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)
Before a recent school year, one of my oldest friends—who now teaches special education courses at a middle school outside of Detroit—shared his excitement of being granted a SMART Board interactive whiteboard in his classroom. The SMART board allows users to write in “digital ink,” mark-up electronic texts (such as Word documents and websites), and save the results for future reference or sharing.
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.
Not my classroom, not ever. My kids are on their own in class, not propped up by gadgets. And don't tell me they're a tech-literate generation: they're quite helpless, even at age 20 unable to change a single-spaced document to a double-spaced one, and unwilling to pursue any question or issue beyond the first screen of its Wikipedia entry.
Recently, there has been increased interest in the teaching and mentoring of new composition teachers who will work both at the secondary and university levels, as evidenced by recent publications including Thompson’s Teaching Writing in High School and College: Conversations and Collaborations (NCTE, 2002) and Tremmel and Broz’s Teaching Writing Teachers of High School English and First-Year Composition (Boynton/Cook, 2002).