Sunday Coffee with @hickstro and @digitalbonnie (Well, Not Really...but Sort Of). Loving Their New Book.

Hicks, T. (2015). Assessing Students' Digital Writing; Protocols for Looking Closely. New York: Teachers College Press and National Writing Project.

I was excited to be called to the office with news that "a book" was placed on my desk after accidentally being delivered to a colleague. Although my research trajectory went the course of writing with relocated, refugee youth, my early interests began with new literacies and Teaching the New Writing (Herrington & Moran, 2009). In 2007, my students and I began writing about the multimedia presentations they were doing as partial requirement for senior research papers and culminating projects. Written my last year in the classroom, I concluded that my personal pedagogy quickly altered when the infusion of digital stories, photo-essays, Powerpoints, and cyber-portfolios entered my English classroom. In addition to literary tools, my teaching shifted to the mentorship (and digital citizenry) of technology. Of course, such technology has changed even more - this was pre-smart phones, the beginning of YouTube and Google, and without all the incredible resources available to teachers today. (Truth: most of the technological work that occurred at that time resulted because I handed my personal laptop around the room and shared with my students).



That is why I am thankful for Troy Hicks and the teacher research he presents with fellow educators in Assessing Students' Digital Writing. This follow-up text to The Digital Writing Workshop (2009) and Crafting Digital Writing: Composing Texts Across Media and Genres (2013), arrived to my office at the perfect time. I've used Hicks' work intellectually to guide yearlong professional development through a 2013-2014 High Need Supporting Effective Educator Development grant and throughout the 2014 Invitational Summer Institute at the Connecticut Writing Project. His influence on digital writing, too, was instrumental to receiving a 2015 LRNG Innovation Challenge grant with six high schools in our state. In all incidences, teachers (and their students) created a plethora of digital work and we have only just begun to analyze and think through all the products we've received. Assessing Students' Digital Writing, then, is timely. Once upon a time Looking Together at Student Work (Blythe, Allen, & Powell, 2007) was the heart and soul of the work my colleagues and I did in Kentucky, so I was thrilled to see a new text that introduces an aim of focusing on digital texts.

In agreement with Richard Beach's forward, I feel that teachers need assistance with how to give feedback on digital writing and ways to look closely at how "audience, purpose, and situation-constituting contexts mediated by uses of digital tools to motive their student writing" (ix) are created. The case studies of six teachers provided in Hick's book models innovative classroom teachers and their analysis of digital products created under their instruction. In both Christina Cantrill's prologue and Troy Hicks introduction, a notion of how to "look closely" (p. 1) at 'new writing' is emphasized. I agree with them both that digital writers compose in an ecosystem that transcends traditional boundaries of classroom practices (shoot, maybe this is why I've been drawn to blogs all these years). As Hicks notes, 

In the age where digital is, we can no longer afford to look at student work in the ways we have in the past. In the compositions our students create with tools ranging from word processors to video editing suites, in genres ranging from traditional essays to podcasts, posters, and short flims, "the skills and capacities essential to new digital literacies can be directly at odds with norms and expectations that undergird most assessment programs (NWP, DeVoss, Eidman-Aadahl, & Hicks, 2010, p. 92). (p. 2)

I'm excited about the contribution being made by Troy Hicks and the others, because I now have a tool, a text, that I can use with my own teacher researchers when evaluating written products born from their instruction. Actually, I'm really excited about using this book with the six teachers who participated in the LRNG work at CWP-Fairfield and can't wait to look at the TedTalks, Blogs, Ethnographic maps, and Radio Plays composed by hundreds of students and showcased at the Writing Our Lives-Digital Ubuntu conference at Fairfield University. With them, I want to ask,

What do you see/notice?What is working in this piece/composition?What does it make you wonder/what questions does it raise?

Yet, I am also curious how the teachers I've worked with would respond to our additional questions,

How do digital outcomes answer our essential question, "Why are you here?" How do the digital compositions represent a sense of community in Connecticut?

I've learned from Hicks that it will be at least 18 months of work (insert smiling emoji here and exhaustion). I recognize, too, like Hicks and his team, that looking at student work can be incredible professional development for teachers, especially in regard to the writing processes students employ.

I appreciated that Assessing Students' Digital Writing recognizes that these are political times in education. Still, they professionally collaborated to share what they learned about teaching and student writing. No, it was not yearly assessments and a microscope to claim what intelligent educators can do in their classroom. Rather, it was the commitment and dedication of experts willing to explore student work in their own rooms, both formatively and summatively.

While reading this collection of work I couldn't help but see it as an extension of Kristina Rizga's Mission High: One School, How Experts Tried To Fail It, and The Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph. 

Teacher research, although not a "gold standard" (5) should matter to the everyday routines of schools. As Hicks remarks, "In an era of intense teacher evaluation, it is admirable that teacher researchers are still willing to put themselves under the microscope" (6). 

With apologies to the other stellar writers in the collection, I was first drawn to Chapter 4, written by Bonnie Kaplan and Jack Zangerle, and Chapter 6, written by Stephanie West-Pucket (mostly because of my secondary school and college English responsibilities). I do know, though, that the chapters depicting digital work of younger students will benefit me and the professional work I do in K-5 schools (to be highlighted at another time). 

In Kaplan and Zangerle's chapter, they describe the digital composition of Katie to conclude, "The focus on high-stakes testing at Dover Schools and most schools around the country doesn't seem to hold a sense of urgency with many students like Katie, who are more interested in using technology to create and to learn in the world" (79). Similarly, West-Pucket depicts the digital composing of Zeke and a This I Believe essay to write, "One of the most difficult challenges of teaching 1st-year writing at the university level is moving students from a set of tightly held, prescriptive beliefs about what constitutes good writing into a space where they can broadly consider the unique rhetorical situation of every composition" (99). Our students will benefit from broadening the assessments of what composing is in 21st century classrooms through interrogations like that provided in Assessing Students' Digital Writing. I also appreciated West-Pucket's discussion of Connected Learning theory (Connected Learning Research Network, 2013), a template I also used in designing grant work in Connecticut. Our work aims to be production centered, peer-cultured, openly networked, academic, student interest-focused, and with shared purposes. 

In summary, then, this is a thumbs-up for the book that landed on my office desk. How we define writing needs to be expanded and the processes we promote in our classrooms need broader definitions and understanding. In the words of Hicks, 

We can no longer hide behind our own classroom doors and grading policies. Students are writing for a global audience, and whether we support them in that process, making it transparent and engaging in our writing classrooms, is up to us. The world judges our students on their writing, and we must take the old adage of "teaching the process" much more seriously, especially with the use of digital writing tools. (p. 123)

Hicks concludes with three recommendations (that I won't share here) and leaves readers with a practitioner-friendly, useful book that I imagine will be of high interest to other teachers.

My critique? Well, I read the collection with zest and enthusiasm. I have to tame my excitement, however, when I consider the realities I see in American schools (especially urban schools). For example, I witnessed a year's worth of professional development on digital writing derailed when the school's computer labs were declared 'off-limits' to creative projects (like those that are highlighted by Hicks and his colleagues). The technology was to be used only for state tests. Seriously. Teachers weren't allowed in the computer labs because the machines "weren't to be tampered with." They housed all the new testing software!

Similarly, I am cautious about getting too gung-ho with my technological enthusiasm because I recognize that digital divides are ubiquitous. The refugee students I work with need to first learn and write in Any language (as their schooling was disrupted and limited before they arrived). Their first experiences with indoor plumbing and electricity were when they arrived - The Hunger Games? There are more pressing tools needed by them than I-Movie, Wordpress, and Garage Band. It is the hope that they one day might gravitate to Western digital luxuries, but they have more pressing priorities in their education.

Still, I'm an optimist and am thrilled to have Assessing Students' Digital Writing in my library. It is a hit!

Blythe, T., Allen, D., & Powell, B. S. (2007). Looking Together at Student Work (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.

Devoss, D. N., Eidmann-Aadahl, E., Hicks, T., & Project, N. W. (2010). Because Digital Writing Matters: Improving Student Writing in Online and Multimedia Environments. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass.

Herrington, A., & Moran, C. (2009) Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press and National Writing Project.

Hicks, T. (2009). The Digitial Writing Workshop. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinneman.

Hicks, T. (2013). Crafting Digital Writing: Composing Texts Across Media and Genres. New Hampshire: Heinemann.