I’ll lead off with an observation from Charlie that I really should have put into yesterday’s discussion of the various classes of universities: while I’ve assigned the vocational education model of the university to the domain of capital, and the liberal education model of the university to the domain of culture, Charlie points out that technical and community colleges have very little capital, and old-line “liberal education” schools like Yale and Amherst College have loads of capital. Charlie also offered the helpful advice that if I follow the course I described yesterday — comparing how class works in the discourse of composition to how class works in the discourse of computers and composition — it might help me to set 1982 as the cutoff date for both disciplines, since it’s the year that the journal Computers and Composition was established, and roughly the time that the process model of writing was completely reorienting writing instruction.
Charlie also pointed out that I ought to be careful not to construct continua of technologies as necessarily teleological, but should rather take care to understand them in their historical contexts: older technologies (for instance, the hammer) are not any easier to learn how to use than newer technologies (for instance, the graphical user interface). And he took isue with my contention that teachers don’t view computers to be a part of the learning process in the same way that they view writing to be a part of the learning process: as Selfe & Selfe point out in “The Politics of the Interface”, learning to navigate the file folder icons of the GUI is training for work in corporate America. (This is another indicator to me as to why I need to read Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America.) His cautions are well-taken, particularly since I see the economic understanding of technology as being an instrument separate from economic systems that could make changes to those economic systems as fundamentally flawed. I’m trying to find a way to see technology as not separable from context, as acting in and being affected by economic systems. This is another version of the argument Cynthia Selfe makes in Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century, although there Selfe is arguing that technology is embedded within and acts upon the system of American political discourse. Selfe points out that Al Gore and Goals 2000 set up technology as a mechanism that would magically spread wealth and power, and one could argue that such a construction is why folks in computers & composition don’t look at class: we expect that computers themselves will do all the work of providing upward economic mobility.
So in order to compare the discourses of composition with the discourses of computers & composition, I’d do well to examine the histories of the disciplines. I’m part of the way there, in having recently read Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran, and Selfe’s history of computers & composition; it’ll also help me to look over the review articles in the journal Computers & Composition, and to do the same for the review articles in CCC and College English from 1982 onwards. I’ll also re-read James Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality, and have a look at the book-length histories Joe Harris, Sharon Crowley, and Robert Connors have written. When I do so, I’ll be looking — in part — for the particular ways in which class enters the discourse: as a reductive example, I might see whether straight compositionists cite Marx while computers & composition folks cite Weber, or whether computers & composition folks toss off an aside about class in the last two sentences while straight compositionists give it a sustained examination. In these examinations, I’ll be mostly ignoring the Wyoming (548K PDF) literature, because my primary interest is in the ways that class and the economies of writing affect students.
As I observed with my recent work on Seitz, critical pedagogy as it’s constructed in composition is one of the sites where class is both foregrounded and elided in problematic ways. Donna confirmed this, pointing out that my work on Seitz may help to understand the entire project of critical pedagogy, as it’s become practically a dominant paradigm in composition, as trading one set of class blinders for another. She suggests that Sharon O’Dair is quite right in her recent contention (171K PDF) that critical pedagogy is the new “default” (despite the fact that we both profoundly disagreed with the conclusions O’Dair reaches) in composition instruction, but also agrees that critical pedagogy for American compositionists is no longer in any way associated with Marxist ideas: rather, it’s become more just a loose construction of “critical thinking” muddled together with cultural studies approaches to teaching composition. For these reasons, understanding critical pedagogy in composition is going to be an important component of my research, which means I’ll do well to look at the work of Shor and McLaren, but also — mostly — to look at the differences between Giroux’s 1983 Theory and Resistance and his 1992 Border Crossings for understandings of why critical pedagogy in composition has moved from Marxist ideas to cultural studies ideas.
I’ll conclude by noting that the last time I met with Charlie, he agreed about the importance of the two questions Donna had posed: How might I try to see technology itself as dynamically interacting with the power relations in the classroom, rather than just helping to create the space for those power relations to exist? How might I see the economies of the wired writing classroom as defining the context within which Bourdieu’s relational classes operate? Charlie noted that these questions may be answerable with classroom studies, but also suggested that I might do well to build up to them, and then leave them at the end of the dissertation as questions for future research. My own gut sense here has been that Andrew Feenberg and some of the recent work of Italian autonomist Marxists (following Negri) may help me do some sophisticated work in attempting to answer the second question, but Donna suggests that it may be enough of a project for the dissertation simply to set up an initial, tentative answer and then declare, “Directions for future research.” Or I could propose some ways in which the questions could be answered and leave it for the next book. In fact, if I’m going to get ambitious, I might envision three steps: first, for the dissertation, setting up the problems of how class surfaces differently in the discourses of my two disciplines, and attempting to explain why. The second big step might then be to attempt a theoretical synthesis based on that accounting that uses Habermas and Feenberg and autonomist Marxism that lays out a productive and consistent understanding for pedagogical praxis involving class and technology. The third big step would then be an extended classroom study that enacts and attempts to somehow test that theoretical synthesis.
But that’s dreams of grandeur, and ten years’ worth of work. Right now, I just gotta worry about the very first fraction of step one, and get this dang prospectus done.
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