Integrating Virtual and Traditional Learning in 6-12 Classrooms

A Layered Literacies Approach to Multimodal Meaning Making

Sandra Schamroth Abrams

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135133160
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Lingue e linguistica
• Categoría: Alfabetizzazione

Integrating Virtual and Traditional Learning in 6-12 Classrooms introduces a model of "layered literacies" as a framework for describing and illustrating how students' digital experiences can inform educational methods. Through the lens of layered literacies, educators can envision opportunities to draw upon adolescents' out-of-school interests and activities to meaningfully integrate digital practices within academic contexts. Such an approach facilitates innovative teaching, inspired learning, and successful pedagogy, and it thoughtfully highlights the role of technology within mandated standards-based instruction in public schools. Combining foundational and contemporary theories, supported by data from multiple studies of adolescent learning, and honoring teachers' and students' experiences and resources, this text helps educators reconceptualize the ways students learn through and with digital texts and negotiate the connection between online and offline spaces. A companion website extends the discussion onto the screen, engaging readers in an intertextual approach to learning that complements the concept of layering literacies across disciplines. With a foreword by Jennifer Rowsell and an afterword by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, it will be of interest to experienced educators and administrators, as well as postgraduate, graduate, and undergraduate students of education.

1 INTRODUCTION

Integrating Virtual and Traditional Learning— The Online–Offline Connection

DOI: 10.4324/9780203077672-1

• How can education include technology in ways that make learning relevant for adolescents?
• How can the confluence of digital and traditional texts provide opportunities for meaningful formative and summative assessments of learning?
• How can new technologies be incorporated in classrooms, even those with limited or out-of-date resources?

These questions—and others like them—confront today’s educators, especially because relevant, contemporary teaching includes the experiences of students and the technologies they directly or indirectly encounter. There can be a mismatch between the devices and/or programs students use inside and outside school. Some students also may only have Internet access in school and others may have better connectivity at home. Thus, when challenged by the above questions about integration, we need to look at how we can use devices and software without blindly embracing new programs, resisting the lure and illusion of technology’s innovation. After all, technology is seductive. The word promises something new, exciting, different. But when it comes to education, we cannot immediately assume ever-evolving hardware and software will guarantee improved teaching or student performance. One should not arbitrarily use contemporary tools for, as the Alliance for Excellent Education’s Terri Duggan Schwartzbeck and Mary Ann Wolf argued, “[s]imply slapping a netbook on top of a textbook… will not necessarily lead to significant outcomes” (2012, p. 8). In other words, it’s not the technology per se that helps students; it’s the purposeful integration of online and offline mediating activities that both teachers and students do with and through the various technologies that foster meaningful learning.

This book combines research and theory to help pre-service and in-service teachers alike grapple with the integration of technology by looking to adolescents’ various literate practices. More specifically, through the concept of layered literacies, this discussion draws attention to the ways in which students make meaning from (and with) the cohesion of experiences and texts, and it offers suggestions for classroom practice. The shift away from the reliance upon a device or software and toward students’ meaning making activities helps to emphasize why adolescents’ experiences with technologies can support classroom learning, and how we, as teachers, can carefully capitalize on their knowledge and skill sets developed outside school. In so doing, we can promote relevant, meaningful technology integration and learning experiences both inside and outside the classroom.

Technology and the Classroom

It is a false assumption that digital technologies are used in all classrooms. In 2014, I visited schools that had limited and outdated devices or software. I have seen defunct desktop computers covered in layers of dust and LCD projectors in storage closets because of broken or missing bulbs that render them unusable. I have heard teachers intend to use the computer lab only to find the room assigned for standardized test use, and I have seen teachers struggle with unanticipated Internet loss (Olmanson & Abrams, 2013). While Internet access seems mostly reliable in our everyday lives, we all face unanticipated and disempowering “outages”; such outages in the classroom can lead to derailed lessons if educators do not have contingency plans in place.

Yet even when connectivity is not an issue and technologies are part of classroom instruction, there are concerns about the ways in which they are used in the classroom. Research suggests that technologies are tools primarily for computational purposes (e.g., calculators) and/or access to social networking sites. For example, the US National Center for Education Statistics report, Teachers’ Use of Educational Technology in U.S. Public Schools: 2009, included data from 1,949 schools (and data of 3,983 teachers’ use of technology) and indicated that digital devices were most often conduits for Internet-based communication. Only 20–30 percent of students used technology for design or creative purposes, such as the production of written texts or graphics (Gray, Thomas, Lewis, & Tice, 2010). Similarly, in the UK, a BBC report indicated that, “children are being forced to learn how to use applications, rather than to make them. They are becoming slaves to the user interface and are totally bored by it” (Burns, 2012, para. 15). These statements suggest that there is a need to address how technology is included in the classroom, with a specific focus on higher-order thinking skills.

The trend to “digify” education has also spawned a blended learning movement that focuses on the integration of technology in the classroom, with multiple approaches that run the gamut of face-to-face opportunities complemented by digital technologies to completely online scenarios. These approaches help define ways to deliver content to students, and primarily focus on online arenas. For instance, Meghan Jacquot, author of the vignette in Chapter 5, works at a charter school that is based on a “flex” principle, a model that hinges upon “an online platform that delivers most of the curricula” (Horn & Staker, 2011, p. 4). Meghan explains:

When I teach high school English at San Francisco Flex Academy, I like to think of myself as a guide. I facilitate English through a blended learning model. Students receive online instruction as independent learners in a cubicle setting in the Flex Centers. They are physically at school, but they have an online curriculum offered through [the software provider] K12^® Inc. As a teacher, I organize their classes and we meet in a physical classroom. It is not 100 percent online and it is not 100 percent brick and mortar, so we call it blended learning.

In this case, blended learning includes online instruction, but the approach centers on content delivery rather than pedagogy; this means that teachers need to pay even greater attention to practice. Flexible and responsible educators, like Meghan, use the time to meet with students in small cohorts and offer individualized instruction while other students in the class continue to work in the online space. However, as Meghan noted, because the flex model (and others like it that involve students receiving instruction from a virtual teacher) requires students to be responsible, independent learners, this approach may prove challenging for those who have difficulty managing their learning experiences. To address these problems, Meghan reported that schools, like San Francisco Flex Academy, offer students extra supports, “systems in place to mitigate the learning curve, with a learning coach and peer mentorship program designed to work with new students.” In other words, effective blended learning requires schools to reconsider and/or reconceptualize curricula and classroom culture to support differentiated instruction and independent learning.

Other forms of blended learning include “flipping” the classroom, whereby students encounter new information and skills at home through assigned materials (typically videos or narrated PowerPoint presentations) and then apply their newfound knowledge to homework-style questions in class. In these scenarios, students are expected to independently learn new material, and then the teacher evaluates their understanding as they complete the questions in class. By centering class time on engaging learners in “the most cognitively demanding work inside classrooms” (Reich, 2012, para. 4), this approach is supposed to provide the teacher more time to target students’ needs in the classroom. Results of successful flipped instruction can be striking, as evident in the Public Broadcasting Service’s segment, How “Flipped Classrooms” are Turning the Traditional School Day Upside Down. Featuring Detroit’s Clintondale High School, which has fully adopted flipped instruction, the segment shows Principal Greg Green explaining the impact the flipped method has had on overall student achievement. According to Green, flipped instruction has been credited with students “doubling the national average as far as ACT gains.” Though he notes “some mixed results” on state testing, Green says “we have also seen an increase in graduation rates to almost 90 percent, and college acceptance rates at 80 percent” (Brown, 2013).

Flipped learning does not need to involve technology, yet digital resources like videos and podcasts, as well as interactive programs, such as games and hyperlinked information, can enhance flipped approaches by offering students a variety of ways to self-select and engage with the material at their own pace. Of course, these activities require students to have access to technology—something that may not be possible or equitable, depending on the devices and connectivity required to complete the assignments. In such cases, schools may opt to mirror San Francisco Flex Academy’s approach to helping students who don’t own a computer, lending students appropriate technology (in this case laptops and Internet hubs) so they may go online at home. Or, like Clintondale, schools may select mobile-enabled programs so that learners can effectively access information through their phones, as well as offer students more time in the schools’ computer labs.

But we must not be flip about flipped learning. As with any assignment, educators must also be careful not to haphazardly use apps or online programs; busy work, even when dressed up with the bells and whistles of the virtual world, often equates to the misuse of time and technology, and supports “learning” that is bereft of originality or application. As consultant and online educator Andrew Miller warns, “If the flipped classroom is truly to become innovative, then it must be paired with transparent and/or embedded reason to know the content”; this includes something more substantial than the “because it is on the test” rationale (2012, para. 4). Still, the flipped model, when used effectively, can help to support independent learning skills at home and individualized instruction in school.

Despite the possibilities of blended learning—from the use of technology to the reorganization of instruction—it remains an umbrella term for technology-based instruction, and such a large category can potentially inhibit the identification of more nuanced approaches that create unique educational experiences. Moreover, given that many blended methods involve commercial-companies-as-instructional-providers, there is an unbalanced attention to content delivery over pedagogy. It is imperative for teachers and administrators not to accept programs at face value, but to ask, “How can I change ‘x’ feature or only use ‘y’ program to support and/or meet a specific goal?” To merely integrate a program as-is, without consideration of its adaptability and the necessary pedagogical shifts, puts teaching and learning activities in jeopardy of becoming mechanistic.

Incorporating digital technologies in the classroom may seem to be the natural course of action, but often schools are quick to value digital approaches without having the educational research and pedagogy to support their assumptions. For example, though schools may have begun purchasing tablets for their students in an effort to offer ostensibly innovative education, only recently have studies begun to emerge on tablet technologies, and these studies suggest a range of implications. On the one hand, students’ use of tablets can aid the development of critical literacy skills (Prinsloo & Rowsell, 2012; Walsh & Simpson, 2013), enhance meaning making when used in concert with traditional print text (Walsh & Simpson, 2013), become a springboard for rich discussion, and “flatten” teacher– student and student–student hierarchies (Rowsell, Saudelli, Scott, & Bishop, 2013). On the other hand, research suggests that tablets can likewise be a source of distraction for some struggling readers (Sheppard, 2011), and that they can replicate “drill and skill” techniques, rather than support higher-level syntheses and ideation; for example, in their assessment of visual arts and mobile applications, Jen Katz-Buonincontro and Aroutis Foster found that the “ability to generate new ideas about art in the mobile applications was not present in most of the applications [and] few of the applications fostered the user’s ability to produce a digital painting (or sculpture in a few instances)” (2013, p. 15). Given that tablets and related apps are part of a burgeoning area of study, schools should resist the urge to “romanticize technologies like iPads as a panacea, an answer to the challenge of 21st-century literacy education” (Rowsell, Saudelli, Scott, & Bishop, 2013, p. 351) and, instead, focus on the pedagogy that can revitalize education. In other words, it’s not just about the technology, or the content area knowledge, or the pedagogy; it’s the combination of all three that supports effective technology integration (Mishra & Kohler, 2006).

The layered literacies framework described in this book goes one step further by offering models for flexible and innovative pedagogy related to technology integration. Building on research into adolescents’ literate practices, it suggests how classroom instruction can include the layering of texts and experiences that inform students’ out-of-school learning, and it addresses a number of ways in which digital and non-digital texts can work in concert to help students find learning meaningful and relevant.

What This Book Offers

In My Pedagogical Creed, John Dewey underscored the importance of education responding to the inevitability and ubiquity of change, and he envisioned education as anything but static: “education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing” (1897, p. 13). In a similar vein, Dewey called attention to the dynamic nature of thinking and creativity, noting that a student’s “learnings and achievements are fluid and moving. They change from day to day and from hour to hour” (1902, p. 20). Education, thus, needs to embrace the imagination, variation, and evolution that accompany learning. Simply put, as Jean Piaget contended, “The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done—men who are creators, inventors and discoverers” (Duckworth, 1964, p. 175). The factory model of education that has driven classrooms to date not only contradicts Dewey’s and Piaget’s assertions, but also has proven to be anachronistic and ineffective for our present and future lives (Collins & Halverson, 2009). From tools to norms, our lives are different and the digital revolution continues to change us at an unparalleled rate, as is evident in the fact that we have developed a “fully networked life” in which hyperlinks and search engines offer us (un)anticipated and rather immediate information (Turkle, 2011, p. xii). The challenge for educators, then, rests on the pedagogy of integration. That is, how do we harness the affordances of technology and students’ experiences with technology to help them develop the necessary skills to be independent and collaborative thinkers and creators? How do we help students become agentive learners who are willing to try “coloring outside the lines” and revel in the excitement of thinking differently?

This book responds to these questions, providing a framework that returns to Dewey’s and Piaget’s imperatives. By layering students’ literacies and honoring dynamic learning, we can continually rethink pedagogy and practice in light of social, economic, political, cultural, and/or technological changes. Building upon research into students’ literate practices in and out of school, this discussion values the textured, cohesive use of digital and non-digital texts in the middle and secondary classroom. The layered literacies framework, therefore, is flexible and customizable; after all, education cannot have a “one-size-fits-all” model if we are to effectively engage adolescents in differentiated and individualized learning opportunities.

To that end, this book combines foundational educational concepts with contemporary learning theories to help explore how the confluence of online and offline learning—both in and out of school—can help educators reconceptualize learning objectives, formative assessments, and educational practices. As such, literacy is not married to its traditional, paper-and-pen definitions; it includes a variety of visual, spatial, and linguistic and non-linguistic modes that are part of the meaning making process, a...