Institutional Literacies

Information technologies have become an integral part of writing and communication courses, shaping the ways students and teachers think about and do their work. But, too often, teachers and other educational stakeholders take a passive or simply reactive role in institutional approaches to technologies, and this means they are missing out on the chance to make positive changes in their departments and on campus.

Institutional Literacies argues that writing and communication teachers and program directors should collaborate more closely and engage more deeply with IT staff as technology projects are planned, implemented, and expanded. Teachers need to both analyze how their institutions approach information technologies and intervene in productive ways as active university citizens with relevant expertise. To help them do so, the book offers a three-part heuristic, reflecting the reality that academic IT units are complex and multilayered, with historical, spatial, and textual dimensions. It discusses six ways teachers can intervene in the academic IT work of their own institutions: maintaining awareness, using systems and services, mediating for audiences, participating as user advocates, working as designers, and partnering as researchers. With these strategies in hand, educators can be proactive in helping institutional IT approaches align with the professional values and practices of writing and communication programs.
"Information technologies have become central to all functions of higher education, including writing and communications departments. Understanding how academic IT professionals make decisions, manage projects, and interact with academic departments is key for the faculty, administrators, and staff in those departments. To aid in this understanding, Stuart Selber spent two years embedded in Penn State's Teaching and Learning with Technology unit. His book offers new insights into the practices, attitudes, and assumptions of academic IT professionals and argues that composition faculty should collaborate more closely and engage more deeply with IT staff as composition technology projects are planned, implemented, and expanded. To help them do so, the book offers a three-part heuristic, reflecting the reality that academic IT units are complex and multilayered, with historical, spatial, and textual dimensions"--

Stuart A. Selber is associate professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, editor of Rhetorics and Technologies and Computers and Technical Communication, and coeditor, with Johndan Johnson-Eilola, of Central Works in Technical Communication.

"This book will inform a diverse array of readers and stakeholders on university campuses about the need to develop a set of literate practices to better understand the impact of technology on teaching and learning. Altogether, it is a phenomenal contribution to conversations in rhetoric and composition and beyond that, like so much of Selber's work, will become canonical in a range of disciplines."-- "Kristine L. Blair, Duquesne University"