I’ve been following the discussion of the proposal for a technology plank on the WPA Outcomes Statement on the WPA-L and on Jeff’s and Collin’s blogs. As has been mentioned around, there is a sense of insiders and outsiders to this conversation. I’m an undoubtedly an outsider with little interest in being on the inside. As director of a professional writing program, I have little to do with first-year composition. Though my colleagues and I are committed to getting back to teaching FYC, a good part of our interest lies in preparing students entering our degree program.
The proposal and the discussion surrounding it identify some of the common goals associated with information literacy: conducting research online, evaluating sources, working with visual elements, using computers to compose writing, and so on. There’s also discussion of issues like information management (e.g. saving/organizing files) and basic computer knowledge (e.g., a basic understanding of computers and networks). Clearly some of this business is a matter for an Introduction to Computers type of course. Students do need to understand the technical matters of sending an e-mail, saving their files, and so on. I suppose it’s a local decision, depending on one’s students, to what is necessary.
However, I don’t see these technical matters as part of FYC. Instead it is an indication of the necessity of expanding the general education curriculum to address such matters.
Moreover, I think it will be very difficult for FYC to handle “technology” as long as it continues to conceive of it as an add-on to writing instruction.
As was noted elsewhere, it is somewhat of a cliché to remark that writing is a technology. And yet, here we have technology as separable in some regard from writing. Well, that’s ok. There are many technologies; they aren’t all writing technologies. The question here is how will we understand writing as a technological practice? Here the strategy would seem to suggest writing + some other technologies, where writing remains locked in a print-era mode. I think that will prove insufficient and ultimately unwieldy as technologies develop.
I imagine that the impulse of some in the WPA to propose a technology plank comes out of a concern that without it, FYC will continue along in a print mode and find itself in a crisis. If the majority of FYC wants to treat computer technologies as overgrown word processors and the Internet as a questionable research source for a print paper a student will write, then the discipline probably will end up in some crisis in the next decade. I don’t share that concern b/c I’m not entirely convinced that having the entire national bureaucracy of FYC crash and burn might not be the best route to some future mode of writing pedagogy. On the other hand, if the discipline manages to reform itself, that’s fine too.
So I can see the rhetorical strategy of adding a plank, as an easy way for others to conceptualize it, from deans and WPA’s to FYC instructors. However, I don’t think it is a practical way to address the challenge of emerging technologies.
The question then becomes, in my view, how do we detach writing, conceptually, from any specific technological-material context so that we may continue to teach and study “writing” even as those contexts change? Now, let me anticipate an objection and say first that I agree that writing practices must be understood within technological-material contexts, so at any one point one would always be studying writing within a those contexts, as well as cultural contexts.
However, I don’t think that problem needs to be addressed here. Instead I think you would want to write something like the following (and let me note that this is something for college administrators and not the way I would articulate for others in our field who should be more in the know). I would put this somewhere at the top of the outcomes statement rather than as a separate plank.
Computers, networks and other emerging technologies continue to reshape the role of writing in education, in the workplace, and generally across cultures. Much like any academic discipline shifts and develops as new knowledge and technologies are created, so FYC must respond to changes in writing practices. As technologies develop quickly, it is impractical to establish specific technology-related outcomes for FYC. Furthermore, the availability and implementation of technologies for an FYC program is generally defined by its institutional context and will often depend on the institution’s particular educational mission. In addition, the challenges of technology extend far beyond the purview of writing instruction, so the role of FYC must be shaped in collaboration with an institution’s other departments and programs.
That said, FYC programs must incorporate emerging technologies into the achievement of their learning outcomes and study the ways in which they call upon us to understand and practice writing in new ways. This knowledge must then be integrated into the FYC program as part of the ongoing development of writing instruction.
Link: Yellow Dog � Blog Archive � The Unbearable Confusion Over Technology.
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