Social Justice | making edible playdough is hegemonic.

Posts Tagged ‘social justice’

you heard it there first: the best reviews of Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation

Dec 6th, 09 / 8 Comments

If you’ve read even a post or two from this blog, you know that I’m going to fiercely oppose the main theories guiding Bauerlein’s 2008 book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.

In a precise exercise in ridiculousness, Bauerlein’s book is loaded up with sweeping claims like the following:

[M]ost young Americans possess little of the knowledge that makes for an informed citizen, and too few of them master the skills needed to negotiate an information-heavyt, communication-based society and economy. Furthermore, they avoid the resources and media that might enlighten them and boost their talents….

[Y]oung people do not understand the ideals of citizenship, they are disengaged from the political process, they lack the knowledge necessary for effective self-government, and their appreciation and support of American democracy is limited.

If that’s what Bauerlein’s selling, I don’t want any.

I am, thanks be to god, not alone in my disgust at Bauerlein’s dance of intellectual superiority. Many others have attacked his book and its tenets with grace, aplomb, and gusto. I give you a list of Reviews That Have Me Nodding My Head In Vigorous Agreement.

I begin with a smart and sassy Newsweek review by Sharon Begley and Jeneen Interlandi, who accuse Bauerlein of coming late to the party:

Really, don’t we all know by now that finding examples of teens’ and twentysomethings’ ignorance is like shooting fish in a barrel?… From evidence such as a decline in adult literacy (40 percent of high-school grads had it in 1992; only 31 percent did in 2003) and a rise in geographic cluelessness (47 percent of the grads in 1950 could name the largest lake in North America, compared with 38 percent in 2002), for instance, Bauerlein concludes that “no cohort in human history has opened such a fissure between its material conditions and its intellectual attainments.”

He is a little late to this party, of course. The old have been wringing their hands about the young’s cultural wastelands and ignorance of history at least since admirers of Sophocles and Aeschylus bemoaned the popularity of Aristophanes (“The Frogs,” for Zeussakes?!) as leading to the end of (Greek) civilization as they knew it. The Civil War generation was aghast at the lurid dime novels of the late 1800s. Victorian scholars considered Dickens, that plot-loving, sentimental (“A Christmas Carol”) favorite, a lightweight compared with other authors of the time. Civilization, and culture high and low, survived it all. Can it survive a generation’s ignorance of history? For those born from 1980 to 1997, Bauerlein lamented to us, “there is no memory of the past, just like when the Khmer Rouge said ‘this is day zero.’ Historical memory is essential to a free people. If you don’t know which rights are protected in the First Amendment, how can you think critically about rights in the U.S.?” Fair enough, but we suspect that if young people don’t know the Bill of Rights or the import of old COLORED ENTRANCE signs—and they absolutely should—it reflects not stupidity but a failure of the school system and of society (which is run by grown-ups) to require them to know it. Drawing on our own historical memory also compels us to note that philosopher George Santayana, too, despaired of a generation’s historical ignorance, warning that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That was in 1905.

Liz Losh, in a review titled Dumbest and Dumber, agrees with the above assertion that though Bauerlein would have us believe otherwise, the complaints of an emerging unprecedented era of ignorance are not new or particularly well founded; and besides, she adds,

how can you hate people under thirty with this much dripping bile and still work as a competent and professional faculty member? How would it be possible to teach your classes with this much misanthropy aimed at people of your students’ ages? With this much contempt taking place in inner monologues that are so well-rehearsed, how can you not communicate it to the student seeking help on the other side of your desk? Well, based on his ratemyprofessor standings, it looks like he’s an easier instructor than I am, ironically. So much for defending high standards of achievement for students.

Over at BlogCritics, Kevin Eagan acknowledges that some of the trends identified by Bauerlein are “disturbing” but wonders about the extent to which The Dumbest Generation offers only the evidence that fits the thesis. “Bauerlein seems to think things are different because the Internet has only given teens one more way to escape adult life,” Eagen writes.

And to a certain extent, he’s right; the Internet is not used by teens to further their intellectual pursuits, at least, not in the way educators would like. But as with all new technologies, the Internet is currently going through a teething stage, and it’s too early to say if our new digital lives will mean the next generation will forever ignore civil discourse and become apathetic toward art and history as adults…. Bauerlein’s approach reveals a one-sided argument, one that forgets that art is created on the fringes of society and that young people rarely get involved in these pursuits since, after all, they’re too busy trying to impress their friends.

This last point, by the way, is also a lynchphin of Losh’s position with respect to Bauerlein’s argument. She finishes her post with this video, which she identifies as a “dizzying spectacle of racial and sexual stereotypes, romantic melodrama, consumerism, instant gratification, and commodity fetishism emptied of its destructive social directives and turned into a clever musical soup that is danceable and evocative of guilty nostalgias and heterogeneous pleasures that Bauerlein would have us condemn.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLaZ-8IMtt0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

Writing in the LA Times, Lee Drutman agrees that Bauerlein is an alarmist whose call to arms against the rising tide of ignorant youth “seems at once overblown…and also yesterday’s news”; but Drutman also offers that “amid the sometimes annoyingly frantic warning bells that ding throughout ‘The Dumbest Generation,’ there are also some keen insights into how the new digital world really is changing the way young people engage with information and the obstacles they face in integrating any of it meaningfully. These are insights that educators, parents and other adults ignore at their peril.”

Is Drutman right to find some kernel of useful information in the collection of histrionics that Bauerlein calls a “book”? Well, sure. It’s probably not exactly good that young people don’t like to read books. At the same time, however, we would do well to approach the gathering data from a somewhat more nuanced approach. Young people aren’t spending their free time reading books; so what are they doing? They’re not spending their free time learning about historical events; so what kind of history piques their interest? They don’t know a whole lot about Constitutional law, the Supreme Court, or local politics; so how do you explain youth turnout in the 2008 Presidential election?

While I disagree with just about every argument Bauerlein makes, I do agree–in
principle, anyway–with Bauerlein’s assertion that awareness of history and involvement in traditional political models are down, way way down. But unlike Bauerlein, I see no reason to cry into my imported beer over this. I believe that a new model of civic engagement is emerging, one that our current tests, surveys, and evaluative measures cannot yet identify or account for. The new civics is an everyday civics, one that may or may not include involvement in local, or state, or national politics; it’s a kind of just-in-time civic engagement that emerges out of an immediate need. In the just-in-time model, knowing what (names, dates, definitions) is far less important than knowing how (how to access names, dates, definitions, when that type of information becomes relevant and necessary). Who cares if you can name every sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice if you’re able to locate and verify a list of current Justices in ten seconds flat?

If you want to justify a conviction that young people are stupid, boring, and lazy, then you look to tests that measure knowing what. If you believe, as I do, that today’s young people are as smart, fascinating, and engaged as any previous generation, then you start figuring out ways to measure knowing how.

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

i haz a mad.

Nov 15th, 09 / 2 Comments

Just 3 months into my graduate school career, I’m already tired of admiring the problem.

What is cognition? How do we measure learning? What can sociocultural theorists learn from cognitivists, and vice versa? What role should assessment play in supporting learning? Which methodologies are most useful for which purposes? I’m not saying I’m not interested in these and similar types of questions. I love my classes; I love my classmates; I love my professors and I love the ideas I’m immersed in.

But:

“you don’t just give up / you don’t just let things happen / you make a stand / you say no // you have the guts to do what’s right when everyone else just runs away and”

Recently, in a conversation about Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Joshua Danish talked about the struggles of implementing critical literacy programs in underserved areas. The challenge, he said, was that a program that can arm young people with righteous anger about their living conditions can also fail to prepare those learners for the fallout of that anger: how go to on living in a society where the odds are stacked so heavily in favor of some at the expense of others. How do we, he wondered, equip kids with the tools to manage their growing awareness of the power structures that hem them in?

I’ve been wondering the same thing about angry young graduate students like me. The more I learn, the madder I get; and the madder I get, the harder I look for something to fucking do.

But there’s nothing to do. It feels like there’s nothing to do.

The problem is lovely from all angles. But my feet are falling asleep from all this sitting. I’m ready to stand up. I’m ready to start moving.

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

boys can wear skirts, girls can wear tuxes: let’s rethink school dress codes

Nov 8th, 09 / 1 Comment

“The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever worn heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H–G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.”

Because it helped to shape my earliest understanding of gender and rebellions, I remember with great clarity the day my high school classmate Justin C. wore a skirt to school.

Actually, I never saw the skirt; I only heard about it from my friends (my high school, after all, had thousands of students spread over three buildings). I don’t know if Justin was sent home to change. I can’t remember if he got in trouble–this was what I now think of as the freewheeling early ’90s, a relative utopia compared to the post-Columbine, post-family values, post-culture wars high school of the ‘new’ century. It’s entirely possible Justin pulled the whole thing off without a suspension.

I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that somebody would wear such an obviously off-limits item of clothing. Then, suddenly, because someone had simply crossed what I thought was an inviolable border, I could believe it. And a boy wearing a skirt no longer seemed quite so off-limits.

Fifteen years later, opposition to sex-based dress codes has hit the big time with today’s New York Times article, “Can a boy wear a skirt to school?” By all rights, of course, the answer to that question should be of course. But there are real, significant reasons to approach this issue more thoughtfully, to answer that question with a resounding of course…except that….

The challenge of this issue goes far beyond the lame, I-don’t-understand-it-and-therefore-it’s-just-not-right stance embodied in the NYTimes article by Kay Hymowitz, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who argues that “It’s hard enough to get kids to concentrate on an algorithm — even without Jimmy sitting there in lipstick and fake eyelashes.” As the article explains, dress codes are as much about maintaining order as they are about keeping students safe. The most extreme recent illustration of this is the shooting death in February 2008 of Lawrence King, a middle school student who sometimes wore heels and makeup to school.

But harassment doesn’t have to erupt into violence to be devastating to the victim and the community, and the everyday cruelty of a school environment that enables difference-phobic attitudes contributes mightily to deeper personal and cultural attitudes toward gender. My classmate Justin was smart, confident, and mature, and I’m sure he was strong enough to reject any hateful reactions to his decision to wear the skirt. Another student may not have been. Any school dress-code policy must take this into account.

The problem, though, is that school policies, and by extension cultural attitudes, toward clothing choices tend to skip over the difference between sex, sexuality, and gender. In case you need a refresher, sex is biological and tied to genetic makeup, hormones, and sex-based traits. Sexuality is socio-biological, meaning that it’s a product of the interaction between biology and culture: It’s who you’re attracted to, and when, and why.

Gender, which is really what we’re talking about when we’re talking about clothing, is a social construct that’s linked to but different from sex and sexuality. Not all boys who wear skirts are gay, and not all girls who wear skirts are straight. Gender is about identity performance, is about presenting yourself to the world in a way that feels right given your sex, sexuality, and general perception of yourself in the world. Gender performance is always a dance between the individual and her culture, and it’s never fully clear who’s leading whom.

I first learned about the gender dance when Justin wore a skirt to school. Before that day, and for much of the time that has passed since, my approach to gender performance was more mechanical than intentional, more reflexive than reactionary. It’s good for all of us to be reminded from time to time that we’re all up on stage and that we have some say in the lines we read, the props we use, and the costumes we present ourselves in. When Justin wears a skirt to school, he gives us exactly this reminder.

What the world needs now, sings Cracker, is a new kind of tension / cause the old one just bores me to death.

Rigid dress codes of the sort identified in the New York Times piece make school flow more seamlessly, sure, but they do it at the expense of the kind of critical thinking that schools purport to value. Every time Justin wears a skirt to school, he lowers the risk, just a tiny bit, of another Lawrence King incident. He cracks open a window, props open a door, and invites us all to take a look at what’s outside. We all have to decide for ourselves whether to accept the invitation, but when schools, out of fear of or for their students, keep the doors and windows locked they not only fail their students but help to foster an environment where fear and hate can continue to rule the day.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TybFyhlwdvU&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

notes from the {gendered} revolution

Oct 28th, 09 / 18 Comments

I don’t like talking about gender politics.

It’s not because I’m not interested. It’s not because I don’t see the value of engaging with social issues tied to gender and identity. It’s not because I don’t have tons to say about these issues.

It’s because most of the time, I feel marginalized by the rhetoric of gender, identity, and belonging. I feel like this rhetoric is talking about someone else–it certainly doesn’t represent my values, needs, or beliefs. And I hate feeling marginalized. I hate feeling unnoticed. So I’d much rather not show up to the conversation than feel like nobody’s interested in my needs.

Let me try to explain why by backing up a step to explain why I’m writing about this issue at all.

It came up in a conversation about a recent seminar with Leah Buechley, an educational researcher who directs the High-Low Tech research group at MIT’s Media Lab. Buechley’s recent work focuses on computational textiles, and a big chunk of her focus is on embedding conductive thread and circuitry into clothing.

There’s sewing involved. And when sewing gets mashed in with computation, smart people start talking about gender.

Though I’m going to argue below that the typical conversation about sewing, computation, and gender is marginalizing for some people and therefore problematic, this is in no way intended to discount the important work that Buechley and others are doing. It’s no secret that women are actively avoiding the field of computer science; indeed, one of the more prominent studies in this area is a project at Carnegie Mellon University, where 1995 statistics indicated that women made up only 8% of the entire incoming class of computer science undergraduate majors. After four years of intensive interventions, that number increased to 37%–a roaring success from one perspective and an ongoing failure from another.

Add to this the fact that during the course of this particular study, women changed majors or transferred out of Carnegie Mellon at more than twice the rate of men–30 percent of women changed majors or transferred, compared to 12% of male computer science majors.¹ Carnegie Mellon, remember, is renowned for its computer science program, and admission into this program and graduation from it are presumably a source of great pride for students.

The numbers are even more dismal for graduate programs in computer science. Take a look at the steady numbers decline: Women make up 27% of master’s degrees in computer science and 13% of PhD’s; they constitute 7.8% of computer science and computer engineering faculty and 2.7% of tenured faculty in the same field.²

So, yes: The struggle is real. The issue of gender equity is salient and important. And the work of people like Buechley is essential to interrogating the ongoing gender gap in the most gender-biased field we have. Not only that, but anyone who knows me knows I like nothing better than a good equity battle.

So why, when a group of us were discussing how Buechley’s computational textiles work addresses gender disparities, did I get so uncomfortable? Why was I praying for the conversation to drift off into some other topic?

I think my discomfort was mainly because of the rhetoric of gender politics–specifically, the assumptions that undergird issues of gender, equity, and inclusion. They are assumptions like the following:

Women often prefer balanced lives (so they don’t stick with computer science, a field that values total immersion).
That (female) researcher must be childless (or unmarried), because otherwise she’d never have the time to do that kind of work.
Women generally don’t like competing with their colleagues (so they’re less likely to get research funding and tenure).
Women often don’t like to argue because they worry about seeming pushy, arrogant, or aggressive (so they’re less vocal in academic or intellectual debate).

I am, it appears, a traitor to my gender.

I don’t doubt that the above assumptions are true for the majority of women³. They just don’t happen to be true for me. And to be clear, this isn’t about my age (32), marital status (single), or family status (childless). This is about the generalizations that get reified through statements like the above. This is essentialism at its most benign and insidious. Women are like this; they tend to want that; they make decisions because this.

I’m not like this; I don’t want that; I don’t make decisions because this. But try saying that out loud some time and see how far it gets you. After a sufficient amount of time, you have two choices: Either try to figure out what’s wrong with you, or try to figure out what’s wrong with the rhetoric.

Because it’s easy, smart people tend to lump people into one of two gender categories: You’re either female or you’re male, and if you don’t align with the values assigned to those categories, you’re probably the exception that proves the rule. Because I’m argumentative, childless, and more rational than emotional, I’m a ‘less feminine woman’; and in our culture, ‘less feminine’ acts in opposition to ‘woman’ such that the very phrasing of that description struggles against itself for meaning.

(For the record, I think the same is true for some men. If you want balance, time to raise your kids, or to be liked even at the expense of your career, then you’re a ‘less masculine man’ with the same struggle inherent in the phrase.)

Too often, strangely enough, liberal feminist rhetoric only adds to the problem. Women should be free, they say, to raise children, to enter traditionally male careers like law and computer science without fear of marginalization or harassment, to make decisions informed by both intellect and emotion, to cry–even at work–without fear of looking weak. And they’re right. Of course they’re right.

But women should also be free to adopt traditionally male mannerisms without fear of seeming ‘less feminine.’ They should be free to walk how they like, to talk how they like, to dress and study and write how they like, without fear of the double penalty of being both not-male and not-feminine-enough.

Gender, after all, is an identity continuum and not a duality. This should go without saying, though it does at times bear repeating.

And the fact that this post has, ounce for ounce, taken me longer to write than anything else on this blog is more telling than anything else (and even still, I fear I haven’t conveyed myself successfully or completely). It proves just how much I hate gender politics, and how important I think it is to talk through exactly why.

1. These stats come from a fantastic study by Jane Margolis, Allan Fisher, and Faye Miller called “The Anatomy of Interest: Women in Undergraduate Computer Science.” (Women’s Studies Quarterly, Summer 2000, pp. 104-127. Accessible with subscription at http://www.jstor.org/stable/40004448.)

2. Spertus, Ellen (1991). “Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?” MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Technical Report 1315, August 1991.

3. And note that I’m tackling these issues from the perspective of a white woman; I couldn’t even begin to address how the assumptions, values, and discourses about ‘how women are’ marginalize nonwhite women in exponentially intense, insidious ways.

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

news may not want to be free, but people want (and deserve) free news

Oct 14th, 09 / 0 Comments

There is, apparently, a “news wants to be free” contingent. I learned this because I was accused of being a member of this contingent over at Beat the Press.

There is no definition of the “news wants to be free” contingent on that blog or in the Boston Globe piece by Lou Ureneck that started the whole conversation. As near as I can tell, though, Ureneck attributes this stance to people who believe that there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle when it comes to online news content–that it’s far too late to institute paywalls or micropayments now.

If this is the stance of the “news wants to be free” contingent, then count me in. I don’t buy Ureneck’s comparison of online news content to cable television. “Are you doubtful?” he asks. “I remember when television also was free.”

Nah, I don’t buy the analogy. The slow but steady transition to paid television content was a master stroke that cannot be replicated with online news. Cable’s success lay in its ability to offer something far superior to free content; to offer pure, easy entertainment (fluff mixed with filler mixed with news channels; if cable was only news, we’d never be willing to pay); to leverage our willingness to pay to be entertained; and, most importantly, to rig up a corporate monopoly on that entertainment. In most parts of the U.S., if you want cable you get fewer then three providers to choose from, and they all cost about the same and offer about the same features.

News outlets, thank christ, could never manage the same sort of monopoly, even if the Big Five news agencies do end up buying all of the major news outlets. There will still be independent sources, alternative journalism, free public radio streams, underground journalism, forums, blogs…and platforms we can’t even imagine yet.

Here’s an example of why it won’t work. My news outlet of choice is currently the New York Times. If the Times decided to charge–even micropayments, even a dime or a nickel per visit–I would take my readership elsewhere. I might go to CNN, and if CNN charged, then I’d head to the Chicago Tribune or the Boston Globe or, god forbid, USA Today. If all of the major news outlets started to charge, then I’d head to the Huffington Post or BoingBoing. If those outlets started to charge, then…well, you get the point.

And I’m not alone. There are millions of people just like me who will refuse to pay. There will be others who will pay in order to access news that they will then distribute to others free of charge. Media moguls might stop some of these resisters, but they’ll never stop them all. It would take nothing short of a carefully orchestrated international conspiracy–every outlet deciding to charge the same amount, at the same time, for the same content–for things to be otherwise.

Besides–and it’s strange to have to remind Ureneck, a lifelong newspaper man and the chair of Boston University’s journalism department, of this–newspapers have never made the lion’s share of their revenue off of reader subscriptions. It’s always been sponsorship, ads, and corporate funds that kept the lights on. The fact that advertising no longer pays does not give news organizations license to suddenly turn to readers to pay the delinquent bills. It only means that new corporate marketing models become necessary.

You should not, contrary to Ureneck’s strange and irrational assertion, assume that I want reporters to starve or their children to have to drop out of school. In fact, as a former newspaper reporter whose paper closed when ad revenues declined, I am deeply sympathetic to the plight of the print journalist. But Ureneck should know that wishing things were otherwise does not make them so.

It would be passing strange to assert that “news wants to be free.” It’s less strange to assert that people want their news to be free. Less strange still to assert that democracy wants news to be free, despite the capitalist tendency to charge. Even less strange to assert that in a free, democratic society dedicated to democratic ideals, more news, made more freely available to a broader public, is better than the alternative.

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

making edible play dough is hegemonic

Oct 7th, 09 / 5 Comments

Science education that enables students to make sense of their world without empowering them to transform it doesn’t go far enough.

You guys, I have to cop to a general apathy about science education. It’s not really my thing, after all, and any time I find myself in a conversation about science pedagogy I basically check out until it’s time to talk Language Arts.

But look: There are serious social justice implications to how we think about and teach science, and anybody who tells you otherwise–anybody who tries to argue that science is somehow “pure” or immune from the issues of rhetoric, marginalizing, and silencing that are so commonly explored among language ed researchers–is some combination of well-intentioned, stupid, uninformed, or mean.

Before I launch in to an explanation of why, I just want to make a short disclaimer: I’m new to thinking about science pedagogy and am therefore less well read on this topic than I would like. (And by the way, if you’re looking for someone to blame for this post, blame Joshua Danish, who blew my mind with a handful of science ed readings and thereby offered me the grist for this particular mill.)

Science education, argues Angela Calabrese Barton in her 1998 piece “Teaching Science with Homeless Children: Pedagogy, Representation, and Identity,” is key in thinking about education’s role in reifying equity and power relations. She writes that

knowledge construction about science and self-within-science occur within and are shaped by the relational space of the social, historical, and political. It is from this perspective that questions of representation in science (what science is made to be) and identity in science (who we think we must be to engage in that science) become central.

What I guess didn’t occur to me is that teaching science is more than teaching the scientific method or the basic features of DNA. Indeed, the deeper issues of research into how and what we teach in science classrooms are linked to the deeper questions of our underlying social structures: Who gets to decide what counts as legitimate participation in the field? What counts as valid, what counts as true? What are the standards by which we decide what and who are allowed in, and who benefits most from the answers to these questions?

Science education is not, after all, just about how best to teach the scientific method; it’s also about reflecting on how the scientific method became the dominant method and on how we decide who measures up, and why, to the standards inherent in our chosen scientific approach.

Calabrese Barton explores this through a feminist approach to science education for homeless urban youth. She considers tactics for addressing the “hegemonic practices” in science that “have resulted in an unarticulated, yet highly active caste system.” In her view, science can serve an important function for the highly disenfranchised young people in the shelter she visits twice a week for two years; she argues that the purpose of her visits

was not simply to help the children do science, but rather to do that which grows out of their questions and experiences. It was not to ﬁt their experiences into science; it was to ﬁt exploration of the natural world, questioning, and critique into their experiences. This distinction is important because it makes the borders of science fuzzy in two ways. First, it removes the binary distinction from doing science or not doing science and being in science or being out of science. Second, it allows connections between students’ life worlds and science to be made more easily. This is signiﬁcant because, as the feminist arguments remind us, much of the culture, discourse, and content of science is reﬂective of masculine, Western, and middle-class values (Harding, 1986).

Calabrese Barton’s science lessons embrace the everyday experiences and needs surrounding these children: Exploration of the pollution in their neighborhood, food-based experiments in an environment where children often go hungry or exist in anxiety over whether they will get enough to eat.

Wolff-Michael Roth and Stuart Lee have a similar take on science education in their 2003 piece “Science Education as/for Participation in the Community.” As they argue, ignoring the role of cultural power struggles in determining what “science” is and aligning science education to scientists’ definitions of what it means to ‘do science’ means that, as Shamos (1995) and others have argued, “the needs of diverse groups of people–except white middle-class males–have not been met, leading to, by and large, their exclusion from science. Despite tremendous efforts expended, educational reforms have for the most part failed to produce scientifically literate citizens.”

Roth and Lee, working with seventh graders in a Canadian community, design a science curriculum as a set of social practices that bring together learners and older community members in a project to clean up and protect the local (polluted) river. The interactions between community members of various levels of expertise, the authors argue, allows for an authentic apprenticeship model of science education to emerge. In this model, it’s not just that authentic interactions between adults and children allow genuine, if largely unstructured, learning to occur, but that the interactions themselves represent the genuine social practices of science.

Fine, fine, I’m on board with many of the arguments identified by these authors. You know me: I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal with liberal accessories and liberal highlights in my hair. I certainly don’t disagree with any argument about the hegemonic nature of the “hard” sciences, and I buy wholeheartedly the assertion that most science education only serves as a continued source of oppression for lots of disenfranchised groups.

What I can’t bear, though, is the hint of soft bigotry. It’s not okay to start an argument by declaring that “science is hegemonic” and to end the argument with “…and so we will not force oppressed groups to engage with it.” Calabrese Barton, for example, tailors “science education” to the direct experiences of the homeless children: In exploring their neighborhood, in experimenting with food, they are certainly engaging in science-y activities, but apparently without any contextualization. These children, it can be assumed, are generally not aware either that they’re doing (some version of) science or that the science they’re doing is a kind of political act, set up in opposition to traditional notions of science education. They are not introduced to the Discourse that serves to oppress, if not them, then other members of their community; they’re not, at least within the confines of this particular description, offered tools for countering that oppression.

The children described by Roth and Lee are in a similar situation. Though the activities are linked to their (presumably) school-endorsed science class, the activities stand in fairly stark opposition to the typical approach of seventh grade science. One child, for example, chooses not to conduct experiments or work with materials directly; he films the experiments of his classmates instead. Another student, at a school science fair, shows off a colorimeter to an adult. The conversation
looks like this:

Miles: What is this?

Jodie: A calori . . . meter. It measures the clarity of the water.

Miles: Ah! A calori . . . a colorimeter?

Jodie: You take the clear water and you put it in this glass and then here [puts it into instrument] (Pushes a few buttons.) and you take the standard, which is like the best there is. And then you switch this (takes different bottle) and put the one with the water from the creek. (Covers sample.) And then you scan the sample. And then you see what the thing ﬂoating in the water is.

Miles: Over-range, what does that mean?

Jodie: (Pushes a number of buttons.)

Miles: Oh, it is when it is over the range, I see.

Jodie: First I have to do the standard again. (Does standard.) Then I take the creek water. (Enters bottle into instrument. Pushes buttons.)

Miles: Oh, I see. This is really neat.

None of these activities are science class as we tend to think of it; none of these students are forced to engage with the hegemonic aspects of an oppressive Discourse. But as far as I can tell, the students are also not introduced to the notion that science is, by its nature, hegemonic. They are not shown how it oppresses.

If students are not made to question the colonizing effects of a Discourse, then, what is the point of finding alternate routes into the domain? Seventh grade science probably went pretty well for Roth & Lee’s students; but eighth grade science was probably hell.

Again, I haven’t read other work by these authors, but it seems to me that the strategies identified in these particular publications stop short of the most important pedagogical work: empowering learners to shape their world. The authors’ approaches may very well enable students to think critically about the information that enters their community, but I wonder about the extent to which it empowers them to reshape the scientific conversation, both inside of and outside of their physical environment.

There’s no other way to say this: When we stop short of empowerment and choose instead to merely enable, we are engaging in a soft bigotry of the most insidious sort. We’re telling those learners that participating in domain transformation is not for them, that they should leave that work to those students with the higher grades or the different skin color, that all they need is the basic skills to get by in their everyday lives. We’re telling them they’re separate but equal, but we don’t really mean that they’re equal at all.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8zBC2dvERM&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

weighing in on the natives / immigrants metaphor

Sep 13th, 09 / 4 Comments

Just FYI, “digital” isn’t actually a language, no matter how badly Marc Prensky wants it to be.

Prensky’s notion of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” has gained cultural traction because it gives us a way to talk about the generational differences in approaches to technology. We get it when he writes that

[a]s Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their “accent,” that is, their foot in the past. The “digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. Today’s older folk were “socialized” differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.

My mom prints emails that interest her and trusts the information delivered in print form to her front door, but not the information delivered digitally to her computer screen; the kids I work with don’t really bother with email and gather digital data like it’s Super Mario Brothers coins. Ha! we say. Digital immigrants! Digital natives!

Fine. Except “digital” is not a language.

“Digital” is a way of conveying information. “Digital” is a cultural tool for delivering language, not the language itself.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the problems with the natives / immigrants metaphor. More troublesome is the question of who gets to decide which of us are the natives and which are the immigrants. We need to consider how this metaphor–taken up so widely in our cultural conversations–continues to reify a divide in participation based on gender, class, and ethnicity.

Even those who subscribe to the Prensky metaphor have to concede that not all young people can be considered “natives” by his definition, and not all old people can be considered “immigrants.” When we make the sweeping proclamation that kids these days are digital natives, what we’re really doing is identifying the type of kid whose practices and ways of being in the world have gone mainstream.

Had we but world enough, and time, this cultural approach, Prensky, were no crime. But what we actually have is a desperate divide: (largely middle and upper class, largely white) kids with excess time and access to resources and support for developing a technological fluency; and (largely lower class, often nonwhite) kids without the resources or support to develop the kinds of social competencies that will enable them to join the larger cultural conversation.

The digital natives / digital immigrants metaphor is yet another tool that gets used, intentionally or unintentionally, to support our culture’s dominant Discourse, dominated as it is by the same members of the privileged classes who have historically monopolized cultural conversations.

One of the most thrilling aspects of the social revolution is its potential to overthrow gender, class, and ethnic divides. So far, we haven’t come anywhere near realizing even a fraction of this potential, and sweeping terms like Prensky’s–steeped as they are in a long history smacking of hegemony–make the revolutionary potential of new media technologies increasingly difficult to realize.

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

new media literacy with an attitude

Sep 12th, 09 / 3 Comments

In an act that feels like the intellectual equivalent of flipping through old photo albums, I recently re-read the Project New Media Literacies white paper, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.

That white paper (now, FYI, a book published by MIT Press) was the guiding force behind all my work for the two years I spent with ProjectNML, first as an education outreach coordinator and then as a curriculum specialist. Now, as an emerging learning scientist (and a kind of social justice-y one, at that), I’ve had the chance to reconsider the piece through a fresh, clean lens. I’m still a fan, though from my new outsider’s perspective I find myself leaning on some problem areas along with admiring the core of this paper’s intellectual work.

the awesomeness: a nod to open source culture
First, and to my great surprise (I had not remembered this), the white paper actually describes the new media era as “an open-source culture based on sampling, appropriation, transformation, and repurposing” (p. 20). The authors argue that “we must push further” in considering the social aspects of literacy, especially in a culture that increasingly values collaborative knowledge-building and collective meaning-making.

Readers of this blog know that I embrace the free/libre/open source movement as a crucial driver of real and lasting social change, so I’m thrilled to see this nod to open-source culture.

In general, however, I’m disappointed that this notion is not taken further. Perhaps this paper aligns more with the open-source contingent than with the free/libre contingent. The difference, briefly, is that open source adherents generally want to see better products made available to more people, and believe that opening up the source materials will support this; free/libre adherents generally believe in making source materials available so as to destabilize economic, political, and cultural institutions. As a free/libre kind of guy, I can attest that there are those who might worry that the key tenet of this white paper doesn’t go quite far enough:

Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued.

Too often, the rules of contribution are set nearly in stone before any potential contributor comes along–which means that questions of what will be contributed, and by whom, and where, and why, and so on have been decided by some vaguely defined powers that be. In America and many Western countries, this isn’t an issue of literal censorship; it’s more a question of paradigm. Take, for example, the recent finding that 87% of all Wikipedia editors are male. Or consider the dearth of women in the open source movement. Or what about Anna Everett’s argument that “[f]rom 1995 to the present…the structured absences of black [and by extension other minority] bodies that have marked most popular imaginings of the brave new world order were in danger of reifying [or naturalizing] an updated myth of black intellectual lag, or black Technophobia”?

on participatory democracy
Which brings me to my next point: Considering the nature of “participation.” Having worked with Henry Jenkins directly for two years, I know how deeply he values civic engagement. This includes political involvement as well as the kinds of everyday interactions in which consumers-turned-producers engage. I happen to know that his current project is focused on a consideration of “participatory democracy,” which good lord, I can’t wait to read what comes out of the ethnographic work he and his team are working on now.

The New Media Literacies white paper doesn’t go far enough in this area. It couldn’t possibly, of course, since it provided the groundwork for Henry’s current focus on civic participation. My concern, though, is that this paper is being taken up in so many ways, by so many different types of people, and with such great force, that it may be interpreted as the definitive argument about new media education. As such, it merits a caveat.

This paper does give a brief nod toward the notion that “civic participation” may not necessarily be about politics, by explaining that

the new participatory culture offers many opportunities for youth to engage in civic debates, to participate in community life, to become political leaders, even if sometimes only through the “second lives” offered by massively multiplayer games or online fan communities.

In the end, however, this section of the white paper asserts that the primary goal of a civics education is “to help learners to connect decisions in the context of our everyday lives with the decisions made at local, state, or national levels.”

Political engagement is about more, much, much more, than elections and the law. Indeed, as Jennifer Earl and Alan Shussman argue, in a culture where corporate entities have an increasingly powerful and important role in the lives of citizens, many people “are protesting against corporations themselves in hopes of directly changing corporate policies or products.” This is, as I wrote in an earlier post,

the new model of civic engagement, a type of activism that goes largely unrecognized by political scientists, cultural theorists, and pollsters but that offers a new model of democratic participation—the struggle over ownership and definition of public spaces, both physical and virtual. It’s hard to identify, harder to measure, because it’s deeply integrated into the everyday activities of an entire generation whose lives, identities, and self-making increasingly extend into virtual spaces.

Part of the difficulty in designing and defining civics education is that learners don’t seem to care about politics–why should they care about something that Jenkins et al. rightly identify as something happening far outside of their spheres of consequence, when they have so much more power, so much greater ability to influence decision-making, within the social networks, the community spaces, that they navigate online every day? Facebook users, angry at a change in their terms of service contract, pushed back hard enough to get admins to reverse their stance. MySpace users have worked for ad-free zones. Fans of TV series have successfully petitioned to keep floundering shows on the air long past their intended expiration date.

Like it or not, this is civic engagement too, and it has its value alongside of the kinds of actions that push for health care reform, election or rejection of politicians, and the overturn of unjust laws.

…and a word on copyright, intellectual property, and breaking the law
I do not know Henry’s official stance on copyright laws and intellectual property, but this white paper appears to take a fairly conservative view on these things. In addressing the new media literacy practice of appropriation, the authors write: r />

Artists build on, are inspired by, appropriate and transform other artists’ work. They do so by tapping into a cultural tradition or deploying the conventions of a particular genre. Beginning artists often undergo an apprenticeship, during which they try on for size the styles and techniques of other,more established artists. Even well established artists work with images and themes that have some currency within the culture. Of course, this is not how we generally talk about creativity in schools, where the tendency is to discuss artists as individuals who rise upon or stand outside any aesthetic tradition….

Many of the forms of expression that are most important to American youth accent this sampling and remixing process, in part because digitization makes it much easier to combine and repurpose media content than ever before…. Despite the pervasiveness of these cultural practices, school arts and creative writing programs remain hostile to overt signs of repurposed content, emphasizing the ideal of the autonomous artist. Yet, in doing so, they sacrifice the opportunity to help youth think more deeply about the ethical and legal implications of repurposing existing media content, and they often fail to provide the conceptual tools students need to analyze and interpret works produced in this appropriative process. (pgs. 32-33)

Let’s take this one step farther: Sometimes, creative appropriation is mistaken for copyright violation; and, importantly, some things that would currently be considered copyright violation are simply a product of a legal system threaded through with corruption and corporate greed (cf. the Disney Corporation). Sometimes, people purposely violate intellectual property and copyright laws for political purposes. Indeed, scads of creative types oppose the current copyright system, steeped as it is in corruption and corporate domination. There is great value in teaching not only the longstanding tradition of appropriation but also the political ramifications of appropriative practices.

I was recently called a conspiracy theorist by a colleague. I wasn’t offended: I am a conspiracy theorist. I believe that a deep if largely unintentional conspiracy exists whose goal is to help maintain the status quo at all costs. The institution of education is an important element in achieving this goal; it transmits a set of core values, beliefs, and discourses that allow continued cultural domination by a vastly outnumbered subset of our culture. There is deep value in challenging our culture’s primary Discourse, even if a complete overthrow would be impossible (and maybe even undesirable).

About a year and a half ago, I heard Ernest Morrell call media literacy “a matter of life and death” for the urban youth he works with in Los Angeles. At the time, I thought he was exaggerating for effect. I no longer think he was exaggerating.

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

why educated elites are lame, by a member of the educated elite

Sep 3rd, 09 / 3 Comments

Great piece this morning at Technollama about the struggle between technophobia and technophilia.

The blog’s author, Andres Guadamuz, cites a quote he attributes to Douglas Adams:

“There’s a set of rules that anything that was in the world when you were born is normal and natural. Anything invented between when you were 15 and 35 is new and revolutionary and exciting, and you’ll probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.”

(If Adams is right, then I better speed up my tech-immersion: I turn 32 on Monday. Also, I’m officially putting all innovative technology designers on notice: Everything awesome must be designed and made public within the next three years.)

The Adams quote aligns with that old political axiom: If you’re not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart; if you’re not conservative when you’re old, you have no brains.

Both point to a key characteristic of most humans: the impulse toward self-preservation. For all their whinging about the dangers of participatory media, many if not most anti-tech curmudgeons will, when backed into a corner, acknowledge the democratic possibilities of new media, even if they’re not sure those possibilities will ever be realized. As I explained in a recent post, I believe that people who engage in pro/con debates about social media become more strident in public than they are in private.

Guadamuz addresses a key issue of what he calls “the war between old media and the internet”: the fact that when everyone is a potential media outlet, a lot of what gets published is drivel and dross. He writes:

We will always need some authoritative and well-written version of events, and for that the traditional publishing mechanisms will continue to exist. However, social media has come to allow more people’s voices to be made available. Is this a good thing? I personally think that it is a fundamental and empowering change in society, one that could potentially create a more participative and rich intellectual environment. Is there a lot of dross out there? Certainly! But there is also a lot of dross in traditional media, as any thinking person who picks up a copy of Heat magazine will attest to.

Guadamuz is right, of course. But, more importantly, the dross that exists on the internet has always existed; it’s just that until the emergence of participatory media, the educated elites never had to lower themselves to engaging with it. Lame ideas, poorly designed creative works, ignorant or bigoted political stances, and individual identity work had no avenue for widespread expression, and so the people in charge got to act like none of the above actually existed. And, for all cultural intents and purposes, none of the above actually did exist.

Let me put a finer point on this: The decline-in-quality argument is an elitist stance in reaction to the transformative democratic potential of social media for the unwashed masses. I say this as an educated elite, as someone who has benefited as much as the next guy from the ability to participate in the dominant group’s dominant Discourse.

People have always had stupid ideas and uninformed opinions; but what makes social media so powerfully transformative is that it allows people to not only communicate but also to refine, clarify, and potentially reject those ideas and opinions. Private opinions brought out in the sun are nearly always better than private opinions, privately held–especially when nearly everybody has approximately the same ability to express and circulate their beliefs.

This does not, by the way, make me an uncritical utopianist. I am aware that participatory media platforms allow stupid ideas to gain adherents and to therefore gain power. I’m also aware that these platforms make it so that more stupid ideas are more readily available, and that it becomes increasingly difficult–both individually and culturally–to separate the wheat from the chaff.

That’s ok by me. Worrying about how to filter more opinions is way better than worrying about how to provide more people with platforms for expressing their opinions.*

*Note: We still need to worry about how to provide more people with platforms for expressing their opinions.

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized