Twittering Dante

Cracking Dante’s Inferno is a tough row to hoe for any high school student—but what if the reading assignment was conducted via Twitter?

The exercise “Twitter in Hell” was handed to some lucky seniors at University Laboratory High School at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, after reading the classic tome. Their mission? To write 140-character tweets describing each level in hell as if they were Dante writing to his beloved Beatrice. Steve Rayburn, the English teacher who assigned the exercise, says the kids took to the project immediately. 

It’s a far cry from the standard writing assignment, but to Kathleen Blake Yancey, the idea of twittering Dante makes sense. Young people today are actively engaged writers—they simply choose to do their composing using more dynamic, digital means, such as chatting on MySpace or texting over cell phones. In her opinion, it’s up to educators to capture that impulse in the work they do in school.

“In a world of writing tests, we want students to submit,” says Yancey, Kellogg H. Hunt Professor of English at Florida State University. “But the world of Web 2.0 is about participation.”

Yancey’s recent report, “Writing in the 21st Century,” which she compiled as past president for the National Council of Teachers of English, could serve as a study guide for those educators stumped by how to reengage students in the process of writing. 

Yancey believes it’s time for school systems to adapt and has challenged educators with three tasks to help steer the process: develop new models of writing, then design a new curriculum for students to support these models, and finally create ways for educators to actually teach this curriculum.

Librarians and teachers have certainly made inroads in bringing new models into writing classes. At Westlake High School in Austin, TX, students work on an annual Vietnam War project, researching names from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and e-mailing veterans’ family members to glean information for their profiles. Another class collaboratively built a series of online Cliffs Notes for David James Duncan’s The River Why, all using a wiki.

“It’s more of a meshing of reading and writing,” says Carolyn Foote, district and lead librarian at Westlake. “And more of this is happening in the library space, with [students] taking notes and then writing on a computer here.”

A recent UK study found that text messages can contribute to reading skills (See “Study: TMOT, Texting Can Help Reading Skills”). “People who read well are good at text messages, and [those who] text are good readers,” says Yancey. “That shorthand relies on a close association with sound and letters.”

But how to bring this new perspective to bear in the classroom? That’s sometimes a struggle, especially when teachers are faced with those assessments demanded by their districts and states. In other words, twittering Dante may be fun—but does it translate into higher SAT scores? Educators may need to find a way to make that happen. According to Yancey, schools must reconcile the need to test with the way young people communicate and write, or risk looking irrelevant to students.

“If we don’t make changes in the system,” she says, “then schools will have less relevance.”

Although Rayburn does not participate on Twitter himself, he says that 21st-century tools have the capacity to "reshape what we do in composition class." Interested in the Dante project? Although the accounts are presently inactive, check out dante1300, danteschmante, and hell_o_dante.