Kris Blair: Feminist (Re)Positioning: From the Global to the Local and Back Again
Feminist Mentoring as Literacy Sponsorship
Despite the varied literacy practices of many of today’s “digital youth” (Alexander, 2006), many of our students do not always view texting, Facebooking, and tweeting as writing, and they can be skeptical of the use of these and other tools in the college-level writing classroom. Our continuing challenge is to help students and colleagues see that the integration of digital tools into our curriculum is not keeping them from learning to write or to read and to help them understand alphabetic literacy as one modality among others. Gail and I believe that alphabetic text is a modality most powerful when it is aligned with other modes and media to reach both academic and non-academic audiences. As Kitalong, et al. (2003) have argued, technological literacy narratives are useful in their ability to foster reflection “on how…attitudes and beliefs develop, both socially and individually” (p. 219). Such reflection certainly characterizes the stories Gail and I shared with each other. We were able to triangulate familial, cultural, and professional influences on our roles as technofeminist literacy sponsors. In responding to the question of whether she saw herself as a literacy sponsor, Gail describes herself as someone who has reached a stage of her professional career where she can individually and collaboratively foster digital literacy initiatives.
"Literacy Sponsor" Audio File
(transcript)
In revisiting the life-stories Gail and I shared that Saturday, I identified several common threads that unified us not only as members of the computers and writing community but also as individuals who benefitted from literacy sponsorship (Brandt, 1998) throughout our lives and careers. Both of us noted that we felt obligated as public intellectuals and as feminists to share with our colleagues, with students, and with communities outside our own. In Gail’s case, this obligation has led to her mentoring of participants in her ongoing teacher professional development with the National Writing Project. In my case, this obligation has led to outreach work with middle-school girls who participate in the Digital Mirror Computer Camp, a residential experience I have co-directed for the past four years with women graduate students enrolled in our doctoral program at Bowling Green State University.
These roles not only call for us to mentor colleagues, students, family, and friends but also open up the possibility for us, in turn, to be mentored by them, as they shift from primarily print to more integrated, multimodal literacy practices, share their stories about those shifts, and contribute to both teaching and research about multimodal composition. For instance, Gail shared the anecdote of her granddaughter using Gail’s iPhone to take a photo and then add it as a wallpaper on Gail’s phone. This story illustrates not only a wonderful way of using technology to build a bond but also an opportunity to better understand the literate practices of today’s youth, a perspective that Gee (2005) also enjoyed as he observed the video gaming habits of his own son.
"Wallpaper" Audio File
(transcript)
In this sense, both literacy sponsorship and mentoring are inherently reciprocal. We learn from students as much as they learn from us, bridging the gap not only between the generations but also between what students do with technology and how we teach them to utilize technology in the composing process. Although my portion of this collaborative exhibit does not specifically focus on classroom practice in the way that Christine and Chris emphasize, this reciprocity has shaped my role as a graduate educator. I have attempted to make my digital classroom a supportive safe space for students not only to experiment with digital tools but also as a place to reflect on their growth as educators. Often this reflection occurs in web-based technological literacy narratives that allow students not only to develop multimodal composing skills over time but also to chronicle their changes in attitude and aptitude. Thus, it’s fitting that Christine Tulley and Christine Denecker, as former students in my courses, have extended their initial work with digital literacy narratives in my classroom to their own classrooms and to their roles as researchers and administrators, enhancing our field’s understanding of the relationship between gender and/or ethnic identity and literate practice. Both Tulley and Denecker position DALN artifacts as multimodal evidence of how our literate lives are shaped by cultural and material forces, reinforcing the role of literacy narratives as the basis of transformative, feminist pedagogical practice.
Multimodal Narrative Affordances
As Hawisher and colleagues originally wrote in 1996,
The field of computers and composition has been successful because of the people active within that community…who have drawn others into their work, who have drawn others’ work into theirs, who have welcomed others into an intellectual collaboration. We recognize a possible danger, as the field ages…becoming larger and more heavily bureaucratized, less welcoming and supportive to teachers. (p. 284)
Aligning itself with feminist principles of inclusion, collaboration, and collaborative knowledge-making, the DALN can, in part, counteract this danger by providing a space within which students, educators, and citizens develop their understanding of what it means to be functionally, critically, and rhetorically literate. Ultimately, our literacy histories are personal and political. For educators, these narratives can constitute calls to action, reminders “to do a better job” (Hawisher, et al., 1996) in meeting the needs of those whose access to technology and literate practices have been negatively shaped by factors of class, race, age and gender, or the value placed upon their literate practices at home and in the classroom. Both Gail and I repeatedly acknowledge some of these factors in our lives, the emphasis on readings by our parents, as well our respective generations' access to and comfort with some technologies. What strikes me in “re-reading” these narratives, three years after their completion, is that our joint videos chronicle histories that are non-linear, despite our individual attempts to respond to a set of chronological questions about our literate lives. The traditional relationship between an interviewer and her subject frequently blurs in these two video interviews, and, as a result, two separate stories become one narrative about women working in the same field and women coming to technological literacy at the same historical moment. Our narratives are unintentionally intertwined, a reflection of the feminist community of teacher-scholars that Gail, Cindy, and others have helped to establish. Although such an historical and narrative layering is certainly possible in print--consider the multivocal, hypertextual layout of the Hawisher et al. 1996 history itself--video and other multimodal technologies afford a type of interconnectedness and intertextuality that differs from print. In this way, the narratives we profile in this exhibit foreground technofeminist approaches to literacy as a series of relationships between students and teachers and among women, as well.
As Cindy Selfe notes at the end of my narrative about the joint dialogue with Gail, "I like the fact that you did it together." From a feminist (re)positioning, a univocal perspective is not possible or desirable, and that conviction may be one reason that the threads between feminism's multivocality and technology's multimodality are sturdy ones. Indeed, our collective ability to intertwine our stories, and encourage students to become part of our literate lives as feminist teacher-scholars, allows students not only space to theorize these experiences across media genres but also an opportunity to educate us about the increasing relevance of multimodal tools in fostering literacy education as a lifelong process. It is, in part, through these stories and the multimodal tools used to produce and distribute them that our field may be able to more richly chronicle its role in making literacy education as accessible as possible through pedagogical innovation and technofeminist reform across the curriculum, as my colleagues Christine Tulley and Chris Denecker now document.