Stances in 'Introduction': Education -Introduction 4 - Full text

(1) Select an 'Introduction'

(2) Select a move in that 'Introduction' (What is this?)

Title: Studying L2 writers' digital writing: An argument for post-critical methods
Author(s): Kevin Eric DePew, Susan Kay Miller
Journal: Computers and Composition (22), 2005. 259¡V278.

Move	Introduction 4: Full text
Move 1: Establish A Territory	For better or for worse, composition studies has become a fragmented discipline. At the college level, the teaching of writing has challenged instructors to negotiate a wide scope of exigencies, such as diversity of student audiences, various proficiencies of academic literacy, and the quick evolution of the technologies students use for writing. With 10¡V16 weeks of student contact hours, instructors choose to focus on a few of these issues, both in their teaching and in their research. Therefore, in composition studies, instructors move towards specializations. With a focused knowledge in these sub-disciplines, instructors tend to excel at developing strategies that address specific aspects of their courses. These specializations, however, can make it difficult for these instructors to see how the sub-disciplines from these various exigencies may overlap. This description represents the current status of digital writing studies and second language (L2) writing. Although both fields are sub-disciplines of composition studies, they have evolved from different disciplinary and epistemological traditions. In their own right, these fields have prospered; in addition to having their own journals, conferences, and listservs, these fields get recognition within mainstream composition venues. Needless to say, extensive corpuses of scholarship have been generated for both fields. As a result, teacher-scholars can confidently answer such questions as: How will incorporating networked writing activities into curricular design affect my students¡¦academic literacy development? How do I assess my L2 writers¡¦texts? But if instructors ask which computer-mediated writing technologies are most conducive for facilitating L2 writers academic literacy development, the available corpus of literature that addresses all aspects of this question decreases significantly. As with the teaching of L2 writers and the teaching of digital writing separately, a cross-disciplinary research project would probably be considered the province of the specialists. In other words, scholars in digital writing may say this type of cross-disciplinary research is outside of their expertise, an argument echoed by L2 writing specialists.
Move 2: Establish A Niche	Though we do not advocate that researchers develop projects about issues in which they have little grounding, we do believe that researchers should view this disciplinary division as an opportunity rather than an obstacle. As we have already begun to see, the writing classroom of the new millennium is characterized by digitally mediated communication and is populated by students from around the world. Both writing instructors and writing researchers face situations that specializations have not prepared them for. As multimodalities and multiliteracies become the reality of the writing classroom, claims of disciplinary ignorance are becoming increasingly irresponsible. Yet, to engage in these types of inquiry (such as answering the questions above), teacher scholars have little theoretical and methodological precedent for studying issues of these disciplines. Scholars, such as George Braine (2001, 2003), Martha Pennington (1996), Marianne Phinney and Sandra Khouri (1993), Jeanne Marie Rose (2004), Taku Sugimoto (2004), and FrankTuzi (2004), have begun a discussion about digital/L2 writing with their theories and examinations, but the conversation is still only a murmur.
Move 3: Present the Present Work	For researchers looking to contribute to this emerging conversation, as we know from designing our own research projects, one has to creatively extrapolate from both fields to cobble together pedagogical and methodological strategies. Because such research draws on multiple methodological and disciplinary traditions, we believe that a post-critical framework, as detailed by Patricia Sullivan and James E. Porter (1997), provided an appropriate methodological foundation for studying the various digital writing practices of L2 writers. Grounded in the field of digital writing, Sullivan and Porter have emphasized that ¡§all methodology is rhetorical, an explicit or implicit theory of human relations which guides the operation of method¡¨ (p. 10). They join others by challenging the traditional methodologies of the objective researcher. The alternative they propose prompts researchers to construct transparent methodological designs, designs that reveal the researchers¡¦ positions (ideological, theoretical, practical, physical). In this new millennium, when most writing (especially in academic contexts) means ¡§electronic writing¡¨ (Sullivan & Porter, 1997, p. 151) and diverse student populations bring global literacies to the university (as international students, immigrant students, and generation1.5 students), the inquiries about student populations and the writing technologies that they use are political discussions. A post-critical methodology encourages researchers to forefront these ideological issues in a research project¡¦s design. To further justify post-critical methods for digital/L2 writing research, we will detail Sullivan and Porter's argument and illustrate how this framework resonates with recent methodological discussions in both digital writing and L2 writing. After establishing a theoretical foundation for post-critical methods, we explain the implications of its application. Although we recognize that post-critical strategies provide only one of many useful methodological approaches for designing digital/L2 writing research projects, we will demonstrate why these methods are a particularly appropriate starting point for such research.