Teacherlife: Technology, modern literacies, and the nature of childhood.

I love being part of NCTE. The National Council of Teachers of English is a plural, thoughtful, scholarly group of researchers and practitioners, and this is evident in their conference and across their publications. They interrogate and interpret literacies as communication practices oriented within society. The communication landscape I grew up in is vastly different from the landscape my parents inhabited and even further removed from the experiences of my students. In the spirit of reciprocal accountability and mutual humanization, I approach my classroom and kiddos with a significant amount of humility–especially when it comes to technology. They are remarkably adept, as only true digital natives can be.

Their cultural texts and mine are different, although they share the same DNA. As literacies are powerful technologies regardless of the platform, so too is the ability to codeswitch across time, space, and culture through the development of multiple (and multimodal) literacies. As we reflect on Blooms’ revised taxonomy and its highest valence of thinking as creativity, the idea that “technologies produce new ways to consume and produce texts” (Schmidt and Kruger-Ross, p. xxv) takes on a relevance that inherently centers learners in the classroom. In fact, it provokes the idea that teachers and learners are complex identities which switch back and forth when both are learning literacy skills and modalities which are unfamiliar to them. Something students know is that classrooms are not neutral. Technologies are not neutral, and texts are not neutral. This is as true for Jonathan Swift as it is for SeeSaw. We learned during the pandemic that there is a significant gap between pandemic learning and actual designed and intentional digital learning.

The TPACK diagram (technological, pedagogical content knowledge) reminds me strongly of the frequently co-opted Ikigai diagram. The nested Venn diagram heuristic posits a happy place where all needed things overlap optimally for teachers to maximize student engagement and learning in their languages–digital ones.

Similarly, the SAMR model is similar to Blooms in that it defines an escalating enrichment of content delivery and engagement for and by students. The goal is not just absorption, but transformation as adoption without mimicry. One of the more entertaining assignments I give my students is to create a meme that clarifies the thesis of a class text. Here are a couple of examples:

When tackling literacy in the modern ELA context within the US, there are very specific intersections between the original intent of public schools and the ethical and moral requirement we bear to ensure students are prepared for citizenship, the reason behind Benjamin Franklin’s great concerns on a robust and effective public education. Few things can rob a citizen’s power from them faster than a manipulable gullibility–and the best way to separate a person from their rights is to encourage their ignorance of those rights in the first place. As such, teachers have a responsibility to teach students how to use the available technologies and communication adaptations to defend their rights and develop their knowledge in the public sphere. I would argue that a critical transliteracy is therefore required of students by the time they reach adulthood if not sooner, if only for self-defense. One of the tasks I set my students early in the first semester is to define the real difference between using an Android phone versus an iPhone.

Both items are slick, attractive, expensive little marvels; but there is one significant experiential difference that expands beyond boundaries, and that is the legal definitions and protections of privacy between one platform and the other. I use this to encourage students to read their end user licensing agreement or EULA. The EULA is a convenient tool to engage students in a discussion of literary style and voice in a way that is relevant to them. The students begin by researching the question generally, and I circulate to help guide them and map any access or thinking speedbumps. I provide clues as we continue, until the students begin to converge on the answer. From there, we begin talking about why they don’t read the EULA, and how that might be purposeful–given the kind of investment that goes into drawing their eyes on every other element of the device.

Critical transliteracies can occur across platforms, push creative thinking, encourage investigation, and form a strong component of independent citizenship education. I find these ideas intriguing for my own classroom practice and appreciate the focused incentivization for me to adopt and adapt further to new literacy.

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