Being “That Guy”: Race and Violence Ruining Wreck It Ralph

5 Replies

I think it’s getting worse. I used to hold my tongue and nod along with everyone else. The problem is I’m tired of not seeing folks of color in films. I’m tired of picking “good” YA texts for the classes I’m teaching and seeing white privilege reinforced on every page. I’m tired of not seeing the lives and experiences of my former South Central Los Angeles students represented in the books we read.*

I’m pretty sure my students might be getting tired of me: I’m a bit of a broken record when it comes to race and politics of representation when discussing literature, popular media, pedagogy, NCLB, relational aspects of connecting with students.

Sometimes (often), I fret about whether it might be best to let it slide. For one class, let the “race-thing” not be brought up. For one movie, don’t let the first thing you say when you walk out of the theater be, “Well, that’s gotta be the whitest movie ever made.”**

But.

But I just can’t. It feels irresponsible not to.

Case in point: tonight I saw Wreck It Ralph. It was fun. The videogame references, the unexpected plot developments, the playful short film before the feature: it was better than its marketing campaign led me to believe. But then…

See, here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure every character is white (except for ancillary villains shown in a bad-guy support group at the beginning of the film… hmmm…). Ally pointed out that title character Ralph might possibly be something non-white. And that’s good, right? I mean he is the protagonist. Except that the attributes we learn about our hero is that he has halitosis, a penchant for making bad decisions, and oafish strength. Not exactly the apotheosis of a young person’s role model.

And then there was the police brutality. Without giving away anything in the plot, there is a part of the film where Ralph is detained. Though he’s already restrained in the sweetest possible way, the two cop-like figures take to physically accosting him. This is done for laughs. Like the part where Ralph can’t move so the cop tasers him in the face: funny, right?

I know. It’s just a movie. Let it go.

But.

But I just can’t. I think about the ways these humorous scenes slowly reinforce lessons about social behavior and normality for the packed theater I sat in. Mix the giggles from this scene with the giggles about the use of the word duty/doody and it’s not quite clear where the line is drawn. And if Ally’s right and Ralph IS supposed to be non-white … well then, congratulations, Disney: you just got America to laugh at police beating up a person of color.

This turned into a frustrated rant. Sorry. I am actually genuinely interested in a pedagogical issue here: when is it our responsibility as teachers to “turn off” the critical lens? Ever? Does it ever interfere with our other content responsibilities?

 

*This week, my class is reading and discussing David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy. I really like this book. It also, however, makes me wonder about the politics of queer identity in YA. Who gets to be gay in YA texts? Is this also a marginalized white privilege? (Future blog post about this at some point.)

**Film in question, by the way, was the Perks of Being a Wallflower. Seriously though, EVERY character was white. Seriously.

Trust and Mobile Media Use In Schools

Leave a reply

I have an article in the most recent issue of The Educational Forum. Like this post, it is titled “Trust and Mobile Media Use in Schools.” The article is a part of a special issue focused on New Literacies. The article can be found here.

Abstract:

This article shares findings from a year-long study about social practices of high school youth with mobile devices during school time. In particular, this study found that students see their school time as fluidly social and academic. Educators and policy-makers need to carefully consider these social practices when preparing 21st century youth for engaging with technology in responsible and meaningful ways beyond their time in school.

Upcoming Lecture Alert

Leave a reply

On Tuesday, October 16 I’ll be speaking at Scripps College as a part of their Social Media/Social Change series. Hopefully this will be less a lecture and more a dialogue. The talk is titled “Control, Resistance and Play: a Discussion of Mobile Media, Pedagogy and Civic Engagement in Public Schools” and will extending work conducted while still teaching in South Central with some of the research I’ve been analyzing since the summer. Joining me for part of the talk, Mark Gomez (aka my ongoing nemesis) will be sharing work happening at the Critical Design and Gaming School in South Central.

The talk is free and open to the public. Info can be found here. If you’re in the Claremont/L.A. area come say hello!

The Thank Tank Returns. Feed the Thank Tank.

Leave a reply

After a brief hiatus, the Thank Tank has returned.

Please review the very short instructions in the video below.

Thank Tank Instructions from Antero Garcia on Vimeo.

The Thank Tank can be fed by following the proper post-it not protocol and dropping off your thanks or mailing them to:

Antero Garcia
English Department, CSU
359 Eddy Building
Campus Delivery 1773
Fort Collins, CO 80523-1773

 

Slow in gestating, the Thank Tank will be birthing guidance once it receives enough notes. Where will the Thank Tank guide us?

Where will we go? Help us get there.

“Imagine your thanks

filling a tank,

a room,

your room,

our lives,

charting a map of our past,

a history of interactions.”

Containing Olive: Restraining a Dog’s Wild Heart and the Plight of Student Nature

1 Reply

I am sitting on my couch preparing to go yell at the dog because she is barking. I sit here thinking maybe today’s the day she finally gets out. I want to share my feelings of constant exasperation and trepidation containing Olive because I think she is helping me understand my growth as an educator.

This is Olive bossing around a Great Dane mainly because she thinks she can.

When we first moved to this house we are presently renting, Ally and I noticed that Olive spent most of her energy running beneath the backyard’s porch. The possibilities of rabbits and the dangers of spiders were too problematic. A trip to Home Depot and some not-so-fancy lumber now lines the porch to only occasionally prevent Olive from the subterranean hunt.

A week later I heard Olive barking outside and I made the trek downstairs to shush her only to find that she was no longer in our yard but in our neighbor’s. We extended our fence upwards and we have blocked off all crevices with cinder blocks. Yes, our fifteen pound beast clears four and five foot fences and can hop onto our counter if the proper morsel entices.

Next, Olive was slowly digging her way out of the front of the yard. More cinder blocks were purchased to line yet another fence.

One day I was sitting on the couch writing, much as I am now, when my phone rang and a woman’s voice asked if I had a dog named Olive.

“Uh, yeah, is there a problem?”

“No, no problem, she’s here with me.”

And that’s when I found out that the gate in our backyard had been jostled open. And the purchase of a MasterLock was added to the tally of costs required to contain Olive.

It’s not that Olive is unhappy here. I re-read this opening description and realize it sounds like maybe I’m a less-than-stellar dog owner and Olive is trying to get away. That’s not it. Olive’s nature drives her to do this. It is who she is.

Olive is a hunter and a jumper and a digger. This is how she learns. When she hears danger: dogs fighting, cars honking, people yelling, Olive runs towards the origin. There is no flight for Olive, only fight. Actually, let me clarify, there is only flight when Olive senses she is being chased. Because her favorite game aside from “Get Out of Captivity and Explore” is “Stay Just Out Of Reach of My Pursuers.”

What efforts and folly have I invested in containing this spirit that wants to run freely and recklessly for rabbits and birds and elusive fun? I think of that line: “blame it on my wild heart.” Olive needing to escape is irreparable because it’s not something that’s “broken” to begin with. And then I think about how much bending and repartitioning and locking and proverbial cinder-blocking we focus on within schools. It makes me worried that something like the achievement gap isn’t broken; it is inherent in how we have programmed the conglomeration of schools and geography and sociopolitical contexts of learning.

And I think about a student, David, from my first year of teaching. The first student I felt like I truly failed to connect with and then failed to keep track of once he dropped out. I felt like I couldn’t contain David within the walls of school and the meticulously crafted curriculum I was staying up late to develop. I remember using my conference period to cross the street to the gas station where I knew I would find David loitering and talking to him about why he was missed in class. I remember figuring out the phone number for the pay phone next to where David loitered and then calling that number when he wasn’t in class. And then having him hang up when he realized his English teacher was hounding him at a pay phone. And then having his name dropped from my and the school’s roster shortly after.

Not that what I was doing that first year was what I would call “highly effective” but I also felt like, as a schooling system, we were trying to contain and control a student like David in ways that were inevitably going to fail.

Last week, I spent forty minutes outside of a dog park trying to wrangle Olive back into human captivity.  She saw a squirrel and decided that it was way more interesting than any of the mutts she was stuck with and, on her second try, cleared the dog park fence and was free.

And then the next day, personifying Einstein’s definition of insanity, Ally and I took Olive back to the same dog park. Upon seeing another squirrel, Olive did the same thing again.

I understand Olive’s nature. It irks me to no end. It challenges me and I realize that my efforts to thwart Olive’s escape attempts are efforts to make her behavior conform to my own. It is convenient for me to have her stay in our backyard (and highly, highly inconvenient to have her running freely). When working with youth in classrooms, such calls for convenience and “domestication” are much more problematic. How have others worked toward dismantling the blocks and locks and timber that are set in place to restrain student nature?

 

Recent Publications On Participatory Culture and Learning

1 Reply

I want to share two recent publications that came out that I wrote focused on participatory learning in schools. Both focused on the alternate reality game I created as part of my dissertation research, Ask Anansi, these two publications look at the challenges and constraints of sustaining participatory learning within today’s public schools.

First, in the most recent issue of Knowledge Quest, I have an article titled, “Inform, Perform, Transform: Modeling In-School Youth Participatory Action Research through Gameplay.”

Here, I focus primarily on how Ask Anansi functioned as participatory action research (PAR) and some of the limitations of YPAR within traditional school power dynamics. Buffy Hamilton, the special issue’s co-editor wrote a great blog post about the issue here. I would like to piggyback on what Buffy wrote and just say that this issue is full of really powerful work looking at participatory learning. I know many of my education-based colleagues may not necessarily be looking to publications from the American Association of School Librarians for PAR and YPAR resources, but this is a good one.

Next, the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab released the recent report, “Designing with Teachers: Participatory Approaches to Professional Development in Education.” In it, I wrote a chapter titled “A Conversation with Anansi: Professional Development as Alternate Reality Gaming and Youth Participatory Action Research.” Notice a trend here? This piece is a bit more playful than some of my other work, functioning primarily as a discussion of how args can function as teacher PD while also acting as a mock-interview with a talking spider. Henry Jenkins wrote about our working group’s major findings on his blog here. I am grateful to Henry, Erin Reilly, and Iona Literat for inviting me to participate in this working group.

Why I Think Educators Should Be Talking About Pussy Riot (Yes, You Read That Correctly)

Leave a reply

I’ve been struggling trying to figure out how to talk about Pussy Riot with my fellow educators. Even that sentence sends a bristle down my spine – how many people have already stopped reading because of the name? And isn’t that the point of naming a band something like Pussy Riot or Fucked Up or The Negro Problem? If you are a feminist punk band shouldn’t your name anger and piss off “the man” (probably both figuratively and literally in this case)?

To be honest, I don’t have as much a thesis about Pussy Riot and education as much as I have a hunch.  My hunch is this (and I kind of hope #1 is wrong):

  1. Most educators aren’t aware of Pussy Riot, Pussy Riot Solidarity Gatherings, or even that (after being detained for five months) members of the Russian punk band have been SENTENCED TO TWO YEARS IN PRISON FOR HOOLIGANISM “DRIVEN BY RELIGIOUS HATRED.”
  2. If a larger group of educators were aware of and able to comfortably discuss Pussy Riot and the global organizing that has resulted in support of the group, discussions of how similar strategies may apply within educational labor struggles, discussions of potential allies, and discussions of how to leverage fomenting frustration for social change would ensue.
  3. Perhaps even more importantly, the people that would benefit from a discussion of Pussy Riot are precisely the people that are unlikely to get it (at least in a formal school setting): students. Because of their name alone, I do not feel like I would be able to engage in the precise conversation about feminism and voice and anger that the band encourages. Even if I were allowed to do this as a secondary teacher, I know I would squirm uncomfortably doing so. (It is a similar feeling I used to get when I taught Huck Finn and sustained a conversation about American language and the “N-word.” The difference, however, that the canonical value of Twain’s work assured such conversations –though uncomfortable –  were “safe.”)

This post isn’t about explaining Why Pussy Riot Matter (please look at that link for a comprehensive primer and this discussion from Riot Grrl Kathleen Hanna). However, considering that in the past two days a Pussy Riot e-book was announced (proceeds will support their legal team) and the Russian Prime Minister has called for the members of Pussy Riot to be released, I am surprised that I have not seen any of my fellow educational organizers, teachers, or researchers interested in what Pussy Riot can mean for education and student conceptions of civic participation.

Anyone else willing to bite the bullet, say the “P-word” and help me make sense of this from an educational perspective?

Blogging, Frustration, and Perpetually Practicing Transformational Leadership

1 Reply

It’s well after 10, rounding the corner towards 11 actually, and it’s a Thursday and it’s late enough in the week where overwork shows in the corners and bags under my eyes. On the stereo Albert Ayler is blowing open heaven and I look at the papers to grade and reading to read and I try to squeeze Robert Frost’s words to fit my own minor apocalypse, because I have pages to write before I sleep/pages to write before I sleep.

I think about the backlog of calls I need to return and the emails that me-me-me for attention. In my ears still echo the words heard earlier this evening when President Obama told me, “You did that” as he helped proclaim the progress made in the country with regards to jobs, to energy, to education.

My rss feed buzzes with reminders of the trickling in blogposts I’ve assigned. Student work getting done late into the evening. My tired eyes skim and it seems like every other post is a self-exploration into the need to blog. It’s polished vehemence about having to write publicly, about writing words because some professor for some required course is making us write a helluva lot about I-don’t-know-what and I have to if I want to get a decent grade and be a decent member of society, about inspiration and  writers block and that menacing blinking and impatient cursor that snarls for you to get on with it already. [For the record, I am really thrilled with the posts and vlogs my students have made.]

All of this preamble is to say, I understand the tensions my students are voicing. Having to blog kind of sucks. The increasingly slower trickle of content on my site, for instance, is likely an indication that other commitments have taken me away from informal online chatter (and even, briefly, away from War and Peace and Cats). However, when I think about what I learned and what I taught, I think I was perpetually practicing. I was shown, as an 8th and 9th and 10th and 11th and 12th grader how to write the evil five paragraph essay. I was shown and practiced how to do this so I could eventually break the rules of five paragraph essaydom and, like, do something different within the essay format. Likewise, as an 11th grade teacher, my students and I practiced mimicking the work of Anna Deavere Smith so that we could look at how writing can help distill, facilitate, and shape local political discourse. When students do work in a class, isn’t that about practice for something bigger? Sure, that may not mean being a professional blogger, but it may mean staying afoot in the tricky landscape of educational policy, it may mean being able to understand and convey a point of view, and it may mean having to advocate through words and actions.

I’ve been called into too many principals’ offices too many times during my years as a teacher and had to call in my union representative (usually my good friend Travis … one in that aforementioned long list of folks I need to call) to know that being able to articulate and to provide evidence for an argument about the needs of my students is not only about CYAing but about leading as an advocate for students and for a profession that is contested.

I think this post is more to psyche myself up for the continual challenge of loving the teaching profession and loving–unconditionally–the students we face each day. As my students and I struggle to figure out how to produce and communicate, I wonder if we need to step back and create an education-focused Ze Frank-like invocation.

As a final note, in my Adolescents’ Literature course this week, we’ve been reading John Green’s Looking For Alaska. I wonder if, like the protagonist of LFA, my students and I should think about this journey as one towards understanding teaching, education, and the future our classrooms hold as another inquiry into the “great perhaps.”

Ongoing Conversations about Adolescents’ Literature, The Teaching Profession, and Literary Felines

Leave a reply

The Adolescents’ Literature course I’ve mentioned previously now has a group page on Figment. You are invited to join our ongoing discussions throughout the semester. This week we are reading I am Number Four. Next Week we’re reading Looking For Alaska and then the Chocolate War and then Perks and then and then and… Participate in the fun!

The other course I am teaching, is a writing course for pre-service teachers. We will be focusing this quarter on writing about and advocating for the teaching profession. Our production will largely be public and can be followed at this blog. If you are interested in sharing work, ideas, or critiques you encounter as an educator, please get in touch!

Finally, if you have a friendly disposition toward cats or Tolstoy or both, my latest tumblr project, War and Peace and Cats is in full swing. Check it out. It’s purr-fect.

Better Blogging and Why I’m Scared of Online Teacher Voice

2 Replies

 

On Saturday, I spent the day in DC learning how to be a better blogger. It was an intense day of brainstorming and I want to talk about the two things that are troubling me:

  1. The skills I developed probably need to be funneled down to our students ASAP.
  2. The rather homogeneous assortment of teachers participating in this event–mainly white and many coming from Teach For America–may eventually shape educational discourse in ways that are problematic.

Bellwether Education invited a handful of educators from around the country to sit with known journalists and improve our chops in the world of blogging. Presentations from Ezra Klein, Carl Cannon, Megan Carpentier, and others helped connect the daily concerns and activities of successful journalists with the scheduling challenges of educators.* (That the event occurred the same day that Paul Ryan was announced as Romney’s VP pick meant that the majority of the coaches and speakers were simultaneously helping us and on deadline for their various publications.) It was an altogether enlightening and somewhat frightening prospect for me to look into the mysterious void of the Internet and be told strategies for improving my search engine optimization and building up a strong brand. At the same time, I think the same discomfort that I faced in understanding these types of dispositions is something that educators like myself are going to have to get over and face more directly within our teaching practice.

 

Blogging and Branding as Required Curriculum?

These skills, new for me despite now blogging here and elsewhere for upwards of six years now, are reminiscent of the kinds of shifts in learning for our high school students as well. Very literally, this daylong intensive seminar was about improving writing and meeting the expectations of a self-selected readership. These are certainly things I want students today to be learning. Is it a matter of time until branding and building up a reliable and respectable number of twitter followers and advertising recent updates on Pinterest with fancy pictures become required components for classrooms? Will there be a standardized exam on the ethics of link-baiting?

Online Teacher Voice and Representation

I am also troubled by issues of representation within the world of teacher blogging. The Bellwether event was one that attendees had to apply to participate in. So while the participants were not necessarily representative of all of the applicants or even of educational bloggers today, it was a largely homogeneous group:

  • Aside from a handful of us, the educational bloggers here were predominantly white.
  • Several of us were no longer teachers (myself included): some ran education-related NPOs or worked for alternative credentialing programs or charter schools.
  • Many of the participants (half? Maybe more?) came from Teach For America and were still relatively new to the teaching profession.

As I looked around the room as one speaker talked about making the shift from a readership of hundreds to a readership in the thousands, I felt slightly uncomfortable. Here we are, a group of educators learning how to help shape discourse about education, and so many of the voices and experiences of teachers I’ve had the pleasure to work with are unrepresented in this space. Granted, Bellwether expressed the intention of continuing these seminars in the future and I’m glad for that. But for now, a disproportionate number of Teach For America teachers are equipped to blog the vagaries and successes of classroom teaching in 2012.

I should be clear that my concerns here are not about being anti-TFA (other writers can go much deeper into that tricky debate). I’m more concerned about representation: if we are mainly preparing to hear from younger teachers being prepared through an alternative model such as TFA, we are also shaping public discourse by eschewing the majority of public teaching voices.

I don’t know how each participant found out about the Bellwether event and decided or was encouraged to apply. I was forwarded an email through the Teaching Ambassador Fellows network. However, it seemed clear that this event–funded by the Gates Foundation–was put on the radar for numerous TFA and Teach Plus folks. While I’m excited about the contributions these bloggers will be making as a result of the seminar, I think it is imperative that individuals from more traditional teaching positions and career paths join the fray.** As I hear about these events in the future, I fully intend to share here. In the meantime, if you are looking to gain a stronger blogging background as a teacher (or even delve in as a current n00b) feel free to send me a note and I’ll pass it directly to Bellwether.

*In somewhat unrelated news, based on an off-the-cuff remark from guest speaker Ezra Klein, I’ve created a new Tumblr: War and Peace and Cats (which will be updated somewhat regularly solely with pictures of Cats and paragraph-by-paragraph additions of the entirety of the Tolstoy text).

** I think part of my concern also comes from the transitional period I am in. As I am no longer the urban high school teacher I was when I first began this blog, I am thinking through how this space may change and still meet the interests of readers expecting reports of in-school mayhem here at The American Crawl.