Composition's Terms of Use: The Pedagogical Implications of Learning Management Systems

Abstract

This dissertation is a critical study of the contemporary relationship between education and technology. It develops a philosophy on technology that both tries to make sense of the specific technologies our universities have chosen to embrace and imagines ways of making critical use of them. The intersection of this treatment of technology and education is Composition and Rhetoric, a pedagogical field. The application of this intersection, then, is a study of a particular, prominent technology of composition pedagogy, which is the Learning Management System. This pedagogical technology is explored in three main ways: narrative-based analysis of three case studies of student writing on the platform, rhetorical analysis of one LMS company’s public discourse, and content analysis of one LMS’s internal architecture. The dissertation finds that LMS companies rely on neoliberal rhetorical syllogisms which bypass public deliberation over enthymemes concerning the purposes of higher education, and thus join an assemblage of rhetorical projects that unite higher education with neoliberal interests. These enthymemes are the “terms of use” teachers and students accept. Finally, new terms of use are forwarded based on an updated method of critical literacy.