Conclusion

Computers and writing scholars have worked diligently on understanding two of the same concerns that basic writing scholars focus on: what it means to be literate and to teach literacy in the 21st century. These scholars are working to demonstrate both the importance and the dangers of digital literacy. In The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity and Basic Writing Instruction, Shannon Carter writes:

As I continue to take vernacular literacies seriously, I have been amazed to find the intellectual rigor and rhetorical sophistication embedded in rhetorical spaces that extend beyond the academy, especially in those spaces rarely understood to have anything to do with the kinds of writing students are expected to do at school. This growing knowledge and the conservative political climate in which those of us committed to representing literacy differently often find ourselves have led me to develop what I call a 'pedagogy of rhetorical dexterity'–that is, a pedagogical approach that develops in students the ability to effectively read, understand, manipulate, and negotiate the cultural and linguistic codes of a new community of practice based on a relatively accurate assessment of another, more familiar one. (14)

From William Labov to Shirley Brice Heath, there is a long tradition of recovering the literacies and rhetorical practices of people who are historically othered and undervalued. At this point we have a chance to help basic writing students gain access to literacies that are quickly gaining power in dominant discourse at the same time that we help them develop more traditional academic literacies. While the fully developed creative journalism project at Upward Bound is not a realistic model for most basic writing programs (due to a lack of available resources), some individual projects that I assigned in my basic writing class,  e.g., the PostSecret Visual Analysis essay and Prezi, can be employed to help both basic writers and more advanced students develop blended digital and academic literacies. Moreover, even teachers with a newly emerging command of new media technologies are capable of teaching them. 

 

In the two teaching experiences I’ve described and the four years I've been teaching between them, I have picked up some tricks from trial and error that help calm my dread. I am presenting them here for fellow teachers who may be considering teaching digital writing to students enrolled in basic writing classes. That said, I will list some of the fears experienced by potential teachers of digital composing:

1. My own digital literacy is not fully enough developed
2. Students’ digital literacies are not fully enough developed
3. We don’t have adequate resources in classrooms
4. Students don’t have adequate resources outside their classrooms
5. The products will not be recognizable as academic work

To address these fears and encourage teachers to try teaching digital and multimodal assignments, I offer a framework for planning a basic writing curriculum that includes digital and multimodal projects:

1. Stress innovation, remixing, sharing. Students do not always need to make everything from scratch! They can practice important academic and social digital literacies by manipulating the work of others toward their own rhetorical goals.
2. Use free resources: Flickr, Creative Commons, online and library-housed stock audio and video archives, Audacity, Picnik, YouTube and many, many more applications and web resources will help with everything from the content to the means of manipulation and circulation.
3. Make each step recursive, asking students to look for effective examples and identify specific rhetorical intentions and strategies, while also encouraging play. These steps ensure that students are learning the transferable and critical reading and writing skills that are the heart of basic writing work. The production of such texts draws upon so many essential college skills—keep the conversation a-flowin’ and help students understand the intellectual, persuasive, critical, and literate moves involved in every aspect of the composing process.
4. Give up the illusion of total control. Things will go wrong, projects will be lost, deadlines will need to be pushed back, and students will invent new and strange artifacts. Go with it and make those material realities of composing (print and digital!) an explicit part of the conversation with students.
5. Knowing how to find answers is more important than already having them.The technologies will change and evolve and it feels like there’s no way to keep up! Teaching students to teach themselves with Internet and print resources is the very same skill we endorse when we teach research and it's just as important here. Students who can teach themselves will be able to stay afloat in the rapid pace of change in the global information economy.
6. Redefine access. Mobile technologies like smart phones, iPods, and tablets are in many cases as powerful as a well-equipped, fully functioning personal computer. These should be counted as having access when assessing the technological needs of a given class. While I didn’t address this directly in the space of this article, based on a recent spat of calls for papers I’ve seen, there is quite a bit of rhetoric and composition research being done on the topic.
7. Collaborate. Sharing knowledge, hardware, software, and the creative process are invaluable in the digital writing process. Teamwork, as we know, also allows for richer content development and the exchange of diverse literacies toward a stronger end product.

While the above framework should help calm some of the fears associated with teaching digital writing, I also want to call attention to some opportunities afforded by multimodal projects in basic writing courses.  Working with multimodal genres allows students to experiment with blending personal and academic literacies, which may be especially motivating for students with weak academic skills. Composing in multimodal genres can also encourage students to express themselves in both home and school discourses, which can often allows student writers to feel ownership of their own texts. 

 

Jenkins' call to task carries with it the implications long ago captured in Brian Street's 1984 Literacy in Theory and Practice and Cynthia Selfe's 1999 Technology and Literacy in the 21st Century. Street's denouncement of the autonomous model of literacy, in which he warns against uncritical commitments to the good of literacy and the consequences of "illiteracy," reminds us to engage with digital and technological literacies as social processes that are continually evolving. Street's citation of Harvey Graff is especially fitting: Graff's research reveals that while "some individuals had gained by acquiring literacy," still other individuals were members of "deprived classes and ethnic groups as a whole [who] were, if anything, further oppressed through it" (Street 104). Selfe's later work furthers this analysis in relation to technological literacies. She discusses the tensions of literacy as a social practice that reflects other power constructs within a society. Noting the "darker side of this dynamic," she writes,

The economic engine of technology has produced not only a continuing supply of individuals who are highly literate in terms of technological knowledge but also an ongoing supply of individuals who fail to acquire technological literacy, those who are termed illiterate according to the official definition. These latter individuals provide the unskilled, inexpensive labor necessary to sustain the system just described; they generate the surplus labor that must be continually reinvested in capital projects to produce more sophisticated technologies. (Selfe 139)

Any political economic analysis of the role of technology in the globalizing era will suggest some bitter truths about the ways in which communication technologies actively create consumerism and labor-based persecution, and often aid in violence and devastation to particular groups of people. But these same technologies are also tools of daily resistance. As Ross Collin and Michael Apple puts it, students and activists can “exploit key tensions in high-tech global capitalism so as to advance the causes of social justice” (53), but they cannot do so without a cultivated critical and digital literacy. It is for this reason that we need to balance the need to prepare students to be effective, whole citizens in the participatory culture of the digital age with the risks of exploitation and the goals of working toward social justice. We can’t allow “insufficient access to digital literacies” to continue to haunt the outcomes of basic writing curricula.

 

Many scholars in computers and writing, such as Cynthia Selfe, Gail Hawisher, Barbara Monroe, Adam Banks, and Kathleen Blake Yancey have made explicit the ways in which digital literacies must be critical literacies. As Banks reminds us in Race, Rhetoric and Technology, we “must make sure clearly articulated pedagogical goals drive all technology decisions so that purchases, training, and planning related to technology implementation remains relevant to the learning, social, political, and economic needs of those we hope to serve” (19-20). And Yancey writes that in the 21st century we “face three challenges that are also opportunities: developing new models of writing; designing a new curriculum supporting those models; and creating models for teaching that curriculum” (1). As basic writing teachers, once we calm our dread and temper our hope, we can develop complex, critical, multimodal assignments that encourage writers to rhetorically respond to the digital, academic, and social demands of the contemporary moment.

 
Works Cited

 

"Are Too Many Students Going to College?" The Chronicle of Higher Education. November 2009. Web. 3 July 2012.

 

Banks, Adam Joel. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

 

Bentley, Jenni, et al. The Word. Moscow, Idaho: N.p., 2007.

 

---. The Word on The Web. N.p., n.d. Web. Aug. 2007.

 

Bernstein, Susan Naomi. “Social Justice Initiative for Basic Writing.” BWe: Basic Writing e-journal 7.1 (2008): n. pag. Web. 11 Jan. 2011.

 

Carter, Shannon. The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity and Basic Writing Instruction. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008. Print.

 

Collin, Ross, & Apple, Michael W. (2010). “New Literacies and New Rebellions in the Global Age.” In Michael W. Apple (Ed.),

Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education (25-60). New York: Routledge. Print.

 

Gee, James Paul. Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

 

Gergoire, Stafford. “PowerPoint Reflection and Re-visioning in Teaching Composition.” BWe: Basic Writing e-journal 8/9 (2009-2010): n. pag. Web. 11 Jan. 2011.

 

Glatstein, Jeremy. “Formal Visual Analysis: The Elements and Principles of Composition.” Artsedge. The Kennedy Center. June 15, 2010. Web.

 

Graff, Gerald and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

 

Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge; MIT Press, 2009.

 

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994. Print.

 

Reid, Alex. “Digital Natives in Graduate School.” Digital Digs N.p., 7 Jan 2011. Web. 11 Jan 2011.

 

Selfe, Cynthia. Technology and Literacy in the 21st Century: The Importance of Paying Attention. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Print.

 

Street, Brian. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge Univ Press, 1984. Print.

 

Syracuse University Writing Program. “Vision and Mission.” Wrt.syr.edu. The Writing Program, Syracuse University. Feb 2005. Web. 11 Jan. 2011.

 

Thibault, Melissa and David Walbert. "Reading Images: An Introduction to Visual Literacy." Learn NC. N. p, n.d. Web. 1 Jan. 2011.

 

United States. Department of Education. “Federal TRIO Programs Current-Year Low-Income Levels.” Ed.gov. 13 Nov. 2010. Web. 11 Jan. 2011.  

 

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. Writing in the 21st Century. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Feb. 2009: 1-9. Print.