Teaching Composition Online: No Longer the Second Best Choice

Blair, Leslie. "Teaching Composition Online: No Longer the Second Best Choice." Kairos. 8.2. 2003. < http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/8.2/binder.html?praxis/blair/index.html>
(23 September 2009)


In this article, Leslie Blair discusses her experience teaching composition online and in the traditional classroom, arguing that teaching composition online is no longer inferior to teaching composition in the traditional classroom. Blair discusses her position that “there are advantages to teaching writing through a text-based technology,” contextualizing her argument in terms of Bakhtin’s theory of communication, group development, and learning rhetoric online. In her discussion of communication, she contends that student-teacher communication cannot be considered authentic, and that at least in an online setting students responses to teachers are written, providing an additional opportunity for learning. She also indicates that the notion of audience shifts in the online classroom and that this is valuable, a seemingly postmodern pedagogical connection. Blair goes on to recommend small groups as a technique for building community in the online classroom and to underscore the significance of the fact that student perceptions of status based on race, gender, or cultural background in an online classroom become less important.

One of the first things I noticed about Blair’s article is its relationship to Black’s article in as much as both authors underscore the possibilities available to students when they are able to go back and reflect on their posts and the posts of other students:

"Hewett also noted that students have the opportunity to save posts that their peers make to use them as a prompt for further responses and review (as qtd. in Blair). As they put this kind of contemplation into their writing, students begin to internalize considerations about audience and purpose when they write because they have become part of a group that forms their audience." (Screen 2)

Blair makes an interesting point, and her discussion of audience as it is related to community-building and electronic writing is an interesting one. I do feel, however, that Blair becomes a bit too excited about the “new possibilities” in teaching writing online and glosses over some of the problems that can be encountered along the lines of gender and race, student-teacher dynamics, and a reification of traditional views of power and authority associated with the on-ground classroom. I do think Blair’s discussion of using electronic writing and discussions in the traditional classroom is interesting. Overall, this article is helpful in as much as it discusses electronic writing in much more detail, electronic writing being the primary tool available for building community in the online classroom.