But Will We Be Allowed? New Teachers Confront Old Conceptions of Literacy in a Rural Middle School

• In Event: Rural Literacies: Text and Context Beyond the Metropolis

Abstract

The field of rural literacies has focused literacy scholars on the particularities of place and space (Donehower et al, 2007, 2011; Hogg, 2006; Green & Corbett, 2013). In addition, contemporary scholarship has focused on expanding understandings of how the dynamics of space and place have influenced curriculum, pedagogy and educational policy relating to communities outside the metropolis (Schafft & Youngblood, 2010; Corbett, 2007). It is clear from this work that rural communities now represent complex confluences influences facilitated and expanded by global communication, production and consumption networks that have transformed long-established communities, lifeways and productive processes. The way the schooling is understood and the way that literacy/literacies are both understood by education professionals, parents and students themselves is changing rapidly.

Rural citizens find themselves subject to deficit discourses about their communities, their productivity, and their literacies (see the proposals for papers #2 and #3 and Corbett, 2010). At the same time the revolution in networked/mobile communication and ubiquitous computer technologies has led to radical changes in the everyday literate practices of the vast majority of North Americans no matter where they live. While there are significant “digital divides” which relate to rural/urban location (Looker and Naylor, 2010), and to generational differences in rural communities (Corbett & Vibert, 2010), there is no doubt that rural communities are significantly transformed by new communication technologies. But have rural schools kept up? This paper analyses a two-year project that challenged rural teachers working in a rural, small town middle school to expand literacy curriculum by incorporating digital video and improvisational story-telling techniques. The basic premise of the project was that digital tools are now “basic” to contemporary literacy and as such all students should have access to high quality teaching in the area of film-making and digital production. The broader project analyzed this initiative from the perspective of four main “constituencies” in the school, teachers, students, parents and the student teachers who introduced filmmaking as literacy to established teachers and to students.

This paper examines the experience of the pre-service student teachers in this project. These student teachers might be describes as the first generation of teachers who are “digital natives” in the sense that they grew up with networked computers and the internet. They understood the project and its importance but also realized just how challenging the introduction of new literacies into highly traditional, “low-tech” rural schools was. While the work they did was highly engaging to students and highly effective in the light of the kinds of pedagogies they imagined enacting in their future teaching careers, they wondered to what extent they would be “allowed” to experiment and challenge hegemonic literacy practices and transmission-oriented norms of schooling.

Author

• Michael J. Corbett, University of Tasmania