Once upon a time I looked forward to seeing mainline literacy journals take an interest in blogging. So, it was good to see an article in this month’s Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy on using of blogs for literature study, Weblogs and Literary Response: Socially Situated Identities and Hybrid Social Languages in English Class Blogs. However, for an education blogger, there’s a gaping disjunction between the academic world of the journal, and the world of classroom blogging described in the article.

The irony of publishing an article about online “socially situated identities” in a print journal that doesn’t provide a reference for the author’s online identity was too incongruous for me to focus seriously on the content of the report, and I drifted in and out of a weirdly schizophrenic consciousness where I wasn’t sure how to read the article. I imagined being the “ivory tower academic” reading about blogs, a cutting edge communication tool that could revolutionize literature study. And then I’d flip into “blogging teacher” mode, wanting to follow a link back to the students’ or teacher’s blogs, hoping I’d learn something from their example. But the JAAL article didn’t provide source citations for the students’ blogs. So the article became its own example of the disconnect between the theoretical world of academia and the messy particulars of the classroom.

Will Richardson and Konrad Glogowski might be interested to know they were casually cited along with Gee, Fairclough, and Jenkins, even though the students’ blogs, the subject of the article, are not listed. Nor are they indexed on Google from what I can see. Which is not to say that Kathleen West, the author of the study, doesn’t have interesting things to say in her account of her 11th grade AP English students using weblogs to engage in authentic talk about books.

I did find a copy [doc] of the article on a digital media course wiki. West used discourse analysis for a case study of three variously successful students to show how each of them created distinct identities and integrated their social language with the discourse of literary analysis. She showed how the “relationship-savvy teen,” the “tempered rebel,” and the “pop-cultured humorist” all constructed hybrid identities as “serious literature students” and “web-literate communicators.” She provides samples of coded transcriptions, and quotes from the student’s blogs as exemplars. The article, written for a university course, is slightly different from the version published by JAAL, but West’s data and discussion are essentially the same in each.

A couple of things about this piece bother me, though. West’s research question, “What is the nature of literary response as communicated via weblog?” was asked about kids in an AP English class at a school which West described as an “AP-saturated,” white, upper or middle class context. She concluded that the discourse of “serious literature student” could coexist with the more non-standard, non-academic online discourse. Fair enough. But what about kids who come from less privileged neighborhoods? Case study documentations that tell only success stories, especially when they come from upper middle class school environments, have limited use for teachers who work with less privileged student populations. I am always curious about what case studies don’t show, because the disappointments in my classroom are often more instructive for me than my successes. What about the kids who weren’t “serious literature students?”

The research question about literary response and weblogs tries to bridge the rift between academic and online discourse, where “socially situated identities” are constructed around different norms and conventions. Case in point from the article: The f-word was spelled out in the JAAL piece, where West apparently has to explain the meaning of ‘WTF’ for the academic readership. It was funny to see them explicitly deal with it, tacitly acknowledging their own cluelessness, like a parent using teen jargon.

Control of academic discourse is challenged by the read/write web. Anyone can publish now, about anything they like, in any style they choose. But the academy still has the credentialing job. For how long? I wonder. We’re publishing our own research, and linking directly to the evidence, every day. So, what can the academy tell us about blogging that we don’t already know, or won’t find out on our own? And when will the academy admit the social languages that kids are bringing with them into the groves of academe?

Source:
West, K.C. (2008, April). Weblogs and Literary Response: Socially Situated Identities and Hybrid Social Languages in English Class Blogs. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 51(7), 588–598.

One of the most common claims for using digital media in the classroom is that it increases student engagement. That may be true, but engagement alone doesn’t ensure academic traction. Rheingold asks whether kids’ enthusiasm for digital media can be harnessed to increase civic engagement. It’s an attractive idea, and it’s worth exploring. But as I read the chapter I’m not convinced that such an outcome is equally likely for all students.

The chapter examines the possibilities for helping students develop a “public voice” which they can use to speak out on issues they care about. And while Rheingold offers a lot of practical suggestions for doing that, he merely waves in the direction of obstacles to implementation:

It is not easy for many teachers to adopt this perspective and put it into action in the classroom—the political and economic necessity of teaching to the test leaves little room to fit these kinds of skills lessons into mandated and standardized curriculum. “Accountability” and innovation are often locked into a zero-sum game. Lack of resources, training, and technical support offer significant additional obstacles.

I don’t agree that accountability is necessarily an obstacle to innovation, but I do recognize that curricular constraints, lack of resources, and technical support are problematic. Many students have serious academic and personal needs which push media literacy education down on the priority list. Rheingold acknowledges the political nature of these obstacles, saying that, “The struggle for participatory media literacy in schools must be seen in the context of these broader societal conflicts.”

I lose some enthusiasm for the edtech vision when these critical hurdles are set up and then sidestepped because the enterprise becomes a mirage for me with my less affluent, more challenging, students. And that’s where I see participatory media literacy education breaking down as an avenue for populist civic reform. It does not extend to everyone equally because the obstacles for some are all too real, and “the vision” is dimmed in the context of a classroom culture impacted by domestic trauma and neighborhood drama.

Nonetheless, Rheingold offers some concrete classroom exercises for developing public voice with blogs, wikis, and podcasts using annotated links and connective, analytic, and persuasive, writing. He looks, also, at possibilities for engaging students in citizen journalism projects such as news reporting, investigative blogging, hyperlocal journalism, and digital storytelling. These are all worthy ideas that seem do-able with middle school-aged students, and they’re certainly worth looking at. There is a wiki, Participatory Media Literacy, set up as a resource for educators.

Rheingold’s question about whether developing a public voice can lead to more civic participation is critically important, but if we’re going to talk about student voice, we need to be clear about whose voices they are. Identity is inseparable from voice, and the possibilities for privileging some over others is no different in a digital environment than anywhere else. The project will need attention from a broad spectrum of educators working with digital media if the question is to be effectively answered.

It’s hard to make a general statement about how I manage the student weblogs because I don’t have a policy that applies the same to every situation. The policy statement the kids hear from me is that we’re writing for a school website, representing our school to the public, and just as if we were on a field trip, we’ll look our best. In fact, this is a fair representation of what’s spelled out in our school district’s web publishing guidelines. I do edit the students’ writing in order to help them look their best. And I do it in a variety of ways. Mostly, how I handle it depends on whose writing it is, and what I want to accomplish with the edit because all editing is not equal.

To begin with, the word ‘edit’ is problematic. I wondered as I read Brian’s post and the various responses to it, if everyone was talking about the same thing. I don’t know, for instance, if it means correcting spelling and typos, structure and paragraphing, sentence syntax, inclusion of specific details, author’s voice, or the topic the student has chosen to write about. There are issues at every level, and I focus on them selectively.

I see the spelling, typos and paragraphing as relatively trivial compared to the larger problems, but that doesn’t mean that I want them to ignore those things. If there are many of them, we have a conference and go through the piece together. They read it out loud to me, and usually that helps them catch a few they hadn’t seen. But that takes a lot of time that I don’t always have for every student who might need help there. Handing the paper back to them and telling them to “find their mistakes” usually ends up with them wasting a bunch of time looking through the dictionary or bothering someone else who knows how to spell better. So, if I don’t have the time to work on mechanics with a student, or if there are only a few of these things, I correct them myself. We work on sentence mechanics with exercises that are isolated from blogging, just as we work on math facts as exercises that are isolated from problem solving.

Sometimes, if I see a pattern among things that a few kids have written, I present it to the class as an “issue” and I take some time to go through the editing process in front of them using the LCD projector. I check with the student to see if this is OK with them, and then we do it as a group. I don’t normally go this route with kids who are insecure about their writing. But sometimes, I might. After all, they did push the ‘publish’ button. Mostly, this is how I teach about structural issues like paragraphing, topic sentences, the use of punctuation, and word choice. I try to show how those things help readers make sense of the writing. Everyone can work on that.

The other, topic-related issues are unique to each piece and each individual, and they require more individual attention. These are usually, in my experience, the most difficult to resolve because they require students to make choices they may not want to make. My editorial policy guides that discussion. One thing that has come up in the last year is that I don’t allow fiction writing. I can’t teach them to be better writers when I have no idea what they’re talking about. I don’t understand Pokemon fan fiction, for example. I apologize, and tell them that I’m good with essays and OK with poetry, but fantasy fiction is outside my area of expertise as a teacher. Reading through that stuff last year was a huge time sink for me.

The question of how much time it takes to do things this way is something that many teachers ask about. I spend a lot of time solving technical problems in class, and maybe a half hour a day monitoring the website. Maybe. Where it helps me, I think, is that at the end of the term there’s an archive of all the work a student has done. I have no papers to look at, and it’s easy to share with parents.

The kids understand that they don’t have individual blogs, and they aren’t writing on their own websites. I expect them to conform to certain constraints, just as a magazine or newspaper writer would. I think there’s an inherent contradiction between the concept of the blog as a personal website and its use in school as a writing platform. In school, there are institutional constraints that are not present for bloggers who are writing independently. How best to teach them to write is the main issue. My emphasis is on effective communication.

My son had a junior high Health class assignment last week to develop an anti-drug abuse message. He could create a poster, a story or poem, a skit, or a video. He was allowed to work with a partner, so he and a friend decided to make a video. They spent time at school writing a script, and then they got together on Saturday to film it. I don’t have a video camera, but the friend’s dad has one, so they met at his house to make the movie. The other boy’s dad shot the movie and edited it after my son left so they could turn it in on Monday.

I wasn’t real happy about how all that worked out for my son, even though he got an “A” grade, because he didn’t do very much to earn it. He did write the script, and he might have actually done as much work as he needed to do. And he probably learned a few things, but he didn’t learn very much about producing a video, which would have been cool, but they did the editing at the other kid’s house after he left. At my house, we don’t help the kids with homework by doing it for them. We do it with them when they have trouble.

When I asked him about the the fairness of having his friend’s dad work on his homework assignment, he wasn’t concerned in the least. It didn’t matter to him if another kid’s parent worked on his project. They offered to help, he said, and the teacher told them they could work with a partner. We told him that in the future, we wanted him to avoid group projects because they involve transportation and family schedules, variables that the kids don’t always have control over.

This little homework incident illustrates another problem with homework that I have as a teacher. I don’t require major projects to be done at home because the help available to the kids is very uneven. In some cases when it does get done, it’s done so poorly that I’m sorry it went home. If parent oversight isn’t the norm, and sometimes even when it is, the kids don’t get the same benefit as if they did the work in school.

In an interview about his book last year, The Homework Myth, Alfie Kohn said there is no research to show that elementary school-aged kids benefit from homework. I don’t entirely agree, because I know that my own kids do learn from having us help them at home. But not every kid has parents with the time and ability to offer effective help. I do agree, though, that a lot of homework is unnecessary busy work, and it wouldn’t be missed. High school kids should have homework, I think. But I also think that everyone who does have it, should know that doing it will benefit them in some way besides the grade.

One of the promises of having internet technology in school is that kids will be able to collaborate on projects away from school, and that they can use the computer as a research tool. But, just as with books and pencils, the kids without solid parent help won’t get the same benefit from the technology as if they had good mentors, people with the time and knowledge to show them how to edit video, and how to avoid researching the entire history of western civilization. And then, some kids don’t have internet or computer access at home.

Kohn thinks that one possible reason homework persists despite it’s dubious benefits is that we entertain widespread misconceptions about learning. Time on task isn’t the same as engagement with a meaningful task. He also says that homework may be deliberately intended as busy work because people are suspicious of what kids might do with too much free time. One of the biggest problems with homework is that it often results from an assumption that kids should have homework regardless of what it is.

One of my goals this year is to help my students develop the skills and interests that would lead them to voluntarily spend time at home on projects that we’ve begun at school, even if it’s “only” reading. I’m not naive enough to imagine that everyone would do this, but that wouldn’t be any different than when I assign it, except that I wouldn’t have so many zeros in the gradebook. Homework should not be on the list of negative certainties in life for elementary school students.

Policy decisions weigh hard on us in Alaska. Our state has a history of being managed from a distance by bureaucrats and corporate interests with little regard for the unintended consequences of their decisions. In Alaska it’s easy to recognize the benefits and the consequences of federal social policy, because it never really seems to fit, like hand-me-down clothes.

The reach of federal policy has tangibly extended over the last several decades into classrooms across the US. Since the passage of The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Bilingual Education Act, the The Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, and the ruling in Brown vs. The Board of Education, federal intervention in schools across the nation has been normalized. In the US we have also had Indian termination policies that included sending Native children to residential schools in order to assimilate them to middle class culture by removing them from their home communities, denying them the opportunity to learn their native languages, and teaching them about Christianity. These policies have had far reaching effects that we live with and implement in school every day. Economic policy also affects education in ways that are not openly acknowledged, so that when we talk about helping students in poverty, we seem to assume the inevitibillity of material deprivation.

My point in this quick historical policy meander is to indicate that social policy is, itself, a sort of master technology that defines and limits institutional conditions of schooling. Social policy links human decision making with mechanical and digital techologies such that they form a complex dynamic system. Kevin Kelly calls it the technium, “a complex web of interacting agents each with their own biases and tendencies” that is “partly human and partly nonhuman.” Despite the overwhelming powerlessness that is implied in such a description of our emergent world, as a teacher, I am not without hope or a sense of agency in the process. Kelly points out in this video that our ethical stance, and the values we embrace, will determine the material outcomes of these sociotechnical forces. Kelly believes that we need to find a way to “train the technium, to imbue it with certain principles because, at a certain level and at a certain age, it will basically become much more autonomous than it is now.”

Education policies currently in place, and under consideration, pose serious challenges to our democratic process, as Deborah Meier pointed out this week. Meier says that the manipulation of data and “thinking like a State” are toxic influences on the ecology of school policy development because there is no direct accountability for the collateral damage it does. Politicians and critics tell us that “the truth hurts” and that “these tools will ‘help us manage the entire system more effectively,’” but they will not.

My experience in the classroom over the last couple of weeks is typical of the beginning of every school year. Many people don’t realize how piecemeal policy implementation disrupts elementary school classrooms. Specialists come around with schedules asking when it’s a good time to take kids out of class. I respond, “There is no good time, but…” And I toss off some times when I think we’ll be doing something not too consequential. If the kids get pulled out during math or reading, they miss those subjects with me altogether.

But surely, they are learning something with those other teachers, aren’t they? I hope so. And that’s just it – I don’t ever really know. And holding kids accountable for material missed while they were out getting special help is problematic on many levels. Kids go to speech therapy, counseling, choir, band and orchestra, reading tutors, math tutors, and bilingual tutors. It’s possible that I may be left with only a few hours per week with my whole class. We work around each other as best we can, but without common planning time these special programs can’t be smoothly integrated and monitored. Common planning time isn’t in the budget.

How do I respond? I follow Kelly’s advice to identify what I want from the classroom, and practice subtle guidance. This involves a certain amount of surrender and a willingness to speak against things that are blatantly wrong.

So, what do I do when the lights go out? I know the answer to this because 20 years ago I built my home in an area without any utilities, and lived without phone, power, or plumbing for several years. We talked and laughed and enjoyed being together without a lot of outside noise. Whatever we needed, we made our own, or hauled it home. We got along without some things, and we adjusted to a little bit of inconvenience.

Eventually, though, the grid came out to find us, snaking along our road frontage. We tied into it once the neighborhood started to grow, and our privacy was compromised. We decided that we might as well enjoy the benefits of electricity as long as we had to suffer the downside. We still have our kerosene lamps, though. And we remember what it means to get along with the basics.