Reflecting: An Introduction

Map or No Map, I’m Counting On English

Since the start of the semester, and in fact, since the start of my career as a graduate student, my bearings have been lost. I’m not sure anymore where I stand in this huge debate about English, and I’m not sure it’s a question that can be answered in a single reflection, either. I am pretty sure that this type of question is one of those soul-searching, combing the depths of the earth, lost in Keatsian melancholy types of questions that I will spend the rest of my life, if not my career, searching for the answer. Now that technology, and all of its eccentricities and complications, has landed itself firmly in the center of my map of English, I think I’ve decided that the map has changed. It is no longer flat and one-dimensional, and it does not merely point out authors and pedagogies; in fact, it doesn’t exist anymore. I think I am through with this map. What this map represents is the old English: the rote memorization, five-paragraph expository essay, and Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” compounded with debates on leadership and political motives.
Now that technology has become supremely accessible for students and teachers alike, though in different ways as we have suggested with the characterizations of Digital Natives and Immigrants, there can no longer be a map. If there is a map of English, it has radically changed, incorporating new literacies, mulitmodal ways of thinking, and new ways of considering how students learn. No, there is no map of English, as Kelly thinks.
Instead, there is a path of English, one that allows for teachers to be on a spectrum of Technologically-Savvy to Where do you put the floppy disk in this computer? In this spectrum, there are markers, points that determine how far you are. Some of the markers may be “can successfully complete an iMovie in a graduate class” and other may be “likes wikis, but doesn’t know how to incorporate them in a meaningful way.” However, the difficulty with this path, is that there is never a final destination. There will never be a spot on this path that says: “You made it! You know everything about technology that there is to know!” Because five seconds later, new technologies, new programs, and new ideas will have been created, and all of a sudden, your newly-acquired knowledge is obsolete. And then, you start over again. From the beginning.