galiciablackman professional

Considering the slow academy

It’s been almost 10 years since Berg and Seeber wrote The Slow Professor, and I wonder if the value in slowing down has crept into the halls and habits of our postsecondary contexts. Perhaps the revolution is honouring its own kairos, the right action for the right time. 

Meanwhile, the winter solstice is around the corner.

In this season, when the shifts in temperature and vitality signal a winding down, at least a little, I invite you to acknowledge where your energy is being called. What does the body say in this season (Shahjahan, 2014)?

Do you have a little pocket of time or space that you guard, for you to take a breather, applaud your accomplishments, and decide where to strengthen next? Is there a dedicated space to reflect AND recharge? As the semester closes and we prepare for another, the practice of quiet time to restore the vitality of teaching and professional practice is not a luxury, but a necessity for ushering and sustaining the vitality that allows us to offer our best. For me, it is the urge to read something new or revisit something familiar, not only with a cup of tea, but with a soft, warm scarf. To linger over a page, not rushing to finish to get to the next. Luxuriating in a line by Mary Oliver.

“And consider, always, every day, the determination of the grass to grow…” From Evidence (Oliver, 2017, p. 81)

But beyond viewing regeneration solely as a return to readiness (Shahjahan, 2014), what might it mean to pursue the slow academy as an attentiveness to teaching and learning, in an honourable, ethical, and meaningful way? The metric might simply be feeling rested and better able to provide measured and meaningful guidance to learners, in the new year. What would the metric be for you?

“When we experience timelessness, we are creative…” (Berg & Seeber, 2016, p. 27)

The slow revolution, has it come around yet? I would hope it is more than a wish and that it can be part of practice.

“We need, then, to protect a time and a place for timeless time, and to remind ourselves continually that this is not self-indulgent but rather crucial to intellectual work. If we don’t find timeless time, there is evidence that not only our work but also our brains will suffer.” (Berg & Seeber, 2016, p. 28)

What is the most suitable word for taking a little extra time to turn things over on all sides so that they can be seen a little more fully, perhaps optimistically, a little more clearly? What other words, in other languages, in other ways of being and seeing time do you use for slowing down? The spanish, con calma, feels just right for responding with attentiveness and attunement to what shorter, cooler days elicit. Going slower, immersing fuller.

That too is teaching.

That too is learning.


Inspirations

Berg, M., & Seeber, B. K. (2016). The slow professor: Challenging the culture of speed in the academy. University of Toronto Press.

Shahjahan, R. A. (2014). Being ‘lazy’ and slowing down: Toward decolonizing time, our body, and pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47(5), 488–501. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2014.880645

Oliver, M. (2017). Devotions. Penguin Books.


galiciablackman professional, research

Reading SoTL: Professional mindfulness for teaching

When I decided to pursue graduate studies in educational research, it was with the hope that scholarship would strengthen pedagogical practices in the humanities. That inquisitiveness also led me to the scholarship of teaching and learning. It seemed to me that if teaching and learning are to be informed by scholarship, research should emerge from the places where the learning takes place.

In my current role, as an educational developer, I often return to that early conviction with renewed clarity. Each semester, I am reminded that teaching is not static but a living, shifting, deeply relational practice. And when faculty look at their habits of head, heart, and hand, to examine their teaching with curiosity rather than judgment, SoTL is not only an academic project but a rich form of professional mindfulness. I see that mindfulness each time I see a faculty member pausing to ask variations of the following questions: What’s happening in my classroom that I haven’t yet seen or can’t see clearly? How can I make the necessary changes that will make the most sense for learning? And how can I know?

There are no quick-fix responses to some teaching-related questions. Professional mindfulness requires some dwelling with the questions emerging from the peculiarities of the learning contexts. Gadamer’s ideas about interpretation and understanding have grounded my research in the humanities, and lately they have resurfaced with poignant force. In The Hermeneutical Imagination, Jon Nixon argued that Gadamer’s ideas may provide insight into what we are trying to do as educators and what learners are experiencing. I am inclined to agree and that’s why Gadamer’s notion of verweilen (dwelling) has captured my attention again.

I call “whiling” [Verweilen, tarrying, lingering], a lingering that occupies this presentness and into which all mediatory discourse of interpretation must enter. (Gadamer, 2007, p. 189)

And that’s where I think the early engagement with SoTL truly begins. Not necessarily in a research project that arrives crisp and defined, but in dedicated immersion to the complexities and niggling questions about teaching and learning. SoTL work may benefit from dwelling with the questions to be able to ask the question that really matters. 

It begins with noticing. 

It is noticing where students lean in, where they hesitate, where learning strains against the edges of what we once assumed about teaching. It is recognizing that evidence does not always arrive in neat tables or tidy graphs. And with the questions that flutter in the consciousness, it is going back to that initial experience of noticing and then dwelling with the readings, and the conversations with colleagues. And on a rare occasion, the conversations with a stranger on a line in the supermarket, telling you something about their child’s learning experience, leading you to consider a part of the question that you’d not included. (a valuable unplanned digression, a necessary meandering)

The temporal structure of tarrying [with an artwork] …It is not a doing of this and that, first this and then that; it is a whole that is present in the seeing, and in the considering that one is immersed in—or if we prefer to listen to the deep wisdom of language: in dem man aufgeht—“in which one is absorbed.” (Gadamer, 2007, p. 211)

There’s a strange effect of dwelling with the development of a research question, for me. I start to see it everywhere. I see its delicate filaments in all sorts of unexpected places, firming up, loosening, and then firming up again. Then the question becomes its own living breathing entity. Yes, I might be steering, but the topic is also pulsating at its own pace, until I begin to see it as a companion to thinking about teaching or learning. It is akin to the hermeneutic address.

An address functions to interrupt or unsettle our everyday taken-for-grantedness of things. This is why it arrives typically in the form of a question or set of questions. (Moules et al., 2014, p. 7)

Gadamer also asserted that “the essence of a question is to open up possibilities” (2013, p. 310). So it’s not surprising that I am compelled to turn to other SoTL for more companionship, to explore possibilities for teaching and learning. Reading other SoTL or other scholars who have addressed some threads that are woven throughout my own queries helps me stitch things together. Reading SoTL, then, is not simply surveying literature and preparing a literature review. Reading SoTL is a dialogue, and it is an attunement practice. More dwelling.

As a journal editor, I’ve put together a brief list of SoTL readings to help me be better able to draw from the thinkers that can help me situate projects in conversation with the SoTL community. You can find it here if you need to dwell with others for a while.

There is a slow, deliberate quality to SoTL that appeals to me, especially in a time of information overload and acceleration, and quick pedagogical fixes. Ciccone said that one of the conditions for a good SoTL question is that it “should raise more questions than it answers and thus invite further research” (2018, p. 19). Ahh, that’s right, possibilities. SoTL asks us to linger. To dwell. To look again. To notice. Not always as steps, but a threading within the complexities of teaching practice.

And perhaps this is why SoTL still beckons to me after all these years. It reminds me that pedagogy is not perfected; it is practiced. It is not a random collection of techniques, but an attunement. And in returning to the SoTL literature, I find myself returning to the very heart, head, and hands of the work: to curiosity, to learning, and to inquiry. Noticing, reading, dwelling.

Inspirations

Ciccone, A. (2018). Learning matters: Asking meaningful questions. In N. L. Chick, (Ed.). Sotl in action: Illuminating critical moments of practice (pp. 15-22). Stylus.

Gadamer, H.-G. (2007). The Gadamer reader: A bouquet of the later writings. Northwestern University Press.

Gadamer, H.-G. (2013). Truth and method (2nd rev. ed.) (J. Weinsheimer, & D.G. Marshall, Trans.). Bloomsbury Academic. (Original work published 1960)

Moules, N. J., Field, J. C., McCaffrey, G. P., & Laing, C. M. (2014). Conducting hermeneutic research: The address of the topic. Journal of Applied Hermeneutics. https://doi.org/10.55016/ojs/jah.v2014Y2014.53242

Nixon, J. (2017). Hans-Georg Gadamer: the hermeneutical imagination. Springer International Publishing.

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The charisma of prose that gives you pause

Without being overly sentimental, I have to declare my unwavering love of Caribbean literature. I was enchanted with Caribbean literature while I lived there and now that I’m away sometimes I swoon with chagwen* and tabanca* at the lyricism. I’m currently reading The Last Warner Woman by Kei Miller. I have wanted to read it from the very first time I heard Miller read an extract, when the novel was in its infancy as a manuscript. I am reading it in small bites because it is an unparalleled Epicurean experience. For example, the following image is absolutely beautiful:

The fish-women gather around concrete sinks and run metal files up and down the bodies of snappers and mackerel; bright silver scales jump into the air and land softly on the women’s heads like confetti.

(Miller, 2010, p. 7)

It evokes all kinds of nostalgia for me, an island village girl. It stirs memories of days where I would scale fish in the outdoor sink at home, and the scales would fly everywhere. It might have been a household chore, especially the cleaning after, but I enjoyed it. To have it described as confetti indeed captures the strange beauty of preparing fresh fish to eat. And by fresh, I mean fish that had not been frozen. I also used to enjoy practicing the delicate technique of parting the stomach, at the right tender spot and reaching up with my thumb and forefinger to grasp the gills and tug firmly so that all the entrails would come away in one swoop. If it was done well all that was left to be done was rinse out the fish and lay it aside for the next level of preparation for dining. Depending on the type of fish, there would be the added pleasure of the treasure of eggs. And the smell of cleaning fresh fish…it lingers, it frustrates, but it is the scent of vitality and sustenance. It is, for me, a pungent homely scent.
In some vegan circles I imagine this description is disconcerting. But I can’t apologize for the beauty and necessity of these ways of sustenance. A big part of me has chagwen which goes beyond my distance from my island home. To enjoy healthy fresh fish and that way of life already feels so remote with climate change. I think to love how animals feed us does not mean that we should harvest indiscriminately. To love how they sustain us, or just love how they are requires us to take better care of their homes. This wasn’t meant to be an eco-political meditation. But guess what, there’s no predicting where the lyricism of beautiful prose takes you; how it gives you pause. Isn’t that part of what good literature does?

*Caribbean vernacular terms which mean something along the lines of poignant heartbreak, longing, yearning for something dearly loved.

Reference: Miller, K. (2010). The last warner woman. UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; UK

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Not a book review

This is more like a book break. Generally I spend a significant amount of time reading—casual, study, academic (across several disciplines), that sometimes, even though I want to get to that highly recommended book—you know the one that all the connosieurs say is a must-read, I prefer something light. I just finished reading Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones and it was ideal for what I needed to read for leisure: an uncomplicated storyline about a complicated scenario, a bigamist juggling his two families. But it’s not quite about the bigamist. It’s more about his daughters and how they come to know each other. I suppose it might be categorized as YA literature.

A book break is an old habit I have. How best to explain it? During undergrad, sometimes right before exams, I’d pick up a novel far removed from my syllabus or related material to cleanse my mental palate. And I’m still doing it—having a book break ever so often.