NCTE 2012 Schedule and Research Forum Invite

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FACT: This photo is featured prominently in one of my NCTE sessions … that’s how awesome this conference will be.

 

The NCTE annual conference is coming up this week. It’s going to be a busy (and awesome) conference.

I’ll post my general itinerary below (noting that there are some time conflicts that are problematic). However, I’d first like to invite all NCTE members to a general Research Forum meeting. Cindy O’Donnell-Allen and I will be co-chairing the Research Forum. The meeting will be held bright and early:

Saturday, November 17
8:30 a.m. – 9:45 a.m.
Diego Restaurant, Convention Center Walkway

Cindy and I are interested in using our meeting time at NCTE as an opportunity to collectively share a vision for where our research is headed, who conducts this research, and how it is articulated to NCTE members and the general public. A couple of goals we have include integrating even more teacher voice within NCTE’s research and to encouraging the work of early-career researchers. We are particularly interested to hear from you about what specific research initiatives you would like to see NCTE pursue in the coming year. Please join us.

 

Also worth noting is the CEE colloquium taking place on the Monday following the conference. It will be awesome:

RAISING THE BIG TOP: ARTS, LITERACY, AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT
Monday, November 19, 2012, 9:00 a.m. – 3:30 p.m.

This day-long workshop will interest K-adult teachers, teacher educators, graduate students and researchers. Presenters/performers include representatives from Cirque du Soleil, the Smith Center for the Performing Arts and a local school. They will be joined by English education faculty  from Colorado State University: Pam Coke, Antero Garcia,  Cindy O’Donnell-Allen, and workshop facilitator, Louann Reid.

If you’re interested in attending I believe registration info for this post-conference workshop can be found here.

The rest of my itinerary follows and includes an (awesome) ignite talk, an (awesome) workshop focused on critical media literacy, an (awesome) roundtable discussing digital third space stuffy, and an (awesome) morning session about storytelling as critical consciousness. It will be an awesome conference and I hope to see you in Vegas. Send me a tweet to say hello!

Hope to see many of you there!

 

Quick note: I’ll also be making a quick stop at LRA at the end of the month. Send me a tweet if you’ll be there.

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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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.