Bud the Teacher

I’m sitting at Denver International Airport this morning, waiting to board a flight to Austin, Texas, and the first meeting of a curators group on a project I’m involved in with the National Writing Project. The goal of my piece of the project is to help create a website, called “Digital Is,” that attempts to show what digital composition looks like here at the start of the second decade of the 21st Century.

As I wait to board my plane and anticipate the work ahead, I’m reminded of my conflicting thoughts on what composition looks like today. Howard Zinsser wrote in his book, On Writing Well, that:

“The new information age, for all its high-tech gadgetry, is, finally, writing based.”

I found that quote in a new report exploring what writing looks like in several classrooms today. In that same report, the authors write that:

Writing has never been more important than in this digital age. It is almost inconceivable to achieve academic success without good writing skills. And, while the fundamentals of good writing remain constant, new forms of writing are quickly evolving. Words are now regularly joined with images and voices.

Writing, or composition, isn’t all that different from the writing of generations past.¹ Since we first started making markings on clay or stone or paper, we have been trying to capture thoughts in a way that would make them understandable to ourselves as well as others. We write to remember, to share, to understand. We compose to be heard, to stand up and say “This is True,” or “I am here,” or “This was scary” or “hard” or “dangerous” or “exciting”, or “emotional”, or whatever we would like to convey.

And although I make my marks today on an iPad,² a device that makes the making of marks very easy, and almost immediately shareable to anyone who can get to the Internet, I am reminded of just how hard it is to say something in a way that accomplishes my goals as a writer, that captures what I am, or was, thinking, that lets you into my head and thoughts.

That we now have more tools for making marks, and that we have new kinds of marks – photographs, videos, complex visualizations – doesn’t make the essential task of making meaning any easier. In some ways, as our options for composition increase, it gets harder to decide, to choose which way of making marks will get the point that we wish to make across. Harder, too, is what we must do in classrooms to convey the power of language and to help make our students critical participants in the literacies and literatures of our/their/our futures/our pasts.

And what counts as “writing,” or “composition?” Is a tweet a text, or a piece of a larger text?³ Is a rambling audio podcast, recorded from the driver’s seat of my car, a composition on par with a Master’s thesis, or an essay? So long as a test or assessment or evaluation of a text occurs within a limited definition of what counts as writing, are these other forms valid? How do we who is a “good” writer? What is “good” writing?

Is “connective writing,” a term that Will and I and others use to describe blogging, a new form?((The more I think about it, it isn’t. But it’s a useful way to talk about and describe some types of “good” writing.)) What’s new? What’s different? What’s useful? What’s good? Who gets to decide such things?⁴

And how in the world does a language arts teacher, sitting in an airport tapping away on a virtual keyboard, find himself in a place to ask such questions, or to attempt to answer them for others via this particular project?

Just a few questions, questions I always wonder about, that are surfacing for me as I prepare to embark on this work.⁵

1. Is it? Would love to hear your take in the comments. [↩]
2. Finished and published on a laptop, because the iPad isn’t quite the writing device I need it to be. [↩]
3. I’d say yes to both. [↩]
4. And how does federal education policy muck with these questions, in sometimes good and sometimes not so good sorts of ways? [↩]
5. I am humbled, as always, when I think about the power and majesty of language and teaching and learning and the fact that even a guy like me can use the Internet to talk to the world about these big ideas. [↩]

In today’s podcast, recorded during my drive home from ISTE’s final activities, I talk a bit about Tuesday and Wednesday of the conference.  There’s talk of the filtering panel I was fortunate to get to sit on, Howard Rheingold’s resources on crap detection, and also some of my thinking about how we must work to model the things that we want to see in our schools.  Always.  I thought ISTE was a good and useful conference.  Thanks to those of you who made it so for me.

Direct Link to Audio

In this podcast, recorded on my way in to the ISTE 2010 conference this morning, I talk through my conference experience so far.  I mention the Leadership Bootcamp, some of Chris’s thoughts about events like those, a conversation I’m having with Dean about digital writing, and some other highlights, as well as a concern I have about how we (don’t) read so well, perhaps.

Direct Link to Audio

On today’s podcast, I attempt to answer a series of Twitter questions from Nawal about how to promote writing environments that help students to write connectively (as Will calls it.)  I also rant a bit about “blogging units” (I’m against ‘em.)  Somewhere in there, I reference George Hillocks’ really excellent metaanalysis of composition instruction studies (PDF) and Stephen Downes’ recent talk in Buenos Aires, as well as Troy’s book, The Digital Writing Workshop.  I hope it helps, Nawal.

Looking forward to your thoughts, as always.

Direct Link to Audio

Learning is most definitely social.  But I think it has to be.

On Twitter this week, Ben has pulled me a couple of times into the question of whether or not learning is social.  And both times, one time in conversation with David, and another time, earlier today, in conversation with Dave and George and Claudia and Rob and Will and some other folks, I had to say that, yes, it is.  Allow me to explain, as Twitter is just not the place for such extended thinking.

As best as I can figure, we’ve got to start with some definitions.  Let’s start with social.  I think Wikipedia’s definition is a fine place to begin:

The term Social refers to a characteristic of living organisms (humans in particular, though biologists also apply the term to populations of other animals). It always refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence, irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.

In the next paragraph, the article, at least as it exists today, pretty much makes my entire case:

In the absence of agreement about its meaning, the term “social” is used in many different senses and regarded as a fuzzy concept

See, my contention is that learning is communication, and that communication requires language, and that language is socially negotiated. By that, what I mean is that words are just sounds.  Sounds that convey meaning.  And they are arbitrary.  We call cups “cups” not because they possess any inherent cupness, but because, over time, and due to popular usage, the word “cups” came to be linked with the concept of a particular kind of container that you put things, usually liquid, but sometimes cakes and other things, into.

Words gain their meaning through social processes.  Specifically, when people, enough people, use them to mean certain things, then they have that meaning.  Without that social negotiation of their meaning, they mean, well, nothing.¹

And all learning, all of it, as near as I can tell, comes from language and how we use it.²  If language is social, and it is, then any use of language to convey meaning that results in either a transfer of that meaning, or a new understanding of the thing you’re trying to learn about, is social, at least to some level.

So when David asked me the other day about how he can go, by himself, into an office and read a book and think about it, and if that’s social learning, my answer, even though he was the only person then in the room, is yes, that was a social experience.  Let me elaborate further.

A book is a recording of someone’s thinking about something.  To record our thinking, we use language.  Writing, a set of symbols that we use to represent words (which we use to represent ideas), is a technology³ that works with language to convey meaning.  As I write this blog post, I’m locking my thoughts into words and putting those words together to, hopefully, convey something.  Just what I’ve conveyed is a little bit up to me and a little bit up to you.  More on that in a minute.

So, working from the Wikipedia definition above, of social as an interaction between organisms, reading a book and thinking about it involves (at least) two individuals – the author and the reader.  It’s a social process.  Actually, it’s much more complicated than that, as the words the author used were negotiated during the time of the author’s writing, and perhaps even the author was attempting, through brute force, to change a meaning of a word or words.  The reader, too, exists in a social construction of language that might be different, or very similar to, the author’s – but it’s not the same.  Our interactions with language and with each other color and shape our interactions with words.  I think of a house as the first house I lived in as a little boy, a yellow, ranch-level house.  You might think of something different when you think of the word “house,” but there’s enough overlap between our two conceptions of the word – a place with rooms and probably a kitchen and a place or places to sleep – that we can have a reasonably meaningful conversation about houses.

Heck, in the example of reading alone in one’s office and thinking about one’s reading, there’s another set of social forces at work, too.  As I wrestle with an author’s ideas, I’m filtering them and my own thinking about them through my previous experiences – with the concepts being discussed, with my teachers and their thinking, and with my own previous wrestling with the particular topic that I’m reading about.  That side of the learning – my thinking about the reading – is a social process, too.  Saying it’s not isn’t a true thing to say.

George argued, a while back, that learning isn’t necessarily social.  I think he was wrong, largely, about that.  It’s terribly social.  He wrote:

As well, a primarily social view of learning also overlooks many of the affordances of technology. I can learn (learning defined as actuated or actionable knowledge) from a computer program, an intelligent software agent, or a contextually appropriate learning resource (i.e. when I need to do the task, the learning resource is mediated by technology).

Each of those items that he’s giving as examples of ways you might learn, are things, like books, that were made by other people.  Someone wrote the computer program, or the intelligent software agent, or the resource.  Those items, like books, were created in and of a social process.  People make technology, or learning objects, or what have you, whether they’re putting words on pages or building hardware.  These items are a conversation, to a degree, between author and reader.  George is a smart guy, and a good teacher, but I wonder if he forgot that when he wrote that post.

Many smarter people than I have written extensively about how reading is a social process.  Folks like Louise Rosenblatt, who popularized the concept of the transactional theory of reader response, is one of them who I think about a lot.  She postulated that a reader takes from an author an experience that is colored by the reader’s experiences as well as the context in which the reading occurs.  Reading is social.  Writing is social.  Learning is social.⁴

Mikhail Bakhtin, too, is worth mentioning here.  He wrote about the idea that language is a response to other language.  He used bigger words than that, but basically, he argued that language exists in the context of the language that has come before.  Unless you were the first person to ever speak, then you are to some degree influenced by what was said before you spoke.  You might be responding to one of those previous utterances, and you might not. ⁵ You are, whether you are aware of it or not, influenced by what came before.

What about writing a note to oneself? Is that social?  This is where I get confused and curious.

Suppose I write myself a note, say a reminder to do something in the future.  I’d say, at the time of the writing, that my present self is the author.  I write myself the note so that I can keep track of something at a future time.  When I return to the note, I am approaching it as my, from the perspective of the note-writer, future self.  As a reader, I am reading a note from my past self.  Even then, I think, if I am the only audience for the note that I wrote, I am participating in a social process.  For one thing, I’m using language, socially constructed language.  For another, my self has changed in a number of ways since I wrote the note.  I’m a little bit older, I know different things, I might be reading the note many years later, in which case the changes might be much easier to see and identify.  But even if it’s a few minutes or hours later, I am reading a communication from someone else – my past self.  And I am reacting and responding as my present self.  Perhaps the conditions in which I wrote the note have changed – I don’t need to do the thing that I was reminding myself to do because I’ve since realized that it was a silly task, perhaps, or I no longer need to do it because it was done by someone else.  But my present self is reacting/responding/interacting with my past self.  I’d argue that’s a social process, too. The idea that we can communicate, in this way, with ourselves, is pretty interesting.  And social.

Well, if you’ve read this far, then you might be asking yourself, “So what?”  I wonder that, too.  Let me speculate as to why such questions of learning and sociality are important.  For one thing, perhaps we could move on to more interesting questions.  Instead of “Is learning social?’ might we ask “How does my choice of language or text change the conditions for learning?”  Or maybe instead “How does language change over time, and how does that affect policy discussions about teaching and learning?”  How does the illusion of non-socialness perpetuate hierarchy?  Who gets to frame conversations about teaching and learning, and how do they do so?  Just a few of the questions that I am thinking about lately.  You probably have better questions.  But let’s move past this “Is learning social” question – because it is. And it’s essential that we understand that.

What place does an individual have as an agent of his or her own learning since learning is a social process?  Each individual, while shaped by and working within social constructs, has the ability to shift the conditions of that sociality to support their own learning.  You can argue for a redefinition of a word, for example. ⁶ Or suggest a different frame in which a particular type of learning can and should occur.  The fact that learning is social doesn’t lessen the impact or importance of any individual.  It actually makes individuals more important.  Our individual actions, aggregated and amplified by the actions of others, shape the “socialness” of an experience.  That’s important.  Worth thinking about.

This is, clearly, first draft thinking on my part, but I think it’s worth getting down while it’s still fresh on my mind, not so much to say that I’m right, although I believe that I am, as to try to push past this question, which, to me, is a pretty obvious one, and begs some really difficult and important ones.  Those questions are more worth our time, perhaps.

I’m eager to hear your thoughts about the socialness of learning.  Learning is social.  And that’s worth talking and thinking about.  Together.

1. If you don’t believe me, then think about the word “Google.“  It used to represent a really big number.  Then a company.  Now an action.  Language changes over time as people use words differently. I find that fascinating. [↩]
2. George mentioned feral children on Twitter today.  “How do they use language to learn?” was his question.  I’m still thinking that there’s a language piece there, on some level.  But I’m still thinking. [↩]
3. Writing is one of my favorite technologies, and the one that I find the most fascinating, be you a writer with an iPad or a pencil or a keyboard or a telephone or whatever. [↩]
4. Turns out, according to folks like Rosenblatt, that rereading a text results in a different transaction every time you reread.  Because you’re a different you when you read the text again.  Isn’t that interesting to think about? [↩]
5. But you probably are.  There is nothing new under the sun. [↩]
6. You might fail.  But you might not. [↩]

The Digital Learning Collaborative, a project I love and spend ever more of my time with, will be taking a large cohort of teachers through the work of conducting teacher research on and in their classrooms over the next couple of years.  That’s pretty exciting to me, for teacher research has been in my blood since I was a preservice teacher working as a graduate assistant with one of my favorite teachers ever.  And in the current climate, strategies like teacher research have much to offer teachers as professionals and as voices in educational conversations.

If you don’t know much about teacher research, I’d recommend you start with this handy little quickread.  And, of course, here’s the definition that I work from:

So here we go.  And here I go, as well.

It seems only fair and fitting that, as we facilitate teacher research for others, I engage in a teacher research project of my own.  This is slightly unusual – my “students” in this case are the teachers and students of the school district where I work.  My classroom is spread out over fifty buildings and miles and miles of physical territory.  Further, I work more and more in online spaces, so my classroom includes those spaces, too.

What to look at?  Well, that’s the easy part, I think.  Since I went to work in technology, two spaces have consumed much of my time, our Virtual Campus, a district-wide implementation of Moodle, as well as St. Vrain Blogs, our district’s WordPress MU-powered blog engine, also open to the district as a whole.

I wonder about how these spaces change classroom practice.  I think about how writing, and more generally, composition,  becomes an extension for learning, particularly when there is a public audience for the work.  Who is using these spaces?  To what ends?  How do the use of blogs and online courseware change the experience of teaching and learning in my school district? (Does anything change?)  How are teachers using spaces like these?  Is the learning day extended? What kinds of writing are happening in these spaces? To what effect?

Those are the questions¹ I’ll start with.  As for data – well, we’ve got lots to look at.  The blog engine itself is a public repository of the use of these tools.   What are the ethical implications of studying, in public, a public space where learning is taking place?  I plan to blog my research log, a tool that I’ll use to keep my reflections and observations about what I’m seeing and learning as I study these questions.  In addition, I anticipate that I’ll conduct interviews with people using these tools in my quest to understand their impact.  I intend to publish these recordings, as well, prior to my analysis of them.

One question – and it seems a silly one – but should I start a separate blog over in the district blogging engine to collect all this work, or should I separate it a bit by placing it over here, at my place? I’m leaning towards creating a space there.  But I’m still thinking.

So, um, here goes.  Wish us luck.  If we do this right, we’ll be telling lots of the stories of our classrooms that don’t get told.  And, ideally, we’ll be getting better at teaching and learning through the process.

1. They started as these. [↩]

Twice today I’ve seen stories in the media, passed around by educators, that gave me pause. In both cases, the articles, headlines, and/or authors and sharers of the article passed along the notion that “Technology X enables skill Y.” I was a wee bit disappointed, not just because of the enthusiasm I saw in the sharing¹, but because both of the articles got the technology that makes a difference wrong.

Let me show you:

Example 1 – “Texting poetry inspires students to learn“

From the article:

Chester Middle School Principal Ernie Jackson, for instance, challenged reading and social studies teacher Mel Wesenberg to find ways to use text messaging to teach poetry.

The results were surprising: Kids who used their cell phones to boil down the main points of the stanzas got 80 percent of the questions about a poem correct on a state test.

Kids taught the same poem in the traditional way – reading, reciting and discussing – got only 40 percent of the questions right.

“That’s a big jump,” Jackson said during a recent demonstration of the experiment with a sixth-grade class.

Well, yeah. When you write about something, or summarize it, then you do learn it. Writing forces the concepts into your brain in a way that discussion doesn’t. And summarizing something is a fine way to deepen your understanding of it. I suspect the student referenced in the article who didn’t have a cell phone would’ve had as much success with passing notes about the poems to her friends as they did sending texts back and forth.
Example 2 – “Teaching literacy using a Kindle“²

From the article:

She gave examples of an elementary child’s note about a character in the book she was reading: “If I were him, I’d say no way!” Such comments indicate a child is unknowingly focusing in on the author’s character development, something college students struggle with in their literature classes. Another child summarized the plot – a simple electronic form of the dreaded book report – which reinforces their understanding of the book.

I need to read Larson’s original work, which is behind an IRA paywall, but again, seems to me that the focus of the improvement wasn’t the Kindle – it was annotating and summarizing the text. Writing about what you’re reading, as well as connecting your notes to the text itself, helps readers become better readers.

The Kindle isn’t the important bit.³

Turns out, in both of these cases, the technology that helps the students to read and to understand better was a very old and familiar technology:

Writing.⁴

It’s exciting to bring new gadgets and gizmos into the classroom, to see what they can help us to do. But we can all too easily get caught up in the shiny object and forget that the basic toolset of teaching and learning, of reading, writing and thinking, is still the basic toolset. Reading and writing, meaningful reading and writing, are important⁵.

Try to write and fiddle with words regularly, be it on a Kindle, a nook, an iPad, a cell phone, or any other device you might happen to have. Teachers should be active readers, writers and thinkers, no matter their subject area. We should be reading and writing with students regularly, whatever the medium. All that practice will help you read better, and then you, too, will be less likely to fall victim to a technology du jour switcharoo scam.

Promise.⁶

1. Look! Aha! It’s true! Texting makes for smarter kids! Kindles change everything! [↩]
2. Not, I’d admit, the most useful headline. “Teaching literacy?” You mean “reading?” [↩]
3. That said, Will wrote an interesting post over the weekend on why you might use a Kindle as your annotation tool, but I’m thinking that his strategy isn’t practical for 2nd graders. [↩]
4. But we already knew that writing supports reading, didn’t we? [↩]
5. Ira’s post complicates this, but in a good way. [↩]
6. Yes, I know that “fatter” isn’t “really” a word. But it seemed like the right word. Please, no red pens here. [↩]

If

local is about
places near you

and

digital spaces are
places you can go

and

access is about
getting to those digital places
wherever you are,

then

what will
local look like
when
the new geography arrives?

Or is it (t)here?

Discuss.

I spent today engaged in some work with the National Writing Project and several of their thinking partners at the Digital Is . . . Convening event, a day of structured thinking and looking and conversation about what it means to write and teach writing at a time of such profound technological change in the world and, perhaps, our schools.  It was a classic NWP event, in the sense that there was a good collection of really smart folks present as well as thoughtful processes and protocols to help us have productive conversation and inquiry time.

What follows are a collection of the thoughts and ideas that swirled around my head today as I moved from conversation to conversation. I’ll probably pick a few of these to expand on in future posts, but I wanted to get them down now before they drifted away into the nebulous space of “I’ve got some notes somewhere about something important.”  Here goes:

• It seems like many (but certainly not all) of the projects I looked at today were created in semi-school environments.  By that, I mean that they were created in after-school programs or through work that students are engaged in outside of the traditional classroom.  I think that’s interesting for several reasons, one of which being that perhaps the role of schools and teachers is changing at the moment, or we’re stuck doing the “boring bits” that help students to be ready to engage in extracurricular projects like these.  More thinking needed here, as I know that many other pieces of work shared today happened within classrooms.
• Lots of talk about the need to expand and fiddle with the definitions of “reading,” “writing,” and “text.”  Words, too, like writing might not be broad enough to encompass skills like making movies and extensive digital projects.  “Composition” continues to be my go to word for the common skills of making meaning that I see across genre, medium and mode.  I like the way that Pat Fox said it this afternoon in one conversation: “We need to renegotiate the terms that we use.”
• Many of the tools that I use every day in my work and with students allow us to turn our processes into texts and to continually take apart and easily republish our final products.  Examples of “process as text” are recordings of classroom conversations, considered temporary and fleeting, that become something more than a passing conversation when they exist as video or audio recordings.  These types of texts stay fixed – we can’t really go back and change the flow of a conversation – but our finished products, when published digitally, are easily and perhaps even secretly editable and revisable after publication.  So we’re able to fix the temporary and fiddle with the permanent.  That seems interesting and worthy of further exploration.
• Is “digital” a new skillset, or do we need to refocus on, as Chris Lehmann said this evening, “Teaching tool and teaching audience is nothing unless we teach thoughtfullness (sic) and wisdom?”  To say it differently – is there anything terribly different about what students can do today with the digital tools they have available to them?  If there is, what is it?  I think there are differences, but reaching for them is difficult.  (This is a question that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time.  It came up multiple times today, particularly in tweets I passed back and forth with Paul Allison.  I wrote a little bit more about it just before lunch:

This morning I was in a pretty fantastic session on the Youth Roots work in Oakland, California. What it reinforced for me was that so much of this work that we’re doing with digital texts and tools is sooooooo not about anything other than what we’ve been trying (often well, often not) to do in schools for a very long time – help people to be better people, preferably together.

What I mean by that is that we might’ve had a very good conversation fifty years ago about “Analog Is” – although we wouldn’t've known to call it that, because we didn’t have the other space of digital to compare it to. In that conversation, we would’ve talked about the tools that we had and how they helped us to better connect our students to the world and the world to our students. And we might’ve talked about the importance of honoring our students as people, and their passions as important. And we should’ve talked about what was happening in the world that wasn’t school, and what was worth bringing in to our classrooms, and what wasn’t. We would’ve had a great conversation about how the media of the day were reshaping the world, and what that meant, and how we could push back as we attempted to better understand that.

And now, we’re talking about what CAN happen in school, and what IS happening out of school, and how the two are or aren’t connected. And we’ll always be talking and writing and thinking about this, and I’m okay with it.

But as we sit here at the beginning of an explosion of writing and composing and making, I’m reminded of our humanness and our deep desires to connect and to be heard and to make a difference, to matter. And I’m excited because the tools have never been more accessible and never more powerful. Our work is as it was and as it will be, but still – there’s something new here, I think.

• Media literacy continues to be vital.  But like so many things, we’ve never gotten that as right as we could at school.  Making media seems more and more to be the best way to help students see how media influences audience.  So, making media becomes the way to teach media awareness and literacy.  Yes?
• A short movie, scripted and shot and edited and scored, takes much more time to make than an essay, it seems.  In fact, at least two texts are created – the script and the movie – so how do we assess all that “extra” work when we give students options for projects?
• For that matter, what happens to assessment when we find ourselves in the middle of digital studios of made meaning?  How do classrooms that look like this get “measured” against schools that look more traditional in nature?
• I heard again and again today that teachers must immerse themselves in the world of digital writing and media creation if they are to teach such things well.  I agree with that, and often say that I’d never do anything to a student that I wouldn’t do myself first.  But where does the time for such exploration fit into an already over-crowded school day?
• Are digital texts necessarily more dynamic than analog texts?  (Espen Aarseth makes a good case in his book Cybertext that the answer to that question is often that the digital texts are more linear and less flexibly read and responded to than their analog cousins.  I think he’s right.)
• How do questions of power and control get fiddled with in digital spaces?  Are there different relationships between those with power and those without online?  The same?  A little of both?
• There are issues of technology here.  Many times today, I heard that “It’s not about the technology, it’s about the learning.”  And that’s true.  Sometimes.  Other times, it’s most definitely about the technology.  It’s hard to make movies without cameras.  And editing stations. Impossible to record music without recording equipment.  What sorts of purchasing decisions affect what kinds of literacies get taught?  What sorts of server connections and bandwidth considerations ensure that students leave school comfortable in networked environments?  How do those technical decisions influence the culture of schools and communities?  Culture, after all, follows structure.

Whew.  Going to stop there for now.  As always, more questions than answers.  I’m okay with that.  I’d be interested in your thoughts on any of these ideas.  If you’re interested in others’ thoughts from the day, you might want to check out the NWP Digital Is Ning.

Earlier today, I sent a link to a student’s Twitter account to a staff member in the school he attends with a request that she share the link with a counselor in the school.  I read some things that caused me to worry for him.  Nothing too extreme, the sorts of things that kids, particularly young adults in the space between adolescence and adult, say and that are important.  I like this particular student; I only met him briefly in a presentation at a school in the district, but I’ve enjoyed getting to know him a bit better from his tweets.  Smart kid.  Needs some attention.  Worth it.

I find much of value in getting to interact with many district students via Twitter, my preferred channel for such interaction. Our students are online, and they are curious about the world, and they have things to teach us, if we are prepared to listen and learn them.

But sometimes, they will say things that may make us uncomfortable.  When that happens, it is up to us to follow up.  That’s the job.

I was reminded today of a counselor that I used to work with some years ago.  I went to her one day during the semester when I really started to wrap my head around social media and the power of the subscribe-able, bring-the-world-to-you Web.  I wanted to show her what I was learning about my students by following their writings on Xanga and MySpace, their public postings coming into my RSS reader.  I saw these students as people engaged in the world.  I laughed sometimes.  Was amazed on occasion.  Worried for them others.  “What an opportunity,” I said to her, “To see a little bit deeper into our students’ worlds, to engage them as people.  Perhaps counselors could and should be paying attention to these public spaces and learning from them, maybe even catching early glimpses of future problems.”  (Thinking back – and opportunities.)

She was hesitant to invade the students’ “personal” spaces, space that they were sharing in public.  She didn’t want to intrude.

Intrude.

I don’t believe that we have the luxury of ignoring our students when they share in public.  I don’t believe that we should duck away from engaging them for fear of finding ourselves in awkward situations.  That said, I think societal climates suggest we should avoid private connections for a bunch of reasons – one reason I like Twitter as a meeting place.  I don’t encourage students to come to Twitter.  But when they’re here, I do look for them as folks to learn from and with.  And while they’re here, I will treat them the same as I’d treat any other person.  Perhaps better than any other – they’re students in my school district, and I have a professional and legal obligation to them as human beings first, students second.  We all get lonely.  We all get down.  We all worry and lose perspective and have rough moments.  Students.  Grown ups.  All of us.  And we’re supposed to look after each other.

That we avoid fumbling through awkwardness is human, too.  It is often simpler to disengage and to not know what happens in the world where our students will spend 85% of their time.  But it’s not right.

No one of us can pay attention to every utterance.  That’s beyond human. But together, we can look out for each other.  Some students will never reach out to us.  But others will.  What a gift.

I learn from and with students in a different way now than when I was a classroom teacher, responsible for the learning of a certain group of pupils.  Now we learn together wherever we can, in the informal publics of our school district, both the physical world of seminars and workshops and classroom visits and also in the virtual worlds of Twitter and the other public spaces of the Internet.  I’ve mentioned to colleagues that I follow students on Twitter and similar spaces.  Often, the response is surprise.  I always worry about that.

I want educators online and paying attention when a student exploring the public voice begins to share some things that are too often left unshared.  I want those educators and students to trust each other to handle those opportunities with respect and care.  I want growth to happen.  I want it to be good. I want positive and supportive models for students to light the way.

And, yes, I do want to intrude.  Each and every kid is worth the intrusion to keep them safe and vibrant and engaged and with us.

And you are, too.¹

1. A gracious thank you to Michelle Bourgeois, who kindly read and responded to an early draft of this post. [↩]