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Understand the impact of Millennials in the educational environment and how to effectively engage them in an accelerated curriculum. Explore their diversity, values, and reliance on technology. Embrace an inclusive approach for successful outcomes.
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“Welcoming Millennial Students to the Accelerated Curriculum” ALP June 2016 Stephanie Bridges sbridges@ivc.edu Michelle Mattoon mgraymattoon@ivc.edu Kristin Nooneknoone@ivc.edu Instructors of Writing Irvine Valley College
The Atlantic Wired March 25, 2016
Why are Millennials so significant to college enrollment? “Millennials have surpassed Baby Boomers as the nation’s largest living generation, according to population estimates released this month by the U.S. Census Bureau. Millennials, whom we define as those ages 18-34 in 2015, now number 75.4 million, surpassing the 74.9 million Baby Boomers (ages 51-69). And Generation X (ages 35-50 in 2015) is projected to pass the Boomers in population by 2028” (Pew Research Center, April 2016)
What characteristics come to your mind when you think of the Millennial Generation? Tired Ruined Uninterested Selfish Totally lazy
Summarize what being a Millennial means to you? • “Millennial or not, I am who I am and I'm happy with it. :D” • “It means opportunities are being more limited, and the market is more competitive. This also means to me that I have less chance to do whatever I desire.” • “To be wise” • “It means that we are lucky because of modern times and have more opportunities.” • “Allowing everyone to be accepted and loved for who they truly are.”
“Older generations assume us Millenials (SIC) are lazy and not self driven, when in reality we are those things and more. We choose to work smarter not harder.” • “A lot of these problems millennials focus on social issues, such as immigration, gun violence, racism, sexism, police violence, domestic violence, and more… I can bet most of them would not have been out there marching with Dr King, that most would have called injustice, but then stayed in with the curtains drawn when the time came to stand and fight.” • “Bringing a change in the world!” • “To be in a generation that will either make the future brighter or will all out dim it”
Acceleration: Affective Issues “We also believe it’s not enough to uphold high standards and then blame students if they don’t meet them. We’re not advocating… the ‘right to fail’… Two pedagogical elements are essential. First, as we give students college-level tasks, they need low-stakes opportunities in class to practice thinking and communicating… Second, it’s important to recognize that the emotional side of learning—particularly feelings of fear and academic insecurity—can lead capable students to be unsuccessful… Our work, then, is… understanding the affective dynamics in our classrooms and having intentional practices to ensure they don’t derail students” (Katie Hern and Myra Snell, Oct. 2013)
Understanding the Millennial in your classroom Demographically, Millennial students are very diverse: racially, ethnically, and believing in a more complex gender identification
How do you feel about having native born Americans and non-native born Americans in the classroom?
Do you think that people of different races dating and/or marrying is good for American society?
Understanding the Millennial in your classroom Many value family and feel a civic duty to help others. • Are your biological parents still married? 62.9% Yes / 37.1% No • Do you live with one or more of your parents? 77.1% Yes / 22.9% No • Do you live with more than two generations of your family or extended family in the same household?17.1% Yes / 82.9% No • Do you volunteer to help others and/or donate items to the needy?65.7% Yes / 34.3% No
Understanding the Millennial in your classroom They also value family and personal connections but still are concerned about monetary and career goals.
How important is it for you to acheive a high paying career/profession?
Understanding the Millennial in your classroom The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA claims that Millennial students have a reliance on multiple tools, mostly with technology, to supplement their learning, value self-learning, and often use campus resources.
Understanding the Millennial in your classroom They appreciate building connections not through established institutions but through virtual networks like social media, so accelerated pedagogy that uses a great deal of group work and idea sharing through blog posts is a very effective tool.
Understanding the Millennial in your classroom The accelerated pedagogy meets these interests as it eliminates stigmatization through the reform of developmental education since basic skills need not be separated from college level skills. Their appeal to this education pedagogy raises the success and lowers rates of attrition.
Understanding the Millennial in your classroom Pew Research reveals that these students are “confident, connected, open to change” and favor “self-expression” but still practice privacy. The accelerated pedagogy appeals to these values by presenting more than just information but dynamic and interesting learning. They respond well to the TRUST in students’ abilities and capacity to learn raising the bar of expectations that accelerated pedagogy encourages.
What can YOU do for the Millennial in your classroom? So be a coach, not a critic! Know that they are… • Talented • Resourceful • Unified with people • Self-less • Team builders
“hey prof sry i missed class if u could let me make up the quiz that would be gr9 thx bai”:Communicating with Millennials (Or, That Lack of Capitalization Does Not Mean What You Think It Means) Kristin Noone Irvine Valley College
Some Examples • Student One: I meant to turn it in on time. I forgot. I’m sorry. Can I still submit the paper for a lower grade? • Student Two: I meant to turn it in on time, I forgot, sorry, would you still accept it maybe thank you bye • Student Three: omg imnt 2 turn in i forgot rly srypls still accept it? • If you got these three sentences in three emails, from three different students, how might you react? What do these sentences tell you about these three students?
“who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?” –Vampire Weekend, “Oxford Comma” Millennials use orthography to mark for tone in massively creative, internally consistent, and generationally distinct modes of writing This presents a challenge in writing courses This requires us to massively rethink assumptions about communications we receive from students, and to recognize that some of their “errors” are not, to them, errors Millennial communication uses orthography and text flagging as affective and creative expression of emotional state
Suggestions/Recommendations • First, we as instructors will have to practice a new kind of active reading and interpretation, examining and in some cases overturning our own assumptions about language and orthography, in order to properly understand what our students are telling us on both a linguistic and emotional affective level. • Second, students will need classroom support that emphasizes learning about audience, impact, and appropriate tone, as well as code-switching and fluency in generationally distinct modes of writing. • These points are especially important in an accelerated course, in which, rather than focusing on remedial skill acquisition, we encourage growth mindsets and recognition of the highly developed intuition many students already bring to the classroom.
Some specific examples (drawn from McCullough’s work on internet linguistics) The judicious use of internet slang can indicate informality and comfort. The choice of "u" instead of "you" or rlly instead of really can tell the reader that you're comfortable and relaxed, like putting on your comfy sweatpants rather than a nice outfit. Minimalist capitalization, often combined with minimal punctuation, is also a tremendously productive source of sarcasm. If standardly-capitalized and punctuated text is a regular newsreader voice and all-caps and/or repeated punctuation is SHOUTING!!!! or ENTHUSIASM???, then no-caps with no or little punctuation invokes a flat, laconic tone of voice that fits naturally with sarcasm. Ex: Boys r like “i prefer less makeup” ok so wear less makeup, wtf does that have to do with me — @lilkittten April 13, 2015
Some more examples/new rules to think about Capitalizing Unimportant Words imposes a certain sense of ironic detachment. Adding (TM) or periods between each word is optional but extra effective. All-caps, however, is generally not sarcastic: there seems to be a contradiction between STRONG FEELING and the appropriate degree of ironic detachment. Certain uses of internet slang can also add a note of sarcasm, especially the vowelless ones: srs bsns, for example, contains a contradiction — how srs can your bsns really be if you’ve disemvowelled it? Codeswitching between “you” and “u” can be more intimate, which is sometimes sincere (“i love u” is cuter than “I love you”) but sometimes disingenuous (someone asking “u mad?” might not care deeply about your inner wellbeing).
“the interesting part is the variation: when you deviate from how people expect you to type in a given context, your punctuation choices take on a greater significance. But just like you have to know how to construct a grammatical sentence in order to speak fluent doge, creative typographical choices are meaningful because they play against a background of routine, default ones.” –Gretchen McCullough
Tia Baheri on tumblr-speak: • We also see the creation of tone in a toneless medium. In order to simulate conversational patterns in writing we SHOUT WHEN WE’RE SUPER EXCITED or *psssst whisper when we’re pretending to tell someone a secret while perfectly aware that anyone on the internet can read what we’re saying.* slash the coolest bit tho is that u can like ironically forgo all capitalization and punctuation just write in a weird speech pattern its ok everyone will still understand maybe it even helps read the text more quickly because nothing is interrupting the flow of words • In short, this dialect results when people who already share a language are given new tools. The result isn’t a butchering of English language but a creative experiment with it. Am I claiming that the Internet as a whole is operating on a level of postmodernism that would make Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon seem like novices? maybe i am maybe im not u punk wut of it like who r u to tell me otherwise
Examples • “people in my generation (at least in the us; idk abt other countries’ timelines on this front) went thru (or are still going thru) our Formative Social Years in an environment where we’d regularly interact with even our closest friends on text-only platforms (whether texting or gchat or fb messages or w/e), and b/c so much linguistic/social information is actually conveyed by facial expression and tone of voice, we’ve collectively made up all of these textual ways of conveying that in a concise, efficient way • so like, sometimes on this blog i’ll talk about “straight people”, and sometimes i’ll talk about “str8 ppl”, and even thoi would pronounce those the same, the first is much more neutral — it would probably happen in the context like “i’m not sure how i feel about straight people writing stories that center around experiences of homophobia” — than the second, which which is much more frustrated/venting — it would be more likely to crop up in the context of “all i want is to live quietly in my little queer utopia but no str8 ppl have to come along and heteronomativity UGH #over it #whatever #NOT RLLY OVER IT” –tumblr user tangleofrainbows
I’ve gotten really upset over some of my mother’s texts because they have a period at the end, and in order to be neutral, they need to not have a period. And then I remember that the way she composes text messages (and, incidentally-not-incidentally, the way my boyfriend composes messages in text) come from a different tonal background, and they don’t use orthography in the same way to convey mood. –tumblr user hello-delicious-tea
One more example: • i’m not going to class • I’m not going to class. • I have reasons for not going to class. • I have Reasons for Not Going to class. • Given some of the rules we’ve discussed, what might these students be saying? • (remember, lack of capitalization/punctuation = neutral, capital letters indicate important but possibly viewed with some ironic detachment, ALL CAPS indicates non-ironic excitement…)
Want to compose your own? • Remember some rules: • lack of capitalization/punctuation = neutral, • capital letters indicate important but possibly viewed with some ironic detachment, • ALL CAPS indicates non-ironic excitement, • deliberately collapsed words or misspelling (pls, fml) often indicates annoyance or frustration or bitterness, and • proper spelling but confused grammar (i can’t even how this) often indicates amazement or enthusiasm to the point of speechlessness) “I was really excited to read this article about growth mindsets because I could relate to the concept.” • How might you rewrite this sentence, as a social media-savvy millennial student, to have a different affective impact? • How might you write it in order to be neutral? • How might you write it in order to indicate enthusiasm and comfortable intimacy with the recipient? • How might you write it in order to indicate sarcasm or bitterness?
Some possible options: Neutral: i was really excited to read this article about growth mindsets, i can totally relate Enthusiastic: i was reALLY EXCITED to read this article about growth mindsets like how even IT ME wOW Sarcastic: I was rlly excited 2 read this article abt growth mindsets b/c oh ye totally me pls
So, back to acceleration! The CAP Principles for Redesigning Curricula, especially relevant and thinking-oriented curricula, collaboration, and intentional support for students’ affective needs, can be helpful here. Millennial students, as Sherry Posnick-Goodwin has pointed out, are “eager to share, collaborate, and utilize technology in new and exciting ways”. We will need to focus on the challenges of communication with students who sometimes do speak another language. This is a collaborative process that requires us to learn as well as to teach.
Those suggestions again • First, we as instructors will have to practice a new kind of active reading and interpretation, examining and in some cases overturning our own assumptions about language and orthography, in order to properly understand what our students are telling us on both a linguistic and emotional affective level. • Second, students will need classroom support that emphasizes learning about audience, impact, and appropriate tone, as well as code-switching and fluency in generationally distinct modes of writing. • Our millennial students are highly literate, fluent, creative, and deliberately engaged in what Baheri calls a “post-modern element of self-consciousness and playfulness” that is anything but random or incorrect. • What they require from us is not an assumption that they lack basic grammatical skills, but guidance in terms of when to deploy their various linguistic talents for specific audience and effect.
Or, in the words of tumblr user linguafandom: “When I say, for example, “The talks broke down because politics,” I’m not just describing a circumstance. I’m also describing a category. I’m making grand and yet ironized claims, announcing a situation and commenting on that situation at the same time. I’m offering an explanation and rolling my eyes — and I’m able to do it with one little word. Because variety. Because Internet. Because language.”
Instructor immediacy A perception of physical or psychological closeness that can bridge the psychological distance between two persons. Eye contact Humor Personal examples Talking openly with students
Affective learning Students are drawn toward teachers they trust and perceive as competent and caring. Increased student Motivation Participation Learning Satisfaction
Out of class communication Expected response time frame One to three hours Twenty four hours
