Kaplan: "Ideology, Technology, and the Future of Writing Instruction"
I found myself identifying with the Henry Giroux statement that Kaplan with which Kaplan opened her article.
"Curriculum in the most fundamental sense is a battleground over whose forms of knowledge, history, visions, language, culture, and authority will prevail as a legitimate object of learning and analysis" (11).
Having taught in a Title I school I encountered a great deal of students who moved around a lot. Case in point: the day our end of year standardized testing started a new student was placed on my class roster. She'd moved from Virginia and hadn't been exposed to any of North Carolina's curriculum standards. She'd been in Honors classes in Virginia but hadn't learned what was on the North Carolina test. Her scores came back saying she was below grade level. This example demonstrates the battleground of curriculum with the clash in North Carolina's and Virginia's curriculum standards.
This example helped me internalize how Kaplan outlines that "Tools work for users, but they also influence the shape of users' work, affecting how users understand their world and their scope of action within it" (11). The day I had to tell that student her score, she dissolved into tears. She told me she'd always been good in math and felt stupid. By changing the curriculum she was expected to master, the tools she'd used to understand math in Virginia were no longer relevant in North Carolina. She'd always been successful in math in Virginia. The tools she'd learned no longer worked to help her understand her world and the action she had to take in it. This was her first failure in math and she didn't know how to deal with it. This is one of the many reasons I support a national curriculum, but I digress.
Having made this connection I was able to apply it to the argument Kaplan makes for how technology is changing writing instruction. It's a Foucault field day with regard to power relations. Inclusion of Ohmann's statement, "technology...is itself a social process, saturated with the power relations around it, continually reshaped according to some people's intentions" (23) points this out. I felt the clash in curriculum example is brought full circle to connect with writing technology when Kaplan noted, "Only when hardware, software, and the multiple literacies enabling their use are available equally to all, of course, can the 'free' information flow freely, and even then only as freely as systems designers and the companies who own the software will allow" (26-27). Virginia won't teach North Carolina's curriculum and vice versa. Standards students learn in one state aren't available to students in others. It's yet another way that tools confine users.
Sullivan: "Taking Control of the Page: Electronic Writing and Word Publishing"
As soon as Sullivan mentioned that "the writer is entering an era where the published page is more directly under her or his control" (44) I thought of Dr. Palmquist's presentation about the Future of the Book. It was interesting that Dr. Palmquist had already addressed one of Sullivan's concerns. Sullivan brought up that "writers currently are trained to think little about the look of the text. That problem is increasingly important" (55). Dr. Palmquist's work with WAC Clearinghouse still considers text layout and formatting by hiring and training grad students to work on it. The method used by WAC Clearinghouse does not, however, work toward teaching the writer how to mediate between "the text driven perspective of a writer and the spatial-aesthetic perspective of a designer" (58). The jobs remain separate. Nonetheless, I believe a case study of WAC Clearinghouse is directly applicable to continuing the discussion of issues that Sullivan brings up about word publishing.
No comments:
Post a Comment