RELEVANCE

"I think that our course texts are very helpful, but they are really expensive, even to rent from an outside source. Some of my teachers provided us with blackboard links and handouts (pdfs) which were really nice to have because I could access them on my laptop. I know you can't do that with everything, but I think online reading is helpful and easy. Also the library should have more of the novels that the English classes read in stock so that students can take them out instead of buying/renting from Duquesne bookstore, Amazon, or the Pgh library. I like netflix, but I would NOT want it to become suddenly related to my school work!" 

"Requiring streamed video services as compared to course texts would be much more engaging/ a cheaper options for students."

--FYW Students' opinions about digital media as a means of teaching composition and literature

While this is not only of material and financial concern, the textual situation within FYW and other classrooms, becomes a bit more fraught if you consider the sheer saturation of digital technology within the college environment. While there is no institutional rule that prohibits submissions that are not word-processed, in all of the FYW syllabi in our study, whether assignments were to be submitted in hard-copy or digital the invisible requirement of access to and literacy of certain digital platforms was implicit. Students are expected to own a computer, and in the rare case that they don't, make alternative arrangements through one of the many university computers available to them. Digital saturation has displaced digital instruction as the pedagogical priority within the University. Cynics might regard this move as purely an administrative attempt designed to market the institution and attract students--though this criticism is not entirely unmerited, it does overlook a key reason why digital saturation has become such a prominent position within universities. Much is made of the current generations starting colleges. The majority of my recent class was born in the year 1996 (the exception being one student born in 1995) which means the following two things: 1) They are younger than this. 2) The have not lived in a time where digital technologies experience heavy and ubiquitous use. This generation--often called, "Digital Natives"--who came of age while digital sacraments were still in the formative stages, has never known a history in which digital connectivity and mediation was not privileged. While this might seem to many who do not share this historical heritage an unsympathetic position, this historical identifier has produced its own invisible prescriptions about these students.

How digital natives have been accused of socializing

In his landmark piece on digital technology and its place not only in the classroom, but in culture, Dennis Baron maps the progress of different technologies, and how they reflexively hack and revise themselves over time as they progress. This projection is not wrong as anyone who has been a member of a social media site for more than a year can attest. What Baron never accounts for is the way in which digital technologies become so divergent that mastery is contingent upon participation in specific microcosms that offer very little in the way of digital literacy cross-pollination. Rather than broader digital literacy. What does this have to do with digital natives? Much of the cultural criticism heaped on them has also contributed to a misrepresentation of their collective computing knowledge. Because there is a cultural proficiency attached to certain technologies (like the smartphone), and digital applications (like social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter), specific digital literacies which are increasingly mobile in nature have become conflated with broader computing literacy. This misrepresentation results in what some regard as a deficit in digital citizenship skills, training, and education. Providing digital resources for students who presumed to already be proficient in digital citizenship is disingenuous and puts the cart before the horse by prioritizing platform over function. Many educators might role their eyes, as they imagine this to be an argument for replacing an upper level specialization class with yet another mandatory Gen ed course. Not so! As Loewy and others suggests in the article linked directly above, it is precisely the segregation of computing rather than its broader participation in all courses that has so far hindered the development of digital citizenship.

Can the deluge of digital resources be effective for instruction?

It is quite curious then that teaching these computing proficiencies have no explicit place within FYW curricula. Despite the prolific drafting of Student Learning Outcomes for the FYW syllabi we studied, digital proficiency was neither a part of the outcomes nor a part of any instructors general aims for the course. If FYW is supposed to equip a student be an effective college writer, why doesn't that curriculum include teaching the actual material processes by which students will produce college writing? These invisible expectations are precariously insidious if we consider the politics of who is provided the educational infrastructure to navigate these platforms, technologies, and interfaces. What is more; students who lack this undisclosed prerequisite knowledge have this same illiteracy invisibly held against them within the practices of assessment. Because they never took (or were never offered) "computer class" there digital illiteracies somehow remain their own fault. If FYW wishes to teach not only technique but rhetorical awareness, it must in some way exhibit this same self-awareness with regard to the very tools it requires students to use for composition. The first epigraph above demonstrates quite clearly what a deficit of digital citizenship instruction creates within a writer. Producing resources does not, in turn produce writers. The very means by which writing is produced must be made visible before a student can learn to appreciate them or innovate them.
Rhetoric is not territorial in the sense that there are situations which can successfully be compartmentalized outside of the scope of someone's identity. In the broader aims of our survey, we asked students to consider their practices with regard to video streaming services, principally Netflix. While that epigraph suggests a reluctance to integrate Netflix practices into the activities and discussions of the FYW class, other responses suggested this might strengthen the relevance of the class. Yet the epigraph which supports separation of class and pleasure highlights just how vital it is for digital citizenship to teach digital form and content together. Breaking down this separation between design and use not only highlights how literary appreciation and knowledge already permeate a student's life, it also underscores the dual function of teaching not only rhetorical position when writing, but how to practice recognizing, interrogating, and learning about the systems of power and discourses in which a student already participates. Teaching the technology not only teaches it can be used and appreciated, it also teaches how it is already used and appreciated.