An image from Coffey's intro lesson with 12th graders "I wanted [students] to understand that everything we read, watch, or hear is a construct with underlying power dynamics [...] I wanted them to think about what happens when you are a people who do not control your own story, and how that changes when you take up the responsibility, as writers, to honor the legacies of struggle and resistance in your community" (Coffey 301). The article I chose to review and read from Rethinking Popular Culture and Media was Jerica Coffey's "Storytelling as Resistance." In it, Coffey describes how she encouraged her students through a unit on "writing the untold histories of our community" (300) to unpack and combat the myths surrounding their neighborhood of Watts, CA by inviting community members 30+ years of age to share their histories. Combining their study of a nonfiction text, Random Family , and their practice of nonfiction narrative writing,...
"I believe that the digital native rhetoric is worse than inaccurate: it is dangerous. Because of how society has politicized this language, it allows some to eschew responsibility for helping youth and adults navigate a networked world. [...] a focus on today's youth as digital natives presumes that all we as a society need to do is be patient and wait for a generation of these digital wunderkinds to grow up" (boyd 197). Reading danah boyd's chapter challenging Marc Prensky's use of the terms "digital natives" and "digital immigrants," I realize that maybe the tension between the two ideas isn't the problem -- but the labels themselves. "Digital native" and "digital immigrant" are, as boyd points out in the quote above (and in further detail throughout the chapter), loaded with ideologies that can create division. In my last entry, I reflected on islands, and being from one and traveling to the other, whereas so-ca...
"When students recognize their own importance in helping to shape the future of this increasingly global, interconnected society, the significance problem fades away," writes Michael Wesch in his article "Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance." When we step away from the retelling of a narrative (but adding new pieces here and there, as time will permit), and invite students -- and by extension, people -- into the "conversation," (to borrow a word from Sherry Turkle )... that's when, and where, dialogue and change, begin. After reading both the perspectives of Wesch and Turkle, I do not find they are at odds with each other, but rather, addressing the same issue with different terminology and phrasing. When Turkle says we "have sacrificed conversation for mere connection," Wesch says the need for significance is driving students to that very connection -- a connection that he sees falling flat in his classroom enviro...
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