A
Review of Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground
Discussion with Banks
Thread 1 - boxes and wires don't make us smarter
One of the more useful discussions for my graduate students (half of whom were TAs) centered around a critique of the notion that more technology will save the classroom, enhance writing pedagogy, or provide inherently better educational experiences for students. Banks’s book, particularly chapter six, opened up a line of questioning that all my students felt was true in their classroom experiences: Technology by itself does not make students better writers, and in fact, it may hamstring some. Context and who a teacher's students are were vital to addressing these issues, but equally important seemed to be developing pedagogies that worked from a variety of access points. In our discussion, Banks asked my students to consider moving beyond thinking in terms of a binary that placed computers as either good or bad, and toward a more complex dynamic of access that any technology creates in our writing classrooms. Furthermore, we probed chapter six’s implications, asking:
- What kinds of discourses do our technologies and CMS’s allow for or encourage in our classrooms?
- What trade offs do classrooms make when composing with technologies simply (e.g., speed, particular kinds of thinking, privacy, access to particular ways of composing and thinking about language)?
- In what ways must our classrooms and students “make do” (and how do we do this) with the technologies we do have?
Art
More and more, its seems there’s a need to put into context a computer's
value for all concerned [ . . . ] I'm thinking more broadly here rather
than in terms of any specific minority. Increasingly, I have come to laugh
quietly at the notion of a classroom referred to as a "smart classroom"
– the absurd idea that technology (a computer) somehow by itself
enhances education. What good is it for a classroom to be crammed with
computers if no one can access the discourse of those wired boxes? [ .
. . ]
Furthermore, a classroom is only as smart as the individuals who inhabit that space, and more often than not, students can digress into other critical discussions without ever striking the keyboard. I believe the beauty in African American language and traditions is in its history of the oral, where communication can thrive in something as simple as a "quilt," as Banks expresses in Chapter 6, or perhaps in the Underground Railroad, where I believe discursive traditions helped combat and quell the kind of racism we still find on the net today, like with WHITE SUPREMACIST groups.
Jane
Right on! I have always wondered where the idea that computers made us
smarter or better learners came from. Could today's college students write
intelligent, thoughtful papers if they had to rely on the old-fashion
ways of writing? I don't mean old-fashion ideas, but literally if students
had to use at least a ball point pen and paper. This would slow us all
down and maybe make us think through our subjects more carefully. Too
often, as studies have found, today's college student just vomits forth
script without much insight or even care. We have begun to rely heavily
on technology to help us write - Internet research, spell check, thesaurus
programs, grammar check. Unfortunately grammar check is based on Standard
Business English, which also brings up the question of what kind of English
are we going to insist on in the classroom.
Adam
I'd say "amen" to Jane and Arthur's frustration with the notion
that somehow our brand new, shiny stuff is somehow going to solve all
our problems (in this case our pedagogical problems and the social, cultural,
and political issues often at their root). And unfortunately, that's always
the narrative that's used to sell technologies to us. That's one of the
reasons I'm so drawn to ML King's understanding of technology in "Remaining
Awake Through A Great Revolution"--he calls us to avoid the temptation
of such simplistic thinking.
Now, at the same time, I think we have to be savvy about *both* the potentials and the problems computers and digital technologies offer us. And in terms of what they offer us in the writing classroom, we have to think of them as more than bad grammar editors or spell checkers that have no sense of the nuances of language use. To stay stuck there would be to think of computers as *just* the black boxes.
The potential of computers and the net for the writing classroom is the ways that they provide different "writing spaces," different opportunities to reach audiences, to have some level of ownership of the means of communication, to play with, experiment with different ways of communicating. Websites, weblogs, making one's own documentaries, mixtapes/cds (yes, I know that dates me :-). In other words, it's the possibility of new social relationships, new levels of independence from the huge concentration of capital and power in older modes of publishing and media, etc.
The challenge of all of these possibilities, for me, is that we need a pedagogy that leaves room for continual learning, for play, for experimentation. And, of course, this is exactly the opposite of all the pressures we face in this high-stakes testing environment.
[ . . . ]
Then I come back and remember that the challenge of the thinker, teacher, leader is to always find room for agency, even in the midst of madness, and this, for me is one of the major lessons of African American rhetoric. Making a dollar out of fifteen cent, making the most wretched part of the pig a food staple in hard times, walking thousands of miles to repair family ties torn by the horrors of American slavery like Paul D in Beloved and thousands of real life former slaves, finding room for hope, for faith enough to build among one's people *and* reach out to build the Beloved Community as King always tried to do.
So high we can't get over it, so low we can't get under it, so wide we can't get around it...this bit of the spirituals and PFunk definitely applies in this real technologized moment...but Blackfolks keep finding a space for themselves and to reach out to the rest of the nation, nonetheless.
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