A quick post to play with Haiku Deck embedding in WordPress. I have been appreciating this app for presentation design and I like the idea of creating a PowerPoint to talk about why PowerPoint kinda sucks.
This is for a technology seminar for Graduate Teaching Assistants this afternoon.
Over the weekend I watch the extended music-video-quasi-art-thing Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film. I would argue it’s one of those three nouns: a performance. And while I think Jay Z has been making strong efforts at pushing himself and the hip-hop genre into loftier domains, I think Picasso Baby is representative of what’s wrong with his strategy.
The daylong project is essentially replicating Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist Is Present” installation but with, like, music and dancing and hoots and hollers. However, the attempt feels more like a bastadization of Abramovic’s work than a transformation.
Abramovic’s work (watch this for a short primer) presented a moment of interaction as a gift and built upon it. (And she made a lot of people cry in doing so.) Jay Z? Not so much. Instead of Picasso Baby being about individuals getting these one-on-one moments of reflection with an artist, the film represents the moment as something closer to worship. Abramovic’s work was (to me) about that interaction between two people. A mutual exchange that felt like it changed both participants. Jay Z on the other hand simply reinforces hip-hop swagger in a new space–a whiter space (both in terms of color aesthetic and in terms of racial representation).
This is media spectacle for the sake of spectacle. Aside from Jay and a bunch of hipster-approved celebrities, the most apparent things in the film are the presence of cameras and the absolutely bonkers responses from fans.
How do we read this?
The film highlights two young men of color yelling, “Brooklyn’s in the house.” Does this give street cred for an artist in an otherwise exclusionary space from his past audience? Is it, instead an invitation into art spaces urban youth may not see as welcoming? Or is Jay Z leaving behind this audience? The design aesthetics of Magna Carta Holy Grail and Watch the Throne were an artsy move that could, for instance, be interpreted as a step toward even bigger hip-hop bravado.
At one point in the film a fan looks at the camera, addressing Jay Z and says, “You make yourself art. That’s amazing.”
But this is the distant art of an artist out of touch.
Among the things Jay has garnered headlines for over the past months–the sad breakup with his hyphen, the debut of his album art next to the actual Magna Carta–there was a problematic statement he made: responding to a quote from Harry Belafonte about social responsibility, Jay Z said, “my presence is charity. Just who I am.”
So there’s that.
And Picasso Baby reinforces this dangerous belief in Jay’s charity. It’s a dangerous pathway for young people to encounter in an otherwise looser culture of fandom today. While I see Jay Z trying to build on the momentum and hype of a new album, I don’t think this is the approach that creates healthy networks amongst fans. It only offers a singular pathway of idol-worship.
[Note: There is a rant to be made – and likely made ad nauseum elsewhere on the internets – about Kanye and Jay and the two roads diverging on a diamond-studded path. I would say Kanye is just as confounding in his Yeezus-like direction. He isolates audiences across the board and more directly challenges the direction a continually maturing genre is headed. I would also add that the lead up to Yeezus was a masterful example of transmedia marketing in 2013 that educators could directly crib within the classroom. That’s another post for another day.]
In mid-July I found out that several colleagues and I received a Project:Connect reward as part of the 5th Digital Media and Learning Competition.
The daylong event that we are hosting as a result of this reward is taking place on August 8th on the Colorado State University campus, here in Fort Collins. This is a daylong event for students, teachers, and families called “Making Equity.” If you are reading this and have the means of getting to FoCo on the 10th, we would love to have you participate in our day of making. The event is from 9am-4:30 (registration at 8:30).
The “Making Equity” event is connected to the Saving Our Stories project–a summer program that the CSU Writing Project offered to help local ELL kids “save the stories” of the Fort Collins Latino community. Some activities that day will include making cardboard cities, book sculptures, quilts out of foam squares, computer games, Ipad stories, tweets, and more.
In the afternoon there will also be professional development breakout groups to help teachers learn how to incorporate making activities with an equity focus in their classrooms. If you are in contact with any teachers, please let them know we will have PD certifications of participation for attending the breakout sessions. Speakers from the National Writing Project, will be flying in for this event and helping facilitate these sessions.
This event is free to all and includes breakfast muffins and pizza and cookies for lunch.
For more info please download this poster or visit our information page. Please help us spread the word, and we hope to see you there!
Sometimes when listening to the echoes of history, breezes from the past are fully felt in the present. (Kirkland, 2013, p. 26)
It was difficult waking up this morning, sipping on coffee, and diving back into David E. Kirkland’s book, A search Past Silence: The Literacy of Young Black Men. I’d ranted earlier in the week to friends about how beautifully written and powerful this book felt.
Reading the narrative of Derrick and Shawn, their cypha, and the ways these young Black men “shattered silence with words” (p. 25), Kirkland’s work sings with an honesty and vibrancy that is often lacking in the academic texts I read. This morning, this was a book that felt particularly prescient in light of the verdict reached in Florida last night.
Picking up where I left off, the first passage I read was:
According to most historical accounts, Black people, through the transnational commerce of Black bodies, were plucked from land and torn from language, parsed into postures of difference, sometimes literally chained to a procession of individuals who lived life and spoke language much differently than they. (p. 58)
—
I am trying to cobble together understanding. All I have are snapshots as clues for reconciliation.
Snapshot:
My social networks are trickling with rage, anger, and sadness. These digital tools are being tapped for in-the-flesh protest, action, and meeting to share bitterness and heartbreak. It’s a cycle that happens all too frequently and I have nothing new to add to the tide of disappointment and anger that carries me along today.
Snapshot:
In our CEE presentation yesterday, Cindy O’Donnell-Allen and I discussed how we framed Bob Fecho’s concept of “wobble” in our preservice teacher courses. One attendee of our session pointed out that when it comes to white privilege we are always wobbling; to not “wobble” with white privilege is white privilege.
Snapshot:
On Friday, Ally and I went down to Denver and saw the Hot 8 Brass Band. The venue was hot, half-empty, and the band seemed tired on this, the last night of their tour before heading back to New Orleans. At one point the band asked the audience to hold up a peace sign in memory of the many fallen Black men that are victims from unnecessary violence in America. The group listed a litany of names of men who died violently because of their race. Each name added to a list too, too long. As if in anguish, trumpet player Terrell “Burger” Batiste screamed “Trayvon!” as his bandmates continued the song. Batiste, who lost both of his legs when hit by a car in 2006, and his seven bandmates were some of the only faces of color Ally and I saw that night. I remember wondering what my fellow concert-goers were thinking and if they, too, were reflecting on race and violence and privilege in the sweltering club in Denver’s wealthy Cherry Creek area on a Friday night.
Snapshot:
I’m finding it difficult to parse the news and feelings of an unsurprising verdict with the work I do. Writing and thinking, lately, about young adult books (and their lack of historically marginalized protagonists) and games and “play,” the immediacy of racialized life in America feels distant. And yet, I think about the exasperation with which some of my students convey when I discuss race in a literature course or a class on teaching reading or a workshop on the uses of technology. I think about how I will honor the memory of Trayvon in these spaces in my own “search past silence.”
First of all if you are heading to Nerd Mecca AKA the San Diego Comic-Con in the coming weeks, please stop by room 26AB. In there you will find the Comic-Arts Conference, an academic space to discuss and share findings related to comics. Peter Carlson and I will be presenting findings from a forthcoming paper about academic literacy scaffolding and comics.
When not trolling 26AB, I will probably be waiting in lines at Comic-Con. It’s been a few years since I’ve been, but that’s what you still do there, right? Actually, I’ll probably be looking for folks running Pathfinder, D&Dnext, Savage Worlds, and 13th Age. If none of those sound familiar to you, welcome to the diverse fan-driven world of role playing games (RPGs). For the next year or so, I’ll be looking at role playing game spaces when it becomes (somewhat) untangled from the clicking and typing of online videogame play. I suspect the robust research in that space is sustaining educator interest in videogames, but the origins of games like World Of Warcraft are still very much alive as their own space. Though I plan to explore some of my ideas about aspects of RPGs on this blog in the future, for now I would point other would-be interested literacy folks to this lengthy tome. Jon Peterson’s exhaustively long book details the history of the nascent days of the first RPG: Dungeons and Dragons. Yep, RPGs are a staunchly American tradition and one that is based on non-digital remix and feedback loops in gaming communities. This history of remix is not only still alive and well, but in some ways even more encouraged due to the industry’s Open Game License (which I read as a Creative Commons-like license for expanding popular gaming systems). A lot more to say about this in the future, but for now if you’re interested in playing in person (in Fort Collins or at SDCC) or online (there are a lot of user-friendly VTTs – Virtual Tabletops) I’d be happy if you helped learn with me.
Last week Ally and I were at the American Library Association’s annual conference in Chicago. I appreciated the artist alley there. That no one was in line to meet folks like Paul Pope, Jeffrey Brown, or Matt Kindt was pretty interesting compared to the craziness those three industry stalwarts will face in San Diego. I was thrilled to get to pick Matt Kindt’s brain about his work. The top picture is Kindt showing a small group of conference-goers his pencil, ink, and painting process for his ongoing series Mind MGMT.
Next week I will be at the NCTE Conference on English Education, conveniently located in my new hometown, Fort Collins, CO. If you will be in town for this conference, please send me a note and say hello.
My CSU colleague, Cindy O’Donnell-Allen and I will be holding a workshop at the conference focused on our recent work in our English Education courses. The session is titled “Pose/Wobble/Flow: Thinking through Privilege with Preservice Teachers.” Here is a brief summary:
What strategies might help preservice teachers recognize their cultural positionality and understand how it might shape their instruction and interactions with future students? Participants will examine online texts, artifacts, reflections, and other materials generated in the course to identify three dimensions of students’ developmental process—pose, wobble, and flow.
For those of you going to the conference, the session will be held next Saturday at 10:30 a.m. See you there!
An article I recently co-authored with Thomas Philip is now published in the Harvard Educational Review.
“The Importance of Still Teaching the iGeneration: New Technologies and the Centrality of Pedagogy” can be found here. This article extends some of the thinking I began in my dissertation and in a research project with Thomas. I’m excited about expanding the possibilities of this article by working directly with educators around these ideas.
The abstract for the article follows:
In this essay, Philip and Garcia argue that visions of mobile devices in the classroom often draw on assumptions about the inherent interests youth have in these devices, the capability of these interests to transfer from out-of-school contexts to the classroom, and the capacity for these new technologies to equalize the educational playing field. These overly optimistic portrayals minimize the pivotal value of effective teaching and are implicitly or explicitly coupled with political agendas that attempt to increasingly control and regiment the work of teachers. Through discussing student interest and issues of educational technology in urban schools and highlighting the affordances and limitations of the texts, tools, and talk that teachers might facilitate with these devices, the authors offer a teacher-focused perspective that is sorely missing in the contemporary debates about using mobile technologies in schools.
I am a co-author on a recently published article in Teaching and Teacher Education called “When educators attempt to make ‘community’ a part of classroom learning: The dangers of (mis)appropriating students’ communities into schools.” You can find it here.
The abstract for the article follows:
In this article, we explore the ambiguous associations of the term “community” within one professional development (PD) program that engaged teachers in using mobile technologies to learn about data. We argue that multiple meanings of “community” are embedded in competing ideological discourses that reproduce and/or contest relationships of power that shape the educational experiences of students of color. We examine how the norms, representational artifacts, and tools in the PD we studied co-constructed various meanings of “community.” Lastly, we explore the implications of our findings for PD facilitators by disambiguating other analyses that are often conflated with “community.”
I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from my collaborators, Thomas M. Philip, Winmar Way, Sarah Schuler-Brown, and Oscar Navarro.
I am pleased to announce that the special issue of Learning, Media and Technology that I co-edited with Ernest Morrell is now available. The entire issue’s table of contents, including our introduction, can be found here. You’ll probably have the most success accessing through your/a university’s library.
Much of this issue came together as I was in the throes of dissertating. I am grateful to Ernest for his mentorship in this process and to the contributors of the journal for their powerful contributions. I also appreciated learning from and getting the occasional you-can-do-it-hurry-up emails from the journal’s editors, Rebecca Eynon and Neil Selwyn.