Apple of my eye

Julian and Kimba

 

Adolescent literacy and the simulacrum

More than 30 years after Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer (1963) called for more research into composition and 40 years after the passage of the National Defense Education Act, which defined reading and writing in terms of national security, we now routinely communicate in something called cyberspace with technologies that must seem to many elderly citizens more fantastic than the gadgets depicted in popular sci-fi films of the 1950s. Those same technologies now provide instant access to information and events that are themselves a function of those technologies. For instance, in a bizarre kind of irony that seem to prove French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s (1983) arguments about appearance and reality, modern political conventions, so long a crucial part of the election process in American society, are now shaped by television and print media in astounding technological efforts to use those same media to shape public opinion: Television represents television representing reality. It all becomes in Baudrillard’s term, simulacra. [Yagelski, Literacy Matters (2000); 13]

Though I really can’t claim to fully understand what Yagelski is saying about political conventions, what he says about technology affecting and standing in for reality, and an acceptance of this symbiotic relationship by the generation coming of age today (the iPod generation, true digital natives) will indeed (and has already) transformed the world and how we know it. I want to explore this a bit.

When I was growing up (boy do I sound old now!), there was TV and there was reality. The two were seperable. I now understand that they weren’t quite as separate as I imagined, that TV represented an ideal, and that I was being duped to believe that somewhere out there lived a Brady or a Partridge family whom I wished I were more like (not perhaps in the broken family part of the picture – my parents stayed together, for better or worse – they celebrated their 43rd anniversary a couple of days ago, but I was enticed by their physical beauty, the glamour of their seemingly average American – and mundane — lives, and probably the way that any problem that upset the cheery equilibrium their almost picture-perfect lives was neatly resolved within 22 minutes). Like many adolescents of my generation (I guess I’m talking about my friends back then), I had crushes on Keith Partridge (often confused with David Cassidy, who played him on TV), and Greg and Bobby, intermittently. These characters and their lives were real to me and I longed to meet them and have my love be reciprocated. Do kids today still have crushes on characters?

Bear with me please, because I honestly don’t think this question is as silly or self-indulgent as it probably sounds. Fast forward (ok now I AM aging myself) a couple or three decades and you have ______ (I don’t even know who kids are crushing on today – need to find out). But from conversations with my 11-year old niece, who seems fairly typical, and what I see in the media, it seems to me that if I were a kid today, and the David Cassidy were still playing Keith Partridge, I might direct my obsession towards the actor and not the character.

And why is this significant? Back to Baudrillard’s simulacra and “there was tv and then there was reality.” Today technology is, as Baudrillard and Yagelski are pointing out, reality; it is inseparable from reality, which is essentially what Baudrillard was presciently saying in his 1981 Simulacrum and Simulation. I want to write more about the whole celebrity culture thang another time, but for now I want to return to the question of adolescent literacy in the 21st century in light of this simulacratic (new word!) world we live in. And in order to do this, I’ll dwell a bit longer on the Bradys and Partridges. When I was a kid and I turned the TV off, Keith (and Bobby and Greg) remained out there. Though they existed in my imagination, I had the distinct sense that they were elsewhere.

Not necessarily so with today’s kids. Which is not to say that “kids today” are deluded into not knowing the difference between television and reality (I am positive that they are smarter and much more savvy than I ever was at their age), but that Web 2.0 changes the nature of our relationships with celebrity, reality, and thereby literacy. Not only do we have more access to celebrities through their blogs — and I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that one motivating factor in “friending” or “tagging” folks through social networks like Myspace and Facebook is the desire to eventually be-“friend” a celebrity through the quick collapse of the six degrees of separation that social networking offers — but, and this is what is really interesting to me, we (can) also create our own celebrity in the level playing field offered through social networking.

This is different from (but integrally linked to) the now common mantra that “privacy is dead.” We do indeed share a lot if not every possible detail about ourselves with others through these media (at least “kids today” do – I guess I shouldn’t say “we,” but I really don’t like writing “kids today,” which is really what I mean). And I would venture to guess that none of these kids who are growing up with social networking as part of the way they socialize worry a lot less about a loss of privacy that encouraged by all this sharing of personal information than I –which is evident in that I have no real profile on these sites, and I don’t care to develop one. My friends who do have profiles on Myspace and Facebook (who, in this example, are usually a bit younger than I), have the sparsest of profiles or at the very least very “honest” ones in that they what they say about them jives precisely with who they are in “reality” or in “person.”

But for social networking natives (better than “kids today,” no?), the line between fantasy and reality must be somewhat muddied. Which is not to say that these kids are dishonest, that they are probably representing themselves falsely, etc., etc. Because “false representation” becomes, in this milieu, a somewhat specious concept. I’m going to temporarily postpone the ethical implications of this statement in order to pursue what I think is a more intriguing implication of this conclusion.

For some this will seem like Postmodernism 101, but again, I think it is worth working through for the sake of extending the discussion to think about the implications of all of this for teaching adolescent literacy. That we need to be integrating kids’ “voluntary literacies” into our classrooms goes without saying. Nor am I interested in concluding that our job as literacy educators is to remind kids about the distinction between “representation” and reality – though I do agree this “media-literacy-ish lesson” is, on some level, a very important part of what we do. But, assuming that this representation and reality are one (Postmodernism 101 again, I know), think about the imperative that this places upon literacy educators to help kids become competent in constructing representations. In other words, “creative writing,” in its new 21st century manifestation, whatever that might be, has never been more important to literacy educators. In addition to digital literacy and a command over the tools of argument and analytical thinking that are so important in traditional literacy instruction, an individual’s ability to craft images, to tell stories, to develop characters will become a key part of the cultural capital commanded by the most literate (and powerful, and wealthy?) individuals in our not-so-distant simulacratic future.

 

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I’m jotting this.

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Wearing a wristwatch

Just watched Ken Robinson’s Visions lecture for the RSA and am inspired, inspired, inspired! I immediately tried to subscribe to the RSA page, since anything that this organization — whose motto is “Removing Barriers to Social Progess” — produces, I want to know about! I’ve just started using an RSS aggregator, and I’m loving having my own personalized newspaper each AM, which includes special sections on education, technology, and (ok) decorating, along with the latest from the independent media at alternet.org. A little paradigm shifting from the RSA each day (or when it comes) would be a welcome addition to the mix.

But back to Robinson. As I wrote in an email to the new media contact at the RSA, I feel like I have found my soulmate in the RSA if not Robinson. HERE are people who are thinking about things the same way that I am. Which is not to say that I could ever aspire to Ken-Robinson- or RSA-stature, but that here is a group of people — an online intellectual community (nod to Will Richardson and Gardner Campbell) — where folks are approaching social change and educational transformation (as Robinson puts it, not reformation, which has been going on — without very impressive results — for a good long time), through eclectic, multi-disciplinary, out-of-the-box, cultural, economic and philosophical routes. I hope I get a response.

So what is it about Robinson’s talk that I found so inspirational? Why do I have such a mind crush on him? In addition to his insightful way of positioning himself vis-a-vis educational reform, and in addition to his presentation of constructivist methods and stances toward teaching and learning in a way that any layperson could understand, and in addition to the way he cites a lack of improvement in literacy rates over time as the principal evidence that all the increased spending on education and all these reforms amounts to little (or no) improvement, it was his suggestive and holistic paralleling of social, economic, and environmental crises with a crisis in education that was so exciting (and so spot-on) to me. The crisis in education, he suggests, directly relates to the way children’s creative thinking is systematically obliterated by the time they reach high school (Robinson’s data, by the way, is drawn from research on US schools, even though Sir Robinson is himself a Brit). He thinks this decline is directly related to standardized testing.

Now I may also be a critic of standardized testing and all the damage is does to today’s students, but it really isn’t Robinson’s powerful condemnation of this assessment mode that is the main thing I take away from his lecture. In fact, it’s probably not even in the top two. Equally important to his point is the way he makes it. Not only is his approach eclectic, drawing from numerous disciplines, but his point is decidedly non-didactic and suggestive (British?). In other words, he pulls together a bunch of data from various disciplines and a wide variety of popular and academic, print and non-print sources that all resonate with and inform each other; they are fascinating in juxtaposition, and seeing them all together like that, drawing conclusions for yourself that the speaker must have made himself allows you to glimpse into the mind of a genius and, for a moment, to share in his vision. Very poetic. Very associative. Very creative. In fact, his way of thinking demonstrates, I’d say, the very type of thinking he suggests we foster in students. A side note on mind crushes: maybe this is how mind crushes happen — you get inside someone’s head and want to know more, to get to know the person better, you conduct a google search, you view his favorites and delicious page, and so on and so on. Originally, I thought Robinson didn’t have much of a web presence, but I realized that I wasn’t accessing his page properly (click on the computer screen icon on sirkenrobinson.com).

But again, back to Robinson’s talk. My absolutely favorite thing about it is that it is geared for digital immigrants, for the generation of people who are over thirty and who tend to run things (education, government, the economy, etc.), but who aren’t in the habit of questioning the assumptions that underly the structures and institutions they run. Robinson tells a humorous story that begins with his asking how many people in the audience consider themselves to be Gen-X-ers? Boomers? Then he asks how many folks are wearing a wristwatch. Same people, different numbers.

He then goes on to tell this story about his daughter and his wristwatch, saying she just doesn’t understand why he wears one. For her generation, “time is everywhere,” he observes: on their iPods, cellphones, computer screens. “Besides,” she says, “It only does one thing!” Why invest in and lug around a single-function device? Robinson then asks this brilliant series of questions of his audience, which I do believe is not only the heart of what he’s advocating, but also the rhetorical heart of his lecture: “How many of you deliberated before putting your wristwatch on today? Should I? Shouldn’t I? How many agonized over the decision?” The answer to this rhetorical question is the point: we don’t question things that construct the fabric of our daily lives, we just habitually accept and do them. Thus we perpetuate the status quo. The point is to question these assumptions, their utility, their implications, their investment in power and the status quo (he doesn’t say all this, but I’m extrapolating here).

Robinson’s elegantly simple illustration demonstrates to all who hear the lecture (in the audience or via the web), that questioning these assumptions — critical thinking and self-reflection — is at crux of “educational transformation.” We need to take a good strong look at ourselves and the social architecture in which we have constructed ourselves, our dreams, our beliefs, our assumptions. Then we have to look at the young people for whose “benefit” we nurture and reform these institutions. And THEN we have to ask ourselves the tough question of whose interests are being served here? How are we inspiring these kids to be creative and revision the world in THEIR own best interests?

 

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Originally uploaded by cynderina

 

My top two favorite guys in the whole wide world (www)

I guess this is the “other stuff” part of my blog. It’s all of a piece, and these guys make me who I am. I suppose this is all part of my figuring out my “web identity” and what a blog does to construct that. Under construction…

 

Why blog?

My reason for doing this (from a letter to a colleague, 18 June 2007):

It does seem as if keeping up with netgenners requires more time than most of us have in a day. I know I can almost never find time to do the journalling that — I do know from those periods when I HAVE been able to sustain a writers’ notebook — truly feeds my creativity and scholarship and, regardless of the time it takes, actually serves to enhance my life and make me more productive than were I not doing it (I feel the same way about exercise). For myself, I know that I NEED to be journalling in this way if I am going be living and working at my full creative and scholarly potential.

A blog seems like the ideal place to do this kind of writing, both because I have more partially filled journals laying about my office than I care to count, a problem that a blog’s virtual and archival quality solves for me, AND because of the blog’s nonlinear (linkable) quality, which I would imagine nicely complements the way I think, and might actually serve to further my thinking than were I developing my thoughts in a vacuum. Which is to say that I imagine blogging, in it’s most engaged and responsive moments, to be something like a cross between being at a great conference and having discovered an excellent piece of scholarship that inspires you to annotate, research, and write. The difference, being, of course, that in the virtual manifestation (i.e., the blog), the normally limiting variables of space and time are completely at your command: you engage in the conversation at your discretion, choosing when (and if) to engage; and the annotation, research, and writing can happen instantaneously and pursued in infinite directions. But my fantasy of this vitual life of the mind might be simply that: I agree with you in that simply chatting for chat’s sake is something I have no interest in nor time for, and if that’s waht this turns into, I’m out.

In any event, your idea of a prayer journal sounds like a great one. My thinking about this blog thing — and all reflective writing, for that matter — is that whatever you do, it needs to be for you (i.e. not others) and add meaning to your life (which is why I made that comment today about my wanting to keep a personal blog in addition to one for our classes). If you kept your prayer journal online, perhaps you might be able to link some of your writings to online scripture, which could at the very least be handy. Or you might link to other contemplative sites, which might take your thoughts in other directions. WHo knows? You might even find yourself connected to other people interested in similar ideas, and together constructing knowledge and understandings that take you well beyond where you might have gone solo? I would be willing to bet money, that were you to do it for a year, it would begin to evolve in ways to reflect your many interests and facets. This is at least the way I am intending to go about it — start small — focusing on English Ed stuff — and commiting for a period of time in the hopes that as I learn the medium, it will evolve to be a more dynamic thing.

But, as in all writing endeavors, at your own pace and as it suits you (and me ). It’s amazing how much we learn about teaching from learning ourselves! See you tomorrow; if it’s anythign like today was, I can hardly wait!!

My commitment for the summer: blog regularly (at least 3x/wk) for the rest of the summer and see what happens.