Technology and Education

     I don't know if there are many things that teachers agree on about technology and the use of it in the classroom, but there is one idea that they do agree on: technology is always changing and at quite a rapid pace.  I know that there is a spectrum for teachers and technology use in the classrooms.  On one end there are the teachers that find it to be the best thing since sliced bread for their classrooms.  On the other end of the spectrum are teachers that are annoyed by it and think it is a distraction from the "real learning" that needs to take place.  In the middle of this spectrum is where I believe many teachers lie; these teachers see the benefits and downfalls of technology and thus do not reside at one extreme or the other.  Wherever teachers lie on the spectrum, it does need to be acknowledged that technology is not going away, and it is an important part of most students lives.

     Knowing that technology is an important part of students lives leads many teachers to the belief that it should be incorporated in some way into their teaching environments.  There are many small scale and large scale ways to incorporate technology, but I was particularly impressed by an article I recently read called, "The Twitter Essay" by Jesse Stommel.  This article discussed the use of Twitter in the classroom as a learning tool, in particular, to write essays.  This idea had never occurred to me. Yes, I have used Twitter in my college classes before, but only as a way to post out thoughts on something that was discussed or that happened in class.  I never thought about a Twitter essay before because really who can write an essay in a mere 140 characters?  The article made a great point though that it is about being concise with your words, which is an important skill to have.  As someone that is constantly told that I am too wordy, this is something that I struggle with on my own Twitter posts.  I have found that for posts that I am passionate about, I know what I want to say and it will take me several revisions before I accomplish that on Twitter with the characters allowed.  It really makes me focus on what I deem to be the important words and parts of the message that I am trying to convey.

     I think that this aspect of being concise with your words is probably one of the best ways that Twitter can be used in the classroom.  I learn a lot about different theorists that have laid the groundwork in education and I know that I would struggle to tweet out what each theorist's major contributions are in 140 characters.  Yet, this task would give me a chance to really hone in on what I believe are the MOST important contributions and why I think that they are the most important.  That work is a critical analysis, and that is the work we want our students to become engaged within our classes.  Dismissing these opportunities to engage our students with technology that they use on a daily basis is a misstep for educators.  We need to become creative like Stommel and figure out how to make the student's everyday technology work for our purposes. 

Specs and Standards-Based Grading

     I became a proponent of Standards Based Grading (it is quite similar to Specs grading) before I left the secondary level of schooling.  It made sense to me, grade students on mastery of the content/standards that were important to your class.  It was so much more concise looking at the assignments I was going to give and seeing how they aligned to the standards that they were going to be graded on.  I found that it cut down on needless busy work assignments that I never found the time to grade anyway.  I wanted to focus on the important standards for my class, not filling time, and standards-based grading helped me do that.  Now do not get me wrong, as the lone ranger of this model in my school, it was not an easy road to travel.
     The idea behind this type of grading is that you are looking for students to re-visit work and continue to improve on standards, and it also helped to focus on the specific areas of weakness instead of the work as a whole.  For example, I have many students that did wonderfully citing their sources and using correct grammar in their papers, but some struggled with explaining their evidence and linking it back to their claim.  So I then conferenced with them about this skill and gave them the practice to help them with this specific skill.  I didn't have to waste time on the skill of citation because I had already assessed that they had mastered that skill.  I also liked that it let the students know what was expected at every level of performance on every standard (I based the levels off the rubrics that I already used for their writing), this gave the students ownership over their learning and how much effort they wanted to put forth and invest in their own learning.  There were some students that said I am okay with a C because I plan to be a mechanic and I won't do a lot of writing in my profession.  I had to respect their choice and that allowed me time with the students that struggled but really wanted to push their knowledge to the next level.
     As I said, it wasn't an easy road because I had to conform to the school's grading system while trying to implement the standards.  For me, I would've rather had a report that listed each standard and how the student performed on each one, but that doesn't work with GPA and sports eligibility which made my life a bit difficult trying to convert it.  Another issue that I had with grading is that standards-based grading is based on a philosophy of constantly redoing to achieve mastery.  This put a lot of extra work on me, especially when all of my students wanted to redo things at the end of the semester; however, I didn't want to deny them a chance at mastery, so I ran myself ragged trying to keep up.  This is where I think that Nilson in her "Specifications Grading" book is a genius!  She talks about tokens.  Giving students a certain amount of tokens that they can use on redo's and late submissions would have been an extremely useful technique for me.  It would have put the ownership on the students to really put forth their best work in the beginning because they could only have so many redos.  Some would argue that this flies in the face of the philosophy of this grading style because it is about mastery no matter when that occurs in the course, but there does need to be ownership on the student to make sure they are submitting their best work the first time, and a teacher can only do so much.
     I think that this grading is where schooling is going, and I couldn't be happier about it.  From the two short years that I enacted it in my classrooms, I could see the students that were really self-motivated to learn at the highest level.  It really became less about the letter grade and more about where do I go from here?  How can I do better? And to me that is what schooling should always be about!

Monsters and Others

     Race/racism and sexuality in literature can be difficult topics to discuss in any literature classroom, even at the collegiate level.  The topics are so difficult to discuss in part because they are wrapped up in so many personal values and beliefs of students in the classroom.  This throws many barriers in the way of looking at the content because the reader must first acknowledge their own biases and beliefs before they can analyze the beliefs that are portrayed within a piece of literature.
     Last week we read an article by Zuba called, "Monstrosity and Majority: Defamiliarizing Race in the college classroom".  The author talked about taking the approach of first dealing with monsters in the text and how they are portrayed and why, before moving to race and how different races are perceived and portrayed in literature.  This technique allows the students to be objective because they are not emotionally/culturally invested in how monsters are portrayed.  They are open to receiving these portrayals and thoughts and they are open to analyzing why they are portrayed in this light.  Consequently, when the students move from monsters to looking at a race they can more easily continue to use the lenses that they were previously looking at the literature through.
     This concept is similar to the article that we read this week called, "Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes" by Zeikowitz.  He states, "The pedagogical approach I propose here is not restricted to analyzing critically how some medieval texts construct queer/ normative boundaries. Reading queer also invites students to examine how their own cultural backgrounds influence their response to monstrous Others in medieval texts. A queer pedagogical approach to medieval literature thus has a political agenda: its overall goal is to create a society more accepting of difference" (76).  As a teacher, we can see that it is important to critically engage with a text to understand why characters are portrayed a certain way and how that relates or conflicts with beliefs and portrayals in the present day.  Readers need to recognize how their own cultural backgrounds influence how they read and interpret literature to be able to critically analyze the role of the character portrayals within literary works.
    "Giroux's critical pedagogy does not rest with reevaluating the past. He suggests that it can transform contemporary society. This transformation can occur only if students come to realize the part they play in an exploitative and unjust society. A queer critical pedagogy leads students who do not consider themselves oppressed marginalized, or silenced to examine the position of "queer" in texts as well as contemporary society, and, most important, it encourages these students to evaluating critically the role they may play in the denigration of both fictional and "real" queers (68-69)."  This is the political agenda that we see played out in all of these articles, from Zuba to Zeikowitz to Winans.  It is the idea of evaluating your understanding of your role in society of creating the "Others" and once that understanding is present, only then can you begin to "transform contemporary society".  This I would argue is some of the most important work that can be accomplished in a literature classroom, the literature is simply the vehicle to lead to that social understanding and change in society.