More "Reconceptualizing. . ."

I just want to say first that I have a huge man-crush on Gee. TMI, perhaps, but I can't help it. My first read in grad school was Gee's Social Linguistics and Literacies, and I've been hooked ever since. Gee's work is relevant and important to schooling reform because he focuses on the "darker aspects" of our capitalist reality and how schooling tends to contribute to social and cultural reproduction. His notion of "Shape-Shifting Portfolio People" informs my practice as I attempt to apprentice my students into the academic discourse (Gee, would that be a "D" or a "d"?). If Gee is correct in his thinking that modern reality requires young people to engage in self-fashioning practices that recreate their identities, students should be provided ample opportunities to engage in such practices. Unfortunately, however, students of privilege tend to participate in self-fashioning acts to gain social capital that will be used for future successes; whereas, working-class students "display themselves as immersed in a world of action and feeling untied to vaunted futures of achievement, transformation, and status" (p. 182). In addition, what I found most surprising was that the upper-middle-class schools in the study did not engage students in social critique and the working-class schools did not engage students in conversations about living in a ever-changing, technological society.

Gee suggests that exposing students to digital literacies may bridge the "divide" between the haves and the have-nots, but alas, in the Wilder and Dressman chapter they show that often teachers and students fail to reap the transformative benefits of technology. The authors argue that students need more explicit instruction in using technology, and the students need to participate in authentic technological tasks.