As my first semester of student teaching progresses and I continue to teach teens how to read more effectively and analyze more thoroughly, I find myself revisiting the same set of questions over and over again.
Am I teaching them things that applicable to their lives? Do they think that the class content is relevant to their lives? Will my students continue to use the skills that they are learning once they move on from my classroom? More importantly, is there any reason that they should continue to use the skills I am teaching in my classroom? The videoI've embedded, a TEDx talk by Michael Wesch, answers these questions and gives educators new goals to align themselves with in the information age. He argues that, not only should educators be teaching knowledge and critical analysis, we should be teaching students to collaborate and publish knowledge. In doing this, we move students from the old expectation of "knowledgeable" to the new expectation of "knowledge-able". I tend to agree with Mr. Wesch. Growing up, I felt a sort of dissonance between what I was studying in school and what I was doing in life. I have not used the majority of the content that I learned in school since I learned it. Of course, we could have a whole debate about the school system's ability or inability to teach relevant content, but that would be missing the point. I don't think that the content is the problem. I think that, increasingly, people are being asked to utilize their knowledge in ways that are unfamiliar and difficult. My take-away point of this whole video is this: In order to engage students in learning that matters, we need to utilize the technology that surrounds them on a daily basis and improve the way that we approach creation of knowledge in our classrooms. In other words, we should be progressing to a collaborative model wherein students and instructors are working together to address real-world questions on the various platforms that students will be expected to be familiar with.
Wesch, M. (2010, October 12). TEDxKC - Michael Wesch - From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-Able. Retrieved October 5, 2015.
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AuthorTrevor Rawlings is an educator at Pinacate Middle School in Perris, CA. Archives
April 2018
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