Starting my conference recap post on this year’s Computers and Writing 2019 conference, I’m struck by my struggle to articulate a starting point. I think that’s in part because this year’s conference theme, “Centering Ethical Challenges,” feels less like a starting point to a conversation and more like a through line to any conversation that must happen about reading, writing, and being online. We can never have enough reminders that people deserve safety and respect online.
Computers & Writing is a relatively small conference, attended primarily by scholars in rhetoric and composition who study digital rhetoric and digital pedagogy. But I can say with confidence that in every panel I attended, I could have imagined the voices and presence of other partners across the university, from teaching and learning center directors to instructional designers to IT specialists and user experience designers. In other words, centering ethical design in writing instruction is not just a concern for those who explicitly teach writing and rhetoric: it is
the central concern of being an educator today.
I’m writing this post to synthesize a few more specific themes that emerged from the conference in the hopes that they may reach educators across institutions and disciplines as they craft orientations for new instructors in the fall, develop materials for summer classes (and beyond!), and consider adopting new tools or infrastructures for the next academic year:
- Imagine and explore the range of experiences our students bring to their academic environments.
At a panel on disability and access, Fairfield University student Margaret Moore asked us to recreate her reality as a learner and communicator. As a writer with cerebral palsy, Moore communicates through computer-assisted communication devices and she has constructed videos in the past by using her CAC device to generate audio and through iMovie to capture the visuals. She necessarily creates transcripts of all of her speech so that her CAC device can read the work aloud, providing the narration. In the audience, then, she asked each of us to navigate to a text-response app (TTS Reader) on a computer or tablet and Kinemaster, a mobile video editing app, on our mobile phones.
The room echoed with the voices of our text-response apps, narrating our photo slideshare videos from Kinemaster. As we transcribed our audio, we couldn’t put ourselves exactly in Moore’s position, but we got to imagine a world within her reality, an activity that opened up, for me anyway, an understanding that with the more options we explore for constructing new spaces, the more capacious and imaginative our practices can be.
This is just one example of what it might mean to imagine a new experience that our students could have with using educational technology. Seeing Moore construct this activity made me think about other ways we could help ourselves imagine other possibilities for composing. If we had other students, for example, replicate their writing processes and practices for us, we could learn so much more than when we make assumptions about how they’re doing their learning. It sounds obvious, but just seeing Moore take the time to show us and have us experience her life, it made me realize how much more we still have to learn about each other and our composing realities.
In short, then, some guiding questions I’ve been thinking about are: what other possibilities for writing spaces, practices, and processes could we imagine to make more students feel more included in academic spaces? What might be some other avenues or pathways for augmenting and navigating through our academic task spaces? The more that we can get ourselves outside of our own patterns and processes, the more inclusive we can be in our teaching design.
- Construct a digital pedagogy plan that guides every decision you make as a learning designer.
Our Friday afternoon, the keynote speaker, Joy Robinson, an assistant professor at University of Alabama, Huntsville, asked the audience a simple question: do you have a digital pedagogy plan?
The room was silent. It’s not that folks didn’t have ideas. It’s that the question was big and challenging. I think we could probably safely say that most of us had something close to a plan, but perhaps nothing formally articulated. She suggested we consider mapping habits of mind that we want our students to develop alongside the tasks we envision and align learning from there.
This concept is not totally new. Instructional designers train faculty to engage in this process all the time. We might call it backwards design, for example, where we begin with our goals and then align from there. What Robinson suggested, however, has a slightly different charge insofar as her articulation of a digital pedagogy plan means not only considering what we want learners to do with their information, but also what values we want learners to develop around navigating digital infrastructures. That is, a digital pedagogy plan involves not just actions, but ethics.
Our Saturday afternoon keynote speaker, Chris Gilliard, professor at Macomb Community College, emphasized this point by asking the audience to construct their “technology ethics” statement. The results were powerful: within minutes, audience members shared ideas about opening up opportunities for students, lifting up vulnerable populations, and helping students develop their own agency as writers.
Both Robinson and Gilliard, then, got me thinking about this: when we construct classes with digital pedagogy components in mind, we need to consider not just what we’re asking students to do, but how we’re asking students to engage, and what constraints our terms of engagement put on our students. The more that we can eliminate constraints and open up options, the more agency we provide our students. That, to me, is a worthy goal, one that I’m cognizant I need to work on.
- Listen to stories from those who approach learning differently than you.
I attended two wonderful mini-workshops this year: one on the challenges of being a technology administrator with Megan Mize, Jamie Henthorn, and Shelley Rodrigo and the other on the rhetorics of reproductive justice activism with Sharon Yam, Erin Frost, Marika Seigel, Lori Beth De Hertogh, Bethany Johnson, and Maria Novotny. They were really different workshops in really fruitful ways. The one on technology administration involved a lot of conversations about institutional bureaucracy, the hierarchical culture of academe, and the challenges of managing change in spaces that may actively resist change. The session on reproductive justice navigated the ways in which experiences of bodily agency get constructed, communicated, and acted upon. So, while the topics for the workshops were extremely different – and had different implications – the goals to me were the same: to listen to others’ narratives and internalize them.
The opportunity to see how others illustrate their process of learning and discovery, whether that’s through drawing a visualization of how we perceive our working selves (in Mize et. al’s session) or processing the lived testimony of activists (in Yam et. al’s session), we gain a lot from making space for people to articulate their learning narratives and to see what trends, patterns, and ideas we can extrapolate from there. Lived, breathing experiences are why we do the work of education, and the more precisely we can articulate what’s actually happening – before we jump to analysis and action – the better.
To me, the take-away from attending both of these workshops was simple: invite sharing where and how it makes sense, though don’t coerce sharing either. Offer people multiple options for sharing their stories too and let that range guide how people can find avenues into participation.
- Intertwine research, teaching, activism, and design; combining these goals makes all educators’ efforts stronger.
At conferences, it can be easy for conversations to become myopically focused on research conversations, on the construction of the cocktail party of ideas. But this year, I felt an energy to see the efforts of research channeled more directly to fuel teaching, activism, and learning design. As someone whose primary job is not research, I was grateful to see language that suggested the work of teaching, activism, and design necessarily informs the work of research (and vice versa). We cannot do effective teaching, activism, and design, in other words, without grounding and engagement in empirical, research-based conversations. This should not come as a surprise to any readers here, nor should it be a radical sentiment, but I find that within my own institution, I’m constantly fighting to make the case for conducting research in my own time to study and understand what we’re experiencing in our institutions.
Especially in the case that I work in, assessing the impacts of educational technology on reading and writing instruction, I think now more than ever, I aspire to partner with and conduct research to ensure that the choices we make around enterprise software and multimedia construction tools are not exploitative of our students’ needs and interests.