Who Owns School?: Authority, Students, and Online Discourse (New Dimensions in Computers and Composition)

This volume examines the ways in which college students engage in online discussions about, and debates over, their relative authority in postsecondary literacy education. Spotlighting sites of online extra-institutional discourse that challenge what faculty believe about the interconnected acts of reading and writing, as well as the purposes of teacher evaluation, this book argues that while college faculty frequently enact student-centred pedagogies, and just as frequently employ various technologies in their teaching, non-“academic” technologies continue to be the most active venue for student discourse about education. Though many teachers strive to empower their students via liveratory or critical pedagogies, particularly in first-year writing and reading-based courses, many of these students still feel sufficiently disengaged from their own authority over the learning process as as to seek opportunities to voice this disengagement online, outside the confines of the educational system. As evident on several commercially sponsored or profit-bearing web sites, students express among their peers―which importantly include those living outside one’s home or school communities―trepidation about their relative agencies and ownership of their own education, including their ability to read and interpret texts; write proficiently (or even adequately) in a high-stakes setting; and be heard as valid participants in education reform/teacher evaluation.