Cursive, really? This is not your grandmother's third grade

Once again there's a bill in our state to mandate cursive writing instruction in school. Our third graders who take high-stakes tests with the risk of potential grade retention are already tasked with elementary curricula increasingly filled with test content to prepare them for test-taking. Should precious curricular time be spent on handwriting practice when teachers have difficulty squeezing in core subjects like social studies and science?
Nationally, there is widespread agreement that academic subjects and new literacies take precedence over pretty penmanship: in the new Common Core State Standards adopted by 45 states including Indiana, keyboarding is included; cursive is not. Forward-looking districts are equipping students to read, write, produce, and publish on mobile technologies, making the decision to prepare children to function with 21st century literacy tools. In this environment, the time-consuming enterprise of cursive writing instruction seems quaint at best, falling into the nice-if-we-had-the-time category.
Apparently, one can be pretty successful with minimal cursive skills. Look at  Jack Lew, the US secretary of treasury nominee who may soon be signing all our money. How long did it take him to master this signature?

Think of play as a 21st century literacy

The definition of literacy is evolving to include multiple ways of interacting with, transmitting on, and navigating across screens and other media, including films, video games, and smart phone applications. We don’t just read and write printed words on a page of paper; we now blog, podcast, text message, video-record, photo-edit, and otherwise manage complex combinations of print, sound, image, and animation as we send texts across vast social networks. These digital texts are not individually-authored manuscripts, rather they are multimedia co-productions shared with an interactive and collaborative audience. We tweet for 140 characters but in larger conversations that reply, build upon, and echo each other in order to create shared understandings.

Play creates the same kind of shared and interactive text as children work together to create and maintain a cohesive play narrative. Whether playing house or playing school, all the players contribute to the emerging script. The ideas here are openly under construction as children work together to make a played text. Our kindergartners will be 21st century citizens who very likely will need to be experts at collaborating and inventing together...with literacies we cannot yet imagine.

In Playing Their Way into Literacies, I argue that we need early literacy policies that encourage children to play into their future literacies rather than policies that play it safe by shrinking the curriculum to fit the tiny bubbles on standardized tests.