You are here: Home / Archives for sabbatical research

On teaching game design in a journalism course, part 2

July 7, 2011 by

Table of contents for Computational thinking in journalism

  1. As we change journalism education, we need to study journalism learners
  2. A foundational concept for the new news economy
  3. What Would WEB Du Bois Tell Henry Jenkins and Soulja Boy?
  4. Building the bridge between journalism and computer science
  5. Can VIBE magazine be saved? And should we care?
  6. Scratch as a Tool for Teaching Computational Journalism
  7. Crafting Literary Journalism
  8. How stories and network science could improve educational equity and diversity
  9. What computing and informatics tools will help Haiti?
  10. Why I fear I’ll never master SEO
  11. You’re gonna need to read this, but it won’t be on Amazon
  12. Scholastic Journalism Education as a Tool for Teaching Computational Thinking
  13. How should journalism educators teach and study social media?
  14. What is a computational journalist?
  15. The Food Stamp Game: a test case for teaching computational journalism, part 1
  16. On teaching game design in a journalism course, part 2
  17. On teaching game design in a journalism class, part 3
  18. On teaching game design in a journalism class, Part 4: Newsgames as literary journalism

In my last post on the newsgames course I will be teaching this fall, I began to discuss how the need to respect the journalistic intent of a newsgame translates into requirements and constraints upon the game’s design and production. In this post, I want to  delve into that topic more deeply, using principles outlined in Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Designing Innovative Games, and applying those principles to a game that I consider particularly successful, MSNBC’s “Can You Spot the Threats?”  game about the challenges of screening airport baggage.  Finally, I will discuss questions that I will raise with my students about my partially finished “Food Stamps Game,” which I introduced in the last post. The intent of the Food Stamps Game is to simulate the experience of trying to buy a week’s worth of groceries on a $30 budget, about average in terms of what states allow a single adult participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) which is the current name for Food Stamps. (Eligibility for benefits and benefit levels vary, and are based on complex criteria. See references on benefits at the end of this post.)

Fullerton defines a game as:

  • A closed formal system that
  • Engages players in structured conflict and
  • Resolves its uncertainty in unequal outcomse (p, 43)

MSNBC's game about airport baggage screening successfully incorporates dramatic and formal elements.

Here, an aside: It should be noted that Fullerton’s definition of a game is at slight variance with that employed by the authors of the other text that I plan to use in the course, Newsgames: Journalism at Play, which I discussed in the previous post. The Newgames text considers animated infographics as games, where as Fullerton is more restrictive. I bring this up because this is an interdisciplinary class in which some of the students are already familiar with Fullerton;s formulations. I may need to take these differing perspectives into account in order to build a common intellectual climate within the class.

Part of the value of Fullerton’s definition is that she breaks it down into components that can be understood as operational requirements.  Games have what Fullerton describes as formal elements (such as rules, playing pieces, boundaries and outcomes), dramatic elements (premise, setting, character and a dramatic arc), and system dynamics (the way the formal and dramatic elements interact). Please note that Fullerton’s definition of these categories is more extensive than I have presented here. This list is only  for the sake of illustration and discussion.

Applying Fullerton’s rubric to MSNBC’s “Can You Spot the Threats” game helps us to understand more about her categories, as well as the characteristics of a successful simulation-type game. The game starts with ominous music and a voiceover narration about the ways in which airport baggage screening procedures changed in the United States after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Then you are told that you are about to experience what it’s like to screen baggage for two minutes. A series of actual images of luggage generated by screening equipment scrolls across the screen, and you have to pick out the bags most likely to contain guns, knives or explosives. However, the pictures are frustratingly blurry and vague, as can be seen above. You can stop an image, zoom in, and change the black-and-white image to color, but the images are still non-descript. Take too long, and the passenger murmuring in the background rises to a fever pitch. Move too quickly, and it’s likely that something dangerous will slip through. At the end of two minutes, you get a score based on the number of bags screened, the number of dangerous bags detected, the number missed, and a score.

In Fullerton’s parlance, there are formal elements – rules, resources (the bags, the controls), boundaries (the time limit, for example) and outcomes. There is a real-world premise, a story in with characters (you, the baggage screener, and the passengers),  a setting, and a simple dramatic arc. The flash program functions efficiently, and the interface is clean.

“Can You Spot the Threats?” is one of the most effective newsgames I’ve seen, both When I had a class of about 24 students play this game in 2003, they said they gained a new appreciation for the difficulty of the baggage-screener’s job, and motivated them to read the accompanying web feature article. My campus is an hour’s train ride from Ground Zero, and the 9/11 attacks were still evoked a visceral emotional response from my students. They said they found it easy to accept the game’s premise, and they felt anxious as the blurry images rolled across the screen and passengers began to complain that they might miss their planes.

These are some of the ways in which the Food Stamps game is unfinished and needs revision.  As some test users report, the boundaries of the game aren’t always clear – for example, a script that should come up when a buyer runs out of money doesn’t yet work properly. There aren’t enough dramatic elements and the system dynamics could use some work. These will be some of the things that will be fodder for discussion with students in the fall.

Arguably, the flaws in this game, and the ability to download and remix the code in Scratch, makes the Food Stamps game useful as a tool for highlighting this game and its design process as an example of computational thinking. I will elaborate on that in the next post.

Endnotes

References on benefits. For more information on how states calculate Food Stamp benefits, please see examples below:

  1. USDA SNAP Eligibility page
  2. Texas: Food Stamp Benefit Estimator
  3. Illinois: DHS Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
  4. MassLegal Services. 2011 Food Stamp Advocacy Guide Part III. Eligibility
  5. Hawaii Financial  and SNAP Benefits RIghts and Responsibilities
  6. Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services: Economic Stability Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
  7. South Carolina Department of Social Services SNAP Benefit Calculator
  8. 2007 Congressional Food Stamp Challenge
  9. US Food Policy “Living on a Food Stamp Budget” (This is the specific source of my $30/week figure.

Course syllabus as of July 13, 2001

     

    Previous in series Next in series
    Filed Under: Civic media, Collaboration, Computational Thinking, Gaming, Journalism, journalism education, Research, Teaching Tagged With: , , , ,

    The Food Stamp Game: a test case for teaching computational journalism, part 1

    July 1, 2011 by

    Table of contents for Computational thinking in journalism

    1. As we change journalism education, we need to study journalism learners
    2. A foundational concept for the new news economy
    3. What Would WEB Du Bois Tell Henry Jenkins and Soulja Boy?
    4. Building the bridge between journalism and computer science
    5. Can VIBE magazine be saved? And should we care?
    6. Scratch as a Tool for Teaching Computational Journalism
    7. Crafting Literary Journalism
    8. How stories and network science could improve educational equity and diversity
    9. What computing and informatics tools will help Haiti?
    10. Why I fear I’ll never master SEO
    11. You’re gonna need to read this, but it won’t be on Amazon
    12. Scholastic Journalism Education as a Tool for Teaching Computational Thinking
    13. How should journalism educators teach and study social media?
    14. What is a computational journalist?
    15. The Food Stamp Game: a test case for teaching computational journalism, part 1
    16. On teaching game design in a journalism course, part 2
    17. On teaching game design in a journalism class, part 3
    18. On teaching game design in a journalism class, Part 4: Newsgames as literary journalism


    This fall, I am teaching a class, “Serious Games for News, ” in which journalism and interactive multimedia students will analyze and design various examples of “newsgames.”  In their book,  Newsgames: Journalism at Play(MIT Press, 2010) Ian Bogost and his colleagues use the term Newsgames to mean, broadly, using game design techniques to “do” journalism – that is to report, present and or comment on the news. That broad definition takes in everything from crossword puzzles to videogame-like simulations and alternate reality games of the type created by futurist Jane McGonigal. Since the students in the class are journalism and interactive multimedia majors, not computer science students, I see the class as a practical exploration of computer science concepts relevant to journalism, as well as an opportunity to learn about and test the possibilities of this rapidly developing journalistic medium.

    Newsgames: Journalism at Play

    The journalistic focus of the class will be on two pressing issues in Trenton New Jersey, the city just blocks away from the location of our college -pollution and food security. Trenton has experienced the difficulties that have beset many industrial American cities: disinvestment, environmental degradation, and a crumbling infrastructure. Enrollments in the federal supplemental nutrition assistance program have risen precipitously in the last five years. How can newsgames make the issues more visible, more comprehensible, and more amenable to citizen dialogue, engagement and resolution?

    As part of my preparation for the class, I thought I would create a sample newsgame  in Scratch for the students to critique and remix. The the game below challenges players to buy a week’s worth of groceries on a food stamp budget – about $30/week, according to my research.  (The title reflects my age – when I was growing up, people getting government assistance to buy food got a coupon book from what was called the Food Stamp program. Now, they get an ATM-like card called an “EBT card,” and the program is now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.)

    The version below is in the user testing phase and will probably undergo some refinements in the fall, but I do not intend to present it to students as a finished product. In addition to some technical glitches, I think it has some important design flaws. I don’t think it has enough story elements to make recreate the experience of having to shop with an EBT card. (what . I have some ideas on how to make it more realistic – swap out the images for images from Trenton, add voices and back stories of real people, add more items to better illustrate the trade-offs people have to make..

    Part of the conversation that I want to have with the students is to raise the question of how much information needs to be built into the game, and how much would need to be part of another story package. Maybe this is the wrong focus for a game about food insecurity in Trenton  - perhaps the focus should be on applying for benefits, or running one of our over-stretched food pantries. Perhaps it can be part of a suite of games around this theme.

    The idea is to get the students to first try to improve on what I’ve done, and use the strength and weaknesses of my approach, along with the guidance from the texts, to develop their own ideas.

    In this series of posts, I want to share some thoughts about what I expect my students to learn from working with this game and creating others like it.

    A Note on the Use of Scratch

    I chose to use the Scratch programming language for this class for the following reasons:

    • It has a low learning curve, but contains many of the features of more sophisticated  languages
    • It allows programmers to import their own still images and audio, which means that we ought to be able to achieve a strong documentary effect on the games we produce.
    • The Scratch website makes it easy to organize student work into galleries, and the uploading feature of the software has built-in version control, so it’s easy to see how projects evolve.
    • Interactive games and stories can be prototyped in Scratch relatively quickly for larger scale production in a subsequent course. We have done this successfully for several years at The College of New Jersey.

     

    In reflecting upon the game design process in the context of journalism pedagogy, and on the use I expect to make of this game in particular, a series of guiding questions and considerations emerge that I want to share here.

    Learn more about this project

    Game design as journalism: general questions and considerations

    • What’s the journalistic goal of making this or any other newsgame?As with text, video, audio, still images and static information graphics, the value of news games as journalism is a function of editorial judgment and skill. Regardless of the medium, the focus is on the story one is trying to tell.

    My goal with the food stamp game is to find new ways to share information and provoke conversations about poverty and the problem of healthy food access in poor communities. The actual experience of shopping with an electronic benefits card (EBT card for short) is something that many Americans, and thousands of Trenton-area residents experienced for the first time during the economic downturn of the last few years. They have joined an often-invisible army of millions. In 2008, the Columbia Journalism Review considered the need for fresh ways of shining a spotlight on the problems of the poor:

    “How can a reporter cover that most persistent of problems, poverty, today without making it boring and predictable, or guilt-tripping readers and turning them off?”

    Hypothetically, simulations of how poor people attempt to meet basic needs might be a way of engaging news consumers and encouraging further exploration of the issues raised. To test this hypothesis, I plan to have students consider how the Food Stamp game might be improved both as a work of journalism and as a computing artifact. As the course evolves, I expect that other approaches to these and similar projects to emerge.

    • What kinds of stories and issues lend themselves best to newsgames and especially, to which type of game? Should the game stand alone or should it be combined with other forms of storytelling and exposition?

    Using Wired.com’s “Cutthroat Capitalism” interactive feature and simulation game about the business model behind Somali piracy as an example, the Bogost text notes that game design techniques open up ways of revealing complex systems. Both the feature and the game make the point that piracy continues off the coast of Somalia because the shipping companies targeted find it more profitable to risk being pirated and pay ransoms than to change their shipping routes. For their parts, the pirates also find the potential wealth to be garnered from crime to be more lucrative than the alternatives available to them, despite the risk of arrest or violence.

    The feature uses the expository technique of process analysis, a method for explaining the how or why something happens or is done. This is a common technique in magazine writing, especially for articles designed to impart personal advice, or to explain how a big news event happened. tt frequently lends itself to a very structured layout with accompanying graphics. (This Jan. 1992 Black Enterprise package, “The Big Comeback” which I worked on with Dawn Baskerville, is typical – it offers advice on how to recover after falling into debt.)

    The Wired.com narrative feature, though, tries to do something more ambitious, which is to make an economic analysis interesting and accessible.

    Wired’s Cutthroat Capitalism feature story and game broke new ground

    It is organized into four sections:

    1. The Hot Zone:Pirates Know Plunder Pays
    2. The Attack: Shippers Brave Shortcuts Through Pirate Waters
    3. The Negotiation: Offer or Counteroffer, Shoot or Stand Down?
    4. The Resolution: Sealing the Deal and the Getaway

    From the perspectives of computer science and game design, Wired.com structured and highly visual approach to the narrative was highly conducive to the kind of abstraction needed to create a game to complement the feature.

    The process analysis method contrasts with the human-interest angle, another popular feature writing technique for approaching complex issues. Human interest stories help us understand what it feels like to be caught in the middle of a complex event, as Alfred Lubrano of the Philadelphia Inquirer does beautifully in his 2010 series on hunger in Philadelphia’s first congressional district.  Lubrano shows us hardworking parents rendered incapable of feeding their kids by sudden job losses, and spotlights a dedicated social worker struggling to help them. The series had an impact, too – readers responded by helping one mother find a new job and an apartment.

    In theory, a well-designed game could complement a strong human-interest series. The food stamp game is one example of such a complementary

    A Portrait of Hunger - by Alfred Lubrano

    Alfred Lubrano’s Philadelphia Inquirer series on hunger inspired readers to help one struggling mother find a new job and home for her family.

    effort. Other examples might be designed around the challenges faced by a social worker struggling with a burgeoning caseload,  or a social entrepreneur looking for ways to bring jobs and a healthy environment back to the community.

    • How do the journalism goals of the game translate into design requirements – and constraints- for the game?

    Creating a game from a complex narrative, whether real or imagined, requires a level of abstraction that can have all kinds of unintended results. The interactive story Façade has been hailed for the sophistication of the artificial intelligence that allows the gamer to participate in a drama whose narrative arc bears an impressive similarity to the Edward Albee masterpiece, Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf. In 2007 and 2008, I asked a number of students and others to play Façade and observed the results. After watching about 40 people between the ages of 15 and 45 participate in the story, I saw a consistent tendency to “game” the story. Instead of becoming immersed in the drama, players did things that they thought would skew the game one way or another, often with results they found hilarious. I think that this was partially a function of the rudimentary quality of the 3-D graphics (a compromised necessitated by the processing requirements of the AI.)  It became obvious that the experience of Façade is nothing like that of the drama that inspired it. This may be fine in this instance because the two works stand apart from each other, but a similar result in a game with a journalistic purpose threatens to trivialize the story or issue that it is trying to elucidate.


    Clearly, then, the journalistic success of The Food Stamp Game project requires careful attention to the dramatic elements – or the storytelling experience of the game, along with the formal game elements (such as rules) or the technical requirements. For a further understanding of these challenges, I will have students turn to the guidance in Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games along with some of the project management techniques that my colleagues and I have developed in seven years of teaching game design at The College of New Jersey. I will discuss this in a subsequent post.

    Acknowledgements: This work draws upon research funded by Microsoft Research and National Science Foundation grants 0739173 and 0829616

    Previous in series Next in series
    Filed Under: Civic media, Computational Thinking, Gaming, Journalism, journalism education, Research, Teaching Tagged With: , , , , ,

    Interdisciplinary Computing Blog: Interdisciplinary Computing Meeting Number 2: Day 1, Part 1

    April 30, 2011 by

    Liza Kaczmarscyk does a nice job of capturing the first day of discussion at our meeting on Creating a Climate for Interdisciplinary Computing. The discussion on computational journalism to which she alludes was initiated by yours truly and Rich Gordon from the Medill School at Northwestern University. Other journalists here include Jonathan Tracy from the AP, Michelle Ferrier from Elon University, and Barbara Iverson from Columbia College, Chicago.

    Filed Under: Blogging, Computational Thinking, Journalism, Research Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Sidebar: Learning about learning – a conversation with Deborah Tatar

    March 5, 2011 by

    Table of contents for The Re-Education of Me

    1. The Re-education of Me: Journalism, Diversity and Computing
    2. The Re-Education of Me: Prelude to My Sabbatical
    3. “What we investigate is linked to who we are”
    4. Mrs. Jefferson’s “Sympathetic Touch” Meets Mrs. Masterman’s Philanthropy
    5. The Me Nobody Knew Then
    6. Discovering Masterman, Discovering Myself
    7. The Electronic Music Lab at Masterman School – An Adventure in Mathetics and Pedagogy
    8. Sidebar: Learning about learning – a conversation with Deborah Tatar
    9. The Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers and the Quest for Computing Diversity
    10. Sidebar: How Kevin Brooks Found the Common Ground Between Writing and Computer Science
    11. Sidebar: The making of young entrepreneurs: Li’l Tech Pro and Baby Billionaire
    Dr. Deborah Tatar, Virginia Tech

    Deborah Tatar, cognitive scientist at Virginia Tech

    Deborah Tatar is a cognitive scientist at Virginia Polytechnic University whose current research focuses on understanding and clearing the obstacles to student learning in mathematics and science. For example, she was a principal investigator on the SimCalc project, a software-based interactive math curriculum for middle schoolers that has shown demonstrable success when accompanied by professional development for teachers. She is a collaborator on the CPATH Distributed Expertise project for which I am a co-PI.

    In this conversation about what it takes to bring students from under-represented groups into computing, Tatar cautions against easy generalizations and simplistic solutions, offering intriguing possibilities for ways in which we can assist learners in finding the paths to understanding that are most appropriate for them.

    Tatar’s insights remind me of Georgetown University math professor Jim Sandefur’s use of “think-alouds” – recorded interviews with students who explain their thought processes while working on math problems. It also echoes and complements the insights from Visible Knowledge Project, spearheaded by Randy Bass during the last decade. I was a researcher in that project in the early 2000s. My research project for VKP, “Blogging on the Beat” details my action research project on whether having journalism students keep blogs will lead deeper and more richly-sourced reporting.

    This interview is part of my work in progress: The Re-Education of Me: Journalism, Diversity and Computing. Pearson, a long-time professional writing practitioner and educator, is using auto-ethnography and literary journalism to probe the implications of the transformation of journalism by computer science for journalism education. This interview was recorded at the National Science Foundation’s CE 21 community meeting in New Orleans, Lousiana Jan. 30, 2011.

    View the interview (Quicktime file, runtime about 26 minutes)

    Previous in series Next in series
    Filed Under: Computational Thinking, Diversity, Research, Social context of education, Teaching, Video Tagged With: , , , , ,

    The Electronic Music Lab at Masterman School – An Adventure in Mathetics and Pedagogy

    February 10, 2011 by

    Table of contents for The Re-Education of Me

    1. The Re-education of Me: Journalism, Diversity and Computing
    2. The Re-Education of Me: Prelude to My Sabbatical
    3. “What we investigate is linked to who we are”
    4. Mrs. Jefferson’s “Sympathetic Touch” Meets Mrs. Masterman’s Philanthropy
    5. The Me Nobody Knew Then
    6. Discovering Masterman, Discovering Myself
    7. The Electronic Music Lab at Masterman School – An Adventure in Mathetics and Pedagogy
    8. Sidebar: Learning about learning – a conversation with Deborah Tatar
    9. The Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers and the Quest for Computing Diversity
    10. Sidebar: How Kevin Brooks Found the Common Ground Between Writing and Computer Science
    11. Sidebar: The making of young entrepreneurs: Li’l Tech Pro and Baby Billionaire

    “There are, at least, two approaches to education: the mimetic approach and the mathetic approach. The mimetic approach emphasizes memorization and drill exercises and is most efficient in inculcating facts and developing basic skills [Gar89, p. 6]. The mathetic approach stresses learning by doing and self exploration; it encourages independent and creative thinking [Pap80, p. 120]. In the mimetic framework, creativity comes after the mastery of basic skills. On the other hand, proponents of the mathetic school believe that self discovery is the best, if not the only, way to learn…”

    “Educational Outlook,”

    Sugih Jamin, Associate Professor, EECS, University of Michigan

    “Music educators can no longer ignore the possibilities afforded by computers and the related fields of science and mathematics.” With those words, Virginia Hagemann threw down the gauntlet to her colleagues in a 1968 essay for the Music Education Journal. It was the first of two articles she would write about the electronic music laboratory that she created at the JR Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School in Philadelphia in the late 1960s.

    I was a participant in that lab, and as I read Ms. Hagemann’s essays, I was struck by the parallels between her arguments for the effectiveness of electronic music and a tool for expanding the horizons of secondary school students, and the research and findings from the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers, a National Science Foundation-funded project for which I served as a co-principal investigator. Like Ms. Hagemann, we found that given the opportunity to make media, young people can produce artifacts that reflect fairly sophisticated concepts. We also concluded that professional development that empowers teachers is central to successful curricular innovation. Ms. Hagemann also learned serendipitously that a budding media maker is capable of becoming a technology innovator.

    In this essay, I want to place Hagemaan’s action research alongside the work of Seymour Papert and his intellectual descendants to turn computers into learning tools for children. While Hagemann was developing her ideas about electronics as a vehicle for musical composition and education, Papert and his colleagues at MIT were creating the LOGO programming language as a tool to help children construct their own knowledge about the world. With this foundation, he reasoned that teachers could then support students in moving to more formal understandings of concepts in mathematics, physics and other subjects that are generally considered abstract and difficult to learn.

    Research shows that music education can be a wonderful foundation for teaching mathematics and by extension, computing.(Research on music and learning) The reasons are not hard to understand: both require that information be organized in certain structures. Pattern recognition is integral to both fields. Both have formal and informal “languages.” One can draw analogies between their elements – bits and bytes of computing and the diatonic scale in Western music, for example. Music has its own versions of computing’s “if-then” statements, loops, strings, recursion, modularization and other fundamentals. Both are fundamentally mathematical, although not necessarily in a “school math” kind of way. Looking back, I can see how many of these concepts were embedded in the work we did in Ms. Hagemann’s electronic music class.

    For the sake of context, I should mention that I also had traditional classes in basic music appreciation and theory while at Masterman, taught by Gloria Goode.   Ms. Goode also expanded our cultural horizons. She added jazz, African and Brazilian music to our studies of Dvorak, Copeland and Stephen Foster. In sixth grade, we happened to have a student teacher who had lived in Brazil, so we learned to make their national dish, fejoida, home ec class and performed a Brazilian number in the school show. As one of the few black faculty members at Masterman, she was a powerful role model for the black students. She was also a crucial mentor for a small group of students who actually did become professional musicians in their adult lives. She also set an example for us as a life-long learner, sharing with us about her explorations of African music and dance, for example. Her 1990 doctoral dissertation, “Preachers of the word and singers of the Gospel: The ministry of women among nineteenth century African-Americans,” was hailed by the author Delores Causion Carpenter hailed as, “one of the finest treatments of 19th century black, singing, evangelist women” in her book, A Time for Honor: A Portrait of African American Clergywomen.

    The exposure that she gave us to polyrhythms through the music of Babatunde Olatunji has particularly stayed with me. What follows is a video collection of the some of the music I was exposed to in Ms. Goode’s classes. I believe that what she taught me about the underlying structure of these diverse kinds of music would become important in Ms. Hagemann’s class, and in my later thinking about writing and problem solving. This collection includes not only Olatunji, but also Sergio Mendes, “Largo” from Dvorak’s New World Symphony, the folk song, “Goober Peas,” Della Reese and Wes Montgomery playing “Windy.” The last song especially sticks out in my mind because my first hearing of the song wasn’t Montgomery’s guitar version. It was our fifth-grade classmate Joel Bryant, who played the song for us on piano at her invitation at the end of class one day. Joel went on to become an accomplished professional songwriter, producer and accompanist with credits that include work with Philadelphia International Records and Gospel great Traimaine Hawkins. Joel was one of many professional musicians who came through Masterman.

    Ms. Hagemann’s essays don’t explain what specifically prompted her to create an electronic music class, but she knew Robert Moog, the physicist-engineer whose experiments with the theremin led to his invention of the first popularly-used synthesizer in 1965.  She was an active composer with far-flung connections who reportedly studied with the legendary music teacher Nadia Boulanger. (This assertion comes from a posting on Facebook; I am in the process of trying to verify it.)

    What we do know from her 1968 essay, “Electronic Composition in the Junior High School,” is that she described the lab as “logical outgrowth and extension of the [Music Educators National Conference] Young Composers’ Project,” an initiative funded by the Ford Foundation. She started the lab with a $316 grant from a fund established by Philadelphia Schools Superintendent Mark Shedd for innovative teaching projects. According to Salon magazine, Moog synthesizers were $11,000 in those days, so she focused on components instead. We had two reel-to-reel tape recorders, an oscilloscope, sine and square wave generators, splicing equipment, and tools for making musique concrete, such as a gong and a metronome. We wrote our compositions on graph paper, plotting frequencies on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal.

    According to Hagemann, the 15 children were initially selected to participate in the lab, and several dozen students were admitted into the program before long because of popular demand. All of the students who were initially selected played instruments. If my memory is correct, I entered the program during the 1968-69 school year, when I was in the sixth grade.

    Ms. Hagemann’s methods emphasized the mathetic over the pedagogic or mimetic. Each of us was assigned a partner,  which meant that we not only had the experience of composing and recording our own work, we also learned to play recording engineer for someone else. She exposed us to experimental composers and methods, and further broadened our cultural horizons. The video compilation below is a sampling of what we heard in class, and what we were taught to do. It includes Switched on Bach, Tibetan chants, a demonstration of musigue concrete composition and production techniques, and a Swingle Singers performance.

    This early electronic music composition, “Lemon Drops,” by Kenneth Gaburo, was also part of our curriculum:

    Hagemann cautioned her colleagues against being “guided by an outmoded philosophy that only the teacher knows best.” At the same time, she added,

    “Although anything is possible, everything should not be permitted. In this incipient stage of a student’s musical development, the disciplined experi- ence of creating logical compositions within the frame- work of accepted musical form is imperative. Although students should become aware of the concept of alea- toric composition (eleven of the twenty-six members in the first class purchased John Cage’s book, Silence), the use of indeterminacy and chance elements in com- position should be reserved until the students have demonstrated their understanding of and competence to compose in various musical forms. Concurrent with a rigid adherence to traditional form, the children can be given a measure of freedom of expression to avoid stifling the possible creation and development of new musical structures.” (p. 88)

    Hagemman reported surprise and delight at the quality and precocity of the musical compositions that emerged from the class (not from any of my work , though, I assure you!). But it was the technological innovation that took place that was an additional delight. She reports on page 90 that after field trips to Princeton and Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute:

    “William Serad, age thirteen, submitted a technical report, complete with schematic diagrams, on the possibility of using an analog computer for writing electronic music. William thought that this computer would be useful in the writing of such compositions as “Study in Square Roots” or “Cube Root Canon.” His report was later discussed with Robert A. Moog, presi- dent of the R. A. Moog Company, Trumansburg, New York, manufacturers of electronic equipment, who agreed that this idea was feasible. With this encourage- ment, William constructed a four-sound, push-button switch, serial sequencer, which he used in writing an electronic canon. He has since made a working model of a tri-amplitude mixer module. Another member of the class, Randy Kaplan, age twelve, was inspired by the linear controller at Princeton to build a three- sound, push-button switch, serial sequencer with mixer. The teacher will not always understand every wire and transistor, but he can always tell if the equipment operates properly, and he can assist his students to use such devices musically.”

    Hagemann concluded her article by noting that keeping up with her students had required her to embark on a new path of professional development for herself. She enrolled in an electronics course and started reading electronics reference texts.  She picked up the theme of the necessity of teacher development in a Dec. 1969 article for the Music Education Journal, “Are Junior High School Students Ready for Electronic Music? Are Their Teachers?”  Hagemann asserted that if teachers open their minds and become resourceful about using electronic music classes as a means of allowing students the “freedom to create” (.p 36) ,

    “The adolescent need for independence will be satisfied by the creative free- dom encouraged within the labora- tory. The study of the basic con- cepts of electronic music will help the student gain a critical perspec- tive of himself, of his social environ- ment, and of the ways he can shape new goals of learning.” (p.37)

    I was astounded to read these words nearly 40 years later, because they are remarkably similar to the conclusions that we reached with regard to the results of our Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers in exposing middle school students and teachers to computing and journalism as as means of creative expression and civic engagement.  More about that in a future post.

    Update: April 30 – Thanks to fellow Masterman alum and musician Ilene Weiss, who send these .mp3s from the online archives of Masterman student compositions on a Philadelphia radio station WFMU.

    Conflict

    Music Educators Journal articles by Virginia Hagemann referred to in this post:

    For examples of research on music and learning, see,

     

    • Hetland, Lois, “Learning to Make Music Enhances Spatial Reasoning” Journal of Aesthetic EducationVol. 34, No. 3/4, Special Issue: The Arts and Academic Achievement: What the Evidence Shows (Autumn – Winter, 2000), pp. 179-238 (article consists of 60 pages) Published by: University of Illinois Press

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3333643

    • Habib, Michel and Mireille Besson. “What Do Music Training and Musical Experience Teach Us about Brain Plasticity? Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 26, No. 3, Music and Language (Feb., 2009), pp. 279-285
    • Wendy S. Boettcher, Sabrina S. Hahn, Gordon L. Shaw, Mathematics and Music: A Search for Insight into Higher Brain Function Mathematics and Music: A Search for Insight into Higher Brain Function,Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 4, (1994), pp. 53-58

    One of those “intellectual descendants,”, my colleague and collaborator Ursula Wolz, was researcher in Papert’s LOGO lab in the 1970s. In the early 1980s, she and Jim Dunne began teaching LOGO to children and teachers at Columbia Teachers’ College’s Microcomputer Resource Center. (See contemporaneous popular press reports on that work from Popular Mechanics and Infoworld. Wolz is the Principal Investigator of the IJIMS.

    I thank my former Masterman schoolmate and academic colleague Elizabeth Gregory for her help in locating both of Ms. Hagemann’s articles.

    Previous in series Next in series
    Filed Under: Computational Thinking, Music, Research, Social context of education Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

    The Me Nobody Knew Then

    January 6, 2011 by

    Table of contents for The Re-Education of Me

    1. The Re-education of Me: Journalism, Diversity and Computing
    2. The Re-Education of Me: Prelude to My Sabbatical
    3. “What we investigate is linked to who we are”
    4. Mrs. Jefferson’s “Sympathetic Touch” Meets Mrs. Masterman’s Philanthropy
    5. The Me Nobody Knew Then
    6. Discovering Masterman, Discovering Myself
    7. The Electronic Music Lab at Masterman School – An Adventure in Mathetics and Pedagogy
    8. Sidebar: Learning about learning – a conversation with Deborah Tatar
    9. The Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers and the Quest for Computing Diversity
    10. Sidebar: How Kevin Brooks Found the Common Ground Between Writing and Computer Science
    11. Sidebar: The making of young entrepreneurs: Li’l Tech Pro and Baby Billionaire

    “When I first get up in the morning I feel fresh and it feels like it would be a good day to me. But after I get in school, things change and they seem to turn into problems for me. And by the end of the day I don’t even feel like I’m young. I feel tired.”

    John, 13

    The Me Nobody Knows: Children’s Voices From the Ghetto, Stephen M. Joseph, ed.  (first printed in 1970, reprinted in 2003)

    The word that I had been admitted to Masterman, a public school for gifted children, came not a moment too soon. It was April, 1967, I was 10 years old,  I was considered one of the top students at Kearny Elementary School, but socially and emotionally, I was failing badly. Had I not been transferred to Masterman when I was, I am not sure how I would have coped with my growing sense of loneliness and isolation. Reflecting upon these experiences leads me to think about how a child’s interactions with home, school, neighborhood and the larger environment affects her perceptions of her place in the world, and her chances of overcoming its obstacles and seizing its opportunities.

    In recent years, psychologists have advocated for models of child development that give central consideration to the role of culture and socio-economic status in shaping the way a child views the world and functions within it. Yvette Harris and James Graham, author of the 2007 book: The African American Child: Development and Challenges (Springer Publishing Company, New York, NY.) argue that this is especially important for understanding children of color.

    I had never been accepted in Penn Town, the neighborhood in which I had lived since moving to Philadelphia from Camden, New Jersey at the age of six. To begin with, I soon learned that only a few of my peers had ever been to New Jersey, so I was something of a foreigner. Even though Camden was only a few minutes away by car, and we lived fairly close to the Benjamin Franklin bridge, not many families owned a car, and the public transportation services that shuttle between the two cities now hadn’t yet been built. I must have talked about Camden too much, because I remember a boy telling me that he had been to New Jersey once, and it wasn’t so special, so there!

    My  father’s second-hand Chevy and my outsider origins weren’t the only problems. I lacked the social qualities that would have given me some currency among my peers. I was a slow, awkward runner, I couldn’t fight, and I had left Camden before I learned to jump double-dutch. Worse yet, I was double-handed, which meant that I couldn’t turn the ropes with a sufficiently reliable rhythm. To make matters worse, I was an only child, so I had no natural allies, and I had my own room. My father and stepmother wore second-hand clothes, but I had a new school wardrobe from Sears every year, and the latest toys. Worst of all, I was the teachers; pet.

    I might as well have had a kick me sign tattooed on my forehead. As is true in every neighborhood, we had our designated bullies, and I was a favorite target for teasing and occasional beat-downs. For the longest time, I didn’t fight back; I’m not sure why. Nor did I know how to play the dozens, the ritual game of  insults built on race, class and gender stereotypes. I also had the annoying habit of questioning the logic of the taunts directed at me and others during an argument. It was common, for example, for a girl to say that she would “beat the black off” another girl. I couldn’t help wondering about that, because they also went around saying there was something wrong with looking too black. Following that logic, wouldn’t they consider it an improvement to have some of the “black” removed? Like the robot in “Lost in Space,” I spent a lot of time saying, “That does not compute.”

    Eventually, there was a girl who declared that she would beat me up after school that day. She had been threatening to fight me since summer camp, and now the weather was cold enough for a coat. She had been a constant menacing presence. We met at the appointed hour, and, thinking that I would stand up for myself for once, I took a swing at her. She pulled my coat over my head and pulled my hair out  An excited crowd ringed around us and made enough noise that eventually some neighbor heard and got my stepmother to come rescue me.

    Her response to the incident is telling. She brought me and the other girl into our apartment and told us that we were letting down the race by fighting like dogs in the street. She extracted apologies from us, and a promise to try to get along. I think a conversation with the girl’s mother followed, or at least attempted – that would have been the norm.  I think it was not long after that when my birthday coincided with the date of our regular Girl Scout meeting and she decided to host it at our place, complete with cake and ice cream. My tormentors were part of the troop. I can’t say we became friends after that, but I don’t recall any more beat-downs.

    But by then, I carried the terror inside of me. Not just the fear of the neighborhood bullies, but the spectre of even worse violence. There were the tales of the tackheads, dark–skinned black girls with (snap fingers) that much hair who would supposedly grab girls, beat them, and carve up their faces to make them ugly. There were the gangs – in our neighborhood, there was 12th and Wallace and the Valley – gang geography was a required survival course in in everyone’s curriculum. During my childhood, the gangs went from zip guns to real guns, and before I left high school, some of my childhood neighbors, schoolmates and relatives were dead, or had suffered near-fatal injuries.

    These dangers were mostly visited on boys, of course. In her book, Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality and Gendered Violence (NYU Press, 2010), sociologist Jody Miller described the violence and threats of violence routinely visited up African American girls and women in urban neigbborhoods.

    Without going into detail, I will say that by the time I was ten years old, I witnessed or experienced actions that I now recognize as acts of assault and sexual harassment, and coercion, and I know that I was not alone. One did not talk about having been the victim of such experiences, although it was not unusual to hear a boy brag about having “felt somebody up,” or to hear that some group of boys, “ran a train” (gang-raped) a girl. That was usually told without sympathy for the girl, who was thought to have allowed herself to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    Layered on top of all of this was the violence in the adult world – the real and rumored incidents of police brutality, the arrest of a neighbor’s father for killing someone in a bar fight, the occasional sight of a violent domestic argument that spilled out into the street.

    I write of these things now because I recognize them as experiences that could have derailed me, and that did, over time, derail some of my peers. I also recognize that today, I could easily have met with the fate that befell Derrion Albert, the  16-year-old Chicago honor student who was stomped to death in September, 2009 as he was trying to escape a street fight that erupted as he was leaving school.

    If we are serious about getting more young people from under-represented backgrounds into computing-dependent professions, our interventions must be sensitive the lived reality of children’s lives.

    In another section of this work, I will explore these culturally sensitive models of child development and their implications in more detail. For now, I want to close with a presentation by Dr. John Rich, a trauma physician who heads the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice at Drexel University. Dr. Rich’s work focuses on young black men who are victims and perpetrators of violence. Using an ethnographic approach, he tries to help us see and understand the human hurt at the heart of behavior that is beyond the comprehension of most people.

    Previous in series Next in series
    Filed Under: Diversity, Social context of education Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Mrs. Jefferson’s “Sympathetic Touch” Meets Mrs. Masterman’s Philanthropy

    December 10, 2010 by

    Table of contents for The Re-Education of Me

    1. The Re-education of Me: Journalism, Diversity and Computing
    2. The Re-Education of Me: Prelude to My Sabbatical
    3. “What we investigate is linked to who we are”
    4. Mrs. Jefferson’s “Sympathetic Touch” Meets Mrs. Masterman’s Philanthropy
    5. The Me Nobody Knew Then
    6. Discovering Masterman, Discovering Myself
    7. The Electronic Music Lab at Masterman School – An Adventure in Mathetics and Pedagogy
    8. Sidebar: Learning about learning – a conversation with Deborah Tatar
    9. The Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers and the Quest for Computing Diversity
    10. Sidebar: How Kevin Brooks Found the Common Ground Between Writing and Computer Science
    11. Sidebar: The making of young entrepreneurs: Li’l Tech Pro and Baby Billionaire

    “The proper education of any people includes sympathetic touch between teacher and pupil, knowledge on the part of the teacher, not simply of the individual taught, but of his surroundings and background, and the history of his class and group; and contact between pupils, and between teachers and pupil, on the basis of social equality, as will increase this sympathy and knowledge; facilities for education, equipment and housing, and the promotion of such social and extra-curricular activities as will tend to induct the child into life.”

    WEB Du Bois

    “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” (1935)

     

    One day during second grade at Kearny Elementary School, I was called out of class to go to the office. This would have been sometime during the 1964-5 school year.  I was introduced to a white man in a dark suit and told to sit at at table. I don’t remember what the man looked like or what he said – only that he gave some games to play and puzzles to complete. Some of them were on paper, and others involved blocks and other manipulatives. I think it was afterward that my parents told me that I had been given an IQ test, that I had scored well, and that I was now being placed on the waiting list for admission to a special school called Masterman. Masterman was described to me as a special school for children like me – children who liked to think, read and ask questions about the world. While the previous post in this series was intended as a broad sketch of those factors in my early life that laid the groundwork for my interest in writing, this post focuses more on the barriers to equal educational opportunity that existed in Philadelphia in the early 1960s, and reflects on one particular intervention in my own early schooling that I suspect was crucial to my future academic progress.

    At the time that my entry into Julia Reynolds Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School was first discussed, the school was only five years old. It was named for the  founder and first leader of the Philadelphia Home and School Council,  and according to a brief New York Times article announcing her death in 1958, she left the School District of Philadelphia a $10,000 trust fund “to help bright pupils finish high school.” Masterman School opened its doors the next year. (Masterman obit)

    Mrs. Masterman’s gift appears to have been made necessary in part because of the miserliness of Add Anderson, the District’s business manager from the 1920s until 1962. Reportedly, Anderson’s first priority was to keep taxes down, and as a result, schools throughout the city were poorly staffed and maintained. More than one scholar quoted Peter Binzen’s description of Anderson as, “a penny pincher all his life…a ruthless man filled with contempt for ‘educators.’” Anderson presided over the school district at a time when the number of black children in the district increased substantially because of the Great Migration. Wealthier whites abandoned the schools and the city in droves, and white working-class ethnics were made to feel as if they had been left holding the bag, fomenting a resentment that would spark the rise of tough cop mayor Frank Rizzo.

    Structural disparities.Although the district schools had been legally integrated since since 1881, they were functionally segregated: black students were consistently assigned to the most dilapidated schools and fewer resources were directed to those schools. Tracking systems within schools led to black students being disproportionately assigned to “RE” (retarded educable) classes. (References) Scholar Lisa Levenstein recalls a 1960 Philadelphia Bulletin series entitled, “The Slow Learners,”  in which schools superintendent Allen Wetter blamed black children for their plight, calling the children of the Great Migration “culturally deprived slow learners.” The series referred to these “slow learners” as “unlovable characters” responsible for “a tragic deterioration of our schools.” (Levenstein)

    In December, 1966, when I was in fourth grade, change came to the Philadelphia schools in the form of a new superintendent named Dr. Mark R. Shedd. According to a New York Times story announcing his appointment, (Reference) Shedd was the 40-year-old Harvard-trained superintendent of the Englewood, New Jersey public schools. He had won praise for negotiating the integration of the public schools there after years of sit-ins and marches. Shedd would bring experimentation to the Philadelphia schools, and become an advocate for disadvantaged students.

    Ever since the release of the 1966 study on Equality of Educational Opportunity by sociologist James Coleman, education researchers have been debating the degree to which these kinds of racial disparate investments and attitudes matter. Coleman’s study pioneered the use of regression analysis of large-scale data sets in order to understand the multiplicity of factors that affect school performance. Coleman found family dynamics and the opportunity to attend an integrated school were stronger determinants of success for students of lower socio-economic status than the state of school facilities or teacher training.   Subsequent analysis of the data from that study, as well as subsequent research,  yielded more nuanced conclusions. Among those conclusions was the view that smaller classes (which presumably allow more teacher attention to students) and particular kinds of resource investments can positively affect educational outcomes, especially for African American children. I am reminded of this as I recall a small intervention by one of my teachers at Kearny that was, I suspect, crucial to my subsequent academic success. It was the moment that I still recall with some emotion, nearly half a century later.

    Mrs. Jefferson’s “sympathetic touch”

    My recollection was that I was enthusiastic about the idea of going to a new school. Although I had warm memories of first grade at Kearny, by second grade I was already feeling out of place. I had started first grade in Mrs. Hayes’ class, where I remembered a lot of picture books and finger painting. After a few weeks, I was moved down the hall to Mrs. Marie Jefferson’s class, where the children were already reading Dick and Jane books. I could sound out letters, but I did not know how to read words yet. (Sonia Manzano, the actress and writer who plays the character Maria on Sesame Street, bears such an uncanny and poignant resemblance to Mrs. Jefferson as I remember her.)

    Seeing my plight, Mrs. Jefferson had me come to her desk at the back of the room when the other children were reading silently. She sat me on her lap, opened a Dick and Jane book, and asked me to read to her. I told her I could only sound out letters. She asked me to do that and pointed to a word. “O-H,” I said. “Not ‘o-h,’” she responded. “Oh. The “H” is silent.” We “read” together in this way for a little while longer, and I went back to my seat with the feeling that I had been let in on an incredible mystery.

    After that, there was daily reading at home,  the arrival of a set of Britannica Junior Encyclopedias, and regular exposure to children’s literature alongside the sessions spent reading Shakespeare and Plato aloud with my father. (A conversation with my father about those sessions is forthcoming. Suffice to say that it bore many similarities to Chicago educator Marva Collins’ use of the the Socratic method in urban classrooms.)

    So while I attended a school where teachers could give us little more than love, my father and stepmother created an incredibly rich intellectual environment for me. These were the things that, in retrospect, probably prepared me academically for Masterman, even as they made me the odd child out at school. For me, going to Masterman promised that I would finally find other kids like me. Educator Salome Thomas-El, who attended Masterman for 5-8 grade in the late 1970s, recalls his own sense of dislocation as he tried to negotiate between the culture at Masterman and that of his inner-city neighborhood:

    “I never felt that I was as good as many of my [Masterman] peers, or that I belonged there, or that I was part of [Masterman.]…The kids I knew and liked were still back in the inner-city.

    “Each school day, as they went in one direction, I took the bus and went a different way. By my second year at Masterman, I felt strange. I didn’t feel comfortable at Masterman, and yet I no longer belonged with my old friends.” (Thomas-El)

    This feeling of dislocation strikes me as a  natural companion for child sent on a journey across the boundaries inscribed by race, class, gender, age and geography – what the late newspaper publisher Robert Maynard called the “fault lines” of  American culture.  It was a journey made by thousands of black children between the 1950 and 1970s  – children integrating schools with or without federal troops, court orders, or civil rights marches. We did not face dogs, hoses or jeering crowds as we entered schools such as Masterman, and except for one teacher, I don’t recall any instances of racism there, but we were crossing barriers nonetheless. Masterman, and later, Girls’ High, would also teach me that black children weren’t the only ones facing obstacles to academic achievement. It was there that I would begin to be introduced to the frustrations experienced by the white ethnic families in Philadelphia who had, they thought, played by the rules of immigration and assimilation only to see those rules change overnight.

    What I would come to understand in later years is that Masterman not only afforded me an opportunity for a superior education – it was an opportunity to be socialized into an intellectual community. Without the sympathetic touch of Mrs. Jefferson and her colleagues at Kearny, and the reinforcement I received at home, it’s very possible that it’s an opportunity that I would have wasted.

    Endnotes

    1. “Mrs. John Masterman.” New York Times (1923-Current file); Mar 8, 1958; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 – 2007) pg. 17
    2. Sources for Peter Binzen’s description of Add Anderson and racial disparities in the Philadelphia school district: Paul Lyons, The people of this generation: The rise and fall of the New Left in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania press, 2003. p. 15; and Lisa Levenstein, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia UNC Press, April, 2009. p. 125. Levenstein details the policies that shunted black students into inferior schools, and the scapegoating of black families for the subsequent poor performance of black students on pages 126-137.
    3. Levenstein, p. 137
    4. Equality of Educational Opportunity: A 40-Year Retrospective
      Adam Gamoran and Daniel A. Long, WCER Working Paper No. 2006-9 December 2006, 27 p.
    5. Thomas-El, Salome and Cecil Murphrey. I Choose to Stay: A Black Teacher Refuses to Desert the Inner City. New York: Kensington Publishing. 2004, p. 26
    6. “Englewood Educator Named Head of Philadelphia Schools.” New York Times, Dec. 1, 1966. ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 – 2007)
      pg. 77
    Previous in series Next in series
    Filed Under: Civic media, Diversity, journalism education, Research, Teaching Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    “What we investigate is linked to who we are”

    December 7, 2010 by

    Table of contents for The Re-Education of Me

    1. The Re-education of Me: Journalism, Diversity and Computing
    2. The Re-Education of Me: Prelude to My Sabbatical
    3. “What we investigate is linked to who we are”
    4. Mrs. Jefferson’s “Sympathetic Touch” Meets Mrs. Masterman’s Philanthropy
    5. The Me Nobody Knew Then
    6. Discovering Masterman, Discovering Myself
    7. The Electronic Music Lab at Masterman School – An Adventure in Mathetics and Pedagogy
    8. Sidebar: Learning about learning – a conversation with Deborah Tatar
    9. The Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers and the Quest for Computing Diversity
    10. Sidebar: How Kevin Brooks Found the Common Ground Between Writing and Computer Science
    11. Sidebar: The making of young entrepreneurs: Li’l Tech Pro and Baby Billionaire

    Phliadelphia: 1963-67

    Literary scholars of the Freudian sort sometimes speak of the fantasmatic, a kind of archetypal drama etched into a writer’s subconscious, rooted in childhood experience, that finds expression in the structural elements of that writer’s work. In her groundbreaking 1998 tome, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, Claudia Tate (pictured below, left) used to concept to explain WEB DuBois’ penchant for eroticizing the quest for freedom in his creative writing. I recall a conversation with Tate not long after the book was published in which we speculated that writers would probably do well not to dig too deeply into the oedipal roots of their creations.

    Nevertheless, this work would be incomplete without some exploration of the ways in which personal experience and social location helped shape my way of doing journalism and thinking about journalism education. Research related to the effort to enlarge and diversify the computing pipeline discloses that young people’s career choices are heavily influenced by parents, teachers and guidance counselors. (References) In plumbing my childhood experiences, I see evidence how I began to think of myself as a writer, and the values I began to internalize that would shape the kind of writer I ultimately became.

    Investigative journalist Florence George Graves alluded to the impact of the personal on the professional in her May 2003 Columbia Journalism Review essay, “The Connection: What We Investigate Is Linked to Who We Are.”(.pdf) Graves speculates that her penchant for uncovering secrets was probably affected by the coded rituals of segregated life in the Waco Texas of her childhood,

    “I couldn’t stop wondering about certain aspects of life in Texas. Why were there separate drinking fountains for “whites” and “coloreds” in public places? Why did my close friend’s parents treat her decision to marry a Catholic as if there had been a death in the family? Why weren’t Jews allowed to join the country club? Why should girls bother to excel in school if they were not entitled to use their knowledge in the world beyond the home?”

    I was born in 1957 – the year of revolution in Ghana, federally-enforced integration in Little Rock, and the first human foray into outer space – accomplished by a Soviet regime considered the West’s chief global adversary. It was, in other words, a time when old orders were under siege, new power equations were being drawn and no one seemed sure whether the future held hope or annihilation. My childhood was lived in the space between the restrictive past and future possibility. On one occasion, my parents and I stood in one long line at an armory to receive a vaccine-laced sugar cube that promised protection against polio. On another, we stood in another long line to see the desk and other effects that had belonged to Pres. John F. Kennedy, who had been murdered in a Dallas street while I sat in my first-grade class and made a paper turkey to decorate our Thanksgiving table.

    Unlike Graves, the adults around me openly discussed the reasons behind the inequalities that she observed in silence. The questions revolved around how those inequalities might be eliminated – or at the very least, how their destructive impact might be minimized. Racial justice and the quest for enlightened governance had been matters of vital concern in Philadelphia since the 18th century, when the Quakers debated the morality of slavery, and black freemen Richard Allen and Absalom Jones protested segregation within the Philadelphia Methodist conference by founding the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

    From a sociologist’s perspective, I suppose my family’s prospects seemed fairly fixed in 1957.  My paternal grandparents had been part of the Great Migration of African Americans from the Jim Crow south to the de facto segregated north. Their parents had been slaves. The men in my family mostly worked with their hands, mostly in construction. My father had done that kind of work as well, although by the time I started school, he had landed at the Post Office, and there he saw other black men who were going to college. With the help of his veteran’s benefits, he enrolled first in trade school, and then Temple University, fitting his classes around his swing shifts at work.

    We weren’t the kind of people whose lives and concerns took up much space in the daily newspaper. The scholar VP Franklin (pictured, left) notes WEB Du Bois’ pointed critique of American journalism as he experienced it in the 19th and 20th centuries:

    “The American press in the past almost entirely ignored Negroes. Very little of what Negroes wanted to know about themselves, their group action, and their relationship to public occurrences to their interests was treated by the press. Then came the time when the American press so far as the Negro was concerned was interested in the Negro as minstrel, a joke, a subject of caricature. He became, in time, an awful example of democracy gone wrong, of crimes and various monstrous acts.” (Franklin)

    Philadelphia, where I spent most of my childhood, was no exception to this general rule. In her 2008 doctoral dissertation, communications historian Nicole Maurantonio supplied the scholarly support for the sense of invisibility and alienation that I and so many others experienced as we searched for some reflection of our reality in the Philadelphia newspapers. Maurantonio argues that in the years between the end of World War II and the fatal 1985 attack on the headquarters of the radical group MOVE:

    “[N]ews organizations were not merely impartial storytellers providing a language with which to narrate crises. Journalists inscribed a rhetoric of racial marginalization that shaped discourses surrounding race and ‘radicalism’ within the city.”

    It was of course, the black press who tried to cater to the needs of African Americans in those years. From the time of its founding in the early 19th century, the black press had, as scholar Matthew Holden puts it, “facilitated the umbrella issues of freedom, racial uplift and the emancipation of the slaves.” My family, and most my peers regularly read the Philadelphia Tribune (which billed itself as  “The Constructive Newspaper” in those days) and Ebony magazine alongside the Philadelphia Bulletin. Many of us listened to black radio stations, where DJs such as Georgie Woods (“The Guy With the Goods”) would become indispensable allies of the Civil Rights Movement.

    Maurantonio recounts how the Tribune tried to counter this dominant “rhetoric of marginalization”  by calling for police restraint during such moments of crisis as the Columbia Avenue riot of 1964 – a series of violent clashes set off by false rumors that the police had killed a pregnant black woman.  Maurantonio discusses the ways in which the Tribune and the other local newspapers framed their coverage  in the following video segment (from 9:12 to 15:03):

    My teachers created what I now recognize as a hidden curriculum designed to reinforce our belief in our own humanity in the face of segregationist school district policies and a a culture that, as Du Bois had explained decades before, constructed us as a problem. Between school, the neighborhood library where I discovered Carter G. Woodson’s magical Encyclopedia of Negro history, the devotion to learning that my parents modeled, I came to understand education as a pre-requisite for personal and racial advancement.

    When my parents and teachers noted my curiosity about certain aspects of science and writing, they shepherded me into Saturday morning writing workshops and science classes. My stepmother folded lined paper into little booklets that I filled with short stories.

    When I was 8, I appeared as a panelist on a children’s version of the popular College Bowl television quiz show. The show ran on WHYY, our local public television station, and was hosted by Philadelphia’s answer to Mr. Wizard, Bess Boggs. (At least that’s her name as i remember it; having failed to find a record of the show during my research, I’ve posted a Facebook query to fact-check my memory.)  My parents dressed me in my Easter outfit for that year (a powder-blue tailleur with a faux-fur collar, don’t you know) and put my hair in a bob instead of the usual school-day pigtails. They cleared their work schedules to accompany me to the studio (no small feat, especially since my father worked swing shifts full time and went to school full time).

    It will tell you something of who I was in those days to know that when Bess Boggs entered the studio, I jumped up and down and started tugging on my parents as if the Beatles and the entire Motown Revue had just strolled by. (Or maybe more – two years later, on a summer camp field trip, I was quite calm when we ran into Marvin Gaye in the Philadelphia International airport. It did please me mightily, of course, when he held my hand and planted a kiss on my cheek.) In any event, my admiration for Bess Boggs was in keeping with the fact that one of my other hobbies in those days was keeping journals on the Gemini space flights.

    I don’t remember the show much, other than the fact that I was Kearny’s only representative. Kearny was not known for its academic prowess. The neighborhood it served included the Sunday Breakfast Mission, then at 6th and Vine. The tow-headed brother and sister in my class,  the only white children in the school, if memory serves, were the missionaries’ children. They had transferred in from somewhere, and I don’t think they stayed long.

    Kearny was old school. We lined up on the concrete playground by class in the morning and stood at attention in the stairwells once we were marched inside. Two or our more imposing teachers, Mrs. Jenkins and Mrs. McCoy, patrolled our ranks to ensure that we kept our mouths closed and our hands to ourselves while we awaited the class bell. Any transgression would require that you step out of line to have them smack you with a ruler. The school day began with a salute to the flag, the pledge of allegiance, and a moment of silent meditation. (We were told that the silent meditation was a substitute for the prayer that had been required until the Supreme Court banned the practice.)

    My teachers exhorted us to be a credit to our race. A local historian, Ed Robinson, spoke at one of our assemblies about the glories of our African past. They were also steeped in art and culture – the crossing guard taught piano, and one of the teachers sang opera. One of the few white teachers taught us about Woody Guthrie and Huddie Ledbetter. They got us some instruments to start a small string ensemble, and had us learn two pieces for my one and only instrumental recital: an aria from Verdi’s “Aida” and “Go Down Moses.”

    In Mrs. Moore’s class in second and third grade, I sat next to a handsome, sharply-dressed, husky-voiced and mischievous boy named William Cook. His brother, Wesley, who was three years older, was a fixture at the Friends’ Neighborhood Guild, whose library was one of my favorite haunts. My clearest memory of Wesley, whose neighborhood nickname was “Scout,” was of him sitting at a table at the Guild, telling another older boy, “Listen Up! Eli Whitney didn’t invent the cotton gin!” If I was 8 or 9, then, he was 11 or 12.

    Two years after that, in November, 1967,a fter Wesley went to Stoddard-Fleischer Junior High School, we heard about the police cutting loose on a throng of high school and junior high school students who had gone down to school district administration building to petition for black history classes in the curriculum. We heard that Frank Rizzo, the inspector to whom mild-mammered George Fencl’s civil disobedience reported, had reportedly unleashed his men on the peaceful crowd with the command to, “Get their black asses!”   (The year before, Time magazine had cited Fencl’s unit as an innovative way of managing protests with minimal conflict.) In later life, after he changed his name to Mumia Abu Jamal, embarked on a career as a journalist and activist, and ultimately landed on death row.

    By the way, the city’s new superintendent of schools, Mark Shedd, earned the enmity of Fencl’s supervisor, Frank Rizzo, when he criticized the aggressiveness of police response to the demonstration, leading to Shedd’s ouster when Rizzo became mayor in 1971. In a subsequent section of this work, I will treat Shedd’s legacy in more detail, but for now, I merely want to note the controversy over the police action.

    All of that would be later. Suffice it to say that by 1967, I had internalized my parents’ and teachers’ messages about the power of the pen, the fun and necessity of learning, and the certainty that Lord have mercy, we were moving on up!

    Endnotes

    1. 1. Franklin, VP. “W.E.B. Du Bois as Journalist,” Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 56, No. 2 (1987). P. 240-244
    2. Philadelphia Tribune page one flag, Sept. 1, 1964
    3. For example, see: Cohoon, J. M. and W. Aspray, (eds.) Women and Information Technology: Research on Underrepresentation, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2006; Barker, L. J., E. Snow, K. Garvin-Doxas, T. Weston, Recruiting Middle School Girls into IT: Data on Girls’ Perceptions and Experiences from a Mixed-Demographic Group, in Women and Information Technology: Research on Under-representation, Cohoon & Aspray, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2006. pp113-136;
    4. References on the black press during this periodFor an on overview of the black press generally, see the PBS website for Stanley Nelson’s documentary: The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords. Pamela Newkirk’s Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media (NYU Press, 2000) offers a comprehensive and concise overview of the process of integrating white newsrooms and its impact on the black press.
    Previous in series Next in series
    Filed Under: Civic media, Computational Thinking, Journalism, journalism education, Research, The Craft of Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    What Would WEB Du Bois Tell Henry Jenkins and Soulja Boy?

    November 13, 2010 by

    Table of contents for Computational thinking in journalism

    1. As we change journalism education, we need to study journalism learners
    2. A foundational concept for the new news economy
    3. What Would WEB Du Bois Tell Henry Jenkins and Soulja Boy?
    4. Building the bridge between journalism and computer science
    5. Can VIBE magazine be saved? And should we care?
    6. Scratch as a Tool for Teaching Computational Journalism
    7. Crafting Literary Journalism
    8. How stories and network science could improve educational equity and diversity
    9. What computing and informatics tools will help Haiti?
    10. Why I fear I’ll never master SEO
    11. You’re gonna need to read this, but it won’t be on Amazon
    12. Scholastic Journalism Education as a Tool for Teaching Computational Thinking
    13. How should journalism educators teach and study social media?
    14. What is a computational journalist?
    15. The Food Stamp Game: a test case for teaching computational journalism, part 1
    16. On teaching game design in a journalism course, part 2
    17. On teaching game design in a journalism class, part 3
    18. On teaching game design in a journalism class, Part 4: Newsgames as literary journalism

    The Criteria for Negro Art in the Age of Computational Media

    In June, 2008, I attended a presentation in which Henry Jenkins, then Director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, contemplated the lessons of Soulja Boy Tellem’s use of what he calls “participatory culture” to create a career as a hip-hop star. Jenkins described how teenager DeAndre Ramone Way (Soulja Boy)  built a fan base by posting the music and a home video of his song, “Crank Dat,” and encouraging listeners to remix it, make video responses to it, and share it freely. (The presentation video is only available to members of the New Media Consortium.)

    The process illustrates Jenkins’ concept of “spreadable” culture — a term that he argues is more accurate than the  ”viral”   model, since viruses proliferate by attacking their hosts, while “spreadable” culture invites voluntary participation. He showed examples of fan videos of “Crank Dat,” including produced by his MIT grad students. Then Jenkins paralleled Soulja Boy’s encouragement of artistic appropriation and the cultural borrowing employed by Herman Melville in crafting Moby Dick.

    In his blog, Jenkins mused about Soulja Boy’s precocity:

    I can’t decide what fascinates me the most about this story: the fact that this teenager broke into the front ranks of the entertainment industry by using tools and processes which in theory are accessible to every other person of his generation or the fact that he has recognized intuitively the value in spreading his content and engaging his audience as an active part of his promotional process.

    Jenkins did not address the actual lyrical content of Soulja Boy’s music, and the actual ideas being packaged in the catchy beat and the playful dance steps. The content wasn’t the point of the presentation. The lyrics offer the kind of  puerile vulgarity one might expect from a boy who is trying to impress his peers with stories about his sexual prowess and toughness.  ”Crank Dat” includes such lines as:

    “Soulja boy off on this hoe…

    “Then Superman that hoe…”

    “I’m jocking on your bitch ass
    And if we get the fighting
    Then I’m cocking on your bitch ass…”

    The lyrics reflect the cliches associated with the worst of hip-hop:  degrading women while  declaring dominance over other males by feminizing and threatening them.  When Soulja Boy released “Crank Dat,” he was a 16-year-old high school student, and the song was spread largely by other teenagers.  The character that Way portrays in the video is the stereotypical black male hip-hopper: hypersexual, prone to violence, gaudily attired. But the implausibility of the lyrics suggest that, like most amateur writers, Way is imitating what he has heard or gleaned from listening to others, not writing from life experience.

    Jenkins showed videos of smiling teenagers and young adults bouncing on one foot, cranking their arms and lunging forward to make the “Superman” gesture.

    In conversations with other conference participants, I seemed to have been the only person who was profoundly disturbed by the content that Way, AKA Soulja Boy, his minions, and ultimately, his record company were spreading. In part, I later learned, that was because many of my colleagues weren’t familiar with the lyrics. There was also the fact that “Crank Dat” was only another in a long list of songs, cartoons, games and other media content that they knew kids were exposed too. It wasn’t the worst thing most kids would be exposed to. And after all, it’s not as if vulgar or even racially stereotypical music originated with remix culture.

    I probably sounded like the scolds of the 1950s yelling about rock and roll, or the highbrows at the beginning of the 20th century inveighing against comic books and “pulp” novels. The Republic was still standing. I’m sure some thought I needed to smooth out that bunch in my panties and move on.

    Or maybe not. The practice of analyzing form and distribution apart form content sits well within the tradition of media studies, going back to Marshall McLuhan’s declaration that “The Medium is the message,” and in rhetorical terms, “The medium is the massage.” However, I find Kathleen Welch persuasive when she argues that rhetorical analysis of both content and delivery is important to understanding the social justice implications of modern communications. If one follows the history of remixing trail of “Crank Dat,” one finds that its commercial success, facilitated by social media, led to the song being played in venues that would have been unimaginable in earlier times.

    For example, a few months earlier, I had been sent a link to another performance of the song by a frustrated colleague and fellow member of the National Association of Black Journalists. It seemed that someone thought it would be fun to liven up a New York local morning traffic report with a performance of the song. The traffic reporter, Jill Nicolini, was part of the morning news “happy talk” format. A former Playboy bunny and occasional reality TV star, she routinely drafted men to dance with her after detailing the morning’s jams, delays, and alternate side-of-the-street parking rules. On this particular morning, she summoned Craig Treadway, the co-anchor, as her dance partner.


    The Dancing Weather Girl – Watch more Funny Videos

    The most telling moment for me was when Treadway broke into a tap dance.  What was Treadway’s shuffle? And what do we make of the black male crew member bunny-hopping in the background?

    I don’t know Mr. Treadway, Nicolini or any of the other members of that newscast, and I have hesitated for more than a year about writing this post because I’m not trying to cast aspersions on him or any other cast member of the show. If this post does that, I apologize in advance.  They were doing their jobs, and perhaps they even had some fun. What I am trying to probe, as delicately as possible, is the meaning of the moment for journalistic norms in the age of remix culture.

    Of course, the packaging of local television news as entertainment has been going on for a long time. A quarter-century ago, Neil Postman demonstrated the emerging parallels between the television news show and a television show designed as entertainment in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Entertainment (Penguin, 1985.):

    “If you were the producer of a television news show for a commercial station, you would not have the option of defying television’s requirements…. You would try to make celebrities of your newscasters…. You would have a weatherman [sic] as comic relief, and a sportscaster who is a touch uncouth (as a way to relate to the beer-drinking common man.)  You would package the whole event as any producer might who is in the entertainment business.

    “The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the world….” (p. 106)

    I came of age professionally during the early 1980s, so as a news consumer and media professional, I understand the pecking order of news shows. The anchor might smile and exchange some banter, but the anchor stayed dignified. I wasn’t thrilled at Nicolini’s shtick, but I understood it for the reasons, Postman described. What I wasn’t ready for was an anchorman to be drawn into the clowning. It is very likely that what stuck in my craw was the sight of Treadway, who probably had to endure a great deal to attain an anchor desk in a major market, pulled out of the role on which, traditionally, his credibility rested.

    There is one sense in which the problem is entirely mine, because it represents a collapsing of norms my generation of media professionals can’t quite stomach. It has become clear in recent years that there is a great deal of skepticism about the kinds of conventions that journalists traditionally adopt, whether it be certain standards of decorum, or a studied modesty about stating their political views.  Even a growing number of journalists reject that last standard.

    Then, too, there is the shifting calculus of racial symbolism to consider. Surely, the sight of a black man dancing alongside a young white female in 2008 does not mean what it meant in my childhood during the 1960s. In those days, such a sight was restricted to Shirley Temple movies. Treadway and Nicolini’s performance occurred the same year that a man with an African father and a wife descended from slaves won the White House.

    It’s unlikely that WEB Du Bois would have approved of SouljaBoyTellem’s art, or much of hip-hop, for that matter. The pioneering scholar, editor and activist hoped that those African Americans who gained access to the instruments of culture making would infuse high culture with the gifts of Africa. For him that meant spirituals (delivered Jubilee-style, of course) the vibrancy of traditional African art and artisanship, the nuanced poesy of a Jessie Fauset or Countee Cullen, with the occasional swinging riff from the deceptively accessible Langston Hughes. In his definitive essay on aesthetics, The Criteria of Negro Art, he implored:

    “If you tonight suddenly should become full-fledged Americans; if your color faded, or the color line here in Chicago was miraculously forgotten; suppose, too, you became at the same time rich and powerful; — what is it that you would want? What would you immediately seek? Would you buy the most powerful of motor cars and outrace Cook County? Would you buy the most elaborate estate on the North Shore? Would you be a Rotarian or a Lion or a What-not of the very last degree? Would you wear the most striking clothes, give the richest dinners, and buy the longest press notices?

    “Even as you visualize such ideals you know in your hearts that these are not the things you really want. You realize this sooner than the average white American because, pushed aside as we have been in America, there has come to us not only a certain distaste for the tawdry and flamboyant but a vision of what the world could be if it were really a beautiful world; if we had the true spirit; if we had the Seeing Eye, the Cunning Hand, the Feeling Heart; if we had, to be sure, not perfect happiness, but plenty of good hard work, the inevitable suffering that always comes with life; sacrifice and waiting, all that — but, nevertheless, lived in a world where men know, where men create, where they realize themselves and where they enjoy life. It is that sort of a world we want to create for ourselves and for all America.”

    Part of Jenkins’ point is that participatory media expands the ranks of the tastemakers beyond Hollywood elites, intellectuals, and activists. Jay Rosen has been saying similar things about the shift to participatory journalism in essays such as The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” But when the ethos from which these new media products emerge can be tainted by values that are corrosive, a critical perspective is necessary.

    In her essay, “Learning the 5 Lessons of Youtube: After Trying to Teach There, I Don’t Believe the Hype,” Alexandra Juhasz makes the argument that corporate dominance of this major media sharing site has turned do-it-yourself culture into a tool for replicating ideas and values that are fundamentally anti-democratic. In particular, she and her students found that depictions of African Americans that reinforce vulgar race and gender stereotypes are more popular, and thus more prominently featured, than those promoting more positive images or cultural critique.

    And this is part of my concern, even as I contribute to this participatory culture and teach students to do it as well. The uncritical replication of negative images of black males in particularly is particularly vexing, because it undermines the effort to transfer of positive values from one generation to the next. In some ways, the current environment is arguably more challenging than the pre-Civil rights era, because in those days, there were alternative, black-controlled civic institutions that promoted images that countered the stereotypes of the dominant culture.  Byron Hurt’s 2008 mini-documentary demonstrated Barack Obama’s rise exposed a deep-seated confusion and ambivalence about the possibilities of success, respect and power for black men in an era that is supposed to be “post-racial:”

    I thought about this ambivalence as I watched clips from DeAndre Ramone Way’s videoblog, which has since been removed. He has been known to talk about his interests in art, education, and business along with his  “beefs” with other rappers, his jewelry and his cars.  Pop culture never was a good place for a complicated persona. When pop culture goes “spreadable,” what gets lost? Sometimes I’m afraid it’s the substance of a culture that we can’t afford to lose.

    Previous in series Next in series
    Filed Under: Blogging, Civic media, Computational Thinking, Diversity, Music, News, Research Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Teach me how to study

    November 10, 2010 by

    Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
    «Older Posts
    Music to browse by: [soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/users/30201375" params="" width=" 100%" height="450" iframe="true" /]