(the new) bgblogging

This has been a busy week back from BlogHer –the many meetings, phone conferences, workshops filling my days have revolved around incorporating Web 2.0 tools effectively into different sorts of learning contexts, a conversation I’ve been having for the past five years, but more urgently now. And it has been an unsettling, disturbing week with the tragedies of our policies in the Middle East bearing their explosive fruit, and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth reminding me of our horrendous domestic policies, too, making the calm of this Vermont summer surreal in its beauty and saneness.

And so in the spirit of James Martin, whose work inspires me to remain optimistic that we still have time to save this beleagured planet, and alongside so many committed colleagues online and off, I throw myself into trying to push ahead educational reforms classroom by teacher by conversation by blogpost by workshop. During this one week of conversations alone I have been asked again and again and again to talk about what brought me to blogging in the first place and how it is I know that blogging has directly affected my students’ learning experience. Especially now that social software is under threat, people want to hear about my journey to blogs, about how I was looking for a way to bring the world to my students and my students to the world through links to conversations beyond those in the classroom, and how I was desperately searching for ways to enliven the classroom dynamic and student written expression–to add authenticity and context to classes focussed primarily on something very few of my students had any real interest in–formal writing. Over the years I had noted an increasing rigidness in my students’ engagement with their learning–it seemed to me that they sought easy-to-follow rubrics, clearly defined processes that would help them arrive at the “correct” answer , the “well-written essay,” the high grade as painlessly as possible. I turned to blogging in part because I suspected it might help me shake things up. I had noticed that these same students were engaging in some really pretty creative work outside of class–online–making movies, chattering away on IM, writing ‘zines, playing around with music clips and multimedia expression, just for fun and as a way to communicate to the world. I was also alarmed by how in class students stayed almost indifferent to one another as members of a group experience unless I the teacher asked them to engage with one another-class discussion, even when lively and heated, seemed just another hoop to jump through with little resemblance or relevance to the discussions they had outside of class. School was just something you did on the way to real life. Sometimes students didn’t even know each other’s names even though they sat next to each twice a week for twelve weeks. When I asked them why, they’d shrug. It seemed like too much trouble to get to know people’s names just for a class. Something was going very wrong even though they were learning to write academic prose quite competently.

In the five years since I first played around with blogs, I’ve seen a shift, a righting of the listing vessel of my classroom; indeed, something quite wonderful has happened to the learning culture–now in no way do I want to ascribe these successes to blogs themselves but to what has happened to the class when we engage in the kinds of co-created collaborations and connected reflections blogging facilitates. We have found ourselves immersed in a creative learning community building strong ties to one another, and a real sense of the worth of our classroom experience. We have experienced all the bumps of a close community–personalities rubbing each other wrong, miscommunication, mis-steps on the part of the teacher–yup, and still every class gives off an energy, a buzz, a lasting engagement. And I have become a much better teacher for it. I think that last statement has surprised some people this week–they were thinking about how blogging affected students, but not necessarily how it has touched the teacher except in as far as time and skill are involved.

Could we have done all of this without blogs? Sure. But not as deeply, not on as many levels, and not as lastingly within a very brief twelve-week semester. Blogging accelerates inquiry by linking us to a wide range of resources and thus the greater conversation within our discipline as apprentices and experts, and it provides a place for the class to engage in discussion, in reflection and in learning construction outside of class. Class never ends. Learning spills into the hallway, out the door and across the campus often in a much more leisurely, thoughtful way than it has in the past. Hyperlinking allows a student to connect statements made three weeks ago to things she’s thinking today, bringing to light the development of ideas, of skills, of practices, and grounding them in the rest of her life. Hyperlinking allows associative, non-linear ways of organizing ideas, helping students make new connections. The mix of media invites in multiple literacies–all of which can be explored, examined, compared, and connected around the clock. Students can see their own points of reference and how they intersect with those of their classmates and teacher. I know of no other way to make the learning outcomes this rich, this real, this lasting.

The talk about how DOPA could eliminate blogging practices from public schools has pushed me to try to articulate what social software really helps me to accomplish. It has pushed me out of my own head and experience to that of others to help me express what I have learned. And it is this connecting of my use of blogs to the wider realm of thinking on learning and teaching that keeps me growing my own practices. I do not sit still; I am a student in a limitless classroom with many teachers.

And so, because this is what I always do when I am puzzling out my own take on things, I turned to my reading practice. First off, and because it is easier than choosing between the two dozen books awaiting me on my desk, I turned to the blogs where I found Lanny Arvan’s mention of the geeky girl’s dilemma. It reminded me of how one of my daughters didn’t feel safe in the halls of her middle and first year of highschool as someone who loved science and studying, and how she convinced us to send her to boarding school, and how my other daughter felt that school was plain old deadening and so propelled herself through high school as quickly as she could, seeking instead enriching experiential, inter-cultural learning programs, first in South America and then in India where she couldn’t get enough of this real-world education, exclaiming during phonecalls home that there was so much she needed to learn about the world. How my older daughter this past year came to understand that only her intellect was being educated and valued in the rigorous prep school and elite college she now attends and so she took spring semester off to explore other parts of herself–the artist, the musician, the worker, the volunteer. Lanny’s post got me thinking about how race, gender, sexuality, kinds of intelligences, and past experience all wrapped themselves up–but invisibly–in the classroom dynamics in my pre-blog years, and how blogging led us to talk about these essential things, and about each of us as learners and teachers. How it was that I accepted so readily in my own youth that academic skill was equated with intelligence, and how that permeated my classroom whether I knew it or not, which brought me to Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative, in which he writes that we often confuse “academic ability with intelligence” (p.7) and

Hmm….I would have said the same about my students five years ago. But not so any more. Once they are given the opportunity to engage in a collaborative classroom that gives them a stake in their learning, in which the teacher plans carefully, works alongside reflecting and learning and collaborating in the messy up-and-down creative process of learning, helping them to frame questions and daring to explore the complexities of the subject from a variety of positions instead of directing, lecturing, and dictating, well, they quickly gain skill in communicating well, working in teams, and thinking creatively.

A conversation with Barbara Sawhill a couple of weeks ago brought me to my third reading, one of the best books I have ever read about teaching, Dawn Skorczewski’s Teaching One Moment at a Time: Disruption and Repair in the Classroom. This book should be brought without delay into every teacher ed curriculum and read by anyone wanting to explore and grow a teaching practice. I don’t think she mentions the word technology once in this book, but she sure does think about creativity and community and what makes a classroom a safe and effective environment for learning and what gets in our way as teachers. She grounds her examples in writing pedagogies, nonlinear dynamic systems theory and infant research– I found myself writing down line after line and thinking about how what she has to say about being present in the moment of the classroom leads to all kinds of revelations about how we are teaching implicitly as well as explicitly. She quotes Freire several times:

another way of putting what Pierre Levy calls “recipriocal apprenticeships.” This is precisely what opening the classroom to dialogic practices during class and outside of class brings us–and it is, I contend, the outside of class interactions on the blogs that lead to many of the most valuable revelations. I also find much in common with what she says here:

She brings up the messiness of such a classroom and how what I’ve called “glorious failures” (from Forster), she calls the principle of “disruption and repair” –that moments of tension, of mis-stepping in classes are precisely the moments that can lead to important group learning about the community and its individuals, and then to more effective engagement with the subject matter. When she writes about Thomas Cottle’s notion of

I think about how asynchronous conversations and long reflective, hyperlinked postings back and forth between classmates, and within each student’s ongoing reflections to self, have helped my students and myself to such realizations. We can bring into our classroom meetings what we have written on the blogs, and sense our own position vis a vis the group. We gain in self-awareness as we grow in intersubjective understanding. She also explores the theory of the contact zone, the need for humility and flexibility, for us to examine our own cliches and not just our students’, and a great technique she developed for classes that aren’t going well, called the “freeze frame” — the class stops the discussion and takes a look at itself and how things are unfolding in the moment and why. Well, it’s an inspiring book, and it articulates so beautifully and grounds in a lovely weaving of theory what I am trying to do integrating social software into the classroom. It’s a complex, complicated business bringing these tools into our teaching, but if we do it thoughtfully, carefully and boldly, we can enhance our abilities to know ourselves, and to foster creative thinking and collaboration and community in our classrooms in the ways that Dawn Skorczewski and Ken Robinson urge us to do.

Final reading tip for today? Back to the blogs we go– For an excellent view on how these online collaborative groups work, check out Nancy White’s Fulll Circle Associates Blog and her Blogs and Community five-part series. Great stuff.

Filed under: Classroom Blogging, community, Emergence, Insights into New Media in the Classroom, Reading, Students online, Teaching and Learning |