Ali’s Voice: Pathways Toward Balance

Abstract

This morning my daughter took up a feminist cause with our carpool. She is angry because women’s volleyball (a national champion team here at Penn State) gets less press attention than men’s football. As a 12 year old girl, her anger is understandable. She’s arriving at a realization about the culture she lives in. Most of us swim in this space: it is the air we breathe; it’s invisible to us until something smacks us in the face and we realize that we still live in a culture that privileges certain races, genders, classes above others. We are seeing an increasing number of women graduating from high school and college, leading organizations, serving in the military, making policies, and being elected to Congress. Women are active in nearly all spheres of public life today, and still continue to enjoy opportunities to stay home with children should a mother choose to, if the family is able to afford it. In many ways, women enjoy more freedom of choice than men who are still expected, as Jack Kammer points out in his book on sexism, (Heroes of the Blue Sky Rebellion), to make a living above all else. Things have evolved enormously over the past decades. Women’s opportunities and successes speak volumes. So it actually surprised me quite a lot to see, in my daughter, an angry feminist. I remember this myself. I remember my 12-year-old self-realizing that I could never be president of the United States, for example. There were many doors in those days that were closed, and technology was generally one of those doors. I was surprised by my daughter, because I thought there weren’t many doors still closed, and that the ones still closed were so inconsequential. Is it really important that volleyball is on an equal footing with football when the door to the presidency is wide open to her? When she can choose pretty much any life, any field, so many choices? It feels nearly frivolous. But it’s truly not. It’s not that she really cares about volleyball (though she does care about volleyball), it’s what it stands for, the still present, truly insidious invisible ways that we still regard certain races, classes and genders differently in our society.

Selected Publications

• Carr-Chellman, A.A. 2006. User-design. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

• ———. 2014a. Transmedia in education. In Encyclopedia of educational technology, ed. Sage. (Accepted December 2013).

• ———. 2014b. We need more videogames in schools. Huffington Post, invited. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-carrchellman/we-need-more-games-in-schools_b_3884206.html

• ———. 2016. Instructional design for teachers ID4T: Improving classroom practice, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

• Carr-Chellman, A.A., and G. Rowland. forthcoming. Classic dialogues: Exploring the field of educational technology. Routledge. Anticipated publication Fall 2016.

• Engerman, J.A., M. MacAllan, and A. Carr-Chellman. 2014. Boys and their toys: Video game learning & the common core. In Proceedings of Games, Learning and Society Conference 10.0 (GLS 10.0), ed. A. Ochsner, J. Dietmeier, C. Williams, and C. Steinkuehler, 504–510. Madison, WI: Games, Learning and Society.

• Jordan, R., and A.A. Carr-Chellman. 2014. DIY design. Training and Development 68(1): 54–58.

• Kirby, J., C. Hoadley, and A.A. Carr-Chellman. 2005. Instructional design and the learning sciences: A citation analysis. Educational Technology Research and Development 53(1): 37–48.

• Reigeluth, C.M., and A.A. Carr-Chellman (eds.). 2009. Instructional-design theory, vol. III: Building a common knowledge base. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

• TED Talk: Bring back the boys: Gaming to re-engage boys in their own learning. Global January 2011. http://www.ted.com/talks/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_engage_boys_in_learning