Since I believe it is time for a better word and a better concept to drive American education, I recommend “vigor.” Here my dictionary says, “active physical or mental force or strength, healthy growth; intensity, force or energy.” And my mental association is to all the Latin-based words related to life. How much better our schools would be if they provided students activities throbbing with energy, growth and life.
These activities that are “throbbing with energy, growth and life” include:
first-hand experiences with real-life problems
talking to people of all ages with different backgrounds
developing and practicing wide range of skills (as gardeners, craftsmen, mechanics)
Yatvin ends with this great line:
These habits of mind, body and spirit are the true fruit of educational excellence. In the end, vigor in our schools is the evidence of life, while rigor is the sign of an early death.
I appreciate this discussion for so many reasons. I love this idea of vigor over rigor. As I have mentioned before on this blog, I am wary of the call for rigor because of who and what it often leaves out:
As a professional academic, I bristle at the notion of being rigorous (another definition of discipline), not because I don’t promote or practice serious engagement but because the call for rigor or the claim that one is not rigorous enough often seem to be used to dismiss ideas/theories/intellectual labor that is serious and smart and deep, but that doesn’t fit the standard of what is/who can be rigorous.
I also like how she aligns rigor with death (where death = shutting down thinking and engaging, being inflexible, discouraging creativity) and then argues for the importance of life (where life = possibility and critical and creative engagement of the whole body with the world).
Possibility…engagement…life…Makes me want to watch this clip from Xanadu:
This summer I hope to develop a more effective yet succinct articulation of my troublemaking pedagogy. It seems important to be able to describe and explain what I mean when I tell people that my teaching philosophy can be summed up in a few words–“I like to make trouble and to train students how (and why) to stay in trouble.” I need a pithy follow-up description because, as you might imagine, saying “I make trouble and encourage others to stay in trouble” gets me in a lot of trouble. And not always the good kind of trouble. Instead of opening up others to be curious about what I might mean with such a claim, it often shuts them down as they struggle to envision a classroom where trouble doesn’t lead to total chaos and a failure to learn and engage.
Here are just a few (somewhat random) reflections, inspired by my reading of this article:
ONE: Kilgard’s article is about how chaos theory might enable us to understand the messiness/unruliness of performative pedagogy. I am intrigued by her focus on unruly bodies–of the teacher and the students–and how they inhabit and move in a variety of classroom spaces. She contrasts her own messy, chaotic embodied experiences in the classroom with the neat, ordered and balanced description of embodiment in several new anthologies on performative pedagogy, writing:
My experience [as an embodied teacher] is not so ordered; my embodied performance in the classroom as I practice troubling performance pedagogy is one of deliberately pushing myself and others off balance (219).
I like this idea of being off balance, especially in terms of how it can generate surprise, wonder, unpredictability and unknowingness. It makes me think of Alison Bailey’s idea of being off-center.
TWO: Shortly after her passage about being off balance, Kilgard writes (emphasis mine):
We have been DISCIPLINED to write in NEAT and TIDY ways because this shows that we have THOUGHT CAREFULLY about our practice, that it’s RIGOROUS and CREDIBLE. How do we write the MESSY, the AMBIGUOUS, the sublime, multilayered, DENSE, complex, GNARLY performative practices of the classroom? And how can we make that ambiguity and messiness ACCESSIBLE to other people? How can we demonstrate theoretical COMPLEXity?
This passage has really got me thinking. I like her contrast between discipline (as neat, tidy, careful thinking, rigor and credibility) and messiness (as ambiguous, dense, gnarly, and complex). She does a good job of describing the problematic binary within the academy between disciplined and undisciplined (yes, another binary to bust for me and KCF over at It’s Diablogical!) Who says that messy can’t be disciplined and undisciplined? That developing complex and gnarly ideas can’t reflect careful and serious thought? Can we imagine making ideas/words/our pedagogical practices accessible and intelligible without reducing them to neat and tidy soundbites? I like this last question. How do we make ambiguity and messiness accessible to others? What is meant by accessible here?
THREE: Kilgard describes the process of moving furniture in the classroom in order to make it a more engaging and productive space:
On the first day of every semester, we assess the classroom for its performative possibilities. Usually we find the space lacking in fluidity and sheer size. However, as budget constraints require small (read: thirty students) classes to use rooms made for thirty desks and no more, we look deeper into the crammed spaces for the possibilities outside of the traditional desk, chair, or table space. We look up and notice the eight-foot ceilings and wonder how we might use this vertical space. We experiment with the furniture to see how it might fit together and take up less space. As I have done this exploration many times before, I encourage some past practices that have proved effective, such as stacking tables two high with their surfaces together around the perimeter of the classroom. No matter how many times I’ve been in a particular classroom, though, I still encourage the exploration. Inevitably someone sees a new way to integrate personal belongings and desks or a new way to utilize the bizarre nook in the front corner where a column obscures sightlines. This exploration is also necessary for us to remake our mental space. Some students grumble about moving things around every day, but most willingly undertake this exercise, freeing themselves from their typical physical constraints (even within these constraints).
The configuration of space in the classroom is always an issue for me in my pedagogical practices. I find the standard classroom set-up, with desks in a row facing the teacher, to be a huge barrier to critical and creative engagement with each other. I have experimented with rearranging the furniture a little (usually this involves finding the best and easiest way to create a “feminist circle”), but I haven’t devoted much attention to thinking through the logistics of this process. Experimenting with moving furniture can take a lot of valuable class time and be met with a lot of resistance from students. Kilgard mentions that she sometimes “encourages past practices that have proved effective.” I wonder if there are any resources out on the interwebz that offer up tips and maps of classroom configurations to try? It would be cool if there were an app for that…(sidenote: just did a very brief search on the app store and couldn’t find anything–anyone else have as much trouble as I do searching for apps?).
In thinking about experimenting with space, I want to throw online space into the mix. How can we use online spaces (through blogs and twitter) to create deeper engagement? Can we connect those online space experiments with physical (offline) experiments to keep pushing at troubling how, why, what and where we learn? When is so much experimenting too much? When does it overwhelm students? When does it become too much of a distraction? These questions remind me of an article I assigned in my feminist pedagogies class last fall, Designing Choreographies for the New Economy of Attention. While I need to re-visit the article, I do remember that they experiment with mixing online and offline space through their use of twitter during conference lectures. These questions also make me think of how it might be possible to put embodied and performative feminist pedagogy into conversation with feminist blogging pedagogy without making the discussion just about how bodies don’t matter in online classroom spaces and without reinforcing a “real” vs. “virtual” binary. Any suggestions?
PEDAGOGY CHALLENGE OF THE DAY: Speaking of experimenting with classroom space, how would you trouble this space? Here’s a picture of the auditorium (from my vantage point up at the podium) that I taught in for an intro class this past spring. While it could seat up to 250 students only 115 were enrolled in the class. In what creative ways could you use this space? (Let me admit upfront that I failed miserably at productively troubling it this past semester.)
Tomorrow (Valentine’s Day), we will be discussing heteronormativity in my Politics of Sex class. To prepare for that class, I thought I would create an entry tracing some of the various implications of Valentine’s Day for the politics of sex. As part of our discussion, we are reading two essays from Chrys Ingraham: “Introduction” to Thinking Straight and “Heterosexuality: It’s Just Not Natural!” In her introduction, Ingraham discusses the idea of straight thinking in many different ways, including “thinking in terms of opposites and polarities when none exist and naturalizing social practices and beliefs rather than seeing them as social, political, and economic creations” (2).
This concept of “straight thinking” has important implications for feminist and queer political projects that put sexuality and issues of sex into conversation with a wide range of other categories of experience (race, class, ethnicity, ability, global positioning, gender identity, just to name a few). So in my own thinking about “straight thinking,” I want to position it in relation to an alternative model for viewing the world: feminist/queer thinking.
My vision of feminist/queer thinking links MAKING TROUBLE FOR (questioning, unsettling, exposing, challenging, resisting, reframing) categories, ideas, practices, norms, institutions with the need for DEVELOPING AND PROMOTING A CRITICAL AWARENESS of how our everyday practices are shaped by and contribute to larger structures of oppression, power and privilege. While straight thinking encourages us to understand our everyday experiences from our particular social/cultural locations as “natural” or “normal” and breaks them down into rigid binaries (male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, white/non-white) with one half of the binary privileged over the other, feminist/queer thinking encourages us to question, play with and “bust” these binaries. It also encourages us to make connections, to find patterns and to be curious about why things are they way they are and how they might be transformed. And it encourages us to ask who benefits from this “natural” order and at whose expense is it perpetuated.
While my version of feminist/queer thinking is inspired by lots of folks, here are three thinkers that are inspiring me right now as I work to articulate my vision of politics for my “politics of sex” class:
Cynthia Enloe and her emphasis, especially within her introduction to The Curious Feminist, on the value of having a feminist curiosity and of engaging in the difficult labor of questioning practices, institutions, ideologies that claim to be “natural,” “normal,” or just part of “tradition.” These acts of curiosity potentially enable us to expose the larger structures (of patriarchy, racism, heterosexism) that undergird those seemingly unquestionable claims to the natural or normal.
bell hooks and her discussion, especially in Feminism is for Everybody and Teaching to Transgress, of the importance of critical awareness and making connections between our everyday practices and larger structures of power, privilege and oppression.
Cathy Cohen and her discussion of the radical potential of queer politics in her essay, “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens.”Challenging a narrow (and straight?) version of heteronormativity as one the reproduces the binary between straight and queer, Cohen argues that while heteronormativity might be a
primary system of power structuring our lives, it [heteronormativity] interacts with institutional racism, patriarchy, and class exploitation to define us in numerous ways as marginal and oppressed subjects (31).
So, moving beyond straight thinking requires that we also think about more than sexuality; we must put our discussions about sex/sexuality/sexual politics into conversation with discussions of race, gender and class. We need to move beyond the single oppression model that narrows our vision and limits our ability to make connections across differences.
Having provided a brief introduction to the differences between straight and feminist/queer thinking, I want to think about Valentine’s Day. What does some queer/feminist thinking about this holiday look like? In my version, it requires paying serious attention to the holiday and exposing and critically engaging with the variety of levels and locations of power and privilege that are involved in our practices and understandings of it. This close attention doesn’t mean that we must reject Valentine’s Day. In fact, I’m not interested in being for or against the holiday. Instead, I am interested in tracing its effects and how that tracing might make visible some processes and practices of heterosexualization. So, here are some questions that V Day raises for me:
Marketing: How is Valentine’s Day marketed to/for women? To/for men? Do the advertisements help reinforce strict divisions (straight thinking) between the “sexes”? How do advertisers encourage us to buy their V-Day products? Do their methods work to reinforce harmful stereotypes about femininity? About masculinity? Do they draw upon other stereotypes (racial, ethnic, class) in their attempts to make their product desirable to us?
Check out the following commercials. Do you see evidence of “straight” thinking here? What are the potentially harmful consequences of these ads? (How) do they encourage us to privilege certain behaviors/identities/bodies over others?
(the first one comes from a student in my politics of sex class):
Description: The guy is struggling to figure out what message to write on a card for his girlfriend. Faith Hill tells him to “speak from his heart.” He writes: “Your rack is unreal.” Text at the end: Telefora says it beautifully. Because, frankly you can’t.
Consider what Ingraham states in “Introduction: Thinking Straight” about “the ways in which ascribed behaviors for women and men–gender–actually organize the institution of heterosexuality” (4). How are masculinity and femininity shaped/reinforced through these advertisements? How do these ads speak to/reinforce larger stereotypes and expectations of what “real” men and women look like? And how they are expected/assumed to act? What do we “learn” about sexuality and straight thinking in these ads?
What about the couples? Which couples are represented in the second ad? Which types of couples are excluded? If, as the New York Times suggests here, that interracial marriages are on the rise, why aren’t any interracial couples represented here? What about same sex couples?
Regardless of whether or not you find these funny, how do labeling them “just a joke” or a funny (and therefore meaningless) commercials prevent us from interrogating their underlying ideologies/structures/patterns? Check out this comment by Kristi on Valentine’s Day and Heteronormativity (note: troll refers to someone who uses their comments to side-track discussions and provoke others who are seriously engaging with the issues in the blog post.)
How do we place the “jokes” from these two commercials into the larger context of how women are objectified (reduced to their “rack”) or who can marry and/or should partner (opposite sex, same race)?
Labor, production and consumption: In “Heterosexuality: I’s Just Not Natural!,”Ingraham argues that events, like weddings or Valentine’s Day, provide us with the opportunity for investigating “the ways various practices, arrangements, relations, and rituals work to standardize and conceal the operation ” (77) of heteronormativity. She also encourages us to ask after whose interests are being served with these practices and at whose expense these practices are encouraged and perpetuated. While there are many different ways to pose these questions, how can we ask them in relation to labor, production and consumption? At whose expense are we able to acquire the products that we use to “express” our love?
I want to live in a world where there isn’t a hierarchy of relationships, where romantic love isn’t assumed to be more important than other kinds, where folks can center any relationships they want whether it be their relationship to their spiritual practice, kids, lovers, friends, etc. and not have some notion that it’s more or less important because of who or what’s in focus. I want to feel like I can develop intimacy with people whether we are sleeping together or not that I will be cared for whether I am romantically involved with someone or not. I want a community that takes interdependency seriously that doesn’t assume that it’s only a familial or romantic relationship responsibility to be there for each other.
What configurations of loving community and kinship does Valentine’s Day foreclose with its almost singular focus on romantic love as man + woman = marriage? Are there ways to rethink love and sexuality that make room for envisioning (heterosexual/monogamous) marriage as one option among many instead of as the only (natural/normal) option?
Public/Private: How do we negotiate our private lives (our relationships, our expressions of intimacy) in public spheres via holidays like Valentine’s Day? How does our participation in V Day (or other heteronormative rituals like weddings) “signify belonging to society in a deep and normal way” (Warner/Berlant, “Sex in Public” 554)? What are the consequences for not participating in these rituals and not reinforcing dominant norms? Who all is excluded from participating in these public rituals and how are they excluded?
Note: The following is a sample class discussion on feminist pedagogy, digital literacy and twitter. The purpose of this discussion is to generate a feminist curiosity about feminist digital literacy and twitter and to get students thinking critically about social media in the classroom.
To tweet or not to tweet…that is not the question.
Teaching without digital technology is an irresponsible pedagogy. Why? The future is digital, love it or hate it. We can argue later about whether or not this is a good or a bad thing. (Hint: the answer is both.) But to educate students, or to attempt to educate students without developing their digital literacy is to leave them ill prepared for their futures. Eliminating technology produces not the affect [sic] of a more engaged literate student populous, rather it produces the reverse, an ill informed, uncritical, unengaged student populous who will become at the very best passive consumers of the technology being resisted, and at the worst its willing victims.
I want to take AcademicHack’s claim seriously (not necessarily to agree, but to take it seriously by critically engaging with it) and think about the importance of digital literacy in terms of feminist pedagogy and practicing and theorizing about twitter. How can/should feminist educators discuss digital literacy in relation to twitter? What sorts of conversations should we/they have and what practices should we/they engage in order to develop feminist digital literacy?
Twitter Basics
Before moving into a discussion of twitter and feminist digital literacy, I want to offer up some twitter basics.
Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting. Simply find the public streams you find most compelling and follow the conversations.
At the heart of Twitter are small bursts of information called Tweets. Each Tweet is 140 characters in length, but don’t let the small size fool you—you can share a lot with a little space. Connected to each Tweet is a rich details pane that provides additional information, deeper context and embedded media. You can tell your story within your Tweet, or you can think of a Tweet as the headline, and use the details pane to tell the rest with photos, videos and other media content. See it in action.
disclaimer: People/organizations are using twitter in all sorts of ways that I haven’t even begun to imagine–especially since I just started experimenting on twitter this past August. My discussion merely touches upon some basic ways that twitter logic works.
Brief posts (called tweets) are limited to 140 characters or less
Post updates about what you’re doing, thinking, reading
Share others’ ideas by retweeting (RT) their posts
Create lists of people on twitter, organized under a topic (e.g.: class list)
Use hashtags (#) to tag post as related to a particular topic (e.g.: #fp2010)
Reply directly to other twitter accounts (tweeps/tweeple?) or mention them in your tweets by including @ + their twitter name in your tweet.
Tweets are posted in “real time” with most recent tweets at the top–the twitter timeline
Tweets often include links to blog posts or pictures (twitpics).
Other people can find you and follow your twitter timeline. You can also follow them.
3. How is twitter different from facebook?
Twitter is a public site. There is not an expectation of privacy.
People who read your tweets are your followers, not friends.
Twitter has a 140 character limit.
Twitter relies on crowdsourcing and how it is used is driven more by how people are using it and experimenting with it. Example: hashtags
Here’s a helpful youtube video that explains a key purpose of twitter: “real life happens between blog posts and emails. And now there’s a way to share”
Uses of twitter in the classroom
If we have time, we can return to this discussion. For now, here’s just a few ways I’m using it for research and teaching:
live-tweeting class (tweeting comments/summaries of what is being said in class as it is being said)
live-tweeting class readings (tweeting passages from and questions about the text as I read it)
answering questions tweeted by class members
posting announcements
posting questions/queries to the class
sharing links to relevant sources
live-tweeting extra office hours (haven’t tried this one yet)
experimenting with different accounts (tweet as class administrator + tweet as myself: undisciplined)
Discussion: Twitter, authenticity, lived experience, and daily habits
We could talk about the limits and possibilities of twitter in many different ways in relation to feminism and feminist pedagogies. For example, how does twitter work for (and/or against) activism? Lots of folks are critically reflecting on this question. Check out Malcolm Gladwell’s article about twitter and “Why the Revolution Will not be Tweeted.” Over at DigiActive, they put together a guide to Twitter for Activism. And Ronak Ghorbani offers up a series of podcasts + analysis on tweeting feminists.
We could also talk about how twitter works in encouraging back channel conversations in classrooms (during lectures and discussions) and in conferences. We could discuss this in relation to class distractions and the need for paying and shifting attention. Check out “Designing Choreographies for Attention” for more. Sample Reality offers up an interesting take on the value of “snark” (or, sarcastic, irreverent comments about the readings or the instructor’s teaching). In terms of using twitter for conference conversations, check out how it was used in the 2010 NWSA conference (they had the live feed on their website).
While these are all great conversations to have (and ones we could continue on this blog), I want to focus on one other way in which to discuss twitter and feminist digital literacy: authenticity, lived experience, and daily habits.
My focus on authenticity, lived experience and daily habits is partly inspired by Berenice Malka Fisher and her claim, inNo Angel in the Classroom, that we “try to bring our most authentic [read: complicated, uncertain, multiple, honest] selves” into the classroom (51). Can we achieve authenticity through the documenting of our lived experience? Through the repeated archiving and sharing of our daily habits? Can we “authentically” connect with others through our engagement with their tweets? What are the limits and possibilities of this archiving/documentation/sharing/engagement?
The following represent two different “moments” related to twitter and the above questions:
Moment One: I tweet, therefore I am, but if I don’t tweet it, did it happen?
Two related events:
a. Peggy Orenstein is sitting with her daughter in her front yard, enjoying the beautiful weather and listening to a download of E.B. White reading “The Trumpet of the Swan.” Instead of “being fully present in the moment,” she reflects on how best to capture the experience with a tweet. She wonders: “when every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy?” And concludes: “The risk of the performance culture, of the packaged self, is that it erodes the very relationships it purports to create, and alienates us from our own humanity.”
Does tweeting “alienate us from our own humanity”?
What sort of authentic expressions are possible via twitter?
Is authenticity counter to/in conflict with performativity/performance?
How does twitter work differently for different bodies and different expressions?
Can we use twitter to express (and value) our lived experiences?
What are the problems and possibilities of expressing/relying on/invoking lived experiences?
In a youtube video about twitter it is suggested that twitter is concerned with documenting “the real life that happens between blog posts and emails.” What value do you see in expressing and documenting these aspects of real life?
b. BIll Nye (the Science guy) is giving a lecture at USC. Suddenly he falls to the floor. Instead of rushing to his aid, it appears that students quickly whip out their smart phones and begin tweeting about the event. The Lookout, a Yahoo news blog, describes it as an example of “civic indifference” and “youthful digital passivity.” The Lookout article links this event with what it describes as “an even more disturbing” example of civic indifference: the posting of images online, in real time, of the shooting and death of “Messy Mya,” a New Orleans comedian and youtube sensation. The Lookout article makes the rounds on facebook, possibly serving as further evidence of the evils of social media.
Do social media like twitter encourage “civic indifference” and “youthful digital passivity”? How?
Are there other ways than “youthful digital passivity” to read what was happening with the posting of the image of Messy Mya’s death? How do the events (and the bodies of the “victims”) differ in these two cases? Are these differences important in thinking critically about how twitter works and what it does (or what we can do with it)?
(How) does tweeting an event make it more “real”? Does this type of “realness” = authenticity and truth?
Moment Two: Following others’ tweets and the limits of sharing
Joel Johnson writes a blog entry entitled, “Why I Stalk a Sexy Black Woman on Twitter (and why you should too)” for gizmodo. He encourages readers to follow someone on twitter that they wouldn’t encounter in everyday life. In a follow-up post, largely written to respond to intensely negative reaction to his initial post, Johnson writes:
You’ve been on Twitter, haven’t you, @shani_o? It’s a website where people post things they choose to display to the public, including—unless one has a perfect follower-to-follows ratio or a private account—several people you don’t know at all who choose to pay attention to your life, your thoughts, and whatever else you choose to share. Rather than worry that I might be viewed as a sociopath for using Twitter exactly in the way for which it was designed, I choose to instead be excited about all the new people and perspectives that are right at my eyeballs’ fingertips. But that doesn’t mean I want—or am even capable of—becoming fast friends with every single person I observe (or read, or watch, or whatever) on the internet. No one really wants that—except for creepy people.
How are the expressions of our lived experiences valued and/or devalued when presented in twitter-logic (with 140 characters + random followers + the impulse to be witty and “cute” and quick)?
What happens when our authentic/crafted/performed tweets are taken up by others?
What are the dangers and limits of tweeting?
Is Twitter designed in order to “other” people? Does it encourage us to pay attention to each other in ways that are objectifying and oppressive? Can we imagine sharing and expression of self in ways outside of this model? Does twitter allow for that?
A few final questions: Is twitter fundamentally flawed? Is it possible to use it subversively and disobediently (in ways that it was never intended) in order to further our feminist goals? How might we use it in tandem with other methods (a both/and instead of either/or model)? What important conversations about twitter should we have inside and outside of our feminist classrooms?
This blog entry serves as a virtual handout for my contribution to a roundtable at the Midwest Modern Language Association Conference in Chicago on November 5th. I also plan to distribute hard copies of the handout at the actual event.
Sara L. Puotinen (University of Minnesota, puot0002@umn.edu) Using Blogs in the Feminist Classroom
Shifting/reworking/disrupting who counts as an authority or who can produce/share knowledge
Providing students with more ways to engage and express that engagement
Enabling students to learn from each other, enabling instructor to learn from students
Requiring students to claim more responsibility for the class and how it works/doesn’t work
Training students in an important form of technology
Giving the instructor more opportunities to engage with students/material and to share their own research/knowledge in creative ways
Disrupting the rigid boundaries of the classroom in space and time
Encouraging the instructor to experiment with new techniques and strategies
Cultivating a space for public scholarship and for connecting with a wide range of people/communities inside and outside of the class and the university
Some Tips:
Successful blogs require assignments that are more than just offline assignments posted online.
Think about the blog as a location for reading and writing and reflect that in your assignments.
Bring blog entries, comments, and discussions into your offline class sessions.
In order to get students to use the blog, you must make it worth their while.
Spend some time at the beginning of the semester training students on how to use the blog.
Spend a lot of time really thinking through all of the details of your blog assignments.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with new techniques on the blog.
Don’t just assign weekly blog posts to your students that involve responding to your questions.
If you want students to be excited about the blog and take it seriously, you need to too.
Complete at least some of the assignments that you require your students to do.
Blogs work better in the classroom when we read and think more about what kind of teaching/learning practice blogging is (and/or could be).
