Dapne Desser writes:

I wrote a grant as a graduate student at the University of Arizona so that I could attend a summer training program to prepare me for teaching in a computer lab--this was led by the very capable Michael Moore, who is now continuing his good work at Michigan Tech. We received on-going support and training throughout the academic year while we were teaching in computer labs for the first time. I should point out that these training sessions were always also accompanied by theoretical and critical investigations into the impact of new technologies on teaching, discourse etc. In my first year as an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, I have tried to draw from the strengths of my training by co-founding and co-directing with Darin Payne USC's PINTE program-- Program for Integrating New Technologies in English.

The PINTE program is an effort to offer teachers and students opportunities to teach and learn in technology-rich environments. Roughly thirty sections of undergraduate English are being taught this Spring in computerized classrooms. In accordance with the goals of our traditional curricula, students learn critical literate practices, but in this case their work extends into the electronic sphere. In addition to reading literary works and writing essays, the students also read, evaluate, and produce electronic texts. They also have the opportunity to explore the impact of the medium on the message; that is, by working in computerized spaces, the students gain a better understanding of how literate practices are shaped by contextual factors like technology.

The teachers--which include TA's, adjuncts, and faculty members--gain further insight into how literate practices, and our intellectual work in academia, are being shaped by technology. The teachers in the pilot program are being trained and supported in two significant ways as they work to integrate computers into their courses: one, they are being introduced to a host of local and web-based applications that can be used to facilitate their curricula; two, they are being introduced to critical intellectual apparatuses for interrogating the technologies they are implementing. Such training and support is being offered by Darin Payne, who is serving as a computer-mediated pedagogy consultant to the English Department and who initiated the pilot program, and by myself, in conjunction the graduate seminar I am currently teaching on "Computers and Writing" this Spring.

We have required that participants in the PINTE program attend my graduate seminar because we feel very strongly that educating teachers to work with new technologies happens best when it occurs within the context of ongoing intellectual investigation into successful practice and critical interrogation. New teachers in computerized environments need to be acknowledged for the extra work their innovative teaching requires (thus the academic credit they receive at USC), they need ongoing support--technical and pedagogical, they need the opportunity to collaborate with other teachers, they need fora for discussions, they need the time and encouragement to read critical and theoretical scholarship on the impact of new technologies on the teaching of English.

In my seminar we are currently investigating the impact of computers on discourse and the teaching of writing by asking these kinds of questions: How do new technologies impact the relationships among author, text, reader, and context? How are new technologies contributing to shifting definitions of literacy? How are writing, subjectivity, and the future of public discourse in a post-humanist world defined and evaluated in the technological age? Do new technologies make more explicit, reveal, reflect, or perpetuate postmodern understanding of language and the self? In what ways do we compose our students as subjects when we prepare them for the computerized corporate world? How do new technologies redefine the roles of teachers, students, classrooms, and institutions? In order to answer these questions, we are reading Passions, Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies edited by Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher, Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing by James Porter, and a course packet of work by scholars in the field of computers and composition, including work by Postman, McAllister, Apple, Feenberg, and Ellul, among others. We also spend time in the computer classroom and on-line experimenting with and interrogating new technologies. The course is divided into three units: pedagogical applications, theoretical implications, and administrative issues.

The course is housed on-line through Blackboard at http://crs.cla.sc.edu, and you are welcome to stop by and visit. If you want to view the communication sections, e-mail me for the password and user id for the guest function.

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