Authoring Identities: Teacher Narratives in the Digital Age

Liz HomanJoint Program in English and Education

University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

First: False Identity BinariesNon-Digital/Gone-Digital

Second: Ways to Re-Think Teaching w/Tech

The Why / The How

The Teacher Hero…

Hero teachers like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds or Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society, among others, are often driven away from the profession as a reward for their self-sacrifice. The hero teacher is also sentimentalized in segments on news shows that illustrate how these teachers have “worked overtime, or spent their own money, or otherwise sacrificed for their students’ benefit” (Alsup, 2006, p. 24).

The Teacher Villain…

Villain/failure teachers include those who violate the moral expectations of society, violating the gendered model narrative of teacher as motherly protector and teacher of children (Alsup, pp. 30-31). The teacher-as-villain narrative is reinforced by narratives of failure in American education, evident in nationally-distributed reports such as A Nation at Risk and Reading at Risk, which promote a rhetoric of crisis and failure in education

In Won’t Back Down, this elementary school is at positioned as at fault for theliteracy “failure” in America

The Teacher Villain, In Michigan…

A New Binary?

Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the same as they have always been, and that the same methods that worked for the teachers when they were students willwork for their students now.

Prensky, 2006: “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”

This blanket labeling obscures the very important and fine-grained details related to writing with computers, and the very diverse backgrounds of different writers.

DeVoss & NWP, 2010: Because Digital Writing Matters, p. 26.

GoogleScholar Citation Records:

Prensky (2006): 4,000+DeVoss & NYP (2010): 4

Wysocki et. al. (2004): 85

A New Binary?

Teachers’ school and socioeconomic contexts, relationships with other teachers or with the university professors who publish the texts, support from administrators, and other contextual factors go largely un-narrated in these texts, as do the stories of their “less-digital” or “non-digital” colleagues.

Sylvia: One “Gone Digital” Teacher Complicates the Binary

15 years of teaching, 10 years experimenting with digital technologies

From Blackboard, to LiveJournal, to SharePoint, to GoogleDocs, to WordPress, to Twitter

“…we have a WordsWithFriends tournament going on in the school among the teachers and it's very funny… I play with the librarian and I walked into the library one day and he knew I was coming because I was scheduled to be in there with my class. He held up a sign as I walked in that said "fence, 60 points.”

“I think that I could use the classroom [twitter handle] powerfully, just haven't figured out how to do that. Baby steps. Baby steps.”

We Need to Consider Teachers’ Existing Uses of…

(among other things)

Teachers Today…

A Networked Approach…

Future Directions

Future studies should consider how teachers collegial

relationships, friendships, communities, cultures, interests, access, and other factors impact the decisions teachers make regarding technology, why they use it (and why they don’t), and how they learn about new digital tools for their classrooms.

Neglecting these dimensions of teachers’ digital lives belittles the knowledge and experience professionals bring to the classroom and risks further oversimplification of how teachers learn and come to use digital technologies.

ReferencesAlsup, J. (2005). Teacher Identity Discourses: Negotiating Personal And Professional Spaces. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Britzman, D. P. (2003). Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach (Revised.). State University of New York Press.WON’T BACK DOWN Trailer 2012 Maggie Gyllenhaal Movie - Official [HD]. (2012). Retrieved from

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvYPxZpstkE&feature=youtube_gdata_playerDanielewicz, J. (2001). Teaching Selves: Identity, Pedagogy, and Teacher Education. State University of New York Press.Doc Z’s SLCC (2012). https://sites.google.com/a/bvsd.org/doc-z-s-slcc/Find Catharsis. (n.d.). Retrieved November 15, 2012, from http://www.findcatharsis.com/2012/11/teaching-similar-comedy/Herrington, A., Hodgson, K., & Moran, C. (2009). Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-

Century Classroom (Language & Literacy Series). Teachers College Press.Kasdan, J. (2011). Bad Teacher. Columbia Pictures.School Safety. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rulTEJYKyHg&feature=youtube_gdata_playerSimpson, D., Bruckheimer, J., & Bass, R. (2012). Dangerous Minds.The Paper Graders. (n.d.).The Paper Graders. Retrieved November 15, 2012, from http://thepapergraders.orgWeir, P. (1998). Dead Poets Society. Walt Disney Video.