Episode I: Computer Literacy for Negotiating Power
In the first episode, while I was trying to address a student's individual concerns, the student also consciously made critical use of her computer literacy to negotiate power with both the research participants and myself—the writing teacher—in a real-life rhetorical situation. In some circumstances, as Benesch has illustrated in her teaching, intervening in students' writing processes by paying attention to their individual concerns actually empowers the students by enhancing their writing and helping them achieve material benefits. Further, addressing students’ individual concerns forms part of teaching critical practice. The distinction between teaching critical thinking and teaching critical practice in ESL writing is important here. As Suresh Canagarajah points out, while the former is divorced from social positions by teaching students universal, objective, and rationalistic thinking strategies, the latter emphasizes socially grounded, self-reflexive, and dialogical thinking. In the following episode, when my student used computer technology to negotiate power relations, through my intervention, she consciously or unconsciously developed the kind of thinking desired in critical practice.
There was a female student from China in my class. She felt so strongly about the hardship of living in Beijing, a city with a large population, that she decided to write about population issues for the entire semester. In her personal experience essay, she described some problems associated with living in an overpopulated city, such as housing, mass transportation, and the competitive college entrance examination. She concluded her essay, saying that “there are several ways to control the population. One of them is birth control. I am very interested in the topic. So I will write about birth control for the next three essays.” This student writer was quite happy that she had found a topic that interested her, and she started preparing interviews with experts on the topic for her next paper—the interview essay.
One day, I received an email from her with the subject line saying, “Help!” In her email, she reported an obstacle that she had encountered and asked me whether she should change her research topic for the following three essays, or at least for her interview essay. She explained that she had sent an email to a professor in the Anthropology department requesting an interview with him about “whether it is necessary to control population through birth control.” The professor agreed to have the interview. However, after she sent the professor a list of interview questions prior to the interview, she received a refusal for the interview from the professor. The response reads,
Xiaohong -- Now that I've seen your questions, which include a very sensitive topic—abortion, I've decided I don't want to talk with you. The more general questions about population growth are ok, but the other issues pertaining to birth control and abortion are more sensitive, and I know very contested in the PRC now. I think you'll have trouble getting people to talk about these issues if there is any chance whatsoever that something an interviewee says ends up being presented as university policy. - B. Johnsons [1]
Upon reading her desperate email, I could have encouraged or allowed the student to change her topic for the rest of the semester if I followed Santos’s constricted notion of ESL writing as practicing academic skills and genres. But instead, enlightened by Benesch’s work, I saw this as an opportunity to intervene in the student's rhetorical process within the academic discourse. Therefore, I suggested that she rewrite her interview questions to avoid the sensitive issue of abortion and that she suggest to the anthropology professor that she would let him read her interview paper before she turned it in to the writing instructor. This time, the professor agreed to be interviewed.
When the student turned in the second draft of her interview essay for a conference with me, I noticed that she did not go straight into the interview. Instead she devoted the first two paragraphs to contextualizing the interview, introducing the intriguing twist before she finally succeeded in interviewing the professor. The student seemed to understand the penetrating social and institutional forces, or the rhetorical context, surrounding the construction of her own discourse, i.e., writing about a “sensitive” topic at an American university. For her, ESL writing no longer simply meant practicing academic genres conforming to standard American English. She explained in her second draft how she felt immediately after receiving the refusal email and what she did next. She wrote:
At first, I thought it was weird. I never associate abortion with something sensitive. Abortion sounds natural to Chinese. Actually, if you do not abort the child after your first one, it is illegal in China. [So] I sent several emails to negotiate [with the anthropology professor]. I gave up all the questions about birth control or abortion.
This episode illustrates that with the writing teacher's support and her own critical and skillful use of emails, this ESL student succeeded in negotiating power and was thereafter empowered. She was empowered in the sense that she came to understand the complexity of abortion issues across nations and cultures. Further, entangled in complicated power relations, she also developed the rhetorical skills and socially grounded, self-reflexive thinking necessary to negotiate power in academic discourse, an area in which she was still an apprentice. In this event, emails have played a critical role. For this ESL student who had just arrived in the U.S. and lacked experience in direct interaction with American professors, emails created an artificial, less-threatening reality for her to engage in academic discourse. Through her reflective use of emails, the student clearly saw the connection between power relations, discourse, and computer technology. Through the mediation of computer technology, she participated successfully in the knowledge-making process. At the end of the semester, she actually changed, or complicated, her views on abortion issues after writing the four major essays. She took the stand of “anti-abortion, but pro-choice” in her argumentation essay.
[1] The names of all individuals in the three episodes have been changed.