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Video Segment 2: What were your parents' attitudes toward literacy and/or education?
Video Segment 3: How would your life be different if you didn't know how to read and write?
Video Segment 4: What is your experience with and attitude toward computers?
Lessons 1 & 2: Narrating Technology Use
Lesson 3: Technology Resistance
Lesson 4: Complexity of Technological Engagements
Working Definitions of Technological Literacy and Narrative Analysis
Working Definitions of Technological Literacy:
Work in New Literacy Studies has productively complicated definitions of literacy over the past couple of decades (Gee, 1996; Heath, 1983; Street, 1993). Street identifies two models of literacy: an autonomous model focused on the influence of literacy absent all other contextualizing factors, and an ideological model that sees literacy as a set of social practices, contingent on cultural context.
Street (2005) explains:
It is about knowledge: The ways in which people address reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of knowledge, identity, being. Literacy, in this sense, is always contested, both its meanings and its practices, hence particular versions of it are always “ideological”; that is, they are always rooted in a particular world-view and a desire for that view of literacy to dominate and to marginalise others. (p. 179)
New Literacy Studies’ claim that literacy can serve to dominate and marginalize individuals and groups complicates the distinction between literacy and illiteracy. However, the remnants of such a division still exist in discussions of literacy, including technological literacy. Definitions of technology literacy or technological literacy in popular culture often assume that literacy is an autonomous agent. For example, a 1996 National Department of Education report defined technology literacy as “Computer skills and the ability to use computers and other technology to improve learning, productivity, and performance” (n.p.). Such a definition assumes that the acquisition of a list of skills automatically results in better, more productive, and more efficient or effective learning. Such statements do not take into consideration that technological literacy functions within social systems. Other literacy researchers have found that learners learn when they have the appropriate environment and sponsors, and not when they are asked to master skills outside a supportive context. These insights play out in the narratives of Madraswala, Jacobs, Mays, and Kamara.
Because popular definitions of literacy are so often associated with the autonomous model of literacy and so often limited to a reductive skills-based understanding, scholars in rhetoric and composition have critiqued narrow, functionally-oriented definitions of technological literacy. Cynthia Selfe (1999), for instance, has introduced critical technological literacy, which she defines as “helping [students] to understand and to be able to assess—to pay attention to—the social, economic, and pedagogical implications of new communication technologies and technological initiatives that affect their lives” (Selfe, p. 432). Stuart Selber uses Selfe’s definition to develop three categories of computer literacy in Multiliteracies for a Digital Age (2004): functional literacy, critical literacy, and rhetorical literacy. Selber’s categories, extending Selfe’s definition, distinguish between limited, skills-based definitions of technological literacy being used in reports like the Department of Education report, and more productive and complete understandings of technological literacy that align with Street’s ideological model to acknowledge the contextual nature of literacy practices.
Digital literacy has also been used somewhat interchangeably with technological literacy in recent decades. In a 2007 article on “Learning Digital Literacies,” Marilyn M. Cooper defines digital literacies as “reading, writing, and exchanging multimodal information in online environments” (p. 181). These definitions understand literacy partly through Street’s ideological framework. However, Cooper’s definition does not get at Selfe’s and Selber’s critical turn.
For this project, I define technological literacy using Selfe and Hawisher’s 2004 definition. Technological literacy is the practice of communicating, using a variety of modes in digital environments. In teaching technological literacy, it is imperative that teachers consider the acquisition of literacy skills to be a lifelong process and understand that technological literacies are contextually contingent and socially mediated (Selfe & Hawisher, 2004). In other words, a critical view is a central feature of defining technological literacy for teachers of technology (Selfe, 1999).
It is also true, however, that understanding these women’s stories solely through a framework of critical technological literacy would not fully illuminate what technological literacy means to these four young women. To this end, I try to align myself as closely as possible in my analysis to their understandings of technological literacy and highlight where their own conceptions differ from those definitions I have already mentioned.
Locating these tensions is complex because none of the participants were asked directly how they defined literacy or technological literacy. Instead, they were asked to tell stories about their literacy experiences. Narratives, as Brodkey (1987) notes, "twice encode culture" (p.46) and are, thus, complexly formed and rendered. Nonetheless, as a genre, literacy narratives lend themselves well to analysis and have been used for a variety of purposes in composition and literacy studies, and in first-year writing courses (Selfe, 2004). Teachers of composition, for instance, use literacy narratives to teach each other (Journet, 2007; Pandey, 2006). Scholars have also used literacy narratives of technology to report on their students’ experiences with technology (Duffelmeyer, 2000; Cooper, 2007). The literacy narrative as a genre is not without its ardent supporters, including Morris Young (2004), or its enthusiastic critics, including Melanie Yergeau (2008). The technology version of the literacy narrative has been used by writing teachers to get a sense of their students’ experiences with technologies. In “Students Who Teach Us,” for instance, Selfe (2004) presents a sample technology literacy assignment, noting that this particular assignment is an amalgam of work done by Selfe, Gail Hawisher, Dickie Selfe, Karla Kitalong, and Tracy Bridgeford (Selfe, 2004, p. 59).
Definitions of technological literacy have, in the past, been paired with narrow understandings of the digital divide (Department of Education, 1996). In such contexts, a white/black binary of haves and have-nots has been constructed, which functions in a deficit model essentializing groups of people, therefore eliding the literacy practices and values of individuals. Following the work of Hawisher and Selfe, this exhibit seeks to undermine the rigidity of the divide construct, which can serve to trap digital writing instructors and technology users in discussions of material access (Banks, 2005) alone. Such discussions should not be limited solely to material access but, rather, should address issues of multiple types of access and practice, as Banks enumerates: material, functional, experiential, critical and transformative access (2005). Similarly, Annette Powell's (2005) study of access with middle school students at a technology camp, argues that access to technology literacy is an on-going process, which is shaped by “what gets reinforced, valued, and rewarded by local communities” (p. 18). Powell attempts to locate more nuanced and complex understandings of the different types of involvement that students have with digital literacy (p. 32). Powell’s study is one of few that paints a more complex and nuanced picture of literacy instruction from students’ own points of view. She argues that teachers need to better understand the practices that motivate students’ use of and resistance to technology.
Because I am using narratives that have already been submitted to the DALN archive, I have employed narrative analysis methodologies to analyze these stories with emphasis on holistic textual features. Some theorists in composition and rhetoric continue to question the use of narratives. For instance, Cindy Johanek (2000) suggests that narratives should only be used as a foundation to support other research methodologies. However, other scholars, including Thomas Newkirk (1992), believe that narrative case studies offer important insights as long as writers situates the data in culturally grounded narratives. Gergen and Gergen (1997), too, argue that narratives are always socially constructed within a particular situation.
Paul Atkinson and Sara Delamont (2006) remind narrative researchers that narratives are “forms of social action…produced and circulated in ‘social contexts’” (p. 169). The particular narratives in this exhibit offer constructions of the participants’ selves within a particular rhetorical context. This rhetorical context also includes the participants’ knowledge that the interview would eventually be submitted to an online archive. That context shapes, in specific ways, the narratives participants chose to contribute.
To analyze these texts, I first viewed them in their entirety and noted the sections in which participants discussed technology and technological literacy. I fully transcribed those sections. I then performed three readings, following Rachelle Hole’s (2007) model of multiple readings: first, I contextualized these narratives within the stories each person shared as a whole; second, I looked for Gergen and Gergen’s (1997) three basic forms of narrative plots: stability narratives, progressive narratives, and regressive narratives; third, I focused on a medial-level analysis of events presented, following Bamberg and Georgakopoulou’s (2008) model of positioning between fine-grained micro analysis and macro accounts.