Safe Spaces and Knowledge Construction

There is an internal conflict apparent any time teachers desire to create a “safe” space in which students can interact. Creating a safe space in and of itself is a noble act and having a space that can be considered as such can be empowering. The conflict becomes apparent more in the use of the term and how the space is to be used. What do we mean by a “safe space?” There’s the rub. By safe, do we, as teachers of composition, mean that this space should enable students to feel welcome no matter what their particular social orientation(s) (race, gender, class, sexuality, region, etc.)? Do we mean that this safe space should be one in which students can discuss issues charged with societal and political implications and meanings without the fear of being “oppressed,” dis-empowered, “”underrepresented,” or silenced in any way?

In essence, I see the conflict as one that underscores our very notions of safety and democracy. If fruitful discussion (and thus knowledge building) comes out of the confrontation (by confrontation I mean the testing of two or more degrees of disagreement in fruitful dialogue) between varying ideologies and ideas, how can we create a space that is both safe for those who have traditionally been considered “other” (and I am by no means condoning the “othering” of these, or any, groups/individuals) and allow in that space a hearing for varying ideas to be tested/discussed without some individual or group feeling silenced in one way or another (if at least by implication)? I see this as one of the greatest difficulties that teachers who use technology to create virtual (digital) spaces and physical spaces have in their classrooms (and teachers in traditional classrooms). How do we create both an open, egalitarian site of collaboration while encouraging discourse through conflicting ideas in order for our students to test and understand the foundations of their own knowledge and how society has impacted those foundations?

In studying space over the past two months specifically (and I plan on continuing this endeavor for a while) I am beginning to get a sense of the overall picture of how space is being located in composition studies and I am realizing that there is a great deal of work being done in this area but there is a great deal more that needs to be done. My current research interest revolves around a two-part question that I believe to be related. First, how are virtual (digital) spaces, those created for students by teachers in the composition classroom, related to activity systems and genres? Second, how has feminist pedagogical discourse and its lineage affected our conceptions of the “safe house,” “safe haven” or “safe space” in the electronic contact zone? I link these two because I believe that in creating these virtual activity systems through specific genres, we can enable and enact safe spaces for our students to collaborate and challenge ideas (construct knowledge). I believe this area of research will prove quite useful and interesting to both me and the community. I relate all of this back to my earlier comments in this post about the apparent conflict between safety and knowledge construction by noting that I hope my research will help me answer some of these questions, or at least provide a better framework from which to ask new ones.

 

Reflections on the Digital Divide

In taking a moment to consider the implications of race in the so-called “digital divide” this week, I was struck by how much I agreed with Barbara Monroe (as I often do with theorists who propose clarifying our definitions–on account of the awkward rhetorician in me) that the term itself has led to confusion in various disciplines and these varying professions interpret and define the word differently. While Monroe calls for a clarification/redefinition of the term “digital divide,” I also found her suggestions for classroom applications helpful for encouraging students to challenge the ways in which they have accumulated their cultural subjectivities.

I think, like NCLB (dare I mention it), as composition scholars we having been coming to the realization that many of our “current” methods are either 1) not in line or representative of our theoretical underpinnings or 2) that our practices have, in some ways, been reproducing the very socio-ideological assumptions we desire in our literature to revolutionalize, instead of institutionalize, especially in the area of race. Granted, examining the effects of NCLB has come to focus recently (since the act itself is relatively recent itself), but the fact that the political power structures that dictate educational standards to our colleagues in K-12 appear not to have “bothered” to read any of the excellent theoretical (and by theory I mean little “t” theory as defined by Brian Huot–a theory that is in itself practice, not something to be added onto or separated from practice) scholarship that has shown how the “standardized test” and other forms of conformist educational assessment models do not benefit many (if not most) of our students.

Specifically in terms of technology, I found Adam Banks chapter “Taking Black Technology Use Seriously” to be very illuminating and helpful. I plan on instituting some of the ideas Banks proposes regarding how cultures construct their own identities in digital spaces. Jeremey Schnieder and I reflected on how students could discover and understand the ways in which communities construct their own voices and change these voices according to their own needs as a community and how they view themselves with a double-consciousness (ie. Pendergast). An activity we brainstorms involved reviewing wikis devoted to a specific culture and reviewing the iterations of the content to discover what information what added, versus left out, versus simply became no longer applicable or useful to the community over time. Afterwards, students would then repeat the activity with a cultural website (a harder activity for sure). It is important to have students encounter difference and relate it to their own lives and beliefs.

Simultaneously, I think that sometimes we, as teachers, can be so focused on recognizing difference, that we forget to recognize and encourage the similarities between people, groups, and cultures. After all, are we not all part of a common humanity with shared biological and global conditions? Can similarity (as difference has been) be a place of meeting, a common ground from which students can interact and collaborate for the good of themselves, their education, and their lives?

 

Materiality and Social Construction

“The very materiality of writing binds writing firmly to human practices and therefore to cultural choices” (Bolter Writing Space 19). I believe it is of some consequence that Jay David Bolter offers the idea that writing is culturally situated, created, and evaluated. Bolter also notes that technologies themselves do not “determine the course of culture or society” since they are inherently situated in culture and are not “agents that can act on culture from the outside” (19). Bolter recognizes that digital forms of writing are a renegotiation of the ideas our culture already has of the purpose and “ideal” of writing. Part of our lineage in the past twenty years in composition studies has been this idea of social construction and its effect on and how it affects our ideas of writing, the process of composing, and the backgrounds (ideologies, histories, understandings) we bring to written communication.

Of course, Postmodernism, and postmodernisms, have had their cumulative effects as well. Now, instead of being simply culturally situated, our writing practices are recognized as individually differentiated and socially mediated, not to mentioned directed by the whole slew of cultural, historical, and emotional developments that comprise our upbringings. One of the important ideas that I took from Bolter’s first few chapters (there were many) is that writing as a technology, and how we (as a culture) view technologies that have become commonplace (think about a pencil, a car, running water) has a silent impact on how we view new technologies. Not only do individuals usually take a new technology and immediately try to do something traditional with that technology, but then it replaces (if it does something better) our older technologies, but the whole evaluation of “whether or not it does X better than another technology” is based in large part on our social biases and personal opinions (and cultural opinions). For example, when cell phones first came out, they were used in conjunction with home phone (landlines). Now, it is not uncommon for individuals (and families) to only use cell phones and have no landline at all. Cell phones can now be PDAs, GPS devices, alarm clocks, watches, etc. We take a technology, use it for something we are used to doing (making a phone call), and then we see how many “other” or “secondary” (which often become primary) things it can do. Perhaps a better example might be the Word Processor. At first, word processors were used for typing letters and print text exclusively. Now, many people create brochures, multimedia presentations, and many other non-textually based items with a word processor. Who knew?

These new things, and old things, that we learn to do with technology and whether we decide the technology is useful, is culturally situated. Cell phones started out too large, so the manufacturers made them smaller. Next, cell phones needed more range, so the communications industry built more cell phone towers and better reception mechanisms. Those choices were based on individual and social needs/choices. No technology appears without purpose. Our culture constructs a need, and then someone attempts to fill that need. Technology is not an agent of change because it does not act from without (as Bolter remarks), it is the people behind the technology (behind the curtai, Dorothy) that pulls strings, control situations, reveal (or not) themselves.

 

Ahhhhh Breakout!

Reading through Bolter’s fourth chapter in particular brought up some thoughts that I had previously unarticulated but that he does a great job of bringing to the forefront. This idea of the “breakout of the visual” is something our culture has now taken for granted it seems. As Bolter notes, in this “dialectic of word and image. . . Words no longer seem to carry conviction without the reappearance as a picture of the imagery that was latent in them” which he sees as “part of a trend to renegotiate the relationship between arbitrary signs and picture elements in communication” (54). Using a USA today “Snapshot” chart, Bolter provides an example of this domination of the visual and subordination of the textual. A brief examination of our surroundings each day provides us with many examples of this renegotiation of relationship. Advertisements in magazines, on billboards, and on television are inherently visually oriented, even on a medium such as magazines that, in the past, has been traditionally recognized as text-based (textual). Even in the elements of articles in magazines and on websites this remediation is evident.

I am reminded by these observations that the text is NOT dead, simply repositioned in a way that its serves differing purposes. I was driving back from St. Louis this weekend (from the Focus on Teaching and Technology Conference) and had the fortuitous chance of passing a particular billboard that really brought this idea home for me. Perhaps by describing the billboard I will be providing an example of what Bolter terms ekphrasis, or the textual description of a visual element. The billboard, and unfortunately I will not do it justice since I cannot recall all the details, was mostly comprised of one visual image on a dark background (something that had to do with a house I believe) and there were some large letters asking some vague question as usual. What I noted of importance was that under everything else, there at the bottom in fine print (and this was remarkably fine print for a billboard) was some sort of stipulation that was supposed to reference an asterisk in the words above. I literally laughed aloud as I squinted to try to read the fine print. I thought to myself, “how in the world is anyone supposed to be able to read that?” Immediately, the cynic in me thought, “No one is supposed to be able to read it, that’s the point., to obscure some possibly important point.” Perhaps this thought is not so related, but I believe this example notes the prominence of the visual, and in this case, at the expense of the textual. The visual elements have to do more work now. They need to explain things that normally the text would explain, and the text has taken on visual elements. Sometimes, as in the billboard, this does not work.

I also think it interesting that Bolter chose the term “breakout” for this renegotiation of the visual and textual elements. This implies that the visual was in some way imprisoned before and now has escaped. I think Bolter was going more for the slang reference of breakout as explosion in popularity or prominence. Interesting. . .

 

Tribridity

Considering distance learning (OWI-Online Writing Instruction) this week has been an exciting and though-provoking task. Breuch asks us, as teachers, to be aware of the changes that peer response enables through time, space, and interaction while Blair and Hoy remind us of the pleasures (interactions, relationships, successes) and pains (invisible labor, administrative prerogative, financial concerns, labor issues) that attend distance learning (OWI). Hewett and Ehmann remind us to not forget our instructors and to offer them solid and pedagogically (not to mention theoretically) sound training in computer instruction.

Considering the needs of adult and distant learners requires a particular attention to the structures we incorporate and the assignments we create for students who are often marginalized by distance and association (if not by the dominant classroom practices). While administrators ask, “What’s in it for me (a.k.a. the institution), teachers of modern composition (steeped in an ethic of care) ask, “what about the needs of our students?” These positions often place administrators and teachers at odds diametrically, but it need not be that way. Granted, there is a balance that must be weighed and a line that must be towed in public universities. This divide is not merely between individual constituencies such as those mentioned above, but also behind the very foundations of our educational system. A system that asks us to create (somehow) citizens prepared to interact and participate productively in our national processes of government, but also expects of us academic freedom which at points counters (and opposes) those same processes. How then, can we as instructors of technology-rich composition strike this balance (or should we)?

Like this hybrid stance between positions, distance learning requires hybrid courses, hybrid students, and hybrid teachers (a tribridity) . It requires courses that integrate technology to an extent not recognized in traditional or mediated classrooms; it requires students who can interact (and live) in the environment of the computer, web, and office/home; and it requires teachers who can negotiate the transitions between these environments while guiding students to find their own voice in and digital world (that is primarily visual-not aural). What a task indeed! This task will require research that continues to ask the hard questions concerning voice, marginalization, community, and purpose. That same research must also remember the questions of physical import such as setting, funding, training, and access. I believe we are up for the challenge as a community. What do you think?