Cheryl Smith
Baruch College, CUNY

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New Technologies and the Expanding Reach of English

Do not cite without permission of the author.

The idea of spacesacross which “literacy is created” strikes me as particularly interesting.A lot of the discussion about technologies of writing is optimistic, even utopian, regarding the potential they have to transform literacy learning.  New technology creates new spaces, literally and figuratively, for writing to evolve, and they accommodate writers who may have been excluded from more traditional spaces.  But there is a useful analogy to be made between the online spaces ushering in profound changes in writing practice and the classroom space, not always utopian, that John Trimbur studies in his influential article, “Composition and the Circulation of Writing.”  I turn in particular to Trimbur’s notions of the classroom space because his solution—to focus on writing as an act of circulation—resonates so meaningfully with where writing instruction is headed as it moves further into the networks of cyberspace.

First, some background on spaces.  We often think of writing and literacy education as occurring in actual physical locations: the page, the text, the essay, the classroom, the school, and increasingly, the computer and Internet.  Many of us might say, for instance, that we do not experience writing and reading the same way on the screen as we do on the page.  They are different spaces.  Thus, in the process of composing on the computer, we may occasionally print out drafts.  We feel the need to hold the hard copy in our hands in order to see beyond the individual sections captured by one screen shot and get a better grasp on the whole.  The two spaces, page and screen, feel quite different, reveal different aspects of the writing process, and deliver our message differently.  Sensitive to such distinctions, we may encourage students to print out and proofread their own drafts and even read their work aloud, an exercise that extends the act of writing from the screen or page to yet another space: the aural space.1

These spaces of writing, however, are complicated: at once vexed and full of opportunity.  Trimbur argues that the main space of literacy instruction, the classroom, can be the most vexed because of the way it reinstates the attitudes and rituals of middle class family life.  Therefore, he seeks “to transcend the domestic space of the writing classroom” (191), where teachers act in loco parentis to regulate and monitor the products of students’ composition.  In this “domestic space,” the student assumes the role of a child called to account for his or her knowledge and the teacher assumes the role of a powerful parent figure poised, however benevolently, to judge.  To begin to replace this model, Trimbur promotes an instruction that focuses less on the end product and more on the “complex delivery systems through which writing circulates” (190).  He thus resists the static aspect of space, where a writer realizes a final composition in one particular moment, and instead prioritizes the movement of circulation, where meaning transmits and changes hands, evading identification with any one space or time.  He frames his theory as “a democratic aspiration” that he hopes will help teachers, “devise delivery systems that circulate ideas, information, opinions, and knowledge and thereby expand the public forums in which people can deliberate on the issues of the day” (190).  Trimbur wants writing classrooms to tap into the channels through which writing circulates in order to expand students’ sense of how they might use such channels to gain a voice in civic life.  In this way, Trimbur and Yancey intersect; both encourage faculty to see students as part of a developing writing public.  The challenge is for teachers to create or make use of platforms for writing that take into account different and emerging possibilities for making meaning in the public sphere—possibilities such as the web networks that have literally exploded in the seven years since Trimbur published his essay.  In this short time, Web 2.0 has radically altered the terrain of reading and writing and has potential to democratize literacy learning.

As literacy practices and instruction evolve in the electronic networks, we continue to develop more ways to figure them as spaces: websites, discussion boards, forums, even “a place for friends” (Myspace).  The writing landscape offers different approaches and creates various access points to enter into the work of knowledge (or relationship) making.  These spaces transition into instruction, where we begin to see change, including new programs, courses, or assignments that usefully capitalize on the spaces where students write and the skills they develop there.  Nonetheless, the spaces of computer-mediated instruction, like the space of the classroom itself, can be vexed by considerable limits.  Students may not share equal access or exposure to Internet forums, creating serious complications for making blogs central to a class.  Meanwhile, teachers may frame blogs in limited ways: as one type of writing representing one type of intellectual, or more likely social, act that accomplishes one type of learning goal, which ultimately remains peripheral to the primary writing of a course.  Or, blogs get associated with one course, first-year composition, perhaps because they fit so easily with composition’s longstanding practice of informal writing or because they are not regarded as serious enough for most upper division courses.  As we confront the first wave of historic changes to writing and begin to shape the spaces for new media and literacy instruction, we should remain aware of how and where we are fixing and entering into them. 
For Yancey, we are not currently entering into them very well, if at all.  “How is it,” she asks, “that what we teach and what we test can be so different from what our students know as writing?” (298).  What they know, according to Yancey, is a remarkably communal kind of writing mediated by computers so that unprecedented scales, time frames, and forums for communicating are continually opening up.  A great deal of writing today happens in networked electronic spaces.  Blogs have emerged as particularly popular, credited with being highly democratic forums for writing (Nelson and Fernheimer 3; Bloch and Crosby) that highlight rather than elide the importance of the author (Bloch 129) and encourage interactive communication (Ferdig and Trammel 16).2   Due to these qualities, many composition instructors readily embrace blogs, touting their potential to inspire student writing by meeting it where it “lives,” in the new social networks of the Internet. 

There are many reasons why instructors of writing may be naturally predisposed to experiment with blogs.  Composition pedagogies are in line with the qualities, outlined above, that users attribute to blogs: democratic expression, promotion of the author, and interactive engagement with an audience.  Because anyone can post and claim a public voice in blogs, they fulfill Trimbur’s “democratic aspirations,” shared by many in the field of composition and rhetoric.  Quite different from online course management systems like Blackboard or WebCT, which are restrictive, blogs are expansive: open to broad audiences and responsive to writers’ creative impulses.  They lend power to the author and may especially empower inexperienced writers, who often feel uncomfortable with academic discourse but more at home with Internet writing, having done it by choice in Myspace or online discussion boards.  Finally, blogs encourage interactivity because participants can read and comment on one another’s posts, thereby fostering community and facilitating the peer review process that is a hallmark of many composition classes. 

Peter Elbow claims this kind of accessible, public community of writers is especially effective at fostering one particularly ineffable quality of writing: voice.  He asserts: “Voice is alive on the Internet” and “What a huge change the Internet has brought to the experience of writing: so many more writers; so much more writing in the world; so much writing to strangers!” (171, italics in the original).  Students likely come to college already adept at a certain kind of writing and voice with writing that they use to profile, shape, and construct online identities.  The aptitudes that students have developed may lend themselves well to college writing.  We have to understand and appreciate students’ facilities with language, however, before we can work with them.  Are we willing to miss out on “so much…writing in the world”?  If not, we need to figure out how we can engage the voices, audiences, and practices—the writing public and public writing—that students commonly experience (and enjoy) in the electronic spaces they frequent as both writers and readers. 

One way to tap into all this writing in the world is to evolve pedagogical innovations for connecting what students know with the distinctive ways of knowing that we value in the academy.  Aligning the familiar world with the public world of school is not a new idea, but technology suggests new ways and reasons for doing it.3   What more powerful new forum for writers exists than the World Wide Web?  And what more democratic tool than the blog?  Students are using these forums and tools in their personal lives; they often understand the dynamics of Internet writing spaces better than academic ones, where confused students can feel alienated by the new discourses and simply disengage.  Again, incorporating new media into college writing especially empowers those students who struggle most and therefore benefit most from alternative approaches.  In this way, blogs help equalize access to success.  Why not use students’ familiar territory to lead them into the unfamiliar terrain of higher education?  They will not only transition to academic literacies more easily but also make better sense of the Internet’s potential if they experience it in academic spaces that newly contextualize what they already know. 

Contextualizing both school and familiar spaces further improves students’ learning because it helps them gain new insight into the disciplinary structures of higher education.  Writing happens in a variety of particularized spaces that change depending on disciplinary conventions, audience, personal preferences, and institutional demands.  Students reared in Web 2.0 may have honed a special kind of sensitivity to shifting contexts that could help them navigate higher education’s disciplinary differences, which Gerald Graff reminds us are often baffling to undergraduates.  Hyper-text, live chat, instant messaging—all challenge the notion of enclosed space, permanence, stasis.  In this age of Internet authorship, where writers regularly talk to strangers in the guise of whatever voice they wish to project, students are developing complicated writing histories that they bring with them to our classes and—regardless of what our instruction may choose to prioritize—that they bring out of school and into the spaces of home and work.  These writing histories are marked by movement, links, and unprecedented (and often largely unexamined) connections.  Young people learn to shuttle between ever-changing contexts.4   We may assume that the kinds of movements students make with ease in the context of Internet authorship would automatically prepare their minds for the connections we ask them to make.  If they can scan a web page and navigate its many links, then they should be prepared to make the leap from, say, finding evidence in a reading to arguing the implications of their thesis.  Or, they should see the links between their biology class and intro to anthropology.  Yet, these are doomed assumptions, especially if we do not bring a more conscious focus on the evolving channels for communication into our classrooms.  Students do not easily make the moves from reading to evidence to analysis to claims without explicit and logical tools for doing so—along with a lot of practice.  They often fail to see the connections between their courses until years later (if ever).  Likewise, students require direct and repeated exposure to new media in classroom settings in order to make thoughtful connections between Internet and academic prose.  They can not deeply understand how spaces for authorship—from disciplines to electronic forums—work if they do not explicitly interrogate them as networks with multiple functions.  Students need to learn about Trimbur’s “complex delivery systems through which writing circulates” (190) by experiencing them firsthand.

This is not to say, however, that the traditional sites of our instruction are drained of all meaning.  Our familiar academic disciplines and discourses are still relevant; they just need to expand to accommodate the developing knowledge and experiences that students bring to college.  Profound change often faces resistances that challenge the creation of effective pedagogies.  As we open up the spaces of literacy education to new networks for writing, our pedagogical innovation will inevitably bump up against established practices and classroom rituals.  Our task is to test our rituals and confront our own resistances.

Rituals in the Spaces of Writing
Trimbur figures the writing classroom as a space marked by middle class rituals; similarly, WAC has its own rituals.  In a recent meeting of faculty and administrators interested in general education, one of my colleagues, a professor of Russian language and literature with years of experience in faculty development, referred to the “WAC rituals” that can be off-putting to some people.  When I asked him what he meant, he specified free writing.  He recalled an interdisciplinary faculty development workshop that he had co-led with a WAC director.  One participating professor, upon being asked to write for five minutes in response to a short prompt, stormed out of the room.  My colleague was surprised by the hostile reaction evoked by free writing, which in his experience had become second nature.  “Aren’t such WAC rituals second nature to us all by now?” he asked.  Apparently not.  Only a few days later, a new biology professor and a seasoned language professor both bristled at the idea of having to free write in a faculty development workshop that we attended together (I am happy to report that neither stormed out of the room).  Young or old, professor of a physical science or humanities discipline: we all hold tight to particular rituals and resist others.
Before becoming a WAC ritual, free writing was a common pedagogy in composition classrooms, promoted in the 1960s by figures such as Peter Elbow and Donald Murray and widely used ever since, including by WAC advocates.  David R. Russell traces the launch of American WAC programs in the 1970s; they quickly became agents for pedagogical change, largely through faculty development workshops and retreats.  Not surprisingly, early workshop leaders asked participants to free write in order to model writing-to-learn pedagogies.  Russell explains the goal of the early faculty development efforts—and hints at the conflicts they would face:

At the deepest level, reconceiving writing as a serious intellectual activity, worthy of study and consideration by academia, was a means of breaking down the century-old academic notion of writing as an elementary mechanical skill or a romantic inspiration and replacing it with transactional theories and student-centered pedagogies in the Deweyan progressive tradition....The workshops gave many faculty their first opportunity to discuss writing and teaching in an environment of communal scholarship, without the “educationist” stigma or the belletristic assumptions of the English department determining the ground.  In a collegial, interdisciplinary atmosphere, a faculty member could explore the relationships between the structure of the discipline, as revealed in its discourse, and the ways in which students learn that structure and discourse. (285)

WAC drew much of its initial energy from being faculty driven.  More often than not, early faculty leaders were from English, where they directed writing programs or held other administrative posts.  These leaders brought English pedagogies to interdisciplinary faculty work and made them subjects of serious inquiry.  Practices common to many English classes, such as free writing, close reading, scaffolded assignments, and peer review, became the center of serious discussion and assumed significance in faculty thinking and teaching across the curriculum. 

Still, as Russell’s comments suggest, the role of English in WAC’s growth was not uncomplicated; resistances quickly emerged, often pulling on English studies’ own internal fractures.  English was seen as possessing a very specific kind of bias toward texts, one driven by “belletristic assumptions” that other faculty might not relate to.  Along the way, WAC has had to contend with this and other biases implicit in its various institutional contexts.  Further, while most WAC programs began through and may still be sustained by the efforts of writing-focused faculty and composition directors, and while WAC leaders often call English departments home, “some of the most entrenched opposition to WAC has come from English departments, who see programs challenging liberal culture’s view of writing as an unteachable gift or infringing on the department’s century-old institutional prerogatives” (Russell 293).  Such moments of opposition sound all too familiar to compositionists.  The longstanding tension between composition and literature afflicts the relationship between WAC and English as well.  Teaching writing still belongs to English departments in many cases, but it gets cast as lower-level, skills work; teaching literature represents higher-level, intellectual duty and the real work of the department.  Replace “teaching writing” with “WAC” and replace “literature” with the name of any discipline and it becomes clear how WAC can get nudged into the same limited space as composition, dismissed as unimportant and remedial or seen as infringing on the delivery of content knowledge, which faculty generally prioritize. 

WAC has thus devolved in some cases into composition’s misunderstood stepchild, its agenda misread as promoting the study of language over the study of content.  WAC works to reveal how a discipline’s materials gets written and communicated so that students can become better readers of and contributors to academic discourse.  Put another way: WAC promotes the cultivation of both knowledge consumers and knowledge creators.  Some would say it leans more toward the latter, but an emphasis on creation, or writing, does not challenge the importance of the disciplinary knowledge itself; it does, however, repurpose the knowledge, seeking to illuminate the delivery systems by which it reaches an audience in the hope that students will learn strategies for entering into the systems and gaining voice.  Not unlike composition programs, WAC can be poorly received, resisted, or marginalized because its central tenet, that writing empowers learning, is misconstrued as a threat to traditional practices and hierarchies in the academy.

Barbara Walvoord forwards one response to WAC’s status and reception: she urges directors to find institutional spaces other than the English departments where WAC may be established yet isolated from important centers of power.  “WAC cannot survive as Switzerland” (69), she remarks, but it can survive by defining new “collaborative roles” and, in particular, by “becoming a network through which other movements [ethical reasoning, critical thinking, assessment, oral communication] form” (70).  The warning that underlies Walvoord’s vision for WAC’s collaborative future is clear: limiting WAC to an affiliation with an English department risks its survival.  Walvoord’s solution: stake out new territory—significantly, through “becoming a network”—or face diminishing influence.  The “become a network” solution is particularly interesting in the context of WAC and blogging because both emphasize networking; both advance a notion of writing that seeks new means for generating and transmitting ideas.  Blogs foreground the act of writing as rhetorical engagement, positioning the writer as part of an interactive community rather than an isolated voice relating to isolated texts.  WAC crosses institutional borders to underscore writing’s power for understanding and sharing knowledge.  In WAC, writing becomes a tool for entering a disciplinary community.  I believe WAC’s move away from English departments or even composition programs, where such a move has occurred, can be attributed at least in part to an academy that resists seeing writing as communal and instead sees it as an individualized act on the part of an author, reader, or learner generating a product that remains isolated from or contingent to the processes of learning content.  Over the years, WAC may well increasingly distance itself from limiting, conflicted views of writing and affiliate itself with other likeminded movements promoting innovative pedagogy.

What does this history and its conflicts mean for our English studies-WAC-blog network?  First, it helps explain how the three belong together at all.  If both composition and WAC are invested in delivery systems for making meaning, then of course they would be equally drawn to the blog, one of the most powerfully networked systems available for public writing.  Second, our institutional history, marked as it is by certain resistances, helps us anticipate potential stumbling blocks to developing means for blogs to be purposefully integrated into the curriculum.  Blogs, as forums that connect and challenge writers beyond the space of the page, can subvert text, especially insofar as we characterize the textual experience as a largely individual one.  Blogs elevate the author in ways that other Internet writing—often anonymous—does not.  At first glance, the central significance of the blog author seems to suggest that blogging plays into the idea of textual creation as a primarily individual act but, in fact, it takes important steps away from this idea.  The blogger writes into a new space that radically redefines audience: full of strangers ready and able to write back.  The interaction between blogger and audience plays a big role in shaping the tone and content of the site.  Blogging thus challenges our accepted wisdom about authorship and authority in many of the spaces—from classroom to page—where we traditionally deliver and assess academic literacies.
Regardless of the concerns and resistances we may have, the shift toward electronic literacies is underway.  Reading and writing environments are changing and the changes will impact our institutions.  Many are taking note of the shift and suggesting ways to respond.  Jeff Rice believes networks and new media are so significant that college English should actively refocus itself around them.  He offers a compelling explanation of how networking refigures our relationship to text that helps illuminate why English departments might resist restructuring their work to embrace new media:

In [the] process of making networks, writers, through their work, see themselves connected to information in ways the space on the page does not allow.  The space on the page keeps bodies of information (and, thus, bodies) separate.  In contrast, networks alter current understandings regarding how learning functions in social spaces.  By social, I do not mean “people,” or “friendliness,” or “mingling.”  Instead, I mean the ways bodies of information socialize, the ways they interact, or…associate. (130-131, underlining for italics in the original)

To put students into networks for writing requires relinquishing some of our notions about what it means to generate and receive text.  Writing becomes less an individual, isolated act of composition and more a connected, even shared and communally experienced, act.  The changes redefine the spaces where writing and literacy education occur and force us to wrestle with some of our most deeply held assumptions about writing.  We in English studies are deeply committed to “the space on the page.”  We relish it, slow down and unpack it, appreciate its layers, assign it to be closely read and carefully composed, and evaluate it.  Our particular brand of appreciation and valuation, however, has a troubling effect.  It can lead to teaching that, as Trimbur argues, “foreshortens the delivery system, the circuits of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption through which writing circulates as it takes on cultural value and worldly force” (194).  Now more than ever, with Web 2.0 shifting the ground beneath our students’ feet (and potentially our own feet), we should guard against the danger of foreshortening the systems and circuits through which people make meaning.  Due to the rapid nature of technological advances, students are becoming active writers well before they sit in our classes and tackle our assignments.  What effect does their Web 2.0 writing practice have on them, their thinking, style, and approaches to college writing?  In this time of profound change, it may be especially useful to relinquish a little of what Russell labels our belletristic assumptions about text and see the acts of reading and writing the way WAC practitioners have long seen them—through eyes trained on the spaces in between.  How does learning to write look when it highlights processes and delivery systems as much as results and delivered products?  By retraining our vision, we will more easily identify the varied rhetorical natures that inform the contexts for literacy instruction today.  

Despite our challenges, I am not particularly pessimistic about the fate of English departments.  Our traditional practices and aims are resilient, but they do need to keep flexible.  Student literacy remains a universal concern in higher education and we in English and WAC are often called to define, defend, develop, and assess it.  According to popular lore, we still have a literacy crisis, Johnny still can’t write (Shiels 58), and all of us—whether we specialize in literature, linguistics, journalism, composition, or WAC—share the blame or responsibility or concern (depending on the tenor of the discussions at our particular institutions).  The ubiquitous nature of the literacy discussion in both culture at large and within institutions of higher education suggests that “writing empire” is a useful formulation, though thinking of this empire as existing in an English department, composition program, or WAC misses the mark.  The empire is “out there,” in the hands of amateur bloggers and capitalist designers creating blogs, ezines, games, and other interactive arenas and determining how and what people today read and write.  The value of these spaces to teaching and learning will almost certainly increase.  We should claim and shape them, despite an impulse to distance ourselves from anything amateurish or capitalist.  If we do not build our own creative bridges to Internet writing, we risk isolating ourselves from some powerful forces that may just imprint themselves on our practices anyway.  Our internal differences—the hierarchies of literary studies and composition, higher-order content knowledge and lower-order discourse knowledge—only increase our isolation.  In the spaces of writing now evolving, will we stake a claim in the Web 2.0 empire or further fracture our departments into programs, centers, requirements, and initiatives that are poorly integrated, defensively designed, and not in touch with the literacy realities of our profoundly changed world?  If we can defend against divisiveness while overcoming some of our outdated resistances to writing innovation, we have the opportunity to forge new alignments, refresh old ones, and realize unique and meaningful transformations to literacy education. 

Works Cited

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Notes