Teachers Teaching Teachers

Here are some things we’ve been thinking about as we prepare for this week’s webcast, which — as always — will be on Wednesday at 9:00 p.m Eastern. Please join us at EdTechTalk.com.
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How can we bring social networks and blogs into the classroom without killing them? Maybe we shouldn’t even try. Just because MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and Sconex are popular with (many, not all of) our students, why should we bring technologies like these into our classrooms? Some of us might answer that blogging is a way to bring new literacies and energy — our students’ capabilities and motivations — into our classrooms. We might even argue that the reading and writing that (many, not all of) our students do online is a powerful underground resource, waiting to be tapped. For many students, communicating online has become akin to a mother-tongue, and for a long time, good reading and writing teachers have known how important it is to begin with the mother-tongue as we expand students’ language use. At the very least, blogging can be seen as a way to help students connect what happens in our classrooms to life outside of school. If these are some of the reasons why teachers are bringing blogs into the classroom, the next questions have to do with how to do it. It’s not as easy as it sounds to be true to “cyber-youth literacies” and our academic, adult goals for reading and writing in school.

Recently, while at The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) meeting in Nashville, Clarence Fisher asked questions about what he was seeing after attending a couple of sessions where teachers were using new media:

Sessions like these make me think two main things. First of all, we still don’t get it. We are still trying to appropriate the literacy practices of youth culture, and co-opt them for our own means. We use hip - hop to teach grammar. We use blogs to nitpick the ultra fine points of novels and to teach grammar. We don’t honour the literacy practices of the people in our classrooms for what they are. To many teachers, they are not legitimate on their own. It is OK to use blogs, as long as we are tearing apart their writing while we use them. We will teach them how to shoot video, but only for a “feel - good” unit, a reward if they work hard on the other stuff we want them to do. New literacy practices become the sugar which makes the medicine go down easier. Second, we still crave control. We are willing to give kids the experience of blogging, if they are responding to a list of prompts. We are willing to use video if the videos are a series of X number of shots, each lasting no longer then X number of seconds. We definitely do need to teach structure and use frameworks with kids; they need a frame and a form to hang their thinking on, but to me, it smacks of assignments not changing. Are we still doing old things in new ways? 5 paragraph essays in video form? (permalink)

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Many of us have felt Clarence’s frustration as schools somehow resist change, even at this time of radical departures from what went before. Teachers who bring blogs into the classroom recognize how difficult it is to get out of the way of student blogging. But also, doesn’t there have to be something different in what we do in our classrooms from what they might be doing at home after school? The good news is that there are some success stories to report. The teachers working with two elggs, PersonalLearningSpace.com (middle school) and YouthVoices.net (high school) have been giving students control. We’ve been finding ways to “give students the experience of blogging” without “responding to a list of prompts.”

One of the ideas we are working on with students in these high school and middle school elggs is “20 Questions: 10 Self and 10 World”. This is an idea that we’ve adapted from James A. Beane’s notions of the integrated, democratic curriculum. Here’s how a blogger from New Zealand, Bruce Hammonds, recently summarized Bean’s ideas:

Beane believes students need to be brought together to develop their own curriculum by combining their concerns and self interest with ‘common good’ in a collaborative and democratic way. For such a curriculum to be worthwhile he believes it must both address significant issues and engage students in an active and meaningful way. After the two key questions have been asked (1. ‘What question or concerns do you have about yourself?’ and 2.‘What questions or concerns you have about the world?’) students gather in groups to discuss the questions and then work with their teachers to help them group common concerns into themes.

leading and learning: More from Mr Beane! Democratic Schools

Following Beane, we begin blogging with students by asking them to produce 10 questions about the world and 10 questions about themselves. Of course, when we did this, some students wanted to know what it meant. What questions should they write about themselves? We also had to stop and think! How can you explain “self” to a teenager? The teenage years are an age when self gets defined and blogging about their own questions is a way for students to gain the confidence to find their identity. Asking for ten questions “about the world” seemed equally strange at first. It’s not easy to trust that young people will find ten meaningful questions about the world. Isn’t it the teacher’s job to come up with good questions? Learning to trust students to write good questions without giving them a lot of guidelines is something that we seem to need to learn over and over. We keep wanting to link their questions to a curriculum theme, essential question, or some other structure. But we are finding that students do come up with important themes to blog about when they are allowed to select their own questions.

Do our blogs have a student-sponsored life of their own? Have our blog sites moved beyond Fisher’s “new literacy practices as sugar” to allowing students to “combine their concerns and self interest with the common good?” Sometimes, and it remains a goal to make our elgg spaces — our students blogs in social networking sites — into places online where they can truly express, question, explore and research subjects that matter to them.

What can be said for certain is that these are some of the issues that we will be discussing on Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. We’d love for you to join us. Tell us a story of when you’ve been able to “honour the literacy practices of the people in our classrooms for what they are.” Or tell us about how hard it is to do this, or even why you wouldn’t want to. Tune us in at EdTechTalk.com and be ready to tell stories of blogging in your classroom.