If something is progressive, it is forward thinking. It means change. It is the antithesis of conservative. The year is 2012. We are not on the cusp of the new millenia, we are in the thick of it. We can no more conduct the business of education in this country as we always did anymore than we could teach 20th century learners the same way students were taught in the 19th century. I get that, yet I'm still struggling to make the transition. It amazes me that others don't see the bigger picture sometimes.
The new core standards that all teachers throughout the nation will be charged with teaching in 2014, require new literacy standards that include technology. For those resistant to this change and yet were taught how to use the internet as scholars in school and college, consider this: The internet was new, unfamiliar, rife with potentilally devastating pitfalls and the teachers charged to teach with it were unfamiliar with it. How do I know? I was one of them.
I earned my masters in 1994. I was a student-teacher during the 1993-94 school year, and I acquired my first teaching assignment the following year. Articles were available on the web in grad school but there was no formatting to them. They were not pdf files the way they are now. Most people chose to forgo on-line articles and found the hard copies in the stacks of the library. People used aol or some other internet service to navigate web pages and the material was woefully lacking.
In less than five years, the net morphed from the wild west into an information superhouse that resembled what we have now. We were asked to teach students to research, using it. There were and are pitfalls and we learned the hard way that the suffixes at the end of websites mattered. Whitehouse-dot-com is completely different from whitehouse-dot-gov... remember those days? We adjusted and are approaching mastery.
Our new challenge? Teach students to use their personal webtools in the classroom as scholars; not just for tweeting, texting, facebooking, videogaming, and killing time. Are there pitfalls to avoid? --some we don't even know about and will get blindsided with in the process-- probably. So what? Aren't we encouraging our students to try new things all the time? When we grumble about change, are we reflecting in our own behavior what we expect out of students when they are introduced to alien concepts like the future pluperfect tense?
Have any of the administrator's threatened us with negative teacher ratings or observations because our best efforts failed? Why fear failure-- how many flights did the Wright brothers attempt before success? How many of Thomas Alva Edison's lightbulbs exploded before he and Louis Lattimer figured out how to make a long lasting filament?
I think having been a transient student, professional and educator helps me accept change more readily than some. The old joke about the only thing you can count on is death and taxes rings true to me. We are charged with laying a foundation for success for the millenial generation. Right now, kids are learning how to accesss information on their own, without our guidance, and we are not teaching them how to evaluate the quality, veracity, and authenticity of that information.
Students are creating online identities without guidance from elders about protecting the only thing they truly own--- their reputation. Students can find information but they don't always know how to ask the question that gets the information they truly need. There are some who say that "That's not my job." as educators. Isn't it? How different are these 21st century challenges from evaluating traditional non-fiction texts? How different is teaching civics from teaching digital citizenship? As a writing teacher, am I ok with standard English's bastardization by the "newspeak" of the internet? John Maxwell said that "The greatest mistake a person can make is doing nothing." If we do nothing, how are we serving the unique new challenges that the 21st century learners will face?
We don't know what the future holds, but if your memory goes beyond 1993 and you think how much our world has changed since then, imagine how much more the technological revolution will alter our daily reality in another twelve years. Educators are supposed to prepare the next generation for the challenges they will encounter as adults. How else will we help students get there from here without acknowledging these future challenges?
Moreover, public education is under attack and many of the reforms, like vouchers programs seem to be designed specifically to destroy school as we know it. When we don't evolve or when we resist change, aren't we setting ourselves up for extinction? In military school, tactical officers said that "the view never changes if you're always following." I like to see the road ahead, not the posterior of the traffic in front of me.
Growing pains--- they let us know we're alive.
