Changing Literacies

Methodology
This survey
Limitations/Challenges
See the Survey

Courses & Workshops
Nature of Training
Faculty & Graduate Students
Assessment

Conclusion
Further Study
Appendix A
Works Cited

The second reason for the necessity of a study tracking TA technology training is the status of students’ literacies. In the wake of the explosion of digital technologies, students’ literacy practices are changing as are the products—the ITexts they are creating. To teach effectively, we must understand the nature of those changes so that we might then craft effective classroom praxis. Thus, the need for a study investigating technology and teacher training is highlighted by the degree to which literacy has been affected by digital technologies. 

In addition, as literacies change, so do the texts that evolve from those literacies, as the evolution of the IText genre indicates. Literacy has always signified some facet of reading, writing, and textual distribution. In other words, if someone is unable to read, write, or participate in the dissemination of texts, our society would classify them as "illiterate." With the advent of digital technologies, literacy, as well as illiteracy, has taken on new meaning. Digital technologies, like all technologies, are not transparent. They have an impact on literacy just as analog technologies such as the pencil have affected literacy. In Passions Pedagogies and 21^st Century Technologies, Denis Baron explains some history behind the pencil. He says, "The pencil maybe old, but like the computer today and the telegraph in 1849, it is an indisputable example of a communication technology" (18). Pencils are technology just as pens, protractors, and chalkboards are technologies, and each has affected the literacy of the time although that impact is now so much a part of our taken-for-granted reality that the changes are transparent. Christina Haas explains this myth of invisible technology. She says,

The myth that technology is transparent posits that technology is a kind of distortionless window: Writing is not changed in any substantive way by the transparent medium through which it passes. . . The transparent technology myth views technology merely as a means of textual production. Writing, in its essential nature, is somehow imagined to exist dependently of and uninfluenced by that means. (34)

In other words, pencils and pens have been around so long that we do not recognize them as technologies, but we must remember that they are and that they have affected the nature of the literacy that evolved with them. The same is true of digital technologies.  Like any other writing tool, digital technology affects how we compose and read messages as well as how those messages are deployed to an audience.

Reading and writing now encompasses the visual and verbal as well as the written. Digital technologies allow us to send messages with words, pictures, and video attached. Digital technologies allow us to talk on the phone and send real-time snapshots of our immediate environment. We communicate using a variety of methods and strategies: pictures, voices, video, and text. Students, teachers, coaches, ministers, employers, teens, and children can use digital technology to compose messages that incorporate the visual, oral, and written components of communication.

This changing nature of literacy intensifies when we consider the impact of digital technologies on both language and society. Literacy creates the ideology of societies, and since we, as teachers, are faced with new literacies we must, more than ever, confront literacy and digital technologies as a vital part of society and how society makes meaning. J. Elspeth Stuckey, in Violence of Literacy, explains literacy as a "theory of society." She claims that,

A theory of literacy is a theory of society, of social relationships; and the validity of a theory of literacy derives form the actual lives of the people who make the society. It is not the case that literacy provides the key to understanding the connections of a people; it is the case that literacy provides a view from which to survey the history and future of social formations. (64)

As literacy practices within the larger culture evolve, as society evolves, teachers will also need to evolve new pedagogy to meet their students’ needs and the demands of that larger culture. Digital technology will not explain itself to us; rather, it will be the job of teachers to use digital technology to facilitate a new literacy for all of our students, especially those who through life circumstances are barred from experiences with digital technologies and thus barred from experiences with changing literacies. Society suffers when it excludes others from literate acts; when some teachers (and students) can use digital technologies while others cannot, we perpetuate a society of haves and have-nots.

Likewise, writing programs, departments, and universities must accept responsibility for contributing meaningful technological support.  But the support and training offered by a program, department, and/or university must consider their own cultural ecology. Or, rather, how the university and department has implemented technological literacy over time.  Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher say that,

Before we can hope to do a better, more informed job of making decisions about these literacies as they are taught in classrooms, homes, community centers, and workplaces across the United States, we need to learn much more about how various social, cultural, political, ideological, and economic factors have operated dynamically, in relation to each other, at various levels of influence, and over time, to shape the acquisition and development of digital literacies within people's lives. (3)

Discovering how universities have, in the past, implemented and valued technological literacy requires an investigation into how the university and department have constructed and implemented technology training for teachers for technology training modules, workshops, and courses offer us one place to begin this discussion, a discussion that will eventually end in revealing the cultural ecologies of both departments and universities.  I believe that our teacher training practices can be even more fundamental as they pertain to technology in the classroom.  There are many of us who have been called to another faculty member's office for help with PowerPoint, attaching objects to email, or even aid in helping a faculty member log into their university account.  These basic operations warrant not just a consideration of their cultural ecology, but practical, sometimes, tool-type training.  As a result, it is essential that we better understand the nature of technology training so that we might provide the best possible experiences with digital technologies and literacy teaching. The goal is to make new literacies available to all of our students, and we cannot achieve that goal without an accurate picture of our current processes and programs of teacher training.

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