Mediating Power: Learning Interfaces, Classroom Epistemology, and the Gaze

DePaw, Kevin and Heather Lettner-Rust. “Mediating Power: Distance Learning Interfaces, Classroom Epistemology, and the Gaze.” Computers and Composition. 26: 2009. 174-189.


This article discusses the ways in which distance learning interfaces reinforce traditional methods of instruction that fail to take into account dynamics of the teacher-student relationship. It discusses how, interestingly, though we have made many advances in the field of distance learning, the way the course rooms are set up is still problematic, if not hegemonic: “We argue that the textual and visual features of the different interfaces lend themselves to specific pedagogical choices while suppressing others and, as a result, articulate certain epistemological philosophies and power relationships between instructors and students” (175). Interfaces are “culturally designed” and influence the way communications take pace and the way instructors teach, as well as who is allowed to contribute to the knowledge created in the course. Acknowledging that “the gaze” of the instructor as enabled through distance learning interfaces is impossible to destroy (the authors say the same about notions of power in the traditional classroom), DePaw and Lettner-Rust argue that this power dynamic can be mediated. They not only discuss and analyze case studies to support their assertions, they also discuss the pedagogical implications of this issue.

This article is useful to an investigation of community in the online classroom in myriad ways. Specifically, it addresses a major problem in the construction of these online communities: they are constructed by teachers based on their ideas of how a classroom should be run by drawing on experience gained teaching in the traditional classroom. Also, even if an instructor intentionally attempts to minimize or negate traditional approaches to teaching that underscore the authority of the instructor and deny the possibility of the student as a contributor to knowledge, the instructor is likely still working within course room spaces and with interfaces designed by course designers or software developers whose own notions of classroom dynamics are informed by their own experiences in the traditional classroom. It seems an impossible situation (though the authors disagree), one definitely at the center of any discussion of online classroom dynamics. In fact, this article problematizes the whole notion of the teacher as “communal architect” in the online classroom (see Ebersole and Woods). This article also offers pedagogical implications, suggesting that this problem basically forces us as educators to reexamine the way we are teaching online, especially in writing courses, in which the authors believe a problem-posing course is better than a “banking-model” course (with which I agree). DePaw and Lettner-Rust’s most valuable assertion is that we need to question why we are using a face-to-face model in the construction of distance-learning interfaces at all, and, in my own view, how this necessarily regulates any community-building in the online classroom above and beyond what any instructor or student can contribute.