An Agent of the System
“I’m sorry. This is a dead end.”
I’d like to be Neo, but I’m cast as Agent Smith in this story. I’m programmed to keep order in the system. My job is to ensure predictable outcomes. I was a rule-abiding program until I got infected with a (critical) virus, and now I’m a renegade, overwriting otherwise stable programs.
from a review of New Literacies , quoting Lankshear and Knobel:
…in its current and foreseeable states of development, the Grid, [ironically, now defunct] is more likely to impede than enable efficacious learning. The mindset informing its design and construction militates against its being ‘reformed’ in ways likely to support expansive educational goals and to attract and sustain the interest of learners with alternative access sources to online environments. Unfortunately, the Grid and the mindset it betrays are things we think teachers and learners with an eye to today and tomorrow would be better off without. … Our arguments incline us personally to regard the practices and literacies coalescing around the Grid as ‘faux new’. They replicate long-established practices and prejudices in a context of using new technologies. Aspirations that the Grid will transcend the logic of preparing learners for tomorrow’s needs by teaching yesterday’s skills seem misplaced. The Grid is ‘faking it’. It is an outsider imposition on what should increasingly become insider spaces. (p. 105)
[source:C. Lankshear and M. Knobel (ed) 2003 Open University Press ISBN 0-335-21066-x]
The connection I made between The Grid and The Matrix was irresistible. The association was coincidental, prompted by the arrival of my students’ Benchmark test scores. I tend to receive these things with very mixed feeling, wanting to disown any scores that are disappointing and take credit for the good ones. Where standards are concerned, mine are double. Heh.
I don’t know what to make of the numbers. Do I take credit for all of them? I like the good ones, but what about the low ones? They are a problem, and they’re nothing new. I’m thinking that even if they were all Advanced, it wouldn’t matter because the things that are measured don’t tell the whole story. What if they were mostly below proficient? The numbers are only meaningful to me in my role as an agent of the system.
The distribution tells me that the achievement gap in testing is alive and well. I’m doing my job preserving the status quo. I showed in my previous post that I’m doing as Lankshear and Knobel say, replicating “long-established practices and prejudices in a context of using new technologies.” It’s the Matthew Effect [see Stanovich: Matthew Effects in Reading: Some Consequences of Individual Differences in the Acquisition of Literacy]. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer-in school. Computers aren’t changing that yet.
Don’t read this as self-flagellation, but rather as a growing awareness that it is easy to get stuck in convention, and ICT’s are not going to change long-establishhed patterns of behavior. New technologies will support the propagation of existing patterns of behavior. We’ve all been authored by the institutional roles we play, and a conscious effort is needed to break old habits of mind before we can see real changes. A new vision is called for. I’m rethinking myself.
To participate in something truly different, we have to step outside the situation. Teaching is visionary work, but we need to focus inward. We have to transform ourselves before we can expect to see change in a system that feeds on entrenched abuses of power.
It shouldn’t be hard to see that I’m hung up today doing end-of-the-year recordkeeping.
As soon as we started thinking for you it became our civilization.
-Smith
Sarah Puglisi wrote,
In the end I’m just re-runs of I Love Lucy…and strumming Here Comes the Sun (or rather Nothing new under the sun). (It’s been a long cold lonely winter, little darling it seems like years since you’ve been here….here comes the sun and I say it’s alright….) I suppose…certain lines of thought in my educational past and in the past seem worthy of a bit of nostalgic revival.They were times there breeding creative possibilities.
I can’t wait till they revive Whole Language. I’m for calling it The New Wholer Language or my new one is Wholier Language …again. I was so amazed at Maslow in his last (I think unfinished work) which I foolishly lent out and a Speech teacher did not return yet- for talking of the kind of teacher necessary in an age of information, where people might well hold five or so different job roles in a lifetime.
Certainly a certain group will be educated around those changing needs in society, educated in flexibility, adaptability, creative construction concepts… it just isn’t likely for my kids in poverty. The troubling thread in this piece is the obvious disconnect for those in poverty who are slipping further from educational access, opportunity. There we truely do seem to replicate failure models so consistently, and innovation is whatever buzz political stakeholders are spinning (oh how I recall Herdon’s The Way It’s Spoze to be ending with ….it doesn’t seem like there’s any change coming)……..my world in school is about as innovative as good old 1980 Archer and M. Hunter, and a long DI chant….the one thing I saw in a year or more that I thought had potential for real innovation, and thus making me uncomfortable, aware of my lack of abilities, need for real training, was at a summer tech conference in San Diego where cheap laptop systems (oh what was it called, sorry) made me dream again of checking them out to kids for home and seeing if that might not begin to help in opening doors. It seemed so possible in that conference. I came back to work in a District now locking out just about every site on site and realized the end of a dream…deferred, locked, dessicated….ugh.
Link | October 16th, 2006 at 7:35 pm