Welcome from President-Elect
Kylene Beers

Ever watched Karl Fisch’s slideshow “Did You Know”? If not, watch it at www.thefischbowl.blogspot.com and note all the sources he used in creating the presentation. I’ve used his punch line—”shift happens”—in the conference theme for the 2008 NCTE convention because I am convinced that the shifts we currently face—technological, political, social, and cultural—have profound effects on the teaching we must do today to prepare our students for tomorrow.

But what does tomorrow look like? Our students will take jobs that don’t yet exist, use technologies that aren’t yet developed, and live— virtually—in a neighborhood that is as open and wide as Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood was bounded and small. Both exciting and daunting, the frustrations of shift have surely been felt before. We so often resist change—scroll to book, manual typewriter to electric to word processor, carriage to car. And who knew that anyone other than Jules Verne’s characters would circle the world in 80 days, or that popcorn (good popcorn!) could actually be popped in a microwave? Yet, in spite of misgivings, we always shift toward the higher level of technology.

Even in your lifetime, no matter what your age, you have witnessed this phenomenon of shift gaining momentum—laser surgery, ethanol, cell phones, MP3 players, the Web—but this one feels different . . .because it is. It’s faster. Much faster. The more we learn about technology, the faster it snowballs. While we lingered in the Industrial Age for close to a century, in a few decades, we’ve whipped through the Information Age, the Technology Age, and have blasted into what Daniel Pink (author of A Whole New Mind) calls the Conceptual Age.

Yet, in relation to our hurtle through change, our schools seem to be moving more slowly. We still move large groups of students from class to class with a shrill bell (reminiscent of the factory whistle during the Industrial Age). We still group kids by age and label them with As or Bs, though few can articulate what differentiates them. We’ve added technology—but it’s in a lab down the hall where only certain websites can be accessed. We’ve said we want kids, the kids of the only nation that has put a man on the moon, to use technology in the classroom, but for students in a remedial class, that might be only an electronic workbook, and for those in a gifted class, a PowerPoint presentation instead of a poster.

While we can all agree that the technology shift has affected our teaching, let’s not ignore the political shift. Once, politicians gave schooling only a passing nod; now, all politicians (from mayors to the president) want to impose direction on serious issues in schools, such as violence and low literacy achievement of some students (with zero tolerance policy and NCLB legislation being the favored solutions). The result is that now we face mindsets that challenge our professionalism.

If the technology and political shifts weren’t enough, we also face social and cultural shifts in schools—the re-segregation of many urban schools, the move toward single gender schools, and the popularity of home-schooling and charter schools. Diversity in schools—language, religion, sexual orientation, press, customs—has exploded, but while some communities have embraced it, others perceive it as a threat and turn to restrictions—on reading, writing, clothing, Web access, and even dating at school functions.

These many shifts are enough to have our heads spinning, but I want to propose one more, one that is intimately tied to the social dynamic of our students’ lives. We’re teaching the Millennium generation, that group of kids who arrived at school as “digital natives” who have a new set of 3 Rs in mind: Relevance, Relationships, and Responsiveness. They live in a digital world in which they turn on, turn up, and tune out with a mere tap on a touch pad. These kids connect with people around the school, city, country, and world as they IM, “friend”, text, game, podcast, and blog. When it comes to preferred technology, they tend (to borrow from the song) to love the one they’re with, so if cell phone is in hand, text messaging is great; if they are online, IM is what counts. Their technology, like them, is mobile and is as much about connecting to people as it is connecting to information.

That connection to others is their culture, a participatory and collaborative phenomenon. Such a culture is defined in part by the online communities they join—Facebook, MySpace, alternative reality game groups, IM chats—and partly by the way they express themselves—mashups, Web pages, blogs, zines, podcasting, texting, IM-ing, icons, screen names, and even away messages. These kids network to the extreme: when they want to think together, they head to a Wiki space or blog; and when they finish, they share their thoughts with a vast audience via the Web. The irony is, while more teens than you probably expect are involved in this virtual culture, chances are you won’t find it at school, because more and more schools are restricting the social networking sites that actually help define the cultural and social life of today’s students.

At NCTE 2007, we explored the topic of diverse literacies in the twenty-first century literacy; now, for the 2008 convention, we invite you to push this thinking even further by joining the national conversation about how to juggle those diverse literacies while addressing current technological, political, social, and cultural shifts. Do this by explaining how you’re effectively working with English language learners, coping with political pressure to pass high-stakes tests, addressing the ever more diverse student populations, and teaching with and through technology to all levels of students across all the language arts. Explain how you use technology to enhance your own learning and how you use it to communicate not only with colleagues, but with parents, politicians, and administrators. Share how technology has affected assessment of students and of yourself.

I can think of no better city than San Antonio, Texas, in which to come together to discuss these shifts. San Antonio is a multilingual, multicultural city, and the San Antonio Riverwalk serves as a powerful metaphor for what you might feel in this time of shift. You’ll stroll the Riverwalk, seduced by the lush vegetation, the gentle lap of a meandering river against the banks of a manicured path; you’ll sit at an outdoor restaurant and visit with friends to music that is drifting on the air. In its shade, time seems slower.

Then, back in the fast-paced, wired world, cars whiz by, the sun glares, people jostle past you wired to iPods, PDAs, cell phones, laptops; they sit in Internet cafes doing one thing in myriad ways: connecting. You feel disoriented, lost, as if you are an immigrant to a new land. And then you remember . . . you are. You are the digital immigrant in the twenty-first century teaching a room full of digital natives who are as comfortable in this digital world as you were on the Riverwalk. Join us there, where together we’ll discuss all that it means to teach toward tomorrow—something we must do, because, after all, shift happens.