This reading, again, is going to cause me to become the
cynical asshole of the class and question the necessity of some of this. Nancy
Bailey is kind of saying the same thing that all of the other readings have
discussed thus far.
Yes, technology should be used in the classroom. Yes,
contemporary students respond well to multimodal approaches. Yes, teachers need
to be aware of the literary practices that their students are engaging in
outside of school (referenced here as a “New literacy stance” with an “insider
mindset.”). Yes, this raises questions about the repercussions of the inclusion
of these technologies. Yes, which technologies we should incorporate versus
which ones we should not is a valid concern.
Ready for the cynicism? Here goes:
In one of my classes, I sit between 2 girls. They are
substantially younger than me; it is a depressing and ongoing theme in my life
currently. The girl to my right keeps her cellphone in her field of vision
constantly. It amuses me to no end because the method she uses to take it out
of screen save mode is a petting motion. And she checks it at least 5 times
every minute, even though it is on vibrating mode and it never vibrates. I can
almost hear her saying “My preeeeeeeecious….”
Ok, maybe that last part is in my head. But she covets the
thing.
The girl to my left is even more impressive. She never has
less than 3 forms of technology in front of her. Texting during class is an
offense not even worth mentioning. One time, while my professor was lecturing,
this person watched an entire video about puppies. I shit you not, an entire video about puppies. The volume
was off, she was not wearing earphones, and there were no subtitles. No content
was necessary, just moving images of puppies. And texting. And Twitter. And
Facebook. Fittingly, I am fairly certain that the one thing she wasn’t doing was following the lecture.
While I appreciate the goals of teachers like Carol Olsen, I
just can’t get completely on board with the “Spoonful of sugar” concept. I do
believe that education does not have to be a boring thing. I do believe that
not all children have the intrinsic desire to be educated, and that teachers
must aspire to create engaging lessons for things that are sometimes not outwardly
engaging. But I also believe that there is real value in muscling through
something that is difficult and less engaging. There is beauty in the results as
well.
End rant.
To be honest, I feel completely lost when forming my own position on this concept of new literacies. I can't help but question whether the push for adopting a new literacies stance in classrooms is fueled by the fact that students truly learn better under this approach, OR is it because technology has an undeniable presence in our society and we must mold our teaching styles to capture the attention of youth that is so obsessed with technology (twitter, instagram, videos of puppies, etc.) that they cannot bare to read a textbook or listen to a lecture without checking their phone or favorite social media site?
ReplyDeleteI'm sure there are studies supporting the fact that kids do learn better with this approach (we've been reading about them all semester), but I am a natural skeptic.
I have a friend who works in a pre-k classroom and once told me of a boy who, for the first couple weeks of school, would throw relentless tantrums because he could not have his iPad. They (the teacher and the paras) would try to play with things like blocks, trains, whatever they had available really in an effort to pacify the kid, but he was totally uninterested. Is this a sign that schools should have more technology for these kids, or is it a sign that too much technology can be unhealthy?
Ah, I digress. The example of Carol Olsen's ninth grade class and adoption of a new literacies stance does not completely convince me either. It seems that no matter the efforts Olsen made to incorporate technology as a way to "learn the 'real' work of English 9", it still was used mostly as a "hook" or a "spoonful of sugar".
Olsen's uses a "box of clues" as a way to expand the students' ideas of what it means to 'read' and 'write'. I believe this is a good (not great) way for students to connect their "local knowledge" to the stuff they are trying to learn in school. However, I think it's important for teachers to stress the difference between "learning something useful" from a popular teen magazine and learning something useful from a piece of great American literature. Yes - your favorite rap song might look and sound like a poem, but there are differences. Or are there not? I don't really know anymore.
I apologize for this lengthy comment. I could go on really, but I won't. I'm just trying to sort through my muddled thoughts.
I am also on the skeptical side.
ReplyDeleteI don't even think that it is necessarily the difference between rap songs and poems, or "Friends" and a short story that irks me. It is the fact that these methods are used as an attempt to buy students.
Hey kids, I think literature sucks, too! Let's analyze a sitcom instead!
What kind of message does this send?
I once watched my friend, a fairly new, fairly inactive mother, plead with her child to take medicine. It was that nasty pink stuff that aspires to taste like bubblegum, but really tastes like gasoline and sugar. Her baby kicked and screamed, then eventually spit it out all over the floor. My friend responded by offering her candy and a new toy.
When my friend's mother heard the bribe, she refilled the spoon with medicine, draped the child over her lap in such a manner that they resembled a violent version of the Pieta, put the medicine in the childs mouth, then covered her entire face with the palm of her hand, pinching together her nostrils with her thumb and pointer finger. She softly said, "You're going to swallow this. When you do, I will let you go." I am fairly certain the baby swallowed before she finished her speech.
At first, I was mortified. But, upon looking back at the situation, my friend would have had this child feeling like the victim of a horrible incident, rewarded for her bravery in swallowing her medicine. God help her if that child breaks a bone.
Her mother, however, had that baby learn a very important lesson: Not everything that is beneficial to us will cater to our immediate wants. I am sure other lessons were learned, too...
What I am getting at is this : rather than using technology as a gimmick to make kids like doing their work, maybe we, as teachers should shift the focus on how to use technology to ENHANCE meaningful education.
Rich and Emily, you raise GREAT points here. I am so glad to see you working through this in a critical (and even skeptical!) manner--I DO believe strongly in new literacies theory, and even I have these worries a lot. So...great reflections. I think you are right, that it can be hard to know where to draw the line between what is a "spoonful of sugar" and what is a meaningful difference. Rich, in class you pointed out how something I had seen as maybe just motivational (about Popplet) had actual intrinsic value. Here are a few responses I have to your ideas. About the women in your class, Rich...that is a huge problem. There is evidence that our reliance on technology is harming our attention spans, our abilities to engage with a text or a problem for a length of time. I FEEL that happening to myself. So...is part of digital literacy thinking critically about what that means and how we want to respond? If these are all facets of our ways of communicating now, and interacting with all kinds of texts, then does it make sense for English class to become a place where students reflect on this--maybe online, maybe in discussions with their cell phones all stowed away in a box for the period, maybe in a paper, maybe in a digital video?
ReplyDeleteAnd then...what are the range of "texts" (broadly defines) that students are "reading" and producing, and how can English be a place where they learn the skills they'll need as consumers and producers of that whole range of texts? ARE there valuable messages in genres, like rap, that don't have the prestige of literature? Or does literature have that prestige because it does something fundamentally different? If we think of music and television and film as a whole range of "texts" that students are interacting with all the time, and if we think about the messages they are receiving there (say, in contemporary music--think about the gendered messages they receive, for ex.)...is it the role of English class to help them think critically about those messages? That is a literacy--but not one traditionally linked with English class, and maybe not one you think should be linked with it. That is at the heart of these questions! If we imagine a student wanting to get a message out--say, the students at that school on the reservation, who made the video that we watched--is writing with words necessarily the most powerful way for them to get that message out? Which then raises the question: what is English about, at its heart? About words? That is an acceptable answer--that is what it's always been about; words have always been at the heart of English! Or do we shift and say, no, it's about communicating, in a variety of ways?
These are real questions that you could answer in ANY way in your paper. But I think these might be ways to think about how new literacies could be about something besides teaching the same old stuff in new and flashy ways? (The article may not have conveyed that as well as it could have!)