Final Project Narrative

(I'm sorry about the formatting irregularities. I tried my best to rein them in, but apparently my digital literacy is a work in progress.)
Who Am I, Anyway?

I have been teaching professionally for over eleven years, but I am not a teacher. Really, I’m not. Not fundamentally. Not at my core. Truth is, I sort of “fell into” teaching. And I’ve been floundering there ever since.

My main vocation for most of my life has been that of reader. I turned my love of reading into a job during college. First, as a part-time employee at a small used book store. Then a full-time employee at a larger one. Then, manager of the same. And finally, I opened my own small used book store.

Unfortunately, as an occupation, bookselling has never paid enough. So, in 2008, ostensibly to patch up a lull in business, I landed a summer job with the English Language School in Bristol, Rhode Island on the Roger Williams campus. I had absolutely no teaching experience. That’s okay, they said. You’re hired. I soon found out that the “teaching” job I’d applied for was really the position of babysitter/clown for rich kids from other countries. I stuck with it though, turning it into a year round gig. I learned from more seasoned colleagues. I studied on my own, reading books and blogs and other online resources. I took a one-month intensive training course in Seattle. I boned up on my grammar and discovered that I had a knack (and genuine love) for knowing explicitly what I had seemingly always implicitly understood. Teaching grammar (but not arching my brow at “bad”examples of it) or better, learning different ways of getting my students to know it and know why or how it works, became a thrill to me.

I teach adults now, recent immigrants to this country. But as Prensky put it so well, most of my students are also digital immigrants: the older ones because of their age and the younger ones because of their lack of technological access. And I’m no different. I have to challenge myself to get involved with online resources that I am unfamiliar or uncomfortable with. But as Boyd has put it, the digital immigrant label doesn’t tell the whole story. Because while it’s true that my students may not have much interest in or experience with computers, they all have smart phones and they all use social media. Now, if I could only get them interested in reading...

What I Believe

I believe that learning happens when a person, let’s say a student, approaches the written word not with trepidation but with glee. The hardest thing for me to teach is reading. It’s hard to budget the time. It’s hard to find any appropriate texts. It’s hard to measure progress and success. It’s hard to know what the sticking points are. Speaking and writing produce output, they’re relatively easy to assess. Listening can be confirmed with an immediate question or simple observation. But reading is mysterious. And I’m not talking about reading out loud. There are ways to test that skill, like using a running record, but that’s different from reading reading. Even totally competent native speakers can stumble and stall while reading aloud. Because reading out loud is a type of performance, actually, and though it has value, I believe it can impede memory and understanding. When we read aloud, we are often too concerned with pronunciation, enunciation, and fluency that we can forget or even ignore comprehension. But reading to yourself, in your head, is, by its very nature, unobservable (unless you have an MRI in your classroom). And while comprehension tests can be useful, they won’t inspire anyone to read or learn, and they shouldn’t steer the ship. Robinson’s position supports this. He said, “The emphasis on standardized testing has tended to encourage passivity and not activity.” Reading and learning to read better are not passive pursuits!

What I’ve Learned and What I Know

Besides what I’ve alluded to earlier, here are my key take-aways from the readings and lessons in this course.

Let’s start with Wesch. We all know that his approach to learning requires taking risks, not only in regard to what a teacher teaches but how. His method, his whole philosophy turns traditional teaching on its head. He wants to allow students to help one another to attain a level of understanding. He wants them to see the classroom differently, literally (by positioning themselves away from the podium) and figuratively. He wants them outside of the classroom altogether if need be, learning to their strengths and not having to mindlessly submit to the teacher’s of the curriculum’s arbitrary standards.

In Wesch’s youtube video, A Vision of Students Today, one of the student’s holds up signs saying something like only a small fraction of her readings are relevant to her life and fewer than half of them are even completed.

Another student held up a sign that declared he paid hundreds of dollars for textbooks he never read. These students may have once believed that reading is fun and interesting, but the texts they are given at university how they are used or not used by the professors is not supporting that belief.
Sinek, though I have many misgivings with his delivery and demeanor, has brought up a very good and perhaps very obvious point, which is that a student (or really anyone) will not “buy your product” (let us imagine the product, here, is “learning” or “reading” and that the “buy”-ing refers to “accepting or understanding”) unless they know the why of what you are doing, or perhaps even better put, the reason for the lesson.

Most teachers know this already, either through their learning or their instinct. For every lesson, the objective must be explicit. We write it on the whiteboard. We say it out loud, several times. And as far as reading goes, Sinek’s point is helpful to a point. I can teach the text (what) and the mechanics (how) but if my students don’t get why they are reading, or more broadly, why reading is fun, then their comprehension and their motivation will suffer.
   There is one last important take-away from I’d like to mention and that’s Noon’s Model of Technological Proficiency and, more importantly, where I see myself on his scale. When I first examined it (a mere week ago), I saw myself falling somewhere between Technotraditionalist(level 3) and Technoconstructivist(level 4). But after some serious reflection, I’ve decided to place myself one rung lower; that is, between Technocrat(2) and Technotraditionalist(3). “Why,” he asks himself rhetorically?" Well, when I really thought about my “go to” teaching methods, whether quick activities or week-long projects, I usually rely on minds, mouths, and hands. When I do incorporate something digital, it’s utilized more as research or finding background. Because I am, in Noon’s words, “unsure of [technology’s] overall dependability or usefulness,” I often feel overwhelmed when trying to imagine a real lesson in which learning will happen that involves digital media in a more central role (like creating a Flipgrid video).

So What Am I Going to Change?

This, I think, was the most difficult section of the narrative because I feel like I have already discussed this at length in my Final Project and Pecha Kucha. And you may be thinking at this point, Well, if you’ve already done it, how could it be hard?


I don’t like to repeat myself (though that doesn’t always stop me from doing so) and I’ve been struggling with finding a new way to say what I’ve already said, in other words (literally), to paraphrase what I’ve said before.

So instead, I’ll link my Final Project here which will give you the chance to read through the original. In it, you'll also find more on what I believe about teaching and learning. And let's not forget a link to the Final Project Rubric. It was great working with all of you, and I wish all the best. Have a great summah!

The Art of Conversation

I'm not yet sure what the relationship between Turkle and Wesch is just yet, but I hope to have a better idea of it by the time I reach the end of these musings...

I def don't see them as opponents. Their positions are not at odds with one another. They both want to encourage an increase in human interaction. They're just coming at it from different angles. Wesch is focused on the classroom, or perhaps more broadly, the university system. Turkle wants to see it, well, everywhere including, presumably, the classroom. But does this make them allies?

Turkle's greatest concern is focused on how the devices we use are keeping us apart rather than bringing us together. She is worried that we are texting and tweeting just to feel something that isn't there. She suggests that business owners and families set time aside for their people to have conversations. She believes that conversation "sips" are not enough, that we humans need to guzzle or at least gulp down great drafts of talk and interpersonal communication. We're missing out, she says. Let's look up from our phones and see the world!

Wesch, on the other hand, is concerned that his students, all students, are being cheated by the way that teachers are teaching. He believes that even the architects, by the way they designed his classroom, are against learning. He wants students to have a reason to ask interesting and critical questions, instead of "What do we need to know for the test." And he's not just talking about reorganizing his syllabus. He wants to reshape his and his students' learning environment. He calls his idea "anti-teaching." 

I see no explicit relationship between these two thinkers. But there may be an implied connection. They are both dissatisfied with the way the world is now. They think if a change were made, that learning would flourish. Their approaches and fixations are quite different, but they could, independently of one another, arrive at a similar conclusion. 

Viewer Vex Tot!

Here's my text overview so far!

I am not proud of this...

Above is a picture of my "thought process." 

And this was my model.

From that, I produced this, uh, thing.

I am a child.

Digital Illiteracy 101

Hi there! Were you expecting to view an informative exploration of a handy digital tool? Me too! So what happened? Well, I was born in 1969...

After I realized that there was no place to insert an 8-rack tape into my laptop, I tried just googling stuff from Professor Bogad's home page and ended up landing on Pixton. Pixton had promise. I love comics and graphic novels, though I'm not too happy about the flat, dead illustration in most of them. However, I know that to get my students writing, the animation is just a MacGuffin to drive the plot. 

I set up an Educator account (you can also choose Student), named my "class," and then created a younger, sexier avatar for myself. Then I got started on my first comic by clicking My Comics and New. This took me to a dashboard type page where I chose an appropriate Background dropped in my handsome and entirely idealized avatar.

After this brilliant achievement, I decided to make a second panel by pressing the Add Panel button on the left-hand side of the dashboard. I selected a new background and found my avatar floating in a laboratory. How unrealistic! So I selected a new, more gravity-appropriate Pose for myself. Here is the result:

(Poses and backgrounds can be selected from a dropdown or searched for.) Finally, with time ticking before this highly effective, totally tutorial post was due, it hit me:

By adding Words (you can choose from Speech, Though, Shout, Whisper) to my pictures and putting them in sequence, I had made a comic. And furthermore, by writing about it and giving you some directions (buttons highlighted in red), I had made a sort of, I don't know, should we call it a how to?

And you can, too. Probably a lot easier than I. This simple four panel comic took me an hour and half to create. Most of that time was just figuring out how to sign up. But I think that students and teachers that have more experience with these types of tools would have no problem. I foresee this being useful to increase literacy and digital literacy among my students. With a bit more practice, I should be able to walk them through it.

Boys Are Selfish

I chose to examine Kate Lyman's chapter entitled "Girls, Worms, and Body Image"(pp. 139-146).

After overhearing some second and third grade girls fret about losing weight, the author decided she needed to make a change to her unit on women's suffrage in order to shed a light on the issues surrounding the body image of girls and women.

She started by asking both boys and girls in her class to brainstorm nine facts about each other's genders. The "facts" she extracted included such gems as: Boys are selfish. Men are mean and lazy and jealous. Girls are bossy, loud, and picky. Girls always complain and they are too sensitive. Lyman wasn't able to get either gender to admit that these truths were not always so self-evident. 

Then it rained and all the earthworms popped out of the ground. During recess, some of the boys were chasing some of the girls with worms and the girls were screaming. Lyman attempted to acclimate the girls with the worms by having them make a terrarium in class. It worked! The girls no longer fell into the "the weaker sex" stereotype. They stopped being afraid of worms!

But they were still making negative body image comments. So Lyman asked them to look at a Barbie. She wanted to know if they thought it looked like anyone in their lives. NO! She asked them to look at magazine ads for cigarettes, make-up, weight-loss products. She wanted to know if the ads were conveying positive messages to the students. NO!

Finally, she set up a participatory activity for the children called "Old-Fashioned Day." She had the girls wear long dresses and the boys wear slacks and long-sleeved shirts and tiny clip-on ties. She changed her curriculum to penmanship, spelling bees, and times tables. Many children got to sit in a corner wearing a "dunce" cap. But another old-fashioned thing was going on. Girls were being treated as if they were inferior to boys. Boys would get called on more often, given more chances to answer a difficult question. Girls were being punished for their "sloppy" handwriting and told they weren't "ladylike." Needless to say, the girls didn't like this behavior and said as much during a class roundtable after Old-Fashioned Day was over. The full immersion exercise helped them to understand just how difficult things might have been in the past, and Lyman hoped it cause them to see how unbalanced perceptions of gender still are. And though she didn't "solve" the body image problem, she felt that she might have at least got her students thinking differently about the topic.

Lyman tried to find a way to show her girls how to face their body issues and to examine some possible sources in culture and media. She had varying levels of success in getting her point across. Admittedly, she doesn't have the budget or reach of Madison Avenue. But she cares about her students, girls and boys, and she wants them all to be healthy and more critical of their environment, more self aware and less anxious about their appearance. She knows from her own experience that body image is nothing new, and so she is doing what she can to try to break the cycle. 

Disno!

I'm going to say something now that may shock you, so please put down your coffee, tea or adult beverage, situate your emotional support animal securely in your lap, and listen to my harrowing declaration: I have never, ever liked Disney movies. Never. Not once. Not even remotely. 

I liked Disneyland. When I was a boy, I lived a mere 20 miles from there. And it was relatively cheap in those days, so I visited it maybe a half-dozen times a year with my family until I was ten years old or so (though I haven't been back since). The rides were fun but I never associated them with movies. It was just an excellent, maybe the very best, amusement park. The movies, the ones I remember watching that is (i.e. Snow White, Cinderella, Peter Pan, Dumbo, Bambi, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Jungle Book) were always a little, uh, boring to me. I always felt I was watching a Disney lesson rather than a Disney movie. Here's the kind of cartoon I liked as a child:

And here's the kind of cartoon I enjoy as a childish adult:

I'm not sure what it is about Disney cartoons and movies I don't care for. (I mean, I was born on Walt Disney's birthday so you'd think there would be some kind of connection there.) Perhaps it's the inherent racism of Micky Mouse? Or perhaps it's the formulaic stories? Or the incessant and devious marketing strategies? Or, I don't know, the fact that Disney's squid-like tentacles have slimed themselves over nearly every corner of the our popular culture?

Perhaps I'm exaggerating a bit. For effect. But I do feel like this gargantuan corporate enterprise has a much too expansive hold on our lives, not just in North America but across the globe. I, like "Pam and Nicole" (Christensen, p.183) won't allow my son to watch Disney movies, though I'm aware that I may someday lose that fight (so far, he's unaware of their existence). My objections on my son's behalf have more to due with consumerism and conformity than the implicit or explicit messages within the films themselves, but I'm not too impressed with those either.

To my eyes, Frozen was nothing more than an animated Broadway musical for kids. I don't mean that as a compliment because I also hate Broadway musicals. (And believe me, I'm aware that this is an unpopular and minority opinion, but that's a whole other blog, you know?) It's lesson was the same as ever: Be yourself! Live your own life by your own rules! Good advice. Good, boring, generally unachievable advice. The messages about what is valued is basically as S.C.W. A. A. M. P. as it gets, updated for today's audiences (the true love is not romantic but sisterly; the hero knocks out the bad guy all by herself; the "bad witch" turns into a "good witch"). Like the Black Cinderella in Christensen's chapter (p.180), the updates don't change the fundamental flaws of the form.