Joseph Cornell and the Artistry of Composing Persuasive Hypertexts

Abstract

n Culture and Commitment, anthropologist Margaret Mead identifies three cultural styles. They include the postfigurative, in which learn primarily from their forebears, cofigurative, in which both and adults learn from their peers, and prefigurative, in which adults learn also from their children (1). Mead argues that unprecedented technologies such as computers propel us into the era concepts bound to the past, could provide no models for the future (72). Drawing on Mead's work, Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe discuss teachers' resistance to incorporating electronic writing into literacy instruction. Situating that resistance within a framework of cultural change, they use the term prefigurative to say that we teach at a time where change is so rapid that adults are trying to prepare for experiences the adults themselves have never (160). The reality of having no models to teach by recently hit me when two students turned in persuasive hypertexts after I had assigned print-based