Category: Uncategorized

• Decolonizing (digital) Pedagogy by Shifting the Seat of Power #HASTAC2019

  The classroom, the seats, the thing that contains the writing in the front, and the professors are all the technologies that make these spaces function. How do we decolonize all this?

  Due to a family situation, I was unable to make it to HASTAC 2019 this year. I was scheduled to be on a panel with an amazing group for “Decolonizing Technologies, Reprogramming Education”. The co-presenters:

  • Danica Savonick (State U of New York, Cortland)
  • Lisa Tagliaferri (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
  • Christina Katopodis (City U of New York)
  • Raven Gomez (City U of New York), and
  • Laura L. Allen (Ohio State U)
  • Christina Katopodis (City U of New York)

  ---

  The classroom is a colonial space. Learning is a colonial practice. This is something I explored heavily at the rise of the MOOCs in 2013 as a PhD Intern at Microsoft Research New England. The structure of a desk, a raised seat, or podium at the front, along with a screen that I control (technological control hi), looking back at people in less comfortable seats that lack vanity shields, etc, creates a dynamic that is more of a one way communication than a dynamic collaborative space. The idea that there is a central seat of power (the professor or teacher), that has the answers to the questions being asked, controls the content that will be shared and reviewed through technology that requires things to be pre-created (such as slides or video), and, at the final step passes judgment of how well a learner is was able to internalize the ideologies and relevant information of a course is a colonial project. The idea of one to many rather than learning spaces as new and evolving collectives is a colonial understanding of any learning project. This dynamic and classroom structure is something that I, as a Teaching Fellow for the duration of graduate school during my PhD would play within the courses I taught.

  Here are the rules/methods I used to dismantle and disempower the seat of power in my courses*

  1. Day 1: Step into the classroom, occupy the seat. Do not introduce myself and just start introducing the course. The syllabus. What they will read etc.
  2. First, ask why the students did not ask who I was/introduction when I started running the course and just went along with it. Explain that it is a seat of power, that I am in a seat of power, and how if functions in  the classroom space should feel like.
  3. Do introductions for the students with note cards that I will use in the future for role if required, or just to call on people because I am bad with names. On the card let them discreetly put pronouns, nicknames, things they might need to disclose like an accommodation, and a fun fact related to the course.
  4. After they introduce themselves, have an AMA for me. Explain they can ask anything within reason (politics, age, family, education background, interests, what I am excited about the course, ethnic background etc), and let them know this is the ONLY day they get to ask all these things*
  5. Have student lead introductions to new topics in pairs before I give my lectures through a presentation/conversation/dialogue/performance to the course from the “seat of power”. During their presentations, rather than sitting with the students I would sit on the periphery in a chair and listen/observe. This forced students to speak to each other rather than to me because if they chose to speak to me it was rather awkward. This also let them understand what it means to be in that seat (often when they would get to the questions portion before they asked their own question of the class, no one would say anything. I would remind them that, the thing about the seat of power is you can say anything and more often than not, no one questions you).***
  6. Begin the first month of course learning about the students and how they understand the topic in their own lives and world without being bogged down by theoretical language or canonical readings (this was done by reading against canon… what are the things that are missing in these theories? Often centered on race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, etc)
  7. Have interactive components on the screen that are updated in real time. This could be a collaborative google doc, but I prefered the anonymous etherpad to collective information in real time so as I am talking there is another place of interaction that I am not the owner of.
  8. Create in class workshops (with worksheets that will be turned in) on course material that feeds into a final project or paper and ensure that, by the time the student gets to the end, their ability to apply learning has been so well established that they final grade is already determined (these workshops are also time for in class office hours so office hours come to the student where they are supposed to be rather than them having to find me in my office).
  9. If possible, have a final project that is workshopped, reviewed, and played with during the course and presented at the time of finals. Their worksheets and in class office hours will have already reflected their competency in the course at which point the course is as close to pass fail as it can be.

  *A caveat is some of these things are easier in production, performance, or upper division courses than it did in 100 level courses because at 100 level there is a foundation that has to be created so people are comfortable when they move on from the course to the next level that has an assumption that the student has a set of preexisting canonical knowledge banks in their head.

  **As I was often the only black Professor people had, and I look younger than I am, and I am somewhat racially ambiguous, I found this to be helpful in getting students comfortable with me as their instructor and it also helped me learn what the students were most curious about.

  *** This format let me shape my lectures around interests that came up for the students either as they presented or had a conversation afterwards. It also meant that as we were going through material I could reflect back things they had said as valid and important to understanding the topic.

  Digital Tools

  Collaborative Google docs (if you need sign in), etherpad (RiseUp is my favorite to use because students learn more by exploring other parts of the site: https://pad.riseup.net/), class blogs and digital participation points are ways to use digital to make a more collaborative learning experience where everyone is in dialogue or visible to each other rather than just the person learning.
  

  Flash Workshop

  Think of a learning experience you’ve had that you would have liked to shift the power of information from you to the other learners. What tools will learners need to take that over? What background information needs to be provided? What can they collaboratively figure out without your intervention?

  Or

  Think of learning space that you were responsible for where rather than speaking to each other learners spoke to you. How might you change the layout of the classroom to enable dialogue? If you can’t change the layout, where might you position yourself? In a corner? Laying down? A seat other than where you are expected to be? What paper tools (like think pair share, or focused feedback cards) might be used to enable more dialogue? What digital augmentation tools could be used to allow for participation that is not dependent on people “speaking up”? Do they need to be anonymous?

  Share what you come up with!

  Jade

  May 19, 2019

  Uncategorized

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• A very short correction to Decolonization : a very short introduction’s take on Fanon

  

  I was very excited to finally get my hands on the Decolonization: a very short introduction because I freaking love these short little books. Me being me I did the thing that I always do. I looked for Fanon on the index, and then read so I can figure out if the author and I align politically. On the one page that quotes Fanon it quickly became apparent that we do not. He states, and I quote, “Fanon was clearly wrong: some colonial regimes yielded to their subjects’ demands for independence without being coerced to do so by violence”.  Hashtag sad face.

  Holy bananas. So, yes, the first chapter of Wretched of the Earth is “On Violence”, but right from the get go Fanon places violence in things as banal as changing the name of a social locale or inviting certain people to events. The demand by colonial subjects for independence is an inherently violent act. Its a demand to break, destroy, and imagine something new. But we tend to not talk about the role of imagination in Wretched. If you look at the agenda on any conference engaging with Fanon, his call to violence is often called as a powerful prescription or a failed attempt to understand what it will take to decolonize. When I read Fanon though, I read him through his introductions, endings, and footnotes, the spaces where he often hid his utterances of hope. I cannot say this enough… to read Wretched of the Earth as a standalone book is weird. It is a follow up to Black Skin White Masks and you miss so much if you don’t read them together. Further, in the other books he wrote he comes down harder on what he really thinks fixes things: love and imagination.

  The death of the author is a concept that looms over engagements with critical theory. This in an of itself is a colonial impulse. It is how theorists like Derrida, Althusser, and writers like Camus (all from families who had been in Algeria for centuries/generations), lost their Africaness and how Fanon, a Frenchman (who was stationed in Algeria but born in the old (a slave) colony of Martinique and educated in France) gained his. Fanon was French. The death of the author also allows us to erase the perspective and position that came with Fanon’s profession.

  Fanon was a medical doctor, a psychiatrist, who wrote a thesis (required for his medical degree) working with neurologists and psychiatrist on how culture effects the manifestation of mental illnesses in Lyon. From there he went to a state run hospital in French Algeria (which was a part of France in the same way as Hawaii is to the US) at the end of their designation as département, as they were being decolonized. In this space he saw violence, the kind that is outlined in the BSWM and Wretched. He also knew that, like most psychiatric practices, to heal people would take even more (mental and sometimes self-inflicted/perceived physical) violence, and love, and imagination. To get people to love themselves and to transcend to a place that is not what colonization “says I am” which was the only message they receive is violent. To get the colonizer to acknowledge this? More (psychic) violence.

  At times there will be physical violence, but more often than not, it is mental anguish.  The impulse to latch on to violence reinforces existing stereotypes of the angry black man in Fanon… I think I think it is just a racist reading tbh because even though Fanon starts with “On Violence”, he ends with case notes “Colonial War and Mental Disorders”. Read that… and also read “The North African Syndrome“, a short essay that has an ending that is my reaction when people insist that Fanon was only about physical violence (without love or direction) shared below.

  

  There is a violence in recognizing that there is a person that is oppressed, but they are not THE OPPRESSED. We are human. All of us. To acknowledge that when so much is wrapped up in that not being true, or people being less than, or, in this political moment in the country where I live, “animals”, is an act of violence toward the man who defines himself based on dehumanizing others. Fanon was not wrong. His reply to those who question if this is violence, who do not see that this requires a certain type of suffering and anguish, might be this beautiful ending.

  Jade

  May 24, 2018

  decolonization, random thoughts, reading, Uncategorized

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• My Temporal Configuration

  Currently reading Cruising Utopia, The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz (Ha! he has a wikipedia page). It made me think of the image Your fictions become history (a current side obsession).  It is reminding me that I have a very specific temporal position I work from.  I think that it is something I need to… not get over… but be mindful of as I approach people working in different temporal frameworks.  How/where we see the importance of time changing so much about how we approach the world. Truly.  Also, I feel really dirty for having a temporal framework.

  My Basic Temporal Configuration

  

  I believe the now is transient at best.

  (really, it is fleeting.)

  I believe the past is about the future.

  (as such, we create both the past and the future)

  I believe that this means that the past is the key to the future.

  (and the now is a combination of both the past and the future)

  I believe memory is how we remember the past.

  (it is also the key to how we imagine the future)

  I believe that what we remember is faulty.

  (and the past determines how we fill in the gaps in the future)

  I believe the Digital fundamentally changes how we conceptualize & interact with Memory.

  (and this is a big part of what I’m exploring in my dissertation)

   

   

  Jade

  Oct 13, 2012

  digital, History, reading, Uncategorized

  beliefs, books, images, memory studies, obesessions, reflections, thoughts

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