More than Myself

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The Value of Discomfort TIB

I felt very fearful for a number of reasons last year when I started my piece on “Joining the Multiliteracy Frontier.”  (I will probably change the name of this piece–it isn’t done.)   Why was I fearful?  I had gotten off the “publishing train” after being pulled in too many directions after receiving tenure.  I had gotten to the point where I was wondering if I had anything useful to contribute to the educational community and had no “warm” papers for potential publication…they were all cold….practically fully dead. I also felt I had no business writing about technology, since playing with gadgets and sitting in front of a computer were not at all, as Mary Poppins might say, my cup of tea. I started the piece by forcing myself to write a paragraph, and it was an anguishing experience. I also read a few books and articles on technology that is a good practice BUT has the problem of filling my head with too much information that I feel compelled to try to share.

The biggest problem I faced was that I was not sure what publication I would be sending this article to, and I also was not sure what my overall point was. I forced myself to actually send it–partially unfinished–to English Journal last November after re-shaping it to fit their theme of “moral imperatives.” Not surprisingly, the article was rejected BUT some very kind reviewer send me his/her comments that helped me revise it. (These comments made even more sense to me once I had a long period of distance from the piece…so I felt like I was reading the piece for the first time and understood what the reviewer was saying perfectly.)

I’m still not finished with the piece, and I haven’t yet shared it with my writing group, but I feel like I kno know

Does anyone else have difficulty having a “work-life balance” as a teacher?  Is it fair to even characterize teaching as work?  Should there be a division between our teaching selves and our writing and other life selves?  I remember buying a book called THE ONE -MINUTE TEACHER about 20 years ago and eagerly seeking our answers to developing more balance.  It wasn’t a great help, but  I think I’m going to look at it again to see what I think of the philosophy.

If you haven’t been an avid reader of English Education, you may not have noticed that the English class you took with Miss. Hardy in seventh grade, the one where you read Edgar Allan Poe and defined “foreshadow” and tried to figure out whether the blank should be filled by “lie,” “lay,” or “laid” doesn’t exist anymore. Or maybe it does exist, but you better keep your fingers crossed that Miss. Hardy and the rest of her English-teaching colleagues have included in their curriculum something academics refer to as “multiliteracy.” What is “multiliteracy?” This concept represents, perhaps, the first revolution in CONTENT in the English language arts. And like every matter of content in this field, it is contested. Every since its inception as a field, WHAT is taught in English class, one of the only classes required EVERY year of a child’s K-12 education, but that is surprisingly unsettled as to what it actually is. Perhaps this is why everyone, from Dick Cheney to Noam Chomsky can agree that THIS is an important class.

But rather than let “multiliteracy” sneak into the ELA curriculum, I want to make a case for its inclusion, and for a radical re-envisionment of the field of ELA in the service of educating the general public—from taxpayers to parents, to students themselves. Multiliteracy is too important to be silent about the matter.

I will argue that multiliteracy is more that a skill. It is an attitude. And that both the skills and the attitude need to be supported in K-12 classrooms for English to be relevant to students and the world they inhabit.

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