Pickens 7/3

1 – In Technology and Literacy: A story about the Perils of Not paying Attention Cynthia Selfe presents an overview of the political and historical contexts which surround the push for technological literacy in the united states during the mid to late 1990’s. She notes that “the national project to expand technological literacy can also serve to re-teach us a second lesson – that literacy is always a political act as well as an educational effort” as well as how “official literacies usually function in a conservative and reproductive fashion – in favor of dominant groups and in support of the existing class based system” (424, 423). In both cases She is suggesting the ways that technology has been pushed into classrooms by the government has done more to widen the class differences, via the forced focus of a class upon technology that is not equally available to all students, than its stated goals of reducing and eliminating those differences. In what ways can we as teachers push back inside the classroom against these policies which provide a clear advantage to some students over others? Does this production of an economic policy through education policy provide us with any advantages as teacher at all? What types of assignments might meet this policy in the middle by requiring the teaching of technological literacy while also highlighting the inherent bias of the system?

2 – When discussing the different roles he sees himself adopting while working as a teacher Tobin says that “Our relationship to with the whole class is not just the sum of the individual relationships we have established” and that “part of my job, then, is to try and bridge this gap, to help students “be themselves” in front of one another; but another part of my job is to learn to accept this gap and to respond to it” (81). For Tobin the ways that a teacher can, and should, interact with students in the classroom setting is drastically different than in one-on-one meetings. If, like he suggests, teachers must adopt many different roles while teaching in front of a whole class then how does a teacher’s classroom persona need to be different than their conference persona?  What types of personas do you adopt while teaching and what situations give rise to their use?