Lesson Spotted: Blog News

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Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Enough About Me: Deformalizing and Deformatting

In the past year, I've been thinking a lot about ways to present information-- the ways we often present it, as lectures and conversations; the ways that we have had to adapt those formats to new modalities, as asynchronous lectures and Zoom meetings; and recently, the way in which some of those formats have started to feel like preferable defaults (our Zoom work meetings, especially within my functional team, are always both delightful and productive). I've dabbled in writing interactive fiction/texts for both personal and professional projects. And, I've grown more and more frustrated with many of the lessons I had absorbed about what kind of work is worth creating. [[So what does that have to do with what's going on here?]]

Glad you asked, thanks. As my interests change, so too does this blog shift, as I'm sure you have noticed by now. Although its goal of connecting teaching to everyday life has remained constant, the material that it uses to do that has shifted. [[How so?]] [[Ok, I get that. Continue.]]

At first, despite the fact that blogs were absolutely past their prime, I started this blog because it represented an uninvasive way to catch up current and former students on connections to classes that I was seeing as I traveled, worked, and just generally lived in the world. There are so many connections between what I've taught about history, pedagogy, and school/work skills in classes and what surrounds us in public space and popular culture, and I had a hard time taking a picture of an <a href="http://lesson-spotted.blogspot.com/2017/10/reacting-to-reacting-first-church-in.html" target="_blank">evocative plaque</a> or a <a href="http://lesson-spotted.blogspot.com/2018/01/reacting-to-reacting-taking-greenwich.html" target="_blank">commemorative garden</a> and not being able to share the experience with the students that these places reminded me of. [[What about after that?]] [[What is it now?]]

So, in short, Lesson Spotted as a whole follows the weaving line of my interests. (Much as a text like this, which invites you to click the parts that interest you and skip the ones that don't, follows the weaving line of yours.) And at the moment, perhaps because of where I'm at in my own life and career, I'm particularly interested in how-- no matter what level or subject we are teaching-- we can foster students' ability to think through things in ways that break down our and their customary methods of approach. [[When did you start thinking about this?]] [[Why are you thinking about this now?]] [[Ok, so the blog follows the weaving line of your interests, gotcha.]]

I've also used the blog as a repository for my teaching content--activities, materials, and ideas I've used directly in classes. I have been surprised how useful it's been to be able to search the site when someone has asked me about how I used a text or when I couldn't remember how I framed instructions for an activity. I wrote <a href="http://lesson-spotted.blogspot.com/search/label/Plug%20and%20Play" target="_blank">many of these posts</a> during the middle period of the blog, especially when I returned from my research year and taught courses again. [[What is it now?]] [[Ok, I get that. Continue.]]

More recently, after I began devoting more attention to developing my understanding of how teaching and learning works and what strategies various disciplines use to accomplish it, my posts have focused on <a href="http://lesson-spotted.blogspot.com/search/label/Pedagogical%20Possibilities" target="_blank">broader issues of pedagogy</a>. [[Ok, I get that. Continue.]]

Thanks for asking, I love that you're wondering about this. So this has been on my mind for a long time, but every time I reflect on this it seems like all my thoughts on it before were <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_a_Glass_Darkly" target="_blank">through a glass, darkly</a>-- that is, that I understand the complexity and value and implications of the idea of breaking down regular patterns of thought and ways of doing things more every time I look at the issue. [[Can you give me an example?]] [[Why are you thinking about this now?]] [[Ok, so the blog follows the weaving line of your interests, gotcha.]]

Honestly, one of the reasons this post exists in this format is because thinking about writing anything resembling my usual blog post was giving me a huge sense of dread. Nothing about the process of drafting a static text was appealing to me, and when I thought about what I <i>really</i> wanted to do, the answer was creating something like this. [[When did you start thinking about this?]] [[Ok, so the blog follows the weaving line of your interests, gotcha.]]

Exactly, and the weaving, absolutely meandering line of my thought process, though I do try and corral it mostly in the hopes of making it more understandable/less self-indulgent. In any case, I've felt bad about this fact before, wondering if I should be adhering to some sort of more principled way of creating posts. Some of my favorite blogs are pretty darn consistent in the content they create, sedate solids; I, a gas, set the loosest of parameters and expand to fill each corner of them, when I'm not condensating into a liquid which puddles on the floor of my container. {reveal link: 'What?', text: '(Long, long ago, I used to know about <a href="https://www.ibo.org/programmes/diploma-programme/curriculum/sciences/chemistry/" target="_blank">four-sevenths of what I should have about chemistry</a>, although I have always retained a fondness for the states of matter.)'} [[Let's hear more about this high-school chemistry class.]] [[Let's weave that line of interest back to the point.]]

The progression has been something like this: At one point, I was really passionate about the idea of getting students to think historically and break out of the ways of seeing history that they were used to. This informed a lot of my approach, and some of the <a href="http://lesson-spotted.blogspot.com/2018/08/current-project-fictionalizing-west-of.html" target="_blank"> more useful activities and assessments</a> I devised stemmed from this goal. {reveal link: 'Mmm hmm', passage: 'Example 2'}.

One, it makes it feel more like a conversation-- to say something, and to think about what you might say, and respond to it. {reveal link: 'Makes sense', passage: 'Reason 2'}.

I still think this is a great and useful thing! But I've also realized that historical thinkers themselves are also often in need of a shakeup, and I began routing my thinking more toward how, pedagogically, it's actually really useful for teachers of anything to take a moment to <a href="http://lesson-spotted.blogspot.com/2020/11/pedagogical-possibilities-teachers-and.html" target="_blank">consider how they learn</a>, and how other teachers are teaching things, and especially how other teachers who are teaching our students might be using terms, explaining concepts, and articulating what it is to think, learn, and create, as these strategies are informing every bit of interpretation that they do of our own content. I'm hoping to expand this last notion into a longer post of its own at some point. {reveal link: 'Mmm hmm', passage: 'Example 3'}

But today, I'm thinking of a third way of shaking up how we think about things, and that's as part of the creative or learning process. For me of late, it's been more rewarding and more creatively fruitful to write something geared for interactivity, for a couple of reasons. [[What reasons?]] [[Ok, so the blog follows the weaving line of your interests, gotcha.]]

Two, it makes it easier for me to realize what lines of thought that might come from someone listening to what I'm thinking-- the questions they might ask make me consider more factors to explore, and consider angles I might not have otherwise. {reveal link: 'Makes sense', passage: 'Reason 3'}

Three, it helps me organize somewhat sprawling thoughts in a rational way. When I'm talking I often reach an idea crossroads, where there are multiple avenues I'd like to go down and talk about but physically cannot talk about them all at once. In writing, this can be one of the more challenging elements-- English writing as it is usually presented can be so aggressively linear, and if you have a paragraph about this and a page about that it can take a lot to make that make sense to a reader. Interactive text encourages branching and emphasizes to the reader the trajectory of thought, and helps them go back to previous sections to learn the breadth and depth of the threads stringing off from the beginning. {reveal link: 'With you so far', passage: 'Reason 4'}

Four, whether you write an interactive text in Twine or in a parser-based tool like Inform, you have to take it a little at a time, and you can see that progression so clearly. If you implement a chair in Inform, there is a whole chair that wasn't there before-- even if there is no story yet, you have created a chair. In Twine, if you make a passage, a very gratifying box appears, and if you link it to a new passage, another one appears with a nice arrow showing their connection. Where there was nothing, now something exists. It's a very visceral representation of <a href="http://hhh.gavilan.edu/ecrook/1A.fall.2005/Lamott.htm" target="_blank">Anne Lamott's picture frame trick</a>. [[Why are you thinking about this now?]] [[Ok, so the blog follows the weaving line of your interests, gotcha.]]

I was not good at chemistry, everyone! I liked a lot of it, but I was not good at it. I squeaked by. But it's the class I think about the most now! I only got rid of my study guide for that class about a month ago, and it was a sorrowful parting. But I digress. [[Let's weave that line of interest back to the point.]]

Point being, one of the things I want to think about is how powerful deformalizing both learning and creative processes can be; to embrace a spirit of tinkering when we are engaging in both. [[How do you think we can deformalize learning processes?]] [[How do you think we can deformalize creative processes?]]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the key example that I think of in this respect comes from my own discipline. History courses, in my experience, frequently find ways to take the joy from the practice of history for novices. Looking at primary sources-- things created in a period of the past under study in the course-- can be incredibly engaging; two of my favorite examples are the often taught <a href="https://www.facinghistory.org/reconstruction-era/letter-jourdon-anderson-freedman-writes-former-master" target="_blank">Jourdan Anderson letter</a> and this <a href="https://twitter.com/TheAncientWorld/status/1432129264426512385" target="_blank">recently tweeted tablet about a sesame field</a>. {reveal link: 'These are so cool! How can you take the joy from something like this?', passage: 'Process 2'}

It's been transformative for me to realize that my process works well for me and doesn't need to be ironed into a different one. This has not been an easy thing to realize, as looking back it seems as though many people have taken a vested interest in convincing me that my processes were all wrong-- whatever they were! Multiple times, I confided in someone that I had found a process that worked for me, only for them to offer suggestions on how to change it-- which then, naturally, made me second-guess the process. I note that not to complain (although, sure, I like to do that too), but to say that there's huge, huge power in stepping back from advice about serious writing, research, productivity practices and opening doors to tinkering. Asking learners to create a narrative in a different format than your field normally uses-- talking through a concept aloud instead of writing a summary or a proof, or representing a complicated social relationship in images or diagrams. Or, sure, making an interactive or branching narrative, tracing all the different threads through which their mind traveled when they considered the topic. [[Huh. Okay, makes sense.]] [[Tell me about the learning thing now.|How do you think we can deformalize learning processes?]] [[I'm not sure I get this, or like it.]]

Don't get me wrong, we've gotta get to the analysis beyond the personal! But one thing I have been trying to do whenever I try and teach someone something or show them something new is to leave time for initial reactions and meandering; to have a plan for where we'll get but leave time to stop at the roadside attractions along the way. In short, to not squelch that joy that people can have about a topic even before they learn much about it by demanding that they immediately engage with it in the way I think is best. [[Huh. Okay, makes sense.]] [[Tell me about the creative thing now.|How do you think we can deformalize creative processes?]] [[I'm not sure I get this, or like it.]]

Great! I hope this conversation was an enjoyable for you as it was for me-- an attempt, as I'm sure you can guess, to practice what I'm preaching a little bit. Feel free to restart and make some different choices (although I tried to make it easy to see everything in one go, if you wanted to). {back link} {restart link}

That's okay! I welcome your reaching out to me for followup in the comments or at my handily-located contact information on the right side of the blog. I hope this conversation was an enjoyable for you as it was for me-- an attempt, as I'm sure you can guess, to practice what I'm preaching a little bit. Feel free to restart and make some different choices (although I tried to make it easy to see everything in one go, if you wanted to). {back link} {restart link}

Well, sometimes we introduce the source and immediately direct conversation about it to the aspects we think are most relevant; we ask students to jump beyond what's interesting to them about the piece into what is interesting to a particular group of scholars who they have little knowledge of. {reveal link: 'Huh. So why do teachers of history do this?', passage: 'Process 3'}

It absolutely stems from very real considerations about good practice-- of course you want students to contextualize sources, to understand why they might matter and why they might not reflect the whole of a society or an experience. And yet so often this emphasis on thinking historically about these sources also belies the way that students just starting out in the discipline have absolutely no way to do this task. We would not say that reading one book on a topic would prepare us to make arguments about the place of a source within it, but because of the limitations of class workloads that is often what we ask students to do-- and then, we become frustrated when they make overly sweeping claims that do not comport with other things we know about the topic. [[So what the heck do we do about it?]]