Month: November 2021

“Let’s Start with Kindergarten” (2019) documents a conversation between artists-educators Lisa Jarrett and Harrell Fletcher who focus on participatory education, a pedagogical methodology that encourages creative collaboration amongst learners and the participants that form their learning environment. Jarrett and Fletcher’s dialogue centers around their ongoing project, “a living, functioning contemporary art museum inside, alongside a living and functioning public school” (p.28), called KSMoCA (the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art). A key aspect of the project is “…about access and exposure” (p. 28). Jarrett shares her experience working as a black woman in an elementary school, situated in a historically black neighbourhood, attended by black students and students of colour, and the importance of having the opportunity to share the works of artists that are meaningful to this community – artists and experiential learning that the students would otherwise not have access to in their standard curriculum:

 We ask: Who are the people we’re inviting in? How relatable are they to our students? Personally, it matters to me because I think about how illegible my own historical and cultural experiences were over the course of my entire education… If arts education remains limited in that way, the picture that emerges from what I described above is not one that reflects me or anybody like me, right? (pp. 31-32)

The design of KSMoCA demonstrates a conscious shift away from “this dominant Western narrative” (p. 44) engrained in art education and the greater art world. This same theme is apparent in Brayboy and Maughan’s (2009) reflection of indigenous student teachers who illuminate for their own teachers that the standardized lesson plans they are being taught to implement reflect a Westernized world view, not the Indigenous Knowledge Systems that they and their future students share. In both examples, the educators are motivated to teach from a place of authenticity, rather than a system imposed upon them, “…all knowledge cannot necessarily be universal in its application because of the importance of space, place and context” (Brayboy and Maughan, 2009, p. 10).

Jarrett and Fletcher are full-time professors at Portland State University (PSU); they consider KSMoCA to be participatory education, but also art in the medium of social practice. KSMoCA is not only a collaboration with the school, the students, and visiting artists, they also operate alongside a curatorial-based project at a nearby high school. Additionally, Jarrett and Fletcher have designed PSU undergraduate and graduate courses to engage with KSMoCA. Their art museum inside a public school exists as a dynamic and multi-level collaborative system of participatory education. Mitra and Crawley’s (2014) summary of their studies of self-organized learning environments showed that “groups of children seemed capable of dealing with questions several years ahead of their time when they worked in unsupervised groups and had access to the Internet” (p. 87). So, what happens in a scenario like KSMoCA when students are provided direct personal access to a wide array of artists, academics, and other students at varying levels of experience, that are ready to collaborate with them in participatory learning?

When pedagogical methodologies are considered from beyond the constraints of traditional Western knowledge systems, innovative models are developed, such as KSMoCA. This kind of creativity: non-standard learning environments, multifaceted approaches to collaborative participation, and the thoughtful integration of the lifeworlds of learners and their community are aspects to be incorporated in technology-based learning. So often education technology mirrors its out-dated, in-person counterpart, yet the Internet alone affords users with the kind of access that can facilitate radically creative and meaningful learning.

References

Brayboy, B. M. J., & Maughan, E. (2009). Indigenous knowledges and the story of the bean. Harvard educational review, 79(1), 1-21.

Fletcher, H., & Jarrett, L. (2019). Let’s start with kindergarten. In H. Fletcher, & M. Sherman (Eds.), Shaped by the People: Conversations on Participatory Education (pp. 8–18). Pdxscholar. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/shaped_people/1

Mitra, S., & Crawley, E. (2014). Effectiveness of self-organised learning by children: Gateshead experiments. Journal of Education and Human Development, 3(3), 79-88.

Part 1

In part one of her 1989 lecture series, The Real World of Technology, and in her book of the same name, Ursula Franklin clarifies that her intention is not to discuss technology as “the sum of artifacts” (1999, p. 21) but rather as part of a greater ecology, “Technology is a system. It entails far more than its individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset” (p. 21). She suggests that although prescriptive technological systems may allow for efficiency of production, the ultimate cost of abandoning holistic technological developments is a society with built-in systems of power, replacing choice and autonomy, for control through “…in social terms, designs for compliance…” (p. 43).

Based on her ideas of holistic technologies, surely Franklin was aware that her own participation as a critical theorist and generator of technological discourse placed her within a unique entanglement of relations. She states, “I myself am overawed by the way in which technology has acted to reorder and restructure social relations, not only affecting the relations between social groups, but also the relations between nations and individuals, and between all of us and our environment” (p. 22). This statement reflects holistic means of understanding, which is reminiscent of how Miller (1989) describes Lewis Mumford’s inclination toward “holism” that he in turn gleaned from Patrick Geddes, “that no living organism could be understood except in terms of the total environment in which it functioned” (as cited in Strate & Lum, 2000, p. 68). The notion of “holism” shared by Geddes, Mumford, Franklin, and others continues forth and is essential in understanding the emerging New Materialist perspective, as Monforte (2018) illustrates, “the research conducted under the rubric ‘NM’ would not focus on discursive statements nor individual bodies, but rather on actor-networks, entanglements or assemblages of relations between bodies, things, ideas and social formations that affect each other” (p. 380).

Although we can see the benefits of engaging holistic perspectives, the long-standing call for holism is overshadowed by the pervasiveness of prescriptive technologies which Franklin explains is when, “…the making or doing of something is broken down into clearly identifiable steps. Each step is carried out by a separate worker, or group of workers, who need to be familiar only with the skills of performing that one step” (1999, p. 28). We see this in education, particularly in the subjects of math or science, where learners are taught complex abstract ideas, without examples or methods that place the ideas in a greater context or apply them to real-world activity. I am reminded of learning about parabolas while concurrently learning how to use a TI-85 graphing calculator in a high school math class. I can recall the symmetrical arc of the parabolic shape, but the relevancy of the concept and the reasons for learning how to use the graphing calculator remain unknown well into adulthood. This uninspired learning experience was not an example of what Ito et al (2015) call “connected learning,” they explain, “in contrast to more fleeting or institutionally driven forms of learning, connected learning experiences are tied to deeply felt interests, bonds, passions and affinities and are as a consequence both highly engaging and personally transformative” (p. 14).  Connected learning allows for an ecological approach to education that not only considers the subject matter as a set of connected relations, but also utilizes a holistic model to actively merge the learner and their previously gained connections into the entanglement.

Part 2

I often listen to podcasts, the radio or television shows while drawing or crafting, so I initially listened to the CBC’s recording of Ursula Franklin’s lecture while working on a weaving. Yet this lecture is traditional in format and exists as a reading of academic text rather than a narrative, open dialogue, or an improvisation. As part one of the lecture series concluded, I realized that although I retained a vague sense of what was said, much of the detail was lost.

I learned recently that I cannot visualize images in my mind. In fact, I was astounded to learn that people do visualize images, as I always thought the instruction “close your eyes and visualize…” was metaphorical. I can recall visual memories by conceptualizing them, but I cannot re-create their image in my mind’s eye. I often wonder if the lack of visual memory has strengthened the emotive, somatic, or olfactory sensations I connect to memory. The condition of not being able to visualize is called aphantasia. The co-worker who accidentally diagnosed my condition told me that she heard it was common for artists and creative people to have aphantasia, that perhaps it is what leads them to create outward representations of their inner thoughts. I re-listened to Ursula Franklin, this time with more focus, and a pen and paper to make notes and illustrations, and to literally draw connections between ideas. After, when I skimmed Franklin’s subsequent book, The Real World of Technology, I was both relieved and disappointed to see that the written word of the text was very closely aligned with the spoken word of the lecture recording – relieved that I could more closely examine Franklin’s ideas, disappointed that rather than being complementary to the lectures, much of the book appeared to be a replication presented in a different medium.

I read Illich and Sanders (1989) chapter “Memory” closely, multiple times and still struggle to understand the statement “Only after it had become possible to fix the flow of speech in phonetic transcription did the idea emerge that knowledge—information—could be held in the mind as a store” (p. 24). Initially this seems impossible – surely some form of memory, though not in the way we understand memory today, must have existed. People must have recognized; this is where I sleep, or this is what I eat because they previously did those things and remember doing them. Illich and Sanders go on to describe the work of Milman Parry whose research clarified that, “a purely oral tradition knows no division between recollecting and doing” (p. 24). Considering this statement, it must be the division that is the key to comprehending thought prior to memory – recollection occurred before the invention of the written language, but it had not evolved into the technology we now take for granted: memory.

Further in the text, Illich and Sanders describe another early technology, a mnemonic technique for storing information for future recitation called a memory palace (pp. 35-36). As the technique instructs a person “to imprint on his memory the interior of a building, preferably a spacious one, visualizing each location—stores, attics, stairs…The person then equates the ideas to be remembered with certain images…” (p. 36) it is obvious, that my inability to visualize has prevented me from expertly employing this elaborate system. It’s not that it’sbut the mental work is slow and headache inducing; I would have to first create a material representation of the space for it to make a lasting impression in my memory. I do not perceive my inability to visualize and maintain a memory palace as an encumbrance – perhaps my verbal communication is more closely tied to my truth, rather than mediated through text, allowing my words to “bubble and flow, not be locked up in script” (Illich and Sanders, 1989, p. 33).

References

Franklin, U. (1999). The real world of technology. House of Anansi. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubc/detail.action?docID=771808

Illich, I., & Sanders, B. (1989). ABC: The alphabetization of the popular mind. Vintage Books.

Ito, M., Soep, E., Kligler-Vilenchik, N., Shresthova, S., Gamber-Thompson, L., & Zimmerman, A. (2015). Learning connected civics: Narratives, practices, infrastructures. Curriculum Inquiry, 45(1), 10-29. doi:10.1080/03626784.2014.995063

Monforte, J. (2018). What is new in new materialism for a newcomer?. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 10(3), 378-390.

Strate, L., & Lum, C. M. K. (2000). Lewis Mumford and the ecology of technics. Atlantic Journal of Communication, 8(1), 56-78.

View slideshow here.

Overview

I find it useful to introduce a new concept with a high-level summary of what it encompasses, then delve into the details and intricacies that help initiate the construction of a deeper understanding. In this case, after the high-level view, we will look at what specifically new materialism (NM) is not, to direct us to what it might be. We will then look at the keywords associated with NM as this distinctive language allows us to understand the key concepts of the theory and eases our entry into the “semiotic domain” (Gee, 2007, p. 18) of NM. We will conclude with an example that employs a new materialist perspective and suggests that perhaps this theory is not so new.

Slide One: High-Level Summary

Javier Monforte (2018) breaks down NM into what they call “two synchronized moves” (p. 380). The first move indicates an attention on the relational aspects of things, rather than simply the thing itself. Monforte further illustrates the first move as a “shift from essentialism to emergent immanent relationality. Contrary to the view that entities have essential attributes and ontological integrity that precede their relations, it stands out that all entities emerge from these relations” (p. 380). The second move identifies that the things in question, are in fact, all things: people, animals, places, ideas, buildings, objects. “The latter move consists of acknowledging that not only humans, but also non-humans (both organic and inorganic) have agentic and performative capacities” (p. 380).

Activity: I created an intentionally subjective diagram for my own visualization of NM. I began by thinking about key actor-participants in my own life, there are millions of course, but for the sake of a legible diagram, I kept it to the first few that came to mind. I thought about people, places, materials, concepts, and landmarks. As I thought about how each were connected to each other, I drew lines representing the relations between the active participants. NM focuses on the relationships between things, as Monforte explains, “not in terms of what it is…but it terms of what it does, that is, in terms of its capacities to act and affect” (p. 380), the rust-coloured relational lines within the diagram are intentionally dominant. Although not central to the diagram, the actors are clearly represented, as without them there would be no relationality. A close-up of the relational lines shows they are not stable but are in constant flux. Each time I consider this diagram I see opportunities to add more, or make edits, for example, the actors are not static either – they are subject to continual change just like their relational connections.

As we continue through this lesson, think about how you begin to construct the concept of NM. Pull inspiration from your learning process, the lesson, dialogue with other learners and your own prior experiences to create a personalized diagram of NM.

Slide Two: Activate Prior Knowledge by Identifying What New Materialism is Not

NM acknowledges the fluidity of reality, recognizes the impossibility of objectivity, and infers a rich, complex, and dynamic perspective of interconnected relationships. It can be useful to understand NM by clearly defining what it is not. This act can seem limiting, or binary in nature, but think of it like this: NM stands for endless possibilities, it does not include theories or ways of thinking that impose limits or are inherently static or exclusionary.

Many contemporary theories reject the following concepts, (Toohey, 2018, p. 29) which might lead us to question the ‘new’ in new materialism’s name (Monforte explores and questions the new as well in his 2018 article), yet I perceive it as a framework to apply to our overarching perspective of reality – an ontology that runs beside and with theories of gender, feminism, post-structuralism, semiotics, etc. The individual parts might not be new, but to me at least, the collective whole is.

Activity: After each of the following concepts are introduced, I invite you to call out or make notes of examples of these same concepts that you have come across in past readings, classes, or research – your examples can be of theories/ideas that support, reject, or are related to these terms. Of note: Each concept will be introduced with its corresponding diagram.

• Anthropocentric

To expand upon the non-dualist nature of NM, inclusive of all forms of actor-participants, we must also understand that this ontology is not human-centric. The agency usually ascribed to humans is evident in non-human entities in how their design, construction, physicality and use actively shape reality. Toohey (2018) explains that “New materialism… argues that an anthropocentric focus on what humans do, to/with one another, on what their intentions are or on what is done to them ignores important aspects of how the world operates, pointing out that material things also perform: ‘They act, together with other things and forces, to exclude, invite and regulate particular forms of participation’ (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010: 7)” (p. 27).

• Binary / Dualistic

Mind/body, human/non-human, organic/ inorganic; NM invites us to think beyond the binary, although that might seem obvious, many common binary constructs are foundational to Western constructs of reality, particularly the human/non-human binary, remembering that a core principle of the theory is that all things, or actor-participants in our reality, whether human, conceptual, environmental, synthetic, are considered with equal significance. Toohey (2018) further illustrates, “as well as asserting that human things (minds, bodies) are not separate but entangled with one another, new materialist scholars take the distinction between humans and non-humans to be an important dualism to contest; as anthropologist Ingold (2013: 31) put it, a new materialist perspective ‘returns persons to where they belong, with the continuum of organic life’” (p. 27).

• Hierarchical / Transcendent

Hierarchical systems of power simply do not fit into a networked or “rhizomatic” (Monforte, 2018, p. 384) relational model, which Montfort describes as “[leaving] room for disruption, wonder and dalliance; it unfolds a meaningful space for thought to move in all directions” (p. 384). When considering hierarchies, I am reminded of the structure of Hegel’s dialectic: a system where a thesis opposes an antithesis (binary) to create synthesis, ultimately leading to a new thesis to be challenged by another opposing antithesis ad infinitum (Maybee, 2020), or until eventually the ultimate perfection is reached – a kind of transcendence of knowledge. A rhizomatic system “…moves away from static, transcendent traits of ‘identity’ to a concern for change, reciprocal relations and difference, and underscores ‘the intrinsic indeterminacy and mobility at the heart of any process of becoming’ (de Freitas & Sinclair, 2014: 34)” (Toohey 2018, p. 30).

• Essentialist

The Merriam-Webster dictionary includes “the practice of regarding something (such as a presumed human trait) as having innate existence or universal validity rather than as being a social, ideological, or intellectual construct” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.) in its definition of essentialism.  Monforte (2018) backs this up, describing essentialism as “…the view that entities have essential attributes and ontological integrity that precede their relations” (p. 380). NM is a relational ontology, meaning that relations, including “social, ideological, or intellectual construct[s],” are integral to understanding reality through this ontology – because of its relational focus, NM rejects essentialist ways of thinking.

Slides Three and Four: Keywords / Key Concepts

James Gee (2007) explains, “by a semiotic domain I mean any 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” (p. 18). It is evident that NM scholars employ a rich set of language specific to their semiotic domain. We will look at some of the keywords currently associated with NM, as gaining an understanding of the meaning of these terms will allow greater access to the more complex aspects of the theory.

Activity: Many of these keywords and concepts have already been touched upon when discussing what NM is not. As in the previous slide, each keyword has a corresponding illustration. As we go through each illustration, learners are invited to guess what word or concept each image might represent. Consider the following questions:

• Regardless of whether you can guess the exact keyword, how do you interpret what the image is trying to convey?
• Can you recognize any symbolism or iconography used?
• Does your own understanding of the keyword lead to a different kind of visualization?
• How might you change, improve, or add to the illustration?

• Multiplicities

Illustration: like the binary illustration of a circle halved, one side black, one side white, the multiplicities circle is cut into numerous unique parts.

All aspects of NM invite us to think about possibilities. What are the countless relations that form who we are?  How can we consider things from multiple perspectives? Rather than being limited to binary or dualist perspectives, we can consider that our place in the world is bound by numerous, equally valuable relations to other humans, spaces, objects, animals, nature, etc. (Toohey, 2018, p.28).

• Agency

Illustration: a shooting star, which represents the power/action that is not limited to human entities.

Some scholars of NM believe that all actors, whether human or non-human have the capacity to have agency, acting or asserting power that affect other actors relationally connected to them.  Others believe that the agency does not lie with the actor themselves, but that it emerges through the relations between actors. (Toohey, 2018, p. 32).

• Entanglement

Illustration: a simplified model of my initial NM diagram that shows a tangled mess of relations connecting various actor-participants.

Entanglements refer to the rhizomatic set of relations connecting us, or a particular actor-participant to other actors. The term entanglement allows us to think of the relationships as being complex, in motion, variable and unpredictable. Terms like ‘web’ or ‘network’ aren’t quite sufficient as they infer a geometric, neat, and predictable set of connections, which is not the reality understood through NM.

• Relationality

Illustration: a visual focus on the matter that exists between two points, to depict the importance of the relationships between entities as they tell us more about reality than looking at the entity in isolation.

Returning to Monforte’s (2018) explanation, “this relational ontology leads new materialist scholars to assert that matter is to be studied not in terms of what it is (i.e. essence), but in terms of what it does, that is, in terms of its capacities to act and affect (i.e. agency) (Fox and Alldred 2017) (p. 380).

• Affect

Illustration: radiating lines that represent a phenomenon experienced by an entity that precedes meaning-making or contextualization, but the experience itself is provocative of such mediation.

Toohey (2018) addresses the work of Massumi to explore affect:

Philosopher Massumi (2002) has brought to our attention the concept of affect, a matter of ‘autonomic responses that are held to occur below the threshold of consciousness and cognition and to be rooted in the body’ (Ley, 2011: 443). Massumi rejected the conflation of affect with emotion, preferring to see affect as independent of meaning or intention and, as some of the research he cited showed, affect occurs before emotion comes to awareness (p. 33). 

• Becoming:

Illustration: A zoomed-out view of multiple actors engaging in relational action, provoking the evolution, fluctuation, and emergent transformational process of becoming.

Toohey (2018) explains, “new materialism sees people, discourses, practices and things continually in relation, under construction and changing together, becoming different from what they were before” (p. 29). The subtle and poetic term becoming is consistently used by new materialist scholars to describe the ever-changing essence of all things. The term is intentionally vague to avoid implications of an ‘ultimate goal’ or positive/negative outcomes, simply that everything is in flux, and as we are bound by linear time, reality seemingly emerges, or becomes.

• Intra-action

Illustration: two actors work collaboratively, creating and merging (or entangling) their unique relational connections with each other, while simultaneously drawing from their own unshared/not-yet-shared agentic connections.

Hill (2017) further explains what is meant by the term intra-action, “Interaction assumes distinct, independent entities that are empowered with agency to act upon one another. Intra-action by contrast, involves the “mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (Barad, 2007, p. 33) where complex material practices assemble in particular ways to produce specific phenomena” (p. 3). 

• Diffraction

Illustration: visually, a play on scientific diagrams of diffracted light, but in this case, the image represents energy/knowledge/ideas/language being received by an actor-participant and being released diffractively: radiating out in all directions to connect with something (multiple things) in new ways.

As Hill (2017) describes, “diffraction, within the context of physics, involves the bending and spreading of waves when they encounter a barrier or an opening. Diffraction therefore, as a metaphor for inquiry involves attending to difference, to patterns of interference, and the effects of difference making practices. Diffraction creates something ontologically new, breaking out of the cyclical, inductive realm of reflection” (p. 2).

Slide Five: New Materialism in Action

Pre-Activity: Request for learners to have read Brayboy and Maughan’s (2009) “Indigenous Knowledges and the Story of the Bean”. Optional reading: Latour’s (1992) “Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts”.

Example One: Indigenous Knowledges and the Story of the Bean

Brayboy and Maughan’s “Indigenous Knowledges and the Story of the Bean” (2009) is a paper that describes a challenging experience that occurred during an intensive program for Indigenous pre-service teachers. The site teacher educators (STEs) of the program initially determined that their pre-service student teachers were not sufficiently capable to begin independently teaching, yet, when one of the pre-service teachers detailed what was lacking in fourth-grade lesson plans from an Indigenous perspective, the opinions of the STEs radically shifted. The initial lesson plans took on a Westernized bias and did not take into consideration or allow room for the Indigenous students’ holistic knowledge systems. Brayboy and Maughan (2009) illustrate the holistic nature of Indigenous Knowledge Systems:

A circular worldview that connects everything and everyone in the world to everything and everyone else, where there is no distinction between the physical and metaphysical and where ancestral knowledge guides contemporary practices and future possibilities, is the premise of many Indigenous Knowledge Systems. This fundamental holistic perspective shapes all other understandings of the world (Fixico, 2003; Marker, 2004 Stoffle, Zedeño, & Halmo, 2001). More specifically, holistic or circular understandings do not draw separations between the body and mind, between humans and other earthly inhabitants, and among generations (p. 13).

Toohey (2018) illustrates that many aspects of NM consciously aim to break down binary and hierarchical constructs of Western thought, but that many non-West ideologies never held these limiting perspectives:

Other religious, cultural and philosophical traditions do not make the same dualistic assumptions found in the Western European tradition… Metis scholar Todd (2016: 5) pointed out that this view has been written and talked about in Indigenous scholarship for some time, and briefly described the writing of Inuk author Qitsualik (1998) about the Western Arctic (Canada) concept of Sila: ‘the breathe [sic] that circulates into and out of every living thing’…Todd argued that understanding that humans, the environment, water, climate, animals, and so on are in relation with one another was characteristic of the thinking of various Indigenous groups. Todd suggested that progress in new materialism (or postmodern ontologies) will mean that we recognise ‘first and foremost, [we are] citizens embedded in dynamic legal orders and systems of relations that require us to work constantly and thoughtfully across the myriad systems of thinking, acting and governance within which we find ourselves enmeshed’ (Todd, 2016: 16) (pp. 26-27).

Optional Example Two: Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts

Explore similarities between Latour’s Actor Network Theory and NM and consider how to think of seemingly mundane objects such as a door as complex relational systems through a NM perspective.

Questions:

• What connections do you see between NM and “The Story of the Bean”?
• Do you think NM consciously draws on non-West ideologies, such as Indigenous Knowledge Systems?
• Considering “The Story of the Bean” is it appropriate to call NM “new”?
• Think of any mundane activity you participated in today (e.g., calling a family member, taking a shower, making breakfast, going for a walk with your partner). Consider all the actors connected to you through this simple activity. What is the nature of these relations and are they static or in flux? If you consciously shifted a relation, how would it affect your existing entanglement? What if one of the other actors made a noticeable change? How would it affect you or others in your entanglement?

Concluding Activity: With what you have gleaned from this lesson, how has your personal diagram for NM changed, transformed, or become something new? To document a moment in your fluctuating subjectivity, draw, either by hand, or digitally your visual conception of New Materialism.

References

Brayboy, B. M. J., & Maughan, E. (2009). Indigenous knowledges and the story of the bean. Harvard educational review, 79(1), 1-21

Gee, J. (2007). Semiotic domains: Is playing video games a “waste of time?” In What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy, 17-45. New York: Palgrave and Macmillan.

Hill, C. M. (2017). More-than-reflective practice: Becoming a diffractive practitioner. Teacher Learning and Professional Development, 2(1).

Latour, B. (1992). Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts. Shaping technology/building society: Studies in sociotechnical change, 1, 225-258. https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/pluginfile.php/877054/mod_resource/content/3/dd308_1_missing_masses.pdf

Maybee, J. E. (2020, October 2). Hegel’s dialectics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved November 21, 2021, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Dictionary by Merriam-Webster: Essentialism. Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/essentialism

Monforte, J. (2018). What is new in new materialism for a newcomer?. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 10(3), 378-390.

Toohey, K. (2018). 2. New Materialism and Language Learning. In Learning English at School, 25-44. Multilingual Matters.

I came across Mike Caulfield’s internet presence during an attempt to find alternative means for creating a wiki through the makeshift use of a free web application and was directed to his blog post: Building a Pseudo-Wiki on Tumblr. The blog revealed that Caulfield works in educational technology, and I navigated to his ‘About’ page to find a link to his active Twitter account. His Twitter handle is @holden, which based on Caulfield’s surname, I assume is a nod to the protagonist from J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in The Rye. He has just over 13,000 followers, which appears average when compared to other educators in his Twitter community. After exploring other Twitter identities, I kept coming back to Caulfield’s because it’s good: he is active, he is engaged, and even his non-academic tweets, retweets and banter can be tied back to who he is as an academic. Up until a couple weeks ago, Caulfield worked as the Director of Blended and Networked Learning at Washington State University (Caulfield, n.d.), and as documented by his Twitter feed, he has recently begun working at the University of Washington’s Centre for an Informed Public as a Research Scientist who will lead a “rapid-response research program identifying, tracking and analyzing how mis- and disinformation takes root and spreads online during elections and crisis events” (Center for an Informed Public).

In consideration of my pre-existing perception of what Twitter is, combined with the experience of lurking through the feeds of many education and technology-based theorists and academics, I have concluded that in addition to serving as a participatory social media platform, a users’ Twitter feed is a means to construct an aura of self. Through conversations, retweets, the sharing of articles and poignant reflections of news, shows, movies, books and other media, a user collects bits and pieces that form a nebulous, fluctuating, and evolving construction of the individual they want their followers to see them as.

Themes of media and information literacy, the identification of misinformation, and education technology represent most of Caulfield’s tweets/retweets, though mixed throughout are quips about a show he is watching, or comments on current events – this builds a persona that comes across as casually professional. His Twitter feed is largely reflective of his work-life, it is for sharing original academic content and for interacting with likeminded thinkers and colleagues. However, there is an authenticity to Caulfield’s content that is often lacking in similar feeds. It is common to see Twitter feeds that take on a capitalistic nature, essentially operating as tools of career advancement and self-promotion to share links to the user’s new article, new book, new award, new collaboration, new event – these feeds limit impulsive, informal, personal, quotidian, or original content and there is minimal presence of unplanned public conversations or interactions with others who are not already in their inner circle. It is this kind of content that makes a person interesting or worth following and allows them to demonstrate a seemingly authentic self. Caulfield manages to exhibit this sense of authenticity through his Twitter persona.

On October 6, 2021, Caulfield authored an 18-tweet-long thread in response to a video of a recent anti-mask/anti-vaccine protest where he identifies a deficiency in information literacy as heard through a specific protester who claims “that in the 1918 pandemic people didn’t die of flu, they died of pneumonia, and you can even look it up on the gov’t NIH website” (Caulfield, 2021).

View entire thread here.

Caulfield’s thread uses this current event as an example to employ his framework for identifying whether a source is factual. The framework was first created in 2017 and is called SIFT, each letter representing a “…short list of things to do when looking at a source…” (Caulfield, 2019). SIFT stands for “Stop…Investigate the Source…Find Better Coverage [and]… Trace claims, quotes, and media back to the original context” (Caulfield, 2019).

In the 18-tweet-long-thread, Caulfield re-mediates the original tweet by working through the SIFT framework to prove, with clear examples, that the protester’s claim is in fact misinformation. This informal and reactive method of applying his work publicly and in real time supports authenticity and brings a sense of immediacy to his Twitter-self. As Bolter and Grusin (2000) describe, “immediacy is transparency: the absence of mediation or representation. It is the notion that a medium could erase itself and leave the viewer in the presence of the objects represented, so that he could know the objects directly” (p. 71). When Twitter is used as Caulfield uses it, his audience is immersed in his activity, they are thinking about him and the ideas he shares – not about the social media platform. The immediacy afforded by Twitter when used in this way provides the kind of rich experience that is analogous to what one might glean at an in-person lecture or artist talk. Barthes (1977) uses the term “supplement” (as cited in Frank, 1995, p. 29) to describe the richness or in other words, the additional something that an in-person encounter provides, but that written text lacks (Frank, 1995, p. 29). Supplement is described by Goffman (1981) as having two essential aspects, “first is the access the speaker affords to the audience” (as cited in Frank, 1995, p. 29) and second is “ritual”, the “preferential contact with an entity held to be of value” (p. 29). Caulfield’s genuine representation of self, combined with his active and abundant theory-based content on his Twitter feed creates a perceived notion of accessibility and ritual, and the functionality of the platform itself, and Caulfield’s use of it, provides a reality where direct access is possible.

Alternatively, when Twitter is used solely for self-promotion, it is reminiscent of passing the excessive billboards driving down to Florida on the I-95, or in digital terms, serves as stand-in for a series of obtrusive web ads on a click-bait site. This kind of Twitter use brings about “the psychological sense of hypermediacy… the insistence that the experience of the medium is itself an experience of the real,” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 71) where the medium itself impedes the audience from connecting and engaging to the content it holds.

Twitter affords its users with a tool for the public display of ideas, the means to connect (both congruently and in opposition) with others that may have otherwise been inaccessible and extends open discourse amongst those within and potentially outside their community of practice. If used to share original content, personal meditations and genuine interaction, the authenticity of a Twitter feed will encourage collaboration amongst peers and create the potential to attract interest and interaction from people outside of the expected community. Hill (2017) suggests that “disrupting personal and professional boundaries, and engaging in autobiographical inquiry, opens a space from which to practice, often producing transformative pedagogical shifts” (p. 9). The disclosure of an authentic, informal self mirrors and supports the de-formalization of academia that Twitter promotes. The public nature of the medium allows educational theorists to associate their ideas directly to real-world occurrences and to formulate unexpected connections, which make their work accessible and of interest to those outside of the academic realm.

References

Bolter, J.D. & Grusin, R. (2000). Networks of Remediation. In Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Caulfield, M. [@holden]. (2021, October 6). About 10 seconds into this one of the people harrassing the parents says that in the 1918 pandemic people didn’t die of flu, they died of pneumonia, and you can even look it up on the gov’t NIH website. And it’s a good example of how the way we teach infolit does harm. [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/holden/status/1445856372613021699

Caulfield, M. (2019, June 19). SIFT (the four moves). Hapgood. https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/

Caulfield, M. (n.d.). About. Hapgood. https://hapgood.us/about/

Center for an Informed Public. (2021, October 8). Mike Caulfield to join CIP as research scientist, lead rapid-response research program. Center for an informed public – university of Washington. https://www.cip.uw.edu/2021/10/08/mike-caulfield-cip-research-scientist-rapid-response/

Frank, A. W. (1995). Lecturing and transference: The undercover work of pedagogy. Pedagogy: The question of impersonation, 28-35.

Hill, C. M. (2017). More-than-reflective practice: Becoming a diffractive practitioner. Teacher Learning and Professional Development, 2(1).