Steven LeMieux's blog

Finding the Sticking-Place: Take Up New Technologies and Unscrew the Cycle of Fear

Steven LeMieux — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:48:27 +0000

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Steven J. LeMieux

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There seems to be a tendency when teaching new technologies to slip into simply teaching the tools. When I’m gearing up to assign my students a multimodal project, rather than teaching students to puzzle over and feel out new technologies, I often—with the semester slipping by—take their hands and rush them through some piece of software. With so few locations of tangible, embodied befuddlement in schools (I hesitantly bracket off conceptual befuddlement as something experienced slightly differently) it’s a real shame to not give students the space to try and fail when the opportunity presents itself. And rather than simply layering new media practices on top of the writing that we’ve been doing for the last semester—attempting a quick bit of transference when everyone is already starting to get a bit worn out—these last few harried weeks of the semester could often be better spent by using the experience of encountering new media tools to open up possible strangeness in otherwise normal environments. The complexity of the tools necessary for new media production—hardware and software both—can be used to remind us how complex the tools (word processors, pens, rhetoric, etc.) that we’ve been using throughout the semester are and that we engage them as embodied subjects.

New media tools, just by virtue of their novelty (their initial, daunting complexity), engage students differently than the old media devices they have been taught to use throughout their schooling. Because they’re new and because they’re full of buttons and layers and unfamiliar work-flows new users have to engage them concretely as things in the world. So they open up a different set of concerns for students. Even if attuned to writing as a process it seems that students look past the material event of writing—the process is built on a series of discrete drafts rather than a long material engagement with texts and tools. When thrown into a new situation, though, there’s the chance that they can begin thinking alongside their materials and tools. If the tools are sticky, if they cause students to slow down and think about their mouse clicks and button presses they can begin to see their products as co-authored. They can think alongside and through the affordances of both the concepts they engage and the tools they use. It is important to spend time with the objects around them, to collaborate with rather than merely use tools and technologies.

I often err on the side of feel-goodery when it comes to new possible engagements with technologies, but it is important to remember that there is a danger here, though. Instead of opening up new possibilities there’s always the danger of getting caught in a rut. What if students, perhaps intimidated by their new tools, learn how to use them just a bit, just enough to get a project whipped up by the end of the semester; they begin to internalize that single constrained relationship. In the move to collaborate with the tools and materials we engage it’s easy to shy away from a fully figured collaboration and instead simply work within the supposed confines of the material. This often arises in the structured or institutionalized creation fostered by the long process of school, and it is made all the more pernicious when those confines are invisible as is often the case with different forms of writing. In my writing classes I often have to coax students (students that have been vigorously taught that there is a ‘good’ writing and that they aren’t doing it) into moving beyond the structures of the five paragraph essay. With something like image manipulation it’s easy to get caught up in flashy effects and basic, layered collage. By not spending enough time teaching my students to engage new technologies I might be sending them down the same path of rote use that is often taken with PowerPoint.

More dangerous than holding a student’s hand through the rocky first brush with new technology is modeling a fear of both failure and possibility. Looking back on the ways that I have been introduced to new technologies in the classroom, I can’t help but notice that fear has been a common thread throughout. I very clearly remember the first time I saw an overhead projector. It was rolled into my kindergarten class one day, brand new to both me and the school. And while we were allowed to draw on the overhead sheets there was a constant refrain of “be careful, don’t touch anything.” Upon reflection, I don’t think that the overhead projector was particularly fragile, but I can see that my teachers were worried more about breaking the machine. When I finally encountered computers there was that same fear, amplified by all the different ways they could fail. These fears can quickly become internalized, and students learn that they might break the machine by pushing too hard, by trying out new things, by playing around, so now there’s fear surrounding both the structural integrity of the thing and its possibilities. I can’t really blame my kindergarten teacher for being afraid, nor my students (maybe not myself, either), because we’ve all been taught to avoid failure at all cost. By squeezing multimodal projects in as a final afterthought, I have done a disservice to my students; I’ve put them in a bind where they aren’t allowed the time to fail. Instead of introducing new tools to students as something they should figure out and produce with, we might trouble the cycle of fear by opening up these concrete technologies as a place to fail and reflect.

Mitigating Silence

Steven LeMieux — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 14:01:20 +0000

Author:

Steven J. LeMieux

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Steven J. LeMieux

I’ve never been able to hold a silence in class. There’s lots of talk about how long you can let a question hang in the air--there’s a swagger in these discussions, a sort of teacherly way of one-upping one another. And I’ve heard boasts about a minute or two and stories about those rare masters that can hold the three, four, five minute silence (we can, in this regard, look toward John Cage as having raised the long silence to an artform). As I’ve met it, this chatter about silence carries with it the tacit assumption that there’s a fundamental good behind the slight squirm caused by a long silence, that it’s worth waiting out our students, letting them know that they’re still on the hook. More than that, though, there’s a belief in the emergent powers of discussion--that we learn by talking things out, asking questions, raising issues, testing out ideas aloud.

It’s hard to disagree with some of these assumptions. We want students to engage the material, to raise issues and questions and begin a conversation, a real thinking through the issue at hand. Plus, there’s an excitement when you’re teaching and real talk breaks out. It feels like your students are learning, that work is being done, and it’s good. But it’s hard to get that conversation going if students won’t offer their opinions, so we ask a question and then wait.

Anyone who has taught the same class multiple times (or even more so multiple sections of the same course) can tell you that the general talkativeness of a given class varies wildly from one group of students to the next. Some classes seem to reach the critical mass necessary for robust discussion--there are those 5 or 6 students that you can rely upon to fill silences, to respond to texts and coax out other responses from quieter students. In other classes, though, it’s like pulling teeth. Every bit of back and forth is a struggle.

I can’t help but feel sympathy for those silent classes. While I’ve never been able to hold a silence as a teacher, as a student I used to last entire semesters without saying word one. Thinking back to my quiet undergrad days there often wasn’t anything in particular that had me holding my tongue so tightly. I did the readings, always came to class, did well on my assignments, etc. etc., but I just didn’t talk. I just wasn’t feeling it. It took me some time, after I had begun teaching, to remember how that felt--to have things to say without really wanting to say them. So rather than developing my silence-holding-skills I’ve instead moved toward mitigating the silence in those quiet classes.

Part of this has been incorporating different modes of expression within the class. In my current course, The Rhetoric of Technology, I have them write fairly regular blog posts about their reading (I also have them comment on each other’s posts). The blogs are nice because not only can I get a general sense for how everyone is encountering the texts but I can be sure to bring up issues that they’ve raised in their posts but are silent on in class. I break the silence with their already articulated questions and comments.

Also, following a method used in a seminar I was recently in, I’ve begun beginning class discussion by asking them to briefly discuss the readings with their peers. The basic idea (as I’ve understood it both as a student and teacher) behind these discussions is that it gives students a relaxed, low-risk environment to talk about the reading, to gesture toward interesting or difficult portions of the text. They can test things out before trying them before the whole class. I wrap up these sessions by asking my students to simply share what they discussed with their group. I’ve grown to love these short (5-10 minute) break out sessions. They tend to scaffold nicely into larger class discussions, but even when they don’t I hear my students, like with the blogs, engaging the material and pushing one another toward new understandings.

Alongside these practices, though, I have been working on my own frame of mind. Part of mitigating the silence is resituating my relationship with it. It’s pretty easy to feel lousy when discussion dies down or when my students are feeling reticent. But rather than blame myself (or my students) I have been thinking more about what they want from me, about how we can situate ourselves and the interaction between teacher and student together. This doesn’t mean that I want to walk into class a blank slate, hostage to my students’ whims. More than anything it’s about recognizing how we’re going to share the load, how we can meet the silence in the middle.