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Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture

231

Teaching Digital Rhetoric:Community, Critical Engagement,and Application

DigiRhet.org

Digital Rhetoric, Fall 2004

The authrs  ths wrk partcpate n a Dgtal Rhetrc curse taught nthe Pressnal Wrtng (PW) prgram at Mchgan State Unversty n theall semester  2004. Bth unergrauate (rm sphmre t senr stan-ng) an grauate stuents (MA an PhD) attene the class, rm fels 

study including English; economics; critical studies in literacy and pedagogy;professional writing; rhetoric and writing; and telecommunications, informa-

tn systems, an mea. The cus  the curse was t aress tw ques-

tions: What is digital rhetoric? How do reading and writing practices change

in digital environments? The course was organized around three main goals:

to explore the dynamics of digital reading and writing by examining the

rhetrcal, scal, cultural, pltcal, eucatnal, an ethcal mensns 

digital texts; to interrogate issues of technology and literacy; and to examineidentity (including gender, race, class, and more), subjectivity, and represen-

tatn n gtal spaces.Curse tpcs nclue explrng the hstry  the Internet an theWrl We Web; ng gtal research, searchng the Web, an thnkngabut nrmatn lteracy; nterrgatng gtal lteraces (nclung a cusn reang an wrtng n gtal spaces, ynamcs  prnt an gtal pub-lshng, an ve-game lteraces); examnng ssues  access an ves

232 pedagogy

(specically ocusing on race, class, and economies, and also on dis/abilities

and usability); researching the histories o Internet economies; exploring the

dynamics o digital ownership and issues o authoring, authority, and intel-lectual property in computer-mediated, networked spaces; exploring digital

culture jamming

and internetworked politics; examining issues of digital

identity (including emphases on gender and online communities); exploringdigital visual rhetorics; examining new media; and thinking about cyborg,

biotech, and digital bodies. Course topics and readings were designed to

equip students to

•



explore and understand digital spaces as deeply rhetorical spaces;

•



understand the sociocultural dynamics o digital writing spaces;

•



better understand the multiple and layered elements o digital writingconventions and digital documents;

•



become more sophisticated navigators o the inormation available in digitalspaces; and

•



become more eective writers and communicators in digitally mediatedspaces.

In this essay, we draw upon our experiences in the digital rhetoricclass to rst contextualize digital rhetoric, providing a thick, collaborativedenition with examples to support our understandings as they emerged inthe class and have evolved since the class ended. We build toward a set o

recommendations or teachers interested in teaching digital rhetoric or inter-ested in integrating digital rhetoric approaches in their classrooms; these rec-ommendations are generated rom recently published literature and rom ourexperiences in the digital rhetoric class. This work engages the conversations

o scholars such as Je Grabill and Troy Hicks, Cindy Sele, Gail Hawisher,and the New London Group (among others) by continuing to examine the

ways in which digital technologies afect our practices as writers and teachers

and to develop approaches or negotiating these infuences.

Setting the Stage: Understanding Digital Technologies and Their Effects

The ollowing section describes the ways that digital technologies have shited

how we think about writing and teaching. By examining our approachesto literacy, the ways that digital technologies have converged, the digitaldivide, and the social and cultural shifts prompted by a growing digital

landscape, we hope to articulate the oundational changes needed or writing

pedagogies to account or the eects o digital technologies.

DigiRhet.org

Teaching Digital Rhetoric

233

That digital technologies have prolierated in our society is not sur-

prising, given the race to conquer technology-related media and markets; they

are obvious, or instance, in the yearly prots o cellular service providers,and in the competition within the Internet service provider (ISP) market. In

our classrooms and at our institutions, our friends and colleagues work — and,

at times, struggle — to keep up with the tools available, to integrate digitaltechnologies into their writing classrooms, and to gain access to the meansand to the proessional development required to teach in digital spaces. Ourdepartments and colleges struggle to renew outdated tenure and promotionmaterials to recognize digital work. The programs o our conerences reveala rise in sessions, panels, and eatured speakers addressing issues o multi-media literacies, new media, digital technologies, and more. The tables o contents o certain journals refect a space being crated through the

absence

o certain topics and technologies to actually

resist

digital technologies andto avoid theorizing and researching their uses, their roles in our classrooms,and the ways in which they shape our practices.

The recommendations of educational organizations such as the Con-

erence on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the NationalCouncil or Teachers o English (NCTE), and the American Library Asso-ciation (ALA) include language that refects the need to teach and encour-age students to gain technological literacy. The CCCC “Position Statement

on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments”

(2004: n.p.) calls attention to the act that “classes and programs in writing

require that students compose digitally”; the resolution continues to describe

the ways in which writing changes shape in digital spaces. The resolutionaddresses the ways in which some o our assumptions and practices o writ-

ing don’t change shape in digital environments, but also calls attention to themultiple and extended facets that require our attention when we ask studentsto compose with computers and across networks (for example, economic andcultural barriers must be addressed, access must be assured). In addition, in

the “Inormational Literacy Competency Standards or Higher Education,”the ALA (2000: n.p.) identies inormational literacy as crucial to today’s

“environment of rapid technological change and proliferating informationresources.” In these standards, the ALA acknowledges that informationalliteracy and information technology are inseparable, and that, along with

acquiring technological skills needed to

use

technology, technological “fu-

ency” requires that the information-literate person have a “deep understand-

ing o technology.”