To begin by giving the reader of this assignment some context for the remainder of this post and my following rationale, Simley High School located in Inver Grove Heights, MN (where I am wrapping up my student teaching experience at), resembles the scenario described in this blog assignment in a number of ways. Although I didn’t notice a particularly huge concern for improving past poor performance on the MCA II, I none-the-less felt the pressure of returning “back to the basics” to prep my group of sophomores for the spring trimester test. Although I was never necessarily told that I "couldn’t" use new media texts and technology to do so, I felt the pressure to rely on the course’s main, required text to accomplish this “back to the basics” MCA II prep. Furthermore, although there was already some time set aside for me to spend three to four weeks on a media studies unit with my group of seniors, I felt that my access to technology at Simley was extremely limited. For example, it was rather difficult to get my hands on an LCD projector, and I was completely on my own when it came to any kind of speakers. As such, although what sounded to be a previously interesting / successful unit, the media studies unit that my cooperating teacher taught in the past relied on what we might consider to be “traditional” media including print-based literature, CDs for music / audio, TV VCR / DVD combo for viewing, and so on.
Now, on to the assigned rationale...
Description (partially fictionalized) of current curriculum / attitudes
Communications 10
Although both the regular and honors sections of comm. 10 students tend to do well / appear to be fairly well prepared for the MCA II tests, the essentials students are another matter. Although the poor performance of the essentials students doesn’t necessarily put the school at risk for failing to meet AYP, something has to be done to improve the tests scores and overall “literacies” of this group of at risk students.
Currently, Simley’s only required text for all sections of comm. 10 (essentials, regular, AND honors) is an anthology-style textbook titled The Language of Literature, which is organized chronologically from literature spanning from the approximate formation of the United States, to contemporary American society.
In Simley's push to go “back to the basics” in order to boost the scores of the essentials students, teachers have been given instructions and a set of handouts requiring them to frame these texts through a lens of common items tested for on the MCA II including: alliteration, diction, figurative language, imagery, irony, main idea, metaphor, oxymoron, onomatopoeia, personification, simile, supporting evidence, symbol, theme, tone, understatement. In other words, teachers are required to reduce their instruction of the required course text to the identification and discussion of these pieces of knowledge common to being assessed on the MCA II.
Out of fear for the continuing poor performance of the essentials students, as well as the ease of using the simple framework described above provided to them, teachers and reluctant to digress from said plan by focusing on media texts / technologies. Furthermore, Simley’s limited access to technology (projectors and smart boards are given ONLY to AP classrooms) makes such a digression sound even less attractive and productive to teachers.
As for the school’s outside community, parents are reluctant to support the teaching of media texts / technology as they are in fear that their children need “the basics” (basic literacies) before they are ready for the remainder of their high school years, let alone “added on” content. As such, parents find the framework described above as an extremely attractive, efficient, and perhaps most important “quick” way to help their children.
Communications 12
Although three to four weeks are devoted to a media studies unit during the final trimester of students’ experience at Simley, teachers find it difficult to create an engaging, quality unit as it is so difficult to get their hands on the adequate technologies to do so. As such, teachers find themselves falling back on traditional, MCA II prep-style lessons and texts during this unit. Students often find these texts uninteresting, but teachers feel that they are left with no other options. In response, students do their best to struggle to find the motivation to “make it through” the work and graduate.
Because these students are in the final trimester of their high school experience, many parents and teachers alike adopt a “they’ll get what they get and that’s good enough” attitude toward this instruction going on so late in the year. As a result, there is little push for change including investing in more technologies to allow teachers and students to access more content.
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Rationale
Members of the board,
A number of students in our language arts program here at Simley are at a danger of performing poorly on the upcoming MCA II tests. In response, the district’s decision has been to remediate instruction, reducing the teaching of texts down to what students will most likely be asked to do on the upcoming MCA IIs. Furthermore, time and funding to integrate media studies into the curriculum have been reduced as they are viewed as not being helpful / relevant to helping students perform well on the upcoming standardized test. Although I agree that these students still have not developed the set of literacies necessary for them to perform adequately on not only the MCA IIs, but throughout their lives in general, remediating instruction and continuing to deemphasize media studies is not the answer for the following reasons.
In his book titled A Web-Linked Guide to Resources and activities, University of Minnesota curriculum and instruction professor Rick Beach states that “marginalization of the media in the curriculum ignores the centrality of media in our live; one study found that on an average day, people spend about two-thirds of their waking hours interacting with media, more time than they devote to sleeping, eating, or work” (2). Although I couldn’t agree more with Professor Beach, I feel that describing the media as “central” to our students’ lives is a gross misunderstatement of the role that media plays not only in American, but global life. In addition to the facts that Professor Beach uses to support his claim regarding the role of the media in our lives, Vicki Rideout of the Kaiser Family Foundation states, “children and teens are spending with media and its messages. An average of six and a half hours a day, seven days a week. That’s the equivalent of a full-time job plus a few hours for overtime. And it’s more time than they spend in any other activity besides sleeping, including going to school.” Taking these findings into consideration, I argue that understanding / being literate with the media is not only “central,” but absolutely “fundamental” to students’ current and future success, as well as developing the particular literacies necessary for success in school and function in the larger society.
As Professor Beach continues, a large and positive educational implication to students spending so much time with the media is that it is well within our power as educators “to extend the active participation in and construction of media in the home to the classroom” (3). The fact is that our children have already become “experts” / extremely literate with maximizing their learning through their use of the media / media tools at home (e.g., finding relevant information, sharing and distributing information, analyzing and critiquing information, creating information, and so on), and not providing them the chance to exercise these particular new / media literacies in the classroom to help them refine the literacies necessary to do well on a standardized test / in the larger society is counterproductive. You fear that focusing on media studies is a “digression” and not helpful / productive to learning the literacies needed to do well on standardized tests / in life. I argue the opposite; remediating instruction is the real digression and disservice to further developing the new / media literacies (e.g., finding information, sharing and distributing information, analyzing and critiquing information, and creating new information) required of our students as they enter society.
In a panel discussion hosted by the Kaiser Family Foundation on the role of the media in our lives, Dr. Don Roberts states, “There’s pretty good evidence in the literature and has been for some time that kids cannot not learn when they watch television or read a book or play a video game. Models teach kids. Kids have always learned from models, whether it was dad showing them how to sharpen an ax or whether it’s Common showing them how to get tested. Kids learn from these messages. The issue is not the time; the issue is what they’re learning with that time.” Although this statement was originally given in response to a question regarding the media influencing children to commit violent acts, consider the educational implications. The key word that I would like to take a moment to discuss that both Rideout and Roberts use is “message.” If the messages going "in" (both what we expect our students to learn, as well as our specific instructional practices / delivery regarding how we expect them to learn) are junk, then they will likewise learn junk. If the messages going "in" (both what we expect our students to learn, as well as our specific instructional practices / delivery regarding how we expect them to learn) are properly aligned with our instructional goals, exercising students’ current competency with and further developing new / media literacies via media studies will prepare them for far more than doing well on an isolated standardized test.
However, please do not assume that I am saying that students need no further training / experience with developing the literacies that they are acquiring. As Professor Beach continues to state, “simply watching a TV drama in the bedroom is very different from actively formulating messages…” (2). In other words, there is a HUGE difference between passively viewing the media (having the teacher pop in a video), and actively analyzing, evaluating, and critically thinking about what is viewed. The later is what I am advocating as students’ already forming competency with discussing, critiquing, evaluating, discussing, and producing more media for social change is a benefit to ALL instruction. However, like anything else, the teacher’s role will then be to act as the “coach” in moving students to this higher level of analysis. As part of the curriculum, such “coaching” might look like analyzing popular cartoon shows (e.g., Family Guy, The Simpsons), advertising, sitcoms, and so on for the “invisible norms of White, Middle-class American culture” that shape our values and the assumptions we make. This “coaching” might also look like integrating MCA II test material (e.g., alliteration, diction, figurative language, imagery, irony, main idea, metaphor, oxymoron, onomatopoeia, personification, simile, supporting evidence, symbol, theme, tone, understatement) for actually creating texts. For example, creating a cartoon with the program Comic Life in which a character experiences an "ironic" situation.
Although media studies could focus primarily on your current concern of MCA II test preparation, I urge you not to halt your instructional goals at that point; media studies can also be used to teach literacies which will be useful to students long after they take the MCA II test. Most important, media studies can be used to teach critical inquiry / critical literacy. As Professor Beach discusses throughout chapter two, “digital tools” including blogs, vlogs, wikis, and webquests are ideal for giving students the opportunity to “define questions of concern to them related to larger issues such as the environment, poverty, schooling, racism, sexism, class bias, and so forth” (18). As the designated media studies unit falls near the end of the third and final trimester for seniors, such a project could look like having students identify an issue personally important to them (e.g., an issue related to the school such as not being able to leave the grounds for the all night senior party, college admissions departments requiring too high of an ACT score, and so on), do research on the issue, and then form a deliverable statement to enact some sort of real change. For example, at the conclusion of the inquiry project, students could write and deliver a letter to the UofM admission department urging that ACT scores alone do not reflect intelligence.
However, none of the advantages of media studies described above can be gained if students and teachers do not have the proper technological tools to work with. Because students are extremely competent and engaged with "new literacies" including blogs at home, they need the tools to access to their blogs at school to continue to exercise and develop these literacies. You will not be investing in a "digression," but rather a sturdy "bridge" between the lived, engaging experience and literacies of the home, to the lived experience and literacies required in the classroom and life beyond school.
It are these and other reasons that teaching media studies are far from a “digression” to our language arts curriculum.
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With all that I have said, considered, and learned throughout this posting, I have the following questions that I will continue to explore throughout the class:
-How do you integrate media studies when you are so “pinned” by the current curriculum?
-How do you integrate media studies when resources are so limited?
-As I discussed during my first post, how do you “make good” on your intentions? In other words, how do you move everyone from a passive “it’s funny when they use the N word” stance to a critical / analytical “why are they using the N word” stance.
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