Author Archives: chendric

Watchmen Part Two

Well, I didn’t get around to writing this second post on Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen (for Arts One) as quickly as I’d have liked. That’s a four-day holiday weekend for you, I guess. But I did still want to write out my thoughts on something about this text, in order to clarify them for myself if nothing else.

Here is a link to the first post I wrote on Watchmen, a few days ago.

In this post I want to think through the treatment of women in the text.

Sexual violence

Apparently a number of people have criticized Alan Moore for having so many scenes of rape, or discussion of rapes that have happened in the past, in his comics. He replies to these concerns in a very long interview (scroll down to the “sexual violence against women” section). I’m not so much worried about having an attempted rape scene in this book as I am about how the characters react.

Sally Jupiter, who suffered an attempted rape at the hands of the Comedian, apparently blames herself, at least in part, for the rape. In an interview published at the end of issue 9, she says:

You know, rape is rape and there’s no excuses for it, absolutely none, but for me, I felt … I felt like I’d contributed in some way. … I really felt that, that I was somehow as much to blame for … for letting myself be his victim not in a physical sense, but … but, it’s like what if, y’know? What if, just for a moment, maybe I really did want ….

And this is just after we’ve discovered that Sally went back to the Comedian, slept with him, and had her daughter Laurie as a result.

One could try to argue, well, this could be read just as a potentially accurate portrayal of how some women feel after they’ve been raped, that maybe it was their fault somehow. And it’s true that women do sometimes feel that way. But this feeling of Sally’s is not questioned in any clear sense, not problematized. In fact, it’s supported by the fact that she went back to the guy and had sex with him later. Worse, in the last scene we see of Sally she has kissed the picture of the Comedian in tears.

Now, this doesn’t show that the text suggests the attempted rape was okay, but it does suggest that perhaps he was more right than he realized when he forced her, thinking she wanted it too. It not only blames the victim to some extent, it could appear to reduce the evil of what he did because, after all, her “no” did kind of mean “yes.” In an era in which sexual violence against women is still alarmingly high, I think this is a very bad thing to portray without problematizing it.

[But after writing the rest of this post, now I’m wondering if maybe it IS problematized? See last section of the post, below.]

Sure, this was published in the mid-80s, and maybe that should make a difference in the degree to which we blame the author, but nevertheless, I find it very disturbing regardless of whether he/they should have known better at the time. That doesn’t mean we can’t still criticize it now.

Women and sex

I also got the sense that pretty much every woman who is a prominent character in the text is somehow connected to sex.

From Pixabay.com, licensed CC0.

There is all that above about Sally Jupiter
Laurie is the one who initiates sex with Dan Dreiburg at first.
Malcolm’s wife Gloria complains that he works when she wants to have sex (6.13), and when she leaves him she subjects him to “crude sexual insults” (6.28).
Josephine (Joey) talks about just wanting to sleep with Aline towards the end (11.9).
Rorschach’s mother was a sex worker (as is his landlady).
Janey wasn’t too terribly connected with sex in the text, only being shown having sex with Jon once.

The only major-ish female characters I could think of who were not connected to sex were in the pirate comic-within-a-comic (the narrator’s wife, and the woman he kills and puts on a horse to ride with her into town).

It just struck me that there are a good number of men in the text who are portrayed doing many things, none of them being sex, but few women. E.g., Bernard & Bernie, Rorschach, Veidt, Hollis Mason, Malcolm…. It feels like when there is a woman in the text who has a major role, she must be shown having sex, or wanting to have sex, or being subjected to sexual violence. But that men can do other things.

One good thing, at least

I do like how Laurie complains about her costume off and on, and at the end says that she needs something that protects her, maybe with a mask, and that she ought to carry a gun (12.30). She, at least, doesn’t buy into the idea that female costumed heroes should be wearing skimpy clothes and be treated as sexual objects. This is in contrast to her mother, who likes it that she is portrayed in a sexually objectifying way in a “Tijuana Bible” (2.4).

Now that I think about it, though, perhaps we can take this fact about the difference between Sally and Laurie as a critique of Sally in the text. Laurie realizes how degrading the images of her mother are, but her mother finds them flattering. Laurie is angry about what the Comedian did to her mother, while her mother can’t sustain her anger (interview published at the end of chapter 9; 12.29).

Perhaps the text is portraying Sally’s attitudes towards and actions after the attempted rape as problematic, whereas Laurie’s attitude is better? Hmmmm…. Now I’ve written myself into not being sure of my own earlier views. That’s one of the powers of writing!

Hello TWP15!

I’m part of a team designing and facilitating an open online course called “Teaching with Word Press,” which will be held in June 2015. You can see our developing site, complete with what we’ve come up with so far for modules, here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/teachwordpress/

And our twitter hashtag is #TWP15 (thus the title of this post!).

It’s still very much a work in progress, and we welcome comments, suggestions–just make comments on the pages/posts! Specifically, we’d love to have comments on our draft syllabus (and maybe we should call it something else, like “schedule”). You can comment on each of the three modules linked there as well.

A little about me and Word Press

I’ve been using Word Press for many years for this blog, but only recently started using it for my courses. Right now I manage sites for my on-campus courses, including the following:

Philosophy 102, Introduction to Philosophy (soon to be updated for Summer 2015)

Philosophy 230, Introduction to Moral Theory (last taught Fall 2014)

Philosophy 449, Continental Philosophy (last taught Spring 2014)

Arts One seminar (a group of 20 students)

Arts One Open (a site where we publish video recordings of lectures, podcasts, blog posts by students and profs, and more)

On the Arts One sites, students and professors make blog posts on their own blog sites and we aggregate them to the main site. On the Philosophy course sites, I’ve just asked students to do posts on the main course site, rather than creating their own blogs (mostly because Arts One is a year-long course, so it makes more sense to ask them to o through the work of creating their own site!).

For all of the sites, I post most of my course materials publicly on the site, and the sites have a general site-wide license (excepting student posts) of CC BY.

On my Arts One seminar site, I’ve been working with some developers here at UBC to create a system where students can submit essays through Gravity Forms, and have those essays only be accessible to me and the members of their small groups. The small group members can then comment on the essays on the site.

What I’d like to learn how to do

I really want to start incorporating online quizzes, or comprehension checks–whether for marks or just for formative purposes. I have worked with Gravity Forms only a little bit, and would like to learn more.

Some people at UBC have been experimenting with Learning Wrappers around videos, such as can be seen on the UBC Digital Tatoo site, here. Below the video on that link, there are sections for “think,” “explore,” and “discuss,” which take you to places where you can answer questions, find more resources, and engage in discussion. That site is run on Word Press too, so this sort of thing is possible!

I’d also like to learn how to optimize the organization of materials on my sites. I think I could improve that, and I’d love to hear from participants how to do so.

One of my favourite things about facilitating courses like this is actually participating alongside others, and learning from them. I’m looking forward to that!

Watchmen Part One

Our final text of the year in Arts One is Moore and Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen. We only had one seminar meeting on this text this week, as opposed to our usual two. Which means I didn’t spend as much time going over the text, deciding on my own interpretations, as usual: usually I spend at least 3 hours before each seminar, and this week I spent just 3 hours before one seminar rather than two. I wanted to spend some time in this blog post going through my thoughts on a few things–writing them out is really the only way they get clear for me.

This first post is starts off talking about Rorschach, then moves into broader themes related to black/white, dark/light and. I also wanted to write about my concerns regarding the novels portrayal of women (which really bothered me), but I’ll save that for the next post (hopefully tomorrow) b/c there is a lot to discuss here already.

Rorschach Blot 1 from Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Why do I dislike Rorschach?

A number of people disagreed on whether they liked this character. Some of us (myself included) find him to be highly questionable as a person, and others sympathized with him because of his bad childhood, or thought he was at least somewhat likeable in other ways. Why don’t I like Rorschach? I’m trying to figure that out.

One obvious thing, for me, is that he reads and trusts the New Frontiersman. This paper publishes racist things, like saying the Ku Klux Klan may have had “later excesses” but “originally came into being because decent people had perfectly reasonable fears for the safety of their persons and belonging when forced into proximity with people from a culture far less morally advanced.” And then again: the Klan worked “to preserve American culture in areas where there were very real dangers of that culture being overrun and mongrelized” (end of Chpt. 8). Now I just don’t see any way to read these statements that isn’t racist. And I don’t believe that as readers the point is for us to take this paper seriously or sympathize with it. Since Rorschach does read this paper, and thinks they’re the only ones he can trust, that tarnishes him for me.

I suppose one might say that well, if anyone is going to print his story it’s going to be a paper that doesn’t mind printing things that sound crazy or controversial in the name of what it thinks of as truth. But he does read the paper himself, going to the news agent Bernard to get it most days.

He also says a couple of things in the first issue that are offensive. After visiting Heidt he asks: “Possibly homosexual? Must remember to investigate further” (1.19). As if being homosexual is something that he needs to investigate, as if there is something about it that requires his further attention rather than just being, well, a fact like someone being heterosexual. Next, as Laurie rightly notices, he refers to the Comedian’s attempted rape of Sally as one of the “moral lapses of men who died in their country’s service” (1.21). Laurie correctly gets upset about this seeming trivialization of her mother’s attempted rape.

These, I think, are the main reasons why I really can’t bring myself to like him. Yes, there’s also the violence he engages in, but arguably that’s against people who have done very bad things: the guy who kidnapped and murdered a child, the guys who came to his prison cell to murder him; wasn’t the man he killed to protest the Keene act a serial rapist? I can’t find that right now, but that’s interesting, in contrast to what he said about the Comedian. It’s not so much the violence that bugs me as the stuff above.

Black and white

At first I wondered whether the book was asking us to see Rorschach somewhat sympathetically b/c of his integrity, the strength of his convictions. There is something valuable in his idea that it’s wrong to let Veidt get away with what he has done, to not tell anyone. In issue 12, p. 23, he tells Jon that he can’t go along with keeping silent, because “Evil must be punished. People must be told.” Veidt can’t get away without being punished. There is some truth to this–he’s done something awful, and it is wrong to let him get away with it. But there’s also truth to the other side, that if they say something it’s likely to destroy a possible peace that millions of people have died to achieve.

As I said in class today, I feel like there’s a kind of dual extreme between Veidt and Rorschach: Veidt (and Dr. Manhattan agrees) says that the moral choice is clear–they must say nothing. Rorschach, too, thinks the moral choice is clear–evil must be punished. I think the moral choice isn’t clear here, that it’s not that black and white, to refer to Rorschach’s face and worldview. It’s a tough choice, and as Dan asks, how can humans make the decision? Perhaps, insofar as Veidt, Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach can make the decision, they are inhuman? But then again, Dan does make the decision to agree with keeping quiet, even though he at least struggles with it.

Rorschach’s face is made of fabric that is, in his words, “[b]lack and white moving, changing shape … but not mixing. No gray. Very, very beautiful” (6.10). Veidt refers back to this when he describes Rorschach as “a man of great integrity, but [who] seems to see the world in very black and white, Manichean terms,” and Veidt sees that as “an intellectual limitation” (last page of issue 11). This would speak against my statement above of Veidt seeming to be very sure of himself, somewhat black and white himself, but I think he is sure of himself as having decided that things are not either good or evil, but evil can be used in the service of good. And, as noted in class today, Rorschach refuses to “compromise”: “Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise” (12.20; see also 10.22).

This black and white stance, this inability to compromise, reminds me of course of Miller’s The Crucible, where he criticizes (in his notes) the Manichean worldview of “us” vs “them,” where “we” are the good, the Godly, and anyone who is against us is diabolical. When then leads me to think also of the cold war, and both sides being unwilling to compromise, to back down for fear the other would take advantage of this. And I don’t think this is portrayed in the novel as a positive thing! When two groups or two people are both so certain they are right and refuse to move towards the other in any way, we are going to end up in conflict rather than, as we discussed in class today, coming together, uniting, connecting (which seems to be one of the things valued in the text).

Darkness and light

Lisbon Sunset in Black and White, Flickr photo shared by Pedro Ribeiro Simões, licensed CC BY 2.0

Finally, I want to think a little about the black and white images in the text. There is one panel that’s entirely black, and another that’s entirely white. The entirely black one is at the end of issue 6. Malcolm is looking at a Rorschach blot, thinking about why people argue, like he and his wife, when “Life’s so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing” (6.28). He begins to muse about the meaninglessness of life, the “real horror” of life (echoes of Heart of Darkness?). Looking into the Rorschach blot, he tries to find meaning there, but can’t: “The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else” (6.28). And the next panel is merely blackness, as the ‘camera’ zooms in on the blackness of the Rorschach blot, followed by a quote from Nietzsche: “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you” (6.28).

I haven’t looked into this quote from Nietzsche much, but one possible interpretation of “the abyss” that fits with its use here is the utter lack of meaning, the emptiness of the universe in the sense that we just don’t matter; it will go on with or without us, uncaring. There is no meaning to life, no morality but what we impose on it. Rorschach says something similar in 6.26: “Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose.” And he imposes a stark, black-and-white morality on what is, at root, just empty blackness.

The all-white panel is at the end of issue 11 (11.28) when the creature Veidt has sent to New York arrives and kills millions of people. Bernie and Bernard are split apart into fragments the same way that Jon is before he becomes Dr. Manhattan. On 4.8, where he is depicted being pulled apart into fragments, he says, “the light is taking me to pieces.” The same thing is happening on 11.28, where the characters’ faces are lit up before they are taken to pieces and all that’s left is light in the last panel.

This light and the fragmentation that results is of course reminiscent of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the “shadows” of people that were sometimes left on the walls are like the black images of Jon and then Bernie and Bernard left in the panels on 4.8 and 11.28. On 6.16, Malcolm points out the link between the silhouettes painted on the street walls and the atomic shadows. While the black darkness of meaninglessness is a horror, so is the blinding white light that tears us into pieces.

Veidt talks about ushering in “an age of illumination so dazzling that humanity will reject the darkness in its heart” (12.17) (again, echoes of Heart of Darkness). He is associated with ‘light’ in the sense of enlightenment, knowledge, but also with the light in the television screens he is continually watching. I’m not sure what to make of this, exactly, except it seems that the kind of light he brings, the “dazzling illumination,” is more like the cold, calculating rationality of someone who sees things only in the big picture, who weighs the lives lost to the lives saved as if they are mere numbers. It is like, I think, the inhuman perspective of Dr. Manhattan, whose view-from-all-time makes him think of human life as invaluable and unnecessary. He does, that is, until he sees individuals as improbable “miracles” (9.27)–until he begins to see the value of specific individuals, of their particularity coming from chaos as being miraculous. Veidt doesn’t care about individuals, only the abstract concepts of “humanity” and “peace” vs “war.”

Well, I think that’s quite enough musing for the moment. I’m not sure I’ve made anything any clearer for anyone else, but I do think I’m a bit clearer on some of my own views of these characters and this story.

On sympathizing with Abigail Williams

In Arts One this week we talked about Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In both our seminars this week there were presentations by students that led me to question my initial response to the play (okay, actually, quite often I question my initial responses to texts during seminars! But I’m going to write about one such instance here).

Specifically, the students asked if we might see Abigail Williams, who is easily cast as a villain in the play, in a somehow more sympathetic light. I have to admit that I really didn’t like Abigail when I read the play the first, second or third times (all this term; this is the first time I’ve read the play–or at least, so far as I remember). I thought I’d use this blog post to think through the more nuanced view the students brought up in class.

“Tiffany as Mary Warren in The Crucible,” Flickr photo shared by Len “Doc” Radin, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

What students brought up in class about Abigail

One student pointed out how the people who end up accusing others in the play are those with very little power. Tituba begins the accusations in Act One, pointing to Sarah Good and Goody Osburn. Then Abigail takes up the thread and names those two, plus one more person. Then Betty speaks and names more. Though, as far as I am aware, there may have been accusations by others in the Salem witch trials, in the play it is only by those with little power: a slave, young girls (several of whom are servants). Can we think of this as a way for these women to gain some degree of power in their society? Does this alter our perception of Abigail or the other girls at all? Does the fact that I may not be doing justice to what the student was asking about, but these are the thoughts I got from her presentation.

Another student on a different seminar day asked something similar as part of a larger set of questions, though this time focused on the title of the play. If a crucible is a vessel in which something is subjected to a great deal of heat and pressure, might we see this being the case for Abigail, and might it be that she responded in a way we can sympathize with? Again, I may have missed the point the student was getting to, exactly, but this is what I remember/what I got out of it.

We had some very interesting discussions on these issues (not as much on the second presentation, as (my fault) I didn’t leave enough time for us to discuss it all together as a group after smaller groups talked about it), with some good points brought up. Among them:

Responsibility for what happened to the people who were accused cannot all laid on the girls. They made false accusations, yes, but who acted on them? Who believed them and brought trials that led to convictions and deaths? Those who were older and who should have been wiser.
- Though I suppose that in those times and in that place it is at least understandable why things happened as they did. There was a real fear of witchcraft, among other evils. We can see why it happened, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still condemn it and say that those who were in positions of power should have stopped it.

In the historical events, Abigail was much younger than she is in the play: she was around 11 or 12, whereas the play turns her age to 17 (according to the Introduction to our text, in order to bring her age closer to Proctor’s (who was really in his 60s but in the play is 35) so he could introduce a sexual relationship between them). It is not terribly uncommon for children to blame others when they are suspected of wrongdoing, I think (not all children do this, of course, but hearing things like “I didn’t do it…it was her!” is not entirely uncommon).
- When you think about Abigail as a real, historical figure at so young an age, I think she becomes much more sympathetic. It becomes more understandable that she would react this way, trying to get out of being blamed, and she may have less of a deep sense of the consequences of her actions.
- Can we see her as sympathetic as an older child, at 17? Does the age difference change how we see her actions? I think it does, obviously, but at the same time I can see that a 17-year-old is still quite young, and her reactions to her situation may be understandable due at least to her age. But there’s more (next point).

Sure, Miller changes her age and Proctor’s age to make a sexual relationship between them more…what? Plausible? Excusable? Acceptable? But is it, really? Can’t we see Proctor in a negative light for taking advantage of a young girl? I’d like to say this is something I had thought of before our seminar meetings, but it isn’t. I was enlightened by the students (happens often).
- I’m rather embarrassed I didn’t see it this way. He had the power in the relationship; she was a servant and a young girl, he was head of the household, older, and as a man already had more power in the society. This is not to say he didn’t have a lot to lose as well as she, for being branded a “lecher” at that time and place was very bad. But when she responds to him putting her off by trying to get him back, hoping to marry him by replacing his wife, it’s not a terribly surprising response from someone so young and vulnerable.

Some of my thoughts after seminars…

The play does, of course, show Proctor’s sexual relationship with Abigail as something to be lamented, but not because of the age difference or power difference, but because he has betrayed his wife and his own sense of himself. Nothing about what it has done to Abigail. In fact, she is a “whore” in Proctor’s eyes (Act 3), and it seems that is how the audience is meant to see her as well. We are to sympathize with Proctor, who has committed a sin against himself and his wife, and we are to see Abigail as a scheming, murdering harlot. Elizabeth Proctor, who seems to be presented quite sympathetically in the play, says of Abigail: “The girl is murder! She must be ripped out of the world!” (Act 2). And, I think, that is the tone we get about Abigail throughout the play.

I do think, now, after seminars and thinking about it further, that though Abigail and Betty and the others reacted very, very badly, if we see the events of the play just from Proctor’s point of view we miss the possible effects of the sexual relationship on Abigail and see her just as a spiteful, cruel, manipulative, delusional teenager. The play even has a deleted Act (included in our version of it as an appendix) in which Proctor and Abigail meet in the woods, and in which we are told, through stage directions, that Proctor “see[s] her madness now.” Perhaps this makes her more sympathetic (she has mental issues rather than being simply cruel and evil), but it does not do justice to thinking about her position as a teenager with little power, in love with an older man, and doing whatever she can to get back what he should never have given her in the first place.

Also, I noticed a pattern of people confessing, or charging others, when they themselves are threatened. In Act One, Abigail feels threatened because Parris has seen more than she realized of what they did in the woods, and she names Tituba as having called the devil. When Hale asks her what she is concealing, and whether she has sold her soul to Lucifer, Abigail turns when Tituba walks in the room and accuses her immediately: “She made me do it! She made Betty do it!” (Act One).

Tituba, for her part, confesses after she hears threats against her person by Parris and Putnam: Parris says he’ll “whip [her] to [her] death,” and Putnam says she “must be hanged!” (Act One). Is it any wonder that Tituba confesses, when threatened in this way? And Proctor himself even notes that such a thing is likely, in Act Two, when talking to Hale: “There are them that will swear to anything before they’ll hang ….”

Then Mary Warren changes her tune in Act Three after being threatened. She was sticking to the story that she never really saw spirits (also probably said because she was threatened by Proctor, actually–see the end of Act Two), and then when Danforth says “You will confess yourself or you will hang!,” Mary breaks down shortly afterwards and accuses Proctor of forcing her deposition. As she does so, she connects him with the devil, by saying that “He wake me every night, his eyes were like coals and his fingers claw my neck, and I sign, I sign ….”

So might we not say that the girls are acting to protect themselves in the face of threats, of feeling they are vulnerable and about to face very serious accusations or punishments themselves? Does this help us to possibly see Abigail in a more sympathetic light?

I have purposefully argued just the side of saying yes to seeing her sympathetically, ignoring the things in the play that show her in a negative light, to see if I could move over from my initial negative view of her. I think I have. But this is not to say she’s a purely innocent victim in the play, spotless and flawless. This was an exercise in changing my mind. And I’m very glad the students in my seminar gave me the impetus to do it!

trying out voice thread

I’m trying to participate here and there in #HumanMOOC, which is an open online course about humanizing online instruction–how to make online courses feel engaging, connect students to the instructor and each other, etc. Here’s the main course page on the Canvas network, and here’s a more “open” version of the general topics and activities of the course, on Word Press.

This week, one of the activities is to try out Voice Thread. They had created a set of slides, and invited participants to comment on them using Voice Thread (free account to comment on already-created presentations), using either audio, video, or text comments.

I found myself frustrated right away with a couple of things.

1. I’m in a coffee shop, the wifi is not that great, and I kept getting kicked off the wifi. It was difficult to move through this program with spotty wifi!

2. I was looking at the embedded version of the presentation on the course website, and found it very hard to deal with. The text comments only have one or two lines visible, and you have to scroll to see the rest; but the scrolling is so fast that you can’t really read it smoothly. See screenshot below (I blacked out names and faces, b/c I haven’t asked permission if I can post them here! When I blacked out one of them it inexplicably turned into a star!).

You can see how there are just a couple of lines visible and you have to scroll down to see the rest.

Turns out this is solved if you go to the “full screen” option at the top left. You can actually see the whole comment!

3. When I clicked on the next slide, the writing on the slide was not visible due to some dark bar on it:

Turns out this was fixed when I went to full screen as well. Good to maybe highlight these issues for students and tell them to use the full screen view.

Otherwise, it seems like a good tool! It plays through all the comments one by one, automatically, but you can pause them if you want. The audio and video comments seem to work just fine (so long as my wifi stays up).

One downside I can see is that if there are a lot of people giving comments, then it’s quite a long process to go through them all. Of course, you can just tell students they don’t have to go through all of them, but then it will likely be that it’s just the first few people whose comments get read/heard/watched. You can jump to the middle or the end easily, in the timeline at the bottom, but I expect most people would just tend to stick with the beginning ones because those start playing right away when you open up the file. It would be cool if you had the option to mix up the comments randomly for different people watching, to avoid this problem.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure I could use this tool in my courses, at least not easily. British Columbia has a law, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, and in section 3, 30.1, it states that storage of any personal information collected by public bodies (including public universities) must be in Canada unless people give written permission otherwise. Vancouver Island University has put together a useful guide for how to deal with this law in public postsecondary institutions in BC, and at the end there is a sample consent form for students to sign. It’s quite an affair to do, though, because you should to present students with the privacy policies of the tool, what could happen to their information (whom it may be shared with), and more. Plus, if one has many, many students in the course, it’s quite a pain to deal with getting all these things back and making sure everyone has filled one out. And then, what do you do about those who don’t agree? Need to come up with an alternative. And since you have to have an alternative anyway, it’s just easier not to use the tools that store personal information outside Canada!

Many educators are frustrated with this law, but it doesn’t look like it’s changing any time soon, unfortunately. Why does it exist? I’m told it started with the Patriot Act in the U.S., and British Columbia not wanting identifiable information to be shared by its public institutions with the U.S. unless the individuals had given informed consent.

I could use this tool if it had a way to log in and post anonymously. Or maybe people could make up a fake name and a fake email address, but that’s rather a pain for the students!

Apparently, though, one university in BC has integrated Voice Thread with Moodle (see presentation here), so it is at least possible…but I think they had to go through a fair bit of work to get that to happen, and I don’t see anything about Voice Thread and UBC when I do a web search. Hmmmmm….

UBC’s Policy 81: draft of a revision

Screen shot of top of revised Policy 81, available here.

Around this time last year, the University of British Columbia implemented a policy called Policy 81, which mandated that any time a faculty member shared teaching materials with others, any other faculty member at UBC could use them for for-credit courses. The text of the current policy, not the revised one, can be found here. However, this link may change to the new policy once a revised version is passed; description of the old policy and my thoughts about it can be found in the blog posts below:

A blog post explaining the basics of the policy

A post discussing my fears of how it might affect faculty attitudes towards sharing their teaching materials openly

Slides and notes from my presentation at the Open Education 2015 conference on this policy

Revised draft policy

In February 2015, about a year after the initial policy was passed by the UBC Board of Governors, a revised version was put forward for comment. You can see the text of that revised version here (note, this is just a draft policy for comment–it has not been passed!). Here are the most important aspects, to my mind.

section 2.3: “UBC Scholars own all the intellectual property in the Teaching Materials that they create but, in order to facilitate ongoing use and collaboration where they have contributed those Teaching Materials to a resource for the collective use of their Department, School, or other academic unit or where UBC has made a material investment in the development of the Teaching Materials, UBC has the irrevocable right to use and revise those Teaching Materials in UBC credit courses and to share those rights within the community of UBC Scholars.”
Section 2.4: “For clarity, resources for collective use are repositories that exist independent from course delivery platforms such as Connect or individual course webpages.”
Section 2.5: “… a material investment in the development of Teaching Materials involves the provision of compensation, facilities, equipment or other resources beyond those ordinarily provided to all UBC instructors in the course of their normal duties, such as, for example, a direct discretionary investment in the development of Teaching Materials.”

Examples of “material investment” listed on the revised policy include receiving a course release to develop new teaching materials, receiving specific payments from the university to develop teaching materials, receiving TA or RA support specifically to develop teaching materials. It does not include having TA support in regular teaching of courses, receiving salary during study leave (even if one develops teaching materials during that time), “incidental use” of UBC computer equipment, or getting one’s usual salary and benefits.

So what would count under this policy, besides getting a course release or having TA or RA help to develop course materias? I’m guessing, maybe, getting a grant to develop certain teaching materials? Maybe if one gets a grant under UBC’s Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund, perhaps, if that involves (as it often does) developing teaching materials?

At any rate, this is a much restricted version of the current policy, which says that whenever one shares teaching materials with someone else–it is notoriously unclear in what “sharing” consists–then UBC can use those materials in for-credit courses. Now, it’s only if one deposits them in a collective resource within their department, school, etc., or of UBC has made a “material investment” in them beyond one’s usual salary and benefits. It’s helpful that they’ve now clarified, in section 2.4, that posting one’s teaching materials to a Learning Management System or a course website doesn’t count–that was one question numerous people had about the current policy, namely whether “sharing” includes posting in such places.

Reaction from others

I haven’t heard much of anything around campus about this proposed revision. There doesn’t seem to be much of an uproar about it, which is not surprising because it is so much more restricted.

Still, the faculty union has expressed some questions and concerns. I mention just some of those, below, for the sake of this not being too terribly long. Many of their questions and concerns sound quite reasonable to me.

The Faculty Association letter (linked to above) states that they understood, through discussions with the university, that this would be an “opt-in” policy, and they would like that clarified: “we recommend that the words ‘and have expressly agreed to share their intellectual property rights’ be added following the words ‘…or other academic unit’ in clause 2.3.” The idea here is to introduce “transaction points” where faculty members would be made clearly aware that their work will fall under the policy.
- This is an interesting point because reading the revised policy as worded does not suggest any “opt-in” aspect. I would have had no idea that that was part of the discussion. I’m curious to see what the wording is when the policy is passed, because I get the impression from the current revised wording that it is not an opt-in policy, but happens automatically when one or more of the conditions are met.
- I’m not sure what would happen at this sort of “transaction point.” Would the faculty member just be made aware that this would be a situation that would fall under the policy, and then they could decide to go ahead with receiving the “material investment” or not, and if they do, then that would constitute agreement to share intellectual property rights? I think maybe not, because of the next point (see below).
- Is “shar[ing] intellectual property rights” the right language? I think it’s clearer, because fairly commonly spoken of, to say that the faculty member retains IP but provides UBC with a “license” to use the materials in such and such a way.

Similarly, the Faculty Association notes in the letter linked above that the current policy allows faculty members to opt out, and not have their teaching materials be allowed to be used and revised by others at UBC, but this one does not. Will there be an opt-out possibility? [April 17, 2015:] I re-read the Faculty Association letter and realized I had made a mistake in interpreting it earlier. It actually says that in the earlier version, there was the possibility to specify limits on how one’s teaching materials could be used. I had forgotten that that was the case in the earlier policy. So the following bullet points actually don’t apply anymore. I leave them here just because the earlier version of this post had them, in case anyone returns later.
- Also interesting. I wonder if the opt-out possibility in the earlier version is because it had such a wider scope than this one, but maybe they aren’t going to allow opting out for this restricted version? Since the earlier version gave the opt-out option only if UBC did not provide a “material investment” beyond one’s usual salary and duties to develop the teaching materials, and only if one did not deposit those in a collection in one’s department, school, etc., then I bet they are not thinking of an opt-out option for this one.
- Plus, if this one will be opt-in, as under number 1, then an option for opting out would not be needed, right? Or is it that #1 just asks that faculty be made aware when their work will fall under the policy, not that it will only do so if they agree to allow the university to use their teaching materials under the policy?
- Perhaps the Faculty Association would like to see a “transaction point” before any work falls under the policy, in which the faculty member would be made aware that their work would fall under the policy, and then they have to decide specifically yes or no, whether they would like to share their work in this way (even while still receiving the “material investment”). That way, they could either opt in or opt out. But that doesn’t seem to need a policy…couldn’t we just have an opt-in system where people could share their teaching materials if they want to and not if they don’t? Does that need a policy, if it’s completely voluntary? I’m not sure, but I would guess not. And I’m guessing that such a voluntary opt-in system is not what the Board of Governors is looking for.

The Faculty Association says in their letter that they would like to see more clarity on what “material investment” means, and specifically, to call it “extraordinary material investment” instead, to point to the difference between investment in one’s normal work and investment beyond that.
- I think the change to “extraordinary material investment” makes sense.
- The FA also points out that it’s fairly common in departments to give faculty members course releases to create teaching materials (which is news to me, actually). They are claiming that this is part of a faculty member’s “regular duties” because it is a common practice (I think that’s the point). I think what they’re getting to here is that they don’t want this to be part of the policy automatically, but it would be discussed at some “transaction point” and both the university and the faculty member would then agree that it falls under the policy. But see my above questions about what would actually happen at those transaction points–would one be able to receive the “material investment” while also opting out of giving UBC permission to reuse and revise the materials?

The Faculty Association letter notes that the policy is silent on attribution: will those whose materials are revised or reused need to be attributed? The previous version of the policy did include provisions for that (unless one says one doesn’t want to be attributed).

[New as of April 17, 2015:] The Faculty Association wonders in their letter about the definition of “UBC Scholars” in the policy, because it allows all UBC Scholars to reuse and revise teaching materials that fall under the policy. Section 2.1 states, for example: “UBC wishes to enable the members of its community who teach or participate in courses of study at UBC (“UBC Scholars”) to collaborate in the development of materials used in association with those courses.” As the Faculty Association notes, this seems to imply that “the entire student body of the university” would be able to reuse and revise teaching materials that the policy applies to. The FA letter states that this is too wide an audience: “We do not believe that the University intends to be so expansive, but the current wording could produce such an outcome.”
- I have no idea what the University intends by defining “UBC Scholars” in this expansive fashion. In the previous version of the policy it was explicitly stated that the rights to reuse and revise teaching materials lay only with “UBC Instructors.” This draft quite clearly indicates that anyone who participates in courses of study (e.g., students in for-credit courses, but perhaps also in not-for-credit courses?) would also have such rights.
- On one level, I actually think of this in a kind of positive light: I think that it could be fantastic for instructors to make some of their teaching materials available for students to revise. It could be a great learning experience for them. On the other hand, though, sharing teaching materials with students and allowing them to reuse and revise them should be an individual choice of faculty members, in my view.
- A couple of colleagues have brought to my attention that students are uploading their course materials into websites that sell them to others, or allow the materials to be viewed if a student uploads something else, all without the instructors’ permission. This sort of blanket statement about giving students the irrevocable right to reuse and revise would facilitate this sort of behaviour, because if the materials fell under the policy then the faculty member could not complain if this is what ended up happening to them.
  - Personally, of course, I share my teaching materials with a CC license, so students may do this with them. I don’t care so much except that others will think they need to pay for materials I am making freely available, or that they need to violate someone’s copyright to get a hold of them. That part I dislike.

Reaction from me

Well, I’m such an advocate for sharing one’s teaching materials openly–publicly, with an open license–that I don’t mind this policy at all. I think it is much less likely to lead people to not want to share their work openly than the last one did, given how much more restricted it is. As noted in the blog posts listed at the beginning of this one, a number of faculty members at UBC were very upset by the original policy, because it seemed to them as if UBC were trying to get their hands on teaching materials in order to use them to make money from courses without having to pay people to develop teaching materials (e.g., in online courses they offer for a fee).

I could be wrong, though; maybe even this restricted policy will lead to the same concerns. I just haven’t heard them yet.

As previously, my main concern with all this has been that it may have led people to be less likely to consider sharing their teaching materials publicly with an open license (such as a Creative Commons license). If they have become suspicious of UBC’s motives (which a small survey I did last Fall suggests some have–see my slides and notes from a presentation I did on this policy last Fall) and don’t want to share even with just UBC, then they aren’t going to be willing to share more widely (because then UBC could also use the materials).

Previous to all this, I thought it might have been a good idea to try for a policy that requires a Creative Commons license if one receives a grant to develop teaching materials, such as from the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund at UBC. The money for that grant comes from student fees, and it made sense to me to say that at least students should have access to those materials. Of course, one could give them access through a more restricted policy, and it’s interesting that the Faculty Association specifies in their response to the revised Policy 81, as noted above, that they would like to see it clarified so that it does not include students. But I’m now wondering if the right thing to do at the current time, at least here, wouldn’t be to just focus on efforts to encourage people to share their teaching materials openly on a purely voluntary basis. Any more attempts to make such things into a policy, right here and right now, are not likely to go over well.

What else might be done to increase open sharing of teaching materials?

It would be great if we could raise awareness and give support to people who would like to share their teaching materials openly and publicly–e.g., best practices on formats, where/how to share them, where/how to find those by others that one might use, etc. There’s a bit about open educational resources on the UBC Copyright website (but mostly it’s about how you can use such things under the auspices of copyright law). UBC also has quite a comprehensive and useful Guide to Creative Commons.

I wonder if we might do more beyond having these resources available. I’m trying to do a bit by holding workshops on open education here and there, but it is common that only those already interested in such issues attend.

What else might work to raise awareness and provide support? Assuming that the university would actually prioritize putting money towards this, what would be some good things to do beyond a policy that requires sharing in some form? I’m curious if anyone has any thoughts.

What kind of position I have at UBC

Recently a colleague at another institution asked me some details about the particular kind of position I have at UBC: a tenurable, teaching position. This is not terribly common in N. America (though I am hearing rumours of some more universities and colleges in Canada looking into it), and so I thought I’d share some of these details also on my blog; others may be interested as well.

Two types of faculty tenure streams

I don’t know when this started, but UBC has two kinds of tenure lines, one research-focused and the other teaching-focused. Sometimes the first is called the “research” stream and the second the “teaching stream,” but these are rather misleading because it’s not as if each group doesn’t do the other thing too (teaching and research). I’ve noticed that the most recent nomenclature (as represented on UBC’s human resources site) is the “Professor” vs the “Professor of Teaching” path.

Which brings up another interesting point about names: the third, top rung of both paths have similar names: Professor and Professor of Teaching. The lower rungs are different.

Professor path: (1) Assistant Professor; (2) Associate Professor; (3) Professor
Professor of Teaching path: (1) Instructor I; (2) Sr. Instructor; (3) Professor of Teaching

There has been talk of changing the “instructor” titles because they are simply odd (made worse by the fact that there is a role called “Instructor II” but it is not in the Professor of Teaching path at all), but nothing has been set in stone yet.

Different criteria for tenure and promotion

1. Professor path

There is a one-page chart on this HR site, under “criteria,” that gives the basic criteria for tenure and promotion in that path (and you can see on that chart that “instructor II” is actually in that path…very confusing…I think this is going to be changed soon, as noted on our faculty union blog).

There are three criteria; the two that differ the most between the two paths are teaching and scholarly activity, so I’ll focus on those.

teaching–for appt. at Assistant professor, one just needs to demonstrate evidence of or potential for successful teaching; for associate, successful teaching should be above that expected for an Assistant prof.; for Professor, excellence and high quality in teaching

scholarly activity–often this is research, but could also be creative and professional work with dissemination
- The Senior Appointments Committee’s guide to promotion and tenure (linked to on the HR page noted above) notes on p. 12 that Scholarship of Teaching and Learning can be counted for faculty in this stream as part of their “scholarly activity”

service

2. Professor of teaching path

I can link directly to the chart for this one on the HR site: click here.

Three criteria here two, but one is different than the above:

teaching–for tenure at Sr. Instructor, one must demonstrate excellence in teaching; for Professor of teaching, one must have “outstanding” teaching, be “distinctive” in the field of teaching and learning

educational leadership
- for tenure at Sr. Instructor
  - “Requires evidence of… demonstrated educational leadership”
  - “Requires evidence of… involvement in curriculum development and innovation, and other teaching and learning initiatives”
- “Keep abreast of current development in their respective discipline and in the field of teaching and learning”
for Professor of Teaching
- “Requires evidence of outstanding achievement in…educational leadership”
- “Requires evidence of… sustained and innovative contributions to curriculum development, course design and other initiatives that advance the University’s ability to excel in its teaching and learning mandate”
Service

Note that “scholarly activity” is replaced with “educational leadership” here. Indeed, the Professor of Teaching chart says at the bottom that “Scholarly Activity is not a criterion or an expectation for tenure or promotion through the Professor of Teaching ranks.”

The current Collective Agreement also describes what is needed for promotion to Sr. Instructor and to Professor of Teaching:

3.04 “Appointment at or promotion to the rank of Senior Instructor requires evidence of excellence in teaching, demonstrated educational leadership, involvement in curriculum development and innovation, and other teaching and learning initiatives. It is expected that Senior Instructors will keep abreast of current developments in their respective disciplines, and in the field of teaching and learning. A Senior Instructor may be promoted to the rank of Professor of Teaching in the fifth or subsequent years in rank.”
3.05 “Appointment at or promotion to the rank of Professor of Teaching requires evidence of outstanding achievement in teaching and educational leadership, distinction in the field of teaching and learning, sustained and innovative contributions to curriculum development, course design and other initiatives that advance the University’s ability to excel in its teaching and learning mandate. Initial appointments at this rank are normally tenured appointments.”

There has been a great deal of discussion in the past few years as to what “educational leadership” means. The Senior Appointments Committee’s guide to promotion and tenure lists the following as possible sources of evidence of educational leadership (p. 18):

“Leadership taken at UBC and elsewhere to advance innovation and excellence in teaching
Contributions to curriculum development and renewal (curriculum design/re-design) within the unit/Faculty
Pedagogical innovation
Scholarly teaching with impact within and outside the unit
Applications of and contributions to the scholarship of teaching and learning
Innovative use of learning technology
Leadership and contribution to teaching and learning initiatives and programs
Advancement of interdisciplinary/inter-professional collaboration
Leadership through mentoring
TLEF grants and other funding obtained for educational improvement/advising
Other activities that support evidence-based educational excellence, leadership and impact within and beyond the University.”

For example, I have taken on a leadership role of late in “open education,” talking with others about the value of making at least some of one’s teaching and learning work open to be used, revised, reused by others. I have given several presentations on this at conferences and workshops, and was chosen to be “Faculty Fellow” with BCcampus’ Open Textbook program this year–I’m engaging in outreach and advocacy about open textbooks and other open educational resources, as well as participating in research about these topics. I think that counts as “educational leadership.”

Different criteria for merit

I have discovered, over the years since I’ve been in the “Professor of Teaching” path (I’m currently in the second level, a tenured Sr. Instructor), that if I do any research in my discipline, it neither counts for promotion nor for merit pay. The reason is because of this clause in the Collective Agreement:

2.04 “Judgments [for merit awards] shall be based on the duties expected of a member in the period in question and shall not be based on activities in which the member had not the opportunity to engage. For example, a faculty member who is not expected to teach but is expected to carry out research and contribute service should be considered on the latter two criteria. A member whose assigned duties consist of teaching and service (e.g. Instructor I) should be considered only on those two criteria.”

This language is outdated; it has been the same for many years, and yet in the meantime the requirement of “educational leadership” has come into existence for those who are in the Professor of Teaching stream–so an Instructor I would not have duties only in teaching and service, but also educational leadership.

However, even if we included educational leadership as part of the basis for judgments of merit, it wouldn’t include research into one’s disciplinary area, only research on teaching and learning–see the above examples of “educational leadership,” which include only research in SoTL and not research in one’s (other) discipline.

The good and the, well, questionable

There are many things I like about the kind of job I have. It is, for me, a perfect fit between having far too many courses to be able to do anything but teach, and being in a research-heavy position that makes me feel like I should not be spending too much time on teaching or I won’t be able to fulfill the other aspects of my job. Those of us in the Professor of Teaching stream teach more than our colleagues in the Professor stream–some of us more than others, depending on the department and the faculty (Faculty of Arts, of Science, of Education, etc.). But since our jobs include teaching, service and educational leadership, we can at least make the case that we need to have enough time to do the latter two, and can’t be too overloaded with teaching duties to be able to fulfill what is expected.

There are still some concerns, though.

1. That disciplinary research is pretty much discouraged for those in the Professor of Teaching path is one area of contention. Part of the concern is that those in the Professor of Teaching path are also supposed to, as noted in section 3.04 of the Collective Agreement, as quoted above, “keep abreast of current developments in their respective disciplines.” It has been (persuasively, to my mind) argued that one way to do so is to not only read the disciplinary literature in one’s area but also add to it oneself. The answer I keep hearing, over and over, is that it is certainly fine if one wants to do research in one’s disciplinary area, but it won’t count for educational leadership. Perhaps it could count for the “teaching” part of one’s job description. But the message I’ve gotten over the past few years is that it is not to be taken into considerations in judgments about merit. If I publish SoTL work yes, but not if I publish an article on Foucault.

There appears to be a real push to keep the two faculty streams separate in this way. Not only do you not have to do disciplinary research if you go into the teaching stream, you’re actually encouraged not to (because it takes away time from the other things you should be doing), and you won’t get much credit for it professionally. However, I suppose we could look at the parallel in the Professor path: if someone in that stream became an outstanding teacher, earned teaching awards, became an educational leader in various ways, that would be great; but they probably wouldn’t make full professor on the basis of that. So even if I published a lot of great stuff on Foucault (which I haven’t had time to do, but you know…just imagine it’s true) it would be great but I wouldn’t become Professor of Teaching on the basis of that. I guess I can kind of see the point there. It does, however, feel strange that it’s possible for me to publish more in my discipline than a colleague in the research stream and not get merit while that person does. I can see why it’s the case, and I would get merit if I got a teaching award, maybe; would that person get merit as a research prof for a teaching award? I don’t know.

2. Another concern I’ve run across lately is that while there are a number of research grants available for disciplinary research, there is much less available for research in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. For awhile it was the case that most of the research grant money available at UBC was not available for those in the Professor of Teaching stream to apply for. That is slowly changing, at least in the Faculty of Arts, where now, finally we can apply for grants to hire undergraduate research assistants, which used to be off limits for those in the Professor of Teaching path (which made no sense to me). And fortunately, we can apply for grants in the Social Sciences and Humanities from the federal government (haven’t checked for other areas of study outside social sciences and humanities).

The problem is that it’s very hard to compete for grant funding when you’re going up against people who have much more time than you do to devote to research. What I’d like to see is more funding dedicated to research work on teaching and learning. We have a fund here at UBC called the “Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund,” which has quite a bit of money for improving teaching and learning, but it’s quite clearly focused on things that are directly applied to teaching and learning, not so much on research needed previous to application (as I’ve recently discovered! Which is fine…it’s just that I’d like to have a place to apply for money for the research). I have recently put in a grant application to the federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council on a SoTL project; we’ll see how that goes in the national competition amongst many people who have more time for research than I do.

UBC has an Institute for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and I was happy to be able to apply for and receive funding from them for a project this year. But it’s now time for me to seek sources of more funds than they have, and time for others to have a chance to get funds from them. Plus, next year they are offering grants 1/5 the size of what I was able to get (though I’m not actually using that much, so some of mine will go back to the kitty for others!).

3. Finally, there is a bit of disagreement around campus as regards the degree to which these two “streams” should be considered as equal–in the sense of whether or not Instructor I’s should have the same privileges and rights as Assistant Professors, same with Sr. Instructors and Associate Professors, etc. A lot of that is still being worked out. One issue of contention is voting rights within departments: can Sr. Instructors, who are tenured members of a department, vote on the appointment or tenure of Assistant Professors? Associate professors can vote on tenure for Instructor I to Sr. Instructor, but so far, Sr. Instructors (tenured) can’t vote on tenure from Assistant to Associate professor. And same with the third level. It looks like some of this is changing, according to our faculty union’s blog: starting with the next collective agreement, it looks like, “in the case of initial appointments the committee will now comprise all tenured and tenure-track members of the department.” So all tenure-track members of the department can have a say on initial hiring. But I don’t see any changes on the horizon for tenure and promotion.

It does seem a little odd that a Professor of Teaching, the top rung of one of the streams, can have no say in the tenure and promotion of someone moving from Assistant to Associate Professor. Surely, just as those focused on research can be counted on to make intelligent decisions regarding quality teaching for those of us going through tenure and promotion in the Professor of Teaching path, those of us in the latter path can be counted on to make intelligent decisions regarding quality research. It seems questionable to me to have this disparity.

Conclusion

I have to say I’m really happy with my position at UBC. I am thrilled that I can focus on teaching, which is what I love, and also have the job security of tenure and the chance to move up to a higher level of recognition of my work and become a Professor of Teaching. I feel incredibly lucky that I was able to get a job like this! Which doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement in some areas (as there is, I expect, with most jobs).

Student questions about Fanon

Frantz Fanon, on Wikimedia Commons, by Pacha J. Willka, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0

In Arts One this week we’re discussed Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952). I asked students in my seminar group to write down some questions they have about the book, or topics they’d like to discuss. Since we won’t get to all of them in class today, I’m posting them here for the students to be able to refer to and think about.

There were some that we talked about a bit on Wednesday, so I’m not including those. I also didn’t include some of they were pretty similar to ones already on the list.

General questions related to the text

Do all of us have to wear a “white mask” to some extent? How does the seeming need for a mask in Fanon’s time compare for its need in Western society today?
- How does the awareness of one’s own mask affect the way that one perceives the masks of others?
Can this text be applied to other racial/ethnic/marginalised people (i.e., Chinese-Americans or Jewish people)? What about women?

Questions specifically about the text

Is Fanon the narrator throughout? (Who is talking in Chapter 5, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man”?)
- Christina’s additions: What is the significance of the use of the first person singular in this chapter? What does it do? Does it help you to perhaps be able to connect with the experiences related there better (or not)?
- Note that in much of the text, Fanon uses the first person plural, “we,” but in Chapter 5, in the conclusion, and in some parts of the intro he uses “I” (e.g., intro xi-xii, xvi); also uses “I” on 67, 200 (maybe elsewhere).
  - What do you make of these different choices of pronouns in the text? Might he be trying to do different things rhetorically or otherwise by using “we” some places and “I” in others?

I still don’t fully understand how the whites are also alienated. What are they alienated from?

What is the main idea of this book?

How does Fanon’s discussion in this text demonstrate a conformist attitude amongst the black and/or white people?
- Is the conformism the fact that they try to fit into the white culture?
- Or is it perhaps that they so easily accept the “livery” that they are forced to wear?

How can we reconcile the idea of realizing an existentialist blank slate among all of humanity as a solution to racism with Fanon’s comments about people needing an external outlet for their aggression and the other seemingly universal psychological tendencies that lead to racism?

How relevant is the psychoanalysis portion of the book if psychoanalysis isn’t really practiced today and is mainly conjuctural?

What is Fanon’s view of being vs becoming? It seems like he agrees more on being and that the black man always “was.” Does this contradict with his ideas on existentialism?

Does all the poetry distract from his rationalism and “scientific” views?
- Christina: note, though, that he says he’s not going to try to be objective (67, 200), so at least objectivity is not part of his purpose (still, rationality does seem to be).
  - What do you think the purpose of the quotes from poetry are in Chapter 5?
  - Just as FYI, some of the theorists of négritude worked through poetry to try to create a new, positive black identity (among other kinds of texts), and Fanon is quoting from some of them here.

What lies beneath the “black skin” (the idea of “blackness” invented by white colonial bodies)? Is it something achievable, or is it like Plato’s Form of the Good or Kierkegaard’s theory of Faith (incomprehensible/impossible to articulate)?
- What is Fanon’s theory of what is at the centre of a person (under the masks)? Is it freedom? I’m not quite clear on this.

If there is no black identity, is the negritude movement based solely on skin color? If so, isn’t it trapping the black man in his skin and the views of others?
- What happens to African cultural roots present in the Americas if there is no common black identity?

Fanon seems to berate the woman of colour in Chapter 2 despite the fact that he says the “stigma” towards black people is socially constructed. Was this a form of misogyny or was there some overarching purpose in how he said what he did?
- Christina: Does he also criticize the black man looking for the love of a white woman in chapter 3, in the same way? Or does the woman of colour seem to be more criticized?
- Christina: I noticed also a cringeworthy section on p. 134, where he talks about a fear of rape being possibly a desire for rape. This is related, I think, to the psychoanalytic view of a defense mechanism called “reversal,” where an unconscious desire or fantasy is switched into its opposite in order to get past the “censor” (Freud’s term) that will not allow the unaltered unconscious content into consciousness. Still, it suggests at least a lack of understanding of the deep horror and violence of rape.

When Fanon criticizes Mannoni in Chapter 4, is it mainly because of the fact that Mannoni describes the dependency complex as a precolonial problem? (Where Fanon argues that it’s because of white society that the inferiority complex exists among blacks.)
- Christina’s reply: Yes, that’s definitely one part of it. See, e.g.,
  - 65: we can’t endorse this sentence of M. Mannoni: “The fact that when an adult Malagasy is isolated in a different environment he can become susceptible to the classical type of inferiority complex proves almost beyond doubt that the germ of the complex was latent in him from childhood.”
  - 66: why does Mannoni “want to make the inferiority complex exist prior to colonization? Here we see the mechanism at work in psychiatry, which explains there are latent forms of psychosis that become evident following a traumatic experience.”
    - It’s like saying varicose veins are caused by weak vein walls rather than standing for 10 hours a day
  - “The reactions and behavior born out of the arrival of the Europeans in Madagascar were not tacked onto pre-existing reactions and behavior.” (75)
  Fanon criticizes Mannoni for not paying enough attention to how it’s the colonial situation that is the root cause of the neuroses.
  - “When the white man arrived in Madagascar he disrupted the psychological horizon and mechanisms. …. Since a new element had been introduced, an attempt should have been made to understand the new relations” (77).
    - “The arrival of the white man in Madagascar inflicted an unmistakable wound. The consequences of this European irruption in Madagascar are not only psychological, since, as everyone has said, there are inner relationships between consciousness and social context” (77).
  - “As for the ‘dependency complex’ of the Malagasy, at least in the sole form in which we can understand and analyze it, it too originates with the arrival on the island of the white colonizers” (88).
  But Fanon also criticizes Mannoni for not recognizing that with colonization came a new identity for the colonized (see next point, below).
What does Fanon mean by the “Malagasy no longer exists”? (77)
- Christina’s reply:
- Earlier in the chapter Fanon says that “…since Gallieni the Malagasy has ceased to exist” (74)
  - Joseph Simon Gallieni was made French governor of Madagascar in 1896; in 1897 he outlawed the Malagasy monarchy and exiled the queen
  - I think Fanon means here that whatever identity they had before being colonized has disappeared, and what they have now is a creation of their interaction with the colonizers: ““What Monsieur Mannoni has forgotten is that the Malagasy no longer exists; he has forgotten that the Malagasy exists in relation to the European” (77).

Finally, I have a few questions too, that I’d be interested to talk about (but I doubt there will be time in class today!)

My questions

What do you make of the first line, about not expecting an explosion today b/c it’s too early or too late?
- He talks about explosions and fragmentation elsewhere too:
  - In chapter 5, the narrator says that when he is fixed by the white gaze he loses his temper: “I explode. Here are the fragments put together by another me” (89)
  - “The black man is a toy in the hands of the white man. So in order to break the vicious circle, he explodes” (119).
  - He talks about being “dissected” by the white gaze on p. 95
- Is the reference on p. xiii to no longer shouting related to there not being an “explosion today”?

In Chapter 5, the narrator talks about how “the image of one’s body” under the white gaze is “an image in the third person” (90). Then, later, he says that he experienced his body no longer in the third person, but in “triple”: “I existed in triple” (92).
- What interpretation can you give to the “third person” and existing in “triple” here?

Fanon says on pp. 2 and 21 that when one speaks a language one also appropriates a culture. How might this be the case? Do you agree?

Media!

So, this is kind of exciting for me. I’ve been mentioned in some articles and blog posts, and even interviewed!

First, as a result of my presentation at the Open Education Conference 2014 in Washington, DC, I was interviewed by Jenni Hayman of the Open Policy Network about UBC’s Policy 81. You can see a video recording of this interview, which was done via Skype, on the OPN blog.

Most recently, there was a writeup of my research on peer feedback on writing, on the BCcampus website.

And then there was an article about the three Faculty Fellows (including me) with the BCcampus Open Textbook program for 2014-2015.

So it’s not the New York Times or even the CBC, but hey, it’s a start.

Presentation at Open Ed conference 2014 (on UBC’s Policy 81)

I have been waiting to make this post, because like last year, all the sessions this year were videorecorded, and I was going to wait until the recordings were posted on Youtube so I could embed mine here. But the conference was in November of 2014, and it’s now February of 2015, and the Open Education Conference Youtube channel still just has the keynotes from the 2014 conference up. So I’m going to at least post my slides here.

This presentation is from the Open Education Conference 2014 in Washington, DC. It was about UBC’s Policy 81, and my fears that it may have lead to enough bad feelings among some people at UBC that they are no longer willing to share teaching materials with an open license. I did a small survey (28 people responded) of faculty members at UBC who had opted out of Policy 81 by signing up on a registry to do so, and found that that was indeed the case for some.

Now, just this week a revised Policy 81 has come out, and the university is asking for comments. I have a blog post about that too.

Here are the slides from my presentation:

How not to promote open sharing of teaching materials at a university: UBC’s Policy 81 from Christina Hendricks

I also have a lengthy set of notes for the presentation (surprisingly lengthy, given that I spoke for about 20-25 minutes, if I remember correctly (so obviously I skimmed over much of this!). In case you’re wanting more background on any of this, you can check out the notes:

“How Not to Encourage Open Sharing of Teaching Materials at a University,” Notes (PDF)

Finally, as a result of this presentation, I was interviewed by Jenni Hayman of the Open Policy Network about UBC’s Policy 81. You can see a video recording of this interview, which was done via Skype, on the OPN blog.

Governance at UBC

At the presentation at the conference, some people asked about whether or not there was shared governance at UBC–how could it be that the administration and the faculty union were so at odds on this issue? A good question. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure how governance works at UBC, but here’s what I do know.

The policy was passed by the Board of Governors, which consists of (according to the University Act of BC)

the UBC Chancellor
the UBC President
11 people appointed by the lieutenant governor, two of whom should be from a list of nominees from the alumni association
3 students (undergrad or grad)
3 faculty members
2 UBC employees who are not faculty members

So there are just three faculty members out of 21 people on the board, and 11 out of those 21 are not currently at UBC (though two of those 11 are probably alumni, from what I can tell). The faculty voice, then, is pretty small.

There is also the Senate of UBC, which is part of the overall governance. The membership of the Senate is pretty complicated, so I’ll just copy here from the University Act, part 7:

(a) the chancellor;

(b) the president, who is the senate’s chair;

(c) the academic vice president who must work through a part not specified under section 3.1 or equivalent;

(d) the deans of faculties who must work through a part not specified under section 3.1;

(e) the chief librarian or a person designated for the purpose by the chief librarian;

(f) the director of continuing education or a person designated for the purpose by the director;

(g) a number of faculty members equal to twice the number of senate members provided in paragraphs (a) to (f), to consist of 2 members of each faculty elected by the members of that faculty, and the remainder elected by the faculty members in the manner that they, in joint meeting, determine, but only faculty members employed through parts not specified under section 3.1 can vote or be elected;

(h) a number of students, equal to the number of senate members provided in paragraphs (a) to (f), elected from the students who are members of an undergraduate student society or a graduate student society, in a manner that ensures that at least one student from each faculty is elected, but only students studying through parts not specified under section 3.1 can vote or be elected;

(i) 4 persons who are not faculty members, elected by and from the convocation;

(j) one member to be elected by the governing body of each affiliated college of the university;

(k) additional members, determined by the senate, without altering the ratio set out in paragraphs (g) and (h).

So clearly, the Senate has a much greater representation of the faculty than the Board of Governors. But which body does what?

The Board of Governors website lays out the different responsibilities of the two. Briefly, according to that site:

The Board of Governors is responsible for the business of the University – its administration, finances, operations, assets and place in the community – and the integrity of such.

The Senates have a more focused responsibility for the academic integrity of the University, subject to the Board’s involvement where academic matters interface with matters of business and the larger community.

According to the longer list on the site, the Board of Governors has a say in most of the activities and policies of the university. The things that the Senate determines on its own are mostly to do with academic matters, such as academic discipline, final exams, admit students, grant degrees, and manage the library.

The procedure for adopting policies by the Board of Governors, such as Policy 81, seems to be that the policy is proposed, then there is a comment period, and then a vote is held among the Board. The UBC Faculty Association (our faculty union) expressed serious concerns about Policy 81 in February 2014, but the policy was passed anyway.

A revised policy

In February 2015, a revised policy 81 was put forward for comment. Please see a later blog post for information on that.