Five Reasons Teachers Should Use Social Media

I've been thinking about my use of social media in my classes. I've used facebook and twitter for classes for a couple of years, with mixed results Having just presented at SDSU's One Day in May series of talks and workshops about teaching and writing, I've been thinking more and more about what my use of social media has accomplished so far and what I might expect it to accomplish in the future.

The (sort of) good and (sort of) bad
I've caught students cheating by reading their facebook wall. Students can't write about themselves in journal entries or class discussion posts ("I have nothing to write about," "I don't feel comfortable writing about..." X--or Y or Z) but seem to have no qualms about a totally public (as long as you yourself have an account facebook wall) conversations about all manner of topics.

Other positive aspects? Connecting with students (yes, I friend some of them), increasing immediacy between myself and students, and learning all the hip lingo the kids use nowadays. I would use some of said slang phrases here, but--much like a foreign language--I've forgotten it all because I don't use it in conversations.

These experiences have resulted in many of what us teachers call "teachable moments," which is code for: a) how we recover when things don't quite go according to plan; b) how we fake it when things gets really screwed up; or c) what we do when we don't know what the heck is going on but figure there's got to be something worth learning here.

Downsides? I think about the notion of surveillance and how my catching cheaters, while technically not illegal or perhaps even unethical, still conjures up notions of Big Brother watching over the public and private lives of students.

I also think about how applications like Foursquare, in which users "check in" to businesses and locations to accumulate points and free stuff, promote a gaming and consumption model of education. Yes, people use foursquare for teaching, primarily for scavenger hunt-type activities, among other things. This includes my alma mater Arizona State University, who is part of a case study of Foursquare for Universities

All considered, I think there's a lot of potential with social media in (and out) of the classroom. But teachers have begin using it in order to understand how it can be used. So, here are five reasons why teachers should use social media:

Five Reasons Teachers Should Use Social Media
1. You can finally justify the many hours spent playing Bejeweled and Words With Friends

2. You now get to deduct points from students who bother you with facebook farmville requests.

3. Letting your students see your foursquare check-in at Macy’s over the weekend helps them remember to compliment your wardrobe on Monday.

4. Calling your students on twitter “followers” instead of “students” makes you feel like a cult leader, compensating for crappy teacher pay.

5. Haven’t you always wanted to see pictures of your students doing a beer bong?

Top Ten Graduate Student Teacher Mistakes: Number 10

As I wrap up another year of serving as Basic Course Director for our school, I'm reflecting on the progress of our graduate student teachers. They do some amazing things, make me look good, and--to my bemusement--attribute their teaching success to me when it sometimes appears to me if I've had little to do with how good they've become.

I think I only really, truly, began to get the hang of teaching in about my sixth year. I've been teaching college and university classes for about 18 years, and only now do I begin to feel like I might have some sort of advice to offer those just beginning to teach. Of course, I've been doing for this several years but have relied heavily on what others have said. Like any good scholar, I've begun to internalize those things, synthesize them, and take credit for them.

So, here is the first in a series of installments on some mistakes I've not witnessed graduate student teachers commit, and mistakes of which I myself am guilty (and how could I effectively teach them if I didn't first experience them?). I've resisted doing the typical scholarly thing and use parentheses, as in "Top Ten (Graduate Student) Teacher Mistakes." But hopefully you get the idea.

These are in no particular order, although I think the lower-stake mistakes are generally near the bottom.

Number Ten: No Lesson Plan
I used to think lesson plans were for elementary school teachers. College professors didn't need them, right? After all, they were teaching their specialty. They were afforded academic freedom, which meant talking about what they deemed relevant and appropriate. Students, basking in the glow of professors' knowledge, would write things down and ask questions, allowing the teacher to re-direct where necessary. Right?

Thankfully, I didn't actually put these ideas, accumulated from years of bad movies about college life, into practice. But I was shocked when I got into the college classroom and found it difficult to fill the hour or so talking about what I was already supposed to know. Teaching my first college class as a first-year M.A. student was terrifying, and I had done theatre and competitive speech and debate my whole life. I believe I spent the first 10 minutes or so reading from the book and hoping students would react to it. No lesson plan. I wasn't taught about lesson plans in my orientation, wasn't taught Bloom's taxonomy, learning objectives or outcomes, assessment...nothing.

So, one of the things I stress to my graduate student teachers is to create lesson plans. To not just think about what they want to say, but literally write out a lesson plan, beginning with learning outcomes and ending with assessment strategies (qualitative, e.g. discussions, and/or quantitative) that pair with a particular learning outcome. I ask them to also include the time each section might take and, if appropriate, the learning styles to which they might be appealing (I know some people have issues with the whole "learning styles" approach, but that's another subject for another post--for that matter, so is assessment).


I realize this sounds both simple and simplistic. But I'm always surprised, especially in the second semester onward, how many GTAs take the "been there, done that" approach and just go into class thinking, "I'm going to do this activity and it's going to be really cool." Okay, you've got the activity. So what? What's the purpose? How are you going to know whether the activity made any difference?

Now, I find myself doing this in my lectures: just going in and talking. Of course, I know what I want to say and what I have to cover, but I find myself glossing over learning outcomes as well.

As I write this, I can hear some of my colleagues advising teachers to stay flexible and not plan everything out, as some of the best teaching and learning moments emerge organically. And I agree. But I'm not sure beginning teachers can go there just yet. So, I advise creating lesson plans but maintain a flexible mind just in case.

One of the things I like about teaching is that I'm constantly learning. I'm learning as I write these, and as I present them to our graduate student teachers. And I encourage them not to take these as edicts, but as guidelines that will prompt a thoughtful and reflexive consideration of the classroom and of their teaching.

Next up, Number Nine: Asking Too Many Questions

Looking Forward to the Past: Digital Grieving, Rembering my Brother

My younger brother, Mark, died in a hiking accident in Long Canyon, Sedona, AZ, 10 years ago next month. I wasn't with him when he fell 45 feet from a cliff face onto his head. But I've never met the man who was. I've talked to him on the phone. He told me about his struggle to pull my brother back up by his belt, his panicked yell to an echoing canyon as he felt his grip slipping, his scramble down the mountain to try and resuscitate Mark. But I've never looked him in the eye, shook his hand, or hugged him.

When I cleaned out my brother’s apartment, I found artifacts from a life I barely recognized. Finding this man will help me find my brother. This is my journey to find him, to find both of them, and rediscover the life I had with my only sibling.

Me and Mark at a party in high school
Photo: Gary Kliczinski

After 10 years, I'm not sure what bothers me more: that I didn't hug Mark as he rode away from my apartment on his bike, taking for granted that I'd see him again soon, or that I seem to be losing traces of him in my life. I've got photos, memories, and conversations with family members. But even though he died in 2001, before twitter, facebook, and the deluge of personal web pages, I find myself Googling his name. Maybe I'm expecting to come across someone in cyberspace remembering him via blog, like I am now. Maybe I want some evidence that his life spread out and touched more just the small group of people who knew him.

Maybe. I've since realized this process is a kind of digital grieving. I know I'm not going to find much, if anything at all. His friends and mine have posted some old photos. But I keep searching, because I understand it's the searching that's important, the deferment of finding something that keeps me going, because if I can keep searching, the possibility that I might find something new about his life is always present. Of course, my searching is also my mourning. I don't think I'll ever stop mourning, though my grief has dissipated. I don't know how Mark's friend feels. I can't imagine how he deals with it, but I'd like to find out.

How does this relate to teaching?
Although I teach and publish ethnographic and performative writing on topics like grief, health, gender, and family communication, which certainly includes this project, I'll be shifting digital platforms and continue to keep this one primarily about life in the academy. It's an arbitrary distinction, but one I'm making for the time being.

As for my search for the last person to see my brother alive, you can read about my ongoing journey here.

Classrooms as Uncomfortable Spaces: Mark Twain and the "N- Word"

When you've read a lot of teaching philosophies and talked enough about teaching, you begin to realize that creating a "safe space" for students is part and parcel of many teachers' pedagogical approach. This usually means that these teachers strive to create an atmosphere in their classrooms that encourages students to speak their mind, not judge or insult others, and not use discriminatory language.

However, "safe" is not synonymous with "comfortable." I think learning should be uncomfortable. Students should be led into unfamiliar and uncertain territory. With good teaching, students brought to this "learning edge" can glean insight by viewing problems and issues in new ways. When it comes to discussing race in the classroom, however, some teachers opt for a "better safe than sorry" pedagogy, treading lightly for fear of offending others. I'm guilty of this, too.

And so, last Sunday I watched with interest the 60 Minutes segment on New South books' revised edition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which changes the n- word with "slave."



I agree with Bradley's argument that Huckleberry Finn without the n- word isn't really Huckleberry Finn at all. I also agree with his assertion that, to a certain extent, if students are comfortable talking about race then they're not really talking about race. Where can we draw the line so we don't sacrifice learning for the sake of comfort?

As I ask this question, I'm reminded of The Daily Show's "Senior Black Correspondent" Larry Wilmore's take on this controversy:
                       

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Mark Twain Controversy
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However, discomfort for the sake of discomfort isn't the way to go either, as Michael Scott illustrated:



So, where does this leave us?
Obviously, it's easy to split the difference between two extremes, but I think the difference between these two bits is that The Daily Show segment acknowledges the structural components of racism, while manager Michael Scott locates racism at the individual level. In short, Michael Scott thinks racism can be eradicated by changing individual values and attitudes; Larry Wilmore humorously indicts the linguistic structures themselves ("slave" is a "occupation"). While individual attitudes are important to consider, it's socio-economic conditions like urban flight, school districting, incarceration levels, state and federal law, and media portrayals that enable racism to continue. Language is also something to consider, and of primary importance to a teacher of communication.

The problem with changing the language in Huckleberry Finn is that doing so seems to attend to individual attitudes without addressing the structural conditions of racism. While an extended discussion of the above conditions is probably out of the purview of a high school literature class, discussing the power of words can be a useful exercise, one that is  short-circuited by replacing making the aforementioned switcheroo.

Teaching public speaking has made me realize that many kids throw around words like "gay" and "retarded" with little thought about how and why they can use those terms in certain ways and others can't. Talking about the word in question, whether a teacher says it or simply defers to the "n -word" phrasing, allows students to consider how some groups have access to certain words and their meanings and others don't; when you get right down to it, there are comparatively few insults someone can hurl at a heterosexual white male. If we consider women, people of color, and gays and lesbians, we realize that in a name-calling contest, the straight white male will never run out of ammunition. This is a simplistic example, to be sure, but it illustrates the linguistic structures of racism.

Discomfort, for me (a straight, white male), comes from realizing I'm implicated in this system in ways I don't like and didn't choose. But once I begin to understand this, I can not only choose my words more mindfully (which is more than just saying, "racism is bad"), but I have a more comprehensive view of the sorts of dialogue that need to be initiated. Changing one word because we're uncomfortable with it doesn't teach us much of anything, except how to avoid talking about it.

Arizona State University, Communication(s) Majors, and Prime Time Television

A joke on tonight's episode of The Simpsons about Arizona State University graduates got me thinking about all the other recent jokes about ASU I've seen. I don't know which writer(s) for The Simpsons went to Arizona State University (or maybe its rival University of Arizona!) and/or were Communication majors, but The Simpsons--more so than any other show I can think of--seems to slip in humorous references to the ASU and to communication majors. I've collected a couple of gems below and thrown in a few others from different shows.

In the first, Dr. Hibbert tries to console an injured college football player about life after football:

In the next clip, Ned Flanders mistakes Homer's "insider art" piece (which floods the town of Springfield) for the rapture, then, well, you'll see:

Not to be outdone, the brilliant show 30 Rock recently featured a jab at ASU:

Finally, although not prime time television, Saturday Night Live made with the funny at the expense of ASU for refusing to award President Obama an honorary degree when he spoke at commencement:

As the saying goes, "There's no such thing as bad publicity," although I'm sure many teachers and administrators would prefer to ignore its ranking as a party school. Anyway, my alma mater probably has more people thinking twice about attending not because of the above clips but because of its home state's recent legislative record, like SB 1070 (regarding illegal immigration), HB 2281 (outlawing ethnic studies courses), and HB 2562 (which would nullify the 14th amendment to the United States constitution, denying birthright citizenship to children and moving the state--in the minds of some--one step closer to seceding from the US altogether).

Nonetheless, I still recommend the university and the Ph.D. program in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication to many of our SDSU students. I have great memories of its outstanding faculty and facilities. And I enjoy a chuckle or two, laughing with the other ASU graduates.

Grey Collars: The "Mechanics" of Teachings

Full disclosure: This isn't an entry about how to teach (hence the ironic quotes around the word "mechanics"). I like to tell the graduate student teachers that I train and supervise that teaching is like yoga. With yoga, if one thinks she's mastered a pose, she's not really doing yoga. Same with teaching. If she thinks she's mastered it and there's nothing to left to learn, she's not really teaching because, to me at least, teaching always includes learning.

Another simile occurred to me today while I was changing the air filter in our car. I initially thought, "No problem." I must have been thinking of a previous car I owned, in which the air filter was a simple, flat style wedge that slipped in and out of a similarly-styled cradle accessible under the hood. Two clips and you're done. However, I opened the hood and realized we have a cone-style filter, which requires more than simply popping a couple of clips. As it turned out, this replacement involved disconnecting tubes from housings and muscling other things out of the way.

Whenever I work on cars, our house, or do any sort of work with my hands, I often think of my Dad. He was a "do-it-yourselfer." He was also a car aficionado, "wrench head," whatever you want to call it, from his teenage years on--always souping up cars and doing repairs himself. When he got hurt and ended up in a wheelchair, I was the one actually doing the repairs on things he couldn't reach. Replacing this air filter, wriggling the housing from its nest of bolts, wires, and tubes, I found myself thinking, "Hmmm. How is working on a car like teaching?" I thought there were several similarities: taking care to assess the situation and your end goal, the approaches to get to that goal, paying attention to detail, problem-solving, etc.

Granted, one could probably liken teaching to just about any endeavor. But my reasons for these comparisons are more important than the comparisons themselves.You see, I was never really interested in the same things as My Dad; I was into literature, writing, and theatre. Laying on my back under our van, assembling parts and pieces that may as well have been from an alien spaceship for all I knew about them, I'd often try to find similarities between his interests and mine: Playwriting is like building an addition to a garage (which my brother and I actually did, in part, assisting a carpenter friend). Writing a story is like shingling a roof (did that, too). Writing a song is like replacing an alternator (yep). I came up with these comparisons to feel closer to him, and I realize I made these comparisons to help convince myself that my leisure pursuits were just as important, just as meaningful, and just as taxing as his.

We were a middle-class family, but all the manual labor I did growing up made me think of ourselves differently. My Dad, although a brake engineer at Ford Motor Company, seemed to me decidedly blue-collar. Growing up, I considered myself from a blue collar family. Thinking about teaching in a more blue-collar way helps me feel closer to him, and alleviates the inexplicable guilt I sometimes feel for doing a job that doesn't require me to use many of the skills he taught me. But teaching does require one to get her hands dirty, to roll up his sleeves and really do some taxing work. I have no misconceptions about that. I suppose my only misconception is that my Dad, were he alive, would somehow see what I do as less valuable than those tasks he and I shared.

In-Class Versus Online Teaching: A (Dis)Embodied Enterprise

I train and supervise the graduate student teachers in our department who teach the basic course (a hybrid of theory/overview and public speaking). I love the job; it's wonderful to see them grow as teachers, to gain reflexivity in their curricular concerns, and move on to teach other classes.

But one of the most difficult things for me is articulating what it is I know about teaching. I've been teaching at the university level for approximately 17 years, yet I have trouble distilling that experience into any sort of overarching list of guidelines, do's and don'ts, or rules. Sure, I can provide advice on specific situations, both real and hypothetical. And we have year-long training meetings, a lot of which consist of me fielding questions regarding classroom management, grading, handling difficult students, etc.

But, I'm not sure I even "know" anything about teaching. Rather, my difficulty in articulating what I know is due to where I know it: the body, my body. Simply, teaching is an embodied experience. That statement will not shock many of my colleagues, especially those in Performance Studies. There have been countless articles and books written at this intersection of embodied performance and teaching, so I'm not forging new ground here either.

But this embodied approach to teaching and learning is increasingly coming under fire (and ire) from administrators and those supporting a consumer-based model of education. I don't use the term "consumer" with too much derision, as I understand the practical value of such positioning. Adjunct teachers, especially, may benefit from a pay-per-student model of education, perhaps best served through online education. The adjunct teacher featured in this story earned upwards of $120,000. That's full professor money at some universities.

While I have taught online classes and recognize the good and bad of the "democatization" of the teaching enterprise--or, perhaps, the move toward a more capitalistic, customer-driven model of education--one thing was always missing: the embodied experience of teaching. I realize that online teaching may complicate or problematize the notion of embodiment rather than simply negate or erase embodiment. I do know, though, that what I "know" about teaching resides in my body, in the ways I feel and remember feeling in the classroom. And however I may articulate that knowledge, it takes other bodies in the classroom as well.