EDCI 353B Focal Blog 3

Once again, before addressing the blog prompt I want to take a bit of space to outline some of the discussions and/or materials I have looked at in the intervening week between these blogs ( I know they were not posted a week ago but I have a terrible case of edit-itis that will require some more blogging to reduce (which is pretty interesting when I juxtapose myself with Will Richardson's blog from May 20th about "writing live," "flowwriting," and his shift away from writing in any overtly edited fashion - have a look here). So ... I read everything that was easily accessible on Will Richardson's blog, I have read a pretty substantial hunk of Steven Johnson's "Everything Bad is Good for You" because I tripped over a copy in the used bookstore on campus, and we had two guest speakers in our class - a teacher-librarian who talked about available internet and library resources, and a library technician who talked more specifically about copyright issues in general, in Canada, and in the classroom.

The big question that forms the basis of the final blog post for my crazy intensive three week Alternative Texts extravaganza is this: discuss four aspects of my own teaching (think of skills, knowledge, and attitudes) that I will need to hold on to and/or let go of within the classroom to engage my students in a time of expanding notions of text.

I am going to need to hold on to my integrity as a teacher. What I mean by this is that I am going to have to teach in a system that uses standardised testing as its primary assessment tool while simultaneously teaching (perhaps even primarily) the critical thinking skills that I (informed by whatever literature I can get my hands on but including Mackey and McPherson) think they need. I know this is not a new dilemma for teachers but it is a tiring one. Tiring because not everyone shares the same view of education and tiring because it will just plain be a lot of work.

I am going to let go of the five paragraph essay (and that is a shame as I can finally say that I am good at it). Not only is it entirely printed-text based (i.e. monoliterary) but it is also a solitary exercise. Students will need this skill, there is no doubt, but how much will they need it? Not much. But if I can get a critically aware blog, movie or web-site, I will be more than happy with that - it will need to be critically aware according to the criteria of its own text-type, it is more in-line with the activities and skills that teens already perform (Mackey's asset model and McPherson's closing the loop between what teens do for fun and what they do in school - an absolute education killer), and finally these are skills that teens are more likely to use in the future (you don't see many five paragraph essays on facebook or in the workplace).

In relation to the last point, I am going to let go of authoritarian control of the classroom. I think students need experiential learning - even when this might seem painfully slow. They need to come up with their own solutions without being told what to do by me. Google can't make you stupid[er] when you need to get what you can from it to overcome the problem in front of you. Steven Johnson spends a lot of time in Section One on games in "Everything Bad is Good for You" making the case that playing video games is more like "learning the basic procedure of the scientific method" in its approach to problem solving than mindless recreation (p.45). I want to open up space in the classroom for collaborative learning like that of Brown and Renshaw used in "Positioning Students as Actors and Authors: A Chronotopic Analysis of Collaborative Learning Activities."

Lastly, I am going to hold on to my own definition of text. It's funny because this is the place that this class took as its starting point and it may seem a little backward to reverse this far. I know what the Integrated Resource Packages list as the Prescribed Learning Outcomes for the province of British Columbia. In fact, I have them saved to my hard drive and I just reviewed them again before I sat down to write this blog entry. The PLOs indicate different outcomes for text and for representations. Furthermore, there are a lot more listings under the headings of text than there are under representations. I will go so far as to posit that the BC Ministry of Education doesn't explicitly agree with Margaret Mackey that literacy is "the interpretation of recorded symbolic representation." Either that, or that the ministry seems to feel that printed-text literacy is worthy of more valourisation than film-text. Blogging, tweeting (otherwise called micro-blogging), and other on-line forms of text are not really mentioned. It looks like I need to interpret the somewhat vague guidelines and I am going to hold on to a definition of literacy that is open the multimodal text types without valourising one type over another - particularly when that valourisation is to my advantage and to my students' disadvantage (I have a vested interest in printed-text and they have a similar interest in on-line forms).