Linguistics and Education - Florida State University · The processes by which writing and other...

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Linguistics and Education 29 (2015) 15–31

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Linguistics and Education

j ourna l h omepa ge: www.elsev ier .com/ locate / l inged

istening to 21st century literacies: Prehistory of writing inn academic discipline

eorge L. Boggs ∗

lorida State University, School of Teacher Education, 1114 W. Call St., Tallahassee, FL 32304, United States

r t i c l e i n f o

rticle history:vailable online 19 November 2014

eywords:ollaborative writingisciplinary literacylassroom talkrgumentthnography of communication

a b s t r a c t

Prehistories of collaborative composition are vital to 21st century literacies research andinstruction. The processes by which writing and other 21st century literacies become nec-essary to students continues to be neglected, however, so that while 21st century literaciesare easily observed outside school, the significance and feasibility of 21st century litera-cies as formal educational goals remain unproven. By examining communicative choicesin a problem-oriented curriculum in a university-based human geography class, this studychronicles the prehistory of writing to relate participants’ argument-based interactionswith their composition choices. Analysis of interactional patterns in transcripts, observa-tional notes, and written products reveals an important link between 21st century literaciesand student talk: Students used disciplinary concepts to give shape to ill-defined prob-lems, which led to tasks requiring many elements of 21st century literacies; the use of 21stcentury literacies to solve problems, in turn, mediated qualitative changes in subsequentproblem posing, tasks, and use of 21st century literacies.

© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Young people’s written composition is increasingly visible, both through out-of-school engagement in 21st centuryiteracy practices (National Council of Teachers of English, 2013) and through changes in the ways researchers concep-ualize writing (Kinloch, 2009; Romero & Walker, 2010). Reconceptualizing literacies in adolescents’ lives in a way thatan benefit schools involves expansion of what writing research sees and hears, from successful performance on assign-ents (Alvermann, Hinchmann, Moore, Phelps, & Waff, 2008; Boggs & Alvermann, 2012) to unfolding participation in an

ncreasingly written world (Yancey, 2011). The expansion denotes a quantitative increase in writing outlets and genres toe considered, but attention to qualitative changes requires examination of how people are living and working in relationo literacy—specifically how people are using what is available, how their use is changing what they do, and how changingool-mediated action is changing their world. Mobile phone messaging exemplifies how social tasks may be transformedhen multiple literacies and literacy practices are incorporated, and the social tasks into which literacy is incorporated are

hanging everywhere. An important question has been how to conceptualize writing research around literacies that arenfolding in terms of their effect on work and thinking.

This research builds upon the neo-Vygotskian tradition of contextualized, intentional literacy instruction in tradi-ional and nontraditional school environments that has helped conceptualize and support school-based literacy education

∗ Tel.: +1 6788978518.E-mail address: [email protected]

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2014.10.001898-5898/© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2014.10.001

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mailto:[email protected]

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16 G.L. Boggs / Linguistics and Education 29 (2015) 15–31

• Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology;

• Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought;

• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes;

• Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information;

• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts;

• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments.

Fig. 1. 21st century literacies are “cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups,” which include the practices listed.

(Wertsch, 1991). It develops the tradition by examining the prehistory of writing, interpersonal exchanges and developmentof shared purposes through which literacy practices became necessary complements to other social tasks. By showing howthese interactions elicit desirable literacy practices, the study described here considers whether a vibrant conception ofprewriting might validate and protect endangered elements of 21st century literacies.

Three years after the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE, 2008, revised 2013) released a “Position Statementon 21st Century Literacies” (see Fig. 1), a major study of the state of writing in US secondary schools found quantitativeincreases across content areas, but not in terms of “the varied tasks that make up the larger domain of writing” (Applebee& Langer, 2011, p. 24).

Their conclusion was that teachers, not students, are more likely to be doing “all the composing” as they design well-defined tasks for students, who largely “fill in missing information” (p. 25), even when composing in response to lengthywriting assignments. Such findings jeopardize the future of 21st century literacies as a way of thinking about literacy devel-opment, for the practices that make up 21st century literacies prize student agency and ill-defined problems (NCTE, 2013),notably in their definition of literacies as developing cultural practices among members of particular groups and in theirassertion of the importance of posing problems and designing information for a variety of purposes and particular audiences.There is real risk that forces in schools restricting the range of social purposes writing serves will desiccate 21st centuryliteracies as they are incorporated into literacy development (cf. Au, 2011).

Prewriting and prehistory of writing

Beginning in the early 1970s “prewriting” gained status in writing instruction as an important phase in an idealizedprocess of writing, though it did not translate well into the school context. Trying to infuse the norms of “real writing”into schools with its uncertainty, searching, and discovery, Murray (1972) said, “Prewriting is everything that takes placebefore the first draft. . .. About 85% of the writer’s time” (p. 12). Unfortunately, structural elements of schooling such asthe division of the school day into discrete subject areas and blocks of 45–90 min in length make Murray’s proportionsimpossible. Revision, demanding far less of the writers time by comparison, according to Murray, has suffered a similar fate(Witte, 2013). Numerous factors in school settings lead to foreclosure on the space in which students choose whether, how,what, and to whom to write, but perhaps most importantly is the foreclosure itself: In the “snapshot of writing instruction”(Applebee & Langer, 2011) teachers and tests are unwittingly doing the prewriting for students. Numerous factors in schoolsfavor carefully staged assigned writing projects, but foreclosure of the preparatory (and recursive) phase of the writingprocess may make it very difficult or impossible for schools to become partners in the project of fostering 21st centuryliteracies among all students. Prehistory may help with prewriting.

There is a long history of inadvertently or intentionally ignoring important learning taking place in preparatory phases ofsome focal event, before participants appear to have done or produced anything. The history consists of calling attention tothese important developmental phases and the learning that takes place in them. Vygotsky (1987) believed the most inter-esting parts of psychological experiments on children often occurred as experimenters taught children how to participate.Aristotle (350/1981) argued that political entities would safeguard their form of government by having educational systemsmimic it. Hillocks (1986), Applebee and Langer (2011), Au (2011), and many others have argued, from a variety of angles, thathigh-stakes testing engenders a hidden preliminary phase that displaces good teaching. The concept prehistory assumesthat any record, whether of student writing or stone tools, presupposes crucial formative factors recorded in modes otherthan writing. That is, just as understanding the use of tools before the era of recorded history requires examining samplesof ice, soil, wood, and stone, so understanding students’ composition requires sampling precursors to the written record oftheir writing, such as problem-oriented social interactions, moving backward in time.

Prehistory begins with instances of some phenomenon, in this case 21st century literacies and writing (see Fig. 2, forexample; full text in Fig. 4), and works backward to the point in the past where no further salient linkages may be plausiblyasserted. Along the way somewhere should be evidence that the range of possibilities for writing was examined and reduced,and mental and inter-mental (Wertsch, 1991) drafts were produced. Contemporary writers, with the advent of the Internet

G.L. Boggs / Linguistics and Education 29 (2015) 15–31 17

Repurposing Public Space to Meet Local Food NeedsOn June 2, 2007, a small, dedicated group of people met at the first Amesville Food Activist Networking Session (FANS). There had been whispers of a farmers market in years prior, but through sharing ideas, a concrete plan was developed that resulted in almost 3,000 people showing up for the grand opening of the Amesville Farmers Market on May 17, 2008. That AFANS meeting demonstrated the power of our community to transform our public spaces for creative, non-traditional uses, like community gardens and farmers markets. Momentum has only built since then, with many individuals and organizations having similar successes. But the possibilities and the need for improved community food systems and equitable access to fresh, healthy food remain.

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Fig. 2. Excerpt of collaborative article from Flagpole newspaper.

nd Web 2.0 technologies, have thousands of publication platforms, billions of potential readers accessible without charge,nd countless representational choices before them.

rompting or preempting literacy development

The prehistory of writing begins writing instruction at the activation of problem seeing and solving (Engeström, 1987),hich produces socially relevant or necessary tasks (Vygotsky, 1978), which involve the acquisition or adaptation of culturalractices such as literacy according to the affordances of the available tools and culturally mediated perception of thoseools. Defining writing instruction inclusively of the personal and interpersonal negotiations about appropriate responseso problems leads to examinations of content area curricula oriented around ill-defined problems and student agency.

As students pose and understand problems, they set tasks that stimulate acquisition and adaptation of cultural tools inays they believe will be effective. Examining writing as the result of broader discursive and literacy practices oriented

round ill-defined problems is in no way a critique of compulsory writing as a method of instruction. However, noncom-ulsory writing and its prehistory offers an important context for studying and understanding elements of “new” and 21stentury literacies (Boggs & Alvermann, 2012; New London Group, 1996). While development of networks, posing and solvingroblems, synthesizing multiple streams of information, and composing purposive texts for a variety of audiences may ando form parts of writing assignments, examining students’ developing engagement in these practices in self-assigned tasksas clear advantages, in particular the potential for validating the relevance of broad or generic expressions of 21st century

iteracy practices. Compulsory writing need not, should not, and often does not squelch the development of students’ sensef writing’s strategic value (Hillocks, 1986). The goal here is to work along the timespan from writing back and forth to writ-ng’s beginnings as students process options for responding to problems they construct. In doing so the goal is to validatend understand the conditions that make up 21st century literacies.

eview of literature

In composition studies, Vygotskian (1978, 1987) theories of development help researchers theorize the role of talkn writing, most notably through ideas of socialization and apprenticeship (Britton, 1983; Chen, 2011; Elbow, 1999).

icroethnographic analysis of classroom talk and writing has drawn on a variety of ethnographic traditions such as com-unities of practice theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Lunsford, 2002), ethnomethodology (Freebody, 2013), social practice

heories of literacy (Barton & Papen, 2010; Barton & Tusting, 2005; Romero & Walker, 2010), and New Literacy StudiesCoiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008; Kinloch, 2009) to consider writing within networked social practices.

The paper’s title draws on Vygotsky’s (1930) essay, “The Prehistory of Written Language,” (1978) in which the Russiansychologist first used the historical notion of “prehistory” to emphasize the cultural and social foundations or precursorshat made writing necessary to human society. For Vygotsky, schooling should then provide systematic assistance in thecquisition of culturally desirable tools, especially written language (Heath, 1982; Hull & Schultz, 2001; Street, 2003). Themportance and effectiveness of indirect literacy instruction (McNamee, 1990) can be confused or conflated with hands-offr naturalistic models of literacy development, as seen in the so-called ‘reading wars, where explicit instruction in primaryiteracy is juxtaposed with learning by osmosis, so to speak. By contrast, literacy researchers in the Vygotskian tradition (e.g.,

oll, 1990) espouse intentional, direct literacy instruction to awaken, strengthen, and diversify abilities students possess oresire. Indirect, not laissez faire, literacy instruction positions teachers and advanced peers as crucial mediators of students’cquisition of advanced communication tools. One of Vygotsky’s most important and least understood contributions to thetudy of mind and literacy development is his thesis that instruction that breathes vigor and sophistication into existing,ut immature, developmental processes accelerates biological development.

A hybrid model of self-sponsored writing, in which the necessity of writing is partially the result of a system of assistancerchestrated by a teacher (Gallimore & Tharp, 1990), evokes Vygotsky’s notion that writing is learned optimally when it isnecessary for something” and “relevant for life” (1978, p. 117). Similar studies (e.g., Barton, 1994; González, Moll, & Amanti,005; Neuman & Roskos, 1997) celebrate the importance of socially necessary tasks that create opportunities for indirect


writing instruction, in sharp contrast to the “narrow and restricted view of writing as a set of academic techniques” (McLane,1990, p. 305).

Emergence of highly interactive and malleable communicative platforms associated with Internet-based communication(Coiro et al., 2008) adds a further challenge to teacher-sponsored, print-oriented techniques. Literacy education competeswith complex, collaborative literacy practices that already thrive in cyberspace, at home, and often largely out of teachers’view (e.g., Beavis, Nixon, & Atkinson, 2005; Black, 2009; Chandler-Alcott & Mahar, 2003; Ito, Horst, Battanti, & Boyd, 2009;Zenkov & Harmon, 2009).

In school-based research, compulsory assignments with due dates have played a central role in the production of studydata—even in studies designed to teach teachers about new media practices in which students freely engage (e.g., Herrington,Hodgson, & Moran, 2009). While practical in the sense that much writing in the workplace is “transactional” rather thanelective (Reid, 2010), to understand the incorporation of 21st century literacies in schools by students requires attention toprehistory of (especially digital, collaborative) composition where a particular kind and way of making meaning becomesnecessary in a particular time and place.

Growing interest in task-appropriate participation in a discourse (Lea & Street, 2006) and a focus on nonhierarchicalnetworks of learners and experts in 21st century learning models (e.g., P21.org; NCTE, 2013) necessitates inquiry intocommunicative resources that novices adopt as they work together. Furthermore, new secondary literacy standards in theCommon Core pertaining to “the capacity to build knowledge on a subject through research projects” (CCSSI, 2012, n.p.)call for research on the discursive processes and changes in consciousness that underpin writing that effectively mobilizesdisciplinary knowledge.

Theoretical framework

Attention to patterned speech in a community is a tool for understanding that community—its hierarchies, its norms,and its orientation toward other communities. Gumperz and Hymes (1986) developed their sociolinguistic approach toinvestigate how social organization and experience are mapped in language, and how norms of language use are establishedand observed. Ethnography of communication describes social organization in terms of patterned communication distributedamong speakers by asking who speaks, how, about what, and when (Hymes, 1962)?

Patterns can have formal and content-oriented elements, such that members of a group identify themselves by theway they formulate an argument. Linguistic choices, patterned in response to precursors, indicate membership or markotherness. The development of these communities involves participants’ ideological becoming in the context of multiplevoices, in which words of others become their own (Bakhtin, 1981). When these processes involve the shared production ofmeaningful texts, interactions occurring among participants index the historical unfolding of composition in the context ofthe social purposes set for it by the community. Writing projects study participants undertook, in this view, become productsof historical, genetic processes in which participants multimodally negotiated ways of seeing and saying the world (Sperling,1995). Research on that negotiation directly responds to calls for a methodology to “account for students’ school-sponsoredliteracy experiences” with an eye to their broader multiliterate “encounters” both in and beyond the classroom (Kinloch,2009, p. 178).

Classrooms are special social situations because their comparatively short life histories include the formation of speechcommunities (Hymes, 1962) governed by an extreme range of patterned communication, especially with respect to whosevoices dominate. Many classrooms evolve into speech communities in isolation, officially governed by speech patternsfound in authoritative texts and clear hierarchies; others are porous and adopt the norms of communities that primar-ily exist outside the classroom. Early research in this vein pointed to the problem of classrooms driven by the speechpatterns of an individual teacher (Cazden, 1972; Cazden, John, & Hymes, 1971); today the concept of ethnography ofcommunication is particularly useful for examining student and teacher interactions across porous classroom bound-aries in problem-oriented rather than teacher-oriented settings. Nonetheless, classroom formation of a speech communityin schools always occurs in the context of existing networks, which assert political and other forces in response towhich members organize themselves and are organized by others. These processes are mediated by semiotic symbols(Vygotsky, 1978), especially spoken and written language, as members orient toward new subgroupings as in a universityclass.

Among many other types of patterned speech, argument-based negotiations over ways of viewing problems amongstudy participants provides a means of charting the prehistory of writing as a stage vital to learning and literacies identifiedwith 21st century society and technology (NCTE, 2013). Making sense of negotiations among students includes ideologi-cal becoming and the argumentative or persuasive constructs that enmesh classrooms inter-contextually with the realitiesperceived by other speakers. In other words, people are making sense of their world together and coming up with sharedways of talking about it. Classroom speech and the writing toward which social interactions may lead are thus likely to bepurposive, ideological, inter-contextual actions enmeshed in the social practices of the community (Barton & Papen, 2010;Heath, 1982).

Situated communicative acts are thus bound together with the learning processes that enable participation in political,disciplinary, and ideological communities. The notion of participation is important because participation in community isthe primary vehicle by which people acquire the use of culturally valued tools, a point no less important today in the contextof 21st century literacies development than it was when applied to cultures undergoing literacy campaigns in the 1930s. The

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odel of communication-oriented apprenticeship into groups helps define communicative patterns that make up systemsf assistance logically most likely to privilege the most advanced communicative tools available to a particular group, in thisase 21st century literacies: digital communication, conditional expertise, and strategic team membership.

On this basis, the following research questions structured my investigation:

How did classroom interactions act as precursors to student-sponsored digital writing?How 21st century literacies and writing’s prehistory related?

ethod

ontext

nstitutionThe study was conducted in a large, selective land-grant university in the southeastern United States. Three human

eography faculty members in the university’s Geography department teach courses and write about food as a social andnvironmental justice issue.

ourseBegun in 2008, one year before the study commenced, Urban Food Collective Service Learning (a pseudonym) became

n increasingly established course in the geography department over the three-year period of the study. Grants from theniversity office of service learning and the United States Department of Agriculture provided funding for developing andxpanding the course, described in the university bulletin as “service-learning experience growing produce for local con-umption. Lectures, readings, and critical writing assignments address different aspects of the industrial food system, theascent local food system, problems of hunger and poverty, and related issues.” In the third iteration of the course, when thetudy began, writing assignments had been eliminated with the exception of an informal journal. Lectures were very rare inhe course, provided exclusively by guest speakers. Syllabi stressed active participation in student-led, ethically responsiveommunity engagement as a means of learning and applying human geography concepts.

articipants

nstructorsCourse instructors desired collaborative community action among students, activist faculty, and members of the commu-

ity beyond the university. They sought support for their project by couching their goals for the course inter-contextuallyMedina, 2006) within other powerful discourses within the university: Their grant applications framed the program asulfilling the land grant university’s goal of local assistance through academic expertise; course descriptions highlighted theontradiction between diverse, underutilized university resources and high rates of urban poverty; and introductions to theourse framed it as an opportunity for students to act upon what they had learned about food insecurity in and out of school.ylan, the focal teacher-participant in this article and the teacher I first observed in UFC I and twice more in subsequentears (UFC IV, V), recalled “a discussion around the UFC that Erica (a pseudonym for the instructor of UFC III) and I facilitatedith groups of students.” Wryly acknowledging professional and pedagogical challenges, he remarked, “We don’t want toake all the decisions. But this is our job. We don’t want to just shoot the shit.”The teachers’ ways of stimulating collaborative ownership of the course varied as unique, fairly concerted efforts to create

separate idio-setting within the larger university setting with its own codes. Simultaneously teaching what might be calledonventional courses in human geography critical of structures that perpetuate economic inequality, all three instructorsubscribed to the notion that students benefit when schooling includes unstructured problems and delegated responsibility.

Their conception of unstructured tasks as beneficial to disciplinary learning did not inform their writing pedagogy, how-ver. In the two iterations of UFC offered prior to beginning data collection, Dylan and a colleague had debated whetherhe assignment of high-stakes writing tasks was too detrimental to student learning to be included in the course. Dylan’solleague judiciously assigned a single paper as a culminating task and hosted a web-based weekly discussion board wheretudents were asked to pose questions. By contrast, while similarly cognizant of writing’s potential to stimulate reflection,ylan believed school culture had warped the meaning of writing to distract students from the transformative potential ofther school-based activities. Other courses he taught and earlier versions of the present course featured writing promi-ently, however. In his opening description of the course for students, he presented consensus-based, community-focusedroblem solving as an alternative to the kinds of work exemplified by school writing. He described his process of “tack-

ng back and forth”—a complex experiment involving students interested in disciplinary content but jaded by institutionalerformances—as an attempt to realize the potential of a curriculum that stimulated students’ “direct learning through directction” (course motto).

Instructors taught the course without pay initially. Later, the course became established through enrollment increases,ositive press, recognition within the university, and programmatic collaborations with other departments. Instructorsositioned the course within the university’s service-learning program, securing startup monies to develop a garden plottop the geography building’s green roof and to build a library of resources about food, environmental justice, and direct


action. Dylan thus initially used writing as a symbolic scapegoat for typical schooling epistemology, which he saw as basedon academic performance, competition, and esoteric rewards. Collaborative writing that emerged in UFC IV was not the goalof the class, one participant explained, but provided a means of “getting out in the community.”

Dylan identified critical reflection as their chief learning goal for students, positioning immediate community uplift asa possible, but secondary, desired outcome. He saw critical reflection in terms of mapping disciplinary knowledge ontoreal world problems. Until the beginning of the study, course evaluations and anecdotal information were the streams ofinformation on course effectiveness. One of my primary goals was therefore to create an informal assessment loop thatwould help teachers see changes in students’ critical reflection. The system used entrance and exit interviews, transcripts ofclass meetings, and observation to identify changes in word meaning that indexed the development of disciplinary conceptsand critical consciousness.

StudentsStudents enrolled for multiple reasons, identified through initial and final interviews conducted in UFC I–V. Many students

expressed a desire to learn to grow vegetables on their own, and connected with the course because of its reputationfor having students maintain a sizable garden on the historic green roof of the geography department. Others had takenconventional courses offered by UFC instructors about global issues related to food systems, and social and environmentaljustice. For them as well as others who shared a ‘now-what?’ desire for application, UFC provided a complement to theirprevious education, in many cases supplying an opportunity to respond to a moral imperative to pursue justice for thosewith severely restricted access to quality food. Some participants were motivated by the hands-on approach because theybelieved that the course would not consist of what Aaron described as “typical academic activities,” of which academicwriting was chief and the most to be avoided.

Students were asked to read academic articles, book excerpts, and other documents listed on syllabi. Students in somecourses kept a journal, while in others, they participated in online discussions. UFC III required students to write a finalpaper and give a presentation. Several students took the course multiple times, from different instructors, and four of the45 student participants enrolled as graduate students. Student data presented comes from UFC IV. Dylan, the instructorof UFC IV, invited me to co-teach UFC V with him, with the goal of continuing to develop multiple literacies as tools forcommunity engagement.

Design

Study participants’ positive reflections about collaborative writing at the end of the UFC IV service-learning coursestrongly influenced modified research design to account for its emergence. To understand the 15 participants’ positive expe-rience of elective use of digital literacies as means of responding to community engagement-related problems, I designedthe present study to examine a putative relationship between problem-posing and literacies as powerful tools for action.Correlating socio-rhetorical phenomena with the use of digital composition can help describe parameters for teaching 21stcentury literacies.

Peer and teacher interactions were treated as possible precursors of writing via two channels: socio-rhetorical, throughthe posing of problems that fit affordances of some type of composition, and practical, through reference to and use ofother forms of writing. These interactions served many purposes, including developing group identity, negotiating waysof seeing problems related to the course, and suggesting courses of action to follow. Argumentative constructs containedwithin contiguous participant interactions were summarized in an initial round of coding. These argumentative constructswere compared with use of and reference to digital tools in order to examine a relationship between shifting argumentationand the choice to write.

Procedures

At the beginning of the course, participants were asked to volunteer to participate by returning a signed consent form thefollowing class meeting. A subsequent consenting process granted permission for students not officially participating in thestudy (i.e., providing entrance and exit interviews not reported in this analysis) to have their contributions to collaborativeprojects included in the analysis. I obtained permission to collect, photocopy, transcribe, or photograph documents composedin a variety of ways (e.g., Fig. 3). Fifteen students and the instructor participated.

Observation of all class meetings and numerous events outside scheduled meeting times were documented through audiorecording and observational notes, which were combined in a single transcript. In addition to these transcripts were a draftand the final version (along with much verbal and written editing by students included in transcripts and observation) of anewspaper article composed by the group to further their community engagement goals. Transcripts were coded accordingto the argumentative construct on which utterances were based, as determined through discussions of approximately 1000
transcript lines with a graduate student.
Working backwards from the late-semester publication of a collaboratively written newspaper article, I examined thestatus in the group of rhetorical positions (e.g., emerging consensus around those found in the published article), discussionsof writing among other possible tactics, and the use of other digital communication.


Fig. 3. Park(ing) Day demonstration media photographs and poster (photo credit: David Tulis).


On Jun e 2nd 2007 , a small, dedic ate d g roup of people met at the �irs t Amesville Food

Activist Networking Sessio n. There had been whispers of a farmer’s market in ye ars

prior, but through sh aring ideas, a concrete plan was devel oped that resul ted in

almost 3000 p eople sh owing up fo r the g rand open ing of t he Ame svill e Farmer’s

Market on May 17 th, 2008 . That AFANS meeting d emonstrated the power of our

community to tran sform our public spaces for creat ive, n on trad itional uses, li ke

community gard ens and far mers markets . Mo men tum has only built since with

many individuals and organiz ations ha ving similar s ucce sses. But the possi bilities

and the nee d for improved com mun ity food systems and equit able ac cess to fresh

healthy food rema ins.

W e mi ght look north for inspiration. Th e city of Toronto has lau nched a n

effort to tu rn public s paces into community gard ens. Th is in itiative a ims to help

socio-ec onom ically dis advantaged youth and othe r ma rginalized communi ty

members tap in to the local food network. A w ell-integrat ed co ali tion of n on- pro�it

organi zations within Toronto coordinate with the mun icipal government to

establish local food prod uction, t o promo te a g reat er rela tionship wi th the farmers

in the regi on, to provi de city dwellers an d yout h w ith educatio n in gro wing and

eating h ealthy food, and t o establish local com munity kitchens that mee t m ultiple

community needs. Thi s com munit y approach to food security also pri oritizes food

recla matio n, t here by dr astically reducing fo od waste .

Here in Ame sville, two downtown parking space s we re t ran sformed into a

community garden for a da y as part of International P arking Day on Septem ber 17th,

where pa rking spaces ac ross th e globe were recla imed as parks a nd pub lic

space. This demonst rati on chall enge d pass ersby to con sider--if these two spaces

can be a g arde n, w hat are the possi bilities for other spa ces th at may be s imilarl y

overlo oked? The exhib it sp arked conversa tion s along these lines: What about my

window sill or porch? Wh at about the ma ll p arking lot?

The demons tration al so playf ully p rovo ked [ resid ents] to co nside r the

prio rities and potenti al o f ou r town and its public spaces. Membe rs of t he [ Urban

Food Collective] collecting reac tio ns f rom p eople f ound that [r esidents] envision

open a nd fri endly pub lic spa ces t hrough commun ity gardening, elimin ating tr af�ic,

repurposing Coll ege Square as a pedestrian mall. [Resi dents] want non- exclusi ve

spaces tha t address th e larger issue s fa cing our commun ity, lik e fo od pr oduction

and the el imination of hunger.

Accor ding t o Partners for a Prosperous Am esvil le, a 20 06 stu dy reported a

28 % poverty rate for [ this] County, w hic h as onl y g ott en w orse in the c urr ent

economic down town . In [this c oun ty], childr en are espec ially i mpacted: 78 % of

students particip ate in the free and reduced lunch p rog rams. Lo cal schoo ls give

away hundred s of ba gs of foo d t o student s to help them thro ugh the wee kend so

they are ensured a m eal betwee n Fr ida y lunch and Mo nday’ s breakfast. Low-

income ho usehold s fac ed with the in �lexible exp enses of rent an d utility bills must

often comp romi se foo d qua lity, quant ity an d nutrit ion.

Public space, pa rks , and schoo ls are resources th at can be mo re fully

leveraged to al leviate hunger and end p ersist ent pov erty in our community. [This

city] has the resources needed to a ssist in plann ing for a foo d sec urity on the

Fig. 4. Full de-identified transcript of published article.

Analysis

Transcripts from UFC IV were examined along with written products to identify argumentative patterns in studentinteractions. My first task dealt with the argumentative content of speech acts. I identified and categorized argumentativeconstructs participants employed, ranking their overall prevalence in discussions (see Table 1) and changes observed in the
patterns of argument content, such as in response to particular events. To characterize these argument constructs, I routinelyused the argument’s keyword or core logical principle. With a graduate student working both together and separately, wereviewed. I made notes about the degree to which argument constructs gained consensus in discussion. I next workedbackwards from prominent argument constructs, such as those used in a collaboratively written newspaper article to trace


Table 1Ideological theme codes, ranked by percentage of total (n = 776).

School norms 7.6Language as action 7.0Representation 6.3Organizing 5.9Popular education 4.5Collaboration/collectivism 4.5Agency/futility 4.4Trust 4.0Food regime 3.2Direct action 3.0Prefigurative politics 2.7Action 2.7Social change 2.6Mutual aid 2.4Growing food 2.4Experience 2.3Scale 2.2Momentum 2.2Intervention 2.0Embodiment 1.9Wealth/privilege disparity 1.7Waste 1.6Compatibility with mission 1.5Affinity 1.4Bureaucrazy 1.4Spark 1.4Enjoyment 1.3Struggle 1.3Interconnection 1.1Political 1.0Anarchy 0.9Food system 0.9Meaningful action 0.9Audience 0.8Food knowledge 0.8General direction 0.8Interaction 0.8Social services 0.8Cultural values 0.6Hunger upsetting 0.5Local food 0.5Biodiversity 0.5Delegation 0.5“Meeting the world where it is” 0.5“Become more human” 0.4Broader economic/social issues 0.4Identity politics 0.4Building blocks 0.1Environmentalism 0.1Food access 0.1Structure 0.1

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he genesis of important argument positions in light of other possibilities. This process required attention to the consensustatus of various arguments within the group and the authority of those perceived to have greater expertise and insight.his analysis included attention to supporting communicative choices (i.e., other communicative modes than face-to-facepeaking), as well: who sponsored their use for what purpose, and how well they were received.

As I moved backward from the newspaper publication I collected excerpts of student dialog that exemplified tensionver whether literate action constituted socially significant community engagement, en vivo development of shared argu-entative positions, reference to digital tools as complements to other forms of social action, and connections beyond the

lassroom to other knowledge resources.

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Participant reflection on their writing experiences reinforced my hypothesis that problem-solving writing and the socio-hetorical context in which it had become necessary together supported qualitative leaps forward in terms of conceptual


understanding and the weight their writing took on. Collaborative writing was first proposed in a list of possible communityorganizing activities in mid-August. Dylan, the instructor said,

The two previous times I’ve taught this class, we’ve created a 4–6 sided zine. Every time we got a little close todoing it completely, to doing a little more work to see if people have been looking at them, we never organizedthe project quickly enough to get feedback. An idea I discussed with [editors of a local newspaper, about writ-ing something collectively. John and I have talked about organizing something collectively, and use the monikerof the Urban Food Collective to make some momentum...and on September 17th there’s going to be a garden createdin two parking spaces downtown on college square as a way of demonstrating urban gardening. I’ve been simul-taneously already imagining doing something similar, whereby we find a parcel of ground, use the starts fromupstairs and kind of overnight create a garden get all kinds of press to show how easy it is to get a garden inthe ground.

Extended, collaborative writing projects that did emerge in the course were aroused and nurtured by preceding interactions.The guerilla project never happened. The writing did. Bill’s account weaves the developmental, interactive, and literatethreads together in his reflection following the newspaper’s publication of their article:

I feel as though we came together. I really liked getting up in front [during editing]. “No!” I’d say, “Finish yoursentences!” and I’d piss people off. I’d not know whether to take this one point or take some other point. Then we’reall at [the downtown coffee shop] trying to nail something together. So we’re taking in all these intellectual endpoints,and things started in September. They started taking new shapes, and we don’t know what it’s going to turn into, andit turns into this. And then this ties in to the [activist networking session we later hosted]. To see that result develop.Not everyone has the same experiences, we’ve been able to come together and build consensus, not just to state whatwe feel, but also learn by taking each other’s viewpoints on. To educate one another. It came together, what we alloffered to a common thing.

Collaborative writing exhibited and depended on a network of literate practices currently incorporated as 21st CenturyLiteracies (NCTE, 2013)—using technology, working together, identifying audiences, designing communication, buildingnetworks, and attending to ethical concerns in the process of posing and solving problems. Alex’s comments highlightprocesses by which various student-advocated “intellectual endpoints” “turn into” electively written, problem-orientedcompositions. “Taking in” and “taking new shapes” refer to changes in arguments during writing’s prehistory that occurredbecause of sustained interactions.

Before the reflection on writing came the published version of the article in print and online. Before that came Dylan’spronouncement, “This embodies what we’ve been talking about all semester.” He delivered this happy ultimatum with aparaphrased review from the editors: “This is really strong. I appreciate the opportunity to assist with students’ valuableefforts, blah blah blah.... It will be in the paper next Monday.”

Several large and small group-editing sessions preceded the circulation and submission of the final version. In one, Johnsaid he was “rewriting sentences” that had been cut and pasted over and over, “to make them more alive.” In a coffee shopoff campus with five students watching, he wrote and said aloud, “We find that we want it. . . [citizens of this city] wantnon-exclusive spaces that address larger issues facing our community, like food production and elimination of hunger.” Thenhe pointed at the sentence and asks, “Temporarily, does that sentence work?” Regarding efforts elsewhere in the draft to saythe same thing, Claire responded, “Yeah, so maybe we could condense this paragraph a lot,” and Xavier added, “Yeah causewe’ve already said that.”

In response to boisterous, somewhat chaotic large group-editing that preceded the above session, Terri said to Bill, “Thisis just the beginning.” Bill regarded copious suggested edits compiled on a projected computer screen and asked, “So wewant to transition toward [the topic of the activist summit] while keeping public space and food in focus?” The nuts andbolts of purposive, collaborative digital composing for an external audience continue:

Aaron: What if we back kick [the sentence beginning with the name of the city, but use the nubbings of that sentence,going to social organizations that have committed, then we open it back up?

Bill: How are we going to introduce the idea of space?

Aaron:... bring it back saying that these issues all have to do with space and food?

According to Murray, we are in the drafting stage, but evidence of prewriting is everywhere: Shared interests, shared viewsof hunger as a social problem, and shared mission to write for publication depend upon a vibrant prehistory.

Moving back farther still, before the article’s thesis had been settled, leads to the full-blown interactions that make upwriting’s prehistory. There, multiple competing “intellectual endpoints” faced students in a course that was not far from itsend. Participants discussed repeatedly whether and how to use a major writing project in the last month. With the apparentfailure of initial efforts to organize a chapter of the national Campus Kitchens organization, they increasingly entertained
various writing schemes as forms of action, especially as a means of fighting back against perceived closed minds:
John: I’m not willing to believe that students don’t have power. But I think [Claire’s] right, I don’t think it’s enough tojust write an article.

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Aaron: What about the [newspaper of record for the university] as a forum for this? Hold dining services accountableto them, they are the community that they are accountable to. If we’re going to challenge dining services, I think the[newspaper of record] makes a lot of sense, because they are part of this institution. If the [newspaper] can say, “Hey,there’s this incongruity here.”

John: What about just protesting directly? Why isn’t that better? Just send three of us to each dining hall handing outcards!

Aaron: I’m not saying not to do that. I’m talking about the value of it being in print.

John: Ok, what about newspapers reporting on us demonstrating?

Delia: I think Claire is right about saying students have power. They care what students think. They care about themoney.

Aaron: I think it’s important to show it, to write an article to [the newspaper of record]. Cause they really, really careabout how they look.

John: So, go to the dorms and tell people that they aren’t telling the whole truth.

he article students published in the newspaper not long after took none of these paths, which is part of what makes itmportant as evidence of prehistory as a crucial space for 21st century literacies. This excerpt reveals complex tension about

hether and how to use this or that kind writing for this or that purpose to satisfy an agreed-upon goal. They were evenxplicit about some of the affordances and constraints of their writing options.

By the time drafting actually began, the writing project had taken a more discrete, as well as task-, genre-, and audience-ppropriate stance, as indicated when Dylan queried Aaron about the main political point of the writing project. Aaronnswered, “to bring up the issue of public space using a few anecdotes, say public space is important, and invite people tongage with the conversation.” Even when the plan to write such an article was virtually sealed, writing and action couldtill be juxtaposed. Kelsie cautioned the group with reference to the course’s motto: “[writing an article] isn’t the most directction. The article itself should more complement the direct action that is taking place. It should state the problem and showhat the progress is now, in solving it.” This relationship between interaction, writing, and action is a theme that dominates

he weeks prior to their article, and is also found at multiple points deep in the prehistory, when students faced other tasksor which they felt digital composition was expedient.

ultiplayer zone of proximal development

Just as everyday interactions will offer widely different explanations for persistent social problems, arguments used byarticipants offered ideologically and politically diverse plot lines for understanding urban hunger. Table 1 displays theotality of argument constructs employed by 15 students in discussions of urban food issues in one semester. Argumentonstructs are ranked as a percentage of the total number of constructs coded (n = 776).

Discussions orbiting a single argumentative construct were rare. The majority of discussion periods presented multiplerguments and often contained multi-dimensional tugs-of-war among competing ways of seeing issues. These competingays of seeing, given the goal of shared discipline-informed viewpoints suggest a multiplayer zone of proximal development

Wertsch, 1985). At times participants acknowledged the consequences of another argument ‘winning out,’ while at otherimes, alternatives were presented without obvious justification.

Pet” argumentative constructsOf 15 students participating, the three graduate students demonstrated patterns in the content of their speech composi-

ions based on their academic and work experience. Terri, who was a social work doctoral student, defended direct servicenitiatives such as relief agencies and charities as supporters rather than enemies of social change. Aaron saw economicistory as a useful way of seeing many issues. John, the most experienced activist in the course, often used the idea of

ace-to-face relationships as a lens for understanding complex food issues.Combined reference to pet arguments occurred at roughly the same frequency as either representation or school as usual,

he most frequently employed argumentative constructs. This frequency reflects the three students’ early leadership iniscussions and defense of positions in which they had made considerable personal investment. John reported in his exit

nterview that, in order to be able to justify spending time on the course, the course had to support his activist goals, aituation he felt justified his efforts to steer discussions toward preferred argumentative positions.

egotiation among many voicesClass discussions not rigidly controlled by the instructor were of particular interest in this research, given the decen-

ered political organization of such events and the focus on content that often accompanied them. Negotiation describes communicative event involving two or more ideological positions, two or more speakers, and extensive dialog or ref-rence to extensive dialog. These interactions within discussion contained the highest concentrations of argumentativeonstructs, and always included at least one of the more experienced students in the course. I identified 29 multi-voiced


(Bakhtin, 1981) negotiations in as many class meetings as a recurring communicative event composed of multiple speechacts within announced discussions. Speech acts in negotiations are important in part because of their concentration, butalso because of the vetting of ideologies that they manifest. Ideological statements offered by multiple members vied fordominance.

The excerpt below suggests how democratic, student-directed collaboration involves selection from among multiplepossible argumentative constructs that target different discourses:

Terri: The amount of money that needs to be made [from the sale of grocery produce items] has been made. It’s astrong comment on the industrial food system—it’s the commodification of food. If I’m a grocery store and I sell xportion, I don’t give a crap about the rest—just throw it way, don’t even compost it. Enclose it in a plastic bag so thatthings will never happen to it.

Jasmyne: I don’t know a lot about it. Not trying to offend.

Terri: Oh, just try and offend me!

Dylan: Guys, we’re talking about this process without saying what it is.

John: The things that helped me understand the commodification of food? So in the Midwest, the bags of corn wouldgo to market with the farmer’s name on them, and the value was tied to person, place, work ethic, land. Taking it outof that bag into a stream of corn, your corn gets mixed with everybody else’s corn or the state’s corn. It’s all in thestream, the value gets divorced from the place and the person, the value is then determined artificially and arbitrarilyby the Chicago Stock Exchange, and that’s my story.

Aaron: It’s also the process by which things are assigned values and are monetized in a lot of ways.

Wendy: Your interaction becomes the point of purchase. The prior history is done away with, corn on stalks, milk ontrees, milk from cows.

Aaron, Wendy, and John present concept-based illustrations and explanations of the commodification of food, but theyemploy different argumentative constructs to do so. A classic example of recurring and yet varied stimuli as optimal meansof nurturing the development of concepts, this many-voiced negotiation, encouraged strategically by the instructor, Dylan,opened ways for Jasmyne’s to understand economic processes from a disciplinary perspective. Of note, Jasmyne eventuallyhelped found a local Campus Kitchens chapter and served as the leader and spokesperson for the organization. Her roledemanded strategic use of the concept of commodification of food in producing online promotional videos for her work.

Working backward from her prominent role with Campus Kitchens and the university’s office of sustainability suggeststhat these negotiations may have contributed to Jasmyne breaking her silence to join a conversation. For Jasmyne, beingexcluded conceptually from the group’s shared knowledge in that moment became important enough to interrupt as moreand more people offered their impassioned, yet differently inflected versions of what commodification means. Breakingsilence drew considerable attention, and cemented an area of interest for her that continues to the present.

Changing arguments

Moving backward from their publishing, drafting, and brainstorming the article, two argument constructs offer a meansof tracing parts of their writing’s prehistory. When describing their writing during the editing phase, Dylan and others usedmomentum to refer to what was needed to achieve the group’s goals in the period between community action events. Allof the forms of writing suggested would have been expected to maintain momentum. Looking back to the middle of thesemester, when students engaged in a multifaceted joint demonstration with students from urban planning (Fig. 3), callsfor work that preserved momentum disappear. In their place, moving backward in time, is the construct of spark that couldprecipitate larger community changes. The shift coincides with their community action initiative.

In the public demonstration, UFC students and the others collaboratively designed and carried out a layered, artisticdowntown public protest of the preferential use of public space for parking and non-food production purposes, and itevidently served as a kind of spark. Momentum and spark illustrate how networking with others to solve problems creatednew social conditions and ways of seeing a problem. By the end of the semester, participants had responded by constructingtasks that required developing new literacy practices (i.e., collaboration, working with editors, and publishing). Yet literacypractices involved in the demonstration itself appear to have stimulated new horizons for problem solving, a point to bediscussed in a section devoted to that protest below.

The argumentative construct public space confirms the extent of the prehistory of writing in ways that parallel momentumand spark. Every 90 words in the published news article contained an argument based on the idea of public space. From itspublication backward to the public demonstration event cited above and discussed further below, the construct appeared
64 times in 17 class meetings. Before that, however, it had been invoked only 16 times in 12 class meetings, of which Dylancontributed seven instances. In other words, the surge in the use of public space as an argument suggests that students gaveprogressively more attention to the idea of public space as an argumentative construct before, during, and after the Park(ing)Day downtown protest.

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Just as the Park(ing) Day protest is entangled in the development of argumentative constructs and the decision to write for local newspaper, the problem of maintaining momentum created further opportunities for tasks in which forging networkshrough digital communications were necessary. In late October, before students decided to write an article in November,he expansive potential of 21st century literacies was clearly evident as participants initiated planning for a summit of localood system stakeholders.

Claire: We should invite folks from Family and Consumer Sciences.

Terri: That’s good, Claire.

[John writes “Family Connection” on board]

Maria: I’m creating a google doc of organizations. I can think of more.

Aaron: Anyone not feel confortable with a class google doc? With the invitations, people really respond better to thepaper invitations.

Rachel: Paper? Aww—

Aaron: Who’d take a stab at writing a press release?

Maria: I need to learn how to do that.

Dylan: I have a shit ton of stuff to help you think about that.

Moments later Aaron defined radical politics in a way that confirmed the group’s practical mission: “A wrong exists thatust be changed. Lots of people don’t think there’s something that needs to be changed.” Kelsie’s response picked up Aaron’s

hift from abstract definition to assertion of the shared political goal of the class, and traced the steps even more explicitlyhrough the concept of problem-posing to communication as a form of action:

Politics is about righting injustice. How people are being wronged, or what is wrong.

That’s a big part of advocacy, showing what is wrong. Part of political process is that people don’t realize how muchhunger there is. Hunger just doesn’t seem like a problem.

ylan added, “If anything we’ve talked about has piqued your interest, go testify. Being on public record is important. It’sne option in the portfolio. Go chain yourself to a bulldozer. Go talk at a public lecture.” Even as the frame moves fartherack in time from any reference to a writing project, these excerpts underscore the relation between interactive problemosing, communication, and action.

wakenings

As the frame moves back into prehistory, the period in which conditions for focused, collaborative writing developed,he Park(ing) Day demonstration appears to have shaped participants’ arguments and subsequent engagement choices.

hile this role confirms the importance of prehistory of writing as a domain in which 21st century literacies may becomeecessary, it is worth asking what characteristics in the event were salient. Looking closely at the Park(ing) Day event revealstudents building networks, posing and solving problems, designing information, attending to ethical considerations, andeveloping technological proficiencies—21st century literacies.

The protest required negotiation over a period of weeks via email, meetings, and shared conceptual maps with a veryifferent community of service-learners in the urban planning department. For those students, alternative possibilitiesor public space was a problem that prompted competing, elaborate, schematic, digitally produced drawings of publicrt installations that could be used to illustrate the point that parking places could be used for food production or otherurposes. This focus, by itself, did not resonate deeply with UFC students, but they entered into dialog with the urbanlanners to refine the art installation to more closely address urban agriculture and food—to give it potential, in theirords, to spark discussion and raise consciousness about urban hunger. In addition, they designed and added five additionalemonstration elements of their own to shape the overall meaning of the public event: A bike cart with explanationsf the concept of food desert and restricted access to quality food, a “free market” where people can take or exchangeoods without charge, a large-scale community meal consisting of organic ingredients reclaimed from local dumpster,nd a public forum in which passersby were encouraged to write down their ideas about public space and pin them to aanner.

During the planning phases, participants thought together about how to optimize meaningful interactions, to build
ommunity support for the class’ larger, practical goals. Using the concept of an Internet forum, their public commentxhibit was designed to facilitate face-to-face interactions with passersby. It tapped affordances of digital writing:
Terri: You know what I think would be really fun. A banner with magic markers that has the question, “Public space?”asking “What are your ideas.” We could say, “Reconceptualize public space in [town]”—either very specific or verygeneral—but interactive. It’s not just our message but it would be.


Dylan: So, asking people to comment on how public space could be used?

Sarah: Yeah, have a giant sheet, like off a bed, with fabric markers.

Students from both classes gathered in the days prior to build sets, as it were, for the event. They half the participants inthe study arrived before dawn to set up, bringing plants from the UFC’s rooftop garden and elsewhere to help decorate theart installation—a hybrid home-garden, where the bed is a vegetable bed and collards peek out of chests of drawers (seeFig. 3). Interactions during the event (not transcribed) and the complementary exhibits were centered on sparking publicdiscussion. The process points emphatically to the Park(ing) Day event as a kind of composition itself. It was comprisedas a kind of multimedia collage, in which even participants themselves played explicit roles in an elaborate, thoughtfullydesigned public dialog text. Media attention, interviews of participants, and a journalist’s photo essay published in the city’snewspaper discussed themes cutting across the various elements of the protest and noted the meaningful arrangement ofindividual components.

The demonstration, part of an international protest contesting the use of public space (cf. parkingday.org), was filledwith surprises for everyone, surprises that may point to awakening of the combination of agency, action, and 21st centuryliteracies. Terri had imagined a rally ensconced in the oral-rhetorical tradition with “a speaker and a march and chanting,”this rally, with it’s public luncheon of organic food reclaimed from dumpsters, a free yard sale, and parking space-sizedhome scene whimsically suffused with garden plants, “hit you in different ways. It was very artistic, really beautiful... Thatway where if you’re in a lovely art museum you might stop at something and someone else might stop somewhere else.”One student who participated very reluctantly in class discussions said, “I thought it was really fun, a lot of community. AtTerri’s house just hanging out, making food. Then downtown, people coming by talking to strangers. I stayed the whole timebecause I liked it.” Threaded through their discussions of the demonstration was the notion of interaction with real peoplewith different ideas, different lives. Their composition of a Park(ing) Day awakened them to a fundamentally different socialposition and horizon for social action available through sophisticated, collaborative crafting of information.

This important social positioning was evident much later in the semester after the students had developed a thesisbut not yet drafted anything. A newspaper editor and city council member were invited to a class meeting to discuss thewriting project. Their years of experience, political authority, and positions may have been intimidating to UFC students,who struggled to articulate a clear reason for their role or relevance in sparking a public debate over the use of public space.Terri’s response turned the tide in the discussion: “We received a lot of input on the banner at Park(ing) Day. We compiledthose ideas. They provide a jumping off point. Our purpose has evolved somewhat from there, but the goal would be to sharethat.”

Prehistory of their article writing was not a flat terrain of brainstorming. Through the guidance (and much backchannelorganizing) of the instructor, the problem posing and solving process precipitated the construction of shared viewpoints,which led to shared tasks, which, in turn, led to the necessity of strategic digital communication beyond the classroom. Asimportantly, Park(ing) Day is a composition occurring in the prehistory of other writing that altered the consciousness ofcourse participants by awakening their interest in seeing and responding to problems through communicative action.

Intentional teacher assistance

Students’ pathways to necessary writing are unpredictable, yet observable. Teachers are vital to the process of listening toand coordinating appropriate stimuli for individuals and groups of students. Listening is not passive; it positions a teacheras responsible for a local system of assistance (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988) tied to cultural goals for learning. For Dylan thatmeant asserting, from the beginning of the course, that, “If the goal is to get everybody on the same page, I’ll allow the timeit takes to do this. This conversation is great because what does it take for us to get on the same page?” Additionally, heinterjected comments such as, “We’re talking about this without saying what it is” as a meta-discursive layer to help studentscommunicate effectively in early phases of the development of their community. In terms of scientific concepts, he stimulateddistribution of the concept on which their divergent argumentative perspectives depended (i.e., commodification). Crucially,several students responded by providing examples based on their own argument constructs that scaffolded the generalizedconcept. In terms of bridging the practical gap between literacies desired and the products required by a task, Dylan’s asideto Maria—“I have a shit ton of stuff to help you think about that”—targeted literacy supported at the moment at which newliteracy became socially important to Maria and the group.

The data suggest that changes in student arguments were co-mediated by sustained teacher facilitation, peer interac-tions, collective action, and literacy development. Eryn’s comments below, collected two weeks apart, point to a changingconception of social problems and engagement. They demonstrate the importance of teacher facilitation. The last in a stringof discussions about credibility as community organizers and the geography of hunger shows Eryn accepting a nuanced,moral version of community engagement predicated on dialog:

I was thinking that if you’re going the wrong direction from oppressed to oppressor, the best you can do is to initiatethe dialogue, not really be a leader of the oppressed, but be part of that dialogue. That was my main concern, readingthat. He writes a lot against the oppressed becoming the oppressor, but it’s important: walking a fine line betweeninitiating a dialogue and being a leader.

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Over the course of two weeks, something happened. Eryn originally repudiated her right to participate based on a sincef humility and lack of credibility:

I am from the suburbs: You don’t see blatant social problems; we don’t frame them in terms of social problems. It’sreally hard unless you come from the inner city, unless you come from classic social problem areas, to make a genuinedifference, because otherwise it’s always you imposing your ideas on society, a kind of really idealistic endeavor.

n the interim her argumentative constructs futility and privilege were challenged from all sides. The class read about the rolef community organizing in social change (Freire, 1970; Horton & Freire, 1990), planned a community engagement events,nd confronted the arguments head on. John responded, “I want to apologize. The suburbs are a social problem in and ofhemselves: They isolate things.” And then,

Eryn: Well, I was thinking along the lines of hunger.

John: But it’s all connected, the readings all connected. Our built environment encourages us to stay in the car, stayin the house without experiencing the things in between.

Aaron: But she’s getting at something, right? Coming from one area to another, even if they [activists] want somethingdone, it’s a difficult thing to negotiate.

Terri: I agree that it’s hard to negotiate, but it’s a hard world. You can’t help who you are, where you came from, howrich your parents were. But once you have awareness of things, you do have a choice.. Your community is going to bewherever you choose to be active and engaged. That’s my inspiration.

Dylan: But your point—the point is that we’re talking about this. From all our positionalities, we have these blinders.I’m like Satan in a lot of areas. . .. I just listen.

he instructor used potent rhetoric to validate the group’s inquiry into their contingent credibility as community organizers,onfirming the group’s dismantling of Eryn’s argument but also defending the humility that inspired it.

The effectiveness of dialog in stimulating concept development depended on the teacher’s broader facilitation of theourse. As an argumentative construct, the notion of dialog as morally superior approach to community engagement man-fested themes found in required reading, peer critiques of her prior conceptions, and of the teacher-facilitated dialogicrchitecture of the course.

iscussion

Prehistory of writing takes into account the cultural and historical setting in which writing became a possible solution to aroblem, in which problems were conceptualized prior to that, and so on backwards to organization of the particular groupshat made up the communities in which problems were later posed and tasks eventually set. Social tasks are increasinglyikely to incorporate composition out of school, but unfortunately, even though the amount of writing in school has increased,he diverse social purposes of writing expressed in conceptions of 21st century literacies remain largely out of view there.rehistory offers a way of thinking about what needs to be protected. Attention to the prehistory of writing in the contentreas opens teachers, students, and researchers to the broader literacy demands of civic participation, entrepreneurship, theorkforce, and personal life.

Different argumentative constructs projected different causes, opponents, audiences, and horizons of conceivable action.articipants expressed belief that persuasive and informational writing was their best option for maximizing the impactf their work as a class. Their composition process shows them deliberating over how to spin informal survey data theyollected during their first initiative, how to represent the initiative itself, and how to link events narratively in order toreate the illusion of momentum.

The interactional processes that constitute writing’s prehistory involve contests over ideological common ground androvide multidimensional scaffolds for acquisition of disciplinary literacies. To listen to collaborative composition as it ‘growsp’ in other modes can help produce strong rationales for teaching 21st century literacies. Literacy researchers are keenlyware of the importance of multiple, multimodal, and digital literacies to this process, but the supersession of skill-and-drillpproaches to content area and language arts writing, which the 21st century classroom promises, calls for new ways ofearning about writing and learning to write. Following the multiliterate interactions of students dramatizes the awakeningf skills such as persuasive writing that are in a process of maturing (Vygotsky, 1987). Like followers on Twitter and blogs,eachers who follow such processes have tremendous opportunities to influence the exchange and refinement of argumentshat may engender writing.

This listening project, with its repeated argumentative exchanges and tasks incorporating digital composition, evokeshe Vygotskian spiral model of development, in which a person passes the same point (e.g., using a particular argumentative
onstruct) over time at two different qualitative levels of understanding and authority (Vygotsky, 1987). Following thatidely arcing spiral back inward toward its center leads to identification of the factors separating one revolution from therevious. The question becomes what happened here that qualitatively shifted the orbit outward, into new modes andorizons of action?


The data suggest that developing shared ways of seeing problems led to setting tasks for themselves that incorporatedcomplementary 21st literacy practices. The data do not support the romantic notion that students are more productive with-out teacher guidance. Instead, teacher modeling and coaching coincided in many examples in the data with participants’leaps forward, both in conceptual and literacy development. The discussion is not a contest between pedagogical models,but rather an investigation of the phenomenon of writing’s prehistory. The data suggest that prehistory is a crucial domainfor the application of 21st century literacies. This finding is significant from the standpoint that teaching involves awak-ening and arousing faculties already in a state of maturing. According to Cole, this point is Vygotsky’s most important andleast understood: Effective teaching accelerates biological development. That’s why children “play a head taller” than theirdevelopmental stature in a rule based game. And that’s why prehistory is so vital in 21st century literacies education. Inthe prehistory the new and broad possibilities for literate action hailed by everyone in the field become available. The datasupport that intentional literacy and conceptual instruction strengthens participation in strategic communication practices.

It is possible to distinguish three processes awakened in this multiplayer discursive negotiation. First, participants’ verbalefforts to realize a conceptual framework make up activity settings in which student interaction becomes part of an overallsystem of assistance (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988). Contemporary problems and communication infrastructure are likely tomediate systems of assistance that cultivate 21st century literacies. Second, arguments change as they become sharedtools for collaborative knowing and problem seeing. These arguments shape possible solutions. The collaborative context ofthis negotiation process ensures that group members are highly likely to consider effective digital communication sociallynecessary. Third, just as necessary tasks are likely to make reading and writing necessary in ‘written’ worlds, the use of 21stcentury literacies in a problem-oriented curriculum can mediate qualitative shifts in the kinds of social tasks that are takenup by students. For language and literacy educators, the effective use of preferred literacy tools is all that is required. But thedata suggest that authentic engagement in 21st century literacies is a process of awakening. Like a snowball effect, spiral,or viral video, 21st century literacies qualitatively expand their reach in every category as they are applied.

To incorporate authentic, collaborative, interdisciplinary projects into a content area course, instruction must make senseof 21st century literacies. Are the component practices of 21st century literacies skills that can be taught in relation to highlyexplicit problems? Can they be translated into conventional school assignments? Must students identify with or connecta particular group to adopt 21st century literacies? In this study, community, communication, and representation wereinterwoven constantly, making it impossible to imagine engagement in 21st century literacies except as means of crossingboundaries, building networks, working together, and persuading target audiences. But that is plainly the result of theirnegotiation of shared purposes. Awaken maturing skills like writing to serve important social purposes (Vygotsky, 1987)requires altering activity settings to extend goal-oriented co-construction of knowledge (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988) thatmakes literate leaps forward necessary. Understanding how to align group interaction, problem identifying, and responsivestudent action with literacy goals aptly describes the responsibility of teachers of 21st century literacies.

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