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Eighth graders, gender, and online publishing: A story of teacher and student collaboration
Computers and Composition 17, 161–175 (2000) ISSN 8755-4615 © 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
Eighth Graders, Gender, and Online Publishing: A Story of Teacher and Student Collaboration PATRICIA J. GRABILL Fall Creek Valley Middle School
JEFFREY T. GRABILL Georgia State University
During the 1997 through 1998 school year, a group of 35 gifted and talented eighth-grade students at Fall Creek Valley Middle School in Lawrence Township, Indianapolis, had the task of creating the school’s first online literary and art magazine. The process of creating such a publication was unique to Fall Creek and a significant step toward incorporating networked writing technologies into a middle-school language-arts curriculum. This article explores issues of access, gender, and collaboration as they relate to this middle-school class and its magazine project. The purpose of the article is to present one way that writing for online publication (a literary magazine World Wide Web site) fits within a language-arts curriculum and presents the ways collaboration between a university teacher, a middle-school teacher, and eighthgrade students can develop new curricular opportunities for students and new collaborative ventures for teachers. collaboration computer literacy gender Internet language arts middle school World Wide Web
Like many teachers, we often discuss students in our classes, course projects, and more distant professional issues. Unlike many teachers who share stories about their work, however, we don’t teach the same students— or even similar students. Our course projects are often quite different, and the professional issues we discuss more often reflect the fact that Pat teaches middle-school English/language arts, and Jeff, Pat’s son, teaches professional writing courses at the university level. Yet for all our differences, we talk about changes that affect our teaching experiences— changes in literacy and changes in technologies. In particular, our conversations have centered on the notion of “writing” itself
Direct all correspondence to: Patricia J. Grabill, Fall Creek Valley Middle School, 9701 E. 63rd Street, Indianapolis, IN 46236. E-mail: ⬍[email protected]⬎.
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or what “counts” as writing, particularly within the framework of K–12 English instruction. We both understand, as do the readers of this journal, that writing cannot be separated from technology (indeed, that writing is itself a technology, a point made differently by Ong, 1982; Haas, 1996, and many others). However, we are concerned about changing literacy demands for middle-school students, specifically the ways computer literacy and more traditionally conceived linguistic literacy are interrelated, and the ways expectations for writing with computers are being raised by both professional organizations (e.g., NCTE) and political bodies (see Selfe, 19981). In this project, our concern was how to adapt a middle-school language-arts curriculum to incorporate new types of literacy in a way that was intellectually and pedagogically sound, and to make sure it was selfconsciously critical of both the technology and our practices as teachers. Incorporating writing with computers for online publication is important for middleschool students. Consider the story Patricia Sullivan (1998) tells about her son Jae: In 2001, my son Jae graduates from high school. Not only will he be part of one of those minibaby-booms of the 1980s, he will graduate from one of the top five high schools in Indiana. More than 90% of his school’s graduating classes attend college, and his class has averaged at or near the top of. . . Indiana’s achievement test. . . continuously since first grade. Yet Jae, a seventh grader, currently does not have any contact with technology other than with table saws and sewing machines and calculators. He knows that his junior-senior high school has two computer classrooms (that are locked or in use by some unnamed people), and that the library has three more computers. But the seventh graders cannot use the library’s computers for their social science projects (or, more importantly, for fun) because someone stole Encarta (an on-line encyclopedia). . . Jae feels this isolation from computers so intensely that he has signed up for a keyboarding class as an eighth grade elective even though he knows every topic to be covered and the computers to be used are so ancient that Jae will be extremely frustrated in that class. (p. 81)
The problems Jae faced in terms of access to and significant interaction with computers for writing are common ones. Although Jae did not attend Fall Creek Valley, both he and students in the class Pat teaches come from relatively affluent backgrounds and attend some of the best schools in Indiana. As many of us are aware, the access problems of students of color, from different class positions, and young women are more significant. But, as Sullivan wrote, the bar for minimal technology literacy skills is too low for all students, and changes are necessary to help prepare them for the types of writing they must do in the workplaces and schools of (today and) tomorrow (see Garay & Bernhardt, 1998). Retelling this story about Jae vividly introduces many problems associated with writing and technology at even the best schools. Ironically, these barriers exist at a time in which governments and local school districts are literally throwing money into computer purchases in response to the demands of parents, employers, and education experts (again, see Selfe, 1998). However, teachers are left with little guidance and few resources to meet these demands, and they must be self-motivated to get the training and expertise they need to best serve students. This article is a narrative about two related problems associated with our experiences in one eighth-grade class: difficulties incorporating World Wide Web-based writing into a middle-school language-arts class and difficulties linked to gender. Our point is to 1 Selfe’s (1998) address has since been published in College Composition and Communication, 50(3), 411– 436.
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highlight partial solutions to these problems. These solutions take the form of two distinct collaborative relationships: one between a middle-school based teacher and a universitybased teacher, and the other between the school teacher and the students in her class. The argument implicit here is that such collaborative practices are viable tactics for meeting the challenges of online writing in middle and secondary school contexts.
STUDENT WRITING FOR THE WEB: ONE SCHOOL’S EXPERIENCE During the 1997 through 1998 school year at Fall Creek Valley Middle School in Lawrence Township, Indianapolis, a group of 35 eighth-grade students embraced the task of creating the school’s first online literary and art magazine, which would be a component of the school’s Web site. Pat had supervised the publishing of numerous print literary magazines of student work and believed that publishing an online magazine would give the students greater experience with technology and a greater audience for their work. In addition, the school also employed a full-time technology expert whose year-long goal was to provide Internet access to the school through a Web site. The collaboration of a middle-school teacher, a technology expert, a university teacher, and the students resulted in the production of the school’s first online publication, The Bearcat Blend (http:// www.indianapolis.in.us/msdlt/fallcreek/mag.html).
Why an Online Magazine? Fall Creek Valley Middle School opened its doors for the first time in August, 1993, complete with fiber optic capabilities that allow the utilization of networked and audio/ visual technologies to the fullest extent. The school has four computer labs, with additional computers accessible to students in the media center and in individual classrooms. Having technology available, however, was not the primary reason for producing a literary magazine. “Because we can” is not sufficient justification, although “because we can” does provide both opportunity and access—something that every school does not possess, but which Fall Creek Valley possesses in abundance. What Pat discovered in beginning her collaboration with the students was that many— but not all—were already very sophisticated, even in eighth grade, in their knowledge of and experience with the Internet. Several students had produced their own Web sites, and some students had produced Web sites for other people as well. The online magazine expanded that knowledge and also introduced technology to those students who did not have a great deal of Internet experience. The magazine also afforded a huge audience to those students whose writing and art were published online. Students were genuinely excited about the prospect of a relative in Florida accessing work produced by middleschool students in Indiana. Pat was excited by the prospect of new audiences for student writing, new opportunities to recognize students as writers, and the knowledge that writing for Internet publication was a reality for students in her class then and into the future.
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Plans Change The actual implementation of the project began with a series of email messages between Jeff and Pat, about two months after the school year began and after Pat had become acquainted with the students in her class. Pat asked Jeff for help with a project timetable, beginning with information about what the first student committees should be. The collaborators developed a project plan and a set of classroom activities to help students analyze online writing and the similarities and differences between online and print publications. They felt that the project might have had more weight if the students could participate in developing a frame for why they were doing an online magazine and how such writing differed from their previous experiences with writing. This frame then became the philosophical ground for the assignment. As all teachers know, however, plans change, and in this case, tactics that worked in a university classroom didn’t transport seamlessly to a middle-school classroom. The project plan for the middle-school students needed to be more detailed yet tighter in scope. There simply isn’t as much time in public schools to speculate, ponder, and reverse course. Given the scope of middle-school language-arts curricula and time constraints, Pat needed pragmatic tactics for incorporating the magazine into the curriculum. She emailed Jeff the following: Be a middle school teacher for a few minutes; I understand and agree with your philosophical response to my questions. I DO intend to get lots of input from the kids, and I intend to have the kids discuss the similarities AND differences between print and on-line publication. What I want from you is just a middle-school-teacher-practical approach—something linear and concretesequential. I want a list of things that have to be accomplished before we can put an on-line series of documents together. Here’s what I picture: A collection of student writing— essay, short story, poetry, and so forth—at each grade level. Therefore, a sixth grade section, a seventh grade section, an eighth grade section, because those are the three grade levels at Fall Creek. Students who are interested in submitting to the magazine will submit a hard copy of their work for consideration by a team of “experts” (my class) who, using criteria they have established, will decide whether or not to include what the student has submitted in our on-line literary magazine. When something has been accepted—perhaps even after being revised by the student who submitted it—the final submission will be saved electronically and then moved onto/into an HTML page that will be a part of the site. Therefore, I guess that Step 1 is to discuss with the kids what they want the magazine to look like and develop a Storyboard. What I want to know—in very practical terms—is what are steps 2, 3, 4, 5, 6⫹? Help! Get me thinking in the right direction, please. I’ve decided that I don’t even HAVE to write the HTML; I already have students who can do that. I just need to be the guide for the program and get the kids moving.
In response to the situation, the teachers developed a more concrete plan: 1. Map the structure, including a sketch of the content for the welcome page and the link structure from there. Pat was to make a big map and put it on the wall, and create it in a media that allowed change but left the process visible (butcher paper, Post-It notes, and string); 2. Story-board the site (page design); 3. Convert selected text to electronic text (using word-processing software); 4. Create the HTML pages (design templates); 5. Meet with authors to introduce to them the possibilities of hypertext and talk to them about how they wanted their texts laid out, the possibilities of art work, and any ideas about links;
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6. Put content together with templates (more design); 7. Revise, revise, revise. The teachers felt that the educational benefit of this work lay in the students’ abilities to see the entire process of production as writing: research as writing, design as writing, mapping as writing, publication as writing (and to see the Web site as a real publication). Both collaborators wanted the project to entail a substantial look at writing and writing technologies. Both knew these kids would write on networks their entire lives. Some already did. The teachers wanted this project to break substantially with a literary/ essayistic tradition in favor of something else. With the plan in place, Pat began the work. She started by having the students take a look at similarities and differences between print and online publications. Students were asked to compare print and online versions of publications (Time, Sports Illustrated, The Indianapolis Star) as a pragmatic way to generate concrete differences (and similarities). In addition, they were asked to use search engines to find online literary journals. Then, once found, students were asked to analyze them to look for similarities and differences between them: What were the links to? Did these journals use images and colors? What kind? How effective were they? What were the content areas? How effective did students think the content areas were? What would they like to model and/or change for their magazine? Because most (95%) of the students in the class had computers and Internet access at home, they were asked to do the following as a homework assignment and then write a short response giving the results of their study: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Do you read a print magazine any differently than you read an online magazine? In what ways—if any—are magazine contents placed differently online? What are the boundaries of a print magazine? Of an online magazine? Estimate what the proportion is of text to nontext material in a print magazine. In an online magazine.
Students’ perceptions of the concepts were amazing. They were quick to note that an online magazine has no boundaries. They noted that online sites looked different and were controlled by links. They also noted that online magazines often included less text and more pictures and ads, and that online articles typically were not split by intervening pages. They noted that online articles were more current and are updated more frequently. In fact, once students began talking about other online publications, they wanted to begin talking about their magazine. They were immediately thinking and talking about how they wanted the magazine to be linked and what they wanted it to look like. Shortly after their homework project, Pat and the students in her class began a class brainstorming session intended to begin discussion of the first steps of putting the magazine together. Pat tacked a sheet of butcher paper to the wall, used Post-Its and string, and the students accomplished the following: ● ● ●
brainstormed content for the welcome page; determined link structure from the welcome page; brainstormed segmentation of the magazine.
Pat encouraged the students to elect an editor and assistant editor because those two people could provide the student leadership necessary for the project. Pat just wanted to
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be a “guide on the side.” Once the editors were chosen, Pat worked with the students to set up committees that would focus on specific aspects of the magazine. Students wrote the following choices and criteria: 1. Creating Templates Committee: Web page template design and writing; 2. Storyboard Committee: Draw out and color pictures of what should be included on each page of our magazine. Will work with the Art and Design team; 3. Marketing Committee: Market the magazine to get lots of submissions; 4. Art and Design Committee: Plan what the magazine should look like. Meet with the Storyboard Committee and present/share ideas; 5. Selection Committee: Decide what pieces will be included in the magazine; 6. Permission to Publish/Rejection Committee: Get writers’ permission to publish their pieces or give them a rejection slip; 7. Editing Committee: Proofread final submissions for grammatical and mechanical errors. Once the committees were set up, Jeff and Pat exchanged email again, reviewing the project and discussing plans for the next phase. Because there was no clear next step, only many simultaneous steps, the collaborators decided to have each committee plan its work and set goals and deadlines, but the committees continued to run into time constraints. The project still faced problems of timely curricular integration. Pat emailed Jeff the following: One problem I’m encountering is that this project is too time-consuming to fit in as curriculum the way I wanted it to— but that’s a learning experience for me. I could do only this magazine project for the next month, and then I wouldn’t be teaching all of the other things my students need to learn to be successful in high school. What’s going to have to happen is that we’re going to have to start spending some time after school—two or three committees at a time—and the kids are excited enough about this project that I don’t think it will be a problem. . . . School ends at 2:45 every day, but there is a student activity bus that leaves at 4:30, which allows kids to stay after and work. Wish me luck. I’ll spend some time in the next week planning and gathering.
From that point, Pat and the students in her class used both limited class time and extensive lunch and after-school time to continue the magazine to its conclusion. Even though Pat considered this project to be a normal part of the curriculum, it had become too large in its scope, especially given the intention to involve each of the 35 students. Meeting that goal alone would have precluded accomplishing anything else, and there were many other curricular issues Pat needed to deal with during the regular classroom time. Once students signed up for the committees they wanted to be a part of, Pat created a spreadsheet with a column for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday (no one wanted to meet on Friday!), and had students check the column that represented a good night for them to stay until they took the activity bus home. In late January, the Art and Design Committee stayed after school and decided what text they wanted on the welcome page and how they wanted it arranged. After that, students on Art and Design worked on text for the first three pages linked to the welcome page: one for sixth-grade writing, one for seventh-grade writing, and one for eighth-grade writing. At that point, students knew they had to work on three links each for each of those pages. Everyone discovered that designing a magazine is like peeling the layers from an onion, piece by piece by piece. Three committees met during the first week of February: Art and Design continued to
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develop new pages; Storyboard began drawing and coloring pages for which text and layout had already been decided; Marketing began making posters, writing announcements for the morning news, and coming up with a schedule for visiting other English classes to ask students to submit work to the magazine. In terms of the content of the magazine, each student in the class was required to submit a piece of writing for the magazine, and submissions were also solicited from the rest of the school. All writing submitted was subject to blind review by the Selection Committee. After-school work on the magazine continued in this manner for several months until the magazine was finished. Pat and the students had set a goal of having all of the work on the magazine completed by early May, a month before the end of the school year. They worked regularly and diligently on the project, but, as in many projects, there were a few complications that needed to be dealt with for the project to be successful. Despite the best laid plans, completing this project within a middle-school language-arts curriculum was more difficult than the collaborators had initially imagined. The expanded view of writing they wanted to foster—a focus on planning, production, design, and on technologies themselves—was conceptually difficult and didn’t easily fit the curriculum. Pragmatically, the class had problems with time. Still, the most vexing problems were unanticipated and dealt with finding ways to encourage girls to participate more fully. Although the collaboration between teachers was working, collaboration among the students wasn’t. The girls were disengaged. And, this issue threatened to undermine the entire project, both conceptually (should any teacher do a project that silences girls?) and pragmatically (without the girls, the project would not be completed).
ACCESS: TOYS FOR BOYS One of the surprising things to grow out of homework and classroom discussions were the gender differences in response to technology and the Internet. Almost every suggestion during the brainstorming sessions came from male students. It wasn’t that Pat didn’t call on females; everyone who had a suggestion participated in the discussion. Many of the girls did not seem to have the vocabulary to take part in the discussion, and they did not seem to be interested. Often, their eyes were glazed over. With every suggestion, the girls deferred to the boys, and even the girls with the strongest, most assertive personalities did not fully participate in the brainstorming sessions. The girls whispered and giggled among themselves and never became fully engaged in the discussions. This behavior was not characteristic of this class of strong female students, and Pat was surprised—and somewhat alarmed—at their lack of emotional and intellectual involvement. For the magazine to be a valid project for the entire class, all students needed to be able to participate in some aspect of the production. When Pat conveyed her surprise and alarm to Jeff, he responded by email: Sounds like the project is coming along very well. I’m excited. But you are encountering one crucial problem with technology and gender. I take the reactions of your girls very seriously (I know you do as well), and see this as a serious problem with the project. Some researchers refer to technology as ‘toys for boys,’ and this certainly seems to be what is happening here. You might want to consider delving into what the girls are thinking—why they may (or may not) feel disconnected from the project. I’m not sure the project works if—for whatever reason—it
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separates into “boys’ work and girls’ work.” I want to know if the girls feel the way you seem to think they are feeling and why.
Pat was concerned and began paying additional attention to the lack of involvement on the part of the girls. Pat decided that she would bake cookies and invite the girls to her classroom for lunch, some dessert, and conversation. She hoped that in a confidential and friendly environment (in other words, no boys), the girls would talk. Pat was confident that the girls would be forthcoming because they always had been previously. She was curious, however, to see how their reasons for their apparent distance from this project fit with the increasingly complex literature on the relationships between gender and technology. However, most importantly, she wanted to do more than observe and understand the gender relations in this classroom; she wanted and needed to intervene. The literature on gender and computing itself is complex (and perhaps confusing), a function of the fact that inquiry is located in a variety of disciplines and employs a range of theoretical and empirical methodologies. Some theorists and scholars are quite clear in their assessment that computer technologies are typically situated in domains (like the sciences, engineering, mathematics) that are overwhelmingly male. As Sherry Turkle (1988) wrote, although the computer “has no inherent gender bias” (p. 41), it (and technology in general) is constructed as a male domain. Valerie Frissen (1992) argued that men design and produce technology—what she calls “toys for boys” (p. 31)— creating values underlying technological practices that “are not experienced [by women] as natural and logical expressions of women’s culture ” (p. 32). These and similar conclusions are based on a range of research practices: analyses of the language of technology (e.g., Wilson, 1992); experiences of women in public, online environments (e.g., Collins-Jarvis, 1993; Hawisher & Sullivan, 1998; Takayoshi, 1994); and empirical studies of performance and/or anxiety from disciplines like education, psychology, and engineering (human factors) (e.g., Gilroy & Desari, 1986; LeBold, Zink, Scott, & Salvendy, 1987; Ogozalek, 1989; Robinson–Staveley & Cooper, 1990). All this work contributes to ideas that computing domains are biased in favor of males and that women struggle to perform well, to enjoy their work with computers, and even to penetrate computing domains (in terms of careers in these areas). Yet, not all the work on gender and computing identifies a gender gap. Robin Kay (as cited in Frenkel, 1990), a statistician at the University of Toronto, reviewed 90 papers on issues of gender and computers and argued that the methods used in the studies were generally “slipshod” and the results “murky” due to a proliferation of definitions of terms and concepts and statistical practices that used too few subjects, too many variables, and lumped together subjects of different—and incompatible— groupings (5- and 17-yearolds, for example) (p. 42). Thus, “the most that can be said about gender differences and the three most commonly studied phenomena—attitude, aptitude, and use—is that it depends on what attitude you measure, what skills you assess, and what use is being made of the computer” (p. 42). In later analyses, Ingeborg Janssen Reinen and Tjeerd Plomp (1997), using the international “Computers in Education” study data, argued that the situation in the U.S. is relatively “gender equal” (p. 77). More interestingly, Bernard E. Whitley, Jr. (1997), in his meta-analysis of studies of gender and computing attitudes and behavior, concluded that any gender gap that exists in computer-related attitudes and behavior is “extremely small” (p. 15). More importantly, he argued that such a gap would
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TABLE 1 Girls’ Computer Access and Use (N ⫽ 15) Computer Access Have a computer at home Have Internet access at home Computer Use Use a computer for word processing Use a computer for research (CD-ROM and/or Internet) Use a computer for games Use a computer for communications (e.g., email) Use a computer for Web authoring
12 8 10 11a 7 5 1b
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Three started with this project. Previous to this project.
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exist “only if women were overrepresented among people with debilitating computer attitudes or if the effectiveness of treatment approaches differed for women and men,” and neither is the case (p. 15). In effect, Whitley argued that the meaning of the gender gap that appears in his analysis is ambiguous because it is small and that, like Kay’s analysis, gender might be only one factor that accounts for behavior (see Parasurman & Igbaria, 1990; Vernon-Gerstenfeld, 1989, for studies that show no gender gap or women thriving in technological environments). We highlight the complex and, in some cases, conflicting conclusions about gender and computer technologies because they provide a critical context for our own inquiry. We knew that just because women in one context (e.g., an office or a university classroom) felt distant and disengaged from computer technologies didn’t mean that the middle-school girls in Pat’s classroom felt similarly. Yet, clearly, something was going on in the classroom, and that something was related to gender. But what? Within the context of the magazine project, these girls’ experiences were indeed debilitating. Pat’s first two intervention tactics sought to understand the girls’ feelings about the project. Her first tactic was to ask the girls to write about their previous experience with computer technologies and what they had learned so far in the project that they didn’t know previously. She intended to use the girls’ responses for her own information and insight into continuing the magazine in future years, but the girls’ responses also provide a revealing picture of their technological identities. Table 1 provides a rough outline of their computer access and use. It is difficult to draw strong conclusions from these numbers. Indeed, the numbers are suspect because the girls didn’t respond directly to any of the issues listed in the table—the numbers are merely the result of our reading of their responses. Still, it seems clear to us that these girls had access to sophisticated computer technologies and used them (we suspect that all of the girls actually used the computer to word process because they had to for the class). Although the collaborators have no means for conducting a comparison between these students and others, the girls seemed, as a whole, to have some computer experience. So, why were they so disengaged when the boys were not? And, how could Pat have more successfully intervened? After examining the girls’ responses, Pat’s next tactic was the lunch meeting (her famous cookie rule: if you feed middle-school students, they will come). The discussion during this meeting was interesting and Pat felt that her first instincts were correct: The
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girls had been fairly silent because they felt they just did not have the experience or the vocabulary to contribute to the magazine discussion. They said they felt stupid and “out of it.” One girl wrote in her written response, “I always thought I was pretty good with computers until we got the Internet,” and another wrote, “I have never really become fond of computers. I only find myself on computers when it’s a need.” The girls were less knowledgeable because, in some cases, although they had Internet access at home, they did not use it very often, for a variety of reasons; Fall Creek had not as yet given students Internet access at school because the school was in the process of obtaining parental permission to do so. In the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township, Indianapolis, of which Fall Creek Valley is one of three middle schools, parental permission is required before a student may access the Internet at school. Previous to the writing of the magazine, students had not needed Internet access, and, in addition, student computer labs were not set up to access the Internet. To gain school system and parental permission, teachers requiring student access had to file a description of the project requiring access, and then a specific form had to be signed by each student as well as one of his or her parents. Even though all the students had the technology available to them at school, they had not previously had the Internet access at school (an important issue), and no one at home had taken the time to show some of them how to access the Internet and the information it provided. As mentioned previously, all the students word processed their papers, but the boys in the class also used the computer for many other things: They created Web sites; they played games; they surfed the Net to see what was out there. The girls, however, found games to be time consuming and boring (even though nearly half of them had played computer games). With the exception of email, most of the girls did not use the Internet. If they needed information, they used ENCARTA or other information sources available to them on CD. They were unfamiliar with surfing and browsing. Some parents refused their children Internet access—and this situation was much more prevalent with the girls than the boys—perhaps because parents were trying to protect their daughters from whatever dangers lurked in cyberspace. The first thing that needed to be done, Pat felt, was to help the girls become more knowledgeable. Issues of parental consent could be dealt with later. Pat asked the girls how they wanted to deal with the issue of Internet familiarity, and they suggested that working with a knowledgeable student, under teacher supervision, would be a comfortable way to deal with those things that they did not know. The class makeup by gender was 19 males and 16 females. Previously, Pat had students indicate whether they felt themselves to be “Very knowledgeable about the Internet,” “Somewhat knowledgeable about the Internet,” or “Having little or no knowledge about the Internet.” Not every male student had extensive Internet knowledge, and not every female student had little knowledge. However, the self-report sheet verified again that, as a group, male students were “very” to “somewhat” more knowledgeable than female students. Remedying the situation then became a class task. At this same females-only lunch, Pat asked each student to pair herself with a male student in the class who proclaimed himself to be “very” or “somewhat” knowledgeable. The girls knew which students they could best work with, and Pat allowed them to make their own choices. The girls were comfortable with this decision and excited about learning more. One intriguing—and even humorous effect— of her work with the girls is that the boys in the class were really hurt that Pat had had lunch with the girls and brought them treats. Pat and the girls did not tell
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the boys what the lunch was about, but Pat knew she would have to meet with the boys, too, and get their cooperation to assure the project’s success. Pat met with the boys at lunch several days after she had met with the girls. Again she brought cookies. The purpose of the meeting was to inform the boys about the teaching/learning partnerships that would take place during the next week to increase students’ Internet experience. When Pat told them that they were partnering with a girl who had chosen them for the purpose of instructing someone less experienced in using the Internet, they were very interested and very cooperative. They wanted this magazine to be successful. The first Internet exercise was designed to familiarize those inexperienced students with Internet vocabulary and procedure. It was taught by Frank Giles, the technology expert in the building. He took the students to the only lab partially set up for Internet access and put them through an exercise designed to give them experience manipulating Web sites. He used software that allowed Internet sites to be moved to an Intranet so that they could be accessed much more quickly. The students—in pairs with the leastexperienced person (usually a girl) on the keyboard and the most-experienced person instructing—worked through an Internet activity designed primarily to show them the difference between various Web sites and domains (the difference, for example, between whitehouse.gov and whitehouse.net). Later, they accessed the literary magazines Pat had found previously and took a look at links, content, appearance, and so forth. Some of the most experienced male students were excellent teachers to students— both male and female—who had less experience. The procedure was that the person instructing was forbidden to touch the keyboard. The more-experienced individual had to talk to the person at the keyboard about what to do. Then later, the students changed places. The experienced students were patient and understanding teachers, and those with less experience (mostly girls) seemed to gain confidence as they gained knowledge. Pat was delighted to see many of the girls coming along and buying into the program. The assistant editor, who had said she understood nothing about computers before the project started, began running the meetings after school and talking about links, buttons, text, and decision-making despite the pushiness of many of the boys. When a highly intelligent but overassertive male student tried to take over storyboard tasks and work by himself, one of the more timid girls told him that he had to come and sit with her because this effort was collaborative, and he wasn’t going to make any decisions by himself. All the evidence indicated that the laboratory exercises and partner pairing had achieved the desired results. Those students who had little knowledge of the Internet—most of them girls— had gained more knowledge and, therefore, more confidence. The girls were more assertive when discussing the components of the magazine, and they had much more to say than they had during earlier brainstorming sessions. Pat felt strongly that the interventions were effective. Early in the project, the girls certainly felt that Web publishing was not their domain and that they lacked the aptitude to be successful. However, Pat’s intervention—to sit down with the girls, to ask them to write about their experiences, and to design with the girls a process whereby they could acquire the knowledge, experience, and/or self-confidence they wanted—turned out to be important. The idea for the laboratory exercise came primarily from the girls. Equally important was separating students by gender. The girls were much more forthcoming in a females-only setting than they had been in a gender-mixed classroom. The boys also needed Pat’s attention, however. Without them, producing the magazine would have been
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much more difficult, and they were eager to be included in lunch, discussion, and cookies. In fact, the project would have been damaged had they not been included in some way. Strategies such as this are encouraged by a number of scholars. John Pryor (1995), writing about the sort of interventions characterizing this project, has argued that positive role models and mixed gender and ability groups are important ways to help foster equitable classrooms. Reinen and Plomp (1997) have noted that it is important for girls to see “examples of women working with the computer” (p. 74), and furthermore, that school is an important environment for girls to work with computers, particularly when it comes to their enjoyment of computer-based experiences. And, Mark Brosnan (1998) has been even stronger in connecting curricular opportunities and positive role models for female students. By structuring computer use into the core of the curriculum, by working to engage girls in all aspects of the project, and through the model that Pat provided, many of the girls in this project seemed to thrive by the end of the project. One wrote that she had “learned a bunch of terms that the boys know from 8th grade English class.” And, another wrote that she had “broadened [her] Internet knowledge greatly. [She had] learned about the set-up of home pages and Internet magazines as well as net-related vocabulary. [She also became] familiar with some of the technacalities (sic) involved in an on-line magazine including links, and so forth” Although access problems are deep-rooted, we feel comfortable with the fact that this Web project at least was not just a toy for boys.
CHANGING IDEAS ABOUT CURRICULUM Teaching is exciting as a profession because it is highly creative. Pat found that, despite her nervousness about the magazine project at the beginning of the school year, she may have learned more from students than they learned from her. Writing has always been one of the most significant parts of the curriculum in her classroom. Pat came through the Indiana Writing Project as a teacher– consultant. As a result, Pat believes that writing well is a key to thinking critically and to development of students’ full language potential. Additionally, Pat recognized that computer knowledge was an important part of her classroom: All writing was conducted in one of the computer labs available to students at Fall Creek Valley. However, it was another significant step to integrate writing and technology more fully. Both researchers believed that it was time to extend the ways students wrote with computers— hence the reason and rationale for the online magazine project. Another important benefit of the project was student recognition that writing was not just putting words on pieces of paper or typing on a computer keyboard. Scott Christian (1997) said that “immersion in real language activities is the single most important factor in language development; in real language activities, kids listen, speak, and write in meaningful exchanges, making real choices in terms of how they engage in these activities” (p. 94). The two teachers not only provided real-language activities, but also wanted students to see writing as more than creating linguistic artifacts. Writing involves the activities of planning, brainstorming, researching, designing, discussing, and generating a product. It is both action and artifact. Everyone, students and teachers alike, saw that in the course of this project writing happens all the time. Everything students did in
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the class to plan for, develop, and bring to a conclusion the online magazine was writing in the real world—authentic writing for an authentic audience. The collaborative benefits that came from producing The Bearcat Blend provided advantages as important as anything else that was accomplished. The collaboration involved in this project— between Jeff and Pat, between Pat and her students, among the students themselves—was one of its most rewarding aspects. Pat knew that she could have guided students through the magazine project without Jeff, but not very easily. Without Jeff, she would have had to search her building, her school system, and her resources for the information she needed. No one in this fairly large school system had as yet produced a student online magazine. Having Jeff as a collaborative guide on the side saved months and months of work for Pat and the students in her class. In collaborating with her students, Pat came to know students in a completely different way, and she was also able to foster collaboration among them as they discovered each other’s strengths and weaknesses. University teachers and secondary school teachers should have discussions because such collaboration ultimately benefits all students. If Pat (or any middle-school teacher) prepares students well, they go on to be successful in high school and college. There needs to be ongoing vertical planning in English/language arts and writing so that students achieve necessary knowledge and skills to be successful at all levels. This shared philosophy is what led Pat and Jeff to work together, a fact that the students were aware of and excited about. In engaging in a collaborative dialogue with students, Pat was able to mentor them, allow them to have a voice in her classroom, and share in their success. As “guide on the side,” Pat was able to turn over the project to students and allow them to work without constant intervention. The intervention Pat did make, however, was an important one for the magazine; it reconnected the girls to a project and a type of technologically situated writing they must do to be successful in the future. The students in Pat’s class will be entering an educational and work world where collaboration is not only possible, but desired. The students learned a great deal about the benefits of working together and recognizing each other’s talents and abilities. They gained a genuine appreciation for each other and were very proud of their final product. The Bearcat Blend will continue to be a part of curriculum in Pat’s class each year. Each year, a new group of students will discuss design and content, form committees, and publish their magazine. Each year the results of those discussions will produce a different product because that product will reflect the interests and personalities of the students who produce it. Each year, Jeff will continue to participate, adding his assistance to the project as needed. For Jeff, for Pat, and for the students, The Bearcat Blend represents an exciting and beneficial writing and collaboration experience.
Patricia J. Grabill graduated from Purdue University in 1965 with a BA in English. She received an MA in English from Ball State University in 1968. She is also a teacher– consultant to the Indiana Writing Project at Ball State and currently teaches eighth-grade English/language arts at Fall Creek Valley Middle School in Lawrence Township, Indianapolis.
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Jeffrey T. Grabill is a 1991 graduate of Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and holds a Master’s degree from Kent State University. He received his PhD from Purdue University and is currently an assistant professor at Georgia State University where his areas of specialization are rhetoric, technical and professional writing, research methodology, and literacy theory. He is also Pat’s son and her mentor for this project.
REFERENCES Brosnan, Mark J. (1998). The role of psychological gender in the computer-related attitudes and attainments of primary school children (aged 6 –11). Computers and Education, 30, 203–208. Christian, Scott. (1997). Exchanging lives: Middle school writers on-line. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English. Collins-Jarvis, Lori A. (1993). Gender representation in an electronic city hall: Female adoption of Santa Monica’s PEN system. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 37, 49 – 65. Frenkel, Karen A. (1990). Women and computing. Communications of the ACM, 33, 32– 46. Frissen, Valerie. (1992). Trapped in electronic cages? Gender and new information technologies in the public and private domain: An overview of research. Media, Culture, and Society, 14, 31– 49. Garay, Mary Sue, & Bernhardt, Stephen A. (1998). Expanding literacies: English teaching and the new workplace. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Gilroy, Faith D., & Desai, Harsha B. (1986). Computer anxiety: Sex, race, and age. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 25, 711–719. Haas, Christina. (1996). Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Hawisher, Gail, & Sullivan, Patricia. (1998). Women on the networks: Searching for an e-space of their own. In Susan Jarratt & Lynn Worsham (Eds.), Feminism and composition (pp. 172–197). New York: Modern Language Association Press. LeBold, William K.; Zink, William T.; Scott, Susan E.; & Salvendy, Gavriel. (1987). Programming perceptions and computer literacy of students enrolled in computer related curricula. IEEE Transactions on Education, 30, 201–211. Ogozalek, Virginia. (1989). A comparison of male and female computer science students’ attitudes toward computers. SIGCSE Bulletin, 21, 8 –14. Ong, Walter, J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Routledge. Parasurman, Saroj, & Igbaria, Magrid. (1990). An examination of gender differences in the determinants of computer anxiety and attitudes toward microcomputers among managers. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 32, 327–340. Pryor, John. (1995). Gender issues in groupwork—A case study involving work with computers. British Educational Research Journal, 21, 277–288. Reinen, Ingeborg Janssen, & Plomp, Tjeerd. (1997). Information technology and gender equality: A contradiction in terminis? Computers and Education, 28, 65–78. Robinson-Staveley, Kris, & Cooper, Joel. (1990). Mere presence, gender, and relations to computers: Studying human-computer interaction in the social context. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 26, 168 –183. Selfe, Cynthia. (1998). Technology and literacy: A story about the perils of not paying attention. Keynote address at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Chicago, IL. Sullivan, Patricia. (1998). Technology, education, and workplaces of the future: A parent’s view. In
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Mary Sue Garay & Stephen A. Bernhardt (Eds.), Expanding literacies: English teaching and the new workplace (pp. 81–96). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Takayoshi, Pamela. (1994). Building new networks from the old: Women’s experiences with electronic communications. Computers and Composition, 11, 21–35. Turkle, Sherry. (1988). Conceptual reticence: Why women fear the intimate machine. In Cheris Kramarae (Ed.), Technology and women’s voices: Keeping in touch (pp. 42– 61). New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Vernon-Gerstendfeld, Susan. (1989). Serendipity? Are there gender differences in the adoption of computers? A case study. Sex Roles, 21, 161–172. Whitley, Bernard E. Jr. (1997). Gender differences in computer-related attitudes and behavior: A meta-analysis. Computers in Human Behavior, 13, 1–22. Wilson, Fiona. (1992). Language, technology, gender, and power. Human Relations, 45, 883–904.
Eighth Graders, Gender, and Online Publishing: A Story of Teacher and Student Collaboration PATRICIA J. GRABILL Fall Creek Valley Middle School
JEFFREY T. GRABILL Georgia State University
During the 1997 through 1998 school year, a group of 35 gifted and talented eighth-grade students at Fall Creek Valley Middle School in Lawrence Township, Indianapolis, had the task of creating the school’s first online literary and art magazine. The process of creating such a publication was unique to Fall Creek and a significant step toward incorporating networked writing technologies into a middle-school language-arts curriculum. This article explores issues of access, gender, and collaboration as they relate to this middle-school class and its magazine project. The purpose of the article is to present one way that writing for online publication (a literary magazine World Wide Web site) fits within a language-arts curriculum and presents the ways collaboration between a university teacher, a middle-school teacher, and eighthgrade students can develop new curricular opportunities for students and new collaborative ventures for teachers. collaboration computer literacy gender Internet language arts middle school World Wide Web
Like many teachers, we often discuss students in our classes, course projects, and more distant professional issues. Unlike many teachers who share stories about their work, however, we don’t teach the same students— or even similar students. Our course projects are often quite different, and the professional issues we discuss more often reflect the fact that Pat teaches middle-school English/language arts, and Jeff, Pat’s son, teaches professional writing courses at the university level. Yet for all our differences, we talk about changes that affect our teaching experiences— changes in literacy and changes in technologies. In particular, our conversations have centered on the notion of “writing” itself
Direct all correspondence to: Patricia J. Grabill, Fall Creek Valley Middle School, 9701 E. 63rd Street, Indianapolis, IN 46236. E-mail: ⬍[email protected]⬎.
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or what “counts” as writing, particularly within the framework of K–12 English instruction. We both understand, as do the readers of this journal, that writing cannot be separated from technology (indeed, that writing is itself a technology, a point made differently by Ong, 1982; Haas, 1996, and many others). However, we are concerned about changing literacy demands for middle-school students, specifically the ways computer literacy and more traditionally conceived linguistic literacy are interrelated, and the ways expectations for writing with computers are being raised by both professional organizations (e.g., NCTE) and political bodies (see Selfe, 19981). In this project, our concern was how to adapt a middle-school language-arts curriculum to incorporate new types of literacy in a way that was intellectually and pedagogically sound, and to make sure it was selfconsciously critical of both the technology and our practices as teachers. Incorporating writing with computers for online publication is important for middleschool students. Consider the story Patricia Sullivan (1998) tells about her son Jae: In 2001, my son Jae graduates from high school. Not only will he be part of one of those minibaby-booms of the 1980s, he will graduate from one of the top five high schools in Indiana. More than 90% of his school’s graduating classes attend college, and his class has averaged at or near the top of. . . Indiana’s achievement test. . . continuously since first grade. Yet Jae, a seventh grader, currently does not have any contact with technology other than with table saws and sewing machines and calculators. He knows that his junior-senior high school has two computer classrooms (that are locked or in use by some unnamed people), and that the library has three more computers. But the seventh graders cannot use the library’s computers for their social science projects (or, more importantly, for fun) because someone stole Encarta (an on-line encyclopedia). . . Jae feels this isolation from computers so intensely that he has signed up for a keyboarding class as an eighth grade elective even though he knows every topic to be covered and the computers to be used are so ancient that Jae will be extremely frustrated in that class. (p. 81)
The problems Jae faced in terms of access to and significant interaction with computers for writing are common ones. Although Jae did not attend Fall Creek Valley, both he and students in the class Pat teaches come from relatively affluent backgrounds and attend some of the best schools in Indiana. As many of us are aware, the access problems of students of color, from different class positions, and young women are more significant. But, as Sullivan wrote, the bar for minimal technology literacy skills is too low for all students, and changes are necessary to help prepare them for the types of writing they must do in the workplaces and schools of (today and) tomorrow (see Garay & Bernhardt, 1998). Retelling this story about Jae vividly introduces many problems associated with writing and technology at even the best schools. Ironically, these barriers exist at a time in which governments and local school districts are literally throwing money into computer purchases in response to the demands of parents, employers, and education experts (again, see Selfe, 1998). However, teachers are left with little guidance and few resources to meet these demands, and they must be self-motivated to get the training and expertise they need to best serve students. This article is a narrative about two related problems associated with our experiences in one eighth-grade class: difficulties incorporating World Wide Web-based writing into a middle-school language-arts class and difficulties linked to gender. Our point is to 1 Selfe’s (1998) address has since been published in College Composition and Communication, 50(3), 411– 436.
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highlight partial solutions to these problems. These solutions take the form of two distinct collaborative relationships: one between a middle-school based teacher and a universitybased teacher, and the other between the school teacher and the students in her class. The argument implicit here is that such collaborative practices are viable tactics for meeting the challenges of online writing in middle and secondary school contexts.
STUDENT WRITING FOR THE WEB: ONE SCHOOL’S EXPERIENCE During the 1997 through 1998 school year at Fall Creek Valley Middle School in Lawrence Township, Indianapolis, a group of 35 eighth-grade students embraced the task of creating the school’s first online literary and art magazine, which would be a component of the school’s Web site. Pat had supervised the publishing of numerous print literary magazines of student work and believed that publishing an online magazine would give the students greater experience with technology and a greater audience for their work. In addition, the school also employed a full-time technology expert whose year-long goal was to provide Internet access to the school through a Web site. The collaboration of a middle-school teacher, a technology expert, a university teacher, and the students resulted in the production of the school’s first online publication, The Bearcat Blend (http:// www.indianapolis.in.us/msdlt/fallcreek/mag.html).
Why an Online Magazine? Fall Creek Valley Middle School opened its doors for the first time in August, 1993, complete with fiber optic capabilities that allow the utilization of networked and audio/ visual technologies to the fullest extent. The school has four computer labs, with additional computers accessible to students in the media center and in individual classrooms. Having technology available, however, was not the primary reason for producing a literary magazine. “Because we can” is not sufficient justification, although “because we can” does provide both opportunity and access—something that every school does not possess, but which Fall Creek Valley possesses in abundance. What Pat discovered in beginning her collaboration with the students was that many— but not all—were already very sophisticated, even in eighth grade, in their knowledge of and experience with the Internet. Several students had produced their own Web sites, and some students had produced Web sites for other people as well. The online magazine expanded that knowledge and also introduced technology to those students who did not have a great deal of Internet experience. The magazine also afforded a huge audience to those students whose writing and art were published online. Students were genuinely excited about the prospect of a relative in Florida accessing work produced by middleschool students in Indiana. Pat was excited by the prospect of new audiences for student writing, new opportunities to recognize students as writers, and the knowledge that writing for Internet publication was a reality for students in her class then and into the future.
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Plans Change The actual implementation of the project began with a series of email messages between Jeff and Pat, about two months after the school year began and after Pat had become acquainted with the students in her class. Pat asked Jeff for help with a project timetable, beginning with information about what the first student committees should be. The collaborators developed a project plan and a set of classroom activities to help students analyze online writing and the similarities and differences between online and print publications. They felt that the project might have had more weight if the students could participate in developing a frame for why they were doing an online magazine and how such writing differed from their previous experiences with writing. This frame then became the philosophical ground for the assignment. As all teachers know, however, plans change, and in this case, tactics that worked in a university classroom didn’t transport seamlessly to a middle-school classroom. The project plan for the middle-school students needed to be more detailed yet tighter in scope. There simply isn’t as much time in public schools to speculate, ponder, and reverse course. Given the scope of middle-school language-arts curricula and time constraints, Pat needed pragmatic tactics for incorporating the magazine into the curriculum. She emailed Jeff the following: Be a middle school teacher for a few minutes; I understand and agree with your philosophical response to my questions. I DO intend to get lots of input from the kids, and I intend to have the kids discuss the similarities AND differences between print and on-line publication. What I want from you is just a middle-school-teacher-practical approach—something linear and concretesequential. I want a list of things that have to be accomplished before we can put an on-line series of documents together. Here’s what I picture: A collection of student writing— essay, short story, poetry, and so forth—at each grade level. Therefore, a sixth grade section, a seventh grade section, an eighth grade section, because those are the three grade levels at Fall Creek. Students who are interested in submitting to the magazine will submit a hard copy of their work for consideration by a team of “experts” (my class) who, using criteria they have established, will decide whether or not to include what the student has submitted in our on-line literary magazine. When something has been accepted—perhaps even after being revised by the student who submitted it—the final submission will be saved electronically and then moved onto/into an HTML page that will be a part of the site. Therefore, I guess that Step 1 is to discuss with the kids what they want the magazine to look like and develop a Storyboard. What I want to know—in very practical terms—is what are steps 2, 3, 4, 5, 6⫹? Help! Get me thinking in the right direction, please. I’ve decided that I don’t even HAVE to write the HTML; I already have students who can do that. I just need to be the guide for the program and get the kids moving.
In response to the situation, the teachers developed a more concrete plan: 1. Map the structure, including a sketch of the content for the welcome page and the link structure from there. Pat was to make a big map and put it on the wall, and create it in a media that allowed change but left the process visible (butcher paper, Post-It notes, and string); 2. Story-board the site (page design); 3. Convert selected text to electronic text (using word-processing software); 4. Create the HTML pages (design templates); 5. Meet with authors to introduce to them the possibilities of hypertext and talk to them about how they wanted their texts laid out, the possibilities of art work, and any ideas about links;
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6. Put content together with templates (more design); 7. Revise, revise, revise. The teachers felt that the educational benefit of this work lay in the students’ abilities to see the entire process of production as writing: research as writing, design as writing, mapping as writing, publication as writing (and to see the Web site as a real publication). Both collaborators wanted the project to entail a substantial look at writing and writing technologies. Both knew these kids would write on networks their entire lives. Some already did. The teachers wanted this project to break substantially with a literary/ essayistic tradition in favor of something else. With the plan in place, Pat began the work. She started by having the students take a look at similarities and differences between print and online publications. Students were asked to compare print and online versions of publications (Time, Sports Illustrated, The Indianapolis Star) as a pragmatic way to generate concrete differences (and similarities). In addition, they were asked to use search engines to find online literary journals. Then, once found, students were asked to analyze them to look for similarities and differences between them: What were the links to? Did these journals use images and colors? What kind? How effective were they? What were the content areas? How effective did students think the content areas were? What would they like to model and/or change for their magazine? Because most (95%) of the students in the class had computers and Internet access at home, they were asked to do the following as a homework assignment and then write a short response giving the results of their study: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Do you read a print magazine any differently than you read an online magazine? In what ways—if any—are magazine contents placed differently online? What are the boundaries of a print magazine? Of an online magazine? Estimate what the proportion is of text to nontext material in a print magazine. In an online magazine.
Students’ perceptions of the concepts were amazing. They were quick to note that an online magazine has no boundaries. They noted that online sites looked different and were controlled by links. They also noted that online magazines often included less text and more pictures and ads, and that online articles typically were not split by intervening pages. They noted that online articles were more current and are updated more frequently. In fact, once students began talking about other online publications, they wanted to begin talking about their magazine. They were immediately thinking and talking about how they wanted the magazine to be linked and what they wanted it to look like. Shortly after their homework project, Pat and the students in her class began a class brainstorming session intended to begin discussion of the first steps of putting the magazine together. Pat tacked a sheet of butcher paper to the wall, used Post-Its and string, and the students accomplished the following: ● ● ●
brainstormed content for the welcome page; determined link structure from the welcome page; brainstormed segmentation of the magazine.
Pat encouraged the students to elect an editor and assistant editor because those two people could provide the student leadership necessary for the project. Pat just wanted to
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be a “guide on the side.” Once the editors were chosen, Pat worked with the students to set up committees that would focus on specific aspects of the magazine. Students wrote the following choices and criteria: 1. Creating Templates Committee: Web page template design and writing; 2. Storyboard Committee: Draw out and color pictures of what should be included on each page of our magazine. Will work with the Art and Design team; 3. Marketing Committee: Market the magazine to get lots of submissions; 4. Art and Design Committee: Plan what the magazine should look like. Meet with the Storyboard Committee and present/share ideas; 5. Selection Committee: Decide what pieces will be included in the magazine; 6. Permission to Publish/Rejection Committee: Get writers’ permission to publish their pieces or give them a rejection slip; 7. Editing Committee: Proofread final submissions for grammatical and mechanical errors. Once the committees were set up, Jeff and Pat exchanged email again, reviewing the project and discussing plans for the next phase. Because there was no clear next step, only many simultaneous steps, the collaborators decided to have each committee plan its work and set goals and deadlines, but the committees continued to run into time constraints. The project still faced problems of timely curricular integration. Pat emailed Jeff the following: One problem I’m encountering is that this project is too time-consuming to fit in as curriculum the way I wanted it to— but that’s a learning experience for me. I could do only this magazine project for the next month, and then I wouldn’t be teaching all of the other things my students need to learn to be successful in high school. What’s going to have to happen is that we’re going to have to start spending some time after school—two or three committees at a time—and the kids are excited enough about this project that I don’t think it will be a problem. . . . School ends at 2:45 every day, but there is a student activity bus that leaves at 4:30, which allows kids to stay after and work. Wish me luck. I’ll spend some time in the next week planning and gathering.
From that point, Pat and the students in her class used both limited class time and extensive lunch and after-school time to continue the magazine to its conclusion. Even though Pat considered this project to be a normal part of the curriculum, it had become too large in its scope, especially given the intention to involve each of the 35 students. Meeting that goal alone would have precluded accomplishing anything else, and there were many other curricular issues Pat needed to deal with during the regular classroom time. Once students signed up for the committees they wanted to be a part of, Pat created a spreadsheet with a column for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday (no one wanted to meet on Friday!), and had students check the column that represented a good night for them to stay until they took the activity bus home. In late January, the Art and Design Committee stayed after school and decided what text they wanted on the welcome page and how they wanted it arranged. After that, students on Art and Design worked on text for the first three pages linked to the welcome page: one for sixth-grade writing, one for seventh-grade writing, and one for eighth-grade writing. At that point, students knew they had to work on three links each for each of those pages. Everyone discovered that designing a magazine is like peeling the layers from an onion, piece by piece by piece. Three committees met during the first week of February: Art and Design continued to
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develop new pages; Storyboard began drawing and coloring pages for which text and layout had already been decided; Marketing began making posters, writing announcements for the morning news, and coming up with a schedule for visiting other English classes to ask students to submit work to the magazine. In terms of the content of the magazine, each student in the class was required to submit a piece of writing for the magazine, and submissions were also solicited from the rest of the school. All writing submitted was subject to blind review by the Selection Committee. After-school work on the magazine continued in this manner for several months until the magazine was finished. Pat and the students had set a goal of having all of the work on the magazine completed by early May, a month before the end of the school year. They worked regularly and diligently on the project, but, as in many projects, there were a few complications that needed to be dealt with for the project to be successful. Despite the best laid plans, completing this project within a middle-school language-arts curriculum was more difficult than the collaborators had initially imagined. The expanded view of writing they wanted to foster—a focus on planning, production, design, and on technologies themselves—was conceptually difficult and didn’t easily fit the curriculum. Pragmatically, the class had problems with time. Still, the most vexing problems were unanticipated and dealt with finding ways to encourage girls to participate more fully. Although the collaboration between teachers was working, collaboration among the students wasn’t. The girls were disengaged. And, this issue threatened to undermine the entire project, both conceptually (should any teacher do a project that silences girls?) and pragmatically (without the girls, the project would not be completed).
ACCESS: TOYS FOR BOYS One of the surprising things to grow out of homework and classroom discussions were the gender differences in response to technology and the Internet. Almost every suggestion during the brainstorming sessions came from male students. It wasn’t that Pat didn’t call on females; everyone who had a suggestion participated in the discussion. Many of the girls did not seem to have the vocabulary to take part in the discussion, and they did not seem to be interested. Often, their eyes were glazed over. With every suggestion, the girls deferred to the boys, and even the girls with the strongest, most assertive personalities did not fully participate in the brainstorming sessions. The girls whispered and giggled among themselves and never became fully engaged in the discussions. This behavior was not characteristic of this class of strong female students, and Pat was surprised—and somewhat alarmed—at their lack of emotional and intellectual involvement. For the magazine to be a valid project for the entire class, all students needed to be able to participate in some aspect of the production. When Pat conveyed her surprise and alarm to Jeff, he responded by email: Sounds like the project is coming along very well. I’m excited. But you are encountering one crucial problem with technology and gender. I take the reactions of your girls very seriously (I know you do as well), and see this as a serious problem with the project. Some researchers refer to technology as ‘toys for boys,’ and this certainly seems to be what is happening here. You might want to consider delving into what the girls are thinking—why they may (or may not) feel disconnected from the project. I’m not sure the project works if—for whatever reason—it
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separates into “boys’ work and girls’ work.” I want to know if the girls feel the way you seem to think they are feeling and why.
Pat was concerned and began paying additional attention to the lack of involvement on the part of the girls. Pat decided that she would bake cookies and invite the girls to her classroom for lunch, some dessert, and conversation. She hoped that in a confidential and friendly environment (in other words, no boys), the girls would talk. Pat was confident that the girls would be forthcoming because they always had been previously. She was curious, however, to see how their reasons for their apparent distance from this project fit with the increasingly complex literature on the relationships between gender and technology. However, most importantly, she wanted to do more than observe and understand the gender relations in this classroom; she wanted and needed to intervene. The literature on gender and computing itself is complex (and perhaps confusing), a function of the fact that inquiry is located in a variety of disciplines and employs a range of theoretical and empirical methodologies. Some theorists and scholars are quite clear in their assessment that computer technologies are typically situated in domains (like the sciences, engineering, mathematics) that are overwhelmingly male. As Sherry Turkle (1988) wrote, although the computer “has no inherent gender bias” (p. 41), it (and technology in general) is constructed as a male domain. Valerie Frissen (1992) argued that men design and produce technology—what she calls “toys for boys” (p. 31)— creating values underlying technological practices that “are not experienced [by women] as natural and logical expressions of women’s culture ” (p. 32). These and similar conclusions are based on a range of research practices: analyses of the language of technology (e.g., Wilson, 1992); experiences of women in public, online environments (e.g., Collins-Jarvis, 1993; Hawisher & Sullivan, 1998; Takayoshi, 1994); and empirical studies of performance and/or anxiety from disciplines like education, psychology, and engineering (human factors) (e.g., Gilroy & Desari, 1986; LeBold, Zink, Scott, & Salvendy, 1987; Ogozalek, 1989; Robinson–Staveley & Cooper, 1990). All this work contributes to ideas that computing domains are biased in favor of males and that women struggle to perform well, to enjoy their work with computers, and even to penetrate computing domains (in terms of careers in these areas). Yet, not all the work on gender and computing identifies a gender gap. Robin Kay (as cited in Frenkel, 1990), a statistician at the University of Toronto, reviewed 90 papers on issues of gender and computers and argued that the methods used in the studies were generally “slipshod” and the results “murky” due to a proliferation of definitions of terms and concepts and statistical practices that used too few subjects, too many variables, and lumped together subjects of different—and incompatible— groupings (5- and 17-yearolds, for example) (p. 42). Thus, “the most that can be said about gender differences and the three most commonly studied phenomena—attitude, aptitude, and use—is that it depends on what attitude you measure, what skills you assess, and what use is being made of the computer” (p. 42). In later analyses, Ingeborg Janssen Reinen and Tjeerd Plomp (1997), using the international “Computers in Education” study data, argued that the situation in the U.S. is relatively “gender equal” (p. 77). More interestingly, Bernard E. Whitley, Jr. (1997), in his meta-analysis of studies of gender and computing attitudes and behavior, concluded that any gender gap that exists in computer-related attitudes and behavior is “extremely small” (p. 15). More importantly, he argued that such a gap would
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TABLE 1 Girls’ Computer Access and Use (N ⫽ 15) Computer Access Have a computer at home Have Internet access at home Computer Use Use a computer for word processing Use a computer for research (CD-ROM and/or Internet) Use a computer for games Use a computer for communications (e.g., email) Use a computer for Web authoring
12 8 10 11a 7 5 1b
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Three started with this project. Previous to this project.
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exist “only if women were overrepresented among people with debilitating computer attitudes or if the effectiveness of treatment approaches differed for women and men,” and neither is the case (p. 15). In effect, Whitley argued that the meaning of the gender gap that appears in his analysis is ambiguous because it is small and that, like Kay’s analysis, gender might be only one factor that accounts for behavior (see Parasurman & Igbaria, 1990; Vernon-Gerstenfeld, 1989, for studies that show no gender gap or women thriving in technological environments). We highlight the complex and, in some cases, conflicting conclusions about gender and computer technologies because they provide a critical context for our own inquiry. We knew that just because women in one context (e.g., an office or a university classroom) felt distant and disengaged from computer technologies didn’t mean that the middle-school girls in Pat’s classroom felt similarly. Yet, clearly, something was going on in the classroom, and that something was related to gender. But what? Within the context of the magazine project, these girls’ experiences were indeed debilitating. Pat’s first two intervention tactics sought to understand the girls’ feelings about the project. Her first tactic was to ask the girls to write about their previous experience with computer technologies and what they had learned so far in the project that they didn’t know previously. She intended to use the girls’ responses for her own information and insight into continuing the magazine in future years, but the girls’ responses also provide a revealing picture of their technological identities. Table 1 provides a rough outline of their computer access and use. It is difficult to draw strong conclusions from these numbers. Indeed, the numbers are suspect because the girls didn’t respond directly to any of the issues listed in the table—the numbers are merely the result of our reading of their responses. Still, it seems clear to us that these girls had access to sophisticated computer technologies and used them (we suspect that all of the girls actually used the computer to word process because they had to for the class). Although the collaborators have no means for conducting a comparison between these students and others, the girls seemed, as a whole, to have some computer experience. So, why were they so disengaged when the boys were not? And, how could Pat have more successfully intervened? After examining the girls’ responses, Pat’s next tactic was the lunch meeting (her famous cookie rule: if you feed middle-school students, they will come). The discussion during this meeting was interesting and Pat felt that her first instincts were correct: The
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girls had been fairly silent because they felt they just did not have the experience or the vocabulary to contribute to the magazine discussion. They said they felt stupid and “out of it.” One girl wrote in her written response, “I always thought I was pretty good with computers until we got the Internet,” and another wrote, “I have never really become fond of computers. I only find myself on computers when it’s a need.” The girls were less knowledgeable because, in some cases, although they had Internet access at home, they did not use it very often, for a variety of reasons; Fall Creek had not as yet given students Internet access at school because the school was in the process of obtaining parental permission to do so. In the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township, Indianapolis, of which Fall Creek Valley is one of three middle schools, parental permission is required before a student may access the Internet at school. Previous to the writing of the magazine, students had not needed Internet access, and, in addition, student computer labs were not set up to access the Internet. To gain school system and parental permission, teachers requiring student access had to file a description of the project requiring access, and then a specific form had to be signed by each student as well as one of his or her parents. Even though all the students had the technology available to them at school, they had not previously had the Internet access at school (an important issue), and no one at home had taken the time to show some of them how to access the Internet and the information it provided. As mentioned previously, all the students word processed their papers, but the boys in the class also used the computer for many other things: They created Web sites; they played games; they surfed the Net to see what was out there. The girls, however, found games to be time consuming and boring (even though nearly half of them had played computer games). With the exception of email, most of the girls did not use the Internet. If they needed information, they used ENCARTA or other information sources available to them on CD. They were unfamiliar with surfing and browsing. Some parents refused their children Internet access—and this situation was much more prevalent with the girls than the boys—perhaps because parents were trying to protect their daughters from whatever dangers lurked in cyberspace. The first thing that needed to be done, Pat felt, was to help the girls become more knowledgeable. Issues of parental consent could be dealt with later. Pat asked the girls how they wanted to deal with the issue of Internet familiarity, and they suggested that working with a knowledgeable student, under teacher supervision, would be a comfortable way to deal with those things that they did not know. The class makeup by gender was 19 males and 16 females. Previously, Pat had students indicate whether they felt themselves to be “Very knowledgeable about the Internet,” “Somewhat knowledgeable about the Internet,” or “Having little or no knowledge about the Internet.” Not every male student had extensive Internet knowledge, and not every female student had little knowledge. However, the self-report sheet verified again that, as a group, male students were “very” to “somewhat” more knowledgeable than female students. Remedying the situation then became a class task. At this same females-only lunch, Pat asked each student to pair herself with a male student in the class who proclaimed himself to be “very” or “somewhat” knowledgeable. The girls knew which students they could best work with, and Pat allowed them to make their own choices. The girls were comfortable with this decision and excited about learning more. One intriguing—and even humorous effect— of her work with the girls is that the boys in the class were really hurt that Pat had had lunch with the girls and brought them treats. Pat and the girls did not tell
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the boys what the lunch was about, but Pat knew she would have to meet with the boys, too, and get their cooperation to assure the project’s success. Pat met with the boys at lunch several days after she had met with the girls. Again she brought cookies. The purpose of the meeting was to inform the boys about the teaching/learning partnerships that would take place during the next week to increase students’ Internet experience. When Pat told them that they were partnering with a girl who had chosen them for the purpose of instructing someone less experienced in using the Internet, they were very interested and very cooperative. They wanted this magazine to be successful. The first Internet exercise was designed to familiarize those inexperienced students with Internet vocabulary and procedure. It was taught by Frank Giles, the technology expert in the building. He took the students to the only lab partially set up for Internet access and put them through an exercise designed to give them experience manipulating Web sites. He used software that allowed Internet sites to be moved to an Intranet so that they could be accessed much more quickly. The students—in pairs with the leastexperienced person (usually a girl) on the keyboard and the most-experienced person instructing—worked through an Internet activity designed primarily to show them the difference between various Web sites and domains (the difference, for example, between whitehouse.gov and whitehouse.net). Later, they accessed the literary magazines Pat had found previously and took a look at links, content, appearance, and so forth. Some of the most experienced male students were excellent teachers to students— both male and female—who had less experience. The procedure was that the person instructing was forbidden to touch the keyboard. The more-experienced individual had to talk to the person at the keyboard about what to do. Then later, the students changed places. The experienced students were patient and understanding teachers, and those with less experience (mostly girls) seemed to gain confidence as they gained knowledge. Pat was delighted to see many of the girls coming along and buying into the program. The assistant editor, who had said she understood nothing about computers before the project started, began running the meetings after school and talking about links, buttons, text, and decision-making despite the pushiness of many of the boys. When a highly intelligent but overassertive male student tried to take over storyboard tasks and work by himself, one of the more timid girls told him that he had to come and sit with her because this effort was collaborative, and he wasn’t going to make any decisions by himself. All the evidence indicated that the laboratory exercises and partner pairing had achieved the desired results. Those students who had little knowledge of the Internet—most of them girls— had gained more knowledge and, therefore, more confidence. The girls were more assertive when discussing the components of the magazine, and they had much more to say than they had during earlier brainstorming sessions. Pat felt strongly that the interventions were effective. Early in the project, the girls certainly felt that Web publishing was not their domain and that they lacked the aptitude to be successful. However, Pat’s intervention—to sit down with the girls, to ask them to write about their experiences, and to design with the girls a process whereby they could acquire the knowledge, experience, and/or self-confidence they wanted—turned out to be important. The idea for the laboratory exercise came primarily from the girls. Equally important was separating students by gender. The girls were much more forthcoming in a females-only setting than they had been in a gender-mixed classroom. The boys also needed Pat’s attention, however. Without them, producing the magazine would have been
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much more difficult, and they were eager to be included in lunch, discussion, and cookies. In fact, the project would have been damaged had they not been included in some way. Strategies such as this are encouraged by a number of scholars. John Pryor (1995), writing about the sort of interventions characterizing this project, has argued that positive role models and mixed gender and ability groups are important ways to help foster equitable classrooms. Reinen and Plomp (1997) have noted that it is important for girls to see “examples of women working with the computer” (p. 74), and furthermore, that school is an important environment for girls to work with computers, particularly when it comes to their enjoyment of computer-based experiences. And, Mark Brosnan (1998) has been even stronger in connecting curricular opportunities and positive role models for female students. By structuring computer use into the core of the curriculum, by working to engage girls in all aspects of the project, and through the model that Pat provided, many of the girls in this project seemed to thrive by the end of the project. One wrote that she had “learned a bunch of terms that the boys know from 8th grade English class.” And, another wrote that she had “broadened [her] Internet knowledge greatly. [She had] learned about the set-up of home pages and Internet magazines as well as net-related vocabulary. [She also became] familiar with some of the technacalities (sic) involved in an on-line magazine including links, and so forth” Although access problems are deep-rooted, we feel comfortable with the fact that this Web project at least was not just a toy for boys.
CHANGING IDEAS ABOUT CURRICULUM Teaching is exciting as a profession because it is highly creative. Pat found that, despite her nervousness about the magazine project at the beginning of the school year, she may have learned more from students than they learned from her. Writing has always been one of the most significant parts of the curriculum in her classroom. Pat came through the Indiana Writing Project as a teacher– consultant. As a result, Pat believes that writing well is a key to thinking critically and to development of students’ full language potential. Additionally, Pat recognized that computer knowledge was an important part of her classroom: All writing was conducted in one of the computer labs available to students at Fall Creek Valley. However, it was another significant step to integrate writing and technology more fully. Both researchers believed that it was time to extend the ways students wrote with computers— hence the reason and rationale for the online magazine project. Another important benefit of the project was student recognition that writing was not just putting words on pieces of paper or typing on a computer keyboard. Scott Christian (1997) said that “immersion in real language activities is the single most important factor in language development; in real language activities, kids listen, speak, and write in meaningful exchanges, making real choices in terms of how they engage in these activities” (p. 94). The two teachers not only provided real-language activities, but also wanted students to see writing as more than creating linguistic artifacts. Writing involves the activities of planning, brainstorming, researching, designing, discussing, and generating a product. It is both action and artifact. Everyone, students and teachers alike, saw that in the course of this project writing happens all the time. Everything students did in
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the class to plan for, develop, and bring to a conclusion the online magazine was writing in the real world—authentic writing for an authentic audience. The collaborative benefits that came from producing The Bearcat Blend provided advantages as important as anything else that was accomplished. The collaboration involved in this project— between Jeff and Pat, between Pat and her students, among the students themselves—was one of its most rewarding aspects. Pat knew that she could have guided students through the magazine project without Jeff, but not very easily. Without Jeff, she would have had to search her building, her school system, and her resources for the information she needed. No one in this fairly large school system had as yet produced a student online magazine. Having Jeff as a collaborative guide on the side saved months and months of work for Pat and the students in her class. In collaborating with her students, Pat came to know students in a completely different way, and she was also able to foster collaboration among them as they discovered each other’s strengths and weaknesses. University teachers and secondary school teachers should have discussions because such collaboration ultimately benefits all students. If Pat (or any middle-school teacher) prepares students well, they go on to be successful in high school and college. There needs to be ongoing vertical planning in English/language arts and writing so that students achieve necessary knowledge and skills to be successful at all levels. This shared philosophy is what led Pat and Jeff to work together, a fact that the students were aware of and excited about. In engaging in a collaborative dialogue with students, Pat was able to mentor them, allow them to have a voice in her classroom, and share in their success. As “guide on the side,” Pat was able to turn over the project to students and allow them to work without constant intervention. The intervention Pat did make, however, was an important one for the magazine; it reconnected the girls to a project and a type of technologically situated writing they must do to be successful in the future. The students in Pat’s class will be entering an educational and work world where collaboration is not only possible, but desired. The students learned a great deal about the benefits of working together and recognizing each other’s talents and abilities. They gained a genuine appreciation for each other and were very proud of their final product. The Bearcat Blend will continue to be a part of curriculum in Pat’s class each year. Each year, a new group of students will discuss design and content, form committees, and publish their magazine. Each year the results of those discussions will produce a different product because that product will reflect the interests and personalities of the students who produce it. Each year, Jeff will continue to participate, adding his assistance to the project as needed. For Jeff, for Pat, and for the students, The Bearcat Blend represents an exciting and beneficial writing and collaboration experience.
Patricia J. Grabill graduated from Purdue University in 1965 with a BA in English. She received an MA in English from Ball State University in 1968. She is also a teacher– consultant to the Indiana Writing Project at Ball State and currently teaches eighth-grade English/language arts at Fall Creek Valley Middle School in Lawrence Township, Indianapolis.
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Jeffrey T. Grabill is a 1991 graduate of Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and holds a Master’s degree from Kent State University. He received his PhD from Purdue University and is currently an assistant professor at Georgia State University where his areas of specialization are rhetoric, technical and professional writing, research methodology, and literacy theory. He is also Pat’s son and her mentor for this project.
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