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I’m really excited to feature today’s guest post by Tanya Avrith, educational technology consultant and former teacher. As she describes below, she’s put in her classroom time and seen first-hand the way technology use has changed the way kids communicate and learn. As one of the brains behind the Lester B. Pearson School Board’s innovative Digital Citizenship Program, she is better positioned than most to argue for a thoughtful embrace of technology by schools.

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During my last seven years as a teacher and consultant, I have borne witness to the technological digital shift in education. When I began my education career in 2005 at the tender age of 23, I had little idea what I was about to face.  I was given an unheard of mixture of classes and was thrown to the sharks wearing my new heels and best “teacher” clothes.  NaÏve and idealistic, nothing had prepared me for the challenges and incredible joys I would face in the classroom. Nor did I realize that a revolution in education and social media was under way.

Looking back to when I began teaching, I can now appreciate what was developing. It was at the very the beginning of what we’ve come to call the “Web 2.0” student generation. My students that year were not yet posting constant status updates on Facebook, nor were they tweeting, sharing videos on YouTube or bringing smartphones to class. Boy, were things about to change…

By my second year of teaching I had become the media teacher (along with a long list of other subjects) and was introduced (by a student of course) to Facebook, founded only a few years before. I still remember the first time I logged on. I was ignorant to the etiquette of status writing and posting pictures as well as privacy issues and how they could affect me later in my life. Like most of today’s first time users, I made many mistakes when using social media because I didn’t know any better.

As an educator or parent it is easy to forget how quickly things changed in those few years. From one day to the next, the way our students/children socialized and communicated was turned upside down. Teachers and administrators are still trying to figure out what their roles are when it comes to dealing with the use of social media, both in and out of the classroom. We are at a crossroads in education where we need to figure out how we should be dealing with the issues that arise from this new “digital” generation of students.

Where do we go from here? Do we ban? Block, filter, take away, confiscate. All adjectives used to describe the current policies in many schools. Early on, like many of my colleagues, I feared technology, and my knee-jerk reaction was to agree with this type of policy. Isn’t it human nature to try to repress the things we don’t understand?

The problem with this approach is that it does not work. It turns teachers and administrators into the “cell phone and Internet police.” We scour our classes and manage confiscated devices. We block everything on the Internet that we don’t want to deal with. We investigate, punish, give detentions, and spend many hours dealing with the issues that arise when things go wrong.

What are we really accomplishing with this approach? We are missing many opportunities that these complex devices could bring to the classroom. For example, many of our students have access to 3G networks on their smart phones where they are always connected. These students have the potential to have a computer, video/digital camera, access to the Internet, and online books at their fingertips… And what are we telling them to do? Put them away! The irony is that we find school boards discussing the need to find resources to put technology into those very same hands.

Do we educate?

What we do need is a coherent plan to teach digital citizenship in schools. Digital citizenship addresses the appropriate use of technology. It is not about the technology itself but rather about the effects that arise from its usage. It’s an interesting approach that focuses on teaching about the ethical usage of technology.

Many teachers admit that they feel intimidated with the use of technology in the classroom because they worry their students know more than they do. What is important to understand is that students may use the technology more, however, they are primarily using it to socialize and/or play games and do not always have the metacognitive skills to use it as a learning tool. Furthermore, they are not equipped with the understanding how to use the technology safely and appropriately. The teacher offers the wisdom of how to learn and the ethical direction needed to manage technology creatively and productively. We need to make the most of this symbiotic relationship between the teacher and student. Imagine the possibilities of partnering with our students to learn from each other.

We are not asking that teachers change what they are doing but rather adapt their teaching to include elements that are relevant to how our students are learning today. With digital citizenship education there are many educational opportunities that would not be possible if we continue to ban the technology in our schools.

What does digital citizenship eduction look like? Teaching about digital citizenship should not be viewed as an “add-on” but rather complement what is already being taught in the classroom.  For example, a teacher who is introducing a research topic in class would discuss how to evaluate websites, and teach the students appropriate searching strategies. The teacher would also discuss copyright and how to properly share information.  The Lester B. Pearson School Board DCP offers a curriculum for Digital Citizenship with many examples of what digital citizenship looks like in the classroom. A few great resources that address digital citizenship include:

• The Lester B. Pearson School Board DCP (Digital Citizenship Program) provides teachers with teachable topics  that are age appropriate. It provides easily organized subject and grade level resources as well as resources for parents.
• Commonsense Media: An incredible resource for both educators and parents that has many resources that focus on digital citizenship.
•  Digizen: Another great resource that provides interactive activities for students to learn more about digital citizenship.
•  The door that is not locked: A bilingual Canadian resource great for parents, educators and students.

Tanya Avrith is a mother of two and a former high school teacher. Currently on maternity leave, she works for the Lester B. Pearson School Board in Montreal, Quebec as an educational technology consultant with a focus on digital citizenship education. Tanya was one of the driving forces behind the development of the Digital Citizenship Program for the LBPSB. She also provides seminars on digital citizenship education and workshops on how to adapt the classroom to include various technology tools (iPads, 1:1 programs, SMARTboards…). Tanya holds a Masters Degree in Educational Technology from Concordia University.

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Have you watched “Sext Up Kids,” CBC DocZone’s amazing documentary about how today’s kids come to understand their sexuality? Because if the answer is no, then you really should.

Why? Because this concerns you as a parent. Whether your kids are 3 years old, or 14.

I can promise you one thing: you will be shocked. I know I was, and I consider myself pretty well-informed about matters of teens and popular culture.

It’s true that narratives of teen sexuality have been pretty messed up ever since, well, ever since we can remember. Sure, there have been instances of genuine liberation (the availability of the birth control pill, Stonewall, Planned Parenthood, websites like Scarleteen.org, etc.), but the for the most part teen sexuality has been about navigating forces of repression (like the Purity Movement, for example) on the one hand, and overt hyper-sexualization on the other (like 15-year-old Miley Cyrus posing seductively in Vanity Fair).

But it’s different from when we were kids. The Internet has made pornography available to everyone, at any time. The CBC documentary points out that kids today are exposed to the kinds of hard-core sexuality that even adults might have found difficult to access only 10 short years ago.  This omnipresent sexuality (which has nothing to do with intimacy, romance or love) has crept into all spheres of our lives — and our kids’ lives — from a very young age. Thong underwear for seven-year-old girls. T-shirts for tweens that read “Future porn star.” Underwear for little girls that say “Eye candy.” Voluptuous, barely dressed female video game characters and avatars entertain our boys.

Even Dora the Explorer was redrawn to lose her childish proportions and resemble the slinky pre-teen that dominates this new aesthetic.

One high school girl in the CBC documentary explains “Everyone is looking at porn now. There’s no romance at all.” And though one researcher says that in her studies of teen sexual yearnings, most do genuinely want that romantic connection, they just don’t understand how to get there. It just isn’t modelled in their cultural narratives.

The hyper-sexualization of our culture teaches boys that they just need to get as much (normative, heterosexual) sex as possible. And according to a researcher in Sext Up Kids, it teaches girls that they only have two choices: “to be f*ckable* or invisible.”

Wow. That got me, as a woman and a mom of three daughters. Then I started thinking about the possible alternatives to hotness or invisibility as cultural frameworks for our girls (and the boys who are also learning how to look at girls).  Surely there are other positive, healthy sexual alternatives out there.

So I turned to Google. And the world of academia. I asked some respectable cultural critics. And I put it out there on the Twitterverse.

I’m glad I did. I learned that true alternatives are few and far between. There is some truly interesting work about teen sexuality coming out of the LGBT communities. Amazing to see, but still unfortunately a sexual ghetto when it comes to straight tweens and teens. There are examples of subversive and creative resistance from alternative communities like Goths or environmental/ Mother Earth-type communities.

Writer Debra Tolman describes the work of researcher Carla Stokes, who writes about some teen girl communities simultaneously resist and comply with the dominant ways of understanding teens sexuality:

She found portraits of “Freaks” who resisted good girl scripts but performed hypersexual Jezebel scripts and “Virgins,” who resisted those scripts but described themselves as “sweet” and “nice,” reflecting proper norms of denying sexual feelings.

In other words, often in trying to be subversive or resistant, these girls just end up reinforcing the same stereotypes.

And the kicker is that these girls are mostly learning about how their own sexuality is really about servicing boys (thank you President Clinton!). Check out the titles of articles in teen girls’ and women’s magazines – it’s all about pleasing men in bed, not about female pleasure at all. Many report that sex is like work, or performance and that it is often painful or uncomfortable because they aren’t even aroused themselves.

That struck me as so terribly sad.

Aside from top-down initiatives in opening up teen sexuality (like Planned Parenthood or Scarleteen.org, whose work I wholeheartedly endorse), I came across the girl-fueled website/ movement called Spark (Sexualization Protest Action Resistance Knowledge). This intergenerational movement, co-founded by community organizations and academics, engages girls as activists in learning/ developing positive, healthy versions of their sexuality. There is a media literacy component (check out their engaging online video-magazine called Miss Representation), and they encourage girls to set up their own Spark chapters  at school to spread the word.

What else is there? I’d love to hear from readers who’ve come across different ways of reading or experiencing teen sexuality (girls or boys) that challenges the Hot or Invisible choices that currently dominate the mainstream. Please feel free to send links to YouTube videos, blog posts, online communities, novels, artwork, video games, music, etc.

French theorist Michel Foucault observed that for all the obsession our culture has with sex, we really don’t talk frankly about it at all. This is particularly true for our tweens and teens. I’m hoping to put together a list of places online that parents and tweens/ teens can go to change this.

*My use of asterisks on key words isn’t out of prudery; I’m trying to avoid these terms becoming search words that bring people to this website.

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