Listening 2.0: What Adolescents Want Us to Know About New Literacies and Learning

by Sara Kajder

On one of these occasions, Dialo, an eleventh grade student who takes great pride in "telling it like it is," took the time to ask about my impending trip to work with teachers in the Teachers' College Reading and Writing Project. He caught me off guard with the frankness of his question, asking, "What do you possibly have to teach them?" Reminding myself to take joy in the way he was able to bluntly cut right to the point, we spent some time talking about the ways that literacy and learning were different inside of classrooms where students were able to engage with powerful, current literacy tools (including web 2.0 tools alongside paper notebooks) as readers and writers creating meaningful, significant work for authentic audiences.

He nodded as I spoke, interjecting ideas about his own work in producing class podcasts and contributing to the class readers' guide housed on a wiki shared among students on three continents. And as soon as I felt comfortable that we were on the same page, he offered a question that led me to, again, shift my thinking, asking, "Well, I get that— but why aren't the students doing the teaching? After all, we have a lot to say, and you're always telling us that our voice matters."

That simple idea set my mind spinning as I recognized how right he was. The result: I got right to work with my students, holding discussions in class to query insights and ideas about what makes learning important and different in classrooms that do more than integrate technology by requiring typed papers or multimedia presentations with PowerPoint. Talk focused on the classrooms which put self-directed student learning at the forefront, and which opened up what counted as valued communication by acknowledging new modes and media alongside the print-based literacies that school is largely built around celebrating.

As much as I've learned to be a better teacher through graduate work, through teaching teachers, and through engaging in the professional discourse present in journals, conferences, and twitter networks, I've really learned how to teach, and how to leverage the unique capacities of familiar and unfamiliar technologies within the English classroom, by listening to my students. In that spirit, I want to share with you my students' insights about literacy and learning 2.0— ideas which they invite us to hear, problematize, leverage, and welcome.

1. Students each bring a history, an identity, and knowledge into our classrooms— as multimodal creators, consumers, and users

It isn't anything new or earth-shifting for educators to recognize that our students come to us with individual histories and experiences that imprint the ways (at least initially) that they will engage as readers and writers in the tasks that our curriculum opens up. Early into my teaching, I began each year with a prompt asking students to compose a letter in which they introduce themselves to me as readers and writers. But if I'm being attentive to thinking about the multiple literacies that my students exercise outside and inside of the classrooms, that assignment now has to expand to include additional modes and media for communicating meaning. So students are asked to use iMovie to create a two-to-three-minute digital video (using either still images or video footage) that offers up their definition of "literacy" and that explores the ways in which they practice literacies. This "opening up" of what counts as valued communication within the English classroom doesn't happen in each task I assign, but it does regularly play a role as I consider what it means for students to communicate— and with whom.

A note regarding access to technology: Where I initially saw the preceding comment— "what it means to communicate"— as referring to the ways in which students are asked to work as readers and writers in my classroom, my students also mean it to communicate another big idea— that each student comes as an individual; this means that one size does not fit all when it comes to access to technology. And, in fact, across the classrooms in which I've taught, one constant when it comes to technology is that access is far from uniform. Despite all the data that indicate that most students have access outside and inside of the classroom, my experience has taught me to assume otherwise. Access has sometimes meant that students are a part of a one-to-one initiative equipping them with highly responsive, "Mac'd-out" technology twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But access has more regularly meant that the classroom has one, usually dated, computer— and the classroom teacher has access to a lab shared across a department or, in some cases, a school. And for lots of kids, access at home is shared across a large family, is tied to a dial-up modem, or is a gaming system, all of which present different opportunities— and different literacies— to the students as readers and writers when it comes to their use outside of the classroom.

It is dangerous to assume anything when working with adolescents, but it has become easy for us as teachers to assume that students are working with technology outside of our classrooms— whether it be at home as "digital natives," or in computer classes, or in the classroom of the young teacher down the hall who surely is integrating technology due to his or her "generation." As literacy teachers, it is our responsibility to ensure that all of our students are able to engage with the most powerful tools available to communicate what they know— and to do so within authentic audiences. That means that it is no longer okay to assume that students are "getting it somewhere else." And it is no longer okay to assume that all students come to us knowing how to evaluate a website, how to critically read multimodal texts, or how to critically select a specific mode and medium through which to communicate their ideas. As literacy teachers, we recognize that work is now part of the domain of the English classroom.

2. Students want to be heard— and by more than their classroom teachers

Hannah and Sam were both equally eager to have me use their ideas to amplify this idea. They are both tenth grade on-level students, tested as reading at least two years beneath grade level, who are participating in a collaborative literature circle around Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror. The literature circle groups are composed of four participants, two students from the class and two external participants brought in using Skype (a free tool allowing for no-charge Internet "phone calls" between computers). The external participants include students in New Orleans and Texas whose families evacuated during Hurricane Katrina, students in the New York neighborhood of Crown Heights in Brooklyn (in which Smith's oral histories for the text were recorded), and practicing, published oral historians. Following the work of the literature circle groups, students first will compile oral histories of adults and children who evacuated New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and then will create and perform their own one-act play, modeled after Deavere Smith's work.

At the core of this work is what Sam calls "connecting." He explains, "In other English classes, it is all about what the teacher knows. In here, it is about what the community gets to know together. It is about the blend." Or as Hannah offers, "We are using the Internet to be with people. And these aren't just anyone who wants to play. These are the people who can help us create something that matters outside of our teacher."

As a classroom teacher, I regularly found myself wearing multiple hats as we engaged with literature, nonfiction texts, and media texts— ranging from historian to scientist to political pundit to producer to designer. What I've come to learn through working with web 2.0 tools like Skype is how greatly my students' learning is amplified when we extend the walls of our classroom to include voices and contributions of experts, peers, and colleagues who are uniquely and deeply invested in the same areas of inquiry or problem solving. In terms of the technology, this doesn't require more than one computer and an Internet connection in the classroom. The challenge is in crafting the learning opportunities so you're creating the richest possible connections and products, thus evoking and enacting a twenty-first-century teaching literacy.

3. Teachers need to focus on when to use tools, not on how

"Usually, when we see teachers bringing in computers or taking us down to the lab, it's the same old thing," declared Max, a tenth grade student in third-period honors English. "I almost shut down. It will be a PowerPoint or a writing assignment. We'll spend all of this time in the lab talking about where to point and click, while I'll likely do something else. And, then, when it comes down to it, it will be something we could have done better without [the technology]. I think teachers have some sort of checklist where they get points for using computers— but nobody pays attention to what they do. Don't they get how this stuff matters in the real world? That's what I want to be doing."

Pauelle picked up where Max ended, stating, "I really wish I had teachers who used media the ways we do— and who could actually teach me how to use tools better." She continued on to explain about how she learns how to blog in the same ways she learns how to play home run derby, from her peers. "That's whack, as we're supposed to learn how to really write in here, aren't we? How can that only mean one thing?"

While there is so much to unpack in both of these students' comments, there is a unifying idea— that as reading and writing teachers, we need to be exploring web 2.0 tools as reading and writing spaces in the same ways that we treat the more conventional literacy spaces to which we accord value as scholars of literature and writing. New literacies don't supplant or replace the print-based literacies that many of us entered the classroom to celebrate and exercise with adolescent readers and writers. That said, I think of this work less as "what do I take out of my curriculum in order to make space for teaching about blogs?" and more as "how can I leverage the unique capacities of blog writing to amplify what I do when I teach students to conduct research?" When a new tool or literacy space provides a rich opportunity to do something better than I was doing before, I seize the opportunity.

My job as an English teacher, then, is not to teach students how to create a blog, but how to write well within one. That means, unequivocally, that I need to know how blogs work and, best case, that I have one of my own as a model for students that posits me as an active, engaged learner and writer— and more importantly, that I understand what good, rich writing looks like and how we can communicate within an invested, yet critical, community. Just like any other well-developed lesson or activity, this isn't work that I leap into without a lot of intentional thinking and design. What is often harder about this work is that I do it while I'm creating schema for what it can look like, as the landscape, energy, and action of the new literacies classrooms are different from what I experienced as a student and from what I was trained to create as a teacher.

4. Creating matters

Rianna, one of the more "checked-out" students in seventh-period, tenth grade English, shared this idea— which was echoed across the classes. On a good day, Rianna could be described as "passively compliant," submitting minimal work, offering up the "adolescent slouch" where the body appears ready to slide under the desk and onto the floor at any given moment, and displaying a doodling hand which is more interested in sketching animae than considering what Fitzgerald might have intended by placing a green light at the end of the dock in The Great Gatsby. Rianna's exact words contrasted the "assigned" work students do in classrooms against the realities of the ways in which our students learn and engage. She noted:

School writing is about set prompts, rules, getting the right number of paragraphs and sentences . . . It's about fitting myself into someone else's box— and that isn't what real writers do. They create. There isn't anything real about what we create in school. It is like we take real writing and strip out the fun and the joy."

Teaching with new literacies doesn't remove us from the realities of assessments that value discrete bits of knowledge or that confine our students to writing five-paragraph essays that include no more than forty sentences, but it does give us an opportunity to push up against those assessments by providing students with opportunities to demonstrate what they know in different modes, media, outcomes, and communities of learners. Here, students are creating. And they are doing so in a way that doesn't come at a cost to the richness and rigor of the work, as working across multiple media and modes is complex literacy work— and more importantly, it is work that values and "sees" students as carrying and using literacies as imaginative and creative learners.

Ending Points

While it isn't a new idea to engage our students in discussion about the ways that they learn and work as readers and writers, I can't think of a time when that discussion has been more important or more telling. The expansion from thinking about my role as a literacy teacher to that of a teacher of multiple literacies has been exciting, perhaps a bit unnerving, but consistently challenging as I consider the possibilities for work which allows our students opportunities to engage with authentic audiences and complete work that has both meaning and significance. At the very least, I hope that this discussion and these ideas lead you to have similar discussions with your own students about what it means to read, write, inquire, create, and critique within traditional and "new" literacy spaces.

Sara Kajder is an assistant professor of English education at Virginia Tech. A recipient of the CEE National Technology Leadership fellowship and a former fellow through the Center for Technology and Teacher Education at the University of Virginia, she focuses her research on the uses of emergent technologies in developing readers at the middle and secondary levels, as well as methods that are useful in leading teachers to effectively and mindfully integrate technology transparently into their instruction. Before her work in teacher education, Kajder taught middle and high school English language arts. She is the author of Bringing the Outside In (Stenhouse, Portland, ME, 2006) and The Tech Savvy English Classroom (Stenhouse, Portland, ME, 2003).

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