Category: teachers

Heading to GLS

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It’s August and I wonder where the summer went. gls_logoBut I’m excited that it’s time for GLS — the annual Games, Learning, and Society conference at UW-Madison. I’m looking forward to catching up with old friends, meeting new people, and learning about what games everyone’s playing and how they’re planning to incorporate Pokemon Go into various learning spaces. I’m especially looking forward to talking with as many teachers as I can. Bringing digital media and DIY sensibilities into classrooms in meaningful ways can be tough, particularly for K-12 teachers who work under intense assessment regimes, and I want to be able to share recent work with my teacher-candidate students.

So: especially if you’re a teacher who is thinking in similar ways, please come join me, Debbie Fields, and Jayne Lammers for our workshop session “Designing for DIY: Presenting Tensions, Lessons, and Questions to Guide Innovative Learning Environments.” Here’s the session link for more info. We’re planning to share experiences from our own efforts to bring various digital media explorations into our classes. We’d love to hear about yours, and we want to think about how we might consolidate these experiences into larger principles, research questions, or agendas. Join us!

Coding for English Teachers

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My students learning to use hex tables to create color on the web.
My students learning to use hex tables to create color on the web. They did it!

When you’re building research in digital literacies, it often is very useful to be married to a coder. Chris often helps me think about the perspective of someone who works in the industry and whether what I’m thinking about teaching might actually be useful for students — either immediately or at some point in the future.

Recently, he came in to help me teach my students about coding. All of the folks in this class are English teachers, reading and writing specialists, or headed into pre-service English teaching internships. To say the least, many of them were highly skeptical. They weren’t sure whether they could code, first of all, or whether they wanted to learn. What relevance does code have to teaching reading and writing?Read More »

#walkmyworld: Identity

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For this past week’s #walkmyworld, I spent a long time thinking about various possibilities and events for sharing. I’ve been many different people over the course of becoming the professor I am today, but I’ve thought of myself as a teacher for many years. My first teaching gig was as a teenager, when I taught horseback riding. When I abandoned my original graduate school plans to study education policy — by writing an undergrad thesis, I had learned exactly how much I disliked reading and writing that kind of research — I went with something that felt plausible, comfortable, familiar. I decided to become an English teacher.

harvest-manipIt sounds too easy when I tell the story like that, though.

One thing I’ve found is that there’s very few people have easy, straightforward career stories. In the midst of this unrelenting winter, my methods students have been interviewing for their full-year certification internships. As they jump into planning their own careers as teachers, I can see the tension rising. They’re seniors, soon to be graduate students, and they want to know that their plans will resolve into solidity, too, eventually. So, I’ve been trying to talk through my own life more often. It’s complicated, even in hindsight, and I have to laugh at myself.Read More »