Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

Today’s NCTE Inbox had an official list of blog posts about the convention, as well as Traci Gardner’s commentary about whether and how teachers should blog (for the record, she thinks that they should, although some districts do not). I find this thread of conversation an interesting complement to a few others floating around today, too.

One of the threads is a group of NWP tech liaisons talking about whether and how we should start a national social network of teachers doing great things with writing and technology. This network exists, in some ways, but it is scattered in many places, not all of them “officially” sanctioned by NWP (nor do they need to be). This conversation is important though because I think that it raises one fundamental issue — for all the blogs, wikis, podcasts, social bookmarks, RSS feeds, Facebook groups, Ning networks, and other ways that we have to stay in touch, do we actually stay in touch?

I have been thinking a lot about this lately as I help my pre-service teachers understand the implications of blogs and wikis as well as try to organize such groups for the various professional organizations that I am in including RCWP, MCTE, MRA, and CEE. How to build and maintain a network — let alone if a “formal” network is needed at all — is at the core of what I and four other colleagues are thinking about as we prepare to propose a new interactive website for CEE. There is also interaction in the works for MRA. Yet, RCWP and MCTE have had interactive sites, more or less, for a year or two now and neither of them generate much traffic. So, even if you build the space for the network, it is not a guarantee that teachers will come.

So, what to do about social networks for teachers? I am not sure how to best answer that. We are trying a wiki and Google groups for Project WRITE, and having limited interactions and success with those spaces. Is part of the problem that the idea of social networking is still too new or different from what we are used to with F2F networking? Are we still just stuck in email mode and not ready to venture out to the web to find a network, rather waiting for it to come to our inbox? Or, is it just the fact that a certain type of chemistry, one that can’t be forced, but must be natural, must emerge?

I certainly don’t have any answers, especially not tonight. But, I feel that the questions are worth asking; even if we don’t get to answering them outright, we can begin to understand why teachers (generally) choose not to use these networks. My thoughts range from being busy to not being aware, from being happy within a school-based learning community to simply not wanting to move outside of one’s comfort zones. As networks continue to grow, I think that we need to ask these fundamental questions about why and how they work for some teachers, while not for others, and whether we should be trying to make the perfect network, or rethink what it means to be a teacher in the 21st century.

The questions that we have collectively explored the past two days leave me with many thoughts, which I will get to in a moment. First, I need to synthesize this weekend with the other working retreat that I recently attended — the CEE Leadership and Policy Summit in Chicago.

Having had two weeks to reflect on that meeting, I think that its essential purpose was two-fold:

1. How do we, as a professional organization of English Educators, induct new members into our field and give them the material and emotional support that will help them succeed?
2. In what ways is the nature of our work changing and how can we respond to as well as be at the forefront of those changes?

What I took from that meeting — and am still working on from it — is that we, as a field, need to begin articulating our positions on what have previously been controversial or taboo subjects and, whether we all completely agree on the position or not, have something to rally around and begin focusing our attention towards. Issues like the achievement gap, restructuring doctoral programs, addressing globalization, teaching literature, and others are all broad enough that we could gain some consensus and need to do so.

In many ways, I think that this weekend is similar to the work of the CEE Summit in that we are trying to capture the state of the field related to wrting with technology (nature of the work) and figure out how to share best practices in the teaching of digital writing with other teachers (induction). There is at least one significant difference between NWP and CEE that I need to address first, and then I will explain how I think we might mobilize in a similar way.

My understanding of the NWP is that we can not, by our very nature as a federally funded program, take a specific advocacy role on issues in the same way that NCTE/CEE can as a non-profit organization. That said, I think that there are many things that NWP can say, definitively, about the nature of digital writing in K-12 classrooms and teacher professional development (based on the work represented here this weekend) that NCTE (or, to my knowledge) any other network of teachers can make claims about.

In other words, we need to use the momentum from this weekend to clearly and concisely say something to all the sites in our network, the field of education, policy makers, and the general public about the nature of writing, how it is changing, the roles that literacy can play in empowering youth, and why the work that we have done in this tech initiative matters.

If NWP was willing and able to produce a book entitled “Because Writing Matters” or “Writing For a Change” — and those books are seen within the scope of our mission and not stretching our advocacy role — then I think that we need to begin thinking about a book such as “Because Digital Writing Matters” or “Learning Multiliteracies and Enacting Change.” We have the case studies, research, and capacity to do this. All that we need to figure out now is how to get started.

Panel: Vision for CEE in….5 Years?

This panel is a prelude to a brainstorming/visioning activity that we are going to be involved in next.

• Don Zancanella, University of New Mexico
• In five years, CEE should and will be further along in the process of using technology to support English Educators; right now our work is done in an ad hoc way and it is inevitable that we will be further along with technology and we need to do it strategically. We need to figure out how to do it well.
• In five years, CEE will be further along in figuring out its role in educational policy. How do we respond at the federal and state level or help others live within that context? We have been caught up in federal policy and we also need to get involved at the state level, too.
• In five years, CEE should or will have created better ways in supporting new English Education faculty. They can see the benefit of membership. Track faculty job openings and then follow up with people who get hired. Set up opportunities for new and adjunct faculty to meet at conferences.
• Probing questions
• Should the web editor have a grounding in technology, digital/visual rhetoric and other understandings of how technology changes writing?
• State affiliates?
• Policy action?
• Suzanne Miller, University at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York
• In the next five years, we need to become the “keeper of the guild” and creating research agenda and organizational identity.
• We need to maintain our own individuality, but we also need to talk about consensus and what voice the organization will put forward. We have the wisdom, voice, and action.
• Individually, we need to step up to contribute, get doctoral students involved, and if we don’t do it, no one else will. We will cede the vision of the profession to others who have political and economic interests that may run counter to what we value.
• We need a vibrant online community. We are looking for a CEE web editor who will help develop content and provide daily change of information. There will be a great deal of information on there, including lesson ideas, video clips, and other resources for methods courses.
• Get grad students involved.
• Get a research agenda and ideas out there. Conduct a national study that collects data from multiple contexts from many CEE members. Create policy documents from that.
• What counts as literacy — we need to promote multimodal literacy as the major focus in the 21st century. What can these literacies help us to do?
• Set policy at the state level. Could we have 50 CEE Affiliates in 5 years?
• Create sets of documents that are readable by parents, administrators, and policy makers.
• If we are to be the keepers of the guild, and we need to be the one developing standards for teachers of ELA.
• We need more retreats/conferences/working meetings where CEE members can all work collaboratively together.
• Probing questions
• NCTE funding research; how can CEE partner with other research entities to co-sponsor research (foundations, organizations, etc)? Do not look at CEE as a stand alone organization.
• Who gets included in our conversations in terms of diversity of viewpoints? There are people who have more conservative positions that might share some goals with us and we need to understand their positions.
• Should we remain an almost exclusively secondary group, or include others from the elementary level? We don’t all talk the same language all the time, but we can be allies as teacher educators.
• Kent Williamson, NCTE
• I think that we are talking about the CEE experience as being a part of a social network that make this a community of practice that is sharing questions, ideas, and other thoughts at an informal level. Then, things move to a more formal level such as a monograph or article.
• We need a web editor who is a great teacher and we need to encourage people to comment and post. People need to see themselves in the questions that are asked. The nuts and bolts of everyday life need to be present in the site. If there was extended weekly participation, that would be good.
• CEE’s involvement with teacher education. NCATE isn’t the only thing that we can do to support program development. We can be assistive in helping build programs and support new faculty and curriculum adoption.
• Licensure is not an end of the road goal, but a continuing process.
• Data from authoritative research will being you more notability. Begin the research now for five years now.
• More participation at both ends of the career scale: grad student and retirees. We need to tap the knowledge base of the past.
• More collaboration with similar organizations. Groups need to find common ground at the level of program and project development while creating interdisciplinary expertise.
• Probing Questions
• How are we going to reach the 6 out of 7 teachers who are not members? Parents? Administrators? Open source publishing? How do we go beyond serving our members to serving the larger world.
• The CEE website is looking more and more ambitious, even daunting. Who is the audience that will view the website?
• English educators who are not active members of CEE.
• Joyce Stallworth, University of Alabama
• Chair of NCTE’s Advisory Committee for People of Color
• CEE must be more inclusive. We have to have inclusions of teacher educators from a variety of institutions.
• If we are to think critically and creatively about teacher education, more diverse voices must be a part of the conversation and the group must be have full participation.
• Classroom teachers do not see CEE as important to their work; how can CEE work with teachers to create useful solutions to problems?
• CEE can be more involved in forming policy.
• Taking small steps to become more politically active.
• CEE and NCTE must be more responsive to the efforts of subcommittees and recommendations and we need to be more careful about the ways in which we act.
• Probing questions
• The language we use to talk to legislators.
• Who is CEE for? Teachers? Teacher educators?
• Recruiting doctoral students from personal connections and bringing them to CEE.
• Sheridan Blau, University of California, Santa Barbara
• From Peter - Why is it that “doing progressivism” is seen as not being rigorous?
• From Ernest - Schools are problematic for learning as racists, classist, and anti-intellectual.
• From Cathy - States messing up what teacher educators have done.
• When have schools not been like this? When we think that we win, we lose…
• The world isn’t ready for what we propose — what does that mean for us?
• We don’t give up on working with public schools. The best teachers feel, right now, that they are totally demoralized and we need to work with them.
• We can do a few things in the next five years:
• We need to become a critic of standards of ELA that we don’t agree with
• We can offer other forms of guidance for beginning teachers
• We need to take it as our role that we harness the research engine and provide scathing evidence-based data that show the ways in which policies and standards are not working.
• Include both elementary and college teacher preparation.
• Probing questions
• The conversation hasn’t changed, some would say. I would challenge us to contextualize our problems and values here in 2007. What are we doing for the classroom English teacher in public schools? Our conversations need to be in the “now.”
• We are also thinking about huge changes that are happening in our country and how do we deal with things in the long term? Who might be opposition to us that we have to have a relationship with here and now and in the future.
• There are some things that are substantive and some that are more political (how do we act on what we believe). I wonder how we have a conversation about how we engage politically about what we now and believe.

More small group discussion will follow…

Of the many great things happening at the CEE Summit, I have had many opportunities to talk to other English Educators and find out about their online lives.

As we prepare for the second panel discussion to start, I am sitting with Carl Young, editor of the CITE Journal and blogger of the SITE blog and Rick Beach, blogger and writer of a new book/wiki, Engaging Students in Digital Writing.

Lots of new ideas and RSS feeds to keep up with here!

The morning session began with some intros and overview stuff, then we got into a more formal presentation called ”Reflections on the Future of English Education.” Here are some notes from those presenters and there will likely be more at the CEE blog:

• The Role of CEE within NCTE - Kent Williamson, Executive Director of NCTE
• CEE is was formed in 1963 to get teacher educators together to talk about teaching future English teachers and a conference was established in 1965
• A deeper purpose within NCTE and the broader education community is that it is the “keeper of the guild,” a position of authority within the professional
• When you look at other professions, you see that there is a gateway into the professional and knowledge that is shared by the professional community
• If we want things done by our professional community, CEE needs to be the place where there is everyday exchange of knowledge with quality control of peer review
• This leads to the messages we send out, the research we do, and what gives us authority as practitioners in this field
• All the strands at this conference are important and it leads us to ask if we can be trusted to chart the course of ELA instruction in this country
• In a world where “literacy” has been appropriated by all fields, we know that we have been saying that for awhile but we need to make sure that the implications of that are clear for policy
• I think that the public policy community is questioning the current state of educational reform, and I think that a peer review community can contribute to that conversation
• It is worth investing in this community as we get together face to face, but it won’t be good enough if we only meet like this periodically. We need ongoing dialogues that center on peer-reviewed information that we can take out and describe what happens in the classrooms of ELA teachers.
• There is more than a PR campaign going on. The rest of the world looks at the learning problems, but there are things that are happening in these professional communities and we need to share, report, and exchange within and outside of our community.
• Ernest Morrell, UCLA
• Thinking about critical pedagogy and mathematics, Bob Moses, and mathematical literacy — from this, we can think about literacy as a civil rights issue
• When we think about literacy as civil right, we need to think about those populations in our society who are being denied their rights
• What role can CEE play
• We have to critique the “literacy achievement gap” because the onus is being placed on students and not institutions
• There are many social, political, and economic consequences to this; student: “literacy is a matter of life and death”
1. We need to think about the literacies in a post-industrial world, more than just academic literacy
2. Identify successful practices with most marginalized students; articulate what this looks like
3. We need to think about the practices of teacher education and professional development and how this engenders these types of classrooms
4. We need to develop a body of scholarship that looks at these classrooms and connects to teacher education
5. We need to look beyond literacy for a global economy and see what the public thinks is a rigorous and relevant education for students
6. We must remembers that literacy practices happen in schools and that schools are problematic institutions to begin with
• How are we going to take a stand within and against institutions and who we are going to ally with
• Peter Smagorinsky, University of Georgia
• Will there be teacher education in the future?
1. Teacher education accountability movement
1. PRAXIS, Mass. Teacher Exam, NCATE
2. We work in a policy environment
1. NCLB mindset moving towards colleges
2. Federal mandates that require colleges of education to teach phonics
3. Things are pressuring us to be things that we don’t want to be
4. State curricula push us in directions that we don’t want to go - Hillocks, The Testing Trap
5. Districts are having teachers teaching within prescribed curricula that are connected to testing
6. We can’t send teachers out to teach without letting them know about these situations
7. There are corporate entities who are making lots of money on this
3. Alternative routes of certifications
4. Presence of a capitalistic economy
1. How do we acknowledge and deal with this in schools?
5. Public opinion that runs counter to colleges of education
1. Students put this pressure on us in this direction, too
6. Public response of policy makers (post 9/11)

• Why is Dewey’s progressivism seen as irrelevant?
• Why are our values of work viewed as counter-productive?

• Cathy Fleischer, Eastern Michigan University
• Balancing mind-numbing conformity with research-based, best practices in our classrooms
• Example from Michigan: we just revised state curriculum and the committee that was formed included NCTE, CEE, NWP, and other smart people
• For those of us not involved, but concerned about it, we were happy that these folks were involved
• Now, we look at what had to happen to get the standards approved by Achieve.org, but we still felt that it was good curricula with enough flexibility
• Then, the roll out of the standards became connected to thematic sample units with sample exams. Even though the state is not prescribing these, many districts are adopting these units as what teachers need to do.
• What is our role in a world where we know that our teachers will be going to schools where they will not be allowed to use writing workshop and will have to use units that are prescribed? Are we going to be seen as the enemy of school districts?
• I believe that we have to work with pre-service teachers to help them understand all of this and help them articulate their beliefs about what they do.
• I believe that we also have to help them be savvy in the ways that they speak to administrators, parents, consultants, and others.
• David Stevens, Durham University and NATE
• I have been struck so far on how many parallels there are and what is happening in England and the UK
• I am interested in adopting a fundamentally romantic vision of English and the root traditions of the subject as a counter to the reductive tendencies of what is happening now
• Expanding the scope of literacy and literature as well as other arts
• If English teaching is to be relevant, maybe we need to establish a new idea of research and what effective English teaching is: English teaching as liberating
• It seems to me that most English teachers are still feeling inspirational and adopting progressive pedagogical models; yet they face the challenge of prescriptive curricula and assessment
• We need to find ways of being creatively engaged in English teaching while working in this paradigm
• Questions and Answers
• Where is NCTE at? What schools does NCTE touch/where does it not even exist? How do we invite people into the professional conversation when they don’t even know that one is happening?
• How can we develop relationship both at the grassroots level in schools but also with policy makers and others who work with English teachers?
• Thinking about marketing ourselves and how/when students/young teachers join NCTE. The average NCTE member joins after 7 years in the profession.
• Mandatory membership for students as a part of coursework?
• The gap between what we do as teachers and researchers (what we know about how learners become critical, smart, and engage) as compared to what administrators know about ELA instruction (e.g., teaching grammar). We need to adjust what we are doing with policy makers at all levels.
• Attempting to understand the mindset that creates the dichotomy between what we value and what is advocated by others. How do others frame the debate as compared to us (we say, “Literacy is complicated” and that can lead to misperception).
• We have to be sure that we aren’t perceived as “soft” on education and make sure that we are showing how we, too, are rigorous and relevant.
• We have to engage at the school level in ways that work in small ways.
• We have 1.5 million literacy educators in the US, but only 250,000 people are members of any professional organization. We need to figure out how to package what we have so that it can be localized in small spaces (e.g., departments in schools).
• Thinking about money and asking philanthropists who might be able to help us in the same systematic ways that universities do.
• Conservatism of the 1980s is still reflected in educational policies today; also, Jim Moffett wrote “Hidden Impediments” and we did research, but we were still associated with the excesses of the 1960s. The backlash of judging people of today with their association from a previous time.
• Impact and consequence in policy decision — we need to remember that the legal authority for teacher licensure and curriculum standards rests at the state level and I don’t think that we, as an organization, have a relationship with any state or the agencies within the state that work on certification or curricula.
• One of the things to learn from NCATE is the way in which they worked aggressively with a clear agenda to work with states. They came forward with clear directions and processes so that they became the voice that represented authority. If we want to do that, we need to be engaged in states.
• Do we find reference to professional organizations in the literature on teacher education reform — there is no mention ever as part of the problem or part of the solution. We need to become one of those if we want to have a consequential impact on what of those sides of the debate.
• These sense of embattlement that teachers in classrooms face in terms of blockades. Spending more time on testing and analyzing annual yearly progress. We need to teach our future teachers to talk to one another and the institutions that they will be embedded in much better than they are now. Parents want accountability, but we don’t know how to show them that.
• People are listening to the things that you do and write, but we don’t always see how it happens in classrooms.
• In NCTE, we do have an association of state ELA coordinators. It is difficult for them to work with us unless they are subversive.

It has been a long day of travel from East Lansing to Chicago and now a bit further north to Lake Forest, where the CEE Leadership and Policy Summit begins in just a few minutes. Just a few quick thoughts on last night’s Teachers Teaching Teachers and what I will be doing for the next three days here at Lake Forest College with my CEE colleagues.

There were many things that came up in last night’s show that I will have to really re-listen to be better able to offer a reflection on it.  One thing that I will note is the idea of teachers developing their own online skills before working with their students. In the context of talking about Dawn’s experience creating podcasts with her students, Paul invited Dawn into the Youth Voices work, and we got into an interesting side conversation about how and why teachers would want to join online communities, create their own content, and generally engage in the processes that we are advocating happen with students related to digital literacies. Long story short, it has to be personal. I want to think more about that, especially in relation to all the institutes I will be involved in this summer.

The other thing going on — and starting in about 15 minutes –  is the CEE Leadership and Policy Summit happening this weekend. I am a part of the strand exploring doctoral education for English educators. This proves to be an interesting topic for me personally (as I am almost done with revisions to my dissertation) and professionally (as I will likely be working to develop a PhD program at CMU once I get there next fall). So, I am looking forward to the weekend and hope to blog about some of the general sessions and other ideas that come to me. More soon…