Author Archives: chendric

Coming to consciousness in the yellow wall-paper

Another post on readings we’re doing in Arts One: this week we discussed a couple of works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Our Androcentric Culture and “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” I gave a lecture on these works this week, and you can see the slides here if you’re interested:

 

I’m using this post to point out something I didn’t have time to talk about in class, either in lecture or in seminars, and see what others think.

 

A “phantasmagoria screen”

There are multiple ways to interpret the wallpaper itself; I found the one by Carol Margaret Davison in “Haunted house/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” (Women’s Studies 33.1 (2004): 47-75) very intriguing:

A … detailed portrait of the narrator’s conspiratorial fears and suspicions is revealed in the yellow wallpaper that decorates her nursery bedroom…. Indeed, it becomes a type of phantasmagoria screen onto which is projected her sense of her situation. (60)

I like this idea of the wallpaper being a kind of screen that she projects her own sense of self onto, that she externalizes it onto, as if through projection of a film. It emphasizes the visual aspect of the story and the wallpaper.

Going off of this idea, I was thinking that as the story goes along, the narrator could be bringing her sense of self and her situation more and more into consciousness, to the point where she finally merges with the woman in the wallpaper because really, that was her all along. She had projected her sense of self outwards, and finally takes it back inwards, so to speak.

Towards the beginning of the story, she just finds the wallpaper confusing, uncertain, contradictory; then she dedicates herself to studying it (650) and slowly it starts to make sense to her–she starts to get some clarity about it. At first (650) she thinks she sees a kind of “formless figure” behind the main pattern, and then on p. 652 she starts to become certain that the figure is that of a woman. Laterthe narrator realizes that the woman is trying to shake the pattern to get out (654). I don’t think it’s only because I’ve lectured on Freud numerous times for Arts One that this reminds me of Freud and repression: one could say the narrator starts to become more and more aware of repressed thoughts and feelings as she begins to recognize them as those of a woman who is inside the wallpaper.

This could connect with her desire to have no one understand what is in the paper but herself, to keep it to herself; after she caught Jennie looking at the wallpaper the narrator says, ““I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself!” (653). On a Freudian reading of the woman in the wallpaper representing repressed content, this is not something that the narrator would want other people to know. Of course, there’s a flaw here: if it were truly repressed content, then the narrator herself wouldn’t want to know it; repression is, by definition, a process of the mind keeping things from consciousness that some part of oneself doesn’t want to have surface. Still, even if the repression theory doesn’t fit exactly, the idea that the narrator is bringing to consciousness aspects of herself that she didn’t really face before could still work.

 

Going round and round

As I started thinking about this idea of coming to consciousness of herself, something else struck me. There are suggestions in the story that the narrator has actually been doing the creeping she says the woman does, during the day, inside the room. On p. 654 she points out that there is a strange mark on the wall: “It goes behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even smooch, as if it had been rubbed over and over.” Who did the “smooch”? Possibly the room has held other women in similar situations, or the children who used to be in the nursery did it. But there’s also the fact that at the end of the story the narrator is going around and around in the smooch herself, her shoulder perfectly fitting into it. It’s possible she had been doing that for quite awhile before she came to consciousness of doing it. This would explain why Jennie says the yellow gets onto the narrator’s clothes (653); but it wouldn’t explain why Jennie says it’s also on John’s clothes. The narrator sees the smooch earlier in the story, but doesn’t realize that it was she herself that made it through going round and round the room.

The thing that really brought this idea out for me had to do with teeth marks on the bed, though. On p. 655 the narrator points out: “this bedstead is fairly gnawed!” And then shortly after that she says she got so frustrated at not being able to move the bed “[she] bit off a little piece at one corner –but it hurt her teeth” (655). She is clearly gnawing on the bedstead herself, and had she been doing that for awhile without realizing it?

So it could be that as the narrator comes to consciousness of her own thoughts and feelings, and her situation as a woman trapped behind “bars” like the woman in the wallpaper (the pattern on the wallpaper becomes bars in moonlight (653)), she also brings to consciousness what she has been doing during the day while John is away and Jennie thinks she is sleeping. Even while the narrator herself thinks she is sleeping (she says on the top of 654 that she sleeps a lot during the day).

At least, I think this is a plausible interpretation!

 

Day and night

One other thing that might be related here, if only indirectly: there are differences in what happens between day and night, including in what the wallpaper is like. By night the pattern becomes bars, as noted above, and the woman shakes the pattern to try to get out. In the day, in the pattern there is “a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind” (653). During the day the pattern is “like a bad dream.” And by day the woman is quiet (652), only moving around and shaking the pattern at night.

If we take a Freudian view (again), then the idea of unconscious material coming out in dreams could fit here: the woman moves, the woman is clear to the narrator at night, insofar as that is when one is usually asleep and dreaming. And perhaps the narrator is actually asleep and dreaming at that time, if during the day she is moving around and around as suggested above. But this interpretation would suggest that the narrator isn’t actually hallucinating but dreaming, and I’m not sure I want to go there. It diminishes the severity of what seems like a very real illness.

Here’s a perplexing thing to me about the day/night discrepancy: the woman in the wallpaper gets out during the day (654), but at night is stuck behind the bars. The narrator sees her creeping out of the windows in the daytime, and at the end the narrator says that she expects that at night she will have to back into the wallpaper (unless she tears it all off). I expect there is something going on here with space: something about seeing the woman outside the bars of the windows of the room during the day and inside the bars of the wallpaper at night, but I haven’t gotten very far with this. I think there are a lot of interesting things one might do with space in this story: why it should focus on wallpaper inside the walls of a room, with a lot of discussion of what happens outside the windows and the narrator saying she can see the woman both inside the bars of the wallpaper (at night) and outside the windows and their bars (during the day). I’d love to see an essay on this if anyone feels so inclined!

 

So, I’m curious if you have any thoughts about any of what I’ve suggested here…. Feel free to argue against my interpretation; it may not work entirely!

 

Reading the beginning & end of Lt. Gustl

 

In Arts One this week we discussed two German short stories:

Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Earthquake in Chile” (I just discovered that there’s a 1970s film version)

Arthur Schnitzler’s “Lieutenant Gustl” (the translation linked to here is different than the one we read; this is the one we read, and the one I’m citing below)

We focused on Gustl yesterdy in class, and my brain and emotions just weren’t working as well yesterday as they usually do (last day of class issues? who knows), and I didn’t get to do some close reading of the beginning & end of the story as I had planned to do. So I thought I’d write a bit about that here on the blog.

Beginning

I noticed that one can get a great deal just from the very first page (first three paragraphs) of the story.

Impatience & concern with time

noun_517277_ccThe first thing we get from Gustl’s internal monologue is: “How long is this going to last, anyhow?” (107). We did discuss in class that a similar sort of sentiment is expressed on p. 141, when he asks himself, “How long will I keep sitting here?” (referring to sitting on the bench in the Prater). Right away we get a sense of his concerns about time, and even his impatience. He is at a concert at the beginning, and doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself and is impatient to leave.

There are many other references to his impatience in the text, including in the second paragraph of the story, which starts with him saying to himself: “Well, then, patience, patience! Even oratorios come to an end” (107). The most obvious example of his impatience is when he gets into the altercation with the baker. He is clearly being impatient trying to get his coat on the bottom of p. 117, and then the baker says to him, “Patience, patience!” (119). The baker also tells Gustl, “You’re not going to miss anything!” Gustl says something similar to himself, later, when he’s out wandering on the street: “slower, slower, Gustl, you aren’t missing out on anything, you have nothing left to do–nothing, absolutely nothing left!” (133). He also asks at one point “Why am I dashing along like this? None of my trouble is running away …'” (125). There are more examples of places that show him being impatient, but these are enough for now.

“I must look at my watch” is the second sentence of the story (107) (compare to the same statement on 143, when he wakes up in the park and wonders what time it is). He is frequently wondering what time it is in the story, along with being impatient. In the first paragraph he notes that it is “Only a quarter to ten?” (107). He hears the clock strike 11 after he leaves the theatre (125), thinks it must be past midnight in the park (141), wakes up at 3 in the park (145), hears a clock strike 3:30 when he’s walking back from the park (147), and notes that it’s 5:45am when he is getting close to his coffeehouse (157). He also decides to set himself the time of 7am to shoot himself and then later thinks, well, he could put it off another hour or so.

I asked in class: what should we make of his concern with time and his impatience? What might be the significance of these in the context of the story? He might be impatient at the concert because he is bored and wants to get out of there. But he also finds himself rushing when he’s out on the street. There might be something going on here in terms of him rushing ever forward only to be heading to his own death–so some kind of irony? I also wondered if it might signify that he is spending so much time looking outward, worrying about how he looks in the eyes of others, going to the places he is supposed to go in order to be seen, that he doesn’t slow down and self-reflect. But I don’t feel really strongly about that interpretation.

I think I still don’t have a good sense of the significance of his impatience.

 

Being out of place

Back to the first paragraph: after noting that he wants to look at his watch, Gustl says “probably not polite as such a serious concert” (107). This starts to bring up an idea that maybe Gustl doesn’t belong in the particular milieu. He doesn’t really know for sure how to act. We can see this also later in the paragraph when he wonders what kind of song it is and has to look at the program: “Yes, that is: oratorio. I thought it was a Mass.” I remember hearing last year when we discussed this book that Gustl is being presented as if he doesn’t really belong in this space. He doesn’t have the right knowledge to really understand this cultural event. He was given a ticket; he didn’t really choose to go because he wanted to attend this kind of concert. He even tells himself in the third paragraph of the story: “By the way, they sing very nicely. It’s very edifying–I’m sure!,” suggesting that he doesn’t really know if it’s edifying but figures it must be. Still, he doesn’t really get how it is so, if it is.

Gustl feeling out of place continues in the story, after the altercation with the baker. Gustl can’t believe what the baker did–he keeps asking whether or not it really happened, and as it is happening he can’t understand what the baker says (119)–because it doesn’t fit with his understand of social relations in his culture. Bakers just don’t do that, and then when it happened Gustl had no ritual to fall back on, no clear way to deal with the situation. When he goes out into the street he is figuratively lost, wondering where to go and what to do: “Where have I got to? What am I doing out on the street? –Yes, but where should I head?” (123). He wanders aimlessly, not really knowing where he is going until he just finds himself in certain places unexpectedly. At one point he even notes that he is sitting on a bench in the Prater “homeless” (143).

 

Worrying about what others thinkman with large eye watching over him

In the third sentence of the story Gustl worries whether someone will see him looking at his watch: “But who’s to see it? If someone sees it, then he’s paying just as little attention as I am, and I don’t have to bother on his account” (107). He’s concerned how he looks to others and what they think of him, but if others are doing the “wrong” things too by not watching the concert and looking at him, then he doesn’t need to worry about them. We get a great deal of evidence of Gustl being concerned what others do and will think of him throughout the story; I don’t need to enumerate them here as they’re quite easy to find!

 

Social manners, ritual, honour

In the second paragraph of the story, Gustl talks about how he got the ticket to the concert from Kopetsky, and since he is bored he thinks he should have given the ticket to someone else who would have enjoyed it more. “But then Kopetsky would have been insulted” (107). Here is an example of social manners he feels he needs to hold up–he is concerned about social roles and expectations. That’s also the reason why he doesn’t want others to see him looking at his watch, looking bored, at the concert–he worries that that isn’t appropriate in this social situation.

At the end of the third paragraph of the story, Gustl’s thoughts take on a tone of foreshadowing: “Yes, the day after tomorrow I may be dead and cold! Oh, nonsense, I don’t believe that myself!” (107). He is ostensibly talking about the duel with the doctor scheduled for the next day, but it could also foreshadow his plans later in the story to kill himself. Then the last two sentences of the third paragraph refers to the duel directly: “Just wait, Doctor, you’re going to lose your taste for making such remarks! I’m going to slice off the tip of your nose …” (107). So here we’re introduced to the social ritual of the duel.

These things are significant because the social manners and rituals that Gustl is used to are broken in when he gets into a scuffle with the baker. Before this, the story is setting Gustl up as someone who plays by the social rules, at least outwardly (while inwardly, as we discussed, he thinks all kinds of things that may or may not fit into the social rules and practices at the time). When the baker doesn’t play along, Gustl is left without a playbook, not knowing what to do.

 

Ending

I also find the very end interesting to read closely, along with the beginning. I’m just looking at the last paragraph here.

Time and being out of place

Gustl is back to paying careful attention to time. He schedules out the rest of his day: “In a quarter of an hour I’ll go over to the barracks and get a cold rubdown from Johann …  half past seven is rifle drill, and half past nine is formation” (163). He then refers to the duel at 4 that day. He now has plans again, he can schedule his day, he knows what he is doing and where he is going, as compared to being lost and out of place the night before.

By the time the story ends he is back in “his” coffeehouse, with the waiter he knows, and he comes back to himself and his plans for his life. He is full of confidence, whereas earlier he had started to wonder where he was, where he was going, and doubting himself (147, 151). By the end he says he’s going to insist that Steffi make herself available to him that evening, and he is certain he is going to win in his duel against the doctor–whereas earlier he was a little unsure (he thinks he might die in the duel (107, 127) and states that he is “unqualified to give satisfaction” in the duel because of what happened with the baker (125)).

So one might say that he starts the story in a place where he’s somewhat out of place (the concert) and then feels lost & homeless in the streets, but finally comes “home” to his coffee house by the end and feels more confident. He’s back in his usual military life with its usual time-table. Everything make sense again to him.

picture of an arrow going around in the circle and coming back to where it startedAnd as we discussed in class, he hasn’t changed much, if at all, by the end. His life goes back to the same things: Steffi, the duel with the doctor. Gustl even says on the last page that “No one knows a thing, and nothing has happened!” (163). The first part is true, but not the second–something has happened, and Gustl earlier suggests that it should matter even if no one else knows. But now that no one else knows or can know, for Gustl it’s as if nothing even happened at all. He has completely left it behind, and the event has left no mark on his life.

 

I don’t often do close readings of portions of texts, but I always find it valuable when I do, so I want to make sure to do more of these in class in the future!

 

 

 

 

Frontispieces in Blake’s Songs of Innocence & of Experience

This week in Arts One we discussed Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake. We only had one seminar meeting discussing this week because there were no classes yesterday, Remembrance Day. In our one class we focused in part on considering, based on the poems in Innocence and Experience, what “innocence” and “experience” might signify for Blake. We also spent a little time in small groups discussing particular poems.

One thing we didn’t spend much time on, but that is important for the theme of the group we’re in this year, “Seeing and Knowing,” is the fact that the poems are bound up with images. We did talk about a few of the images while discussing poems, but there is so much more to consider. One set of images I wanted to discuss if we would have met in class yesterday, is the frontispieces for Innocence (plate 2) and Experience (plate 28).

Frontispiece for Songs of Innocence

There are numerous versions of Blake’s book, each coloured slightly differently by him (the engraving outlines are the same, but the colours he did afterwards are different). Here is one that is somewhat similar to the one in our book.

From Wikimedia Commons, public domain

From Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Here’s a very different version of the same image, from the British Museum.

This image connects to the “Introduction” poem to Songs of Innocence, clearly, as it depicts a piper and a child.

From Wikimedia Commons, public domain

From Wikimedia Commons, public domain

There’s much to say about this poem in itself, but I’m only going to mention a couple of things I noticed: (1) the repetition of the song the piper is piping, several times, and (2) that the song changes in terms of media. Here’s what I mean: at first, the piper is just piping a song, some song of “pleasant glee.” Here, clearly, the song is just notes from the pipe. Then the child appears and asks him to pipe a song about a Lamb, so he does that–no longer just a song of pleasant glee of some sort, but a song about a specific thing. The child asks to hear it again (repetition), and weeps.

Then the child asks him to change the medium: “Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe / Sing thy songs of happy cheer.” So now we might consider that the song has words–though perhaps the piper could just be singing the notes without words at this point. Again it’s the same song, but with a voice rather than a pipe.

Next the child asks him to write the songs “In a book that all may read.” The sounds have disappeared into words and pictures: the piper makes a pen out of a “hollow reed” to do so. But notice that a “hollow reed” can also be something you can use to make music. And these poems are still “songs”–the aural aspect of them is still emphasized. They are not just words on a page, but meant to be heard as sounds (perhaps).

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this repetition and progression from sounds to words, though one thing it does is to preserve the sense of sound into the words; the piper starts with music in the “valleys wild,” and this music is transformed into a song about a Lamb that is repeated in different ways until it ends up in the book. It almost feels like we’re getting a kind of direct line from sounds in nature to sounds on the page.

Another thing that’s interesting is that the child on a cloud disappears when the piper writes the book; the piper no longer has the child for an audience, but instead writes songs in a book that “Every child may joy to hear.” Instead of the one child, the piper has many children (us) for his audience. And as we discussed in class, the “children” mentioned here could be the “innocence” aspect of adults as well as children.

I just want to say a few things about the frontispiece image, because mostly what I am thinking about comes out when we juxtapose it to the frontispiece from Songs of Experience. The image seems pretty straightforward: there is a piper who has stopped piping and is looking up at a child who is floating in the air and looking down at the piper. The trees form a canopy over both of them, which is something I noticed happening pretty often in Songs of Innocence (e.g., plates 6, 8, 9, 10 and more) and not nearly as often in Songs of Experience (e.g., there are more trees without leaves, such as in plates 32, 33, 42, 43 and more). There are sheep behind the piper, which might suggest that he is also a shepherd like in “The Shepherd” poem, which follows “Introduction.” Unlike in “The Shepherd,” though, the piper isn’t looking at his sheep, and seems to be walking away from them but stops to pay attention to the child. I have more to say about this image below.

 

Frontispiece to Songs of Experience

This version is the closest one I could find online to the version we have in our book.

From Wikimedia Commons, public domain

From Wikimedia Commons, public domain

The main difference between the one above and the one in our book is that the figure with the winged child on his head is clothed in more of a blue-green colour in our text.

From Wikimedia Commons, public domain

From Wikimedia Commons, public domain

This image might go along with the “Introduction” to Songs of Experience like the frontispiece to Innocence went with the “Introduction” poem there, but if so it’s a bit harder to tell, and I don’t have much in the way of thoughts about that. From Innocence, the Introduction is about the writer of the poems as a piper who seems fairly simple and connected to the “wild,” while in Experience the Introduction suggests the poems are given us by a “Bard” who has much more knowledge of the world (“Who Present, Past & Future sees”) and who is calling “the lapsed soul” and also Earth to “[Rise] from the slumberous mass.” The Bard is more insistent, more commanding, telling us that we must “Hear [his] voice” with an exclamation point right at the beginning of the poem. This speaker, far from simply piping songs of “pleasant glee” in “valleys wild,” has “heard, / The Holy Word”–he has knowledge of religion and scriptures, and is perhaps using that to help Earth to arise and return from her slumbering. As we see in “Earth’s Answer,” though, this is not so easy; she complains of being “Prison’d,” “Chain’d,” cold and frozen, and can’t seem to free herself.

But that’s not my emphasis here; what I’m more interested in is talking about the image in the frontispiece to Experience and comparing it with its counterpart in Innocence.

A couple of things strike me right away about the frontispiece to Experience: (1) the adult figure is holding the child figure, now winged, on his head, and (2) both are looking intently, straight ahead. In the Innocence frontispiece they are looking at each other, but here they are staring straight at us. I find it a bit unnerving, as if they are coming out of the page in a way, interacting with the reader in ways that aren’t common in the rest of the text. If we connect this image with the “Introduction” to Experience, then it could be that the adult figure is the Bard, and the Bard is speaking directly to us when saying “Hear the voice of the Bard!”. In that case, the speaker of “Introduction” wouldn’t only be speaking to Earth, who is addressed in the poem as well, but also to us, the readers, who are being addressed with the eyes of the two figures in the frontispiece.

The other striking difference to me in the two frontispieces is that in Experience the child figure is no longer flying free, but held down. It’s as if the child has lost its freedom in some way–it still has wings, but is grounded, not flying. There are many other interpretations possible here, and I’ve seen some things in my online perusings (which I didn’t keep track of like I should have!) saying that while the child figure in the frontispiece to Innocence seems like a child, this one is more like a cherub, a religious figure of some sort; this child also has a halo, signifying some aspect of divinity. So perhaps the adult figure here has experience with religion in a way that the one in the Innocence frontispiece does not.

There are still sheep in the background, and the adult figure is still walking away from them. It’s clear that in the first frontispiece he is walking with his left foot first and here it’s his right, but I haven’t been able to find anything in my minor efforts at research online to explain what might be significance of that.

 

I haven’t been able to come to any major conclusions by going through this exercise, and I bet we could have come up with more things to say if we had been able to discuss this together in class! I always learn more by doing that than by sitting, thinking and writing by myself. But hopefully this post points to some ways in which one might do a close reading of images (though it could be closer than I have done here), and perhaps will spark some new thoughts in some of the students for their essays!

 

Sights, Sounds and Words in Shakespeare’s The Tempest

In Arts One this week we discussed Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I just noticed that I have two other blog posts on this book from Arts One as well: see here for a post on the play and on the film Forbidden Planet, and here for one on how to interpret Prospero’s “magic” or “art” and why he might give it up at the end (also talking about Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books). I guess I like to write blog posts on this book!

I’m writing this one because we ran out of time to talk about something in our seminar meeting that I wanted to discuss. We were focused on reading the script, but this is a play, after all, and I thought it would be useful to look at some scenes from performances of the play to think about what we lose (or gain?) when we just have the words vs when we have the visual and the auditory elements of a play. Clearly, a play is much more immersive and vivid, but one thing it does is to present the audience with a particular interpretation of the words, by the way the characters speak, their facial expressions, their movements on the stage, the stage set, and more. If you just have the words, there are multiple interpretations one could give to them, multiple ways one could imagine the story going, whereas a performance narrows those options down by the way it’s staged (there can still be room for interpretation, but I think it might be lower…?).

This means the bare words alone give directors a great deal of freedom in how to stage the play. I picked a couple of examples of the same scene played two different ways, in the videos below.

First, we have two different versions of Act I Scene 2, in which Prospero and Ariel are speaking together for the first time, and after describing how he performed the storm, Ariel asks for his freedom and Prospero gets angry.

This one is from Savage Rose Classical Theatre Company, 2014. I can’t get the link to work with a start and end time for the clip, only a start time. So just watch until about 21:40.

https://youtu.be/czFoUWwd6mI?t=17m29s

And this one is from a Globe Theatre production in 2013. This one ends at the end of the scene so you can watch it until the end

https://youtu.be/k771DZzn_m4?t=5m10s

 

There is quite a difference in how Ariel is played between these two scenes. In the first one it is clear that he remembers Sycorax well, and his imprisonment in a pine tree–indeed, his memory is played out directly on stage. Prospero in this scene seems cruel, torturing Ariel by bringing up this painful memory again. As someone said in class, Prospero could be said to be inflicting psychological torture on Ariel by reminding him of this experience every single month. It makes Prospero seem like he is using this memory over and over to express his power over Ariel.

In the second video, it’s less clear. The actor playing Ariel seems to have trouble remembering where Sycorax is from, and his facial expressions earlier in the scene suggest that he doesn’t really have that vivid of a memory of her. The way Prospero is played, he seems mostly to be exasperated at having to remind Ariel over and over what he has actually forgotten. This changes the dynamic between Ariel and Prospero considerably–if Ariel really is this forgetful, then we can see why Prospero gets upset at having to constantly remind him. Prospero could be read as less cruel and more just frustrated. Though, at the same time, one could argue that Prospero doesn’t really need to remind him of this experience over and over except to keep Ariel in his power. So maybe the ultimate function of this reminder is the same as in the previous video; it’s just that Prospero could seem less cruel.

 

I also wanted to point to something about how the characters move on the stage as indicating various interpretations that are left open by the mere words in the text.

In this clip from the Globe Theatre’s 2013 production, I think the way Caliban and Miranda move is quite telling. This one you can stop at around 5:30.

https://youtu.be/UtVeDyw9ntk?t=25s

In this scene we find that Caliban is quite literally stuck in a “hard rock” (1.2. 342-343). He often stays low to the ground, something that we see often in performances of Caliban. Possibly it’s to signal that he is not entirely human (and so doesn’t stand upright), but it also shows his subordinate status to the rest of the characters.

In addition, I find it interesting how Caliban’s movements suggest both anger and desire for rebellion against Prospero, but also significant fear. He runs at Prospero, pointing and shouting, but then also cowers backwards, hiding behind a pillar. You can see this in particular when he gives the lines about how the island is his, from Sycorax, and Prospero has taken it from him.

Then, when Caliban talks about how at first Prospero was kind to him, he is suppliant, staying low to the ground. But when he talks about how he showed Prospero various good things on the island, he starts to get angry and stands up, walking around. Then he attempts a magical incantation against Prospero: “all the charms of Sycorax…light on you!”

Miranda’s movements are telling in this scene too. She starts off cowering behind a pillar, clearly afraid of Caliban. But then when Prospero reminds Caliban of his attempted rape of Miranda, and Caliban says he would have peopled the island with Calibans, Miranda can’t take it–she gets angry and comes out shouting, moving quickly towards Caliban, who immediately cowers and drops to the ground.

Finally, we get a clear demonstration of Prospero causing Caliban pain, around 4:40. When Prospero says he is going to fill Caliban with cramps, Caliban writes on the ground–clearly, Prospero is already doing so. This we can see from the stage production; it’s not necessarily clear in the text.

 

These are just a few examples of what one can see when looking at performances vs. just reading the words. I haven’t talked about things like set or costumes, which also can convey meaning through vision. Reading the text of a play is in some ways just a small sliver of the meaning one can get from the work, but at the same time, it’s more open to multiple interpretations because the words can be said in so many different ways, with different facial expressions, different movements, etc. So reading the text could leave one’s imagination freer than watching a performance!

 

Sketchnotes on Plato’s Republic

We are talking about Plato’s Republic this week and next in Arts One, and over the summer I started getting interested in doing sketchnotes–basically, trying to take notes with both images and words.

I have found this a really useful method for forcing myself to take in information and make it my own, to condense ideas down to what I think is most important, and to put that into my own “words,” so to speak. I think it helps me remember things better than just copying down as many words from a lecture or presentation as I can by typing on a keyboard (what I would otherwise be doing).

I have a long way to go before my drawings are attractive (and I’m slowly working on that), but I’ll be sharing my sketchnotes on our Arts One lectures throughout the year, here on my blog.

Here’s the first set!

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What’s the focus of Sophocles’ Oedipus?

Oedipus & the Sphinx, pottery decoration from circa 470 BCE

Oedipus and the Sphinx, c. 470 BCE, by Carole Raddato, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0 on Wikimedia Commons

 

In Arts One last week we discussed Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. We put a bunch of questions/topics for discussion on the board and didn’t get to all of them (unfortunately, not an uncommon occurrence in Arts One, but fortunately, it’s because students are so engaged and want to discuss!).

I wrote a question on the board that I had myself:

What of the Oedipus story is included in the action of the play and what occurs before or after? What takes place on stage versus off? And what do these say about what the play is about, what it’s focused on, and what message we might get from it (if any)?

We didn’t have time to discuss this question, so I thought I’d take the opportunity of doing a blog post to provide some of my own thoughts. As with all texts we read in Arts One, my interpretation is only as strong as my evidence–like those of students as well. This is to say: I am not arguing that mine is the only way to answer this question, just because I happen to be the instructor in our seminar group.

What takes place within the action of the play itself?

There are numerous elements to the Oedipus story, including:

  • the oracle to Laios and Jocasta that their son would kill his father, and his subsequent abandonment to die as a baby
  • his growing up in Corinth thinking Polybos & Merope are his biological parents
  • the oracle’s message to him that he was going to kill his father & marry his mother
  • his killing of Laios, answering the riddle of the Sphinx, marrying Jocasta
  • the plague in Thebes, Oedipus trying to find the murderer of Laios and in turn discovering who he is, what he has done, and that the oracle was right; his self-blinding and asking to be exiled from Thebes
  • his exile from Thebes and what happens afterwards

Only the second to last bullet point, above, is what takes place within the action of this play (Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonnus and Antigone address the last bullet point). More specifically, what happens is that Oedipus vows, as king, to do what Apollo said in his oracle to Kreon and find the murderer of Laios, and he continues to search and search for the truth until he does. It’s kind of like a murder mystery in modern terms, except that the audience knows all along that Oedipus himself is the murderer.

So we might say that one focus of the play, at least, is on the seeking of knowledge, and gaining self-knowledge. One could argue that it’s also about a king trying to save the citizens of his state from a plague, trying to do fulfill his kingly duties by doing what the god Apollo commanded–find the murderer of Laios and punish him.

But there’s another aspect to what happens within the action of the play as well: there is a focus on the issue of the knowledge of humans vs. the knowledge of gods. Oedipus is at first treated as a god by the priest in the beginning (and Oedipus himself seems to be answering their prayers as if he were a god at the top of p. 33 in our version), and yet the audience knows that his knowledge falls far short of that of the gods. So we see him not only gaining knowledge and self-knowledge by the end of the play, we see him in the process realizing that he is not at the same level as the gods (though, at the end, he knows as much as they do, so do what you will with that …).

The Chorus states that only Zeus and Apollo see and understand “the dark threads crossing beneath our life” (46), and then later they reflect on the nature of human life and how we are all like Oedipus:

man after man after man
o mortal generations
here once
almost not here
what are we
dust ghosts images a rustling of air
nothing nothing
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
we are you
we are you Oedipus (78)

According to the chorus, then, Oedipus does not have the same knowledge the gods do, and neither do the rest of us. Humans are only “dust ghost images a rustling of air”–very little, or perhaps “nothing.”

Similarly, he comes to realize, during the play, that the oracles all were true (and that Teiresias was right about what would happen to him). Despite Jocasta (and Oedipus) saying that we don’t need to pay attention to oracles, it turns out that they were right even when humans think they have discovered that they aren’t.

What takes place off stage or on stage?

Partly this question is going to be answered by the nature of staging drama in ancient Athens. There was a stage with very little in the way of backdrops or props. From what I understand, showing Jocasta hanging herself or Oedipus blinding himself would have been difficult or just not part of the normal way of doing plays at the time. Still, we can maybe glean a little from what takes place onstage vs. off stage in the play.

On stage

  • Mostly conversations: Oedipus and the chorus, Oedipus and Kreon, Oedipus and Teiresias, Oedipus and Jocasta, Oedipus and the shepherd, etc.
  • Mostly Oedipus is on stage except a few times when he’s not there
    • The chorus is sometimes on stage alone
    • Jocasta also prays to Apollo without Oedipus at one point
    • Jocasta, the chorus, and a messenger speak without Oedipus; she learns of Polybos’ death before Oedipus does
    • A servant comes out of the palace to tell the chorus & audience that Jocasta has hanged herself and Oedipus has blinded himself

Off stage but still within the action of the play itself

  • Oedipus sends for Teiresias (he says on p. 36 that he has done so, but Teiresias hasn’t come yet)
  • Kreon hears of Oedipus charging him with treason; on stage p. 46 he says he has come to answer those charges
  • Polybos dies; onstage, a messenger comes and tells Jocasta and then Oedipus
  • Jocasta hangs herself; Oedipus blinds himself

So we see that most of the action onstage is Oedipus talking to others, and most of it is him learning the truth about the murderer of Laios (himself). What happens off stage are mostly things that don’t have to do with Oedipus trying to find the truth (except for the first bullet point, above, but that’s a fairly trivial action). This again suggests that Oedipus and his quest for knowledge is at least one of the foci of the play.

 

Conclusion

I don’t know if this exercise has revealed anything that people weren’t thinking already, but I think it’s useful when one is considering a play to think about what parts of a story the dramatist chooses to include within the action of the play, what takes place onstage and off, to glean some insight into what the play is about. I may try this again with the next play we study in Arts One this year, Brecht’s Galileo. And I’ll be thinking similiar things about the films we watch. And I suppose really, one could also do something similar with novels…

 

I’d love to hear your thoughts, comments, questions, disagreements if you have them! Just write in the comment area, below.

Literature on open textbooks: COUP

[Updated Dec. 11, 2016]

I am working on a literature review for an article I and a couple of other people are writing about a survey about open textbooks in a course at UBC, and as part of that effort I created a table of some of the research literature on open textbooks. I thought it might be useful to others.

This table is based on the “COUP” framework explained by the Open Education Group (with whom I have an OER Research Fellowship at the moment): Cost, Outcomes, Use, and Perceptions. See here for an explanation of each element of this framework as it relates to research on open textbooks and other Open Educational Resources.

The Open Ed Group has a great list of literature using this framework, here: The Review Project. What I’m trying to do with this post is present at least some of that literature in way that clearly shows which articles connect to which aspects of the COUP framework. The Review Project, though, is updated more often!

The table is not an exhaustive list of literature; for one thing, it doesn’t include an article I found that is not open access (and I don’t have access to it):

Petrides, L., Jimes, C., Middleton‐Detzner, C., Walling, J., & Weiss, S. (2011). Open textbook adoption and use: implications for teachers and learners. Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning, 26(1), 39–49. http://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2011.538563

I also only included studies that focused on open textbooks, specifically. There are other studies that talk about other OER in the Open Education Group’s Review Project.

Oh, and unfortunately the table doesn’t work on a mobile phone…I tried using a table plugin but it was messing up the format, and the table below is copied and pasted from a word processing doc, which doesn’t work on mobile. Boo.

Here is a MS Word version, though, that you could download and edit for your own purposes if you want!

There are probably other studies about open textbooks that I’m missing at the moment. Please add them in the comments!

Article Cost Out-
comes		 Use Perce-ptions
Allen, G., Guzman-Alvarez, A., Smith, A., Gamage, A., Molinaro, M., & S. Larsen, D. (2015). Evaluating the effectiveness of the open-access ChemWiki resource as a replacement for traditional general chemistry textbooks. Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 16(4), 939–948. http://doi.org/10.1039/C5RP00084J X
Allen, I. E., & Seaman, J. (2016). Opening the Textbook: Open Education Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2015-2016 (Babson Survey Research Group). Retrieved from http://onlinelearningsurvey.com/oer.html F
Allen, N., & Student PIRGs. (2010). A Cover to Cover Solution: How Open Textbooks are the Path to Textbook Affordability. Student PIRGs. Retrieved from http://www.studentpirgs.org/reports/cover-cover-solution X X
Belikov, O. M., & Bodily, R. (2016). Incentives and barriers to OER adoption: A qualitative analysis of faculty perceptions. Open Praxis, 8(3), 235–246. http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.8.3.308 X F
Bliss, T. J., Hilton, J., Wiley, D., & Thanos, K. (2013). The cost and quality of online open textbooks: Perceptions of community college faculty and students. First Monday, 18(1). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3972/3383 X S, F
Bliss, T. J., Robinson, T. J., Hilton, J., & Wiley, D. A. (2013). An OER COUP: College Teacher and Student Perceptions of Open Educational Resources. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 0(0). Retrieved from http://doi.org/10.5334/2013-04 X X X

S, F

 
California Open Educational Resources Council. (2016). White Paper: OER Adoption Study (April 1 2016). Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/WPOERAdoption040116
  X  S, F
Feldstein, A., Martin, M., Hudson, A., Warren, K., Hilton III, J., & Wiley, D. (2012). Open Textbooks and Increased Student Access and Outcomes. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning, 15(2). Retrieved from http://www.eurodl.org/index.php?p=archives&year=2012&halfyear=2&article=533 X X S
Fischer, L., Hilton III, J., Robinson, J., & Wiley, D. A. (2015). A multi-institutional study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students – Springer. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 27(3), 159–172. http://doi.org/10.1007/s12528-015-9101-x X

Florida Virtual Campus. (2012). 2012 Florida Student Textbook Survey. Retrieved from https://florida.theorangegrove.org/og/items/10c0c9f5-fa58-2869-4fd9-af67fec26387/1/

Florida Virtual Campus. (2016). Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey. Retrieved from https://florida.theorangegrove.org/og/items/3a65c507-2510-42d7-814c-ffdefd394b6c/1/

 X X S, F
Hilton, J. (2016). Open educational resources and college textbook choices: a review of research on efficacy and perceptions. Educational Technology Research and Development, 64(4), 573–590. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-016-9434-9 X S, F
Hilton III, J. L., Gaudet, D., Clark, P., Robinson, J., & Wiley, D. (2013). The adoption of open educational resources by one community college math department. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 14(4). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1523 X X S, F
Hilton, J., & Laman, C. (2012). One college’s use of an open psychology textbook. Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning, 27(3), 265–272. http://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2012.716657 X
Hilton III, J. L., Robinson, T. J., Wiley, D., & Ackerman, J. D. (2014). Cost-savings achieved in two semesters through the adoption of open educational resources. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 15(2). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1700 X
Jhangiani, R., Pitt, R., Hendricks, C., Key, J., & Lalonde, C. (2016). Exploring Faculty Use of Open Educational Resources at BC Post-secondary Institutions. BCcampus. Retrieved from https://open.bccampus.ca/2016/01/18/new-study-exploring-faculty-use-of-oer-at-bc-institutions/ X F
Kimmons, R. (2015). OER Quality and Adaptation in K-12: Comparing Teacher Evaluations of Copyright-Restricted, Open, and Open/Adapted Textbooks. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 16(5). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2341 X F
Lindshield, B. L., & Adhikari, K. (2013). Online and Campus College Students Like Using an Open Educational Resource Instead of a Traditional Textbook. Journal of Online Teaching and Learning, 9(1). Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol9no1/lindshield_0313.htm X

S

 
Pitt, R. (2015). Mainstreaming Open Textbooks: Educator Perspectives on the Impact of OpenStax College open textbooks. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 16(4). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2381 X X F
Robinson, T. J. (2015, May). The Effects of Open Educational Resource Adoption on Measures of Post-Secondary Student Success (Doctoral dissertation). Brigham Young University. Retrieved from http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1710437283.html?FMT=AI X
Robinson, T. J., Fischer, L., Wiley, D., & Hilton, J. (2014). The Impact of Open Textbooks on Secondary Science Learning Outcomes. Educational Researcher, 43(7), 341–351. http://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X14550275 X
Senack, E. (2015). Open Textbooks: The Billion Dollar Solution. The Student PIRGS. Retrieved from http://www.studentpirgs.org/reports/sp/open-textbooks-billion-dollar-solution X
Senack, E., & The Student PIRGs. (2014). Fixing the Broken Textbook Market | U.S. PIRG (pp. 1–18). Retrieved from http://www.uspirg.org/reports/usp/fixing-broken-textbook-market X

 

Collaborating with students on objectives & assessments

I just did a quick read of the following article:

Abdelmalak, M. (2016). Faculty-Student Partnerships in Assessment. IJTLHE : International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 28(2), 193–203.

See the TOC for this issue, with link to the open-access PDF of the article, here.

The article reports on a study of a course in Education in which 6 graduate students collaborated with the professor on developing the course objectives, the assessments to meet those, and the criteria for assessing the work. The students brainstormed ideas, and then they agreed on objectives, goals, criteria based on what they shared in those ideas, and based on negotiations afterwards. Clearly this process would work best in a small class.

The author found that for the grad students involved,

  • collaborating on these things gave them a sense of control over their learning (unsurprising), which increased their motivation to learn.

However,

  • even though they had agreed to provide peer feedback on a writing assignment, most felt uncomfortable providing deep feedback to their peers due to a sense of lack of knowledge and a reticence to take up a perceived position of power over other students
  • some found the whole process difficult because they were used to an instructor deciding all of these things for them.

 

I have been thinking a lot lately about getting students more involved in creating assignments, though mostly what I teach are first-year courses and I think their lack of knowledge about the subject at that point means it would be best to not have them try to decide all the assignments. Plus, I have over 100 students in some of my first-year courses, and that makes such things difficult.

But I think something like this could work in a 4th year course (my 4th year course is max 25 students). The students still might not be able to come up with objectives that have to do with specific content they have yet to learn, but they might be able to come up with good ones about other aspects of the course; and I like the idea of them deciding on assignments after and grounded in the objectives they hope to achieve. Why write a paper, for example? Just because that’s what we always do in Philosophy, or for some other reason? What are we trying to achieve by writing papers? Are there other ways to achieve those goals?

In my experience, most fourth-year students in Philosophy courses don’t have too much issue with providing peer feedback that is critical and useful, so I don’t think I’d run into that problem. But it might be a bit difficult for them to go through this whole exercise because they’re not used to doing it. I think it would be really useful for them to work through why courses are designed as they are, and re-design them as needed to fit goals that are shared by the class.

I haven’t taught a 4th year course since 2014, and I’m not scheduled to do so next year either, but maybe the next time I do I’ll try something like this. Perhaps not for all the assignments, but for one or two to start with.

Has anyone tried anything like this before? If so, how did it go?

Update later on Aug. 12:

Robin DeRosa responded on Twitter that she had done this sort of thing with a first-year composition class–see the thread of that conversation here.

The syllabus, with student-created objectives and policies for that course, is here.

I had thought this wouldn’t work with first-years, but I can see how it works for a composition course in which students come in with some general knowledge about writing–you can get a sense of that from the objectives they created.

For first-year philosophy students, I think they might have a harder time determining just what they want to get out of a course when many of them don’t even really know what philosophy is yet, or why it is worth taking a course on!

Robin had a good suggestion:

So one could have them collaborate on one or two things that they can bring to the table.

And I love this point:

 

Also, Juliet O’Brien gave some great ideas via Twitter, which I’ll just post here as they are pretty self-explanatory I think!

 

 

You can see more about Juliet’s courses from this page: https://metametamedieval.com/courses/

And here is a link to a PDF that explains some of what she’s talking about above.

 

More course planning with Dee Fink

 

I am back to planning a course using the Integrated Course Design model by Dee Fink, outlined in this document & set of worksheets. I worked with this model and the same course about a year ago, and blogged about it briefly here.

Now I am preparing for a presentation on using Fink’s ideas for developing course goals and assessments, as well as using David Wiley’s suggestion of practicing open pedagogy through using renewable assignments (which I discuss in this article). I’m presenting on this at the upcoming American Association of Philosophy Teachers’ conference, which is held every two years and is easily one of my favourite conferences–it’s filled with people who love teaching philosophy!

Here in this post, I’ll focus on drafting learning goals with Dee Fink’s Integrated Course Design. I’m also presenting on Wiley’s idea of “Renewable Assignments,” and I’ve already reflected on some ideas for those in a previous post.

I’ve been working on my Philosophy 102 course again, because even though I’ve taught it many times, I’m still not entirely happy with it. I feel like it could be more engaging for students, and since there really are few restrictions on what I can teach in that course (it’s an intro course focused on value theory…anything within that is fair game) then there’s a lot of freedom to consider how to make it more engaging.

Like last year, I’m using Workflowy to do the planning. Here’s a link to the part of my Workflowy list about this course that focuses on the learning objectives. While I find Workflowy excellent for planning in list format, it’s not so great for long-form reflecting, so I’m moving over here to my blog for that.

Draft Learning goals for PHIL 102

One of the things I love about Fink’s model for course design is the expanded kinds of learning goals he asks one to consider. He suggests setting goals in the following areas:

  • Foundational Knowledge: what key information or ideas, perspectives are important for students to learn?
  • Application: what kinds of thinking are needed, such as critical, creative, practical? What sorts of skills do they need to learn?
  • Integration: what connections should students make between parts of the course? Between what’s in the course and other courses? Or between the course and their own lives?
  • Human Dimension: what should students learn about themselves? About interacting with others in the future?
  • Caring: what changes would you like to see in what students care about? What changes like to see in their interests, values, feelings?
  • Learning How to Learn: What would you like students to learn about how to learn well in this course (and beyond)? About how to become self-directed learners, engage in inquiry and knowledge construction?

On my Workflowy list I went through each of these areas and answered the questions (see here for my answers), and then came up with a draft list of Learning Objectives for the course as a whole. Here they are in their current form, but if you go to the link in the last sentence, you can see any updates I make later.

  1. Explain the basic structure of a philosophical argument–premises and conclusion—and correctly outline an argument in a philosophical text
  2. Assess the strength of arguments in assigned texts, in oral or written work by other students, and their own arguments (oral or written)
  3. Read a complex philosophical text and produce notes that distinguish the main points of the arguments therein.
  4. Make a claim about a philosophical issue and defend it with sound reasoning, orally and in writing
  5. Participate in a respectful discussion with others on a philosophical question: clarify positions and arguments from themselves or others, criticize flawed arguments, present their own arguments, and do all this in manner that respects the other people in the discussion
  6. Based on what we’ve studied in the class, give one (of many!) possible answers to the questions: What is philosophical activity and where do we see it in the world outside this course? How do you engage in philosophical activity beyond this course?

What’s missing

Now, one of the great things about Workflowy is that I can go through and tag items in my list so as to just view them on a page and clear everything else out. I found a number of things in the 6 areas of learning goals (Foundational Knowledge, Caring, Learning how to Learn, etc.) that were not reflected in my draft set of learning objectives. I tagged them with #attn (for attention) and was able to just focus on them. Here is what I don’t have in my learning objectives or ideas for course activities yet:

  • Human dimension: what should students learn about themselves? about interacting with others in the future?
    • It would be good if they learned the degree to which they tend to rely on unexamined beliefs and values in their thoughts about the questions we’re discussing, and why it might be good to examine those #attn
    • Learn the value of respectful, philosophical (or other) dialogue with peers–how can we engage in dialogue that respects everyone and yet moves forward rather than sitting with everyone’s differing opinions and not going anywhere out of fear of offending anyone? #attn
    • At the same time, don’t want them to just rely on relativism–your view is okay and so is mine, there isn’t an answer. Need to find a way to both recognize that you might be wrong, and yet hold steady to what you have good reason to believe in b/c of evidence, good arguments behind it, etc. Still open to questioning and challenge from others. #attn
  • Caring: what changes would you like to see in what students care about? What changes like to see in their interests, values, feelings?
    This is a hard one–how can one work to change what people care about? #attn

    • I would like them to care about careful, philosophical inquiry, argument and dialogue, about how such activity can be helpful in addressing disagreements, if done well #attn
    • Care about whether their own views and values have been examined, whether they can provide adequate arguments for them, and what to do if they think they can’t #attn
    • Care about whether their own arguments about the content of the course are sound #attn
    • Care about treating with respect those whose views differ from theirs, but not thinking that this must mean we have to be relativists, that there are no objective truths about value #attn
    • Care about working together with others to solve problems/try to answer complex questions #attn
  • Learning how to learn: what would you like students to learn about how to learn well in this course (and beyond)? how to become self-directed learners, engage in inquiry and knowledge construction?
    • learn the value of working together with peers to learn; that sometimes learning on one’s own works well, and sometimes it’s also valuable to learn with peers #attn
      how to get them to see this?

      • learning with and from peers is not a waste of time compared to getting info from the prof as expert
      • recognize that even when they feel they know more than others, “teaching” others is a very useful way to better understand something; we learn by helping others to learn, not just by getting information from them
    • learn what to do if something isn’t making sense; what options do they have for getting help? How can they avoid just being confused and not doing much to solve the problem? #attn
    • understand that philosophical texts may require more than one read to understand them well, and have the patience to do work hard to understand something that is challenging. Of course, time pressure is also an issue, so want to make sure not overwhelming them. #attn
      how to help them see this?

Okay, so how?

Here is where I start reflecting on the things I’ve marked “attn,” above. It’s interesting to me that the ones I’m having the most difficulty with are the ones I hadn’t really thought of much before reading Fink’s work–goals about caring, the human dimension, and learning how to learn. My course goals were more content-focused before that.

Caring goals

I’m going to start with the hardest one, in my view. How do I get them to care about certain things, if they don’t already? I feel the need to tread carefully here, as there are ethical concerns with trying to change people’s values when you’re in a position of significant power in comparison to them. I don’t think I should require students to care about certain things so much as show evidence of doing certain things (whether doing so has entered into their emotional or value structure deeply is their own concern).

So while I’d like them to care if their arguments are sound or if they are relying on assumptions that they can’t defend, I can’t require them to show that they care about such things–only that they do unpack their assumptions and that the arguments they produce are sound. And while I would like them to care about working together with others to solve problems and treating them with respect in discussions, all I can require is that they do so.

One thing I could do is to model my own enthusiasm in striving to unpack my own assumptions and produce sound arguments, model respect in discussions, and show how I think of myself as working with them to address the problems we are discussion (which I do think, and I can model that). I can also explain why I believe those things are important, as a way of explaining why I require them, and then these reasons may resonate with others as well.

So while I don’t think the Caring goals will show up in my learning objectives, they will operate in how I teach, and how I explain why I’m teaching that way.

Human Dimension

  • Learning about how they might rely on unexamined beliefs: could help them see this by asking them to reflect on their views about certain issues and come up with arguments to support them, examining those premises as deeply as possible.
    • I’ve done this in the past when I’ve asked students to pick a current issue in the news and write blog posts about views one might have about that and arguments they can come up with to support them. I have always said it doesn’t have to actually be their own views, but the views someone could have (because some students are wary of blogging in front of their classmates about their own views).
    • I have run into issues where students have gotten upset by what others have written (one student was upset by a blog post about how abortion is wrong, because, this student said (in anonymous feedback), other students in the class may have had abortions. So this is not without dangers. One option is to just have all of them submit these posts privately to me, which has always been an option and students sometimes take it, but other students don’t mind blogging publicly and that’s how this student got upset.
    • Still, isn’t there a teaching moment there, or something valuable in determining how to deal with the fact that there are different views in our class just as in the world, and we need to learn how to engage with others who disagree? Probably, but I’m not sure I’ve yet figured out how best to handle this. So I’m still undecided on whether to require all such writing to be private to me or to let them post just to the class, or publicly, as they choose (which has been my practice so far).
  • Learning the value of respectful dialogue with others, but not falling back into relativism: mostly I think I just hope this happens when I require them to talk in small groups about the issues we’re discussing. I and the TA’s try to monitor the tone of such discussions, but we can’t be in all groups at the same time. Here are some things I could do:
    • Have us come up with ground rules for discussion, collaboratively. I have tried something like this with large classes before. It worked pretty well; the large class was split up into groups of 25 for one hour a week, and I had a google doc for each of those small groups. Then I compiled all the results into one doc.
      • I think in future I need to not just collate what students said, but use those as a basis for a concise set of simple guidelines that we can easily refer to throughout the class. So I’ve started this process by gathering what students have said, but just need to finish it by making the resulting set of guidelines easier to read and refer to.
    • How to avoid falling into relativism? How to get them to recognize that while each view could be debated and needs to be justified by reasons that others could question, this doesn’t mean all views are equal?
      • I do talk about the difficulties that ethical relativism puts us into, so that’s one thing.
      • I could also try to require each group to come up with one thing they or most of them think is justifiable, rather than just letting them discuss and not requiring them to come to some kind of conclusion (which is what I sometimes do).
      • I have in the past used Google docs for this, again–I have had a section on a google doc for each small group in the Friday discussion meetings (about 5 or 6 per discussion meeting) where they have to record something concrete, some kind of answer or argument. Possibly this could help with the relativism issue?

Learning How to Learn

  • Learning the value of learning with peers: This is a tough one. Many of us think, and there is research to back this up (geez…I need to have that at my fingertips, but I don’t!), that learning with and from peers is valuable, but there are still a number of students who resist it. So many times I’ve heard from others that students complain about the professors not doing their jobs when they focus part of class time on peer learning, or that they have paid tuition and fees and what are they getting out of it? I haven’t heard that myself (yet?), but it’s an important problem. How to address it?
    • I suppose one way is to point to the research on the value of learning with peers. I need to write something up on my course websites about such research so that students can understand it quickly but also dig more deeply into the articles if they wish.
    • I might also stress that I ask them to engage in peer learning because I firmly believe that each one of us has valuable things to contribute to philosophical discussion. I don’t believe that philosophy can only be done by experts (thus I would like to see more philosophy in schools, in earlier grades than university, even when kids are just starting school). We experts do have significant roles to play, but since my focus in this intro course is less on content and more on skills development regarding reading, writing and discussing, peer learning makes sense: I can model those skills, but so can other students. I am there to help refine the skills that many people already possess to some degree. And I can answer questions about the philosophers we’re studying with my disciplinary expertise. But other than that, you don’t need to be a philosophical expert to engage in philosophical discussion and help each other do it better.
    • I wonder if I could give an example or two where I learned just as much, if not more, from peers than from the expert? I wonder, not because I can’t think of any, but because I am not sure it would resonate with them. My “peers” are already “experts” to some degree. But we are not always experts in what we’re trying to learn, so maybe this sort of personal story would help?
  • Learning how to recognize when you need help and how to get it: I’ve found that too often, when students are struggling, they don’t reach out for help…perhaps because they don’t know how, or are intimidated. And that can be when things like plagiarism happen. Here are some thoughts on what I might do.
    • How many first-year students don’t really understand “office hours”? I say I have them, I talk about rescheduling them when I can’t make them one week, etc., but do I really explain what office hours are for? Do I make sure to continually invite students to come when they would like help? Do I say that I’m available even if students just want to better understand something but aren’t really having significant difficulty? Do I emphasize that they can talk to TA’s if they prefer (sometimes students find TA’s more approachable)? I think I could do better in these areas.
    • Of course, being approachable in class is important–having a demeanour that shows you really care and want to talk to students. I try to do this all the time, and student evaluations do show that many think I am open and kind and approachable. Not sure I need to do anything more in that regard.
    • I could do more to emphasize the various support services for students on campus. Sometimes they don’t want to talk to their professors about things that are going on with them, and there are wonderful supports for them that are available but they may not know them. I could put a line or two in the syllabus, but also have a section on the course website devoted to that. And talk it up in class, particularly during midterms and towards finals time.
  • Learning how to read philosophy… carefully and more than once: introductory students often struggle with primary texts. Sometimes people don’t assign them for that reason. I still do, and I think there can be value in learning how to read challenging things. But I also need to better support students in doing so.
    • Assign less reading: one common issue that comes up in student evaluations is that students often find it difficult to keep up with the amount of reading I assign. I keep cutting, but perhaps I still have to do more cutting next time. If what I care about is less the content than the skills, then students need time to practice the skills. And if there is less, then I could in all seriousness and practicality ask them to do the readings more than once.
    • I already have in the draft learning objectives above (#3) that they will be asked to write notes on texts that distinguish one or more of the main arguments in the text. That should help with this concern as well–they’ll have to read carefully to do this, and probably more than once!. I won’t ask them to do it on every single reading (I have over 100 students…I couldn’t possibly grade all those!), but on at least a few. And they’ll be practicing this in small groups first.
      • I suppose I wouldn’t have to grade them all…I could ask them to do peer comments on each others’ rather than grading all of them. I could grade one or two and then have one or two just have peer comments after that. A possibility….
    • I wonder if I could create a more “fun” way to ask students to summarize the main points in a reading? So far I’ve just been thinking of them doing an outline of one of the main arguments in a text in standard from (premises and conclusion). That’s important to learn, and I’ll keep doing that, but are there other, more engaging ways to summarize an argument in a text? Just some brainstorming below…might not use any of these…
      • write a summary in a “tweet” form (140 characters)
      • do a drawing that summarizes an argument somehow; or a comic strip
      • write a short dialogue between two or more people that summarizes the argument in your own words–maybe one person asking questions or bringing up objections
      • write a newspaper headline that summarizes the argument; or a short newspaper column
      • write about the reading in the style of a Wikipedia “lead” section–that part of a Wikipedia article before the table of contents, that is supposed to give a summary of the main points so you could get a good sense of it even w/o reading the whole article
        • of course, they could just go to the Wikipedia page of that reading, but not all of them are very good, actually, so perhaps the students could improve them!
      • Do a slide presentation with a few slides that explains the reading (with images so more visually interesting; will have to be sure they understand open licenses!)
      • Will keep thinking for more…

 

Conclusion

This was a very useful reflective exercise for me, even though it’s probably too long for others to read! And one thing I learned is that without realizing it, I’m already doing a few things that are helping to support the learning goals I thought at first I wasn’t addressing!

 

Summer of tears and hope

This summer has been tough. Hell, this year has been tough. Okay, this lifetime. But it seems there have been more and more reports, each week, of atrocities around the world. And each time they hit me hard.

Somehow the attack in Nice, France on Bastille Day 2016 hit me the hardest. Maybe because it was a family event, a happy and fun event I can imagine my family going to anywhere in the world. Maybe it was the extreme violence of it. Maybe it was just because it came on the heels of so much else. But it’s really hard for me to take.

So I decided to draw a picture. Maybe art therapy would help? It helped a little.

IMG_2261

 

I was trying to express my crushing sadness without letting it crush me, while also reminding myself of hope and work to be done and beauty and love that still exist and that we must cultivate.

 

I also took up an invitation to participate in a collaborative poem through #clmooc, on this post by Terry Elliott.

He had taken a poem by someone else and focused on a few words.

picture of a poem over another poem with words turned into colours and a circle image

Image from here, original here

 

Now, this original creation (the words in colours) came from work many of us did in #clmooc. See Deanna Mascle’s post about it.

Then Terry invited others to play with his creation on a Hackpad, so I did. And the result kind of resonated with my feelings today and the image above, without me trying to have it do so. I kept focusing on the words “struggle” and “love,” and realized they can go together and help me think through my pain and outrage. Struggle and love.

So I, too, took words from the picture and then added them to Terry’s chosen words. I then left some of it for others to play with, later. The first screenshot below is Terry’s poem; the second is my additions (at the top).

 

 

I have to say, doing all this today has helped me feel a bit better. Especially the part where I am in a collaboration with others to make things, things that make you think, that invite others to join in. That’s really what I need right now. Maybe many of us do.

 

Post script later that day…

Daniel Bassill added to my drawing in a fantastic way that extends its meaning and impact. Please see here!

Having someone else resonate and connect and extend what I did is amazing. Thank you, Daniel!