As a technological shift has occurred over the last few decades in the United States, there has also been a significant shift in the population of the country. This population shift has largely been driven by the rapid growth of the Hispanic population, of which Mexicans and Mexican Americans are the largest part (Passel, Cohn, and Hugo Lopez 2011). Increasingly, this population is enrolling in two-year and four-year colleges with a total enrollment of 12.2 million Hispanic college students in 2010 (Fry 2011).1 Although both technological and demographic shifts have occurred and are occurring outside educational environments, the space of educational environments has not, on the whole, adapted to the changes in learning and learners. Design of learning spaces—both physical and virtual—has come under more research consideration; much more work, however, needs to be done on the connection between student learning and classroom spaces (Temple 2008).

This chapter explores the digital writing spaces in an overwhelmingly Hispanic high school and two federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), a community college and a university, located in a midsize city on the U.S.–Mexico border. We explore how digital writing spaces differ between these three institutions and how those differences impact instruction and student work.

^{1. According to the Pew Research Hispanic Center, in 2010, Hispanics comprised 15 percent of the total student population of young students between eighteen and twenty-four years old. Forty-six percent of them were enrolled in two-year colleges, and 54 percent were enrolled at four-year colleges (Fry 2011).}

The presence and use of technology in institutional learning spaces is more complex than the number of computers available to students and the frequency of computer use. An increased consideration of educational space is important because, as Les Watson (2007) noted, “The spaces in which we work, live, and learn can have profound effects on how we feel, how we behave, how we perform and can affect different people differently” (260). With this in mind, we turn to articulating a perspective that realizes spaces as socially constituted and more than the sum of their physical parts.

Like Henri Lefebvre (1991), we understand space as a product of social interaction: “(Social) space is a (social) product... [and] such a social space is constituted neither by a collection of things or an aggregate of (sensory) data, nor by a void packed like a parcel with various contents” (26–27). Although the contents of a particular space are important in and of themselves, they are situated in a system of “networks and pathways” through which they and nonphysical things, such as information, are exchanged. In addition to creating spaces as places of production, these networks create spaces as places of “a means of control, and hence domination, of power” (Lefebvre 26). The production and use of space, therefore, is ideological in the sense that it is affected by, and also contributes to, power hierarchies in educational institutions and in broader society.

Diana Oblinger (2005) reminded us that “learning spaces convey the image of an institution’s philosophy on teaching and learning” (11), and Paul Temple (2008) noted that space design in higher education has traditionally been determined by campus master planning and institutional architectural dictates. Additionally, ideological shifts regarding what makes for effective pedagogy have placed emphasis on student-centered learning rather than the dissemination of knowledge (see Jamieson 2003; Jamieson et al. 2000; Kuh et al. 2005). As a result, the traditional “one-to-many,” or Harvard-model, lecture hall, which positions the professor as the ultimate source of knowledge and authority, is now frequently sharing space with classroom designs that center students and facilitate collaboration between them. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1988), Maggi Savin-Baden (2007) contrasted these different learning spaces as “striated” or “smooth” (13). While these spaces can overlap, in their simplest forms, striated spaces are “characterized by a strong sense of organization and boundedness”; learning in these spaces occurs via a “sense of subordination to a body of knowledge and the power of the expert” (13). The smooth learning space, however, is “open, flexible, and contestable.” In these spaces, learners are not static, but are always on the move. In contrast to the utmost respect for disciplinary knowledge and the expert in the striated space, in smooth learning spaces, learners are “encouraged to contest knowledge and ideas proffered by lecturers and in doing so create their own stance toward knowledge(s)” (14). Figure 11.3 is a depiction of what these two spaces might look like:

Thinking through space in these terms demonstrates Watson’s (2007) point that spaces affect how we feel, behave, and perform. It stands to reason, then, that educators may be challenged by bringing new curricula and innovative teaching methods into old, often striated, learning spaces. The integration of technology into a traditional learning space very much may replicate existing social hierarchies and “limit the possibilities of our activity, restricting us to old modes of working and thinking” (Watson 2007, 260) in spite of the innovations.

With this point in mind, Educause’s Education Learning Initiative, or ELI, is interested in answers to several pertinent questions related to the creation and usage of educational space, including:

• What kinds of spaces enhance student learning?
• What assumptions should we challenge as we design learning spaces for the future?

As we consider responses to these questions within the frame that space is a social construction, it is important to realize that our definition of space is not restricted to physical classroom spaces but also includes social learning spaces and virtual learning spaces. Savin-Baden (2007) found that much learning and production of knowledge occurs outside of the traditional learning spaces where instructors physically meet with their students. Of course, with increased use of the Internet in teaching and learning, including immersive virtual worlds (Johnson and Levine 2008), the boundaries between physical and virtual learning spaces are blending. Savin-Baden (2007) noted that “learning, knowledge, relationships, communication, home and workplaces are no longer seen by staff and students as static, bounded and uniform but instead as ongoing, variable and emergent” (10). As observed in an Educause Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR) report, students suggested that “blending modalities was a winning combination” for learning (Dahlstrom 2012). Digital learning spaces are not without control as well, however. External social forces, such as administrative restrictions placed on the use of technology, can overtly shape, even striate, these virtual spaces.

As evident from the discussion in the previous section, institutional spaces are ideological and shape student experiences—as they are also shaped by students, professors, and a variety of external forces. As societal inequalities persist across racial and ethnic lines, these inequalities trickle down to classroom spaces and the life-worlds of the students that inhabit them. Any investigation of institutional spaces, then, must consider the myriad of forces shaping them and shaped by them, including not only the design of spaces, but also how technology is used in and around these spaces.

As educational researchers have documented, home lives of students are a critical force shaping student success in the educational realm. In a Pew Research Hispanic Center report, Gretchen Livingston (2011) documented a digital divide in the home spaces of Latina/o and non-Latina/o students, with Latinas/os less likely than African-American and white students to have home broadband access (45 percent vs. 52 percent and 65 percent). Another Pew report noted that, even though they are gaining ground in terms of smartphone usage and Internet access, Latinas/os continue to lag in terms of owning a desktop or laptop computer compared to whites (72 percent vs. 83 [percent; Lopez, Gonzalez-Barrera, and Patten 2013). As writing programs continue to increase focus on multimodal composition, it is important to consider how to support the success of students whose families may not be able to afford fast Internet access, a dedicated laptop for a student, or software required by the program. For a student dependent on a campus computer lab—including many of the students at the institutions profiled in this study—the creation, support, and design of institutional technology spaces becomes a vitally important consideration.

While many K–12 schools serving large numbers of Latina/o students have access to grants that can support adding technology to classrooms and labs, this does not equal effective use of these enhanced spaces. An unfortunate reaction to the lack of home technology resources and skills that minority students bring to the classroom has been to lower expectations surrounding the use of technology for educational purposes, much as schools will “dumb down” instructional programs and lower expectations when serving students who come in with lower literacy levels. A number of scholars have documented this curricular divide (e.g., Banks 2006; Margolis et al. 2008; Scardamalia 2003; Warschauer, Knobel, and Stone 2004; Wenglinsky 2005). In a study of technology in public schools, Barbara Monroe (2004) noted that white suburban schools tend to use computers for “communication and collaborative learning projects,” while poorer schools tend to focus on “keyboarding and drilling,” much the way developmental courses use technology for grammar or math drills.

Moving to the college level, the aforementioned ECAR study was based on survey results from ten thousand undergraduate students at 195 institutions and produced a comprehensive picture of current technology usage and future pedagogical possibilities at two- and four-year colleges (Dahlstrom 2012). While the study found that students were increasingly using technology both inside and outside the classroom and that engaging students via technology in the classroom is a valuable practice, the report highlighted a continued access disparity.

Along the lines of Mark Hugo Lopez, Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, and Eileen Patten's (2013) findings, ECAR (2012) reported that that “fewer community college students own laptops” than their four-year college counterparts although they tend to make up for this disparity with desktop ownership. Given that Latinas/os are overrepresented at two-year colleges compared to white students, this finding is perhaps unsurprising (St. John and Musoba 2011). Whereas an expectation that students bring laptops to class may be feasible at certain schools, many Latinas/os are dependent on the institution to undertake a conscious redesign of its campus spaces to provide student access to these technologies while building their technological literacies.

Community colleges seem to be addressing this to some extent; the ECAR (2012) survey also noted that community colleges are “more likely to provide on-campus computer access” than four-year schools (13). However, with conflicting numbers, the reality is uncertain. Arthur Cohen and Florence Brawer (2008) wrote that community colleges often lead in classroom computer use but lag in equipment, with only one computer station for every 6.7 students compared to a computer for every 2.9 students overall in higher education. This disparity is even greater in the availability of technology support personnel, with one for every 912 students in community colleges, and one for every 277 students overall in higher education.

Although access data provide some indication of how technology is used in educational settings, how and for what purposes instructors use technology is equally significant but perhaps more difficult to both measure and change. The Two-Year College English Association has emphasized that “skills need to be developed in using technology-mediated instruction” among faculty at two-year colleges (TYCA 2004, 10). A 2005 TYCA survey of 338 faculty at two-year colleges in all fifty states found that 86 percent of colleges offered technology training, but that the majority of this was devoted to preparing faculty to teach online courses, not on how to use smart classrooms or computer labs effectively in instruction (Millward 2008). Overall, technology was used minimally in mainstream composition classrooms, with only a small minority of instructors including a multimodal assignment in their courses. Jody Millward (2008) attributed this to a variety of causes, including inequitable distribution of technology across campuses, limited compensation for professional development, and limited leadership for implementing technology in teaching. As Harold Wenglinsky (2005) pointed out, effective technology instruction stems from good, well-trained teachers; overworked community college instructors lacking time, support staff, and consistent access to technology across institutional spaces will be less likely to integrate technology in their instruction. Consequently, even when educators are trained and ready to innovate, they may be limited by constraints in the digital spaces provided by institutions, as well as constrained by striated spaces that limit opportunities for pedagogical innovation. As the New Media Consortium (2013) noted, “Educators are often trying to design new, innovative learning models that must be integrated with outdated, pre-existing technology and learning management systems” (19).

In sum, although access to educational technologies may be improving overall, and some strides have been made in encouraging innovation and providing support, there is still considerable work to be done in providing the infrastructure and support needed to develop students’ technological literacies. Given disparities in home access among Latinas/os and white counterparts, it is vital that institutions and programs serving Latina/o students carefully consider how they can build institutional spaces where students can develop their technological literacies (Scenters-Zapico 2010, 2010–2011).

This chapter draws from two forms of inquiry by two researchers across three different institutions: a formal year-and-a-half study of seven Mexican / Mexican American students transitioning from Samson High School (SHS) to El Paso Community College (EPCC) or the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and narrative inquiry conducted by the former director of First-Year Composition at UTEP.2

The first author spent time as a volunteer and researcher in the high school and followed seven study participants through their first year of college. The second author spent five years as the writing program administrator at UTEP. During this time, she worked with the first-year composition faculty to redesign the curriculum to incorporate, among other things, a more multimedia-focused curriculum. In this capacity, as all WPAs do, she also addressed ongoing issues of available classroom space.

Borderland and Institutional Contexts

Each of the institutions profiled in this chapter is located in El Paso, a city of approximately 820,000 people located on the U.S.–Mexico border in the southwestern corner of Texas. It is located across the border from Ciudad Juárez, a city of just over 1.5 million. A number of students at each institution profiled in this study crossed the border to attend school on a daily basis, while some lived in the U.S. side while their families continued to live in Mexico, including Juarez. The slideshow below shows some aspects of the area.

A closer look at U.S. Census data on El Paso, depicted in the table below, reveals a city that is largely Hispanic and has a large number of immigrants. The education and income level of its population are significantly lower than the national average. As noted by Livingston (2011) and by Lopez, Gonzalez-Barrera, and Patten (2013), income levels correlate with home broadband access and computer ownership, so we can infer that these numbers are lower in El Paso than nationally. All aspects of the community profile, among others, should be taken into consideration when designing and utilizing institutional spaces to build student technological literacies.

Table 11.1. Selected demographic characteristics of El Paso Texas (Source: 2011 American Community Survey, U.S. Census)

	El Paso	United States
Hispanic	81.4%	16.7%
Native U.S.	74.0%	87.0%
BA or higher	20.7%	28.5%
Median household income	$39,573	$50,502
Food stamp income	23.6%	13.0%
Health insurance coverage	72.3%	84.9%

At SHS, the approximately fifteen-hundred-student population was over 99 percent minority, with the vast majority being Latina/o. Over 90 percent of the students qualified for free or reduced-cost lunches, around 80 percent were classified as “at-risk,” and around 40 percent were classified as Limited English Proficient (LEP). Because of the high school’s proximity to the border, some students drove, took the bus, or even walked from Juárez daily. In the years approaching the study period, the school continually missed testing benchmarks mandated by No Child Left Behind. As a consequence, preparation for the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), the state-mandated test, dominated the school culture. Because of its demographics, the school qualified for and received certain grants that supported activities such as special tutoring for test preparation and the purchase of technology oriented toward test preparation. As with other high schools with predominantly low-income minority populations (Callahan and Shifrer 2012; Mosqueda 2012), Advanced Placement and dual credit options were limited, with only a couple AP senior English classes offered during the time of study.

EPCC served approximately 27,000 students on five campuses located throughout El Paso county. It was a federally designated Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) with over 80 percent of students identifying as Latina/o. This study was conducted primarily on the Rio Grande campus, which served the lower-income downtown area.

UTEP enrolled 22,600 students and was also designated an HSI with 77 percent of the student body identifying as Latina/o. The majority of students at EPCC and UTEP were bilingual first-generation college students who commuted to classes. For the 2010–2011 school year, tuition and fees at UTEP were about three times that of EPCC, at $2,643.56 for 12 credit hours. The differences between the institutions are somewhat reflected in their advertising slogans. The most common advertising slogan for EPCC was “the best place to start,” while UTEP embraced the slogans “access and excellence” and “the first research university with a 21st century student demographic.” In 2013, UTEP ranked seventh among national univerisites by Washington Monthly, and was ranked number one in terms of impact on students’ social mobility—a strong statement to the relationship UTEP has with the region from which its students come.

Data Collection and Analysis

The primary study on which this chapter is based is a year and a half ethnographic/case study of seven Latina/o students transitioning from high school to a community college or university. As part of this study, Ruecker interviewed participants three times a semester for three semesters, and interviewed nine of the English faculty at the high school and fourteen of the students’ college writing instructors, in total conducting approximately one hundred interviews. He also regularly observed the English/writing classes of all study participants. These observations were conducted twice-weekly during the participants’ last semester in high school and three times a semester at the college level. Ruecker adopted an action researcher role at the high school, initially volunteering twice a week with ESL classes and then with senior English classes by giving individual students feedback on their work and occasionally leading lessons. Consequently, he had to record observation notes between classes; at the college level, he was a more traditional “objective” researcher and took notes while classes were being conducted. All interviews were transcribed, inductively coded, and analyzed in conjunction with observation notes and other materials collected from the research sites.

The personal experience of Brunk-Chavez as program WPA was corroborated with the findings of the study described above. In preparing her contribution to this chapter, she drew from her involvement in the daily running of the program: curriculum redesign meetings, observations of graduate student instructors teaching in computer classrooms, and workshops and meetings held to address productive methods for using technology in and for the writing classroom. Her contribution is grounded in autobiographical narrative inquiry, which explores various changes in the first-year composition program at UTEP over the past several years from her perspective as the program administrator. The purpose of such inquiry, according to Mark Freeman (2007), is “to understand, to make sense of the past in the light of the present” (14). Her portrait of the program, as narrative portraits are, has been shaped by multiple elements: micro interactions recalled over her years as WPA; research reviewed in the preparation of this chapter; and the findings of the longitudinal study by Ruecker, a project that she helped advise. By combining the perspective of a WPA with that of instructors and students in the program, we were able to draw various elements and experiences to be pulled together into a narrative that provides a sense of the whole (Connelly and Clandinin 1990).

^{2. The high school and participant names are pseudonyms, and institutional review board (IRB) approval was secured from all three institutions.}

SHS was dominated by test preparation, something that shaped every aspect of instruction, including the way technological spaces were created, accessed, and used. Computers were added to institutional spaces and made accessible to students in different ways: closed and open computer labs in the library, computer labs embedded in classrooms, roaming laptop carts, and netbooks provided to students who would own the laptop after completing a certain number of tutoring hours.

Senior-level mainstream English classes went to one of the two library computer labs relatively frequently. The space was constructed along the lines of a traditional classroom with computers set up in rows with a central aisle. There was a computer and projector pointed at a board in the front of the room. In this lab, seniors received instruction from school counselors on applying for college, financial aid, and scholarships. Students would also use this space to work on their personal statements and literary analysis essays, primarily using computers as typewriters with the exception of copying and pasting “research” from web sites like Sparknotes.

Outside of class time, student access to labs was highly restricted. Students were not allowed into the computer labs without a teacher present. The only computers they were permitted to access outside of class were twenty or so machines. Ironically, they were largely useless for school purposes as they did not offer access to Microsoft Office programs like Word and PowerPoint. A junior English teacher, Ms. Diaz, explained how restrictions on access led to a limited use of technology in comparison with other schools:

For example, I know somebody that went to [Eastern High], and he has his own website and all the lessons are there so if you miss a day, you go to the computer lab and you get it. Here's it's not like that. We don't have the computer labs they do where the students can just go in on their own. We have to take them as a class. The one that they do have where students can go by themselves, they're limited. They don't have PowerPoint, they don't have Word, we can't save, we can't do a lot of things, you know. Sometimes they can't print.

Even if the labs could be made more useful to students and teachers, most non-AP teachers found it difficult to find time to take students to the computer lab, largely because of the school-wide testing emphasis. Ms. Diaz described this constraint: “There’s a computer lab, for example, and it’s just sitting there and the teachers are not taking the kids because we are so caught up in TAKS. . . Before TAKS there’s very few people that actually go there.” As noted by Ms. Diaz later in this discussion, there was a clear divide between AP and non-AP classes at all levels, including the knowledge that students in different classes brought with them to school. The SHS senior AP classes had very different opportunities in school because the presence of technology in their classroom was much stronger than in most, and it was used in much different ways. Most classrooms had a Smart Board, projector, and a single computer for the teacher. In contrast, the classroom where senior AP classes were held had these items in addition to an always-present unlocked laptop cart with computers for every student and access to multiple printers. Observations of these classes found students researching opportunities and application procedures from top colleges, conducting additional research, and writing reports for their class. The senior AP teacher, Mr. Cordero, described a use of technology very differently than the other teachers interviewed at the high school:

When I was teaching at UTEP, I taught in a computer classroom. Every student sat at their own terminal and did their own thing. It was a very effective form of teaching. We do the same thing here. What I have the students do is a multitude of research. . . On average, each class will use the laptops no less than once a week.

In collaborating with the mainstream senior English teacher as an action researcher, Ruecker attempted to bring a laptop cart to these classes to introduce more technology into the classroom space; however, this experience was much different. Because these laptops were designed for testing purposes, the menus did not have access to commonly used features like a web browser, so we had to figure out creative ways for students to access these tools. Half of the laptops never worked, and the battery capacities on the others were diminished. This led to students losing what they wrote when they did group work with the computers.

Beyond the focus on test preparation, there were other factors imposed by school and district administration that negatively impacted teachers’ ability to use technology in writing instruction. The core of this problem was the heavy-handed restriction of online spaces through a filtering software used by the district that blocked YouTube, Google Images, and other sites that teachers regularly find useful for teaching.

The link connected with the blocked-site message led to a five-page document titled “Electronic Communication and Data Management” that detailed the district’s policies on technology access, which explained that filtering was necessary for the school to qualify for federal funding. Filtering was guided by a “Harmful to minors” statement (figure 11.7):

While guidelines 1 and 2 are clearly reasonable, the third could be interpreted in very different ways. The consequences of a broadly interpreted policy under the third guideline meant that teachers at SHS were regularly challenged to find work-arounds when wanting to use blocked web sites, including YouTube, Google Images, and MySpace. For instance, Ms. Portillo wanted to use YouTube videos to build student interest in a novel or story they were reading. As she noted, there is “always a way to work around it if you know how to use the technology.” While students would find proxy servers to gain access to sites, Ms. Portillo would download videos in advance and bring them on a flash drive. However, another teacher, Ms. Diaz, recalled a messy situation when she tried to involve students in this technology work around in her visual media class. To circumvent the filters, she had students bring in visuals such as YouTube videos and downloads from Google Images on their USB drives, but Ms. Diaz's computer got a virus as a result and stopped functioning.

Another English teacher, Mr. Molina, clearly valued the rise of social networking, explaining that these online spaces gave students a new way to communicate that was an improvement on the didactic one-way communication of older technologies, for instance, showing movies in class. He argued that teachers should harness technologies like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace as tools to support education, rather than actively blocking them from student use. He attempted to put this belief in practice by creating an assignment in which students created MySpace profiles based on characters in the novel they were reading for class, Animal Farm. He described this experience in depth:

When we talked about Animal Farm I had them create Animal Farm characters within MySpace and they created MySpace pages for the characters. We commented on the story as it was going on, in character, throughout the book. And we had quotes that we said throughout if you had that character. . . And they understood these characters on such a deeper level. And what I came to understand [is that] the more native it is, the more authentic it is to their environment and what they do every day, the more they can run with it and the more they can connect with different types of intelligences and creativity out there.

The school’s administration took a different perspective from Mr. Molina, deeming the technology dangerous to students, as it exposed them to peer-to-peer networking, and presumably to content considered “harmful to minors.” They quickly shut down his MySpace learning environment. Outside of the creative work of a few teachers like Mr. Molina, students’ sanctioned experiences centered on test preparation tutoring guided by PLATO Online Learning, an online learning services provider. Because of administrative constraints, broader political constraints in the form of the TAKS, and other considerations, students at SHS had different experiences in regard to technology than their counterparts in EPCC and especially at UTEP.

Students at EPCC, especially the campus where most of the students in the study started attending classes, were generally not as financially secure as many of their UTEP peers. This fact was constantly on the mind of interviewed instructors, who made comments like “A lot of my students, they don’t have access to the computer except here. And then, I’m hearing constantly about, you know, how—sob stories about how they’ve got their jobs and their kids.” Given limited access to technology in home spaces as well as the lack of time to go to a lab outside of class, it would seem that these are the types of students who need the most guidance and access to technology in institutional spaces; however, EPCC did not have the resources or instructors with the training or time to provide extensive support in building student technological literacies.

Upon visiting EPCC classrooms, Ruecker was struck by the fact that computers were absent from most of them and that overhead projectors were occasionally used in instruction. When instructors were asked about technology in classroom spaces, the first thing that typically came to mind was the divide between “smart” and traditional classrooms. Dr. Thompson, a tenured professor who had taught at the college for thirty-five years, described a smart classroom like this: “There’s a projector from the ceiling and up front there’s a DVD player and we have access to the Internet. There’s a screen that drops down.” At underfunded institutions like EPCC, however, these are not so common. Only one of the five writing classes observed at the Rio Grande campus was held in a smart classroom. The other instructors would work with handouts, the reliable chalkboard, and sometimes the antiquated overhead projectors. The slideshow below includes images of technology and instructional spaces at EPCC.3

There was thus a correlation at play: With limited access to technology, there was limited use of technology in teaching. Dr. Thompson’s was the only class observed at the Rio Grande campus in a smart room, but he was never observed using the classroom technology. Echoing the concerns of other interviewed instructors, he explained that he would like to incorporate technology in his teaching, but with three to four class preps and a five-class teaching load, with only selected classes in smart classrooms, it was too difficult to think about how to incorporate technology into instruction for just a few classes. So, although the space did provide some affordances to innovative instruction, other challenges created insurmountable barriers.

This contrasted with some of the younger instructors observed, who did find ways to incorporate technology into their teaching, albeit in limited ways. In a smart classroom at the main EPCC campus, Ms. Warner, an instructor of a first-year composition and sociology learning community, regularly showed movies in her class, but otherwise engaged in limited classroom technology use. Mr. Madison, a young developmental writing teacher who taught on multiple campuses in addition to teaching online for a major for-profit university, regularly sought out a laptop cart even though he did not teach in a smart classroom. However, video watching seemed to be the dominant theme of his digital pedagogy:

I use videos from YouTube. So another assignment, I did—I had them, instead of giving them the PowerPoints, I just printed up the PowerPoints. Had them do notes, and then I showed them videos from YouTube of other lecturers because I know they get bored with me lecturing all the time. So I have—I just put the videos on, and they took notes on their notes based on what the—so I use videos that way a lot.

Mr. Madison requested a computer/projector cart from IT for two of the three classes observed. However, one of the times, he only used it to display a long quote from Gandhi followed by a writing prompt; the technology evidently saved him the time of writing on the chalk board. The third time, he had planned a sentence correction exercise in a Word document; however, the projector was not working so he had to write the sentences on the board and correct them the old-fashioned way.

Like all but one of the classes observed at the Colorado campus, the other developmental writing class observed was in a traditional classroom. The instructor, Ms. Mariscal, did not see this as a problem because the class, in her words, “doesn’t require that much technology.” In this particular class, one of the students in the study handwrote all his essays (see figure 11.9), which was an option the instructor allowed out of concern that her students had limited technology access in home spaces.

Students’ primary exposure to technology occurred when they had class in a computer lab one day a week. However, student time in the physical space of the lab and the online space of the computer they worked with was highly constrained. Their sole purpose in being there was a departmental requirement that they had to log twelve hours a semester on the PLATO tutorial software, the same drilling program used by SHS. Ms. Mariscal explained how the software constantly monitored and timed their activity, such that slow readers would have less time counted than faster readers who were moving the mouse more often. She had mixed feelings about this use of technology in the class: “I’m doing it because it’s a [departmental] requirement and I know that they have to incorporate some technology in their learning.” Otherwise, the only technology element was when the students went to the library to electronically search for “one small piece of research” to be used in their final essays.

Although EPCC did not restrict access to online social networking spaces as SHS did, the older instructors involved in the study questioned whether or not “real writing” occurs in these virtual spaces. Ms. Flores, the tenured professor of a second-semester first-year composition class, commented:

It would be nice if everybody had a laptop and you could do, you know, more stuff instead of just counting on the media carts, things like that. But on the other hand, a lot—at least my own personal feelings, a lot—you know, they still need to just know how to write.

Dr. Thompson noted:

I don’t think they have enough experiences writing these days. I don’t call texting writing and they’re all doing that and I have to remind them to shut off their cell phones during class and, they really don’t write other than messenger kind of things, Facebook kind of stuff, many of them, and so I feel that well they really need to have a sense of writing more fully as a way of communicating.

Defining “real” writing primarily as traditional essay writing and excluding the writing that occurs in networking spaces like YouTube, Facebook, and texting represents a different philosophy about writing than that espoused by the redesigned writing program at UTEP, to which we will now turn.

^{3. In thinking about disparities, it is relevant to note that instructors who taught on multiple community college campuses mentioned that smart classrooms were much more common on other EPCC campuses. Ruecker witnessed this when observing a student at the main campus, which offered smart classrooms that were just one aspect of the facility more developed than at its counterpart. The expansive library had many more computers than the eight present at the tiny Rio Grande campus library.}

When the first-year composition (FYC) program at the university sought to redesign its curriculum and delivery in 2008, access to technology was not an issue. In 1997, UTEP opened the Undergraduate Learning Center Building (commonly called the UGLC), the first fully technological classroom building in the country. This four-story building didn’t belong to any one department. Rather it housed a range of classroom spaces that could accommodate two thousand students: six large lecture halls with a range of technological capabilities, smaller smart classrooms, and a suite of four computer classrooms. Also hosted in the building were a computer lab, the Digital Media Center, Instructional Support Services, and the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning as well as a highly qualified support team available to assist with technology at a moment’s notice. Over time, several collaborative learning and meeting spaces were also created. Because of the diligence of Evelyn Posey, the vice president of technology and innovation, who was also Rhetoric and Writing Studies faculty, the suite of computer classrooms was designed with writing classes in mind and kept off the “scheduling grid” so that writing classes did not have to compete with the general university for this instructional space. The slideshow below provides a visual tour of selected technology spaces on the UTEP campus, especially the UGLC.

Although the digital writing space was available for instruction, there were two issues to be addressed: not quite half of the first-year composition classes could be taught in the computer classrooms, and those scheduled in the computer classrooms were taught by instructors not yet equipped to use the technology in pedagogically meaningful ways. However, through the development of a technological culture of use on campus and intensive professional development with a focus on teaching with technologies, the program was eventually able to maximize the infrastructure of its digital writing spaces.

Because there were many more sections of FYC than there was available computer classroom space, not every section could be scheduled in these rooms. In the early 2000s, different configurations were attempted, including shared classrooms where an instructor taught Monday and Wednesday in a regular classroom and Friday in the computer classroom during which another section would meet Monday and Friday in a regular classroom and Wednesday in a computer classroom. In 2004, however, Instructional Support Services asked FYC to be the first academic program to formally deliver hybrid courses. Only six instructors, however, were approved by the previous director to deliver hybrid courses, so the impact on access to computer space was minimal. In 2009, the FYC program began scheduling all second-semester courses as hybrid. After working with the classroom scheduling office to determine that it was, in fact, possible to schedule two classes in the same classroom at the same time but on different days, 95 percent of the FYC sections were scheduled into four computer classrooms. As a result, all second-semester courses and the majority of the first-semester courses could be taught in these computer classrooms.

As noted earlier, however, access to a computer classroom is only half of the challenge. What happens in those digitally equipped spaces is equally, if not more, important to students’ educational experiences. Observation notes to instructors in 2008–2009 typically asked them to “consider how teaching in a computer classroom is different from teaching in a regular classroom, how you might be able to engage your students with the technology, and how regular access to computers during class time might help to improve student research and writing.” To their credit, instructors weren’t prepared to consider these questions, and the text-centric traditional curriculum provided little room for technological innovation regardless of the space they were in. So although students sat at computers, they often did little with them, and many instructors claimed they were a nuisance to their teaching as students were easily distracted. A common solution was to require students to turn off the monitors, rendering the technology essentially useless. Thus, perhaps the two biggest advantages to teaching in a computer classroom at the time were the reliable overhead projector and the availability of a printer for students to print their essays and submit them to the instructor for evaluation.

Also during 2008–2009, however, there was a significant shift in the curriculum, delivery, evaluation and assessment, and professional development of the FYC instructors. In part, the redesign sought to achieve two goals: to simultaneously acknowledge the digital writing worlds that students inhabit as well as to prepare them for the digital writing worlds that they will move into. With the new curriculum, students were encouraged to not only analyze digital texts but to also create a range of multimedia texts. Projects included a traditional analysis project, and also a public service announcement, a documentary, and an e-portfolio or advocacy website. To make the shift from the traditional essay-based curriculum to this multimodal one, professional development became a robust component of the program.

As a result of the shift in thinking about what the goals of a writing curriculum should be, as well as a shift to a hybrid course where half of the coursework was completed online, instructors collectively began thinking more productively about how the computer classroom could be used for teaching, learning, and writing. Observations revealed instructors engaging students with the technology available in their classrooms: Students researched during class time, shared and commented on drafts, revised drafts, watched and shared videos, created storyboards, and mocked-up websites. One recent observation reported on students sharing ear buds as they searched for a TED Talk appropriate to their research; another observation reported on students playing an interactive game on plagiarism. Most importantly, nearly all instructors provide some time for the students to research and write during class while making themselves available to answer on-the-spot questions and provide immediate feedback.

To promote innovative teaching across the program, professional development opportunities needed to be created and sustained. Teaching with technology became a focus in the teaching assistant preparation class with attention to how writers collaborate with technology, how to choose appropriate platforms for teaching and writing, and how to analyze and create digital media. Additionally, monthly workshops occasionally featured ideas for using technologies in instruction, the faculty wiki featured digital teaching tips, and new instructors observed experienced instructors teaching in the computer classrooms. Through these professional development opportunities, ideas were shared and improved, and the culture of use grew by number and in strength. In contrast to EPCC, UTEP enjoyed not only the resources of a robust technological instructional space but the ability to spend time and resources in professional development.

Finally, the digital writing space has not only taken hold within the classroom, but also in a variety of online spaces. Most instructors used the campus Learning Management System (LMS) to assist first-year students in their ability to navigate online learning spaces they will experience in their future coursework. Many added a variety of additional online learning spaces to augment student learning experiences: class wikis, class blogs, Facebook pages, SMS, and Twitter are a few of the additional learning spaces used by FYC instructors. According to Evelyn Posey, the UGLC was designed and built with the intent of offering “the latest in technology for UTEP students while encouraging faculty to use the technology as a teaching tool” (personal communication, Feb 26, 2013). Although the results were not immediate, nearly a decade later, the FYC program had achieved this goal.

Comparing the access to and use of technology across writing programs at a high school, community college, and a university has revealed how the physical and virtual spaces at different educational institutions offer radically different possibilities in shaping student literacies for the twenty-first century. While these are only three institutions in one city, they illustrate Lefebvre’s (1991) point that spaces are social products, as they were constructed through a myriad of internal and external attempts, desires, and pressures to integrate technology into instructional spaces. Here, we recap some of the forces at play, their impact on perpetuating social hierarchies, and conclude with ways to challenge the status quo. Table 11.2 provides an overview of some of the differences we identified.

Table: Differences identified between SHS, EPCC, and UTEP.

	SHS	EPCC	UTEP
Technology use in writing classes	Low	Low	High
Type of learning spaces	Striated	Striated	Striated and smooth
Level of technology access across campus	Medium	Low	High
Types of technologies present	Smartboards, projectors, and teacher computers in all classrooms; Windows desktop computers in labs and select classrooms; roving laptop carts	Teacher computer and projector in selected classrooms; Windows desktop computers in labs; roving projector carts	Teacher computer and projector in all classrooms; Apple and Windows desktop computers in labs
Software use in writing classes	Microsoft Office; PLATO Tutoring	Microsoft Office; PLATO Tutoring	Microsoft Office; iMovie/MovieMaker; Weebly; PBWorks; others
Faculty training	Occasional optional district workshops	Optional college workshops	Required monthly program-organized workshops; graduate student theory and pedagogy course; university workshops, etc.
Restrictions	Web filtering and administrative oversight prohibited sites like MySpace and YouTube; most computers off limits without teacher present	Check-in required to use computers in non-library labs	Public signs identifying social-media-free spaces but no software-based filtering

Although computers were widely present in SHS, the spaces in which they were situated or the access to online spaces they provided were what Savin-Baden (2007) would refer to as “striated.” Students (and even teachers) were subordinated to those in higher positions of power via decisions made within and beyond the high school. Multiple teachers and students explained that courses were more rigorous and technology was more accessible and widely used at other high schools in town. In the case of SHS, Internet-filtering conditions attached to Department of Education funding contributed to an overly restrictive filtering system. Mandated assessment and associated pressures led to most technological resources in the school being devoted to test preparation, supporting Adam Banks’s (2006) assertion that students in low-income schools are often relegated to drill-oriented technology instruction. When one creative teacher engaged students with a novel by having them create personas in an online social networking space, this space was declared off limits by administration because it tended to be primarily social in nature and also exposed students to risks associated with peer-to-peer networking.

At the college level, the external mediators of state and national politics and the internal meddling of administrators in shaping the creation and use of technological spaces did not factor so strongly as they did at the high school level. Nonetheless, the spaces provided in these environments were not consistently ideal, and many were based in the traditional, striated, notion of learning space. Most commonly, the integration of technology in classrooms across both institutions consisted of installing a computer and projection system in a traditional classroom environment, which continued when an instructor upheld traditional models by situating the teacher behind a fixed computer podium at the front of the room. When teachers at EPCC would take their developmental writing classes to a computer lab, it was because of a departmental mandate and the tasks in which students engaged were narrowly defined by those with more authority.

While some of the earlier constructed computer labs at UTEP followed this more traditional model, the newer technology-enabled classrooms created pods of students not oriented toward the front of the room, with the teacher the center of expertise and knowledge. This orientation, paired with a curriculum that fostered individual creativity with technology, enabled these learning spaces (both physical and virtual) to be more in line with the “smooth” spaces described by Savin-Baden (2007)—spaces that are “open, flexible, and contestable” (13).

The reality of technological spaces across the three institutions was constructed through a variety of factors, but funding disparities seem to be the most prominent culprit. Charging three times the tuition amount and having access to state-level funding through the top-tier university system gave UTEP opportunities in providing technology to students that EPCC was not able to match. These funding disparities not only affected the ability of each institution to provide and support technology, but also affected important tangential factors such as teaching loads and disciplinary expertise. As noted earlier, the only professor at Rio Grande observed in a smart classroom never made use of the available technologies; he, like other teachers at the college, taught five or more classes a semester with several preps in different types of classrooms and thus found it difficult to integrate technology consistently, if at all, into his teaching. On the other hand, the WPA at UTEP had a lower teaching load, one largely based on preparing graduate teaching assistants for writing instruction, with the expectation that she would stay active in reading and publishing current scholarship. She had the time and support to apply for a state-funded grant and was able to build on previous processes to continue to negotiate access to computer labs on campus to facilitate the transformation of UTEP’s writing program.

Our study of the construction of physical and technological spaces across institutions illustrates that space is social and consequently ideological (Lefebvre, 1991). As mentioned previously, one of UTEP’s prominent advertising slogans is that it is providing both access and excellence to a twenty-first-century student demographic. A vital part of preparing twenty-first-century students is helping them develop the technological literacies needed to be effective communicators in an increasingly digitized world. Unfortunately, as this local study has revealed, disparities between minority-serving high schools, community colleges, and universities that have been documented in numerous education studies (e.g., Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2008) are likely to be replicated in the creation and use of technology in instructional spaces. Political ideologies shaping assessment agendas for the K–12 system, funding disparities between community college and university systems, and notions of appropriate use of technology are constantly shaping the spaces that students pass through in their educational journeys. The institutional space that students pass through—often by no, or little, choice of their own—has a dramatic impact on their ability to communicate effectively with technology and consequently have a larger voice in this century. Before concluding, we would like to suggest a few ways that writing program administrators and others can work to begin some of these transformations.

At the high school level, the ongoing implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) offered across most states provides some leverage in changing the way technology is situated and used in high schools. Advocates of the CCSS have framed the standards as a way to create students that are “college and career ready.” In defining the type of student who meets this descriptor, the CCSS states: “They use technology and digital media strategically and capably” (7). This is further explained: students should “use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others” (41). Given the enormous pressure on schools to implement these standards, teachers like those featured in this chapter can leverage this language in their schools and districts to promote increased access to digital writing spaces through decreased restrictions on online spaces and subsequent increased creativity with engaging students with communicative tools such as social networks, wikis, and web site builders.

The story of transformation at UTEP provides insight into how WPAs can affect change. Being awarded a state-funded transformation grant provided a genuine exigence for change in the FYC program. While the charge of the grant was to improve retention, student success, and efficiencies in delivery, FYC used this opportunity to additionally review and revise nearly every aspect of the program. Although the grant funds could not be used for equipment or infrastructure, they could be used for something more significant: time for instructors to review, read scholarship, plan, collaborate, and design. The result was that by the end of one summer, the program had created an entirely new curriculum, pedagogical materials for instructors and students, and a vision for a new kind of FYC program. Thus, the quality of instruction was improved and digital writing was meaningfully incorporated into the curriculum. FYC was then able to maximize the already present smooth instructional spaces available on the UTEP campus. As a result, students who attended UTEP had the opportunity to engage with technologies in a blended environment, which ECAR (2012) suggested as a positive educational move.

Constraints such as institutional policies and financial limitations make creating space for digital composition in writing programs both a challenge and an opportunity. Advocates for the creation and effective use of technological spaces on campus need to jointly make the argument that failure to create and effectively use such spaces, especially in environments where students may have limited home access, widens a digital divide and perpetuates a hierarchy of readiness in a century where digital multliteracies are increasingly valued.

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