Critical discourse of youth in education

What is “identity?” How do youth in today U.S. society express their identity in public versus private settings? How do institutional contexts like public education create multiple youth performances of identity?

These are questions of interest to me lately as I begin to explore data I collected over the last year as a teacher researcher. Identity is typically defined as a series of qualities that distinguish one individual from another. In psychological terms, identity reflects a series of mental features such as beliefs, memories, preferences, and the capacity for rational thought. However, society and culture impress upon individuals many different characteristics and pressures and create complex relations between sociocultural groups. Thus, sociocultural identity, as marked by ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status, race, gender, heritage, or combinations of these, creates a particular type youth discourse in the public school classroom.

I propose that youth identity in the public school classroom transcends individual manifestations of psychological phenomenon and emerges through the accumulation of social and cultural capital. While psychological, social, and cultural structures may overlap, the relation of self to sociocultural structures creates students’ negotiation between peers and teachers in a dance of similarity, indifference, difference, compliance, acquiescence, and opposition.

Individuals’ sense of self is certainly an important element of identity. However, students’ identity is more significantly dependent on ways that students position themselves and are positioned through roles dependent on hierarchies within the social and cultural structures of the institution of education. Bourdieu (1977) argues that the role of education is to reproduce “the structure of power relationships and symbolic relationships between classes” (p. 487). Interactional student negotiations are constructions of others’ perceptions and representations and are byproducts of larger ideological processes and structures. Students’ self-conceptions surface in the social world of the classroom through discourse.

Discourse comprises the ways that people communicate in verbal and non-verbal ways: spoken, written, signed, and body language and through multimodal and multigenre forms of communication. Discourse is a dynamic that creates tensions between language, structure, and agency. The relationship between discourse and social practices is dialectical in that elements are internalized by other elements. Students’ past practices and imaginative futures become embedded in social practices and networks.

Buckholtz and Hall state that identity is emergent in discourse, does not precede it, and is an intersubjectively achieved social and cultural phenomenon (2005). Students’ experiences can be deeply felt yet unnamed, even unnamable, within discourse, as dominant ideologies drive and deepen discoursal tentions. Fairclough (2003) says that ideologies are representations that “contribute to establishing, maintaining, and changing social relations of power, domination, and exploitation” (p. 9). Such a definition of identity as a construct of dominant ideologies challenges essentialist definitions of identity, or definitions in which identity is viewed as fixed, singular, or binary, or in which concepts of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation exclusively create self-concepts. Addressing sociocultural identity is part of the work of critical pedagogy, in that critical pedagogy explores new identity categories and the development of relatively new discourses for addressing sociocultural identity, difference, and diversity. Discourse within contexts of social and global justice advocates equity in representation for marginalized groups locally, nationally and internationally.

Fairclough (1995; 2001) outlines a three-dimensional framework for studying discourse, moving from analysis of language texts, to analysis of discourse practices, and, finally, to analysis of discursive events as sociocultural practice. In the public school classroom, critical discourse analysis can help to unveil the culture of student voice and silence, of advocacy and resistance. For example, how do youth negotiate difference and come to understand democracy? To what degree do youth today understand themselves to be citizens who participate altruistically in community-based duties and responsibilities? How are youth today developing national and political identifications? What does it mean for a new generation of U.S. citizens to share common democratic values? How does identity play into definitions of national, regional, and group identifications?

Use this forum to respond, either as a teacher, youth, or interested observer. And keep peeking in on this blog as my data analysis takes on life through my own reflection.

Resources
Bourdieu. (1977). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In Karable & A. H. Halsey (Eds.), Power and ideology in education. New York: Oxford University Press.
Buckholtz, & Hall. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4-5), 585-614.
Fairclough. (1995). Critical discourse analysis. Harlow: Longman.
Fairclough. (2001). Language and power. Harlow: Longman.
Fairclough. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. New York, NY: Routledge.

Looking back at public school as a rite of passage

At the end of this month, many high school seniors around the country will complete their twelve years of formal and mandatory education. Ahead will come a series of new decisions about career and identity. This rite of passage can be invigorating, illuminating, and illusory.

To the high school seniors who read this blog, you are a child no more. You are an adult who’s made many initial decisions about your life and future. You’ve traveled a very long path to be at this sometimes tenuous, sometimes wonderful moment in time. Before you take that last step off your high school campus, I’d ask you to take a few moments to think about life as it was for you as one of America’s children, especially in your former role as a student. You can also help those of us in the field of education to know your generation a little bit more, if you will. (Please note that the comments to this blog are pseudonyms. Anonymity offers a certain freedom.)

Consider the Native American proverb, “No river can return to its source, yet all rivers must have a beginning.” How do you look back on the twelve years of formal education? Are you nostalgic? Relieved? Reticent? Why? Do fond memories of simpler times resonate? Or was life never really simple? Do life lessons that once seemed traumatic now seem just an awkward stage, even cathartic? What was it like for you to be a learner at the cusp of a new millennium?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet and essayist, said, “Not in his goals but in his transitions is man great.” Life when Emerson wrote surrounded small New England community enclaves; discourse rose primarily from family and religion. Your life is very different. How did the society and culture in which you were nurtured create pathways for your academic integration into school culture? What is life like when you are ready to graduate high school? Pesky calls you “a digital native” due to the ubiquitous technology in which you have been emerged. He says:

It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

Do you agree with his statement? What advise to you have to offer to educators? If you were given the power, what institutional changes would you incorporate for other students in public schools who follow you? To what degree do you feel that school has been a microcosm of society? What were the best parts of school? What challenges continue even though you will no longer be a participant?

Dr. Michael Welch, a cultural anthropologist and digital enthnographer from Kansas State University, recently uploaded a short video to YouTube called Web 2.0, the Machine is Using Us. The video discusses how the Web is changing how and how fast humans around the globe communicate. After you view the film, offer a socio-cultural critique of Wesch’ argument. Is his view accurate? Why or why not?

As you think about your answers to these questions, I’d like to thank you on behalf of educators in the United States everywhere. You have offered us vicarious links to the energy and enthusiasm of our own youth. You’ve also introduced us to many new ways of knowing our own worlds. A part of you will live on with us and in the students we’ll help to grow as learners in the future to come.

Blogging as part of classroom learning

What is a blog?

The word “blog” is short for "Web log." A blog is a specialized site that allows an individual or group of individuals to share a running log of events and personal insights with online audiences. (www.pvt.com/oth/glossary.htm) It offers readers the opportunity to reply to opinions and link to their own blogs. (www.iab.ie/FAQs/DefinitionofTerms/) Some blogs have definite authors who disclose their names, and some has anonymous authors who use a nickname.(www.searchenginegenie.com/search-engine-glossary-b.htm)

Why am I requiring students to post on a blog?

As part of a “Society, Issues, and Identity” unit, two of my classes will post occasionally to a classroom blog. Because it is important for them to be safe and protected when using the Internet for classroom purposes, they are posting on the classroom blog using pseudonyms.

What is a pseudonym?

A pseudonym is a "false name" or alias used by a writer desiring not to use his or her real name. Sometimes called a nom de plume or "pen name. (home.cfl.rr.com/eghsap/apterms.html) A pseudonym serves many purposes. An assumed name protects the anonymity of an author.(www.reddeerbookexchange.com/terminology.htm) Fictitious names are often used when the person performs a particular social role. (wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn) In this situation, students are using a blog to publish their classroom learning experiences.

Do all students have to post to the blog for every assignment?

No. Several windows for extra credit opportunity will open and close for students to post. In a privileged community where grades are intertwined as status and pathways to academic capital, grades are very important to my students. They like extra credit opportunities.

Periodically, however, all students will be required to post as part of scaffolded learning events. Upcoming, for example, is an assignment called, “Citing Your Sources: Ancient Greece Society and Life.” Each student will submit a post in conjunction with a self-selected Issues Group.

Who is the moderator for our sophomore blog?

I am the moderator for the blog. This means that I review and sometimes abbreviate posts from the students. Some posts that are submitted to the blog may not be accepted, and yet other posts may be accepted without any editing. It is likely that most submissions will get posted with some editing.

What is the address for the blog?

http://societyissuesidentity.blogspot.com/

What has been the reaction to the blog so far?

In the week since the students have become aware of it and its potential for digital discourse, nine students have posted on a voluntary basis. Several of those students have sought me out in person to ask, “What did you think of my blog?” The blog has invited conversations around topics that a teacher might not freely address in this era of restricted teacher freedom of expression.

What do you think about incorporating blogs as part of classroom instruction? Add your own ideas.

Submit a comment to this blog in which you describe your own experiences using blogs in the classroom. Did you seek administrative approval, like I did? Was it approved (my questions were never answered, so I went ahead, anyway)? Have students or families resented the requirement to publish their work for a wider audience than teachers or classroom peers? Have students who live in a Web 2.0 world embraced the opportunity to reconcile their inside/ outside school personas, at least to a small degree? Has manipulation of form ever exceeded unveiling of students’ learning content and making links among ideas? If so, what did you do to streamline that learning process?

New Digital Media: Teachers' Roles as Trustees

The GoodWork® Project at Harvard University has been studying how individuals strive to achieve work that is “excellent in quality, ethical, and engaging to the worker” (http://www.goodworkproject.org/research/digital.htm). Much of their recent work has turned to digital media --- cyberspace --- in which youth engage in social as well as work activities.

Pettingill (2006) reports on the trust that youth place in internet sources. She found that participants who engaged in social networking sites daily were “more likely to cite Wikipedia as a trusted source for information. Subjects in this subset also had a tendency to search for content that has a perspective similar to theirs and exhibits consistency with other sites” (p. 7). Moreover, the researcher determined that teachers are regarded as trustees, “particularly regarding how to choose credible sources of information” (p. 9).

All right, teachers: raise your hands if you are comfortable with new digital media. Hands down.

Okay, I’ll start again. What is new digital media?

When digital computers became ubiquitous, our homes became sites for the Internet and computer games. Yet those media were only the beginning of new media, however. Online publications have emerged. Typographic press has been transformed through image manipulation software and desktop publishing tools.

Thus, new media represent new forms of digital media and remake traditional media forms. Think of CD players and their reincarnation, IPODs. VCRs became DVD players, and those are being supplanted by fascinating applications of video and audio streaming. Most importantly, information is shared and modifed by a number of users. No longer do intellectual property rights carry sacrosanct, individualistic meanings for composers.

In a recent study, ETS ("ICT Literacy Assessment Preliminary Findings", 2006) found that most students possess undeveloped Internet comprehension. Additionally, students seemed unable to critically reframe traditional media into new digital media genres.

Students rely on their teachers as guides to collective mapping as to what is and is not credible in the new digital media world. So, teachers, raise your hands if you agree with the following statement: “Teachers in the 21st century need to gain fluency in use of the tools of new digital media in order to help students ascertain credibility of the information they encounter online.”

I, for one, have my hand raised skyward. I’m starting tomorrow. I’m going to take a risk. I’m writing an e-mail to the Technology Coordinator in my building to inquire if our school has any policies about teachers and students blogging as part of public school instruction. Yes, again I will be extending past the curriculum mandates. Yes, my rebel status will rise in conversations. And, more pragmatically, my time as an English teacher will have a new layer of response added in what is already a time management nightmare. Sure, I will have to spend careful time monitoring students’ comments. Yes, I anticipate that I will receive phone calls, e-mails, and maybe even a few personal visits from parents and guardians who will voice concern about public posting of student work. But my instincts and pedagogical beliefs tell me it will be worth it.

I feel that more important than collegial critique is my role in Vygotsky’s (1978) Zone of Proximal Development as someone who can scaffold students’ learning. Who knows? Maybe, someday, when my students have long forgotten my name and face, they may encounter an Internet scam and know how to assess its value. Maybe one of my students will figure how to distinguish between sources as entertainment or superficial information from those of scholarly research when a personal crisis occurs.

In all likelihood, my influence in asking students to participate in a classroom social networking website will have more immediate results. New digital media in the classroom may introduce opportunities for us to have conversations about ourselves, the various personas we all embrace, and the occasional vulnerabilities we all feel in our lives and world.

Those chances to reach out transcend any classroom risk or traditional and new media applications: real conversations about lives lived penetrate the heart of lifelong learning.

Resources

ICT Literacy Assessment Preliminary Findings. (2006, 03.31.08). from http://www.etc.org/ictliteracy
Pettingill. (2006). Trust Without Knowledge: How Young Persons Carry out Research on the Internet [Electronic Version]. The Goodworks Project Papers, 48, 1-17. Retrieved 03.31.08 from http://pzweb.harvard.edu/eBookstore/PDFs/GoodWork48.pdf.
Vygotsky. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hard versus soft data?

Eighteen months ago, I was really lucky: I received a grant from the SMARTer Kids Foundation. In my technology-deprived high school, SMART Interactive Whiteboards are more myth than mainstream. Yet I was going to receive one due to a research project I had proposed! It was titled, “Look! Johnny and Janey Can Read: Enhancing the Literate Lives of Teens through SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard Technology.” I wanted to study whether students’ overall literacy levels could improve by utilizing both print and visual texts, with the SMART Interactive Whiteboard as delivery vehicle within the traditional public school classroom.

Since the Call for Proposals included the criterion “should have a sound, rigorous research methodology,” I designed a mixed method research design.

Now let it be said: as a qualitative researcher, I was most interested in analyzing data on students’ learning processes. I like to observe then tell the stories of students’ lives as learners. This project would take most of an entire school year, and I was keenly interested to compose four narratives about students who fit the description of “the children we worry about the most” (Hankins, 2003).

However, I was conscious that quantitative research is still more highly prized. Thus, I offered to code and analyze via SPSS to describe frequencies of identified variables; one sample T-test with test variable “curriculum track in English class;” paired sample T-test, with variables “score on previous standardized test” and “think of self as literate;” and, comparisons of pre- and post-test assessment indicators. Ultimately, I wondered, “Would incorporating SMART Interactive Whiteboard Technology enhance student performance on mandated statewide testing?”

Fast forward to 2008. I’ve completed the qualitative aspects of the report and am now beginning collaboration with a colleague who will check (and probably heavily edit) my quantitative data. You can view the qualitative component of my report at http://smarterkids.org/research/library_subject.asp.

This week, I received my first response to the article I wrote. The response was, honestly, a backdoor compliment at best. Yes, the person who found me through the internet was delighted that my students had received and learned through the SMART Board so positively. She knew of many qualitative and anecdotal reports with similar findings. Yet, she required “hard data” to sell her own district on the merits of capital investing toward SMART Boards in their district classrooms.

Hard versus soft data, hhhmmm? There's that issue of researcher bias emerging again. And the targets seem to be almost exclusively qualitative researchers.

Regardless of socio-economic class, race, or gender, all students have tremendous abilities to be critical readers of their worlds when offered the tools for success. Drawing from a Freirian (1992) perspective, I help learners to struggle for academic success “not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform” (p. 34). This social justice orientation raises complicated issues about power and knowledge and does contain bias. As a teacher-researcher, I must constantly identify ethical dilemmas. Our lives as practitioners and our lives as partners, members of cultural communities, and political citizens are intertwined richly. As Haraway (1988) argues,

“…only partial perspective promises objective vision. All Western cultural narratives about objectivity are allegories of the ideologies governing the relations of what we call mind and body, distance and responsibility. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see” (p.583).

I believe a false dichotomy of objectivity and subjectivity, between the personal and professional, pervades educational thinking. Actions in many domains of all teachers’ lives contribute to praxis. While I argue that a teacher cannot leave one identity at the public classroom door and assume another elsewhere, I also recognize that teachers, students, and their families do not always share the same values. We live in a pluralistic society. Values are a community standard. I constantly debate issues of justice versus caring (Noddings, 1984), and I reconcile the two by creating a classroom climate that is safe, meaningful, and consistent with community contexts.

I will leave you with questions to ponder. How many quantitative researchers offer climates where all students have chances to be successful? In what ways do quantitative researchers really know the humans they are studying and, so, live in conscious states between personal and professional --- never really leaving one to become solely the other? To what extent do quantitative researchers accept and identify their own areas of biases?

Hard data versus soft data are jargon, and distinctions between the two rise from an accepted American binary cultural system. Do quantitative researchers seek to escape binary thought and attempt to navigate the multiplicity of learning possibilities in our postmodern world? Let's just say it: all researchers have bias. As teacher-researchers, our focus must become how to reconcile that bias with the humans we observe in the constant goal to foster educational reform.


Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.
Hankins, K. H. (2003). Teaching through the storm: A journal of hope. New York: Teachers College Press.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of the partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599.
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Generational divides

Texts that changed our lives are not our students’ texts

A recent professional development seminar for our high school English department asked me to consider and write for twenty minutes about the following question:

“What book changed your life?”

I couldn’t remember one particular book, but a vivid story did come back to me. Every Sunday afternoon of my childhood was spent in the same way: my mother, my younger brother, and I would visit my maternal grandmother, a widow. I can still see my perch on her brown couch with its red diamond pattern and the oil painting of the brunette woman at the piano over my head. I imagined that the pianist was my mother.

Certain, very specific rules accompanied my brother and me on those Sunday excursions. Television and radio were forbidden. We were required to sit politely, listen attentively, and talk when asked a question. We were not to play games, run around, or cause any commotion, and we were absolutely not to divulge the inner workings of our own 1000 square foot home, three miles away.

We were allowed, however, to read.

I took full advantage of what I perceived as this exception to civility. I read all of my mother’s Nancy Drew mysteries, and then inhaled my brother’s Hardy Boy series. I read --- albeit abridged --- Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. I cried when the spider died at the end of Charlotte’s Web.

And I learned to yearn for those Sundays spent reading, for dedicated times to explore ways of seeing and knowing and living beyond my very provincial small town, whose boundaries even then seemed to kick the breath out of me.

I liked that writing assignment a lot, and I considered asking my students to complete the same assignment. But then it occurred to me: I was a Vietnam War child. Mine was the first generation to watch a war broadcast live on the evening news. The mass media as we know it today existed only in the imaginations of a rare few: Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Marshall McLuhan.

Which media would my contemporary students remember with nostalgic fondness? I suspect their texts are a lot closer to Barney than Isaac Bashevis Singer, more Simpsons than Sounder.

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) executive committee has asked its members to think more intently about shifts in literacy.

Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable.

In an era when our students are blogging, adding to wikis, accessing podcasts, watching webcasts, and social networking, what are we, as teachers, doing in our classrooms to enrich their full literate lives?

We need to move beyond fear of our own inabilities to access new media. We need to treat literacy as more than a functional skill -- one's ability to read and write --- and, instead, as a sophisticated set of meaning-making activities situated in specific social spaces.

Finding the Middle in the Curriculum Versus New Literacies Wars

As I begin to make decisions about a framework for the data I’m collecting for my dissertation, I continually question how traditional literacy instruction can meet the world of new literacies. The answer circles back, over and over, to Freire’s (1992) critical pedagogy, in which teachers and students are co-learners. Thus, through critical literacy, students’ and I together recontextualize literacy processes through translation of symbols, analysis of social constructs, and negotiation of meaning.

When my senior classes read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1997), they also sort through intertextual layers and connections: Chinua Achebe’s essay, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1977); the film, Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979); documentary footage of the Vietnam War; articles from the progressive community website, CommonDreams.org on US colonialism; and a Google search using the text keywords to analyze the effect of Conrad’s text on modern American society.

After sifting through a variety of peer-reviewed research sources, students decide which frames of knowing, observing, and interpreting they will incorporate into their final projects. “Frames are powerful not only because we have internalized them from media, but because they have become second nature to us --- they allow us to process information efficiently and get about our lives” (Gilliam, Aubrun, Grady, & Bostrom, 2002, p. 4). The frame is a portrait of trends rather than a particular individual’s identity. The concept of frame is constant as I incorporate a critical literacy framework into the classroom.

Due to the efficacious means of producing, circulating, and exchanging information, popular and media cultures are central ways in which my students can learn about themselves, their relationship to others, and the world beyond their homes (Giroux, H., 1999). I seek to create critical readers who can identify ways that body, power, and gender messages contribute to discourse (Gee, 2003). I want students to “read” their worlds in new and increasingly reflective ways, to add a metacognitive layer to learning, to adopt an outsider perspective in order to become analytical; and to interrogate the media as major political, pedagogical, and social forces (Giroux, H., 1999; Giroux, H. & Simon, 1989).

If my students own these strategies, then my influence will have transcended one school year. I teach students to question textual authority and use reasoning to come to autonomous decisions. Rather than trying to superimpose a particular world view on my students, I attempt to help them to achieve critical distance as they read their worlds in order to make independent and informed decisions as to whether to support or refute messages about identity within economic, social, political, historical, and aesthetic contexts.

For example, a senior honors female related a narrative to me about her maternal influences. “My mother refused to wear a veil on her wedding day,” Kelly Leigh began, “because her mother did, too. My grandmother said it was a sign of being submissive to her husband. She wasn’t having any of that.” A huge smile burst onto her face. “I’ve decided to wear one, anyway.”

Kelly Leigh had constructed “meaning through the integration of existing and new knowledge and the flexible use of strategies to foster, monitor, regulate, and maintain comprehension” (Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991). Through a critical literacy classroom, she was able to express and reconcile hegemonic gender messages. She made her own decision in light of evidence and after reflection.

Students like Kelly Leigh who become critically literate will question hegemony in its various forms and have the wherewithal to choose to accept or reject the mythology of the American Dream. It is a critical means to reconcile curriculum and embedded messages of cultural transmission.

Resources
Achebe. (1977). An image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Massachusetts Review, 18, 782-794.
Conrad. (1997). Heart of darkness: Signet Classics.
Coppola (Writer) (1979). Apocalypse now. In Z. Studios (Producer). United States: Paramount.
Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson. (1991). Moving from the old to the new: Research on reading comprehension instruction. Review of Educational Research, 61(2), 239-264.
Freire. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.
Gee. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Gilliam, Aubrun, Grady, & Bostrom. (2002). Framing public issues. Washington, D.C.
: Frameworks Institute.
Giroux. (1999). The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Giroux, & Simon. (1989). Popular culture as a pedagogy of pleasure and meaning. In H. Giroux & R. Simon (Eds.), Popular culture: Schooling and everyday life. New York: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc.