Teachers are Radicals: Teaching, activism, and other (un)related stuff

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.