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Review of Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground
Teaching Points and Passages
From chapter 2 - defining "access"
Chapter two offers a provocative discussion of technological "access" that is quite useful for secondary and post-secondary composition teachers to engage in. In his section on "Defining Access," Banks states that technologies are not just "the instruments people use to extend their power and comfort"; they "also include the systems of knowledge we must acquire to use any particular tool and the networks of information, economic, and power relations that enable that tool's use" (40). The implication to this, he says, is that technological access is more than "material access." His taxonomy of access can produce lots of questions that may open up pedagogical inquiries for revision and change:
- Material Access, or one's physical proximity to and ability to use the actual material tools and instruments that are often thought of as the technology (e.g., the Internet, computer, software, etc.) (41), is often assumed in many classrooms. But clearly material access should be measured by degrees.
- Functional Access, or the knowledge and skills needed to effectively participate in society with the tools that constitute material access (41-2), might also be measured in degrees. Pedagogical assumptions seem particularly crucial to consider here.
- Experiential Access, that is, the actual use by people of the tools in question as a "relevant part of their lives" (42), might be interrogated in pedagogy as one way to test whether a course is providing some meaningful and relevant experience for its students, particularly those who may have historically been estranged from the academy.
- Critical Access, or the development of "understandings of the benefits and problems of any technology" so that critique, resistance, and avoidance can be exercised (42), is where many teachers probably want to get to with their students since understanding this kind of access develops cultural and social questions.
- Transfomative Access, or the use of tools that creates "genuine inclusion in technology and the networks of power," whose purpose or goal is more than inclusion (45), is possibly the most difficult to accomplish since it calls for "genuine inclusion," which might be termed creative participation in the continual rearticulation of the technology in question.
Banks illustrates in this section (pp. 40-45) how technological access is more than having close by a computer and an Internet connection. Not only is this kind of "access" arguably only one fifth of the foundation needed for equal opportunity in the academy and other communities, it's not a toggle (one either has access to a computer or not). Access to technology is multidimensional and complex, an aspect of our students' lives that should be investigated and accounted for continually.
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