{"id":61,"date":"2021-08-14T22:27:30","date_gmt":"2021-08-15T05:27:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/marranca510\/?p=61"},"modified":"2021-08-14T22:27:30","modified_gmt":"2021-08-15T05:27:30","slug":"keyword-reflection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/marranca510\/2021\/08\/14\/keyword-reflection\/","title":{"rendered":"Keyword: Reflection"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my first keyword response, I explored the term\u00a0citizenship<\/em>. I reflected on my time as a young art school student, navigating my way through an understanding and personal development of\u00a0artspeak<\/em>: the language that artists, art instructors, academics, critical theorists, curators, critics, and students use to talk about art.\u00a0Artspeak<\/em>\u00a0is infamously pretentious, often criticized as being overly poetic, flowery, superfluous, or intentionally elitist. In my reflection on\u00a0citizenship<\/em>, I made the connection that the development of this type of language serves as a sort of citizenship, providing entry into the world of art – by understanding the language, one may become a participatory member of that world. Kalantzis and Cope (2010), members of the New London Group, explain the phenomenon of distinctive language, or \u201cmetalanguage\u201d development within a community, \u201cspecialized disciplinary knowledge is based on the finely tuned conceptual distinctions typical of those developed by expert communities of practice and characteristic of bodies of academic knowledge. In the case of teaching writing, for instance, students develop a metalanguage with which to describe how texts work\u2026\u201d (p. 209). What I later began to realize within this course, is that the theme of my learning is in fact\u00a0centred<\/em>\u00a0around the concept of social infrastructure. I would later learn about a series of related concepts that describe how the success of learning is made through various means of social interaction and semantic construction.<\/p>\n

Kalantzis and Cope (2010), also introduced me to the notion of \u201ccommunities of practice\u201d (p. 209), and I came to understand that\u00a0artspeak<\/em>\u00a0is one of many literacies taught in art school to support learners\u2019 entry into the community of practice. Kalantiz and Cope explain, \u201cIn order to learn, the learner has to feel that the learning is for them. They have to feel they belong in the content; they have to feel they belong in the community or learning setting; they have to feel at home with that kind of learning or way of getting to know the world\u201d (p. 205). Midway through this course I learned about the concept of the \u201caffinity network\u201d (p. 14) through the work of Ito et. al (2015), which represents another way to consider social grouping formed by shared interest. Below, Ito et. al, describe what they mean by \u201caffinity network\u201d:<\/p>\n

Our use of the term \u201cinterest,\u201d then, is not meant to signal an individual or innate quality; we see interests as cultivated through social and cultural relationships and located within what we call an \u201caffinity network\u201d of commonly felt identity, practice, and purpose. We draw from Jim Gee\u2019s (2005) term \u201caffinity spaces,\u201d which he uses to describe online places where people interact around a common passion and\/or set of commitments but broaden our focus to civic and political action and wider networks. We use the term affinity network to signal contexts that can span multiple sites and platforms but hold at their center joint interests, activities, and identities. (pp. 14-15, 2015, Ito et. al)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the final weeks of this course, the theories and practices of social learning culminated with Gee\u2019s (2007) idea of the \u201csemiotic domain\u201d (p. 18). James Gee, in fact, has influenced many of the texts we have covered in class \u2013 seeing various education technology academics referenced throughout each other\u2019s\u2019 works reveals a glimpse of the social practice that transpires in the semiotic domain that we as master\u2019s students are currently learning within. Whether celebrated, condemned, or mocked,\u00a0artspeak<\/em>\u00a0serves as an entry point into the semiotic domain of the art world – Gee\u2019s (2007) writing details the concept of \u201csemiotic domains\u201d in depth. He provides the following definition: \u201cany set of practices that recruits one or more modalities (e.g., oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, etc.) to communicate distinctive types of meanings\u201d (p. 18). To further explain the notion of semiotic domains, Gee touches on related concepts such as\u00a0social practice<\/em><\/strong>, \u201cvarious distinctive ways of acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, knowing and using various objects and technologies\u201d (p. 15);\u00a0affinity group<\/em><\/strong>, \u201cthe group of people associated with a given semiotic domain\u201d (p. 27); and\u00a0lifeworld domain,<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0\u201c\u2026 \u2018everyday,\u2019 \u2018ordinary\u2019 life is itself a semiotic domain. In fact, it is a domain with which all of us have lots and lots of experience\u2026I mean those occasions when we are operating (making sense to each other and to ourselves) as \u2018everyday people\u2019, not as members of more specialist or technical semiotic domains\u201d (p. 36).<\/p>\n

I have come to understand these different realms: communities of practice, affinity networks and semiotic domains, as overlapping social convergences, connected with growing ease through the use of the internet and other digital tools and social media. The concepts mentioned above allow us to consider how people exist, interact, and converge in an increasingly connected social world to allow us to design educative environments that are based on these critical factors. By learning about learning, I am able to look back at my time in art school and understand that even though some aspects seemed needlessly complex and superficial, like\u00a0artspeak<\/em>, they actually form key literacies required to gain a full understanding of a specific culture.<\/p>\n

Throughout this course, I have developed an understanding of the different ways in which social interaction and semiotic construction can create interest and a sense of agency in learners, and by applying these ideas to the design of learning, teacher-designers create learning environments that are reflective and inclusive of the everyday realities of the learners themselves. With this knowledge serving as a base, my next step is to develop my own methods to apply this knowledge in my own educative practice.<\/p>\n

References:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gee, J. (2007). Semiotic domains: Is playing video games a \u201cwaste of time?\u201d In\u00a0What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy\u00a0<\/em>(pp.17-45).\u00a0New York: Palgrave and Macmillan.<\/p>\n

Ito, M.,\u00a0Soep, E.,\u00a0Kligler-Vilenchik, N.,\u00a0Shresthova, S., Gamber-Thompson, L., & Zimmerman, A. (2015). Learning connected civics: Narratives, practices, infrastructures.\u00a0Curriculum Inquiry<\/em>,\u00a045(1), 10-29. doi:10.1080\/03626784.2014.995063<\/p>\n

Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2010). The teacher as designer: Pedagogy in the new media age.\u00a0E-Learning and Digital Media<\/em>, 7(3), 200\u2013222.\u00a0https:\/\/doi.org\/10.2304\/elea.2010.7.3.200<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my first keyword response, I explored the term\u00a0citizenship. I reflected on my time as a young art school student, navigating my way through an understanding and personal development of\u00a0artspeak: the language that artists, art instructors, academics, critical theorists, curators, critics, and students use to talk about art.\u00a0Artspeak\u00a0is infamously pretentious, often criticized as being overly … Continue reading “Keyword: Reflection”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83564,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/marranca510\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/marranca510\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/marranca510\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/marranca510\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83564"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/marranca510\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/marranca510\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/marranca510\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/62"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/marranca510\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/marranca510\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/marranca510\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}