Keywords: A vocabulary of pedagogy and new media
Ilana Snyder
Monash University
The symposium paper was based on a chapter that will be published at the end of 2003 or early 2004 in:
E. Bearne, T. Grainger & H. Dombey (eds), Interactions in language, literacy and the classroom. London: Open University Press.
In this chapter, I ask an apparently simple pair of questions: What do we mean by the ugly word 'pedagogy'? And, more importantly: What do we mean by pedagogy in the age of the Internet? These questions are critical for, while there is increasing recognition amongst literacy teachers of the cultural significance of digital technologies, classrooms and ways of teaching have not altered very much since personal computers first entered educational institutions in the late 1970s. It seems that new media are used far less in the classroom than at home and much classroom use is uninspired. And there is a somewhat prosaic explanation for this: in the main, literacy teachers are not trained to use new media nor are they given real opportunities to devise imaginative ways to exploit their possibilities.
This pair of questions also has profound implications for the effective design of new curriculum frameworks and teachers' inservice and preservice programs that take account of new media. Classroom change is more likely if teachers understand the nature of the new media for themselves, share, even if imperfectly, the language with which to talk about them and have real opportunities to consider how best to reorganise their classrooms and their approaches to teaching and learning in creative ways when they are used.
The meaning of pedagogy
In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams (1976) points out that when some people see a word they think the first thing to do is to define it. Dictionaries are produced and, with authority, a meaning is provided. For words such as 'desk' and 'blackboard', this kind of definition is effective. But for words such as 'pedagogy', which involves ideas and values, 'it is not only an impossible but an irrelevant procedure' (Williams 1976: 17).
Dictionaries provide a number of current meanings for 'pedagogy'. For example, Webster's Dictionary (1975: 1320) defines it as:
1. the profession or function of a teacher; teaching.
2. the art or science of teaching; especially, instruction in teaching methods.
The first is an instrumental definition which emphasises the process of teaching, the activity itself, the second, the acquisition of skills to do it. Both may be taken to assume that teaching how to teach and acquiring the skills to teach are not only possible but also unproblematic. These definitions do not entertain the idea that teaching is connected to learning and the production of knowledge. They also imply a transmission model of teaching.
By contrast, historical dictionaries, argues Williams, go beyond such limited and limiting meanings. For example, the Shorter Oxford Dictionary on Historical Principles (Little, Fowler & Coulson 1973: 1537) explains that 'pedagogue' comes from the Greek paedagogus, a 'slave who took a boy to and from school':
1. A man having the oversight of a child or youth; an attendant who led [OR leads?] a boy to school. Obs. exc. in ref. to ancient times. 1483.
Later, the Oxford continues, 'pedagogue' was used to describe:
2. A schoolmaster, teacher, preceptor, (Now usu. hostile, with implication of pedantry, dogmatism, or severity.) late ME.
We can contemplate the irony of a pedagogue characterised as someone who leads a student to school but is in no way responsible for what happens once the student is there. And as for the emergent association between teacher and pedantry, dogmatism and severity, that understanding, sadly, continues to linger. But even the historical 'definitions' don't get us very far in understanding what 'pedagogy' means today, at the beginning of the 21st century, a time of immense change much of which is mediated by the rapidly increasing use of the new information and communication technologies.
For Williams, there are difficulties in any kind of definition because the meaning of a word such as 'pedagogy' is embedded in relationships and in processes of social and historical change. No word ever finally stands on its own; it is always an element in the social process of language. Thus his extraordinary book, Keywords, is neither a dictionary nor a glossary: it is a record of an inquiry into a vocabulary, a shared body of words and meanings concerned with the practices and institutions described as 'culture' and 'society'.
Although Williams' focus was different, we can usefully apply his method in Keywords to the central concern of this chapter: exploring the notion of 'pedagogy' when new media are used. Taking my lead from Williams, I identify a shared body of words and their meanings foundational to a potentially illuminating and generative discussion of literacy in a world increasingly mediated by the use of new electronic technologies. Each word that I have included has somehow demanded my consideration because the problems of its meaning seem bound up with the problems I have used it to discuss. Of course, the complex issues surrounding teaching and technology cannot be understood simply by analysing the words used to discuss them. But at the same time, the issues can't really be thought through unless we're conscious of the words as elements of the problems.
What follows is a first cut at which words should be included and how we might begin to explain them. The body of words and their meanings represents, however, a work-in-progress which is unashamedly idiosyncratic and not exhaustive because of the constraints of the chapter's prescribed word limit. The emphasis is on current use. As the project develops, more attention will be given to changes in the meaning of the words over time, and to their interconnections.
Pedagogy in the age of the Internet: keywords
In alphabetical order, the words I've selected are: communication, critical, culture, database, equity, hypertext, information, interface, knowledge, literacy, narrative, new media, pedagogy, technology. Although someone else might have come up with a different cluster, this does no more than affirm Williams' insight that each of us has different immediate values and that we use language differently - especially when strong feelings or important ideas are in question, as they are here. Although the group of words chosen is somewhat arbitrary, I hope that the selection will be encountered critically - a process fundamental to the development of language. The words offered have meanings that are to be tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, perhaps changed.
Communication
'Communication' represents a practice or a process. It encompasses communication for information and ideas, in print and electronic media. It is also commonly applied to non-human systems such as animals, canals, roads and railways. At one extreme, 'communication' means the unidirectional transfer of meaning from one to another. Alternatively, it can signify the sharing of common meanings, activities and purposes, a mutual process. 'Communication' as sharing is to do with having the capacity to convey to others the nature of individuals' unique experiences.
'Communication' is more strongly associated with media studies than with literacy studies. Computer-mediated 'communication', however, is increasingly used to distinguish between print-based literacy and screen-based literacy practices. In the context of new media, 'communication' is a word that could be used to destabilise the close association so often made between literacy and the printed word (see Snyder 2001).
Critical
'Critical' is a difficult word because its predominant sense is of disapproval and denigration. In literary studies it tends to refer to commentary and judgement, but in literacy studies, it is often used in association with 'literacy' or 'pedagogy' to highlight the complex relationships among language, power, social groups and social practices (Knobel & Healey 1998). Like 'communication', 'critical' represents a practice or a process. Concerned with the development of social awareness and active, responsible citizenship, a 'critical' approach to literacy or pedagogy argues that meanings of words and texts cannot be separated from the cultural and social practices in which they are constructed. It recognises the non-neutrality of texts and is concerned with the politics of meaning: how dominant meanings are maintained, challenged and changed.
As the use of the Internet expands, attention increasingly turns to the promotion of 'critical' digital literacy practices. 'Critical' digital literacy is about recognising and valuing the breadth of information available and learning how to evaluate, analyse and synthesise that information. It is also concerned with the construction of new meanings and knowledge with technology and with the capacity to communicate in a variety of media for different audiences and purposes. Moreover, it focuses on understanding the ethical, cultural, environmental and societal implications of the use of new media (Faigley 1999).
Culture
Possibly one of the most complicated words in the English language, 'culture' represents an abstract process. Long associated with being cultivated, even as a synonym for civilisation, 'culture' has acquired a number of other meanings. When pluralised, it refers to national and traditional cultures, but is also used to distinguish between human and material culture. More recently, it has come to be used in three principal senses: the general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development; as a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group or humanity in general; the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity (Williams 1976). A distinction is often drawn between high 'culture' and popular 'culture'. In his early works, Williams (1958) developed the concept of a common culture. He conceived of culture not as the domain of a special elite but rather as something all could share through education. Bruner (1996) also makes the link between 'culture' and education. He proposes that the mind reaches its full potential only through participation in the culture - not just its formal arts and sciences, but its ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and carrying out discourse. A central goal of education thus becomes one of equipping individuals to participate in the culture on which life and livelihood depend.
'Cultural' practices are characterised as regular and repeated ways of doing things - constituted over time. The meaning of different 'cultural' practices is established by the shared purposes, values and beliefs of those participating in the 'cultural' practice (Lemke 1995). Computer 'culture' refers to the 'culture' of a distinguishable group, a 'subculture' of people, who engage in a set of 'cultural' practices surrounding the use of new media. Visual 'culture' represents the internal organisation, iconography and viewer experience of visual sites in contemporary life: advertising, fashion, supermarkets, billboards, television, websites. Information 'culture' (Manovich 2001) includes ways in which information is presented in different 'cultural' sites and objects: road signs, displays in airports and train stations; television onscreen menus, layout of books, newspapers and magazines; interior designs of banks, hotels and other commercial and leisure spaces; the interfaces of planes and cars; and the interfaces of computer operating systems. There are also what Manovich (2001) calls 'cultural' interfaces: the ways in which computers present and allow users to interact with 'cultural' data. 'Cultural' interfaces include the interfaces used by designers of websites, online museums and magazines, computer games and more.
Database
A 'database' is a structured collection of data organised to maximise fast search and retrieval by a computer. It represents an abstract process of organising information. There are different types of 'databases' - hierarchical, network, relational and object-oriented - and each uses a different model to organise data. No matter how they are organised, 'databases' appear to users as collections of items to view, navigate and search. The experience of using such a collection of information is different from reading a narrative or watching a film. Like a narrative, a 'database' presents a particular model of what a particular world is like and in this sense represents an independent cultural form.
Some argue that the 'database', examples of which include multimedia encyclopaedias and commercial CD-ROM or DVD, is the dominant cultural form in new media (Manovich 2001). Indeed, multimedia works that have cultural content, such as the CD-ROM virtual tour through a museum collection, favour the 'database' form. Instead of a constructed narrative, the user is presented with a 'database' of texts that can be navigated in a variety of ways. As a cultural form, the 'database' represents the world as a list of items and it does not order that list. By contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of items or events. However, in the context of new media, these two dominant cultural forms are not necessarily competing or oppositional: rather, most often, there is a complex interplay and exchange between them. For example, when users access a museum 'database', the objects in themselves are meaningless: they have to be framed in narrative terms to become meaningful. This might be achieved by a Web developer or by the users, who create their own narrative 'exchanges' (Reid 1992) as they choose which links to activate and thus which elements to juxtapose and connect.
Equity
The social sense of equity involves the notion of equivalence of position or status. Integral to its meaning are the processes of equalisation (that all people are equal although not necessarily in particular attributes) and the removal of inherent privileges (that all people should begin equally but may become unequal in achievement or condition) (Williams 1976). The notion of the 'digital divide' builds on these ideas about 'equity', arguing that because access to the new technologies is unequally distributed, there is a growing divide between the haves and the have-nots (Castells 2001). Intrinsic to this notion of the digital divide is the cachet society accords access to the new media. It is also widely understood that the overriding factor in determining who gets access and who does not is wealth: the per capita funding of particular educational institutions and the income level of students' family/caregivers determine the likelihood that particular students will have access, at school and/or at home, to the new technologies.
Hypertext
'Hypertext' provides a means of arranging information in a non-sequential manner with the computer automating the process of connecting one piece of information to another. It differs from printed text by offering users multiple paths through a body of information: it allows users to make their own connections and to produce their own meanings (Snyder 1996). In 'hypertext' systems, individual media elements (images, audio, chunks of written text) can be connected by hyperlinking. Elements connected through hyperlinks can exist on the same computer or on different computers connected on a network, as in the case of the Web. Critical digital literacy theorists alert 'hypertext' users to the non-neutrality of hyperlinks: they do not just happen to be there. Rather, they are put there (or omitted) by someone to achieve particular purposes.
'Hypertext' is the literacy model of the electronic world of the Web. On the Web, sequential reading is supported by non-linear connections to alternative ideas; the journey through the labyrinth of 'texts' is replete with choices. And because the journey through text is full of choices, developing navigational skills is a basic capacity (Gilster 1997).
Information
Information comprises data that have been organised and communicated; it represents what is essentially a static resource. While recognising that the categories cannot be absolutely separate and that the relationships are fluid, there are important distinctions between 'information' and knowledge. To convert 'information' into knowledge requires 'an active, purposeful process of selection and interpretation' (Reid 2001: 4).
The Internet demands a comprehensive and necessarily sceptical approach to 'information': knowing how to manage 'information' thoughtfully is more important than ever. 'Information' literacy involves three generic skills: acquiring 'information', evaluating 'information' and using 'information'; it is essential to the process of shaping 'information' into knowledge. Becoming 'information' literate involves ensuring that students at all levels of education can locate, retrieve, decode, appraise and apply information in a range of contexts and media. 'Information' literacy underpins the development of knowledge (Reid 2001).
As the Internet rapidly becomes more broadly established, with hyperlinks connecting users to vast amounts of 'information' on any subject, questions arise: Does the act of access change the ways in which users regard 'information'? Does the fact that 'information' appears on a screen give it more or less weight than its counterpart on a printed page? Further, does the packaging of 'information' in a cohesive format, as in a CD-ROM, preclude the student user from an important part of the learning process - the act of acquiring 'information'? On the other hand, it may be that some users are drawn to these texts precisely because of their availability and persuasiveness.
Interface
The term human-computer 'interface' describes the ways in which users interact with a computer. The 'interface' includes physical input and output devices such as the monitor, the keyboard and the mouse. It also includes the metaphors used to conceptualise the organisation of computer data. For instance, the Macintosh 'interface', introduced by Apple in 1984, uses the metaphor of files and folders arranged on a desktop. Since Microsoft adopted the same icon-driven 'interface', the desktop metaphor has become more or less ubiquitous. Further, the 'interface' includes ways of manipulating data: copy, rename and delete a file; list the contents of a directory; start and stop a program; set the computer's date and time (Manovich 2001). As more and more forms of culture become digitised, computer 'interfaces' allow more interaction with cultural data: hence the notion of cultural 'interface'. And the language of cultural 'interfaces' largely comprises elements of other, already familiar cultural forms such as painting, photography and film.
Knowledge
'Knowledge' is a set of facts or ideas, presenting a reasoned judgment, which is communicated to others in a systematic form. As it involves the acquisition of some degree of understanding, 'knowledge' entails considerably more than the gathering of information. Nor is 'knowledge' produced in the intentions of those who believe they hold it: it is produced in the process of interaction, for example, between writer and reader at the moment of reading, and between teacher and learner at the moment of classroom engagement (Lusted 1986). Knowledge isn't what's offered so much as what is understood.
'Knowledge' has several forms all of which require a critical focus if they are to lead to true learning. 'Knowledge' about facts is just information: 'know-what' as distinct from 'know-why' (explanatory science), 'know-who' (socially related understandings) and 'know-how' (skill in managing practical processes) (Lundvall & Johnson 1994).
'Knowledge' assembly is the ability to collect and evaluate information, both fact and opinion (Gilster 1997). Effective information gathering can be represented as a balancing act. Used skilfully, networked information possesses unique advantages. It is searchable. It can be customised to reflect users' needs. Moreover, its hypertextual nature connects with a wide range of information sources, allowing users to consider different points of view and to make informed decisions about their validity. The process of using these tools and evaluating the results is 'knowledge' assembly.
Literacy
Moving beyond narrowly conceived explanations of 'literacy', rendered simply as encoding and decoding language, more recent versions take account of social phenomena. They also critique inadequate views of 'literacy' which fail to look further than pedagogy and the classroom (Barton 2001). 'Literacy' Studies investigates reading and writing in diverse areas including everyday life and the workplace. It covers a range of cultures and historical periods, as well as multilingual contexts, and is concerned with the use of new technologies, including the Internet. Further, 'Literacy' Studies recognises that 'literacy' is not fixed but is always changing: successive advances in technology extend the boundaries of what was previously possible. And each technological advance has seen a corresponding change in how literacy is practised and its social role understood (Lankshear & Snyder 2000).
Digital (or silicon, electronic and technological) 'literacy' is the capacity to access networked computer resources and use them (Snyder 2002). It is the ability to use and understand information in multiple formats from a wide range of sources when it is presented via computers. The Internet can broaden the 'literacy' experience from the world of print by incorporating video, hyperlinks to archival information, sound clips, discussion areas, supporting databases, and related software. Talk of technological or digital 'literacy' seems to arise from the fact that the technologies integral to conventional 'literacy' practices have become invisible, but when new technologies come along, they stand out in relief from conventional practice and notions of applying them strike users as introducing a technological dimension (Lankshear & Knobel 1997).
Acquiring digital 'literacy', or information 'literacy', for Internet use involves becoming proficient with a set of important skills. The most essential of these is the ability to make informed judgements about the information that is found on-line, for unlike conventional media, much of the Internet is unfiltered by editors. This capacity for critical thinking - critical digital 'literacy' - governs the judicious use of what is found on-line. Developing the habit of critical thinking might be considered to be the most significant skill of all: if it is achieved, other skills fall into place; if it is ignored, the Internet remains a seductive, perhaps deceptive, space. Despite the speed of change in the digital world, core 'literacies', at least for the moment, include: Internet searching, hypertextual navigation, content evaluation and knowledge assembly (Gilster 1997).
Narrative
Narrative has been described as 'a primary act of mind transferred to art from life' (Hardy 1977: 12). The most effective techniques for achieving a strong story-line in the print medium are linearity, plot, characterisation, textual coherence, resolution and closure. In the context of new media, these qualities are diminished in varying degrees by exploiting the electronic medium's capacity to create open-ended stories with multiple narrative strands, a form often referred to as interactive 'narrative' (Snyder 1996). 'Narrative' created with new media represents a significant cultural form, the principal purpose of which, like its print counterpart, is to make meaning of the world.
If creating a 'narrative' work in new media can be understood as 'the construction of an interface to a database' (Manovich 2001: 226), then the user of the narrative is traversing a database, following links between its records as established by the database's creator. An interactive 'narrative', then, can be understood 'as the sum of multiple trajectories through a database' (227). To qualify as a 'narrative', however, a cultural object has to satisfy a number of criteria: it should contain both an actor and a narrator; it should contain three distinct levels consisting of the text, the story and the fabula; and its content should be a series of connected events caused or experienced by actors (Bal 1985). Thus not all cultural objects are 'narratives'. Just creating trajectories is not enough - the creator also has to control the semantics of the elements and the logic of their connections so that the resulting object will meet the criteria of 'narrative' as outlined above. It also cannot be assumed that by creating their own paths, users construct their own unique 'narratives'.
Regardless of whether new media objects present themselves as linear 'narratives', interactive 'narratives', databases or something else, underneath, on the level of material organisation, they are all databases (Manovich 2001). In new media, the database supports a variety of cultural forms that range from direct translation, that is, the database remains a database, to a form that is closer to a 'narrative'. Importantly, databases occupy a significant if not the largest territory of the new media landscape.
New media
The categories commonly discussed under the label 'new media' include: the Internet, websites, computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMs and DVD, and virtual reality. But the explanation might also include: a television program shot on digital video and edited on computer workstations; feature films that use 3-D animation and digital composting; as well as images and text-image compositions - photographs, illustrations, layouts, ads - created on computers and then printed on paper. Popular understanding of 'new media' identifies it with the use of a computer for distribution and exhibition rather than production so that texts distributed on a computer (websites and electronic books) are considered to be 'new media', whereas texts distributed on paper are not. Similarly, photographs that are put on a CD-ROM and require a computer to be viewed are considered 'new media'; the same photographs printed in a book are not (Manovich 2001).
This explanation, however, is too limiting. There's no reason to privilege the computer as a machine for exhibition and distribution of media over the computer as a tool for media production or as a media storage device. All have the same potential to change existing cultural practices and all have the same potential to leave culture as it is (Manovich 2001).
In education, and in the social sciences more broadly, the terms 'information and communication technologies' or simply 'new technologies' are more commonly used than 'new media'. 'New media' seems particularly useful as it accommodates a greater range of technologies. If indeed we are in the middle of 'a new media revolution' - the shift of culture to computer-mediated forms of production, distribution, and communication - then an all-encompassing term is appropriate.
Pedagogy
'Pedagogy' is a key 'concept-framing word' which indicates how teaching is to be grasped as a complex activity, in terms of 'an extensive understanding of educational theory interrelated, in practice, with a wide range of classroom management skills' (Levine 1992: 197). Pedagogy brings together theory and practice, art and science, conventionally and commonly understood as separate and distinct.
More specifically, Green (1998: 179) suggests that 'pedagogy' refers to the structured relationship between teaching and learning, that is, 'pedagogy' refers to teaching and learning, as dynamically interrelated. Further, explains Green, 'pedagogy' is best conceived as 'teaching for learning', with teaching understood not as the cause of learning but rather as its context. This view of teaching as contextual rather than causative with regard to learning leads to a semiotic view of pedagogy and curriculum, rather than one that is mechanistic in nature.
Thus the concept of 'pedagogy' draws attention to the process not only through which knowledge is transmitted or reproduced but also to how it is produced. It poses the question: Under what conditions and through what means do we come to know? As Lusted argues: 'How one teaches is therefore of central interest but through the prism of pedagogy, it becomes inseparable from what is being taught and, crucially, how one learns' (1986: 3). What 'pedagogy' addresses is the 'transformation of consciousness' that takes place in the interaction of three agencies - the teacher, the learner and the knowledge they produce together (Lusted 1986: 3).
Such an understanding of 'pedagogy' denies notions of the teacher as neutral transmitter of knowledge, the learner as empty vessel, knowledge as immutable material to impart. Instead it foregrounds exchange, recognises the productivity of the relationships and renders the participants as active, changing and changeable: in essence, it's transactional (Lusted 1986). Significantly, it is probably a pointless exercise to try to describe a general 'pedagogy'. As 'pedagogy' is always tied to an historical moment, 'it is necessary to clarify the nature of particular pedagogies in particular instances of theory and teaching' (Lusted 1986: 10).
'Pedagogy' implies that it is teachers who take responsibility for what and how students learn. It is teachers who take responsibility for creating the conditions in which understanding is possible; it is the students who take advantage of opportunities for coming to know (Laurillard 1993). Since the advent of new media, a vision of learning with growing currency is of young people pursuing their own objectives towards knowledge, inspired but not necessarily directed by their teachers. When students take responsibility for their own learning, they can use the classroom as offering a set of resources which are largely under their control.
What should pedagogy in the age of the Internet aim to achieve? To deepen and refine students' capacity for significant response to cultural change, so that the changes can be constantly criticised and their implications understood. To raise the level of literacy in its full sense to ensure that 'the technical changes which have made our culture more dependent on literate forms are matched by a proportionate increase in training in literacy in its full sense' (Williams 1983: 310). Although writing before the advent of the Web, Williams' admonition continues to resonate. Despite the widely held belief that teachers will become less important as students become more independent, engaging in self-directed learning, teachers are needed more than ever because critical digital 'literacy' practices are cognitively and socially demanding.
Technology
It is still common for teachers to think of 'technology' in terms of tools, implements and applications. Although this is not wrong, it is limiting; it impedes understanding of 'technology's' social and cultural dimensions. Like literacy, 'technology' is widely recognised as social practice. It represents not just the need to acquire certain skills: 'technology' is 'an expression of the ideologies, the cultural norms, and the value systems of a society' (Bruce 1999: 225). This means that talk about 'technology' and its effects is inadequate if it remains in the realm of the technical.
It's easy to produce a list of the technical things teachers perhaps should know: how to operate a multimedia system, how to use certain software, how to use tools such as word processing, databases and spreadsheets, how to explore, evaluate and use a range of computer applications. Just as important, however, are the underlying pedagogical values 'which might inform decisions about whether this option is appropriate for particular students in a given context, how it should be used, and how one might judge its success' (Bruce 1999: 226). A set of questions needs to be asked: On what basis should teachers judge software? What kind of instruction is required to support it? What do teachers want the tools to help produce? A list of the technical requirements fails to connect with the fundamental issues of teaching and learning. Finding answers to these questions is a central part of everyday teaching: thinking primarily about learning is paramount, but thinking critically about the technologies that support it is also important (Lankshear & Snyder 2000).
Endnote
Philip Roth opens I Married a Communist (1998: 1-2) with a description of Murray Ringold, high school English teacher. He is remembered by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter-ego:
He was in those days, a crusty, brash, baldheaded guy … rangy and athletic, who hovered over our heads in a perpetual state of awareness. He was altogether natural in his manner and posture while in his speech verbally copious and intellectually almost menacing. His passion was to explain, to clarify, to make us understand, with the result that every last subject we talked about he broke down into its principal elements no less meticulously than he diagrammed sentences on the blackboard. His special talent was for dramatising inquiry, for casting a strong narrative spell even when he was being strictly analytic and scrutinizing aloud, in his clear-cut way, what we read and wrote.
Along with the brawn and the conspicuous braininess, Mr Ringold brought with him into the classroom a charge of visceral spontaneity that was a revelation to tamed, respectablized kids who were yet to comprehend that obeying a teacher's rules of decorum had nothing to do with mental development. There was more importance than perhaps even he imagined in his winning predilection for heaving a blackboard eraser in your direction when the answer you gave didn't hit the mark. Or maybe there wasn't. Maybe Mr Ringold knew very well that what boys like me needed to learn was not only how to express themselves with precision and acquire a more discerning response to words, but how to be rambunctious without being stupid, how not to be too well concealed or too well behaved, how to begin to release the masculine intensities from the institutional rectitude that intimidated the bright kids the most.
Zuckerman runs into Ringold in July 1997 for the first time since graduating from high school in 1950 (2):
In every discernible way still the teacher whose task is realistically, without self-parody or inflating dramatics, to personify for his students the maverick dictum "I don't give a good goddam," to teach them that you don't have to be Al Capone to transgress - you just have to think. "In human society," Mr Ringold taught us, "thinking's the greatest transgression of all." "Cri-ti-cal think-ing," Mr Ringold said, using his knuckles to rap out each of the syllables on his desktop, "- there is the ultimate subversion."
For Zuckerman,
hearing this early on from a manly guy like him - seeing it demonstrated by him - provided the most valuable clue to growing up that I had clutched at, albeit half comprehendingly, as a provincial, protected, high-minded high school kid yearning to be rational and of consequence and free.
Although Ringold, the 'pedagogue' immortalised in Roth's masterpiece, worked in a post-Second World War classroom, in which the most complex literacy technology was a blackboard, his approach to teaching and learning, his keen understanding of the key to effective knowledge production, embodies the critical pedagogy promulgated by theorists such as Freire, McClaren and Giroux. Improving the material and cultural conditions of the world - subverting what is less than desirable - can only be facilitated if students are given opportunities to develop their capacity for 'critical thinking'. If students themselves want 'to be rational and of consequence and free', and if their teachers want something similar for them, then the capacity for 'critical thinking' is fundamental.
In the final analysis, attention needs to be given in classrooms to what Roth calls 'critical thinking', or what some literacy educators call 'critical digital literacy'. It represents the most significant goal of literacy education in the age of the Internet, and it cannot be reached just by giving students more access to computers. If, however, teachers and their students begin to develop shared understandings of the keywords intrinsic to the promotion of effective literacy teaching and learning, predicated on the critical use of new media, then the process required to achieve this important goal has already begun.
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Snyder, I. (2001) The new communication order. In C. Durrant & C. Beavis (eds), P(ict)ures of English: Teachers, learners and technology (pp. 111-124). Adelaide: Wakefield Press & Australian Association for the Teaching of English.
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Bioblurb
Ilana Snyder is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University. Hypertext (Melbourne University Press 1996), Page to Screen (Routledge 1998), Teachers and Technoliteracy, co-authored with Colin Lankshear (Allen & Unwin 2000), and Silicon Literacies (Routledge 2002) explore changes to cultural practices associated with the use of new media.
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