Wednesday March 11/ 2015

We are approaching the end of Unit three in the coming week, and I want to urge you all to be up to date with your assignments before we enter Unit 4. During the following weeks, you will need to be available to work with your research team on a regular basis, so adjust your schedules accordingly please.

This week we will continue our readings of  Green Grass Running Water and finish up with a most interesting task.  In the lesson 3:2, I suggested that there is no doubt that King wants us to work to get the story. His invitation is specific; it is up to you to bother to find out what the symbols mean. Reading this novel means you have to be willing to pay attention, to speak the words out loud, to listen up –to look it up and, perhaps the most important reading strategy to begin with, is to be willing not to know. With lesson 3:3  you are going to look it up and make connections between the characters in the novel and the stories they bring with them.

Your blog assignment is to hyper-link your research on the characters and symbols in GGRW  — according to the pages assigned to you on our Student Blog page. You should write a 600 to 1000 word blog that explains the connections you have found in context with that part of the novel, or in a general context with the entire novel. Be creative, be critical and ask questions.

Every semester students ask for an example of a blog that hyper-links assigned pages – so here is one for you:  https://blogs.ubc.ca/kozarkristin/assignment-33-not-is-all-what-it-seems/ – an example of hypertexting

Good Wednesday March 11th 470:

I have just finished reading all your blogs and following all your links and offering you all my midterm evaluations. Whewwww, that took longer than expected, but was a most pleasant experience. Thank you all for some really wonderfully thoughtful work.

After reading and thinking about all your stories about home – I have a question. Can we look at the values and stories of home we’ve told and imagine the other side of this metaphor: homelessness? I do not expect you to write about this, but I think that thinking about homelessness in context with our stories, is valuable. What do you think ‘home’ means to the people on the streets in Vancouver, or Calgary, or any Canadian city, the people we name ‘homeless’ and for the most part, avoid? Or, conversely, what does ‘homeless’ mean to you, in context with your ideas about home?

Having read through all your blogs and your dialogues, I have noted an interesting pedagogical dynamic. I can’t help but to note the differences between teaching this class in a classroom in an institution – and here, online. In the classroom, I often stop to discuss what it means to create knowledge through social relationships. When we listen to each other as we learn together, we seem, almost by nature, to begin to share stories, which means the class comes to engage not just with the assigned texts, but also with each other — as we learn through the stories we tell each other. That is what I mean by creating knowledge through social relationships, a pedagogy I have used for some classes for some years now.

Now here is what I am noting. Ironically, it appears to be easier to create this type of social and educational interaction online. In the classroom, there is more tension around stepping outside of traditional course content and pedagogy, in the classroom there is far more reticence to speak up about what “you don’t know.” In the classroom, we put chairs in a big circle and we work with a speaking stone – and, I never, well, hardly ever, lecture. I do tell stories; every other class is a presentation by students with lots of time for dialogue. So, you can see, in the classroom, I work hard to physically create a space that takes us outside of the space we are in: the institutional space.  Clearly, creating knowledge through social relationships, ours – is much easier online, and by that I mean simply that all the elements of orchestrating your work together as your teacher are moving along and intersecting with ease – great ease, wonderful ease.

Why do you think that is so? Why is it easier to work online to create dialogue and knowledge together, around subjects that are political and emotional, than it is in the classroom?

Here are some of my thoughts for you:

It was interesting to see how many stories about evil focused on a similar idea: stories are powerful tools of deception! Imagination is where evil begins?

It is interesting how many of our stories hold the sense of home with people, families – and how many of us have moved, crossed borders, learned new languages, and how many of us have expressed our value of home in the context of leaving one home and finding another. It appears to me that ‘home’ is always a story.

And, here are some comments I have offered around the dialogues on ‘the other’ – dichotomizing and the notion that western thought is representative of “human nature”

When I voyage around the world with students, this is what I say in my storytelling classes: You are only ever learning about yourself. It is not possible to know ‘the other’ – so just stop trying. Yes, listen to the stories, but understand that in the listening what you are learning about is yourself: how you feel, think, how you respond to that story. Yes, tell your stories to others, but you are not teaching them about yourself, you are teaching them about themselves. Can you see how this can work to enable students to actually exchange cultural knowledge? When you let go of the need to know, but rather discover the need to inter-act, to meet in the intersection of your encounters with others, then you begin to find common ground.

I think, in the western tradition, when we encounter “others’ who are different from ourselves, what we learn, is always about ourselves. I think it is impossible to know the other through the lens of Western thinking — because we construct the other for the purpose of disconnecting — like the” Imaginary Indian”. But, what we can come to know, or to recognize, is that the making of the “other” is how we define ourselves.

One important point I want to suggest, is the that the idea that dichotomizing and categorizing is “human” nature, as if it is a universal and inherent in all epistemological or philosophical systems, is a mistake. Dichotomizing, categorizing hierarchically is   a western way of coming to knowledge, of knowing: the urge for universalization of western patterns of thought – is also a western way of knowing. There are other ways of coming to knowledge, which do NOT require the process of dichotomizing, separating and categorizing that western thinking depends upon. So,this binary thinking is not “human nature.”

There are many Indigenous cultures in different geographical parts of the world with intellectual philosophies and epistemological systems which do NOT rely on breaking things apart and creating hierarchic categories in order to come to knowledge, but rather these systems of thinking work to connect and balance phenomenon and relationships in order to come to knowledge. But, just like orality and literacy, there is no need to separate the different ways of coming to knowledge, they are inter-connected, working side by side and sometimes meeting in the intersection.

Dichotomizing and categorizing are not universal cultural practices, rather they are Western intellectual practices, as is the desire to establish universal categories. It is possible that the “other” does not even exist in some intellectual practices. When ‘we’ study the “other” or “them” in Western intellectual practice, we first construct the other, and then we define ourselves through our differences. So, in this tradition, the only thing we ever lean about when we study the other – is, ourselves.

I am going to leave you with these thoughts, and a few of my favourite quotes from your blogs below — and compose a new blog re: Lesson 3:3 Hyper-texting Green Grass Running Water. I am also assigning your page numbers today. Check out Student Blog page to see your assigned pages.

Stories – Reading all my fellow classmates’ blogs got me thinking, most of our ideas of home stemmed from a story or a form of storytelling. I think this is a telltale (pun fully intended) sign of the kind of power story-telling has. The ability to bring us back to a place where perhaps distant can become vivid and close again. Stories carry the notion that there is a lesson to be learnt, a moral to be understood and an experience to be felt, although of course, not always the case. However, in the way we remember home, we often gravitate towards stories of our past. Stories seem to have the ability to bring us back.

I like how Chamberlin believes that “We need to take a cue from mathematics and the sciences and develop a greater comfort level with contradiction as a way of life” (233). My background lies in Physics, and while reading this chapter I kept thinking about how well his ideas fit with the way physicists have to approach certain theories. One of the fundamental principles behind quantum mechanics lies in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. To describe it simply. the principle states that you cannot know the exact position and velocity of a particle. As soon as it comes into contact with an interference (such as a human attempting to measure it), this changes the particle fundamentally; it collapses. If you want to measure its position, you can, but you will have no idea what its velocity is; and vice versa. This is because it holds the property that it is simultaneously a particle and a wave.

This is how I understood what Chamberlin was saying. Neither position, neither story is any more correct than the other, they are just different ways of approaching the same thing. In simple terms, the particle has both a vague sense of position and velocity (vague due to its wave-particle duality), but as soon as we attempt to look at it from one perspective, we cannot see it from the other. Chamberlin warns us not to forget that the other perspective is present. Both the bear and the soil stories provide important ways to imagine what happened, but they are both just stories. They both walk the border between imagination and reality.

 The process of approaching storytelling in this class has been incredibly difficult for me; as a prospective law student the idea of dialogue without debate is incredibly conflicting. However it is clear that this is the rule of law for stories, where previous events only influence (and do not shape) the stories that come after. I decided to play with the story and put our class in a cave having a party, an attempt to make a novel connection between our class and storytelling. But it has a serious implication; it does not suggest the existence of evil, but it does suggest the possibility of evil that can arise from a story. One of the most important details from this story is the fact that stories cannot be taken back; no give-backs or tradesies, redoes or re-spawns. We forgive but we don’t forget. With this in mind I want to turn to the residential schools of not long ago, and think about how there is a meta-narrative within the history of these schools. The attempts at assimilation are now part of the historical narrative between settlers and Aboriginals, and no matter what we do these events cannot be reversed. But on a deeper level, the settlers in fact changed the narrative that the Aboriginal students were learning, and they took those kids out of a native culture and taught them ‘white’ stories in an attempt to bridge the gap between Them and US. But this gap, which I will call the ‘otherness gap’, cannot be changed by dismantling the distinctions between Them and Us. Try as they might, the settlers could not reshape the Aboriginal communities but could only influence them, because the Aboriginal story had already been told and can never been swept away now that it exists. I think this is a crucial reason that dialogue rather than debate is essential in bridging the ‘otherness gap’ that currently exists between Western and Aboriginal cultures, because there is no debate to be had. There is no empirical right or wrong answer to the question of cultural superiority (if such a thing even exists), and our job is to understand this fact and to appreciate Them rather than preach about Us. Along this vein we see the importance on irreversible stories; a story can profoundly damage the relationship between Them and Us which will lengthen the ‘otherness gap’, making it imperative for us to attune ourselves to the consequences of the stories we tell.

NOTE: A tip to make your writing style even better: never end a sentence with a two letter word: it / at / on/ in/ by… you get the idea. Always proof-read looking for those two letter words at the end and rephrase the sentence. The word ‘it’ is not your friend – avoid this word, unless used at the beginning of the sentence for emphasis.

Before I begin a discussion on the evaluation process, I want to ask you — once again, to consider what is wrong with the following list of names:

• Canadian
• European
• indigenous
• French
• Spanish
• first nations
• Montrealers
• mohawk

Let’s talk about this list on Face Book 🙂

Well, well, we have reached the midway point of our studies and dialogues together and that means the time has come for me to speak up and join in with you all. Here’s how the process works:

1. You need to post a Facebook post with three links  to the three blogs you would like me to respond to – and of course assign a number of evaluative points [please see our syllabus for the breakdown of percentages].
2. Over reading break, I will read and respond to your blogs, and engage in your dialogues; this is my feedback.
3. I will also make up an evaluative grade sheet with comments for you, which you will receive as an attachment in an email message.

I expect this process to take me a couple of weeks, so you can expect my evaluations sometime between tomorrow and Feb. 27th. I will alert you when I have finished the process.

I hope you manage to accomplish some reading over reading break. I am very much looking forward to this coming week of reading and responding to your blogs. Enjoy.

” Home is such a complex subject, as the stories this class have produced this week reflect, but one certainty emerges for me, and that is the act of reflecting on “home’ inspires remarkable creativity, and that is something to think about. Perhaps home is a story.” Instructor’s Blog

“As I alluded to in my first post for this class, I feel that we all share many cross-cultural similarities that often get swallowed up by investigations of our differences. There are many examples of common values and beliefs between people which may not be immediately evident, as I’m sure as we have come to realize now after reading the stories of home written by our fellow classmates. Our sense of home is undoubtedly something shared across nations and cultures, …” Student Blog

This has been a most interesting week of reading for me.  Today I want to talk a little about some of the common threads I found in your stories. But, before I synthesize, first, I must say it was fascinating to discover such a diversity of creative and reflective ideas about both “evil” and “home.”  Thank you all.

My Canada: a home at the end of the road

This is my story;  I just can’t believe the story of Canada, anymore. I mean, the story that most people I encounter think of when I say, “I am from Canada.” I mean the story of how “we” are so nice and tolerant and polite (not at all like people from the USA) and benevolent and peacekeeping with open borders and arms to welcome homeless refugees and medical care provided for everyone — that is the story that everyone, everywhere, seems to know.

I am a traveller – travelled around the world twice, circumnavigated the Atlantic from North Atlantic to the tip of South American and sailed 900 miles up the Amazon River, once. I have lived and worked in education in six different countries. I used to believe the story strangers in strange lands told to each other —  about Canadians, about me.  And, I carried the same story around with me on my travels in the past, I was delighted to share this tale of being a Canadian.  Until about 1990. To be clear, it is not that I think ‘Canada’ has changed – no, not that much. It is the story that has changed for me.

I just can no longer believe in the old story.

Nowadays, Canada is the place I come from, it is no longer home.

But when I was young, I had some good stories about who I was based on where I came from. Like most Canadians back then, I identified myself by my ancestry.

Let’s see, I was born in Montreal in the middle of the last century. That makes me old (er) – but this little bit of information can leave you guessing – am I French or English?  It is only natural to identify a person by ethnicity, isn’t it?  I mean, isn’t that what the question is really asking: “where do you come from”? “Montreal.” “Oh, are you French or English?”  “I am English.”

Identity is different when you are online, you can’t tell if I am French or English by looking at my image. Relationships are different too – including teacher-student- student-teacher relationships.

But, thinking about appearances and ethnicity, in a way that is where we live; our bodies identify us, right?

One set of my great grandparents were Swedish and when I was growing up in the 60’s, everyone knew Swedish women were the most beautiful and alluring, so the story went, so I said I was Swedish.  I can sing “Who hid the Halibut on the Poop Deck’, with my Granma’s Swedish accent, and I can polka too. I have travelled to more than 50 countries, but not Sweden because it is very expensive.

I have a great story about my Irish Great Grandmother that I love to tell.  It’s about how she was  the first fox and mink farmer on Prince Edward Island early in the last century, after her husband died.  Everyone was farming potatoes on PEI when the depression hit in the 30’s. But, when my great grandfather died young, my great grandmother, working on the principle that “the rich get richer and the poor stay poor,” sold off a big chunk of the potato farm and bought some breeding foxes and minks. She was an independent woman, not afraid to take a risk, and full of Irish smarts, so the story goes. So, when the feminist movement hit in the 70’s, I changed my story and became Irish: smart, brave and independent.  She didn’t get rich, but she was successful all through the 1930’s and sent both her children to university. She used to say, “it takes minks to buy an education and it takes an education to buy minks.”  Now that’s a good story and makes me proud to be Irish – too.

I went to Ireland for the first time last year. Some of the people look like my grandfather, but I look more like my Swedish Grandma. To be Swedish is to be beautiful, Irish is to have smarts, I’ll go with that story.  Really, I guess according to my own usage, I am European.

Which could lead you to assume I am also a Christian of some sort. But I am not. But, that doesn’t mean I am not a person of faith – I have great faith. I just have  never been able to believe those Bible stories, and some of them are frightening. My Irish Grand Father was an Anglican minister, and a professor of theology, and I loved him dearly — so, I knew all the stories. When I was young they scared me, when I got older, they were just too bizarre and way too sexist too for me to ever believe  -–not even in the midst of the ceremonies. And today, well that story about it all ending in apocalypse really worries, I mean, if we are indeed the stories we tell ourselves, then I wish like hell people would just stop with that story.

But every one needs ‘something’ to believe in – right?  Nope. Not my mother or father. For them, religion was “the opium of the people”. They would say, there is no heaven and when you die you are gone and where you come from is little organisms that swam in the sea billions of years ago, and where they come from is simply inexplicable. Not a very good story, if you ask me – way too scary, where’s the meaningfulness?

But, my parents were not radicals; they were like a lot of people, a lot of Canadians living in the Montreal and then Toronto. Being an atheist was kind of a Canadian thing, back then – an English Canadian thing I should say. I think maybe that shedding religious beliefs was thought of as a way to be less ‘colonial.’ I grew up thinking that is was ‘we,’ the white English Canadians, who were colonized by Britain.  Until I ran away from home, which was Toronto at that time (1970), with my big sister, about as far as a couple of teenaged kids from Toronto could run, westward to the end of the road and across Queen Charlotte Sound: we stopped running when we got to Wuikinuxv territory.

But, that is another story.

Let’s just say that home, for me, home is at the end of the road  – has been for many years, and I have travelled many roads, and there are many more roads to travel.

Notwithstanding the importance placed on accuracy, oral narratives often present variations—subtle or otherwise—each time they are told. Narrators may adjust a story to place it in context, to emphasize particular aspects of the story or to present a lesson in a new light, among other reasons. Through multiple tellings, a story is fleshed out, creating a broader, more comprehensive narrative. Should listeners ever recount the narrative elsewhere, they would likely alter it to some degree to reflect their understandings of events and to better apply the story to its present context. In some instances, precision may be crucial: both precision and contextualizing have their place in oral societies.

Indigenous Foundations .arts.ubc.ca

I am not so arrogant as to attempt even heuristic science of the computer. The advantage of this platform in this medium is that I can revisit this blog – a ‘living’ document – and add / retract.

Student blog.

 I have passed a wonderful couple of days reading our blogs and following links. You have provided some good links and a good answers to my questions and the growing dialogue via our comment boxes is excellent. Thank you all.

One of the wonderful elements of working online is that you can go back and correct typos and small errors that you did not see while composing, and even better, I do not stop to evaluate your blogs until mid-term, so you have the opportunity to make these corrections before “official evaluuation” occurs.

My Instructor’s blog is responsive: I read your work and respond. Because I have made a decision to spend my weekends with family and friends, instead of my past practice of working every day because I love my work — I think I need to change my Monday blogs to a Tuesday or  Wednesday blog.

Reading through all your blogs can take a long while  because you hypertext and send me off to places like this , where I learn about new ideas and endeavours and have all sorts of new and wonderful insights to add to what I think I already know. Check it out: Wattpad.

After reading through all your blogs I have a few technical notes and general suggestions for you:

• In the future, link in your sources in your works cited when they are avalible online.
• Also, delete the sample page to clean up your blog
• Paste the question you are answering at the top of the post – and you are free to make introductory comments on why you chose this question
•  If you have any questions or comments about this lesson or the assignments in the next lesson, please do post on our FaceBook page
• Links to EBSCOhost do not always work for me?
• If you can find the same article in pdf form – that is the best way to link
•  In order to encourage comments, it is a good idea to end you blog assignments with a question.
• Use MLA style for your citations: This is a great style guide: OWL

BE SURE TO READ THE GUIDELINES FOR BLOGGING AND HYPERLINKING IN THE SIDEBAR!

One more note, that I will probably make many times in different ways:

• can you see what is wrong with the following phrase:   “… the Western one and the aboriginal – are equally valid.” Post your answer, if you have one, on FaceBook for me – thanks.

I want to encourage you to explore different blogs this week, even though you may have made a connection with someone you easily identify with, for the first couple of Units it will be more interesting if we explore beyond our comfort zones and engage with each other as widely as possible. Thanks. 

Some notes on Monday’s assignment:

Your task is to take the story about how evil comes into the world, the one from Silko that King’ retells in his text, The Truth About Stories, and change it to tell it. First make the story your own, you can change any elements you want, or not. The only thing you cannot change is the meaningfulness of the story. The story will always end with the same meaning: Be careful about the stories you tell AND the stories you listen to because once a story is told it can never be taken back.

Learn your telling of the story by heart –  and then tell the story to your friends and family.  When you are finished, post a blog with your version of the story and some commentary on what you discovered. If you want, you can post a video of you telling the story, in place of text.

This is an unusual assignment and I encourage you to have fun with it – play with whatever ideas come to mind for you. Let your intuition and inspiration lead your storytelling choices. The best way to approach this exercise is to read the story a few times, and then begin re-telling it to as many people as you can. Let your listener shape the story. Each time you tell the story, let it change in the moment, until you find the story inside the story that you like best. Then, memorize that story by heart and tell it again to as many people as you can. Then post it on your blog in what ever form you fancy.

Just so you know, I will also typically leave a smiley face on your blog after reading each post; this is just to let you know I have enjoyed my read and am moving onto to the next blog (sometimes I get distracted and forget to leave the smiley). Most of my commentary will be here, on my blog where I post excerpts from your blogs. Thanks and enjoy your week.  Have fun with your story-telling assignment, that is the most important criteria.

Good Tuesday morning all;

I have finished reading all of your introductory blogs and am most pleased to meet you all and learn a little about your interests and objectives; you are indeed an interesting group of people. According to my class list, we are a group of 33, counting myself, but so far we only have 25 blogs posted. So, I am assuming a few people will arrive late and am hoping that if you are having technical difficulties, or any difficulties at all — that you will feel free to email me: erika.paterson@ubc.ca. I realize many of you will have little to no experience with using social media in an educational endeavour, so please do not panic if you are feeling frustrated with the tools we are using, I am patient and understanding.  My goal is to teach not judge; no question is too small or too long or too late to ask.

Just so you know, I like to work very early in the mornings most days and I like to quit working around one.  During this time I am always monitoring our Facebook page and my inbox. I do not like to work on weekends, but I am dedicated enough to “typically” check daily when difficult assignments are coming due, in case someone is really in a panic – I don’t like panic, it is not good for your creativity or your well-being. I can also disappear for a couple of days during the week sometimes, but I will typically let you know ahead of time.  I also post my Monday Blogs on Tuesday – some days, like today, I will always post a link on our Facebook page when I post a new blog.

Here is a little extra guidance for this weeks assignments which is inspired by your Facebook questions. I realized that the instructions for this first “comment’ assignment were a cut and paste from the blogging instructions, but really this week is different then the coming weeks. Here are the original instructions:

Assignment # 1 . Students are required to read two student blogs and post a significant and relevant observation or question in the comment box of each blog. By significant I mean; the comment offers a new insight or a question with some measure of complexity, or a criticism.

And, here is how I have improved the instructions – thanks to a Facebook question which alerted me to the need to improve my instructions:

Students are required to read two student blogs and post a significant and relevant observation or question in the comment box of each blog. For this week, you will be reading each other’s blogs for the first time, I would like you to spend some time reading a number of blogs and find a couple of people who inspire a response from you. Use the comment box to introduce yourself and ask your questions. You ARE expected to respond to comments left on your blog.

Please NOTE: you are always expected to respond to comments on your blog.