Chapter 8: NEGOTIATING THE PRIVILEGE OF PRINT WITH THE AFFORDANCES OF DIGITAL VIDEO AUTHORING

As English teachers, we want our students to write well. We relish diaries, journals, responses, reflections, revisions, and freewrites. Our students have heard us say that writing is a process through which we actually discover what we want to say. With our pedagogical knowledge, we direct students through brainstorming, drafting, responding, revising, and publishing. Simultaneously, we struggle through our students’ resistance to process, their difficulty in finding any audience beyond the teacher, and the overwhelming power of our school literacy practices that reduce the rhetorical purpose of writing as a measure of psycho-linguistic capability and correct information, instead of the exploration and debate of life relevant ideas. The five paragraph essay and writing-on-demand have exorcised the creative exploration and critical examination of ideas from print, and reduced the dialog between writer and reader to matching formulaic structures of a rubric to specific linguistic expressions for the primary purpose of a grade or test score.