#4.

Faigley, Lester. "Literacy after the Revolution." College Composition and Communication 48.1 (1997): 30-43.

Selfe, Cynthia L. "Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention." College Composition and Communication 50.3 (1999): 411-436.

CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments. Conference on College Composition and Communication. (2004).

Having never attended any of the CCCC conferences, I can admit to being intrigued by the nightmare stories Faigley describes, especially about linguine. Linguine aside, I enjoyed the overall tone of both Selfe and Faigley’s essays. Here are overlapping ideas found within these essays:

-Members of CCCCs (and scholars in general) are uncomfortable with technology and talking about technology. Faigley writes, “Writing teachers who have been at the forefront of initiating change have run up against a multitude of institutional barriers and attitudes that would limit writing instruction to teaching students to replicate the traditional forms of academic and professional discourses” (32). By limiting writing instruction to the traditional forms of academic and professional discourses, writing students limit, and, as Selfe points out, cripple their students. Selfe claims, “technology is either boring or frightening to most humanists; many teachers of English composition feel it antithetical to their primary concerns” (Selfe 412).

-Faigley and Selfe address is the idea of technology accessibility technology, though they tend to disagree regarding culpability. Selfe asserts, “We also need to recognize that technological literacy is our responsibility... We need additional research on how various technologies influence literacy values and practices and research on how teachers might better use technologies to support a range of literacy goals for different populations” (431). In this way, Selfe argues that we, as teachers of literacy, must “recognize that if written language and literacy practices are our professional business, so is technology” (Selfe 431).  Faigley disagrees, stating, “we as teachers have little control over who gains access to higher education and even less control of access to the Internet” (Faigley 39).

Regarding the five assumptions—I do think these are all realistic goals to employ in my classroom, though I think it’s unrealistic to set every class in a computer lab, or have every class session revolve around technology. Assumption three includes the word “much”. What does “much” mean? Does “much” mean every day? Does it mean every other class? I feel that assumption four, “engage students in the critical evaluation of information” is something that most teachers currently do, especially in terms of the Internet and Wikipedia. “Provid[ing] students with opportunities to apply digital technologies to solve substantial problems common to the academic, professional, civic, and/or personal realm of their lives” is also equally doable, especially in a class structured like my English 101 class, where my focus question for the semester is “Who do you want to be?”. I ask my students to think about who they were, who they currently are, and where they want to go in terms of their lives and academia. Our use of the AML (as well as the AML’s orientation and helpful figures in blue), makes it easier to fulfill assumption one, which is to “introduce students to the epistemic characteristics of information technology,” and carefully structured writing exercises and reflections afterward encourage students to actively think about their choices with both technology and writing.