recompositiongabrielle

ENGL 200W: Writing: Developing Skill and Confidence

Gabrielle Civil's observations and conclusions

Project Summary
Re/composition was a 2001-2002 Center of Excellence funded action research project to reconsider and redress women’s marginalization in today’s technological world. In the spirit of true liberal arts education, my colleague Yvonne Ng, a professor of Computer Science in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, and myself, a professor of Literature and Writing in the English Department, worked together to design this project with interdisciplinary aims and strategies. Overall, we pushed students and ourselves to approach technology more comprehensively and dynamically through the means of writing. In this way, we revised curricula for two courses, reformed pedagogical strategies, and inaugurated important discussion across the sciences and the humanities.

Aims

To push students to relate more critically to technology

To employ / analyze the role of writing as a bridge between sciences & humanities

To engage in significant curriculum revision in our respective courses

To inaugurate discussion about technology and writing in our departments

To garner insight from professionals who routinely blended writing & technology

To present our ideas in scholarly arenas

Problem Description
To review briefly, the specific problem of our project was the uncritical approach of College of St. Catherine students to technology, in particular computers. Students used computers constantly and yet applied no critical thinking to their use. Interestingly, this had ramifications for both Professor Ng and myself. As an English Professor, I had long been frustrated with how unconscious computer use had degraded the quality of student writing (via sloppy proofreading, reliance on spell check, and unreflective drafting, etc.). Professor Ng saw this lack of critical thinking as an obstacle to her work as a professor of Computer Science, especially in her endeavor to tie computers to the liberal arts.

Our individual observations had significant national resonance for St. Kate’s students. A 1999 statistic showed that women made up only 20% of Information Technology (IT) professionals. And significant attention has been paid to the “gender divide” in computer culture, a likely carryover from the still existent “science gap” between school boys and girls. Sherry Turkle, MIT professor of sociology and one-time co-chair of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) Educational Foundation Commission on Technology, Gender, and Teacher Education, asserted: “[G]irls are critical of the computer culture, not computer phobic . . . Instead of trying to make girls fit the existing computer culture, the computer culture must become more inviting for girls.”

Morever, this invitation needs to move beyond “user friendly” passivity. The AAUW Commission stressed the need for girls to gain technological fluency, problem solving skills and flexible critical thinking. Such remarks named our problem as a national one and provided us an important scholarly context.

Methodology
To reach our aims, Professor Ng and I consciously incorporated technology and writing into the already existing computer and composition courses, CSCI 106 Introduction to Computers (Fall 2001) and ENGL 200W Writing: Developing Skill and Confidence (Winter 2002). Both courses were re-worked to use a mixture of composition and computer science activities to engance students enthusiasm and understanding of technology and its affect on their education.

Each professor served as a consultant to the other in her particular area of expertise. To bridge the academic world and industry, and to gain practical strategies for the blending of these fields, we had two external consultants, Bette Frick and Judy Nollet, offer guidance to us and the students.

Maria Marchand, a graduate student in Education, specializing in Math education, served as a project research assistant. She conducted scholarly research to help us connect the project to other scholarly and pedagogical efforts. Her main work was to devise a survey to help measure student entry and exit responses to technology. To this end, Ms. Marchand, Professor Ng and I worked with Professor Ken Vos, to strategize and develop important assessment tools.

As the courses proceeded, Professor Ng, Ms. Marchand and I met regularly to discuss the process of the project. I also recorded my observations and questions in a “teaching log” throughout the Winter 2002 semester.

General outcomes
The Re/composition project was an extremely successful one relative to our aims.

Through our course curriculum revision, we did push students to relate more critically to technology.

In ENGL 200W, for example, students had to write about their relationship to writing. They had to “hand-write” assignments, and word process them on a computer and then analyze the difference in the writing process. With the help of Professor Ng, they had to create their own website and analyze the difference between computer writing ( HTML “code”) and the expository writing of their essays. They had to also encounter and perform their own “web writing,” again analyzing the particular process required for this form and garnering specific critical insights about technology.

To employ / analyze the role of writing as a bridge between sciences & humanities

Writing emerged as the key thread between the two courses and as our main means for pushing students to greater technological fluency. Because my course was already a writing course, my task was to link elegantly writing to technology in a way that made sense for the students. Professor Ng’s task was more radical. For a population that often favors the field because of its relatively small amount of writing, she had to integrate meaningful writing assignments to enhance their critical thinking about their work. As her final report attests, this was a challenging and rewarding process for both her and the students.

To engage in significant curriculum revision in our respective courses

Both CSCI 106 and ENGL 200W were significantly revised with changes that have persisted beyond the project. (See appendix for ENGL200W syllabus.)

To inaugurate discussion about technology and writing in our departments

Both Professor Ng and I used the Re/composition project as an opportunity to discuss technology and pedagogy in our departments. At a Winter 2002 department meeting, I shared the process of the project. In our subsequent discussions about curriculum revision—particularly regarding the technology requirement in the English major—I also brought up positive rewards of the Re/composition project.

To garner insight from professionals who routinely blended writing & technology

In the Summer of 2001, Professor Ng and I had consultation sessions with Bette Fricke and Judy Nolte who offered helpful suggestions for the execution of the project. Judy Nolte also came to present directly to my ENGL 200W course about professional web writing.

To present our ideas in scholarly arenas

This was perhaps the most fruitful aspect of the project from our end. Professor Ng and I had the privilege of presenting work from the Re/composition project three times.

We presented “Re/Composition: An Engineer & A Poet Working Together” November 2001 at the national Association of American Colleges and Universities “Technology, Learning and Intellectual Development” Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

We presented a modified version of this presentation at the Associated Colleges of the Twin Cities Classrooms of the Future Conference in May 2002.

Highlighting our individual motivations and challenges for the project as well as our interdisciplinary collaborative work, these presentations were extremely well received.

We also both wrote articles for the College of St. Catherine scholarly newsletter Colleagues. My article, focusing on my specific response as an English professor (and initial Luddite) to the rigors of teaching technology, appeared in December 2001.

Work on Re/composition also informed my curation of a Center of Excellence for Women Science and Technology creative event, “hYPERcREATION” which featured computer-based or computer-inspired art and performances.

Student Outcomes
Because participation in our survey was optional, the numbers for our empirical data are too small to offer a fair account of student response to the project. (See the report of Professor Ng and Ms. Marchand for more information on the student surveys.)

Informally, students offered a positive response to the project. My students were surprised and engaged by the attention to the web, although they did show ambivalence, much like myself, about the role of technology in their own writing. Just as many of Professor Ng’s students had come to Computer Science to escape writing, many of my students were not happy about computers emerging as an important topic in their writing class. At the same time, they accepted far more quickly the importance of computers to their future, than the computer science students did with writing.

Again, both Professor Ng and I realized that despite the difference in our fields, student response to “required” skills and learning are quite similar. (It’s like making children eat their vegetables!)

Personal/Pedagogical Outcomes
As my article for Colleagues attests, my attitude toward technology was significantly more ambivalent than that of Professor Ng. Indeed, my complaints about computers ruining American culture were a main impetus for the project. Professor Ng called the bluff behind my bluster and challenged me to get involved and better educate myself and my students about computer technology. So Re/composition was born.

While teaching technology will always reside more in the realm of Computer Science professors than English ones, the Re/composition project has helped me accept the role of liberal arts instructors in the process. In order for students to gain technological fluency, all their teachers need to discuss and strategize together. This is because technological fluency is a subset of critical thinking, which is the ultimate outcome for all of us.

Similarly, interdisciplinary learning takes everyone. The best part of this project for me was my work with Professor Ng and the development of a interdisciplinary model that allowed us to work from our strengths and help each other help the students. This opened my pedagogy and allowed for dynamism and collaboration across the disciplines.

As with any technological innovation, the key is to teach students how to value and evaluate it critically. While I still have concerns about the future of the liberal arts at colleges such as the College of St. Catherine, and also about the demise of literacy connected to the rise of technology, visual culture, and the hypercirculation of bad writing, projects like Re/composition help me get a grip.

My own critical stance towards technology in society—and that of my fellow liberal arts professors—must not become pedagogical stagnation or nostalgic obsolescence. Re/composition helped me devise new approaches that deepened discussions of my own field.

Since the end of the project, I have worked hard to integrate websites, web reviews, web writing and other elements of computer technology into my regular teaching. (I have even since presented again at the ACTC Classrooms of the Future Conference about a student-centered video project in my Senior Seminar class.) My relationship to technology teaching is no longer adversarial, my own technological fluency has been greatly enhanced, and I am therefore better motivated and prepared to help our students exist in a technological world.

MS Word file of this report
appendix