Recipe cooking

By disposition I’m not a follower of instructions, and so as a teacher I began by offering very few instructions. I gave students big general assignments, threw lots of materials and models at them, and let them figure something out, kind of on the Inuit model:

“I remember an essay by Jean Briggs, an ethnographer who studied child-rearing among the Inuit. One of the things that disturbed her was the practice of setting problems for children, not providing the materials they needed, and teasing them when they failed to solve them. She initially thought it was cruel. She then came to realize that if, for example, an adult Inuit was out seal-hunting on the ice and some of his equipment broke down, the inability to improvise a solution would kill him.” (Comment here by John McCreery)

Bonus: consistent with open-ended, inclusive, non-prescriptive feminist and post-colonial epistemologies! Because I lived through the 90s and paid attention. And I got back plenty of good work this way. But I also got a lot of really terrible work, stuff that made my eyes cross and my brain melt, stuff that was dreadful by any conceivable standard but ‘turn something in’. Stuff that would get ya killed if there were polar bears and sub-zero temperatures about. And that made me sad.

So in the spirit of figuring something out, I read the research and followed the discussions and listened to the students who were telling me that these assignments were too vague and confusing, and that some people just don’t know how to work this way, and some of those need more explicit instruction about what’s expected and what to do. A recipe. And I thought yeah, it’s probably not reasonable to expect students to do things we haven’t shown them how to do. And so after piecemealing more explicit instruction for quite awhile, a couple years back I completely redid my syllabuses, which no one was reading anyway, into dedicated instructional primers, dividing them into sections on requirements, guidance, and assessments, where anyone reading the syllabus and doing what it says would inevitably do pretty well in the class. And then I turned my classes into workshops, where what we did was work through the steps of good research, analysis, and writing described in the syllabus in a recursive developmental process, so everything had a chance to become familiar and settle into practices.

I still get back plenty of good work, and I get a lot less really terrible work. That’s a win. I’m less sad.

What I came here to write is that as far as I can see, there’s no particular correlation between wanting a recipe and actually reading and following a recipe. The ones who read and follow along get what they need. The students who previously would have come to me asking for more explicit instruction on ‘what I’m looking for’ still do, only now they have to systematically ignore all the places and ways I’ve already told, shown, and worked them through ‘what I’m looking for’. The students who would have struggled because they just couldn’t make sense of what was expected now do that in the presence of a dedicated and encompassing instructional framework of explicit expectations.

There’s a very sad scene in “The Joy Luck Club” where Rose, having at length and systematically demolished any expectation that she might be a competent or interesting person capable of making responsible decisions, begs Ted to just tell her what he wants. And what he wants is the Rose who was a competent, interesting person capable of making responsible decisions. But there’s not a recipe for that, or really any way of saying it that would get through the debris they’ve made of their relationship. That’s obviously a bit pat, and a bit sideways of the instructional situation I’m talking about here. But as to the students who want a recipe, as far as I can tell it’s not really a recipe they want or that would help. They want the task to be made familiar in a way that doesn’t take them out of their comfort zones or put pressure on them to be competent, interesting, or responsible.

There’s a whole lot more to say about this, but I’m not sure how much is at stake. Over the years I have also learned to be less confident that anything about my teaching in particular or the massive education apparatus in general was creating massive swings of achievement, for better or worse. As educational research keeps showing, for a whole lot of pretty interesting (and sometimes heartbreaking) reasons the distribution of performance is basically homeostatic in roughly a bell curve shape. In any given school or program or classroom your n=small enough to enable lumpy statistical anomalies, and there are also threshold effects where someone tips from one attractor to another, which can be really striking and feel like the whole transformative promise of education fulfilled. But those moments are striking because they’re not the norm, and so they just don’t work as the standard. For the most part there’s only so much education can do to overcome some pretty sticky priors, and it’s not much. The systems are complex, and they’re resilient.

It’s hard to maintain strong opinions about better and worse teaching in the face of these inconvenient facts. Not much difference with and without recipes; a bit higher floor, a bit more general competence overall. A more modest goal of calibrating and provisioning the homeostasis for its better expressions is cautiously supported. Unburdened of crushing infinity standards about changing the world, it is observably possible to set people up for more success in the general zones and trajectories of their aptitudes. Bad can become less bad. Good can become more good. Meh can become more robustly and effectively meh. The instruction and workshop format seems to do a better job of distributing the increments of progress in this way.

Research guidance

This is how I teach it, starting with the world history surveys. I wrote it down for the online class I’m teaching now. The whole process is meant to be recursive, generating new questions and diving back into the research. All of the research projects are written up in three phases culminating in the masterpiece.

Education can be a lot of jumping through hoops, and you may not be used to studying things you’re interested in. In this class, you learn by engaging your curiosity and then developing the skills and knowledge you need because there’s something you actually want to figure out and understand better.

Somebody has to do the research and find the sources that support informed and reliable historical knowledge. If you’re writing the paper, that somebody is you! There are some skills involved in good research, but there’s also a disposition. Good researchers are curious, stubborn, and persistent. They want to know, they’re confident the information they need is out there, and they keep digging until they hit it. Good researchers don’t say “I can’t find anything,” they say “let’s try another approach.”

If you can’t find the sources, you can’t be informed and reliable, and you can’t write a paper on that topic. There are two ways to handle this (well, three, if you count giving up). You can pick a different topic where the sources are easier to find. Or you can get stubborn, persist, and find the sources you need, becoming more ‘resourceful’ in the process.

Overview research

For any topic, it helps to have a general understanding of how that topic works in itself, and a general overview of that topic as part of a place and time with various other things going on. For this kind of orientation, encyclopedias and brief online summaries from reliable providers are fine! You can even go ‘Wikipedia surfing’ – find the entry for your topic and then click all the links, and then click all the links, and so on until you feel like you have a pretty good idea of the main outlines and features of your topic. Sometimes the citations, bibliography, and external links on better Wikipedia pages can even guide you toward more serious research.

Overview research is the common knowledge level of investigation. You’re just getting up to speed on what anyone who knows anything about the topic already knows. Any educated person with a device can do this step in a few minutes. You have not yet “done the research,” you have “informed yourself.” It’s very good to be informed, and a great start for serious research. But none of this basic information belongs in a research study. You only make yourself useful when you get way, way past Wikipedia and the first page of Google, and figure out something that wasn’t common knowledge.

Search terms

Other than general knowledge, the most important takeaway from overview research is an enhanced list of search terms. Most failed searches are just worded badly, and part of getting better at research is getting better at words. Make note of words and phrases that characterize your topic, then plug them back into your search to get more informed and specialized results. Keep doing this as you go to achieve a virtuous knowledge spiral.

Secondary sources

Most of your overview research will be what’s called “secondary sources.” In this case what makes them secondary is that they are written after the fact (second hand) by people with no direct experience of the topic. Secondary sources come in different grades of reliability and different levels of elaboration. For historical research, specialized sources published by scholars are usually where the reliable knowledge in depth is. They’re usually “peer reviewed,” which means approved by other people who study in that field. And they’re usually long format, starting in the 15-20 page range. You should get used to seeking out and reading research in that range.

Google

Regular Google searches move ads to the front, and after that are designed to give you the common knowledge overview, because that’s what most people want. So if you’re not careful, Google can distort your research and even your understanding of how knowledge works toward the superficial and trivial. Over time you can teach Google to take you more seriously and return better quality results automatically, but in the meantime you can go direct to Google Scholar and do your search at https://scholar.google.com/.

Proquest

There’s lots of great free scholarly content on the web. But if you hit a paywall, or you want to get straight to the good stuff without fighting through garbage, and also take advantage of your tuition dollars at work, it’s best to go through an academic database. At Davis Memorial Library the one database to rule them all is Proquest. It comes in a lot of curated subsections, but unless you know for sure that you only want the results from a narrowed search, go with Proquest Central, which is all of it. Look under P in the Digital Resources section of the library web page, (). (For History specifically, JSTOR is also great. Look under J.)

Primary sources

Primary sources are really important in historical research, because they were produced at the time you are studying by the people you are studying (primary in this case means first-hand). They can be a little tricky to find and may require some creative flexibility. The Library has what are called “LibGuides” that offer access to some primary source collections. There’s a link to the LibGuides on the main library page, and they’re organized by general topic area, including World History. Lots of libraries have terrific libguides online and you can use any of them, but signing in and going through MU’s libguides can help with paywalls if that’s an issue.

If you know the specific primary sources you’re looking for, Google can work fine. There are also collections of primary sources online that can be accessed directly if you know what they are, or discovered by searching your topic plus the search terms “primary source” and/or “archive” (an archive is a place where old writing is stored). Obviously you should have lots of different ways of saying your topic to the computer so you don’t miss the resources you need just because of bad wording.

Reading

Finding great sources is terrific, but then obviously you have to read them. In good research where you develop knowledge in depth, you should expect to find and read hundreds of pages, including lots that don’t turn out to be all that useful. This is why it’s so incredibly important to pick a topic you find genuinely fascinating. For guidance on extracting information and understanding from sources by reading them, see “Reading for Evidence.”

Research help

You can schedule a personal consult with a research librarian. They will help you find what you’re looking for. It’s not even cheating! Here’s the link: ()

(Also posted at Dead Voles.)

Perfectionism

Most semesters I’ll have at least a couple of students who are torturing themselves with perfectionism. Sometimes it’s so bad and they get so completely in their own way that they can’t do any work at all. I am well aware that there are some neurological and psychological dimensions to this, but as a sociological response it’s interesting as well.

In my specific experience perfectionism manifests as flailing around standards and expectations. These are the students who beg me to tell them what I want, to give them a checkbox algorithm for success. Turing me up, they say. “I want you to become responsible for an area of investigation and figure out some things about it” does not compute in the language of standards and expectations they are using.

What’s happening is that they’re waiting for someone else to define the domain and the task in a way that makes perfection possible. They’re waiting for this because over and over again, this is what they have in fact gotten. Perfection makes complete sense as a standard when perfection is achievable. In the familiar model, this looks like a test with a hundred questions on it. Although it’s difficult to answer a hundred questions correctly, it certainly can be done and often is. Perfection is a harsh but reasonable standard under these circumstances.

All through our lives engineered linearizations like tests and classes and disciplines and jobs compress and control the situations we’re in, so no one has to answer more than a hundred questions at once. But these tours de force come with some severe consequences. The world is not actually divided up into hundred question domains. There are millions of questions, and they’re irreducibly interrelated. Answering them with some level of understanding requires openness to unstructured learning, and pulling in information and strategies from across multiple domains. Perfection is not possible and therefore not a reasonable standard. We’re pulling together what we can and trying to do better. Although a division of labor and/or the emergent wisdom of markets can simulate that to some degree, such arrangements leave each actor desperately ignorant about how anything actually works.

I may be wrong, but I don’t think you can scaffold the transition from a hundred question mindset to a million question mindset. It’s not a matter of scaling up an existing cognitive routine. The existing cognitive routine is in the way, which is where the flailing comes from once it starts to fail. So I think you have to insistently make it impossible to scale the task down to a hundred questions and let the magnitude of that failure work its magic. At least that’s what I do, and it works often enough that the occasional tragic virtuoso of perfectionism looks like a sad but acceptable price to pay.

Fun?

Here at MU we’ve got a pretty generous student worker policy. Each of us can have one or more student workers if we can produce an explanation of how they’d come in handy. Their compensation is part of the financial aid package.

I’ve had several over the years. Their official title is “Igor,” pronounced eye-gore like the Marty Feldman character in “Young Frankenstein.” They’ve done various things for me, from rearranging my bookshelves by color to peer reviewing all my World History papers to bringing me up to speed on digital resources.

This semester’s Igor is an Albanian guy, which is fun because Gramsci (he tells me we’re spelling it wrong) was Albanian-Italian, and also because when my family lived in Italy in the 70’s we mythologized Albania (then a closed society) as a mysterious land of crazy geniuses. Which has, in fact, pretty much fit the few Albanians I’ve known.

OK, so on to the ‘fun’. Igor has been sitting in on one of my World History sections, to get a feel and make suggestions about how to improve the learning experience for students. He’s prepped me with a lot of great traditional teaching materials about 1914 (our topic at the moment). But it’s become clear that we’re not really on the same page about the project, which is no surprise and a learning opportunity for both of us.

I don’t want to be throwing traditional teaching materials at the students; I want to be guiding them in a process of figuring out how to find stuff for themselves. Igor has been impatient with the chaos of this process; he sees the students spinning their wheels and thinks we’re not really getting anywhere. But he’s very smart, and he pays attention, so he gets that I’m not going to be lecturing. What we need to do, he says, is package up the historical resources so they’re “fun” for the students.

Igor’s so far ahead of the game. It took me until grad school to figure this out. So much better than jamming the porridge down the students’ throats. Then it took me until I’d been teaching on my own for five or six years to become dissatisfied with it. It’s a trap. Yes, you win hearts and minds; you gain a positive relationship and a comradely process. Some learning does happen. But, once you go down the rathole of what students find fun, it’s almost impossible to get out. That fun sticks to what they already know and think like glue. Unless they happen to find learning fun, what they find fun and interesting is itself the cognitive / emotional limitation a higher education is meant to open out into new abilities, possibilities, and perspectives.

What I have to offer is not the laborious translation of history into their existing ludic frames. What I have to offer is whole new ways to have fun. The fun of understanding complex processes; of puzzling through ignorance to knowledge; of knowing what the hell you’re talking about. The fun of belonging in adult conversations, of being taken seriously for the quality of your insight and not just tolerated for the humanity of your personal opinion. The fun of a whole world bursting with interesting things, in which nothing isn’t interesting. Most of them don’t know this stuff is fun yet, because it’s not how education has ever worked for them. For some of them, the fun has been actively sucked out of learning. Trying to make learning fun in the ways they’re used to is not a solution to that problem.

Nowadays I try to make the process quirky and offbeat and informal in ways that are at least intriguing and non-threatening. But the fun doesn’t really start until they’ve hesitantly selected a topic and done some research and actually found something out. It’s then that the magic of education can slide in among the other pleasures of our lives.

Why do American teachers stink at learning how to teach?

Via the Facebook page of Making Thinking Visible (Project Zero, Visible Thinking) comes an interesting article from the NY Times, “Why Do Americans Stink at Math?”

It turns out a big chunk of the answer is, because American teachers stink at learning how to teach. This stinkage is illustrated by contrast to the Japanese, who ironically got jazzed about American innovations in teaching theory and practice during the ’80s, and implemented them at the same time they were going nowhere in the U.S. The article, which is adapted from Elizabeth Green’s forthcoming book Building a Better Teacher, argues that although the U.S. is a leader in conceptual innovation and extraordinary experimentation, we do a particularly bad job of general implementation because we fail to actually show teachers how to do the exciting new thing. This has happened over and over again. In contrast again, the Japanese made a commitment to the change and poured tremendous institutional and peer support into training up the educators. So in fact Green’s thesis is that it’s not that we stink at learning how to teach, but at teaching how to teach.

No doubt this is true, or at least it’s a perennial complaint. But there’s something a little odd about the argument. The consistent theme of each iteration of innovation is to take an experimental attitude to teaching, and to commit to an open-ended process of discovery. The Japanese teacher offered as model is Takeshi Matsuyama. “At the university-affiliated elementary school where Matsuyama taught, he turned his classroom into a kind of laboratory, concocting and trying out new teaching ideas.” The idea is to set up a discovery-oriented environment, then let students figure it out for themselves.

So, why does Green think teachers themselves need something other than this? I realize there are all sorts of strategies that ‘facilitate’ this process – I’ve developed many by doing, learned others by paying attention and reading and making connections. There’s much more for me to learn, and plenty I’ve forgotten that I shouldn’t have. I could tell all this to apprentices. But again, the point of the method is self-discovery through recursive experimentation and research and reflection. It’s really the opposite of ‘we need to show these people how to do this algorithm’, which is precisely the old model that we’re trying to get over. On this view, we don’t at all need to show teachers how to do this. We just need to set them to the task and let them sort it out.

Well in actual fact, that hasn’t worked. Instead, confusion reigns and the reform collapses back into old habits. Which, as Dave Mazella keeps saying, have the substantial merit of not working in familiar ways that define the norm, reinforced and perpetuated by what Green calls the “apprenticeship of observation.” And since it’s clearly the case that failure is endemically acceptable – normal, in fact – in the American education system, so things remain. Would teaching the teachers how to teach change that?

I’m not sure. It’s the disposition of discovery and risk that’s missing; that would seem to be built into our system, but it was in Japan too. And it would seem to be simple enough – it’s a one-page handout, a blog post – to convey the concept of moving from an “I, We, You” to a “You, Y’All, We” classroom framework. Try it, work with it. Here’s a problem: “Without the right training, most teachers do not understand math well enough to teach it the way [innovator Magdalene] Lampert does.” But Lampert’s method does not require the teacher to understand math, yet. It requires the teacher to understand the process of figuring math out, which, as the math-in-the-wild examples in the article show, is available to anyone who accepts the need to do so and puts their mind to it. Again, the idea that there’s some special training teachers need here seems off-base.

Green tells poignantly of teachers trying to do it right, but instead taking the new script and jamming the old one into it.

And how could she have known to do anything different? Her principal praised her efforts, holding them up as an example for others. Official math-reform training did not help, either. Sometimes trainers offered patently bad information — failing to clarify, for example, that even though teachers were to elicit wrong answers from students, they still needed, eventually, to get to correct ones.

How could she have known? Well, did her students figure something out or not? Did they start getting right answers or not? Why were their answers right or wrong? Really, she has to be told that eventually the point is to get to right answers? She’s looking for a recipe, rather than paying attention to what’s happening. It’s not hard to know if students are learning or not, if you pay attention and think a little.

What’s needed is curiosity and responsibility. When teachers have these, all is well, just as when students have them, all is well. The Japanese (and Finnish, and exotic flavor-of-the-month) example show that this can, to a degree, be generalized. I’m not sure what it would take to enable this in the American setting, but years of failed innovation suggest it’s not a one-variable problem.

Going with the flow

I was about ten minutes late to my “Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective” class today. I’m doing a study group off-campus with some students who got fascinated by Marx last semester, and because of the way my brain works around time and presence, I lingered too long. From long experience I know I can minimize the consequences of this as long as I deliver robust value in the time remaining, even turning the ethos of the class from a quantitative time-served model to a qualitative work-accomplished model. So although I prefer not to be late, I’m not fretful about it.

The last time I was late, I mentioned that since the class is discovery and discussion oriented, there was in principle no need to wait for me and they could just go ahead and start. I mentioned that my ideal class was one in which the students seized control of their own learning and made the authority position of the teacher obsolete. That little speech is meant to create a fermenting contrast, but it does not usually work any immediate transformation – the habits of passivity are very deep.

But! When I walked into class today, one of the students who hardly ever says anything was presenting information and making an argument from the section of the text we’re working through that his study group was leading discussion on. (The text, btw, is Reilly, Kaufman, and Bodino’s Racism: A Global Reader.) I sat down quietly and the conversation continued for twenty minutes without any input from me. As we had discussed in setting up the order of march, members of other groups regularly chimed in with connections to their own sections of the text. Broadly speaking, they were trying to make sense of the dynamics of ‘internal Othering’, and how groups that were tolerated or even absorbed in one context could be stigmatized and oppressed in another. Eventually they reinvented frame analysis together, and I broke my silence to tell them so.

I am so happy and proud about this group. It certainly matters that there is a focused, disciplined, and motivated knot of military students; I suspect they were the catalysts of self-starting. But all of the students (about 15 today) were engaged when I came in; none of them much noted my entry, or shifted their attention to me as if the class would ‘really start’ now. It probably helped that I just sat down with them and did not make a show of moving to ‘the front’. It probably helped that this was the second run of our discussion format. It probably helped that we had brainstormed and concocted the discussion format together, with them getting the last word on how we would do it. It probably helped that the format engaged all of them by making the ‘leading’ group prompters rather than presenters, and explicitly encouraging connections to all of their centers of expertise.

Would this have happened if I was on time? Obviously not in exactly this way; I think my absence was a productive accelerant. This is a place where INUS conditions apply, which is fun because they reinvented those today, too.

Figuring out figuring it out

(crossposted from Dead Voles)

I’m pretty sold at this point on ‘figuring out’ as a teaching / learning rubric. The idea being that what we’re up to is figuring things out, not being told things. Here’s what that looks like, according to one student in a journal I just read:

I’m really beginning to see how things are connected. There isn’t a piece of history that we have covered that cannot in some aspect be related to something previously discussed and it can be overwhelming, but exhilarating. When you start thinking, it’s like you can’t stop your brain from jumping from one track to another. This class seriously requires an adjustment to how I process information. I realized that I have to literally stop thinking when I go to my next class because that class doesn’t function that way.

I’m a bit embarrassed by the invidious comparison, but the purpose of the journals is for the students to work on their metacognition by tracking their learning process in this and other classes, so it seems to have worked here. That this student has to ‘stop thinking’ in its next class is an amazing observation, and heartbreaking.

Here’s an email exchange with another student, who I’ve mentioned before as an enthusiastic but not-yet-confident newcomer to the concept of figuring things out for itself:

Me: I really like how you’re developing the project. Everything you’re writing is consistent with what I know, and you’re teaching me some new things. I can see that the volume of information you’re working with is overwhelming your sense of how it all goes together a bit, but you’re on the right track. This could be a life’s work. Stay focused on what you want to figure out, and pull it together as best you can.

I’m really looking forward to reading your final paper. ¡Buen trabajo!

Student: Thanks for your guidance, I am really trying to excel in your class. Now that I have gotten your feedback, I am questioning whether or not my final essay topic is the right one for me. I am doing how the new world treasure (gold and silver, etc) ultimately lead to Spain’s financial crisis (due to creation of credit systems, where they would just use treasure as a place holder which accumulated large amounts of debt).

If you think a different topic would be more suitable, I wouldn’t mind starting over on my paper.

Me: Your topic is wonderful! Please continue with what you’re doing!

The point about using the treasure as a place holder seems like a great example of how complex evolutionary systems work, by repurposing and reassembling available resources and relationships for the contingent dynamics, constraints and affordances of the environment. How that happens from case to case depends on initial conditions, as you’ve seen.

So interesting. Again, please continue.

In my experience this is pretty typical once a student begins to see how big a quality analysis is – they worry if they can handle it and how they’ll be judged, and feel like defaulting back to the comfort of pat answers, as represented by some-other-topic-they-don’t-know-as-much-about-yet. I’ve tried to calibrate my response here to be encouraging and collegial, and just far enough out of this student’s reach, yet decodable given what it knows already, to refresh the intrigue of discovery.

And look what this student did – went in one semester from thinking of history as a bunch of dates to memorize and spit back on a test, knowing nothing about Spanish colonial history, to following its curiosity to a weighty question of economic history and putting gems of analysis like “due to creation of credit systems, where they would just use treasure as a place holder which accumulated large amounts of debt” in parentheses. No big deal.

I’m getting more results like this, it seems to me, and as always I’m trying to figure out why what works, works. Part of it, I’m thinking, has to do with my own renewed / intensified relationship to figuring it out. Specifically, I’m sitting working on final grades, which now involves a multitude of technologies and platforms. I’ve got portfolios on Dropbox with drafts, papers, and journals; a Qualtrix data-entry form for the History Department’s evaluation matrix; Evernote windows for email addresses and roundtable grades and data collection from their journals for the teaching / learning complexity project. I’m backchecking citations on the web. I’m working on a laptop, tablet, and smartphone for all of this.

I still remember learning to type on a Selectric. My computer class in high school programmed on punch tape. My own first computer, in grad school, was an Epson XT clone with two 5.25 floppy drives and no hard drive. I think it really helps me be a better teacher that, like the first student with seeing connections and the second with colonial debt systems, I have learning curves in my life that are steep. I am figuring it out.

The usual story about the importance of doing research for teachers is along these lines, but I’m not sure the analogy actually holds. In standard disciplinary research there’s certainly a figuring-it-out element, but that happens around the edges of a whole bunch of embedded expertise. For the students, what we want them to figure out is often almost completely unfamiliar, an ocean in which there may be monsters. Both of the students I’ve quoted here actually have substantial resources of intellectual and scholarly disposition to draw on, as do I when I’m trying to figure out how to get things done with a new app. But the curves have still been very steep for all of us, and I think sharing the excitement and terror and humility of that in some dimension is a very helpful thing.

Engaging students (c/p w/ Dead Voles)

…is not recommended until they’re not your students any more. Haha. So anyway, I might have mentioned that my Dean tapped me along with several colleagues to do a workshop on ‘student engagement’ at this year’s opening faculty meeting. He was interested in me showing off my ’roundtable’ schtick, loosely based on Steve Allen’s old “Meeting of Minds” tv show. But I think of that as more of a gimmick, that only works as engaging pedagogy if it’s embedded in a more comprehensive project of student-centered learning that disposes (at least some of) the students to take it seriously and do justice to their characters. So I couldn’t think of a good way to convey all of that in the 10 minutes I would have had, and my colleagues agreed about the stuff they were doing.

We decided to pool our time, about 50 minutes, and engage the faculty about engaging the students. So we preambled by remarking on how ‘best practices’ of student engagement were likely to vary in important ways for different disciplines; wondered what those might be; and set them the task of doing some quick research, school by school (using their laptops, smartphones, etc.) on student engagement in their fields. We showed rather than told, in other words.

Of course the faculty, themselves used to being talked at by ‘experts’, did not shift immediately into this more ‘engaged’ mode, and had trouble staying on task when they did, mostly wanting to say what they already thought they knew rather than doing new research. But that’s fine and that’s the point – it’s a culture shift and it’s a process; harder in fact with faculty, who are deeply invested in their expertise and a teaching / learning mode that has worked for them, than with students. So thinking of it as a process, but one that I’m thankfully involved in only as a colleague and not an official change agent, I just sent out a couple of links to the fac/staff listserv. I’d be interested in discussing them here (but perhaps the larger discussion will be at Dead Voles).

The first is from Wired, a report on the use of new technologies to engage students’ natural curiosity and enable self-teaching.

The other is from NPR, on physicists’ discovery that most students don’t learn how to work with concepts very well from lecture. (I may have linked this one before. It’s part of a series they did, which is linked at the bottom of this one.) Incidentally, I think of concepts as tools, and that metaphor works pretty well here – most people don’t learn how to use a hammer from being talked at about hammers, either.

So I think it’s likely we won’t get much traction from a discussion about whether these articles are ‘right’; most of us are already on board with the project. But I would enjoy thinking through what they mean, in various ways, and whether they’re something that could, and/or should be generalized, and if so, how. For example, I just remarked to Duncan Law on a g+ thread that the gist of these pieces looks a lot like the emergent self-organization that Marx had in mind as ‘communism’. But they may also be consistent with the Hayek’s spontaneous order. In both cases, a very different model than centralization and hierarchy, something much more like ‘freedom’. (I do realize that depending on the audience, either Marx or Hayek aren’t going to work as selling points….) Anyway, if that’s the model, it would seem contradictory to impose it from the top down, and we have all those nasty experiments to support this intuition. So how to encourage this leap to freedom without mandating it?

“OH, THEY’RE MOVING DADDY’S GRAVE TO BUILD A SEWER …”

[What follows is a guest post from Dyke the Elder, a.k.a. Chuck Dyke, Temple University, who’s been reading the blog and thinking about our conversations here. Links kindly provided by WordPress.]

Big historical doins in the UK. Work crews in a parking lot in Leicester found some old bones. Forensic investigation, including some DNA matching with currently living descendants, convinces them that they’ve found the grave of Richard III, whose bones will now be re-interred in a more regal setting. Well, now. Déjà vu all over again, for the re-interrment of Richard has been carried out in symbolic space any number of times over the centuries.

With time on my hands, and the memory of a terrific read, I couldn’t resist getting Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time for the Kindle. Memory hadn’t misled me. The book is near the top of the list of great classic Brit mystery novels, and remains a great read. It also resonates with thoughts I (actually several of us) have been having about “historical truth.”

We’re introduced to a Scotland Yard detective, lying in bed with a broken leg [close enough], bored and restless. A friend brings him a sheaf of prints with which to while away some time: landscapes, genre scenes, portraits. Among the portraits is one that especially attracts his attention: the subject is evidently late medieval, and well-to-do. Before turning it over to see who it is, the detective reflects a bit about what portraits can tell us: what inferences to character, status, and so on the picture supports. He experiments with nurses and visitors. What does the portrait say to them? What sort of a person was the subject? What was his opposition in life? A mini-consensus develops that he was a nice guy who had known much pain, and might well have been a judge. The portrait is turned over, and the subject turns out to be Richard III: the personification of ruthless tyrannical evil, as Shakespeare and Sir Lawrence have conspired to convince us.

How is the apparent anomaly to be dealt with? What is the truth of the portrait, and what is the truth of Richard. The detective begins with the latter, and cadges a stack of history books. They range from a short illustrated history retrieved from old schooldays through a long standard and well legitimated history of England. The image of the evil tyrant persists among them all, though of course it’s variously nuanced, or not nuanced at all. Central to the image is the wicked uncle who has slain his two innocent young nephews “in the tower.” However, the more serious and nuanced accounts provide material that seems inconsistent with the image of evil. Needless to say, the Scotland Yard detective begins to think of the situation in his accustomed terms. E.g. the death of the young princes is a mystery, and Richard a prime suspect. A police investigation is in order.

We’re obviously at a suitable point to make (at least this) long story short. The investigations of the detective effectively exonerate Richard, and go far to rehabilitate him in an extremely favorable light. Henry Tudor, on the other hand, is re-interred as a shit, as well as the likely culprit. Beyond that, Tey is a very smart lady, and provides a lot of interesting considerations about the responsible reading of historical evidence. Her sense of legitimate vs. illegitimate inference is remarkably reliable. Since this was my second reading, I read the book with an attempted jaundiced eye, looking for flaws in the rehabilitation process. There were only two steps that were a bit fishy, but neither badly damages the rehab project. This isn’t surprising, since, as Tey tells us in a denouement chapter, the case has been re-opened several times, and the verdict has stably remained in Richard’s favor –- on the evidence. Tey says, “A man Buck wrote a vindication in the seventeenth century. And Horace Walpole in the eighteenth. And someone called Markham in the nineteenth.” They pretend to know of no defender in the twentieth century, but, I believe, it was someone named Kendall, who Tey figures, slightly transfigured, as one of the detective’s primary aides. As a matter of fact, I vaguely remember reading the Kendall after having read The Daughter of Time for the first time. So, in a perfectly legitimate sense, “everybody knows,” but the public image of Richard III remains that of evil.

Well, with an attention surplus to deal with, the teacher in me stirred. Why not use The Daughter of Time as a centerpiece in, say, a philosophy of social science course. It really is a little gem on the evaluation of evidence. The approach from the point of view of Scotland Yard might be enough to jumpstart some actual text reading, and a sort of mock trial might do some pedagogical work. So I actually thought some of the details through – long enough to reject the whole idea. Here are some reasons for the rejection, all to be collected in the judgment that the hermeneutic geography is wrong.

My students, given the bizarre exception, have no idea who Richard III was, nor do they care. Except as a disembodied exercise, Richard III simply doesn’t matter. Except as just another instance of the general proposition that all truth matters, the stake in Richard III has to be established, not assumed. So Richard has to be more than a literary artifact, for, if he remains a literary artifact, the situation becomes Pirandellian, and questions of truth default into questions of consistency. To put this in pedagogical place: for the students, Richard III is, and will always remain, just who and what you tell them he is. They’ll have a real stake in his truth only if we supply one.

That caricature of historical indifference is the benchmark, or, better, default starting point for any thoughts on teaching the search for, say, evidence and truth. Defaulting to it is an eternally available alternative that can never be made to go away – just shared out differently. As eternally dysfunctional as it is, philosophical skepticism has eternal life. Religions live off the interest. There isn’t a whole lot of point rehearsing the same old songs once again.

It’s part of the fun of The Daughter of Time that it reminds us of the failure of pragmatism – as a theory of truth in the old rationalist mode. For the image of Richard III as the monster has almost certainly been more useful, for innumerable purposes, some of them wise and noble, than the rehabilitated Richard could ever have been, whatever the truth may be.

Now, there’s really not much point in pursuing the line through yet another slash at rationalism and its evil twin skepticism. That’s a parlor game by now. The serious context, the one not only worth spending time on, but also mandatory for us, is the context we walk into a dozen or more times a week. Hence the essential value of attention surplus. Our classrooms are excruciatingly particular, and the failure of the traditional a priori’s and, for good or ill, the failure of the once-for-all, top down framers and organizers condemns us, whether we like it or not, to building on that particularity. (Fat(uous)ly stated, we can’t pretend to transcend our own history. Romantically stated, our lot is an existential one.)

One of the first consequences is an old familiar one: commonality replaces universality as the ground of intellectual sharing. (1844 was a vintage year for that sort of thought.) On those grounds, the impossibility of using The Daughter of Time as an “historical example” is that it essentially cannot be a part of the very particular commonality of our classrooms. The intellectualization of history dehistoricizes history, and converts it into fiction and fable. Richard III? Why not just rehabilitate the big bad wolf, obviously an ideological construct foisted on us by pig huggers?

This line may seem to be pushing (mindlessly) toward a fundamental anti-intellectualism. It’s not meant to. It’s meant to push toward what I often call the difference between epistemology and learning as two alternative approaches to being intelligent. Epistemology is a major impediment to teaching and learning. It’s our traditionally honored dogmatism as Western intellectuals. In the context of colonialism, and the Arnold/Leavis curriculum that was devised in the service of colonialism, we got away with that dogmatism. We’re not getting away with it these days (as the entries in attention surplus seem, to me, to show). But it sure does make a helluva convenient way to avoid difficult curriculum decisions. So we’ve got to move on to real questions about how to create intelligent commonality: the kind that doesn’t just float off after the final exam.

It seems to me that the work on All Quiet on the Western Front – as frustrating and more or less unsuccessful as it was – nonetheless stands as an excellent first example. It genuinely seeks an existential dialectic (to be fancy): a genuine clash of minds. It recognizes the disruption that has to be caused to happen if (here) the Nazis are to be removed from the realm of Aesopian fable. It wanders close to a point I’d insist on. Something has to be done that threatens to make a difference. You can’t just move the Nazis to another (in this case liberal) mythic space – or, if you do, it has to be the mythic space the students are living in (metaphors we live by) in order to disrupt the comfort of that space. Even in the classroom, learning, but not epistemology, is as much a political process as voting or marching to city hall. To, recapitulate, Richard III could never be the vehicle for the necessary transformations (though, if you were cool) he could be a practice exercise that, in the right context, might prepare the ground for some real pedagogical work (Bourdieu and Passeron).

Interestingly, some very strange beasts can be harnessed up to do that sort of work. Because I’m having fun and have a lot of time to have fun in, at the moment, I’ll spin out a really arcane example. It’s road tested over about a decade by now:

Sometimes when I’m asked why I enjoy teaching at Temple so much, I say “Where else can you find the challenge of trying to teach modern scientific cosmology to Wiccans?” As esoteric as the big bang, dark energy, and the Higgs field may seem, they generate genuine imperatives for truth in an almost perfect way. For example, they stand outside the lock-step rituals that the “debate” about biological evolution has defaulted to. Furthermore, they stand at the ragged edge of the most sophisticated science there is, where scientists squabble at the boarders of doubt. Every new time I teach the course, something has become obsolete in the readings from the last time I taught it (every two years, in my rotation). In addition, they are all, in important ways, outside my scope of authority and expertise. I’m constrained, as students usually are, to “take the book’s word for it.” (Agreed. Lots of things we do are in the same boat; but, in this case it isn’t just a matter of not having done the homework, it’s a matter of not being able to do the homework.) I, as they, submit to authority, and show them how to do it humbly, appreciatively, and responsibly.

On the other side of the coin, I choose to have the science delimit the course. Sure there are cosmologies of all sorts, from all sorts of points of view and from all over the planet. They’re irrelevant. I do have the authority to impose that limit. [Almost always, I offer a way out. If a student is willing to accept C+ as a maximum grade, he or she can do their term paper on, for example, the four corners of the Navajo world, the yin and the yang, or – witches.]

Metaphor, mathematics, and measurement: that’s one way to gloss what the course (and the tradition from Timaeus to Einstein and beyond) is about. Each of the three is a teacher in the project defined here:

“I opened the door and looked into the room. It was empty.” EMPTY? Were you sucked in? That would be empty. ‘Tis but a short step from that to the ancients’ worries about – nothing; and from that to “space,” and then along to the quantum vacuum: the fullest nothing you could ever imagine. (The current main text is Frank Close’s Nothing, in the Oxford Very Short Introduction series. A wonderful book.) “Empty” is a metaphor, in the first instance. The optimist and the pessimist: is the glass half full or half empty? Yes, certainly; and so’s your heart, turkey. You get serious when you have think your way through kinds of emptiness. Metaphysics is getting your metaphorical shit together.

Math and measurement go together. How many Tweets will fit on the head of a pin? Well, the answer is “All of them at the same time.” You don’t believe me? How good is your WIFI connection? What does “tuning” mean? The craziness of electromagnetic fields is a day by day experience. Whatever the cosmos is like, it has to support the quotidian, however bizarre. So if space has to do with there being room or not being room for that, it has to make room for the twitters. (This is actually the present day form of the question Einstein asked himself about Maxwell’s equations: the question that led to special relativity.)

The math in the course begins with the ancients’ math of shape and ratio. Very quickly (depending on who’s taking the class, and what they want to talk about (within reason – what a phrase)), we’re into the bigger and smaller, the scaling up and the scaling down. Do things stay the same as they get bigger or smaller? (Aristotle worried about how big or small a good polis could be.) Does size matter? When do things add up; and when to they organize and elaborate? (The issue of “emergence” is so ubiquitous in the course (and the cosmos) that it unravels into a lot of questions about how and why things outrun mere additivity. Modern cosmology, like modern biology, is ruthlessly unkind to Descartes and Russell.)

The issue is: how much of this can you get how many to understand. My claim is that it’s a lot more than you might have thought. Part of my confidence in that answer goes back to where we started. The question I’m interested in is not how many students can be got to be able to pass this or that exam. Let the sciences worry about that one. My question is how much of it can be gotten connected well enough to be a conscious part of lived reality: that is, be moved out of the realm of just another story. What threads do my students’ lives give me to connect to; and how do I make the connections – in terms of active images and metaphors? How do I make it impossible for the craziness of a world with googles of tweets perched on the head of a pin to move out of the realm of “just another pretty story” into the realm of “evidently, or even obviously, the way things are”? Well, now’s the time for the always disappointing “You gotta be there.” For the same sorts of reasons why you can’t reproduce your classroom on paper, the instruction booklet for producing existential engagement is pathetically inadequate. When you think of it, to be adequate it would have to be such a classroom, cleverly reconstructed in another medium, since its teaching is just the sort of thing it aims to teach. People ask me how I can teach the same thing over and over (sometimes for decades). I don’t. The students are always different (if they’ve had a course with you before, they aren’t the same as before); and so am I.

So, to wrap up these reflections on the attention surplus for the moment, cosmology, of all things, even and especially because of its esoteric craziness even within the scientific landscape, turns out to be an amazingly fertile route to lived reality learning.

Book-burning: Censorship, ideology, and dissent

– is the perfectly good title my Chair Karen invented for my contribution (in April) to the local library’s “Fighting the Fires of Hate” events associated with a traveling exhibit from the Holocaust Museum. I’m to talk, roughly speaking, about Nazi banned / burned books, which is not what we’d call an area of expertise for me. What to do, what to do.

Well, at the moment we’re in the part of the evening semester where our students in the ‘bad writing’ class are leading discussion on genres of bad writing they selected and researched. (Assigning ~50 ideally genre-representative pages for class reading, which has been an adventure.) Last night, the group that picked Nazi banned / burned books (yes, I prompted, but gently) was up. They picked Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) as the focus of discussion, and assigned the first 50 pages. Missing the points of ‘genre’, ‘representation’, and ‘selection’ a little, but it’s a work in progress.

After about five minutes of show-and-tell that was beginning to wind down into mumbling and paper shuffling, Patrick and I sprang into action to encourage a practice and salvage a learning situation. We zeroed in on the scene right at the beginning where the soldiers are getting double rations because about half of them died that day, and started to play the ‘so what?’ game. Why might Hitler et.al. have thought that was bad? “Well, it depicts the realities of war!” What realities? “Lots of guys die and supplies are sometimes scarce!” Yes. So what? Does anyone dispute that? Lots of French guys died too, but they won the war and didn’t produce a famous banned book on the subject. “But the men are miserable!” Yes. So what? “The war sucks and they know it!” Yes. So what? “This scene might cause readers to think critically and question the war.” Yes. So what?

Things were moving along, but the analysis was sticking on the idea that this was a starkly realistic and sensible portrayal of the war, and that was the problem. So we said, let’s take context seriously and accept for a moment that this was banned at a time (right away, 1933) when every adult knew already how tough war was. Millions of people died in the Great War less than 20 years earlier, nearly a million at Verdun alone. Hitler knew it, the Nazis knew it, Remarque knew it and everyone else knew it, many because they lived through it, if nothing else because they lost some relatives. Everyone did. There was absolutely no news in the losses and privations of war. So, what’s the problem? … Anyone?

OK, let’s notice that we agree with Remarque’s soldiers, and his implied perspective. We take for granted that war is factually hell, that lots of casualties are factually a problem, that supply breakdowns are factually a hardship. We sympathize with the soldiers’ bleak stoicism and opportunistic appetites. So instead, let’s imagine Hitler writing that scene, using the same facts. Half the guys die, the other half pig out on the extra supplies. What’s his take on this? How’s he feel about German soldiers whining about food and wolfing down the rations of the honored dead?

I swear that the room echoed with an audible click.

So we went through another round of ‘so whats’ that got us to something like an accurate account of Nazi ideology re: glory, honor, sacrifice, striving, progress, the Fatherland, in the process of which we drew in the next section of the text, in which ignorance, the hectoring of Kantorek the schoolmaster, and the pressure of peers and social expectations account for all those young ‘volunteers’, not a heroic sense of duty and indomitable Aryan will. So clearly Hitler and the Nazis were all about propaganda – all about clouding the minds of the young with high-sounding lies. All that work and we’re back to what everyone knows already about those Nazi scum, that they were ruthless, self-serving con artists and bullies.

Back to context. Before class I’d pulled up on my tablet the University of Arizona’s Banned Books, 1932-1939 page (#4 on the Google search of ‘nazi banned books’ and found, but not used, by our student presenters). When it became clear that the analysis had gotten stuck again I read from “12 Theses Against the Un-German Spirit: A Propaganda Campaign of the German Students’ Association (Twelve Book-burning Slogans), as printed in the Voelkischer Beobachter, April 14, 1933:”

6. We wish to eradicate lies, we want to denounce treason, we want for us students, institutions of discipline and political education, not mindlessness….

8. We demand of the German students the desire and capability for independent knowledge and decisions.

So, we have a hypothesis that the Nazis were busily spreading lies and eradicating mindfulness, independent knowledge and decisionmaking. And we have a passionate Nazi demand to eradicate lies and spread mindfulness, independent knowledge and decisionmaking. Is the hypothesis supported? Should we at least consider the possibility that the Nazis actually believed they were in possession of a truth that any mindful, independent thinker would freely embrace, and that it was their opponents who were the ruthless, self-serving con artists and bullies? Whose books were not just conveniently, but righteously burned?

There was more, but that’s the gist. And thanks to my students I now know, I think, what I’m going to be doing at my library talk.