Remediating (our motivations in) the classroom

To think about remediation in the classroom, or rather, to think about remediating the classroom, requires an instructor to rediscover his or her fundamental motivations and pedagogical beliefs. In my ponderings, I noted that Bolter and Grusin’s theory of remediation maintains that media constantly changes, shifts, and blends. That writing, academic or otherwise, stays static makes little sense. Because we ought not to treat the classroom like a vacuum, we must be aware of the changing rhetorical situations in the world beyond the classroom door and incorporate the skills necessary to be successful in these rhetorical moments into our teachings. It would be a great disservice to our students to ignore the movements in the world “out there” and pretend that they (and we) belong to a stagnant world “in here.” When I mentioned this in class, someone posed this question: “Yes, we can say we want to bring technologies into our classrooms to empower students, but what’s in it for us?”

The question blindsided me. Of course, I take graduate courses because I enjoy them and because I love learning, but I plan to teach first and foremost because I love the possibility of empowering others. What is in it for me is what is good for my students. Granted, like all desires, my plan to teach also benefits me directly; it is not wholly selfless. I might get summers off to travel. Empowering others will, hopefully, contribute to positive, larger scale social change that will benefit everyone, including myself. Teaching will allow me to continue learning, will afford me the chance to meet many different people from whom I can acquire new skills and new knowledge, and will give me the opportunity to take part in engaging, critical discussions of theory, its manifestations, and its applications. To ignore technology, new media, and the changing nature of mediation (past, present and future), then, would be to deprive students of the opportunity to communicate more effectively with the people around them and would deprive all of us (students and teachers) the opportunity to gain new insight about today’s “what is,” and to think critically and rhetorically, as Selber might suggest, about why it is, how we fit into it all, and how we can shape it and ourselves when change becomes necessary.

To think about remediating the classroom, we must not just question our feelings towards technology; we must also question what motivates us to teach and what we consider our goal in the classroom.