Borderland

What do thank you notes and walking the dog have in common?

What?

They both need to be done in a timely manner.

The dogs wait for me to finish with the many incomprehensible things I waste perfectly good daylight hours doing. They wonder about my ability to remain motionless and stare fixedly at static objects – the same way I marvel at their patience to wait for squirrels in trees.

“When can we go?” They look at me intently, trying to read me for some sign. Dogs are good readers of their humans. Much better, I’d argue, than humans are of their dogs. They move when I move. If I put on coat and boots, they dance and sing. If it’s a false alarm, they flop and wait. They’re waiting right now, while I follow up on these great comments that were left on a recent blog entry.

It didn’t seem right to leave the comments buried down there, and if I wait much longer to respond, there won’t be much point.

Artichoke encouraged me to follow my labyrinthian thought process, not because the ideas are a “bad” or “good” thing/ “easier” or ‘harder” thing” but because of what they can make happen. Yes, that’s me. I’m a wanderer, domesticated now, and have to content myself with making life interesting by rearranging furniture and turning the room inside out. Sometimes a small change can be an occasion for new understanding and reflection.

Michael and Wesley commented on the power of dialog, and I agree completely. Wesley’s comment that “Students today want to be involved in activities that matter, and one of the problems with school is that many students view the things they do there as irrelevant to their lives” is exactly right. Wesley’s question is about how to change attitudes toward technology. But I wonder about whether we can presume to know what will be relevant for everyone, or whether we can say that anything should be relevant to everyone. My neighbor across the road has a small farm. He told me this summer that he has absolutely no interest in the internet. He said, “If I could get on there and find out whether someone has a pile of horse manure to give away, then I might be interested.” Since some people do see the internet as relevant, I suppose our job these days is simply to put people in touch with the piles of horse manure that are out there. Many would say that we should just let people follow their noses. But then we get into a big discussion about internet safety and filtering…

To say, as Wesley does, that “critical literacy is subsumed by digital literacy” is a claim that I’ll argue, and it may be simply a matter of how we define the terms. To me, it should work the other way. Critical literacy is a discourse that interrogates and disrupts relations of power in texts, examining the relationship between text and context. Digital literacy can and should be taught from a critical point of view, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be. As Wesley pointed out, many teachers use it to fulfill Freireian ‘banking model’ pedagogical aims. Teachers use books and videos and talk to do the same thing. There is nothing inherently critical about any particular medium. The critical part comes from our human ability to sort through intention and outcome in communicative activity. That said, I think that Freire would be a blogger these days if he was still around. The power of dialog that conversational media enables is its real power, and Freire advocated dialog as a means of consciousness-raising. Of course, we don’t need electronic media to dialog with our students, but I agree that we could show them how to make it useful for whatever purposes they may devise.

Our understanding of how critical literacy might look in practice is a matter of continuing interest to educators in various settings. A paper by Barbara Comber: Critical literacies: Politicising the language classroom (1997) discusses the need for teachers to join the discussion, and offers some classroom examples while exploring the problematic nature of the discourse as it is may appear in schools. I’ve read some of her other work, and I enjoy her insights. Sharing just a bit from her conclusion

While educators have devoted energy to promoting their preferred versions of critical literacy and conferences have often become battle grounds for theorists, it is essential teachers also enter the debate. We need to critically examine the different versions of critical literacy that emerge and develop complex pictures of what pedagogies for critical literacy look like in different educational contexts.

Moving on, Jeremy gave me a New Year’s “Hmmmm” . I never got one of those before. Thanks, Jeremy. (I guess.) I’ll do my best to live up to it.

Brian left me an awesome comment. His insight and thoroughness is impressive. And when I followed the link back to Brian’s site I learned that everything I said in my Recursion post was something that he’d already covered in his. I wish I’d discovered his work sooner because it would have saved me a lot of time. I’ll have fun going through his archives because I know that I’m going to learn plenty. From his comment, the bit that I especially liked was this

New technologies in education do not lead to fundamental change and creative uses of them can hardly be called innovative. A so-called “disruptive technology” will always fail to disrupt the underlying source of authority in the system and therefore will always be subsumed by it. There is a far more powerful and borg-like technology at play, and that technology is called curriculum.

I added the Wikipedia link to Brian’s word, ‘borg’ because I found it such a great metaphor for the faceless power of curricula. As with terrorism, it’s difficult to fight an enemy that you can’t even recognize.

Marco Polo is thinking about what I had to say, but in the meantime he found Artichoke’s link to a helpful paper about the problem of trying to teach critical thinking in the context of conventional classroom instructional models.

Finally, I notice that Will has my above-mentioned Recursion piece about curriculum on his sidebar (along with stuff by other folks). It’s also on a site called Squidoo, where he is the Lensmaster for Connective Learning. That’s cool! Thanks Will. I’ll ride your coat tails as far as you’ll carry me. What’s Squidoo about, anyway? Have you mentioned it? I don’t always pay attention in class. Sorry if I blanked out for a while.

Now for my poor dogs. We need to stretch while there’s still daylight. It goes by quickly at 64N latitude in early January.

Thanks to everyone who pays attention to what I’m doing here! I know that soon I won’t have time to post to the blog-space so obsessively because I’m due back in my teacher role next week. But that will give me something else to write about.