If you love writing and want to know more about the future of writing, then keep reading.
This post will discuss the importance of writing in our futures and hence focuses on alternative approaches in
regards to literacy. However, for starters, I think we can all agree that writing is one of the greatest inventions
of all time. Armed with the linguistic knowledge of the interconnectedness of words and phrases we, as humans, have the ability to interact and communicate in not only spoken language, but to correspond over written language. Hence, over the last few decades writing has played a major role in education.
However, writing has changed over the last years; it used to be only the writer, the idea that needed
to be expressed, a paper and a pen. Nowadays, you can either write on your phone, your computer, your laptop or your I Pad. Or if you prefer the classic and old-fashioned way, you can use an electronic typewriter or
simply a pen and paper. These days, the opportunities are endless. Our digitalized world has created
thousands of new ways to create meaning and to communicate with people from different cultures. One can
argue that it might even be exhausting and overwhelming to make a decision in regards to the sources. Topic
and tools and thus writing have become even more challenging and difficult. However, due to the constant
growth of technological innovations, the communication spaces have wildly grown and thus writing now
serves as an enabler to digital communication.
Think about it. Everything that is connected to digital communication takes place via writing.
When we use social media, for instance, we comment on each other posts, we write a blog, we discuss certain topics or we simply formulate a message, but we always use writing. Hence, writing will play an even
a more important role in the future.
So far we have come to the conclusion that writing, due to the constant and rapid development of technology,
will be an important skill in the future, which needs to be promoted. Moreover, digital communication has
opened up opportunities to communicate with friends and family all over the world and thus encourages
cross-cultural communication. Therefore, it could be argued that due to the increasing cultural, digital and
linguistic diversity of our society, new teaching and learning strategies are demanded.
For various reasons, it has become obvious that the changes in writing need to be reflected in our
educational system and that learning standards have to consider new forms of communication ( e.g social
networking). The new London Group dedicated itself to find a new approach to literacy pedagogy that they
call „multiliteracies“. Their aim is to respect the cultural, digital and social changes within our society and to
use these in order to form and create new educational standards. The mission of education is to ensure that
all students benefit from learning and thus enable them to participate in every realm of our society (culture,
economy, political life). In order to ensure what needs to be changed and transformed, we have to think about
the current approaches of literacy pedagogy.
When I look back at my school career, I remember that especially in the „Oberstufe“ we had to
read a lot of traditional literature (Shakespeare Othello/ Macbeth) and in general the books we read in school
were rarely modern literature. Furthermore, my teachers hardly ever included digital material in their lessons. From time to time we would watch a movie or listen to a dialogue on a CD in order to foster our listening comprehension. But we never worked with computers or laptops in order to improve our writing skills.
However, the last few years show, a remarkable tendency towards the usage of: podcasts, short films, graphic novels, movies, online learning platforms and creative video editing. Even though we use these digital
features on a daily basis and they have gained great importance in regards to our future, they are hardly
ever included in our learning environment.
To sum up, multiliteracies put the focus on newly needed skills and try to further encourage visual literacy, digital literacy, multimodal literacy, functional literacy and reflective literacy by taking into account current changes and developments in our society and thus seems to be a considerable approach for the
future of teaching writing.
