California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: January 9, 1999
Faculty on the Site.
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Perhaps the most exciting part of research is finding yourself right in the middle of it all. A collaborative learning project on adaptation of the new technology of the Web provided us with such a climate. One year ago we set up a Web site. We wanted our students to adapt to the new technology. We wanted to try new teaching strategies that would include them in their own narrative of learning. The Web site took on a life and narrative of its own. This is that narrative.

Our Web site is at http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas. We called it Dear Habermas, the outgrowth of a hardcopy product that evolved from our classes in Sociology of Law. Both of us taught with Habermas'Between Facts and Norms, and Dear Habermas was our means of answering any questions our students put to us, with the preface they always used, "What would Habermas say about. . ." So we became "Dear Habermas" and translated that production into the Web site.

Our goal was to create a forum in which our students had a chance to share their questions and answers, with each other, and at our respective institutions, thousands of miles apart.

We had chosen Habermas because we shared his optimistic hope for the system of law. We did not think it good to share only despair for the future with students. Moreover, it was our fervent hope that Habermas just might be right, that public discourse, in which every citizen has the right to a good faith hearing of his/her validity claims, just might provide a means to peace and a future.

Because we teach in small commuter colleges, it seemed a formidable task to create public discourse amongst our students. Most do not have the leisure time for hours dawdled away in mere academic discussion. The Web site was one of our answers to that. Through the site we had a forum in which all could participate, no matter when or where. One student actually sent e-mail to tell us that she appreciated this opportunity to change into pajamas and grab something to drink as she settled in before her computer. The new technology was offering us some plausible solutions to the time and space conundrums of the commuter environment.

Not all our students had access to their own computers. But we did find some students who lived near one another sharing. Nice result in modern communities. We hope to encourage more of that. We encouraged collaborative work, recognizing both "asking for" and "giving" help as positive contributions to our students' class work. We made tutoring available. We included lab access for those who needed it.

This all worked to varying degrees. We found that the lab machines were pesky and frustrating, but that they were much less provoking when dealt with by collaborative groups. We encouraged that, and held collaborative work groups in our offices. We combined programming on the office machine, with software not licensed in the lab, with lab use of scanners, so that we created interactive paths between our collaborative work spaces.

Site references on this section:

About the Site for out goals.
The Poem and Art Gallery with "If Computers Were Real."
Instructions on Importance of Sharing on Spring 1999 Statistics Syllabus.
Burbules' and Callister's "Risky Promises" A first assignment for all our classes.

Another important goal for our teaching and our site was the recognition of the extent to which learning texts had been ignored by the academic community. Most term papers lie gathering dust under beds and most faculty efforts in reading and writing for their classes go unnoticed and largely uncounted in tenure considerations.

The publishing of textbooks is currently debated on many faculty committees - does such production go toward the successful garnering of additional income, or is it really scholarly production? And this is not a gentle debate. But textbook publication aside, there is much serious thought that does not fit into current projects and very few forums in which to bring such thought to light.

As Barbara Christian notes, a writer without a forum perishes. Habermas despairs for the deplorable state of our skills in public discourse. One of the tremendous advantages of the new technology to higher education is that it permits us, to the extent that it works, to cut across the dilemma of time and space. We were lucky in that both our colleges have had to struggle for equipment. Our consequent view of the new technology, especially through Dear Habermas, is that we must use any combination of hardware and software that we and our students, and our community, can manage to lay their hands on.

In Spring of 1998 we had enough equipment available to move, for the first time, away from traditional paper production. That permitted us to change the ground rules. Term papers, long and cumbersome, and rarely written by great writers, gave way to texts that could be shared on the Web site. That meant that whatever students produced would have an audience. And produce they did.

An excerpt from our Public Discourse as Sociological Method file will afford some idea of our excitement over this production:

"January 8, 1999 update: As we struggle to complete paper submissions and finish research projects, we are forced in the midst of this chaos to recognize that order is beginning to assert itself. I wrote this introduction to public discourse as we were beginning to see it happen on Dear Habermas. But that was in November, and then the semester end was upon us with deadlines and loose threads all about. Now, in January, we see the flurry of projects that emerged. We watched students, some in their seventies, some in their early twenties, collaborate to make those projects available as process texts to others.

From never having used a computer to issuing orders to a programmer, and calmly watching with equanimity the program, if only html, flash across the screen. In one semester! Yes! From surfing lightly while the faculty wrote all the text, to the determination that their texts would go up on the site. In one semester! Yes! From faculty who were desperately trying to manipulate the hardware and software they could scrounge from scrap heaps to the assured knowledge that what they wanted to do could be done with the proper technology. Yes!"

Students had begun to understand that a forum was available. And they wanted it. Now we begin the slow task of understanding how to set up rules and standards, and still hear every validity claim in good faith. Student texts and teacher's text certainly can contribute to the intertextual interpretation of scholarly research and writing. We are just beginning to understand precisely how.

Our growing need to balance the tension between the individual and the community in this new forum is seen in new additions to the site. We want the student's stories. But we also want them to understand how to link those stories back effectively to theory.

We are social constructionists. We believe in the importance of narrative to the contextual understanding of the texts of science and literature. The importance of narrative to identity is clear from our site. But even more particularly, we find that a major factor of identity comes from learning.

"Literacy is a social enterprise, which to be effective, requires both a redefinition of what literacy means and a strategy for achieving it. Every person or group of persons who move into literacy first build a foundation for reading and writing in the world of orality. Orality supports literacy, provides the impetus for shaping it. The skills one learns in orality are crucial because literacy is more than a series of words on paper. It is a set of relationships and structures, a dynamic system that one internalizes and maps back onto experience." A is for Ox: Violence, Electronic Media, and the Silencing of the Written Word, Barry Sanders, Pantheon Books, N.Y., 1994.

Perhaps process texts will take their place in the new tradition of orality on its way back to literacy and public discourse. We, at the very least, have begun to shape those skills with new teaching approaches. We are now directly teaching students to link their stories through the technical terms we use in discussing public discourse: "The idea of providing you with links to help you focus is just aborning. Notice that it transfers from the idea of links on the Web. Interdependence. Isn't that neat? Where this approach doesn't help, let me know. Where it does, let me know. We'll keep the best parts and revise the rest."

We are making provision to teach the language of academic discourse, that all may play. And these links to concepts that qualify us for academic discourse are always at hand, for the site is always there. We are taking a cue from TV, which does not quiz you. You may turn it on or off, as befits your time and space. We are taking a cue from the study of narrative identity. We are letting the students collaborate with us on the narrative of their learning to take part in academic discourse, their learning to engage in discourse.

Site references on this section:

Intertextuality and Teaching Production as Alternative Texts
N.J. Fox's Intertextuality Paper Another paper we ask our students to read.
Calhoun's summary of Habermas' position on this loss of essential skills of discourse.
Public Discourse as Sociological Method Report of the semester's progress in discourse development to the students on the site.
Basic Concepts that offer the student the tools for academic discourse.
Comments, providing guidance to the use of the discourse.
Public Discourse Report to students on site of our goals and strategies for teaching public discourse.

Early in the semester of Fall 1998, we began to realize that a virtual community was forming within Dear Habermas. There was face to face interaction. Students gathered in my office, through which Dear Habermas was programmed. But the face to face interaction did not limit participation in the developing community. There was usually an ultimate link. A student knew someone who knew someone who did hang out in my office. But not always. On two occasions that stand out in my mind for their extraordinary production, the student had only Web access until the actual stage of production of the individual project. Then both interacted face to face with me. They came in. But had not previously done so because of personal constraints.

The diversity of types of interaction is encouraging. We will need to study this aspect of the site and its corresponding virtual community. Access may be completely over the Web, as it was with a young French student. But most choose face to face interaction when they can manage it.

By the end of the semester it had become clear that there was some intutive grasp of forum, of the right to be heard, and of the will to master whatever skills were needed to do that. These students dropped their superficial attitudes to computers faster than any we've ever taught. Programming in html didn't faze them.

I program directly in html, having had considerable programming experience. That is neither the recommended nor the usual procedure. But neither of our schools had the budget for the tech help we needed. The skills we had available, like the software and the equipment, dictated as much of what we did as theory dictated it. But students were unperplexed. They appeared to listen eagerly as I programmed in each piece of the file. Those with fairly solid skills began to see that there was more, and to take over the computer and try their own hand at it. It never was directly expressed that this was extraordinary.

I had never intended to ask that they attain such proficiency over the course of a semester. They certainly still need my presence to guide them through the more complex software. But they seem to recognize that as a minor obstacle. Their eye is on the forum and a virtual community in which they realize a stake.

Site references on this section:
The Chalice of Tribute by JasmineThe Chalice of Tribute Poem, sent by e-mail in one large undifferentiated block. The student sat in my office as I demonstrated the html to alter the line length. She proceeded to take over the computer and create the image of the chalice.
Oneness Student project in which the student discussed at length how to express the concept, and then persisted in seeing this painting through to the site.

These students all took different paths to participating in the forum. But as a virtual community they defined a new learning objective: to create that which could and would be shared with other learners.

To ritualize the paths of interaction before we thoroughly understand them would be tragic. That is one of the alarming aspects of today's higher education. There is a kind of metanarrative of what the "serious" student and what the "serious" teacher, and even what the "serious" university is. We have crystallized these narratives in 20th Century terms. And our loss of orality, of story-telling, and literacy, has impoverished many of us to the naive belief that the ritualized metanarrative of learning IS "learning."

Increasingly, it is becoming clear to us that we are trying to write a collaborative story of learning that will be one of the stories for the 21st Century. We believe that if the writing of such a story is to happen that all must find the skills to tell the individual stories, and that it must come from the collection of stories being written like ours, hesitantly, interactively, reflexively.

We found that, given a chance, guided and encouraged, students have not lost any of the old literacy. They need for us now to help them find the ways to express what they seem to know at some level - that learning is theirs, part of their identity, and precious.

The more we see of student seeking of forums and community, the more we realize the tragedy of the metanarrative with which educators have become satisfied. The metanarrative has feedback provisions. But system-ritualized feedback. It has new rule formation procedures, so that it can adapt to the social changes it determines from its own privileged position of metanarrative. That is what Habermas would call an auto-poietic non-learning subsystem. We consider it essential to our future that universities become learning subsystems, that we demand that the system accord a good faith hearing to all validity claims. Hard to demand of an entrenched perspective. But is the job of the educator, and particularly the sociologist, to do so.

Site references on this section:
Calhoun on the metanarrative of which we speak.
Habermas on an auto poietic non-learning subsystem.

This paper has intermingled our concepts of critical theory and what it means for public discourse and the narrative of learning along with our experiments in interactive teaching on these issue by means of a Web site that we maintain. We believe that our observations and our attempt to fit them into our theoretical orientations have established that public discourse is still possible, that we can recapture literacy in this society, and that students still seek actively to write the narrative of their own learning as a major part of their identity formation.

This doesn't seem like a lot. The sort of thing that should have been obvious to everyone all along. But it has not been that obvious. We have worked steadfastly over nearly twenty years to come to these insights and their practical applications. We hope that others will take what we have learned and carry it on from here.