The Brookings School District is considering strict rules on teacher-student fraternization. It's easy to portray such rules as essential for protecting students, given the seamy accusations of sexy texting and worse against former Sioux Falls teacher Nicholas Jastorff (who did his teaching internship in Brookings). Brookings superintendent Roger DeGroot is floating rules that would ban all sorts of teacher-student interaction:
- personal letters and e-mails
- calling students on cell phones
- phone conversations unrelated to homework or class work
- discussing personal matters
- replying to any message from students on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other "interactive platforms"
The personal-professional boundary between teachers and students is hard to define. The power relationship of the classroom requires that teachers be careful not to take advantage of students and insinutate themselves into their charges' personal lives. But teachers and students are also members of the same community. Effective teaching requires teachers to care about students as people, not just as products on an information assembly line. The best teachers make clear that they give a darn about their students. Teachers don't have to friend kids on Facebook to do that. But I can recall numerous teaching and coaching situations where acting in the best interest of students called for dropping the professional façade andtalking with students about what was really happening. A strict reading of the language Supt. DeGroot offers appears to tell every teacher that if a student mentions anything about his or her personal life, the only appropriate responses are either "Go see the counselor" or stony silence.
The draft language on online fraternization seems to ban any interaction on Twitter, blogs, wikis, or any other website, even wholly public ones. This language seems rooted in the oh-so-1999 attitude that the Internet is a weird, scary place filled with exceptional danger. It ignores the fact that the Internet is not just some island of depravity detached from civil society (not unlike Madison's Four Corners, a place where teachers and students most certainly shouldn't interact). Twitter, blogs, and other social media are an integral part of millions of peoples' lives. Those tools are how we interact. They are as normal as face-to-face interaction.
From a security perspective (or is it paranoia?), all that online interaction may be safer than face-to-face interaction. If a teacher says something rude to a student in person, it's he-said-she-said. If a teacher and student conduct a conversation online, that text remains on someone's server, just waiting to be read into the record if there's ever cause for investigation into inappropriate behavior.
Not every student feels comfortable raising that hand in the classroom. Given the Jastorff arrest, some students may feel skittish about going to see a teacher personally after class. Online interaction can provide a safe for students to connect with and learn from their teachers while establishing a text trail of accountability.
The Brookings School District is justifiably concerned about maintaining appropriate teacher-student relationships. But instead of branding technology as a bogeyman (bogeything?) and closing channels of communication, we should look for ways to use the technology to enhance the appropriate relationships that make good education happen.