Extension, Engagement, and Agency: Canvas as a Network for the Writing Classroom

Abstract

Using the Canvas LMS at a large, Midwestern public institution, I wrote this dissertation seeking to understand how writing instructors’ design and organizational decisions in the Canvas LMS affect the ways in which their students write and learn. Learning management systems, or LMSs, have long been fixtures of K-12 and postsecondary education, and in part due to recent interest in online learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic, opportunities abound to study these spaces to better understand the relationship between instructor pedagogy and student learning. Many scholars have rightly explored attitudes toward LMSs from both instructor perspectives (e.g., Salisbury, 2018) and student perspectives (e.g., Chou et al., 2010), but at the time of this study, scholars have not addressed specific practices that students and instructors enact through LMSs. And while writing studies and digital studies have taken up other types of online spaces as sites of inquiry pertaining to student literacies, the LMS remains an understudied artifact in this discussion. Further, while writing instructors often use LMSs to supplement their pedagogies, scholars in writing studies have not yet addressed the roles that these platforms might play in mediating writing instruction or students’ writing processes. On this score, I found that Canvas might be hosting tensions between what writing instructors intend when they build their course sites and what their students are actually doing in response.

Using a conceptual framework of networks (Eyman, 2015; Chun, 2016), this study reveals how LMSs such as Canvas can function as extensions of F2F classrooms and provides new ways of rethinking modes of student engagement. I interviewed three writing instructors and eight students while embedding myself in their course sites under the Observer role; I investigated how writing instructors built their course sites, how students navigated them, and how Canvas mediated writing instruction and student engagement. For writing instructors, Canvas served as an extension of their classroom spaces and pedagogical practices, and often reflected pedagogical and personal values in ways that they perhaps did not perceive otherwise. Students responded to Canvas through various modes of engagement, including skimming, creating touchpoints for their writing, and resisting, suggesting that students can find ways of navigating LMSs in spite of a course site’s design. This dissertation sets a foundation for exploring the tensions that exist in and between networks and agents, as well as between teaching, learning, and LMSs.