In the fall of 1991, I sat nervously with my new college classmates in Rockefeller Chapel at the College of the University of Chicago.  We were gathered there during Orientation Week to hear the annual "Aims of Education” address.  Our speaker was English Professor Richard Strier, who warned us that any institution with aims “means to do something to those on whom the process works.”  He warned us that the College “means to make you into (or help you become) creatures of a certain kind…productively questioning and reflective persons.” 

           

As an example of the good answers we should expect from our education, Professor Strier explained that Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” was not the celebration of non-conformity for which it is often mistaken.  The poem’s speaker, in fact, upon the first telling, chose between two roads that “equally lay.”  He impulsively chose the second road, knowing he’d never return to the first because “way leads on to way.” Not until his re-telling did the story change to reflect a decisive moment in favor of a less worn path.  Such a study of the poem leads to a more interesting set of questions and an entirely different set of answers about the poem’s meaning. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The truth is that we all face decisions in which the choices seem all too similar, resulting in a leap of faith or an arbitrary step forward which leads us from way to way.   It is too early to appreciate exactly how my experience in the Michigan State University Master of Arts in Education program will affect my career.   Anything might happen to set me on an unexpected path.  What I do know is that the program has prepared me to embrace the possibilities, especially those that exist through technology.  Because I cannot predict the future and “connect the dots looking forward,” I will attempt to “connect them looking backwards” (Jobs 2010). This essay will describe the most influential elements of my experience in the program in order to weave together their unifying meaning and impact on my learning and practice.  

 

The first class I took in the program, EAD 860 The Concept of the Learning Society, was a revelation.  I chose it because the course description referenced Robert Maynard Hutchins, a famous former president of the University of Chicago, not because I had some enlightened insight about the impact it would have on my learning.  As my first online class, I was awed by the affordances of the web to enrich, enhance, and enliven the course content.  It was also the first of four classes I would take from Dr. Steve Weiland, who turned out to be the instructor who had the greatest impact on my learning.  The reading load was substantial and extensive, supplemented by a rich mix of hypermedia, which Dr. Weiland’s syllabus (Fall 2011) described as a “web for the course [that] operates as an anchored but mobile network of resources for learning” (p. 2).  It was that web, branching out from Dr. Weiland’s written unit lectures, which revealed to me the opportunities represented by online learning and my need to develop my own digital literacy.   

 

The variety of readings and multimedia resources throughout the course were assigned in pursuit of the aims of education, providing a complex quilt of perspectives, opinions, and agendas through an historical lens.   In this course, we considered “what education can and should do.”  That question has woven itself through all of my coursework in the program. 

 

It turns out that there are varying opinions about the aims of education.  I see it in my daily practice, as some families emphasize a college path that provides technical training for good pay right out of college, like engineering or accounting.  Other families embrace the liberal arts tradition with the understanding that the skills of critical thinking, analytical reading, and effective communication translate to any job.   The Concept of the Learning Society examined these conflicting notions of career training versus career development, theory versus experience, and liberal arts versus technology by examining the cases of lifelong learners in a variety of domains, from the practicing doctor, whose reflective writings enhanced his practice, to the autodidact attempting to learn the piano.  In each, there was tension between the need for content knowledge, ways of doing, and “tacit understanding.” These case studies helped me to see the intersection of those ideals, rather than simply their competing natures.      

 

The next course I took, in Spring 2012, was another one from Dr. Weiland called EAD 864 Adult Career Development.  This course, too, was designed around a series of case studies, including a doctor, a swordfish boat captain, a Major League Baseball team’s general manager, a whistleblower in the tobacco case, and an educator, all of which pointed to the learning that happens outside of formal schooling.  It was the beginning of my exposure to the importance of self-reflection, autobiography, and “narrative competence” as means through which one might develop their own professional understanding, practice, and meaning.  The case of Steve Jobs’ career trajectory was the most telling with respect to the important relationship between our identities and our careers.  

 

The course also provided a critical framework for inquiry into the concept of career development, which is invaluable to my practice as I shepherd students into the first stage of their career exploration.  The course unfolded along a structure through which we considered careers as critical components of the life cycle and within the context of our culture, at a time when American workers value lifestyle elements like “flexibility and creativity” over the traditional notions of success as defined by money, power, and respect in society (Williams 2008).  

 

In the required introductory course for the Master of Arts in Education program, Dr. Weiland’s ED 800 The Concept of Educational Inquiry, I explored the philosophical history of American schooling, with a special focus on the influence of John Dewey’s pragmatic, progressive movement in education.  As my school embraces trends in education, like design-thinking, prototyping, and engaging in the community to solve real-world problems, I see their foundations in Dewey’s approach to education.  I also studied the teacher research of Vivian Gussin Paley who believed in purposeful self-reflection as practiced by intentional and disciplined journaling.  I read a number of Paley’s works, including The Girl With the Brown Crayon, which reminded me of my earlier studies in narrative competence and autobiography as useful tools for career development.  I was also fascinated by Paley’s technique of using literature to reach all of her students, whatever their abilities, backgrounds, or limitations.  I was inspired by her focus on the works of Leo Leoni, a children’s book author and illustrator, and the way she developed relationships with and among her students through a year-long exploration of Leoni’s works.  Perhaps that was the moment of influence that set my foot on the road to my next class, TE 849 Methods and Materials for Teaching Children’s and Adolescent Literature.

 

I had not expected to focus my studies on children’s literature.  It did not make sense to do so, because I am neither a classroom teacher nor an educator of young children.  Like John Dewey, my parental interest in education, as the mother of two young children, naturally affected the direction of my studies.  My three previous classes had exposed me to the practice of writing as a tool of professional development and research.  I have only recently seen the connection.  At the time that I enrolled in Professor Laura Apol’s class, I simply trusted my instinct and let my interests guide me.  It was an impulsive step in what seemed like a new direction.

 

In Methods and Materials, I learned a difficult lesson about authorial authenticity as it relates to multicultural literature.  Dr. Apol’s masterful course design allowed our thinking to unfold in unexpected ways.  First, we read several literary works by different authors claiming to depict the Native American experience.  In team discussions, we debated whether a cultural outsider has the authority to portray a particular group.  That exercise was followed by several assignments which unveiled the literary critiques of each work, revealing the depth of sensitivity to inaccurate cultural portrayals and the impacts of those insensitive depictions on the identities of readers whose cultures were misrepresented.  I saw through a new lens the critical issues of stereotyping, identity, and voicing the concerns of the voiceless.  The notions of perspective and interpretation began to take center stage, along with the idea of the teacher as an adaptor of literature for her students. 

 

Those points were driven home further in another of Dr. Apol’s courses, TE 836 Awards and Classics of Children’s Literature.   After developing a background in the history and role of the major children’s literary awards in our culture, we also considered literary classics as social constructs.  Dr. Apol selected J.M. Barrie’s original Peter Pan as our focus for the exploration of how classics become adapted and, even, appropriated by our culture.  A reading of Barrie’s original reveals just how much our culture has changed the story to reflect our modern values.  My interpretation of Peter Pan was deeply affected by what I learned about J.M. Barrie’s personal history.  In one class assignment, we were asked to identify and explore a theme in Peter Pan.  I took a risk by choosing my own topic and wrote about death and grief as my theme.  Given Barrie’s tragic childhood losses, I saw in Peter Pan the tragic figure known by Edwardian audiences; not the high-flying, carefree adventurer we know in the modern popular culture.  Again, the connection to identity, biography, self-reflection, and the exercise of writing to uncover new meaning revealed itself to me.   

 

These experiences with children’s literature brought me through my own journey of self-discovery, shaping what I see as one of the aims of education:  to help students discover themselves and where they fit into society.  In Dr. Apol’s Methods and Materials class, a reframed but familiar question emerged.  She asked us to consider and write about “what literature can do.”  In response, I answered:

 

A child who reads quality literature is empowered with the most important learning skills, regardless of the

kind of school he attends or the quality of instruction he receives.  He discovers a world outside of himself,

learnts to appreciate different peoples and places, builds language skills that allow him to communicate

effectively with others, thinks critically, and solves problems creatively.  Quality literature also allows him to

dream and escape from the pressures and challenges he encounters in his own life. Through the books we

choose for our children, parents and teachers transmit unspoken values. We instill respect for others who

are different from us, and for animals and our planet, which depend on us for survival. We communicate to

them that we can bond through language and connect through words. We build memories as we read to

them, snuggled in a chair or gathered in a circle.  For the time we read together, they relax, engage, and

focus.  They take a moment to sit still and listen quiety, calming their minds in a world full of noise and

distraction.  And, by taking the time to read with them, we tell the children they are important to us.

(Flanagan, Spring 2013)

 

As a more practical consideration of the importance of literacy in early childhood, evidence presented in Educational Researcher by Herbers, et al. (2012) reveals the significant impact of early reading skills on future achievement in math and reading.  The study's conclusion, as applied to homeless students, who demonstrate the highest risk for academic failure, was “Early reading skills may function as a protective factor…with potentially greater benefits of early achievement on later achievement for students of high risk status” (p. 370). 

 

My answer to Dr. Apol’s question of “what literature can do” relates to my ideas in response to Dr. Weiland’s question of “what education can and should do.”  During nearly twenty years in education, I have watched with concern as our devices entered the classroom.  Dr. Weiland’s course, EAD 882 Education in the Digital Age, was an opportunity to explore both the costs and the benefits of technology’s integration into education. 

 

Many of my concerns were confirmed by the late Stanford University researcher, Clifford Nass, whose work showed that the multitaskers among us are actually weaker performers than those who focus on one task at a time.  I was dismayed by the students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who text, surf, and otherwise tune out of class lectures.  The mother in me ached for the South Korean parents who send their game-addicted children to the equivalent of detox treatment centers to deprogram the automatons we see in the Korean PC bangs.  I was offended by the U.S. military’s use of my tax dollars to operate recruitment centers disguised as Internet gaming sites (Dretzin 2010).

 

My skepticism for the claims of edutopians that technology and gamification are useful ways to reach the modern child’s educational needs and interests only deepened.  I shared the concerns of MIT’s Sherry Turkle and Emory University’s Mark Bauerline, who see in their students a diminished capacity for in-depth reading of complex texts thanks in part to reduced attention spans and the students’ expectation of constant entertainment and sensory stimulation.  I identified with the thinkers Adam Gopnik tagged as “Better-Nevers” in his New Yorker essay, “The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us,” seeing our society as “better off if the whole thing [technology] had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create a private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts [or 140 characters] of information don’t” (p. 2).

 

In 2010, Steve Jobs told New York Times reporter, Nick Bilton, “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” Bilton uncovered the same parenting philosophy among many top executives of tech firms, who worry not only about kids’ access to harmful content and vulnerability to cyberbullying, but also to screen addiction.  These tech executives instead emphasize what William Powers calls the “old tools,” like books, family discourse, and “the capacity to be alone.”  Even Stewart Brand, one of the prophets of the technological revolution and one of Steve Jobs’ idols, reflected more recently on his search for the “not-so-fast button,” recognizing that we are adopting these technologies in education without fully appreciating their long-term effects.

 

At the end of my online master’s program, I am forced to confront the irony of my skepticism.  I must now acknowledge the many benefits, and not just the costs, of technology.  It was another work in Dr. Weiland’s Education in the Digital Age that started my slow conversion.  In DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, Anya Kamenetz examines the role of technology in providing access to education.  From Kamenetz (2010), I learned about Kahn Academy’s mission to provide “a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.”  I discovered MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) offered by some of the world’s most prestigious educational institutions, and the movement in favor of “signaling” one’s achievements and qualifications without the “sheepskin,” including the idea of portfolios replacing diplomas (Kamenetz, 2010, p. 48).

 

The study of dropouts, homeless students, students with disabilities, and the similarly disadvantaged in Dr. Kristy Cooper’s EAD 882 Serving the Needs of All Learners, connected the dots for me.  As students from those backgrounds struggle to survive in the traditional educational system, I saw the possibilities that they might “hack” their own educations and earn the “signal” that might open doors to opportunity.  If one of the aims of education is to create an enlightened and informed citizenry for the benefit of the polis, an idea that dates back to the ancient Greeks, then we must be concerned with access to it for all.  If technology enhances access, then we must seek to capitalize on its benefits. 

 

I have done so, as a working mother completing an online degree.  Dr. Weiland and Dr. Apol taught me that it is possible to develop relationships with one’s professors even from a distance thanks to technology.   Dr. Weiland showed me how to integrate hypermedia into course design and to engage with each other through meaningful feedback to assignments and about shared interests.  Dr. Apol taught me how to guide students to their own discoveries and that effective and productive class discussions are possible, even in an asynchronous course.  My classmates in Michigan State University’s ED 870 Capstone course, most of whom are earning their degrees in Educational Technology, have shown me tangible evidence of technology’s affordances in their teaching through their developing portfolios.  And, the publication of my own digital portfolio has developed my skills to create content for the Web 2.0.  Even if no one else reads the content I post there, the literary self-reflection it requires will serve as a valuable career development tool, as Gawande, Ofri, Paley, and countless others have proven.

 

I did not choose this road to a technological conversion because I wanted to be an educational pioneer.  I just put one foot in front of the other, going from way to way.  I will continue to “follow my heart” and trust that “the dots will connect down the road.”  Just as Professor Strier warned over twenty years ago at another institution, this education has done something to me, too.  I will continue to ask critical questions about technology in education, but this learning experience has opened my mind to new possibilities.  

 

 

Media sources: 

Rockefeller Chapel. The University of Chicago.  Retrieved Nov. 2014 from https://music.uchicago.edu/page/performance-and-research-places.

Frost, Robert. The Road Not Taken.  Retrieved Nov. 2014 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie2Mspukx14

Image of children. Deborah Flanagan 2014.

 

References:

Bilton, N. (2014, September 10).  Steve Jobs Was a Low Tech Parent. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/fashion/steve-jobs-apple-was-a-low tech-parent.html.

 

Brand, S. (2000, June 19).  Is Technology Moving Too Fast?. Time.  Retrieved from http://longnow.org/essays/technology-moving-too-fast/.

 

Dretzin R & Rushcoff D. (2010, February 2). Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier. Frontline. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/us/.

 

Frost, R. (1916).  The Road Not Taken.  Mountain Interval.  Retrieved from http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/road-not-taken.

 

Gopnik, A. (2011, February 14).  The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us. The New Yorker.  Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/14/the

information.

 

Herbers J., Cutuli, J., Supkoff, L. Heistad, D., Chan, C., Hinz, E. & Masten, A. (2012). Early reading skills and academic achievement trajectories of students facing poverty, homelessness, and high residential mobility. Educational Researcher, 41 (9), 366-373. DOI: 10.3102/0013189X12445320.

 

Jobs, S. (2005). Stanford University Commencement Address.  Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc.

 

Kamenetz, A. (2010). DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

 

Powers, W. (2010). Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. New York: Harper.

 

Strier, R. (1991).  Good Questions Deserve Good Answers.  Aims of Education Address. Retrieved from https://aims.uchicago.edu/page/1991-richard-strier.

 

Weiland, S. (Fall 2011). Syllabus for EAD 860 The Concept of the Learning Society. (Available from Michigan State University College of Education)

 

Williams, A. (2008, January 6).  The Falling-Down Professions.  The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/fashion/06professions.html.