Reviews for Re-imagining computers and composition

The average rating for Re-imagining computers and composition based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-01-17 00:00:00 Corey Seidl In Radical Departures (2002), Gallagher writes against our commonplace notion of progressive, a term “often used unreflectively as a term of approbation” (xiii). Compositions studies, he notes, views itself as progressive in two ways: 1) as left-leaning; and 2) as progressing from a less enlightened past into a more enlightened present (xii). His goal is to “show how various visions and versions of 'progressivism' continue to inform the development of Composition and Rhetoric” (xiii) in order to refocus Composition and Rhetoric so that we put the “practice of pedagogy at the center of our work” (xvi). Gallagher defines “pedagogy as the reflexive inquiry that teachers and learners undertake together” (xvi, emphasis original). In Chapters 1 and 2, Gallagher focuses on the history of progressivism in Composition and Rhetoric, discussing two major movements: pedagogical progressivism, which draws from progressive politics, especially John Dewey, and administrative progressivism, which saw schools as like businesses that needed to be more efficient. Administrative progressivism results in the de-professionalization of teachers, the development of outside experts, the incorporation of standardized tests, education in service of the marketplace, and the distrust of local Rhetoric and Composition scholars and administrators. Of particular interest to us in an emancipatory composition course is Gallagher's discussion of critical pedagogy in Chapter 3. Gallagher argues that the discourse of “critical pedagogy has, ironically, drawn us away from pedagogical progressivism” in various ways (70, emphasis original): 1.Critical pedagogy has created a gendered structure of authority, with male theorists, who have a critical tradition supporting their authority, and female clients, whose own theorizing in the classroom is not ignored or is not valued (72). Teachers are turned into “clients” or consumers, relying on the authority of knowledge-makers (77). 2.Critical pedagogy portrays critical literacy as a skill or artifact to be “given” to students, which doesn't make critical pedagogy much different from other transmission pedagogies, which Freire discussed as relying on “the banking concept” (74). It also portrays students as completely naïve and fully determined by hegemony, as “culturally blind.” Teachers and students are then cast in oppositional ways: teachers as fully enlightened and students as fully duped by ideology (75). 3.Critical pedagogy often focuses on larger cultural or societal transformative change, calling for teachers to be engaged in various ways outside the classroom to bring about this change. This ignores the material conditions of teachers, many of whom are teaching hundreds of students and putting in 70 hours a week. The effect of this call is that teachers are portrayed as bad practitioners because they do not live out the prescriptions of critical pedagogy (77). Because of critical pedagogy's call for large transformative change, smaller acts of resistance are dismissed as merely “reformist” or “cosmetic” (87). 4.It often portrays all institutions as the same: monolithic institutions that solely reproduce oppressive conditions, are not constantly changing, and need to be changed by the transformative intellectual (79). Ultimately, “critical pedagogy has become another academic regime of truth” that “positions students and teachers in disempowering ways” and moves us away from the reflexive pedagogy that Gallagher desires to see at the center of Composition and Rhetoric (85, 73, emphasis original). Gallagher ends the first half of his book with a call for institutional literacy: the ability “to read institutional discourses (and their resultant arrangements and structures) so as to speak and write back to them, thereby participating in their revision” (79). Drawing on Ellen Cushman's work, Gallagher argues that counterhegemonic work is always being done, and once we reposition ourselves to our own classrooms and institutions, we can tap into this work (87-88). Gallagher's work reminds us that much of critical pedagogy shouldn't be read as a “how to” guide for what to do in our particular classrooms. Instead, his call seems to me to be a call for a refocusing on particularities: who are your particular students, where are you located, what are your institutional constraints, what do you and your students know about your community and institution, and what tensions do you and your students feel in their own lived experiences? Pedagogy should be the work of reflexively learning together, as Freire and Dewey conceptualize it.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-05-13 00:00:00 Robert Burchill I took a doctoral class at UNL and read this book by my instructor! So I do have a signed copy. Neat, huh?