Presentation on Research in Art and Design

CURRENT is the Journal of Design at Emily Carr University. Here is a recent discussion between myself and the editors.

Discussion

Dilemmas of Learning and Teaching

In an essay written in 1982, Shoshana Felman described some paradoxical statements made by Socrates and Freud on education and learning. In the context of a discussion on pedagogy, they both talked at different times about the "radical impossibility of teaching." (Felman, 1982: 21) I would like to argue, in some agreement with Felman’s conclusions, that a recognition of the "impossibility" of teaching, enables and encourages the development of new and innovative approaches to pedagogy and learning. (Most of the discussion which follows deals with undergraduate education.) I will also link my discussion of teaching and learning with some comments on the creation of technologically mediated environments for education. My ultimate goal is to enrich the debate on technology and learning by linking innovation in education with the history and theory of classroom practice.

At the root of the claim about the impossibility of teaching is my feeling that learning never progresses along a "simple one-way road from ignorance to knowledge." (Felman, 1982: 27) In addition, teachers cannot fully anticipate the outcome of the processes of communication and interaction with their students unless the learning process is framed by a set of very narrow concerns. The balance between where students have come from and where they are headed is rarely linear and is often not clear. There is a legitimate desire on the part of teachers to structure ideas and values, as well as knowledge and content, for the purposes of presentation and discussion. What must be recognised is the role of "desire" in communication and teaching, as well as the gap between what teachers know and how well they have come to grips with what they don’t know. This profoundly affects the teacher’s capacity to create a site of learning for students. The same problems and potential solutions apply to learners.

As Felman herself suggests, "Ignorance is thus no longer simply opposed to knowledge: it is itself a radical condition, an integral part of the very structure of knowledge." (Felman, 1982: 29) For Freud, and for Socrates, knowledge is only gained through struggle and as a result of the recognition that ideas have an impact because of the dynamic interplay of words and spoken language, interpersonal communications and public discourse. It is their recognition of the importance of speech and of the balancing act between knowing and not knowing that opens up new possibilities for discussion and learning.

Ignorance is about resistance. It is about the desire to think and act in certain ways, most of which are rooted in a conscious refusal to engage with processes of inner reflection. The problem is that some pedagogical strategies try to anticipate what students need to know, as if teachers have already solved their own contradictory relationship with learning. The result is that teachers create (if not imagine) an ideal student and then make judgements about the students who are unable to attain the standards set by their instructional methods. If there is to be some equality of exchange here, then the teacher has to be learning nearly all of the time. This can then set the stage for some linkage and visibility between the foundational assumptions of the instructor and her own past, as well as her own history of learning. This may then return the teacher to a closer understanding of what it means to be a student.

The underlying presumption of most teachers is that students need to learn. There is a moral imperative to this assumption that is often linked to the overall values of a society, even if those values are themselves the site of intense struggle. Ironically, as the age of students at the undergraduate level increases, the question of who knows what drives teachers into using more and more specialised knowledge constructs.

The difficulty is that the need to learn cannot be understood in isolation from actual classroom practice. And the classroom is not necessarily a site of communication and exchange. The more specialised the teacher is, the more likely that the teaching will orient itself towards a power relationship that is results-oriented. But why should students learn in the first place? It seems almost heretical to ask that question. I ask it in the context of institutionalised forms of education that are driven by a complex set of motives, where the student is often not the primary focus. The culture of education has bred a tree of contradictions. Many of the supposed beneficiaries of the educational experience participate because they have to, not because they want to. This combination of resistance and acquiescence is framed by an increasingly complex system of assessment and evaluation. In order to fill the obvious gaps here, institutions rely on survey strategies to find out what is working and what isn’t. If the students are ambivalent about their learning experiences, their capacity, even their need to respond to survey-type questions, will be influenced by a set of impulses that are unlikely to appear in the results. This only further amplifies the difficulties in getting to know what students know.

Bad News, Richard Posner and New Media

Richard Posner, who is a Federal Appeals court Judge as well as Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and an active Blogger, is one of the most prolific writers in the United States. He has a lengthy article in the New York Times Book Review, Sunday, July 31, 2005.

It is a superb piece of writing and a profound analysis of the role that the media play in the everyday lives of the American people. He makes a series of points that I would like to comment on: the proliferation of Blogs means that audiences have more power; that the traditional press has lost a significant percentage of its readership, especially among the generation of twenty to forty-year olds; that the media have become more sensational and polarized along traditional political fault lines of right and left. There is a great deal more in the article, but these three points are central to the Posner’s direction and orientation.

It is interesting the Posner has the stated aim of reviving and enriching public discourse and that he has on numerous occasions commented on the weakening of the role of the public intellectual in American life.

Blogs

The vast majority of Blogs are directed towards a very small readership. They are really more like old style bulletin boards, written sometimes for the pleasure of writing and other times to proclaim allegiance to one or another of the many ideologies that surround us. In general, however, the vast majority of Blogs are private and confessional in orientation. They testify to the everyday experiences that people have, but more importantly Blogs are a sign of the extraordinary importance that Bloggers place on the activities of writing. Ironically, it is the news media, which has highlighted a relatively small number of Blogs and made them the reference point for what is happening in the Blogosphere as a whole. Clearly, publicity is a good thing for those Blogs that receive it. But, for the most part, Blogs are private affairs, diaries that have the potential to be read by a large number of people, but generally are read by family and friends. Are they important? Absolutely. Are they a significant shift in the way the public (which is an amorphous term anyway) sees itself and its neighbors? Yes. Is news being disseminated in a different way because there are now so many people commenting on nearly every aspect of American life? Yes, but here I depart from Posner’s analysis, because my own feeling is that that it is almost impossible to summarize what is being said with the kind of accuracy that is needed to explain and comment upon most Blogs.

Blogs, in my opinion are not about the creation of large communities of interest. They are about communities dividing into smaller and smaller groups with people sharing their interests and concerns through the written word and sometimes through the use of visuals. Blogs reflect and represent something akin to what happens among people when they use the telephone to talk to friends and family. They are about telling stories and more often than not, the stories aren’t that interesting to anyone outside the group. Posner makes a common error in media analysis. He uses the mainstream media themselves as the source for commentary on Blogs. What we need, I believe, is a more historical overview, which links Blogs to nineteenth and twentieth century reading clubs and other organized community based clubs and groups.

Learning from Popoular Culture (2)

Chris makes the following point:
"What strikes me about these debates is that the center seems so western and middle class. I don't think the phrase "popular culture" has any meaning at all and by extraction maybe popular culture itself is meaningless."

This is an interesting point. Popular culture as a term is probably too broad and overly general to mean that much. Nevertheless, from a social and societal point of view, the term has become a "category" that is both provocative and a continual part of debates about the direction in which most cultures are headed. India has a strong base of "popular" cultural activity in film, if the measurement for that — millions of viewers — is acceptable. During my recent visit to Shanghai I was amazed at the proliferation of popular cultural artifacts from Western DVDs to local shows on television many of which were built on soap opera principles. The more profound question is whether people are learning from the experiences that they are having. And, this question needs to be at the center of debates about culture in general. There is a superb article by Joel Garreau in the Washington Post on this debate. It was reprinted in The Vancouver Sun, Saturday, July 16, 2005. This is the link to the Post

Learning from Popular Culture (1)

Steven Johnson's new book Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter popularizes an argument that has been at the core of debates in communications and cultural theory for over thirty years. The argument is that analyses of popular culture cannot be reduced to a simple and uni-dimensional approach. For the most part, the analysis of video games, for example, has focused on their negative effects upon children. There may be some validity to suggestions that young children are not able to discriminate with enough acuity to explore the differences between real life and gameplay. The counter argument is that a great deal of what we describe as play among children is filled with violence and aggressive behaviour. In general, and Johnson makes the same mistake, it is difficult to come to conclusions about the impact of the media both on children and adults.

It would take a long and detailed empirical study not of the behaviour of individuals, but of their reactions to the experiences of engaging with popular cultural artifacts. Note the two words, reactions and experiences. How long does it take you to articulate your reactions to a television show or to a film? Furthermore, which part of your discourse reveals the truths about what you are saying? The complexities of analysis and reflection surrounding these issues are rarely dealt with in the popular media. Rather, in a lovely irony, the popular media generally trash their own activities pointing to the dangers and never analysing the audiences they make claims about other than through the most primitive of survey tools. I would argue that we know very little about the impact of the media and popular culture and I therefore welcome Johnson's intervention in the debate. As with any analysis, it would take more than a simple set of generalized assumptions to really investigate what happens when viewers engage with various aspects of popular culture. In any case, popular culture is not a monolith. There are as many counter-arguments as there are arguments about its value and relationship to everyday life.

Part Two…