According to the 3rd chapter in Alvermann, printed information is the source of control in the classroom:
"The use of popular culture, represented by multimedia, may undermine the traditional control teachers enjoy when enacting prescribed curricula...The result is that intermediality, while overlooked by teachers ostensibly because it detracts from print literacy, is consequently enhanced in its subversive use by students...students' competence with digitized multiliteracies must be delegitimated because it has the potential to destablize teachers' control" (42).
If teacher control is derived from using the traditonal, canonical DWM texts to subdue and bore their students, then it is WORKING!
However, if a teacher's aim is to continuously learn and relearn their field, their content, and their methods, then maximizing student input, ideas, and technological aptitude is a no-brainer: we need to make use of our resources, including that of our students!
Alright, here's an example:
If we decide as ELA teachers that WE are in control of the input-output flow of information, knowledge, and (perhaps even) wisdom, then it would be considered allowing students to "waste" time surfing when they could be doing...more important things like alternately reading Frankenstein and watching the movie version.
Better version of the above example (perhaps a bit more progressive):
As ELA teachers, we realize that the students are the ones in control of their learning. If they don't want to, they won't. WHY waste their time and ours with mundane (though useful tools of assessment) essays, multiple choice questions, and all other traditional forms of understanding their knowledge? Perhaps, instead of the book/movie version, the students provide a set of presentations/podcasts/iMovies/etc. on their interpretation of Shelley's horror novel after reading the first half. Then, maybe it would be time to show CLIPS of the Hollywood versions, and do a compare/contrast between their versions and the expensive type.
There are no limits to the ideas our students have. Why should we be the ones to put a cap on their imaginations??!
1 comment:
I appreciate your efforts to "see" classrooms through the flat world's lenses as well as the Alvermann chapters which challenge us to re-imagine our roles as teachers. I think you'll find the Ursula Kelly chapter more interesting than it might have been last semester Dawn.
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