Top Story of the Year

The most popular blog entry of 2007 was the “Conduct Unbecoming?” entry from a few weeks ago. Most of the teachers who commented indicate that they use social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to keep in touch with current and former students. As a result, many objected to limiting teachers’ communication and advocated that teachers should continue to use such spaces. Teri Lesesne (blog, school page) explains in her comment:

I do think telling teachers to forego blogs and social networks crosses over the line, though. Our presence within communities where our students are comfortable connects us in new and fresh ways. Our willingness to embrace new technologies is also essential.

Another teacher who posted anonymously shared an analogy: “The world has changed. Saying educators should not be involved in online communities today is the same as saying 5 years ago we should not talk on our cell phone in public. Who knows what random students could overhear?”

Naturally, teachers agreed that online postings should maintain a level of professionalism. Teacher-commentator Matt Skillen (blog) states, “I believe it is important for teachers to have an identity online, however professionalism should be maintained. If one posts pictures online that could lead the viewer to believe the teacher was acting inappropriately, he or she should be prepared to answer the questions from students, parents and administrators.”

The topic is certainly controversial—and the issue is not limited to students. One of the commentors shared the Dayton Daily News story “Online profiles a factor in college admissions” and BoingBoing posted the contradictory findings that “Adults warn kids off social network sites, use them themselves—Pew Internet report on search and identity.” On the positive side, the New York Times reported this week “On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data.”

The only thing I think we can all agree on is that as new 21st century literacies develop and composing possibilities evolve, the controversies will continue. When people first started publishing novels, women authors often had to pen their stories under male pseudonyms to be published.

My hope for 2008 is that teachers aren’t driven underground in the same way by the school systems where they teach. Communicating is the life’s blood of the English teacher. Our lives are devoted to such vital tasks as helping others tell stories. It would be a sad world if we were forbidden to share our own stories with the world.

Conduct Unbecoming?

Not only did thousands of teachers meet in New York City earlier this month for the NCTE Annual Convention, but many of them blogged about their experiences. Some educators and administrators might question whether they should have. Just last week, the Ohio Education Association urged members not to post personal information on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. eSchool News shared an excerpt of the warning message:

“OEA advises members not to join [these sites], and for existing users to complete the steps involved in removing their profiles,” the memo said. “While this advice might seem extreme, the dangers of participating in these two sites outweigh the benefits.”

News stories across the nation have identified instances of blogs and social networking profiles that resulted in problems for the teachers who composed them. The Edutopia site has posted a poll, with links to related stories of teachers and social networking gone awry. The poll asks:

Can pictures and writing displayed on a personal Web page qualify as “conduct unbecoming”? Or do teachers have the right to express themselves as they please outside of school grounds? Tell us what you think.

The Wired column “Sex Drive” argues that the answer is no. The column’s title makes the point clear: “Teachers Should Blog, Tweet and Flirt Online Like the Rest of Us.” Teachers should participate in any online communities that they desire, columnist Regina Lynn asserts, and they should follow the same general rules of behavior that they would in any other social context. Lynn explains, “teachers who understand appropriate relationships with students are not going to ‘friend’ teens on MySpace, text message youth about sex lives or hook up with minors in role-playing games.”

I have online profiles, blog entries, and twitters out there in cyberspace, so my position is probably obvious. Are personal blogs “conduct unbecoming”? If teachers mention going out to a bar with colleagues after convention sessions, have they stepped over the line? Would a blog post with a photo of friends raising a toast or hugging be inappropriate?

I say no. Forbidding teachers to use social networking and blogs distances them from the 21st-century literacy tools that students use and suggests that teachers cannot use mature judgment when they communicate with others. I’m not suggesting that everything included in the Columbus Dispatch article that reports the OEA’s memo is acceptable. But the solution is not silencing teachers either.

Instead why not provide some professional development for teachers that focuses on safe and savvy online communication? Ignoring sites like MySpace and Facebook isn’t going to prepare teachers or students for the future. Talking about the communication that happens on blogging and social networking sites is a far wiser and more pedagogically-useful step toward toward 21st-century literacy skills. Hiding from the technologies of today and the future is not going to make them disappear, but dealing with the issues of effective online communication actually could lessen problems that the Columbus Dispatch identified in their investigation.

Teaching the Truth

To support the students campaigning against the censorship of The Prince of Tides and Beach Music in Nitro, West Virginia, the books’ author, Pat Conroy, wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper that “scolds censors [and] praises teachers and students.”

Unfortunately, this is not the first time that Conroy has had to defend teachers who sought to teach his works. In 1988, Conroy penned a similar letter to the editor of the Charleston, South Carolina, News and Courier, praising another teacher who had added Prince of Tides to a list of optional readings for 11th-grade AP students.

The April 1992 English Journal article “Pat Conroy’s ‘Gutter Language’: Prince of Tides in a Lowcountry High School” (please forgive the low quality of the scan please) traces the story of the book’s challenge by a local preacher who “called the book ‘raw, filthy, raunchy pornography’ and ‘garbage that would gag a maggot’” (18).

As part of his response to the Charleston censorship case, the article explains, Conroy also visited the classroom of the teacher involved in the book challenge and talked with the class about writing. Conroy told the class: “[T]o write good fiction . . . one must be willing to write the truth and not to worry about what the public reaction will be” (19).

As I read that line, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if the same were true of teaching?” I would love to exclaim to the teachers of the world, “To be a good teacher, one must be willing to teach the truth and not to worry about what the public reaction will be.” Teachers must always worry about what the public reaction will be—from students, families, colleagues, administrators, school board members, and the local community.

Teaching the truth is not enough. The teacher’s mantra must be “To be a good teacher, one must be willing to teach the truth and always be ready to explain why the truth must be taught, especially in the case of the ugly and inconvenient truths of the world.”

If certain students or their families are compelled to hide from such truths, that’s their prerogative, but, as The Students’ Right to Read explains, they should not have the right to impose their will upon the larger community. Teachers have the responsibility of making sure that students’ right to read is protected.

Our best option is to be prepared. “What Do I Do Now? Where to Turn When You Face a Censor,” from the NCTE book Preserving Intellectual Freedom: Fighting Censorship in Our Schools, provides scenarios and the related resources that fit the different kinds of challenges. To write your own rationales, follow the detailed instructions in the SLATE Rationales for Teaching Challenged Books.

Check out the NCTE/IRA Rationales for Challenged Books CD (Volume One and Volume Two) for ready-made rationales for dozens of books. And finally, for even more advice, rationales, and other resources to help with challenges to literary works, films and videos, drama productions, or teaching methods, visit the NCTE Anti-Censorship Center.

Reading and Power Relationships

Reading is about power relationships. The power to decide what we read, what counts as reading, and whose readings matter is ultimately at the bottom of text selection. Questions such as “Who chooses the texts?” and “Whose experiences are reflected in the texts?” foreground the underlying power struggles that teachers, students, family, and community members can face as they choose texts for classroom and independent reading.

The English Leadership Quarterly article “Outside Teachers: Children’s Literature and Cultural Tension” (E-M) explains that calls for censorship frequently communicate the tensions between differing cultural and philosophical perspective. Rather than avoiding such differences in perspective in text selection, the article explores how such conflicts can become opportunities for communities “to help students become literate, socially responsible, culturally aware, and contributing citizens” (p. 8) .

Near the end of the article, the author summarizes questions teachers can use as they consider whether a text is appropriate for a particular classroom or student:

Therefore, while reading these books, teachers should pay attention to power relationships as represented in the print and picture text. Some questions Lissa Paul (1998) has identified that could facilitate this process include the following:

• Whose story is this?
• Who is the reader?
• Who is named? Who is not?
• Who is on top?
• Who gets punished? Who is praised?
• Who speaks? Who is silenced?
• Who acts? Who is acted upon?
• Who owns property? Who is dependent?
• Who looks? Who is observed?
• Who fights for honor? Who suffers? (Paul, p. 16)

      If teachers find the sociopolitical implications that they uncover through this method to be too heavy or overwhelming to deal with at this point in their career, they may want to put the book aside and find an alternative (p. 10).

As I read the list, I realized that its questions served another purpose for me this week. Not only does the list lays out questions that reveal the power relationships within a classroom text, it also illuminates the power struggles implicitly communicated by the 2007 NAEP scores on reading that were released today.

The NAEP scores, after all, are also about power and reading. While the report claims “statistically significant” increases of scores by two points, they cannot deny the overall stagnation of student achievement in reading. Improvement has been creeping along at the same basic level for years, and “improvement” is in the eye of the beholder.

Each of the text selection questions above has a corollary that reveals the power relationships behind the NAEP scores:

• Whose story does the report tell?
• Who is the reader of those scores?
• Who is named, and who is not?
• Who gets punished, and who is praised?
• Who speaks in the scores, and who is silenced by them?
• Who acts, and who is acted upon?
  
  

Take, for instance, the three “Reading Top Stories” featured on the 2007 NAEP Reading Scores Page:

• Average reading scores were higher in 2007 than in 1992 at both grades 4 and 8.

• Average reading scores were higher in 2007 than in 2005 in 18 jurisdictions at grade 4 and 6 jurisdictions at grade 8.
• Average scores for White, Black, and Hispanic students at grades 4 and 8 were higher in 2007 than in 1992.

Whose story do these three bullet points tell? Not the students whose strongest literacy skills tap areas other than recognizing facts and understanding vocabulary words. Not the students whose strongest literacy skills focus on reading multimodal texts that go beyond words on printed pages. Not the 4th- and 8th-grades students whose primary literacy skills are more evident in languages other than English.

Who is named? Not the students in the 25 jurisdictions at grade 4 and the students in the 47 jurisdictions at grade 8 whose average reading scores were not higher in 2007 than in 2005. Not the students in grades 1–3, 5–7, or 9–12.

Who speaks? Not the Native American 4th graders, whose performance has dropped 11 points over the last 7 years. Not even the Asian students whose 2007 average reading score, like the Hispanic students, showed a 2 point increase over the 1992 score.

Today's Reading Report Card demonstrates the same kind of cultural tension that the English Leadership Quarterly article refers to. It’s clear that all students are not represented and alarmingly evident that the word reading is defined in narrow ways that do not reflect the expanded, highly complex definitions of literacy that teachers explore in best practices.

Given these shortages, let me end with a challenge, paraphrased loosely from the final quoted passage above:

As we examine the NAEP scores and their coverage in the media this week,  if  when we find the sociopolitical implications these questions uncover too heavy or overwhelming, perhaps we should simply put the scores aside and find an alternative—Instead of focusing on the scores, let's focus on pedagogically-sound, student-centered literacy instruction—whether those students are reading banned books or not.