teaching: January 2007 Archives

I received many of these photos of daily life in Tehran in an email last fall.

Whatever our political-economic competition, I resist the path to war. Religious difference is an excuse, a justification, mere rationalization cloaked in moral self-righteousness. To alter the apparent inevitability of another war, we - as "a people" - must begin to create new bases for the global economy. It is up to us to shift the PPF from guns to butter.

The Production Possibility Frontier is a graph of the most efficient way an economy can produce goods and provide services. In a recent college classroom, the basic benchline diagram (at the macroecnomic level, such as global and national economies) is plotted between military expenditures ("guns") and domestic expenditures ("butter"). Interestingly, the links I'm finding with a general google search for "production possibility frontier" on the Internet give the example of two domestic products. What a subtle convenience! Let's just pretend that only the domestic matters! This is what drives consumerism - if we spend, the economy will grow. However, this is only half the equation, or - more realistically - less than half. "Wine" and "bread" is the (everyday living domestic) part that is currently dependent on the other, on the "guns" and bombs and armored uniforms and tanks and military expenditures generated ad nauseum when the US goes to war.

There are more roads to peace than there are to war. We must find the will to choose them.

Although January isn’t quite over, the winter break is. The spring semester of interpreting, teaching, and writing begins tomorrow. How have my bones handled the gift of reflection? Evil Kachina suggested the following theme:

I remember my story not as my own, but as a member of a family. Three families, actually, the biological one in which my brother and I basically raised ourselves, a chosen one which I lost, and the encompassing ‘family’ of humanity. The weaving of these three seemingly separate tales shifts from loose to tight, compacted to disbursed, distinct to conflated.

When I was working on my Master’s degree (Social Justice Education) in the mid-90s, a professor challenged me once about how far accessibility and inclusion could go. Would the scope of my own action be reduced each time I met someone with a kind of disability that I had not encountered before? I struggled with the vast expanse of non-disabled privileges that I took so much for granted: should I give them up in solidarity? Must I plan events with strict restrictions on the non-disabled, thus enabling conditions of welcome for people with disabilities?

Focusing on the physical is crucial (we are talking basic needs), but an exclusive focus on the material is limited. As siblings growing up in a ‘wannabe’ upper-middle class household, my brother and I were well tended; as consciously-living (thinking and feeling) beings we both needed more nurture than we received. That absence, those gaps, have re-appeared in strange forms over the four decades of our existence, manifesting most profoundly in our intimate relations and core sense of self. The contemporary philosophy of mutual constitution, of the pervasive and constant interplay of “self” and “environment” (relational and material), of the social/linguistic (see online) co-construction of reality, teaches that there is no linear cause-effect relationship between “who I am” and the context of what, where, when, with whom, under which conditions…there is no ‘story of me’ that makes any sense outside of the places and people populating the experience.

How does one become when the conditions for becoming are not ideal?

My current strategy, developed over years of trial-and-error (and some days it definitely feels like mostly error!), is to keep stretching my perception of the context. I think of it as a matter of adjusting the degree of focus – at what level of awareness, which range of conditions, can I find an environment that supports me being the kind of person I seek to be? Sometimes the lens must be narrow, small, even pinpoint: ”In this stressful moment, what can I say/not say that allows the conversation to continue?” Other times, the lens must be broad and encompassing: ”How much credibility do I allow mass media accounts of politics and everyday life in the Middle East before I travel there?”

The continuum of adjusting focus applies to family life, too. The immediate intimacy of present relationships (actual and felt) constitutes the closest focus: who can I be when interacting with lovers, ex-lovers, children, the extended members of their families and all of our closest friends? A few degrees removed, the biological family is that ‘container’ where I spent the early (some say formative) years of being human. When I can make connections between present behaviors/emotions/reactions/interpretations and patterns from my vaguely dim past, then I believe I gain more capacity to free myself from habits and instincts that no longer serve. I expand the range of choice concerning what it means to be a person, to be a self, to have ‘a story’ that is uniquely my own.

Extending the lens of my awareness to humanity, to the species of homo sapiens, the phrase that leaps to mind today, is 'the human race'. This label strikes me as more meaningful than 'the human species' because all of our large-scale social (corporate, political, educational, religious) institutions are premised upon notions of competition, scarcity, and hierarchy. We have inherited a social world built by our forebears as a race. The global system of interconnected technologies and money flows is running as fast as it can: we (as a species) are in such a hurry to get … somewhere. I recognize this as a social metonymy for my own life. My parents were moving up, seeking to advance their socioeconomic status. The effort and thrill of (apparent) success distracted them from some of the tasks of childrearing. I inherited the need to rush. “Here” was never sufficient; “there” was going to be better. My chosen family suffered my impatience.

It has taken years to interrupt the pell-mell, hellbent race to elsewhere and elsewhen, to find the people and places that call me to an other self, to build the structures, conditions, and skill at shifting focus to the most conducive level for becoming other than who I was originally constrained to be. Now, instead of telling the story of an existence, I can begin to tell a story of life.

Laura hosted our first training on Friday – we’re an eclectic bunch. I wish I could snoop on everyone’s classes, great topics. :-) The most humorous moment was when I was asked, “Who is a Dark Ally?” “Someone who is friends with a person who wants electric sparks to fly out of computer keyboards to keep students in line.” A colleague's (teasing) comment brought to mind the image of the Y2K bug. (Not only an interesting bunch of characters, but a range of pedagogies as well!) :-)

Blackboard is much fancier than it used to be. (I didn’t ask, why does the University say we’re using WebCT but the software itself says Blackboard?) I made a start at designing (“building”) my course and learning about the range of options. I’m excited at the potential of being able to return to what students’ have written in order to examine our own (online) processes of interpersonal communication. Hopefully, by learning to recognize ourselves, students will develop the skills to recognize differences and then – instead of writing the differences off as “misunderstanding” – be able to strategize about repairs, accommodations, and other strategies for communicating, interpersonally, across a range of differences: cultural, socioeconomic class, gender/sexual orientation, etc.

In addition to personalized, technical support, the text, recommended by Associate Dean Dr. Robert Feldman, is useful. Much of it is elementary (crucial for first-timers!). For me, it is a refresher as well as a resource. I’ve gleaned some new ideas from the authors (Susan Ko and Steve Rossen), as well as a ton of intriguing links.

For instance, it’s about time I started playing with constructing my own webpages, perhaps through Composer. The ideas for audio might be dated (Labtec) – podcasting isn’t mentioned. I think Todd’s recommendation of Gcast beats the options in the text. There are streaming options (I already have QuickTime, but not Producer and RealSlideShow), I need to confirm for myself that these are what one needs to use to generate the video that one might upload to, for instance, youtube. I want to check out the animation tools also – another skill that would enhance the video presentations I do on sign language interpreting (so visual!) Not to mention online virtual labs and simulations. hehehe

I've been thinking about assigning this zine to the students in Section 71, starting soon at a university near you.

Written by Christy C. Road, it is much more gritty than the selections in the Text-Wrestler.

One of the students in last fall's class loaned his copy to me. Thanks Dave.

Selected quotes:

"...we could talk about other things. We could talk about our formative heroes selling out, and about cast aside neighborhoods. We could talk about dismay and how its sometimes followed by deliverance" (Nine).

"Death was a difficult concept. I couldn't really talk about it, I could only think twice as hard.......I grew to see my friends and I as young and powerful, but not quite invincible. For once [when I found out Desiree had died], I didn't need invincibility. I realized that as real as our hurt is - fearlessness can be just as real. Invincibility was an attribute we entertained; as radicals, as manic-depressives, as optimists, as romantics, and as young people with whirlwind dispositions and fucked up experiences. But a boundary exists between what's true liveliness and what's unreal. What's tactical thrill and what's naive idealism. I never saw myself teasing or pressing a fingertip towards the edge of that boundary; not then, not ever. 'I'll be an idealist or a pessimist', I thought. Until one day, Desiree taught me about the difference between truly living and just staying alive. While you're truly living, you face danger's coils with spirit. You create emotional weapons and valiant tact. When you're just alive, you choose an unreal outlet to avoid distraction, whether the distraction is too positive or too negative. You wallow in mediocrity and evoke simplicity. Denial makes sense to you" (Fifteen).

This sentiment haunts The Jacket, a film about consciousness. Although no plausible physical mechanism is provided for time travel, we witness the lead character adapt proactively to the most improbable scenario: discovering himself in a future timespace in which he has already died. Instead of engaging a futile struggle to avoid what has been foreordained, Jack uses the forays into the future to identify, strategize, and act to change elements in his present that influence the unfolding of time for others. The physical fact of his own death cannot be undetermined, but the trajectories of others’ lives might be shifted just enough to lead to (at least potentially) more satisfactory, less painful unfoldings.

“I know the difference between reality and delusion,” Jack asserts. “I’m not delusional, the real events that have happened to me are crazy.” ("Quote" based on memory.)

The craziness of real events is a theme in the other film I saw last week, Children of Men. Although it seems too far-fetched to be believed that all women might become infertile more-or-less simultaneously, that “reality” serves as the backdrop for the dissolution of society in the face of events too dramatic (apparently) to be managed on the human scale. While viewing the movie, which depicts an escalation of immigrant-baiting and an intensifying police state in England, I kept thinking about institutional and interactional fallout from global warming. Given the existing gaps among socioeconomic classes – globally (between countries and regions) as well as internal to national populations – the spread of anomie seems quite likely. Such chaos can conceivably be countered by cumulative acts of individual and collective consciousness such as that demonstrated by Jack as he moves between wearing and not wearing the jacket, back-and-forth in timespace, discovering a way to maintain the continuity of his be-ing.

The combined image of possibility presented by juxtaposing the two movies reminds me of Shemaya, who recently gave me her take on global warming. “It’s dramatic change,” she said, “just like disability. You’re going along, having your life, and suddenly things change drastically.” Dramatic change requires adaptation and issues of survival. I agree with the parallel of the microsocial experience of disability with the macrosocial event of weather-disrupted institutional systems; the distinction of scale seems relevant. The challenges that confront the newly disabled to retain, maintain, and reconstruct a social world fit to live in are magnified by the scale of cooperation required to shift major global societal flows.

Time (change) vs Information (fixed meaningfulness)

I have been witnessing a fascinating discussion in the course on Cultural Codes in Communication which is helping me identify tensions between the transmission and ritual views of communication in interpersonal, communicative action (an element of group dynamics). The events in this class unfolded with the routine assignment of a solid piece of ethnographic research demonstrating one particular way of “culture talking about itself” (Cultural Communication and Intercultural Contact 1990 p. 1). (Find review via JSTOR.) The article is about the problem of recognition - how it is that persons are recognized as being of ‘this identity’ or belonging to ‘that group’ ("On Being a Recognizable Indian Among Indians"). Somehow, some students in the course understood that the authors were positioning themselves as authorities in determining, applying, and bestowing “recognition” of membership. If I had been teaching, I would have been tempted to return to a more careful reading of the text to show this is not the case, but to do so would have been to perpetuate a debate of “my” meaning versus “your” meaning (a style in the form of the transmission model) and done nothing to educate the class about the crucial differences between the transmission model and ritual model.

So, instead of returning to the article and finding the quotes that would counter accusations against the credibility of the authors, such as (I can’t resist!):

“Pratt, who collected most of the data, is an actively participating member of the Osage tribe. In becoming a participant observer of matters that he was already participating in, he did little to alter his usual activity, other than taking notes and becoming somewhat more focused in his attention…his questions were questions that he might well have asked as part of his ordinary pursuits” (47).

What are the matters that Pratt was already participating in? “On frequent occasions, the issues of recognition become a matter of discussion and ‘folk analysis.’ That is, Indians discuss the obvious Indianness, or lack of it, of a candidate Indian” (47).

The teacher, instead, invited a guest speaker to criticize the text and then facilitated a discussion among the students themselves, establishing the roles, identities, and practices necessary for an actual dialogue to take place in the classroom. Here, I’m talking about both the change-over-time occurring in any group as people become familiar with each other and the topic/task at hand, and also about the way the group learns to handle conflict and disagreement. Because difference was invited in, welcomed, and respected, a back-and-forth debate within narrow lines was avoided; instead, a broad-ranging investigation of the problem of recognition was actively engaged. [See here for a Hegelian lens, and here for a work by Paul Ricoeur.] The students are handling significant questions with depth and mutual regard.

I am gleaning some hints for my own research framing and problem-posing. I will gather as much “naturally-occurring speech” as I can, but most of my data will be interview-based. I need to learn to “hear” the transmission and ritual views in operation. I had the flash as I began to write this entry that there is a relationship (a metonymy?) between talk conducted within the epistemology of a transmission view of communication and dialectics, and talk conducted within the epistemology of a ritual view of communication and dialogics. It will take my lifetime to investigate potential ways that the transmission view shapes communication-in-the-present differently than the ritual view, and how tensions between these two views (when they are both present) play out in the process of negotiating meaning. They may contest or complement each other . . .