In Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice , George Hillocks outlines a theory of teaching that allows the practitioner to learn through practice, to build her theories of writing and writing instruction by engaging her theories and practices in a dialectic. Hillocks discusses theory and practice in traditional writing classrooms. As computers and composition scholars have argued in several different contexts, when technology is added to an already existing context, everything shifts slightly or dramatically.
Technology becomes another consideration at every reflective point.
This complication is a problem which teacher raining must consider. Because context permeates pedagogies in ways which shift the very nature of the theories informing those pedagogies, teachers cannot simply transfer their traditional classroom pedagogies without considering the ways the technology changes the relationship between theory and practice. In this presentation, I explore the ways the theory-practice dialectic is affected by the presence of technology. The presentation moves toward an articulation of the ways technology complicates the dialectic between theory and practice through a discussion of one teacher training program where this relationship was foregrounded as an explicit area for investigation. Teachers are encouraged to think about their teaching in this environment as one shaped by theories of writing and technology and to develop practices which support their own theoretical understandings of the relationship between technology and writing.