It is my personal belief that schools, as we currently know them to be, are failing to prepare students for life on the outside. Instead, we have become caught up in the surreal world of teaching to the CRTs, a necessary evil affiliated with a strong political agenda.
Traditional schooling teaches content, leading one to believe that assisting a student in the ingesting and spewing forth of memorized course content facts, s/he has taught something of value. Unless the student is motivated in school, s/he will not learn. Motivation is key. The next segment becomes identifying what appears to be a key factor in motivating the students of today. In answer, none other than technology, digital media and video games.
James Gee poses a very interesting question in Learning by Design: Good Video Games as Learning Machines; namely, “how do good game designers manage to get new players to learn their long, complex and difficult games?” In making the comparison between gaming and education, do student decisions/actions make a difference in the classroom curriculum? Are students helping to design their own learning? “The whole curriculum should be shaped by learner’s actions and react back on the learner in meaningful ways”. Gee also states that we need to look at learner centered learning and “extend the idea to mean learner controlled learning”.
It is a well known fact that different styles of learning work better for different people. One cannot be an agent of one’s own learning if they cannot make decisions about how their learning will work. Classrooms that “allow students to discover their favored learning styles and to try new ones without fear” are those that enable students to better reflect on the nature of their own learning, thereby assisting them in the understanding that there are many different ways to solve problems. “... humans are not good at learning through hearing or reading lots of words” outside of context application (Gee). It is more important that one know how to apply learned knowledge in actual practice.
According to Gee, it is the at-risk learner that needs “horizontal learning”. These students need time to explore what they are about to learn; they need to make the important connection between seeing failure as informative. Such is the way of technology, digital media and video games. And yet, how can we even begin to attempt to prepare young people for the future when we are provided with ad hoc computer systems, systems and materials that are completely outdated?
Joyce Kim, in Practical Challenges to NLS, states that although teachers may well be convinced by the insights of NLS, they must continue to work within the increasingly narrow constraints of the school system. She poses two valid questions that continue to reverberate in the recesses of my mind; namely, (1) How can the field of education develop teachers to be mindful of students’ local practices while honing students’ school literacy skills? and (2) What kind of school infrastructure needs to be in place for such a successful practice?
In the study conducted by Catherine Beavis and Noel Gough, as demonstrated in Magic or Mayhem? New Texts and New Literacies in Technological Times, “unexpected and paradoxical questions arose for teachers about how to support students already fluent with print who seemed disoriented and at a disadvantage in this context through their unfamiliarity or clumsiness with digital literacy”. In addition, “issues of equity and assessment were, in many ways, turned on their heads, as students normally disengaged in school became highly focused and involved, while more print oriented, literary students were for the moment marginalized if they could not also operate in this visual, digital world”.
“As teachers, we must consider ways in which to incorporate” ... the integration of digital media ... “effectively into our teaching if for no other reason than our students will force us to change”, as these very “students are using these technologies, using different writing processes, researching in new forums and connecting critical thoughts in visionary new ways” (New Literacies for the Twenty-First Century by Ilana Snyder). In addition, Ms. Syder goes on to say that “if we are to begin to bridge the growing gulf between ourselves and our students, we cannot afford to remain ignorant of the characteristics of these new technologies and their complex cultural influences”. Certainly, “a more pressing reason to integrate digital media into our teaching relates to issues of power and how we and our students gain access to it”.
Who are we to deem what is an appropriate literacy and what is not? As per Guy Ewing, in The New Literacy Studies, “once people learn a particular literacy they have the tools to learn another. No literacy is limiting; all literacies are enabling”.
Stephen Downes speaks of polyfocal attention, hyper-grammar and multi-threaded interactions as being key operatives in The New Literacy. He also goes on to say that it “may be years before people cease to lament the decline of the literate student. But lament it we should not, because by avoiding the need to codify knowledge into sentences and seminars students today are acquiring not only different modes of learning, but much more efficient and effective modes of memory and recall. The new literacy may not be an even greater grasp of the fine points of language, but rather, a capacity to move beyond the limits of text and to manipulate experience directly”.
I guess it all comes down to what one deems important.
