Fall 2013 Early British Literature.  A book in my hand that we later learned to call “The Brick” and a small room filled with less than twenty students. Almost all of them Berkeley bound kids with stiff backs and the latest vegan craze stinking up the classroom. Well it wasn’t their food that stank that the classroom, it was their attitudes.

 

You read what over the summer?

I just finished reading Jane Eyre and all of Jane Austen’s novels.

Oh, interesting but I don’t think that’s sophisticated enough for me.

I can’t text like that. I have to write grammatically correct or I’ll go insane. Texting is really messing with writing and makes everyone sound stupid.  

Tablets and computers will never be equivalent to a book when it comes to learning.

I’m so embarrassed that I’m apart of this generation.

 

So how do you survive two years of literacy bullying? You pretend to be like them so they don’t leave you out of discussions or judge you about the things you prefer to read.  Professors stood behind the students and secretly judged those who pulled out a laptop or started to fall asleep during their two hour monotone lecture. So in the next two years it was slowly instilled into me that literacy came only in the form of a twentieth century or earlier novel. Literacy only came from reading and writing tiny print on a white piece of paper.

 

Fall 2015 Introduction to Literacy Studies. Thank you Kim Jaxon for teaching me that for once they weren’t completely right.

 

In a weird backwards world the nerd girls had become the “social queens” and I had become the outcast “tough cookie.” My parents taught me to read whatever I had wanted as long as I read. So for the longest time I grew up thinking that reading was reading. Everything and anything was good enough (except for Twilight because let’s be honest). Of course I couldn’t see that my idea of literacy and their idea of literacy had been molded by our sponsors. Deborah Brandt and Margaret Finders really made it clear to me. So while both my parents, who wouldn’t call themselves readers, encouraged my literacy by letting me read anything from Vogue, National Geographic, Harry Potter, and Goosebumps; their well educated parents pushed a different genre of literacy on them.

 

I look at my grandmother, myself, my sister, and my cousin. One writes letters with carefully written cursive, one texts, one blogs, and one tweets.

 

My point? My point is that we are all different, we all communicate differently. The way we communicate is greatly influenced by the world around us. Time has become a sponsor of our literacy without us even knowing it has. When something important needs to be said my grandmother will write long letters taking almost two pages to express how upset she feels about a situation. My 16 year old sister will write a two paragraph blog with relevant gifs on Tumblr about how annoyed she is with her school’s dress code. My 11 year old cousin will tweet out in less than 140 characters and tags about how excited she is to be going on a field trip to the Exploratorium. And I’ll simply text the only three people I actually care to talk with emoticons and abbreviated words. My grandmother didn’t have a cell phone or social media to express her concerns. She had some stationary and a pen. I grew up when cellphones were just becoming apart of everyone’s life. My sister and cousin grew up with social media being an influence on everyone’s life.

The time we grow in up not only influences the way we communicate but also sponsors our literacy. We might all have the same concerns but we are going to communicate them differently. One’s not better than the other and one form should not be valued over the other.

So if I decide that I want to become a teacher, I want students to understand that what you read, how you communicate, how you learn and understand can never be limited to one way. No one has made me see how important this until I arrived to Room 442 where certain interesting and exceptional beings blew my mind away.

…’cause it’s a dude looking at a mirror.  IT’S FUNNY.  Moving on…

English 332 ended up being less of a giant wake-up for me than it was a solid reinforcement of some ideas I’ve had as far as how to undergo teaching… I guess a common term used to define this transition in the gaming industry would be “evolutionary” vice “revolutionary”.  I already knew I wasn’t going to follow traditional paradigms with regards to how I conducted a classroom, however, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the research other individuals had conducted was favoring the direction I was moving in, as well as giving me ammunition for when the time comes to defend that particular foxhole.

The course did give me some interesting ideas as to how to incorporate elements of gaming into the classroom, and where to adjust the challenge of the assignments as needed, from a perspective of desired challenge derived from gaming theory.  Deviating from the standard will be a challenge in itself in terms of designing an intuitive and effective program, but ultimately will result in a better education for my students.  I’ll be taking the idea of “social learning skills” and “apprenticeship” quite a bit further than simply giving out copious group projects and forcing my students to wish death upon me far too many times before it mercifully acquiesces to their pleas.  I won’t be “that guy”.

What I will do, largely as a result of my courses this semester, is keep my ear to the proverbial ground.  What are my students doing for entertainment?  How are they communicating “normally”?  What are they reading, to the delight and derision of other teachers?  How can I engage them on level ground, and, without boring or scaring them, give them the access they’ll need to thrive as adults?  In order to teach, I will have to engage in learning myself, and employ one of the strongest human traits so many “bad teachers” failed to use:  adaption.

I will also have to be very aware of things like tool access and “unwritten lessons”, as I call them, constantly asking questions like, “Are they learning to craft a better essay, or are they learning to craft a better essay for me.”  Will the act of writing a paper in my class be an act of creativity, or one where the student plays the time-honored game of “Guess-what-the-teacher-wants”, or that other high-school/college favorite, the writing projects that emphasize mind-reading skill over independent thought.

As final addendum to this, I decided to refresh myself as to just how difficult it can be to learn a completely new concept, employing any and all techniques as I could to finish this.  The result was a completed animation project for my related English 431 course, and though it’s far from perfect, I learned hell of a lot making it.  Bear in mind, I’m not an art major and have had no training in making animation, video, or animated video: https://youtu.be/vSA6UuCN7KA

It’s also the first successful assignment submission I’ve made featuring Dickbutt.  That was your warning and the last I’ll give!

     In all honesty I walked into this class feeling completely burnt out even though we had just come back from summer break. English had been something I had loved my entire life. The only thing I was even sort of good at without having to study my booty off for. I grew up with books endlessly being handed to me. Apparently when you love to read people are willing to give you books even if it’s not Christmas or your birthday. I came to Chico and declared myself a liberal studies major, while also considering an English Education major. After my freshman year there was a shift inside myself and the subject of english didn’t make my world brighter anymore. All of the creativity that seemed to surround every word, every paper I had ever written, and every book I had read didn’t set my soul on fire. But as I walked into Kim’s class I had hope because an amazing professor from the year before had strongly recommended her, claiming she was the “Yoda of the English Department”.

     Our book groups and our article groups provided us with a new kind of freedom that is very rarely experienced in the classroom setting. I loved the conversations that were able to happen where separate minds shared their thoughts and came away with something bigger. I loved that in these groups and in this class in general we were treated like human beings and not just students. In these groups I got to know different people in my class on a more personal level. And together, through learning that literacy is all around us and cannot be confined to one single definition, we got to laugh together and truly learn the whole way through.

     As we sat down on that first day and were asked to define literacy I knew that this was the seemingly simple door to something bigger. When we went even further and talked about our sponsors of literacy and read some of Deborah Brandt it was a reality check. Of the countless sponsors that are tied to my education I realized how blessed I was to have parents who cared about my education and supported me, financially and emotionally, every step of the way. It also lead to realizations about availability and privilege. It was at this point where I fully understand the full privilege I had because at this time in my Anthropology class we were learning about all of the ways humanity has torn our world apart. I learned that in order to go to war with other countries we take part in dehumanizing other humans. We give them a different face. A face we are able to fear and even hate. Instead of a face that has a family praying for their safety back home just as our soldiers did. I learned that millions of people around the world STILL don’t have access to clean water. I learned that throughout history humans have killed in the name of the gods they believe in, in the name of the God I believe in. And in the face of all of this I didn’t feel that I deserved the privilege and blessings I was born into while one in every five children in the United States lives in poverty today. While all of this is happening around the world I was being asked to explore what literacy IS. And now at the end of this semester there’s that new hope again. I believe that wanting to teach tiny humans is special because Santa still exists and they’ve heard “no” a lot less times than older humans have. I now know that we as future teachers have a responsibility and the opportunity to hack education and redefine what failure means.

So thank you to all of you. You all blew me away and I will forever remember this class when looking back at my college career.

P.S. : Shoutout to Ed for being an awesome human being who should seriously consider being a high school drama teacher. You’ll blow their minds, break every drama geek stereotype, and make us the coolest kids in school.

P.S. #2: Kim, you are most definitely more than worthy of the title, “Yoda of the English Department”. Thank you for bringing out the kid in all of us.

     

So we’ve arrived at the end…

This class was completely surprising.  It didn’t talk about literacy in the way I expected.  It didn’t focus on literacy as specifically learning to read and write and when it did, it expanded our preexisting ideas of what these texts about which the public so desperately needs to learn to read and write were exactly.  What I learned is this:

Literacy is about competency.  Literacy is influenced by a variety of factors and manifests itself in a multitude of forms.  Literacy must be understood in all of its complexities to be taught and taught in all of its forms to be understood.

When schools seek to increase literacy rates they should be looking at literacy as a multifaceted concept and teach it as such.  Szwed lists examples such as graffiti, sheet music, cereal boxes, and closed captions as valid forms of literacy.  He, along with others, makes the argument that literature can be diverse without creating a hierarchy.  A lack of formality doesn’t indicate a lack of knowledge.  In fact, this diversity should be encouraged.  Students should know when to use what diction and level of formality and shouldn’t be taught that a specific dialect or convention is inherently wrong, but rather better used in certain environments.  Literature is encountered constantly in every aspect of life and when schools pretend most forms don’t exist or are in some way invalid it can be harmful to students, many of whom will go on to be people who create this supposedly invalid writing.  Szwed states that “one must know what [language] means to its users and how it is used by them” in order to improve literacy’s relationship to schools and education.  He goes on to say “the focus should be on the school and its relation to the community’s needs and wishes” (429).  If schools don’t look at how people are currently using language and anticipate how it will be used in the future, their students are going to be both uninterested in education and unprepared for the future.

Having more literate students requires students coming in contact with a wider variety of literacy.  Sponsorship and access, ideas discussed by Brant, are an incredibly important part of the process of becoming literate in any area.  Szwed talks about how socioeconomic classes and social context change what is being read and how that reading occurs but Brant expands on this idea.  In Sponsors of Literacy, she focuses on how people and environments affect literacy.  She defines sponsors as “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy –and gain advantage by it in some way” (166).  Without sponsors who provide access for students, or anyone learning a new literacy, there will be significantly less success.  Teachers should be working to be sponsors for all students and to introduce equality in the learning environment because, as Brant points out, this doesn’t exist outside of school due to the marginalization of minorities, people experiencing varying degrees of poverty, and other causes.

Sponsorship, specifically with newer literacies, is becoming less and less something that occurs with someone in a position of authority.  New media tends to be learned in peer-to-peer environments.  This way of learning creates communities that can work together and use a shared knowledge to solve problems.  This idea is talked about in James Paul Gee’s book and was discussed in class in the video game and make/hack/play groups, but most importantly it was implemented in the class itself.  Video games teach us, through forums or mods or walkthroughs, the value that other players and participants in the community add to the experience of playing and the knowledge of individual players as well as the collective.  In this environment all players’ work is inherently canonical.  This class demonstrated this principle in a refreshing and inspiring way.  All students became active participants in an academic discussion through writing blogs and interacting with each other’s blogs, by teaching each other through activities and presentations, by having discussions and making things together in class.  This class embodied the ideas about literacy it was teaching and showed the value that peer-to-peer learning can bring to a classroom.

Learning about maker culture made these ideas even more evident.  Maker cultures argues that we should be creating instead of repeating.  In this way too the work of the makers has inherent value.  They are not trying to come up with the solution but instead a solution, and this is predominately done through collaboration.  Peer-to-peer learning and low risk learning are essential to successfully learning a new literacy.  Peer-to-peer learning requires participation, which our class was full of.  We taught each other things we never would have had time to study intensively on our own and used this communal knowledge to create activities, resources, and ignite talks.  We weren’t expected to regurgitate information but generate it.  And yet, all of these things were done in a risk free environment.  Repeating someone else’s work can be expected to be done without failure, but creating cannot.  Students in low risk learning environments are expected to fail, to retry, to tinker, to modify, etc.  Maker culture is inherently connected to low risk learning.  It asks students to solve a problem rather than telling them what they should do.  There is no right answer to look for but instead an effective solution to be created and we spent most of our class trying to build off ideas about literacy instead of memorize them.

There is so much more to be said about literacy studies, how it is changing, how literacies should be taught, etc.  But for now this has been a summary or manifesto of sorts of what I have learned in this class and what I have come to believe literacy is.  This class has been an eye opening experience and has led to so many interesting conversations outside of class, and hopefully will lead to more even once the semester has ended.

The first day of my Spanish class this semester, my professor told us absolutely no cell phones during class!! Ironically she typed this on her computer onto a projector. I thought holy mole (Spanish pun amiright), how am I going to pass this class? Good thing I made friends with two native Spanish speakers that I could ask for help since I had no resources outside of myself and my very unhelpful Spanish book and god forbid I buy a dictionary. There were so many moments in the class where I could have benefitted from looking up one word or a conjugation here and there. If I learned anything from the drastic differences between this class and my Spanish class it’s that the classroom should be a space apart of the modern world that incorporates tools that people use on a daily basis. Some might argue that this decreases attentiveness, and yes I’m sure there are moments it does, but I would argue we have more information and increased ability to take part in a community of academia that no other generation has ever experienced before. In no moment should any tool be discouraged completely. For instance, I’m sure not every 8th grader has access to a laptop or maybe not even a computer. If I had a class of 8th graders with smartphones I would like to encourage all of them to learn to use them to publish to Google Docs, use the internet as a source, and among many other skills utilize their smartphones to increase their accessibility to take part in a learning environment.

In regards to how ideas from the study of literacy can affect the classroom I want to focus on some ideas from James Gee’s book “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy”. I have a hard time thinking of student identity which is why I probably think of it so often. For me, I always felt like teachers were teaching me to become a teacher. Maybe other students didn’t feel this way but I always did. My parents both became educators so maybe I was truly predestined to be involved in education before I even thought about my other options. I always wonder how my older sister decided to become an environmental scientist while all along I wanted to be a teacher. In my classes in the future I strive to have each student’s personal identity shining through on every assignment I ask them to participate in. Hopefully this will impact them when they decide how to use English class to move forward in any path they choose. Another idea Gee discusses is choice. This class is the first class I truly felt I had a choice to take part in which community I was most interested in. The model of groups about 5-10 people can be reconstructed at most any size, classrooms with 300 students or classrooms with 25 students. Supplying choices for any population of people is such an obvious solution to increase engagement. During article groups, Jason had a station illustrating the concept of community within video games. On these interfaces people were discussing game strategy, sharing ideas, discussing politics, making jokes, and burning through so many topics it was hard to keep up with. At our table group we started discussing how encouraging students to work together, ask each other questions, and collaborate could potentially affect our classrooms. We talked about how this might decrease cheating and increase understanding for some students. I could see this type of interface used in any classroom whether it was a math, science, language, history, or an elective class.

The relationship between language and literacy interests me since they are so interconnected. John McWhorter’s Ted Talk about texting and literacy argues that texting is a new type of language that resulted from the desire people had to write like how they speak. I’ve been trying to categorize in my brain how reading, writing, communication, and language fit into literacy studies but I decided recently while I was preparing my presentation that these things are all just jumbled into and connected to literacy studies. Much broader than that I’ve decided to think of literacy as the way people learn to use text. BOOM. I think I defined it. The more general any definition of literacy is the better, since there are so many parts that can be added to or changed.

My favorite part of this class was giving my ignite talk. I was really happy with how it turned out and I have never been confident speaking in front of people until now when I felt I was passionate and informed about my topic that I presented. So thank you Kim for encouraging me to speak, I was so happy that I did and I could definitely see myself participating in these types of events in the future. I feel responsible to share ideas with others and I feel like I’ve stepped into a community that I just want to frolic about in for the rest of my life.