Welcome to The Spaces in Between, a weekly newsletter on culture, language, and technology written by Stephan Caspar. If you’re new here, then welcome, feel free to subscribe.
I wasn’t going to start every issue with a weather report but the snow arrived in Pittsburgh on Monday night and everywhere is sparkling and the light is magical. Although melting and disappearing fast, there was still time for a snowball fight.
The snowfall provided the icing on a weekend break to celebrate Thanksgiving. Yet another national occasion that requires deep unlearning to challenge the colonial myth that surrounds it. While many might complain that decolonizing thanksgiving, or talking about statues and presidents for that matter is to rewrite history, I’ve been reminded by several historians who say this is what we’re supposed to do.
For many in America, this time of year usually is a chance to meet with family, but soaring coronavirus rates in the US have meant staying home and avoiding gatherings of any kind. Similar advice was given in 1918 when around 50 million people died worldwide from H1N1 influenza, the so-called Spanish Flu. Back then there were anti-mask campaigns and organized resistance against closure and lockdown, but many were stirred by a patriotic duty to abide by the order and follow safety advice. Vaccines soon followed in December with clinics set up around the country, but not in time for a devastating third wave that hit the following year. There’s more in this article in USA Today that will leave you scratching your head about why we are struggling so terribly more than a century later.
This week there’s some reflection around teaching, news of a departure, and a call for papers.
Stephan
Teaching & Learning
One of the shapes that keep popping up in my pedagogy is a spiral, the idea that you keep revolving through concepts and ideas, first in a broad or easily accessible way, then each time in more depth, and with greater complexity. This simple enough concept that owes much to Jerome Bruner’s ideas of spiral curriculum and discovery learning, is really helpful when students need to be making, and there are affinities to design-thinking in education.
I thought it might be useful to sketch out some thoughts and after I drew this picture, I realized that it had more than a passing resemblance to one of Austin Klein’s wonderful sketches.
If students are to learn through doing, making mistakes and building from earlier efforts, then they need just enough to get started. In the case of filmmaking or podcasting, I’m trying to truncate years of learning into a matter of weeks, so we might start by setting a starter-project, and asking the students to produce a short, raw outcome with little instruction or guidance, and then to use this as a starting point to think about process and compare their experiments with more polished examples that they’ll find elsewhere. We (the student and me) get a good sense of the prior learning that they bring to the course, and because there’s so much to cover, we can work to personalize the learning, as we tackle gaps in the learning, hone precise skills and work towards a more considered and complete project outcome.
Here’s a lovely video of Bruner at the age of 99 (he lived until he was 100) speaking about learning. I love his New York directness and the passion and humanity he conveys, even in this short clip.
If you haven’t noticed, I don’t mind too much mess and I’m perfectly comfortable with it in learning. I know that’s not always the case for some students though, who are deeply troubled by the incomplete, disordered and uncertain. I’m interested to try different ways to deliver, but I don’t want to lose the spontaneity and playfulness, of this approach that can produce nice moments of serendipity, self-discovery, and joy.
I think this might be the first of two posts on spiral pedagogy as I consider how front-loading concepts and ideas, then examining them through practical work might offer a different approach (perhaps a more scientific one).
Life Lessons
A couple of years ago I sat in an audience at SXSWedu in Austin, Texas, listening to the Secretary for Education, Betsy DeVos, a major Republican donor with no experience of public education, much less any policy experience; to talk about the future of education. In an oddly stage-managed event, she chaired a panel of experts in a discussion, carefully avoiding any direct questions or the need to give her view, much less share her own experience or understanding.
I’m pleased that there will be a new person in charge who might know and care about education and relieved that it will be relatively easy to undo what DeVos did, in part because she ultimately failed to push through much of her legislation or act in any positive way towards ensuring equality of access to education as she argued for massive cuts in departmental funding and pushed much-needed cash towards to private companies and charter schools.
Most of all she will be remembered for removing rights for LGBTQ+ students, and new rules, such as allowing a representative of students accused of sexual assault to question his accuser in real-time that "…communicated to survivors that they should not expect to be believed," remarked Liz King of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
But let’s end this section on a more optimistic note.
Lost and Found
I got some good feedback about the new Apple Translate app I mentioned last week and sounds like some of you are recommending its use with learners. Please tell me more…
Padlet now lets you create native video files, so you can record straight into the Padlet that you’re working on. It works in just about every version, except it seems Safari on macOS and Microsoft Edge, but otherwise great on a tablet, phone and using the Padlet client on mac or windows. I like the idea of getting students to record their own videos, this might be great for capturing question responses, feedback, and even mock interviews.
I was a huge fan of del.icio.us which was a social bookmarking site that pretty much embodied the concept of folksonomy. Although I stopped using it (along with millions of others) I have needed something like it again and so it’s been a relief to find Pinboard which is similar and is managed by some of the original delicious team.
I have a public pinboard profile, but honestly, you’ve got better things to do than scroll through a long list of papers and articles. At least I no longer have to rummage through my history or try and remember the search terms that took me to a particular site. All the useful stuff is here, labeled.
By the way, Eurocall Conference Call for Papers is out, I hope to be able to submit an article for what will be a hybrid event in Paris, Aug 2021. I’m going out on a limb here and declare that I’ll be attending in person…possibly….who knows?
In time, and as one comes to benefit from experience, one learns that things will turn out neither as well as one hoped nor as badly as one feared.
Jerome Bruner
Enjoyed this Vimeo, a pocket-sized Coenesque drama from Quebec about Maureen and her attempts to escape and start over. (French with English subtitles).
I was about to write BIST which is the old acronym for Burnt in Subtitles, but that probably isn’t used much now that we’re in a digital age. I made a short 16mm film years ago that took me to Amsterdam for my subtitles. My roll of negative sat on a pile next to Pulp Fiction and Broken Arrow, ready to go through the lazer machine. It felt like I’d made it.
Thank you
I really appreciate all your feedback and comments, it is lovely to hear from you.
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