Hunter wonders if the concept of accreditation has come to stand-in for a concept of thinking…
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The report has been subdivided into sections that explicitly refer to guiding questions from the Unit handbook.
The report has been crafted to explicitly refer to the Unit learning outcomes of the handbook for this unit.
Blog 1:
https://hunterbrueggemannpgert.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2022/05/23/blog-post-1-disability/
Blog 2:
Blog 3:
(Newly)
Dr Hunter Brueggemann
I loved the readings and the podcast for this session.
The prompts took a moment for me to relate to; as I think that a critical stance to technology is at the core of my course. Yet, I use this example of me using “the digital” in a non-banking way (cf. Freire’s banking model on education).
In my smaller course, my students are tasked with procuring their own reading material for class according to parameters I set out. (Peer reviewed, in HCI, on the topic of…..).
The students come to class having read different articles and (obviously) with different backgrounds and perspectives. Through having read different texts, the students are empowered in their knowledge that they (and only they) are able to contribute a specific and new piece of knowledge to the class.
The students need to find themselves in a position of confidence and a space of trust in themselves to do that.
I achieve this by beginning the course with a class on Haraway and the Cyborg manifesto. This text is explicitly teaching the reader to be assertive and have agency with their teaching and understanding and their voice.
I think this is a type of using “the digital” as a resource in teaching that undermines the concept of “baking the student” (the student as empty vessel). It forces the student to be an agent, rater than an empty canvas.
Blog post 2: Faith
I find this assignment hard to deal with. I am certifiably mad, and thus have tacit experiences with academic ableism; yet the format and layout of the assignment do not enable me from putting my background forward in a manner that is conducive to meeting the assessment criteria.
Precluded from the opportunity to safely bring my past experiences and knowledge forward, I am instead following a firmly structured framework.
I was the last speaker in a long chain of presenters.
I was tired (just before me was a presentation that I expected to relate to excellently, yet instead my brain was completely unable to process any information).
Hence, despite limited time and a hard time-frame (I was the last speaker) – I chose to prompt the attendees to start with a short movement exercise. They were invited to open their window, and maybe shake their limbs for a moment.
“Only 20 minutes to go, we can do this!”.
One participant even did a small yoga exercise on screen, which impressed me deeply. Their comfort and enjoyment of acknowledging their body was what I had anticipated my audience would be comfortable with.
For this reason my prompt was to “open their windows” which entails a movement aspect that, I assumed, everybody would be comfortable with.
My presentation was an abbreviated version of the OB1 class.
My slides were ready, and I used a brief video-game extract to introduce the key idea “object oriented ontologies” to my colleagues.
The video was subtitled (as are all my class videos) and it was a nice opener (I was told later).
All slides followed UAL guidelines and my colleagues complemented me on these. (Quote: The slides could not be faulted.)
I included a preamble which I called “housekeeping”.
Housekeeping here refers to good practices of being a “considered host” when giving a class. It is my responsibility that my students (or “guests”) feel safe and comfortable when they are in my class. I want to insure safe and honest learning environments.
I declared that I will (on slide 19) make mention of a nuclear bomb and that I invite everybody who
(quote) “currently hasn’t got the emotional space,
or doesn’t want to make emotional space for this topic, ……
they are invited to turn their camera off,
leave the room and have a coffee or tea instead.
I will still be here in 20 minutes once my presentation is over, and I want them to make their own informed decision if they consent to engage with my presentation”.
My slides were shared via link in chat and I offered to be approachable by anyone, should they be so inclined to want to take this conversation further.
—-
MOVE:
Open windows.
Acknowledging our body.
Overall I found this peer review and observation extremely useful, and much more engaging, interesting than the lectures in the sessions before.
Unlike the lectures, which were modulated not at the right tone for me, the observation and active listening and critiquing were occasionally very challenging.
There were certainly aspects that I didn’t like in some of the presentations, and some practices that I follow which were not executed by my colleagues around me.
This sparked me to engage into a fairly nuanced process of active reflection.
On one hand I try to appreciate another teacher’s work on its own merits (i.e. trying to minimize my own biases and preconceptions) –
Are you familiar with the work by Erin Manning? It changed me, it changed my practice and it continues to change my life. I want to begin with a quote from her paper:
In “Body/Power” Foucault writes: “One needs to study what kind of body the current society needs.” While the university is certainly not the only site of power/knowledge, I turn to the university for this account of “what kind of body the current society needs” because it is a site of contestation where the exception often reigns in the name of alternative pedagogies and practices, a site where many of us, myself included, imagine other ways of working and sometimes are even able to activate them. I turn to the university because there is a troubling asymmetry at the heart of teaching and learning practices, on the one hand creating a path for new ways of thinking and making while on the other imposing forms of knowledge that do violence to the bodies they purport to address. I turn to the university because there is of necessity a discontinuity between the individual and collective practices of experimentation it houses and the neoliberalism that undergirds it. I turn to the university because it has been a site of resistance and a site where new orientations toward study have been born: black studies, queer socialities, postcolonialism, disability studies. And I turn to the university because most days I am not at all certain that the site for these explorations and activations of power/knowledge is actually capable of the kind of complex work necessary for the decolonization of knowledge, at least not as long as the centrality of the (white) (neurotypical) human as purveyor and guarantor of experience reigns supreme.
Manning, E., 2018. Me lo dijo un pajarito: Neurodiversity, black life, and the University as we know it. Social Text, 36(3), pp.1-24.
Erin Mannings work takes place of the intersection of STS, pedagogy and intersectionality and mad studies. Despite not being a scholar “on the digital” Manning is a scholar of knowledge, knowledge-power and “the body”. Respecting embodiment and the learner’s body and the teacher’s body in encounters-of-learning and learning-encounters, is a key issue I feel strongly about.
In this sense I recently watched an interesting and challenging video on the topic of “modal learning and learning styles” i.e. the common belief that some of us are visual learners, auditive learners, kinetic learners or … etc. There seems to be little empirical evidence of these modes of learnign are more than pedagogical myths.
Further research though (and this finally leads me to this topic of embodyiment and experiential learning) indicates that “great teachers” are facilitating multimodal learning in their sessions that activate multisensory and synchronised messages across a number of media. They show, they tell, they facilitate exeriences and make use of intellectual and emotional modes of knowledge-mobilisiation.
Below I will unpack the quote by Manning, which I posted above.
In “Body/Power” Foucault writes: “One needs to study what kind of body the current society needs.”
Bodies know stuff and bodies are at the centre of creation, externalisation and reception of knowledge. Yet, in the context of designing and thinking about pedagogies, the visceral material body, of either – the student/learner and the teacher – remain overlooked; remain taken for granted. Remain mute and are docided into overhearing.
While the university is certainly not the only site of power/knowledge, I turn to the university for this account of “what kind of body the current society needs” because it is a site of contestation where the exception often reigns in the name of alternative pedagogies and practices, a site where many of us, myself included, imagine other ways of working and sometimes are even able to activate them.
What does it say about our society then, and us and The University if this site at the forefront of knowledge is consistently failing the students, its teachers and the learning. Knowing about knowing is the matter of STS; hence I think that these discissions of knowledge-power are fundamentally at the heart and part-and-parcel of STSing.
Dissecting and retelling the story of the academy through the lens of the body; of subaltern bodies and bodies subaltern … leads us inevitable to instances of friciton and subjugation of knowledges.
Bodies not only “know”; “following the body leads to new knowing”.
And some bodies know more about fricitons than others.
That’s sad; that’s a fact; that’s a state that we should not accept; tolerate or leave unchallenged.
I turn to the university because there is a troubling asymmetry at the heart of teaching and learning practices, on the one hand creating a path for new ways of thinking and making while on the other imposing forms of knowledge that do violence to the bodies they purport to address.
Amen.
I turn to the university because there is of necessity a discontinuity between the individual and collective practices of experimentation it houses and the neoliberalism that undergirds it.
The increasing neoliberalisation of the academy is a catalyst of these undesirable new tendancies; but it is also a distraction from any realistic goals we can seek to achieve as a university, as an institute, as individual lecturers on a specific course.
Yes, fine, let’s take down capitalism- but until capitalism has ended; let’s improve the conditions of teaching and learning hilst our colleagues vanquish Mark Zuckerberg, Empire and borders.
I turn to the university because it has been a site of resistance and a site where new orientations toward study have been born: black studies, queer socialities, postcolonialism, disability studies.
If my legacy is the catalisation of more of those conditions of transformation, I am happy.
It is what I am trying to achieve in my UALONLINE project; it is what I am pusuing by studing and teaching critical theory.
Criticality in this sense is not about critique it is about care, critical care. Intensive care. The kind of care that prevents death and preserves life. Critical thinking at the inception of technology saves lives. Not metaphorically; but literatlly.
And I turn to the university because most days I am not at all certain that the site for these explorations and activations of power/knowledge is actually capable of the kind of complex work necessary for the decolonization of knowledge, at least not as long as the centrality of the (white) (neurotypical) human as purveyor and guarantor of experience reigns supreme.
I close this blog post with a page from my own doctoral work.