Youth workshop in a college computer lab.
For the first time in my teaching career, I have access to a computer lab. It simply was never possible before. My classes will only visit the lab three times in the semester (beginning, middle, and end) for design-work but I am just now incorporating this into my pedagogy. I am embarrassed to admit that this is the first time that I am understanding how significant the changes in pedagogy are based on the lay-out of a computer lab. I have read about these issues, for sure, but honestly, I ain’t read all that stuff closely. What I need to think about all of this for when my students’ university-supplied laptops die at the second year? Or what if we ain’t got no labs? Those texts didn’t relate to me and maybe I was hatin a little bit on them folks with resources. I shoulda been listening though.
So here is what I have worked with:
- classrooms where all students have a laptop that they bring to class with them
- a large lab with long rows and computer-station/screen at front
- a medium-sized lab with concentric squares and computer-station/screen at front
- a small lab with desks with the computer-station at the back of the room and the screen at front
- no tech at all (very few students have laptops, there are no labs, and there is a long waitlist for a classroom with computer and screen).
By far, I like #4 the best though that spy-cam stuff could give the same effect (where you see what each student is doing on their computer screen on your own screen). I also like #1 for everyday classroom activities but when you are doing design or introducing CSS, there’s just something about those large, television-sized screens that really offer a unique dynamism.
Your whole body movements shift in these labs. For #1, you are sitting at small group tables with students. For #2, you are pacing rows after you demo some design issue but you can walk to the back of the room and get a sweeping, panoramic view of what everyone is doing. For #3, you are circling rows after you demo some design issue (there is no room at the back so you never get the panorama). For #4, you are hidden from view, only your design elements are visible to students. You offer highly individualized instruction because you can see what your students are struggling and hesitating with as you look on their screens during your demo. Each room lay-out offers different possibilities that I now need to think about before I select the lab location.
Click here to go to this digital interview.
All in all, my students’ CSS design so far is impressive. They still have some work to do and I did not teach things like left navigation hovering (I barely understand it myself), but all is good. There are ironies though. For the first time that I have this much ability to design my e-pedagogies, design is not really valued as composing, literacy, or thinking in the 21st century here. There are more ironies. I have many colleagues across the country where ePortfolios are mandated or saturated across the curriculum who often complain to me, quite bitterly at times, at how unthoughtful and uncritical their students’ visual design is. On the contrary, I asked my students to think of what they want to convey— just with color— in the context of a course that makes culturally relevant pedagogy central, and they soared with flying colors on that (pun intended). But hardly no one around them seems to see or value that as literate behavior or 21st century composing. It’s a damn shame. I’m not worried about students though because they are entering a digital world with a whole different set of expectations and requirements than the digitally-illiterate folk who marginalize them. To my students: keep flyin high. I see you!
Maybe this is an academic/professor thing but I am often perplexed by self-aggrandizing and conceited college faculty. I remember when I first started on the tenure track and was surrounded by folk who thought their scholarship was the most impressive and deepest thing ever. It was perplexing because these folk weren’t the least bit interesting to me, much less offering some kind of new Kuhnian shift to the world. It was like these folk had no sense of themselves, what they did well and what they didn’t do well. It became very dangerous because you could end up working on a project/committee with someone who claimed an expertise on the subject at hand, only to find out they didn’t know/do jack! The folk who I actually thought were brilliant scholars and teachers NEVER spoke of themselves, name-dropped their famous advisors, patted themselves on the back for the comp exams they took 10+ years ago, quoted from their unpublished/old dissertations, or sent emails/tweets announcing the brilliance of their newest publications/talks! They were somewhere writing, organizing, working with students, and actually BEING brilliant, not talkin about themselves. The lack of self-awareness could even extend beyond scholarship. I remember once talking with a colleague who had spent hours shopping, picking an outfit, doing her hair and make-up, and getting ready for a campus event because she needed/wanted to aesthetically compete with one of the women in the program. Here’s the thing: the woman who was the mark is a former model with a wardrobe/collection of labels rivaling Michelle Obama’s… and also one of the nicest people around (I knew her outside of the campus from common friends). She is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen and yet she doesn’t think of herself this way nor is she the type to compete with women for men’s attention. Now here’s the real twisted part. The woman who saw HERSELF in competition is a dead-ringer for an Italian Greyhound dog. Yes, I know I am being triflin’ and mean, but I just gotta call it like I see it. DEAAAAAD-RINGER! 
I realize that people love greyhound dogs and I mean them no offense; greyhounds do seem quite unique but you gotta admit they are some scraggly, weird-looking things. The point remains: if you look like a greyhound dog on your best day, what makes you think you are a shining star next to one of the most beautiful women in the world? Really, how does someone anoint themselves as Miss Universe when in actuality they could be racing around a dog-track chasing a fake rabbit? Maybe these folk just need some black friends because ain’t no way I could even walk out the door so falsely convinced of my superflyness without my peoples setting me straight real fast (my family talks about you BAD to your face for much LESS than the examples I have offered). Just this summer, I tried to purchase some $8.99 finger nail polish and the 19-year-old black male sales clerk assured me that it made no sense to spend THAT much money for a color that had NO chance of looking good on my toes. I put it back and saved myself that 10 dollars. When black folk offer constructive feedback, they really CONSTRUCT! My toes can’t even make it out the stores in my neighborhood without some real honesty. Academics don’t choose their profession because of their good looks so this kind of vanity is a REAL strange and misplaced thing anyway. If you think this greyhound-dog-woman had an inaccurate sense of something as irrelevant and materialistic as physical beauty, well, honeychile, you need only imagine how delusional and impressed she was with something serious like her scholarship. If women get away with these levels of fantasy, conceit, and delusion, imagine what men in such patriarchal structures do. In fact, at every “third-tier” university where I worked/interviewed, male administrators stayed proclaiming the university’s similarity to the University of Illinois. I have been to UI campuses: there are NO similarities. The last time I saw such grand delusions of grandeur was when I lived in Hollywood, Los Angeles for a summer in my 20s. This is why self-reflection is important: if you are convinced you are the BOMB, then you don’t ever look deeply at yourself, at what you are doing, at who you are, and why you are making the decisions you are making. You just walk around proclaiming to be one thing when you are another altogether and stay STUCK on stupid forever.
I have always liked Bill Withers’s song, “Grandma’s Hands.” He takes what is seemingly part of mundane, everyday utility and reads an entire history and philosophy of life there. I could do the same thing with my grandmother’s words, though I am ashamed to admit that it is really only at this late stage in my life that I am truly understanding them. She gives me an explanatory model for things. I actually named my dissertation based on one of her expressions: running with the rabbits but huntin with the dogs. 
Like I said, I have learned these lessons very slowly and today is no different. I decided to look for videos from someone in my field who marks himself as a radical Marxist of color; I thought maybe I would add his work to one of the modules my students get to choose this semester. I found some self-aggrandizing performances of really bad poetry (and that’s bad meaning bad) and more than 100 videos of his daughter with more than 50,000 views on youtube alone, posted by him and the mother of the child (also a self-proclaimed Marxist). Now, really, I should have known to expect this foolishness from them but I felt a certain kinda way to to see this biracial family raising a little brown girl to publicly dance and sing in outfits like a pink, Mickey Mouse tutu with two kittens who she has named after Disney princesses. 
These have all been hard lessons for me to learn. As strange as it may seem, I would prefer my students to come at me, in full force, as the next kingpin of the G.O.P. rather than think/act like the G.O.P. but then turn around and call themselves Howard Zinn. My GOP example is extreme because I have never actually had such students, but the point remains. Today when I have to explain to my students the kind of writer that I want them to be, I think of my grandmother’s life as an example: