Week 13: Bias

I related to both Lauren Marshall Bowen's "Resisting Age Bias in Digital Literacy Research" and Adam J. Banks' excerpt from "Digital Griots:  African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age" as an instructor who has taught diverse populations in the past and present.

Before I moved to Ohio to pursue my studies at Bowling Green State University, I taught as an adjunct instructor at Indiana University South Bend and the South Bend and Elkhart campuses of Indiana Institute of Technology (Indiana Tech).  Both schools were diverse in their own ways; IU South Bend particularly catered to non-traditional students.  IU South Bend was an "in-between" school in the South Bend area - it wasn't as competitive (or expensive) as the University of Notre Dame and it wasn't a community college like Ivy Tech.  Because of this, the university brought in many older adults that were looking to pursue their education later in life.  It wasn't unusual for me to have several students in my classes that were the same age as my parents (or older).

Indiana Tech had a (somewhat) different demographic.  The school offered classes that were five weeks long and ran in the evenings so as to be accessible to those with full-time jobs and/or family responsibilities.  The school was very small and non-traditional and was much more affordable than a typical university.  The majority of the students in my classes were African American, blue collar workers with families to care for and tough jobs that exhausted them mentally and physically.

I was thinking of these teaching experiences as I was going through the readings for this week.  Most of my non-traditional students at IU South Bend did not have the same computer capabilities as my college-aged students, and I often struggled with how to reconcile helping the older students while also helping the college-aged students expand on their "advanced" computer knowledge.  While Bowen focuses on a discussion of the elderly in her article, I think her main points apply to my teaching experiences, as well.  As Bowen states, "It is a mistake to identify elders [or older adults] who do not use Web 2.0 technologies, or at least not in expected or conventional ways, as somehow failing or digitally illiterate.  Even online activity that by now seems mundane, such as writing an email or sharing photos, not only counts as digital literacy practice but can also teach us about literate practices that extend beyond youth-centered ideologies" (588).  This is a point that I could have used in my classroom setting at IU South Bend; just because an older individual doesn't use/understand the "youth-centered" technologies of modern society (ex. social media apps) doesn't mean that the knowledge they do possess is useless or obsolete.  Young people have as much (or more) to learn from older generations as older adults do from youth.

Similarly, Banks' article helped me to see the importance in valuing a person's cultural dialect while also teaching them how to write effectively.  I was especially interested in the following statement:  "At this moment...anyone still attempting to argue that Ebonics is a problem for black students or that it is somehow connected to a lack of intelligence or lack of desire to achieve is about as useful as a Betamax video cassette player, and it's time for those folks to be retired" (15).  At Indiana Tech, I struggled with how to value the rich cultural background present in this dialect with my African American students while also fulfilling my duties as a composition instructor (to teach proper "Standard Written English").  Giving value to a student's cultural background is so important, but it can also conflict with the goals of a particular course.  This is something I still haven't completely sorted out, but I do think both a student's background and the goals of a class can converge in a way that promotes learning and growth for both the student and the instructor.

It's great that we live in a time where diversity is celebrated!  Image credit:  annenberglab.com

Week 12: Challenges

"Certainly, technology has been an impetus for constant change, and in the context of online writing pedagogies, this change has impacted not only the spaces in which we teach writing as process but also the increasingly diverse students we serve...What we teach in the writing classroom, both hybrid and fully online, has remained unchanged:  we teach alphabetic writing meant to be produced and consumed on an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper, accessed onscreen or in-hand" (Blair 472). 

This quote seems to sum up many of the conversations that have been taking place in my coursework thus far in the Rhetoric & Writing program - technology is constantly growing and expanding and changing the way we complete tasks, but academic work doesn't seem to reflect the changes taking place.  This question keeps popping up in every one of my courses:  Why does alphabetic text continue to be the preferred modality when so many more composing modalities exist?  Why do schools/teachers avoid multimodal composing in favor of the written text?  Where is the disconnect?

This is where I found the Kristine L. Blair chapter, "Teaching Multimodal Assignments in OWI Contexts," to be particularly interesting.  The challenges to multimodal composing that she presents are very real in the university setting.  Some barriers she mentions include "the presumption that writing remains a 'text-based' process," "limited/inconsistent access to digital composing tools," and "the lack of faculty training" (474).  I've seen these challenges and more step in and keep instructors from encouraging multimodal composing in the classroom and I've experienced some of them myself. 

Recently, our ENG 6020 Comp Instructor's Workshop course required us to create a "lighting talk" (a quick presentation on a specific writing convention) PowerPoint or Prezi complete with a script and sound recordings.  When this assignment was announced in our class, chaos ensued.  In Blair's excerpt, she mentions that the General Studies Writing director stated that her graduate student instructors were more likely to incorporate multimodal composing into their curriculum than their faculty counterparts, probably due to graduate students' "recent training and often generational status as millennials" (472).  However, this wasn't the trend I saw in my ENG 6020 class that day.  My classmates (and me, to an extent) were terrified about this assignment because we had little experience with multimodal composing as students in the classroom setting.  If we had such little experience with multimodal composing, how were we expected to teach it and use it in our classroom?

Another challenge I've experienced is the access to certain apps and programs that can be necessary for multimodal composing.  I've been wanting to work on my webtext review assignment for ENG 7280 outside of class, but without the Adobe Dreamweaver software on my home computer, this is an impossible task.  I was able to recently download a free trial of the software on my computer and work on the project that way, which is helpful for students who may commute to campus or who have work/family responsibilities outside of school.  This challenge and those previously discussed are barriers that consistently get in the way of truly incorporating multimodality into the writing classroom, and are challenges I've experienced firsthand as a student and as an instructor. 

The other readings for this week point to digital composing as a way for students to learn more effectively (as with using blogs for peer review with EFL students), complete assignments more efficiently (and creatively), and "reduce costs, allow students to self pace through courses, and even improve retention" as evident through the discussion of hybrid courses (Warnock 13). 

Despite everyone in my ENG 6020 class being graduate students, I think we all struggled a bit to create the multimodal lesson plan.  Here's a bit of the alphabetic lesson plan that I posted alongside the multimodal presentation on Canvas.

We were required to include a script of the audio so the presentation would be ADA compliant.

The background images were a bit basic in my presentation, was I was proud of how my first multimodal lesson plan turned out!