Instructions: Click legend below the graph to turn lines on and
off. Double click or pinch graph to zoom in. Drag graph to move
through time. Hover over the dots to make hyperlinked
citations to the articles appear; hover over a new dot to make
citation info boxes go away. Click link at top of graph to reset.
When we zoom in on the computer, a different story of English studies’
relationship to media begins to emerge compared to prior examples. We
first see a small burst of interest in computers in the 1960s era of the
mainframe. These articles were all coded as “reception,” because none
featured students using computers to compose, unsurprising given how
expensive and difficult it was to access computing resources during this
period. Furthermore, the mainframe computer was not culturally
positioned as a writing device in the ways that personal computers later
were. Still, English teachers’ early speculations about the computer as
a tool for grading (Daigon 1966) or as a tool for text analysis (Ellis
1964) sound strangely contemporary.
After the initial blip of interest in the 1960s, the computer vanished
from the pages of English Journal until the arrival of
mass-produced personal computers in the early 1980s. When the field
turned back to computing at this moment, the vast majority of articles
emphasized student production with computers; in particular, teachers
conceptualized the personal computer as a tool for enabling students’
alphabetic writing. Another observation of particular interest: as you
hover of the dots to peruse the authors and titles in each year, you’ll
note numerous articles by prominent founding members of the computers
and writing community (Hawisher 1989; Moran 1983; Selfe 1988).
The persistent focus on personal computers as tools of alphabetic
production makes sense, as they were marketed in this period as writing
devices and the teaching of alphabetic writing was already a commonly
accepted goal of the English teaching profession. Also, this emphasis on
computer-based writing pedagogy likely reflected the highly active
writing process movement in the field, which sought to place student
writing at the center of the English class (Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran,
and Selfe 1996).
Computer: Alphabetic vs. Multimodal Outcomes
X = Year; Y = number of articles
Click to view graph data in table format
Computer: Alphabetic vs Multimodal Outcomes
Date
Alphabetic
Multimodal
1963
0
0
1964
1
0
1965
1
0
1966
1
0
1967
0
0
1968
1
0
1969
1
0
1970
0
0
1971
1
0
1972
0
0
1979
0
0
1980
1
0
1981
2
0
1982
3
0
1983
4
1
1984
8
0
1985
3
0
1986
5
1
1987
4
1
1988
7
1
1989
5
1
1990
2
1
1991
2
1
1992
1
2
1993
3
0
1995
15
1
1996
3
0
1997
4
0
1998
7
3
1999
4
3
2000
17
9
2001
7
1
2002
6
2
2003
8
3
2004
5
3
2005
4
1
2006
3
1
2007
5
4
2008
4
0
2009
3
0
2010
14
8
2011
6
3
2012
11
6
We coded computer articles based on whether they focused on teaching
alphabetic literacy, multimodal literacy, or both (in other words, these
were not mutually exclusive categories). While the computer has been
strongly associated with media production pedagogy since the early
1980s, the emphasis was placed almost entirely on the production of
alphabetic text, without explicit pedagogical attention to typography,
layout, and other visual features of text design. This narrow alphabetic
focus only began to change in the late 1990s as the proliferation of the
graphical web and increasingly refined multimedia production software
started to turn English teachers towards explicit attention to the use
of the computer for visual, audio, and multimodal forms of composing.
While the large spike in articles in 2000 partly reflects the
proliferation of the graphical web in this period, it also can be
explained by the presence of a large special issue dedicated to
“Technology and the English Class” during that year. In addition to the
influence of technological developments, we’d also note the New London
Group’s (1996) foundational manifesto as another likely influence
pushing English teachers to consider modalities of communication beyond
the alphabetic. When we zoom in just on the computer, the common notion
that multimodal production is relatively new in English studies makes
good sense (indeed it is empirically true that early computer pedagogies
were not robustly multimodal, at least as they are described in English
Journal).
Topoi for Teaching with Computers
X = number of articles; Y = topoi
Click to view graph data in table format
Topoi for Teaching with Computers
Computer Topos
Production
Reception
Enhancing Alphabetic Literacy
115
26
Engaging for Students
105
23
Changing the Nature of Literacy
87
21
Expanding Audience Beyond Teacher
72
3
Requiring Teacher Judgment
18
3
Harming Alphabetic Literacy
13
4
When we break down the topoi about computer pedagogy that
appear in our corpus, the claim that the computer “enhances the teaching
of alphabetic literacy” was the most prominent—even edging out the
ever-popular topos of new media as increasing “student
engagement.” In some ways, the computer’s strong staying power in English
Journal can be explained based on the fact that it has been and,
to some extent, continues to be framed first and foremost as a device
for enhancing process-based, alphabetic writing instruction. We also
note with interest that the computer has been framed as a device that
can enable students to compose for audiences beyond the teacher—whether
by printing multiple copies of a text for peer review, exchanging work
via email listervs, or publishing websites. Of course, here too we can
speculate about the mutually animating influences of pedagogical
theories and technological affordances; in some ways, computer
technologies made the sharing of writing with peers and public audiences
easier, but it’s also true that growth of networked computing in the
late 1980s and the arrival of the graphical web in the 1990s coincided
with the rise of the social constructivist pedagogies in both
composition and English education. Once again, we see pedagogical
theories and technological developments interacting in complex ways that
these graphs cannot fully explain.
As we turn to the twenty-first century on the timeline, we find the
computer has strong staying power in K-12 English education, especially
as an alphabetic writing tool. Although we tracked an increase in
articles emphasizing the multimodal affordances of computer-based
composing in the twenty-first century, we still recorded a large number
of articles focused primarily on how computers can support traditional
alphabetic writing and reading instruction. In this sense, the field’s
uptake of the computer has followed somewhat similar patterns as earlier
media; however, there is one critical difference: the computer has been
positioned primarily as a tool for student production since the early
1980s, never experiencing the drift towards reception pedagogies that we
have seen with other media. (There was a moment of declining interest in
computer production pedagogies in the early 1990s, but interest quickly
picked up again with the arrival of the graphical web.) In this way, we
can come to recognize that the computer has been a disruptive force in
English classrooms, and we believe that this will likely continue to be
the case as new technologies of computing emerge. In chapter
7, we’ll delve deeper into the question of why the computer has
persisted so long as production device—looking closely at particular
moments in the history of computing pedagogy when new technologies and
new pedagogies converged in ways that opened up new possibilities (and
new problems) for enacting digital writing pedagogies.
