Considering the Place(s) of/in Technologies in English

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Ink on Paper: Figurations of the Subject English

Abstract

“There are not technological revolutions without cultural transformation….This is not an incremental process; it is a vision, an act of belief , a gesture of rebellion.” (Castells, 2001, p. 177).

The academic subject English has long been positioned as central to American secondary schooling (National Education Association, 1894). Characterized as the study of language and literature, it has traditionally been constituted by the conceptions of an economic and cultural elite of what it means to be ‘educated’ and ‘literate’(Applebee, 1976; Myers, 1996) . Conceptions of English have been hammered out in debates about curricular specifics: texts to be read, courses of study to be established, and practices to be pursued, usually in service to the needs of an industrial society. Outcomes of these debates have perpetuated discourses of the dominant culture (Applebee, 1976).
But sociologist Manual Castells (2010) posits that at the turn of the century and the start of the new millennium, a perfect storm of social, technological, economic, and cultural transformations catapulted us from a post-industrial society into an information and knowledge age. Castells (2009, p. 387) argues that this era is characterized by new social structures constructed outside of the discourses of “civil society”. For Castells, the exponential developments in information and communication technologies have profoundly disrupted and continue to disrupt dominant discourses. I extend this to include discourses that have long constituted the academic subject, English.
Current debates in the field of English Education take up questions about the effects and place of information and communication technologies in English. For example, the technologies of hypertext disrupt both fixed notions of what constitutes text, and the linearity of written alphabetic text itself (Kress, 1999). What then are the implications for the long held position that English is the study of language? Digital tools afford new possibilities both for representation and distribution of new forms of text (Yancey, 2004) . Do they have a place in ‘English’?
Many of the discussions of the relationship(s) of technologies and English continue the debates of ‘English’ as a curricular construction of the Information Age (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007). However, in examining histories of the academic subject English, Brass (2010, 2011, 2012) identifies the Protestant Ethic as a dominant discourse in the construction of English and challenges the field to reexamine itself in the light of this perspective. In a similar approach, Castells (2001) locates the technological revolution in the discourses of the technological visionaries who initiated the revolution in information and communication technologies .
Thus, in this presentation, I will explore the idea that tensions about the places of technology in English occur as the ethics that gave rise to English (Brass, 2010, 2011, 2012) bump up against those that spawned the technologies of the information age (Castells, 2001). I interrogate data I’ve gathered from in- and out-of-class writings from preservice English teachers to examine these tensions as they immersed themselves in the revolutionary culture of a Web 2.0 learning environment.

Author

• Karen A. LaBonte, Teachers College, Columbia University