In an effort to try and make the best out of this reading situation:

Play is commonplace. From the time we’re born until our faculties no longer permit us, we play, we interact, we engage, we challenge, we set rules and restrictions and we look for loopholes to avoid them and the entire time we’re engaged in some level of critical thinking. Except for that period between first grade and 16th grade – then it’s all standardized learning and hoopla.

Being the SLS outsider that I am, I realize that this theoretically, philosophically dense reading is probably a staple in R/C, providing a series of anti-standards (or maybe a different set of standards) to apply to the composition classroom. I certainly see its benefit: learning through play; and I can’t help but think about second language acquisition theories that in some way agree with this notion. A child is born and is immediately bombarded with coos and goos of language, and belly time, and play time. They get older and are thrown into Pre-k not so much to learn their ABCs as it is to learn how to play, or socialize, with other kids following a set of certain rules. It’s said that this play time with children their own age teaches them how to learn language, they intuitively pick up syntax structure, pronunciation, the differences between inside and outside voices, and learn to negotiate meaning in a social context with some guided input from the adults monitoring their play. When we look at SLA, we consider context, anxiety, purpose for learning a second language, and, with adults, learn to mitigate the different rules they bring with them into the classroom. Yet, there’s a clear distinction between the playground and the classroom, and if play can’t be forced, how do you encourage students (especially adults with various cultural backgrounds) to play with language – written or spoken?

I have some thoughts, but I’ll tease those out during class maybe.

There is freedom in rejecting a social belief in which we share no social purpose for believing; the exposure of how a particular belief is constructed by society and not by science is equally freeing – until you attempt to break away from that mold in a overly zealous crowd.

The rules for gender (and race) were established for clear purposes, to serve a particular society with a particular goal. And there’s no greater demonstration of these roles (rules) than in the classroom that is dominated primarily by white males. For a brief second, I thought perhaps my classrooms (the ones where I’m the teacher) were an exception to Rickly’s assertions. And then I remembered (Because I so often forget) that I’m a woman of color. Of course the women in my classroom and the male/female students of color feel comfortable speaking up orally and in online discussions. While the non-others remain silent. Is that a power trip? Who knows. Admittedly, I’m cautious when it comes to playing the race/gender card. Aren’t we as a society beyond that? Are 18 year olds really capable of race and gender discrimination? They’re kids. Their brains still have another growth spurt to manage. I then go home, frustrated, sad, disheartened, and discouraged as I remember the sly remarks, the refusals to participate, the need to find an area in which I’m not knowledgeable in to aggravate, the drastic differences in interactions and perceptions of credibility between an African American woman using spoken word to talk about being trilingual in English and a White British Male validating world Englishes. And I think I’ crazy until someone observing my class empathetically brings it up to me: do you notice the race and gender tensions in your class? And then I look in the mirror and imagine what it’d be like to teach as a white male.

And for shiggles, it turns out I’m masculine. According to the BSRI, I scored 84.167 out of 100 masculine points, 60.526 out of 100 feminine points, and 60 out of 100 androgynous (neutral) points.

Is there a race version of this?

Though all of the pieces pulled my eyes open to the narratives of women and technology, Takayoshi’s piece was especially gripping. Actually, it was saddening. I immerse myself in the scientific side when it comes to my research, with my metaphorical lab coat, glasses, and gloves because I’m often told these “feelings” don’t matter. You can’t generalize feelings. And yet, I wonder why not when narrative after narrative after narrative suggests otherwise.

“This cultural sign communicates a well known story – neighborhood boys building a secret club, maybe in a tree house and refusing membership to little sisters and other girls.”

If you pause and reflect on experiences, experiences that are valid and worth being noted in research, you’ll notice the patterns speak truth: Every little girl has been told no – you can’t do that because you’re a girl. Maybe the no was subtle, maybe the no was overt, but the volume of the no doesn’t take away from the impact of it, the ripples that will later well up into waves of insecurity and self-doubt.

“These young women’s activities and experiences with the World Wide Wb clarify the negotiations young women make in gendered terrains and suggest areas for further research on the relationship between women and technology.”

How many times have I looked to a male colleague to fix something related to my laptop, to teach me how to do what he can do (to do it for me), because I simply thought I couldn’t. I want to do X,Y,Z, but that involves too much technology – the smart side of technology. Or I observe my male students taking over a project that involves building a website while making the girls do the writing, because writing is feelings and technology is building.

“Including girls’ voices in the professional scholarship introduces perspectives that might otherwise be ignored or not understood.”

Ah. Scholarship. In an attempt to break away from the cement blocks of assimilation, I notice that most of my field is dominated by men. Narrative is less appealing because narrative is feeling. Men don’t narrate; therefore, scholarship shouldn’t either.

“Women in this culture know too well how worn down one can feel repeatedly fighting oppression over time”

…self explanatory.

I’ve only ever done research using a computer – the computer tells me where the books are in the library; the computer tells me where the online articles are; the computer tells me which school has the book(s) I need tomorrow; the computer tells me that Amazon is cheaper than the campus bookstore; and, when the computer fails to tell me anything, the librarian (often a female) tortures the World Wide Web into submission. Once I have the information, the knowledge, regardless of where it was retrieved from, my professors help me piece it together. I do remember, though, using an encyclopedia in primary school, and reading through the dictionary so I could “sound smart” during my second grade class discussions. But that was only because I didn’t have access to a computer until I was in the 8th grade, and then I don’t recall having access to one at home until maybe high school, and I didn’t have my first personal laptop until I was a freshman/sophomore in college (that was 9-10 years ago). There’s something about being able to be comfortable at home with a cup of coffee while you do your research, and I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom – us youngins aren’t losing out because we didn’t have to walk 5 miles in the snow to get an education; perhaps we take it for granted that information is at our finger tips, but hasn’t that been the goal since the creation of mankind? Wasn’t that the plight of Adam and Eve – a hunger for knowledge that surpasses all limitations?

Regardless, I do think it’s pertinent that students are taught how to flesh out this knowledge – we can’t believe everything we see, read, hear, or even feel. I can’t say how many times I’ve called someone an idiot on Facebook because they posted a satirical piece and started a war between fools. Look up your sources people. Perhaps that’s the potential pitfall of the World Wide Web and access to everyone’s thoughts and feelings at all times: no one knows what’s true anymore, no one critically thinks about what they’re reading before they hit the share button, no one considers the counterargument before hitting the paste button. We share knowledge like it’s sloppy seconds, with no will regard for where that knowledge originated, who thought that, who said that, why and how did they come to this conclusion. It’s all just hand-me-downs now.

After chatting with Alisha, Bianca, Sam, & Sherri on Tuesday, my mind is pretty much on overload with the all of the possibilities gaming brings to the ESL classroom. Obvs it’s not new research (CALL does a lot with gaming these days), but I’ve always felt on the outside of that conversation because I don’t self-identify as a “Gamer” and could never really figure out how something my parents fought over could have educational benefits beyond building thumb dexterity. Thankfully, that’s starting to shift.

I’m highly interested in the endless possibilities gaming brings to SLA and what exactly that looks like: Learning vocabulary, interacting in a new social discourse, building audience awareness, analyzing rhetorical devices, negotiating meaning, etc. I’d like to see what having an ESL composition classroom with a certain genre of games or a game as a theme for an entire semester does for their writing and language skills. Since I didn’t know Dungeons and Dragons was a originally a paper game (don’t judge me too harshly), I especially favor the idea of scaffolding from a paper/board version to a system version of a game for a semester – but I’m not opposed to just tossing them in (that’s literally how I learned to swim) and seeing where the struggle takes us (I didn’t die). Since I am new to this gaming world, and am trying my hand at playing some myself, I can certainly see the possible frustrations that ESL students are likely to experience when trying to navigate a world that doesn’t bend quite as easily to our rule of thumb; I can also imagine the lively conversations, descriptive pieces of writings, and the leaps in learning that are possible from stepping out of one’s comfort zone.

The biggest worry I have, honestly, would be transfer and finding clear-cut objectives that demonstrate the benefits of such a class to my students.

While reading for today, I kept flashing back to when I was a child and the ways I would attempt to play with language – mainly through poetry and my little 8 year old rants in my journal. I then considered the ways I began intertwining Spanish and English, trying to find my place in both. Reflecting back, I think I was attempting to develop some sort of power role that I could exert in my monolingual classrooms (I wonder how that would have come across in any of the “games” mentioned in the readings for today). I never considered any of that play. I did, however, recall the many Saturday mornings I’d wake up early just to play Donkey Kong and Mario Bros on our new Nintendo, and while that was certainly play, I, again, didn’t consider the role of language and negotiation when playing with my adoptive father who’d speak primarily in Spanish to me during two player games and perhaps the impact that had on my language development – oral and literate. Jumping forward 20 years, my interests in the role of “play” in second language development is certainly budding. I wonder how ESL/multilingual students would respond to a task such as the one Daisley discusses: what personas would they take, would they continue to focus on form or venture over to meaning? how would negotiation play out if this occurred between a NS and NNS versus two NNS? Would a different identity emerge than the one they hold to in their L1? would they feel empowered at all? would ownership of a language that isn’t their Mother Tongue take root?

1. Podcasts
2. Youtube (making videos – like a practice presentation)
3. videos (assessing presentations – loading videos to course site and having students self-assess, primarily focused on speaking skills)
4. learner corpora
5. Facebook – class group for discussion of readings
6. google docs (collaborative processing, peer-feedback)
7. research
8. online discourse communities
9. blackboard (ew)
10. blogs
11. wikis

How I wish SLW and R/C didn’t view one another as Uncle Jimmie Joe Bob at the annual family reunion no one really wanted to go to anyways. The same conversation these articles dive into, is nearly the same conversation SLW (and CALL and digital literacies) began exploring in the early 90’s and continues to even today. Researchers wonder the effects of word processors (and other forms of digital literacies) on the SLW process: are teachers better at grammar instruction and feedback than WP or vice versa? are WP actually able to assist in SLW instruction if the data used to run WP is gathered from L1 language usage? do the squiggly cursors distract students? does spell checker actually impede the process of learning new vocabulary? do students see a whole text or a partial? what about ownership? who/what has more authority in the classroom: instructor or computer?

Most instructors will argue that we should merely turn off the many complex functions MS Word comes with – students don’t need, and shouldn’t, rely on them. However, some scholars (Li & Cumming (2001)) argue that proper instruction of word processors actually positively impacts writing instruction – to what degree is still under scrutiny. Yet the conversation of access, and how the lack of assumed access to the technologies used in the American classroom, is just beginning to ring loud enough for us to actually look up for our screens and pay attention.

The culture of our SLW students is ubiquitous throughout their writing process and interaction with digital media/literacies; many of our students may not have been granted technological privileges and have had little exposure to the modes of writing being integrated in American universities. Consequently, students may not only be struggling with linguistic components such as, grammar, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, and phonology, but they must also navigate through a digital divide created through a difference in educational context (e.g. Warschauer, 2003). Though it may be assumed that countries such as China (where most of our international students are currently from) are largely ‘developed’ in their uses of technology, Taylor, Jamieson, and Eignor (2000) found in their research that the following countries were described as not having computers in their classrooms: Bangladesh, Chile, China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and various others; however, the United States, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland are known for having the means to structure curriculum around computers (p. 576). So while using the computer in an ESL (or a mainstream comp class with multilingual speakers) context has proven to have a positive effect on the students’ motivation and attitudes towards writing, Pennington (2003) explains that students’ “behavior is dictated by their knowledge and understanding of the [technology]” they are interacting with (p. 408). In other words, students’ attitudes, based on their previous experiences, directly affect their interactions with the new modes of writing being introduced to the classroom setting.

For example: My international students in 106 last year spent more time learning and using the technology I was “forced” to teach (and they were forced to learn) than they did improving their writing skills through negotiation and collaboration. Writing quickly became the backdrop to technology’s play, and they knew it, disliked it, and rebelled against it.

While it is intriguing to glance back on the perspectives of technology, namely of the computer and word processors, from the 80’s and especially that of Rhet/Compers (being that I’m in my hobbit hole: Second Language Studies), I found myself repeatedly stomping my feet at the authors (I am looking 29 + years back, using a MacBook to write a blogpost for an assignment) and second guessing my criticisms due to my lack of training in this field (again, my hobbit hole). The article I grappled with the most, though, was Moore’s.

Let me explain:

Moore (1985) 

I appreciate Moore’s attempt at investigating the effectiveness of microcomputers on the writing process and believing that “…with minimum instruction and some common sense approaches, beginning writers stand to gain the most from the use of word processing” (p. 55). I do. Yet, I found myself searching for a theoretical framework, a hypothesis, a clear methodology, an explanation of “common sense approaches”, an understanding of the learners’ profile (besides the fact that they’re “economically disadvantaged” and 83% of the class is Hispanic), what constitutes a “beginning writer” – I read none of that. What I did read came across as blaming: “In a more affluent school, I suspect the number of students with typing skills as well as the number of students familiar with computer keyboards would be higher, making instruction even more effective” (p. 57). Where was the discussion on accessibility? Were these students second language learners ( being that TSC, now University of Texas at Brownsville, is only 400 meters away from the border), or bilingual? Were they working while also going to school? Was their education primarily in the States or in Mexico (I’m just going to make the assumption that Hispanic = Mexican here)? Hypothetically speaking, if these students were learning English as a second language or even bilingual, perhaps there are other factors that contributed to the lack of improvement in their writing performance (aside from the fact that maybe there just wasn’t enough time for them to develop those computer skills along with their language skills or maybe Moore’s instruction was faulty in some way). Side note: What constitutes as writing performance here?  

Perhaps the hardest question: How much has really changed these 30 years in terms educators’ views of multilingual writers in FYC and the instruction of technology (and language/writing skills)?