Participatory culture and classroom transformation--easier said than done

Although the video from Dan Brown posted by Anna had its weak points—for example, most of my and my children’s university experience has involved much more than the memorization of facts, and I’m also not convinced that increased access to facts by more people is what drives society forward, his general argument that the nature of institutional education needs to be transformed is one that I have been reading about, thinking about, and agreeing with over the past several weeks.

In Digital Literacies: Social Learning and Classroom Practice, the book I critiqued for my second assignment, editors Victoria Carrington and Muriel Robinson argued passionately that it is not especially useful to view new digital technologies simply as nifty new methods for getting the attention of children so that we can teach them the same old facts; if we want to educate children for media literacy, the very nature of education will have to be transformed from a model in which teachers impart information to students who lack it, to a model in which teachers act more as guides and facilitators and classrooms become communities of co-learners and creators of knowledge. This is a familiar concept to readers of Henry Jenkins's white paper which argues that as digital technology encourages and enables an increasingly participatory culture, the challenge will be to shift the focus of literacy education from one of individual expression to one of community involvement. Ross Todd, in his article “Youth and their Virtual Networked Worlds: Research Findings and Implications for School Libraries”, speaks of the need both to re-conceptualize the school library as a knowledge commons and to shift the goal of instruction from the imparting of information to the development of knowledge.

These scholarly and research backed arguments conform to my own experience as a homeschooling mother. I rarely told my children what they had to learn and I never gave them tests or grades. I was not their chief source of information. They pursued their own interests, learning from books, from TV, from each other, from friends, from other adults, from the internet, and occasionally, even from their father and me. We truly did function as a community of co-learners. I learned along with them. My most important tasks were to facilitate their learning by making resources available to them, to encourage them to think critically about what they learned by asking questions or suggesting additional sources of information, and to help them learn how to accomplish what they wanted to do when they were stuck. All of them have remained enthusiastic and competent learners as they have grown into adulthood.

Having expressed all of this agreement, however, I have to say that I think that transforming how we approach education is a lot easier said than done. My positive experience with homeschooling was dependent upon a household in which there were two parents, there was enough financial security for one parent to be unemployed, and there was one parent who preferred home to career. For many families, public school is the only option.

It may be easy enough to argue persuasively that the nature of education needs to be transformed, but actually achieving those changes is another question altogether. The Jenkins white paper offers a few concrete suggestions for activities that could be used to promote the various competencies that, according to Jenkins, need to be taught, and these are reasonable starting points. But they are still just a beginning step on the road to transformation. Anyone I have ever talked to who has taught in the public schools has spoken of the difficulty of effecting change in the classroom. With more and more emphasis being placed upon test scores, learning standards, complying with various federal and state mandates, and increased “accountability” for teachers and schools, there is precious little room for a teacher to introduce a new way of doing things, and precious little time for a new practice to take root and produce the sort of verifiable positive results that would allow it to be continued.

Transforming how we think about education will take more than persuading teachers of the need for change. In fact, persuading teachers of the need might be the easiest part of promoting change. The greater task will be achieving the social and political change that will need to occur in order for teachers to have more freedom to experiment and try new ways of conducting their classes. I have to admit that this strikes me as a rather daunting obstacle. I would be interested in others’ ideas about what can be done to make it easier and more acceptable for teachers and librarians to transform how education is carried out.