So What?

My best advice to recent Brock graduates ...

Keep asking THAT question ....

So what, indeed?

When did I become useless?

I will turn 64 on my next birthday, just 2 weeks away.  As is required, I have given plenty of notice that I shall retire from full-time employment on my 66th birthday, in two years from now. There are but 6 weeks remaining in my current administrative position. In July, I shall return to my responsibilities as an Associate Professor of Digital Humanities and Communication Studies.

Since I arrived at Brock in August of 1980, fresh Ph.D. in hand, I have served the students of the university, and the university itself.

So when did I become superfluous to the Academy?  At what point did "senior colleague" tip over into "senior citizen," with its attendant cultural associations of over the hill, past prime, slow, helpless, in the way, a bother -- useless to my department and to my colleagues?

The signs have been creeping in all around me.  But it wasn't until I was talking to other senior colleagues did those individual signs start to fall into place and I began to see an unpleasant picture of my Grove, my Academe.

"I feel irrelevant in my own department" was the declaration of a colleague that resonated with frightening clarity within my being.  It was spoken by a man whom I respect as an academic, as a teacher, and as a colleague for his achievements and his wisdom, as well as his humour and sensible advice.  We sat in my office, discussing his struggle with the idea of retirement after 41 years of dedicated, selfless, and often unacknowledged service to our university.  He is a 3M Teaching Fellow, recognized as one of the best university teachers in Canada.  Yet he was voicing aloud the same misgivings I myself had been feeling for at least a year now.   

I have observed that, as I grow older, I have become more sensitive to behaviours and vocabulary choices of people around me.  I think of it as my mature life experience automatically filtering and routing stimuli to my brain for processing through a lens vibrantly polished by 64 years of application.

I am acutely aware of that sensitivity, so I find myself frequently second guessing my reactions --

Aren't you just over-reacting?  Would they really cut you out of the discussions intentionally?
Are you sure that was a dig and not an attempt at humour?  Did your suggestion really require a response?

But with increasing and alarming frequency, I find that I cannot help but conclude that I am in fact misreading neither the words nor the actions, that in fact there is a dismissive attitude towards older colleagues that is evident within segments of the university.  I get the unmistakable impression that I have passed my "best before" date and have already been consigned to the compost heap.

Confronting those involved invariably results in a hurried apology, "I'm sorry, in my haste to get [name task] done, I just went ahead.  You should have been consulted."  And with that wee bandage affixed, healing and forgiveness will no doubt follow, and off the person goes until the next time.

There are days when I rise up against this attitudinal shift, when I rail and feel feisty enough to push back.

But lately, I have been noticing that there are more days when I  feel that the swell is too great to crest, and my fatigue draws me down silently, beneath the dark rolling wave of indignity.

A Christmas Treasure

“It came without ribbons! It came without tags!”
“It came without packages, boxes or bags!”
 
Before the gifts had been unwrapped, before the mince tarts and the turkey and the gravy had been set upon the already groaning table, before a single Christmas cracker had been snapped, I had already celebrated the spirit of the feast.

It was a message of humanity and caritas, thanks and optimism, care and compassion, wrapped simply but carefully in plain e-mail text on December 21.

Former student Chris wanted to let me know that he had found employment, and even better, employment in the field he most desired.  He prefaced his good news with some context, to help the aging prof recognize who was writing.  Chris could not know that this was a young man whose contribution to my class was as unforgettable as it was inspirational.  I knew exactly who he was, and I could recall vividly the defining moment he distinguished himself in my class.

Chris told me how he thought about our class in computer-mediated communication, instigated by some recent funding for a new computer at his workplace and the implications that digital social networks, as well as "cheap pay-as-you-go cellphones" could have on his otherwise marginalized clientele.   It was a totally new perspective on computer-mediated communication, a view that I had not previously considered and I was so deeply grateful that Chris had shared this with me. 

Each year, I tell my students that the "So what?" reflection that each of them must include in their final project is the most important part of the exercise.  "So what?" is the ultimate expression of learning outcomes -- "I have created a video/built a game level/written a paper about plagiarism -- so what?  How does this project relate to my life as a human being within a digital world, and how does it relate to discussions/debate that we have had in class on so many topics?"  In other words, what have I learned in my discussion with others, in my reading, in my personal reflection?

Chris had just articulated in a few well-crafted sentences of his e-mail the ultimate "So what?" with clarity, passion, and humility.  He wrote that he is still inspired by our class of 2009, and I replied to tell him how inspired I was by his e-mail.  And that is what learning is, to my mind; a mutually inspirational exchange of ideas.  The roles of teacher and learner are seamlessly interchangeable.  Chris understands this too, for he closes his note (with a wee bit of sarcasm about my appointment as Director of the CTLET!), "I hope you're enjoying your new cushy gig while still inspiring (and being inspired by) all the students that grace your presence."

I closed the e-mail, bursting with pride for his accomplishments and for his sustained reflection on his learning and how it relates to real life.  And it does not get any more real than in the job he is doing, believe me. 

So thank you Chris, for a remarkable, unforgettable Christmas treasure.   I am forever indebted to you.  You have taught me something that I must now pass on to next year's students, so you will have taught them as well.

Treasures such as this are surely the reason I love teaching and the reason I love learning.


By the way, Chris:  Your PS was "Update your blog!"  Thanks for the inspiration.

Where have you been?

I know it has been almost a year of waiting for my inner blogger to re-awaken.  But it has been a very full interval indeed.

I am changed by that interval, and must say that it is a welcome, comforting change.

Potential has become plan, 'may be" has become "will be," and "if" has become "when" as decisions solidify desires.

Atumn is my season, the time of year when I retreat more deliberately into myself and reflect.  As the Niagara Grape and Wine Festival enlivens the downtown core, I sit on the porch, sipping my strong tea and observing the leaves begin their gradual transition to scarlet and gold.  The Kyrie  from Tomás Luis Victoria's Missa pro Defunctis lifts me on the ethereal beauty of its stunning polyphony.  And I  ponder my life, now in its autumnal stages.

Has it been good?  Has it been well-lived?  Has it been charitable?

Another sip of tea, I close my eyes and I am carried away by the majestic intertwining of plainsong and chorus, as the Westminster Cathedral Choir intones the Agnus Dei.

Their Gift

It has happened again this term.  It wasn't quite when I had anticipated it, rather late in fact. Nevertheless, my students have once again this year presented me with a priceless gift.

Yesterday, as our conversation worked its way into a comfortable groove, the atmosphere suddenly began to crackle.  With every point/counterpoint, I witnessed a gradual elevation of the discussion into scholarly argument, one that had started connecting the dots from articles we had discussed earlier in the term to the current article by Pierre Lévy on Collective Intelligence. 

Then one student shared a story that narrated a modern day experience of Plato's Cave, a precise mirror ... and suddenly it clicked.  The class got it.  They got the whole idea of the questions the fuel our discussions, they got the point of postulating possibility, the point of contemplating the impossible.

My skin erupted spontaneously into goosebumps of salute as my students continued their debate, transforming before my eyes from my students to my colleagues in the learning community.

It was the moment of trust about which I have written previously, a veritable emotional and intellectual crucible through which they pass and emerge renewed, strengthened, transformed.

After 30 years of teaching, one might expect a certain nonchalance about "one more" moment like this.  But I never cease to marvel at how incredibly proud and emotional I feel each and every time I witness the transformation. 

What a precious gift ... what amazing students.

September ... Again

September ... and the university cycle begins anew.

My inner clock reminds me that it is once again time to revise my course outline. Check the syllabus for a consistent path to learning outcomes. Review the reading list ... and as I find familiar passages in provocative readings, the corners of my mouth smile in anticipation of debates yet to come.

However, this year it feels different.

This year, I can see the end of my journey, the culmination of my teaching career.  It is as if I were at the end of the magnificent corridor of plane trees on the Neckarinsel in Tübingen, and a brilliantly lit clearing, where the Allee ends, beckons to me.

I have much to accomplish, wonderful heady challenges as I wander along that magical path between the majestic stand of trees.  But I will reach that clearing in four short years, and I am both excited and saddened.  I alternate between "Walk faster!  You're almost there!" and "Slow down!  Savour the smell of autumn leaves!  Linger along the sun dappled path for just a bit longer..."


Herbsttag, my favourite bit of Rilke that is ripe with the melancholy of ontological realization and cathartic resignation, has a new and an especially intimate meaning for me this year.

  Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
  Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
  und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.
  
  Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
  gieb ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
  dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
  die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.
  
  Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
  Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
  wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
  und wird in den Alleen hin und her
  unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben. 

Opening new doors ...

On August 1, I walk through a new door.   

In fact, it is a familiar portal, for I have been here before, yet at the same time I do not quite know where it leads this time.

I have accepted the position of Director of the Brock University Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies.  This was the post that I held once before, from 1998-2003.  

Embracing the new means surrendering something of the old, closing one door to open another.

It is therefore with great regret that I must give up my full-time teaching appointment in Interactive Arts and Science, effective August 1, 2010 in order to discharge my responsibilities in teaching and learning on a full-time basis to the broader university community.

I am champing at the bit to engage the challenges of my new responsibilities, particularly in helping structure an institutional e-learning plan with a focus on pedagogical innovation.

At the same time, I leave the IASC classroom with great reluctance, but with wonderfully fond memories of my students and our invigorating, robust conversations about interactive digital media and life inside the digital bubble.

Small pleasures

Small pleasures add welcome piquancy to my routine, the way a tray of aromatic chutneys and hot lime pickle kicks up the flavours of a well-prepared bhoona beef, as a perfect background complement.

My latest little discovery has been at Lee Valley, a gardener's paradise. In their catalogue, I stumbled by wonderful accident upon an artful little tin of bronze book darts that point with understated dignity to the line one wishes to distinguish on any book page.

The tin is lined with a royal blue plush cushion and contains 50 bronze darts, each wafer thin, anxiously awaiting deployment for my referential pleasure.

What a delightful find!

Some will read this and scoff, "Get a life!"  Yet others, I would hope, will read this and murmur, "What a life!" 

Small pleasures, to be sure.

Empowering Power

I am reading an important book on critical pedagogy, When Students Have Power  by Ira Shor, and one line early on in the work resonates so strongly with me.  When Shor refers to democratizing the power structures inherent in the traditional classroom, he proclaims:

"The power that uses power to share and transform power is the power that I am seeking."

This is the classroom activism that I embrace, a politicized pedagogy of equality and liberated knowledge. 

Their names ...

My memory is not what it used to be.  At 61, how can I expect it to be that of an 18-year old?  How cruel is Nature to give me a life so rich and then gradually restrict my access to its records in my dotage ...

Fortunately, there are important moments from the past 30 years that I yet recall,  moments when I witnessed the spark take hold in the eyes of students, moments when I knew the bonfire had been lit.

I write this entry now so those moments can never be taken from me by synaptic failure.

To these students, whose names I still recall, I express my deepest and most heartfelt appreciation for allowing me to be part of that learning, that moment of awakening.  They have provided me with immeasurable insight into what it means to be a teacher/learner and that is a source of infinite joy.

There are so many more, who are just as significant but whose names have been taken from me by the cold collusion of chronology and biology.  To these students, I apologize but assure them that their effect on me has been as permanent as my memory is impermanent.

And so, wherever they are today, I speak these names, still within my recall, with all of the respect, admiration, and gratitude that constantly informs my teaching:


Doug DiPasquale

Tanya Laughren

Kyla Redden
Sarah Carruthers (now Wells)
Tim Lacey
Danny Pilon
Ryan Maitland
Robbie Vize
Dave De Santis
Matt Voynovich
Cedric de Jager
Laura Thomson (now Scoufaris)
Adam Smith
Stephen MacKinnon
Matt W. Clare
Bryan LaPlante
Chris Hannah from Glasgow (for Gorillaz)
Steve Dixon
Brandon Cleary
Christie Adams
Michelle Chan
Jason Chow
Chris Vandenberg
Mike Brousseau
Andrea Winter
Johannes Bittner
Vicky McArthur
 And then there are those who are still my students and their names will appear here after their graduation.

I am so deeply indebted to each and every one of them for teaching me how to be a better teacher.

Gardens

Now that classes are over and grades are in, I can focus a bit more on getting the last bits cleaned up in the garden.  It is always a surprise to see early blooms that we had forgotten about, and always a welcome pleasure to get those first fragrant whiffs of lilac that just whisper Spring.

Classes are so much like gardens, I find.  Some classes you simply know will grow and blossom just about as you might hope: buds push up and grow tall and straight.

And then there are classes like the ones I had this year that grew in their own ways, their stems sometimes leaning, sometimes curling, not at all what I had expected.

But on that last day of class, there it was:  a garden of absolutely unique blooms, some with subdued colours, others with colour so vibrant they could barely contain themselves, some that looked as if they were plants from another planet, and others that were easily identified. They had, each and every one, found their own shape and purpose in that class, each one beautiful, each one exceptional.

And so, even with thirty years of university teaching experience, I still have to remind myself:

Your expectations are your expectations. 

Trust the students.
Nurture them and they will flourish.

My Most Cherished Teaching Award

Over the years, I have been fortunate enough to have been the recipient of a number of awards for my teaching and educational leadership.

Not one of them, not even my coveted 3M Teaching Fellowship, measures up to what I got on the last day of class this year.

A young man who had been in my 2P90, 2P91 courses, and who had already taken 3P90 last year showed up at the last 3P90 class this year and asked if he could sit in.  It was the very last class of his university career, he explained, and he wanted his last class to be my class.  In fact, he was skipping a class in which he was registered to do this.  My insides just collapsed into an emotional mess.  What a tribute this was, and how honoured I felt.

And as I went around the room asking for comments on what each had learned, I invited our guest student to speak.

Speak he did. 

He began by talking about all he had learned in his 3P90 about  games and about himself, and ended with a heartfelt thanks that soon turned emotional.  Needless to say, I was myself on the verge of a meltdown as this poignant, deeply personal testimony came tumbling out.  I had been offered the Gift of Tears, a gift of which I feel singularly unworthy.

Isn't it amazing?  Our teaching touches students on an emotional level, even as hard-nosed and thick-skinned as they must be to get through the maze of today's university power structures.

This act, performed ingenuously in front of a group of strangers, was humbling and so very, very moving.

This was a teaching award unlike any other.

Finding their own voices ...

Our first-year learning circle has explored all manner of things digital during our discussions and presentations this term, including interactive media, censorship and the Net, being a digital citizen, community and identity in a digital world, and video games and narrative.

I think each of us has a better sense of who we all are, certainly my colleagues in this learning community have more insight into who I am as a teacher, as a learner, as a thinker, as a digital immigrant in the midst of digital natives, and as a human being.

But the greatest accomplishment of this course, in my view, will not be found as a targeted learning outcome on the course outline. Rather, this achievement comes from within every member of our learning circle.

Each student has found his or her own unique voice in the Academy and has begun to exercise that voice.

For some, this has been a relatively easy step. They have made themselves heard since the first class. For others, it has been a more complex process, taking weeks of quiet observation and interior reflection before summoning the nerve to speak. But each and every member of our circle (or rectangle, as we were corrected recently) has found a piece of his or her unique voice that has contributed at least once to our discussions.

In our last meeting, I told them that I spar with them verbally before each class as a way of telling them, "I see you, as an individual and as a person. You and your ideas are important to me. I hear and welcome your voice."

I am very proud of this little community.

Facing the last class is going to be tough.

Digital Salon

Last summer, I would meet informally each Wednesday evening with interested students and their friends and acquaintances to chat about issues in digital culture that were of interest to us. We met at a local coffee house with free wi-fi, sometimes competing for space with D&D tables.

People felt free to come out when they wanted to, or to give it a miss when they had other things to do. The relaxed atmosphere was wonderful, but the people were the best part. It was such a pleasure to get to know these young men and women simply as people, people with wonderful, crazy, provocative ideas. There were no constructed roles, no professor and student. And when they brought friends along, or family members, our conversations were that much enriched. Social constructivism in action popped into my mind.

Robbie, Christie, Andrew, Dan ...

Recently, on at least 5 occasions, I have been asked whether the Digital Salon will be meeting again this summer. Two of the inquiries have come from people who were not part of the core group last year, so I don't know how word of this spread.

The answer, of course, is of course, "Yes!"

It is both a pleasant surprise and an encouraging sign for unhurried evenings of renewed conversations.

Joy

Look at my face. That is joy. That is delight. That is affirmation.

It is March 17, St. Patrick's Day. The sun is finally shining, crocuses and hyacinthes are pushing up through the thawing earth, and once again today, I have been reminded of the reason I draw my nourishment from teaching.

I have just read an assignment submitted by a first-year student. The student is in the course that was not particularly responsive to inquiry learning, not particularly responsive to transformative learning or social constructivist learning. Many in the class seemed to be not particularly responsive to university at all.

I had begun to wonder whether my beliefs in student-centred learning had been misplaced. After all, students have in the past reacted well to the kind of creative freedom and acknowledgment of their views that my pedagogy reinforces. Yet this group seemed to be entrenched in cynicism. No matter what I proposed in the way of learning avenues, many of the class seemed to find reasons to dismiss the ideas or to discredit their intellectual value as mere necessary evils that one had to endure in order to get the credentials they wanted for life after uni.

In a semester-long Gethsemane of soul searching, I had been questioning my value to these students as a guide to their intellectual maturity since Christmas break.

And then I read the assignment of the student to whom I have referred.

There it was, a well-written, thoroughly researched response that sank a spade firmly into the superficial observations, dug back the obvious top layers and exposed the rich and subtle substrata of meaning and interconnection. The tone was mature and confident, the vocabulary admirable. The argument was introduced, examined and triangulated, and a reflective conclusion bound it all together.

A young scholar had emerged into the brilliant sunlight of his intellectual Spring.

There are more like this in that pile of papers that now beckons to me. I will bet my life on it.

With portents of Spring like this, I am now content to settle into my own inevitable Winter and let new growth blossom.

[Post-script:  A student responded to my despair in her own blog post that she revealed to me later:  read that response here in "An Open Letter to Barry Joe"]

My Father

Chou Man Look

My father taught me lessons I never knew would find resonance in so many corners of my life, and all without saying a word.

He was the product of a brutal "school of hard knocks" childhood and youth that would have crushed lesser men.

At 12, he was sent from his tiny farming village in Guangdong province in China into indenture to his uncle in Montréal so that he could send money home to his impoverished parents. The promise of Gim San, "Gold Mountain," stole his childhood.

He landed in Vancouver in 1922, a child lost in a crowd of lost children streaming off the Empress of Canada steamship. He stepped into a foreign land whose language he did not speak, whose food he had never tasted.


Official government documents describe him like a steer at auction, as mere Oriental inventory. My sister and I both sat in stunned silence in the Vancouver public library a few years ago as we peered at the microfiche capsule of a human life:

Jew Mun Look

Male, 12 Bor Law Schoolboy

Empress of Canada 1922 December 4

Mole, centre right cheek

4’ 6.5 inches

mole back left neck

small mole above right eyebrow

small pit under left eye

He had a note written in English pinned to his tattered jacket, "Take this boy off the train in Montreal."

  My father was subject to the racist head tax imposed only on Chinese by the Canadian government (my sister has the certificate framed in her home to remind her, to remind us, to remind them ...).

 He worked in essential slavery for that uncle as a child, paying off first the costs of his passage to Gold Mountain, then his exhorbitant head tax of $500.

He endured the pervasive, systemic discrimination of a Canada that enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act (1923-1947), a Canada that extended to Chinese Canadians the right to vote in federal elections only in 1947.

But he survived. In a time and place where it was mandated by law that Chinese could not become doctors, lawyers, or accountants, he survived. In a country where a poor Chinese child with no nuclear familial support could not expect even a rudimentary education, he survived.

He learned how to cook Western food, because cook was one of the few jobs Chinese could hold. His greatest memory that became his signature story was of the time he worked in the Prince of Wales Club, long since defunct, in Niagara Falls. He had prepared a batch of cream of celery soup when the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII was visiting. According to my father's account, the Prince walked into the kitchen and began sampling food, among the dishes was my father's potage à l'impérial.

 

Dad became a salesman for Chinese import/export firms specializing in bolts of silk, he opened his own fish and chip restaurant on Pape Avenue in Toronto, he owned a hand laundry on Vaughan Road where I was born.

 He married outside his race, a dangerous act in those times, for both my father and my mother. He raised a family of four children, all of whom attended university.
He lived a hard, difficult life and endured. When, as a farmer, his produce rotted and was dumped at the consignment wholesaler's, he gritted his teeth and went back into the fields. When, one winter as we especially felt our poverty and he had to accept the Christmas charity basket sent by the local church for us, he swallowed his pride and said thank you. When, as a lawn maintenance man, he was repeatedly humiliated and ridiculed by his rich clients and their demands that he perform the tasks they would not ("My dog died -- you're the gardener --bury it!"), he ate the bitterness and came back the next week.
He told us tales of the blatant discrimination he had endured and warned us to be prepared, for our slightly almond eyes would betray us in this society.

And they did.

He hoped his stories would toughen our skins, harden our psyches so that razor-sharp prejudice would not pierce our souls as it had his.
Education was our passport, he told us repeatedly. No one can take it away from you. And he made sure we attended to our education, insisting, cajoling, demanding until we understood our own responsibility in the undertaking and began to drive ourselves.
My father was right.
Perhaps this is the reason that indifference to education, feigned or real, on the part of my students is like a red flag to me. I fought so hard, with so few resources, so that I could attend university (OSAP was finally established just as I was entering first year at Victoria College, University of Toronto).

When I hear my students tell me they don't care, or when they say that they don't put much effort into a project "because it's only first year, dude!" I feel the affront deeply.

I feel it as an affront to me, as an affront to my father who understood the value of an education he would never have, and as an affront to those potential students who cannot be in that seat because they cannot afford tuition.
I cannot help but feel the responsibility to teach my students the most important lesson my father taught me without his ever saying a word.

Let me be as good a teacher as he was. Thanks, Dad.

Das Werdende - The Becoming

It is beginning to happen. I am noticing a slow shift away from the silly and pointless high school avowals that:

• studying is for nerds
  
• we are here just to get the degree and get out
• we don't care
• we do not think about who and what we are

I am starting to notice an interest, a tentative probing by my first-year students at the world around them, and some very positive acts that may corroborate my observation.

This is incipient reflection, a discovery that "what I think may actually have value or consequence."

I think of the process as digital constructivism, a nascent inquiry into self that opens the first of so many other doors to so many other questions.

I hope I am right.

If Today Were The Day You Had To Stop Teaching...

Too painful a thought.

I can't write this.

Return

Term has started and I rise each day with the excitement and expectation that teaching brings to my life. Students have returned to campus and it is once again alive, revived from its summer emptiness.

I am already in love with my classes, barely a week into the term. To my great delight, I have in each of them bright, engaged, committed minds who seek to challenge me and each other in the intellectual fencing match that can have no loser.

It is exhilarating to be in the same room with these students, caught up in the vibrant energy stream of their youthful exhuberance, of their existential certainty.

I know I will learn a lot from them and that makes me smile. I can't wait for the little pearls of wisdom my students always leave with me!

Treasures

"Ludus is the politicization of Paidea."

"Narrative is the application of the time dimension to our memories."

These little treasures make me happy.