I’m pretty excited about this. Clive Thompson writes in Wired Magazine 17.09 about Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, and the Standford Study of Writing.

“[Lunsford] has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples — everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

“‘I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,’ she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing out ability to write. It’s reviving it – and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.’

“The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. …

“We think of writing as either good or bad. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.”

I think it’s fair to say that there’s some tension between the breadth of the vision in The New Zealand Curriculum and the government’s crusade for literacy and numeracy, which has seen something of a narrowing of focus and funding in the education sector.

What I’ve heard said in some circles is that we’re not leaving the curriculum behind, rather that students need literacy and numeracy to access the curriculum. But how about teaching the curriculum to teach literacy and numeracy? Using the curriculum to genuinely engage with students’ strengths and interests to support literacy learning?

There’s a history of educational resource development across government departments, which serves to advocate for their work and the wider curriculum. Let’s hope it continues – I think it can both support the crusade and the curriculum.

To help out, here’s a video by Professional Daniel Willingham on why teaching content is teaching reading. (Thanks to Artichoke for the link over twitter.)