Instagram and The Art of Making Sentences
After twenty-two years as a professional writer, my favorite part about writing is the art of writing a sentence. Many people struggle to understand how I can be a methodical one-draft writer and possess a fascination with writing a sentence. Such a fascination, in their estimation, lends itself best to a multi-draft writer, given a multi-draft writer composes more than one draft. They do not know what a methodical one-draft writer is, however. I probably spend as much time or more penning a piece as the average multi-draft writer. When I write, I view myself as an artist and prose stylist. For the past two weeks, I unpacked this view. Angela Stockman’s (2016) Make Writing: 5 Teaching Strategies That Turn Writer’s Workshop into a Maker Space helped me discover why a sentence captivates me: I love making one. Making a sentence is about discovery, uncovering possibilities. I surrender to the sentence, placing no demands on it, willingly permitting it to expose any reservations hindering complete vulnerability. Uncanny as my obsession with sentence making might be, I posit that exploring and documenting the process of making a sentence can improve one’s writing significantly. To animate sentence writing as making, to capture the grandeur, intricacies, and mysticism of making a sentence, I argue that employing Instagram as an intentional writing tool can facilitate these desires. Writing instructors should investigate Instagram’s potential to buttress student writing.
Instagram is a free social media platform. Many students and writing instructors are familiar with it outside of the classroom. The extant professional literature explains that teachers, professors, and students use Instagram in classrooms, but this literature provides little empirical evidence about how incorporating Instagram in instruction affects student writing performance. Although teachers and professors are increasingly using social media platforms in their writing instruction, more research is necessary to collect and analyze data to discover writing instructional practices and strategies yielding the best results. Without this evidence, many ELA teachers will hesitate to incorporate Instagram into their writing instructional praxis, given they lack evidence to justify its use. During a professional development session I led this week, I presented teachers with Instagram as a vehicle for inspiring students to compose various compositions. Many teachers doubted they would receive approval from their administrators to employ Instagram in their instruction, and they contended that the limited empirical evidence about its impact on student writing performance would not merit approval.
To gain administrators’ approval, I suggest ELA teachers articulate a plan for ensuring student safety for their incorporation of Instagram in their writing instruction. ELA teachers can create an Instagram account for each student, and this would allow them to monitor and address any inappropriate activity, including any inappropriate original posts and responses. Just as with any work students complete through extant approved software and technology, the existing school and classroom rules and expectations can govern the work students complete using Instagram. Safeguarding student safety is vital. Teachers can balance student safety and social media use in the classroom. To combat many administrators’ resistance to employing Instagram in instruction, teachers must begin serious discourses with administrators about safe and best practices for using social media. Administrators will not perceive these discourses favorably without well-written plans, procedures, and safe and best practices for student use of social media in the classroom. I continue to insist it must be ELA teachers who collectively advocate for such approval. In How We Think, John Dewey (1909/2019) wrote, “Our teachers find their tasks made heavier in that they come to deal with pupils individually and not merely in mass” (p. 1). Applying Dewey’s thought, I assert constructing articulate and thorough plans, procedures, and safe and best practices for student use of Instagram in the classroom is the most powerful way for teachers to “deal with pupils…in mass” and dramatically assuage administrators’ anxieties about it. This approach empowers teachers to unite in solidarity against administrators’ protectionist policies.
We, English instructors, have a critical window of opportunity to strengthen students’ love of making and writing sentences by embracing student use of Instagram in the classroom. When students employ Instagram to make a sentence, they can learn about sentences in ways more traditional methods and mediums do not afford. To allow unnecessary protectionist policies to bar students from the power of Instagram to fuel their writing skills is unacceptable. Teachers and administrators must stop relying on conservative practices and strategies and unleash the potential of unconventional approaches. Best practices and established instructional strategies were once uncommon. Liberate Instagram’s use in the classroom from being uncommon.
Antonio Maurice Daniels
Johns Hopkins University
Reference
Dewey, J. (2019). How we think. Anodos Books.
