Media Lit Introduction

Hello everyone!

My name is Christian Collins. I am originally from San Diego, CA, but I have been living in Rhode Island since the summer of 2016. I moved here with my boyfriend Ammar, as we both were placed in Rhode Island as part of the Americorps programs City Year (for myself) and Teach for America (for him). Without knowing a soul in New England, we moved from one of the largest and most populous states, to little Rhode Island.

I have since fallen in love with Rhode Island and New England in general. We have decided to make Rhode Island our long term home and have since put down roots here, including; buying our first house (yay!), adopting our dog/son Winston (super cute!), recently sold our first home to buy our second (that was fast!) and have created long term commitments with our employers.

Currently, I am teaching as part of the Americorps program Teach for America. I teach 6th and 7th grade English Language Arts (with "English as a Second Language" certification) at Del Sesto Middle School. I have just completed my first year of teaching and I am so excited to have my first summer! So far, I have spent most of my time building IKEA furniture and sleeping. In July however, I will be going on a cruise to the Bahamas, visiting my brother in Seattle, and have tickets to go see Hamilton! I am taking CURR 550 as part of my IMED program, which I will be finishing this July!

In my spare time, I love to garden, hang out with my boyfriend and dog, bake, play video games or go hiking.

Comments

Digital Native or Not?

I was born prior to most of the modern day technology youth have access to today. Although I was not born into this technology, my early childhood years saw the transition into today's modern technologies. Due to this, I think of myself more as a digital native than a digital immigrant. Though I was born in a time when cellphones and laptops were not quite as ubiquitous as they are today, I spent most of my time with the forms of technology that were available to me. As a 6 or 7 year old, I would play Nintendo 64 or Playstation or Gameboy, which were new and advanced for the time. By the time I was in middle school, I was spending a lot of time on the desktop computer, on websites such as Myspace (shoutout to Tom !). I developed the 'native' skills of twitch speed or parallel processing while going down Wikipedia rabbit holes while playing flash games in another tab.

Assignment B - Taking it All Home!

This week's reading was theTeaching Tolerance article Teaching at the Intersections by Monita K. Bell. In this article, the idea of 'intersectionality' is discussed, and what that means for educators and our students. Various student experiences are discussed throughout the article as a way to make sense of the idea of intersectionality. In my experience, intersectionality has been framed as the threat of discrimination due to one or multiple of your identity markers. In this way, a student in the article, named G.G., is used as an example of the ways in which multiple markers can disadvantage someone beyond just one of their identity markers. Being black and female and queer presents the potential for increased instances of discrimination due to one, multiple, or all of those markers. In order to be effective educators, we must view our students " through an intersectional lens: recognizing that race-, gender- and class-related circumstances a...

danah boyd vs Prensky - Digital Nativism

Are today's youth digital natives? In the debate of digital nativism between boyd and Prensky, I wholeheartedly agree with boyd's perspective. Digital nativism is the idea some generations are digital natives, meaning they naturally adept at navigating and understanding digital technologies and systems. On the other hand, the existence of a digital native implies the idea of digital immigrants, or those who are foreign to the digital familiarity experienced by natives. In chapter 7 of danah boyd's It's Complicated , she discusses the idea of digital nativism and how it is actually dangerous mindset to have. To start, boyd discusses that the idea of nativism vs immigrant truthfully stems from the fear created by generational gaps which are increasingly illustrated through technology use. She paraphrases Barlow when she discusses that, "the implicit fear that stems from the generational gap that has emerged around technology." The idea of generational tensi...

Collins Compositions

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