Ok. I read this article by dana boyd, and it has certainly stuck with me. I’ll get to how and why it sticks with me in a little bit. The other day, however, when I was teaching library research skills in a lower-division Communications Class, something really wonderful and curious happened: students were talking, laughing, arguing, and questioning. And it was because I proposed some of the ideas boyd thinks about to the students in these particular classes.
In previous classes, I have been expected to “follow prototcol” which illustrates the dehumanized vision some people have of education. Really, I’ve been taking personal steps to reject this language (“following strict protocol”)altogether when talking about education and to abandon the practices that promulgate more of the same mind-numbing crap students have experienced since highschool or before.
Anyway, students were discussing evaluation criteria as it applied in two articles–a popular one and a scholarly one. (Something I would hate to pose (as I am instructed to) as dichotomous in the classroom because the boundaries are certainly blurred!!!) As students began noticing that there were images and ads in the articles and websites they were evaluating, I asked: how many of you have Myspace pages?? Only about 2 admitted to it, and there may have been more. The rest all had Facebook pages and talked about Facebook like it was the master and conquerer of all social networking sites. I asked students to describe why they liked Facebook better than Myspace. Their answers?: clean, professional, secure. When asked why they didn’t like Myspace, could you guess what these students said?: dirty, juvenile, and nappy. Yes, nappy–often used among young whites as an insult or to insinuate that someone is dirty.The negative connotations of nappy, however, appear to be white, middleclass constructions that do NOT survive outside of that demographic.
The important part? Students started to look at questions of identity, social constructions, language….FINALLY! In a class where I am supposed to “follow strict protocol” and where education (if it is what humanizes and liberates) rarely takes place, students were actively engaged in reflection and talking about real issues that affect their lives . And we got to talk about it the context of Facebook and Myspace, and they loved it.
And it really got me thinking: how often does education actually challenge students to approach master narratives with a critical eye, to call into questions systems of dominion and oppression, to humanize?
