Entanglements: Re-articulating discourses and practices of Web-based teaching and learning
Abstract
This project explores the ways in which composition instructors integrate the World Wide Web (WWW) into their writing pedagogies—a concern of mine as both a computer-composition teacher and a mentor of instructors teaching in computer classrooms. I assert that without the adequate means to understand how we both affect and are affected by the cultural narratives on the WWW, we, as computer compositionists, may find ourselves implementing the Web to the detriment of our teaching and our students' learning. I also suggest that many instructors are not provided adequate teacher training and support for incorporating web-based technologies into their pedagogies. I employ articulation theory as a methodology to locate the contradictions among the narratives of WWW. My work with instructor participants and my analysis of WebCT reveal that predominant cultural narratives—the Web as a global community and as the source of economic viability, and technology as easy and invisible—complicate the ability of even the most experienced instructors to implement the Web productively and equitably in their composition classrooms. I, therefore, suggest that we re-articulate the WWW. Through historical inquiry, ideological inquiry, and resistant material instantiations of technology, computer compositionists can complicate those cultural narratives and strive for more egalitarian web-based pedagogies.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Weiser, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Rhetoric|Educational technology
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