All posts by Haley Robertson

Facebook: the educational network

eLiteracy and Social Media(tion), Media and Technology Critiques, Urban Adolescents

The Aaron Sorkin production, The Social Network, chronicles the early life of the most ubiquitous of all social media platforms: Facebook.   The movie depicts the instant popularity, almost virus like in its spread, of this new technology and the rise of its famous founders.  While a dramatic picture, the film accurately portrays Facebook’s role in young peoples’ live and how it has become an integral component of a prosperous social life.

Recent scholarly research in the field of education emphasizes the importance of social interaction in the learning process.   This includes interactions with both teachers and classmates: positive peer-to-peer and teacher-peer relationships are critical to student success.  These relationships motivate students, reduce affective stress levels in the classroom and allow teachers to understand the individual needs of students.  While most educators are aware of the importance of social relationships, creating and maintaining them can be challenging in any classroom, even more so in classes where there are upwards of thirty students who come from diverse backgrounds.

Facebook can be an effective tool to fill in the interaction gaps and create a more involved classroom, one that is in tune with the interests of students.  As an educator, Facebook can be used for classroom organization, fostering student discussion, and addressing student concerns that were not taken care of during class time.   Due to students comfort with the technology, it may be easier to implement than other online classroom management tools or discussion forums.  Additionally, the ease of access promotes student participation and autonomy as a learner; the phrase “I couldn’t do my homework because…” will become harder to justify as school work becomes accessible by phone, computer and tablet.

While Facebook is a key resource that can be implemented by educators to engage students across disciplines it has particular relevance for the second language classroom.  One of the biggest challenges as a language teacher is creating authentic situations for language use and relating language learning to student’s everyday lives.  The use of Facebook brings the target language to a platform that students already engage with.   Students can communicate with each other in the foreign language, particularly supportive for more introverted students who are often quiet in the classroom.  Students can connect through Facebook to language learning resources, target language news sources, and famous figures who post in the target language.  As student’s news feeds’ fill with the foreign language, their brains will too, with authentic input, vocabulary that reflects their interests and culturally relevant content.  The hope is that students can see the living nature of language firsthand through their online experience and be able to create their own persona in the target language.

Facebook can be a highly effective resource for teaching critical media literacy, if teachers are willing to do the front loading necessary for students to be able to engage with a critical eye.  Teaching about credible news sources, exploring stereotypes of those that speak the target language and monitoring student discussions are all ways that teachers can use Facebook to create discerning students who can censoriously analyze online content.

The use of any social media platform does however come with risks and challenges; the foremost challenge being the protection of student identity and information.  As an educator, one must be knowledgeable on how to use the technology in a way that does not put student safety or privacy at risk.  The other obstacle to the implementation of a Facebook friendly classroom is access to an internet equipped device when working with students with high financial need.  In these cases, the use of social media, though challenging, is of increased importance to cultivate leaners that are savvy to resources available and mindful of their pitfalls.

Over time, successful implementation of Facebook as a classroom tool can improve student engagement, the social network will become the educational network, but then, there is no need to tell the students that.

Chicana tattoos: important social-cultural issue?

eLiteracy and Social Media(tion), Urban Adolescents

“Tattoo parlors determine how Chicanas “do Chicana” as a situated accomplishment of difference that is maintained and reproduced in diverse social interactions (West and Fenstermaker 1995) with peers, male tattoo artists, and women who uphold community expectations of what is considered ladylike as their “essential nature”…”

“In the tattoo parlors of East Los Angeles, the colonizer (the tattoo artist) wields his power over the lives of colonized subjects (Chicana tattoo clients) by privileging men and maintaining gendered legacies through the patriarchal requirement that women be inferior”

I chose two passages for this MVP reading, as I really struggled to understand the larger social context or importance posed by this particular reading.  Typically, while reading for my MVP, I gain little chunks of understanding on a large and complex issue that I as an educator will face.  With this particular reading, however, I am having difficulty connecting it to my work as an educator or as a critical social issue.  While I found the passages that spoke about male tattoo artists touching female clientele inappropriately to be upsetting and alarming, I am having trouble buying into the author’s idea that male tattoo artists are “oppressors” and female tattooees  as the “colonized” subordinates.   I don’t really understand how women who make a choice to become tattooed are oppressed; in fact the very nature of them getting a tattoo signifies to me that they are very much in control of their own lives.  I understand that they often are rebuked by the men working in the parlors, but this hardly seems like a pressing issue related to gender roles within the Chicano community.   It feels to me like the author is jumping to some intense conclusions before research had been done and even then it didn’t seem to me, from the interviews that the Chicana women being tattooed felt “conquered” by their tattoo artists.  I am questioning this academic research as to its direct purpose in moving for the Chicana agenda and providing the reader with objective food for thought.  Instead, I found it to be filled with sweeping general statements without much specific research to back up these claims.

Life-long identity crisis: embracing ambiguity

Socioemotional and Psychological Development in Adolescence, Urban Adolescents

“Whether we are seasoned adults or young children, our identities are always in flux.  The human impulse to categorize, however, has resulted in labeling people in ways that restrict the expression of complex identities.”

Boxing people into convenient categories has been an unfair practice that I have both engaged in and suffered from.  When meeting new people we as humans have a desire to “know” someone from the get-go; maybe out of a survival instinct (is this person good or bad?) or maybe due to our discomfort with the unknown.  This categorizing is both offensive and self-limiting, yet is so prevalent in our society.  I identified so strongly with this passage, because ideas about identity are so frequently on my mind.   The more I travel and have new experiences, the harder I find it to define myself:  I am white, yet I do not identify with mainstream “white” culture in many ways; I speak Spanish and bachata, but I am not Latina; I have lived in so many places that I don’t even know what to say when people ask me where I am from.

The difference, however, between the adolescents that I will be teaching and my own self, is the confidence that I have gained with this ambiguity over the years.  Like Joaquin Rosario, I find this ambiguity both convenient and liberating.  For young people, these differences can cause personal trauma and social stigma if not encouraged and embraced by important adults in their life.   But it is this search for self and critical analysis of who we are (and who we desire to be) that allows us to understand and grow into our full selves.    Conforming to a stereotype or prescribed identity is often the easiest thing for people to do; veering away from the norm takes fortitude and resilience, two characteristics that we as teacher should try to cultivate.   In particular, I find the anti-intellectualism in America harmful to identity exploration and I think it is absolutely critical that as educators we foster students’ intellectual tendencies and capacity for critical thinking.   It is important to tap into the individual interests of students meanwhile exposing them to new ideas or ways of thinking.  In a language classroom, the avenues for exploring identity are virtually endless.  In embracing a multi-cultural approach to language teaching, we are inherently teaching our students to appreciate differences by acknowledging and  valuing elements from other cultures.

Deficit thinking and adolescent brains

Biological & Cognitive Development in Adolescence

“When this development proceeds normally, we get better at balancing impulse, desire, goals, self-interest, rules, ethics, and even altruism, generating behavior that is more complex and, sometimes at least, more sensible.  But at times, and especially at first, the brain does this work clumsily.  It’s hard to get all those new cogs to mesh.”

Reading “Beautiful Brains” was like watching Inception based upon my own teenage years. Despite the fact that I was a relatively mature teen, and now a relatively mature adult (at least in my own opinion) I did many stupid things when I was in my high school years.  What I remember feeling most distinctly about this time: was a distinct sensation of boredom, a deep and almost painful boredom that drove me to do things I knew I shouldn’t do (which I will not enumerate here).   This article really reminded me of the deficit thinking that we talk about frequently in our Educating Students with Disabilities class.  Instead of lamenting the sometimes negativity and restlessness of our adolescent students, I am beginning to think how I can draw upon the inherent desire in adolescents to engage in new experiences and explore.  I have thought about how this principle can be applied to my own student teaching placement.  Based on this theory, adolescent brains would be the most adaptable to learning a foreign language, as foreign language learning requires taking chances, allowing oneself to be susceptible to failure and engaging socially with peers.  I will continue to think about this theory as I plan my future classes and brainstorm how best to engage my adolescent learners.

Individual Agency and Teacher Roles

Urban Adolescents

“…the focus on plasticity, diversity, and individual agency and the strength or capacity of an adolescent to influence his or her development for better or for worse means that problematic outcomes of adolescent development are now regarded as just one of a larger array of outcomes… Indeed it is this plasticity that provides the theoretical basis of the view that all young people possess strengths or, more simply the potential for positive development”

I found this paragraph to be particularly powerful and it left me wanting to know more about individual agency and how it manifests (or does not) during adolescence.  Why is it that certain individuals seem to have a strength of self that allows them to rise above oppressive situations?  What component of that strength comes from within an individual and what component comes from outside factors?  How can we tap into that individual strength?  I recently read an article in the New York Times about a debate team made up of incarcerated youths recently beat Harvard at debate competition.  The imprisoned adolescents were part of a Bard College program to educate young people in the prison system, and for them to earn bachelor’s degrees.   It was a highly competitive program that many applied to.  This article definitely lends itself to the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture argument and it made me wonder if the key concept was expectations.

As an educator, I do believe that all students can learn, yet in my experience I have found that some individuals, for as much as you persist or come up with new teaching strategies or get to know them on a personal level, never seem to take their education seriously.  It is not that they are unable to learn, in fact they are often quite smart, but it appears unimportant to them.  In contrast, I have had students who are in equally dire economic or social situations and yet they seem to blossom after only a few classes, much like the students on the Bard debate team.   I would like to know more about how I as a teacher can nurture that individual strength and instill a core of  internal motivation.