Monday, September 14, 2009

Media Literacy - Part 2

**This post is not part of the post that I completed for class, so please don't consider it to be one.  This is completely separate and is intended to be a reflection of my personal beliefs and thoughts only.**

We've all seen that Apple commercial from 1984...the one that ends with "...and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984."  If you haven't, watch this:




Well, I had an epiphany just a few moments ago, and it started with the above commercial.  Please understand that I have never read 1984, but I do know enough about Orwell's novel to understand that it is basically about a society that os completely controlled by its government.  The citizens have no access to the arts, sciences, or any literature so that they completely devote all their time and energy to their government.  Everything is controlled by the government.  If it helps to understand, the term "Big Brother" was coined by Orwell for this book. 

So, I'm sitting at my desk, after just putting my daughter down for bed, when I realize that our schools are turning into Big Brother.  Now, in some cases that may actually be a good thing.  It keeps us teachers on our toes, makes us put our best foot forward, gives administrators and teachers alike accountability.  On the other hand, this whole Big Brother thing is just creepy.  I certainly don't like the idea that someone is constantly watching me and monitoring everything that I do.  It makes me nervous, and I am more prone to make mistakes.  I wonder sometimes if they (meaning "The Man") can watch what I do online, can they watch what I do when I'm not online.  Do they watch me when I play blocks with my child? Do they watch me when I go to the bathroom?  The very idea of Big Brother is unsettling.

According to the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), any school that receives funding from the E-rate program must have Internet safety policies in place that prohibits students from accessing pornography and elicit content online.  The E-rate program helps schools with the high cost of Internet access for all computers.  So any school that participates in this program must adhere to the CIPA guidelines.  All the K-12 public schools that I have been in have some sort of filter on their computers.

So here's a list of stuff that I think should be blocked at school:
  • Non-educational gaming sites
  • Pornographic sites and pictures
  • Non-educational social networking sites
  • Sites that promote terrorism and/or violence and hatred
  • Sites that feature copyrighted materials, such as movies and music
Sites other than these should be fair game.  Currently, CIPA has us block child pornography; pictures that appeal to nudity, sex, and/or excretion (that's right, we can't see pictures of people using the bathroom); sites that feature explicit sexual acts; and sites that lack academic value to minors.

I totally agree with the first three, but to block sites that lack academic value?  That takes out 90% of the Internet.  How can we realistically do that??  Part of our jobs as teachers is to teach and promote media literacy.  We need our students to know how to go online and filter out all the crappy stuff for themselves.  We need them to know how to find and use academic websites in their research.  We need them to do this on their own without us holding their hands all the time.  How can I show my students that the Poe Museum website is a better website for research than The Poe Decoder when one of those sites is blocked due to advertisements? 

In theory, CIPA is a God-send.  It helps promote positive, academic research on campus, not the hours of time wasted by some of us on Facebook or MySpace.  However, with my new-found knowledge of Web 2.0 and media literacy, I've realized that there are some educational values to the social networking sites that CIPA has us blocking (apparently social networking has no academic value).  I would also hate to know that one of my students has been getting his jollies while looking at porn on one of my computers when he was supposed to be researching or working on a class project.

So here's where Big Brother comes into public education.  For the past two years, I've read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne with my students.  It usually takes me three to four weeks to read, analyze, and test over the novel.  As with any unit that I teach, I include some kind of project to tie all the parts of the novel together.  For The Scarlet Letter, I have my students create an Alphabet Book.  It's a simple little assignment where the students associate each letter of the alphabet with something important from the novel.  The students must write in complete sentences and must include a picture that is relevant to their sentence and letter.  For example, for the letter A I could write "Hester Prynne committed adultery when she thought her husband was dead."  I might include a picture of Hester Prynne with the letter A on her chest or a picture of an ornamental letter A.  I had my students create a PowerPoint with one letter/sentence/picture per slide.  It is a simple assignment and uses minimal technology, but my students love the assignment and do very well on them, and they actually reinforce their knowledge of the book through this assignment. 

So, this past spring I read The Scarlet Letter with my students like a always do.  We were almost at the end of the novel, so I told my students about the project, gave them their assignment sheet, and passed around an example Alphabet Book.  By this point, I had already booked two days in the computer lab, so I told my students to mark those days in their calendars.  We spent the rest of that class period working on our sentences, so we could maximize our time in the lab.  The next day my school system blocked Yahoo and Google images.  I found out through two students in a different class.

There was no warning.  There was no email stating why images were blocked.  There was no faculty meeting explaining why the system had taken this measure.  NO FORMAL EXPLANATION WHATSOEVER!!  So I asked my media specialist why images had been blocked, and she said that we had to follow the CIPA guidelines and by allowing image searches to be conducted, the system could possibly lose E-rate funding, and they couldn't afford to lose E-rate funding given the economy at the time.  I deduced on my own that a student accidentally came across a pornographic picture of some sort, the administrators freaked out, and forced our media specialists to block images on our computers.  Thanks to someone briefly losing control of their common sense, my students lost out on an engaging project that would have helped them understand a hard-to-understand novel.

It was foolish to block all image searches because someone accidentally found porn.  If the filters were working like they were supposed to, the image never would have appeared in the first place.  I bet the student didn't even react when the picture came up; someone else over-reacted and thus punished the entire student population.

Now, this idea of Big Brother isn't limited to just the Internet.  I have a friend who has been teaching in a major college town in South Georgia for two years; she is currently in her third year at an elementary school there.  After school one day at the beginning of September, she posted a Facebook status that said that all schools in her system were not allowed to watch President Obama's speech to America's students.  My friend gave no explanation as to why the superintendent of the system would make such a move, and the town's newspaper gave no explanations on their website.  Granted, there was a lot of controversy surrounding the President's speech, but the transcript of said speech had been available online for several days before Obama's scheduled appearance.  So why would the Superintendent feel the need to censor our children from a motivational speech from our nation's President?

**UPDATE** I received an email on Sept. 15 from my local news station that says that this particular college town is asking the Superintendent of schools to step down over his decision to ban the President's speech last week.

As I delve deeper into my studies for my Master's degree, the more I realize that the things we are trying to keep from our students are the same things that are going to help them survive in the 21st century.  I find myself getting fired up about ideas that I didn't even think about six months ago.  As an English teacher, I think it's important that my students know how to read and write the old-fashioned way with paper, pens, and a physical book in their hands.  I find value in reading The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, and The Scarlet Letter.  As a teacher in the 21st century, I also find value in my students knowing how to survive in a media-rich society.  We can't continue teaching our students as if we are stuck in the 1990s.

Our students have spent much of their lives online and connected to each other because they are social people, but yet we want them to be engaged in class without the tools that engage them.  How can they be attentive in class when they aren't motivated or engaged?  We want our students engaged, right?  We want them to be curious about the lesson at hand.  The core academics aren't going anywhere, but we teachers can't expect our students to learn and enjoy dry subjects on their own.  I enjoy reading, I always have, but I know that some people don't.  Take my husband, for example.  He won't read books unless they hold his attention (he has ADD), but he'll read a magazine from cover to cover if the subject is something that interests him.  I've seen him read 200 page magazines about diesel engines in one sitting.

My previous school had a 20-minute Silent Sustained Reading time where the students were supposed to read and only read.  And, luckily for them, they were allowed to read anything they wanted.  Magazines, books, newspapers, anything they wanted, as long as they were reading.  I would have enjoyed those 20 minutes of quiet to read.  If my husband were a student who had to endure those excruciating 20 minute reading periods, he would have gone crazy.  Imagine taking away the freedom of choosing his reading material.  Thankfully, my school did away with SSR before they decided on the reading material for the students.  I'm glad they never became that controlling.

So I guess my point is this:  If our intention is to make our students media literate, then we need to expose them to all kinds of media, good and bad.  We need to teach them how to discern the good from the bad.  We need to let them be their own filters.  Our students know what pornography is, and I don't advocate the non-filtering of pornographic material.  But if it accidentally comes up, the answer isn't to freak out and draw attention to the issue.  Ideally, we teachers should be walking around the students as they are at our computer; we should be monitoring what they are looking at, so if they do come across something inappropriate, we can take that opportunity to explain why it was inappropriate and move on from the subject.  If a student somehow finds a way around the filter and is purposely looking at said banned sites, then punish that student, not the entire student population; it isn't fair to those students who did nothing wrong.

The more we try to keep our students from the media surrounding them, the more our schools essentially become Orwellian micro-societies.  If we continue to move in that direction, more and more students will eventually resent us and hate school in general.  That could lead to more and more students dropping out or being at school only because their parents said they had to.  I don't want to teach students who are only motivated by their parents say-so.  I want to teach students who are eager to come to class because they know that they will get to use some sort of new technology that will keep them engaged in class.  Therefore, I'm going to fight Big Brother to ensure my students that their creativity and curiosity will not be suppressed.  It is not 1984, and we should not treat our students like it is.

1 comment:

  1. B, this is a great read and a real wake-up call. So many teachers have little or no access to valid resources out on the Internet. My ARP is starting to touch on this same issue. Thanks for this!

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