Author Archives: chendric

Students and open education

For an article I am writing this week, I’d like to showcase work by students relating to open education and Open Educational Resources (OER). I’m writing this brief post mostly to gather comments from others on examples I don’t know about!

Here are a few things that come to mind:

  • Student advocacy on campuses and what it has accomplished: there has been some great stuff happening at UBC due to student advocacy around OER, and I’ll talk about that. What else has student advocacy accomplished?
  • Students creating OERs: I will speak about work I know of here at UBC where students are creating OER, including Wikipedia projects and also other open educational resources. What else is out there?
  • Students contributing to open textbooks: Yes, open textbooks are OERs, but I’m separating them out here just for now. I know that Robin DeRosa has involved students in creating open textbooks, and this blog post from the Conversations on Open Education for Language Learning blog talks about a couple more (by students in classes with David Wiley and Lixun Wang). What other such projects do you know about?
  • Anything else that would fall under students working to create, revise, or promote OER?

Please provide your ideas in the comments!

 

Update Aug. 21, 2017: Several people replied on Twitter instead of in the comments below, and in order to keep all of the contributions in one place, I’m embedding the tweets here.

Mobile teaching and learning

On July 26 I participated in an elearning symposium at the University of Washington-Bothell, virtually, on the invitation of Todd Conaway. There were numerous presenters, many from far and wide, including Alan Levine in Arizona and Viv Rolfe in the UK.

Each of the presenters only had 15 minutes to speak, on something related to the symposium’s theme of “Learning Everywhere.” And since several of us were coming in virtually, we didn’t see the rest of the symposium. Fortunately, Todd did a writeup of the whole day, in a blog post.

I wanted to share here what I said in my 15 minutes, in case it’s useful to others.

college students sitting on stone steps of a building, three of them with phones in their hands

People of Berkeley – Meeting Place, shared on Flickr by John Morgan, licensed CC BY 2.0

The title and description of my short presentation were:

Teaching & learning on the go: students and faculty

Our students are learning pretty much everywhere: on the bus, at coffee shops, walking around town…. What can we as teachers to do facilitate that learning? And what can we ourselves do on the go in our teaching and learning practice? Christina will provide a few ideas on these questions, and ask for participants to share their thoughts too.

So yeah, that’s what I had planned. But I didn’t get to that last part of people sharing their thoughts too. I finished what I had planned to say with maybe 1 minute left, so there wasn’t time for discussion while I was there. 15 minutes is hard to squish things into, and I probably took on too much for that time slot. But anyway. Here are my thoughts on the two questions above, expanded a bit from what I actually said in the symposium.

Continue reading →

Open Case Studies project

I am involved in an OER (Open Educational Resources) creation and sharing project called Open Case Studies that started about a year ago. I’m writing this post to give a general overview of the project to introduce it to new people who might want to participate.

This post will generally follow the format of a couple of presentations I’ve already given recently. Here is a set of slides from one of them, that goes over the basics of the project. You can download the slides as powerpoint, here: BCcampus-OpenEdWebinar-OpenCaseStudies-Feb2017

Motivation for the project

This project started from an idea by Daniel Munro, who was in 2015-2016 the Associate VP Academic for the student association at UBC, the Alma Mater Society. He wanted to start a project that would allow for several things:

  • Creation and adaptation of OER by both faculty and students at UBC, to be shared for revision and reuse by others
  • Interdisciplinary discussions and activities–students and faculty working across disciplines
  • Students avoiding “disposable assignments” and instead creating things that add value to the world; this is also connected to the idea of students as producers of knowledge rather than just consumers

You can see more about the objectives of the project on the “about” page of the Open Case Studies project website.

Project in a nutshell

Our project and site involve both faculty and students creating or editing case studies that are openly licensed (CC BY) to allow for revision and reuse by anyone with no restrictions except an attribution to the original source. See here for more about CC BY and other Creative Commons open licenses.

We held a two-day sprint in May 2016 in which faculty and students wrote the first set of case studies. You can see all about that sprint in my blog post about it.

How the case studies have been used in courses

In the 2016-2017 academic year, several faculty members used the case studies in their courses at UBC. There are many ways to do so! Here is what has been done so far:

  • One faculty member has assigned a case study “as is” in a course
  • One has asked students to add “action plans” at the end of one of the case studies (see here)
  • Several have asked students to write their own case studies
    • See the Forestry case studies on our site
    • And also this case study from Civil Engineering
    • A class in Gender, Race and Social Justice had students write case studies too, but they’re not on the site because we haven’t yet sought permission to give them a CC BY license. You can see them on the UBC Wiki, here.

We have a teaching guide for the project that shows some examples of assignment instructions faculty have used with the case studies. See the “sample assignments” on the Teaching Guide page for the project.

We are particularly interested in developing interdisciplinary activities involving the case studies. So far students in single disciplines have been approaching the case studies from those disciplines. But we would love it if students could approach existing case studies from a separate discipline and add their own perspectives. There are places in each case study where such perspectives can be added.

Or perhaps two classes could work together on creating case studies from two (or more) different disciplines.

Help with implementing open case studies into courses

This project is funded in part by a Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund grant from UBC, which allows us to hire graduate assistants to help faculty design and implement assignments.

We also have access to help from the UBC Library and the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology in creating resources to help students understand how to write or otherwise contribute to the open case studies.

So anyone from UBC who would like to join has access to help in implementing open case studies into their course (at least for the next year or so)!

Anyone can contribute

We have focused most of our efforts so far on UBC faculty and students, but we are also opening out the project to anyone who would like to join in, from any post-secondary institution.

We are working on creating a form for people who are interested to fill out that will be posted on the site, but for now, please just email me if you would like more information or think you might be interested: c.hendricks@ubc.ca

And be sure to check out our website!

 

 

 

 

 

What needs improvement in Intro to Philosophy

bust of Socrates with the words "PHIL 102: Introduction to Philosophy with Christina Hendricks, University of British Columbia-Vancouver" off to the right of it

Image from front page of my PHIL 102 course site from Spring 2017. Image of Socrates is Bust of Socrates from the Louvre, by CherryX, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 on Wikimedia Commons.

 

I am working on my Introduction to Philosophy course (PHIL 102) again; I’m teaching it next starting in January 2018. But I’ve just been appointed as the Deputy Academic Director of the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology at UBC (starting July 1, 2017) and so I’m trying to get as much planning done on this course before the Fall as I can).

I have taught this course many times already and every year I am not fully happy with it and try to make it better. This year was no exception (I taught it from Jan-April 2017). Some of my previous blog posts about this course are here. The post I did in Summer of 2016 on this course I thought was pretty good on overall learning goal planning and reflection, so I’m going to reuse those ideas.

But this post here will be a bit different; I’m going to approach it from the perspective of what I thought didn’t work so well, and see if I can’t come up with new ideas from there.

Continue reading →

Navigating open pedagogy, part 2

many different colours of embroidery thread, tangled together

Trying to pull together stray threads. Threads image licensed CC0 on pixabay.com

This is the last (for now) in a series of posts over the last couple of days on open pedagogy. Previous posts:

  • Part 1, where I do some not terribly focused reflecting on some recent posts on open pedagogy, as well as my own view before reading them (warning: long!)
  • Part 1.5, where I consider: why try to define open pedagogy at all?

This post is dedicated to trying to pull together some of the threads from what I’ve read in the last two days.

Note: I have gone back later (November 2017) and added some things here and there…so not all of this was written in the original post.

Continue reading →

Why define open pedagogy?

This is a kind of addendum to my last post, where I did some summarizing of and reflecting on a few definitions of open pedagogy given on blogs and elsewhere lately.

When I first heard about the flurry of blog posts on open pedagogy, and the disagreements on how to define it, I thought: why do we need to spend so much time arguing about the definition? Why is it so important to focus on how to define it?

Continue reading →

Navigating open pedagogy, part 1

In April 2017 there was a flurry of blog posts and a hangout about open pedagogy–various ways of defining it, thinking about it, etc. That was during a heavy teaching term for me and mostly I just saw that it was happening and read maybe one or two of the many blog posts at the time.

You can see a curated list of them, here (thanks Maha Bali!).

In a couple of days I am presenting on a panel for the BCcampus Open Textbook Summit, called Open Pedagogy Case Studies & Examples from Langara, UBC and Athabasca. Marianne Gianacopoulos (Langara), Michael Dabrowski (Athabasca) and I will be speaking on projects we’re involved in that we each think of as having an element of open pedagogy. So we’re starting with a discussion of just what “open pedagogy” is.

Thus, I figured it was time to visit that large number of blog posts linked above.

I won’t be able to read them all before Wednesday. And I definitely won’t be able to synthesize all of even those I manage to read. I am writing this post just to gather some thoughts from what I am reading in the next day or so. Think of it as my own filtering, focusing on what I find most interesting or surprising or what I want to think further about, rather than a definitive analysis of what I think open pedagogy is. [Aside: As I’m writing this post I’m surprised to find I don’t already have a tag on this blog for “open pedagogy.” Just changed that.]

This post is my somewhat rambling reflections on reading some of the posts Maha Bali curated (linked above). The next one, part 2, is where I will try to pull some of these threads together into a revised view of my own.

[Addendum added later: Actually, it turns out I wrote another one before part 2: part 1.5, why define open pedagogy?]

Continue reading →

Open Textbook for Intro to Philosophy

Drawing of a book with "open textbooks" on it, and arrows pointing out to people using the book in various contexts

Open Textbooks, by Giulia Forsythe on Flickr, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

 

After talking about it for a few years, I am finally able to start working on an open textbook for introduction to philosophy courses. There are a few of us working on it already, and we’re going to need all the help we can get…so this post is to introduce the project and talk about how others can get involved.

Open textbooks

First, what is an “open textbook”? The easiest way to think about it is that it is like any other textbook except in two crucial respects:

First, it is free of cost to students. There is no price tag. This comes with another implication: we are doing this for free ourselves. There is no publisher who is paying us to create the textbook, and there are no “royalties.” But frankly, I can’t imagine ever making much off of a textbook anyway (how many new textbooks are there a year, and how many actually make money? I don’t know but I am skeptical of it being terribly lucrative in philosophy).

Second, open textbooks have an “open license” that allows others to reuse, revise, remix it with other things and release new versions publicly for others to use, revise, etc. The most common open licenses for educational resources like this are Creative Commons licenses, which come in several versions. See this CC page for a general discussion of the licenses and different license types; the University of British Columbia Creative Commons Guide has further information, including a comparison chart. The license we will be using for this textbook is the most permissible of the CC licenses that require attribution of the original content creators: CC BY, which lets content be used and revised by anyone for any purpose as long as the original creators are attributed.

Why do this?

I can’t speak for others, but I myself have two main motivations, having to do with the two characteristics of open textbooks given above.

  • Saving students money
    • Textbooks are expensive, and getting more so as time goes by. There is a good deal of research on open textbooks that explains the costs to students and how this affects them not just financially but pedagogically (e.g., when they go without textbooks because they are too expensive, or choose what courses to take based on textbook costs). I am co-author on an article whose literature review details some of this literature; I’ll try to remember to link to it here when it comes out (it’s in press right now). Or you can check out this 2016 research review on open textbooks by John Hilton (open access), though it doesn’t have information on costs.
    • I also get frustrated that students are paying a lot of money and I might not be using the whole textbook. Which leads to…
  • Ability to revise the book
    • Only want to use Chapters 3 and 8? Great–delete the rest.
    • Want to add in some of your own interpretations, or change what you think might be misleading, or add in a graphic you have created that helps illustrate an idea? Excellent–go ahead and change what’s there.
    • Can’t understand why the textbook excerpted Mill’s On Liberty in a way that leaves out that crucial part? Put it in!
    • Dislike the example used to illustrate a point because it only speaks to a limited audience of students and may not make any sense to others? Change it!
    • etc.

Basically what an open textbook does is provide a starting point that you can adjust if needed…or not. You can use it as is, or you can make it fit your course or context better. I want to be involved in a project that provides this starting point for myself and others.

For some, creating educational resources that are used by others can be considered for merit, tenure and promotion. That is going to depend on your college or university context.

Rebus open textbooks

We are working with an organization called The Rebus Foundation, a Canadian non-profit that is made up of wonderful people who are doing great things with digital publishing and open textbooks. We are part of several open textbook projects that are creating new models for publishing open textbooks, through connecting people into a community to collaborate on shared projects.

The Rebus open textbook projects are all being discussed on the Rebus Community Forum. There you can see and contribute to multiple textbook projects. Each is going to need help in the form of reviewing and copyediting as well as writing, so even if you just want to contribute a little without writing anything, that’s possible too. All help is appreciated.

Some basic parameters

Please see this document for an explanation of some of the basic parameters of the intro to philosophy open textbook, some of the ideas of what, generally, it should be like and why. The following is copied and pasted from part of that document:

This Open Textbook “Introduction to Philosophy” should be, firstly, an accessible introduction to philosophy, suitable for college or university students taking a philosophy class for the first time.

As such, the book should:

  • cover a broad range of the fundamental ideas in philosophy
  • present these fundamental ideas in a clear and accessible way
  • focus (first) on presenting existing arguments, rather than making novel arguments

As an Open Textbook, this Introduction should be considered the starting point: a reasonably complete (eventually), and relatively accessible “map” of the important intellectual traditions of philosophy.

But it should also be considered a framework upon which further (open) explorations could easily be built, further sections or additional materials added, by a professor for a particular class, by students as part of course work, or by future contributors (or current contributors) to the project itself.

Note that there is a table of contents on that document; we are not saying nothing else could be there. That is what we have come up with at the moment. As new people are added to the project, new sections might be created.

The process

I am serving as the main editor for the whole thing, but mostly what that means is being the central organizer. I will be writing some parts, but this is a joint venture that will come to fruition from the work of many people. That way, no one person has to do a great deal of work but it can be spread out. We’re all doing this on a volunteer basis, after all.d

Here is a list of tasks for the book.

I will be the overall editor, but each section of the book (e.g., ethics, social and political, metaphysics, philosophy of mind) will have a section editor who is responsible for that section. That means helping to find people to write subsections, arranging for others to review/comment on what has been written, ensuring those texts are copyedited (by themselves or by volunteers), etc.

Here is a post describing what we are envisioning for section editors.

We have already started discussions on general topics to include in a textbook for introduction to philosophy courses, and we found that we were rather scattered…so we have decided to start by focusing in on two sections. I asked the group who would be willing to be section editors, and we came up with two volunteers:

Ethics section: editor George Matthews (see here for a discussion board devoted to that)

Aesthetics section: editor W. Scott Clifton (see here for a discussion board devoted to that)

So those are the two sections we’re making a push on at the moment, but I would also love to hear if anyone else would like to volunteer as a section editor.

How do I get involved?

Does this sound intriguing? Or even better, are you excited to get started? Here are your next steps:

  1. Join the Rebus Community!
  2. Peruse the conversations we’ve had so far on this textbook if you want, and add your thoughts. It’s a long thread, but you can skim it! Introduce yourself and what you’re interested in about this project.
  3. Add your name and interest area to our spreadsheet (go to the ‘people’ tab at the bottom)
  4. If you would be willing to write something for the Ethics or Aesthetics sections, we are particularly interested in hearing about that right now. You can go straight to the discussion threads for those:
  5. Email me if you have questions: c.hendricks@ubc.ca
  6. Spread the word!!

 

 

Teaching portfolio workshop for grad students in Philosophy

I am facilitating a session on teaching dossiers/portfolios for graduate students in the Philosophy department today, April 12, 2017. I created a page on the UBC wiki to house information about the session so it’s available to anyone who wants to see and possibly use it. I am also embedding it here b/c it looks nicer on a WordPress site!

Soon I’ll put it in my teaching and learning portfolio, but for now, here it is!

Here is the direct link to the page on the UBC Wiki.

 

These are notes and links to resources for the Philosophy department TA training session on teaching dossiers. This session was held April 12, 2017, but this page can be used for future sessions as well if anyone would like!

Objectives for the session

By the end of this session you should be able to:

  • Explain some of the important elements of a teaching philosophy statement in the discipline of philosophy
  • Explain the main elements you'll put into your teaching dossier, depending on the purpose and audience you're creating it for

You will leave the workshop with:

  • An outline of some of the main points you could include in your own teaching philosophy statement
  • An outline of elements you may include in your teaching dossier

Elements of a teaching dossier

What kind of dossier you create, and what goes into it, will depend on the purpose and audience for it.


Discussion:

1. For what kinds of purposes might one create a teaching dossier or portfolio? Who would be the audiences for these?

  • Write on board purposes we come up with

There is space on one of the worksheets handed out in the session for notes on these things: File:TchgDossier-TAtraining-Worksheets-April2017.pdf

notes from session in April 2017 on the above

  • job applications
  • for students, to see information about you as a teacher
  • for feedback from others
  • for reflection on your own teaching


2. How does one demonstrate effective teaching? What evidence could be used to show it?

  • List on board
  • Then say which sort of portfolio each kind of evidence might go into, from number 1, above)

notes from session in April 2017 on the above

  • For job applications
    • Teaching statement
    • Teaching experience: describe courses and responsibilities in each, briefly
    • Professional development activities (e.g., workshops on teaching and learning you've taken)
    • Sample course materials (e.g., syllabi, assignments, advice for writing)
    • List of courses you are prepared to teach
    • Evidence of Teaching Effectiveness
      • student evaluations (be sure to include representative sample of comments, including critical ones; can briefly explain how those helped you reflect on & improve your teaching if applicable)
      • student letters or emails thanking you for the course, or solicited student letters for things like teaching awards
      • evidence of what your students have been able to do on the basis of your course (e.g., did you help a student publish a paper in an undergrad journal that they had written in your course?)
      • peer reviews of teaching--by profs, by graduate student peers (informal; CTLT has a program that organizes such peer reviews)
      • teaching awards or other recognition
      • professional development workshops you've facilitated
      • conference presentations about teaching & learning


Collect evidence as you go through your graduate study!

  • Keep many documents: syllabi, assignments you've created, course evals, emails from students, notes or slides you have from giving guest lectures or running discussion groups, notes from PD workshops...what else?
  • These things may not all go into your dossier but they are useful for reflecting on what you've done as you craft your dossier, even if they don't go in.


Some online examples of dossiers


Philosophy dossiers


For teaching dossiers related to academic job applications in philosophy, you could also ask the Philosophy department Placement Officer for samples from recent graduate students who have agreed to provide their dossiers for this purpose.

Teaching philosophy statement


Activity

Groups read teaching philosophy statements from recent graduate students in philosophy. Write down:

  • what you think is particularly effective
  • whether you think anything might be improved
  • whether there is anything else you would like to know about this person's teaching if you were reading this for a job application

Discussion

Brainstorm and write on board what you think should go into a teaching philosophy statement, focusing in particular on the context of teaching philosophy courses. You can take notes on the worksheets for this session: File:TchgDossier-TAtraining-Worksheets-April2017.pdf


General suggestions for teaching philosophy statements

Here are some general suggestions gleaned from my own experience reading teaching philosophy statements and from reading a few online sources.

  • Keep it concise: Most teaching philosophy statements are 1-2 pages. This makes doing all of the following challenging!
  • Get feedback: Write a draft, get feedback from others (including peers and also those with experience in reading or writing effective teaching statements), write a new draft, get more feedback if others are willing. Repeat.
  • Be specific: Don't stop at sweeping statements about what you hope to accomplish in your teaching but give concrete examples of what you have done or plan to do. E.g., instead of just saying you include both lecture and classroom activities during class time, give one or two specific examples of the classroom activities and why you use those.
  • Show evidence of reflection: Explain your rationale for what you do in your teaching; if your teaching practice is based in any research on teaching and learning, you could include citations to that research (optional).
  • Don't forget student learning: This is a "teaching philosophy statement," but it's good to also talk about student learning. What are your goals for student learning and how do you try to achieve them? (more on this below). How have students reacted to what you are doing in the classroom? Has their work improved through a particular intervention?
  • Avoid jargon: Your audience may not know buzzwords or jargon related to teaching and learning, so it's better to explain what you are doing rather than rely on terms the audience may not know (this is audience-dependent, of course)
  • Avoid nice-sounding but empty terms and phrases (or fill them out): Everyone wants their students to be critical thinkers; don't stop at saying that. If you want to include discussion of that, explain what it means to you and how you try to instill that skill/habit in students.
  • Ground your statement in your discipline: Your teaching philosophy statement shouldn't be interchangeable with that of someone in another discipline; think about what you do that is specific to teaching philosophy courses, what you try to accomplish in those.That will help you avoid the empty phrases discussed above.
  • Make it memorable: Here is a nice piece of advice from a Cornell University website on teaching philosophy statements: "The search committee is seeing many of these documents—What is going to set you apart? What will they remember? Your teaching philosophy will come to life if you create a vivid portrait of yourself as a person who is intentional about teaching practices and committed to your career."
    • You can set your statement apart and make it more memorably by including specifics of what you do and why, allowing others to visualize your teaching practice beyond platitudes.


Online resources for teaching philosophy statements


The Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan

They have a helpful short paper with advice on writing teaching philosophy statements that is based on survey responses from search committee chairs, research on best practices in teaching and learning, and the authors' own experiences reading teaching philosophy statements.

They suggest a few categories of things you could include in your statement:

  • Goals for student learning
    • Consider: how do you hope students will be different after taking your class? What can they do, what sorts of skills and attitudes will that have if your goals are met?
  • Enactment of goals
    • What sorts of activities do students do in your class that are aimed at reaching the above goals?
  • Assessment of goals
    • How do you determine if the goals are met? What kinds of assessments do you use, and how are they related to your goals for student learning?
  • Creating an inclusive learning environment (this might be covered in a separate diversity statement, if you have one)
    • Instead of having a standalone "diversity paragraph" in the statement, consider including diversity considerations in several aspects of the statement

They also have a rubric you could use to evaluate the quality of your teaching philosophy statement in these categories.

They emphasize ensuring you have an alignment between goals, activities to enact these goals, and assessments--this not only unifies your teaching statement, but is best practice for course design as well!


Article by Kearns and Subino Sullivan (2011)

This article makes similar suggestions as to elements of the dossier, saying it would be useful to include learning goals, teaching methods aimed at achieving those, and assessment of student learning. They also add another category you could include:

  • Assessment of teaching: "What are your strengths as a teacher? How will you improve students' achievement of [your] learning goals? What aspects of your teaching are you working on right now?" (p. 139).

They also provide a useful set of examples for how to structure a teaching statement. There are multiple formats you might choose, such as:

  • Start with a paragraph about the goals you have for student learning, then give specific examples of activities and assessments linked to these goals in the next 2-3 paragraphs, then end with a paragraph in which you "analyze your overall teaching effectiveness and propose future teaching developments" (p. 140).
  • Include as part of your statement a "great moment" you have had in teaching--what has worked well and why? How do you know it worked? How does it connect to your teaching goals?
    • You could also include a "not-so-great moment" as well as a great moment, comparing the two and saying what you've learned.
  • Structure your statement around a story, "a pivotal moment, either in your own learning or in your teaching" (140). Then connect the rest of the statement to that event in some way, being sure to still talk about teaching goals, activities and assessments.
  • Start with a metaphor about teaching and learning, and then structure the rest of the statement around that metaphor.

Outlining your dossier

Start with your statement of teaching philosophy, and then build your evidence around that in order to have a coherent dossier.

Starting a teaching philosophy statement

Activity:

  • Write down 2-3 goals you have for student learning when you teach philosophy courses. These could be different for different courses, so choose 1-2 courses to focus on. They can be short phrases.
    • Put these at the top of sheets of paper (or one per side of a piece of paper)
  • Under each goal, brainstorm course activities and assessments you do or could do to help students achieve the goal.

Put these notes on the worksheets for the session: File:TchgDossier-TAtraining-Worksheets-April2017.pdf


If you want to work on your teaching statement outside the workshop, you could also consider brainstorming:

  • Write down a "great moment" in your teaching so far, and a "not-so-great moment." Why were these great and not-so-great? What did you learn from the latter? How could you connect those to teaching goals?
  • Think about an excellent teacher you have had. What did they do that impacted your learning effectively? What values or goals for your own teaching can you connect to that experience?
  • Is there a story about a pivotal moment in your teaching or learning experience you could use to start your statement and connect other parts of your statement to? How could you connect it to teaching goals?


Outlining your dossier

Activity: Outline which elements you'd like to include in your dossier, based on:

  • What we brainstormed on the board earlier
  • What you are including in your teaching statement--how could your dossier connect to what you said in your teaching statement?

Put these notes on the worksheets for the session: File:TchgDossier-TAtraining-Worksheets-April2017.pdf

Resources

Here are some web pages linked to above and also a few others.

Teaching Philosophy Statements

Diversity Statements

Teaching Portfolios

Philosophy Specific resources

  • Melissa Jacquart has some useful slides on teaching dossiers & teaching philosophy statements for philosophy, on her website. Here is a PDF of the slides, which are under Teaching -> Resources for Instructors on her site.
source: http://wiki.ubc.ca/Sandbox:PHIL_TAtraining_TeachingDossier

The scribbled face in Karasik & Mazzucchelli’s graphic novel City of Glass

In Arts One this past week we discussed Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass as well as the graphic novel adaptation by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli.

We were very fortunate to have a guest lecture by Paul Karasik on the graphic novel, on Monday, March 27, and he gave a public lecture later that day as well.

One of the students in my Arts One seminar group asked him about the scribbled face that appears numerous times in the graphic novel. Karasik didn’t want to “give too much away,” and just said it had something to do with who the narrator of the story is. So of course we had to discuss this further in class!

We talked about it in small groups and then I took notes on the board on what the groups had discussed. I’m not sure it’s all going to make sense outside of the context of our class discussion, but here it is! (and you get to see my not-so-clear handwriting…)

 

The first point: “Has different versions–left, centre, right, left” refers to how the face stars off facing left, then later we see it from a centred perspective, head on, and then is facing right, and then on the very last page where it is on a piece of paper in the pit it is facing left again. There are several possible interpretations for why this might be the case, and unfortunately I didn’t write down the one that was given by the student who noticed this and I can’t remember what it was! (Please comment below if you do). We also noticed that the expression is slightly different in it sometimes, such as when it is more angry on p. 52, when Quinn sees Peter Stillman Sr. for the first time.

We thought it might have been drawn by Quinn’s son, or even by Peter Stillman, since it looks like a child’s drawing. We noticed that it appears sometimes in places that are emotionally significant for Quinn, such as when he thinks about children raised by wolves, about Peter Stillman Jr., and about his own son; when he meets Peter Stilllman Sr. for the first time, and when Auster tells Quinn that the case is over because Stillman Sr. has committed suicide. Some students thought the face was a kind of raw expression of emotion, such as one might give with visual language rather than with textual language. As I wrote above, basing it on what the students said, you can “feel it viscerally” even more than you might if it were in words.

We also noticed that the face could be thought of as a kind of incomplete character, such as Miguel Mota spoke of Stillman Jr. being in Auster’s novel–he is a kind of puppet without a controller, a character without an author, someone who is incomplete and still needs filling out (he is all white, as if blank, and can’t use language well). The scribbled face could also represent Quinn himself as an incomplete character in the sense that Quinn has multiple identities and isn’t fully any one of them: Quinn, Wilson, Work, Auster…. The “deterioration of his identity as Quinn” is related–Quinn is losing himself as Quinn, becoming more of an incomplete shell of himself.

 

We didn’t come to any full conclusions, just discussed various possibilities. I myself don’t have a reading on this that I’m happy with. When I read the graphic novel I assumed that the scribbled face was a drawing done by Quinn’s dead son, and that it comes up for him at various times that are, as noted above, emotionally significant. It comes up first on p. 7 in between two panels when Quinn is going to sleep, suggesting that it emerges for him when his guard is down, perhaps, as something that he has been trying to repress–among other things, memories of his dead wife and son. And that fits with p. 33, when the face appears right after Stillman Jr’s face and his son’s face, and Quinn is thinking about children that grew up without parents. But that doesn’t go very far in explaining the face’s appearance in other parts of the book–why would it appear when Quinn is standing in the station as the train is arriving, next to the multiple images of Quinn himself, on p. 50?

 

Students in our class have also blogged about this question, and you can see those posts on our class website, here. Some interesting interpretations there…well worth a read!