Abstract:
Children are part of a global economy that interacts with a variety of media. When unusual ways of writing, beyond what was being used in school began to creep into the classroom, it was timely to ask, “what resources do children use for writing at school and how do they use them?’ The study is framed by Wenger’s (1998) view of learning as situated within communities of practice. The framework was applied to understand the resources that children use for their writing. What resources the participants used, and the way the participants used the resources allowed them to create narratives that reflected their position within the writing community. The interpretive, qualitative study allowed for an in depth consideration of the community of writing practice. Eight students aged from 9 – 11 years discussed their media consumption and their literary involvement. The teachers of the students were consulted over the students’ writing practice within their classrooms. The children were observed creating collaborative narratives, first as handwritten texts and then as computer-composed texts. Follow up semistructured interviews about the two writing sessions revealed a range of schooled and unschooled resources that the different participants of the writing community used. The findings showed different students within the writing community used different resources. Students close to traditional writing at school wrote within traditional media resources and there was little trace of digital affordances. The group at the edge of the writing community used few traditional schooled resources and worked with a range of digital resources to write both narratives. A third group co-habited texts, they used both schooled and digital resources to create dual print and visual texts. What all the groups had in common however, was a narrow range of genre models as a resource for writing narratives. Two implications of the study suggest a need to cultivate knowledge and use of traditional literature resources. The second implication is that teachers and schools need to open up their practice and engage more with the media and modes their pupils and the rest of the world are interacting with outside of school.