Community Meetings
The Way We Will Have Become
The Future (Histories) of Computers and Writing

Position Statement
Claudine Keenan
On the K-12 front, teachers face all the more pressure and all the fewer opportunities to incorporate technology into literacy and language arts instruction. As Dickie notes, compositionists should and will continue to be at the forefront of technology in higher education, as we respond to shifts in our student population. As their instructors, we raise our voices and encourage our students to raise theirs in support of incorporating technology; and let's face it, we write the best proposals to fund our research in this area.

But consider the 4th grade school teacher, facing a local school board's mandate to teach spelling, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and the paragraph form, all in an effort to increase standardized test scores. When she goes home to grade her stacks of worksheets, that teacher tunes in to see Al Gore and Bill Clinton calling for widespread incorporation of computers in the curriculum. Her school building has yet to be wired. Her classroom may never be. And if her building's test scores don't increase, federal funding for *books* may be withdrawn, let alone funding for computers. Her principal can only reimburse her for professional development courses that advance her knowledge of *teaching language arts*, not computers. And the 8th grade teacher? He faces the same situation, as does his colleague over in the high school, busily preparing students to pass the ultimate standardized test: the SAT, so that her students can qualify to become ours. How can our profession bridge the distance between what happens in K-12 and what we expect our students to have learned about language and literacy by the time they reach our classrooms?

As we continue to broaden the scope of our definition of literacy to include techno literacy, we will face disappointment as we recognize that our assumptions about what students have learned in the technological arena are based on fallacy. Yes, students in the next few years will have had more experience using computers at home and in school, but how will they have used those tools? What programs are in place to prepare public school teachers for what we expect students to be able to do with computers? The electronic writing classroom, like its predecessor the process writing workshop, may be heading for a pedagogical blame game.

To avoid this, we may want to begin building bridges to our public schools now more than ever, when the technology itself makes this outreach even more convenient, even more feasible. Perhaps we should be looking to solidify our ties to the high schools (I'd like to mention what Becky's old ECB is doing here, and a few other partnership models). For without cooperation between public and higher education, computers cannot effectively help to promote and promulgate current composition theory until we overcome the gap that inequity between the two systems is helping to widen.

Back  Hugh Burns
 Cynthia Haynes
 Jan Holmevik
 Fred Kemp
 Dickie Selfe
 John Slatin