Produsers, Prosumers, and the Job Market

When I think about participatory culture in my personal life, I know I am pretty actively involved in it. I see pictures of cool hairstyles on Facebook and adapt them to my daughter's head. I watch youtube tutorials on crochet patterns and then make my own version of them. I'm inspired by online recipes all the time, though you better believe I'm using parsley instead of cilantro (you can keep your nasty soapy-tasting herb, Interwebs!). I post pics of what I've made on social media and generally link to the websites that inspired me in the comments. At this point, going to Google images is one of the first steps in my creative process for most projects I undertake, from Halloween costumes to craft ideas for my daughter's classroom parties to illustrations for my lecture slides for my composition classes. It's a little jarring when I find I have to actually pay for instructions or inspiration, though I am sometimes motivated to do so.

I bought a kit that came with an instruction booklet
and materials to make this guy and some of his
friends last year.

This mermaid blanket, on the other hand, I adapted from a
YouTube tutorial.

One of the struggles I've faced that has kept me from fully engaging in this sharing culture, however, has been a lack of access to certain technologies. Every time I post a picture of a fancy braid I've done in my daughter's hair, someone comments that I need to have my own YouTube channel to teach others how to do it. I'm not at all opposed to sharing my expertise and am flattered that other people are interested in this hobby of mine, but I lack the camera crew, or technology that could stand in for one, to actually enable me to film myself braiding and then edit it for mass consumption. 

Bet you wish you could see how I made this happen!

 Now, I could go out and buy a new camera and tripod and editing software to launch my new, clearly viral hair tutorial series, but since I'm a writing instructor rather than a hairstylist by trade, it doesn't seem like a wise financial investment. It's entirely possible that I could find ways of adapting my smartphone or iPad to this purpose with decent and inexpensive results, but again, I'm not sure it's worth the investment of my time given my day job.

I think this struggle of access and investment is at the heart of the issue of pursuing an open culture in education. On the one hand, when we already have the necessary skills and access to technology, we teachers are pretty inclined to share. The birth of the meme below is a good illustration. It started as something that I said on the fly in class as I tried to explain to my students what their essay introductions needed to accomplish without devolving into the rigid structure of the five paragraph theme. My students responded well to it, and I thought it was funny, so I shared my illustration on Facebook because I thought it might prove useful to one of my teaching friends, or at the very least, entertain them. One of my friends and colleagues was so entertained by it that she deemed it worthy of a meme and spent a few minutes turning it into one, which she then shared as a comment. My friends loved it and wanted to share it, so we decided to make the image public. I'm told it was even printed off and now hangs in a couple of university writing centers around the country.

Look Ma, I'm a meme!

I loved every bit of sharing this particular nugget of wisdom. I loved the positive feedback. I loved the sense of connecting with my fellow teachers. I definitely love the picture my friend chose that reminds me of one of my other common van references involving Chris Farley, living in a van, down by the river. But most of all, I loved how easy it was to share.

That ease is important to me, not because I'm lazy, but because I have so many demands on my time and need to use it wisely. My effort has to match the payoff, at least to some extent. This meme is fun, but it has yet to lead to a hiring committee deciding to put my CV and letter of application into the interview pile. I've spent countless hours in the last year revising part of my dissertation into a chapter for an edited collection, however, because I'm hoping it will one day do just that for my job prospects. I fear that not just tenure committees, but hiring committees, would view any online sharing of work, no matter how rigorous or grounded in research, as essentially as frivolous as a meme and therefore not worthy of academic consideration. For those who have tenure, it may be possible to work from within to change the expectations of the system, but for those of us still trying to break into full-time or tenure-track positions in higher education, being completely unselfish about sharing our expertise in open formats (that we may need to spend considerable time/effort/finances learning) could lead to us not being able to do pesky little things like pay our bills and feed our children/selves. 

I'm curious how such open-source content creation is viewed in K-12 settings in terms of hiring and promotion. Is there space in a typical teaching portfolio to showcase such materials? Does the collaborative nature of so much of it raise concerns of plagiarism or padding ones resume? 

I would imagine that districts would love the flip side of the equation, though. Textbooks are such a financial investment, yet they are so often obsolete by the time they are produced, distributed, and used for a few years. Then again, maintaining the technology that students use to access "free" content online is also expensive and a constant battle against becoming obsolete. Additionally, the digital divide or participation gap is a real problem in school districts with high poverty rates. 

I guess, overall, my thoughts are that we are moving as a society towards a sharing economy and that is going to impact our classrooms. While it is a boon for teachers to have access to all that their peers are willing to share, that access doesn't automatically erase the obstacles to education that are endemic in our current education system, which is built on the exploitation of underpaid instructors and which perpetuates the class and segregation lines we have developed over our history as a nation. Still, I believe this open and participatory impulse is a move in the right direction and I would like to contribute to it more as my skills in doing so increase (here's hoping through this course!).

Sharing is Caring

When I started teaching English composition as a first year MA student in 2007, my program took a rather "sink or swim" approach to training teaching assistants. We were given three half days of orientation, a sample syllabus, and a department-approved textbook the week before our classes began, then we met weekly throughout the semester with other new TAs in a teaching practicum led by the Director of Composition. The practicum functioned as part formal pedagogical training, part practical planning session, and part support group. Sharing was absolutely essential to its success, as well as ours. Having never even taken a composition course myself (I tested out of them), I was particularly desperate to hear people say "I tried this activity in class and it worked," so I could figure out what to do in my class.
"Teacher Research" and the beauty of failure:
I soon discovered, however, that my favorite resources were the published articles we read that followed a simple formula: I thought x activity would be a great way to teach y, but it blew up in my face, and here's what I learned from that experience. I might not get a specific, concrete classroom activity out of such articles, but I did get a sense of camaraderie with other teachers, as we all, even the seasoned professionals, seemed to be figuring this out as we went. Such sharing of classroom failures also encouraged me to remain flexible in my teaching. Just because an activity worked in one class didn't mean it would work in another, or that it was always the best way to teach a particular concept. I eventually came to express this philosophy in these terms: It's not just acknowledging that I might be wrong, but remaining certain that I am not completely right (an idea I first saw expressed in this book by Kate Ronald and Hepzibah Roskelly). Keeping my fallibility always in mind helps me to try new strategies and to accept that some of them will fail.
If the teachers who came before me had been unwilling to be transparent about their classroom failures, as well as successes, my classroom would be a very different place today.
Student Safety in the transparent class:
The key to sharing both successfully and wisely, though, comes when we remember to protect and respect our students. Sharing our frustrations with student behavior or mistakes in the safety of our face-to-face practicum was okay, but to voice such comments online is unfair and often simply unkind. It's a tricky balancing act between only sharing the positive, success stories, giving a false impression of what teaching is actually like, and sharing our failures in ways that end up disparaging students rather than focusing on what went wrong on our end.
I see this play out in my Facebook newsfeed all the time. A big block of my friends on Facebook are fellow composition teachers, so I know I have a sympathetic audience for things like my recent post about the perpetual frustration I feel when a student emails me after missing a class to ask "Did I miss anything?" and my overwhelming desire to reply, "No. We were so devastated by your absence that we just couldn't find the will to go on." It's good to feel solidarity with my colleagues in such a moment, and it is certainly better to talk to them about my frustration than to actually send that reply to my student, but it is also important to remember that each student who sends that email is making that mistake for the first time and needs to be granted the opportunity to learn from it while maintaining their dignity. Anonymity is essential for that. When it comes to sharing a student's exact words, though, one should get their permission first.
Sharing is Caring (Except with the flu. That you can keep all to yourself):
In the end, then, I agree with Dean Shareski that we have an obligation to share our teaching practices with others. I could not have become the teacher I am today without the sharing of other teachers, and I believe others have benefited from the materials and activities I have shared with them at conferences and in informal meetings. I would add, however, that sharing our failures can be even more important for building a community of teachers.