[Xmca-l] Re: Teacher Distancing and "Social Distancing"

[Huw Lloyd]

Hi David,

I think you skipped over the attachment to grades as a proxy for interest
in the subject. And I am curious whether you do anything about that.

Huw

On Wed, 27 May 2020 at 22:20, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> Spinoza says that passions (in the sense of something you undergo, c.f.
> "the passion of the Christ") are feelings that increase or decrease the
> capacity of the body for action or the idea of the feeling (!). And, alas,
> I just gave you a pretty good example
> As Mike points out, there are ways of dealing with the unfair attacks on
> Bernstein's legacy that increase the capacity for action many times. These
> tend to be based on the idea of the feeling, and you can find a lot of them
> in the LCHC autobiography and elsewhere. I think you cannot find them in
> the attached article, because I am still undergoing some passion over this:
> for me it is hopelessly inter-twined-and-woven with attacks on Ruqaiya
> Hasan's legacy and the legacy of Halliday with which I am intellectually
> and even emotionally inter-twined and -woven. Sometimes (e.g. my last post)
> it much diminises the capacity of my body, of which my feelings are not
> always the best functioning part, for action. For which I apologize to the
> whole list.
>
> Here in Korea, schools are reopening and classes are going off line again.
> This has been a gradual process, both because different grades have
> different levels of urgency (high schoolers who are entering college are
> considered urgent) and because different ages have different levels of risk
> (again, older kids given to clubbing and courier jobs--the sources of two
> recent spikes--are at greater risk). But yesterday we started second grade
> classes, which means that our Vygotsky Community, which is overwhelmingly
> composed of elementary school teachers, is now back in the classroom.
>
> You can see from this order that one thing that was not discussed was the
> different levels of teacher presence that kids emotionally need. This is
> something teachers themselves are quite sensitive too--it is why
> second-grade teachers are usually motherly women with school age children
> of their own, and sixth-grade teachers tend to look like that physical
> education trainer you were so terrified of in sixth grade. But varying
> levels of need for teacher presence has not really been a factor in public
> health planning at all, nor am I sure it should be. At some point
> (adolescence?), children really do need to differentiate their emotional
> attachment to a subject matter from their emotional attachment to a
> teacher, not just because study has to become self-sustaining to go
> anywhere but because teachers are passionate bodies and this can greatly
> increase but also greatly decrease their capacity for action. In China in
> the eighties, for example, young professors did date their students at
> university level but nobody dated anybody before that. I think that
> here--helping us distinguish passion for the subject matter from passion
> for the instructor--Zoom can also play an important role, the same kind of
> positive role that those goofy parasol-hats they put on Chinese
> preschoolers to enforce social distancing have played.
>
> (By the way, our Vygotsky Community has more than doubled in size since
> the crisis began and we went on-line. Believe me--it's the subject matter!)
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
> Outlines, Spring 2020
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!SfcBRdvbRsdnyRz3_MVYlBet22JuSBqL086sp47Z8xrIrT4jLtXUT-1blJosfk9ZxkHxlg$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!WBIKx_PGWy9c_5V3mDvDNJVVxbZ8MEjkHhRS-OIGQmR1hzERRuRQ9FPV6IgP2zuUMhn5OA$>
> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works* *Volume
> One: Foundations of Pedology*"
>  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!SfcBRdvbRsdnyRz3_MVYlBet22JuSBqL086sp47Z8xrIrT4jLtXUT-1blJosfk_oJwUdKQ$ 
>
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!WBIKx_PGWy9c_5V3mDvDNJVVxbZ8MEjkHhRS-OIGQmR1hzERRuRQ9FPV6IgP2zuw1k_7AA$>
>
>
> On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 1:36 AM Tom Richardson <
> tom.richardson3@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi David
>> Fortunately I was listening to this thread, so "I hear you!". I shall dig
>> to see what I find about Spinoza in LSV.
>> Big thank you.
>> Tom
>>         BoWen
>>
>>
>> On Tue, 26 May 2020 at 22:43, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Rob--
>>>
>>> Thanks--my link works okay, but it's probably because I'm already logged
>>> in. So I replaced the link with yours.
>>>
>>> For a fine example of witless misunderstanding justified with willfull
>>> misrepresentation that was used to drive  Bernstein's work out of the
>>> academy, see the work of Peter Jones, referenced in my article.
>>>
>>> Peter E. Jones (2013) Bernstein's ‘codes’ and the linguistics of
>>> ‘deficit’, Language and Education, 27:2, 161-179, DOI:
>>> 10.1080/09500782.2012.760587
>>>
>>> Notice the scare quotes around "code" (which Bernstein did
>>> use) and likewise the term "deficit" (which Bernstein explicitly
>>> repudiated). Clever, huh?
>>>
>>> But Jones doesn't make this stuff up. He mostly just borrows from the
>>> long liberal anti-Marxist American tradition of this kind of attack, going
>>> back to William Labov. For example, the "linguist" Jones cites against
>>> Halliday is actually a historian of psychology (Jonathan Edwards) who
>>> argues that some cultures can have completely degenerate moral codes but
>>> very advanced languages, such as cannibal savages!
>>>
>>> A few years ago we were discussing an article here on xmca by Marilyn
>>> Fleer and I asked her if she was a Bernsteinian. I have always considered
>>> myself one, and I was genuinely curious to find others of a similar
>>> persuasion; Bernstein's name was not so blackened in Australia as it was in
>>> America, and Ruqaiya Hasan, who taught in Sydney, was always proud to
>>> acknowledge Bernstein as her colleague and mentor. Marilyn was a little
>>> indignant.
>>>
>>> Michael--
>>>
>>> Here in Korea the main way of giving on-line classes is just uploading
>>> audio file which the student then listen to when they have time and giving
>>> lots of homework. Curiously, some of the kids prefer this. ALL of my
>>> students dislike using the camera. I am not sure what to make of this...
>>>
>>> Every crisis is a turning point. Education has gleefully saddled three
>>> cash cows: foreign students, college sports, and diploma mills, and all
>>> three of these are now hamburger. On the one hand, Zoom classes and audio
>>> classes allow us to provide universal college education for almost
>>> nothing--if we can solve the mediational problems. On the other, pinkspace
>>> classes can easily be social-distanced--if we can just make undergraduate
>>> classes the size of graduate seminars (with more classes outside in good
>>> weather). But both solutions--universal online tertiary education and
>>> extending the graduate seminar experience to undergraduates--will
>>> inevitably hinge on the outcome of the struggle to make education an
>>> intellectual public institution instead of a semi-intellectual luxury
>>> brand,  and this in turn will hinge on the struggle for preventive medicine
>>> based on foresight instead of astonishment.
>>>
>>> Oi, Tom! (Way over on the other thread, so I have to shout!)
>>>
>>> Vygotsky writes a LOT about Spinoza; his sister was doing her PhD on the
>>> guy when he was still in high school and he went to stay with her at Moscow
>>> University and caught the bug. He was working on a vast tome on how
>>> Spinoza's work could be retooled to give us a Marxist (materialist, monist,
>>> but dialectical) theory of higher emotions when he died. We are translating
>>> it all into Korean, and I am trying to write a preface. Spinoza believed in
>>> sentient meat: "Deus, Sive Natura" ("God, that is to say, Nature...") Above
>>> all, though, Spinoza believed that emotions are anything that increases or
>>> decreases our ability to do things. The interesting thing, which I am still
>>> trying to wrap my head around, is that one of those things that does this
>>> is the idea of the emotion itself--the perezhivanie.
>>>
>>>
>>> David Kellogg
>>> Sangmyung University
>>>
>>> New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
>>> Outlines, Spring 2020
>>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!SfcBRdvbRsdnyRz3_MVYlBet22JuSBqL086sp47Z8xrIrT4jLtXUT-1blJosfk9ZxkHxlg$ 
>>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!Xxc_XhqDwcRNNskS29_qkEvlYqR1a1UszU0k6dB-USF8PCH3fnJ5OcvuWgTKCF-MUhfj1A$>
>>> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological
>>> Works* *Volume One: Foundations of Pedology*"
>>>  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!SfcBRdvbRsdnyRz3_MVYlBet22JuSBqL086sp47Z8xrIrT4jLtXUT-1blJosfk_oJwUdKQ$ 
>>>
>>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!Xxc_XhqDwcRNNskS29_qkEvlYqR1a1UszU0k6dB-USF8PCH3fnJ5OcvuWgTKCF94i4Ox7A$>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 10:51 PM Glassman, Michael <glassman.13@osu.edu>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello David, Elizabeth, Annalisa, Rob, others,
>>>>
>>>> Well social presence and teacher presence are two completely different
>>>> lines of research and thinking even though they sound alike. Teacher
>>>> presence comes from localized classroom research while social presence
>>>> comes from the communication field I believe sometime in the 1960s.  Lately
>>>> I have begun to think of teacher presence as similar to Bourdeiu's cultural
>>>> capital. Our education system teaches certain groups of children how to
>>>> read and get in sync with teachers from their more subtle physical signs so
>>>> that they become more successful later in their school careers and in life.
>>>> Many of the more successful children also get practice in reading these
>>>> different signs at home. It is the old adage, don't listen to what I say,
>>>> watch what I do. Social presence on the other hand is more related to our
>>>> own understanding of our own communications and the value of those
>>>> communications. We have a sense of what we are doing from those who are
>>>> watching us (in the broad sense), and this sense changes as our sense of
>>>> those who are watching us changes not only how we act but the investment we
>>>> make in what we do changes accordingly. I see it all the time in teachers,
>>>> who they are changes completely when they get up in from of a room of
>>>> students. Just a mind experiment. The next time you read an XMCA post see
>>>> if you can imagine a few of the members standing over your should observing
>>>> you are you are reading with the expectation of some response. See how this
>>>> might change your behavior.
>>>>
>>>> As for Zoom. I just think it is not a good tool for education and the
>>>> reason we use it is illusory (because it recreates a place-based experience
>>>> so we are more comfortable with it?).  Zoom's purpose is not education in
>>>> the sense of knowledge sharing and knowledge creation. Its proximal purpose
>>>> I believe was to sell to corporations and such for meetings so they would
>>>> not have to spend as much on travel. Its distal purpose, meeting platforms
>>>> in general, was so individuals could engage in multiple activities related
>>>> to the topic but not focused on the topic. I mean it is kind of cool, you
>>>> can have a meeting where you wear a tie on top and boxer shorts below. And
>>>> we are sometimes a talking head culture. But it is by nature very
>>>> unilateral and expert oriented. Do we have to develop a whole new cultural
>>>> capital oeuvre for Zoom meetings. We must make sure that those who are
>>>> ahead stay ahead. Annalisa in answer to your question no education or Zoom,
>>>> I worry about binary choices such as this. Maybe we should be asking
>>>> ourselves how we got here in the first place. Why are these our only two
>>>> choices right now, and many attempts using Meeting platforms are failing as
>>>> they seem to be, how do we move forward from here. Why aren't we asking
>>>> more questions, trying to understand how our great digital experiment is
>>>> failing education. And speaking to Rob's poignant use of the term pink
>>>> space, why is the lack of universal broadband dominating discussions. I
>>>> think about the whole one to one movement and I really question why we
>>>> leaped ahead to this without a reckoning over the need to have every corner
>>>> of our society equitably wired (spoiler alert: because instead of
>>>> corporations making oodles of money our society will have to spend oodles
>>>> of money). So Annalisa I got back to your question, is it better to have no
>>>> education or Zoom and I ask if you stepped on a nail would it be better to
>>>> put on a band-aid to stop the bleeding or to figure our how to save your
>>>> life (I know the answer will be both but where do I prioritize).
>>>>
>>>> Michael
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
>>>> On Behalf Of robsub@ariadne.org.uk
>>>> Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2020 4:53 AM
>>>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
>>>> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Teacher Distancing and "Social Distancing"
>>>>
>>>> Just a couple of very quick observations. (I find regularly that by the
>>>> time I have formulated my response to something, the conversation has moved
>>>> on by several degrees, so I'm getting in quickly.)
>>>>
>>>> Firstly the link to your article on Ruqaiya didn't resolve, David. But
>>>> I found it here:
>>>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!XdBjusDTRI2ze6diFPoONbkpS5qFdLZworNTRS5-z-d7Wrm3_kaKqODPVr-UtouXiIa-kw$
>>>> . Thank you for that, though - looks well worth reading.
>>>>
>>>> Secondly, I always had the impression that Bernstein was resisted not
>>>> because of his work on codes specifically, but because he was too prone to
>>>> allowing his work to be used to justify class differentials, almost to the
>>>> level of the poor keep themselves poor by deliberately restricting the
>>>> language their children learn.
>>>>
>>>> Thirdly, meatspace. Hmmm. I'm toying with the idea of pinkspace. Less
>>>> physically vulgar than meatspace and reflects the reality that the physical
>>>> world, just like the online world, is dominated by those of us who are
>>>> pink. Just a thought. Needs developing though.
>>>>
>>>> Rob
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 2020-05-26 03:08, David Kellogg wrote:
>>>> > Michael, Anthony, Elizabeth--and (of course) Annalisa:
>>>> >
>>>> > I apologize for changing the threadline title AGAIN. I feel like the
>>>> > five-year-old who is always unscrewing the back of the TV set to see
>>>> > the little people inside; I was very dissatisfied withe the abstract
>>>> > theory on the other line, according to which everything is everything
>>>> > and mediation and unmediation are equally both and I wanted a way of
>>>> > finding the people inside it. I thought the term "meatspace", which
>>>> > Annalisa has heard before, captured that feeling pretty well (and
>>>> > there are also some echoes of a corruscating book review I once read
>>>> > in MCA titled something like "Yer askin' me to believe in sentient
>>>> > MEAT????")
>>>> >
>>>> > Let's use Michael's categories of "teacher presence" and "social
>>>> > presence" instead, so long as we keep in mind the point that Michael
>>>> > made at the end, that is, the teacher is always present even when the
>>>> > teacher is not present (as when the child is doing homework alone)
>>>> and
>>>> > the additional point that teacher presence is one kind of social
>>>> > presence. But because presence and absence are (like mediated and
>>>> > unmediated) equally both ungradeable categories, I would prefer to
>>>> > talk about teacher distancing and social distancing. Michael
>>>> Osterholm
>>>> > has objected to the term social distancing for the same reasons I
>>>> > raised earlier--it's a physical, mechanical distancing that actually
>>>> > creates a higher form of solidarity (and that is why the elements of
>>>> > society which oppose higher forms of solidarity oppose it). So I put
>>>> > "social distancing" in scare quotes. But the teacher distancing is
>>>> > real enough.
>>>> >
>>>> > Real but not by itself of developmental significance. What worries me
>>>> > is the possibility that we are adding to the kinds of inequalitiees
>>>> > that Annalisa, Henry and Tom are talking about on the other thread.
>>>> It
>>>> > seems to me that teacher distancing differentially hurts some
>>>> > populations. I disagree that Koreans are more homogeneous than other
>>>> > cultures (in class terms significantly  less so) and I also think
>>>> that
>>>> > if you were to sit through a lecture in the Korean language without
>>>> > understanding Korean you would not agree that language is the least
>>>> > important aspect of teacher presence. But (to bring these two
>>>> > together) I think that students who are able to focus on language,
>>>> and
>>>> > on particular kinds of language, are disproportionately enabled in
>>>> > conditions of teacher distancing. This is the issue that dare not
>>>> > speak its name, for when Bernstein tried to raise it he was, as
>>>> > Halliday noted, "driven out of the field".  One of the reasons I
>>>> wrote
>>>> > the article linked below is that Ruqaiya Hasan was not.
>>>> >
>>>> > David Kellogg
>>>> >
>>>> > Sangmyung University
>>>> >
>>>> > New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
>>>> > Outlines, Spring 2020
>>>> >
>>>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/vie
>>>> > w/116238/167607__;!!Mih3wA!XdBjusDTRI2ze6diFPoONbkpS5qFdLZworNTRS5-z-d
>>>> > 7Wrm3_kaKqODPVr-Utot_Yz0eEQ$  [1]
>>>> >
>>>> > New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: _L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological
>>>> > Works_ _Volume One: Foundations of Pedology_"
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/978981150
>>>> > 5270__;!!Mih3wA!XdBjusDTRI2ze6diFPoONbkpS5qFdLZworNTRS5-z-d7Wrm3_kaKqO
>>>> > DPVr-UtotPljj6rQ$  [2]
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> > Links:
>>>> > ------
>>>> > [1]
>>>> >
>>>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/vie
>>>> > w/116238/167607__;!!Mih3wA!VO48fELJW7sniTLYfb-jdmrQdoIXI216JGBeW6N8-Zc
>>>> > e9P2I5M_FZBJKElhGyP20UejX0w$
>>>> > [2]
>>>> >
>>>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/978981150
>>>> > 5270__;!!Mih3wA!VO48fELJW7sniTLYfb-jdmrQdoIXI216JGBeW6N8-Zce9P2I5M_FZB
>>>> > JKElhGyP026P9-1A$
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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