Week 7: Weweni, Cybertech, and Taking Care

Blog Prompt: Discuss something that has captured your attention the last few weeks of class

Having just returned from a conference, I’m going to take this week to talk about some of the conversations that took place there, as well as areas where ideas were sparked for me. Almost everything made me think back to Yancey's "Made Not Only in Words" and the idea of both writing across the curriculum/interdisciplinary writing and multi-modal composition.

The conference I just presented at was the regional Great Plains Alliance for Computers and Writing, one of my favorites because it’s where many people go to present their preliminary research or their works in progress. As a result, there’s more discussion and more interaction between the audience and the presenters, and it feels like a collaborative environment. At this conference, our keynote speaker was Dr. Jessica Huber from Purdue University, who studies in speech pathology and physical therapy. During her talk, she referenced the fact that she didn’t have a technical communication background, and it struck me then how great it is to implement interdisciplinary perspectives when we are trying to reach places of innovation in our work (the presentation was super cool by the way: "Using Wearable Devices and Repurposed Gaming Technology to Improve Quality of Life").

This conference, as well as one of the keynotes from last year’s Computers and Writing (Dr. Meg Noodin's "Weweni: Take Care" about Ojibwe poetry), make me really appreciative to be part of a field that defines itself, for the most part, as interdisciplinary. From Dr. Huber, I was inspired by looking at how the body and mind interact, with Dr. Noodin I was drawn by how culture, language, and art influence one another. Both presentations fueled my thinking in technical communication, and I think that’s one of greatest things about incorporating different perspectives into research and, ultimately, into composing.

Lately, I’ve been increasingly drawn to areas of accessibility studies, particularly cognitive diversity and looking at alternative problem-solving approaches. All of my readings have ascribed to the social model of disability, which in a (oversimplified) nutshell means that disability is caused not by the person/user/subject’s impairments, but by barriers created by society.  Studying accessibility has made me think about how we teach writing and composing—how we value some processes/thinking strategies over others. When I think about scaffolding models, I see both the value of consistently integrating course content, but I also wonder about the limits instructors should have in directing/guiding the composition process. I’ve recently read an article (not peer-reviewed) on dyslexia entitled Mind/Shift, which offered a critique for teaching to what I’ve been mentally calling the hegemonic mind.

Obviously, in teaching we need to give students the tools and skills to succeed in a vocational sense, but I also think there should be more avenues of exploration in writing and discovery. I want to learn more about how to connect studies of accessibility to composition, because I see that being an extremely helpful avenue for cultivating critical thinking skills, civic engagement, and diversity in thinking. When I think about more alternative teaching for composition (drawing to learn, multi-modal, etc.), I see it correlating to many areas of accessibility studies, where we need to incorporate diversity (cultural, cognitive, SES, racial, gender, etc.) from the foundation, allowing space for students to become innovative in process that is conductive to their own experiences. This mentality also makes me think of the article we read on Contact Zones, where diversity can't be added as a filter but must be embedded in the original code (to get all techy about it).