ERIC Number: EJ1213686
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2019
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1522-7502
EISSN: N/A
Going Public in an Age of Digital Anxiety: How Students Negotiate the Topoi of Online Writing Environments
Gold, David; Garcia, Merideth; Knutson, Anna V.
Composition Forum, v41 Spr 2019
Though composition studies has long sought to leverage new technologies of literacy to help students go public, we remain anxious about our ability to do so, as students commonly enter our classrooms already composing for diverse public audiences in a variety of digital contexts. Yet students, too, are often anxious about these new modes of composition, which circulate in a destabilized rhetorical environment where traditional understandings of authority, argument, and audience no longer hold. This article identifies five topoi of this new rhetorical landscape--"presence," "persistence," "permeability," "promiscuity," and "power"--describing the anxieties and affordances they present for student writers, the dispositions toward writing they foster, and the challenges and opportunities they pose for composition. This framework provides a critical vocabulary for compositionists seeking to help students negotiate emerging networked publics.
Descriptors: Educational Technology, Technology Uses in Education, Literacy Education, Anxiety, Writing (Composition), Audiences, Persistence, Power Structure, Barriers, Teaching Methods
Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition. e-mail: cf@compositionforum.com; Web site: http://compositionforum.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A