This
week’s readings:
Wysocki,
Anne Frances. "Introduction:
Into Between--On Composition in Mediation." Composing(Media)=Composing(Embodiment).
Eds. Kristin L. Arola and Anne Frances Wysocki. Utah State UP. 2012. 1-22.
Banks,
Adam. "Oakland, The
Word, and The Divide: How We All Missed the Moment." from Race,
Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. NCTE Press.
2006. 11-46.
Both Wysocki and Banks are concerned with
various levels of access in using technology. These authors recognize that to
have more than a basic understanding of technology is to have power. For
Wysocki, “writing as a technology […] enables us to experience our bodies as our
bodies while at the same time writing mediates those bodies in line with
existing institutions” (p.22) and for Banks, digital technologies are essential
to enact meaningful changes in our society. Banks argues that “just as the
right to vote alone does not ensure that people have access to the local,
state, or federal governments that are supposed to serve them, just as school desegregation
alone did not magically provide equal access to education, a few computers and
Internet connection alone will not mean that people in rural communities, poor
people and other people of color will wake up some fine day and marvel that
they now have equal access to technology and information” (Banks, p.137 –
sorry, I pulled this from the last chapter in his book. It was just a really,
really good quote).
Wysocki pushes against the traditional Western
of vision and, therefore, sensory experience
“is more complex and changeable than conceived
and, as conceived and applied, has consequences we should not wish blindly to
accept” (p.6). In place of these singular visions, Wysocki encourages us to
consider technologies and means of communicating that encourage multiplicities of
sight and of our other senses. And she encourages us, as teachers and as
readers, to consider “what other sorts of arguments are possible when we
broaden our senses of the texts we can make for each other through the
possibilities of the digital. What might be possible if we encouraged a
democracy of the senses in our teaching instead of a hegemony of sight?” (p.7).
It is this democracy of the senses that will ultimately allow us to have
influence on our collective knowledge and to attend to our own various embodiments
through media (p.8) while “better understanding how we have and can use written
words in shaping our lives with individuals” (p.9).
Like Wysocki, Banks is concerned with encouraging
all citizens to better communicate using digital technology. His primary
concern, though, is the lack of meaningful technological access for African
Americans in the United States. He argues that material access, “to own or be
near places that will allow him or her to use computers, software, Internet
connections, and other communication technologies when needed” (p.41) and even
functional access, to “have knowledge and skills necessary to use those tools
[those of material access] effectively” (p.41) defines most African Americans’
experiences with technology. For Banks, these levels of access only allow users
to simply USE, rather than fully understand and meaningfully use, technologies
that are essential to enacting change within a culture and within our country.
Banks encourages educators to push users towards experiential access, where “people
must embrace the technologies involved […where] there must be a level of
community awareness and acceptance in order for those technologies to mean
anything. Beyond the tools themselves and the knowledge and skills necessary
for their effective use, people must actually use them; they must have
experiential access, or an access that makes the tools a relevant part of their
lives” (p.42) and critical access, where “members of a community must … develop
understandings of the benefits and problems of any technology well enough to be
able to critique, resist, and avoid them when necessary as well as using them
when necessary” (p.42), with the ultimate goal of achieving transformative access.
Such access involves as genuine inclusion in technologies and the networks of
power that help determine what they [a community] become, but never merely for
the sake of inclusion” (p.45).
Both Banks and Wysocki encourage individuals
to be careful consumers and producers of technology and new media in order to “enable
individuals to stand up to the pacifying structures of the mass media” (Wysocki,
p.15). Wysocki, specifically, is concerned with the materiality of writing and
digital media as she paraphrases Marx’s view that “human freedom is the freedom
to do productive work in one’s community. We cannot be fully human if we cannot
work and see how the results of our work connect us with others” (Wysocki, p.17).
That is, we all must be connected as embodied members of society in order to be
truly free. This is much like Bank’s plea that we realize that “all
technologies come packaged with a set of politics: if those technologies are
not inherently political, the conditions in which they are created and in which
they circulate into a society are political and influence their uses in that
society…and those politics can profoundly change the spaces in which messages
are created, received, and used” (Banks, p.23).
For me, these arguments are well taken. We, as
a discipline, spend a good deal of time talking about naming the our
discipline, expanding views of literacy, etc. but we don’t often talk about
what access to the core technologies of our discipline looks like. Perhaps the
readings of Foucault and Ohmann, Cooper, Selfe and Hawisher, Yancey and Selfe, and
Selfe’s “Not Paying Attention” provide a good framework for the potential
hegemonic uses of technologies in which all citizens do not have equal access.
It is worth considering (and I’m going to talk quite a bit about this in my
crit for tomorrow) how we might encourage deeper literacy in the technological
use of our students. It is simply not enough to put these technologies in front
of our students and expect them to know what to do with them and, more
importantly, to expect them to make something meaningful from these digital
technologies without a bit of training. I’m wondering how you all think of
access as it relates to incorporating digital technologies into the classroom.
Is this fair? What sort of accommodations do you make? Why?
Good questions, Ti. I do agree that it's important to make sure that we don't just put technology in front of our students and say "okay, now liberate yourselves!" but I'm a little bit skeptical of the degree to which modern students are harmed by these hegemonic user interfaces. It seems like a lot of these articles define "meaningful" use in terms of how disruptive it is to the hegemony. I'm not so sure that's the right way to frame the issue. Not every student is going to come out of our classes fired up and eager to become activists. A lot of them just want the skills to better succeed in their own lives. That's not to say that giving them these skills isn't a political act in itself, but I wonder if by paying TOO much attention we risk becoming overly critical of the ways our students engage with technology.
ReplyDeleteI was lucky enough to teach at a school with great technological access: we had big computer courtyards with plenty of tech support and up-to-date (if slow) computers. The problem, like you mentioned, always came from differing comfort levels with technology. My solution was to give relatively open-ended assignments and then have conferences with students where we would discuss different ways they could approach it. Though not specifically geared to technology, I found that digital resources came up fairly often, and I would usually help them find out what was feasible or difficult given their level of access, expertise, and time. We rarely used technology within the classroom, but they often experimented with it on their own for projects I gave. I found that students pretty much use technology insofar as it makes their job easier and not much further.
Hi Jacob!
ReplyDeleteI don't know that I'm arguing so much against the interfaces themselves as I am the lack of opportunity to deeply understand these interfaces, although that is an argument (the interface argument) that we can take up next week with Selfe's article. I absolutely agree that we have to be really careful in how we position technological access in the classroom. I don't want to shove my "take control of your digital lives and embrace the power of technology" ideas on the students but I do want them to recognize the power structures of technology - just like I do in terms of publishing in academe (something that we often discuss in class).