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Digital fluency and the role of the teacher
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Annual Conference for Teachers of
English at the Instituto Cultural Dominico Americano. I speak to you on
one of the cusps of history; by that I mean that , worldwide, technology
has shifted the way we communicate and do business, so that the world
your students are going into is quite different from the world that you
were educated in, or the world that you expected to find your way in
upon leaving school. You may have been confident that you had the tools
and the ability to survive in this modern world, by virtue of having
been taught English, knowing your craft, knowing how to read and write,
and in general being able to prove that you could teach a language and
teach it well. Your students, who are going into a number of different
fields, all affected by the technological revolution in their own way,
will not be so lucky. They must in effect step onto a moving train as it
takes our entire culture and moves it online. This virtual world is at
the same time a place where opportunity is infinite, and yet where it is
also small; people can see virtually everything that is done; they can
recover it, and the price of making mistakes is quite high. In short,
it is a scary world, where one needs a confident guide and vigilant
guidance.
It appears sometimes that they know more about this world than you do
already; that they could simply go there, and teach themselves about the
dangers, dangers which you yourself may have trouble even imagining. In
fact many of us who entered technology from a non-technological world
did so because our own children were there already, and we were
determined to know more about what they were doing and how. In fact,
the younger generation may always stay a step ahead of us, and someone
will always be someplace new, where we can barely find them, much less
imagine what they are doing. But now is not the time for us to back
off and let what happens happen. Never has the role of the teacher, in
guiding, leading, and teaching, been more important than it is now.
You, the teacher, and your attention to this situation may be the single
most important influence on their lives as they step into this new and
unfolding world, which, remember, they have little choice but to enter.
Hold on, you might say; I am only an English teacher. I have been
trained to teach reading, writing, pronunciation, grammar, speaking;
it’s all I can do to keep up with these, with the limited resources that
I am given, and to give my students what I can, with the limited time
and support available to me.
I can understand your protests. It's a scary world, and we have limited
time to explore and understand it, much less lead an innocent soul into
something of which we are not confidently sure that we understand. Yet
I will explain to you why we have no choice, and in fact we should
embrace this opportunity and begin to take advantage of it.
I should begin by saying that my name is Thomas Leverett; I am a
Lecturer at the Center of English as a Second Language at Southern
Illinois University-Carbondale, and I have been putting entire classes
online, by which I mean on weblogs and using chat, for several years.
The world of education is quite cautious, I should say, and would not be
going online at all, if it were not convinced that it had to, that the
world is not going back. But that is just what has happened. Even the
schools and the universities, bastions of the system and of
understanding and reason, know when it is not going back.
My classes are diverse, from many countries, young enough, at 18-22, to
be open to new opportunity, but not too young to be denied access by
virtue of their age. I have talked to them more about this world, the
world of weblogs, chat, HiFive, Facebook, and Skype, a world which they
may have onceconsidered their own social domain, but which is
increasingly being absorbed by the worlds of business and diplomacy. At
first, as I said, I did it to know where my own children were going.
Then, I did it because I realized that my students had an enduring
interest in the things they were finding there, good and bad, permanent
or not. Finally, I did it because the allure of connecting to anyone,
anywhere, was too useful to ignore as a teaching tool, and because I
realized that the new technology and its ethic of permanent, ongoing
connectedness was the first wave of a massive, permanent shift that
would change our lives dramatically, theirs moreso than mine; that there
was no ignoring this tsunami, no turning our backs, and pretending it
wasn't there.
As a teacher who was taught to teach at the height of the communicative
era, I was taught that we were to teach our students to use the language
in the environment that they would need it in; that separating a
language from its environment set up the futility of the language
learner who had an infinite vocabulary, yet was unable to respond to
simple questions because of unfamiliarity with the medium or with the
social realm that language after all belonged in. At that time, the
prevailing belief was that oral, conversational fluency was at the heart
of knowing and being comfortable with the language; that reading and
writing skills should come later; that without the ability to function
in the simplest conversational contexts, reading and writing skills were
to some degree useless. The communicative idea was that language at its
base was face-to-face oral interaction, involving conversational
strategies, gap-fillers, questions, and functional objectives such as
asking politely, disagreeing politely, and clarifying things you didn't
understand. Communicative teachers set out around the world to teach
this basic conversational fluency on the assumption that a certain
conversational ease was necessary as a base, before one started to read
or write; that a learner basically had to be able to hear and respond
first, before starting the productive skills.
We know now, through the world of technology, that people often chat
online and use written language without corresponding sounds. Thus we
know that perhaps the oral fluency that we considered the base of all
successful communication, may move into a different role, as people
start with the written online medium perhaps, and move on from there.
What I am saying is that the assumptions we made about primary mode, and
base of languages, may not necessarily be always true, for all
languages, as we move into the future. We know that in a world of
depleted energy resources, increasingly crowded, travel will be more
limited, but ability to communicate cross-culturally, and across
languages, will be increased and will be increasingly blended, perhaps
less distinct, and certainly more voluminous. Increasing numbers of
people will do most of their communication, every day, with people
outside their own culture and/or country, and this will be considered
the norm. English, or an online, written, coded version of it, will be
extremely useful in this context. Our students will never forget the
person who first showed it to them, or the attitude that teacher had for
the opportunities available in the online realm. They will not forget
whether your attitude toward the dangers of that world was cavalier, or
careful. They will not fail to notice how you responded when your
browser failed to accomplish what you wanted, because above all, we are
models; we show them how to manage the things they don't understand,
and, by doing so, unwittingly sometimes, we determine whether they will
go forward into it, head held high, or shrink from it and the
opportunity it offers, for another twenty years or a lifetime.
It was in the context of this new world that, before coming here, I was
able to find out in minutes about this conference, this city, and you;
you, in turn, could probably find everything I've written online, find
my Facebook profile, my weblogs, and my biography, with a but a few
clicks of your iPhone, or other cell-phone. This instant access to all
information about anything, anywhere, is a given in the new world; if
your students aren't used to it yet, they will be soon enough, and so
should you. It will require of us a certain transparency of intentions,
a fearless and adventurous sense of how to reach out to people, wherever
they are, using whatever medium arrives and becomes accessible. As
communicative teachers, we will find, use and master the environments
that our students will use English in, even if we have never experienced
them before. We will do this because we know that English cannot be
separated from the cultures and environments it is used in, and because
we know that all the reading and vocabulary in the world will do you no
good, if you don't have the digital fluency to master the environment
that it is used in.
And this is perhaps where we can be of the most use to our students. We
may find ourselves teaching just a little bit of HTML, in order to make
a link, or fix a broken one. We may have to interpret code that is
dense, thick and impenetrable, in the same way the car or bus engine is,
that engine that you have been relying on all these years, yet don't
really understand. But when we ourselves are unwilling to try a new
medium, or dive into unknown code, even when we have a good reason, how
then can we expect anyone to learn a language, when they don't really
know the benefits of using it? Here is where we can remember: a huge
English-speaking world is at our fingertips. It makes our small
environment, wherever we are, seem unnecessarily confining; it opens out
as we go; it is everyone's future, and somebody has to go forward, and
know the way. It is, after all, our new home.
[ CESL ][ Tom Leverett's weblog ]
 Page maintained
by
Thomas
Leverett, CESL, SIUC
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