A Foreword About a Foreword
In his preface to this collection, David Bloome asserts that “While the dominant way of reading scholarly works is in terms of an ‘argument’ structure, we need to be careful about such readings because perhaps we may give too much power to and have too much faith in ‘rationality,’ and we may overlook other ways of reading.” With this thought in mind, the DALN’s methodological challenges are inherently political as we argue for its value in shaping our collective and contingent knowledge about literate practice through narrative methods in both the data collection and data representation process. For Bloome, and for us, people are more than data, however, and an emphasis on narratives allows for a level of reciprocity for which feminist researchers have long called, allowing the voices of our subjects to be heard.
Within our exhibit, narrative also allows our voices as teacher-scholars to be heard, to tell a story of our literate lives that we do not get to share in as much detail in traditional accounts of research results. In this way, the DALN has the potential to privilege certain methodologies (narrative, auto-ethnography) over others. As Bloome stresses, narrative itself privileges “the particularities of people’s lives; and in this case, the particularities of their lived literacy histories.”
Despite these “particularities,” and the potential for “exploding the framing” of reporting research results, a significant methodological challenge we face is balance among these stories, including the stories we tell here. How do the inclusive goals of the DALN actually play out in practice; how can we foster a multi-vocality in terms of who is represented in the archives; and who is able, via various forms of literacy, to represent themselves?
We must address these questions in order to harness the power of the DALN to move beyond a cohort of digital literacy specialists talking only to each other and to genuinely reach out to our non-specialist colleagues. Indeed, we must explode and re-deploy methodological frameworks and data collection methods to bridge the gap, as Bloome suggests, between localized literacy practices and more global theories of literacy that may continue to inadvertently position storytellers at the margins, rather than at the center.
For that reason, our exhibit foregrounds this concept of “re-positioning,” taking Bamberg’s original concepts of localized vs. standardized relationships between narrators and audiences. We rely upon feminist theory and method to privilege the local and ultimately to align with Bloome’s shift away from reading and writing literacy histories as “coherent,” “rational” master narratives that don’t mesh with our lived, “unruly” experiences as feminist teachers, or the literate lives of the students we work with and learn from.
Introduction
The continuing work of Selfe and Hawisher (Literate Lives, 2004) has chronicled in narrative form the technological literacy acquisition of women faculty and students from a range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, grounding that acquisition in the material conditions that have enabled or constrained access for individuals and the subgroups to which they belong. In much of our own feminist work, we have called for digital learning environments to become more egalitarian spaces for all students, regardless of gender, and for teachers to employ mentoring as opposed to mastering models of digital literacy acquisition (Haas, Tulley, and Blair, 2002). These approaches also enable students to experiment with multimodal literacies and develop digital identities and in so doing create cultural perspectives that posit technology not as a male enterprise (AAUW) but rather as a cultural resource to which all citizens and all educators have easy, unmitigated access.
Similar to Nancy Naples (2003), we strongly believe that feminist research must concern itself not only with method but also with politics, paying “explicit attention to the social relations manifest in women’s everyday activities” (p. 94). As technofeminists, we have drawn heavily upon narrative as a methodology for generating knowledge about how and why women and other groups rely upon technology in their daily lives. For us, narrative provides that sturdy thread that enables students, teachers, and citizens to share their lived experiences that might otherwise be marginalized. Indeed, such narratives have the potential to resist cultural stereotypes and to document the ways experiences are inevitably filtered through differences such as race and ethnicity, class, sexuality, and generation. How we capitalize on that potentiality rests in a theoretical lens that challenges us to ponder: “What is ‘acceptable’ research methodology?” and “What does feminist research . . . look like?” (Blair & Tulley, 2007, p. 305). Even more specifically, this lens encourages us to explore the ways digital literacy narratives can shape some of the philosophical and pedagogical choices of women, including our own as three feminist educators who have consistently worked together and learned from each other.
The lens of feminist research also shapes our understanding of narrative analysis. Bamberg’s (1997) work identifies narrative positioning as a way of establishing a relationship between narrators, between narrators and audiences, and finally between the narrators and themselves in relation to storytelling. An important implication of his analytical framework, however, is located in its potential emphasis on power relationships, articulated by narrators through language. In applying his own linguistic framework to a series of examples, Bamberg includes a teenager’s account of sexual identity and two women’s accounts of difficult pregnancies. Although Bamberg implicitly acknowledges in both narratives a type of power differential between an adolescent narrator and her mother (in the teenager’s account) and between a localized context and the “master narrative” of the “normal” pregnancy (in the two women’s narratives), his linguistic emphasis privileges the structure of the stories at the expense of the material conditions and cultural contexts that serve as the impetus for the stories themselves.
Nevertheless, as technofeminist teacher-scholars, we see much potential in Bamberg’s concept of positioning. With that thought in mind, we ask two additional questions: What does a feminist lens enable us to see as digital literacy researchers? How does such a lens foster a repositioning that better acknowledges the material conditions mediating literacy acquisition in ways that empower some groups and disenfranchise others? Such a repositioning, similar to Bamberg’s framework, requires a heuristic that foregrounds the specific historical and contemporary power dynamics that contribute to the narrative and allow for the story to be heard. Although a range of questions might serve in this context, the following considerations are important first steps in analyzing any set of narrative artifacts and their specific cultural contexts through a feminist lens:
- How does feminist repositioning refocus the analysis of literacy narratives from a global to a local perspective to acknowledge ideological and material differences between institutions and individuals?
- Whose voices are privileged within a narrative? How are such voices positioned as insiders or outsiders? To what extent are women’s voices, and those of other cultural groups, privileged or marginalized?
- What power dynamics exist between literacy sponsors and the recipients of such sponsorship? What is the role of mentoring, and how might such mentoring be positioned as feminist?
- What roles do feminist researchers/educators themselves play in the positioning of the narrative form? Of literacy narratives, more specifically?
- How do the affordances of new media literacies shape the ability of these narratives to be shared and potentially transform our approaches to literacy education?
This exhibit asks a number of these questions across a series of narratives within the DALN collection to theorize the ways in which digital artifacts provide faculty and students with opportunities to articulate experiences that might otherwise be marginalized and to balance the emphasis between global and local narratives about literacy acquisition in our own field. In order to frame feminism’s role in addressing these questions within the context of computers and writing research, Kris Blair first foregrounds the joint dialogue that evolved from her interview of Gail Hawisher and Hawisher's interview of Blair. These initial narratives help articulate the literate lives of technofeminist teacher-scholars, stressing how their early emphases and the goals that inspired them not only have shaped the field’s history but also have opened spaces for the current forms of technofeminist pedagogical choices demonstrated in both Tulley’s and Denecker’s work, respectively.
Specifically, Christine Tulley describes how technology and feminism intersect in an introductory gender studies class, using the digital video “Writing about Boys” and the audio file “Music Story” as tools to explore rich narratives on dating, gender roles, and as tools for examining how and where print, musical, and digital literacies intersect. Similarly, Chris Denecker explores the spaces where feminism, technology, and culture dwell in order to reflect upon the power of digital literacies to inform and to affect an appreciation and understanding for America’s slave past. The video, “Language as an Expression of Culture,” and the audio narrative, “Reading and Motherhood,” represent these spaces and suggest that feminist pedagogies need not be “confined” to the classroom (Ronald & Ritchie, 2006) but, instead, may occur organically in a multitude of settings.
Despite the differences in content and methodological approach in these respective sections, an emphasis on repositioning and on re-reading the narratives within a feminist framework unifies these sections and juxtaposes women’s stories with larger historical, material, and even academic contexts, contexts which shape both the development and subsequent interpretation of narrative. Each of the discussions in this exhibit focuses on “women whose literacy stories provide connection to the past and to the present as well as contemplation of the future,” as Chris Denecker notes in her section. For the women featured in these stories, from Gail Hawisher and Kris Blair, to Liz Rohan and Paige Panter, and finally Hazel Williams and Jessie Blackburn, gender, race, and other social markers inform literacy acquisition. To articulate these connections among the women's stories featured in our exhibit, we in some instances model a structural analysis of visual, aural and other modalities (in ways similar to Bamberg’s original work) but align this approach with a cultural analysis that informs our disciplinary understanding of literacy as simultaneously personal, social, and political. In this sense, literacy is always relational, the result of interactions among individuals, texts, and contexts.
Ultimately, we rely upon these particular DALN narratives to help us articulate the powerful role of such literacy histories. Our application of a feminist lens through which to analyze the narratives contributes to the shaping of an ongoing disciplinary emphasis on both transformative digital pedagogies and the reciprocal mentoring models required to sustain those pedagogies. Finally, our exploration of these narratives also represents our own technological experiences and values as women and as members of the field of teacher-scholars working within and outside the academy. Specifically, as former students of Blair, both Tulley and Denecker have fashioned identities as technofeminists within a larger teacher-scholar context. Likewise, just as Blair offered a space in which to shape their “stories,” Tulley and Denecker now reflexively provide their students opportunities to explore and fashion stories of their own and of the world through multimodal and digital literacies. Exploring the DALN narratives as feminist researchers is one way to facilitate this process.
Special thanks to Dayna Lessig, Megan Hall, and the Student Coaches at The University of Findlay's Student Technology Center for technical and design support.