The teaching of writing in the upper secondary school in the age of the internet and mass media culture

Abstract

This article considers the impact on the teaching of writing and the curriculum, of changes in culture associated with mass media and new means of communication such as the internet. It specifically focuses on the implications these changes might have for the ways in which writing is taught and practised in schooling today. The article is based on interviews with three Swedish upper-secondary school mother-tongue teachers and presents their views on how the writing situation has changed for their students. According to the teachers, the curriculum faces challenges from students’ access to and use of mass media culture and computer-mediated communications. For example, the teachers reported that students currently are less interested in grammar and spelling, and more interested in images and layout. Students also use what teachers consider to be plagiarism in their methods of communication. The article draws on media ecology to understand these reported changes in the sense that students are seen to develop new media practices involving several media-specific competences (Mackey, 2002) which gives them access to new ways of meaning-making in their acts of reading or writing. It is tentatively claimed that students may thus develop alternative notions of authors as well as texts, which affect their own view of text production in school. Other theoretical frameworks drawn on in the article include Habermas’ discussion of how the public and private sphere fuse and Ziehe’s (1989) perceptions of teachers as ‘relation workers’ in increasingly intimate school environments.