Doug Peterson’s blog, Doug off the Record is yet another blog that delves into the
technology debate within the education system. From his previous posts (click to see), he is clearer a supporter of technology within the classroom. In one of his recent posts, he shares a link to an article titled, "Why banning technology is not the answer".
The beginning of this article says something truly brilliant:
"There is something about human nature that draws us towards
dichotomous patterns of thought; an all or nothing, us or them style of
thinking in which an option is either good or it is bad. In such a model
complexity and subtle nuance with multiple possible outcomes and routes towards
a goal are ignored. The field of educational technology is one where such a
pattern is evident and recent ban on technology by a Sydney school shows how
this style of analysis can have a significant impact on student learning."
This Manichean tendency to view teaching paradigms either as
progressive and modern or backward and traditional permeates contemporary
educational discourse. I wonder how these ‘21st century literacies’ are not
just a repetition of progressive liberal
thought - are the literacies merely reflective of another parochial paradigm
which masquerades as reformist?
To answer my own question is the least useful way possible, I don’t so and I do think so. I think, over
the years there has been a genuine effort within education system to adapt to
contemporary society. The incorporation of technology, cultural education, and
financial literacy for the everyday, is illustrative of a paradigmatic change.
However, one can make the argument that the factory model of education still
persists. Akin to classical Fordism, the educational system produces subjects
within a set confinement of parameters, to be incorporated within the
contemporary structures of late capitalism.
Slavoj Žižek’s short video on the institution of university is quite an interesting corollary:
The university as an ivory tower that that churns out
experts, who have expert knowledge, is an old banal dilemma. In the same vein,
the school churns out citizens, ready to be consumers within capitalist
society. The 21st century literacies are just another type of consumerism that
indoctrinates subjects into the all consuming capitalist machine. This is nothing new either in
this proposition - very banal in fact - the institution of school has always
been the place to train citizens in the proper decorum of society; the school
is glue between the social contract which precariously holds the social order together.
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| From: http://www.richgibson.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ |
How will I incorporate the literacies?
The literacies to me, means to think. The goal of education
is to produce thinking citizens. Whether this thinking is guided by a moralist,
ethical lens, I have no control over. What is moral to one, is not moral to
another, perhaps there is some universal moral core that is taught in the
hidden curriculum (to obey government), but this is another topic... As I have mentioned on previous posts, before thinking can begin, the proper environment must be established. Democracy within the classroom is the best model for fostering thinking students. Through a democratic classroom, everyone's voice is heard and everyone's voice is equal. Establishing a democratic classroom requires a skilled teacher, who recognizes the individuality of each student. There is no ready-made guide to creating a democratic classroom; each class will have its idiosyncrasies that the teacher has to account for.
How will I get my students to think? This is a very tricky
question. It is the classic catch 22 scenario in which the moment you delineate
a concept of critical thinking, you have stripped away any criticalness. As an
English teacher, we already actually have the literacies encoded into our field,
but they are referred to as ‘Schools of Thought’: Marxism is a mix financial
literacy and global literacy par excellence, Post-colonial theory covers environmental,
global and multicultural literacy; Postmodernist theory covers media and
technological literacy; and perhaps philosophy covers moral and mental health
literacy. Of course, constituting the literacies within schools of thought is
not an efficient or effective framework of thinking through the complexities
and interrelationships between these categories.
I am an English teacher and main vehicle I use to teach with
is language. When we read the text, what we really desire is to deconstruct the
meaning within the text - we want to denaturalize what has been naturalized by
history, institutions, and society at large. A methodological approach to
deconstruction is to apply these schools of thought, Marxism, post-colonial discourse,
postmodern theory, psychoanalysis, to the text in order to examine and unearth
the meanings within the language. Subsequently, a thorough deconstruction scrutinizes
the framework in which it has been placed into. There is nothing ‘natural’
about these schools of thought, but rather, they have arisen out of historical conditions. There
is nothing natural about having a conception of history, it too is another
manmade idea. This is the horizon of criticalness I find myself subsumed
within.
The point of literacies to be critical - to question
everything, even the question itself. Within my discipline, I incorporate the
literacies as best I can through the examination of language. Without language,
no literacy exists. Without literacy no language exists.
There has been a
certain way to write, to speak, to think, to be taken into consideration. There
is a pre-structuring to our thoughts and perceptions; the metalanguage that
lurks behind the signifier. One has to discuss
Marx in a certain light, Fanon in another. Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze,
Guattari, etc. are talked about in a particular way. Writing about these men
requires a particular language. It is this framework, the ‘meta,’ which critical
literacy seeks to dismantle and obliterate. To veer away from convention is
where literacy is born.
My summative answer then to the question, 'how will I incorporate the literacies?' is to teach unconventionally. To be critical of what isn't critical. In English, history, and the humanities at large, we examine the interior and exterior of language to begin a critical discourse.
