by Colleen A. Reilly, Praxis co-editor
We are happy to announce that we have decided to change the name of the section to Praxis. For us, the name Praxis better reflects the current and future goals, contents, and function of our section. As teachers of writing, we recognize that much of the exciting work, innovations, and knowledge making that occurs in classrooms is not captured, shared, and entered into our professional discourse. The function of our section is to provide a peer-reviewed space in Kairos for these narratives in the form of our (loose) categories of article types:
- Classroom Spotlights
- Research Spotlights
- Project Spotlights
- Voices
from the Classroom
The new name, Praxis, reflects the many of the archived pieces in our section and our hopes for the section’s future contribution to the journal and the disciplines it serves. Our view of Praxis, the concept and the section, draws on the multiplicity of current uses of the term. Praxis can be seen as the lore arising from ethically and politically informed inquiry (North; Harkin) as well as the process of conducting such an inquiry in local situations, in other words, of situated knowledge making. As conscious and reflective action, praxis involves practice and theory in dialogue, privileging neither and opening potential changes in both (Sullivan and Porter 29). Furthermore, as Sullivan and Porter outline, a fully realized critical praxis of computers and composition research results from the reflexive interactions of theory, practice, and methodology, all of which are open to and require conscious analysis and interrogation. As a goal, our section wishes to embody such praxis and foster an honest reflection about the ways that research about writing and technology is conducted and represented.
As a result of our understanding of praxis and its importance to the research about computers and writing, the webtexts we seek to publish not only provide reports of successful classroom and institutional projects, but incorporate analyses and critiques of approaches that seemed positive at first glance as well as innovations that appeared to fail or had unintended results. The pieces we publish and continue to welcome tend not to be as formal as those in the CoverWeb or Features sections, which obviously contain praxis-oriented webtexts as well. Based on our goals and placement within an electronic journal, we are in a position to provide a place for exploring newly conceived ideas close to their inception and presenting them as building materials for the innovations and experiments of others in the field. As a space of (electronic) work in process, we can easily embrace the inconsistencies and stops and starts resulting from the clashes of theories, methods, and practices in praxis.
For us and we hope for you, Praxis captures the complexity of the past, present, and future contributions to our section of Kairos, contributions that critically present, discuss, and analyze classroom practices, departmental and university-wide projects, and teaching research so that all interested in rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy may see, reflect on, critique, and alter their own practices based on the local experiences of other teachers in the field.
Study of interactivity in online journals | Works cited
vol. 7 Iss. 3 Fall 2002