a shift from spectator to creator: a study of blog writing in a print and photo high school class

This article is a study of written blog texts from 12 third grade high school students produced during one academic year, commenting on their photos and artwork as part of their curriculum in the discipline Print and Photo. The article aims to capture a change in how the students position themselves as photographers in their blog texts from the beginning towards the end of the academic year. An initial hypothesis is that the students develop a disciplinary language throughout one year of writing about their photo activities. This hypothesis is the basis for the research question: Throughout one year of blogging, is there a change in the students’ writing with a focus on how they through resources in language construe a perspective on their role as participants in a discipline or profession? Analysis of the texts shows that there is a clear tendency to reduce constructions with forms of to be from the beginning towards the end of the academic year, whereas constructions with forms of to have increase in the same time span. This finding is detailed by analyzing one of the students’ texts, finding a shift from predominantly descriptive accounts of the images to using language to position themselves as active participants focusing on the process of composition. Examining the distribution of abstract versus concrete nouns in the same texts shows that the frequency of abstracts nouns stays the same whereas there is a reduced frequency of concrete nouns. These findings suggest a change in the students’ language from descriptions of elements in their photos into a particular kind of abstraction where the students discuss their photos in terms of how they compose the images. This change in language use suggests a shift in the students’ positions from spectators to creators.