And now, three years later, the research is done, and I am very happy to report that I have successfully defended my PhD thesis. It was a fascinating journey. I learned a lot about writing in online environments, about student interactions online, and about fostering student engagement in online spaces. However, one of the most personally relevant findings of my research was the impact that it had on me – the teacher-researcher.

During my defense, I focused on all the key findings of my research, but paid particular attention to my conclusions on teacher professional development. My research taught me a lot about the role of the teacher in an online class community of writers. At my defense, I used this painting by Caravaggio, the Italian Baroque master, to elaborate on what my research findings suggest about teacher professional development:

Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ

Before I explain why I chose this painting, let me first elaborate on Caravaggio as he himself is an important figure to consider, an important role model for 21st century teachers. Caravaggio’s work was revolutionary. He was an innovator in his time who rejected established conventions. Instead of painting epic scenes with masses of people and religious symbolism (as was the established norm), he chose to focus on the personal struggles and experiences of his subjects. He chose to highlight the individual. The subjects he chose were mere mortals, representatives of the working class – the poor, humble, ordinary people of his time. The faith he depicted in his work was the faith of the simple, uneducated masses, not the faith of the grand Biblical narratives. Caravaggio focused on what he saw around him. His paintings feature wrinkled, aged faces, torn clothing, and unadorned, simple, often neglected interiors. Truth, in other words, truth as he saw it around him on a daily basis, was more important to him than conventions.

So, what does all of this have to do with teaching in the 21st century?

That painting by Caravaggio has became for me a metaphor that I like to use to explain the role of the teacher in a blogging community. Since I’m using it as a metaphor, I am interested only in its visual appeal – the placing of the subjects, the light that penetrates the scene, and the fact that the man carrying the lantern on the right side of the painting, the one who looks with interest over the heads of the two Roman soldiers, has been identified as Caravaggio’s self-portrait. (Caravaggio is well-known for inserting his self-portrait, inserting himself, so to speak, into his paintings.). I believe that, much like Caravaggio in this painting, a teacher in a blogging community should enter the context that gives rise to his or her work. Caravaggio portrays himself as one of the characters. He becomes implicated in his painting. He is both subject and artist … and that is why I think this painting is so relevant to my research and can help convey the redefined character of teacher presence in online communities. It makes visible some key implications of my study in the field of teacher professional development.

What this painting says to me is that we can gain a better understanding of our classrooms-as-communities if we immerse ourselves in them. In the manner of Caravaggio, teachers should weave their readerly, personal voices into the fabric of classrooms-as-communities. What my experiences illustrate, and what the painting metaphorically emphasizes, is that teacher professional development in the 21st century requires that we look closely at how to most effectively embed ourselves in our practice and in the experiences and interactions of our students. Professional development in the networked world requires that we look closely not only at what we do as educators but also at how we are embedded in educational contexts. Much like Caravaggio, we have to narrate ourselves into existence through participation in our classrooms in a way that is non-authoritarian, readerly, and conversational.

Much like Caravaggio in this painting, we need to be present in our classrooms as providers of light. Our guidance is needed and important. But, too often, our guidance becomes authoritarian and fails to take into account the voices of our students. We don’t often peer questioningly over the shoulders of our students. Instead, we impose the content and pre-define the learning trajectories for our students. Why don’t we take the time to just listen and observe once in a while? Those of us who give our students the freedom to define themselves through their work in classroom communities know how much we can learn by listening and observing. We should not be afraid to step down from behind the lectern and move to the edge of the community, where we can redefine our presence as that of a participant, as one of the voices, not as the voice that dominates, demands, and evaluates. What Caravaggio’s painting reminds me of is that I can be just as helpful as a facilitator if I engage from the sidelines and do not dominate the community as its focal point. Let student voices remain in the centre, let them be the focal point of the community where they interact, engage, and learn.

This reconfigured approach requires a difficult shift in our understanding of classroom practice. It requires that we accept a new dethroned position and become embedded practitioners – embedded in the classroom interactions as readers and participants, not evaluators and overseers.

That brings me to another important point: What’s Next?

My research has led me to some important and timely questions about teacher professional development – questions that I hope to be able to work on in the near future:

1. How do we prepare teachers to teach 21st century learners whose lives are based on rich interactions in multiple online environments?
2. How do we help new teachers move away from what Marshall McLuhan once called the “imposing of stencils” and adopt a practice of probing and exploration?
3. How do we help new teachers acquire the courage to transform their classrooms into communities of learners and transform themselves into participants who can embed themselves in those communities?

My study and experience provide some answers, some of which I addressed on this blog in the past, but they are just starting points that will need further attention and elaboration. I believe that this process begins with opening ourselves up to the language of possibility and recognizing teachers whose work in the classroom can help us redefine not only our own classroom presence but also our notions of professional development. We need what Paulo Freire calls “curiosity as endless questioning.” He describes it as

movement toward the revelation of something that is hidden, as a question verbalized or not, as search for clarity, as a moment of attention, suggestion, and vigilance … there could be no creativity without the curiosity that moves us and sets us patiently impatient before a world that we did not make, to add to it something of our own making (Freire, 1998, pp.37-38).

In other words,

[...] there is no such thing as teaching without research and research without teaching. One inhabits the body of the other. As I teach, I continue to search and re-search. I teach because I search, because I question, and because I submit myself to questioning. I research because I notice things, take cognizance of them. And in so doing, I intervene. And intervening, I educate and educate myself. I do research so as to know what I do not yet know and to communicate and proclaim what I discover (Freire, 1998, pp.35).

Coda

Recently, Al Upton, an award-winning teacher from Adelaide, Australia whose work I’ve admired for a very long time, was forced to close his classroom community that has proven over the years to be of immense benefit to his students. He was forced to disable the classroom community by the Department of Education and Children’s Services in South Australia despite the fact that he used it to teach his students about online safety and received parental permission to carry out his project. The Department of Education is worried that some material on his class blog may put the students at risk of being identified by outsiders.

Al and I never met and we never corresponded, but I’ve been following his work for years and have always found it innovative and inspiring. In my opinion, Al is an embedded practitioner, someone who listens, observes, and is constantly searching for and researching new ways to improve himself and bring greater educational value to his classroom practice. I hope that he will soon regain his freedom to bring the world into his classroom and the classroom out into the world.

Works Cited:

Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom. Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Rowman & Littlefield, New York.

People often miss the opportunity to enjoy what they do because they focus all their attention on the outcome, rather than savoring the steps along the way. Where does the pleasure in singing come from – finishing the song, or producing each note or phrase? … To be overly concerned with the ultimate goal often interferes with performance. If a tennis player thinks only of winning the match, she won’t be able to respond to her opponent’s powerful serve … our primary concern here is not with what constitutes a successful performance, but with the quality of experience during performance. If we agree that the bottom line of life is happiness, not success, then it makes perfect sense to say that it is the journey that counts, not reaching the destination.

In education, however, the product – the grade, the final draft, the test mark – still often takes precedence over the process of learning – the sense of personal journey without which the final destination is meaningless. What is even worse is that many of our students are very comfortable with that idea. To them, school is often about “playing the game.” They follow along, raise hands, submit assignments, study for tests. Of course, there is nothing wrong with these activities as long as they do not impede their progress as independent thinkers, researchers, and writers. Unfortunately, most of the time, “playing the game” means following the rules that we’ve set up for the students. We bring in the hoops, and the students jump through them. It’s an easy process for everyone involved.

In my classroom – a predominantly blogging classroom – things have to be different. I believe that it is my role as an educator to ensure that my students are given opportunities to grow as individuals, and are not treated as mere pupils who passively receive information. As a result, the traditional approach to teaching and learning, to assessment and evaluation, has to be modified. It is a difficult process for both the students and the teacher. It is a process in which the classroom becomes more of a studio where learners engage with concepts that they find interesting and personally relevant. It becomes a place where they are given opportunities to create their own networks and become experts in their chosen fields.

In order to create that classroom, however, I need to continue to tweak my classroom practice. The students need a different, more conversational, expressive, and individualized kind of support. They also need to be gradually eased into their new roles of independent researchers.

At the beginning of the year, I always talk to my students about “growing” their own blog. It is a challenging concept because, when they are first introduced to blogging, they are all under the impression that everything they write will be graded and that their blog is just an electronic version of their notebook or journal. So, when at the beginning of the year, I start talking about blogging and the steps that the students need to take to “grow” their own blog, they are always a bit confused and surprised – my words suggest a lot of freedom, and freedom, as we all know, is not something that students associate with school.

For two years, I struggled to verbally explain the concept to them, with varying results. This year, however, I had a visual tool.

I created it this past summer and could not wait to use it in class. When I finally used it last month, the results were encouraging. The students looked at it and, when I said “I’d like you to think about how you are going to grow your own blog,” they knew exactly what I meant.

The diagram I created is intended to help them visualize their progress over the course of a school year. It assumes that blogging is not about posting an entry in response to a homework assignment but about engaging in writing that is personally relevant. The diagram helps students define their goals and ways of reaching them. It helps them realize that blogging is not about posting well thought-out entries, and that each entry does not need to present a definitive and complete view on a given topic. Rather, it helps them see that blogging is about engaging with ideas.

Blogs are perfect tools to encourage and assist students in cognitive engagement. Blogging is a process, a conversation. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the year, my students tend to see each blog entry as the equivalent of a well-composed paragraph response or even an essay. I admit, there is nothing wrong with producing well-written and well organized entries as long as the entry is not an end in itself, as long as the process of intellectual engagement does not end once the piece is posted. I want my students to understand that bloggers blog because they are on a journey, a quest, and that every entry is an opportunity to continue that journey.

So, when they see this handout, this planning sheet, the students realize that the academic year ahead of them is an opportunity to produce a body of work, to stay engaged, to use their time productively doing things they’re interested in as opposed to completing assignments for their teacher.

This planning sheet, called How to Grow a Blog, consists of three parts.

The first part refers to the blooming flower – the goal of any gardener or a serious blogger. This is the long-term goal. When I explain this first part, I say to my students that they should think about what they want their blog to represent at the end of the year. I tell them that they need a personal goal. I say that once they start blogging, they will continue to add to their blog thus creating a body of work. “What,” I ask them, “do you want to see there right before you graduate? What do you want the visitors to your blog to think when they see it in June? What do you want to accomplish?”

Keep in mind, this is not easy. Generally speaking, the only time students in grade eight think about long-term goals is when they worry about grades or getting into the high school programme of their choice. Engagement with ideas lasts only until the assigned deadline. Once the assignment is handed in, the engagement ends. Blogging is very different, of course, and the diagram helps them realize that.

Once they choose a personal goal, a topic that they want to pursue, I ask the students to fill in the bottom part, called “The Right Habitat.” Here, the students have to think about the steps they need to take in order to create the right environment for their blogs.

This part asks them to think about the root system for their blog. Where are the nutrients going to come from? Where will I find nourishment as a thinker and researcher? This is an opportunity to consider the fact that in order to learn and engage with ideas, one needs a habitat that will support it, and that the best way to build just such a habitat is to find other people and resources that one can converse with. In other words, I want the students to learn that blogging is about initiating and sustaining conversations. So, I ask them, “Now that you know what you would like to research or document on your blog, where is the inspiration going to come from, where are your ideas going to come from? What kinds of resources are you going to include in your habitat to help you grow your blog and extend your thinking?”

So, having chosen their goals, the students look for online resources that will help them learn more about their chosen topics. This is a perfect opportunity for me to make it very clear that blogs are about learning. Once they choose their topics, I always ask them how much they already know about the topic. The answers vary, of course, but fairly quickly the students realize that they do not know much about the chosen topic, even if it is something they are very passionate about. And so, a discussion about blogging turns into a discussion about learning. “Where will you go online to learn more about your chosen topic?” I ask them, “Who will you interact with and learn from?” This is how they begin to build their networks.

Finally, I give them time to consider habits and commitments – that’s what the stem represents in my diagram. I want them to think about the kinds of habits that, in their opinion, will be necessary to accomplish their goals. If the goal is to produce a body of work on globalization, for example, then they need to ask themselves what is required of them, on a daily and weekly basis, to achieve that goal. This is a difficult part for them to fill out because it requires a certain degree of self-knowledge. If they want their blogs to bloom, then they must think about the steps they need to take every day to ensure that they are on track. They must also know themselves and decide on the steps they need to take to develop good habits.

I believe that the most effective part of this diagram is that it gives the students an opportunity to do some long-term planning, which is not an easy task because, as students, they are used to short-term goals, such as finishing tonight’s homework. At the same time, they have to think about the little steps, the daily activities and posts and where they will come from. They need to find the right habitat that will inform their work. They need to think about strategies and habits necessary to both start and continue their journey.

In short, the goal of using this handout is twofold: to help students plan and begin their journey, and to think about the habits they will need for that journey. I want them to understand that the most valuable part of blogging is the process of interacting with ideas and people, not producing finished assignments on assigned topics. This planning sheet helps them define their long-term goals but, at the same time, it also helps them see that blogging is a journey. I have already noticed that this handout and the instructional conversations that it initiates help the students realize that successful learning is not about submitting definitive pieces on assigned topics, but primarily about what Csikszentmihalyi calls “the quality of experience,” a sense of meaningful immersion in one’s pursuits.

The challenge, of course, is that the students perceive traditional school work as something that is safe, much safer than becoming an independent researcher. They often find comfort in the fact that as long as the questions are answered and the work handed in, they will continue to do well as students. Blogging, on the other hand, is initially a big unknown. There are no deadlines and no clear guidelines. After years of jumping through hoops, students are suddenly faced with a lot of freedom which they often find overwhelming. I’ve noticed that the planning sheet I developed can provide a solid support mechanism that many young bloggers need at the beginning of this journey. It’s a good tool to use in order to start a process of conversational feedback and assessment.

Below, you will find some examples of how my students filled out their How to Grow a Blog planning sheets. Keep in mind that what these sheets represent is the start of their journey as researchers and writers. They provide me with an opportunity to engage students in meaningful conversations that can eventually lead to meaningful and long-term personal engagement on student blogs. Your feedback on this handout and the strategy behind it would be truly appreciated. If you are interested in using or modifying this planning sheet, please feel free to download it. If you do choose to use it, either in its original or modified form, please send me your feedback.

What I am really concerned about, however, is my own voice. For the past three years, my three successive grade eight classes enjoyed blogging and created successful and engaging blogging communities. Most of the time, this development took place without me. While I certainly encouraged my bloggers, discussed their work in class, and posted comments to involve my students in instructional conversations, I have always been absent as a person. This year, I want things to be different.

This year, I want my personal voice to be present in the community. I will, of course, continue to be present as Mr.Glogowski, the grade eight Language Arts teacher. I will be present in my didactic and supportive role of an educator, of a classroom teacher who guides and explains. At the same time, I want to be present as Konrad Glogowski, the human being who has his own interests and views. I want to be present as an individual, not an individual reduced to one role.

In other words, I want the students to see me as yet another blogger in their community, as someone whose reason for being there is not only to support and instruct but also to learn. To learn from and with my students.

My own blog in our class blogosphere has always been used to post updates, assignments, commentary on student work, and words of encouragement. For years, it was called “The Language Arts Blog,” or “Mr. Glogowski’s Blog” or something equally official and unimaginative. The name of my blog has always reflected my one-dimensional presence in the community – the voice of a teacher. I don’t think my students ever perceived it as a blog – a place where the author shares his thoughts, ideas, or experiences and engages in meaning-making. It was a place that my students would visit regularly to read their latest assignment or download a rubric. I don’t think they ever learned anything from my own blog. They learned from the instructional conversations that I engaged with them on their own blogs, but certainly not from my own blog in the class blogosphere. It has always been an uninspiring place, a kind of online bulletin board.

Last year, I started experimenting by posting entries that reflected my own interests. However, I always made sure that they also related to the curriculum. When we read and discussed Animal Farm, for example, I posted some links to articles on totalitarian leaders or on the fragile nature of democracy in developing nations. There needed to be, it seemed to me, a clear link between what we were reading in class and what the students saw on my blog. Everything that I posted on my blog was designed to cultivate an adopted persona and to fit within the confines of the curriculum.

This year, I want to move beyond blogging only about course-related topics. I want my students to see what I am interested in, what makes me mad, what fascinates me, what I write like when I write as someone other than Mr.Glogowski, the Language Arts teacher. In short, I want to be myself and am beginning to take small steps towards this goal.

I started by giving my blog a different name. The titles I used before were too official, too limiting, too school-like. They were institutional and impersonal. This year, the title of my blog is “…looking at things for a long time.” It comes from a quote by Vincent Van Gogh, which, in its entirety, reads: “It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper understanding.” I chose it because I feel that it represents who I am as a person and a teacher. I chose it because I believe that the habit Van Gogh recommends in this quote is something that I want my students to develop as well. I want them to be critical, attentive readers and thinkers. I want them to take the time to achieve that “deeper understanding.”

I also chose an avatar. I chose the picture of the fern globe suspended above the Civic Square in Wellington, New Zealand that I took last year (almost exactly a year ago) while participating in the FLNW unconference. It represents one of the most inspiring experiences in my life as an educator and researcher. It also, as a globe, represents unity and peace – values that are important to me as a human being and educator.

In addition to using an avatar, I also used the “About Me” feature of my blog to post a paragraph that explains my reasons for choosing the title and the avatar. My students need to know the reasons behind these decisions – they will provide them with an important glimpse into my personality. They will help them see me as more than just their Language Arts teacher.

The “About Me” page of my blog also contains two quotes that represent my views on writing:

“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
- Thomas Mann

“Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.”
- John Ruskin

I also uploaded my own background image to further personalize my blog. It is no longer just a virtual class bulletin board. It’s becoming a place that reflects the values and interests of its owner:

Of course, these visual changes, while important, are not sufficient to transform my blog into a personal online space. Blogs, after all, are defined by writing, and not merely their appearance. So, this morning, I posted my first personal entry. I wrote about an article on the recent protests in Myanmar and commented on the treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been held under house arrest for 12 of the last 18 years. I also linked to a call to action video recorded by Jim Carrey. The post has little to do with what we are currently studying in class. I wrote about it because it moved me as a human being. I posted it on my personal blog in the class blogosphere because I want my students to understand who I am as a human being. Why? Mostly because that human being will walk into their classroom tomorrow. If we are to be a community of learners, we need to know each other as individuals, not people who, for six hours every day, play assigned roles.

In other words, I don’t believe teachers should engage in self-censorship. If we do, then our students end up interacting with an automaton, an actor performing a role. Our schools, administrators, and classrooms cannot demand that the richness that makes us human be stripped down because the students are only fourteen, for example, and should not read about human rights abuses, or because time in class should be used only to study the curriculum.

Tomorrow, I will post an entry about a book I started reading last week. It is entitled 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa. It does not relate to our grade eight curriculum. It does, however, reflect my interest in social justice and I will blog about it every time I finish a chapter or two because that is how I learn, that is how I interact with things that I find important. So, I’m beginning to use my blog to define myself as more than a classroom teacher. Mr. Glogowski, the teacher, is an important part of my life, but it should not exclude other aspects of what makes me who I am.

So, fairly soon, my students will see that I am more than my role as a Language Arts teacher suggests. They will see that I am a teacher who is also interested in social justice, foreign affairs, and human rights. They will see that I am a teacher who is also interested in photography and who collects old books and maps. They will get many glimpses into my life. I hope that they will understand that what makes a community is a network of human beings who have the freedom to be who they truly are and whose richness enhances the value of the community they inhabit.

If education is essentially a social process, then the teacher needs to be part of the learning community, not only as its facilitator but also as one of its members. When students are part of a learning community, a blog titled “Mr.Glogowski’s Blog” will stick out and suggest that the community is really a school-sanctioned place where Mr. Glogowski presides because he has already learned all there is to know about his subject. I do not know all there is to know. I use Web 2.0 to expand my knowledge and to engage in meaning-making. I want to be connected to the class community as a learner. I want my students to see how I engage in negotiating meaning.

I have taken the steps I described above because I believe that a teacher’s blog needs to be a personal space. It needs to be a place where I become visible as an individual and where my experiences – joys, disappointments, struggles, successes, moments of inspiration and epiphany – are shared with the community. It needs to be a place of authentic personal attempts at meaning-making, a place where I engage as Konrad Glogowski and not only as Mr.Glogowski, the content expert.

In her preface to Teaching Community, bell hooks argues that her book “offers practical wisdom about what we do and can continue to do to make the classroom a place that is life-sustaining and mind-expanding, a place of liberating mutuality where teacher and student together work in partnership.” There can be no true partnership in a classroom where the teacher can hide behind an adopted persona while students are encouraged to be individual learners and bloggers. We cannot expect students to engage as individuals, to blog as human beings, to share their experiences, passions, interests, and struggles if, as teachers, we are not willing to do the same.

And so, my inspiration for the coming weeks comes from Teaching to Transgress where bell hooks states:

When education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess. Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process. That empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging others to take risks. Professors who expect students to share confessional narratives but who are themselves unwilling to share are exercising power in a manner that could be coercive. In my classrooms, I do not expect students to take any risks that I would not take, to share in any way that I would not share. When professors bring narratives of their experiences into classroom discussions it eliminates the possibility that we can function as all-knowing, silent interrogators. It is often productive if professors take the first risk, linking confessional narratives to academic discussions so as to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic material. But most professors must practice being vulnerable in the classroom, being wholly present in mind, body, and spirit.

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.

Two approaches proved to be quite effective: instructional scaffolding and the related concept of instructional conversations, often defined as “a dialogue between teacher and learners in which the teacher listens carefully to grasp the students’ communicative intent, and tailors the dialogue to meet the emerging understanding of the learners” (Tharp & Gallimore, 1991). Over the past two years, I have been learning to make instructional scaffolding (or its variations) a natural part of my classroom.

According to Judith A. Langer, instructional scaffolding “builds on analyses of the characteristics of parent/child interaction that contribute to the rapid pace of early language development” (1984). She argues that the following five characteristics of instructional interaction are critical to successful classroom activities (Langer, 1984; Applebee & Langer, 1983; 1984). I would add that they also work quite well in the context of a class blogging community.

Ownership of the Learning Event

Langer argues that in order to use instructional scaffolding teachers need to ensure that the students have ownership of the learning event: “the instructional task must permit students to make their own contribution to the activity as it evolves, thus allowing them to have a sense of ownership for their work” (Langer, 1984, p.123). The project can be initiated or suggested by the teacher as long as the student has his or her own reasons for participating in the activity and is given opportunities to develop the topic as an independent researcher.

In other words, think about teaching English or social studies by organizing the course around one broad theme – social justice, for example. Then, give your students the freedom to pick specific aspects of that broad theme and then research them. As a class, the students will be engaged in exploring a variety of readings and events related to this topic but, as individual researchers, they will be able to focus on a very specific aspect of the topic and make their own contribution within the context of a class community of researchers.

Appropriateness of the Instructional Task

The task that the student is engaged in needs to be based, to some degree, on the skills and knowledge that the student already possesses. However, it “must pose problems that cannot be solved without further help.” Let’s say that the student has chosen a specific aspect of the broader topic of social justice and is in the process of collecting information and resources. In today’s world of the world wide web and information overload, the student can begin to feel lost amid all the information. This presents the teacher with a perfect opportunity to introduce RSS, for example, or a tool that can be used to aggregate video clips, such as VodPod or a YouTube account. It also presents a perfect opportunity to work with the student on specific curriculum related skills, such as summarizing. This can also be a fantastic opportunity to help the student start a research journal (on her blog, using a del.icio.us account, or a tumble log) or use mindmapping to develop a plan for further research. The point here is that once the student feels stuck, overwhelmed, or discouraged, a perfect opportunity presents itself for the teacher (or a more knowledgeable peer) to step in and offer support.

Supportive Instruction

In fact, this is where real teaching takes place. According to Tharp and Gallimore, two neo-Vygotskian researchers, “real teaching is understood as assisting the learner to perform just beyond his or her current capacity” (1991). This interaction in the student’s zone of proximal development awakens those faculties which have not yet matured but whose “buds,” as Vygotsky calls them, are already emerging. Langer explains that this process could take the form of “direct instruction in the form of questioning, modeling, or constructive dialogue … to help the student develop a successful approach to the task.” In other words, the student who has by now become passionate about the task needs to learn certain skills in order to complete it. Motivation is thus built into this process. The teacher engages in dialogue with the student only when the student is already motivated by both the work that has already been done and the student’s own goal that she is working towards. Whatever the student needs to master will be done not in the context of schooling, or in preparation for a test, but in the natural context of the activity chosen by the student – in a context that is meaningful to the student. The student won’t mind the teacher’s involvement (or that of her peers) because the sense of ownership is already present. In fact, that involvement will be seen by the student as one of the steps necessary to achieve the personal goal.

This is where instructional conversation is most effective. Once the student is engaged as a researcher/writer/thinker, the teacher can focus on conversing with the student. In a blogging classroom, the student’s individual blog can thus become an “activity setting” which, according to Tharp and Gallimore, maximizes “opportunities for coparticipation and instructional conversation with the teacher and, frequently, with peers” (Tharp & Gallimore, 1991). Instruction, in other words, becomes a communicative event.

Shared Responsibility

As a result, both the traditional view of school work and the role of the teacher are redefined by supportive instruction. The traditional role of evaluator is reconfigured in this context because the focus switches from testing how much the student has learned to assisting her in exploring new ideas and building her own knowledge. It shifts from testing prior knowledge to assisting in developing new understanding. The teacher is no longer waiting passively for the project to be completed and handed in. Instead, he or she is actively involved in the student’s research. The student and the teacher become co-participants, engaged in building knowledge.

Internalization

Langer claims that, over time, as the student internalizes the new patterns of learning and the new approaches to learning practiced with the teacher, the teacher needs to recognize that growth by adapting instructional strategies. The focus here is to extend learning and to understand that the relationship between the student and the subject matter has changed and that, in fact, it continues to evolve. Once the initial scaffolding has done its job, it is no longer needed and can be replaced by a different set of scaffolds, a different kind of teacher involvement.

The sense of partnership that developed through the initial set of instructional conversations needs to evolve in order to be of benefit to the student. Since I now know (I have seen) that my student has made progress, I need to use different tools and engage in different conversations in order to ensure that the student does not see my involvement as patronizing or intrusive. The set of competencies that developed as a result of our instructional conversations now demands that our conversations increase in sophistication. The old rubrics, in other words, can no longer be used in this context. The rubric used in September will be inappropriate in May – there has been too much internalization and my attempts at assessment or evaluation have to reflect the progress made by my student.

Why Instructional Scaffolding?

I think that the most important impact of instructional scaffolding is that it dethrones the teacher from the traditional role of content expert. It also ensures that the transmission model no longer dominates classroom discourse. Learning happens because the students are involved in the process of researching their own topics. Schooling gets replaced by conversations about things that matter to the students.

From the point of view of instructional scaffolding, blogging and, specifically, blogging in a supportive community of peers, becomes a psychological tool – the practical activity that the student is engaged in is internalized and allows for the development of higher-order cognitive operations:

Many relations that first appear in real group activity are later internalized by the student as the relations between his or her inner intellectual processes. Thus the role of the teacher as an expert and advisor working within the group becomes internalized by the child as his own function of reference and control. (Kozulin, 1998, 57)

The instructional conversations that we engage in with our students (or interactions that the students have with their peers) are likely to be internalized so that the next time our students face a similar problem they will no longer need support. They will most likely need support with a different and more complex problem, but not something that has already been tackled in an instructional conversation. As a result, our conversations will continue to evolve and increase in sophistication. That progress towards increasingly more challenging tasks emerges from the student’s own involvement, not from our curriculum expectations. To me, this means that while instructional conversations can certainly seem like a template to be applied in a blogging classroom, the role of the teacher will always follow a different trajectory depending on the needs of the students. What we do depends on what the students are working on and not on a pre-defined notion of what a grade nine English teacher, for example, needs to teach.

What emerges from all this is the kind of learning that is de-institutionalized, where every student is not defined as a unit to be taught but as an individual who is free to learn and who can rely on the support of a more knowledgeable peer or the teacher.

Instructional scaffolding is not easy to implement with a class of thirty students. It requires time and demands that we read carefully everything that the students write. In my classroom, I see it as an approach that demands that I do the following:

_____________________________
Notes:

Applebee, A.N. & J.A. Langer (1983). Instructional scaffolding: Reading and writing as natural language activities. Language Arts 60, 168-175.

Langer, J.A. (1984). Literacy instruction in American schools: problems and perspectives. American Journal of Education. 93, 107-132.

Langer J.A. & A.N. Applebee (1984). Language, learning, and interaction: A framework for improving the teaching of writing. In A.N. Applebee (Ed.), Contexts for learning to write: Studies of secondary school instruction. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Tharp, R.G. & R. Gallimore, (1991). The Instructional Conversation: Teaching and Learning in Social Activity. Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence. NCRCDSLL Research Reports. Paper rr02. http://repositories.cdlib.org/crede/ncrcdsllresearch/rr02

So, while I do post comments, I want them to show that I see the students as independent researchers, as individuals who need to know that their work has value not because it will generate a grade but because it keeps me glued to my laptop screen at 10:30pm on a Tuesday night. I read because I’m learning, not because I have a gradebook to fill.

Needless to say, in order to have these conversations, I needed to abandon my teacherly voice in favour of a more conversational, expressive, and readerly voice of a participant. I think I succeed most of the time but I’m still at a point where I have to carefully analyze my responses to student work before I press that “post comment” button. They still tend to be evaluative, of the “teacher knows best” variety. They still tend to end student engagement. “This deserves a B+,” they seem to say, “now let’s move on to another assignment.”

Recently, I’ve been commenting on the work that my students are doing on human rights. I gave them the freedom to pick any topic within this context and encouraged to find some aspect of it that they want to engage with as researchers. Some are still looking for that perfect fit, but some have already posted a number of entries. I’ve been trying to nurture the voices that I see around me in the class blogosphere by starting and maintaining conversations about student research. Here are some of my attempts:

Dawn,
I am really looking forward to learning more about child soldiers from your research. I’ve always been interested in this topic but never really had the time or the opportunity to do serious research.

The video is excellent – I’m glad that we got YouTube unblocked and that it is possible to post videos on this blog.

What a great way to start your project – with a poem! I think the repetition of this line – “Lies and hatred obscure all truth” – is very effective. This is what the whole problem of child soldiers really boils down to – brainwashing. I’ll be visiting your blog regularly – inspiring stuff!

Then, in response to Dawn’s subsequent entry:

In my comment to your previous entry, I wrote that I was really looking forward to learning more about child soldiers from your research. I feel that I am learning. You are very good at combining facts and statistics with your own personal thoughts. Your writing is personal and informative, thoughtful and engaging.

I find this topic very sad but I am glad that you chose to research this issue. Forcing children to fight in a war and to kill is a reprehensible act. It is wrong on so many levels. Is anything being done to stop it? Have there been any attempts, either in Sierra Leone or other African countries and Western nations, to introduce laws to protect children and punish those who recruit and use them as soldiers? Perhaps the region where this is happening is too unstable to do anything about it. Are any other countries doing anything to stop this?

Also, you should probably take a look at this: Declaration of the Rights of the Child It might be helpful to you in your research.

This probably does not read like anything out of the ordinary but, to me, it represents a long period of learning to engage with students as a learner and a participant and not a teacher who has read it all and knows everything the students can possibly come up with. I’ve had to learn this and it is still a challenge.

It’s a challenge because becoming a participant and divesting myself of that teacherly voice means that I need to gradually move away from formal evaluation. I want to. I am interested in reading my students’ work, sitting down with them individually and talking about their progress. I don’t want to be the only arbiter of their progress. They need to be part of the process too. In fact, since it is their work, they should be given a chance to talk about it, not as an artifact to be evaluated but as evidence of engagement. I want them to ask themselves the following questions:

• What is my goal?
• What have I learned?
• Where do I want to go next?
• Are there any gaps in my knowledge?

Assigning a grade is not going to help them in this process, primarily because grades are final and tend to stop progress. Once we attach them to student work, they indicate what has been accomplished, not what can still be done. They do not measure potential.

So, instead of assigning grades, even progress grades, I want to experiment with my own take on instructional conversations (and here). I’ve devised a Personal Progress Chart (work in progress) that I’ll be testing over the next few weeks.

I want my students to realize that learning is not about making your work conform to some standard imposed by the teacher. Learning is about creating your own standards and adjusting them based on your goals. Learning is about setting your own goals and monitoring your own progress. It is about having conversations with yourself and others. So, instead of imposing, I want to ask: What do you want to accomplish? What do you think is good? What would make you feel proud? I want to promote a process of questioning and I want to do it through dialogue.

If I give my students a list of my own criteria or a rubric then I’m essentially asking them to listen and conform. They may have the freedom to do their own research but if all their work is expected to conform to a rubric imposed by the teacher then they are still just trying to reach some goal that may have very little to do with who they are and what they’re interested in. So, instead of giving my students a list of criteria, I want to talk with them individually and get them to develop their own. I want them to use the progress chart to think about where they are, where they see themselves going, and how they think they can get there. I want them to use this chart to ask themselves questions about their own work and their own work habits. I want to use the chart as an opportunity to talk about their work, one-on-one. I’m tired of having conversations about grades. I want to start talking about ideas that they care about. I’m hoping that this guide will help.

This is, of course, work in progress. Any thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

But there is another thing that, I hope, will have a positive effect on my grade seven students. Some of my former students that I mentioned in my previous entry have agreed to participate in this creative writing community as grade nine mentors. They are no longer at my school but have expressed interest in working online with my grade seven students and helping them become stronger writers. Much like Mark Ahlness who has made it possible for his former students to return to their old community as “alumni,” I, too, decided to use the energy, the enthusiasm, and the talent of my former students in the new community where they will be able to work with the Writer in Residence and over forty grade seven students.

The reason I’ve decided to bring in both an accomplished Canadian poet and my former students who have studied poetry with me and have demonstrated excellent writing skills is to create a climate where literacy can flourish. I know that they will enter this community as writers because that is exactly who they are. While Douglas Smith will be both an inspiring and intimidating presence, I hope that gradually, my grade seven students will see that, as a writer, he faces the same blocks and the same frustrations as they do. I am hoping that this will challenge them to function inside their zone of proximal development, which “defines those functions that have not yet matured but are in the process of maturation, functions that will mature tomorrow but are currently in an embryonic state” (Vygotsky, 1978). I am hoping that the words of Douglas Smith and of my former students can create a climate that “awakens and rouses to life those functions which are in a stage of maturing” (Vygotsky, 1978). I am hoping that the students will be motivated to write with a poet and a handful of high school students who understand what it means to nurture one’s own creative, expressive, and exploratory voice.

So, the question is, How do we do it?

The answer is, quite simply, that I’m not exactly sure how this can be done. However, I am convinced of one thing – I believe that all of the above can be accomplished only if the Writer in Residence and the five grade nine students are not viewed as experts. I don’t want them to enter this community and say to the sevens “I’ve done this before, and now I’m here to tell you everything I know.” Instead, I hope that both the nines and Douglas Smith can create an environment that will help the students embrace writing not as something that is done at school but as something that is deeply personal, expressive, and human. In a community of writers, we need writers and not experts. We need inquiring voices and not voices that preach. So, I believe that both Douglas Smith and my grade nine students need their own portfolios in this community. They need their own virtual places. They need to write. The last thing I want to do is ask them to only read and critique. I believe that each participant, regardless of how old or how experienced, can contribute more by writing and engaging in conversations about writing than by merely critiquing. I want all of the participants in this creative writing community to come together through texts. I want every participant to be a writer and a reader. I hope that motivation, knowledge, and literacy will emerge through interaction with and about texts. I hope to see “cognitive apprenticeship” where students are not mere recipients of instruction but developing members whose every text helps them find their own voices (Collins, Brown, and Newman, 1989).

In other words, I want to create an environment where creative, expressive writing can flourish and where texts combine into episodes of interaction and intertextuality. At the same time, I’m trying to find a role and a place for myself. Where do I fit in? What is the role of the teacher in such an environment? What impact will it have on my presence in the classroom? Should I enter the online community of writers as one of its voices, or should I stay away? Should I try writing poetry and engaging with my students and our guests in conversations about texts?

I’m tempted to stay away from the online community and see what happens when the students interact with writers and not teachers.

I’ve learned from my study that, in a blogging classroom, students learn when they are allowed the freedom to use their blogs in order to write themselves into existence as individuals. Of course, a teacher can allow that to happen only if he or she is willing to operate at the edge of incompetence, never knowing what the next day or lesson will bring. I haven’t met too many teachers who embrace this sense of uncertainty and enjoy what Marie Jasinski calls “facilitating the unpredictable.” We seem to think that it undermines our authority and that we are paid to know and to dispense that knowledge with confidence. Not surprisingly, giving my students the freedom to become independent writers and researchers presented me with an enormous challenge of having to redefine my own presence and my voice in the classroom. It took a lot of effort to divest myself of the teacher’s voice and acquire a new one, one that helped me function more effectively as a facilitator, learner, and co-participant in the class blogosphere.

When I first tried participating as a reader, I realized that I did not know how to write like a co-participant. I found it very difficult to divest myself of the omniscient and evaluative voice of a teacher. When I first started responding to my students’ creative work, I realized just how difficult this process of acquiring a new voice would be. The following is my very first comment posted in my new role as a co-participant and reader:

Vanessa, I have to agree with Jack who posted the second comment. If you were to hand this in as an assignment, I can easily see myself giving you an A+. The characters are very well-defined and the plot moves well. You should also be congratulated on how well you established the setting in the first few paragraphs. It seems very realistic and yet your description is not forced. I think it is also very effectively described through some of the dialogue. Well done!

Needless to say, I was not pleased with what I had written. While the comment is generally supportive and very positive, it is also filled with evaluative comments. There is even a reference to a specific grade! It is clear from my comment that I read Vanessa’s short story as a teacher, not a reader. There is nothing here about the impact that the story had on me as a person – I remain emotionally detached, unwilling to comment on the experience of reading Vanessa’s story. Implicit in this comment is the suggestion that I “know best” – I focus on literary devices, on Vanessa’s technical expertise as a writer. The comment sounds as if I had composed it while looking at a rubric.

I wanted to be able to respond just like Vanessa’s classmates who often included specific references to her work but also managed to do it in a more expressive, conversational, and readerly voice:

Vanessa, you already know i love this
this is awesome
it was so descriptive, and i felt as though i was watching the girl give herself the needle, and trying to blindly find the “items”
i love the suspense factor of not knowing completely how the society works, but having little hints all along the way.
keep writing!!

Or

Outstanding work! I loved the ending … especially how you just leave the reader with that last sentence … makes you think! It’s like you’re letting the reader make up his own … conclusion or point of view about the society. I like the way you introduce the father’s mysterios death without putting it simply. You suggest that there’s some kind of scam going on, and that James is really the only remaining person who knows about it. It grabs the reader well, gives hints toward a more dramatic story. I really am looking forward to the next chapter… i loved this one!!

Vanessa’s classmates were able to convey a lot of support and, at the same time, engage in some critical analysis of her work. My attempts to do the same seemed insincere and “teacherly.”

There were times, of course, when I thought that my attempts to become one of the participants in the class blogosphere were silly. “Is it really that important,” I wrote in my research logbook, “to become just another reader, another voice? Isn’t it also important to assert my role as that of a teacher and evaluator? Would they not benefit from my guidance and expertise, especially when it comes to writing?”

The answer, I soon learned, was “No.” One of the reasons why I decided to establish a class blogging community was to get away from the “fourfold feedback” – the kind of feedback about writing that students in traditional classrooms receive from their teachers. It consists of grades, editing symbols, margin comments, and student-teacher writing conferences. In short, it’s a process which encourages the student to write in accordance with the teacher’s view of writing and the teacher’s interpretation of a given topic. I knew that this would only undermine the class blogosphere and the sense of community that I wanted to create:

Such a process emphasizes the instructor and the instructor’s reading of the text at the expense of the student and the student’s reading of the text. This current-traditional approach presumes that the student learns best to write perspicaciously by following the precepts of the instructor, delivered no matter how idiosyncratically through the fourfold feedback. What this approach engenders, however, is not emulation of the instructor, but rather a sense of distance from one’s own text. In the current-traditional classroom, writing is not so much to be read as to be evaluated; the effectiveness of any text lies not in the power of persuasion and description, but in its ability to trigger highly conventionalized responses from professional graders. (Barker, T & Kemp, F., 1990).

A teacherly voice can effectively stifle genuine, personal student voices. The presence of the teacher’s voice reminds the students that they are writing for “an examiner audience” (Britton et al. 1975). It tends to shift the focus from reading and composing their texts to “reading” the teacher in an effort to figure out exactly how to appeal to his or her preferences and thus “do well.” I realized that my students had learned how to “read” me very well and that their grades depended to a large degree not on what they had learned but on how well they had learned to “read” my idiosyncrasies as a teacher and marker. When reading the teacher becomes more important than reading one’s own text, education begins to stifle and not empower.

It was crucial, then, to stop using my teacherly voice and learn to enter the community as a co-participant. Of course, as I found out, it is virtually impossible to outgrow the teacherly voice. It is, however, possible to modify it substantially so that it empowers students to see themselves as writers and contributors, as individuals with unique ideas. I wanted the students to assume the responsibility for generating ideas, expressing their opinions, exchanging views, evaluating them and collaborating to create knowledge. Knowing that a teacherly voice would seriously hamper these efforts, I continued to practice my new voice.

While the initial attempts, much like the comment quoted above, seemed artificial, I gradually developed a more personal and personable voice. I continued to reveal my personality and comment as a reader, as a human being who experienced the writing and not as a teacher who merely reacted to it:

I was reminded of my own childhood when I read your poem. You used very descriptive language and the metaphors make your description truly magnificent – very visual. There are specific images here, such as the bicycle and the fishing rod, that I can almost remember seeing when I was a child. I think it’s very difficult to write a poem in which the reader can see so much of his own life and you did it! You have really grown as a writer! This is an outstanding poem! I’m sure everyone else will agree!

Or:

I felt really sad when I read the stanza about the church. It reminded me of my uncle’s death. I remember that it was a rainy day and everything around me – the traffic, my family members, the echo inside the chapel – all seemed somehow muffled and very distant. I guess I was just as absorbed in the situation as the girl in your poem. You conveyed that sense of quiet emptiness so well. If you look at some of the other comments here you’ll see that this magnificent detail in your poem had a strong impact on most of your readers. You crafted it very well.

Of course, it would be incorrect to claim that my students ever stopped seeing me as their teacher. It would also be incorrect to claim that I have learned everything there is to learn about becoming a teacher-participant. However, I think I can safely conclude that the new readerly voice that I developed has enriched my experience as a teacher and allowed my students to understand that our classroom discourse includes all writing – not just formal and transactional but also creative, expressive, and conversational.

Notes:

Barker, T. & Kemp, F. (1990). Network Theory: A postmodern pedagogy for the writing classroom. In Handa, C. (Ed.). Computers and Community. Teaching composition in the twenty-first century. (pp. 1-27). New York: Boynton/Cook.

Britton, J. et al. (1975). The development of writing abilities (11- 18). London: Macmillan.

Teacher as Learner

Learning to transform my classroom practice was very difficult and I certainly don’t want to sound like someone who believes he has mastered this difficult new role of a teacher in a networked environment. I think I did well but I still have a lot to learn about what it means to be “dethroned” by a community of bloggers. It was a very difficult process and had a profound impact on my understanding of professional development. I had to learn how to learn with my students, how to become a learner and, yes, how to stop teaching. When I say stop teaching, I, of course, refer to the transmission mode of teaching. I was still teaching as a learner/participant but it was very different.

It started with facilitation. I spent a lot of time guiding and assisting my students. This involved class discussions about individual posts and blogs as well as conversations that began to develop in response to specific entries. Gradually, however, I began to realize that I needed to become more than a facilitator (hence my previous entry) and tried to enter the community as a learner, writer, and contributor. This proved to be very difficult because I did not want my students to know that I also had gaps in my knowledge and that, as an individual, I also wanted to spend some time reading and writing about topics that we were exploring – that I didn’t have all the answers.

It was difficult not because of my students (who, by the way, thought it was the most natural thing to do) but because I kept thinking that by engaging myself in the process of learning I was neglecting the class. I thought that it was irresponsible to read and post about the Potsdam Conference, for example, while my students worked (seemingly) unsupervised. I abandoned many drafts of my own entries just because I felt the need to “move around” in the class blogosphere, to see what the students were doing, to comment, assist, and oversee. It took me a while to realize that I could contribute more as a learner than in my capacity as a teacher. It gave me an opportunity to immerse myself in the cognitive current that my students had created through the simple act of writing to learn. I found myself linking to their work, while my own entries, filled with links to numerous online resources, showed them one possible way of cognitive engagement with the chosen topic. In some cases, the work of my students aligned so closely with my own interests that an interesting partnership was formed whereby we learned from and through each other’s writing. I was able to model reflective thinking and writing, and I saw that many of them followed my example. I did not know it at the time but I now realize that by entering the community as a participant, I was setting the stage for semantic apprenticeship or “instructional conversation” – a dialogic process of meaning-making that emerges from the student’s engagement with a particular task.

The Role of Texts

The second reason why I think the class eventually switched to the progressive discourse mode was our new understanding of texts. My challenge was to create an environment whose structure would make it easy for my students to see that every text is, as Gregory Clark argues,

suspended in an exchange of texts in which it contributes to the collaborative process through which the knowledge that constitutes the community that comprises its writer and readers is continually reconstructed (Clark 1990, 68).

I also wanted my students to understand and see through everyday interactions that writing and reading are not private acts and that

every text is necessarily public and political as it contributes to the perpetual process in which the values and beliefs that sustain community life are modified and revised, that writing and reading are both public acts that carry with them significant social responsibility (Clark 1990, 69).

In short, I wanted to create a community that would instill in my students the understanding that texts are dialogical, that they construct social knowledge, and that texts are never individual in nature but are threads in a complex fabric of social interactions. The role of the student in this space changed from that of an “imitative apprentice to that of critical collaborator” (Clark 1990, 69). In short, there was a strong emphasis on reflection, questioning, and conversation.

Writing Ourselves into Existence

Finally, I need to stress that as a group we had a clear purpose and that, in my opinion, is what really helped us see ourselves as a community of learners. This community emerged not because we were all writing together in the same online space. It did not emerge because some of our interests happened to coincide. The community emerged because there was one overriding purpose – to learn more about the key themes of the course. The purpose was to build and contribute knowledge, to learn together – engage in the process of “purposefully knowing together” (Wells & Haneda, 2000).

This ongoing exchange of ideas (centred around one clear, collective goal) helped all of us see that we were contributing to a larger whole. This was not in addition to class work or some preconceived, carefully delineated curriculum. No. This mesh of interactions was the curriculum. Unlike the environment in a typical LMS where the discussion forum is an additional space where students can interact, this community was written into existence by contributions made by every single student. This was our space. There was nothing else; no resource collections or teacher-generated lesson plans. It started with an idea which grew through individual contributions and a growing network of interactions.

Notes:

Clark, G. (1990). Dialogue, dialectic, and conversation. A social perspective on the function of writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Haneda, M & Wells, G. (2000). “Writing in knowledge-building communities.” Research in the teaching of English, 34 (3), 430-457. (PDF available here).

So, let me take you back in time … back to late March when I came home from school and wrote the following note about an interesting community-related development:

March 29, 2006

“My students continue to contribute to their blogs with surprising consistency and enthusiasm. In addition to engaging in many knowledge-building activities, many of them have also found specific topics of personal interest and are posting entries that reflect their personalities and their interests. Some of them have even been able to connect their personal writing to the work they’re doing in class. Many don’t seem to stop, not on weekends or even March Break. In fact, I’ve noticed that some contributed more during March Break than ever before. All of this is important to my research and will find its way into my thesis but what I find truly remarkable is that the community seems to be doing fine without me.

The students are engaged in writing and commenting on the work of their classmates. They often ask for time in class to work on their blogs. When I do give them time, I often get the feeling that I could leave them alone for the whole period and they would be happy writing and conversing about the blogosphere. Has the community acquired a life of its own?

I still walk around in class and talk to individual students about their work – their entries and the comments they’ve left on other blogs. They enjoy talking to me about the work they’re doing or about discussions that they’re contributing to on someone else’s blog. “J” said recently, “Look at all these comments about my entry on democracy. They’re all talking about it now.”

I’m really happy that they’re so engaged and I’m now beginning to spend more time thinking about my role in the classroom. From a professional point of view, I am very happy that I have the time to talk to each student individually, to listen to them talk about their writing. I now have the time to work with writers, not with students who need to be taught writing, but with individuals who have voices and want to be contributors.

At the same time, I realize that I am the only one who is not engaged in the process of writing about things that I care about and that are important to me. While my students are expanding their knowledge of whatever it is that interests them (Vanessa wrote about System of a Down and their stand on the Armenian Genocide!), I seem to be doing very little as a learner. I am certainly not a contributor. Sure, my role has changed to that of a facilitator but now that the community has been more or less facilitated into existence, my role seems trivial. Since September I have been using my teacher blog to post entries about the students’ work online. I linked to interesting conversations and posts in an attempt to make them aware of the interconnectedness that characterizes their community. But now that they’re very well aware of it and have started contributing, linking, and participating in their own conversations and building their own knowledge through writing, the kind of facilitating that I have been doing seems unnecessary. My blog entries are now reduced to commenting on posts and expressing my amazement at their work. Is it, therefore, really needed and, what’s more important, does it contribute to the community? What am I facilitating now?

Where is my voice? A quick scan of my blog entries shows that while I have been actively commenting on the life of the blogosphere, my voice has been fairly authoritarian. I’m still an overseer – I comment on good entries and some interesting discussions, but I never engage in the kind of work that so engages my students. I have a feeling that I could withdraw for a week or two and my absence would not be noticed. It would certainly not affect the community. If Vanessa stopped contributing they would certainly notice. An important voice would suddenly stop speaking.

The students’ involvement in the class blogosphere makes me wonder:

• Shouldn’t I enter the community as a personal voice and not a teacherly one?
• Isn’t my blog too detached from the rest?
• Shouldn’t I be engaged in these discussions?
• Isn’t it time to become a blogger, just like my students?

I spent quite a bit of time developing a sense of community, showing my students what it means to be part of a community of writers. We talked about linking and constructive criticism. It clearly worked because I am sensing that this community became an organic entity and seemed to have acquired a life of its own. Whether I assign anything or not, my students (well, most of them, anyway) keep writing. They keep contributing to their blogs, they keep engaging in dialogic critique and in discussions. They clearly see themselves as writers, as individuals capable of responding to ideas that interest them. They have begun to see that they have voices. It seems to me that I have done my job as facilitator and, frankly, am not sure what to do next. If the job of a facilitator is to assist and guide, then, at this point, it is no longer as critical in the community as it was in September. Perhaps at this stage, facilitating should morph into a different role, one that allows me to contribute as a writer, as a voice and not just a guide?

What does this mean to me as their teacher? Do I have a voice? Now that my students are using their blogs to learn and engage in discussions, shouldn’t I also use my own blog to write about topics that I care about? Shouldn’t I use my blog to learn more about the things that interest me? What if, in the community of grade eight students writing about social justice, I started researching a related topic and proceeded to learn right in front of them? What if I entered their conversation with my own research, my own questions, doubts, feelings. What if I used this community to learn more about the history behind Darfur, for example? How would they respond if I did that?”

And that is how it ends. I wanted to share this note here because it shows the beginning of my realization that the teacher’s switch to the role of the facilitator is only the first step in an online community of learners. The reason why I think this is an important piece of the puzzle in my study is because it hints at more than the need to become a facilitator. When the community emerges and begins to sustain itself through the combined efforts of its student participants, the role of the teacher needs to change again. The facilitator needs to become a contributor, one of the learners. This is not to say that guiding and assisting are no longer needed. They still are, but a teacher cannot fully enter the community if he keeps looking at it through the lens of facilitation.

This realization helped me come to the conclusion that in the process of helping my students acquire individual and unique voices, in helping them become independent learners working through and with dialogic connections, I lost my own personal voice. Of course, my teacher voice was very much present but my own personal voice was missing. How ironic – I was dedicated to helping my students become more expressive, to teaching them that true writing comes from within, and yet I myself chose to cling to my professional, adopted voice.

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