Transcript
Even though I didn’t know it at the time, I was fortunate to do my undergraduate work at a small school in a state that was really pushing for the inclusion of technology in the classroom. As a student, and even as I entered the classroom for student teaching, I was hesitant to really see the value of teaching with technology. In the terms of author Jeff Rice, I was stuck in a “paperdigm” (81). Rice uses the term, coined by Ted Nelson, to describe how our focus on print medium “limits technological integration into writing” (81). Despite being a student of the technology age, one who was well versed in using technology for personal means, I was stereotypically old-fashioned when it came to using technology in my high school English classrooms. However, my first job was working for a small school district that had a 1:1 computer program. Each of my students, as well as myself, were provided a laptop by the school. While I know I never fully integrated technology in my high school classroom, about half-way through my first semester teaching Writing 101 as a graduate teaching assistant, I realized my students were coming to my class with pen, paper, and a physical book. Sure, there were cell phones scattered around the room, but I was not using them as part of the course curriculum. My students seldom brought tablets or laptops to class, and on the rare occasion they did it was because they didn’t have time to print their papers.
With this observation, I realized I used significantly more technology, creating writing assignments that looked less like traditional essays and were more collaborative, in my high school classrooms than I currently was in my college classroom. Thus, the idea for this survey, and really this project, was born. I wanted to know if students had been asked to create writing assignments that utilized technology—defined as more than word processing, such as the use of blogs, videos, podcasts, etc.—more often in their high school classrooms than I was asking them to do in their college writing classroom. The survey was distributed via Facebook, where I shared it with my previous high school students and asked that they share it with others, and it was sent out to all of the WRIT 101 instructors at Montana State University-Bozeman via email, where they were asked to share it with their students. In the course of one week, I received 61 total responses to the survey.
Ironically, the question I was most interested in was possibly the question I asked least clearly. Question 3 of the survey asked, “Specifically in relation to your writing classes, where have you been asked to create projects/assignments that use technology (other than word processing) more?” Due to a number of mistakes on my part, first not realizing I needed to set the survey to only accept one answer, and second phrasing the question so that the “more,” was tucked behind a parentheses and probably infrequently seen by survey takers, my results for this question were not what I expected or hoped, although they did confirm my suspicion if only slightly. What happened was that 12 of my responders, a full 20%, actually marked both options: “high school” and “college.” So, the original results captured by the survey showed that 65.5% of students used technology in their writing classes more in high school and 55.2% used it more in college. While it does show that students, a full 10% more in fact, were being asked to use technology in high school more, it was not a very accurate representation. By going through the individual results and tallying up the answers by hand, separating those that selected both options, the new results showed that 44.8% of responders used technology more in high school compared to 34.5% who used it more in college. It would be interesting to see if that gap increased, or maybe decreased, if survey takers had been forced to only select one option.
Looking at some of the other questions in the survey, it is interesting to note that students are being asked to use technology in their writing classrooms. A full 66.7% of survey takers said their high school English classes asked them to create projects that utilized technology (question #1), and 15.1%, plus six “other” responses for writing bring the percentage up to 26.4, said they were using technology in their college humanities classes (question #2). The numbers here show an even wider gap between technology use in high school and technology use in the college writing classroom. The majority of the respondents were freshman (question #6), and over half of them, 52.5%, had just graduated in 2012 (question #7). One of the most interesting things about the response to this survey, though, is while the other numbers show a gap between the use of technology in high school and college writing classes, respondents said their college writing teachers were using technology more effectively. In response to the last question that asked, “Did your college writing teacher(s) assign writing assignments that effectively used technology…to promote your learning,” 60.7% replied yes, as compared to only 57.4% (question #9) who said yes for their high school teachers. Even though high school teachers may be incorporating more technology, it is possible college instructors are doing a better job of using it effectively.
Bringing it Together Podcast
Transcript
As the title of this blog suggests, the purpose here was to explore the role technology plays in the gap between high school writing courses and college expectations. In my first podcast, I discussed the results to a survey I conducted with students in first-year composition courses. My theory was, and still is, that students in high school are being asked to use more technology. High schools in general are pushing the inclusion of technology in the curriculum more than universities, and thus the types of assignments students are doing in high school are not actually preparing them for college writing. My survey showed that 44.8% of participants were asked to use technology in their writing classes more in high school as opposed to the 34.5% who said they use it more in college. What this means is that even though high school teachers are trying to prepare students for writing beyond their classroom, be that in college or in the workforce, by including technology they may in fact be failing to do so, because college writing classes still assign traditional essays that only require a word processor to complete.
In order to arrive at my conclusion, I’ve looked at a number of different areas that I think influence this situation. First, my blog post “The‘Paperdigm’ Grand Narrative,” discusses the fear and discomfort of new media that characterizes many writing teachers. With our culture’s and our field of study’s emphasis on print medium and the values we associate with it, we find it hard to accept anything else. Since new media really demands writing assignments that do not resemble our traditional essays, which I explore in “Technology Use in the Classroom,” it is challenging for writing teachers of all levels to abandon our values and embrace digital writing. However, as I’ve argued repeatedly throughout this blog that is the next step we need to take. Additionally, I’ve looked at documents that govern our writing curriculums, including but not limited to the newly adopted Common Core State Standards. What I was really interested in was how these documents approach new media and writing. What I found out in the “Technology Language in the Common Core” post was that the Common Core really does emphasize technology use more than other documents, such as the WPA “Outcomes for First-Year Composition.” This then lends itself to further my argument. High school teachers are not left with a choice. They are mandated to use technology in their writing curriculum, whereas it is still more of an option at the college level. Finally, when I started reading about research related to the gap between high school and college writing, I found interesting discussions about standardized tests and the constraints of the high school Language arts classroom, which I discuss in “Mind the Gap, Please.” As I note at the end of that post, I didn’t find any literature that looks at how technology factors into this gap. So, while I agree that the other issues explored are relevant and do indeed impact the success of first-year composition studies, I am arguing that technology should also be considered a factor. I know from my own personal experience as a teacher on both sides of this gap that I stepped backwards in terms of technology when I started teaching at the college level. I did assign traditional essays in my high school classrooms, but I also asked students to create products that were less traditional and relied on the use of new media.
