What is Access? A Critique of Adam Bank’s Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground

Assumptions Make an Ass of U and Me

Institutions of higher education make a number of assumptions about students. One such assumption of great gravity, but that is often over looked, is the assumption that all of our students have access to the basic technologies that they will need to be successful at the university. Yes, many institutions have nearly round the clock access to state-of-the-art computer labs and nearly all of the students on such campuses have access to these electronic devices and software. These technological offerings are certainly impressive but, although students may have physical access to technology, they may not actually know what to do with it. Without fairly sophisticated technological literacies, most students are unable to use these technologies in meaningful ways (we’ll define this later in the discussion). This flies in the face of common claims that our students are all impressively technologically literate since they are videogame and texting wizards. Luckily, scholars like Adam Banks encourage us, as educators, to remember that not all students have equal access and literacy to academic technologies and that we are desperately in need of “serious, thoughtful discussion about race and the problem of access to computers, the Internet, and information technologies” (Banks, 2006, p.13).

A Review of Banks

            For Banks, access “requires an individual or group of people having the material of any particular technology, along with the knowledge and experience and genuine inclusion in the networks in which decisions are made about their design and implementation that enables them to use –or reuse—them in ways that make sense in their lives” (p.135). When he discusses the missed opportunities of the Digital Divide from the late 1990’s in his chapter “Oakland, The Word, and the Divide: How We All Missed the Moment,” Banks draws a clear parallel between the NCTE’s “Resolution on Students’ Rights to their Own Language” to students’ rights to meaningful engagement with technology. For him, discussions on language, such as the Oakland School District’s appeal to include Ebonics as a legitimate language also in the 1990’s all serve as a springboard for discussion surrounding the lack of technological literacy that African Americans and rural poor tend to experience in the United States in that language is a form of expressing power just as meaningful literacy in various technological media also serves as a means to power and change. Unfortunately, according to Banks, such conversations do not frequently occur and, in the case of the late 1990’s, an essential opportunity for such discussions was missed by nearly every writing educator of the time.

Focusing on Technological Access in the Classroom

            Banks goes on to explain that “the rhetorical problems that dominate understanding of race in our discipline are technological problems” (p.12) and his treatment of this discussion is both fascinating and thorough in his book-length analysis of this issue. For this class, however, perhaps a more immediately applicable discussion of Banks’s scholarship lies in his concerns with using technology in the classroom and the potential means with which we might assist our students in developing literacy beyond material or experiential access. Banks’ primary concern is that technology is either entirely not available to students or that it is “dumbed down by skills only curricula [see his example on p.19]” (p.19) and not used in meaningful ways to empower students to achieve transformational access. In this way, teachers and administrators must be critically aware of technological implementation in the classroom and we must be cautious of simply importing technology into our pedagogies as a quick solution to a complex problem.

Unfortunately, this careful consideration is all too often the exception rather than the rule and technology is often treated as a magical solution where throwing money at the problem of technological illiteracy is thought to make the problem go away. This poorly considered solution often leaves educational institutions with quickly outdated technologies that are useless to both students and teachers in addition to perpetuating despair and disillusionment with the constant pursuit of accessing relevant technologies.

Scholars like Cyndie Selfe, Gail Hawisher, Marilyn Cooper, Kathy Yancey, and Charles Moran argue that implementation of technology into a classroom without careful purpose and critical consideration often merely advance hegemonic classroom roles. They, like Banks, argue that teachers must “make sure clearly articulated pedagogical goals drive all technology decisions so that purchases, training, and planning related to technologies related to technology implementation remains relevant to the learning, social, political, and economic needs of those we hope to serve” (Banks, p.20).

Despite the careful implementation of technology by some educators, many teachers and students still resist the implementation of technology as a new and intimidating or unnecessary literacy and, as a result, students are not assisted in the development of meaningful technological access. Banks argues that “committing fully to integrating technologies in the classroom can put us in touch with the natural awkwardness and adjustments that come with picking up new skills and acquiring new discourses, and help us move beyond some of the debilitating assumptions we made about all student writing, and especially that of students from different linguistic traditions” (Banks, p.139). In this way, Banks argues that our discomfort and struggles with technology are actually natural and useful means of working through technology just as working through linguistic differences enable us to embrace all types of student writing. Such pedagogy requires that teachers accept and embrace their limitations and that they even accept a level of discomfort as they “put themselves out there” amongst the students in learning various technologies. Something that, I would argue, is a valuable pedagogical and personal experience.

Meaningful, Schmeaningful – What Does Meaningful Access Look Like?

            At this point, it is important to recognize that Banks defines “meaningful” access as access that enacts social change. Of course, this is not necessarily the same level of access that we all accept since we are not all activists and it is unfair to ask our students to be (unless they want to). What IS important in Banks’ discussion is that everyone should have the ability to experience such access if they choose to. For me, it is essential that we attempt to introduce students to levels of technology beyond their comfort level to develop in them the critical thinking skills that make advanced technological literacy possible. It is, of course, impossible to elevate students from material access to transformative access over the course of one semester but it is possible to build students’ technological confidence and knowledge to set them on the right path.

The Long and Short of It

            If, as Banks claims, technological literacy and access are key to social transformation (something that I imagine David Parry would agree with), it seems that the “burden of access is not only the responsibility of those seeking it, but is a systemic burden as well” (Banks, p.21). If we want to truly value various literacies and if we want our students to have the opportunity to enact social change, then a well-considered technological pedagogy seems like a logical place to start. It is not enough to simply encourage students to use technology. We must, instead, provide them with meaningful and challenging opportunities to embrace technology and, thus, improve their technological comfort level. After all, as Banks points out, “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). 

Works Cited

Banks, A. (2006). Race, rhetoric, and technology: Searching for higher ground. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Cooper, Marilyn M. and Cynthia L. Selfe. "Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse." College English, 52.8 (Dec., 1990), 847-869. Print.

Hawisher, Gail E. and Cynthia L. Selfe. "The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class." College Composition and Communication, 42.1 (Feb., 1991), 55-65. Print.

Moran, Charles and Cynthia L. Selfe. “Teaching English across the Technology/Wealth Gap.” The English Journal 88.6 (Jul., 1999), 48-55. Print.

Selfe, Cynthia L. "Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention." College Composition and Communication 50.3 (1999): 411-436. Print.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." College Composition and Communication. 56.2 (2004): 297-328. Print.

Week 11 - October 30th Post

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?

Week 9 - Oct 17th Post

This Week’s Readings:

O'Gorman, Marcel. E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities. Toronto, Ontario: Toronto UP, 2007. Print.

O’Gorman is against the dehumanization of texts through traditional processes of imitation and this is at the core of his Chapter 3 argument. As we learned in Chapters 1 and 2, O’Gorman is frustrated with the printcentrity of the Republic of Scholars (an apt name for those stuck in our current forms of scholarship and who resist change) and he continues to argue against systemic pressures that limit invention in composition in the next chapter. 

For O’Gorman, Peter Ramus represents the foundation of our current printcentric academic foci. O’Gorman resists and even rails against Ramus’ “phallogocentric history of the print apparatus” (p.47) and he asks, “might it not be possible to invent scholarly methods to [re]shape the digital apparatus?” (p.50). It is important to note here that O’Gorman does not define digitization in a traditional fashion. Instead, he quotes Morris Eaves who explains that “digitization is not a notion confined to electronic devices but a technological norm that operates across a spectrum of materials and processes. As a rule of thumb, the more deeply digitization penetrates, the more efficient the process becomes” (p.58). O’Gorman is concerned with the commerce-driven, capitalistic need to sort, organize, and encourage imitation that constrains our current scholarship – something that Ramus has represented for centuries.

On the other hand, William Blake represents a focus on invention and “chaosthetics” (p.58), something that O’Gorman argues will assist us in the necessary decompartmentalization of our current academic and composing practices. Because Blake’s political works against imitation and rigid academic expectations are carefully and artfully couched in children’s literature, O’Gorman applauds his inventive strategies that tend to “fl[y] in the face of mechanization” (p.59).

In order to encourage us to think more like Blake and to invent “new scholarly methods suitable to an age of computing” (p.69), O’Gorman cautions that “specialization is a liability” and that “multitasking, dabbling, and audodidaction are the order of the day” (p.69). He also claims that Blake “teaches us not to trust our visual sense alone – an invaluable lesson for students bombarded daily by the words and images of a postmodern mediascape in which the imagetext is the dominant mode of communication” (p.66). In terms of the classroom, I love O’Gorman’s notions of students writing WITH rather than ABOUT sources and I agree with his argument that multitasking is valuable and that students should learn not to trust any one sense but, rather, make use of all senses as much as possible.

While I do agree with much of O’Gorman’s argument in this section, I find myself a bit torn in terms of what he says and what he does. O’Gorman makes use of nonsense words like “mystory” (p.68), puns (the repeated use of ‘puncept’ for example), and he repeatedly uses visuals to make his argument for him, which works well only because he is clearly a master of traditional prose. That is, he understands the rules before he artfully breaks them (something that I often explain to my FYC students). I wonder, though, if “chaosthetics” is really the answer to inventing new methods for composition and communication. If students, unlike Blake and O’Gorman, do not understand language and are without specialization as O’Gorman advocates, will they be able to make effective arguments? Like Jen, I appreciate what O’Gorman is doing here and I even agree with him on some level but I still find myself a bit dubious towards the applicability of his arguments. 

Multimodal Timeline Assignment

Here's a link to my multimodal timeline assignment pics and here are the pics themselves... just in case you don't get your own copy at the presentation tomorrow (my printer is completely out of ink):

Link to this file on Twitter

Week 8 - October 10th Blog Post

This Week’s Readings:

George, Diana. "From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing." College Composition and Communication 54.1 (Sept. 2002): 11-39

Hesse, Doug. "Response to Cynthia L. Selfe's 'The Movement of Air, The Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.'" College Composition and Communication. 61.3 (2010): 602-605. Print.

Selfe, Cynthia L. "The Movement of Air, The Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing." College Composition and Communication. 60.4 (2009): 616-663. Print.

Selfe, Cynthia L. "Response to Doug Hesse" College Composition and Communication. 61.3 (2010): 606-611. Print.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." College Composition and Communication. 56.2 (2004): 297-328. Print.

This week’s readings are very in line with my own ways of thinking and, happily, quite in line with the move of our WSU’s FYC program’s move towards multimodality. The Selfe and Hesse pieces demonstrate both the benefits of such a move as well as the potential drawbacks and concerns for those who are yet to be “sold” on the notion of multimodal work. Cyndie Selfe argues for the inclusion of aurality in the FYC classroom in addition to traditional alphabetic literacy. For Selfe, aurality, as part of a long rhetorical tradition, has a central role in the classroom as a means of recognizing multiliteracies (clearly influenced by the NLG) and to give voices (literally) to a number of marginalized groups. Once again, Selfe is at the center of multimodal discussion and, in addition to clearly influencing Doug Hesse (who directly responds to her essay), Selfe has paved the way for more multimodal publication by students and scholars such as Shipka and Lauer.

Ok, so I’m going to geek out a bit. I love, love, LOVED Cyndie Selfe’s piece on aurality. In fact, I would say that I have been “looking for it” all semester in one way or another. I’m very interested in the roles of aurality and orality in the classroom and I’ve actually recently decided to focus my dissertation on the roles of aurality and orality on commenting on student essays. Patty Ericsson recommended this text to me on Friday and, lo and behold, it was on the schedule for reading this week.

Selfe encourages compositionists to consider the importance of both alphabetic literacy and print literacy in our FYC classrooms. She is very careful to avoid exclusively arguing for any specific type of literacy but explains that there is room (and indeed, we should make room) for a variety of literacies in our class. For me, the discussion on pedagogical uses of aurality was especially useful. Selfe describes how teachers have, in the past, used technologies to provide students with an auditory “walking tour” of their essay (Selfe, p.633) from the readers’ point of view – something that I plan to expand on in terms of the impact on at-risk students.  Selfe’s larger point is that sound is undervalued as a compositional mode (p. 617 and that very little work in aurality has been done for the sake of adding to or better understanding our oral tradition. Instead, most of our focus is on using this mode to compose written text (p.634). Selfe also bemoans the lack of aural tools for teaching practitioners (p.641) but ultimately continues to argue for the employment of a variety of literacies in the classroom since, “when we insist on print as the primary, and most formally acceptable, modality for composing knowledge, we usurp these rights and responsibilities [of the student] on several important intellectual and social dimensions, and, unwittingly, limit students’ sense of rhetorical agency to the bandwidth of our own interests and imaginations” (p.618).

Doug Hesse’s response to Selfe is quite well-founded and his concerns are clearly well considered. Hesse points out that composition as a discipline has long been described as a series of literacy crises which have led to our own identity crises. If our role truly is composition on all levels (not just writing), then the political implications of professional overlap with departments like communications deserves consideration. Hesse also specifically asks whose interests composition studies should serve and he voices his concerns over the social implications on higher education if Selfe’s views are realized. In the end, he argues that “perhaps the best we can do is tour students through the taxonomy of roles, audiences, situations, affordances, constraints, and rhetoricity: a tall order for a course or two” (p.604), and that we must, as a discipline, discuss these issues of multimodality and various literacies to garner answers to the questions that he poses.

Cyndie Selfe's response to Hesse's commentary simply asks Hesse and other naysayers to

consider WHY alphabetic literacy is valued above all other literacies. She points out that much of the work that we (and our students) do today is with literacies other than traditional alphabetic literacies. Selfe goes so far as to suggest that "faculty in rhetoric and composition should serve as role models in this regard, [show] students that they, too, are willing to learn new ways of composing, to expand their own skills and abilities beyond the alphabetic by practicing with different modalities of expression that may be unfamiliar and difficult but increasingly expected and valuable in different twenty-first century rhetorical contexts both in and out of the academy” (p.608).

Diana George and Kathy Blake Yancey’s works also provide support for multimodal work in addition to a few words of caution. George advocates for the use of meaningful visual analysis in FYC classrooms. For George, alphabetic literacy stifles both student and teacher creativity in the classroom and, as a result, assignments lack interest and fresh ideas. As an element of rhetoric, George suggests that we use assignments to break down notions of high and low culture in our visually oriented society. She is clearly influenced by the New London Group's call for multiliteracies and she also influenced Wysocki et al's recommendation that teachers look at student projects with "generosity".

Kathy Blake Yancey's work "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key" was one of the first calls for multimodal assignments in the composition classroom. In this work, she encourages teachers to dive into multimodal work and to consider multimodal work as a "new key" in writing (this was also the keynote address in the 2004 CCCC keynote address). This work is very much in line with Cyndie Selfe's works, Selfe and Moran, Selfe & Hawisher, etc. as Yancey encourages the use of technology in the classroom but also cautions us against using it without being pedagogically and theoretically minded. Yancey's text clearly influenced the works of Shipka and Lauer in the ways they incorporate multimodality into their classrooms and studies. Additionally, Yancey was clearly influenced by Cyndie Selfe's earlier works in addition to Richard Lanham (whom she mentions specifically in her text).

Week 7 Blog Post - Oct 1

This week’s readings:

New London Group. "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." Harvard Educational Review. 66.1(1996): 1-32.

Shipka, Jody. Toward a Composition Made Whole. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh UP, 2011. (read through pg 82)

Shipka and NLG have a good number of similarities in that they both argue for an expanded view of literacy. For both sets of authors, literacy must be expanded to LITERACIES but, for NLG this focus tends to focus almost solely on digital literacies and their impacts on various elements of society while Shipka urges us to be wary of focusing only on digital literacies.

Shipka argues that composing is never really monomodal but is, instead, always some sort of a multimodal creation. While she is clearly in favor of multimodal work, though, Shipka is “concerned that emphasis placed on “new (meaning digital) technologies has led to a tendency to equate terms like multimodal, intertextual, multimedia, or still more broadly speaking, composition with the production and consumption of computer-based, digitized, screen-mediated texts. [She is]…concerned as well that this conflation could limit…the kinds of texts students produce in our courses” (pp.7-8). For Shipka, focusing only on the written text or on the digital text is limiting to student growth and it should only be one of several foci of the FYC class. “in addition to examining writing as ‘the thing,’ meaning final products that may be entirely or even partially comprised of alphabetic text, we need to investigate the various kinds of writing that occur around – and surround – writing-as-the-thing” (p.82)

I find Shipka’s argument to be very persuasive. In many instances in our own lives, writing is often a tool as a means to an end rather than always as THE end product. After reading Shipka’s argument, I find myself rethinking the overall structure of my classroom. Presently, the class is structured by a series of traditional and multimodal assignments that ultimately result in a researched argument essay. Perhaps I should structure the class in a sort of reverse organization to assist students in achieving their own goals like Shipka’s Muffy (I never could really get over that name in the reading).

Like Shipka, the NLG focuses their arguments around the notion of multiliteracies but, unlike Shipka, they tend to discuss digital literacies. The NLG argues that our views of literacy must evolve with the multiplicity of discourses that currently exist and that constantly seem to appear in our culture and in worldwide cultures. For me, the NLG primarily argues that “such a view of language will characteristically translate into a more or less authoritarian kind of pedagogy. A pedagogy of multiliteracies, by contrast, focuses on modes of representation much broader than language alone. These differ according to culture and context, and have specific cognitive, cultural, and social effects” (p.4).

This is my second time reading this NLG piece and, for whatever reason, it made much more sense to me this time. I think that pairing it with Shipka made it much more accessible and the concepts made way more sense. I do, though, find the NLG a bit frustrating since their “manifesto” is deemed a “tentative starting point for that process” (p. 28); whereas Shipka’s argument is a bit more decisive.

Overall, I would agree with some of the other blog posts that put NLG at the center of the multimodal timeline discussion. Their 1996 discussion was relatively early in the game and it is, most certainly, a seminal text in the discussion of multiliteracies. Shipka’s text seems like a 2011 text to me. It is clearly influenced by the Lauer and Wysocki’s pieces that discuss naming issues since she specifically discusses the dangers of labeling specific literacies. Her text was also influenced by Selfe and Selfe and Hawisher who suggest that we must be cognizant of simply using technology for the sake of technology’s existence.