A Marriage of Classes

A Marriage of Classes
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The paper I am most proud of and was thrilled to write is one where I incorporated concepts and readings from EDCT 585, 559, and 552. Some might see this as a daunting task, but it was one that seemed natural to me, and still does. In the MA program students are taking classes that are supposed to lead them toward their ultimate goal, a project, thesis, or a test. All of these classes are meant to build off of one another, even though their content may vary. It is in their nature to help the student toward an end goal, so it seemed important to me to connect the content and push myself to understand how I could link all of these courses together.

The culminating paper was one that explored how new media technologies needed a strong theoretical base in order to justify their use in the classroom. This is a concept I’ve heard time and again in my educational technology classes. Don’t put the tool before the task, a chant that Mark Beatham (2008-2009)has pounded into my conceptual soul. As an educator it is important to know what I want to teach students and why before considering how to do it. In this paper I say that progressivism and pragmatism offer up a student-centered, inquiry-based model that allows exploration of content through technology, offering students a variety of ways to explore writing (My focusing being the English classroom). I utilized the theoretical literature in 585 with the new media theories I learned in 559 and 552 to establish the concepts I was working with and ultimately show how they could be married to create a new tech-savvy classroom.

The ideas I present for this new classroom helped me further my interest in collaborative learning. I discussed the question of authorship in these new environments and how the re-mixing of text with music and images creates a new piece of literature that becomes a culmination of multiple authors. This allows students freedom with text, but also allows them to critically analyze the ownership of online media and laws that surround these concepts. One of my most exciting thoughts from this endeavor was that English is a subject that dabbles in all others. Jay Lemke (2005)calls this incorporation of text in many mediums “intertextual constellations” and he notes that they are easily accessible through the connectedness of the internet. Students can read, write, sing, dance, or draw as a form of text and post it online, allowing others to share in their discovery. These textual responses can be to History, Science, Math, or any other subject covered in school. English is becoming important in all content areas, and this may mean the phasing out of it as a lone class. This should be a cause for alarm! I welcome this change, and hope that it means English teachers and other content areas will discover a harmony amongst their subjects and drive curriculum toward interdisciplinary study.

The Artifacts

- One Pager - EDCT 585 - PSA - Marriage of Classes - 3D Gamelab -

Resources:

Beatham, M.D. (2008-2009). Tools of inquiry: Separating tool and task to promote true learning. Journalof Educational Technology Systems. (37)1, 61-70. Doi:10.2190/ET.37.1.e

Lemke, J. (2005). Towards critical multimedia literacy: Technology, research, and politics. Handbook of Literacy and Technology 2. Retrieved from: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke/papers/reinking2.htm

Images used on this page were borrowed from the following websites:
- Image 1 - Image 2 -