“In our world—the writing world—authority always rests in the hands of the reader, who can simply close the book and choose another. The most fashionable novels and the greatest poems cannot force you to read themselves. Authority always belongs to the reader.”
Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences about Writing
Introduction
What does it mean to communicate meaningfully in an age of instant messages, emojis, voice notes, Artificial Intelligence responses, and autocorrected thoughts? As a fifth-grade teacher in a technology-driven classroom, I have observed how easily students interact with their devices —yet how rarely they pause to consider the power, purpose, and impact of their communication. I created this unit, Voices from the Renaissance: Letters Through Time, to engage my students in exploring the rhetorical and historical dimensions of communication through an interdisciplinary practice, combining historical analysis, writing, and performance.
This unit integrates Social Studies, English Language Arts, and Science, offering opportunities to engage in critical thinking, cultivate historical empathy, and develop a strong personal voice. serves as a rich historical context in which to examine how individuals used language, image, and invention to persuade, document, and express the complexities of the human experience. As a period marked by intellectual awakening and artistic innovation, the Renaissance invites comparison to the present era--one in which students are surrounded by a multitude of tools for expression. However, unlike the deliberate and reflective communication practice of Renaissance thinkers, contemporary forms of expression are often marked by immediacy rather than intention. This unit encourages students to reflect on their communicative habits, drawing parallels between the past and present to promote greater awareness, purpose, and authenticity in how they use language and the intention to connect with others.
Drawing upon art, literature, and history, this unit invites students from diverse cultural backgrounds to write letters from the perspective of Renaissance figures, engaging with both historical content and rhetorical strategy. Reflecting on this process through a rhetorical practice reinforces the concept of interpersonal communication understood as a “transactional view...a complex, transactional process through which people create shared meanings through continuously and simultaneously exchanging messages.”1 This curriculum unit exploring written communication throughout human history will initially be planned for five weeks. It can be adjusted depending on the number of activities and interests of the students.
As a teacher, my role will be to facilitate for them to bridge the past and present, recognizing that powerful communication is both a skill and a joyful act of learning and self-expression.
The primary goal of this unit is then to help fifth-grade students build a strong foundation in written communication by introducing the basics of rhetoric and guiding them in expressing ideas with clarity and intention. As Mack Peter says:
“Rhetoric is a training in writing and delivering speeches... which became the principal form of higher education throughout the ancient world... Rhetoric manuals typically cover and connect an enormously wide range of doctrines, including the training of the memory, the use of voice and gesture, the ways to discover and present arguments, the arousal of emotions, self-presentation, selection of vocabulary, the organization of a speech, patterning of words and sounds within a sentence, metaphor, and allegory.”2
Using letters as both historical artifacts and creative tools, students will analyze authentic excerpts from Renaissance correspondence and create their own letters from the perspective of influential figures of the time. In doing so, they will explore the audience, tone, and purpose of a letter, while cultivating historical understanding and empathy. Through guided drafting and revision, students will improve the effectiveness of their writing and begin to understand the power of language in shaping experiences. By connecting writing to history and self-expression, the unit aims to make communication meaningful, creative, and engaging for young learners.
In tracing the historical dimensions of communication, this unit also opens the door to broader reflections on the evolution of expression, from the written word to the invention of the computer, itself a kind of modern Renaissance. The word Renaissance, meaning “rebirth,” derives from re- (again) and nasci (to be born), and is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary 3 as “the revival of art and literature under the influence of classical models in the 14th-16th centuries.” Just as the Renaissance marked the rebirth of intellectual inquiry and humanistic thought, the digital age—characterized by the rise of computing - represents a new rebirth in how we reason, communicate, and construct meaning.
Jonathan Sawday, in his book The Renaissance Computer, draws a compelling parallel between the intellectual explosion of the mid-fifteenth century and the information revolution of the late twentieth century. He writes:
The modern computer has a history which can be traced back at least to the seventeenth century... many associated with the information explosion.... were in many ways anticipated in the parallel explosion following the Gutenberg ‘revolution’ (Sawday, 2000, 29) 4.
Sawday explores how the Renaissance understanding of the human mind, shaped by thinkers like Milton, Descartes, and Hobbes, laid the groundwork for seeing humans – and later machines – as “reasoning engines” capable of computation. These ideas remind us that the tools we now take for granted – computers, algorithms, and digital communication – are extensions of intellectual traditions rooted in the Renaissance. In this sense, the classroom becomes not only a place to write historically, but also to reflect critically on the nature of thought and communication in our own age of technological rebirth.
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