It’s the media…the social media, that is.

UPDATE: It seems fitting that this is the post I wrote yesterday, the day before the passing of Steve Jobs. While I avoided the terms iPhone, iPod and iPad, Job’s visionary genius and Apple’s leadership in terms of technology are the foundation and infrastructure upon which these social media tools depend, and are the hardware students are using and will be using for years to come to access the universe we all inhabit. While the company will continue, and his spirit of creativity is no doubt imbued into the philosophy and plans for the future, his creative vision will be missed. Thank you, Steve.

“Social Media” conjures up a variety of thoughts and images: kids hunched over their smartphones in groups, not speaking to each other but laughing about the text they are sharing; teenagers or college students snapping pictures of each other, posed and unposed, and uploading them to Facebook for consumption by that website’s “more than 800 million active users”; people wasting time in front of screens, mobile and desktop, instead of talking to each other or appreciating nature and athletics. All of these pictures portray a negative, narcissistic environment doomed to collapse under the weight of it’s own self-indulgence. But what if they’re wrong?

Mobile computing, social media, smartphones and iPads are toys that adults are turning into tools (or tools masquerading as toys) that have the power to transform education as we know it. Latinos are already the largest ethnic group of users on Twitter and Facebook. Rather than fear this fact, muttering to ourselves in Spanglish about how children are spending too much time playing on their phones, we need to encourage them to put those tools to work, creating a revolution inside the classroom, inside the schools in this country, inside our minds to empower our children.

The power of social media played out earlier this week when thousands of people, Latinos and others, logged in to Ustream to participate in a town hall on the state of education in the Hispanic community with US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. What was notable was the immediate access and interaction granted the citizens of the United States via Twitter, allowing real time interaction with the man responsible for shepherding education policy in the United States. We got to ask questions, from the philosophical to the financial, and get some answers. It will play out again when people from across the country gather in Chicago next month for the LATISM National Conference. Imagine if we shared that power to learn and interact with our students.

Teachers are already finding that student success is increasing using technology and social media across the country. It simply takes a shift in thinking to understand that what our kids are using for fun can be used to teach them both the content and skills, that the same apps and sites they’re using to KIT (keep in touch) can be used to create songs, films, podcasts that speak to who they are and share their gifts and talents with a larger world.

In doing this, using new technology and social media to interact with their own education, they will learn that the power to transform the world rests in their hands; the tools they need to impact their school, their neighborhood, their city, their state, their country can be used inside the classroom as well as with their homies.

And there is definitely an app for that.

Originally posted 10/03/11 at Latinos In Social Media for Edu-Wednesday.

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• Time to Vote for LATISM’s BEST of 2011 (juliorvarela.com)
• Word Cloud: How Social Media Remembered Steve Jobs (socialtimes.com)
• Social media is for telling your Story.. not for distributing your CV !! (mysocialadventures.wordpress.com)

Books Before Pencils

Princesas para mi Princesa.

There were books in my parents’ bedroom. There were books in my parents’ office.  There were books on my nightstand with pictures in them before I could read, and books with words and pictures after I learned.  I learned to speak when Winnie the Pooh asked Christopher Robin for some honey, sounding out the words to make sense of the pictures, or the other way around (I’m not sure). And my parents read to me at night, sending me to sleep with language and pictures that I made up to see what they were reading. The input was more important than the output before I went to school.

Necesitamos poner libros en las manos de todo los ninos Latinos y Americanos y Latino Americanos, también, y temprano mas aun.  Early childhood education begins before children set foot in school, before they pick up a pencil. It is the basis for, and a strong indicator of, academic success as they get older. With “less than half [of Latino children] enrolled in any early learning program” we are sending them into schools un- and underprepared to learn, without the language to articulate their difficulties.  And, on top of this, there are other forces standing directly in their way once they arrive.

In her book, The Latino Education Crisis, Patricia Gándara examines the structural and societal obstacles to educating Latinos in the United States.  From political pogroms like Arizona’s attack on the Tucson Unified School District’s highly successful Mexican American Studies program, to the current vilification of illegal and legal immigrants (read: Latinos) in state legislatures across the country, Latino children’s educations are being thwarted with devastating impact.  “Only about half earn their high school diploma on time; [and] those who do complete high school are only half as likely as their peers to be prepared for college,” and “only 12 percent of Latino students are completing a Bachelor of Arts degree.”

The Obama Administration has begun to address the external obstacles.  The Department of Education and the White House recently coauthored a report “Winning the Future: Improving Education for the Latino Community” which identified not only the status of education amongst Latinos, but also begins to at least articulate changes in the structure of public education to benefit them as well.  And in Tucson, current Latino students are using the oldest method of expression, direct protest, to stop people interested in the demise of Latino education.

Politically, those of us in advanced years, having matriculated from educational institutions or simply left them, need to begin cultivating candidates and politicians, like President Obama, of whatever political affiliation who understand the importance of giving Latino children a Head Start, and making sure that those early childhood education programs are financially accessible.

Most importantly, though, and most immediate, is we need to get them books.  Books with pictures before they can read.  Books with pictures and words after.  Books in English and books in Spanish.  Books before pencils. The input is more important that the output before they go to school. Books.

Cross-posted at Latinos In Social Media for Edu-Wednesdays, May 4th, 2011.

New Latino Majority Creates New Challenges for CA Schools

Improving Latino Education to Win the Future (blog post)

Winning the Future: Improving Education In the Latino Community (report)

The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies

TUSD ethnic studies meeting changed to Tuesday

“Why Don’t More Latinos Graduate?”, LATINA Magazine interview with Patricia Gándara, May 2011, p. 110

Divided We Fall

Image via Wikipedia

The electoral college is a tool which maintains political power within a certain circle.  It means that the popular vote for president every four years doesn’t legally elect the President of the United States, and it is written into the Constitution of the United States. Keeping citizens divided has been a tool of the powerful since before the nation’s inception, utilized by many different groups in our two-hundred-plus years rather successfully. Whether through:

a class system which kept poor white farmers from voting in the early Republic, or

black codes which ensnared newly freed citizens of African descent while “grandfathering” in those same poor whites, or

Chinese Exclusion laws which prevented only residents of Chinese birth from becoming naturalized citizens, or

the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, or

the Bracero Program which shipped Mexicans in to work and shipped them out when the work was done, or

“separate but equal” Jim Crow laws constitutionally approved by the Supreme Court, or

“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and the Defense of Marriage Act which still segregates and disenfranchises citizens today,

keeping the poor and uneducated focused on their own privileges while claiming that they are “endangered” by “others” has proven a successful tactic historically.

Today, the Arizona legislature, the Ohio legislature, and the Scott Walkers of the world are pitting the working citizens of the United States against each other using the same tactics.  And their misdirection appears to be working.  The “Tea Party” movement, engineered by Dick Armey and co-opted for fifteen minutes by Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, is simply the White Citizen’s Council with better makeup.  The Wisconsin Republican Party is the new face of the Gilded Age’s robber barons, shamelessly paying placed politicians for the political support to deny rights to the poor and working classes.  We’ve even seen Representative Peter King channeling Senator Joe McCarthy, attempting to taint an entire group as subversive and extremist with his Congressional hearings on “Muslim radicalization in America.”

The false equivalencies of deficit v. entitlements, or civil rights v. national security, or citizens v. illegals manage to keep all of the participants, both the have a littles and the have nots, focused on each other instead of the Koch brothers and the Boehners, who are reaping the financial and political windfall while we fight for the scraps.

The power of the United States rests on the just application of the American Ideals of equality, opportunity, liberty, rights and democracy.  It rests on the government mandate to “secure the rights”, “promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty,” for all.  When any of these are abused, or usurped, as they are in Wisconsin, Arizona, Ohio and on the national stage, they are endangered for all citizens, regardless of race or color.

My Parents Are Teachers

Nine years old and college-bound

Lately, this blog and my voice have been getting some airtime and attention.  After years of working and learning, of writing and speaking, I accept those because they feel like acknowledgement of hours spent hunched over a notebook, hands stained in ink, mind churning as I analyze the history of this country, and the relationships and roles my peoples play in building that history each day.
But, in that attention, I need to admit that I haven’t done this on my own.  I need to admit that I have stood on the shoulders of giants, and taken the next step.  When I was nine years old, my grandmother, then going back to school to complete the college degree that had been interrupted by marriage, World War II, and raising four black women during the Civil Rights Movement, asked me if I was going to college.  Being the precocious (or obnoxious) child that I was, I simply answered,

“You’ve met my parents.  Like I have a choice!”

My mother and father made clear, not by telling me but by showing me with the stories of their lives and the actions I witnessed, that my education was important.
Since I began kindergarten there has not been a parent-teacher meeting, a Christmas play, a championship soccer game (maybe not championship,but…) that they didn’t change their schedules to support.

1985 never looked so good!

They also showed me, by their vocations, how important education is.  My father moved our entire family across the country as he earned his PhD at Georgetown, investigating and teaching the best methods of learning for students whose primary language isn’t English.  From the Montessori classroom to the US Department of Education, my mother has kept her hands on the pulse of learning her entire adult life.  I say these things, not as braggadocio, but echoing the awe that others speak with when meeting them.
They’ve always been my mom and dad, and I’ve always known that education was important because they showed me that it was. They watched the morning news and talked about it with me, even when I wanted to watch The Justice League, even when I didn’t understand what they were talking about. Now a husband and father, I’m doing these same things for my children because that’s how I learned, and that’s how I’ve become successful.
As I watch Arizona attempting to kidnap the future in this country; as I watch the Teachers in Wisconsin being vilified rather than lauded; as I watch public education being turned into assembly lines for manual labor, I have to stand up and say My Parents Are Teachers.  I have to stand up and say that it isn’t the American way to cheat children of their futures, and to keep families ignorant and afraid.  I have to stand up and say THANK YOU to my parents, for teaching so many years in the classroom, and teaching me out of the classroom when to stand up. From my work with Latinos in Social Media to my support for the public workers in Wisconsin, the lessons that I’ve learned, that my parents live, resonate each day.  This seems like a good moment for me to give thanks.

Thank You, Mom.  Thank you, Papi.

From UCLA to the President’s Advisory Board for the National Institute of Literacy, Thank You.
From the University of Redlands to the United States Department of Education, Thank You.
From Olin Street to Almansor Street, Thank You.
Your examples continue to inspire me, and to show me how important learning and education are.  And so I’ll continue doing my best to Spread the Word.
As I continue fighting Arizona, fighting Wisconsin, fighting ignorance and oppression across the country and the globe, I have to say thank you for arming me with the tools, the desire, and the knowledge to do so.

My parents are teachers.  And they’ve taught me quite a bit.

La Familia Macias in 2011.

 

Epilogue: This post was catalyzed by Univision’s Es El Mometo initiative, which began because too many Latino students in the United States don’t have the blessing of parents who know how the education system works, or have walked through it themselves.  The matriculation rates for Latinos are far below other ethnic groups in this country.  One way we can improve this fact is greater parent involvement, and greater awareness on the part of families of the requirements for students to graduate and go to college. As my parents have been involved in my education, we need to educate, inform and get parents and caretakers actively involved.

Related Articles

• Outlawing Chicanos: An Alien Education (blog.latism.org)
• Univision’s Es El Momento Program for Education (amoxcalli.ginaruiz.com)