Teaching, for me, has been largely impacted by the digital culture of my upbringing. I can still remember learning how to type and code on monochrome desktop computers as a child that felt so advanced at the time, but are now considered antiquated. I think about my educational experiences, now and can honestly say I was equally impacted by the good and bad experiences I had as a student. However, too often I have encountered pre-service teachers who are drawn to education by the trappings of re-creating/writing their own educational histories for their future students; instead of reimagining what classrooms could be, they want to know what classrooms should be. I talk about my childhood memories with those ancient computers and ask my students to consider what my classroom would be like if I assumed my students had the same backgrounds and understandings as I did when I was a student. Throughout my courses, I try to model new potentialities in the English classroom by using multiple forms of texts, including video, podcasts, and digital texts that honor various modalities and ways of learning. Whether it is exploring a new digital tool or lesson planning alternative reading or writing assessments, my hope is that students begin shifting their dispositions and challenging their own strongly held beliefs by relying less on their memory of what it was like for them in middle and high school and consider who their future secondary will be and what they will need.
As a professor of English Education, I see my role as one of the quiet disruptor, pushing up against my students beliefs and preconceived notions in order to challenge and open them up to new ways of approaching education. However, I work hard to ensure that my voice is simply one of the panoply of thoughts and ideas that are shared within the classroom. I explain that every single student in my class has a responsibility to their classmates to bring in their perspective. While I explain that I have a level of expertise, my experiences as a teacher have informed my current approach to education, which will likely differ from my students’ current and future experiences in the classroom. As such, I always welcome honest and respectful dissenting views and ask that my students welcome these challenges as well.
Like the internet, distributed knowledge is critical for allowing preservice teachers to share thoughts and to establish a culture where students know that they learn from everyone in our shared learning space. I explain to my students that the room is always smarter than the individual, so we spend significant time crowd sourcing ideas in order to model teacher communities where our preservice teachers learn to work with other professionals and to share their new ideas. Rather than taking a “do it yourself” approach, I model a “do it ourselves” method that adopts a traditional hacker ethic of doing and thinking something different together.
My courses are predicated on three big ideas: 1) Be brave 2) Take risks 3) Think like a teacher. All three tenets require a stark balance between creativity and logical rationales for pedagogical decision. But, more than anything, it forces pre-service teachers to consider what it means to be a teacher who puts the interests and needs of students first. In order to do this, I consider my classroom to be the mixture of a sandbox and a mad scientist’s laboratory. Pre-service teachers play and tinker with digital tools that force them to think of their future classrooms beyond the four walls of their schools. At any given time, students might be going on scavenger hunts across campus, traveling into space using a green screen, establishing their expert teacher voice using podcasts, or partaking in annotation flash mobs online. The secret to these activities is to make something seemingly outlandish for our preservice teachers’ current field placements seem practical, valuable, and doable. Although I work hard to provide students with the foundational theory and praxis they will need, I caution students that best practices are safe practices. Students need to believe that something else is possible than what they see in many of their mentor teachers’ classrooms. The future of English education will likely be determined, not by me, but by the students who leave my classroom to inherit their own secondary spaces. My responsibility is not to innovate the field of English education, rather to support pre-service teachers who one day will.