Mirror, mirror on the wall: email as an object of practitioner inquiry

Abstract

As new communication technologies enter the classroom, teachers must attend to how digital platforms impact the interpersonal practices of teaching and learning. In this article, I study email exchanges with three of my students – Jorge, Adriana, and Jason – over the course of one year in an 11th-grade English class at River High School, a struggling American school subject to intervention for failing to meet the federal No Child Left Behind requirements. I ask several questions: what role does email play in my relationships with students; what does email reveal about the ideological content of my communication with students; and how could I use email transformatively? When I studied these email exchanges, I found that while email has the potential to transform literacy instruction, it can also perpetuate a poor student/teacher relationship and reproduce neoliberal narratives that narrowly imagine students as test-takers, workers, and consumers.

Keywords:

• email
• teaching
• communication technology
• writing instruction
• practitioner research
• neoliberal educational reform
• metaphor

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the the author.

Notes

1. Most of the Caribbean students in the class were biracial but referred to themselves as Black; one student publicly identified as Asian. In class, they rarely mentioned their countries of origin. Students could enroll at River without providing documentation of their immigration status, but deportation of family members was a real concern. The Caribbean has often been in the middle of the triangular slave trade, of the jockeying between colonial powers, of Cold War gamesmanship, and of discriminatory immigration policies.

2. Students’ names changed to pseudonyms.

3. Emails are exact transcripts, so errors are intact and the formatting is not consistent. For readability, I treat emails as texts and follow APA in-text citation rules.

4. The students refer to me as ‘Ms. Max’ as an abbreviated form of Maxwell.

5. Standard English’s dominance requires speakers of non-standard dialects to adopt a language disconnected from their own experience and ensures the perpetuation of inequality. The standardization of a predominantly White dialect of English sets one group’s language as the norm and all others as deviant, broken, or bad. While I publicly discussed the value of other language and dialects in class, we were also very aware that the tests only valued Standard English (Baugh 1999; Milroy 1999; McWhorter 2000).

6. Students and parents signed consent letters that laid out the research focus and methods of the project at the beginning of the year. Additionally, I shared ongoing research questions with students. Students could write ‘DNU’ for Do Not Use at the top of any of their assignments or communication. I reminded Jason that he could opt out of having me keep his work for my research, but he never did. But how can a student ever freely consent to participate in research in an educational climate of mandates and penalties?

7. In Hamlet, the ghost of Hamlet’s father reveals that he has been murdered by his brother, Hamlet’s uncle, and tasks Hamlet with rectifying the crime. After this ghostly visitation, Hamlet famously says: ‘The time is out of joint. O cursed spite/ That ever I was born to set it right!’ (1.5.190–191). While the play is often discussed in terms of Hamlet’s decisions and actions, I have always been struck by the line that immediately follows: ‘Come, let’s go together’ (1.5.192). Hamlet and the ghost have just enjoined Hamlet’s companions, Horatio and Marcellus, to secrecy and collusion. While the two men agree to help Hamlet and would, arguably, suffer under the reign of a murderous, false king, they really are not in much of a position to refuse Hamlet (and a ghost!). This line has always reminded me of the ways in which we attempt to influence and compel those we find with us, often by accident, in the service of our projects.