Jeffrey Grabill’s “Utopic Visions, The Technopoor, and Public Access: Writing Technologies in a Community Literacy Program”


In this article, Grabill addresses the issue of technology access—and, more specifically, the issues of access in Adult Basic Education courses. Grabill draws attention to the fact that in the discussion of literacy and technology access, most (if not all) of the conversations have been focused on activities based in the context of traditional schools. By focusing all of the attention on the writing and the access of technology in schools, we are missing an opportunity to investigate these same issues in the work place. To summarize the point of this article, Grabill states “My argument is that writing with computers in nonschool contexts is a significant area of inquiry that needs the experience and expertise of computers and composition professionals. But, work in this area demands that we confront complex issues of public access and participate in the design of writing technologies” (299).

Grabill acknowledges that the issue of access has already been addressed. There are three main categories of access: infrastructural, literacy, and acceptance. Infrastructural access revolves around how technology is distributed. This involves questions like “Who is making these decisions about technology? And “How will these access—both physical and virtual—be designed?” (300) Literacy as an access issue revolves around who has the knowledge to use these technologies. Finally, the third issue of access is about acceptance. The groups that are typically silenced in traditional classrooms (women and minorities basically) have the opportunity of an equal playing ground in technological environment. Grabill includes data that shows how these groups in particular have limited access to technology, and he states, “In a sense it seems irrelevant to talk about how electronic discourse in a medium like e-mail can hide markers of race, class, or gender or that network use may allow a group or individual to cross lines of social stratification more easily. Given this data, it is increasingly unlikely that individuals of lower income, education, and people of color are online. Groups and individuals without access, who fit the Rand profile, form a fluid, multiple, and complex class position of the technopoor” (303).

Having touched on all of the issues of access that have already been explored, Grabill then addresses something that has not: the adult population outside of the context of traditional school. Grabill uses an example of the Western District Adult Basic Education program. He writes, “The purpose of the case was to understand how literacies were defined at that site, who participated in those decision-making processes, and in whose interests those decisions were made” (305). One particular class of the program was a writing class (though the teacher claimed it was not a writing class) that dealt specifically with teaching students how to communicate through technology. Some students were frustrated with the technology to the point that they dropped out: “In some respects, the technology impeded the students’ ability to learn to write with technology” (308). Grabill concludes that some of these problems that students come across when learning technology can and should be dealt with through the design of the curriculum.

COMMENTS:

I was uncertain about reading another article about the issue of access because I thought we had pretty well covered the topic, but when I read this piece I was taken aback by the fact that Grabill addresses many issues I had never considered: adults’ access to technology and access in work place situations. I, like many other people apparently, have always thought about this issue in a traditional educational setting.