Taking a huge step back in time, the early eighties, to mind map the discussion on the digital age according to Jackie Marsh (2010) and David Buckingham (2009). Like much of the technology used today to create it, there was more certainty with the simpler aspects of virtual gaming world a few decades ago.
Here is a link to my Prezi: http://prezi.com/jvy86ebfhqrn/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share
Since none of my embedded files are uploading on this worn-out laptop!
The two readings selected for this week examine a question very close to my concerns over the children growing up digital, whether the technology that surrounds them at school and at home makes them into a different type of learner than what is described in many scholarly research. With a fondness for Vygotsky and the cognitive psychologists so influential to my early educational studies, I am inclined to say there is no great difference between what children were able to do prior to on-line interaction and now. They simply have abilities to use tools, modeled by their parents and peers, and will continue their development into higher mental functions the more they internalize use of such tools. Virtual worlds such as Club Penguin or Minecraft will enhance the imaginative or “figured world” (Holland et al, 1998) that include many of the same types of play that could be found in living rooms and playgrounds. It is still nice to have data that backs up this theory, and therefore looking at Jackie Marsh’s research provides some quantitative evidence alongside her qualitative study of primary grade students who use virtual social media sites.
Pre-Disney Club Penguin
My first encounter with one of her studied website, Club Penguin happened on my practicum, where laptop computer cart would be wheeled into the classroom so that the grade four students could work together on a social studies wiki I had designed. Those who finished the tasks early usually demanded free-time, and I became interested to see what the students could do independently with monitored access to the Internet. Most of the time, students would fuss over their log in name (or forgotten passwords) but once in the game showed a high level of compitence. As Marsh points out, most of the collaborative gaming happened between friends already in the classroom – usually one student asking another to join them in a particular chatroom or on-line activity. For most of the girls in the class, there was the cuteness factor of raising “puffers” and the boys seemed to enjoy the sledding and skiing activities, plus both girls and boys would gleefully engage in a snowball fight with whomever was on-line at the time. A benign game, as far as I can tell, and not so much under the influence of Disney cross-promotional marketing (users can now access Avengers penguins, based on the Disney-owned Marvel film franchise, are penguin princesses far behind?) that was promoted as the safest on-line site for children. Marsh investigates more thoroughly the possibilities of student interaction and cultural capital of both Club Penguin and Barbie Girls. Her conclusion, like many others investigating this field, is that more research needs to be conducted, and I would happily like to add my final project for LLED 558: Multimodalities and Literacy, once it is in a more publishable form!
Another American agency monitoring
21st century learners and educators!
Following Marsh’s engaging research, I decided to investigate one of the major professional organizations listed on the course outline, hoping to uncover some digital literacy gems for local Early Childcare Education professionals (such as my wife) but surprised to find most were American agencies. It is not such a surprise, at the PhD level, to encounter more information on education in the United States (even with my Master in Educational Technology, much of the latest trends seemed to be coming up from south of the border). The only international website (ISTE) linked me to a stub, one of those message pages that indicate the page could not be found, yet on further investigation, located the Standards for Teachers page, which like much at in the field of education (including the very department I got my master degree from) had gone through a process of rebranding to keep up to date with Web 2.0 changes. As for the document itself, Advancing Digital Age Teaching, it seems to be well thought-out and includes many buzz-worthy words and phrases (such as innovate, technology-enhanced learning environment and engage) that share a positive outlook on the future of teaching children younger than the ones Jackie Marsh. Yet while presenting a open-ended guideline for the qualities administrators want to promote with the educators they will hire (and possibly fire for not meeting their expectations), I can already hear the cry of complaint: “what do they really expect us to do?” One sticking point in particular is the respect for copyright nicely tucked into the second page of the document. Education 1.0 already features copious pages of photocopied material, some of it falling within the legally permitted 10%, and the occasional teacher playing a DVD or video for the class, skipping over the explicit warning that this video is not for public viewing (usually home use only). It is this mindset that produced the document on Education 2.0, I strongly argue, and it seems a bit more rethinking of values such as copyright is in order to make education truly relevant for 21st century citizens.
Danger: Violence!
No time to mind the p’s and q’s with this music video, this week’s readings touch a nerve with a topic supposedly inappropriate for most students, yet as Bourdieu would point out, all within the “field” of child development: violence. It is as unavoidable as Bourdieu, Foucault and Marsh make it out to be in their writing. Evidence can be found in the earliest form of children’s literacy: my wife, an Early Child Care Educator, began a project with the 3-to-5 year old children at her centre. They would create a story, each taking turns with a sentence. From the outset, the children decided that they wanted to tell a happy story, and selected an animal living in the woods, going for a walk. It did not take too long to establish the field, and as soon as the animal came to some water, it fell in and was eaten by a shark. When my wife asked what happened to the happy story, the children had unanimously decided that this turn of events is the only one that could take place; the doxa determines that stories must end tragically, despite many examples in the centre of happy endings. On a similar train of thought, high school students that I tutor are often given open-ended drama activities where they get to create a new final chapter for Lord of the Flies or a different fifth act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it seems like the only ending is one where the characters find a way to kill each other off. This is not to say that every single child is innately violent, especially those digital natives who are more familiar with video games and popular culture than paper-bound books. Perhaps there is something wrong with the schooling, the forcing of creative choices on students who just want to end the story in the quickest and most final way possible: the protagonist dies, the end!
Foucault speaks about this tendency toward violence in his abridged chapter “the Discourse of Language” and words like “prohibition”, “control” and “discipline” are used with increasing frequency. One can only imagine what words were used in the omitted passages (everywhere there was a “[…]” indicated parts of the lecture we are not privileged enough to hear). There are words one must not say, like yelling fire in a crowded theatre, and as much freedom as we are supposed to share in democratic societies, there is the implicit understanding of what sane people say and do. What mad people say can be ignored, what they do can be controlled through institutions like hospitals or prisons. “Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse,” (Foucault, 1970, p. 239) and as teachers, it is really up to us to monitor what is happening for the future citizens. My wife, on the other hand, argues that children as young as the ones at her infant-toddler centre are already citizens, and the process of schooling withholds democratic participation, for their own benefit of course. Even for the student teacher Jackie Marsh interviews, there is a sense that the participants are being held back, their version of popular culture in their practica was rife with misunderstanding and possible falsehoods in reporting. As much control is needed at this end of the education system as it does at the beginning. While Marsh centres upon the limited field of experience of students’ popular culture for one or two of the participants, using Bourdieu’s theory as her frame, the suggested better way is to let students decide for themselves what is the best way to interact with literacy. Letting go of tried-and-true standards, like Golding and Shakespeare, may be the only way forward, as long as students are aware that some people at some point in history thought these authors were as exciting as Pokëmon or Minecraft.
“You mess with the bull, you get the horns”
Principal Vernon from The Breakfast Club (1985)
Lastly, Bourdieu (1982), in his own words, sees that intimidation “can only be exerted on a person predisposed (in his habitus) to feel it” (p. 471) which sounds like a tough-love approach to moderating the psychological scars we inflict upon each other with our choices of words. Blaming the victim, or just simply pointing out that some people have the ability, thanks to various forms of capital, to absorb or ignore? As the majority of scholars seem to be increasingly French, I am reminded of a silly yet politically-charged moment in cultural history, not too long ago, when “freedom fries” were items to be found on American menus. Despite centuries of ideological sharing between France and the United States (the Statue of Liberty being an iconic symbol of the pact between the two nations), one political act of violence turned brother against frère. What would Bourdieu made of this Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey’s Weekend Update?
Reference
Bourdieu, J. (1982). “The production and reproduction of legitimate language”. In Routledge Reader (reference needed). 467-477.