Flexible use: Tracing technological propositions through an educational ecology

Abstract

To stave off extinction, many Small Liberal Arts Colleges (SLACs) have undertaken dramatic initiatives—often scripted by outside consultants—to bolster their financial solvency, increase their enrollment, excite donor interest, and revitalize their pedagogy, Writing Scholars like Overstreet (2022) and Devoss, Cushman and Grabill (2005) have called for more fine-grained analysis of the sites of Higher Education and the changes that occur in how they teach and engage in the activity of writing and composition. Though multiple studies have measured the efficacy of a newly introduced technological systems of practice to improve writing, much less research has gone into understanding the compositional design of what ‘good’ represents or how value may skew toward the various ideologies that support other stakeholders in addition to the implementing entity. Writing technologies, measured by the criteria of the very literacies which they enact (digital proficiency determining the value of digital tools, for example, mobile proficiency determining the value of mobile tools) often introduce cycles of spending in SLACs which compel them to re-invest in simulacrums of the externally defined modern or good even as the internal struggles that justify spending remain consistent and problematic. This study, borrowing from the spatial analysis of scholars like Pigg (2014) and genre studies of Spinuzzi (2003), looks at how the propositions of a 1:1 technology initiative cut across a local community and were shared, lived, and governed collectively to see the multimodal whole of a community plan to create innovation and improve their social condition.