Over a casual lunch at a recent professional conference, Trent Batson, a
professor at Gallaudet University, told us a story that made us think about
borders and their effects. He had been visiting Mexico on a short day trip
in the company of an academic colleague who taught at Mt. Holyoke but had
been born in India. On the way back into the United States, these
colleagues entered two separate lines at stations marking the official
re-entry point to this country. Border guards, observing the darker skin
of the one colleague stopped him--as they did all people who, in Batson's
words, "looked vaguely Mexican." The Indian colleague, having lived and
worked in this country for a number of years, had made the mistake of
thinking that this border, this country, was an open one. He carried only
a photocopy of the green card that identified him as a "resident alien,"
rather than the card itself, as required by United States law.
Given these relatively unexceptional circumstances, what followed seemed
significant to us--the Indian-born colleague was detained by officials and
eventually fined--even though he carried additional materials identifying
him as a professor at Holyoke. Batson was not stopped or questioned. He
was also not allowed to accompany his friend, who was taken to an office by
the border guards where he was detained for half an hour. Batson was
allowed to watch the proceedings through a window, to gaze on the
administration and application of American law.
On the surface of the story, no real harm was done: the detainment was
short term, the fine minimal, the laws for resident aliens clear. But for
us, as citizens of the United States, the telling of this story had a
chilling effect. We were ashamed not only about the assumptions that the
border guards seem to have made but also of the cultural values that the
story revealed. As Midwesterners who live relatively far from the border
in question, we were taken aback by the story--by the guards' reactions, by
the feelings these reactions suggest about Mexican nationals, and by the
treatment that people of color receive every day in our own country. We
should not, of course, have been surprised at all. It is at the
geopolitical borders of countries that the formations of social power,
normally hidden, are laid embarrassingly bare--where power in its rawest
form is exercised.
If at the time of this story's original telling we didn't like what it made
us think about our country, it was not until we had reflected more closely
on the incident that we began to unpack the various ways in which it seemed
meaningful and bothersome to us--in general, for our own professional lives
as teachers and, in specific, for the more specialized instructional work
that we do in computer-supported writing and learning environments. The
longer we thought about it, the more we realized that the borders
represented in this story, the values built into them and constituted
continually by them, were--and are--present in our own classrooms as well.
These borders are represented and reproduced in so many commonplace ways,
at so many levels, that they frequently remain invisible to us. One place
in which such borders remain quite visible, we realized, is in the computer
that we, and many other teachers of English, use within classrooms. When
re-considering this story in light of our own experiences, we began to see
how teachers of English who use computers are often involved in
establishing and maintaining borders themselves--whether or not they
acknowledge or support such a project--and, thus, in contributing to a
larger cultural system of differential power that has resulted in the
systematic domination and marginalization of certain groups of students,
including among them: women, non-whites, and individuals who speak
languages other than English.
This article represents our further thinking about these realizations. In
it, we begin the task of describing some of the political and ideological
boundary lands associated with computer interfaces that we--and many other
teachers of composition--now use in our classrooms. We also talk about the
ways in which these borders are at least partly constructed along
ideological axes that represent dominant tendencies in our culture, about
the ways in which the borders evident in computer interfaces can be mapped
as complex political landscapes, about the ways in which the borders can
serve to prevent the circulation of individuals for political purposes, and
about the ways in which teachers and students can learn to see and alter
such borders in productive ways. At the end of the paper, we talk about
tactics that teachers can use to enact a radical pedagogy of electronic
borders and borderlands.
As a way into this examination, we look at computer interfaces as
linguistic contact zones, in Mary Louise Pratt's words, "social spaces
where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts
of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or
their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today"
(34). Within this context, we talk about computer interfaces as maps that
enact--among other things--the gestures and deeds of colonialism,
continuously and with a great deal of success. This is not to claim, of
course, that the only educational effects computers have is one of
re-producing oppression or colonial mentalities. Indeed, from the work of
computers and composition specialists, it is clear that computers, like
other complex technologies, are articulated in many ways with a range of
existing cultural forces and with a variety of projects in our educational
system, projects that run the gamut from liberatory to oppressive.
However, because recent scholarship on computers has tended to focus in
overoptimistic ways on the positive contributions that technology can make
to English composition classrooms, our goal in this piece is to sketch the
outlines of an alternative vision for teachers, one that might encourage
them to adopt a more critical and reflective approach to their use of
computers. [1] Such a picture provides the necessary balance, we believe.
An overly optimistic vision of technology is not only reactive, and, thus,
inaccurate, it is also dangerous in that it renders less visible the
negative contributions of technology that may work potently and effectively
against critically reflective habits efforts of good teachers and students,
Our goal is to help teachers identify some of the effects of domination
and colonialism associated with computer use so that they can establish a
new discursive territory within which to understand the relationships
between technology and education.
For the last decade, English composition teachers have been using computers
in classrooms to create electronic forums--on local-area networks (LANs)
and wide-area networks (WANs)--within which writers and readers can create,
exchange, and comment on texts. These spaces, it has been noted, have the
potential for supporting student-centered learning and discursive practices
that can be different from, and--some claim--more engaging and democratic
than those occurring within traditional classroom settings. [2] Such a
vision is all the more tantalizing given our recognition that the education
taking place in traditional classrooms--despite our best
intentions--contributes, in part, to a continuing cultural tendency to
marginalize and oppress groups of people due to their race, gender, or
ethnic background. Gomez, for example, citing Wheelock and Dorman,
compares the 12% dropout rate for white students to the 17% rate for
African American students, 18% for Hispanic students, and 29.2% for Native
American students (319-20). Giroux notes that "in many urban cities the
dropout rate for nonwhite children exceeds 60% (with New York City at 70%)"
(111). As teachers of English, we recognize, in other words, that we work
in an educational system that instructs students about oppression and
inequity, by example, even as we strive to erase such lessons from the
official curriculum. This situation and these figures, as June Jordan
notes, are all the more dramatic in light of the fact that only 15% of the
entrants into the American workforce will be white males by the year 2000
and that some states like California will have 61% non-white students in
their populations by the year 2010 (22). And as Mary Louise Gomez further
reminds us, most schools can expect 30-40% of their student population to
come from a non-English language background by the end of this decade
(319).
This continuing pattern has encouraged many teachers of English to turn
to--among other things--computer-supported writing environments as places
within which they and students can try to enact educational practices that
are more democratic and less systematically oppressive: for example,
student-centered, on-line discussion groups in which individuals discover
their own motivations for using language, on-line conferences in which
students' race gender, age, and sexual preference may not figure in the
same ways that they do in more conventional face-to-face settings;
collaborative groups in which students learn to negotiate discursive power.
To create and maintain these communities--to defend their use and
value--we have often used what Hawisher and Selfe have identified as an
overly positive "rhetoric of technology" (55) that portrays
computer-supported forums--among ourselves, to administrators, to
students--as democratic spaces, what Mary Louise Pratt might call
"linguistic utopias" (48) within which cues of gender, race, and
socioeconomic status are minimalized; students speak without interruption;
marginalized individuals can acquire more central voices. And if this
rhetoric is helpful in that it describes what we want to
happen--and sometimes, to some extent, does happen--in our
classrooms, it is also dangerous. Through its use, we legitimate the
status quo of computer use and, as Hawisher and Selfe note, "de-legitimate
critique" (53)--thus allowing ourselves to think erroneously that the use
of computers and networks provides discursive landscapes that are, in Mary
Louise Pratt's words, "the same for all players" (38).
The rhetoric of technology obscures the fact that, within our current
educational system--even though computers are associated with the potential
for great reform--they are not necessarily serving democratic ends.
Computer interfaces, for example, are also sites within which the
ideological and material legacies of racism, sexism, and colonialism are
continuously written and re-written along with more positive cultural
legacies. [3] Perhaps the most salient evidence for this claim lies in the
different uses to which computers are put in minority classrooms and
majority classrooms. Sheingold, Martin, and Endreweit, for example, note
the "in schools with large minority enrollments computers are used
primarily to provide basic skills instruction delivered by
drill-and-practice software...In contrast, computer use in majority schools
is characterized by its emphasis on the use of computers as tools to
develop higher order literacy and cognitive skills as objects of study
(e.g., instruction focused on computer literacy and programming" (89).
Charles Piller, in a recent article in MacWorld, notes that
minority populations and lower-socioeconomic populations are America's
growing "technological underclass" (218) and, thus, that these students are
the least likely to gain skills during their public schooling experience
that will serve them well in a world increasingly dependent on
technology.
The recognition of this situation, for many computer-supported teachers of
English, is not possible without a great deal of pain. It demands our
realization that--while we, as individual English teachers, may very
strongly support democratic reform, broad involvement, or egalitarian
education, and while our teaching and computer use may be aimed toward
these ends--we are also simultaneously participating in a cultural project
that, at some level and to some degree, seems to support racist, sexist,
and colonial attitudes. This is true even as our profession broadly
supports more productive and progressive forms of educational action. If
we hope to get English composition teachers to recognize how our use of
computers achieves both great good and great evil--often at the same time,
as Joseph Weizenbaum points out--we have to educate them to be technology
critics as well as technology users. This recognition requires
that composition teachers acquire the intellectual habits of reflecting on
and discussing the cultural and ideological charactersitics of
technology--and the implications of these charactersitics--in educational
contexts. With such a realization, we maintain, English composition
teachers can begin to exert an increasingly active influence on the
cultural project of technology design.
The project that we have just described is not a simple one, nor is it one that we can describe fully here. We can, however, provide an extended example of the agenda we want to pursue by focusing in particular ways on computer interfaces, those primary representations of computers systems or programs that show up on screens used by both teacher sand students. Within the virtual space represented by these interfaces, and elsewhere within computer systems, the values of our culture--ideological, political, economic, educational--are mapped both implicitly and explicitly, constituting a complex set of material relations among culture, technology, and technology users. In effect, interfaces are cultural maps of computer systems, and as Denis Wood points out, such maps are never ideologically innocent or inert. Like other maps that Wood mentions--the medieval mappaemundi
Given this background, we can better understand why it is important to
identify the cultural information passed along in the maps of computer
interfaces--especially because this information can serve to reproduce, on
numerous discursive levels and through a complex set of conservative
forces, the asymmetrical power relations that, in part, have shaped the
educational system we labor within and that students are exposed to. What
is mapped in computer interfaces--just as what is mapped in other social
and cultural artifacts such as our educational system--is both "ownership"
and opportunity (Wood 21). In this sense, we maintain, the "ferocious"
(Wood 25) effectiveness of computer interfaces as maps is established as
much by what they do not show about American culture as by what
they do. Primary computer interfaces do not, for example, provide
direct evidence of different cultures and races that make up the American
social complex, nor do they show much evidence of different linguistic
groups or groups of differing economic status. It is only when we
recognize these gestures of omission for what they are, as interested
versions of reality, that we can begin to examine the naturalizing
functions of computer interfaces and, as educators, break the frame to
extend the discursive horizon (Laclau and Moulffe 19) of the landscape we
created and that, in turn, creates us and students in our classes.
Once we recognize these functions, we also begin to understand the
ideological gesture of the interface's map as a "flawed, partial,
incomplete" (Wood 26) and interested vision of reality, as least partly
constructed from the perspective of, and for the benefit of, dominant
forces in our culture. In particular--given that these technologies have
grown out of the predominately male, white, middle-class, professional
cultures associated with the military-industrial complex--the virtual
reality of computer interfaces represents, in part and to a visible degree,
a tendency to value monoculturalism, capitalism, and phallologic thinking,
and does so, more importantly, to the exclusion of other perspectives.
Grounded in these values, computer interfaces, we maintain, enact small but
continuous gestures of domination and colonialism. To examine these
claims, we have to turn directly to examples that illustrate the ways in
which such maps "name, marginalize, and define difference as the devalued
Other" (Giroux 33)--not in a totalizing fashion but through many subtly
potent gestures enacted continuously and naturalized as parts of
technological systems. Such examples are not difficult to come by if we
examine the borderland of the interface from the perspective of
non-dominant groups in our culture.
In general, computer interfaces present reality framed in the perspective
of modern capitalism, thus, orienting technology along an existing axis of
class privilege. The graphically intuitive Macintosh interface provides a
good example of this orientation. That interface, and the software
applications commonly represented within it, map the virtual world as a
desktop--constructing virtual reality, by association, in terms of
corporate culture and the values of professionalism. This reality is
constituted by and for white middle- and upper-class users to replicate a
world that they know and feel comfortable within. The objects represented
within this world are those familiar primarily to the white-collar
inhabitants of that corporate culture: manila folders, files, documents,
telephones, fax machines, clocks and watches, and desk calendars. We can
grasp the power of this ideological orientation--and thus sense its
implications--by shifting our perspective to what it does not
include, what it leaves unstated. The interface does not, for example,
represent the world in terms of a kitchen counter top, a mechanics
workbench, or a fast-food restaurant--each of which would constitute the
virtual world in different terms according to the values and orientations
of, respectively, women in the home, skilled laborers, or the rapidly
increasing numbers of employees in the fast-food industry.
Built into computer interfaces are also a series of semiotic messages that
support this alignment along the axes of class, race, and gender. The
white pointer hand, for example, ubiquitous in the Macintosh primary
interface, is one gesture, as are the menu items of the Appleshare server
tray and hand, calculator, the moving van (for the font DA mover), the
suitcase, and the desk calendar. Other images--those included in the
HyperCard interface commercial clip art collections, and in the Apple
systems documentation--include a preponderance of white people and icons of
middle- and upper-class white culture and professional, office- oriented
computer use. These images signal--to usersof color, to users who come
from a non-English background, to users from low socio-economic
backgrounds--that entering the virtual worlds of interfaces also means, at
least in part and at some level, entering a world constituted around the
lives and values of white, male middle- and upper-class professionals.
Users of color, users from non-English language background, users from a
low socio-economic class who view this map of reality, submit--if only
partially and momentarily--to an interested version of reality represented
in terms of both language and image.
When users recognize the corporate orientation of the interface, they also
begin to understand more about how computers as a technology are
ideologically associated with capitalism. Computer interfaces, for
example, can serve to reproduce a value on the commodification of
information. On the Macintosh desktop, for instance, the raw material of
information is gathered in databases and files, stored in folders and on
hard drives, accumulated within artificial expanded memory spaces, and
finally manipulated and written in the form of documents that acquire their
own authority and value within a capitalist economy.
All of these products--following the prevailing model of text-as-commodity
established in what Jay D. Bolter calls the "late age of print" (1)--are
"owned" by an author who can protect work with a "password" and accord
"privileges" to readers according the relationship and involvement she
would like them to have with a text. This commodification of information
is also played out at additional levels within computer interfaces.
Through interfaces, for example, students now learn to access and depend on
sources like BITNET or Internet, library systems in other states, and
information bases around the world for the information they need. These
electronic spaces--which are subject to increasing legislation and
control--are at the same time becoming more expensive and more rigidly
aligned along the related axes of class privilege and capitalism. The
refinement and use of packet charging technologies, for example, and the
increasing exploitation of large-scale commercial networks that appeal to
the public will continue to support such an alignment. Recent figures
published in a recent New York Times article indicate that
commercial public networks such as Prodigy and Compuserve charge
approximately $50 for starter kits on their systems, between $8 and $15 for
basic use each month, and some additional per-message or per-minute charges
as well. The capital stake that commercial groups have in promoting these
electronic systems to citizens is not a small one: Information-as-commodity
is a big business--approximately 3.4 million people subscribe to commercial
networks at the rates we have mentioned (Grimes 13-15).
The orientation of the interface along the axis of class Privilege is made
increasingly systematic by the application of related discursive
constraints. Primary interfaces, for example, also generally serve to
reproduce the privileged position of standard English as the language of
choice or default, and, in this way, contribute to the tendency to ignore,
or even erase, the cultures of non-English language background speakers in
this country. Although the global expansion of technology is exerting an
increasingly strong influence on the computer industry--and thus interfaces
in other languages are becoming more common--these influences are resisted
at many levels and in many ways, and this resistance is represented vividly
in the maps of computer interfaces. A more particular example of this
orientation exists in most word-processing programs--those tools we present
students with so they can "express" themselves in the language of our
choosing. Many such programs commercially distributed in this country
present their menued items only in English, despite the fact that, as Mary
Louise Gomez reminds us, most schools can expect 30-40% of their student
population to come from a non-English language background by the end of the
decade (319). Those word-processing programs that do present an
alternative-language interface market their non-English language background
products separately, adding additional cost; or market them only in other
countries; or retain the privileged position of English simply by default.
WordPerfect 5.1 for the IBM, for instance, which presents English menus as
the default interface, does allow users operate in other languages--among
them three versions of English (Australian, Great Britain, and United
States) and only one of Spanish, in addition to Catalan (WordPerfect
for DOS 325). To write or edit in another language, users must go to
a "Layout" pull-down menu and then select--with some irony, we hope--the
item labeled "Other" (324). As the manual for WordPerfect notes, moreover,
the thesaurus and spell checkers accompanying the regular WordPerfect
package come only in English. One can order versions of this thesaurus and
spell checker in other languages, but they come at an additional cost. The
telephone number which one uses to place such an order, the
Reference manual notes, further, is "not toll-free" (326).
The decision to use English as a default language--articulated, as we have
pointed out, with the custom of identifying non-English language background
speakers as a marginalized "other" and the socio-economic forces that limit
access to software in other languages--clearly has importent implications
for our educational system, for teachers and for students. In schools,
this default position means that students from other races and cultures who
hope to use the computer as a tool for empowerment must--at some
level--submit to the colonial power of language and adopt English as their
primary means of communication, even if this submission is only partial or
momentary. Few schools and few teachers can find a realistic perspective
from which to resist the tendential forces associated with this default to
English as a standard. Certainly, schools that may most need fully
functional bi- and tri-lingual interfaces are the least likely to
have the monies available to purchase additional packages. This
characteristic focus of the interfaces on Standard English is further
supported and exacerbated by the fact that style and grammar packages are
generally based on an overly narrow--and erroneous--vision of "correct"
language use and spelling checkers that exert a continuously normative
influence (LeBlanc) within the setting of colonial discourse. Both kinds
of software can serve to de-value linguistic diversity and inscribe
nonstandard language users as Other within the interface, the classroom,
the educational system, and the culture.
We got an idea of just how powerful and evenly dispersed this cultural
inscription is--how systematically it operates when we attended the 1992
convention of the National Council of Teachers of English. At that
gathering, a software company demonstrated a word-processing package
designed to present a bilingual (Spanish/English) interface. The package
was available in a low-cost, school-edition package for approximately $300
and in a site-license, networkable version for approximately $1500. As the
package's literature pointed out, users could employ a pull-down menu
system to select the Spanish mode--where all menus, dialog boxes, help, and
messages appear in Spanish. When we tested the software in the Spanish
mode, however, we found the keystroke options did not change
correspondingly to the same language. In fact those options, which depend,
for the most part on mnemonic aids--apple-D for "delete"--remain keyed to
the English words even when the corresponding Spanish menu
items--"eliminar," for example--start with different letters. A student
using this program, then, should she want to use the keystroke options,
might be able to write in Spanish, but would have to think at some level in
English.
This value on English as the privileged language of computer
interfaces--and the effects of the design decisions that support this
system--are certainly not limited to the United States. For example, a
recent international gathering of computer-based instruction (Teleteaching
'93) sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing
and focused on the use of computers for global education projects, required
all discussions to be conducted in English--even though the conference was
held in Norway and many representatives from non-English speaking countries
were in attendance . This decision, presented to participants as a
necessary convenience, recognized the extent to which Americans have
influenced computer design, computer use, and computer applications over
the past decade, and the fact that English has been, during the same
period, the world language of science and technology. The language of
computers has thus become English by default: The majority of standard
interfaces are English, much of the documentation for these interfaces and
the machines they operate on is in English, and the systems that currently
support global computing networks rely on English as a standard exchange
language. At the conference in question, several presenters from
non-English speaking countries, for instance, noted that the educational
conversations and projects they set up for French, German, Russian, or
Slovakian students were conducted in English because these exchanges relied
on the ability to link computers and systems through a common exchange
standard called American Standard Code for Information Interchange
(ASCII)--because it was originally based on a 7-bit code--can handle, as
Charles Petzold points out, only "26 lowercase, 26 uppercase letters, 10
numbers, and 33 symbols and punctuation marks" unless it is extended by
8-bit byte computer systems that allow it to handle 128 additional
characters. Even with these additional characters, ASCII's alphabetic
limitations preclude the full and adequate representation of Greek, Hebrew,
Cyrillic, and Han characters (374-75).
In a recent article about Unicode--proposed international replacement for ASCII--Petzold explores some of the implications of relying solely on ASCII:
There's a big problem with ASCII and that problem is indicated by the first word of the acronym. ASCII is truly an American standard, but there's a whole wide world outside our borders where ASCII is simply inadequate. It isn't even good enough for countries that share our language, for where is the British pound sign in ASCII?....ASCII...is not only inadequate for the written languages of much of the world, but also for many people who live right in my own neighborhood...We simply can't be so parochial as to foster a system as exclusive and limiting as ASCII. The personal computing revolution is quickly encompassing much of the world, and it's totally absurd that the dominant standard is based solely on English as it is spoken in the U.S. (375)
Although this limitation may not represent a large problem to academic professionals, such a limited system makes global computer communications unnecessarily difficult for student learners who speak languages other than English. What remains most interesting about this situation--especially given that teachers, scholars, and computer designers generally acknowledge the limitations of ASCII--is that the change to a more broadly accommodating system has been too slow, even though the technological means for other alphabetic systems (e.g., the memory, the programming mechanics, the computer hardware) have been available for some time now. To change ASCII, however, is to work against a complex set of tendential forces encouraging inertia--because changing ASCII means changing existing software, hardware, documentation, and programming approaches. It also requires that individuals and groups in the computer industry abandon English as the natural
If the map of interface is oriented simultaneously along the axes of class,
race, and cultural privilege, it is also aligned with the values of
rationality, hierarchy, and lagocentrism characteristic of Western
patriarchal cultures. IBM's DOS environment, for example, is fundamentally
dependent on an hierarchical representation of knowledge, a perspective
characteristically--while not exclusively--associated with patriarchal
culture and rationalistic traditions of making meaning. This way of
representing knowledge within computer environments, although not
essentially limiting or exclusive by itself, becomes so when linked to a
positivist value on rationality and logic as foundational ways of
knowing that function to exclude other ways of knowing, such as
association, intuition, or bricolage. This validation of positivism,
rationality, hierarchy, and logic as the only authorized contexts for
"knowing" and representing knowledge continues to inform--and limit-- many
formal aspects of computer programming and technology design. As Winograd
and Flores note, the current rationalistic framework that informs the
design of computers and their interfaces is "based on a misrepresentation
of the nature of human cognition and language," one that provides "only
impoverished possibilities for modeling and enlarging the scope of human
understanding" (78). As a result, these authors continue, "We are now
witnessing a major breakdown in the design of computer technology--a
breakdown that reveals the rationalistically oriented background of
discourse within which our current understanding [of technology] is
embedded" (78-79). A similar case has been made by Ted Nelson, a pioneer
in the design of hypertext interfaces, who has referred to the conceptual
structure of hierarchical file systems as an "enormous barrier" to creative
thinking. Nelson has characterized the effects of such systems as both
"oppressive and devastating." The "tyranny" of hierarchial systems, Nelson
contends, "imposes intricate, fixed pathways that we must commit to memory"
and "forbid acting on inspiration." He adds, further, that such systems
cause programmers to "oversimplify" their representation of data and the
uses of such data within computer interfaces (83-84).
As Sherry Turkle and Seymour Papert point out, this conventional validation
of--and dependence on--hierarchy, rationality, and logic is all the more
potent because it is operative at all levels of computer interface design
and programming. Computer programmers are educated to solve problems using
hierarchical approaches to problem solving and to represent relationships
in the programs abstractly, within a strict syntactical system of linear
propositional logic. This "formal, propositional" way of constructing
knowledge (129) has come to constitute a "canonical style" (133) for
programmers who are solving problems and representing information, a
privileged way of relating ideas one to the other that has become
"literally synonymous with knowledge" (129) in computer science. So
synonymous has this way of thinking become with knowledge, in fact, that
computer scientists have come to see propositional thinking as one
way of knowing, but as the only way of knowing. It has become
equated with "formal" and "logical" thinking, and given "a privileged
status" (133) within computer science.
Recently, however, increasing numbers of computer specialists have begun to
identify the limitations inherent on hierarchical approaches and data
representations--in dealing with learners who have varying levels and kinds
of visualization skills, in training programmers to apply epistemologically
diverse approaches to programming problems, an in representing
non-hierarchically organized information structures like wicked or
fuzzy problems (complex problems with no definitive formulations
or solutions), and incoping with natural language input. [4] Several
programming paradigms have been suggested as alternatives and supplements
to hierarchical representations of knowledge, such as object-oriented
programming concepts (OOPS) and iconic interfaces that represent knowledge,
concepts, or programs through small pictures, called objects or
icons. Such methods of programming and designing computer
interfaces, some computer designers contend, can support alternative
approaches to constructing meaning--through "bricolage," for example, a
term that Turkle and Papert (135) use in reference to the work of Claude
Levi-Strauss. Bricolage, as Turkle and Papert employ the term, refers to
the construction of meaning through the arrangement and rearrangement of
concrete, well known materials often in an intuitive rather than a logical
manner. Bricoleurs get to know a subject by interacting with it
physically, by manipulating materials, or symbols, or icons in rich
associative patterns, by arranging and re-arranging them constantly until
they fit together in a satisfying or meaningful way. Bricoleurs reason
"from within" (144) to come to an understanding of a problem through a
direct "physical path of access" (145) rather than reasoning with the help
of a traditionally validated pattern of logical representation that depends
on objective distancing.
Turkle and Papert contend that allowing for bricolage as a way of
representing knowledge will encourage "epistemological pluralism" within
the "computer culture" (153) that might especially benefit individuals who
feel "more comfortable with relational, interactive, active, and connected
approaches to objects" (150). In particular, Turkle and Papert link
bricolage with approaches to problem solving that are culturally determined
and articulated with gender. Drawing on the work of Carol Gilligan, Evelyn
Fox Keller, and Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka, these authors suggest
women, in particular, might benefit from conceptual frameworks that would
support bricolage, but not exclude rationalistically determined approaches
such as hierarchical representations. It could be a mistake, however, as
Judith Butler points out, to see gender itself in such fixed terms or to
consider the continual construction and re-constructions of gender
identities as other than complex, momentary, and contradictory
"intersections" (3) of cultural and political forces. As played out
realistically within the maps of computer interfaces, Turkle and Papert's
suggestions prove more problematic. The Macintosh interface, for instance,
allows for bricolage and rationalistically determined representations of
hierarchy--that is documents, folders, and text nodes can be arranged and
re-arranged according to the alternative relations of space, time,
association, and intuition or to more traditional logical
relations of hierarchy and classification. As we have tried to indicate,
however, the alignment of these cultural maps along the articulated axes of
capitalism, class, gender, and race issues creates a set of tendential
forces that continues to value approaches associated primarily with
dominant ideological positions.
Given the characteristics of the interface contact zone, our uses of
computers in English classrooms certainly seem capable of supporting what
Henry Giroux calls "imperialist master narratives" (57) of colonial
dominance, even as they make the promise of technological liberation and
progress. Students who want to use computers are continually confronted
with these grand narratives which foreground a value on middle-class,
corporate culture; capitalism and the commodification of information;
Standard English; and rationalistic ways of representing knowledge. These
values simultaneously do violence to and encourage the rejection of the
languages of different races and the values of non-dominant cultural and
gender groups. When students from these groups enter the linguistic
borderlands of the interface, in other words, they often learn that they
must abandon their own culture or gender and acknowledge the dominance of
other groups. As Pratt and Said, among others, note, such individuals are
forced, at some level, into "simultaneously identifying with dominant
groups" and disassociating themselves from the colonial values of these
groups (Pratt 59, citing Moreau).
This is, as we see it, one of the ways in which computer educators use
computers--albeit unconsciously--to enact what Elspeth Stuckey calls "the
violence of literacy." Each time we ask students from a marginalized
culture group to use computers, we ask them--require them--to learn a
system of literacy that distance[s] them from the ways of equality" (94).
When we connect the regularly dispersed violence of literacy education to
the use of computers, as technology critics like C. Paul Olson and Anfrew
Feenberg point out, we get more than the sum of the parts. We get, indeed,
a master narrative that resonates all too successfully with modernist myths
of technological progress: Civilization and reason, as manifested in a
increasingly literate people, are supported in their historical evolution
by continual improvements of industry and science. If teachers hear this
resonance, we think they understand the need to identify and correct the
tone.
Scholars who use technology and educators who teach with technology will, no doubt, find it difficult to study the maps of computer interfaces in a critical light to identify the many layers of culture and ideology they represent. As Denis Wood suggests, the greatest difficulty of all comes when we understand that we must locate ourselves in relation to the map. At this point, we end up asking ourselves where we stand in this colonial landscape, how we have cast our own multiple subjective positions within the territory that we have created and examined. Are we the cartographers who compose the map in our own cultural image--as white-collar professionals, many of us white or privileged? Are we members of a dominant group that profits from the map's reproductive function--as official representatives of an educational system and, in the case of many institutions of higher learning, the State? In part, of course, we do (already and always, as they say) stand in these places, but we can also--by revealing the partial and flawed nature of the map, by acknowledging our own role in composing the map--claim other vantage places as well. In particular, we can take with increasing seriousness the role of serving as technology critics when we use computers in the classroom and when we work with other teachers to integrate technology within these learning spaces. As Elspeth Stuckey, in The Violence of Literacy says of literacy education in general--when we finally get around to "seeing" how a system supports repression, we can also find ways to alter the nature of our involvement in it:
A system takes a lot of trouble. A system must be devised and implemented. To be sure, much of its design is tacit, its implementation an extension of usual modes of comfortable life. That is why uncomfortable people can often change a system. They can see it. (126)
So what de we do as educators and as teachers of teachers? In our own
classrooms, the continuing process has to be centered on a continuing
foregrounding of the problems we have sketched out here, which leads us to
suggest some related strategies for re-drawing the territory of the
interface with students. To begin, however, we have to learn to
recognize--and teach students to recognize--the interface as an interested
and partial map of our culture and as a linguistic contact zone that
reveals power differentials. We need to teach students and ourselves to
recognize computer interfaces as non-innocent physical borders (between the
regular world and the virtual world), cultural borders (between the haves
and the have-nots), and linguistic borders. These borders, we need to
recognize as cultural formation "historically constructed and socially
organized within rules and regulations that limit and enable particular
identities, individual capacities, and social forms" (Giroux 30). We also
need to teach students and ourselves useful strategies of crossing--and
demystifying--these borders. It is important to understand that we
continually re-map and re-negotiate borders in our lives.
One of the ways to come to this understanding is through working with
students and computer specialists to re-design/re-create interfaces that
attempt to avoid disabling and devaluing non-white, non-English language
background students, and women. Our goal in creating these new interfaces
should be to help rewrite the relationships between the center and the
margins of our culture and, in Henry Giroux's words, "extend rather than
erase the possibility of enabling human agency" (27) among currently
marginalized and oppressed groups represented within the culture and the
educational system. Although it is important to recognize--given the
strong tendential forces of our culture and the regularly dispersed nature
of ideological systems--that any progress we make toward these goals will
be partial, temporary, and contradictory, there are few practices (what de
Certeau might call tactics) that could help us enact a border
pedagogy in computer-supported writing environments. We would like to
spend the last part of this article identifying a few of these practical
approaches that might be of use in composition programs at the college and
university level.
One tactic for responding to the interested nature of computer interfaces
has to do with encouraging a general level of critical awareness about
technology issues on the part of both pre-service and in-service teachers.
Currently, most teachers of composition studies at the collegiate level are
educated to deal with technology not as critics but as users--if, indeed,
they are educated to deal with it at all. Few programs that educate
college-level teachers of composition, for example, require students to
take coursework in technology studies. If they are lucky, new faculty or
graduate teaching assistants at an institution may be introduced--during an
orientation for instructors or during a graduate course in teaching
composition--to a computer facility that they can use for their teaching.
Often, these introductions accomplish nothing more than exposing teachers
to one or more software programs available for use in the classroom, and
allowing time for some minimal hands-on practice with the software. Few
composition programs or English departments, however, make a systematic
effort to provide parallel instruction on technology issues as they touch
on educational projects--stressing readings and discussions on technology
criticism, or the growing body of scholarship and research associated with
computers and composition studies. [5] As a result, the teachers of
composition--and prospective teachers of composition--may learn to use
technology, but not to think carefully about the implications of its use
within their classrooms.
Influencing this situation is an additional set of forces that encourage
relatively conservative teaching strategies in connecting with technology
and relatively little room for reflection on these strategies. Given the
costs involved in computing, most composition programs and English
departments must depend on access to generic computing
environments rather than facilities designed specifically to provide
computer-supported writers' environments. Such generic
facilities, because they are administered and maintained by computer
specialists rather than teachers of English, foreground an emphasis on the
machine and its use rather than on a critical approach to teaching
composition with computer support. Characteristic of these facilities,
often located in interior rooms or basements, are rows of numbered machines
arranged to look very much like traditional classrooms and often networked
so they can be controlled from a single teacher's workstation at the front
of the room. In such settings, and often armed with very little
preparation or training, teachers of composition also have little
encouragement to make changes in conventionally influenced teaching
approaches they observe in regular classrooms, as Klem and Moran note
(5-22). In such an environment, for example, it may become difficult to
have students working in flexible groupings, to avoid a teacher-centered
classroom, or to provide students room to take some charge of their own
learning.
Operating within these parameters, it is recognizably difficult to educate
teachers of composition as technology critics and to inculcate the
intellectual habit of reflecting critically on the effects that technology
might have within composition classrooms. Writing program administrators
and individual teachers can, however, take some steps toward this goal by
making sure their programs--whether pre-service or in-service--are spending
at least as much time educating teachers about important technology issues
(access to technology, design of technology, ideologies associated with
technology) as they are on training them to use technology. Among the
efforts that might be undertaken by teachers and program administrators in
support of this goal are collecting and circulating articles and books that
provide critical as well as optimistic visions of technology, setting up
research groups and teaching observations to encourage reflective teaching
habits in computer supported writing facilities, encouraging faculty to
participate in e-mail lists that discuss technology issues as they are
manifested in English composition classrooms, and sponsoring talks by
informed scholars who examine technology issues from critical perspectives.
[6]
A second tactic for addressing the interested nature of computer interfaces
is more narrowly and specifically focused on the efforts of those faculty
who are computer and composition specialists. Given the embryonic state of
this field and the traditional educational reward structures within which
computers and composition specialists must function to earn tenure,
promotion, and professional recognition, these colleagues have focused most
of their efforts during the past fifteen years on identifying, exploring,
and testing pedagogical uses of available computer
technologies--suggesting, for example, effective ways to integrate the use
of word-processing packages, on-line conferences, or idea generation
packages into the teaching of English composition classes. [7] Less
effort, therefore, has been available to invest in software design
efforts--which can be costly in terms of resources and professional
advancement, as LeBlanc points out--and almost no involvement has been
encouraged in the design of primary interfaces. Without such an
involvement by humanist scholars and teachers--especially those individuals
who are familiar with language and learning theory, who understand issues
raised by technology studies and cultural studies--interface design will
continue to be dominated primarily by computer specialists and will lack
perspectives that could be contributed by humanist scholars.
Fortunately, avenues for involvement in software design efforts are
becoming more accessible. Computers and composition specialists who find
the penalties associated with the effort to design specific software
packages to be overly costly in terms of tenure, promotion, and
advancement, can also influence software design through collective
professional action aimed at general technology design efforts.
Professional organizations such as the Alliance for Computers in Writing,
[8] International Federation of Information Processing, and even the
National Council of Teachers of English (through committees like the
Instruction Technology Committee, and the CCCC Committee on Computers)
currently influence the design of software through various formal and
informal strategies of collective action: by identifying groups of teachers
and professional educators who can engage directly in conversations with
software manufacturers and vendors, by charging committees to take on the
task of making systematic suggestions to these manufacturers after
consulting with reflective computer-using teachers, by identifying
outstanding efforts in software design, by publishing papers and reviews
that include critical examinations of design implications in the classroom,
and by identifying the kinds of products that are limited in their
classroom usefulness. many of these committees and organizations also hold
ongoing discussions of computer issues of interest to teachers of
composition on the Internet. Within these forums--which often are global
in their participation and include a mix of computer scientists, educators,
software designers, and content specialists--computers and composition
specialists can encourage discussions that focus on interfaces, language
issues, cultural reproduction, learning theories, and critical theories of
language use. Through these conversations, computers and composition
specialists can contribute to an increasingly critical awareness of
technology issues on the part of individuals involved directly in the
design of technology. Such conversations--if they can serve to extend and
transform the existing intellectual and political terrain for various
groups of people--could have, in Laclau and Mouffe's words, a "profound
subversive power" (155).
A third suggestion for addressing the interested map of reality offered by
computer interfaces is to involve composition teachers and students in
composition classes in an ongoing project to revise interfaces as
texts. The purpose of these map-making sessions would be to come
up with ideas for changing the interface to reflect a range of cultural,
linguistic, and ideological perspectives. Faculty who specialize in
computers and composition studies can serve as key resource people in this
effort, although the goal is to involve all computer-using
teachers and students in conceptualizing alternative maps of computer
interfaces. The outcome of such sessions should not be to redesign
interfaces in a technical sense, but rather to reconceive of them according
to the experiences of a broad range of writers and teachers of writing:
identifying desirable features generally unavailable in primary interfaces
(a light pen for writing in the margins of documents, or a highlighter for
color coding related documents), suggesting ways of customizing interfaces
for the needs of various writers and readers (adding a read-aloud option
for writers who want to hear how their texts sound), or imagining
productive metaphors around which interfaces can be built (mechanics'
workbenches, kitchen countertops, garages). In these sessions--to further
reduce the focus on technical expertise--teachers and students can
represent their interface re-revision ideas through prose descriptions or
pencil-and-pen drawings.
For those faculty and teachers who are more adventurous in terms of
technology, some relatively simple computer-based tools already exist that
could support these projects at a level accessible to non-specialists.
Teachers and students can use the computer-based drawing and illustration
packages they are already familiar with, for example, to create
representations of re-designed interface screens to which they add new
features. In addition, software designers for the Macintosh have already
published scores of alternative icons and images that can be used by
English composition teachers, and students, to customize primary computer
interfaces. Matrix Communication Associates of Pittsburgh, for instance,
is now marketing a package of African American computer graphics and has a
plan to market graphics packages that more adequately represent other
ethnic groups as well (Creedy). With such packages, faculty and graduate
students who have very little familiarity with computers can illustrate how
they would like to incorporate various features into primary
interfaces--creating icons for bulletin boards, on-line conferences,
multiple user dimensions, or other student-centered learning spaces that
they would like to include in an interface. It is possible that
representations identified by writing teachers and students can later be
used by software and hardware design specialists as the basis for more
technical projects that might actually produce working versions of
alternative interfaces.
To support these conceptual redesign efforts, computers and composition
specialists can also work with both teachers and students to assemble
expanded libraries of images that appeal to writers of different ages,
races, sexual preferences, classes, and lifestyles. These icons should be
chosen to resonate with a range of different cultural ideological
positions--delicatessens and 7-Elevens, babies and rocking chairs, rosetta
stones and piñatas, apartment buildings and subway maps, powwow dances
and storytellers--which can be used to customize systems for different
groups of writers. The goal in identifying these images and icons, in
Henry Giroux's words, would be to help students and teachers focus on the
act of crossing borders "moving in and out of borders constructed around
coordinates of difference and power," learning and negotiating "the
shifting parameters of place, identity, history, and power" (136). This
project may help us and students to see that interests represented within
maps are "neither singular nor simple" (Wood 94) and that interests
concealed in one map, one representation of a culture, can be revealed and
foregrounded in another.
For both teachers and students, Giroux notes, the project of eliminating
oppression based on class, race, and gender involves "an ongoing contest
within every aspect of daily life, a continual project of mapping and
re-mapping the educational, political, and ideological spaces we want to
occupy." He continues, " no tradition should ever be seen as received in
this project" (155-156). In this sense, English teachers cannot be content
to understand the maps of computer interfaces as simple, uncomplicated
spaces. Rather, we need to prepare ourselves and the students with whom we
work to map these virtual spaces as sites of "multiple and heterogeneous
borders where different histories, languages, experiences, and voices
intermingle amidst diverse relations of power and privilege" (Giroux 169).
At the same time, it is prudent to acknowledge the complications and
contradictions inherent in such work. As Winograd and Flores point out,
our continuing efforts toward revealing the interested nature of computer
interfaces will, in part, contribute to concealment because "as carriers of
a tradition, we cannot be objective observers of it." This realization,
however, cannot provide an excuse for inaction. We must also, as these
authors note, take on the responsibility of continuing to "work towards
concealment...and let our awareness guide our actions in creating and
applying technology" (179)
Acknowledgments: We owe a great deal of gratitude to colleagues
who helped us work through the ideas in this article. The generosity and
intellectual contributions of Marilyn Cooper, Jim Sosnoski, and Joe
Janangelo are evident in the best aspects of this paper
1. For more critical discussions of the overly optimistic rhetoric associated with computer use in composition classrooms, see Faigley's description of a synchronous network conversation (Fragments 163-99), Barton's discussion of the dominant discourses associated with technology, ("Interpreting the Discourses of Technology"), Hawisher and Selfe's exploration of teachers' claims about computer use ("The Rhetoric of Technology"), and Romano's discussion of bias in on-line conversations ("The Egalitarianism Narrative").
2. Readers who want to explore the potential of electronic forums on WANs or LANs may want to consult: Barker and Kemp's "Network Theory" Bruce, Peyton, and Batson's Networked Classrooms; Cooper and Selfe's "Computer Conferences" Eldred's "Computers, Composition and the Social View" Faigley's "Subverting the Electronic Notebook" Handa's Computers and Community; Kiesler, Siegel, and McGwire's "Social Psychological Aspects;" and Spitzer's "Computer Conferencing."
3. Discussions of the ways in which racism, sexism, and power relationships related to colonialism are enacted in connection with technology use can be found in Gomez's "The Equitable Teaching of Composition," Hawisher and Selfe's "Rhetoric of Technology," Jessup's "Feminism and Computers," and LeBlanc's "Competing Ideologies."
4. For descriptions of the challenges associated with wicked problems and fuzzy logic, readers may want to refer to: Ambler, Burnett, and Zimmerman: Kurzwell; Seagull and Walker; Turkle and Papert; and Winograd and Flores.
5. For criticism related to technology, we recommend the works of Feenberg, Kramare, Olson, Ohmann.
6. Several such lists exist for teachers of composition. Megabyte University (MBU), for instance, focuses on issues surrounding the use of computers in writing-intensive classrooms and BreadNet serves to connect English teachers who have attended Breadloaf seminars. To obtain information on Megabyte University, contact Fred Kemp, the founder of MBU, at Texas Tech University (YKFOK@TTACS1.TTU>EDU). To obtain additional information about BreadNet, contact Bill Wright (BWRIGHT@TMN.COM). The National Council of Teachers of English is currently engaged in designing a computer network that will connect teachers of English across the country. For additional information on NCTEnet, contact Tharon Howard, Chair NCTE Instructional Technology Committee, at Clemson University (THARON@HUBCAP.CLEMSON.EDU).
7. The advent of computers and composition studies is typically dated from 1975, when Ellen Nold's CCC article, "Fear and Trembling," gave voice to the concerns English composition teachers had about technology (and thus gave impetus to focused work in this area), or from 1979, when Hugh Burns published the first dissertation that systematically examined the effects of computer-assisted instruction on student writers' invention efforts. The first fully assembled microcomputer, the Apple II, marketed in 1976, provided the actual technological means of introducing computers into composition classrooms in a meaningful way. These machines provided composition teachers with word-processing systems that were far easier to teach and far less difficult to use than the clumsy line editors offered on mainframe computers in the seventies.
8. The Alliance for Computers in Writing is a national coalition of teachers, publishers, professional organizations, and educational institutions interested in promoting the effective use of computers in English composition classrooms. For more information on the Alliance for Computers in Writing, contact Trent Batson, Gallaudet University (TWBATSON@GALLUA.BITNET).
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This Article originally appeared in the CCC 45.4 (December, 1994):
480-503.
Converted to HTML by Ted Phillips, Nov. 1996.