I noticed my facebook problem when I couldn’t reach the end of my news feed while sitting on the commode one morning. I hadn’t…what? eaten enough to get me through the ribbon of repetitive and mindless posts from which I couldn’t turn away? Ugh. I realized that with the ubiquity of digital technology we have amplified a problem of blind consumerism. Many of us simply vacuum up content, “liking” or “sharing” instead of arguing or interrogating. We are caught in an endless scroll through bumper-sticker wisdom or repetitive posts about how “The Donald” once again stepped on his own junk.

Think for a minute about any rhetorical act, any use of language for some purpose. This rhetorical act can be graphically represented as a triangle with the three corners representing audience, subject, and speaker/writer respectively.

         Writer/Speaker

Audience                  Subject

Among these three influences on language, my dad has always argued that audience is most significant. He is usually reminding me of this when I haven’t responded to emails he has sent. He wants to draw me out, to engage. He wants me to remember that this triangle is pliable. He wants me to act and reflect. When we position ourselves as mere consumers, when we naively believe “reading” is a passive act of reception, this triangle becomes rigid and fixed. We live cowering in the audience corner with dilated pupils. We acquiesce to a culture of power feeding us a steady diet of advertisement and cat videos, Huxley’s soma.

It doesn’t have to be so. Many school districts, the one I teach in included, have taken up one-to-one technology initiatives. Every student has a device – a tablet or laptop. Of course, like any other initiative or “strategy,” digital technology is no silver bullet. If these devices are only used to replace paper texts or only to assess (which is happening) we will have missed the opportunity technology represents. We will have cast our students as mere consumers of a standards-aligned curriculum. We will have sterilized and teacher-proofed the classroom. And we will all be forever looking for the end of whatever newsfeed, curriculum, classroom management system into which we’ve become entangled.

If however, we understand the relationship between writer, audience, and subject matter is fluid. If we understand that literacy, digital literacy especially so, is a process to actively engage well then, the possibilities are thrilling.

Aspects of power are enacted in classrooms, and digital technologies offer opportunities to to intentionally build collaborative, connected, and innovative spaces. Not attending to classroom culture in intentional ways results in a default setting of the status-quo. Such classrooms look eerily like one another and eerily like the classrooms I sat in thirty years ago – desks in rows facing some platonic cave wall, a chalkboard or white board or smart board. Curriculum is just a corpus of stuff to be delivered, to be written or projected onto the cave wall. Writing tasks become contrived academic exercises often organized around rhetorical modes: the compare and contrast essay, or the descriptive essay.

Intentional culture building in the classroom, therefore, is risky and maybe a little subversive. It challenges the existing power structures. I want my classroom to be collaborative and innovative. I want my student-writers to have more autonomy over the rhetorical forces of audience and purpose. To do so, we begin unpacking our understanding of the word empathy. Meaningful collaboration toward meaningful ends depends on empathy, on having empathic thinking partners. We name and practice four qualities of empathy as defined by Teresa Wiseman and Brene Brown: perspective taking, suspending judgment, recognizing emotion in others, and communicating that to them.

Specifically, we begin the semester by interviewing our thinking partner, learning as much as we can about their interests, hopes and goals, their summer. We practice paraphrasing and asking clarifying questions. We engage in rounds of feedback-giving and receiving to be sure we have information that is accurate and willing to be shared. We then introduce, via a prezi, our thinking-partner to the class. We are establishing a way of being together that is collaborative and empathic and digitally connected; we are creating culture. I am also introducing a digital technology, prezi, I will expect students to engage and appropriate for various work throughout the semester.

Creating class culture isn’t simply a matter of engaging in cute or fun “icebreakers” on the first day, and then proceeding to cover the curriculum. Cultures emerge over time through the active participation of all members in the rituals and routines of the class. We both shape and are shaped by the larger community. And it requires maintenance.

One way I maintain and grow classroom culture is through writing, what William Zinsser would call Type B writing – writing to learn. Writing is so often tied to assessment by the culture of power – defined as merely a means of delivering an answer, some truth or meaning projected on that cave wall. Reflecting culture. Writing to learn is messier, riskier, and works to redirect the flow of power in a classroom.

Early in September, I invite my senior students to read the Wendell Berry essay “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear,” a piece he wrote about the 9/11 attacks. The piece, in very gentle ways if you know Berry, pokes at American hubris and blind patriotism. I ask students to write “one-pagers” in response to the essay. I expect three things from one-pagers – that they are more developed than a single paragraph, that based on what is written in the one-pager (quotes, paraphrases, insightful questions and speculation, etc.) it is evident that the mentor text – the Berry piece – has been read, and that this writing be done and shared in a digital space, Google Drive, specifically.

Students react strongly to the piece as it challenges some of our grand narratives; it offers a different perspective on those tragic events. It challenges our empathic capacities to suspend judgment and take up another’s perspective.

The following exchanges unfolded both in face to face classroom experiences and in digital spaces outside the brick and mortar classroom. All students have school issued gmail and drive accounts which allowed this work, these conversations to continue. We used the digital spaces and technologies to engage one another, the curriculum, and to negotiate our place in the world.

In his one-pager David (pseudonym) writes:

This article was not a very good one. It followed no structure, no point was backed up with fact, and it lacked a consistent thesis throughout. Berry starts with “9/11 was bad” and continues on in a five page rant about how technology breeds hatred and how we need to save the environment. He even goes as far as saying that teaching muslim [sic] traditions in school would have helped prevent 9/11; You know, the american [sic] school system that legally does not teach any religion, should have taught this one. Thats [sic] his stance on how to make the world an equal and better place, treat one group better than the other so they won't get offended. I had absolutely no desire to finish this article, [sic] I only read it so i [sic] could get a grade on this paper.

The second and final paragraph of David’s paper goes on to name-call and rant but does not support any claims. In the comments bar of his google drive page, David and I have been discussing the ideas in the Berry piece. I first wrote:

Can you support this claim [paragraph one] with the text? Despite his early mention of technology and how it was used, I'd say that technology was not the focus of the piece.

To which David replied:

Just for the sake of continuing what looks to be a wonderful argument...

He then quotes directly several passages from the text each of which containing a reference to technology – supporting his original claim that Berry “continues on in a five page rant about how technology breeds hatred.” His response ends with:

While it may not be the main focus of the essay, Berry does seem to possess a negative opinion to technological advancements and progress, even going as far as to blame weapons and tactics for villainy in the world

A few things are noteworthy in this exchange. First, notice how tone has changed in David’s writing. He is less angry and judgmental. He is more aware of audience, and he is using the text more to support his claims (A major emphasis of the Common Core – or New Illinois Learning Standards, as they are now being called in my state). He is engaged and passionate still. Our exchange isn’t about winning but about perspective-taking and clarifying and testing our own assumptions and beliefs.

As our school year began, a shooting sparked unrest in Ferguson, MO – just across the river from us. Our faculty was advised not to talk about what was happening a mere thirty miles from our front door. If you were to read the comments oozing below any news story or facebook post about the event, you could understand the directive, maybe. Still, in any language or history or literature class directed not to talk about Ferguson it became a giant elephant in the room.

Students in my sophomore English class read Sherman Alexie’s novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a novel of race and class and coming of age. Parallels to Ferguson were impossible to avoid.

For one of our first formal writing assignments of the semester, I invite students to write editorials for the local paper’s guest columnist feature (a feature they have recently dropped). This writing gives students autonomy over the rhetorical forces of audience and purpose – stretches them to write about something they care about for a broad audience. Given what was happening just across the river and given the literature we were studying, some students took up issues of race and class.

In her first draft, Elaine created a metaphor to try and understand race and express a tolerant world view. She compared race to milk – chocolate or white doesn’t matter. Milk is milk. The metaphor is awkward and doesn’t quite work, but that is not the point. Here is a writer working out complex issues and trying to express an empathic world-view. While working through the writing process Elaine received feedback from her thinking partner and from me. She revised her opening metaphor:

When a banana turns from green to yellow does the inside change? Or how about when it turns from yellow to brown? No, the inside stays the same no matter what color the skin on the outside is. You could say the same thing about people; does a person changed [sic] on the inside after they are sunburned and turn red? What if they got a suntan does that change who they are inside? No, they are still the same person they were to begin with, just with a different skin color. This all has to do with the topic I chose, racial equality.

The metaphor is still labored but works better than the milk metaphor. Awkward metaphors aside, what we see here is a writer working through complex issues, shaping her language to fit her world view, and in the process her world view evolves and matures. Her understanding of racial equality is evolving by being an active member of our class culture.

David and Elaine both shape and are shaped by the classroom culture we are creating. Their own identities, their hopes and goals, are given space are made available to others to learn from and with. Learning is social. It is discursive – grounded in language. Attending in intentional ways – collaboration, reflection, writing to learn – gives teachers and students alike access to these powerful modes of learning.

Digital technologies, coupled with an intentionally constructed, empathic, collaborative classroom culture moves people from being mere and mindless consumers. Creating content, appropriating technologies, asking questions rather than parroting answers is the hope of a connected world.