Reimagining the Classroom as a Newsroom

When I transferred to Rhode Island college in 2008, I never imagined that I would graduate five years later with a certification in teaching. In fact, I was vehemently opposed to the idea. You see, nearly every adult in my family works in public education - both grandmothers, my mom and dad, and a handful of aunts and cousins. And all of them told me that I would make a great teacher. But I didn’t see it. I had a much more glamorous vision for my future. A career in journalism, or public relations, I didn’t have a concrete plan, but I imagined a job with opportunities to travel, see the world, and live in a big city. So I majored in communications and started working for The Anchor, RIC’s student-run newspaper. 

It was an exciting time and place and we took our jobs very seriously. We shared a communal sense of urgency and importance as we covered RIC related events. Perhaps to a fault -we had an almost antagonist relationship with RIC’s Student Community Government -we thought we were working for the Washington Post or something. I remember this one incident where we managed to get an anonymous source to reveal the finance committee’s proposed budget for student organizations. For some reason, the LGTBQ and multicultural clubs’ budgets had both been slashed and it felt like an injustice. We rallied together to print an emergency mid-week copy of the paper as if it was our own Watergate investigation 

At first, I was a layout editor. We would start on Monday afternoons and work until 4 or 5 in the morning to get the paper to the printers. I liked organizing and arranging images and articles in an aesthetically pleasing way.  In my 3rd year, I ran for and was elected as one of two Managing editors. With my new title came new responsibilities and a lot more stress. I enjoyed the friends I made, but for most of my time there I was suppressing a feeling like I did not actually belong or deserve to be there. I doubted my accomplishments and had a persistent internalized fear of eventually being exposed as a fraud. There were aspects of the industry that I didn’t understand and it always seemed like everyone else was more talented than I could ever hope to be.  Ultimately, The Anchor was a place where I had learned and experienced important things but I realized, after 3 years, that this was not a world I wanted to make a career out of. 

So one day, midway through the spring semester of 2010, I literally turned around on my way to Whipple Hall, skipped class, went to Craig-Lee instead, and spoke to an advisor who helped me apply for the secondary education program. Then, I walked upstairs to the Writing Center and asked for an application to become a tutor. By the Fall of 2010, I was taking FNED and working as a writing tutor. A new course and a new path. Both the program and the writing center had a strong sense of community within their spaces, but unlike at the anchor, I truly felt like I belonged. The writing center, specifically, shaped who I am as a teacher and my belief that kids learn best within a community of learners built by telling stories and sharing experiences.

I have always tried to carry these beliefs and experiences with me and within my own classroom. For the past 5 years, I have been teaching English Language Arts at Dighton-Rehoboth Regional High School. I feel like I am at my best when kids are working together in groups and collaborating towards a greater goal. After my first year of teaching, I was offered the opportunity to trade one of my sections of eleventh grade English for a journalism elective. There was a lot of freedom for me to take the club and the class in any direction I wanted and I was excited! I put a lot of time that summer writing out the curriculum. My plan was to rebrand the school’s newspaper entirely - create a new logo, website, and social media. I made press passes ss badges for the kids when leaving the classroom to do interviews. It was going to be great! 

My guidance and expectations were clearly lacking, however, because what I found in the first semester of this elective was a group of unenthusiastic and disinterested kids. Or honestly, it might have been that I actually overplanned. I should have given the students more responsibility and autonomy over the direction of the course. Either way, that imposter syndrome was at it again and I felt like I did not have the authority or credibility to teach the class. Luckily, the course was only 1 semester, so in January I could reevaluate and start over. 

Since then, I have spent the past four years reinventing the course every semester hoping that something finally clicks! There are some aspects of the course that I am happy with. Like our weekly Socratic seminars on student-chosen news articles and current events.  In this way, I can kind of get away with the “no-politics” rule at my school and you can tell the kids really enjoy the opportunity to discuss “controversial” topics and how the media portrays thems. 

Something I want to change is how my students create, share, and publish articles and photographs. I have already worked with the IT department at my school to get a license for InDesign - a program that will teach them graphic design skills and that will allow us to publish one special print edition per semester. 

I believe that kids learn best when they have an authentic purpose, medium, and audience for their work. Reading Mike Wesch’s writing, “Anti-Teaching: Confront the Crisis of Significance” really got my thinking about the structure of my own room both physically and pedagogically. When I look back at my time working for The Anchor, my best memories are when I was collaborating with my peers and publishing meaningful work for the RIC community.  I want to work towards embodying this final quote from Wesh: “I decided to get to work creating a learning environment more conducive to produce the types of questions that create lifelong learners ratty than savvy test-takers.” In this respect, I want to recreate this space and atmosphere in my classroom - where students are given leadership roles and the space to operate as if it were a “newsroom” and not a “classroom.”

I plan on achieving this is by creating a class Remind so that we can communicate even when we are not in class. News happens at all times and on the weekends - and I want students to be able to post ideas for stories as they come up and be able to assign work to themselves and one another in a more organic way.  

Also, we currently have a WordPress site that is overwhelming, difficult to use, and disconnected from the G Suite tools that they are used to work with. Instead, I want to create a class and student-run newspaper using Blogger. Students already have Gmail accounts through the school, and the blogger platform is more user-friendly. As I have played around with it, I have learned that I can toggle permissions in the settings so that students can use their own email account to publish articles to the shared blog. 

Overall, this will allow me to foster a learning environment where students can build a strong sense of community among themselves as well as with their larger community - where other students, parents, and teachers can interact and respond to their writing in a public sphere. 

If you would like to watch this narrative with visuals, feel free to check out my Pecha Kucha! 

A Student-Centered Cloud

I had previously heard the idea that present-day schooling has its roots in industrialization and preparing working-class children for working-class work. Students sit in rows and work on repetitive tasks until a bell rings to tell them to move to the next thing -much like a factory. Suga Mitra discusses another historical aspect of modern-day schooling that I had not previously considered in his TedTalk, A School in the Cloud. He explains that during the reign of colonialism, the British Empire, specifically, had to figure out how to run the whole word and communicate data with paper alone. I was slightly surprised by Mitra’s positive outlook on the impact of British Colonialism but his goal and purpose here are to explore and explain his wish for the future of education - not to dwell on the past. 

He argues that education was developed to create essentially identical people who have good handwriting, read, and do basic math. All of the skills necessary for a “bureaucratic administrative machine” that no longer exists and yet schools have not changed all that much. He maintains his positive outlook - he explains that schools are not “broken” as people like to say but simply that their purpose is outdated, perhaps even obsolete. 

Hearing his stories and experiments of giving children in rural communities a computer to play with and then coming back to see that they have taught themselves some kind of complex topic or programming was absolutely fascinating. I think it really proves the point that students (children) are innately curious and intuitive. They just need an engaging question to hook their interests and an adult figure to support and admire them. 

As we begin to look towards the next school year, it is entirely (and likely) possible that we will be teaching “from the cloud.” My colleagues and I have expressed mixed emotions regarding this… on the one hand, we take the global pandemic seriously and do not want to put ourselves, our families, and our students at risk. On the other hand, we truly believe that face to face learning is crucial for forming bonds, establishing trust, and building a safe learning environment for students to take risks. 

Mitra seems like he disagrees with our final premise and I am struggling to reconcile with how I perceive my own role as an educator. I want to believe that my role is a little bit more important than just being a cheerleader who asks strong questions. In my last post, I discussed how much I strongly resonated with Wesch’s argument that the classroom space is just as important as the content itself. I think Wesch would agree with what Mitra believes about the importance of good questions. As I reassess my role and think about myself in the classroom, I want to continue to reflect on my skill of asking questions and encouraging collaboration. 

The Power of Questions

One of my favorite things about starting a new unit, text, or novel, is when students start asking questions. This happens frequently with plays like The Crucible where people are behaving in ways that appear ridiculous on the surface but offer insight into themes of hysteria, power, language, and justice. The kind of questions I especially enjoy occur when students are incredibly frustrated with the characters and the system of the narrative: ‘why is Abigail lying again?! She is going to get everyone in trouble’ or ‘how could the judges possibly believe these girls?’ or ‘why don’t the townspeople run away?!” 

These questions - which they ask in tones of almost hilarious incredulity, are part of what makes teaching The Crucible so much fun for me. Typically because I field them right back to the rest of the class like “Yeah, Abigail has grown up in a community that deeply undervalues the voice of children and women, so why do you think she is lying?” 

When students don’t ask these types of questions, the lessons fall flat and I feel disappointed. 

Interestingly, it never actually occurred to me that I on a conscious level that their questions were a crucial aspect in the lesson until I read Michael Wesch’s “Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance” where he explains that a strong classroom has students asking questions because “the question itself is the insight.” I honestly felt my eyebrows shoot up in the realization that this is what I am trying to replicate in my own classroom I just never had the words or the why for it. 

This is yet another reason why I am feeling dread about the coming school year. Wesch also argues that the “medium is the message” and that the environment (medium) of learning just as important as the content (message). 

Every year I spend four to five days in August organizing and setting up my classroom with my students in mind. I have been asking for tables instead of desks for years (I doubt that will ever happen now..) and I have a conference table for group work that I am hoping isn’t removed over the summer due to state guidelines for social distancing (it took me so long to find and move this table!). 

But either way -regardless of what happens in the fall, I want to work towards embodying this final quote from Wesh: “I decided to get to work creating a learning environment more conducive to produce the types of questions that create lifelong learners ratty than savvy test-takers”

That is my goal and I am going to make it work whether I am face to face or distance learning with my kids.

Evolving Disney and Girl Power

I’m not a parent, but as an aunt, I have sat with my niece, Grace, and found myself watching her watch films. I am interested in how she reacts to certain scenes and concepts, and, because I have read Christensen before, I am curious about the messages she is internalizing through media. 

Combining Christensen’s textual analysis with a reading of the political and economical culture makes for a really interesting discussion. Particularly in regards to how Disney has evolved over the past few decades to reflect the ideological pushback from audiences to the “passive princess” trope found in classic films like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. Lindsey Ellis, (amazing YouTuber makes videos about popular media and film criticism - if you enjoy Popular Media Analysis you absolutely have to subscribe to her channel) explores this in her “Woke Disney” video essay. 

She argues that while Disney has come a long way in its portrayal of female characters, Disney is still strongly invested in making sure consumers keep going to their parks and keep purchasing Disney princess merchandise. So what they do is create princesses, like Moana, who are strong independent girls with girl agency and girl power but who ultimately still reinforce the status quo and dominant ideology about girlhood. 

Moana, in particular, is interesting, because it is essentially a narrative remake of Pocahontas. 

The story is about a young girl who is a daughter of a tribal chief living in an indigenous tribe in pre-colonial times just as she is about to come of age and her dad wants her to behave one way according to their culture but she isn’t so sure about her place in their world and water is a metaphor for freedom (they both sing a song about this) and there is an old grandmother character who dispenses important spiritual wisdom .... (okay I could go on but you get the idea, right?) and it all concludes with the message that conflict should be solved, not with violence, but with compassion.  

A textual analysis of both stories, however, shows that Moana, as an individual, has more agency and resists the stereotypes of race, culture, and gender that Pochahantas reinforces.

An economic analysis of Moana is a bit less forgiving though. The question I want to ask and think about is in regard to cultural appropriation. Are the filmmakers guilty of exploiting an underrepresented culture in order to profit? They did make sure to include the input of actual Pacific Islanders but overwhelmingly the film was created by white men and reads as a pretty classic Disney story.  Looking at Moana through an economic lens, we have to take into account that no matter how well-researched and thoughtful it was in its approach, the stakeholders at Dinsey are white, and their ultimate goal in creating this film was … make lots of money. 

Can there be any ethical creation or consumption of Disney Princesses under capitalism?

Google Forms and Long-Distance Learning

When distance learning began in March of this year, I knew I was going to have to start thinking and teaching differently than I was used to. What I didn't realize, was just how challenging that would be. I'm not the teacher who can plan step by step lessons days in advance. I have objectives and ideas and directions I want my students to travel, but overall I try to just light a spark and see where the class discussion and activities take us. 

This works in my classroom, where I have physically set up the room to encourage student-led group and partner work. In the not so physical space of "online learning" however, this does not translate well. Especially considering the fact that I was not able to work synchronously at any point with students through video meetups. 

In the classroom, I am constantly doing informal assessments and check-ins with students. With distance learning, I still wanted to assess kids and give feedback but I needed a more formal and organized method of doing so. I turned to Google Forms and I made "quizzes" - some traditional, and others that were fun surveys. Either way, I learned a lot about this google feature and ways to streamline it to more effectively assess students. 

Here are some tips and tricks I created - I posted a few screenshots but you can view the full slideshow here!

**Caveat: google forms is not the only means of assessing - this is just a really quick and easy "dipstick" to informally check in on kids in the online world**

Getting All Political

I have been teaching in the same school district for five years now and I can honestly say that I have lost track of the number of times we (teachers) have been told, in meetings and emails, that under no circumstance are we to “get political” in our classrooms. I can tell you that every time this message is delivered, I wish I had the power or voice to counter it. I haven’t yet, in my career, but maybe someday. Because here is the thing, as educators, we cannot be afraid to talk about real issues and reality, and education is not and cannot be neutral. And whether we like it or not, silence (aka, what most administrators would call “neutrality”) IS a political stance.  

I think Elie Weisel says it best so I will let him say it:

However, I do understand where this concern comes from. And it is the same concern mentioned in pages 127-130 of Rethinking Popular Media and Culture “Shhh!! No Opinions in the Library: IndyKids and kids’ right to an independent press” by Amanda Vender. 

This particular chapter discusses a conflict that the progressive magazine, IndyKids faced when trying to partner with public libraries in NYC in 2005. The magazine is for kids in grades 4-7 and covers relevant topics, including controversial ones. Local librarians were hesitant to display or even host the magazine at all because the magazine did not shy away from controversial topics. 

I was curious about the magazine so I researched it and the website is still active:

Author of the article (and founder of the magazine) points out that librarians did not find conflict prominently displaying other types of magazines, such as a Boy Scouts one that hosted ads from the National Rifle Association (NRA) or issues of American Girl. Furthermore, she argues that there is a myth of “unbiased” news that is pervasive in education: “All news publications, those aimed at both kids and adults, come from a certain political perspective or not” (129). 

Reading this chapter, I was honestly surprised by the librarians' responses and refusal to host the magazine, as I typically associate libraries with free speech, and certainly not censorship. But this particular quote is telling. One library explained to Vendor that, “Most of us children’s librarians live in the constant fear that one of those petition-wielding parents will cry foul over a selection we have made” (129). 

This fear is not actually unfounded. At my own school, we have had instances where parents have refused to let children participate in reading certain books (typically I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou) and have even questioned why we even have the book in our curriculum. 

But, as Vender points out, “kids need a free press, too” and they deserve one that covers the issues they care about and at a reading level that meets their needs. Librarians and teachers alike need to have these difficult conversations with our higher-ups so that we can effectively “get all political” in the classroom.

Golden Capitalism

I’m going to be honest, I felt like a bit of a cynic watching Simon Sinek’s TedTalk on How Great Leaders Inspire Action because it reminded me of why I changed my major from communications to secondary education in 2013. I have always felt discomfort when watching or reading things that are made by and targeted at business-minded people. So, as a teacher, I am interested in thinking about “The Golden Circle” hypothesis as it pertains to my pedagogy. But I feel deeply unsettled watching someone teach business people how to essentially manipulate people into consuming things more efficiently. 

Sinek explains that all of the most inspired people start with their why and then work towards their what. All of the examples he gave were positive ones -Apple, MLK Jr, the Wright brothers, etc. Conveniently, he left out any negative examples. But The Golde Circle strongly reminded me of how MLMs (Multi-Level Marketing companies, AKA,  thinly veiled pyramid schemes) operate. During my first year of teaching, an MLM called Vemma Nutrition swept through colleges and high schools and many of my students fell prey to their tactics. They had a what -a product, sort of, but that was not important. Nor was how the product was sold. Their why, however, was brilliant. They found a charismatic young guy named Alex Morton who gave motivational speeches about how young adults could “own their own business” and “be their own boss” and live a “healthy, fun, fit lifestyle” - rarely did he even mention the product (mostly a “nutritional” energy drinks called Verve) because the product didn’t matter because as Sinek explains well, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” 

Verve’s business model was lucrative for its upper management and catastrophic for its “employees.”  Recruiting others is the only way to make money (not selling the actual product). This company, like many other similar companies (beachbody, Herbalife, Pampered Chef, ITWorks, etc) works by selling a story -the “American Dream”- and manipulating vulnerable populations.  The biggest issue is that over 90 percent of people who join MLMs actually lose money by the time they decide to quit. 

While Sinek might have an interesting theory with his “Golden Circle,” my concern is that he only uses positive examples to support his idea and even encourages businesses to use it as a way of marketing. His advice is to not market the product, but rather an idea associated with the product so that consumers will see the company as part of their identity. It works brilliantly in many cases (consider how many people, including myself, say things like “I’m an Apple person”) but personally, I think it reinforces the more dangerous aspects of capitalism and consumer culture. 

My Journalism Journey

After my first year of teaching, I was offered the opportunity to trade one of my sections of eleventh grade ELA for a journalism elective. I had worked at Rhode Island College's student-run newspaper The Anchor for three years as an undergrad so I felt like I had enough experience. The high school where I teach had only a very small student-run newspaper and so there was a lot of freedom for me to take the newspaper and the elective in any direction I wanted. The excitement started to fade after I realized that with great freedom, comes a lot more work. I struggled with a combination of things: too many ideas, not enough focus, and a “staff” of students who were all graduating with almost no interest from younger grades for joining the after-school club. Since then, I have spent the past four years reinventing the course every semester, hoping that something finally clicks! 

There are some aspects of the course that I am happy with, like our weekly Socratic seminars on student-chosen news articles of local, national, and/or international relevance. However, something I want to change is how my students create and share the news and issues happening in our school and town community.  Something I believe is that kids are engaged when their classwork assignments have a meaningful and authentic purpose, medium, and audience. 

Currently, we have a WordPress site that is overwhelming, difficult to use, and challenging to update frequently. Instead, I want to create a class and student-run “newspaper” using Blogger. Students already have gmail accounts through the school, and the Blogger platform is more user-friendly, and I can toggle permissions in the settings so that students can use their own email account to publish articles to the shared blog. I think this will help build the classroom community and also help my students reach a greater audience with their writing!