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gender bias: (yet) another reason to worry about MOOCs

Jan 28th, 13 / 0 Comments

Image source: http://cogdogblog.com/2012/07/17/mooc-hysertia/

You may have heard that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are going to revolutionize and/or destroy higher education as we know it. A MOOC, in case you need a quick primer, is a free online course, generally offered through a university or through one of a small handful of educational technology companies (Coursera, Udacity, and edX are the most prominent these days). The goal of the MOOC model is to open up education–to make it possible for unprecedented numbers of people to gain access to college-level knowledge. As a recent New York Times article notes,

The shimmery hope is that free courses can bring the best education in the world to the most remote corners of the planet, help people in their careers, and expand intellectual and personal networks.

Of course, not everyone is quite so enamored with the MOOC model. Media scholar Douglas Rushkoff, for example, worries that the MOOC craze reduces education to the mere acquisition of skills. Rushkoff explains:

For pure knowledge acquisition, it’s hard to argue against [an increased emphasis on online learning models], especially in an era that doesn’t prioritize enrichment for its own sake. But it would be a mistake to conclude that online courses fulfill the same role in a person’s life as a college education, just as it would be an error to equate four years of high school with some online study and a GED exam.

Rushkoff’s view has its own problems: For one thing, it assumes that the goal of a college education is, and should be, less about credentialing workers and more about crafting people. Which is fine–except that the “crafting people” model has baked right into it a set of assumptions about what makes a “good” and “educated” person, and it turns out that these assumptions align pretty closely with Eurocentric, masculinist, and middle class ideals. Which is fine, unless you don’t happen to believe that those ideals are necessarily the ones we should want to bake right into our people.

Still, Rushkoff’s point is worth considering. What does it mean to embrace a higher education model that emphasizes knowledge acquisition over acculturation, that emphasizes quantity (thousands, perhaps millions of students learning about science and math and business and writing!) over quality (very little interaction with instructors, and sometimes very little interaction with classmates!)?

Here’s another reason to worry: Recent evidence suggests a deep gender disparity in who teaches MOOCs. Lisa Martin and Barbara Walter explain in an LA Times op-ed that the vast majority of MOOC classes are developed and taught by men–even when the classes are in more woman-heavy areas like the humanities. They explain:

One consortium, Coursera, offered 205 courses with named instructors at one point this month. Only 34 are taught by female instructors; 157 are taught by male instructors; the remaining 14 courses are taught by groups of both men and women. Even in fields in which women are a majority of doctoral recipients and recent faculty hires, such as the humanities, the vast majority (72%) of classes at Coursera are taught by men. Udacity, another major provider of MOOCs, has almost no women as sole or lead instructors in its course offerings.

The gender disparity becomes even more obvious when we look at individual universities. At Princeton, for example, 33% of the permanent faculty members on campus are female, yet none of the courses offered by Princeton through Coursera are taught by women. At the University of Pennsylvania, women on campus also represent 33% of the faculty, but they teach only 12.5% of the courses offered through Coursera. Only MOOCs offered by Stanford, which has 25% female faculty, come close to a representative level.

The authors note that since the selection process for MOOC course instruction is generally fairly opaque, it’s difficult to decipher exactly why MOOC instructors are predominantly male. They point out, however, that

it surely can’t be because women don’t want to take advantage of this exciting opportunity and the potential resources that might flow from it. And it does not appear that women are under-represented because MOOCs are choosing only the oldest and most established professors, most of whom are male. The ages of the instructors range from fairly new PhDs through long-tenured professors.

My view, as a reformed Open Education evangelist, is that there are three main reasons for the gender disparity described above. First, the MOOC model is an offshoot of the broader open education movement, which has roots in the open source software movement, which has a long and storied history of gender bias, sexism, and exclusionary practices. Although the OpenEd movement is working hard on the “gender problem,” it’s not easy to shake free of all that yucky history.

Second, the MOOC model, with its reliance on lectures and content delivery, is misaligned to certain pedagogical approaches. If you embrace a feminist pedagogy, if you favor culturally relevant pedagogy, if you believe good teaching requires responsiveness and flexibility and an effort to come to mutual understanding in collaboration with your students, then you may consider the MOOC to be incompatible with your epistemological commitments. This is not to say, mind you, that no MOOC could ever be taught using one of the above approaches–I’m sure that some instructor, somewhere, has found a way to shape a MOOC to fit these and similar commitments. It’s only to say that developing a MOOC gets harder the farther you get from the “traditional” lecture-based approach to instruction.

Which leads me to my third point: the MOOC model doesn’t really help female faculty all that much. Let’s say you’re a female-bodied university professor–which, by the way, means you overcame some odds: Although women make up nearly 60% of all college undergraduates, they’re far less likely than are their male peers to begin a doctoral program and far less likely to earn their Ph.D. Women are also less likely to secure faculty positions at top-tier universities like Stanford and Princeton and MIT and the University of Pennsylvania–which are among the most prominent proponents of the MOOC model.

Ok, so you’re a female-bodied university professor at one of those universities. You know you’re going to have to fight harder than your male colleagues to earn tenure. Your students are probably going to give you lower evaluations than they give your male colleagues. And teaching a MOOC, while it may be an intriguing project, is probably not going to help you overcome these obstacles. So why would you bother?

The MOOC model has been embraced as a potential equalizer, as a way to confront educational inequity on a global scale. I don’t disagree in theory with this–making more information available to more people has to be viewed as an important project. In practice, however, MOOCs are still very much part of the broken system they purport to fix.

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Jenna McWilliams: still not a seminal thinker

Sep 12th, 12 / 0 Comments

Almost three years ago I explained why I hate the words ‘seminal’ and ‘disseminate.’ Here’s the explanation, in brief:

Both words come from the latin root seminalis, or seed, from which we also get the word semen.

Now: seminal, disseminate, semen. All linked to the notion of the seed, the germination of all things that can grow: the sowing of ideas, of genes, of the next generation of people, texts, and theories. The terms, though we may not think of it in daily use, are innately masculine–innately male. A seminal idea is one that has taken root, has grown, has spread; it engenders offspring in which we can see (genetic) elements of the initial idea, text, or approach. There’s not even a feminine equivalent. What would we say? He’s an ovulant thinker in his field?

As a female scholar, I resent the notion that my ideas may, if I’m lucky, be likened to the very masculine process of impregnation. I resent the paradigm that leads us to consider seminal ideas that allow other thinkers to bear fruit.

Since that post, I’ve made some headway in convincing some members of my scholarly circle to either replace those words with the dozens of alternatives provided within the English language, or to use those words but be aware of the way they sound to some Alert Feminist Readers.

At the same time, I’m still finding myself in conversation with people who think I’m a) overreacting, b) looking for something that’s not there, or c) being overly simplistic in my analysis of these terms. Lately this issue has taken on fresh meaning for me, since I’m studying for my qualifying exams and the word seminal, in particular, keeps rearing its ugly head.

So, at the risk of repeating myself, I want to reiterate my objections to the ongoing use of these terms. This time I’ll do it by outlining some general principles:

1. Cultures simultaneously reflect and reproduce belief systems. These belief systems include ideas about what counts as knowledge, what kinds of behaviors, values, and beliefs are “better” than other kinds, and who gets to be in charge of things like government, schools, law enforcement agencies, universities, and religious institutions, and what sorts of authority we’re going to bestow upon those leaders and the institutions they lead.

2. Language is one key area in which a culture simultaneously reflects and reproduces its belief systems. This includes not only the words that come into use (or fall out of favor) in a culture but also extends into how a language is structured, what sorts of words, metaphors and analogies are available to its users and how words are appropriated and recruited for use in new contexts. For example, in America we use the term “kindergarten” (German for “children’s garden”) to refer to a child’s first year of school because it aligns with our schoolish metaphor of cultivating learners. But “kindergarten” is not a universal term for that first year.

3. Over time, a culture’s vocabulary changes. This is true for a big huge pile of reasons, three of which being that certain words or terms get recognized for limiting our thinking, for being too limited in scope for some new purpose, or for being overtly offensive. For example:

The word meme was first coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, but took off within the last decade to account for the wildfire spread of new cultural products, inside of which were contained new behaviors, values, or ideas. Think honeybadgers, lolcats, someecards.com, and Antoine Dodson. Before the emergence of the internet, there was no need for the widespread use of the word meme, and now there is a need for such a word.

In America, the terms Negro and colored to describe Black people and American Indians to describe Native Americans or First Nations people have long fallen out of favor and are generally viewed as racist.

4. Some words in a culture may reflect yucky aspects of that culture’s belief system. This is so regardless of whether individual speakers of a language are explicitly aware of the connection between that word and its connection to yuckiness. This is why we tell kids to stop saying “that’s so gay” even if they aren’t aware that the phrase is linked to homophobia and heterosexism.

5. Individuals who are part of a nondominant group (i.e., are removed from power by dint of their gender, race, class, physical attributes/abilities, neurologies, or other characteristics) are far more likely to recognize words that reflect yucky beliefs about their group than are individuals who come from dominant groups. For a long time, I used the word “lame” to refer to things I didn’t like. I used “lame” like it was going out of style. As a non-disabled individual, I wasn’t primed to notice on my own that “lame” is a term that is characteristic of ableist language.

6. If an individual from a nondominant group (or an ally who is not part of that group) is able to articulate why she thinks a given term reflects yucky cultural beliefs, the person who has used that term is responsible to either justify continued use of the term or agree to abandon that term.

7. Justifications that do not count as reasonable include:

“But there’s not a better term to replace it with!” (Because if a word reflects yucky cultural beliefs, there’s always a better term, although it may require you to think harder about language than you want to.)
“I think you’re overreacting / seeing something that doesn’t exist / focusing on something that doesn’t matter.” Members of nondominant groups (and their allies) often see things that are not recognized by members of dominant groups. Because dominant groups get to be dominant, they get to spend a lot of time ignoring people who see things differently. That doesn’t make them right; that makes them oblivious. It’s not even necessarily their fault! They’re conditioned to be oblivious by a culture of power whose continued existence relies on nobody questioning the culture of power.

8. Justifications that do count as reasonable include:

{this space intentionally left blank}

9. Because if a term feels yucky to a member of a nondominant group, why in the name of all things awesome would you want to keep using it? Seriously. That makes you part of the problem. And who wants to be part of the problem?

The words seminal and disseminate are yucky to me. Because they are linked to the word semen, and because the word semen is a definitively masculine term with definitively masculine connotations in our culture, they reflect masculinist views of knowledge production and reproduction. Dissemination–the literal spreading of semen, or seed–often happens without consent, and is therefore a matter of physical violence, most commonly perpetrated on women.

Dissemination–the literal as well as the metaphorical ejaculation of semen, or seed–also reflects a heterosexist worldview. If I’m a seminal thinker, that’s because my seeds have germinated–because they were fertilized, and took root, and grew. Because the spreading of seed also requires germination, now we’ve headed into the world of male-female sexual activity. You can tell me the root of the term is botanical, not biological, but you can’t argue that the root word, semen, is more strongly botanical in our culture than it is biological. Which means that in general use, the words semen, seminal, and disseminate are at least more strongly linked to the biological activity of heterocopulation than to the botanical activity of plant reproduction.

Here are some other words you can use. They may require you to think more deeply about what you’re trying to communicate, because each of these words means something slightly different than the others, but that’s what Good Thinkers do anyway!

seminal: critical, crucial, fundamental, important, influential, original, primary, distinctive, distinguished, esteemed, extraordinary, famous, foremost, incomparable, leading, notable, noted, noteworthy, preeminent, prominent, formative, generative, ingenious, innovative, unprecedented, untried, unusual

disseminate: distribute, scatter, broadcast, circulate, diffuse,disperse, promulgate, propagate, publicize, publish, radiate, sow, spread, strew, radiate, bestow, deal out, deliver, devote, disburse, dish out, dispense, mete, communicate, declare, decree, make public, spread, proliferate

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now begins the experiment

Feb 22nd, 12 / 0 Comments

I started teaching college students nine years ago, when I was a graduate student in Colorado State University’s Creative Writing program. After I finished up there, I spent a few years as an adjunct instructor teaching almost any class that any university could offer me. Back then, I had little formal training in the theory and practice of teaching. I mostly went by feel, by what felt successful to my students and to me. By “successful,” I mean to point to activities and classroom language that led to higher engagement, more discussion, more efforts to challenge what the textbooks, what the instructor said was “true.”

Back then, I believe, I was heading toward a classroom pedagogy that treated teaching as a practice of freedom. In Teaching to transgress, bell hooks writes:

Education as the practice of freedom is not just about liberatory knowledge, it’s about a liberatory practice in the classroom. So may of us have critiqued the individual white male scholars who push critical pedagogy yet who do not alter their classroom practices, who assert race, class, and gender privilege without interrogating their conduct.

I don’t know if it’s possible to become a liberatory teacher without sustained research and interrogation of dominant pedagogical practices; that is to say that I don’t know if an adjunct instructor, working effectively in isolation from her teaching community, can engage in a sustained critique and reframing of what it means to learn and teach toward freedom instead of toward submission and repression.

Now I’m teaching again, this time at a Research I institution, in a department that wants its academics to value research over teaching. (While Colorado State University is also a Research I institution, I was not there to get a Research I education; I was learning how to write poetry in an MFA program.) This time around, I have career goals and a plan for myself; my plan includes sustaining enough Awesomeness to snag a job at a Research I institution once I finish up at Indiana University.

This institution does not emphasize teaching as the practice of freedom; in fact, it doesn’t particularly emphasize teaching as something that requires a whole lot of sustained interrogation or time or energy. Which is not to say that individual faculty members at my institution do not value teaching, do not strive to be excellent teachers; only to say that their efforts are the result of a personal desire to teach well, and are not supported by the institution.

You get tenure at a Research I institution by doing good research, not by doing good teaching.

So I’ve taken several steps backward in the movement toward teaching as the practice of freedom. I rely an awful lot on Powerpoint and the lecture; I ask students to rearrange the desks into a discussion circle sometimes, but I don’t insist that we use this structure for a whole lot of discussion. More than once this semester, I’ve asked my students why they do what I say: “Why do you agree to work in small groups when I tell you to?” and “What do you think would happen if you just refused to listen to my lecture today?” But I haven’t required them to speculate with me.

And to tell the truth, I haven’t really wanted my students to speculate with me on these things. I’ve wanted these challenges to be seen as thought experiments, not as real challenges to rethink how they approach learning.

My students are, for the most part, studying to be teachers. Some day, assuming we continue to value teaching and assuming the economy continues its turnaround, my students will be teachers themselves. If I believe in the importance of liberatory pedagogy, if I believe that teachers can and should do better, can and should foment revolution, then the only ethical way to proceed is to attempt to practice this pedagogy in my own classrooms.

Now begins the experiment. I’ll keep you posted.

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mike rose, the mind at work and how academics get working-class credibility

Feb 14th, 12 / 0 Comments

This post is about two recent works by Mike Rose, an educational researcher at UCLA who focuses, as he describes it, low-status places–working-class schools, blue-collar job sites, remedial classrooms–places not privileged by society or, frequently, by the institutions in which they are located” (Rose 2012, p. 2). The two works are:

Rose, M. (2004). The Mind at Work: Valuing the intelligence of the American worker. New York: Penguin.

Rose, M. (2012). Rethinking Remedial Education and the Academic-Vocational Divide. Mind, Culture, and Activity 19(1): 1-16.

I’ve been using The Mind at Work as an anchor text for an undergraduate educational psychology course, and I was just prepping to discuss chapter 4, “the vocabulary of carpentry” as I got distracted scrolling through the xmca listserv in which several members of the listserv were discussing Mike Rose’s article “Rethinking remedial education.

The article starts out with a bang:

What you see depends on where you sit, and for how long. You enter the classroom from the rear, wanting to be discrete on your first visit, and slip into the desk closest to the door. A few students 20 notice you, but most are walking around or leaning over to the person next to them talking. Except for one woman, the class is all men, 20s and 30s, a few White guys, the rest Black and Latino. Hoodies, baggy pants, loud profanity. The teacher is in front at a cloudy overhead projector. Three men are around him—each seems bigger than the next—and they are arguing.

The room is old and dingy, no windows, bare except for the irregular rows of desks, the table 25 with the projector, a cart holding pipes and metal bars, and in the corner a worn flag from the American Welding Society. You’re trying to take it all in when a sullen guy in an oversized T-shirt, a bandanna around his head, walks over to you and asks, “What are you doin’ here?”

Rose explains that “[t]his is an article about perception and ability, about the way beliefs about cognition blend with social characteristics—class, race, gender—to create both instructional responses and institutional structures that limit human development for people already behind the economic eight ball.” We read his opening paragraphs, we get a sense of what this classroom is like, what its students are all about. But, Rose explains, our first impressions are wrong: The surroundings, the foul language, the clothing choices–they belie an effort to develop serious vocational skills. They belie these students’ focus, sense of purpose, and intelligence.

And that guy who wanted to know what you’re doing here? Well, it’s a legitimate question, isn’t it? And everything depends on how you answer it. When it was posed to me, I said I was here to study programs like this one because we need to know more about them to convince our politicians that we need more of them. The man’s features softened, and we moved out into the hallway. “We need programs like this,” he said. “People like us.” “It’s the teacher that really makes a difference,” he continued. “He treats us like we’re people.”

In the chapter from The mind at work that I’m prepping for today’s class, Rose writes: “What testing vocabulary do we have, for example, to discern the making of judgments from the feel of things, or the strategic use of tool and body, or the rhythmic spacing of tasks, or the coordination of effort and material toward the construction of a complex object?”

Certainly the purpose of this book, and of a lot of Mike Rose’s work, is not to show how skills developed through welding, for example, or waitressing or carpentry or what-have-you can help you advance beyond a given vocation. In fact, in the introduction to his excellent book, he gently criticizes a discourse that treats working-class activity as romantic because of its physicality. He writes:

How interesting it is…that our testaments to physical work are so often focused on the values such work exhibits rather than on the thought it requires. It is a subtle but pervasive omission. Yet there is a mind at work in dignity, and values are intimately related to thought and action.

I’ve also been interested to watch how Mike Rose and other scholars focusing on blue-collar work establish their orientation toward blue-collarness–primarily by establishing credibility by pointing to personal experience with blue-collar work. I do this all the time: I say that I grew up in a working-class household. I say that I am public school-educated all the way from kindergarten to graduate degree(s). I say that before I came to academia I was a groundskeeper, a cashier, a phone operator, blah blah blah. This is designed to, perhaps, “prove” I have access to the exotic world of the blue-collar worker, to “prove” I have cachet.

Yet if I were to tell Ray, the pseudonym for the aspiring welder in Mike Rose’s “rethinking remedial education” who asks Rose why he’s in the classroom, about my “working-class credibility,” what do you think he would do? Me, standing there, a white, well educated academic who can choose when to enter his classroom and when to leave, whose livelihood both does not depend on whether I can learn today’s math lesson and rests on the backs of those learners who are trying to do precisely that?

I think it’s far less common for researchers to use their personal backgrounds to “prove” they “understand” research participants who come from more privileged backgrounds–say, students in a gifted and talented program or students completing advanced graduate work. Perhaps researcher credibility does not need to be established in these cases; perhaps its existence is simply understood.

“I used to ______, but now I _________.” When we demonstrate our class-ness, when we offer our personal histories, we assume we’re confessing our relationship to the phenomena of interest. And certainly that’s part of it.

But when we say “I used to _______” or “before I came to academia I _______” are we attempting the opposite of “going native”? Are we actually simultaneously feigning distancing ourselves from academia while in fact embracing it fully? We have the best of intentions, but to what extent do our best intentions serve only to further stigmatize and Other our research participants without actually leaving us with any taint of Other?

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I sit here crocheting: the (genderqueer) female academic

Jan 23rd, 12 / 1 Comment

I’m taking a class this semester called “advanced pedagogy: gender and sexualities.” The class is offered by my university’s Communications and Culture program, and so far it’s less focused on pedagogy than it is on gender and sexualities, which makes it different but not bad.

In fact, the assumptions held by the instructor and students, nearly all of whom have some background in gender studies and/or queer theory, have enabled me to let my hackles settle down a little. A guy gets tired after a while of explaining once again that language both contains and reproduces gender- and sexuality-normative attitudes. A guy gets tired after a while of ignoring the eye rolling and the scoffing–more from the ladies in the room, would you believe it?! than from the gentledudes.

Now I’m reading various opinions about the body of the female academic in the university classroom. It is okay, Joanna Frueh assures me, to inhabit an erotic body. It is okay to wear perfume, fuchsia lipstick, to acknowledge attraction to students. It is even sometimes okay, she assures me, to act on that attraction.

Martin Jay agrees with Frueh that the female academic body is a performance site. Jay tells us that the female academic as performance artist exists in direct opposition to the philosophy that in scholarship, “perfect neutrality” must exist so that objectively “better” ideas can prevail:

The women academic performance artists have contributed to the subversion of this model in several different ways. At times, they have adopted a confessional mode, which seems to say let’s cut through all the crap and speak sincerely from the heart. No more closets, no more subterfuges, they defiantly assert; we’re big girls now with tenure, and we won’t knuckle under to your outmoded rules of civility. Even when you enter the public realm, they remind their audience, you don’t lose your gendered, desiring, ethnically marked bodies and become a disinterested mind.

Of course, this subversion is okay by Martin Jay only insofar as the academic in question is not Camille Paglia, who apparently represents all that is reprehensible in the female academic, since

she betrays an almost clinical need for exhibitionism, which drives her to extremes of freakishness that seem too bad to be true. Combined with a take-no-prisoners willingness to belittle anyone or anything that stands in her way, her tawdry self-exposure has garnered her lots of easy publicity, but virtually no respect. Her pronouncements on such issues as feminism, French theory, or political correctness, for all their glittering packaging, often prove to be about as original and scintillating as those of Phyllis Schlafly. At least Madonna, who is Paglia’s explicit role model, knows how to sing and dance. Hurricane Camille, as she likes to call herself, turns out to be like the many destructive tropical storms: lots of sound and fury surrounding an empty center.

For Jay, then, the female-academic performance must be paired with a mind that is pretty close to the neutral/objective (masculine) ideal. And the mind, housed as it is inside of a female body, is still open for judgments and grand proclamations by men of its “quality” and “substance.” And for Frueh, performance is erotics, and erotics is defined by embrace of gender norms: The female professor has nipples, has breasts, wears perfume. The female professor who lifts weights may, in her embrace of certain traditionally masculine traits, threaten the self-satisfied place that male academics occupy–but only by claiming a female identity (she is sexy! and beautiful if you can learn to re-see!) with a masculine garnish.

What’s a genderqueer biologically female academic to do?

I sit here crocheting. I’m using up my leftover yarn balls to make a pile of winter hats for my friends. My friends are mostly queer. Some are genderqueer. Some are transgendered. Some are gender normative. All get cold in the winter. (This is one of many traits that all bodies share.)

I don’t want my students to stare at my breasts. That turns me into an object for their perusal and besides, I prefer my torso to occupy a genderqueer domain–not quite bound, certainly not shoved up and out in offering to others. “Genderqueer” means you need to rethink what you “know” about gender, about sexuality, about attraction. At the beginning of this academic year, I announced that I was thinking about asking people to start referring to me as “Jake” instead of “Jenna”–but I was utterly unprepared for the smirk around the eyes of some of my classmates. I was utterly unprepared for the way my chosen name sounded dropping off some of my classmates’ tongues. I quickly “changed my mind” and took up “Jenna” again.

Not in my class about pedagogy, gender, and sexuality, though: In that class only, I have asked to be referred to as “Jake.” The only smirk I hear in that class is the echo I bring with me from elsewhere. Yet I wonder how the discussion of the assigned reading “the female academic as performance artist” will go: Am I a “female academic” as defined by Martin Jay, by Joanna Frueh, by others? Do biology and hormone dictate where a person falls in this respect?

Some of my friends have enormous melons–not melons as in breasts but as in heads. I’m trying to make my hats in a range of sizes so everyone can have a hat that fits. Last week for class we read a horribly self-satisfied and embarrassing “ethnography” by Loic Wacquant called Body and Soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. And we watched the boxing film Million Dollar Baby, in which Hillary Swank’s character is forbidden access to formal boxing instruction because she is a girl. Am I a girl? If I express physically my body–in the classroom, at a paper presentation, here on my blog–will I be judged as incomplete, as not enough of a “female”? If I express my body in a way that feels authentic to me (no perfume, no lipstick, no pushup bra–a tie! a collared shirt buttoned all the way up!), will I be judged by Frueh and others as one of “that kind” of female academic–the kind who’s oblivious and happy to de-gender herself in order to align with the masculine norms?

The female academic gets it from both sides–from other female academics and from male academics as well. The female-bodied genderqueer academic gets it…from four sides? Because suddenly not only is sexuality front and center, but so is gender itself–a category that so far in my readings feels taken for granted, overassumed and underexplored. When bell hooks writes about her cluelessness about what to do the first time her teacher’s body had to use the restroom during class, well…at least she knew which restroom she was supposed to use.

Crocheting is about using one’s hands, but typically the hands are used to craft something for the body to wear. I like making hats because they work up fast and take little concentration. And I want there to be some connection I can draw between my crocheting and my struggle to understand and articulate: One is largely intellectual, the other is largely craft. But nothing in my life seems to tie itself up neatly these days. The loose ends just hang there, waiting for someone to weave them in.

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I guess I’ll be submitting proposals for the 2012 AERA Annual Meeting

Jul 13th, 11 / 3 Comments

At the end of my last trip to the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), I decided I no longer wanted to submit proposals or attend the conference. I had lots of reasons, but here are some of the biggest:

The AERA Annual Meeting embraces mainstream (nonthreatening) research. As researcher and activist Jeff Duncan-Andrade pointed out in a session I attended, AERA offered up Diane Ravitch at its opening plenary session. Ravitch, after 30 years of supporting standardized testing and teacher accountability based on test results, recently reversed course and stood up against standardized assessments. “Which is super,” Duncan-Andrade said, but added that Diane Ravitch should be spending the rest of her career in apology to all the kids whose lives she helped to destroy.
The AERA Annual Meeting does not support dissenting or alternative voices. It’s true that lots of individuals and a handful of sessions introduced radical or controversial theories or ideas, but those were drowned out by the plenaries, featured speakers, and sessions designed to promote the general mainstream of educational research.
The AERA Annual Meeting does not effect or result in any significant, lasting change in education.
The AERA Annual Meeting is expensive. Which wouldn’t be a problem if the membership and attendance fees resulted in any significant, lasting change in education. But it doesn’t.

So. Here we are, a mere 9 days before the submission deadline for AERA 2012, and I’m preparing to submit at least four different proposals, and I’m hoping to have at least one accepted so I can go to Vancouver in mid-April. I haven’t changed my mind about any of the points above. So why in the world am I spending so much time and energy on a conference that goes against everything I believe comprises good educational research?

Someone’s gotta be the chainsaw. I know lots of people who feel like I do about AERA, and some of them have chosen to no longer attend. It’s a good decision, choosing not to participate in the AERA circus, and it means those people can spend their energies in far more awesome ways. But we also need people to work on tearing AERA down, and I’m willing to do my best.
Someone’s gotta bring the heat. If accepted, I promise to introduce dissent, to introduce an alternative perspective in my presentations, in my participation as an audience member, and in my attendance at business meetings for the Divisions and SIGs of which I am a member.
Someone’s gotta bring the challenge. I am planning on organizing a protest against the fees and ineffectuality of AERA. Tentatively, I plan to organize attendees to commit to donating the $70-$205 they would spend on registration fees for the Annual Meeting to one or more local educational initiatives. Attendees could announce their participation in this protest by wearing an armband indicating their refusal to pay the registration fee. Let’s say that just 4% of the estimated 13,000 attendees donate their registration fees. That would result in a pool of at least $70,000 to support local initiatives–a drop in the bucket to some, but a much needed income source for others.

What do you think, dudes? Wanna join me in taking a chainsaw to AERA?

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some thoughts on queering DML

Mar 28th, 11 / 9 Comments

I attended the recent Digital Media and Learning Conference, “Designing Learning Futures,” in Long Beach, California. During the conference, something sort of cool happened: It became evident that this year’s conference schedule included exactly zero references to queer studies, queer theory, or queer youth. Yes, there were panels in which participants talked about their work with queer youth, but the panel titles and descriptions lacked any indicators that, yes, this would be a queered conversation.

But that’s not the sort of cool thing! That’s the frustrating thing. The sort of cool thing was that I decided to try to organize an (un)panel to talk about how we might make queer studies work more visible in future DML conferences and in other venues. And…people showed up! They showed up with good ideas! And afterward, they wrote neat things about queering DML! (Check out Fiona Barnett’s post on Queering DML here and her update, including instructions for joining the QueerDML listserv, here. See Alexis Lothian’s summary of the conference at Queer Geek Theory.)

What was most awesome about the unpanel was that it was a largely positive, largely future-directed and goal-focused event. People came, not in anger or frustration, but with a desire to think about strategies for making queer studies-based work more visible at conferences like DML. It took about 5 minutes for everyone to agree that any omission by the conference organizers was not intentional, malicious, or antiqueer–it was probably an accidental oversight, at worst. Anyone who’s spent any time with folks in the field of Digital Media and Learning can figure out right away that this is a field that embraces queer studies and work on queer-focused issues.

So then today I saw danah boyd’s post, “the politics of queering anything,” in which she writes of the DML conference, without explicitly identifying it:

I was one of the program committee members and coordinated three invited sessions. In the wind, I heard that a few folks were disappointed that there were no LGBT-specific panels. The assumption was that queer issues were forgotten. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only did all of the panels that I coordinated have queer-identified panelists on them but they all integrated queer theory into their arguments, whether explicitly or implicitly. I purposely left these issues unmarked in my description of the panels because my goal was to make sure that these issues were integrated seamlessly into a conversation without making identity politics the organizing theme of any of the panels.

First: I’m glad to have confirmed what attendees at the unpanel assumed: That there was no malicious effort to silence queer theorists or queer theories at DML 2011. I attended one of danah’s panels, an invited session called “living a networked public life.” One of the panelists in this session, Mary Gray, also attended the queering DML unpanel and spoke of her surprise at the absence of “queer” in the conference program and suggested we consider strategies for making this work more visible beyond the field of DML and into more “traditional” (read: normative) fields and conference venues.

Second: I want to address what boyd explains is an intentional effort to “unmark” queer theory or queer studies. She further explains her belief that

if you want to get a message across, it’s important to recognize people’s anxieties and discomforts at face value and try to present information to them in a way that’s palatable and embraceable. Let them understand through a set of language that they can recognize instead of alienating them with language that terrifies them.

This form of “selling out” is bound to piss off anyone who believes that failing to mark queerness is a sign of weakness, a form of re-closeting, a way of undermining queer experiences, etc. I can totally hear and respect that. But I’m a pragmatist. And I’m more than willing to “sell out” if it means that I can get more people to understand why the core tenets of queer theory can help them understand structural inequality and systematic marginalization. I’m willing to let that go unmarked if doing so helps.

I understand the ‘pragmatism’ argument–I really do. It’s an argument that characterizes just about every social movement; we’ve seen it in, for example, every wave of the feminist movement, the American movement for black (and Native American, and immigrant) civil rights, and the gay civil rights movement.

It’s also an argument that doesn’t hold much truck with me. We must remember that ‘pragmatists’ depend for their livelihood on ‘radicals’–by definition, pragmatist stances are less extreme than alternate stances, and pragmatism gets to position itself somewhere in between the most and least radical stances. The term ‘pragmatic’ is also politically problematic, since it’s typically used oppositionally, to mark other stances as too radical (and, therefore, unpalatable or unfeasible).

Further, I do worry, as danah suggests, that leaving the queer unmarked has the effect of silencing queer studies work. Certainly Mary Gray has no problem having the word “queer” associated with her work (her most recent book is called OUT IN THE COUNTRY: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America). I imagine other queer-focused panelists feel perfectly happy marking their work with queer keywords. It’s not clear whether Gray or other panelists specifically requested to include those keywords in their panel descriptions, but if they were not given the option to decide for themselves how to mark their work, the effect is to enforce silence where it is not necessarily desired.

The other problem is one of invisible intent. In the end, for audience members and panelists, there’s really no effective way to tell whether identity politics are being addressed in a ‘pragmatic’ way, or whether they’re not being addressed in any way at all. I find that to be a problem, and I sure do hope to continue this conversation as the group of queer (and queer-focused) academics and allies that formed around and after the unpanel continue to consider strategies for making these issues more public, more publicly discussed, and more publicly accessible.

I simply can’t believe that DML attendees would be opposed to identity politics and queer studies issues addressed explicitly. If there’s any arena where this scholarship would, should, and could be embraced, it’s there. And if we have to worry about whether DML folks will be hostile to queer theorists and the issues of queer youth, then we have a bigger problem than any form of ‘pragmatism’ can address.

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just in case you were considering becoming a college professor

Mar 27th, 11 / 0 Comments

via MinnieMouse1224.

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why educational researchers like holiday gatherings

Nov 30th, 10 / 0 Comments

hint: because they don’t have to get IRB approval.

Some people spend Thanksgiving weekend in a tryptophanic daze. Some people spend it in a Black Friday frenzy, followed by a Cyber Monday mania.

I spent Thanksgiving weekend testing out my niece’s Zone of Proximal Development.

The Zone of Proximal Development, or zpd (or zo-ped), is a concept developed by the Russian learning theorist LS Vygotsky. In brief, the zpd is the distance between what a child is developmentally capable of doing on her own and what she can do with assistance.

Here’s an example. My niece, Morgan, who’s 15 months old, was playing with a plastic carrot and a square of fabric. Her grandma suggested she could make a hot dog out of these two items! Which she immediately wanted to do! Except that she couldn’t quite figure out how to do it:

So Grandma stepped in and helped Morgan’s hands make the fabric roll around the carrot:

Then Morgan was able to eat the hot dog!

The next day, Grandma gave Morgan the carrot and the fabric and said “Can you roll the carrot up?” And Morgan did it, all by herself!

The Zone of Proximal Development: Morgan knew she could make a hot dog out of a plastic carrot and a square of fabric, but her little hands didn’t know how to do it. The distance between that and her grandma helping her make the hot dog: That’s the zpd. That’s where all learning happens, according to Vygotsky: What Morgan could do with assistance on Saturday she was able to do by herself on Sunday.

This is a powerful idea, in case you were wondering, because it directly contradicted the prevailing wisdom of the time. Whereas other theorists assumed that development came before learning (that a child has to be developmentally capable of doing something new before being able to learn it), Vygotsky argued that learning comes before development (that a child has to be given an opportunity to do something new, with assistance, before she can be developmentally capable of doing it on her own).

Here’s another example: I taught Morgan to say “pie.” I showed her the pumpkin pie and said, “Morgan, oooooh! This is pie! Ooooooh! Can you say ‘pie’?” And I did it enough times that she figured she’d better just say ‘pie’ so I’d stop shoving it in her face and give her a piece. So eventually, I held the pie out and said, “Morgan, what’s this?” And she would say “pie.” (Actually, it came out sounding more like “puhayyyhhhhhhh.”)

So far so good. Except then I wanted to see if she really knew what pie was. So I did this:

Me: *holds lemon meringue pie* Morgan, what’s this?

Morgan: puhayyyhhhhhhh.

Me: That’s right! It’s pie! *holds empty paper plate* What’s this?

Morgan: puhayyyhhhhhhh.

Me: *points to Grandma* Morgan, who’s this?

Morgan: puhayyyhhhhhhh.

So that was awesome.

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