Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi's TED Talk about "The Danger of a Single Story" was enlightening and so true. Many of us have perspectives about people based on one or two stories we hear that many times are the same "single story." If that is all you ever hear about a people or culture, what elso do you have to believe. This is so important to understand in an education environment where we are choosing materials to use to support curriculum or in some cases the curriculum itself. As soon as she started talking I immediately began thinking of the typical English curriculum which usually involved the "old dead white guys" we usually hear about with not much real diversity in the authors or stories being read. Fortunately this is something that is starting to be addressed in schools to offer up a more diverse group of works with many different stories.
As a teacher in the social science subject matter, this is also very important to bring in resources that show a variety in people and cultures so that students do not just have one perspective to go off of. If one side of a story is all you ever hear it will shape your perspective and biases without ever really having an opportunity to make informed decisions about what is really occurring in the world. It doesn't help that our media tends to like and focus on items that are sensational which usually revolve around poverty, drugs and violence. My Instagram project tells different aspects of my story although it may be slightly single sided. While I look like a great dad, and hope I am and strive to be, I could have included images of me planning lessons or doing homework leaving my wife to take care of the babies solo. I have had to shirk some of my duties in order to keep up with the demands of this program. I am not perfect. Perhaps if my wife told a story of me during this process it would focus on another aspect of our lives. I could also tell the story of the quality of my work. Perhaps it is not where I would like it to be in all aspects of my life. When I'm being a dad and husband, I feel I'm taking time away from my duties as a student and teacher. When I'm being a student, I'm not focusing on being a dad or teacher and so on. So there are many possible sides to my story, but this is what I chose to share. I have to say, Austin Kleon's book was quite enjoyable and made me thing about what I post online, and the value of my posts. While reading, I realize I guess I don't really share much of my "work" so to speak... Unless you count the hours I put into being a good dad. That is what the majority of my posts are about. I don't try to just post cute baby pictures of my kids though (sometimes, but not always...). I do try to make selections that have to do with them learning something or trying new things. It just so happens that they are cute and the pictures turn out that way. This may also be because Instagram is probably my preferred method of posting online so it usually revovlves around an image or occasional video.
Thinking about it from a teacher's standpoint I never really thought about posting the work I am doing. Aside from more or less being made to post for a class I am in for my credential I usually have maintained a pretty solid separation from social media. I have posted insightful tweets on Twitter I have come across but not much more. I do a lot of work for this credential program if you look at classes and homework I do myself in addition to the hours I spend planning for and then teaching lessons. I suppose I have been reluctant to show students in any posts and therefore have not tried to create any "real time" or "action" posts form class. This is something I am thinking about doing now because we do some cool stuff in class. Another aspect I haven't even thought about is showing my process, although I guess we have been doing that for the class we are in. But with regards to planning for my classes I am teaching I never even thought about how or what to post from my planning process. I still don't have any concrete ideas to share my work but I will be on the lookout moving forward. I just want to make sure it reflects the time energy and passion I have for what I am doing and doesn't waste anyone's time, but I need to be better about putting myself out there.
Next installment of the Storified Twitterchat. Again, like the first time I think there is great value in the online collaboration that occurs on these chats and the resources that can be shared for the particular topics are amazing. This one today focused on teaching the Holocaust through different types of primary sources. While the Holocaust is not something I have much experience teaching yet, I did get some great resources to put in my tool kit for future use. I also had my Storify and Tweetdeck open so logistically speaking I made it much more efficient to consolidate chats and create my slide show this time! Here it is...
For the last 3 chapters of the book, Thomas and Brown make the connections between Knowing, Making, and Playing to the ideas of "hanging out," "messing around," and "geeking out" which deals with the level of interacting within the ideas of collectives as discussed earlier in the book.
Chapter 7 specifically deals with the differences between knowing, making, and playing. They discuss knowing in terms of exactly that, "knowing." What this means is a focus on the "what." This we can all relate to as this is what the traditional classroom setting usually focused around: being able to recall facts. They then go further to to discuss knowing is not only what but now-a-days "where." Students no longer need to just be able to recall facts because we have a wealth of knowledge at our fingertips. The focus should be on knowing where we can find the information and then what we can do with it. They state, "in the new information economy, expertise is less about having a stockpile of information or facts at one's disposal and increasingly about how to find and evaluate information." This is at the heart of what we try and do in the social sciences. Get the students to not just know facts but be able to find it and think for themselves connecting the issues at hand to those facts. In this chapter they also discuss making. From there they discuss making and the importance of "hands on" activities. This is something that resonated with me as I have tried to have my students use the Knowledge to make more original works to show their interpretation of the information. Unfortunately technology is limited so this is sometimes limited in the way we can incorporate the activities in the classroom, but we make due. The idea of re-imaging existing images is something I will surely incorporate into my class with the creation of memes and similar activities. In chapter 8 they make the connections between knowing, making, and playing with the ideas of Hanging out, Messing around, and Geeking out with regards to levels of participating in online communities/collectives. "Hanging out" refers to "learning to be" a member of those communities and this is really where I think I still fall in the spectrum of online involvement. At the other end of the spectrum is "geeking out" which is supposed to be an intense autonomous development of participation in the communities you are interested in. Unfortunately, even in the communities of topics I am most interested in I do not have an intense autonomous urge to participate so I don't foresee me getting to this point for some time. Even where I have my own student voice and choice involved, getting to geeking out seems to be more forced than something I want to do, but perhaps in the future. Chapter 9 wraps the book up by looking at the online gaming communities such as World of Warcraft and the gamers ability to learn through play. This was very interesting and I think it is very cool how they can tap into the wealth of information their community is sharing. They mention that collective indwelling is "the feeling and belief that group members share a tacit understanding of one another, their environments, and the practices necessary to complete their task" and while reading this I thought where have I seen this before? Must this sort of engagement and learning occur in a game? The answer is no. Although the knowledge base is potentially higher to tap into, I did this for 12 years in the Marine Corps with good old fashioned ingenuity and creativity. But I suppose this sort of community can't help but to help develop these skills in our future leaders. Unfortunately, I don't think I see myself playing any games in the future. I have too many lessons to plan! But it does make me think of ways to make may students play in order to learn. |
Mr. SiersStudent of Pedagogy Archives
May 2016
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