{"id":3282,"date":"2021-03-25T18:55:26","date_gmt":"2021-03-25T22:55:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/?p=3282"},"modified":"2021-03-25T18:55:26","modified_gmt":"2021-03-25T22:55:26","slug":"unabashedly-anthemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/unabashedly-anthemic\/","title":{"rendered":"Unabashedly anthemic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since many roads lead back to The Who for me, I’ve been looking through some of my collection and re-reading things I hadn’t looked at for some time. In the “Director’s Cut” edition of\u00a0Quadrophenia<\/em>, I found this striking observation from Chairman Pete Townshend, and it made me think about parts of my approach to teaching online during pandemic time:<\/p>\n

In 1971, as the chief songwriter for The Who, I faced a new problem: our audience apparently hoped for another rock-opera. No one else had picked up the system, not properly; quite a few people thought it was a rotten system in any case. I was already running with it, and I felt there was more mileage in it. After a lot of scrabbling around with various other ideas, I landed on the dystopian Lifehouse<\/em> that gathered a lot of the futuristic ideas that had bee presented to me when I had been at art college. This failed as a rock-opera collection, but produced Who’s Next<\/em>, an album of separate tracks that with ‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, developed the rock-anthem trick we had stumbled\u00a0 on almost by accident in the finale of Tommy<\/em>. The high energy presentation of songs like this soon made it possible for us to perform with some intimacy to much larger audiences in the open air as a matter of regular occasion from this album onwards.<\/p>\n

I’m always intrigued by the counterintuitive, especially when it seems to describe a hunch or intuition I have had and am puzzled by myself. (Yes, my intuition is often counterintuitive, which you must admit is a genuinely puzzling state of affairs. Or a colossal failure of understanding.) So I’m drawn to that idea that going toward a high energy presentation of a rock anthem helped The Who maintain a sense of intimacy when performing to larger audiences.<\/p>\n

Maybe that’s what I’ve been experimenting with in my larger classes (N>100). Not sermons, not lectures even, but learning-anthems. A way of taking all of us out of ourselves, if only for a while, and thus creating an opening for thinking, re-thinking, and hopefully that sense of nearness and empathy that conveys the feeling of community. If the feeling is there, the thing itself may follow.<\/p>\n

Maybe I am trying to design learning experiences that are\u00a0anthemic<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I do not believe that critical thinking [sic] and anthemic learning experiences must be mutually exclusive. Like Milton, I think “the sober certainty of waking bliss” is both desirable and possible.<\/p>\n

Listening to you, I get the music.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Mike<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since many roads lead back to The Who for me, I’ve been looking through some of my collection and re-reading things I hadn’t looked at for some time. In the “Director’s Cut” edition of\u00a0Quadrophenia, I found this striking observation from … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/01-Tommy-triptych-cover.jpg?fit=900%2C298&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4bHwM-QW","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3282"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3284,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3282\/revisions\/3284"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}