ENGL 680M: New Media

I'm teaching Business Writing this semester for the first time, so I'm in the PW mentoring class. This is the first time in a long time that I'm teaching a brand spanking-new class, and it's that way for many of the folks with me in mentoring. Teaching the new course and taking mentoring has led me to return to many of the same fundamental questions about teaching writing that I first had when I started. The one that comes up more than any other is, what exactly is the range of what we should be teaching in writing courses?

In my PW mentoring, there are two different schools of thought. One school believes that we shouldn't expect our students to do anything that we aren't willing to teach them. If we're going to assign them a PowerPoint presentation, in other words, we should be prepared and willing to teach them how to use PowerPoint. The second school of thought believes that we are there to teach rhetoric and rhetoric alone, and that it is the students' responsibility to learn the tools that will help them create the rhetoric they want to create. These tools are typically computer applications. A very vocal few in my mentoring class believe that it's perfectly acceptable to expect students to create documents using Publisher, Dreamweaver, Adobe, etc. without being prepared or willing to teach these applications or even spend class time answering basic questions about them.

I have always held the philosophy that, within reason, I don't hold my students responsible for things that I don't teach them in the class. It's always seemed unethical to me to expect them to know things I'm not going to teach. (Again, this is within reason--I think it's pretty acceptable now to expect students will know how to use Microsoft Word. But even with things that are second nature to most students, like Word and the Internet, I have helped students one-on-one.) I have always seen it as unacceptable and unethical to expect my students to make a website with Dreamweaver if I'm not willing to show them how to use it.

One of my PW mentors reminded me that this line of thinking, even though it feels more comfortable to me, has often worked to make English classes like composition and even business writing a dumping ground for everything that no one else has the time or the desire to teach. He explained that, when he taught high school, this was something he fought constantly. If we want to prevent English courses (he argues) from becoming this sort of dumping ground, we have to set up some strict boundaries as far as what we're willing to teach. I do tend to feel overwhelmed by the amount of material I could potentially cover in my Comp and PW courses, so any way to limit the amount I have to cover is appealing to me. I also like the idea (especially in the Business Writing course) of making students responsible for going off on their own and learning new things of their choosing, without me forcing them to. At the same time, though, putting this much responsibility on the students still seems a little off to me. I also worry that encouraging them to learn applications on their own that will allow them to create documents for my course focuses too much on the product, since the idea is that they should do--independently of me--whatever they need to do to produce.

This post is less of an argument than an exploration (or rambling). I'm curious--where do you guys stand on this?