Social Journalism and Education

Woody Lewis at Mashable writes that on-line social media have replaced the traditional newspaper/magazine media as sources of fast breaking on-the-ground news.

To grasp the power of social media think of the citizens who caught the beating of Rodney King by the LAPD 30 years ago. They could have turned off their cameras and called 911 or the LA Times but did not. Todays citizen advocacy and investigative blogs play a similar role. Lewis explains:

The Web is now the sole distribution channel for newspapers that can no longer afford to publish hardcopy, and those that don’t follow the best practices of social media may see their brands marginalized in cyberspace as well. Social journalism, an extension of those practices, is now an essential component of any news organization’s strategy.

Citizen journalists post photos of fast-breaking events, and cover stories from a different angle than legacy news organizations, but it’s the premeditated watchdog or advocacy role that defines a social journalist. Another factor is the network effect: people using social media to communicate and collaboratively produce content. Editors are still important, but the pieces are shaped by crowd dynamics and the velocity of information.

Lewis' post runs through the past-present-future of social media and is worth a close read. He sees advocacy blogs with an investigative bent as playing a major role going forward.

Take-away

Progressive educators frequently complain about the educational coverage in news and the retrograde policies pushed by even progressive politicians. On-line educational journalism by teachers and students, documenting school conditions and amplfying the voices of concerned teachers and students, would offer a counterpoint and a pressure for change.

Obama's Educational Policy

The Political Animal summarizes President Obama's March 10 address to the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, laying out the outlines of his educational policy. Here are the main points:

* Charters: Obama supports lifting caps in every state on the number of charter schools that may be opened, so long as firm and effective accountability guidelines are put in place;

* Curriculum: Obama supported higher educational standards. But his agenda stops short of pursuing national curriculum guidelines or tests, promising only "to promote efforts to enhance the rigor of state-level curriculum."

* Early childhood: Obama's budget provides incentive grants for states to develop uniform quality standards and target care and education to the most disadvantaged children.

* Performance pay: Obama did not directly support merit pay, but spoke broadly of of "recruiting, preparing, and rewarding outstanding teachers".

* The school calendar: Obama said that the conventional school calendar with its short days and long summer breaks, shaped for the needs of an agricultural society, no longer makes sense and places the US at a disadvantage compared to developed nations with longer school days and school years.

A few initial comments;

On charters, the problem is bringing the various states' charter laws into conformity with some standards that limit corporate corruption and narrow targeting of specific populations (often those with anti-democratic agendas) that fragment the public.

On curriculum, Mr Obama seems sensitive to the basic postulate that education is a reserved power of the states. As one comment in The Political Animal notes,

I'm a little rusty on this, but my memory from graduate school suggests the word education doesn't appear anywhere in the constitution of the U.S., but responsibility for it is in every state constitution.

Under our federal system the sdtates are supposed to function as "laboratories of democracy". Until the recent extension of federal power over education, the federal government had been very chary about usurping the educational perogatives of state governments. In addition, it is arguable that different states and regions, due to regional traditions and regional occupational emphases, need distinct curriculum emphases.

On the other hand, a rapidly changing national society needs to promote citizen geographic mobility, and this requires some degree of unification of grade by grade curriculum standards.

A curriculum policy sensitive to these conflicting considerations can only be worked out through close cooperation of state and federal policy makers, leaving the primary power in the hands of the states. However politically appealing, no top down regime such as NCLB can achieve the desired result.

Teacher performance policy must address two distinct issues: on the one hand, recruiting the best people into the teaching force and encouraging teacher enterprise; on the other, keeping weak people out of the teaching force and getting rid of poor teachers. Merit pay, in itself, can not achieve either. It can also be counter-productive in establishing a rigid measure of performance and thus blocking teacher enterprise.

Regarding the school calendar, the idea that the entrenched calendar is simply a holdover from the agricultural era is a howler. Old habits die hard, but where are the horses and buggies on the city streets today? They are gone because they no longer fit our lives. The calendar we have persists because in some ways, not all of them understood, it is in adjustment with our other institutions. For this reason alone I would be cautious about major changes.

But there are positive reasons for preserving something like our current calendar. Shorter school days allow children more time for their own pursuits and more free time with their families. Longer summer breaks ideally give children the vivid experiences of freedom and informal learning that they treasure for a lifetime. One commenter in The Political Animal wrote:

Obama seems to agree with the view that the purpose of America's education system is to create technically-skilled worker bees who will efficiently and productively compete with slave-wage labor in the developing world to fill whatever jobs the corporate aristocracy has for them.

Well, I don't think so, but the point is well taken. Obama said he knew that the idea of long school days and years was unpopular. The democratic ethos is deep in the United States, and the development of individual autonomy absolutely requires long periods of time free from bureaucratic control by school teachers or managers at work. Adults might be quick to keep their kids in school and avoid the inconvenience of arranging for child care, but how many of them are eager to give up their fond memories of their own summer vacations?

Another comment states:

. . . (what does) the ongoing calls for eliminating summer break do to family vacations, where quite frankly I taught my kids more than the schools were doing, and that was in Palo Alto?

The genuine problems here are to develop more efficient use of the school day and more effective use of the school after-school and summer educational programs for children whose overworked or distressed families can not provide informal enrichment activities for their childrens' free time.

Jefferson once wrote that "that government is best which governs least." I do not believe that that education is best which educates least, of course. But the best education carefully restricts its standardized formal component and assures adequate time for informal learning essential for the formation of autonomy and personal responsibility.

Please add your comments and write your own reactions to the Obama policy agenda.

Honey, who’s watching the kids? Take two!

Barbara Stengel’s “theory-practice puppy” is commanding attention this summer in Oklahoma too, precisely over Andrea English’s question—but in its non-satirical ordinary sense associated with necessary adult efforts at child-minding, as distinct from institutional surveillance. Andrea is right that the latter is a serious social issue worthy of much critical discussion, and I don’t want to detract from the importance of her concern about institutional surveillance. But I have little to add to it, and at the same time I know that this question’s non-satirical sense has a different kind of urgency for students who are parents. For their sake I do want to suggest that this question’s ordinary sense presents a social issue as well, about which “post-feminist” complacency on a Social Issues blog like this would be decidedly premature.

As professional educators, we have dedicated our lives to the improvement of children’s schooling and of colleges and universities. Yet how many of us have taken those broad aims seriously enough to pause and ask our students—not in the interest of surveillance, but in the interest of empathetic understanding of what they and their children are going through: Who’s watching their “kids” while they’re in class? How hard was it to find someone or someplace to help them fulfill that responsibility? How long did they have to spend on a waiting list in order to get such help? How much is such child-minding costing them, and how can they possibly afford it as graduate students? What are their children doing and learning while they’re in class? Where, when, and how can they find the time to get their own academic work done? What do they have to do when their daughters or sons or their parental partners or hired child-minders get sick? What effects might their parenthood have on their anticipated speed of degree completion? And, last but certainly not least in any educational studies program worth the name, what educational wisdom might they be learning through their abundant parental labors? (Such questions can be posed intrusively to individuals, of course, but I am not suggesting that; as discussion questions, they need not and should not be posed intrusively.) Doubtless some of you have felt little need to ask such questions because you have worked through such challenges yourselves and know how difficult they can get, but I have not confronted them myself, because (much to my regret) I have never been a mother. As a doctoral student, I conducted philosophical and literary case studies of mothering as educating, partly with a view toward my own future motherhood. But watching my female peers in such circumstances, I could never see my way past such hard questions to envision myself even capable of working through them adequately while a doctoral student, while an assistant or associate professor. Therefore, I confess a personal disposition to admire the chutzpah and ingenuity of graduate-student mothers.

After witnessing my step-daughter’s childbearing and childrearing through nearly a decade of scientific doctoral work at a major research university, a mighty and sometimes desperate but ever resourceful struggle even with my son-in-law’s 100% collaboration and remarkable parental talents raising my grand-daughter, now aged six, I resolved to open Pandora’s Box by asking what our student-parents in educational studies are going through here in Oklahoma. Graduate students specializing in educational women’s and gender studies have gathered together over all the above loaded questions this summer around a table at our local free public library’s children’s section. Their children, of both sexes, range from the age of five months to the age of military deployment in Iraq, and some students are not yet parents, but hope someday to bear and raise children of their own without sacrificing their intellectual and professional development in order to do so. They are themselves diverse in age, race, national origin, marital status, sexual orientation, and economic circumstances, and (because they do need to feed and shelter their children) most are employed full-time as educators of various sorts while attending graduate school and raising their children.

In response to my questions, I got an earful that I cannot divulge without IRB approval for such communication; that is why I enjoin you to find a way to ask these same sorts questions of your students, so that you can compare what you find out with what scholar-mothers are writing on Inside Higher Ed’s MAMA PhD blog by, about, and for “Mothers attempting to balance parenthood and academics." Lest you wonder at the practical or theoretical significance of such informal and internet inquiries with your students, one graduate student-mother of two, Robin Stroud, has referred me to an interesting University of Victoria dissertation (1997--old but probably not yet outdated) in Communication and Social Foundations, Breaking the Silence: Toward a Theory of Women’s Doctoral Persistence, by Roberta-Ann Kerlin, a qualitative study of electronic mail transcripts and face-to-face interviews, whose fifth chapter reports of her research subjects that “To be seen and accepted as serious scholars in the academic milieu, where motherhood has a negative status, required them to make a cognitive shift in which one’s primary identity as a woman was displaced with a newly emerging identity as a scholar. This identity shift gave rise to internal conflict and was manifested in the strained and sometimes estranged relations the women experienced with their families. . . . This reshaping of their identities in a way that devalued this fundamental aspect of who they were contributed significantly to the ambivalence the women felt toward academe as an institution.” Yes, I know! There is essentialism here, but so what? The alienating conflicts reported are deeply felt nonetheless, with consequences for women’s doctoral persistence.

Even without IRB approval, I think I can safely tell you that graduate-student mothers in the University of Oklahoma’s College of Education are no strangers to Barb’s theory-practice puppy. At the Society for Educating Women’s inaugural conference in the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in May 2008, one student leader within the Oklahoma group, Kara Morgan, a toddler's mother, had presented a carefully conceptualized survey of theoretical literature on mothers’ learning; a new mother, Maria Laubach, had presented her study of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s theory of pedagogical mothering in German; and yet another mother of three, Julie Davis, had presented her study of Black lesbian-feminist Audre Lorde’s theorizing about maternal teaching, specifically with regard to her thought on educative vs. miseducative anger. A couple of them had read Jane Roland Martin’s Coming of Age in Academe (2000) and recognized this informal summer gathering at the public library as what Martin, following the Swedes, had named a “fika,” a gathering for both mutual support and problem-solving. Meanwhile one schoolteacher-mother of two teenagers, Kristen Holzer, had presented her formulation of lesbian-feminist mother-poet Adrienne Rich’s thought on coeducation, and therefore urged the group to study together Rich’s classic 1975 essay in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1979)—“Toward a Woman-Centered University”—because it lays out an agenda for what this group calls “family-friendly” campus development.

Now in legal process of non-profit incorporation as the Oklahoma Mothers and Educators Collaborative (with guidance from a graduate student who presented her feminist-ethical critique of legal education at the Hull-House conference, Virginia Henson), this group has articulated its mission, begun designing a website, embarked upon research on other universities’ family-friendly features (which have turned out mostly to target faculty, not students) and upon possible partnerships with various Student Life administrators including one non-mother student in the group, Johnnie-Margaret McConnell, and the university’s Women’s Outreach Center. They are planning what they hope will be a schedule of children’s meals, homework help, and artistic, aesthetic, and athletic activities during their evening class times, over which student interns and retired persons may preside; this means they are wrestling with hard questions about safety, insurance, and the like in order to realize their vision of what they want for their children. But they believe that an educational studies program’s student parents can make the college of education a vital locus of cultural creativity, initiative, and leadership for educational programming that can benefit graduate students’ children across the university as well as women’s persistence to graduate-degree completion and education students’ professional learning. Realistically and collaboratively, they are starting small, doing only what they can, one step at a time.

How do busy student-parents find time for such activity? They find time for it because it offers them a supportive community of friends who are going through similar parental and academic struggles as well as opportunities to transform practical obstacles to their graduate studies into subject matter for their scholarly study. This activity is part of their apprenticeship for the educational studies professoriate, through which they are learning how to theorize, initiate, organize, and lead transformative professional service for social justice—for policy changes and new programs of educational value. Indeed one member of the group, Pam Harjo, a mother whose graduate assistantship concerns service to a department committee for graduate recruitment, is showing the group how their work may serve that interest no less than their own needs as student-parents. Meanwhile, the problems to which this group’s members are giving their attention pose many questions worthy of philosophical, historical, and sociological research on childrearing, higher education, and women’s & gender studies. Moreover, they could learn much from those of you who have learned how to survive the juggling act that they are now attempting—and from your students who are also parents. Contact: mothers.educators@gmail.com.