It is only day eight and I am overwhelmed by the comment challenge. I dropped the ball sometime around day five or six. This is embarrassing because I don’t even have a job, but not only have I not written a quick post highlighting the lessons I am learning by commenting, I am not even commenting. I am not sure if I even have the energy to make excuses. So let me catch up:
Day Five-Comment on a post you disagree with and Day Six- Comment to engage in conversation:
I left the following comment on The Science Bench. For personal reasons, I am very passionate about the idea of professionalism and online identities:
This idea of how teaches should or shouldn’t act online seems to be a popular topic these days, and one that I am personally very familiar with. I was recently asked to resign from a private international school because of a parent complaint about material on my Flickr page. Unlike the teachers from the Washington Post article, I feel I have a good grasp of what is on my various sites. I keep a clean Facebook. I actually invited parents to view my personal blog because I wanted them to have a fuller picture of who was teaching their kids; this brings me to my point:
I am a language arts teacher who is very interested in using technology and Web 2.0 in my classroom as a tool for student self expression. I use these tools myself as an artist, a writer, a photographer, and amateur filmmaker, and as a human being, so what happens if I don’t do anything “stupid” online, but a parent still finds fault with my taste in books, my politics, or religious views. I am an atheist, should I hide this fact to the world, even while I teach my students to be open minded about people’s religious beliefs. What do teachers who do not use these tools tell their students when asked, “Do you have a Youtube page, or do you have a Flickr page?|
It is one thing to judge young teachers who are being flagrantly “inappropriate” online, but who decides where the line is to be drawn. I am a grown adult who loves teaching, loves kids, and loves what I do. I don’t want to have to hide who I am because some parents may think that I am inappropriate. My point is that there will always be someone who doesn’t like who you are and what you stand for, so how do teachers who feel are doing right by their online identities react to being told to be careful, or worse to not engage in online activity.
I have lost my job and have since been re-thinking my stance on all of these questions, but I know that the day of the teacher being a robot of professionalism is dying. Teachers like all professions are made up of eclectic people; we should celebrate this diversity, rather than forcing the educators of our children to be forced into some strange homogeneous fake world of conservative expectations.
I teach my kids to use Web 2.0 to create, share, exchange, and build networks, how can I not be doing that myself…as myself?
Day Seven- What have you learn do far:
I have learned that I don’t like the pressure of this challenge. I am not sure if staying on schedule is good for the quality of my comments and subsequent blog posts. Take this last post for example. I was looking for a blog with which to disagree; I am not sure how natural this process is. I do, however, see the value in keeping these lessons with me as I move beyond this challenge.
The most important lesson I have learned early on, is that commenting is the most important activity for establishing and fostering online relationships, which will only strengthen one’s network. I have already met several bloggers with whom I am regularly interacting with on my blog and twitter, simply because we exchanged a few comments.
I hope that I will continue to comment frequently when the pressure of this challenge has subsided. I am off to find a blog outside of my niche. I’ll let you know how that went.
Jabiz,
Heartbreaking to think someone with your passion and range of talents would be removed from a teaching position for your Flickr page content. I hope it is just because there is someplace that will fully embrace who you are just around the corner.
This is my second challenge. I do the daily thing for about three days, then branch off and do my thing. I get to the tasks, but it is very much in my own time. I frequently have to think about them and how they will impact my day to day interaction with my blog and others. I’m not looking to check off the task, but to really consider how it might work for me, or not.
That said, I do get a lot of value from watching others process and doing as much as I can in my own way.
Guess artists just have to be creative?
Jabiz,
My question is: How much of yourself is appropriate to reveal to students?
I agree that you need to be yourself, I agree that we (as educators) need to demonstrate diversity, I agree that we need to be individuals and revel in our passions as role models for our students. However, I disagree that we should share everything we are with impressionable students. I think we need to think before we speak and post – both in our professional and personal lives, if we are sharing both with our students.
Do we have a responsibility to be a quality role-model for our students? That may include making visible mistakes and sharing aspects of our personal life, but again, how much is appropriate?
@mscofino
Although I encourage a more aggressive level of exposure and openness between student and teacher, I don’t think even I have ever advocated sharing everything. There are many things that are simply not appropriate to share.
I am simply arguing that we need not have this paranoid vision of hiding our online lives for fear of repercussions. If we value teaching these We 2.0 tools than we must value authentically using them as users as well as teachers. This level of web interdependence will be problematic in the years to come. We need to be having these discussions now. Who we are online should reflect who we are in the classroom. I am not saying we should link all of our sites to our students, but we should not fear being found, especially if what we have out there is a reflection of who we are.
I have never been a fan of superficial professionalism, especially in education. School is about building and maintaining relationships. Like all relationships, teachers must be able to negotiate how much they need to give in order to build trust. I have experience that the more open I am with students about my thoughts, my ideas, my likes and dislikes, the more inspired and passionate our learning communities become. It is unfair to expect students to express themselves fully in poetry, essays, and class discussion when their teacher is some old man they know nothing about.
So to answer your question: How much of yourself is appropriate to reveal to students?
As much as is necessary. As for Do we have a responsibility to be a quality role-model for our students? Of course we do, but one person’s role model is another person’s moral corruption. I think about the type of teachers I hope my daughter will have…and the role model I envision for her is very different then the traditional teacher model being forced down our throats.
None of my comments were directed toward @mscofino. I know first hand that she is an inspiring and amazing educator. Tone can be difficult to convey in text.
I agree that this is a huge issue. Are we supposed to give up living online and send schools back to the dark ages?! I’m rather confused about the whole thing myself Jabiz. Good teachers like us sitting on the sidelines and watching it all go by?! What the hell is happening! No wonder pupils find school so boring when they have to power down!
We live in an age of social networks and the very art of teaching is an essentially social and communicative one. To move on we need to engage with the pupils on a level that they do, and if this involves VLEs, social networks and whatever else they (and we) are communicating by then what sort of school would choose to get in the way of that?
Well most of them it seems!
Surely it is trying to bury your head in the sand if you don’t engage in communications online and try and restrict internet use to looking stuff up as if it were a book. We have entered an age where finally all this theoretical educational theory about group dynamics that we are taught when teacher training is happening on a global level! And we are getting rid of the best practitioners of this from schools because the management are terrified through essentially ignorance of the technologies capabilities.
GRRRRRRRRRR!
It’s so frustraitng! Anyway, as Kate Says, “I’ll never fit in” here and so as of next September I’ll be leaving the profession as I think that it still has a long way to come before people like us can be accepted as the norm.