Sleepless Since Seattle: Reflections on MLA 2012

As a teacher of first-year community college students, I’ve returned from the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2012 conference in Seattle, where as many as sixty sessions touched on digital pedagogy, more convinced than ever of our collective responsibility to wean our students and ourselves from traditionally packaged textbooks, course management systems, and assessments. It’s clear to me that my first-year college students need to be prepared for what Cathy Davidson calls the “keywords for a digital age” in her new book, Now You See It: things like “attention to work flow (multitasking, remix, mashup), interaction, process (publish first, revise later), collaboration, blended, interdisciplinary, “hard” and “soft” skills, and datamining.”

Asking our students to participate alongside us in the ongoing process of building a body of readings and resources can be a powerful way for us to encourage reflection about the social construction of knowledge.  By challenging our students’ and our own assumptions about textbooks and challenging the constitutive power they have held over our collective understanding of education, we can consider the implications of all the tools and lenses we use in our everyday teaching and learning lives. By foregrounding the full, messy context and often tortuous history of digital texts, and helping students to view digital content as dynamic and fungible, we can escape the blanching process textbook anthologies and academic databases use to promote the fiction of textual stability and consistency.

The generation of students left behind by No Child Left Behind is most in need of this disruptive gesture.  Our students have been taught by K-12 textbooks tied to rigid state curricula and standardized testing to “look through” a text as a window through which to see content -- to borrow Richard Lanham’s distinction in The Economics of Attention – rather than to “look at” a text in a way that foregrounds its medium, its genre, and the conditions of its production, dissemination, and consumption.  Eschewing a traditional textbook in first-year composition may be the best way to initiate a productive break from a standardized K-12 education while readying our first-year writing students for the new and richer kind of information literacy they’ll actually need in order to navigate the digital texts they’ll encounter during their academic and professional careers.

--Miles McCrimmon

Professor of English

J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College