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Volume 1, Issue 2 ISSN 1528-5804
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Carroll, P.S., & Bowman, C.A. (2000). Leaping
fire: Texts and technology. Contemporary Issues in Technology
and Teacher Education, [Online serial], 1 (2)
. Available:
http://www.citejournal.org/vol1/iss2/currentissues/english/article1.htm
Leaping Fire: Texts and Technology
PAMELA S.
CARROLL and CYNTHIA A.
BOWMAN
Florida State University
Note: This article presents a theoretical framework to
support the strategies suggested by Medicus and Wood for the
integration/infusion of technology in English language arts
classrooms in the second English article. Together these articles
put theory into practice for English educators.
As English educators, we are called upon to prepare future
teachers of English language arts as they journey from content
knowledge, to pedagogical knowledge, to classroom practice. It is
an opportunity to share our passion for teaching and learning, for
spiraling between theory and practice. We encourage our students to
create classroom communities where wonder and the imagination are
nurtured and challenged. Medicus and Wood illustrate many creative
and exciting uses for technology, which capture the students'
attention and interest, engaging students in classroom activities
to promote academic achievement. They have focused on three
concepts, which are central to the language arts teacher's
practice—(a) connection/community, (b)
artistic/aesthetic/imaginative thinking, and (c) literacy.
Technology and the Connection / Community Link
Technology enhances the teacher’s ability to connect with
students. Collaboration with others is fostered, nurtured, and
enhanced through technology. Together, problems are solved,
decisions are made, and meaning is made. Sociologically, a
community possesses human interdependence, solidarity, a sense of
culture and history, diversity and pluralism, and social
integration. With the decline of a culture comes a loss of
spirituality and aesthetic experience, which yields an emptiness,
despair, and hopelessness. Perhaps that is one reason that the
students in our classrooms "surf the web" and search for
opportunities to reach out into cyber-space for understanding and
conversation. Creating caring spaces requires that "classrooms
should be places in which students can legitimately act on a rich
variety of purposes, in which wonder and curiosity are alive, in
which students and teachers live together and grow" (Noddings,
1992, p. 12). Caring, in community, does bring to education its
greatest moral competence and worth. Education should be concerned
about the whole person. Dewey (1916) said, "School should be a
genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart
in which to learn lessons" ( p.27). Therefore, curriculum must
allow for new learning, the integration of old knowledge, and
community. It must be a student-focused course of study
characterized by questioning, moral and ethical reasoning, and
caring interactions. No theory of learning that mechanically and
reductionistically treats others can improve the heroic lives of
children or their teachers.
Thomas Sergiovanni (1994) proposes that the most hopeful reform
for education is to build community in the classroom, a partnership
which allows for a shared learning experience, provides
opportunities for personal relevance, makes meaning through
narrative, lets go of control, and enhances caring. A structure for
community must be built on dialogue and reflection. In Democracy
and Education, Dewey (1916) begins his discussion of communication
in community:
Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by
communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission,
in communication. There is more than a verbal tie between the
words common, community, and communication. Men live in a comunity
in virtue of the things which they have in common; and
communication is the way in which they come to possess things in
common. (p. 5)
John Dewey (1916) links communication inextricably with
community. In Freedom and Culture he writes:
There is a difference between a society, in the sense of an
association, and a community. Electrons, atoms, and molecules are
in association with one another. Nothing exists in isolation
anywhere throughout nature. Natural associations are conditions for
the existence of a community, but a community adds the function of
communication in which emotions and ideas are shared as well as
joint undertakings engaged in. (p. 159)
Dewey viewed community as a shared matrix of human relationships
based on a spirit of cooperation and communication, where quality
is more important than quantity. As Medicus and Wood illustrate,
technology today has the capacity to create global communities,
providing a learning environment for our students beyond the walls
of our classrooms. Their ideas for cultural exchanges and on-line
publications reflect the endless possibilities for today’s
educators.
In Literature As Exploration, originally published in 1938,
Louise Rosenblatt (1995) focused on the social context of
literature in the English classroom. Rosenblatt believes that the
personal, social, and cultural contexts of literature provide a
sense of belonging that is fluid and reciprocal.
[The student] needs to understand himself; he needs to work out
harmonious relationships with other people. He must achieve a
philosophy, an inner center from which to view in perspective the
shifting society about him; he will influence for good or ill its
future development. (p. 3)
Rosenblatt (1995)stresses the interactional components of a
classroom where language and literary discussion can flourish.
Technology has the potential to enhance and promote such
interaction through inquiry, problem-solving, critical thinking,
self-evaluation, and reflection. Like Dewey, Rosenblatt explores
the connection between community and communication.
In most cases a personal experience will elicit a definite
response; it will lead to some kind of reflection. It may also lead
to the desire to communicate this to others whom the boy or girl
trusts. An atmosphere of informal, friendly exchange should be
created. The student should feel free to reveal emotions and to
make judgments. (p. 70)
Other reader-response theorists have also discussed the social
nature of language and learning. David Bleich (1975) believes that
responses to the text can be enhanced through community in the
classroom. Further, Stanley Fish (1980) posits that interpretation
is a process of "interpretive communities."
Martin Buber's (1996) notion of community exists in the between
of the I/Thou relationship and values dialogue, reciprocity,
openness, concern for the relationship, and a rediscovery of the
boundary between self and other. I is the beginning of dialogue; We
evolves through sacrifice, commitment to values, nurturing the
bondedness, and time.
Man has always had his experiences as I, his experiences with
others, and with himself; but it is as We, ever again as We, that
he has constructed and developed a world out of his
experiences...Man has always thought his thoughts as I, and as I he
has transplanted his ideas into the firmament of the spirit, but as
We he has ever raised them into being itself, in just that mode of
existence that I call "the between" or "betweenness."...It is to
this that the seventh Platonic epistle points when it hints at the
existence of a teaching which attains to effective reality not
otherwise in manifold togetherness and living with one another as a
light is kindled from leaping fire. Leaping fire is indeed the
right image for the dynamic between persons in We. (Buber, 1966, p.
107)
Buber's notion of the We affirms the individual and the
community in much the same way Thomas Merton espouses that the
essence of human life is one's connection to others. In Buber's
words, "Only men who are capable of truly saying Thou to one
another can truly say We with one another" (Buber, 1972, p.175). It
is a slow process, which awakens trust, belonging, and
purpose—a process, which cannot be forced. Indeed, one of the
problems for community is maintaining a dual spirit of being
willing to struggle for what one believes to be true while
remaining open to another's perspective. When this narrow ridge
between the I and Thou is marginalized through appeasement,
indiscriminate listening, stereotyping, or shunning; the community
becomes threatened.
In Teaching the Universe of Discourse , James Moffett
(1968, 1987) expands Buber's notion of the I/It and the I/Thou
relationships in creating his ladder of abstractions. Moffett
compares Buber's I/It relationship to the self and the I/Thou
relationship to the other. Discourse, like community, is fluid and
begins with the self before reaching outward to known others in
close proximity to known others at a distance and, finally, to
unknown others. According to Moffett, the whole structure of
discourse is based on relationships and connectedness, as he
outlines the continuum from interior dialogue to conversation to
correspondence to publication.
Existential philosophers Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hegel
attempted to define meaning and human fulfillment through authentic
relationships, community. Minar and Greer (1969) view authenticity
as a responsibility to self, an awareness of the person one ought
to be which creates a bond supporting the potential and growth of
the other. "To be authentic is to establish integral connections
with other people, nature, work, and ideas, thus making the world
really one's own" (Minar & Greer, p. 72). Community nurtures
the authenticity of the other, a relationship which allows for a
shared learning experience, provides opportunities for personal
relevance, makes meaning through narrative, lets go of control, and
enhances caring. A structure for community is built on dialogue and
reflection (Noddings, 1992).
There has, historically, been a tension between individual and
common interest, in the move to a more industrialized world. The
rapid technological advances have dramatically shifted notions of
community.
Community refers both to the unit of a society as it is and to
the aspects of the unit that are valued if they exist, desired in
their absence. Community is indivisible from human actions,
purposes, and values. It expresses our vague yearnings for a
commonality of desire, a communion with those around us, an
extension of the bonds of kin and friend to all those who share a
common fate with us. (Minar & Greer, p. ix)
Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development is based on the
notion that learning takes place through interaction with other
people. Vygotskian psychology has been formative in many English
classrooms. Collaborative learning, the exploration of ideas
through informal talk, writing as a process, and language across
the curriculum all have their source in insights derived from his
work Carl Bereiter (1985) views the classroom as "a social setting
for mutual support of knowledge construction, a setting that could
eventually be internalized by the individual students" (p. 221).
Frank Smith (1998) encourages membership in the "literacy club" to
foster literacy through community.
Language, like community, requires responsiveness and
understanding; it is relational and interactional. If community is
our place in this world, then language is the means by which we
create that place, that world, a world which is changing rapidly as
computers expand our borders through exploration, collaboration,
reflection, and meaning making.
Technology and the Artistic / Aesthetic / Imaginative Link
Motivating readers and writers involves helping students find
ways to create aesthetic responses. Teachers should provide
students with opportunities for developing an image bank of
memories, visual representations, and other flavorful qualities
that depend upon interaction and invite criticism (Gardner, 1983).
Computers allow students to manipulate text, images, sounds, and
graphics, providing opportunities for students to write,
illustrate, publish, and create. Reading evokes visual, auditory,
and all sensory images, requiring feeling, sensing, responding,
focusing, synthesizing, and evaluating. Today, when students are
expressing themselves through violence, the opportunity to channel
some of their energies to create original valued projects holds a
great deal of promise. Seeing a pattern through reading and writing
activities is sharing a unique vision of the world, creating
connections and enriched understanding evoking experience,
imagination, and wonder. Elliot W. Eisner (1998), in The Kind of
Schools We Need , encourages teachers of English to expand our
definitions of literacy, to recognize that artistic expression can
take many forms, to support students’ efforts to create
meanings through visual art, music, dance, mathematics, and other
forms, in addition to the linguistic forms that are the staples of
the English classroom, to realign our curricula with our
understanding of multiple literacies. He also encourages us to
recognize that it is appropriate, not intellectual softness, to
bring attention to the feelings our students experience while
making meaning in our English/language arts classes.
Humans think not only in language, but also in visual images, in
gestural ones, and in patterned sound. The surest way to create
semiliterate graduates from American secondary schools is to insure
that many of the most important forms through which meaning is
represented will be enigmas to our students, codes they cannot
crack. (Eisner, p. 19)
Medicus and Wood offer suggestions to classroom teachers for
using technology as a means of infusing art and music into English
language arts classrooms to enhance understanding and
comprehension. Images are the building blocks of our thinking
schemata and an essential characteristic of meaning making.
Technology augments students’ metaphorical powers,
objectifying self- and world-consciousness, emotions, and
moods.
The construction of meaning depends upon the individual’s
ability to experience ways in which others in the culture have
constructed and represented meaning. Forms of
representation—visual, auditory, kinesthetic, linguistic, and
mathematical—are ways in which members of a culture uniquely
‘encode’ and ‘decode’ meaning. The meanings
that can be secured from music, for example, have no identical
counterpart in any other form. Composers make sound meaningful by
the way they organize it, artists by the way in which they compose
visual images, writers and poets by the way in which they treat
language, mathematicians in the forms they employ to describe
quantitative relationships.
The ability to ‘make sense’ out of forms of
representation is not merely a way of securing meaning—as
important as that may be—it is also a way of developing
cognitive skills. The forms of thinking that students are able to
use are profoundly influenced by the kind of experience they are
able to have…All thinking, especially all productive
thinking, is infused with feeling. Feeling permeates the forms of
thinking we employ and provides us with the information we need to
make judgments about the quality of our work. Mind is not separated
from affect; affect is part and parcel of mind. Thus, for the
refinement of cognitive skills to be fully developed, it must in
some way be emotionalized. (Eisner,1998, pp. 7-8)
The English curriculum requires writing, composing, and
creating. For teachers of English, technology is essential for
publications, performances, and public presentations (Moffett &
Wagner, 1992).
Technology and the Literacy Link
We believe that teachers can learn to use technology to improve
instruction by enhancing students’ abilities to enter the
conversation of the discipline—to become active members of
the 21 st century learners’/thinkers’ club.
As teachers, we can help students find ways to demonstrate, from
varied perspectives, the meanings they construct when they read
literary texts. Although some may argue that technology is an
answer to over-crowded, under-challenging classrooms as the
computer can “teach” students, or that technology is
only flash, not substance; we believe that careful, thoughtful
incorporation of technology allows us, as teachers of English
language arts, to re-think our relationships with our students and
our discipline. English demands that personal connections be made
to others’ words and expressed ideas and that students learn
to form, articulate, and communicate their ideas to others.
Technology offers numerous venues for improving the literacy of our
students. We propose thoughtful, creative planning in which
technology is used to increase students’ abilities to make
sense of their worlds. If we define critical literacy as the
ability to make sense of one’s world, the deceptive
simplicity hides enormously complex questions about what it means
to know. The philosophical question of knowing and the pedagogical
question of teaching are connected: How can we teach so that others
can know? As literacy takes on new meaning based on the changing
notions of text and communication, we must seek new ways to address
the changing needs of today's students. Improving the literacy of
our students is the greatest challenge of the 21 st
century as literacy cannot be isolated into disconnected programs
of study or content areas. Each student’s literacy impacts
reading, writing, problem-solving, and technical skills; and every
educator must be able to support students across grades and across
disciplines to interact with and comprehend their worlds as
represented through a variety of texts. As teachers of English
language arts, we view technology as essential materials for
inquiry as students possess the means for collecting data and raw
materials. Students must then summarize, synthesize, and evaluate,
select, reject, listen, read, organize, interpret, talk, write,
edit, and revise. Technology-enhanced teaching and learning, if
conditions are established to increase the range of expression
available to students, provide opportunities to construct and
articulate meanings that in the traditional class would be limited
to rendering and expressing in words only. We paralleled the
potential characteristics of technology to Frank Smith’s
(1998) Classic View of Learning and found comparisons illustrating
that both are:
"All learning pivots on who we think we are, and who we see
ourselves as capable of becoming” (Smith, 1998, p.11).
Language is an important factor in a student’s
self-understanding and the interplay of reading and writing is a
vital on-going cycle. Technology in terms of life skills is all
about integration and finding connections, prior knowledge with new
information, integrating one skill with others, one discipline with
another. Uniting school with the world, the mind with the body, and
the child with the adult one wants to become. It is the process of
evolving meaning that motivates students. Through reading and
writing, students are collecting and connecting; for literacy is a
bridge to understanding.
Technology and the Teaching Link
Classroom teachers need support to implement the strategies
necessary to create instructional frameworks that will improve the
literacy skills of their students, to become familiar with methods
that will enhance each student's understanding and integrate these
methods with field experiences and technology applications.
Technology supports content, critical, and creative thinking
(Jonassen, 2000). Literacy is not simply a challenge for education;
it is a challenge for life. Information literacy, or technology,
requires students—and teachers—to conduct searches,
evaluate, and create new ideas.
Schools need to provide the opportunities for literate occasions
for students to share their experiences, work in social relations
that emphasize care and concern for others, to take risks, and to
fight for a quality of life in which all human beings benefit.
(Giroux, 1987, p. 181)
References
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subjective criticism. Urbana, IL: NCTE.
Buber, M. (1966). The knowledge of man: A philosophy of the
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Buber, M. (1972). Between man and man . New York:
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Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education . New York:
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Dewey, J. (1963). Freedom and culture . New York:
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Eisner, Elliot W. (1998). The kind of schools we need:
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Fish, S. (1980). Is there a text in this class? The authority
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Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind . New York: Basic
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Giroux, H.A. (1987). Critical literacy and student experience:
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