All posts by Tianling

Escape and explore

Blurring the In-School Ouf-of-School Line, eLiteracy and Social Media(tion)

“I decided to do SecondLife because I didn’t like MySpace, Facebook, Tagged, or Crushspot. Everybody at school was using these online social networking sites, and I don’t like people at school that much…They mess with me. I didn’t want to always have to be in school and deal with high school stuff, especially when I’m at home, you know what I’m saying. Anyway, I have fun on SecondLife. I don’t have to be myself because my life sucks. And then I feel like I can be more like myself because I don’t have to front about stuff.” (Kirkland, 2009, Researching and Teaching English in the Digital Dimension, p17)

This kid’s situation reminded me of my younger sister who had the similar experience, not enjoying school, lacking of friends but exploring a new world through the social networking sites. Like the kid mentioned in this article—Raymond who confronted awful situation at home and suffered a lot, my sister had been though much hard times because of her physical deficits in her left eye and her mouth. She was taken to the hospital every week for treatment which lasted for seven years after she was born. It’s hard to imagine the physical pain she suffered; however, it is always the psychological trauma that is harder to be healed. She hated to go to school and had little communication with either her classmates or her teachers because she was laughed at by her peers a lot and lacked confidence so that she only had one or two friends, and for the rest of her classmates, she barely talked to them. As far as I’m concerned, there’s a strange phenomenon in china that teachers tend to show bias to students who are outgoing or active in class and pay a little attention or care the introverted students so that students who volunteer to answer questions in class, ask questions after class and communicate well with teachers often times receive more care in all aspects. My sister was the opposite who never liked to talk because every time she spoke, people would stare at her mouth, so I was not surprised that her teachers paid no attention to her and never cared about her. Continue reading Escape and explore →

Let’s chat–Wechat

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

When you see Chinese people typing on or talking to their cellphones, they are probably using Wechat which is a cross-platform instant messaging service created by Tencent in China and has become world famous with over a billion created accounts as of 2016. The Wechat app can be downloaded for free and is available for many systems including IOS, Android, Blackberry, etc.

Like many other social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, Wechat provides a way to share and express in public. Users can put pictures, type words or do both to share anything with friends, and nobody else can see your posts unless you “allow strangers to see at most ten posts”. Wechat also supports different ways of instant messaging such as texting and sending voice messages which is one of my favorite features of it since it brings a lot of convenience to us.  People can send what they want to say by just pressing a button to talk and releasing it when they finish. Besides, making videos, scanning QR code, adding contacts via other social media, finding friends nearby can also be done though Wechat. In mainland China, even shopping is available by using electronic cards.
Continue reading Let’s chat–Wechat →

It’s time to get real

eLiteracy and Social Media(tion), Urban Adolescents

“Within that societal curriculum, the media serve as pervasive, relentless, lifelong educators… so-called entertainment media… have a major impact in shaping beliefs, attitudes, values, perceptions, and “knowledge” and influencing decisions and action.( Cortes, “Who is Maria?” 75) (Yosso, Challenging deficit discourse about Chicanas/os,p52)

Speaking of the negative impact and influence of social media has brought to me, I always have a lot to say because I’ve suffered from it and struggled with myself for a long time.
I was born and grew up in Xinjiang, the Uyghur autonomous region of China in the northwest of the country, home to many ethnic minority groups. As for the ethnic group of Uyghur, there has been a huge issue since a long time ago, but the fact is that because of the politics, the history and other factors, some Uyghur people, especially those in the south part had no chance to be educated and lived under extremely poor condition. Gradually, they started to do some bad things, stealing, robbing, and even hurting people, and made a bad reputation for the whole group. I became so aware that some people don’t like people from Xinjiang when I went to college in Beijing. They watched the TV news, the report, the videos on the internet of Uyghur’s crime, and they assumed that all people from Xinjiang are mostly the same, no matter which ethnic group they are in. The message sent from the media sometimes could be so misleading for outsiders since it only, only focuses on the bad and negative side. I hated others asking me where I came from because I couldn’t bear the weird expressions in their eyes and sometimes the worse reaction when I told them my hometown. Continue reading It’s time to get real →

Let young adolescents be themselves

Biological & Cognitive Development in Adolescence, Creating Classroom Community, Socioemotional and Psychological Development in Adolescence, Urban Adolescents

“Unlike their high school counterparts, young adolescents haven’t yet gone underground with their experiments in who they want to be and how they want to behave. They try out the possibilities like actors improvising on a public stage, taking first one role and then another. They are still playing with lots of possible selves.” (Cushman, K., & Rogers, L. 2008, P14)
This is so true, and I like the last sentence “They are still playing with lots of possible selves” in particular. Young adolescents haven’t completely figured out what they want to be, what they want to do or how they want to behave because they are still going through a phase where they experience dramatic physical changes, amplified feelings and expanding minds so that they can act very differently when they are being different selves. The most important thing is that in this special stage, every “self” is extremely easily influenced by their peers, usually in bad ways. Continue reading Let young adolescents be themselves →

The impact of physical changes on adolescents

Adolescent Brain, Reaching Adolescents and How to Respond, Urban Adolescents

#MVP 4 The impact of physical changes on adolescents

I really enjoyed reading Brown and Knowles’ article “Understanding the young adolescent’s physical and cognitive growth” because it addressed two important aspects of this special stage—physical changes and cognitive growth during adolescence, and it made me think about that as teachers, what can we do to respond appropriately to these dramatic changes? Here I focus on physical changes.

 

This article listed several physical changes happened in males and females. For example, female young adolescents experience weight gains, breast development and menstruation which are the main concerns for them and create challenges as well so that most of them see these in a very negative way. I remember one of my friends cried for a whole night when she first got her period and she didn’t even know why she acted like that, and she just knew that there’s something really bad happened. Also, I remember once in our gym class, a girl was in her period but felt very embarrassed to tell our male teacher so that she did a lot of intense exercise with other classmates but fainted after class.  I think the teacher should have asked at the very beginning of the class in order not to make students feel embarrassed about this. For males, one of the major changes is their deepening voice. However, adolescents experience this at different age and rate, which could be a problem for some students. For example, some boys who haven’t gone through a voice change (high to low) would be laughed at by their peers and labeled as girlish.

 

Additionally, other aspects such as nutrient needs, insatiable and peculiar appetite, and sleep needs of adolescents were presented. These are all normal things, nevertheless young people develop different thoughts since they would like to compare with each other and often times turn the differences among them into feelings of inadequacy and deficiency. As teachers, we should be aware of the huge impact that physical changes have on adolescents’ development and be responsible to guide them in the right way to view these changes.  We can encourage them to talk about these things and express their feelings to adults, either parents or teachers, and provide them the accurate information to eliminate their doubts and concerns.