When I logged in to the site today, I saw that quote from David Foster Wallace – “To really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.” As the semester comes to a close, I relate to that quote more and more. This course (in conjunction with Fosen’s ENGL 431 course, which runs along the same vein) was, in many ways, a revelation of my own ignorance. Before taking this class, I took the concept of “literacy” for granted; to me, it was a fairly static idea. I now feel like I’m back to the drawing board – who knew that something seemingly so foundational and elemental has, in fact, no agreed-upon definition? The lines that define literacy are, in fact, vague and problematic. Now we have to consider that literacy is more likely expressed through a myriad of different types of media; playing video games and creating humorous song mashup Youtube videos now have a place in 21st century literacy as much as reading selections from the Western canon.

Not only is literacy becoming more difficult to define, it’s becoming clearer that there is power associated with literacy. In class we’ve discussed Scribner and the social uses of literacy; more specifically, the social capital you are afforded, or deprived of, due to your literacy skills (or lack thereof). Certainly this presents a conundrum for future teachers, who struggle with how to define literacy in the first place. I now ask myself: what literacy skills, out of the plurality of different types of them, do I emphasize in the classroom? It’s not a question I have an answer for. It’s a can of worms that I’m glad we all got to open in this class; despite feeling acutely aware of my own ignorance and confusion, it reveals how much more to learn there is.

I had a love/hate relationship with Rafe Esquith of The Hobart Shakespeareans. On one hand, his ability to engage the students in something as intimidating as Shakespeare was absolutely unreal. It’s obvious that he is in many ways a genius pedagogue and it was genuinely heartwarming to witness his infectious amount of passion for his students. Gee was brought to mind – he does a fabulous job showing the kids that literacy can take the form of embodied action. He helps the kids understand that reading and writing aren’t flighty abstractions, but something tangible and applicable to their daily lives. That being said, there were parts that made me cringe. While I understand (and maybe even admire, if I use a little bit of imagination) his attempt to instill a work ethic into the children by using a money-based “real world” simulation, it kind of caused a knot to form in my stomach. Certainly there are meek, noncompetitive kids in his class who this exercise might unfairly disenfranchise? I certainly was like that in 5th grade. Moreover, what kind an attitude does this cultivate in his students? To me, it seems to be a winner-loser dynamic, with the winners having the money and the losers having none of it. The winners, of course, won because of their hard work and “eager-to-please” attitude, and the losers lost because of their laziness and unwillingness to work hard. Real talk, right? Or just crony, elitist, borderline-social darwinist bullshit? Perhaps it’s somewhere in between. I’m sorry if I’m going a little off the rails here, or perhaps offending anyone. While I approve of contextualizing the material presented to students, I was a little concerned that it was an exercise in political indoctrination disguised as a lesson preparing them for the “real world”. Yes, I understand that we live in a cynical, “sink-or-swim” society, and that money is in many ways the centerpiece of our adult lives. Yes, I understand that it’s important to know who Abraham Lincoln was and who the Founding Fathers were and all that. Did it all have to be so damned uncritical, though? For all of his talents, his imposition of a fairly one-sided idea of what it means to be an American on the students sort of poisoned the well for me.

 

Primarily I found the article group project useful because I was given a chance to take a look at the Common Core standards, which is especially important for an English Education major such as myself. The implications for critical literacy were especially encouraging for me! But back to the article groups – it certainly fortified this ongoing notion that there exists a plurality of literacies (hip-hop being one such literacy, as that was my article group subject). I also found a lot of value in experimenting with the various ways in which a teacher can use something common or immediately engaging to the students (such as a rap song, but I suppose it could be anything) and using it to bridge the gap to the world of academia. It’s particularly encouraging that we, as teachers, can make learning something fun, engaging and relevant to students. While reading the literature concerning the pedagogical value of hip-hop, it often became a matter of re-framing skills that students may already have in a kind of embryonic form. I can imagine that it would break down the intimidation factor and boost their efficacy.

A neat website to check out is rapgenius.com (as well as it’s sister sites rockgenius and poetrygenius which work in the same way) – a website that annotates song lyrics line-by-line. It’s user generated (meaning that some of the interpretations can be iffy, and certainly makes it anything but a scholarly source), but the basic principle is eye-popping and something similar could be fun for use in the classroom. It certainly serves to exemplify the dense, connotative, and richly meaningful nature of a particular lyric or poem. Below is a link to one of the better annotations.

http://rapgenius.com/Nas-ny-state-of-mind-lyrics

I read the article entitled “How to Build an Ethical Online Course” by Jesse Stommel. The author delineates his views on hybrid teaching, which refers to education that mixes analog and digital pedagogy. Stommel cites the mind-boggling enormity and versatility of the internet as an educational resource – for example, he might ask students to blog about Thoreau’s Walden while on a hike, including in their posts pictures from the walk. They would tag their posts with “geotagging” enabled, which could contribute to the “One Million Tweet Map” – a massive archive of location tagged tweets from around the world. This is just one such example, but it serves to illustrate a creatively appropriate use of online instruction that asks the students to make meaningful, reflective connections about the text rather than asking them to passively receive information for temporary storage. Learning no longer is established to be limited to the classroom – somewhere, Emerson and Thoreau are smiling.

I was immediate reminded of a couple of ideas from Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, where he praised video games for encouraging and recruiting situated, experiential, and embodied forms of learning. Learning and thinking become “powerful and effective” rather than “passive and inert”. This is more or less the modus operandi of Stommel’s vision for effective hybridized instruction – you could use Gee’s exact terminology to characterize his hypothetical Thoreau activity as well. Gee bemoaned the fact that schools make use of general, purely verbal meanings and abstractions, with no ability to customize for specific situations and no invitations for embodied actions. The learning is completely decontextualized. Stommel, like Gee, propose that teaching in the digital age de-emphasize purely verbal and abstract modes of teaching; rather, the instructor can invite the students to engage with the content in an active, situated and contextualized fashion.

On another note, Stommel makes mention of the use of hybridized classes to provide students with a venue by which they can actually guide the creation of course content and have influence over the structure of the online course. Again, this offers context and serves to foster engagement by appealing to different learning styles. Giving them the freedom to express their understanding of course content through the implementation of video, audio, images, or just linear text (depending on the individual learning style of each students) would certainly aid in engagement. Courses I’ve experienced myself that have implemented such an approach were tremendously successful.

I chose to read James Paul Gee’s book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, and in particular one of his claims from chapter 4 stood out to be very important and reflective of the overarching theme unifying this course. To paraphrase, he asserts that video games encourage and recruit situated, experiential, and embodied forms of learning. Learning and thinking become “powerful and effective” rather than “passive and inert”. This theme is referenced throughout the book and has a lot to tell us about how best to practice teaching. Gee describes the current situation in schools as making use of general, purely verbal meanings and abstractions, with no ability to customize for specific situations and no invitations for embodied actions. In other words, schools operate using decontextualized meanings – “If you can’t use ‘democracy’ in a situation-specific way, then the word does not make sense to you”, Gee explains. In contrast, the video game Deus Ex, which Gee focuses on in particular, allows the gamer to learn in an embodied and situated fashion – all of the actions are themselves part of a storyline, and the game actually punishes the gamer for not thinking in a situation-specific manner.

It was interesting to see the other members of my group respond to Gee. I’m somewhat unique for my age because I don’t play video games for whatever reason, aside from the occasional Grand Theft Auto, which becomes impossible to avoid after a point. But even then, the level of engagement is less “situated, experiential learning” and more “brief, indiscriminate shooting rampage” before I get frustrated and hand off the controller to someone else . So, while I was more less enthralled all the way through Gee’s book (being an outsider looking in, just as Gee was when he started researching these games), my peers who’ve been playing video games for many years and have built up complex schemas to make judgments and critiques of them (“appreciative system” is the term used in the book) found him slightly less impactful. That being said, I think all of us ultimately liked the book, especially for his concise, unpretentious style of writing.