Kris Blair: Feminist (Re)Positioning: From the Global to the Local and Back Again
Privileged Voices
Certainly, the emphasis on narrative is not a methodology unique to our field. Consider, for example, Haswell and Liu’s collection, Comp Tales. In an attempt to define the academic labor of writing teachers across ranks and institutions, they collected teacher narratives (the discounted lore of Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition Studies) in written form. Speaking of the power of narrative, Bruner notes that “narrative solves no problems. It simply locates them in such a way as to make them comprehensible” (p. 72), forcing us to listen up and, as Selfe has advocated (1999) throughout her career, to “pay attention” to larger rhetorics of technology and ascertain who within these discourses are privileged and who may be excluded. Given Gail's and my own longstanding roles in the field, our voices are not marginalized perspectives. Our video narratives, however, afford us the opportunity to chronicle individual “tales” from the field as opposed to more global histories of presumed equal access to technology within and outside the academy. This approach may help in ensuring that the field of computers and writing does not lose sight of the contributions of women in a field largely developed and sustained by women who had to negotiate for access to digital composing technologies on behalf of their colleagues and their students.
Inevitably, our current theoretical frameworks and pedagogical practices have their roots in feminist principles of diversity, community, and collaboration. Despite these feminist connections, without the opportunity to reflect upon our pedagogical and political goals as a field in the ways that literacy narratives allow, we may actually reinscribe dominant voices and hierarchies we wish to subvert by presuming our goals and our methods are understood and shared. Thus, our shared interviews also focus on concerns about the field, a type of “What worries us about our community” similar to Inman’s original question. One of our major concerns is how, by emphasizing the pedagogical potential of the newer multimodal literacies of the Web 2.0 era, we may be talking to ourselves and privileging our own voices as a discipline.
"Perceptions of English Class" Audio File
(transcript)
Despite our field’s sustained emphasis on community, the efforts of digital composition teachers to foster multimodal literacy will require dialogue with colleagues in other disciplines about bridging the gap between what students do with technology and what educators do with technology. Part of this process includes an advocacy for diverse, inclusive literacy practices and tools (such as video, audio, and interactive Web 2.0 forums) that provide spaces in which students can theorize their relationships to the world and think critically about the role that technology plays in helping to articulate and mediate that relationship. As an excerpt from my own narrative concludes, both students and sometimes colleagues "have very traditional notions of what an 'English' class is supposed to be." Students, through conversation about how their digital communication practices are powerful forms of multimodal literacy, add their persuasive voices to ours as we seek to educate our colleagues.
Transformative Pedagogies and Political Action
Perhaps the greatest challenge to students’ developing multimodal literacies that are functional, critical, and rhetorical (Selber, 2004) is the charge that web-based communication is negatively impacting traditional alphabetic reading and writing practices (e.g., Carr, 2008, 2010). Lest we think that this challenge is not widespread, consider Jeffrey Young’s (2010) article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “College 2.0: Teachers without Technology Strike Back,” in which he interviews West Florida University English instructor Mark James, who has refused to use or allow students to use technology in his most recent literature course. In this article, several instructors testify to the benefits of both the chalkboard and the bluebook. For James, "We're preparing citizens that need to be able to communicate with each other” (online). This statement presumes that the privileging of alphabetic literacy in the academy is something that extends to workplace and community settings. We maintain that educators are largely ignoring and discounting the literate practices students bring to our classrooms, practices that, as James Gee (2005) has argued, fit “better with the modern, high-tech global world today’s children and teenagers live in than do the theories and practices of learning they see in school” (p. 5).
For the group of colleagues at Ohio State who have collaboratively developed the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, the archive
provides individuals with the chance to reflect on their reading and writing practices and values during a fundamentally important time of cultural transition, a period within which print literacies are increasingly giving way to digital literacies, when the mediation of paper and pen is increasingly replaced by the mediation of a computer screen, and when print words are being challenged by audio and video as modes of vernacular expression. (Selfe and The DALN Consortium)
In many ways our dialogue acknowledges that the sustainable modes of documenting and disseminating these narratives, which run counter to some larger cultural presumptions about literacy practices, are both digital and multimodal. Such a stance in our shared literacy histories has often positioned us as politically resistant to larger material and ideological structures, particularly those that presume that English faculty, in general, and female English faculty, specifically, remain outside the institutional discourse that governs the ways in which educational technology is deployed in academic settings.
"Ruining the Program" Audio File
(transcript)
Many aspects of Gail's technological literacy development can be read through this lens, particularly her chronicle of work with information technology professionals who attempted to limit students' use of tools such as HyperCard, an approach based purely on a consumption model of passive, reader-based access, because they feared students would “ruin” the program. Gail, in contrast, adopted a productive model that emphasized active, writer-based access. Through these early stories of resistance to dominant ideologies about technology use, Gail and others like her become models of transformation.