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Friday, December 13, 2013

Rose is a rose is a rose, etc.

The question of whether students in 21st century American classrooms are “digital natives” is a well-investigated question. Huffington Post published an inaugural introductory article for the masses in September 2012, “A Teacher’s Challenge: Empowering Today’s Digital Natives for Tomorrow.” Before then, slightly more niche Internet voices were already taking a position on the digital native debate; Campus Technology, for instance, published their opinion (admittedly oriented more toward technology use among college students) in “Will the Real Digital Native Please Stand Up?” And long, long before that, academians were writing eloquent and highly specialized essays, claiming the question had already become hackneyed (“Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” Marc Prensky, NCB University Press). As it often the case, it is this perspective from “the turn of the century” when people and especially scholarly people become reflective and a delightful mix of nostalgic and visionary that most informed my initial investigation into the technology citizenship of my own students:

Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

At first blush, it is always the sheer amount of time our students spend with technology that elicits the most gasps, headshakes, and brows furrowed in teacherly resolve that we must redeem the children, redeem the media, and redeem ourselves. Ten thousand hours playing video games? We own more or less 1100 hours of their lives per school year: by the time they graduate, we will have exerted at least that much influence over them. Ah, but what about when we added the twenty thousand hours of television? The truly immeasurable tens of thousands of hours spent (as Marc Prensky wouldn’t have yet known in 2011) on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Imgur, YouTube, etc. etc. etc.? The stalwart teacher blanches. We cannot amass more hours in the classroom than hours in the digital world; it is a physical impossibility. And so we about face. If books and whiteboards cannot win, then screens and connectivity must be drafted into the cause. Educational technology became the way, oddly and with an irony few notice, to win against all other forms of technology. The greater pull recreational technology has on students, the more fabulously educators swear allegiance to integrating technology in the classroom. Since Marc Prensky penned (yes, we know he typed his essay, but for ideological purposes let us imagine that he might have, out of habit from his childhood, scribbled down the first notes of his treatise on paper with pen or pencil) his inquiry into digital nativehood, educators have become more and not less frightened at the prospect of technology in the classroom. PLCs and department meetings at junior highs and high schools are preoccupied with the learning, unlearning, and relearning of each new technology districts and states prescribe (or suggest). Most recently, digital doc cams have been replaced with iPad and Apple TV duos: and I do mean replaced. One fellow teacher lamented two weeks ago when the bulb burnt out on her doc cam; the expensive bulb would absolutely not be paid for by the school because it was already outdated technology. The teacher mournfully began using the Apple TV screen that had been installed in her classroom long before. Most students prefer it, when queried, but my colleague regrets its existence every day.

And this is where the crux of my question lay. When I began researching my students covertly through observation of what they said and did in the classroom and openly by asking them questions they tentatively then gustily replied to, I wanted to know what they thought of their own history with technology. What do students—even, no, especially, the ones who were only just born when Marc Prensky wrote his essay—think about their technology use? What is their own perception of their experience of technology? Most importantly, how does my students’ experience of technology at school and at home differ?

What I heard from my students, and interestingly what I do not hear from any Internet source, amateur or academic, is not that schools lag in their use of technology; not that students use computers more at home than at school and “why do I have to handwrite this at school”; not that teachers are technologically inept compared with students (at least not most of them); and not that students wish there were more technology at school (this was a tricky question as every self-respecting teenager takes a lot of explaining to understand that “more technology at school” does not mean free license to be on Instagram all day for any and all purposes). What I heard from my students, when I listened in between the lines, is “I have a smartphone but all I know how to do on it is access a few social media sites. No one has ever explained to me why we use an iPad in my English classroom instead of a whiteboard, and honestly I kind of prefer the whiteboard. I’ve never written an essay on a digital device at home in my life, and I like writing essays on the computers in the library at school because it helps me feel less insecure that I don’t really know how to write an essay. I’ve never been taught how to research online, and I’ve never even been taught how to type with more than three fingers so I have to write really slowly.” And most of all what I heard was, “We can’t afford a computer at home anyway.”

What I learned from my students in the little cracks and crevices between their words, where all their vulnerable confessions lay quiet and still and maybe even a little ashamedly, was that they do not consider themselves digital natives. They don’t even know what digital natives are because adults invented that term. It is irrelevant to them whether they are the first generation to own smartphones en masse before they have a driver’s license. It is irrelevant to them whether their social studies teacher using a doc cam or an Apple TV. It is irrelevant to them whether they do assessments on a desktop or an iPad. Students, from what I learned in the last several months of listening and watching, are far better barometers of what they are actually learning—no matter the medium it comes through—than the assessments and research we impose on them to further our own ideological pro- or anti- or ambivalent-toward technology positions. My students, even though they did not suspect it, were actually teaching me how to navigate the turbulent currents of educational technology. My only guiding question as I steer my classroom forward in the coming years will be, Does this technology benefit my students more than anyone else concerned, and does it benefit them more than the alternatives? My allegiance is not to what the Internet says about what  “young people these days” know or feel about technology. My allegiance is not even (don’t tell anyone this secret) what my administration or district tell me about what is good for my students. My allegiance is to what my students tell me about their technology needs. This doesn’t mean that my students will be let loose to play Angry Birds all day. It means that I will work very hard to make a safe and wise environment in which students and myself discover together what is truly helpful for their learning. Technology, when you get right down to it, is only one factor in that commitment.

As a final reflection to these last ten weeks of learning, I was prompted by what I saw in my students to think about my own technology usage, both in my personal life and in the my classroom. If the students’ bottom-line was what they learn, my own bottom-line needs to be the same. I have learned to think less pensively and more critically about how I teach and how I facilitate learning. I have learned to cast my research net wide and to throw out everything but the most succulent pieces of advice. I have learned to begin a network so that I can support and be supported by other educators who are grappling with the same questions and goals. I have learned how wonderfully pitifully little I know about technology: I have learned, accordingly, that I very much want to take a computer programming class, and a Microsoft office class, and tons of other classes, not because these technologies will be eternal in their relevance but because I will only respect myself as much I can when I investigate the tools I use as extensively as I can. I have learned that students are capable and knowledgeable peers as I and my colleagues determine what our students’ classroom experiences will look like. And in my personal life, I have learned that habit trumps all. If I habitually am afraid of change, this will determine my attitude toward technological possibilities and will plug my eyes and blind my eyes toward what might truly benefit my students and myself. If I am habitually mourning the loss of journaling with pen and paper in the park, and hunting for an armful of Dover thrift editions at the local bookstore, and a brisk evening with a reading club at the local café where the fireplace crackles with warmth and invention and yet I do nothing to reclaim those things in my life, then I will automatically and always feel resentment toward anything with a screen or a keypad or a web address. If I habitually insist on characterizing myself as “old fashioned” and use that adjective as an increase for being ornery and petulant, then I am not really benefiting my students and am in fact creating an ever-growing gap between their future and my past. I learned in the past weeks that it is good to be reticent and argumentative and inept toward technology, and more than anything, it’s good to take the first wavering steps toward changing myself, not just for the sake of my students, but for my sake as well.

As Gertrude, after sipping her lemonade, might say,
"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
Loveliness extreme.
Extra gaiters. 
Loveliness extreme.
Sweetest ice-cream.
Page ages page ages page ages.
Wiped Wiped wire wire.
Sweeter than peaches and pears and cream."


1 comment:

  1. Hi Rebekah,
    I thoroughly enjoyed reading your final reflection blog post. You have grappled with a lot of the key debates, insights, and criticisms regarding the increased use of technology in education. I agree wholeheartedly that the best approach is to work with your students to figure out how they learn and to be open and flexible to incorporating whatever mediums they choose to learn. I found your research study to be fascinating. It sounds like administrators are pushing edtech regardless of the fact that many students many not be familiar with using these new tools other than a few apps on smartphones. I think this is an important disconnect for teachers and administrators to acknowledge. Thus, the importance of observation and collecting informal data to learn more about the population of students that you are working with. I think that your post is fantastic and I strongly encourage you to submit it to be published. Edutopia (http://www.edutopia.org/contact-us) and The Journal (http://thejournal.com/pages/contact-us.aspx) are good places to start.

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