An internal struggle over discursive reading in class

There's a discussion that's been ongoing in my Lit for Older Children class which is unresolved. As any educator who's been through school themselves in the last 30 years knows, teaching is now focused on student centered approaches. While I'm amazed that this approach is still talked about as if it were novel, it isn't new. Student centered approaches to teaching began gaining ground in the 70s and 80s as constructivist theories of learning percolated from the university teacher training systems into the schools. Given the long serving terms of classroom teachers and the lack of pressure to change or update their strategies (which is totally debatable but I'll tow that line here for the sake of argument), I can see how it may take time for large scale changes in pedagogy to take place.

Since I'm learning about literacy and the teaching of literacy, the focus of discussions in my classes almost always relates to reading and what came up Tuesday was the idea that a teacher should stand out of the way as much as possible. Let the kids discuss and carry on about their reading. Let uncomfortable silences last until one of them breaks it. Let the students be wrong about a text if only so they might reflect on that wrongness and learn from it. There is, to my delight, profound disagreement about this approach and how far to take it. Strangely, I find myself on the more student-centered side of the argument. It's not somewhere I expected to be.

The overall philosophy of a student centered approach is a constructivist one. The teacher is not the primary source of knowledge in the classroom and instead fits a role more like a curator. I should create a learning environment and instructional events which provide the students with a chance to figure it out themselves. Please know that I'm actually highly critical of constructivism but mostly because it's been dumbed down into a kind of "exposure" teaching which leads to all kinds of abuses.

Anyway, I'm on the side that you can and should let the kids have free ranging discussions about the books you read in class. I think these discussions can accomplish a number of curriculum goals without you having to sit down and make the kids identify specific things for your lesson. Through tutoring and from recalling my own experiences, I see a lot of teachers following a path where they lay out something for a student to find in a text e.g., theme, mood, tone, metaphor, allusion. This results in a lesson where the kids are doing a search and retrieve for specific tidbits which the teacher has identified as important. In my idealized classroom (I admit I'm a few years removed and lack experience) kids would still end up talking about theme and mood and tone and all the rest but it would occur as a product of a good conversation about the readings. If you ask them to pick out some controversial issues in a book (race, class, gender, etc) they'll end up talking about themes. If you let the students discuss what did and didn't seem authentic to them they'll discuss issues of tone, characterization, and setting. By letting them get around to discussing a text organically, you then open up chances to teach about the things your curriculum should include. It's not a panacea and I'm the first one to acknowledge there aren't any silver bullets in education but a discursive class has much more engagement and much more variety.

But what if they're wrong? That's a question that pops up from the majority in my class who are skeptical of this approach. Now, they're teaching students who are much younger than I ever taught. That could be a big part of it. A younger kid my take leaps of logic that aren't really coherent with anything going on in a text. One of my classmates keeps talking about how her students lie about making personal connections to a text. She talks about this a lot, come to think of it. Maybe she's a bad example. The pushback comes from the need to not waste time and that's something which I think I have forgotten about teaching. The clock is always ticking on your class and the calendar is alway flipping toward testing season. This puts a lot of pressure on teachers to make every class productive and to make every class count for something. If the kids spend 20 minutes of a 45 minute class in a discussion unrelated to the text, shouldn't the teacher step in? I think that's reasonable. I'm not dogmatic about literature discussions.

The objections do not end there, however. Teachers complain that they can't run a reading circle for two dozen students at once and they can't monitor every reading circle if they break into small groups. Without a producible output, like a sheet reporting the themes and allusions and such, it's difficult for the teacher to know if the group made any real breakthroughs or had any substantive discussion. Again, I don't have a great response to this. In my mind, this kind of classroom has to be continually modeled and practiced throughout the school year (another time sensitive problem). It relies on classroom norms which might be impossible in certain situations. I don't think this approach would have worked effectively in my small-group special education classroom without significant modification.

Somehow, I'm still in favor of open ended, student centered discussions. I'd like for students to have the opportunity to be more of themselves in class. I want them to feel responsible to each other for their learning instead of to me or their parents. I'd like them to have debates and disagreements over issues raised in a text. While that may not be necessary to help them check off required standards, I think it is necessary for them to be educated.

I'll close out with a link to a new book challenging common notions surrounding the concept of reason. Typically (and classically) reason is put on a pedestal as the best humans can do for noodling through complex problems. Reason is decidedly a solo task in which a person considers her or her own actions, choices, etc. Work on cognitive biases and behavioral studies are beginning to chip away at that pedestal pointing out that human reason is deeply flawed and subject to all kinds of environmental influences. In The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding, Mercier and Sperber propose that reason is not a superior means for an individual to think through problems. It is, instead, a system meant to be used in interactions with others. They argue reason is used to justify our thoughts and actions towards others and to convince others to think and act as we do. We use reasons other people produce to to justify their actions to convince ourselves of things. If I can borrow from Rosenblatt for a moment, reason is transactional. Classrooms ought to reflect that.

Jason is right about everything all the time

Go read Jason Jones' blog. It's consistently excellent and he is right. About everything. All the time. Not only does he keep a great blog, Jason teaches full time. I'm jealous!

Okay, enough fawning. Jason is a good friend of mine and I like when there's some dialogue between writers. He wrote a reply to my recent post about technology education which I though made an excellent point. There's a tension in education which forces everyone involved to constantly prove they're somehow doing something amazing and new and different. Technology is a kind of low-hanging fruit which allows administrators and policymakers to point to an investment they're making. This is not technology's fault, which is, I think, part of the point of responding to my soapbox post. 

When there are a seemingly infinite number of answers to the question "how do we improve education?" but many of them involve expensive processes like implementing massive social reforms to relieve poverty, it's much easier to just buy a few thousand iPads. Jason makes other points and I do recommend the post in its entirety but analyzing his argument is not why I'm posting. Instead, I ran across some reading today which made me realize Jason is right about everything all the time. 

Academic Interventions for Elementary and Middle School Students With Low Socioeconomic Status: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis does what its title suggests. Dietrichson, Bøg, and Jørgensen reviewed 101 studies, a third of which were quantitative analyses. I want to stress that quantitative part because so few studies in education are quantitative. There are a number of reason for this ranging from the benign (it's hard to have blind and double blind experimental designs in scholastic settings) to the malign (quantitative analyses are racist/sexist/classist/otherist and reinforce white privilege, only qualitative and descriptive research is allowed). Clearly I think there is a place for quantitative analysis in education regardless of its history or present abuse by policymakers. This study of studies is a good example of how illuminating the inclusion of quantitative analysis can be. Moreover, 76% of the studies (so, umm, 76 of them?) were randomized controlled trials. This is also very rare in the education field. The studies selected by Dietrichson, Bøg, and Jørgensen are supposed to hold to the highest standards of good studies.

The authors (please don't make me find the unicode for ø anymore!) find that most interventions have small impacts on student performance across a variety of measures. Some are not even statistically significant. A few do, however, stand out as being both significant and of higher effectiveness than other interventions. Among the best interventions is something as simple as providing students with tutoring. Among the least meaningful interventions is, as you might have guessed, technology. Computer-mediated instruction performs no better in the analysed studies than no computer-mediated instruction. 

So, Jason is right. Schools, especially school systems, pour money into education technology because it's an easy way to look like you're doing something meaningful. They spend millions on interventions we know don't work. Why? Because the interventions we know do work, providing tutors, for example, are expensive and not very flashy. Afterall, how often do we see articles about schools who try to turn things around by bringing on more staff or offering to pay for kids' tutoring? Why give intelligent, caring, qualified individuals the chance to interact on a personal level with students when we can pay Google $30 per Chromebook? It's cheaper. Parents like when their kids use technology because they feel it prepares them for the modern workplace. Teachers like the convenience of managing classwork online. It's a win-win. Except for the students who forego better alternatives for the quick fix. Jason is spot on when he writes:

There’s a real tension between people who badly want it to be that silver bullet (typically administrators who are working with a limited budget and want to be able to point towards something that they’re doing to improve the educational experience) and people who think it’s just a mess that complicates the business of getting students to learn.

I count myself among the latter group in this tension with the exception that  I don't think education technology is deployed with student learning even remotely in mind. It's a political decision beginning to end. Perhaps that's my cynicism showing a bit and I should be more like Jason. I should give the benefit of the doubt to the people who clearly are trying their best to improve a flawed system. Jason is, after all, right.

Textual Lineage

Textual Lineage was big part of my first in-person class, Literature for Older Children. The idea is that all people follow a path through reading and the books (or whatever) they've read influence their thinking. It's not a complicated concept but it has been troubling me for the last two days. As we talked about our textual lineages in class, I kept drawing blanks. Since one of my mottos is "I write to know what I think," I'm going to try and use this post to suss out what my textual lineage is. It also helps that I have to present it, briefly, to the class on Tuesday.

The example textual lineage was a teacher's post on the Teaching Tolerance website. Emily's entire world changed when she read The Color Purple as a young adult. Other books that changed the trajectory of her life included The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told by Alex Haley and The Miracle Worker. These all inspired Emily to become a teacher and focus on social justice and diversity in her role as an educator. Later, after teaching for several years, she read Herbert Kohl's I Won't Learn From You: And Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment and Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. The latter of those appears to have been especially important to her because "[m]y well intentioned, liberal-progressive efforts had the potential to unknowingly enact culturally specific rules and codes that undermined those efforts an disempowered my students." That part of her textual lineage stuck out because I wrote something very similar recently.

Implicitly, the hidden curriculum promotes specific kinds of behaviors which, if we're being honest with ourselves, are white. Young children sometimes don't do well in group environments. They want to play and "act out" and do things kids do. Kids who lack self control are often referred for special education testing. They don't get recommended for talented and gifted programs. Kids who don't speak English as a primary language suffer similarly. It's an easy connection from strong behavioral preferences in collaborative learning classrooms to the school-to-prison pipeline. 

The format of Emily's textual lineage flows from early reading through to her professional life. I suppose I should try to do something of the same here.

The earliest book I can solidly remember is How Much is a Million?. David Schwartz's book is full of lovely illustrations which give a visual to the ever growing numbers that eventually add up to a million. As a kindergartener, I was inspired by this book to attempt counting to one million, despite the book's assurances that I would die first. And so, one day during nap time, I took my usual place on the floor by the emergency exit back door of Sister Dougherty's double-wide classroom and tried to count to one million. People who know me know my math skills are sorely lacking. It was no different when I was five. As I reached one hundred, my concept of numbers reached its limit and I began counting by one hundreds: one hundred... two hundred... three hundred... I began counting by thousands when I reached one thousand. After that my memory gets a bit hazy. Clearly I didn't understand there were many numbers in between one and two hundred or one and two thousand. I probably didn't know what came after ten thousand either. After going home that day, I looked up some of the large numbers in How Much is a Million and discovered, in part, my error. I did not try to count to a million ever again. I don't know how this fits into my textual lineage.

Around that same age, my dad would read books to me every night. He typically worked long hours so that was some of the only time I got to have with him after he came home and it's a very treasured memory for me. In particular I can remember him reading Jurassic Park to me. The exact details of the book are somewhat muddled for me as I have seen the movie quite a few times but never read the book for myself. What I do remember is how much I let my imagination run wild and I think it was the genesis of my love of science fiction. I still have notebooks with drawings of dinosaurs in them from that age. I also know the exact date of the first time I watched Star Wars and Indiana Jones because I also have drawings from my first grade notebook jammed in between handwriting lessons. Later in my childhood, I tried to read every Star Wars novel that I could find. I kept a wealth of trivia in my head about Admiral Daala, Grand Admiral Thrawn, and Wedge Antilles. Later on I read Dune. I read The Hobbit and the Lord of The Rings trilogy. My textual lineage, then, is one in which I enjoy using my imagination and enjoy books which have a unique and well built world.

It's also notable that I don't have any memory of books I read for school. None. I can't think of a single one. I've spent two days trying to think about specific teachers and classes but I don't recall a single book. I'm sure I read books. I can even remember being bored in class and reading through the literature textbook but I don't remember reading anything. Midsummer Night's Dream maybe. I think that was 10th grade. Or no? Was it Julius Caesar? I know I never read Macbeth until I decided it'd be good to know one of the most famous Shakespeare plays. That was just before teaching it to 10th graders a few years ago. But that's too late. College is much clearer and I remember a lot of my reading at that time. High school and earlier, however, I remember nothing that I was assigned to read.

It's probably not a coincidence that I was really getting into non-fiction at that time. Being on the debate team meant I was constantly following current events and analysing them for use in competitive arguments. I didn't learn about philosophy, religion, politics, or economics from English class, history class, or any other class. I learned from seeking information to use to win. I can't emphasize enough how powerful this drive was. I'd spend late nights on the internet (AOL dialup) prowling through newspapers and magazines and whatever else I could find. I began reading some early bloggers. Then the material would get synthesized into arcane argumentative structures for use in debate competition. Thinking back on it, this too was fantasy. The way debate trained me to think and talk about the real world did not have much relationship to reality. Sinister forces constantly threatened the very existence of humanity. I would routinely deploy long chains of argumentation to prove that adding a single cent to the budget deficit would trigger global thermonuclear war. Drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Preserve? Nuclear war. Passing No Child Left Behind? Nuclear war. In debate, winning an argument often came down to proving who had the worst worst case scenario.

So what does this say about my textual lineage? I'm still not sure. I can't point to any books outside of my childhood that changed my world. I didn't read some book and decide I wanted to be a teacher. I never read a book that changed who I was internally. I've not ever felt empowered by a book but that probably isn't odd given that I'm just about the most empowered kind of person in America, a rich white man. All I ever wanted from my reading was a different world to be in. I wanted to go away for a while. Even my non-fiction was in service of a fantasy world informed by the same kinds of apocalypses found in Tolkien and Herbert. Later on I'd have video games fill in some of that territory. I'm firmly in the games-as-literature camp and I probably ought to mention that in class. In college I read voraciously and enjoyed it. Even then, I think I was reading to build arguments (I loved literary criticism, for example). If any book sticks out from college, it's Edward Said's Orientalism. Again, this is a critical and argumentative text. It picks apart culture and literature to examine the way the west constructed an eastern other in service of its own ends.

I suppose that my textual lineage comes in two parts. On one hand there is a love of the imaginary and of fantasy worlds. On the other is a love of debate and criticism of the world around me. I'm simultaneously deeply cynical and intensely idealistic. Let's see how that flies in class!

James Starts Learning Literacy

I've committed to liveblogging my experiences in grad school so I'm going to do just that!

Last night I reread some articles for my only online course, Adult Literacy. The course appears to be focused on defining the problems facing Adult Literacy and evaluating various programs and solutions here in the US and internationally. Given that I care quite a bit about adolescent literacy, this course is a nice corollary. It's basically "what happens when the kids never learn to read". Prior to the fisrt class "discussion" (yes, online classes appear to be the same everywhere) I read two introductory articles. I'll tackle each one below.

The first is an introduction to the National Research Council's Improving Adult Literacy Instruction: Options for Practice and Research. This report was written in 2012 by the Committee on Learning Sciences as part of a broader review of education in the United States. If anything, reading this introduction first is a great way to describe the problem of inadequate Adult Literacy. The report is heavy on statistics. 90 million adults in the US lack the literacy skills for a "fully productive, secure life." It also covers the impacts of inadequate literacy: increased unemployment and lower wages, limited access to healthcare, lower civic and community engagement, increased incarceration. Clearly some of this is obvious to anyone who takes the time to think about how being able to read and write can change your life. Still, statistics have some impact and definitely give us an idea of the scope of the challenge facing, well, me. Of note, the data they're pulling from does not include people of limited English proficiency due to speaking a foreign language. If anything, the report may be undercounting the limited literacy population. Also, the population of young adults (defined as 16-20, not enrolled in US k-12 education) entering adult literacy courses, labs, communities, and other forms of adult literacy education has grown to about 25%. Half of the attendees were under 25 years old. In other words, this is an inherent and pernicious shortcoming in the US k-12 education system. The burden for educating these students often falls on Community Colleges, which is likely to be one focus of this course.

For me, it's a pretty clear sign that my intuition about the flaws in my own classroom reflecting a larger systemic failure was correct. Large numbers of students are leaving schools without the basic reading and writing skills necessary to function in our society. I would like more granular knowledge of what, specifically, they're lacking. As this is only an introduction, I will have to dig further into the report and its data to see if I can find out. The data presented so far also divides up racial groups. As you'd expect, African Americans perform worse than their peers. Whites and Asians performed best. Many things in education are multivariate and I expect Adult Literacy to be no different.

The second article is a research analysis of studies published between 2000 and 2012 relating to any and all approaches to Adult Literacy. Some were merely like the above, a definition of the scope and depth of the problem. Some were evaluations of instructional methods or of curriculum. It paints a slightly different picture of Adult Literacy because it focuses on what's being done to address the problem. Overall Perin (the author) reviewed 43 studies which met her selection criteria (won't bore you with it, but basically it had to focus specifically on adult literacy and without significant methodological flaws or it wasn't included). She further divided the research up into what was being researched. Some were "assessment studies" that, like the above, focused on identifying characteristics of the population. Others were studies of the effectiveness of instructional methods, and studies only describing instructional methods. As someone wanting to bring better literacy instruction to the secondary classrooms of America, I'm very interested in effectiveness.

To my surprise, the results were worthless. Perin begins her discussion saying that there is "still much to be learned". Of the 43 studies, none gives a clear picture of what, if anything, can be done. None of the effectiveness studies showed any significant gains and none of the descriptive studies offered any serious evaluation of efficacy. In the end, she calls for further study and broader research goals. The problem is real, but solutions are going to be nontrivial. On the receiving end, I'm actually quite excited about this prospect because I may want to try and publish some research relating to late adolescent literacy. I would have preferred to see more analysis of the methodologies because my own literacy with regard to research is poor. I'm excited to read more and, hopefully, learn how to better evaluate the information that is available.

All in all, it's an odd start to my return to education. On one hand, it's obvious our education systems faces a number of challenges, literacy among them, and that those challenges are going to be difficult to tackle. I wasn't expecting, however, to see such an open admission that we have no solutions on day one. I have a feeling that there will be solutions in this and other courses. Hopefully, the lack of proper research doesn't color my perception of these solutions as I come across them.

Anxious about Ed Tech

With classes beginning this week, I thought I'd discuss another area of anxiety for me: technology.

It's weird to think that a young, educated, affluent male in the United States would have anxiety about technology (no, this is not the discussion about how our technology is designed to produce equal parts anxiety and reward in order to addict us to it) but I am really quite concerned about my relationship with education technology. I'm concerned because I think it's complete bullshit.

I'm anxious because I don't see good technology use in schools. For the past few months I've worked at a large corporate tutoring company and I've really enjoyed it. While I could have earned more and been more of a teacher working as an independent tutor, I've been able to meet a number of teachers and students from Long Island and learned quite a bit about schools here which I'd otherwise not have learned. I also like the large corporate model because it brings down the costs of tutoring. I feel like my independent rates would have been high. From what I can tell, it could have been upwards of $40 an hour if I'd been able to market myself effectively. But who can afford a $40 an hour tutor? Exactly.

With my large corporate tutoring center I was able to meet more minority and poor students than if I'd been indy. Plus, I got to learn all about how dozens of different schools use education technology. The picture isn't pretty. Private schools, publics, charters, all pretty much followed identical models. These kids didn't have worksheets. They had cloud worksheets. They'd log into whatever content delivery system that school used and they'd have, basically, a worksheet. Sometimes it included a link to a video (YouTube, obviously) that the teacher thought was helpful. Sometimes there would be a quiz following a lesson using a free service like quizlet. None of this is revolutionary. None of this is a kind of learning which hasn't already existed for decades. Most of these students are not in "flipped" classrooms. They say they still do the same kind of work in class. It's hardly revolutionary and I have to wonder how much these districts spend on the content delivery systems and hardware for each kid which could be going to better use.

Let me also mention that the experience of using this technology is equally uninspiring. The computers are typically Chromebooks or Windows laptops and they're cheap. Obviously I just said that these districts are wasting money and taking a position now that they should spend more on better computers is contradictory. I'm not taking that position. I'm merely pointing out that these schools are getting what they pay for. These computers and Chromebooks don't maintain battery charge after constant daily use. Students frequently bring computers directly from school where they've been using them all day to the tutoring center. They're drained and they can't sit at the table and reach an outlet. We give them our center's ageing laptops. They have failing hardware (especially the windows ones which appear to be equipped with spinning magnetic hard drives, a recipe for disaster in a young child's hands) and bad software choices. Besides often being physically damaged (because they're used by goddamned children!), the internals are often cheap and not of a grade that is meant for consistent daily use. The wifi on these computers typically doesn't work or cuts on and off. This doesn't happen on my phone or the center's computers so I have to assume it's their computers. They crash from time to time and often take ages to load simple things like the web browser. The software might need updating on the laptops or on the school's end. Some of the content delivery systems rely on outdated products like Flash which doesn't even work on Chromebooks. Yes. This happens. I have one to two hours with these students and it is not uncommon for them to spend half an hour simply trying to get the computer to work well enough to access the worksheet for me to help them with. Education technology in practice is not exciting.

I'm anxious because I don't have much background in how to effectively use education technology. Way back in 2010 when I completed my MAT in English Education at Georgia State, I was supposed to have, ahem, mastery of education technology. There was a whole course devoted to the use of technology in the classroom and its potential for changing education for the better. Reflecting back on that experience, I think it was hopelessly inadequate. I also think that it could not have been any better. I remember being in my Ed Tech class on the first day. It was in a nice computer lab with large friendly Dell desktops and large friendly Dell monitors with a satisfying hum just barely below the level of conversational speech. Our professor said hello and after a quick introduction we all created Second Life accounts. The remainder of that first class was devoted to exploring Georgia State's virtual campus and classroom. The professor was working very hard to actually hold classes virtually in Second Life and was partnering with other schools of education around the world to collaborate and ... you get the picture. For the remainder of the semester we never used Second Life again. I do not remember a single other thing from that class. And yet, online education grew immensely since that time. While we may not be meeting with virtual avatars, we are pushing forward with a variety of online courses. At the primary and secondary level I don't see any evidence of these models but my sample size is limited.

Another lesson I remember from GA State's "immersive" technology focus was a requirement that we use Flip video cameras. The idea was that we could give them to students and let them express themselves through video. There was some kind of way to tie that into the actual lessons and content but I don't remember it. Flip went out of business in 2011. Again, the limitations are fairly obvious. The kid has to know how to edit video, has to have access to a computer that can edit video, and has to have access to software that can edit video. Basically, it was the teacher's job to facilitate all that so the students could express themselves in a way which demonstrated understanding of some curricular item. I recorded myself teaching using one of these cameras. It wasn't pretty. That was the only time I used it because something went wrong with the camera and it was broken. Permanently.

We were also admonished for using Powerpoint. I think that was actually one of the central pillars of my education education from GA State. Don't use Powerpoint EVER. The preferred alternative was not changing the way you educate your students. It was not a new model of the classroom instruction. It was Prezi. Prezi is Powerpoint. Like. Literally. What does it do that Powerpoint can't? Not much from what I can tell. At the time, we were told Powerpoint lacked bright colors, fun transitions, and encouraged the overuse of text. I guess that's true? But, to reiterate my main idea, this is not really inspiring. I don't see how using Prezi is some pathway to significantly improved student learning. It's shinier and fancier than Powerpoint was in 2011. Is that enough?

I'm anxious because I don't trust schools to embrace education technology. When I started working after graduating from GA state, I tried to bring my personal laptop to work. Ya know, because I wanted to get shit done. I was unable to connect to the school's network. That's probably a good thing. You don't want random passers by to immediately have access to any organization's network. I dropped by the school's IT lady who basically said she was being nice for not reporting me to the county and that I should never bring a laptop from home again. My county, even as recently as 2012, forbade teachers from bringing their personal computers to school. Thankfully, I received a computer within a few weeks and was able to get shit done after that.

Shortly I discovered other choices made by the county also hurt my chances of ever effectively using technology. YouTube was blocked on the staff network but not on the student network. Then it was reversed one day which was great. For about three week I was able to use YouTube videos of things to help with my lessons. Then it was blocked again. It's not just YouTube but that's a popular service with teachers. I frequently couldn't access educational sites and services, even some like edmodo which were the content delivery system for a course. It was a wreck.

Famously (at least for me and the teachers I keep in touch with) this school district overhauled its IT and bought every teacher a Microsoft Surface. The next school year they bought all of the students iPads. Recently, that's probably become more manageable as Microsoft has embraced putting Office onto all the mobile platforms but, initially, there was almost zero interoperability between the devices given to the teachers and to the students.

That's not to say I didn't use technology. I checked out the school's laptop cart (an unwieldy giant locker for holding small portable computers and which required me to register, by hand, which students used which computer) almost weekly and used it for research and writing. More than anything, I think research is what technology does for the classroom best. Nothing beats a good 30 minutes of searching the web to gather information about a class topic. It almost always went well even with the intermittent blocking and network problems. When you're trying to help kids with basic reading and writing problems, a Google search is actually an interesting opportunity. How can you write your query better? How can you tell if your results are any good without spending a long time reading (or sometimes failing to read) each result? There's a lot of cool interaction there for kids on the bottom rungs of the skills ladder and the kids at the top can mostly manage the tasks themselves which they enjoy more anyway. Am I old fashioned because I think that's how education should be? Kids ask questions and I help them build the skills to answer them. Technology works there.

So those are my anxieties about education technology. I'm going into an environment very much unlike anything I have experience with and I'm not sure how much technology is going to play a role in it. Will I have the necessary skills and knowledge? Is my thinking about tech going to place me on the outside of a younger and more connected cohort? And most of all, am I going to be asked to focus more on technology than on my students? When signs and symbols matter more to professors (Prezi, no red ink, space for self expression) than demonstrable learning (can the kids read better now than before I started teaching them), I have a hard time getting along. Sadly, that's what I feel like tech is to most people in education. A symbol that you're doing it right instead of actual attention to doing it right.

The Hidden Curriculum

The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley, 

An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!

Within the educational world we have the concept of the hidden curriculum. On one hand, you have the lessons and subjects taught in class from which students are supposed to be learning. On the other hand, you have the mostly implicit lessons which students internalize as they go through their education.

The hidden curriculum is often thought of as a way in which the dominant class, culture, and race exert control over an institution which seeks to allow people to escape that control. When the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries fought hard for the idea of universal public education, they did so under the banners of republican motherhood, marginalizing Catholics and Lutherans, and ignoring (if not outright promoting) racial segregation. The hidden curriculum promoted in this era was that of white protestants. For all the progressive activism of John Dewey or Booker T Washington, the classroom remained a place which championed a specific kind of outcome.

Explicitly, our modern classrooms are mostly engaged in active learning strategies which center on the student's abilities and needs rather than the teacher's preferences. Ostensibly, students learn better when given all the elements necessary to construct knowledge on their own. Hallmarks of this strategy include a strong focus on collaboration and group work. Teachers are encouraged to use technology as much as possible and even "flip the classroom" to allow more time for collaborative learning at school.

Implicitly, the hidden curriculum promotes specific kinds of behaviors which, if we're being honest with ourselves, are white. Young children sometimes don't do well in group environments. They want to play and "act out" and do things kids do. Kids who lack self control are often referred for special education testing. They don't get recommended for talented and gifted programs. Kids who don't speak English as a primary language suffer similarly. It's an easy connection from strong behavioral preferences in collaborative learning classrooms to the school-to-prison pipeline. In my own experience, I've seen that behavioral problems result most frequently from students who can't access the curriculum (poor literacy skills, for example) or from students with circumstances outside the school building that affect their well being (gang membership, parental death, poverty, homelessness). These kids act out and disrupt the collaborative classroom which begins to put them away from their peers and into pathways which help them understand the hidden curriculum: You Don't Belong Here.

It's not just behavioral expectations, though. The hidden curriculum has larger influences on the economy at large. For example, only 3% of young adults surveyed by the National Association of Home Builders say they would consider a career in construction. I strongly dislike uniform age cohort stereotypes (thank goodness they didn't say millennials) but I tend to pay attention to data that shows large effects or reveals strong preferences. 43% of surveyed young adults said they wouldn't consider working in construction at any compensation level. $1,000,000 a year wouldn't convince some of these respondents to work construction? I'd do it. But I'm not young anymore. I think this is, in part, due to the hidden curriculum.

No Child Left Behind famously gutted vocational education across the United States. I recall my county eliminating the Vocational Prep track while I was still in high school. They put out a press release claiming that 100% of Fayette county students were College Prep! Amazing! Stupendous! And, basically, a lie. Even now, more than a decade later, about 30% of high school graduates don't go to college (58% for blacks). Only about 1 in 3 adults in the US has a college degree. High schools, however, focus almost exclusively on college. The hidden curriculum is telling students that college is the only acceptable outcome. That's why surveyed youth don't want to work construction. They probably don't want to be electricians, plumbers, or mechanics either despite the fact that these jobs pay well (better than the shitty retail and service sector jobs so many kids end up in).

There may be other perceptions at work too. Construction jobs are stereotyped as worked by immigrants and as being harsh conditions for low pay. There is little social prestige attached to construction work so kids who say they want to go into construction don't receive praise or admiration. It's often seasonal and seems like it is highly at risk during recessions. We did just come out of the deepest recession in the post-war era which prominently featured a collapse of the housing market and nearly 3 years in which new residential construction (typically what we think of as construction jobs, another bias, somebody builds skyscrapers) ground to a halt. It's not an open and shut case, to be sure, but we can't ignore the effects schooling has on what careers people pursue later in life. If you spend 12 years being told that college is the only acceptable option, then you're going to strongly prefer college.

The thing about the hidden curriculum is, it's typically not something which exists on purpose. The goal of progressive reforms in the early 20th century was never to disenfranchise people but that was sometimes the result. The goal of focusing on college was not to deprive the world of skilled tradesmen but that was the result. The goal of collaborative learning strategies wasn't to marginalize students with different cultural expectations (or environmental influences) of behavior but that is the result. As I get closer to beginning my new degree program, I'm interested to see what the hidden curriculum is. How does a highly progressive institution like Teacher's College fail itself? How does it reinforce dominant cultural, racial, and economic forces? We shall see.