Report from the National Council of Teachers of English with a call to action to teach writing appropriately for the 21st century. Writing now often happens outside school in social spaces where people learn informally through their peers. Includes an overview of how writing has been viewed historically and how that has affected how we teach writing.

"Writing has never been accorded the cultural respect or the support that reading has enjoyed, in part because through reading, society could control its citizens, whereas through writing, citizens might exercise their own control."

"Writing has historically and inextricably been linked to testing."

"In much of this new composing, we are writing to share, yes; to encourage dialogue, perhaps; but mostly, I think, to participate."

"First, we have moved beyond a pyramid-like, sequential model of literacy development in which print literacy comes first and digital literacy comes second and networked literacy practices, if they come at all, come third and last."

The author calls this a new learning theory combining behaviorism & cognitivism. I see a new instructional design model that combines elements from a number of different sources, but I'm not sure I see a new learning theory. The model seems very complex; how long would you have to work with this before you internalized all the separate parts of the model?

Student results were better using this model. However, the control group was tested before doing a roleplaying game and the experimental groups did the game prior to testing. This could just show that roleplaying helps students understand characters in the Aeneid. Free registration required.