Relationships: Relating to Others around Technology

The playful, social, positive experiences Musgrave, Springer, and Lanning describe suggest funds of knowledge, productive emotional associations, and even sources of private expertise that supported the narrators’ formal technological literacy instruction at the college level. On the other hand, the limited, functional use of computers and lack of social support Johnston describes points to the dangers of assuming that all students associate play and socialization with computer use or have a history of substantial support for computer use at home. The diversity of these experiences indicates that assuming a ludic past may further exclude students who are already at a technological disadvantage, as Catherin Pavia notes when she cautions against integrating computers into the basic writing classroom without accounting for unevenness in students’ technological literacy backgrounds (15-20). Without the kind of supportive, social environment Knobel theorizes and which the other narrators describe, uncritical incorporation of technology into formal education risks replicating inequality, as Ito warns: early children’s software developers

hoped to put accessible technical tools in the hands of the disenfranchised, alleviating the oppressiveness of narrow notions of education. Instead, children’s software became another site for addressing achievement anxiety in parents and for supporting achievement for children who seem to have been born into success. (188)

To avoid exacerbating existing inequalities in cultural capital, teachers and students should be encouraged to recognize that students in contemporary classrooms fall across a broad spectrum of technological literacy, one even broader than this small subset of narratives represents. Teachers need to avoid the assumption that students of similar ages and levels of academic achievement will share technology experiences and to remind themselves that these different experiences will leave students with widely varying attitudes toward technology. In light of students’ experiences with and attitudes toward technology, literacy narratives like these are an important teaching tool for making both teachers and students aware not just of their own relationship to technology, but of how their relationship parallels and differs from their peers’: dimensional awareness like this helps to cultivate the kind of critical thinking about the social construction of technology which many educators strive for and—even more important for the immediate classroom environment—helps students understand where their peers are coming from, laying the groundwork for sensitive and effective classroom interaction and peer-to-peer instruction.