are at work in a school computer lab. They sit individually or in pairs, selecting pictures and writing text to post to a networked platform. The posts describe features of their local area--where to find the best pizza or how the firefighters keep the community safe--for a guidebook which will be made available on the Internet. All of a sudden, against the backdrop of muted chatter: “He tricked me! He tricked me!” A boy named Ram points to his partner Tiger, who is giggling and moving the mouse attached to the keyboard of the computer they are sharing. “Look! Look! We typed all this stuff, and then he told me we lost it all!” On the screen, the field for entering text seems to be empty. Tiger highlights an area on what appears to be a blank screen, and words appear. When he releases the highlight, the text disappears again: it is written in white font and does not appear on the white screen, except in relief against the color of the highlight. Tiger gleefully proclaims, “It’s invisible ink! It’s invisible ink!” On the opposite bank of computers, Pony uses her mouse to highlight this invisible ink message that Tiger and Ram have saved to the shared network platform, then leans over to a peer to show her how to make “invisible ink” in her own post. Tiger, Ram, Pony and the other kids in this school-based summer program are taking part in an interdisciplinary unit. Their objective is to explore their local area and create a multimedia guidebook; they are facilitated in this project through use of a networked platform. Tiger and the others are part of a generation who are growing up with networked platforms as a primary site for the communicating and composing actions of workplace and civic life (Lenhart, Arafeh, Smith, & Macgill, 2008). 1 Today’s young people are accustomed to writing in networked environments as they participate in their society. A Pew survey of 700 adolescents in 2007 found that 97% of American teens write using the Internet at home (Lenhart, et al., 2008). And they would like to use the Internet and digital tools in school writing: 78% of teens feel that if teachers were to use computer-based writing tools, student writing abilities would improve. Nearly six in ten teens (57%) say they edit and revise more when they write using a computer than when they write by hand. Teens are motivated to engage their peers through digital, collaborative writing and develop sophisticated literacy practices to do so (Lewis & Fabos, 2005). These desires of young people to write in networked spaces in schools and their belief they write better in such spaces, along with the societal reality of workplaces making increased use of networked environments (Zemlianski & St. Amant, 2008) reveals a locus for inquiry: how do students experience working in networked writing contexts in schools? In this introduction to the present study, I will describe how networked writing contexts in schools—contexts where students make use of digital tools, see others’ work and make their work available to others—differ from pencil-and-paper writing contexts. Then I will establish a rationale for researching student communicating and composing actions in these new contexts in a particular way—by focusing on student perspectives on, and engagement of, various audiences for their work. Finally, I will describe how, for students in the present study, networked writing work is part of a larger instructional unit that also makes use of drama, and present a rationale for inquiry into drama’s bearing on the understanding of networked writing contexts. For those classrooms that make use of networked technologies for student communicating and composing, there are many differences as compared to pencil-and-paper writing available to consider. In classrooms, traditional audiences for student work are the 2 teacher and perhaps one or a few student peer-editors. Networked writing changes these traditional audiences. Significantly, networked platforms greatly expand the range of readers and collaborators for student work. They create an enduring audience of peers as a condition for communicating and composing. Depending on choices the teacher makes in configuring the shared platforms, each student’s composing work, from brainstorming to drafting to revising, is available for the entire class to see, if they want. Each student is able to communicate with selected or all other students around their work, in the mode of the work itself (typed text). Writing process and product are made public to an audience of peers, who may also be collaborators. Tools support collaboration by making texts available to more than one composer at a time. And, again, depending on teacher choice making, the work posted in the network may be made readily available to audiences outside the classroom, who may be given options to peruse, comment or contribute to the work. Networked platforms can create a new public space within a group of young people who spend most of their day together; in this public space, they can make themselves known to each other as composers. The manner in which networked technologies alter conditions for composing is something I find remarkable. Yet, that which is remarkable often slides into classrooms without much remark. In this study, I attempt to look closely at student action in this new context. Given the many ways that a networked context for composing differs from a nonnetworked context: networked contexts reconfigure process, publication, collaboration, time, space, etc, it can be challenging to target a manageable sphere of inquiry. The WIDE collective’s position statement on digital writing helps me as a researcher to hone my focus by describing some of the implications for a writer’s composing process with the advent of networked technologies (2005): 3 Computer technologies allow writers with access to a computer network to become publishers and distributors of their writing. And chances are they will get feedback, sometimes immediately. Therefore, audiences and writers are related to each other more interactively in time and space. Writers can easily integrate the work of others into new meanings via new media and rescripting of old media—text, image, sound, and video—with a power and speed impossible before computer technologies. The depth and breadth of this type of collaboration—both implicit (“borrowing” from others) and complicit (communities of writers)—may be one of the most significant impacts of computer technologies on the contexts and practices of writing (n.p.). WIDE targets interactivity of audience and writers as well as implicit and complicit collaboration within a community of writers as having the potential to significantly impact the contexts and practices of writing. WIDE suggests that assessing the changing contexts and practices of networked writing starts with looking at writers in relation to their audiences and their writing communities. Questions around the writer/audience relationship include: Which audiences matter to students and at what point in their writing process? How do they develop work in light of audience considerations? How do they manage multiple and/or interactive audiences? In order to address these questions, I need to select an appropriate theory. The theory must contain language and heuristics capable of capturing student-student interaction and student perceptions about the various “who’s” they consider in their composing work. Audience theory, from compositional studies, provides the language and heuristics I need because it provides a taxonomy for types of audiences. In networked platforms, students need to keep track of their peer audience, the audience the prompt may indicate, an ever-present teacher 4 audience, and potentially other audiences as well. They may interact with these audiences during composing, or after composing, or not at all. I need a taxonomy that will help me describe when e.g., Tiger is acting or is cast by peers as a composer, or as a communicator, or as a particular kind of audience. As the WIDE collective described, in networked contexts, writers and audience interact and may shift roles. Audience theory has designated classifications for the types of audience, which will assist me in keeping track of how and when Tiger’s focus and role shifts in his participation in the networked context. Working under the premise that audience theory will enable me to see what I want to see and illuminate student actions and practices in light of the audiences they have or hope to reach, I introduce the larger instructional context in which these students’ networked composing took place. Composing within and for a public forum is not only the purview of networked composing. Drama also exemplifies this type of composing. A group of educators based in the UK saw the resonances between this new and old type of composing, and intuited a renewed relevance for the use of drama in 21st century classrooms. Like networked composing, dramatic composing makes use of verbal and symbolic dexterity in a public forum. These educators created an inquiry-based unit, called Webplay. The unit allows for students to use media of performance (such as their bodies and voices); in complement with activities that allow for students to use digital media (such as computers). This unit is studied here. Because being literate in using networked technologies is required for participation in workplace and civic life, and because student actions within contexts that use these tools require further understanding, my primary focus in this study is on composing with networked technologies, with a secondary focus on drama. While student actions in networked composing is 5 my main interest, I also use the language and heuristics of audience theory to look at what is happening in the other kinds of composing in the unit. The shared language will help me to talk about the implications of using drama in conjunction with networked composing for student writers. Another researcher might access the networked platform so as to identify the work of the Tiger/Ram partnership and see nothing but an empty screen. By looking at student communicating and composing actions through a lens of audience theory in a situated context that also makes use of drama, I have attempted to select the right style of highlighter to see the “invisible” texts. When I look at the work of Tiger and his peers, I aim to capture the richness of the interactions and perspectives that have suffused the seemingly blank space. 6 CHAPTER ONE Introduction In this chapter, I review supporting literature for the following elements that are at play in my research project: theoretical framing, type of curriculum, student actions of interest, and student actions within relevant contexts for participation. Then, I share this study’s research questions, informed by past research and positioned within the proposed theory. In my research project: • The theory proposed to understand the communicating and composing students do during participation in the inquiry unit is audience theory. • The type of curriculum under study is an inquiry unit. The reviewed literature will introduce inquiry-based learning. • The student actions of interest within this inquiry unit are communicating and composing in networked environments. • The contexts for participation are those with an enduring audience of peers; networked and drama-based. The reviewed literature will show empirical findings of how students communicate and compose in inquiry-driven learning contexts that make use of and enduring audience of peers, and/or networked technologies or drama. Theoretical Framework: Audience Theory Theory development and deployment has not kept pace with the development and deployment of new tools and methods in research on networked contexts for writing. Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu (2009) argue “…the new literacies of the Internet are sufficiently distinctive that they require their own theoretical framework—one that is grounded in the social practices of the new literacies of the Internet…” (p.12). Single traditions of inquiry are not 7 adequate. Appropriation and creation of multiple theories and perspectives are called for in framing and understanding this type of research (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2009; Hewett, 2004; Koehler & Mishra, 2008). New theoretical constructs that describe technologically-enhanced writing, particularly concerning social practices such as communication, appropriation, and interaction with collaborators and audiences, are needed to strengthen the impact and claims of the findings concerning networked, sometimes collaborative, online writing. I hypothesize that, while originally derived from rhetoric/composition studies and applied to written composition, audience theory can robustly describe the creation work of upper elementary student composing in 21st century contexts. Juzwik (2010) describes how the field of writing research is edified by the multiple disciplinary traditions of those who contribute to it (p. 267). Rhetoric/composition studies is a field closely related to the field of education. These fields share theoretical traditions, including application of sociocultural ideas; as well as empirical traditions of interpretivist research methodologies and methods, including case study (Juzwik, 2010). As both these fields draw upon other fields for theories, including psychology, sociology, and English, it is reasonable for a study of communicating and composing situated in a college of education to draw upon a theory from rhetoric/ composition studies. This kind of cross-field application can help to grow the theory, as studies in education introduce a new population, e.g., upper elementary students, to whom the theory is traditionally applied. There is room for this study to contribute to the ongoing process of audience theory expansion, as the existing audience theory has not been applied to research with upper elementary students. As writers transition from upper elementary to high school to college 8 writing, it could be valuable if scholars theorizing their progress were able to use the same language. Audience theory is a theory of writing/composing that sets social considerations and practices at the center of writers’ processes. Its heuristics enable inquiry into what composers do in light of the “who’s” involved in their composing: readers, viewers, collaborators, contributors, 1 etc. Audience theory will be the central framing heuristic in the present study. Audience Theory The most pervasive conception of audience in rhetoric and compositional studies over the past thirty years has been the audience addressed/audience invoked model of Ede and Lunsford (1984). In this model, writers have two audiences in mind when they write: the audience addressed, which is actual or real-life people who read a discourse, and the audience invoked, which refers to audience called up or imagined by the writer (p.4). Ede and Lunsford explicate that the act of “invoking” in this model situates the writer as one who establishes and invokes the roles he wishes his audience to occupy in their reading of his text and uses available resources to indicate to the reader what these expected roles are. Ede and Lunsford urged readers not to consider this heuristic as a binary, but rather as part of a complex writing situation: any discussion of audience which isolates it from the rest of the rhetorical situation or which radically overemphasizes or underemphasizes its function in relation to other rhetorical constraints is likely to oversimplify (p.21). 1 In addition to the central framing heuristic of audience theory, I introduce within some chapters additional framing literature as necessary, specific to the work of each respective chapter. 9 In 2009, an NCTE edited volume on audience, Engaging audience: Writing in an age of New Literacies was published. This volume builds on the work of Johnson (1997) and others to articulate a third prong to the original heuristic of audience addressed and invoked; this third prong is “audience interacting.” Audience interacting captures the idea that the audience for written work is capable of writing and responding in tandem or in communication with other writers throughout the stages of the writing process: brainstorming, drafting, revising, etc. The three prongs of audience theory inform the foci of the four data analysis chapters: 2 students in dialogue with peers through communication (audience interacting ); students in dialogue with peers as audience (audience addressed); and students in dialogue with remembered, imagined and/or distant others (audience invoked). Audience Interacting This audience for written work is capable of writing and responding in tandem or in communication with other writers throughout the writing process. With the rise to prominence of computer-based writing in workplace environments, Robert Johnson (1997) and others foresaw a need to update audience theory for a digital age. Johnson describes how the effect of an audience’s input on the produced document changes the act of writing. Writing before the Internet was broadly in use, Johnson’s work presaged participatory audience concerns of writing environments of today. 2 While audience interacting is the most recent addition to the audience addressed/audience invoked paradigm, I present it first because this was the first type of audience students in this study encountered in the networked platform. Like other units of this type, students introduced themselves to each other in an interactive forum before beginning collaborative work intended to reach distant audiences. 10 Erin Karper, in her 2009 essay on audience interacting, makes plain that in many networked spaces, the given structure of the page provides more space to represent the contributions of the audience to a piece than to the original piece itself: The amount of page real estate devoted to the display of an explicitly addressed audience and comments from said audience is larger than the amount of space devoted to the person’s writings—to see blog entries or additional writing from the person, one must navigate to a separate page (p. 279). Given the reality of the structure of the space in which they are writing, it is not surprising that writers intuitively write in ways that strive to create points of identification with their writers and to write in ways so as to provoke expressions of “approval, disapproval, and description” (p.278) which Karper describes as the norm for interacting audiences. This type of audience awareness is currently underestimated in audience theory, as Karper makes clear: The manifestation of the “involved audience” and identification-focused practices demonstrates a much more nuanced and sophisticated view of audience than is typically assumed of people engaged in Web-based self-presentation. I believe that many of those so engaged are aware of audience to the point of involving them in the construction of discourse as well as practicing identification, albeit not always on a conscious or reflective level (p. 280). Karper describes how identifying actions relate to other key considerations of composing, such as purpose, and how this type of audience awareness is by rote for digital natives: The shaping of self-presentation through audience involvement and engagement in identification strategies in order to achieve a specific purpose by conforming to the needs 11 and desires of a specific audience is perceived as normal for most digital natives. (p. 280). Many networked composers orient toward trying to involve their interacting audience and trying to identify with them and their preferences, opinions, or viewpoints. Audience Addressed Audience addressed refers to actual or real-life people who read a discourse. This perspective on audience focuses on the reader (Ede & Lunsford, 1984). The most common audience addressed in upper elementary writing is the classroom teacher; peers are rarely cast in instruction or in research as a potential audience addressed. This focus may have much to do with the mode students write in (pencil/paper or word processing)-which makes peer-wide accessibility and visibility difficult--and the available contexts for writing, such as preparing for exams (Gere, Christenbury, & Sassi, 2005). In early elementary writing pedagogy, many students have the opportunity to address their audiences with their writing. For example, in Calkins’ and other methods, students read aloud their work to their peers, who are encouraged to respond to the written text and in many cases to help construct the text with ideas. However, with the advent of the writing test assessment or other more general curriculum shifts in 4th grade, many students lose opportunities to address an audience of their peers with their writing in school contexts (Dyson, 2003), just as their interest is increasingly drawn to “audience interacting” writing spaces outside school. A networked environment for composing provides for a close look at if, and if so, how writers aged 8-11 work to address their peers through their writing. Certain affordances of networked composing facilitate this inquiry: the mode used is both easily accessible and visible 12 to all peers, not just one or two “reviewers”; the mode more easily accommodates inclusion of visual components, such as photos; and the context for writing is not to prepare for an exam, but to share research work for the purposes of collaborative writing. These conditions facilitate observation of how writers cast their known peers as audience for their composing. Audience Invoked Audience invoked refers to audience called up or imagined by the writer. This perspective on audience focuses on the writer and the writer’s influences during writing. Audience invoked may refer to “all whose image, ideas, or actions influence a writer during the process of composition” (Ede & Lunsford, 2009, p.20). These influences may come from a writer’s past or may be invocations a writer makes projecting future readers. In Engaging Audience, Dayton (2009) describes how the act of invoking an audience leads his students to think like fiction writers as they invent personas and scenarios. These personas and scenarios are imaginative scaffolds that Dayton describes are for the field of technical writing: “now considered standard elements of a user-centered design process for creating all manner of interactive information products” (p.115). Teams work together to develop narratives and create various infrastructures like websites to flesh out invented personas and test possible scenarios. Although Dayton’s students are college-level students, inventing scenarios is an activity accessible to the upper elementary student as well. Imagination and intuition--working along with observation and experience--play key roles in guiding students through invoking distant audiences. Research will query the ways upper elementary students operationalize imagination and experience to both draw upon influences from past experiences and interactions and picture their future audiences, and thus, orient their compositional choices. 13 Why Audience Theory? With policy and writing standards documents proclaiming the importance of students writing for a variety of audiences and purposes (Common Core Standards, 2010; NAEP, 2011), I am interested in how students conceive of audience and how their texts are oriented in light of these considerations, particularly considering the type of writing contexts students will be entering in school and in the workplace: networked, communicative, and collaborative. As described in the rationale, networked composing is an activity not yet fully understood in terms of the writer’s process. There is a need to understand for whom student writers are actually composing and how those considerations affect their composing, especially in networked contexts--contexts that for many students are often associated with communicating with an audience of peers. Curriculum: Inquiry Unit Inquiry projects invite students to propose and seek to answer big idea questions within an instructional unit extending over multiple class sessions, with multiple curricular objectives. The activities of multi-week projects often use inquiry tools such as interviewing, communicating online, and gathering research in pursuit of answering the big idea questions, be they about literature, a local community, or a societal issue (Beach, Campano, Edmiston, & Borgman, M. 2010; Wilhelm, 2007). These projects often invite students to take on a particular “expert” role, such as “expert” historian, journalist, etc., and during the interdisciplinary project, students may fulfill a number of curricular objectives, in subjects as diverse as social studies, math, and language arts. Like Dyson’s 1999 and 2003 studies of student writing, the texts and practices of the studies in this review are not artifacts of one strictly demarcated writing instruction lesson or unit, but are artifacts of communicating and composing during the course of 14 a shared inquiry. Inquiry projects are not completed individually, but make use of “ensemble spaces” where teachers and students adopt a discovering and critical stance together (Edmiston & McKibben, 2011). Inquiry projects in recent years have made strategic use of networked technologies. Networked technologies are characterized as supporting the types of learning actions valued in inquiry-driven work, e.g., learner-initiated investigation, co-construction of knowledge, collaboration, and idea synthesis (Coiro, Guzniczak, & Castek, 2010; Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2009). Educators have explored the potential roles for networked technologies in inquirydriven teaching and learning, particularly within the fields of social studies and science. One of the most common and researched trends is that of asking students to participate in inquiry units that make use of networked technologies called WebQuests. WebQuests are inquiry-oriented activities that take place on the Internet. WebQuests often incorporate roleplay, an element of dramatic composing, asking students to take on the role of a professional who might be trying to find out information, e.g., a computer science engineer trying to find out about superconductor; or a figure from history, trying to present his/her version of a course of events, e.g., a student in Alabama during the era of school desegregation. Research has shown that roleplay promotes communication among collaborators (Brucklacher, B., & Gimbert, B. 1999; Jonassen, D., Howland, J., Marra, R.M., & Crismond, D., 2008) and that undergraduate students engaged in WebQuests involving roleplay had higher quality online discussion than other types of communication activities, including nominal group technique and reflective deliberation (Kanuka, H., Rourke, L., & LaFlamme, E, 2007). These findings are with populations older than that of the present study, but serve to illustrate characteristics of inquiry units at large. 15 Student Actions: Communicating and Composing There are typically many aspects of literacy within inquiry units that make use of networked technologies. To preserve a manageable sphere of focus, the present study limits its 3 inquiry to student actions of communicating and composing. A suite of “new literacies” required for literate participation in networked contexts--to identify questions, locate information, critically evaluate information, synthesize information, and communicate to others-has been identified by the New Literacies research team (Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, & Cammack, 2004). The present research focuses on the literacy of “communicating to others.” Communicating to others has often been researched as part of an inquiry cycle that includes the online reading comprehension skills of identifying, locating, evaluating and synthesizing information. Online reading comprehension has a solid empirical base of work that began with observational studies, from which upper-elementary student actions and strategies related to online reading comprehension were identified. Continued categorization and theorization of these actions were achieved and continue to be refined through multiple studies with differing student populations. (See, e.g, Coiro & Dobler, 2007; Hartman, Morsink, & Zheng, 2010; Leu, D.J., Coiro, J., Castek, J., Hartman, D.K., Henry, L.A., & Reinking, D., 2008.) This study seeks to contribute to the larger project of understanding student literate action in networked contexts through a closer look at just the “communicating to others” new literacy. 3 As will be discussed in the next chapter, the instructional focus of the present study’s inquiry unit was to guide students in collaboratively producing a guidebook to their local area. Various communication and composing actions occurred in several different contexts throughout the sixweek unit. These actions sometimes directly supported, sometimes indirectly supported, and sometimes did not support the composition of a collaboratively-produced guidebook to the local area. I analyze these actions on their own terms. I ask questions about them in pursuit of understanding more than just how they contributed to the creation of the guidebook. 16 Most of the identifying, locating, evaluating, and synthesizing work of the present study’s inquiry project took place offline. From a new literacies perspective the phrase “communicating to others” holds under its berth the action of composing (making new meaning). The phrase “communicate to others” is used so as not to limit the definition to a particular mode or genre, e.g., a text-based composition, and so as to include the idea of audience into the definition. From a compositionist perspective, the phrase “composing” holds under its berth the action of communicating. Communications that generate ideas that are included in the ultimate composition are considered to be part of a larger composing act. Because these activities are so wrapped up in each other in networked environments, when I refer in this study to “composing” I mean to include within it the communicating that contributes to it, either directly or indirectly. Students working towards making something new is the process I'm really focused on, and I’m interested in how the back and forth talk contributes to that. I define communicating and composing as follows: Communicating is the use of text, images, sounds, video, and/or performance within a back-and-forth exchange with one or more persons. Composing is the crafting of text, images, sounds, video, and/or performance so as to make new meaning. There is much overlap and mutual influence between these two student actions, particularly within networked contexts for composing. The analysis of this study will attempt to characterize the ways in which students engage in these actions during the course of an inquiry project. 17 Context for Participation: Enduring Audience of Peers Before I review the literature on networked and dramatic contexts for participation, I review appropriate literature on the practices of student composers as observed when they participate in contexts that enable an enduring audience of peers—this is a term I have developed to describe the condition common to most student environments in which peers witness, comment on, reproduce, re-enact, and discuss the actions of each other. When this condition is explicitly capitalized on for composing instruction, it indicates contexts of learning in which peers are routinely audience to fellow student composers’ work, whether as listeners, readers, reviewers, or variously all three. Anne Haas Dyson leads the field in describing the ways an enduring audience of peers shapes students’ writing practices. Dyson’s work (1999, 2003) describes how the classroom functions as a public for young writers. She describes the influence of peers on writers’ processes. She finds that students write as a way to tell themselves and their peers the stories of their shared social life. Dyson (1999) explains that learning to write involves figuring out the kinds of social work involved in the medium used (p.11). Students she studied wrote about their peer communities as well as used writing to bring desired peers-in-school communities into being. In the K-2 classrooms Dyson studies, the public sphere in which classroom writers work supports a visibility of process and product. Students write together at tables and talk while they are writing. Students share what they’ve written; they perform it for others. Dyson (2003) finds these conversations and performances to be critical for students’ development as writers. The anticipation of whole-class sharing informs and sustains collaborative decision-making (p. 189). The anticipation of what the enduring audience of peers will say influences students’ individual 18 and collaborative decision making during composing. What Dyson has shown about the influence of an enduring audience of peers on student composing suggests the need for an inquiry about students’ socially situated decision making in networked classroom environments – the focus of the present study. Networked and dramatic composing have the potential to make student composing more public as students advance through the grades. Thus, I will keep in mind Dyson’s findings as I review literature on networked and drama-based composing practices to determine how her work can shed light on research in such environments. I turn now to a review of available empirical studies of inquiry units that made use of networked technologies, informed by my guiding interest in composers and their audiences. Context for Participation: Networked The studies presented here researched inquiry projects that made use of networked technologies in classrooms. “Networked technologies” is defined for this study as “technological devices, such as computers and phones that are interconnected via networks, wired and wireless, so that the devices can communicate with one another.” I present big ideas in scholarship, supported by brief descriptions of studies. Although the studies represented here did not use audience and/or ties to dramatic composing as their organizing mechanisms, I find much of interest in them that can, nevertheless, inform the present study in terms of audience/dramatic composing. What I do not find in them is also instructive for setting my research agenda. Networked Technologies Connect Students in Communication to Adult Experts Beyond the Classroom; Learning is Richer 19 One of the ways networked technologies are most often used in inquiry projects is to connect students in communication to audiences beyond the classroom walls. Students participate in communication with subject-area experts via email or synchronous chat; or with students their own age in other schools. Clark & Heaney (2003) studied 10 and 11 year olds asynchronously communicating online with an author who was writing to the students both in the voice of himself and of the main character in the novel he had written. The students also communicated with peers and with a government representative through structured online activities. Their task was to find out about landmines. Researchers found that the social and situated elements of the project made learning richer and more engaged for the students. Harris & Jones (1999) performed a discourse analysis on 10 learning teams’ email communication. Learning teams consisted of students who had inquiry questions to research and experts with whom they had been paired. Researchers found that most of the generated text was done by adults (teacher and experts) rather than students. When students communicated without direct instruction from their teacher, they were more likely to ask their partner, the adult expert, for ideas and information that was beyond the bounds of the specific topic they were meant to be inquiring about. Guy Merchant and his co-researchers (2005, 2006) write on projects that link students to other students via email connections. These researchers focus on the role of audience for young writers, and look at digital technologies because they can be used to introduce a distant audience and authentic purpose for writing. Merchant, Dickinson, Burnett, & Myers (2006) describe the influence of written communication on students’ sense of audience and purpose: 20 Their experience of interactive written communication seemed to stimulate them to reflect on issues such as formality in language and the importance of sensitivity to audience and purpose in writing (p.59). As part of their interactive written communication, Merchant and co-researchers find that students signal their identities and affiliations with each other; this identity-establishing work can contribute to students’ collaborative composition processes. They also found that students make language choices based on the type of on-screen writing they do; they draw on out-of-school experiences with digital communication; they are aware of visual affordances of the screen; and they have critical awareness of their behaviors as digital writers (Merchant, 2005). These findings indicate that technologies are often used in schools to facilitate student information gathering to answer inquiry questions, and identity-establishing work via networked communication contributes to successful collaborative composition. These studies provided information on how students engage with adults for their own inquiry purposes, but not necessarily how students engage with adults who are intended audience for the compositions that are the result of their inquiry process. And regarding communication with peers, these studies demonstrated one-to-one peer communication, but did not look at contexts where students’ communication with others is public to the enduring audience of peers within their own classroom. Networked Technologies Enable Students to Communicate in Role; In Role, Students Empathize and Communicate Well with Peers By providing avenues for communication that can be devoid of personal identifiers such as height, weight, and facial expression, networked technologies enable users to play with their identities. Indeed identifying one’s self in multiple and varying ways based on purpose and 21 audience is a key Web literacy practice, even in contexts where roleplay is not a stated objective (See e.g., Lewis & Fabos, 2005). Wishart, Oades & Morris (2007) studied an online roleplay exercise with 9-12 year olds. Students were playing the part of Net Detectives; the curricular goals were learning Internet safety. Through survey and questionnaire of teachers overseeing the exercise, the researchers found that students learned about Internet safety, empathized and communicated effectively with others, and enjoyed playing detectives. They also determined the presence of planning and troubleshooting mechanisms in the curriculum were key for a unit such as this to work. They ultimately advocated for more online roleplay activities with students this age. This research demonstrates how playing in role can contribute to effective communication with others, which can contribute to curricular goals. Networked Technologies Link the Act of Communicating with the Act of Composing; Communication Serves as an Enabling Strategy Many programs in schools combine communication tools, such as online chat, with composition tools, such as word processors. One example is the Google Education suite, which has both chat and collaborative word processing available to students. Studies have researched the effects of communicating on composing. Morgan and Beaumont (2003) studied the use of a chat room with early adolescents to teach argumentation as dialogue. The researchers were informed by dialogic understandings of argument and worked with the classroom teacher to develop and research the curriculum. The chat room was considered as a bridge between speaking and writing. The teacher implemented a recursive pedagogical strategy of communicate-compose-communicate-compose. Morgan & Beaumont found that the electronic discussions functioned as an enabling strategy for writing. 22 Morgan and Beaumont’s study (2003) demonstrates that communication and composition can have fruitful interplay within networked spaces such as a chat room. While each student worked on writing his own argument, the student-student communication functioned as a resource upon which all communicants could draw. Thus, within an individual agenda for writing, a record of collaborative talk served to affect the composing process. The chat room facilitated the students acting as both communicants and audience to each other. Areas for Further Study 4 The reviewed studies set students and their audiences into clearly defined roles: experts acted as knowledge suppliers, but not as audience to the final composition produced a result of the students’ inquiry. Students were directed to chat, then, in a different space and time, to compose. Networked environments are often more fluid spaces, where communication develops around a composition more organically. There is room for study of how students engage others when given options to communicate or compose in a space where others have the option to do the same and where others are privy to the communication. Of the six empirical studies with students in the same age range as the present study, only two of the studies employed interviewing students about the kinds of communication and composing that were taking place. This indicates a gap in research regarding students’ 4 Another somewhat incidental but also interesting gap in research revealed after review of these studies is geographical in nature. The studies reviewed were implemented in, respectively, Ireland (Clark & Heaney, 2003); Australia (Morgan & Beaumont, 2003); US (Harris & Jones, 1999); and England (Merchant, 2005; Merchant, Dickinson, Burnett, & Myers, 2006; Wishart, Oades, & Morris, 2007). England, Australia, and Ireland all have educational technology learning standards that are more advanced than those of the US. There is a need for educational technologies research based in US learning environments, given the projection that educational technologies will occupy a more prominent place in US schools in the near future (Leu, D.J., Coiro, J., Castek, J., Hartman, D.K., Henry, L.A., & Reinking, D., 2008). It will be necessary to generate and actively maintain a local-to-US set of research-based best practices. 23 viewpoints of their participation in such contexts. With so much evidence indicating that students have complex online literacy lives outside of school settings (Lewis & Fabos, 2005; Pew Internet Research, 2007), and as the use of the Internet becomes more prominent in schools, it makes sense to inquire about how students understand their motivations and actions regarding in-school expectations surrounding networked composing. While artifact analysis may indicate such positive actions as collaboration and high-quality communication with peers, student analysis of their own work may reveal a different assessment of what was going on. The present study explores these areas for further research. I now describe the role of another context for participation--dramatic composing, then review relevant studies. Context for Participation: Drama This study also inquires about students’ processes and actions in another context for composing sometimes included in inquiry units: drama. As the particular inquiry unit I chose to research included drama, an assessment of student communicating and composing in this unit would have been an incomplete picture without also paying attention to what went on in the dramatic contexts. Not only does studying the students’ participation in drama contribute to a more complete representation of student experience, there are interesting resonances between the work of the networked composing and dramatic composing. As with composing that makes use of networked technologies, composing that makes use of drama is highly conducive to study of the “who’s” students engage in their composing efforts. Betty Jane Wagner, an educational theater scholar describes audience consideration in drama: …speakers have to imagine the effect of their words on the others and have to tailor their messages to a specific context, that is, to the exigencies of the particular situation and to 24 the attitude, belief system, goals, gender, age, personality, and level of understanding of the character in role or reader they are addressing (p.122). By using the language and heuristics of audience interacting, audience addressed, and audience invoked, the student work in networked composing and in dramatic composing can be talked about in the same way. The present study inquires about students’ dramatic composing so as to determine its potential to contribute to students’ understanding of and facility with 5 composing for and with 21st audiences, both in general, and in networked contexts. I turn now to a review of relevant literature of student communicating and composing in drama-based contexts for participation. Because the present study aims to analyze drama’s potential to contribute to understanding composing actions in networked contexts, I review literature on drama in inquirybased studies, as well as studies of drama’s effects on student writing. Drama in education is defined by Wagner (2008): Through ritual, dramatic encounters, pantomime, tableaux vivants (still pictures made with the bodies of the participants), writing in role, and reflection, participants enter the lives of imagined characters and play out their responses to challenges or crises (p.7). I here present big ideas in scholarship, supported by brief descriptions of studies. Students in Role Communicate to Solve Problems Through roleplay in inquiry units, the nature of communication between students was shown to be problem-solving oriented. 5 In a future study, I intend to return to the data I generated and to ask questions about the dramatic composing actions in their own right. The present study aims to reach all teachers of literacy; a future study would be intended as more of a niche study for teachers of drama. 25 Edmiston & McKibben (2011) describe how a class engaged in an inquiry unit study around the play King Lear established “Transition Care”: a professional company with expertise in caring for people “in transition” like Lear, who had given up his crown and land and moved in with his children. Because the students were working to address Lear’s and other characters’ needs in transition, their communication with each other about the play was action-oriented, rather than focused on what they didn’t understand about the play. Beyond simply pretending to be, e.g., a princess in a two-minute sketch for peers, the extended roleplay described in this study requires that students make use of the following literacy skills: act; write, occupying the role they are playing; communicate, occupying the role they are playing; and deliberate and come to conclusions, occupying the role they are playing. The role inspires particular public, literate actions, carried out for an audience of peers, and students’ exercise of these literate actions are motivated by their interactions with others in role. Students in Role Communicate across Ages and Mentor Each Other Inquiry projects can facilitate cross-class communication and peer-to-peer mentoring, as classes share spaces and an inquiry focus. Moore (2009) describes The History Centre: a place for inquiry for upper elementary students. Students are given tasks to solve the problems of e.g., constructing the inner chamber of an ancient Egyptian tomb. The History Centre is literally a centre in a school in Australia: a room that four classrooms open into. All four classroom teachers and the drama teacher work together to craft inquiry projects which span the length of the year. Students communicate in cross-age planning and performance. Moore describes that students informally mentored each other when building environments for the roleplays: during the unit on Egypt, students worked together to construct a sarcophagus and line the Centre walls with hieroglyphics. 26 Rosler (2008) in her reflective-practitioner study of drama in her 5th grade social studies class found that students came to each other’s aid during roleplay. She describes how during a question and answer session where students were in role as soldiers informing Boston colonists about King George III’s actions, a student, Xavier, became for another classmate the “more capable peer.” Rosler interpreted this action through a Vygotskian (1978) perspective. These findings demonstrate the role of a shared, public space in facilitating peer-to-peer assistance and communication around the learning objectives. Moore found that public centers for gathering facilitated informal mentoring; the spaces of many networked composing platforms are, likewise, “public” places where students of different ages and skill levels may interact, in a manner more informal and at will than traditional classroom spaces may support. Drama Can be Used to Contribute to Gains in Writing A drama condition within writing instruction has been found to lead to gains in varying elements of the writing process. Dunnagan (1991) found that after participation in drama, student pencil-and-paper writing showed an increase in audience awareness, specifically, demonstrating more attention to sensory imagery and greater empathy towards subject. Student interviews suggested that assuming a role influenced perspective-taking, which contributed to empathy towards subject. Schneider’s (2003) study of drama and writing found that having multiple contexts for writing (drama as one) influenced elements of writing. Schneider spent a year in a 2nd/3rd grade classroom that used dramatic activities, among other types of writing instruction, for literacy building. She found that three major areas of pencil-and-paper writing were influenced by the multiple contexts for writing: enacted writing (students coming around to writing via talk or play), attention to text, and rhetorical awareness. 27 These findings demonstrate the, if not causal, then perhaps, ancillary effects of drama on composing when they are taught together. Areas for Further Study A real need for further research of drama’s potential contribution to composing using networked technologies is demonstrated by the fact that in all these studies of the effect of drama on writing processes, none of the contexts for writing were networked. They were all pencil-andpaper or word processing contexts. Networked composing has the potential to bring writing even more in line with dramatic composing: in both settings, work is visible and accessible to the whole class audience; revision ideas can be instantly taken up and incorporated; composing is often collaboratively produced. There is a need for research that further investigates these and other connections between dramatic composing and networked composing. The present study meets that need. Research Questions In this chapter, I have proposed an appropriate theoretical perspective with the capacity to query into the “who’s” being addressed, invoked, and interacted with during student composing. I have demonstrated the principles of inquiry-based learning and defined student actions of interest. I have reviewed the literature on communicating and composing in inquiry-based contexts that use networked technologies. I have demonstrated the rationale for studying dramatic composing alongside networked composing and reviewed relevant dramatic composing literature. Thus, I present my guiding research question: 28 o How may student actions in communicating and composing in networked and dramatic spaces support their development in composing for 21st century composing contexts and 21st century audiences? In order to answer this question, I must first examine the following sub-questions: • How do students draw upon their personal histories when communicating and composing for audiences? • What are communicating and composing actions of students interacting with an audience of peers? • What are communicating and composing actions of students addressing an audience of peers? What are student perceptions of addressing an audience of peers? • What are communicating and composing actions of students invoking, addressing, and interacting with distant audiences? 29 CHAPTER TWO Introduction In this chapter I describe the methodology of this dissertation study. First, I tell a narrative of the origins of research. I then outline the underlying structural elements of the study, and go on to describe the process by which I secured a site and participants. I then describe my data generation methods. Finally, I outline analytic structures used to approach my research questions about student communicating and composing actions using the data I had generated. Narrative of the Origins of Research As a theater artist, as well as student of online technologies, I belong to various personal and professional networks. In 2008, through a colleague in Los Angeles, I was made aware of an organization called Webplay, which was delivering inquiry-unit programming using theater and online communication technologies in LAUSD public schools. In Fall 2009, as I prepared to begin my dissertation work, I decided to contact this organization. I looked up Webplay on the Web and discovered Webplay is a non-profit arts-education institution based in the UK. It has been in existence for almost 10 years. Its mission is to create projects for students that combine drama and technology. Projects use online communication to connect students across schools, and even across countries. Classroom teachers are trained in the Webplay curriculum and then teach the program to their students. Teachers are supported by frequent virtual communication with the Webplay headquarters, as well as a school visit by Webplay staff, who put on a theatrical performance for students and lead them in a dramatic play workshop. I contacted the director, Sydney Thornbury, to inquire about research opportunities. She encouraged me to visit England if I could and expressed enthusiasm in helping me to observe a 30 Webplay program in action in a UK school. Sydney agreed to host me for a week in March so that I could meet administrators and teachers at school sites who would have the program during that summer session, and inquire if they’d be willing to have me on board as a researcher. I traveled to London in March. I observed a theater performance and dramatic workshop by the Webplay staff at a UK school and had the opportunity to visit the downtown London office headquarters. I was able to gain first-hand knowledge of this program: up to that point, I’d only read about it and seen a couple videos. This direct exposure was immensely informative and confirmed my conviction that the Webplay programming was rich with potential for study. Unfortunately, none of the schools I approached agreed to my research. Sydney hypothesized that increasing pressures from the overseeing government agencies to raise student achievement scores school-wide may have made head teachers reluctant to introduce anything new to the school environment. Thus, I returned to the Midwest of the United States. Through conversations with arts and technology coordinators at the district level, I was introduced to a number of teachers and school technology coordinators who had interest in using a program such as Webplay with their students. Ultimately, I partnered with one school to implement the program and research student composing actions during the course of such a program. I undertook this study as a scholar with an understanding of educational theory and practice, as a drama teacher, as a writing teacher, and as a user of and experimenter with educational technology. Structure of Research 31 Following O’Donoghue (2007), this research operates within an underlying research paradigm, a methodology consistent with the paradigm, and a set of methods for data gathering and analysis consistent with the specific methodology (p.xi). Research Paradigm The research paradigm is interpretivism. O’Donoghue describes: This approach emphasizes social interaction as the basis for knowledge. The researcher uses his or her skills as a social being to try to understand how others understand their world. Knowledge, in this view, is constructed by mutual negotiation and it is specific to the situation being investigated (p.9-10). As the teacher for the unit I would be researching, I was embedded within the social situations of the participants. Because research was conducted in one situated and specific context and the phenomena of interest student action and perspectives (See Chapter Two research questions), the interpretivist paradigm is most appropriate. Knowledge generation, therefore, focuses on describing the interactions among people and phenomena and is specific to the situation being investigated. Study findings aim to contribute to disciplinary dialogues around student composing in networked and drama-based contexts. Theoretical Position The theoretical position within the paradigm is audience theory. Please see Chapter Two for a detailed description of this theory’s principles. Methodology The methodology for the present study is grounded theory, also called editing analysis style or constant comparative analysis. O’Donoghue describes the features of this type of methodology. In this approach: 32 The researcher acts as an interpreter who reads through the data in search of meaningful segments. Once segments are identified and reviewed, the interpreter develops a categorization scheme and corresponding codes that can be used to sort and organize the data. The researcher then searches for the patterns and structure that connect the thematic categories (p.59). The present research has applied a lens of audience theory to observation of upper elementary students as they work in networked and dramatic composing contexts. While audience theory serves as an orienting conceptual lens, there is room for continued theory development because the existing audience theory has not been applied to research with upper elementary students, working in these types of composing contexts. O’Donoghue continues: As concepts are generated, they are compared and clustered-‘the constant comparative method’- until categories are formed. This process is assisted by asking oneself constant questions of the data, particularly the question, ‘What is this an example of?’ – ‘the method of constant questioning’ (p.59). Asking questions of the data was a process facilitated by the use of researcher memos. Methods The methods used are semi-structured interviewing, participant observation, surveys, and document study, as described in further detail below. Site and Participant Selection Setting The Midwestern town in which I did the research is sometimes referred to as a “bedroom community.” It is a community of under 5,000 people, according to the 2000 census (U.S. 33 Census Bureau, 2000) and the median income level for a household is between $60,000 and $70,000. The community’s population is over 90% White. On my drive into the school, I often had to wait as farming vehicles made wide turns. The school district has six schools; each school is dedicated to serving just a couple grade levels. The summer program—which I’ll call PALS— works a little differently, with students who are going into grades K-three housed at the school I’ll call Partridge and with students who are going into grades four-six housed at the school I’ll call Morris. The research took place at the Partridge and Morris buildings. The summer program was provided for the school district in partnership with a community education organization and ran from June 14-September 3 (closed July 5-9 for the 4th of July holiday). The Webplay program ran for seven of these weeks on M, W, and F from 9:00-10:00 am at Partridge and from 10:30-11:30 am at Morris. It was a program added to the regularly scheduled day program and taught by myself and an assistant, Suzy. Consent Process Informational leaflets and consent forms for research were distributed to PALS parents as part of a packet about the details of the entire PALS summer program (not just Webplay). The informational leaflet made clear to parents and students that all children would be able to participate in Webplay activities, regardless if they wished to consent to research. Miss Spider, the head teacher for Morris, reached out to parents as they dropped off or picked up their children during the first few days of the program and suggested they read the informational leaflet and consent to the research. Additional leaflets and forms were made available at the program sign-in table. Miss Spider told parents she thought both the program and the research would be very interesting and beneficial for their children. Sixteen of 21 regularly attending PALS program students parent consent forms were returned. During the first week of the 34 program, I read aloud the informational leaflet and consent form for students and asked students to consent to research if they desired. All 16 children whose parents had consented to research also consented themselves on their own forms. Focal Participants After the program was complete, I determined that of the 16 students who had consented to research, five students had attended too infrequently to gather adequate data for analysis. Therefore, study data represents 11 students: three students entering fourth grade; eight students entering fifth grade; and two students entering sixth grade. Please see Table 1. Table 1 Focal Participants Name Grade Age Sex Pony 4 8 F Crocodile 4 9 M Tiger 4 9 M Camel 5 9 M Gorgon 5 9/10 M Ram 5 9/10 M Panther 5 10 M Ladybug 5 10 F Manatee 5 10 F Gecko 6 10 F Phoenix 6 11 M 35 6 To maintain anonymity, I assigned students a pseudonym. Program Curriculum In order to place into context the types of student work data collected and analyzed, I will describe the curriculum of the Webplay program. This is the description of the Webplay Local unit as advertised to schools on the Webplay website: http://webplay.org. Webplay Local is delivered in class, in two 45-minute sessions per week (for 9 weeks). It is specifically aligned to the National Curriculum and Literacy/Numeracy Frameworks - achieving targets in Literacy, ICT, Numeracy, Geography, History, Citizenship and PSHE. Teachers are given two days’ training in ICT and drama, and all the resources they need. These include lesson-by-lesson differentiated teaching plans, online films and audio, adaptable worksheets, evaluation tools, display board materials and parent involvement resources. The children attend a performance and interactive drama workshop as part of the programme. Webplay Local uses the highly effective ‘teacher in role’ technique, and links classes from the same area online. Webplay have created Jet Set & Go, a fictional online travel agency, and the CEO of the agency wants to create a guidebook of the whole world, but he needs help! 6 During the first week of the Webplay program, we played a name game. In this game, students choose an animal whose name begins with the first letter as their first name, e.g., Anteater Anne. Students then make a noise and action to go along with their animal, and each student in the circle repeats each preceding student’s noise and action. As this game set the tone for the imaginative and playful work of Webplay, so too are pseudonyms used to reflect the spirit of the programming. 36 The teacher goes into role as one of the agency employees helping him with his mission, and the children become secret agents tasked with investigating their local area undercover. They work to produce a multi-media guidebook which will put their area on the map, comparing their research with their local partner agents. Halfway through, they attend a ‘secret meeting’, where they meet their partner class in person and take part in an interactive drama workshop. The curriculum used during the study was derived from the Webplay Local curriculum guide, which was provided by the Webplay organization to me. I shaped and enhanced the curriculum to support its implementation in a summer program setting, as opposed to an in-school setting, for which it was originally designed. I restructured the curriculum so that it could be delivered 3 times a week, for one hour a week, for six weeks. I used the differentiated teaching plans; the audiovisual and worksheet materials; and the evaluation tools. I also included many dramatic games and collaborative warm-up exercises that I had learned throughout my years of work as a drama teaching artist. (For a table demonstrating the differences between the intended curriculum and the delivered curriculum (Applebee, 1996), please see Appendix D). The curriculum was also shaped to reflect priorities for the research, such as including weekly journal writing, to generate handwritten samples of student work. Each student was given a notebook in which to write observations and answers to prompts given during the program. Each student was invited to decorate the outside of his/her notebook. Many chose to do so using a spy or agent theme. In-school teachers who use the Webplay Local curriculum are encouraged to make their own adjustments and enhancements, based on their pedagogical priorities. It is by no means a prescriptive curriculum; the suggestions for each day are presented as a menu of options for teachers to select from, with encouragement to use other methods as seen fit. I was 37 aided in adjusting the curriculum to a summer program setting through email communication with a teacher in the UK who had previously adapted the curriculum to a summer program. A series of exchanges allowed me to source a model of previous adaptation, as well as hear first hand about potential areas for concern, e.g., a community of students who do not share a classroom context, and strategies for addressing those concerns, e.g., including more teambuilding games. The original Webplay program was designed for use with students in Years 3, 4, & 5 in the UK. In order to provide Morris students with a group of students with whom to correspond in the online space, I also offered the program to Partridge PALS students, who were entering grades 2 and 3. Because the program was designed for students who were the age of the Morris group, the focus of this dissertation is the Morris students. Future studies will analyze the data from the Partridge cohort of students, to answer questions about early childhood experiences with drama and communication technologies. The purview of this dissertation is the Morris cohort: students entering Grades 4-6. Data Generation Data generation consisted of videotaping class sessions and exporting the raw footage into Quicktime files; collecting student writing in the form of worksheets and notebook entries; collecting student contributions to the online platform by downloading entries as PDF files; and typing, handwriting, or orally recording field notes after most class sessions. Students were also given a pre-post/survey, and select focal students were interviewed. Interviews Of the 11 focal students, I interviewed seven. The interview protocol was designed to ask students about three different compositions: through writing, through the arts (e.g., drama 38 and/or photography), and through typing on the online platform. The four students I did not interview did not attend the program with enough frequency to generate these three different types of compositions. Please see Table 2. Table 2 Interviewed Focal Participants Name Grade Age Sex Interviewed Pony 4 8 F X Crocodile 4 9 M X Tiger 4 9 M X Camel 5 9 M X Gorgon 5 9/10 M Ram 5 9/10 M Panther 5 10 M Ladybug 5 10 F Manatee 5 10 F Gecko 6 10 F X Phoenix 6 11 M X X The interview protocol was designed after review of relevant literature and in support of probing the study research questions. I revised it to incorporate dissertation committee feedback and further revised after a pilot interview with a volunteer 5th grader. The pilot participant answered the interview questions, and revisions were made based both on my observations of her 39 understanding of the questions and her answers to the questions, as well as suggestions she gave me during and after completing the interview. Revisions were made primarily to shorten and simplify the protocol. The questions related to the research questions about invention processes and audience considerations proved particularly fruitful. Questions that were cut included questions borrowed from another researcher’s work, as I realized that her categorization scheme would not align directly with the particular phenomena in which I was interested. In order to simplify the protocol, I began with more open-ended prompts for each piece of composition such as “Tell me about this.” (Daniels, Beaumont, & Doolin, 2001). Interviews with focal students were conducted in the following manner: one student at a time (with the exception of Tiger and Phoenix who are brothers and were interviewed together) joined me in the school computer lab during a break in PALS activities. I asked each student a series of questions related to where their ideas came from, when they were writing, and what sorts of audiences they considered while writing the three different types of compositions they made during Webplay: a dramatic composition, a networked text, and a pencil-and-paper text. (“Text” here may include writing and/or drawings or photographs). Before beginning each set of questions, I first showed the student her work if possible. For dramatic composing, I projected photographs of the tableaux or scene if possible; for networked composing, I pulled up the text on the Thinkquest site on the computer; and for notebook composing, I showed the student pages in her notebook, or showed her a digital image of the photo she took. I began our conversation around each composition with the open-ended question, “Tell me more about this,” or “Tell me what you think turned out well about this,” and then proceeded with the other questions. 40 I conducted my own interviews because I knew the makeup of the program: its day-today routines and the students’ participation within the program. I was interested not only in student perceptions of their artifacts but also with the participation and conversation around the composing processes (Dyson, 2003). An outside interviewer would not have knowledge of the participation and conversation patterns present around the processes of composing. Additionally, the interpretivist paradigm situates the relationship of the researcher and participants as central to data generation. The protocol was designed to be semi-structured, and I used it as such. Where students raised issues that I wished to probe further, I asked “off-script” follow up questions. I did not ask each and every question on the protocol of each and every student. In some cases, the student and I had spent so much time on some questions, that I did not want to prolong our contracted time and so did not complete the protocol. In other cases, a group of questions proved, in early interviews, difficult for students to comprehend or address comfortably. So, in later interviews, I omitted a couple of these questions, especially if they were closely related to other questions in the protocol. Nevertheless, I asked each student a critical mass of the same questions so as to make cross-student analysis possible. Data Analysis Step 1 I catalogued all data collected and renamed all files using pseudonyms. I made copies of the data and locked these copies in a secure file. Step 2 I transcribed all student interviews. I used “A” to indicate when I was speaking and the first letter of the student’s pseudonym to indicate when he was speaking. In the original protocol, 41 I had only considered I would ask students about two compositions. However, for most students, I ended up asking them about three compositions. Each set of questions was asked for each composition, with a few wrap-up questions asked which were independent of any one particular composition (See Interview Protocol, Appendix B). Questions and answers were coded with PQ# for photography questions, DQ# for drama questions, TQ# for Thinkquest questions (the online platform the students used during the program) and JQ# for Journal Questions. My questions for students that came directly from my protocol are represented in bold in the transcripts with the relevant tag behind them, e.g., Where do you think your ideas came from? [TQ5] This interview protocol was designed to query student perceptions of the audiences they kept in mind while writing and the ways these audiences did or did not contribute to their communicating and composing processes. In the transcripts, I included disfluencies such as, “um” and “like.” I did not set these off in commas, as I wished to preserve the flow of speech, particular to kids aged 8-11. As Daniels, Beaumont, and Doolin describe (2001), interview data from children is a means to capture the voice of children; I wanted my reader to “hear” a kid speaking, and thus tried to keep the transcript free of unnecessary punctuation and symbols which could detract from the reader being able to fall into the idea stream of the students’ answers. As I transcribed, I memoed observations and ideas. After completing this process for all interviews, I reviewed all interviews and memos to create a categorical schema. Construction of the schema began by seeking to identify what students drew on in composing, who students sought to engage in composing, and how students hoped to affect those “who”s through their composing. I identified emergent categories that related to these theory-based ideas, and kept those which were representative in data to a saturation point. I then returned to the interviews to 42 formally code utterances within the interviews, and made one final revision to the categorical schema after that coding process. For a more detailed description of the theory-to-data application, please see Appendix C. The resulting emergent codes applied to interview data are as follows: Interest=I Interest is coded for an utterance in which students cited liking or knowing about the content or the form of their compositions Indicator: Language such as “like” used to describe the content or form of their compositions Remembered event=RE Remembered event is coded for an utterance that refers to student memories of experiences or events in their past which did not include another person. Examples of such events include watching TV, reading a book, etc. Indicator: Language such as, “I remember when…” Remembered interaction=RIP (parent); RIA (other adult); RIF (friend) Remembered interaction is coded for an utterance that refers to student memories of an engagement with another person(s). This person may be a parent, teacher, or friend. Examples of such interactions include a conversation with mom. Indicator: Language such as, “with my mom” Recognition=RG Recognition is coded for an utterance that refers to either a desire that peer audience members identify a truth the composer has presented regarding lived experience in common or an assessment that their writing was successful based on this identification of a truth by peers. 43 Indicator: Language such as “we”; “us”; “everybody” Appreciation=AM, AF Appreciation is coded for an utterance that refers to a desire or understanding of job well done that the student’s work is appreciated or liked by a peer audience. Indicator: Language such as “they liked it” Step 3 I collected all the Thinkquest platform data into Word documents. I read through the documents and memoed observations and ideas. Construction of the schema for this data began by seeking to identify textual features associated with student composing and textual features that function to engage “who”s. Because my sphere of inquiry is concerned with networked composing in a school setting, I took note of textual features related to traditional ways that school writing is read and evaluated. I counted words for each post, which is represented by Length. Following Dyson (2003), I counted words so as to come to a better understanding of students’ comfort level with writing and growing orthographic sense (p. 94). I determined to what degree the composer addressed the expectations of the prompt (Centrality). If there were any textual features associated with school writing, such as thesis/supporting statements structuring, or complex sentences with appropriate punctuation, etc., I coded posts with Academic Convention. I sought to identify student actions that could function to engage “who”s. I identified emergent categories that related to this theory-based idea, and kept those which were representative in data to a saturation point and included these in the categorical schema. I then returned to the posts to formally code text, and made one final revision to the categorical schema after that coding process. All codes applied to Thinkquest data are as follows: 44 Length=WC=# Length is a word count of the post. Centrality=(1/3, 2/3, 3/3; 1/2, 1) Centrality is a measure of the alignment of the post to the prompt. If the post answers all elements of the prompt, it is given a 1. If the post answers part of the prompt, it is given a 1/2 (if there are two elements to the prompt) or 1/3, 2/3 (if there are three elements to the prompt). Academic convention use=AC Academic convention use is coded for a post that uses academic writing conventions. Indicator: Language such as repeating the words of the prompt in the post; using a thesis/supporting statements structure Online convention use=OC Online convention use is coded for a post that expresses ideas through means common in online text (text messages, IM chats, email) Indicator: Language such as “u r ” to mean “you are” Conversation=CN Conversation is coded for a post that expresses ideas through means common in oral, informal talk. Indicator: Language such as “Football, baby!” Appreciation of peer post (message or form)=AM, AF Appreciation is coded for a post that directly supports the message or form of a previous post. Indicator: language such as “I like” 45 Communication=CM Communication is coded for a post that initiates a communication or responds to the communication-initiation of another post. Indicator: Language such as “Hey you guys” I created tables for the Thinkquest Week One and Week Six post data. For each post, I entered a word count (Length) and (Centrality) measure. I marked presence of indicator for all other codes. I then calculated averages for the Length and Centrality measures (These tables can be found in Chapters 5 and 7). Step 4 I considered which composing acts students had talked about in their interviews: an “act” may refer to work and/or conversation around work (Dyson, 2003). To best gain understanding of these acts, I reviewed available video data and determined which class sessions met the criteria: (a) students engaged in composing acts and/or (b) mentioned by students in an interview. The 2010 class sessions that meet these criteria are as follows: July 12th—students engaged in dramatic composing work (15 min) July 16th—students engaged in conversation around composing notebook entries (30 min) July 26th—students engaged in dramatic composing work (45 min) August 4th—students engaged in dramatic composing work (70 min) August 6th—students engaged in conversation around composing a guidebook (30 min) I transcribed each of these class sessions. As I transcribed, I memoed observations and ideas and contributed “turns” in dialogue with my data. These transcripts served to triangulate and/or confirm analyses made from interview and Thinkquest transcript data. 46 Step 5 I scanned all focal student pencil-and-paper notebook entries into the computer, then retyped each entry into a document for each focal student, to more easily facilitate analysis. These documents served to triangulate and/or confirm analyses made from interview and Thinkquest transcript data. Step 6 I read across the data analyses to assemble evidence that addressed each of the spheres of inquiry my research questions outlined about students engaged in networked and dramatic composing acts. In Chapters Four and Six, I grouped findings by category. The main data sources for these chapters were student interview data, with triangulation via confirmatory checks using observation and document data. In interviews, students talked about a range of different composing experiences, using a number of different media (e.g., photography, drama, and pencil-and-paper). The way students talked about their experiences could be grouped by utterance into categories of in-kind language, making the use of categories the most relevant sorting mechanism for these chapters, which focus mainly on capturing student perceptions. In Chapters Five and Seven, I grouped findings by participant descriptions. The main data sources for these chapters were transcript documents of the students’ work in the networked platform, Thinkquest, with triangulation via confirmatory checks using interview and observation data. Because the task students were completing during the composing experience was uniform for all students, but the ways in which they completed that task were divergent. The participant descriptions capture the range of student action; to arrive at these descriptions, I determined patterns of actions as indicated by the codes applied to student work. 47 The following describes the composition of the four Findings chapters. Each data chapter contains a data analysis section that describes my researcher moves specific to the data represented within that chapter. Chapter Four—(Audience) This chapter draws primarily on interview data and dramatic composing class session data (July 12th; July 26th; August 4th). This chapter presents the phenomena of and indicators for students in dialogue with their interests and memories, born out of prior interactions and experiences they’ve had. Chapter Five—(Audience interacting) This chapter draws primarily on Thinkquest Week One online contributions, supplemented with researcher field notes and interviews. This chapter presents the phenomena of and indicators for students communicating directly with present peers during a composing act of introducing oneself in a networked platform. Chapter Six—(Audience addressed) This chapter draws primarily on Thinkquest Weeks Two-Four online contributions. This chapter presents the phenomena of and indicators for students in dialogue with perceived and/or invented expectations of present and distant peer readers. Chapter Seven—(Audience invoked, addressed, and interacting) This chapter draws primarily on notebook entries, the August 6th class session and Thinkquest Week Six online contributions; supplemented with researcher field notes and interviews. This chapter presents the phenomena of and indicators for students in dialogue with perceived and/or invented expectations of distant, unknown readers. 48 Chapter Eight is a discussion chapter that describes implications for networked composing in light of an audience theory framework, as well as presents ways in which drama can be used in conjunction with networked composing. Having laid out the map for what I do in this study, I introduce limitations of the study: these limitations describe what I did not do, or was not able to do. I also describe how these limitations can be considered as invitations for future work. Study Limitations I researched myself as a teacher; I conducted the interviews with students. I am at the center of this research project. As an arts and technology educator, the findings are very valuable to me as a reflective practitioner. One direction for future research will be to split the roles of researcher and teacher between two or more people to include more perspectives. The unit was delivered in a summer program setting, but is intended to be delivered in a classroom setting by a classroom teacher, who has established relationships with her students. Future research will observe and analyze student actions in such a unit as part of a day-to-day classroom learning agenda. Student motivations and teacher and student priorities for literacy teaching and learning would be different in a classroom setting, and a comparison of the findings in such a setting to those of this study would be instructive. Some readers may only feel comfortable using the findings of this study to inform other multi-age projects, which is understandable. Many of the differences among students may be attributed to their different ages in school, and not necessarily to their preferences: i.e., what they are actually capable of doing becomes what they prefer. Future research with a group of similarage students would contribute to separating out these effects. 49 There is little data available about the composition of the final product, the guidebook. By the end of the summer, fewer and fewer students were showing up to the PALS program. The actual assembling of the guidebook fell to two or three students, and they made largely executive decisions, with little collaborative work. While this may be a pattern of collaborative work that can be observed in non-school settings as well, in which a few persons take responsibility for final assembly, future research would attempt to capture more of the types of collaborative conversations students engage in to assemble a shared product. The present research captured student communication as it affected students’ individual contributions; I would like to know more about student communication around assembling collaborative work. 50 CHAPTER THREE Introduction In this chapter, I present contextual information that may be helpful in setting the stage for the findings of the analysis chapters. I identify the types of composing students did during the unit. I describe the makeup of the class sessions in which there was dramatic composing and present all the prompts students saw during their online composing. Finally, I provide short biographies of the focal students. Types of Composing Within Webplay Within this study, there were a number of rhetorical and discourse forms in which students composed. Descriptions of the types of composing are as follows: Dramatic composing: This form of composing involves the use of human body and voice, often along with props and stagecraft, so as to convey meaning. Networked composing: This form of composing involves the use of a networked platform which displays icons which have been selected, text which has been typed and/or photos that have been uploaded by the user so as to convey meaning: written work is immediately available for viewing to others who also have access to the platform. In this case, the network consisted of two classes of summer school participants (n=42); one researcher; one researcher’s aide; and the school district technology coordinator. All users registered for the network had both composing and viewing privileges. Photograph composing: This form of composing involves the use of a camera to capture an image so as to convey meaning. Pencil-and-paper composing: This form of composing involves the use of a pencil or pen and paper to form words and/or pictures so as to convey meaning. 51 The bulk of the analytic work in this manuscript will focus on dramatic and networked composing, as these forms made up the bulk of the student work done during the program and as these forms are often collaborative forms (forms in which the final composition has been actively constructed by more than one person). Collaborative composition processes and forms are of particular interest to this study because the composition to which the Webplay curriculum 1 builds is collaboratively constructed. Occasions for Dramatic Composing There were three key days of student dramatic composing: July 12th–Interview the animal On this day, in order to practice the skill of interviewing, students were invited to pretend to be an animal and answer questions from the larger group about their habits. I began the lesson by modeling what I expected them to do: I pretended to be an anteater and called on students as they raised their hands to ask me questions, and then I improvised answers to their questions based on what I knew of anteaters. After the modeling session, I described what made some of the questions asked particularly good questions. Then, Pony, Camel, and a male NP took turns being their animal. Pony and Camel both chose to be the animals they had been the previous week during the name game: a mouse and an camel. This activity lasted about 10 minutes. The focal students who participated were, Pony, Crocodile, Camel, Ram, Gorgon, Phoenix and Gecko. July 26th—Guess the profession, then interview the tradesman/woman On this day, in order to continue to practice interviewing, students were given a card with a profession on it, e.g., artist, chef, park ranger. They were asked to act out central actions of the 1 For a full description of Webplay curriculum, intended and delivered, please see Appendix D. 52 profession so peers could try to guess what they were. After someone in the group guessed correctly, then others were invited to ask questions of the actor, either by making up their own, or by using questions from the Thinkquest curriculum interview sheet, which select students would use the following day when they went on a field trip to a local eatery, a local shop, and the town fire and bus stations. Students were called up in pairs, but in the first round, did not collaborate with each other. Each did a silent pantomime independently of each other, and then individually called on peers in the group to guess what she was and ask her questions. Suzy and I then instructed that for the next round, we expected students to work together to create a scene with dialogue that would help the audience to guess what the profession of the one student with the card. Pairs or groups then came up, acted out their scene, and the person holding the card fielded questions, sometimes answering them with help from his group. This activity lasted about 30 minutes. The focal students who participated were Crocodile, Pony, Camel, Tiger, Ram, and Phoenix. August 4th—Secret meeting On this day, the two partner classes (from Morris and Partridge) met together in person and were visited by “agents” from the Jet, Set, and Go agency who performed a short play for the students and then led them through dramatic games and dramatic composing events. The agents were 3 MSU undergraduate theater students whom I had auditioned and hired. Before arriving at the school, they had rehearsed both the short play and leading the students in the composing activities. The culminating activity of the day was for students to work together to create tableaux of one of the places in their local area and then brainstorm together two key reasons why that place was important to the local community. In the short play the agents performed for the students, they themselves modeled composing different tableaux, including a table, the ship 53 Titanic, and a trash can (“dustbin” was used in the original British version; we changed it to trash can). After the performance, the agents led students in dramatic games, including a game called Pass the Pulse, in which students stand in a circle and squeeze each other’s hands. When a student receives a squeeze from the person on his left, he squeezes the hand of the person on his right, and so on until the squeeze returns to the person who started it. After this whole group game, students broke into pairs. The adult agent called out a direction like “Hand to Hand” and each pair arranged themselves so that one body part is in some way touching a body part of his partner. The game continued with the agent calling out different directions such as “Elbow to Elbow,” “Knee to Knee,” “Elbow to Knee,” “Foot to Foot,” “Back to Back,” etc. The composing act of creating tableaux requires that students work together to symbolically represent a place by the means of touching each other. This initial activity was designed to leave out the composing element and just allow students to become familiar with working with the medium, as it were. The adult agent then instructed each pair to find another pair: now the students were in groups of four. The agent called out the same directions, “Elbow to Knee,” etc., and now all four worked together to negotiate, e.g., who is putting out an elbow versus who is putting out a knee, etc. This racheted up the work students must do in terms of working with more than just one other person--also an expectation of the tableaux composing activity. Then, the whole group was split into girls and boys. There were 5 girls and 7 boys. In these larger groups, students were instructed to create, using their bodies, first a particular shape, e.g., a rectangle, then a particular letter, e.g., D. 54 Finally, each group of eight students were told they may choose a place from their local area they’d like to create through tableaux together. At this point, they have introduced themselves to each other and played around with the medium together, as well as communicated to create a simple representation. The activities leading to this final activity were designed to scaffold collaborative composing, as an individual mental representation of, e.g., a pizza parlor may be more differentiated and complex than an individual mental representation of e.g., a square, making a negotiating and consensus process more involved. Working alongside each group once the composing begins were the available adults: agents and other teachers. These adults helped facilitate communication and promote compromises, as well as suggested starting places for groups that were stuck. This activity lasted about 90 minutes. The focal students who participated were Panther, Manatee, and Gecko. Occasions for Online Composing Throughout the six weeks of participating in the online platform Thinkquest, activities were scaffolded so students would collaboratively create a guidebook about their local area for an outside audience. In Thinkquest, each discussion board, poll, or composing field is housed on a page that corresponds with a week of the project. Pages for each week are titled Week One, Week Two, etc. Week One activities ask students to choose an icon that represents them, and type their name, their school, and something they like about living where they live. Subsequent weeks’ activities ask students to contribute to polls and to type rationales for their poll choices regarding their favorite sports, hobbies, family traditions, etc. Students become familiar with how polls work and are able to see how their individual information is 55 synthesized with their colleagues’ information in tables and graphs. They are shown through visuals that ideas they contribute individually become part of a larger, comprehensive picture. Finally, students review what they have researched throughout the unit--via contributing to polls, conducting interviews, visiting websites, and taking photographs--and type paragraphs about features of the local area for inclusion in the guidebook. During each session, students were given about 30 minutes to contribute to the page for that week. Students could also return to work on their pages during the PALS computer time if they chose. All focal students contributed to at least one page. Thus, compositions within the Webplay curriculum trace the following arc: Thinkquest work begins with introductions, then moves to short descriptive pieces about the places students have seen, and finally to more substantial expository pieces about these places for inclusion into a guidebook. The prompts for each week profiled within chapters are included here: Thinkquest Week One: “This message board is designed to help you get to know the other class in this Webplay Project Space. Leave a message for your fellow agents below saying who you are, what school you go to and what you like best about living where you live.” Thinkquest Week Two: “Pick one of these pictures your partner agents took to write about. You can explain to a person who has never been to Drafnor what the picture is about or represents, or you can write from the point of view of something in the picture, like, ‘Hi, I'm an eclipse.’” Thinkquest Week Three: 56 “Tell us about your favorite sport here.” and “Tell us about your favorite hobby here.” Thinkquest Week Six: “Week 6: Images and text posted here.” Biographies of Focal Students In the four analysis chapters to follow, I use evidence from a set of focal participants: the seven I was able to interview (Pony, Crocodile, Tiger, Camel, Panther, Gecko and Phoenix) and two others (Ladybug, Manatee) who had a sufficient number of composing artifacts available for analysis. My aim is not to tell the story of any one particular student. Rather, I use evidence from each student in turn as representative of larger categorical phenomena. I introduce each student here with a short biography. (Grade designations are the grades they are entering). 4th graders: Pony: Pony has a close relationship with her grandparents. She has short blond hair, and one day, she wore a “crazy” outfit to school because she was going to a party later and wouldn’t have time to change. She loves to talk and to make friends with the adult teachers. She is quick to reprimand her peers, but also to praise them for deeds well done. Crocodile: Crocodile is a red-haired, freckled, skinny boy. He likes space and Star Wars and “geeky” things. He is the oldest, as he said, of “half a dozen” siblings and step-siblings. He is friends with Pony and with Camel, whom he admires. Tiger: Tiger is Phoenix’s younger brother. He is short, full of energy, and quick. He is an avid sports fan. As part of our interview, Tiger, Phoenix and I played trivia in a sports magazine in the library as an incentive to keep going with the interview. 57 5th graders: Camel: Camel is a thin boy with big eyes. He is very perceptive and has a skeptical demeanor. Throughout the project, he repeatedly insisted that none of it was real, that it was just a project for MSU. Despite his skepticism, he actively contributed to most activities. He was caught between a younger peer group with Crocodile and an older peer group with Gorgon, Ram, Phoenix and others. Panther: Panther is short, with wild, spiky hair and a mouth that always seems to be open. He is prone to shouting out comments he thinks to be funny, at which his peers sigh and say things like, “All right we get it, Panther.” He loves football. Ladybug: Ladybug is a pale girl with dark hair, glasses and freckles. She has a younger sister who was in the program at the partner school. She is involved with many extra-curricular activities. She loves to help prepare for the workings of the day. She is friends with the other girls. The most I ever saw her express emotion was when her face lit up when her grandmother came to pick her up from the program. Manatee: Manatee is a girl with brown hair and a confident demeanor. She is kind to others and anxious to get her own cell phone. She did not attend as much in the second half of the program, and she was missed. 6th graders: Gecko: Gecko is a tall, thin girl with brown hair and a big, infrequent smile. She loves art and drawing. She catches others’ inconsistencies. She has a younger sister who was in the program at the partner school. Phoenix: Phoenix is a leader: attentive to authority, but not so much as to destroy peer credibility. He is eager to participate, eager for a challenge and loves sports. One day when we 58 were all in the hallway, I said, “Let’s roll,” and he led the other students in literally rolling along the floor down the hallway to the computer lab. 59 CHAPTER FOUR Introduction Like many educational researchers, I have a background in teaching. A foundational aspect of my teaching is to ask students about their personal history with regard to the subject matter of the course. In every course I teach, I administer surveys to students at the beginning of the semester asking them to describe habits and experiences from their personal history. As a Preparation for College Writing Instructor at MSU, the first assignment my students completed was a literacy autobiography, in which they reviewed their life’s experiences with literacy, 1 written and other. As a teacher, I like to have an understanding of what learners are bringing to the table as we begin our work together. Likewise, as a researcher and disseminator of research, I believe the results of my research are best digested with a base understanding of how the subjects of the research drew upon their personal history during the instructional unit. I present this analysis here so that in later chapters, when I do a close textual analysis of a few lines of students’ composed text, my reader both has context for what may be prompting some of the students’ compositional choices, as well as understands that I am aware that the analyses I present are situated within a context for composing made up of a myriad of influences. While chapters to follow examine student engagement with their peer and distant audiences during compositional acts, this chapter examines student engagement with their own history during compositional acts, an action that falls under the broad term of audience. 1 This assignment was made available to me through the WRAC instructor training provided by Dr. Nancy DeJoy and her graduate assistants. 60 Theoretical Framing What, and more importantly, whom students draw upon in their composing acts is a part of audience, construed broadly. Ede & Lunsford (1984) describe, …the term audience refers not just to the intended, actual, or eventual readers of a discourse, but to all those whose image, ideas, or actions influence a writer during the process of composition. One way to conceive of “audience,” then is as an overdetermined or unusually rich concept, one which may perhaps be best specified through the analysis of precise, concrete situations (pp. 20-21). As students try to engage others through composing, they are in constant conversation with themselves, as well. To continue to frame the findings of this chapter, I introduce schema theory, which comes from educational psychology, and the related terms, indwelling and prior knowledge, used in circles of inquiry that have bearing on this study. When considering students’ personal histories, the principle of schema theory can be instructive. The analysis of this chapter operates using the lens of the transactional notion of schema theory as articulated by McVee, Dunsmore, & Gavelek (2005). In an article for Educational Researcher, McVee et al. review and revisit schema theory as a construct in educational research. McVee et al. describe how early schema theory was more often situated in sociocultural perspectives than in cognitive models: Central to our discussion in this article is the recognition that the early development and use of the schema construct had its origin in efforts to understand individual thought processes as inextricably embedded in cultural life. Individual knowledge schemas were transactionally linked to culturally organized experience (p.536). 61 To support this point, the authors cite Vygotsky (1978)’s assessment that functions in children’s cultural development occur first on the social level (interpsychologically) and only then on the individual level (intrapsychologically) (p.57). They go on to describe what computational models of mind leave out: Computational models of mind, as presented by cognitive scientists, have represented individual knowledge as existing distinct from, and thus portable across, sociocultural contexts. Absent is the constitutive force of the social—that schemas are cultural historical constructions that emerge only within the individual through transactions with others (p.541). The interpretations made in this chapter are grounded in this perspective: that schemas (or knowledges) not only originate interpsychologically as a result of interaction with others, but also re-emerge operationally and interpsychologically as a result of subsequent transactions with others. Another way this process is described in the McVee, Dunsmore, & Gavelek chapter is as “embodiment.” The authors cite Lakoff & Johnson (1999) and Gee (2004) as scholars who have described at length what it means for literacy knowledge and practices to be embodied. McVee, Dunsmore, & Gavelek conclude: Schema and other cognitive processes or structures are embodied. Knowledge is situation in the transaction between world and individual and these transactions are mediated by culturally and socially enacted practices carried out through material and ideal artifacts (pp. 555-556). Viewing student use of personal history within this lens is in keeping with the larger audience theory framing perspective of this entire manuscript. Student artifacts mediate transactions among audiences, past, present and future. Focusing on embodiment helps to explain and support 62 some of the types of knowledge drawn upon, used, and internalized to aid the composer in invoking audience so as to craft her texts. Students’ use of what is in their heads is also a phenomenon discussed by scholars interested in 21st century learning dispositions and in drama education. In A new culture of learning: Cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown (2011) describe an asset for learning they term, indwelling: Indwelling is a familiarity with ideas, practices and processes that are so ingrained that they become second nature. When engaging the learner, we must think about her sense of indwelling, because that is her greatest source of inspiration, but it is also the largest reservoir she has of tacit knowledge (p.85). And Wagner, in her 1998 review of educational drama and language arts describes the need to understand drama’s relationship to prior knowledge: We need to systematize and report the patterns we see as students engage in classroom drama. For example, we might watch for activation of prior knowledge, which is now recognized as critical to success in both reading and writing (pp. 236-237). Schemas, indwelling, prior knowledge: this chapter takes up Wagner’s call to report what students draw upon from their personal histories in order to better understand student composing actions in 21st century contexts which include networked and dramatic composing. 63 Key Terms of the Study Relevant to this Chapter Individual interest: Individual interest refers to both “a psychological state and a relatively enduring predisposition to attend to events and objects, as well as to reengage in activities” (Hidi and Boscolo, 2008, p.146). 2 Interaction: the reciprocal influence of individuals upon one another’s actions when in another’s immediate physical presence (Goffman, 1959, p.15). Data Analysis A portion of the interview protocol was designed to query student beliefs and opinions about where they perceived their ideas coming from during composing acts. Emergent categories related to this theory-based idea and numbers of students whose interviews contained category indicators are presented here: (1) draw upon interest Code: Interest=A Interest is coded for an utterance in which students cited liking or knowing about the content or the form of their compositions. Examples include students talking about their favorite sport. Indicator: Language such as “like” used to describe the content or form of their compositions Six of six students/student pairs interviewed described composing about things they liked or knew a lot about or composing in ways they liked or knew a lot about. (2) draw upon remembered events Code: Remembered event=RE 2 From this point on, I will refer to student interest as “interest” and mean individual interest, as opposed to situational interest. 64 Remembered event is coded for an utterance that refers to student memories of experiences or events in their past which did not include another person. Examples of such events include watching TV, reading a book, etc. Indicator: Language such as, “I remember when…” Six of six students/student pairs interviewed described events from their personal history as being an influence on either the content or form of their composing. (3) draw upon remembered interactions Code: Remembered interaction with parents (RIP) other adults (RIA) friends (RIF) Remembered interaction is coded for an utterance that refers to student memories of an engagement with another person(s). This person may be a parent, teacher, or friend. Examples of such interactions include a conversation with mom. Indicator: Language such as “with my mom” Four of six interviewed students/ student pairs described at least one interaction with an adult in their life as being influential during the course of one of his/her composing acts. These adults included, among others, a basketball coach, a teacher, a pet store employee, a Planetarium employee, and a friend’s uncle. Six of six students drew upon memories of interactions with other adults; four of six students drew upon memories of interactions with their parents; and three of six students drew upon memories of interactions with friends, during the composing act. After identifying these categories of what students drew upon from their personal histories during composing acts, I returned to student artifacts and classroom transcript sessions so as to triangulate the students’ self-report with the artifacts they produced and the classroom 65 activities in which they took part. I will present representative examples of student data for each category (Athanases, 2008; Dyson, 1999). These examples will be drawn from students talking about their work across the various types of compositions. (For descriptive introductions to the students whose talk and artifacts are used as examples, please see Chapter Three). While future chapters will separate out the different types of composing for differentiated analysis, this chapter selects representative examples from across the different types of composing as evidence that students drew on their interest, remembered events and remembered interactions in all styles of composing. Interest Content The following interview transcripts reveal examples of how students expressed their interest in the content of what they wrote during the Webplay program: Camel: A: And is there anything that made you want to make this? [JQ5] C: Yeah, because I really like animals and I’m planning on being a vet when I grow up. A: Oh, so this is like your area. C: Mhm. Crocodile: A: Is there anything that you remembered that helped you to write this? [TQ4] C: Um what really helped me to write it was the fact that I knew a lot about space. A: Ok yep. C: And I-I’m kinda the geeky guy. Like Star Wars geek and video game geek, you know I collect a lot of things. 66 Panther: A: Yeah. Um so where did your ideas come from for this one. [JQ6] P: Mm. Just football. A: Just knowing about football. Mhmm. P: And also because I’ve been like try- like I’m gonna play football, well do practice tonight. A: You have practice tonight. P: For junior panthers. A: Oh my gosh. P: But, so, I’ve been trying my stuff on making sure it still fits even though I just got it. A: So you’ve really had it on your mind lately. P: Mhmm. And it’s also my favorite sport. A: Do you think it’s easier to write about things you like? P: Yeah, and I know a lot of the players’ names because I get football cards and it helps me recognize their face, their names, their jersey, their helmet, sorta and like sometimes their like footwork and handworkIt is well documented in literature on self-sponsored student writing that students like to write about things they like, things they are interested in, and know a lot about (Hidi & Boscolo, 2006). This is not new information, but there is room for further understanding regarding the role of interest in composing when students make use of networked technologies. The Thinkquest platform used in Webplay invited students, in their very first online post, to write about what they like most about living in the local area; the curriculum incorporated elicitation of student interest so as to inspire interest in contributing to the online discussion. 67 Other writing prompts to which these students responded often provided flexibility for students to choose the content they wanted to write about within broader, more fixed parameters. One writing prompt provided students the opportunity to write about pictures showing nature, space, or sports, all of which were taken at Michigan State University, a key landmark of the local area. For these students, choice making within prompt-driven composing was related to using content about which they would readily have ideas: in this case, their interests. These students describe how, not only in self-sponsored writing, but also in response to composing invitations delivered via a networked platform (which other students may access), they often choose to write about what they like. This choice may be attributed, in part, to knowing that others who like the same things will be able to see the digital post in the shared platform and appreciate their post and/or want to communicate about it (This topic will be further explored in Chapter Five). Form Not only did students express interest for the content of their compositions; in two cases, they expressed interest in the forms of dramatic, pencil-and-paper, and/or networked composing as well. Here is an example from my interview transcript with Gecko: A: And do you think that doing other creative stuff like drawing or pretending to be someone else in a role do you think that helps with your writing? Do you think they’re connected? [Q13] G: Cuz we had to do this well report on the Gold Rush. Like you could make a poster, you could do a play, and um we me and my partner were going to do it on a poster but like the next day was the presentation and I had to like I was looking up some more stuff and I was stressed out and my dad was like well Gecko why don’t you just use Barbies to act your thing out and I did I made these little um wagons and then I tied-I had play 68 horses, I tied them up to them and then I put um Barbie luggage in and then um I made the little um dolls that would ride the horses and my partner really liked that so we did that instead. And we wrote out scripts too. A: And you wrote out scripts too. How funny. And then did you act it out in class or did you film it G: We acted it out. A: So you would like to do stuff like that more if you could? G: Uh huh. Students expressed not only interest for particular composing subject matter, such as football or space, but also for composing styles. As Gecko expresses in her interview, she liked presenting historical information by using scripts and props like Barbie toys. Reviewing with ourselves what we know about what we like is something we do frequently, students and adults alike. When a student checks in with herself during a composing act, it is easy to see how she would draw upon what she likes, for interests and passions are topics frequently visited, built upon, added to and engaged in the mind. Memories of Events and Interactions To introduce these analysis categories, I would like to step, for a moment, into a musing space to reflect a little on the role of memory for children. In considering this category, I needed to articulate to myself that it is easy to forget that the sum total experience of a child’s worldview is what she has experienced, along with those reports she has heard or witnessed of others’ experiences (be they factual, fictional, or liminal), and how she has thought about those experiences for the duration of time such as she can remember. So, for an average nine year old, there are between four and five years worth of experiences consciously available to her. 69 Proportionally, this is a much greater chunk of time relative to her time alive, than, e.g., four to five years’ worth of experiences is to me. Additionally, the types of experiences children have are in large part made possible or allowed through the actions of various caretakers in their lives. While I may have decided to fly to Australia, as I did a number of years ago, children cannot decide to fly to Australia to experience things. These may seem to be obvious points, but in reviewing the data, I was reminded of the gravitas afforded by children to their past interactions and experiences. Regardless of the lack of control children may have over present situations, their past is uniquely theirs to own, to dwell upon, and to rehearse. Novels that capture the voices of children looking back on their own short pasts, such as To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, capture the centrality of past interactions to a child’s worldview as well as the way these interactions are perpetually positioned to be reframed as children engage their own memories in new conversations, driven by happenings of their current situations. Remembered Events Students remember events in their lives in which they gained factual knowledge. These events may include watching movies, taking part in activities, or reading books. The following piece of text is Camel’s artifact from the Thinkquest platform Week Two page that I pulled up to show Camel during our interview. Camel’s text addresses the following prompt: Pick one of these pictures your partner agents took to write about. You can explain to a person who has never been to Drafnor what the picture is about or represents, or you can write from the point of view of something in the picture, like, ‘Hi, I'm an eclipse.’ There were five photos available on the page for students to choose from: a picture of a solar eclipse taken inside the MSU planetarium; a nebula, also from the planetarium; the MSU mascot 70 Sparty; the MSU football stadium; and the MSU running track. This is Camel’s response to the prompt: Sparty is the MSU mascot. There is a statue of a spartan. They only wore loin cloths and helmets in war so people did not grab on to them and kill them. They are very strong. The statue was made of actual marble. the statue is on this giant stand and is about ten feet tall with an extra three feet because of the stand. In the following transcript, Camel describes a movie he had seen, the memory of which contributed to his knowledge of the Spartans: C: I was watching this movie about the Spartans and um well it wasn’t really about the Spartans, it was about this basketball team, and they were Jewish so they were talking about the Spartans and how they fought at war. A: And did you just-when did you watch that movie? Like right before your trip orC: A very long time ago. This is one example of how a student drew upon a remembered event to supply information to fill out a composition. Camel used knowledge he had gained in a past life event to describe a picture recently taken by his peers on their PALS trip to MSU. Students also remember events that bear on the “how” of their composing efforts. In our interview, Pony used examples from remembered events in her life to contextualize why she often did what she did while composing. Pony remembered two separate events from her life in which she did things “accidentally.” She told the following story as an example of her poor memory, which she cited as being something she struggles with as a composer: P: I was at my horse show one day. There was like a year ago I learned the course like a minute before it was my turn. It was easy for me to remember it the first time but when I 71 got to the second to last jump I was like where’s my next jump? So then I jumped the last jump and I’m like oh it must be right and then I accidentally go to the wrong jump which I shouldn’t have done anyway because the last jump was my last jump. I shouldn’t have gone to the other jump. So I’m like oh man I just lost my remembering. And here is another remembered event from Pony that picks up on this theme of “accidentally” doing something: this time with a computer (this story is not coded under “interactions with others” because Pony was not directly communicating with another human being). She is describing her experience using a computer at home: P: Cuz the computer has to think it, put it down, do all the software you have to-when I first started on the computer, you know the mouse? I always considered where the mouse goes--one time it was fun to watch, move the mouse and so I was going like this (demonstrates with mouse) So I started to go up here, pop up I press the button and all of a sudden my old--well technically we’re moving--so my mom’s like “Mouse this is your last time on this computer cuz we’re getting rid of it,” I’m like, “Oh good.” Cuz I’m like uh oh I’m not gonna tell my mom this so I accidentally pressed the button and there’s this email and I’m like how do I get out? And all of a sudden I go up here before I click the exit button and it didn’t say exit it just said something different like Home Depot wants you to donate money and it’s going to take it from your credit card. It was my mom and dad’s computer so I was like oh man, so I’m like I better not click that so I go over here and there’s this other button and it’s really the x button. I press it-ok. Ok, except I was playing around with it again, like later on in the day before we left and it was like a minute before we left and all of a sudden there was this pop up like “You’ve won $50,000, a computer, a beach ball, and a vacation in Florida!” And I’m like very 72 new and I’m like Oh, I want to do that! Yay. So I go over there and I click on it and I’m like that’s not what this really is and it has the credit card number and I’m like delete so I delete the credit card number which is bad because I had to go on to the xx and delete that too which is impossible to do because you need to have your credit card number to delete it so I didn’t know the credit card number, and I had to delete everything on there-I couldn’t do it. Just from that one thing. Pop up. A: Playing with the mouse. P: Pop up. Yeah and the pop up thing. Like ooh I want that $50,000, the vacation, everything, the computer. I want my own computer. I wonder if it’s gonna come next week. Uh oh. Next week we’re gone oh no. I’m like we didn’t get a call from them, what happened here? Pony’s memory of her previous event involving the computer contains the same word “accidentally.” She uses “accidentally” a third and fourth time, to describe her networked composing acts during Webplay to account for why she wrote so little. During our interview, I presented to her her own text from the Thinkquest platform, Week One, for which the prompt was: “This message board is designed to help you get to know the other class in this Webplay Project Space. Leave a message for your fellow agents below saying who you are, what school you go to and what you like best about living where you live.” Pony wrote the following: hi my name is Pony i like to horse back ride,ski. This is what she told me about that post: P: I couldn’t-I was going to do a lot more but I accidentally pressed the save button, because I was like this and then I accidentally pressed down on the key. So I saved it. 73 But then I did another one that’s somewhere and well, it’s longer, it had horseback riding, skiing, gymnastics, a whole bunch of stuff. The events that Pony remembered when asked about her composing acts indicate the kinds of themes that may come up for her when she checks in with herself about composing: she tells herself the story of how she forgets things and does things accidentally. This conversation with self may serve to influence her networked composing acts as she describes below: P: Yeah you can do anything with paper almost. You can like, you can barely do anything with computer. You can do games. It takes a long time to get to a site and you have to type it and it’s hard cuz you have to find all the letters unless you know how to do it and then just type and then just watch the screen. Her conversations with herself about her empowerment to compose situate her as in control during pencil-and-paper composing, but out-of-control, prone to having accidents, in networked composing. Camel and Pony’s transcripts demonstrate that in composing or reflection upon composing, students draw upon not only about what they like, but also events they’ve remembered as happening to them, or events they’ve caused to happen. The Camel transcript provides a straightforward example of what a student drew upon to supply content he needed to fulfill a task, while Pony’s transcript provides an example of a student’s self-assessment about how she is at certain things related to the procedures of composing. Pony describes herself as accident-prone; she accidentally does things in networked composing that mean her text does not come out as she hoped it would. Because form in networked composing is related not only to genre concerns--such as what type of text is expected 74 to be inputted by the students, but also to basic hardware concerns--such as how to operate the keyboard and the mouse in ways that support effective generation of text—students may converse with themselves and draw upon more than is particularly relevant to the task at hand. Clicking on a pop-up button is qualitatively different from contributing to a discussion board; however, because both are done using a computer, it is easy to see why Pony would remember that particular event and to see how this remembrance could encumber her. This type of conversation—of students with their remembered events—limits the student to her own perspective, be it present or past. The final category introduces a further perspective to the students’ conversation with themselves, for in the final category, the student remembers an interaction with another. Remembered Interactions with Others During composing events, students draw upon memories of interactions they have had with other people. A representative example of a student drawing upon a past interaction in a composing act is Gecko’s report of how she worked with other students to create tableaux. On the August 4th dramatic composing day, Gecko’s group had decided to make a tableaux of the local bus garage to fulfill the assigned task of representing a location from their local area using their bodies (See Chapter Three for a more detailed description of the activity.) The group worked together to decide how to best represent the features of the bus garage. During my interview with Gecko, I projected a still image taken from a video recording of the Webplay activities on August 4th. It shows five girls in a pose. Three girls are kneeling in a line: they are on their hands and knees on the floor with their faces out. At both ends of this line, a fourth and fifth girl are standing. They are leaning toward each other, and their hands meet over the heads of the 75 three kneeling girls. Also visible in the picture are boys who are watching what is going on. One boy has circled around the frozen group to view it from a different angle than the other students. Gecko and I are referring to this image throughout this portion of the interview: A: So where do you think your ideas came from on this one? [DQ6] How do you think you got the idea to make the triangle with your hands or… G: Well since I wasn’t there I didn’t know really. So um Manatee was like well, it had a pointy top. A: And she said it had a pointy top and you just thought let’s put our hands together to make a point. G: Yeah, um because in 4th grade we went to Mackinac Island for a school trip and we had to build, make a human arch and we had it like that so I had that idea from there. Gecko did not take the PALS field trip to the bus garage with the other students in the tableaux. As a result, she did not possess the knowledge of the features of the bus garage, which her peers who had been on the trip did. Fortunately, in a collaborative composing situation, knowledge of substance may be supplied by one member of the group, while procedural knowledge of form may be supplied by another member of the group. Just as many bodies present creates the possibilities for many features to be represented (e.g., two girls form the roof of a bus garage, three girls form three buses under the garage), in group composing, many minds present creates the possibilities for different types of knowledge to be supplied by different students. Gecko reveals in her interview, “Well since I wasn’t there, I didn’t know really.” She did not know what she was meant to be creating. Manatee (a focal student who was not interviewed) who had gone on the trip and interacted with the tour guides there said, “Well, it had a pointy top.” Once the “what” was established—the roof of the bus garage is a pointy top--Gecko was able to draw 76 upon the memory of a prior interaction to suggest how to represent just such a pointy top. She reveals in the interview that on a fourth grade field trip (over a year prior to the current composing event) she had been guided through building a human arch: students stood opposite each other with their arms raised to touch palms. It was this technique that she shared with her group that day. Gecko had not gained knowledge of this technique through reading or observing; she had actively participated in a collaborative composition that had symbolically represented a form using human bodies as artistic medium. It was knowledge of this prior interaction that Gecko was able to bring to the group. This example of Gecko’s remembered interaction is especially interesting in the context of this collaborative interactional composing event. The interview data reveals that students often recalled interactions with others in which they were the subject or the listener. In the act of writing and performing to which recall contributes, the student can shift roles and become the expert or the author. In Gecko’s case, she was a student in fourth grade, learning how to make a composition using bodies; now entering sixth grade, she shows younger girls how to make the composition: her role has changed from learner to teacher. Having thus described the interest and memories that students draw upon, I turn now to demonstrate their interplay. Interplay of Interest, Remembered Events, and Remembered Interactions The various types of memories (of events and interactions) that students bring to composing events do not operate in isolation from each other. In fact, students reported how one type of memory may trigger another. The data reveals that students may draw on memories of many different types so as to supply themselves with the information needed to complete a writing objective. 77 Interplay of Remembered Events and Remembered Interactions I return to the example of Camel’s remembered event about watching a movie that talked about the Spartans. Reading farther along in the interview transcript, it is shown that it is not just the movie that feeds Camel’s knowledge base, nor does he recall the information from the movie directly. I present again Camel’s text: Sparty is the MSU mascot. There is a statue of a spartan. They only wore loin cloths and helmets in war so people did not grab on to them and kill them. They are very strong. The statue was made of actual marble. the statue is on this giant stand and is about ten feet tall with an extra three feet because of the stand. The following transcript is repeated from above and then continues on: C: I was watching this movie about the Spartans and um well it wasn’t really about the Spartans, it was about this basketball team, and they were Jewish so they were talking about the Spartans and how they fought at war. A: And did you just-when did you watch that movie? Like right before your trip orC: A very long time ago. A: Ok well you saw that movie. Did you know when you started it that you were going to say all this or did it kind of happen while you were writing it? C: Well it wasn’t because of the movie: I had asked my mom about the Spartans and she told me all about them. So I remembered the movie and then I remembered what she had said about them. A: Gotcha. And how about this part-it says the statue was made out of actual marble. How did you know that part? 78 C: Because my friend’s-for one, my friend, Crocodile, Agent C-his uncle’s a carpenter and he knows what’s marble or not and because I’ve seen marble statutes on TV and everything so. A: And how about this part-it’s about 10 feet tall, with an extra 3 feet because of the stand. C: Um, I was judging by how tall it was compared to me. A: So you were judging-you know how tall you are. How tall are you? C: Like 4 foot 10 or something. A: Ok, so you could kinda estimate based on how tall you are, oh. C: Plus I fell like 8 feet. A: You fell 8 feet? C: Yeah. I-in the winter I broke my arm. This transcript is an example of how remembered events, remembered interactions, and reasoning may all play a part in the production of one paragraph. Camel only recalled the movie information as a result of an interaction with his mother. It was a conversation that served to prompt recall of the remembered event of watching the movie. In the utterance that begins, “Because my friend’s- for one,…” Camel triangulates the data available to him: citing both a memory of an interaction with a friend’s uncle and what he has seen on TV, as providing sufficient evidence to support his inference that the material the statue was made from was marble. Additionally, Camel supports his inference about the height of the statue by describing a remembered event that reinforced for him the concept of height. Not only does the remembered event provide material from which to draw, the viscerally79 experienced knowledge of what 8 feet is serves as a springboard for reasoning acts. None of this recalling or reasoning is evidenced by the final paragraph. The final paragraph uses these tools to present a more audience-ready paragraph (I return to this subject in Chapter Five). Remembering a past event (like a movie) may trigger a remembered interaction that provides more information than watching the movie did (like talking to a parent). Camel credits his conversation with his mother as more informative to him than the movie was. Not only a remembered event, but a host of remembered interactions contribute to Pony’s perceptions on particular types of networked composing. Pony’s discussion of her experience with computers continues: …I was like uh oh I just remembered the class I took at MSU reminded me of it on the computer it said don’t click on a pop up if you click on it, it’s a problem because you could get a worm or a virus, which happened. And they had the computer so everything-. And the computer broke down, literally broke apart. A: Wow so you took a class at MSU that helped with computer stuff? P: Yeah, Grandparents University. A: Oh Grandparents University. P: It told you a lot about computers and what you should and shouldn’t do with computers. Pony’s accident triggered a recall of interactions she had had with others around computers during a continuing education course on technology use as a part of a “Grandparents University” weekend at a nearby university with her grandparents. Later in the interview, she attributed that much of what she knows about Internet literacy, she learned at that class. She went on to 80 describe the tug-of-war that took place between her and her grandmother over her getting an email address. The transcript continues: P: It says on ebay or whatever don’t ask to meet here it says don’t ever give your name, number. Don’t even give a fake one, cuz that could really be a real one. And that might be in very big trouble. So I’m like I don’t want an email account. I’m like uh oh I might give my email thing to the wrong person I think it’s my friend because if it says a name in it, and it says the last name, I’m like I better not do that. So I’m like I don’t want an email account, something could go wrong. I’m like I don’t want one. My grandma’s like what do you want for an email account? And I’m like I don’t want one. And I’m like saying I don’t want one. She’s like begging me to get one so I can like –so she can email me. I’m like no, I don’t want one. I have this- the phone at my house I’m like why don’t you text me or something? She’s like No I want to do it on the computer, I’m like how do I know it’s really you on the computer so I’m like No and I just walk out. A: Uh huh, yeah. P: And I go back to my house. A: You definitely have to be vigilant right? P: Yeah You have to know what you’re doing. You have to know it’s your friend. Never give out your email unless know absolutely 100% positive they’re your friend and they will not give it to anyone else. So you can trust them. A: Right. P: Cuz if you don’t trust them, they could hook you up with another person; they email they have your first and last name in it if I get one I’m not going to respond unless I’m 100% positive it’s them. What I’m gonna do is when I get their email, I’m gonna call 81 them and ask them did you send me an email and then if they say yes, I’ll give them the thing, if it’s exactly the same, if I highlight it, it says down at the bottom of the screen, it says it again, the same thing that’s when you know. A: That’s smart. Call em and check, is this actually yours. P: Yeah call em is this actually yours. My mom-my grandma-she got this thing that said your credit card is gonna expire in the next hour so she clicks on it it’s really from UPS they’re going to send you something bad in the mail or something and she got a virus in her computer it’s a brand new one that she just bought like a hundred dollars like oh man I got a worm in my computer now so she had to get a new server, a new thing a new password where no one knows what it is and it’s like oh man it’s more money cuz I just got a new computer. And then she took that computer obviously to the Goodwill or something I don’t remember where she took it. Goodwill or the somethingA: That’s why you have to be safe too because it’s expensive right? P: She took on a um a email account that had a virus in it email had a virus I don’t even know how you get rid of the viruses, I don’t think you can. The extended example from Pony indicates the reciprocal relationships of memories and stances regarding composing: in this case, specifically, networked composing. Pony’s reluctance to engage in particular kinds of online communication and composing, such as trading messages via email, is greatly influenced by remembered interactions with adults, including her grandmother and university teachers; and by remembered events, such as accidentally clicking on a Web link. Pony’s story reveals that even as many adults choose technologies to use only after having performed a cost/benefit analysis; so, too, do some students come to the use of technologies with a critical perspective. Pony had witnessed the vulnerability of computers, as 82 well as had attended a continuing education course offered by the local university about computer technologies. These experiences worked together to discourage Pony’s interest in an email address: “I don’t want an email account. Something could go wrong.” Interplay of Interest and Remembered Interactions In this section, I describe the relationship between student memories of interactions and their interest: two categories presented in this chapter as separate stimuli in composing acts, but between which there is much interplay. One of the PALS activities was a visit from Gordon’s Pets, a pet store in the larger metropolitan area 10 miles from the town. Many of the students I interviewed had either visited the Gordon’s Pets store or remembered when the Gordon’s Pets staff brought various animals to the school the previous summer. Many students cited their past interactions with the people and animals of Gordon’s Pets as motivating and/or inspiring them to write about Gordon’s Pets, either what they were looking forward to seeing, (as they had been prompted to write about in their journals) or following the visit, what they had appreciated or liked about the visit (as they were prompted to write about in both journals and the Thinkquest platform). Transcripts from Camel, Panther, and Gecko indicate the effect of the remembered interactions: Camel: A: Which one sticks in your head? MSU or Gordon’s Pets? C: Gordon’s Pets cuz I have –I’ve been to Gordon’s Pets a lot and I um really like animals. A: So is there anything that helped you make this? [JQ4] C: Just what I remembered from the last time they did it. 83 Panther: A: So, um so where do you think your ideas came from to help you with this one. [JQ6] P: Mostly the animals I used to make and looking at the animals from Gordon’s Pets and also when I- also during the school year one of our fish died, like a sucker fish so we went to go get another one at Gordon’s Pets cuz we kept going to Meijier [name of grocery store] and they kept dying so we saw one a sucker fish and we bought that one, he was very fast tho so we called him Speedy Gonzalez and when we were walking past, going to the cash register, I saw the lizard and the bird and I saw Fred the tortoise. Well I think it was Fred. A: You had already seen all these animals P: Yeah. A: When you went to the store to get your new fish. P: Yeah, but I saw them last year also. Gecko: A: So is there anything that you remember that helped you to make this piece of writing. [JQ4] G: Um well I’ve been to Gordon’s before. Like the store. A; So you’ve already been there. G: Yeah, and I know what the like, what’s there, so I was just like jotting down stuff from the store that I could think. Just as students cited liking to write about what they liked, these examples also reveal that having interactions can contribute to their interest for a particular subject. Visiting the store and 84 being visited created ties from the student to the information. Students’ interest for the pet store and pets works in interplay with the interactions resulting from visiting the store. Assuming the theoretical premise that students engage remembered, present, and projected others as audience during composing acts, the significance of the remembered interaction, especially in conjunction with remembered events and interest is apparent. Remembered interactions call forth not only knowledge, but examples of role. For youth aged 811, in many of their remembered interactions, they are situated as listener or object. A composing act is a site where students may not only draw upon previous experiences to craft new meaning, but may re-situate themselves as speaker or subject, instead of listener or object, by virtue of participating in a composing act. Moving beyond talking with themselves about what they like or talking with themselves about what they are like (i.e., Pony), remembered interactions provide a third, fourth, etc. perspective into the conversation, allowing students to invoke and triangulate their interest and memories so as to achieve consensus within themselves. In dialogue with remembered interactions, students entertain, as it were, multiple viewpoints at once: their own, the others in the interaction, and their current state of mind. The presence of the composing act compels rehearsal of these past interactions so as to give the student inspiration for a new presentation, or a new role within presentation. Conclusion To summarize, the chapter shows how students draw upon interests they like and know about, as well as memories of events and interactions, during the course of dramatic and networked composing. In a memory of an interaction, students may often be featured as object or listener: the composing event as it occurs within an enduring audience of peers may invite 85 students to place themselves into more active roles of the forms remembered from their interactions. These roles may include, among others, speaker or author. Student memories of interactions that supply knowledge used in composing become visible and useful to others in the class because in networked and dramatic composing, knowledge-sharing may be more visible and accessible. 86 CHAPTER FIVE Introduction In this chapter, I’ll look at the way fourth, fifth, and sixth graders enter an electronic space and how communicating and composing are taken up in different ways by different students. Students “talk” together through producing text as prelude to more extensive writing for different audiences. Key purposes for networked writing while considering audience interacting are to get to know, to build relationships, to introduce and to interact with others. In Chapter Four, it was demonstrated how students engage their memories and interests in a composing act. Here, in Chapter Five, through close analysis of the transcript of the students’ Week One networked composing, I will demonstrate how students engage each other in communication during a networked composing act, as well as describe some of the features of the compositions they produce in such an act. This chapter describes the features of student action as they consider an audience interacting comprised of their peers. Given the task to introduce themselves through typed text to a partner class who would access their text through a networked platform, students worked to meet two objectives. One was to compose: to generate text that fulfilled the task requirements as outlined by the prompt to introduce themselves and what they liked about their local area. The second was to engage present peers in communication: to generate text that “talked” to the peers sitting alongside them in the lab. In Thinkquest Week One, the curricular focus was on students communicating, while in Thinkquest Week Six, the curricular focus was on students composing. However, in this chapter it is demonstrated that in networked composing contexts, these activities are not mutually exclusive, and there are many different ways students attempt both. 87 Theoretical Framing In this chapter, I describe the ways the most important audience for students in the first week of Thinkquest work was “audience interacting” or “audience involved.” As presented in Chapter One, “audience interacting” refers to the readers’ potential to contribute to a given composition. Audience interacting captures the idea that the audience for written work is capable of writing and responding in tandem or communication with other writers throughout the writing process: at brainstorming, drafting, revising, etc., stages. Audience Interacting: Self-identification in Networked Writing In her 2009 article, Erin Karper describes actions associated with writing for and with the interactive or involved audience: Web 2.0 writers can expect that their reading/writing audience will engage in actions such as approving, disapproving, and providing comments. As discussed in the introduction chapter, the amount of real estate devoted to audience contribution exceeds that of the original writer in many networked spaces. Aware of this balance, Karper describes how digital natives shape their work and use various identification strategies to address an audience interacting: The shaping of self-presentation through audience involvement and engagement in identification strategies in order to achieve a specific purpose by conforming to the needs and desires of a specific audience is perceived as normal for most digital natives. (p. 280). Using identification strategies that demonstrate the writer understands the needs of her audience is, as Karper describes, so commonplace to digital natives as to be invisible to them as a “strategy,” but is nonetheless as important a facet for the networked writer’s toolbox as other more traditionally school-taught strategies. 88 For school writing, students are taught to anticipate their audience’s needs (Graham and Perin, 2007), but with “audience interacting” audiences, writers self-identify in part to attract the type of audience they’re seeking. For example, if a chef turns to a Web 2.0 platform to gain audience input on a recipe she’s posted, she may engage in self-identification strategies, such as describing herself as a working mother, a Westerner, and a BBQ expert. This self-presentation can aid in attracting the type of audience she seeks, a specific group who may share certain aspects of her life, thus making it easier for her to write to them because she is more intimately aware of their needs and desires. By putting out there that she is a mother, she may get feedback from other chefs who, like her, may not have the time or resources to get out and buy exotic ingredients but have tips for making do with household ingredients and limited time. For Web 2.0 writing, self-identification and presentation is an ongoing and fluid process, which often begins with some sort of introductory material. For writers with stable blogs or websites, an “About Me” page is common. In networked academic spaces, both within inquiry units and not, much online curriculum begins with a task for learners to introduce themselves: it asks the writer to situate him/herself in the context that he/she shares with the others in the class. This is a common feature of online curriculum at every level, from early childhood to graduate student; it is used to encourage communication and build community (http://www.ion.uillinois.edu/resources/tutorials/communication/activities.asp). The introduction prompt is often designed to reveal the way the foundation for learning is shared by the members of the online group or class. In this chapter, I analyze student writing within the introduction page of the networked platform, the page that asks students to self-identify in relation to the larger compositional agenda, creating a guidebook to their local area. 89 Audience Interacting: Spaces for Writing in Wiki Work To continue to frame the findings in this chapter, I turn to Michael Morgan’s (2009) essay on wiki work. Morgan describes how wikis provide multiple spaces for different types of writing yet allow for fluid cross-application across spaces. He introduces categorizations that are instructive for thinking about the online platform work detailed in this study: ThreadMode is a dialogue, a discussion, a dialectic. It is open, collective, dynamic, and informal. It can develop as a page or develop on a page, but it develops organically, without predictive structure. ThreadMode is not a soapbox so much as a sandbox (p.161). DocumentMode is expository, discursive, more monologic—but no less open—than thread mode. DocumentMode pages and sections of pages become the collective understanding of the wiki (p.162). While not a wiki, the online platform used in this study (Thinkquest) shares this feature with wikis: networked writing takes place in a platform that houses multiple spaces, conducive to composing with differing purposes and in differing genres. Writers working in these platforms often shift back and forth between what Morgan characterizes as “ThreadMode” and “DocumentMode,” and it is even possible that text can exemplify both modes at once. The visible presence of a typed dialogue among contributors, carried out in the same mode as the expository pieces, makes communication an integral piece of networked writing. Key Terms of the Study Relevant to this Chapter Audience interacting: captures the idea that the audience for written work is capable of writing and responding in tandem or communication with other writers throughout the writing process: at brainstorming, drafting, revising, etc. stages 90 Communicating: crafting of text, images, sounds, video, and/or performance so as to initiate or respond to ideas within a back-and-forth exchange with another(s) Composing: crafting of text, images, sounds, video, and/or performance so as to make new meaning Curricular Background: PALS Computer Lab Time Routines I will now describe the larger educational context in which students were situated when they began the work in the networked platform. PALS is the name for the summer program for the Morris and Partridge schools in Drafnor. As part of the general PALS program, students went to the computer lab every day. In the computer lab, the PALS teachers designated that part of the time was to be used for academic time, and part of the time was to be used for free time. The teachers listed on the board some appropriate sites for academic time, e.g., wikipedia.org, as well as academic software that were available on the computer desktops, e.g., Math Blaster. During free time, students were allowed to play games and visit sites that were appropriate for school, as determined by Miss Spider and the other teachers. As part of PALS in Summer 2010, I delivered a bi-weekly, one hour inquiry unit called Webplay. One of the sessions each week in Webplay was dedicated to inviting students to work in the online platform, Thinkquest, so as to communicate and compose in the service of creating a guidebook about the local area. Oftentimes when I entered the computer lab to begin the Webplay session and students were having their free time, they were on the Country Music Television site, http://cmt.com, watching country music videos. I never saw students on other music video sites such as http://mtv.com or http://bet.com, and I don’t know if the teachers would have believed the 91 material on these sites to be inappropriate for students or not. Regardless, http://cmt.com was the favored choice for this particular school culture, and the staff allowed students to access it. Popular sites for games (as told to me by the students) included poptropica.com, crashonlinegames.com, bubblebots.com, gamesgames.com, and gamehouse.com. While games common for students to play during free time would be classified as “interactive,” there were few construction, design, or composing elements to these games. Students were not usually participating in massively multiplayer online role-laying games, or, MMORPGs, in which play is with other users and extended over a period of days, weeks, or months. Students did not contribute to social networking sites during their free time. These were not blocked by school firewalls. From communications with students, I learned that some students were not allowed by parents to have accounts; others weren’t interested in having accounts. It’s also possible that the PALS teachers would not have allowed social networking sites to be accessed. There were often negotiations among staff and students about various sites being appropriate: either with regard to being academically suitable during academic time or to being “appropriate for school” during free time. During lab time, students often counted down the minutes from when academic time would end and free time would begin. Within this context of time carved up for students in the computer lab, students were introduced to a set of expectations for what was to be accessed during academic time vs. free time. However, there was very little produced by the students using computer technologies during this lab time, neither during academic time nor during free time. During academic time, students accessed information online, then reproduced, or summarized it, in handwriting with a pencil in a paper journal. During free time, students were primarily using arrow keys to navigate adventures and quests in games, or watching and listening to music videos or other multimedia. 92 Composing or designing using computer or online technologies were rarely part of lab time during PALS. It is with this understanding of the context of lab time that I turn to the work students did during Webplay time. Curricular Background: Thinkquest Week One Participation Choosing an Icon 1 In Week One of Thinkquest, students were asked to log on , create a password, and choose an icon to represent him or herself. The database within Thinkquest has over 60 icons for 1 Each student was given a unique username and password to use in the Thinkquest platform. The technology coordinator for the school gave me passwords that had already been assigned each student for use with the school computer labs. The technology coordinator wished to keep password use for each student consistent to the highest degree possible. The Thinkquest platform required that students log in using their first name and last initial with the extension, “.sctdew”: this was the username generated for each student. Then, each student was required, upon initial log-in, to change the password generated by Thinkquest to a different password of his own choosing. When I did a test run, I found that Thinkquest required a new password to have both letters and numbers, and many of the passwords already in use in the school district contained only letters. Therefore, I had to add numbers to the end of the existing passwords. On the first day we logged on to Thinkquest as a group, students were given a slip of paper with their username, the password Thinkquest had originally assigned to them, and the new password they were to type in to be their permanent password. I could have simply changed all the old passwords to the new passwords myself, but there were a couple important screens that popped up during the password changing process that I wanted students to see, including rules for participation and a radio button for students to click “Yes” to indicate that they had read the rules and agreed to abide by them. There was also a screen which showed students how to be safe online: e.g., not to share passwords, etc. Had I changed the passwords myself, the students would not have seen these introductory screens and would not have been given the option to actively agree to the rules of the online space, within the online space itself. This logging on process extended over a number of days, as there were students who missed the first day we did it or typed in their new password incorrectly and so couldn’t log on again the next time they tried. In these cases, I was able to manually change their password for them, using the administrator menu. Had students memorized or written down their username and password, they could have accessed Thinkquest from home, but this was not something we encouraged students to do, and time logs of log-ins generated by Thinkquest show no evidence that any students accessed the platform from home. A few did return to the platform during computer time as part of the PALS program that was not Webplay time, to add to or revise or catch up on what they had done earlier in the day or week during Webplay time. 93 students to choose from: many of these are dynamic. For example, Camel chose a soccer ball that bounced up and down in the box that contained it. Others chose more abstract symbols, such as a black and red spiral that rotated clockwise within its box. One student chose a picture of a dog that alternated with another picture of three dog prints, which appeared in the box sequentially: one dogprint appeared, then another, then another. Choosing an icon was one of the first activities students engaged in, and they liked this very much (Field notes 7/14; 7/16). It functioned as a self-identification strategy, a key action in networked writing (Karper, 2009). Choosing an icon to represent themselves was also an activity that was easy for students to teach to other students who were newer to Thinkquest. For students who missed the day when choosing an icon was introduced in a mini-lesson, there was a ready supply of peers excited to show them how to do it. As this was a “how-to” question I delegated to students to answer for each other from the beginning, many students never asked me directly, but just leaned over and asked the person next to them how he/she got that cool picture. Phoenix was particularly keen to show his younger brother and his friends how to do it (Field notes 7/16). Addressing a Prompt The prompt for Week One was as follows: This message board is designed to help you get to know the other class in this Webplay Project Space. Leave a message for your fellow agents below saying who you are, what school you go to and what you like best about living where you live. Before the students had begun working, I, the instructor, gave a mini-lesson on using the platform and outlined the objectives for students for the day’s activities. During this mini-lesson, Phoenix raised his hand and asked me if he and the class were allowed to “use, like, computer language”: specifically, if he could “write ‘Sup’ for ‘What’s up?’” (Video transcript, 7/14/). I 94 had answered “No,” explaining this composing act was part of school and therefore the language should be like that used for any school assignment. I don’t know to what degree other students were listening to Phoenix’s question and my answer, for, as demonstrated in the analysis, some students did use many online conventions in their postings. To get started, students individually logged on to computers and then logged on to the Thinkquest platform and worked to address the above prompt on the Week One page of the Webplay space. As may be seen in the italicized portion of the prompt, the intended audience is specified: “This message board is designed to help you get to know the other class in this Webplay project space. Leave a message for your fellow agents below…” The students had been told that there was another group of agents working on the Webplay project: these were students at Partridge Elementary also attending the PALS program. The phrase the other class indicates that a message was to be left for these Partridge Elementary students. However, after answering the initial prompt, many students immediately began addressing the students within their own class, in other words, the people they were sitting right next to and across from in the computer lab. Data Analysis The following transcript of all Week One posts has been reformatted to read from top to bottom in chronological order, as opposed to how the transcript is generated in Thinkquest, with the newest post appearing at the top of the page, and the first post appearing last. Metadata such as date has been removed for each post: all posts were generated July 14th. All capitalization, punctuation, and spelling appear as the student originally typed. Pseudonyms appear instead of student names. Please see Table 3. 95 Table 3 Student Week One Thinkquest Contributions Post # Student Text of Student Contributions Post 1 Camel Hi I'm Camel I like soccer. Post 2 Camel Boing Boing Boing Post 1 Crocodile hi my name is crocodile i go to moris Post 1 Manatee hi my name is manatee i go to morris school. I like to stay here because the park and it is fun!!! Post 2 Crocodile i like fish do you Post 1 Male NP Hi i'm male NP. I go to ,and what I like best about where I live is that I have some neighbors that aren't like a mile away and friends that live right next door to me. Post 1 Pony Hey! Post 1 Female NP Hi my name is Female NP. I go to morris school.I like to live here because i like to have fun. i like gymnastics. Post 1 Phoenix hi my name is phoenix. I go to and i am entering 6th grade. I like living in Drafnor because of the sports programs. Post 3 Crocodile i also like to hunt to Post 2 Male NP Yes Crocodile I do like fish. 96 Table 3 (cont’d) Post 1 Ladybug Hi my name is Ladybug. I go to Morris School! What I like about about Drafnor is how many cool things they have that everyone can go to like Conheads, Desserts-r-us,and all the parks we have! I like to play Volleyball and do Tap dancing! Post 2 Manatee heyy what are you guys doing today. I like justin bieber.my fav song is eenie meenie1!!!! Post 2 Phoenix fish is good Post 2 Female NP Hey I like dogs do you? Post 4 Crocodile ow I fish at my geradpus hous Post 2 Pony hi my name is Pony I like to horse back ride,ski. Post 5 Crocodile camel how are you Post 3 Manatee I like were I live because I can walk up town and go 2 coneheads and lesters and heyyyyy female np wht r u doing right now Post 3 Male NP Yeah hunting is cool. Post 2 Ladybug yes, female NP I love dogs! Post 4 Male NP Hey Camel I like soccer too, and play in an organized league. 97 Table 3 (cont’d) Post 4 Crocodile hi giuys wen we git bake to theroom dowont to play Post 3 Female NP im righting to you. Post 3 Camel Hi I'm Camel a hobby of mine is fishing. I have been fishing since I was four thats great because I live by the looking glass river. when I was four I broke my head while fising. Post 4 Manatee hi um what i also like about Drafnor is that there r funnnnn places to go to!!!! Post 3 Pony i like to ride bikes,gymnastics and cmt.com Post 1 Gecko My name is Gecko. I go to Morris. I like where I live because the neiborhood is friendly. I love horses and horseback riding. I'm also a great artist. ;) I applied the following codes to the transcript above. I introduced these codes in Chapter Two; I include them again here for ease of reference. Length=WC=# Length is a word count of the post. Centrality=(1/3, 2/3, 3/3; 1/2, 1) Centrality is a measure of the alignment of the post to the prompt. If the post answers all elements of the prompt, it is given a 1. If the post answers part of the prompt, it is given a 98 1/2 (if there are two elements to the prompt) or 1/3, 2/3 (if there are three elements to the prompt). Academic convention use=AC Academic convention use is coded for a post that uses academic writing conventions. Indicator: Language such as repeating the words of the prompt in the post; using a thesis/supporting statements structure Online convention use=OC Online convention use is coded for a post that expresses ideas through means common in online text (text messages, IM chats, email) Indicator: Language such as “u r ” to mean “you are” Conversation=CN Conversation is coded for a post that expresses ideas through means common in oral, informal talk. Indicator: Language such as “Football, baby!” Appreciation of peer post (message or form)=AM, AF Appreciation is coded for a post that directly supports the message or form of a previous post. Indicator: language such as “I like” Communication=CM Communication is coded for a post that initiates a communication or responds to the communication-initiation of another post. Indicator: Language such as “Hey you guys” 99 The following table displays the word count, centrality measure, and presence of indicator for all other codes for each student who participated in the Week One activity. An x under a column indicates the student’s post fit the criteria for that particular code application. As an example, three of Crocodile’s six posts (2, 5, and 6) contained text that sought to initiate or respond in synchronous back and forth communication with peers; thus an x is marked in each corresponding row under the “CM” column. This table provides an overview of the nature of each focal student’s participation in this first networked composing activity, while the student descriptions to follow use narratives to represent actions exhibited during the students’ composing acts. Table 4 Thinkquest Week One Coding Post # Student WC C AC OC CN AM/F CM Post 1 Pony 1 0 Post 2 Pony 11 1/3 Post 3 Pony 8 0 Post 1 Crocodile 9 2/3 Post 2 Crocodile 5 0 Post 3 Crocodile 6 0 Post 4 Crocodile 7 1/3 Post 5 Crocodile 4 0 x Post 6 Crocodile 11 0 x Post 1 Camel 6 1/3 Post 2 Camel 3 0 x x 100 Table 4 (cont’d) Post 3 Camel 37 2/3 x Post 1 Ladybug 46 1 x Post 2 Ladybug 5 0 Post 1 Manatee 22 1 Post 2 Manatee 16 0 Post 3 Manatee 27 1/3 Post 4 Manatee 17 1/3 Post 1 Gecko 31 1 x Post 1 Phoenix 26 1 x Post 2 Phoenix 3 0 10.2 0.4 AVERAGE x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x Findings-Broadstroke This table shows the average number of words in each posting was 10.2, but there was wide deviation from this average. Crocodile, for example, writes numerous posts of around 10 words or less, while Gecko writes one post of 31 words. The table also shows many students addressed all elements of the prompt: (name, school, and what they liked about living in Drafnor), but not necessarily within the same post. Additionally, many students addressed one part of the prompt numerous times (such as presenting more than one thing they liked about living in Drafnor) while never addressing another part of the prompt (such as writing what school they went to). 101 This table presents an overview of student action and indicates directions for closer attention. Analysis of student writing began with these counts, and then moved to establishing descriptions of students’ actions. By analyzing patterns of these codes’ occurrence and overlap, I was able to determine particular roles students played in this networked composing act. Findings-Student Descriptions Crocodile: Engager/Non-Composer Crocodile directs his attention to trying to engage present peers in communication (networked, oral, or both) rather than trying to compose so as to address the prompt. Crocodile sought to engage his peers in communication. In interview data, he referred to this act of engagement as “experimenting.” I had asked him a question about his decision to use direct address language, (e.g., typing the phrase “I like fish do you”): A: What made you decide to do that? C: I don’t know; I was just seeing if anybody would write back; I was experimenting with it. Responses from peers in the room, both oral and networked, demonstrate to Crocodile that his experiment worked; he likes this. A: So you said, “I fish at my grandpa’s house.” C: Oh yeah some other people wrote back to me like oh, um which grandpa, or what’s your grandpa’s name. A: Oh here we go, what did Male NP write? C: “Yes, Crocodile, I do like fish.” A: Yes, Crocodile, I do like fish. C: Like to eat it. 102 A: Like to eat it, oh ok. So you saidC: Yeah. A: So you said, “I like fish do you?” And you didn’t put anyone’s name. C: Yeah, that was just random. That was just to see who’d send it. A: Just random, who’d send it back. C: Yup and Male NP said I do too. A: Oh yeah, so he said, let’s see I think it’s back here, so he said, “Yes, Crocodile I do like fish.” C: (reading) “I also like to hunt, too.” And somebody responded to me about that too I don’t know where. A: Oh cool so what- do you like it when people respond? C: It was really really fun. I had fun with that. I had a couple people come over, “No, that’s not how you spell ‘house.’” A: Oh, ok and what did you think about that? C: I’m like oh thank you, I didn’t recognize that because I’m not really good at spelling. A: Uh huh, so um did it umC: It taught me that I don’t really know how to spell house. A: Well but it didn’t make you not want to write anything ever again. C: No, no, I didn’t care. I actually thanked them for telling me that because I had never recognized that. A: Oh ok, so you’d rather that someone let you know. So what would you do now if you wanted to fix it? How would you go about solving that? C: I don’t really know. I don’t know. 103 A: Um do you think that you might look it up or ask someone? C: I would ask someone. Crocodile seems to be a student who depends on engaging others in order to compose. When asked how he would go about fixing a problem, he doesn’t possess the inner resources (or isn’t adequately aware of them) to self-regulate, but states that to fix a problem, he’d ask someone for help. As the transcript demonstrates, he appreciates his peers engaging with him over his writing, even if it’s to correct his spelling. Crocodile’s primary focus is on conversing with his peers in the present moment, not on addressing the composing prompt. Although he does write about what he likes, he does not explicitly address the elements of the prompt regarding what he likes about his local area. Having seen that his “experiment” worked (others responding to him in oral and networked communication), Crocodile goes completely off-prompt to ask another student how he is doing: “camel how are you”. While the first communication was partially rooted in the expectations of the prompt (what do you like to do?), this sally cannot be classified as both relevant and communicative, but only communicative. His final post follows the same pattern: Crocodile: hi giuys wen we git bake to theroom dowont to play Having not gotten an answer from Camel, Crocodile extends his range of those he’s trying to engage in conversation. Now, not just “talking to” Camel, he “talks to” everyone in the class as evidenced by his use of hi guys. The phrasing when we get back to the room clearly indicates that Crocodile has only present peers in mind as he writes this, as it is only contextual to the present group. Crocodile’s posts did not demonstrate use of academic conventions as other students’ posts did. He also never fully addressed the prompt: this measure of centrality, like academic 104 convention use, is often measured to determine composing success in school writing assessments. However, he has higher counts of language that initiates or responds to communication than any other student. Crocodile’s attentions in this composing act are directed toward engaging present peers. Crocodile represents a student who would be at one extreme of a communication/composing continuum. He desires communication during his composing act: looking solely at what he produced may lead one to conclude that he was distracted from fulfilling a prompt by the opportunity for communication. However, the interview data in conversation with his artifacts as a set over the course of the 6-week unit indicates that this initial session created in Crocodile a sense of peer audience awareness that was instrumental to him in later compositional work. While as an educator I would be tempted to negatively assess Crocodile’s progress on this first task, as a researcher, I am able to describe Crocodile’s communication in this session and see how it plays out for him in the larger compositional act of contributing to a guidebook (See Chapter Six). Camel: Bystander/Composer Camel directs his attention to the various stimuli available to observe within networked composing platforms so as to source ideas and tools for use in composing. As described earlier, students chose an icon to represent themselves. Camel’s first posts were in dialogue with this feature of the Thinkquest platform, rather than with the composing prompt. Camel had chosen a soccer ball as his icon; this dynamic icon bounced up and down in a small square decorated with grass on the bottom and blue sky on the top. Camel introduced himself with his name, then wrote that he liked soccer. This post didn’t address the directive to say where he went to school or what he liked about his local area: his first dialogue was with the 105 capacities and properties of the icon he had chosen for himself. His second post was “Boing Boing Boing,” a linguistic description of the action of the bouncing ball that was his icon. Camel’s humorous post is an example of composing to an addressed audience as opposed to communicating with an interacting audience, a move that will be further analyzed in Chapter Six. “Boing Boing Boing” doesn’t expect any particular direct response back to the author, back to Camel from a peer in the room, or the distant peer invoked in the prompt; it rather expects the reader will laugh as a result of the appropriateness of the words she’s read. After self-identifying as both a soccer fan and a networked platform user who brings a sense of playfulness to available technological features, Camel is “quiet”: he does not contribute to any of a few ongoing communication threads that his peers develop. Camel does not contribute to the discussion board again until close to the end of the session, in which his post picks up on a communication thread, elaborates on it, and makes it uniquely suited to his own author agenda. Post 3 Camel: Hi I'm Camel a hobby of mine is fishing. I have been fishing since I was four thats great because I live by the looking glass river. when I was four I broke my head while fising. Camel’s post picks up on the content of the collaboratively-constructed thread and elaborates on this topic in his own individual manner, including more advanced vocabulary, such as “hobby” and a story of an experience he had while fishing. While still leaving out the school, Camel’s post addresses the prompt in its inclusion of a landmark feature specific to the local area. Camel’s post had higher word counts and made more use of academic conventions than his peers’ posts that explored this topic, fishing. While not himself a contributor, the networked 106 nature of the communication likely contributed to Camel’s sourcing of content for his own composing. Camel represents a student who uses wit to contribute to a forum for introductions but does not expect immediate online communication back from peers. He does not actively communicate, by, for example, reaching out to peers with a “you” voice, as Crocodile did. However, his contribution to the discussion board was on the same topic of fishing that Crocodile, Male NP, and Phoenix had all posted on. His composition is influenced by communication, even though he does not actively communicate online himself. Phoenix and Ladybug: Composer/Engagers Phoenix and Ladybug both direct attention to the expected academic task of fulfilling the expectations of a prompt and once finished, engage in communication (oral or networked or both). Typical of “good student” practice, these students get their assigned work done and then feel free to converse with others. As evidenced in the Week One transcript, Phoenix and Ladybug do not initiate communication, but they do respond to others’ communication initiations, but not in any sort of academic or even intellectually engaging sort of way. They appear to draw a line for themselves between academic work and communication. Both Phoenix and Ladybug are older and more advanced in composing skills. Both Ladybug’s and Phoenix’s initial posts had high word count rates, fully met the centrality measure expectations, and used academic conventions, such as including the language of the prompt to frame their own language. Their subsequent posts were low in word count, did not fulfill the Centrality measure expectations, and did not use Academic Conventions, but did use Communication language. 107 These students, thus, demonstrate an ability to rhetorically shift register within one platform. Although the tools for composing did not change (typing into a networked platform), both Phoenix and Ladybug dramatically changed their composing style when they changed their intention, as demonstrated by the difference in their posts from initial to subsequent entries: Post 1 Ladybug: Hi my name is Ladybug. I go to Morris School! What I like about about Drafnor is how many cool things they have that everyone can go to like Conheads, Desserts-r-us,and all the parks we have! I like to play Volleyball and do Tap dancing! Post 2 Ladybug: yes, female NP I love dogs! Post 1 Phoenix: 2 hi my name is phoenix. I go to and i am entering 6th grade. I like living in Drafnor because of the sports programs. Post 2 Phoenix: fish is good Phoenix and Ladybug’s omission of various mechanics--such as capital letters and periods--in Post 2 after including them in Post 1 demonstrates they chose to contribute text in a different way for a communication than for a composition. These students did not only drop more 2 Since the program took place in the summer, students had left one grade and had not entered another. For Gecko and Phoenix, this also meant they were between schools: 6th grade-8th grade are housed in one school in the Drafnor school district. Phoenix chose to align himself with the grade and school he was entering, while Gecko chose to align herself with the grade and school she had most recently finished. I did not give the 6th-8th grade school a pseudonym since the school is not relevant to this analysis, thus is used. 108 traditionally academic composing conventions: it is likely that given the chance, they would have included more online conventions, such as slang. As described earlier in this chapter, Phoenix was a student who had asked permission to use language more associated with online composing, and I had answered that the writing should be like any other writing done for school (a move I describe as a mistake later in this chapter). Phoenix and Ladybug are representative of students who are accustomed to completing assigned tasks quickly and easily, then moving on to more social pursuits, such as communicating with classmates online. In their posts, there is evidence they rhetorically demarcate the communicating task from the composing task. One avenue for future pedagogical effort may be to consider how to invite “good students” to craft communication as “smartly” as they craft expository prose, so as to generate ideas and material for a collaborative composition. Gecko: Non-Engager/Composer Gecko solely directs her attention to the expected academic task of fulfilling the expectations of a prompt. Given the prompt’s expectations did not include engaging with present peers, it is of interest that only Gecko did not engage in communication with present peers. Additionally, Gecko was the only student not to include a salutation to begin her post, e.g., “hi” or “hey.” The rhetorical purpose “to introduce” has genre conventions familiar to students as evidenced by their use of a salutation: not a traditional letter writing salutation, but a more informal salutation like “hi.” Although not directed in the prompt to use a salutation, the first action they were told to take was to “say who you are”; of seven focal students who participated in this exercise, five used the salutation of “hi” and one used “hey” before writing their name. 109 The only one who did not start with a salutation was Gecko. She only wrote one post and did not make or respond to any directly communicative posts. Gecko focused entirely on the composing task; she did not engage her present peers in communication, although she may have had them in mind as audience, along with the other group the prompt directed her to write to (“the other class in this Webplay Project Space”). Gecko, like Phoenix and Ladybug, is an older, more advanced student than others in the PALS program. Her post had a high word count, fully addressed each aspect of the prompt, and used academic conventions. She also included an emoticon, something no other student did. This indicates she is familiar not only with academic conventions, but online conventions. However, for her, online conventions aren’t necessarily used for immediate communication-making purposes. I include this to demonstrate that online convention use is not necessarily synonymous with desire to engage in immediate communication with present peers, but in Gecko’s case, may exemplify an awareness of how to use networked composing tools to meet rhetorical and more distant audience consideration aims. Gecko is representative of a student who takes the composing prompt at its word. While others began communicating, either initially or after seeing others do it, Gecko never directly engaged her classmates. This research raises questions about whether or not every student working on a collaborative composition needs to informally engage peers, if he/she does not so desire. Manatee: Composer/Engaging Composer Manatee addresses the prompt, then goes on to solicit and engage in immediate communication, and returns to further address the prompt. 110 In contrast to Crocodile, who doesn’t really compose; Camel and Gecko who don’t really engage; and Phoenix and Ladybug, who don’t engage so as to compose, Manatee’s compositions both address the prompt and engage present peers directly. Manatee manages two agendas simultaneously, albeit with sudden jerking shifts, and allows them to influence each other: communicating and composing. Manatee’s posts are only average as far as word count. However, her use of online conventions is much more pronounced than that of her peers. Post 1 Manatee: hi my name is manatee i go to morris school. I like to stay here because the park and it is fun!!! Post 2 Manatee: heyy what are you guys doing today. i like justin bieber.my fav song is eenie meenie1!!!! It is evidenced that Manatee has experience with genre conventions of online communication writing. Manatee asks of potentially present or distant peers “what are you guys doing today” Like Crocodile’s post, this statement is rooted in the present moment; Manatee expects that her readers will read her post “today.” However, discussion boards are online spaces that do not assume same-day reader/writer participation. Discussion boards are designed so that readers may log on and “be introduced” to others at their leisure. Manatee’s mother informed me in a talk during a student recess (Field Notes, 7/28/10) that Manatee had been begging and pleading with her parents for her own cell phone, explaining that all her friends had one and she needed to be able to send texts. Manatee’s use of language in the discussion board shows that texting/online communication genre conventions were familiar 111 to her, e.g., in her use of “heyy” with two ys and her use of “fav” for “favorite,” as well as her use of multiple exclamation points at the end of her utterances. Post 3 Manatee: i like were i live because i can walk up town and go 2 coneheads and lesters and heyyyyy female NP wht r u doing right now Manatee liked contributing to the discussion boards (Field Notes, 7/14/10). In this third post, she returns to the prompt so as to write more in accordance with the prompt, but then also addresses a present peer. Crocodile first addressed a peer, Camel, then, lacking a response, the larger group, “you guys.” In contrast, Manatee first addressed “you guys” then, lacking a response, a peer, Female NP, who was sitting close to her. Manatee asks the same question: “What are you guys doing?” but instead of asking about today, she asks about “right now”—language which expects an even more immediate response than her previous attempt to engage, which used “today.” Instead of using “you are” as she did the first time, she uses the online/texting conventions of “u” for “you” and “r” for “are.” Manatee changes her tactics so as to be more successful at getting her peers to engage with her in communication. Although it seems her primary energies are directed towards adapting her style to be more successful in communicating through networked composing—switching to use of a specific name, using the phrasing “right now” instead of “today,” incorporating more online conventions—she also continues to return to the expectations of the prompt. Manatee is representative of a student who is familiar with online communicating and desires to communicate with peers in a manner befitting the social networking applications she is familiar with, while simultaneously working to fulfill the expectations of the academic prompt. 112 For students like her, communicating and composing contribute to her work in relation to each other and recursively. Reflection: How Student Appropriation Upended Teacher Work, Fulfilling the Original Curriculum’s Provisions As indicated through use of direct address and use of names, students used the discussion board (the prompt did not indicate that synchronous communication was expected) to communicate with each other, with present peers. The Webplay curriculum had also included an online space within Thinkquest where this desire for more one-to-one, back and forth communication could be supported: student-to-student chat. Because I, the instructor, did not want the added responsibility of monitoring one-to-one communication among students, I did not introduce this provision within Thinkquest to the students. It was a part of the curriculum I chose to omit. However, as demonstrated by the students’ use of the discussion board—which did not through prompt or through explicit functionality support one-to-one communication—to communicate directly with the classmates they were sitting next to in the lab, the students had a set of expectations for online discourse that they used in this online space. For, even though the discussion board wasn’t designed for one-to-one, direct, synchronous communication, the students saw a clear way as to how it could be used to achieve such communicative action. So that’s what they did. And they were not incorrect, nor ignorant of the prompt in doing so. The prompt did say it was a place to “get to know “ the other class. “Get to know” is an act associated with communication. Additionally, this particular online tool, the discussion board, did not give students the option to revise their text before posting it. They had only one opportunity to “get it right”: once 113 they had clicked “Submit,’ they could not return to their post. Other functions in Thinkquest designed for more substantial writing work, such as the “write text” provision, by contrast, did allow for students to return to a text they had begun and revise it. Some students took a very long time to write their first post, understanding that once they clicked “Submit” they would be finished. Other students made initial posts more quickly, and, again because there was no explicit directive not to, simply contributed more posts. Some students read the initial prompt as it was written with the intended inference that each student would just leave one message: “Leave a message”: “a” indicating “one.” Other students did not. In the intended curriculum, each participating class would leave a message addressing the prompt: probably just one each, and then the partner class would read them so they would know more about what their fellow agents like about their local area. In my delivered curriculum, I could have discouraged the students from using the board to communicate with each other while sitting with each other, composing in the lab, but I did not do so because my focus was the exigencies and priorities of the present teaching context, not necessarily maintaining exact fidelity to the curriculum. The nature of the activity was such that some students would finish sooner than others. However, the Week One platform was configured such that there was no capacity for students to go back and write more or edit. I did not want students to move on to the next possible activity because that would have meant drawing students who were hard at work away from their work to listen to a mini-lecture, nor did I want students to just have free time to play around on the computer, unrelated to Webplay. So, I realized that by letting the students post more than once, they would continue to be occupied. Also because the option to go back and edit was not an option, it would have been unfair to say, “You’ve interpreted the prompt incorrectly,” or “This isn’t this space to do that in” because I was more curious about what 114 they’d write, and I was excited by their desire to communicate with each other. Did I insist on students fulfilling the rhetorical function “to introduce” solely with an expository post? No. Did I eagerly watch to see how students appropriated the online space to communicate?” Yes. Was this maintaining more of a researcher’s priority for interest in unexpected phenomena and less of a teacher’s priority for ensuring students understood the functions and forms of various online spaces for various work and rhetorical purposes? Perhaps. But that particular teacher priority was, at the time, also outweighed by the more pressing teacher priority to help everyone a) get online b) find their way to the Week One space and c) show those who were having trouble how to submit and how to view what they and others had submitted. By trying to meet the exigencies as I did, I inadvertently created a networked composing context that revealed more about understanding student networked composing actions than what I had originally imagined. I discovered that, even when presented with a prompt asking them to write for a non-present audience as the intended audience, this group of students wished to engage each other, both as interacting audience and as addressed audience, as the next chapter will detail. I made a mistake by closing down on Phoenix’s proposition to use more online conventions in his post, but by not doing so for the whole class, I was able to observe, e.g., Manatee’s rhetorical shifts using online conventions. While there is always some degree of disjuncture between intended and delivered curriculum, in technologically-mediated teaching contexts, this disjuncture may be particularly wide, given the many pedagogical factors at play. This disjuncture doesn’t have to be a bad thing, however, as it may, (as it did in this case), open up more local-specific, situated uses for adopted technologies, e.g., using a discussion board for communication as well as composition. 115 Conclusion To summarize, this chapter shows that when contributing to a networked platform to which their peers had access, student ordering of actions of composing and communicating varied. Some did not communicate at all. Some did not compose at all. For some, communicating occurred before composing; for others, composing occurred before communicating; and for some: communicating and composing were recursively related. Communication activities can provide entré into composing contexts with an enduring audience of peers for students unused to or insecure about more formal composing. Composition activities may provide entré into composing contexts with an enduring audience of peers for students unused to or insecure about informal communication. 116 CHAPTER SIX Introduction This chapter will examine, through coding and analysis of student interviews, how students try to address a peer audience and how they want their compositions to be received by their peer audience. This chapter examines aspects of peer interaction and audience consideration that are new to 21st century composing contexts, as well as those that have occupied creators of new meaning for millennia. New literacies research often focuses on the impacts of particular technologies on the composing process. If I was to analogize the composing process to the driving process (and my 8-11 year olds could drive), I would say that researchers get very excited about examining the roles of technologies, e.g., GPS or the iPhone, on students’ driving processes. However, few researchers pay attention to the roles of performances and playful interactions, e.g., “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” or “I Spy” on the driving process. Examination of performative and socializing actions of creation within a context of new technologies is rare. In this chapter I will discuss how students sought to, through composing work—picture taking, networked writing, notebook writing, and dramatic composing—engage their peers as audience addressed. In creating the compositional work that forms the dataset for this chapter, students did not expect an immediate verbal or typed communicative response from peers, as they did in Week One. Rather, students crafted expository and symbolic texts and sought to elicit from peers a particular reaction to the work. Unlike communicative expectations, which are fulfilled with immediate responses, the expectations students have for the composing profiled in this chapter are more closely in line with traditional writer-for-audience expectations: a hope that by using rhetorical strategies familiar to an audience, the audience reaction to a piece of work 117 will be as desired. These peers for whom students wrote and performed were both in their own classroom and in the partner classroom at Partridge. Theoretical Framing To frame the analysis of this chapter, I present pertinent written composition theory and performance composition theory regarding audience, as well as field-based principles of the relationship between purpose and audience. Audience Addressed: Written Composition Theory “Audience addressed” refers to the audience for a composition that is known to the composer (Ede & Lunsford, 1984). Its members are real to the composer, and composers are familiar with their audience’s beliefs and expectations. While the most common audience addressed in classroom settings is the teacher, classroom peers are a potential audience addressed for student writers as well. In her 2009 essay, Traci Zimmerman argues for the particular and crucial function of the addressed audience. She says: …to understand how audiences operate we must focus on specific readers[…], readers with enough power over us to make them emphatically “nonfictional”: for instance, those we depend on for esteem and affection…(p.86) Zimmerman demonstrates that writer knowledge of how audiences operate is borne out of experiences with specific readers. By writing for people with the power to bestow esteem or affection, the stakes are high enough for composers to pay attention to the rhetorical features that engender these reactions in our known readers. Students in this study share a good deal of life experience with their peers: they live in the same city, attend the same school, and have experienced the same style of education in that 118 school: a peer audience is a different known quantity to address through composition than a teacher audience and an audience with whom composers share more in common. In school, students this age (8-11) often write for an audience addressed comprised of the teacher, and for an audience invoked comprised of an audience articulated in a writing prompt, such as a local council or newspaper. Use of pencil-and-paper and word processing modes that render peer-wide accessibility and visibility to each others’ work difficult, and/or a writing instruction context dedicated to exam preparation (Gere, Christenbury, & Sassi, 2005) may contribute to the centrality of teacher and invoked audiences. This chapter fills a gap in research on writers of this age by examining how they set out to address an enduring audience of their peers, a natural audience, but one that is frequently overlooked in instruction and in research. The inclusion of multiple types of student artifacts for analysis in this chapter broadens the scope of inquiry beyond traditionally-researched compositional acts of pen-and-pencil writing and word processing to examine what students do when striving to address an audience of peers through networked, pencil-and-paper, visual, and dramatic composing. Audience Addressed: Dramatic Composition Theory Performances of the type created in this inquiry unit are designed to speak to an audience addressed. In contrast to film actors who work to reach an audience invoked, the students of this study engaged in drama games that situated students as audience for each other’s performances. I will briefly introduce performance theory relevant to this chapter’s analysis here. According to Eric Bentley, theater scholar, “the theatrical situation, reduced to a minimum, is that A impersonates B while C looks on” (1964, p.150). Imitation of life is a distinguishing human action. Bentley presents Aristotle’s description of how recognition of an imitation is what makes a person like seeing a performance: 119 The instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood…the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is…that they find themselves …saying…“Yes, that is he” (p.10). Analysis of the student interviews revealed that students had the desire to create in their audience a sense of recognition and a desire for their audience to appreciate the composition. Neither the students nor I had ever explicitly discussed recognition of a likeness as indicating a composition’s success, yet this was what they sought as composers to create and as audience to experience. The analytic categories of this chapter, “recognition” and “appreciation” were derived from student interview data: Bentley’s presentation of Aristotle’s theory confirms these categories as fundamental to the enterprise of composition- dramatic composition, as well as any act of creation in which a likeness is represented symbolically. Audience Addressed: Purpose and Audience Awareness While this study has focused its sphere of attention to audience, it bears reminding that audience is a writing heuristic consistently linked with purpose in writing best practices literature and assessment rubrics (ACT, 2007). Troy Hicks (2009), describes students engaged in digital writing: Students need not only to understand the technical aspects of creating hyperlinks, posting to a blog, or collaborating with a wiki, but they need to have the intentional focus as a writer to understand the audience and purpose for which they are writing (p.127). Likewise, standards documents for multimodal writing frequently include abilities for assessment such as the following, as used by Bearne in her 2009 framework: 1. Decide on mode and content for specific purpose(s) and audience(s). Not only digital writers, but also dramatic composers must have an understanding of their desired purpose. If, for example, a troupe of actors were to pick up a Brecht script without full 120 understanding that the purpose of a Brecht play is to not to engage the audience in empathy with the characters, but rather to create a sense of aesthetic distance, they may find it difficult to perform the play successfully. For the 8-11 year olds in this study, dramatic composing as it occurred through games was quite naturally intended for an audience addressed of peers. Unlike written or visual artifacts, which an instructor can direct students to create for a particular distant audience, dramatic games are usually intended for the audience of peers within the room. Thus, while students did not have a decision to make regarding audience addressed/audience invoked in their dramatic composing, they nevertheless needed an appropriate sense of purpose to successfully craft their dramatic composition. Key Terms of the Study Relevant to this Chapter Audience addressed: refers to actual or real-life people who read a composition Communicating: crafting of text, images, sounds, video, and/or performance so as to initiate or respond to ideas within a back-and-forth exchange with another(s) Composing: crafting of text, images, sounds, video, and/or performance so as to make new meaning 1 Data Analysis A portion of the interview protocol was designed to query student beliefs and opinions about the audience considerations they kept in mind during composing acts. An example of questions asked is, “Did you remember thinking about who was going to read/see this when you were making it?” Analysis of the interviews revealed that questions which were not designed to 1 My key terms: “communicate” and “compose” are actions that can map onto Morgan’s (2009) terms: “ThreadMode” and “DocumentMode.” 121 query student beliefs and opinions about audience nonetheless did shine light on the topic of students’ consideration of audience during composing acts. In the transcripts, I used “A” to indicate when I was speaking and the first letter of the student’s pseudonym to indicate when he/she was speaking. My questions for students that came directly from my protocol are represented in bold in the transcripts with the relevant tag behind them, e.g., Where do you think your ideas came from? [TQ5] In the transcript selections included in this chapter, the utterance, or part of an utterance, to which a code was applied is underlined. During the coding process, two different types of indicators related to how students considered their addressing of peers-as-audience became evident. In some cases, students described intending at the point of creation to elicit such responses; in other cases, students described how evidence of these responses indicated to them that they had done a good job with their composing. Thus, the codes were applied regardless of whether the composers had intentioned them prior to sharing their composing efforts, or witnessed them after sharing. I include codes relevant to this chapter here: (1) creating reader response of recognition: Code: Recognition=RG Recognition is coded for an utterance that refers to either a desire that peer audience members identify a truth the composer has presented regarding lived experience in common or an assessment that their writing was successful based on this identification of a truth by peers. Indicator: Language such as “we”; “us”; “everybody” 122 Four of six students/student pairs interviewed described wishing to represent their shared peer group experience as influencing his/their composing process and/or being indicative of a job well done. (2) creating reader response of appreciation: Code: Appreciation of work from peers (message or form)=AM, AF Appreciation is coded for an utterance that refers to a desire or understanding of job well done that the student’s work is appreciated or liked by a peer audience. Indicator: Language such as “they liked it” Six of six students/student pairs interviewed described peers’ appreciation of their compositional work as influencing his/their composing process and/or being indicative of a job well done. After identifying the considerations students held in writing for a peer audience, I returned to student artifacts and classroom transcript sessions so as to triangulate the students’ self-reports with the artifacts they produced and the classroom activities in which they took part. The following descriptions of students’ considerations in writing for a peer audience are the result of this triangulating process. Analysis revealed that students had their classroom peer group in mind for much of their Webplay work. This first findings section on photography, networked, and pencil-and-paper writing covers student work for which they were told to imagine the audience for their work as distant readers of a guidebook about Drafnor. Despite this instructional directive, many students chose to address an audience of peers who were also collaborators. Findings Related to Visual, Networked, and Pencil-and-Paper Composing Background of Photography, Networked, and Pencil-and Paper Writing Instruction 123 In Weeks Two-Three, part of the Webplay curriculum involved instructing students on using a camera as a tool to compose photos. I had borrowed four digital cameras for students to use when they went on their field trips to places in the local area. These trips were already part of the PALS curriculum; I was fortunate enough to be able to “piggyback” on these already established trips and incorporate picture taking and note taking elements into these trips, which served as research for the guidebook the students would produce. Upon returning from their trip to MSU, student photos were uploaded to Thinkquest for their peers to see and write about, and students were asked to write in their agent notebooks about their favorite part of visiting MSU. The focal students who participated on instruction days were Camel, Pony, Ladybug, Manatee, and Gecko. Recognition Camel and Pony were two of the students who had taken pictures available for inclusion in the guidebook. In my interviews with them, I asked them about their composing choices when taking their photographs. Camel had taken a photo of the school library while Pony had taken a picture of the MSU track with her classmates positioned in the lanes, about to take off in a footrace. Pony’s photo was one of the photos from the MSU field trip I uploaded to the Thinkquest Week Two space. The Week Two prompt asked students to describe the element of MSU that the photo portrayed or represented for someone who had never visited MSU before. Both Camel’s and Pony’s answers in the interview indicate that while the picture taking activity was presented as being instrumental for creating a guidebook for people who had never visited Drafnor before, it was not this audience that Camel and Pony composed for primarily. They composed for the audience of their classroom peers with whom they shared the experience of visiting the places their pictures profiled. 124 A: How about taking the picture of the library? Why were you guys taking pictures of the library? C: Um because that’s the library for the school. That’sA: And why were you taking pictures of the school again? C: Because we wanted to put the school in the guidebook. A: Ok, gotcha. So you all had different parts of the school and you could take any picture of the library but you wanted this one. C: Yeah. A: So where do you think your ideas came from to help you make that? [PQ6] C: Because everybody-I just guessed everybody liked the dome cuz it was on pretty much everybody’s list of things. I wrote it down in the guidebook, the library and I decided the dome was the main part that everybody sees everytime they come in the library. Before setting out to take pictures of the school, students had listed parts of the school they’d like to photograph and this is what Camel is referring to when he says, “it was on pretty much everybody’s list of things.” In his answer, Camel repeats “everybody” four times. His composing decisions take into account what his peers think of the library. It is a priority for him to represent what he thinks is representative of their experience. When peers see the photo, he would like for them to agree this part of the library and this part of the school are what they think important or interesting as well. So while he knew the picture would go in the guidebook for distant audiences, he wanted to choose a feature of the library to present which everybody in his known audience of peers would recognize. 125 In the following transcript, Pony discusses her photo of her classmates lined up on the track at MSU: A: And did you think about who was gonna see this picture? Were you thinking about who, who would see it when you were taking it? [PQ9] P: Yeah, I thought that maybe if it was posted that people would see it and say hey that was a good picture and people that especially were in it, they would know that they were in it because they knew what number they were on, saw the person take it, they would notice it, because every picture that we took of the track we would show the people so they would know, this is them. A: Gotcha, so that’s cool. So even if other people don’t know it’s them-they know it’s them. P: Yep. All the directions for taking the pictures had been geared toward capturing MSU for people who had never been there; yet it is her own peers that Pony imagined and engaged as audience in her decision to take the picture in the way she did. Like Camel, she referred to “people” three times in her answer and used “they” three times. She describes how she especially wanted the people that were in the picture to see it and know, as Aristotle described, “Yes, that is (in this case) me.” Phoenix also wrote about this event of students running the track. He says in his interview: A: Where do you think your ideas came from to help you make this one? [JQ6] P: Everybody-it seemed had fun doing it and nobody else in the group wrote about it so… 126 Like Pony, Phoenix wanted to use his composing to capture a shared fun event with his peer group and felt he needed to be the one to do it, to represent a shared group experience. During Webplay time, part of journal writing time often included reading entries aloud, and this would be how he shared his writing with his peer group. Especially concerning shared experiences, students seem to want to engage their peers as audience for their work and to accurately represent the experiences of the group. It is a desire for peers as readers to experience recognition, a sense of “yes, that is how it is” triggered by the words or photos composed. Appreciation: Expected Some of the interview questions queried how students knew they did a good job at their composing. Audience appreciation was cited by four of the six students interviewed as one of the indicators of a job well done. When asked about knowing if he did a good job on his library picture, Camel answered: A: So when you were making it do you remember thinking about who was going to see it, like did you think about what other people were going to say about it or? [PQ11] C: No I just thought they’d like it and if they liked it then I thought it would be fine. Phoenix also referred to expressions of appreciation by peers as being a barometer of his success in composing: A: Um, what do you think, how do you know you did a good job on that one? [JQ7] P: I think everybody liked it. A: Oh- 127 P: Because, everybody, like after I read it, everybody like started to say how much they liked it and say how much fun they had running and all that. In Phoenix’s case, he likes hearing appreciation from his peers. Like Camel, he frequently uses the word “everybody” to describe the audience of peers whom he is addressing. Both Phoenix and Camel’s prose throughout this unit indicate they do well in academic writing in school. They are the type of student to expect they may be called on to share what they’ve written and may expect that others will like it. By contrast, Crocodile’s prose indicates he is not highly proficient at academic writing. For him, peer appreciation came as a surprise. Appreciation: Unexpected Crocodile, who as demonstrated in Week One was the keenest communicator, describes what it was like to have an enduring audience of peers for his work. His Week Two Thinkquest contribution describing a photo of an eclipse a peer took on the MSU field trip is as follows: “the eclips looks like a blake hoil” (Crocodile, Thinkquest Week Two). In this transcript from our interview, Crocodile describes the peer-as-audience exchange with a Male NP around this text: C: He said Oh yeah, that-it did look-that did remind me, that- it did look like a black hole. A: Ok, cool, so you know right away that someone read your work. C: Yep, yep, yep A: And what do you think about that? C: I think that was pretty cool I mean I haven’t really gotten any comments on what I’ve done-unless it was like my teacher saying something about it. A: Oh, ok. C: I’ve never gotten a compliment from like another kid on what my work was. 128 Crocodile’s desire in Week One for peers to respond to what he wrote (as a part of an immediate back-and-forth communication) undergoes a subtle shift in Week Two, where students are doing more than introducing themselves; they are describing a photo from a shared trip they took. In his Week Two post, Crocodile also hopes for a peer response, and he is surprised that the response is to his descriptive prowess displayed in his expository statement, an element of academic writing. The classmate’s response is that of an audience addressed who has experienced a composition, rather than the audience interacting response Crocodile received to his initiations of communication in Week One. I used the word “work” in the interview, and Crocodile picked up on it and said, “I’ve never gotten a compliment from like another kid on what my work was.” Crocodile’s understanding of the possibilities for the space of Thinkquest seemed to have expanded, from a place to initiate conversation to a place to initiate conversation about composition. Crocodile uses the academic convention of a simile in his description of the black hole. Describing something is a writing task he is familiar with in other, non-networked school settings; however, getting feedback from peers who can immediately see his work is not. While Crocodile didn’t set out to make his peers appreciate what he wrote, he thought it was “pretty cool” to get comments on his work from another kid. The networked platform made it possible for his peer collaborators to instantly see what he had written and comment on it to him. While a teacher might hold back Crocodile’s work from sharing with the larger group due to his poor spelling and lack of punctuation (I myself would be guilty of this), a networked platform creates an audience addressed of peers that is not subject to flow control by a teacher. Crocodile’s appreciation of being appreciated may create possibilities for him in thinking through what he might do in future composing acts to spark appreciation again. 129 This desire by students to affect “everybody” is interesting, given the context peer sharing often has in the academic classrooms of these students. In upper elementary grades, students are often paired to peer review or peer critique each other’s writing (Graham & Perin, 2007). While this type of peer interaction has a particular type of merit, the present findings indicate students may also seek in their composing to affect not just one reader, but are concerned with “everybody.” For student writers are, like it or not for most of their day, part of an “everybody.” They sit with others at tables in classrooms, eat with others at tables at lunch, get addressed as one unit by teachers and administrators alike, move as one unit on school trips. Therefore, it is not surprising that in their composing, they are desirous of representing and creating recognition and appreciation in those who are part of their “everybody.” I now turn to analysis of student action as they addressed an audience of peers in dramatic composing. Both I, as instructor, and students considered their immediate peers as the audience addressed for this work. A key difference between the photos and writing and the drama work is that students worked in groups with other students to create scenes and tableaux. Analysis demonstrates how students sought to affect recognition and appreciation through dramatic composing and describes how if the collaborative group does not share a sense of purpose, the effect of the composition can be compromised. Findings Related to Dramatic Composing Background of Drama Instruction In the dramatic events of Webplay, students created short performances for their peers. In both events analyzed in this chapter, the peer audience was supposed to guess what the performers were intending to symbolize (e.g., a park ranger, a bus garage). The July 26th activity lasted about 30 minutes. The focal students who participated were Crocodile, Pony, Camel, 130 Tiger, Ram, and Phoenix. The August 4th activity lasted about 90 minutes. The focal students who participated were Panther, Manatee, and Gecko. Both these dramatic composing acts were audience addressed events, in that the composers did not expect the audience to participate in the composing with them, rather to take in what they had done as actors and try to draw a conclusion from it. In conducting the interviews, I asked focal students about their action during dramatic composing. I showed them still images of their participation (for the August 4th class session) and then asked questions about their consideration of audience. (For a more extensive description of the dramatic activities, please see Chapter Three). Recognition In dramatic composing, one way students described working to meet the goal of having peers recognize what they were portraying was to use the available resources in the most appropriate way. This is a selection from my interview with Tiger and Phoenix. A: Where do you think your ideas come from to help you make that one? [DQ6] Like how did you decide who was going to be the bear? Or who was going to be the ranger? T: He (gestures to Phoenix) was the tallest and bears stand up tall. P: (Phoenix stands). RRRroooooaaarrr. T: And I come along and can be like I’m little. A: So who were you? P: He was the person being attacked. Like Rrrrroooooaarr T: Like Aaahhhh. A: Ok. So you really made it look like the bear was bigger than the person. 131 T: And then Ram was the park ranger because he’s medium-sized. Desiring for their audience to recognize what they were trying to do, Tiger, Phoenix and Ram used their available resources to show the audience a “believable” scene with a bear and a park ranger: the tallest person plays the bear, so he can tower over the others. The purpose of the activity was for peers to guess what they were: the actors used their available resources as assets in promoting recognition. In her tableaux for the August 4th dramatic composing, Gecko and her group also made logical use of their bodies as tools for composing. As described in Chapter Four, Gecko and Manatee stood over three younger, shorter girls who crouched together beneath the triangular arch formed by Gecko and Manatee’s hands. Gecko and Manatee formed the bus garage roof while the three crouched girls formed three buses parked in the garage. Both groups strived to meet their audience’s expectations by trying to represent places familiar to the whole PALS group. As described in Chapter Four, collaborative compositions may be empowered by the mental schema and past interaction experiences of each of the members of the group; here, it is demonstrated how collaborative dramatic compositions may also be empowered by the diversity of collaborators, considering height, age, and other representational assets. Recognition: Unsuccessful without Corresponding Sense of Purpose During the August 4th dramatic composing event, Panther was very in tune to addressing the peer audience of girls, but he didn’t understand the objective of the game. In some dramatic games, like Charades, each team performing is supposed to guide the audience (the members of their own team) as best they can to guessing the e.g., person, place, or thing being symbolized by the performers. In this scenario, Panther doesn’t seem to get the idea that it’s a good thing if the 132 girls can guess what he and his group of six other boys are representing—as demonstrated in the following selection from our interview transcript: P: The girls couldn’t find out what we were at all. A: They couldn’t? P: Nuh uh. A: How did you help describe to them what you were? P: Well, we really didn’t all we said was- all we said was- well, him, him, and him said look at the thing on top that’s red with a stem and then they were like- and then the girls are like what has red with a stem besides an apple- they thought we were a big giant basket of apples and I was yelling “apple.” The boys were forming an ice cream cone, to represent the local ice cream store, Coneheads. Panther tried to mislead the audience from guessing correctly by shouting out “apples.” This information from Panther demonstrates that student awareness of peer audience is potentially unproductive without a corresponding awareness of purpose for composing. Purpose/audience awareness is a foundational construct in 21st century composing instruction (see, e.g., Hicks, 2009). Panther’s interview reveals ways in which the success of a composition may be compromised if audience awareness is not also informed by an awareness of purpose: in this case of collaborative composing, a shared sense of purpose. Appreciation: Laughter and Interest As in the photography and pencil-and-paper activities, interviewed students described how their peers reacted to their work. Phoenix describes his group’s bear sketch: A: Um how do you know that you did a good job on that little thing. [DQ7] P: Just everybody laughed and- 133 A: Even the grownups were laughing-I mean even the teachers were laughing. P: Yeah. And Gecko describes how audience reactions contributed to her sense of the success of her collaborative tableaux. How do you know you did a good job on that?[DQ7] G: Well. Um, Agent A said we did good and the boys looked interested. A: Ok. G: Like they liked it. In this dramatic composing event, the boys were able to circle around the tableaux to view it from different angles. Their movement around the piece indicated to Gecko interest on the part of the audience. This indicated to her that her group had done a good job. Appreciation: Uptake Peer audience appreciation can be witnessed not only by laughter or exclamations of “I liked it” but through audience uptake of the content or style of the performance. The following transcript is from my interview with Gecko. We are discussing her group’s formation of the bus garage during their dramatic composing. So is there anything that you remember that helped you make this. [DQ4] G: Um like like? A: Like any ideas or people or anything that helped you come up with it. G: Well the boys were in a group and they were like doing it 3-d and we were just gonna um make like 3 people like we were gonna lay on the floor and do it but we looked over at them and said why don’t we do like them. 134 A: So that’s gotcha. So you had the idea you were all just going to be flat on the floor but then you looked over and thought no we could be 3-d. G: Mh hmm, A: Is there anything you remember that made you want to make this or make you want to do it? [DQ5] G: Well first we were gonna do Coneheads but the other group had already done Coneheads like for the first time. And so I said why don’t we do the bus garage? During the dramatic composing event of creating tableaux of local area: Gecko and her group were able to glance over and see how the other group had gone “3-d”; inspiring them to make the same compositional move. While Gecko and her group demonstrate uptake of peers’ work to contribute to their own process, another kind of uptake demonstrated was more free associative. Also during the August 4th dramatic composing day, Jackrabbit, one of the Partridge students, began singing “London Bridge” in response to the girls’ portrayal of the local bus garage. A: Bus garage, what makes you guys think it’s the bus garage? (NP circles around to back of picture). NP: Cuz there’s three buses and there’s a top to it. A: Cuz there’s three buses and there’s a top to it? That’s a good one. Ok, boys go back to your spots. Girls, good job. Ladies. Jackrabbit: London Bridge is falling down. Falling down. Panther: Whee. Jackrabbit (a Partridge student) and Panther continued to extend the performance after it had ended. Jackrabbit acted out a nursery rhyme game that the girls’ tableaux had prompted for him. 135 In the tableaux, two girls had leaned together with their enjoined hands forming a canopy over the other girls. This triangle reminded Jackrabbit of a similar configuration of bodies that children make in order to play London Bridge. He grabbed Panther’s hands and began singing “London Bridge” with him. As producers are pleased to see audience members file out of a popular musical humming the tunes, success in addressing an audience can be in part measured by how audience members take up what is shown and re-present and riff from it for themselves and others. Outside school, dramatic composing audiences, like those filing out of a musical, are at liberty, according to societal conventions, to revoice elements of the performance. It’s a particular “state of grace” in contrast to other “in public” situations, where singing or humming a tune may earn one an askance glance or two. In classroom settings, there may be little opportunity for just such a “state of grace” with audiences for written compositions: spaces in which audience is at liberty to revoice, extend, play with, or otherwise represent the composition they’ve just heard. The only available spaces for response are often those of critique, as a teacher incorporates student work in the service of a lesson on a particular component of composition, or as students work together on revision. There is little room for the sort of spontaneous free association demonstrated by Jackrabbit and Panther in response to a peer’s composition. However, both dramatic and networked spaces for composing extend the possibility for expression of appreciation beyond the read-aloud moment in class or the moment in class where partners exchange work. Conclusion To summarize, this chapter shows that even given a prompt to write for distant audiences, i.e., those who have never visited the students’ local area, some students have in mind the 136 enduring audience of peers, the peers in their class, as their intended audience. When addressing peer audiences, student composers seek to inspire recognition and appreciation in peers. Many student writers in this study thought in terms of “everybody”; networked and dramatic composing can give “everybody”—an enduring audience of peers-- easier access to compositions. Student writers have a desire to represent shared experiences of their local communities and to gain appreciation from their present peers through their compositional work. These motivators may be particularly important to include in instructional conversations in our 21st century culture, a culture which privileges sharing of experiences and representing them for involved, interacting, interdependent, and local audiences. 137 CHAPTER SEVEN Introduction In Chapter Four, it was demonstrated how students engage their interests and memories of interactions and experiences in a composing act. In Chapters Five and Six, it was demonstrated how students engage their present peers as communicators and as audience in a composing act. Here, in Chapter Seven, through analysis of transcripts of classroom activity as well as of the students’ Week Six networked composing, I will demonstrate how students invoke distant others via communication with their peers and with representative members of the distant audience. I will demonstrate a variety of ways that this invoking of distant audiences may influence students’ composing. This chapter expands the sphere of attention for communication beyond the networked platform. While Chapter Five analysis centered on a context for composing in which communication occurred in the same Web-based platform as composition, in the composing acts featured in this chapter, communication occurred outside the networked platform: in a wholeclass oral conversation, and in a Skype call with Mr. Williams, the Webplay Programmes Manager who lives in Britain. Students’ composition still took place in the networked platform Thinkquest. Theoretical Framing Certain types of written work are intended for distant audiences. A student-generated guidebook to a local area is a good example of just such a type because its purpose is to introduce the reader to the local area and guide them through a visit there. The intended reader is not a member of the local community, not a known quantity who may be addressed, so using Ede and Lunsford’s (1984) taxonomy, he/she is invoked by the authors. “Audience invoked” 138 refers to audience called up or imagined by the writer(s). Classically, this is the type of audience able to be reached by writing, as opposed to an addressed audience who may also be reached by voice. Addressed audiences are often local to the writer, while invoked audiences are often distant to the writer. Audience Invoked: “Other”-Identification in Networked Writing In recent years, with the ascendancy of information technologies, distant audiences have electronic access to not only books but also programs and electronic products. These audiences (who are often also consumers) expect that what they read/interact with be designed with their needs in mind. Imagining and inventing reader personas can be strategies for reaching a distant audience’s needs. In Engaging Audience, Dayton (2009) describes how he encourages his technical writers to think like fiction writers as they invent personas and scenarios, which he describes are “now considered standard elements of a user-centered design process for creating all manner of interactive information products” (p.115). Teams work together to flesh out invented personas and test possible scenarios: since products are interactive, such exercises enable designers to prepare for audiences who not only read, but interact with their compositions via data entry, etc. Through a process of inventing personas, these designers explicitly draw out distant audience needs. While invoking the distant other is a key activity for 21st century composition and can be achieved through imagination exercises, certain features of networked composing can also make possible communication with distant other audiences. Technologies such as email, instant messaging, and Skype make it possible to more directly communicate with intended audiences during planning, drafting, and follow-up stages of composing. 139 This chapter will describe how both imagination and interaction helped students strive to address a distant audience’s needs in their guidebook composition. Audience Invoked: Spaces for Writing in Wiki Work To continue to frame the findings of this chapter, I return to Michael Morgan’s (2009) essay on wiki work. Morgan describes how wikis provide multiple spaces for different types of writing yet allow for fluid cross-application across spaces. He introduced categorizations that are instructive for thinking about the online platform work detailed in this study: ThreadMode is a dialogue, a discussion, a dialectic. It is open, collective, dynamic, and informal. It can develop as a page or develop on a page, but it develops organically, without predictive structure. ThreadMode is not a soapbox so much as a sandbox (p.171). DocumentMode is expository, discursive, more monologic—but no less open—than thread mode. Document mode pages and sections of pages become the collective understanding of the wiki (p.172). While not a wiki, the online platform used in this study (Thinkquest) shares this feature with wikis: networked writing takes place in a platform that houses multiple spaces, conducive to differing purposes and genres. Writers working in these platforms often shift back and forth between what Morgan characterizes as “ThreadMode” and “DocumentMode,” and it is even possible that text can exemplify both modes at once. Webplay curriculum was designed to transition students from ThreadMode to DocumentMode within the platform. In Week One--profiled in Chapter Five--the dominant form of text contributed to Thinkquest could be classified as ThreadMode: students used selfidentification strategies to interact with other students. In Week Six, the dominant form of text contributed to Thinkquest could be classified as DocumentMode: students wrote extended 140 expository pieces intended to form the text of a guidebook to the local area. However, also during Week Six, multiple examples of ThreadMode (open discussions) took place offline, in the form of a whole-class conversation about audience and a Skype interview with an intended guidebook reader who lived in London. Key Terms of the Study Relevant to this Chapter Audience invoked: refers to audience called up or imagined by the writer Audience interacting: captures the idea that the audience for written work is capable of writing and responding in tandem or communication with other writers throughout the writing process: at brainstorming, drafting, revising, etc. stages Audience addressed: refers to actual or real-life people who read a composition Communicating: crafting of text, images, sounds, video, and/or performance so as to initiate or respond to ideas within a back-and-forth exchange with another(s) Composing: crafting of text, images, sounds, video, and/or performance so as to make new meaning Curricular Background: Audience Conversation On August 6, a curricular conversation took place during Webplay time in the Morris school “den”—the corner of the central meeting room/cafeteria that the PALS program had filled with couches, bean bag chairs, rugs, and a pet rodent in a cage. Focal students present during this session include Panther, Tiger, Ladybug, and Phoenix. In the following transcript selections, my words are designated with “A.” My teaching assistant is “Suzy.” Each student is designated with his/her pseudonym. Suzy began the discussion on audience: 141 Suzy: Who are we giving this guidebook to? Like who’s going to be reading this? Like we need an audience. We’re giving this to Sinclair right? Voice: Mr. Williams. Suzy: We’re giving this to Sinclair right? Tiger: It’s Mr. Williams. Phoenix: Mr. Williams. A: It’s Mr. Williams who is at Jet, Set and Go who is going to make it available. Jet Set and Go is the name of the travel agency that Sinclair and Mr. Williams run. Phoenix: Is Mr. Williams Sinclair? A: Mr. Williams works with Sinclair. So they are gonna put your guidebook on the Jet, Set and Go website for other people to find out about Drafnor. Mr. Williams’ name was consistently displayed in the Thinkquest platform where students worked because Thinkquest formatting templates included his name and icon in a sidebar on each page he had created. While students had viewed a weekly video message from Sinclair St. Lewis--the “boss” of the travel agency who had given the students the responsibility of creating a guidebook of Drafnor for his agency’s website--it was Mr. Williams, more than Sinclair, who was present in the Web platform Thinkquest. The exchange featured in the transcript above inspired me to arrange a Skype conversation with Mr. Williams for the following week. As many of the students had expressed the sentiment that the whole “agency” artifice was, in fact, artificial, I imagined that students talking to a real person who was interested in what they were creating would be compelling. Englert, Okolo, & Mariage (2009) describe what an instructor should strive to provide students: 142 …the audience/author relationship is an essential aspect of making the social function, purpose and requirements of informational writing apparent to the writer. To achieve this goal, teachers need to provide an audience who can respond with compelling questions and authentic comments (p.139). Even if the students were aware there wasn’t really a Jet, Set, and Go Agency staffed by a cranky curmudgeon named Sinclair St. Lewis, I thought they, nevertheless, would like to communicate with someone who was British, who lived in London, and who would express interest in learning more about their local area. Additionally, since the students lacked a distant partner class, I wanted to arrange a communication for them that took place across a substantial geographic distance: students could hear that the person they were speaking with, who would read their guidebook, had (in this case) never set foot in Michigan, much less in Drafnor. Curricular Background: Conversation with Mr. Williams On August 11, students communicated with Mr. Williams, one of two full-time employees for the Webplay non-profit organization based in London. In the roleplay conceit, Mr. Williams works for the owner of the travel agency, Sinclair St. Lewis, who had tasked the Drafnor secret agents to write about their local area, for his company website, Jet, Set, and Go. At the beginning of the August 11th class session, 9 students, 2 PALS teachers, and I all clustered around one Macintosh laptop computer with a built-in video camera. I called Mr. Williams via Skype video conference. He answered, and we could see that he was sitting in his home office, looking into the video camera on his own laptop. I introduced Mr. Williams to the students, and all students introduced themselves by name. Mr. Williams asked the students questions about their local area. They in turn asked him questions about England. 143 Throughout this conversation, Mr. Williams referred numerous times to the guidebook the students were creating and his eagerness to read it. This conversation may have demonstrated to students a reality they might not have fully acknowledged or understood: someone(s) other than myself and their classmates would indeed be reading what they had written on the Thinkquest pages and what they would write for the final guidebook. It may also have demonstrated that the town of Drafnor held many topics of interest for a visitor, topics in which the students felt as though they were expert, a feeling supported by the previous weeks’ research efforts into their local area. This direct communication was greatly enjoyed by many students. In a post-program evaluation, four focal students cited the conversation with Mr. Williams as their favorite part of Webplay (Post-program evaluation data). These students, via networked technology, were able to have direct communication with a distant others audience. Chapter Five analysis revealed that students like to engage others in communication in networked platforms and to search for common ground, as students and teachers sought to do with Mr. Williams. This synchronous, video-supported dialogue differed from Thinkquest dialogue, which was archived for later use and was of the same mode as the compositions to be created. This dialogue introduced students to the physical and aural presence of the distant other. In the student descriptions below, this conversation, along with the instructional wholeclass conversation, is placed in (researcher) conversation with the students’ Thinkquest work and interviews. I described student actions of invoking and composing for and with audiences when communication events took place outside the shared Web platform used for composing in 144 contrast to the student descriptions in Chapter Five, where communication and composition occurred in the Web platform. Curricular Background: Guidebook Composition The Webplay unit was designed to introduce many academic skills, (e.g., map reading, codebreaking, writing) with the overarching purpose that students collaboratively produce a guidebook to the local area. In early weeks, students practiced the skills of communicating with others with a networked platform, interviewing luminaries in the local area, visiting local spots to take observational notes and pictures, and creating texts describing what they’d seen and heard. Throughout the course of the unit, the Thinkquest work evolved from experimenting in an online space where exploration and communication could happen to answering idea generation prompts, to recording information about the local area, to collecting and synthesizing available material with new material into chunks for audience consumption. Early in the Thinkquest work, I uploaded pictures students had taken to the platform so students could view and annotate them. In Week Six, each writer was also tasked with choosing pictures to go along with the words he/she wrote. Data Analysis By Week Six, students were using the Thinkquest space as a repository for the writing that would ultimately become the finished collaborative product of a guidebook about their local area. They were familiar with the objectives of the project. No longer was their writing in this space exploratory. By Week Six, they knew they were responsible for generating guidebook text and that others would be reading what they wrote. The only directive prompt for Week Six was the following: “Week 6: Images and text posted here.” 145 The posts are grouped in the focal student order because, unlike the posts generated in Weeks One, these posts did not all appear on the same page within the platform, and they were generated over the course of a couple of weeks. Please see Table 5. Table 5 Student Week Six Thinkquest Contributions Post # Student Text of Student Contribution Post 1 Pony gymnastics is fun hard and involves a lot of team work,you do flips,handstands,cartweels,rowndoff the splits and so mutch more.i do it at tumblers.they have the beam the bars the tramp the valt floor and the rop.i think that the rop is the hardest to do becase you half to go up the rop Post 1 Tiger If you like ice cream, Coneheads is the right place for you. They sell play dough, chocolate chip cookie dough, Mackinaw Island fudge (brown font), vanilla, chocolate, strawberry (red font), birthay cake, (green, italicized font) Post 1 Camel Photo: An exterior shot of the storefront of Coneheads. It is a white clapboard building featuring painted ice cream cones and a sign hanging over the entryway. Text: Some of the fantastic food in Drafnor is from Coneheads they have some of the best icecream in 146 Table 5 (cont’d) town plus upstairs they have a arcade so you can have parties up there. If you come to Drafnor you HAVE TO go to desserts r us they make the best pastries ever. Post 1 Ram Drafnors 10u travel baseball team won the state finals and made it to Kentucky and lost . it was VERY tragic .before that, they were undefeated Post 1 Gorgon You may think MSU is just a regular old basketball team. It's a really good basketball team. Did you know that they went to the final four two times in a row? Not only that but they have won two tittles Post 1 Panther DETROIT LIONS ARE THE BEST NFL TEAM EVER AND THAT IS A FACT BUT LAST YEAR WAS A SAD TIME 0-17. FROM JAGUAR (blue font) Post 2 Panther I AM THE BEST PLAYER IN THE NFL ! Post 3 Panther FOOTBALL BABY! I LOVE FOOTBALL . SOME OF THE BEST TEAMS ARE FROM MICHIGAN. LIKE THE LIONS,MICHIGAN STATE AND THE DRAFNOR PANTHERS BUT NOT MICHIGAN SO DONT GO TO A MICHIGAN GAME EVER! 147 Table 5 (cont’d) FOOTBALL OUT. Post 1 Ladybug Photo: A memorial stone in a garden plot which reads: Francine’s Garden (in dark purple lettering) ‘Our Warrior Princess’ (in pale pink lettering) Dedicated in 2010 (in pale pink lettering) Caption underneath photo: This is Francine’s Garden, A garden in memory of a girl who passed away because of cancer. Text: Francine’s Garden is a Garden at Morriss School that Morriss School made for Francine because she passed away a couple of years ago, She died of Cancer, She was only in the 4th grade. I never know her but I have heard she was a very good person to have in Drafnor. Post 1 Manatee Photo: A memorial stone in a garden plot which reads: Francine’s Garden (in dark purple lettering) ‘Our Warrior Princess’ (in pale pink lettering) Dedicated in 2010 (in pale pink lettering) 148 Table 5 (cont’d) Text: francines garden is very special because the girl francine died in the 4th grade. Mrs. F-- made a rock this summer for her. she planted flowers all arond the place. she died because of cancer. she would be in seventh grade right now. she really cared about her. well we now shes in a better place now and thats a good thing. but if that happend to your bother or sisster you would be sad so thats probaly your only sisster or brother so be nice to them!!! Post 1 Gecko Photo: A statue of Sparty, the MSU mascot. Text: When you come to Drafnor, you have to come to MSU. It's the nearest university and it's beautiful. There's a track, a football field, a pool, and a lot more. There's also a really nice statue of Sparty. There is lots of flowers, trees, and green space. Lots of nice dorms surround the university, but not all the way. There's also a planetarium on campus. Inside, there's marble floors, and when you enter, there's glass walls and Sparty is against a white one. Anyway, MSU is really nice and I'm 149 Table 5 (cont’d) sure you'll enjoy it. Post 1 Phoenix Photo: An exterior shot of the Meijer logo on the front of the store. Shopping carts are visible on the road beneath the sign. Text: You may think Meijer is just a grocery store, so you might be suprised to hear that it's not. Meijer is actualy a department store with alot of departments. At the electronic department you can get photos developed. Or you can go to the toy department to get a birthday present. At the sporting goods department you can get sports stuff for the coming up season. To the above transcripts, I applied the following codes. I introduced these codes in Chapters 2 and 5 and include them again here for ease of reference. Length=WC=# Length is a word count of the post. Centrality=(1/3, 2/3, 3/3; 1/2, 1) Centrality is a measure of the alignment of the post to the prompt. If the post answers all elements of the prompt, it is given a 1. If the post answers part of the prompt, it is given a 1/2 (if there are two elements to the prompt) or 1/3, 2/3 (if there are three elements to the prompt). 150 Academic convention use=AC Academic convention use is coded for a post that uses academic writing conventions. Indicator: Language such as repeating the words of the prompt in the post; using a thesis/supporting statements structure Online convention use=OC Online convention use is coded for a post that expresses ideas through means common in online text (text messages, IM chats, email) Indicator: Language such as “u r ” to mean “you are” Conversation=CN Conversation is coded for a post that expresses ideas through means common in oral, informal talk. Indicator: Language such as “Football, baby!” Appreciation of peer post (message or form)=AM, AF Appreciation is coded for a post that directly supports the message or form of a previous post. Indicator: language such as “I like” Communication=CM Communication is coded for a post that initiates a communication or responds to the communication-initiation of another post. Indicator: Language such as “Hey you guys” The following chart displays the word count, centrality measure, and presence of indicator for all other codes for each student who created compositions for the Week Six activity. An x under a column indicates that that student’s post fit the criteria for that particular code 151 application. As an example, three of 10 students’ posts contained conversational language, thus an x is marked in the corresponding rows under the “CN” column for these students, Ram, Panther, and Manatee. This table provides an overview of the nature of each focal student’s participation in this final networked composing activity, while the student descriptions to follow use narrative to represent the actions exhibited during the students’ composing acts. Table 6 Thinkquest Week Six Coding Post # Student WC C AC Post 1 Pony 53 1 x Post 1 Tiger 32 1 x x Post 1 Camel 51 1 x x Post 1 Ram 26 1/2 Post 1 Gorgon 41 1/2 x Post 1 Panther 25 1/2 x Post 2 Panther 8 0 Post 3 Panther 35 1 x Post 1 Ladybug 69 1 x Post 1 Manatee 88 1/2 x Post 1 Gecko 94 1 x Post 1 Phoenix 66 1 x 49 .81 AVERAGE OC x CN x x x 152 x x x AM/F CM Findings-Broadstroke This table shows the average number of words in each posting was 49. The average number of words for Week One was 10.2. The word counts and centrality ratings are significantly higher than those of the posts in the first week. The academic convention use counts are also higher than in posts from previous weeks. Every student who contributed to Week Six used one or more academic conventions in their post, such as using second person voice purposefully or using a thesis and supporting statements structure. The online convention use counts, such as selecting font color for a particular purpose, are also higher than in posts from previous weeks. There were zero communication counts in any of the posts. This is in stark contrast to Week One, in which six of seven students sought to engage in back-and-forth dialogue with peers through the networked platform Thinkquest. These findings can be explained given the differing natures of the composing prompts between Week One and Week Six as well as the time between tasks, as students grew increasingly familiar with the unit objectives and the technologies available to them. The entire six-week Webplay unit was designed for students to trace a trajectory from introductory and communicative text generation to more expository and persuasive composing. Although earlier weeks’ prompts had invited students to write for audiences who had never before been to Drafnor, there was little evidence in the student work that students had taken on these audience considerations. After the conversations about audience and with an audience member (Mr. Williams), there was increased evidence of student awareness that the guidebook was intended for distant readers who did not live in Drafnor. Students who had never 153 used the “you” form previously in Thinkquest work began to use the “you” form. In fact, eight of ten students who contributed to the Thinkquest Week Six pages used second person direct address. For example: Phoenix: You may think Meijer is just a grocery store, so you might be suprised to hear that it's not. Additionally, students began to cast the reader as a visitor to Drafnor, by including a reference to the reader visiting or coming to Drafnor and by more frequently using the name of the town. For example: Camel: If you come to Drafnor you HAVE TO go to desserts r us they make the best pastries ever. Ladybug: I never know her but I have heard she was a very good person to have in Drafnor. The aggregate analysis reveals that during Week Six, many students wrote more extended posts, which were pitched to a distant others audience. In order to gain a more nuanced understanding of student action during their composing acts pitched for distant audiences, I placed analysis of patterns of codes’ occurrence and overlap in context with instructional conversations and student interviews. Through this process, I was able to determine particular roles students played in Week Six networked composing acts. Having established which focal students I had Thinkquest and interview data available for in Week Six, I used the findings from the coding structure from the broadstroke analysis for 154 these students, as well as class session transcripts and interviews, to create student descriptions of different styles of invoking and composing. In Chapter Five, I presented descriptions of the ways students communicated and composed during the Thinkquest Week One class session dedicated to creating introductions within the Thinkquest platform. In Thinkquest Week Six, students did not attempt to communicate with each other through the platform. However, students did communicate with each other and with a representative member of a distant audience in real time conversations; the way these conversations contributed to students’ invoking of distant audiences is the focus of this chapter. In this chapter, I break student descriptions into the separate acts of invoking a distant audience and composing which took place in Thinkquest as the students made contributions to the prompt, “Week 6: Images and text posted here.” The grouping of type of invoker with type of composer is not intended to be read as fixed. While particular students in this study exemplified being a certain type of invoker and a certain type of composer, other students in other settings could exemplify other types, as well as other pairings of types. The pairings presented here are specific to this group of students. Findings-Student Descriptions Tiger: Conversational Invoker; Creative Composer Invoking. Suzy, my teaching assistant, posed a question to begin our whole-class conversation on the intended audience for the guidebook to Drafnor, the students’ local area. Suzy: Who are we giving this guidebook to? Like who’s going to be reading this? Like we need an audience. In response to this open invitation by the teacher, Tiger says: 155 Tiger: Phoenix-your Canadian friend, you could send it to your Canadian friend and then maybe he’ll move to Drafnor. This utterance is a communicative utterance; Tiger does not directly address the teacher or the larger group with an answer to the question posed by the teacher; he addresses his older brother by name and turns the content of the group conversation into material for a suggestion intended for his brother. This type of communication is reminiscent of Week One interactions in Thinkquest where students adopted a general prompt’s themes into a directed utterance to one other peer. Tiger casts the guidebook as an agentive tool, powerful enough to motivate a young man living in Canada to move to Drafnor. Thus far during the unit, Suzy and I had focused on the purpose of the guidebook being to educate others about Drafnor. We described how people would “find out” about Drafnor by reading the guidebook. Earlier in the session we had described one purpose of a “guidebook”-- travelers use them as they seek to navigate an unfamiliar place. Tiger extends the purpose of the guidebook beyond educating to prompting a desire to relocate. This is a purpose he maintains throughout the conversation. Suzy continues: S: I mean people that you don’t even know will see this. So you’re right, people all over the world can see this probably. Once again, Tiger enters the large-group conversation responding to Suzy’s comment by directly addressing his brother, Phoenix. Tiger: Phoenix, we need to send this to Vladimir Guerrero. So I can get his autograph. Vladimir Guerrero is my favorite baseball player other than . And again, Tiger picks up on a group utterance made by the teaching assistant and uses his uptake of it in a directed utterance to his brother. After Suzy introduces the ideas of readers 156 unknown to the composers, Tiger draws upon his topic interest to imagine just such readers. He references a baseball player he likes very much as potential audience. As demonstrated in Chapter Four, students draw upon their topic interest in dialogue with themselves to generate content for their compositions. Topic interest may influence not only content, but also the purposes for composing. Tiger thinks first of known peers, then moves to celebrities who represent his topic interest in imagining his (and not just his but his brother’s) audience. In his first utterance to his brother, Tiger suggests his brother send the guidebook to his friend. In this second utterance aimed at his brother, Tiger enjoins his brother in a “we”—baseball is a topic of interest they both share. The first effect Tiger imagines as a result of making the guidebook and having Vladimir Guerrero see it is getting his autograph. If he considers the guidebook something that can be sent through snail mail, he may at that time ask for and receive an autograph in return. Tiger and others go on to cast the guidebook’s purpose (what we instructors had considered to be introducing people to and making them excited about visiting Drafnor) as the same purpose Tiger had construed earlier—to motivate people to move to the area, in this case to fulfill a desire he has a sports fan. A: There’s going to be groups of people that find out about Drafnor through the guidebook that you guys make on the Internet. Panther: Can we send one to Calvin Johnson? A: Who’s Calvin Johnson? Panther: NFL wide receiver of the Detroit Lions. A: Absolutely he could see this and I know that – Tiger: Can we send it to Vladimir Guerrero? 157 A: Here’s the thing- we don’t have to send it to anybody but what we can do, we can send a link to the guidebook that we make to the Lions and to Vladimir Guerrero. Tiger: (Jumps out of seat) Yay, Vladimir Guerrero is coming to Drafnor and make the Detroit Tigers a lot better. A: Oh maybe that should be our goal for the whole thing to get Vladimir Guerrero to move to Drafnor. Tiger: Yeah! Panther: And Calvin Johnson. A: And Calvin Johnson. Even distant audience consideration may begin with known topic interest and people. In previous chapters it was demonstrated how students attempt to address audiences peopled with people they know. In this discussion of distant others, Tiger demonstrates that some students begin to invoke distant audiences in much the same way they set out to reach addressed audiences: Tiger readily envisions himself addressing people he knows and people associated with his topic interest when attempting to imagine an audience for his composition work. Even for upper elementary students, a consideration of audience is interconnected with a consideration of purpose for composing. The reason Tiger wants to write to Vladimir is to inspire him to do something: move to Drafnor. While this purpose was not shared, nor ever imagined by the teachers, in a collaborative composition effort, each participant may be working with differing purposes, but still create a cohesive whole. 1 1 For example, if professors and graduate students collaborate on a paper, the professor’s main purpose for the work may be to contribute to an ongoing field dialogue, while the graduate student’s purpose may be to generate a piece to meet institutional criteria for degree advancement. 158 Because Tiger and his brother and peers share an interest in professional baseball and football players, they can communicate in order to invoke a shared distant audience. Providing for peer-to-peer communication in order to prepare for distant audience may be a way to capitalize on the power of the local in the interest of meeting the needs of the distant. Composing. Tiger’s Week Six Thinkquest submission is as follows: If you like ice cream, Coneheads is the right place for you. They sell play dough, chocolate chip cookie dough, Mackinaw Island fudge (brown font), vanilla, chocolate, strawberry (red font), birthay cake, (green, italicized font) Tiger uses a standard, traditionally school-taught “if, then” statement to grab his reader’s attention. He also uses the technology affordances of multiple font colors. Each ice cream flavor is typed using a representative color, e.g., red font for strawberry. As Tiger was playful in the whole-class conversation, describing Vladimir Guerrero as the intended reader, so Tiger is playful with the technology’s affordances. Before writing this text, he had played around with font and tricked his friend, Ram (See Introduction). He was very excited to use the font colors and agonized over which color would most accurately capture the flavor “birthday cake,” trying a few different colors before settling on green (Field Notes, 8/2010). Tiger is representative of a student who invokes an audience via a conversation with a peer (in this case his brother). Tiger is imaginative in his audience consideration, drawing on his topic interest. Tiger’s compositional work demonstrates creativity with technology affordances, as he matches font colors to textual meaning. Tiger relies on idea generation via conversation with known peers, audience invoking via purpose-driven imagining based upon topic interest, and creative exploration of composing tools. 159 Panther: Parroting Invoker, Pleaser Composer Invoking. At the point in the August 11 class session this portion of the transcript portrays, we, as a group, are trying to decide what to include on the food pages of the guidebook (Hungry Howie’s and Gino’s are both pizza parlors in Drafnor). A: Hungry Howie’s or Gino’s? Tiger: Hungry Howie’s. Voice: Hungry Howie’s you can find anywhere. Female NP: Gino’s you can only find in Drafnor. Panther: You can only find it in Drafnor. Female NP: So do Gino’s. Panther repeats the words of a classmate with “you can only find it in Drafnor.” Panther follows up not only on peers’ words but also on peers’ ideas. Here, Panther repeats a peer’s idea: Tiger: (Jumps out of seat) Yay, Vladimir Guerrero is coming to Drafnor and make the Detroit Tigers a lot better. A: Oh maybe that should be our goal for the whole thing to get Vladimir Guerrero to move to Drafnor. Tiger: Yeah! Panther: And Calvin Johnson. A: And Calvin Johnson. Panther doesn’t really get the concept of sharing the guidebook with a professional athlete in the same way that Tiger did. Panther suggested that Calvin Johnson, who already lives in Detroit and plays for the Lions would move to Drafnor since it would be a good place to live. For Panther, the guidebook would be a means to a celebrity living in town, but for Tiger the guidebook would 160 be a means to acquire more talent for his favorite team, making them better. Vladimir Guerrero played for the Texas Rangers (at the time of the study); the guidebook would entice him to move to an area close enough for him to play for the Detroit Tigers baseball team. Panther does not often initiate ideas, but he is eager to follow up with peers. In a platform like Thinkquest, Panther’s text met audience needs in a way that is uncommon for him in other composing settings. Composing. Panther’s Week Six Thinkquest contribution is as follows: DETROIT LIONS ARE THE BEST NFL TEAM EVER AND THAT IS A FACT BUT LAST YEAR WAS A SAD TIME 0-17. FROM JAGUAR (blue font) I AM THE BEST PLAYER IN THE NFL ! FOOTBALL BABY! I LOVE FOOTBALL . SOME OF THE BEST TEAMS ARE FROM MICHIGAN. LIKE THE LIONS,MICHIGAN STATE AND THE DRAFNOR PANTHERS BUT NOT MICHIGAN SO DONT GO TO A MICHIGAN GAME EVER! FOOTBALL OUT. In this transcript selection from our interview, Panther describes the difference between this typed post he made in the Thinkquest platform and his notebook writing. J: I don’t want like people to see my writing cuz it feels sort of embarrassing that my sloppy handwriting. A: So you would rather type it so it doesn’t look sloppy. Because when you type it it doesn’t look sloppy. J: Uh huh. It just looks sorta normal. 161 A: Yeah, so let’s look at this typing that you did. Do you like the way that this (typed post) looks better than the way that this (journal entry) looks? J: Definitely. A: Definitely. J: Cuz of the colors and also because of like how it’s not all messed up. A: It’s all even. J: And it’s perfect also. Panther refers to his typed text as “normal”; “not all messed up”; and “perfect.” As a writer who struggles with feeling embarrassed about his sloppy handwriting, seeing his text before him in uniform type makes him less embarrassed. He also appreciates being able to use the colors. Like Tiger, he uses font color symbolically: he uses blue to write about the Lions as the team colors are blue and white. The interview continues: A: So do you think that a per-that somebody is going to be more likely to read this (points to notebook) or to read this (points to computer screen)? P: Definitely that (points to computer screen). A: Definitely that. What makes you think that? P: Because it’s not sloppy. It’s-it has better spaces-I don’t forget to do periods on it for some reason and for some reason I feel much better when I’m typing than when I’m writing cuz when I’m writing I feel sorta like it’s really really bad but when I’m typing I think- when I said my hand and fingers like to move that way I can move my fingers better and my hand it like can move around and with a pencil I do sort of sloppy work cuz I keep forgetting where to hold it in the right place and when I do get it, it’s still sloppy. 162 A: So like you said you like to make your hand move around or your hand just moves around and that’s ok on a keyboard because you’re supposed to be moving your hand around. Oh and for some reason you think you remember to put in the periods and stuff when you’re typing. P: Cuz I can see where the periods would be mostly like where it would be right there and it reminds me to put down a period. Thinking about audience for Panther is still in large part thinking about not wanting to be embarrassed by someone reading it and judging his penmanship. He thinks that a distant reader is more likely to read his text if he types it, both because it’s neater for them and because it’s more grammatically correct. Panther was reminded, via the keyboard, of textual conventions that readers appreciate; his expository composing is improved, according to him, by having the keyboard in front of him as he composes. The bare fact of the visibility of the components of textual composing (e.g., letters, punctuation marks) on the keyboard helps him to compose. Like alphabet posters in grades K/1, the keyboard serves as a visual aid to recall. Excited about being able to present his text neatly, Panther focuses on making his text look good, as well as being funny. As demonstrated earlier, creating a more casual or personal connection to readers can be a positive in networked writing (Karper, 2009). Phrases he uses like, “Football baby!” may serve to self-identify Panther as a watcher of football and/or player of the popular video game Madden NFL, thus legitimizing his claims to be able to speak about football. He knows this phrase will be familiar to other football fans. Panther is able to target that his knowledge of football is more than what is revealed in his post and he could include this knowledge to better represent the specifics of Michigan football. This transcript is from our interview: 163 P: Yeah, and I know a lot of the players’ names because I get football cards and it helps me recognize their face, their names, their jersey, their helmet, sorta and like sometimes their like footwork and handwork andA: Really, you can learn about the footwork and the handwork on the cards too? P: Uh huh like you just see how they would run cuz some run differently than-well a lot—everyone runs differently than um-. A: Oh I didn’t know that. P: Because people stretch their legs out farther or shorter and it’s mostly never the same. He continues in responding to his Week Six post: P: Yeah, but all I talked about was the teams. I didn’t talk about what they really do. So I forgot that part. Panther can see areas for revision. He can see that what he has written is not as fully rounded out as it could be. Panther was excited by the surface-level concerns of how his post looked and the mechanics of the post, but he could also target areas for revision at a more global level based on what a distant audience might like to know about the Lions. In the instructional conversation where we decided who would be writing on which topics, Panther volunteered for the football page. He was able to advocate for and negotiate with peers and teachers so that his contribution of expository text for the unit was related to his topic interest: football. This was a good move for him in terms of being able to express his ideas in writing because much of the lingo he needs to use he is already familiar with. FOOTBALL BABY! I LOVE FOOTBALL . SOME OF THE BEST TEAMS ARE FROM MICHIGAN. LIKE THE LIONS,MICHIGAN STATE AND THE DRAFNOR PANTHERS BUT NOT MICHIGAN SO DONT GO TO A MICHIGAN GAME EVER! 164 FOOTBALL OUT. Consider the above text in contrast with this selection from his notebook writing, in which he describes something he also liked (the agents visiting) but is not as familiar with (describing theater performances): the angents were funny. They were all sotersofstupe. i cant whait for fun stuff. Panther’s interest in using technology combined with his interest for the topic he was writing on seemed to have affected his networked composing positively as compared to his notebook writing. Panther contributes to whole class conversations around inventing the audience via parroting the words and ideas of others. Panther uses popular culture references and tries to be funny in order to please his enduring audience of peers. Panther’s compositional work demonstrates a student who draws upon his topic interest to compose; his familiarity with his subject and the technology affordances enable him to pass for a more literate student than other writing samples may indicate. Panther uses technology affordances to address surface-level features of writing, such as spelling and punctuation. He possesses more information about his topic than his writing would indicate. Perhaps a lack of confidence in his ability to express his ideas in writing combined with a desire to be funny and please others keep Panther from tackling more substantive description in his expository prose. Panther is a composer who parrots other’s ideas, invokes audience via popular culture references he assumes his reader shares, and uses networked composing tools as mental aids. 165 Phoenix: Aligning Invoker; Academic Composer Invoking. During the course of the unit, Phoenix changed his Thinkquest icon so it would be the same as Mr. Williams’ icon. As Karper (2009) points out, authors in networked writing use a variety of symbols and words to identify themselves with intended communicants/audience. Phoenix knows that Mr. Williams, the male authority figure, also contributes to the PALS program Webplay space in Thinkquest: by changing his icon to be the same, Phoenix identifies himself with Mr. Williams. While Mr. Williams is a distant other, because it is networked writing, he is not one who needs to be entirely imagined or invoked. Rather because he is part of the audience interacting through the network, he can be directly communicated with. While students hadn’t heard his voice or seen his face, they knew something about him based on the icon he chose and the profile he created in the shared platform. Communication between writer and distant audience interacting often takes place in a networked platform via photos, icons, and text, but may also take place via synchronous chat (e.g., Google Talk); via phone; or via videoconferencing (e.g., Skype). While with peers, Phoenix’s interactions began in a space of verbal talk and during the course of Webplay, were continued in a networked space; Phoenix’s interactions with distant audiences began in a networked space and during the course of the unit were continued using videoconferencing (synchronous and visual verbal communication). As students increasingly become linked with distant others through networked platforms, there may increasingly be a need for “interaction literacy”—an ability to communicate based on being able to read a person’s identity and interests from visual, iconic, and textual representations. As a member of an intended audience, Mr. Williams helped Phoenix and peers to determine what would be of interest to a person who had never visited Drafnor. During extended 166 collaborative composing acts, such as the one undertaken in Webplay, instructors may invite students to communicate with not only peers, but adults outside the classroom who are other authority figures. Authority figures of opposite gender to the teacher may be just the sort of interacting audience more accelerated students like Phoenix would benefit from as a gateway figure for moving writing from addressing known audiences to invoking distant audiences. Composing. Phoenix addresses his audience’s state of mind and empathetically attempts to describe their point of view with phrases such as “You may think” and “you might be suprised” (sic). You may think Meijer is just a grocery store, so you might be suprised to hear that it's not. Meijer is actualy a department store with alot of departments. At the electronic department you can get photos developed. Or you can go to the toy department to get a birthday present. At the sporting goods department you can get sports stuff for the coming up season. Selecting the right photo for his post on Meijer was a key audience consideration of Phoenix’s as well. He wanted to choose a photo that would represent his expository text; he ultimately went with one he took that showed the Meijer logo on the outside of the building and some PALS students standing beneath it. Phoenix is representative of a student who carefully selects representative images as part of his networked composing to align himself with invoked audiences. He composes using familiar academic conventions for meeting distant audience needs, for example the phrase, “You may think…” Further instruction might show Phoenix and students like him who seek to align themselves and interact with distant audience members how to ask questions related to composing work. These questions would help students to get at what the distant audience already 167 knows and would like to know more about. Through further instruction, a strong desire to communicate with others whom writers identify with can be more strongly connected to the way these writers craft prose for distant audiences. Gecko: Individual Invoker; Resourceful Composer Invoking. Gecko was not present for the instructional conversation day, and during the conversation with Mr. Williams, she stood in the back of the group and didn’t ask a single question. The boys in the group were standing near the front and asking many questions. As in Week One, when Gecko didn’t engage with classmates in conversation, Gecko, as part of the larger group of her class, didn’t engage with Mr. Williams, a member of her distant audience. I don’t know what Gecko would have done if given the opportunity to communicate one-to-one with Mr. Williams or with a different member of the distant audience. Composing. Gecko’s Week Six Thinkquest contribution is as follows: Photo: A statue of Sparty, the MSU mascot. Text: When you come to Drafnor, you have to come to MSU. It's the nearest university and it's beautiful. There's a track, a football field, a pool, and a lot more. There's also a really nice statue of Sparty. There is lots of flowers, trees, and green space. Lots of nice dorms surround the university, but not all the way. There's also a planetarium on campus. Inside, there's marble floors, and when you enter, there's glass walls and Sparty is against a white one. Anyway, MSU is really nice and I'm sure you'll enjoy it. This expository piece built upon Gecko’s PALS field trip experiences and her own experiential awareness. As demonstrated in Chapter Four, Gecko is a student in tune to the dialogue within herself as she draws on experience to compose. Discussing her Week Six contribution to the guidebook, Gecko answers my question: 168 A: And how do you know you did a good job on this? G: Because I described like everything in the picture and I put some of the sports stuff in because colleges always have sports and stuff. Gecko has a particular understanding of what a “college” is and/or has. She imagines what the idea of “college” encompasses for a distant audience and includes information about what she perceives to be shared mental representations: e.g., colleges always have sports and stuff. In writing for present peers (See Chapter Six), Phoenix and Pony described PALS students’ shared experiences on the track during their trip to the university. Because they were pitching their text at their peers, they sought to prominently feature theirs and their peers’ experiences. However, in describing the college for a distant audience, Gecko’s treatment of sports attempts to meet her imagined reader’s needs: “There's a track, a football field, a pool, and a lot more.” Each of these three things is grounded in Gecko’s own experience—(the PALS students visited the track and the football field, and while eating lunch, Gecko smelled the chlorine of the outdoor pool). For a distant audience, however, Gecko categorized these three elements of the day trip into the larger heading of sports knowing sports is something readers expect to hear about when reading about a university. Gecko is in tune with a general imagined audience and it is demonstrated in her writing, as opposed to Tiger who is in tune with a specific imagined audience (Vladimir Guerrero), but this awareness does not seem to manifest itself in any tangible way in his writing for the guidebook. Gecko is representative of a student who is less interested in invoking with others as part of her composing process, yet she routinely draws upon remembered events and interactions. Her prose would be the most suited for a distant audience of any represented in Week Six, and, for 169 her, direct communication played little part. As demonstrated in Chapter Four, Gecko’s use of her observations and memories in networked and dramatic composing is made more public than in pencil-and-paper writing and thus may serve as an example/model for her peers. Peers may learn just as much from observing her work as communicating with her, and vice versa: she may learn from her peers and later draw upon their communication as another remembered interaction, or event. Conclusion To summarize, this chapter shows that both instructional conversations with an enduring audience of peers and teachers, as well as video communication with intended readers, helped students to imagine distant audiences and varied purposes. Conversations about the distant audience with the present enduring audience of peers and interacting with representative members of a distant audience may contribute to students’ increased capacity to meet distant audience’s needs through their compositions. Students build upon existing relationships and interests in their efforts to invoke and meet the needs of distant audiences. Networked technologies can facilitate imagining and invoking within an enduring audience of peers, making visible a range of ways to invent so as to meet distant audience needs. 170 CHAPTER EIGHT Introduction In schools, kids are audience to each other’s actions all day long. Take Tiger, as an example. Tiger is running at recess, then he trips and falls. He’s not hurt at all. But Tiger’s going to have a rough day because his fall becomes the “thing that happened” that morning. Other kids are around and immediately become audience, whether Tiger likes it or not. Some kids laugh or go to help pick him up or both. Within a matter of minutes, Manatee and Panther are re-enacting the fall. The other peers as audience laugh at the representation of the event they’ve just witnessed. Pony and Crocodile, who were “lucky” enough to see it, run off to find other kids who didn’t see it to tell them about it. Pony and Crocodile re-enact the trip for a new audience. As the students file back into the classroom, Tiger hears comments and feedback about his tripping, “You should have watched where you going.” “You looked like an idiot!” “Oh my gosh, Tiger, are you ok?” Being between 8 and 11 years old and going to traditional American schools means having an audience for what one does, i.e., having what I’ve termed an enduring audience of peers. Like it or not, despite if one’s action is planned or not, peers will see it, share it, comment on it, re-enact it, have an opinion about it. Given that other kids are around to think about Tiger and copy what he does and talk to other people about what he does, is there a way to capitalize on this condition when students are learning to compose? What if those other kids could act as audience to Tiger’s work—to what he composes as it demonstrates his thoughts, his ideas, his passions, his time, and his effort? Why not give students the opportunity to be audience to each other’s writing? A networked platform 171 for composing can make possible this condition of an enduring audience of peers for composing work. The rationale for this study describes my interest in the ways in which the new condition of increased visibility and accessibility to peers’ composing processes and products, made possible with networked technologies, influences students’ composing actions. The big idea to come out of this study, arrived at by using the lens of audience theory to analyze student data, is this: In upper elementary networked composing environments, an enduring audience of peers may be a condition that is central to the project of learning to compose. The present research reveals that for student composers, their peer group has enormous potential and influence as an interacting audience. This peer group also holds sway as students’ most prized addressed audience. And an enduring audience of peers influences the way student composers invoke or imagine other more distant audiences. In this chapter I describe how this study contributes to the ongoing project of building audience theory, particularly with regard to its use in research on the writing of upper elementary students. I began research with audience theory as a framing heuristic; the results of this research--most saliently, the idea that an enduring audience of peers influences how students engage interacting, addressed, and invoked audiences--may enrich understanding of the theory’s explanatory power when taken up by other researchers in the future. I go on to present the implications of my data chapters regarding how an enduring audience of peers affects student composing actions in terms of the three prongs of audience theory: audience interacting, audience addressed, and audience invoked. I give a brief summary of these discussions here, with more extended treatment of each to follow: 172 The data demonstrates different ways that students made use of audience interacting with an enduring audience of peers in their composing. The data shows that struggling writers interact frequently during writing tasks, and, thus, “talk themselves” into composing, traditionally a difficult task for them. Their interaction with peers demonstrated to them that peers care about what they write, thus giving them a communicative reason for composing. The findings further suggest that in networked environments, students should receive instruction in how to productively interact with an audience of peers (i.e., how to make conversation, how to listen, and how to help) and should be given a relative amount of freedom to select patterns of interacting and composing, ones that suit their composing agendas and personal styles as well as meta-awareness instruction concerning how to target their own agendas and styles. The data demonstrates that an enduring audience of peers influences the students’ addressed audiences and what student writers hope for audiences to experience as readers/viewers. Even when the composing prompt directed the students of this study to write for an outside audience, students had in mind the enduring audience of peers who could actually see and respond to their work. As students used a networked platform, their work was available to peers. Interview data reveals that students evaluated their work in terms of peers’ recognition and approval, rather than evaluating their work in terms of the other more distant audiences the instructions and activities of the learning unit supplied. These findings suggest that students composing in genres for which other 9-10 year olds have the adequate life experience to be authentic readers—e.g., the genre of local area guidebook—may be a fruitful way to make use of the possibilities that networked platforms provide students in terms of accessing and engaging with each other’s work. An implication is 173 that students may benefit from instruction in how a reaction from the enduring peer audience has the potential to both add to and detract from the project of reaching the intended reader (if the peer audience is not, in fact, a target audience for the work). These findings also suggest that the traditional way of students engaging with each other’s work in a spirit of review is not the only way that students can, or should, be audience to each other’s work. Within the enduring audience of peers created by a networked platform, instruction can guide students through their many options to be audience to peers: students can opt to read all peers’ work or select certain works they would like to read. Each student has liberty to read and experience peers’ work without necessarily having to respond to the author. Each student has a greater range of options regarding the manner in which she’d like to respond to certain peers—in spontaneous and unstructured ways, such as simple expressions of appreciation, or in more formal, review-oriented ways. The data demonstrates the different ways students made use of invoking distant audiences in their individual composing within the presence of their peers-as-audience. Students drew on their interests and previous experiences and used conversation with their peers to imagine distant audiences. They also interacted with distant audiences (a collapse of the audience theory categories of invoking and interacting, made possible by the 21st century networked technology of Skype) as a collective group, making it possible for peers to watch each other engaging distant others. Chapter Seven data reveals that individual composer use of second-person voice and attention to meeting distant audience needs grew considerably after this imagining and interaction work with their peers. These findings suggest that distant other audience engagement for 9-10 year olds may first develop out of writing for and with peers. By “road-testing” work with the authentic 174 audience of peers, students may be more equipped to imagine and invoke distant audiences. An enduring audience of peers made the acts of imagining and interacting a more collective enterprise for students than is traditionally represented, both in audience theory with its focus on the solitary writer, and in recent scholarship with its focus on student email (one-to-one) conversation with distant experts. These findings suggest that instructors should design learning spaces for collective imagining and interacting. By working in the visible networked platform and thus the enduring audience of peers, students gain access to different strategies used by peers for meeting distant audience needs in composing. Students may thus add strategies to their toolbox for composing, having witnessed them carried out by fellow composer peers. Finally, I describe how educational drama can be used to demonstrate good practices for composing in the context of an enduring audience of peers. 1 Audience Theory Revisited I began this study using the theoretical framework of audience theory. Audience addressed refers to a known audience; audience invoked refers to an unknown audience (Ede & Lunsford, 1984). And audience interacting is a third prong of audience theory articulated by scholars for a networked age. Robert Johnson (1997) describes how interacting audiences can aid a writer, or group of writers: 1 This study looked at an interdisciplinary unit that made use of both networked technologies and drama. The bulk of the analysis work for this project focused on students’ networked technologies use, so I present the discussion of drama for its potential to reinforce composing values important for working with the enduring audience of peers present in networked technologies. Future research will more comprehensively address the drama work in and of itself. 175 …not only does the involved audience literally bring audiences “into the open,” but these actively sought out and valued members of the discourse production community engage students directly in the public sphere (p.374). One key difference concerning a composer’s audience now as compared to when Johnson first talked about audience interacting may be the presence of audiences who are not actively sought out, nor necessarily valued. Ede and Lunsford (2009) write on Internet-supported composing: …the reality is that audiences are there all the time, browsing, searching, engaging, responding, and sometimes accusing (p.56). From actively sought out and participating to random and unhelpful, much of the thinking around audiences accessible to students, as made possible through 21st century technologies, focuses beyond the classroom walls. And perhaps for college-age and adult writers, this is more appropriate to the experiences of writers. College age writers may spend three hours a week together and a couple more online. But upper elementary students, those with whom I was working, are located within an enduring audience of peers. These students spend between six and eight hours with the same group of people every single day. They are part of a public with its own guiding rules and norms. In this research, I analyzed student work and perceptions to learn more about how students engage various audiences in their composing practices. Reading across chapters, it became evident that the public-to-peers nature of the networked composing was the most important factor underlying student perceptions and actions regarding composing and audience. The present research describes the influence of the enduring audience of peers for upper 176 elementary writers in networked contexts and thus contributes to the project of enhancing the explanatory power of audience theory for the actions of upper elementary student composers. Student writers have a unique condition for networked compositional work: a peer audience for their work that can be stable and enduring. Of course, not every member of the audience will be enduring; the makeup of classrooms can go through changes determined by social and economic circumstances of children’s families and communities. Although not each member of the audience may endure, the presence of a group of peers available to view work does endure. While adult writers’ audiences are often tied to the purposes associated with the genre in which they are working, student writers have an enduring audience who can be with them across many different genres and purposes, and who can be enlisted as an interacting audience, addressed audience, or imagined audience, as needed. This enduring audience has always been present in the person of the teacher in communities of learning where writing happens, but not necessarily in the body of peers. This more flexible mobilization of student-tostudent interactions in writing instruction is connected to a tradition in writing research described by Hillocks (1986); Applebee (1986); and Smagorinksy (2010). These researchers stress the centrality of a writer’s context for writing on his/her process. The present research demonstrates that an enduring audience of peers influences student engagement of audience(s). This research, therefore, suggests that an extension of audience theory to upper elementary school writers should factor in the enduring audience of peers. In the following sections, I make clear how the enduring audience of peers influences student engagement of the three audiences articulated in audience theory. 177 Students Interact with an Audience of Peers In this section, I review how an enduring audience of peers gave student composers a range of possible communicative and composing actions to make during their composing process. I present implications for instruction based on these findings. One traditional example of how students interact with peers during composing work looks like this: a teacher gives students a defined amount of time to work on composing a short piece. Each student works on his/her own. If someone finishes, he sits quietly. After the time is up, everybody or selected students, read their work aloud. The teacher follows up after one or more persons read to provide feedback and/or reinforce the points she wants to get across. Students may wish to talk back to what someone said, but there often isn’t time for that since there is an overriding imperative to get through everyone else reading. A networked platform can change the possibilities for students interacting with peers while composing and sharing work. Online, the work/sharing scenario is different; for these activities are collapsed into the same time and space. For example, a student composes, and as she is working, up pops the work of someone who has finished, which she can access either as she writes or after she submits her own piece, depending on the platform. A 9-10 year old student composer working in a networked platform can glance at a screen and see the sentences her peers have written to address a prompt (or to deviate from the prompt) in the middle of her own composing process. Student attention can shift from composing their own work to chatting (typing conversation) to listening (reading others’ typed conversation) to reading others’ compositional work, not to mention all the verbal exchanges that commonly take place in computer labs. A networked environment for composing supports student conversation around 178 and during their work that (1) is not mediated through the teacher and (2) is not restricted to the traditional classroom maxim of “One speaker at a time.” Implications Regarding the Interacting Audience of Peers for All Students This study demonstrates that the diversity of student action in such a context for composing is considerable. In their first introduction to the networked platform, where they were prompted to introduce themselves, the students in this study interacted in different ways with each other. Chapter Five demonstrates how students variously: favored communicating with peers; preferred to be a bystander to peer conversation, then composed in light of that conversation; shifted from an academic composing agenda to an informal conversation agenda; virtually ignored the peer audience; or rapidly shifted between engaging peers in conversation and composing to the prompt. Previous research literature studied curriculum that separated out actions and audiences for students, e.g., write this email to an expert to get answers to your questions (Clark & Heaney, 2003). Similarly, in Morgan & Beaumont (2003) all students online chatted; then all students individually wrote arguments. The context of the present study allowed for students to choose to communicate or compose, or both, as suited their own style for composing and composing agenda. The exertion of composer autonomy over potential distractions is a 21st century composing skill. Instructors may build students’ capacities as writers by guiding them in conversations about the many ways to shift across communicating, composing, or otherwise engaging the enduring audience of peers during networked composing. They may invite them to practice different ways; for example, inviting Camel, the bystander, to take a more active role in conversation, or inviting Crocodile, the conversationalist, to concentrate more on his individual composing. It should be 179 demonstrated to students that their objective as a composer can be, in turn, both enhanced and distracted with the potentials of networked technologies. They must practice coming to understand how, for themselves as writers who each work in unique ways, to select appropriate actions to take and when. A future study undertaken with other students would likely find more and different student actions and desires to engage audiences. However, the implication of this research is that whatever student actions are taken, making students aware of the diversity in actions can point them toward multiple ways of contributing and being successful in composing environments of extended composing acts. Awareness of different ways to engage with technologies and peers for varying and multiple audiences is a type of awareness necessary not only for 21st century composing work, but also for 21st century life at large. Implications Regarding the Interacting Audience of Peers for Struggling Writers This research demonstrated that of the three actions articulated in audience theory, 2 interacting proved to be a key support for the struggling writers of this study. The role of conversation in creating an incentive to compose was one key support provided by an interacting audience of peers. The data shows that in the introductory week, struggling writers’ posts had high communication counts; they used language to invite peers to respond directly back to them. Interview data demonstrated that Crocodile was delighted to find that composing typed text could be a way to make conversation with peers. Though this conversation was only tangentially related to addressing the composing prompt, it created an incentive for Crocodile to keep composing, to keep contributing to the platform in the following weeks’ activities. Rather than 2 In this study, “struggling writers” are those students who self-identified as struggling with writing and whose text, written and typed, contained many surface-level errors, as well as incomplete idea generation and/or representation. 180 focusing on the trouble he traditionally experienced with composing, he focused more on what his peers might say back to him. With a networked platform, means exist by which struggling writers can seek help, and the audience of peers can provide help. In the composing acts where students were tasked to reach a distant audience, the present and available peer audience interacted with the composer to assist them in her goals. While previous research on students’ networked composing has described an audience interacting of adult helpers (Clark & Heaney, 2003; Harris & Jones, 1999; Johnson, 1997), the present study demonstrates how the members of the enduring audience of peers functioned as peer helpers. In the following selection from my interview with Panther, he explains how it is specifically networked composing that, for him, enables peer-to-peer support: A: Ok. So do you, how do you know that you did a good job on your typing. P: …Because I’m spelling the things right, because I’m getting help from friends and usually when I write this a lot of people don’t like really know. Cuz when I’m composing like once I forgot the word “the” how to spell it and “was” and then I’m in the computer lab I feel like it’s sort of not embarrassing but it is embarrassing when I write. Panther describes how when he usually writes, “a lot of people don’t like really know.” Panther sees his peers’ viewing as an asset, even though he does not write as well as most of the others in the group. Seemingly, the positive feedback from peers on the content of posts outweighs potential embarrassment over surface-level concerns and, in fact, the visibility opens up a space for constructive dialogue between peers around surface level concerns, such as spelling (See Dyson, 2003). 181 Panther’s visible composing in the networked platform gave him an opportunity to communicate with others, whom he terms “friends.” Panther’s use of the word “friends” to describe those from whom he is getting help is a phenomenon demonstrated in other research with struggling writers of this age as well (Certo, 2011). Talk around composing is a socializing activity. Panther’s enduring audience of peers is able to help him without, according to him, causing him embarrassment. Previous research has demonstrated the role of peer talk during a composer’s process. Anne Haas Dyson’s work (1993, 2003) describes how the classroom functions as a public for young writers. Dyson (2003) describes her research findings with a slightly younger population: Children need “open-ended” composing periods…In such open-ended composing times, children need the opportunity to talk among themselves, just as they need to be expected to write, and teachers need the opportunity to observe…During open-ended composing, when children interact mainly with each other, they may generate the social energy that helps initiate and guide authoring decisions at varied discourse levels (e.g., topic, discourse form, spelling) (p.188). The present research demonstrates that a networked platform may support just this sort of open-ended composing period for upper elementary students, as it provides a space where students talk to each other, and teachers are able to observe and help as necessary. Thus, an open-ended composing period may be advisable for upper elementary students’ composing processes, as it can facilitate a social energy that supports students in making better authorial decisions. A networked platform displays all writers’ ideas for their peers to see. In classrooms, struggling writers’ work may not be made public as frequently as others’ work simply because it 182 often does not serve as a good example of successful use of mechanics. A networked platform can ensure that even struggling writers’ ideas are brought to the classroom “marketplace.” And, with the right sort of community guidelines in place regarding how to solicit and provide feedback, peers can both interact with the ideas and provide support to help with both surfacelevel and global-level composing concerns. Students Address an Audience of Peers An enduring audience of peers influenced student composers’ intended audiences for composing work: participants in the study wished for their peers to react in certain ways to their work. These findings suggest several implications for instruction. One traditional example of how students are invited to address audiences in composing instruction is as follows. Students are often tasked to engage “authentic” audiences like school principals with their writing. While the principal is an audience known to the students, the principal is not likely to read and respond to each student’s work (I’m sure there are exceptions). Simultaneously, students are also often tasked to work with present peers in a spirit of critique and review. Students pitch work at audiences who won’t read the work, then have it read by real audiences (their peers) whose job is not to experience it or be affected by it as a reader audience. These peer readers help student writers make the composing better for the “authentic” audience, a particular individual that can’t react or be affected, since she will never read it. The true audience of the teacher as evaluator is also an intended audience for this work, though not often explicitly so. Networked platforms can engender a shift from pitching work to the teacher and being told by the teacher whom to share it with for review, to pitching work to peers and being prepared for anyone among the entire audience of peers to read it and/or comment on it. If 183 students intend to affect their peers and try to compose in ways to do so, their peers can provide feedback about how successful they were. A student audience may not be able to offer the same kind of constructive feedback as a teacher can, but they can certainly attest to whether or not they recognized what their peer was trying to represent, and whether or not they appreciated it. Implications Regarding the Addressed Audience of Peers and Genre The present study demonstrates that in networked composing contexts, when composing tasks are public to an enduring audience of peers, students pitch their composing to their present peers and are interested in the responses of those peers. Analysis of interview data found that students seek peers’ recognition and appreciation for their writing. Chapter Six shows that Phoenix and Pony composed pieces about MSU in order to capture an experience that “everybody” (their peers) would recognize as her own. Even though the prompt directed students to produce descriptions of the local area containing photos and text for people who have never visited Drafnor, those audiences weren’t there in the same way for these students as their peers were, in the public that a networked composing platform creates. For student composers, the peers who saw the work they did, the next day or even in the very moment they did it, commanded attention over the audiences not seeing the work. These findings suggest that students should receive instruction in how a reaction from the enduring peer audience has the potential to both add to and detract from the project of reaching the intended reader (if the peer audience is not, in fact, a target audience for the work). They also suggest that allowing students to compose in genres of interest to peers may support them in their development of audience awareness. Students composing in genres which other 9-10 year olds have the adequate life experience to be authentic readers for—e.g., as in this study, a description of the local area--may be a fruitful way to make use of the opportunities that networked 184 platforms provide students in terms of accessing and engaging with each other’s work. Genres of composing that peers could write for other peers include “how-to” guides, like how to use the Internet to find information on sports (see Vriend Van Duinen, 2010); humorous vignettes; or, as in the case of this project, representations of shared experiences, be they in photo, video, essayist, narrative, poetic, or a combination of these forms. When student composers pitch their work to an enduring audience of peers, students don’t have to evaluate each others’ work with an added step of assuming a role: e.g., a peer has to read while acting as the principal to whom the piece is pitched. Rather, the peer can respond as the reader they are: a kid of the same age and social milieu as the author. Implications Regarding the Addressed Audience of Peers and their Roles as Audience The research demonstrates that composers appreciated peer response that was not just given to them in a spirit of review or critique, but also given as the spontaneous response of a reader of a work, as one who has experienced the work and been affected by it. When Crocodile wrote that the eclipse looked like a black hole, his classmate who had also seen the eclipse at the Planetarium was able to say, “Yes, it did,” and Crocodile was able to take that reaction as evidence that his ideas meant something to his larger community. When students are given the opportunity to write about experiences they’ve shared with peers, for peers, it creates space for the addressed audience to engage with the work with sentiments like, “I also experienced that, and you’ve captured it in a way that is both familiar and creative.” Previous research has described how an enduring audience of peers serves in young writers’ development. Dyson (2003) describes the influence of peers on young composers’ process—as they are most often the intended audience. She finds that students write as a way to tell themselves and their peers the stories of their shared social life. They write about their peer 185 communities as well as use writing to bring desired peers-in-school communities into being; they write with the knowledge that what they write will be read or heard by peers in an oral sharing session. The present study also researched a context for writing that incorporates within it expectations for public airing of writing. This study differs from Dyson’s studies by researching a slightly older age group and the use of networked technologies for writing: access was not a matter of circling up to listen to peers read, but logging in to read what peers posted. However, like Dyson, this study also found that peer opinion of writing was key criteria for student engagement in the classroom writing contexts. Traditionally, the opportunities to interact through talk during and around writing, as well as to share writing for purposes other than to receive peer critique (i.e., elicit statements of recognition or appreciation), decrease as students move through school. Networked technologies reintroduce these conditions for writing. This research suggests that, just as instructors working in younger grades do, digital writing instructors can open up spaces of dialogue where a composer may “pitch and perform” their work for an enduring audience of peers, and an enduring audience of peers may respond as readers or viewers who have experienced the work as the intended audience, and not just as reviewers helping composers to improve work for a different and more distant intended audience. The range with which peers may experience each other’s work is expanded beyond 3 traditional peer review to basic witnessing to aesthetic appreciation and more. 3 This is not to say that peer review--a careful and systematic partnering or grouping of students to improve a written piece of work--should not still be a central part of composing curriculum. Networked tools, such as Google Docs and ELI, make available new options for peer review and recast that process in exciting ways. However, the present research did not focus on peer review. 186 Many studies have shown writing for an authentic audience to be a pedagogically effective way to improve students writing and revision (e.g., Dyson, 2003; Graham & Perin, 2007). This research suggests that giving students the opportunity to be an authentic audience member could likewise be effective. When students are given the opportunity to respond to their peers’ work authentically--in their own voice, not just as editors, and around genres that interest them; their response to peer work, just like their own composing work, can come from a personal place. Additionally, responding in such ways can support students who are working together on an extended collaborative project, as were the students in this study because each composer has an inherent stake in the composing work of her peers. Her peers’ work will ultimately become her work as well. “Authenticity” may thus be achieved in a formative/summative loop within the enduring audience of peers. Students Invoke Distant Audiences in the Presence of a Peer Audience An enduring audience of peers influenced student composers’ engagement of distant audiences in composing work: participants in the study made use of conversations with peers to imagine more distant audiences. These findings suggest several implications for instruction. One traditional example of communicating with a distant audience is students being matched with adults or same-age peers outside the classroom in one-to-one communication via email. While these communiqués connect students to audiences beyond the classroom, the communication does not take place within an enduring audience of peers, and composing actions such as how to introduce one’s self, or how to ask purpose-driven questions, are not visible to peers. Newer networked platforms and technologies make possible the potential for free, visible, and public-to-the-whole-class conversations with distant audience members. Distant 187 others can have an identifying Web presence in the networked platform used for composing; they can access the composition work at various stages of process, if desired. Distant others can be available for communication, either through the platform or through picture and voice. These distant others can talk to the whole class at once in real time. Implications for Invoking Audiences by Imagining Them in the Presence of an Enduring Audience of Peers The present research demonstrates that in this particular group of students, the work of imagining and inventing the distant audience for the composing (and thus making compositional decisions based on their perceived needs) was done through conversation with the enduring audience of peers. This research demonstrates that for some students aged 8-11, invoking distant audiences began in conversation with the enduring audience of peers and grew from the students’ interests. Tiger was interested in baseball; he invoked a major league baseball player as audience for the work he was doing about his local area, in a purpose-driven strategy to get the baseball player to want to move to the local area and be a part of the neighboring major league baseball team. This invocation was taken up and supported by the enduring audience of peers, particularly his brother Phoenix and friend Panther. Invoking distant audiences is an act of imagination, and students draw on their previous interactions and interest for this part of the composing process. This research suggests that using the enduring audience of peers to provide for peer-topeer collective imagining can capitalize on the power of students’ shared interests, preparing them to invoke distant audiences. Instructors may create spaces where such collective imagining can occur, be they whole-class, small-group, or Web-mediated conversations. 188 Implications of Invoking Audiences by Interacting with Them in the Presence of an Enduring Audience of Peers The present research demonstrates that invoking distant audiences may also involve interacting with them. As demonstrated in Chapter Seven, Mr. Williams was a present figure (through his icon) in the networked platform the students were using for their work. In this way, he was “known” to the students. Towards the end of the project, the students interacted with Mr. Williams via Skype in an exchange about their respective local areas. In this conversation, Mr. Williams expressed his interest in reading what the students were going to produce. Much previous research has been done on students interacting with distant others using email: a one-to-one conversation (Clark & Heaney, 2003; Merchant, 2006, 2007). In this project, students interacted with a member of a distant audience via Skype, as part of an enduring audience of peers. All the students were able to see and hear Mr. Williams and construct the flow of the conversation as a group. Then, all the students were able to give feedback about the conversation and think about what they could take from it for their own process as one writer contributing to a group project, as well as what the final group composition should include based on the conversation. The more visible nature of the communication between composer(s) and distant audience as facilitated by Skype ensured that students could be audience to the ways in which their peers asked questions of distant peers and to the ways in which peers engaged representative members of the intended distant audience. This research suggests that peer modeling of pre-composing activities such as interviewing and invoking is possible, especially when these activities are facilitated with networked technologies that support visibility of process. Instructors may direct students’ attention to observation of their peers’ interviewing and 189 invoking behaviors so they may gain a sense of the range of ways in which one may imagine distant audiences and their needs. Previous research on students interacting with adults outside the classroom has situated the adult as an expert whom they can ask questions about facts needed for the inquiry (Clark & Heaney, 2003; Harris & Jones, 1999). With networked platforms becoming more prominent in schools, young people and experts do not have to communicate only via asynchronous means like email. Of course, we still can make use of student communication one-to-one with distant others through email, but the public type of conversation also allows students to pick up on the interviewing/question asking/preparing-to-write work that their peers do, so they can learn more about how to do these tasks from each other as well. This research shows the value of instructors providing students with opportunities to interact with distant members of intended audiences within the enduring audience of peers, so that students may observe the strategies peers employ to establish the needs of the distant audience as readers who have a particular stake in the work. Drama and an Enduring Audience of Peers Previous research has demonstrated there is overlap in the ways that dramatic composing and networked composing can facilitate students’ composing know-how in general, particularly with regard to the effects of audience awareness, roleplay, communication, and inquiry-driven participation in writing communities (Dunnagan, 1991; Rosler, 2008; Wishart, Oades, & Morris, 2007). The present study examined a unit in which students participated with and for an enduring audience of peers in both drama and networked-based contexts. This study reveals new directions for considering the utility of drama for networked composing and composing at large. Drama and Visibility 190 In networked composing, students shift across: interacting with and addressing audiences, drawing on past experiences, communicating and composing, looking at what others do, and talking to others. Dramatic composing can showcase these actions for students. During the tableaux-creation activity used in this study, each small group was able to be audience to their peers’ work: to look around and listen during the rehearsing processes to see what the other groups were doing. Peer groups did not directly interact with each other, but were audience to each other’s processes. Take Gecko and her group, for example. During the activity, they looked over to the boys’ group and noticed they had gone “3-d.” She and her group decided they, too, would not lie flat on the floor and use the floor as a canvas, as it were, but would stand up and work in “3-d.” Their composing process was, in the moment, improved upon, as they capitalized on the observation of peers’ processes. As further demonstrated by Camel’s (the “bystander”) activity in the first ThinkQuest discussion board (See Chapter Five), when using more visible and transparent media, peers need not engage each other directly to benefit from the potentials of observation. The learning is not necessarily “collaborative” or “group” work; however, students have more examples available to them from which to work. Drama is public composing: it always has been. Just within the last few years, networked composing has allowed for student textual and visual composing to be public as well, available to the whole class—the entire enduring audience of peers--all at once. Drama can help students see what composing for a public actually entails. 4 Drama and Imagining, Inventing, and Invoking Distant Audiences 4 One tangential direction for future research may be to engage students in drama as part of Internet bullying education, as it can put a face and body to the disembodied bullying language kids put on the Internet about each other. 191 Invoking a distant audience has been described by theorists as part of the composing process; inventing and imagining readers one does not know can be facilitated through the use of drama. Dayton (2009) described how his students imagined the properties and needs of their audiences by constructing identities for these audiences and writing out scenarios. Creating scenarios is the main activity for much drama education curriculum. During the present study’s learning unit, we used the taking on of identities and inventing scenarios as preparation for interviewing members of the local community. Recall Tiger, Phoenix, and Ram performing a skit in which they pretended to be a park ranger and others associated with the park; their audience then asked them questions about their professions. The enduring audience of peers collectively “imagined” a park ranger during a question-and-answer session with a member of the group acting as a park ranger. Other community members that students pretended to be during this class session were an artist, a chef, and a baseball coach. Through drama games, students embody potential audience members and field questions from the enduring audience of peers. This conversation becomes inventive pre-composing fodder, available for each student composer to glean ideas for meeting distant audience needs from the collective understanding about what a prospective newcomer would know and want to know more about the local area of Drafnor. Edmiston’s work (2007, 2011) has described the potential for various literacy skills, such as critical thinking, to be exhibited by students in roleplaying. The present research introduces roleplay as an aid in determining audience needs, another compositional literacy skill. While in this case, Suzy, my teaching assistant, and I incorporated roleplay to prepare students for interviewing--an activity contributing to idea generation--we could easily have incorporated more roleplay throughout the process. We could have directed students in role to read what the group had written so far and describe what they were missing, or what questions they still had, 192 based on their perspective as that chef, for example. The bottom line is that drama is an age-old technique for imagining the actions of others; it can be deployed in various ways at various stages of composing to give the composer(s) an imagined partner in dialogue against whom the composer(s) may test ideas and make revisions. Drama games within an enduring audience of peer composers can make this imagining, testing, and revising work even more public and shared. Drama and Flexibility Flexibility is a value that honors what educational technology scholar Rupert Wegerif (2007) refers to as dispossession. Learners must be able to occupy spaces of dispossession—where they let go of the notion that their way is the only way, that there is one right way to use tools, that objects are only what they are. This value of flexibility operationalized in networking work contributes to exploiting, experimenting, and innovating with technologies. Based on my observation of participants in the computer lab during non-Webplay-time (See Chapter Five), much of the technology these students use in the school computer lab situates them in positions of passivity and/or receptivity (Perhaps, at home, their practices are much more active, as Gee (2004) and others describe, for example, gaming to be). However, passivity and/or receptivity are not highly sought after 21st century workplace skills. The key 21st century skills of creating, exploiting, and playing within technological constraints are instrumental to the further development of technologies, as demonstrated by hundreds of opensource and code-sharing online communities which distribute random, accidental or purposefully experimental innovations among interested users, and often eventually, to the public at large. 193 How, then, if students are accustomed to passively accepting the constraints of the technologies they use in schools, can educators promote the technological literacy skills of tinkering, exploiting and discovering? One way may be the use of dramatic games that encourage symbolic thinking. In “What is this,” a dramatic game we played during the unit, students pretend a common object, such as a stick or plastic disc, is something else and use pantomime and words to indicate to the group what they’re pretending the object to be (e.g., the plastic disc becomes a steering wheel). Whoever guesses what the object is “supposed to be” gets to go next. Students take great pride in thinking of creative symbolic representations and, in turn, successfully miming those representations. In performance, it’s this kind of symbolic thinking that transforms a piece of blue cloth into a river. In networked composing, it turns a colon and parentheses into an expression like the human smile and white font into invisible ink. It is doubtful that the Thinkquest crew included white font for the purpose of making “invisible ink.” However, this discovery generated an inventive energy throughout the room; it displayed creativity, a necessary aptitude for 21st century composing. The discovery was easily shared via the network and inspired peers to be mentors to each other in spreading it. The networked platform facilitated students’ displays of their creative flexibility to the enduring audience of peers. Just as the audience of peers could re-enact Tiger’s trip and fall on the playground through a performance for other peers, an enduring audience of peers could reenact through composing the invisible ink discovery. Not every classroom is necessarily going to have an “invisible ink” moment, but the use of drama games like “What is this?” can easily put the skill of flexibility on the “student stage” for the enduring audience of peers using just ten 194 minutes a day, creating a culture in which creative flexibility is expected, as is peer audience support and extension of such expressions of flexibility. Being locked into using technological tools as they are can lock people into using outmoded technologies (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). Proficiency in 21st century composing involves an ability to re-imagine and/or reconfigure objects and technologies. As 21st century audiences and the ways they interact with composers and compositions undergo radical changes in relatively short amounts of time, those working in networked platforms must possess an aptitude for flexibility; this aptitude can be fostered through drama. This analysis barely scratches the surface regarding the possible analyses to be conducted concerning the students’ experience with dramatic composing in this unit. The present study demonstrates how much crossover is possible between dramatic and networked composing priorities. Conclusion to Project In this study, when students were tasked to write for other audiences, they wrote for each other. Tasked to write individual posts, they helped each other. Tasked to care about what outsiders thought, they thought about insiders. Tasked to work in groups, they looked across groups to get ideas. Students composed within an enduring audience of their peers; each student was both composer and audience. While using networked technologies to compose, students drew on personal experiences; witnessed each other’s work; helped each other; engaged in whole-class conversations; and collectively interacted with distant audiences. These activities contributed to students’ successful crafting of compositions intended for a distant audience. Audience theory demonstrates ways for instructors to talk to students about their process, especially given the many decisions they need to make in networked writing about whom to 195 communicate with, and when, and how, and why. Hart-Davidson (2005) suggests that all writers share the goal of “optimizing the value of a document for its audience” (p.30). We do a disservice to student writers in not including value to an audience in writing assignments and assessments. Talking about audience when introducing writing tasks proscribes that students’ writing should be of value to someone(s). Leading progressive educational thinkers have called for students to write for real, networked audiences in inquiry-driven environments (Thomas & Brown, 2011). The present research contributes understanding about what students do and how they think about their work in relation to audience in networked composing acts, as well as some of the ways drama can contribute to facility in composing with and for 21st century audiences. 196 APPENDICES 197 APPENDIX A Glossary of Key Terms 1 Audience addressed: refers to actual or real-life people who read a composition (Ede & Lunsford, 1984). Audience interacting: This term captures the idea that the audience for written work is capable of writing and responding in tandem or communication with other writers throughout the writing process: at brainstorming, drafting, revising, etc. stages (Weiser, Fehler, & Gonzalez, 2009). Audience invoked: refers to audience called up or imagined by the writer (Ede & Lunsford, 1984). Communicating: crafting of text, images, sounds, video, and/or performance so as to initiate or respond to ideas within a back-and-forth exchange with another(s) Composing: crafting of text, images, sounds, video, and/or performance so as to make new meaning Networked composing: the creation of new meaning through use of networked technologies. Dramatic composing: the creation of new meaning through use of dramatic performance Composing act: a period of time marked by the talk and artifacts generated during the process of creating something new Enduring audience of peers: the condition common to most student environments in which peers witness, comment on, reproduce, re-enact, and discuss the actions of each other. When this condition is explicitly capitalized on for composing instruction, it indicates contexts of learning 1 When I adopt another’s terminology, I provide a citation and/or include original terminology in quotations; in cases where there is no citation, I have used my own words. 198 in which peers are routinely audience to fellow student composers’ work, whether as listeners, readers, reviewers, or variously all three. Interaction: the reciprocal influence of individuals upon one another’s actions when in another’s immediate physical presence (Goffman, 1959, p.15). Interest: a psychological state and a relatively enduring predisposition to attend to events and objects, as well as to reengage in activities” (Hidi and Boscolo, 2008, p.146). Networked technologies: technological devices, such as computers and phones that are interconnected via networks, wired and wireless, so that the devices can communicate with one another 199 APPENDIX B Interview Protocol Hi, let’s take a look at some of the work you’ve done so far. What is your full name? (Show student his/her artifacts, samples of online communication, or video of him/her working in a group in class.) [Q1] Tell me about this. [Q2] Choose something you think turned out really well or something you want to talk about. Tell me about this. [Q3] Can you remember what you did before doing this? [Q4] Is there anything you remember that helped you make this? [Q5] Is there anything you remember that made you want to make this/do this? [Q6] Where do you think your ideas came from to help you make this one? [Q7] How do you know you did a good job on this? [Q8] Who asked you to make it? Why did they ask you to make it? [Q9] Who do you think is going to read what you made here? Why do you think they are going to read it? [Q10] When you were making it, do you remember thinking about who asked you to make it? What did you think that person would say about it? [Q11] When you were making it, do you remember thinking about who was going to read it/watch it? What did you think that person would say about it? [Q12] Do you want to say anything else about what you made? (Show student another artifact). You made this after you did this. Did making this one first help you make this one? Why? (Repeat Questions 1-12). (Show student another artifact). 200 (Repeat Questions 1-12). [Q13] What do you think about using drama and writing together? Like pretending to be an animal to get ideas about what you might write about that animal… [Q14] What parts of Webplay do you like? [Q15] What parts of Webplay would you change? [Q16] Do you think you’d like to do this during the school day? Why or why not? [Q17] What comes to your mind when I say “creative”? Do you think it’s important for school and learning to be creative? [Q18] What do you feel about the differences between writing online and writing on paper? 201 APPENDIX C From Theory to Data: A Snapshot of Researcher Process Audience interacting theory captures the idea that the audience for written work is capable of writing and responding in tandem or communication with other writers throughout the writing process: at brainstorming, drafting, revising, etc. stages (Weiser, Fehler, & Gonzalez, 2009). Audience interacting posits an audience for composing work who communicates with the composer. There are many types of communication. One that I noted in reading the transcripts was a desire for immediate, back-and-forth communication, or, what we would consider in offline settings, conversation. The potential for fluid, cross-purpose composing has been described as de riguer for the networked platform of a wiki. Michael Morgan, in his (2008) essay on wiki work, describes two types of actions that occur within a wiki space: ThreadMode is a dialogue, a discussion, a dialectic. It is open, collective, dynamic, and informal. It can develop as a page or develop on a page, but it develops organically, without predictive structure. ThreadMode is not a soapbox so much as a sandbox (p.161). DocumentMode is expository, discursive, more monologic—but no less open—than thread mode. DocumentMode pages and sections of pages become the collective understanding of the wiki (p.162). In a networked platform, student “conversation” may take place in the same mode as the composition--typed text. Previous literature on students aged 8-11 and their networked composing has studied communication as it occurs independently, in a different time and space from composing work. One example is W. Morgan & Beaumont’s 2003 study of student chat rooms—whose main rhetorical function is communication—and its effects on students’ 202 persuasive writing as it occurs in other places (word processing programs), at other times. Keeping in mind audience interacting theory and demonstrated behaviors common to networked platforms such as wikis, I needed a way to look at how students sought to dialogue or communicate with each other in typed conversation during their composing process, as they created posts for a networked platform. To “see” in my data where and how the dialogues and discussions were happening as opposed to contributions that were expository and monologic (Morgan, 2009), I adopted a “Communication” code. This communication code was applied to posts or parts of posts that developed without predictive structure (i.e., not in accordance with the stated prompt for composing); and that sought to engage others in an immediate, back-and-forth dialogue. All incidences of the application of this code are provided below. The relevant part of the post is underlined and the letters “CM” are applied after it. Table 7 Communication Code Applied to Week One Thinkquest Contributions Post # Student Text of Student Contribution Post 1 Camel Hi I’m Camel I like soccer. Post 2 Camel Boing Boing Boing Post 1 Crocodile hi my name is crocodile i go to moris Post 1 Manatee hi my name is manatee i go to morris school. I like to stay here because the park and it is fun!!! Post 2 Crocodile i like fish do you CM Post 1 Male NP Hi i’m male NP. 203 Table 7 (cont’d) I go to ,and what I like best about where I live is that I have some neighbors that aren’t like a mile away and friends that live right next door to me. Post 1 Pony Hey! Post 1 Female NP Hi my name is Female NP. I go to morris school.I like to live here because i like to have fun. I like gymnastics. Post 1 Phoenix hi my name is phoenix. I go to and i am entering 6th grade. I like living in Drafnor because of the sports programs. Post 3 Crocodile i also like to hunt to Post 2 Male NP Yes Crocodile I do like fish. CM Post 1 Ladybug Hi my name is Ladybug. I go to Morris School! What I like about about Drafnor is how many cool things they have that everyone can go to like Conheads, Desserts-r-us,and all the parks we have! I like to play Volleyball and do Tap dancing! Post 2 Manatee heyy what are you guys doing today. CM I like 204 Table 7 (cont’d) justin bieber.my fav song is eenie meenie1!!!! Post 2 Phoenix fish is good CM Post 2 Female NP Hey I like dogs do you? CM Post 4 Crocodile ow I fish at my geradpus hous Post 2 Pony hi my name is Pony I like to horse back ride,ski. Post 5 Crocodile Camel how are you CM Post 3 Manatee I like were I live because I can walk up town and go 2 coneheads and lesters and heyyyyy female np wht r u doing right now CM Post 3 Male NP Yeah hunting is cool. Post 2 Ladybug yes, female NP I love dogs! CM Post 4 Male NP Hey Camel I like soccer too, and play in an organized league. CM Post 4 Crocodile hi giuys wen we git bake to theroom dowont to play CM Post 3 Female NP im righting to you. CM Post 3 Camel Hi I'm Camel a hobby of mine is fishing. I have been fishing since I was four thats great because I live by the looking glass river. when I was four I broke my head while fising. Post 4 Manatee hi um what i also like about Drafnor is that there r funnnnn places to go to!!!! 205 Table 7 (cont’d) Post 3 Pony i like to ride bikes,gymnastics and cmt.com Post 1 Gecko My name is Gecko. I go to Morris. I like where I live because the neiborhood is friendly. I love horses and horseback riding. I'm also a great artist. ;) Audience theory prepared me to look for ways in which students interacted with each other during networked composing. Previous literature showed me some actions common to networked composing and contributed to formation of codes. Through application of the communication code, I was able to see how and when students interacted with each other via back-and-forth communication. This information, in combination with the results from the application of all other codes, allowed me to articulate the various roles students played as networked composers. 206 APPENDIX D Webplay Curriculum The following demonstrates the differences between the Webplay Local intended curriculum and the curriculum as I delivered it. The Webplay team encourages adaptation and flexibility within this plan, given contextual conditions. Because they were already created for and populated our Thinkquest space, the Thinkquest prompts referred to throughout this manuscript retain the name used in the intended curriculum, e.g. “Week One,” although we actually used them in a different week. Webplay Local Intended Curriculum Overall Plan: Webplay Local is taught during two lessons of around one hour per week. Lesson One each week focuses on speaking and listening skills and is taught in the classroom. Lesson Two each week focuses on written skills and should be taught in the ICT suite, or similar. Pupils work in groups throughout the project. Week One: Pupils learn the SMART rules for staying safe online. They explore the communication platform ‘Thinkquest’ and add their own content to a class webpage. The class go on a local area walk, either virtually or for real, and begin to discuss the area in which they live. Week Two: Through the first Jet Set and Go video, pupils are introduced to the overall task of the project, the character of Sinclair St. John, their teacher as Agent Z and their own roles as Agents. Through a real-time online link-up, pupils are introduced to their partner class and use an online interactive map to explore where their local area is within the UK. 207 Week Three: In role as Agents, pupils will find out what there is to do in their local area and where they can do it. Using a questionnaire, pupils collect information from their group about what activities are most popular and present their findings in a pictogram. Week Four: In role as Agents, pupils will find out who the important people are in their local community. Pupils conduct interviews with school staff and/or local people doing important jobs in the community. Pupils consider themselves and their families as part of the local community, and create content on the class webpage that communicates information about themselves to their partner class. Week Five: Pupils study postcards to explore how images can portray what is special about an area, and create their own postcard about their local area. As a class they create a virtual postcard that is sent to Sinclair St. John in preparation for the secret meeting. They meet with their partner class and Jet Set and Go special Agents, and together they participate in a show and in-role drama workshop focusing on what makes their area special. Week Six: In their groups, pupils agree on an image that represents one of the key questions they’ve been working on, and create a representation of that image using any form of visual art. They create text that describes their image and use a mathematical code to send it to their partner class online. Week Seven: Pupils received their partners’ images and decode the text. Pupils compare and contrast the images and text with their own and, using software of your choice, they create electronic guidebooks that reflect what they have learned. Week Eight: Pupils view the finished guidebooks online and complete a review of their partner group’s work. Pupils evaluate their own work and learning through a variety of online 208 and offline activities. A DIY pack for an in-class celebration can be found on the Webplay CD accompanying this plan, enabling you to hold an event to mark the achievement of your class. Webplay Local Delivered Curriculum Overall Plan: Webplay was taught over three lessons of around 1 hour per week for 7 weeks. Lesson One each week focused on speaking and listening skills and was taught in the gymnasium/cafeteria. Lesson Two each week focused on written skills and was taught in the computer lab, or similar. Lesson Three each week focused on either speaking and listening skills or writing skills. Pupils worked in groups throughout the project. Week One: Through the first Jet Set and Go video and drama games, pupils were introduced to the overall task of the project, the character of Sinclair St. John, their teacher as Agent Z and their own roles as Agents. Pupils used an online interactive map to explore where their local area was within the US. The class went on a local area walk with cameras and began to discuss the area in which they live. Week Two: Pupils learned the SMART rules for staying safe online. They explored the communication platform ‘Thinkquest’ and added their own content to a class webpage. Student did not participate in a real-time online link-up; they shared the same Thinkquest class webpages with their partner class. Week Three: In role as Agents, pupils found what there is to do in their local area and where they can do it. Using a questionnaire, pupils collected information from their group about what activities are most popular and presented their findings in a pictogram. They contributed photos and descriptive text to a class webpage. 209 Week Four: In role as Agents, pupils found out who the important people are in their local community. Pupils prepared for interviews with drama games and conducted interviews with local people doing important jobs in the community. Pupils considered themselves and their families as part of the local community, and created content on the class webpage that communicated information about themselves to their partner class. Week Five: As a class, pupils created a virtual postcard that was sent to Sinclair St. John in preparation for the secret meeting. They met with their partner class at the school a few blocks away, and Jet Set and Go special Agents, and together they participated in a show and in-role drama workshop focusing on what makes their area special. Week Six: As a group, pupils and teachers agreed on the “chapters” and audience for the guidebook. Students chose from among photos they had taken and created text on the Thinkquest class webpage that described those photos. Each class read what their partner class had contributed to the shared webpage. 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