Efficiency, Correctness, and the Authority of Automation: Technology in College Basic Writing Instruction

摘要

Nearly one-third of first-year college students are required to complete remedial courses (NCES, 2013), costing public institutions an estimated $1 billion annually (Bettinger & Long, 2009). This project examines a central tension in that much-debated policy space: whether colleges should pursue automated instructional tools to more efficiently prepare students in remedial classes for later coursework. Building on literature from composition and literacy studies and from higher education, this work investigates how pressures to make writing instruction for underprepared students faster and less costly risk restricting student access to complex literacy skills and, in turn, full access to college and professional pathways. The dissertation begins with a historical review of how technology has intersected with college literacy remediation across the twentieth century. A contemporary case study of a developmental writing course then examines student and instructor beliefs about the use of automated classroom tools in writing instruction. This work draws from and extends theoretical understandings of literacy as a social construct that is dependent on rhetorical awareness. The project also is framed by a consideration of the ways that beliefs about efficiency and Standard Language Ideologies (SLI) influence instruction and outcomes in college remediation.;Three central themes---authority, constraint, and possibility---emerge from this study. From historical analysis, the dissertation argues that the push to make college remediation faster through technological interventions is not a new phenomenon but, in fact, has been a recurring theme for the past century even as repeated turns toward automation have made little difference in remediation rates or outcomes. In the contemporary context of a developmental writing classroom at a regional community college, the project shows how automated instructional technologies assert strong authority over writing instruction and reduce the classroom focus almost exclusively to notions of correctness around language usage and conventions and standardization of form for written essays. Both students and teachers are reluctant to directly challenge this understanding of writing and writing instruction. Instead, they adapt their learning and teaching to meet the requirements of the technology system even, in some instances, as they voice doubts about its utility. Yet there also are moments of authentic possibility for broader learning and understanding through the use of the automated system. At various points, both students and their teachers bring their own critical questioning to bear in using the technology system to think more deeply about how language functions and the role of writing in their lives.