To teach is to change. Or at least to try to. . . . We want to make a difference. But what kind of difference, what kind of change? And, more specifically, who is supposed to be changed, in what ways, and how much? (Kameen 3)
Individualized conferencing, a situation where instructors and tutors work individually with students, is one traditional way in which students whose first language is not English (ESOL) can receive help as they learn and practice their English speaking and writing skills. With face-to-face conferencing, for instance, ESOL students experience the individualized attention that they need given their varying educational, cultural, and language learning backgrounds.
“The best approach to frogs is on their own level. Leave the meadow its milkweed and August asters, and instead belly up to the pond’s bank in an inner tube. . . .” (Swain 250).
The impetus for this special issue came from multiple avenues over the past several years as we have journeyed professionally and concurrently as students of multimodal composition; authors of multimodal scholarship; faculty members implementing multimodal projects into our courses; and mentors guiding colleagues, adjunct faculty, and high school dual enrollment instructors in their own construction and production of multimodal assignments.
As the editors note in their introduction to this issue of The Writing Instructor, some teachers of writing receive training in teaching writing with computers, and those that have completed their pre-service training or graduate coursework recently may have been introduced to multimodal pedagogies. The majority of college writing teachers, however, lack the training necessary to help students compose multimodal texts. In short, they teach writing how they learned to write, and this process is a traditional print-based one.
The focus of this special issue is squarely on the training of educators—secondary teachers and university faculty—as they prepare, perhaps for the first time, to work in technology-rich environments. This essay contributes to that focus as it emphasizes the importance of adaptive or assistive technologies, namely those technologies that facilitate learning for students with disabilities. The point here is simple: training in the multiple and varied instructional technologies that today facilitate learning in the writing classroom is not complete without training in assistive technologies.
My colleagues Christine Denecker and Christine Tulley invited me to contribute this perspective on technology and faculty professional development to their special issue of The Writing Instructor, and it is an honor to do so.
The new work of composing presents educators with “a new vocabulary, a new set of practices, and a new set of outcomes” (Yancey 308). This new work is multimodal, digital, and often intertextual. It provides writers with new communication tools and with a variety of options for creating and disseminating texts. “[L]ike the old work of composing,” write Diana George, Dan Lawson, and Tim Lockridge, this new work “is about deciding what you want a text to do, what audience you want to reach, and where and how you want that text to appear.
At the 2001 CCCC, a special interest group met for the first time. Jonathan Bush and Janet Alsup were the co-founders of this SIG, and members were primarily English educators who had completed graduate studies in rhetoric and composition; why else would they be attending the C’s? Five years later, the group—currently known as Composition/English Education Connections—has plans to meet at both CCCC and NCTE, and it is still evolving; however, “professional profile” patterns of participants have begun to emerge.