7718 Week 4; American School for Americans
I chose the Pixton comic maker to express my thoughts on this week’s assignment. I thought a comic was a good way to playfully criticize visual profiling, public schooling, and how education is Americanized. I thought that including some phrases from the videos was challenging. I had to be creative in how I got that message across. It was hard to incorporate the reading and video material into the comic without quoting it. I was limited as to how many characters I could include in the comic, which made it harder for me to get my message across.
While both characters in the comic represented different aspects of visual profiling, public schooling, and Americanization of education, they also are mixed in their stereotypes of each other. (At least, that was my intention in creating the comic). I think this is a very popular aspect of American education today. The Teaching Channel video obviously proves that visual profiling exists and that many would stereotype the long-haired, earring-wearing teacher as sub-par. Yet, he was quite effective. The Learner video was different and more formal in their approach to teaching reading. Shirts, ties, and clean-cut were the most obvious differences. I noticed the gentleness of the opening tune in which the video begins. It was more inviting than the Teach Channel video. I tried to express these ideas in the comic by using the words of the characters.
You can see the comic represents these misconceptions and clearly the male would much rather a more traditional looking teacher. While the female character stands up for the stereotyped, she also judges the male character’s tie! Ironically, the male character is judging his teacher when he represents a similar stereotype (visual profiling), just in the opposite form.
I also believed that a comic was a good choice to state my opinion of this week’s issues because generally a comic is not something people take very seriously. Again, I wanted to criticize how America falls victim to visual profiling and the Americanization of public schooling. The comic represents my agreement that we are guilty of these faults and shows I think it’s wrong. The irony that comics are very “American” also struck me!
After having created the comic I have found it was more challenging than I had expected in regards to delivering my thoughts about the prompts to light. However, I did enjoy the process of learning to operate the Pixton application. I can see the value of comics in my classroom, however, I am hesitant to utilize unless I have a very applicable assignment. I would hate for my students to run into the same issue that I did. I first tried an application similar to Powtoon. It was another comic application but it wasn’t free. I only found this out after I signed up and downloaded it. SO, it was a time-consuming process. In Pixton, I spent a long time creating the appropriate quotes to represent the sources. I would probably use this with my students to represent certain personality traits of characters or deliver a theme similar to a story we’ve read.
Overall, I am better versed in how to use the application and glad I tried it. I do see myself using Pixton in my classroom!
Resources:
Gee, J. (2012). Social Linguistics and Literacies (4th ed.). New York: Routledge.
Teaching Reading; 3-5 Workshop, http://www.learner.org/resources/series204.html
Rick’ Reading Workshop: Complete Workshop, http://www.learner.org/resources/series204.html
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