Professional Documents
Culture Documents
by
Joan Vinall-Cox
my Writing Process voice reveals how I write using the online computer;
ii
Acknowledgements
Dr Cheryl Craig,
for agreeing to be my External Examiner;
Sandra Hodder,
for her shaping of the Mobile Initiative at Sheridan
and the learning opportunities it provided; and
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Table of Contents
ABSTRACT..................................................................................................................... II
DEDICATION ..................................................................................................................IX
Writing Developments.....................................................................................................40
(Re)Writing......................................................................................................................70
Auto-ethnography.............................................................................................. 118
iv
An Arational Rationale ..................................................................................................121
Semiotics............................................................................................................ 152
The Topics....................................................................................................................192
Screen Representations.................................................................................................198
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Caught on the Web .......................................................................................................237
Implications........................................................................................................ 276
vi
Table of Figures
Figure 1: A screen capture of a draft of this thesis in a Windows environment.............. 20
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viii
Dedication
To my dear husband, Jim Cox,
whose support, wisdom, and good humour
made this journey even more pleasurable.
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Following the Thread
computer labyrinth — my story as a writing teacher learning to use the online computer
as a new writing and teaching instrument. The online computer has become my passion,
my path, and the place where I increasingly dwell. I invite you, curious reader, to be a
inquiry thesis.
Above you have encountered two of the voices who speak in this thesis: the
Oracles’ Voice, quoting experts which you met in the box above, and my Academic-
and-Teaching voice, which you are reading now. Each voice, and there are more, will be
“heard” in its own font, with its own tones and powers. Below I introduce you to Ariadne,
the seeker who discovers meaning in the technological labyrinth, followed by my voice
of insight and discovery, my Illuminal Voice who here explains my choice of the myth of
Ariadne
I am no longer that Ariadne who trailed a thread to lead us
away from the technological Minotaur
and out of this Labyrinth
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Joan Vinall-Cox
Illuminal Voice
The Minotaur results from the union of human desire and the gifts of the gods,
expedited by technology, and then instantiated by yet more technology. In the Greek
myth, Ariadne’s mother, Pasiphae desired the white bull from the depths, a gift from
Poseidon, god of the sea (and home of the unconscious mind.) Daedalus, that careless
and pandering inventor, created the machine that made their coupling possible, and
thus the Minotaur was born. The dark story alleging that the Minotaur consumes human
victims was a tale spun by his enemies, just as those opponents of technology claim that
it consumes the will of humans who, they say in their dauntingly authoritative tones,
Perhaps, in this version of the story, we who seek the Minotaur at the core of the
technological labyrinth will reach less than happy endings, or perhaps we will find new
possibilities. It is not yet known. But this story will provide a worthwhile journey, and
not a tired rerun of that old story where the Minotaur is labeled as enemy so the
audience can simply turn its attention to the “reality based show” where Ariadne rescued
faithless Theseus from the Minotaur he feared, only to be abandoned on some island.
I hope that you will come to see my family of voices not as a code to be cracked
and challenged, but as a chorus displayed in fonts and colours, telling you stories of the
many aspects of my journey into the core of the technology labyrinth, each voice hitting
notes the others cannot, giving you a fuller experience of our music.
professor. I have been teaching in the college system for over 30 years. During the past
10 years, and especially during the past five years, I have been using an online computer
to create my course materials, and I have been using these to teach students how to
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Following the Thread
write using the online computer as their writing instrument. What I am learning to do is
also what I am teaching. I believe that I am at the core of a pivotal time in writing
research. As Bolter (2001) comments in Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the
Remediation of Print:
The Internet and the Web, CD-ROMS and DVDs, and computer RAM
constitute a field for recording, organizing, and presenting texts – a
contemporary writing space that refashions the earlier spaces of the
papyrus roll, the codex, and the printed book (p. 12).
Our writing and indeed all our communicative tools are well into a period of
radical change that strongly affects individuals, both personally and in their roles in
business, government, and education. In this thesis, I operate as multiple “eyes” / “I’s”
with a chorus of voices describing this ocean of change, both technological and cultural.
My Research Question
I seek to investigate the impact of the online computer on composing and
You will find I take up writing as threads from my own and other
consciousnesses, inviting you to weave with me your own “Web of meaning” (Emig,
1983), into cords to guide us as we seek our ways through the technological labyrinth
that we now all live within. As this thesis progresses, you will see “cord” thicken and
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Joan Vinall-Cox
room of my own” (Woolf, 1973) and, more significantly, a laptop for my exclusive use.
The laptop is, in many ways, my traveling “room of my own” because much of my work,
both finished and in process, resides on its hard drive. With the addition of a DATA
projector, I can turn any room into my classroom. Using a wall, I can project PowerPoint
overheads, bulletin boards, and posters. The laptop, with a DATA projector and an
Internet connection, is the most powerful teaching tool that I have ever encountered in
Before I could use my laptop as a teaching tool, however, I had to learn how to
construct the materials I would use in my teaching. I had to learn how to create
documents, visual examples, presentations, and Web sites to be shown in class and
mounted on the Internet. And to do all this, I had to engage in an extended time of
As Polyani (1969) states, “[t]he structural kinship of the arts of knowing and
doing is indeed such that they are rarely exercised in isolation; we usually meet a blend
of the two” (p. 126). My learning how to use word processors, presentation software,
Web authoring software and course authoring software took place not in isolation before
I taught with them, but, of necessity, in relation to my teaching and using them. Initially,
I learned how to use them, because I was required to teach with them. I have an
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Following the Thread
I might never have acquired my computer skills if I had not been embedded in an
institution with its multiple demands and supports, its technology projects and demands
technology. I originally taught before the computer became widely available, before the
word processor, before presentation software, and before the Internet. I am now
community college. And I am teaching at the moment and in a place where the
but where it has become a user-friendly tool available to, and necessary for, even non-
meaning, but also through my understanding of how that meaning is made. How I tell
this story is part of this story; the form carries the meaning as surely the page, or
screen, displays the text. I believe, as Richardson (1997) asserts, that “[w]e are always
viewing something from somewhere, from some embodied position” (p. 58).
1969, p. 148) with my own learning and classroom work as a learner of writing, as a
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Joan Vinall-Cox
about it” (p. 87). I am both. I am in a doctoral program, studying theory because I have
been a practitioner, a teacher, who learned how to use a computer and the Internet as
part of my profession. As I moved into closer encounters with word processing, email,
and the Web, then into teaching using learning management software in a laptop
environment, I discovered a passion for the online computer, and for writing and
teaching writing with it. I also developed a need to explore how I, as a formerly
passion for writing, and teaching writing, using the online computer as a tool for
making meaning. The technological labyrinth that I used to fear has become my
home.
express the direct aspects of experience” (Diamond & Mullen 1999, p. 39). Arts-based
as a rich and blended research medium gives me the loam I need, a seedbed for this
thesis that I am writing. In this aesthetic loam, the blue-flowered flax of my memories
grows and I write as a way to “rett and scutch” these flax stems and extract the fibres,
the threads of memory and discovery, that I spin into the linen threads with which I
We humans see ‘signs’ and read ‘meanings’, in other words, we are interpreters
par excellence, and constructing meanings is our most human modus operandi.
Furthermore, we are always seeing things from our individual positions, and from our
embeddedness in various groups and/or cultures. Denzin (1989) argues that “[n]o self
group, cultural, ideological, and historical contexts” (p. 73). Additionally, what we
construct when we read signs is not a stable, final meaning, but an ongoing stream of
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Following the Thread
shifting and limited interpretations, as Iser explained (Albertson, 2000), even of self and
As Diamond and van Halen-Faber (2002) say, “the self experiences and,
therefore, constructs meaning that, in turn, creates the self. The reflexivity of arts-
based inquiry allows us to write ourselves into our world, inserting ourselves into it as
agents” (p. 125). I am writing about my learning and teaching experiences to embrace
and deepen their meaning because that allows me to grasp them more firmly. Through
writing and through consciousness both of my action in my own ongoing story and of
the cultural story it is embedded within, I attempt to catch the wave I am a part of, to tell
the stories of my learning how to use this new tool that is exploding into cultural
Yet, as I sit here in my study writing on this online laptop computer about my
computer. As Denzin (1989) says “[s]tories …, like the lives they tell about, are always
I write about my writing? I have decided to do what the American poet Theodore
Roethke (1958) recommends; I will “learn by going where I have to go” (p. 413). As I
write, I observe how I write. In van Manen’s words, “writing is the method” (1997, p.
126).
Before I can tell my stories to you, the reader, we have some questions to
How does the author position the self as a knower and a teller? Who is the
writer? Who is the reader? For the experimental writer these lead to the
intertwined problems of subjectivity / authority / authorship / reflexivity,
on the one hand, and representational form on the other.
Postmodernism claims that representation is always partial, local, and
situational …. There is no such thing as “getting it right”; only “getting it”
differently contoured and nuanced (p. 91).
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Joan Vinall-Cox
stories about teaching and learning and also as a theorist, one who analyzes her own
process of writing, who recognizes herself as embedded in her life while she writes it,
who is an intuitive thinker, and a playful poet. I invite you, as reader, to visit with me in
my thesis home, where you will hear many voices, some mine and none telling the
complete story. In this, my arts-based postmodern narrative thesis, you will be reading/
hearing a plurivocal inquiry, a harmonised and counterpointed chorale that can also be
While Writing” voice, using the earth colour, brown, interrupting my academic voice
coat, and a dark blue backpack with her laptop in it. As the train doors
open in Union Station, she flows out and down, turning corners and
flowing down more stairs. On she flows into the Toronto subway, north on
the University line to St. George, where she exits. Up more stairs, through a
turnstile, and she’s into OISE/UT, her destination. She takes the elevator;
stopping on the third floor to pick up the DATA projector she’d booked a
month before. She pushes the cart onto the elevator and heads for the tenth
floor.
and the wall. I have created a PowerPoint presentation with screen shots
and bulleted points, showing how to use the Outline View and Styles in
generated. I am passionate about how this makes the writer’s work more
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Following the Thread
inadequate (my sense of myself as a writer before being forced into using
about my own writing process. I write and rewrite and “cut & paste” because that is how
I think in written words. I shape and reshape this path of words to create the flow of
your reading mind engaged with my writing mind, moving together, following our
After many revisions and writing decisions, some parts of this thesis remain
clearly demarcated and can be seen and read as separate voices, separate threads, and
some have been smoothed over and woven into this complex cord to guide readers
through this labyrinth of meaning. These re-structurings and re-writings are part of the
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Joan Vinall-Cox
I’ve inserted the word “bricolage,” after being surprised and intrigued when I
encountered it in my reading. I researched it, claimed it as describing how I think and
learn, and came to understand that it is central to representing what it is I am studying
about how I learn. Delighted with the connections that arose in my mind as I researched
the word, I carefully highlighted and dragged small sections of my text to different
locations to better shape the path for you, the reader.
more than to argue. I wish to make you, as reader, more conscious of the bricolaged
you that much writing is composed in this manner, but the additions and changes that I
emphasize here are normally sanded down and painted over, pretending to a unitary
nature of the composition that is constructed and fictive. Any sustained complex piece
of writing, such as a thesis, is created in bits and pieces and stitched together
thematically. I display such quilted thinking below with a collection of quotations and
Gardner, (1972) describes how Lévi-Strauss, in his book, The Savage Mind, uses
Myths and ideas are built up out of remains and debris, odds and ends of
thought put to service to help resolve philosophical problems or issues
confronted by society. … They seem to be cemented in the same
nonrandom but not completely foreseeable way as the reveries of young
children falling asleep: fragments of phrases, poems, and songs
occasioned by casual observations, combined in a novel creation with its
distinctive rhythm, tempo, and phrasing (pp. 140 – 141).
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Illuminal Voice
At night and in the morning, as I live in this time of study, meditation, and
writing, connections arise and represent themselves in words trailing through my mind.
Friesen, in his Web site on Women and Computers, (2003) refers to what the well
known writer on issues of technology and culture, Sherry Turkle, Director of the MIT
[She] … describes the way many women interact with computers as being
concrete, associative, and non-linear in nature. Using concepts drawn
from anthropology, she characterizes this interactive style as being one
of "soft mastery" and "bricolage." She opposes it to the "hard mastery" of
linear, abstract thinking which has been privileged in the rationalist
tradition and in computer programming.
Illuminal Voice
I have learned that I learn by use, not by organized instructions. I learn bit-by-
bit, doing tasks that require a complex of physical learning (my fingers on the keyboard
and hand on the mouse) intellectual engagement (the patterns and purposes of
processes) and necessity (I must teach writing where it now happens, on the computer.)
Mason (2001) fleshes out idea of bricolage further by referring to Turkle and to
Gilligan:
Pointing out that “bricolage” is a style of reasoning and not a stage that
happens as part of an individual’s progression to a superior form, Turkle
notes that “soft mastery” thinking has been validated by Carol Gilligan’s
work which “validated bricolage as mature widespread and useful” (57-
58)… [T]hat, furthermore, this style of thinking may result in a more
virtuous way of acting, as “soft mastery” thinkers tend towards
negotiation and compromise as opposed to … competition and
dominance (para. 24).
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Joan Vinall-Cox
Illuminal Voice
I see this “associative” way of thinking, this way of seeing / creating connections
that generate meaning, as the basis of poetry and literature. I see this “bricolaged”
method of placing pieces in conjunction with each other as resulting from an innate way
Each piece means more and differently depending on what it is near. The
writer suggests connections with his or her placement of words and / or images, and
the reader then constructs further meanings with them. When Roethke (1958) wrote that
“We think by feeling. What is there to know?” I believe he was describing the kind of
associative thinking that a bricolaged approach displays openly. Bricolage, then, is the
kind of thinking that artists use in crafting their work, and the engaged, active reader of
learning allowed me to move from being a “technophobe” to being a writer and teacher
who was delighted with and empowered through using the online computer for writing
and for teaching. Frost has been quoted as saying that to get an education “you have to
hang around till you catch on” (Parini, 1999 p. 185). My learning to use the online
computer and a variety of software was achieved by “hanging around” over a number of
years and learning incidentally from school workshops, colleagues, students, the IT Help
desk, Help in the software, what I could find through the search engine, Google, and,
but only if absolutely necessary, manuals. This piecemeal and often “just-in-time”
Thus, this thesis inquiry is focussed on the changes in my writing process that
occurred as I learned to write using the online computer as my tool. I also seek to
explore how this shift may have impacted my writing and my thinking processes. As I
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not set off separately but strung together like a collection of gems on a cord.
Although this thesis is built according to the principles of the traditional external
eclectic, and even eccentric, or, in the language of Lather, (1991) “ex-centric” (p. 33). In
a postmodern de-centring, “the formerly silenced …come to voice” (p. 33) and finally
take their turns in the centre. I write with different voices that rise from my different
thesis does not politely ignore and sweep these different modes under the academic
carpet. Here, in my thesis, they will be enabled to speak from their (normally hidden)
separate points of view, so you as reader and I as writer can see if and / or how using an
An Invitation to Linger
In the very process of perceiving the world, we give and find shape,
pattern, order. In our talk and writing — the way we tell the stories of
our lives — we give and find further shape (Britton, 1982, p. 210).
In and through this metaphor-laden inquiry, I seek to reveal the story of how I
came to teach writing using the online computer as an arts-based writing tool. It is a
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Joan Vinall-Cox
story of discovery and insight about writing, teaching and learning, but, as I have
confessed, it is not confined to using the traditional, expository academic voice. It is not
in my nature to give you as reader and myself as writer only a single thread, a single
voice to follow.
brutally into your mind. Instead I invite you into my artistically arranged collection of
artefacts, of stories, and essays, and comments, and quotes, and poems. I am offering
you a bricolaged thesis where you, as reader, and I, as writer, dance together to shape
this postmodern collage knowing that “coherence, and thus meaning hinge on the
where the text is assembled in voices, not in a directorly scripted form but with the
improvised page as the stage. I cut and paste bits and pieces together to mirror the
capabilities that the computer extends to the writer. I move from font-revealed voice to
inserted image and offer colour as a guide. I visually assemble this bricolage form by
using the tools that the computer offers. With my shaping I imitate the mental
connecting style both of the leaps of hyperlinks and the reader control of “surfing the
Web.” This is how we, reader and writer, search this labyrinth, and shape the form of my
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I invite you to bring your rhetorical knowledge of the thesis tradition to this
reading. I also request that you open yourself to the changes promised by postmodern
capacities of the online computer, I transform the labyrinth into a thesis playground and
sometime palimpsest where “different voices are laid side by side or top to bottom, up
against one another, in juxtaposition” (Diamond & Mullen, 1999, p. 433) You will be my
guest here, not my captive. If, as reader you allow me, I will:
show you my town — where I grew up — and the neighbourhood that contains
my current home;
bring you into the kitchen, where I have cooked up this bricolage and show you
seat you in the living room with my aperitifs distilled from the books that have
from my past;
feed and entertain you in the dining room as I share with you my narratives of
take our postprandial drinks in my study where we can reflect what it might all
mean.
opportunity to experience the treasures I have created and arranged. What I ask is that
you not think that this artful arrangement is anything less than an openly crafted
fabrication designed to reveal both how I am constructing my learning story and how I
have discovered and am discovering computer-use. I invite you in, hoping you will take
pleasure in my construction and perhaps see similarities to, and possibilities in, your
own experiences.
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Joan Vinall-Cox
A Chorus of Voices
In this thesis, I construct a chorus of many voices, with meaning as segue and
glue. By using a bricolage form, I hope to highlight how meaning wends its way from
me, the author, through the marks on screen to those on paper that mediate the making
of meaning by you, the reader. I hope to display how ideas can be linked in patterned
sequences that are more associative than directly linear and hypothetico-deductive.
that erases the bricolaged seams that more authentically represent the activity of
thought. Here I introduce you, dear reader, to my familiars, the voices performing in my
inquiry, the voices popping out from behind my academic voice, all the voices you will
meet in my thesis home. Here I briefly name them as a preliminary overview which I will
follow up with individual introductions of their appearance and the meaning they
present.
My Voice of Homage displays my gratitude and respect for those thinkers and
theorists who have given me insights, and speaks at the beginning of each
My Academic Voice will dominate by being the ground and container of the
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and
My Published Voice with articles and excerpts from work I have previously
My Artist’s Voice sings the insights I or others have reached through lyricism
and poetry;
My Living While Writing Voice tells stories from me as the writer who has a life
burst out with some dark or forbidden thoughts; and finally, (to animate and
Ariadne’s Voice, made up of fiction and poetry, created from a postmodern re-
writing of the Greek myth of Ariadne and the Labyrinth from the early days of
our Western academic culture is an arts-based allegory of the learning quest and
Each of these interior Voices will tell its own version of this thesis journey, the
give you the keys, the visual signifiers so that you will know which voice and / or source
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Joan Vinall-Cox
All our constructs are devices that we and our paradigms make up in
order to achieve a purpose (Diamond & Mullen, 1999, p. 242)
personal experience, feelings, empathy and play as substitutes for ‘scientific’ method”
(p. 424), and invite you to “indwell” (Polanyi 1975) with me, and imaginatively
Writing Process
In talking to my friend Mary Ann who teaches Graphic Design, I mention using a
Lucida font. I don’t tell her I chose it as much for its name as its appearance. (I hope to
write a lucid thesis.) She responds vividly, praising me for choosing a family of fonts
designed to work together. I come home and look at my academic voice, at that time
written in Arial. For a week I write and think and look. Then I sample Lucida Sans for my
academic voice, and I decide on it as part of my design choices. I think I will use the
Lucida fonts for all my voices. I want a coherence of design as well as content. And here
in my Writing Process Voice, for a while, I speak with the Lucida Sans Unicode font. As I
build the content in words, I also design the form of the content, in its appearance.
Then, a change in my teaching assignment leads to my having to exchange my
IBM ThinkPad laptop for a Mac PowerBook G4 laptop. The word processor on the Mac
doesn’t have the same fonts as the IBM. After investigating the cost of buying more
Lucida fonts, I decide to reformat my Styles choices using the two Lucida font sets
available to me on the Mac: Lucida Grande and Lucida Handwriting.
A central aspect of my composing is the visual design. I can’t just write the
words; I feel compelled to design the page simultaneously. Even though I am aware that
I will edit and change the appearance as well as the words, I build both text and design
as I write. For me, the meaning is in the arts-based connotations of the appearance of
the text as well as in the denotations of the words.
Lucida Grande font, 10 point in size, double-spaced, I will now formally introduce
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The introductory quote, under major titles is the Voice of Homage, in a special
font, Lucida Grande bold, 10 point, 1.5 spaced, and boxed and framed, to show my
respect for the scholars who have written the books and articles that have confirmed
processes. These are the Voices that have come before mine and have helped to light
my thesis home.
point and double spaced, and is focussed on what I have learned through and about
teaching. It will speak in its embodied form through the relevant course materials that I
course Website and/or course PowerPoints. These will be inserted as figures, and
although the screen capture shows a yellow background for my “Living While Writing”
voice, the yellow background has since been removed because it looked better on the
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Joan Vinall-Cox
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Following the Thread
I have also removed the ornamental detail seen in Figure 2, above, in the Mac OS
X screen capture which displays the desktop with many elements visible in addition to
the Word page. The Windows screen capture, Figure 1 above, shows only the Word page
itself. I work in each environment differently because they each operate in their own
way. In both the Windows and the Mac OS X environments, I have placed the bar, or
dock, that allows me to navigate from application to application at the bottom of the
screen.
necessary, are typical of my teaching voice. My teaching voice will also speak reflectively
through excerpts and adaptations added into this work from relevant essays completed
for some of my graduate courses. Some of these will be labelled and referenced.
point 10, 1.5 spaced, in brown with an orange line as box, reminds
different times of the day, such as the lived world of work, and the lived
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Joan Vinall-Cox
consecutively, but conveniently. My life stories are ordered by the text they
are tied to, not their own chronology because the text of my thesis was
written in chunks that I later re-assembled into an accessible order for the
The Artist’s Voice speaks through my own poems and lyrical musings and
through the poems of other poets who nourish me, in the colour of deep water, in dark
teal, with prose in Lucida Grande italic, 10 point, 1.5 spaced, and poetry in Lucida
Grande bold, single-spaced, within a shadowed teal-coloured box.
Ariadne’s Voice
Finally, this tale of the labyrinthine learning required to arrive at agency with the
online computer as a tool for making meaning is leavened by excerpts from a rewritten
Ariadne myth in Lucida Grande font, 10 point and 1.5 spacing, in the faded tone of
old pulp fiction, grey, surrounded by a romantically frilly border. In this postmodern
thesis, “the activity of reference is problemized and celebrated” (Diamond & Mullen,
1999, p. 431). I learn best through the leaven of beauty and narrative, and, in this arts-
based inquiry, I offer an apparently frivolous allegory to lighten your way.
I suggest that, as you read, you not worry about remembering the details of all
these keys. I will remind you (we as multiple voices will remind you) when each voice or
aspect of my inquiring self appears, what each signifies and where it comes from. As
you grow to know this collage of writings, the visual signals will grow more familiar,
reminding you and reinforcing your awareness of my different voices and sources. Each
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voice is an imperfect map of the labyrinth that, pieced together, leads Ariadne to an
Illuminal Voice
A brief note: a central source of my enthusiasm for the computer as a tool for
making meaning has just been demonstrated. The ability to use text, colour, and
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Joan Vinall-Cox
The Way It Is
In the world of the World Wide Web, threads are found in message boards or
discussion groups. They are formed as people respond to a message and a chain, or
thread, is formed from one message to the next. Sometimes a writer will shift, or even
utterly change, the topic. The thread goes on as long as there is energy among the
readers to respond, despite or because of changes.
Ariadne left a thread to guide Theseus away from the Minotaur s/he feared. In
this mystory (Ulmer, 2003), she confronts the technological labyrinth and creates the
thread that guides her to the centre, the core, the meaning, and the Minotaur.
What is this thread I follow? The technology is its setting, not its answer. Is it
teaching or writing, or a plaiting of both? Or is it a “new voice/ which [I] slowly
recognize… as my own” (Oliver, 1992)?
Now, dear readers, in writing this I am seeking your help to see my thread
clearly. In writing for you, I uncovermy meaning. I hope you are ready to “go with this
narrative flow” and because we are scholars and researchers who seek the “truths”
hiding behind and inside stories, we will start before the beginning, or in the middle of
things, as the Ancients and the Oracles advise. Here, then, the story opens.…
In Medias Res
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Like Eisner (1991) I believe that, “[t]heory … grows in the light of perception.
Perception gives rise to consciousness, and interpretation gives meaning to it” (p. 129)
The advent of the online computer has created new arenas of communicative
possibilities, and the teaching possibilities in this kind of a milieu call out for the
& Clandinin 1988) thinking about my experiences on this journey of writing and
knowledge and skills, and to do this through exploring “stories about [my] own
struggles for self-knowledge and identity” as a writing teacher (Mitchell and Weber,
1999, pp.1 - 2) who learns to use a computer. I am using both the content and the form
to do with an online computer gives me great personal joy and professional power, and
it is the source of this joy and power that I seek to explore. With Atwood (2004), I hold
that “’[t]he arts’ — as we’ve come to term them — are not a frill. They are the heart of
the matter, because they are about our hearts, and our technological inventiveness is
create. It allows me to produce learning materials that, 20 years ago, would have taken
several highly specifically trained people to produce. As the key to my Voices, above
shows, the computer with its software and peripherals gives me, as a writer, the agency
a copy editor;
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Joan Vinall-Cox
a printer; and
a publisher;
Shifting Semiosis
Figure 3: Two Labyrinths - a microprocessor (Mortimer, 1990) and a church maze (The
On the Web, I can also think with moving images and sound, though these cannot be
component of computers, and on the right, a spiritual labyrinth, a maze. Their similarity
is clearly visible and this is far more easily seen, than verbally described. The online
computer allows me to find such images easily through using the search engine,
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Following the Thread
Using the online computer as a tool allows me to create and support a holistic
on Web pages, or through visually designed paper products, give me pleasure, and are
part of the dramatising of the meaning of the materials that I produce as part of my
teaching. They are one of my ways of connecting “the cognitive and the affective
domains” (Miller, 1988, p. 110). The use of the online computer in my teaching also
allows me to create individualized teaching materials that are authentically shaped out
of my understanding of specific classes and students and created for their development.
communication even while not together physically in the classroom, allow me to co-
create an atmosphere that is shaped for and with the students with whom I share our
learning task. I can “be with students” (Miller, 1988, p. 137) in a rich and authentic way,
and, with the creative possibilities of the online computer, with its links to libraries, data
bases, and search engines, I can relate our “subject matter to the interests of [each]
student” (p. 137) in a deeply connected way. Thus the communication possibilities of
the online computer are both my subject and my method, and, in a fully integrated and
This ease and ability to shape and respond to individual classes and even
students is another reason why I have created my thesis in the form of a bbrriiccoolla
aggee..
This collection of bits and pieces is created, assembled, arranged, and designed to lead
you, dear reader, through the kind of postmodern, arts-based narrative inquiry
(Diamond & Mullen 1999) that the computer does not simply allow, but positively
incites.
Writing Process
In composing this arts-based postmodern thesis, I have used:
initially an IBM ThinkPad with a Windows operating system and MS Office
software and Netscape as the internet browser;
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Joan Vinall-Cox
(Richardson, 1997).
28
Following the Thread
You are entering my past, a town, which, I assume, will resemble yours in many
ways. I am going to show you the schools I grew up within, and tell you some stories
about how I learned in their classrooms. I also assume that you, dear reader, have gone
through your own learning-to-write experiences and that you can compare and/or
contrast them with mine. Crayons, pencils, straight pens, ballpoints, fountain pens, and
typewriters were my early instruments as I practiced and learned how to write. I felt little
Writing Process
This following section has been developed out of a reflective narrative piece written for
Professor Jean Mason’s course, Writing Matters: Theoretical and Practical Models for
the Study and Teaching of Writing which I took in the spring of 2003.
Originally I wrote about learning to write using both memory and reflection on
memory. I tried to use illuminal moments (Denzin, 1989), and, because I have thought
through my writing experiences previously, some of these stories are actually memories
of memories. With my use of the third person, I hoped to both show distance, and to
create an imaginable visual experience for the reader.
After the original paper had been written, I encountered the work of Mitchell and
Weber (1999) in using “memory in the third person” with teachers. I was struck with
how closely my work resembled what they were describing. Consequently, I have used
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Joan Vinall-Cox
their ideas as a pattern and the original paper has become the source of bits that I have
pieced together, the same way my mother and grandmother used the leftovers from
previous sewing projects to create their quilts.
Like an artist in the music industry, I am “covering” my original paper, using the
original music, but creating a new “sound” with it, more suitable for this “project.”
Ariadne Speaks
In my pack I carry indigo, a gift from a wise woman encountered on my journeys.
Tonight I rub it on my hands before I begin to weave and it colours this part of the cord I
weave that guides me back into the labyrinth I once fled.
Writing (In)competence
My mom and dad tell how, when I started kindergarten at four, they walked the
route to my first school with me, down a block, along three blocks, turn at the bridge for
another block, then turn again and three more to the school. They tell how they walked
the route once, and from then on I could follow this labyrinthine path all by myself. I
walked by myself, everyday, to and from school. This is a mythic family memory.
What I remember is a feeling. I liked school. I never understood, and still do not,
why on the radio and now on television we are encouraged to feel normal if we hate
30
Following the Thread
advancing and retreating on a beach, one wave making a gain but the
next falling short of it, just as a young writer may present very
variable quality of work from one week to the next. Obviously over a
period progress is taking place, but not taking place obviously
(Andrew Wilkinson, 1986, p. 12).
Picture a little girl in the 1950’s in a new public school, a one story, flat-roofed
double string of classrooms encapsulating a central hallway. She sits in a classroom with
a blackboard at the front, a wall of windows on the left, bulletin boards across the back
and along the right side, and a large wooden teacher’s desk at the front, near the
windows. The students’ desks, set out in careful rows, are small metal tables, with a
storage space beneath the hinged, liftable top. She sits a row over from the side bulletin
boards, just a little back from the middle. The sunlight coming in the windows and the
Bible comics posted on the side bulletin board become part of her future memories.
Now, however, she struggles to figure out where in her notebook this work goes, under
the “S” that is “Science” or the “S” that is “Social Studies”; one starts at the beginning of
her notebook and the other in the middle. Even though Mrs. M*** told them what
subject this work belongs to, she struggles, because both subjects start with ‘S’ and the
names get tangled up for her. If she chooses the wrong one, she’ll have to erase her
Illuminal Voice
With this memory, I also “sense” the classroom, as I described it. Yet sitting in
my messy study so many years later, I wonder why I worried so intensely about making
the correct choice. I wonder why the fear of creating a messy notebook was so strong
that, fifty years later, writing about learning to write, I remember the struggle. In this
thesis journey, as I go over the same ground repeatedly, I see that from early in my
graphic neatness.
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Joan Vinall-Cox
Picture the same girl, a little older now, in another school, an older red brick two
story building, right at the foot of a small step in the Niagara escarpment, set in a large
asphalt playground edged with scruffy grass and green-leafed trees. In this, her third
school, just as for the other two, she lives at the far edge of the territory, and walks a
In this “new” older school, she is in grade five, even though she failed one of the
units in her “old” newer school. They had three units a year there and she failed one.
They don’t have units here, and the grade behind her is already too full, so she’s in
Grade Five. Miss F***, her old and grey-haired teacher, doesn’t smile much. The long
poster stretching above the blackboard has thin blue lines at the top and bottom and a
pink line in the middle. The whole alphabet is up there, with how you write a capital ‘A’
and how you write a small ‘a’ and so on for the entire alphabet. She stares at it
yearningly.
Her battered wooden desk has a stained hole in the front right-hand corner. It is
for inkbottles. You can only get a bottle with real ink in it and a straight pen to go with it
when you can “joined-print” well enough with a pencil. She wants to write with a pen.
That is how real writers write, and she has seen pictures with plume pens. She will not
get a plume pen, but a straight pen to dip in the ink, and write, and change the nib
when it gets scratchy. She looks at the others near her, the girls and some of the boys
with their straight pens dipping into their inkbottles. She sighs and tries to write a good
She finally gets her pen and ink, one of the last in her class to, and she wonders
if she got them because everybody else has theirs and the teacher could not wait any
longer for her to get good enough with her joined-printing. She slides her mind away
from the fear that she is not good enough but no one is telling her.
At first, she loves writing with the straight pen, but soon she feels inadequate
here too. She presses too hard, and the nib splurtches out blots. Her pages are even
32
Following the Thread
messier than when she wrote with a pencil, and when she spells incorrectly and writes
an “a” in a word where she should have known an “e” was right, it is harder to erase and
really shows. The grey ink eraser rips up the surface of the paper where the pink pencil
eraser just left a grey blotch. Her fingers are almost always ink stained and messy now,
and she knows most Grade Five girls can manage better. Writing is hard and
Now, I almost always have at least one fountain pen with me and I take great
pleasure in the colours of ink I can use. Currently I have a pen with hot pink ink and a
pen with turquoise ink. I use them to handwrite class notes, my journal, my dates, and
my cheques. My fingers still get ink stained occasionally, but now I find it mildly
amusing. It doesn’t make me feel clumsy anymore. I have integrated my history into an
aesthetic pleasure.
A year later, in Grade Six, her almost constant reading satisfies her attraction to
words. She has a pattern in her reading. She keeps a book in her desk to slide half onto
her lap and read when she has finished her schoolwork before the others. She has a
book at home that she reads any chance she gets. She reads two books at the same time
because she does not want to carry stuff on the long walk back and forth between
school and home, but sometimes a book gets so exciting that she just can not wait till
the next day to read the next part and she has to take it with her. She visits the library
once or twice a week and takes out from three to six books. She reads and reads. Her
spelling is not so good and her handwriting is loopy and sloppy, and she has no real
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Joan Vinall-Cox
consciously recognize patterns and use them to my advantage. And that, of course, was
the beginning of my development of agency, power, a sense of “I” that was consciously
Ariadne Speaks,
As a child I learned how to grow and harvest the flax I needed to create my
garments and my art. First I had to learn how to de-seed, rett and scutch the fibres,
preparing them, and then spin the cleaned fibres into the linen threads I would need to
make the cord to guide Theseus (and later myself) with. In those early days, my voice
was faint. Even though I first clung to his future, and long remained blind to my own,
now I am learning to create my own cord and tospeak my own story. Then, I embraced
his fear of the Minotaur and gave him the escape cord, as Dadaelus had instructed. I had
not yet begun to separate “the voice of [my]self from the voices of others, … [and ask] if
it [wa]s possible to be responsible to [my]self as well as to others and thus to reconcile
the disparity between hurt and care” (Gilligan, 1982, p. 82).
Theseus and my sister, Phaedra, never learned that lesson, and I have come to
pity their moral blindness and all that resulted as a consequence. For myself, I have
learned how to follow the thread.
I remember the physical details less than I remember what I thought. I think it
was Grade 11 History, and I think it was with Miss L***, a stiff, thin teacher, with little
vibrancy to her. However I remember having the sense that there was a real person
34
Following the Thread
hidden away underneath her brittle surface, and I remember thinking that the hidden
person was a nice human being. I think I felt safe and competent with her as my teacher.
I remember feeling troubled because my best friend Barbara studied longer and
harder, and often helped me the night before, and clearly knew our work better than
me, but I got better marks, although neither of us was at the top. I wondered if I was
somehow cheating.
Illuminal Voice
Now I see that I was learning, that I was teaching myself through my curiosity
future teacher voice. On re-writing, I also see the self-doubt and fear of success that I
lived with.
Our exams were a mixture of multiple choice and essay questions. By Grade 11, I
had figured out that, with multiple-choice tests, I was better off to go with my first and
instinctive answers. I was often unsure that my answers were correct, but, as I remember
it, I had done some informal experimentation and discovered that the answers I second
thought and changed were more likely to be wrong than the ones I “guessed at.” So I
taught myself to stick to my instinctive first answers, and do the multiple choice
We also had essay questions to answer. One of my strategies for studying history
was to find and read historical novels about the time and place we were studying. I
especially liked novels where the political events that we had to know about for history
had an impact on the action in the stories. Authors like Nora Lofts helped me pass
Illuminal Voice
Nobody knew about dyslexia then, and my dyslexia is minor, but numbers and
spelling were areas of special weakness. Remembering the dates was something I did
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Joan Vinall-Cox
not do at all well. Stories I remembered easily, but remembering dates was/is difficult. I
look back, now, and see I was developing important language skills, despite my
In grade 11, I had an illuminal moment. I realized that I could phrase my essay
answers in such a way that they suggested that the teacher and I shared some
knowledge. I didn’t have to be explicit about the date I could not remember. I could
pretend to forget that I needed to include that bit of information. I could pretend I had
the knowledge but had simply slipped up and failed to include it. I could, as I remember
consciously naming this strategy, talk around something, using the knowledge I
remembered from the course or picked up from my historical novel reading to suggest I
had more knowledge than I actually did (or thought I did). It seemed a kind of cheating,
but it worked; the teachers gave me good marks, so I thought maybe it was okay.
Illuminal Voice
I now know I was struggling with a kind of gap tied in with Attention Deficit
Disorder and a consequent lack of confidence. I was learning, but denying myself credit
My conscious awareness of strategic writing, and hence rhetoric, was being born
here. I remember other strategies I was aware of, all connected with school writing and
the discovery that I could get good marks, though never the top ones that I wanted.
and permanent script if I was part way through a sentence and needed to make a
change. I could play around with words in my head, and figure out how to change the
direction of my sentence without having to re-write the whole page or use White-Out.
This is something no modern child will practice with the assiduousness I did,
because of the fluidity and plasticity of text on a computer screen. Cut-and-paste with a
word-processor has eliminated the need for this kind of strategic revisioning, and
White-Out, and that may be a loss in learning a kind of language flexibility. However
36
Following the Thread
that ease of recursiveness using cut-and-paste was also one of the initial reasons I was
This high school girl hated typing. She took it in Grade 9, with all the other girls,
because it was required or expected. She sat near the back of the room, on the right-
hand side, at a manual typewriter with no letters on the keys. They were supposed to
remember them; something she found difficult. There was a chart of the keys, showing
where the letters were, high up on the wall to her right and behind her. She could check,
but it was really obvious to the teacher (some anonymous figure she never felt any
connection to) if she turned and looked. She was supposed to learn where the letters
were by memory so she could type fast. Everything was about skill and speed. Nothing
Querulous Voice
My mother was a secretary and took great pride in her speed and
knew that I wouldn’t be following in her footsteps in this area where I felt
In typing class, she was evaluated by timed tests, where a formula combining
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Joan Vinall-Cox
(much later diagnosed) dyslexia, I never got good marks in dictated typing tests. I often
had to do these tests more than once. I suspect, looking back, that my anxiety
always made major errors near the bottom of the page, as if the closer I got to getting
the page right, the greater the stress and anxiety, and, consequently, the more
likelihood of making a mistake. I used typing as little as possible, even though we had a
handwriting, even for my university papers. This avoidance was not something I was
aware of until writing this thesis, yet looking back, I can see how absolutely I avoided
She remembers that in Grade 12 and 13, she was taught how to write essay
questions to prepare for the Grade 13 Provincial exams. They were supposed to create
an outline on the left-hand blank page of their foolscap exam booklets, and then write
the answer in paragraphs, using the outline, on the lined right-hand side.
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Following the Thread
down my answer in a kind of overview using the structure in the question, I had the
introduction. I started with that on the right-hand side of the foolscap exam booklet
because it confused me to try to plan explicitly. When I wrote, I just let my words out. I
wrote the introduction first and then I just made sure that I explained each chunk and
gave examples in the same order that was in the question. Then I concluded by
repeating a version of the question with my answers. It seemed obvious to me.
After that, I created an outline on the left-hand side, so I wouldn’t lose marks for
not using an outline. Sometimes I even deliberately put parts of the outline in the
“wrong” order so I could circle and draw arrows to “correct” it, making it look more like I
had indeed written it first, but I almost never had. I was “performing” the process the
teachers required, using my inauthentic but strategic voice.
In university, when I wrote out my rough copies of essays, I wrote on every other
line on only one side of the page. Then, if I had to revise it, I would add stuff in the lines
between, and/or I would circle a part and draw an arrow to where it should go.
Sometimes I even cut up the pages and taped them in a different order on other pages. I
corrected my spelling or got my mom to. (My dad struggled with spelling too.) Then I
wrote up the good copy in ink, using White-Out, if necessary. It worked well enough to
get me through my undergraduate university courses.
Illuminal Voice
continued pretending to comply with writing (process) rules that did not fit my personal
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Joan Vinall-Cox
experience. Learning that there is no absolutely ‘correct’ writing process, that it varies
from person to person, and for individuals, from task to task, was very liberating for me
as a writer. Yet, as a teacher, I find student writers often resistant to finding out what
writing process might work for them by exploring journaling, free writing, mind-
mapping and outlining. They want the finished copy fast, and are reluctant to explore
I glance at the rusted metal junk above the door, and my daughter
leads me through into the grubby, near-empty bar, and I follow her
flaming red dress into the crowded black back room, and I follow her
through the smoke, through invasively loud music, to the tables at the side,
and I step up, and I step up again to sit on the black bench high against
the black wall, and I look up at the TV monitor, and I watch the words
change colour, and the man in the shiny grey tuxedo sings, and the people
seated around the three walls wear black, and the people standing on the
floor wear black, and everybody yells over the music, and the lyrics are
violent and angry, and yet everyone cheers when someone sings, and
everyone smiles. I marvel over the urban young at play, their world and
their voices.
Writing Developments
40
Following the Thread
I remember three pieces of writing I did in high school that pleased me: my
Grade 13 essay on Wuthering Heights, a poem I wrote just because I wanted to, and a
piece of ‘creative’ writing about the Skyway Bridge in Hamilton. Each of these pieces has
She has a crush, which she’s been wise enough to keep secret, on her English teacher,
Mr. M***. He has a sardonic tone, Slavic cheekbones, wings of dark, aggressively
straight hair, and a dark five o’clock shadow clearly visible before noon. He has a habit
of sometimes running the class while stretched out on his side on the wide radiator
Illuminal Voice
Four years later Mr. M*** was the vice-principal of the school and my brother
had several run-ins with him, and hated him. Many years later, at a social event of an
organization for writing teachers, I encountered two people who had taught in a school
with Mr. M***, and found him to be difficult, authoritarian, and rampantly sexist.
Even so, I remember him with affection. He opened doors into literature for me,
allowing me both to love it and to learn the academic game. He prepared me for getting
reader of historical romances, I can never forget my first encounter with the Demon-
Lover archetype.
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Joan Vinall-Cox
Mr. M*** is not lying on the radiator now, sardonically directing a discussion.
He’s put a couple of cardboard boxes on the radiator, and in them, in alphabetical order
by student name, are the major essays students have written based on questions Mr.
Literature. If this teen girl contributes an essay, she can borrow other essays. Her paper
was carefully copied out by hand, double-spaced, and satisfyingly long, though that was
partly because she writes in such a loose-sloppy style that her words took up more
Illuminal Voice
This was my first literary essay using “secondary sources” though I wouldn’t hear
that term for over a year, and wouldn’t understand it for a couple of years more. I had
found a book, probably one written by David Cecil, the name re-found through Google-
based research as I write this thesis. I had read and loved Wuthering Heights at least
three years before I studied it in school and encountered Cecil’s analysis. He analyzed
Wuthering Heights, which was part of our course of study, pointing out the “children of
the storm” and the “children of the calm” as themes. I delighted in this “story” about a
story, and loved the stately orderliness and creativity of writing a paper using a critic’s
commentary. I had discovered my taste for theory and interpretation and the power of
writing models. (I was learning how to prepare and spin the linen that I could weave a
This teenaged girl’s essay mark is “good enough” and Mr. M***’s comments are
positive. She decides to risk it, and puts her essay in the box. It is her first experience of
sharing her writing with other students, and getting to read their work. She is gratefully
aware that this is a good way to study for the exam she is so worried about. This is also
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Following the Thread
that she will encounter and co-create many times, but not recognize as such until her
Illuminal Voice
I did not know it at the time, and I suspect Mr. M*** just did it intuitively, but the
box of essays to share was a really powerful teaching / learning technique. Although the
contents of the essays were important and helpful, more significantly, I am convinced,
reading the other students’ writing gave me a richer understanding of my own. Looking
back from my current perspective, I see my first experience with shared writing, — and
a model for teaching. The collaborative approach has been a major part of my
understanding of how to teach writing effectively. Looking back, I see students who
discourse community (Fairclough, 1995). I was lucky to have been in Mr. M***’s class,
Many years later, at a high school reunion, I encountered a small group from my
Grade 13 class. Embarrassingly, there was someone who was able to remember me
while I did not remember him. What he also remembered was “acing” one of the major
questions on the provincial exam based on having read my essay. (I realized then that I
had probably “aced” it too, because of my essay, but I had not realized that before.)
speaking of was that all the way through the essay I had consistently spelled “children”
as “childern.” When he laughed about this, I had a momentary felt memory of actually
wondering about the spelling when I was doing my final copy, but letting go of the idea
of checking with Mom or the dictionary. I thought I was right so I just made sure all the
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Joan Vinall-Cox
What I also realized, many years after the reunion, was that this was an example
of my dyslexia, and of my attempts to deal with it by making sure I spelled the words
the same way. My laughing classmate had said he admired my consistency. I cannot
remember either him or Mr. M***, telling me of this error at the time. It is a silence I find
[T]he inner learner [has] two selves: an analytic, verbal self and a
more holistic intuitive one. … [A]t different times different selves
need to be in control and … an important part of learning is to teach
each self when to take over and when to leave it to the other
(Boomer, 1988, p. 72).
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Following the Thread
English, I encountered Emily Bronte’s poetry, and tried to imitate it. I remember basing
my poem around the name Elizabeth, in its different abbreviations. The poem had a
traditional form, with the rhymes carefully placed, and the rhythm counted out. I was
Illuminal Voice
love object, who becomes unified, because the speaker loves her. The speaker in the
poem sees Beth, Bess, and, I think, Liza, “[be]come one.” I am not going to look at a
meant about me then (and, consequently, now.) All I will say is that it was my first
conscious attempt at poetry, and I wrote it myself, that is, not as an assignment but
simply because I had an urge to write it. Even that long ago, I was intuitively multiple, as
and I studied a wider variety of poetry, especially in Mrs. M***’s course in Modern
Poetry, and those influences were what opened me up to writing poetry regularly. I have
not often published my poetry because I have not had enough of a sense that it was
worthy of someone else’s reading time to learn how to push it at editors or even share
it. Besides, what I value my poems for is what they do for me while they are still secret.
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Joan Vinall-Cox
understand who and where I am in a particular class or school moment. As Van Manen
(1997) says,“ Poetry allows the expression of the most intense feelings in the most
intense form” (p. 70). And Richardson (1997) says that “[l]ived experience is lived in the
body, and poetic representation can touch us where we live, in our bodies. Thus poetry
gives us a greater chance of vicariously experiencing the self-reflexive and
transformational process of self creation” (p. 143).
Here I share with you an example of how I have experienced November and do
again even now as I am writing this thesis in 2002:
November in School
and I
am late for school.
and more,
much more, is required.
In November, we fear -
even if Christmas ever comes,
even if spring only hides behind
the winter we have to endure,
we have lost
whatever we came here to find.
(Vinall-Cox, 1995)
Illuminal Voice
form, supports me and comforts me and helps me grasp and cope with my lifeworld.
The quality and form of Mr. M***’s teaching of literature provided a significant
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Following the Thread
I grew up in Hamilton and Stoney Creek, and when given the assignment of
writing a creative, descriptive piece in Grade 13, I decided to describe Hamilton Harbour
as seen at night while riding over the Skyway Bridge. I saw the steel mills with their
flaming chimneys reflecting in the dark water of the Harbour as barbarically splendid.
The affective reason why I saw this scene as beautiful comes from my family’s
experience. I knew intuitively that with my Dad working at a company on the Harbour,
like most of my friends’ families, our prosperity was rooted in Hamilton’s industry.
Plus I liked the drama of the image. Perhaps I had encountered Blake’s
description of “dark, satanic mills”, or maybe I was consciously avoiding pastel topics
because I was writing for an admired sardonic teacher. In any case, I was really satisfied
and proud of what I had written. I got a mediocre mark and a lot of painful criticism. I
Querulous Voice
because, even though he was so different, she was friendly with him. It never
occurred to me that I could be friendly with him too. I was highly, though
offer him a social hand up. I, too, was a recipient of Barb’s social
around the fringes of the Mac student paper and the drama society, I
discovered he was highly regarded and had a real status within that
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Joan Vinall-Cox
from what he wrote and published in the paper. In 1965 he was the first
environment, he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and he had been the person who
I found out from some mutual high school alumni that Mr. M*** had paid this
very bright young man to mark some of our class’s papers. Where I had seen barbaric
splendour, he saw rampant pollution. He marked severely, being young and passionate.
I understand why he responded as he did, but now I wonder why I accepted his opinion
The Ontario Council of Teachers of English had a journal, indirections, and I was
published there a number of times. My first article, “Bridging Between Student and
Teacher”, (1986) was about using peer group editing groups and interviews with the
teacher for teaching writing. I used the story about my piece of writing on the Hamilton
Skyway to explain and support this approach. In the middle of the article, in my
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Following the Thread
I wrote the article the excerpt above is from using an early word-processing
application, the Bank Street Writer, and since that time I have used some word-
processing package for all the prose I have ever had published and all the academic
writing that I have done. Currently I use MS Word, the designated word processing
software in my institution.
Ariadne Speaks
This tiny piece of amber with its frozen memories was part of a necklace I made
when I first started exploring the labyrinth. Now I tie it into my cord, part of my new
As I wrote “Bridging Between Student and Teacher”, (1986), I was exploring both
write, and as a teacher seeking to extend both her writing and her teaching skills,
Illuminal Voice
I clearly remember my delight in writing the original piece about the Hamilton
Skyway, and I know that the grade I received strongly affected my attitude toward my
writing. The idea that I could not expect people to appreciate what I had written was
highly reinforced. It has been a hard lesson to overcome, and I only really became more
comfortable about letting others see my writing when I found a nonjudgmental space.
When I found what it was like to have people read my writing with the intention
writing with a small group at the Sheridan Writing Institute in the Eighties, and with a
small group of colleagues after, I began to understand that what I wrote to please me
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Joan Vinall-Cox
could also please others. I had found my public voice, which you see examples of in my
Published Voice.
The Sheridan Summer Institute of Writing, led by Dr. Robert Parker (1986), was a
the experience of developing our piece(s) with our writing group; and
the experience of then ‘publishing’ them by reading them to the full class,
organized it, not realizing I was actually ready to learn theory about writing and
teaching. I had close to 20 years of teaching experience to draw on and Dr. Parker was
me, and a central moment in the journey this thesis is tracing. Two strands have
emerged for me from this time. Interestingly, only one has been in my focus; the other
has been hiding in plain sight, but is now obvious because of my writing.
50
Following the Thread
The first strand, my delight in theory that can explain my experience and its
application to my teaching, is part of all the writing about teaching I have done since
then, and a central part of this thesis. These pieces display the theories that became my
neighbourhood, which both allowed me to see and name where I lived, and thus to
shape it. I will continue to include excerpts from my published work or even whole
articles as part of the bricolage of this, my arts-based narrative inquiry, just as I have
This delight in pedagogical theory has led me twice to OISE/UT to study more of
it, and it is no accident that I asked Dr. Parker to write an initial recommendation letter
for me when I first applied to enter the Masters program; what I learned through him
changed my direction, or maybe even gave a direction to my teaching life. He was a kind
constructing. I have been looking at my delight in these exciting new concepts I was
learning, but have been oblivious to the tool that was helping me learn them in a deep
and holistic way. I had only a subsidiary awareness of the marginal clues of what was
equally important (Polyani1969, p. 140). What made this summer in my life so fortuitous
was not simply the theory I learned, but the instrument, the tool I had only recently been
introduced to. If the pedagogical theory was seminal, the body that carried and
birthed it was as least as important, and that was the computer and word
processing.
During the Sheridan Summer Writing Institute I used a pen and handwrote my
class notes and the journal we were required to keep. However, I did the writing for my
small group by using the Bank Street Writer, an early word-processing application
developed for students who struggled with writing. (I wanted to learn how it felt to
students as they used it.) Below, I introduce an article I wrote about my first experience
with word-processing.
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Joan Vinall-Cox
Two-Handed Writing
In June 1988, I had an article published in indirections, the Journal of the Ontario
I wrote it, as I wrote all my articles, for no extrinsic reward, except for seeing my
words and name in print. There was no pay, and being published was not seen as
significant in the college system, so there was no benefit to my career. I wrote for the
what I believed. I wrote to “shape [my] li[fe] into a kind of narrative in order more fully to
active construer of meaning in [my] transactions with experience” (Emig, 1983, p. 153).
And I was writing myself into being and agency by finding my first public voice.
Ariadne Speaks
Theseus gave me two gifts, and knew neither of them.
The first was — he let me love him. Creating the cord to guide him away from
the Minotaur he feared (and out of the labyrinth he hated) taught me that I could put
together strands that could guide someone. Later I came to see that I could create my
own cord and guide myself. I thank him for that.
The second was — he left me on an island. I thank him and my sister for that
too. They went off to their fate, which I am happy to have no part of. I followed
Dionysius and travelled toward my own fate, my bliss, and the labyrinth I had fled. As I
mapped the distance from my youth I realized I still had pieces of the cord I had made
for Theseus, and that I could make my own cord. I began to look for flax and a spindle.
52
Following the Thread
I remember the room, with its wall of windows, the rows of tables, the
important ideas. I remember Rob (Parker, 1986), the teacher, asking how
accept a claim that it could be seen in their eyes, and his probing for
something more in the answer. I remember, because this was the beginning
search for “ways of giving form to the ‘shadowy and incomplete condition’
(Schwab 1978 p. 278 - as cited in Pinar) which is the human world” , and
the classroom.
I saw, while looking back, “interrogating” (Mitchell & Weber, 1999) my memory
and this artefact, the article that I include below, that I had been missing something
obvious. The room and physical and mental space plus the teacher and students within
it, gave me deeper, richer understandings about what writing is and how to teach it. I
acknowledge that fully and gratefully. However, what is surfacing as I write this inquiry
is what was hiding in plain sight. I wrote and sought to get what I had written published
only after I began using a computer and word-processing as my writing tool. I came to
the Sheridan Summer Writing Institute after I had started working with students using
the Bank Street Writer. I agreed to work with students using the Bank Street Writer
reluctantly and only because my colleague and friend insisted we should, and there was
using computers with students by learning to use the computer to write as part of my
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Joan Vinall-Cox
beginning to use a word processor for writing, are fundamental to this thesis. Thus,
include my article on writing using a word processor in its entirety for three reasons:
It is a record of both what I thought then and how I “went public” with my
I wore this large amber crystal as adornment before I knew I would come
searching for the labyrinth and the Minotaur. In this guiding cord that I am
now creating, the amber reveals a map from time past, a template for the
quest I am now on. I stitch this amber map into the cord I am spinning and
weaving now, as an artist would stitch a jewel into a wall hanging that she
this thesis.
54
Following the Thread
sounds that went with the letters, and of the Second World War, but no blood
most times a letter had more than one or fragments of bone marred the clean
sound. How confusing it all was! Finally, page. Even the pictures were unmoving
I could see that I was beginning to images, often in black and white and l
recognize words, just like the adults and could study them without a problem.
bigger kids who had been reading to Books were safe, and both teachers and
me. I finally had access to all those parents approved when I read, so my
wonderful stories. I could read books; I self-esteem flourished. Writing was
was on top of it all. different, though.
I had, however, failed to take an I don't remember learning to print, or
important factor into account. They - that next step toward maturity, joined-
adults, my parents, my teachers - printing, but I do remember my grade
wanted me to reproduce those little four struggles with a straight pen. I
squiggles; they wanted me to learn to loved the romantic idea of using a
print, and to produce my own stories. I straight pen and could hardly wait to be
thought that the recognizing part had granted this privilege. The teacher
been difficult to learn; the reproduction showed us perfect examples of written
part turned out to be far harder. words on the blackboard, using the full
I can't remember a time, once the two lines for the big letters and the
initial struggle was over, when reading single line for the little letters. I worked
wasn't easy. From the time reading away on my paper with the blue and
came into focus for me, I didn't see pink lines, struggling to match the
squiggles, or letters, or words, or even teacher's perfection. I was taking so
paragraphs any more ~ I swam in the long to learn how to copy her perfect
meanings. I wasn't left with phrases or blackboard writing onto my page that it
logical arguments, but with the images I was depressing. Only the thought of
had built, the emotions I had felt, and achieving that straight pen kept me
the “sense" of the book. It was never going.
work; each book was an opportunity for Looking back, I have no idea why I
pleasure. I loved reading. had to learn to write using a straight
Printed books were regular, neat in pen - it was of no use whatsoever, but
appearance, and predictable in format, we had to learn to use a straight pen
even when the stories were explosively before we were allowed to use a
new and exciting. Anne's passionate fountain pen or a ballpoint. It was the
anger with Gilbert came into my mind, RULE. And what a pain using a straight
but the book and the page remained pen was; it almost put me off writing
neat and calm. I read about the horrors permanently.
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Joan Vinall-Cox
Finally, I got my straight pen and my job! So boring, in fact, that I often made
inkpot filled with dark blue ink. Now I careless mistakes while I was recopying.
would write. It wasn't quite the thrill I The impact, the status, of the neat page
had imagined. I worked hard but my constantly escaped me. Despite the joy I
letters looked big and awkward, and the sometimes experienced of getting lost
frequent scratches and blots depressed in my writing, and despite reasonable
me. Writing was very difficult physically, marks, my writing didn't feel successful
and after all that work, the result was a to me. It looked amateurish and messy.
messy-looking piece of paper. Writing A grade nine typing course didn't
made me feel clumsy and inadequate. help, Errors were more forbidden on the
Even after I had mastered the typewritten page, and harder to
fountain pen and was in high school, I disguise. Even that wonderful invention,
wasn't happy with my writing. First of correctable bond, only allowed limited
all, it was still big and inelegant. How changes. You couldn't move phrases or
could I say anything other than sloppy, paragraphs around, and if your spelling
personal stuff in that kind of script? And error required two letters in place of
my third finger would develop a sore one, you had to retype the line, or
spot right where the finger got indented maybe even the whole page. Writing
when I wrote a lot. It was still remained messy, and it was difficult,
distressingly physical in a way reading time-consuming and boring to make it
was not. look as perfect as the printed page (the
I found writing hard work with little only real writing). Consequently I wrote
reward, and I knew it branded me, only in my diary and when I had to, for
revealed me as inadequate. On top of its school or for business reasons.
inelegance, there was another problem Suddenly one spring, I was face to
now that I wasn't just copying out the interface with a computer. I was going
teacher's words, but trying to compose, to teach using a simple (so they told
to put words together to make them me), straightforward (so they reassured
mean something. As I tried to "improve" me), word pro called the Bank Street
what I was saying with my writing, the Writer. I wasn't unprepared. I lived with
page got messier and messier. When I someone who talked and played his way
crossed out words, or used arrows to through computer stuff. I'd earnestly
indicate where sections should be taken the TVO Academy on computers. I
moved to, my work looked worse rather knew some of the jargon and basic
than better. To gain the credibility that concepts. I was even a co-owner of a
should result from these improvements, computer. None of that mattered: I was
I had to recopy my work. What a boring
56
Following the Thread
terrified. Here was another form of randomly all the way through. I thought
writing I would have to struggle with. the printing machine was broken; I
Learning even this very simple word thought I should give up. I thought this
processing program was difficult was another painful form of writing that
initially. I had trouble learning how to I would have to struggle with. I was
move the Cursor, skating a little blip of wrong on all counts.
light around the words on the screen by The Bank Street Writer, a quite simple
tapping or holding down buttons with word pro, opened a whole new road to
arrows on them was completely novel to writing for me. I found myself doing less
me. I hadn't even played any computer work, and having more polished
games and here I was cursing the material to show for my writing time.
cursor. Not only could I correct spelling
The concept of “delete" was foreign mistakes with the delete button and a
to me, too, but I found it an easy one to dictionary, and forget about the borders
adapt to. In fact, delete was the first on my page with the wraparound
aspect of word pro that I really liked. My feature, I discovered other timesaving
typing skills had never been strong, and wonders. I could move whole
I'd allowed them to fade away over the paragraphs using the cursor. I could
years. I was slow at finding the letters, keep lots of half-done work in a small
and I made a lot of stupid mistakes. amount of space on a disk. I could print
"Delete" helped me deal with these out a beautiful-looking piece of writing,
mistakes easily and efficiently. discover four spelling errors, and decide
"Wraparound" is the word pro trait to change three sections, and it was NO
where you never have to hit return as PROBLEM! I simply moved the cursor
the letters approach the right-hand around as required, rewrote on the
border of the screen because the screen what needed to be changed, and
computer moves to the next line printed it up again. I no longer had to
automatically. Initially wraparound drove copy, and re-copy, huge chunks of
me nuts. I carefully hit "return" each mostly correct material. It was like being
time the line of words on the screen freed from a kind of slavery!
neared the right-hand border. (I'd never Writing for myself in my journal, I
heard of “wraparound" and I didn't know still do longhand. The immediacy, even
that the number of words in a line on the messiness, feels right for my raw
the screen was different from the emotions, or my raw ideas. However,
number of words in a line printed up.) the writing I do for my writing group
You can imagine how ridiculous my first and/or for publication, I do almost
printout looked, with lines stopping always on a word pro. I like to sit in
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Joan Vinall-Cox
front of that TV-like screen and stare at I was thinking about. I would surface to
it, thinking. I like being able to start at notice the time with a shock; I had been
any point, at the end of what I've written lost in the joy of writing, in a way similar
before, in the middle, or back up at the to the way I always got lost in my
beginning. I like the transitory nature of reading. Using a word pro, I fell more
what is up on the screen; I can dump it, and more in love with writing.
or save part or all of it. I like the This is not to say that writing,
efficiency of saving chunks of material, composing material for others to read,
in polished or in half-formed state, on a is always an ecstatic experience, or a
small, neat disk. I can have all kinds of breeze. Even with the help of a word
pieces of writing in process, all available pro, planning, altering, editing, and
from the list of files on my disk. I can proofreading are necessary and they
work on a piece for a while, then clear take work. But I know that I have to
my screen and call up another to work work on only what I'm changing, not on
on. There's no limit to the number of all the parts that are already well
times I can play with any one piece of written. And I know that when I print it
writing. And then there's the ease and up, it will be neat and professional and
delight of watching my words appear more of a pleasure for my audience to
neatly on a page as the printer clatters read.
away. The word processor gives me I don't mind the hard work parts of
freedom, and I love it. writing now, because it is work with
It is difficult to say whether I started immediate gratification. I see my writing
writing more often because I had started with no messy marks or errors
to write with a writing group, or whether obscuring it. I feel like a runner who has
I was writing more often because of the discovered that it is much more
ease of using a word pro. Personally, I pleasurable to run with well-made
believe it was a fortuitous combination running shoes on than to run barefoot. I
of both. I discovered the pleasure of am an artist who has discovered her
using the word pro because the medium, her instrument. With a word
pleasure of having an audience led me pro as my writing tool, I delight in the
to write more and more. Sometimes I beauty of my ecstatic word-dancing.
wrote just for the fun of it on whatever I The Bank Street Writer has freed the
wanted to. I would be doing my writing writer in me (Vinall-Cox, 1988).
for my group and I would find myself
swimming along through a story, or
immersed in a description of something
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Following the Thread
Illuminal Voice
Ontario Council of Teachers of English, at how much it prefigures the thesis I am writing
now. I wrote it because I had discovered that I loved writing using word processing
software, and that is what I wrote about then, as I am writing now about writing and
teaching using the online computer. I see, in this article, elements of arts-based work,
narrative inquiry, memory work, and phenomenology, yet I had not at that point studied
any of those approaches. I simply wrote then, and later discovered validating theories
for how I had unthinkingly chosen to represent my experience. Throughout this auto-
ethnographic thesis I ask myself the questions: “How does [my] past experience play
into who [I am] and how [I] teach today” (Mitchell and Weber1999, p. 4)? And that same
pattern, of acting and then discovering that a theoretical basis exists for what I did
I see a pattern that I never consciously intended, but that I am discovering the
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Joan Vinall-Cox
white” mode. I tried again with these changes. It worked! I scanned the article, went
through the process as I now understood it, saved the file as a Word document, and
then edited it. This is typical of my learning trials and adventures as I learn to use the
computer.
I discovered that scanners can read “and” as “arid”, “d” as “cl”, and make other
visual misreadings. The editing took a long time, but not as long as re-entering the
whole text would have taken.
Querulous Voice (Interrupting!)
Maybe it’s perverse of me, but I rather enjoyed the long struggle and
eventual triumph.
There is no way I could have accomplished this task without the support of the
Mac technicians and Jim, so being embedded in an institution with a culture of sharing
and helping was, again, a central support of my learning.
The first time I re-read the article, I did not really “see” the content. I saw it as a
memory piece: this is what I remembered then and now I can question how it influenced,
and how it compares with, the way I describe my memories now. But, as I struggled to
thus “interrogate” this piece of my writing, my construction of myself, what had been
marginal came more and more into focus. I gave you, dear reader, the whole article
because it is the seedbed of this thesis. Not only was I writing about teaching, I was
using the computer and word-processing, and it was having a profound impact on me
inquiry, of arts-based awareness, none of which I had yet studied. Somehow, after I had
written the article above, and I cannot remember how, I found my way to OISE/UT and
the type of research that I was already intuitively doing. This is the crossroad that
Illuminal Voice
scholarly, when I saw on article in the Toronto Star entitled, “‘My Time’ Follows Midlife,”
(Trafford, 2004) I read it. “A new stage has emerged in the life cycle. This bonus period
60
Following the Thread
comes after middle age but before old age” Trafford says, and among the activities she
I recognize myself in her description. This assures me, but doesn’t resolve the
paradox that my arrival at this crossroads has surfaced. I see myself as having stumbled
accidentally into teaching, rather than having known my calling and mapped my way to
being a teacher. I see myself as having stumbled accidentally into OISE/UT and the study
of narrative and arts-based inquiry, rather than having recognized my strengths and
sought suitable education. I see myself as poor at planning, yet I have arrived at the
place I started from almost 20 years ago and am seeing it as if for the first time.
How do I explain to myself that I saw no path when I looked forward, but I can
see a clear and direct path as I look back? What does it say about living by intuitively
Welcome to the neighbourhood. As you can see, it is older and fully treed, with
well-kept lawns, often innovatively landscaped with ground cover and interesting plants
rather than plain grass. I hope you enjoy your stroll as I prepare for your visit, and copy
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Joan Vinall-Cox
Writing Institute led me to. This is the context that led to and surrounds this, my thesis
I have a letter from Rob: he is running the Summer Writing Institute for the
second summer, and I have been invited to assist him. I am delighted to have the
opportunity to learn more and immediately agree. He also asks permission to use one of
my daily journal entries that I had given him the previous summer, as a course
and even messier than usual because I had been angry when I wrote it, and my raw
I had written to vent my annoyance with my husband who kept coming home
from his course in statistics, something I had no understanding of or interest in, and
telling me about his class. He would go into excruciating detail, and I would get
increasingly irritated. While I was ranting in my journal, I had an epiphany. The reason
Jim kept telling me about his statistics classes, whether he was aware of it or not, was so
he could talk through what he had learned. In the Summer Writing Institute we had been
reading and talking about the importance of oracy for learning, the importance of the
learner putting his or her ideas into his or her own words, and here was a prime
example in my own home, and all I had been focusing on was my inability to understand
Right there, in the flow of writing my journal, I had, in writing, linked the
aftershock. I wrote about how writing can engender insights, and this was an example. I
thought it was a rich journal entry, which is why I had originally handed it in. I
remembered how confused and messy I had felt while writing it, but I had felt so alive,
too.
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Following the Thread
I can’t remember now if my journal was simply Xeroxed and handed out in all its
messiness, or if it was typed out and my sloppy handwriting and spelling slips hidden.
In any case, I remember re-reading it and being stunned to see that it was coherent and
made sense. In fact, a number of that summer’s participants said it helped them
understand the concepts. I felt affirmed; they liked and valued my writing voice.
own writing immediately after writing it. One’s (my) tendency is to ascribe the emotions
felt while writing to the judgment. Because I felt messy and ashamed of myself, I saw my
writing as messy and inadequate. And that showed me another reason why feedback
from others is essential for writers. We need the balance of a trusted reader to help us
write.
Another strand for this cord I am creating: midwives, readers who respond, are
needed.
The Sheridan Summer Writing Institute fostered the conception and birth of me
as a new kind of teacher and writer. For the first time I had a voice beyond my journal
and my poetry, both of which were largely private; they were my “inner speech”
(Vygotsky, 1962, p. 131). My “external speech … for others” (Vygotsky, 1962, p. 131)
came into existence through the combination of finding theoretical language for my
teaching insights, of discovering the writing instrument that freed me to “shape at the
point of utterance” (Britton, 1982), and the feedback of an audience who recognized my
(written) voice. This early voice precedes my voices in this thesis, and their singular
My earliest public voice had a deliberate folksy quality to it, very similar to my
speaking voice in the classroom. With my tone of voice I sought to establish myself, as
among those I was speaking to, not in any way separate from. Just as in the classroom,
where I saw myself as a “guide on the side” before I encountered that phrase, so I
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Joan Vinall-Cox
presented my voice in the articles I published for teachers. I had discovered early in my
infatuation with pedagogical theory that many teachers resented and mocked any
mentioning theory, leaving it openly obvious to those who would recognize it, but
writing as a social activity below. I offer these excerpts for two reasons:
writing is created.
Ariadne Speaks
More amber, smaller pieces, that I weave into this linen cord to mark this point
on my journey and help me continue to travel towards the core of the labyrinth with its
secrets and memories. Dadaelus used scientifically made machines to foster the creation
of, and then to contain, the Minotaur. Is it the Minotaur that Theseus feared, or the
power of the technology?
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Following the Thread
they felt that way because they liked responses to my story. By the second
me. week I was pleased when one member
It was a lose-lose situation and the of my group pointed out a gap in logic
hungrier I was for response, the less in my story. He was right, and fixing it
able I was to receive it. I wrote less and helped me reach the story's climax. I
less. Finally, I wrote only on scattered was surprised when I noticed it had
occasions, usually at times of crisis. never occurred to me to be offended.
At the same time as my own writing Only after the fact did I understand that
was dwindling, I was continuing to teach we had always discussed, honestly, what
students how to write. I felt fraudulent was good first. As well, we would ask
as I assured them that they could learn questions if we were confused or simply
to write well if only they did ... whatever wanted to know more. Only slowly, as
the text I was using recommended. First the trust and comfort grew, did we start
of all, I wasn't writing that much myself, to ask hard questions or suggest that a
what did I know? Second, I didn't follow certain area could be better written. We
the text-book structures myself when I learned how to talk to each other about
was writing; I had a variety of our writing, and how to listen. Those are
approaches, none of them identical to important, and usually ignored, skills.
the ones I was teaching. I began to We all improved our writing. I could
develop a fear: what if I weren't really hear the improvements from day to day.
teaching my students anything. The I had never before heard the shifts a
good writers remained good; the weak piece of writing takes as a writer moves
writers remained weak. Were all my red it through the process of composing.
ink and instructions futile gestures? This was another important learning
****************************** experience, as well as a delight. I came
I didn't call it writer's block; I was to enjoy my writing group immensely,
being sensible. Writing was a yearning, for my learning and for the social
a dream that I would get over, occasion it was as well.
eventually. *********************************
Then I took a course, sensibly, on I was surprised, too, at the changes
teaching. people's writing went through. "How did
************************************** they get from there to here?" I would
I was lucky in my group; two of them wonder as a piece I had heard before
had worked in writing groups before returned, changed in a manner I never
and were wonderful at responding, and would have thought of. I also watched
the four of us worked very well cross-fertilization in action as one
together. I found myself eager for their person would try a new form, or another
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Joan Vinall-Cox
new content. after hearing others in the them to be more authentic, less
group write that way. sycophantic. As well, their inner sense
********************************** of how an audience reacts will grow as
As I said at the beginning, writing, they experience a variety of different
for me, is a social activity. I find I need a audiences, and experience for
real, feedback-giving audience, not one themselves what they as an audience
that is only potential or a fantasy. I want need and want.
to know that specific people will be *******************************
reading or listening to what I have Finally, both we and they need to
written. I want, in fact, to find out what I hear each other's ways of shaping
think by writing to people who can writing, and learn from each other at the
understand what I'm trying to say level where real learning happens, in the
because they know both me and my parts of our brains that we can't control
writing style, people I know well enough or monitor. This can occur only when
to speak to in a manner that they can writing is shared while it is still raw,
understand. I am learning what I have to before it has solidified and been
say, and how to say it most clearly, by stamped "finished". When we share
writing to my own specific audience. writing with our peers before trying to
This has a powerful impact on my get it published, we see it as malleable,
motivation for writing and on what I say changeable. In this non-threatening
when I write. More importantly, and this atmosphere (where we all know the
was the point of the Writing For writing is unfinished so criticism is
Teachers course which I took that inappropriate and help is
summer, working in writing groups nonjudgmental) we learn how to revise.
myself has had a powerful impact on Students, too, will learn the habit of
how I teach writing. revision if they get feedback from their
********************************* peers and gentle guidance from their
Even if we have established a friendly teacher before their work is marked. (I
relationship with our students, we are don't mean have their mistakes
still primarily teachers to them. That is corrected for them; I mean quickly show
the role we were playing when we first them where their most immediate
met them; the school is our common problems are so they can improve their
social structure. Consequently both they writing.) As the students see the
and we expect us to respond to how changes they make and experience the
they have written more than, or other exhilaration of successful
than, to what they have written. Writing communication, and see their fellow
for fellow students, for peers, frees students undergoing the same process,
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Following the Thread
For a few years, I taught writing using student choice of topic, small groups for
students’ commitment to their writing was much higher, and they produced more
writing to a higher standard than I had seen students produce when I taught writing in
the traditional style. I learned more from my students too. Not just more about who they
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Joan Vinall-Cox
were and how they thought, though that was interesting, I learned about the world as
they saw it from what they were writing about, and I learned why a teacher must make
space for students in responding to students’ writing. I learned I was not always a good
audience, and sometimes my students could help each other more than I could help
them, as I reveal in the poem that follows. One student’s writing and her fellow
students’ reactions showed me how important it is for students to have more than
simply one person, a teacher, as an audience. I came to this insight through writing a
Artist’s Voice
ask questions:
Against my will —
tears and choked breath,
(memories defeat judgement);
the others all hear, see.
I don't
want her
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Following the Thread
to like me.
I don't want
to tell her;
I want her
to know already.
And I am amazed
The students whom I thought highly of showed their reactions as readers, which
were very different from mine. In this poem, which I wrote to explore my discomfort at
what had happened, I discovered that my reaction was, inevitably, rooted in my own
subjectivity. I saw again that a multiplicity of hearers was needed to help students learn
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Joan Vinall-Cox
When I came to OISE/UT in the early Nineties, after my experience with the
understanding that my writing might have strength and power, that I might be, for some
readers and in the context of some discourse communities, a “good” writer. I have
returned to OISE now in the early 21st century, both to explore how writing gets done
and to seek improvement for my teaching. I came expecting to inquire and write and be
(Re)Writing
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CD (having had instructions before and having the software available on my machine)
and then opened my files on my PowerBook G4, another computer and another
platform. So this frightening task turned out to be a minor chore compared to the many
major changes in writing tools, even within my lifetime, let alone during the long history
of human inscription practices.
Within my lifetime, the tools for writing have changed radically. When I entered
university, handwriting was almost universally used for schoolwork, though some of the
more sophisticated students used the typewriter, as did secretaries in business. Courier
was the commonly used font, though we lacked both the perception and the language
back then to recognize and name it. Currently, handwriting is becoming limited to (for
some) taking notes, first drafts and personal writing such as journaling or diary keeping.
The manual typewriter is a quaintly anachronistic machine, and the electric typewriter is
also passé. For most who write now, writing is almost totally associated with the
another visitor who has waist-length white hair and is chatting about her
child who is married to the child of another one of the guests. She tells us
the story of their romance and their education. The children had married
while in school and then both proceeded to get their Ph.D.’s. They are now
professors at different universities. I listen quietly. Then she laughs and tells
us that, about a month before they wrote any set of exams, they would stop
using their computers for writing, and handwrite all their work. Intrigued,
I asked why. She explained that they believed that they had to get their
hand muscles back in shape for writing their exams, and they also
believed that they thought differently when they wrote by hand than when
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As well as this major change in the tool of writing, the practice of teaching within
One of these changes, the increase in students staying on much longer in school, I will
address briefly. The second, theories about how learning takes place, especially in
writing, and therefore about how to teach writing, I explore through some of my own
learning narratives. The third, the change in the tool, and therefore the process, of
writing, is central to my experience, and I will introduce the basic context of the ideas
that I am addressing about writing and its impact. First, however, I will introduce you to
the context of my learning about how to teach writing both before and after the arrival
The Ontario Community Colleges fill a unique and necessary educational niche,
but their role and how they fill it have not always been widely understood. In order to
give you a fuller understanding of this educational context that is neither university nor
high school, I have included excerpts from a 1998 article I wrote for an in-house college
I have reproduced these excerpts below because they provide a context to this
thesis. I have detailed my views, at that point in time, on the value of the Ontario
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Community College system, how it is structured academically, how its students learn,
and my observations on teaching and learning. I wrote this voluntarily because I felt the
confirm and affirm my place in the educational universe. The content is a description
from inside of the college system; the process can be seen in my choosing writing as a
learning path. The act of writing this article is paralleled by my act of writing this thesis
in that I am using writing to investigate where I find myself, and who I am as a writing
Ariadne Speaks
This amber is yellow like the sun, opaque, not the clear gold that lets me look
into the past it holds. This yellow amber brings the nourishing sun that fostered my
growth into the story being woven into this guiding cord, this art I follow, the making of
which is my bliss.
The Uniqueness of Ontario’s Colleges, thought Ontario’s colleges were like the
1998 — from 28 years teaching in American system of junior colleges.
Ontario’s colleges That has never been true.
What makes Ontario colleges unique *******************************
in the Ontario educational system? The The colleges’ mission, training for
colleges’ mission, the colleges’ employment in a wide variety of non-
curriculum, and the colleges’ students. academic fields, has quickly gained a
The Colleges’ Mission higher profile, especially as the
Until the early ‘90’s, Ontario’s emerging information age brings a rapid
colleges were the best-kept educational proliferation of new types of jobs.
secret in Ontario. Few people outside *********************************
the college system, and even some What is not so clearly understood is
within, did not understand what the that what is taught at the colleges is
colleges were doing and how unique we widely different from what is taught in
were. Most Ontarians, if they noticed high schools and universities, and the
colleges at all, assumed that we were way students learn in the colleges is
simply weak copies of universities for quite distinct too.
students who didn’t have the money or
the marks to get into universities. They
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Joan Vinall-Cox
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have seen students start off diffident or create film sound tracks, or draw
frightened or reluctant then slowly and animated images, or assess injuries with
delightedly begin to blossom as a level of intuition and knowledge that
learners. They have found that in their is almost magical.
program, they are good. Their The increasing standards of the
intelligences are a good fit, finally, and college students for their programs,
they do far better than they used to in their strong focus on learning direct job
high school. skills, and the kinds of intelligences
Gardner says that of the seven they have - all these mean that college
intelligences that he has identified, only professors need to be skilled, not just in
two correlate with school marks. The their program’s field, but in the art and
academically gifted are usually strong in craft of teaching.
the linguistic and/or mathematical ********************************
intelligences. Those who come to It is not enough that we in Ontario’s
college may well have their greatest colleges are recognized as having an
strengths in the musical, visual/spatial, important mission. It is not enough that
kinesthetic, interpersonal and/or we have curriculum content that
intrapersonal intelligences. As a employers approve. We must, if we are
teacher of writing for over 25 years in to fulfill that mission and serve
the college system, I have observed, employer needs, pay much attention
at first with bewilderment, and later and spend much time on the quality of
with the understanding that Gardner’s what happens in our classrooms.
theory gave me, that students who College professors need to be as good
are not proficient in language can be at our teaching as our students deserve;
brilliant in their chosen fields. I have and that is very good indeed. (Vinall-
seen students with weak language skills Cox, 1998)
The excerpts above are from an article published just prior to the pedagogical
and technical change this thesis is about, the introduction of laptops as a teaching tool
provided the medium for my growth as a teacher and have supported my learning about
milieu of the colleges gave me access to pragmatic learning and the opportunity to
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Joan Vinall-Cox
Sheridan was at the forefront of preparing students with its mobile computing initiative,
DELTA3. Consequently as a technophobe who liked to write, I found myself learning and
teaching the basics of communicating using this new tool, the online computer. I was
not a computer insider, but someone teaching how to communicate using paper and
presentations. Thus I approached the tool not as an expert but as a user, and learned
how to use the online computer to help people learn to be users of it.
As you have undoubtedly noticed, I take great pride in the part of the
educational system I teach in. As I identify myself as a teacher, I have also been a
Schooling Changes
Over the course of the twentieth century, the attitude toward higher education in
general has shifted from seeing it as exclusively the reserve of a small minority, to an
expectation that almost everyone must be admitted to it. Describing the American
educational pattern, which was similar to the Canadian, Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery and
Taubman (1995) indicate that, “until 1930, most children had completed their education
when they finished elementary school” (p. 85). In my own time as a youth in school,
mid-last century, I can remember being in one of many of the grade nine classes, twelve
or more, in my high school, yet when I reached grade 13, there were only three classes
Querulous Voice!
status of teachers from the setters of standards that students were expected
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another story.
knowledge, together with knowledge about human nature, how and why people behave
in certain ways, and how we learn. During this time, although the content of courses
changed, the form and style of education remained much the same. Schools became
more plentiful and larger, but teachers and students spent their time in classrooms, with
teachers speaking and marking, and students listening and trying to perform what the
teacher required.
Even the look and technology of the classroom remained remarkably similar:
desks in rows faced the front of a room with its teacher on a dais who used chalk on a
blackboard to make displays that were largely image-deprived. By the 1980’s, it had
become clear that film and television were not going to radically change the classroom
culture, but the blackboards had become green, and overheads had become ubiquitous.
However, during the Nineties, in my role as a college professor, I saw some teachers
begin to mount parts of their courses on Web Sites that they had created, so students
could have access to materials at any time they could go online, thus replacing or
supplementing course notes. Then, in my college, the “mobile initiative” meant that
some programs required that all their students be on laptops. Consequently, I saw some
students to work in groups. Simultaneously, the computer and the DATA projector
replaced overheads, film projectors, and television. Even more radically, as more
programs began requiring their students to have laptop computers, their teachers were
courses on a Web site. Suddenly a new school environment existed, and, after the initial
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I will describe, later in this inquiry, the “puddle” tables and classroom design that
were developed based on pedagogical issues rather than rote reproduction of traditional
influence part of the change to laptop use. They asked for a classroom layout that
allowed them to use their teaching theories in the new classrooms being renovated for
the “mobile initiative”, as it was called. These teachers wanted an environment that
allowed for group work as well as teacher-led and individual work. The “puddle” tables,
the soft, non-“techie” colours, and the classroom layout were all chosen and shaped by
part of the story of my experience of the mobile initiative resides in “the architecture of
[my school] and the ways classrooms are organized” (Craig, 2000, p. 38).
Teaching Theories
started, like most college and university teachers, I had no specific training as a teacher.
I knew my subject and a week’s introduction to the college and teaching was deemed
other words, I reproduced what I had experienced. The much later happy combination of
Institute, gave me a wonderful initial experience of teaching theory. Long after I had
discovered intuitively how to teach my students, I found that there was a body of theory
that matched, supported, and expanded my teaching approach, my (the new word I had
learned) pedagogy. This was a central change for me, moving from an unarticulated and
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Illuminal Voice
I use the term “pedagogy” to refer to the art of teaching, even though it refers
etymologically to the teaching of children. Although I teach young adults, and the term
“androgogy” is the accurate word, “pedagogy” is now the term used for teaching,
without any reference to age. In fact, the Merriam Online Dictionary (2002) does not
include the word, “child” in its definition of “pedagogy” as “the art, science, or
profession of teaching.”
There is a large and growing body of theory on language, writing, and the
teaching of writing, largely developed since the 1960’s, although some work from
earlier in the century is foundational. I frequently refer to and/or cite from these
theories as part of the story about what has guided my understanding of both writing
I find myself solidly within the constructivist camp (Kelly, 1963, p. 190),
using an expressivist pedagogy (Allen, 2002, pp. 141 - 176) with my
employment of the process and collaborative approaches to learning, and
my understanding that what students learn is dependant on their goals
and needs, as they define them (Berlin, 1982pp. 765 - 777). I have also
intuitively adopted an arts-based approach (Diamond & Mullen, 1999,
Cole & Knowles, 2001) because of my, and my students’, focus on
design. I have adopted these approaches because of
my experiences as a teacher;
I teach using theories that help me understand how learning can happen for my
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Joan Vinall-Cox
Writing Theory
the Sheridan Summer Writing Institutes run by Dr. Robert Parker (1986) in the mid-
Eighties. Through the readings he gave us, the discussions he led, our own practice of
writing, and our immersion in writing groups, I discovered theory as a map that
described (or failed to match up to) my own experiences. I had previously thought that
theory was simply a way of “showing off” obscure knowledge, and that it was practically
useless. I had never understood that theory was more than an elaborate academic game.
Because the tiny snips of theory I encountered made no sense to me, I rejected the
whole field. However through Parker’s (1988) belief that “[w]hat is needed is a more
put teachers at the center of the picture, as agents of both theory and practice” (p. 36).
Through the Summer Writing Institute, I discovered that theory gave me the language to
my abilities to see and understand the writing of both others and myself, and to help
students develop as writers. The theory I learned through Dr. Parker’s course
leave marks on people’s lives” (p. 70). She pauses to think about where she
has heard the word “Epiphany” before. In church, it is the time after
Christmas, when the Wise Men arrive. (Later, she will use her computer to
look up the word and discover this meaning: “an illuminating discovery, …
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tell about what has happened to them.” (Denzin, 1989, p. 71) Her mind
moves to the Qualifying Research Paper (QRP) she had written 10years ago.
She had loved telling stories about her reading, then unpacking
each story with theoretical references. She sighs gently, and continues
reading her “story as narrative is filled with multiple stories, stories within
pauses again with a growing sense of discovery. That was exactly how she
had organized her QRP. As she continues to read her excitement grows; she
reads what Denzin (1989) says and sees that it does, indeed, describe how
her QRP was structured. Her reading has quickened and her interest
experience.
James Britton, Nancy Martin, Andrew Wilkinson, Peter Elbow, and foundational to
them, Lev Vygotsky and George Kelly, provided the theories that gave me language to
intuitive approach to teaching writing. Indeed, they often gave me language for what I
had taken for granted but never articulated, or ever heard anyone else articulating. I
heard about all of them and read excerpts from most of them in the Sheridan Summer
Writing Institute. I will next review some of their most fundamental theories in terms of
James Britton
Britton’s (1982) categories of writing functions gave me a framework that made,
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Joan Vinall-Cox
that is a transactional function. Students are learning how to use language to get
Now, in this arts-based thesis, I am continuing to learn how to make a verbal object to
accomplish a task.
From Britton, I also learned about Expressive Writing as “the form of written
discourse closest to speech … and a ‘natural’ starting point for beginning writers” (p.
63). This I could see in the journals where the students, or I, could write without
worrying about correctness and coherence. Just writing whatever we were thinking
helped us think further and learn more. So this was also useful to me pedagogically.
Whether I am using journals as part of a reading course, or “free writing” as part of the
writing process in a writing course, I understand the purpose and value of expressive
writing, and am not tempted into obsessing prematurely over spelling or other forms of
correctness. I know that expressive writing is a thinking tool, not a product, and I teach
discourse, and thus literature, in the college curriculum. Not only could students
develop a richer understanding of language skills from reading, but the concept of the
Spectator (p.62) looking at rather than operating through language, of the made object
as different from the channel of activity, aids an understanding of the nature of editing.
To edit, you look as a spectator, not as a participant. And editing is one of the most
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important language skills that all writers need. I understood Britton’s theories through
my experiences of teaching and writing, and his theories helped me to become more
conscious and deliberate in my writing and my teaching. Even more importantly, I was
From reading Britton, I also learned about “Vygotsky’s view that learning to read
and learning to write must be seen as inseparable aspects of one process, that of
mastering written language” (Britton, 1982, p. 62). “Reading and writing and talking go
hand in hand. And development comes from the gradual internalization of the written
forms .… Development comes in two main directions – towards the transactional and
towards the poetic. … [E]xplorations of the outer world demand the transactional; …
explorations of the inner world demand the poetic, and the roots of it all remain in the
Vygotsky
Because Britton often cited Vygotsky, I began to learn more about his theories.
The first pedagogically significant concept I found was Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal
development” (1978), which “is the distance between the actual developmental level as
more capable peers” (p. 86). “What children can do with the assistance of others is even
more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone” (p. 85).
Querulous Voice
me. Of course there is a space where people know a little but not totally,
where we are starting to “get it” but we need some help; I knew that! I am
sure everyone has experienced that. My cynical voice mocked the obvious.
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Joan Vinall-Cox
However, slowly I began to see that the concept of the zone of proximal learning
gives theoretical support to such practices as classrooms where the teacher can spend
time with individual students on a regular basis, the use of cooperative learning
techniques, and the value of group work. It also shows the inadequacy of individual
know more than they can show. So, even though my initially sceptical opinion was that
Vygotsky’s definition of the zone of proximal learning was obvious, I grew more aware
that it clarified my thinking and gave me language. The changing zone also prefigured
that, how I learn and the support of learning communities can be explained through the
concept of the Zone of Proximal Development. Eventually, the concept of the ZPD led me
to purchase and struggle through his Thought and Language (Vygotsky, 1962).
When I read that “[t]he relationship between thought and word is a living
process; thought is born through words. A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and
expressive writing and felt even more determined to teach students to use expressive
writing to help themselves learn. I read more Vygotsky. “Words play a central part not
Vygotsky’s words, and then found myself, as a twentieth century person, thinking
visually in images from cartoons and moving pictures like computer-generated models.
I fall into sleep thinking of Vygotsky’s words and dream and while
dreaming I see a vision of words as rooted into the individual’s and the
culture’s past with silken threads radiating out and connecting to other
dream the glowing words shift, change colour, and size, and linkages and
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these threads that are the words produce ever changing tapestries and these
grow brighter and turn their luminous beams forward onto the tapestries
still being made from our words continuing to move through time. I awake
with this vision grown from and illuminating Vygotsky’s words. And rush to
pour it through my fingers into the words that appear on the screen.
contention that language is central to all learning and should be part of the teaching
curriculum approach. For me this has become computer-mediated learning, which I see
Nancy Martin
Martin’s (1976) focus on Language Across the Curriculum made pragmatic sense
to me. I took for granted the idea that developing language skills was the responsibility
of teachers of all subjects, not just English teachers, because all courses required the
use of language. Martin(1983) says “every piece of writing, and the circumstances that
gave rise to it, represents a network of past experience, relationships and expectations
Ontario community college, I teach students who have already self-selected into various
job-related programs. I usually consult with the program teachers to find out what kind
of writing the students are likely to do, both in their program courses and in their future
jobs. Students are more committed learners in my classes when they come from
programs where the teachers understand and take seriously students’ language needs.
(Students from programs where the teachers ignore or denigrate time spent learning
Querulous Voice
In the college, there are complaints that students still write “poorly’”
despite writing classes, so what’s the point if the teachers can’t teach
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Joan Vinall-Cox
expectation that English teachers will correct them as they speak or write,
and some teachers do “correct” others. Few people seem to pay attention to
what research reveals about how to teach, and how to teach writing. I
watch and see that many teachers, including many English teachers,
Wilkinson
Over the years of reading theory, I have found I learn by “thick reading,” that is
by reading lots of authors writing about the same subject. And having more than one
the mother’s behaviour on children’s language, he creates a model of language use that
has similarities to Britton’s. Laying the two models up against each other increased my
Wilkinson speaks of the conative, the affective and the cognitive uses of
language. His “Conative Use” (p. 105) of language sounds similar to Britton’s (1982)
transactional discourse (p. 53). Wilkinson (1971) describes the conative use of language
to make his (sic) own needs known, to influence others, to gain his (sic)
ends, to make it clear that he (sic) matters (p.105).
Similarly, Britton (1982) says that transactional discourse is language used to get things
Wilkinson (1971) describes the affective use of language as rooted in both the
mother’s response to the child’s feelings, and in the stories and rhymes that the mother
and child share in verbal play (p. 106). This appears to connect with two of Britton’s
(1982) forms of discourse, the expressive where the free flow of feelings pours out, and
the poetic, where language creations are art objects (p. 52). This difference is the result
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of Wilkinson looking at the source of language learning and Britton looking at how
language is used. Different angles of research require and create different models.
Wilkinson’s (1971) category of the cognitive use of language has some parallels
to Britton’s (1982) transactional discourse (p. 52), in that it is focussed on requests for
because it is the use of language to discover, develop and extend knowledge. It is the
adult eliciting from the child information from the child’s zone of proximal
development. “Educare,” the Latin root of “education” means to elicit, to bring out from
within, and that is the aim of this kind of language use, which is a kind of “covert
(1982) and distinctively different. In his later research and writing, Wilkinson (1986)
displays a detailed taxonomy of written discourse (p. 130) and other models that have
their writing. However what I treasure in Wilkinson’s work is his call, in the teaching of
writing, for “[t]he range of writing [to] provide more scope for the development of
thinking and feeling and for moral growth” (p. 137). He makes explicit the moral and
affective dimensions of writing, and recommends that schools include this in the
teaching of writing.
This touched a deep and previously inchoate chord in me, a belief in and
commitment to honesty and compassion in the use of language, and thus in teaching
language. His humanity as well as his scholarship shines through his writings, and I
honour and value both. I hope my own commitment to honesty and compassion in the
Kelly
When I speak of what I honour and value, I recognize that I am thinking in terms
of my own personal constructs and I next come to Kelly (1963) one of Britton’s main
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Joan Vinall-Cox
sources, even as Kelly’s own were Dewey and Vygotsky. Kelly said that “[i]f we stopped
to pay our respects to all the thinking which has preceded and influenced what we have
to say, we would never get it said” (p. 42). However, we build on each other’s work, so I
chose, in this survey of the writings of those preceded and influenced me, to name and
give credit to Kelly as the creator of the psychology of personal constructs. I chose to
the influence of his theory on educational theory, and thus on teaching. This
of de-centering; and
Kelly was at first just another name I learned through the Sheridan Summer
Writing Institute (Parker, 1986) but then Kelly, too, gave me a language that allowed me
to see and understand, and then to see the glasses I was seeing through, my personal
constructs. He said,
Britton, Vygotsky, whom Kelly cites, Martin, and Wilkinson all gave me their
theories, their constructs, and I came to see and adapt my own implicit theories by
adopting (some of) theirs. Kelly gave me a metacognitive theory that showed me that we
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toward a mid-century style rose brick church with a grey roof capping it
and I drive around and behind and I park beside the other cars and nod
at the people I see once a week here and walk towards the door. I go into
the lobby and hang my coat with all the other coats and I speak to this one
who is my daughter’s age and that one who is another teacher and watch
the families cluster and flow up the stairs and watch the old ones using the
railing and I follow the others up the stairs and shake hands with the
greeters and accept the bulletin and smile and nod and move to the pew
where I usually sit and I sit down and feel the movement of people as they
come in and find their places and the two women who are mates stop and
we whisper briefly and I watch the choir form into their double line and the
music changes and people stand and open their hymn books and the choir
slow -marches up the centre aisle and I sing and all of us sing “Holy, holy,
holy,” as the tall woman in the long white robe smiles gently and follows the
Another writer who wrote about teaching writing, gave me more than theory,
Elbow gave me a thick description of the experience of the teacher in the writing
classroom.
Elbow
writing, using as “[his] main source … [his] own experience” (p. 16). When Elbow
described his experiences as a writing teacher a shock of recognition went through me.
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Joan Vinall-Cox
As I read this, I remembered how I had felt watching students looking at papers I
had spent 15to 20 minutes each marking. It was the end of the class, and I handed them
their papers as they were preparing to leave. Most immediately turned to the back to
look at their marks, then many of them, as they left the classroom, casually dropped
their papers in the garbage. I remember a feeling of shock and then a bleak sense of
depression. All that work of mine wasted. Everything I had written, unread and ignored.
Elbow, too, had found that the “good model,” the virtuous approach to teaching
writing seemed to be a rote exercise that students did not appear to benefit from. What
a relief to find that someone else had experienced a similar sense of ennui in his or her
suggested, and described the solution he had found. Elbow said, “it didn’t take [him]
long to realize it would be better if the student could get the experience of more than
one reader” (p. 121). When I read this, I remembered high school and Mr. M***’s
cardboard box on the classroom windowsill with its collection of Grade 13 essays. I
remembered how reading others’ essays had made me feel more accepting of my own. I
remembered the sense of pride I had had at the school reunion when my former
classmate told me that my essay had helped him pass the Grade 13 Provincial
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What Elbow offered me was quite different from what I received from Britton and
Wilkinson, though equally valuable. It was not so much a theoretical model as a sensitive
manual for how to teach and learn writing that was implicitly based on his constructs as
Elbow had no bibliography for me to check citations, but Vygotsky’s (1978) belief
that the “primary function of speech, in both children and adults, is communication,
social contact” (p. 19) could effectively support the use of writing groups that Elbow
advocates. Elbow (1973) describes the need for writers to experience how readers, (or
listeners,) actually retrieve meaning from their written words by saying “[w]riting is a
string you send out to other consciousnesses” (p. 77) (as I do both literally and as a
metaphor in this thesis) and “[y]ou need movies of people’s minds while they read your
words” (p. 77). Clearly, writing is a socially embedded act too, and to learn to write well,
people need to know how their words “work” for / with the recipients, the readers. Our
words are simultaneously a labyrinth created for our readers and the string, the thread,
Elbow showed me that both my students and I needed responses to our writing,
and he showed me how to organize for us to be able to get such feedback. Elbow also
helped me become more conscious of how I thought and behaved while I was writing. I
now even respond to my own writing, and to my writing about my writing, as here in my
thesis.
There are yellow stickies several layers deep extending from the top to the
bottom of the right side of my cerloxed copy and several pencilled notations
on most if not all pages. When he hands it back to me, he leans towards me,
his eyes concerned. I think he’s worried I’ll be upset at all the markings. I
notice that he doesn’t use red ink, but soft pencil, like I do when I’m giving
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Joan Vinall-Cox
make notes.
my much marked-up copy scrunched into the space to the left of the
When I talk to my parents that night, my dad is concerned about how I feel
I’ve marked hundreds, maybe even thousands of papers this way, but
I’ve never had anyone give me this kind of help that I can remember. And
some of my mistakes are just silly. I should have looked up what you do
when you cite multiple pages. Each time Pat has written in the extra “p”, I
appreciate it. Each thing he corrects, I feel gratitude as I make the change.
Sometimes I even read ahead and see where I’ve done it again, and make
He tells me, too, where what I’ve written is unclear and makes
a gift! I am grateful.
Elbow also wrote an Appendix Essay called The Doubting Game and the Believing
Game – An Analysis of the Intellectual Enterprise (p. 147). This essay has deeply affected
heuristic approach. He points out that “the doubting game has gained a monopoly on
legitimacy in our culture” (p. 150) and shows how, by itself, it is an inadequate method
for learning. He says that “[b]y believing an assertion we can get farther and farther into
it, see more and more things in terms of it or “through” it, use it as a hypothesis to
climb higher and higher to a point from which more can be seen and understood – and
finally get to a point where we can be more sure (and sometimes completely sure) it is
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What Kelly (1963) called the “as if” game, imagining for the sake of acting. This concept
subject is not just a new theoretical approach for me; it is the way I have always learned.
It is, by necessity, the way I have learned to write and teach using the online computer.
Elbow lists cognitive and affective character traits that predispose someone to
either the Doubting Game or to the Believing Game. When I read through his list for the
Believing Game, I see a list of what I believe are the characteristics of a good teacher:
I see someone who learns by immersion and curiosity. I also see “soft mastery” (Turkle,
2002), bricolage learning and a description of the pattern of how I learned to use the
important for thinking as the Believing Game, I prefer to operate through the latter.
Having this approach described and affirmed allowed me to think and learn with more
confidence.
and shaped the teaching approach that I was playing the Believing Game with. I learned
first to imagine, and then to persist until I found my way of doing it. I also came to
understand that a teacher who approaches a student’s writing this way, who tries to
help her (or him) reach her (or his) meanings, is playing the Believing Game as a
teaching-learning tactic.
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As I later found, the phenomenological approach has much in common with the
Believing Game. By immersing myself in a learning experience and exploring its nature, I
am experimenting with an approach to find out how it works. Both are “hands on” and
both are useful for those of us who need experience before theory, who learn like many
of the college students, by doing and thinking about what we did and what happened as
a consequence.
Ariadne Speaks
Many were the weavers I learned from, all creating their own patterns, their own
threads to follow. I study their weavings to learn both their patterns and their styles.
And I weave my cord in the hope that it will be a source for other weavers who follow
me. Perhaps the core of my labyrinth will be a portal for them to travel further.
The act of filling the page with the meaning the writer chooses to
put out into the world alters the writer’s relationship to self and
world: The writer becomes conscious of consciousness and at once
defines and transcends a situation. The writer acts upon the world,
and in so doing produces a changed world and a changed self in the
world, a self that takes responsibility for deciding what meaning is.
(Allen, 2000, p. 281)
The major change in education central to this inquiry is the evolution in how we
inscribe the squiggles that denote words and thus meanings. The choice of writing tool
has changed radically in the past 15 years. I believe that this change, using the online
computer as a writing tool, is, in some ways, more radical than the introduction of the
printing press because it affects anyone writing at their “point of utterance” (Britton,
1982). The printing press affected the appearance of written text and its availability
rather than the actual composing of text. I acknowledge however, that universal literacy
is a result of the printing press, and that has had an incalculable impact on our culture.
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The act of writing, of composing written work, is, however, at the beginning of a
another);
blogs (Web logs, that is Web sites used exclusively for frequent
characters); and
What it means to write and communicate with text is changing and these changes will
shape how people write and think about writing in the future. What else is clear is that
when they can write what they want and how they want.
Blogs, which can range in content from informational, academic, opinion, and/or
diary-like, are proliferating on the Web. I suspect that more people are writing for
pleasure in blogs than ever did in private journals or diaries. Certainly reading a variety
of blogs can give fascinating insights into the surprising things people want to write
about.
discussion space on information technology and education. There are many hyperlinks
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As I look at what is known about the nature of writing and the impact of the
the materiality of the physical equipment for writing and the appearance of
writing difficult because almost all humans now live in writing-drenched environments.
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manuals or Web pages, we are looking at text. And many of us spend significant
amounts of our time, workplace or leisure, using computer keyboards to input text of
some sort. How, then, can we find out how different our thinking would be in a textless
Shlain (1998), building on McLuhan (1964), argues that the very physical
structure of our brain is altered, rewired, by learning to read, and the arrival of this new
style of thinking led to our mechanistic Western culture. And both McLuhan and Shlain
see major changes coming in our thinking and culture as a result of developments in
communication media during the twentieth century, changes that Shlain refers to as an
“iconic revolution” which draws on what what McLuhan refers to as “the auditory sense-
life.” “The return of the image in the modern age through the medium of photography,
film, television, and the internet have brought about a sharp rise in the values
denigrated during the 5000 year reign of patriarchy and literacy” (Shlain's The Alphabet
My eye is caught by the bright clear colours on the plasma screen above the
bar where the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine is playing without its sound, its
animation moving separately from the other rock music. filling the room,
and I watch as the cartoon John Lennon moves in the cartoon landscape
and a giant glove is joined by the text “Glove” and then the “G” dissolves
and the word “love” remains and I understand by watching without sound
that these are images with the song … yes, there’s the text on the screen, “All
You Need is Love”, and I watch as the text appears on the screen as a
The lyrics from the music that I can’t hear are there in the text that is
also a character in the visual story, and no matter whether it’ is image or
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believe, prophetic. The global market, just-in-time production, the move towards
interdisciplinary studies in education, and the internet are all easily identified within his
the mid-Sixties, a time I can remember clearly from an adult point-of-view, his ability to
project what was coming, leads me to take seriously his view of the historical impact of
writing.
Linear argumentation, as both McLuhan and Shlain suggest, will be joined if not
replaced by more intuitive, holistic thinking. Taylor, (2000) in an online article called
Editing for the electronic age from McLuhan Studies: Issue 2, described the effect of the
online computer screen with its hyperlinking capacities on the work of editing. He says
“[l]inear thinking is logical, analytical, sequential. Words and ideas flow in an orderly
oversimplify, traditional editing is left brain; electronic editing will have to be right
brain” ("The end of linear thinking", para. 4). This presents hyperlinking as much like the
bricolage manner of thought and composition that Gardner credits Lévi-Strauss with
identifying. Connections are “cemented in [a] nonrandom but not completely foreseeable
way” (Gardner, 1972, p. 141). Ideas are linked, as in art, by intuitive connections that are
neither rational nor irrational, but different from, outside of, beyond rationality, in what
could be called arational thought. Writing and thinking are becoming more a creation or
recognition of pattern and connection and less a demand for a linear so-called rational
structure.
The Twentieth Century is remarkable for the growth in importance of text, but
even more so of image and sound, both of which require holistic, that is right-brain
processing. What the printing press did for text, presenting uniform, identical multiple
copies, the development of photography and of sound recording has done for image
and sound. What would be remarkable would be if this massive increase in the use of
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the eye as image reader and the ear as sound decoder did not affect the pathways in our
children live surrounded by films, music recording and television more than by text. Yet
text is also essential to the creation and dispersal of these new kinds of communication
objects.
Russell, (1997), in his article, Rethinking Genre in School and Society: An Activity
Theory Analysis, says “activity theory traces cognition and behaviour, including writing,
to social interaction” (p. 509). He points at the social, indeed the transactional (Britton,
1982) function of writing. In our culture with its legal contracts, manuals, business
plans, memos and emails, people are always using writing to accomplish tasks, even
when those tasks are the creation of artefacts in alternative kinds of media. We have not
just had our brains restructured by the written text, it is essential to our economic,
cultural and academic activities: the communication networks we live in. So I conclude
that perhaps reading text has physically altered our brains and totally permeates our
lives, but that simply underlines our need to know more about how individuals connect
Reading Text
I read more text than I write, and I suspect most people, with the possible
exception of some academic and professional writers, would report the same
experience. We start learning to read before we start learning to write, although as long
I read some words, phrasings, or genre, say an arts-based thesis, and I start, largely
based style, I read examples looking more closely so I can see how to write that way,
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and I learn to understand the elements of that style in greater detail. My writing style is
shaped by what I read, and by what I then study the style of.
What I read affects how I speak. Reading gives me information to talk about,
vocabulary to talk with, and a way of phrasing what I say. Olson (1994), in The World on
Paper, suggests that “[w]riting … provides the model for the production of speech (in
constituents, namely, words (p. 77). That is, “writing, rather than being an attempt to
represent speech, provides a model for that speech” (p. 78). He further asserts that
writing has allowed us to learn about language. The written record can be studied in
detail and over time, thus allowing us to make metalinguistic observations, and thereby
Olson (1994) also indicates that written words are not enough for clear
interpretation. “The history of literacy … is the struggle to recover what was lost in
simple transcription” (p. 111). Reading is interpretation, but until text became uniform
and widely distributed, the issue of differing understandings of the same text was seen
very differently. The invention by Gutenberg of the printing press, and the introduction
in England of the printed book by William Caxton, followed by the push by Protestants
for universal literacy, led to a new approach to reading. Universal literacy became a goal
in England and Europe so people could read the Bible in their native languages, so they
could interpret it for themselves, or at least agree with the interpretations of their
religious authorities. However printed text was also increasingly useful in science and
philosophy as well as law and business, for the spread of ideas. As literacy grew,
people’s reading also continued to include the traditional forms, poetry and stories,
and business was partially the result of an attempt to ensure that the text represented
the ultimate meaning, the unambiguous “Truth.” But by the middle of the Twentieth
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Century, the idea of a single unambiguous Truth, a correct interpretation, had become a
battleground. In literary studies, what captured theorists’ interest was the reader — “it is
in the reader that the text comes to life” (Iser, 1978, p. 19) — and the consequent
In this focus on the reader, the act of writing came to be understood in the
existence of the publishing industry, and the continuing use of writing by hand for
recording information and agreements by clerks in business and the law were so
can be read, it must be written, and that is an action by the writer’s body (as well as
[A]ll texts, like all other things human, are embodied phenomena,
and the body of the text is not exclusively linguistic (McGann, 1991,
p. 13).
Although the act of writing has used many materials for inscribing on, such as
rock, wet clay, animal skin, papyrus, and wax, paper has dominated as the surface for
inscription, especially since the invention of Gutenberg’s press in 1436. The tool for
inscribing has a somewhat wider variance, including the stylus, bamboo, the quill, the
straight pen, the fountain pen, the ballpoint pen, and the pencil, when writing by hand.
Another material aspect of producing text is the printing press which used replaceable
wooden or metal letters. A variety of recipes were used to produce ink to leave the
markings that were the result of the act of writing, that is, the text.
Interestingly, shortly after the invention of the printing press, the Italian “running
hand” was invented. (Bellis, 2003). So texts simultaneously became more mechanistic in
their public form, and more of an embodied flowing motion in their personal form. In
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the business and legal professions, clerks with “good hands”, or the ability to write in a
uniform and easy-to-read manner were essential until into the Twentieth Century.
About 300 years after the printing press and cursive writing appeared, another
major change occurred, the typewriter. By late in the Nineteenth Century, the typewriter
was becoming common in business. The text produced by typewriters looked like
printed texts, owing to the use of uniform metal letters, but the typewriter could
published. And now there were two distinctly different physical ways for an individual
writer to produce text, the one-handed cursive writing and the two-handed.
Some writers say they prefer handwriting because of its direct physicality, the
learned flowing movements that produce the text with one hand and presumably from
one side of the brain, but typing is also physical and also becomes a highly automatic
act. This can easily be seen by simply asking anyone where the “A” on the keyboard is.
Almost always the answer includes moving the little finger on their left hand, which is,
Like most computer keyboards, mine has the QWERTY layout, just as the old
typewriters I was forced to learn typing on. Many attempts have been made to produce a
“better” keyboard, but once the QWERTY keyboard has been learned, people do not want
to do the physical and mental re-learning that another keyboard would require. The
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Typewritten work, with its resemblance to printed text, soon carried more
authority than handwriting. In fact, in the early Eighties, before I was computer literate, I
paid a friend to type up my poems, which I had written by hand. I wanted “good” copies,
that is copies that looked as close to the appearance of poems in books as possible. My
art, my poems, I implicitly assumed, would be “read” differently if they were typed rather
than handwritten.
Handwriting did not disappear with the arrival of the typewriter, as it was still
useful for making notes and personal communications. However handwriting came into
greater prominence as an art form. Just like factory production of bread made baking
bread a popular art, so the replacement of handwriting by typing led to the spread of
calligraphy. When mechanical production becomes common, the process left behind
becomes not just restricted in use, but seen as a craft or an art form.
Ariadne Speaks
This cord I weave using a loom, though some weavers knit cords together with
only their fingers, as our ancestors did. This loom (loaned to me) allows me to create
more, and I take joy in this beautiful and lucid art. With this hand-loom, I create the
cord that guides me through the labyrinth, that helps me move toward the Minotaur.
words that can be read and/or decoded. While words can be embodied either as sound
or as these visual squiggles, they are always encountered in a material form. As such,
just as different voices create different responses in listeners, different formats also
create different responses, even to the same words, as I hope my different voices show
in this thesis. As McGann (1991) states, “the reading eye is a scanning mechanism as
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well as a linear decoder” (p. 113). McLuhan (1964) and Shlain (1998) spoke of how the
brain reads images and the iconic revolution. McGann (1991) says that all
layout and text. In fact, in graphic design, graphics come first and text second.
In the early Nineties, while Word Processing was still new and before text was
tracing the material movements of a text I had written and submitted for publication
where/when synapses
fired
their ballet
and I thought
a feeling
a rhythm
held in these words
sliding in black
ink
on a page
waiting
for synapses
and time
and fingers
tapping
green life
through electric connections
to a screen
that holds
and releases
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thoughts, words
reconstituted
regained
these words
which bent
and folded -
and, wrapped,
travel
to be studied,
held,
approved.
that prints
these words
for you
to read
now.
(Vinall-Cox, 1992)
Simply by the layout of my words on the page, I have suggested that you read
a related pair of important truths about poetry and all written texts: that
the meaning of works committed into language is carried at the
bibliographical as well as the linguistic level, and that the transmission of
such work is as much a part of their meaning as anything else we can
distinguish about them. Transmission is an elementary kind of
translation, a reenactment (and often one kind of completion) of the
poetical act which the artist sets in motion (p. 149).
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The rigidly uniform reproduction of plain text by the printing press led to the
“bibliographic” or visual aspect of text becoming virtually invisible. One of the most
evident aspects of using the computer as a writing instrument is the level of control the
writer has, as I am demonstrating in this thesis, over the “bibliographic” aspect of the
that prints books only as they are ordered. The opening recounts a story
about how Robert Service’s poetry first got published and I am intrigued so I
control, from font size to the cover design, in the hands of the writer”
(MacKlem, 2003, pp. 32 - 34). I am delighted but not surprised. The technical
capacity only had to be recognized. I suspect over the next five years this
composition theorists, such as Emig (1983), were constructing “models of the writing
Research into perception has made it quite clear that, in part, we see
and hear, as we move our hands, with our brain (Emig, 1983, p. 111).
The act of writing is highly personal, and the first draft is the most idiosyncratic
in nature. Emig (1983) addresses the physicality of writing directly in her article “Hand,
Eye, Brain: Some ‘Basics’ in the Writing Process” (pp. 110 – 121). She suggests that
by hand;
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using a keyboard; or
dictating.
Most writers favour one mode exclusively; although some may use one mode, say
handwriting, for composing poetry, and another, such as using a keyboard, for
composition. However, I still compose my poems more directly “by hand” and I write my
journal with a fountain pen in hardcover bound books. My academic writing, my fiction,
and my teaching materials I compose directly through the keyboard and screen of an
online computer.
Emig (1983) speaks movingly about “the cruciality of literal writing in the
composing process” (p. 111) yet she is open-minded enough to pose it as a question
too.
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Illuminal Voice
I remember that both Emig and Parker were graduate students of Britton and
and sloppy-looking. When I was a university undergrad, I taught myself to handprint the
notes I took in lectures, partially because my printing is easier to read than my writing,
and partially because the appearance of my writing embarrasses me. Many people with
Attention Deficit Disorder are dyslexic, Many are also dysgraphic; they write slowly and
you and others see it as sloppy or ugly. It is also hard to enjoy the process of writing if it
skilled in language use, who find handwriting difficult or distasteful. For people like my
daughter, myself, and others similar to us, composing using a computer, what I call
“two-handed” writing, is a liberating experience. That piece in this bricolage, the article I
published long before I read Emig or dreamed of writing this thesis, called “Two-Handed
Writing” (see p. 54) declares how profoundly releasing of my ability to write I found the
computer.
Most of the current talk about the basics of writing is not only
confused but, even more ironic, frivolous. Capitalization, spelling,
punctuation – these are touted as the basics in writing when they
represent, of course, merely the conventions, the amenities for
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“Process” is the basis of how I write my thesis. It seems self-evident that writing
involves thinking, but thinking occurs mostly within the confines of our minds and is not
accessible for observation. Some thinking can presumably be seen in what people write,
but often this is highly groomed thought, carefully built and then smoothed into a pre-
determined shape, like the academic argument. Sometimes it is not even thought, just
information inserted into a standard format, as in a business memo. Theorists about the
teaching of English Composition have sought to discover how to best help students
think and produce written products in the manner required of them. One avenue of
composition research has involved studying how writers physically write, as described
Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) draw a distinction between two kinds of writing
writer uses only a limited number of “cues for content retrieval –- topic, discourse
schema, and text already produced” (p. 7). Most essay questions in examinations or
content and rhetorical problems “in ways that allow a two-way interaction between
am doing in writing this thesis. However, even knowledge-telling can have an aspect of
material from memory, it is probably the case that putting such material into words has
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Ariadne’s Story
It took me years, years, to be able to see and read this map of the labyrinth
caught in the amber I wore as an adornment — a gift from Theseus, made by Daedalus.
Even once I knew enough to be able to recognize the map and seek to read it, I was
gambling that I could find the entrance to the labyrinth, which was both everywhere and
nowhere, in the core and in the neglected outside.
My father and mother never understood themselves, which is why they created
and hid the Minotaur. Now Daedalus, that technical wizard who couldn’t communicate
clearly enough to save his own son, Icarus, is long gone, and Theseus, whom I had
thought would be my husband, long ago betrayed me for my sister and became trapped
with her in a vortex of betrayals. After their betrayals, I sought consolation with
Dionysus, but he gave me no map, except perhaps, for showing me how to follow bliss.
Yet all of them, by not helping me, helped me to do it by myself. Each had given
me a part of the map, a way to spin and weave my thread, but only I could follow what it
meant for me. I have studied it for years.
where we can find my thesis-home. As above, I teach writing and story structure in the
Ontario Community College system, and, as a middle-aged teacher, I have seen many
I showed you my town, and brought you to the crossroad where this thesis was
conceived. I have displayed the seminal understandings I cherish — theories about how
to teach, especially theories about teaching writing, and I have mentioned the theorists
who most helped me grow as a teacher. I have shared my surprise at discovering that
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once hidden partner which is also part of the creation of this thesis — the computer and
word-processing.
You have been invited to see that I am intrigued by writing. I have explained how
I see writing as part of our culture, how we read text, and how both writing and text are
forms of flexibility” (Bateson, 1990, p. 235) in the structure, content, process and tool of
I invite you, now, further into my artfully designed and created home. We will
start in my favourite party space, the kitchen, as I show you the recipes that I have used
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Do you mind coming straight into the kitchen? Have a seat while I do a few last
minute tasks. Maybe you would like to look at the recipes I have assembled. I have to
confess that I chose the recipes after I went to the larder and found out what I had on
hand. I think, though, that you will find that the recipes fit the materials perfectly. I hope
you can see that your visit has inspired me to experiment with a wide variety of research
forms.
and the question is shaped the choice of the method. What fascinates me, what I want to
explore, is my personal experience of learning to write, and to teach writing, using the
investigate the impact of the online computer on composing and teaching, penetrating
to the core of the labyrinth of what it means to be a teacher of writing in this computer-
fundamental aspect of our lives, in the business world, in the academic world, and,
indeed, in any aspect of our lives that requires written agency. As a long time teacher of
writing in a community college setting, I have seen a transformation in how we write and
started with an understanding of writing that was simply instrumental and have moved
ability to write effectively and well and even artistically. I started from an implicitly
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approach centred on the student’s goals for the piece of writing, including personal
transformation. And I have moved from writing by hand to two-handed writing using a
simple word processor, and then to using the complex capabilities of a sophisticated
publication, and is currently part of the most massive shift in communication since the
invention of the printing press. Now I can create something that looks polished and
“professional” and put it up on the Web where anyone anywhere in the world (with an
online computer and the access programs) can read it. We now have the technology that
allows me, and others, to communicate directly with the world. Beyond this ability to
“publish” in a worldwide environment, our actual writing process has changed as the
tools have changed. Consequently, I believe research into the new process of writing is
required.
rhetoric and composition theories, and the practical in-the-classroom experiences that
allow me to judge their usefulness. That is to say, I know which theories work in my
oriented software, and the layout, communication and navigational skills required in this
language and constantly open to experience” (van Manen, 1996, p. xi), I believe that I
am the best source, as both the subject and the author of this thesis. Thus, I am writing
phenomenological approach.
Ariadne Speaks
What a load of heavyweight, polysyllabic words, but this woman who sometimes
shares my mind is throwing them down on the page with growing assurance. The cord
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has led us to this portal and I am sliding inside the inner labyrinth, feeling my way into
the maze, starting my search for the core, and the Minotaur. I am certain, now, we are
certain, that searching for him is leading me (us) to secrets worth knowing, worth
sharing.
technoenthusiast, someone who has been teaching writing for a number of years using
students must learn to use as their writing instrument, I have a fund of stories about my
educational experiences in using this new medium. I am demonstrating, and revelling in,
the vviissuuaall ppoossssiibbiilliittiieess the online computer adds to text, and I explain how this
construct meanings that might otherwise elude us” (p. 6). With the plasticity the
computer provides, I claim that we can express meanings more artfully, vividly and more
In order to research the shift in writing that is occurring as students and teachers
learn to use the computer as more than a “shiftless” typewriter, I need the artistic
and of the visual aspects of the page and / or screen, to explore and represent what I
have experienced.
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aspects in turn.
Narrative Inquiry
Our questions, our research puzzles, have focussed around the broad
questions of how individuals teach and learn, of how temporality
(placing things in the context of time) connects with change and
learning, and of how institutions frame our lives. (Clandinin &
Connelly, 2000, p. 1)
I will use arts-based narratives of my learning and teaching adventures with the
online computer as the basic phenomenon and method for producing my thesis. Like
Bruner, (1990) I “suppose that there is some human ‘readiness’ for narrative” (p. 45) that
is the basis for how we construct meaning both for ourselves and within our culture.
Storying is a fundamental aspect of being human. Stories are a basic gestalt, the
patterning through which we achieve meaning. Jung’s theories about archetypes (1976)
suggest that we are born with plots and characters already incipient in our unconscious,
and Campbell (1972) too claims that symbols and myths “are the spontaneous
productions of the psyche” (p. 4). Further, like Carr (1986), I argue “that narrative form
is not a dress which covers something else but the structure inherent in human
experience and action” (p. 65). Carr quotes “Barbara Hardy’s remarks that narrative is a
‘primary act of mind’ that derives from nature…” (p. 69) and points out that
our actions constitute narratives for us. Their elements and phases are
lived through as organized by a grasp which spans time, is retrospective
and prospective … (p. 69),
as I show here.
When we have goals that we attempt to reach over time, we are living a plot with
a beginning, middle and an end. To see ourselves as agents existing in time, having
direction and the ability to accomplish significant ends, we inevitably think in narrative
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structure, and to organize what we are doing, we think about our actions in story-telling
ways. Thus, my actions in learning how to use the online computer for writing and
teaching were built through my attempts to achieve goals for my purposes. By creating
can organize and reorganize [those] action[s] for me. Similarly, telling the
story of my life in autobiographical accounts can serve to make a sense
of my life that I have not been aware of before” (Conle, 1999, p. 15).
As Narrative Inquiry invites me to see and create the stories that are the sources
of meaning of and for my teaching life, I will be using it as my foundational method for
Stories
We live in stories:
we recognize a pattern
and embrace the trajectory
we put ourselves into costumes
so the audience knows our role.
We swallow stories
and become them.
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We drink stories
and colour all we see
and feel.
into Bruner’s (1990) claim that “the human condition [must be] interpreted in the light of
the symbolic world that constitutes human culture” (p. 138), I claim Narrative Inquiry as
the approach that will give me both “the phenomenon and the method” (Clandinin &
Connelly 2000, p. 18) that will allow me to explore my experiences composing and
Learning to use the online computer as a writing tool constituted both a crisis
environment was a further challenge and one that became an exciting journey for me.
The sheer novelty and intensity of what was demanded of me made it a story-rich
inform an article, “Going Mobile: A Journey into a New World”, for The College
simply had to reflect on my learning and teaching experiences in story form, using story
as both narrative and metaphor, because of the impact of my learning about this new
I am, as you have already seen, using my published stories together with some
unpublished ones from my personal and my teaching journals as sources for this
inquiry. I also have located some potential stories in my memory. I want to also confront
the “gaps and silences that take on new significance when interrogated from the
perspective of who [I,] the rememberer [have] become” (Mitchell and Weber, 1999, p.
54). These materials will allow me to “fill in the richness, nuance, and complexity of [my
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Another reason why I have chosen the form of narrative inquiry as an umbrella
for my research is that “[n]arrative inquiries are always strongly autobiographical. Our
research interests come out of our own narratives of experience and shape our narrative
inquiry plotlines” (p. 121). I am both the practitioner and the researcher of my
experiences of learning how to write using the online computer; consequently an auto-
Auto-ethnography
as my writing instrument for the purpose of composing teaching materials for students
also being taught how to write using an online computer. Thus it is a subjective journey,
and involves “drawing on personal experience [and] the personal experience of others in
(Denzin, 1989, p. 27). As I am the one who has had these experiences and am inquiring
into them by writing about them, I am writing, as also above, “an ethnographic
statement which writes the ethnographer [me] into the text in an autobiographic
manner” (p. 34). That is, I am writing a “descriptive and interpretive” (p. 34) auto-
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(p. 112) knowing that “[t]he object of a self-narrative [is] not its fit to some ‘hidden’
reality but its achievement of ‘external and internal coherence, liveability, and
I am the author constructing this tale, the adventurer at the centre, and the spectator
conscious about how I tell my story/(ies). Ulmer (2003) speaks of “(my)story” where “one
simply documents the external details of any situation that has persisted in one's
issues: guiding metaphor and narrative voice” (p. 17). My “narrative voice” emerges as a
polyvocal chorus of voices. They sing my discoveries, allowing me the playful freedom to
create the richest version of my tale, and allowing me to most fully exploit the
potentialities of the computer as a writing instrument. I seek to show, not simply tell,
the reader why I delight in using the computer for my purposes, in my way.
My Guiding Metaphors
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I use two guiding metaphors. In the first, I represent my thesis as a home that I
have invited the reader to enter as my guest. In this metaphor, I see my text as
entertainment and sustenance, and the act of writing as creating an environment where I
am the reader’s host. The second metaphor I use is a literary allusion, that of the myth
of the Minotaur in the labyrinth. With this I suggest a need to transgress the traditional
story. I intend, by comparing writing using the computer to the effect of the Minotaur in
the labyrinth, thus adapting this mythical allusion, to suggest how computer technology
and more as a creative and artistic tool, perhaps with a dark side, but also presenting
bright aspects.
I believe that we need to alter our perception of the impact of computers in order
to recognize that the life form at the heart of the technology is our humanity. The plot I
imagine now is a transformative, happy-ending story where this new union, the animal-
human at the centre of the technological labyrinth, has life-affirming gifts for those who
Arts-Based Inquiry
explanation for the effectiveness of arts-based inquiry, drawn from a major paper I
wrote for Professor Jean Mason’s course, Writing Matters: Theoretical and Practical
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Models for the Study and Teaching of Writing, which I took in the spring of 2003. The
paper itself was based on my experiences in Professor Patrick Diamond’s course, Arts-
Based Teacher Development, which I had taken in the fall of 2002. I speak both as
Ariadne Speaks
From the wise woman, I take a gift she gave me, and add these smoothed over
amber beads. I first received the raw amber from a wise man, and strung it on a cord of
my making and gave it to the wise woman. Her gift to me was the time to make the
necklace, and then, when she gave it again to me, the time to polish the beads, to
smooth them out and add them to this, my guiding cord.
Within this iteration, I used voices, but not the same chorus as I am using for the
rest of this thesis. Consequently, the match is not always direct, but the titles in each
box will guide the reader. The original paper has been altered, revised and revoiced, the
An Arational Rationale
(Vinall-Cox, 2002)
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Inquiry is, second I will make clear my definition of transformative, or “deep” learning,
and third, following the logic developed by Allen (2002) to explain the surprisingly
effective impact of his writing pedagogy, I will show, using Winnicott’s (1990) terms,
“True Self,” “False Self,” and “Transitional Objects,” why Arts-Based Inquiry can create
effective learning.
Arts-Based Inquiry
at OISE/UT in the fall of 2002. My initial response was divided. I had trouble accepting
the use of a variety of forms and the playful qualities of some assignments and
presentations as appropriately scholarly yet I found myself spending more time and
energy doing the readings and assignments for this course than for my two others.
observer-self questioned the approach, but my mind-body human complex was having
a different response. This can be seen in the poem with which I opened this section. In
it, I described myself as being in a classroom where my body was relaxed, my mind was
engaged, and, most importantly, I felt “safe and/ i /[could] listen and hear” (Vinall-Cox,
2002a). Once I had written that poem, and then read what I had said and reflected on it,
I knew I had to take Arts-Informed Inquiry seriously because the safety I named wasn’t
This sense of safety and openness to learning, which is something I take very
other classes. Both were intellectually engaging and I learned many “facts;” however, in
both I was occasionally in a defensive mode, carefully hiding from potential attacks. In
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one, most of the other students were distant and spoke at, rather than with, each other,
with little teacher input or direction. In the other class, the teacher at one point raised
repetition. In both classes ‘I’ performed adequately, but always wearing a mask and
body armour, which absorbed some of my energy, thus limiting what was left for
Illuminal Comment
whispering that I am over-sensitive, and other people would not be bothered by such
events. This is true, and both teachers have their student fans, and I respect much of
what these teachers did to guide our learning. However, I believe that all teachers, and
especially those who teach teachers, teacher-educators, should be highly attuned to the
human qualities of their students. Dewey (1963) says: “Any experience is mis-educative
that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience” (p. 25).
The intellectual confusion caused by the loss of a sense of safety is inevitably mis-
teacher was good; you felt safe and could learn. But what did you learn? What is this
Arts-Based stuff and why are you advocating for it? Or is it just the teacher?”
A Postmodern Position
Although it is a cliché, change is the one constant in life. We are currently living
in a world of accelerating change and shifting bedrock, and I think we have only two
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choices: drown or learn to swim. As part of the change we live with, we are also living in
species, we are producing scholarship that struggles to become ever more conscious,
more self-aware. Ours is a postmodern world. Diamond and Mullen (1999) recognize
In the postmodern world, there is no singular Truth, there are only small, local,
We see “signs” and read “meanings;” in other words, we are interpreters par
are seeing from our individual positions, and from our embeddedness in various groups
and/or cultures. As Denzin (1989) says “[n]o self or personal-experience story is ever
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historical contexts” (p. 73). Additionally, what we construct when we read signs is not a
stable, final meaning, but, according to Albertson (2000) speaking of Iser’s ideas, an
that as “reality.” Thus, depending on the moment and mood of the writer who is, of
course, shaped by her or his culture, different stories emerge as different voices speak
Denzin (1989) carries the case for a multiplicity of voices (and/or viewpoints)
further.
A story that is told is never the same story that is heard. Each teller
speaks from a biographical position that is unique and, in a sense,
unshareable. Each hearer of a story hears from a similarly unshareable
position (p. 72).
Denzin points to the unshareable positions of teller and hearer and to the constant
What is new is what was previously covered up. A life and the stories
about it have the qualities of pentimento. Something new is always
coming into sight, displacing what was previously certain and seen. There
is no truth in the painting of a life, only multiple images and traces of
what has been, what could have been, and what is now (p. 81).
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perspectives and the constantly ongoing flow of time as boundaries in what we can
voices, many visions laid down beside and across each other, carrying on a conversation
among the voices as well as with the reader(s). This has profound implications for how
we chose to represent life, whether our own, our cultures, or “Others.” Joan Vinall-Cox
Comment: Is this a quote or my own text?
images, or other forms and/or activities. For Saussure, (1983) the arbitrary nature of the
sign is the first principle of language (p. 67). For Eisner (1997) the form of
That is, we see what we know how to see; we perceive what we have learned how to
perceive.
Ah, my imaginary friend whispers, “Good. You understood enough to write about
it and writing about it, you understand more. But you sound like you “believe,” if that’s
the “right” word, in this postmodernism. I thought you had only disdain for “po-mo.”
I shrug, somewhat embarrassed. “Well, yes, I thought it was just the noise the
Academy makes to amuse and employ itself. That is true. But that was before it started
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“So,” this intimate reader whispers, “How did that happen? How did it come to
Development class. I knew I did not have to declare belief, chant the “po-mo” creed or
anything, and that took away my transgressive urge. Then, when I was not resisting and
my guard was down, it kind of snuck up on me. In the readings or in class something
would make me think of one of my poems, and how writing poetry often helped me
understand a complex issue in a way that logical, linear writing did not. What can I say?
postmodernism.
“I found myself playing on my computer and using Google to find some sites on
postmodernism. I read and thought about it. When postmodern ideas came up in
readings in my course with Dr. Jean Mason, Writing Matters: Theoretical and Practical
Models for the Study and Teaching of Writing, they made more sense to me, and I
realized that I was beginning to actually consciously experience the world through my
own “po-mo” lens. The lack of fear and the freedom from a sense of ideological demand
“More than that, I read in Richardson (1997) that: ‘The part of me that is
seduced by postmodern theory’ (p. 125) and I saw that I wasn’t so much a convert as
enabled by postmodern theory to make sense of my personal history. Even when I was
quite young, I had felt decentred by the use of ‘Man’ for all humans, and the use of ‘he’
for the singular third person, and had questioned this in My Grade 13 English class, in
1964. In the Seventies, I had discovered the lack of acceptance of my voice as a young
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professor, a member of a small minority who was neither a high school teacher nor a
university professor, I often felt invisible and marginalized. So a theory that questioned
forms and explore intellectually was inevitably attractive to me. And it had been opened
up for me in the safety of both the classroom of my poem, and in the safety of playing
“So you tell me, my reader, does that make sense to you? Not the conceptual
phenomenological sense? Not answering yet? That is good. Take your time, and I
certainly do not expect you to see it entirely my way. Take some more time and think
about it, maybe read up a bit on it. You could do worse than go to Google and explore
that way. Or read Richardson’s Fields of Play (1997): “Postmodernist culture permits us
— indeed, encourages us — to doubt that any method of knowing or telling can claim
authoritative truth” (p. 188). She argues that we can “crystallize” (p. 92) ethnographic
material in poems and plays, and demonstrates how. It makes sense of my own
Not there yet? That is okay. We will talk more later, but now, I have to get back to
my thinking / writing.”
I believe that what we have lost of certainty and absolutes in this postmodern
world, we can make up for in increased forms of representation so that many ways of
knowing are part of the scholarly search for meaning, not simply one or two privileged
interviews into poetry can make visible the underlying labor (sic) of sociological
production and its sales pitch (conventional rhetoric)” (p. 144). Using different,
unconventional, forms not only allows us to think differently through using different
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Intelligences, lists seven intelligences, (and later added another) based on specific
biological and cultural criteria. The Ontario public school system, like most of the
Western world, privileges only two of the eight, linguistic intelligence and mathematical
kinesthetic intelligence, and visual intelligence, while virtually ignoring the personal
them. This, even though research reveals that the Personal Intelligences are central for
successful living (Goleman, 1995), and that the other intelligences support learning in
the two chosen or dominant ones (Gardner, 1993). Clearly we have multiple ways of
knowing. It would be rational and logical, if only we could step outside the cultural
prejudices we live within, to make use of multiple ways of representing and to inquire
Constant change and many viewpoints, even within a single person, are the
this postmodern state, with many voices making contradictory demands and pleas.
Several times in my teaching career, change, major change, has been required of me.
Often the change necessitated my learning new approaches, or in the case of the
computer, a whole new way of teaching and of being. This is not a situation limited to
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Teachers who do not understand what or why certain changes are required may
pretend to change, or even try earnestly, but because they did not “get” whatever the
change was, they do not implement it well. I believe Whole Language approaches in
conclusions,’” (Craig, 2001, p. 343) was used to introduce Whole Language and many
teachers felt at an impasse because they could not integrate what they were expected to
Because teachers’ professional welfare, sometimes even their jobs, are at stake,
feeling threatened is almost inevitable when a change either does not “make sense” or is
difficult to learn. Fear is always mis-educative, and thus, always blocks and/or slows
down change. Effective teacher development requires a sense of safety for the teachers
for the real change that is needed to happen. More than union protection is needed to
create a safe learning situation; teachers, and students, need to be able to engage
When we create an art object, or perform an art piece, or explore either reflectively, we
approach its meaning through art forms, and thus differently from approaching
understanding the world and our experience of it. Embedded as we often are in
institutions of learning that are complex “lifeworlds” (van Manen, 1997) and performing
a complex task, teaching, in a deeply inter- and intra-personal situation, we need more
than conceptual knowledge plus safety to make changes. We need the opportunity to
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represent our understandings of what is happening in our classrooms using our own
modes of representation. We can think most deeply and effectively in the modes we are
most knowledgeable and/or most playful in. As arts-based Inquiry allows learners to
think and create in different modes of representation, it allows efficient and effective
and/or develop skills with sometimes difficult and/or resistant audiences. This is not a
linear, propositionally directable process; rather “the curriculum comes to form as art
567). That is, the creation of an art object is a closer match to the experience of
Arts-based Inquiry with its complexities and multiplicities is, therefore, more
change and/or to develop more fully as a teacher, arts-based Inquiry is simply a better
fit for effective learning, and thus more likely to produce the kind of complex and deep
Speaking subjectively, I have found that I feel the need, from time to time, to
and learning, some of that poetry is about my school experiences. Often I find, when I
reread and reflect on what I have written, that an understanding that I was not fully
conscious of has appeared within the poem. (This happened within the poem I included
at the beginning of this section.) Long before I heard the term “Arts-Based Inquiry” I was
Given the paradigm shift that postmodern thought results from and extends, the
increased knowledge we have about how we know and represent our knowledge, and
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“sane and reasonable” (Richardson, 1997, p. 41) approach to teacher development and,
indeed, all kinds of learning. As van Manen (1997) says, “over the ages, human beings
have invented artistic, philosophic, communal, mimetic and poetic languages that have
sought to (re)unite them with the ground of their lived experience” (p. 9). In this section,
inquiry.
An Addendum
effective method of inquiry, was that the art might not be “great” art. I resolved that
concern for myself when I recalled a distinction I make about poetry. I firmly believe
that, for me, poetry is a channel between my subconscious awareness and my conscious
emerging into my conscious perception. Thus, they are deeply personal and very
valuable to me. They are my private poems. However, I view arts-based works as fitting
into the category that van Manen (1997) describes. He says “that phenomenology aims
at making explicit and seeking universal meaning where poetry and literature remain
implicit and particular” (p. 19). Arts-Based Inquiry is phenomenological and aspires to a
different epistemological end than “art for art’s sake.” The question of whether Arts-
Based works are “great” is irrelevant; what is relevant is what I (and maybe others) can
learn with and from them. As Diamond and Mullen (1999) say, "arts-based inquiry is art
pursued for inquiry's sake" (p. 25). And for professional development, like mine.
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Transformative Learning
The place that is familiar can be the place where we are most lost
(Grumet, 1988, p. 65).
the “learner” who sometimes change roles with each other as the dance goes on.
Authentic learning is a deeply engaged practice of puzzling and trying, with moments of
triumphant experience. What do I mean by that? I mean the opposite of rote learning
and directive teaching. I mean the lively moments where people are present and open to
change, and the flow. I mean learning that changes the way the learner is in the world,
so s/he experiences and performs differently as a result of what they have learned.
We are part of a culture that has being seeking to understand how we humans
know and learn for millennia. From before Socrates and onward (Miller, 1988, p. 62 -72)
we have been trying to understand how we learn because that is central to ongoing
human existence. We are the species that learns, and records our learning so others may
learn from and/or through us. I claim that tradition as carried forward by these and
others in the Twentieth Century. Hall-Quest (Dewey, 1963) in his editorial foreword to
declares:
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(sic) thinking and limit his (sic) access to the ideas of others. We see
these channels existing in the form of constructs (p. 61).
In this inquiry, I display (some of) my channels embodied in the voices I present and in
These connections both result from and create “channels” in Kelly’s (1963) words.
And I add that reading is one of the “social realities” (p. 105), and Bruner (1990) has
helped me build my constructs by recording his, as I am also doing here for my reader
and myself.
teacher, I have built constructs there, both tacitly and explicitly. I could not, I believe,
have come to appreciate the power of arts-based work, without constructing that
understanding, that channel, socially, with others I respected and cared for.
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(1997) describes, we are allowing the whole human to learn and grow.
learning, holistic learning, arts-based learning, exploratory pedagogy, and all real
kind of learner, must have a safe space and some freedom in how they represent the
have found that arts-based inquiry gives the kind of safe space needed for teachers and
others to construct their new understandings and transform themselves and their
practice.
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presentation I co-facilitated. I chose purple for this rather simple spiral, with a green
bead and some gold embossing. Although made using the same materials as my fellow
students, this was not truly the “transitional phenomena” for me that it was for them. I
will explain how this all came about more fully in the following section.
A Presentation Moment
The classroom is sunny, and all the students are sitting facing the back wall,
looking at a collection of brightly coloured hanging objects. They are yellow, green,
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markings, and images. Most of the objects have a spiral shape, and some are truly
beautiful. The quiet energy that, to me, denotes focus dominates as one of the students
speaks softly, “I did not really think about a teaching moment. I was having such fun
with the colours and textures and shapes, and that was all, I thought,” she says.
leading this class presentation, I had watched, gratified, as most of the others stood
beside their art objects and told intriguing stories of important school experiences.
However, I smile anyway and comment, quite honestly, on how beautiful this student’s
art object is. She smiles back, and shakes her head. “But I was actually thinking of a
moment,” she continues. “As I listened to everybody talking about their objects, I
remembered one particular experience, and it connected with what I had made!” A kind
of surprised excitement infuses her voice and, after a brief pause, she continues her
story.
I really enjoyed the writing and performance parts. I was surprised at the
level of commitment in the class on the creative project − how long they
took with their spirals and how connected to the topic they were − we had
not explicitly planned to put up the spirals and have them comment
individually, but that evolved and we went with it − and it was amazingly
focussed and on topic. It felt so good, doing the seminar (Vinall-Cox,
2002a).
The presentation was a rich experience for my co-presenter and me, and, as
many of the other students told us, for them. It was an important transition in my
Although I did not have a name for the construct then, my co-presenter and I
had created a “Potential Space” where the other students could create “Transitional
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teaching writing very similar to the one I have found most effective.
explores “the decisive role played by nonrational determinants in the way people learn”
(p. 141). He explains that “[t]he Enlightenment paradigm — that people learn through
the application of reason and logic” (p. 141) not only does not explain the discoveries he
made while teaching his writing classes about how students learn to write, but the
conditions that actually do produce development” (p. 141). I find his analysis compelling
because I have made a similar discovery while teaching writing in the community
Pointing out errors does not improve people’s writing; giving them the
opportunity to write about something they genuinely care about, an audience attentive
to their meaning, and advice when they’re ready does create improved written work over
the long term. It is not “rational” in positivist terms, but it is rooted in a “common sense”
understanding of how people actually develop, and that is what Allen focuses on.
Through his careful collection of student data, he is able to state that “the best way to
improve students’ performance in academic writing was to offer intense training and
experience in personal narratives” (p. 146). Allen theorizes why this is so using
development of the “False Self” and the “True Self.” I follow Allen’s lead in applying
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Winnicott’s theories, but apply them to teacher development through the use of arts-
Winnicott’s Theories
In the healthy individual who has a compliant aspect of the self but
who exists and who is a creative and spontaneous being, there is at
the same time a capacity for the use of symbols (Winnicott, 1990, p.
150).
Winnicott (1990) posits a “False Self” (p. 142) which, in its benign state, is simply
“the polite and mannered social attitude” (p. 143) that gets us through normal social
interaction. However, problems develop when there is a “tie-up between the intellectual
approach and the False Self” (p. 144). When a student, whether a teacher in the position
of student, or simply someone attempting to learn, feels inadequate or fearful, s/he will
automatically, unthinkingly, hide their “True Self” (p. 147) behind their “False Self,”
becoming compliant and imitative (p. 147). “Only the True Self can be creative and only
use of fonts and borders, thus showing the channels that I think through. My “True Self”
understanding, becoming the cord that guides me in my learning quest. (My “Querulous
development, it is necessary to explain how the False Self develops. Winnicott looked at
the early stages of infant development, where the infant is learning how to communicate
its needs and desires as an individual. The infant’s partner in this communication is the
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In seeking the aetiology of the False Self we are examining the stage of
first object-relationships. At this stage the infant is most of the time
unintegrated, and never fully integrated; cohesion of the various sensori-
motor elements belongs to the fact that the mother holds the infant,
sometimes physically, and all the time figuratively. Periodically the
infant’s gesture gives expression to a spontaneous impulse; the source of
the gesture is the True Self, and the gesture indicates the existence of a
potential True Self. …
The good-enough mother meets the omnipotence of the infant
and to some extent makes sense of it. She does this repeatedly. A True
Self begins to have life, through the strength given to the infant’s weak
ego by the mother’s implementation of the infant’s omnipotent
expressions (p. 145).
admire dealing with an infant. Notice the intense focus of the mother, often maintaining
strong eye contact, as she works at answering what her child wants. “Is it this toy,” she
silently asks, “or a session of rocking, more activity or less, food, changing, or
emotional comforting that is wanted?” She will work intensively at understanding what
the infant is inchoately trying to communicate. When this attentive inquiry into the
infant’s desire is continued repeatedly, the infant will learn to expect to be understood
and to have her or his desires and needs met most of the time, and redirected when not.
The infant will begin to feel a kind of agency, that their actions cause results that they
are seeking. If, using your empathy, you can get a sense of this, you will have a richer
Now remember a teacher you learned from. Remember the feeling you had when
you were with her or him and attempting to learn. Thinking of a teacher I admire, I
remember the light touch on my shoulder, the rewards of smiling praise for small
achievements, the sense that the teacher was on my side, the sense of complete
confidence in the teacher and in the teacher’s caring. If you can remember similar
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experiences kinesthetically and emotionally, you will have a sense that goes beyond
intellectual comprehension of how a developing “True Self” learner feels, and what
The mother who is not good enough is not able to implement the infant’s
omnipotence, and so she repeatedly fails to meet the infant’s gesture:
instead she substitutes her own gesture which is to be given sense by the
compliance of the infant. This compliance on the part of the infant is the
earliest stage of the False Self, and belongs to the mother’s inability to
sense her infant’s needs (p. 145).
This time, picture a mother (or other caregiver) whose interaction with an infant
makes you uneasy. What is it you want her to do? What do you hear in the infant’s cry or
see in her or his gesture that you want to respond to, or see the mother respond to? Is
the mother gazing into her infant’s eyes or are they turned from each other? And, most
Now think of a teacher from whom you felt alienated. I remember the two I
mentioned at the beginning of this paper, though the disappointment was mild. One did
not protect the students from each other, and the other momentarily raised his voice.
Both evoked my perhaps overly sensitive False Self who took on the task of protecting
my vulnerable-feeling True Self. Both, quite unintentionally, left me feeling isolated and
potentially powerless. Have you ever felt the anxiety of knowing that you were unseen
and unheard?
Finally, think of being at a meeting where you are being instructed in how to
implement a system that does not match your experience, your constructs, of how
things work in classrooms. For example, perhaps you have spent all your teaching
energy in marking every single mistake in students’ papers, spending hours on this
highly detailed work, only to see the students glance at the final mark and toss their and
your work into the garbage. You feel virtuous, yet bitter and frustrated. Then the
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administrator in this meeting tells you to teach using a different approach, gives you
some confusing and contradictory instructions, and will not, you believe, be in your
classroom or easily available if the new system does not “work.” Which learner self
When we teach according to positivist instructions, we may feel the logic of the
material, but our approach is not logical precisely because it is not developmental.
inevitable that those around us will be present in their False Selves, and, with their
speaking to myself. I also learned to treat my “True Self” somewhat similarly; I learned to
speak my perceptions silently, in my mind, and then allow the words out silently onto
paper (or screen.) Writing poetry and keeping journals were/are my pressure escape
valve.
True Self, and alive and open to learning. (And the pleasure led me to write the poem.)
postmodern thought, I lost my False Self’s transgressive wall that it had thrown up
against it, and then found I resonated with it. I was learning deeply, broadly, holistically
(1982), Elbow’s (1973), and Wilkinson’s (1986) developmental approaches. It was late
October and I felt that this new approach was not working. I was upset but trusted him
enough that I could actually tell him that I was having trouble implementing this new
sense your discomfort when you tried something new, and how they would feel
discomfort themselves with a new approach. He pointed out they would try to pull and
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push me back into the old approach, even if it did not work, just because it was familiar.
impressed by Elbow’s “believing game” (1973) and reminded me of it. By the end of the
conversation, because I felt heard and supported, I was ready to go back and keep on
trying. By end of term, it was clear to both the students and to me that our new
approach was leading to improvement in their writing. A real conversation where I could
speak authentically allowed me to survive the difficulties of change and to adopt a new,
technophobic attitude to someone able to teach computer basics with enthusiasm. She
worked by supporting the approaches I was trying out. When I wanted to teach page
layout as part of teaching word processing, she told me to go ahead. Her support, her
ability to listen and point out my achievements, especially when they were small and
reached only with difficulty, allowed me to develop as a teacher. She was a “good-
enough” manager because she paid attention to my messages, my views, while keeping
both of us attending to the requirements of the school and the needs of the students. In
both these situations, the courses I created were “Transitional Objects,” a term which I’ll
“Yes, very interesting,” my most intimate reader murmurs, “but how does this
connect to arts-based inquiry? That is what you’re writing about, isn’t it?” I hear from
my inner critic.
I ignore the sarcastic tone and answer as best I can. “This section is, itself, an
example of arts-based work,” I point out. “This conversation between you, my imaginary
reader, and me, the writer, is an example of postmodern playfulness and part of a
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to give a “contextually embedded” (p. 28) explanation. These stories are all linked and,
combined with the calls to somatic and experiential understanding, together with the
“works.” I hope now to “crystallize” (p. 92) this understanding, to “provide…us with a
The use and the value of the biographical method lies in its user’s
ability to capture, probe, and render understandable problematic
experience (Denzin, 1989, p. 69).
in a variety of arts forms to invite the participants to explore their own and others’
understanding of school experiences. Our plans and the handout were designed to
gradually increase the participants’ involvement, until they told their own story and
created their own art object. Their story and their art object were their “Transitional
Object,” their “security blanket”, their “potential space” where they could take learning
Winnicott calls the psychic space between caregiver and infant potential
space. This potential space, a creative place for both caregiver and child,
is a place where the “work” of childhood happens. Here we find the
paradox, both separation and connection. In the potential space child and
caregiver are separate, but through creative play, the psyche of the child
connects to the psyche of the caregiver. It is important to recognize that
the space is only “potential” and depends on the “good enough” caregiver
making and maintaining that space. If the caregiver interferes with and
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dominates the space, then the space and its potential are compromised.
If the caregiver is negligent, there will be no defined, protected space
where “the work of play” can happen (p. 151).
I hold that the classroom should be such a “potential space.” If the teacher is
“good-enough,” she or he can hold that space and allow the learners the necessary
“play.” If the teacher neglects holding that space, and dominates or allows individual
students to dominate, the learners will learn to stay in their “False Selves” because they,
quite reasonably, do not feel safe. This understanding of “potential space” and learning
has profound implications for curriculum and the classroom, especially for learning
writing and for learning how to use the online computer as a communicative tool.
As Allen continues,
holding the potential space in such a way that the student is enabled to be in her or his
“True Self” and to create. Sadly, even with a “good-enough” teacher who is able to offer
such a potential space, if the student has been trained in other less beneficent spaces to
feel fear or a sense of inadequacy, s/he will have trouble making good use of the space.
(The great emphasis on expository writing and contradictory notions among different
teachers of what makes such writing “good” causes many students to write, and think,
from their “False Selves.” The pattern among those teaching computer applications to
have students perform a rote copy of an already created project similarly evokes
students’ “False Selves.”) That is why Allen advocates personal narratives for his
expressivist pedagogy. That is why I advocate arts-based projects for teaching computer
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applications, and arts-based inquiries to promote the development of teachers and their
If teachers (as well a students) are freed up in the kinds of writing and/or
representation work we can do, we can develop more creatively and effectively. If we can
safely play with new ideas, approaches and media, we can use the potential space to
create our own “’transitional phenomena’” (p. 151) (as I am with this thesis) and thus
Finally …
the kind of “potential space” Winnicott (1990) described, and the art objects the
students made were transitional objects that they could think and learn with and
through. The creation of and holding of that space for the participants was my co-
accounts and looking at their art objects, I felt the kind of excitement and pride that a
teacher feels while watching students’ independent and well-developed creations; I felt
crystallized.
oriented, I know experientially what it feels like to see students produce art pieces as
part of their learning, and what it feels like to engage them in writing in a creative
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and learning, and Allen’s use of Winnicott’s theories to explain why writing personal
narratives has such a profound effect on students’ learning of writing, I suggest that the
kind of deep, transformational learning that is essential for teacher development can be
Writing Process
The writing of the section above (p. 122 — 147) was profoundly influenced by
the possibilities provided by word processing. If you compared these pages to the
original paper as I submitted it, you would find some passages were repeated word-for-
word, some were entirely missing, some were altered, and some were added.
Initially I inserted the file containing the paper, and then using the moveable
cursor and word processing’s plasticity and iterative possibilities, I added text, and with
“Cut & Paste” I deleted and moved sections. I changed the font and other aspects of the
original paper’s appearance. Indeed, if we could see traces of this editing on the
physical page when it is printed up, grey eraser marks would cover all of the text and
would intensify over many parts that have been re-visited and altered a number of
times.
This use of a computer-created “object” for more than one purpose has given
rise to a new phrase and a new word in educational commerce. “Learning Objects” are
exercises or examples that can be placed in a number of different lessons and teachers
are encouraged to submit theirs to a “bank,” or collection, from which they will be able
to draw on “learning objects” created by others. “Re-purposing” is a term for altering
and then reusing already created materials, as I have done with this paper. The
computer makes this so easy as to be inevitable.
object, the spindle I used to spin the thread of my own understanding of arts-based
inquiry. This thread is one I am using to weave the cord I use to explore the labyrinth of
my inquiry into the use of the online computer in writing and teaching writing.
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We think and learn through metaphor. Gibbs (1994) says, “not only is much of
our language metaphorically structured, but so is much of our cognition” (p. 5). As one
of my touchstone poets, Roethke (1958), says, “[w]e think by feeling” (p. 413), and
This arts-based inquiry has both controlling and incidental metaphors to “help capture
In Diamond and Mullen’s (1999) “An invitation to an In-quest” (p. 1) they use the
have a different analogue. Like theirs, mine is focussed on a quest represented by the
image of the labyrinth and the dreaded beast at the core; however Ariadne, my searcher,
using the amber map of her memories and the linen threads she spins, is creating a
cord that is guiding her to a new ending. My analogue, learning to use the online
computer, is my research focus. The online computer has been feared and resented, and
sometimes demonized, despite and / or because of its powers, because of the way some
fear it “consumes” the young by offering them all the forbidden (and dangerous)
pleasures of anonymous desire and the possibilities of dark seductions. And for some, it
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argue for, and provide new tools for, representing and inquiring into
educational questions and the teacher-researcher self. [They] float
between text and figure, image and shade, evidence and doubt, and
between ways of thinking that no longer provide a hold on events and
those that are being birthed. In the midst of death-in-life and life-in-
death, we are detectives in-quest and in need of creativity. Although we
feel that “things fall apart: the center cannot hold,” we do not yet know
whether it is boon or “rough beast, its hour come round at last,/
[that]Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.” (Yeats, 1996, p. 187). (p. 7
– 8).
communicative media, exploring the impact of a new technology on teaching and on the
creativity, and so elusive, ephemeral, and plastic in its representational powers) arts-
based inquiry offers me the most appropriate research path. The computer and this
“new vision of inquiry and teacher development” (p. 8) are remarkably complementary. I
seek to intermingle the labyrinth and the Minotaur (my metaphoric image drawn from
Classical Greek mythology which comes from the beginnings of our academic culture)
with the new technology and the postmodern context of my current classrooms. I
believe that:
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I am writing about my own experiences in a form I find compelling and with a tool I find
both familiar and exciting. I understand that I am also creating an “intimate space” for
this representation of my life, an intimate space that readers can visit, an intimate space
approach is central so I can work richly with the experiences I study. As I practice my art
with words and exploring with words, I also explore hermeneutics and phenomenology
lifeworld in order to see the pedagogic significance of situations” (van Manen, 1997, p.
(1990) points out, "[t]he self of the researcher is present throughout the process and,
while understanding the phenomenon with increasing depth, the researcher also
that will guide her onwards through the labyrinth. She is being buffeted by
the winds of unwelcome change and the swinging weight of worry. Nastily
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hatched changes for her husband’s employment, academic problems for her
dense fog that slows her down and scatters her thoughts.
Can she, should she, wrap herself in her (re)search to achieve rescue
from this noxious time? She reaches into her memory of music, and takes
advice from Gladys Knight and the Pips. What she must do is to “Keep on
keeping on.”
phenomenologists, Moustakas and van Manen (1997). As van Manen (1997) explains:
This approach fits well with Narrative Inquiry and auto-ethnography especially in
the first three points and the fifth and sixth. The fourth point concerning writing and
rewriting and the structural aspects of the sixth point deserve separate consideration, in
the world. “Good interpretation shows the connection between experience and
expression” (Smith, 1999, p. 31). The online computer presents a rich array of new
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computer, to create a thesis that shows that “[u]nderstanding that which confronts [me]
which is already in [me] through past experience” (Smith, 1999, p. 33). My experiences
with, and feelings about, writing and the appearance of the written word have shaped
my learning of how to use the computer for writing, and my experience as a teacher
teaching writing have led me to see how the computer and the Web could contribute to
experiences, I am telling stories and reflecting on them. I am doing this with words, with
text. Consequently, I am aware of the need for “a deep attentiveness to language itself,
to notice how one uses it and how others use it” (Smith, 1999, p. 33). Accordingly,
I call on my memory. As Mitchell and Weber (1999) use the term, I am working within a
“pedagogy of reinvention … studying [my] own experience with the insight and
Semiotics
[T]he very languages and constructs I use to think about the world
are themselves very much of the world itself (Smith, 1999, p. 45).
something like “the last man alive will spend his last hours searching for his wife and
children.” This statement was in a context that used the term “man” as a generic term
for human beings. I was puzzled because it was clear to me, a female, that the generic
should include the female (slightly more than) half of the human population, yet it didn’t
seem to. It didn’t say “spouse and children”; it was clear that the gender of the active
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In the early Seventies, my husband saw and admired Germaine Greer on a T.V.
talk show and bought her book, The Female Eunuch, which I immediately appropriated
and devoured. Her language astounded me, and her ideas often put into words
something I immediately recognized from my own experience, but previously had had
the world in a more sociological and anthropological manner. Her use of boxed quotes,
a style I had never noticed before in a book, was the kind of bricolaged presentation
that has influenced this thesis. The Female Eunuch, to use a term ironically in a manner
that I suspect would amuse Greer, was seminal to my growth in ability to perceive
semiotically.
Some time in the mid to late Seventies, I encountered a book by Farb (1975)
called Word Play: What Happens When People Talk. Neither Jim nor I can remember who
originally bought it, but it ended up on my bookshelves. Every August for a number of
Farb’s lucid writing and vivid examples were a wonderful introduction to the
semiotics of language, and provided a strong foundation for my future learning in this
area. His explanations on how we use language and are, in turn, shaped by language, on
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how we use language for power, or get defeated by language, ours or others, prepared
see that, as a researcher, I am looking at things and behaviours that signify, that mean.
When I write out what I perceive, I create a further system of signs representing the
meanings I chose to focus on. Once I had became conscious of the constructedness of
what I was able to see and how I then constructed what I perceived, I could not help but
Lemke (1995), making an essential postmodern statement, states that “No one
sees the world as it is” (Italics in the original.) (p. 4). He says further that
All meanings are made within communities and that the analysis of
meaning should not be separated from the social, historical, cultural and
political dimensions of these communities (p. 9).
(p. 10), citing those authors with ideas that provide support for my approach and my
words. As well, I invoke discourse communities by the manner in which I write. How I
put together words, and how I manage the appearance of the text signals a complex mix
of social meanings. (I believe any writer, especially any writer in the social sciences, even
added communicative impact that can be created by the visual impact that
appearance;
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I will be using visible words to describe my experiences, and will have to use
Querulous Voice
Wa-hoo! The big words are flying. She wants to show that she’s been
reading. She wants to be let into the academy game. She want to be part of
this “discourse community” (Freedman & Medway 1994, p. 7). Is she showing
off? No, she decides. She really likes pulling ideas into her mind through
words, and finding new words and concepts that help her “catch” and play
with patterns that were just alienating confusions before she read and
I am writing within a form with a history, the research thesis, yet pushing, if not
transgressing the borders of this form. I hope my work will be able to:
Not only am I writing what I know, I am writing from where I know, and writing
the stories I tell and study, but I acknowledge that I can only tell my limited version,
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mind. She sees through her bedroom window the black mass of evergreens presenting
an isosceles triangle from the bottom to the top right of the window; she sees the bare
branches of a leafless tree against the other silver-grey triangle. A black bird flies by.
Some branches move.
She hears/sees the words “The Crisis of Representation and the Tool of
Opportunity” and synapses in her brain stretch and touch, and the connection ripples
through more synapses, catalytically flowing outward, linking and linking.
Now she is awake and filled with wonder. The postmodern idea of “decentering”
(Lather, 1991, p. xix) matches the pedagogy she admires where the students are their
own subjects (Allen, 2002) when they write, and the teacher is shifting between margin
and centre. She thinks of Buber (1958) who knows the closest we can get to another’s “I”
is being radically open to “Thou” and she wonders how this links to postmodern
“polyvocal complexities” (Lather, 1991, p. xvi) and “examining ‘self’ and ‘other’” (p.
xviii).
She is shifting towards “a conceptualization of knowledge as constructed,
contested, incessantly perspectival and polyphonic” (p. xx). And this feels like home,
like a place she started from but didn’t know until now, as the synapses link.
She knows that she is writing an auto-ethnographical account which is
“consciously infused with literary devices, and which rejoices in, rather than recoils
from, the partial vision and situated knowledge of [her] own ‘lived experience’
(Richardson, 1997, p. 87).
She wants to write with a thick, rich rhetoric, and she knows that before the
advent of the computer and word-processing, she would have been imprisoned within
the limited aesthetics of what a typewriter allowed. She couldn’t have been postmodern
before the computer and its possibilities. She wouldn’t have understood so easily that
[a]ny text is part repetition, part creation” (Fairclough, 1995, p. 7) without the moving
power of “cut-and-paste.”
She sees, feels, knows that the computer is the postmodern writing tool, and she
sees, feels, knows that postmodern thought is woven out of and around her
constructivist understanding of pedagogy. Her tool and her task are linked through/in
this postmodern world.
She rises, dazed and excited, and sleepwalks through grooming and breakfast,
eager to sit down in front of her laptop and represent her insights in text.
In the following section, I acknowledge the sources of the meaning I have, am,
and will be constructing. And things are never absolutely clear. I may find out that what I
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through and choose from. Although Richardson (1997) points out “the intertwined
form” (p. 91), I prefer to see them as different voices accompanying me on my journey.
As I travel with these elements in my self-narrative, I seek to “crystallize” (p. 92) and to
experience of learning to write using the online computer, and then teaching students
here, will be cobbled together, woven harmoniously, and / or positioned to allow the
kind of postmodern “multiple and contradictory readings” (Lather, 1991, p. 44) that
encourage the reader to use this “polyvalent data source … to vivify interpretation” (p.
Picture, if you will, baskets filled with different materials that, as the inquirer and
artist, I will sort through, seeking the raw amber crystals that I can string together to
create a thesis of merged voices and memories and years of collected writings, formal
and informal, and course materials. Indeed all those elements that allow me to create a
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bejewelled cord to guide myself through the labyrinth created by this new
communicative tool, the online computer. Here, then, are the labels of the baskets that
teacher of writing;
poems I have written and preserved that rose out of my school and teaching
publications;
the Web site I created partially to support my students’ learning, and partially
paper;
essays;
developmental narratives;
Mullen 1999);
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photos of the spaces I teach and live in, and screen shots of my Web sites, in
some public domain materials from my institution’s Web site, and from some
The primary sources are materials I have created, although some public domain
materials are included in this arts-based autoethnography. I hope this mixed menu
gives aesthetic pleasure and helpful insight to you, as you read, as well as to myself.
This is the larder, and you have seen the recipes. Now I invite you to come and
sit down in the living room and watch this old slide show of my history as a writer.
Ariadne’s Story
I had to learn how to read this map that I was buying with my life. I left my
parents and my role as Princess, daughter of a king and queen, and I went adventuring. I
tried to leave my family for a hero, and found that I had to become a hero myself. I came
to understand that “[p]art of the heroine’s quest is to find her work in the world, which
enables her to find her identity. It is important for a woman to know that she can survive
without dependence on parents or others so she can express her heart, mind, and soul”
(Murdock, 1990, p. 44).
When Theseus left me lost on an island, he was travelling towards his own future
labyrinth, his own inescapable fate. My story is different. I was deserted, wandered lost,
then found a purpose: seeking the Minotaur in a labyrinth by creating a cord to guide
myself with.
I tell my story this way: I was left isolated on an island, and I was lucky: the
fumes of Theseus no longer fogged my senses, and the god, Dionysius, only showed me
the power of following one’s bliss. I had no one, so I had to create myself. I learned to
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string amber on a cord to adorn myself with. I carried my past within me as memory not
as a prison as I searched for the question I knew I must answer.
All of life trained me, showed me how to search for the treasure, though no one
marked the map that would guide me to my treasure. That direction I had to create for
myself.
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Welcome to my Home
Come in. Sit down. Relax. Is the couch comfortable? Can I get you a drink? Is
there anything you want while we settle in and look at my scrapbook? Feel free to
interrupt any time, especially if you have had a similar experience. Here’s the scrapbook
then. I hope you enjoy my comments on the stories. We will get to dinner soon.
Writing is my art; the online computer is my tool. How I have arrived at research
on the use of the online computer for writing is my story in this section. Before
exploring the focus of this thesis, writing and teaching using the online computer as an
instrument, I offer you the second of the strands of my history. Here, while we sit in the
Computer Tales
Indeed, like many citizens, college faculty are just beginning to learn
what it means to work successfully within a society that is
dependent on computer technology for literacy activities (Hawisher &
Selfe 1999a, p. 3).
avoided the computer as I avoided the typewriter, which was the initial association I
made with it. However, when my duties as a college teacher made avoiding the
computer impossible, I capitulated and reluctantly began to use it. I have since learned
about how to use the computer as a tool largely in response to the demands of my
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studies and my teaching assignments. However, in this reluctantly begun journey, I have
learned not just how to use the computer for my writing and teaching purposes, I have
discovered a “renewal of energy” (Hunt, 1992) and a great pleasure in the added agency
Early Times
There was talk of computers when I was an undergraduate in the Sixties. They
were huge, filling up buildings and used only by professors and grad students doing
certain kinds of work. They were for number crunching. In the early Eighties, my
husband came home with a Commodore Vic 20, which I had no interest in. Later he
came home with a PC run by something called “DOS.” When he talked about it, I was
bored and confused. Computers looked like strange typewriters, and were connected
with math, and I disliked both. Then, in the middle Eighties, my English department
acquired a small computer lab and a friend and colleague told our department head that
Picture a small classroom with a wall of windows opposite the door. There are
computers along both the side walls, and back to back in a row in the center. The faculty
assistant, M***, is trained and knows how to turn on computers and trouble shoot. Each
computer is loaded with Bank Street Writer, the user-friendly word processing software I
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have mentioned previously, which has been designed for students who struggle with
their writing. I sit down to write at a computer for the first time. It is like a typewriter
with a black TV screen instead of paper and neon green letters. It still feels like typing,
which I still hate, but I like being able to go back and correct mistakes without copying
I look at what I have written on the screen and then ask M*** to show me how to
get it printed. It is odd that I have to go to the next room to get the paper that has the
words I wrote in here on it. M*** laughs as she looks at my paper. “It’s not a typewriter!
You don’t hit ‘Enter’ at the end of every line,” she tells me, and explains how text-
wrapping works. I have just found out that what these (early) computers show on the
screen doesn’t match the lines as they print out. I sit down and painstakingly delete
every on-screen end-of-line “Enter” that I had so carefully included. This is not much
better than just re-copying the whole thing the way I would have to with a hand-written
Another day, in my role as teacher, I lean over G***’s shoulder and look at what
he has written. His writing is error-ridden and incoherent, but he is willing to work now
that he can make corrections without copying everything over. I suggest a few changes,
and then he prints it up and we go over it again. When I think about what his writing was
like at the beginning of term, I am amazed. He is definitely getting better, and that is
unusual with as weak a writer as he was. I continue to use the computers myself
occasionally. This allows me to get typewritten work, and M*** helps me with any
technical problems.
Illuminal Voice
I look back now and see that I began to use computers for writing and for
teaching writing in an environment with technical support. I have never used computers
for writing and for teaching writing without having institutional and technical support.
My learning has been scaffolded. Even though, as already confessed, in some ways I am
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an autodidact, I like / need the security of support while I am early in a particular zone
of proximal development.
I also see that much that I take for granted now, a screen that matches the
printed page in appearance, for example, was not available in earlier versions of
computers, which made them less “intuitive,” and less easy for someone who was not
technically-oriented to learn.
As the cutbacks in funding start, the budget and M***’s job description are
changed, and now only those teachers who can operate the computers and troubleshoot
them themselves can use them. Eventually, most of the computers do not work any
Despite how much computers helped students, especially remedial ones, learn to
write, we could no longer afford them. Our outpost of computers for writing and
teaching writing closed but, on another campus, other writing teachers kept an English
computer lab open. By the late Eighties, most of the school computer labs on our
campus were still for the students in computer programs, but increasingly other
students had started slipping into the labs to word process or use e-mail. The use of
Jim, my husband, has bought us a PC, and I want to write on it. However, I am
somewhat dyslexic, especially with numbers. We have a DOS system, and I have trouble
with meaningless strings of letters and numbers, so it frustrates me. Every time I want
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to use the (damn) computer, I have to get Jim to turn it on. It drives me crazy. It drives
him crazy. Eventually he writes out the strings of letters and numbers and posts them
on the wall beside the computer. Mostly I can manage from that, but not always.
In the late Eighties, we have a dot matrix printer, and flimsy paper with holes on
the edges, and all the pages linked together with perforations. Sometimes the paper
gets set up the wrong way in the printer, and the perforated part ends up in the middle
of the typed text, and the page break is without perforations. And the printer is so slow.
But it is better than handwriting. I learn where the faster, better printers are where I
work, and begin to take disks in so I can print up my writing. I take a sabbatical to go
back to school, where I have to write letters, journals, and papers. I use the computer
for much of this work, and get help when I need it from the technical people at the
school I teach at. My 182 page Qualifying Research Paper (QRP) for OISE/UT is entirely
computer-generated using an IBM clone and DOS, but looks just like it was produced on
a typewriter.
Illuminal Voice
interest that impels me to learn how to use the computer as a writing tool. Being able to
produce an object, a created piece, an artful creation is both my goal and my thrill, and
gives me the energy to keep on learning. As Dewey (1963) says, “The most important
attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning (p. 48). The visual
harmony that I can produce using the computer’s capacities seduces me into learning
more about how to produce more work in a more highly skilled and professional-
appearing manner
The light comes early now, almost at Midsummer’s Eve, and wakes me
even with my eyes closed and I lie listening to the soft snuffle of my
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husband’s breath as he sleeps and I open my eyes and see the dome of his
forehead and scalp and I breathe in his scent, and my mind implodes to a
single thought: the memorial service today for the husband of a girl I grew
up admiring, now newly widowed. I reach out and gently lay my hand on
In the mid-Nineties in the Curriculum office, we use Macs. N***, V***, and L***
everything is run through little pictures they call icons. I like that. And everything is in
colour; no longer are there green letters on a black background. I like that.
Illuminal Comment
With the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) screen and colour, and the
emerging World Wide Web, a new aesthetic node had arrived. Although most printers
provided only black and shades of gray, and most texts produced were more in the style
of business documents than advertising copy, the screen with its colours and images
was fascinating. Adding the agency of creativity with that colour, those fonts, and
images only increased the fascination. A new tool for arts-based work had emerged.
A*** and B*** tell me about nesting, and show me how to tuck folders within
folders in a logical hierarchical pattern. I like that. I begin to develop training materials. I
see how N*** lays the page out, and I ask her how she does it. She really knows Word
Perfect, and shows me how to use bullets. I like that. I go back and write more.
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The next day I want to use bullets again but I cannot remember where that
command is in the menu. I look, get frustrated, and call out to N***. She yells “Format”
and I find the Bullets command and can continue writing. I like that.
The Curriculum and Instructional Development office and the Macs are my next
growth medium. The visual aspect of the Macs fits me far better than DOS. A*** and
create professional-looking documents. N*** is always there and always patient as I ask
different from typing. I love the neat professional polish I can create using word
processing and the computer. My writing looks “real,” that is, like a book, like it has
Writing Process
I was using Word Perfect, at that time the designated word processor for my
school. Shortly after, MS Word was designated the school-supported word processor,
and I switched to that. The transition was not difficult; all word processing applications
do similar things in slightly different ways.
V*** shows me the flyer. The school has set up small tutorial sessions on various
computer skills. There are a number on word processing; I sign up for Level 1. A few
weeks later, I find my way to the small room in the C Wing where there are 12 computer
stations. I remember when this room was the projection room for the two classrooms
that adjoin it, but now it has been converted to a tiny windowless room for staff
computer tutorials. I choose a seat and greet a couple of the others I know who are also
there to learn. I already have my, a new term, “user name,” which I have to know to get
on the school network. The teacher hands out the work sheets, and we start learning
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This two-hour tutorial is the first of many I attended. What I found particularly
helpful was that I could take the same tutorial more than once. Over the next few years I
took tutorials here in several levels of word processing, in email applications, in Web
browsers, in Excel, in PowerPoint, in HTML and in Web authoring. These free and
frequent tutorials provided a significant way for teachers and support staff to learn how
to use computers, a small chunk at a time. I found them very, very helpful. This kind of
brief workshop that could be booked during work time and in the work environment
gave me, as a learner, enough time to practice and digest what I was learning, and a
sense of control because it was my choice to sign up for workshops as I felt the need of
them.
A*** and I are scheduled to run a training session for teachers up at the Heavy
Equipment campus, and he has let me work on the training materials. He developed the
original workshop, and he wants overheads to go with the handouts. He has given me
the file on a disk, and, with N***’s help, I have opened it on my computer. I know what
to do. I have seen other overheads made this way, and I know what it is like for the
audience if the font in an overhead is too small. I highlight the text and change the font
from 12 to 24, big enough to read easily. If it is 48, only a few words fit on a line, and
that is awkward to read, but 24 to 36 is easy to read and enough words fit on each line.
I use bullets too. After I send the file to the printer, Verna helps me make it into an
My word processing skills are growing. I see the possibilities that the plasticity of
word processing offer. Altering the text size to create overheads that are readable and
even attractive becomes a regular part of my preparation for teaching. I use overheads
all the time now, and the blackboard, (which is now green), only for backup and
supplemental information.
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and sometimes can only get into the room shortly before the start, writing on the
blackboard is not a good option. Besides, my handwriting is messy, and under stress, I
reactions, thinking about how to explain something and writing on the blackboard all at
Can I get you another drink? It won’t be long before our meal; I just need to get a
am one of a group of “facilitators” who are leading other college teachers through a
four-day ISW workshop. “ISW” stands for “Instructional Skills Workshop”, originally
developed in British Columbia for college teachers, as described in a current Web Page:
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doing the first of his three 10-minute lessons. He is in his mid to late twenties; the rest
of us, facilitators and participants alike, are in our forties or fifties. He reminds me of
videotaping the lesson for review and group feedback later. I watch in growing concern
as the young man lurches through his material in an off-hand and off-putting manner.
I have taken the ISW workshop myself, and the ISW facilitator’s training. I like the
format very much. It is practical and hands-on, just like the teaching and learning done
in the colleges. The videotaping and the written feedback are especially helpful. You can
really see what you are doing well in your teaching performance and where you need to
change. I know some teachers come because they are part-time and trying for a full-
time job, and some are new and want some direction. Some come because they want a
tune up, an invigorating renewal. Sometimes, however, some colleges allow managers to
push some reluctant teachers into going. I think that is what has happened here.
The timer goes off and the young man’s performance ends abruptly. Now he and
I go out into the hall so I can give him feedback; the other participants write down their
comments on the feedback form he had carelessly chosen before his lesson. The other
facilitator rewinds the videotape to a section he wants to comment on. As soon as the
young man and I are finished our discussion, we will return to the small group and the
other facilitator and the participants will give him their feedback. Right now, however,
we are sitting side-by-side on a wooden bench, with me angled towards him, and him
slouching with his legs straight out and his arms crossed, staring straight ahead.
This certainly does not feel like a “teachable moment,” but it is what I have. For
some reason I like him, and I want to see him be successful, and I believe in the ISW
format, so I take a deep breathe and start. I have found something to praise, and I tell
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him what I have seen. Then, with very great carefulness I begin to describe the impact of
heels come back under the bench and he releases his arms so the palms of his hands
can rest beside his thighs on the bench as he slumps forward, and I feel that he is really
listening. When he turns his head towards me and makes fleeting eye contact before
Later, during a break, most of us go up to the roof garden. I sit and talk with
him. He has had a really chequered school history, and he has developed most of his
skills outside of school. I listen, fascinated, and ask questions about what he has
learned and how. When it is time to return to the classroom, I hesitantly express some
concern about his next lesson, and what he is going to teach. With absolute confidence,
The next day, owing to some scheduling mess-ups, we are in a different room.
The young man is present, and I am pleased because sometimes participants who are
not happy just drop out. When it comes to his turn, he is careless with the choice of
feedback form, but he has got books and overheads and is clearly organized. Today I
am videotaping, so I can relax a little; the other facilitator will have to find the strong
aspects of the young man’s lesson, and point out what he can improve. I just have to
run the video camera and notice the tape numbers at a significant moment so I can
Today he starts by following the formula we taught for “bridging in,” telling us
about a newsletter he edits and distributes. He talks about how important it is for it to
look professional and readable. He uses a computer, and some kind of newsletter
software. I find that interesting. Then he moves smoothly into his lesson, which is on
never been conscious of before. I do not notice that I have stopped looking for a good
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book that explains layout. Peripherally I notice that the others are highly focussed too.
When he returns from getting feedback, I have a taped moment all lined up to
show. I tell him, and the rest of the group confirms it, that I had no trouble finding a
moment of excellence, because it was all so good. He shrugs casually and then, with
enthusiasm in his voice, distributes extra copies of his newsletter and points out more
layout aspects. We have to interrupt him to stay on schedule and get to the next
person’s lesson.
Later I tell him again what an incredible improvement he made from his first
sample lesson to his second, and I ask him how he learned about page layout. He shrugs
off the compliment, but seems to enjoy it. He tells me there are books around on layout,
and he had just gone out after yesterday’s lesson and picked up this one. I note down
the name, and go to three bookstores before I find it at Pages on Queen Street. It’s
Illuminal Voice
With my discovery of page design principles, I became fully conscious that the
computer was not a typewriter, that the person using the computer could control not
just the words being written, but the appearance of the words in a way simply not
possible with a typewriter, and even difficult with a printing press. A page could now be
designed to greet the reader’s eye as a whole. A writer could shape the page to help
convey the meaning of the words. The reader could be wooed by the appearance of the
computer. As I studied Williams’ (1994) book and looked around me I began to see the
four layout principles, Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity (easy to remember
with the rude acronym the author so delicately reveals), (Williams, 1994, p. 14) all
around me. Printed advertisements were an especially rich source for study.
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what can be done visually with word processing, especially for learning materials. Here
Learning Layout
Sa ns-
The word on the top left has little decorative bits
at the ends of letters; those are serifs, and Times New
Roman is a serif font.
The word on the bottom left has none of these
decorative bits and is quite uniform; Arial is a sans-
writing by wooing their energy through their ability to shape the appearance of their
written work. Many students are prepared to work more on their writing in order to
match in quality the layout and design they create. I take advantage of their interest in
the visual aspects of their work to get them to work on their writing. Now I teach writing
embedded in page layout, and design embedded in learning computer skills. Below is a
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reproduction of a page from my inspiration, William’s (1994) book, taken from her Web
Figure 7: This image of a page from The Non-Designer’s Design Book (Williams, 1994,
p. 14) reveals examples of each of the principles, and shows how they contribute to a
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There is contrast between the size of the regular font and the font used for
headings and there is more contrast in the types of font used. The text is in serif font
There is repetition in the four subheadings; they are the same font and size
each time. The font used for the text remains constant too.
There is alignment in the layout with the major heading, “The four basic
principles” being perfectly aligned with the rule, (or line) underneath and the text for
that section, while all the sub-headings and their text are indented and aligned.
There is proximity with the subheadings having a space above them but being
Thanks to a “student” from the ISW workshop, I have learned to see text
differently. I have begun to see the context of the text, that which is with the text. I see
that, just as words have denotative meanings and connotative meanings, so text has its
own kind of connotations, created by choices in fonts and layouts, that is, in the design
book or author with only minimal interest in its general appearance, although we will
“read” a sense of the book that affects our interest. The first copy of Wuthering Heights
that I read in my early teens had a lurid image of a man and a woman embracing in
apparent distress. That had a clear impact on how I “read” the novel. Browsing, either in
aspect of seeing and touching and glancing through a book often guides our choices.
Interestingly, as ordering books online becomes more common, the online booksellers
have tried to give their customers a simulacrum of this physical experience by providing
an image of the cover of and of some of the internal pages (see Figure 7 above) to
So another aspect of how documents are read is based on the semiotic messages
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L***, V***, N*** and I are chatting. L*** has been talking to a public health nurse
about a problem one of her children is having. The nurse has advised an action that L***
thinks is out-of-date. When L*** asks about this, the nurse responds that it cannot be
out-of-date because it is in the pamphlet. L*** tells us that she does not say anything to
the nurse, but, as someone who creates pamphlets as part of her job, she does not have
such total trust in information found in pamphlets. She will do her own research.
Illuminal Voice
Published texts are artefacts. I know that, but L***’s gentle cynicism reminds me
that people make texts. I feel a “eureka” moment similar to the one I felt in first year
university when I saw a friend’s poetry, and realized that before poems appeared in
textbooks, real people had created them. I now understand that the computer allows
that convey authority simply by their appearance. I realize that the computer is not just
Ariadne Speaks
I am over the threshold, and into the inner labyrinth. The gift of a long life is to
see beyond those who create monsters, and those who use tales of monsters to bully.
Now I am ready to seek to understand the gifts of Daedalus the designer and technician.
Now I seek to direct my inheritance: my mother’s curiosity and desire and my father’s
daring and determination. And because I no longer see the world through the eyes of
Theseus, I can see that there may be another story about the “monster,” the Minotaur,
and I seek him out to learn what I must and can.
The labyrinth itself is designed. Can I learn the design by using my amber and
linen to create a beautiful cord to guide me through the labyrinth?
Ariadne’s cord is this textual artefact which I am creating using the computer, its
pleasures and desires, plus printers and paper. In the following chapter I tell you more
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about how my learning evolved and developed through and for my teaching tasks. I
invite you into my dining room where I will share with you how I learned to create with
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You have travelled through my town and neighbourhood, looked at the recipes
with me in the kitchen, and listened to my stories over appetisers in the living room. Let
us move into the dining room so I can serve up what I have prepared. I hope you take
the time to look at the way I have designed this room (and all my home.) Although I am
not trained as a designer, I have done some reading and I have had some help, a lot
from my students.
Development office is over and I miss teaching students. I decide not to apply for the
next contract. Here is the poem I wrote at that time which both shaped and shows my
decision:
Choices
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I have chosen
the energy intersection,
the point where the performer
and the audience
meet
to build
this timeless moment
and the future.
In this “new” “old” role, as a “regular” teacher who does not teach in the
computer area, I have no access to a computer, except in the students’ computer labs.
The computers in the students’ labs are IBMs, so I avoid them assuming they are DOS,
just like Jim’s computer at home. I want a Mac and icons. I hear of a Mac portable for
sale second-hand. It has Word Perfect, and lots of other software, because the previous
owner had been a partner in a Mac dealership. Jim says IBMs give you more computing
power for the dollar. I say IBMs with DOS give me no computing power because I don’t
lesson on nesting and decide to organize my desktop, the one on the screen, not the
one my computer is sitting on. I begin cleaning up the desktop. I work diligently for
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quite a while, moving icons around. I cannot remember clearly what happened next,
maybe I closed the computer, but I had managed to be more thorough than I had
intended. Two thousand dollars worth of software was gone. I had tried to put it away
My husband and the seller could not believe it. I was abashed. The seller could
not get access to the software to re-load it because he and his partner had parted
bitterly, and the partner had kept the software installation disks. I should have felt
worse than I did, but I only cared about one thing, word processing. As soon as I got
(I do not shrug this setback off and believe that such stories that I have held
nested within me should be recovered and reviewed, so they cannot be “deleted” and
For me, as for the majority of computer users, the computer was initially a
fall schedule will be. Two of the sections I will be teaching need to be in
computer labs, and have not yet been scheduled. This problem needs to be
scheduling office does most of the scheduling, but I do not fit into this
programs
to plan for the fall classes, even though most of us are officially on vacation.
If we can sort this out now, the fall start-up will be smoother.
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with the published of the Ontario Community Colleges’ Vision 2000. Although “[t]he
report advocates nothing less than a major orientation of the curriculum in the direction
of general education and generic skills,” its mandate calls only for a required amount of
General Education, with no specific requirements for separate generic skills courses. My
Communications colleagues and I, having prided ourselves on being one of the best
such departments in the Ontario college system, are shocked when our department is
disbanded. Over a third of my departmental colleagues are laid off, and those of us with
enough seniority to survive, are distributed out to the other departments (called
I provide Communications courses for two programs, Media Arts and Interior
Design.
Querulous Voice
This is a difficult time for me, even though I was not one of those laid
off. I deal with survivor guilt, the dislocation of not really belonging
I still have a job, but now, instead of my consulting with programs and
developing courses to suit their students, I am being told what to teach and sometimes
how to teach it. As an experienced teacher with a Masters in Education and recognition
in my former department as a teacher with expertise, I find this change disorienting and
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conference in the States in her field, Interior Design, and she is uncharacteristically
abstracted. Apparently the use of the Internet for ordering products and for advertising
businesses is growing rapidly in the Interior Design field. Plus CAD (Computer Assisted
Design) is increasingly part of the industry. Later, when I meet with this coordinator and
the Associate Dean, I am told my previous course is being cancelled, and offered a
I am afraid of two things, one is not having courses to teach, and the other is not
knowing enough about computers to teach this course. I am not at all a computer
expert; although a colleague who is a skilled computer user says I underestimate myself.
I believe I am only minimally competent, but I am a strong teacher and I understand how
to teach language skills. I inhale deeply and agree to teach Electronic Communications
This is my giant step into the unknown, the fateful decision that moves me
more deeply into the computer labyrinth. I tell this as an epiphanal story and keep
Ariadne Speaks
The capricious gods told me the price of my lodging was weaving. I had created
a cord by hand before, but that was different, and we were all in another country. I
needed flax and my spindle, and where were they? And where was this new loom I was
supposed to use?
There followed a time of trials, where I found my way with great difficulty, but
found helpers too. So it was a bad time and it was a good time, and all of it was part of
my story.
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At first, it does not appear to have been an auspicious choice. The Mac laptop
that I bought is no longer useful. I have to teach using the IBM system. However, the
Windows operating system has arrived, and, with its use of icons, is similar enough to
the Mac that I can adjust. I sell my laptop, and begin using the IBM system we have at
home, now with Windows. I ask for access to a computer at school, but the Associate
Dean is pre-occupied with other things. I continue slipping into the students’ computer
labs when I can find an open one, but all my papers and books are in my office; it is very
inconvenient.
The Interior Design coordinator specifies that I teach File Management so the
students will be ready for the CAD teachers, and allows me to teach whatever I think
important in word processing, email, and Internet searching, and later, PowerPoint for
presentations. She leaves most of the planning details to me, for which I am grateful. I
am used to doing my own course development, and using what I’ve learned about
being able to adjust the teaching and the content to fit the students. The Interior Design
co-ordinator is happy to allow this, as she values her students’ learning and
performance. Because of her leadership, I begin to once again feel like a skilled
professional and a real teacher while I am working with the Interior Design students.
Manual Production
[A] close observation of the materials, the means, and the modes of
textual production… (McGann, 1991, p. 125).
In Media Arts, I am teaching writing to all the students in a course I call “The
Construction of Meaning.” The students write their own stories, only partially in class
because we are not in a computer lab. I had asked for space in a computer lab, but they
are not seen as something needed in a writing course, so I can’t get scheduled in one.
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It seems obvious to me that the students do most, if not all, of their writing on
computers. From my own experience as a writer, I have come to believe that we think
with our tools (Polanyi, 1969). On the most basic of levels, as almost all assignments
must be typed to be handed in, eventually all written materials will be transcribed using
complete their assignments. And some of them, like me, may prefer to write directly on
the computer without a handwriting stage. However, no computer labs are available for
students read the stories they have written to their small groups for editing advice, The
small groups work on creating ‘zines (small roughly produced, usually Xeroxed
magazines then popular among the young bohemians) with what they’ve written. I do
brief “lectures” about writing and stories and how to give feedback in a productive way.
(Always give positive feedback first, ask questions, and don’t play “English teacher” and
“correct” the writing. Be an audience for your fellow students; tell them what their
writing makes you think of.) All students get their work edited by me before they hand
their stories in for marking. (This leads to them making the corrections I suggest and
learning how to actually improve their writing.) Finally, I reproduce the ‘zines and
distribute them to the rest of the class and each of their program teachers. I see this as
a way to make the writing more “real” by “publishing” it, again hoping to inspire them to
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I am in the Xerox room, looking around furtively. All the designated “layout
persons,” one from each of the small writing groups, have figured out how to set up
their group’s collection of written pieces and some accompanying images so they can be
booklets — ‘zines — that can be folded and stapled in the middle. Each group has a
page limit, and I sat down with many of them to work out the logic of how to layer the
single pages.
page, using columns, and the inside cover and inside back page have to be on another
landscape-oriented page. When I put the two pages back-to-back, or copy them as a
double-sided sheet, I have a page for the booklet. I also showed them a low-tech
alternative. They could produce regular portrait-oriented pages and use the Xerox to
shrink them to half size, and then make up the pages for their group’s ‘zine prototypes
that way. The complication was getting all the pages set up so the booklet would flow
sequentially from page to page. It was much more complicated than I had first imagined,
but once I had worked it out with one small group, it became easy to explain to the
others. All the groups have produced a prototype ‘zine. I am delighted and proud of
their accomplishment.
Xerox use. I make multiple copies of each of the ‘zine prototypes, take them off to a
long, flat railing, and collate them by hand. (My Xerox skills do not yet extend to
automatic collating.) I discover another technical problem: most staplers are not
designed to staple in the middle of a page. I am tired, and I feel discouraged. I really
middle. I remember it from the Curriculum and Instructional Design office. I call L***
and leave a message about what I am looking for. On Monday, L*** returns my call and
tells me about a stapler that you can staple booklets with, and offers to loan me her
office’s. Many, many staples later, the ‘zines are finished. I hand them out in class, post
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Joan Vinall-Cox
them on the program bulletin board, and drop off copies on each of the program
teacher’s desks. I am proud of their work, and mine in helping them write and work
Some of the ‘zines (Figure 8) are fairly rude, but they are by students who usually
avoid writing, and the work is amusing and similar to the underground ‘zines I am
asking them to imitate, so I accept anything not racist or sexist. The teamwork is
important as a future employment skill, and some of the dyslexic students are quite
skilled at computers — a pattern I often see. The students who are limited in their
write by describing, so they can use their visual sense to help them write. I encourage
them to use computers to help with their lexical difficulties. I also encourage them to
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write in a storyboard style, which matches their visual strengths. Some use their
supported in the program. Then politics intervene, and I am told the course is cancelled.
The replacement course is one that does not make pedagogical sense to me. After many
frustrating negotiations, I am informed that I am no longer in that program, not even for
my other course that the students are really enthusiastic about. When I complain to the
Union, they tell me that management has the right to manage badly.
Querulous Voice
supervisor who was responsible for the other portion of my teaching time has
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Joan Vinall-Cox
possibilities. It feels demeaning, but I don’t know what else to do. I tell
the Curriculum, many programs declare that language generic skills are
in Vision 2000 , the paper on college reform. Now I find out how much
my courses myself, and shaping them for the students I would be teaching,
always after consulting with the program teachers to collect ideas about
around learning skills. And the students quickly make it clear they
consider anything other than their program courses a waste of their time.
synopsised on it, in large font so it will be easy to read. I set up small group
time does not work well. I hint a lot about the content before I give
multiple-choice tests so they will learn at least some basic information, and
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that does work, sort-of. I set up short written assignments but find there’s no
time to help the students work on their writing. One student says to me, one
day when I ask why he is absent so often, that this course is not worth his
As I have said before, how the colleges operate and what they are like in Ontario
is not well known. We prepare our students for their chosen professions. We are
pragmatic, and hands-on. Our students study in cohorts, with little contact with
students outside of their program. Once the students have chosen a program, they have
very limited choices in their courses, less than they had in high school, much less then
they would have in university. Sometimes that makes them restless; usually they
appreciate the focus and just want to get on with it. Or so it seems to me.
We are there for the students who want a pragmatic, hands-on approach. We are
cheaper than university; the tuition is lower and often the program is two years long, or
even only one year for the post diploma programs. There are a sizable number of
university graduates among the college students, seeking career entry. I have felt for a
number of years that colleges, and college graduates, and college students do not get
Querulous Voice
colleges compared to the support per student in the universities. I’m pretty
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Joan Vinall-Cox
2003) .
The Web and Google provide the kind of immediate research possibility that
delights me: the information I have found supports what I know but did not have
evidence for.
Querulous Voice
So universities get $6,800 per student, high schools get $6,700 per
student, and the colleges get $4,400 per student, a little less than two
You can see the cause of all the changes in the colleges; in ten years
we lost 42% per student of our funding. That is why class hours for students
are two thirds of what they were when the colleges opened, and class sizes of
40 are average and a growing number of classes are large lectures with a
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that made the colleges so successful initially. And this is why colleges
mention slowing down the economic engine by keeping young people poor
and insecure.
This, then, is the background to my beginning to learn how to use computers for
writing and for teaching. Now we revert to two years earlier and the first days of my
Electronic Communications for Interior Design was the hothouse that forced the
growth of my learning about computers. With it, my students and I learned the basics of
file maintenance;
word processing;
Communications was and is a preparatory course for using the online computer for
online computer, and it prepared me for teaching using the online computer.
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Joan Vinall-Cox
The Topics
What [s]he has learned in the way of knowledge and skill in one
situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing
effectively with the situations which follow (Dewey, 1963, p. 44).
Communications. I know about filing from my early days on the Mac. But this is IBM and
Windows, and I have never been good at filing in filing cabinets. I prepare by talking to
Explorer.) I decide that there are two issues I have to teach, the logic of filing and the
use of the technology. I organize my own files, and see that the technology can be used
to support the logic and the two strands can be taught together.
The students already know how to create folders in Netscape’s Bookmarks. They
know that folders can be created and, if you are “in” a folder, you can create sub-
folders. (This is the logic of nesting that I learned with the Macs, but use now in
Windows Explorer.) This structure I describe as having a few “big baskets,” the top level
folders, with smaller baskets inside them, and smaller baskets inside each of these, until
the file level is reached. I insist the students create a folder for their schoolwork and a
personal folder. Within the school folder, I suggest a folder for each course. Further
automatically uses numbering and then alphabetical order. I will have to stress that, I
think as I jot down my lesson plan. First something on the logic of file management,
while they are still wide awake at the beginning of the three-hour class.
Illuminal Commentary
With each iteration of my courses I found and solved different problems in the
naming and storing of my files. The top level was obvious: a list of major categories
where I had files to save. The second level was any needed divisions within each folder.
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When I got to course levels, I found it logical to in include a minimum of two folders, an
The organizational style that I eventually reached for lessons was neither a
separate folder for each week, nor a simple naming of the topics. I found that I often
changed the order of my topics from one year to the next, and having to search through
each week’s folder was a waste of time and annoying. I also found that I needed to have
all the files for a particular lesson grouped together. My solution was to use numbers
and recognizable topic references. If all the file names for all the files used in the first
week started with “01” followed by the topic information, for example,
“01filemang.doc”, then I could easily find files by both week and topic. And I put a “0”
before the “1” so that it would not be placed after “10” when I got to Week 10. Perhaps
second, explain the logic of hierarchical structuring, using the “big basket;”
with smaller baskets inside, and smaller baskets inside of each of the sub-
baskets;
fourth, run around the lab, looking at everybody’s screen to make sure they
fifth, get them to make folders, first one for school and one for personal,
second, a folder for each of their classes inside the school folder;
I make my notes by hand on lined paper that I take with me to class. I go into my
husband’s study to use his (our?) computer, so I can go through the steps to get to
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Windows Explorer, and type them up in large font for copying onto an overhead
transparency. This part of the lesson is ready, and it is early enough in the term that I
starting with browser bookmarks, through file management to email mailbox folders.
The design of many computer processes replicates others, making it easy to layer the
learning. Stressing this pattern not only helps the students learn more effectively, it
prepares them for their CAD courses, and a future of computer use.
The Tool
It is the mid-Nineties and I watch as T*** puts his computer on a cart; there is a
I have no idea what this means. It is a technical term, and I recognize only that a
“I don’t have one, and I have to teach computer stuff. Can I have it?”
Not wanting to risk losing this opportunity, I take over the cart and wheel my
treasure through the halls to my office. I awkwardly lift it off the cart and onto my desk.
I have a computer!
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Querulous Voice
very kindly helps me get everything set up. Now I have a computer on my desk that
works! Now I can start to learn more about the Internet, so I can teach it.
Two days later I am sitting in front of the computer reading the book in my lap. I
typed in the letters that are the Internet address, and while I wait for it to appear
(download?) I read. Otherwise it is too frustrating. I now know what Tom meant when he
said it was slow. But I can word process my teaching materials on it, then save them on
“Ouch!” I exclaim, but I stop myself from cursing in front of the students. I have
been rushing down the limited space between two rows of students at their computer
stations and once again, I have rammed my thigh against a chair a little further out than
the rest. The chairs are the stackable ones, with an orange tweed back and seat, and
square white metal rods for legs and for holding the seat and back in place. The white
metal rods holding the back are angled outward, as are the back legs. The square rods
have corners at their tops. When I am trying to look at students’ work on their computer
screens, I tend to rush, and that is when I bruise myself. All during that term, I have
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The computer labs are converted classrooms, and the computers are in rows
back-to-back because that is the easiest way to wire them. One row of wires services
designed for teaching. It is difficult to set up group work, but I can try to get them to
hard to get scheduled in them. The computing programs get first choice. However, now
I notice that two students I do not know have slipped into the classroom and are
quietly working at some open stations. I assume that the drop-in labs are full. I slip over
to them, and tell them that if they are quiet and do not use the printer while I am talking
I remember a couple of times where students using the free stations during one
of my classrooms were less than polite, and once when they kept talking audibly after I
had asked them to be quiet. They were quite rude when I told them to leave. But they
were the exception. Most students understand that computer space is limited during the
day, and that teachers do not have to allow them into scheduled classes. A couple of
times, too, I have had drop-in’s quietly ask me how to do something they were
struggling with on their computers. Helping them made me feel computer skilled!
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I teach writing, not word processing, but word processing is the way I teach
writing. Suddenly handwriting does not count, and spelling is largely supported if
students remember to use the spell-checker. Suddenly the appearance of their papers is
highlighted and fluidity and structure (or lack of the same) are prominent. I begin to
teach basic layout and design, using the theory that what looks smarter is read as if the
content were smarter. I find the résumé formats available in the word processing files
and get the students to try them out. It is exciting, exploring word processing and
having students take writing advice more seriously now they can see a direct relevance.
take workshops on the Web and Netscape, because they are the word processing
software and the browser my college has now designated. I also take the workshops on
PowerPoint, and discover a wonderful presentation tool; it is both easy to learn and
visually-oriented. I do not know it at the time, but I am riding the cultural semiotic shift,
where, as Gunther Kress (1999) states, “[t]he shift from page to screen is having its
having effects on the media, such as book, page, and screen” (p. 81). I love the colour
and the condensed, bulleted text that holds me on topic but lets me talk around and
about the topic. I structure PowerPoints, and then they structure me, as in Figure 10,
below.
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Screen Representations
Meanwhile, in walking through a hallway with computer labs on either side, I see
not by the overhead but by the content I can see projected onto the screen. There, in
black and grey splendour, is a picture of a computer screen. It is too detailed for her to
have drawn it, and it has no surroundings, so it probably is not a photo. I stare so long
she sees me through the window and comes to the door. Her students are busily
working and I can see I am not interrupting so I whisper to her, “What is that?” pointing
to the image projected onto the screen. She whispers back a phrase I have never heard
before including the word “screen.” I do not understand and do not want to interrupt her
class any further so I ask where her office is, and note down her answer.
Later I prowl through the hall leading to her office and find her in her little
windowless cinderblock cubicle. She is friendly and glad to show me how to create these
images. I learn the phrase “screen capture” and about the (IBM) key with “Print Scrn.” She
also introduces me to Paint under accessories, and I have the next part of my teaching
tool jigsaw.
PowerPoints are very easy to create, and suddenly are everywhere in business
and education. I have to teach my students how to use the PowerPoint program, and
now I know how I am going to. I busily make screen captures and build a PowerPoint on
how to create PowerPoints. I love the ironic circularity of using the software to teach the
software. I also love the templates available in PowerPoint, a number of which I find very
aesthetically satisfying. PowerPoints have the colour of films and television, frequent
change from screen to screen, and the kind of text and visual combination I increasingly
enjoy creating. (I have not yet learned the word “multisemiotic.”) When I learn how to
add arrows, I feel like a super-PowerPoint teacher and begin using them almost every
week.
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The power of screen captures and PowerPoint as a teaching tool can be seen, in
Figure 11 below, with the image of the screen showing where and how to add images,
projector. I need it to show the PowerPoint. I have printed up enough copies of the show
to hand out to the students, with six slides a page and double-sided, I did the Xeroxing
yesterday, and today I am collecting the data projector so I can show them the
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PowerPoint. The handouts should help them remember and they can make notes on
them. I enjoyed making both the PowerPoint and the handouts. Although they took quite
a while to make, the attractiveness of the PowerPoint and the neat and visual clarity of
the handouts make me feel successful as a teacher. I have found I like making visual
materials.
which displays what the world is like is carried by the image; information which orients
the reader in relation to that information is carried by language. The functional load of
My teaching continues to be the site of my learning, and the impetus for it.
Ariadne Speaks
I sat with others and we all worked with looms. Sometimes I could show others
patterns, and sometimes I watched and learned from them. Others who lived in this
town who were famous weavers would allow me to visit and study their works. I began
to dream of creating a great and wondrous cord like the one that now guides me in this
quest.
Email Eurekas
Email was on the list of essentials to teach, (and learn) both for my own
purposes, and for Electronic Communications. Initially Eudora was the email application
designated by the college, so that was on the computers in the computer labs, and that
was what I had to teach. There were no manuals given out and the IT technicians did not
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have any and did not use Eudora for their own email. I could not find a manual in the
local bookstore. I had to learn where I could and figure out what I could.
practice using Eudora so I can teach students how to use it. But I personally do not know
anyone else who uses email. It feels unnatural writing messages I am never going to
send, and there is never any mail for me to practice opening and reading anyway. J*** is
the only person I know who really likes email, but she uses PINE, while I am supposed to
teach the current college standard, Eudora. She shows me what she has saved in PINE,
all kinds of messages. I gather from talking to her that librarians are in the forefront of
using email. She has both professional and hobby messages on various topics,
organized into folders. I am so impressed. She shows me how she does it. I get the
concept, but I cannot catch all the technical details, especially as I am not that familiar
with PINE.
Later, back at my desk, I sigh and dutifully open my email account. There are
messages for me! I love that! J*** has added my name and email address to a list of
other names and email addresses, most of them teachers I know slightly, spread
throughout the college. Once or twice a week, J*** sends out some messages she has
collected with humorous stories, jokes, and sometimes with information about authors
she and I both like to read. Now I get email regularly and I can practice using “Reply,”
“Forward,” and other aspects of email. I get to know Eudora much better.
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Illuminal Voice
Once again, the context, the community I am in, provides the support I need to
learn. J*** not only loans me books that I enjoy reading, she makes opening my email
need to practice using advanced aspects of Eudora so I can teach students how to use it.
“Net” and “etiquette,” with suggestions on how to be polite while using email. That
seemed easy enough to teach. There are books that suggest appropriate ways of writing
email messages. I study them, and copy the most important rules out for the class. That
is easy for me to learn and it is easy to explain to the students and tell them to learn the
rules. It is just memory work, like teaching the business letter, and how to format it. But
many are mature, and a few have at least some university credits. Most are not too
comfortable with computers. The ones who are “computer literate,” the new phrase for
people who are good at using computers, these knowledgeable ones, I find, are already
using email, and have developed some, to me, strange habits. They have a carelessness
with spelling that astounds me, and they use some strange short forms. Even the
students who have been to university write their emails this way, if they are computer
literate.
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Early in the development of emails, the need for more context for the words in
the message, more “body language,” more illocutionary information, was clearly felt by
from within the community of early email users. Writing in “full caps,” that is, totally in
capital letters was labeled as “SHOUTING,” and discouraged. Jokes or cute comments
“emoticons.” Any Google search will find descriptions and glossaries of these symbols.
(My Teacher Voice insists on interrupting here to show you the original, and my
favourite variant.)
A Happy Statement
treated like a common spelling error and automatically “corrected” to the “smiling face”
I use this smiley to signal that I am making a joke or being ironic. It represents a
wink and a grin and is made up from a semi-colon, a dash, and the angle bracket made
Short Forms
There are also text short forms that are becoming pervasive in emails —
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A whole culture of Chat and Voice Messaging is evolving using much of this
language base from emails, but that is beyond the scope of this thesis.
I get one of the amusing emails J*** still sends to me, and this one
fascinates me. I became a very fast reader because I was taught to glance
olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the
rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll
correct.
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difference between writing a formal business letter and writing personal letters. In fact,
few of them wrote personal letters, and most of them wanted to be able to write
impressive cover letters for their résumés. They had an understanding of the difference
between informal and formal writing, and I assumed that this would carry over to work
done on the computer, and it did, to the letters of application that they learned. But,
with email messages, what seemed to me to be an obvious parallel about when to use
formal language was not obvious to the students. Personal letters do not match emails,
and the desire to produce the perfect covering letter does not transfer over into an
On the one side, email is like mail — you type it in and send it to
someone. On the other, email is like a conversation — you talk about
whatever you want, you make jokes, you don’t bother re-reading it
before you send it, you forget about it ten minutes later. So which is it? A
formal letter or an informal conversation? Get it wrong, draw the line
between public and private inaccurately, and you could end up fired (p.
13).
At the time, I did not know whether to be relieved or upset to discover I was
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[I]t means that a person, young or old, gets out of his [or her]
present experience all that there is in it for him [or her] at the time in
which he [or she] has it (Dewey, 1963, p. 49).
journals, free writes or rough drafts; however, I believe correct spelling and polite
greetings are important for business emails, and so do the program teachers. In my
the growing use of email for business purposes, and see that correct spelling and a kind
of informal formal politeness are always called for. Even though Eudora does not (in the
mid-Nineties) have a spell-checker like MSWord does, I insist on correct spelling for
congratulate her, she grins and tells me she write her messages up in MSWord, spell-
checks them there, then cuts and pastes them into her email message space.
I am impressed with such a smart approach. I didn’t know that you could copy in
one, I don’t know the word, one kind of computer “thingy”, and paste the words into a
completely different, oh yeah, “application.” I get her to show me, and I deliberately
perform my amazement. I turn to the rest of the class and with great excitement I tell
them how they can easily have perfect spelling. I ask the student who showed me how
to, to tell the rest of the class how it is done. I thank her again, and tell the students in
the two other classes from Interior Design, the strategy, and mention that I learned it
from G***.
Illuminal Voice
sense of reciprocal learning, of sharing our strengths as we fit the cultural change
brought by the online computer to the prescribed curriculum, brings me great personal
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satisfaction. Even the computer phobic students get more relaxed with computers as
they learn both the patterns in the software and how to ask each other for help.
The original departure into the land of trials represented only the
beginning of the long and really perilous path of initiatory conquests
and moments of illumination (Campbell, 1972, p. 109).
for formal or business messages — and discussed the difference between writing email
messages to friends and writing for school or business purposes. Now the Interior
Design students want to learn how to attach a file to the message. I do not know how to,
It is a busy week, and I do not get going on “prepping” till Friday. The librarians
know everything about email, so I plan on going to them. I’ve already checked with Jim,
and he does not use Eudora, so he cannot tell me. He uses PINE. So does J*** the
librarian when I ask her, and she does not know anyone who uses Eudora. The librarians
like PINE better. I do not have a manual for Eudora, and neither does the bookstore or
anyone I can find. I am starting to feel a bit panicky. It is Friday afternoon, and I have to
I head out of my office and into the hall. I see M***; she’s pretty computer savvy.
I ask her. She is excited and pleased to be asked. She just learned how to from D***. She
explains the steps to me. I write them down. I rush back to my office, and follow her
instructions. They do not work! My stomach is beginning to ache. By now it is after 3:00,
and most teachers have left for the week. What am I going to do?
I look up D***’s extension, and I dial, expecting to get his Voice Mail. I figure,
even if I have to put off teaching how to do attachments for another week, at least I’ll
leave a message and make sure I catch him some time next week. He answers! I am
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stunned and delighted. Giving up my planned message, I stumble into speech, and
explain to him that I need to know how to do attachments. He tells me how, and then
walks me through the steps over the phone as I go through them on the computer in
front of me, and then write them down. I thank him, and wish him a good weekend. I try
Querulous Voice
Here is a question. If you were taking a writing course, would you rather have it
taught by someone who knows the software with absolute certainty, or by someone who
knows how difficult the software is because she is still somewhat struggling with it?
Would you rather have someone who knows how to write and how to teach writing, but
is learning word processing, or someone who knows word processing well but doesn’t
know much about writing and / or teaching writing? How do we say who can teach what?
The question, David Geoffrey Smith (1999) says, is how can “we live with
indeterminacy creatively” (p. 93). He also says that “the contemporary classroom [is]
already postmodern in character” (p. 94) and watching the rapidly changing shapes of
what I teach and what my students want to learn, and who my students are, I have to
tool of literacy is both being changed and changing us as we teach and learn.
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[A text] so remote from her experience that for the first time since
she learned to read she could not make the words cohere into
meaning (Hayles, 2002, p. 11).
Internet, and/or the Web. I buy a book about it, and read up on it. I have a computer,
the 486 T*** was throwing out, but it is, as he warned me, so slow. And I do not know
what to look at or for. I do not know enough about the Interior Design profession to
judge the sites I can find. I sign up for another of the college workshops on the Internet.
I learn a little bit about how to use Netscape, but I cannot see the point. I wish I were
more interested, but I am not. Then someone, I can’t remember who, tells me about
Web” page.
I carefully copy all the letters into that space at the top of the Web page, double-
checking to make sure I have not made a spelling mistake. I pause to wonder if spelling
will become more valued now that there’s a consequence for getting the letters wrong. If
every letter is not just where it is supposed to be, the (damn!) Website does not show
up. But this time I have got all the letters set up correctly; this time a page comes up on
the screen. “Cybersurfing” is written across the top of the page. I stare at the page, but I
do not really understand it. There are a whole bunch of blue underlined words in a grid.
I know I can click on the words and go to another page. They are, I taste this new word,
silently shape my mouth around it, still learning it, “hyperlinked.” I understand the
concept, sort of, but I do not know what to do. I do not know how to read this strange
page. I do not know what the point is. I can read each word individually, but I do not
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I know now, looking back, that I was entering a radically new form of discourse,
one being created by the new technical communication possibilities brought by the Web.
from the interface of the variable interpretative resources people bring to bear on the
text and the properties of the text itself” (p. 9). I was trying to enter a conversation
where I did not yet know the communication patterns, so I found it more than
confusing; I found it unintelligible. I did not yet have the “interpretive resources” I
needed. I did not have the experience or knowledge to orient myself within the page so I
could “read” it, navigate within it, work with it. Looking at the page was like trying to
understand a new creole; I recognized the words, but the syntax defeated me.
me. R***, another former English teacher, now part of the computer area, comes into
our office and says “Hi.” I respond abstractedly and then, remembering his background,
I focus on him. He was the strongest computer user in the former English Department.
He ran the English computer lab on a different campus. At least once, he had been
R*** puts his armload of papers down on his desk and comes over to peer at my
screen with me. “Sure,” he says, G***, the Library Tech teacher, developed it. It is handy
to send the students to it for some assignments. She has set it up so it is helpful for
basic research. Let me see, um, okay.” He leans over my shoulder and points to the
screen. “Say you want them to write an essay with some basic information about
Canada. If you just ask them for something on youth unemployment, they will search for
that phrase and get American stats. Instead I get them to click here.” R*** points to
“Canadian Resources”; I click on it. “Then I tell them to find StatsCan,” he points to that
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in the list and I click again, “and get them to look around in there. The Net can be pretty
confusing, so I steer them to help them learn how to use it.” R*** continues to point out
other aspects of Cybersurfing until I am overwhelmed with information and ask him
thanks to R***. Now I can see that digging out information is sort of like nesting files,
Figure 12.)
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I begin cautiously exploring the Web. At home, I am finding out that we have to
learn more about Attention Deficit Disorder as it is part of our family experience.
Somehow I find out about the newsgroup “alt.support.attn.deficit” and begin reading it
regularly. I read lots of books on Attention Deficit Disorder at the same time, ranging
from self-help populist to medical books aimed at an educated general audience. While I
learn much from the books, it is the newsgroup with its daily infusions of real peoples’
I learn the newsgroup etiquette of “lurking.” I read the messages but do not post
my own. I am pleased at what this new technology makes possible as I read the
messages, posted only a few hours before, mostly from the States, some from Canada, a
few from Britain, Holland, Israel, and regularly from the fascinating woman in New
Zealand.
I read about diets that help, or do not, with ADD. I read about how helpful, or
dangerous, Ritalin is. I read about behavioural patterns that are familiar, or different and
I am grateful at not having to deal with those aspects of ADD. I read snippets of
information that help me learn more, and I find references to books and other
resources. All these small tales and ongoing stories give me the medium to grow my
complex understanding of ADD, with the books I read as fertilizer. I begin to see my
own history differently, and some of my relatives. I begin to see my students differently.
The wonderful woman from New Zealand writes about going into schools to
educate both students and teachers to what it is like to live with ADD. She describes one
technique that captures my imagination. She takes several radios into a classroom,
places them at different spots around the classroom, turns them all on, sets them all at
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different stations, and then proceeds to speak to the class. Almost immediately, she
writes, students begin protesting that it is not fair, that they cannot be expected to learn
under those conditions. That, she tells them (and us), is the point. That is what a noisy
classroom feels like for someone with Attention Deficit Disorder. I wonder who it is she
loves who has ADD. She never writes about them, just about what she is doing to lobby
I continue mostly lurking, but when someone new asks how to learn more, I post
newsgroup to my daughter’s doctor, then to my doctor. I begin noticing how I enjoy the
students who, given what I now know, I suspect might be ADD. I begin speaking of ADD
Learning Struggles
For those … who do, in fact, have ADD, it is of great importance that
the diagnosis be made as early as possible so as to minimize the
damage to self-esteem that usually occurs when these [people] are
misunderstood and labeled lazy or defiant or odd or bad. The life of
[someone,] and his or her family, with undiagnosed ADD is a life full
of unnecessary struggle, accusation, guilt, recrimination,
underachievement and sadness (Hallowell & Ratey, 1994, p. 43).
“Jack,” as I will call him, is a quiet, rather intense young man from my Story
Structure in Movies course at a time when I still taught in Media Arts. He always sits at
the back, and when he does speak, he’s articulate and intelligent. His writing does not
match his speaking and his assignments are often late. His leg is always jiggling too, but
I have not really noticed this much until he sits down with me for a requested talk after
He wants to thank me. One class, around the middle of the course, something
came up in one of the movies — I think in reference to Tom Cruise in Top Gun, and I
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had talked about ADD and how I was strong in some areas because of it, and how I
struggled in others, also because of it. I talk about distractibility and hyper-focus, and
how both are features of ADD, and each is both a strength and a weakness, depending
on the situation and the person. Jack now tells me that some of what I had said matched
his experiences very closely. He had felt he had found an explanation for his
experiences during and after high school so he had found out more about ADD. Just last
hopeful rather than depressed because now he knows more about how to steer himself.
We talk a little more, but I have another class to get to. Jack thanks me again and says
good-bye. I have never seen him since, but because of his story, I continue to briefly
A week after I wrote the rough draft of this story, two students hang
around after our class is over. One I am very concerned about; the other I
know needs to find out about the assignments she’s missed over the last
show her on the computer. And I show her most processes individually many
times. I have watched her work away on her own trying to figure out what I
have just shown her while she is supposed to be working with a small group.
Even after asking her group (and her) who is doing what of the assigned
group work, she does not take on one of the tasks but wants to talk more
about how she can do programming but searching the Web is new to her.
Today she is telling me how group work is impossible with this class. I
think she will not do well in her program, which is oriented toward group
work; she does not understand that she is blind to social cues. I don’t know
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what to tell her, so I suggest she go to Student Services for help. She is not
interested. I feel sad, helpless, and irritated. She leaves and I turn to the
holiday, so I was able to spend some time showing her some of what she had
missed. Her rapid-fire speech and charm impressed me. I was even m ore
impressed when I showed her how to create a table in MSWord using the
table icon on the icon bar, and she stopped me so she could go through the
steps herself to “get it into her head”. I told her I was impressed that she
Now I sit down beside her prepared to show her some of what else she
had missed. Again she tells me how little she knows about computers, and
how bad her spelling is. I show her how to make the table lines “invisible”
and set up a picture in one cell and the relevant text in the cell beside it, as
a formatting tactic. She leans forward, her hands reaching toward the
keyboard, and I pull back so she can go through the steps herself. I ask her
if she knows she’s a kinesthetic learner, and we start talking more. I tell her
how impressed I am at how quickly she gets the idea of the process and how
wise she is to immediately repeat it herself. She tells me that she “stares and
stares” when she is learning something, and she isa visual learner.
Her speeding from topic to topic makes talking with her fun. When she
mentions her bad spelling for the fifth or sixth time, I ask her what she
knows about dyslexia. Our conversation moves into ADD and depression. I
tell her some of my experiences, and suggest she go to Student Services. She
office. They have left for the weekend, but a receptionist from another area
gives her a brochure and suggests she come back on Tuesday. She agrees
with great enthusiasm. I make a mental note to follow up with her next
class. I feel like I have made a difference for at least one student, and head
home in a happier mood. (At the end of the term, both the students I was
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A Different View
I am walking through the Media Arts lobby when a cluster of students blocks me.
“Bill” (as I will call him here) is ranting, intelligently, articulately, and taking an extreme
position, as usual. Sue (also a pseudonym) is calling him on one of his more extreme
points. Two others are watching, somewhere between entertained and confused. I am
amused, and then, as I join the conversation, I notice that Bill can be quite hurtful, even
nasty, in his comments. I see Sue’s face freeze at one of Bill’s verbal swipes. He appears
not to notice when she abruptly goes silent and leaves, and continues his rant.
I slide out of the conversation and catch up with Sue. She’s angry. “Why does he
always do that? Just when you think he’s okay, he turns into a jerk!” After a little
calming talk, I leave. I like both of them, and I can see both their points-of-view. And I
can relate to Bill’s ranting; I enjoy going on about topics I am passionate about too. The
nasty verbal swipe is also a familiar pattern; I have been on the receiving end of such
verbal swipes and I have worked hard to contain myself when I think something cruel. I
have learned to repress that impulse in myself, except that I sometimes whisper unkind
“blurter” and a “ranter” and how this has lost him friends. I think about Bill. In another
conversation, I find a space to tell Bill about alt.support.attn-deficit and a couple of days
later, I see his name in the newsgroup. The pattern, the etiquette, I have learned from
lurking and from reading about newsgroups, is to write brief questions or quickly
describe incidents and/or problems. Bill, even though he is new to the newsgroup,
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Over the next few days, a number of the regulars speak back to him, creating a
community where he can have conversations and learn, which had been my response to
alt.support.attn-deficit. When I see Bill in the hall, I refer to the responses his posting
had drawn. I can see he is not very interested. He tells me he has not been back to look
at how people responded, and probably will not bother. Shortly after, he leaves the
almost everyone.
A few months later, after almost a year of regularly following the newsgroup, I
still enjoy its supportive atmosphere and its “lived experience description[s]” (van
Manen, 1997, p. 55) which I find comforting, re-assuring. I feel less alone and more
“normal.” I also get good suggestions and ideas. People are always coming and going on
the newsgroup, but some are long-term regulars. Most newcomers, when they post
messages, are responded to helpfully. Then someone arrives and stays on, someone
who “flames” others. The Computer User High Tech Dictionary says a “flame” is:
Soon the flamer is joined by another, and even gentle remonstrance has no effect
on them. One uses a female name, the other a male. I wonder if they are “performing”
with the newsgroup as a captive audience. I stop reading their posts, and then I stop
reading the newsgroup altogether. I have learned much, but the repetitiveness
participation are identical for the most part with Web groups” (p. 112). I see, after
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learning and shaping a cultural pattern. I found a group with knowledge I needed to
explore, knowledge that was deeply relevant to me, knowledge that was more than
Weinberger says,
least one of the early adopters, seeking a support group on the Web. Following
alt.support.attn.deficit was like letter reading, except I was reading lots of personal
letters from lots of people, without ever having met any of them, except “online.” And
they were writing, telling their stories, because they wanted to, and on the assumption
that their stories would help others. It was like a kitchen discussion, a sharing of
experiences, except it was all in text, a new kind of text, informal, asynchronous, and
voluntary.
When I wrote, it was like letter writing, except that I had not been obliged to
answer, In fact, the evolving etiquette was that I should not write anything until I had
“lurked” for a while and read any available “FAQ” (a list of Frequently Asked Questions). I
had somehow learned that “[l]urking [was] considered very good form, for it lets
‘newbies’ absorb the group’s ethos and mores” (Weinberger, 2002, p. 112) and,
consequently, Bill’s flaunting of this ‘norm’ had bothered me because I had “introduced”
These groupings are “a new social public space” (p. 119) yet, “the ground rules
are different from the real world precisely because there’s no ground on the Web” (p.
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119). In fact newsgroups, discussion groups, and “blogs” (a kind of “Weblog” or diary)
are introducing, not just a radically new public space but a radically new form of
discourse — casual, informal writing in a public forum. This is not public “speaking”;
this is public writing. I was part of a form of discourse that was shaping itself, as all
“[b]oundaries between and within orders of discourse are constantly shifting, and
change in orders of discourse is itself part of sociocultural change” (p. 13). I was reading
was still in its childhood, and the newsgroup continues to be active as of this writing,
still a “place” to go to touch base with others with similar interests and experiences.
Accepting Students
how to use the computer, which I often share in public, does not appear to offend my
students. The ones who do not know much about computers are watching me extend
my own learning, and I think it gives them some confidence that, if their middle-aged
female “artsy” English teacher can learn this computer “stuff,” they probably can too.
The few who already know some computer stuff often, for whatever reasons, are not
that good at academic and business writing, and my obvious respect for what they know
about computers gives them a balancing leadership role in this class. And, if I cannot
answer one of their questions myself, I make sure I can by the next class. In this way, I
can keep their trust in me as a teacher, and their learning feeds my learning as I seek
the answers they ask for. In all the Electronic Communications classes I teach over the
next few years, even as more and more students have some computer skills to start
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with, even as I get more knowledgeable myself, the sense of excitement and the pattern
The most exciting teaching, in my opinion, occurs when both students and
teacher are fully committed to the learning. My first teaching employment was teaching
English to adult immigrants. They were totally committed learners, and I was as
committed a teacher. I have not always been that lucky in having students with such an
intense commitment to learning, and I have not always been able to offer such full
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myself into and students with a similar sense of commitment. In the Interior Design
In the late Nineties, I am given another Interior Design course; it seems a natural.
Before students can graduate from this rigorous 3-year college course, they have to
write a thesis “of substantial length,” defined as 100 pages, with only 20 pages of
images allowed. They are not allowed to graduate without it, and that is the basis of
their commitment. The coordinator has structured this Thesis Course with a specific
purpose in mind: to have the program qualify for professional certification, thus giving
especially for visually oriented students who have not written very many academic
The course is laid out very sensibly, with due dates for all the “process” stages.
First a research due date, then an outline due date, then a first draft of the first (or any)
20 pages, and so on till the final copy’s due date. It is sensible, but writing is not always
that linear, and some of these students have no confidence in their ability to write at all,
let alone 100 pages. I like working with the coordinator, and I like the structure even
though I see it as awfully rigid. It gives me the freedom of “no choice.” I can join the
students and work with them against a challenging curriculum; they know I did not
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Writing Lessons
Three of us are huddled beside my desk in the mezzanine of the studio area. We
can hear the students working in the studio, but we are focussed on our work. Two
students are talking with me about their fears. They do not think they can do this much
writing. I ask about their writing background and what writing they do now. I ask about
their research. One young woman begins to speak with enthusiasm. She is fascinated by
what she is discovering. Riding on her energy, I grab some paper and a pen and push
them at her. “Make a mind map,” I tell her, and she starts creating words and lines out
to other words. “See,” I say to the other, “What is your topic? Can you do that too?”
After a few more minutes of sorting out mind maps, we make a future
appointment. I tell them to bring their mind maps to the next class.
Some still have not chosen their topics or want to change the ones they have
chosen, but the outline is due next week. This week, I am teaching them to use
MSWord’s Outline View. As you can see below in Figure 13, the Outline View is one of
the choices under View in Word’s Menu bar. When you choose it, it displays the
headings indented to display the hierarchy. The Toolbar that comes with it, allows you
to indent more or less and set the levels of hierarchy that show.
I teach the Outline View as part of teaching the structure of an academic paper,
and only secondarily as an aspect of word processing. The technology actually supports
learning how to structure written work, and that is why I value it. The technology
changes how to teach writing. After the students have produced mind maps, I encourage
them to use the Outline View as the next step in their writing. I “sell” the learning of this
part of word processing by showing them how this is part of Styles, which they can use
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Suddenly, with the addition of an early version of their Table of Contents, their
work starts becoming formal looking, official, and yet not dauntingly detailed and
complex. They can see that they are producing a formal document, something that will
enhance their ideas and their words, and this changes their attitude and their
willingness to produce text. The word processing application is their helper, their aid to
creating significant writing, and no longer just an annoying demand on their learning
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These students are designers, and their work should demonstrate that, I tell
them, and we talk about layout and design. The word processor allows them to create
an aesthetic object; their document can display their visual talent and knowledge. We
talk about font choices, sizes, margins — all those finicky decisions. I conspire with
them. The margins have to be standard, but the font can be Arial or Times, and 10 or
12. I show them how to take some of their text and test it out in different fonts. Arial 12
point wins every time for taking up the most space so they need fewer words to fill that
daunting 100 pages. With a computer as their writing instrument, there is more for
them to learn about writing visually, and more support for lexical difficulties.
What I am trying to teach them is how to explore and use the advantages of
word processing for their purposes. By aligning myself with them as a coach who
wants them to win out over this challenging curriculum, writing a thesis, we become
I meet frequently with the students, often in twos or threes. I encourage. I nag. I
read their work and enthuse. Because I am a writing teacher and not an Interior Design
teacher, what they are writing about is often new to me, so I am fascinated, and I display
my interest to them. If, using my critical thinking abilities, I think they have some
inaccuracies, I check with them and/or one of the Interior Design teachers. I edit each
chunk of their work — and get annoyed if I see my corrections or suggestions ignored in
the next iteration. I encourage their design of the cover. I am midwife to their theses,
Querulous Voice
Yes, but that was then. A few years later I had 60 students writing 100
page theses and no colleague to commiserate with, plus three other courses.
survival routine, and I didn’t have the energy to lift the fearful ones into
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learning can happen (so it was a real not a rote course) had become so
onerous that I, the teacher, and then the students, began to lose hope and
interest. (I think this happens when managers look at numbers rather than
people and situations. I think this is called burnout, and often ignored. But
that is just my opinion after spending this past weekend marking 154 two-
page reports.)
The Interior Design Thesis Course and the commitment of the students allow me
role. I like working with my students, helping them use their strengths to accomplish a
significant task. I like showing them how they can use word processing to support
themselves in their writing. The weak spellers learn to use the spell checker, and an
editor in case of word errors. The messy hand writers learn to design their pages, at
least to a standard setup, sometimes in an effective graphic design. The visual thinkers
learn how to move their visual structure into a textual structure. They can learn how to
write well using the support provided by the intelligent use of computers. The Interior
Design Thesis Course caused me to learn more about using word processing and more
Slowly, I accumulate more teaching time in Interior Design, teaching not just
Electronic Communications, and the third year thesis course where the students have to
write this 100-page thesis. Eventually, I get to create a second year introduction-to-
the-thesis course, to help the students improve their academic writing skills before they
have to write their thesis. I still have some unstable teaching time that changes from
term to term, but now I have an Associate Dean who sorts out most of that for me, so it
is not as bad. The courses I teach in Interior Design are stable and I have some shaping
power for them, and they are the ones that require computer use. This stability and
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freedom are at least part of the reason I become increasingly skilled and interested in
meetings. It has got to do with students having laptops in classes. I monitor the
The structure of the Mobile Computing Initiative at Sheridan requires that all the
students in specified programs must rent laptops from the college, and the laptops
come loaded with program-appropriate software. So all the software is the same
version, and, with a laptop, students can work on their assignments any time that is
convenient for them. For mature students with parenting responsibilities this means
they can do their work at home without needing to hire a babysitter in order to use the
college’s computer labs. For other students, after midnight learning is possible, despite
the computer labs being closed. For the college, the need for a large number of up-to-
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date computer labs is lessened. And, although the laptops are expensive to rent, there is
a tax-deduction available to help mitigate the cost for the students. In May 1998, 55
students become part of what was named DELTA3 (Delivering Emerging Learning
Although the Interior Design Coordinator wants to be part of the first year of
Mobile Computing, politics intervene and we are blocked from joining the initiative.
However, different politics make it possible for Interior Design to “go Mobile” in the
second year, the fall of 1999, and we do. What this means for the Interior Design
teachers, as for the teachers in other programs that have “gone mobile” is three-fold:
1. laptops are distributed to all the teachers in DELTA3 programs (including the
2. all the mobile classrooms are newly renovated and quite beautiful and
3. teachers are expected to mount our course material on a course Website and use
software so we can teach it and new learning management software for course
Web sites, which means learning how to create Web pages and use email, as well.
It is the classic “carrot and stick.” We get laptops but we have to use them. Some
teachers are delighted; some are fearful and / or resentful. Five support systems help:
1. there is the added support of “Tech Tutors”, students who have computer skills,
and, in brief workshops, train the teachers and the students in the basic care of
the computers. They are also present to help in most DELTA3 classrooms for the
2. a very helpful HELP desk, who help on the phone and, if necessary, come to the
3. the DELTA3 PD Committee, made up of teachers who plan and lead professional
development sessions to help teachers learn more about teaching using the
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teacher, no matter their skill level, welcome to join and help shape the DELTA3
PD;
software, hardware, dates to add and remove student access to the course Web
sites, and other related matters that require both teacher and technical input;
and
5. teachers who are converting their courses to the Web have a time release
their time per course. It asks a lot from the teachers, but also provides a
Now, at Sheridan in 2004, over 30 programs and 5000 students are part of
DELTA3, the Mobile Initiative at Sheridan, and DELTA3 has won the ACAATO (Association
of Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology of Ontario) 2004 Award for Innovation. This
massive curricular change, as I experienced it, was the inspiration and is a significant
The Mobile Initiative occurred late in the story of my learning experiences, after I
had learned and taught the basics of word processing, with MS Word, as the college now
mandates, and the basics of emailing and Web searching, using Netscape Navigator and
Messenger, as mandated by the college, and PowerPoint because that is the presentation
software.
Following the college mandates has meant I could get support from IT and the
HELP desk, because they have to know the college-mandated software. This does not
make me feel constrained; instead I feel supported. As a new computer user, I had no
pre-made choices, and so I learned what had been mandated and now it feels “natural”
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to me, and thus has become my software of choice. I have not myself made informed
choices about what software or browser I favour; I have just learned what I am told I will
be teaching, and I assume that there are good reasons for these choices. The surprising
aspect is that when I do try another browser or word processor or Web authoring
software, I am not lost outside the labyrinth. I already have a partial map of what to look
for to guide me because learning one form of software makes learning others easier.
Process Notes
This description of the beginnings of mobile computing at Sheridan feels dry to
me, more a report than an aesthetic engagement, but it is an important part of this arts-
based thesis. I want you, dear reader, to understand that my sense of wonder which
supported my learning was itself supported by the structures within my institution. All
of the institutional supports, described above in such a business-like tone, provided the
field for my adventures.
Ariadne Speaks
Those capricious gods have given me a new lighter travelling loom for my own
use. I see that I can carry it in my pack as I travel. I go to the flax fields and pull up flax
so I can rett and scutch the fibres to take with me as I journey. I add my spindle to my
pack and begin creating this cord in earnest.
The four of us are sitting around a small table in the main hallway, and talking
seriously, the coordinator, two fulltime Interior Design program teachers, and me, a
fulltime teacher who teaches language skills to the Interior Design students. The Mobile
Initiative has been running for a year now, and Interior Design will be part of the next
expansion this coming fall. We will be getting laptops and be expected to teach our
first-year classes using the laptops and something called “learning management”
software. There are two varieties available, one called Course-in-a-Box and the other
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called WebCT. When I heard that it was sure that we were going to join the Mobile
Initiative, I talked to my computer mentor, D***, and read through the comparison of the
and to assume other people will see how self-evidently right my heroes are. I remember
and listens. The two other program teachers are reluctant, worried about learning the
complexities of WebCT.
I did not then think about the advantage I had over the other teachers from two
years of teaching Electronic Communications to three sections each year. Because I was
much more comfortable with computer basics than the other teachers, I pushed for what
around. The two program teachers sit with their arms crossed under expressionless
faces.
The coordinator speaks decisively: “Joan will use WebCT and we will use Course-
in-a-Box.” I feel like someone who has been pushing on a door, only to have it swing
open, causing her to fall halfway through. And, as you will see later, getting what I
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“If that is okay?” I say, but everyone seems content that the meeting is over, and
Outside my study window I see grey and white. Snow is falling lightly,
giving a white outline to the dark grey tree branches. I can hear squeals
from the schoolyard across the road as children play during recess. I can
hear the voice of my husband on the phone in his study beside mine. Books
Powerbook G4, the second computer I have had the use of while writing this
from my department at Sheridan, will help me move this thesis, and the
EndNote library I have created while writing it, over onto another laptop,
am a little worried. This thesis is densely formatted and the file is very
I sit in my study in 2003 reading a document from January 1999 — the DELTA3
“Mobile Computing Starter Kit” — and see the framework that was used for the academic
side of this massive change. The document is clear, sensible and impressive. I synopsise
it below.
First there is a series of DELTA3 questions and answers, laid out in a table format
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about Faculty;
about Curriculum.
program is;
This clarity and structure was essential for cultivating this new field where the
flax seeds would later grow into flax plants from which I could spin and weave the cord
to guide me further through the technological labyrinth. But there was so much more
that was invisible to me then that I have learned about since, the most important of
which is the involvement and valuing of the grassroots (flaxroots?) teachers and the
learning community I was immersed in, a group of teachers who created and supported,
and grew in their teaching from and with the Mobile Initiative at Sheridan.
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Illuminal Voice
The Web of Learning is supported from many points. How humbling it is to look
back and see how supported I was by the school structure and cooperative and
supportive people in learning how to use the online computer as a teaching tool.
Without this structure, without these people creating and supporting the structure, I
would never have been able to learn what I have learned, to teach how I have taught.
Ariadne Speaks
In the labyrinth, now I can now see the beauty and complexity that I helped
Theseus to ignore as he ran from the Minotaur so many years ago. I look again at my
judgement of Daedalus, the maker of contrivances, and of my father, the determined
and daring king, and of my mother, filled with curiosity and desire. I had to run from
them as Theseus had to run from the Minotaur; it was fate. Now, once again deep inside
the labyrinth, I hold this cord I have made and am making, and see a richer possibility
than the black and white cord I shaped so rigidly so many years ago.
I pause to give thanks to the ones who, for whatever reasons, helped build these
virtually magic looms.
I pause to give thanks to those closer, whose town I lived in, who helped me
learn the loom, and gave me a loom to use.
I pause to give thanks to those who planted the field and grew the flax from
which I create the linen to weave this cord that is guiding me into the core of the
labyrinth, and to the Minotaur.
The most remarkable aspect of the mobile initiative at Sheridan was that it was
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pedagogical decision, as is clearly evident in the nomination of DELTA3 for the 2004
As I was one of the “second wave” of teachers joining the Mobile Initiative, my
knowledge of the first year is limited to the shreds of information I have been able to
collect since I joined. A computer teacher was named the leader of the initiative, and she
took a clear grassroots approach. My mentor was a teacher in the human services area,
teachers in her area held regular “lunchbag” meetings to discuss co-operative learning.
The Interior Design coordinator was consulted, and there was a designer in Facilities
Management. All these influences and others made within the Information Technology
portables with mice and wasps and garbage trucks right outside,
the beauty and intelligent design of these new mobile classrooms alone would have
seduced me into learning as much as I could to in order to continue to teach in them. All
the classrooms for the mobile initiative had to be set up with the wiring and networking
required by teachers and students with laptops, but a holistic vision of what could be
done pedagogically was also applied. The results are wonderful. (See figure 14, below.)
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The teachers have a podium at the front where we anchor our laptops onto a
dock that links them with electricity, the network, and the DATA projector. Using
materials I have prepared or found, I can project Web pages, PowerPoints, videos, or
other visual, and sometimes aural, materials for my classes. The visual power of the data
projector is a remarkable teaching tool, especially as the students can later access the
same material on their screens at any time and anywhere that is networked. In the
The students have desks that have been designed according to the suggestions
of the teachers in their programs. As each program entered/enters the mobile initiative
the teachers meet with the designers and discuss the kind of set-up most appropriate
for their subjects and students. The result is many different styles of classrooms from
wired lecture halls to my favourite, the classrooms with “puddle tables” that support and
Data Projector
Screen
Puddle Table
Moveable seats
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Most classrooms have walls that are a soft yellow, the puddle tables, and the
teacher’s podium look like lightwood, and the students’ seats are a muted green and
moveable so they can work facing their table, or turn and watch the teacher and the
screen.
Puddle table classrooms are ideal for teaching writing using computers. I usually
give a few mini-lectures paced throughout the three hour weekly class, often with a
PowerPoint, and set group tasks as a way of introducing new writing concepts or
computer skills, or, in the best of lessons, both. The pulsing pace of mini-lecture,
group-work with my visiting each group, allows for learning in a safe, comfortable
Before I tell you more about the fall of 1999 and my move deeper into the
labyrinth, I want to underline the importance of the inclusion of pedagogical and design
planning in the mobile classrooms, and how engaging it was, as a teacher, to have
choice and input into the classroom design. Part of my learning was a direct result of
feeling valued as a teacher. Seeing my wishes about classroom design respected, and
environment for learning. I learned so quickly about computers because I was allowed to
Ariadne Speaks
Now, far along on the intuitive path of following my bliss, I look around and back
and see my path as a straight line leading me directly here. I had thought that looking
back I would see the meandering wanderings of someone just lost in a labyrinth, but it
is a straight line from discovering the pleasures of using a loom for weaving to here, in
the labyrinth. How could what felt like directionless drifting be such a direct route?
I pause to savour this journey and its surprising outcomes.
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wave. The Interior Design coordinator, with the foresight to see that her students would
need CAD (Computer Assisted Design) and an ability, when working in the future, to use
the Web, had led those of us who taught in the Interior Design program into DELTA3. In
the halls I rushed past students with navy blue, rectangular backpacks with the Sheridan
name and logo on them. (I had managed to get myself a student-style backpack instead
Inside these backpacks were IBM ThinkPads loaded with the MS Office suite and any
which required only MS Office and Netscape, and we were all on the Web. With me, they
were on WebCT, my choice in learning management software, but, with the other
complaining about having to use two course platforms as I drove them and myself
through this new teaching and learning environment. However, part way through the
term I realized the students were having to learn and use two different forms of course
Illuminal Voice
Perhaps this was hard on the students, or perhaps they adapted with the
computer expertise that we older ones conveniently assume is innate in those who are
currently young. I did not know then and I do not know now if using two forms of
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learning management software made their learning more difficult. What I do know, and
for WebCT; within a term or two, Course-in-a-Box had disappeared from the school,
and all of us in the mobile initiative were running our courses on WebCT.
Picture a woman with a backpack going into a classroom. She smiles a little
uncertainly at the room full of mostly women and asks if they are Interior Design
students. A few say, “Yes” and all are watching her. Some have laptops in front of them
all plugged in, but some just have their laptop bags sitting beside them. The teacher
moves toward the podium at the front to the right of the screen as she introduces
herself. She twists out of her backpack and unzips it to get at the laptop. Glancing at the
class, she sees that some are not yet setting up their laptops, and she instructs them to.
While they are unzipping and plugging in, she lifts her laptop over to the dock on
the podium and shifts it back and forth, trying to find just where it should be before she
presses down. The tech tutor, a young computer student, had shown her how to dock
her computer, but he did it so fast and she has not done it before and she worries about
breaking something.
Finally she feels the give and presses down. Her computer clicks into place, and
she sighs in release. She turns on the computer and looks anxiously up at the data
projector. Yes, the light is starting to come through and the image of Sheridan’s home
page strengthens on the screen. She clicks on “WebCT” on her personal Tool Bar and
looks out at her class. “Do you know how to get to WebCT?” she asks, and her very first
What I remember of that fall was a blur of excitement and effort. I had some
course materials already in my computer — files from having taught the Electronic
Communications previously — and I had to create new ones. I took the advice of my
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mentor and others with a year of experience behind them and limited my expectations
of what aspects of WebCT I should learn in this first term. I decided to learn how to use
the following:
Manage Students where I could store students’ marks, and, with this course-
authoring software, set up an icon where each student could click and see just
Lessons, where I mounted a Web page a week for each lesson; and
Calendar, where I mounted assignment dates and other important course dates.
Communications.
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Above you see a recent iteration of the top part of the Web page that I mounted
in my WebCT Web site for Electronic Communications for the first week/class. At the top
are the course code, title, and my name, as the teacher, a part of the WebCT shell. Under
that is the “breadcrumb” menu identifying the route I have followed to get to this page
and allowing me to click back to any point. Under that is the Action Menu, which I can
also use to navigate. Every screen in all WebCT courses shows similar frames.
mounted into my course. Making one or more Web pages a week soon gave me
mentor’s example and advice and use MS FrontPage to create my lesson Web pages. I
stuck to the very user-friendly Netscape Composer, a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What
You Get) Web authoring software that can be downloaded for free. (I will include more
Here is the next section of Lesson 1’s Web page; compare Figures 15 and 16 and
you can notice that there are three frames that remain unchanged at the top, while you
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With the course mounted on the Web, and students doing their work on laptops,
page above and, I believe, an example of the new “text” for online courses. The heading
using a search engine. The text under that heading instructs students to work in pairs
with one person’s computer on the lesson and the other’s on the tutorial, which they are
heading with another online tutorial I had found and instructions for an exercise using
what they had learned. By teaching them how to use Web browsers I am preparing them
for the rest of Electronic Communications, and for using the online computer as a
Illuminal Voice
As I examine this currently inactive course Web site, I am struck by the radically
new writing space I was moving into. Although this is not the very first iteration, it is
based on it. I can see that, through the influence of my mentor and other teachers, I had
learned how to write for both PowerPoint presentations and the Web. (I still use Google
and search for tutorials and information to help me learn about the Web.) I was using
“scannable text” (Neilsen, 1997) several levels of bullets, and hyperlinks. My knowledge
of layout and design is evident, too. I used Arial, which is a sans serif font and easier to
read on the screen than the default font, Times New Roman, which has serifs. I also
used colour to make the text both more attractive and more readable. The headings are
grey or red, and the regular text is grey, with the hyperlinks in red and underlined,
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which:
“forefronts process;
Already, early in my use of the Web as a teaching space, I was intuitively using the
teaching space of the Web-enhanced classroom in the manner Mason has described.
Querulous Voice
Yes, but it is not all wonderful progress. There were / are students who
dislike[d] the expensive rental fees for the laptops, despite the software
provided and the tax benefits. There were / are teachers who dislike[d]
teaching with laptops. Students will sometimes distract themselves using the
have caught plagiarists who apparently were not aware that copying and
pasting their surprisingly improved prose into a search engine could take
There are other problems too. The year I started on the Web, there
using Napster to download music. Such network crashes are more rare now,
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And there is the problem of the learning curve. I had a two-year lead
I joined the Mobile Initiative; many of my fellow teachers were not as well
difficult task.
and the IBM Thinkpad that the school issued me with is open on my desk. It is late, and I
have an 8:00 AM class tomorrow morning. As an act of personal discipline I had finished
my marking before I allowed myself to create the lesson Web page. Now the screen
glows in front of me, open to Netscape Composer, which looks and operates like a
simple word processor. I think about background, and decide to leave it white. I think
about font and decide on Arial 10 point in a medium dark grey, with Arial Black font for
headings, in 14 point grey for the major one, and 12 point red for the secondary
headings. (Not that straightforwardly, of course. I tried several variations before I found
one that was aesthetically satisfying. These artistic choices are a great part of the
I think up a main heading which includes the week’s number and has an amusing
(for me at least) reference to either the topic for today’s lesson or the situation. I save
the file and place it in the folder for the lessons, nested inside the folder for this course,
nested inside the folder for this program, nested inside my school folder.
I finish creating the Web page for tomorrow’s lesson, and check all the
hyperlinks to make sure they are “active,” that is that they “work” and, when clicked on,
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open the desired Web page. I make sure the URLs (Universal Resource Locators, or “web
addresses”) are correct, that the PowerPoint links and opens properly, as do the two
I go into Netscape and click on the WebCT link. I enter my username and
course.
Next I click on the icon labelled “Lessons” and it opens a Web page with a Table
of Contents. My first two lessons are there; now I will add this week’s. I have to click at
least 12 different times to get one single Web page mounted. I forget steps, get
frustrated, and have to repeat the process. Then I have to upload each separate file, the
PowerPoint and the two Word files. It is late and I am tired, but I go through my lesson
on line. It looks beautiful to me, and I imagine my class finding it clear and easy to
That first semester I learned much, including how to endure frustration. This is
picture, but they take a long time to upload because the files are so large;
unlike with MS Word, pictures do not get embedded in Web pages, Every
page itself;
you cannot upload folders to WebCT, just individual files. (I learned to use
fewer pictures, and more colours in the font and /or backgrounds;) and
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projected on the screen from your laptop and find out part way through that
the students cannot get access to this lesson on their laptops because you
Ariadne Speaks
These bits are jewels too, rewards for the trials I survived and prospered from.
You may see these bits of greenish amber as less than beautiful, but they add an
essential aspect to the design of my cord. Without undergoing these trials, I would have
no sense of how sweet success can be, because I would have had no difficulties to
measure accomplishments against.
To give some sense of the learning trials of my first term teaching Web-
enhanced classes, I call again on my Published Voice, this time with excerpts from a
Excerpts from DELTA3, A Story From the that lovely room. When other WebCT
Front Lines users dropped in, I ambushed them with
Although some aspects of WebCT questions. From B***, the most senior
[the learning management software I WebCT user at Sheridan, I learned how
used] are obvious and pretty well to grab class lists off the Sheridan site
intuitive, many are not. Repeatedly I and drop them into the WebCT Student
spent hours trying every variation Management tool. I also learned how to
possible, using what I remembered and grab class email lists for my Address
the notes, - there’s no manual available Book.
and the Help function isn’t always Another ambush in the Greenhouse
helpful, - and failed to get my lessons got me a lesson in how to use Netscape
up on the Net. … Composer to create attractive HTML
I was still stymied at almost every documents easily. As well, D*** helped
turn. me understand a little bit more about
The Greenhouse [a room set up how the WebCT File Manager worked.
for teachers using laptops] was a great Every bit of knowledge helped, and led
help. As I was “between desks” at the to new possibilities to be creative - and
start of classes, I spent a lot of time in to get lost!
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Like our students, I have found that more frustrated, and not at all
having a real project — getting through enthusiastic.
the next class — inspires real work and From B***, too, I got the concept that
learning. However, as sometimes also there is “button knowledge” and there is
happens with our students, I have found “pedagogical knowledge” for using
that I need extra help. It is difficult to WebCT. And that’s where my real
get. There were people whom I knew enthusiasm lays. I love the Delta3
had been using WebCT who I could, rooms with their “puddle” tables and the
(and did,) email and voice mail for help. giant screen connected to my computer.
And I did get help, but people are really The screen and the computer make for a
busy at this time of year, and it wasn’t much richer learning set-up than the
always easy for me to find someone overhead projector does. And the
whose timetable meshed with mine. It puddle tables almost force group work –
was frustrating and unnerving to need they’re so much better than the usual
to mount a lesson, and not know when I long tables with rows of students
would be able to get the help I needed staring at the teacher. As I get faster
right now. I almost gave up trying to and more competent with the buttons,
use anything other than the WebCT I’m finding it exciting to plan exercises
Calendar. that organize the students into working
Luckily, B*** is both enthusiastic in small groups so they can learn co-
about WebCT and generous with his operatively. I’m hoping to get better
time. And we have a time match up in and better at being a “guide on the side”
our timetables. After his third using planned exercises, the laptops,
mentoring session, (Thank you, Thank WebCT, and the puddle tables (Vinall-
you, B***!) he has even agreed that I can Cox, 2000).
have a semi-regular appointment with
him. Without his help I would be much
more limited in my use of WebCT, much
Illuminal Voice
Reading through this article again, long after that first term, I see that I have
forgotten how much help I needed and received. My sense of gratitude to my learning
community is increasing still more. I also see my Querulous Voice publicly displayed as I
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Web-Weaving
I was deeply committed to teaching using laptops, but not all my courses were in
the Mobile Initiative, and the Interior Design courses came in a year at a time so initially
the second and third year classes did not have laptops. I also loved, despite its
Consequently, I began to think of alternate strategies for using the Web to link with
students, even those who weren’t in the Mobile Initiative. My understanding of how to
teach had undergone a profound change. Just as the computer was becoming a
writing necessity.
Piles of books dumped beside my reading chair, books to read when I’m
brain-dead from marking and don’t have the energy to think nor the
calm to rest.
Piles of books for my thesis research leaning against the bottom self of
Piles of files and notes in front of the bookcase against the hall wall.
And piles of various things yet unsorted, simply dumped on the footstool.
It takes energy to write, and I don’t have any. But I will. After a
the summer to the first part of the winter term. A number of things have
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Previously, when I had taught Media Arts students, some of them talked about
their Web sites. When I asked for more information, some of these students told me that
they had sites on Sheridan’s Web. My interest was piqued. Around the same time I had
become more aware of another teacher, a woman my age with an interesting taste in
clothes that I admired, with great knowledge of, and interest in, pedagogy, and,
although she was not a computer teacher, with more knowledge about using the
computer than anyone else I knew. I was intrigued and began to regard her as my
mentor. She was also very generous with her knowledge. I found out how to navigate to
Sheridan’s faculty and student Web sites, and looked around for myself. My mentor had
a number of linked Web sites with information about various aspects of teaching using
the computer, and using the Web in general. I saw a possibility; perhaps I could create
Querulous Voice
community.” I want to set up a site to help my students learn about this new
I will!!
In the Greenhouse, the wired room set up for faculty to use when working with
their laptops, I had learned that Netscape included a simple WYSIWYG Web-authoring
more frequently, I found Van Camp’s (1997 - 2003) Web site on how to use Composer
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In late 1999, I became determined to mount my own Web site. The WebCT
course sites I had been teaching with were “secure”, that is the URL (the Web address)
started with https:// and only registered students and teachers had passwords that
allowed them to get into the course sites. They were a protected Web space, not
accessible to most people. WebCT course sites had provided a scaffolded learning site,
but I wanted the full experience, a presence on the World Wide Web for myself. Here is a
I want to do work that I find meaningful; I want to make my own artful Web site. I
have read sites on how to write for the Web (Neilsen, 1997), much like you write for
PowerPoint. I have studied sites written by teachers for their students. I have a implicit
understanding of how to enmesh my Web within the World Wide Web by hyperlinking
I start to develop my very own Web site. I have collected a number of URLs (the
“addresses” of Web sites) that I want my students to be able to access easily. I open
Netscape’s Composer and begin to work. I use colours I like, and find some clipart to
add interesting detail. I structure the page with the text in the middle, an interesting
design on the left at the top, and a “navbar” (links to the other pages of my site) on the
left.
I use “Save As” to save the “index” page under a new name. (I do not know why I
have to call it “’index” but everything I have read is very clear about the first page being
called “index,” so I follow the rules.) When I save “index” under a new name, I can delete
all the material specific to the home page, yet keep the colour and the layout. I create
several pages this way. I have never liked a common pattern of teaching software -
someone else. With Netscape’s Composer and van Camp’s (1997 – 2004) Web site,
whenever I feel confused or at a loss, I can learn at my own pace, in my own order. By
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the time I click on van Camp’s section called “User-friendliness” near the end of my task
In the hyperlinked table layout (see Figure 17 below) I found the learning set-up
that worked best for me. Each heading is hyperlinked to instructions and the user can
Van Camp is one of a host of people posting information and tutorials on the
Web. I used her work to create my own Web site, which in a way, mimics hers in that it is
meant to help people learn. On my Web site, I set up links to relevant instructional sites
that I found, including hers, instead of re-inventing the information myself. Below in
Figure 18 is the first version of my Web site, which has gone through at least two visual
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I organized my home page by putting the information for my students first, and
my personal interests second, including what I like to read and some of my own writing.
With help from D*** at the Help Desk, I FTPed (File Transfer Protocol) my site folder to
Figure 19, below, shows my current (at the time of this writing) Web site. It was
visual appearance, while I did some design of the page and wrote all of the text. I have
since learned the basics of two other Web-authoring softwares, Dreamweaver and
GoLive. I continue to be fascinated by the possibilities of Web pages, and to learn more
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something of importance in the past year for each of us, for me, for my
husband and for our daughter. Then he wishes each of us well for the
The online computer has become my composing tool for two media, text on
paper, and pages on the World Wide Web. For both, my learning has been driven by
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I have learned to write using the online computer, and to teach using the online
computer, and I cannot go back to a pre-computer innocence. I have three last tales,
one of using WebCT even with a class that was not in the Mobile Initiative, the second of
the energy core of this teaching and technology initiative, and the third of a great gift.
I am pushing a cart up the incline to the second floor, my body slanted forward
as I forge upward. Others flow down the ramp on my left. I have my laptop, in its
knapsack, on the bottom self, along with my purse. On the top of the cart is a data
projector locked to the cart by a plastic coated wire rope. At the beginning of every
month I go into the IT area and sign up for one of the four data projectors, in the same
time slot for every week. I cannot teach this course without a DATA projector.
I open the door and awkwardly push the cart into the computer lab. Some of the
students look up briefly from their computers, and then focus again on whatever is on
their screens. I wheel the cart into the middle row up the only position that works; it is
as far from the screen as the plug and cord from the cart will allow. The image is not
that large, but it is the best I can manage given the length of the networking cord and
I lean on the table beside the computer, and twist so I can reach the network
jack. I unplug it and then straighten up and plug it into the laptop. I plug my laptop into
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the outlet on the cart, and plug in my mouse. I turn on the DATA projector, turn on my
laptop, and turn to see who is here as I wait for everything to load.
Querulous Voice
This group is often irritable. We had a poor start. Because I work for
about what I was teaching, and I discovered in the late summer that I was
double booked, scheduled to teach two different classes at the same time. By
the time a new schedule was worked out, most of the rooms and labs had
already been booked. This class ended up with an awkward schedule, one
hour in a classroom, then an hour off, then two hours in the computer lab.
to what I taught in Interior Design. I believe very strongly that all students should be
introduced to computer basics, because it is now a life skill, required by all. Besides, the
students pay an Information Technology fee in their tuition, so they are entitled to
benefit from it. The co-ordinator accepted my suggestion, so here I was, with the
students in a computer lab, with my laptop and DATA projector set up.
Most of the students are here; I begin by explaining what we will do in this class.
I will show them how to create a PowerPoint slide show, and then, in groups, they will
make a small show, and finish it by next week. I turn to my laptop and begin. The laptop
barely fits beside the data projector on the top of the cart and I move my mouse over a
very small space right at the edge of the cart. I am speaking to the class, glancing at my
laptop screen and occasionally at the large screen. I ask questions, point out elements in
the screen shot of the PowerPoint menu, and go through the steps they need to take,
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My silver link bracelets clink as I move the mouse. I pause and turn to the class
to make a comment, and I …. stop. On all the computer screens, the images flip and
disappear. I feel weird, shocked. And that is literally what has happened. I have been
shocked and that shock has knocked out the computers. The students murmur; a couple
approach me. We look at the cart. The plug for the laptop is right up at the top, right
under where I had been moving the mouse. The plug is loose, and about a quarter inch
of the tongs can be seen. I look at my bracelets. One has a link with two indentations
slanted across it. My silver bracelet had dropped onto the live plug.
I cancel the rest of the class. A little shakily, and very carefully, I unplug
everything, returning the network jack to the original computer, winding the cart cord
around the storage arms, packing up my laptop, and putting it in the knapsack, and the
knapsack and my purse on the bottom shelf of the cart. Slowly I brace the door open
and wheel the cart through, and take the cart down the ramp, leaning back against its
weight. I take the cart into the IT room, and tell the technicians what happened.
Both examine my bracelet. They begin to discuss how they could re-structure the
cart so that would not happen again. (I am grateful neither blames me for wearing my
bracelets.) The next week, when I arrive to pick up my cart and data projector, all the
plug sockets have been moved to the middle shelf. I do not have to give up my
bracelets.
The soft “bong” that indicates that email has arrived sounds and I
click on the mail icon; a message has arrived from my computer mentor.
She has sent a link to some research on the time required to teach an
respond to her email immediately, and within two minutes she has
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I don’t yet use Chat, but when the person whom I am sending email
messages to and I are both online, the messages can bounce back and forth
almost instantly.
Part of the renovation for the Mobile Initiative included creating a dual-purpose
space for teachers. We can go to this space to plug in our laptops at the U-shaped table
and work or just to sit in the small grouping of armchairs and relax. It has some more
and a data projector. The Mobile Initiative committees meet there too. Each of the two
large campuses has its own “Greenhouse,” and each has the soft yellow walls, light wood
tables, and muted green office chairs, like many of the mobile classrooms. The lounge
area armchairs are a gentle yellow, and there is a wall of windows in the Oakville
Greenhouse. I like to work there both for the environment and because I encounter
have uploaded to the Assignment Dropbox in WebCT. I sigh in relief as I open the next
one; this student has followed the instructions and put the assignment in Arial, a sans
serif font. Already my eyes are feeling a little itchy from all the on-screen marking. Serif
eyes more when I am marking a large number of assignments. I read through the
assignment quickly and type a couple of sentences into the response field — one
praising the student’s exploration of the Web, and another suggesting how she could
have been more detailed in her description. Then I type her mark into the mark field,
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which also puts it into Manage Students, where the course marks are held, and where I
can set up a calculation formula and automatically generate the final marks. (My
institution and many of the students insist on having such marks. I see marks as only
Consequently, I welcome any device that allows me to spend less time dealing with
marks.) The students will be able to see their own individual responses and their marks
when I finish marking and release the Assignment Dropbox comments and the marks.
One of the new members of the DELTA3 PD Committee arrives and we chat briefly
while she is unpacking her laptop and plugging in. I mention how I am enjoying not
having to haul bags of papers home because I am using the Assignment Dropbox. She
comes over and looks over my shoulder at what I am doing and I show her what it looks
like and tell her about getting her students to use Arial instead of Times. She goes back
to her laptop and a couple of minutes later asks how to set up the Assignment
Dropbox. I go over and stand behind her as I talk her through the steps. Others are
coming in; the DELTA3 PD Committee meets every week from 12:00 to 1:30pm.
The noise increases as people sit down, some plugging in their laptops, some
not. Most of the seats are taken when the Chair rushes in. S*** has been the lead for the
mobile initiative since it started and she chairs both this, the PD Committee, and the
WebCT Steering Committee, which meets once a month in the late afternoon. She plugs
in her laptop and speaks over the chatter which tails off as she starts asking questions
from the last meeting’s “to do” list, mostly about the upcoming Show and Share PD day
— a day of teacher-led workshops for teachers, mostly aimed at those on laptops, and
held in the non-teaching midterm week in the fall and in the spring. (See examples of
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sent out?
suggestions. D*** points out a time discrepancy, and adds a line to the building thread
of humour. S*** asks me a question, and I confess that I had been looking at clipart
possibilities and did not catch the question. Someone makes a joke about multitasking,
and without stopping typing L*** does a “teacher-voice” instructing me to close the lid
of my laptop and pay attention. I love this committee; it gets a surprising amount of
The Chair is the same and there is some overlap of members, but this is focussed not on
Professional Development but on technical and institutional issues. The level of humour
and playfulness is high here too, but it is later in the day so it is a bit quieter. The
committee includes teachers from different areas, and people from the technical areas.
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Teachers bring problems in how the software is working, often after someone
has been on the DELTA3 email Help list. The technical people explain why it is
happening, report what they are trying to do about it, and what else might be done. The
technical people tell the teachers how much time they need to “roll over” the courses,
moving current courses to the inactive server and dropping the next term’s student
names into Manage Students in the fresh iteration of the courses. We discuss end-of-
term dates, and the due dates for marks, the symbols educational institution run on.
different dates, and we all decide when the rollover should happen. This committee
complexities. I am also impressed at the mutual respect and civility as we all work
A Sweet Reward
It’s springtime in 2001 and I am in the Sheridan theatre, at a front table on the
right, sitting with my husband who also teaches at Sheridan, our teen-aged daughter,
my mom and dad, and the office-mate and friend who is responsible for starting the
chain-of-events that brought us all here. I have a new dress, special for the occasion, an
unusual combination of gold and mauve, and I am very excited, especially about my
Querulous Voice
I have won the Annual Teaching Excellence Award for 2000 –2001, the first given
at Sheridan. I had not even dreamed it could happen. I have never been good at school
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politics, and, as I do not belong to any program, I have no real base. The real award, in
many ways, is that L***, my office mate and friend, someone who “does not suffer fools
gladly” and is a very hard-working professional, nominated me for one of the Awards of
Merit, which are given out three times a year. This had made me eligible for the Annual
award.
Between being told I had won the teaching Excellence Award and this ceremony, I
had done a little digging. A committee made of people from the mid-level of the
school’s hierarchy decides who get the award on the basis of interviews with students
and other teachers. I think at least two of the committee are people I have worked with
before, and one a former student; but I am not sure of the exact make-up. At first I feel
guilty, as though knowing some of them had made it easier for me to win, then a friend
points out the two-edgedness of that, and I feel more comfortable. I casually mention
the award to one of my students from the Interior Design Thesis class, and she smiles
self-consciously. I pause, and she tells me she was one of the students who were
Now I am here, waiting to get my framed award certificate and pose for a
photograph with the new Human Resources Director (whom I have never met before)
who is standing in for the new President. My parents are here, my husband, daughter,
some colleagues, and my nominating friend is here, and people whom I have worked
I am grateful.
Ariadne’s Voice
I can tell from the angle of the sun and from the sounds of someone moving that
I am almost into the core and close to the Minotaur. I yearn for this exploration to be
complete; yet I fear it ending. Every night to rest, I sit leaning against a wall in the
labyrinth. After eating some of the cheese and fruit I find every day somewhere in my
exploration, I pull out some of the flax fibres, and my comb and spindle. After combing
and spinning the flax into linen thread, I pull out my small loom and begin to weave.
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Every night I fall asleep, weaving, with the cord on my lap. All night I dream, and
in the morning the design of the cord rises in my mind and wakes me. Every morning,
when I wake, I find the cord stretched out and leading me down one of the passageways.
I eat the fresh bread that is always waiting beside me and then rise and follow the cord.
Tonight I rest against a wall so thin a glow from the other side shines through
and so supple it seems to hold me, shaping to my body. I see the movement of light and
hear the whisper of feet; I think I can hear breathing. I am so close to the core and the
Minotaur.
This journey has been so rewarding its pleasure is reflected onto the Minotaur.
His labyrinth is difficult yet beautiful and my heart swells with anticipation as I await our
meeting.
Here, at the climax of this discovery journey, I find myself focussed on the
Minotaur, and what he means to me. I understand that Theseus feared death from the
Minotaur, so he fled him, with my help. However, I will not flee. Here in my thesis-home,
I will confront the Minotaur I have been seeking with persistence and care. In the next,
and penultimate chapter, I will guide you into my study and report what I have learned
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V — Afters — In My Study
We are still looking for coalescences within the disorder, for organic
unity beneath the superficial disruption, and for disruptive forces
beneath the superficial unity. Such work is less about attempting to
contain aesthetic experience and more about showing what
piecemeal, working examples of it may look like (Diamond = Mullen
2000, "Reformulation: Letting Go of the Original Paper" para. 6).
You are such a good audience; you make it easy to tell you all these stories. That
is most of what has happened as I have followed my fascination with writing and
teaching using the online computer. Now, I have some liqueur and glasses up in my
study: a reward from this inquiry, and for patient listening. Please, come up. It is a
spiral, you know, we will walk from here in the dining room to the front hall and then up
stairs angled toward the back of my home, turn left at the landing, up a few more stairs,
go along the hall, and turn again left into my study. Let me just move this pile of books
— wonderful ones that helped so much. You can look at them later if you like, but now,
sit here in my reading chair, and I will sit over here in front of my desk and laptop so we
can talk.
Ariadne’s Voice
This morning I awake and find myself half way through the wall; that thin
membrane I rested against last night is gone. My feet in one part of the labyrinth and my
head, heart and hands here, in this new place, in the core. Beside me I find the sweet
water and fresh bread that I find every morning, and this time, a small pot of honey as
well. I am almost trembling with eagerness, but I wonder what I am entering, why the
Minotaur stays hidden, and if I should be afraid. Despite my unease, I take time to eat.
The honey melts into my mouth and I feel charged with energy and a sense of wonder.
As I finish this breaking of my fast, I look around and am astounded to see my
linen cord leading me to a strange chair on wheels and a crowded table with a curious
object, part white like a scroll, but part stiff and angled and, like a frescoed wall, filled
with colours. The fresco painted on the “wall” part of the scroll has small black markings
on white against blue surrounded by more colour with small pictures. It draws me and I
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scramble the rest of the way through the labyrinth wall and sit down on the wheeled
chair, staring at the colour.
I have come through a portal into a new world, or maybe been born into a new
state. My linen cord has wrapped itself around this object before me and flows over the
“floor” part of this odd scroll with its strange grid, with a small black marking on each
square. The cord reaches over to a light grey smooth rock that my hand is drawn to. My
hand knows it, and my middle finger rests on a darker bump of the rock and caresses it.
The fresco shifts! The blue line moves up showing more grey markings below it! I stare
in fascination. In a mind that seems co joined to mine, I hear the whisper, “I am online.”
Confirmations
beliefs about how learning, especially of writing, happens from my points of view as a
teacher and as a learner. I have read and re-read many books and articles, some of
them ones I have written. I have combed through my memories and spun them together
with the differing threads culled from accounts I have written during earlier times. I have
opened myself and spoken in a variety of voices, all mine and none with the whole story.
In order to research the shift in the technology for writing and communicating
that is occurring as increasing numbers of students and teachers are on computers and
online, I used the artistic possibilities of poetry, and the visual possibilities provided by
the word processor and the Web to explore and represent on paper what I have
delve into the details and texture of what it has been like to live through this era of
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In this inquiry into the impact of the online computer as a writing and a teaching
tool, I have explored some of the semiotic changes occurring in our culture and their
impact on what and how we need to teach in writing classes. I have looked at the impact
of this prosthesis, the online computer, which is gaining such ubiquity in our culture,
and looked at how, as a teacher, I have been learning to work through and with it. I have
playfully attempted to create an atypical thesis, with the academic form present, and
with the postmodern possibilities that the computer incites artfully displayed.
Now, having moved beyond my former sense of never knowing enough, I feel
infused with the strength of knowing what I know, and knowing that my knowledge is
worthwhile. I have travelled far in my quest, from pencil, pen and reluctance to joy and
triumphal skill in this new two-handed composing technology that so deeply impacts
material uploaded to the web. Computers can crash. Software can fail. Connections with
meaning of the impact of this new technology to the explicit practice of research to
“investigate the impact of the online computer on composing and teaching, penetrating
The object of a self-narrative [is] not its fit to some hidden “reality” but
its achievement of “external and internal coherence, livability and
adequacy” (p. 112).
In their physical occurrence, things and events experienced pass and are
gone. But something of their meaning and value is retained as an integral
part of the self. Through habits formed in intercourse with the world, we
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also in-habit the world. It becomes a home, and the home is a part of our
every experience (p. 104).
Having gathered all my threads together into this cord which you have been
following with me, I now share with you what I have learned through my inquiry here in
Jim leans against my study door and I stop typing to turn and look
at him. He holds out the purple case containing the current version of my
encouragingly.
“There’s not really a, uh, story arc to Ariadne’s voice. Uh, will there be
an ending, you know closure?” he asks gently. I take the case from him,
with his pencilled questions and comments and put it down on the pile
closest to my chair. I am pleased and grateful for his help and tell him so.
Insights
result of writing this thesis, I have developed a number of insights and/or opinions.
First, in this concluding conversation among my voices, each speaks and tells of their
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Joan Vinall-Cox
Querulous Voice
All my voices are ways of thinking, and repressing any one of them
I weave this cord shaped in the pattern of a thesis, and made of the
linen I have spun. The lumpy threads of my complaints and distress reveal
insights as surely as my other voices, and are even more necessary because
they show what denial and repressive politeness would hide. Sometimes I
don’t know what I feel and think until I hear what I complain about. Those
usually as “logical” in outcome, I am like the math intuitive who knows the
learn more slowly, but I learn them more deeply and in more detail.
spelling and do not have the patience for a lot of small detail. Many of my
students, as well as I, write more and better with the supports a computer
can provide. And many of the intuitive learners of computer skills that I
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Different people are being empowered by the computer. Some who did
have not had language or learning problems struggle to learn how to use
computers. Using a computer is not a simple process, and many people flee
the difficulties or fall victim to them. Yet in our culture now we all need to
learn to use this writing tool because without that skill, a person is limited.
Illuminal Voice
My intuitive, arational connections arrive like cartoon light bulbs above my head,
that help me map my future and understand my past. This happens with my teaching,
These illuminations occur without my employing logic or rationality, yet they are
valid logically and rationally. They have simply come to me in a non-linear way, and
always associated with a passionate interest or need. They come in response to what I
call “worthy tasks,” work that is absorbing, difficult, yet possible. And the connections
often rise into my consciousness in the morning before I am completely awake and/or
I treasure my insights.
Poetic Voice
In a textbook from my undergrad university course in modern poetry, I have
marked a poem by Roethke called “Dolor” (1958) where he writes —
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight
All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places (p. 404).
I have felt the possibility of such an emotional state becoming all I knew of
school and teaching. I have mostly avoided such a space by finding vitality with the
students learning in the classroom, excitement through learning for the classroom, and
comfort with my colleagues, and all these were part of the personal renewal that
learning about and with the computer brought me.
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In this writing about my writing and teaching with the computer, I have found, as
the poet Anne Wilkinson (1982) describes,
In my dark room the years
Lie in solution,
Develop film by film.
Slow at first and dim
Their shadows bite
On the fine white pulp of paper (p. 142).
My memories emerge and I retrace my path into the core of the labyrinth where
the Minotaur waits “on the fine white pulp of paper.”
Writing Necessities
narrative approach has been essential for me to write my way through to reach explicit
Design Thesis course helped me learn the traditional format of a thesis and what
elements it should contain, which I needed to know before I wrote this thesis. I learned
the deliberately planned structure and the usefulness of outlining, which then allowed
choices. I wrote story built on story, with insights emerging from the memories that held
and released meanings for me. And I spontaneously wrote openly in different voices; I
have always written with different voices, though I usually tried to politely smooth them
together.
The combination of the structure of the thesis form and the freedom of the
writing space I needed. Indeed, this thesis, this “Web of meaning” (Emig, 1983) is both
the result of, and an exemplar of, Britton’s (1982) “Expressive Writing” as I shape at the
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point of utterence, and a version of Allen’s (2002) “Expressive Writing” (p. 149) as I write
about my own experiences, in my “True Self.” Writing my story, my way has engendered
the energy I needed to complete this project, and the confidence that has resulted from
computer-mediated age.
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After I write, I use a screen capture to add the image of the MSWord toolbars so I
can show the Styles field. (See Figure 21 above.) As I continue writing, I bold the word,
“Styles” to display that it is a function I am naming. I double click on “Styles” to highlight
it, then I use the mouse to move to the Word icon bar above and to the “B,” (see Figure
21 above) which is the icon that changes the highlighted text to a bolded appearance, or
removes the bolding. I click on the icon, and the text darkens and thickens. I carefully
click to place the cursor over from the bolded work and move the mouse again till the
arrow rests on the “B” icon and click to remove the extra bolding. It does not take and I
have to repeat the action with small variations twice before I get the text back to an
unbolded italic. Such is the complexity of writing with word processing.
Now I pause for a “meoment,” resting my right hand on the sensually shaped
mouse, and think. The red squiggly underlining leads me to notice that I added and
extra “e” to “moment.”
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I use the mouse to position the arrow-form of the cursor over the misspelled
word, and use my middle finger to click on the button on the right side of my mouse. A
list, including the correctly spelled word “moment,” appears over the text on the screen;
if I click on the word, it will replace the one on the screen. I decide not to so you, the
reader, can see the error.
Beyond that level of actually “inscribing” the words on the screen and creating a
“document” that might be printed using a printer attached to the computer, there is
another level of writing with the online computer. My email application is open, with its
icon showing in the application “Dock.”
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icon for “Google” which I have placed on my personal toolbar, just under the other
toolbars I have chosen to have show.
I write “I teach to live” in the Google search field and links to 10 “results” appear.
I glance through the descriptions, but chose not to look at any and instead move the
cursor to the icon for MS Word and click on the left mouse button to return to writing
this, here, now.
Such is my writing process.
There is no end to learning about how to use the computer as a writing and
teaching tool, and there is always more complexity than imagined. I have been able to
focus intensively on learning the tool of the online computer for my own writing and
Published Voice with these excerpts from an article I wrote in 2001 for the CALL
(http://www.callmagazine.com/).
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The most surprising and unexpected insight for me as I wrote this thesis has been an
understanding of the importance of the institution and the learning community for my
writings, I declare my love for what the computer allows me to create, for the teaching
power I gain through it, and for how Sheridan and my colleagues have supported my
learning.
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Ariadne Speaks
I look at my cord and remember what it was like as I began my quest. I see a
design that I did not see early on, and that I did not plan as I wove. I remember people
who were around me and see them differently now. I review my journey and the oracles
and the trials and the path I have been following. I hold one of the looms that I have
used to create this cord and look back — what I have done is illuminated so I see more
richly and with greater detail and clarity.
This cord ties me to my past and to my future, an umbilical link that is
momentarily severed only with the birth of a finished “piece,” an artfully formed
document, or Web page, or …. whatever artful object waits to be born through this rich
communicative technology.
Illuminal Voice
This cord, created from my learning to extend my learning, has threads wrapping
around the core knowledge in a kind of coil or spiral that holds and extends my
teaching and computer knowledge. The spiral coil is formed with my ever-moving Zone
spotlighted. Like MacLeish’s (1958) moon revealing and then re-hiding “twig by twig the
night-entangled trees” (p. 379), so the part of the coil is highlighted where I am learning
With repetition and scaffolding help, I learn, and sections of the coil retreat into
the background and become tacit (Polanyi, 1969). “Tacit knowing now appears as an act
of indwelling by which we gain access to new meaning” (p. 160). The institution I work
within and the others who work with me within that institution have created the
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and set up the Mobile Initiative. My cord would be distorted and much shorter without
the generosity and understanding of the value of cooperation and a learning community
Querulous Voice
I hate to admit how much I owe the institution and the learning
The manager who introduced me to writing theory, the coordinator who thrust
me into teaching communications using computers and who led the program into the
Mobile Initiative, the leader of the Mobile Initiative, the teacher who was and is my
computer mentor, all these “specific events and people in the stories of [my school have
left] imprints on [my] professional knowledge landscape” (Craig, 2000, p. 38). And I wish
398) not simply as a “knowledge-using and knowledge sharing” (p. 400) place but also
Implications
The online computer is everywhere and our students, in secondary and post
secondary institutions, will spend significant parts of their future professional and
personal lives “wearing” the prosthesis of a computer. Already there is a powerful Web
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educate the young need to understand the impact of the changes brought about by the
online computer and help those we teach, and our colleagues, learn how to make use of
the powers available to us with the online computer. We also need to maintain and share
our pre-computer knowledge and expertise. As in this thesis, we need memory and
quests.
including in 2003, I have seen unevenness in my classes between the students who
already have a depth of computer-based skills and those who can do little more than
email and Web browse and often think this is all they need to know. This unevenness
creates a challenge for the teacher trying to present classes that neither bore the
A second unevenness can be found in students who are skilled in one aspect of
computer knowledge, say the technical aspects of creating Web sites, but limited in
understanding the language and/or navigational needs of their users. Our institutions
and culture have focussed on technical knowledge and theorizing while often over-
looking communicative skills and knowledge. The communicative skills, linguistic, visual
We walked through the snow to the coffee shop today and sat and
read the paper. There was an article reporting that more photographs from
the Second World War are being put up on the Web. I wonder briefly if my
any longer to teach history, or any subject, without recourse to the resources
The new possibilities of writing and teaching with the online computer need to
be integrated into educational practices without the technical aspects dominating the
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knowledge and communication aspects. Both the knowledge and skills of how to handle
the computer and software and the ability to shape semiotic creations to successfully
convey meanings to a reading audience are needed for current teaching and learning.
[The teacher] must survey the capacities and needs of the particular
set of individuals with whom [s]he is dealing and must at the same
time arrange the conditions which provide the subject-matter or
content for experiences that satisfy these needs and develop these
capacities. The planning must be flexible enough to permit free play
for individuality of experience and yet firm enough to give direction
towards continuous development of power (Dewey, 1963, p. 58).
specialize in the study of language, dealing with unevenness in students’ abilities and
interests in writing has been my lot throughout my career. Adding the online computer
into my classroom has not changed that, except that students are more willing to spend
time looking at computer screens (whether or not on the designated task) than most
And writing is, if anything, increasingly important in the age of the online
computer. More people are spending more time writing on the computer for the internet
and Web than ever wrote letters or stories. How much time do you spend reading and
writing emails? One of the greatest incentives for the spread of the online computer is
email. Seniors increasingly use it, and almost all young people spend possibly hours
every day on email and messaging. That is writing. Many people now mount business
and/or personal materials on the Web and that requires multisemiotic authoring and
text. That is writing too. The online computer has made writing easier and more
prevalent. However, there are skills, conventions, and etiquette involved in writing and
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online communication, and the person who wants to look skilled and smart needs to be
educated in them.
The challenge for our educational (and other institutions) in the future, as I see
it, is creating and enhancing learning communities so those who teach (and work) can
continue to learn and develop computer skills and subsidiary language skills to enhance
their teaching (and work.) As an automatic addition to that, teachers need to become
skilled in creating and enhancing learning communities within classes so students will
develop the pattern of sharing their skills and learning from each other as well as from
where teachers have a grassroots and authentic influence on the set-up of classrooms
helps create the sense of community that will support in-house professional
After teaching in computer labs, and teaching on a platform different from the
one most of my students were familiar with, I can only stress the teaching and learning
efficiencies of having everyone in the class on the same type of computer and the same
software. It is true that once someone has some familiarity with computers, it is possible
to teach and learn without exact matches. However, for those still in the initial stages of
learning how to use computers, the more explicit and exact the computer and software
I believe that learning to write using a word processor is a skill most will need in
their lives, and I have seen that the use of a computer often inspires and extends
students’ writing. Writing teachers need to learn these skills themselves in order to
teach writing using this new and increasingly essential writing tool. And increasingly all
teachers will need to use the resources of the online computer and access to the Web as
part of our teaching tools. We as a profession must gain the knowledge and skills that
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My own experience has been that I acquired relevant language, layout, and
computer skills when I needed them for a worthy and/or desired objective. When I
that contained resources, I learned what I had to in order to teach my courses. Once I
felt some level of competency, I discovered gaps I wanted to fill. I knew the look of a
document affected how it was read, so my students and I needed to know the basics of
graphic design. As I saw this new space for language opening in email and on the Web, I
found tasks I wanted to perform. Being able to make individual choices about what and
how to learn, plus following my aesthetic pleasure, enhanced both my desire and my
ability to learn.
directly relevant to themselves, and support as they struggle with their first attempts,
appear to learn both how to do the specific task, and how to problem-solve by asking
approach to teaching writing and other computer uses is most effective. Both as a
learner and as a teacher, I start not from the technology but from the task and how to
I believe the challenge for educational institutions, especially during this time of
great cultural shift, is to offer both technical support and the opportunities for learning
communities to develop for all within them, students, teachers and staff, and thus to
support efficient and effective learning of how to use the ubiquitous tool of our time,
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The Web is a written world. The 300 million people on the Web are
its authors (Weinberger, 2002, p. 145).
The research challenge is to actually choose a singular focus from all that needs
to be inquired into in this new semiotic and technical space. The writing tool, the writing
space, and the writing possibilities are all undergoing massive change as is the teaching
tool and space, and educators need to be riding and observing this wave. I see that the
core of one learning labyrinth has paths leading out to other mazes, and although
arrival can be declared and celebrated, there will be further voyages, further
explorations.
Ariadne’s Voice
Here, in the core of the labyrinth, I hear a throat being cleared behind me and I
swing towards the sound — and almost fall off this strange chair that moves with me.
Someone, both a stranger and yet oddly familiar, is sitting opposite me and smiling
inquiringly. ”Have you found the Minotaur yet?” I am asked. What do I say? I can feel his
presence; I can hear, almost, his breathing; and I rest in the glow that lights the space
around him. I sense something ripe for being born, and I do not know if I am giving
birth or being born into a new world, or a witness at someone else’s birth. I must hold
the space; I must be a vessel, waiting ….
Writing Process
I decide I need to see my thesis on paper, its eventual home, for a final close
edit. I want to have a colour copy and then give colour copies to my committee
members, a total of four copies are needed. I check with local businesses that print up
computer documents. To print this paper in colour would cost over $200.00 each, a
total of$800.00. I decide to use my home printer.
It takes hours to print up even one copy; it takes days to print up four. I persist.
Partway through the printing marathon, I realize I haven’t done the page
numbering correctly; I need to have roman numerals for the front part. I use “Save As” to
save the document under a new name. I now have one copy on a CD, and two on the
hard drive because I am afraid of losing all my work because the computer crashes or
something technical goes wrong. I work on the new copy and finally get the pagination
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correct. I will print the remaining three copies using that and keep the copy with the
incorrectly numbered pages as my copy to edit.
There are printer problems. The black cartridge runs out. The colour cartridge
runs out. The black cartridge runs out again; I get two this time. Each pause is a
disruption.
I have to move my computer into another room to attach it to the printer and it is
hard to plug in the computer, so I let it use the battery. When the battery gets low, I stop
printing and plug in the computer so it can re-generate. I turn on the computer and put
it into sleep mode. It crashes. I learn later from the IT person who rescued my data that
sleep mode can drain a low battery.
I have to turn in the computer that crashed after it is fixed because the school
only lent it to me for a limited time. I take my CD with my data and borrow my
husband’s computer, but he will need full use of it in a few weeks. I create an account
for myself, and install my copy of EndNote. It doesn’t work. I spend a few hours with the
manual and on the web site and discover that I need an upgrade, available free on the
site. I download the upgrade and now EndNote opens, but the page numbers don’t show
in the citations. I quickly figure out how to deal with this, but the window I need to
access only flashes open and closes immediately. Finally I send a request for help to the
EndNote Support Desk. While I am writing this section, my email notification bongs, and
there is the answer less than one work day after my message I will have to change
almost all of my citations. This is hard labour.
I enter the changes I planned during my close edit, then I enter the citation
changes, and then I enter further edits from my supervisor. What I had thought was a
finished document is caught between the screen and paper as I struggle with the
mindless complexities of finishing then moving what I have created from its electronic
existence to its life on paper. If the computer is my prosthesis, the Minotaur is the
beautiful but difficult (and sometimes destructive) child of mind and machine, the
Ariadne’s Voice
The stranger pours a clear liquid into a small goblet and offers it to me. It smells
like liquor, and I drink it quickly. I feel the pull of the cord as what I have held in this
womb-like labyrinth pulses toward birth.
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I turn back to the fresco and look at it, and now the strange markings make
sense and I see my name. I turn again to the familiar stranger and hear my voice, and
others:
And now a chorus of all the voices that form my cord strikes and holds a chord:
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We learn through artful desire, not technical rote, and we can learn to use the
online computer to shape what we dream of and to build beauty to print out and/or
My voices have sung their final chord together, but my academic and teacher
on my journey, finding that the core of this labyrinth has paths that lead to further
mazes and explorations — “to make an end is to make a beginning” (Eliot, 1965). Below,
in Figure 22, I show you a screen shot of my current project, my own blog about the
visual aspect of text. I used a template, but went into the HTML code (the technical
foundation needed for Web pages) and changed the colours — because I like purple, and
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Picture a woman. She is sitting across from you on an office chair, her body
turned toward you with her right hand on a mouse beside a white laptop. The light
thickens and seems to ripple and you find yourself looking at a wondrous cord in her
left hand and she looks for a moment like an antique Greek princess. You shake your
head and look again, and you see a postmodern middle-aged woman in glasses
“Etymologically,” she says, “cord, c-o-r-d,” she spells it out, “and chord, c-h-o-
r-d,” she spells again, “are tangled together. C-o-r-d started in Greek, where it meant
strings for musical instruments. The light flutters and again the antique Greek princess
stares imperiously at you. You blink and it is the modern scholar who smiles at you. “It
travelled through Latin and French, becoming many strings woven together.” She
gestures with her left hand and the image of a thick woven cord floats into being and
you see it extends out the door of the study and turns toward the stairs.
“C-h-o-r-d sounds the same and may be tied to the strings of musical
instruments. It comes from the Middle English ‘accord’ and is linked to harmony, three
or more pitches being sounded together.” You can hear the excitement rising in her
voice. “So the cord in the labyrinth and the chord of all my voices come together in this
study which is here, this room in my home that I write in, here, the core of my labyrinth,
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and here in this study, inquiry, that I am writing. And,” her voice is infused with a delight
that belies the long gestation and hard labour as she reaches over and taps a button on
the laptop, “the Minotaur, whose father was the god of the sea, earthquakes and horses
and whose mother was a daughter of the sun, and who was conceived through a
Long ago this study started with Ariadne returning to the labyrinth and the
“Monster” she remembered helping Theseus flee from. As she searched through her fate
and explored the labyrinth, she sought the machine-conceived Minotaur (her half-
brother) and found ….” A noise starts in the next room, a regular click and whoosh. The
woman picks up a book from one of the piles on the floor and reads a passage aloud:
And this child of the depths and shining outlaw passion, this Minotaur, comes
into being this time, as he has countless times and places before, from the union of
passion and insight mediated by technology, in this paper marked from the electronic
impulses of the machines that have mediated between me as writer and you as reader,
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