Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Sunday, October 29, 2006
The natives are restless
(Immigrants arrive New York in 1887)
Imagine this.
There’s an influx of immigrants into a community. The natives try to help them assimilate, seeking to teach them the skills they’ll need in society. But there’s one problem. None of the native teachers are fluent in the immigrant language.
What’s more, it just may be that the it’s knowledge of the immigrant language that’s key to thriving in the emerging global marketplace.
Sound like some far away place? This may, in fact, describe your home and your children’s classrooms.
Here’s what I mean.
On Friday, my wife and I got new cell phones after two years so I gave the old, disconnected phones to the kids to play with. About half an hour later, electronic sounds drew me away from the frustration of navigating through the features of my new phone to the room shared by my eight and six year old daughters.
I was fairly stunned by what they were up to. One was playing a video game that I never even knew was in the phone. The other had changed the ring to a song, re-arranged the welcome screen, renamed the phone and put her sisters’ names into the address book. Neither of them had ever used a cell phone before.
Folks, let me introduce you to the digital natives. They’re our kids, the ones who have always lived in a digital world. We, on the other hand, are the digital immigrants, the ones learning the language of technology second hand.
Apparently, this isn’t a new idea, but only recently I was passed this great paper from 2001 describing the daunting challenge for our education system. Here’s a taste:
“It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize.
“Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures,” says Dr. Bruce D. Berry of Baylor College of Medicine. As we shall see in the next installment, it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed - and are different from ours - as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed.”
Which leads to this problem:
” … the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language. This is obvious to the Digital Natives - school often feels pretty much as if we’ve brought in a population of heavily accented, unintelligible foreigners to lecture them. They often can’t understand what the Immigrants are saying. What does “dial” a number mean, anyway?
In some ways, I’m lucky. I sent my first E-mail and joined my first Internet listserv in 1988, long before many people had even heard of the Internet, thanks to a summer job at a university. I loaded my first web page on a work computer in 1995, again ahead of the curve compared to the general public.
But nothing changes the fact that I am a digital immigrant — I’ve learned enough of the language to get along but I’m far from fluent. My kids, even at very young ages, already know some aspects of this digital language better than I do.
It’s a tough problem. Teachers, like many of us in other professions, have sought out training and experience. But we’re still immigrants and “language learners,” to borrow education jargon.
Any ideas for how to overcome the divide with the natives?
(Image credit: www.latinamericanstudies.org)
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