Coe Quick Clips - Episode 04 - Professor michael smith

I'm Michael Smith, I'm the chair of Curriculum, Instruction and Technology in Education. It's my fifth year here at Temple. I've been a teacher for 34 years, though. I taught high school in suburban Chicago for 11 years and I taught at the University of Wisconsin and then Rutgers before coming to Temple. My area is secondary english education, so I tend to teach the people who are or want to be high school english teachers. I believe that education is vehicle for self development and for social change, and so what I want my students to do--I want, I want to prepare teachers who are going to make a difference in the world, who are going to create conditions so that their students are--be prepared for the future even as they are engaged in really significant work in the present. Because kids need to feel the benefit of education immediately if they're going to be involved in it in a way that will let them reap the benefits of education sometime in the future. So, that's what I try to do. So, in my field it's a very exciting time to be an english teacher because our understanding of texts and what counts as texts is changing so much. And the interesting thing to me is that we have all these new literacies, so we have... we had letters, and then we had e-mail, and then we had IM-ing, and then we had Facebook walls, and then we had Tweeting, and the interesting thing--I don't know what's next, but there's going to be something-- but, the interesting this is, when we get the new ones, none of the old ones go away. So, even though one can Tweet, one still is expected to write letters. Even though one can read something on a blog, there are still newspapers and books and magazines and all those things. So, one of the things that's really exciting to me-- it's a really exciting time--is to think about what are the relationships among these kinds of texts and to what extent can we, in preparing kids and helping kids understand how to either produce one or consume one--that is, to read it-- how we are helping prepare them for the others. So, that's one of the things that I try to work with my students to think about. We have to recognize that... We have to recognize that outside of school kids are producing and consuming texts all the time. So, they're not coming to us as blank slates. As a teacher, you're not-- it doesn't make any sense if you don't make use of what your kids have, the resources your kids are bring with you to class. So, we have to do that and we have to do a better job of that than we have in the past. So I think that's one educational educational implication. I think another one is that now more than ever, maybe more than any time in human history, everyone has a way of having a voice in the world that, if it's strong enough, people will pay attention to it. That's an enormously liberating or powerful thing, so we want... I think as teachers we have to recognize that we can... When we're thinking about our teaching, we want to think about getting kids ready for the state tests and all of that stuff, for sure. But, also to participate themselves in the reading and writing that's going on in the world because now more than ever, if you have something worth saying, people will find you. And that's really exciting. The walls between school and home are just too high and that doesn't make sense to me. So, we need to do a much better job in recognizing that our kids, that the students that we teach, are intelligent, they have goals, they have plans, they make arguments, they do all the stuff that we want them to do outside of class. We need to figure out a way to take advantage of them. So, one of the things that I worry about so often when people talk about education today, they talk about it only in terms of the language of crisis: kids can't read, kids don't want to read. Well, that's not true. I mean, they want to read. They might be reading different things, but they're reading. They might be writing different kinds of things, but they're writing. They're engaging with text and with print and with media-making in different kinds of ways. So, I think sometimes the alarmists help us from seeing all of the capabilities that our students have. I came to Temple because of its historic commitment to making a difference for people who have not been well-served by traditional-- by the status quo. We try to make a difference, I think, in a variety of ways. One of the things that we're doing, and I'm really proud that we're doing, is that my students are working with kids in the neighborhood to see how their approaches that they're developing in their classes play out in the real world. And that's an enormously powerful thing. I think what happens there is part of the power is my students get to see not only how they did, but they get to see what the kids in the neighborhood schools can do. And that's a very powerful experience that they have. So, I guess what I would say the Temple's commitment to education is that, as scholars, we're studying how kids to what they do and how teachers could do what they do better. So, we're contributing to the knowledge base. And as teachers we're engaging our students in sort of on the ground and working in the areas where change most needs to occur. So, I'm really proud of that.