Reflection 2.
“So if Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives – i.e. all their students – they will have to change.”
Digital Natives and Posthuman Technology: A Relational Network.
Mark Prensky closes out his article “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” encouraging educators who belong to the latter group to “Just Do It” like Nike in order to begin reaching students. The purpose of the metaphor is to describe the differences between learners who grew up in the age of internet technology and its affect on the learning process. As I read I can’t shake this icky feeling.
It comes up in passages like the “‘new’ students of today,” “Net-gen,” and “today’s students.” These phrases are dilute the diversity amongst student populations in the U.S. Ultimately, what I’m hearing in Prensky’s writing is an assumption about the types of learners instructors may encounter in the modern classroom. Although this article was written close to 20 years ago, it hasn’t aged well.
Age. Age. Age is the true topic hidden behind the eerie nationalist semantics dressed up as a harmless metaphor of natives and immigrants. Covered in “accents” from past learning experiences, instructors and professors are assumed to be people of “a certain age.” An example of a digital immigrant accent is “needing to print out a document written on the computer in order to edit it (rather than just editing on the screen)” (2).
There is another assumption that students are all young people projected at warp speed through ethernet and Bluetooth connections. What to happens to this paradigm when you are a young adult teacher or an older adult student? I have direct experience with the former, its a fine line to walk when you’re close to your student’s age. What if student’s “accent” of needing printed documents is for accessibility reasons. Indeed, this Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants idea is flawed at best. Probably the most egregious example, to me, is his advocating for gamification of every subject!
“Yeah,” I thought to myself, my eye gliding through the paragraphs about detaching direct learning objectives from learning games, “try making a game about Black face minstrelsy for a Popular music course, or American Chattel Slavery for an American Root Music class. Not gonna happen.”
To my surprise that is exactly what he suggests writing,“The Holocaust? Create a simulation where students role-play the meeting at Wannsee, or one where they can experience the true horror of the camps, as opposed to the films like Schindler’s List.”
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The Holocaust: A Historical Immersive Gaming Experience
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Pause. Makes you cringe at the thought, right? I mean I understand his logic behind this idea, teaching heavy and traumatic histories through movies, although a form of technology, is the lazy teacher’s way out of facilitating those difficult discussions snd lessons. I hear why he believes that instructors need to change the ways they use technology to teach their students. But on the other hand I’m like.... What are you doing, sir?
We still live in a world where white history and social studies teachers are can’t hear how casting Black students to perform as enslaved Africans for a mock pre-civil war era “slave auctions,”–yes teachers were doing this in 2019– are an assault to their budding minds. Surely, there is a social and sonic dissonance that occurs when teacher’s cultural incompetence supports learning as play along the lines of Black American’s delicate generational traumas. And the deafening silent emotional labor that is forced upon these young Black people only reinforces subconscious stereotypes threats. So, in an age where school shootings had become the poster child of a national school crises, there is even more work that needs to be done about the subtle epistemological violence that assaults students from marginalized backgrounds in learning environments both in the in-person and online classrooms. (I suggest you check out Bettina Love’s Spirit Murdering concept for K-12 classrooms for more. Listen to her define it below and read the article. It’s life changing!)
In the immortal words of housewife Porsha Williams, I have but one response to Prensky’s line of thinking here: Wrong Road.
This is not to say that teachers should avoid instruction on oppressive histories. Those instructors that do often are protect their own comfort by projecting an assumption that to talk about topics like Redface, and Indigenous genocide, Covington Students controversy, because it will only discomfort the student. It takes a whole lot of courage, research, and careful contextualization.
I believe that social media can still be used as transformative tool for educating students about difficult histories that is uplifting. In fact, the term “digital native” can mean much more to BIPOC cultures when decontextualized from Prensky’s stance. There is an opportunity for a deeper understanding of networked relationship’s as well if steeped in Afrofuturist and Posthuman theories. But before you get lost on me, I want to bring in Rainie and Wellman’s position on Networked Relationships. In the fifth chapter, they debunk the assumptions that “People get lost in the virtual world” because it is a separate immersive media. They do this with the arguments:
1. Online and in-person interactions–and live–are intertwined
2. Emails, text messages, Facebook posts, tweet, and the like are everyday tools that people routinely use to stay connected
3. People have a strong sense of the other with which they are online and internet encounters complement and increase the volume of communication among people, rather that substituting for richer-in-person contact
4. People are not confusing the Facebook screen with the person at the other end of it, just as they have not confused the telephone receiver with the person with whom they were talking
These are valid points, and if you allow yourself look and listen closely online you’ll experience all four aspects working together in real time. In a last week’s discussion post, I discussed how social media creates a significant communal and relationships for Black Americans. Mark Anthony Neal’s TEDxDuke talk “A History of Black People on Twitter” amplifies my posthuman premise. Watch the full video below.
Dr. Neal suggests a powerful act of reclamation a humanity denied. He states “And so we go back to, you know we have this term the Original Gangsta’s, OGs, well these are the Original T’s, as in the Original Technology. That weird relationship that Black folks have with technology, because at some point they were in fact the technology” showing picture of enslaved Africans working in the cotton fields. So, imagine being in the classroom and today’s topic is slavery. Instead of recreating virtual conditions of slavery and injustice– there is already enough of this documented online with the graphic policy brutality of unarmed Black men, women, and trans folx– how empowering would it be to start with the inherent posthumanity of Black American people. America’s OT’s, contributors to the U.S. technological and economic advancements since 1619. To get at the real reason, why Blacks just can’t seem “to get over” what was done to their ancestors eons ago.
“And so we go back to, you know we have this term the Original Gangsta’s, OGs, well these are the Original T’s, as in the Original Technology. That weird relationship that Black folks have with technology, because at some point they were in fact the technology”
Teachers could transform students’ understanding of online communication. Back in the day’s of 1700s the OT’s used spirituals to connect during uncertain futures of hard labor, and now in midst of an unprecedented pandemic Black twitter boasts of #Verzuz battles between prominent Black music artists and producers. They are communing online by reimagining new live music events. The #Verzuz battles are building cultural capital that to be shared and one of a kind cultural experiences that are to be relived. These media rich online experiences are simultaneously digitized through memes and playback videos. I can go on and on. I won’t launch in to a lesson plan. But I wonder designing online learning spaces bearing in mind the online performances, videos, and media often capture the physical and epistemological violence that happens to BIPOC people in learning contexts, online or otherwise. What interventions can be made that show case joy over trauma? I hope I’ve made the point that technology mediates how relationships between communities of marginalized people, and those in the majority, are sounded, appropriated and disseminated in U.S. culture. When we have honest conversations about these aspects of Web 2.0 learning ,we begin the technological change, I believe, Prensky calls for. Tell me what you think? How would you begin to address these issues? Let me know in the comments.
