Last month, I followed Pernille Ripp’s 7th grade English class’ progress through a project on refugees. I even pointed to it in a recent post as an example of Twitter’s potential for learning. And on Tuesday, Microsoft shared a beautiful Youtube video of their experience:
After witnessing how all this learning and growing has unfolded, I was saddened to encounter the following comment on the Youtube video:
It’s not the first time we’ve heard this kind of rhetoric, nor will it be the last. The “reading, writing, ‘rithmatic” camp is still alive and well.
However, what those who are of this mindset still don’t understand is that this is English in today’s world.
A world in which we’re flooded with false, misleading, and clickbait-y “news.”
A world in which current events no longer sit quietly in the morning paper, and instead are loudly debated at all times from the devices in our pockets.
A world in which the negative is amplified and distorted truths go viral.
So when the standards instruct us to “engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse partners on grade 7 topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly” (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.7.1), is it beyond English instruction to tackle an issue that is very much a part of their lives?
Or when we’re to teach students to “Delineate a speaker’s argument and specific claims, evaluating the soundness of the reasoning and the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence” (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.7.3), is it beyond English instruction to seek out civility and compassion to help bring clarity to current events fraught with misinformation?
The truth is, we can’t just direct our students to the encyclopedia anymore. The volume and quality of the information our students receive every day from the Internet is staggering, and we simply cannot pretend that it does not shape their learning process. Especially since with greater global access comes greater global citizenship. Thus, dramatic is the difference between asking a student from 1990 vs. 2016 to “Trace and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is sound and the evidence is relevant and sufficient to support the claims” (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.7.8).
In the complexity of teaching and learning today, 21st century educators know that we are tasked to teach our students how to think, not what to think.
Or, as Pernille put it so well herself at the onset of this project,
“My job is not to make you think a certain way, my job is to make you think. So whatever your opinion may be, all I ask of you is to have one based on fact, rather than what others believe. Keep your ears open and ask a lot of questions. That is the least you can do as the future of this country.”
Keep up the great work, Pernille, and all other teachers dedicated to helping their students make sense of this dynamic and exponentially shifting world!
featured image: DeathToTheStockPhoto