This election, choose your own adventure—or Trump will choose Westworld for you

October 25, 2016 By

You can have Trump’s Old West fun times or Clinton’s new frontier. Spoiler alert: One ends badly for most of us.

I’ve become an avid watcher of the new HBO series Westworld. The show takes place in a “Wild West” theme park that sprawls across miles of what appears to be the American southwest. Wealthy guests visit the park to live out their fantasies — from sex to bounty hunting to murder — with the “hosts,” cyborgs who have largely moved beyond the uncanny valley and seem genuinely human.

Westworld’s viewers become acquainted not only with the hosts and guests, but also with the people who run the park — the programmers, roboticists, scriptwriters, management, and one of its founders. The park’s staff craft intricate, interwoven story loops through which the hosts run; the rancher’s daughter, for example, visits town each morning, interacts with guests and hosts, and returns each night to almost inevitably fall prey, with her family, to homicidal rapists. The prostitutes in the saloon charm guests until they die in an armed robbery.

Guests insert themselves into these stories, as literal black- or white-hat characters, saving hosts’ lives or taking them. As the guests sleep each night, the park staff repair the hosts and wipe their memory before setting them back on their narrative loops.

Every once in a while, however, through a glitch (or feature?) in her programming, hosts flash back to previous trauma. Sometimes these memories manifest as nightmares, but increasingly the hosts’ flashbacks happen during the day. Occasionally an external stimulus causes the hosts to short-circuit; in one case, a rancher finds, half-buried in the dirt, a photo of a woman on the street of a modern city. He cannot comprehend this woman.

Throughout Westworld, we see men gaslighting women: the park’s programmers ensure the cyborg women question their own memories, and men on the staff try to persuade two human women that their perspectives — including things they have observed — are not valid. According to these men, the explanatory narratives the women employees have crafted for themselves as they seek to understand the park and its hosts lack the proper perspective.

Read the rest of this post at Medium.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Tall tales and true, Whining Exhortation and Angst

Applying critical instructional design

July 1, 2016 By

This is the final assignment for Critical Instructional Design. The prompt:

How do you design an exercise, create content, open a discussion, or build an assessment that is truly critically pedagogical in its design?

What you create as your final project is up to you. But some guidelines include:

  • Create something practical, something that can actually be used in an online or hybrid course;
  • Build into the work a space for reflection, or a space for learning to happen, whatever that looks like to you;
  • Make the work reflective somehow of your thoughts about critical instructional design.

The assignment

In this course, we have broadened our definition of what “counts” as public history, emphasizing collaboration with the public rather than more traditional forms of public history in which professionals “do history” for a public audience. You need to keep this distinction in mind for your final digital project, which calls for you to engage with stakeholders.

This final digital project has three parts:

  1. A wireframe, mock-up, minimum viable product, or other proof of concept of a digital public history project (explained in detail below).
  2. A mock NEH grant application (or other proposal of similar scope) to support the project.
  3. A reflection on the project and mock grant.

The digital project (submitted as a group)

In a group of no more than four people, you will plan, and then begin to build, a digital public history project that serves an underrepresented or underserved audience.

The topic is up to you, but I recommend selecting a topic:

  • that is underexplored;
  • that is of interest to a large number of people;
  • has existing, readily available primary-source images or texts or has informants you can interview easily; and
  • about which you have some background knowledge, or about which you can acquire knowledge quickly.

If you’re casting about for Idaho topics, I encourage you to explore the finding aids for collections in Albertsons Library Special Collections, the Idaho State Archives, or the archives of local corporations.

In the past, for assignments similar to this one, students have proposed or created:

  • a retrofitted bus that visits neighborhoods to help residents collect oral histories, scan photos, and begin a neighborhood history site;
  • an app template for local historical sites to promote their programs and services to tourists;
  • an on-site, augmented reality tour of the Morris Hill Cemetery, with “pop-up” names over graves, biographies of Boise’s notable dead—some in video form that incorporated audio from oral history projects;
  • an educational app for Idaho fourth and fifth graders that dives into the history of Idaho’s diverse native peoples;
  • self-guided walking tours of Boise’s disappeared Chinatown and the African-American River Street neighborhood, complete with QR codes posted on today’s buildings that allow tourists to see what sites looked like in the past.

You will undoubtedly wonder what project scope will allow you to succeed in this assignment. I don’t have a single answer, as my response will vary with group size, topic, audience, and proposed tools; your group should come to me to determine a reasonable project scope.

You will turn in all work and/or documentation of work to the instructor, and you will present your project to the class.

A few things to consider

Stakeholders

We have spent a good deal of time in this class considering public reaction to public history projects and programs and to thinking about who the stakeholders of a particular project are and how best to work with them. (Recall in particular Tom King’s Our Unprotected Heritage and its case studies illustrating how stakeholders too often are underconsulted.) In the early stages of your project, you need to figure out who its stakeholders are; these likely will include the audience for the project as well as people connected to its subject (or their descendants), but may comprise other groups as well. How do you plan to identify stakeholders, approach them, recruit them, process their contributions, and maintain their enthusiasm for the project?

Content

You need to be sure you have access to the materials you need and will have permission to share them via your digital project. Figure out the rules for things such as archives’ digital permissions, reproduction fees, and contracts (for archives or oral histories, for example) early in your project planning.

Tools

Consider your digital toolbox, or proposed digital toolbox, carefully. Some questions to consider:

  • Will the platform you are using or proposing to use be around in another year or two, or is it the product of a brand new startup? (Funders want to see stability.)
  • Is the tool electronically accessible to people with disabilities? What steps will you take to ensure your project is accessible?
  • Does accessing the project require broadband access?
  • If you are proposing building a digital tool that requires programming or other development skills beyond your expertise, what kind of developers will you propose hiring? How will you find them and vet them, and what will their services cost?

The grant (submitted as a group)

You will write a grant application in response to a call for proposals for a program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Unless I tell your group otherwise, you will need to complete all parts of the proposal, with two exceptions: You need to merely tell me from whom you would secure letters of reference rather than having them actually written, and you can use a simple spreadsheet for your budget rather than using the forms the NEH provides.

We will discuss in class how to identify grant opportunities and craft a proposal narrative.

The reflection (submitted individually)

Your reflection should be at least 750 words. (Some of you will barely break 750 words, while others will write 3,000. I will read whatever your submit.) It should address at least some of these questions:

  • Why did you choose your subject?
  • Why is this project needed at this time, and why did you choose to serve your particular audience?
  • Are there audiences who will find your project controversial, offensive, or otherwise challenging? Explain. Did you intentionally exclude anyone from your audience, or design “against the grain” to provoke a particular audience or type of viewer/user? If so, why and how?
  • How did you go about selecting your particular methods and tools?
  • What challenges did your subject or sources present?
  • What challenges did your research and content creation present?
  • What challenges did your collaboration (in your group or with stakeholders) present?
  • What would you do differently next time?

Deadlines:

  • Sketchy project proposal and work plan: TBD
  • Polished project/project proposal: TBD
  • Group presentation: TBD
  • Mock grant proposal: TBD
  • Individual reflections: TBD

My reflection on the assignment

This assignment is designed for my graduate seminar in applied historical research, which I teach as a public history seminar with an emphasis on what it means to “do history” in a digital age. The assignment, however, could be adapted for an an upper-division undergraduate course.

In this course and in all my courses, I aim to increase students’ digital savvy by an order of magnitude. For some, this means collaborating via Google Drive or simple video editors for the first time. For others, it means learning some PHP as they tweak a WordPress site the class is building. While it may appear this project tosses them into the deep end, so to speak, the course assignments scaffold students’ digital skills—though there still is for many students a considerable gap between where they are and where they want the project to end up. The group nature of the project helps to quell anxiety over technology, as students work together to solve technical challenges before coming to me for help; only very rarely do students come to me for technical support.

Idaho’s past has been underexamined by professional and public historians, at least in ways that challenge the traditional narrative that begins with Lewis and Clark and white contact with Native Americans, then continues through fur traders, mining, logging, pioneers, and farmers. There are plenty of opportunities for students to interpret the state’s past, as there are two easily accessed, large public troves of primary sources here in Boise. Despite such archives, I did not require students to focus on Idaho history exclusively, for two reasons: First and most obviously, students may have their own interests outside Idaho history. Second, I’m hoping some students will opt to serve underrepresented audiences that are not well represented in the local historical record; many of my students have not considered race in any substantive way, yet I’ve found some are eager to tackle the subject. (In the past, students have begun to address the historical Chinese and African American presence in Boise, but the primary sources for these communities are largely inaccessible to our graduate students, either because they are not well-catalogued in local collections or because they are in Chinese, and many of the secondary sources are of questionable value.)

As I scan the field of local and regional public history, I’m frustrated by the very traditional nature of many projects and programs. The social web makes it easy to make friendly first contact with strangers and even recruit participants without even leaving one’s desk. I teach my students that consultation with stakeholders is an essential part of any project. Designing an app for fourth grade history? Talk to fourth-grade teachers. Talk to fourth graders. Is the app about historic Native peoples? Consult their descendants.

My insistence on consultation with public stakeholders isn’t just to promote ethical standards or inclusive excellence, though those would be sufficient reasons in themselves. In addition to helping my students to be thoughtful and inclusive, this requirement may increase the quality of historical practice among amateurs and laypeople. The public is already trying to make sense of the past on sites like Ancestry, Wikipedia, countless blogs, and HistoryPin. A well-developed digital public history project that solicits public participation may help the public better understand both the past and what historians do.

At the same time as I try to build my students’ digital skills, I also caution them to keep in mind the relative lack of broadband internet in Idaho and other remote rural regions of the U.S. Idaho has the slowest internet in the 50 states, and even some of my faculty colleagues don’t have broadband or wifi in their homes here in Boise. If they are assuming an Idahoan or rural audience for their project, students need to balance any newfound enthusiasm for a new technology with its accessibility to rural users or users with disabilities.

This class assignment is not an entirely new one, though I have made more explicit here my own commitment to inclusive design. I believe all public history is pedagogical, and I’ve designed the assignment itself to be a critical pedagogical project.  In On Critical Pedagogy, Henry Giroux writes,

Critical pedagogy is not about an a priori method that simply can be applied regardless of context. It is the outcome of particular struggles and is always related to the specificity of particular contexts, students, communities, and available resources. It draws attention to the ways in which knowledge, power, desire, and experience are produced under specific basic conditions of learning and illuminates the role that pedagogy plays as part of a struggle over assigned meanings, modes of expression, and directions of desire, particularly as these bear on the formation of the multiple and ever-contradictory versions of the self and its relationship to the larger society. (4)

Giroux might as well be talking about the kinds of projects my students will be asked to create and manage during their careers. It makes sense, then, to infuse this final class project with principles of critical instructional design.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Sometimes I teach

Bloom’s Taxonomy

June 26, 2016 By

This post is another response to an assignment in Critical Instructional Design. This week’s prompt:

This week your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to dismantle and re-mantle one common assumption about instructional design. We encourage you to tackle one of those assumptions that you hold most closely—because discomfort can often be terrifically productive.

I’m tackling Bloom’s taxonomy.

Why? I find I refer to it often, but I realize I’m frequently using it as shorthand for something else.

Bloom’s taxonomy emerged from a series of educational conferences in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but ended up being named after Benjamin Bloom, who served as chair of the committee of educators that formulated the taxonomy. Those of you who are teachers or professors very likely will have seen this diagram or one like it:

This is actually one of three taxonomies and represents what the committee termed “the cognitive domain.” It’s the part of the taxonomy that remains most popular in higher education. The way I’ve seen Bloom’s taxonomy described—and honestly, how I usually explain it—is that these cognitive skills build on one another as they grow increasingly complex. The common implication, then, is that these skills need to be scaffolded—though I confess in my classes I’m not particularly good about careful scaffolding. In my courses I try to get students into application, analysis, and synthesis almost immediately.

In the 1990s, some of Bloom’s students revised the taxonomy so that it looks more like this:

Lorin Anderson, one of the authors of the revised taxonomy, described the process and previewed the changes in a 1999 paper; Anderson explained that the next taxonomy emphasized the contexts in which cognitive processes take place and acknowledged more than the academic context—the authors added two additional knowledge categories or dimensions: the “strategic/motivational” and “social/cultural.” Anderson writes,

The first, strategic/motivational, recognizes the importance of knowing as a legitimate educational goal. This category contains what has been termed metacognition and includes the learning strategies students employ, the links they make between their efforts and their accomplishments, and their perceptions of themselves as people and as learners. The addition of the second category, social/cultural, reflects our appreciation of the cultural-specificity of knowledge. It also recognizes the role of social learning theory in explaining how students learn.

The revision, therefore, infused the original taxonomy with additional complexity and nuance. Whereas the original taxonomy suggested students should be climbing ever upward on the chart, another of the creators of the revised taxonomy, David Krathwohl, made clear that students may more freely move up and down the chart:

Like the original taxonomy, the revision is a hierarchy in the sense that the six major categories of the Cognitive Process dimension are believed to differ in their complexity, with remember being less complex than understand, which is less complex than apply, and so on. However, because the revision gives much greater weight to teacher usage, the requirement of a strict hierarchy has been relaxed to allow the categories to overlap one another.

Krathwohl implies, then, that the skills don’t necessarily need to be scaffolded. This freedom from moving systematically up the taxonomy frees up faculty to take risks as they pose greater challenges to their students, asking them to take cognitive leaps rather than plodding steps.

Krathwohl added an additional layer to the revised taxonomy by suggesting the cognitive skills be used as column heads across the top of a table, with different varieties of knowledge—factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive—forming the row headers. Instructors could place their individual learning objectives in the table’s cells, mapping in one visual what kinds of cognitive skills and knowledge a course aimed to develop in students. While filling out this taxonomic table may feel a bit mechanical to some instructors (myself included), the completed table makes transparent what kinds of knowledge and skills will be cultivated in a course. Should all of these skills and knowledge be grouped into a single area of the table—say, the upper-left quadrant, which focuses on remembering, understanding, and applying factual and conceptual knowledge—the instructor may want to reconsider the course objectives. Some instructors may be comfortable conducting a 100-level course in this quadrant of the table, but uncomfortable if their upper-division courses also fell there.

Criticisms

Bloom’s taxonomy in both its forms has been both popular and influential, but it has not been free of criticism. As Robert Marzano and John Kendall note in The New Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Bloom’s original taxonomy has proven especially useful in evaluation, though less influential in curriculum design. In particular, Marzano and Kendall write, developers of the standardized state tests that arose in the 1970s leaned on Bloom’s, sometimes heavily, to define skill levels. In the past few decades, such tests have come increasingly under attack from parents and teachers alike. Anderson acknowledges Bloom’s utility in and application to such evaluation, but defends the new taxonomy from critics who might say the original taxonomy lends itself to oversimplified assessments: “We believe that the diversity of cognitive processes represented in the taxonomy requires a comparable diversity of assessment strategies and techniques.”

That’s an important acknowledgement and correction, as one of the biggest criticisms of the original Bloom’s taxonomy is that it’s unscientific and out of step with current theories of learning. In particular, the levels, which Bloom et. al. claimed were hierarchical, are actually quite muzzy. Drawing on others’ criticisms of Bloom’s, Marzano and Kendall point out that higher-order skills can be prerequisite to allegedly lower-level ones. For example, they write, analysis of a subject can be central to comprehending it.

Syntheses of Bloom’s

Those who criticize the original taxonomy’s embrace of hierarchical levels of cognitive skills can indeed hold the original taxonomy responsible, but the synthesis of Bloom’s with other learning theories strengthened this hierarchy. Take, for example, the three theorists perhaps best known for their uses of various kinds of scaffolding: Vygotsky, Bruner, and Rogoff. Each scaffolding theory holds that learners need assistance, usually from other people, in moving to higher orders of thinking and understanding.

These theories emphasized the social aspects of learning: people learn in community, whether it be in a formal classroom or in an informal setting. And once we introduce the social component, the multitudinous learning scenarios become impossible to track. As our networked, digital age has increasingly made clear, knowledge lives and thrives in networks, and it’s situated in bodies (h/t Donna Haraway). Depending on which nodes (people, learning artifacts, contexts) are connected and activated at any given time, different kinds of learning take place and different knowledges are created. As John Spencer suggests in a blog post, the original taxonomy’s clean modernism does not stand up in a postmodern age. That said, the modernist tendencies of Bloom’s are written right into the model’s name: it is a taxonomy; it names, classifies, and orders.

Even in the midst of this analytical chaos, however, Bloom’s remains useful as a shorthand in introducing learning theory to faculty who have never considered the subject. I frequently refer to “pushing students up the pyramid.” On the one hand, the metaphor is a bit coercive. On the other hand, it suggests we have students’ backs and are trying to support them in their journey. I’ve used the expression with students as well as faculty, and it seems to help students understand what’s going on in my (to them) unconventional online course. I even used Bloom’s to explain my course’s activities in a recent wrap-up post in the online course I taught in the spring.

Bloom’s, scaffolding, and employability

I want to take a look at that same closing post from my online course, as it captures a moment when I was trying to make sense of the first course I’d taught fully online, and it references Bloom’s, then immediately swoops into a discussion of career outcomes.

That course, HIST 100: Themes in World History — Engineering the Past, is meant to serve primarily as a general education course for non-majors and secondarily as a place where we might recruit majors. It was my first time teaching online and my first time teaching world history (which I last took in eighth grade), and I complicated the semester by using WordPress as an institutionally unsupported LMS and by trying to use as much free course material as possible. It was messy and not too far beyond what Silicon Valley types might call a Minimum Viable Product. When I teach it again, it will look very, very different.

I’m fortunate to be at an institution where we aren’t mandated to use the supported LMS, Blackboard, though I did use Blackboard’s gradebook because students like to have a place to track their grades, and I didn’t trust any gradebook I could set up in WordPress would be compliant with FERPA.

There are many benefits to working outside the institution’s LMS—benefits I’ll try to remember to elaborate in another post—but one disadvantage in teaching a 100-level online course on a platform that’s new to students is that it requires a good deal of technological scaffolding and hand-holding. I’ve used WordPress in my face-to-face courses, where students can easily help one another with technical questions before, during, or after each class meeting. In an entirely online general education course, however, there doesn’t tend to be the same sense of community because, at least at my institution, many of the students sign up for online courses hoping they’re a smaller time commitment than face-to-face courses. Students enter the semester, then, already reticent to invest time, let alone emotional energy, into such a course.

Accordingly, I found I needed to show students how to do simple technological tasks, such as logging into WordPress, writing and publishing a post, adding visual or audio media to a post, collaborating via Google docs, or finding a journal article in the library’s databases. As the semester progressed, I expected students to remember what I had already showed them how to do, then apply those patterns to other technological challenges in the course—e.g., finding other library resources or collaborating digitally on a much less structured group project.

It was clear to me some students felt more than a little lost during the course, and for every student who gave polite voice to their frustrations or confusion, I suspect two or three remained silent. At the end of the course, then, I felt the need to tie everything up with a neat bow, explaining that what may have seemed like a scattershot approach to world history was actually (somewhat) carefully planned to provide students with a lower-division course experience that expected more of them than a typical 100-level course.

Furthermore, although I had not done so intentionally, I realized many of the course activities and outcomes aligned with an entirely different but relevant taxonomy: my university’s “Make College Count” initiative, which encourages students to find opportunities to practice the skills employers most seek:

  • analyzing, evaluating, and interpreting information;
  • thinking critically;
  • solving problems;
  • taking initiative;
  • contributing to a team;
  • managing time and priorities;
  • performing with integrity;
  • effectively communicating orally;
  • building and sustaining working professional relationships.

I don’t like to think of higher education as vocational training, but when I view many of my courses from my students’ perspective, I understand students see college as key to developing the knowledge and skills that will let them earn a better living in a state that ranks first in the nation for minimum-wage jobs per capita. Student can develop these skills in any number of disciplines, but as an advocate for the humanities, I try to ensure students practice such skills while coming to appreciate the value and utility of the humanities in everyday life.

And so, yes, I practice scaffolding in some of my courses, and I found it to be especially valuable in my online course. I scaffold skills—from collaborating with others in a digital environment to analyzing material culture to better understand the habits, beliefs, and values of artifacts’ users—more than I do content. Content is just a way for students to get to the skills. And so I tend to skip very quickly over remembering and understanding in favor of emphasizing application and analysis through the act of creating a digital project that synthesizes text and multimedia elements.

Looking forward

So. . . What will I change in my courses and my instructional design practice now that I’ve taken a closer look at Bloom’s taxonomy and its critics?

Honestly, not much. Bloom’s remains a useful tool for me in my current context. Were I teaching at a selective small liberal arts college or an R1 university, both of which often have more middle-class and wealthy students than my institution does, I might not have to think as explicitly about how the skills we use in class affect students’ immediate career prospects. Like the educators who reformulated Bloom’s Taxonomy in the 1990s, I’m compelled to take the learning context into account.

Still, I appreciate the opportunity to reconsider, and then defend, one of my core ways of thinking about skills and outcomes in my courses.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Sometimes I teach, Whining Exhortation and Angst

Lyrical delight in an elegiac moment

June 3, 2016 By

 

I.

I recently happened again upon W. H. Auden’s poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” It’s been a favorite of mine since high school, but somehow it had fallen off my radar. No matter what one thinks of Yeats—I happen to be a fan of his poetry, but not his later politics—Auden’s poem is a tremendous elegy for a poet (any poet). It begins

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

In its third section, “In Memory” lapses into the distinctive meter Yeats uses in “Under Ben Bulben” (“Irish poets learn your trade/sing whatever well is made”), a poem in which Yeats imagines his own grave. Here are the final three trochaic stanzas of Auden’s work:

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

 

Auden’s poem delights me for so many reasons, from the monosyllabic “The day of his death was a dark cold day,” which hearkens back to ancient Anglo Saxon verse with its stressed alliteration, to the smooth, almost conversational rhythms of “the wolves ran on through the evergreen forests.” We move from the chilly, industrial gray concrete of the airport to the wildness of the mossy forest. And then suddenly we’re in Yeats’s own meter and imperative verse, at once dark and uplifting. Plus, we get the thrill of two neologisms, or at the very least unfamiliar words, each of them in the third line of a stanza: unconstraining, unsuccess. We expect the same in the third line of the final stanza, but instead the unconventional un is implied: we’re stuck in the prison of our days, but then—then!—the release in the turn: Teach the free man how to praise.

If the man is free, whom or what is he praising? A god? Or human unsuccess?

I am reminded, in my own reading of this poem, that we are allowed to celebrate failure. Failure means a new beginning.

II.

It’s these little turns—of meter, of phrase, of meaning—that drew me to poetry, my first academic love.

(I apologize in advance for being so canonical in my allusions here, but my brain is fuzzy, and I’m drawing here on what I know well, hoping it will launch me into a new and much-needed period of intellectual playfulness.)

I’ve long looked for these little turns in life as well, moments of unexpected delight of a species that appears so often in poetry:

Elizabeth Bishop’s beautiful, battle-scarred fish, or her moose “on the moonlit macadam.”

The “red wine, / artichokes, and California / politics” Amy Clampitt had for dinner in “Portola Valley.”

Eugenio Montale’s gray city and the peeking beyond “a half-shut gate / among the leafage of a court”—through which “the yellows of the lemon blaze,” opening the heart with “golden trumpets of solarity.”

Garrett Hongo’s Mendocino rose that comes “erupting out of pastureland” and how “the roses seemed everywhere around me then” on a California highway.

These are phenomena that happen all the time, but for each of us perhaps only once. And then there are the sweeping pronouncements that come couched in the specificity of place:

Also within sight of Highway 1 lies Robinson Jeffers’s Carmel Point, where the suburbs run up against “the pristine beauty” that “lives in the very grain of the granite.” Jeffers reminds us to “uncenter our minds from ourselves” and “unhumanize our views a little, and become confident / as the rock and ocean that we were made from.”

Adrienne Rich’s adrenaline-inducing cautions as she goes “picking mushrooms on the edge of dread” at the “ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise” in  “What Kind of Times Are These.”

Robert Penn Warren’s reminder that a drive across the Great Plains is “one way to write the history of America.”

Larkin’s “London spread out in the sun/ Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat.”

Sometimes the lyrical crosses into another realm entirely.

Take, for example, Seamus Heaney meeting the ghost of James Joyce after passing through the stations of the cross. Here’s Joyce’s advice to the poet:

‘You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,

so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’

III.

I’m trying to read more old-school literary criticism and analysis of poetry. The genre scratches a particular intellectual and artistic itch that cultural studies never could because there’s too much at stake in that interdiscipline’s social justice imperatives. Poetry is important, but the reading of it is rarely urgent. The writing of it? Yes, definitely urgent. But I can read poetry and the literary deconstruction of it and pretend I am an old-school intellectual with plenty of leisure. (Instead of me sitting in a clean but messy kitchen, imagine me sitting in a comfortable chair on the garden patio, my view of the roses half-obscured by vines.)

Meanwhile, each weekday morning I check in with a friend before sitting down to two hours of writing. This past month I’ve been reworking an article that returns from journals with excellent suggestions and even praise from reviewers, but which remains without a home. It falls in the cracks between disciplines. If it had a narrative, it would be charming. Instead, it’s analytical, and it’s trying to balance a big picture of women in science with the minutiae of a tapir’s sticky snout against a woman’s face. It’s history and American studies and feminist theory and science studies, and yes—poetry.

Sitting next to me on the kitchen table—we’ve lived in this house for ten months, but my home office remains largely unassembled, aside from my bookshelves, so I write in the kitchen—is Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, The Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets & Poetry.

Vendler opens chapter 2, an essay on the poetry of Yeats and Jorie Graham, with this insight:

Fin-de-siècle writing suggests seriousness and flamboyance, hyperbole and arbitrariness. The notion of fin de siècle presents itself to reflection as unsuitable for lyric, since it derives from the time span of epic narration, and lyric generally prefers the brief moment to the narrative span. The primary formal problem for the writer of lyric who wishes to invoke the notion of history is how to tuck such a panoramic concept into a short-breathed poem.

Vendler captures my current quandary.

IV.

Meanwhile, the brain fog persists. I test my blood pressure several times a day. (153/108.) I’ve been through two medications. Neither worked. I allow myself to be optimistic when the numbers decline after hours of work in the garden. But in such cases the decline in pressure persists for less than an hour.

And so I meet many technicians.

Today, for example, I saw my heart on a screen. I was hoping for some mad, au début du siècle visualization, my heart scanned and spinning on a screen, but instead the ultrasound looked very much like it did when I last saw my heart on a screen, in 1994, when I was nineteen years old.

It was disappointing. There were no answers, revelations, or delightful turns. I had already seen, decades ago, the grainy clapping frog legs of the mitral valve.

Next week I go in for another scan. And then I get a new -ologist.

I’m confident it’s a genetic issue, the longue durée of maternal ancestry running up against cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine. The clash of history with a lyrical moment, expressed in a particular pattern of DNA, the iambs of a heartbeat.

V.

I lost an IT coworker yesterday, on my birthday. He had a heart attack upon receiving some bad news about a loved one, and then he lingered in the ICU for a week before dying. He and I weren’t close, but we crossed paths several times a week, and he always had a smile for me. He attended the same Long Beach high schools as my Dad and I did (though years before me and years after my dad) and we reminisced and joked about that. His family—kids and grandkids in a big, blended family—know he loved them, and he knew they loved him.

I have, of course, my own stubborn cardiac issues on my mind. I intend to stick around for a long time, but I want to say I value every one of you in my life. Thanks for being here. You’re a fabulous bunch.

Meanwhile, hold your loved ones tight. Let them feel the patter of your heartbeat.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, What passes for science around here, Whining Exhortation and Angst

2015 in hindsight: difference

January 1, 2016 By

As I look forward to 2016, I also want to recall how, in 2015, Marci gave me the STAR word “difference.” I printed the word on a paper star and posted it above my desk at work.

Lots of things were different this year.

  • I turned 40, a cultural milestone, especially for women. Already I can feel the hot breath of perimenopause on my skin.
  • We bought a house this summer, our first. It’s lovely, if already kind of scruffy around the edges in the ways our residences tend to become. (220 pounds of dog generate, it ends up, a lot of dog hair, and the garden is huge.)
  • I sprained my ankle really badly in late September falling down the stairs of our new house, and I used crutches and a knee scooter for the first time in my life. Learning to use crutches at 40 is pretty miserable, especially when, like me, one is more than a little out of shape.
  • I took a new job and have made it my own. I adore the people with whom I work, and I am eager to go to the office every single day because the kind of work we do is really interesting and important. Alas, I also have learned more about human resources than I ever cared to know. (Next up: learning more about delegating.)
  • Because of the new job, I’m home later in the afternoon or evening than I used to be. I’m so grateful Fang long ago committed to being the work-from-home, PTA-type parent.
  • My son turned 10, another milestone. He also earned his second-degree black belt and is turning out to be a bright, balanced, and intrinsically motivated kid. I’m one proud mama.
  • I lost an aunt who I thought might outlive me. She had always been my healthiest relative, and her illness and passing has grounded me further in the here and now and made me reconsider my own health and fitness, especially since I had to show up to her memorial service on crutches.
  • I experienced a major attack on social media that made me experience the world differently, at least for a while, and reinforced some ideas I have about whiteness and masculinity in Idaho.
  • I flirted again with Quakerism, attending a couple meetings for the first time in years and writing an article on teaching and mentoring for Friends Journal. I deepened my belief in the primacy of nonviolence, especially with regards to the epidemic of gun violence in the U.S.

Even though much was different this year, I wasn’t sure how I was embracing difference or making a difference until recently, when my efforts began to pay off in ways large and small.

  • I’m not necessarily at liberty to say exactly how my efforts at work are making a difference–and doing so might make it seem as if I’m tooting my own bureaucratic horn–but I will say I’ve been working hard to get administrators and faculty thinking about priorities in undergraduate education, with a particular emphasis on the accessibility (in every sense of the term, including disability and affordability) of course materials and where the university invests in its technological resources. I’ve been speaking up and pushing back in an attempt to move undergraduate education forward. A lot of this work has involved, appropriately enough, talking about difference among students.
  • In the last couple months of this year, I’ve been trying to emphasize work-life balance, which seemed out of whack when I was primarily a faculty member. I’m fortunate to rarely have to take work home with me–much of what I do can wait until the next day–but I have often mulled over work challenges in my head when I’m at home rather than attending 100% to my family life. I hope to maintain the little momentum I’ve built up there with Fang, the boy, the dogs, and domestic life.
Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Mamablogging, Revolutions

Remembering Joan Van Blom

August 31, 2015 By

Bad things, I’ve been reminded by several people lately, come in threes. The threats, the heart attack scare. And now a death in the family.

On Friday, physical education and women’s sports lost a huge champion—in every sense of the word—in the passing of my aunt, Joan Van Blom. Joan’s life and career illustrate why it’s wise to invest in women’s sports; she took full advantage of the opportunities available to her under Title IX, blazing a path through doors that weren’t previously open to women in rowing, including the Olympics. As a teacher, coach, athlete, and PE curriculum coordinator, she inspired at least two generations of athletes (and others!) of all genders.

From an album on Joan's Facebook page. Her caption: "just after the finish of the 1976 Olympic finals race in Montreal, July 24, 1976, smiling at the realization that I'd won silver and almost gold. Photo by John Van Blom who was alongside the course, riding in the back of a stationwagon. John still had his own Olympic finals race within days, stroking the US quad, in the first time men raced the quad in the Olympics. (1976 was John's 3rd of 4 Olympic teams (1968, 1972, 1976, 1980) all as a sculler. His 5th Olympic team would be coaching our women's US quad to silver in 1984. — at Montreal, Canada - 1976 Olympics and other locations."

From an album on Joan’s Facebook page. Her caption: “just after the finish of the 1976 Olympic finals race in Montreal, July 24, 1976, smiling at the realization that I’d won silver and almost gold. Photo by John Van Blom who was alongside the course, riding in the back of a stationwagon. John still had his own Olympic finals race within days, stroking the US quad, in the first time men raced the quad in the Olympics. (1976 was John’s 3rd of 4 Olympic teams (1968, 1972, 1976, 1980) all as a sculler. His 5th Olympic team would be coaching our women’s US quad to silver in 1984. — at Montreal, Canada – 1976 Olympics and other locations.”

We all thought Joan would live forever, but she spent the past two years living with glioblastoma multiforme—and did so, at least as far as I saw, with verve and elegance. She kept rowing for as long as she could–and, being Joan, continued to take home the gold.

Despite all of her accomplishments and my great admiration for her, I’ll miss her laughter the most. Any dinner with Joan and her sisters, however informal, was always a party.

Jean Strauss has been crafting a documentary about Joan. Here’s a taste:

Joan Lind – America’s Sculler from Jean A. S. Strauss on Vimeo.

And here’s Joan’s own perspective:

An Island With Joan from Jean A. S. Strauss on Vimeo.

Some obituaries:

“In Memory of Joan Lind Van Blom” by US Rowing— including an especially thoughtful tribute by the women’s double at the World Championships on the day of Joan’s death

“Two-Time Olympic Medalist Joan Lind Van Blom Passes” at Row2k

From the Cal State Long Beach student rowing team: “Remembering Joan Lind Van Blom”

And, from the front page of the daily Long Beach paper, “Long Beach’s Joan Van Blom, rowing legend, dies of brain cancer at 62”

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Tall tales and true, Whining Exhortation and Angst

“Idaho Citizens”

May 20, 2015 By
15535882211_7a91024dde_zImage by Thomas Hawk, and used under a Creative Commons license

 

When I listen to testimony before Idaho’s state legislative committees, I invariably hear—mostly from conservative speakers, but not exclusively—multiple people mention how many years they have been “citizens of Idaho.”

I thought this was an interesting slip of the tongue. After all, those testifying were residents of Idaho and likely citizens of the United States. I don’t recall ever hearing anyone call herself a “California citizen” or a “citizen of Iowa” (or Virginia or D.C.) when I lived in those places.

Still, I wasn’t sure whether to be amused (was the use of “citizen” ignorant or accidental?) or infuriated (was it intentional?).

And then I came across these passages in the Idaho state GOP platform:

“We believe that Idaho Citizens should not and or shall not be taxed for federally mandated health care.”

“The Idaho Republican Party recognizes that the future of this great state lies with our faith and reliance on God our Creator, in our strong efforts to uphold family values, and in the quality of education provided for its citizens.”

“The benefits of hydroelectric power should be retained for the citizens of Idaho.”

“We encourage all Idaho citizens, and their religious, civic, and community organizations, to be actively engaged in this effort.”

Argh.

This explains why the state GOP has made sure we’ll soon need passports to leave the state on an airplane—or, really, to fly anywhere in the U.S.

This state really is another country.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Tall tales and true, Whining Exhortation and Angst

Little boxes

May 10, 2015 By

There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

(Would it be heavy-handed to quote the next verse?)

I haven’t blogged for a while because the new job (director of instructional design and educational assessment), which I’ve been doing on top of being a history professor, has used up all my brain space. The position encompasses even more than I thought it would. (Anyone here ever been responsible for an online testing center before, or merged two testing centers into one? Me neither.) Toss in a mandate for electronic accessibility, a need to represent students’ achievement of university learning outcomes both quantitatively and qualitatively to accreditors, a small staff of bright people who are already pulled in too many directions, software the university adopted that may or may not work as advertised (but which I’m responsible for making sure gets used as it was marketed), an expectation we’ll find a way to lower course resource costs for students, a relationship to be (re)built with the campus’s rapidly expanding online learning unit, and much more. . . and I barely have time to think about anything else.

I really do enjoy the work because I get to think about big-picture things and have interesting conversations with all kinds of people, but it seems every day some issue emerges that causes me some cognitive dissonance or, at the very least, pedagogical discomfort.

Right now I’m stuck on the imperative to be “entrepreneurial” within the context of the university.

I’m torn. On the one hand, I’m all for finding new and interesting sources of funding—by which I mean grants and community partnerships—for scholarly and creative work that might otherwise be impossible. On the other hand, there’s a renewed attention to the bottom line that makes the humanist in me deeply uncomfortable. (I feel compelled to preemptively mention the History department is profitable; it brings in more money to the university than it costs, especially now that we are—to borrow terminology from those darling Silicon Valley start-ups—a leaner and therefore more agile unit.)

But, it ends up, there’s profitable and then there’s profitable. In the new cult of entrepreneurialism, the History department’s metrics make our entire endeavor—our research, courses, and public service—appear, in the eyes of some administrators, barely sustainable. When the provost came to talk to the History department, he recommended we spawn some “self-supporting” degrees or programs that would help to fund our bread-and-butter bachelor’s degree programs.

So, what is a self-supporting program? In my local context, a self-supporting program does not receive any funds appropriated from the state. (This is important because state appropriations to Idaho’s universities fell when the recession began, and have yet to return to 2008 levels. In addition, the state board of education provides Boise State only 2/3 the amount per student as it does the University of Idaho.) In return for not costing the university much, each self-supporting program (I’m told) gets to keep upwards of 90 percent of its revenue, out of which it pays faculty salaries and all its other costs.

There is a tremendous incentive in self-supporting programs, then, to reduce costs incurred by the department and to have students bear as many of these costs as possible.

As any academic knows, one way to reduce costs to the department is to hire very few tenure-line faculty and to farm out teaching to lecturers or, better yet, adjuncts. And there is a widespread belief—which I’m guessing is a myth—that online programs save the university money because they don’t place a burden on the university’s physical plant. In this paradigm, the most economical courses are those offered online and taught by adjuncts. (Of course, it’s not really economical, as there’s a huge support infrastructure in place—from servers and the people who maintain them, to expensive enterprise software and the people who maintain it, to instructional designers, help desk staff, admissions recruiters, the registrar, and all kinds of other units that don’t get reimbursed in any meaningful way by these self-supporting programs.)

But who has time to ensure all those online adjuncts are adhering to best practices in instructional design? A university can moderate such concerns by having “subject-matter experts”—who may or may not be tenure-line faculty—provide the content for each course. Then, in concert with specialists in instructional design, the subject-matter expert develops a course, populating, for example, discussion boards with prompts and exams with questions and answers. This course is then cloned within the university’s learning management system (e.g., Blackboard) and handed off to adjuncts whose teaching experience and subject matter expertise fall all over the spectrum. For purposes of quality control and discipline-specific accreditation (for example, in engineering or the health sciences), the adjuncts typically lack opportunities to make their course their own. The course becomes, for all intents and purposes, a less-than-open xMOOC with better-staffed sections.

On my least cynical, most optimistic days, I can see how this process might work for, say, Boise State’s nursing program, which offers a bachelor’s degree completion program for RNs, for a relatively cookie-cutter MBA program, or for any number of programs that offer continuing education to professionals in fields that require formal accreditations beyond degrees.

It’s going to be a screaming failure in the humanities, however. In some cases, the one thing humanities adjuncts have going for them is a sense of autonomy in designing their courses and agency in teaching them. This paradigm takes away that autonomy, in the name of cost-cutting and quality control. If you think humanities adjuncts are agitated now, wait until universities ask them to teach courses out of a box.

In addition, the humanities typically don’t scale well. Done well, the humanities require significant time for research, reflection, discernment, and revision. When he met with the History department, our provost recommended, for example, we bring in 30 new grad students each year and graduate 11 of them. (As I understand it, we typically bring in 10 students in a good year, and offer support to fewer than half those students. Eleven students is a lot. Because history student projects necessitate many, many drafts and we require a high standard of student work, I had three grad students file to graduate this spring, but only one did.) We have 14 tenure-line faculty in the department, and most of them don’t serve on more than two graduate students’ committees at any one time, but if we’re to keep our graduate programs, our tenure-line faculty are expected to ramp those numbers up considerably while teaching a 3/3 load, plus doing enough research to keep us off a 4/4 load.

Yes, there are examples of individual instructors teaching humanities concepts well online for a large audience of enrolled or open students—I’m thinking in particular of DS 106 in its various permutations—but in every case I can think of, their success relies on connectivism rather than content delivery, and they teach outside of a traditional LMS. The scale derives from an instructor’s generosity with his or her time, and from students’ willingness to expand their personal learning networks, rather than from a widgetizing of course production.

In a climate that favors entrepreneurialism and self-supporting programs, the problem is that the humanities—and increasingly so, when we teach them well—are about building community, about collaboration and connection—not about sharing content in a way that can be measured by exams. The learning management platforms on which universities offer online courses are optimized for sharing content and quizzing students on their knowledge of that content, not for genuine connection and community-building.

But back to the provost’s recommendation that the History department develop some self-supporting programs: what kind of student is going to pay premium rates for a humanities degree? Humanities degrees do indeed provide a significant financial return on their investment by mid-career but our students don’t usually understand that, focused as they are on getting that first post-baccalaureate job. In the cold calculus of universities with dwindling state support, the humanities may slip from being the bread-and-butter liberal arts courses at the heart of a quality undergraduate education, becoming instead a luxury for those who can afford higher tuition for History courses one administration here dubbed “boutique.”

Meanwhile, of course, employers are asking for students who can think critically and creatively, synthesize complex information from multiple sources, and write well. I can’t wait to see how universities get remote nursing or business adjuncts to teach those skills online.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Sometimes I teach, Tall tales and true, Technobabble, Whining Exhortation and Angst

Mass firing in the History department at Boise State

March 8, 2015 By

This past week, the History department chair sent out an e-mail with the subject line “Grim News.” In the e-mail, she detailed extensive cuts to the History department’s funding, apparently emerging from the Provost’s office. Among the cuts are:

  • The Public History faculty line I recently vacated
  • 2/3 of the funds we use to support graduate assistants
  • Two lecturerships
  • A visiting lecturership
  • All adjunct funding

I’ll have something more substantive to say about this soon, but right now I’m grief-stricken.

In the meantime, you can read this Idaho Statesman article to get a sense of the university’s party line. As you might imagine, though, “declining enrollment” is not the whole story.

I’ll leave you with these tidbits, calculated by one of our endangered lecturers, who used to work in college finance and administration:

The department offered 49 full-semester 3-credit courses with 1,385 students total in Spring 2015. Of these:

  • 17 classes with 556 students were taught by tenure/tenure-track faculty (41%)
  • 15 classes with 449 students were taught by 3.5 lecturers (33%)
  • 14 classes with 340 students were taught by 8 adjuncts (24%)
  • 3 classes with 40 students were taught by full-time faculty not housed entirely in the history department (2%)

The lecturer estimates the department’s instructional expenses constitute less than 45% of the revenue it brings in through teaching alone, and that there’s no way the now diminished tenure-line faculty can accommodate all of the students currently being taught by lecturers and adjuncts. Even trying to accommodate them will mean History faculty won’t have time to do research during the academic year. Currently we have two NEH fellows, an NSF fellow, a Fulbright scholar, and the editor of a top journal—as well as everyone else’s research agendas—so our department isn’t exactly shirking its research responsibilities. Many of us have also service commitments that already are untenable.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Tall tales and true, Wait. . . I moved to where?, Whining Exhortation and Angst

Humanities = employability

October 20, 2014 By

I found myself in a meeting on Friday with several science faculty, and I had the opportunity to share with them what I’m doing in my Digital History course this semester. When I mentioned in particular that my students were mapping the neighborhood’s irrigation ditches, an engineering professor asked me how they were doing that. I said I had a student minoring in GIS and she’d likely in the end use Google Maps or maybe even Illustrator just to indicate where the water flows through the neighborhood and where it disappears underground.

She clarified her question. “No. . . How do you get your students to do things you haven’t taught them to do? If we ask our students to do something new, they say they can’t do it because we haven’t yet taught them how to do it.”

I pointed out that history, and the humanities more generally, provided students with plenty of opportunities to take initiative in research and communication, and that we tried to cultivate independent thinking in our students. Plus, I try to model this spirit of inquiry in the classroom. I pointed out (once again) that I’m a history professor without any degrees in history, and I’m a technologist without any formal training in that field. I’ve decided to eschew impostor syndrome in favor of openly making up my projects and career as I go along.

The professors seemed a bit flabbergasted. Maybe they hadn’t ever considered the humanities as anything other than courses that taught students grammar and asked them to read a lot.

For me, job #1 is ensuring students are critical and creative thinkers who can use technology thoughtfully so they can both tackle big problems and make a living. I don’t understand how anyone could enjoy—or even think it was morally defensible—to teach a course that didn’t inspire students to stretch themselves, that required them merely to learn content or basic skills. If your students don’t get past “comprehension” in Bloom’s Taxonomy, you’re doing it wrong. Students need to get to synthesis, evaluation, and creation in as many class meetings as possible.

In light of this discovery that the university apparently is producing STEM students who lack initiative and intellectual curiosity, I’ve just suggested it fund an interdisciplinary project that would bring some of this humanities secret sauce to STEM students. Here’s a smidgeon from my response to a CFP aimed at gauging faculty interest in new, interdisciplinary projects:

a) Project description – provide a short description of your project idea

Students need more opportunities to practice solving problems across disciplines, and Idahoans often need low-cost solutions to the challenges they face. My years in the classroom have taught me that humanities students (and especially history students), if given the right tools, support, and encouragement, are both persistent and creative researchers and makers. They seek out new knowledge, teach themselves and each other skills, and work together collaboratively with little complaint or friction. I’d like to bring this “humanities secret sauce” to students across the disciplines, as I’ve heard from faculty that their students don’t always demonstrate this initiative and ability to learn new things—or synthesize their knowledge and skills—outside the classroom.

Accordingly, I propose creating the Curiosity Shop, a place where the Boise State community, as well as everyday Idahoans, can bring persistent issues or problems, and students can—working alongside these individuals—address these challenges using research, experimentation, and communication. The atmosphere of the Curiosity Shop will be permeated with curiosity, deep inquiry, empathy, creativity, improvisation, and perseverance. Working in multidisciplinary teams, students will learn to prioritize challenges, research possible interventions, and then propose, fund, implement, iterate, and evaluate their solutions.

b) What are the broad research questions?

  • Are there differences in how students in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences tackle problem-solving? If so, what are these differences, whence do they emerge, and do students’ problem-solving styles change during collaboration on interdisciplinary teams?
  • What kinds of technologies, digital or otherwise, do students employ while solving diverse problems? What patterns emerge in this use, and what does their use say about students’ habits, beliefs, and values?
  • How do these students’ problem-solving styles and choices of technology jibe with or deviate from employers’ expectations of entry-level employees’ knowledge, skills, and abilities in various fields?

Here’s hoping the appropriate committee bites. Our students can change the world if we let them.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Sometimes I teach, Tall tales and true
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Header image credits

origami beetle by Emre Ayaroglu, mounted butterflies by Black Country Museums, First Lady Sarah Polk's dress and the Jefferson Bible source book by the National Museum of American History, and lionfish by Martyn Steiner, all used under Creative Commons licenses.

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