How NOT to teach in the digital age

“On this side and that I hear “Africa is poor,” “Africa is an enigma,” “Africa is a millstone around humanity’s neck.” To these voices deciding whether we belong in the world, I replay “Africa is generous, “ “Africa is a martyr,” and nonetheless, “Africa is the solution.” (Aminata Traoré, from Origins 2005)

My Mac iCal calendar tells me that in 18 weeks I will leave the United States of America to teach English to secondary school children in West Africa. My Peace Corps recruiter tells me I will be doing this in French. As hard as I try, my imagination fails to create a realistic picture of this in my head. Seeing as how this is a life altering decision, my thoughts are constantly wandering to the future and I often find myself daydreaming about life in Africa: where it’s going and where advances in mass communication are taking it. Nearing the end of my education at the UW, I have deemed this quarter “My Africa Quarter.”

The few months I had spent in East Africa last year are now always in the back of my mind. At the time of my last visit, Thomas Friedman’s book had just come out and was all the buzz on CNN and newstands in the airports. I read a fair portion of the tome during my 12 hour layover in Heathrow and found the short blurbs on Africa to be less than convincing. Friedman looks at Africa as a problem – if only the continent could join the globalization fun ride, their problems would be solved. Africa has its problems, like anywhere else in the world (granted, not to quite the same extreme); but Africa also has some concepts that more “developed” nations, such as the United States, could learn from.

“As is true for most people I know, I’ve always loved learning. As is also true for most people I know, I always hated school.” (Jensen 2004)

The opening paragraph of Jensen’s book Reading, Writing, and Revolution has stayed with me since I had decided to seriously pursue teaching. Leaving for Africa to teach for two months, the words burned my ears. While standing in front of 40 smiling students, I knew they were all watching the clock too. Or they would be watching the clock, if the school had one. Standing in the dusty brick school building in front of rows of glowing white eyes dying to flee the building into the mid-day sun, I was reminded that education had not always been this way for them. In pre-colonial days, someone like me would have no place in tribal education – I was an outsider. Who would apprentice under me? And for what purpose? Western ideas of education are diametrically opposed to Africa and its people. We go to school so we can get a good job. So we can support our family. So we can be good citizens and contribute to the system. We bring these values to developing countries like Africa, believing what worked for us, will work for them. But a good education does not necessarily guarantee a good job; the economy simply cannot support that many employees. What then is the purpose of western education Africa?

In general, before the coming of Western colonialism in Africa, education was handled by the community. The child was seen as an asset of the community in whom the community maintains a stake and as such, every member of the community contributed to the upbringing of the child whether the child was an offspring, family relative, extended family member, or simply another member of the clan. The term “ubuntu” best defines this attitude, as it best defines a recurring theme throughout the continent. Ubuntu is difficult to define, but roughly it means “I am who I am because of us all.” Jy Mokogoro, a South African judge, explains it this way: “The meaning of the concept however, becomes much clearer when its social value is highlighted. Group solidarity, conformity, compassion, respect, human dignity, humanistic orientation and collective unity have, among others been defined as key social values of ubuntu. Because of the expansive nature of the concept, its social value will always depend on the approach and the purpose for which it is depended on. Thus its value has also been viewed as a basis for a morality of co-operation, compassion, communalism and concern for the interests of the collective respect for the dignity of personhood, all the time emphasising the virtues of that dignity in social relationships and practices.” (Mokgoro 1998)

While traditional African education was a collaborative process where learners are cultivated into integral members of their community, Western education is far more rigid. For one, it’s for the most part compulsory. The revolutionary 1969 rant of Jerry Farber was very explicit about its oppressive nature. His controversial title Student as Nigger was released at the height of the Civil Rights movement in an underground publication where he vituperated that education is compulsory, that you can’t choose at the age of 14 not to attend US History class or trig, and that as children we’re essentially forced into the system. He likened formal education to prison, and in a sense, students are imprisoned for 12 years to learn mandated materials.

Compare this to traditional African schooling. An African child sees value in the skills that he or she is learning as they are passed down from elders. They see how their education strengthens the community. “I am who I am because of us all” is woven into the fiber of their society. It’s different in the developed world. It’s difficult to understand as a young student how grammar lessons fit into the big picture. They know there is a test they must pass, but they don’t know why. Then in their private and social lives, they use and are highly skilled in technologies that are valued outside of the class. They participate in communities where they can learn from each other and value each other’s skills.

“At a village level, communication is the most important thing, that of addressing everyone with those problems that are common.” (Origins 2005)

Upon arrival in Addis Ababa, I discovered the overwhelming ubiquity of cell phones. Reaching Kenya and traveling four hours into the bush outside of Nairobi only reinforced my first impressions. Although the tiny village of Kyale (pronounced Challie) was void of electricity to charge such devices, most people over the age of 18 carried a cell phone. A friend I met across the street who built his own tiny house out of bricks made from the sand it sat on, showed me how to text message my own address back in the states into his phone. I had no idea how to do this and he looked at me like I was an idiot – “doesn’t everyone know how to text message?” With Patrick’s help, I feebly entered my US address and asked him how long he had been carrying a cell phone around. “About four years,” Patrick answered. I did some quick math. Patrick had owned a cell phone longer than I had – yet he had no electricity or running water, a large family, and very little to eat. I scratched my head, “Will you email me?” I asked. And he agreed that he would when he returned to his school in central Kenya.

“The cell phone has brought the past into the future by supporting Africans’ oral traditions and the sheer pleasure they take in talking with one another. Their insatiable appetite for mobiles has made the continent a profitable market for the hightech gadgets, which were introduced only a decade ago…Ironically, because it’s still harder to get an old-fashioned landline phone, University of Swaziland sociologist Anthony Zwane explains, the rich consider it a mark of status to use a cell phone. Thus, country clubs and upscale restaurants now ban the devices. Cell phones have become, instead, ‘the people’s way of communicating,’ says Zwane, who notes that these days every bus conductor and street vendor has one.” (Utne 2004 )

In parts of Africa, cell phones are a return to the importance of the community in an age that devalues its function. Across the continent, Capitalism draws more and more peopke to big cities in search of wealth and repreive from drought, land scarcity, and the hardships of rural life. African culture relies on tribal communication – on the virtues of ubuntu – to survive. As rural areas empty out and families scatter across the continent, communication technologies speak to the heart of Africa as a socially connected society.

Perhaps the same desire for communication that drives Africans to spend large percentages of their income on mobile devices is the same fundamental drive that possess adolescent Americans to participate and contribute in weblogs and online spaces like MySpace. As most people know by now, MySpace is a place for people to post a web page that frames a picture of themselves, a description of their interests and personality, and most importantly, a place for friends to network and have ongoing conversations. Users can share the stories of themselves, of things they have heard and read on the net, and contacts of people they know. It’s modern storytelling. The world over, oral traditions of storytelling were at one time the fundamental method of transmitting knowledge through generations. This is nothing new. We are a planet of stories and storytellers. In the west we call it entertainment. In Africa, it’s a tradition. And now There’s also a fundamental desire of all people as they develop their own identities to be supported by the community they identify with. They want to become active members of that community. /p>

“The basic idea is to distribute power as much as possible, so that everyone has a piece of it and feels involved. That is what has enabled these systems to survive through so many centuries.” (Origins 2005)

Western education favors passivity, order-following, and lining up in straight lines. Public schooling is not a place that fosters democracy or a place where everyone feels included and everyone feels represented. But on the web, everyone has a voice. Perhaps that’s why the democratization of media has taken hold like it has. “Many to many, few to few. The blog is the medium of both, and all. Weblogs and their ecosystem are expanding into the space between email and the Web, and could well be a missing link in the communications chain. To date, they’re the closest we’ve come to realizing the original, read/write promise of the Web. They were the first tool that made it easy—or at least easier—to publish on the Web.” (Gillmor 2004) The hijacking of information by the masses has literally revolutionized the way we seek out information and evaluate information sources. As consumers and creators of media we are in control of what we learn. We are no longer passive vessels waiting to soak up whatever bit of information comes our way. It’s inclusive and it’s democracy. It’s a feature of the modern info-landscape that adolescents have become accustomed to. It’s a world-wide electronic version of ubuntu. It’s a sort of revolution.

“Furthermore, advances in computers, in information retrieval and in communication should soon make it much easier and cheaper than it is now to learn outside of public schools. Technological developments should, before long, give a home to resources that are presently available only to a large and well-funded school. Sooner or later, if a child (or adult) wants to learn more about, say, snakes or jet engines, he should be able to tune in, at home, to books, films, learning computers and so on, which he can use as much or as little as he wants.” (Farber 1969) Farber dreamt of a community where education was facilitated and not mandated upon the will of the child. Everyone loves to learn, but everyone hates going to school. Farber subscribed to the idea that the child who is encouraged to follow his interests, will continue to do so to the betterment of himself. The technology that Farber dreamt of is here, and it could be apart of his envisioned revolution. However, public school is becoming more rigid and less open to alternative ideas of education thanks to legislation like No Child Left Behind which requires students to pass a series of standardized tests before passing certain grades and eventually graduating from high school. Pressure for students to perform in turn has driven most public schools to focus on test subjects.

“Practical education develops through ritual ceremonies in which art is created and builds the person in his or her fullness.”

Since January I have been teaching a web design class at a private girls school in Seattle to 6th, 7th and 8th graders, a huge audience for MySpace. Before class, many of my students would huddle around a MySpace page adding links or pictures or communicating with mutual friends. Taking advantage of the class’s hands-on nature, I ran my class quite unorthodoxly. I have always had a difficult time in class calling myself a teacher and instead consider myself more as a facilitator. In web class, as with most important things in life, I believed web design was not something one could teach. Like a fantastic video game, web design is full of discovery, trial and error, and at last, success. Or at least some success. To begin the class, I gave a brief tour of “the tools” of the game and began my own version of ubuntu schooling.

The class turned out well: students worked together to create fantastic web designs of their own creation. I granted minimal formal instruction and what the girls couldn’t grasp or discover for themselves, they sought me out for answers. They were, I felt, well on their way to becoming revolutionaries. And even if public school ignores the revolution, the revolution has come nonetheless. As the power of media is handed over to the masses, the more adept and cognitively “wired” become its masters. The internet is the democracy that is unable to survive in school. The blogosphere is its democracy. It is a return to ubuntu education, an education that is inherently desired in all humans. It’s not natural to sit in silence in close proximity to our peers for hours on end without interacting. This is why most teachers dread teaching middle school; the transition through adolescence is in direct opposition to quietly listening to an authority figure whilst in a group setting. As adolescents attempt to define their identities, outlets such as MySpace, text messaging, and instant messaging (IM) become key vehicles for this exploration. Meanwhile teachers aren’t sure what to do with these changes.

Hagood et. al, describe two teachers who “worry that they aren’t prepared to integrate technology into their teaching, especially with students who are likely to know more than they do about new communication technologies.” (Hagood, Stevens, & Reinking 2004) Hagood et al argues that “the adults’ perceptions seem disconnected from the literacies the adolescents use independently, especially literacies that encompass interests in popular culture…as the adults recognize the need to encompass technologically based alphabetic literacies, they typically do so by situating these literacies within the context of traditional school subjects and classes.” (Hagood et al.,) Meanwhile, these uneasy teachers are incorporating new literacies into their lives that are largely helped by their tech savvy students.

As noted by Kapitzke et al., “Electronic information and communication technologies are reconfiguring the physical places and social spaces of many schools and communities…The speed and interactivity of digital communication reduces problems associated with large distances and the social isolation of physical separation.” (Kapitzke et al., 2000) In a culture built on communication and collaborative learning, a device that simplifies communication, such as a cell phone, was bound to catch on in a big way. And the same is true for internet access. While in Kyale, that tiny town without electricity or running water, I had access to a larger town called Nunguni only 3 miles up the road. This town had electricity, with kiosks to charge cell phones, and a post office that promised internet access (it was coming soon!). Larger cities around Kenya held numerous “cyber cafés” which weren’t really cafés as they served neither food nor drink, but were instead communal gathering areas in which to share and consume information. Music played, people laughed and chatted all while staring at screens that contained news or email. The collaborative nature of African culture that seeped into even web surfing was inspiring.

Conclusions

A longing for communal interaction and sharing of ideas while forming identities is manifesting itself in the democracy of the world wide web. As educators, we should look with interest at the collaborative and cooperative nature that foster education and learning in a way that closely mirrors traditional forms of education still embedded in African tradition. It’s interesting to consider as our society becomes more and more digitized, our desire to hear from each other and in turn, be heard, continues to grow. To me this signals a longing to return to a supportive community that fosters learning and values the voice of the learner. We are no longer passive receivers of information, but active seekers looking for information that is meaningful to their lives. Perhaps it is time to stop rethink school as less a place students hate to go and more a place that fosters community learning.

Bibliography

Farber, Jerry (1969) Student as Nigger Available in a variety of places but accessed on the web 03/05/2005 at http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030301studentasnigger.html

Follmi, O., Follmi., D. (2005) Origins: African Wisdom for Everyday (offerings for humanity) Days listed include June 26, October 30, November 1 and November 7. Harry N Abrams Inc

Friedman, T., (2005) The World is Flat: A brief History of the 21st Century; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, NY

Gillmor, Dan (2004) We the media : grassroots journalism by the people, for the people Sebastopol, CA : O’Reilly, 2004

Hall, James (2004) Africa Calling From Mali to Mozambique: cell phones find a place in ancient oral traditions Utne Reader, 2004

Jensen, Derrick (2004) Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution Chelsea Green Publishing Company, Canada 2003

Hagood, M.C., Stevens, L.P., & Reinking, D., (2002) What do THEY have to Teach US? Talkin’ ‘Cross Generations! From Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World (2002) Peter Lang, NY

Kapitzke, C., Bogitini, S., Chen, Min, MacNeil, G., Mayer, D., Muirhead, B., Renshaw, P., (2000/2001) Weaving words with the Dreamweaver: Literacy, indigenity, and technology Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy; Dec 2000/Jan 2001; 44, 4; Research Library pg. 336

Mookogoro, JY (EcoPort Foundation http://www.puk.ac.za/lawper/1998~1/mokgoro-2.html) Ubuntu and the Law in South Africa: The concept of ubuntu, and the social values it represents first accessed 2/20/2006