by Christopher Dean, Will Hochman, Carra Hood, and Robert McEachern

Exuberance and the Failure to Learn Their Names: Node II
By Carra Hood

My reasons for believing it is important to put names to faces are not fixed; however, I am convinced, for now anyway, because I cannot think myself out of the notion that what makes a theory of identity meaningful for the purposes of cultural or literary interpretation fails to satisfy social needs. In other words, the playfulness that follows from destabilizing identity in theory can, in human interactions, prove disruptive. I am wary, for instance, in a classroom setting that, if I am not recognized as the teacher and students are not recognized as students, we might not immediately know what role to play. To further complicate this identity problem, I should add that I don't have the same difficulty when the social occurs fully in writing or, importantly, outside of SCSU. The two students who commented "No biggy," when I asked them if their experience of the class was better once all of the students knew each other's names are clearly more comfortable than I am at not knowing either to whom they are talking or to whom they are writing. As well, they are not prone to distinguish or valuate social locations.

The classroom space is not special to these students. At least it is not special enough for all of our names to matter. Perhaps students have a less cluttered, more efficient experience of a course if they are able to remain anonymous. Perhaps this kind of anonymity provides privacy in a world where the boundaries between public and private are continuously reshuffled in ways that increasingly diminish the private and remove its disclosure from individual's control. Perhaps in this world, students need a name to be just a name that does not carry the baggage of identity (recognition, history, memory) and accountability. As Chris Dean laments about "the absence of the physical body" in electronic discussions, "what I felt was a loss of sorts," a loss that I assumed students also felt. However, students did not experience the loss in the same way I did.

Arguments that explain this effect of computer use as potentially more egalitarian and, therefore, less likely to produce discrimination of the sort that relies on body cues are persuasive, as are those that perceive this effect as a symptom of dehumanization. Donna Haraway, who considers the debate irrelevant, insists, "Get over it, boys; there is no going back; the cultural connection to computers has already "chang[ed] what counts as. . .experience in the late twentieth century" (149). Her position is persuasive too. First, according to Haraway, twentieth-century identity is no longer attached to the previous century's dream of a unitary self; rather, it is "a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and. . .an imaginative resource" (150). "No biggy" expresses the same sentiment. Also in "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," Haraway resists distinguishing physical and non-physical space; the boundary is an "imprecise" one, she argues--even more imprecise than it was when she wrote this manifesto in 1991 now that laptops and wireless technology have begun to replace stationary desktop computers in schools and workplaces. I agree with her, knowing, however, that I disagreed a few paragraphs back when I concluded, "I am convinced that it is important for me and for the students in my classes to put names to faces of everyone who shares the same physical space."

More tentative and more desperate than it might have appeared when I first stated it, this conviction hides a deep epistemological insecurity about my role as "the professor." If our names don't matter, if recognizing each other as student and teacher doesn't matter, if sharing the same physical space doesn't matter, and if our sense of the class as a face-to-face community doesn't matter, then how might what I do matter? Journalists who are also engaged in redefining their role in the context of the information revolution spawned by the expansion of Internet access shift from understanding themselves as gatekeepers of information--selecting authoritative sources from insupportable sources for readers--to conceiving of themselves as witnesses and interpreters of events. These roles vary from those that journalists occupied before the information revolution in one significant way: Journalists are no longer the sole providers and fashioners of what constitutes news.

Confronted with the identitarian "fiction mapping our social and bodily reality," professors, like journalists, must re-imagine themselves. Are professors gatekeepers who decide primarily which students pass and which do not? Are they fundamentally designers of learning situations who teach by eavesdropping and occasionally mediating to direct students' conversations? As I reflect on how I might matter to students, I realize that I don't matter in these ways or in the ways that a professor who teaches in a conventional classroom matters; I am not recognized as the authority. However, I do matter. Teaching in an environment that requires my defacement presents me with a unique opportunity to become a different sort of teacher in relation to students--in other words, a writer. As Will Hochman insists "pedagogy comes before technology;" however, technology also challenges pedagogical conventions. Technology, in this case, significantly changes the teacher's self-perception and the teacher's role. Instead of the ideal reader who makes notes on students' papers from a position of power and knowledge, I have learned to see myself as a co-author or collaborator. The use of computers in writing courses facilitates this shift in part because the technology disembodies and, as a consequence, undoes the conventional classroom hierarchy. In this kind of classroom, a text is no longer the product of an individual student, but the collective effort of multiple readers and writers--including those identified in face-to-face classrooms as student authors, peer editors, and the teacher. It's not simply that "the way we use the tools determines their effects," as Bob McEachern suggests, since our identity, our pedagogical role, and the product of our teaching, are all changed through our use of and connection to computer technology. So, although I prefer to put students' names to their faces, I think I would rather be a writer than an authority.

Node Three of "Exuberance and the Failure to Learn Their Names": The Works Cited