ABSTRACT
In a recent College English article, Chris Anson poses an important question: “What will multimedia do to alter the personae of teachers and students as they respond to each other virtually?” (276). A study I completed in 1998 prefigured Anson's question and included a description of how students construct a writerly ethos when they have “voice or verbal presence” but not “bodily or material presence” in televised courses (Neff, “From”). Anson's question is clearly worth additional consideration; thus, my current study examines human and technological interactions that shape teacher ethos in writing courses delivered from a distance. I find Tita Baumlin's work on ethos helpful in this examination. She defines ethos as “the interrelations among language, authority, private character, and public self…intricately interwoven with the culture's concepts of power, gender, and rhetorical self-fashioning” (230), and she concludes that the “traces of capitulation to, and exploitation of, both authority and other” are present in the process of fashioning an ethos (253). In the distance education system that I study, producers, technicians, site directors, and instructional designers share authority over what is seen and heard by distant students. Other pedagogical decisions, traditionally the province of the instructor, are mediated by microphones, cameras, computers, and studio arrangements. In the videotaped recordings of each classroom session, lie traces of these human and technological interrelations, traces of an instructor refashioning her teacher ethos in the new world of distance education.
