Thoughts on Hawisher and Selfe

Hawisher, Gail E. and Cynthia L. Selfe. “The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class.” The Writing Teacher’s Source Book. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 129-38.

Since the first fully-assembled microcomputer was introduced in 1977, technological changes have swept across the nation’s classrooms. As money has become available to school districts, computer-mediated classrooms with Internet access for e-conferences became the “norm.” Particularly within the English language arts classroom, computers redefine how we understand text, how we read and write, and especially how we teach composition to students. In today’s environment, however, composition “instructors who hope to function effectively in these new electronic classrooms must assess ways in which the use of computer technology might shape, for better and worse, their strategies for working with students” (129). While using technology in the classroom can benefit students, writing instructors also need to be aware that technology can also reinforce traditional and ineffectual learning techniques. In their article, Hawisher and Selfe accomplish three goals. First, they explore the discourse that has surrounded the incorporation of computers into the classroom and how it has caused change and how it has maintained the status quo. Second, they discuss how technology can solidify ideas of authority structures, and third, they propose that computers present us with an opportunity to transform our writing classes into other forms of learning environments.

In exploring the discourse of implementing computers into English classes, Hawisher and Selfe surveyed numerous writing teachers at a 1988 Conference on Computers in Writing and Language Instruction and found that many composition instructors have found numerous positive results. In their responses, the instructors point out that computer-mediated classrooms allow students plenty of time to write, opportunities to peer teach, one-on-one conferencing with the instructor, and more collaboration between the teacher and students, among other things. By using technology in their classrooms, these instructors considered themselves not as the traditioanl “dispensers of knowledge but rather as collaborators within a group of learners supported by technology” (133). They rarely spoke of any negative outcomes of using technology in the writing classroom, which did not help the authors explain the “less positive, more problematic uses of computers that [they had] encountered during the last five years as [they] visited many other electronic writing classes” (133).

Since the authors could not find any responses to help them solve this dilemma, they conducted their own formal and informal observations of writing classes. In observations, Hawisher and Selfe note that computers did not make an ideal learning environment. In one class, the students wrote a great deal using computers, but there were no notable exchanges of value between students and the teacher. In another, the teacher used computers and projectors to display sample texts to be critiqued by the class. Here, however, only three or four students participated, and the class as a whole “seemed to be searching for answers to the instructor’s preset questions” (134). With these two classrooms, the use of technology merely made the course more “teacher-centered” and “teacher-controlled”—not exactly the ideal computer composition classroom (135).

So how are we to proceed from here? The authors show that merely using technology in a writing classroom does not always improve student writing and learning, but technology cannot be ignored nor abandoned. As a result, the authors wisely propose that we use “our awareness of the discrepancies we have noted as a basis for constructing a more complete image of how technology can be used positively and negatively” (135). In considering all possible effects, writing instructors can build a better writing curriculum that incorporates electronic technology effectively.