Vol 22, No. 3 (My 2005)
University of Arizona
CMC as Written Conversation: A Critical Social-constructivist
View of Multiple Identities and Cultural Positioning in the L2/C2 Classroom
MARY E. WILDNER-BASSETTUniversity of Arizona
Abstract:
This article proposes a model for a critical social-constructivist (CS-C) approach to the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in language/culture education. CS-C theories emphasize a critical approach to social interactions, interpersonal relations, communication, and
the influence that these activities have on learning. I will use the model to explore the extent to which CS-C approaches, especially in relation to the principles of connectivism, impact postsecondary language and culture education and its effects on identities within the constraints
of a CMC institutional setting. Readers will participate in an exploration of new ways of thinking, learning, and teaching that emerge from the ecology of second language and culture classrooms integrated with CMC. There I have found the life experiences of learners and my own experiences as a teacher to be highly relevant to the learning processes at hand. I develop these explorations using global qualitative discourse-based analyses of selections from learner data produced in asynchronous CMC contexts over the course of 3 years. My focus is on the
learning of culture rather than on second language acquisition in a narrow sense. Language
learning and even language attrition are thematized in the learning ecologies that are my focus. This study does not, however, make any claims about language acquisition that are not mentioned in learners� own reflections. The data include written conversations produced in both English (often as the second language of the participants) and German (most often as a foreign language for the participants) using various platforms for asynchronous CMC interactions.
INTRODUCTION
My intention in this article is to share an exploration of new ways of thinking, learning, and teaching that emerge from the ecology of second language and culture classrooms integrated with computer-mediated communication (CMC). In CMC, I have found the life experiences of learners and my own experiences as a
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teacher to be highly relevant to the learning processes at hand. This observation, documented in the remainder of the article through the development of a critical social-constructivist (CS-C) approach to the use of CMC in language/culture education, puts into question the perspective that technologies uniformly condition personal, social, and historical change—a viewpoint often termed technological determinism. Thorne (2003), an active critic of deterministic accounts of technology use and adoption, has written that
… an approach that presumes the existence of `the Internet' and then seeks to understand its effects on identity, activity, social formations, or the genres appropriate for intercultural communication risks becoming yet another argument that succumbs to the reductionism implicit to technological determination on the one hand and of reifying a dualism between agent and structure on the other. (p. 58)
I would add that viewing participants as independent of the institutions and structures where they are learning poses an equal risk to technological determinism. Kramsch (2002) has pointed out that the introduction of a major change in the learning environment shifts the ecology of that environment. Consequently, innovation to the learning environment invites learners and instructors to move beyond pre-established categories of knowing. The question I pose is, how can we balance the categories present in institutional and professional contexts of teaching and learning while, at the same time, remaining sensitive and responsive to local experience and locally contingent contexts, especially in regards to the use of CMC?
I propose a model that attempts to understand language and culture learning in a CMC environment that embraces the mediational affordances of communication technologies while also retaining a sensitivity to local contingency. What informs this model are my readings of CS-C theories, which emphasize a critical approach to social interactions, interpersonal relations, communication, and the influence that these activities have on learning. This notion of a critical approach, as Luke (2004) has explicated it,
… entails an epistemological Othering and `doubling' of the world—a sense of being beside oneself or outside of oneself in another epistemological, discourse, and political space than one typically would inhabit. … [It is] the out-of-body experience of watching oneself watch oneself as an object of power and naming oneself as such. (pp. 26-28)
My use of the idea of CS-C theories makes possible the out-of-body experience of watching ourselves (both learners and teachers) performing acts of power as they emerge in the learning ecology of the CMC L2/C2 classroom. It is within this CMC ecology that students and instructors develop voice and identity.
Written computer-mediated conversations, which are temporally and spatially independent of the immediate face-to-face classroom context, invite opportunities for just those “out-of-body experiences” of watching ourselves that Luke sees as
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an essential aspect of the critical part of CS-C. Thus, critical acts where we name identities in CMC inevitably move us outside of pre-established categories. They also constitute an invitation to change those identities and the voice that we find to express those identities, not only in the CMC community but also in our communities at large. Any language and culture learning invites us to get in touch with our desires for establishing voice and identity.1 Locally contingent contexts which include CMC help all participants to engage in new ways of knowing, of being, and of communicating in written conversations.
In order to actively engage with the challenge that results from this critical approach to voice and identity in a CS-C pedagogical climate, I turn to the ideas of a recent and closely related development of George Siemens. Siemens has worked to integrate ideas that have found expression in chaos/complexity theories, networking theory, and systems/self-organization theories.2 Using the term “connectivism” to characterize his integrative model, Siemens interprets CS-C and related models with an emphasis on what he calls the “information climate.” Stewardship of the information climate provides connections that nurture and maintain the “… health of the learning ecology …” in a constantly changing landscape (Siemens, 2004, p. 4). Thus, key to learners' engagement with the processes of their learning is to have them connect in a real and personal way to the practices of CS-C and the theories that inform them in order to engage with that out-of-body experience which fosters critical language and culture learning. It has been my experience, as documented in Wildner-Bassett (2001, 2002, n.d.), that by gaining more and more familiarity with the practices of CS-C and connectivist learning and teaching made manifest in written conversations using CMC, learners become active participants in a new, emergent paradigm. This article will illustrate the extent to which the CS-C model, especially in relation to the principles of connectivism, impacts postsecondary language and culture education and its effects on identities within the constraints of a CMC institutional setting. I develop these explorations using global qualitative discourse-based analyses of selections from learner data produced in asynchronous CMC contexts over the course of 3 years.3 My focus is on the learning of culture rather than on second language acquisition in a narrow sense. Language learning and even language attrition are thematized in the learning ecologies that are my focus. This study does not, however, make any claims about language acquisition that are not mentioned in learners' own reflections. The data include written conversations produced in both English (often as the second language of the participants) and German (most often as a foreign language for the participants) using various platforms for asynchronous CMC interactions.
DESCRIPTION OF THE LEARNING ECOLOGY—CLASSES AND CONTENT
In order to be better able to interpret the processes and products of the classroom context that are my focus, it is important to know more about the ecology of the classrooms involved. For these classes, learners' writing, research, and opinions become essential content of the class work, and these processes are co-constructed and assessed/evaluated with the help of multimedia resources and especially asynchronous collaborative computer-mediated writing and discussion activities.
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Technology Used
All participants in our study had the luxury of using the COHLab, a computer lab created and maintained within the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona. The room and equipment have been designed to facilitate collaborative writing, small group interaction, and the ability to move easily and freely from group to group. Throughout the room are three custom-designed circular “pods” each with eight computer workstations surrounded by bright red chairs on wheels. There is a large electronic whiteboard in one corner. Computers are at every workstation with their monitors recessed so participants can see everyone else at their “pod.”4
The software used for the asynchronous discussions has changed over time. In general, discussion board tools were used, such as those found in WebCT or, most recently, D2L. The word processing and “track changes” tools of Microsoft Word were also used as learners edited and made comments about their formal and informal writing. The CMC discussion boards as well as the processes and products of the exchanges by participants using any of these software platforms, both inside the COHLab and off site as part of the temporally and spatially extended classroom, are all parts of what I refer to as written conversation (Ittzes, 1997).
Classes
One of the classes best suited to serve us with some concrete examples carries the title “Dialogue of the Sexes: Women and Men in German-speaking Societies.” It is a course taught in English with a general studies focus in the category of “individuals & society” and can be applied to students' requirements for course work that addresses general education requirements for gender, race, class, ethnicity, or non-Western area studies (see http://catalog.arizona.edu/2001-02/gened.html). This course views many aspects of the daily lives of individuals in contemporary European German-speaking societies. The course content includes recent historical perspectives, such as the Wall and unification; daily life, including
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the political issues that affect daily living; and personal profiles of women and others in German-speaking countries. Collaborative CMC activities are integrated as essential elements of the course. I have also pursued this pedagogical approach, with the CS-C theoretical underpinnings and with similar aspects of course content, in intermediate and advanced German language courses, as much of the data throughout the paper will illustrate. In all of these classes, the phenomenological stance5 comprises both the pedagogical approach and the content of the class. The focus in both course types is on an exploration of narratives that construct the Other, the foreigner, and the outsider in German-speaking societies.
Content
The content of the courses mentioned above encourages the participants to engage with a sense of being beside themselves or outside of themselves in a different epistemological, discourse, and political space than they typically would inhabit (Luke, 2004). We focus on recent historical perspectives on daily life, including the political issues that affect the daily living of women and Others in the German-speaking societies. Personal, first-person narratives are the focus for learners to look at themselves and their places in groups and societies and at their own voices and identities as they know them in their own language(s) and culture(s). In addition to utilizing the wide resources of multimedia (e.g., the Web, film, asynchronous computer-mediated discussions, books, and articles), learners are their own and each other's main sources of interaction. Byrnes (1998), in her discussions of constructing curricula in college foreign language departments, pointed out that in the pedagogical approach that I also adopt, “The emphasis is on dynamic, creative, interpersonal, context-embedded, synchronically and diachronically variable aspects of language …” (p. 285). This emphasis is similar to Siemens' (2004) view of an information climate that provides connections that nurture and maintain the “… health of the learning ecology …” in a constantly changing landscape ( p. 4). Thus many of the classroom activities consist of learner-produced content, often based on co-constructed or even learner-initiated tasks.
SOME CONCRETE EXAMPLES
It is now time to add some truly concrete examples from classrooms. These will take the form of descriptions of classroom-based tasks that students in my classes have engaged in during the last 3 years. With this set of examples, I frame the following analysis of the data produced by learners in these classrooms. I do this to portray the context, the ecology, and the information climate of instruction in these classes.
In the first sessions of the general education class entitled “Dialogue of the Sexes: Women and Men in German-speaking Societies,” during the introduction to the course and formation of working dialogue groups, students are asked to find a partner who can be somehow defined as “other,” that is, of other gender, background culture, family background, sexual orientation, and so forth. Participants also begin a discussion of the “Intellectual and Cultural Autobiography,” which is a focal assignment for the semester. I quote from the class materials here to show as concretely as possible the way that students interact with this approach.
The Intellectual and Cultural Autobiography
Rationale for the Assignment
Our first assignment, both for individual and then for collaborative written work, is the Autobiography. The Autobiography can indeed include the facts (where you were born, what your family background is, etc.), but it should then include a reflection on which of these facts and events have been most important or defining for how you see the world. We want to explore together how meanings you have found in your life story so far are similar or different to the histories, experiences, and meanings of Others, both those partners we have here in class and in our examples of women and Others within the German-speaking cultures. Rather than excluding voices or experiences from the discourse/discussion communities of either gender, or of any of the cultures we discuss and learn about, this approach
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will attempt to show ways to theorize and to develop a “dialogic [italics added] emergence of culture in the classroom” (Kramsch, 1993).
It is also important for us, as we work first independently and then collaboratively on this Autobiography, to remember that the goal is to learn to value our own but especially also the Other's perspective and to pass over in thought into the social condition that creates ways of thinking and ways of knowing about the world that are different from our own.
This assignment is the first step in our process of engaging in a dialogue of the sexes and a dialogue with the Other. By viewing another but closely related culture (whether that is the culture of the opposite sex or the culture and way of knowing of someone who otherwise is different or “other” from ourselves) from the standpoint of each of our positions in the diverse American culture, we can learn how to get a critical perspective on the spontaneous assumptions, presuppositions, and consciousness created by viewing the world in a way that otherwise begins and stays in our own dominant and accustomed social and cultural location.
As our readings will also show us, our stories, our autobiographies and narratives about our experiences, locate our own personal culture, our way of seeing. These narratives make our own consciousness more visible to us. Stories, that is, narrating our experiences, transform them into ways of knowing—ways of knowing about ourselves individually and about ourselves as men and women looking at the world.
How to Accomplish the Assignment:
Write at least 500 words which describe what you find most important to discuss about your personal history and experiences. Include mainly those events, experiences, and facts that you see as having shaped you into the person you are and the way you think about the world. Consider as your assumed reader/audience first your partners, then myself as the instructor, and then also the members of your larger collaborative group in the class.
Remember, it is a first draft, even though we are using a word-processed document which may seem more like a finished product to you. It is the first step in the process. But make your best effort for this first draft to give you and your partner and group a good place to start for the collaborative process after you post your draft.
The semester's further assignments and activities center around this essential first assignment.
Assessment is a key part of the message we as instructors give our learners about what is truly important in the paradigm we have embraced, no matter what the rest of our course materials say. Therefore, the main evaluation points in the semester include, as part of the set of tasks, a requirement that learners know and can retell and comment on the autobiographies of three of their classmates. As the work proceeds, they must also then relate any three of their classmates' lives, in
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addition to their own, to the topics and content that the class produces collaboratively. In this way, participants define and co-construct approximately 60% of the content of the course; readings and other source materials (e.g., web sites, films, documentaries) serve for the other 40%. The logistics of managing this key set of goals for the class and this mode of co-constructing class content are only possible with the help of the CMC tools that are fully integrated into the class work. If similar work were done in a class with face-to-face or hard-copy communication, much would be lost or never come into being. For example, multiple viewings of multiple versions of classmates' work, relative permanence of availability of the course work, and integration of classmates' ideas into subsequent drafts of more formal writing or threaded asynchronous discussions would all be lost without CMC.
As the semester progresses, students have two more assignments, which are summarized below:
Researched and Interview profiles of women or other Others in German-speaking societies
The second and third parts of the Profiles project are to complete a researched profile (a biographical essay) about a person who lives or lived in a German-speaking society and then an interview profile with a living person who has some connection to the German-speaking societies. These profiles will not be a complete biography of the person, but they should include a more in-depth discussion of aspects of the person's life that overlap or are very similar to your own interests, goals, talents, personal history, or other overlaps and a discussion of aspects of the person's life that are different or “other” than your own interests, goals, talents, personal history, or other overlaps. A paragraph that explains connections between the process of researching and writing about this person and thinking about and writing your own standpoint autobiography should also be included.
As these assignments illustrate, the class is invited to continually build on their own narratives of their cultural standpoint autobiographies as they add to their ways of knowing. They build on their narratives by doing traditional research (library based) about persons in the German-speaking societies, and then again by adding direct communication (often face-to-face6 but just as often by email) with a living person whose life narrative can be connected to the work of the class and to the life narrative of the individual learner. The final assignment of the semester asks students to reflect on the complexity of the whole network of embodied narratives. With this final assessment opportunity, the students are invited once again to reflect on the connections they can make among the ways of knowing and of maintaining a phenomenological stance in their social context with the ways of knowing and being that they have co-constructed throughout the semester.
These assignments show most directly how a CS-C/connectivist pedagogy interwoven with CMC written conversations can be accomplished in the real world of postsecondary education with all of its constraints. Let us have a closer look, now, into the ways the students navigate the ecology of these learning contexts.
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PARTICIPATING IN MULTIPLE AND COMPLEX CULTURES: WRITING TO THE “OTHER”
In this section, the goal is to see a way in which data from CMC conversations reveal how participants in one of the classes engage in writing their identities as participants in multiple cultures. Below are contributions from a single participant in her initial responses to the assignment for the autobiography. They are notable contributions because the participant, RD, a Native American woman and member of the Navajo tribe, explicitly names the act of story telling and its role in defining who she is and how she came to this place in her life. What I see in these contributions are specific moments where this student began to reshape her identity within the local context of CMC written conversations. I offer these three excerpts from RD's writing as a possible model for observing a writer participating in complex ecologies of culture; this will set the stage for later discussion concerning other learners who also participate in cultural ecologies, though perhaps without the extent of RD's critical self-consciousness. Here is her first contribution.
This story tells a lot about who i am now and how I was raised. I am a Native American, belonging to the Navajo tribe, or Dineh. I am of the salt people clan, born for the black sheep clan. My maternal grandfather belongs to the big water clan, and my paternal grandfather belongs to the red water running through the canyon people. I was raised by my grandmother, because my mother had just gotten a big pharmacy job in phoenix. My father left us before I was born, and I never really saw him since. I am an independent woman, and learn responsibility at a very young age. RD F02
She begins with a clear positioning of herself and her narrative in a way that holds great meaning and tradition for her primary culture. We, as outsiders,7 perhaps cannot fully appreciate the details of this aspect of her narrative, but we can see and understand that the precise positioning of her life among the clan associations of her parents and grandparents is a defining aspect of her narrative and her life. She is in fact naming important aspects of her identity. We are also given more information that immediately helps define the narrative positioning of this participant in the CMC classroom contribution, namely that the situation surrounding her early childhood was also determined by her mother's professional obligations. The CMC environment provides RD with an opportunity to embody a narrative wherein she names and gives form to the complexity of the multiple forces of various cultures that have worked and continue to work on her identity. As a result, she gains some power and authority over the complexity of the multiple cultures in which she lives, including the CMC classroom that elicited the production of her narrative.
In a different CMC posting 10 days later, RD explicitly narrates a recent conversation with her mother that went far beyond family details to include positioning in the culture of the Navajo Nation. Here, we learn much more about RD's architecture of self and the components that contribute to her participation in multiple cultures.
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Once i was really into a dialogu with my mother of why it was harder for me to pick up my native language again, even thought i didn't learn to speak english till i went to Kindergarten. It didn't inlvove just me but the navajo nation as a whole RD F 02
The fact that mother and daughter are having this conversation in English, a second language for both of them, is itself an indicator of the complexities and power relationships within which RD struggles to define her self. The complexity is underlined by the fact that she can only report the dialogue with her mother using English, of course, since that is also the classroom language. This student seems to have chosen this anecdote to mirror an important part of her own self-reflections about identity, though she does not overtly state that intention. RD's concern with the difficulties of relearning her first language of Navajo reveals the element of institutional power present in the narrative of her life that includes a critique of the forces at work even in the schooling that requires her to use a second language (English) to the exclusion and eventual attrition of her own native language. In addition, the learner alludes to comments or perhaps even an extended discussion with her mother about language attrition and perhaps culture attrition, adaptation, or assimilation that she and/or her mother sees as affecting—or as symptomatic for—the entire Navajo Nation. This issue is an essential aspect and a complex example of this learner's architecture of self as she expresses it in the narrative form of this particular short anecdote. The CS-C and connectivist approach is thriving in this learner's contributions. There is evidence that her willingness to engage in naming her positions and identities in her CMC postings, with full knowledge that her classmates will read and respond to the postings, has contributed to an ecology of learning in which it becomes possible for learners to move to a position of criticality and socially co-constructing questions about institutional and linguistic power relationships.
Before I move the discussion to other classes, though, there is more to be learned from RD. In another posting, RD discusses a person whom she has interviewed and reported on to the class in a description posted on the asynchronous CMC site. We see here how central the idea of narrative is to the negotiation of meaning and to learners' assessment, reassessment, reflection, and reformulation of accounts of experience. RD uses her discussion of the interview and reflections on similarities and differences between herself and the other woman to critically reassess and reflect on her own relationship to her multiple positionings in multiple cultures. The power structures of dominant or nondominant language communities become an implied focus of her reflections on the force these experiences had on her identity building.
One very similar experience we [the interviewee and RD] share is the comfort of language. She remembers that her father in public spoke with hesitant, accented and not always grammatical English. We both have one thing in common, and it is that English is our second language. The German language is her first and the Navajo language was mine. However either of our parental
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figures lacked any deep feeling of ease or belonging to the public. Her parents and my grandmother regarded the people at work or in crowds as being very distant and they were the others [original italics]. As a young child she felt as thought they were the foreigners on the block, while I felt the same whenever my grandmother and I went into town. It always made me nervous when she would have to strain herself, and her body would become tense by trying to catch what was rapidly being said by the others.
When I was at home with my grandmother, she only addressed me in Navajo, and in Navajo I would reply. By contrast English was what was rarely heard in the house, and therefore foreign to me. The Navajo language which was rarely heard away from the house became the private language. To hear its sounds was to feel myself recognize as one of the family and made me feel apart from the others. We both lived in a magical world, surrounded by sounds both pleasing and fearful. We shared with our family a language enchantingly private, what was different from what was used by the others. RD F02
For most of us readers, who are no doubt RD's “others” in many contexts, this eloquent description of the joys and tensions surrounding the private language of home and family versus the language of the others, together with the description of the personal and societal power structures contained in those tensions, provide an example of what Brunner (1994) characterizes as “embodied narrative—narrative that takes on the presence of persons engaged with and situated in the world in a variety of ways” (pp. 16-17). Brunner's work and RD's embodied narratives make convincing arguments that CMC-based narrative may also be described as a communicative practice with all the give and take of conversation when it makes possible—and values—a multiplicity of voices and perspectives. Without CMC, RD would not have had access to the other narratives of the group, nor they to hers. With this approach and by integrating CMC in the classroom ecology, though, the class participants and I could engage in mutually constructed social criticality. We must assume that the CS-C helped RD see and express the personal, linguistic, and societal domination systems that had been part of her own local experience. RD's contribution to the research ecology that I engage in, then, was a deepening of my theoretical understanding of power issues in the CMC classroom.
POWER
Within RD's descriptions of the joys and tensions surrounding the private language of home and family versus the language of the others, we also see the personal and societal power structures contained in those tensions. Shaping both the ecology of RD's learning and communicating and an interpretation of the CMC postings she made, the CS-C/connectivist approach to classroom interactions gives us a context for understanding how we can view complex relationships of power. Rather than a social order with a center of power (e.g., a teacher as the center of power in the classroom), the vision of a social construct of the classroom
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order was described early by Foucault (1997), without whom no discussion of power relationships is complete, as that of a “… multiple network of diverse elements … a strategic distribution of elements of different natures and levels …” (pp. 307-308). In this application of ideas connected to that description, we gain awareness that the relationships of power can become multiple and complex in a CMC classroom, as they did in the class where RD was such an active participant. As RD's CMC postings show so clearly, voice and identities are inextricably involved with relationships of power. Initiated in the learning ecology of RD's class by eliciting embodied narratives in a context of CS-C/connectivist teaching and learning structures, the consequential reshaping of institutional power structures have an impact on the individuals involved. These data and our interpretation of it connect directly to what Luke (2004) has described as a key to a critical approach to second language and culture education. He has written that these approaches need to be “… predicated on assumptions that the refashioning of language and literacy … will have an impact not just on individual capacities and life pathways, but also on the reshaping of institutions, of local cultures, of social lives, and of civic and political spheres.” He goes on to describe the reshaping of power structures in institutional and personal spheres as gaining “… the power to contest power” (p. 28). The most essential aspect of this reshaping of power structures is that they become more transparent. CS-C/connectivist approaches in a CMC language and culture classroom make this increasing transparency possible. Learners and teachers co-construct the insights needed to contest power by first expanding their abilities to see the structures that are at work and then expressing their insights, directly or indirectly, in CMC written conversations. In her description of the tensions surrounding the shifts between a private language of home and family to the language of the dominant others, RD's CMC posting cast light on the personal and societal power structures contained in those tensions.
So, with all this discussion of power, of contesting power, and of making its structures transparent, how can we define it? Lantolf and Genung (2002) in their discussion of power, success, and failure in the foreign language classroom, offer a working definition, similar to Luke's in some ways. They define power as the capacity/privilege to project and impose my perspective on others. For our purposes, in order to qualify the nature of power dynamics in the CMC ecology, I propose another working definition, one which I believe is much more in keeping with the perspective focused on the health of the learning ecology. I propose that power can also be a capacity to consider and even accept the perspectives of others and then choose how and how much of those perspectives to integrate into our own. This definition is, paradoxically, also in keeping with Luke's emphasis on gaining power to contest it because, through integration of other perspectives we gain the power, institutionally or personally, to contest the aspects of power we are not willing to integrate. How can we hold the tension between the two sides of the power paradox, namely the idea that power is projecting and imposing my perspective on others, versus the idea that power is considering other perspectives and making choices about what to integrate into our own?
The CMC classroom can show us the way because it is self-reflective of the
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power it exerts on the participants, including the teacher. As we all know from personal experience, the dynamics of power permeate any classroom with questions of whose experience is valid, what counts as legitimate knowing, and how that knowing can be transmitted or constructed. To explore these ideas further, we can turn to the work of Judith Butler (1997), who gives us a perspective for engaging with the creative tension endemic to the two sides of the power paradox: power as projecting and imposing versus power as the prerogative to make choices about what to integrate. When we confront the paradox, we first enter the uncomfortable spaces of either subjecting others to our own power or feeling subjected to “others'” power. For instance, if we imagine that I am a participant in peer-editing activities in a CMC classroom, does it mean that I have relinquished power over my own work if I accept editing suggestions for my writing from peers or others? Or, is it more likely the case I might perceive that their suggestions are helpful and even expand my own perspectives? By accepting suggestions for editing, I use the framework that defines power as the ability and freedom to consider other perspectives and make choices about what to integrate into my own writing. In addition, when I am able to make these choices and integrate others' ideas, I am at the same time subverting a social construction of power defined as projecting and imposing my perspective on others, and thus also subverting its converse. That converse idea is that if I accept others' perspectives, I am losing power. I can replace the latter idea of losing power with a shared, co-constructed redefinition of power. New ideas and better writing might emerge from my acceptance of editing suggestions by peers or others. Butler points the way to making these sorts of connections among the dynamics of power and the ideas of emergence that are so important to complexity theory. Complexity theory promises to lead us away from a dualistic view that sees only paradox (power as imposing one participant's will on others vs. power as choices to integrate from others) to a view of emerging coherence. That coherence is, though, in an organic, nonlinear, and dynamic form. Butler points out that power imposed on us or taken away from us, whether we were conscious that we “had” it or not, “animates our emergence” (p. 198). As became apparent in our reading of RD's postings, the dynamics of power in the CMC environment shape identities and promise to shift the positionalities of all participants and the information climate surrounding them. When we experience shifts in a learning landscape, we can and will experience shifts in power and identity. This process, one of emergence, is only possible through conscious stewardship of the learning landscape.
MULTIPLE IDENTITIES AND CULTURAL POSITIONING: SEE THE SELF IN THE “OTHER”
The process of emergence, which allows learners to experience shifts in power and identity, is, as we have seen, fully intertwined with a critical social co-construction of the particular ecology among learners. In this ecology, learners cooperate in their ways of knowing and of being together by revealing their processes of naming and critically viewing their own identities. They use CMC to accomplish this cooperation and revelation. The next example from learner data stems from a
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similar course to the one the Navajo student RD participated in, but I taught this one in German for those majoring in German Studies at our university. The 300-level course, entitled “Minority” Views in German Culture, views Germany as a multicultural society and focuses on a critical exploration of “minority” voices and on constructions of identity within a dominant culture. The readings again came from several sources and media, and several discussions throughout the semester were asynchronous CMC discussions. In this general context, we have the following longer comment by TJ, who responds to the autobiographical narrative contributed to the class on the CMC discussion by “Ned.” She responds
Ned,
Es ist beeindruckend, dass du geschafft hast dich zu aendern und die anderen zu akzeptieren. Du hast es geschafft, was ich schon seit langer Zeit versuche. Du hast es fertig gebracht keine Vorturteile mehr zu haben und deine neue Heimat zu akzeptieren. Ich hatte schon seit langer Zeit vergessen, warum ich mich gegenueber den meisten Amerikanern verschloss und nicht mit ihnen redete und immer nur die Gesellschaft Europaeers suchte. Aber deine Geschichte aehnelt meiner sehr. Ich habe die gleichen Erfahrungen gemacht wie du, auch wenn das schwer zu glauben ist. TJ S03
[Ned,
It is impressive that you have managed to change yourself and to accept these changes. You have managed to do what I have been trying to do for a long time. You have accomplished the ability not to have any more prejudices and to accept your new home. I had forgotten for a long time, why I had closed myself off to most Americans, and don't speak with them, and always tried to keep company with Europeans. But your story is very similar to mine. I've had the same experiences as you, even if that is hard to believe.]
In her response to Ned's writing, TJ shows how she has struggled with positioning herself in US society. Her embodied narrative indicates that one of her self-styled rules of being could have been something like this: “I keep Americans at a distance because I am not one of them, and they don't have much to offer me anyway.” As a result, her interactions in the US culture, where she lives, is one of being what we might call a European in exile. Or so she reports, for at the end of this posting, she reveals that because of Ned's contribution she was able to see a contradiction in herself. She names a part of herself who has accepted the new culture as her own, just as Ned did. We can see this moment of self-criticality as it emerged in TJ, as evidenced in her posting, as closely connected with what emerged in RD's postings. In both contexts, the participants express a similar self-criticality and the poignancy of native language and/or native culture attrition in the dominant English-speaking culture.
In their postings, these two writers, RD and TJ, constructed multiple identities that included allusions to loss and reorientation, and certainly to the feeling of being “other” for a long time in their homes in the US. The forces at work on Ned
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and TJ encourage and even demand profound adjustments and reorientations that affect identity. The concomitant loss of other strong culture-of-origin connections is very different in some ways from those working on the Navajo woman. For these two Europeans in exile, their moves and subsequent difficulties were a result of their parents' choices to move to the US.8 The Navajo woman, RD, in contrast, was taken from her home environment of the private and “magical” world where she lived as a small child with her grandmother to gradually enter the world that her mother also inhabited and then to eventually enter this particular class at the university. The effective stewardship of the CS-C learning ecology, which affords transparency to the forces and structures at work for the participants, has provided a landscape where these learners can first see and then name their own multicultural ways of being as part of that ecology. As becomes transparent in TJ's posting, this landscape is sometimes uncomfortable because of the conflicting demands these cultures impose on the individual learners.
MULTIPLE IDENTITIES AND CULTURAL POSITIONING: INTERROGATING THE “OTHER,” THEORIZING THE SELF
We see evidence here for critical social co-construction of the particular learning ecology as learners cooperate in their ways of knowing and of being together. In other words, they see aspects of themselves in the “other,” as revealed in their processes of naming and critically viewing their own identities. They use CMC to accomplish this cooperation and revelation. Another manner in which these co-constructions emerge is when participants in the classroom interaction note what is somehow missing in the narratives that their classmates offer. One example of this noticing, and of requests for a deeper contextualization of a particular classmate's negotiated development, appears in this excerpt.
Was fuer eine Kultur hat deine Familie, als du ein Kind war? Wie war dein Leben in Singapur und die Fillipien? Wie ist deine Kultur mit deiner Frau jetzt? Ist es ein grosses Vermischung? GJ S 03
[What kind of culture did your family have when you were a child? What was your life like in Singapore and the Philippines? What is your culture like with your wife now? Is it a big mixture?]
Here the questions are asked of the CMC partner in order to clarify several things, all of which deal with learners' positioning among the various cultures in question. The original posting appears to have been incomplete for GJ, whose questions most likely emerged from her own cultural expectations and interests. Clearly several cultures are involved for both learners, and they become visible in the CMC conversation as GJ interrogates her “other” here.
Positioning and a critical naming of identities in the next CMC entry are yet more complex: the cultures involved are (at least) the Mexican heritage culture of the writer, the US culture of her chosen residential home, the culture(s) of gender, and even the culture of her adopted third language (German), which she uses to
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express her thoughts in this particular context. The refreshing aspect of this contribution to the CMC postings and responses, especially surrounding questions of personal identity and positionings of identities in multiple cultures, is the full awareness and even playfulness with which this participant describes her situation and the situation of those with similar multiple cultural connections.
Ich wurde … in Phoenix, Arizona geboren. … Mein Vater und meine Mutter waren in Maderal, Chihuahua und Nogales, Sonora bzw. geboren. Viele Leute, die ein ähnliches Kulturellefamilienverhältnis als ich haben, haben Probleme sich zu identifizieren. Es gibt solche Beschriftungen als Chicano/a, Pocho/a, Hispanisch, Latino/a, Mexikanisch-amerikanisch, usw. Chicano/a ist jemand, das Mexikanisch ist und wohnt in den USA. Diese Person weißt viel über ihre Herkunft und spricht Spanisch. Pocho/a—Diese Person ist auch Mexikanisch und wohnt auch in den USA, aber sie weißt nicht zu viel über ihr Herkunft und spricht nur Englisch. Hispanisch ist jemand, das Spanisch spricht. Latino/a ist jemand, das eine lateinamerikanische Herkunft hat. Mexikanisch-amerikanisch ist jemand, das Mexikanisch und auch Amerikanisch ist. Es gibt Probleme mit diesen Begriffen, weil sie verschiedene Sachen zu verschiedene Leute bedeuten können. Ich habe mich als Mexikanisch-amerikanisch identifiziert, weil ich ein Teilnehmer von beiden Kulturen bin. Viele Leute wissen das nicht. Wegen meiner Aufmachung denken sie, dass ich “Native American” bin. DG S03
[I was born in Phoenix, Arizona. … My father and my mother were born in Madera, Chihuahua and Nogales, Sonora. Many people who have similar cultural family relationships as I do, have problems with identifying themselves. There are such terms used for naming as Chicano/a,. Pocho/a, Hispanic, Latino/a, Mexican-American, and so on. Chicano/a is someone who is Mexican and who lives in the USA. This person knows a lot about their background and speaks Spanish. Poch/a—This person is also Mexican and also lives in the USA, but doesn't know much about his/her background and speaks only English. Hispanic is someone, who speaks Spanish. Latino/a is someone, who has a Latin American background. Mexican-American is someone who is Mexican and also American. There are problems with these terms, because the can mean different things to different people. I have identified myself as Mexican-American, because I am a participant in both cultures. Many people don't know that. Because of my appearance, they think that I am “Native American.”]
DG's explanations are insightful and straightforward, and they show a slight distancing or objectivity about the vastly complex situations of those in the southwestern US who have ties of language and cultural identity to Mexico or other Spanish-speaking countries in Central and South America. The interdependence of the aspects of naming of her own identities and the names given by others becomes a major contributor to DG's description of herself and the various cultures
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to which she could claim allegiance and from which she could claim identity. There seems to be a clear though subtle differentiation, as well, among some aspects of status or knowledge among the various designations and thus the identity and power structures implied by them. DG chooses, from among all the options, a classification/naming for her cultural identity and thus actively engages in her own criticality. She also clarifies the differentiation of the power relationships among the various cultures and their implied hierarchies of status. She does not necessarily distance herself from those who might identify more thoroughly with any of the other possible names for their cultural identity, but she does raise the issue of the complexity of these various names and identities, indicating that there are also complexities in the individual perceptions about the implications of these names in terms of power or status.
While she participates in both the Mexican and the American cultures, the German classroom language and culture (within which she expresses these thoughts) are also clear parts of her ecology of learning. As a result, the classroom ecology necessarily weighs into her construction of self; even naming the various possible designations for her cultural identity when she tries her best to express them in German syntax and partially using appropriate German morphology becomes a process of distancing for her through the filter of a third language (Spanish, English, German). Just to make life, identities, power or status relationships, and cultures more complex, she also mentions that she is misinterpreted and misaligned by others with yet a further cultural identity, namely Native American, because of her appearance. The implication is that this misnaming of an identity is also because of her skin color or other physical features. This identity, however inaccurate, is imposed on her by “others.” DG is thus showing us as readers—and as co-learners—how we all theorize our lives and understand theories against our lives and the lives of others, often foremost in terms of naming. She is engaging in what Luke (2004) describes as “This doubling and Othering of the self from dominant text and discourse can be cognate, analytic, expository, and hypothetical, and it can, indeed, be already lived and narrated, embodied, and experienced” (p. 26). We write/read/voice/think and continually revise narratives and even metanarratives of the gendered, raced, and classed identities our cultural positionings form. Through these positionings we forge new identities, whether they are imposed by others or are first generated from within our own communities and families. Thus theorizing our worlds and experiences is directly related to narrativizing our worlds, our experiences, and our identities (Brunner, 1994). Creating narratives of self and identities becomes possible for learners by inviting their participation in an ecology of learning where criticality and socially constructed communication are encouraged. Teachers and learners find support for making the power context transparent enough to create these narratives of self in the temporally and spatially unbound communication that asynchronous CMC contributes to this expanded classroom ecology.
IMPLICATIONS FOR CLASSROOMS
In this section I now shift to a concentration on the pedagogical principles and
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practices for engaging participants in exploring language and culture learning in the CS-C context and the paradigms that emerge from the work so far. While this section will not include “teaching tips” of a generic kind that any given teacher could take into the classroom directly for “Monday morning” use, pedagogical principles and real CMC classroom experiences will serve here to explore the pedagogical implications of this work.
All of the suggestions that emerge from the processes I describe here emphasize that a critical approach to social interactions, to interpersonal relations, and to communication with others will influence learning. In learning that emerges from these processes, there always needs to be an emphasis on getting input and responses from participants on all class activities. Interactions in any such classroom need to emphasize flexible thinking, mutual tolerance and respect, as well as self-respect and self-acceptance. Communication among the members of the class and among the class members and the cultures they are studying are at the heart of the instructional climate, and the multimedia resources available are key to enabling, supporting, and enriching that communication, though not, as discussed earlier, deterministic of the communication. Learners are the center of the process, and we take a phenomenological stance to lead all participants toward making connections between their own personal and individual histories, experiences, and the meanings and values they have found in their life stories so far and those of their classmates, those of others in our society, and those of members, past and present, of (in the case of my own classes) German-speaking societies. Whenever possible, as Kubota (2004) has pointed out, the efforts are also to “… understand the Other in relation to the Self or allow the Others to express their authentic voices in educational settings …” without imposing an “… essentialized, idealized, or stigmatized identity onto the Other …” (p. 44). The effective stewardship of the CS-C learning ecology, then, is possible not because we have simply added CMC to the traditional classroom interactional structure, but because we encourage transparency for all participants, learners and teachers alike, about the forces and structures at work in the classroom and in their lives.
LEARNERS' VOICES
I have put a lot of emphasis here on the effective stewardship of a CS-C learning ecology. However, when students walk into these or any classes on their first day, they always need to get their bearings in the landscape of a new class for the semester. As they learn to see the power structures working on all participants in the classroom and as they take more and more initiative to express their own multiple identities and cultural positioning, they cocreate the course and the role of their teacher in it. When I am teaching, the learners are cocreating me as their teacher. Toward the end of the semester, learners have assumed power, integrating what they accept or contest in the power dynamics of the classroom. In the spiral of the interaction, supported so well in the temporal and spatial independence offered by CMC, I have also been challenged to integrate their power and decided what to accept or contest in the dynamics of the classroom. Learners' writing which expresses fruition of this process will serve as the final section of this
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contribution. Here I show, with the learners' voices, how they have written themselves into the power dynamic of the course and, thus, write me into it in a different way as well.
In the postings from the class taught in English9 that follow here, learners' responses are to a class assignment which elicited a critical look back at and process evaluation of the various assignments they had accomplished throughout the semester. They reflect on the processes they engaged in from the vantage point of the end of a semester's worth of exploring the turbulent edge of this approach. One learner, ML, expresses himself about the class this way.
The anecdotes are the most advantageous way for me to learn and expand my knowledge. Whether I was reading a story about LE growing up in Japan, or reading an interview with a women from the former GDR, I was able to understand it better when they told it from their heart. Through the little details that come out in a story, I was able to really see the dailiness of that person's life and relate the moral of the story to the overall topic of the paper. … I really feel like my knowledge of German history has expanded greatly and I am proud to have this understanding of a country that I previously stereotyped as frightening.
Lastly, I learned that writing about yourself is a lot harder then most people think … . I had an incredibly hard time deciding what to include.
In the end, I realized just how many important people and events I have taken for granted these past couple of years and how much they mean to me. Additionally, I now understand that the technical aspect of writing about yourself is difficult. The issues of what to include and how you want to be remembered are issues I had never thought of before. Writing these papers has given me a greater respect for writers of biographies and autobiographies around the world. ML F 02
While ML focuses on his own ways of knowing, learning, and the difficulties of writing about himself that were parts of his expanded perspectives from the class, another student, EM, focuses his reflection on the more interactional aspects of the postings that he and his classmates wrote and read. He also emphasizes the “growth of connection” that took place in his learning ecology throughout the semester, and supports his comments with several details that he gleaned from his classmates' CMC postings. He either had them clearly in memory or referred back to the temporally and spatially independent CMC record of the class writing in order to detail his critical summary.
We have been led to understand new people this semester in a variety of ways. There were presentations that sparked emotion (personal relations of events within a life), some of which relied mostly on fact presentation (researched profiles) and those that touched us by mixing the two together (interview). …
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Due to the heavy impact of emotional content, the interviews and autobiographies are the works that stayed with me the longest. Scenes from these pieces remain vivid in my mind. I can see LA's budding connection to the girls next door, her emergence into the role of mother figure for them. I can picture AR's friend in bed after attempting suicide and, though the impact is nothing compared to what she went through at that moment, a piece of her feelings are left within me. These personal aspects, those things in life that are so difficult to go through and even more difficult to share with others, are the images that establish themselves within the mind and foster the growth of connection, and it is these shared memories that are most likely to remain.
In the midst of all of this reading and connecting, it would have been impossible not to think about my own life … . Lastly, through my interview, I began to think about the ability of people to be blind to everything around them. Both my interviewees pointed out things about this country that I knew, yet did not realize the significance of. The fact that I could set myself on any track I wanted, that I had never experienced life in a military state and that my decisions could be changed whenever I felt it necessary were all things that seemed constants in life and, therefore, unimportant in the grand scheme of things. All in all, I feel that I have learned not only about new people through these encounters, but I have also caused a ripple in my own fluid viewpoint that could change the way in which I see the world. EM F02
EM has discovered and written about a core value of the CS-C classroom ecology that he experienced, namely that connecting with others teaches him about himself, his own culture and daily life, and that he has learned to see the world differently this way.
Finally, the following shorter segment from the process evaluation posting of yet another student, SL, emphasizes the narrative aspects of the CMC postings made by her classmates and herself throughout the semester. She seems to have deeply understood what Brunner (1994) characterized as “embodied narrative—narrative that takes on the presence of persons engaged with and situated in the world in a variety of ways” (pp. 16-17). She also shows us how, as Kubota (2004) had called for, it is indeed possible to create a learning ecology with CS-C/connectivist approaches where CMC contexts help understand the “other” in relation to the self. This is the climate of CS-C instruction that allows all selves and “others” to use their authentic voices to express their identities in education's settings.
I think one of the most important things I have learned this semester is that everyone has a story. Behind every face in class, each teacher we see, and every person on the bus are years and years of stories that made them who they are. We were shown this in the video about the women who lived during the Wende.10 We read and shared this concept in our autobiographies (although no amount of paper can hold all the experiences we have had.) We witnessed this as we researched our famous German women or “others” and found what
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turned them into the well-known person they are today. Everybody has a story. Everybody has a quilt. Everybody is willing to share. Now all we have to do is listen. SL F02
These learners' voices, then, and literally scores more of these types of summary statements, some more and some less articulate, all show how effective stewardship of the CS-C learning ecology can help CMC language and culture classrooms and their participants thrive. By initiating and supporting this kind of ecology and climate, all participants' multiple identities and cultural positionings can be expressed with the temporal and spatial independence offered by CMC. For them to express these identities and positionings, for them to teach and learn from each other, learners and teachers alike need to be able to see the forces and structures at work in the classroom and in their lives. Critical social-constructivist/connectivist approaches make the transparency for this seeing possible, and it creates the atmosphere in which learners' voices can all be heard. Indeed, in this kind of climate, it becomes apparent that “Everybody has a story … . Everybody is willing to share. Now all we have to do is listen.”
NOTES
1 Luke (2004) also alludes to the possibility of second language education research being “… about the desire for voice and identity, about new ways of being and communicating … (p. 28).
2 See also Wildner-Bassett (n.d.) for an expanded discussion of these ideas.
3 Data have been collected for over 5 years total.
4 See McBride (2005) for a thorough description of this lab and the data collection projects which serve as the data foundation for this paper.
5 The phenomenological stance incorporates a relational “way of seeing” that helps us account for phenomena that we would otherwise not have seen. This stance aims to encompass phenomena on a universal and a particular scale, without, as Kramsch (2002) reminds us, “… losing sight of who does the seeing, the embracing, the encompassing, and against which horizon of expectations” (p. 8).
6 Of course face-to-face communication is important. Our goal here is not to ignore its importance, but it is not part of the data I have collected, nor is it the focus of the inquiry here.
7 I project my own positioning as an Anglo-American of European heritage here, with apologies to those who are more directly connected to the Navajo Nation than most readers might be.
8 This information was included in classroom background narratives but not shown here.
9 As a reminder, the class is the general education class called “Dialogue of the Sexes: Women and Men in German-speaking Societies.”
10 The word Wende means literally `the turn' and refers to the fall of the Wall in 1989 and the shift of government in Germany thereafter.
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REFERENCES
Brunner, D. D. (1994). Inquiry and reflection: Framing narrative practice in education. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Byrnes, H. (1998). Constructing curricula in collegiate foreign language departments. In H. Byrnes (Ed.), Learning foreign and second languages: Perspectives in research and scholarship (pp. 262-295). New York: Modern Language Association.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Pantheon.
Ittzes, Z. (1997). Written conversation: Investigating communicative foreign language use in written form in computer conference writing and group journals. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona.
Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and culture in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kramsch, C. (2002). How can we tell the dancer from the dance? Introduction. In C. Kramsch (Ed.), Language acquisition and language socialization: Ecological perspectives (pp. 1-30). New York: Continuum.
Kubota, R. (2004). Critical multiculturalism and second language education. In B. Norton & K. Toohey (Eds.), Critical pedagogies and language learning (pp. 30-52). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lantolf, J. P., & Genung, P. B. (2002). “I'd rather switch than fight:” An activity-theoretic study of power, success, and failure in the foreign language classroom. In C. Kramsch (Ed.), Language acquisition and language socialization: Ecological perspectives (pp. 175-196). New York: Continuum.
Luke, A. (2004). Two takes on the critical. In B. Norton & K. Toohey (Eds.), Critical pedagogies and language learning (pp. 21-29). New York: Cambridge University Press.
McBride, K. (2005). CODI: COHLab Project Data Initiative. Retrieved March 18, 2005, from http://www.coh.arizona.edu/codi
Siemens, G. (2004, December 12). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. elearnspace everything elearning Retrieved February 22, 2005, from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm
Thorne, S. L. (2003). Artifacts and cultures-of-use in intercultural communication. Language Learning & Technology, 7 (2), 38-67. Retrieved May 23, 2005 from http://llt.msu.edu/vol7num2/thorne/default.html
Wildner-Bassett, M. (2001). Multiple literacies, CMC, and language and culture learning. Academic Exchange Quarterly (Fall 2001), 57-62.
Wildner-Bassett, M. E. (2002). Planet Xeno: Creating a collaborative computer-mediated communication culture. In P. Comeaux (Ed.), Communication and collaboration in the online classroom: Examples and applications (pp. 157-174). Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company.
Wildner-Bassett, M. E. (n.d.). Beyond chaos: CMC and multiple literacies in learning environments. Unpublished manuscript.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My sincere thanks to Drew Kopp, Ph.D. student in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona, for his support and editorial work on an earlier version of this manuscript. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thorough suggestions and Steve Thorne for his in-depth review and very helpful comments. Any mistakes or shortcomings in the paper are, however, solely my responsibility.
AUTHOR'S BIODTA
Mary E. Wildner-Bassett is Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona. Selected publications include Improving pragmatic aspects of learners' interlanguage (1984), Zielpunkt Deutsch (1992), Beyond chaos: Explorations in pragmatics and computer-mediated communication (manuscript in preparation), and many contributions to anthologies and journals on foreign language pedagogy and second language acquisition, applied linguistics, and computer-mediated second language communication. Her research interests include the pragmatics of foreign and second language acquisition, second language and culture acquisition and theory, discourse analysis—especially as it develops for computer-mediated communication—and social constructivist explorations in language and culture pedagogy.
AUTHOR'S ADDRESS
Mary E. Wildner-Bassett
Professor and Head of the Department of German Studies
University of Arizona
301 Learning Services Building
P.O. Box 210105
Tucson, AZ 85721-0105
Phone: 520/621-1799
Fax: 520/626-8268
Email: wildnerb@u.arizona.edu
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