Home Archives 2014

Yearly Archives: 2014

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It's World Autism Awareness Day.

Autism and pervasive developmental disorder is a personal part of my life because one of my nephews, a lovely boy named Henry, was diagnosed with autism when he was five. I have to admit when he was a toddler I only saw him a few times because we lived far away, but I no sign of any disorder at that time. But by the time I moved closer to home in 2009 it was obvious that Henry had communication and attention issues. He lives in Ontario where it takes a shameful amount of time for diagnosis and to get access to treatment. In Henry's case, over three years between the diagnosis and action. Three very critical years. It is lucky for Henry that he is intelligent, taught himself to read by the time he was 5 years old and that our family as a group works very hard at fostering communication skills. But that isn't enough. 

What was missing in Henry's life was the school component/social component. Henry, prior to enrolling in the school he's in now, was having a great deal of difficulty in school. JK and part of Kindergarten was completed in a regular school, where they believed he needed to be sent to a behaviour class (this was prior to the diagnosis.) They also didn't believe that Henry had taught himself how to read. The rest of kindergarten and Grade 1 was completed in a Waldorf type school environment. A small class, focusing on life/social skills, where Henry thrived but also began to wonder when he was going to a "real" school. Since there was no nearby Waldorf school and given Henry's wish to go to a "real" school he transferred to a local school at the end of Grade 1. The principal was welcoming and so was the teacher. Grade 2 was great. Henry still had problems, as he doesn't like to write or do math and he has no understanding of social boundaries and touching. But his Grade 2 teacher knew he had ability and pushed him to do what he didn't like and so did his aide. But Henry didn't have any friends and in fact a fellow student broke his collarbone by picking him up and throwing him to the ground. Grade 3 (this year) has been not so good. A different teacher, a different aide, and the inclusion in his class of the student who broke his collarbone has made this year in this particular school much less successful. Henry is easiest to deal with when he is left to read and so that is what they have been doing. Once again, there is talk of sending him to the "special class" since he has not improved in regards to understanding social space and stopping the inappropriate touching of people (he really likes belt buckles and belly buttons).

So why am I hopeful for Henry? For a number of reasons. At Christmas, Henry got to play with his cousins for three weeks (they live in Australia, so we do not get to see them often). They are the same age. He noticeably improved in his social behaviour because of that interaction. And in February, after three years of waiting, Henry was finally been placed in a school where he can thrive. Three days a week he is in the new school and two days a week he is in his old school. Suddenly he is excited to go to the new school. He has friends, real friends. And the work he is being requested to do appeals to him. The government will help fund this opportunity for one year but I hope for Henry's sake it is for longer. 

My questions are many. Why does it take the Ontario government so long to diagnose and provide services for autistic children? Why do teachers, all teachers, not have training in how to create a truly inclusive classroom?  Why is special education taught as an ABQ (Additional Basic Qualification) instead of part of basic teacher training across Canada? My sister showed me the potential training the Ontario government was going to originally give to Henry's regular classroom teacher prior to making the decision to offer him a place in his new school. It was a booklet. That's frightening. 

Finally, why do we continue, as a society, to judge what is "normal" and what is not? One day I hope we will stop marginalizing anyone who is not like us or is different. As teachers, we should be at the forefront of creating a warm welcoming space for all of our students and demonstrating that different is ok. It is interesting how social media is becoming a vehicle for shrinking our differences. Witness this link that Sheri Edwards sent me a few days ago. I am sharing it here. Thanks Sheri!

P.S Another link Sheri sent me!

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A inicios de marzo se celebró, entre los días 5 y 7, en la facultad de Ciencias de la Educación de la Universidad de Málaga, el III Workshop Internacional sobre Creación de MOOC con anotaciones multimedia. Además de poder asistir, junto a mis compañeros de la Universidad Internacional de Andalucía (UNIA), a las distintas conferencias y mesas de comunicaciones, yo misma participé presentando dos.

Hasta ahora no había, por distintas circunstancias, publicar sobre ello, pero aprovecho ahora para compartirlas por si resultan de interés.
La primera comunicación está relacionada con una experiencia piloto que estoy coordinando desde la UNIA, los llamados #webinarsunia, seminarios virtuales sobre uso didáctico de TICs y social media que, aunque dirigidos a docentes de la Universidad, están abiertos a la participación de cualquier interesado y que han contado, durante este primer año, con más de medio millar de inscritos. Mientras que la segunda es un análisis exploratorio, a modo de estudio de caso, del programa de MOOCs del Knight Center of Journalism de la Universidad de Texas, centrado en la capacitación en competencias digitales de profesionales de la información.

A continuación incluyo los enlaces a los textos completos, publicados desde la web del Congreso.

HACIA LA APERTURA DE ACTIVIDADES DE PROGRAMAS UNIVERSITARIOS DE FORMACIÓN DOCENTE: #WEBINARUNIA:

http://gtea.uma.es/congresos/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/2.11.omuComple.pdf

LOS MOOCS ORIENTADOS A LA CAPACITACIÓN DE PROFESIONALES DIGITALES: EL CASO DEL KNIGHT CENTER OF JOURNALISM DE LA UNIVERSIDAD DE TEXAS:

http://gtea.uma.es/congresos/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/2.10ComuCompleta.pdf

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cc licensed (BY-SA) flickr photo by mrkrndvs: http://flickr.com/photos/113562593@N07/13558173444

In Episode 70 of RU Connected, +Lois Smethurst and +Jenny Ashby discussed the place of blogging in school. Both outlined how they had been setting up blogs in the classroom as a great way to collaborate, but also as a way to connect with the wider community, whether this be parents or other schools and students. What I found most interesting though was when the conversation turned from the student to the teacher. Jenny explained about how she had introduced Quadblogging to her staff. I had always heard of Quadblogging been used as a structured way to make links with other classes and other schools, however I had never heard of quadblogging been used as a means for teachers to connect and collaborate.

This all reminded me about an idea that I posed in a post last year, titled 'Sharing the Load of Blogging.' My thought was that in creating a collective school blog, it would ease the stress of time put on staff to maintain their own personal blogs. I envisaged this as a space where those involved within the community could celebrate all that was happening in school. Instead of leaving it up to staff member in the office to chase up people for items for the school newsletter each fortnight, maybe it would be more empowering if teachers actually published something when they had something to publish.

In response to my post, +Jason Markey shared with me a great post from +George Couros titled 'The #Learn365 Project'. In this post, Couros discussed how he had created a site to share all the great work that was happening in Parkland School Division. Modified from the #edu180atl initiative, Couros suggested that the basic premise was that, "every day during the school year, one person within our organization posts a blog on something they learned that day." For many, Couros explained, the collaborative site was a great catalyst for exploring the potential of blogging and led to some teachers creating their personal blogs.

What I didn't realise when I wrote my original post was that, in addition to Couros' own, there were actually quite a few schools already running their own blogs, such as Leyton Learn 365 and tslg1440. However, what this got me wondering was whether there was place to share not only within the school community, but also beyond, a site set up for a wider district or even a state. Maybe such a thing does already exist and so again I am simply being naïve, but a part of me thinks that sharing within the school is only half the battle, we also need a means for sharing beyond the school, with those who may also be going through the same experiences, who may benefit from a different perspective.

In some respect, I am assuming that this is what +George Couros was on about with the #learn365 hashtag, where school communities are able to share in a global manner, however I wondered whether there was a place for a #VicPLN site. A place where teachers could cross post ideas and information that mattered to those in Victoria, Australia. If not a site, then maybe there was a place for something like a Flipboard which contained a great collection of celebrations all in one place. At the very least, wouldn't it be great to have a collection of blogs created teachers all over Victoria celebrating successes, reflecting on failures and just sharing awesome ideas?

If you know of any such blogs, whether it be school based or even region wide, I would love to know. Also, if you are a Victorian teacher interested in adding to list of blogs, please add your blog to the form below:



Here is a link to the results.

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Dear friends like you know already from my previous post I will be teacher trainer in a Erasmus Plus Course conceived by me in partenership with Euneos : Curation Social Media Master Class in Semantic Web 3.0 http://educuration.wikispaces.com/Main+Page . I must told you that I discover more than 100 presentation tools, Power Point alternatives and I want to share all  these apps you can use to emaze your audience . What app you like , use to share your awesome presentation ? Please leave a comment also if I missed a killer app to emaze a global  audience . 



Powered by emaze


Because in 1st Ipad by Apple was relased on 3 april 2010 and since then this mobile device evolve and now are 500.000 apps in store I will share daily all april mounth here in my blog Top 10 Ipad apps in all of kind of categories, and in last day of april Top 100 iPad apps to take notes in the class  :) 


View on Flowboard - Presentation software for iPad




For more edtools follow @web20education

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Per my last post, it is obvious it has been a trying week for me at school. Not only have I been having a hard time, but some students have been struggling due to being close to the teacher that passed away since they were in Model UN which was the club the teacher proctored. On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, there were times where I had another teacher cover my classes so I could sit and let these girls talk. Or the girls would have study hall and just come in my room and relax so that they would not have to be in complete silence (like our study hall requires).

Beginning on Friday, the girls that were struggling as well as some other juniors that I had taught for two years in a row, started to stop by to ask me how I was doing. It isn't that they were over their grief, it was that they knew I was grieving as well.

This past week has been one of the hardest of my life so I tried to think of something positive. It wasn't hard today to realize that the most positive thing in my life is teaching. Yeah, it is stressful and there are days I want to scream due to losing patience with my students, but overall, I enjoy it. So to remind myself that there are positive things in life and to have a less depressing post, I present you with the following list.

5 Reasons Why I Love Teaching


  1. My students that I currently have. One of them sent me the following picture in an email to try and make me feel better. I printed it out in color and it is now hanging on my door to remind everyone else as well. Not only did I receive this but they have also been super patient with me both in class and outside of it. They have been on their best behavior recently and they haven't bugged me about why I haven't gotten their tests graded that they took on Monday. They know I'm struggling so they are giving me time and space. Regardless of the times when annoy me, in general I care about my students and it is nice to know that they care about me.


       
  2. My former students. So many juniors (juniors because I taught the majority of them two years in a row) have stopped by my classroom to use the scented hand sanitizer that I keep on my desk as an excuse to ask me how I'm doing. Most of them are on a "bathroom break" from their class so that they could just pop in to ask me if I was okay. One even made me the card/picture below (the blurry parts are my doing to blur out names). I started to tear up at it because I knew they cared about me.


        
  3. Students I haven't even taught. The girls that are struggling from Model UN knew I was close to the teacher so they have been coming to me for comfort since they know I feel just like they do. I have never taught any of them. This morning, they cam in with cookies (because I need to make sure I eat) and a card. I was yet again reminded of how many lives I touched just by doing my job even if the part of my job I'm doing isn't the actual "teaching" part. The card read:

    You have no idea how much your support has meant to us. An escape to your room may seem simple, but it helped SO much to get away, even just for a few minutes. It helps so much to talk to someone who understands. I hope you are getting better everyday, and know that you meant a lot to him. He'll always be watching over us, and, if you need anything, or just a hug, we'll always be here for you. #MUNislife
       
  4. Influencing every day. What this event has taught me is that I'm influencing students every day even if I don't realize it. It is sometimes hard to realize why I do my job or if I'm actually impacting students since many times they just sit there and stare. I'm never actually sure if what I'm trying to teach them gets through. This past week, however, I know for a fact that I have at least taught them compassion. They may not remember why Moore wrote Utopia but they know when a person is suffering and actually care.
          
  5. I am surprised everyday. Sometimes these surprises are upsetting like learning a student has depression, that I didn't expect, or that they had a parent that passed away. However, most of the time, I am surprised in a good way such as learning that my students care so much or that they made sure they learned the material so I wouldn't get frustrated at them. Sometimes it is as small as learning that one of my students actually finds my jokes funny or remembered the fact I had told them the previous day in class. Regardless, I love that my students can surprise me every day and that, for the most part, it is a good surprise. I wouldn't trade that for the world. 

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John Holbo is discussing MOOCs at Crooked Timber. Part 1, Reason and Persuasion On Coursera – or – Look, Ma, I’m a MOOC; part 2, The Game of Wrong, and Moral Psychology. Here's a comment in part 2:
John Holbo 03.31.14 at 4:10 am 
Not to yet further break the butterfly of mdc’s objections on the wheel of what Clay was actually saying, but it’s worth noting that the ideal of liberal arts education as spiritual good in itself is a kind of four-year program of assisted auto-didacticism. One problem with holding up this ideal, to reproach MOOC’s, is that MOOC’s are actually good at assisted auto-didacticism, for those capable of it. (If there’s a problem, it is that MOOC’s are only good for this, not that they are not good at this.) If you are the sort of student who could get the spiritual benefit of going to Harvard, and taking philosophy, you are probably the sort of student who would benefit from a philosophy MOOC. I’m not saying Harvard isn’t better. But the MOOC is a lot cheaper and less rivalrous, as goods go.

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The optional assignment this week was to write at length about something that takes very little time to happen - and to write very briefly about something that takes a long time to happen - and to do each three times. I loved this exercise - the short and long writing - and being forced to do each three times. For the long writing about a short thing I chose to do the sneeze - and for my short writing about a long thing I chose to write of birth/life/death. I have included all three versions here - I loved that I had to do it differently each time - and I think I did it. 
Lessons for practice: This is definitely an exercise to build into teaching practice - to allow students to just free write and to start to develop a writing self - and to demonstrate in practice that there really is more than one way to answer an essay question.

The writing:
I felt it coming – the tickle, tickling tickled sensation at the back of my nose – down into the deep depths of my whole body. Toes clench, muscles bunch – the diaphragm contracts, roils, bubbles and bursts – the rush – the noise – the expulsion of a burst – an explosion, a ratcheting convulsive bang of AIR thrust through spaces too small to contain the power – the force - the sheer amount of air – from tubule, bronchial, lobe, lung – trachea – nasal passage and OUT through nostril – mouth – nose – body – the SNEEZE!!!
Nasty brutish short.
A light cool breeze caught my ankle – and a sudden shiver ran through and up. Hairs stood erect – puzzled. The feeling became muscular – a dissonance – and a shake – a shiver, a shivering… No! Doubt – resistance  - confusion… What? Why? How? And still it came, building force – gathering pace and power – and bursts – erupting – eruption – the body twisting turning resisting fighting – giving in releasing exploding imploding outploding bursting – BANG. The SNEEZE!
Birth Movement Stopped
Wet dripping force and energy – a twisting and turning – a damp a wet a movement an eruption a dissonance and a confusion a roil a boil a convulsive burst of air and noise and resistance and acceptance – an in – and an OUT – oh such an OUT – such a bang a burst an explosion of self of noise of release of anguish – am I ill? Is this a sneeze or the biggest big bang my personal beginning from nothing comes noise and wet and air and… collapse.
Leap Life Lost.


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This week we explored the quick and the dead – the performance and the time it takes to produce the performance. There was much emphasis on the role that photography played in stimulating artists in other media to think differently about their own relationships to image/time. This emphasis launched by re-visiting Jeff Walls 1963 ‘Sudden Gust of Wind’ – photomontage, history-painting-type photo-image: of a moment frozen, motion stopped. More challenging perhaps would be Warhol’s ‘Sleep’ five hours and twenty minute film of a friend – asleep. This, easier to engage with than Marcay’s ‘Clock’ a twenty-four hour video installation with each second a movie frame… Or Eleanor Antin’s ‘Nude’, carving her body with a 37-day crash diet – recorded four photos a day…



And suddenly we are drawing connections between stop frame animation and the still life – or as the French term them: nature morte. And we see the parallel in Art History and animation: the impact when what should be still, is quick. Hence Jason’s fighting skeletons and Burton’s ‘Frankenweenie’.
The Interview: This week Chi-Wang discussed the Wooster Group Hamlet:
Three-minute postscript:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_10u984AvzE
Nine minute clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VwDPThy_68
The Wooster Group: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheWoosterGroup
And we were asked to recall influential Stop Frame Animation…
From when I was very young – some stop frame and some puppetry – magical – Bill and Ben – this from 1953: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6zNwBTLSWU
Creature Comforts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7ozEy0lQBE– Nick Parks.
Or as they put it:
This week we will explore different ways in which visual artists have engaged with time-based experience, motion and narrative. How do artists evoke ephemeral sensation in fixed images? How did the invention of photographic technologies cause artists to think about time differently? How did the invention of film compel new narrative conventions of telling time-based stories? By slicing reality into finer and finer intervals artists alter worlds into an experience that moves faster than the eye can see (and perhaps even faster than the body can consciously experience). Alternatively, the same technologies challenged artists to reconnect duration to affect by working in “real time.”

Optional Sketchbook Assignment 4: Keeping Time

Track A: Using any media you like, make a work or manipulate an image in such a way as to exhibit the process of making or unmaking as a quality of time or duration:from slow to fast, as a sequence of one thing after another, using repetition, or abrupt transitions or gaps and blanks, giving the effect of a single glance or a long slow stare or …? 
Using the same image, repeat the above two more times but differently each time… include 2-3 sentences about your process and what aspect of time or duration you wanted to convey in the work.
Track B: Write a long paragraph about something that happens very quickly (it can be something “real” that you observed or a made-up event). 
Then, write a sentence about something that takes a very long time indeed. 
Using the same events you chose to describe above, repeat steps #1 and #2 several times, rewriting the events differently each time. If you wish, select one of your texts (either one of your paragraphs or a sentence or both) and post it in this forum … include 2-3 sentences about your process and what aspect of time or duration you wanted to convey in the work.

Further Reading

Jeannene Przyblyski, “Moving Pictures: Photography, Narrative and the Paris Commune of 1871" in Vanessa Schwartz and Leo Charney, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (UC Press, 1995)



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Creativity and the art of thriving in arid environments (Mar 22 - 30)
And the Trickster spake: After a couple of days required for a creative break, here it is Week 10! In thinking about the topic that I would propose for Rhizo14, the mental image that came up was a desert, and Dave Cormier's evil Japanese plant that grows like crazy. Of course, I wasn't quite sure what to make of this mental image, until I asked the all powerful crowds in the facebook group and it seemed to be that creativity was a topic that many people wanted to tackle. So here we go, Creativity: The Art of Thriving in Arid Environments.
This topic is wide open, it can be about your own personal creativity in education, it can include face to face and online, it can be about any subject - not just art. For instance, how does one creatively move through obstacles in their own organization in order to improve that organization? How do students stay within confining rubrics yes exert their own creativity in their assignments? How do you, as a designer or instructor, act creatively to meet those institutionally mandated goals and objectives for you course while giving your learners something they can sink their teeth into and be engaged through creativity in their learning endeavors?
To bring this to the MOOC realm, xMOOC platforms seem like dry and arid places, all of the creativity has been seemingly sucked from these platforms in favor of video based education. How do you break those system? use them creatively to create engaging xMOOCs? Will they still be xMOOCs if you do something creative with them?
How do YOU see creativity, and how would you respond to a criticism of creativity?


Hey you – don’t touch that – touch this!
We are learning developers (LD) and educationalists teaching mostly F2F – so here’s a response from that perspective rather than from a MOOC one. A big aspect of LD work is to help especially ‘non-traditional’ (NT) students become familiar with and powerful within the exclusionary practices of HE. If we were being Deleuzian (1987, 2005) but critical – we might argue that we were re-territorialising that student to enable them to participate successfully in HE (see arguments about skills – socialization – academic literacies, Lea & Street 1998). More hopefully our new Year-Long Becoming an Educationalist module creates spaces, fissures and cracks for students not traditionally welcome in the academy – spaces for them to re-territorialise as educational nomads.

We wanted our course to both empower students and to critique the reductive nature of education per se. Our fish swim in educational currents composed of the over-riding narratives of assessment, SATs, League Tables, OFSTED and other inspection regimes, moral panics about plagiarism – and the ‘dumbing down’ of education (viz. that great Starkey quote on our University: there are Mickey Mouse students for whom Mickey Mouse degrees are quite appropriate). It is an education system moulded by neo-liberalism and, in the UK, the sense that the market will solve all our problems.

Our module was designed to empower in and of itself – and to act as a tool or lens to critique reductionist education and reductionist curricula. The module includes some direct didactic teaching alongside active and engaging learning: Role playing and simulations; Creative and visual learning strategies, see http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/epacks/look_make_learn/; Inquiry Based and Problem Based Learning; Reflective learning; Drawing, Poetry and Prose analysis and discussion; Analysis of Educational Policy documents; Research projects; Resource/artefact production; #ds106 and development of a digital self; Peer Mentoring; Contribution  to the University’s annual student-facing Get Ahead conference http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/epacks/get_ahead_conf/

Students are expected to talk, listen, discuss and be with (Jean Luc Nancy) each other; they are expected to attend Music improvisation and Dance workshops – and to design and present their own interactive workshops. They are expected to make notes, read actively and interactively and share their findings – and also to produce collages, blind drawings, conference presentations, real research and digital artefacts. We hope that they join in with energy and enthusiasm to all the different things that they are asked to do – and then to make the learning conscious… especially in their blogs.

Narratives of the self: a space for real writing
There is much research, both anecdotal and more formal, on the fear that academic writing holds for students. In a study at our own University Burn, Burns and Sinfield (2004) found that even successful PG students said:
‘I’m still not sure if my writing is academic. I still don’t know what makes one essay better than another.’
‘I’ve been humiliated in ways that I wouldn’t have put up with anywhere else.’
Arguably the academic essay as a genre exemplifies academic writing per se: non-polemical in form yet inviting certainty of argumentation whilst excluding the personal, the emphatic, the confused, the flippant and the humorous. But these traits can all be valued parts of the individual – needed especially when coping with the implicit threats inherent in transition (Winnicott 1971) into formal academic spaces that traditionally exclude people from certain social, economic and cultural backgrounds. It could therefore be said that writing in the academy acts as a metonym for the academic: implacable, reified, classed. It is the space where our students most feel like ‘a fish out of water’. They are, as with Bowstead’s (2011) student, ‘coming to writing’ passionate, opinionated and eloquent verbally; but ‘we can’t speak as we write’, especially not in an academic environment. This boundary-crossing module is designed to help students enter not only the academic world per se, but also that most tricky academic form - academic writing - including by the quasi-academic writing of the reflective learning log or blog.

Can you blog it?
We presented the reflective log and the Blog in particular to the students as quasi-academic and semi-public space. We wanted to invite ownership: this writing matters – because you have something to say. It is a space to perform one’s self as it becomes academic – and to perform that more wholly than in an academic essay. In both log and Blog you can be playful (Winnicott 1971) – and it is play we need to tackle the threat implicit in transitional spaces – those becoming spaces (Deleuze 1987, 2005) – and it is in play that we are wholly fiercely alive – and fiercely ourselves. We, as with Bowstead (2011) note that in our students all the passion – all that energy – all their power is deemed invalid in the academic essay: it becomes transgressive in and of itself. We hoped that the logs and the Blogs allowed the passion and the play – and that our students would utilize these lines of flight (Deleuze 1987, 2005) to narrate a more powerful self.

Lines of escape/Lines of flight
In stark contrast to the formality of the academic essay, narratives and more personal writing, and multimodal Blogs especially, can constitute the cracks – the boundaries – the borders - the space for disruption, irruptions and eruptions: the place of collision and encounter. Those representations become where space and time collapse – compressed – intensified – because finite – become finite – existing in a fixed placed and time. Their composition emerges from a compressed space, time and setting: meaning and communication become one narrative. And (as Deleuze might argue) this offers an opportunity not to re-trace the compilation of the sign – but a moment – just before it becomes fixed – when all the potential and possibilities still exist. A moment of and for transformation – for recognition of the self … A crack in space and time to re-territorialise educational spaces – to become educational nomads (or as we say in #rhizo14, Knowmads).

Check out Mo’s blog on that A-Maze-ing thing: http://moa1484.wordpress.com/2014/01/28/a-maze-ing/

References (in progress)
Bourdieu
Bowstead, H., 2011. Coming to writing. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, [online] Available at:
Brande, D., 1981/1934. Becoming a writer. Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher.
Burn, Burns and Sinfield (2004) ‘Writing Resistance’ in Discourse Power Resistance Conference, Plymouth University 2004
Burns, T. & Sinfield, S., 2012. Essential study skills: The complete guide to success at university. 3rded. London: Sage.
Deleuze G and Guattari F (1987, 2005) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press
Elbow, P., 1975. Writing without teachers. New York: Oxford UniversityPress.
Herrmann, N., 1989. The creative brain. Lake Lure, NC: Brain Books.
Freire – mentoring
Freire and/or Giroux – emancipatory education
Kossak, S., 2011. Reaching in, reaching out: Reflections on reciprocal mentoring. Bloomington, IN: Balboa Press.
Lea and Street (1998)
Nancy J-L DATE
#rhizo14 (2014) MOOC: The Community is the Curriculum (Dave Cormier via P2PU https://p2pu.org/en/courses/882/content/3154/ )
Sinfield, Burns and Holley (2003)

Winnicott, D., W., 1971. Playing and reality. London: Tavistock.

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Alan Liu week continues at New Savanna. Now I want to look at an interview he gave to Scott Pound at Amodern: Reengaging the Humanities. While the interview is worthwhile in its entirety I’ll select passages where Liu’s thinking (usefully) intersects with my own.

First, though, I want to cite a biographical passage which speaks to attitude and intuition. While talking about Bruno Latour’s interrogation of critique in the name of compositionalism Liu informs us that he’s “the son of a structural engineer and descended from a whole clan who were allowed to immigrate to the U.S. because they were engineers and builders.”

Yes.

And I’m the son of a chemical engineer who spent his professional career in the coal business. Engineering is about designing things and building them.* I used “Speculative Engineering” as the title for the preface to my book on music (Beethoven’s Anvil) because I wanted to emphasize the constructive nature of my enterprise. I talked about the building blocks I played with as a child and posed the question: “How does the nervous system design and construct music?” (xiii). I think about literary texts and systems of texts in the same way: How are they built?

Returning to Liu, he has quite a bit to say about critique and compositionism. Note his use of engineering language in the following passage:
Critique and compositionism are best understood as arcs in a common cycle of thought, whether at the level of individual projects or of longer generational agendas. Think of it this way: in any project there are tactically important moments when critique is constructive, e.g., at the beginning when assessing what is wrong with precedents or in the middle after the first prototype. Equally, there are tactically shrewd moments when composited methods and viewpoints are constructive, e.g., when the architect pitches a project to a client and has to incorporate the client’s views, when the architect then has to adjust plans in response to the structural engineer, and when the engineer subsequently has to adjust plans in response to the contractors, not to mention the tactically decisive construction workers who actually wield the hammers). It’s just that neither critique nor compositionism has a right to rule as the “last word” in the process–the terminal stage, the end result, the payoff, the final record. In the humanities, I feel, we have fallen into the rut of thinking that interpretive discourse (e.g., a critical essay) should be the final statement of a project, and, further, that critique should be the final payoff of interpretation. [Emphasis mine, WLB] But what if we were to position interpretive discourse and critique elsewhere in the cycle of thought that goes into a project? Compositionism would then not be antithetical to critique; it would include the arc of critique, and vice versa, as part of the rolling launch of thought.
Perhaps we should remind ourselves that the primacy of interpretation is a relatively recent development in our disciplinary history, mostly post World War II, and that literary culture managed to function for centuries without a guild of professional interpreters.

Liu is quite clear that reengaging the humanities is a long-term effort that involves far more than refitting old defenses of the humanities:
Engaging, or reengaging, the public to make a persuasive case for the value of the humanities will need to be a long campaign over many generations – a far longer time horizon than the longest typical time line for activism in the contemporary humanities (going back to May 1968).

Second, I say “reengaging” in the sentence above because the issue of how the humanities should present themselves to society is part of a broader theme today: the great change in how institutional expertise of many kinds (e.g., in higher education, cultural or heritage institutions, journalism, government) engage with the new public networked knowledge (exemplified by Wikipedia or the blogosphere). There is no longer a one way flow in which experts send their knowledge to the public (mediated by journalism and other agencies) while the public sends back only mute feedback in the form of tax dollars, tuition, subscriptions, membership fees, and so on. The flow is increasingly bidirectional or multidirectional. Presenting the humanities afresh to the public today will mean helping to create the new institutional structures, practices, incentives, discourses, and technologies needed for reinventing the role of expertise in the world.
That is to say, we need to rethink our institutions and, in particular, we need to invite the public in. I note that fan culture is all over the place on the Internet, from such general sites as the Wikipedia and TV Tropes to sites devoted to specific titles and in sites for fan fiction. These are obvious points of entry and application for literary scholars.

(See my various posts on citizen science, my post, Ethical Criticism and Descriptive Criticism Online, and my very brief remarks, Crowd-Sourcing Descriptive Work, in Some examples of description.)

Concerning graduate training, Liu remarks:
I know so many humanities graduate students who are not only passionate about public issues but build that passion into their research topics. After all, that is where much of cultural criticism; race, ethnic, and gender studies; postcolonial studies; and now anti-neoliberalist studies, as well as other vibrant movements, come from, not to mention all our “theoretical” allegories (e.g., “rhizomatics”) mirroring our drive (at least as expressed in its modern Western form, with allowance for alternative understandings of the pursuit of happiness elsewhere) for human emancipation and equality. The self-interest of the humanities, I thought, would be served by creating a training path – not just courses or informal colloquia, but perhaps also extramural internship and other opportunities – for our best, brightest, and most passionate students to act on their activism in a way that blends formal education and public engagement.
I don’t know quite what Liu has in mind here – and perhaps he doesn’t either – but I’ve blogged a number of posts under the rubric “JC Rising” (where “JC” stands for Jersey City) suggesting local points of application around gardening and public murals. There’s a lot of very interesting grass roots activity in Jersey City that, I suspect, would play well with the kind of training that Liu is suggesting. In particular, I note that Jersey City is minority white and culturally diverse, with a relatively large Spanish-speaking population and many immigrants from East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East.

Finally, Liu has some interesting remarks on what he calls “network archaeology.” Here I’m a bit puzzled, in part because I’m quite familiar with certain kinds of network structures – conceptual networks, neural networks – and I’ve got intuitions from that work that do not quite know how engage with Liu’s formulations. Let me offer one statement by Liu and a few comments:
First, treat individual works of media as proto- or micro-networks. This means that we shouldn’t treat documents (or, for that matter, people) as en bloc entities engaging each other in networks but should instead adopt a radically networked worldview in which it’s networks all the way down. En bloc entities – individual documents or people constituted internally as relationships of parts, levels, and stages linking and unlinking in time – are themselves network structures.
Networks everywhere. Sure. But I worry about reification. One can draw network diagrams and use those diagrams to represent lots of different kinds of things. But there may be other ways of representing those things as well. Don’t confuse the (descriptive) notation with the thing itself.

Finally, to ride another intellectual hobbyhorse, I suspect that a lot of what Liu is talking about under the rubric of networks could be conceptualized as evolutionary and population processes, but in the cultural domain rather than the biological. Still, think of the biological domain as a source of concepts for thinking about worlds within worlds where you have a large number of entities interacting in many and diverse ways over a wide variety of scales in time and space.

Liu begins his final paragraph by noting “I don’t think there can be a place for the humanities in a networked world without any sense of history; and the world would be the worse for it.” Yes. And, biology is a deeply historical discipline, being very much about how the living world not only changes in time but whose very being is deeply entwined with and constituted through time.

* Addendum: On engineering

I've written some posts about engineering as a mindset:

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It’s increasingly recognized that while large parts of the of populations of the US (and other Western countries) are aware of climate change and accept that human action contributes to it only little behavioural change can be observed. People continue with their lives as usual although knowing their actions contribute to climate change.

“Although a poll by the Pew Research Center last October found that 67 percent of Americans believe that global warming is happening, a Pew poll in January showed that Americans ranked global warming as 19th on a list of 20 issues for Congress and the president.” (NYT-19 March 2014)

President Obama now has launched the development of a website that is designed to make visible to people the impact of climate change locally, in their citie  and neighborhoods. The New York Times reported on this development in its Science Section “Obama Turns to Web to Illustrate the Effects of a Changing Climate” and cites the motivation behind the campaign as “building a political case for the climate rules, both by defusing the opposition and by trying to create an urgent sense among Americans that they are necessary”.

Gail Markle’s recent article “Accounting for the Performance of Environmentally Significant Behavior: The Symbolic Significance of Recycling” published in Symbolic Interaction addresses this very same issue. Markle investigates why people consider recycling as a sufficient action to help the environment although being aware of the impact their consumption habits and life-style have on the environment.

A related campaign to use the Internet to raise awareness for ethics and ethical action has recently been launched by Andrea Prothero, Associate Professor at University College Dublin. The Facebook Group Talk About Ethics was launched a couple of weeks ago and encourages its members to take pictures of themselves stating why ‘talking about ethics’ is important.


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There is growing concern that despite planning pregnancy women delay taking pre-pregnancy supplements like folic acid as advised by experts who argue that these supplements substantially decrease the risk of birth defects that can impact the brain. These concerns have been raised in newspapers lie The Guardian and the Nursing Times.

A study concerned with the uncertainty towards their pregnancy and potential risk to it that become apparent in antenatal screening has just been published on Early View of Symbolic Interaction where I am book review editor. Alison Pilnick and Olga Zayt’s article explores the interaction between participants during antenatal screenings. In their analysis they focus on the ways in which this uncertainty is used to manage the institutionally defined category of ‘high risk’.


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This week we explored ‘world making’ – where art both constructs worlds and creates a narrative or commentary about the world. We saw different ways of tackling the 2D aspects of flat planes to imply 3D space – with geometry, lines and grids in the Renaissance and with oil paints creating light to solidify subjects bursting out of 2D space, in the Baroque. We considered Mondrian’s refusal to accept this melody and illusion; stripping away shape and shading and texture in favour of flat paint in primary collars. Reality squared. Pollack’s definitely 2D dripped paint canvas, however, draws the viewer into the implied 3D, immersing in a something, an ‘other’, to experience. And thus we see how the artists create specific conversations with their ‘public’ – engaging – challenging – puzzling – distancing - immersing…The conversation created as much a revelation of the world view as the paint and light and canvas.
This week – Drum Roll - First Compulsory Assignments
The courses offers a Track A option – to produce an artwork; or B – writing; or both. In each case the whole assignment requires the preparation and submission of the piece PLUS peer review of three other pieces. If you do both A and B, you will have to peer review six other pieces in total. I chose to do both assignments. Both options were taken from Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of assignment (New York; Paper Monument, 2012). MUST GET THAT BOOK!!
Track B: Thick Description - required us to spend an hour with a work of art – being with it – recording thoughts and perceptions not just of the artwork but of its surroundings… After an hour we were required to organise our thoughts and write a 300-400 word essay, list or narrative.
Mostly it’s brown paper: spending an hour with a primitive portrait of my mother
I live half the week in the country not able to get to a real gallery till Monday, when I hope to see Hannah Hoch’s collages in the Whitechapel Gallery in East London, UK. I wanted to do this exercise with a real picture and not an image on the screen. I wanted to be with a real picture – and to see and feel that experience: to learn to really see a picture by being with it. So I chose a primitive portrait of my mother that I have hanging in the front room – and that was drawn by a friend of the family who is a self-taught artist. I thought that the sitting with the picture would be a meditation experience and that I would learn a lot from it… but again – only if it were a real thing. So even though this picture might not be classified as art by many – it is art to me – and it is real – so this is what I did.

The thick description:
The picture is about 12 X 6 inches on heavy cheap brown paper. It is pasted onto white paper and set within pale yellow card within a light wood simple frame. It is a head and shoulders portrait of Jeanne Marie Victorine Dierrieckx Sinfield – my mother. This picture seems to have captured her at about the age of 69 (1995) – but it is unsigned and un-dated – although I know the artist was Anita Melloche. 
The outline is sketched in with heavy soft black pencil which thickens as the hair is sketched in: unruly as if just back from working in the garden. The pencil outline is filled in with only three colours; water colour crayons of red, brown and white – they sketch in the hair, face, eyes and a red and white striped top. 
My mother would have hated the picture as un-flattering and not life-like; but whilst it is not exactly what she ever looked like – it really is ‘her’. It has captured her eyebrows – those slightly fine, thin eyebrows of old age. The eyes below are a bit doe-like, a bit cartoonish – not ‘real’ at all – but they have her direct gaze – and are somehow brave, strong – full of character. 
The character is also there in the closed mouth, the calm. The face is slightly at an angle looking to the right of the frame, her left. The left side of the portrait feels more three dimensional than any other bit of the picture – due to the white highlights that bring shape and substance – and push out that side of the face from the two dimensional plane. 
Mostly the whole picture is created by the brown paper; the very few bits of black, red, white and brown crayon create the illusion of the head, hair, face, shoulders and top by laying very few lines on the brown paper: carving the face from the paper. 
The background is simply brown paper; no contextual setting. The most in-filled sections are the hair and the top – but even there – brown paper peeks through adding another colour and another dimension to the portrait. The most amazing thing for me was seeing for the first time how much brown paper makes up the face – and I thought: it is mostly brown paper – and it is my mother. 
Ways of seeing
To spend this hour with a painting was both moving and illuminating. I definitely saw it differently by spending this quiet focused hour with it. At first I just sat and looked and looked – describing things to myself. After 30-minutes I started to sketch the picture and annotate. After that, I painted the sketch – using that painting as another way of analysing the painting itself. Then I free wrote a response – briefly looking at my notes. I could not get in all the information that I had noted down. When it was as edited as possible, I pasted it into the Module Box – and found that it was still 200 words too long. I managed in the end to get it down to 399 words! Dead chuffed with this – and I hope I take these eyes to the Whitechapel Gallery on Monday.
Track A: World in a Box: Using any means, materials or style– we were asked to put together a collection of objects and a means of displaying them. We could operate in 2D as well as 3D – we could make the objects or find them – we could create a narrative or not – it could just be what it is. We had to think about how to display them – and then how to frame them in the photograph.
I like to create spaces around the cottage that are curations or artworks designed to tease or please the eye – to create a look or feel or experience… So I thought that I would photograph and present one of these small spaces. Unfortunately I could not cut the photographs that I initially wanted to up-load (technologically challenged) – and so was only getting a third of whatever world I wanted to share. In the end I worked with this limitation, uploading a picture that would be de facto cut in the Module Box – to create the frame I was after:
Schwitter’s Bedroom: The Buddhist Temple

Schwitter treated his studio as a collaged art spaced – bit like my approach to my home – so a cool title was born. The submitted piece is just the left side of the above picture - just over a third and just under a half of the total width. This cut emphasised the contrast between the Buddhism trail up the bookcase - and the bloody detective fiction that frames it.
End: The Assignments this week were really engaging and thought-provoking. I learned a lot about looking, seeing – and really seeing. Activities that I want to bring into my real world teaching… (Oh and I got 14/15 for the quiz – and I DO KNOW what Baroque is – but obviously did not describe it well enough on the day L )


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