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Category Archives: Sept 2013

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?

LLED 558 Week 5

Slide 7 of last week’s presentation

Before getting onto the reading, I will write a brief reflection on the multiliteracies and multimodality presentation last week. Despite the 10-minute delay as we discovered we could not reconnect an already-running presentation to the SMARTBoard, we accomplished our goal to demonstrate how the SB is an example of multimodality in the classroom. Well, most classrooms anyway. What surprised me in preparing the presentation, and even some of the in-class feedback during the presentation, was how much teachers and students don’t like using this expensive learning tool. Things could be done a lot more smoothly on a giant LCD television screen connected to a Bamboo electronic drawing pad, but without the hands-on-screen manipulation of objects and text, it just becomes another skill most teachers would tire of introducing to the class, especially as it will get replaced by tablets or the latest technological “fad”. Like it or not, SMARTBoard will be in the classrooms for a while, and with a growing number of children who have been using them since kindergarten (many of the primary students I meet in North Vancouver seem to know more about these devices than the teachers for whom I substitute). While it is a shame that high schools cut off these students from the technology they essentially grew up with, returning them to dusty used books and a mountain of photocopied handouts, there is also a push to make learning more asynchronous, at home on the students’ computers. Nevertheless, our LLED 558 presentation set out to rekindle creative use of classroom technology, and it will remain to be seen who will carry on the torch passed from us to them.

Bamboo drawing pad – SMARTBoard’s next level up?

Now, onto this week’s readings, I would imagine if the grown-up versions of Chelsea and Lucas (from Edwards-Groves’ case study) were to present in our classroom, we would be in for a treat. At their young age, only a couple of years ago, they already have a handle on collaborative work in designing a presentation, as well as the imaginative showpersonship needed to impress net generation students. All three articles acknowledge that the look of learning has changed thanks to online resources, and as Gee would want to add in here, familiarity with gaming practices. It was amusing to read the back-and-forth between James Paul Gee and Julian Sefton-Green, one claiming that online games creates a community of practice, while the other questioning this approach of a gaming literacy that only promotes more gaming (Jewitt, 2008, p. 255). From some of the South Korean students I have tutored on the North Shore, university-aged older siblings could make a better career out of playing Starcraft than continuing with their studies. While JS-G scores a point on the side of caution (for teachers not to get too carried away by every digital bell and whistle), the children from Christine Joy Edwards-Groves’ (hereafter CJE-G) case study demonstrates, they like the wow factor being added to the research and planning they are required to do. It is especially a hit with the kindergarteners, and who knows what technology will be in use when they finish up their studies? A more balanced approach is presented in Jennifer Rowsell and Kate Pahl’s investigation of “sedimented identities” that demonstrates for each device in use in the classroom, students bring knowledge from home that may either support or contradict what needs to be done for school. Rowsell and Pahl place great emphasis on Bourdieu’s theory of “habitus” for defining their studies of the sedimentary layer of home world, school world and other influences on the students.

Although Bourdieu and habitus are two related terms that I have heard in the last couple of weeks, it is still a vague notion of what he means. The field theory video posted to the class makes it a bit more relatable. Reflecting upon Lisa and Meg’s presentation question about the Sri Lankan teacher’s habitus, the answer revealed itself from the discussion with Angela. When teaching a grade four classroom in the United States, there was a district-wide initiative to get students interested in getting into college, each teacher’s classroom was named after the college they had attended, and students took on the identity of that post-secondary (Angela’s college team was the Cougars, and so were her students). While there is not such a focus on the teacher’s university life in Canada, my experience as a Teacher on Call are walking into way too many classroom decked out with hockey posters and other paraphernalia, and the closer the hometeam gets to the play-offs, the more team jersey are spotted around the school. No wonder Vancouver had riots when the team lost the Stanley Cup (twice) when a student’s school world has become so hockey-ified.

Lastly, looking ahead to multimodal text for next week, I would like to draw attention to the latest RSA Animate that came out last week: David Coplin’s Re-imagining Work:

Reference

Edwards-Groves, C. J. (2011). The multimodal writing process: changing practices in contemporary classrooms. Language and Education 25(1). 49-64.

Jewitt, C. (2008). Multimodality and literacies in school classrooms. Review of Research in Education 32. 241-267.

LLED 601 Week 5

Constructivism at an international Shakespeare conference

As a theme I would like to explore in relation to this week’s readings on constructivism, I will mention an international conference I attended this summer. In the sunny Mediterranean town of Montpellier, I was at the European Shakespeare Research Association conference to discuss some findings that involve the digitization of First Folio text happening in Japan. It was an eye-opening experience for me, but in terms of constructive learning, far from the ideals of Piaget, Dewey and Vygotsky. It felt more along the theme of oppression written so evocatively by Freire. Little evidence did I find in France for the Shakespearean sense of freedom (Greenblatt, 2010) and even less for a democracy where everyone can read and have an opinion about the plays (based on the tradition that everyone could understand a commonly spoken language while watching a play). Instead, there was an educated hierarchy represented at the conference, where only certain skill-levels could fully understand the deeper meaning of Shakespeare’s words. The professors at the top of this food chain had reputations to uphold, insisted upon their (usually) singular way of reading the text, and while others convened to listen to lectures, those on top did not seem to be too willing to construct ideas about the plays (unless of course they had a book on the same topic as someone else). The closing plenary speaker articulated my growing suspicion that I had come to the wrong place to learn about the latest ideas in Shakespeare scholarship, by showing a slide of a related text (Robert Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit) and declaring that “anyone who doesn’t know what this is doesn’t deserve to be in this room.” As the French would say, incroyable!

Pre-show at the Berliner Ensemble’s Richard II
Domain d’Or, Montpellier

Romanticism often gets looked down upon, even though for Dewey it was a major influence. At ERSA, the Germans seemed to get blamed for perpetuating myths about Shakespeare, yet the Berliner Ensemble’s production of Richard II was inspired theatre, one of the highlights of the conference. There is a connection here to be sought with John Dewey and his fondness for the Romantic poets, such as Coleridge (Garrison, 1999, para. 21) in forming his philosophy of education. One person’s delights can lead to higher levels of thinking about other topics in their lives. Contrasting to these enlightening moments glanced at in Jim Garrison’s entry on John Dewey is his growing mistrust of Social Darwinism, which he saw as control via an undefined notion of being fit to survive. Happily for most readers, Dewey was not a racist, and perhaps for the American readers that he also had reservations about Soviet Communism. Those who try to impose order on a society are no better than the oppressive “bankers” that Freire writes about in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It will be important to remember that English burnt down the Globe Theatre the second time it was built, part of the Reformation, and if it wasn’t for other countries noticing how enjoyable Shakespeare’s plays are, there would be little evidence of his plays past the late 17th century.

Scene from Peines d’amour perdues (Love’s Labour’s Lost)

Another connection I will make between the constructivist ideal and this eye-opening conference centers upon the participants themselves. While their devotion to Shakespeare scholarship cannot be questioned, many of them traveling great distances to attend this annual conference, there seemed to be little joy in watching versions of the plays. The opening night production of Richard II was well attended, but many left at the intermission (which came a few minutes shy of midnight, so understandable for most long-distance travelers). Before the show, during the welcoming dinner, local university students had prepared scenes from Shakespeare plays, a program called “purple passages” in both French and English. It was a brave sight, many of these young theatre students presenting before a renown collection of scholars, but as for the aural pleasures, it was hard to make out any of the actors’ words over the din of table conversation. Similarly, the same group of actors performed the first three acts of Love’s Labour’s Lost for this dwindling crowd on the closing night. I loved seeing (and hearing) the French construction of this play, and by this time not at all surprised to see the people who should be most interested in how students make meaning from the play (they are all professors, after all) grouping together for more chat in cafés and bistros around town. A banker’s holiday, it seems.

Dining alone at French bistro

Not so much to write about Piaget this week, and I am finding it a struggle to write positively about the Canadian Journal of Education article I selected which refers to both Dewey and Piaget, but confuses sociocultural and cognitive constructivism. While searching for James Paul Gee’s video “Books and Games”, I came across this intriguing item: Howard Gardner, Noam Chomsky and Bruno della Chiesa discuss the influence of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. At one point, around the 30 minute mark, they even put in a word or two about Dewey’s school.

Reference

Garrison, J. (1999). John Dewey. In M. Peters, P. Ghiraldelli, B. Žarnić, A. Gibbons, R. Heraud (eds.) Encyclopaedia of Philosophy of Education. Retrieved on September 26, 2013 from http://www.ffst.hr/ENCYCLOPAEDIA/doku.php?id=dewey_john

Greenblatt, S. (2010). Shakespeare’s Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

LLED 536 Week 4

Ethnotheatre: Research from Page to StageEthnotheatre: Research from Page to Stage by Johnny Saldana

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Here is the first draft of an autoethnodrama based upon recent teaching experiences.
Et Tu…

LLED 558 Week 4

See our SMARTBoard presentation first! – Uploading soon.

Lots of readings to cover this week, but Natalie and I got off to a good start in preparing for our presentation. New London Group seemed to be the most daunting, even after reading it again since my Master of Educational Technology course (and it is on the reading list for LLED 601 later this term). It tells an enticingly simple story of where literacy education was at the end of the 20th century, and how it must be designed for the 21st, making the fullest use of multiliteracies. In predicting changes to lifeworlds, even without the paranoia caused by September 11th, the Group seem to have envisioned Twitter and Facebook. People are reading information in a decidedly more public way, and able to comment on what others are up to, that would have shocked other in the late 1990’s. One issue that comes up is harm that happens, and cases like Amanda Todd get more attention than most people are able to deal with in a respectful way. Amongst the obscenities and wry comments in Lewis CK’s latest stint on Conan O’Brien’s talkshow, he raises an interesting point about the lack of empathy children have for other when most of their interaction happens through a smartphone screen.

James Paul Gee, one of the New Londoners, as well as Knobel and Lankshear, see the young students’ ability to process the vast amount of information coming at them from all corners as a sign of multitasking, and it was a good point raised in this week’s discussion that how well these students are able to blog, listen to music and study at the same time is not made clear. On the one hand, if students are productive with so many resources at their fingertips, it will encourage others to make use of any device within reach, never mind the digital divide that supposedly limited how many can access these tools. Yet on the other hand, society seems to have taken just as many steps forward as they have regressed into a mob mentality due to anyone being able to say anything in a vaguely anonymous manner. Another recent example is the fall-out from Guido Barilla’s anti-LGBT comments. It is unfortunate that the chairman of an otherwise successful pasta company needed to air his views on the “family values” issue, and equally sad that he is not as unbiased and enlightened as others appear to be. Somehow hectoring him to conform to a 21st century standard makes social justice all the more oppressive, when tolerance is only granted to those with the same level of tolerance.

Barilla backpedals

Finally, two other article that captured my attention were Kress and Bhattacharya. Another New Londoner, Gunther Kress writes about mutlimodality in the year 2000, and takes a less digital, more “at hand” or manual approach to the different forms literacy takes. The shape and feel of a bottle of water, the images on the label, the taste of local spring are all working together to make one brand more appealing than another – good thing he stayed away from the pasta aisle when generating his thoughts on this topic! For him, there are multiple ways of experiencing the same thing, yet a more critical stance is taken by the more modern Usree Bhattacharya, who problematizes the western alphabet and the Eurocentric culture of education. When it comes to histories disrupted by the colonial takeover of the world, learning to type or text using only the 26 letters provided (less and less accents, tildes and umlauts seem to be required) by the English alphabet makes for easier computer processing, but a less dialectally interesting world. Two developments occurring with digital literacy could be the game-changers for New Londoners and their new literacies-backed opposition alike: video lectures and online gaming communities (what Gee calls an affinity group). The former is evident with popular websites such as TEDtalks and RSA, which produce digital video of lectures and can communicate radical ideas across the world, no doubt in as many languages as subtitle-writers permits; it moves the information age into the visual and aural corners of the New London Group’s multimodality circle. The latter allows for people to work past political and socia-economic boundaries in the form of avatars (or more simply players – the spatial and gestural modalities) to tackle important issues like zombie invasions or minecrafting.

Minecraft Earth

Move over Google, here is Minecraft Earth!

LLED 601 Week 4

Some inspired and dramatic choices for this week’s reading list, starting with the image suggested in the first paragraph of Rosenblatt’s (1978) The Reader, the Text, the Poem: a darkened stage, two chair and a book. Much of this discussion recalls one of the novels I had just finished rereading, from Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series. Whether it was Lost in a Good Book (2002) or The Well of Lost Plots (2003), I cannot recall, but the scene played out could have just as easily been restaged in Rosenblatt’s discussion. Miss Havisham, I believe, was telling her rookie Jurisfiction agent Thursday about the role the reader plays in the creation of a narrative. The author seems to get all the creative credit, her point echoing Rosenblatt, while the people who choose to read the book (and at what point in their lives the reading happens) become so generalized as barely to be mentioned in any discourse on literacy.

Maggy Roberts, created for Jasper Fforde's Lost in a Good Book

© Maggy Roberts, click this link for her webpage.

Throughout the chapters, Rosenblatt invokes poets, playwrights and other authors but they merely seem incidental. Perhaps what she really wants to draw attention to is the fact that she has read this poem, seen that play etc. On a similar note, Bakhtin slyly slips in a quotation from Gogol’s Dead Souls which made me smile… oh, those Russians! Back to Rosenblatt, the Robert Frost experiment she describes is a wonderful examination of what goes on inside the reader’s head, minus any background knowledge they bring to the text – what might have happened if one of the student recognized the stanza? New word of the day comes a chapter or two later, where she contrasts “efferent” (p. 24 et passim) with the aesthetic sense of reading. Here I may need to reflect upon the classroom discussion for her idea to sink in, so stay tuned to the comment section below. Of course, the chapter I am figuratively dying to read is not included in this excerpt, but someday soon I will catch up on her discussion of timelessness texts for Hamlet and The Waste Land.

Something Rotten illustration sketch by Maggy Roberts

Now for Bakhtin’s article, I must admit that I was efferently carried away from the meaning that he was making, by a very simple mistake. What seems like a lifetime ago, I was an actor in small productions around town, and I got really excited about a production of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; I was advised by one of the director I was working with to read as much of Stoppard’s plays as I could, and set about collecting and enjoying those. A few weeks before I shipped myself off to Japan, for what was to become the next phase of my life as a teacher, I found in the library a new collection of plays called the Coast of Utopia. It was a trilogy that followed the ups and downs of Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Here’s where the mistake comes in, as any reader might start to sense in this lenghtening digression: when I saw on the class reading list an article by Bakhtin, my mind immediately leapt to the conclusion that we were going to reading about that guy from the Stoppard play I never got to finish reading. Wonder what Ferdinand de Saussure would think about me unconsciously substituting a “un” for the “ht” (not withstanding the Russian characters Бахт’н and Бакунин that signify their surnames as originally given to them)? Ah well, plenty more to write about the actual Mikhail Bakhtin in the comment section below 😛

Ferdinand de SaussureFerdinand de Saussure by Jonathan Culler

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Finally, one author who can’t escape so easily is the one who barely wrote anything during his game-changing career as a philologist and professor of linguistics. Kind of silly to dwell on these biographical details, when so much of what is written about his theory of language is worth discussing here, as opposed to the comment section below. yet out of respect for this proto-linguist, i want to bring any thought I have about Culler’s text into the classroom to discuss. One of the greatest shifts from my Master of Educational Technology and the current Literacy Education PhD programs is the amount of face-to-face time instructors and students. If there is not a rousing discussion on the sounds and utterances de Saussure observed coming from round the tables, I don’t think there will be much more I can add to this online discussion that will set the record straight.

LLED 536 Week 3

Started work on the tentatively titled ethnodrama Et tu… and will find out soon what stage it has to be in for each of the classes. Also discovered another interesting play that will happen at the East Van Cultural Centre (the playhouse of my youth) called Inside the Seed, looks like a modern-day spin on Oedipus Rex, but more to do with argi-business than wireless communication. Hope that the class can decide on this one (although I still want to see the concurrent play Penelope. Perhaps a double bill?

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