Step 4: Embrace Student Experiences
Although scholars from across disciplines have anticipated a time when technology, including virtual spaces, would democratize writing instruction and support, research indicates students from different communities use equivalent technologies in significantly different ways (Taylor 1997). Further, divisions in the physical world are recreated in virtual spaces: socioeconomic, ethnic, religious, political, and other divisions might even be exacerbated by the ease with which people can self-sort online (Lee 2007). Virtual writing spaces should be monitored to address the self-segregation we see on campus, which likely will occur online.
To help students express their lived experiences, we need to design virtual spaces that embrace online personas. There is significant literature on the construction of online identities (Bolter 1991; Bolter and Grusin 1999; Kress 2003; D. Selfe 2004; Turkle 1995). Some scholars suggest we adapt “icebreaker” activities to virtual writing spaces, fostering student connections (Conrad and Donaldson 2004). We should also consider open forums—unmoderated online spaces for students to interact casually. Such conversations reinforce the sense of community necessary for productive collaboration, peer editing, and peer feedback exchanges (Garrison and Vaughan 2008).
Creating an online persona and profile should be purposefully academic in virtual writing spaces and should allow all students an equal opportunity to express themselves, because research suggests patterns of introversion and extroversion continue in online settings (Garrison and Vaughan 2008). The ideal profile evolves, with the student adding information across the time he or she participates in the online community.
For inclusion to be the unifying ideal underlying writing classrooms and writing centers, we must foreground the obstacles we seek to remove. Only by admitting current and historical barriers can we appreciate their power and the inertia that maintains them. One pitfall we must avoid is the tendency to pressure students to define or examine their lives primarily by disabilities or difficult circumstances they have experienced. Some advocates for the disabled refer to this as the “super-crip” persona, a mythology that celebrates overcoming a disability with an exceptional effort (Nazeer, 2006).