My recent DMLcentral post focuses on the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site. I’ve been excited about the increased engagement with this community of educators recently and I am encouraging teachers of all disciplines and ages to consider participating within the Digital Is community.
Cliff, my colleague at UCLA, and I are currently working on several collections for Digital Is (as pictured above). I’m looking forward to sharing some of the ideas we’ve been developing in the near future.
I’m pleased to announce that I am co-editing a special issue of Learning Media and Technology with Ernest Morrell. The theme for our issue is “City Youth and the Pedagogy of Participatory Media.” You can read the full CFP here and I will also paste it below. If you are a researcher, teacher, or student involved in work that relates to the theme described, please consider submitting an abstract for consideration by September 30th.
Learning, Media and Technology
Call for papers – special issue
Issue theme: City Youth and the Pedagogy of Participatory Media
Learning, Media and Technology is acknowledged as one of the learning academic journals in the fields of educational technology and educational media.
Proposals are invited for papers for a special issue of the journal on the theme“City Youth and the Pedagogy of Participatory Media”. The special issue will be edited by Antero Garcia and Ernest Morrell.
We are currently soliciting abstracts for proposed papers for the special issue. Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words and be accompanied by up to six keywords.
- Deadline for submission of abstract: 30th September 2011
- Successful authors informed: 10th October 2011
- Deadline for submission of full papers: 31st January 2012
Full papers are expected to be between 4,000 and 6,000 words (please refer to the journal website for full ‘instructions for authors’). All papers will be subject to the usual blind reviewing and refereeing processes.
Please send abstracts and keywords to the guest editors by 30th September 2011:
- anterobot@gmail.com
- ernestmorrell@gmail.com
FURTHER DETAILS OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE
In 1950, approximately 29% of the world’s population was classified as urban. According to the 2007 revision of the United Nations’ World Urbanization Prospects, 70% of the world’s population will be classified as urban by 2050 and most of the people who will inhabit urban centres globally will be economically disadvantaged. We also know that school systems in cities around the world are challenged to provide socially and culturally meaningful education to increasingly diverse populations and, because of their inability to meet these challenges, many city youth do not receive the formal education they need to participate meaningfully in the world of work or civil society in the 21st century.
At the same time, we see that city youth have increasing access to technology and many scholars have shown that youth are engaging technology outside of school in increasingly sophisticated ways. Because of this, technology is being called upon as an antidote to education inequity globally. These tools are used not only to engage students in meaningful learning experiences, but also to shape ways people participate and interact with the world. However, while there is burgeoning research around the role that participatory media play in improving learning, educators are identifying challenges toward implementation. Specifically, “research on teaching in urban schools suggests that teachers’ limited skills and limiting beliefs about their students lead to a steady diet of low-level material coupled with unstimulating, roteoriented teaching”.
When applied to historically marginalized communities, participatory media acts as a powerful tool for amplification of voice and as a means to personalize content and assessments for the specific needs of marginalized youth. Part of the challenge that educators face is in looking at the ways youth come together and communicate to refine/establish new technologies. As we better understand how culture happens among young people, an understanding of how to develop new technologies emerges.
This special issue explores ways that technology-based opportunities present strategies for closing a global literacy gap based on race and class. Specifically, this issue focuses on pedagogy and participatory media:
- How are city youth demonstrating the potential of participatory media to intentionally develop a public pedagogy?
- How are participatory media reshaping social thought and action?
- How do educators leverage media in critical literacy development? What are examples of successful attempts of this form of pedagogy?
- Are there ministries and departments of education or government agencies that are getting it right with respect to policies that promote the pedagogy of participatory media?
- What are the risks of adopting participatory media tools developed for capitalism and consumerism? How are educators engaging youth in these topics?
The guest editors of this issue have extensive experience as teachers, teacher educators, and researchers working with youth in the U.S. This issue requests submissions from a wide range of agents from around the world within the field of education: in addition to researchers, teachers, students, and combinations of collaborators across these audiences are encouraged to share their work.
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.
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.
As teacher layoffs have become a frustrating norm for several of my friends, I wanted to find a way to personalize for the public the mass layoffs that affect the teaching force. Peter and I sat down for an afternoon trying to figure out a way to clearly explain the mess that has been his employment status over the past few years. The conversation took nearly four hours and spilled over dozens of post-it notes. The result is the above children’s book. Though it glosses over details and even more infuriating bureaucratic mistakes and lack of communication, the general difficulty with determining seniority (and thus ensuring a job) is pretty clear. The messy scrawl is all mine – Peter made all of the images using a program we used in our journalism intersession class. (The slideshow can be slowed down by clicking on the options once it’s launched.)
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.
As critical as I get about depictions of race, class, and gender in media, I have a real problem with the thrust of this article. While I think the author is trying to be inclusive in his vision of the need for non-White heroes (and I agree with him on this point), I think bashing Holden is the wrong approach. Let’s look at two specific passages from the article’s beginning and ending:
Teachers and writers who venerate Catcher have to ask themselves: How relevant is Holden in a world where he is an actual minority?
And
As for the coming minority represented by dying Holden, whose popularity among teens has waned in recent years, the prize is out there. The first writer who accurately describes what it is like to be the only white boy in the room in 21st-Century America can redefine the White Outsider and make him relevant again.
So, to make a long story short, as a teacher, I did ask myself if Holden was relevant for my class of all black and Latino youth. I did this seven years ago during my first year as a teacher. At that time, I specifically felt that the whiny voice of a rich, white east-coast male would be completely alien to my students. It would be patronizing to force them to spend their time with such a literary character. I said this to several of my teaching colleagues.
But what I forgot was that Holden is the apotheosis of being a teenager and growing up. I’ve had few texts that have quite the near-universal positive response as Catcher gets in my 11th grade classroom.
While I ask students to think about the critical nature of the text and its politics of representation, I also recognize that students need to look at the world from myriad viewpoints – especially when those of privileged folks like Holden end up looking a whole lot like their own. Each time I teach this book (and it’s been taught to every 11th grade class I’ve taught at this point), I have students ask to buy a copy when they are finished. I have students each year admit it’s the first book they’ve finished reading. Ever. I have impassioned and emotional reflections from students that discuss their fears, uncertainties, and desires about growing up. The fact that Holden is white or male doesn’t get in the way of this pathos or this ability of students to engage meaningfully with an aging text.
Ultimately, I think there is a danger in taking an effective and proven piece of literature like The Catcher In The Rye and allowing it to function as an effigy to burn in tribute to large and significant questions about racial diversity, representation, and media. These are important questions, but the approach is misguided and uninformed. And isn’t this kind of writing specifically what would lead to popularity waning? Is a text’s popularity tied to its relevance?
[As should be obvious, the images and quoted text in this post were not made by me.]*
As schools are being cleaned, painted, prepared for the new year and as many of my friends collect unemployment and search for teaching jobs in charters and small non-LAUSD schools, I want to spend some time on this blog describing some of the individual challenges I’m seeing my school community face. I plan to dedicate several posts over the summer looking at what budget cuts and educational reform look like through the lens of my school. Starting right now.
The problem, of course, is that there isn’t even a pretense of objectivity in what I’m trying to do here. Pertaining specifically to the words and images here, I’m trying my best to simply offer you, the reader, a snapshot of what is happening. What I want to show now is how teachers are voicing, organizing, and enacting civic action within a public & open digital sphere.
“The Truth About L.A.’s Promise” Facebook group has only been up for about a day. I don’t know what kind of response the members can anticipate. As a bit of background, L.A.’s Promise is the “Network Partner” for Manual Arts; the company manages and oversees the organizational and academic operation of the school in conjunction with LAUSD. As I’ve written about before, the climate at the school over the past year has been less than harmonious. [If it sounds like I’m downplaying any conflict or tension, you would be absolutely correct; the focus here is on the Facebook group.]
Though I will weigh in at some point down the road, I want to simply show one way the current circumstances of public education are engaging teachers in responsive ways. The fact that many of the people, my friends & colleagues, who are voicing opinions in this digital space are no longer working at Manual Arts is not lost on me. Being liberated from this work environment allows for dissenting voice. However, for the teachers like myself that are still working at the school next year, I am interested in how this open Facebook group will protect and share support for teachers still teaching at Manual Arts and those that will not be teaching there in September.
Ultimately (and from the “safe” view of researcher), I am fascinated by the ways these teachers advocate and continue to “teach” within this space; former students speak up and participate in this group and the lessons of activism are seen by students – through what kind of interpretive lens is not up for me to decide.
Similarly, taking the traditionally text-heavy interface of groups, the participants of this open group are weaving images into a clearly digestible campaign.
Again, I have yet to see a response to this group. It’s membership and organization is still nascent. I am intrigued about the way Facebook’s process of recruitment – a current member simply “adds” me – signals to outsiders how I am to be read. Though I did not choose to join this group, I am automatically affiliated with them (and, conversely, I haven’t yet chosen to “leave” the group either).
Pragmatically, L.A.’s Promise could quickly scan the membership of this group, see that I am included, and see me as an individual that opposes them without engaging me in dialogue one way or another. I am essentially placed in an oppositional position simply through sharing digital space at the behest of a friend. Intrigued, I’m encouraging (but not “adding”) you to follow along.
*If you were to think that I was worried about retaliation or being seen as libelous, you would be correct.
[UPDATE: 7/29/11 12:21 a.m] This was posted by a member on the Facebook group:
Hey Everyone. Looks like I got REPORTED by someone on Facebook. Problem is I removed myself from “Admin” status when I started this group because I believed that it should be open to all.
I guess that’s how this group will be engaged for progressive dialogue.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been working for the past few months as a member of the committee that is revising the ELA standards for the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards. For the next month, the current draft of the standards is open for public comment. I’ve spent significant time thinking through how I see the changing role of the accomplished ELA teacher, and this is your opportunity to shape the language and ideas in these standards.
Please spend some time taking a look at the draft and commenting. The committee will convene in September to review all of your helpful feedback.
Except for my students, I probably learned more from Sadie than anyone else on a daily basis. Sadie was a 10 year old basset hound and she passed away unexpectedly late last month.
She looked like this:
I had clocked it one afternoon in June: it took Sadie and I 52 minutes to go around the block. This isn’t some irregularly long block and it would have been substantially longer if I’d allowed her to indulge in a particularly odoriferous patch of dirt or to continue to bark socially at the black lab up the street. I’ve yet to meet a dog (or a person for that matter) that can be as simultaneously lovable and infuriatingly stubborn as Sadie. And while the seemingly never ending walks have ended, I wanted to share just a few of the many things Sadie taught me about education, the way we learn, and the process of schooling.
First of all, the obvious: like her walking, learning is going to happen at its own pace. It doesn’t matter if the latest episode of the Voice is starting in ten minutes. It doesn’t matter if my slurpee is rapidly melting or if perishable groceries should be stored in the refrigerator. Sadie’s walking cannot be hurried. For her, walking is learning. It reinforces the information that she’d been processing before and offers new knowledge to integrate into her sense of being. Each new scent, each suspicious passerby, each canine (or even better feline or squirrel) is new information and a moment for the world to expand for Sadie. And this, at least as I understand it, is kind of what it’s like in our classrooms. On a good day, we can change the world for students; we can make apparent the magical, undiscovered viewpoints, concepts, literacies and skills that help them unlock new pathways for traversing and understanding the world. And, on a good day, they too can change our lives.
Related to these mediations on walking, Sadie taught me that sometimes learning can’t wait. I’ve been on conference calls with, for example, superiors when I was working with the Department of Education when Sadie would announce with finality that it was time to go out and take what the world has to offer. Her bellowing barks would occasionally elicit laughter from people on these phone calls, if I was speaking or had not muted my phone line, which was embarrassing to say the least. If recent school conflict, in-class tension, or current events are driving the interest and motivation more than my pre-planned lessons, it becomes clear that my students are requiring an imperative shift in instruction for the time being. Like Sadie, student learning needs sometimes present themselves at times when they are unexpected.
Likewise, I’ve left, in the past, social gatherings early and made roundabout detours to others in order to let Sadie out into the world for her walks. Part of teaching is learning to negotiate the demands of an entire learning community.
Sadie’s an adaptive walker. When we first began strolling together, I could gently yank on her leash and she would move according to where I would guide her. However, shortly after Sadie realized that as the alpha individual in our meandering learning space, she would dictate how a lesson would unfold and the time it took to cover specific, grassy content. For example, Sadie knew that when I pulled on her leash in one direction she could quickly throw her weight in the other direction to counter my efforts and change our trajectory. Sadie learned a physics lesson about force and acceleration through engagement. I learned a lesson about the necessity to adjust my pace of teaching by being attentive to the needs and individual journeys of the students I work with.
At the end of the day, I realized that I couldn’t speed up the process of engagement or learning for Sadie. Shortening the length of her walk would actually be pretty disastrous; considering I don’t have a backyard, the necessity for Sadie to get the most out of her walk and the walk to literally get the most out of Sadie is pretty clear.
Five years ago, when I’d first adopted the unnamed basset hound that eyed me suspiciously from the back seat of the car and would growl when I tried to pick her up, I was reminded of the lessons of love and embrace and letting go encapsulated in Joanna Newsom’s song “Sadie.”
Which brings me to one of the most important lessons that my good friend Sadie taught me: in the end, it’s about love. I argued, begged, and (sometimes) cursed Sadie because of the love I nurtured for her. I was able to engage in this process of learning because I came to love and trust her. Like Sadie, I can’t imagine any reason more necessary to teach and to continue to worry over and pester continually the students I’ve spent my time with than because I unequivocally love them.
Last fall, Sadie went on her first camping trip. I’d brought along a couple of rawhide bones to keep her busy as the group of us made camp, unpacked the car, and cursed those damn poles that converge into a complex calculus of tarps and gravity. After being unable to locate the bone I’d given her just moments before, I watched Sadie closely as she eagerly took the peanut butter bone I offered her, trotted happily away (“Oh now you want to walk quickly!”), and warily found a decent hiding spot. Under the assumption that she wasn’t being watched, she quickly dug a bone-sized hole, placed her morsel in the ditch, and–using her snout like a bulldozer–covered up the space. Within a minute it was impossible to tell where the bone had gone and she’d safely tucked away her possessions from my watchful and appropriating gaze. Instead of meting her a bone when she barked or when I felt she deserved one, she was equipped with the innate knowledge to save things for herself. In teaching and learning from Sadie, I am reminded about the need to let go of the classroom space and for educators to relinquish control of curricular decisions at times.
I want to end this meditation on the way that Sadie has bettered me not only as a teacher but as a human by returning to the words of Joanna Newsom. Perhaps she best of all, captures the lessons that Sadie taught me about patience, love, and letting go of buried bones:
And the love we hold
And the love we spurn
Will never grow cold
Only taciturn
And I’ll tell you tomorrow
Oh Sadie, go on home now
And bless those who’ve sickened below
And bless us who have chosen so
And all that I’ve got
And all that I need
I tie in a knot
And I lay at your feet
And I have not forgot
But a silence crept over me
So dig up your bone
Exhume your pinecone, Sadie
