Please watch: What can we INFER from a bag?

I chose to reinvent the “what’s in my bag” task to something that a teacher could use in their classroom to work on making inferences, while identifying biases and assumptions present in the students’ thinking.  What pieces of information are helpful?  What cultural, political, and gender biases are present in our inferences?  How can we acknowledge and then challenge these biases?  This would likely occur after some work on identifying assumptions and biases and this could be a more summative, challenging task. Or it could be a provocation into the ideas of bias within our inferences.  Doing this through a videoscribe was on purpose to help direct and focus the audience in different ways. The images, text and audio are all layers to the story, all helping to paint the picture and encourage questioning of our own thinking process. In the video, I wanted the students to focus on inferences, and questions they could ask. What could they add to the inferences I was making? How would we know which are true and which aren’t?  In my redesign, I was really attempting to shift the perspective on the task from ‘what do I want to present as my identity?’ to ‘what could others assume about me?’.  As the New London group describes, “[t]o be relevant, learning processes need to recruit, rather than attempt to ignore and erase, the different subjectivities – interests, intentions, commitments, and purposes – students bring to learning” (1996, p 72).  Challenging students to take anything beyond what ‘face value’ or their initial inclinations might imply is a powerful skill in today’s complex world. Understanding subjectivity vs objectivity and how it influences their thinking. Dobson and Willinsky discussed the collaborative shift between students after word processing became common in the classroom (2009) which can allow for greater sharing of thought and ideas between students. Knowing the “democratic qualities of digital literacy, as it affords greater access to knowledge as well as the ability to speak out and make one’s views widely available” (Dobson & Willinsky, 2009, p 1) comes with a responsibility to make digital citizens who are able to see different perspectives and opinions that may be different from their own and seek to understanding instead of simply dismissing them. If  Dobson and Willinsky are correct and there is a “trend favoring icon over alphabet” (2009, p 15), having students collaborate together to acknowledge assumptions and biases in each other’s thinking that could occur by looking at an image is a critical skill for our students.  

References:

Dobson, T. M., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital literacy. (pp. 286-312). Cambridge University Press.

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.