Category Archives: Why We Can’t Get It Right

Four Emotions While Watching Pixar’s Inside Out: Body Shaming, #CharlestonShooting, and the Privileged Feels

Building off of the four key emotions portrayed in Inside Out, a quartet of reflections on Pixar’s latest.

Joy

It’s a fun Pixar film that gives you Pixar feels. Yay.

(Also, the fleeting nod to Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field” was a nice gesture.)

 

Anger

As much as I wanted to love this movie, I kept wondering why the characters of “Anger” and “Sadness” had to be the heavyset characters. The former resorts to violence and the latter is so lazy she is dragged on the floor throughout a third of the movie. If I think about the diverse bodies we have, I can’t help but ponder what effect seeing one’s larger body type manifested as someone that is “angry” or “sad” will have on an impressionable audience. What does this movie say about who I am and my relationship to feelings of joy if I am considered “fat” by society’s definitions?

 

Disgust

At the heart of this movie (and not really a spoiler) is a young girl struggling to adjust to life in a new city with her parents; there are delays from a moving truck, a fleeting moment of embarrassment in school, an argument at home. The entire social and emotional range that this character undergoes is rooted in the pretty comfortable life of being a white girl in an upper-middle-class family in an industrialized, wireless, and accepting society. As I watched the movie, I reflected on Jeff Duncan-Andrade’s scholarship on “critical hope,” the signs of PTSD that youth in spaces of poverty experience, and the ways youth of color’s feelings would be triggered by entirely different circumstances than those of the protagonist of the film. This is very much a film for and about white feelings. (My caveat here about reading Catcher in the Rye with my high school students applies to this concern. But. But the whiteness of the film’s emotional core is frustrating in light of where American discourse stands in 2015, which brings me to…)

 

Fear

Last night, nine people were murdered. It was fueled by hate and our country needs to do more than mourn. We need to have important discussion and action about race, our history of racism, and what “fear” means when it feels like it is open season on unarmed boys and girls of color in the U.S. I worry that the snow-globe like feelings of Inside Out and an underlying feeling of see-we’re-all-the-same does more harm than good when the very real differences in where we’re born and from whom can mean life or death.

Sadness-Tinged Relief: Uncomfortable Reflections on Leaving Manual Arts

It’s been just over a month since I stopped working at Manual Arts, the high school where I spent the past eight years trying to cut my teeth as a teacher; the place where I probably learned more every day than I was privileged to teach. And while I’ve been spending my time since packing­­–and later unpacking–boxes, standing in line at a new (though just as slow) DMV, and figuring out how to at least somewhat safely operate a circular saw, this primarily offline time has afforded me the opportunity to reflect on this final year at Manual Arts and what that school space has meant to me.

In many ways, leaving this school–particularly in light of this last year–has been filled with sadness-tinged relief. It makes me uncomfortable to say that, so let me explain where this feeling is coming from.

I should make it clear, though, that despite any of the challenges I’ve faced or dealt with at Manual Arts, I feel extremely, extremely privileged to have been able to be a teacher there. The students that I’ve worked with have pushed me in ways that this rant will not encompass. In a moment, I plan to share the more troubling challenges at Manual Arts but want to make sure that my gratitude to the abundant experiences of joy and enlightenment I’ve had from my students and colleagues is noted.

I’ve made it no secret that Manual Arts has had its fair share of challenges over the years. From truancy policies that essentially criminalize students to the fact that my eight years at this school has included eight different principals, Manual Arts, structurally is a persistent mess.

Last August, I met my eighth principal for the school. Robert Whitman was assuming his first head principalship at Manual having been an assistant principal at several other local urban schools prior. I want to stop here for a moment and note that this is par for the course of urban school leadership in Los Angeles: the schools most in need of strong leadership according to district metrics like standardized test scores, teacher turnover rates, and dropout levels act as training grounds for principals. The majority of the principals that have left Manual Arts while I was there spent little more than a year (sometimes less) letting the school coast while adding their new leadership position to their resumes and quickly taking a job at a less demanding school.

The new principal’s challenges were compounded by the fact that the school moved from a three track year-round schedule to a traditional calendar. While the three track system meant longer school days and is generally inequitable for all of the students involved, it was at least a routine students and teachers had learned to cope with for the decade plus that Manual Arts was a year round school. And while time was stabilized as a result of the move to a traditional calendar, all else was disregarded: class sizes shot up well beyond what teachers or classrooms were equipped to deal with. Across the board, students were packed 36-40+ students deep in core instructional classes. Strangely, our security and deans at the school were gutted. Here’s an equation for disaster at even the best of schools: too many kids with too little supervision equals dismal instruction.

Of course, the instability of varied leadership and strategies takes its toll on the students and teachers of Manual Arts. The Freshman Preparatory Academy–the school’s effort two principals before Whitman–was an effective effort in sustaining student interest during the year our students are most at risk of dropping out. With a new regime of administrators and a general lack of institutional memory to drive the decisions of the school this year, the majority of the practices that supported ninth grade teachers were decimated. The halls of FPA, where I spent most of my time helping teachers with technology challenges at the school became chaos.  Even the most collaborative teachers I was privileged to work with went into all-out-survival mode, trying to get through the overcrowded classes one day at a time.

The administration, like LAUSD’s superintendent’s phrase, shifted to a “laser-like focus” on skills and test preparation. The execution of this focus, however, was generally incompetent. My former guiding teacher and one of the most innovative educators I’ve been privileged to work with was subject to no less than a year-long procession of passive-aggressive administrators observing and encouraging him to volunteer to pilot the Scholastic Read 180 program in his classroom. The experience sapped him of the enthusiastic energy I typically got to see in him and seemed like a contract-protected form of administrative bullying. (I assure you I have no problem with being observed–under the best of administrators my practice has significantly grown from administrative observation. What this teacher underwent felt possibly retaliatory for the way he has been outspoken on the school’s campus.)

As a quick aside: as I type this, my former advisor forwarded me her emailed “word of the day” and it is fitting to today’s discussion.

Quantophrenia: “Undue reliance on or use of facts that can be quantified or analyzed using mathematical or statistical methods; inappropriate application of such methods, es. In the fields of sociology and anthropology.”

Nearly all of the teachers I’ve come to work with closely and that I’ve learned from are voluntarily leaving Manual next year. Most of them have helped co-design the Schools for Community Action and are trying to make these new schools (just down the street from Manual Arts) a more humane alternative to the bureaucracy that has plagued Manual Arts this past year and long, long before.

I say “voluntarily” in the previous paragraph somewhat uncomfortably. None of these teachers want to leave the students at the school. As is the case in school after school, Manual’s problems are adult-driven.

Perhaps what’s driven me to this reflection more than anything else is an announcement that was made during my last week at Manual Arts: the school has been awarded a School Improvement Grant for next year as a “turnaround model.” What this means is that the school is being reconstituted. “Reconstitution” is fancy ed-speak that essentially means that everyone at the school is being fired and needs to reapply for their jobs. Everyone, that is, except that in this single instance the principal will be keeping his job without reapplying. Wait, what? Yeah, that happened. Oh yeah, one other thing: in this particular concoction of reconstitution, the school will only hire back 50% of the teachers that choose to reapply at Manual Arts. This is clearly an opportunity to clean house and ensure that the bad apples in the eye of the nascent principal and less-than-effective management company, LA’s Promise don’t come back.

Here’s the fancy color-printed handout that teachers received notifying them of the reconstitution. Sure looks expensive to have printed out the school’s logo in color: a sound decision, I’m sure.

I should make it clear that money is great: the million plus dollars that the School Improvement Grant can bring to the school can make a real difference in the outcomes of the students at Manual Arts. But you know what else can make a difference? Positively driven, motivated teachers that know and have been involved in a school community. I should note, too, that even when working on school wide reforms in the past and reconstitution was invoked, I could not find significant research that it leads to positive academic outcomes.

So: sadness and relief. The work conditions at Manual have become untenable in a way that has made such an archaic word to me feel positively spritely. I’m genuinely saddened that the school I’ve invested so much time and energy in and that has rewarded me again and again with happiness and the best of my teaching experiences has been denigrated by inconstancy and poor management. I’m saddened that I left the school under these conditions. And, as awful as it may be for the students there, I am relieved not to be there next year. Even if they would have hired me back.

Not Quite EverythingEverything: Why Our Approach to Music Education is Kinda Awful

Over the past week, along with an abundance of holiday shopping, I purchased the updated anthology of Underworld’s selected hits and rarities. It was with nostalgia that the opening arpeggiated notes of “Rez” kicked in that I remembered the way the band seeped into my consciousness.

It was the Golden Age of Napster and it was less a site I understood as leading to piracy than as my own open university. This being 2000 and stuck negotiating space in new ways in a dorm room at UCLA, the possibilities of the system were limited only by the occasional lag in internet service. I felt like I was playing catch-up. Eighteen and recently donned music editor for the school newspaper, I was taking night classes in ’80s hip-hop, IDM, and Impulse Records’ free jazz artists. Confusion was the norm with my poorly skinned Winamp player doing its best to make sense of things for me. I remember downloading a cover of “Brown Eyed Girl” that was attributed to Weezer; though it clearly was not Rivers Cuomo & company singing through my paltry computer speakers, it was an inspired cover that’s been a lost but longed for mp3 in the shuffle of computers and files over the years, a relic of the wild west-like nature of Napster. Similarly, I remember (as part of my self-prescribed curriculum) burning DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing and Aphex Twin’s Richard D James Album on a single disc and, for months, not knowing which was which when it came to musical styles and sonic textures. [RIAA, if you’re reading, I eventually bought both albums along with countless others as a result of the Napster days, a testament to the possibilities of profit that were overshadowed by fear and terrorism and Metallica.]

That summer, I’d read Generation Ecstasy and it was an eye opener not only in terms of the possibilities of musical genres, but in revealing the possibilities of academic engagement in music in meaningful ways. Later, I remember talking about music with friends and mentioning the book only to find out it was an assigned text in an undergraduate elective about popular music. You can take a class on this stuff?!

I remembered Underworld as that group that wrote that song for Trainspotting and, on a lark, bought their live album Everythingeverything at a Tower Records near my grandparents’ house in Huntington Beach. The sheer size of what Karl Hyde and Rick Smith were accomplishing fascinated me. The climaxed clash of “Rez/Cowgirl” is forever connected in my mind with fevered drives home through the winding roads of Mt. Helix.

And all of this is to prelude a simple question: Why did I have to wait so long for this opportunity? While I was already a music “fan” and immersed in family practices that included going to musical performances, singing at family gatherings, and enthusiastically drumming on car dashboards, it really wasn’t until college that I was able to see music as a source of study, as a place to connect passion with purpose, a place to learn new ways of listening.

Look at a student’s Facebook for even a few minutes, hear their in-class earbuds bleating distorted tones, or ask them what their current ringtone is and it’s clear that music is a source of passion for the vast majority of the kids in our schools today. And yet, we leave music instruction into the hands of people who are inclined on the production side of things (and even then in only limited ways such as marching bands and big band numbers). Why do we wait to make the study of music, its history, and the cultural meaning of it an option only for those students that eventually matriculate into universities? Some settings allow us to engage in “Music Appreciation,” but even that signals very limited understandings of listeners’ and academics’ roles and relationships with music.t

Look at any of the many studies about scaffolding toward academic instruction and utilizing youth popular culture and the academic opportunities for use of music in core content areas are seen in abundance. Music has been a regular presence in my classroom to both instruct and to help foster community. As I continue working with current and aspiring teachers, thinking through pedagogy of incorporating music in English classrooms will continue to be a part of how my courses and in-services are structured. However, I want to make clear that I think that courses in music criticism, music history, and ethnomusicology would speak strongly to the students that often feel disconnected from the curriculum in schools and aren’t necessarily interested in holding a bassoon or lugging around a sousaphone.

Two days ago, I was involved in a rational debate about Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All with a student that had failed my class last year. He spoke passionately about the group’s strong suits and I played devil’s advocate for the purposes of our conversation. A friend of mine, as we enjoyed dinner prior to a record-breaking Kanye West & Jay-Z concert earlier this week, mentioned that his students are really into Whiz Khalifa. Another former student is probably South Central’s resident expert on all things Beatles. Aside from being a novelist and paranormal romance expert, my former student Sam happily shares her listening habits with me, her interests in Chromeo, Vampire Weekend, and Interpol a common system of semiotics in our too infrequent conversations. These are scholars waiting to be acknowledged and engaged and not necessarily wanting to hold an instrument or perform in front of a crowd.

Open up the door of cultural studies and it’s not a big stretch to see new ways of engaging students critically in schools and for meaningful ways. The way I see it, get kids thinking academically about music and movies and it isn’t long until we’re reading Bordwell and Ross in high school. And then it isn’t long until we’re reading Stuart Hall. And then the Frankfurt School. And Marx. It’s not long until we’re listening to music in new ways and hearing in the notes and silence the sounds of change and possibility and cultural action for freedom.

Colored People’s Time and the Disappointing Inconsistency of Time Management at Manual Arts

I want to talk a bit about time at Manual Arts. Our school’s use of time denigrates students in ways that can be read as classist, racist, and apathetic towards the needs of urban youth. I would argue that they define “colored people’s time” in a way that’s as equally racist as the original definition. Let me explain.

Turns out our school’s schedule will change next week – it’ll effectively be the third schedule students have had since the school year started last month.

Why is our schedule changing next week? Oh, because our school is unable to count properly. And even though we had the entire summer to calibrate the schedule for students, it was only now that the school realized it was short of instructional minutes:

Due to a mishap last Spring with the district bell schedule design software; our current schedule is 18 minutes too short for our regular length days. 2 minutes will be added to each passing period and 1 minute will be added to each class period.

I particularly appreciate that our new schedule–to emphasize instructional minutes–adds six total minutes for students in class.

This week there was a vote from our faculty regarding minor tweaks to the new allocation of school minutes. Here are the details:

Please find the NEW Bell Schedule attached. Please Note that since staff voted to eliminate Advisory on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday; there are 6 minutes added on to Period 4 on Monday & Wednesday and 2 minutes added on to Period 4 on Tuesdays to allow for school announcements. On Wednesday and Thursday announcements will continue to be at the end of Advisory after lunch. Please remember this new bell schedule will not start until a week from Monday on October 17, 2011.

In case you’re wondering, “Advisory” is the space for students to gain mentoring support from teachers, to share their learning experiences, gain study skills, and prepare for post-secondary plans. At least in theory. Our school has absolutely floundered with any kind of clear articulation of how to use the advisory time. And now, by cutting advisory to a two-times a week situation, is essentially killing advisory all together*.

Finally, in regards to time: our school has a problem actually ringing bells at the right time. It shouldn’t be difficult, right? I mean, you ring the bell when it’s time for the class to end. End of story, right? Except that­–since day one–our bells are hugely erratic. They will ring anywhere from 1 to 7 minutes from their actual time.

This may seem minor, but teachers plan for the consistency and depend on bells ringing correctly in order end class in an orderly fashion.

If you’ve got a few minutes to kill, I videotaped my watch this week while waiting for the bell to ring. The class is supposed to end at 12:00. You can see my clock tick three additional minutes before it actually rings. You can hear the principal announce lunch changes, presumably because he thinks the bell is about to ring. In turn, you can hear Peter concluding his class because he thinks the bell is going to ring. And then: there’s a whole lot of time for students to be restless. [That really is the extent of what happens in the video, but feel free to experience it if you really want.]

Watching the Clock from Antero Garcia on Vimeo.

The above examples of disregard to consistent learning time have significant impact on how students perceive their schooling as valuable and important. For the urban youth at Manual Arts, these inconsistencies tell students that adults don’t care enough about running a school properly. They reinforce messages of shoddy schools perpetuated in the media and stereotypes about urban communities. This is the way our schools define a new and even more racist understanding of CPT.

*In an slightly related note, an upcoming PSAT for all 10th and 11th graders is extending advisory for a day to 180 minutes. That’s three hours. In a class that our school is at least symbolically saying is worthless. How many 9th and 12th grade teachers are going to be showing movies during advisory for three hours: probably most of them. [10/17/11 This footnote was edited per clarification from Ben in the comments below.]

Projecting On the SMART board: Playing Catch up with Technology

 

Related to something I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Peter and I found it interesting that the English teachers at school were given overhead transparencies to prepare students for the CELDT (California English Language Development Test).

Check out the instructions emailed to teachers:

 

In particular, Peter and I were trying to figure out how to best utilize the transparencies in the classroom since many teachers have Smartboards. Maybe they would look something like this:

A Classroom Tour (And the Difference Between Whining and Advocating)

In an effort to get all of the students to fit on campus, my school has converted our former woodshop into two different classrooms: a biology and a history class. Originally, one teacher was supposed to teach upstairs and one downstairs.

 

Both teachers agreed that the second floor alcoves felt too prison-like to actually conduct classes in.

 

I think these forgotten materials are pretty much all that’s left of the woodshop classes. So much for shop class as soulcraft.

Here’s the view from the top of the stairs walking into the main classroom space – you can see the history teacher’s desk at the bottom of the stairs and the biology teacher’s student desks in the background.

The high ceilings, walls lined with wires, and mysterious HVAC unit on the ceiling make it a little difficult to decorate and personalize the space. I imagine it’s got to feel like taking a class in an abandoned Costco.

That’s the history class in the small corner – they had to make use of the small space to offset the noise when both classes are in session.

I find the yellow lines left from the woodshop class fascinating. If I were a student here, I know they would be endlessly distracting to me.

I want to conclude this tour by briefly addressing the way that Manual Arts has been discussed in public lately. As much as I feel like I helped accurately represent the teacher concerns at school in Saturday’s column, today’s follow up column by Sandy Banks is disappointing in how little it actually says.

I’m also disappointed in Mike McGalliard’s response to all of this. While I’ve heard from many incensed teachers about the lack of respect and navel gazing that he accomplished, I don’t want to waste energy pointing fingers, sniping about details of what’s happened at the school, etc. However, I want to address being called a “whiny” teacher.

[First of all, really? Is this really what Mike is bringing our level of discourse down to? Really?]

When classroom conditions are clearly beyond what is equitable and are now a civil rights issue, I think it’s time to make sure you are whining in public. 22 extra days won’t do anything when teachers cannot work within an environment. I see the critical lens I am trying to shape on this blog as a way of advocating for a profession that is continually portrayed as “whiny” and the perpetuation of the label by the former head of an organization that teachers brought on campus via a grassroots campaign is saddening.

It all makes me wonder if Mike and the people that “want to see the needle move” ever feel like there is an okay time for teachers to whine?

Should my colleague that has had a leak in front of her classroom with overflowing buckets sit idly? (The leak’s been their since May.)

Should the students be wondering why we don’t have a librarian?

The students that haven’t gotten lunch because they don’t know where the line is for students without meal tickets and haven’t gotten the applications be allowed to whine?

Can I whine that I’m given overhead projector transparencies as an instructional aid even though we’ve spent hundreds of thousands on smart boards?

What about the signficant number of teachers still subbing for themselves?

You see, it’s not that any one of these is a dire problem in-and-of-itself, necessarily. However, when these different challenges (and the many, many more that have arisen this year) are compounded, they create a pretty dismal learning experience for students and a soul-deadening outlook on work for even the most leveled teachers. If Mike’s hoping to lead with the dollars of “corporate America,” maybe he should also think through his own recognition that he should be listening to why I am whining and for whom I am advocating.

 

My Union Sucks at Twitter (#DeasyFTW)

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.

Canyons of Inequality: A few thoughts on Academically Adrift

 

Flying to Boston for the Urban Sites Network Conference, I read Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Really insightful report. Though I’ll go over a few main ideas from the text below, it’s worth a look.

Some main takeaways:

  1. Teachers and schools matter – Students’ critical thinking and general learning was improved by the rigor of teaching, the amount of interaction between faculty and students, and school climate.
  2. Teaching isn’t valued by universities – Faculty workload and tenure review de-emphasize teaching. Adjunct, graduate students and lecturers teach more and more courses. In many graduate programs, teaching is not instilled in graduate students as something valued.
  3. Students are opting for easier classes, spending less time studying and “taming” professors – Despite critical thinking being tied to a professor’s teaching track record, students are generally opting to take easier classes, not frequently interacting with professors, and generally pushing the rigor of courses down.
  4. The K12 achievement gap continues throughout post-secondary education – Looking at students by race and class, students that come from socio-economically disadvantaged groups tend to more frequently take easier classes less frequently interact with professors, and show marginal growths in learning and critical thinking over time.

The implications of the study captured in the book are significant. However, in considering the need for a college degree in gaining entry into the competitive workforce, the study portrays a significant gateway American youth must pass through.

The study highlights the “college for all” mentality that is perceived throughout the country. At the same time it shows that not only are students less prepared for the rigors of college, they also expect to be able to achieve competitively despite a lack of academic focus in their secondary education. And, ultimately, these students (though there is a significant rate of students dropping out of college) complete degrees by navigating through easier courses; the statistics on the amount of students that never write compositions longer than 20 pages by the time they graduate is both significant and unsurprising in the context of the disembodied learning experiences that students are currently undergoing.

What’s not said, in the book, however, is just how necessary college is. Students are expecting to go through college–even when they are not motivated in high school–because, if they want a middle-class level job, they need a bachelor’s degree (at a minimum). Essentially, we are forcing students to go through a program they are not prepared for and may not be interested in, in order to get a job afterwards. On the other side of this are the thousands of students not represented in the study: the students that don’t even bother with college in the first place. In a school like Manual Arts, a school of black and Latino students, this is roughly 90% of our students … more than 3,000 of them. They aren’t playing the college game, they are not taming college professors, they are not not visiting professors during office hours, they are not spending too much time socializing in fraternities and sororities, and they are not worried about the debt that so often comes with entering the sphere of higher education.

I get that that is not the purpose of the book. Frankly, I found Academically Adrift compelling–the hard data that fills roughly a third of the book as an appendix is a valuable resource that will eventually guide a Socratic conversation with my high school students. I bring up the unspoken story of the students who aren’t entering the drift-free world of college because it brings up the further segmentation of American society. By the time students get to college, the achievement gap cleaves working class students well away from their counterparts and leaves them with few options (aside from the marginal small percentage of students that “make it” and perpetuate the cycle of inequality). By the time students finish college, they are further partitioned by race and class: many will not finish, a majority will finish with a bare minimum of engagement and negligible amounts of learning (less selective universities have looser general education requirements–students will usually take easier classes at these schools), and a small fraction of students will leave college with the kinds of higher order critical thinking skills that universities were established to instill. Our achievement gap essentially becomes a series of canyons of exacerbated inequality.

Reflections on #aera2011

After a couple of days to recover, I wanted to share a few thoughts on another AERA conference. Though they do not represent everything I saw within the conference, I think they speak directly to what needs to be improved.

 

Lack of twitter

While I didn’t expect a twitter feed as lively as #dml2011, I was disappointed by the lack of engagement with the not-so-new medium. With nearly 15,000 people and the usual phone-book sized directory of sessions, Twitter is an ideal way to personalize the conference experience, engage in networking, and collaborate. Competing hashtags, a lack of free wifi & spotty service in the main hotels, and a limited number of tweeters made the conference generally disappointing in terms of social networking. One person tallied roughly 20-25 attendees (total) were contributing tweets from the conference.

And having a mobile app that does little more than act as a clunkier version of a directory doesn’t bring AERA any closer to connecting to a “social imagination.”

 

The problem with CHAT

The problem with CHAT isn’t really a CHAT problem at all. Instead, it is much more a problem of depersonalization and decontextualization of the research at AERA. I described AERA to several people as a giant five-day show-and-tell. While there is meaningful research being contributed, what happens as a result of AERA? More directly: we have 15,000 experts in the same place, at the same time, and all largely wanting to engage in conversations about education; why can’t AERA be productive, active, and responsive?

And so, I found myself participating in a working group that largely revolved around discussing CHAT-related sessions at the conference. Don’t get me wrong, when I understand CHAT, I find it really interesting. I’ve described it this way to a friend recently: “CHAT is a theory about everything and nothing. It’s kind of like the Seinfeld of learning theory.” In any case, geometry has never been my strong suit, and a conversation about CHAT eventually devolves into a conversation about triangles (literally). I couldn’t help but feel the tension of having flown across the country to engage in dialogue with the best of academic researchers only to have this be a conversation about triangles.

[btw, I’m amazed there is no wikipedia entry for CHAT … get some grad student to get on that!]

 

The “It’s so nice” syndrome

I spent a healthy portion of my time with the UCLA IDEA Council of Youth Research. I can say that they were the true highlight of the conference, representing both cutting edge research and calling those that saw their work to enact change.

However, I heard several conversations throughout the conference that described the research of teachers and students in ways that was tokenizing. Specifically, a conference attendee described hearing students talk in ways that matched current researcher rhetoric. The students were described glowingly and the attendee said it was “so nice” to hear these students speaking so clearly. I’ve been on the side of the discussed students before as well; teachers presenting and interacting at AERA fare little better than students. While the Council argues for students and teacher to be engaged in the process of research, we are still more subject than peer at AERA. It is difficult to imagine a research community that will treat practitioners and youth as legitimate partners if their experiences and voices are not more fully developed within the conference. I’m pretty sure I’ve ranted about this when reflecting on past AERA conferences as well.

Monday morning had one of the best sessions of the entire conference: four different youth-oriented research groups from across the country presented their findings. It was powerful and meaningful work and it was all voiced by high school students and teachers. Of course, it was the only session like this and a morning sessions towards the end of a conference (in New Orleans of all places) didn’t yield record crowds. Yes, it’s a step forward for AERA to have sessions with students, but with this sliver of a door open, it’s time to budge open full swing. How about, instead of a single, round-table session where students are literally competing for audience members, we make this a regular part of the conference. What if sessions had students and teachers as discussants? Or are we not as concerned about relevance when it comes to our work? Summarizing a question Ernest Morrell asked at the end of a session on Saturday, what’s going to be more important at the end of the day: directly interacting in research with teachers and students to improve education, or getting another citation in a peer reviewed journal?

 

The future and beyond

A non-Council of Youth Research highlight for me was seeing the members of the New London Group discuss what is in store “Beyond New London.” While the academic Lollapalooza was fun, at the end of the day, it left me curious about what’s next. When actually addressing what is “Beyond” in terms of the future of literacies, the group did little more than shrug. Likewise, the working group I was involved in, “Intervening for the Future,” while a useful group for intellectual conversation, puttered more with the concept of intentional intervention; should we or shouldn’t we? Not that I’m thrilled with a book like this, but I do wish AERA had a bit more forward-thinking, on-the-ground engagement at this year’s conference. I do see the research of my colleagues and I as moving beyond New London “stuff,” and the Council provides me with a sense of optimism and possibility for the future, but these are tangential groups and not all mainstream practices within AERA.

 

Monopoly Panopticon: Why Hasbro is Screwing up Game-Based Learning

Hasbro, I want to tell you something: I grew up playing Monopoly with ever-evolving house rules that varied everything from the value of dice roles, to jail-breaking bribery, to lucrative Free Parking.

Reading about the changes that Hasbro has made to the game makes me concerned. Changes in board games like this doesn’t feel like healthy adaptations; this is pandering.

I’d imagine many educators would point to a concern about elementary math skills lost without the transaction of paper money. However, I think the main problem with this proposal is the lack to augment, challenge and reinvent when all of the rules and arbiters of those rules are hidden inside a speaking, electronic box.

Part of what is so important about the value of games is the way they make us challenge traditional thinking. Passing go, for instance, would be a relatively easy task without the rules that you must move in one direction and only on legitimate squares. Gambits of investing in trains, calculating income tax, and desperate negotiations to complete monopolies are part of the social interaction of playing games.

And while the importance of socialization of games is addressed, the value of “cheating” is just as important. Cheating – changing rules and exploring more creatively how to problem solve within a gaming environment are just as valid in learning to play, compete, and evaluate the structures of power placed within a game.

Games like Little Big Planet, level editors for popular first person shooters, and avid affinity spaces online for gaming strategy, guilds and lore are all extensions of why the creepy tower in the middle of the Monopoly tower thwarts creativity, fun, learning. Ultimately, limiting one’s freedom in authoring gaming components within Monopoly will reduce the success of garnering a newer, “digital” audience and transferring videogame components to board games.