Technology comes slowly to small rural school districts like
Portland Public Schools in Michigan. Money is tight and there
is little funding or time for teacher training. But it does eventually
arrive, and with it come opportunities to challenge students'
notions of text and broaden their literacy skills.
I have found hypertext to be a wonderful
vehicle for growing middle school students' literacies. If nothing
else it challenges students to find relationships between pieces
of text, and such relational thinking helps move them beyond
their traditional concepts of textuality.
But of course, there is so much more. The purpose of my eighth
grade language arts class is not to teach students about technology.
The computer, for the purposes of this particular class, is merely
a vehicle through which students learn more about themselves,
the world, and text in general. These are critical elements of
literacy, and eighth grade language arts is all about building
literacy. Keene and Zimmerman, in their
excellent book Mosaic of Thought (1997) stress that literacy
is about individual readers and writers connecting text to themselves
and their real life experiences, about connecting text to what
they know about the world and how it works, and about connecting
what they are currently reading and writing to what they know
about textual conventions and structures and texts they have
read in the past. But of course students learn a great deal about
computer technology as they work on their hypertext projects.
My goal for my students is to open up the world of text, to
make it more accessible to them. Students do this through creating
their own texts, via web editors, and through reading others'
hypertexts.
Tuman (1992) points out that such
electronic media as hypertext allow students to engage in textual
interaction with more totality. Certainly more student-centered
reading and writing pedagogies that use a workshop approach move
us closer to this. And I use reading and writing workshops in
my language arts classroom. But hypertext allows me to more fully
practice such student-centered pedagogy. Part of this rests in
the sheer totality of student engagement
with electronic text. It is perhaps too early to tell whether
that engagement stems from technology as novelty or from the
fact that electronic text is more easily manipulated and that
students sense more power over text for that reason. That sense
of power may bring about more engagement with text and textuality.
Michael Joyce (1995) believes that
hypertext empowers novice learners because it allows them to
engage in "fundamental cognitive skills that experts routinely,
subtly, and self-conciously apply in accomplishing intellectual
tasks" (40). In other words, it engages students in authentic
literacy events or tasks. Paul J. LeBlanc
(1994) reminds us that if technology is going to work as an agent
for advancing student literacy, teachers must have a clear model
of literacy and an underlying theoretical framework which informs
and supports their classroom practice.
The theory that informs my classroom practice falls broadly
under the banner of constructivism where students work through
a learning task or problem, constructing their own meaning in
the process.
I keep LeBlanc's caveat in mind when I introduce each hypertext
project to my students. I want to move my students to create
what Joyce calls constructive hypertexts, bodies of information
that call upon both readers and writers "to create, change,
and recover particular encounters within the developing body
of knowledge" (42). I want them to experience what it is
like to create "visual representations of the knowledge
they develop" (42).
I believe that immersing students in a network of text--their
own and others, challenges and pushes their literacy. Jay
Bolter (1991) reminds us that "a true electronic text
is not a fixed sequence of letters, but is instead from the writer's
point of view a network of verbal elements and from the reader's
point of view a texture of possible readings" (5). I want
my middle school students to experience this texture of possible
readings and see that text is not a fixed entitity. Students
work toward this goal by pariticipating in hypertext projects
throughout the school year. This article will discuss two of
those projects--a poetry web where
students annotate a poem of their choosing, and a biography
web where students select a figure from American history,
research that figure, and create a hypertext web designed to
inform others about that person.
Placing students in an environment where this is the expectation,
I believe, pushes their literacy because it challenges them to
reimagine text, to reinvent text for their own purposes. Few
school writing tasks truly challenge students to do this, to
transform knowledge. Joyce calls this type of text work the "essence
of learning" (43).
