Controlled and watered down literacies in classrooms

Clarence Fisher over at Remote Access discusses something I think is pretty important: the co-opting of cultural literacies for the classroom, without actually using them in ways they are actually used. He write about blogging, for instance, where the teacher uses it for the sole purpose of answering prompts, instead of how blogging is used in the “real world”. Here’s an excerpt from his post:

But a few sessions I’ve been in have been disappointing. Sessions like “Using Hip – Hop to Teach “X.” In other sessions I’ve heard teachers enthused and gushing about weblogs in their classrooms. My ears perk up and my level of hope rises, only to hear them go on to discuss how their weblogs are locked down and closed off from the general public. When they show screen shots of their work, we see a list of teacher generated prompts with kids simply responding to them.

Sessions like these make me think two main things. First of all, we still don’t get it. We are still trying to appropriate the literacy practices of youth culture, and co-opt them for our own means. We use hip – hop to teach grammar. We use blogs to nitpick the ultra fine points of novels and to teach grammar. We don’t honour the literacy practices of the people in our classrooms for what they are. To many teachers, they are not legitimate on their own. It is OK to sue blogs, as long as we are tearing apart their writing while we use them. We will teach them how to shoot video, but only for a “feel – good” unit, a reward if they work hard on the other stuff we want them to do. New literacy practices become the sugar which makes the medicine go down easier.

Second, we still crave control. We are willing to give kids the experience of blogging, if they are responding to a list of prompts. We are willing to use video if the videos are a series of X number of shots, each lasting no longer then X number of seconds. We definitely do need to teach structure and use frameworks with kids; they need a frame and a form to hang their thinking on, but to me, it smacks of assignments not changing. Are we still doing old things in new ways? 5 paragraph essays in video form?