February 2009

Our students may have a different culture than we do, but it may not be as visible as the differences as the picture of these women of the Samburu tribe show. It may not be visible at all. But it could still be there.

Most college professors came from the middle class or the upper class. There are very few college professors who came from generational poverty. But many students, especially in the community colleges but even in large universities, come from generational poverty and are attempting to escape from it. They recognize that education is essential, even when they don’t know how education “works.”

As teachers, we can also be the facilitators for their entry into the academic community, by making clear what the mores and customs are. Why do we need to do that? Because they aren’t from our America. They didn’t grow up learning these things.

Dr. Ruby K. Payne grew up middle class and married someone from generational poverty. In an attempt to better understand her husband she did her graduate research on the differences between the classes. As a result of that, she is the leading expert in the US on the mindsets of generational poverty, middle class, and wealth.

Some notes from Ruby Payne:

“Hidden rules are unspoken cues and habits of a group. Distinct cueing systems exist between and among groups and economic classes. Generally in America this notion is clearly recognized for racial and ethnic groups but not for economic class” (58).

“When there are limited material things, and life is about survival, then virtually the only possession one has is people. And when people become possessions, the rules change. That’s why the physical fights over people are so intense- the person is a possession. That’s why being educated is often feared in generational poverty because when people get educated they usually leave [emphasis mine-ed.]. That’s why the put-downs for getting training or getting educated are so intense from those who come out of generational poverty” (60).

She means here that it the put-downs are intense toward the people who are getting educated or getting the training from the people who are not doing those things, if the two sets of people are in generational poverty. I would argue that it is the main reason students from low SES groups drop out of college. First generation immigrants from Asian countries do not, for example, because their culture is different, not because their families are richer.

“Six aspects of language affect the ability of a person to ‘listen’ in the workplace: verbal/non-verbal, concrete to abstract, language registers, discourse patterns, story structure, and ability to formulate questions” (90).

If our students have different verbal and non-verbal cues and ways of listening, if they do not understand our examples because of the ways we tell stories, and they can’t formulate questions as we do, they are in trouble. We can help them. We just have to know what their issues are.

“In poverty, the most important information tends to be conveyed non-verbally” (91).

“.. the structure of a story is different, depending on the use of casual or formal register. In formal register, a story is told from the beginning ot the end with cause, effect, and sequence by time. The story revolves around a plot- what happened. In casual register (this is what is used in gossip), one starts at the end first. Then episodes or vignettes are shared, along with spontaneous comments from the listeners” (95).

Our students may write a narrative in the casual register, especially if they are from generational poverty, because that is how stories are told in their experience. If we want them to tell them a different way, we need to be explicit about the rules.

Payne, Ruby K. and Don L. Krabill. Hidden Rules of Class at Work. Highlands, TX: aha! Process, Inc., 2002.

Some notes not from Payne:
It is not common for class-disadvantaged students to take advantage of the learning tool that the internet can be (Rothbaum, Martland, and Jannsen).     

Rothbaum, Fred, Nancy Martland, and Joanne Beswick Jannsen. “Parents’ Reliance on the Web to Find Information about Children and Families: Socio-economic Differences in Use, Skills and Satisfaction.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 29.2 (March 2008): 118-28.

The key to effective cross-cultural communication is knowledge. First, it is essential that people understand the potential problems of cross-cultural communication, and make a conscious effort to overcome these problems. Second, it is important to assume that one’s efforts will not always be successful, and adjust one’s behavior appropriately.

For example, one should always assume that there is a significant possibility that cultural differences are causing communication problems, and be willing to be patient and forgiving, rather than hostile and aggressive, if problems develop. One should respond slowly and carefully in cross-cultural exchanges, not jumping to the conclusion that you know what is being thought and said

from the University of Colorado

Since I had never had any classes on teaching digital literacy and no one else at my college was teaching digital literacy, most of these questions I worked through either by myself or by looking online.

One place I looked was the journals at school, which is where I found this.

“Teaching Digital Rhetoric: Community, Critical Engagement, and Application”
Pedagogy – Volume 6, Issue 2, Spring 2006, pp. 231-259 –Article
Course topics included exploring the history of the Internet and the World Wide Web; doing digital research, searching the Web, and thinking about information literacy; interrogating digital literacies (including a focus on reading and writing in digital spaces, dynamics of print and digital publishing, and video-game literacies); examining issues of access and divides (specifically focusing on race, class, and economies, and also on dis/abilities and usability); researching the histories of Internet economies; exploring the dynamics of digital ownership and issues of authoring, authority, and intellectual property in computer-mediated, networked spaces; exploring digital culture jamming1 and internetworked politics; examining issues of digital identity (including emphases on gender and online communities); exploring digital visual rhetorics; examining new media; and thinking about cyborg, biotech, and digital bodies. Course topics and readings were designed to equip students to
explore and understand digital spaces as deeply rhetorical spaces;
understand the sociocultural dynamics of digital writing spaces;
better understand the multiple and layered elements of digital writing conventions and digital documents;
become more sophisticated navigators of the information available in digital spaces; and become more effective writers and communicators in digitally mediated spaces.

Then, to get my mind going, I found a list of hard questions for teachers who teach blogging. While some of them are blogging specific, others apply to any teaching of writing.

What do you do about the student who is on-line more (has that luxury) doing stronger work than the student who has less experience with being on-line?
…
How do we help the student who isn’t getting beyond Internet chat language in his/her comments?
…
How do you teach students to have voice when it seems that no-one is listening; example a student writes 3-5 really thoughtful posts and receives 0 comments.

This post actually made a big difference in the design of my English composition course. First of all, I made sure I started at the very beginning (a very good place to start, h/t Mary Poppins) and I actually assign comments as part of their writing. This has made a big difference, I think, to the quality of the discussion online.

I found this work from UNC work interesting. It is a UNC English class guidelines for reading, analyzing, and creating a blog, then describing a blog community

This is
apparently another English class on blogging. This one is group blogging, with collaborative writing by students, but uses individual grades. It includes a discussion of discourse community.
The class requires
an annotated bibliography,
a movie review for IMDb, and
a book review for Amazon.

I thought these were good ideas but I have not yet implemented them. I could easily, though. They would make good assignments for when I am out of pocket at conferences.

UT Austin’s Computer Writing lab,
has an introduction to the theory for using blogging in class: very theoretical, but lots of assignment ideas.

A Texas Tech teacher wrote about an unsuccessful blogging attempt within the classroom and why it failed. The main reason I noted was that there were no post requirements. I definitely took that to heart.

Unfortunately, on the net, information often disappears. I tell my students all the time that if they find something good, they should copy or print it right then so that they will have it. On a page that is no longer available I found a thoughtful list on the kinds of literacy skills students can develop from writing about one topic from multiple sources (synthesizing reading too), specifically involving computer research.

Consider the literacy skills necessary all by themselves, without any further involvement:
reading for comprehension
understanding cause and effect
organizing and classifying information
using tables of contents and indexes to locate information
restate facts, summarize main ideas
connect prior knowledge to new information in a text
distinguish between fact and opinion in informational text
prepare a document using technology
gather evidence in support of a thesis
use Standard Written English
demonstrate understanding of correct spelling, punctuation, and other writing conventions
apply appropriate manuscript conventions
support assertions using examples, facts, and relevant details
edit and proofread using an editing checklist
integrate quotations into a text
synthesize information from multiple sources

This research list indicates that we are teaching our students information literacy and using computers to do it, not simply teaching technology in the classroom. And I don’t want to simply teach technology in the classroom. I want to enrich the writing experience with technology, take advantage of technology, and let the students use technology well.

Top Ten Reasons Writers Should Blog include
A blog can become a writing workshop. Comments and linking allow immediate feedback on the poetry, articles and other types of posts presented by bloggers to their readers. Sometimes comments become the basis for extended online conversations about a given work or topic.

Build a writing portfolio. A blog can serve as an addition to a writer’s professional portfolio. The content and theme of a blog will influence how well it can be applied to this purpose. If a writer is going to spend the time building a public blog, it serves them well to view it as a true publication. Well written blog posts, articles, commentaries, poems, etc., are valid examples of a writer’s work. If done with portfolio building in mind, blogs can serve as a testimony to a writer’s abilities and professionalism.

Ideas I wrote down, though I don’t know where I found them. (I think they were advertisement for an online course on teaching blogging. But they aren’t there now.)

* Blogs as rough drafts vs. the importance of revising finished prose, and the expectations of the community of readers
This is something my students don’t understand. Because it is on the computer, those who use the computer often, ignore that ours is an academic blog. I need to stress this more.

* Community of blogs as dialogue – the importance of linking, addressing other writers, exposing your writing to a wider audience by becoming part of it

* Blogs as support group, the importance of commenting on other people’s writing and contributing positively to the community

After reading through these and other websites, I wrote:

Blogging is writing, writing in a context which is often decried as too public, but with some simple care, a class blog can be created, made public, and used as a forum for not only writing but reading and response to writing. If we introduce or steer our students into blogging, we may succeed not only in getting students through our courses cheerfully, with improved writing, but also in turning them into lifetime writers.

I suggest that this confluence of writing and internet will help our students in our classrooms, because they are writing for a real audience that is not just the instructor and which is much more likely to hold disparate views, articulate them, and request a response. It can also help some of our students overcome the socioeconomic status they were born in and facilitate their entry into a professional world.

Update: This post was confusing for some readers, based on a lack of focus. I want to explain what use I was getting out of the notes and why they are here.

I am working on a paper for Computers and Writing about sustainable learning. As such, it behooves me to know how learning works. I have been trying to find good websites and journal articles on the topic that contribute to what I already know/knew.

These are quotes that I thought were particularly relevant to what I hope to do in my Computers and Writing paper in/for June.

Understanding Learning

“[T]he opportunity to learn embodies two basic dimensions: the amount and quality of exposure to new knowledge (Hallihan 1987). The amount of exposure has three components-enrollment, length, and rate…. The quality of exposure, which refers to the effectiveness of pedagogy, has two components: intensity and accessibility” (Kilgore and Pendelton 64).

“High intensity … increases the probability that students will become engaged with the material” (Kilgore and Pendelton 66).

“Accessibility, which refers to the degree to which a learner is able to make sense of new information, …includes the pedagogical processes and technologies that affect the clarity and tangibles of the new materials from the learner’s perspective” (Kilgore and Pendelton 66).

“Learning, then, involves the active construction of knowledge by which ‘the learner actively interprets and imposes meaning through the lenses of his or her existing knowledge structures, working to make sense of the world’ (Putnam, et al. 87)… (Kilgore and Pendelton 67).

Student resources + opportunity to learn & effort = knowledge acquisition (Kilgore and Pendelton 68).

“Cultural inducements … likely constitute an important factor in students’ efforts” (Kilgore and Pendelton 71).

“The density of social networks, their intergenerational linkages, and the quality of information embedded in them also influence effort and the opportunity to learn” (Kilgore and Pendelton 72).

Kilgore, Sally B. and William W. Pendleton. “The Organizational Context of Learning: Framework for Understanding the Acquisition of Knowledge.” Sociology of Education 66.1 (January 1993): 63-87.

Class discussions (a part of active learning) and social integration impact student retention (Braxtem, Milen, and Sullivan 581).

Group work does not influence student retention (Braxtem, Milen, and Sullivan 582).

Braxton, John M., Jeffrey F. Milem, and Anna Shaw Sullivan. “The Influence of Active Learning on the College Student Departure Process: Toward a Revision of Tinto’s Theory.” The Journal of Higher Education 71.5 (Sep. – Oct., 2000): 569-590.

According to one of Ruby Payne’s books, a simplistic description of the three socioeconomic classes can be made regarding food.

Poor people ask if you had enough, because often there is not enough. So portions are the big thing in poverty.

Middle class people ask if you like it, because there is always enough. So the subjective response to it is the big thing in the middle class.

Rich people expect their food to be beautifully plated, because there is always enough and if you don’t like it you can have something else. So presentation is the main focus in the upper class.

This particularly resonates with me because I did grow up poor, even though I don’t feel like I grew up in a culture of poverty. And that situation has effected my family’s life ever since.

When I was growing up poor…

We often did not have enough food to eat to feel full. When we would sit down together to eat (usually at night), my father would save his food. If we finished and wanted more, he would give us his dinner. Since we were young, we did not know he was hungry too. Instead we assumed he didn’t want his food. And we gladly raced through our meal to get his or part of his, too.

I do remember that we sometimes had odd foods in the house. I remember eating spoonfuls of brown sugar because that was all that was in the house and I was hungry. I was ten or eleven at the time. We often had ketchup sandwiches for lunch. Back then condiments and luncheon meats were very cheap. For Thanksgiving and Christmas we would have mac & cheese with fried baloney.

Long term impact

Long term that has meant that my family tends to make too much. Two days ago I fixed my husband a plate of food and he said, “Hey, that’s a normal sized meal.” We’ve been married twenty years and it is the first time (or at least one of the few) that I have recognized a regular portion size.

My family often didn’t have enough food, so we usually make far more than necessary when we eat. Even my baby sister who was four does this to some extent, even though she is now in the upper class and was at least upper middle class from age eight to eighteen.

This is a video, fairly short, which illustrates how low SES students function in college. That’s not what is supposed to be about, but it is incredibly relevant.

Exactly how should we teach ‘digital natives’?

A Sociologist says Students Aren’t so Web-wise After All

I think the assumption is that if it [computer usage] was available from a young age for them, then they can use it better. Also, the people who tend to comment about technology use tend to be either academics or journalists or techies, and these three groups tend to understand some of these new developments better than the average person. Ask your average 18-year-old: Does he know what RSS means? And he won’t.
…
There are positive outcomes for those who know how to work and employ tech information, and those who lack information will confront a different situation. In terms of a link with demographic differences, those people who seem to be more savvy are the ones who tend to be in more-privileged positions. There will be an increase in social inequality if this divergence continues this way.

WSJ article on how hard it is for low SES students to get into college

But what stands between disadvantaged kids and college is not mere money. It is orderliness, attentive mentoring and simple organizational guidance. Public schools used to be the great equalizer in America — the institutions that allowed the children of immigrants and the descendants of slaves to become fluent in the English language and prepare them for careers. In too many urban areas, they don’t perform such basic educational functions. But they don’t offer structured environments, either, for the few students who are trying to lift themselves up and get a better educational experience at college.

School turnaround built on teaching students how to behave. This article is about an elementary school, but the same issues work in college. If the student does not know how a college student should behave, they will not behave that way. Low SES students are especially disadvantaged in this way. Ruby Payne’s work is particularly applicable to this issue and I will be writing on it tomorrow.

Something that might be relevant is Internet culture spells doom for strait-laced orthographers.

A related joke to the article above goes like this:
Why is there such bad spelling on the internet?
Because it is powered by 100,000 English teachers rolling over in their graves.

A Closer Look at Why People Blog

Deep Learning for a Digital Age: Technology’s Untapped Potential to Enrich Higher Education

Weblogs in the Writing Classroom, published 2008

If you are wondering what other people are doing, a good source to look at is CCCC’s Survey of Multimodal Pedagogies in Writing Programs. I especially was interested in question thirty. “What role should the production of non-textual compositions play in the writing class?” It at least tells what people are thinking about the issue.

Dynamic Subspace is not too impressed with the idea of a multimodal classroom.

I love technology, and it’s an integral part of my life, including two World of Warcraft accounts, a 30″ Apple Cinema Display and Mac Book Pro, iPhone, building a Media Center PC, blogging, and keeping my girlfriend’s ailing Sony Vaio alive while she studies for her comps, but I strongly insist on keeping that separate from my goal of enriching the lives of my students by challenging them to think deeply, imagine new possibilities, and effectively communicate through writing before moving up to multimodal composition practices.

Computers and Composition Online: Theory Into Practice has some good articles on teaching multimodal classrooms.

A question for me
As a follow up to the question from this post the author sent me part of a response from the professor at a local university. I was asked not to reprint it here, so I won’t. Basically the local professor said modes and literary analysis are out and genres related to activity-systems are in.

A question for readers
I answered based on what I know. Am I correct? Or has my circle of influence led me astray? Comments anyone?

Here is what I wrote her.

Academia is not as monolithic as it seems that it ought to be, since we are all attending conferences together. Actually even our conferences are self-perpetuating circles of influence. If you are all about literature and theory you go to MLA, if you are all about composition you go to 4C’s, if you are a community college you go to TYCA.

I teach at both a community college and a small liberal arts college. I have also examined what the large universities in our city are teaching. So I can speak pretty expansively for the circle of academia in Houston. I would say that it probably translates fairly well across colleges until you get to Tier 1 research schools. These are the huge name schools like UC Berkeley, Harvard, etc.

First, the modes may be “so 80s” but they are also still very much in fashion, not just among English composition faculty. Essay exams from other disciplines rely on the modes and, therefore, even if the freshman composition class does not, their usefulness is clear.

Second, in my experience freshman composition is rarely genre-contextualized. I would say other composition courses are, in fact, strongly leaning that way. We offer not only technical writing and business writing (junior level courses) but also writing in the hard sciences and writing in the behavioral sciences (sophomore classes) at the liberal arts college. These types of courses are becoming more ubiquitous.

What is far more common, I have found, in freshman composition is teaching a topic of interest. A teacher of freshman comp at Purdue in 2007 taught on “Time Travel and Paradox.” The teacher chose that as the organizing principle of the class. Rollins College in Florida also organizes around topics of interest, including food. Abilene Christian in Texas had a freshman composition course organized around the study of vampires.

These courses still require writing, including the research paper, but their approach is a bit different. Instead of reading standard texts, for example, at Rollins they read food critics’ reviews in the newspaper and recipes. Food critics’ reviews are persuasive essays, often compare and contrast. Recipes are process writing. So, even when the mode being read is not the “main” point, the mode is still at issue. Of course, time travel doesn’t exist, so much of the writing being read at Purdue is science fiction, with some discussions from Einstein thrown in. There aren’t any vampires writing, so ACU is reading about vampires, not genre-contextualizing for an audience of vampires.

Even when the teachers are instructing from a unique emphasis, however, the courses are teaching writing and usually this is writing in different modes. They may be discussing a more specific audience, more specific genre and tropes, but they are still writing in the same modes.

About literature… Second semester freshman composition is still usually literature. The reason for that is that most teachers of English are literature teachers. If they must teach composition, they want it to be about literature. That generally holds true at Purdue, Rollins, and ACU, as well as here in Houston. So literary analysis is still useful and necessary. In addition, many, though not all, colleges still require sophomore English, which is still mostly literature. A student could take writing for the hard sciences and writing for the behavioral sciences and have six hours of sophomore literature that counts at most schools, but most students not in those fields will not do that. Writing is even scarier than literature for most students.

So, I would say to some extent what the professor said is accurate and certainly it would be very accurate for his/her university. If most of your students are going to be attending there, then looking at that is more important than what is being done across the board. (Which you can’t really know anyway because we have so many colleges in the US.)

However, his/her dismissal of literary analyses and genres is probably based on what is happening at the local university and attending conferences in which what is happening at the local university is being supported. So, for instance, he’d go to conferences where theories of and pedagogical approaches to genre-contextualizing hold sway.

How will you teach your senior class professional contextualization when they don’t even have a strong idea of what professions they will enter? I don’t think you can. I would say that you should concentrate on teaching them to write well, whatever you choose to teach them to write about, and they will be well served.

When I wrote about the cultural aspects of teaching in my Computers and Writing proposal, I was not talking about poverty per se. People can be poor without being part of the culture of poverty. But when I talk about low SES students and their culture, I am talking about those who are part of that culture.

What is the difference?

I grew up poor.

My parents married when my mother was a sophomore in high school and my father was a junior in college. He was also homeless and living in his car.

When I was little my father was a college student and went to school 21 hours a semester and worked 50 hours a week at minimum wage jobs. My mother worked on the weekends when my father was home to take care of the children.

My mother got pregnant with me because the doctor insisted that a girl as young as she was could not get pregnant and refused to give her birth control. But since my three siblings, all born before my mother turned 25, were all born on birth control of various types, it is doubtful that birth control would have helped.

Our family had five people in it and lived in a one bedroom apartment. My brother and I slept on couches in the living room. I was going through the trash in our apartment complex and found a pair of shoes that would fit my father, brand new in a box. He wore them to work for the next few years. I was five or six at the time.

We often did not have enough food to eat to feel full. My mother always said we weren’t poor because we always had something to eat. But I remember many times being hungry. And I remember the rare times when I was full after a meal, usually at my grandmother’s house on the farm. She used to worry because I didn’t eat much meat when she fixed it. Dad never told her it was because I wasn’t used to eating meat; he just said it was okay because I ate some of it.

When I was 12, my father got a significant pay raise and I never remember going hungry after that. My sisters, who were four and eight at the time, do not remember much of the poor years at all.

Despite the fact that I grew up poor, I did not grow up in the culture of poverty.

First of all, education was valued.

My father was a college student when I was born and attended law school after that. While neither of his parents had even completed high school, they had six children five of whom got college degrees because education was worth getting. It would get you off the farm and out of back-breaking labor that came without a guarantee of profit.

While my father’s parents had a third and eighth grade education, my mother’s parents both had college degrees. My grandmother, in fact, earned her master’s at Berkeley in the 30s. While my mother never got her college degree, she did attend several colleges while we moved around the country following my father’s career.

There was value seen in going to college, in making something better of yourself.

My parents did not teach me to read at home, but we always had books in the house and reading was valued. My father would come home from work and take my brother and me to the library. We would leave carrying as many books as our arms would hold. If we finished them all, he would take a break from work to take us to the library again to return them and get more. For several years my brother and I read eight to ten books a day.

In our house, the teacher was always right (even when she was wrong) and our job was to learn as much as we could. My father even stated it that way. “I go to work. You go to school. I do my job. You do yours.”

My parents encouraged us to do well in school, to go to college, to get a degree. One of their mantras when I was growing up was, “Don’t get married until you finish college.” It was assumed that I (that we) would go to college.

Second, the individual was valued over the group.

My extended family valued the individual. My father’s parents told their children to “make something” of themselves. My mother’s parents firmly believed that a person could improve their lot in life.

My mom was the first stay-at-home mother in her family in four generations, maybe more. She was countercultural to her family and chose to (mostly) stay home at a time when women were leaving the homes in droves to find fulfillment in their work. While she made odd choices (to them), the family valued her for her choices.

There are other differences between being poor and having a culture of poverty. But these two serve to illustrate the values and experience that I grew up with.

While I grew up poor, I did not grow up a child of poverty. I had mentors in my parents who had been there before me.

My parents went to college. They expected us to go, too.

My father worked hard to improve his lot in life. By the time they retired, my father was an executive in a multinational corporation. He had overcome his own background to succeed. And he showed us how to do that as well.

This is a departure from my normal topics of discussion on this blog. I hope regular readers will not be turned away by this soul baring information on my family. It was an attempt to discuss my background in relation to the online conference topic.

This is how I am looking at/writing about/thinking of my topic for my Computers and Writing presentation. I am blogging a process here.

Since the topic is one which has been of interest to me for a while, I have multiple articles already noted or written on this blog (identified with a TCE: at the beginning). These are articles which are pertinent to where I am going/want to go with the paper.

Articles which are relevant to my Computers and Writing topic:

College for the Underclass
This is a blog post written by a member of the underclass about how she went to college, what she expected from it, and how she veered significantly off the expected path and became a college professor. It is well worth reading, especially if you have no personal experience with being an early person in your family to go to college.

TCE: Rethinking the Value of a College Degree is a post worth looking at, especially in light of the above article, which emphasizes that low SES and underclass students are coming to college to get better jobs.

TCE: An informal discussion of how computer use can be made accessible, particularly for students who are from a low socioeconomic background.

TCE: Class-Based Value Differences

TCE: Notes on student retention
Student retention is an important concept for all college students, but it is especially important when talking about low socioeconomic status students.

TCE: 7 Specific Strategies for Student Retention in the English Classroom

TCE: Why is Student Retention Important to Teachers?

TCE: Bad News for Community Colleges and the students that attend them.

This is especially important to look at since many low SES students go to community colleges, because they are near home and are less expensive than other colleges.

Study into relationship between physical environment and pupils’ attainment and behavioroffers something to think about.

The report’s chief author, Katy Owen, says she found that urban decay could “easily impact upon pupils and their teachers”. She says: “They may demonstrate poor behaviour in the classroom, have low self-esteem, little appetite for educational attainment and have little cultural or social capital to draw on. Their teachers may become disillusioned and frustrated with their limited ability to teach in a community where crime and incivility is rife.”

TCE: The Ugly Stepsister- Rhetoric

TCE: Good links on low SES status students

TCE: Community Colleges

Are Community Colleges Losing Touch with their Communities?

I am involved with the Computers and Writing Online Conference taking place throughout the web for the last week or so and continuing for another week or so. This is the first post for my blog in Asynchronous Sessions 2.

Clearly I am personally involved in blogging and I am married to a digital native. (No, I didn’t rob the cradle. He learned to program on the Apple IIe. In fact, his mother wrote the first computer program for the IRS on the same computer.) I, however, am a digital immigrant. I have had to learn what my husband and my sons take for granted.

I have been teaching college for years, as a TA, an adjunct, and an instructor. Last spring, I was teaching at a community college where most of the students were first-generation college students. They were either urban or rural poor. (I am not sure how the school lines got drawn, but that’s how they worked out.) That is what catapulted me into the study of how to introduce computers, use computers in the writing classroom, and make sure that my students had some measure of information literacy.

Throughout this week you can follow my journey, through blog posts I wrote, articles I read, notes I took, and a discussion of what and why I was thinking. I would love to know what you think of the various topics outlined on the blog throughout this week. Feel free to leave comments.

If you have personal experience of the topics discussed, I would appreciate hearing your stories in the comments as well.

Ensuring Information Literacy and Sustainable Learning across Socioeconomic Backgrounds

Many of our students are digital natives. Because of this, we search for new contact zones in emergent technology. But if we presuppose that our students are already computer savvy because of their age or texting ability, we are doing some of them a disservice. A Pew survey indicates that twenty-three percent of college age people never use the internet. Most often these students are from a low socioeconomic (SES) background. How can we move beyond short-term interventions and help all our students develop information literacy and sustainable lifelong learning?

One part of the answer is to understand the value patterns that students’ communities have historically championed and invoke those as a means of engaging the students in their own educational development. We need to understand and follow their cultural mores in order to introduce them to academic culture.

Another part of the answer is to create a multimodal composition course which predicates a minimal expertise with technology and engage our students, at all levels, by building towards information literacy for everyone that is on par with the most technology-immersed. While the early levels of expertise will be basic to some of our students, they will be a stretch for others. We can enhance student learning for the former by decompartmentalizing their knowledge and applying it in new configurations, expanding its domains and applications, thus building their framework for sustainable learning. We can enhance student learning for the latter by creating a system for the active construction of knowledge through intense involvement with accessible technologies.

Addressing the difficulties of providing information literacy across socioeconomic backgrounds is a challenge that we can meet in the multimodal composition classroom. Through institutional support and sustained instruction, our students can gain the expertise they need for work, school, and play.