Karyn Romeis responded to my South African reflection by linking to her own African tale. Her words struck a chord because I returned from Africa (South Africa and Kenya) only a few weeks ago, and my experiences there profoundly changed me as a teacher and a human being. Her entry took me back to many schools and classrooms that I visited in Kenya as part of the Teachers Without Borders-Canada project.

Here’s a link to Karyn’s entry and to a version I annotated using Diigo.

Final video of the Virtual Classroom Project hosted on the Islands of jokaydia in April and June, 2008. For more information about the project, click here.

Screenshots of the Virtual Classroom Project are available here.

She’s five, maybe six years old, and her eyes are glued to my camera. After some hesitation, she comes up to me and says,
“Can I see?”
I kneel down on the wet concrete and show her the camera. I point to the viewfinder. She puts her small hand on mine and gingerly lowers the camera to her eye level. She looks through the viewfinder and smiles. She can see Sharon and the other children . Then, her eyes big and innocent and happy, she looks at me and says, “Do you have money?”

And then, back in the car, going back to the guesthouse in Cape Town where we’re staying for the duration of our project, I find myself overwhelmed by emotions. Today is my third day in Cape Town working with Teachers Without Borders Canada. Today is when it hits me: In the grand scheme of things, how much can we really do to help?

My thoughts take me back to some of the conversations that I’ve had with South African teachers this past week. The teachers who attended our Teachers Without Borders ICT Workshop here in Cape Town have been very enthusiastic about learning how to integrate technology into their lessons. They were the first to admit that the “chalk and talk” approach that is so common in their schools bores students. They told us that they want to differentiate instruction, to engage their students in learning. “I want my students to want to stay in my class,” one of them said to me at lunch.

The teachers who participated in our workshop were true lifelong learners. I was very impressed by their passion for learning. They embraced Moodle, they embraced blogging, and their questions and comments made it clear that they see technology integration as a complex, but rewarding task. They want to invest in themselves so that they can improve the learning experiences for their students. When Sharon showed them the four XOs that she was lucky enough to have donated to this project by various institutions and individuals in Canada, the whole room started buzzing . They all wanted to see them. They all wanted to test them. When we took out our Flip cameras , the reaction was equally enthusiastic. Then, at lunch, one of the teachers said to me, “I understand what you mean about engagement. When my students ask me, ‘Miss, what does this word mean?’ I tell them to take out their cell phones and find out for themselves. I want them not to always ask me.” (I was surprised to see how ubiquitous cell phones are here).

Of course, they all realize that integrating technology in a meaningful way, in a way that engages and challenges the learners takes time. They know that learning how to use Moodle, for example, is a long process. But what I found truly inspiring about the teachers we worked with is that they were undaunted by these challenges and, in fact, always took the time to consider how the technology could be best integrated into their existing curricula. They did not look at blogging, for example, as a panacea that would automatically engage their students and make them excellent writers. They thought first and foremost about how it could best be used in their classrooms. They thought of their context and how blogging could be used to enforce some of the excellent approaches that they’re already using as teachers of English, or social sciences, or math. When I mentioned how blogging with my students necessitated a shift in my teacherly voice, they all agreed. “This takes a lot of work, but we have to do this for our students,” one of them told me. Yes, it is a challenge. Undergoing that shift is difficult for all teachers. It dethrones us from the privileged, traditional position of the expert. How wonderful to see that teachers here do not cling to that role and want to empower their students.

Of course, it’s easy to see why. In our informal interactions at lunch and during breaks, the South African teachers told us repeatedly that their country is a “young democracy” and that it “needs time to grow.” One of the comments that I heard over and over again from the teachers was that “education is key.” This morning, when we first drove into the township of Langa, the oldest area of black resettlement in Cape Town (created in 1927), our tour guide echoed the statement I’d heard so many times from the teachers, “Education is key.” He meant that it’s key to individual success and opportunities, and key as a solution to the crippling poverty that surrounded us as soon as we entered the township.

Such a simple, yet powerful realization. “Education is key.” This is why I’m here. This is why I signed up to be part of this Teachers Without Borders project in South Africa. It’s also an answer to the question that’s been troubling me ever since my brief encounter this morning with that five-year-old girl: In the grand scheme of things, how much can we really do to help? As many of the people I have met since I arrived here last week have emphasized, the answer is quite clear: Education is key.

So, we will continue to have conversations with the teachers here. We will continue to assist them as they develop technology integration approaches that are grounded in the existing South African contexts. We will continue to remind each other that, as Paulo Freire argued in many of his writings, teachers are political beings who can effect change only if they see themselves as political agents and not mere handout technicians.

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If you’re interested in learning more about our TWB projects this summer, please read Sharon Peters’ entry .

Ever since I returned from EduCon, I’ve been thinking about instructional conversations. After touring the Science Leadership Academy and listening to SLA students share their views during all sessions that I attended at EduCon, I have come to believe that I need to have more conversations between myself and my students, as well as among all the students in the classroom and the class blogosphere. I think we need more blogtalk - more talk about texts.

It’s not enough to know how to grow a blog, to pick a topic and keep contributing to one’s blog. Our students must also be aware of the class communities in which they learn. They have to have opportunities to think and respond to other writers. They need opportunities to engage in and sustain conversations about their own work and the work of their peers. Blogging is not about choosing a topic and writing responses for the rest of the term. It is about meaningful, thoughtful engagement with ideas. But a grade eight student may need additional support to learn what it means to be thoughtfully engaged. I find that for so many of my students blogging often becomes a race to publish, to write entries and receive comments. (Most of them measure the success of their blog by the number of comments they receive, and the content of the comment is often not as important as the mere fact that it is there). They rarely look critically at their own writing, preferring instead to judge their own work by the traffic that it attracts to their blog.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been trying to test and implement a number of strategies to get my students more involved in their work. The first step that I take towards helping students think critically about their own work, towards engaging them as writers, consists of leaving readerly comments on their blog. The blogging platform we use makes that process easier and more transparent for the student. What I like about this platform - 21 classes - is that my comments appear in a separate space from that devoted to comments left by other students. The author of the blog can use the dashboard to quickly scan the entries where the teacher left comments. It may not be a very important feature to all teachers, but it is of significant value to me and my students because it makes conversations easier to track:

(Click for a bigger version and embedded notes)

In my opinion, this feature encourages instructional conversations. Comments are not just an extrinsic part of having a blog - in 21classes they are presented as an integral part of the activity. The caption at the top says “Follow Your Threads” thus making it seem like there’s a discussion forum attached to every blog entry. All of the links shown in the screenshot above are linked to specific entries where the comments have been posted so the students can easily follow all the comments left by their teacher. They don’t have to check every single entry. All they need to do is log into their dashboard and the latest comments and the entries they are attached to will be displayed for them.

This does not mean that teacher comments are more important than those posted by the student’s classmates. In fact, my doctoral research suggests that peer comments can have a stronger impact on confidence, engagement, and development of writing skills than comments left by the teacher. However, having the peer and teacher comments arranged side by side does help, I believe, in learning to see every entry as an originator of activity that can then lead to deep reflection. The students quickly learn that the same entry can generate very different responses or responses that address the same aspects of the entry but from two different points of view. For example, with the peer and student comments arranged side by side, the students see that my comment on their blossoming personal voice mirrors an entry left by a classmate who wrote that the entry was interesting and fun to read. The two comments, one left by a classmate and the other by the teacher, are indeed quite different but focus on essentially the same aspect of the entry. Seen side by side, they complement and reinforce each other. The voice of the teacher and the voice of a classmate combine to have a strong impact on the author’s sense of confidence and can lead to ongoing conversations about his or her work.

Also, while I do try to assume a readerly and conversational voice when leaving comments, I also believe that my role in the classroom is to guide and support, and that the students need that specific type of teacher presence to be available to them. Having teacher comments appear in a different column makes instructional conversations easier for the students to follow and participate in.

But there’s more.

In order to engage in truly reflective thought about their work, students must also have opportunities to analyze who they are as bloggers and writers. They must have opportunities to look critically at their own work and see how they fit into the class blogosphere.

Recently, I developed a handout that helps students accomplish just that.

The Ripple Effect Sheet is designed to encourage students to become aware of the class blogosphere, of other writers, of entries that define the environment in which they write, and of their own contributions to that environment. I begin this process by asking the students to reflect on one of their own blog entries:

This handout gives students an opportunity to pick their single best blog entry and comment on how writing that entry contributed to their growth as a thinker or writer. In other words, I want them to think about the perceived ripple effect that this one specific entry - one specific topic and their subsequent engagement with that topic - had on them as individuals. How did it expand their understanding of the topic? What exactly did they learn? Was there a reaction from the class blogosphere?

Here’s a sample response:

(Click for a bigger version)

As you can see, this handout provides a perfect opportunity to start a conversation with a student about his or her specific entry. It’s a great opportunity to not only help the student reflect on what she has learned through her entry but also try to discuss the impact of the entry on other writers in the class blogosphere. For example, the six comments that Terry mentions in the Ripple Effect diagram shown above offers a good opportunity to discuss specific characteristics that made the entry appealing to his classmates - to discuss, in other words, the impact that his work had on its readers in the class blogosphere. Once Terry completed his Ripple Effect sheet, we sat down and looked closely at the six comments that his classmates left on his blog. We talked about how the depth of his work and his unique conversational style appealed to his classmates. Needless to say, it was a very empowering conversation for Terry but also one that helped him look discerningly at his work and see himself, for the very first time, as a member of a larger community of thinkers, not just a classroom where students write because they need to submit assigned work.

But the process did not end there. Having looked closely at his work and discussed some of its aspects with the teacher, Terry used the other part of the Ripple Effect sheet to assess the strengths and weaknesses of his work:

(Click for a bigger version)

Take a look at the first comment under “Weaknesses.” Terry wrote: “Careless mistakes that everyone noticed.” I did not have to point out to him that his entry was filled with careless mistakes - the community of his peers did that for me. They assumed not only their readerly roles but also the role of the editor. When we sat down with Terry to talk about his work, I did not have to begin the conversation by assuming my traditional teacherly voice and pointing out typos and grammatical mistakes. Having reflected on both his own entry and the comments left by his peers, Terry himself arrived at the conclusion that careful proofreading would make his work clearer and easier to follow for his classmates.

This is a very important realization for a thirteen-year-old student. It’s a realization that I could have tried to drill into his head by printing and then underlining or circling all the careless mistakes that he had made in his entry. I did not do that. But I did not abdicate my role as a teacher either. I merely adapted my presence to work within a class community of writers. In other words, I chose not to say anything. I chose not to directly address Terry’s carelessness because I knew that the community I had helped create would step in and make Terry aware of this problem. Now, let’s face it, there are schools out there where modifying my presence in this manner would lead some people to accuse me of being irresponsible, of not doing my job. I believe, however, that creating a community of reflection and support that the student can depend on for timely and accurate feedback that can replace, or at least complement, the role of the teacher is more important and more effective than maintaining my authoritarian voice of the expert.

The fact that Terry’s realization about careless mistakes did not come from me is immensely important. Learning from his own classmates that his work, while interesting and fun to read, would become even stronger if Terry took the time to proofread and revise is much more effective as a learning tool than constant reminders from the teacher. By encouraging reflection, the Ripple Effect handout helped empower Terry and made him more aware of the strengths and weaknesses of his own work. It also provided me with an opportunity to become a conversation partner, a guide who helped Terry find the time to reflect, to evaluate, to listen to and become aware of his own voice and other writerly voices in the class blogosphere.

This awareness of other writerly voices is very important. That’s why the Ripple Effect sheet provides an opportunity to reflect not only on one’s own work but also on the work of other writers and their impact on the class blogosphere. Once the students get in the habit of looking critically at their own work, I also ask that they look around the class blogosphere and pick one or two entries that had impacted them in some way. Once again, I ask for a reflective response. I ask the students to describe the ripple effect that the entry or entries had on them as individuals. “What did you learn?” I ask. “How did you respond?” “How big of a ripple did this cause in your own understanding of the topic?” “Was there a ripple effect in our community?” “Did people respond? If so, how?”"Did this writer help you grow as a thinker, a writer? Why? How?”

Here’s a sample response:

(Click for a bigger version)

The response develops from a simple “Sierra Leone and Child Soldiers by Anna” to a much more complex “I realized what is happening there relates to Animal Farm (undemocratic governments).” The reason why I think this process is valuable pedagogically is because, without it, most of my students would not even be aware of the fact that Anna wrote about child soldiers. The ripple effect handout, however, forces the students to look carefully at specific entries and think about their own reactions. It gives them an opportunity to look carefully at what is happening on other blogs in the class community and then reflect on their own reactions. I want the students to realize that Anna, for example, is not just some isolated writer writing in order to get a grade, but a thoughtful, creative, and sensitive human being who is communicating ideas we can all learn from. Once Terry understands how much Anna can contribute to his understanding of the novel and current international events, he will be less likely to dismiss his class blogosphere as just a group of kids writing for school. And so, it isn’t surprising that Terry’s reflection does not end at the last ripple - his engagement with Anna’s piece went beyond making the connection between Sierra Leone and Animal Farm - he also made a connection with the author, with Anna herself, and, as his own words indicate, he cemented that connection by leaving a comment.

I admit, this approach is still in its infancy, but it provides a valuable mechanism to engage students in reflective thinking about their work and the work of their peers. It also provides an opportunity to continue to redefine my presence in the classroom.

The point here is that when we talk about blogging, most of us focus on writing. We tend to ignore the fact that a class blogging community provides teachers with a very valuable opportunity to use informal instructional conversations to engage our students as thinkers and writers. These conversations can help our students immerse themselves in the rich tapestries of voices that characterize blogging communities.

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First of all, thanks to those of you from Brigham Young University who added your thoughts to my first post on the set curriculum. I enjoyed reading your comments and learning more about your concerns and questions regarding teaching 21st century learners. As you can see, this is a conversation that can continue for a long time, and I hope that it will continue this week and even after our Second Life meet-up on Monday.

Today, I want to respond to your questions about student-teacher relationship and technology. I’ve selected the following questions from the list you sent me:

You mentioned that sometimes you end up talking about things not within the curriculum while you are establishing relationships with the students. What would you consider the balance to produce such effective bonds, but also obtain the goals of vigorous curricula?

To what extent do you think you can expose yourself as a mere human being, and not a teacher in your blogs and classroom settings?

Through your blogs, you make yourself seem more “human” to your students and they get to know you on a personal basis. Does that affect the way they treat you as a teacher?

What difficulties do you anticipate as the students start to perceive you in your other role as someone who can learn from them? Do you think that you will come upon classroom management problems? What feedback have you received from the community about your use of technology in the classroom?

How do you censor how much you should tell or show your students about yourself?

Do you ever loose the respect of the students when you actively show them you don’t know everything about your given subject?

These questions reveal the same apprehensions that I experienced when I first decided to redefine my teacherly voice and modify my classroom presence. They betray fear of losing control and the reputation of the content expert. I think it’s understandable - we are taught, after all, that in order to become successful and effective teachers, we need to become experts in our chosen fields and project an aura of expertise. Parents and students expect the teacher to be knowledgeable. Consequently, the decision to “learn with the students,” to use one’s own personal blog in the class blogosphere, to engage as a participant and a co-learner, often leads us to think that we will lose the respect of our students and that we will no longer really teach. The question immediately arises - how will my students benefit from being in my class if I don’t actively teach them?

At the same time, it would be silly to try to use blogs or wikis, for example, and try to preserve the traditional type of teacherly presence. These new tools demand that we assume the role of a facilitator and a co-learner. They really don’t work very well when the teacher insists on being in complete control and dictating how students engage as learners. They demand a more democratic and participatory approach.

So, how do we reconcile the new technology with the traditional expectations of most parents and students that we enter the classroom as subject experts? How do we encourage personal inquiry in our students and also maintain the traditional teacherly voice?

Needless to say, as the new technologies open up new vistas for exploration and personal engagement, educators struggle with how they can best meet these traditional expectations and adapt their practice to suit the new reality of a more conversational and participatory approach to learning brought about by the new tools of web 2.0. Leigh Blackall echoed many of my thoughts on this topic when he expressed this dilemma and the resulting frustrations in one of his recent posts. His ideas prompted me to comment on the process of losing the teacherly voice. I’d like to reiterate here the thoughts that I shared in response to his entry.

Losing the Authoritarian Voice

First of all, I’ve come to the conclusion that losing the teacherly voice is not the equivalent of losing the voice of an expert. When I first started blogging with my students and using my blog to learn and not just dispense knowledge or post evaluative comments about my students’ progress, I was under the impression that, in order to lose my teacherly voice, I would have to stop being an expert. I thought that, in order to be a participant and a co-learner, I had to learn along with my students. It took me a while to realize that I was wrong. How can I possibly say to my students that we will be learning together about Elizabethan drama, for example? I already know a lot about that topic. I cannot pretend that I don’t. In fact, I probably shouldn’t because they are in my class to learn from me, and they expect me to be their guide and introduce them to the topic.

And so, the challenge is that when I try to divest myself of my teacherly voice I need to remember that this process is not about losing the voice of the expert but about losing the voice of the traditional authoritarian teacher who enters the classroom as an official persona armed with a pre-defined set of goals and very specific lesson plans for his students to follow. It is about giving the students the freedom to engage with ideas that they find relevant and interesting, not about dictating every step of their learning process.

I believe that it is important to lose the authoritarian voice, the controlling voice, but not the voice of an expert who chose to teach because of his passion for the subject. The students need to see that the instructor is someone who lives and breathes whatever it is that they’re studying, that they have in their midst someone who has a wealth of expertise.

I think that the best way of losing that voice is to say the following:

“I’ve been teaching Elizabethan drama for a long time, but there are still many things that I don’t know very well. So, this term, while you research Elizabethan drama and related topics that you find interesting, I will research one specific aspect of Elizabethan drama that always interested me but that I never really had a chance to explore.”

Saying this to my class suggests that I still see myself as an expert. It also shows that I am a learner, someone who wants to use his blog to research things he’s passionate about. The voice of an expert is still there in that comment, but the traditional teacher persona has disappeared.

Modeling Personal Investment

In one of my recent posts, I suggested that I had decided to use my own blog as a more personal space. I decided to give it a meaningful title and blog about things that I am interested in: film, music, architecture, human rights. Clearly, most of these entries have nothing to do with the work we do in class. But the point here is to lead by example, to show the students that I am more than a subject expert, that I am a multi-dimensional being whose life is not limited to Elizabethan drama, or essay writing, or grammar, or reading Victorian novels. It shows that blogging is about reflection and thoughtful engagement with ideas that are important to us. How can I expect the students to take blogging seriously, if I use my own blog in the class blogosphere only to post assignments and evaluations? They need to see that blogging is about personal investment.

This strategy can have a very positive effect on building a solid relationship with my students. They get to know me as a person, not just a teacher. They see the richness that is in every human being who engages with ideas and shares his or her thoughts. When they see how much you care about different things in your life and how much time you take to reflect on them, their respect for you as a human being and a teacher can only increase.

Does all that writing about things that are important to me personally detract from the curriculum? I don’t think it does. I do think, however, that it redefines what we mean by curriculum. It redefines the curriculum because it shows the students that any topic is of value if it studied in reflective manner, if it is approached as a field to be explored. Northrop Frye once said that “it takes a good deal of maturity to see that every field of knowledge is the centre of all knowledge, and that it doesn’t matter so much what you learn when you learn it in a structure that can expand into other structures.” In other words, knowledge is not a series of fragmented and carefully compartmentalized units (although school does a great job of presenting it that way). Young people who see that their teacher blogs about things he finds meaningful are more likely to see blogs as personal spaces where they can be themselves and explore ideas that are personally relevant. They begin to see their blogs as a powerful medium for research, communication, expression, and reflection. (For a very insightful glimpse into a classroom where personal engagement works very well, check out Graham Wegner’s Starting Next Round Of Personal Research Projects.

Once they engage as individuals, once they find something that they want to explore as independent researchers, they become hooked and committed. This presents a perfect opportunity to work with them individually on specific skills that can help them improve their work and learn how to more effectively communicate their ideas. In other words, I don’t need the whole class to study the same thing in order to help them become better writers, readers, researchers, or critical thinkers. In fact, my chances of helping them develop in all those areas are much greater when I can interact with them in the context of their own research. Instructional conversations work well only when the students’ sense of ownership is already present.

In other words, I think it’s important for me to redefine my teacherly voice so that the students see me as a learner and not only as an educator. I think it’s important to show them that learning happens when we engage with ideas that we find personally meaningful. Of course, in order to do that we must first be prepared to grant them the freedom and provide the forum where they can become independent researchers. That, let’s face it, is not always easy.

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On November 19th, I will be hosting a Second Life workshop for pre-service teachers from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. They are currently taking a course on instructional technology in teaching. They have already explored technology integration, internet safety, and information literacy. They’ve read a number of entries on this blog and then, as a group, composed a list of questions regarding technology integration in my classroom. For the next few weeks, we will be using this blog as a discussion platform.

If you are interested in following the discussion and interacting with teachers who, very soon, will be integrating technology into their subject areas in their own classrooms, please join us by responding to the questions, my own answers, or the comments left by the students. I hope that you will jump in and join the discussion, either here or by posting a response on your own blog. I want the students from Brigham Young to see that the edublogosphere is a varied and rich network. So, if you are a librarian, a high school teacher, an elementary teacher, or an administrator, please join me in this collaborative and mutually-enriching exercise in professional development. If you choose to express your views on your own blog, please use the following tag to make it easier for all of us to keep track of this discussion: BYUPD07.

So, let’s begin!

First of all, I’d like to thank the students from Brigham Young and their instructor for the opportunity to engage in this discussion. Those of us who have been blogging with our students or using other interactive tools often begin to live in a sort of bubble and forget that our first steps were often very hesitant. The questions you sent reminded me that meaningful integration of technology can be a challenging task - one that is often dominated by technical and Internet safety concerns, as well as the need to conform to institutional pressures at the school or district level. In other words, as I looked at the questions I remembered all the obstacles that I had to overcome when I first started thinking of creating a blogging community in my classroom. Now, I realize that while learning from other teachers is an important part of this process, implementing technology in my own classroom is a process that requires a lot of personal reflection. It’s a great opportunity to engage in some informal action research, learn more about myself, and the nature of my classroom practice. In other words, there is no clear, simple answer to any of the questions that you sent me. They are, however, great conversation starters. I hope that you will engage in a discussion here on this blog and that other readers of this blog will join us as we explore the issues you are interested in.

In this entry, I’d like to address your question on the set curriculum:

What are your feelings on a set curriculum? Do you believe we as teachers, and as human beings should have more freedom to be able to study and teach things that are important and that interest us, such as human rights abuses? What is the limit of going outside the curriculum? Is there such a limit?

Prior to researching and using a blogging community in my classroom I never had a problem with a set curriculum. I never even questioned it. It seemed logical to me that my responsibility as an educator was to prepare a collection of texts, resources, diagnostic and assessment/evaluation tools in order to achieve specific learning outcomes. I saw myself as a subject expert whose primary responsibility in the classroom was to teach a very specific set of skills and competencies. I saw myself as someone who possessed knowledge and perceived my students as individuals who needed to acquire it.

Then, one day, in my grade 12 English class, Julia came up to me after class and said:

“Mr.Glogowski, could you please take a look at my essay before I hand it in? I just wanna make sure that it’s ok.”

The essay was due at the end of that day. Julia was a conscientious student and thought that asking me to proofread it would give her another chance to revise her work, if necessary, and then hand it in in the afternoon.

I said, “Sure, let’s take a look.”

I skimmed her work and saw that it was well organized and supported with lots of specific examples from a variety of secondary sources. Julia wrote about the AIDS crisis in Africa and seemed to have a solid grasp of the topic.

“This looks great!” I said. “You can hand it in now. No need to wait till this afternoon.”

“Thank you. But could you take a good look? You see, I’m worried about little careless mistakes … you know they’re never really serious but they do add up.”

“Julia,” I said, “you’ve written essays in the past. You’re a good writer … I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”

“But … could you just take a good look at the thesis statement and the hook? Also, I’m not sure my supporting sentences flow very well. The conclusion took me hours to write … now it seems forced.”

I skimmed through her work again, this time focusing on the specific parts that she was unsure about.

“No, I don’t see any major weaknesses here … I’m sure you’ll do well.”

“Thanks … but … will this get me 89%?”

“Why 89%?” I asked, puzzled.

“I need 89% on this assignment to get into Queen’s.”

That’s when I realized that, to Julia - one of the best students in my class, one of the best writers - writing was really only about getting a grade. It had no other meaning or purpose. All of her learning was reduced to one thing - the need to achieve a certain average.

Of course, the whole system is based on evaluation. It wasn’t just my classroom and my methodology that transformed Julia into an average-calculating automaton. Yet, as I was driving home that day, I thought, “She did not engage with her topic at all. She wrote about human rights in Africa and yet she didn’t really seem to care about the issues she had researched. Instead, all she cared about was her average. Writing that paper was a means to an end. It certainly was not an opportunity to engage with a topic, to engage as a human being.”

I realized that my classroom was a place where there was a lot of teaching going on, but not a lot of learning. When talking to me about her work, Julia had used an adopted voice. She spoke about the thesis statement, the hook, about effective support. She used the terminology that I had been using since the beginning of the school year. She realized that school is about “playing school,” that as long as she could jump through all of my hoops, she would do well and get into the university of her choice. My class was reduced to an obstacle course. She knew that writing a good paper was about learning how to produce the right reactions in its evaluator - her teacher. That’s why she asked about specific parts of the essay - the introduction, conclusion, specific supporting ideas - things that were part of my set curriculum. What she produced was an example of “school writing.” It was voiceless and generic, written to demonstrate that she had acquired a skill but devoid of any personal meaning.

And so, the problem with a set curriculum, regardless of the subject, is that it makes us focus almost exclusively on teaching. It makes us think that the most important person in the classroom is the teacher. It is based on the assumption that we know all and that the students know very little.

Should we have the freedom to study and teach things that are important to us as human beings? Absolutely. What is even more important is that we create environments in our classrooms where the students can explore issues that are important to them. Of course, they do need to know how to write an essay or organize a written response - I believe that it is my responsibility to help them learn how to best express their thoughts. But I also believe that it is my responsibility to help them learn how to express themselves in more than one medium and to support them as they engage in this process. In every subject, there is a set of skills and competencies that the children should learn, but we often believe that they must be taught in specific, pre-defined ways.

After that brief conversation with Julia, I realized that I had pre-defined all of her learning. I reduced English and writing to topic sentences and proper organization. No wonder then that Julia’s topic was not as important to her as the technical aspects of her writing. As a teacher, I had completely neglected her growth as a human being and focused instead on peddling pre-selected content. Of course, I should be proud of the fact that I had, after all, taught her a great deal about writing essays. But, at the same time, I wish that I had done it in an environment where knowledge was not presented as a static product to be absorbed. Imagine how much more competent she could have become as a writer if she had been given the opportunity to arrive at the importance of solid support as a result of trial and error, peer editing, and in the context of her own journey as a budding writer. Instead, she acquired the skills through automatic drills. In other words, I wish I had taught those skills in an environment where she could also explore her own passions and grow as a human being.

This brings me to John Dewey and his notion of experience. In Experience and Education, Dewey argues that amid all uncertainties in education “there is one permanent frame of reference: namely, the organic connection between education and personal experience.” He goes on to say that:

There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that the acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.

and

What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul; loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses the desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?

In other words, Dewey argues that no subject has inherent educational value. It is the interaction between the individual and the subject matter that makes the experience “educative” and that our job as educators is to ensure that the environment in which learning takes place allows learners to interact with the subject matter. He argues that “educative experiences” must “arouse in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas. The new facts and new ideas thus obtained become the ground for further experiences in which new problems are presented.”

The environment in which Julia wrote her essay did not provide opportunities for interaction between the learner and the subject matter. The skills she had learned were removed from any meaningful context. They were neatly pre-packaged and delivered. As a result, her learning stopped once she finished the paper. There was nothing to motivate her to keep exploring her topic of the AIDS crisis in Africa. Dewey would have said that since no experience has an inherent value, I erred when I selected experiences ahead of time for my students and neglected to create an environment where personally relevant interactions could take place.

Julia taught me that my classroom needs to be first and foremost an inclusive and welcoming environment that encourages exploration and knowledge-building. It needs to be a place where students can engage as individuals. In this kind of environment students can learn through personally meaningful experiences which engage them in what Dewey calls “an active quest for information and for production of new ideas.” This cannot happen if the curriculum is pre-selected for the students. If the experiences they are to have in the classroom are pre-defined ahead of time, the opportunities for meaningful involvement are greatly reduced.

Unfortunately, such an environment is not easy to create. First, because it must be co-created with the students. It must take into account their interests and goals. Second, because it dethrones the teacher and forces us to assume the role of a facilitator or a co-contributor. It requires that we participate as human beings and not just content experts. It requires that we engage in learning with our students.

I’ve been trying to create that environment in my classroom for the past two years. I cannot say that I’ve succeeded or that everything I do always works out. I can say, however, that I have learned a lot from these attempts to create an engaging and participatory environment, and that they have tremendously affected my classroom practice. That’s all it really takes … finding in ourselves the courage to admit openly that we enter our classrooms every day not just to teach but also - perhaps primarily - to learn.

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I’ve spent the last couple of days thinking about the tools I will use next term with my classes (21classes? Edublogs? Ning? Wikispaces? PBWiki? MindMeister?) only to discover that what I’m really interested in is preparing the ground for learning. I don’t want to structure and pre-define. I do not want to create a community or a social network for my students. Instead, I want to create the conditions necessary for the right kind of environment to emerge. Building an environment for the students is likely to result in failure: environments and communities need to be build with the students, with their full participation, through their work and their interactions with and about texts. It’s not just about choosing a blogging platform and letting the kinds in. We need to move beyond the traditional approach of “pick the tools, add students and stir.” Unfortunately, my curriculum is still to a large extent dominated by units, lessons, assignments. Those are the realities of teaching and learning in North America in the 21st century - it’s not about the process, it’s about the product.

So, as a teacher in the 21st century, I am taking a stand: I want to have a classroom where my students can enjoy learning experiences. Instead of dividing the curriculum into neat chunks, I will try to set the stage for the right kind of environment to emerge - the kind of environment where learning experiences can take shape. The kind of environment that is similar to what Ben Wilkoff has termed, “the ripe environment,” one characterized by “a culture of connection.”

Before I explain what I have in mind, let me take you back to last term. I’d like to tell you about Vanessa. Last term, she chose to research child soldiers. She spent months reading articles, interviews, watching online videos, and documenting her research on her blog. Gradually, she immersed herself in her topic and learned much more than I ever could have taught her. Then, towards the end of the term, after documenting her research, reflecting on it, and sharing it with her classmates, she started writing poetry in response to this gruesome and difficult topic. Take a look:

I am part of the Revolutionary United Forces and I will stop at nothing for victory…

To overthrow the enemy one must not abide by the rules,
Governing ourselves, altering the thoughts of many
Vulnerability in a child is our advantage
Even in the children’s eyes, death is to be taught as the answer
The children have sorrow in their eyes longing for love
They cry,
Scream,
Weep for love,

Defeating the enemy, is of the utmost importance
No sympathy, no traitors, no survivors
The child’s innocence will not affect us,
Risking their lives will lead us closer to victory.
The children have sorrow in their eyes longing for hope,
They cry,
Scream,
Weep for hope

Respect given to the children will conquer any love once given to them
Our training methods constant and cruel
On the front lines of battle, they shed blood for us
We are the R.U.F’s, envisioning only supremacy
The children have sorrow in their eyes longing to defeat the enemy
They cry,
Scream,
Weep for victory.

I realized that this was a genuine personal response, indicative of a lot of personal investment in the topic. It was a kind of personal way of coming to terms with what she had learned. Vanessa wasn’t the only one. Trudy, who’d spent months researching Anne Frank, also posted some poetry:

The book opens
A new piece of information is just being handed to you
But you know at the end something dark awaits
And lets just say its not a happy ending

You read the beginning and then the end
Throughout each day personalities change
Feelings change
It is a new type of life unfolding right in front of your eyes

You witness life in the eyes of a young girl
The way she writes the way she explains,
Its like its happening
To you
Right this very moment
Everyday sounds and voices scare you
But shes just a 13 year old girl what can she do?
Nothing

New laws, new relationships are all so different
Its kind of like beginning a new life
Like a caterpillar growing into a butterfly
A new life unfolds

No fun, no friends
Just your family
With petite spaces and little boundaries
Closed windows make you want to witness nature
But you can’t

A new love,
Someone to share your feelings with
But is it true?
Or have you just gotten to the point you can’t think and you do things that you would never do in you old life

So many rules to follow:
Be Quiet!
Walk Slowly!
Sit Down during the day!
Read, write just be quiet….during the day!

When the sun has gone down and the moon has gone up
There are different rules:
Walk Around
Be Free
But Don’t open the windows
Or go outside!

With every pleasant thing you do,
There will always be a consequence
During this time of your life

All the personalities change so quickly
Funny
Talkative
Sometimes even ignorant
Personal

There is so much time but soon…. Sooner than you think
There will be no more time left.

At first, while certainly very impressed by the creative work of these thirteen-year-olds, I did not think that there was anything out of the ordinary about it. Then, I realized that there was. Having become researchers (one might even say content experts) in their respective fields, Vanessa and Trudy started contributing. Yes, contributing! We don’t often think of students as contributors. Even in the context of Web 2.0, I often talk about collaboration and connections, but rarely about genuine contributions. These poems, it occurred to me one day, are learning objects - they are unique artifacts that I can use next year with another class when discussing child soldiers or Anne Frank. Much like edubloggers around the world who, through my aggregator, contribute to my knowledge of learning in the 21st century, these girls were contributing specific artifacts to the topics they chose to study.

I started thinking about their progress as researchers and it occurred to me that the whole class seemed to follow the same pattern. Once I gave them the freedom to find a topic they were interested in, they began to seek out and immerse themselves in learning experiences. No one really seemed to care about grades or tests. Instead, they were immersed in learning about topics they cared about. Looking back, I realize that the process that the whole class engaged in consisted of four stages. Vanessa and Trudy, however, moved beyond into the fifth stage. The girls, along with their classmates, inspired me to start thinking about the process of creating learning experiences. The five stages described below illustrate my emerging approach based on my classroom practice and the work of my students (be kind - it’s still a work in progress):

1. DISCOVER:
First, the students were given the freedom to pick a topic of interest within a specific context that we had entered through our discussions of literature - the context of social justice. I gave all my students sufficient time to think about what they were passionate about, visit some sites, read some articles and uncover that one specific topic that they wanted to learn more about.

At this point, the students were really just surfing and lurking. They were visiting various sites and communities to explore topics that were of interest to them as potential ideas for future research. There were no conversations here, just fleeting interactions.

2. DEFINE:
During this stage, I gave the students time to post some preliminary entries on their blogs, to think out loud about their topics in general terms before they started their research. The point here was to allow them the freedom to start defining their research topics and possible ways of tackling them.

3. IMMERSE:
The next step was the longest and most complex. Having narrowed it down to a specific topic, the students then were given time in class to immerse themselves in the topic, to learn more about it, to start looking for, identifying, and interacting with valuable resources. This was an opportunity to bookmark relevant content and use RSS to start creating a network of valuable and reliable resources (I want to extend it this year to a network of peers and adult experts). I wanted my students to become researchers who locate valuable content, read, interact, and document their learning on the blog by writing entries about the topic and their journey as researchers.

4. BUILD:
The students’ efforts to document their discoveries and their learning contributed to the process of building their own knowledge in this specific area. The entries showed me and their peers - our whole community - how much they were learning. These were thoughts made visible. The students used their blogs to document their research and to build their own knowledge in their respective fields of expertise. There were many connections that emerged among students researching related ideas. The students interacted with each other by posting comments and by sharing and commenting on resources. They were engaged in their own research projects as individual researchers but, at the same time, there emerged many small networks within our class blogosphere of students interested in similar topics. They were all engaged and connected.

And that was where the process ended, or so I thought until I noticed Vanessa’s poem and then Trudy’s. Both girls were contributing unique, personal content to the fields they chose to research. That’s when I realized that in order for the learning experience to be complete, the students needed to go beyond researching, connecting, and network-building to become creators and contributors. Of course, one could argue that their research entries contributed valuable material to our class community, but this - their poetry - was unique and personal. These were artifacts which, despite their personal, literary, and creative nature, could enrich anyone’s understanding of child soldiers or Anne Frank. They emerged because the girls went beyond the process of documenting their research.

So, I realized that there was one more, final stage in this process.

5. CONTRIBUTE:
This final stage happens when, as learners, the students begin to contribute through their own creativity. It happens when, having acquainted themselves with the topic, they begin to rewrite or remix it in their own unique way and thus contribute to and enrich the field they’re researching. This is the stage when the students begin to create unique artifacts that contribute to the existing body of knowledge on a given topic. This final stage is not just about contributing links or resources to a group project or to a community. It is primarily an exercise in creativity. It begins when the students interact with ideas, resources, and people to create or enter a network. Once they can tap into the collective intelligence of their networks, they can begin to learn, and once they begin to learn, they can also begin to create their own resources - podcasts, films, creative writing, or any other artifacts that can then be used by others and can enrich their grasp of the topic.

Why can’t this fifth stage replace my traditional evaluation strategies? Why can’t I replace tests or assignments given to the whole class with the kind of engaging and personally relevant approach to learning that is encapsulated in the five-stage process above?

I think it can certainly be accomplished but, first, I need to foster in my classroom the kind of environment where this five-stage process can take place. This means that I need to think about how to create the kind of environment that fosters and supports learning experiences, not the kind of environment that imposes them on students. Perhaps, what I’m really interested in is what Dave Cormier calls “habitat.” He states that a proper habitat can “make it more likely for community to form and more likely that that community will do the kinds of things that were intended … that prompted the creation of that habitat.” In other words, as Dave argues, “a careful attention to the construction of habitat can increase the chances of a community forming.” I spent the last three years creating communities with my students and I learned that if the right (ripe?) environment is there, the community will emerge. It seems to me that the approach I described above can help create the kind of habitat that will lead to the emergence of networks, correspondences, and - most importantly - contributions.

In order to make all of this happen in a grade seven or eight Language Arts classroom, I need to think about facilitating connections and supporting my students in the process of creating their own networks where their contributions - poems, interviews, chatcasts, blog entries, podcasts, films - will be seen as enriching artifacts.

This past term, my students and I used a new blogging platform called 21Classes. One of its most appealing features is the fact that, as a community, our class had its own blog portal - one communal page that displays all the most recent posts and comments. This home page is a kind of aggregator which can be set to display static information posted by the teacher as well as non-static items such as the following:

We did not use all of the above but the ones that we did use helped in two significant ways. First of all, they made it easier to navigate around the online community by displaying links to all student blogs and to the most frequently discussed entries. Secondly, they also helped create a sense of community among the students by making all contributions (posts, comments, photos) clearly visible. It helped the students see the global progress of the community and their own place within it.

One of the most valuable features of this platform, however, turned out to be the ability to personalize the look of each individual blog.

For the very first time since I started using blogs in my classes (over three years ago), the platform I chose allowed my students to customize the look of their individual blogs. The software I used before (Manila, LifeType) allowed users to change the themes (I had to upload them first in order to make them available to my students) but did not give my students the freedom to personalize any of the specific aspects of each theme, such as the blog header, the background, or the colour and size of the font.

Unlike the other software we used in the past, 21classes allows every blogger to modify the background, the header, and the colour and size of all fonts - practically every little detail of one’s blog. The students can also choose from a variety of different widgets that can be embedded in the blog’s side panels (Calendar, About Me, My Favourite Blogs, Most Recent Comments, etc.).

So What?

As administrator of our 21classes.com portal, I was able to give my students the opportunity to pick a theme and then modify it. At the beginning of the term, when I gave them one class to get to know the community and the software, the students used it to learn how to modify their blogs. These are some of the questions and conversations that I overheard and jotted down:

How do you change the title?
You mean the header?
Yeah. That top banner.

How did you change your background to yellow?
You can upload a picture, too. See?

Can you change the size of the font?
Where?
In my title.
Sure. You can change the colours, too. Just pick a theme and then click on it. That opens a new page … here I’ll show you.

Look at …’s blog. She changed the borders. How do you do that?

In other words, they spent one hour and then also some time at home learning how to personalize their blogs. Most of them kept the same theme and modifications throughout the term. Some made minor changes on a regular basis.

Why is this important? I believe that the effort they had put forth to personalize their spaces contributed greatly to their sense of ownership and involvement as writers. Initially, I was concerned that this would lead to an undue preoccupation with the visual appeal of their blogs and distract them from the focus of our blogging community - writing and research. It didn’t. The students seemed aware of the fact that the visual appeal of the blog, no matter how inspiring, would not ensure readership. They knew that conversations emerge from interactions with and about texts.

The ability to create a virtual space that is uniquely one’s own turned out to be much more important than I had anticipated. It helped the students define themselves as individuals, not pupils who use a teacher-sanctioned tool to post work. When I compare student blogs from two years ago or from last year to the personalized blogs that the students created with 21Classes, I see a collection of individuals, not a classroom. I see evidence of personal engagement but no evidence of an institutional setting. The uniformity that the other platforms forced upon us was gone and what emerged was a creative and engaging mosaic. Take a look:

Some of the students modified their blogs to reflect the focus of their research, not their personalities. Take a look at the following examples (move your mouse over the photo to see explanatory notes on my Flickr site):

Blogging is about personal expression. The ability to personalize one’s space is something that needs to be an integral part of every community. I believe that it is an important building block that can help us build communities with our students. If a blogging community focuses primarily on creation then why not start by creating one’s space, one’s atelier where the process of creation will take place?

This reminds me of John Dewey’s statement that the self depends for its wholeness upon its surroundings (Art as Experience). In other words, what impacts the work of every individual blogger is not just the community itself or the connections made in the World Wide Web but also the immediate environment where he or she creates and “resides.” This immediate environment also allows students to become emotionally attached to their spaces. Without that involvement, Dewey argues, there can only be craftsmanship and not art. In other words, a blog I cannot personalize is a place where I have no control and no personal investment. This will greatly limit my ability to engage as an individual.

Perhaps I’m exaggerating but it seems to me that it is important to use a blogging tool that allows students to redefine their spaces as other than strictly academic sites of engagement. I have spent quite a bit of time looking at the screenshots above and have come to the conclusion that, for the most part, they do not look like school writing journals. Yes, you can see that the students are clearly engaged in school work and that there are certain elements that make these blogs similar (the “About Me” page or the link to the home page of our community), but there is also a lot of individuality in each blog. There is evidence of personal and creative engagement. These are (or have the potential to become) out-of-school learning spaces and not just school journals.

Of course, one can argue that it is all about contributions and ideas, not visual appeal. I agree. At the same time, I think it is crucial to allow all participants to create sites of inquiry that are uniquely their own. To some, this might mean using widgets. Others might choose to modify the header or font size. Whatever it is, as teachers we need to remember that it all starts with freedom - this is not just about creativity but also about stretching the boundaries and the control that characterize institutional settings.

I want my students to be able to say “This is where I write about things that I am interested in,” not “This is my school blog.” In other words, perhaps it’s time to liberate my students from the mindset of uniformity imposed upon me by the school and, instead of telling them to come to an online place that I have chosen, ask them to give me addresses of their own electronic spaces. Instead of saying, “Bookmark this URL, this is where all our blogs are going to be,” I could say, “Give me all your URLs - flickr, facebook, myspace, blogger - wherever you are - so that I can put them into one OPML file for all of us to share.”

I realize that due to various institutional constraints, many of us may not be able to use that approach for a very long time. Giving our students the freedom to build their own spaces, even within a teacher-sanctioned portal, is a good start.

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