Introduction

For the past four years we have conducted a listserv on which students (pre-service teachers and graduate teaching assistants) at our respective institutions could e-mail each other to discuss issues raised in class and course readings. In this paper we offer an analysis of selected incidents and recurring themes of the listserv to examine this usage of technology at the intersection of rhetorical and pedagogical theory and the practice of critical reading and writing instruction.

E-mail represents a hybridized rhetorical space, a mix of letter-writing, telephone conversation, and writing from sources. It allows students to quote and comment on other students’ messages. It allows, though it does not require, editing and proofreading as well as reflection by the writer. Yet it has an element of spontaneity and personal exchange, like the telephone, in its timeliness. E-mail lends itself to brevity and informality, in tone and form. According to Frank Griffin and Lillie Anderton-Lewis, e-mail "fosters an informal rhetorical relationship that rewards openness and collaboration" (p. 9) in an academic setting.

Thus, e-mail lends itself to the kind of discourse that Kenneth Bruffee and many others have characterized as collaborative and socially constructive. Students share and negotiate their respective areas of expertise to construct a web of meanings about various issues. In contrast to Bruffee’s vision of consensus as the outcome of collaborative learning, however, the listserv illustrates that the "conversation of mankind" includes, even at its best, conflict and the silencing of some voices regarding meanings that are unresolved or unresolvable. At its best, the listserv represents what Robert Hutchins and Gavriel Salomon have called, in different contexts (Hutchins in work places requiring sophisticated technological acumen and coordination, and Salomon in educational settings), a system of socially distributed cognition. While such systems constrain thought through focus on a specific problem (for Hutchins, how to steer a large battleship with a general power failure in a small harbor) or a specific agenda (for Salomon, how to combine the necessary transmission of knowledge from teacher to student with student involvement and ownership of that knowledge), they also create a potential for a seamless interweaving of discussion threads. Here, on the listserv, a collaborative way of thinking about the teaching of writing and other language arts includes enough rhetorical space for issues to remain open, problems unsolved, and meanings tentative. Thus, the listserv creates a potential for further discourse while it constrains that discourse through its explicit focus on professional issues and concerns.

For our students the presence of several different threads of conversation going on simultaneously or in closely overlapping sequences opened the rhetorical space of the course to a greater range of possible topics for reflection and ways of reflecting on them than an individual teaching log could. Often, students contributed to the conversation by affirming and extending someone else’s ruminations on their experiences or reactions to something they had read or talked about in another class. Distributed systems, as opposed to hierarchical systems, are flexible and adaptable to change though they can appear to be chaotic since no single authority exists that controls the system from above. The listserv as such a system allowed for a wide variety of contributions, including many that built on and moved away from discourse that was strictly about the teaching of writing. This sort of openness can be distracting, but it can also be useful in helping students understand how the teaching of language arts (and anything else, for that matter) is embedded in social contexts and practices that are themselves objects of critical reflection.

Of course, e-mail at its non-best also lends itself to a shallow treatment of issues, especially if there are several threads running simultaneously that people want to respond to, leading to a reply-and-run syndrome that does not encourage critical reflection or critical discourse. This kind of interaction can be frustrating for some students who raise issues and questions that other list members address superficially or not at all. On the other hand, many of our students treated the e-mail messages on this pre-professional listserv as texts to be closely read and analyzed, synthesized, and evaluated, higher order thinking activities that students should be familiar with from other classes, especially those in English literature and composition. We argue here that the listserv seems to be most effective and least frustrating for students when it is part of a larger set of discourse practices of professional development courses, including class discussions, responses to readings, reflective teaching logs, and other professional activities (other courses, participation in professional meetings and student groups, mentoring programs, substitute teaching, tutoring, volunteering in schools, and so on). Thus, the listserv may become both a medium for the expression of multivocal perspectives as well as a resource in itself for further elaboration and critical reflection on these perspectives.

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