Part collection of case studies, part autoethnography, and part working research model, Sibylle Gruber's Literacies, Experiences, and Technologies: Reflective Practices of an Alien Researcher investigates the democratizing potential of technological literacy for "involuntary minority women" (Gruber's term) within the context of her own position as a researcher in a nonnative country and framed by feminist, postmodern, and cyborgian theories (1). Rather than argue that technology is or is not democratizing for these minority students, Gruber's goal is to illustrate the need for researchers to investigate themselves within the context of their research. Her book investigates Gruber the researcher through examining Gruber the ESL student, Gruber the feminist, Gruber the instructor, and Gruber the administrator, using as evidence her case studies as well as her own personal narrative. She writes:
I hope to show that as researchers we need to highlight that our own literacies, our ideologies, and our predilections are integral to how we approach and conduct research, and how we choose, analyze, and compose the stories that our research participants share with us. (28)
Literacies is effectively the case study of the researcher.
For fellow researchers interested in following an open-ended, question-raising, model of research in composition this book may serve as a valuable model; Gruber consistently brings her research back to questions concerning the nature of the research as well as her own interpretation of it. As a feminist, she practices allowing various forms of knowledge to enter her discussion, including her own personal history, so feminist researchers interested in this method will also find much to take away from this book. Because the book intends to be open-ended and to raise questions rather than to answer them, instructors looking for useful pedagogical tools for using technology in the classroom are not the ideal audience. Those interested in pedagogical questions surrounding the use of technology and how it influences hierarchical relationships in the classroom will, however, have their curiosity piqued.
Chapter 1
In the first chapter, Gruber lays out the structure of the book, introduces her main subjects (including herself), and an examination of the motivations and history behind her research and subject selection. Gruber situates herself as an alien (she is from Austria) and explains her own evolving understanding of "race" in the United States, beginning as a graduate student outsider who saw all Americans regardless of race as "highly privileged" compared to her own status as legal alien and culminating in the research in this book. She ends the chapter: "Most importantly, I show that I am not done thinking through these complicated issues of nationality, race, culture, history, and experience. I have much to ask and much to learn" (10). She reemphasizes the tentative nature of her research and the fact that it is on going, beyond the scope of the book. We are thus invited into her thought process, beginning in Chapter 2, which details her own theoretical grounding for her research as well as for her personal narrative.
Chapter 2
Gruber begins her discussion of the theoretical basis for her research with Christina Haas and Christine Neuwirth, who, according to Gruber, suggest that "we not only use computers, but they also use us" (11). Gruber advocates critical technological literacy that acknowledges that computers are not just neutral tools. She also cites Bertram Bruce and Selfe and Selfe to back up this position. Gruber further aligns herself with Dona Haraway's cyborg theory, explaining that "neither the machine nor the organism are clearly definable entities" (13) as a cyborg. Not only do we and computers use each other, but the boundaries between our fingertips and the keyboard, between our minds and the computer's programs, are also blurred.
Beyond this theoretical grounding for the study of technological literacy, Gruber seeks to ground her interest in the gender dynamic of this literacy within feminist theory that takes "women's social, cultural, economic, and ethnic backgrounds into consideration" (16). She invokes bell hooks, Susan Jarratt, Marsha Houston, and Gloria Anzaldúa. As Houston points out, "women of color do not experience sexism in addition to racism, but sexism in the context of racism; thus they cannot be said to bear an additional burden that white women do not bear, but to bear an altogether different burden from that borne by white women" (qtd. in Gruber 18). Following this logic, Gruber acknowledges her own position as outsider and her subsequent inability to understand the experiences of her research subjects. She attempts to achieve what Iris Marion Young calls "asymmetrical reciprocity" in her interpretation of her data and in her personal contextualization. Gruber writes: "Young's work on asymmetrical reciprocity helped me understand that I could only respect my participants if I did not assume knowledge about the other that I could never achieve" (19). She seeks to respect individual experience. Throughout the rest of the book, Gruber recalls this mandate and effectively hedges her interpretations as well as questions her own assumptions of knowledge.
She ends the chapter with a brief introduction to her own computer literacy narrative as an ESL student and a composition instructor. As Gruber moves on to discuss her first subject's, Alba's, experience of computer literacy in Chapter 3, she will further develop her own literacy narrative as well.
Chapter 3
The title of Chapter 3 is "Living in Different Cultures: Experiences of the Borderlands," which immediately brings us back to Anzaldúa as a theoretical framework, while effectively describing the position of the subject of the chapter, Alba, a Latina student in Gruber's Basic Writing class, as well as echoing what we already know of the author's experience living in the United States as a legal alien. Gruber writes:
What I want to show in this chapter is twofold. I want to show the complicated positionalities that Alba occupies at the university, in the classroom, and in her home environment. I also want to show that as a researcher I need to be critically aware of my own interpretations of my work and my own positionalities as the researcher and teacher in this context. (29-30)
It is not enough to acknowledge the multiplicity inherent in the identity of the participant without also investigating the researcher's multiple subject positions. This chapter weaves Alba's literacy narrative with Gruber's narrative of her immigrant experience with transcripts of Alba's online comments in Gruber's class, creating a web of meaning that, according to Tierney, "confronts dominant forms of representation and power in an attempt to reclaim, through self-reflexive response, representational spaces that have marginalized those of us on the borders" (qtd. in Gruber 30). Is the representational space here the online discussion forum or the book itself? Or both?
From the observation of Alba's discourse online versus in class, Gruber asserts that Alba was able to be critical in ways she was not able to be in the class and that she participated more. It is not clear from the context of this chapter if there were other factors that contributed to her increase in critical analysis and participation. Was it further along in the term, and therefore was Alba more comfortable in general participating? Or more fluent in critical thinking? Despite this potential drawback of the chapter, if we consider Gruber's over-arching goal to investigate herself as researcher, she does effectively question nearly every assumption she makes when approaching the online class discussion as well as her interpretation of it.
One particular moment that highlights Gruber's attempt to maintain an asymmetrical reciprocity occurs in her discussion of her own lack of reaction to a post of Alba's that details a personal experience of gang violence. In retrospect, Gruber writes, "Now I understand that my silence might have been an indication of not being interested in Alba's story or of assuming that I knew what Alba experienced . . . I went away with preconceived notions about the 'ghetto' and Alba's experiences with violence" (51). In this pedagogically vulnerable moment, Gruber admits to having failed (at least in part) in this particular instance to respect Alba's experience. This chapter is useful in its pedagogical self-reflection as well as in its research methodology. Additionally, as Gruber points out, it is valuable because of the large sections of Alba's voice in the text, as an individual, not as a representative. Gruber continues this individual focus in Chapter 4, which details the online posts of Celie, an African American woman in the same Basic Writing class.
Chapter 4
Celie serves as a good counterpoint to Alba in a number of ways. Her position as "outsider" is only newly acquired in college. Her communication style online is short and conversational, as opposed to Alba's long, composed posts. Perhaps most importantly for his project, Gruber acknowledges her own inability to understand Celie's position in society. Gruber allows herself to fall into assumptions in her research of Celie, only to then deconstruct those assumptions. The effect is eye-opening and refreshing. One example of this technique occurs when Celie tells Gruber that her high school was not diverse. "When I heard Celie say that, I automatically assumed that most students and teachers were Anglo and that she was one of the few who did not fit the majority profile" (62). Celie continues, however, that 90% of the students in her high school were African-American. This revelation completely turns around all of Gruber's assumptions about Celie based on her race and on Gruber's learning of race relations in the U.S. Celie is only just experiencing herself as an outsider in the new educational setting of college, and Gruber sees her struggling with this.
Though Gruber illustrates a great deal of self-reflection in deconstructing her own initial assumptions, she continues to make some assumptions about how Celie must be feeling in her new environment: "She looked tired and overwhelmed, and it took her a while to start concentrating on the tasks at hand. Some days she seemed dazed by all the expectations imposed on her" (69). Here, it seems Gruber is reading quite a bit into Celie's demeanor in class. This feeling is somewhat corroborated later by Celie's own assessment of her performance in the class initially as "a rocky start" (69), but Gruber still seems to be making too many assumptions about what constitutes "rocky" for Celie.
This being said, the chapter is still significant. Gruber includes many excerpts of transcripts from Celie's online communication as well as from interviews that effectively bring Celie to life for the reader and offer a very different individual account of a minority woman's experience with technological literacy and with college in general. Celie's online personality is refreshingly assertive and critical. She seems unafraid to take other students to task for their comments and is adept at using the technology to illustrate her intended tone through all caps and exclamation points. We leave the chapter feeling we have been introduced to Celie through her own voice and not just through Gruber's interpretation of it. We move to the next chapter, which details an online communication between several students in this class, armed with a more personal knowledge of two of the players, Alba and Celie.
Chapter 5
This is perhaps the most interesting and the most disturbing of the chapters. Gruber details an online discussion of date rape (and then rape more generally) in which she resisted adopting an authoritarian role, and (perhaps consequently) the discussion seemed to get out of hand with several male students blaming rape victims for their victimhood, and Alba potentially being very hurt. Gruber does not shy away from criticizing herself, but gives no definitive conclusions about the episode. This chapter, more than any other, raises questions about the efficacy of an attempt to decentralize authority in the classroom through use of an online discussion forum. This exploration leads us to larger questions about how authority is figured in any classroom and how a teacher in deflecting from her own authority may be providing space for traditional patriarchal authority to take over. It hangs as an ugly hinge for the book, before moving to a more generalized discussion of technological literacy in the Navajo Nation, as represented by two individuals whose voices are not as extensively documented as the previous participants.
Chapter 6
Chapter 6 is vastly different from the previous chapters in its setting, subjects, and methodology. The focus on the researcher as subject, however, remains constant. This chapter situates Gruber in a new Context at Northern Arizona University, where she must develop a new literacy in Navajo education history. Gruber details her own discoveries on the subject and effectively takes the reader through a quick overview of education in the Navajo Nation without projecting any assumptions about whether readers would or should already know this information. She recalls the visit in 2000 to the Navajo Nation by President Bill Clinton (the first presidential visit ever) in order to address what he named "the digital divide" (125). Perhaps more than anywhere else in the book, Gruber's own lens of her family history in Austria adds depth to an understanding of the attempt to bring digital literacy to the Navajo Nation. She explains that in her own home in Austria, in a farming family, her parents found the idea of a computer to be useless to their everyday needs, just as many of the Navajo people in her experience have found computers to be outside the realm of their everyday struggles and ultimately unhelpful. This chapter raises questions about access to technology as a goal when many other educational needs are not being met.
Specifically, Gruber concentrates on the experiences of two women in the Navajo Nation, Jolita and Mani. They both come from very different backgrounds with and attitudes to technology. Jolita is a nontraditional student hoping to become a more effective teacher. Of computers she says, "I do not like them" (146). She is forced to use computers for her assignments, but sees them simply as inconvenient, but neutral, tools. Jolita is also older than any of the other participants in the book; she was born in 1954. Though this is useful in spanning the history of the digital divide in the Navajo Nation and in illustrating through her personal educational history the history of education on the reservation, it also leads the reader to wonder how much of Jolita's reluctance to use technology is generational and not related to her minority status. Gruber does not bring this particular question up, but she does reassert her goal to give individual minority women voice in the text. So Jolita is not meant to be representative, though the account of her experiences and attitudes add a new dimension to the book thus far.
Mani, on the other hand, works with the Education Technology Improvement Project that works to integrate technology successfully in the classroom while acknowledging and incorporating Navajo values (147-8). Mani has been interested in computers most of her life and had a computer science degree. She seems in many ways the polar opposite of Jolita. Gruber's choice of subjects in this chapter is very effective since, though they are individuals and not representatives, they do offer a broad spectrum of attitudes toward technology that works to disrupt any easy proclamations about Native Americans' attitude toward and use of technology. Gruber writes:
What I try to show is that Jolita's and Mani's technological literacies are literacies that grow out of many other literacies that are a part of their lives. They are members of a marginalized group as well as individuals whose literacies are changing constantly, adjusting to new experiences and revising old ones. This, then, is an effort to show what provided motivation for literacy acquisition, and how technologies can help or hinder this process. (122)
Though Jolita and Mani stand as individuals, Gruber's approach to them can be applied to all students of technology. Technological literacies must "grow out of many other literacies" that are a part of any students' lives. What Gruber writes here about Jolita and Mani can be just as easily applied to Celie and Alba, and therefore she situates her discussion of Jolita and Mani as a part of the previous discussion. In the final chapter, Gruber does more work to tie her research into one over-arching discussion of technological literacy and research.
Chapter 7
The concluding chapter reemphasizes the question-posing purpose of the book as opposed to question-answering. Gruber attempts to define the various questions that her work engenders as well as reasserting her initial goals in representing her participants as whole individuals. She concludes looking to the future: "I hope that it can move us beyond established patterns, giving credence to the work of scholars who embrace alternative scholarship such as auto-ethnography and personal narrative" (157). According to Gruber, this kind of alternative research resists essentializing our subjects and acknowledges our own subject positions as researchers.
Assessment
Literacies, Experiences, and Technologies: Reflective Practices of an Alien Researcher opens doors to new directions in research of technological literacy. Not only does Gruber provide a variety of case studies worth examining for the stories they tell of minority women's journeys in technological literacy, but she also provided an innovative model for conducting such research. She is perhaps uniquely positioned to do so, as an "alien researcher," but native researchers could still adopt her approach as well. We are all alien in some regards to our research subjects. Though the book goes in many directions, and Gruber is not free of assumptions despite her best efforts to acknowledge them, the book is still extremely valuable for researchers in this field. We all carry assumptions about our research and ourselves, but few of us approach these assumptions as part of our research. Gruber is opening up new territory, and her flaws perhaps only illustrate how effective her approach is in getting her readers to think critically about the researcher's position and their own.
Works Cited
Gruber, Sibylle. Literacies, Experiences, and Technologies: Reflective Practices of an Alien Researcher. New Directions in Computers and Composition. Eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007.
1 comment:
Cyborgian!
Looking forward to your presentation. I'll be sure to ask questions.
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