Critical Work in First-Year Composition: Computers, Pedagogy, and Research

Constructing forms of agency . . . relies on individuals' abilities to see culture as "leaky" by mobilizing the multiplicity they bring to any cultural production. . . . Rather than a predetermined discursive or ideological production, the subject becomes a site of cultural negotiation herself, individuated in her relationship to ideology.

—Donna LeCourt (1998: 285)

For those who work in postsecondary composition and believe in a critical pedagogical approach to that work, simple, dichotomous positionings relative to writing technology (either-or, hegemonic, or oppositional) are problematic. Indeed, our discipline's scholarship is moving away from reductive, unrealistic ways of thinking about teaching and learning in computer-enhanced composition classrooms (Braun 2001: 129). For instance, Ken S. McAllister (1999: 192-93) notes that "scholarship about computer-enhanced pedagogy is maturing," citing as evidence the fact that "simple positions are becoming less viable."

Nevertheless, Pamela Takayoshi (2000: 132) deplores our wider culture's continuing tendency to use an either-or approach to thinking about technology and insists that we work "toward a balanced perspective. . . a more complex vision of technology." ¹ Thus, while we adopt more nuanced and complicated stances toward technology as scholars and practitioners, we must as teachers help our students achieve this balanced perspective as well. Why? Because writing is epistemic. As James Berlin (1982: 776) asserts: "In teaching writing, we are not simply offering training in a useful technical skill that is meant as a simple complement to the more important studies of other areas. We are teaching a way of experiencing the world, a way of ordering and making sense of it." Berlin (1992: 32) calls this our "work of creating a critically literate citizenry."

The central location for this work typically lies in the first-year-composition (FYC) course in reading, thinking, and writing in which students, ideally, gain facility in "the critical reflective discourse that provides the medium for the undergraduate experience" (Bazerman 1995: 256). However, our pedagogy does not always invite our students to undertake the kind of investigation that work requires, and it systematically overlooks digital technology as a focus for that critical work. ² Of the dearth of critical pedagogical attention paid to technology, LeCourt (1998: 275) observes, in language that echoes Berlin's, that "despite similarity in pedagogical goals, critical literacy theorists, with a few exceptions . . . make little mention of writing technology. . . . Yet both critical pedagogy and computers and composition have much in common, specifically an abiding interest in how students make meaning in culture."

Our Work: Critical Pedagogy and Computers

Our pedagogy, to be critical in this potentially valuable way, needs to provide an occasion for students to reflect on and articulate their relationship to digital technology, the forces that influenced the formation of that relationship, and the ways that they might develop some agency within the parameters of that relationship, thus opening the way for them to develop the more complicated and mature positionings relative to technology that computers-and-composition scholars advocate. Because the computer is now a substantive part of our culture, including occupying an increasingly central position in FYC pedagogy, and is changing the environment in which we function as teachers and students, digital technology's seemingly commonsense assumptions need to be acknowledged and explored, not unproblematically accepted or rejected. Our work in the FYC classroom, therefore, must deliberately and conscientiously create "critical pedagogy," beginning with "reflection aimed at making the individual effects of ideology apparent and, thus, open to critical scrutiny" (LeCourt 1998: 277). For FYC students, critical pedagogy provides a much-needed opportunity to become aware of how cultural "texts" create subject positions that they have never examined.

These subject positions, relative to digital technology, are natural (although not neutral) extensions of cultural assumptions about it as they are presented in the dominant discourse of technology. Because these assumptions are overwhelmingly positive, persuasive, and unchallenged (Barton 1994: 57), Christina Haas (1996: 21) calls them "cultural myths" of technology. They include beliefs like the following...