#BrandEd

There is a lot of pressure for teachers to engage in professional learning over the summer. More than that, we must passionately and publicly demonstrate it on social media, where there are capacious opportunities to join chats or attend conferences that promise positivity and transformation. Instagram is full of reminders to be the #MAGIC, teach your heart out, get your teach on, #GLOW, and somehow be an #eduhero or #edurockstar, too. Your classroom should be transformed constantly, your lesson plans should include cutesy resources with clip art and fancy fonts, and don’t forget to spend your paycheck on TPT room decorations! EducationTwitter feeds are full of a variety of messaging about how #KidsDeserveIt in this age of a Classroom Zombie Apocalypse, where we must be Relentless, adopt an Innovator’s Mindset, Culturize our schools, ‘DITCH’ textbooks, ‘#EmpowerOurGirls’, and be a ‘Codebreaker’, a ‘Pirate’, or a ‘Wild Card’. What do most of these movements have in common? The books they are based on are underwritten by one marketing network: Dave Burgess Incorporated, formerly Pirate Press.

I am all for teachers participating in what energizes them. But we need to ask critical questions about the ways that marketing networks shape the learning opportunities that teachers engage in, understanding the perspectives the networks do – and do not – bring. Many of the leaders in the network have anywhere from 20k to 255k twitter followers and their books are accompanied by chats that serve as marketing, bringing an illusion of discussion when in fact the market relations between the authors inhibits critical conversations. Almost all of the books focus on ‘positivity’, individual change, mindset, rather than the systemic issues that students and teachers face. Thus, any criticism is dismissed as negativity.

Maybe the idea you need is in one of these books. Maybe these chats or conferences will give you the energy you need to renew yourself this summer.

But, there’s a danger of getting locked into any marketing network for our learning and growth.

The ‘pirate‘ books themselves are often structured like listicles with short and breezy chapters (sometimes only a few pages each) and have very few sources (less than a dozen). The sources often point to other people in the network, mostly white males, and the business press. Because the books don’t situate themselves critically in relation to what other educators have said and done, the ideas are made to appear new. The authors of the latest book in the lineup tell us that “For the first time in decades, there is hope”.

For the first time? Really?

In terms of actual content, aside from talking positively about technology, there’s virtually no reference to the political times that we live in: structural racism, poverty, heteropatriarchy, ableism, or the climate crisis. Somewhat paradoxically, the books do promote engaging students in authentic and purposeful work, while at the same time, the books bear no signs of being ‘political’. The books bear no signs that they are written in an era of state violence against Black, Brown and Indigenous bodies, of the extraction of profits from our data and the environment. Similarly, if you scroll through the Twitter timelines of the authors, there’s scant engagement with the wider world. When the marketing network does address issues of equity, it comes as an add-on, rather than part of a fundamental approach. As educators, we need to wonder how relevant those books might be.

One of the newest books relies on the outright sensationalism of zombies and invokes the ‘classroom apocalypse’ (referring to standardized testing regime). Classrooms are ‘battlefields’, ‘trenches’, and ‘bunkers’. The authors suggest we ‘double tap’ formative / summative assessments. While I’m sure these metaphors are meant to be edgy and energising, we need to ask who is made vulnerable by them.

Another book uses the metaphor of poker, claiming that “childhood is one randomly dealt hand” and encourages teachers to be the ‘Wild Card’ for students who metaphorically have been dealt bad hands. Viewing childhood as a randomly dealt hand of cards individualises and privatises the structural issues of racism and poverty, which encourages teachers to be ‘wild cards’ sounds like white saviourism amped on neoliberal market ideology. The Wild Card is tied to the conference ‘Get Your Teach On’, both of which encourage expensive room ‘transformations’. Both focus on the need for teachers to be extroverted and engage students through flashy entertainment, which, as Sarah Mullhern Gross argues, “puts immense pressure on young teachers to spend inordinate amounts of money on decor.” As Mike Caulfield points out, the marketing mediums, such as Instagram, influence the commodification of pedagogy: “what you’re struck with is the way the thinness of the signal plays to a certain thin and disconnected pedagogy, and how that pedagogy slowly seems normal to newcomers.”

If you’re an educator who is interested in learning this summer (and it’s great to take the summer off, too!), then here are the places I’d recommend starting to help break out of marketing networks. These are all books I’ve read in the last year or so thanks to my wide network on Twitter. I’ve mostly used Amazon links. I don’t benefit in any financial ways from your clicks.

I would like to thank Sarah Mullhern Gross for conversation on Twitter and suggestions about editing.

Breaking Out

If Twitter is your thing, Follow #ClearTheAir and #DisruptTexts and #31DaysIBPOC. Expect to be challenged in the best ways.

But wait, there's more! @ChristieNold and @Lyricalswordz are back to #BreakRank with the follow up chat that asked BIPOC (Black and Indigenous Persons of Color) what they need from white folx in anti-racist movements. That will be a live chat on 7/24 @ 7:30 PM EST. 5/
— ClearTheAirEdu (@ClearTheAirEdu) July 2, 2019