Review
Manuscript prepared for Digital
Rhetoric Collaborative, an imprint of Michigan
Publishing. 
In this chapter, we delve deeply into the evolution of computer pedagogies in English Journal from 1964 - 2012. After an initial fleeting burst of fascination with computers in the 1960s and early 1970s, English Journal authors largely turned away from computers until the 1980s when the emergence of personal computers kicked off a surge of interest in digital pedagogies that, despite some modest ebbs and flows, has remained constant. One of the reasons we surmise that interest in computers has not waned was that computing technologies kept radically adapting and changing over the years. Whenever one aspect of computer pedagogy such as word processing started being taken for granted, a new development such as hypertext authoring or digital video editing came on the scene and fired up interest in computer media once again. Seeking to highlight some of these recurrent bursts of technological newness (and concomitant forgetting), we have organized this chapter as a play in Five Acts —a light-hearted comedy with a few tragic moments thrown in for good measure. Each of the Acts represents a moment when a particular nexus of new computing developments seized the attention of English teachers, while other computer technologies increasingly became taken for granted or forgotten entirely.
In our first act, “Imagining Computer Futures, 1964-1971,” we discuss how the computer was imagined as multimedia teacher, textual analyst, and robot grader in the early days of mainframe. In the second act, “PC Software Revolutions, 1980-1987,” we unpack how the rise of process pedagogy was complexly interrelated to new developments in instructional and word processing software in the 1980s. In Act 3, “A Networked Social Turn, 1988 - 1994,” we demonstrate how the emergence of email and other forms of networked computing worked in tandem with an increasing emphasis on the social aspects of writing to propel a greater emphasis on students’ using computers to write for audiences beyond the classroom. In Act 4, “Reading and Writing the Graphical Web, 1995 - 2004,” we revisit both the great enthusiasm and the much needed critiques that English teachers proffered about the internet in the early days of the graphical web. In Act 5, “Digital, Multimodal Literacies, 2004 - 2012,” we tell the story of how new multimedia composing software and Web 2.0 applications set the stage for a burgeoning interest in digital multimodal pedagogies that continues today.
In each act, we converse in genres and with technological tools common to the time period under consideration; accordingly, our historical play moves from conversations recorded in typed letters (Act 1), to a chat with a computer-based invention program (Act 2), to a text-based conversation via internet-relay chat (Act 3), to a collaborative “geocities” website (Act 4), and finally to a Digital Story composed with iMovie (Act 5). Paradoxically, this chapter on computers is the most alphabetic-centric of the case studies in this book. Compared to the robust audio and video content that we foreground in the radio, film, and television chapters, the first three Acts of this chapter are composed almost entirely of words; images and hyperlinks start becoming more prominent in Act 4, and only in the concluding Act 5 do we turn to a truly robust form of multimodal composing in which images and sounds take center stage. In this way, we seek to highlight how the connection of computers to multimodal composing is actually quite new, whereas the history of using computers for traditional alphabetic writing and reading instruction is much older.
In many ways, the history we tell here follows in the footsteps of Gail Hawisher, Paul LeBlanc, Charles Moran, and Cynthia Selfe’s (1996) masterful historical recounting of the early development of the “Computers and Writing” field in Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979 - 1994: A History. This foundational book copiously mapped how new computing developments, emerging pedagogical theories, and material social conditions complexly interanimated each other in propelling the development of a unique field dedicated to studying the use of computers in university writing instruction. In many ways, our second and third acts parallel the story that Hawisher, Moran, LeBlanc and Selfe told as we similarly articulate the shift from using personal computers to teach individual writing processes to the use of networked computer technologies to engage students in composing as a social-rhetorical process. Yet, we also add to Hawisher, Moran, LeBlanc, and Selfe’s narrative by showcasing how the computers and writing conversation unfolded in English Journal —drawing on sources that they largely excluded as they didn’t meet the book’s stated focus on Computers and Writing scholarship in higher education.
This is not to say, however, that Hawisher, LeBlanc Moran and Selfe were uninterested in building connections between K-12 and university instructors. Indeed, Hawisher, Moran, and Selfe all published about computer pedagogy in English Journal in the 80s and 90s (Hawisher 1988; Hawisher 1989; Moran 1983; Moran & Selfe, 1999; Selfe, 1988) —though the they did not cite these articles in their history, with the exception of Moran’s 1983 essay. Furthermore, Cynthia Selfe demonstrated great commitment to K-12 - university collaboration by working to found and sustain the Computers in Writing Intensive Classrooms (CIWIC) institute as a professional development space that “was open to teachers at all levels and attracted elementary, secondary, and college teachers” (Hawisher, Moran, LeBlanc & Selfe, 1996, p. 262). As we review the English Journal articles of Hawisher, Moran, Selfe and other founding members of “Computers and Writing” community (Constanzo, 1988; Kinkead, 1988; Rodrigues 1984; Tchudi 1988), we can be reminded that the field of computers and writing was in many ways founded out of dialogue among K-12 and university educators. Indeed, some of the founding luminaries of the field —including Hugh Burns and Cynthia Selfe —had PhDs in English Education, and they as well as many other computers and writing scholars have remained committed to sustaining ongoing dialogue with K-12 teachers, via National Writing Project sites and other venues (DeVoss, Eidman-Aadahl, & Hicks, 2010; Hicks 2009; Banks & West-Puckett, 2014). Given the long-standing connections between university and K-12 computer writing instruction, it makes sense to turn to the English Journal archive to flesh our understanding of the historical development of the “Computers and Writing” field.
Ultimately, we see this chapter as answering the call that Hawisher, Moran, LeBlanc, & Selfe so compellingly laid out in the conclusion to their history:
Computers and Composition, although it is a relatively young field, is, nonetheless, already informed by a long and complex history; already located in rich and influential patterns of historical developments in education, composition, and the computer industry; already old in terms of cultural influences and relationships. In this sense, the project of rediscovering history is never a new undertaking, and, importantly, it is one that is never finished. (Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran & Selfe, 1996, p. 281)
We seek in this chapter to pick up where Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran, and Selfe left off, not only by turning to the under-explored English Journal archive, but also by extending their timeline of histories of computers and composition both further back to the 1960s and further forward to the 21st century. And yet, we remain very much aware that the narratives we tell here are also partial, unfinished, and open to revision. We hope that as you make your way through the upcoming Acts, you can feel some of whimsical joy that we have felt in excavating and performatively reimagining some of the archives of the “Computers and Writing” field —and that perhaps you, dear reader, will come to experience your own joy and wonder in wandering through and remixing the copious, diverse, and (dare we say it?) fun archives of our field’s past.
Without any further ado, let the play begin!