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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 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 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 558 Week 3

The plot seems to thicken with the New Literacy Studies, especially as the binary relationship between orality and literacy is called in to question. Gee (1996) leads the way with his review of the development of the two-sided debate, including some familiar names like Havelock, Vygotsky, Ong and Heath. The old world view of educated civilization and illiterate savages was demonstrated not to be so appealing after Havelock proved Homer’s epics were most likely composed ages before anyone could read or write (at least anyone Greek had these valuable skills). Ong’s further praise of oral culture’s strengths, along the same argumentative lines as Plato, prove that more the word’s proper place was in the mouths of people, not on surfaces or even screens. Ong’s Orality and Literacy presents an intriguing case for secondary orality, which follows along the same lines as TEDtalks, RSA.org and even YouTube itself. Here is a link to animator Andrew Park discussion with RSA on link between the visual images and memory: The RSA Animate Revolution.

Andrew Park’s scribing for RSA Animate

Perry (2012) covers the same ground, but with more questions about the difference between New Literacy studies and New Literacies. Kind of difficult to follow along without a map or flowchart, and she even includes diagrams in her paper. Many of her questions are answered, some with more questions to follow, all zeroing in on the big question, what is literacy? Much of the class seems to be pondering this very question, which is not so bad for literate minds like ourselves, but I really have to wonder if students in other graduate degree programs spend as much mental energy asking questions like “what is physics?”, “how do we define law?” or “what does ‘ocean’ mean?”. A paradigm must have something in view, however nebulous the abstract idea might be, and Perry puts her two-cents in with a subtle complaint that “something is lost when the field defines literacy so broadly” (p. 65). For other answers that Perry provides, they are directed towards multiple meaning and differing opinions, and I find her paper at a balancing point between Gee and Street.

Finally there is Street (2003) again, jazzing up the questions Perry would ask less than a decade later, but focusing on the newness of New Literacy Studies. If he himself and Gee take so much credit ushering in the new studies in the early 1990s, how new could they be by the start of the 21st century? I felt the same sense of unease as when I studied post-modern art for my undergraduate, wondering if there will be a point in art history where people look back at our period and say “ah, that po-mo movement, so dated. Thank goodness society moved on to…” While literacy seems to keep morphing its researchable shape, picking up new terms and dropping out-of-date concepts, one of my classmates last week raised an interesting point about the continual search of the new. Taking digital literacy as the newest of the new literacies, there will eventually be a point where society, led by dissatisfied academics, go into post-digital literacy. No doubt Google has its top thinkers working on a way to get their corporate logo put in front of whatever words are used to describe gliteracy.

Reference

Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and social literacy: Ideology in discourse. London: Taylor Francis. 46-65.

Perry, K. H. (2012). What is literacy? – A critical overview of sociocultural perspectives. Journal of Language & Literacy Education 8(1). 50-71.

Street, B. (2003). What’s “new” in new literacy studies? Critical approaches to theory and practices. Current Issues in Comparative Education 5(2). 77-91.

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