Rhetoric/Composition/Play is further evidence of an increasing advocacy toward teaching approaches that allow and encourage students to greater exploration and more “play” in college-level writing courses. Such pedagogy often comes coupled with an acknowledgement of technology as an increasing influence in the lives of students entering composition classrooms. Not only a call to engage students where they are and where they want to be, scholarship of this kind also tends to stress how American higher education often fails to even adequately participate in this endeavor. It is here that various questions concerning implementation arise, and paramount among these is a focus on how to make pedagogy more of a competitor. The easy answer is to incorporate said technologies to further learning and literacy, and while many compositionists already teach in computer-assisted classrooms, more remains to be done regarding pedagogical applications. Integrating such technologies can be done better, though. Without a more thorough understanding of technology and how it is manifest in society, any incorporation is almost certainly doomed to some kind of failure. A perusal of the history of the root of technology, techne, can result in not only applicable understanding for today's post-wired reality but also achievement of a more beneficial balance between pedagogy and technology.
Despite being commonly understood as synonymous with art, craft and/or skill, techne remains a rather ambiguous term. However, it does not work in isolation as it is often inseparable from other old Greek words, like episteme, ethos, phronesis and kairos. Examining the relationships between such terms reveals an operative definition of techne as the acquisition of literacy; such examination also assists in understanding how techne itself is manifest within videogames. Out of such analysis, we are then able to question the nature of composition pedagogy in relation to technology, applying both techne and videogames to the teaching of academic writing. Through such a two-tiered methodology, we come closer to a peaceful and reciprocal relationship between composition pedagogy and technology, one in which each acknowledges and acts on the influence of the other.
My curiosity lies in the application of videogames to composition pedagogy. As the very idea of what constitutes composition expands beyond traditional definitions, I am all the more interested in what videogames might bring to the theory and practice of teaching writing. Videogames constitute an evolving, popular medium that not only refashions earlier media but also promotes a greater degree of interactivity. Videogames are also representative of a more immersive style of learning and, as mentioned above, this is something I see composition pedagogues aspiring toward.
Therefore, I propose an analysis of videogames as a techno-pedagogical manifestation of techne with an eye toward implications for composition pedagogy. Techne provides a historical foundation and videogames provide a current literacy practice, both of which serve to improve approaches to teaching composition. There is an obvious, reciprocal relationship here: To better understand techne, it is necessary to show how it functions within a current technology. Furthermore, to better understand video games, it is necessary to explain them in relation to contextualized, historical inquiry of an old Greek word. This is also important work because there is ongoing a process of negotiation inherent to present multimedia which exerts an influence not only on various and sundry technologies but also the ways in which we learn and use them. By their very nature, videogames reveal such processes in creation and subsequent interactivity.
So, as society and technology advance, it is of great importance that we not only keep up but, in fact, reflect on process and progress. We need to be more attentive to technological influences, which are also often unmarked in the lives of the students entering composition classrooms, and redesign courses and sequences in accordance with these influences. As such, there is much to learn from historical understandings of techne and its current manifestations in popular media technologies, like that of videogames. Such a technology reveals techne as flexible and diverse, requiring rather different forms of interaction in relation to particular principles and the acquisition of means to desirable and fulfilling ends, which can be achieved through tapping into the potential presented within.
It is through various communicative technologies that we are better able to not only understand ourselves and the identities we create but to also comprehend and embody change. Understanding techne as the acquisition of literacy and seeing the current, popular technological medium of videogames as an example of this idea in turn promotes a rethinking of composition pedagogy, re-imagining approaches and sequences designed to promote active, critical thinking. To be gained from discussion of techne as manifest in videogames is not only a burgeoning appreciation for how the concept operates today but also a greater curiosity for how both connect with current approaches to teaching writing.
This chapter endeavors to be an exercise in reflection, recognizing past and present understandings of the relationship between technology and society and, more specifically, between techne, phronesis, episteme and ethos. Out of the exploration of such relationships, there arise some new, alternate understandings of various aspects of composition, which are further illustrated by a focus upon the particular technology of videogames as a manifestation of the aforementioned relationships. Doing all of this should help composition perform better in keeping up with and integrating technology, bringing closer together and making more obvious the aesthetic and technical aspects of the various communicative technologies students use to make meaning.