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Monthly Archives: October 2013

LLED 558 – Week 7

Not sure if this qualifies as an aspect of multimodality, but my readings over the Thanksgiving weekend (when one would imagine I’d have plenty of time to get into them, seemed to be actively working against me, conspiring with other events to make it nearly impossible to have them all read by Tuesday’s class! Dinner on Sunday evening was the least of my concerns, but my wife cutting her finger while preparing a salmon the next day, her trip to emergency to get stitches and then another trip to recover from the anaesthetic-induced nausea from the first trip all ended up with me at 2 am in the hospital waiting room, trying to read Pippa Stein’s wonkily scanned article on my low-battery iPhone – can any of this be blamed on the new basics?!

New/Old Basics I
LLED 558 – Oct 15, 2013

Stein’s trip to museum is a good place to start, not only because it was the most legible part of the PDF, but also for connecting back to an earlier class discussion where Anna explained an exhibit that was a slab of marble that every day had milk poured onto it. Her point was that the museum had taken down the title cards, and there was no explanation for what the artist attempted to achieve. While such a curious, innocuous artwork would not have captured my attention (unless a sudden draft caused the milk to ripple, it would have had me transfixed), I agree with the museum’s decision to remove title cards, PDA and any other multimodal method of filling in the gap created by an artist like Frida Kahlo between her biography and the paintings themselves. Nothing against Frida herself, the bio-pic directed by Julie Taymor completely won me over, but if her artwork needs description and commentary by people she would not have met, perhaps the artwork itself is not doing its job. It would be a good criteria for much of the new basics, our own class projects included in this post (sorry to Anna and Liam’s group, I did not get a photo of your fabulous projects), does it stand alone as an effective meaning-making object, or does there need to be another form of literacy to support what the teams created. Please feel free to leave a comment below on your interpretation of the three projects.

New/Old Basics II
LLED 558 – Oct 15, 2013

Anne Haas Dyson’s brief account of issues that occur with the new basics brings up another unanswerable question: how much of the students’ selves are acceptable to include in their literacy learning? Will it ever get to a point of being too much, and the students have to learn how to self-correct? In extreme cases where racist, sexist or other hurtful language is brought into the classroom, it becomes a stern lesson of what is not allowed. Yet in matters of faith, it becomes a matter of tactfully sidestepping theological issues that shape one person’s attitude. An example of this comes from my TOCing experience, where a class of grade 2/3’s had a guest speaker (called in by the principal to address some of the bullying and less-than friendly ways the students interact with other). The speaker was calm and professional, and wanted to get the class thinking about how nobody is more important than anyone else. This did not sit well with one student, who insisted several times that God is more important than anyone, and couldn’t accept the speaker’s gentle persuasion that it might be true for this student but not for everyone. What is an appropriate response? (Incidentally, the guest speaker told me confidentially that the students at this particular school – that will remain nameless on this blog – had the worst case of stubborn entitlement and it was difficult for any learning, social-emotional or educational, to happen at any grade level). Back to the role of religion in education, it is easy to wag fingers and say how reductionist most religions can be, the whole purpose of any religion is to promote one story while denying value in contradictory accounts. Dyson’s commentary on Tionna and Ezekial’s classroom discussion celebrates the identities these children have formed, and while it seems out of place to mention Jesus or God in an academic article, it is entirely relevant to a discussion on multimodality. It prompted me to ask a question in class that went unanswered: are churches on-side with multimodal education, or does it go against their belief system. Initial reaction might have one believe they would have nothing to do with new basics, but on second thought, Christianity has been multimodal for centuries: cathedrals, devotional song and poetry, and widely celebrated holidays like Easter and Christmas (for starters) are all inspired by words printed in the Bible. In fact, I would not be surprised to find an entire section of educational libraries with articles on religious multimodality.

Multimodal Land
LLED 558 – Oct 15, 2013

Still there is the issue of basics, the traditional approaches to education mentioned in Marjorie Siegel’s earlier article that run contrary to new and new-fangled multimodal frameworks. Why are some people inevitably drawn back to them? With religion there is a purposeful “tying back” to one interpretation of text, but with schools shouldn’t the focus be on moving forward and developing? Her other article, from 2012, makes an evocative allusion to a fun Charles Dickens novel I recently read, Hard Times where the protagonist (or at least the character with the most dynamic change throughout the novel) is Thomas Gradgrind, a stanch uphold of traditions and the old basics. Books are book, numbers are numbers, and any attempt to make imaginative use of any school resource is frowned upon by this headmaster. What I have found interesting with this parody of extreme rationality is how it gets taken up by people who seem to be missing Dickens’ point. One of my side careers is working part-time at an afterschool academy, to train K-12 students on how to pass SAT and SSAT reading and writing tests – while they have no bearing on local schooling, many parents who want their children to get accepted into American universities will see this academy their children for rote learning skills. Of the many reading passages I have taught, and the usually inane multiple choice question that follow, passages that directly quote or refer to Hard Times seem to take the satire of education as well-reasoned persuasion. Why be critical of these passages, when students need to know only the correct answers to move ahead in life? The best I can do is suggest that students find time to read the novel, or at least watch the BBC adaptation, to get a better sense of how taking standardized tests is similar to being one of Gladgrind’s pupils, and that multimodality offers more than just “fact, facts, facts.”

LLED 601 Week 7

Each time I get a discourse of critical pedagogy in my hands, literally holding onto a book instead of an article or chapter reproduced on-line, I go to the index and see what names appear in the text. Listings of Gee, Vygotsky, Freire and Murray are good signs that parts of the book will be on somewhat familiar grounds, and every once in a while there are pleasant surprises, like a reference to Shakespeare or the Brontëe sisters will appear (very fortuitous that Dorothy Holland et al. has an entire section on Bakhtin and Vygotsky plus a brief allusion to Shakespeare!). One name I have noticed with increasing frequency is Sigmund Freud, and I can understand the connection between the present texts being read and the founder of modern psychoanalysis. Another name I would expect, yet rarely ever find, is the more radical former colleague of Freud, Carl Jung. This week’s readings put me in mind of this “other” psychologist and the brief outline of his beliefs I had read earlier this year. Understandably a controversial figure not to every scholar’s tastes, still some of the concepts he presents are a wealth of ideas to make connections with identity and culture. This is particularly true in connection to Gee’s interview describing how he got into critical discourse analysis (NB: all lower-case letters). Both Jung and Gee seem to be aware of the shifting positions one will have throughout one’s career, and even the occasional moments of synchronicity that leads to the Big Idea.

Jung: A Very Short IntroductionJung: A Very Short Introduction by Anthony Stevens

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A just-right introduction to this series by Oxford University Press, although I was tempted to see if Greer’s VSI on Shakespeare would have anything new to say on an already familiar topic. Stevens’ Jung was fascinating, especially as his psychoanalysis is just one of the many brilliant insights into what seems like a vastly complex and some would say indecipherable mind like Jung’s. Not only will readers have a better sense of who they are, and what archetypal influences shape them into individualized Selfs, but we get peeks at the course Jung’s life took, narrated adequately in his own words based on his self-analysis. It will be hard now to get through any of Freud’s groundbreaking works, such as the Interpretation of Dreams without thinking of his eventual breaking off with Jung, as if Freud was only prepared to go so far. Jung seems to have no limits, especially when it come to making sense of a theories as dynamic and multidimensional as the collective unconscious, shadow and mythological influences. As Stevens mentions numerous times, Jung was never one to be tied to one theory, and throughout his long career, everything he thought and wrote would be open to re-evaluation. It is obvious the best way into understanding him more is to read his ideas, and Memories, Dreams, Reflections has sat in my bookcase unread for far too long, yet in a synchronistic way I hope to discover more about my own self more than Jung with reading his biography. I’m even tempted to visit a therapist to see how it all will work out, and I am pleased to learn that his patients were given the freedom to find their Self by their selves. View all my updates

Like Jung, in some ways, Gee discusses at great length how he cobbled together his theories, almost as if he makes up his critical discourse analysis as he goes along. It may be a surprise to some classmates that he does acknowledge Mikhail Bakhtin twice in his interview, but not so much as the intellectual debt he owes the Russian literary theorist, rather how others should not be so beholden to the big ideas from the past. Instead, we get Gee’s surfing metaphor, making his discourse current for the Internet (and surfing) communities of practice: each scholar has to develop a sense of which wave to ride: join the established ones from the recent past like Kress and Fairclough and ride along, or wait for the next wave as Gee seems to be doing with video game literacy, or make some waves of one’s own. At some point in Jung’s career, he began to doubt most of what he had written before (perhaps fell prey to waves of criticism from the traditional Freudian analysis/surfers) and through this crisis produced even more astounding writing on alchemy, flying saucers and answers to questions raised by the Book of Job. Perhaps not as extreme as Jung (perhaps not yet in any case) Gee seems to be turning his back on the once-revolutionary multimodality theory of literacy, and can be seen by some as obsessing over video games. Yet he defends this choice by recalling how Sarah Michaels and Courtney Cazden’s critical analysis of sharing time radically changed the way educational researchers thought about this seemingly innocent primary grade ritual. Especially important topics as serious gamers are already making inroads towards academia. One last surfing analogy: in 2001 there was a documentary called Dogtown and the Z-Boys which showed the inception of skateboarding culture from the surfing community in Santa Monica. The Zephir team (Z-Boys) seemed just as surprised as anyone else that millions of dollars could be made from doing what most people saw as an idle pastime. Already in South Korea, there is a huge industry created around playing the on-line game StarCraft and perhaps a student’s Minecraft skills will be more in demand than an ability to spot names like Jung, Brontëe or Shakespeare in book indices.

Speaking of the index, what exactly is “indexicality” as mentioned in Davies and Harré’s article? Most of the way through this article, I found myself a bit too much in the deep end of discursive analysis, and this notion took me aback. Admittedly, there were moments of crystallization, particularly their example from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, reminding me of Jasper Fforde’s footnoter conversation on the same novel that appears (at the bottom of various pages) throughout The Well of Lost Plots. Anyhow, where was I? Near the end of their discussion on identity-makers, they examine Robert Munch’s Paper Bag Princess, very much an anti-Anna Karenina heroine, from a feminist perspective. Must have been disheartening for the researchers when the students reacted negatively to the active heroine, mostly those who see the poorly-dressed princess as “bad”. Seems particularly cruel as the story itself is designed to assert the heroine’s side of the story and change the hegemonic view that girls must patiently wait for the boys to restore order to the kingdom. I wasn’t a huge Munch fan when I was growing up (a bit before my time, actually) and while I can look back at the radical changes he set for the Once-upon-a-time crowd, at the time I only remember being peeved that boys were portrayed as dumb bullies. Now I am quite fond of children’s literature that pushes the boundaries and problematizes the hero’s journey – most of Fforde’s novels have women in the narrative driver’s seat. And to bring the discussion back to Jung, he opened the door not only for Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces by working out his own archetypal images, but Jung also has interesting theories about dual masculine/feminine identies (animus and anima) that I need to explore further to see how they apply to literacy.

This brings me back to Dorothy Holland, and the first two chapters of Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. While Jung does not appear anywhere in this book, a shadow of anima theory seems to be lurking in chapter one with its evocative title “The Woman Who Climbed up the House” – both Campbell and Munch would have written something relating to Holland and Debra Skinner’s Nepalese field work. The pseudonymous Gyanumaya could not enter the rented house to be interviewed by Holland and Skinner, and her creative solution inspires Holland to write about how some people are positioned in society, and others resist the constraints placed by this positioning. At some point, it may have occurred to Gyanumaya that not being able to enter the house could have simply sent her home, her story never shared with the foreign researchers. It is not here, however, that we find out what she contributed to their study, other than the house-climbing incident; more details can be found, I assume in her 1992 New Directions in Psychological Anthropology article. She does, unlike Gee, have no problem directly referencing Bakhtin and Vygotsky, claiming to be standing on the shoulders of these socio-cultural giants – talk about being a head taller! I am very interest to read more of Holland et al. discourse, and may have some time during the December break to read their work while also starting in on Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Reference

Holland, D., Lachicotte, W. (Jr.), Skinner, D. and Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultured worlds. Cambridge: Harvard U P.

Holland, D. (1993). The woman who climbed up the house: Some limitations of schema theory. In Theodore Schwartz, Geoffrey White and Catherine Lutz (Eds.) New Directions in Psychological Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge U P. 68-81.

LLED 601 – Assignment 1

Here is the article from the Canadian Journal of Education: Ciampa 2012

Click on this link to download my article review: Article Review for Ciampa 2012

Please post comments on this blog if you’d like. Thank you.

LLED 558 Week 6

An extended title for Wohlwend’s mostly enjoyable article could be: A is for Avatar, B is for Beta-mode and C is for Collaboration… this seem to be the new skill set children need as they work their way through school. Not so much because every child needs to learn these concepts, but rather they are already familiar with most of them, having something close to Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of gaming and video watching by the time they get to kindergarten. There is some fright amongst parents and educational stakeholders that these children are going to lose touch with the natural world, that it should be animals or flowers that they are naming off with their alphabets rather than these digitized concepts. Louv’s Last Child in the Wood gets dismissed in Wohlwend’s article, perhaps a bit unfairly, yet unless children being educated today are going into the agriculture business (as I am sure many of the farming communities were expecting of their children back in the late 19th century, when schools and the alphabet were just coming into vogue), I feel they are better off knowing the ins and outs of the ubiquitous tools that connect them to the Internet. It is a romantic ideal (idyll actually if you want to get poetic about it) that people in the developed world can go back to the way things were in the supposed good old days. With the increased percentage of Canadian living in urban, as opposed to rural, areas of the country within the last fifty years, we’d be fooling ourselves to think that apples, butterflies and cows will be the right frame of mind for students to start learning about their letters. It takes a multimillion-dollar Hollywood film like James Cameron’s Avatar to remind most of the young ones that trees are good, and technology has its downsides. I know, what a world!!

Where both Wohlwend and Rowsell & Pahl get the story right is by raising awareness that each on-line connection teachers can make to lived experiences in the students’ lives, the better prepared they are for being creative with these tools when they are older. During my practicum in a grade four classroom, I wanted the students to have access to the laptop cart as much as possible, as they worked on their responses to Kenneth Oppel’s novel Silverwing. It took me by surprise how easy it was to get the laptop cart wheeled into the classroom, as none of the other teachers seemed to be making use of them. It became evident why when a roomful of students tried to access the wifi at the same time, so I had to think up some off-line activities while others patiently waited to log on. Letting children explore what they could do with the approved webpages was the task I set before them, and if it meant they could have a few dozen minutes playing Club Penguin once they finished their classroom work, all the better. Some of the students did not have access to computers at home, yet seemed to know what to do with those bonus minutes of on-line free time. It was a great opportunity for me to learn a bit more about how Club Penguin works, too. What I find interesting with Rowsell & Pahl is they assume some familiarity with Facebook and other on-line worlds their students would visit, yet it become a worksheet-filling activity. I get the multimodal aspect of remediating webpages onto pieces of paper, and wonder if teachers are not aware of the disconnect students make from these types of project: why don’t we just go on-line and create a Facebook page? Hundreds of reasons why not, I am aware (especially with the elementary students who are not permitted to enter this social media arena, yet somehow already have a digital presence thank to parents and older siblings allowing them access to their pages). Seems a bit silly to discuss authenticity in the virtual world that social media allows students access to, but as young as 10 years old, possibly younger, these children know when they on-line or not.

The multimodal example I brought to class this week was a brilliant remix of the 2012 United States presidential debate, turned into a video game by digital artist Schmoyoho. As much as I could distance myself from the actual events (not being an American, I viewed the whole campaign with mild curiosity) but hard to escape the polarization of views. Schmoyoho’s brilliant parody plays up the standardization of sentiment, overused rhetorical devices to make people feel secure in the choices they had already made – let’s face it, if an American had already decided to vote for Obama, there is little either he or Romney could say to persuade that voter otherwise (a sad truth about Canadian politics, voter apathy, will need to be discussed another time). What works so multimodally amazing in the video below is that it is made into a video game, but uses the 16-bit graphic more familiar with Pac Man and early Mario Bros games. When showing this clip to Ernesto earlier last week, he had much to say on this topic: how if Schmoyoho had used images from 2012 games, they would not have been as readily identifiable for a majority of people to get the joke. Some of the digital natives may wonder why the gaming references are so old, but then it fits with the old-fashioned world American politics continually seems to represent.

Where it gets really interesting is with Kendrick & McKay’s work in bringing these digital tools to Kenya, and how empowering much of the older technology can be when compared to North American standards: why bother with a digital voice recorder when you can do the same thing with your smartphone? (and sadly, why bother with the last generation smartphone when someone can buy you the latest iPhone 5s, because it come in pink or green?!). As Maureen explained, the students in the journalism club had to play around with these newly-acquired tools for weeks before feeling comfortable with them, but once they mastered the technology, they could do amazing things (until they graduated and were sent to the school test scores recommended). I felt the same sense of untapped potential with the students on my practicum, let them play around with the laptops and they can do some amazing things, but also the slight frustration that my 15 weeks with them won’t amount to much if their teachers next year were to keep the laptops out of their classrooms, and handout more pieces of paper which only simulate the experiences they could be having on-line. Maybe these teachers are expect their students to enter into the newspaper business? Reminds me of the joke Jimmy Kimmel told at Obama’s Meet the Press event a few years back: “What is black and white and read all over? Not much, actually.” What a world, indeed.

LLED 601 Week 6

Danger: Violence!

No time to mind the p’s and q’s with this music video, this week’s readings touch a nerve with a topic supposedly inappropriate for most students, yet as Bourdieu would point out, all within the “field” of child development: violence. It is as unavoidable as Bourdieu, Foucault and Marsh make it out to be in their writing. Evidence can be found in the earliest form of children’s literacy: my wife, an Early Child Care Educator, began a project with the 3-to-5 year old children at her centre. They would create a story, each taking turns with a sentence. From the outset, the children decided that they wanted to tell a happy story, and selected an animal living in the woods, going for a walk. It did not take too long to establish the field, and as soon as the animal came to some water, it fell in and was eaten by a shark. When my wife asked what happened to the happy story, the children had unanimously decided that this turn of events is the only one that could take place; the doxa determines that stories must end tragically, despite many examples in the centre of happy endings. On a similar train of thought, high school students that I tutor are often given open-ended drama activities where they get to create a new final chapter for Lord of the Flies or a different fifth act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it seems like the only ending is one where the characters find a way to kill each other off. This is not to say that every single child is innately violent, especially those digital natives who are more familiar with video games and popular culture than paper-bound books. Perhaps there is something wrong with the schooling, the forcing of creative choices on students who just want to end the story in the quickest and most final way possible: the protagonist dies, the end!

Foucault speaks about this tendency toward violence in his abridged chapter “the Discourse of Language” and words like “prohibition”, “control” and “discipline” are used with increasing frequency. One can only imagine what words were used in the omitted passages (everywhere there was a “[…]” indicated parts of the lecture we are not privileged enough to hear). There are words one must not say, like yelling fire in a crowded theatre, and as much freedom as we are supposed to share in democratic societies, there is the implicit understanding of what sane people say and do. What mad people say can be ignored, what they do can be controlled through institutions like hospitals or prisons. “Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse,” (Foucault, 1970, p. 239) and as teachers, it is really up to us to monitor what is happening for the future citizens. My wife, on the other hand, argues that children as young as the ones at her infant-toddler centre are already citizens, and the process of schooling withholds democratic participation, for their own benefit of course. Even for the student teacher Jackie Marsh interviews, there is a sense that the participants are being held back, their version of popular culture in their practica was rife with misunderstanding and possible falsehoods in reporting. As much control is needed at this end of the education system as it does at the beginning. While Marsh centres upon the limited field of experience of students’ popular culture for one or two of the participants, using Bourdieu’s theory as her frame, the suggested better way is to let students decide for themselves what is the best way to interact with literacy. Letting go of tried-and-true standards, like Golding and Shakespeare, may be the only way forward, as long as students are aware that some people at some point in history thought these authors were as exciting as Pokëmon or Minecraft.

“You mess with the bull, you get the horns”
Principal Vernon from The Breakfast Club (1985)

Lastly, Bourdieu (1982), in his own words, sees that intimidation “can only be exerted on a person predisposed (in his habitus) to feel it” (p. 471) which sounds like a tough-love approach to moderating the psychological scars we inflict upon each other with our choices of words. Blaming the victim, or just simply pointing out that some people have the ability, thanks to various forms of capital, to absorb or ignore? As the majority of scholars seem to be increasingly French, I am reminded of a silly yet politically-charged moment in cultural history, not too long ago, when “freedom fries” were items to be found on American menus. Despite centuries of ideological sharing between France and the United States (the Statue of Liberty being an iconic symbol of the pact between the two nations), one political act of violence turned brother against frère. What would Bourdieu made of this Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey’s Weekend Update?

Reference

Bourdieu, J. (1982). “The production and reproduction of legitimate language”. In Routledge Reader (reference needed). 467-477.

LLED 536 Week 5

Click on this link to upload my reflection on Upintheair Theatre’s Inside the Seed

Part of the actors’ talkback sesssion last night revealed something interesting I noticed in Tara Goldstein’s 2001 Hong Kong, Canada ethnodrama. In both cases, the characters in the play need to respond to what other people on stage want from them. Wendy wants a second family to substitute for the “astronaut family” that live in Hong Kong – that one-child policy of the recently (as of 2001) reunited special administrative region of mainland China already taking its toll on what members of the family get to stay together. She needs Joshua to step up and be more of her man, rather than the mensch he is for his own family. Joshua wants controversial content for the flailing school newspaper, and pushes others into risky situations so that he can add another achievement to his resume, but he is not the villain, just a guy, Wendy claims, who starts asking questions. Sarah, the Veronica to Wendy’s Betty, wants things seemingly out of reach, and a telling cutaway scene where she refuses to ask Carol for help with calculus says a lot more about her than her snooty written responses, angry petitioning or unsubtle seduction of Joshua. And most tellingly of these characters is Carol’s silent gestures as Ms Diamond takes charge of the English only policy inquiry.

Lastly, an update on the progress of Et Tu… which could easily become a three-part dialogue based on interviews I intend to conduct, asking other people to share the first time they saw Julius Caesar. The two participants I have in mind will hopefully shed some cultural light on the “old” English play, especially as one of them studied it first in another language. While I haven’t yet started to compile my data, there are already scenes emerging in my mind, starting with Cassius’ line “How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted over…” with actors taking the role of research participants, bathing their hands in Caesar’s blood. There are no coincidences in my program of study anymore, and this week I am reading about Bourdieu’s field theory, and the violence implied between habitus and doxa. I have already gathered accounts of the innate fascination with blood and death in young children, and while my personal experience with the “Et tu, Brute” scene in an intermediate classroom sparked my interest in this autoethnodrama, I see this episode now as a small scene, a touchstone really, for a much more engaging investigation of how people react to a play not often performed. Much of these thought are spurred on by reading Chapter 4 of Saldaña’s Ethnotheatre coursework, and I now cannot wait to get back in the classroom, see what shape the research project will take. If I can work in current research into the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) project, my three-hander play will grow into a cast of dozens of players, both actual and virtual!

Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) stages the murder of Julius Caesar

LLED 536 Week 6

Class discussion on the play Hong Kong Canada was not as playful as I had hoped. Even in Ethnotheatre textbook, whenever the author includes scenes, or even entire dialogues, it just feels like we should be getting up on our feet, performing. Our resident monologuist has plenty to say on any topic, but why is it always only her that gets to be in the spotlight? Reading ahead to prepare for my presentation later this month, I am excited that Anton Chekhov gets mentioned. Hmmm… wonder how we are going to embody his text?

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