All posts by Martina Gamboa

Instagram and the Adolescent Language Learner: A Critique on Media

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

Instagram has become a powerful tool for many, whether it’s showcasing, marketing, self-expression, or more. This past week, while trying to sort out lessons within a unit for my middle school ENL class, I took a brain break to scroll through Instagram and noticed that immediately afterwards, the ideas began to flow and I was able to get right back to writing. I’m currently mapping out the main topics I want to teach my students from now until December, and I’ve split things up into two units: Belonging to my community and Belonging to the world. In the former, we learn the parts of speech and how to describe ourselves and the people around us (family, friends, and others in our community). One of the lessons I have planned involves listening to a short interview of M. Tony Peralta, an Uptown and Dominican native that expresses latinidad and afrolatinidad visually through his art. Thus, scrolling through his Instagram page and discussing the images that catch students’ attention seem naturally like a great way to engage them and give them control in the learning process. I think Peralta is a great figure to share with students, because his page will feel culturally familiar for them and many of his posted videos include him speaking English and Spanish, and planning this lesson allowed me to begin to see the value in using Instagram as a tool in the classroom.

Initially, Instagram was developed for iPhone users, but after its purchase by Facebook, it became accessible on all smartphones. A desktop version has subsequently been developed, which could be used with full sound on a SmartBoard present material in class. One great benefit to using Instagram in class is that by showing public accounts, students can engage with the material that sparks their interest outside of class and gain more knowledge, which would be great for my Belonging to the community unit. For example, @SubwayDoodle takes the New York experience of “riding the train” to a whole other level by layering cartoons on top of actual photos of train commuters, so students can not only feel closer to the commuting community that they are most likely a part of, but also learn interesting idioms and visual representations of the absurd. A character created entirely of springs at Spring St. Station or a cartoon’s face melting on a hot summer train platform would be great visual aids for English language learners. For the unit Belonging to the world, a way to create consciousness in my students on their interconnectedness with the world would be by showing the page @Parley.TV which creates awareness of the oceans to help work towards ending ocean pollution. Parley for the oceans features stunning images of marine life, as well as examples of the ways humans have affected aquatic habitats with suggestions for how to alleviate human environmental stress. Students could discuss a particular image or video that caught their attention and then write a response to it.

All in all, there is a powerful learning opportunity hiding in one of the apps in our phones. While not everything on Instagram should be shown in a classroom full of adolescents, there are ways to proceed with caution and I believe the pros outweigh the cons and this could be a valuable tool in many classroom settings.

 

@tallerperalta / @peraltaprjct

@subwaydoodle

@parley.tv

Why are we still “tracking”?

Differentiation as an Approach to Teaching Diverse Learners

 

G. Ansalone (2010) p.6

Friday was a difficult day for me. On my way to my student teaching placement I had finished reading this article. Towards the end of 7th period (out of 8), I was setting up my side of the classroom for my stand-alone ENL group that I was about to pick up. As I wrote the aim on the easel, the middle schoolers on our floor were transitioning to their last period of the day and were quite loud, “rowdy”, and excited. They were 45 minutes away from the weekend. But one of the teachers in my department went on a bitter rant:

“They’re criminals. All of them. I swear I’m going call 311 or something and report this. This is ridiculous. I don’t even know why we waste our time on them”

I stared at her in disbelief as a million and one things raced through my head and her words rang in my ears. My eyes swelled up and it was as if my voice had been taken away from me, after what seemed like an eternity in this stare, all I could say was “are you serious?”.

Each one of those students is either 14 or younger. They are children. They’re supposed to be excited about the weekend. Unfortunately, this teacher is convinced that these “lower track” students need to be more docile and obedient or face the consequences.

What hope is there for a the students of an openly discriminatory teacher who has already labeled some of her students as lost causes, others as criminals, and others as a waste of time?

Tracking has made sure that these students have a less enriched curriculum. Tracking has made sure that their teachers focus on order, obedience, and silence rather than content and creativity. Maybe I’ve only seen the bad side of tracking but I’ve seen it do more harm than good. My overall question becomes: Why are we still tracking? Why won’t we stop?

The deserving poor and the undeserving poor

eLiteracy and Social Media(tion)

Teaching students to critically analyze unjust and inequitable conditions in their lives means having hard but necessary conversations about poverty, race, trauma, and oppression in their lives and the actions needed to change them. However, talking about poverty as a structural problem of policy and discrimination goes against stereotypes about poor people held by those more privileged, as well as by working-class and poor people themselves, that blame the poor for their condition and stigmatize them as lazy and undeserving of our help. Poor people are particularly stigmatized when the source of disadvantage is perceived as controllable, as compared with an uncontrollable cause of poverty such as natural disasters (Williams, 2009). As educators, we too carry our own assumptions and implicit biases about race and poverty that impact our teaching. As Paul Gorski (2013) writes, “What we believe about poverty and why it exists even affects our expectations of and attitudes toward low-income students…. [W]e need to challenge common myths about poverty and develop robust understandings of the experiences of poor and working-class families both in and out of school” (p. 27). 

-S. Goodman, It’s Not About Grit 

I took an intro to sociology class in undergrad and one of the topics that we spoke about that most stuck with me was the idea of the “deserving poor”, that there are a group of people that someone wants to help because they feel like they can’t help the fact that they’re poor and therefore have merited the chance to be helped. Comments like “Don’t waste food, there are starving children in Africa” show ideas of a deserving poor because it neither actually helps the starving children elsewhere but also fails to recognize that there may be starving children in their county or city. But, the difference here lies in that the children in Africa deserve our help (see also the Savior Complex) but the children in urban areas don’t because if only those people would work harder, get a higher paying job, or go to college, they wouldn’t be poor. 

The idea of controllable or uncontrollable poverty, as this passage states, is the deciding factor behind who we as a society deem is deserving or undeserving of being in that socioeconomic situation.

Leaving behind those categorizations is essential to our work as educators because how can we give all of our students an equal chance at excelling in our classes if we, from the beginning, push the finish line further away from certain students. By recognizing and understanding our students better, we can even out the playing field in our classroom and inspire students that will even it out in the “real world”.

The extent of teacher beliefs

Socioemotional and Psychological Development in Adolescence

My MVP for this week is a passage split in two because one part represents the cause and the other the effect of this type of behavior. The behavior I’m referring to goes into what we as educators may be subconsciously promoting in our classrooms. The sheer length of time we spent in school often times, as previously read and mentioned in class, affects our teaching style more than teacher preparation degree programs and that means that sometimes we might perpetuate ideas that aren’t so universally accepted anymore. This MVP specifically talks about how implicitly instilling in students the idea that success is based solely on academic achievement and then furthermore that intelligence is a “fixed entity rather than a modifiable skill”, we are setting up many students for failure. Yes, some students may thrive in this sort of setting and yes, maybe we could have been one of those students growing up, but that doesn’t make these ideas universally true. As educators we must strive to be as receptive as possible in our teaching styles to the many different ways in which students learn. If we place students in an education system that immediately rejects and belittles their type of intelligence, we rule our their input into the class and stunt their socioemotional and psychological growth in that setting. In order for students to develop, they must be given the space to do so.

Eccles _ Roeser _2011_ Schools as Developmental Contexts During Adolescence
p.228

Testosterone, Progesterone, and Gender Roles

Adolescent Brain, Biological & Cognitive Development in Adolescence

Before continuing with this MVP response, I would like to plainly say that I haven’t taken a biology class since 9th grade and do not consider myself to be a scientist or expert on the human body. But, that being said, I do have one and think that that counts for something.

This particular article, when I read paragraph after paragraph regarding the physical and neurological changes all of our bodies go through during puberty, I couldn’t help but note how deeply engrained our perceptions, and reactions to them, are to prescribed gender roles.

How much of this is nature and how much of it is nurture? Will young boys that reach puberty later than others continue to (in general) have feelings of inferiority if they grow up in a society that doesn’t define masculinity largely on athletic ability, physical size and height, and penis size? Will young girls that develop earlier than others continue to (in general) feel self conscious about their bodies if they grow up in a society that doesn’t over sexualize young girls? How much of the blame for the pressure that children transition into is our collective fault for creating a society which actively and cyclically foments this?

I think social constructs regarding gender and gender roles still largely dictate MANY of the decisions and perspectives of adults. It’s not like we turn 20/21 and all of a sudden, toxic masculinity and sexism cease to affect our lived experiences.

Gender roles sometimes stick with us longer than puberty.

 

Brown, Knowles (2007) Understanding the Young Adolescent’s Physical and Cognitive Growth. p.25

Side note and personal vendetta: Yet another article that lightly mentions that: “Researchers have noted that African American females reach puberty several months earlier on average than Caucasian females (Daniels et al. 1998).” (page 18), but provides no further information on the topic.