Kairotic Design: Building Flexible Networks for Online Composition

• Intro
• Design Process
• Instructor Perspectives
• Student Perspectives
• Implications
• References

• Intro
  • Premises
  • English111
  • Methods
• Design Process
  • Starting Assumptions and Assets
  • Dissonances
  • Space Decisions
  • Kairotic Design
• Instructor Perspectives
  • Making Space Work (Lance)
  • Making Space for Collaboration (Renea)
  • Party Time at Burke's Place (Ryan)
• Student Perspectives
  • Initial Nervousness and Uncertainty
  • Interacting Online
  • Agency in the Timing of Learning Activities
  • Challenges
• Implications
  • Principles of Online Course Design
  • Rethinking Traditional Writing Instruction
• References

Premises

Classroom design is rhetorical.

A key premise underlying our work is that classroom space, both traditional and online, is rhetorical—it shapes and promotes certain kinds of interactions and activities while it inhibits and discourages others.

Our goal as writing teachers, always, is to make classroom design support our pedagogical goals. Sometimes we do this by fighting the traditional classrooms we are assigned to. For instance, we may, through de Certeauian tactics, thwart the restrictions of spatial design—desks in rows, for example—to achieve the desired collaboration and interaction. Other times we have the opportunity to work proactively to design our classrooms in ways that support our composition instruction—for example, when we collaborate with university classroom designers and instructional technology specialists to design a new computer classroom.

What we must recognize, though, is that however we make, remake, design, or rebel against our assigned classroom space, the design of classroom space matters to the teaching of writing. It can help or hurt our efforts to teach composition well, as many scholars have noted (e.g., Bemer, Moeller, and Ball 2009; DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill 2007; Fleckenstein, Johnson, and McKinney 2009; Walls, Schopieray, and DeVoss 2009).

1. Online classrooms shouldn’t replicate traditional classrooms.

   Another key premise underlying our work is that the online classroom space should not aim to replicate the traditional classroom space. By traditional we mean any class taught in a brick-and-mortar space where instructor and students are physically present in the room together at set meeting times in the week and most student–teacher and student–student interaction occurs in that space. Traditional does not refer to pedagogical approach, like “current–traditional.” So no matter one's pedagogy, if the class meets in a physical room with all members physically present, then that’s a traditional classroom.

   Unfortunately some approaches to online course design, including some reputable, popular distance education certification programs (e.g., Quality Matters), rely on the mirror model assumption—that is, the assumption that the goal for online course design should be to recreate the bounded traditional classroom space where instructor and students are all together in one place, virtual desks in a circle, teacher writing on the virtual whiteboard, and so on.

   We begin by questioning that assumption: Why replicate the traditional classroom? Has it really worked all that well as a space for teaching writing? Could we do better? We agree very much with Douglas Walls, Scott Schopieray, and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss (2009), who have critiqued the traditional classroom model:

   Although we interact, socialize, and otherwise live lives in very flexible and various physical spaces, our classrooms often remain inflexible spaces, typically based in agrarian and industrial revolution era designs [which] assumed that students could be educated in an assembly-line fashion where the instructor held all of the knowledge and transmitted this knowledge to students before moving them along to the next grade level. (271)

   We think that the attempt to mirror traditional learning spaces in online learning spaces undercuts the dynamic potential of online learning and the collaborative and social possibilities for online writing spaces.