U-46 Needs a Communications Academy
An open letter to Emily Krone, Daily Herald Education Reporter
Dear Ms. Krone,
This note is in reference to your provocative opinion piece
The Last Thing U-46 Needs is a Communications Academy which appeared in the Daily Herald on Friday January 12, 2007. I enjoy reading your stories and opinion pieces because you do your research and clearly and compellingly express your thoughts, as this opinion piece demonstrates. I want to thank you for spotlighting this issue and beginning a public discussion on this important topic. The focus of your piece centers on a U-46 committee’s decision to include a Media and Communications theme as one of the finalists for the new South Elgin High academy.
In the commentary you state a number of reasons why “students at a media and communications academy will have spent so much time learning how to communicate, they won’t know anything worth communicating.” You mention taking a communications class in school in which you stated “I learned not one thing I’ve ever used as a reporter”. Heavens knows this applies to most of us: I can speak the same about an educational methods class. And if the classes at the Media and Communications Academy were taught the same way, perhaps your predictions would come to pass.
I personally do not know how those in charge would plan the curriculum of such a Media and Communication Academy, but I do know that District U-46 has wonderfully perceptive people in the areas of instructional technology and curriculum. Allow me to disagree with your conclusions and to present another possible view of what a Media and Communications Academy could mean to our students.
Please let me address some of the concerns raised. First, this Media and Communications Academy will be much more than a means of producing student newspapers, as the opinion piece implies. The key word of the designation “Media and Communication Academy” is the “communication”. You, as a reporter, use communication skills in your job. I presume you love doing this since it is your profession. Why can’t students be given the opportunities to do the same?
The instructional approach of the Media and Communications Academy could be
problem/project based learning (an educational phrase meaning “a teaching method that engages students in learning knowledge and skills through an extended inquiry process structured around complex, authentic questions and carefully designed products and tasks”).
Research has shown ” that students who received assignments requiring more challenging intellectual work also achieved greater than average gains on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills in reading and mathematics, and demonstrated higher performance in reading, mathematics, and writing”.
Teacher Magazine reports that New Hampshire is instituting performance based / competency based assessments for their high school students. This means that “student will have to demonstrate mastery of content – not through memorization, but through performances, portfolios, or projects that encourage them to think and solve problems…”
According to U-46 reports, students have opted for the theme of media and communications as their first choice of the five finalists. I do not think they are being misguided in their choice as you suggest. You mentioned in your article that these young people already are waist deep in media. We would both agree that the world that we grew up in, with respect to communication, is much different that the one they are growing up in. Most adults are immigrants in this technological world; these young people are natives. Where I, as a student, thought communicating with a friend was to slip a note into his locker, today fifty five percent of young people ages 15-17 with access to the web have My Space accounts. They upload and share images to Flickr, share bookmarks through the deli.cio.us web site, share videos through You Tube, share their thoughts on blogspot.com, etc. The point is they understand and use many more communications tools than you and I ever thought possible. Why not teach them to do this in a purposeful and accountable way? Don’t they deserve this?
You mentioned students think the idea of a Media and Communications Academy “equates to celebrity”. What is wrong with that? It would be great motivation to do work and at the same time be held accountable for their work. Ms. Krone, isn’t one of the reasons you write is the excitement of seeing your byline appearing under an important story that you feel you did a great job on? Why can’t students have a chance at that same kind of recognition and satisfaction? Even if the event that students are publishing isn’t a tremendously important one, they can get highly motivated in their work when it is published for someone besides the teacher. By using wikis, blogs, RSS, telecasts and podcasts students would supersede classroom walls as they expand their sources of learning and mentoring and thereby have new venues for publishing their work.
As an example, a third grade teacher I currently am working with told me that her students were resisting writing, and groaned when asked to take out their writing journals. We then established a blog for each of her students in which they now write about the same kinds of topics they did before. The difference now is that they are communicating their writing as they converse with eighth grade mentors (parents and other third graders in their class have also written on their blogs). The third graders are now so highly motivated they now remind the teacher that is time to write in their blog journals. They now are excited when writing because they are using writing to communicate. I can cite other examples where students who do not have the chance to physically come together in school because of scheduling conflicts are conversing about book reviews. Again, just as you get satisfaction from having readers appreciate your work, why can’t our students have the same opportunities to be read?
You had also asked in your piece “how can the district fill an entire academy devoted to the media?” You suggest from the students’ preference for a Media and Communications Academy that students are “very interested in devoting four to five periods a day to media courses.” I would hope that the instructional technology and curriculum people of District U-46 who develop the Media and Communications Academy would never consider such an approach.
The main point I would like to emphasize is that the theme of media and communications should be viewed only as a tool to reach goals, not an end in itself. You mentioned that your junior high communication class you attended had you acting out skits from Saturday Night Live. Wouldn’t it have been better if you had been allowed to investigate issues such as the conditions in nursing homes, or interview seniors about what it was like to be teens in the Great Depression, or interview immigrants on what their American dream is? Then you could have produced a television show on these issues and presented this to interested audiences. I know of a class that researched the stem cell issue while our elected representatives were discussing it in Springfield. The students then presented their findings to Representative Ruth Munson. She complemented the young people by stating she had learned more from them than from the debate in the legislature. Ms. Krone, if your communication teacher had joined with your social studies, science and language arts teachers, think of the wonderful possibilities you could have accomplished in that class. Why can’t our U-46 students be afforded those possibilities?
I would like to emphasize again the students in the Media and Communications Academy would not be studying media and communications for their own sake, but in order to use media to converse and communicate. As a reporter, I am sure you, above all else, are interested in finding the truth. A blog article I wrote emphasized the processes, mindsets and skills that are extremely important to anyone seeking the truth:
--- Finding information
--- Distinguishing it’s relevance to the problem
--- Determining it’s validity and reliability
--- Rearranging and reorganizing the information based upon the expressed problem
--- Making conclusions
--- Composing compelling communications of these findings
These are the same processes, mindsets and skills that are essential for our students to be successful as they compete in a
flat world in the twenty first century. These should pervade every classroom in the Media and Communications Academy. They would put technology, including media, into its proper place: that of helping students become literate. Research shows that if students can rearrange information to solve a problem and then present this in a compelling way, long term memory of the information increases dramatically. Students in a Media and Communications Academy would still emphasize the subject matter of language arts, science social studies, etc., but with a pervading theme of literacy through communications.
Literacy today is much
more than knowing the three R’s. In another
blog article I wrote literacy is “the skills required to acquire and use valid information to accomplish goals”. Notice that communication and media could be used in each of the processes, mindsets and skills mentioned above. Aren’t these used by you as a reporter? Aren’t they essential for anyone wanting to discover and report the truth? Aren’t they used by most people on their jobs? Why shouldn’t our students have an opportunity to learn them in a Media and Communications Academy?
Students in a Media and Communications Academy would develop learning communities both within the academy and with appropriate groups outside the academy in order to not only expand sources of inquiry but also to share learning beyond the classroom wall. Another benefit is that teaching techniques used at the Connectivity and Communications Academy could be used as a model for other teachers in the district. It won’t be easy,
as shown by the work being done at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia which has adopted this model of learning through conversations, but it will be very much worth it.
Another advantage of a Media and Communications Academy is that the cost of running such an academy shouldn’t be greater than the Gifted Academy at Elgin, because the technology tools would be used in the process of learning. Communication tools such as safe wikis, blogs, email, video and image sharing sites, etc. are available online already with little extra cost needed. I agree with you that the technologies will change as time goes on, but the kind of learning process that will pervade the Media and Communications Academy would be useful to students throughout their lives. This is why a Media and Communications Academy should be adopted over a “Computer Academy”. The computer should be used to help students learn the above mentioned processes, mindsets and skills, not as an end in itself.
Again, thank you for bringing this issue to the forefront. Even though we have had different thoughts on this question, it is obvious that we both very much care about the young people who will be affected by the decisions to be made. I hope you might consider the possibility that that a Media and Communications Academy could be a positive addition to our district. If you would like to discuss this further, please contact me.
Citation
Labels: academy, communication, Daily Herald, Emily Krone, South Elgin High School
