Day Five: Not an earth-shattering day, but I know that without time to process and discuss the projects they remain isolated ideas

Catch up days after projects are always interesting. I like the flexibility of having an open day with nothing planned, but then always have the concern that we won’t have enough to talk about. We stared with an exercise in recontextualization. Breaking into 4 groups I gave each group a list of 7 quotations – each group got the same list. They then decided what to do with the list – between the two classes there were 8 totally different responses. In a gesture to meta-pedagogy I spent some time talking about why we start with these type of exercises. Engage the mind, collaboration, think on your feet, see the other responses, and finally some linkage to the day’s discussion.

Although I still feel like we are still in “exposition” mode in the sense that we are gathering information on modernism and postmodernism, the opening exercise was geared toward the same kind of recontextualization that we saw in the second project. I started the conversation by asking the students about the difference between the first two projects. Differences are easy in that one aimed for a discussion of unity and the other was designed to present fragments. The answer to the question – “could you explore the second projects with the list from the first?” was not what I had expected. The upshot was a conversation about how we as humans can rationalize just about anything. So – as the first project seemed to be about defending or at least explaining how the example fit the criteria and this approach could easily be applied to the second more fragmented projects.

I do find that in asking certain questions that I have an agenda – a list of terms, ideas, etc to cover. I am working at trying to phrase questions that require more thought than simply “yes” or “no.” But, this means that I may have no idea where the answer will take us. The process of structuring the conversation works like a feedback loop in which answers determine direction which determines questions and then back to answers. It would have been impossible to teach this way at the start of my career, I just wouldn’t have enough examples to draw on to weave into the conversation. Like most teachers I suspect that I come back to a set group of examples, any student that has taken more than one class with me can see this, but there are often augment by new material brought in by the students.

In these first few weeks I am trying to establish terms and ideas that we will later explore in more depth. So far we have discussed text, defamiliarization, juxtaposition, and now today the “play of meaning.” The point with this is to discuss the interplay of fragments in the second project and, how, without an argument or explanation, slippage between meanings is possible. As these become foundational ideas in turning more specifically to postmodern I asked what kind of culture produces those techniques. This lead to a conversation about technology and the accessibility of information. Quite literally this era has access to information from all other eras – instantaneously – not something that could be said of the past. Here I linked these ideas to Simon Reynolds’ book Retromania. Not an earth-shattering day, but I know that without time to process and discuss the projects they remain isolated ideas. The goal is to begin to shape them into something more connected.  The next class we dive into the first reading – Ihab Hassan’s classic essay “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism.”