I paused mid-step. A red-bellied bird had just hopped in front of me and she too had suddenly frozen in her tracks. In her beak hung a long, droopy piece of grass and a short, thin stick. We eyed each other. A cool April breeze whipped around the busy street corner. She took another hop forward balancing the items she had gathered for her nest. I reached for my phone to take a picture. I already had my 140-character tweet in mind. And she was gone.

It may seem like a stretch at first, but my thought in that moment was a comment Sid Dobrin casually made in a presidential session at CCCC 2011: “Writing is making stuff.”

Here on a fresh Spring morning a bird was composing.

Her tools? Her beak and ingenuity. Her medium? This piece of grass and a yellowed stick. Birds, like writers, are bricoleurs (or if you’re hip to the scene, writers are DIY warriors—prime examples deviantART and CC). When we “make stuff” via writing, we aren’t making from scratch. We have been collecting bits and scraps from language, experience and idea. Blogger Mark Kerstetter poses the following:

Writing as Bricolage
Cutting and pasting, the use of found text, the willingness to use any type of discourse whatsoever, a complete disregard for genre and a love of the hybrid text—these are some of the features of the bricloeur as writer. She will read any kind of text or listen in on any conversation for no other reason than love of language.

And in addition to language, the 21st Century writer/composer/bricoleur has access wider range of media  and modes of communication (e.g. image, text, video, sound, color) than ever before, and the digital tools that make the act of bricolage (the collection, mixing, revising, repurposing) with that media easier and more accessible than we have yet known. Just in this one blog post, I have copied and pasted links and text, resized and edited images, searched and gained access to over 19 different websites, IMed with a colleague who then did an index search of her digitized notes—all of which I have drawn from to compose this post.

Unlike the birds, as 21st Century bricoleurs, we don’t just have our beaks and ingenuity as tools, and our media is not just limited to that which we can spot and then carry in a short flight from our nests.

How have you digitally bricolaged today?

In our forthcoming book, Developing Writers: Teaching and Learning in Digital Age, Richard Andrews and I explore the affordances of 21st Century composition the modes, media, tools and sociality of communication in a digital age, and what these affordances mean for the teaching and learning of composition.

We suggest that in addition to linguistic elements of writing, developing writers grow in their experiences using and navigating multiple modes, and that our schooling assessment, policy and curriculum must adapt and encompass the these aspects of growth. Below is a list (from our book) of some of these areas not yet addressed in most curricula:

• understanding the affordances, and the communicative and interpretive possibilities of various modes, e.g. writing, video, sound, diagram, artistic rendering;
• facility with and adaptability to tools for creating multiple modes;
• telescoping in to compose within a single mode and expanding out to compose, position and layer several modes together;
• drawing on modes other than linguistic to complement in a variety of positions in relation to the written word;
• transduction – engaging in decisive changes from one mode to another;
• remixing and appropriating existing communicative messages in multiple modes, i.e. using an image within a film or a section of speech in a song.

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