When Amy and Amberly and I were on the radio (since it probably won't happen to me again, I've got to get all the mileage I can out of it...), the host asked me if I ever felt like the Hands on a Camera students already knew everything that we were teaching them in regards to media. Obviously my first answer would be, "No," since if I really felt that way we wouldn't really engage in the project at all. I think that the answer I actually gave was that I felt like a lot of the things that we taught the kids were things that were fairly intuitive to them, but that didn't mean that they didn't need guidance to be made aware of the fact that they actually knew it.
I feel like this is the case with youth and new media: there are things they know, things they understand, but that doesn't mean that they don't need good pedagogical strategies to help them learn, and it seems like this where we hit a wall. We talked about it last week, and the reading this week (of which I've actually done only about half of at this point. Too many things to read, not enough time!) also confronts the issue head on: how do we change our communities of practice (since not learning happens in classrooms) to reflect the seismic changes in society brought about by the influx of new media and new media technology? The things I've read so far don't really give very many answers to these questions (which is fine, though frustrating at times), inviting practitioners to take this knowledge and do with it what they will.
In "Multimodality", Kress aptly discusses how we are inherently multimodal beings, and our educational system has done us very few favors by placing ultimate primacy on the written word. I believe that the issues brought up in this chapter (which I can't even believe was written 10 years ago, because it seems so relevant) are particularly relevant when trying to decide how to change our classrooms: students need pedagogical strategies that reflect our multiple modalities, because we increasingly communicate in multimodal ways. We need to stop seeing areas like visual art and music as separate, specialty interests in school and start recognizing that these are areas of literacy just as important as print literacy.
The need for solid and relevant pedagogical (I'm pretty sure I've already used that word at least 3 times...sorry) strategies was made quite clear in the Seiter article, whose unabashedly pessimistic tone made it clear that introducing technology into the classroom is not the end-all fix-all solution that some people (even myself, on occasion!) seem to think it is. Her article makes apparent what most of us know but try to ignore: in our knowledge economy, rich kids always have a leg up on working class kids. Fixing schools is a step in the right direction, but even if every school had equal access to technology, the vastly different home lives of students from different socioeconomic classes will still be a barrier to true equality. I love her closing statement: "Technological utopianism is past: we need to be clear and precise about the goals and the feasibility of technology learning, in the context of a realistic assessment of the labor market and widening class divides, struggles for fair employment in both technology industries and other job sectors, and the pressing need to empower students as citizens who can participate actively in a democracy."
Though Seiter is pessimistic, this doesn't mean that there aren't any solutions. I think the solution begins in recognizing what strategies we already have in place that are worth hanging on to. It also involves recognizing the new skills that all students need, and allowing them the time they need to practice them (though this will not result in completely fluency for all students, it's a start). It means finding the ways that we can encourage multimodal literacy practices to prepare students to find ways to communicate effectively.
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2 comments:
So, you, too—NICELY done last night. I know life has been difficult lately, but your lesson did not reflect that in the least. So, props to you. In response to your post here, and by extension your presentation last night, I really appreciate your last paragraph especially. I know that we talked a bit about the fact that there is no way we can ever come to a definitive response regarding educational revolution, but when are we going to stop complaining about stuff and do what we can within our sphere? While it may not seem to be something hugely “new and ground-breaking,” I think that what you say here is absolutely important. There IS something to be said for sifting through what’s already being done and then recognizing what is needed and allowing practice for the new skills taught. Sometimes the things that seem to be the most “duh” are the most profound because someone needed to articulate them.
I, for one, am a bit sideways because I am not a teacher, nor anywhere near involved with the public or private educational systems. This does not mean that I do not have some degree of intuition from my own experience, but I do not know the framework/structure that you work in. I hope that you will take that into consideration and forgive me if I overstep my bounds in any way.
It is my experience that we need to acknowledge and understand the systems that are already in place in our classrooms. At work, I have to understand how things are organized as far as people systems go in order to understand what my boundaries are. I look at these boundaries (and forgive me my use of analogy) as the edges of a painting. Once the canvas has been established, painting on it is entirely up to the artist. I understand that there are many requirements in the state core that must be fulfilled per subject matter. These I see as the canvas. From what I understand, a teacher's canvas is rather small because of it, but that does not necessarily mean that the use of media study is impossible. This just means we have to be more creative.
As you and Timbre have intimated, it is important to understand what steps have been taken already, which have failed and which have succeeded. I have to admit, the equality in students is a difficult gap to bridge and I would say that there is not much that we have control of in the wider sphere - we need to concentrate on what we can control within our current sphere - and then we will find our sphere increase accordingly. This is not to say that one should not be concerned with what is going on in the larger sphere, but in order to make any difference at all, we need to control what is directly controllable; we cannot do much about that which is a concern.
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