Computer-Mediated-Communication: What is its Place in the Environmental Composition Classroom?
The environmental composition (or literature) classroom is designed to foster an awareness and appreciation of writing about the natural world as it teaches writing and critical thinking skills. This somewhat interdisciplinary effort involves more than designing and integrating a strong curriculum. It also involves exposing students to values and ideas inherent in the ideal of a sustainable society. As James Berlin said, "A rhetoric can never be innocent" (Berlin 477). This means a pedagogy is never innocent. Thus our pedagogy often speaks volumes about society's most critical issues, problems and blind spots even when our content does not. Writing classrooms that implement an environmental theme are vulnerable to scrutiny, because students receive spoken and unspoken messages via content and pedagogy that may undermine each other.
Bringing technology or computer-mediated-communication (CMC) into a classroom not only alters pedagogy in practical terms, it brings a host of concerns such as technology's impact on the way we think and what we value as knowledge. It isn't surprising that some environmental educators, such as David W. Orr and C.A. Bowers, have been critical of over-reliance on computers, when the computer replaces forms of knowing that may have a direct connection to global sustainability. Other instructors favor the use of computers and develop interactive Web-based courses. Still others forego technology and rely on face-to-face (f2f) strategies such as lectures and traditional group discussions. A few instructors incorporate outdoor or on-site experiences into the writing curriculum. I submit that if our goal as educators is to teach environmental literacy as a means of fostering understanding and concern (and perhaps activism) about our planet, we need to ask, which approaches best serves this goal? And how do we integrate these approaches most effectively?
This paper explores the issue of using CMC in environmental composition/literature classrooms that supposedly espouse the principles of global sustainability. I argue that the decision to use CMC must be carefully weighed against the tenets of good and sustainable societies. As teachers, we must recognize the powerful (and sometimes subtle) messages that accompany computer use. We must reflect on how students acquire and value knowledge and how the presence of technology in the classroom influences their subjectivities.
First I look at the philosophical views that foreground teaching both writing and sustainability; the ideas of James Berlin and David Orr are considered. I discuss the views of CMC supporters such as Ann Woodlief and critics such as Richard J Selfe, Jr. and C.A. Bowers. I also note teaching alternatives-in particular, John Tallmadge's use of outdoor experiences as a way to shape the affective as well as cognitive domain. Finally, I offer suggestions for integrating pedagogical strategies in order to reconcile how we teach with what we teach.
My inquiry into the pedagogy of environmental composition stems from a Berlinian social epistemic perspective, because James Berlin considers the subjectivities of both teacher and student. Berlin's 1988 paper, "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class," advances the notion that all rhetoric and writing classrooms serve some ideology. He explains his premise by describing the three "most conspicuous" classroom practices-the rhetoric of cognitive psychology, expressionistic rhetoric, and social-epistemic rhetoric.
According to Berlin, cognitive rhetoric looks at the writing process as more important than the written product and attempts to dissect how the mind works during the composing process. Expressionistic rhetoric assumes that reality lies within each individual and writing is the creative process of discovering this reality. The writer is paramount (not the reader) and finding one's authentic or individual voice is the goal. The ideology of this approach promotes individuality above authoritarian tyranny.
Like Berlin, I recognize cognitive and expressionistic rhetoric in classrooms as evidenced by textbooks, writing manuals, and pedagogy. But each fails to serve the needs of global sustainability, because they fail to consider the social dimension and ecological consequences of language and writing.
Social-epistemic rhetoric, on the other hand, views rhetoric as a dialectic interaction between the "material, social and the individual writer" (Berlin 488), where knowledge can emerge. This approach continually challenges ideology because it asks: Who benefits from this knowledge? How does this knowledge distribute power? This approach supports the ideology of social and political democracy, because it encourages students to analyze the existing order on our planet and constantly revise interpretations of reality, which now includes virtual reality.
I'm in agreement with Berlin that (according to his scheme) social-epistemic rhetoric is the best way to consider what exists, what is good, what is possible, and what is sustainable within the boundaries of the biosphere. How does this translate into classroom pedagogy? Do we reinforce binary thinking and blind allegiance to corporate consumerism? When teaching environmental literacy, do we adhere to the narrow view of data as knowledge or do we re-affirm intuitive forms of knowing as well?
David W. Orr, a noted environmental educator and author of Ecological Literacy, asks, What is Education For? He believes that modern education is based on certain myths that we take for granted and fail to recognize as insidious. One myth is that given enough knowledge and technology, we can manage the Earth. Orr says this mindset appeals to our fascination with computers but ignores the fact that all life can never be safely managed to suit our whims. Instead "human desires, economies, politics, and communities (What is Education For? 2)" need to be managed by exercising morals, ethics, and common sense. He adds that the explosion of data and the means to manipulate it doesn't mean that knowledge is increasing, because some forms of intuitive, holistic, and place-based knowledge that show us how to live sustainably are being lost. If we accept the fact that computers do not promote intuitive knowledge, we must ask, At what price? Can we expect students to become literate and responsible if tacit, common-sense knowledge is ignored or underprivileged?
The notion that the purpose of education is to provide upward mobility is now commonly accepted. Does this scheme make the world more habitable and humane? Ron Miller, editor of Holistic Review, says, ". . . the economic-technocratic-statist world view has become a monstrous destroyer of what is loving and life-affirming in the human soul" (What is Education For? 3). Is this all we offer students if CMC is privileged over intuitive forms of knowing?
I concur with Orr that "the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses" (What is Education For? 3). Students learn passivity from being passive learners; they learn "monologue, domination, artificiality" (What is Education For? 4) from institutional pedagogies that do not allow real-world experience and problem-solving. For this reason, Orr is skeptical of CMC, if it is at the expense of real experience. He's addressed that problem at Oberlin College by spearheading a building project (to house his department) that is exemplifies environmental concepts such as zero discharge, solar energy, local renewable resources, and global responsibility. Computers that monitor the heat, water, air and materials are included, but learning takes place in small active groups that focus on the places (wells, mines, farms, forests and dumps) that service the campus. Technology has a place, but it is not privileged over direct experience. Such pedagogy promotes learning by doing, for example, becoming involved in the reduction of toxic substances on campus can teach concepts related to science, sociology, politics, and business. Can the same concepts and attitudes be taught using computer simulations? Is the result the same if students have no opportunity to experience the local landscape? Can e-mail or Internet surfing or on-line discussion result in the same degree of environmental literacy?
Paul Rowland, Coordinator of Environmental Education for Northern Arizona University, notes:
One of the problems of [computer landfill] simulations (and they are very good simulations) is that many of our students have never been to a landfill, so they often have trouble connecting with the simulation. What we hope to do in the future is have the students visit landfill and then do the simulation. The visit will give them the visual and olfactory experience while the simulation will allow them to do groundwater sampling that would be impossible for them to carry out on a field trip. (Rowland e-mail 4/14)
When the computer simulation is foregrounded in real experience, this combination of site-based and computer pedagogy uses the best feature of each approach. It also implies a subjectivity that conveys the importance of sensory, real-life experience as the source of knowledge and simulations as a way of manipulating data.
According to John Tallmadge, place-centered education has profound effects on students' attitudes and actions, and their cognitive skills. For more than twenty years, Tallmadge, a professor at the Union Institute in Cincinnati and president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, has been taking writing students (young and old) into the field for observation, reflection and composition. He argues that "landscape adds to text; students can appreciate the work of art [writing] by experiencing the soil from which it came" (Tallmadge interview 4/15). He believes that learning should be transformative and long-lasting and students who ground their writing in a physical place become deeply vested in text. Can we transform our students at a keyboard? If we want our students to engage in the landscape as part of the writing process, can they do so via a terminal? The question remains, What is education for?
Computers do offer more than word-processing and research functions. They provide convenient editing tools, opportunities to learn long distance, and creative ways to present text. And many students seem very productive in a lab setting. For these reasons, computer-based courses are proliferating and administrators are bolstering funding and support. The following example is a success story for CMC in a nature writing course.
Ann Woodlief, a 25-year veteran at Virginia Commonwealth University, is a leader in using computers to teach literature and composition. Although Woodlief has experimented with computers for about ten years, in the last three years she's taught all her courses on-line. Her goal was to:
use the computer environment to help create more dynamic communities of readers and interpreters of literature with classes which involve each student in intense reading/thinking/writing activities yet bring each into the larger community of readers and interpreters and to empower students as better readers able to generate and articulate their own informed interpretations in writing. (Teaching with Computers 3)
Woodlief contends that this approach intensely involves more students with readings and each other than traditional lecture methods. She admits that it was difficult at first to relinquish control in this decentered class, yet the rewards include "strong interpretive voices from all of my students, not distorted echoes of my own" (Teaching with Computers 2). Her students claim they are more equal, learn more, and work harder in her courses than in traditional ones and she's had many "repeaters." Some have become friends and stay in contact with her and classmates, although their subsequent ecological involvement is not always apparent.
In 1996 she designed and implemented a course called American Nature Writing that involves hypertext, on-line discussions, e-mail, and the Internet. She believed that, contrary to the idea of nature writer at work in the wilderness, a computer classroom was an efficient place to write and communicate about the natural world. The computer lab would not replace the outdoor experience, which she calls "untouchable in human terms," but complement it. In this respect she echoes Rowland. Re-seeing, writing, rewriting, research, and collaboration seemed to match the fluid medium of hypertext.
Reading in hypertext offered insights about all reading. Students soon realized that "any type of reading involves seeing beneath the surface." Even "nature is a hypertext embedded with numerous possibilities of meanings" (Writing Nature 2).
Woodlief believes that "the whole point of nature writing is rhetoric and communication . . . helping someone see as you see, feel as you feel, think as you think" (Writing Nature 2). Her classes are "intensely collaborative" interacting with other classes in Colorado and Ohio and with authors from Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. This opens up unlimited possibilities for discussion of text and other issues.
Woodlief believes that this collaborative learning is fostered by using CMC and encourages students to share at all stages of their writing. This creates a social and intellectual bonds that prove valuable in later writing courses. She admits this collaboration does not replace field experiences where writers can crouch by streams to glean "precious fresh observations." Yet the fluidity of the computer does allow student writers to see "viable possibilities for their own voices reflected in those of others" (Writing Nature 1). Again, like Rowland she recognizes the limitations of technology and encourages her students to seek inspiration outdoors on their own.
Woodlief admits there are drawbacks to CMC. As students gain confidence at the keyboard debate and disagreement occur: they sometimes stray from the issues or resort to chatting. Some timid students thrive using CMC; others students "never quite take off." Although some students display less attention to the reading than the instructor would like, strong readers emerge in each group. I think Woodlief would agree that a site experience might engage the more aloof students by providing fresh observations.
Cynthia and Richard Selfe seem to agree with Berlin when they say that computer "interfaces are cultural maps of computer systems and . . . are never ideologically innocent' (Selfe 485). They also say that the use of computers don't necessarily serve democratic ends. Thus the cultural information passed along to students may be "flawed, partial, or incomplete . . . constructed from the dominant forces in our culture" (Selfe 486). In fact, they say reality is framed "in the perspective of modern capitalism . . . orienting technology along existing axis of class privilege" (Selfe 486). They cite the example of mapping the virtual world as a desktop with files and folders; text is a commodity that is owned by authors with passwords. Does this reinforce corporate elitism? I think Selfe would say it does and Orr would agree.
Selfe also says computers follow "rationalistic traditions" and validate "positivism, rationality, hierarchy, and logic as the only authorized contexts for 'knowing'" (Selfe 492). This neglects the other forms of knowing that Orr alludes to--inspiration, intuition, common sense. And if linear, rational knowledge is accepted as the only knowledge, we perpetuate the myth that technology is the answer to all of our problems.
What can we do? Selfe encourages teachers to be technology critics who understand how power is negotiated via technology. We must understand the limits and uses of technology and reflect carefully about how we use it in classrooms. As environmental literacy teachers, we must be especially aware of the implications of technology use and abuse. Selfe encourages teachers of humanities to become involved in the design of computers and software in order to help reconceive the map of the interface.
Chet Bowers is a scholar committed to the idea that technology is not neutral. "The manner is which computers influence patterns of communication and the structure of knowledge, mediate the individual's sensory relationship with the environment, and re-encode vocabularies of culture, while influencing . . . what gets saved and what gets lost" (Cultural Dimensions 2) is an issue of concern for educators. For Bowers, there is a danger in using "data as the basis of thinking" (Cultural Dimensions 3) and assuming "mastery of skills automatically contributes to social progress" (Cultural Dimensions 5). If technology advocates "ignore what kind of future we are progressing toward," (Cultural Dimensions 5) the results can be environmentally and socially disastrous.
Bowers contends that technology strengthens cultural orientations such as "measurement and planning as sources of authority, a conceptual hierarchy that places abstract-theoretical thought at the highest, a competitive-remissive form of individualism, and the definition of human needs in terms of what can be supplied by a commodity culture"(Cultural Dimensions 6). At the same time we lose "forms of authority and skills associated with oral traditions" such as folk arts, fine arts, community traditions, and values that Wendell Berry referred to as "care, competence, and frugality in the use of the world" (Cultural Dimensions 6). This results in greater dependence on facts and less respect for human intuition and caring in decision-making
Bowers points to traditions in Western thought which claim that a technological mind-set leads to a belief that ecological crises can be fixed using technology. It recognizes only "explicit forms of knowledge that allow for an abstract-theoretical formulation of the problem" (Cultural Dimensions 8). The underlying metaphor is "the world as a machine" (Cultural Dimensions 9). This attitude privileges "innovation over substantive traditions, abstract . . . thinking over implicit forms of understanding, the autonomous individual . . . over the . . . group, and a reductionist, materialistic view of reality that denigrates the forms of spiritual discipline necessary for living harmoniously with other forms of life" (Cultural Dimensions 9).
Bowers says that computers alter language as well as thinking. An example of how computers have altered vocabulary is to look at the term, "literacy." This term traditionally means the ability to decode symbols, however computer literacy means being able to program or operate the hardware. When coupled with the notion that a computer is an innocent tool (as textbooks allude), educators fail to address the power to alter language behind every monitor. As our composition students spend more time at the keyboard, are we privileging their abstract, hierarchal thinking over intuitive ways of knowing? If our goal is to transform students into caring, thinking members of the global community, does over-reliance on classroom computers undermine our efforts? How do we strike a balance between the real and the virtual, the rational and the intuitive?
Orr suggests principles for rethinking education. They are worth remembering as we consider the pedagogies we employ in composition classrooms.
"All education is environmental education" (What is Education For? 3). We can use computers to teach students that they are a part of the natural world by complementing virtual learning with experiential learning. They can then frame their knowledge in real problems in the real world, where our survival depends.
"The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter [or technology], but of one's person" (What is Education For? 4). This perspective demands that we take responsibility for the development of pedagogies and technologies that focus on students becoming reasoning, caring, and sensible people who use knowledge toward a safe, sustainable world
We must remember "the power of examples over words" (What is Education For? 3). If our pedagogy and our institutions fail to show students that ecological sustainability is important, we have widened the breach between ideals and reality. Faculty and administrators must be role models of integrity in order to promote a sustainable future.
"Process is important for learning" (What is Education For? 3). If learning only takes place inside four walls, how can we expect them to address problem in the real world? Computers can provide a valuable classroom aid only if we recognize their strengths, weaknesses, and hidden agendas. Being aware of the subjectivities that technology imposes must be a prerequisite to implementation.
In summary, I maintain that virtual experience cannot replace place-based experience and on-line learning must not be privileged over direct human experience. We must balance our eagerness to employ computers with an awareness of their potential for shaping perceptions of knowledge. As technology expands across campuses, it becomes more critical to ground it in real-world experiences that foster global sustainability.
For information about cultural studies and environmental literature, see Scott Denton's Eco Pomo.
For more information about literature and the environment, see ASLE.