Cartography & High-Wire Not-Believing

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A novel is a tricky thing to map. At times the invented landscape provided me shelter from the burdens of having to chart the real world in its entirety. But this escapism was always tempered by a certain emptiness: I knew I was deceiving myself through a work of fiction. Perhaps balancing the joys of escapism with the awareness of deception was the whole point of why we read novels, but I was never able to successfully manage this simultaneous suspension of the real and fictive. Maybe you just needed to be an adult in order to perform this high-wire act of believing and not-believing at the same time. – T. S. Spivet

NBPTS ELA Standards Public Commenting

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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.

 

Old Dogs, New Tricks, and the Pace of Learning

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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

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

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

 

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

Passion, Teaching, and Literacy

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

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

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

Multiliteracies and Thinking about Literacy beyond 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Search, Query, and Interpretation

2. Conscious identity development

3. Online/Offline Hybridity and Spatial Interaction

Search, Query, and Interpretation

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

Conscious identity development

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

Online/Offline Hybridism and Spatial Interaction

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

Collaborating Around a new Framework

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking Through Literary Interconnectedness and Dissertation Format (Another Cheap Rehash: Sonic Nurse Album Review)

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Working through analysis, I had a (brief and fleeting) moment of clarity in terms of structure of the dissertation and the opportunity to strengthen a literary reading of critical instantiations of student agency within the community. And while I’m still wading knee-deep into this theory building component of my dissertation, I was reminded of a bit of theoretical interconnections dealing with velocity and knot-tying I’ve written about in the past. I long ago linked back to this review dealing with the fleeting nature of the thrill in hunting the white elephant in popular culture. Below, I wax lengthily on the historical context and timelessness found in the continued output of Sonic Youth. (Review now updated with relevant links! Huzzah!)

 

Sonic Youth

Sonic Nurse

Geffen

By Antero Garcia 

It would be a simple and rather enticing affair to don the ubiquitous role of the Magister Ludi and play the ever-important Glass Bead Game with Sonic Youth, labeling, connecting, imbuing the band with the inner workings of the universe. And, I think, to a certain extent, the members of the band want us to play the game, to tinge the world an ecto-green with the noise yr witnessing on each record. We can play connect the dots and build the elaborate, if still unseen, spider web of connections between the band and every breathing, living, existing object in the world. There is a familiarity in each moment of this album, how are we to connect it? And to whom?

Immediately the first track echoes the charging, dismal feeling of “Hyperstation” from the awe-instilling Trilogy off of Daydream Nation. The off kilter riff, akin to the Mighty Mouse theme, harks that yes, Sonic Youth – the Sonic Youth you grew up with and fell in love with music by, that same Sonic Youth that stands in the face of all things conventional, that trumpet the outside and the unknown – is truly here to save the day. The same riff which felt utterly banal and sardonically hopeless as the band utters “Smashed-up against a car at three a.m. Kids just up for basketball, beat me in my head,” is now elevated to true heroics. We’re talking life and death, friends lost forever, growing up, being serious, 9/11. And it’s all purred lovingly by Ms. Kim Gordon. That the song is titled “Pattern Recognition” only further emphasizes the deliberate mimicry of the band’s past output.

Though “Pattern Recognition” is the most blatant nod to SY’s massive discontinuity, that sense of renewed vigor, it seems clear that the band was thrown back 15-20 years into their past the day two planes were jettisoned into the World Trade Center, across the street from the band’s office on Murray Street. This, artistically, is a deconstructed rupture. Though this is most clearly harked to on 2002’s stunning return to form, the post-9/11 American exterior is still a lurking presence on Sonic Nurse. We are still bruised as we listen and tenderly traversing toward the new musical terrain as the band takes its time to sift through the ashes and rubble and see what it can salvage of itself, what needs to be reinvented. If Murrary Street finds the band lost, in dispossession of itself, Sonic Nurse finds the quartet offering solace, searching for amenities, shelter, regrowth. Theirs is a record of reassurance and rekindling. By no stretch of the imagination am I labeling this as “happy,” but there is a sense of coming to accepting the past, of filing the last three years in a nearby folder for constant reference. This too becomes part of the familiar and interconnected world, and we again envelope ourselves with the fictitious role in Herman Hesse’s novel: there he is, the Magister Ludi, sliding the small pebble – completely unvictoriously as the Glass Bead Game is not one of wining or losing, but of maintaining balance, of keeping the world in check – into its slot next to the WTC, next to New York, and, in their own sense, nest to patriotism.

“Dripping Dream” opens swathed in a sea of feedback, it’s umbilical cord still tied to the band’s Glenn Branca-ian  past while simultaneously sucking on the teat of Washing Machine. Soon kicking into a traditional – snare on the 2s and 4s – ditty, this is Sonic Youth in a comforting niche. Slightly off-kilter from the mainstream, these are our music’s grandparents. They show us how to do it, and they do it well. So many bands would do well to learn the lessons being preached in such a song. Wilco, The Jicks, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, Le Tigre, Yo La Tengo (who, with the husband/wife thing also going, have a lot in common with the charging forward band), Weird War, and dare I even look to more “upstanding” and “mainstream artists?” This is, perhaps, a good enough portrait to see just how far the tendrils of the band stretch, whom they have penetrated, which they claim as their own, and whom are thus in debt to the band.

Beads, beads, beads. The world is a series of knots, suggests one exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Through Sonic Youth, we are reinterpreting, unraveling the ball of twine that distances you and I like frayed wire on the head of Shakespeare’s maiden. We are pulled apart, dissected, and labeled. We find identity in being separate, as alien as the concept may be.

The few disparate moments in Sonic Nurse, those that do not comply with the ethic of adhering to their past, the moments that feel unhinged from both the outside world and the insular warmth of Sonic Youth’s unseen omnipotence, fee almost like place holders for areas that are to be ventured in the future, placards that would read “coming soon” in the barren, cantankerous museum hall of our minds. Are you seeing the frayed ends of the devilish know? “Kim Gordon and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream” (which made a previous appearance on a split record earlier this year as “Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream” … damn those fat wallets protecting Mariah’s good name!) is about as far as the band is willing to venture into the SYR-avant-garde the band quietly, independently releases. And even hear is a chorus, a verse, amid cacophony and grating noise this is still, unmistakably, a “song.” We can’t let our little chicks deviate too far from us, can we? While we’re here, discussing the rise of the Kim Gordon who can sing in a way that is actually listenable (at last!) (for once!), why not throw in some connections with the neophytes like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Peaches. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind. We’re all connected in here somewhere. Are you unraveling this knot like I am?

“It’s later than it seems,” the band warns on “Paper Cup Exit,” a building and tense song that wryly dares to remake a song that’s already been made before… new ears are listening. We are writing our own ending here, one that is continuing to be rewritten on the fly as we thrust forward, and parry to the left. [The end is coming soon now. Can you feel it? You’ve earned it. But, before you reach the concluding words in this rather long, uneventful treatise, I want to offer a bit of a warning. I intend to end with a quote from Sonic Youth that is not lifted from their last album. It’s going to be from an earlier album, one some would say is their most popular, others would say their best. I’m going to do this because – can you not see it by now? – the past and present and future have all commingled within the terms of Sonic Nurse. To look back we reach forward. Redeconstructionism gentrified, courtesy of Geffen Records for the unassuming time travelers at Best Buy and Amoeba Music. When I make this quote, I can say with a certain degree of confidence, I’m still quoting the present; by quoting a record from the ‘80s, I am directly quoting Sonic Nurse. My apologies for the lengthy interruption. On with the show.] Remember our past, connect it to the future, and with a massive power chord that’s improvised on the fly in a tuning that no one has yet invented, blow it away; a discarded kiss to everybody and nobody: “It’s an anthem in a vacuum in a hyperstation, daydreaming days in a daydream nation.”

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

The Fall of Eve – Commercial Interests & Citizen Dissent

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

 

Summing Up

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

 

 

Transitions: Manual Arts, The Department of Education, and Stepping into the Productivity of the Summer

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Thursday was the final day of the school year at Manual Arts. It was the end of a very long year with significant changes. As the students left the school, they walked away from a campus that has been under constant operation for nearly a decade. This will be the first summer since I’ve worked at Manual Arts that the school is not in session (aside from a paltry summer school offering). What will the school’s return to a traditional calendar look like next year? Will student, teacher, and parent concerns about security at the overcrowded campus be addressed? Will we adequately meet the needs of students in classes that are averaged at 40 students per teacher? Will the incredible (absolutely incredible) graffiti murals at our school be painted over? (Strong signs point to yes.)

Thursday was also my final day as an official employee of the U.S. Department of Education. And though my role as a 2010-2011 Teaching Ambassador Fellow has come to an end, I am excited about the network of individuals I have been able to talk with and from whom I hope to continue to draw expertise on future projects.

This summer, I am focusing on coding, analyzing, and writing up preliminary findings for my dissertation. I am also teaching a few classes in and around L.A. and will be consulting for a few education-related projects. I hope to share information about these in future posts.

I am also pleased to be working with the Schools for Community Action design team. We are developing four amazing (amazing!) small schools to serve the South Central Los Angeles community. The work before us is exciting, difficult, and (occasionally) overwhelming. You are welcome to join us. At the least, please consider following us on Twitter.

I am excited to share a bunch of other work in the coming weeks:

  • I am beginning to play around with Google Plus (thank you all mighty Twitter for coming through with a speedy invite!) and can’t wait to talk about how I see it playing a transformative role in schools.
  • There have been some exciting conversations brewing related to the NBPTS Take One program within my school.
  • I will eventually take issue with Jaime Oliver (while still enjoying the occasional burger at Patra’s).
  • I’m taking down the “Teacher of the Year” program.
  • I’ve got a serious problem with capitalism and creating “lifelong readers”
  • And finally, I have a series of ongoing thoughts about what I have learned from Sadie, my basset hound companion that passed away earlier this week (I am still, slowly, coming to terms with the quietness of the house now that she’s gone, but will be sharing the lessons she’s taught – in her slow, stubborn way – as the time feels right).

I can’t wait to get to all of this! And if you are interested in engaging in an American Crawl conversation and want to collaborate here, this is your official invitation to reach out and make this happen. School’s out! Time for learning!