Teaching in The Connected Classroom

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Kylie Peppler, Indiana University

INTRODUCTION: TEACHER AGENCY AND CONNECTED LEARNING

Antero Garcia, Colorado State University

CHAPTER ONE: INTEREST-DRIVEN LEARNING

Nicole Mirra, University of California, Los Angeles

CHAPTER TWO: PEER-SUPPORTED LEARNING

Cindy O’Donnell-Allen, Colorado State University

CHAPTER THREE: ACADEMICALLY ORIENTED TEACHING

Antero Garcia, Colorado State University

CHAPTER FOUR: PRODUCTION-CENTERED CLASSROOMS

Clifford Lee, St. Mary’s College of California

CHAPTER FIVE: OPENLY NETWORKED

Bud Hunt, St. Vrain Valley School District

CHAPTER SIX: SHARED PURPOSE

Danielle Filipiak, Teachers College

CONCLUSION

Antero Garcia, Colorado State University

AFTERWORD

Christina Cantrill, National Writing Project

REFERENCES

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

FOREWORD

Kylie Peppler, Indiana University

In common attempts to standardize what and how teaching is conducted, we often fail to recognize the tremendous amount of innovation that educators bring to solving an array of challenges in today’s classrooms. This volume highlights compelling firsthand counter-narratives from educators engaged in exactly this work, underscoring the fact that today’s teachers have to design the classroom experience in ever-changing contexts in order to be successful.

Educators have to fluidly adapt to constant interruptions, create new instructional materials, utilize new technologies, respond to the changing needs of their students, and wrestle with new policy movements and their implications for the classroom. All of this requires a tremendous amount of insight and commitment to the iterative design process on the part of the teacher and the classroom community.

This volume draws together narratives from an inspiring group of educators within the National Writing Project (NWP)—a collaborative network of instructors dedicated to enhancing student learning and effecting positive change—that contributes to our understanding of what Digital Is (DI). DI is a web community for practitioners with high levels of expertise and a deep commitment to engaging today’s youth by fostering connections between their in- and out-of-school digital literacy practices. Furthermore, DI is about sharing experiences that offer visibility into the complexity of the everyday classroom, as well as the intelligence that the teaching profession demands. What follows is not a how-to guide or a set of discrete tools, but a journey to rethink, iterate, and assess how we can make education more relevant to today’s youth. The chapters in this volume represent a bold re-envisioning of what education can look like, as well as illustrate what it means to open the doors to youth culture and the promise that this work holds. While there are certainly similarities across these diverse narratives, the key is that they have taken a common set of design principles and applied them to their particular educational context.

Moreover, these examples aren’t your typical approaches to the classroom; these educators are talking about integrating design principles into their living practice derived from cutting-edge research. We know from this research that forging learning opportunities between academic pursuits, youth’s digital interests, and peer culture is not only possible, but positions youth to adapt and thrive under the ever-shifting demands of the twenty-first century. We refer to this approach as the theory and practice of connected learning, which offers a set of design principles—further articulated by this group of educators—for how to meet the needs of students seeking coherence across the boundaries of school, out-of-school, and today’s workplace. Taken together, these narratives can be considered working examples that serve as models for how educators can leverage connected learning principles in making context-dependent decisions to better support their learners.

As a designer and researcher of new technologies to promote creative learning, I personally took this journey as I co-designed a new digital media curriculum with educators from the National Writing Project. Though we started with a set of exciting new digital tools, we ended up radically re-designing almost everything about the curriculum as the teachers embarked in the co-design process—revamping classroom activities, rethinking current theories of systems thinking, and aligning our designs to promote high-quality teaching and learning. I came to the table with a set of tools to use but left with an experience of what it meant to engage in the design process as an educator.

If you, too, are inspired to take this journey, you will have to commit to being a designer-in-context. The benefits of doing so are manifold: You can expect to be more actively engaged in your work, and you also can expect more actively engaged students as they help to shape the resulting designs. When we, as educators, begin to see ourselves as designers, we immediately reposition ourselves as active agents of change in today’s educational environment. Moreover, given the continued failure of retaining non-dominant youth in the schooling system, it behooves educators to explore how connected learning practices might exemplify a particularly important avenue for learning and equity in the twenty-first century.

INTRODUCTION: TEACHER AGENCY AND CONNECTED LEARNING

Antero Garcia, Colorado State University

Classroom of Today

Classrooms and schools today look remarkably like classrooms and schools of the past. The factory model of schools in the United States—with desks and bells and Carnegie units and panopticon-like designs—is alive and well as we continue deep into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Sure, there are updates: The Apple IIe computers that allowed me to play The Oregon Trail as a child of the ’80s has been replaced by slimmer and shinier brethren, and the boards in front of the classroom have gone from black to white to digitally smart. But in nearly all respects, the classrooms and how they function today look strikingly the same as they have for decades. This stagnancy would not be much of a problem if the rest of society also remained in stasis. However, that’s simply not the case.

An Environment of Connected Learning

Kids today are learning, engaging, and producing in richly productive and collaborative ways. Media products can now function as building blocks for unique and personalized productions. From discarded cardboard transformed into cityscapes and vehicles to taking one’s favorite book characters and rewriting new adventures for them, learning and production are centered around youth interests in many out-of-school contexts. And these aren’t new dispositions; the previous two examples are deliberately highlighting things kids are doing with or without the use of computers. What is new, though, is the ways youth expertise can be networked, amplified, and pinpointed globally with new media tools.

These new forms of engagement that we see shaping how youth learn and connect comprise what a research team spearheaded by Mimi Ito call connected learning. In their 2013 report, Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design, Ito et al. write that connected learning is:

socially embedded, interest-driven, and oriented toward educational, economic, or political opportunity. Connected learning is realized when a young person pursues a personal interest or passion with the support of friends and caring adults, and is in turn able to link this learning and interest to academic achievement, career possibilities, or civic engagement.

And while youth learning is at the center of connected learning, this book makes the case that the framework presented in Connected Learning functions as a set of key design principles for today’s teachers to consider. While connected learning principles are seen flourishing in out-of-school spaces, there are fewer articulations of how connected learning can help inspire and shift existing teacher practices.

Connected learning transforms classroom spaces and shifts expectations of expertise and content delivery. Instead of following traditional, banking models of education (Freire 1970), teachers, too, are learners in connected learning environments. I want to underscore that in this context then, the principles of connected learning (e.g., it is interest-driven and collaborative) apply to teachers, as well as their students. This collection, Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom, brings to life the possibilities of connected learning as it is enacted daily in schools across the country.

The Role of Teachers in the Twenty-First Century

This is a particularly frenetic time for teachers: An increased focus on how to measure and assess the effectiveness of educators and what they do in their classrooms is sweeping educational policy. Meanwhile, increased focus on the value of out-of-school learning leads the charge for what is being scrutinized as youth education. As a teacher who spent eight years in the high-school classroom before moving into my current role of working with pre-service teachers, I am both excited and cautious about the new turns the teaching profession is taking. How are connected learning principles changing what teachers can and need to do within their classrooms? While I started this book with the note that classrooms look fundamentally the same despite the fact that society is in constant flux, I think a lot of educators are enthused about not only catching up to these cultural advances, but also pioneering much needed new forms of learning within our classrooms. As such, policymakers and researchers collectively need to take a hard look at what we are expecting teachers to do and how we are supporting them in doing it. Not simply in terms of cultivating principles of connected learning in our schools today, but in nearly every aspect of teaching, today’s education labor force is constrained, silenced, and stifled.

Connected learning within classrooms is an approach to embolden and revolutionize today’s teaching labor force. Today, the rhetoric about teachers often focuses on what they need to be doing, including the tests they should administer and how they should interpret and adhere to nationalized standards. Today’s media portray educators as laborers unable to make creative and context-dependent decisions within their own classrooms. I believe connected learning principles can provide a vocabulary for teachers to reclaim agency over what and how we best meet the individual needs of students in our classrooms. With learners as the focus, teachers can rely on connected learning as a way to pull back the curtain on how learning happens in schools and agitate the possibilities of classrooms today.

Considering these possibilities, teachers today are environmental designers: We craft the educational ecosystems in which we mutually learn and build with students during the hours of 9 to 3. In my experience, one of the most important aspects of teaching is the flexibility to adapt and change with the context of the classroom. Individual student needs, a different bell schedule, or a local news event that may need debriefing within a classroom are all part of the regularly occurring factors that required me to change the plans I had developed for classrooms. I want to share the challenges I faced and note that great teachers today are fundamentally focused on rethinking their practice and reshaping the narratives of what happens as classroom learning.

The Voices in this Book: More than Best Practices

In the spring of 2013, one of the classes I was teaching at Colorado State University expressed frustration with the direction of the course. E401, Teaching Reading, is an upper-division English course for future teachers focused on exactly what you would imagine for a class called Teaching Reading. The frustration stemmed from the fact that I had designed the course to be a constructive one: We would collectively define culturally dependent terms like literacy and reading and, over the course of the semester, develop a framework for adapting teaching practices depending on the environments where these teachers would eventually find themselves. The students, on the other hand, rightfully pointed out that I wasn’t showing them the how implied in a course called Teaching Reading. (For a continued look at how this class progressed, see the case study written by a couple of my students in Chapter Two.) Like the design of that class, this book is not one full of how-tos. It is a book that highlights why: why educators can adopt a connected learning framework to help meet the needs of their students in their individual contexts. This is purposeful in helping illustrate myriad examples for readers that may not currently spend time within classrooms, as well as in sparking creativity for educators.

Typically, publications about or for teachers highlight best practices. The buzzword-driven form of highlighting a superior approach, to me, ignores the cultural contexts in which teacher practices are developed. The best practice for my classroom is going to be different both from a classroom anywhere else and from my classroom a year down the road. Context drives practice. As such, this is not a how-to guide for connected learning or a collection of lesson plans. The pages that follow are, instead, meant to spur dialogue about how classroom practice can change and inspire educators to seek new pedagogical pathways forward.

Each chapter of this book is anchored by three case studies of how connected learning unfolds in classrooms across disciplines and age levels. In culling together the incredible corpus of work here, the curators of the six chapters of this book—Danielle Filipiak, Bud Hunt, Clifford Lee, Nicole Mirra, Cindy O’Donnell-Allen, and I—have worked to emphasize the intentionality of the educators as it emerges from their particular teaching contexts. The documentary film project of a kindergarten and first-grade teacher (Lacy Manship in Chapter Two) and the interactive fiction activities of a high school educator (Jason Sellers in Chapter Four) both speak to the unique learning contexts to which these teachers adapted, including consideration of their students’ cultural, social, geographical, and interest-driven backgrounds. The dozen-and-a-half case studies presented here offer disparate visions of connected learning that overlap and crisscross in delineating connected learning in schools. There is, as a result, a messy swath of different connected learning approaches rather than suggesting a linear approach to classroom pedagogy. What’s more, it is important to recognize that though the six chapters of this book are separated by different foci within the connected learning framework, these, too, will overlap. As you read, consider the dialogue that emerges across these case studies.

Digital Is: Supporting Teacher Practice

The work shared throughout this book is based on timely examples of connected learning as current classroom teachers describe them in the online community, Digital Is (digitalis.nwp.org). With support from the MacArthur Foundation, the National Writing Project’s Digital Is online space is more than a social network. A brief description of the purpose of Digital Is can be found on the site’s about page:

As an emerging and open knowledge base created and curated by its community of members, Digital Is gathers resources, collections, reflections, inquiries, and stories about what it means to teach writing in our digital, interconnected world.

Promoting dialogue among current educators about transformative uses of technology in the classroom, Digital Is shares teacher inquiry, lessons, and teaching samples from across the country. Leveraged under a Creative Commons license, the work on Digital Is can be shared, remixed, and transformed in various forms and contexts. Work in a ninth-grade English classroom may inform innovation in a third-grade classroom and in pre-service teacher seminars at the university level. Instead of instructional considerations stemming from national policy, Digital Is promotes democratic teacher voices to support a professionally capable and resilient generation of educators.

As someone who continues to benefit greatly from the insights and expertise of the Digital Is community, I shaped this book to build on the existing conversations taking place in that online space. My goal is to offer meaningful illustrations of how teachers are already utilizing principles of connected learning to upheave traditional classroom structures and methods of engagement.

Though all of the case studies here initially started as resources on Digital Is, the authors were asked to highlight at least one of the connected learning principles their practice illustrates. These snapshots of classrooms are just that: They offer many brief conversation starters to further connected learning and to extend and complicate a new framework for classroom teachers.

Conclusion

Taken