Digerati Boombati

“What Should High School English Be?” is the question answered by eight prominent teachers, researchers, and writers in Don Zancanella’s article in the November issue of The English Journal. Honestly, this is one of the best pieces I’ve ever read on the subject of ELA in any journal, book, or newspaper–anywhere. As a grad student who hasn’t student taught yet, I’m aware of the fact that pretty much all I’ve done so far in three semesters is idealize my future classroom inconsiderate of the everyday demands and harsh realities as the contributors to the English Journal piece have done. Reading the piece, I found value in each writer’s vision of the H.S. English classroom. Despite the fact that a few of them are completely ignorant of the importance of new literacies, multimodal literacies, digital literacies, every day literacies, whatever you want to call them literacies, I still cannot deny that the vision of the English classroom as a place where students do lots of meaningful reading and writing is a wonderful thing. If your classroom is not “dripping with literacy” then you are not doing your job, but, ideally, and realistically, in the twenty-first century, we need to more closely examine what literacy means and how it has changed in order to fully address student needs. We all know this. Virtually every article and book about technology and education or progressive ELA education outlines the redefining and expansion of the word literacy.

The only vision of the English classroom from the article which I can wholeheartedly say that I subscribe to is Arthur N. Applebee’s though. In Applebee’s piece, the ideals of the old (”it is primarily in English class that students deal with the questions of what it means to be human” [73]) meet the literacies of the new (”embracing all of the tools and media available to express themselves in our twenty-first century culture” [73]). Applebee’s concise answer to the question of what high school English should be gets at the heart of language study: “The English classroom should be what it has always sought to become: the place where students learn to master the power of words and symbols—theirs and others” (73). Despite the fact that what it means to be literate is constantly changing, the vision has not changed, and critical thought and vigor won’t need to be compromised, but instead taken to newer, deeper levels in which students are not just digital media consumers, but also digital media creators.

This article got me thinking, and I’ve been trying to visualize how I specifically define what high school English should be. I’ve spent the past few months blogging trying exactly to answer this same question, and I’ve put down a great many words on the subject, so I thought I’d try to make an image of my vision. I spent a couple of hours in Adobe Photoshop, and above you can see the image that I produced. Reflecting on the image, I see its limitations, but in my defense, I’ll just say that I could only fit so many things in there. You should be able to figure out what most of the things are, though many people do not know The King of the Cosmos from the game Katamari Damacy who is in the bottom left corner. Oh, and the pencil sketch self-portrait is, of course, Vonnegut. I realize that this image may seem indicative of a vision of an imposing of canons of taste, such as Dinosaur Comics in comics and WordPress as a blog service and Vonnegut as a novelist, etc., but I’m not advocating an imposition of superior teacher taste. I guess when it comes down to it, my vision of high school English is too huge and messy to fit into a single image. I guess the image that I made above (click here for a larger version) is what I would hope to be allowed to study if I had to redo high school English.