The Pain of Change

Ch-ch-ch-changes
I'm not opposed to change. I embrace it and have learned in my lifetime that being able to adapt to changes is absolutely necessary for survival and sanity. The only constant is change, right?

Sometimes we feel uncomfortable not knowing everything, and there is a difference between what you know is best for your learners and what you feel comfortable teaching. Stepping out of your comfort zone is a challenge for many but often necessary to connect with today’s learners. Educators cannot be experts in the many interests and passions of their learners. Simply put, there are just too many. There are too many innovations— too many outlets where students can publish what they’ve produced on these topics. It’s just not possible to be an “expert” in so many fields. By finding a way to connect to students and their passions—by investigating what makes them tick and bridging to academic tasks—educators are modeling risks that encourage the same behavior in their learners. It is possible to make inquiry a process to connect to new people, new content, new networks, new understandings, and new wonderings. It is a lot of work. And it is empowering our students to make important connections to what drives them and what drives them to learn.

When I started my master's program in August of 2014, I quickly got the increasing sense that the world of education is changing more than it ever has in a very short period of time (duh...I know). It used to be that teaching English meant that students learned grammar, spelling, reading, comprehending, analyzing, etc. In high school and college courses, we made analytical arguments and had lively discussions about our interpretations of novels, poems, plays, etc. Every so often, we got to create something: write a poem, short-story, play. This is all still important. At least, I think it is. But, now we need so much more, and little by little I have begun to push my students and to give them more choice and autonomy with class work and projects. What’s interesting is that for some students, there is this frustration or discomfort that they exude. They want to know exactly what to do/produce/write. They want to know how many points each activity/assignment/product is worth and how their grade will be affected. They are afraid of getting something wrong and want to make sure they pass/get a B or an A. I think this is the effect of having experienced a majority of their schooling in a CST, standardized-testing world and am hoping that it lessens as each year passes.

We need to model for our students that change is constant, discomfort is expected and normal, and pushing through it all is the way to handle it.

It's not Just About Tech Tools

Throughout the course of my Master’s program through the University of San Diego I had an increasing sense that the world of education is changing more than it ever has in a very short period of time (duh...I know). It used to be that teaching English meant that students learned grammar, spelling, reading, comprehending, analyzing, etc. In high school and college courses, we made analytical arguments and had lively discussions about our interpretations of novels, poems, plays, etc. Every so often, we got to create something: write a poem, short-story, play. This is all still important. At least, I think it is. But, now we need so much more, and little by little I have begun to push my students in senior English/Language Arts and to give them more choice and autonomy with class work and projects. What’s interesting is that for some students, there is this frustration or discomfort that they exude. They want to know exactly what to do/produce/write. They want to know how many points each activity/assignment/product is worth and how their grade will be affected. They are afraid of getting something wrong and want to make sure they pass/get a B or an A. I think this is the effect of having experienced a majority of their schooling in a CST, standardized-testing world and am hoping that it lessens as each year passes.

In one course, Critical Media Literacy, we read a text by Ernest Morrell entitled “Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Popular Culture: Literacy Development Among Urban Youth,” published in 2002, he makes the case for critical media literacy in our curriculum. This is so long ago, and yet, it seems like we barely scratch the surface of it even though it's been over a decade. As he mentions, a lot is changed but also much remains the same, for example the tenets of critical media literacy. He sees the change as making even more crucial  the need for focus on popular culture in English classes because kids are not just consumers of media, now they are producers of it. And as he says, we should be asking how we can work media production into what we are doing in our classrooms.

Of course, as I say all this I think about the people who will be saying that critical media literacy is not college preparatory and that it doesn't have the value that literature and nonfictional texts have. But nobody is saying that it has to be one or the other. Our curriculum can be augmented with CML, not be replaced by it. So much of the reticence I see in teachers is just from them wanting to do things the way they've always done them. They're reluctant to adopt digital technologies because they didn't see value in replacing paper with a Chromebooks until they learned a little bit more about Google doc sharing and being able to make comments on student papers. It takes examples and specifics and anecdotal evidence to convince reluctant teachers to try new things. Teachers need to see new ideas in action. To this end, I will keep taking risks in my own classroom.

My biggest takeaway from my all the digital courses in my Master’s program was a new way to look at all my curriculum, at each and every lesson and activity, to evaluate it all with a critical eye. Technology in the classroom isn’t just about learning how to use Kahoot or Socrative. It’s also about being critical practitioners and reflecting about our practice, and quite often needing to stop doing what we’ve been doing just because that’s what we’ve always done and that’s what we’re comfortable doing.