2. Our historical quest for safe spaces
The history of computers and composition chronicles the early rhetorics of technology that shaped our rationale for the use of computers in both face-to-face and virtual writing spaces. Among those earliest rhetorics included the belief that the inclusion of computers in the curriculum was democratizing and established a sense of community called for by Carolyn Handa in her edited volume Computers and Community, published in 1990. Mary Flores, one of the contributors to that collection, concluded that
the issue for the composition teacher. . . is to use computers to facilitate an interactive, diverse, and collaborative writing community in which every student has a voice and can engage in dialogue with each and every other member of that community. (109)
In addition to aligning the advent of computer-mediated composition with the paradigm shift from product- to process-based writing, other connections included feminist theory and pedagogy, with scholars such as Billie Wahlstrom (1994) articulating the important role of feminism in moving the field beyond these overly positive rhetorics of technology:
Those of us who rely heavily on the computer in our writing classroom have been naïve to assume the neutrality of the computers or of any techniques we develop for using it. The nature of computer networks and network-supported software, the uses to which we put them, the ways we conceive of their abilities and describe their function—all show evidence of being part of a gender-coded system less hospitable to women than it should be. Feminist analyses help us foresee possibilities for changing this reality. Such a vision critiques technology and its uses, suggesting alternatives that are democratizing and equalizing. (184)
By 1994, the date of Wahlstrom’s chapter in Selfe and Hilligoss’s Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology, early utopic rhetorics of techno-pedagogical potential were giving way to the messy realities of the shift from computer-assisted instruction to computer-mediated communication in both asynchronous and synchronous forums. Possibilities for dialogue and collaboration were tempered by “flaming” and the realization that the same cultural biases based on race, gender, and sexual orientation that circulate offline can and do circulate just as easily online.
For Wahlstrom (1994) and many others, the value of feminist critical interrogation was and is to make visible not only the politics of networks but also the politics of software and hardware, leading to questions about whether the integration of technology into the curriculum is as much about perceptions of currency as it is about actual empowerment. This distinction can lead to a “technology for technology’s sake” approach that is inevitably tied to the cultural capital surrounding technology and grand narratives of innovation, progress, and access. Given this gap between rhetoric and reality, Cynthia Selfe (1999) has long advocated the need to “pay attention” to the linkages between technology and literacy as “part of our ethical responsibility to understand how literacy and literacy instruction directly and continually affects the lived experiences of the individuals and families with whom we come into contact as teachers” (xix).
An emphasis on the lived experiences of actual technology users is equally aligned with both techno- and cyberfeminist concerns with the ability of women or any cultural group to access and deploy digital spaces for personal and political purposes (Wilding 1998; Stabile 1994). As Faith Wilding (1998) has stressed:
If feminism is to be adequate to its cyberpotential then it must mutate to keep up with the shifting complexities of social realities and life conditions as they are changed by the profound impact communications technologies and technoscience have on all our lives. (10)
These feminist critiques of technology have been diverse, from analyzing stereotypical representations of women online, to identifying local and global spaces and communities that disrupt such depictions (Blair, Gajjala, and Tulley 2009), along with ongoing scholarship that questions the extent to which technofeminist pedagogical practices can equalize digital writing environments for both students and teachers, regardless of gender. Part of the process invariably defines digital literacy acquisition in ways that move students and teachers from consumers to producers within technological spaces and that encourage both groups to be technology critics and not just technology users. As Claudia Herbst (2009) argued, “We should not settle for the mere integration of women into the male dominated world online; integration falls short of granting women full authority. Rather, women need to become authors of technology and thereby self-assured proprietors of virtual spaces” (149–150). Such concerns have led to a range of action research and community outreach initiatives aimed at women and girls to enhance not only aptitude but also attitude about technology use in order to promote early self-confidence, to better balance gender representation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and to enhance economic opportunity for women and girls internationally.
Based on interdisciplinary efforts to equalize the technological landscape, our own discipline has continued to question the educational and democratizing possibilities and constraints from the earliest of networked tools, such as usenet groups, email lists, Internet relay chats (IRCs), and multi-user domains, object-oriented (MOOs) to the most recent of Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis, and the myriad of other social-networking platforms in use by students. Often the purpose behind teacher integration of these and others tools has been subversive—to disrupt the more traditional teacher-centered space of face-to-face classrooms and to allow students multiple points of entry into educational spaces (Tulley & Blair, 2002). For example, a blog that collapses the binary between private journaling and public dialogue has the potential to provide opportunities for student self-reflection and collaborative knowledge-making. It is important to remember, however, that integrating digital tools does not represent a de facto commitment to empowerment and that any technology use must be aligned with curriculum and pedagogical practices that support such a goal.
The CMS classroom
In the middle of the decades-long technological tsunami is the rise of course-management systems on university campuses, inextricably tied to the rise of fully online course development afforded by the Web. Certainly, there exist many advantages to course management systems, specifically that they are technically and institutionally supported by the universities that purchase them, and that they have given equal rise to the portal-driven interface at institutions across the country, where all student and faculty services are more visible and accessible. From a training standpoint, course-management systems represent ease of use; both students and teachers know where to go for what, and the need for instructors to rely on separate external tools is reduced because the system contains chat rooms, bulletin boards, and spaces for document storage, assignment submissions, quizzing, and gradebook functions. The interface of the virtual course management system mirrors the presumed interface of the face-to-face course, which may explain the early popularity of Blackboard and its classroom-based metaphor.
The Blackboard metaphor, however, is not merely an object-based one; it is a spatial one as well, suggesting that, not unlike the traditional classroom where desks or computer workstations face the front of the room (presumably where the teacher is located), the space within Blackboard and other systems is much more teacher-centered, and ultimately much more difficult for students and teachers themselves to subvert. Blackboard becomes a space in which teachers upload content for students to consume, and thus aligns with Freire’s (1970) concept of “banking education” in that education is one-directional, from teacher to student. Students are inevitably positioned as more passive receptacles in an information transfer model, as opposed to a more genuinely dialogic, interactive model in which students have more coequal control of the space and their learning. Similarly, Doug Brent (2005) distinguished between knowledge-making as dynamic interaction as opposed to knowledge and teaching as a static enterprise, a “thing” that becomes separate from participants and that transfers knowledge through primarily textual processes. As Brent noted, this viewpoint
also includes students who think that education is merely the transfer of knowledge through texts. These are the sort of students who regularly ask me at the end of a face–to–face class why I can’t put my course notes on the Web so that they don’t have to come to class.
Since Blackboard’s ascent into the course management hierarchy, there are numerous platforms that attempt to compete: Desire2Learn, Canvas, and even open-source options such as Moodle and Sakai. As Kristine Blair (2007) discussed elsewhere, both online learning and the course management systems that support it respond to more contemporary rhetorics of technology that include convenience, or the model of anytime/anywhere, 24/7 access to learning. While certainly this model is convenient in terms of access to the course among diverse learners, such access does not automatically foster more feminist, democratic pedagogies. For instance, as Darin Payne (2005) argued in his critique of Blackboard, “Pedagogical practices in Blackboard become homogenizing spatial practices that contribute to (re)inscriptions of normalized identities and ways of knowing privileged and maintained through dominant cultural modes of production and reception” (485). Thus, the ability to control the design of online space, including teaching and learning spaces, from a feminist standpoint, is limited. Participants in Blackboard are both controlled and contained by its teacherly template, and the teacher function is one in which surveillance technologies monitor student behavior and overall performance of the student role in ways that reinforce differential power relations between teacher and student. This ultimately leads to a migration of traditional teacher-centered hierarchies from brick-and-mortar classroom space to digital classroom space.
The search for a “safer” space
C/LMS spaces are not solely responsible for reinforcing ideological hierarchies and preventing users' agency. In fact, Selfe and Selfe (1994) revealed how the Macintosh interface “presents reality” by upholding “the values of professionalism,” with their use of “manila folders, files, documents” (p. 486). According to Selfe and Selfe, this design choice prevents our students who do not find familiarity, let alone comfort, in a white-collar-driven interface, not only from developing beyond functional users of technology, but also from subverting ideologies of class and power. In an attempt to move away from the institutionally controlled spaces of the C/LMS, many faculty have experimented with social networking in the classroom, tools that often provide students with more control over the design of both course space and their identities within such virtual locales. But admittedly, blogs, wikis, and Web 2.0 online communities can and do suffer a similar fate, with limited ability to move beyond the standardized look and feel of a profile page or a WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger theme. For Kristin Arola (2010),
the belief that design is simply a "vessel" or a "container," and that content is the real meat of the Web, threatens to make the effects of design invisible. Those of us committed to engaging with modes of meaning. . . need to work to bring design to a discursive level so that we, along with our students, become attuned to the ways in which design encourages users to participate in online spaces. (13)
No virtual space is ideologically neutral and as a result space may limit participation and the performance of identity. For instance, while a social-networking application like Facebook may encourage a sense of belonging to a community, both groups and individuals represent themselves and respond to one another in limited ways—Like buttons, status updates, and timelines that do little to move beyond the universal profile. Identity is ultimately reduced to a predetermined set of alternatives (Almjeld 2014).
Regardless of whether it is in consideration of a C/LMS or a more “social” network, a cyberfeminist perspective calls for “an awareness of how power plays not only in different locations online but also in institutions that shape the layout and experience of cyberspace” (Gajjala and Oh 2012, 1). In her theoretical overview of feminist geography in digital space, Yeon Ju Oh (2012) contended that “looking at cyberspace in terms of gender relations is an attempt to unpack the power played out in the space” (p. 252). While certainly there are inhospitable spaces for women and other cultural groups within cyberspace, and while there have been strong critiques such as Arola’s (2010) and Herbst’s (2009) regarding the inability to control the design of space and thus the development of digital identity, the explosion of virtual subcultures has led to both local and global advances for women and other cultural groups within social and educational settings through the use of these free and open-source tools that potentially afford more opportunities for self-expression and social solidarity. For Oh (2012) and other cyberfeminists, the emphasis has been on the concept of a “safer” space (Tulley and Blair 2002), not only for women but also for students whose life experiences and learning styles may be disenfranchised within spaces that reinforce differential student–teacher power relationships.
Our own cyberfeminist analysis of course management systems mirrors these contemporary and historical discussions, drawing on long-standing calls, such as Pamela Takayoshi’s (1994) query whether “computerized communications tools. . . offer the possibility of dismantling these confining roles or are they, as Audre Lorde (1981) says, ‘the master’s tools?’” (21). And just as course management systems may confine students and teachers, to what extent do new tools provide an opportunity for “dismantling the ‘master’s house,’ in this case traditional classroom discourse patterns?” (21). The remaining sections of this chapter address visual and textual power structures within course and learning management interfaces, including MOOCs, and the ways tools within the C/LMS surveil and restrict student identity and participation. In conclusion, we call for more opportunities for both students and teachers to interrogate the existing spaces they inhabit and collaboratively work to align learning spaces with the curricular and cyberfeminist goals of accessibility and inclusiveness.
1. Introduction
2. Our historical quest for safe spaces
3. Contested spaces
4. Taking back the spaces
5. Conclusion
6. References