Conclusions

In this webtext we teased out the various impacts resulting from our experiences with material/pedagogical and personally/institutionally dependent realities. Our conversations offer lived illustrations of writing teacher TPD and the impact of that TPD. Despite CIWIC and DMAC’s 30-year history, gaps often remain between the critical literacies we learned and the practices we presently reside within at our institutions. Jeff Grabill and Troy Hicks (2007) pointed to conversations in English education about difficult logistical problems in teaching educators to employ technology in the classroom—conversations “taking place at the same time that literacy theory has been accounting for multiple modalities and the deeply contextual nature of literate practices” (p. 302). In other words, and in our cases, technology in the writing classroom, from an institutional standpoint, remains difficult not just to take advantage of in our own classrooms but also to share with our colleagues. As we discussed when crafting this webtext, the personal, pedagogical, and institutional exigencies that got us to CIWIC, WNM, and DMAC and sustain us in our what-we-feel-is-necessary-technical-professional lives is complexly difficult to maintain when returning home. Thus, despite Grabill and Hicks’ assertion that “English teachers (and teacher educators) should no longer have a conversation about literacy without considering technology” (p. 306), we find ourselves, at our institutions, doing just that.

Our videos are organized around geographic metaphors that speak to distance—going to the institute and coming back. We learned, from our discussion, that DMAC’s reach has limits; the material conditions of TPD (i.e., funding and sponsorship) matter the most. Moe mentions his desire to offer faculty workshops, but his department lacks computer lab space to do so. Rik discusses the importance of local TPD events, but lacks the funds to take graduate students. Also important is the resource of personal career time; Moe, like many other faculty members across institutions, could not continue to offer faculty workshops while he was pre-tenure—his own personal resources needed to be spent elsewhere.

The demands of keeping up with developments in sophisticated meaning-making with visual, aural, and spatial literacies is incredibly time-consuming, especially when teachers are too often at the mercy of economic realities outside their control. Institutionally, it has been our experience that we remain mired in local training of the “brown bag” variety—quick, non-disciplinary training experiences on the most recently, institutionally supported software. We have found through this project that these training models, of the variety that Mouza asserted were unhelpful in 2002, remain the norm. As she asserted, “traditional sit-and-get-trained sessions without follow-up support have not been effective in preparing teachers to integrate classroom technologies” (p. 273; see also Selfe, 2004). And other research indicates ongoing professional development is much more effective than scattershot approaches (Hord, 1997; Lauer & Matthews, 2007; Lowden, 2006; Richardson, 2003; Tienken & Stonaker, 2007). And, yet, the difficulty lies in sustaining professional development. Concerted efforts to maintain and sustain professional development adds further strain.

As our conversation points out, effective professional development is made possible due to the often extraordinary pedagogical skill of workshop leaders who function as literacy sponsors; in addition, many colleagues at these workshops are already skilled teachers and therefore function concurrently as important mentors. Our workshop leaders and colleagues, who possess such a range of practical, theoretical, and discipline-specific approaches to technology, are invaluable to professional development.

Although sustained professional development is difficult to achieve, as is widespread change within a department or an institution, our respective returns from CIWIC, CIWIC-NM, and DMAC did allow us to impact our institutions. This video project is an instantiation of a professional community “characterized by shared purpose, collaborative activity, and collective responsibility” (Newman & Wehlage, 1995, p. 44). Indeed, the collaborative effort demonstrated in this project is itself technological professional development. The practices of inquiry and the engagement with technology that we learned in the institutes are reenacted in our collaboration, and our project reiterates our professional development experiences.