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*books* may be withdrawn, let alone funding for computers.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.