U Penn's CFP and Category Breakdown: A Rant

Continuing somewhat with the topic of inter- and trans-disciplinarity...

I've been following U Penn's Call for Papers site for some time now. I say "site" because it is no longer just a single page where the CFPs are dumped and clumped together arbitrarily, where we had to sift through endless calls of which only about 1 of every 20 or so caught our interest. After growing into something too unwieldy, the administrators divided it into several pages using your typical categories--Eighteenth Century, Gender Studies & Sexuality, Medieval, etc. Fantastic! It was great that I could then check out the Rhetoric section without having to waste my time stumbling upon a call for the postcoloniality of Beowulf or whatever somesuch that is irrelevant to me at the time. It was clear that the field of English studies was becoming more and more superspecialised.

Along with a growing interdisciplinary movement, however, came CFP posters who wanted to post matter that ran across more than one category and still had to post manually in each of the different ones. So, sometime during the last few months, the administrators "developed" the site's functionality. Now, if you're someone wanting to post a CFP you think deserves to be in several categories, all you need to do is check categories you deem applicable. This new system requires a certain degree of professional consideration. But what we get now are overzealous calls that, through the seductive simple click of a New Media feature, checkmark every single box and revert our practices. After following Jessica's suggestion to subscribe to RSS feeds from the site, its return to an unnecessary barrage of irrelevant CFPs became even more apparent to me.

Example #1: The 2010 National PCA Fat Studies Panel
In Cultural Studies? Definitely. In Popular Culture? Makes sense. But in African-American?! Wow, what kind of assumptions are the panelists working on here?

Example #2: Red Feather Journal: An International Journal of Children's Visual Culture
In Children's Literature? Definitely. In Film & Television? Sure. But in Classical Studies?! I'm not a classicist, but I like to think I know about what constitutes as classical studies. If I were a classicist, I may just feel the urge to post in the Children's Lit section a CFP about the virtues of worshipping the Greek pantheon of gods, or the necessary homoeroticism of Homer's Iliad, or the sublime political joy of death by drinking hemlock--because we should start our American kids early on polytheism, homosexuality, and capital punishment. How do you like that, children's lit?

Facetiousness aside, I do realise that there is a certain intellectual stimulation in academia becoming more and more interdisciplinary, which is a positive way to look at these recent developments. Let's do an arbitrary test based on the two examples above. How about: for #1 "Donna Haraway and the Posthuman Prosthetic Trope in Tyler Perry's Use of Fat Suits," or for #2 "Plato's Republic and Philosopher Kings in Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are." Sound like interesting papers. On the other hand, when we can apply any of our specialisations to any CFP at random, what is the point of using categories?

For me, it has to do with efficiency. We are, most of us who regularly visit the CFP site, busy busy little scholars/professors/graduate students. When I go to my home category of Rhetoric, I don't want to think about how rhetoric or composition apply to this CFP about popular romance narratives that has been posted there as if on a whim. If, one day, I wake up thinking: "Hmmm... I should teach Obama's rhetorical moves through a fresh perspective, and I think Nora Roberts is on to something," I will gladly set aside time to look around in appropriate categories like Twentieth Century or Popular Culture.

My concerns may seem rather trivial and exaggerated, but they have larger, ideological implications in the way we conduct this practice: The way certain CFPs feel forced upon me is the same feeling I get from Amazon or eBay dealers when they tack on irrelevant search tags to their products in order to get more customer hits. And that, the capitalist-institutional pressure, is what I guess will always determine our noble pursuit of knowledge, including our efforts with U Penn's CFP site.

Ultimately, it all comes back to the "publish or perish" anxiety that we experience. Likewise, we need more people to come to our conferences, to make a name for ourselves, to get more funding and grants, and so on. What I'm afraid all this might result in (if not already) is a category crisis because we are intellectually exhausted, have nowhere else to go, and are cannibalising one another's areas. Nonetheless, I do think the CFP site is a very practical site even so. But now I'm starting to formulate thoughts on the cultural, economic, and institutional pressures that are causing my concerns, and it is building up to be a whole paper, so I'll stop now, and save it for a rainy day.

Backward Design Across the Curriculum

In his article, "End the University as We Know It," chair of Columbia University's religion department, Mark C. Taylor, calls for a radical redefinition of colleges and universities. He strongly criticises narrow scholarship in which "each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems." Sound familiar? To me, it seems very much like the irrelevance that Wiggins and McTighe criticise of coverage pedagogy in the classroom, but on the larger stage of the institution with the larger stakes of college-wide curriculum.

Taylor uses the example of international relations theory ignoring the role of religion in society to imply that current disciplinary divisions are inadequate. Instead, Taylor proposes to "abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs" such as "Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life, and Water [or what he goes on to explain as what I would label as Environment]." Again, what this looks like to me is Wiggins/McTighe's consideration of the Results stage before Assessment and actual Design.

For example, the "Mind department" would consider new cognitive reading and writing strategies, and so would employ a medical psychologist and literacy specialist in collaboration. Or, similarly, in the "Money department," a business scholar and a Marxist literary critic for some other project. The limits are endless, and make for more dynamic scholarship that, because of its holistic approach, is bound to be more relevant to society.

These examples do reflect the current increasing trend of scholarship that uses inter- and trans-disciplinary methodologies, so perhaps we are already headed in that direction...

Backward Design Pedagogy pt. 2: In Practice

The purpose of this lesson plan is to incorporate Wiggins and McTighe's backward design pedagogy into the teaching of Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken." To critique our own backward design lesson plans effectively, I think we should see how an ineffective "forward design" of this would look like: an in-class reading, a response critique, and perhaps worst of all, covering Frost's other canonical poems to compare, and researching the cultural contexts of the piece--all with no clear or constructive purpose in mind. But wait a minute dot dot dot my lesson plan looks somewhat similar to this. Have I failed you again, mother?

I don't think so. I do feel that the backward design is more effective. But why? That forward design and backward design lesson plans can look similar on paper is maybe why some of us don't see the latter as anything more than a neatly repackaged version of the first. One difference for me now, however, is more clear in that the actual process of backward design forces us to keep in mind the greater purpose of the "Results." Asking students to respond because "that's what has been done and what is expected by them, us, the institution" and asking students to respond because "sharing and comparing their responses in class will show the subjective nature of interpretation, and lead to discourse on individualism vs. conformity" are two very different approaches.

Wiggins/McTighe's backward design may still have a major limitation--it is mostly speculative until it has been tested. But speculating with a clear purpose is still better than wandering around aimlessly like headless chooks.

Backward Design Pedagogy pt. 1: In Theory

In Memento, director Christopher Nolan begins in media res to mimic his protagonist's rare condition of anterograde amnesia (the inability to retain short-term memory). The scenes work "backwards," each subsequent one showing what chronologically happened before. This is how I'm coming to reconcile Wiggins and McTighe's convoluted "backward design" pedagogy. We first need to understand the eventual results we want students to reach before assessment and lesson designing.

Yet I wonder if backward design is really as "groundbreaking" as Wiggins/McTighe make it out to be. In conferring with my group of peers, we strongly questioned it, and even considered the idea of it being the same institutional-centered tool masquerading as something more innovative. Furthermore, I question whether or not it isn't just a reiteration of other pedagogies. The bottom-up model that the field of rhetoric/composition has adapted from, of all places, the business discipline, bestows more power and voice at the bottom of the institutional hierarchy. Arguably, even the ancient Socratic method of teaching is a very close precursor to backward design. And as Jack has mentioned, it shares much with Dewey's ideas. I think it may be because I'm seeing many shared elements in established pedagogies that I don't quite see what the big deal is.

Nevertheless, since then, I've rather relaxed my resistance for it and am merely placing these different pedagogies (among others) on a spectrum of degrees. Backward design may be difficult because we intuitively want to think about means before ends, but the student-centered philosophy of this pedagogy is ultimately worth these moments of skepticism and hassle.

To Sir, with Love

Earlier this week, U.S. President Barack Obama abused his position of power by inspiring the nation's schoolchildren with his much-ballyhooed speech. Some are fortunate enough to have parents who took them out of school and forbade them from watching the speech. But for the unlucky majority of these schoolchildren who have open-minded parents, their innocence was subjected to his speech, which coerced them into appreciating the values of a good education.

On a different note, I'm surprised that, Obama, who has been shaped by mainstream media as a pro-technology progressive who can hardly keep himself away from texting on his Blackberry, mentioned very little about the role New Media has in today's education. Sure, he says--

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best. It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other,

--but it's a throwaway line in which Google, Twitter, and Facebook could easily be replaced with Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and MTV to the same effect. This was a wasted opportunity not only to foster the attitude within children that New Media isn't just for play and can be used effectively for education, but also to win over any traditionalist educators who still resist, to the detriment of students, that it has become an essential part of their daily lives. This also beckons the question: What role, if any, should the governments play in effectively incorporating New Media in education? To sir, with love, please plan this for next year's Back to School speech.

A part of me fears that I may be racialising the issue, but I'll use the cultural memory defense, and claim that it has done a good job of that on its own. So, just because I now can't get the song out of my head:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Chaotic Pedagogy

Last week, Burning Man took place--an event touted for being a whole week of such sensory-overwhelming, semi-anarchistic, "creative chaos," that its 40-50,000 participants need several days of cultural decompression to integrate back into mainstream society. And yet the overhead photo of the event, at a makeshift town called Black Rock City in Northern Nevada that is constructed and disassembled just for the week, shows that they create subcultures that cluster and satellite around the giant wooden "burning man" effigy in a rather orderly manner. Christine's post discusses the chaos of learning. As we've established, there is no one set way to teach and learn. But chaos brings about order in many ways, such as the way Burning Man does.

In academia, the Chaos theory of natural science and mathematics can create geometric orders in fractal graphics, even in nature, such as the dimensions of a leaf. In the humanities, the Formalist literary criticism of New Criticism claims "good poetry" to be a harmonising of chaotic elements in the poem. Specifically in education, even Wiggins and McTighe, in Understanding by Design, warn "[not to] confuse the logic of the final product with the messy process of design work" (29). As long as we can identify the order, then, embracing a chaotic/improvisational pedagogy may not only be fine, but perhaps even desirable as a method of breaking outdated but persistent traditional pedagogy.

The Meaning of Plus

Wicket the Ewok and his Luddite comrades destroy the technologically advanced Imperial AT-ST walkers.

I've been feeling uneasy with recent discussions about Blackboard, iLearn, and other course management systems/learning management systems (CMS/LMS) for a few reasons. First, it seems to me that we are, through our humanist criticisms of the systems, more and more becoming Luddites, the group and labour movement of the 18th-19th centuries that aggressively resisted the Industrial Revolution and technological advancement by destroying machinery. To be clear, I do include myself here in the collective first-person plural because I, too, balk at the cold, impersonal qualities of CMS/LMS.

The term Luddite, to me, has several connotations. It suggests pro-human-ability. In this case, I think our Luddism may be virtuous for being in favour of a physical classroom that needs structure, design, and maintenance--basically the human touch. Conversely, it thus also suggests anti-automation, which is more of a mixed sentiment because it's a matter of efficiency, and whatever values we attach to it in different contexts. Therefore, the CMS has un/favourable qualities depending on the situation. But the term also suggests complacency and anti-progression, which is the one that worries me the most. It occurs to me that, while we criticise the impersonal CMS/LMS, we're not really looking forward at how to use it. Our resistant attitudes aren't really helping the student, who, according to Stephanie Coopman, is much more active in an online setting. We may consider it to be useful to store syllabi, readings, other documents, but I don't feel as though we're really trying to figure out how to use it effectively. CMS aren't very conducive of discussion--so how can we make it that way? I don't have an answer myself, but am heading toward a better understanding of my own resistance:

Alpha 60 narrates: "Sometimes... reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form... which enables it to spread all over the world."

In his Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard creates a society that has become a complete technocracy--authority and power are not held by those with wealth, but by those with knowledge and skills. While not quite there, our reality is slowly moving away from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Likewise, as we become more and more technocratic, it becomes crucial for all involved--students, teachers, administrators--to have the know-how and skills to effectively maneuver CMS interfaces.

Alpha 60, the menacing supercomputer that monitors society, states ominously, "Once we know the number one, we believe that we know the number two, because one plus one equals two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus." We've figured out that learning requires the variables "curiosity, destruction, presence, patience, effort, work, engagement, participation, doing, digestion, creation, need." We can add up these variables and solve the equation when "plus" means the pedagogy of the physical classroom discussion. We just need to use these same variables to solve the equation when "plus," instead, refers to the pedagogy of the CMS forum discussion.