Category Archives: eLiteracy and Social Media(tion)

Critical Approaches to Media in Urban English Language Arts Teacher Development by Ernest Morrell, University of California, Los Angeles

eLiteracy and Social Media(tion)

          “As English educators, we have a major responsibility to help future English teachers to redefine literacy instruction in a manner that is culturally and socially relevant, empowering, and meaningful to students who must navigate a diverse and rapidly changing world.” (Morrell 158) Yeeeeeeeeeesssssssss Pleeeeeaaaaasssseeeeee!!!

Do you ever get so excited about something that you can’t sleep? That is exactly how I feel about teaching daily, especially when I have an amazing new idea on how to approach a specific lesson in a unique and engaging way. I cannot wait to present this new way of learning to my students to see how they respond. I get even more excited if my kids come to class with their own brilliant ideas on creating an approach to a lesson. The learning is then in their hands and I am merely the facilitator. That is the way I believe truly effective education should be. “You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need” (Jerry Gillies) I originally heard this quote from a spoken-word poem I always share with my kids for a Journal prompt called “The American’T Dream(The Purse Suit Of Happyness)”(Suli Breaks 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzcxOl4b7IA

He is only one of the many spoken word artists that I share with my kids…My favs are Rudy Francisco, Marshall Soulful Jones, Team Nuyorican, Brave New Voices, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and too many more to give credit to for helping me motivate and inspire my kids with new perspectives on studying literature. My kids get so focused and passionate when they can have the freedom to use variant mediums to demonstrate their understanding and acquired knowledge of difficult texts in class. They create short movies and trailers with their phones based on Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. They design storyboards, graphic novels, comics, and bitstrips on Google Slide Show Presentations to illustrate their genius in analyzing and interpreting classical literature and poetry. They research song lyrics, animals, and pictures of inanimate objects to symbolize their character analyses from Lady Macbeth to Star in The Hate U Give. Teachers CAN enact classroom curricula and pedagogies that simultaneously empower students culturally and adhere to state and national literacy standards as this study suggests. I see it happen daily.

The essence of this article is that English educators need to consider moving toward multimedia theme-based units that incorporate poems, film, music, and the Internet and allow students to express their ideas through essays, e-mails, Websites, videos, and drama. English studies will only remain relevant to the extent that students develop the conceptual and methodological tools to critically interrogate multiple streams of information. (Morrell 169) Advances in technology are transforming what it means to be literate (Cushman, Kingten, Kroll, & Rose, 2001; Kress, 2003)

The Internet as a Space for Expression, Empowerment, and Healing

eLiteracy and Social Media(tion)

“What might they learn about being Black and female; what might they learn about themselves that might heal them – that might heal other Black females? They too could claim a digital space to tell their stories, for the telling of stories is itself therapy.”

Kirkland (2010), pg. 87

Posting on the internet or on social media is so easy to do with today’s technology, and it’s so common amongst adolescents, we often forget how powerful, artistic, and even therapeutic it can be. Continue reading The Internet as a Space for Expression, Empowerment, and Healing →

MVP #6 – Graphic Novels

eLiteracy and Social Media(tion), Urban Adolescents

“History for many students is often a boring exercise in the classroom primarily due to many standardized and sanitized textbooks that strip away the interesting dramas and contradictions that constitute our histories. As a result, these textbooks tend to discourage critical reflection and thinking in their presentation. In contrast, a graphic novel like Maus can engage students’ attention and activate their imagination through the author’s use of multi modalities in presenting visually arresting narratives that feature the multilayered emotions and contradictions of the characters” (Chun, 147).

This passage got my attention, as someone going into teaching history, because of how accurate it is. Even though I’m passionate about studying history and am finishing up my history major, a lot of the assigned reading is very dry and boring. Particularly in high school, much of the textbook readings were boring to the average student. The way our public schools tend to structure the curriculum focuses on wars and centers around white men. We don’t typically focus on interesting personal stories, music, art, women, minorities, etc. The assigned readings felt repetitive and cyclical. I and other students at my school would have loved to learn history through graphic novels, and I’m sure it would have encouraged discussion in the classroom. I recall one history class I had in high school which I loved, but because of the dry reading material, class discussion was nearly nonexistent.

Discussing Motivation and Video Games

eLiteracy and Social Media(tion)

Video games, therefore, involve individualized skill
development, which likely leads to enhanced motivation (Green and Bavelier 2008). In contrast, this high level of individualized skill development is more difficult to replicate in the average classroom where there often are more than 30 students per class, potentially contributing to the finding that many adolescents report feeling bored and unmotivated in school (Larson 2000). As we have shown, mainstream ‘‘popular’’ video games that involve problem solving are associated with increased self-reported problem solving skills, and thus educational video game developers […] should focus more on including problem solving tasks in educational games.

As someone who played a lot of games in my adolescence, I’d like to be a little nitpick-y with this quote from the article. Continue reading Discussing Motivation and Video Games →

What else can we do?

eLiteracy and Social Media(tion), Urban Adolescents

(Goodman, pg. 5, 2018) 

Many students have faced changes in their lives that are hard to overcome to be successful in school. Luis, as Goodman narrated his story, is another one of many who also had circumstances out of their social and emotional control. In this case, immigration laws affected greatly the family dynamics of Luis’s home by not having a father to provide emotional and economic support. A family is broken, and those barriers prevent Luis to just take care of school and persevere. I also know of a student whose parent passed away or another who has repeated a year in school, leaving heavy emotional distress and a feeling of not belonging with your friends anymore. This prevents them to be successful in school and continue to fail. It’s not just teachers, but also society teaches us to instill a grit mentality to push students and people in general to be successful, graduate, go to college, and have a job that you are passionate about. It’s look down upon when a person fails given that we have a free public education, and supposedly all of these great jobs, etc. However, emotional trauma, access to resources, and information to get those resources—economic or social—aren’t distributed equally to all of the neighborhoods in New York City. You can also think of any other city in the United States, they have similar problems. A lot of times, we as teachers feel powerless because we can’t probably bring every parent who has been deported or feel helpless because we cannot help every student that is struggling. How do we navigate these circumstances when creating safe spaces of learning in the classroom  or having programs that helps students use storytelling to retell their traumas to overcome them isn’t enough? How do we bring outside resources like professional therapy when school counseling isn’t enough?