- Email: [email protected]
Technology, pedagogy, and context: A tale of two classrooms
Computers
and Composition
II,
275-282
(1994)
Technology, Pedagogy, and Context: A Tale of Two Classrooms J. YELLOWLEES DOUGLAS Lehman
College,
City University of New York
This article explores the interplay between pedagogy, technology, ond social context through a comparison of two writing courses in two differen settings. Using computers in one classrooms seems to foster tangible changes in students’ attitudes toward their writing; yet students in a conventional, pen-and-paper classroom respond readily to the some pedagogical oppraaches without the aid of computers. Comparisons between student writing and student attitudes toward their work in the classrooms suggest that it is nearly impossible to account for the results without weighing the roles played by pedagogy, technology, and even the ambitions, class, age, and ethnicity of the students involved.
composition teaching
computers
writing
technology
pedagogy writing
social
construction
writing
workshops
Introduce a computer into the classroom and chances are you’re going to see possibilities for teaching writing that may never have occurred to you when your students were all wielding Parker pens. That’s not to say that technology automatically transforms pedagogy, but introducing computers into the classroom does seem to give change a nudge. But what happens if you carry this scenario further? What if the introduction of new technology, followed by a few epiphanies of the pedagogical kind, makes all your assumptions and practices endure a radical sea of change? Would it be possible to carry these revelations back into a classroom dominated by fountain pens and college-ruled notebooks and watch them work as effectively as they did in your computer writing lab? Or do these practices work only within the confines of space bounded by technology? And, if pedagogy altered by technology can work without computers, does this mean that the real force at work is an entity as abstract and ephemeral as an attitude toward students and their writing, and not an artifact as sturdy and apparently immutable as the computer? We can begin looking for answers to these questions by pondering a tale of two classrooms. One was a well-equipped computer writing workshop at New York University (NYU); its Macintoshes were linked together by a server and a local-area network. The other, a bare classroom at Lehman College, City University of New York, was equipped with nothing more than battered chairs and minute desks (as well as the occasional family of squirrels living in the heating ducts under the windows). In the computer writing lab at NYU, each student had access to a computer and all writings within the class were nestled tidily in a folder on the network server’s hard disk. Chairs swiveled and rolled smoothly across the carpeted floor enabling students to move their attention from the monitors to fellow writers’ faces without having to scrape the chairs around as they shifted from Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Jane Yellowlees Douglas.
Writing, Lehman College, 100063.346(ZLCompuServe.com.
City
University
of
New
York,
New
Program in Professional
York
10468.
E-mail:
275
DOUGLAS
276
computer to human and back again. Students brought their “papers” to class on floppy disks, or simply uploaded their work directly to the class folder via the computer. In the other classroom at Lehman College, students moved their chairs into intimate huddles as they pored over one another’s work. Their handwritten papers were often smudgily photocopied because most of the copiers around campus churned out well-nigh unreadable products. Members of class often forgot to bring their papers with them or to bring extra copies for their classmates, and latecomers ended up using my departmental mailbox as the drop-off and collection point for papers. The box became so crammed with rolled, ruled sheets that secretaries and colleagues took to bundling my mail with rubber bands and leaving it on the floor. Physically, the classrooms couldn’t have been more dissimilar; pedagogically, however, they were virtually identical. In the writing courses in both the conventional classroom and the computer lab, students were required to work with their fellow writers by writing extensive comments on rough and final drafts-and by grading their completed pieces. Writers had to grapple with the tricky process of writing for a real audience of real readers with real prejudices and tangible idiosyncrasies. Readers had to hunt for words to describe what seemed liked visceral reactions to peer papers and for a critical assessment that clearly explained as well as justified the grades they assigned. Pedagogy in the pen-and-paper classroom was shaped by my experiences in the computer writing lab, where I had arrived at an approach to teaching writing that changed my understanding of the interrelationship among writers. readers, and texts. I couldn’t fathom how I could possibly return to the pedagogical methods I’d used back in my “BC”-Before Computers-years. Yet, I was far from certain that I could translate the methods that worked so well in the computer lab into conventional classroom practices.
WRITING
“JUST TELL ME HOW TO FIX IT”: AS AN ASYMMETRICAL TRANSACTION
Before I ever thought of using a computer in my writing courses, I seemed to keep running up against the same problem: My students appeared afflicted with selective hearing. Every few weeks, I either scrawled in margins of their papers or stood up and made the same declaration, something like: “I’m not your entire audience-I’m just a representative of it. So don’t try to follow what I say to the letter. Get perspective on your paper before you rewrite it: It’s your paper.” And every week, they gave me the same response, give or take a few choice adverbs and adjectives: “Just tell me what you want” or “What do I need to do to my paper to fix it”. My students. I soon realized, were nothing if not canny and infinitely pragmatic. They knew their papers’ audience consisted of precisely one person-me. I not only acted as judge and jury on each piece of writing they produced, assessing its strengths and weaknesses and assigning grades, I was also the only person to clap eyes on the finished product, the final draft, after its author rolled the last page out of the typewriter or printer platen. As far as my students were concerned, my talk was just a charade, a form of ritual behavior in the same class as parents who insisted on talking about Santa Claus long after the kids had already figured out that Santa was shopping at Macy’s or Sears and using plastic with the family name embossed on it. So, they kept approaching me to clarify exactly what it was I wanted to read in their final drafts, and I kept insisting they treat my remarks as simply one way of responding to their writing. The most difficult aspect of writing, media theorist Walter Ong (1982) notes, is that
A Tale of Two Clossrooms
277
one invariably thrashes out prose in private for comsumption by a real public-the writer must always project imaginatively into the work. The problem with my classroom was that the audience wasn’t a fiction: I was real. The writers in my class knew how I felt about their writing and just about anything else we read, and they could probably arrive at some pretty accurate guesses as to my political affiliations and choice of music, given the opportunity. In their conventional form, writing classrooms are lopsided versions of the aside) is real-life writing scenarios awaiting our students. Writing (correspondence generally a one-to-many form of communication in which the recipient is nearly always unknown. Writing, you might say, is the ultimate cold call without a phone listing or another voice on the end of the line, where you have to say your spiel without benefit of knowing either the addressee’s interests or tone. But the interaction between writer and audience in our classrooms is unnaturally symmetrical: The students write to us, for us. And we write back to them and let them know how their work did or didn’t please us. It is this model of the writing-workshop scenario that provokes students to come forward with their “just-tell-me-how-to-fix-it” queries. By bringing computers into the scenario, we can help introduce writing’s essentially asymmetrical nature into workshops and courses. The root sense of to publish, is, after all, the Latin publicare, meaning “to make public.” Publishing on a local-area network or minicomputer might mean simply making all class writing easily accessible to all students. Surrounded by examples of virtually flawless essays in anthologies or sterling pieces of the literary canon, student writers have little idea of how writing that has not already been canonized or anthologized should look or read. Just how rough around the edges (or at the core) can a rough draft really be? How adroit are the other writers in the class? How much do other writers revise? Making our writing classrooms more closely approximate to their worldly counterparts, however, is seldom this straightforward. After all, most students in conventional writing workshops already enjoy considerable exposure to their peers’ texts. But, usually, students become too bogged down with their own workload or too immersed in their own concerns to take more than a passing interest in the other writing published in the class. Students’ attention to the work of the writers around them is more than a little like the selective (in)attention viewers tend to give, say, to commercial breaks during the Super Bowl, where viewers might screen ads between trips to the kitchen and bathroom, with an eye half-opened for anything that seems unusually well-produced or out of the ordinary. Otherwise, they couldn’t recount the contents of a lvfichelob ad more than 50 seconds after the spot aired. Just as advertising doesn’t necessarily create either an audience or sales, publishing-even on a computer network-doesn’t always equal a readership or a legitimate transaction. If writing is a private act with a public outcome, it is also always part of a transaction, whether real or intended. We write to provoke a response from our audience-to prompt them to tell their acquaintances to buy a book or magazine, to persuade someone to give us a job interview, to seduce readers with inviting scenarios or aspirational products that induce them to fork over hard cash to somebody in sales (which may please the person in marketing that hired the copywriter in the first place). A member of this public who isn’t expected to take part in a transaction or who doesn’t have a role that enables her or him to take action cannot be counted as an audience member per se, which is one reason why writers in my conventional writing classes generally ignored what other writers had to say about their work. Transactions that take place in writing courses involve students tendering up pieces of writing to teachers, who, in turn, pay them back with bits of
278
DOUGLAS
writing on the writing, with an assessment tacked on at the end (of the paper or the course). So, in order for the transaction between audience and writer to approximate its counterpart outside the classroom, all would-be audience members need to carry a more or less equal responsibility for writing about their peers’ work-and for assessing its relative failure or success, according to standards the class articulates as a whole. But to accomplish a scenario like this, you need to ensure that all commentors have access to all writers’ papers and, later, that all comments are assembled and bundled back to their author, who must then weed through the marginalia and end comments; reconcile mutually exclusive bits of advice, conflicting suggestions, and contrary readings; and rewrite the paper before the whole process begins anew in time for the final draft. Add to this some students’ squeamishness at saddling struggling peers with a less than aweinspiring grade and the need to disguise authors’ or commentors’ names and you end up with a task almost more challenging than teaching the class in the first place. As daunting a prospect as this appears for the print classroom, this undertaking nearly dwindles into insignificance once you introduce computers into the scenario. Students can upload papers into a single assignment folder and then download the entire folder onto their own computer or diskette. Once they complete their comments (either in the form of end remarks or comments embedded into the text itself), they can simply upload both paper and commentary back into a folder bearing the writer’s name, titled with a coded version of, perhaps, the commentor’s name. Or, if the class prefers, the authors can replace their names with code whereas the commentors retain their real names. Or both papers and responses can remain entirely “owned” or “unowned.”
TWO CLASSROOMS: WITH AND WITHOUT During the early phases of my teaching in the NYU computer writing lab, I stumbled across the usual discoveries reported by researchers on computers and writing. The uniform appearance of student papers, without the idiosyncratic appearance of handwritten or even typed papers, seemed to invite more fully engaged critical responses from other writers in class. It seemed as if the papers themselves had represented some kind of tangible commodity, and writing less than approving comments on them was a violation of struggling fellow writers’ property. On the other hand. the ephemeral computer text seemed to belong to no one. It had no discernible distinguishing marks; its pages had passed through no one’s fingers: it wasn’t even a physical commodity. Yet the writers in class were evasive and more euphemistic than direct: Many of them admitted privately to me when it came to commenting on another writer’s paper and signing a name at the bottom. So we experimented: On one paper. the authors kept their identities a secret from everyone but me. whereas on another, the commentors developed code names that only two of us could decipher. Without writers names on them, papers seemed to invite the most forthright responses, apparently liberating respondents from the last shreds of decorum that govern students’ treatment of one another’s work. When assessments were due, the grades placed on these unowned papers also better reflected the full spectrum of responses than had assessments of their owned counterparts. Gradually, as the course progressed, writers seemed less interested in what I had to say about their papers: Some had discovered other writers in class who seemed better barometers of possible reactions to their work: others were simply more curious about what everyone had to say as a collective audience. When the course had finished and final grades were posted. the
A Tale
of Two Classrooms
279
writing lab was still overflowing with students flicking through the written responsesnot to their own papers, which they had already seen before the end of the term, but to peers’ papers-comparing their reactions to specific papers with those of classmates. When I began teaching writing courses in a conventional classroom at Lehman College, I was already prepared for the process of swapping papers and comments to be cumbersome, confusing, and messy-which it was. What I couldn’t figure out, however, was how to make an end run around the whole problem of ownership, identity, and response without relying on a computer network. Student papers sometimes trickled into class or my mailbox when their owners were absent; occasionally, they arrived in their commentors’ hands after writer and commentor had arranged to meet up at the nearest photocopier. There was no central repository for papers or comments, and plenty of both went astray, making the task of concealing identities or removing names well-nigh impossible. So, we simply went ahead with the first round of comments and assessments with both writers and cornmentors affixing their names to their words. When I asked them to privately note their feelings about the whole arrangement in a brief piece of writing addressed to me, only one student had a negative reaction-and he expressed his gut-level feelings by talking to the entire class. The variety of responses to his paper intrigued him he said, directing his words to everyone around him. He was particularly amused by his paper receiving as many raves and As as it had Cs. That was all right. But he wasn’t happy with the criteria one particular reader had applied to him. He claimed that this reader’s definitions of “good” writing were far more narrowly drawn than those the class had already agreed upon during an earlier session. The writer and his respondent exchanged words more or less amicably-a direct confrontation that would have been impossible had any identities been concealed. Thinking this might be a good time to poll the class about possibly removing writers’ or commentors’ names from their work, I asked the class to vote on the options. Everyone voted to leave things precisely as they were. If I had worried that this strategy might incline students toward leniency in grading their peers’ papers-I discovered as the semester went on-I’d been wasting my time: Members of the class reserved higher grades the way they did out-and-out adulation in their comments, giving both to only a handful of papers during the entire course. “The grades aren’t that important,” one student told me, “compared with how my paper went over.” Another insisted that we should all approach one another’s work far more critically than we would any piece of published writing: “Those writers are already professionals-it doesn’t matter if we cut them some slack or give them the benefit of the doubt,” she said, “but we need to learn. It’s better for us in the end to be more critical with one another-we’ll end up better writers.” At the conclusion of the course, one student observed: Having others point out what could be better or what was good about a piece has shown me how to re-evaluate my own writing. Also, reading other people’s work has helped me to be more critical with my own writing. It was interesting to see the diversity of grades that are assigned to the same paper, It is clear that, even with clear-cut instructions, personal perception and subjectivity will always influence a reader. From the earliest assessments, most members of class had discovered just how broad a spectrum of responses even the best of papers could evoke, which may have accounted for the relative ease with which they handled doling out what were often highly critical responses accompanied by dire grades. Yet, nearly every paper submitted in both rough and final draft stages was handwritten, which under my earlier set of assumptions should
DOUGLAS
280
have made the papers seem like sacrosanct personal property, the sort of ground on which a respondent should trespass only with great delicacy and a light touch. Further respondents and writers confronted each other nose to nose when the time came to swap papers and assessments, with respondents collecting papers from authors and handing their comments back again. All the conditions that had appeared to foster the changes that took place in the computer writing lab were conspicuous in their absence in this conventional writing course. According to my earlier set of assumptions, the Lehman writing students should have handed out lenient grades and evasive, euphemistic responses. Their responses, instead, were more comprehensive, direct, and forthright than their NYU counterparts in the computer lab-and the Lehman writers assessed and received with unruffled equanimity grades that would have provoked an outcry in any other context. So where does this leave us‘? Plainly the technology was responsible, at least in the early stages, for providing me with an apparatus that foregrounded for students the importance of writing for an audience. Yet, if the technology were largely responsible for the change in writers’ attitudes, then, strictly speaking, the Lehman writers should have acted the way writers in my earlier just-tell-me-how-to-fix-it courses had. And, if the pedagogy was the source of the changes in critical attitudes in both courses, why did writers in the computerless classroom-who, with their owned papers and responses had more potent incentives to behave less critically-assume more forthrightly critical stances toward writing in class’? Is there any way of accounting for these equally unexpected similarities-and differences-between the two classrooms?
INSIDE
THE SOCIAL CONTEXT: AND OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM
Perhaps we should consider the context surrounding the writing that took place in these two disparate classrooms. The NYU writers, as I learned during the semester, came mostly from middle-class backgrounds and intended to pursue graduate or professional degrees after completing the requirements for baccalaureate degrees. In contrast, the majority of Lehman writers were mature students from blue-collar backgrounds, intent on equipping themselves for grappling with demands of the job market immediately after graduation-including those who intended to complete higher degrees. At NYU, firstsemester freshmen writers understood that a surplus of B grades on even a freshmen transcript could ultimately hinder plans to secure a coveted MBA, MD, or JD degree a few years down the pike by lowering overall grade point averages and, thus, making students less attractive candidates at admissions time. The Lehman writers. as many told me during the course, were not terribly concerned with grades but were concerned with mastering skills that could help them secure jobs in the precarious world outside the classroom. By handing someone at Lehman a D grade and a list of quite stringent critical comments, you could possibly be doing them a favor-as more than one student pointed out to other class members. At NYU, students saw giving out these same goods as tantamount to tarnishing their peers’ immediate and future prospects. This could account for the higher grades NYU writers awarded classmates; at the same time, however, the admissions standards at NYU may also have brought a collection of unusually adept writers into my computers and writing workshop. It is quite reasonable to assume that NYU writers awarded consistently higher grades and more praise to their classmates
A Tale
of
Two Classrooms
281
because they were simply better writers: As any teacher of writing knows, factors like these are nearly impossible to quantify. Nevertheless, my own subjective and highly idiosyncratic recollection of the two groups of students plays somewhat differently: The most gifted writers in both settings were roughly equals, as were the least fluent writers. Yet, the Lehman writers consistently awarded the best writers lower grades than did their counterparts at NYU-why? Here, too, there remain still more factors to weigh. Most of the NYU writers were white, 1% to 22-year-old students who lived on campus; many knew one another outside class and belonged to the same social groups or clubs, which could equal a reluctance to alienate peers with forthright, critical comments. As a commuter school, Lehman offered students few opportunities to socialize outside the classroom, although the smaller college meant that members of class generally recognized peers from other classrooms during previous semesters. Moreover, because most of the Lehman writers were mature minority students-with many the heads of single-parent households-the impact of grades on their social standing in groups outside class was virtually negligible. Perhaps the Lehman writers may even have approached the entire task of critical reading and assessment with greater seriousness than their NYU counterparts as a result of differences between white and minority perceptions of the whole raison d’etre for higher education. In a recent survey that examined the different priorities white and minority high-school students used to help them select which college to attend, White students chose “attractive campus” and “quality of social life” as prime motivators behind their choices. Minority students, however, selected “quality of major,” “ preparation for graduate and professional,” “ qualify of advising/counseling,” and “challenge” as the chief factors influencing their decisions (Elfin, 1994, p. 8).’ Aware of the often fierce competition awaiting them outside the classroom, the Lehman writers may simply have created a different structure of priorities for performing in the classroom-one that placed social groups, peer pressure, and the status attached to grades considerably further down the list than did their opposite numbers at NYU. Where does all this leave us? In the middle of a densely woven web that inextricably binds together the social, technological, and pedagogical-exactly where we have always been. The role played by the pedagogical and social contexts in both classrooms is far from extraordinary; it was simply more visible than it might have seemed in a classroom where no experimentation or research was taking place. Yet, with only rare exceptions (see Bader & Nyce, 1993, 1994), little research into the impact of technology on education has focused on the interplay among computer, pedagogy, and social context. Yet, as we have seen from the similarities and differences in the behavior of writers in both classrooms, neither technology nor pedagogy alone can account for the nature of the transactions that took place in two dramatically different settings. Without taking the interrelationships between these other factors into account, our research findings can end up oversimplifying or misleading us with their conclusions, or even result in our using new and potentially enabling technologies without headway in the same, unchanging struggles.
‘Conducted by a consulting firm specializing juniors and seniors between 1989 and 1994.
in higher education,
the survey interviewed
10,280 high-school
282
DOUGLAS
J. Yellowlees Dough is director of the Program in Professional Writing at Lehman College, City University of New York and can be contacted at jdouglas @interport.net.
REFERENCES Bader. G..
& Nyce. J. (1993).
When freedom of choice I’dila: Ideology and action in a secondary school
hypermedia project. NAPA Rullrtm. Bader. G..
& Nyce J. (1994).
Elrwnth
fnternutionul
12. 70-71. works. In Provx4ittg.s of /he Educatiott (pp. 2-3). Edinburgh, United kingdom:
Seduced by common senbe: Why hypermedia
Cor@wtcc~ OHYk/mdo~~~ cd
CEP Consultants. Elfin. M. (1994). Student priorities in picking a college. In M. Elfin (Ed. ). Americu’.~ hr.tr co/lrp.s. (pp. 2-11). Washington. DC: US News & World Report. Ong. W.J. (1982).
Ordig and litetyy: The t~,c,hriologi-irrKof the uwd. New
York: Met when.
The ratings
and Composition
II,
275-282
(1994)
Technology, Pedagogy, and Context: A Tale of Two Classrooms J. YELLOWLEES DOUGLAS Lehman
College,
City University of New York
This article explores the interplay between pedagogy, technology, ond social context through a comparison of two writing courses in two differen settings. Using computers in one classrooms seems to foster tangible changes in students’ attitudes toward their writing; yet students in a conventional, pen-and-paper classroom respond readily to the some pedagogical oppraaches without the aid of computers. Comparisons between student writing and student attitudes toward their work in the classrooms suggest that it is nearly impossible to account for the results without weighing the roles played by pedagogy, technology, and even the ambitions, class, age, and ethnicity of the students involved.
composition teaching
computers
writing
technology
pedagogy writing
social
construction
writing
workshops
Introduce a computer into the classroom and chances are you’re going to see possibilities for teaching writing that may never have occurred to you when your students were all wielding Parker pens. That’s not to say that technology automatically transforms pedagogy, but introducing computers into the classroom does seem to give change a nudge. But what happens if you carry this scenario further? What if the introduction of new technology, followed by a few epiphanies of the pedagogical kind, makes all your assumptions and practices endure a radical sea of change? Would it be possible to carry these revelations back into a classroom dominated by fountain pens and college-ruled notebooks and watch them work as effectively as they did in your computer writing lab? Or do these practices work only within the confines of space bounded by technology? And, if pedagogy altered by technology can work without computers, does this mean that the real force at work is an entity as abstract and ephemeral as an attitude toward students and their writing, and not an artifact as sturdy and apparently immutable as the computer? We can begin looking for answers to these questions by pondering a tale of two classrooms. One was a well-equipped computer writing workshop at New York University (NYU); its Macintoshes were linked together by a server and a local-area network. The other, a bare classroom at Lehman College, City University of New York, was equipped with nothing more than battered chairs and minute desks (as well as the occasional family of squirrels living in the heating ducts under the windows). In the computer writing lab at NYU, each student had access to a computer and all writings within the class were nestled tidily in a folder on the network server’s hard disk. Chairs swiveled and rolled smoothly across the carpeted floor enabling students to move their attention from the monitors to fellow writers’ faces without having to scrape the chairs around as they shifted from Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Jane Yellowlees Douglas.
Writing, Lehman College, 100063.346(ZLCompuServe.com.
City
University
of
New
York,
New
Program in Professional
York
10468.
E-mail:
275
DOUGLAS
276
computer to human and back again. Students brought their “papers” to class on floppy disks, or simply uploaded their work directly to the class folder via the computer. In the other classroom at Lehman College, students moved their chairs into intimate huddles as they pored over one another’s work. Their handwritten papers were often smudgily photocopied because most of the copiers around campus churned out well-nigh unreadable products. Members of class often forgot to bring their papers with them or to bring extra copies for their classmates, and latecomers ended up using my departmental mailbox as the drop-off and collection point for papers. The box became so crammed with rolled, ruled sheets that secretaries and colleagues took to bundling my mail with rubber bands and leaving it on the floor. Physically, the classrooms couldn’t have been more dissimilar; pedagogically, however, they were virtually identical. In the writing courses in both the conventional classroom and the computer lab, students were required to work with their fellow writers by writing extensive comments on rough and final drafts-and by grading their completed pieces. Writers had to grapple with the tricky process of writing for a real audience of real readers with real prejudices and tangible idiosyncrasies. Readers had to hunt for words to describe what seemed liked visceral reactions to peer papers and for a critical assessment that clearly explained as well as justified the grades they assigned. Pedagogy in the pen-and-paper classroom was shaped by my experiences in the computer writing lab, where I had arrived at an approach to teaching writing that changed my understanding of the interrelationship among writers. readers, and texts. I couldn’t fathom how I could possibly return to the pedagogical methods I’d used back in my “BC”-Before Computers-years. Yet, I was far from certain that I could translate the methods that worked so well in the computer lab into conventional classroom practices.
WRITING
“JUST TELL ME HOW TO FIX IT”: AS AN ASYMMETRICAL TRANSACTION
Before I ever thought of using a computer in my writing courses, I seemed to keep running up against the same problem: My students appeared afflicted with selective hearing. Every few weeks, I either scrawled in margins of their papers or stood up and made the same declaration, something like: “I’m not your entire audience-I’m just a representative of it. So don’t try to follow what I say to the letter. Get perspective on your paper before you rewrite it: It’s your paper.” And every week, they gave me the same response, give or take a few choice adverbs and adjectives: “Just tell me what you want” or “What do I need to do to my paper to fix it”. My students. I soon realized, were nothing if not canny and infinitely pragmatic. They knew their papers’ audience consisted of precisely one person-me. I not only acted as judge and jury on each piece of writing they produced, assessing its strengths and weaknesses and assigning grades, I was also the only person to clap eyes on the finished product, the final draft, after its author rolled the last page out of the typewriter or printer platen. As far as my students were concerned, my talk was just a charade, a form of ritual behavior in the same class as parents who insisted on talking about Santa Claus long after the kids had already figured out that Santa was shopping at Macy’s or Sears and using plastic with the family name embossed on it. So, they kept approaching me to clarify exactly what it was I wanted to read in their final drafts, and I kept insisting they treat my remarks as simply one way of responding to their writing. The most difficult aspect of writing, media theorist Walter Ong (1982) notes, is that
A Tale of Two Clossrooms
277
one invariably thrashes out prose in private for comsumption by a real public-the writer must always project imaginatively into the work. The problem with my classroom was that the audience wasn’t a fiction: I was real. The writers in my class knew how I felt about their writing and just about anything else we read, and they could probably arrive at some pretty accurate guesses as to my political affiliations and choice of music, given the opportunity. In their conventional form, writing classrooms are lopsided versions of the aside) is real-life writing scenarios awaiting our students. Writing (correspondence generally a one-to-many form of communication in which the recipient is nearly always unknown. Writing, you might say, is the ultimate cold call without a phone listing or another voice on the end of the line, where you have to say your spiel without benefit of knowing either the addressee’s interests or tone. But the interaction between writer and audience in our classrooms is unnaturally symmetrical: The students write to us, for us. And we write back to them and let them know how their work did or didn’t please us. It is this model of the writing-workshop scenario that provokes students to come forward with their “just-tell-me-how-to-fix-it” queries. By bringing computers into the scenario, we can help introduce writing’s essentially asymmetrical nature into workshops and courses. The root sense of to publish, is, after all, the Latin publicare, meaning “to make public.” Publishing on a local-area network or minicomputer might mean simply making all class writing easily accessible to all students. Surrounded by examples of virtually flawless essays in anthologies or sterling pieces of the literary canon, student writers have little idea of how writing that has not already been canonized or anthologized should look or read. Just how rough around the edges (or at the core) can a rough draft really be? How adroit are the other writers in the class? How much do other writers revise? Making our writing classrooms more closely approximate to their worldly counterparts, however, is seldom this straightforward. After all, most students in conventional writing workshops already enjoy considerable exposure to their peers’ texts. But, usually, students become too bogged down with their own workload or too immersed in their own concerns to take more than a passing interest in the other writing published in the class. Students’ attention to the work of the writers around them is more than a little like the selective (in)attention viewers tend to give, say, to commercial breaks during the Super Bowl, where viewers might screen ads between trips to the kitchen and bathroom, with an eye half-opened for anything that seems unusually well-produced or out of the ordinary. Otherwise, they couldn’t recount the contents of a lvfichelob ad more than 50 seconds after the spot aired. Just as advertising doesn’t necessarily create either an audience or sales, publishing-even on a computer network-doesn’t always equal a readership or a legitimate transaction. If writing is a private act with a public outcome, it is also always part of a transaction, whether real or intended. We write to provoke a response from our audience-to prompt them to tell their acquaintances to buy a book or magazine, to persuade someone to give us a job interview, to seduce readers with inviting scenarios or aspirational products that induce them to fork over hard cash to somebody in sales (which may please the person in marketing that hired the copywriter in the first place). A member of this public who isn’t expected to take part in a transaction or who doesn’t have a role that enables her or him to take action cannot be counted as an audience member per se, which is one reason why writers in my conventional writing classes generally ignored what other writers had to say about their work. Transactions that take place in writing courses involve students tendering up pieces of writing to teachers, who, in turn, pay them back with bits of
278
DOUGLAS
writing on the writing, with an assessment tacked on at the end (of the paper or the course). So, in order for the transaction between audience and writer to approximate its counterpart outside the classroom, all would-be audience members need to carry a more or less equal responsibility for writing about their peers’ work-and for assessing its relative failure or success, according to standards the class articulates as a whole. But to accomplish a scenario like this, you need to ensure that all commentors have access to all writers’ papers and, later, that all comments are assembled and bundled back to their author, who must then weed through the marginalia and end comments; reconcile mutually exclusive bits of advice, conflicting suggestions, and contrary readings; and rewrite the paper before the whole process begins anew in time for the final draft. Add to this some students’ squeamishness at saddling struggling peers with a less than aweinspiring grade and the need to disguise authors’ or commentors’ names and you end up with a task almost more challenging than teaching the class in the first place. As daunting a prospect as this appears for the print classroom, this undertaking nearly dwindles into insignificance once you introduce computers into the scenario. Students can upload papers into a single assignment folder and then download the entire folder onto their own computer or diskette. Once they complete their comments (either in the form of end remarks or comments embedded into the text itself), they can simply upload both paper and commentary back into a folder bearing the writer’s name, titled with a coded version of, perhaps, the commentor’s name. Or, if the class prefers, the authors can replace their names with code whereas the commentors retain their real names. Or both papers and responses can remain entirely “owned” or “unowned.”
TWO CLASSROOMS: WITH AND WITHOUT During the early phases of my teaching in the NYU computer writing lab, I stumbled across the usual discoveries reported by researchers on computers and writing. The uniform appearance of student papers, without the idiosyncratic appearance of handwritten or even typed papers, seemed to invite more fully engaged critical responses from other writers in class. It seemed as if the papers themselves had represented some kind of tangible commodity, and writing less than approving comments on them was a violation of struggling fellow writers’ property. On the other hand. the ephemeral computer text seemed to belong to no one. It had no discernible distinguishing marks; its pages had passed through no one’s fingers: it wasn’t even a physical commodity. Yet the writers in class were evasive and more euphemistic than direct: Many of them admitted privately to me when it came to commenting on another writer’s paper and signing a name at the bottom. So we experimented: On one paper. the authors kept their identities a secret from everyone but me. whereas on another, the commentors developed code names that only two of us could decipher. Without writers names on them, papers seemed to invite the most forthright responses, apparently liberating respondents from the last shreds of decorum that govern students’ treatment of one another’s work. When assessments were due, the grades placed on these unowned papers also better reflected the full spectrum of responses than had assessments of their owned counterparts. Gradually, as the course progressed, writers seemed less interested in what I had to say about their papers: Some had discovered other writers in class who seemed better barometers of possible reactions to their work: others were simply more curious about what everyone had to say as a collective audience. When the course had finished and final grades were posted. the
A Tale
of Two Classrooms
279
writing lab was still overflowing with students flicking through the written responsesnot to their own papers, which they had already seen before the end of the term, but to peers’ papers-comparing their reactions to specific papers with those of classmates. When I began teaching writing courses in a conventional classroom at Lehman College, I was already prepared for the process of swapping papers and comments to be cumbersome, confusing, and messy-which it was. What I couldn’t figure out, however, was how to make an end run around the whole problem of ownership, identity, and response without relying on a computer network. Student papers sometimes trickled into class or my mailbox when their owners were absent; occasionally, they arrived in their commentors’ hands after writer and commentor had arranged to meet up at the nearest photocopier. There was no central repository for papers or comments, and plenty of both went astray, making the task of concealing identities or removing names well-nigh impossible. So, we simply went ahead with the first round of comments and assessments with both writers and cornmentors affixing their names to their words. When I asked them to privately note their feelings about the whole arrangement in a brief piece of writing addressed to me, only one student had a negative reaction-and he expressed his gut-level feelings by talking to the entire class. The variety of responses to his paper intrigued him he said, directing his words to everyone around him. He was particularly amused by his paper receiving as many raves and As as it had Cs. That was all right. But he wasn’t happy with the criteria one particular reader had applied to him. He claimed that this reader’s definitions of “good” writing were far more narrowly drawn than those the class had already agreed upon during an earlier session. The writer and his respondent exchanged words more or less amicably-a direct confrontation that would have been impossible had any identities been concealed. Thinking this might be a good time to poll the class about possibly removing writers’ or commentors’ names from their work, I asked the class to vote on the options. Everyone voted to leave things precisely as they were. If I had worried that this strategy might incline students toward leniency in grading their peers’ papers-I discovered as the semester went on-I’d been wasting my time: Members of the class reserved higher grades the way they did out-and-out adulation in their comments, giving both to only a handful of papers during the entire course. “The grades aren’t that important,” one student told me, “compared with how my paper went over.” Another insisted that we should all approach one another’s work far more critically than we would any piece of published writing: “Those writers are already professionals-it doesn’t matter if we cut them some slack or give them the benefit of the doubt,” she said, “but we need to learn. It’s better for us in the end to be more critical with one another-we’ll end up better writers.” At the conclusion of the course, one student observed: Having others point out what could be better or what was good about a piece has shown me how to re-evaluate my own writing. Also, reading other people’s work has helped me to be more critical with my own writing. It was interesting to see the diversity of grades that are assigned to the same paper, It is clear that, even with clear-cut instructions, personal perception and subjectivity will always influence a reader. From the earliest assessments, most members of class had discovered just how broad a spectrum of responses even the best of papers could evoke, which may have accounted for the relative ease with which they handled doling out what were often highly critical responses accompanied by dire grades. Yet, nearly every paper submitted in both rough and final draft stages was handwritten, which under my earlier set of assumptions should
DOUGLAS
280
have made the papers seem like sacrosanct personal property, the sort of ground on which a respondent should trespass only with great delicacy and a light touch. Further respondents and writers confronted each other nose to nose when the time came to swap papers and assessments, with respondents collecting papers from authors and handing their comments back again. All the conditions that had appeared to foster the changes that took place in the computer writing lab were conspicuous in their absence in this conventional writing course. According to my earlier set of assumptions, the Lehman writing students should have handed out lenient grades and evasive, euphemistic responses. Their responses, instead, were more comprehensive, direct, and forthright than their NYU counterparts in the computer lab-and the Lehman writers assessed and received with unruffled equanimity grades that would have provoked an outcry in any other context. So where does this leave us‘? Plainly the technology was responsible, at least in the early stages, for providing me with an apparatus that foregrounded for students the importance of writing for an audience. Yet, if the technology were largely responsible for the change in writers’ attitudes, then, strictly speaking, the Lehman writers should have acted the way writers in my earlier just-tell-me-how-to-fix-it courses had. And, if the pedagogy was the source of the changes in critical attitudes in both courses, why did writers in the computerless classroom-who, with their owned papers and responses had more potent incentives to behave less critically-assume more forthrightly critical stances toward writing in class’? Is there any way of accounting for these equally unexpected similarities-and differences-between the two classrooms?
INSIDE
THE SOCIAL CONTEXT: AND OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM
Perhaps we should consider the context surrounding the writing that took place in these two disparate classrooms. The NYU writers, as I learned during the semester, came mostly from middle-class backgrounds and intended to pursue graduate or professional degrees after completing the requirements for baccalaureate degrees. In contrast, the majority of Lehman writers were mature students from blue-collar backgrounds, intent on equipping themselves for grappling with demands of the job market immediately after graduation-including those who intended to complete higher degrees. At NYU, firstsemester freshmen writers understood that a surplus of B grades on even a freshmen transcript could ultimately hinder plans to secure a coveted MBA, MD, or JD degree a few years down the pike by lowering overall grade point averages and, thus, making students less attractive candidates at admissions time. The Lehman writers. as many told me during the course, were not terribly concerned with grades but were concerned with mastering skills that could help them secure jobs in the precarious world outside the classroom. By handing someone at Lehman a D grade and a list of quite stringent critical comments, you could possibly be doing them a favor-as more than one student pointed out to other class members. At NYU, students saw giving out these same goods as tantamount to tarnishing their peers’ immediate and future prospects. This could account for the higher grades NYU writers awarded classmates; at the same time, however, the admissions standards at NYU may also have brought a collection of unusually adept writers into my computers and writing workshop. It is quite reasonable to assume that NYU writers awarded consistently higher grades and more praise to their classmates
A Tale
of
Two Classrooms
281
because they were simply better writers: As any teacher of writing knows, factors like these are nearly impossible to quantify. Nevertheless, my own subjective and highly idiosyncratic recollection of the two groups of students plays somewhat differently: The most gifted writers in both settings were roughly equals, as were the least fluent writers. Yet, the Lehman writers consistently awarded the best writers lower grades than did their counterparts at NYU-why? Here, too, there remain still more factors to weigh. Most of the NYU writers were white, 1% to 22-year-old students who lived on campus; many knew one another outside class and belonged to the same social groups or clubs, which could equal a reluctance to alienate peers with forthright, critical comments. As a commuter school, Lehman offered students few opportunities to socialize outside the classroom, although the smaller college meant that members of class generally recognized peers from other classrooms during previous semesters. Moreover, because most of the Lehman writers were mature minority students-with many the heads of single-parent households-the impact of grades on their social standing in groups outside class was virtually negligible. Perhaps the Lehman writers may even have approached the entire task of critical reading and assessment with greater seriousness than their NYU counterparts as a result of differences between white and minority perceptions of the whole raison d’etre for higher education. In a recent survey that examined the different priorities white and minority high-school students used to help them select which college to attend, White students chose “attractive campus” and “quality of social life” as prime motivators behind their choices. Minority students, however, selected “quality of major,” “ preparation for graduate and professional,” “ qualify of advising/counseling,” and “challenge” as the chief factors influencing their decisions (Elfin, 1994, p. 8).’ Aware of the often fierce competition awaiting them outside the classroom, the Lehman writers may simply have created a different structure of priorities for performing in the classroom-one that placed social groups, peer pressure, and the status attached to grades considerably further down the list than did their opposite numbers at NYU. Where does all this leave us? In the middle of a densely woven web that inextricably binds together the social, technological, and pedagogical-exactly where we have always been. The role played by the pedagogical and social contexts in both classrooms is far from extraordinary; it was simply more visible than it might have seemed in a classroom where no experimentation or research was taking place. Yet, with only rare exceptions (see Bader & Nyce, 1993, 1994), little research into the impact of technology on education has focused on the interplay among computer, pedagogy, and social context. Yet, as we have seen from the similarities and differences in the behavior of writers in both classrooms, neither technology nor pedagogy alone can account for the nature of the transactions that took place in two dramatically different settings. Without taking the interrelationships between these other factors into account, our research findings can end up oversimplifying or misleading us with their conclusions, or even result in our using new and potentially enabling technologies without headway in the same, unchanging struggles.
‘Conducted by a consulting firm specializing juniors and seniors between 1989 and 1994.
in higher education,
the survey interviewed
10,280 high-school
282
DOUGLAS
J. Yellowlees Dough is director of the Program in Professional Writing at Lehman College, City University of New York and can be contacted at jdouglas @interport.net.
REFERENCES Bader. G..
& Nyce. J. (1993).
When freedom of choice I’dila: Ideology and action in a secondary school
hypermedia project. NAPA Rullrtm. Bader. G..
& Nyce J. (1994).
Elrwnth
fnternutionul
12. 70-71. works. In Provx4ittg.s of /he Educatiott (pp. 2-3). Edinburgh, United kingdom:
Seduced by common senbe: Why hypermedia
Cor@wtcc~ OHYk/mdo~~~ cd
CEP Consultants. Elfin. M. (1994). Student priorities in picking a college. In M. Elfin (Ed. ). Americu’.~ hr.tr co/lrp.s. (pp. 2-11). Washington. DC: US News & World Report. Ong. W.J. (1982).
Ordig and litetyy: The t~,c,hriologi-irrKof the uwd. New
York: Met when.
The ratings