student voice – Page 3 – Sylvia Libow Martinez

December 7, 2011

Infographic: Understanding a Diverse Generation: Youth Civic Engagement in the United States

From the CIRCLE website:

“A new CIRCLE study, “Understanding a Diverse Generation: Youth Civic Engagement in the United States,” shatters stereotypes and dispels conventional myths about the ways in which young people ages 18-29 are involved in the United States political system.

The study from THE CENTER FOR INFORMATION & RESEARCH ON CIVIC LEARNING AND ENGAGEMENT – CIRCLE uses U.S. Census data on young voters from across the United States and compares youth engagement in the 2008 and 2010 election cycles. Despite the over-simplified portrayal of young Americans in the news media, their political engagement is diverse. The study shows that at least three quarters of youth were somehow engaged in their community or in politics in both 2008 and 2010. But they engaged in very different ways. The key finding of the study is that young Americans were divided into six distinct patterns of engagement in recent years. In 2010, the clusters were:

The Broadly Engaged (21% of youth) fill many different leadership roles
The Political Specialists (18%) are focused on voting and other forms of political activism
The Donors (11%) give money but do little else;
The Under-Mobilized (14%) were registered to vote in 2010 but did not actually vote or participate actively
The Talkers (13%) report discussing political issues and are avid communicators online, but do not take action otherwise
The Civically Alienated (23%) hardly engage at all.”

Sylvia

October 26, 2011

Teacher Training, Taught by Students

“In a role reversal, Ms. O’Bryant and other teachers at Brick Avon Academy are getting pointers from their students this year as part of an unusual teacher training program at 19 low-performing Newark schools.

The lesson learned by Ms. O’Bryant? “It makes you think about really hearing the kids,” she said. “You can learn from them. They have their own language.”

The training program, which is supported by a federal grant, is being run by the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, a nonprofit group based in Syosset, N.Y. During a daylong workshop, teachers were instructed by the group’s trainer, Eyka Stephens, to watch their students teach mock lessons, study their methods and language, and discuss together what works (and what does not).” (Read more…)

Why does this work? It’s not because the kids are delivering the content better – it’s because of the sense of community and collaboration that’s developed as the learner/teacher roles blur.

Sylvia

September 23, 2011

Drama! Why adult concepts of cyberbullying don’t mesh with teens

It’s an unimaginable tragedy for any person to commit suicide. It’s a family’s worst nightmare and a problem that society must address. In recent months, more and more news stories are surfacing about very young people committing suicide and tying the cause to bullying, especially in online environments – cyberbullying.

Campaigns have started to find ways to reach youth with media and school anti-bullying programs. Of course people want to do the right thing. Of course adults want to help young people. But what really does help?

Alice Marwick and danah boyd, both highly respected social media and youth researchers wrote an op-ed for the New York Times today – Why Cyberbullying Rhetoric Misses the Mark

It’s based on a new paper – The Drama! Teen Conflict, Gossip, and Bullying in Networked Publics

You should read these, both of them. Why? Because the authors talked to teens, and listened. For six years. Across all kinds of kids, all kinds of socio-economic groups and geography. What they heard was that teens do not use the same language as adults. What an adult might label “bullying”, teens call “drama.” And in the paper, the authors distill what that means and how it plays out in real life (both online and off.)

It’s not just a different word for the same thing. The authors listened to youth about the motivation – why would teens engage in drama? What do they get out of it? It’s a fascinating read.

One of the big takeaways for me was the relationship of adult bullying solutions to the issues of youth agency. When we ask young people to accept adult definitions and solutions to the problems of their lives, adults often ignore the fact that this is asking them to put a label on themselves. If you are being bullied and adults tell you “tell an adult”, it’s meant as a friendly, supportive gesture. However, for a young person, that means first accepting that they are a victim. This is a big ask for a young person building their own identity.

I hope you take the time to read both the article and the full paper. They are worth it!

Sylvia

Paper Abstract: While teenage conflict is nothing new, today’s gossip, jokes, and arguments often play out through social media like Formspring, Twitter, and Facebook. Although adults often refer to these practices with the language of “bullying,” teens are more likely to refer to the resultant skirmishes and their digital traces as “drama.” Drama is a performative set of actions distinct from bullying, gossip, and relational aggression, incorporating elements of them but also operating quite distinctly. While drama is not particularly new, networked dynamics reconfigure how drama plays out and what it means to teens in new ways. In this paper, we examine how American teens conceptualize drama, its key components, participant motivations for engaging in it, and its relationship to networked technologies. Drawing on six years of ethnographic fieldwork, we examine what drama means to teenagers and its relationship to visibility and privacy. We argue that the emic use of “drama” allows teens to distance themselves from practices which adults may conceptualize as bullying. As such, they can retain agency – and save face – rather than positioning themselves in a victim narrative. Drama is a gendered process that perpetrates conventional gender norms. It also reflects discourses of celebrity, particularly the mundane interpersonal conflict found on soap operas and reality television. For teens, sites like Facebook allow for similar performances in front of engaged audiences. Understanding how “drama” operates is necessary to recognize teens’ own defenses against the realities of aggression, gossip, and bullying in networked publics.

August 25, 2011

iPlay no more? Has childhood play been changed by technology?

I recently ran across this interesting study, Children’s Playground Games and Songs in the New Media Age (PDF). Honestly, I don’t remember where or how it came up, but it was one of those things that I had no idea people even studied formally, but once reading it, seemed impossible not to want to know more.

It’s a wonderful antidote to some of the silly pronouncements of late that childhood is “toxic”, that children have no capacity for real play anymore, and of couse pointing to technology as the ogre in this sad myth.

However, this study disputes those claims.

“Needless to say, serious research in this field has usually discovered the opposite. Our own project, found that play was alive and well, more diverse in some respects than ever, and drawing on resources which had both a long historical lineage as well as ones from contemporary media cultures.”

This is really a fascinating study, with a website with digital recordings, ethnographic studies, collections of the games, a documentary film, and interestingly, a panel of youth who provided input and commentary on the study.

Hope you read it!

Sylvia

August 9, 2011

Back to School 2011 – Empowering students starts today

Here are a number of “back to school” posts collected in one place!

What tech vision will you share?
What message does your Acceptable Use Policy send when it goes home with students for them and their parents to sign? Try reading it with fresh eyes and change overly complex, negative language to language that celebrates the potential of technology – and students.

Games for collaboration and teamwork
Want to create a more collaborative, constructivist classroom? Instead of traditional icebreakers, try these games that encourage collaboration and teamwork.

What do students want from teachers?
Listen to what students say they really want from teachers. And no, it’s not “more recess.”

Student technology leadership teams for laptop schools
Are you getting more devices this year? Laptops, iPads, iTouches, netbooks or going 1:1? Do you have enough tech support? Enough support for teachers using new technology? Enough support for students? No? Well then learn how students can be a great resource in laptop schools to ease the burden on overworked teachers and IT staff – and mentor other students. Genius bar, anyone?

Student-led conferences
Traditional parent-teacher conferences leave the most important person in the learning equation out in the cold. Find out how schools around the world are using student-led conferences to put the learner back in the loop.

Ten commandments of tech support
Ten ideas for making technology support more learner-centered and less network-centered.

Start the year off with hands on
Think you need to wait for kids to settle down and learn the basics before you let them do projects and hands-on work? Not according to this expert teacher.

Last but by far not least, if you are looking for some inspiration to post on your wall, here’s 8 Big Ideas of the Constructionist Learning Lab. These eight ideas give actionable advice to create opportunities for deep learning for all.

Happy back to school!

Sylvia

May 11, 2011

Must read! The Real Change Agents

A must-read blog post from Ryan Bretag – The Real Change Agents

Their voices are key; they are an essential stakeholder that we can no longer afford to have adults as the sole speaker on their behalf. Students deserve their own voice especially if we are going to continue saying it is about them.

In fact, here is my hard-line: stop saying it is about the students if you haven’t asked the students what they need, what they want, and what is the reality of their world. Just say it is about you or the school and what you find relevant. If you are okay with that, great.

Personally, I’m not.

Seriously, read this… The Real Change Agents

Sylvia

March 13, 2011May 28, 2017

Students co-author the learning experience

It’s so great to have a string of stories about the positive impact of student technology teams in schools.

It’s tech time at Capital High – Generation Tech lets students become ‘co-authors of learning experience’

The Olympia School District was where Generation YES founder Dr. Dennis Harper settled in about 1990 after working around the world to bring computers to schools in countries from Africa to Afghanistan. He became the technology director and found a school district that wanted to be first class in technology, but had little to start with. He dug in and got started by involving students in every aspect of the district technology – from planning, to getting out the vote for a technology bond, to putting up a district website when no one even knew what that was.

One of the teachers he immediately started to work with was Scott LeDuc at Capital High School. Today Scott is still at Capital, still working with students to make “student-centered learning” a reality. This article profiles Scott and his students who work every day to make education better.

Today’s young people have grown up in a society that revolves around technology.

Want to talk? Send them a text message on their cell phone.

Want to see who their friends are? Visit Facebook.

Want to remove photos from your digital camera and fix that annoying printer error on your computer? Give them about five minutes, and they’ll probably be able to figure out and explain everything to you.

Their teen years are so much different from those of their parents and grandparents, and that’s why students in Capital High School’s Generation Tech class are exploring ways to change their learning experiences, too.

For example, several of the students have begun serving as “technology mentors” at the school, helping teachers and other staff members become more tech-savvy, according to Career and Technical Education instructor Scott Le Duc.

“Education is not going to change fast enough for anyone,” he said. “The only way it’s going to change is if students become the co-authors of the learning experience.”

Read this article – it’s not about technology, it’s about life-long learning…

Although students have access to some of the newest high-tech bells and whistles in their classroom laboratory, much of their growth is taking place outside the class, where students are serving as information resources for others, helping to locate computer support and projects for their teachers and peers, Le Duc said.

“They blow my mind; this group of young people is just awesome,” he said. “They want to see school change, and they’re making it happen.”

Scott authored the GenYES curriculum units on student tech support based on his experiences at Capital High School and years of teaching students how to “learn how to learn” by fixing real problems. Students don’t learn by being talked at – they learn by tackling challenging problems and issues that are meaningful and DOING something about them. And of course, teachers amplify the learning when they guide students through these types of experiences with expertise.

As one of the commenters on the article said – WAY TO GO, COUGARS!

Sylvia

March 10, 2011May 28, 2017

Syracuse here we come!

I’m heading to Syracuse, New York next week to keynote the March ITD TALK series at the Central New York Regional Information Center (CNYRIC) on March 17, 2011. We have a really special day planned for all the attendees, because after my talk, there will be presentations by students and teachers from local GenYES and TechYES schools.

So if you are in the area and want to see student technology leadership and literacy in action, be sure to register and come by! I’ll be setting it up in the morning talking about how we must expand our narrow view of technology professional development to include more than one shot, one-size-fits-all, “sit and get” sessions.

GenYES and TechYES in Action
Teachers and students from Jamesville DeWitt High School and Baldwinsville’s Ray Middle School will be on-hand to discuss their experiences with the GenYES and TechYES programs in their respective schools. GenYES is the only student-centered research-based solution for school-wide technology integration. Students work with teachers to design technology-infused lessons and provide tech support. In TechYES, students show technology literacy by creating projects that meet state and local technology proficiency requirements. As part of TechYES, a structured peer-mentoring program assists the teacher or advisor, and provides student leadership opportunities that serve to further strengthen the program and enrich the learning community.

Hope to see you there!

Sylvia