A Case for a Humanizing Ecological Uptake of Digital Media Composition Development

• In Event: Interrogating the Status of Digital Writing in Practice and Pedagogy

Abstract

This paper provides a cross-case content analysis of the role of digital composition and development in guiding curricular documents from 10 countries including Australia, China, Colombia, Germany, Greece, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It provides a basis for arguments regarding the limited and limiting guidelines for composition development internationally.
This analysis was conducted within a critical frame that recognizes the role standardization has played in dehumanizing the educational experience in schools while perpetuating social inequities, and racist and classist educational practices. As such, in addition to employing tools for critical discourse analysis (Gee 2011), I attuned to the documents’ “answerability” through two reviews, employing Patel’s (2016) notion of answerability to being-in-relation, learning, and context. The two reviews included: 1) the role of digital media composition in writing standards; and 2) the developmental trajectory explicit and implied by standards’ sequences. Countries and documents were chosen through convenience sampling of academic contacts in each country. As a limitation, this review is partial, not representative of the range of curricular approaches worldwide. However, as stakeholders in their countries’ educational projects, the contacts supported the interpretation of curricular documents by providing historical and contextual explanations, as well as convening a focus group of stakeholders to provide initial analysis.
Across countries, forms of digital and media composition are quite limited in specificity, criticality, and scope. As a sample of findings: Few countries include digital media composition guidelines, and when taken up do so in a techno-functional way. In key stages 1-4 in the UK, for instance, technologies are not mentioned within writing guidelines; design, technology and computing guidelines are presented separately. In the US, digital media composition is directly addressed in one Common Core ELA standard related to production and dissemination, presented as “technology, including the Internet.” There is, however, no mention of an interrogation of digital technologies’ “software space” (Lynch, 2015) including analytics, trace data, or the new rhetorical dimensions, multimodal capacities, mobilities, and malleability of texts, modes, and meaning with evolving technologies (Author & Colleagues, 2018).
In terms of development, across composition fields and approaches whether rhetorical, cognitive, linguistic, etcetera, composition development is consistently depicted as emergent, multidimensional, relational, dynamic, and driven by human desire (Author, 2018). However, staged progression models derived from cognitive psychology--rather than writing theory--dominate curricula internationally, and psychometrics and measurement theory rule assessment schemes of those standards (Behizadeh & Engelhard, 2011). Furthermore, the fixation across countries on grade-specific goals (predominantly regarding grammatical “correctness”), and their accompanying assessments, imply a linear trajectory of development, misaligned with these theories, and simply, not answerable contextually to learning’s complexity (Patel, 2016). As arguments are made to more centrally incorporate digital composition within schooling, I argue we must simultaneously advocate for an emergent, transformative, and humanizing (Bartolome, 1994; Gutiérrez, 2008; Stetsenko, 2016) ecological perspective (Smidt, 2009; Wardle & Roozen, 2012) on development so as not to further replicate the persistent problems in curricula that push limiting, techno-functional visions of composition (Yancey, 2009).

Author

• Anna Smith, Illinois State University