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August 2009 First Year Writing Faculty Meeting

August 28, 2009
100 Levan

Aligning Practice With Purpose:
Literacy, Technology & Pedagogy

We first broke into groups, where we shared and discussed our biggest day-to-day teaching challenges. We then came back together to talk about them and what role(s) we imagined where technology may or may not help address these challenges:

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Discussion notes

If we want to foreground pedagogy before technology — letting technology support our teaching, rather than the other way around — it is worth noting how deeply pedagogical these terms are: “student expectations” … “time” … “participation” … “getting everyone involved” … “reconciling grades” … “apathy” … “process” … “thinking” … and how many decades have been invested in trying to solve them. 

Concerns about technology in the writing classroom: 

  • Time-wasters for “playing”
  • Doesn’t help teach writing
  • My own comfort level using computers isn’t great
  • Time for learning is limited
  • It’s just another trendy thing that reduces rigor
  • Access: not all students can afford computers

Opportunities for technology in the writing classroom: 

  • Ideas about audience expanded and change for the better
  • Easier to share for editing and peer reviews
  • Integrating meaning-making rhetorical elements such as color, layout, formats, typography beyond just MLA formatting
  • Access to more of students’ real, actual, genuine literacy practices — social, academic, critical
  • Engages students with more dynamic texts and platforms
  • Do print epistemologies restrict what we can know about composing? 

Recommended Reading:
Selber, Stuart A. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004. 240pp. — we can meet in the WQ to talk about this one: