What I saw on Monday

Roaming the vicinity of Virginia Commonwealth University, I found a spot just across from Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Church where I could get a few action shots:

united states whoa tight

New Zealand racer closeup

france 1 close

australia 2 close

USA. New Zealand. France. Australia. It’s fascinating to me to watch the time trials, watch the bicycles and their riders in their caravans: motorcycle, bike, car following. Like the transit of a planet, the procession has a period, a rhythm, a time. Yet the photos reveal globe-spanning difference and subtle changes in expression. Joy, concentration, effort.

Later on, I was delighted to find students from the Anthropology of the Crowd course (part of the Great VCU Bike Race Book project) sitting in the library and debriefing each other on their day. They were excited by the experience of learning while participating in an event within a course that required them to make a kind of festive contact with strangers from around the world. That’s an interesting set of circles, both intersecting and concentric. The world in Richmond, themselves in Richmond, citizens whose accents enacted journeys from Broad Street sidewalks to lands far away.

The students were joyful.

Great VCU Bike Race Book debrief 1

Is this not study? Is this not study abroad?

Great VCU Bike Race Book debrief 2

A professor in Massachusetts

Thoreau and WaldenI went to the woods to see the woods Thoreau went to, hoping to feel more of the why that he felt. Thoreau didn’t erect that sign, of course. Someone else did, later. Did they betray him or his work by doing so? Did Thoreau even write those words without irony? Was / is Walden a cruel hoax, an aspiration, a bit of self-indulgence, an inspiration, a record of life-long learning, a mass of undecidability (and then how would we know?).

What are the essential facts of life that Thoreau assumes can be so confidently identified and proclaimed?

What does life (if that’s the “it”) have to teach? What does it matter what life teaches if death is inevitable? Why so many negatives in that last sentence, three in total? (How would we grade such a sentence?) How can Thoreau be so sure of his motives? “I went to the woods because”: how can we accept any such direct, simple statement of motives as anything but glaring self-deception or, worse, obfuscation, sleight-of-mind? Is it a trick? (The antecedent for “it” may be unclear, I admit it.)

I remember making many kinds of meanings as I stood behind the camera and took this picture. I imagine I would like to share the “I” who was there to take the picture, but that person is not pictured.

With all the complexities and uncertainties and critical-thinking born-and-bound modes I can and do bring to bear upon the words on this sign, in this setting, in the larger context of an August afternoon near a public pond just last year, many years after I have read Walden, I do believe, anyway, that I can learn from Thoreau, and not just about Thoreau. I sense his living hand, then warm and capable, stretching toward mine. Though I cannot map or fully articulate what that meeting is or will be, I do believe he is as sincere as one can hope, and that I can trust him enough to meet him, and trust both of us to do our utmost not to betray our meetings and the hopes those meetings might yet revive.

 

 

Curriculum Cooking

I’m at the end of day two of VCU’s first annual University Seminar on General Education. There’s more to say than I can possibly articulate in this small space of time, but I do want to mark this phase of the experience with a metaphor. Metaphors are how I mark my experience. (I was going to qualify that sentence with various hedging “arguably” and “perhaps” locutions, but thought better of it.)

Thanks to a wonderful suggestion by Suzie Fairman, my division’s Coordinator of Operations, we closed day one of the seminar by adjourning to a kitchen-school and cooking together. Tapas! Team. Nourishment. Fellowship. Direct instruction (recipes, kitchen rules and etiquette) along with informal learning and a good deal of improvisation. Not a bad metaphor for the way we’re trying to imagine (and re-imagine, and design) a general education curriculum (or environment) cooking with connection.

cooking3jeffsouth

Credit: Jeff South

cooking1

Credit: Jeff South

Now for a little more weight on the metaphor: see how this context problematizes the often pernicious dichotomies between “sage on the stage” and “guide at the side,” or between “group work” and “individual reflection.” And I freely confess, and loudly celebrate, that it was hard to quarrel with the very tasty results.

Below, more cooking, in a setting that could benefit from the liberal application of that metaphor:

whiteboard1

 

whiteboard2

 

Here I leave the further elaboration as an exercise for the reader(s).

Tomorrow, our midpoint. What will be the feast we prepare together?

 

The 30,000 Foot Foundation

–It’s a bag of gold.

What would I do with a bag of gold?

What would you like to do with a bag of gold?

I don’t have time for your philosophical questions.

The aim, therefore, of the philosophy of education must be to get at the meanings, the assumptions, the commitments which are implicit, but too often unacknowledged, within the educational practices already engaged in. Such an ‘uncovering of meaning,’ critically engaged in, inevitably reveals beliefs which are not sustainable or which require refining. They put the practitioners in touch with intellectual and moral traditions which give greater depth to what they are doing and which provide the basis of professional commitment, often against Government or others who wish to import a more impoverished language of educational purposes.
–Richard Pring, Philosophy of Educational Research, 3rd ed. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015)

Time for a word-association game. Like Kafka and his companions as they read his writings together, we can laugh until we cry.

Takeaway
Measure
Target
Outcome
Metric
Dashboard
Timeline
Action Item
Practical (pedant alert: not parallel!)
Pragmatic
Operational (and operationalize)

Not one of these words is necessarily a bad thing (ok, maybe the concept of a “takeaway” is a bad thing and always already reductive). Yet how quickly these words enlarge to fill our entire field of view. How loud and near they become, so much so that anything outside their lexicon comes to sound like a lonely bell tolling from an ivory tower.

But send not to learn for whom the bell tolls! Here is Pring again:

    Similarly with educational research. Here, as elsewhere, there is the constant danger of the ‘bewitchment of the intelligence by the use of language.’ It is easy to stipulate a straightforward statement of aims, broken down with a finite range of measurable objectives or targets. It is relatively easy then to identify the means which, empirically, can be shown to attain these targets. It would seem to be but a matter of administrative efficiency to ensure, through various ‘performance related awards’ or through relevant funding ‘drivers’ and ‘levers,’ that a compliant teaching force will adopt the right means to attain the right ends.
But the more philosophically minded have doubts.

Indeed. To take up yet another metaphor: trains are good things, and if we are to rely on them, we do well to run our trains on time. But we must not be too narrowly practical. Not too “grounded.” Without the 30,000 foot view as our foundation, we may find we have operationalized our timely trains thus:

Train running in circles

Image: http://www.sevenoaksart.co.uk/trains.htm

Credential or Certificate

I continue to think about what we mean by a “degree.” Or rather, I think about what a degree might or should mean, and what we in higher ed increasingly act as if it means, and how that disjunction (if it is one, which I think it is) plays out across our practices, our assumptions, our mission statements, and our civic life. (I’m sure I’ve left out several crucial areas there.)

My thoughts are spurred by a conversation I had several days ago with a colleague who wanted to know what kind of certificate we might offer as an incentive for open participants to complete a cMOOC. I started thinking about the difference between a certificate and a credential. I talked about credentials many years ago in a presentation I podcast here. At the time, though, I simply urged we recall the root meaning of credential, a word that derives from credence, the mark of believability and the grounds for trust we stipulate as a result of some experience or, perhaps, a formation of character we have collectively witnessed.

I didn’t then have the contrast, though, that would drive the point home. I think now the contrast is between “credential,” a condition of being, and “certificate,” something that is not of a person so much as about some specific competency the person has demonstrated. I grant that I am skeptical of any education that focuses narrowly on “competency,” as if skills could be divorced from contexts, or ideas, or personhood. I grant that my skepticism may lead me to exaggerate the distinction I’m trying to make. Yet the distinction may prove useful in articulating how two views might diverge, an what the consequences might be.

Incorrigible and largely unrepentant English professor that I am, I went on an etymology hunt. R. W. Emerson observed that language is fossil poetry, so it was time for some paleontology. I usually go to the Oxford English Dictionary for my etymologies, for there I will also find a useful set of historical definitions that help chart how early usage changes over time. Tonight, though, I had only my iPad with me at dinner. (I try to travel lighter at conferences when possible–I’m writing this post from the annual meeting of the AAC&U.) I have long known how to use Google to define a word: simply type in the search box “define x” (without quotation marks and with a word where the x goes, of course), and away you go. On a lark, and because Google is always introducing cool new things on the sly (aside from tracking its users, that is), I typed “etymology credential” — and here’s what came up!

image

Ah. The word was first an adjective, and only later became a noun. First a descriptor, then the thing it described. Alas, the thing described, a credential document, seems to have skipped the possible middle sense of a quality or virtue. Instead, a credential, a trustworthiness or recommendation, is typically reduced to that piece of paper we call a diploma–in other words, a certificate.

image

As “credential” moves toward “certficate,” “recommendation” becomes “document,” indeed an “official document” attesting to facts, records, achievements, ownership. I’m not arguing that facts, records, achielvement, and ownership are unimportant. Not at all. They’re vital. But taken outside the context of trust, of personhood, of recommendation, credentials edge toward a kind of “guarantee,” or a license. Something transformative becomes  instead flat and transactional. Get a certificate, get a raise, get a job. Yes, and those are important, But what of the person?

I continue to mull these things over. A small shift in meaning may lead to a large and potentially regrettable shift in civic and cultural practice. I am especially struck by this possibility in the aftermath of the challenging and fascinating opening forum tonight at the AAC&U meeting.

And I think of the words we say at our higher education commencement ceremonies when it comes time to award to–or is it confer upon?–our students their degrees: we deans present our degree candidates to the President, and say that we are doing so upon the “recommendation of the faculty.” In that moment, deep within that phrase and yet still visible if one knows to look, we may still find what is most valuable about a truly credential education.

Loving the Engineers

Note: the title suggested itself when a melody from a certain song by the Roches popped into my head. That’s exactly the kind of thing that engineers might find puzzling or irrelevant, at least within an academic context, but it may tickle the funny bone of anyone who knows the Roches song I’m talking about.

A couple of weeks ago, Tom Woodward and I had the privilege and pleasure of presenting the new Academic Learning Transformation Laboratory, ALT Lab, to the VCU School of Engineering at their undergraduate studies retreat. We were on a high platform, and our good friends and colleagues from Engineering were arrayed below us at circular tables, waiting respectfully for the cookies that would follow our talk. (The cookies were on the schedule already; we didn’t bring them, though in retrospect we should have offered.)

We came to the task with a little trepidation. As one of my Virginia Tech colleagues once said, “Gardner, you have to understand: these folks really are rocket scientists.” Just what a Miltonist wants to hear, though perhaps Miltonists are the engineers of those who study literature (I did hear of a senior Miltonist shouting out the correct date when a grad student got it wrong at a conference, so obviously we don’t make it all up as we go along). My VT colleague did have a point, however: engineers are smart, math-savvy, and makers of high precision and (sometimes) no small degree of monetizability. Engineers have to get the answers as right as possible, lest the bridge fall down or the pacemaker short out. Precision is an ethical imperative of the discipline. Not much talk about epistemology within engineering circles. A realist epistemology underpins the discipline’s work. So here we were, a history major (Tom) and an English major (me), talking about concepts and pedagogy and doing our best to demonstrate some core questions about understanding and some pretty nifty examples of new ways to represent and do math. And of course I led with the patron saint of ALT Lab, an electrical engineer (with patents!) named Doug Engelbart, and I shared with them Engelbart’s abiding vision of human capability, as well as the conceptual framework that supported and represented that vision.

I also worked in two film clips from The Right Stuff. I was very excited to do so, as you can imagine.

Time flew by, we fielded some questions about learning and digital technologies, and then we packed up our sample cases, so to speak, and left the platform. I found, as always, that my trepidation had turned to excitement. Don’t let this get around, but engineers are some of the coolest folks on the planet, even though some of them pronounce “blogging” as if it rhymes with [redacted]. Not to worry: I’ve known a couple of champion engineer-bloggers in my day. I know it’s possible.

My one regret is that there wasn’t enough time to get to the last three slides in our deck. These were slides that I thought might stimulate some interesting conversation, if not controversy. They also represented a little conceptual framework I was eager to try out, to hear what they might say in response.

Here’s the first slide:

ALT Lab for Engineering Retreat-linearThe idea here was to identify four stages of engineering process. No doubt Montessori or Papert covered a similar idea somewhere. Nevertheless, I wanted to try out the idea that both unstructured and ultra-focused stages informed the particular kind of making that characterizes engineering. As I put the slide together, I realized the stages probably informed many other disciplines as well–perhaps all of them.

Play is pretty obvious. Both Huizinga and Bateson have written eloquently about the way play pervades culture, as well as about the way in which play is liberatory in terms of thinking. Some kinds of play involve very elaborate if-this-then-that modes of thinking, all counterfactual, and all on the edge of a dreamworld where everything can turn to metaphor. Here new ideas first emerge. I thought the idea of “play” might be challenging within an engineering context, so I wanted to see what they’d say.

Tinkering is playing with what emerges from play. Tinkering is a more focused and experimental version of play. I’m particularly drawn to the idea of “stochastic tinkering” much loved by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. And here I thought I’d have a slam dunk with my colleagues, since many of the engineers I’ve talked to are quite comfortable with the idea of tinkering. Indeed, many of them became engineers precisely because they love to tinker. Our station engineer at WFDD-FM was nicknamed “Tink,” and it was always a treat to visit him in his office and see all the pieces and parts carefully hanging on the wall or gathered into small plastic drawers in apparently endless organizers.

Practice comes in from music, for me, but stands for the deliberate repetition of any task until one can do it without thinking. Many learning theorists (and others) call this quality “automaticity,” and while human beings are not automatons (at least, not yet), it is still very useful to be able to perform precise motions repeatedly, and to focus on getting it right, whatever “it” is.

Make is as obvious as play, though I figured it would be the most obviously resonant and relevant element for this audience.

Then the next two slides were to explore more complex and, I believe, more accurate representations of the linear process, which even in its more radical moments (“play”) still resembles a standard design model, what project managers would now call a “waterfall” model.

Iterating upward in complexity, I had this slide for us to consider:

ALT Lab for Engineering Retreat-circleNow the line has become a circle, with the implied argument that the cycle cannot be considered complete when the make occurs. Whether one calls this iterative development, rapid prototyping, or the like, the idea is that “make” is more or less perpetual beta. I don’t think we can say that a bridge or a jet engine is itself in perpetual beta, in terms of the engineering that keeps the bridge intact and the jet aloft, but of course we can always iterate toward better bridges, better engines. I am especially interested in the notion that one should play as the next step of iterative development, not simply refine or troubleshoot what’s been made. This is a challenging notion and I could be wrong, but it seems to me that one danger of a thoughtless. automatic model of iterative development is that one can be confined within confirmation biases, iterating away on the polishing of the thing that cannot be polished without revisiting the essential question of “what are we assuming?” (In the article I linked to above, the dangers of too much automaticity are illustrated beautifully by the ham-in-pan story.) I should also say that I am continually saddened by how much “educational technology” is pretty much ham-in-pan thinking. But I digress.

Finally, the most complex of the slides I’d prepared:

ALT Lab for Engineering Retreat-networkThe implicit argument here has to do with resemblances and analogies. How are play and practice related–indeed, how might they be versions of each other? Similarly, in what way do making and tinkering represent similar activities?

I’ll leave those questions as exercises for the reader.

And yes, I confess: still loving the engineers.

The Sweet Spots

I have been thinking very hard lately about the nature and value of focused learning, and especially the kinds of focused learning experiences we might explore and craft within school. I greatly admire the DALMOOC George Siemens and his research group at UT-Arlington crafted last fall, but I also worry a little about the binary structure. As a practical matter, the dichotomy makes a great deal of sense. Those of us who are trying to work on modes of openly networked learning continually struggle with the question of how to define, recognize, and reward multiple modes of engagement–or to speak even more precisely, multiple ranges of commitment. Yet I wonder if one can truly read a book, hear a symphony, or watch a movie without being all in. I wonder if being led and being leaders are necessarily always mutually exclusive. That’s not to say that what Tom Woodward calls the “energy inputs” of open participants who come and go during a course of study are of no benefit to the class. Quite the contrary. But I do worry. Are formal structures of  what may amount to lesser commitment really a way forward? The opposite extreme, of course, is a formal structure of pedantic insistence–i.e., much or most of what constitutes school-based learning– that can bleach away all the energy of self-directed learning. But these are sad realities of misguided practice, not necessities. I just don’t think that “instructor-led” or “learner-centered” set up the deeper conceptual framework very well. And if I never again hear the grinding binary of “guide at the side / sage on the stage,”  I will weep tears of joy. Even Ivan Illich, the great prophet of deschooling, recognized the role and importance of the genuine pedagogue.

For me the positive vectors are commitment, openness; a willingness to dwell in conjectures and dilemmas and to insist on precision (or the nearest aspirational approximation) when precise information and precise execution are needed to keep the spacecraft from disintegrating. I must also testify that experts lead in many different ways, and many of those different ways are not only important and eminently cherishable but have in fact changed my life. When I watch The Godfather, or read A. S. Byatt, or talk with a gifted and humane practitioner of the healing arts and sciences, I give myself over to the experts, not uncritically, but with commitment and a desire to open myself toward those talents, so long as they are not exercised with cruelty or in mere self-interest.

I too keep looking for the sweet spots.

Oddly, that search has also characterized much of my scholarly work as a Miltonist. How could it not, when one of Milton’s choicest lines is “the sober certainty of waking bliss”?

Here’s an anthology of sweet-spot readings, placed together with minimal commentary: bread crumbs along my wandering way.


 

glenn miller direct disc[Jimmy Henderson] has been compared to Miller as a strict disciplinarian. Certainly he is an excellent leader. Jimmy sees the band as self-disciplined out of pride in themselves as artists and pride in being associated with the Glenn Miller Orchestra. “Discipline we do have,” he affirms, “but regimentation we do not. There is an enormous difference. Regimentation has no place in music.”

Patricia Willard, from her liner notes to  The Direct Disc Sound of The Glenn Miller Orchestra, directed by Jimmy Henderson (The Great American Gramophone Company, 1977. GADD-1020).


giant hairball tocOrbiting is responsible creativity: vigorously exploring and operating beyond the Hairball of the corporate mind set, beyond accepted models, patterns, or standards” — all the while remaining connected to the spirit of the corporate mission.

To find Orbit around a corporate Hairball is to find a place of balance where you benefit. from the physical, intellectual and philosophical resources of the organization without becoming entombed it eh bureaucracy of the institution.

If you are interested (and it is not for everyone), you can achieve Orbit by finding the personal courage to be genuine and to take the best course of action to get the job done rather than following the pallid path of corporate appropriateness.

To be of optimum value to the corporate endeavor, you must invest enough individuality to counteract the pull of Corporate Gravity, but not so much that you escape that pull altogether. Just enough to stay out of the Hairball.

Through this measured assertion of your own uniqueness, it is possible to establish a dynamic relationship with the Hairball–to Orbit around the institutional mass. If you do this, you make an asset of the gravity in that it becomes a force that keeps you from flying out into the overwhelming nothingness of deep space.

But if you allow that same gravity to suck you into the bureaucratic Hairball, you will find yourself in a different kind of nothingness. The nothingness of a normalcy made stagnant by a compulsion to cling to past successes. The nothingness of the Hairball.

Gordon Mackenzie, Orbiting The Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace (Viking, 1996), p. 33. H/t @marianafunes. NB: I question that “it is not for everyone.” I believe Mackenzie is delivering a strong caution there, not a statement about eligibility or desirability. Or he may simply be trying to forestall objections.


By virtue of a privilege which he shared with the greatest creative artists, the composer [Maurice Ravel] never lost, in his obstinate determination to acquire technical mastery, that fresh sensibility which is the privilege of childhood and is normally lost with advancing years.

Alexis Roland-Manuel, quoted in Richard Freed’s liner notes to the original 1975 Vox Quad recording of Daphnis et Chloe (Ballet Suites Nos. 1&2) and Ma Mere l’Oye, as reproduced in the Mobile Fidelity SACD reissue of that recording in 2005. Ravel is one of my favorite composers, and I cannot imagine a sweeter spot than at the intersection of an “obstinate determination to acquire technical mastery” and “that fresh sensibility which is the privilege of childhood….” How to keep that intersection always in view and always yielding energy? Great teachers have a feel for those tasks.


 

And yes, such commitments are difficult to manage, especially when they take vastly different forms, experiences, and methodologies. Ironically, an obsession with standardization built out of superficial outputs, outcomes, and analytics will appear to ease the learner’s path, only to rob the learner of the very many-mindedness that leads to the deepest, most transferable, most enduring learning of all.

The changing values of the 1960s influenced the CMU [Carnegie Mellon University] drama department’s instructional program. A few faculty members explored innovative techniques, while others adhered to the acting methods they had learned, or passed along specialized skills like mime, dance, and diction. The diversity of their approaches was both helpful and challenging for the undergraduates. Leon Katz remembers, “There was no uniform attitude to the faculty. We had five acting teachers. All of them were tremendously good and they loathed what one another was doing. Each one had a totally different conceptual training. The students were confused. They would go to [department chairman] Earle Gister and say, “What are we supposed to believe? We’re totally confused!” He said, “Good, that’s your training. You sort it out and find the thing that’s right for you.”

Carol De Giere, The Godspell Experience: Inside a Transformative Musical (Bethel, CT: Scene 1 Publishing, 2014, pp. 21-22)