|
Articles Conference Reviews |
A.33 Writing (in) the Public SphereA.33 Writing (in) the Public Sphere: Deliberative Democracy and Computer Mediated Communication The members of this panel considered a number of ways in which conceptions of and interactions in the “public sphere” are reconceived and renegotiated when the place/space of these exchanges moves online--that is, when much of the communication happens in writing among participants who are not physically present. Each of the panelists discussed particular ways in which he or she has used CMC to engage students in deliberative discourse. Jacqueline Schiappa, “Theorizing the Public Sphere for the 21st Century Classroom: Including the Online Experiences of Digital Natives”An addition to the printed program, Schiappa suggested that “digital natives” are often dismissed as self-absorbed and disinterested in participating as citizens in the public sphere because the new media texts that they produce—in both public and private spaces—are not considered “real writing.” But, contended Schiappa, the very act of writing is a kind of doing, and thus the public sphere should be re-envisioned as being enmeshed in those very texts. According to Schiappa, the types of online writing assignments that are often assigned to digital natives in their college composition classes fail to relate to or complicate the writing that students are already doing. In other words, when instructors ask students to write class blogs or contribute to class wikis, these writing environments are still viewed as “schoolwork,” separate from the writing these students are doing outside the academy. Therefore, Schiappa proposed that instructors should try to revalue the writing students are doing outside the academy by asking 1) What preexisting online writing is appropriate for use in the classroom? 2) How would such writing be included? And 3) To what purposes and ends would such writing be used? Schiappa answered the first question by suggesting that Facebook might be a place to start and that the President’s Facebook site could be considered a space of public engagement. In response to her own second question, Schiappa acknowledged the brevity of most written texts on Facebook, and she suggested asking students either to take an essay and reduce it to a Facebook comment or to take a Facebook comment and expand it into an essay--and afterwards asking themselves what was lost and/or gained in the new genre. Schiappa concluded by reiterating her contention that the online writing students are already doing is significant, real, and meaningful to them, and that it does matter in the public sphere of the 21st century. Joshua Welsh, “Is There Anybody Out There?: Helping Student Writers Address Audience in Technical Writing Courses”Welsh began his presentation with an anecdote about his two nephews: the 3-year-old nephew does not consider his audience yet, and thus does not lie; his 7-year-old nephew, on the other hand, has figured out that he can influence his audience to affect a desired outcome, and thus may choose to lie in an attempt to achieve that outcome. The point of this story, said Welsh, is not to suggest that audience awareness is so simple that a 7-year-old can figure it out, but that audience awareness is deceptively complex (which is part of the reason why his nephew’s lies are so readily discovered). Reminding listeners of Chaim Perelman’s distinction between the universal audience (an audience of all rational beings) and a particular audience (a smaller subset of rational beings), Welsh suggested that Perelman’s overreliance on the rationality of audiences is problematic because it tends to privilege data and to minimize the audience’s shared experiences and shared values. Welsh then discussed the role of audience analysis exercises in technical writing courses, using an example of a usability study focused on measuring users’ actions. The specific example Welsh used was a heat map of a website that recorded the users’ actions, which he characterized as a hyper-rational grid imposed on a text. Such analyses, Welsh suggested, may be good at finding out problems with the website design, but he argued that that are not so good at figuring out the audience for the websites themselves. Therefore, Welsh suggested that, in addition to such standard usability studies, technical writing students should also be given audience-based writing assignments. One example of which is one in which they choose a technological issue and then write a piece of deliberative discourse arguing for a particular course of action that considers who the audience is, what the medium of delivery is, etc. Andrew Virtue, “Appealing to ‘Place’: Forging Identities in Online Environments”Virtue began his presentation by clarifying that his use of the term “Computer Mediated Communication” (CMC) would be used “specifically in relation to digital-based tools for learning such as WebCT, Blackboard, Moodle, etc.” (handout). He then suggested that CMC offers online places that have a rhetorical appeal for students as a space of shared identity, but CMC also creates the possibility for an effective public sphere in a “safe” place. The difficulty for instructors in a traditional classroom setting, Virtue contended, is that writing is often an abstract idea that is talked about but not often carried out due to time limitations. Virtue claimed that the IRE pattern of classroom discussion (characterized by Lester Faigley as initiation, reply, and evaluation) may limit student engagement because some students carry “baggage” and two or three dominant students can often silence others. However, suggested Virtue, CMC can disrupt this traditional structure in three important areas: place, identity, and collaboration. Virtue characterized CMC as both a public and anonymous space at the same time, and stated that CMC is attached to identity. Virtue went on to claim that students need to forge strong identities in order to achieve effective learning. Using James Gee’s definitions of virtual identity (a constructed identity within the limitations of a specific system), real identity (any and/or all combinations of an individual’s real-world identity such as age, gender, race, hobbies, etc.), and projective identity (the ability to project values and desires onto the virtual identity), Virtue suggested that CMC spaces provide students with the opportunity to use their projective identities to become better writers, as these identities have strong relationships to CMC and may provide a stronger sense of group identity and consequently encourage more collaboration . This collaboration can be governed by students either as an entire class or in separate “rooms” within the CMC, and these spaces become a kind of public sphere. Virtue concluded by saying that using CMC to supplement a traditional classroom setting provides students with a learning environment that can be less oppressive than a traditional classroom, a space with a better distribution of power. In addition, CMC provides a low-stakes writing environment in which students can gain more practice with writing while keeping in mind the notion of audience and conceiving of their writing as a collaborative/public act. Timothy Oleksiak, “Incendiary Discourse: Reconsidering ‘Flaming,’ ‘Authority,’ and Deliberative Democracy in CMC”After distributing a handout containing a number of scholarly definitions of “flaming” (including those of Rovai, Shea, Eve & Brabazon, and Vrooman), Oleksiak offered his own definition: awful language in a CMC class directed at another person. Oleksiak then examined what he found to be problematic about responses to flames in the existing literature. Before critiquing two particular approaches to flaming, Oleksiak problematized two elements of modern democratic theory: 1) the assumption of fixed identities and stable experiences in which interlocutors are able to engage each other as equals in a rational system of discourse, and 2) the assumption that social injustices can be dealt with by a fair system of distribution. The first scholarly approach to flaming that Oleksiak critiqued was Mary Lenard’s 2005 article in Pedagogy, “Dealing with Online Selves: Ethos Issues in Computer-Assisted Teaching and Learning .” Oleksiak characterized Lenard’s response to classroom flames as an authoritative method in which teachers try to prevent students (specifically, in this case, homosexuals) from being abused by other students by employing a top-down approach to civic engagement in which the teacher not only has the authority to define “civic virtue” (or, in Lenard’s case “polite” discourse) but also casts the recipients of the flames as “vulnerable” or “weak” or unable to defend themselves. Instead of taking charge as teachers and attempting to protect students (which assumes they may be weak or unable to speak out themselves), Oleksiak suggested that teachers use chatroom records as texts for rhetorical interrogation and analysis, that they treat students as mature adults who can be trained in active listening, who can learn to listen better to terrible things that get said and to think about how to engage each other with courage and maturity. While not denying that flames can serve to undermine the goals of democratic citizenship or that CMC classrooms should be consequence-free environments, Oleksiak urged teachers not to prohibit flames but to allow students the chance to meet the challenges of radical democratic citizenship and to interrogate the discourse that they use. Oleksiak next took on Jeffrey Weinstock’s 2004 article in Pedagogy, “Respond Now! E-mail, Acceleration, and a Pedagogy of Patience.” In offering instructors suggestions on how to approach the phenomenon of flaming in email correspondence, Weinstock suggests that instructors ask students to write about emails they’ve written and then regretted or flames that they have received. He suggests that instructors allow students to write a flame and then discuss those flames as a class. The problem with this approach, according to Oleksiak, is that it takes flames out of context and that it presents flames as failures to communicate, failures to deliberate “properly.” In these kind of flame analysis exercises, said Oleksiak, the teacher functions as the remediator of failed discursive practices and solidifies his or her authority. Oleksiak then offered his own suggestions for how to open up discussions about flames in the classroom: 1) treat flames in the context of their use; 2) allow students to respond to flames in the moment how they see fit; 3) as an instructor, be aware of the tensions that might result from flames but be reflexive about one’s own authority and explore the justifications students have for their own behaviors: don’t assume flames are a failure of communication or that students have fixed identities. Overall, members of the audience seemed to appreciate that the panelists grounded their theories within specific classroom applications, and much of the question-and-answer period (which was relatively short given the 4 speakers) centered on sharing similar classroom experiences or asking the panelists: “What would you suggest I do in situation X or Y?” |