“...write about something that matters.”

Maker affords us the opportunity to involve students in activities and projects where they create real things that matter to them, as creations, and then, before, during, and after those processes, they write about and reflect on what’s going on. Often the final product of their reflection may not be a written text, but along the way to a video or an audio presentation there are many pieces and parts of writing and its processes.

A skeptic’s question – “Where’s the writing in that?” – prompted much reflection on the particulars of those pieces. The organizational thinking, not just of linear ordering but of logistical coordination, which goes into the completion of authentic project-based learning opportunity is a writing process. The conversation and confrontation that create the sea of talk on which working in a group depends is essential to the winnowing process which allows some things to float to the surface and other insights to sink into irrelevance.

Perhaps most important, the selection of which elements to include and how they are organized and presented as a communication product afford a context for teaching genre awareness and meta-cognition about writing as a multi-layered and social activity. Our students need to navigate in a world of poly-modal inputs, and to see themselves as critics and creators, not just consumers, in this world.