English Teacher Finds Digital Age Engages Student Interest, Literacy
Contact: Dave Boardman, (207) 649-9863; George Manlove, (207) 581-3756
OAKLAND, Maine — When two students with disabilities at Messalonskee High School in Oakland, Maine, wanted to raise awareness about the lack of accessibility in their school, they made a video. Within 24 hours, hundreds of students, teachers and even the school board had seen it.
“It made 300 students instantly aware of something about which they didn’t have a clue,” says Dave Boardman, an English teacher at Messalonskee who is pursuing a Ph.D. in education literacy at the University of Maine. “They convinced 12 adults that there had been a major oversight. The school board made a decision and a guarantee to fund automatic door openers last year. They couldn’t have done that with an essay.”
Boardman, a former newspaper reporter, is a big proponent of digital age writing and communication. He recently was named one of 12 curators for the National Writing Project’s new “Digital Is” website, a collection of resources, questions, answers, latest thinking about writing, pedagogy and what it means to write digitally in today’s world.
Federally funded and supported by foundations, corporations, universities and K–12 schools, the National Writing Project is a network of more than 200 institutions dedicated to improving the teaching of writing nationally. The Maine Writing Project, based at UMaine, is an affiliated site with more than 300 teachers, professors and others working statewide to improve the learning and writing lives of Maine students and teachers.
“Technology is not only influencing the teaching of writing, but the writing itself,” says Boardman, who has worked with the Maine Writing Project for seven years. “Digital writing is writing what could be totally different genres than the traditional word-based essay. It can be writing without words, with images, with music. I think there are so many possibilities.”
That broad spectrum gives a voice to all students, including those who resist traditional forms of writing, he says. Students tell Boardman that the Internet enables exciting new avenues of self-expression — in their own words.
Boardman, who received a 2006 Instructional Technology Educator of the Year award from the Association of Computer Technology Educators of Maine, says the technological creativity available to students today is a personal palette for storytelling.
“Nearly anything that people do is a story of some type, whether writing about something that has occurred or will occur,” he explains. “I try to teach students that life is a series of stories. Kids can do incredible things today with cell phone cameras and images, whether they create them themselves or find them on the Internet. With YouTube, we’re seeing peoples’ stories in different ways.”
A UMaine Today magazine article has additional details about Boardman’s work.