Day 4: Creating A Space for Conversation
As a student in the TESL masters
program at RIC, I am constantly reading research that shows the benefit of
conversation to students learning an additional language. Conversations allow
students to practice and play with the language and learn from the mistakes. In
addition, conversations between proficient speakers of a language provide a
model of a language for language learners. However, I believe that Turkle and
Wesch would argue that all students would benefit from a classroom that
explicitly teaches conversation skills and incorporates conversations into
instruction.
At almost every family gathering, I
hear my grandmother, Noni, state, “Doesn’t anyone know how to talk to each
other anymore? You only talk with these plastic things! (referring to our i-phones).
Although it’s true that we can be found sending a quick text to a friend during
gatherings, we do mainly have our phones out at gatherings to show pictures or
tell stories to relatives. When we are conversing we almost always pull
out our phones and look up something related to the topic we are discussing.
For instance, we have looked up a name of an actor in a movie or the name of a
new business being built. However, I do wonder how our conversations would be
different without phones.
When I taught abroad in London a
few years ago with a group of friends from my undergraduate program, I did not
have a cell phone or access to wifi. At first, I was anxious about surrendering
my i-Phone. It was indeed hard to not have wifi at first. My friends and I
would laugh when we went to Google something mid conversation and show each
other pictures and we could not. In retrospect, I can say that our topics of
conversations did change. Instead of talking about surface level movies or what
we had viewed on Instagram or Facebook, our conversations switched to the real
life experiences we were having. Furthermore, we focused on the now and were
more present. In addition, we talked about our feelings and thoughts about the
future. Overall, our conversations were deeper and more meaningful. Unlike
conversations that we were familiar with, these conversations required trust. I
think it was easier to build trust because we were connected in the mere fact
that we were having similar experiences in an unfamiliar face without
technology to fall back on. The relationships that I developed in London are far stronger than relationships that I have had for years!
I was lucky enough to have this
experience in which I learned to converse without technology, but how do we
foster that in our students? Turkle and Wesch both discuss how we need to
figure out how to bring conversations back into the classroom. It is in
conversing we learn how to truly build relationships and trust. Unlike
connecting with each other online, we are pushed outside of our comfort zone
and learn to think critically and take risks. When we are challenged to take risks,
analyze, and think critically we learn. Isn't learning the goal of education? I believe that educators need to explicitly teach conversational skills, but also simply incorporate time for students to converse. This at first might be uncomfortable for some educators, but I believe it is crucial in a test driven curriculum.
Although I believe technology has
its place in the classroom, I think as educators we need to find a balance. We
are responsible to teach students how to think critically about the media around
them and how to develop the conversational skills that allows them to share
their thinking and create!
As a teacher of adults, this is less of a stressor for me because many of my students are not digital natives. However, I know that will change over the coming years and I will be stretched to find a balance, as you are now. Right now, my challenge is introducing more technology into the classroom for students who don't know English and may have no home literacy skills...and no common language (so that Duolingo and programs like it don't really work).
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