Back in the Saddle with 5472

For this week, I have read Rick Beach's first chapter of his Teaching Media Literacy. This is a chapter that is spent largely on justifications and rationalizations and research that supports the teaching of Media Literacy in schools. This brought up a lot of thoughts for me given my current state. I am a 7th grade teacher at South St. Paul Secondary School which is both a school and community that is undergoing difficult transitions. The school itself is an IB school and has just received authorization, so it is undergoing all of these test-like things. Further, it has failed to make AYP for the last three years, which means that if it doesn't make it this year and next, it will be re-structured by the state. From a social perspective, SSP is a traditionally white, working-class community that in recent years (about the last 10 years) has been more and more populated by students of color (mostly latino, but also some black kids).
All of these things converge to make my school a somewhat tense building. Never have I experienced that tension more than when I first arrived. I took Rick Beach's Digital Writing course this past fall, and this was also my first semester of teaching in the U.S. public school system. I did two wiki projects which included the use of video, bubblus, and podcasting with gcast. Part of the second wiki project involved some talk of media literacy. We reviewed websites to find out what made a good one and what didn't. I found that it was amazing how well kids could almost intuitively know when a website was "bad", even if they couldn't articulate why. Of course, they had trouble identifying shoddy information when it was presented in a professional looking manner. Overall, I thought the experience was positive and my students said that they would rather do a wiki project, even though it was more difficult, because they enjoyed writing for an audience besides myself. I also found that I got better quality of work and better engagement in the project from my students on the wiki projects than on the essays that I forced them to write.
So, if you are still reading, you're thinking, "Ok, sounds good, so what's the problem?" The problem was that while all of these wonderful things were happening in my classroom, I was also developing a reputation at my school. Before people even really knew my name I was the "wiki teacher" who booked up all of the computer labs. While most teachers were admiring in their comments, I almost got the sense that there was a bit of jealousy or "Who does she think she is? She should be teaching in the classroom instead of futzing with the computers". To me, as a first year teacher in my first semester of teaching, this was not an attitude that made me proud. This was an attitude that offended me and disappointed me. It was yet another instance when I felt the disconnect between what I had been taught to do and what got me the approval of my peers, which, like it or not, is actually important when you teach in a school. This chapter in Beach talks about the justifications for teaching media literacy, and in doing so, it assumes that the major reason that more teachers do not use pop songs, movies, and websites in their classroom is because they themselves don't know how useful it is or how to justify its usefulness to administrators. What Beach fails to mention is that when one decides to be an agent of change in his or her building, one is going to encounter not just professional pressure, but also social pressure. Perhaps it is just my small district (which I will be leaving at the end of the year), but I know that even in my student teaching at Como Park in St. Paul, when I did a podcasting project with my Creative Writing class, i was told by both of my cooperating teachers to be careful, to not try to do too much, and to stick what I know I can succeed with (and that is not to say that my cooperating teachers were at all bad- in fact, they were fantastic teachers).

I know that I will be met with choruses of "But that social struggle is worth it for the good of the kids", and I would agree with you, but I am one of very few. I have pushed my media literacy agenda perhaps to the detriment of my own personal/professional life because it is simply more fun to be a classroom full of kids who are really engaged than it is to fight them. I like the way my kids learn, and it's especially useful because I have received the education I need to teach them where they are at. However, many teachers have not received such an education, and in an effort to hang on to the legitimacy of their own teaching methods, they have to balk at the methods of the fresh-faced first year teacher, just in from grad school. We need to remember that if we are going to be agents of change, if we are going to teach media literacy and defend it using scholastic, theoretical arguments, we will be doing so in an actual school, with actual teachers whose last education credit was received years ago, and who aren't as interested in what works for the students as they are in what works for them as teachers. We have to be ready to face that social opposition and figure out how to respond in such a way that we don't compromise ourselves as teachers and professionals or as social beings who need a relatively pleasant place to work.

Again, all of this comes from the perspective of someone who is just about to finish her first year of teaching. I've found that there was much that teacher school couldn't prepare me for, and I am excited to be back in my academic community where ideas and research are smiled upon, both in discussion and follow-through. I know that I would have written differently about this one year ago; I wonder if I will write differently about this after I have another school experience.