“I wrote to become part of that discourse community”: Developing writerly identity and agency in an online writing course

The acute phases of the Covid-19 pandemic precipitated, for many, an abrupt shift to digitally-mediated, fully-remote work and education; for others, remote work and education were already realities. As the pandemic dragged into its third year, there emerged increasing political and public appetite for a “return to normal” – which, for the many Australian institutions who offered few or no fully-digital classes before 2020, is figured as a return to pre-2020 on-campus operations. This goal is justified by a deficit framing of online education relative to in-person learning, eliding the strengths and affordances of learning in digital spaces. If we are to prepare students to write effectively, we need to take seriously the notion that writing is always in digital environments and harness the strengths of online writing instruction such as scalability and improved accessibility. In this article, we draw on a case study of a hybrid researched writing class to demonstrate how an online-first Writing About Writing pedagogy helped students build the confidence, flexibility and self-efficacy needed to establish distinctive writerly identities. This prepares students to write more effectively in novel and rapidly-changing contexts, and offers one approach for building a sustainable, effective, realistic culture of writing.