An open letter to young teachers about teaching in a world of social media
Frequently, I have this scary realization that my best teaching days are waning. I'm 29, entering my eighth year of teaching high school students. What I truly enjoy teaching, with every opportunity I can find, is passion-based learning (and digital citizenship) through social media. For many years, I've reached students in their digital space and helped them use it positively, for learning; but with every incoming class, I fear that I'm losing touch with my students and they're losing touch with me in that same space.
As a "young" teacher, students feel comfortable talking to me about things their parents and other teachers just don't understand. And I can astutely explain to "older" teachers (and administrators) how students use their devices and social media pages and what impact that had on their lives. That's because I grew up understanding the digital divide between these "generations."*
I feel particularly lucky that growing up, I didn't have a cell phone until 17 or a smart phone until 24. I experienced high school without social media and I experienced college with only Facebook. When new products/apps arrived, I experimented with them and thought critically about them. This unique timeline has allowed me to understand the strengths and weaknesses of new social media applications with a perspective that younger digital natives don't yet posses.** Because of this pursuit, I can transition between the technophobes and the technophiles--the young and the old, if you will. Let's call educators my age "digital frontiersman"
I think my growth learning about and using social media provides important perspective to an incredibly controversial issue in education. While administrators debate being proactive or reactive with respect to phones and social media, I built a course designed around it. As parents create long lists of things their students can't do on their phones/social media, I've used it to empower passion based learning.
These past few summers teaching my new media course, I've had a particularly enlightening experience helping my students learn online. Nevertheless, I can feel my words having less of an impact on these children. They still agree with what I say about social media and cell phone use, but they don't act the same way they used to. That's because two things are happening at the same time: I'm getting older and losing touch with each class's nuanced understanding of social media, and my students are getting younger and losing touch with life without phones and without social media. While aging is inevitable, I'm not ready to give up the lessons that a digital frontiersman can teach a digital native.
Losing the frontiersman's perspective will corrode the bridge between the digital natives and the older generation. It'll hurt dialogue between individuals and generations and it will create an intergenerational disconnect. As a result, our digital natives will struggle to adapt to the world that existed before social media.
Digital frontiersmen watched social media change the our lives. We were forced to make the connection between the social and the professional. That's why we're better equipped to understand and teach social media (and phone use in general). When digital natives run the classrooms, they'll have to contend with the same issues, but they won't have the same perspective. Without that perspective, I fear students will live in a constantly distracted world and won't adapt to the professional workforce easily.
Let me conclude this post by saying that one does not have to be a "digital frontiersman" to teach social media to teenagers. As long as a teacher establishes himself as someone knowledgeable about the space and knowledgable about how teenagers use that space, he can always teach it.
I also acknowledge that this post contains many are generalizations. Plenty of teachers my age are not using their phones and social media for learning, just like how many older teachers have figured out how teens use social media and are using it themselves for learning/professional development.
I just fear that the impact of my example and my perspective wanes with every year and every incoming class. That's what inspired this post. But it won't stop me from staying up-to-date with what my students are doing online and providing my perspective on how they can learn and understand the world they will inherit after school.
*I do not mean to imply that older means a teacher or parent will not understand tech or social media.
**I don't usually use the term "digital native" because it implies that the the younger generation is good with technology--and most aren't. I use it here to talk about an age range, not a skill set
