ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes and plays with approaches to cultural texts in ways that will be both familiar and unfamiliar to readers and is based upon a number of convictions about the way we teach and the way students learn. 1 It begins in the personal but has an underlying political purpose, which is to explore the need for greater flexibility and trust in the teaching of 'literacy' at all levels of the education system. In particular, I am using the focus of media technologies as a means of addressing questions of approaches to teaching and learning that restate the need for interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary study, for a general suspicion of fixed educational boundaries, and for a recognition of the complex debates about technoculture and how these might be productively used in teaching. In examining the machine, we confront questions about our own changing roles, identity, gender and our relations to power and control. This, therefore, is a chapter of boundary-crossings, as McLuhan and Giroux put it, of adventures in the new spaces that can be created by interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary studies, the terrain of the 'cyborg' that 'acknowledges the
interdependence of people and things, and just how blurry the boundaries between them have become' (Leigh Star, 1995, p. 21). Following the theories of Donna Haraway, I will suggest that technology should be integral to any reconsideration of literacy in the future and should permeate teaching as it does everyday life, and in particular the life of the young. As Haraway (1991) writes, a 'cyborg' culture 'is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work' (p. 154). I believe teachers at all levels, along with their students, can be these 'progressive people' contesting the meanings and uses of technology in a complex society which traditionally divides human and machine over issues of control, in order to imagine and explore a social order in which 'people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of partial identities and contradictory standpoints' (ibid.). At the centre, for Haraway and for my argument, is the fear of a 'single vision' (ibid.), what I will term a 'monologic', single-disciplined view of things, for it 'produces worse illusions' (ibid.) and imposes itself as 'the one code that translates all meaning perfectly' (ibid., p. 176). In our relations with technology, we are made aware of multiple differences that move away from simple divisions like mind-body, male-female, whole-part, child-adult and so on, and enter a world in which 'we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras' (ibid., p. 177). Through this process, we might begin to understand identity as something unfixed, in process, and constantly being reformed and constructed by a variety of cultural discourses, of which technology is of central importance.
