Final Blog from Burbank

*Includes a narrative context about where this project came from, what you did, and why it is important to you.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Where it came from

The senior English curriculum at my school is nebulously established and inconsistent across classrooms.  Perhaps much of my impression has to do with diminished department contact due to my room being in a separate wing, but the disconnect it creates is a feeling I've learned to trust.  However true this may be, (or seem) as an education model, it neither befits learning in 2012, nor my personal preference.  It's even anathema to the curriculum itself, as the year is anchored by a theme of social justice - a philosophy that combats the modernist notion that the community exists only to support the desires of the individual.  Said another way, the teachers who are teaching about meaningful, non-hegemonic human relationships are doing so in ultramodern isolation.  If it wasn't for the students spreading the word about what's happening, it'd all be academic radio silence.     

What I did

Objectively speaking, this is an unacceptable way to teach, and our department has embraced it mightily.  My response was to create a website for the ease of planning it will afford me, the ease of access it will afford students and families, and because it is a public space that can lead to better dialogue among teachers about our methods.  I consider myself fortunate ("How great is that?" Dr. Patterson had pointed out) to have the autonomy to do what I do, and I know the other senior teachers feel similarly.  But classroom autonomy can also give rise to militant territorial-ness – a quality that looks good on no one and doesn’t expand community beyond the classroom. 

Why it is important

As a person who is drawn naturally to teams and to the belief that I exist at my best when I exist with others, I am seeking always to be part of one.  My primary goal with each class each year is to create a team and captain them through, and I have been most successful when I’ve done it.  Creating the website was important to me because I want my classes to have a place that they can access anywhere, at any time, and on any device that will help create and amplify that team feeling.  I also want to create a space that comes closer to moving at the speed of a Digital Native.  Dr. Marc Prensky’s radical idea that the brains and thought modes of Natives are fundamentally different from my own is both fascinating and a major challenge to me.  Like many educators, I struggle with knowing whether the technology I use is only enabling me to teach what I have always taught with more digital flash, or allowing me to communicate wholly new ideas.  I am grateful for the struggle, however, as I know it will keep the question uppermost in my planning. 

Seeing the Wesch-moderated "A Vision of Students Today" in conjunction with Sir Ken Robinson’s talk helped to concretize their collective thesis: that the methods employed by U.S. teachers are stultifyingly arcane and must be adapted for the contemporary digital environment.  Wesch spotlights part of that piece in his 2010 TEDx talk wherein he uses the arrival of new media (census books and maps) in a New Guinea village to show how media literally changed the landscape, the history of the people, and how they relate to each other.  He then makes the point, of course, that the arrival of new media to the digital world has precisely the same effect on Internet denizens.  The parallels are clear and teachers remain mired in the past at their own peril.  The village children are born into and grow up in numbered, ordered houses that bear resemblance in shape only to those of their elders.  Teaching the obsolescing literacies of the past to our students is tantamount to the village elders neglecting to teach their children how to get from house to house by looking at the addresses.  All of this is to say that I want the site to be a place that teaches and uses contemporary literacies. 

Of course, it is also important to me that this site will lead to an easier and more open dialogue between the teachers.  It’s a way to engage in conversation about our department goals without using time at the department meetings.  It’s my hope that mine can be a small step towards consolidating resources, workshopping ideas, and refining the course, all while maintaining each teacher’s instructional affordances. 

*Explains how the use of digital technology enhances or changes this content/context.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Because it tends to be unwieldy and abstract, teaching about the global availability of food and water can be difficult.  How I hope digital technology can help reshape the context for the students is by immediately connecting them, the outcome of our class discussions, and their experiences with others across the world.  I know the food and water unit (meal journal, 10,000 grains, rice visualization, taste test, examination of municipal vs. multinational quality documentation, Tapped, analysis of their own water habits, etc.) can benefit greatly from being taught and understood in a hyper-real digital context, and not just by embedding the information in the site.  I am eager to test the capability of the Internet to convey information that I have not yet been able to and have not yet even considered.  I think that an infographic of their food consumption versus that of someone living in poverty, with information supplied and manipulated by the students, will make a stronger point than I could.  Understanding character motivation, ambition, and the implications of knowing something one can’t un-know in Macbeth will be made more salient through attending Skype rehearsals for a professional production.  If I’m honest with myself, I know that I don’t yet know all the ways in which I’ll be able to make more content more available through use of digital technology.  I am looking forward to exploring, though.                

During the week, I was primarily inspired by the spirit and work of Drs. Wesch, Fortuna, and Patterson, as well as that of my classmates.  By the course’s end, I knew that I had learned at least one new instructional technology from each of the other 7 that I am excited to use in class.  Among others, Jing, Voicethread, Infographics, safercar.org, QR generator, Google’s url shortener, and especially Weebly will figure prominently into my pedagogy in the coming year. 

As I said, Dr. Prensky’s concept of Digital Natives is both a curio and a challenge to me.  His claim implies that, as a Digital Immigrant, I am and will forever be playing catch-up with new technology and those whose proficiency with it shapes the world in which I teach.  I do have an advantage as an immigrant, however, and it’s the same as that which many immigrants of all kinds have – a critical eye for that which the Natives accept as normal, natural, and good.  Clicking through the Media Education Foundation’s website quickly and powerfully reminded me that my students don’t know how to scrutinize the media that is both (mis)representing and commodifying them because they don’t know that it’s happening – they’re too close to it.  As an outsider, as it were, I can recognize it for what it is and help them to become literate in their own constructed image.  The films on the website, particularly the Killing us Softly series are resources I will use in class.  This week confirmed for me that the media, which I’m beginning to understand as that which reflects an image of people back to themselves, has perhaps the largest role in determining what counts as normal, natural, and good in a culture.  And, like we saw in the Rucker Park film, it matters very little whether the reflection is accurate, because it will inevitably become the truth.  If “ideal” and “ideology” are linked by the media, then it is critically important to educate students on how to view the reflection critically.  To do so is to supply them with the literacies necessary to understand their position and be able to speak cogently about it.  There are no answers - no way to extract Photoshop from the image industry - but there discussions to be had in light of that reality and others.  And it is, I suppose, the Natives who will have them, facilitated as they will undoubtedly be by new digital media that 

has not yet even been imagined.     


All of this will take dedication and genius, please let Ms. Gilbert explain how not to let the pressure get to us.  (My favorite part starts around 15:35...).