My first post from AERA involves a topic I did not anticipate. I assumed I would offer something related to an inspiring session I had attended. No luck so far. Instead, I find myself writing about conversations I have had with colleagues and with the all too frequent topic of these conversations. Higher ed folks are experiencing the same budget cuts so common in other industries. Words like furlough, layoff, adjusting course loads, and budget cuts seem to come up in most conversations. The convention itself is smaller and this was apparent reading the newspapers on the way here. This is typically a very large convention 12,000-14,000 and I suppose it makes sense that graduate students and junior faculty members would really struggle to find the means to get here. I wonder about those who have made a full-time commitment to a graduate education and now must try to find that first job. It really is a leap of faith or a commitment to a cause when you spend four years dedicating yourself to this goal. We admire risk takers and true believers, but we tend to think of business entrepreneurs as our examples. Why is that?
I have been attending sessions concerning 21st century skills and new media. I am still trying to understand if these areas are really new to me or simply represent a new vocabulary. I still like higher order thinking skills and participatory media – similar ideas I think. The one paper that intrigued me was from a U of M (that is Minnesota in my neck of the woods) group that were examining new media use among struggling readers (more on the specifics in a later post). The core idea, if I am interpreting correctly, was that by middle school a significant group of students have given up on reading or at least text-only content. New media may offer an opportunity to engage these students again. It appears that students were engaged, but may still be capable of avoiding the text components of projects by using options such as audio instead.
I like to think I keep up on emerging trends, but often I find myself interpreting using older models. I think this is how the constructivism thing is supposed to work. Many of these ideas of interdependence of production/consumption and modalities sounds a lot like the “language experience” model. Communication is a more basic process than specific skill areas such as reading and writing, speaking and listening. As I remember a core premise, these skill areas offer the potential to inform each other if the setting for learning a given skill does not decontextualize that skill from the others.
Back to the budget thing. The session I am sitting in writing this ended up with a different orientation than I expected. Several presenters did not show and the focus that remained was hip hop and the use of this genre in urban schools. Not what I came to hear. Can’t blame those who made it. Hip- hop would not be my thing, I am more of a jazz and blues kind of guy. I also don’t teach in an urban setting. Exploring new ideas, hip hop included, takes both time and money. I wonder how the public costs out such ventures. Some may not understand hip hop in the classroom. I think your beliefs have to accept that these folks are trying to find ways to engage kids and the challenges in doing this work in these kinds of settings may not be apparent to those who view the effort from another time and a very different place.
