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Learning/Teaching IdentityThis segment reflects on the English server project, particularly the building of the server in the summer of 1999. After learning about free, downloadable courseware (Web Course in a Box) at a conference, I came back to my university's Information Services department to request the download and installation of this software on our server. After several discussions regarding server policy, and no progress towards a Web Course installation, a colleague recommended I apply for a grant and build my own server (as she, a computer science professor, had done). With enthusiasm, I said okay. The project went forward, made possible by a unique constellation of variables: availability of funds for hardware ($1000), no need for funds for software (because of wide availability of Open Source and free software); the existence of and accessibility to various scholarly and technical communities via listservs and bulletin boards; opportunity (summer project); motive (great conference); and a supportive colleague (whom each day in my mind I thank and reprimand by turns). Dirty Learning on the English Server Project The building of the English server provided me an opportunity, as Burke puts it, to become an observer of myself while acting (Attitudes Toward History, 171). I was an "expert learner," who in my day job studied learning theory professionally, and then this project came along and stripped me of my expertise and threw me into quandaries. Nothing worked, and everything pointed . . . to nothing; I had no idea where to turn in the problem-solving or even problem defining. But while I experienced the discomfort of failure and demoralization, I still had my ideals from Burke's comic theory: convert liabilities into assets; become an observer of yourself, and learn how you learn, or in this case, don't learn In searching for insights or clues on how I learned, I didn't have to look far, and I didn't even have to look at myself. For I was in a household full of activity, intense learning activity--and a lot of it around me looked suspiciously similar to what I was going through, though it wasn't obvious to me at first. There I was in my study, hacking away at my computer, and in the next room were my kids, noisily progressing on a project. It was summer and school was out, but my five kids (ages four to thirteen) were focused on the trials and exploits of Link in his efforts to reach and save Princess Zelda. For though the kids had gotten their Nintendo system the prior Christmas, they only recently became engaged in the Zelda project (three months earlier), and they still had levels to go before they could sleep, for the challenges of Zelda were, well, legendary. It was Seymour Papert, via Fred Kemp at the 1998 Winter Workshop of CCCC, who first directed my attention to computer games and kids and projects as the stuff out of which vital learning can take place or be constructed. So I had been on the lookout. But it still caught me by surprise. As the kids inched along to their final showdown with the evil boss, Ganandorf, I wrestled with wicked CGI scripts and server directives. While the nature of the tasks were dissimilar, our processes were remarkably congruent. I was on the Internet searching bulletin boards; they chatted and Googled. I was on amazon.com buying The Complete Idiot's Guide to Linux, Linux in a Nutshell, Apache Server for Dummies, Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours, and more; the kids were at Border's buying Prima's Official Strategy Guide for the Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time. I phoned Lorenzo, my high school friend computer software engineer (and after running through a detailed list of what wasn't working, he stopped me, long pause, and said, "Angelo, Angelo! I don't know Linux and Apache. . . ." You could have knocked me over with a feather: don't these computer guys know all this stuff? It was like finding out your parents don't know everything, your father can't beat up your friend's father, they have limitations, and mortality starts closing in, and then the vertigo...); the kids called their cousins (who weren't much help to them either). I ran through problem-solving scenarios; in the TV room, I heard the kids experimenting: "What if you pick up the box and throw it--try that!" I progressed through levels (unnumbered though they were. What's the purpose of CGI-Wrap anyway? If only I could get CGI-Wrap to work!); they progressed through levels, one through eight. I told my wife, "Imagine you've climbed Mt. Everest, and you're near the top, you know it, but it's getting dark, and the chill is setting in deep in the marrow, and the snow and ice are colder and more merciless than January in Lake Wobegon, and you're beaten and you have to turn back. And you've done this nine times, each time learning a new trick, getting a little farther, but not lately, not for the last three times, and this is your tenth time....and well, that's what it's like, this project I'm on, and help me, help me on this tenth time...." "You sound like the kids," she told me. And that's when it struck me, and I was reminded of Papert and Kemp! Yes, I did sound like the kids, only they would leap and high five one another when they got the boss key and defeated Valvagia, the menace of the Fire Temple, and I would do a jig in my office (alone, alas) when I found out, for instance, that all you have to do get the "tilde-public_html" convention to work is to create a folder called "public_html" and dump it in the account holder's home directory (provided you've configured httpd.conf to use such a convention, and you've given the server permission to read the public_html folder)--it's so obvious and clean! The kids and I were
constructivists. We were thrown into a problem
(a "perturbation" in the literature), and we were
actively trying to resolve difficulties,
through the construction of new knowledge, not mere
acquisition of facts or objective knowledge. We were
curious (okay, driven, obsessive). We were seeking
out resources--using authorities as
references--as "just-in-time" providers of
"boss keys" and such, rather than transmitters of ready-made
knowledge. We were learning collaboratively in
"authentic" situations (or neat simulations, with
some exceptions--just how real is it anyway for Link to play
a song on his ocarina to make himself older or younger as
needed--though, talk about resources!). We were
learning by reflecting on our experiences and
thinking about our thinking. We were using our
learning pragmatically, to accomplish a task. For purposes of this article, with its emphases on the intertwining of chaos, guilt, and technology, I couldn't find a more appropriate characterization of constructivism than the description Irene Chen provides of Papert's comparison of behavioral and constructivist approaches: Papert (1993) characterizes behavioral approaches as "clean" teaching whereas constructivist approach are "dirty" teaching. The English server project was a dirty job. From its inception, it partook of the illicit, (much in the way I described the origin of my collaboration with Meg Hughs). I started the server project the final week of Spring Semester 1999--just when I should have been finishing my grades. I played hooky, and enjoyed it with much guilty pleasure. And since that time, I have come to see all academic technology projects as requiring some kind of "illegal" act; even if only in the sense that one attends to technology typically by neglecting some other obligation. As an example of the "emotional, complex, and intertwined" dirtiness of the server project, I have one suggestive, but by no means lewd word: "Macintosh." At the start of the project I was (and still am) a "Mac person." I used a Mac at home and a PC in the office--and I was convinced early on that the only way to make things work was to learn Linux at both home an office. The dual difficulties of running Linux on a Mac (easy to do now, but not then), and the very different difficulties of partitioning an in-service Windows hard drive (easy to do for a "Windows person," but all new to me) were enough to completely demoralize me and cause me to abort the mission--were it not for one thing--the dirtiest of all entanglements. I'm referring to a certain attitude, the "can do" attitude that two respected colleagues implanted in me. Two colleagues, one a campus friend in computer science who said "sure, you can build your own server," and the other a colleague from a listserv, who wrote me with succinct, encouraging instructions--these colleagues have convinced me that the "can do" attitude is the ultimate, blessed dirtiness. Make a people believe, and they become promiscuous--in the etymological sense of the word--mixing everything up, and persevering through it.
There was one regrettable outcome from my career as a constructivist learner: without realizing it I became something of a zealot on constructivist principles. And here is where the main value of the collaboration with Meg Hughes for me as a teacher enters. Because of Meg I was able to study my teaching in a way I didn't plan, and couldn't plan, for just as with the server at the start I didn't even know how to define the problem. Aglow in my conquest of Everest, I made some (I now realize) blind assumptions that all learners are yearners for the "can do" attitude--and with some proper guidance and set up, they will be launched on their constructivist journeys, propelled by the "intrinsic" drive of authentic relevant tasks. . . . Only through the dialectic of Meg's co-teaching, have I been able to see that this optimum state might not always hold. Though my classroom refrain was "Reflection!" I was blinded a bit from some trends in my pedagogy by the very "wisdom" I had gained from the success and passion of the English server project. To make a long story short, I reified my Zelda/server experience into a "universal" learning method. Though I had not consciously adopted a dogma, I did come to see how all my teaching and course design has been built on the premise that for learning to happen, or for it to be most likely to happen, the teacher must construct a learning environment that possesses the following characteristics:
Powerful and cool and good as this model is (and I am still committed to it), it is not the Ultimate Truth about learning, and it can threaten one's teaching with the limitation of becoming one dimensional. Sound as the assumptions are, they will not facilitate learning for all types of students, particularly when those assumptions are buried beneath the perpetrating teacher's consciousness. . . . It was Megan's theme of "becoming an agent of your own learning" that led to my development. Till her commentary, delivered publicly in class and to me privately, I had not realized how fully I assumed that yes, of course all students are and wish to be agents of their own learning--problem solvers on missions of their own making. In fairness, we can't criticize students for not setting their agendas and pursuing them constructively, when so much of institutional "School" militates against this attitude, in favor of passive rule following. But because of her identification of the issue of agentry in learning and professional development, I was able to develop that concept--in my mind and the students' minds and course agenda--as a "terministic screen" for the course and English education program. The reification of my learning theory is but one example of how my collaboration with Meg Hughes constitutes the dirtiest, most kairotic component of the technologization of English 356. Meg's involvement provided me perspectives of what was going on in the classroom, in the curriculum, in the students' minds--and most of all in my own mind, and these perspectives were new and disturbing to me. To my credit (and because Meg was so trustworthy and capable) I never let the chaos and discomfort push me away from what (in my mind) was total involvement in the mess. Some of the rewards I garnered would be obvious to any teacher; others were more subtle. Here are some examples: Megan was able to keep me aware of student responses to the class in process, something I had been trying to do by using more conventional assessment methods (five-minute papers, periodic self and course evaluations, weekly conferences, etc.), but with limited success. When the teacher is the sole arbiter of the information, the data comes in very unproportionalized. Everything is "loud" or overpackaged or silent; it's so, so difficult to discern those crucial messages not being delivered at all. It's a very delicate matter, performing the buffering zone without coming across as a spy, but I think Meg's motives were so honestly focused on the class, the experiences of the students, the possibilities of the curriculum, and the belief in change and improvement that she was able to pull it off, where others couldn't have. Perhaps the unofficial aspect of her role in class provided a benefit in this regard. In any event, this issue of gathering data on the students' experience is one of the more challenging types of policy issues for individual faculty and institutional planners. Ultimately the complexities of the matter will only be solved, I suspect, by "dirty wisdom" rather than systems and methods and programs. More than anything, as I've suggested above, Meg's role in the class helped make me aware of certain assumptions I was making about my teaching that I was totally blind to. Besides alerting me to my reified views of learning, she also made me aware (indirectly) of how guilt-ridden some of my teaching was, and how this guilt was responsible for radical changes in the TW design, and how oblivious I was to the depth of the changes I was making, and how drastically those changes would be perceived by her. In the third year of the collaboration, after two very different but positive years of experiencing and working on, and in part designing and teaching the class together, I made a move to make some adjustments. The nature of the adjustments are not the crucial issue (in essence I was trying to "tighten up" some of the more messy ramifications and outcomes of the student experience. I was losing my chaos). What blew my mind was how oblivious I was to Meg's perception of my adjustments. I thought we had arrived at the kind of communication where you no longer needed words so much, but were just in sync, and of a unified mind. I was making decisions about the course setup that to me were "inexorable" and "obvious" (e.g., bringing in the Learning Record Online as a way of systemizing the data gathering, self-assessment, reflection, etc. of the students)--that there were no decisions being made at all in my mind; I was just going ahead with what we tacitly knew we had intended to do. I was wrong, of course--but the issue here is not to address the particular communication difficulties of collaboration (though that's an important discussion, too). The issue is how unaware I was of the fact that I was even making changes in my teaching, and how Meg's role in the class provided me a "mirror" with which I could more clearly "reflect on" what I was doing, and how radically I was doing it (despite how much of that mirror had been borrowed from the fun house). The value of this perspective should be obvious (another one of those obvious things, like those "necessary" changes I had made), but there is very little in institutional life to support the possibilities of gaining those perspectives. It sounds insulting, but I am convinced: We as teachers are oblivious to much of the important design and substance of our teaching. Our reifications are that opaque. Our technology collaborations helped
us break through some barriers, but only just so far (and
truth be told, much of the awareness of the co-teaching
dynamics only became accessible and discussable once the
co-teaching had ended and we set out to write this
presentation of it all). So technology per se, despite its
chaos and prompts to reflection, is not the answer, not
alone. This is not the "ultimate impasse"--but it's an
important one in the context of this article: What can be
done to help teachers make their teaching visible, to foster
new types of reflection, to invite new types of
collaboration, to provide for chaos, dirty chaos, to inspire
the "can do" attitude, to make reifications visible and
dissolvable--and to do all this without overwhelming the
teacher with threats to his/her professional and personal
sense of self that such deep knowledge about one's work and
intentions makes inevitable?
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