Posts Tagged ‘education’

robo-readers do what teachers can’t! Or, how we turned writing literacy into an algorithm

Jun 7th, 12 / 1 Comment

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has this weekly radio show called “Spark.” It is, in my opinion, the best technology-focused show that Americans don’t know about.

This week’s show included a story on the use of computer tools to read and score student writing on standardized tests. Spark host Nora Young interviewed Mark Shermis, the Dean of the College of Education at the University of Akron, who had this to say about how so-called “robo readers” assess writing:

They don’t necessarily use the same logic that you or I would in evaluating an essay. Those that use natural language processing will look for structures of arguments, so for example they might be looking for key words like ‘first,’ ‘second,’ ‘third,’ and ‘finally.’ Or if they’re looking for the main point, they might look at the topic sentence and try to identify key words that would be associated with an essay that was on topic. Or if they were looking for a conclusion they might be looking for something like ‘in conclusion’ or ‘in summary.’

Guess what, dudes–I’m not down with this approach to assessing writing. As a pretty decent writer myself, a former college composition instructor and a current instructor of preservice teachers who will one day be teaching our young people how to write, I tell my students the following:

  • Don’t use the phrase “in conclusion” to end your essay–any reader who’s paying attention can tell that they’ve hit the end of your paper, and “in conclusion” is therefore redundant, throwaway information.
  • Key words like ‘first,’ ‘second,’ third,’ and ‘finally’ are often lazy transitions, and ones that extremely strong, creative writers almost never use. While they work just fine, they often make a reader feel like s/he’s reading a set of driving directions.

Then I tell my students some things about how good writing is writing that meets the needs and interests and expectations of the reader while also jarring or provoking the reader in some significant way. Often, this jarring can be brought about through creative, unexpected use of language–precisely the sort of thing that robo-readers cannot detect.

Young asks Shermis about the creativity aspect, noting that computers can’t effectively assess this element of good writing. Shermis concedes the point, but adds that

this notion of creativity is kind of a curious one. If you take a look at the actual curriculum, when kids graduate and they go to the university, most colleges and schools aren’t looking for creative writing; they’re looking for somebody who can string together a subject, predicate, and nominative–that is, that they can communicate effectively. When you actually do an analysis of 95% of the writing that goes on even at the university level, it’s not creative. It’s simply a communication pattern that’s been ascribed to by professionals in the field.

Sure. But given that so much of the writing that young people are doing is not directed toward professional or career goals, given that so much of how young people learn, communicate, and participate in social and civic life is through written but informal text online, it just seems silly to put faith in the idea that writing skills are, at their base, about following ‘conventions’ agreed upon long before the internet was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye.

Anyway, go take a listen to Spark if you’re into technology. It’s a cool, fun show that deserves more listeners on the American side of the North American borders.

 

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on supporting the needs of gifted learners

Jun 6th, 12 / 1 Comment

I’m the kind of guy who spent a lot of fifth grade secretly reading books in class instead of paying attention to the teacher. I earned good grades, took a few AP classes, and got a full-ride academic scholarship to college. I graduated something-cum laude (I can’t remember anymore whether it was summa cum laude or just plain old cum laude). As far as I know, I was never labeled “gifted,” but I was certainly a Smarty McSmarterson.

I know from personal experience, from my friends’ and colleagues’ anecdotes, and from this literature review I’m currently working on that it’s hard being a Smarty McSmarterson–especially in a public school system that’s not particularly equipped to meet the needs of overachieving or gifted learners.

But I can’t take the next step and agree that the ‘equity’ issues surrounding so-called “gifted” learners are equivalent to (not identical to, but similar in scope and urgency as) the issues surrounding struggling or underachieving learners. Here’s how Susan Winebrenner put it in her 2000 publication  “Gifted students need an education, too”:

Consider the range of abilities present in most classrooms. Visualize that both extremes of a learning curve are equally far removed from the norm. Students who fail to achieve the designated standards have received unprecedented attention during the past several years.They are identified for special services before they start kindergarten, experience lower student:teacher ratios, and may even have a full-time aide assigned to them for the entire school day. School districts spend much more money educating this population than they designate for the usual per-pupil expenditure.

Teachers are expected to create numerous differentiation adjustments for low-achieving students by modifying the amount of work, depth, complexity, and content of the curriculum and by linking students’ learning styles and interests to the prescribed learning tasks. Politicians, community members, and teachers avidly follow the progress of these students’ learning for evidence that these students are indeed moving forward.

Contrast this with the situation for gifted students, whose natural learning abilities place them as far from average as their classmates who struggle to learn. In September, many of these youngsters could take the assessments that all students in their grade will take at the end of the year and still score at or above the 95th percentile. Simply in the interests of equity, these students are as entitled to receive the same types of differentiation so readily provided to the students who struggle to learn.

I have two major concerns regarding Winebrenner’s argument. The first is the use of that phrase “natural learning abilities.”According to Winebrenner, “gifted” students are just “naturally” more academically advanced than their peers. Can we really embrace the “born this way” argument when the truth is that students labeled “gifted” are overwhelmingly white or Asian, overwhelmingly middle- and upper-class? Are we to assume, then, that white and Asian, middle- and upper-class learners are more predisposed to “naturally” higher intelligence? Down that road lies only darkness and tragedy.

I also don’t know what to do about Winebrenner’s use of that phrase in the context of her larger argument, that the equity issues surrounding gifted learners are equivalent to those surrounding struggling learners, by mere dint of the equidistance of each group from the mythical “norm.” If gifted learners are “naturally” more academically advanced than their peers, should we assume that struggling learners–disproportionately Black, Latino, Native American, and ESL students–are “naturally” less academically talented?

Ok, so that’s the first thing. The second thing is that it is impossible to assess the depth and scope of an equity issue through measures like standardized test scores and other formal assessments. Learners who fall in the bottom quartile on standardized test scores are simply not facing the same issues as those who fall in the top quartile on the same measure, and to suggest that they do shows a stunning lack of awareness of what doing better than average gets you that doing worse than average does not. We are talking, after all, about an educational system in which a) some kids are more likely to come to school with certain skills, dispositions, and attributes that are more likely to make them successful in school; b) those kids overwhelmingly (and not coincidentally) come from the dominant (white, middle class) culture of our society; and c) the people who end up ‘educated’ enough to argue, in research journals, in our classrooms, and in the halls of our government about whether helping gifted kids is an equity issue on par with the need to help struggling kids ALSO happen to overwhelmingly (and not coincidentally) come from the dominant (white, middle class) culture.

“Gifted” kids, whether placed in honors classes or not, are going to leave school and enter larger social structures that, overwhelmingly, are designed to support their continued success. Struggling kids, whether “remediated” or not, are going to leave school and enter larger social structures that, overwhelmingly, work against their best interests and throw up barriers to their success.

I agree that every kid has a right to a good education that meets her specific needs, that challenges her, that helps her become the best person she can be. But I don’t agree that the equity issues surrounding underchallenged gifted kids are the same–in spirit or in substance–as are those surrounding underachieving or struggling learners.

I accidentally started a conversation about this on Facebook, where the discussion is all walled off and hidden from people who aren’t my facebook friends (or who avoid reading my posts), so I wanted to bring it over here for more people to see. What do you think? How can we support the needs of gifted learners without falling into the trap of treating all equity issues as, er, equal?

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don’t ask me to withhold judgment of dharun ravi: a response to danah boyd & john palfrey

Feb 25th, 12 / 2 Comments

danah boyd and John Palfrey would like us to stop bullying Dharun Ravi.

Dharun Ravi, you may remember, is the young man whose Rutgers University dorm-mate, Tyler Clementi, committed suicide days after Ravi apparently used his computer to record, watch, and tweet about Clementi’s sexual encounters with another man. Here are the details as boyd and Palfrey explain them:

What seems apparent is that Clementi asked Ravi to have his dormroom to himself on two occasions – September 19 and 21 – so that he could have alone time with an older gay man. On the first occasion, Ravi appears to have jiggered his computer so that he could watch the encounter from a remote computer. Ravi announced that he did so on Twitter. When Clementi asked Ravi for a second night in the room, Ravi invited others to watch via Twitter. It appears as though Clementi read this and unplugged Ravi’s computer, thereby preventing Ravi from watching. What happened after this incident on September 21 is unclear. A day later, Clementi’s body was discovered.

boyd and Palfrey make it clear that they are appalled by anti-LGBTQ bullying and by the suicides of so many queer youth. Yet they are concerned that the public response–near-universal and vehement condemnation of Ravi and his actions–itself verges on bullying.They write:

Tyler Clementi’s suicide is a tragedy.  We should all be horrified that a teenager felt the need to take his life in our society.  But in our frustration, we must not prosecute Dharun Ravi before he has had his day in court.  We must not be bullies ourselves.  Ravi’s life has already been destroyed by what he may or may not have done.  The way we, the public, have treated him, even before his trial, has only made things worse.

I can’t summon the language to describe how vehemently I disagree with boyd and Palfrey. It’s hard to believe they’re even seriously trying to convince readers that what Ravi did to Clementi is equal to how the American public is reacting to what Ravi did to Clementi.

Imagine this, somewhere, in some schoolyard:

A boy, call him Jake, gets accused of being too effeminate. Another boy, call him Sam, corners Jake behind the slides at recess and punches him in the eye. He says, “That’s for acting like a faggot.”

Another boy, call him Tom, sees the fight, walks over and punches Sam in the eye. He says, “That’s for acting like an asshole.”

boyd and Palfrey would have us believe that both punches must be seen as equal, that both should be viewed as bullying. Are these actions equivalent? Only if you have only the most surface understanding of what constitutes bullying.

When LGBTQ students are bullied, they are attacked for their non-normativity. They are attacked for being different, for being threatening to the status quo. Violence is one really good way–but certainly not the only way, about which more later–to subdue a threat. When Sam punches Jake, he is motivated by fear. Is it fear that motivates Tom to punch Sam? Probably not. It’s probably anger, frustration, and a desire to stand up against reprehensible behavior. It’s a desire to make a stand–to make a public stand–to say “this behavior will not be tolerated.”

Has the public reaction to Dharun Ravi’s actions ruined his life? Yeah, probably. And here’s where I differ from boyd and Palfrey: I believe that the public’s reaction is fully appropriate in response to anybody who acts as reprehensibly, as vilely as Ravi did toward his roommate. This is a man who invaded his roommate’s privacy, who was so goddamned proud of recording and watching Tyler Clementi’s sexual encounters that he tweeted about it. This is a man who was perfectly comfortable ridiculing, belittling, and dehumanizing another human being. The only appropriate response is to stand up against such vile behavior. The only appropriate response is to take a public stand that says “this behavior will not be tolerated.”

It gets worse, because boyd and Palfrey have the nerve to suggest that one reason we should be kinder to Ravi is that there’s a chance that his actions didn’t lead directly to Clementi’s suicide:

As information has emerged from the legal discovery process, the story became more complicated.  It appears as though Clementi turned to online forums and friends to get advice; his messages conveyed a desire for getting support, but they didn’t suggest a pending suicide attempt.  In one document submitted to the court, Clementi appears to have written to a friend that he was not particularly upset by Ravi’s invasion.  Older digital traces left by Clementi – specifically those produced after he came out to and was rejected by those close to him – exhibited terrible emotional pain.  At Rutgers, Clementi appears to have been handling his frustrations with his roommate reasonably well.  After the events of September 20 and 21, Clementi appears to have notified both his resident assistant and university officials and asked for a new room; the school appears to have responded properly and Clementi appeared pleased.

I think boyd and Palfrey hope that this information will help readers view Ravi in a kinder light–which is utterly ridiculous. Are we supposed to assume that Clementi didn’t feel bullied by Ravi’s behavior simply because school officials agreed to place Clementi in a new room? Are we to hold off judgment of Ravi’s behavior simply because there’s no evidence that Ravi’s behavior led directly to Clementi’s suicide?

It is hard to believe that two people as well read and intelligent as danah boyd and John Palfrey can seriously take such a simplistic view of bullying, of violence, of harassment and depression and suicide. It’s hard to believe that they seriously want us to be kinder to Dharun Ravi based on the possibility that his reprehensible behavior didn’t directly cause his roommate to kill himself. Assuming the reports of Ravi’s actions are accurate, he was only the last person to have the opportunity to bully Tyler Clementi. That may make him not guilty according to legal standards, but it certainly certainly certainly doesn’t make him innocent.

And let’s remember that Dharun Ravi is not on trial for the death of Tyler Clementi. He’s on trial for invasion of privacy, witness and evidence tampering, and bias intimidation–a hate crime that requires that prosecutors prove Ravi was motivated by an anti-gay bias. Let’s further remember that our legal system serves a different purpose than does the court of public opinion. Our legal system is for figuring out whether someone has broken the law. Public opinion is where a culture makes clear how it feels about that person’s behavior. When the LAPD officers accused of beating Rodney King were acquitted, the nation was in outrage: The racism was too blatant, and too appalling, to ignore.

Just as Dharun Ravi’s behavior is, thank christ, too blatant and too appalling to ignore. It’s about goddamned time people got mad about homophobia and anti-gay hate. It’s about goddamned time people stood up en masse for the dignity of their LGBTQ brothers and sisters.

And another thing: Let’s not forget that young men and women like Tyler Clementi are convicted to death by the court of public opinion. Why do LGBTQ youth commit suicide at such higher rates compared to their straight peers? Because of social pressures to conform. Because of religious and conservative groups that tell queer kids that they’re abominations who are destined for hell. Because of families and friends who turn their backs. Because of bullies and assholes like Dhuran Ravi.

boyd and Palfrey end with this exhortation:

To combat bullying, we need to stop the cycle of violence.  We need to take the high road; we must refrain from acting like a mob, in Clementi’s name or otherwise.  Every day, there are young people who are being tormented by their peers and by adults in their lives.  If we want to make this stop, we need to get to the root of the problem.  We should start by looking to ourselves.

Here is where boyd and Palfrey and I, at last, agree: We should start by looking to ourselves. We should, all of us, consider what cultural biases, what personal beliefs and prejudices, guide us in extending our sympathies and emotional and intellectual energies. “Ravi’s life,” write boyd and Palfrey, “has already been destroyed by what he may or may not have done. (my emphasis.) The way we, the public, have treated him, even before his trial, has only made things worse.”

There is, in fact, no doubt that Ravi did record and view Tyler Clementi’s sexual encounters; there is no doubt that he showed at least a snippet of his recording to his friends. There is no doubt that he boasted about these escapades via Twitter. What’s left for doubt is to wonder what leads us to want to wait to decide how we feel about what he did until the court tells us how guilty he is of violating the letter, not the spirit, of our nation’s laws.

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now begins the experiment

Feb 22nd, 12 / 0 Comments

I started teaching college students nine years ago, when I was a graduate student in Colorado State University’s Creative Writing program. After I finished up there, I spent a few years as an adjunct instructor teaching almost any class that any university could offer me. Back then, I had little formal training in the theory and practice of teaching. I mostly went by feel, by what felt successful to my students and to me. By “successful,” I mean to point to activities and classroom language that led to higher engagement, more discussion, more efforts to challenge what the textbooks, what the instructor said was “true.”

Back then, I believe, I was heading toward a classroom pedagogy that treated teaching as a practice of freedom. In Teaching to transgress, bell hooks writes:

Education as the practice of freedom is not just about liberatory knowledge, it’s about a liberatory practice in the classroom. So may of us have critiqued the individual white male scholars who push critical pedagogy yet who do not alter their classroom practices, who assert race, class, and gender privilege without interrogating their conduct.

I don’t know if it’s possible to become a liberatory teacher without sustained research and interrogation of dominant pedagogical practices; that is to say that I don’t know if an adjunct instructor, working effectively in isolation from her teaching community, can engage in a sustained critique and reframing of what it means to learn and teach toward freedom instead of toward submission and repression.

Now I’m teaching again, this time at a Research I institution, in a department that wants its academics to value research over teaching. (While Colorado State University is also a Research I institution, I was not there to get a Research I education; I was learning how to write poetry in an MFA program.) This time around, I have career goals and a plan for myself; my plan includes sustaining enough Awesomeness to snag a job at a Research I institution once I finish up at Indiana University.

This institution does not emphasize teaching as the practice of freedom; in fact, it doesn’t particularly emphasize teaching as something that requires a whole lot of sustained interrogation or time or energy. Which is not to say that individual faculty members at my institution do not value teaching, do not strive to be excellent teachers; only to say that their efforts are the result of a personal desire to teach well, and are not supported by the institution.

You get tenure at a Research I institution by doing good research, not by doing good teaching.

So I’ve taken several steps backward in the movement toward teaching as the practice of freedom. I rely an awful lot on Powerpoint and the lecture; I ask students to rearrange the desks into a discussion circle sometimes, but I don’t insist that we use this structure for a whole lot of discussion. More than once this semester, I’ve asked my students why they do what I say: “Why do you agree to work in small groups when I tell you to?” and “What do you think would happen if you just refused to listen to my lecture today?” But I haven’t required them to speculate with me.

And to tell the truth, I haven’t really wanted my students to speculate with me on these things. I’ve wanted these challenges to be seen as thought experiments, not as real challenges to rethink how they approach learning.

My students are, for the most part, studying to be teachers. Some day, assuming we continue to value teaching and assuming the economy continues its turnaround, my students will be teachers themselves. If I believe in the importance of liberatory pedagogy, if I believe that teachers can and should do better, can and should foment revolution, then the only ethical way to proceed is to attempt to practice this pedagogy in my own classrooms.

Now begins the experiment. I’ll keep you posted.

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mike rose, the mind at work and how academics get working-class credibility

Feb 14th, 12 / 0 Comments

This post is about two recent works by Mike Rose, an educational researcher at UCLA who focuses, as he describes it, low-status places–working-class schools, blue-collar job sites, remedial classrooms–places not privileged by society or, frequently, by the institutions in which they are located” (Rose 2012, p. 2). The two works are:

Rose, M. (2004). The Mind at Work: Valuing the intelligence of the American worker. New York: Penguin.

Rose, M. (2012). Rethinking Remedial Education and the Academic-Vocational Divide. Mind, Culture, and Activity 19(1): 1-16.

the mind at workI’ve been using The Mind at Work as an anchor text for an undergraduate educational psychology course, and I was just prepping to discuss chapter 4, “the vocabulary of carpentry” as I got distracted scrolling through the xmca listserv in which several members of the listserv were discussing Mike Rose’s article “Rethinking remedial education.

The article starts out with a bang:

What you see depends on where you sit, and for how long. You enter the classroom from the rear, wanting to be discrete on your first visit, and slip into the desk closest to the door. A few students 20 notice you, but most are walking around or leaning over to the person next to them talking. Except for one woman, the class is all men, 20s and 30s, a few White guys, the rest Black and Latino. Hoodies, baggy pants, loud profanity. The teacher is in front at a cloudy overhead projector. Three men are around him—each seems bigger than the next—and they are arguing.

The room is old and dingy, no windows, bare except for the irregular rows of desks, the table 25 with the projector, a cart holding pipes and metal bars, and in the corner a worn flag from the American Welding Society. You’re trying to take it all in when a sullen guy in an oversized T-shirt, a bandanna around his head, walks over to you and asks, “What are you doin’ here?”

Rose explains that “[t]his is an article about perception and ability, about the way beliefs about cognition blend with social characteristics—class, race, gender—to create both instructional responses and institutional structures that limit human development for people already behind the economic eight ball.” We read his opening paragraphs, we get a sense of what this classroom is like, what its students are all about. But, Rose explains, our first impressions are wrong: The surroundings, the foul language, the clothing choices–they belie an effort to develop serious vocational skills. They belie these students’ focus, sense of purpose, and intelligence.

And that guy who wanted to know what you’re doing here? Well, it’s a legitimate question, isn’t it? And everything depends on how you answer it. When it was posed to me, I said I was here to study programs like this one because we need to know more about them to convince our politicians that we need more of them. The man’s features softened, and we moved out into the hallway. “We need programs like this,” he said. “People like us.” “It’s the teacher that really makes a difference,” he continued. “He treats us like we’re people.”

In the chapter from The mind at work that I’m prepping for today’s class, Rose writes: “What testing vocabulary do we have, for example, to discern the making of judgments from the feel of things, or the strategic use of tool and body, or the rhythmic spacing of tasks, or the coordination of effort and material toward the construction of a complex object?”

Certainly the purpose of this book, and of a lot of Mike Rose’s work, is not to show how skills developed through welding, for example, or waitressing or carpentry or what-have-you can help you advance beyond a given vocation. In fact, in the introduction to his excellent book, he gently criticizes a discourse that treats working-class activity as romantic because of its physicality. He writes:

How interesting it is…that our testaments to physical work are so often focused on the values such work exhibits rather than on the thought it requires. It is a subtle but pervasive omission. Yet there is a mind at work in dignity, and values are intimately related to thought and action.

I’ve also been interested to watch how Mike Rose and other scholars focusing on blue-collar work establish their orientation toward blue-collarness–primarily by establishing credibility by pointing to personal experience with blue-collar work. I do this all the time: I say that I grew up in a working-class household. I say that I am public school-educated all the way from kindergarten to graduate degree(s). I say that before I came to academia I was a groundskeeper, a cashier, a phone operator, blah blah blah. This is designed to, perhaps, “prove” I have access to the exotic world of the blue-collar worker, to “prove” I have cachet.

Yet if I were to tell Ray, the pseudonym for the aspiring welder in Mike Rose’s “rethinking remedial education” who asks Rose why he’s in the classroom, about my “working-class credibility,” what do you think he would do? Me, standing there, a white, well educated academic who can choose when to enter his classroom and when to leave, whose livelihood both does not depend on whether I can learn today’s math lesson and rests on the backs of those learners who are trying to do precisely that?

I think it’s far less common for researchers to use their personal backgrounds to “prove” they “understand” research participants who come from more privileged backgrounds–say, students in a gifted and talented program or students completing advanced graduate work. Perhaps researcher credibility does not need to be established in these cases; perhaps its existence is simply understood.

“I used to ______, but now I _________.” When we demonstrate our class-ness, when we offer our personal histories, we assume we’re confessing our relationship to the phenomena of interest. And certainly that’s part of it.

But when we say “I used to _______” or “before I came to academia I _______” are we attempting the opposite of “going native”? Are we actually simultaneously feigning distancing ourselves from academia while in fact embracing it fully? We have the best of intentions, but to what extent do our best intentions serve only to further stigmatize and Other our research participants without actually leaving us with any taint of Other?

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on snobbery and digital literacy instruction

Jul 17th, 11 / 0 Comments

cross-posted from HASTAC.org

I’ve been thinking lately about Roger Ebert and digital media snobbery.

I found out through my colleague John Jones that Ebert, a blogger and film critic, recently attacked the publication of “easy reader” editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. His main concern appears to be that these abridged versions of Gatsby omit the poetic language of the full text:

Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby’s lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style–in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process. You are left with the impression of having read a book, and may never feel you need return for a closer look.

Is Ebert correct? Sure, I guess. You know, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is my favorite novel not because of the plot, but because of how the plot is conveyed. Same thing with another favorite, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. We pick our favorite books and movies and songs and so on in large part because of a nebulous feature we might call style. Clearly Gatsby is one of Ebert’s favorites, and he wants others to experience the novel like he did and does.

This desire to bequeath to others our magical interaction with a text iis what leads us to force people to watch our favorite TV shows, even though we know they’re just going to get distracted or bored and stop paying attention because they need to check their email or grab some chips from the kitchen or they just got a text from someone they sort of like and they have to figure out how to respond and meanwhile DONNA NOBLE IS ABOUT TO ASK THE DOCTOR THE NAME OF HIS PREVIOUS COMPANION AND HE’S GOING TO SAY IT WITH SUCH TRAGEDY AND PAIN IN HIS VOICE THAT YOU’RE GOING TO KNOW EVERYTHING YOU NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT HOW HE FEELS ABOUT ROSE TYLER AND jeez never mind let’s just watch Parks and Rec instead.

So I’d be on board if Ebert said he wanted others to experience Gatsby and other canonical novels as he did, and left it at that. But no. Ebert takes it a step farther:

I never read a simplified text of a novel in my life, and to the best of my knowledge neither did any other graduates of St. Mary’s Grade School or Urbana High School — not in school, anyway. The first book I read was Huckleberry Finn, and I got through it just fine, encountering hundreds of words I didn’t know.

It’s not snobbery to say “I did things this way and you can too”; it’s snobbery to say “I did things this way and if you don’t do things my way you are not as smart as I am.” The latter seems to be precisely what Ebert wants us to hear in his argument.

(Snobbery, by the way, is also what has led lots of people to embrace the Core Knowledge approach to education.)

I have a touch of technological snobbery. I browbeat people who use Internet Explorer until they switch to Firefox or Chrome. I make fun of friends who live without smartphones, and–in a particularly low moment for me–I once made fun of a family member when she began an online information search at about.com.

That kind of snobbery is annoying but not necessarily dangerous–until it gets codified as an approach to digital literacy education. It’s easy, I think, to fall into the trap of believing one way of understanding social media technologies is the best way of understanding social media technologies. We say we want kids to develop an understanding of the complexities of digital technologies, but we mean that we want them to embrace digital technologies–to love new media like we love new media.

It’s literacy snobbery when we try to teach kids what to think about technology instead of how to think about technology. In this respect, I worry that educators who stand on very different sides of the digital literacy issue embrace a very similar, problematic attitude: I did things this way and if you don’t do things my way you’re not as smart as I am.

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I guess I’ll be submitting proposals for the 2012 AERA Annual Meeting

Jul 13th, 11 / 3 Comments

At the end of my last trip to the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), I decided I no longer wanted to submit proposals or attend the conference. I had lots of reasons, but here are some of the biggest:

  1. The AERA Annual Meeting embraces mainstream (nonthreatening) research. As researcher and activist Jeff Duncan-Andrade pointed out in a session I attended, AERA offered up Diane Ravitch at its opening plenary session. Ravitch, after 30 years of supporting standardized testing and teacher accountability based on test results, recently reversed course and stood up against standardized assessments. “Which is super,” Duncan-Andrade said, but added that Diane Ravitch should be spending the rest of her career in apology to all the kids whose lives she helped to destroy.
  2. The AERA Annual Meeting does not support dissenting or alternative voices. It’s true that lots of individuals and a handful of sessions introduced radical or controversial theories or ideas, but those were drowned out by the plenaries, featured speakers, and sessions designed to promote the general mainstream of educational research.
  3. The AERA Annual Meeting does not effect or result in any significant, lasting change in education.
  4. The AERA Annual Meeting is expensive. Which wouldn’t be a problem if the membership and attendance fees resulted in any significant, lasting change in education. But it doesn’t.

So. Here we are, a mere 9 days before the submission deadline for AERA 2012, and I’m preparing to submit at least four different proposals, and I’m hoping to have at least one accepted so I can go to Vancouver in mid-April. I haven’t changed my mind about any of the points above. So why in the world am I spending so much time and energy on a conference that goes against everything I believe comprises good educational research?

  1. Someone’s gotta be the chainsaw. I know lots of people who feel like I do about AERA, and some of them have chosen to no longer attend. It’s a good decision, choosing not to participate in the AERA circus, and it means those people can spend their energies in far more awesome ways. But we also need people to work on tearing AERA down, and I’m willing to do my best.
  2. Someone’s gotta bring the heat. If accepted, I promise to introduce dissent, to introduce an alternative perspective in my presentations, in my participation as an audience member, and in my attendance at business meetings for the Divisions and SIGs of which I am a member.
  3. Someone’s gotta bring the challenge. I am planning on organizing a protest against the fees and ineffectuality of AERA. Tentatively, I plan to organize attendees to commit to donating the $70-$205 they would spend on registration fees for the Annual Meeting to one or more local educational initiatives. Attendees could announce their participation in this protest by wearing an armband indicating their refusal to pay the registration fee. Let’s say that just 4% of the estimated 13,000 attendees donate their registration fees. That would result in a pool of at least $70,000 to support local initiatives–a drop in the bucket to some, but a much needed income source for others.

What do you think, dudes? Wanna join me in taking a chainsaw to AERA?

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on a related note…

Jun 5th, 11 / 1 Comment

There are times when I feel very happy and comfortable with fighting for equal rights for all humans alongside all humans who care to take up the fight, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. There are times when I am awed and humbled by the work of my nonqueer friends, family, and colleagues to understand, embrace, and support the rights of people whose lives and choices and needs and interests they don’t and can’t ever fully understand. There are times when I see straight allies as (almost) as heroic as the queers whose rights they’re fighting for.

This does not happen to be one of those times.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for me. I’ve been attacked, stigmatized, and bullied because of my gender and sexual orientation. I’ve been accused of horrible things. These accusations began as I attempted to start a conversation about the role of straight privilege and male privilege in academia. I wanted to begin from my experience of feeling silenced and harassed, of being on the wrong end of both of these forms of privilege.

It was suggested that I’m seeing things that don’t actually exist.

Yes, we know that in conversation males are more likely to silence females than the other way around. Yes, we know that heterosexism is insidious and hard for nonqueers to recognize, just like the signs of White privilege are hard for white people to recognize. Yes, we know that the dominant group is likely to dismiss the experiences of marginalized groups, is likely to explain that it’s all in your head.

We are sympathetic to these truths and want to work to change these things. But, really, Jenna–these things you think you’re experiencing are all in your head.

It was suggested that my real issue isn’t that I’m struggling against heterosexism or anti-womanism, but that I’ve probably had some bad experiences with men, possibly quite recently, which is making me oversensitive.

Well, yes. I’ve had some bad experiences with men, and some of those experiences were quite recent–and that’s utterly beside the point.

I think black people have had a few bad experiences with white people and that has made them oversensitive about how white people interact with them.

It’s not fair for the differently abled to think that our entire country is against them, just because they’ve had to deal with a few ignorant people.

You feminists are just touchy because you don’t like men.

So I’ve written a series of posts recently about my frustrations with people who identify as straight allies but who behave more like an enemy. Right now I’m not feeling conciliatory, and those posts don’t strive to appease or make peace.

I’m tired, you guys. Right now I’m just tired.

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Taylor Mali: “What teachers make”

Apr 18th, 11 / 0 Comments

Here you go.

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