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Amy Price Azano, Ph.D.
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Digital Demands in Rural Schools: #InstitutionalPlacism

3/21/2014

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First published on SmartBlog on Education
Assign a virtual tour of late 19th century Nigeria to prepare for “Things Fall Apart.” Plan a web quest through Auschwitz for “Night.” Use Instagram to document personal odysseys. Text during literature circles. Create Facebook profiles for a character analysis project. Co-author on Google Docs. Publish on wikis and blogs. Tweet as a modern day Romeo: Just met this girl Juliet #Loveatfirstsight. There are countless creative examples of using technology in meaningful ways in the classroom, and — with an inundation of media messages in a flatter world — educators are attempting to respond to digital demands which have made their way into the standards. Last year, for example, Virginia added “media literacy” as a strand in its Standards of Learning for English Language Arts. But what does the press for digital literacy instruction mean for rural schools that might struggle with furnishing resources such as laptops and tablets or basic internet access?

In addition to limited financial resources in rural schools, low population density coupled with topographical barriers in remote rural areas present challenges for broadband service providers, and many rural communities struggle to secure reliable high-speed internet. Education policy that ignores the contextual realities for rural communities results in “placism” or the bias against people based on the virtue of their place. Laws and policies mandating digital literacy instruction is an example of this discriminatory placism.

I was recently asked to provide professional development on the media literacy standards for a rural Appalachian school district. I met with administrators and teachers who asked: How can we meet media standards when we don’t have access to media? The high-school teachers explained they share one laptop cart, do not have internet access and few students have smartphones; therefore, teachers cannot regularly integrate technology into their lesson plans. My answer surprised them: You can teach students digital literacy skills without technology.

A careful look at the standards illustrates this point. Digital literacy has been defined in many different ways but, in basic terms, a digitally-literate person strategically uses technologies to evaluate information, connect, collaborate, create and share content. We can remain passive consumers of information if we are watching TV or reading the newspaper. Reading the newspaper online does not make one digitally literate. Rather, digital literacy connotes an interaction or relationship with technology as a tool or expression. As a literacy skill, we need students to analyze and examine media messages. They need to evaluate sources, differentiate between fact and opinion, determine purpose, and identify rhetorical devices used in those messages. Ideally, this instruction would occur while students are engaging with digital tools to create products. However, we can teach students critical digital literacy skills even when the actual technology for doing so is limited.

In rural classrooms, students can critically consider how their lives are contextualized by place. If rural students have limited access to digital spaces, do they have greater access to natural ones that perhaps those in other environments do not have? How do these different spaces — real or virtual — shape our knowledge of the world? We need to teach students to communicate effectively in any medium, to read critically and to investigate the space between the message and the context in which it is being created and shared. Even without access to certain technologies, rural adolescents are still plugged in to popular culture, but it’s a fallacy to assume that all young people are digital natives. Too often we describe rural places in deficit terms, but an affinity for rurality does not mean we ignore the contextual realities of students coming from geographically disparate or economically disadvantaged communities or shrug our shoulders at policies that reinscribe institutional placism. All students should have digital access, but funding inequalities do exist and for many rural schools, technology is one area where this is clearly evident.

And, yet, digital literacy is a needed skill for adolescents and part of the world for which they need to be prepared. The digital tools will evolve so knowing how to master any one in particular is not necessarily teaching students to be digitally literate. Rather, they need to understand how messages can be manipulated and to recognize rhetorical devices inherent in media messages. For example, English and social studies teachers can capitalize on curricular opportunities, such as teaching students about propaganda (e.g., lessons about the Holocaust, “Animal Farm” and “1984″), to teach critical literacy skills which can then translate from literature into the digital world. And in learning about rhetoric and bias, rural students can consider placism and how in areas with limited access or tough terrain the digital divide might be more fully bridged.

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Glocalized Learning: What's Relevant in the Rural World 

2/15/2014

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First published by SmartBlog on Education 2/14/2014 http://smartblogs.com/education
The mission statement of the Common Core State Standards concludes: “With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.” I wonder in an effort to create global citizens if the premise of this mission isn’t flawed. Using similar language, the U.S. Department of Education states its goal of preparing students for “global competitiveness,” but surely global competition is not the same thing as teaching students to engage globally. Instead, imagine a mission statement that ends: With all students fully prepared with an understanding of the past, an engagement with the present and a plan for the future, our local communities will be best positioned to participate humanistically and responsibly in the global community. The standards are designed to be “relevant to the real world” — so what does that mean anymore, especially when your “real world” seems completely ignored by the global economy, as is often the case for rural communities? We’ve all read the bumper sticker: “Think Globally, Act Locally.” Perhaps this should be our rallying cry for globalized, or rather glocalized, education? We can develop students’ critical-literacy skills, connecting learning first to a student’s sense of place then using the immediacy of home to connect to more global issues.

There is a lot of rhetoric about globalized learning, but why do we have blind acceptance of this notion? An eye toward the broad aim of schooling and civics education for a global community makes sense, but, rather than a competitive, ethnocentric stance, we can engender a worldview in students — and place-based pedagogy can help us do that. We can teach students how to be glocal, focusing on globalized learning without sacrificing what’s important on a local level.

In January this year, some 300,000 West Virginia residents suffered without water after a massive chemical spill that has yet to be resolved environmentally or politically. But chemical spills are nothing new for West Virginia – what’s new and news is that the rest of the country heard about it. Just two weeks ago we saw the third largest coal ash spill in North Carolina. There have been 40 years of mountaintop mining with multiple studies reporting devastating human health impacts, yet every time I mention mountaintop removal, people outside of rural Appalachia seem surprised — despite the fact that half of the country’s electricity comes from coal. In fact, land area in some counties — such as the 40% in Wise County, Va. — have been decimated by surface mining. Rural counties in Pennsylvania have incurred social and economic costs due to fracking; yet, there seems to be a relatively quiet response to these rural realities, despite their far-reaching economic and environmental consequences. Oh, and never mind the damage done socially and politically by “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Deliverance,” and the countless redneck jokes circulating in popular media.

So, forgive me if I roll my eyes when I hear terms like globalized education. Glocalized learning, by contrast, allows us to help students forge connections between local and global understandings. Place-based education provides familiar footing, inviting students to use their home knowledge to foster connections to a curriculum that might otherwise seem impersonal and irrelevant.

Take, for example, “The Book Thief,” by Markus Zusak who uniquely positions Death as the narrator in a story about the Holocaust. While adolescent readers may or may not know someone who is Jewish or German or Polish or European, they do likely understand the notion of mortality. In teaching about the Holocaust or World War II in a social studies or language arts classroom, teachers can use novels like “The Book Thief” or “Night” as “glocal” texts, asking students critical place questions, such as: Who from our community fought in the war? Where did they fight? Do we have living veterans in our community? Do we have a Jewish population in our community? Why or why not? What populations have been discriminated against, marginalized or harmfully targeted in this community? How is that similar to (or dissimilar from) other instances of oppression? The novel then becomes a personally relevant place text serving as a scaffold to distant places in time and space.

When teachers draw on students’ understanding of place and local knowledge, students become the curricular experts. They also become engaged! Consider the chemistry, earth science, economics and civics lessons derived from considering the future of coal or understanding the impacts of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (or crude MCHM) into the local river. This notion of grounding learning in local phenomena creates opportunities for students to engage at a local level as a scaffold to reach more global perspectives on the same topic, understanding chemistry and water politics at home before understanding how those disciplines are contextualized in different countries. Again, teachers can use critical place questions to cultivate learning: What do these “outside” places have in common with my place? How do the different communities respond to disasters? What established infrastructure assists residents in need? What are the politics influencing natural resources in other places? How are these similar to or different from my community?

Maybe we can amend the bumper sticker: “Learn Locally, Act Glocally” to communicate the importance of our home communities as part of the global economy. We do not learn how to be global citizens. We are born global citizens. The role of schools should teach students how to engage in that citizenry and use our membership responsibly at all levels — at home and places farther away.

Amy Price Azano is a professor of adolescent literacy at Virginia Tech. Follow her on Twitter @ruralprof.

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"The Hunger Games" - Catching fire in rural schools

1/9/2014

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First published by SmartBlog on Education  1/6/14  https://smartblogs.com/education

As a professor of adolescent literacy, few things make me more hopeful than witnessing tweens and teens waiting outside in the cold for tickets to the newest release of a movie based on a young adult novel. And so it was with the release of “Catching Fire,” the second of four movies based on “The Hunger Games” series by Suzanne Collins. My own precocious tween reader was among them! The self-proclaimed “Harry Potter freak” begged for permission to read the books a full year before the Mom-imposed acceptable age. We read and discussed the first novel together. She questioned the Capitol, examined the absurdity of a dystopian society, considered why hunger was used as a means of oppression, and she admired the protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, who volunteered as a tribute for the hunger games. As she constructed knowledge from the text and her inquiry, I realized how fitting a novel this was for use across disciplines, including social studies, science, language arts, agriculture, etc.

Upon completing the first novel, we curled up on the couch for the movie and within minutes of watching Katniss hunt in the woods surrounding her home, my daughter said, astonished: “I didn’t realize we live in District 12.” There it was, my rural learner who has grown up in the shadows of the Allegheny mountains made a “place-to-text” connection! Katniss explains early in the first novel that “District 12 was in a region known as Appalachia,” but it wasn’t until my daughter saw the images of “mountains like ours” that she connected Katniss’ home to ours in the Appalachian region of Southwest Virginia.

While educational challenges in rural schools are well-documented — geographic isolation, limited resources, funding — rural students often enjoy a richness of community, extended family living nearby, the passing down of stories and traditions and a connectedness to the land. This rural lifeworld contextualizes their experiences and creates a place identity for students, a lens through which they come to know and understand their worlds. Katniss knows this rural lifeworld. She grew up in a tight-knit community with intimate knowledge of the natural world, and a unique understanding of norms and expectations. Her sense of place is her greatest strength.

While many rural teachers intuit how to use place-based pedagogy to engage readers, few can justify using what they may perceive as “creative” strategies to motivate students, especially in an era of high-stakes tests and time consuming Common Core State Standards. Dewey, however, argued that an education should deepen and extend what students already know. Therefore, Collins’ trilogy presents an opportunity for teachers to use a popular, engaging novel in the language-arts classroom as a scaffold for more complex, canonical texts, to forge meaningful connections with the curriculum, and to have students think critically about the ways rural people and places are depicted in popular media.

Tapping into a student’s sense of place can serve as a powerful critical literacy tool in the classroom, teaching students how to read the word and “their world.” This notion of political-literacy instruction, made popular by the work of Paulo Freire, is ever important for rural learners. A critical stance toward rurality is vital for the sustainability of rural communities, and the onus is not just on rural educators and students but on society at large. Urban and suburban students are waiting outside in the cold for tickets, too; after all, sustainability issues like mountain top removal and fracking have huge implications for rural communities but they are nonetheless national energy, environmental and economic issues.

Katniss didn’t need the hunger games to understand how District 12 was being exploited; however, we may need this trilogy to incorporate place and rurality as part of a critical and culturally-responsive literacy pedagogy for all students. Despite reports telling us that adolescents can’t or don’t read, they do crave relevance in the curriculum, and place-based pedagogy can strengthen students’ personal connections to what might otherwise seem irrelevant. We need not replace the canon with young adult novels, but rather invite students to debate the symbolism of “mockingbirds” in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “mockingjays” in Collins’ novels, all the while asking them to consider how place influences their reading of those texts, their own sense of place and ultimately, what are the mockingbirds and mockingjays in our own communities.

Place-based strategies at work:

“The Hunger Games” trilogy provides teachers with an ideal opportunity to wed an engaging and popular young adult novel with a rural heroine to an English curriculum that might seem otherwise irrelevant. The heroes of District 12 hail from “a region known as Appalachia,” and the young adult series provides educators with opportunities to teach students critical literacy skills as they consider place and explore how rurality is depicted in popular media. Consider using the critical questions below to guide instruction.

P: People & Politics:

Who are the people in my place? How are these people portrayed? Who makes decisions about my place?

L: Life & Literacy:

What is it like to live in my place? What discourse communities am I part of? Which ones am I not part of? What are the literacies and critical literacies needed in my place?

A: Access & Affect:

How does my place afford or hinder my access to other places or spaces? How do I feel about my place? How do others feel about it?

C: Community & Citizenship:

What does it mean to be part of the collective consciousness of my place? What does it mean to be a citizen here? What did it mean to be a “good citizen”?

E: Engagement

How do I engage with my place? Am I an agent of change? What questions do I need to explore to become critically engaged now and in the future?

Place connections

Place: Self connections

What is my own sense of place? Students can describe their own discourse communities. What are the words of our community? Who keeps them? Who tells our story to the outside world?

Place: Text connections

How does Katniss represent District 12 as a tribute? How was Katniss or other characters portrayed? What evidence do we have to suggest that she had a special, critical knowledge of the people and spaces in her place?

Place: World connections

How is my place perceived? What is happening in my place that has implications for other places (e.g., coalmining)? Which decisions, policies, practices made about my place have implications for my community?

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    Rural Places

    Rural advocate. Autism Mom. Writer. Assistant Professor of Adolescent Literacy.

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