Over the past five years, while my foundational belief of creative expression is still instrumental in the work my students and I do, I’ve realized that my pedagogical values have evolved. The students I teach in Lawrence are predominantly the children of immigrants. Some are the first in their families to graduate high school, and most are the first in their families to seek and have access to higher education. More than anything I want to be a teacher who gives them the space to create, express, and feel supported while questioning the world around them. This has prompted my expectation that all my students critically think about the world around them through culturally representative and sensitive content, as well as assignments. Much of this happens through the use of twenty first century tools like Google classroom and The New York Times Learning Network. Although our access to technology can at times be limited, this motivates my students and I to problem solve creatively to access information and work with what we’ve got.
Understanding first hand the hardships of first generation immigrant students, I have witnessed time and time again the systematic, cultural, and linguistic limitations technology helps dismantle. One of the major assessments for students in the English III course is a research portfolio which is done completely digitally. The purpose of this project is to ask students to choose a social issue, which they have personal experience with, while using 21st century tools to research and prepare to present the reality of their issue with a potential solution in the form of a speech. As a result of working digitally, students are able to work in and out of the classroom while collaborating with their peers, families, and members of their communities despite, for example, language restrictions, thanks to tools like Google Translate. In Remixing Composition, Jason Palmeri makes reference to Flower and Hayes suggestion of “teaching students to engage in composition as a recursive process of discovery -- a process in which composers continuously redefine their ‘problem’ as they intensively explore, transform, and rearrange materials” (30). Working digitally, my students are expected to identify what they already know about their issue, what they are curious about, what they learn through research, and reflect on how their perspective on the issue has changed. Throughout the project I am able to witness my students learn through processing because of the multi steps their portfolios require. This results in them thinking about how has this issue been approached in the past and how can we go about it differently to change the results. Their default frame of thinking about problems as ‘right or wrong’ has been able to transform into creative problem-solving. Each component of their portfolio is assessed based on a rubric, which is introduced at the beginning of the project, and focuses on the content of their work; setting clear expectations about thesis, counter arguments, evidence, etc.,
Moving forward a goal of mine is to learn how to teach the effective use of these platforms to continue promoting social change for and through the voices of my students. As digital natives, it’s imperative for me to teach understanding the fact that, my students are acquiring information at exponentially faster rates than ever before and from a limitless amount of sources. How my students process their role in the current state of the world is deeply affected by how they are asked to connect to it in the classroom. As Edward P. J. noted “1960’s youth privileged nonverbal, fragmentary means of persuasion in their attempts to argue persuasively for social change...young protestors employed music, visual posters, costumes, and other nonverbal modes of persuasion” (91). I’d argue that given the technological advancements of the 21st century, particularly with social media, how students interact with social justice is far more accessible, both in reception and production. Therefore, using multimodal assignments can better prepare them to be the critical thinkers needed to cause social change.
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Palmeri, Jason. Remixing Composition: a History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy. Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.