December 28, 2008
December 8, 2008
Howard Bernstein on Knowledge, Power & Teaching
Thoughts of one of my favorite college professors, Howard Bernstein. He was a real outsider-type in the university and ended up leaving Wesleyan the year before I graduated. He was denied tenure, having focused more on his teaching then on his own research. He died about a year ago. Enjoy.
December 3, 2008
OpenEducationResources [OER]
These are some resources I gathered a while back (in mid-December!) but left in draft form on my blog… but now I’m trying to use this space less to share my thoughts and more to keep track of my research. I have not gone back and annotated these links because I don’t think I would really profit from the process, but in the future of course I will aim to identify the purpose/contribution/hook of the resources I gather.
Open Textbooks: Why? What? How? When?
National Education Technology Plan [ED]
Electronic Frontier Foundation
National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture [NAMAC]
Center for Social Media @ American University
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Publishing in the 21st Century (LOC Webcast)
Open-Source Reality (LOC Webcast)
gee, pup
In one of his masterful Keynote lectures [How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law - TED], Lawrence Lessig invokes the discourse of document permissions in describing our contemporary culture as “RW [ReadWrite] culture – a culture where people participate in the creation and re-creation of their culture – in that sense it is RW.” The opposite of RW culture, according to Lessig, is “read only culture – culture where creativity is consumed but the consumer is not the creator – a culture that is top-down, owned, where the vocal cords of the millions have been lost.”
Gee characterizes the experience of a young person engaging with a “good” video game in similar terms. On page 41 he writes: “Since the child [plays the game successfully]… he can understand (“read”) and produce (“write”) appropriate situated meanings for elements and combinations of elements in the domain (game).” Gee argues that successful playing of first-person shooter video games requires that an individual establish proficiency in that semiotic domain. This means cultivating an awareness of the existence of the semiotic domain as a bounded community of practitioners who speak, write and behave in ways recognized and sanctioned by the group at large. In order to become a recognized member of a new community, an individual necessarily must engage with the community at a meta-cognitive level, thinking about the community as a socially-constituted entity that observes certain conventions, is concerned with certain ideas/issues/questions/problems, communicates in a highly specialized discourse about certain topics and not others, and generally shares a common set of values, norms, goals and practices.
portrait of a pup
One of the things I appreciate about Gee’s argument is his broad construction of what counts as reading. Dismissive of the notion that reading can be reduced to the act of decoding printed characters – a la phonics or DI (direct instruction) – Gee argues that literacy is the ability to make symbols contextually intelligible, the ability to make use/make sense of the abstract representations on the page or the screen. His conception of reading grows from a broad conception of text as any representational system in which meaning is encoded – similar to the notion of what constitutes a text in the developing field of media literacy.
An interest in popular culture films about teachers in urban schools has prompted some of my recent forays into the literature of media literacy. There is a good deal of scholarship that is concerned with developing in teachers and students the capacity for push-back against the oppressive and continual assault of mainstream media messages. As I have been familiarizing myself with the field I have noticed a great deal of emphasis on pedagogical approaches that seek to empower students to deconstruct mass media artifacts like pop songs and junk food advertisements. But the flip side of deconstruction is, of course, construction – yet the literature I have read tends to de-emphasize the building of new culture (the “write”) as it champions the importance of critique of existing culture (the “read”). Gee, however, finds much of value in the process of building new meaning to replace the meaning one has torn down. He spends a great deal of time elaborating throughout the book the distinction between active learning and critical learning – in the latter case the learner “reflect[s] overtly on the goals, values, feelings, and desires that compose this system [the semiotic domain].” His framework maintains that critical learning (or “write” culture) is the highest form of learning.
December 2, 2008
meet Hangzhou, my pup
I was curious to see what Gee had to say about video games, having first read him six years ago in the only good course that was part of my masters in education degree – courtesy of the City of New York Teaching Fellows Program at crappy Pace way downtown in the crude anthill purgatory that is the Financial District. In Social Linguistics and Literacies Gee articulates a sociocultural approach to language, learning and literacy. It kind of shocks me in retrospect that my “preparation” to be a high school English teacher of 17- to 21-year olds in the stand-in cinematic ghetto of Bed-Stuy was so spotty, and this in what was considered a model fast-track certification program. <shudder>. I remember finding Gee very compelling when I first read him – thinking the political implications of his work ground-breaking. So it was interesting to read Gee again, post-meat-grinder, from my later vantage point as a grizzled veteran of the inner city hallways.
hangzhou
Trends and buzzwords are the bread and butter of teacher education – one of the things that people were always telling us in our classes was to “activate prior knowledge” in order to get students interested in seemingly arcane topics. A lot of what we were taught – aside from how to use the right *scientific sounding* to prop up the floundering reputations of schools of education (as if they were ever prestigious!), was pretty unobjectionable – like, of course, as a teacher one should be intentional when introducing topics and always new ideas to what students already know. It is not a quirk of inner city students that they resist learning about things they don’t think are relevant to their lives. We all do it, or at least we should.
But anyway, one of Gee’s points is that video games, like books, help us build a more robust mental framework by contributing to the construction of linkages between first-hand experience and the life of the mind. He also says at one point, and then barely touches on it since in all that I’ve read, that access to high quality video games is a plausible social justice agenda. Maybe that’s why I have this vague sense of Social Linguistics and Literacies as a political book – tossing bombshells like sunflower seed shells on my classroom floor…
