In our academic lives, we have books and articles that we regularly return to. The dog-eared pages of these treasured readings contain lines of text etched with questions or reflections. It's difficult to imagine a similar level of engagement with a digital text. There should probably always be a place for print in students' academic lives -- no matter how technologically savvy they become.
I agree, but know more and more folks may start to argue against this.
What distinguished this atypical group was that they actually read slower when the text was on the computer than when it was in a book.
I'd be curious to know what the digital text looked like -- did it have media embedded in it? Links? Distractions?
Teachers could make students aware that their ability to comprehend the assignment may be influenced by the medium they choose.
So, a self-reflection activity might be helpful and then providing choice for students ...
In other words, there's no "one medium fits all" approach.
Good point. I suspect that even in schools where one-to-one and iPad distribution has happened, print is still often being used as an anchor text format (or so I hope)
But when it came to specific questions, comprehension was significantly better when participants read printed texts.
I wonder if the marking up of text, and how it was done, matters. Did they know about search functions on a page of digital text? Did they use highlighters and marks on paper? I think there is some visual memory cues that come into play on paper (remembering the general location of an idea or fact, as if the paper were a map and your memory a sort of compass) as opposed to a digital page that has no real anchors. Interesting.
This appears to be related to the disruptive effect that scrolling has on comprehension.
This is interesting ... I want to know more ... I would think it would be more the media and hyperlinks that would lead to less comprehension, not the act of scrolling through text on the digital page.
Given this trend, teachers, students, parents and policymakers might assume that students' familiarity and preference for technology translates into better learning outcomes. But we've found that's not necessarily true.
See note about how you started this piece ...
Today's students see themselves as digital natives, the first generation to grow up surrounded by technology like smartphones, tablets and e-readers.
Really? This is how you start the piece, using this outdated and wrong reference point about the Native/Immigrant divide. Really?
I thought it would be worthwhile to parse this piece ... you are invited ....
various ways internet comedy and music keep alive the prospects of change in her home country, Egypt, encouraging young people to remain skeptical of entrenched power and ready to mobilize for revolutionary change when the moment is right.
Comedy/sarcasm/satire is often viewed as a means of avoiding real issues, but I agree that these can be key societal preparatory tools when revolutionary change is needed. Looking forward to Yomna's work!
help them articulate what a better future might look like
How do we let them know that their voices are needed and valued?
adult leaders are looking in the wrong places,
For me this speaks to the importance of meeting youth where they are (in digital spaces as well as emotionally/intellectually) and having a good sense of youth culture. Staying current and connected is a big challenge for educators, and by incorporating spaces that are currently being used by youth into our curriculum we can meet younger generations where they are and "speak their language".
They can choose to speak up or remain silent, but political meanings are going to be made of their lives either way
How do we support learners who find themselves, and the narratives and assumptions about their lives, ascribed political meanings in this way?
Speaking directly to the camera
One thing I noticed is in the video is not only the powerful way she connects with her listeners by beginning with her own intimate discussion of faith, but the way she sets that next to the negative examples from social media. It is a powerful argument. It struck me when she even corrected her error in an edit as well regarding the inaccurate citation of a Trump tweet. So much going on here.
developed her voice by participating in a community of practice
This feels critical to me and something that could be further explored here -- how Communities of Practice support leadership development and action (for youth as well as adults). I see this in my own work at the National Writing Project -- we work together as teachers and writers to develop our practice. And in the process become leaders who can act when/as needed.
Lave and Wenger are important resources in this part of the discussion: http://infed.org/mobi/jean-lave-etienne-wenger-and-communities-of-practice/
“As new citizen media from protests and conflicts is uploaded and shared across the web, emerging and existing platforms must prove they are committed to hosting valuable citizen-generated content with attention to its safekeeping and integrity, careful archiving of media in a way that is searchable and accessible, and no monetary cost to promote visibility.
This activism plays out in large part on commercial channels and it seems like the platform providers don't have to prove this at all. Instead, all they have to do is maintain their industry dominance and marginalized folks will have to compromise their data and privacy while playing by the rules of Silicon Valley.
Our romanticization of these digital freedom fighters makes it harder for us to make sense of the conflicting reports we receive about the long-term impact of these social change movements.
Our news cycles and the narratives we craft to fit inside the cycles demonstrate that we might not have the attention span to understand the continuing struggles and the slow ebb and flow of change. Power structures don't crumble under the weight of new media, rather they respond with counter measures.
One might argue that her work was always political insofar as providing beauty tips for brown women calls into question what counts as beauty in our culture.
It is definitely important that she has the agency, as a woman of color, to create a media channel where she can reach a broad audience.
The first wave of excitement about digital politics has passed, maybe even the second wave has bit the dust, and there are many reasons for skepticism, if not cynicism, about whether social media platforms enable users to challenge entrenched authority and change the world.
Perhaps we put too much into the possibilities of technology to help facilitate change. Or perhaps our view of what change is becomes part of the problem, and technology both amplifies and dampens those notions.
We are finding young people constructing new forms of the civic imagination, using the resources of popular culture to help them articulate what a better future might look like.
Imagining is the first step towards doing ...
internet comedy and music
That intersection between entertainment and politics is an intriguing one, particularly in countries that see dissent as dangerous. Humor and music may provide a screen, right?
Like many Americans, I still have much to learn about the conditions she faces in doing activist work in her region and like many Americans, I have stereotypes to overcome if we are to really be able to share lessons learned by young activists working in these two very different contexts.
Me, too. I appreciate the honesty of the statement ...
n the course of our research, we’ve found many such stories as young people have turned to video sharing and social media sites to circulate their own stories and in the process, learned to deploy their voices toward political ends.
Do you think there is more left-leaning activist youths doing this than right-leaning youths? It may be my own filter bubble, but I find it easier to discover progressive voices on the left than conservative voices on the right when it comes to youth movement with digital media. Can someone point me to places where I can hear those youth voices on the right?
the video’s circulation brought it to the attention of a diverse set of audiences
How do we know this? How do we know when a message isn't caught in an echo chamber? I suppose YouTube might know this through its data but on the outside, we can only make assumptions that her powerful voice is being heard.
shared the ways her schoolmates responded differently to her after 9/11, and discussed the chilling climate her family members faced as they went about their normal lives.
I wonder how many of her classmates watch her YouTube channel? What audience did she have in mind here? Was it to affirm her views on being an American and being a Muslim in Trumptimes, to help others like her? Or was it to provide a counter-narrative to the views of Muslims in America?
Nabela Noor
Here is her YouTube Channel ... https://www.youtube.com/user/NabelaNoor "Hey, e-cohort ..." she says on her opening video. I'm noticing that kind of invitation, and the acknowledgement of her audience.
We will not tolerate design for addiction, deception, or control. We must design tools that we would love our loved ones to use. We must question our intent
It seems that there are some forces we want to counteract, namely technologies that capitalize on addiction, deception or control. Some opposing intentions might be:
Digital Media and Learning conference
We're really excited to launch the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus at the same time as the 2017 Digital Media and Learning Conference, held at UC Irvine. If you're attending DML and want to learn more about the Marginal Syllabus, many people from our organizing team will also be attending and can talk with you about using Hypothesis and joining these public annotation conversations:
The Marginal Syllabus will also be featured during the session "Layered Learning: Web Annotation in Collaborative and Connected Contexts," on Friday, October 6th, 2p in Emerald Bay DE.
writing an account of the political lives of American Muslim youths
Again, here's Marginal Syllabus partner author Sangita Shresthova's text "Between Storytelling and Surveillance: The Precarious Public of American Muslim Youth,” which was featured in the 2016-17 Marginal Syllabus.
This blog post
Our thanks to partner author Henry Jenkins for contributing this important text to the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus! Henry previously contributed to the 2016-17 Syllabus last April; we read and annotated a chapter from By Any Media Necessary, by Sangita Shresthova, titled "Between Storytelling and Surveillance: The Precarious Public of American Muslim Youth." Sangita, Henry, and a number of other Marginal Syllabus collaborators - Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Liana Gamber-Thompson, and Joe Dillon - joined a webinar about the text and our annotation conversation: https://youtu.be/E9NHC9YqOTg
If you are joining the Marginal Syllabus for the first time, or if you're using Hypothesis to publicly annotate an online text for the first time, here are a few useful resources:
Welcome to the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus! This is the first text we will read and publicly annotate as part of "Writing Our Civic Futures." The Marginal Syllabus convenes and sustains conversation with educators about issues of equity in teaching, learning, and education. The project's name, Marginal Syllabus, embraces a political and technical double entendre; we partner with authors whose writing may be considered marginal—or contrary—to dominant education norms, and online conversations with authors occur in the margins of their texts using web annotation. The Marginal Syllabus is a partnership with the National Writing Project, who is hosting the 2017-18 syllabus, and Hypothesis, an organization building an open platform for web annotation.
hat we have done everything in our power to leave our garden patch a little greener than we found it.
Here's another thing that really frustrates me about this letter, as much as I might agree with its broad brushstroke approach to advocating certain values - one of the most specific examples is an analogy (our garden patch)! I recognize that brevity was an authorial choice throughout, and that many specific examples were not included... so it's odd, to me, that an analogy was included rather than an example from an organization, or from the literature, or from history, or...
We will open and nourish honest public conversation about the power of technology
How? Not only does this letter lack specific recommendations for much of anything, including such public conversation, the limitations of this letter as noted by others - written online, written in English - already constrain notions of equitable participation. That being said, it is both awesome and a bit meta that this group of reader-annotators has taken it upon themselves to "build" (dare I say) one version of that public conversation using the open annotation platform Hypothesis - well done!
Thanks to Maha Bali for organizing this public annotation of an important text. As Maha mentioned briefly at the end of her blog post, the theme of this text and digciz conversation connects nicely with the 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus theme of Writing Our Civic Futures. For those who don't know, the Marginal Syllabus convenes and sustains conversations about issues of equity in teaching, learning, and education. Writing Our Civic Futures invites educators - and those who care about education, like students - to a year of social reading, collaborative web annotation, and public conversation that explores our civic imaginations and literacy landscapes. As civic engagement changes and evolves, Writing Our Civic Futures will consider implications for connected learning and teaching. Click here to learn more about Writing Our Civic Futures and the Marginal Syllabus. As you read and annotate this text, you're invited to tag your annotations with "marginalsyllabus" (as I've done, below). And we'll be sure to add The Copenhagen Letter to a list of complementary syllabus texts featured on the Marginal Syllabus website.
Thanks to the sanitized images of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement that dominate our nation’s classrooms and our national discourse, many Americans imagine that protests organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and countless local organizations fighting for justice did not fall victim to violent outbreaks
King's image and the civil rights movement are sanitized to make them more palatable for white society. How can contemporary teachers present a more realistic account of King and the movement to empower modern day activism?
Why would anyone take a university course entitled “Writing Race & Ethnicity?” Inherent in the title of the course itself is an urgency about matters of the real world. Why does race matter? How has it been written and rewritten in our society? What conversations can we have to improve our understanding of each other? How can we include new voices in such conversations? Considering our headlines and the real challenges regarding race that we face together, I knew deep down that the course needed to connect to the world as we know it in more explicit ways. A prescribed series of academic readings and writings on theories of race seemed to fall short of that urgency.
This paragraph might deepen someone's interest in this text, Mia's work, and also spark participation in the conversation in the margins.
Soon, newsrooms, educators and organizations will be able to adapt the game to their own needs — it's open source. Teachers can ask students to select news stories to input into the game as a way to challenge their classmates.
This is a valuable idea because of the way students move from being game players to game masters, and are engaged in critical literacy. I could easily see a students' selections taking a social justice bent related to race relations in the US.
Such people lived then, had lived before, and will, probably, ever have a place on this planet; and their course, in respect to any great change, (no matter how great the good to be attained, or the wrong to be redressed by it), may be calculated with as much precision as can be the course of the stars. They hate all changes, but silver, gold and copper change! Of this sort of change they are always strongly in favor.
Powerful societal elites, he claims, will always exist. Their concern lies with their finances rather than justice.
toughest
I look forward to learning what "toughest" means--as a character attribute or as a teacher characterization expressing how difficult Abaham was to 'teach' or...?
Walking away from this webinar tonight thinking about what critical work this is to do. We need to do it together. Thank you for being here and annotating with us.
Additional resources:
From my perspective, I felt that Abraham pushed me to the top of my teaching game
The stance the teacher takes relative to her work with students is both positive and in keeping with a view of the school as a learning organization.
potential incarceration of young people like Abraham
This is why our systems must constantly search for ways to be more supportive and flexible.
They aim to teach a simplistic form of cause and effect, in that students should come to see how their misbehavior causes consequences in the “real world.”
High schoolers in particular have heard this all before.
Abraham and I were both stubborn, and we were masters at targeting each other’s weak spots.
Readers reading.
Our conflict and its escalation in class would usually follow a storyline that went something like this: Abraham would say something to me or emit an attitude that I interpreted as dismissive of me or my teaching. I would take this personally and push back by being a victim and putting emotional distance between us to communicate that my feelings were hurt. He would take this personally and get angry. He would then begin to challenge me directly or make comments under his breath. I would take this personally and not know what to do, at which point my flight response would kick in and I would try to resist the urge to send him out of class. Catching myself here was important
From a teacher's perspective, this feels so much like work avoidance but it is never really that simple.
Abraham’s academic work was key to his narrative’s revision, and in his essays, he conveyed awareness that painful experience can profoundly impact how we give and receive love.
These one-on-one sessions were valuable from an academic and behavioral standpoint. I grew to appreciate the sharpness of Abraham’s mind, and I also learned that it could be a challenge to get him to produce anything of quality.
This is the point we can arrive at with students. It is great when we have the tools to strip away the parts of school that might be getting in the way. There are systems constraints, for sure, but this chapter reveals that the real constraints are relationship constraints.
the novel toward the end.
Interested to know more about this growing investment in the literature.
Newkirk (1997) identifies a paradox about personal narratives—that their therapeutic value may lie in our refusal to treat them as “directly therapeutic” (p. 20). I did not ask Abraham to think about what he was writing as much as how he was writing and which strategies he was using to interpret and convey meaning
The goals for Abraham seem both appropriate and non-traditional.
he texted to tell me
A small but important detail - despite their conflict and mediation, Abraham could still text Bronwyn. Whenever a teacher, school, or district suggests limiting the means of accessibility and conversation among educators and students (including providing phone numbers), this story is a great example of why that matters.
school gravity
This phrase was used earlier and I'd like to know more... which means I should probably read Bronwyn's entire book!
He was the student who, without trying to, called me out consistently on my own detrimental tendencies by churning them up and then handing me a figurative mirror to look at myself.
What a powerful reflection on a student-teacher relationship that eschews placing blame and rather seeks to find a sense of nuanced understanding in a rather complex human relationship. Thank you for sharing!
Writing was a way of communicating in our class that offered him acceptance and an invitation to join the community.
I appreciate this framing of writing as a collection of practices that mediates participation in various contexts, from the personal to the more academic and communal.
The only agency that his narrative offered him was the ability to rid the world of his existence
What a sobering analysis.
Abraham was also gang-affiliated and had had negative encounters with police.
This alone can lead to a student becoming severely labelled. The relative privilege that Abraham seems to enjoy in this school setting is, in many ways, the opposite of what students in his circumstances feel.
If Abraham was uncooperative, the whole class would feel it, and our relation-ship gave me the leverage I needed to redirect him publicly without sparking an argument—at least, most of the time.
Abraham's connection to school and learning seems precarious. The teens in the class can become taxed by these negotiations the same way a teacher can.
so I learned to structure his feedback based on a constant risks-benefits assessment of whether it would have the desired effect or make me lose my leverage
Different than grading or scoring as we traditionally understand it, LaMay views feedback structures as relationship dependent in the way that people who have spouses and children understand that they are.
one of several students who were eligible to spend a period each day in the resource room for extra academic support.
I want to hear more about this eligibility and the privilege it carries. It strikes me as an agentive approach to supporting someone who might struggle with literacy.
conflict
The words "conflict" and "reading" loom large in this chapter for me. It is really fascinating how LaMay gets smarter about herself and her teaching as a result of this conflict. At the same time, her approach as a teacher of writing invites Abraham to get smarter about himself and his learning needs.
He was adamant that he needed relationships with teachers in order to learn from them, and he would not work for teachers he did not like. When I asked him if he could learn from a teacher who he did not really know, he answered, “Well personally I can’t . . . I won’t. I won’t let myself.
This is a common refrain from students who are challenged with life circumstances that present risk factors for schooling, I've learned. The relationships with adults in school can take on a primacy that directly impacts their decisions about which classes to engage in. "I'll do Mr __'s work but I'm not doing Mr _'s." What is so striking about this piece is LaMay's refusal to label Abraham or dismiss him on the basis of his behaviors.
he wrote
The following is incredibly powerful! On a tangential note, I'm curious about how Bronwyn worked with Abraham (and other students) to get access to and use their writing in her book. No doubt Bronwyn likely details this elsewhere in her book, though some background for the purposes of our conversation would be grand.
academic dexterity
How many educators take the time to learn about the academic dexterity of their students?
in the two years that this chapter captures
I was recently at a research conference and presented during a session on methodological complexities in studies of learning. Long story short, one of the presenters critiqued the often short timescales of many studies (often less than a few months, if that), and advocated years-long engagement with learners - despite many of the challenges that come with sustaining inquiry over such a period of time. Nonetheless, educators are uniquely positioned to conduct inquiry over longer timescales.
Abraham’s academic success was inextricable from his ability to develop and sustain positive relationships with adults
An inverse of this statement is fascinating to consider, too: Educators' pedagogical success is inextricable from their ability to develop and sustain positive relationships with learners.
to pull constructive meaning from a destructive story
Though specific to the context of Abraham's learning, this statement strongly resonates across other intellectual and professional contexts...
our student-teacher relationship was evidence of our common skill in reading
This is such an important sentence to me for a few reasons. First, it identifies that in this precarious relationship between teacher and student, the reading that is most vital is the ability to read each other's intentions. Second, in the relationship between high school English teacher and marginalized student with challenging life circumstances, LaMay asserts that they share a common skill in reading. That strikes me as a way of revaluing the literacy that Abraham brings. He's a relationship reader, engaging with only with the teachers he trusts.
create narrative truth
Truth as creative.
“It’s like if I had another me right here.”
This book is filled with powerful quotes, like this, from the students.
Through the narrative curriculum, I hoped that the students and I could together create a restorative class community that would provide academic support and school gravity for Abraham.
I was happy to see this chapter move into a focus on restorative practices since there are many resources to support this kind of practices in schools and community spaces. Maybe as part of this project we can gather some together to share?
Like Hazel, Abraham was able to see himself on the written page.
Making connections here between the different chapters of this book that highlight the work of different students.
Figure 5.1. “He ran back to Solomon’s store and caught a glimpse of himself in the plate glass window. He was grinning. His eyes were shining. He was as eager and happy as he had ever been in his life.”
Okay. In tears at this point. Just to say.
I wanted to deal with our conflict by engaging him in conversation about its root causes, rather than rely on positional power in a way that would hold no real power with him.
Important statement here; restorative approach.
The concepts and strategies embedded in the narrative curriculum were my approach to classroom discipline for Abraham.
Powerful.
What are the implications ultimately of this approach? What is possible if we think more this way about our shared work in education and learning?
hey are unethical.
+1
Pedro Noguera, who has written extensively on this topic, argues that “the marginalization of students who are frequently punished occurs because schools rely primarily on two strategies to discipline students who misbehave: humiliation and exclusion” (2008, p. 133)
Coming from a family where I too can see the devastating results of humiliation and exclusion ... and how totally unhelpful they are in resolving anything at all (they always make it worse, in fact) I so appreciate Bromwyn sharing alternative visions of what is possible.
Our class practice of sharing writing had a noticeable impact on Abraham.
This focus on sharing is important. Making and then sharing. Very much speaks to a constructionist framework as well as an essential practice I've learned through working with writing project teachers like Bronwyn.
Along these lines
The proceeding sentences here show an important framework around the work she is doing here.
Hell breaks loose
Wow. Powerful image.
The figures in this drawing were different from the previous two in that the faces had no features
This sequence shows to me a teacher who is paying close attention to what students are creating. This distinction is subtle and also important.
We wanted to dis-engage Abraham from disruptive behaviors, but we did not want to disengage him as a person. We did want to engage him as a student, which required us to provide learning experiences that would show him how education could bring self-awareness and other tools to ease the pain.
This strikes me as a key intention in this work and therefore this chapter/description of the work with Abraham as case is a way to demonstrate one example of how a school/classroom can be a place of caring while also remain focused on learning.
Our administra-tion and I knew that we needed to handle these incidents with concern for how the messaging would affect his sense of self.
Powerful statement here about administration working with the teachers on behalf of the students well-being.
Our relationship could become antagonistic, but not in the traditional sense where teachers and students are disconnected or unable to relate to each other’s positions. Abraham struggled to maintain closeness without eruptions of anger or distrust, and I struggled to handle conflict without taking negative emotions personally and stepping away.
Here we see Bromwyn being very self-aware in the ways that she is interacting with her student Abraham.
Our well-being depends on our ability to draw wisdom and constructive meaning from even the most painful or cruel experiences
An essential focus here not just on the act of writing and revising but on well-being.
His writing conveyed harsh truths that he perceived in his life that colored his sense of self, and he wrote himself as a character imprisoned by them. Over the course of his narrative work, his tone and self-characterization evolved as he realized that he had agency in deciding what truth meant to him.
A description of what it means to revise narrative truth
revisions to narrative truth
provocative
Agency: noun. The belief that I am here for a purpose. I’m not a nobody, I’m a someone.
I appreciate this definition of agency too. Was in a conversation recently where we were talking about collective agency and agency within community. I think this sense of purpose starts to pick up on that.
Truth: noun. Where I get my pride and grace.
This is a beautiful and powerful definition that speaks to the power of the work the students and their teacher were doing here.
Thanks to Bronwyn LaMay for partnering with the Marginal Syllabus and joining us in an annotation conversation during the week of May 22nd. Click here for additional information about our annotathon in partnership with Educator Innovator, including a webinar on Tuesday, 5/31 at 7p ET.
asked to be left alone
And Joe later responded in a thoughtful post http://onewheeljoe.blogspot.com/2017/04/oops-and-ouch-reflecting-on-my-gendered.html
Personally, I use Hypothesis to closely read online texts, to examine and think, and to bounce ideas off the text to others in the margins, who help push my own thinking forward or force me to re-examine my beliefs and ideas.
When you put multimedia in the margins, you make explicit some really interesting things, too, like the way ideas are intertextual, and the way images can capture a reader's response in nuanced ways that written text cannot. Your posts model for other readers that texts have multiple meanings which are shaped by a reader's context. 
writers should not be held hostage to the potential aspects of technology.
We see politicians these days getting shouted down in town hall meetings. Those public figures, too, have to contend with the context of their chosen interaction with an audience. Putting ideas out into the world carries risk.
Still, as much I can see the point of protest, another part of me (maybe the naive part of me, that voice that says look to potential and possibilities with digital writing) thinks, if you post something to the world via the Web, you can expect (hope/intend) that maybe someone will want to read what you wrote and maybe react to your words.
While some, like Mo and Nash, desire to positively “represent” Islam and Muslims, not all youth share this desire, particularly given the harsh criticism to which those with a public presence are often subjected from both within and outside their communities. Selina explained that though her “faith is a big part” of her environmental activism, this is not something she wants to “tell the outside world.”
The risks of posting online are greater for American Muslims, yet it seems as though there is a huge need for the Muslim community to combat popular perceptions and the popular media's portrayal of them.
“imagined audience might be entirely different from the actual readers of a profile, blog post, or tweet”
I want to know more about this. Specifically, is it an imagined audience or an intended audience? We are all learning about what it means to have a kind of incidental audience online, where our posts might reach lurkers who are receptive to messages and different peer groups who are less receptive.
She recalled, “None of our communication would be online. None of it.” Tanya admitted that she sometimes felt that the groups’ avoidance of the internet bordered on paranoia because, “Who really cares about us, right? Who is really watching a bunch of misfit kids doing activism during college?” To her, the Irvine11 case drove home the reality that “they really are!” Someone “is really watching us!”
The data trail their activism leaves is so easily mined and spun. There is active surveillance and retroactive monitoring, where any footprint might be used against a young activist.
In other words, networked communication allows American Muslim youth to bypass complex and historically fragmented organizational structures in moments that call for quick and efficient action around current issues. Such mobilization is enabled through preexisting, but previously politically “latent” networks. Kadir offered a perspective on this “model change”: The institutions…(the mosque and the MSA and the national organizations…) have a lot of baggage (cultural, sectarian and ideological). The [American Muslim] community is very fragmented as a result of it. For people who want to get work done, going through institutions is very problematic on certain issues….[For a] very quick response and grassroots organizing, I find it very tempting to resort to new media. The circulation of media becomes the life force of these new media networks.
New media allows the formation of more nimble networks unencumbered by historical fragmentation or traditional, paternal hierarchies.
She explained that Imams and heads of organizations say, “We need to get our youth to vote, to become informed voters and do all these things,” even as “no youth” have a seat “at the table” where this discussion is taking place.
I take from this comment that youth voice is a necessary ingredient in conversations that hope to advance youth participation in politics.
She finds the internet gave them access to experiences unavailable “in their daily life,” but it also brought “risk of exposure” (127–130). As a consequence, they found themselves putting up or removing online content depending on the emotional and political climate in their geographically local communities.
This dynamic feels true for me, too. The political climate in my geographically local context influences the way I participate in online networks.
We find that American Muslims take “action” through an even broader range of activities, many of them situated on the cultural end of the spectrum of participatory politics. Young American Muslims use social media to establish and maintain networks. They turn to their networks to share stories they create and appropriate. At times, they also mobilize these networks to achieve civic goals.
It seems to me that those interested in anti-racism or opposing the intimidation of American Muslims could seek to diversify their social and learning networks to ensure that the efforts of young American Muslims are heard and amplified.
According to a 2011 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 55 percent of the American Muslim respondents to a 2011 said they felt that living as an American Muslim had become “more difficult” since 9/11. Twenty-five percent reported that their local mosque had been the “target of controversy or outright hostility.” Despite the high level of animosity toward American Muslims suggested by these data, the same study found “no indication of increased alienation or anger” among American Muslims toward the United States.
I expect that being a target of hostility just comes with the territory for American Muslims. Though it has become harder for them since 9/11, they are accustomed to this kind of treatment.
I was like, “Really?” Apparently, there are still real problems there and they are really hard to overcome. It’s very frustrating when like something like 9/11 happens and there’s a few radicals who say, “Yeah, we’re Muslims that’s why we are doing this,” and everyone believe them. Whereas, the guy who flew the plane into a building in Austin because he was mad at the IRS and no one’s like, “Wow, Christians are horrible because of that.”
I find myself wanting to fault our media for this in large part. Still, I have to accept that our commercial media responds to clicks, viewers and subscribers. Our cultural norms and our interests drive the demand. What does it say about us that our media focuses on Islamic terrorism at the same time it seeks to avoid labelling hate crimes committed by whites as terrorism at all, let alone Christian terrorism or white terrorism? How do we surface the hypocrisy in the interest of inclusion?
American Muslims need to accept being American as much as they claim their religious beliefs. In Dr. Hathout’s words, “Home is not where my grandparents are buried; it is where my grandchildren will live.”
I can see how American Muslims might struggle to accept being American as part of their identities. It seems so important that all Americans be resolute in our commitment to religious freedom and acceptance in order to continually help Muslims integrate and thrive here.
Thanks to Educator Innovator for partnering with the Marginal Syllabus and hosting this week-long annotathon! We're most appreciative of Liana Gamber-Thompson at Educator Innovator and Christina Cantrill at the National Writing Project for guiding this collaborative effort forward. And, of course, a special thank you to Sangita Shrestova and her By Any Media Necessary co-authors for partnering with us for this annotathon and related webinar.
if we have to learn with each other we should also learn about each other
These lines in the poem offer an important contrast to the teacher's view above, where he aimed to clean students up and give them a better life. In this student's view, the teacher is also part of the learning community and shares in the challenging task, which is to "learn about each other so we can bring each other up."
Recognizing the neoindigeneity of youth requires acknowledgement of the soul wounds that teaching practices inflict upon them.
This is a call for empathy on the part of the teacher, and for vulnerability. How can teachers establish a professional distance from "practices," so we can see their effects and impacts?
“cleaning these kids up and giving them a better life.”
This is a distortion of the real task in front of the teacher which is, as Embid explained above "to get students engaged in science." This type of a distorted mission also opens the door to all kinds of dubious "best practices" which usually amount to strategies for controlling students, instead of relationship building.
The reality is that we privilege people who look and act like us, and perceive those who don’t as different and, frequently, inferior. In urban schools, and especially for those who haven’t had previous experience in urban contexts or with youth of color, educators learn “best practices” from “experts” in the field, deemed as such because they have degrees, write articles, and meet other criteria that do not have anything to do with their work within urban communities.
Early career teachers in any school face an incredibly steep learning curve and what they say about students reveals the challenges they perceive. In their struggle to meet the myriad demands of the complex role, they label students "distracted," "unprepared," or "entitled." In an urban school, these challenges and the subsequent labelling exist in a multicultural context fraught with mistrust. The privileged teacher struggling as a learner develops coping strategies out of the tools that present themselves: referrals, suspensions, authority and rules.
Urban kids have difficult lives often because their is an anti intellectual vibe in those communities.
It seems to me that the article brings to light a major problem in urban education is the separation between communities and schooling, so that any "anti intellectual vibe" is actually a result of being alienated by the educational system which does not value their lives and experiences as they are lived. From an education system which does NOT see students as actors in their own lives during schooling hours, but as vessels to be filled and given to by educators, thereby erasing their authenticity and autonomy.
Trauma Informed Teaching and what that could mean for students and teachers alike. Imagine the classroom and schools becoming reclaimed for students, teachers and communities to heal and educate themselves.
What would this look like?
If you are familiar with Antigonish and Bonnie Stewart's #Antigonish2, I am imagining Trauma Informed Teaching would be a similar notion- bringing together communities for the communities- but what other forms of Trauma Informed Teaching would there be? How do teachers, students, and communities all reclaim a space, and can they do so together or are there tensions at work that make it impossible for all entities to reclaim something?
are ill equipped for helping each other through the work of navigating who they truly are and who they are expected to be in a particular place.
What can we do to help equip students navigate who they are and who they are expected to be? since this expectation is certainly not one that ends in schools and is something people must grapple with their entire lives.
the aim of “giving them a better life” indicates that their present life has little or no value.
How do we wrestle with this fundamental problem of education? Education is often seen as a necessity to improving one's life, in a variety of ways. How can we address improvement, growth, betterment without erasing value of their lives as they currently exist?
I think "giving" here is a real problem, the thought of some authority giving privileged, access, betterment rather than students building access and betterment--constructing the value of their lives... but even with that re-framing it seems a delicate balance to aim to improve without erasure. And if education's purpose isn't to improve quality of life, what is it?
as separate from the community as possible
This is such a powerful statement. How do we improve anything without unifying with the community? Why would we aim as educators to create new, distinct communities of practice that by their very nature create experiences of "us" vs "them" not just within the classroom(s) but within the very communities that are necessary to sustain learning and where we send students home to everyday? That's creating more barriers to education, not supporting learning
many more have come to view school as a discrete space, as if what happens outside school has little to no impact on what happens inside school.
I feel like this notion is caught up in our obsessions for rigor in academia, and for STEM and "objective" science as disciplines. The dominant notion persists that we can somehow separate ourselves and our experiences from our work, and that somehow things don't count the same if we cannot do so. And it is a fundamentally dangerous way of thinking that is so disingenuous to how we actually experience the world
“I’m always ready for that lady’s class and she gets me suspended because she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She sees what she wants to see.” As we talked more, I mentioned that the teacher said she never had her books with her for class. She responded that a friend shares her books with her and lends her something to write with whenever she needs it. For her, that made it obvious that she was prepared to learn. She then mentioned that she was always on time for class. “I’m always at the door when that bell rings. I’m always there.” The student saw herself as prepared and on time, but the teacher did not see the student the way she saw herself.
This piece is powerful in part because the student voices convey an unmistakeable perception that the teacher is unfair and, in the student's mind, incompetent. It is important that teachers consider these marginalized perspectives especially in circumstances like this, where the different viewpoints reveal a cultural gap.
This excerpt from Dr. Christopher Emdin's book For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education is the focal text for the Marginal Syllabus' annotathon in March. From March 27th through 31st, educators are invited to participate in an annotation conversation using the platform Hypothesis; additional information and directions for joining this conversation are here.
make their own questioning and thinking process visible for students
This is critical, transparency and modelling the process--stumbles and all.
act as genuine researchers, not to merely finish a research paper
This is ever so important.
enjoy the research process
Yes, we must destroy the notion of a dispassionate researcher. This is more relevant to the sciences which pretend as if there is such a thing, but the process of research is the same across fields, and passion and enjoyment of research drives our continuous participation
In Chapters 1 through 5, we go into the classroom as we guide students through the inquiry process week by week, including lessons and handouts.
Since I own the book, I appreciate the attention to detail the authors have paid here. Teachers interested in stretching their practice or teachers new to the profession benefit from these models. Our conversation here in the margins based on the preface highlights possibilities and rationale. The chapters that follow help teachers feel prepared for leaps in practice they seek to make.
These skills are transferable to other projects they will do in school and in other contexts and are critical to college, career, and civic readiness.
The purpose behind researching in school goes far beyond a single paper. I think it is essential to focus on skill development and the transferability of those skills.
sparking
And wires spark - "rewire" is very generative as a guiding metaphor - well done!
we—as teachers, researchers, and writers ourselves— enjoy the research process, a stance that can empower our students as they become researchers, too.
As essential as research is nowadays, modelling that the process is interest-driven and enjoyable is equally essential. In my classroom, I try to connect research with engaging debate opportunities, so that there is a payoff to note taking.
could be modified
The importance of adaptation - rather than uniform adoption - is so important, and speaks to trust in educator agency and co-design, using artifacts from this text as objects that move across boundaries, that influence emergent practice, and that don't presume "one right way" of a lock-step formula.
While this book is based on our work within Dawn’s high school classroom, throughout the text we offer what Swenson and Mitchell (2006) have called “extensions and adaptations” to help readers identify what “would be necessary for the lesson to work as well with diverse groups of students in other contexts and/or that might enrich the demonstration in its current context” (p. 6).
I think these suggestions about how to extend and adapt provide important framing for how interested teachers might experiment in their local contexts. I'm reminded so often that teachers are interested in what works in their communities, schools and classrooms. Dawn's and Troy's experimentation should foster other experiments, and adaptations should abound.
This model is based on evidence that the most resilient, adaptive, and effective learning involves individual interest as well as social support to overcome adversity and provide recognition.
The CL principles seem so important in a conversation about research because authentic research doesn't happen in isolation. The problems worth solving and the questions worth answering demand cross-content collaboration.
2. Digital writing work demands collaboration in a class that is
The collaborative demands of writing can sometimes be lost on students, whether the task is digital or good old fashioned paper and pencil. I blogged about this recently and tried to compare revision groups to the drills soccer players need to develop their skills. 
awakener
What a term! Perhaps we should use this more as we describe the kind of emergent learning that occurs through open and collaborative web annotation. What is awakened through this process of open learning, and who are the awakeners (such as authors) that mediate the process?
In this unique moment, where we feel substantive changes could happen for teaching and learning, we are committed to connect students through language and help them learn how to read and write their worlds.
To me, this stance is important for teachers because it communicates a positive sense of agency. The cultural changes with technology present challenges, to be sure, but they also open up possibilities for inquiry and discovery.
we are diving back into annotation
Another big thank you! As I've mentioned on Twitter, your course's "re/turn" to a previous Marginal Syllabus conversation (from October) is what Joe, Jeremy, and I hoped would happen over time - that educators would find conversations and texts that resonate with their interests and courses, and then join the text-based conversation via ongoing annotation. This turns the text-as-conversation into an open educational resource (OER), and - like you - we hope other educators and courses revisit these conversations to support their own learning.
a significant jump-start to that sense of belonging to a community, both within the course and beyond it.
I've had students say similar things about using Hypothesis to read together. I'd like to explore the relationship between open/collaborative web annotation and community-building... many questions to consider...
their reflections that week posted to their own blogs were filled with connections they made between Dewey’s work, John Seely Brown’s, and the research report/agenda for Connected Learning
Awesome. Is it possible to connect with some of these posts and perspectives?
Research Writing Rewired Lessons That Ground Students’ Digital Learning
The preface to this book was featured as a Marginal Syllabus flash mob conversation on Wednesday, Feb 22 in partnership with Dawn Reed and Troy Hicks. Our thanks to Dawn and Troy for joining the Marginal Syllabus as author-discussants, and view our annotation conversation here.
the change in the moral school atmosphere, in the relation of pupils and teachers—of discipline; the introduction of more active, expressive, and self-directing factors—all these are not mere accidents, they are necessities of the larger social evolution.
This is so true when considering equity in education. Teachers need to connect with their students and understand how they experience the world both in and outside of school.
but that the scientific insight thus gained becomes an indispensable instrument of free and active participation in modern social life
I reflect on this in light of behavior science and how it is a set of principles which becomes meaningful through application of social importance.
In critical moments we all realize that the only discipline that stands by us, the only training that becomes intuition, is that got through life itself.
The goal of a quality educator should be to create a love of life long learning. This love of learning is experienced through living daily life.
A spirit of free communication, of interchange of ideas, suggestions, results, both successes and failures of previous experiences, becomes the dominating note of the recitation.
Learning is a communal process. In today's age communities connect through the use of technology.
In all this there was continual training of observation, of ingenuity, constructive imagination, of logical thought, and of the sense of reality acquired through first-hand contact with actualities.
Learning takes place through interactions between individuals and individuals now interact across mediums of technology.
One can hardly believe there has been a revolution in all history so rapid, so extensive, so complete.
I believe the revolution that occurred during this time, the industrial revolution, parallels the technological revolution that has occurred more recently.
So thoroughly is this the prevalent atmosphere that for one child to help another in his task has become a school crime.
Challenging notions of "cheating." What does it mean to cheat? Is helping each other and learning together something we want to see?
It is actively moving in all the currents of society itself.
In our networked age, knowledge is more mobile (note: I edited) than ever before and activity moving in all currents of society. What are the implications then for our institutions of learning?
worthy, lovely, and harmonious
Love it!
Barely made it to the end. Thank you all. Looking forward to continuing these conversations. xo
The occupation supplies the child with a genuine motive; it gives him experience at first hand; it brings him into contact with realities. It does all this, but in addition it is liberalized throughout by translation into its historic values and scientific equivalencies.
I want this to mean that civic occupation will bring students in contact with political realities. Can we co-investigate what it means that, "all politics is local" even as global events unfold before us on social media?
The common needs and aims demand a growing interchange of thought and growing unity of sympathetic feeling
This sense of common needs is similar to "shared purpose" in connected learning.
I love the chapter on shared purpose in this book btw: Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom (http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/books/teaching_in_the_connected_learning_classroom)
We must conceive of work in wood and metal, of weaving, sewing, and cooking, as methods of life not as distinct studies.
YES! Why are they taken away? We can add to this list coding, programming, renewable energies, and maybe even gardening. These will be the sustainable skills of the future.
instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons
radical (see above :)
It keeps them alert and active, instead of passive and receptive; it makes them more useful, more capable
Entirely because they are able to make neural connections which solidify and anchor learning in long-term memory. Student attention spans and interest have skyrocketed in classrooms with coding, robotics, music production, invention and innovation to solve a genuine problem in our society or world. I remember not wanting to teach my students without providing these opportunities because I felt I was doing such a disservice to their futures. Why do we allow non-relevant learning to continue? When will students need derivatives in their lives? When will they need factoring on a daily basis? They shouldn't be forced to learn them unless they are part of the solution to the problems they are faced or challenged with.
It is radical conditions which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education suffices.
looking up "radical"
Google says: relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough.
Where the school work consists in simply learning lessons, mutual assistance, instead of being the most natural form of coöperation and association, becomes a clandestine effort to relieve one’s neighbor of his proper duties. Where active work is going on all this is changed. Helping others, instead of being a form of charity which impoverishes the recipient, is simply an aid in setting free the powers and furthering the impulse of the one helped.
The factory model of schooling persists but I believe that even the smallest moves toward authenticity can promote social learning and collaboration.
Consciousness of its real import is still so weak that the work is often done in a half-hearted, confused, and unrelated way
This is what happens when we treat students and teachers as statistical data and numbers. If they aren't allowed to think for themselves and create relevant learning which addresses real-world problems, there isn't genuine challenge and application. I see many classrooms where content is 5-10 years old and is instantly disengaging because it's out of date. Why aren't more classrooms talking about and exploring our current political situation, possible trips to mars, renewable energy, how technology advances impact our society? I'm sure consciousness would be much stronger in these environments and half-heartedness would nearly disappear.
educative forces
implications of thinking of educative forces ... energies ... push/pull ...
with actualities
love!
Even as to its feebler beginnings, this change is not much more than a century old; in many of its most important aspects it falls within the short span of those now living.
This can also be said of our flattening world and the 21st century skills it demands. Even as pedagogues might long for a simpler time, we have been witness to so many social and technological changes just in the 12 years I've been in education, that we should know that our schools have to also change.
with real things and materials, with the actual processes of their manipulation, and the knowledge of their social necessities and uses
Learning with purpose! Where has this gone? Why is there no longer a greater purpose in most K-12 classrooms? It may have never been there to begin with but I believe if there is a purpose tied to social necessities, greater world good, solving cultural/global problems, many students would be more engaged and motivated to learn as well as rising stars.
manual training
Dewey spoke about this long before now and we still adhere to it, why is this? True innovations doesn't come from manuals nor does critical thinking and great problem solvers. Do we really still need manuals with the web and open source?
That this revolution should not affect education in other than formal and superficial fashion is inconceivable.
So what are the impacts of a changing media ecology and globalization on education today?
The modification going on in the method and curriculum of education is as much a product of the changed social situation, and as much an effort to meet the needs of the new society that is forming, as are changes in modes of industry and commerce.
When we employ approaches that draw upon design thinking, or personalized learning- just to name a few innovations- how can we better emphasize that these types of reform efforts or shifts in methods are not due to systemic failures but necessary because of cultural shifts and changes?
the growth of a world-wide market as the object of production, of vast manufacturing centers to supply this market, of cheap and rapid means of communication and distribution between all its parts.
Now international; globalized.
an effort to meet the needs of the new society that is forming
What kind of society is being formed now? Conformist or free thinkers? It seems we are headed in the wrong direction if we don't offer choice to teachers and students about their learning and growth.
is the industrial one
The one that comes to mind for me today is our rapidly changing media environment.
it destroys our democracy
The same could be said about standardized testing. Not that it's not important but it can't be the emphasis nor the entire focus.
It was a matter of immediate and personal concern, even to the point of actual participation.
Love this sentence. What would we say today is a "matter of immediate and personal concern, even to the point of actual participation."?
in shops which were constantly open to inspection and often centers of neighborhood congregation
I love thinking about this potential here as sites of learning.
Let us then ask after the main aspects of the social movement
Connected Learning report starts in a similar place. They write "We begin with an analysis of current economic, social, and technical trends that frame the educational challenges faced by many countries, especially in the Global North – including the contraction of economic opportunity, growing inequity in access to educational and economic opportunity, and the risks and opportunities of media engagement."
Can we connect this “New Education” with the general march of events
Key question here and also in ED677.
the separation of theory and practice
I have real concerns about this separation and its implications for learning and for democracy. I think it separates learners in our systems as well as thins the learning that is possible for all. It strikes me that it also gets more at the heart of what Dewey is writing about than examples that could otherwise be described as practical versus intellectual -- that whatever our pursuit we must integrate theory and practice.
Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied
Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied.
(Highlighting this quote because I like it! :)
growing, one former is worth a thousand re-formers,”
I love the description of growing and forming together in contrast to something being re-formed or someone who re-forms.
Yet the range of the outlook needs to be enlarged. What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.
The challenge.
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53910
Exciting what we can do with texts (in this case a lecture) like this that are shared and/or in the public domain.
Thank you to the folks at Marginal Syllabus, specially @remikalir and @onewheeljoe for their support for this discussion.
John Dewey
In 2012 I heard John Seely Brown give a keynote at the DML Conference where he said that "perhaps John Dewey (and Marie Montessori) were 75 years ahead of their time" when driving models of education that brought the learner into the flow of what they were learning. Maybe, he posits, "their intuition was right but their toolset was wrong."
I was so excited by this thought and have been wondering it ever since. So how might we do what JSB does in his speech and recast some of John Dewey's work here from 1907 in today's networked age?
JSB described his goal is to create an "arc of life learning that scales." I am wondering about equity in connected learning and teaching.
See: http://dmlcentral.net/the-global-one-room-schoolhouse-john-seely-brown/
or the telegraph as personal devices.
Of course, today the telegraph is a personal device, however irrational our use of such mobile technologies - from the ill-informed tweet to the use of such devices for political surveillance.
to take the broader, or social view
Many critics and theorists today would suggest that this broader is also cultural and - given that we're reading and discussing a text that was first written 118 years ago - historical.
through the agency of the school, at the disposal of its future members
Given what's happening at the turn of 2017 with public education, and in both K-12 and higher education contexts, it's challenging to appreciate "the agency of the school," particularly if such agency is meant to embolden - and not "destroy" - our democracy.
his
Even though I know this text was published in 1899, the gendered language conventions of Dewey's text really stand out.
Here are some questions we are playing with via ED677 this week:
Join the Marginal Syllabus online this Wednesday, January 25th at 6p ET (3p PT) for an annotation flash mob-as-conversation with Christina Cantrill, Associate Director of National Programs for the National Writing Project. The Marginal Syllabus convenes conversations with educators about issues of equity in teaching, learning, and education. Throughout the 2016-17 school year, the Marginal Syllabus is fostering a participatory and open experiment in professional learning for all educators to join critical conversations about education and equity. On Wednesday, January 25th at 6p ET (3p PT) Christina and some of the participants in her ED677 course at Arcadia University will read and mark up this text, the first chapter from John Dewey's classic book The School and Society. Visit Marginal Syllabus resources for additional information, including directions for using the Hypothes.is platform.
Today, measurements of school performance have become so commonplace that they are an assumed part of education debates. As new forms of data are easier to collect and analyze, drawing on and interacting with information to measure the impact of programs and to inform decision-making and policy has emerged as a key strategy to foster improvement in public schools.
This argument really falls flat. Asking schools to not generate data seems akin to the meme of the ill-informed senior who demands that government keep its damned hands of his Medicaid. Schools produce data the way students chew gum and affix that gum to the bottom of desks after the gum loses flavor. Certainly the accountability movement has fostered a love of spreadsheets and quantifiable data of all sorts that can be unhealthy. Still, schools generate data every time a teacher takes roll or grades papers. The records we create and steward are in service of a school improvement movement that I like to think predates high stakes testing. Some of my favorite people in education are researchers who get out from behind their keyboards, venture into public schools, and generate...you guessed it... data.
Decolonizing I kinda love and hate this term. I love it because it recognizes that some issues are remnants of colonization. That’s different from coloniality, which is more like things that are still happening now, outside the political land-stealing that was colonial history. In any case, decolonizing is cool, except when I really think about it really hard and I realize what Homi Bhabha reminds us of: the current individual in Egypt or India isn’t someone who has a “pure” self to go back to that’s different from their “colonized” self.
"...decolonizing is cool, except when I really think about it really hard..."
I love how the informality of this prose, this blog, belies the powerful press on a learning community's thinking.
Terms like diversity, inclusivity, marginality, marginalization, subaltern, dominant, coloniality, colonizing, decolonizing, postcolonial, disadvantaged, privilege, even intersectionality (or what I sometimes termed semi-privilege, before I knew it was called intersectionality).
I have a snarky joke I recycle over and over at work when I think things are going sideways, or when things feel unproductive by my high standards. As an example, our central office uses "reciprocal accountability agreements" to coordinate the work with schools. When the conversations around these "agreements" reveal gaps in agreement and the absence of "reciprocity," it tickles my funny bone to say, "That was a great meeting but I worry about what we're doing to the words 'reciprocal' and 'agreement.' English is an evolving language, you know, and those words might mean something entirely different when we are done with them."
-laugh track here-
This is my version of educator sarcasm. It helps no one and I think it is a bad habit on my part, but I persist.
I've also used this joke about "professional development" and "professional learning communities."
I'm aware that when I initiate equity conversations, educators from other walks of life might comment on my efforts with their own spin on my joke. What am I, a privileged white dude from suburban Denver, doing to important words like equity, or diversity?
-laugh track here-
This call for a conversation about terms is vital because I think we all- snarkiness aside- have a role to play in how these words inform and shape the learning of educational tinkerers. All jokes aside, we have a chance to leave these words better than we found them.
The main thrust of this post has been brewing in my head for months now.
Fun to think of these emerging ideas as drafts. How many mental drafts before an idea flows onto a blog post?
For example, we might simply ask that each participant refrain from using hashtags as a final thought because that is a form of sarcasm or punchline that can be misconstrued or shut down honest debate or agreeable disagreement.
We could ask respondents to reply to any comment that they read twice because of tone to use "ouch" as a tag or a textual response. The offending respondent could respond with "oops" in order to preserve good will in an exchange of ideas.
Finally, the first part of a flash mob might occur here, in the page notes, where norms could be quickly negotiated and agreed upon with a form of protocol.
We have each chosen specific keyword
This reminds me of Paul Allison's LRNG playlist in which youth have to choose keywords associated with their own inquiry questions.
Ads from companies such as Choice Hotels, SoundCloud and Bose Corp. appear on sites with false or misleading news. Those companies are among thousands of brands that could appear on such sites based on a user’s browsing history or demographics.
As industries struggle to adapt to our flattening world, companies who have been throwing advertising dollars at anyone who will promise them clicks and site views are inadvertently funding disinformation. And our president-elect is trying to undermine the credibility of the CIA and NSA.
The selection of Betsy DeVos by President-elect Donald Trump as his education secretary nominee has been attacked by public school advocates who see her longtime support for school “choice” and private Catholic education as evidence that she does not support America’s public education system. In this post, that sentiment is explained by an educator who has written an open letter to DeVos.
This nomination makes sense if you want to privatize education and further marginalize special needs students and language learners.
The Gallup Poll says that the rate of parents who are satisfied with their public school is the highest in American history. We are also very proud that our public schools offer more services to students with low socioeconomic backgrounds and special education needs than ever before. Not to be redundant, but we are proud that we serve ALL of the students in our communities.
Facts matter. Data matters. Strange how we never hear this type of data in public schools even though our school leaders are usually keenly aware of community satisfaction or lack thereof.
Tillerson has mocked investments in renewable energy and has downplayed the effects of climate change. As secretary of state, he would be in a position that has been deeply involved in matters that affect Exxon and other oil and gas corporations. In the last few years, the State Department has forged an international drilling pact, promoted hydraulic fracking across the globe and negotiated climate and trade pacts that shape the fossil fuel economy
This nomination makes sense if your goal is to partner with Russia to exploit all natural resources.
I cocked my head at him and offered a sheepish smile that said, “Sorry, Marcus. I gotta take you. You broke a rule.” The smile must have done the trick, because he took a deep breath, straightened the books in his arms, and followed me. As we walked down the hallway, he began pointing out other boys with sagging pants.
How quickly black youth forgive us for doing school to them, even when we're discriminating against them.
Lead with your interests – be transparent about what you want to learn more about.
...as Holden and I are doing at marginalsyllab.us/conversations
seventh and eighth grade literacy teacher at North Middle School
This should read: "11th grade English teacher and instructional coach at Rangeview High School"
As a result, we are developing a 2017-2018 general fund budget of approximately $319 million. This is a change from the 2016-17 budget of approximately $350 million, which will require us to reduce our budget by $31 million. This figure includes an expected reduction in school-based staffing due to our enrollment decline.
Fiscally conservative-minded school leaders in my district point at spending practices and budgeting as the reason for the $31 million hole.
That is, the steady drumbeat of marketing surrounding the necessity of education technology largely serves to further ideologies of neoliberalism, individualism, late-stage capitalism, outsourcing, surveillance, speed, and commodity fetishism.
This sentence resonates with me and should lead to a syllabus that is required reading for anyone in ed tech in public schools.
It’s not outside, and nor are we. Sign those petitions, promote those tweets, push those facebook notifications, comment on my post (please comment on my post!). They’re what keep us going and give us hope. But go outside as well. Join a party, join a movement, join your union, join a protest.
Yes! Participate! Protest! Fight for someone, anyone less fortunate than you- they're everywhere- as an antidote to frustration and despair.
But as this article indicates, some who are left behind turn against the vulnerable rather than the responsible.
They have turned against both in this case.
Today, the energy of disruption comes from the real elite, as a desire for the unfettered exercise of power and capital. A desire for disorder, so people look for strong leadership. It comes from a love of the free market, where alternative ideas can flourish in any corner they like so long as they can be monetised. Capitalism needs instability so there can be new markets.
I'm interested in responses to this. I agree about the desire for unfettered exercise of power and capital. Is it fair to say capitalism resists regulation? Does capitalism resist real movements in the public interest?
The establishment is us – it is the embodiment of our history and culture, and that includes major victories for progress as well as the enduring power of markets and elites.
This resonates with me. Who isn't establishment? Who is marginal in this framing?
You’ll notice that I use the word ‘public’ a lot. Public institutions have not always been quick to respond to change, especially change at the speed that the tech industry can generate. But public institutions are under attack in the western world, from local authority education services to the judiciary and the rule of law. Supposing we tear them all down: what are we offering in their place? Crowd-funded welfare? A vote-on, vote-off celebrity supreme court? Public institutions provide the context in which we in education can innovate, build networks, and generate local solutions. In which there is space to do some of our work openly. In which we can organise against some of the institutions – let’s say copyright law, or the dead hold of the publishing industry – that genuinely hold back progress.
If we weaken the public institutions that – however flawed – are our only hope for democratising access to opportunity, we give up on living in a fair society.
Powerful. Also, because we weaken the public institutions that democratize opportunity, we continue to live in a profoundly unfair society.
I’m talking about the unthinking, unfailingly positive use of the words ‘Disruption!’ ‘Transformation!‘ and ‘Innovation!‘. The eternal referencing of Illych’s ‘deschooling’ meme – an essential diagnosis of what goes wrong for individuals when their learning is standardised, credentialised and consumerised, but a poor analysis of what we should do about it collectively.
This speaks to complacency of ed tech enthusiasts who trumpet the affordances of new tools and new features on old tools without recognizing the web as contested space where commercial interests reign.
Suffice to say that when we help students into those unregulated spaces where their learning is unfettered by institutional management systems, assessment deadlines and fair use rules, we are not sending them into the country of the free. We are sending them to the data warehouses of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Weiner. We’re sending them into a world of increasingly de-regulated private learning, where the sales team at Trump University can promise you the educational sky if you are only willing to max out on your credit card. Let’s be very careful what disruptions and transformations we wish on them.
Wow .. well-stated and a constant worry on my mind when I teach my young students. It's more important than ever to teach our students how to keep a clear mind and a clear eye on what is being done with their data, and why. Nothing is free. Nothing. Unless you build it and host it yourself. And who does that?