Reflections on New Learners of the 21st Century

After viewing New Learners of the 21st Century, I spent several days reflecting on a few things mentioned in the video (and some things that were not mentioned, but I felt related in some ways).

Initial thoughts....

Very early into the program (about 2 minutes into it, actually), I found myself stopping the video after Henry Jenkins, a media scholar at the University of Southern California asked people to consider the meaning of addiction. He posited that we (as a culture) find it commendable for a child to be so interested in reading that he or she stays up late into the night reading a book, but if a child spends many hours playing a video game, we are critical and consider the child's obsession to be addictive.

It made me think about my own bias, and how my personal experiences have formed that bias. I'll share an example of two different, intelligent students, both of whom, based on his views, were interested in their respective media (literature and computer games).

The first example, a female student from Rio Grande City, Texas, whom I taught at Ringgold Middle School, was so enamored with reading that she frequently would hide in a colleague's classroom during the weekly pep rallies in the gymnasium, buried her head in a book a lunch and recess, and usually ignored her other teachers in favor of reading a book in the back of her classroom. Most of her teachers were annoyed by her obsessive reading, but she maintained a straight A average in her classes (except PE).

She told me she read to escape the monotony of the lessons in other teachers' classes, the monotony of life in South Texas, and the tediousness of poverty. She read voraciously because she wanted to learn more about the world, and I thought about her almost immediately after Jenkins spoke in the video. She has since graduated and was accepted on a full scholarship to Brown University, and she will be the first in her family to earn a college degree.

The second example, a male student from Seoul, South Korea, whom I worked with last year while covering my boarding school responsibilities, was so enamored with StarCraft that he spent hours a day hiding in empty classrooms, playing through lunch and breaks, and staying up through the night (when his laptop was not confiscated) to play. Most of his teachers were annoyed by his obsessive playing, and he maintained a straight F average in his classes (except Art).

He told me he played to escape the monotony of the lessons, the monotony of life in South Korea, and the tediousness of wealth (his parents had started him in boarding school life at age 8, and he rarely saw his mother or father except on major holidays). He played voraciously because he wanted to improve his ranking in the game. He has since left KIS because he was unable to maintain the minimum grade point average.

So when Jenkins spoke, I realized how strongly I held this cultural bias, and perhaps I needed to rethink some of my own prejudices if I want to effectively prepare my students to be new learners.

Other thoughts....

I really like what Nicole Pinkard, founder of the Digital Youth Network, was doing with the older students in the program. Using high school seniors as teachers is similar to a program I helped to develop at the Korea International School, Jeju. At KIS, middle and high school students in the SLAM (Students Leading And Mentoring) program collaborate in their advisory groups in order to create lessons to teach the elementary students about concepts like leadership, fair play, and teamwork. I was pleased to see students, like a high school senior, teaching middle school students.

And finally....

As a History major, I was troubled to hear, in Diana Laufenberg's History class at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the discussion she was having with a student working on her "What If?" project. They were talking about the Spanish not wanting to sell the Louisiana Territory to the US, and the impact this might have created for the development of the fledgling United States.

WOW! History certainly would have been quite different if the lands were Spanish "possessions" (quotes are used because these European powers did not have title to the lands owned by the Native American nations living in these areas), but, in fact, it was Napoleon Bonaparte of FRANCE who made a strategic choice to "sell" this territory. And with Napoleon focused on Europe (and military campaigns financed, in part, by the sale of these lands), world history was dramatically changed. At this point, I had to stop the video too because I was upset with the teacher, Diana.

To some people, perhaps, it might not seem like such a BIG deal to make a mistake over "ownership," but I hope in some course of the research, this student (or the teacher) discovered this HUGE mistake; otherwise, the students in this class will learn erroneous historical information from a peer. I'll likely rant about the dissemination of wrong information online in another blog posting and refer back to this example. But this example, in the very least, is a case of a facilitator (the teacher) needing at least a minimum foundation of knowledge to teach this subject, and of a potential downside of peer to peer teaching.

I think, though, I'm going to continue to think about this PBS video, and consider how teachers as facilitators of knowledge and learning fit into the new learning paradigm of the 21st century. And that, I suppose, is the point of this part of the Week 4 lesson: to make me think!