Category Archives: literacy

“Chinese Communist bliss,” Alienating 11th grade Urban Youth, and the Danger of a Single Story Revisited

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I’m both intrigued and troubled by the prevalence of stories like this one. At once I am fascinated by the voyeuristic look into the rigorous lives of “the other” while also concerned about what the prevalence of these narratives say in maintaining the competitiveness from a capitalistic perspective in the United States. We’re still #12, after all, right?

I also think there is a danger in presenting this article in a way that ends up feeling like it’s a universal proclamation of the lived experience of an entire nation – not just a handful of individuals.

I’m reminded of this news article I read with my 11th graders last year. From the Wall Street Journal, the article discusses how – for many Americans – junior year is such an intense year (with AP classes, volunteer service, afterschool clubs, SAT prep, and whatever else will pad a college application) that many students aren’t even interested in going to college by the time they get to the point. Like the above article about the crazily intense “other” studying harder, better, faster, stronger than everyone else, the article was an exciting peak into the lives of youth. The only problem was that it reflected absolutely none of the experiences of my students here in South Central. They read the article with a mixture of confusion and with concern: wait … were they, too, supposed to be doing all this stuff to be getting into schools? Was someone going to tell the black and brown kids down at Manual Arts about the way the other half lived and operated?

When we peak into the lives of the hardworking student, the secret sect of an alternative music scene, or even the inner-workings of gold farming, there is a danger in making broad generalizations and reporting them. While I don’t doubt the factual accuracy of the articles described here, I’m concerned by the way these articles function to further dominant, hegemonic narratives that inevitably distance communities, pressure communities, and fuel narratives of capitalism.

“Panic on the Streets of London”: The Urgency for Participatory Media Pedagogy

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Like many of you, I am experiencing an interpretation of the riots taking place in London through a mediated lens of retweeted photographs [see image above], blog posts, +1d news articles, and forums sharing freshly sparked memes. Nested commenting across online sources-like this video/blog post/tweet-are rich and inherently different from how information is shared and absorbed than ever before.

The experiences of the urban youth that are engaged in political dissonance, in resistance, in bringing social issues to the foray are, in many ways, retelling a narrative that I’m already uncomfortably familiar with. The prominence of looting and of reprehensible behavior in the dominant narrative here echoes the social discourse of looters during Katrina and Rodney King (events so engrained in America’s consciousness I can signal them through proper nouns only somewhat associated with the events themselves).

As I continue to follow along with what is happening–now geographically distanced from the culturally familiar–I am struck by the fact that this is precisely the urgency for a widespread induction of critical engagement with participatory media and its resulting media literacies in formal schools. Right now,  it is the livelihood and well-being of entire communities at stake. Technology’s role in mediating resistance efforts across global channels means that a media literacy today extends directly into illuminating these repeating narratives and in equipping a generation of youth with the tools to successfully interpret, contribute to, and reflect upon the myriad thread of information about physical world activism and protest. A pedagogy of participatory media begins with what is happening in the streets of England right now and empowers educators and students alike in transforming & challenging dominant narratives.

There’s a Patent For That

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Last week’s episode of This American Life described the troubling problem with innovation and ownership of patents*. Specifically, the show questioned, how we protect our intellectual work and our ideas. In listening to this, I realized how closely the challenges of patents are to the current struggles of ownership of textual products in an age of remix.

As educators need to reevaluate concepts like plagiarism for a generation that is being apprenticed into practices of remixing and appropriating old media for new purposes, so too do we need to think of the relationship between textual production and productive innovation. Pragmatically, I can imagine students–in ELA classrooms no less–will be required to produce mobile apps or participatory media platforms to demonstrate their skills as writers and producers. In this sense, where does the line between writing and building start and end? When we write in response to literature and yield a mobile app that integrates into our everyday use, at what point does our work become patentable? At what point need it be copywritten in an old paradigm?

Last month, I spent a significant chunk of time enveloped in an intellectual tussle with M.M. Bakhtin. I still have not fully wrested my thoughts from his Discourse of the Novel and see directly how language practices are constantly in negotiation with the reader/viewer/user/customer/programmer and how these negotiations spin out into larger areas of exploration. For now, as content and its method of delivery become intwined in even more complex relationships, educators need to prepare for work that defies metrics like paragraphs, double-spaced 12-point font and pesky one-ince margins.

 

*As I don’t spend a whole lot of time here discussing the actual show, I suggest listening to the whole thing. I should also mention that this response from Intellectual Ventures is interesting.

Multiliteracies: Thinking “Beyond New London” (at DMLcentral)

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My latest post at DMLcentral is about the future of literacy research. I am interested in collaborating with other stakeholders around the question of how are literacies shifting currently. Though the text is cross-posted below, please consider commenting over at DMLcentral to continue this conversation.

 

Multiliteracies is an area of interest for me and my classroom, and I am hoping to use this post for dialogue and collective theory-building. But first, I want to talk briefly about being a book geek. As an English teacher, I am passionate about literature. During my first two years in the classroom I overextended myself by maintaining an evening and weekend job assistant managing a popular independent bookstore in Los Angeles.

Passion, Teaching, and Literacy

The pay was paltry and secondary to the opportunity I had at first dibs for advanced readers’ copies of works by my favorite novelists – not to mention engagement with local literati, and the opportunity to discover personal favorites through customer recommendations, fellow employees, and random books falling on my head while shelving the particularly tall bookcases.

I’ve written elsewhere why this kind of passion is a key component to successfully engaging students. Passion is contagious; it was my bookstore co-worker, Nancy, enthusiastically talking about the growing complexities of J.K. Rowling’s work that eventually compelled me to bother breaking the spine and entering the world of Hogwarts.

All of this is to say that I’ve become interested, now as an educator and researcher, into the changing and fluid world of literacy development.

Multiliteracies and Thinking about Literacy beyond 2011

As a 21st century teacher, the work of the New London Group – their conceptualization ofmultiliteracies – is not only a breath of fresh air, but it also liberates my approach to English Language Arts instruction when I guide the learning needs of my ninth graders.

Briefly, the major principles of a multiliteracies framework relate to how technology is fundamentally changing the ways people are communicating: It is  bringing people into closer proximity to one another, and the forms of communication in which people engage are multimodal, meaning that they incorporate word, image, video and sound.

And so it was at this year’s American Education Research Association conference last April that I eagerly joined a crowded room to see many members of the New London Group speak in a session titled “Beyond New London: Literacy, Learning and the Design of Social Futures.” And while I was excited about the potential of this session, I left feeling that the researchers, for the most part, didn’t talk about what is happening in literacy development, nor did they update the concept of multiliteracies or point toward reasonable responses to this work.

My interest is, where is literacy heading? What are the implications for the students in my classroom and the literacy achievement gap in general?

Literacies are multitudinous and text is a fluid concept that moves beyond the printed page. This much educators and researchers are generally accepting in this day and age (thank you, New London).

However, in 1996, when “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures” was published, social networks were not a norm, Google did not yet exist (nor did YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.), and mobile media devices were owned and used by an exclusive and small sector of young people. In short, the work does not account for the significant ways young people are interactive and learning today.

I want to outline a few ideas about how I see literacy expanding today. These are initial thoughts and I hope we can engage in collective development around what you may think as well. There are three developments in literacy that are under-recognized in classrooms, in policy, and in empirical learning theory research:

1. Search, Query, and Interpretation

2. Conscious identity development

3. Online/Offline Hybridity and Spatial Interaction

Search, Query, and Interpretation

To effectively navigate, produce, and communicate within the participatory structures both online and offline, students today need to understand the ways that search functions. Black hat & white hat search optimization, for instance is an innately complicated idea that directly impacts what students see and interact with through online spaces. Likewise, the tenets of something like Google’s search algorithm dictate what students are allowed to “find.” In this instance, seemingly ubiquitous engines like Google and Bing act as gatekeepers for counternarratives that are published online but suppressed by a page’s ranking. Douglas Rushkoff’s warning, Program or be Programmed, paves the away for thinking about how students need to be equipped to not only understand why they are seeing the products online when they search academically and recreationally, but also to think about how students can develop search tools for themselves – these computational and programming literacies are going to be the second language acquisition tools students will need to master.

Conscious identity development

Related to interpreting and understanding search-like tools, it is necessary for young people to recognize the way students read and view texts online reifies specific hegemonic ways of being. As a quick example, if students search for images online of their community or a profession they aspire to work within, the images they see dictate an aggregate normative understanding; the narratives online of urban youth perpetuate stereotypes and students should be able to read these narratives critically. Likewise, when students develop and shape online personas inMMORPGs, social networks, and online discourse, they are consciously involved in personal (and sometimes collective) identity development. These literacy practices directly impact the images, words, videos, and other myriad media products that a larger and larger public sees and interprets vis-a-vis youth identity.

Online/Offline Hybridism and Spatial Interaction

Finally, and perhaps what most teachers are seeing within their classrooms, students are utilizing online tools to mediate predominantly offline relationships. When students are texting in my classroom or posting updates to their Facebook pages, they are doing so mainly to maintain a closeness to peers and friends are usually interacting with on a daily basis. Students mediate their day-to-day physical world decisions through online tools. This hybrid media interaction is a space that is becoming more and more persistent in classrooms. Asking a group of my 9th graders if they text or are on Facebook as frequently during lunch or after school, the students rolled their eyes incredulously: of course not – they are busy socializing with the friends they’ve been texting and communicating with when they were supposed to be silent reading in my classroom.

Collaborating Around a new Framework

Without the New London research and much that has since followed, this conversation would not be anchored within meaningful discourse. I am hoping for this to be the start of an ongoing formation of post-New London Theory building. I am interested in the space where this work can be done.

Fifteen years ago, when the authors of “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies” met at the New London site, they purposely published their article in the Harvard Education Review without their names attached. Though the identity of the authors of the piece was not a conspiratorial secret, the gesture is significant. I am hoping those individuals interested in participating in shaping a renewed framework of multiliteracies can comment below and we can discuss an open space for this conversation to continue. Ultimately, I’d hope for a group of us to share this work’s developments in a future post & perhaps wherever else this work can directly impact classroom practices and research.

Doing Things Correctly on Google Plus: Social Networks, Youth Practices and What Educators Need to Know about Appropriation

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Part of my current ongoing goal of this blog is to provide a continuing understanding of social networks and their role in the shifting nature of the new culture of learning. While I’ve only played with it for two weeks at this point, I can say that Google Plus (Google+) is a significant step forward in terms of how to manage, engage, and mediate learning personally and when interacting with youth, pre-service & in-service teachers (the current contexts in which I teach).

Although there are useful guides elsewhere about how Google+ is different & useful for educators, I think the possibilities of the new pool of information lies not in a single component than in the convergence of the myriad features to provide a customized learning experience for a group of co-inquirers.

As I’ve dabbled at posting and “being” on Google+, I am conscious of the ways I post, comment, and share. I do it deliberately. Cautiously. Worried that I’m not “doing it right.” Using a Chrome extension, I tried to share with a circle of friends a link to something I found funny. I made a note that I was “In tears” (implying because of how funny it was). Of course, the way I ended up submitting this link ended up actually omitting the shared content. My social network instead received the wrong message that I was likely upset and “In tears.”

And while such blundering examples are innate as we better understand the tools we are equipping ourselves with, I am more interested in this moment of self reflection and metacognition that occurs as I (and I’m sure most of you) wonder if you’re using Google+ “correctly.” I wonder about this because this feeling is one that is mediated by the immediate culture we surround ourselves with in these virtual networks (and on-line/off-line friendships). “Correct” use of this network is only as what is dictated by the practices I see reinforced by the people I follow and share in circles.

As an example, I want to turn to Facebook briefly. The migration of my students from MySpace to Facebook has been significant and swift. Within a year, MySpace is bereft of its biggest demographic as Facebook accounts become the ubiquitous cache of legitimate online student identity. As I watched a generally new demographic utilize a social network that was initially populated by people around my own age, I was intrigued by the differences in use. I often see a student post a status update that would be followed by dozens of comments. Looking at these, students were utilizing the commenting space on Facebook to engage in conversation. Often only one or two participants would rapidly fire comments back and forth to have publicized chat logs (some extremely personal in nature). I remember distinctly thinking “that’s not how you use this component or tool.” For me, such conversation we to be conducted in a chat window (isn’t that why it’s available on Facebook?), through a private message, or – ideally – in “real” life. I didn’t understand that I was naturally ascribing my own rules of use on a cultural practice that was not my own.

danah boyd writes about “Networked Privacy” and this is a useful realm to better understand other ways students are using Facebook differently (and just as “correctly”) as many of my own peers.

Part of why my use of MySpace in the past was successful is because I asked and watched how youth were using the site. I incorporated elements of what they did, closed off the reaches of my social network so it was not as invasive as they may have felt, and ultimately found a medium between youth cultural use of MySpace and academic use of the site for my group of learners.

As we steadily proceed up a naturally developed learning curve around Google+ it is a useful time to remember that educational use of these social networks is going to have to largely be negotiated with our youth constituents. We will all have different online registers in how we are utilizing this new tool. We will all be utilizing it differently and “correctly.” In order for this use to be effective in the context of sociocultural learning, we will have to collaborate around how to engage with Google+ (or Facebook or MySpace or Friendster etc.). To simply appropriate these tools and monopolize them in constrained ways will ultimately fail. I’m looking forward to sharing and learning about the different and “correct” ways we will be learning with a site like Google+ in the future.

Your Summer Syllabus: Three Recent Examples of Participatory Media that Teachers Should Know About (Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy Ahead)

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My browser is overcrowded with tabs of information I want to share here. Instead of focusing on a single example, I want to briefly reflect on three different aspects of the shifting nature of culture in participatory media: community, copyright, and civic engagement. By looking at all three of these, educators can get a quick & robust snapshot of what is on the horizon for pedagogical implications vis-à-vis all of this “new media stuff.”  The examples below speak to three different ways that media and culture are changing the ways young people are learning, interacting, and acting upon the world. For teachers, all three of these bring up significant ways that pedagogy needs to shift. (I’ve called this, previously, Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy.)

 

How to Have the Number One Book on Amazon Without Actually Finishing It

When it comes to YA literature, John Green’s works are not only a personal favorite, but also a consistent hit with my students. During the final days of June, John Green went live on YouTube to his legion of fans and (over the course of nearly two hours) announced the title of his new book, answered questions being sent in real time, and read a chapter from the unreleased work. He also announced he was going to sign every copy of the first edition of the book. As a result, The Fault in Our Stars shot to number one on Amazon and Barnes and Noble websites & Green’s work was profiled in the Wall Street Journal, and media sites are pointing to the phenomenon of the sudden sales. What’s important to notice here is specifically how this happened. Green didn’t go online overnight and simply announce the book title (as mainstream media like WSJ signals). Instead, this has been a sustained relationship with readers that has developed trust and identity. John announced that the title came from someone within his online community. Fans have created tons of covers for the book. John’s hosting an online book club that’s reading the Great Gatsby. He has a series of video exchanges with his brother. He interacts with readers through twitter constantly. If anything, part of the fun of being a “fan” of John Green is being able to interact & engage with other readers, the author, and other artifacts in varying degrees of intensity. Spending some time meandering across his official site, his tumblr, his various twitter accounts, and fan pages is a great way for educators to think about ways to collaborate and share the learning experience with young people.

The Good, the Bad, and the Bloop of Fair Use & Copyright

Do you like Kind of Blue? How many times have you heard a soloist riff on those opening bars of “So What”? And while the music is constantly pointed to as a vanguard album in the history of jazz, a recent reinterpretation of the music finds itself a useful case study in when art appropriation exceeds “Fair Use.” I’m regularly talking about the importance of discussing fair use, copyright, and Creative Commons with young people; I’m convinced that this is a space that  students need to explicitly understand as we shift toward a cultural shift from merely consumption to production. This case study, “Kind of Screwed,” is a fantastic introduction into the challenges that are being faced across artistic mediums. Related to this, I regularly either include Free Culture or the film RIP: A Remix Manifesto in courses I teach to teachers about media and technology- both of these are great resources for further investigation on this topic.

 

The Fall of Eve – Commercial Interests & Citizen Dissent

Think of Eve Online as the geekier, way (way) more complex version of World of Warcraft. With political and corporate intrigue at the center of a game that takes place on ships and in fleets of aircrafts, Eve isn’t as widely played in the U.S. as other MMORPGs. However, that hasn’t stopped EVE’s distributor, CCP, from cashing in on game updates & expansions. In doing so, the company’s revealed a strategy that is more interested in a bottom line profit than in continued support of a long term player community. The result? Nearly 5,000 subscribed players walking away from the game and community. Digging through forum postings and news articles, a clear tension between creator and user emerges. And while teachers aren’t likely to utilize EVE Online in daily instruction (though the class that does has got to be an interesting one, no?), the way that these players are signaling dissent within the game, through canceled subscription and through collective organizing demonstrate how civic engagement is reshaped through participatory media. There are past examples of this kind of work described by researchers, particularly in America’s Army and the Sims, for those who want to look at other work in this area.

 

Summing Up

While all of the examples above have related precedents, they point to the fuzzy edges of socio-cultural interaction that most educators aren’t thinking about. They are all from within the past two weeks and are related to the kinds of practices our students are engaged in every day. When are we, as educators, going to formally sketch out a redefinition of pedagogy that addresses the paradigm shift that affects our classrooms?

 

 

Thinking About Video Games, Narrative, and Freedom

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[This post is shared, intended for, and written as a resource at the Digital Is site for the National Writing Project. If – for some silly reason – you haven’t been over there, please take a look.]

Reading the article, “Press X for Beer Bottle: On L.A. Noir,” by Tom Bissell I was left with several significant thoughts and questions about the role of video games on learning, media, and how we teach storytelling and writing.

Though quite lengthy, I encourage you to read through this resource – though the comments below can be read as a stand alone reflection on video games at large, the review is a useful case-study of how narrative shifts in storytelling affect player freedom and understanding of choice.
What’s at the heartof this inquiry is a tension that exists between video games and story. Specifically, can a video game act as a useful means to convey narrative? As an English teacher and as a writer, I question whether my intentions as a writer – to recount a specific narrative, to persuade and effectively defend a thesis – can be adequately represented in a video game. And even if these ideas are in a game, will it ultimately be a fun one?

A popular game series  many of my students (and youth around the world play) is the Grand Theft Auto saga. In these, players may undertake specific missions driving around cities to meet various objectives sand move up the ranks in a city’s organized crime underbelly. At the same time, however, most of my students usually play the game with a more broad understanding of the game’s purpose: cause as much chaos as possible. Driving over pedestrians, getting into glorified shoot outs with law enforcement, creating spectacular crashes, explosions, and city-wide damage, most of my students appreciate the game platform as a space for exploration and play. It is a giant sandbox filled with digitalized violence. Your ethical concerns aside, I question how the developers (writers) of these games feel about this approach. Clearly, there is a loose narrative that students are supposed to adhere to. Clearly, most of them do not.

I should make it clear that I think this is okay. The freedom to resist narrative and to resist societal conventions (to specifically push against them) is exactly what makes these games so engaging for young people…and probably cause the kinds of fear mongering about violence and video games that are monthly headlines in grocery-store magazine displays.

However, the developers of the Grand Theft Auto series have recently released a new game. L.A. Noire (as detailed in the article). In it, opportunities for chaos still can be found. However, this game has a very specific narrative vision. It adheres to traditional storytelling narrative arches. There are things like denouement in its final moments. But with this narrative comes a much more limited scope of choice. The player, though posed with options and-at times a broad area to play and explore-ultimately must take specific paths, choices, and steps in order to proceed. In fact, the game doesn’t really provide much choice at all.

As creating games becomes easier and cheaper, it will become the kind of literacy practice that – I imagine – will be second nature in ELA classrooms in the near future. If this holds true, what kinds of lessons do we develop about teaching choice, agency, and power within video game design?

Similarly, in addition to looking at images of race and class and literary elements in video games, how do we get students to write and think critically about agency and power when they play these games? In essence, by playing a game, a player is essentially committed to a programmed contract that forces them to adhere to the rules, laws, and conventions of social behavior that are designed into the game’s architecture.

This may seem like a superficial discussion, but I caution us, as educators, to think specifically about what video games inculcate in students about power, authority and the way they understand & synthesize information. By garroting a game’s scope, its designer is afforded the freedom to closely “tell” a narrative. However, it will take more innovative game design for a video game to allow open ended exploration that can “show” a narrative based on player free will. This tension between choice and narrative is one that needs to be conveyed in our lesson plans and in our classrooms. How we design our classrooms, establish class rules, and set agendas are no different than digital walls and required button mashing in the stereotypical first person shooter our students play daily.

 

My Union Sucks at Twitter (#DeasyFTW)

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I’ve been disappointed with my union lately.

That’s a difficult thing for me to say in the current teacher and union-bashing climate. However, while I support unionized teaching labor, I don’t feel like my union (both at the my specific school site and the district at large) has made decisions that are in the best interest of “rank-and-file” teachers. And yes, a union is as strong as its members, so I accept the criticism that comes with speaking ill of one’s own organization.

I say this all as a prelude to point to a useful contrast between my union’s online presence and that of the management it negotiates and works with (or against, depending on the day of the week).

 

Exhibit A:

 

And Exhibit B:

Really, UTLA? 2009? Back-patting our own demonstration through a series of tweets? Really? That’s our best use of social media? Meanwhile, Deasy not only communicates an issue clearly, he does so in a way that calls for support and empathy from teachers and the public alike. Regardless of where you may stand on the actual issue at hand, Deasy leverages social media to more effectively inform and sway a population.

 

Exhibit C:

Unless someone else in UTLA is following other users, UTLA is missing the boat big time with the people they are “following” – this is a huge opportunity to engage, interact, and personalize the union for thousands of its members, instead of merely deferring and following mothership accounts.

Exhibit D:

Really? A broken link for the (once again) 2009 twitter handle?

Discussing this with colleagues at lunch today, I mainly expressed frustration that this is so backwards in our district. I’ve come to see Twitter (through the many news headlines in the last few years) as a tool for working class activism. It is a free, easy, and proven way to mobilize many (many) people. It’s hard to speak hyperbolically about the potential of Twitter; it has literally broken the news about global revolutions.

And yet, instead of UTLA “getting it,” the superintendent beats us to the punch.

And while this can be rectified, this is a useful turning point for thinking about the lessons we teach in our classrooms. If we want to work toward a libratory education, understanding the potential of a tool like Twitter and how to implement effective use needs to become a necessary aspect of education. Clearly, @utla2009 is a useful demonstration of ineffective participatory literacy practices.

Lastly, I realize that some would see it as prudent for me to volunteer to take over the UTLA Twitter handle, but that’s not my M.O. here. Frankly, someone is being paid to stay out of the classroom to help aid with communication and outreach for the union. I imagine they are overexerted and already working well beyond their limits. However, fax blasts are painfully slow when the vast majority of a constituent is Smartphone enabled. I’d imagine it is time to update how our union operates and communicates.

Rethinking “A Call For Change”: Examining Sara’s Criticism of Tyler, the Creator

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Violence? Check. Homophobic lyrics? Check. Potential for social transformation? Check.

Currently making buzz amongst music geeks is this rant from Sara of Tegan and Sara regarding the lack of criticism about Tyler, the Creator’s homophobic, sexist, violent, lyrics.

Two caveats before I move forward:

  1. I’m not an apologist for offensive lyrics. Frankly, much of the violence – specifically towards women – in the album is troubling for me to hear.
  2. When his crew is causing riots and generally rabble-rousing, I kind of doubt Tyler will get an Elton John to come to his rescue.

That being said, I have a hard time in general lambasting the content of most work for being “offensive.” It reeks of elitism to shy away the ideas, language practices, and recurring tropes of one genre or another. Yes, Tyler’s album may be more violent and more homophobic than most, but criticizing this album, is no different that writing off the bulk of mainstream hip-hop. It’s a problematic genre for critical analysis, but the same recurring ideas, concepts, and language is prevalent in other genres and even other mediums if only slightly more subdued. Just yesterday, Daye and I discussed the racist overtones of the noble savage in The Game of Thrones series. Does the fact that it’s a polished work on HBO adapted from a lauded book make it a more excusable exercise in reinforcing oppressive social norms?

About the lack of criticism of Tyler’s music, Sara writes, “I don’t think race or class actually has anything to do with his hateful message but has EVERYTHING to do with why everyone refuses to admonish him for that message.” Again, I think she’s off on this. Tyler is now the scapegoat for a larger lack of attention to the origins of violent lyrics that neither starts nor end with rap. Will I recommend my mother listen to Goblin? Of course not, just as she’s ceased to recommend I listen to Dave Koz.

Tyler is unapologetic about blaming an absentee father for much of his verbal aggression. Adolescent rejection, issues with authority, and witnessed violence in the community all present themselves throughout Tyler’s lyrics. In essence, his is a life lived as an urban youth. It’s a quintessentially American album that Tyler’s released and I can understand how that is something that will make a lot of people uncomfortable. How we move forward with an album like this is what is interesting to me. With each swear word, each image of misogyny, and each hyper-violent threat, Tyler invites us to imagine what steps are necessary to move this democratic experiment a step further towards equity.

Funnily enough, I was thinking about the rise of ODD FUTURE WOLF GANG KILL THEM ALL as another example of a Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy. Within months, the group has gone from  obscurity to the subject of derision for mainstream artists, selling out concerts, and getting profiled and reviewed by the majority of music press. This article not only captures the essence of ODD FUTURE’s approach, but it also provides key points to take away from the music group’s entry into mainstream popularity. Educators, it would be great to think more critically about the group’s approach to the sharing of information and engagement with audience. [Related, the post’s author also published a really useful series of interviews that point toward ways to redefine education.]

 

P.S. Free Earl?

 

EDIT: After 12 hours being up, here’s a summary of  the searches that lead people to this blog:

Productivity and Unhinging Ideas From Books: A Collaborative Post with Jason Sellers (Part I)

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A couple weeks ago, I got an email from a fellow teacher, Jason Sellers. We’d met several months ago while I was in Orlando for NCTE and he for the National Writing Project’s annual conference. Jason is a high school English teacher in Staunton, IL, a rural high school 45 minutes outside of St. Louis. He’s also a NWP Technology Liaison with the Piasa Bluffs Writing Project, a member of the Cultural Landscapes Collaboratory (an organization that provides professional development to schools), a Hill Country blues guitarist, a motorcycle adventurer, and an MMA fighter.

Discussing the ways we get tied up with information, we thought it would be useful to share out some ways we are organizing, synthesizing, and being able to just remember the myriad information strands we are engaging with on a day-to-day basis. Below we begin our discussion of academic productivity.

How do you manage the information you read in books for future reference?
Jason:

Here are possible options I’ve explored: purchasing traditional books and writing in the margins; purchasing e-books and using Kindle’s highlight feature to save passages; taking snapshots of passages with my cell phone and saving them in EverNote; taking notes in a journal; creating mindmaps.

My main reason for leaning towards ebooks and/or saving passages in Evernote is that I feel books will inevitably move to an electronic format. I don’t want to have to comb through my collection of paper books for marginalia, which I’ll then have to convert to digital format.

The problem with margin writing and ebooks is that they both require purchasing the book. I can’t write in books from the library, and pirated e-books are difficult to find online (waiting on the book equivalent of Napster). Ultimitely, I ruled these two options out, because I’m poor.

I prefer to check books out from the library. I tried taking snapshots of passages of library books with my cell phone. This may be a good method, but I have an older model of cell phone with a crappy camera — doesn’t capture text very well. Someone with an iPhone might be more successful doing this.

The best method I’ve found for retaining information in books is to mindmap the book. I’ve been using this method that past two months after reading Tony Buzan’s The Mind Map Book. I keep a 8.5″ x 11″ sketchbook with me while I read, and make notes with page numbers for quick reference. That way, I have all the information on one page. Single words and short phrases are enough for me to remember whatever it is I need to remember, and page #s help me track down the passage if I need to cite it directly.

When I finish a mind map, I take a photo, upload it to EverNote, and tag it. Easy to find, and EverNote recognizes handwriting, so it’s searachable.

Thanks again for starting off this discussion Jason. I’m definitely interested in finding out more about other people’s research and creative practices (and hope a few of you will share in the comments below).

As for me, if I’m reading generally, I do a lot of annotating in most books (with exceptions noted below). I also compile a note-taking sheet at the back of most books that allows me to reference back to specific topics and pages I think will come in handy later on.

If I’m reading for a specific project, I’ll also probably start typing my notes or direct quotations as they become prevalent. As I’ve talked about before, Scrivener is an essential note-taking tool for me and for how I organize work related stuff. If there are quotes, passages, or main ideas I want to draw upon or puzzle through, I will type those directly into Scrivener for later–they may get discarded, they may get expanded, they may lead to another book and to another ad naseum, but the point is to get them to the general “space” to which they are related.

I have a pretty strict but impractical approach to writing in books that I’ve been stuck with since beginning my undergraduate work. Basically, any literary, YA, or leisure reading text gets a kind of no-writing embargo placed on it. I’ll admit that the materialistic part of me appreciates the book as a product, especially Books So Ridiculously Awesome You Don’t Even Know What To Do With Them (BSRAYDEKWTDWT). I’ve amassed a handful of first editions of books that have felt important to me at one point in my life or another, and I’ll buy more than one edition of a book to have a “reader’s copy” of a book I don’t feel comfortable risking getting tattered by borrowers of books. Geek Love, Infinite Jest (though the second printing with Vollmann’s name correctly spelled, unfortunately), and–come to mention it–a healthy portion of Bill’s books as well:

Now, when it comes to academic texts, many get put through the wringer, as do books that are often drawn upon or which it’s a good idea to keep in a back pocket once in a while – some of Salinger’s books fit in this category and I’ve probably bought or given away a copy of Franny and Zooey on an annual basis.

The tricky thing for me is when a book straddles the line between work and play (Dewey reminds us that this is a false divide in the first place). So, having to read House of Leaves for an undergraduate seminar, made me struggle between writing in and not annotating (this sometimes leads me to do things like buy two copies of a book … I am not proud of this).

As for non-fiction, every page and inch of the book is fair game in terms of annotation. Some of my critical theory books are difficult to read due to third and fourth rounds of annotations. In general, however, the very last page of the book becomes a pseudo-index for me of pages, phrases, and ideas I may want to reference at some time in the future. The page is usually very sloppy may have notes to random people, doodling, and references to things that may not make sense to me. It’s pretty common for me to be unable to decipher some of these notes later on – the fact that many of these books are at least partly read in cars and on airplanes makes the notes that much messier. Here’s the back page of this book that I read last week:

Again, very random notes and jottings. However, considering that the majority of my academic books have similar pages, my library very quickly is distilled to a handful of pages that I can cull together around specific projects. It leaves me in the midst of an unfinished conversation I can pick up and add to very quickly.

So that’s a snapshot of two approaches to digesting reading materials. What are your approaches? I think we’ll, eventually, work through our approaches to writing, organizing, and moving from others’ work to our own. This reflective practice reminded me of this and I hope this can be a way to think about the different approaches pedagogues and researchers take in engaging with the mental labor of educating America.