Dec
15

Mashing up the Canon (Part 1)

Over at Profhacker, Ryan Cordell recently described how he uses literary  mashups in his classroom: he asks his students to re-write texts using another author’s style – – e.g. rewriting a few paragraphs of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse using Hemingway’s voice.  (I remember a similar exercise in parody from my high school English class  – – where I rewrote a Bellarmine football game as if Edgar Allan Poe were doing the play-by-play.) The mashup is a version of parody, in its broadest definition, and, as Ryan points out, asking students to crossdress an author’s text can help to make the concept of “style” much more visible.

At its best, this parody exercise takes us deep into a Bakhtinian understanding of voice, identity, and literary style; at its worst, it can repeat 100 years of failed literacy education, based mainly the osmotic principle of language and learning, e.g. imitate the masters and you too will become more masterful!

Still, the mashup has come a long way from its literary roots (a genealogy I tried to point to in a recent post on zombies). And, the profane explosion of cultural creativity associated with “Web 2.0,” encourages us to play with new ways of mashing up even the most canonical of literary texts.  In fact, the mashup may be a seriously powerful tool for deepening our students’ engagement with genres, like poetry, that have become increasingly distant from popular experience.

This is a proposition I’ve been trying to explore for the past couple of semesters.  First, in a general education, American literature course and this semester in my Literature of Labor class.  Most of the students in the general ed course are not English majors, and one of my major goals in the class is to simply draw the students into the pleasures and powers of literature.

Since I’m a Whitman freak, it only makes sense that I want my students to share my undying connection to Whitman’s poetry.  To do that, however, I can’t just describe the beauties of Whitman, nor can I rely on the propagative effects of my enthusiasm, I have to help them to experience the power of Whitman’s poems.

So, naturally, I turned to YouTube.  For the past two semesters, I’ve asked students to choose 15 or so lines from a Whitman poem and read the poem on camera.  Then, based on that performance, I ask students to further “interpret” the poem by integrating their reading into a multimedia performance.  In its first form, the exercise was pretty loose.  My basic instruction was: Get Emersonian with the poem – – do a “creative reading” of Whitman – -by mashing up whatever feels good.

My students produced some amazing mashups.  I include two here:

In the first video, Ryan autotunes Whitman – – and his performance was a reply to  a semester-long debate (conducted largely before and after class) about the contemporary fate of rock and roll.  In the second video, Tony mashes up “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” with a machinima from Halo 3, the popular video game.  Both students obviously had a lot of fun with the assignment.

However, the mashups also taught me a couple of things.  First, mashing up Whitman forced students to slow down and really pay attention to the poem.  Slowing down made the poem more “visible” in more different ways to the students.  Second, as poetry became performance, it developed and extended our sense of the classroom as community.  Thanks to social media, students shared their “texts” and shared their experience of the poems.    Third, the poetry became a medium of creativity.  Instead of parroting my interpretation or imitating my way of reading, students were able to use their voices, performance, and media to remake the poetry and steal it away from me, the teacher.  I think this helped them to “own the poem” (one of my new and favorite pedagogical slogans) – – Whitman moved from being a text on the syllabus to a part of their experience.

Finally, in mashing up the poem, the students were also mashing up their own identities.  This is an aspect of the mashup that few commentators seem to have noted.  Maybe because we’re still so fixated on texts as artifacts, we miss this process: in “re-creating” Whitman’s poetry, my students were also “re-creating” themselves.  Based on their videos, you’d never be able to pick Ryan or Tony out of my class of 50 plus students.  When a literary text becomes the vehicle for exploring new identities – – at a time when many students are already experimenting with who they are, something powerful is going to happen in the classroom.  To put it lightly, our discussions of Whitman, post-YouTube, were richer, livelier, and deeper.

Technology is often pitched to teachers, especially in its LMS/CMS version, as something that saves time and makes things more efficient.  In other words, technology makes things invisible.  Technology helps us to think less about what we’re doing.  But, the YouTube assignment actually forced me to think a lot more – – about Whitman, about how students read, about my goals as a teacher.  The assignment also posed a very practical challenge: how to evaluate my students’ mashups of Whitman and, more generally, how to evaluate new forms of multimedia “writing” in the classroom.

That question needs a new post . . . .

Dec
11

A Manifesto for Slow Learning

Alan Levine over at CogDogBlog used to be a runner. Now, he walks.  He does a great job of describing why he finds walking so much more fulfilling than running; most importantly, walking encourages him to “find the world bigger or more wonderous or more colorful or more vibrant in sound.”

Walking cultivates a different kind of cognitive platform and sensorium:  longer attention span, deeper engagement with the world, expanded perception, maximum consciousness. One of the first great proponents of ambulatory epistemology was Walt Whitman.  “I loafe and invite my soul,” Whitman says right at the start of his epic poem of wandering, “Song of Myself.” “I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.”  Whitman is the poet of democracy, of brother-sisterhood, free verse, etc.  But one of his most revolutionary acts is simply to “loafe.”  All around him whirs the busy commercial world of mid-19th century America, and there stands Whitman – – eyeballing his blade of grass.  This is an emergent politics of refusal, a great existential negation of Whitman’s contemporary society.  His comrade in the revolutionary tactics of refusal is Melville’s Bartleby, whose own assertion of radical loafing – – “I would prefer not too” – – completely freaks out his Wall Street lawyer-boss.

Loafing is an often unacknowledged plank in the anti-capitalist politics of the American Renaissance.  In “Walking“, Thoreau celebrates the act of sauntering.  “Every walk,” he tells his reader, playing on the etymology of “saunter” (fr. “sans” “terre” – – without home),  “Is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of infidels.”  Thoreau’s “infidels” are the Church and the State, institutions that seek to confine us to the “highway” rather than Nature’s “freedom and wildness.”  The walker rambles like a camel – – “the only beast which ruminates when walking.”  He or she resists enclosure, disdains the fences and walls of private property,  and enjoys the commons.  “To enjoy a thing exclusively,” says Thoreau, “is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.”

If schools are the knowledge factories of capitalist consciousness, surely one of the most important, but hidden elements of the curriculum is  teaching students the bourgeois meaning of work-time.  Schedules, lesson units, syllabi, deadlines, tests – – all these things train students to understand work-time as rational, orderly, and above all, as efficient.  Time is something to control; and so, time becomes a medium of control.  Who can forget that primal scene of schooling in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – – where Stephen Dedalus’s daydreaming in class is interrupted by the entrance of Father Dolan and his terrifying pandybat?  “At your work, all of you!” Dolan shouts. “We want no lazy idle loafers here, lazy idle little schemers. At your work, I tell you. Father Dolan will be in to see you every day. Father Dolan will be in tomorrow.”  It will take only about 75 years until Father Dolan meets his match in that superhero of all-American loafing, Jeff Spicoli:

Movie Videos & Movie Scenes at MOVIECLIPS.com

The point is: we need a lot more walking in school. But, walking along the lines of Whitman, Thoreau, and Spicoli. Or, better yet, more Zapatista walking. One of the big slogans from the Zapatista movement is “Preguntando caminamos,” e.g. “Asking we walk.” This motto has been picked up by popular resistance movements across the globe, particularly in the ethics of “horizontalidad” worked out by workers and citizens in the wake of the 2001 Argentinian economic implosion.  “Asking we walk” describes a new kind of politics because it refuses “telling” and “ordering”; the path forward is charted as we go along,  as we observe, reflect, and talk about  the realities unfolding around us.  We walk together and, asking each other, we co-create a sense of direction and purpose.  The rational, teleological time envisioned by the planners of social change dissolves into the radical, democratic, dynamic, and dialogical platform of “our time.”

Forget lesson units, class hours, test preparation, the deadlines imposed by semesters and quarters, the dictates of coverage and orderly curriculum: we need to embrace “slow learning,” a slow learning inspired by Whitman’s loafing and the Zapatista’s “preguntando caminamos.”  Education needs to catch up with slow food, slow travel, and slow thinking.  Slow learning – – walking together, asking – – means a deeper, more authentic engagement with material and texts.   It means a more democratic relationship between teacher and student.  And, it means slowing down and observing student learning as if it were Whitman’s “spear of summer grass.”  Slowing down reveals a whole new world, which requires whole new ways of reorganizing work, time, authority, and purpose.

Far from making education more efficient, I believe technology can help us all – – teachers and students – – become slow learners. That’s a topic for another post. Time now to walk on out of here . . .

Dec
08

Flickr-ing Sandman (Reading comics with visual annotation)

I teach American Studies, which means (amongst other things) that I use a lot of different media in my classroom – – novels, movies, poetry, non-fiction prose, photographs, and graphic novels.  For a long time, I was frustrated with students’ ability and disposition to “read” images.  A lot of students were eager to do careful readings of poems or novels, but this kind of reading seemed pretty alien when it came to understanding images.  Maybe because we are so surrounded by images that we see them as simpler and more natural; or maybe because we mistake the “iconic” status of images for the thing itself.

In any case, in an effort to encourage maximum attention to images, I’ve been slowly working Flickr into my course, more particularly the “add note” feature of Flickr.  This started in a course I taught on the “revolutionary imagination.”  One of our concerns in this class was figuring out how the “masses” were represented in representations of revolution.  I won’t go into detail about the design of the assignment or its seriously, laddered structure.  But, one important stage was annotating “The Sabine Women” by David, a highly allegorical image of revolution and popular power.  Students uploaded the image to Flickr and then started visually commenting on the painting.  Thanks to the social dimensions of Flickr, they were able to read each others’ annotations and  comment on them.  Here’s a sample from the David assignment:

This semester, I’m teaching The Sandman, a very complex example of visual-textual narrative.  The class had some great discussions about the themes of the comic, but we started to stall when it came to really digging into the relationship between text and image.  Time to try some visual annotation.

Again, I’ll skip some of the introductory work.  Eventually, I asked students to annotate two pages from the comic.  I also asked them to think about the “visual language” of comics by supplying them with some brief excerpts from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (on abstraction versus concreteness), some great introductions to the gutter and panel-to-panel transitions, to layout, and to composition.  Armed with this rudimentary lexicon, the students went to town.  Here are a couple of examples:

The students really enjoyed this annotating exercise – – in part, I think, because it allowed them to get their hands on the art of The Sandman and because they “saw” so much more in the art than they had initially thought they could.

Two major reasons I like the flickr’ing assigment are:

1) time.  Technology is often presented as something that speeds up and makes things more efficient.  But, the Flickr annotation uses technology to slow down the reading process and encourage students to linger, to reflect, to hunt, to discover.  This new temporality surrounding the image helps to de-naturalize the image – – helping students to see the many decisions involved in each pen stroke and each color, so helping them to see the image as constructed and art-ful.

2) the black box problem.  For many years, I’d throw a text at students, give them some ideas or ways of reading the text, ask them to engage with the text, and then to represent their engagement (typically through a written representation).   I assumed that the ways of reading I modelled for the students were the ways of reading they would deploy.

And, for years, I was constantly mystified at the huge gap between my expectations and the results tendered by my students.  Some teachers blame the students for this gap: they don’t know how to “read”; they aren’t “prepared” for the difficulties, sophistication, expertise, etc. required by the course; they’re so busy texting, they’ve been rewired to avoid analysis, etc. etc.  In fact, that frustrating gap was the “black box” of learning.  I feed in ideas and texts; students produce knowledge.  But, what happens (or doesn’t happen) in between?

Sam Wineburg, among others, has spent a lot of time trying to figure out what happens in that black box.  He calls these operations, usually veiled from teachers’ understanding, “intermediate processes of cognition.”  For teachers interested in learning, this is where the action is.  But how do we make these processes visible? And, hence, open to reflection, understanding, and change?

The Flickr assignment takes me a little further down the road of understanding student learning because it allows students to “make visible” what happens as they read the image.  The annotations enable student to “think out loud” and so to make learning into something less intuitive and mystical.  (Theorists of “horizontalidad” have a nice phrase for this process, which they’ve borrowed from the Zapatistas: “preguntando caminamos” –  – “asking we walk.” ) That’s a good starting point for thinking about teaching.  Let’s keep walking . . .