National Writing Project

Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom

Edited by Anne Herrington, Kevin Hodgson, and Charles Moran (National Writing Project and Teachers College Press, 2009)

List price: $26.95
NWP's Price: $18.00

How has the teaching of writing changed in the 21st century? In this innovative guide, teachers share their stories, successful practices, and vivid examples of their students' creative and expository writing from online and multimedia projects such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, electronic poetry, and more.

The book also addresses assessment: How can teachers navigate the reductive definitions of writing in current national and statewide testing? What are teachers' goals for their students' learning—and how have they changed in the past 20 years? What is "the new writing"? How do digital writers revise and publish? What are the implications for the future of writing instruction?

Editors Anne Herrington, Kevin Hodgson, and Charles Moran of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project have gathered a set of contributing authors from public, independent, rural, urban, and suburban schools and from writing project sites across the country. Whether writing instructors embrace digital literacy now or see the inevitable future ahead, this groundbreaking book, appropriate for elementary through college-level teachers, will both instruct and inspire.

"Too often school writing bears little resemblance to writing beyond the classroom. Not so in Teaching the New Writing. Regardless of grade level, each teacher-author presents challenges to those of us who would 'teach' and 'test' today's student. On every page, the contributors remind us that multimodal digital writing is here to stay."

Gail E. Hawisher, University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign

About the EditorsAnne Herrington, professor, Department of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and site director, Western Massachusetts Writing Project; Kevin Hodgson, sixth grade teacher at the William Norris Elementary School, Southampton, MA, and technology liaison for Western Massachusetts Writing Project; and Charles Moran, professor emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and former site director, Western Massachusetts Writing Project.

© 2023 National Writing Project