"The Importance of Breadth and Diversity in Graduate Computers and Writing Education"
James Inman
Furman University
"The Importance of Breadth and Diversity in Graduate Computers and Writing Education"
James Inman
Furman University
If "disciplinary determinism" is half as problematic as technological determinism, then I'm in trouble right away, but I want to begin anyway by arguing that computers and writing education seems now to determine computers and writing as a discipline more than ever. And, my purpose in this brief statement is to articulate some reasons why I believe we need to think differently about such education, why we need to think more broadly and diversely about the work we do and that we ask our students to do.
A useful starting place is to ask this question: What is the functional and conceptual link that enables disciplinary determinism, and why is it necessarily suggesting we need to rethink computers and writing education?
Many of you entered computers and writing not from a formal academic program emphasizing it, but instead from a range of diverse and interesting places---literary studies, industry, writing studies, anthropology, sociology, education, and more. And, the result has been positive: much outstanding work has been done already in our young field.
But, now, we have formal academic programs in computers and writing, and they are taking us away from our diverse beginnings to a future space wherein specific training will be required to enter and interact within the discipline. Do I mean that the community won't be as accepting as it always has? No. Of course not. But, I do mean that too much local specialization in computers and writing education harms the field as a whole.
Consider this scenario. Sample State University graduates 10-12 doctoral students per year, and this year, 5 of them have specialization in "computers and writing," a doctoral emphasis added by Sample State's Department of English several years ago. A small state college, Example O' the Day College, receives funding to hire a tenure track assistant professor of English, with specialization in computers and writing. Example receives 47 applications and narrows its list of candidates to five. Of these, the Sample State graduate is the only one with an explicit emphasis in "computers and writing." The other four candidates have done promising work with computers and writing as well, but have different specializations, three in rhetoric and composition and one in technical communication. After much deliberation, the search committee believes the five candidates to be nearly equal----a tie, more or less. So, who is ultimately hired? Sample State's graduate because the explicit specialization in "computers and writing" broke the tie. Every time this scenario is repeated, it further develops the potential for such specialization to be required, meaning that graduate education must be specifically in "computers and writing" for anyone who wants a "computers and writing" job. You see, I'm sure, where this is going.
And, no doubt, someone will respond with "Shouldn't a computers and writing specialist be best for a computers and writing job?" A fair question. But, the point is that our discipline should not be about training; it hasn't in the past, and we should take note of the diverse academic beginnings to chart a path for the future. We are at our best, I believe, when we haven't all read the same things, interacted with the same people, shaped the same minds. When we, to put it simply, need each other to be our best.
Less problematic perhaps, but still quite limiting is the way computers and writing education seems to be constructing the discipline only as a subdiscipline of rhetoric and composition. Again, breadth and diversity are suppressed. What about relations to women's studies, communication studies, information studies, history of science and technology, educational studies, anthropology, and more? For my dissertation, to offer one example of how subdiscipline status does not do us justice, I had the honor of working with Cindy Selfe, co-panelist in this forum, and it's interesting and representative to me that we didn't talk about articles in Computers and Composition or books that have developed specific computers and writing focuses---instead, we talked about theorizations of agency, like that of Michel De Certeau, and philosophical explorations of technology, such as those of Martin Heidegger, and we discussed the importance of transcripts to any qualitative research. Each of these topics was and is important, but none, with perhaps the exception of qualitative research design, fit easily into a model of computers and writing as only a subdiscipline of rhetoric and composition.
What happens to computers and writing scholarship, if educational programs alone determine the bounds of the discipline? We continue to call in field dialogues for outreach, expanding our base of community members, but how can we do this when we only talk to each other, when breadth and diversity are becoming less and less an element of our work? You can see this in recent publications. Think about any edited collection published in 1999 or 2000 that addresses issues important to computers and writing, and see where the student authors are from----do you recall any outside of large scale, well-known programs? Maybe, but not many, I would guess. In fact, many alumni of these programs write for the books too. So, they still reflect, at least implicitly, the influence of the original graduate programs.
This, I think, is a large issue for us. How do we broaden our publishing to include other audiences and, thus, expand our discipline? With Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments, which Douglas Eyman and I co-edit, we have worked to take first steps in the various CoverWebs we publish. In issue 5.1, for instance, which released in early April, CoverWeb Editor Joel English developed a focus on K-12 Language Arts and Technology, and the response has been very positive, especially in terms of how we're reaching out to public and private school educators. The key is moving beyond a rhetoric of inclusion ("K-12 teachers should be interested in what we do," "I once talked to a K-12 teacher, and she . . . .") to an action plan for inclusion, and this sort of approach needs to be modeled in computers and writing education.
We need to fight disciplinary determinism, then, not with rhetoric, but with action. This means, I believe, making sure a few graduate programs do not dominate the national and international scenes, and it means educating both our discipline and others who may share issues with us that computers and writing is less about training and more about experiences and perspectives. If we allow the contemporary educational scene to erase important breadth and diversity, then we run the risk of not having a discipline at all in the end.
