Hawisher, Gail E. and Cynthia L. Selfe, eds.  Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st-Century  Technologies.  Utah State Univ. Pr./ National Council of Teachers of English, 1999.

Stephanie Tingley

One key question has determined the content and focus of Hawisher and Selfe's ambitious, challenging, and wide-ranging collection of twenty-three articles about the future of language arts and composition studies: How have the rapid advancements in information technologies changed both how we read, write, teach, and communicate; and how we think about these activities?

 Hawisher and Selfe draw on their considerable expertise as scholars investigating the promise and peril of computer-assisted writing instruction and co-editors of the well-regarded journal Computers and Composition. Their prefatory essay to the volume introduces the four broad topics their contributors will address in the volume. Neither technophilic nor technophobic in their orientation, this strong compilation of essays concentrates on how rapid changes in information technologies provide fascinating, and often frustrating, challenges that scholars, teachers, and students need to negotiate. The contributors to this volume enter the discussion of these issues at quite an advanced point. Although the general reader will find much of use in the volume, readers who have some familiarity with recent advances in information technology and the key terms those "in the know" use (e-mail, MOOS, WWW, hypertext) will be more comfortable with the level of conversation in the book.

The articles in Part I, "Refiguring Notions of Literacy in an Electronic World," give readers historical perspective on writing as a technology and raise questions about competing, and often controversial, definitions and re-definitions of literacy as they apply to readers who encounter complex electronic texts as well as more traditional print texts.  I found two essays in this first section to be particularly interesting to teachers of writing and literature.

Dennis Baron's "From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literary Technologies," traces the history of literacy, reminding us that computers are the latest, and admittedly most sophisticated, of a long series of communication tools that include the invention of writing itself as a symbol system, the pencil, and the telephone.

In "'English' at the Crossroads: Rethinking Curricula of Communication in the Context of the Turn to the Visual," author Gunther Kress focuses on suggesting some possible answers to two questions which begin his essay: "What will the subject of English need to become in order to function as an essential part of the education of young people? What does it need to focus on? (66). Kress's answer requires a broadening of the traditional definition of literacy to include both the traditional temporal-sequential logic of spoken and written language and the spatial, simultaneous logic of the visual. He argues that teachers need to help students discover and refine strategies for reading and evaluating electronic texts, which often  mix and meld the visual with the verbal.

Essays in Part II, "Revisiting Notions of Teaching and Access in an Electronic World," shift the focus to address difficult questions about those circumstances when technology clashes with the real work of teaching. James Sosnoski's article, "Hyper-Readers and Their Reading Engines," argues that the quantity and diversity of information made available by high-powered search engines, browsers, and information-accessing computer programs requires researchers and readers to develop new ways to read and synthesize materials accessed through these electronic means.

In contrast to Sosnoski's interest in how readers with access to these new information technologies cope with the flood of materials available with a few clicks of a mouse, Charles Moran worries about the ever-widening gap between those he calls the "haves" and the "have-nots"--and how social class and wealth determine, in large part, who among us has access to cutting-edge technology. He reminds us in "Access: The "A" Word in Technology Studies" that although approximately 100 million people worldwide have access to computers, the Internet, and the World Wide Web, this 100 million is just 2% of the world's total population.

The articles in Part III of Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st-Century Technologies are grouped under the wide-ranging heading "Ethical and Feminist Concerns in an Electronic World." Among the most provocative of a strong set of essays is Susan Romano's discussion of online equity issues and Hawisher and Patricia Sullivan's feminist rhetorical analysis of gender and electronic discourse.  Of particular interest are the critiques of women's personal and professional web pages. All of the articles in this section raise interesting questions about how gender and cultural differences affect the reading, writing, and critiquing of electronic texts.

Part IV, "Searching for Notions of Our Postmodern Literate Selves in an Electronic World," asks the question: "What next--How will rapidly-changing technology continue to affect our concepts of literacy and community?" Anne Wysocki and Johndam Johnson-Eilola, in the section's opening essay, "Blinded By the Letter," wonder whether we should use the relationship we have with the technologies of the printed word as the model or paradigm for how we interact with electronic technologies or whether we need a new model to explain our relationships with and within these cutting-edge technologies.

Worthy of special mention is Janet Carey Eldred's powerful and poignant elegaic meditation on her relationship with her mother, a relationship mediated by writing--both traditional letters and electronic communications over e-mail.  Eldred's contribution skillful melds the realm of personal writing with over-arching theoretical questions about how electronic communication may alter, and often enrich, both our personal and professional lives.

Perhaps contributor Bertram C. Bruce best encapsulates the key questions and essential ethical issues about teaching and learning addressed in Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st-Century Technologies as a whole in the list of questions he includes in the final paragraph of his essay "Speaking the Unspeakable About 21st-Century Technologies":
 

What do we want students to learn? How can we use new technologies?  How should we? Why should we? What will change when we do? Do we want those changes? What do they mean for us, our students, society? What is fair? What kind of society do we want to live in? And, perhaps ultimately, who do we want to become? (227)

These are questions that have profound and far-reaching implications for all who teach and learn at the brink of the 21st-century. Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st-Century Technologies does a good job of helping us to begin the process.

Youngstown State University