I had two conversations about class today and yesterday, one with a fellow PhD candidate in the Rhetoric & Composition program here, and the other with Charlie, who’s on my committee, and gleaned some small and useful insights from those conversations.
First: in composition (and in many other places as well; the Raymond Williams I so frequently invoke is certainly an example), there exists a genre of the social mobility narrative; the story of the professor from the working-class background. Victor Villanueva and Mike Rose offer perhaps the foremost examples, but there are plenty of others, and in fact one of the things I’m trying to work against is the use of the authenticity of lived experience as the class marker that trumps all others. My small insight, though: within the context of composition’s engagement with identity politics (our assumptions that race, gender, age, class, sexual preference, and other markers of identity influence the teaching and learning of writing), the narrative of the academic’s transition from the working class to the professional class is always going to be a narrative of isolation and betrayal, because the academic can no longer claim working-class status. She can’t go home again. Other identity-politics narratives of entrance into the academy are not so bound by definitions: the queer professor is not made un-queer by becoming a professor.
Second: Charlie observed that the view of technology in composition’s subfield of computers and composition has changed from an understanding of technology-as-efficiency to an understanding of technology-as-equalizer. Early theorists in computers and composition believed that word processing would make writing easier, that computers would help students to write better papers in less time. The enthusiasm for this view waned, and writing teachers began to focus more of their hopes on technology as furthering egalitarian ends, on computers as the tool that might help to remedy social inequalities in the classroom. We’ve moved from asking “How can computers make writing more efficient?” to asking “How can computers make writing more egalitarian?” In this same conversation, Charlie also again suggested that I need to consider whether I’m going to use my dissertation to ask, “How does class affect what students do in the wired writing classroom?” or to ask, “What do compositionists say about how class affects what students do in the wired writing classroom?” In other words, am I doing a literature study or classroom research? A possible answer: I think both efficiency and equity are concerns associated with class; the former with the relationships of production, and the latter with relationships of privilege. And yet nobody in computers and composition ever talks about class. My research question, then, might be: how does the specter of class mobility hide behind and/or inform the discourse of computers and composition? How and why are people in the field avoiding explicit discussions of the very real ways in which concerns of class intersect with our ideals of efficiency and equality?
To take a shot at your rhetorical question:
My impression is that technology is seen as valueless and, yes, classless. One need only access to the bleeding edge of wired comp instruction, and one is on a par with those of greater socioeconomic means vis-a-vis the act of composing: it may as well be a scriptorium; inherent “genius” (of the Enlightenment stripe) becomes (again) the factor to be evaluated/fostered. I suppose I should refine and say that computers in the writing class are seen (explicitly, in some of the literature) as having a leveling effect in this regard (your discussion of equity is much more elegant here).
While the physical artifact might convincingly be argued to have no inherent value or class, it certainly is an instantiation of values and class. Perhaps it isn’t talked about because discussions of writing and class seem mostly to have to do with difference and/or locus. I suppose I could add pedagogy to that. I’m looking at the issue of The Council Chronicle that arrived in the mail today, regarding the NCTE convention in SF. Under “Sessions for College Educators” I see, under the technology rubric:
-“Using Media to Promote Understanding of LGBT Family Circles”
-A session entitled Digital Language and Literacy about establishing partnerships in technology-based teaching/learning
-“Online Reading and Writing Processes”
The intersection of class and technology is absent. I’d have to look back at this year’s CCCC program, but I certainly didn’t attend any sessions about the intersections of class and tech. Class in writing is, by and large, still seen as a pedagogical concern, I think (Think Lives on teh Boundary). Technology is too, to an extent, but I’d hazard a guess that they aren’t being interrogated by the same folks. I guess that’s why I’m so interested in your dissertation, Mike.
But what if the physical artifact itself does have an inherent value or class? The latest issue of College English came in the mail a few days ago, bringing with it Sharon O’Dair’s impressively argued slam of critical pedagogy; the one difficulty I saw with the essay is that , in order to make her argument work, O’Dair has to construct class differences as cultural rather than economic. I think the ideas about technology expressed in the literature of computers and composition often make the same mistake: they’re just tools, so many people so often say. (Cynthia and Richard Selfe’s article is an insightful exception to this rule.)