4. Taking back the spaces
As we have sought to elucidate in previous sections, the limitations C/LMSs place upon users (both teachers and students) offer the potential for users to feel disenfranchised. And although Carol A. Stabile (1994) contended that critique is essential to upholding a feminist agenda, critique in and of itself is not enough. Instead, we must attempt to move beyond critique to envision alternatives or “possible futures” (Stabile, 156) for writing spaces. Heeding Stabile’s advice, in the following section we seek to offer alternatives in the form of two interconnected, pragmatic suggestions; we argue that by implementing these interrelated approaches, writing teachers can foster the cyberfeminist goals of accessibility and inclusiveness within virtual learning spaces.
- Space must be made: Students and teachers develop beyond functional users of technology into critical users (Selber, 2004); they respond to the possibilities and constraints of the virtual classroom space and the technologies used for digital writing.
- Knowledge is coconstructed: Students and teachers collaboratively create and share knowledge. This means that the virtual space must allow all users to have the authority and responsibility to edit and publish information, as in the case of platforms like wikis and blogs.
As we see it, both suggestions are useful for not only elucidating the politics of C/LMSs’ power structures to users but also for encouraging and equipping users to consider the potential for subverting such power in the virtual spaces they occupy. Furthermore, the alternative we seek to encourage is for teachers and students to be more creative within (and beyond) C/LMS spaces since, for many of us, C/LMSs are institutionally required and institutionally designed.
Developing students' capacities for making space
Students and teachers must develop beyond functional users into critical users of technology (Selber, 2004) by acknowledging and responding to the barriers and affordances of virtual classroom spaces and the technologies of digital writing. First and foremost, an awareness of the barriers inherent within template-driven spaces of C/LMS platforms is crucial for both teacher and student. Stuart Selber (2004) offered twenty-first-century teachers and students a comprehensive, multidimensional approach to contemporary literacy practices. Selber’s “postcritical” approach to the teaching of technological literacy warns us, as Selfe and Selfe (1994) did before him, that teachers who “fail to adopt a postcritical stance” consequently cheapen student success as well as student ability to perceive “computers in critical, contextual, and historical ways” (13). Moreover, Selber posited that if students are not educated or afforded the opportunities to critique and manipulate the designs of computer environs, our best intentions for providing students the opportunities to develop their technological literacies run the risk of “simply perpetuat[ing] rather than alleviat[ing] existing social inequalities” (13). Thus, Selber’s multiliteracies approach encourages students and teachers to “use, question, and produce” in technological environs (25).
Although we acknowledge and stress that all digital spaces run the risk of limiting the inclusion and accessibility of some users and that no space is apolitical, we also argue, like Selfe and Selfe (1994), that as teachers we must be attuned to and proactive within these spaces. As Blair (2007) argued, C/LMSs can be seen as “gated communities,” in that they privilege teacher learning styles at the expense of student access to learning. Due to the various barriers C/LMSs construct, it is our responsibility as educators to elucidate these obstructions to students, concurrently equipping them with the ability and authority to recognize such barriers in the other template-driven spaces they occupy. As Arola (2010) argued, recognition and analysis are integral to the eventual subversion of barriers to learning and access. Furthermore, the ability for students to recognize barricades in digital and technological environments develops their skills as critical users of technology (Selber, 1994), equipping them to be prepared and successful within the composing situations of the twenty-first-century.
Joining forces, gaining ground
Students and teachers must work together to create and share knowledge in online spaces. Virtual space must grant all users the authority and responsibility to edit and publish information, as in the case of platforms like wikis and blogs. Although wikis and blogs are still template-driven spaces, unlike C/LMSs, wikis and blogs can be set to allow all users the ability to edit (somewhat) the form and content of these spaces. Choosing settings on wikis and blogs that allow all users to modify, edit, and upload content is one small but important technique for feminist pedagogues to subvert hierarchies in virtual classroom spaces, thereby allowing students to develop beyond functional users into critical and rhetorical users of technology (Selber, 2004).
Grohowski has been using wikis for her first-year writing courses in the way her other colleagues engage the institutionally offered C/LMSs (of once Blackboard and now Canvas) for the last two years. Grohowski modified the wiki’s settings to allow all users the liberty to edit content. In addition, Grohowski sets aside class time to instruct students in modifying content and altering the design of the course wiki, assuring students that the wikispace is an opportunity for students to share the responsibilities of authorship and engagement with one another and with course content. Using the template-driven spaces of Web 2.0 in the forms of blogs and wikis upholds the feminist agenda for decentering authority and fostering community. Torrens and Riley (2009) argued that
the very tall and idealistic charge feminist pedagogies take seriously [are] the effort[s] to empower students, to challenge them personally and academically, to share responsibility for learning, to shape activist thinking, and to engage with the self, with the material, with others, and with one’s community. (213)
Although these Web 2.0 tools can enact the decentering of authority and facilitation of engagement and community building that feminist teachers try to uphold—and while Grohowski has designed this space using the institutionally approved logo and branding color students are familiar with from other online contexts they inhabit—this pedagogical agenda is not warmly received by all students. Grohowski has experienced some backlash from students expressing their frustrations with Grohowski’s departure from the “traditional,” in her intentional avoidance of the institutionally available C/LMSs to which many students have grown accustomed. In end-of-semester evaluations, students press Grohowski to reconsider the familiar space of the C/LMS.
These reactions could be attributed to Selber's (1994) and Arola’s (2010) claims that if students are not instructed in how to critique such spaces, students remain functional users of technology, unable to manipulate or contribute within diverse online spaces. Furthermore, if students are not first made aware of an instructor’s rationale behind using (or avoiding) a given online space, let alone specifics of how the “design of the space shapes understanding” (Arola, 2010, p. 12), students may be less willing to accept alternative learning spaces. What’s more, the conveniences the C/LMS affords the functional user (e.g., a student needs only to log into the C/LMS to access several course shells; the student does not need to remember the course URL in order to access content) can allow students to see alternative spaces as a barrier to their access to course content. Perhaps students rely on the convenience of being functional users of C/LMSs and other template-driven spaces in ways that may preclude their willingness to embrace the alternative spaces teachers provide.
As Pamela Takayoshi (1994) noted, upholding feminist agendas in teaching with technology runs the risk of oppressing the very students she sought to empower. In fact, as Paulo Freire (1970) contended, “We must never provide the people with programs which have little or nothing to do with their preoccupations, doubts, hopes and fears—programs which at times in fact increase the fears of the oppressed consciousness” (96). Freire stressed that only through dialogue can teachers and students gain awareness of the “structural conditions in which the thought and language of the people are dialectically framed” (96). As a result, feminist teachers run the risk of further oppressing students if they try to enact a decentered classroom authority that is not fully desired (or understood) by their students. Due to what Freire (1970) terms “the structural conditions” for which student “thoughts and language are framed” (96), some students have come to expect the familiar, teacherly centered space of the C/LMS.
It is not just undergraduate students that rely favorably on the familiar, authoritative space of the C/LMS. As Blair has found in her teaching of graduate students in a Computer-Mediated Writing Theory and Practice seminar, when given the choice of multiple platforms for delivering course content during student-led facilitations, some students deliberately choose to utilize the affordances of the C/LMS platform. Blair provided “instructor” status to those students so that they could customize and integrate a range of media content for their facilitations. Blair begins her seminar by explaining her rationale for not using the traditional C/LMS platform (Blackboard) as a course space and providing students with a copy of her 2007 chapter “Course Management Tools as ‘Gated Communities’” as an optional reading. This article serves as explanation for her teaching philosophy and rationale for not primarily engaging the C/LMS for disseminating course content. However, Blair provides students a variety of online platforms—including C/LMSs—in addition to blogs (WordPress), wikis, Second Life, VoiceThread, Adobe Dreamweaver, and Google’s suite of programs.
Because an objective of her course is to instruct teacher–scholars in myriad ways for engaging multimodal theory and practice, it is essential that students be afforded opportunities to employ a broad range of technological tools and platforms. Thus, as the students who chose to use Blackboard demonstrated, all tools are malleable by users. Ultimately, C/LMSs, like any tool or medium, can be used from a feminist standpoint and, as these graduate students demonstrated, C/LMSs can be engaged to subvert structural powers they otherwise uphold.
As students in Blair’s seminar, Martha Wilson Schaffer and Mike Salitrynski used the affordances of a C/LMS (Blackboard) in three very pragmatic ways. First, they used the “pages” feature to share resources with classmates, such as links to relevant web sites and information; second, they engaged the “discussion board” tool to facilitate a constructive discussion amongst their classmates. The use of the discussion board was strategic in that it afforded the potential for both asynchronous and synchronous dialogues to occur among colleagues, as well as the ability for the multiplicity of voices and perspectives to be considered that may not have been accommodated within the time constraints of the typical face-to-face, in-class discussion. Third, Schaffer and Salitrynski creatively used the C/LMS by uploading a short (i.e., thirty-second) welcome video, which informed users of the purpose of the space and how to navigate within it.
As Salitrynski and Schaffer’s use of the C/LMS demonstrated, C/LMSs can be utilized in creative and constructive ways for the benefit of both teacher and student. Thus, the alternative we seek to elucidate is more of an approach than the recommendation of the engagement of a particular tool or software. It is often the case that instructors either do not have a choice in the C/LMS or are not aware of alternative spaces for delivering course content. Additionally, in the case of online education, C/LMSs are invaluable to accommodating learning for teacher and student.
C/LMSs are not going anywhere, and we are not arguing that teachers should stop using them all together—such is not a practical or realistic argument. Our intention, like that of cyberfeminist Mary Hocks (2009), has been to offer a cyberfeminist-informed analysis of C/LMS spaces and offer a perspective on these writing spaces that elucidates, among other things, the “institutional infrastructures work[ing] for and against these pleasures, pushing against bodies that must live in time and space” (Hocks 2009, 251). Thus, we recommend the two cyberfeminist-informed, interrelated suggestions that began this section:
- Teachers should encourage students to critique online spaces and digital writing tools; doing so will not only subvert the power inherent in such spaces, but it will also foster student development—beyond functional users into critical users of the technologies of writing.
- Students and teacher are cocreators of classroom content. Teachers should facilitate such collaborative teaching and learning by affording greater student access to manipulating and creating course content in virtual spaces. Certainly, this can become problematic in the C/LMS if the teacher is using the space to manage grades. However, the proper adjustments can be made to prevent students from access to all C/LMS content areas. This inclusion can foster the cyberfeminist goals of inclusivity and access to a broader range of student abilities and learning styles.
1. Introduction
2. Our historical quest for safe spaces
3. Contested spaces
4. Taking back the spaces
5. Conclusion
6. References