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LLED 601 – Week 8

This week’s readings are circling back to my Master of Educational Techonology (MET) program recently completed “at” UBC… I know, I should have used the ampersat symbol to accentuate that most of my studied occurred on-line, but in my first year it was hard to know where to place the Community of Practice among on-line learners (some of them were studying in such exotic locations as Jamaica, Thailand and Turkey etc.), so hardly a community in the traditional sense. I believe both Wenger and Heath were some of the authors we looked at during the program, and the concept map was my first attempt to make it all make sense. And not-so surprisingly now, as I press on with my reading of Masny and Cole (2012) in preparation for my book review (Assignment 2), many of the same themes are coming together. The idea of mapping to show the connections between related ideas was also a big idea when I started my Bachelor of Education here at UBC. One of the instructors wrote about it in his textbook, Engaging Minds (Davis, Sumara & Luce-Kapler, 2008), and while students were not required to actually map anything in Brent Davis’ class, the introduction that I got from him led me continue on with the Education 2.0 studies in the MET program.

One of the most challenging courses in this program was ETEC 530: Constructivist Strategies for e-Learning, and while the readings were a lot to get through, what made this course especially difficult was the expectation to be constructivist while learning together. I should also hasten to add that it was the second term in the program, and perhaps I was still a bit green with on-line collaboration. My partners for the group presentation, however, were resistant to the asynchronous affordances (the techie way of saying we didn’t always have to be on-line at the same time to communicate) this course was trying to support. Rather than working with these teammates, I found myself racing around town (between teaching on call in North Vancouver and tutoring after-school at various homes) to find a free wifi area (usually Starbucks) to connect with the others. There were definitely a few missing components from this community, and more squabbling than social learning from my team members. It even got to the point where the instructor had to intervene, asking each of us to write out what we expected from the others. I am sure that file is saved somewhere, but from that point onward, my group projects became less social, more networked. The oddest thing about this whole ordeal in ETEC 530 was it ended up being my first A+ (95 over the class average of 92) in the MET program, so whatever my partners were claiming I wasn’t doing, my instructor at least thought otherwise!

Being a MET student living in Vancouver was not such an uncommon thing, as many of the other teachers in the program were from here or at least around the Lower Mainland. Every once in a while I would chat with other teachers and health care workers across the province and a few from other parts of Canada. It was a great introduction to the needs of teachers in rural and developing areas. Yet while there were some strange things done in the hinterland, not once did I encounter a teacher from any place resembling Trackton. Perhaps because even the enrolled teachers in the United States were more Mainstream-ish, leaving the former plantation land far behind. Anyone left in these communities, according to Heath, would either be working in the factory or preaching at the church. And yet, despite the numerous setbacks economic or otherwise, the children of Trackton develop a strong sense of self and literacy (perhaps self-literacy, if there is such a concept) because there is a community. The point I believe Heath makes is that children should not be placed in further difficult situations because the Mainstream standardized test scores, but a more thorough investigation of the circumstances the children are raised in is necessary.

When I first encountered Heath, my attitude was dismissive, and now I cannot claim being completely won over, at least there is a bit more understanding of her way and her words. And through the MET Program, which began shortly after Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games, I discovered that my hometown had begun its slow descent into Tracktoniness. There is no major industry left for Vancouver’s brightest, most engaged minds: the film industry is slowing down, video game and animation left for other parts of Canada, forestry, fisheries and mining (all damaging the earth) also in decline. It got to the point where the two things Vancouverites seemed to care passionately about were legalizing marijuana and rioting to get rid of a certain goalie. Most of the local teachers enrolled in the MET program got a bump in their salaries, with Teacher Qualification Services raising them from level 5 to level 6 (the highest a teacher in this province gets before moving into administrative positions). Would have been nice for me too, if I had a full-time teaching position. And don’t get me started on the plateauing of public school teacher salaries due to the budgetary schemes of oil-crazed politicians (both provincial and federal). The light at the end of the tunnel, through the MET program at least, was that it allowed me to get into the PhD program at UBC.

SMART/bored: A cartoon created in the first year of MET studies

Lastly, Brian Street. After venting as much as I did about the lowered prospect of anyone who wants to build a career in Vancouver, there is hardly enough spirit left to discuss the academic hit-job the anthropologist Street enacts. Page after page, he sets up one theorist after another only to knock down Olson, Hildyard, Greenfield, Goody, Watt, Bloomfield, Lyons etc etc etc, while Street cunningly never (or at least not yet) offers any counterargument to his theory of literacy. The bottom of this blog page has a transcript of Street comment at the 2011 AERA conference in New Orleans, which are particularly revealing of his continued stand-offishness towards ideas that aren’t his. Enough said on that.

Reference

Davis, B., Sumara, D. and Luce-Kapler, R. (2008). Engaging minds: Changing teaching in complex times. 2nd Ed. New York: Routledge.

Masny, D. and Cole, D. R. (2012). Mapping multiple literacies: An introduction to Deleuzian literacy studies. New York: Continuum.

LLED 558 Week 3

The plot seems to thicken with the New Literacy Studies, especially as the binary relationship between orality and literacy is called in to question. Gee (1996) leads the way with his review of the development of the two-sided debate, including some familiar names like Havelock, Vygotsky, Ong and Heath. The old world view of educated civilization and illiterate savages was demonstrated not to be so appealing after Havelock proved Homer’s epics were most likely composed ages before anyone could read or write (at least anyone Greek had these valuable skills). Ong’s further praise of oral culture’s strengths, along the same argumentative lines as Plato, prove that more the word’s proper place was in the mouths of people, not on surfaces or even screens. Ong’s Orality and Literacy presents an intriguing case for secondary orality, which follows along the same lines as TEDtalks, RSA.org and even YouTube itself. Here is a link to animator Andrew Park discussion with RSA on link between the visual images and memory: The RSA Animate Revolution.

Andrew Park’s scribing for RSA Animate

Perry (2012) covers the same ground, but with more questions about the difference between New Literacy studies and New Literacies. Kind of difficult to follow along without a map or flowchart, and she even includes diagrams in her paper. Many of her questions are answered, some with more questions to follow, all zeroing in on the big question, what is literacy? Much of the class seems to be pondering this very question, which is not so bad for literate minds like ourselves, but I really have to wonder if students in other graduate degree programs spend as much mental energy asking questions like “what is physics?”, “how do we define law?” or “what does ‘ocean’ mean?”. A paradigm must have something in view, however nebulous the abstract idea might be, and Perry puts her two-cents in with a subtle complaint that “something is lost when the field defines literacy so broadly” (p. 65). For other answers that Perry provides, they are directed towards multiple meaning and differing opinions, and I find her paper at a balancing point between Gee and Street.

Finally there is Street (2003) again, jazzing up the questions Perry would ask less than a decade later, but focusing on the newness of New Literacy Studies. If he himself and Gee take so much credit ushering in the new studies in the early 1990s, how new could they be by the start of the 21st century? I felt the same sense of unease as when I studied post-modern art for my undergraduate, wondering if there will be a point in art history where people look back at our period and say “ah, that po-mo movement, so dated. Thank goodness society moved on to…” While literacy seems to keep morphing its researchable shape, picking up new terms and dropping out-of-date concepts, one of my classmates last week raised an interesting point about the continual search of the new. Taking digital literacy as the newest of the new literacies, there will eventually be a point where society, led by dissatisfied academics, go into post-digital literacy. No doubt Google has its top thinkers working on a way to get their corporate logo put in front of whatever words are used to describe gliteracy.

Reference

Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and social literacy: Ideology in discourse. London: Taylor Francis. 46-65.

Perry, K. H. (2012). What is literacy? – A critical overview of sociocultural perspectives. Journal of Language & Literacy Education 8(1). 50-71.

Street, B. (2003). What’s “new” in new literacy studies? Critical approaches to theory and practices. Current Issues in Comparative Education 5(2). 77-91.

LLED 558 Week 2

It was a happy coincidence that I have been working through a reading of Vygotsky’s Mind in Society (1978) for another class, and noticing the synchronicity between the long-deceased Soviet cognitive psychologist and the literacy specialists read this week. So much of what Kress and Street have to say about pre-reading or pre-literate people can be found in Vygotsky’s writing. The one line that led me into this connection was “written sign frequently are simply gestures that have been fixed” (p. 107) onto a page in squiggly shapes otherwise known as letters. Kress makes a similar meaning similar images as well, when recalling a day at the beach upon seeing a print of seagulls snacking on fish and chips. His daughter makes her own meaning, and Kress dotingly examines the complex process that his daughter must have went through to understand that the gulls are reading the newspapers rather than eating the left-behind food. It probably did occur to this three-year old girl that the birds might actually be eating, as she has been to a beach before and probably seen what seagulls actually do in their natural habitat. But being able to see more meaning than the picture, or the visual text, suggests is the playfulness that comes with pre-literacy, where the signs are not as fixed as the sign-makers intended them to be.

The title of the print, interesting enough, is Fish and Chips   Seagulls and the extra spaces between the hendiadys and compound word (my fancy etymological way of pointing out these italicized squiggly lines have names) suggest other words could fit between them. The most telling would be …on Newspaper, Picked at by… but this three-year old girl isn’t interested in making sense of the first signifier. Instead, she wants to claim this portrait as Newspaper, Read by… as it is more amusing than the maudlin reality depicted, that some creature thrive off of the waste human being leave behind. Her father raises a similar point, noticing the headline on the print’s newspaper and commenting on the irony of newspapers decrying overforesting while the entire newsprint industry requires trees to be cut down (even with recycling). His musing on this topic may be more sophisticated, but if asked by his daughter, “why is there so much garbage left behind on beaches?” or “How many trees were cut down to have their processed remains scattered about?” – big questions for a three-year old, but something along those lines – what answers would he have for her?

Make meaning of this sign, Kress!

Speaking of seagulls, I was fascinated to learn that early in Vygotsky’s career he taught theatre at an adult education centre in his hometown of Gomel, Belarussia. One theory I have about young Lev was his fascination with playhouses and theatre, and it is entirely possible (though not confirmed) that he would have caught productions of innovative theatre by the great playwright Anton Chekhov, possibly while the artist himself was still alive (his initially disastrous debut play was successfully restaged in 1898, the same year Vygotsky was born). The Moscow Arts Theatre still uses the image of the seagull out of respect for Chekhov’s first play. Being an undergraduate in Moscow, or perhaps seeing a touring production of any one of Chekhov’s plays, possibly even directing his students in Uncle Vanya or Three Sisters might have inspired Vygotsky to examine the people’s roles within a family, closely attuned to how play helps children develop psychologically. There might not be anything to this theory at all, just my strong sense that Chekhov and Vygotsky would have shared a connection, other than the grim fact that they both died of tuberculosis; two promising careers ended! And yet the cultural impact of both of their collections of handwritten pages would have on generations that followed is impressive.

Chekhov’s Seagull

Not many birds were mentioned in Street’s article, but there is still a sense of human migration and roles within pre-literate cultures in the chapter. Particularly where religion is involved, whether it is sermons pounded into people’s heads on Nukulaelae, or competing Christian and Islamic rules for reading and writing in the Philippines, Malaya and Sumatra. Even the Hmong people in Philadelphia, I believe, have some ideological issues that chased them out of Vietnam and Laos. Like many other cultures involved with dominant cultures invading, there is a certain amount of adaptation involved that combines ways of representing culture from the non-dominant as well as concessions made towards understanding of “them” and “their” ways. New Literacy Studies, as Street suggests, is an acknowledgement of the many variations literacy can take, and it is refreshing to see academics opening up to these ideas. The same cannot be said, however, for Heath’s close examination of three types of communities: the educated swells in Maintown, the trashy workers in Roadville and the former slaves in Trackton. I now see how her way with words was influential for language and literacy scholars, but I could barely get past the first paragraph of her abstract. She set up the dichotomy of rich vs. poor, white vs. black that I couldn’t really take her seriously. Yes, it was a different world back in the early eighties, where direct quotation in Ebonics may have provided a researcher with ethnographic street cred, but when the Tracktonian vernacular is used to demonstrate how hopelessly undereducated these people are, it gets embarrassing to read. Similarly, poor lil’ Wendy and her disinterest in listening to bedtime stories was disturbing from a social constructivist point of view. All that Aunt Sue and other adults seem to do is reinforce the dread of reading, and cuts off imaginative play with squiggly shapes on a page. After this article, Heath will have a hard time winning me over, but I am willing to find out more.

Reference

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: Development of higher psychological processes. Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner (Eds.). Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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