There are some pretty interesting essays in the newest issue of The Writing Instructor, not the least of which is Christyne Berzsenyi's essay on slurs and obscenities in CMC-chat. An excerpt follows:

In the case with my 12 basic writing students, their obscenities operated within a peer communication context independent of me. While I was physically in the computer classroom with them, I was not in the conference space reading and writing their conference text. What resulted was a peer-run rhetorical game operating beyond my knowledge or control. Indeed, students later admitted, during a follow up class conversation, that they didn’t realize that I would be reviewing the earlier portions of the transcript. They reported feeling unaccountable for their text, just having fun with the freedom and lack of supervision, not unlike some of the ways students “act up” when the teacher leaves a traditional classroom. New order was established among the peers, and these students were actively engaged in a composing process as agents, experimenting with their own authority and hierarchical social status in a real, rhetorical context. In other words, they communicated in the roles of real writers and readers in a communication context that was motivated by genuine, not contrived, exigency—compelled to immediate discursive action.

On the one hand, I wanted to celebrate students’ finding their voices, as offensive as they were during this chat, because writing with voice isn’t an easy feat for basic writers. I didn’t want to discourage their generating of material and having something to say, because developmental writers are typically unmotivated, unconfident, and under prepared in skills and strategies (Matthews-DeNatale). Therefore, half the battle is just getting them to write and feel comfortable doing so; then, teachers can develop specific rhetorical skills, stylistic features, genre knowledge, etc. On the other hand, I wanted to express my concerns about their crude, dismissive, and graphic language that degraded women and gays. I questioned if I was pushing my own ethical values and practices onto students. Finally, I wondered about the value of outlawing obscenities, which perhaps would only function to give me a false sense of social harmony. My pedagogical challenge continues to be the negotiation of preparing and presenting a process of rhetorical analysis with students that avoids forcefully imposing particular values on students but opens the discussion.

Later, Berzsenyi facilitates a face-to-face reflection on the utterances in the computer-mediated discussion, and gets this response:

Once again, students admitted to a lack of forethought about the various potential malevolent connotations and effects of their humor that was directed toward an assumed heterosexual male adolescent audience with a common anti-gay sensibility. Clearly, as a writing instructor, my challenge was to increase students’ awareness of their audience.

How do you handle it when things like this come up? Do you lay down ground rules at the beginning? Do you have this kind of group reflection? I see this article as a case study that replicates prior research in this area. Can an open-content approach bring new solutions to this problem, for example if students blog and then have to respond to comments made by readers outside the class?