Digital Networking for School Reform

The Online Grassroots Efforts of Parent and Teacher Activists

Kenneth A. Loparo, M. Landon-Hays, Kenneth A. Loparo, M. Landon-Hays

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137430748
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

Presenting school reform grassroots activists - teachers, parents, and organizers alike - in their own words, the editors document the newly emerged role of digital networks of activists in school reform and analyze their efforts as acts of critical literacy.

1

Critical Digital Literacies and the Struggle over What’s Common

George L. Boggs and Trevor Thomas Stewart

Abstract: It is tempting and even useful to imagine stable camps in a warlike contest over common interests in school reform, and it is an ingrained national tradition to portray meaningful struggle between camps, with Jimmy Stewart or Sidney Poitier playing the good guy in the movie version. Web 2.0 activism, a type of critical literacy, challenges that view as teachers and parents, long positioned in the backseat in national education reform, are increasingly able to drive, organize, and disagree with self-selected protagonists of positive change. In this chapter, we examine the connections among Critical Digital Literacies (CDL) and the struggle over what is “common” among stakeholders in American education.

Alison Heron-Hruby and Melanie Landon-Hays, eds. Digital Networking for School Reform: The Online Grassroots Efforts of Parent and Teacher Activists. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137430748.0006.

The concepts of community and dialogue are becoming part of the world of education in ways that demand attention. How advocates for policies and practices in the realm of educating students interact with one another has serious implications for policy creation and sustainability. Interactions about schooling mediate life experiences of students in US schools, their parents, and interlocking communities. Despite fervent calls for change among educational experts and policymakers, those stakeholders in public education have not agreed on how best to improve the quality of education in US schools. Public policy advocates press for accountability (Hanushek & Raymond, 2005) to the public interest from schools, teachers, and colleges of education; teachers’ unions try to preserve the profession inviolate; some academic camps point to weaknesses in the testing approach to school improvement (Kohn, 2004; Nielsen, 2013; Ravitch, 2013); and others build and refine the tests themselves. Neither reaching a central, united reform stance nor decentralizing public education to accommodate autonomous approaches, an atlas of education reform might suggest, at first glance, stable communities with opposing ideologies. Upon closer inspection, however, the landscape is considerably more complex. It is tempting and even useful to imagine stable camps in a warlike contest over testing and other top-down mandates, and it is an ingrained national tradition to portray meaningful struggle between camps and via representatives, with Jimmy Stewart or Sidney Poitier playing the good guy in the movie version. Web 2.0 activism challenges that view as teachers and parents, long positioned in the backseat in national education reform, are increasingly able to drive, organize, and disagree. Design and control of digital media information platforms emerging in popular resistance to the testing movement offer powerful new images of what communication is and how communities may be represented. In this chapter, we examine the connections among Critical Digital Literacies (CDL) and the ways educational stakeholders construct what is common as they engage in dialogue with (and without) others. The chapters that follow this one offer examples of CDL in action and demonstrate the chapter authors’ efforts to organize around a common cause, or to “make sides,” as we explain here.

In his introduction to Education Is Politics, Ira Shor (2000) began with a quote from Elie Wiesel’s 1986 Nobel Peace Prize speech to remind readers that “we must always take sides” (p. 1). Taking sides involves making sides. To Shor, neutrality is tantamount to siding with an oppressor, yet teachers’ and parents’ efforts to make and take sides regarding testing focuses our attention on communication itself as the starting point of partisanship. The tendency to take sides and align ourselves with a way of representing a cause or perspective often results in surprising caricatures. Attacks “on schooling as we know it [are] generally grounded in politics rather than pedagogy” (Kohn, 2004, p. 571), but the neat opposition between politics and pedagogy is more appealing than real. Like Kohn, one voice presses for consensus around one us and them arrangement, but simultaneously there exist myriad voices online, in print, on television, and elsewhere vying for consideration. To understand the collective dissensus (Ranciere, 2010; Trimbur, 1989) being produced around contemporary school reform debates in the United States as a productive, literate, and political activity, in this chapter we consider the inability to claim, plausibly, consensus among policymakers, colleges of education, and the broader communities of stakeholders they serve. The philosopher Ranciere used the notion of dissensus or “difference within the same” and “sameness of the opposite” (Bowman & Stamp, 2011) as a basis for understanding the interaction among politics, communication, and community:

If you assume that politics is a form of dissensus, this means that you cannot deduce it from any essence of the community, whether you do it positively in terms of implementation of a common property such as communicative language (Aristotle) or negatively in terms of a response to a destructive instinct that would set man against man (Hobbes). There is politics because the common is divided (p. 1).

To understand how critical digital literacies enable and shape grassroots organizing by composing (i.e., projecting, constructing, asserting) community in a landscape of dissensus, we relate the constituent factors of language, ideology, and community through a Bakhtinian (1981) concept of communication. Bakhtin (1981) describes poles that work through discourse to shape human consciousness. Center-seeking communication, at one pole, standardizes and centralizes thought, while centrifugal, heteroglossic forces decentralize thought toward a living conversation. The notion of living conversation in complexly literate digital arenas helps us make sense of a wide range of digitally literate activism. Accounting for the purposes and processes of critical digital literacies raises questions about the future of educational reform in a post-representative democracy, where politicians create policy outside of constituent geographic communities, under the influence of alternatively organized and asserted communities, such as a lobby or corporation.

School reform involves politics of scale

In 1983, the authors of A Nation at Risk constructed the message that school failure was a national problem, which simultaneously incited fear and positioned national initiatives as the “natural” response. Under the ominous heading “Indicators of Risk” the members of the conspicuously scaled National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE) made the claim that the “average achievement of high school students on most standardized tests is now lower than 26 years ago when Sputnik was launched” (p. 8). Drawing connections between Communism and the idea of US schools failing collectively projected a national public with Cold War and space race wounds not yet healed.

Texts like A Nation at Risk position education stakeholders as best represented by policymakers and philanthropists, who in turn frame high-stakes tests over other measures of student performance (Giordano, 2005; Hillocks, 2002; Lipman, 2004; Ravitch, 2010). Berliner and Biddle (1985) responded to the foreboding claims of the NCEE with data from the similarly scaled National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Ravitch (2013) attempted to undermine the argument that public schools are failing with a more optimistic national outlook: Standardized test scores in US schools “are at their highest point ever recorded” (p. 44), and the real significance of US performance on international tests is an indictment of ineffective national education policy. The social and organizational implications of academic literacies (e.g., interpreting large data sets, academic publishing, and sustained rational disputation) are evident in both camps’ acceptance of a politics of scale that silences local lived realities of teaching and parenting. That silence was golden from the standpoint of the rapid and widespread state adoption of the Common Core standards and federal Race To the Top funding. Challenges to asserted consensus about the meaning of a national educational crisis led not so much to cracks in the camps themselves as in the ways camps are produced. Parents’ and teachers’ online organizing and resistance manifest a living conversation in the comparative dead zone of elite representatives’ perceived failure to represent people’s interests. These parents and teachers’ language of resistance—through networked digital literacies—redefines the debate about what is in the best interest of the people.

Advances in technology, in particular the proliferation of the Internet and the phenomenon of social networking, are shaping how people interact with one another in their efforts to shape the world at an ever-increasing pace. The implications of the changes in how we communicate spring from the living link between dialogue and community. People tend to arrange themselves around belief clusters (Davies, 2002) into activity-oriented affinity groups (Gee, 2004; Jenkins, 2006): and communication amounts to a social process of making things common among people, making community. Like-mindedness grows as people see themselves and their opponents reflected rhetorically. The carefully constructed image, in the Bakhtinian (1981) sense of a speech plan, seeks to elicit an anticipated response, in other words to make something common, and thus to commune.

Languages, whether verbal or otherwise, are representational, but not “indifferent media,” nor do they simply reflect data (Cassirer, 1955, p. 93). Community should be thought of as generated and enacted rather than merely interpreted or existing somehow apart from the representational media that in fact composes them. Myriad Web 2.0 tools facilitate efforts to craft utterances, construct messages, and build, by asserting, community. Aphorisms carry forward this communication-centered view of community, as seen in the saying, “Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.” The social construction of community via digital literacies is an area of research across multiple disciplines, especially communication studies, IT fields, anthropology, sociology, and literacy research. For stakeholders in the field of education, Critical Digital Literacies are significant both as objects of study and as means of building community in a period of extreme politicization of teaching and learning.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) theory of language and dialogue helps us think about digital literacies as they are used to alter the scale of dialogue around education reform. We observe the process of articulating community in ways that fundamentally reposition stakeholders with selective disregard for norms governing who can speak, what they can say, and who hears. Our focus is critical because it seeks to understand, explain, and redirect actual conditions produced by human interaction; it attends to literacies because of their role in the establishment of human networks, digital because the technological means of constructing commonality cannot be separated from the ends they help people reach. We focus on the concept of CDL because of the need to understand and explain community changed, asserted, built, and re-built in a social world characterized by opening of spaces in which to create, develop, and assert community. The Internet is, at its essence, networking and building community. In the world of the Internet, new norms of affinity are developing, and these norms affect how resources are created and garnered in moment-by-moment utterances projecting community.

How do literacies bring communities to life and vice versa?

Literacies bring communities to life, but communities constructed in the education policy debate and related political debates bring literacies to life as well. These literacies include the thinking and action that are foundational to the rhetorics used to espouse a point of view. Bakhtin’s (1986) work helps illuminate the reality that there can be “no such thing as an absolutely neutral utterance” (p. 84). Online composers design information with an acute awareness that “the word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provides an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 280; emphasis added). The key phrase here is in living conversation. Words are positioned this way via systems of making meaning, or literacies. The concept is crucial because it highlights the importance of intent directed at (etymologically “holding onto”) others as the basis of communication.

Web 2.0 communication, then, possesses a centripetal or centralizing tendency, which unifies and standardizes meaning. It manages prior intent, engagement, and assertions of community, and it pre-tends (holds forth or claims) some commonality. This tendency to “centralize verbal-ideological thought” is met by “the pressure of growing heteroglossia” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 271). The resulting mirror held up to a potentially global audience consequently projects and questions projections of community, to the extent that the Badass Teacher Association (2014) warns its own followers to “[s]tay away unless you have thick skin.”

Badass Teacher/forum moderator ladywclass writes of innovation:

[W]e as the professionals shouldn’t always have to have an already authored study in order to take what we are observing and use what we already know as teachers to try something new and different in our classrooms. With the current evaluations, it’s very difficult to try something new without being penalized. I don’t mean we should just suddenly abandon teaching facts and skills (and heaven help us . . . thinking shhhhh) but even some of the most important scientific discoveries have happened because something went wrong.

Why does living dialogue require thick skin? Because dialogue is full of efforts to confirm both old and new commonalities. Ladywclass’s rant criticizes aspects of the scale of educational reform by her firm assertion of professionalism and competence (i.e, “what we know as teachers”), but the contingent and emerging nature of individual and collective teacher knowledge shows why non-dialogic “evaluations” seem more powerful. The rant ultimately argues that teachers—an allegedly unified body of professionals knowing collectively about teaching and learning—deserve freedom to shun old commonalities in favor of the “new and different.”

Profound tension between inherent conservatism and the need to try new things is repeated infinitely many times, from classrooms and homes to the digital spaces in which activists attempt to make an educational perspective common. It can be difficult to speak of “concert” in the anti-testing movement because thousands of authors are projecting and seeking to sustain communities digitally and ephemerally across temporal and spatial boundaries, whereas the existence of other communities such as teachers’ unions, governments, and school districts appears self-evident.

Mightier pens: credibility, authorship, and rhetoric in online worlds

When individuals craft their points of view, they enter the tension-filled environment that Bakhtin (1981) called social dialogue. In this context of dissensus, people craft utterances that “brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads” (p. 276) as they reflect the utterances of the other and draw upon those rhetorics to make the facets of their own images sparkle. Critical digital literacies thrive at the junction of ephemeral communicative phenomena and the noblest expressions of literacy: Managing that which appears a law unto itself—or taking the words of another that are absolute and static (i.e., crafted in anticipation of acquiescence) and attempting to bring them back into social dialogue and support new thoughts. Cutting and pasting from the Obama-Biden camp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Critical Digital Literacies and the Struggle over Whats Common
• 2  Getting the Attention of the White House: Using Facebook to Promote Teacher Knowledge about School Reform
• 3  United Opt Out National and the Resistance of High-Stakes Standardized Testing
• 4  Beginning at the Blog: Moving from Kitchen-Table Plans to National Political Activism Using Digital Narratives
• 5  Fighting Testing Madness in Charlotte, North Carolina
• 6  In ClosingThe Potential of Current Grassroots Efforts for Effecting Sustainable Change: A Socio-historical Perspective on Making a Difference
• Index