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You
are here: Lessons on Teaching Writing from Website Design
Over the past decade, the Internet rapidly has become a staple in students' in- and out-of-school lives. As stated in a 2001 census report, approximately one-third of all young people in the U.S. between the ages of 3 and 17 use the Internet at home. Also, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, (2002) 98% of all students have Internet access in their schools, 92% in their individual classrooms. While there is, of course, wide variation in what use and access look like, these numbers indicate that now, more than ever, our students need to be able to engage in Internet-based forms of reading and writing. Whereas many U.S. schools are adopting increasingly narrow versions of what counts as literacy, teachers and their students are faced with an ever-widening array of textual possibilities
In this essay, I examine five lessons that I have learned from both my research and teaching of website design with 7th graders. Through these experiences, I have found many of the values we promote as literacy educators to be problematic (e.g. the primacy of print over other forms of representation, a universal "proper" grammar, etc.) To illustrate these lessons, I draw examples from a course on web design that I taught in a university-sponsored after school program for middle school students from historically underrepresented backgrounds called the Metropolis PEOPLE Program. Many of the students qualified for free and reduced price lunches. Most of the students were English language learners or spoke a dialect of English. 10 students regularly attended the course-- 6 boys, 3 girls; 3 Southeast Asian, 5 African American, and 2 Latino; 6 spoke English as a second language. None of the students had used web-authoring technologies previously, but they all had experience with related technologies, such as surfing the Internet, e-mail, scanning images, and so forth. The course met weekly for 90 minutes for 12 weeks, equivalent to a 3 week unit in a regular classroom.
The curriculum, which introduced students to theories and methods of web design, was divided into three phases. During the first phase, students learned the basics of web design. This included technical skills such as how to use the web authoring program (Microsoft FrontPage) as well as how to scan, capture, and manipulate images. This phase also included critical literacy activities around web-based genres. For example, we looked at how different kinds of websites, such as informational and entertainment sites, used text and images to build particular world views.
During the second phase of the curriculum, we engaged in a shared construction of a website that was based on an earlier project where students researched and wrote biographies about important people of color in our community. As a group, the students had to figure out how to take a print-based collection of biographies and organize it into a website format. Through this phase, students learned, in a highly supported way, how to plan and build a complex website.
During the final phase of the curriculum, students planned and constructed their own websites independently. For this piece of the course, each student selected a topic, conducted research, developed a plan, and constructed an informational website, which was published on the Internet for a year. It is drawing from these individual websites that I illustrate the following lessons on teaching writing.
Lesson 1: Literacy educators can use web design to highlight the relationship between processes and products of writing, as well as to underscore the importance of revision. Indeed, planning is necessary to create complex websites. One of the biggest struggles I faced as a language arts teacher was helping my students realize that planning could improve their writing. Students were often satisfied to write down whatever came to mind without carefully considering how to do so. For complex websites, such as those created in this workshop, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to create a coherent, effective website without careful planning. As illustrated in Figure 1, students used their plans to structure their sites, identify links, figure out possible text, arrange visual elements and text, develop a coherent style for the site, etc.
In addition to stressing the importance of planning, this medium foregrounds the role of revision in writing. When creating a website, it can be published immediately and changed at anytime. This is very different from other types of texts where the final product is final and changes require substantial investments of time, materials, and money. Revision is a key aspect of web-based writing, where authors constantly must adapt to ongoing audience feedback, new content, and changing technologies.
Figure 1: Okada Ibe's website plan
Lesson 2: We need to attend to the "multimodal" aspects of writing. Historically, literacy education has focused on print-based forms of communication. However, this disregards that all texts are in fact multimodal—that is, they are meaningful in a number of ways beyond print (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001.) Websites draw on multiple forms of representation including print-based language, images, sound, layout, color, movement, etc.
The concept of multimodality is illustrated by the website in Figure 2, which was created by Okada Ibe. Playing video games was one of his favorite pastimes. As he told me, he wanted to make a site to help people find good gaming sites and give players a sense of each site's content. In making the site, he conducted research online, found sites that he had used as well as new sites, and wrote brief reviews of each site.
In creating this site, Okada used text size, color, layout, and images to, among other things, to guide users through the structure of his site. For instance, on his homepage, his title is in the largest font and blue, each of two subjects of his content pages are in a smaller size and red, and links to his content pages are in the smallest font and blue. The two content pages are further separated, but made parallel in importance, by boxes and images from each type of game. By combining multimodal resources of print-based text, images, font, and color in this way, Okada created a homepage that carefully guides his users through his site. Because of this organization, one can easily ascertain what the site is about, what two types of games it addresses, and how to get to the two content pages.
Figure 2. Okada's homepage
Lesson 3: We need to help our students develop a flexible understanding of grammar. In literacy education, we tend to focus on grammar as either "fixed sets of rules" or as "byproducts of reading and writing." Websites illustrate just how flexible grammar can be as well as how it changes as we move across social contexts. Rather than rotely memorizing rules or picking up grammar from extensive practice, young people need to learn how to craft their language to fit the grammatical expectations of particular contexts (Juzwik & Stone, 2001.)
This lesson is illustrated well by Okada's content page about "Java & Shockwave Sites" (Figure 3). For the website description of "Shockwave Games," he wrote "Shockwave game central. Best shockwave site I know." Short phrases and clauses like this are typical of the grammatical structures used on similar sites. By writing in this way, he situated himself as an insider member of the gaming community (and online communities more broadly.) Were he to write each of his descriptions in highly formal, complete sentences, as is often valued in school, he potentially would be perceived as an outsider, in the same way that the grammatical structures used on this page would be inappropriate for a letter to the principal. The social consequences of grammar, aside from occasional warnings to use proper English, are rarely, if ever, addressed in the context of literacy education.
Figure 3. Okada's "Java and Shockwave Sites" page
Lesson 4: Literacy teachers and students need to examine the relationship between the texts students write and other texts/contexts. In literacy education, we often treat reading and writing as acts that occur with individual texts. For example, especially in younger grades, we often ask students to read a book or write an essay, without looking at how these books and essays relate to other books, essays, other texts, or other situations in the world. This ignores the important ways in which texts connect to other texts and how they potentially bring contexts into conversation. Because of the hypertextual nature of the web, such relationships are increasingly apparent (i.e. how often do you start looking at one website and end up at a completely different website?) They also call into question the "single text" approach we like to take in literacy education.
One important kind of text to text connection made in websites is the hyperlink. While hyperlinks seem simple enough, they encode a wide range of textual relationships that readers need to be able to recognize and writers need to be able to mobilize (Burbules, 1997.) For example, In Okada's website he used two types of links—those leading to examples and evaluations of genres of game sites and those leading to the actual sites. Reading and writing such connections between texts is crucial for today's youth.
In addition to connections between texts, websites, because of their globally distributed audiences, often build connections between contexts This is, of course, true of print-based texts, as well-- web technology just makes such connections more transparent. In my work in the PEOPLE Program, I was particularly interested in how students brought their out-of-school lives into conversation with academic contexts in their writing. For example, in his website, Okada brought his experience in the gaming community into the academic context of an after school program. Another student, Mai who was a recent refugee from Laos, created contextual relationships in her website, as well (see Figure 4.) Not only did she bring her membership in Hmong culture into an academic context, but she also related two different contexts in her page on the Hmong New Year. In this page she contrasted the New Year celebration in Laos and the U.S. She cited several differences, including the time of year and length of the celebration, as well as similarities in the purposes and events of these celebrations.
Figure 4. Mai's Hmong New Year page
Lesson 5: We need to provide students with avenues for engaging in original research and writing across multiple media and genres. In many ways, web design is not extremely different from more print-based forms of writing. As illustrated by both Okada's and Mai's websites, online composition often overlaps with genres valued in school, such as persuasive or informational genres. As with print-based research, writers need to deal with multiple resources and evaluate the "trustworthiness" of these resources.
As I found in this project, students who may not perform well in primarily print-based forms of writing often can engage successfully in similar academic forms of writing on line. For example, Mai did not perform well on informational writing at school. She often received low grades and avoided writing informational texts whenever possible, choosing instead to write in safer and more comfortable genres to her such as personal narratives and fictional stories. In this workshop, Mai chose to make a site about Hmong culture because she wanted to make a site to, as she stated, answer all of the stupid questions people always asked her about being Hmong. In researching her site, Mai talked to her parents and grandparents, found books, and drew on online resources She was surprised to find other websites about Hmong culture by Hmong people. As this example illustrates, when provided with a different medium and a setting that values their cultural and other out-of-school resources, students can demonstrate that they are quite capable of writing academic texts.
This workshop was different than most contemporary classrooms in many ways (class size, student enrollment based on interest, etc.). However, with support, such as collaboration with technology specialists, volunteers, access to technology, etc., I have no doubt that such writing instruction can be adapted to classroom contexts. The lessons learned from this workshop apply not only to web design, but to writing instruction as a whole. These examples and lessons can help us to both problematize and support many of the writing practices we teach our students.
References
Burbules, N.C. (1997). Rhetorics of the Web: Hyperreading and Critical Literacy. In I. Snyder (Ed.) Page to Screen: Taking Literacy Into the Electronic Era. New South Wales: Allen and Unwin.
Juzwik, M.M. & Stone, J.C. (2001, November). M. Nystrand (Chair) Rethinking sentence-level pedagogy: From teaching grammar to teaching the consequences and uses of style. Symposium conducted at the meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, Baltimore, MD.
Kleiner, A. & Lewis, L. (2003). Internet access in U.S. public schools and classrooms: 1994-2002. National Center for Education Statistics.
Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Arnold.
U.S. Census Bureau. (2001). Home computers and Internet use in the United States: August 2000. U.S. Department of Commerce.
Jennifer C. Stone is an Assistant Professor of Language, Literacy, & Culture at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching focus on the intersection between literacy, technology, and social justice.
Contact information:
University of Washington
115 Miller Hall, Box 353600
Seattle, WA 98195-3600
jcstone@u.washington.edu
http://faculty.washington.edu/jcstone
©March 2005 New Horizons for Learning
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