Influential Role in "Computers in the Composition Classroom"

From RhetorClick

Contributing to three different articles in the Computers in the Composition Classroom book, Cynthia L. Selfe has played an instrumental role in Digital Composition and Pedagogical studies. Since the late 1980’s, Cynthia Selfe has dedicated a significant portion of her work to analyzing how teachers should incorporate computers into the classroom. Repeatedly in the three articles co-authored by Selfe, her message remains consistent: that teachers should not just assume the traditional role as the teacher teaching and the students learning, rather writing in the computer classroom should be both learning and teaching as a mutual practice shared between teacher and student. Selfe also consistently persists throughout the three articles that it is naïve for teachers to talk about “the effects of technology” in overly positive terms, as if computers had intrinsic value and their mere existence in composition classroom improved the pedagogy itself. Rather, Selfe calls for awareness of technology in the computer classroom as it tends to disappear when we consider it just another instructional tool, and that is the most dangerous part; she calls for paying attention to how technology has complex linkages among issues of literacy, poverty, and race, as technology does not necessarily equate to improved literacy for all children in the U.S.