Pedagogy in the Read/Write Revolution

I was struck by the following paragraph in Will Richardson's recent blog post "The New Story (?)":

In these 10 years at least, the basic “story” of education hasn’t changed. Schools are where we go to get educated. With a very few well documented exceptions, it’s a planned, linear, for the most part standardized process, one that allows everyone to recognize what being “educated” means at the end of the day. We all learn basically the same stuff on the same day in the same way, take the same tests, get the same diploma. It’s that narrative most of us share, at least those of us who didn’t drop out or choose homeschooling as our option. It’s one that Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee and most everyone else who is trying to “reform” school still buys into. It is the best and easiest, most familiar story to tell, and it’s a deep part of our culture as Americans.

I'm finding more and more that it is that linearity that is frustrating me. Why should I be the one deciding what idea follows the next and how the narrative should be told? Yes, I'm the "teacher," which means I'm familiar with the material I'm teaching (ideally, anyway.) But I can't make the material meaningful to my students, only they can do that for themselves by making personal connections that I will likely not even be aware of. I can see LOTS of connection between the various ideas covered in a class, a whole three dimensional web of them, and there are any number of paths that can be taken, each step illuminating relationships that from any other perspective might be missed. Why shouldn't students work through the material as it best makes sense to each of them, sharing with the class the meaning(s) they find? I'd be there to answer questions, or ask them, but a half-step behind the students, rather than leading them where I think they should go.

I do have a few experiments going on this semester that I think relate to this idea. One is the use of the online bulletin board, to allow students to post questions and comments arranged spatially rather than in the sequence of a discussion board. I had students in one class try it last week and got almost entirely positive feedback. It wasn't a complete success, however, Students were willing to post their questions on virtual stickies and to place those stickies near other similar questions, but they didn't take the further step that I encouraged, to actually rearrange those stickies to identify patterns in the questions. Perhaps they weren't comfortable with taking ownership of others' posts and imposing their own order on them all? Or perhaps they are still thinking that their role is just to ask and MINE is to impose order? How do I overcome that?

Another experiment is that I am trying VERY hard not to be too present in the online class discussions. (And it is hard. I was the student who always had an opinion in class.) I don't want to stifle the conversation by swooping in as "the expert" to answer the question. I teach humanities, and one of the most important things that students need to learn is that there is no one right answer to the questions we raise. Instead, I'm allowing students to respond to each other, to try to give each other insight and ideas and come to some consensus (or to agree to disagree) on their own. Then, as the conversation winds down (a new one starts each week), I read over the posts, determine what dominant concerns were raised, and use my class blog to write a short essay to wrap up loose ends, address unresolved questions or add a point that I think needs to be addressed but wasn't. But I'm trying to take my cues from the students, rather than cue them to what they "should" learn from the week's readings.

I realize that this sort of unorganized structure won't work in some classes, maybe even most. (The math teachers' eyes are probably spinning in their heads. But perhaps that's why I never did well in math....) And I don't know how to combat the linearity of the system. Blackboard's entire structure is linear. Textbooks are linear. Degree programs are largely linear and so are many course sequences. And too many students still just want to know what they need to learn to pass the class, to move through and on to the next one, a straight line to graduation. I'm likely to frustrate them to no end. But perhaps, just perhaps, the rise of Web 2.0 will work in my favor in this. Students who are used to working with others to make their own way through World of Warcraft without a step-by-step guide, or who see commercially-produced music and videos as fodder for their own mash-ups already know that there is no one right way to do something, that meaning is found in the interaction with, not the passive consumption of information. Why shouldn't that be the organizing logic of our classes as well?

And on that note, I have to share a cool, new video series I've discovered, a trio of guys who are making interactive You Tube movies where you get to choose how the story plays out.