Earlier this decade, Nancy Kaplan and Gail Hawisher argued that classroom
technologies have illustrated, intensified, and changed the very theories that
drive our composition classrooms. And indeed, technological literacy is
changing our notions of literacy itself: it is working its way into what
literacy means for English studies. My argument is that, before too much time,
critical technological literacy "will have had" established itself as a basic
component of composition education, becoming an arm of our classrooms parallel
with critical writing and critical reading.
It's an increasing reality that our students use email, word processing,
internet research, and other computer applications as basic tools for
completing their work in college, and command of these technologies are
presupposed in the workforce. In her address to CCCC last month [April 1998],
Cindy Selfe illustrated that "technological literacy--meaning computer skills
and the ability to use computers and other technology to improve learning,
productivity and performance--has become as fundamental to a person's ability
to navigate through society as traditional skills like reading, writing and
arithmetic." I want to push this by saying that functional, rhetorical, and
critical command of communication, information, and composition technologies
will become as basic to our classrooms as the abilities to read and write
critically and reflectively: we can agree that, if students leave our writing
programs without being able to read critically, we have not done our jobs; and
if they leave without knowing how to write critically in different rhetorical
situations, we have failed; but we are coming to realize that, if students
leave us without the abilities to use word processors as tools to facilitate
the writing process, without rhetorical command of email generated writing,
without critical experience finding and analyzing web-based research material,
without an understanding of different modes of online conferencing, then we
have not positioned them for success as literate contemporary readers and
writers.
Let me make clear the extent to which I believe we should realize this:
technological literacy is not a component of academic literacy; if it is "as
fundamental to a person's ability to navigate through society as traditional
skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic" (as Selfe tells us), then
technological literacy is a major component to functional literacy. And if we
send our students away from the composition classroom without knowledge,
experience, and rhetorical command of communication, information, and
composition technologies and the conventions of those technologies, then we
must consider them functionally illiterate--functionally illiterate graduates
of our writing programs.
Finally, it occurs to me that arguing this before the 1998 Computers and
Writing Conference may be an extreme example of preaching to the choir. If it
is so, then I challenge the choir to sing. Sing with the tunes that the
composition field and our departments value--empirical research and teacher
research on a publication-level, and teacher-training workshops on the
service-level. And sing with the lyrics that will turn our pedagogical
directions toward including critical technological literacy--using technologies
and consistently reflecting on their effects on learning and society--as a
fundamental component to composition instruction.