Only one more full day left here, and then a long, long flight back Thursday afternoon and into Friday morning. I’ve been having a fine time, though, and I’ll post some pictures of my day trip up to the North Shore.
Nancy Barron, Sibylle Gruber, and Connie Sirois presented on “Theories of Technologies: Rhetorics, Embodiments, and the Everyday” for the conference’s second session, and offered some provocative and engaging insights. I was happy to have the chance to chat briefly with Sibylle and Gail Hawisher afterwards, as well. Most interesting were the theoretical perspectives that Sibylle and Connie offered, and the way that Nancy grounded Sibylle’s theoretical perspective in a description of teacherly practice in a hybrid learning environment.
Nancy detailed the study that she and Sibylle did with two classes themed around the effects of hybridity on identity formation. As I noted, the classes took place in a hybrid learning environment — online and classroom — and Nancy and Sibylle hoped that the hybrid nature of the course and its effects on teaching might increase students’ awareness of hybridity in their own lives. Furthermore, they hoped that students would also no longer consider technology as a force in its own right, but as something more complex and ambiguous. Nancy noted that many students made reference to “heritage” in describing their identity formation, but admitted that “heritage” didn’t really tell others online much about who they were. Her consequent question to them: how, then, do you identify yourself in online discourse?
(Okay, it’s dark out now, and I thought that what I just saw moving in the shadows by the garden wall was a really big gecko. Turns out it was a frog. What is this, Wild Kingom? If Marlin Perkins shows up by the pool with a Mai-Tai, he’d best be drinking it from a coconut.)
Anyway. Sibylle described some of the responses to other questions that she and Nancy posed to students in a survey. What she found most remarkable was the students’ response that technology is dehumanizing, one-dimensional, and interferes with interpersonal communication. According to students, technology is also functional, convenient, and inescapable: it’s required of you to be familiar with it. In these responses, students seem to ignore the critical perspective offered by Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher, the perspective that Sibylle and Nancy were hoping to foster. To their students, technology is, indeed, a force in its own right.
From the observations they made in their study, Nancy and Sibylle were able to construct a progression of the seven stages of identity development.
- Students are new to the technologies and enthusiastic; perhaps slightly intimidated, but not much.
- Students see technology as a necessity for success; they’ve encountered it before.
- Students are immersed in technology; they see it as all-powerful and an absolutely essential component of life.
- Students internalize the importance of technology.
- Students become critical of technology.
- Students distance themselves from seeing technology as an integral part of themselves.
- Students become committed to being critical users of technology, and understand that while they may be able to control technology, technology can also control them.
Sibylle concluded by suggesting that she and Nancy would like to figure out a way to use these stages to help meet students’ needs. (My immediate internal response: and those needs are — what, exactly?)
Connie’s presentation, on “Computers, Composition, and Theories of the Everyday” was a slight departure. Here’s the summary she offers: “This presentation focuses on theories of the everyday that offer unique ways of assessing our technological lives and the effects that technological changes have on students’ everyday lives. It also looks at how these theories work within composition classrooms that require higher levels of computer literacy.”
I was interested to see that I’ve been doing some of the same things that Connie’s doing: borrowing terminology and constructs from other fields and applying them to composition. Of course, this is nothing new in the history of composition, but Connie’s doing with sociological theories of the everyday what I’ve been doing with economic and sociological understandings of class. She gives a heavily theoretical history of these sociological perspectives concerned with the nature of everyday experience, with her summary stretching from Aristotle to Bakhtin, and mentioning De Certeau and a few others. Personally, I might have hoped for a little more on De Certeau, and balancing the more generally theoretical with some concrete and specific examinations of the applicability of these theories to computers and writing. Still, her presentation was philosophically complex, and I’d be doing it violence to attempt to summarize the way she deploys Bakhtin.
The Q&A was productive, with some interesting attempts at synthesis from Cindy and others. My questions were for Sibylle, about the stages of development that she and Nancy constructed, since I’ve seen similar stages of capital-D Development in the literature of economics, wherein all societies are theorized as beginning at the stage of primitive accumulation and reaching the end-point of mass production coupled to mass consumption. Clearly, this is an ethnocentric narrative — basically, Western capital declares itself as the model of Development for the rest of the world, declares itself as the highest point of Development, and then suggests to other cultures ways in which they might more adequately follow Western capital’s own steps of Development. Of course, this ensures and rationalizes the circumstances by which other cultures will always remain “behind” Western capital, ignoring the possibility of multiple paths of Development. If we think about metaphorically applying this critique to Sibylle’s model, here are my questions: first, do all students need to go through all seven stages? Second, do all students have to get to step seven? Third, are there no steps beyond step seven? My concern, in a nutshell, is that Nancy and Sibylle’s seven stages are deeply teleological, and as such may risk obscuring other understandings of the ways all of us learn to interact with technology.
Still, it was a fine, informative, well-delivered panel, and I’m grateful to Nancy, Sibylle, and Connie for what I learned.
(And, OK, this is Wild Kingdom. I’m watching the geckos dart up the screen door and gobble the flies that are fluttering around the outside light. The flies have pretty long wings, so the geckos just hang out for a while with the tips of the wings sticking out the side of their mouths, while they chew. Marlin?)
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