- What is your daily need for the items in your bag?
- Most items are directly related to my job or facilitate my ability to do my job the way I like. Others are just-in-case sorts of items. And then there are items that have accumulated and are not needed, which speaks to my personality a bit.
- How might these items be considered “texts” and what do they say about you, the places you inhabit, the cultures with which you engage, and/or the activities you take up?
- The computer symbolizes that I have privilege and financial resources to purchase such a machine, and the fact that I use it for work speaks to the type of teaching I do, with multimedia elements. It’s important to me that I have the computing power and capability to do what I like, rather than being restricted by the technology my workplace might provide. The lack of food or other survival equipment shows that I inhabit a non-wild space.
- Thinking about the title of the course, what are the “text technologies” in your bag, if any? What do these items say about how you engage with language and communication?
- The student work is being marked, and written feedback is in the process of being provided to my students. I communicate to them both the level to which I think they are demonstrated the learning I’ve expected and how they might improve. The business cards have a sociocultural weight to them, and communicate contact information for financial services provided by my wife’s office. She doesn’t work on commission so it’s less about referral business for business’s sake and more about offering people help if I encounter such a situation. The lack of paper based day planner or notebook also says something about how I operate – I rely on technological text based tools and technologies to keep my life and work organized and I embrace those affordances over paper based technology.
- What do the items in your bag say about the literacies you have?
- the computer and adaptor show some digital literacies, and an ability to operate in different spaces with different technologies; I am somewhat of an early adopter but want to remain functional in legacy spaces with my colleagues and the resources available at my workplace. On the surface, the pens imply I’m able to write. At a deeper level, the green pens represent emotional literacy, as in the potential psychological effect on students of work marked in red pen that I’ve been made aware of. I also possess literacies of holding responsibility and conducting myself in my job; the keys give me access to most of the spaces in my workplace (school) but that doesn’t mean I have the right to access or ought to access every space those keys might allow.
- How does the narrative of the (private) contents of your bag compare with the narrative produced by image you have of yourself or the image you outwardly project?
- The fact that I keep my work keys in my work bag while all my other effects like car keys and wallet are kept in a drawer in my house speaks to a strong aspect of my personality in that I am forgetful and keeping work things together is a coping strategy. I outwardly project an organized person, but I have to communicate that this is a developing skill and a coping strategy. I also dress fairly well in brands people might recognize, but people often aren’t aware that most of those clothes were purchased at a deep discount when I was working a retail job before I had full time work teaching. Said another way, I don’t like to spend money but that isn’t how I appear, and my free leather bag is no exception.
- What would this same bag have looked like, say, 15 or 25 years ago?
- In terms of technological advancement, decades ago this bag would contain either a larger laptop computer or no computer at all. Likely more paper (my own teaching materials as well as students). In terms of my own life and development, decades ago this bag would be far less organized and inconsistent day-to-day.
- How do you imagine an archeologist aiming to understand this temporal period might view the contents of your bag many years in the future?
- An amazing question and hard to answer. I don’t know if an archaeologist would be able to predict my job as a high school teacher from the contents of the bag alone. They would be able to place the time period based on the technology of the computer and the dongle. The reusable mask might narrow it down to the 2020 pandemic so long as there aren’t more pandemics to come!!!
Task 1 (1.7) – What’s In Your Bag?
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