Life After Facilitation

What is the role that the teacher needs to assume in the online community of student bloggers? I'm spending a lot of time right now reviewing my log notes from last year in order to look for references to how the developing community of student bloggers kept influencing my online presence and my understanding of my changing responsibilities as instructor and facilitator. So, let me take you back in time ... back to late March when I came home from school and wrote the following note about an interesting community-related development:

March 29, 2006

"My students continue to contribute to their blogs with surprising consistency and enthusiasm. In addition to engaging in many knowledge-building activities, many of them have also found specific topics of personal interest and are posting entries that reflect their personalities and their interests. Some of them have even been able to connect their personal writing to the work they're doing in class. Many don't seem to stop, not on weekends or even March Break. In fact, I've noticed that some contributed more during March Break than ever before. All of this is important to my research and will find its way into my thesis but what I find truly remarkable is that the community seems to be doing fine without me.

The students are engaged in writing and commenting on the work of their classmates. They often ask for time in class to work on their blogs. When I do give them time, I often get the feeling that I could leave them alone for the whole period and they would be happy writing and conversing about the blogosphere. Has the community acquired a life of its own?

I still walk around in class and talk to individual students about their work - their entries and the comments they've left on other blogs. They enjoy talking to me about the work they're doing or about discussions that they're contributing to on someone else's blog. "J" said recently, "Look at all these comments about my entry on democracy. They're all talking about it now."

I'm really happy that they're so engaged and I'm now beginning to spend more time thinking about my role in the classroom. From a professional point of view, I am very happy that I have the time to talk to each student individually, to listen to them talk about their writing. I now have the time to work with writers, not with students who need to be taught writing, but with individuals who have voices and want to be contributors.

At the same time, I realize that I am the only one who is not engaged in the process of writing about things that I care about and that are important to me. While my students are expanding their knowledge of whatever it is that interests them (Vanessa wrote about System of a Down and their stand on the Armenian Genocide!), I seem to be doing very little as a learner. I am certainly not a contributor. Sure, my role has changed to that of a facilitator but now that the community has been more or less facilitated into existence, my role seems trivial. Since September I have been using my teacher blog to post entries about the students' work online. I linked to interesting conversations and posts in an attempt to make them aware of the interconnectedness that characterizes their community. But now that they're very well aware of it and have started contributing, linking, and participating in their own conversations and building their own knowledge through writing, the kind of facilitating that I have been doing seems unnecessary. My blog entries are now reduced to commenting on posts and expressing my amazement at their work. Is it, therefore, really needed and, what's more important, does it contribute to the community? What am I facilitating now?

Where is my voice? A quick scan of my blog entries shows that while I have been actively commenting on the life of the blogosphere, my voice has been fairly authoritarian. I'm still an overseer - I comment on good entries and some interesting discussions, but I never engage in the kind of work that so engages my students. I have a feeling that I could withdraw for a week or two and my absence would not be noticed. It would certainly not affect the community. If Vanessa stopped contributing they would certainly notice. An important voice would suddenly stop speaking.

The students' involvement in the class blogosphere makes me wonder:

• Shouldn't I enter the community as a personal voice and not a teacherly one?
• Isn't my blog too detached from the rest?
• Shouldn't I be engaged in these discussions?
• Isn't it time to become a blogger, just like my students?

I spent quite a bit of time developing a sense of community, showing my students what it means to be part of a community of writers. We talked about linking and constructive criticism. It clearly worked because I am sensing that this community became an organic entity and seemed to have acquired a life of its own. Whether I assign anything or not, my students (well, most of them, anyway) keep writing. They keep contributing to their blogs, they keep engaging in dialogic critique and in discussions. They clearly see themselves as writers, as individuals capable of responding to ideas that interest them. They have begun to see that they have voices. It seems to me that I have done my job as facilitator and, frankly, am not sure what to do next. If the job of a facilitator is to assist and guide, then, at this point, it is no longer as critical in the community as it was in September. Perhaps at this stage, facilitating should morph into a different role, one that allows me to contribute as a writer, as a voice and not just a guide?

What does this mean to me as their teacher? Do I have a voice? Now that my students are using their blogs to learn and engage in discussions, shouldn't I also use my own blog to write about topics that I care about? Shouldn't I use my blog to learn more about the things that interest me? What if, in the community of grade eight students writing about social justice, I started researching a related topic and proceeded to learn right in front of them? What if I entered their conversation with my own research, my own questions, doubts, feelings. What if I used this community to learn more about the history behind Darfur, for example? How would they respond if I did that?"

And that is how it ends. I wanted to share this note here because it shows the beginning of my realization that the teacher's switch to the role of the facilitator is only the first step in an online community of learners. The reason why I think this is an important piece of the puzzle in my study is because it hints at more than the need to become a facilitator. When the community emerges and begins to sustain itself through the combined efforts of its student participants, the role of the teacher needs to change again. The facilitator needs to become a contributor, one of the learners. This is not to say that guiding and assisting are no longer needed. They still are, but a teacher cannot fully enter the community if he keeps looking at it through the lens of facilitation.

This realization helped me come to the conclusion that in the process of helping my students acquire individual and unique voices, in helping them become independent learners working through and with dialogic connections, I lost my own personal voice. Of course, my teacher voice was very much present but my own personal voice was missing. How ironic - I was dedicated to helping my students become more expressive, to teaching them that true writing comes from within, and yet I myself chose to cling to my professional, adopted voice.

Unending Conversation

I have been thinking about the changing role of the teacher for quite some time and this entry is my attempt to vocalize some of my conclusions. It seems to me that the old conception of what it means to be a teacher is, generally speaking, predicated on the notion that teachers convey information. Teachers are content experts who dispense that content to those who need to acquire it.

My research on blogging and, specifically, on creating communities of writers, has had a strong impact on my practice; it has transformed me from a teacher who peddles content to a facilitator who co-constructs knowledge within and with a community of learners. Consequently, I no longer see myself fitting into that traditional definition. I have outgrown the definition because of the community to which I belong. The community has transformed me. Here's how:

1. My classroom is now a community of inquiry where knowledge emerges from conversation - an act of engagement with ideas based on reflection, knowledge building, and collaboration.

2. I have learned that thought is internalized conversation (Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Wells,), generated in the process of contributing and interacting with others in a social space. As a result, I have come to believe that teachers need to become proficient in creating social spaces that contribute to the development of conversations. They need to become responsible for creating social spaces and the kind of community life that can create and sustain these conversations and the individual cognitive development that ensues. Do these social spaces need to be located online? Of course not. What they do need is personal investment on the part of the instructor to participate and grow along with the community and not assume that the community of learners needs to grow on its own to catch up to its facilitator.

3. I no longer view the texts produced by learners as definitive pronouncements or conclusive statements on assigned topics. Texts are tentative attempts to construct knowledge and, if they are produced within a community of inquiry-oriented peers, they will lead to further knowledge building and meaning-making.

4. All members of a community of learners, including the teacher, enter into a semiotic apprenticeship. We mutually define each other. The discourse of one always interacts with and interanimates the discourse of others. Definitive statements and conclusions are discouraged. Instead, we build our understanding through incomplete attempts at constructing knowledge, attempts that will always remain incomplete because it is their very incompleteness that allows us to keep constructing, to keep questioning, revising, and reflecting. It is through the process of communication and participation that we construct and transform our interpretations so that they become knowledge structures we can use to claim as our own and use them to define who we are.

5. I do not correct - I read, interact, and assist the members of my community in constructing their knowledge. I treat texts as epistemic tools - as tools for thinking and developing understanding. My students write to construct knowledge. I refuse to correct attempts to construct understanding and improve cognitive development.

6. Learning and teaching take place through participation. They are both about learning to enter a conversation and to contribute to it.

As a teacher, I have spent many years ending conversations. I thought it was my responsibility to present information as static, irrefutable, and conclusive. I thought it was my responsibility to teach my students to compose texts that present their understanding as definitive and authoritative. By insisting on closure, I had foregone the richness that is human thought. I never insisted on the process of construction but, instead, favoured the final result. I framed learning in terms of units, tests, and exams. Those who entered my classroom learned that learning is about arriving at authoritative conclusions. While we did engage in conversations, they were all designed and controlled to end neatly with a statement or two - a neat representation of reality.

Today, my classroom is an epistemic, polemical space. I aim to ensure that students who enter my classroom for the first time understand that they will be joining a conversation:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress (Burke 1941, 110-111).

So, teaching, the way I see it, is what Michael Oakeshott refers to as "unrehearsed intellectual adventure" (Oakeshott 1962), it is an "unending conversation" (Burke 1941) which teachers enter with their students to show them how to participate and construct their knowledge amid a choir of voices. This conversation does not end with the unit test or the final exam.

A few days before my students wrote their final exam (imposed upon me and them by administration), one of my students said to me:

- But I just started writing about Sugihara ... I can't possibly finish before the exam.

- Well, you can always finish after the exam.

- But, I'm not going to be ready and ... the school ends two days after.

- So? You can still keep writing. Who's stopping you?

He did continue his thoughts on Sugihara and the heroes of the Holocaust. In fact, it's been over a month since the exam and he is still contributing to his blog. His thoughts on the Holocaust led to thoughts about heroism, which then led to thoughts about Darfur, the UN, courage, personal choices, and the portrayal of heroism in Hollywood. Of course, he hasn't been alone - his friends who care about this conversation are reading, commenting, contributing.

The conversation continues.

Notes:

Burke, K. (1941). The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Oakeshott, M. (1962). "The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind," Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Methuen, 197-247.

Teacher as Blogger

I have received a number of e-mails from teachers who attended my ECOO presentation last week and are interested in how blogging can help them create communities in their classrooms. Unfortunately, I ran out of time at the end of my presentation on communities of writers and did not get a chance to talk about the impact that blogging has had on me as a teacher. I really wanted to discuss the transformation that I have been undergoing as a teacher-blogger. We often talk about all the positive impact that this technology, when used in a meaningful fashion, can have on young people but we rarely address the role of the teacher. I have been blogging with my students for almost two years and I have learned that a community of writers can have a significant impact on the teacher. I have been commenting on how blogging has changed me on this blog but a recent comment from Quentin forced me to think about some of the really new changes. Quentin asked:

Your comments to your student are magnificient and this one is going to pale in comparison. I apreciate the depth of your response and the unlearning that you needed to do to achieve it. It seems as though, based on this response, that you are putting in so much effort into each comment. Perhaps as much as the students are putting into their writing. I have a few questions, is this a feasible model for other educators to replicate in their own blogging experiences? With regards to time associated with reflecting on this area of the curriculum, as opposed to other areas from the perspective of a generalist educator. Do you feel that you are developing depth and breadth and are able to maintain this level of commitment in many of your comments? You really made me wish I was back in the classroom.

Quentin is here referring to one of my previous entries and certainly raises a valid point. The comment that he is referring to is rather long. He is right in saying that the level of commitment this reflects has to be rather high. I remember how much time I spent writing those comments to my students' work. Frankly, it would have been easier to write a sentence or two to summarize their work and efforts. But I chose to write more. Wait. I should re-phrase that. It wasn't really a conscious decision to start writing longer comments. I don't really remember making that decision. I did not wake up one day and say "I will write longer, more detailed comments." No. This new way of responding to the work of my students evolved over time.

Once a community of voices emerged from a network of individual student blogs, it pulled me in - I was surrounded by original, interesting voices and I did not want my voice in that community to be limited to pragmatic directives about course content. I felt that there was a need to respond as a reader. A new, more readerly voice replaced that of a teacher. The omniscient voice was gradually replaced by a contributing and an inquiring one. I started commenting on many individual entries. In most cases, I started by contributing a sentence or two. I was encouraging, praising, faciliating but also contributing my own views, defending them, posting relavant resources that I had found online. I initiated conversations and entered those started by my students. I was part of a community where we all had things to say, discussions to participate in. I was surrounded by voices and started responding to them. Those new voices awakened in me a strong need to participate in the community - not as a teacher but as a contributor.

After a couple of months, I acquired a lot of insight into my students' voices - their personalities as students, teenagers, and writers. So, when I respond to their longer pieces now, I do so from the point of view of someone who has seen them develop, as someone who is very familiar with the challenges and the struggles that they had to overcome to get to this point. I am aware not just of the content of their work but of their personal histories as writers, their trajectories of learning. I also keep in mind that the work I am responding to is tentative and provisional. Even after the paper is deemed finished by its author, it will still continue to receive comments. It will remain suspended in the blogosphere as a text that other students might choose to continue to interact with. It is certainly going to remain there as one of many building blocks in the student's journey as a writer.

So, when I comment on student work now, I keep all of that in mind. I am aware of the personal trajectory, I am aware of the ongoing development, and I also address what is specifically in front of me - the most current reflection of the student's understanding of his chosen topic. Here's an example from a comment I posted on a student blog a couple of days ago:

The last paragraph reminded me of that first essay you wrote back in September. I think we can both agree that that first essay was a struggle but you persevered because you found a good parallel in real life. You were able to relate the novel to some current events. This is exactly what you've done in this entry. I keep returning to your blog because your work keeps reminding me of how timeless this novel is - many of the ideas in it are just as curreent today as they were when the book was first published. This ability to relate literature to current events is one of your strengths as a writer. But I'd like you to clarify one point - why did you say that Napoleon is successful? I think I know where you're going with this but it needs to be made really clear. If you look at some of the responses to your entry you will see that many of your classmates are wodnering the same thing.

Blogging has certainly empowered many of my students to acquire personal voices. I have devoted a number of entries on this blog to that topic but I never mentioned that blogging as a community with my class also allowed me to develop a voice. I don't think I had a voice before I started blogging with my students. It certainly wasn't a readerly voice. Of course, I had solid classroom management skills, I knew my course content, I had files of handouts and lesson plans. I knew how to teach a lesson on essay writing, for example. I knew how to grade a paper. But, all of that from the point of view of who I am now, seems to have been very artificial. I didn't really know how to read an essay or a personal response. I was very good at both creating and following my own rubrics but I did not read - I marked.

Blogging has led me to start developing a new voice. It is still developing. At this stage, this new voice results in lengthy and fairly detailed and personalized comments. I write these comments to my students to engage them but also because I myself am very engaged by the conversations that they are involved in. Quentin's comment made me realize that I have been doing a lot of writing. He is right in suggesting that this practice of responding to student work in such an exhaustive fashion may not be very feasible. It is certainly time-consuming but I think we need to keep in mind that the role of the teacher is changing. I have certainly learned that my students need more than some cliche words of encouragement. What they need from their teacher is evidence of active engagement with the work that they produce. What they need from their teacher is a conversation partner, someone who can read, listen, and co-create knowledge with them. Once we decide to give our students blogs so that they can build knowledge, one of our responsibilities is also plugging ourselves into that knowledge-building network, becoming one of its nodes, becoming someone who can participate in that process of creation and not be perceived as an evaluator in whose hands the process ends and the journey terminates.