Barbara A. Sasso
I initially thought about creating this unit after reading Susan Sontag's essay, "In Plato's Cave."
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In the essay, Sontag expresses the dangerously seductive power visual images have in creating many illusions: of importance, of truth, and of a skewed reality. When the essay was written in the 1970's, home computers and mobile phones were still dreams in the realm of science fiction, yet these very seductive and highly visual communications devices are now in most of my students' pockets.
This year, the New Haven Public School system issued new curriculum units crafted to address the Common Core Standards in English Language Arts that the state of Connecticut has adopted.
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The New Haven English Language Arts (ELA) Curriculum for grades 9-10 contains a unit titled "Technology and Society: Who's Really in Charge?" The unit asks students to consider how technological changes are affecting their lives and to "consider the various aspects of human nature that accompany invention and innovative change." How have technological changes pulled us away from the natural world, especially in the "age of incessant information"?
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When I began this seminar, this was the unit that my students were starting, and I felt powerfully motivated to examine how swarms of images emanating from their phones were affecting their learning and their lives. I wanted to create lessons that would not only meet the academic requirements of Common Core Standards, but also help students to thoughtfully consider how to use these ubiquitous and mesmerizing mobile smart phones. This meant that I would be researching this topic, writing the curriculum, developing lesson plans, and teaching it days, sometimes hours later. I'm sure you all know what this feels like. When a topic seems compelling and important to students, we will all put our shoulders to the plow. When I brought the idea back to my academic team,
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they were all on board.
