Full of Questions

One of the most thought provoking questions came from Boudin’s article when her students asked “What can we do with everything we are learning?” (p.222). Isn’t that the question we all ask ourselves every week? How can we apply what we are learning to our respective work? It can be so difficult to bridge the gap between the theoretical and the application. I am looking across a country filled with theory X students, yet I desperately want to bring them into theory Y. It comes up for me on a weekly basis. In fact, someone asked me today to fix all of the new hire classes for the call center, so that they aren’t so process oriented, but reflect the principles of adult learning. How can I flip the model of learning to take what we do in this class, where we read/review and process materials and then come to class to discuss, and apply it to a call center? Or apply the principles of adult learning to the branch environment? Neither of my audiences is actively interested in learning. I realize the same holds true for most children in the school system as well, so this is not a unique problem.

The participants in Boudin’s correctional facility class and in Precious’ class weren’t actively seeking knowledge either. Yet, in both examples, they ultimately found their personal reasons to want to learn. And they made it their own, either through journaling or through the creation of a play on AIDS. Their ability to internalize what they were learning and make it meaningful was a sign of a successful learning experience. However, I can’t make banking or procedures to support federal regulations personal, so these specific tactics won’t work, but I will keep searching for inspiration.

The other question that surfaced while I was reading Michelson's article on self-narration is "do you know who you are?" She doesn't ask it outright, but writes around the question. Do you have to be self-aware to write about your experiences to define them as action learning? She makes a leap of faith in her writing that gives a certain amount of credit that action learning is an automatic experience. Many personal accounts can be captured on the page without true understanding. Do we really think that everyone in our society grows from their experiences? Or do they simply make the same mistakes over and over without learning the lesson? Do they get to a certain point and just hit a plateau?  Or perhaps the patterns and therefore the learning happens after the words are on the page. Maybe it is in the combination of reflection, distance and time where the true learning occurs.  

Me and Precious

After everyone telling me I'd bawl for hours I put off reading Push. I just didn't have it in me to cry so much. But because I hate being surprised, I read the synopsis on Wikipedia when the movie came out (side note: it is how I decide if I want to see something, especially if it's sad). But I loved the book and I only cried a little (yay for being pro-spoiler!). Here are a few observations:

I thought it was really interesting how she became more aware of her situation, as well as her own possibilities, as her literacy level increased.

It was subtle, but I loved how Sapphire made her "writer," Precious, become better with spelling and grammar as the novel wore on. Because Precious WOULD get better as she wrote more and more.

Is Blue Rain like, the most perfect person ever? She totally seems like it. I am very sensitive to these things, but I hope Sapphire didn't make her a lesbian so Precious could see her as less than perfect.

I was not prepared for all the uncomfortable sex stuff, but she seemed to work through that in a similar fashion as she did everything else. Before, she did not have the knowledge or vocabulary to express what was really going on, and then, after the incest group, she realized she was not alone and you could tell she understood what she felt was shame.

Narratives, which are “fact” and which are “fiction”?

In the beginning section of Michelson’s article, “If the Self Is a Text, What Genre Is It? Structure and Ideology in Narratives of Adult Learning,” there are two statements that caught my attention:

  “life histories produced by adult learners in our classrooms are, in important senses, fictions (Michelson,  2011). That is, the narratives that students produce, however much they originate in real events, are multiply overdetermined (having more than one determining psychological factor) by the structural and ideological frames within which they are encouraged to write.” [page 200]

“Brookfield (2000), in turn, argues that ‘narratives of critical analysis in which people experience contradictions, are visited by revelations, get better, and come to fuller self-knowledge are necessary palliatives but essentially false’” [page 202]

In my analysis of the article, these two statements (and others) formed the foundation for Michelson’s critique of the “Bildungsroman,” a type of writing sometimes referred to as a “coming-of-age” story.  But my question is this – who determines what is “fiction” or what is “false” in someone’s life story?

For example, in the novel “Push” by Sapphire, Precious takes her file (the social worker’s narrative of her life) from the social worker’s cabinet and reads it.  In the file, the narrative of Precious' life is very negative.  She chooses to de-emphasize her accomplishments, e.g. winning the mayor’s achievement award, focuses on Precious’s low TABE test scores, and bemoans the time and resources it would take for Precious to earn a GED or get into college.  The social worker summarizes that Precious would be better off entering a one of several workfare programs (perhaps becoming a home attendant) and believes Precious “seems to envision social services, AFDC, as taking care of her forever."

On the other hand, not only does Precious vigorously challenge the social worker’s assessment  with her statement “I'm getting my G.E.D., a job, and a place for me and Abdul, then I go to college,” but her journal is full of positive affirmations about doing well for herself and her children.

Both narratives, the social worker’s official report and Precious’s journal, are based on real events or facts, but who is to say which narrative is “fact” and which one is “fiction”?

Technology may not always be the answer....

I attended an educational conference on Friday that began by assuming two things: 1. That the US has one of the worst healthcare systems in the world (an aggressive start considering the audience was full of physicians who can't understand how bad the system is when everyone from all over the world comes to the US for treatment) and 2. That the worst health care system must therefore be doing a bad job of educating the apparently inadequate physicians (even though physicians from all over the world try to come to US to get trained at residencies here).
This made me think of the topic of technology.  For whatever reason we assume that newer is better.  In today's world we also think faster and more innovative is better.  Technology is better. Whatever we used to do (like use a landline to call someone) is outdated and ineffective.  We have to find a new and better way to do things and technology will do this for us!
I'm not sure this is true in medical education or education at any level.  We've been training physicians in the US for over 100 years with, in my humble opinion, pretty darn good results.  In those 100 years there have been many cases of trial and error, modifications, and revisions of the system to produce better doctors.  For some reason the mindset now is all that experience is rubbish in the face of new technology.
The problem is that the most important person in the equation, the learner, has remained essentially the same in the last hundred years.  I'm not sure all the technology in the world is going to make competent orthopedic surgeons in four or even three years, when we've learned that it takes five years!
I'm all for making education better and more efficient, but I dont think we give ourselves enough credit for what we currently do.  I think we expect more out of technology than it may be able to provide.  The learner should always remain the focus

Social Technographics Ladder

I really enjoyed our discussion in class on Tuesday with Dr. Rhodes, she brought up a lot points that I had never really thought of before when it comes to the way we use technology. When we were reviewing the Social Techno-graphics ladder, I was surprised by how high on the ladder I was. I don't think of my self as being the most technically savvy person out there (just last semester during a presentation Melissa taught me what a hash tag was and how to use it - sad). I see the ladder and think "okay - I'm a joiner", that's as high as I go. However, when Dr. Rhodes brought up being a critic and gave the example of leaving feedback for a business online - I moved up the ladder to critic. When we were talking about being a creator and we were talking about our personal blogs that we keep for this program - I moved up the ladder to creator. It was fun to break it down and really see how involved I am when it comes to social media.

The Presentation of Self

I forgot to blog last week... but the articles we read were (of course) right up my alley.

I have been on twitter since 2008, under the name I use for everything online, bunnycaper. I was public and open and didn't think of people outside of my circle reading my thoughts, because I guess I didn't spend a lot of time reading through tweets of people I didn't know and I projected that belief to others, I guess. I sent my twitter to private a few years ago so only people that I approved could follow me, and started another account for personal and school.

This was ok for a while: adult learning-related things were posted to one account and TV/music/all the hilarious things I say to another. It felt like I was splitting myself in two. Like the Marwick and boyd article, I was having a hard time maintaining public and private information so I stopped using the (public) school account and switched my personal account from private to public.

Right before I read this article, I began to have similar thoughts about authenticity and self-presentation on my own. Was I really being myself online, when I filtered my thoughts to different places with different settings? After all, my personal account was used less and less for weird personal rants--I was learning to present myself in a certain way and filter the comments I didn't want anyone to read. I felt like my social media usage was maturing, and I was growing up, but there was some self-censorship going on. After reading this article and seeing what I was really doing... I am ok with self-censorship. I don't think you need to post everything you are thinking all the time. I guess I was figuring out how to balance.

I think "I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately" is going to be one article I come back to repeatedly to analyze & get deeper insight into my own social media usage.

Everyone Loves a Good Story

In elementary school, I was very shy.  I rarely spoke up in class unless someone else spoke to me first, and even my interactions with my classmates were quite limited.  I am not sure why that is...perhaps it is a phase that a lot of children go through at one time or another.  However, despite my shyness, I loved to write.  Writing stories was my favorite part of class time.  Through writing I felt more confident in expressing my creativity and ideas and communicating bits and pieces of my personality to others.  Essentially, it gave me a voice and a way of making sense of the world.  Even as an adult, I often feel that I learn best through writing.  I may read something or listen to a lecture and feel that I have understood the subject matter, but I'm not really confident that I've learned something until I have written about it.  For this reason, I would agree with Rossiter and Boudin that writing can be a powerful tool for making sense of life events and for forming one's identity.  

As Rossiter mentions, "To be a person is to have a story.  More than that, it is to be a story."  People have been making sense of the world through stories and narratives for centuries.  The idea of narratives and passing down knowledge, genealogy, and national identity through stories transcends cultural barriers, ideologies, and languages.  Everyone loves a good story!  Perhaps that is why stories and narratives have survived for so long as a means of conveying knowledge and identity.  Conversely, if someone changes the story or writes against the dominant discourse, they can bring about a transformation of ideas and identities, just like the women in Boudin's Adult Basic Education class.

However, I also agree with Michelsen that the dominant discourse has taken over the traditional narrative to such an extent that it is not always effective in producing authentic self-reflection and identity formation.  Because the models of personal narratives that are taught often anticipate the process of critical reflection  and the types of epiphanies that students are supposed to reach through this process, I feel that the narratives are sometimes contrived to meet the teacher's expectations.  For example, one of the student workers from my office, an immigrant from India, was required to write a personal narrative for a writing class.  She asked me to look over it and give her feedback before she turned it in to her professor.  In her narrative, she told a touching story about how she overcame racism in her first place of employment.  When I asked her about it later, she said that she "just made it up."  It wasn't that she hadn't actually encountered racism in the workplace, but it wasn't nearly to the extent that she portrayed it in her paper.  She said that she had exaggerated the situation to make her paper more interesting for the professor, and then she "made up" some reflections about the experience because that is what she was told to include in her paper.

I think that one of the reasons that writing was so effective for the students in the novel Push was because they had the freedom to write whatever they wanted without being given expectations about the content of their work.  In this way, they really had the liberty to find their own voices and identities, by taking ownership of their own stories.

The readings this week were really interesting, and I am looking forward to talking about these complex issues in class.

The Atlantic Says VCU Education Degree Not Worth It

Sorry to be the naysayer of the group - but The Atlantic reports that a high school graduate will earn $107,000 MORE after 20 years than a VCU graduate with an education degree (that's in-state, the number is $169,000 for out-of-state). This is not a perfect study, but it raises many questions for me... How terribly are teachers paid? Why is VCU's tuition so high? WTF are we gonna do about this?

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/03/these-us-colleges-and-majors-are-the-biggest-waste-of-money/359653/

Reflection on narratives

In reading this week's readings about narratives, I have a deeper understanding of a project we completed in Dr. Muth's 601 class: an educational biography. This is the second time I am reading Michelson's article about the self as text, and I'm finding myself reflective about that educational biography, and putting it into the framework of this class.

I found the educational biography project really difficult to complete.  We moved a lot when I was a kid, so I attended a huge number of schools throughout my K-12 years.  I even put off going to grad school for a really long time because I was never an awesome student until my latter years in undergrad, and even then, my confidence was not great.  Reading Boudin's article about learners in prison also struck a chord with me, as it writes a lot about poverty and situational life instability---familiar topics.  This quote resonated with me, talking about the prisoners' lack of self-confidence when it came to education:

...they brought with them negative feelings about education and about themselves as learners.  Attitudes about race, class and gender undermined their confidence to learn academically, compounding their insecurities about school. --Boudin, p215

I think I'd suggest to Dr. Muth that he add the Boudin reading to the Michelson reading for the 601 class, when discussing how to write about the narrative self.  I think the two are great companions to one another, coming from different perspectives.  I'm reflective of my educational biography project, which might look different if I wrote it today.  However, I could probably rewrite it every semester in this program and have a different perspective. That's one of the goals of this program, though, right?  Critical reflective practice?

To tie it back into digital literacy, and because I was tempted to just type a smiley face at the end of that last paragraph, I leave you with Chelsea Peretti from Brooklyn 99:

Banning Technology?

Preface: I'm only embedding an image so that I can show Caitlin that I'm not a complete luddite despite my not knowing what is "Pintrest" (though if I lived in the 19th century, I totally would have been!). Also, I'm a fan of Latrice Royale.

Dr. Rhodes mentioned that the Waldorf school she visited didn't allow students to use technology (until high school? - my handwritten notes were unclear ... if only I had a tape recorder ;-) which reminded me of an Huffington Post article I read. I spent at least 15 minutes in class "google jockeying," trying to find the article, but I could not. Furthermore, by the time I would have found it, the conversation had moved on. Not one to be discouraged by a failed google search, I came home and looked through my browser/browser's history (is browser an adjective modifying history or does the history belong to the browser? I could just say browsing history to simplify the matter, but where's the fun in that?). Back on March 10th - which took a while to backtrack using chrome - I found it! Below is the table and a link to the article which recommends the maximum length of time children should be exposed to technology based on age - according to several doctors, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Canadian Pediatric Society. This blog is either a metacognitive exercise in digital literacy or a pedantic recitation of my process to cut and paste a table. Whatcha think - about any of it?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cris-rowan/10-reasons-why-handheld-devices-should-be-banned_b_4899218.html?fb_action_ids=10100340181879657&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%5B602202916533106%5D&action_type_map=%5B%22og.likes%22%5D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D

Purposefully Developing Digital Literacy

About a month ago, a friend of mine asked me to check out some books for her from the VCU Library.  Her 13-year-old niece was working on a project on French theater, and needed some literacy criticism to include in her discussion paper.  As I got off the elevator on the fourth floor of Cabell Library, call numbers in hand, I was met by the sight of diligent students hard at work on their laptops, tablets, and other portable electronic devices.  I quietly made my way past them and into the library stacks...where I found myself...ALONE... with hundreds of old, dusty books.  I selected the 10 books that were on the list and went downstairs.  Some students in the elevator were giving me curious looks as though to say, "what is she doing with so many books?"  When I reached the circulation desk, there was a long line.  It soon became apparent to me that I was the ONLY person there to actually check out books.  Everyone else was there for renting laptops or asking a question about computer issues.  Are books slowly becoming obsolete?  Many experts think so.  In fact, I recently read a book by Nicholas Carr called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains (which I found VERY interesting).  But this is perhaps another topic for another time...

It is no secret that technology is all around us and (rapidly) changing every day.  Our education system is inundated with a cornucopia of digital media.  Furthermore, there is a tremendous push for educators to incorporate technology in the classroom.  This is an exciting time to work in education! But at the same time, I wonder if we are effectively teaching digital literacy.  Do students really participate in digital literacy events, or are they just learning discrete computer skills?  I think that we have come a long way in the past decade, but we still have quite a way to go. As Coiro pointed out in this week's reading, almost anyone can "access and consume information" that the digital world has to offer.  However, he goes on to say that "not everyone is equipped to build on that information in ways that generate new knowledge."  This is so very true.

In my own experience as a K-12 student, and later as an undergraduate student, I feel that I was exposed to a variety of resources, but I was essentially left to my own devices to learn how to use them effectively and meaningfully.  In my undergraduate institution, every student was required to take a content course with a "digital literacy" component.  In my case it was a Victorian Poetry class.  To satisfy the necessary requirement, the professor taught us how to search for literary criticism in JSTOR.  He did not actually teach us how to "consume" the information, but only how to look up articles on different topics, then import then into RefWorks and cite them MLA style.  Somehow, by performing this task effectively, I was suddenly deemed digitally literate by the university. 

I think that as educators, it is so important for us to continue on this journey of understanding digital literacy!

Fluency Takes Time

I enjoyed reading New Standards for Online Thinking, but it scripts a tall order for what a successful online reader-and teachers of those students-should do.  I agree with many of the points Coiro makes about developing flexible mindsets, problem-solving skills, sustained focus, etc. but I couldn’t help to think of many of the adult education students and how far removed their academia is from something like the self-regulated reading cycle described in disjuncture #3. Digital literacy will certainly play a large role in their future success but speaking as a realist, which hyperlink to click or ignore is the last of their concerns when the basics of reading and writing are at the forefront (e.g. Precious). I believe each student is completely capable of achieving all that is mentioned, it’s just getting them to hang in there long enough-along with the teachers-to develop deeper understandings of how to navigate the complexities of the online world will take time.

A take-away from the article which has morphed into my generative term for the week is fluency.  This idea about how many words are read and how many are skipped depending on the medium is interesting and something I do all the time…perhaps take for granted!  Until this reading I hadn’t thought much about how I honed skills to ignore the extraneous and became savvy enough to know what shouldn’t be clicked.

I also found Marwick and Boyd’s imagined audience intriguing.  Historically, I shy away from sharing myself on social media platforms (LinkedIn in the exception) but when I considered why I’ve done this I realized it is because of my imagined audience! Consequently, this concern with my digital identity has actually hindered my fluency with handling and navigating popular social media sites.  I guess I’m still testing how safe I consider  digital spaces to be, and a large part of that is the audience I’ve imagined...but likely isn’t!