Interview: Cynthia Selfe Talks about the Future of Technology and Teaching
by Evelyn Beck
English professor Cynthia Selfe has distinguished herself in a niche that puts her colleagues to sleep. In a 1999 essay that appeared in College Composition and Communication, Selfe writes, “A central irony that has shaped my professional life for as long as I can remember goes something like this: the one topic I actually know something about—that of computer technology and its use in teaching composition—is also the single subject, in my experience, best guaranteed to inspire glazed eyes and complete indifference in those portions of the CCCC [Conference on College Composition and Communication] membership, which do not immediately open their program books to scan alternative sessions or sink into snooze mode.”
Selfe’s career path didn’t initially focus on technology. She has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a M.Ed. and a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction from the University of Texas, Austin. But lack of funds in graduate school set her in a new direction: “[Someone] showed me how to code my dissertation on the university mainframe because I didn’t have enough money to have it typed,” she says. “So in 1980 that made me a specialist. At my first job, PC’s were just coming in; I’ve had a career contemporaneous with personal computers in education.”
Today, Selfe teaches courses in computers, composition, scientific and technical communication, and literature at Michigan Technological University in Houghton. She is the author of Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Perils of Not Paying Attention (1999), Creating Computer-Supported Writing Facilities: A Blueprint for Action (1989), and Computer-Assisted Instruction in Composition (1986). She has also coauthored many books, including Global Literacies and the World-Wide Web (2000) and Literacy, Technology, and Society: Confronting the Issues (1997). And she has written dozens of articles, has received numerous grants for the study of technology and literacy, and is the cofounder and editor of Computers and Composition Press. Within the past few years, she has spoken about global literacy and technology in Japan, Greece, Egypt, and Australia.
The Adjunct Advocate caught up with Cynthia Selfe to talk about her thoughts on the future of technology in higher education.
Q. How do you use computers in education?
A. I use computers in many ways–as a resource for students, for myself, for the teaching and learning environment, for enrichment, and as a focus for helping students be critical about technology. We can’t just educate them to use technology. We have to get them to pay attention to the effects of technology—to the ways humans influence and shape technology—so they can be active in working with computers, so they can be agents in changing technology to do what it is that we want them to do.
Q. Do you teach on-line?
A. I teach classes that are partially on-line. I enjoy people face-to-face. If I can’t meet them face-to-face, I do enjoy working with them on-line. On-line environments make possible working together when we wouldn’t necessarily work together. For example, I have a student in a wheelchair who uses a blow tube to navigate on-line and doesn’t travel a lot.
Q. What do you mean when you talk about technology in higher education?
A. I’m referring to computer-supported systems for learning and teaching. But by that I mean I look at those systems very broadly as systems that include people, and are shaped by literacy values and practices. Not only are they shaped, but they shape those values and practices, too. It’s a very broad definition that includes people as well as hardware and software. It’s about how systems shape literacy practices and values.
Talk to any youngsters today; they are doing lots of reading and writing but not necessarily of the kind that we consider reading and writing. They’re doing on-line, chat, Instant Messenger, gaming, programming. But much of that is invisible to teachers because most of us were raised in the print literacy generation; we consider literacy to be print and books. We don’t like to think non-print literacy has as much value because that would devalue our literacy. However, the result is that many youngsters think we’re ignorant and illiterate because we don’t know the same literacies they know. Literacy is culturally determined. Literacy scholars have told us that if you have only one official form of literacy, then you encourage illiteracy. We need to take a broad view and recognize that different literacies are valuable.
I want to try to get us to recognize that, but it’s also my contention that as Margaret Mead said, in a culture that changes fast, adults can’t do the job of teaching children what they need to know because adults don’t know what’s coming down the pike. A lot of students working on-line today know what’s coming down pike, and we don’t. Not only do we have to pay attention to their literacies, but we must integrate emerging literacies into our classrooms. Alphabetic literacy alone is not sufficient to the task of carrying meaning across cultures. We need visual and multimodal literacies–sound, graphics, movies, and images.
Q. Is technology mainly the use of on-line education?
A. There is a lot of work in on-line education. But there’s also a whole field called computers in composition–not just distance education. It addresses issues of identity and equity and access and literacy and feminist and visual rhetoric.
Q. What are some of the best practices in on-line education?
A. There are as many creative practices as there are good teachers. It’s the kind of thing that is multiplied–you can be a good or bad teacher and teach on-line. If teaching brings students together and enriches students, it’s good teaching.
Q. What are some of the common mistakes in on-line education?
A. When we get around technology, we forget about human beings. We put machines first or technological systems first. Too many people use computers because they’re the thing to use rather than because using them will help human beings. We shouldn’t use technology unless it makes the world a better place. For example, we must use technology within teaching to make students’ lives better. If you’re using technology just because your department chair tells you to use it, that’s wrong. We need to use technology to help students get better jobs and be more productive citizens. We have to make technology more humane.
For example, it’s a good use of computers to give an assignment that helps students research their family or literacy background and find out about their ancestry—something that they couldn’t normally find out without access to communication networks. But it’s bad to use a drill and practice skills-based approach that turns everybody into the same automaton. That’s not paying attention to technology; that’s just using it. There are many programs that use computers without paying attention to technology and the ways students can change.
We’re training students to be good consumers, to want the latest technology for writing or math. Very few of us are educating students about what kind of relationship humans should have with computers.
Q. What are the perils of technology in higher education?
A. Who’s going to shape the technology so it helps people? That’s the job of humanists. Technology is very seductive, and it can become invisible, which is also dangerous. How many times have you looked at a PC? How many times have you wondered why you have a desktop instead of a kitchen table? Why not a workbench? Why not some other way of thinking about technology that might be more amenable to women? When you’re not thinking about something, that’s a peril.
We’re a big consumer society. We use computers but don’t necessarily think in very productive terms about how and when and if. The results are that we have two kinds of people–those who really like technology and are enthusiastic and use it without questions and those who hate it and think they don’t use it. Where’s the middle ground? Who’s looking after the store?
If we don’t think about technology, we start to believe it’s really a World Wide Web and that computers connect the whole world. But think about it—it’s really Western countries. Whole regions of the world are poorly represented because of money and economic structures that underlie the use of computers. In our own country, there are more computers in the homes of whites than people of color or Hispanics or single families headed by females or poor families. We must begin to wonder whether computers are correlated with and distributed along an axis of race and class and gender and not evenly.
I suppose that would bother a lot of educators. Humanist educators have to really pay attention to what’s happening with technology because if you’re not, then somebody is paying attention who doesn’t have the same humanist values we do. I want humanist values to shape technology.
In the future I see the same kind of thing other technology critics see: If humanism doesn’t shape technology, then the technological mindset will think technology is the answer to all questions. But sometimes technology exacerbates problems or may cause problems. For example, consider illiteracy. There’s already the problem with intergenerational illiteracy along the axis of race and class. If computers are also distributed along the axis of race and class, then you are not considered literate in this country anymore unless you use computers. That’s why so many schools have bought into computers.
