[Xmca-l] Re: General check-in?

Thu Apr 9 16:39:02 PDT 2020

Dear Helena:

A book on contingency? In higher education?  Details, please. What color
will it be? Who is on the cover? What will the ink and paper smell like?

I jest. But the longer we pursue these online classes, the more I worry
that a transitional structure risks becoming permanent (which is LSV's
definition of a developmental disorder!).

I guess that the SARS or MERS epidemic left us no antibodies, no immunity
and not much infrastructure. The death rate was high but the infection rate
was so low that we never developed a vaccine or even a decent preventive
scheme (except for here in Korea). And then we were sitting ducks.

Something similar seems to have happened with Basil Bernstein/Bill
Labov. Bernstein thought that some kids come from families where
individuals are unique and ineffable, but roles are interchangeable (e.g.
Mom can be a big sister, your dad can be a friend). Other kids come from
families where things were the other way around. Ruqaiya showed that,
linguistically, this is true; in some families kids use their parents'
given names, and in others a role is named followed by a string of gendered
pronouns. I think one of the reasons why our classrooms in Korea are
relatively successful with both types is that classroom discourse does tend
to the latter rather than the former. The fever that the debate stirred up
subsided, and everybody forgot about it, or assumed that the side that made
the biggest stink won.

So I am worried that we are sitting ducks again. The learners whose
learning is highly contingent on generalized perceptions and interpersonal
meanings are going to get poorer and poorer, and those who have easy access
to purely verbal meanings are going to get richer and richer. The right
wing narrative will be that the lower orders of our society can't make use
of online learning because they are just not good at disciplining their
attention. Of course, attentional control is a scarce resource (and one
that is rather more easily husbanded when you are not working on an
assembly line). The left wing narrative will be that it shouldn't matter.
The technocratic wing will insist that with infinite bandwidth it can't.

But what if it does matter? In my on-line classes only two students out of
ten have a camera, and only half of them even have a microphone.. And this
is Korea!

I think of it as being able to think in exchange values and not just use
values. Speaking of which. Is eighteen dollars a lot or a little? I mean,
for three cukes, four toms, and a bag of romaine?

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

Book Review: 'Fees, Beets, and Music: A critical perusal of *Critical
Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky and Freire: Phenomenal forms and  educational
action research'  in Mind Culture and Activity*

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847

Some free e-prints available at:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QBBGIZNKAHPMM4ZVCWVX/full?target=10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847

New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: "L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works
Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"

 https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270

On Wed, Apr 8, 2020 at 7:10 AM Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi, David — on this list I use my academic U of Illinois email, which
> still works,  but we don’t live there — we left Illinois in 2010. Artin
> Goncu just responded in this list — maybe he can tell us what he sees in
> Illinois.  Artin, you’re in Chicago, aren’t you?
>
> We left Viet Nam about a year ago. The labor law there was changing
> (pulling more power into the center, but also strenthening local
> representation) and our department was changing to become more of a HR and
> Business Administration department. I don’t know if Uyen or Dinh ever
> joined this list; they participated in the CHAT Re-Gen discussions, Uyen
> (Sally) as a student in HoChiMinh City and Dinh from his afterschool
> program (based on Vygotskian concepts) in Phan Rang. They might speak up if
> they can —I’ll nudge them by copying them.
>
> Joe and I are in a bubble in Berkeley, CA in an old residential
> neighborhood with lots of walking paths and good fruit and vegetable
> stores.  We just did a 3rd draft of our book on contingency in higher ed.
> We’ve been touched by the wildfires (one county to the north) that covered
> us with stinky smoke for a couple of weeks last fall, and by the various
> droughts that resulted in water rationing, etc. but these were all
> geographically local and we could walk or drive away from them and pretend
> it didn’t really happen. As compared to this. I swing back and forth
> between feeling joyful to see deer in the street and hear birds singing and
> other signs of less traffic and pollution — and on the other hand, becoming
> aware of two kinds of grief, one because of individuals who have died or
> who are vulnerable and  probably will die, the second because of the
> challenge of imagining what kind of world the  next generation will live
> in, and what will be lost to them because we were never able to communicate
> it well enough.  I find myself imagining the emotions of Jewish families in
> Europe as the menace of facism became clearer, and those of the indigenous
> people of California — the Miwok, for example, and the Chochenyo, who lived
> right here where I am now — and saw their languages disappearing as their
> population was killed and dispersed.
>
> This second kind of grief seems to be something people can talk about -
> it’s collective, cultural. Not unrelated to this list!
>
> Finally, David, since you encouraged me to write: yesterday our son-in-law
> went grocery shopping for us at an enormous food emporium and brought home
> three large cucmbers, four ripe tomatoes of middle size, and a plastic bag
> of hearts of romaine.  How much did it cost?  $18.00.
>
> With best wishes to all — Helena Worthen
> helenaworthen@gmail.com
> hworthen@illinois.edu
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 7, 2020, at 2:02 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Helena--
>
> Situation in China, courtesy my sister-in-law: life in Beijing is pretty
> much back to normal at least on the face of it. People are going out to
> their work units (but there is more work from home than before the
> crisis). Classes still largely taught from ZOOM. My nephew is in
> Shanghai, where the situation is somewhat tighter (proximity to
> Wuhan). Wuhan opened up for real yesterday--people can leave (I lived there
> for two years in the mid-eighties, but I can barely recognize what I see on
> the news now....) I have students in Chengdu (who attend my class via
> ZOOM). People are mostly shopping on line with delivery to the gate of the
> housing unit rather than to their flat (as we do here in Korea). Air
> quality better than it's been in decades.
>
> Situation here in South Korea: We just extended our lockdown for another
> two weeks. This is in response to a few days of new infections over a
> hundred, but the infections are mostly (80%) Koreans from the US and Europe
> who want to live in a place where the medical system has not broken down or
> is not in the process of breaking down. There are still some "hotspots" of
> community transmission, but these are almost all connected with churches or
> PC cafes. Schools reopen on the 16th, but only online. We have elections in
> a week, and there is a lot of campaigning going on, including the usual
> street based campaigning (the right wing opposition campaigns around the
> curious notion that the government has done absolutely nothing, and the
> government ignores everybody who is not an actual virus). People shop in
> stores, and there is no panic buying or disruption of supply chains. The
> main changes in economic life seem to have to do with transport, and it
> seems like this too will be permanent (electric scooters are everywhere
> now). Bowing instead of shaking hands is really not a bad idea, and
> coffee-shops always were over-rated and over-priced....
>
> But what about you, Helena? (One of the things I have learned on this list
> is that you get more or less what you give--people tend to use what you
> write as a model for writing back!) Are you still in Vietnam? Your address
> says Berkeley and your email says Illinois--those are three very different
> venues for the virus and the economy. Can you give us a brief account of
> the situation in each?
>
> Stay safe, wherever you are!
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> Book Review: 'Fees, Beets, and Music: A critical perusal of *Critical
> Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky and Freire: Phenomenal forms and  educational
> action research *
> in *Mind Culture and Activity*
>
>
> *https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847
> <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847>*
>
> Some free e-prints available at:
>
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QBBGIZNKAHPMM4ZVCWVX/full?target=10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847
>
> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: "L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works
> Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
>
>  https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270
>
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 8, 2020 at 4:30 AM Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
>
>> Hi Helena,
>>
>> I share your concerns. And, despite its challenges, this situation seems
>> a great opportunity to apply our distributed expertise(s). I tried to get
>> some discussion going in a group concerned with the Anthropocene, but
>> people seemed disinclined.
>>
>> Martin
>>
>> Here’s the first message that I sent…
>>
>> The current situation is producing important evidence about the probable
>> consequences of the strategies proposed to mitigate climate change.
>> Satellites are showing significant reductions in pollution:
>>
>> https://www.space.com/italy-coronavirus-outbreak-response-reduces-emissions-satellite-images.html
>> Experts are suggesting that as a result the coronavirus may save more
>> lives than it takes:
>>
>> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2020/03/11/coronavirus-lockdown-may-save-more-lives-from-pollution-and-climate-than-from-virus/#4a39bb3c5764
>> So when skeptics ask “How can you know that reducing air travel will help
>> with climate change?” there is now clear evidence with which to answer them.
>>
>> Also in China:
>>
>> https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/04/811019032/why-chinas-air-has-been-cleaner-during-the-coronavirus-outbreak
>>
>> At the same time, I am starting to wonder whether the current health
>> guidelines regarding coronvirus are culturally biased. Can they work in
>> ‘collectivist’ cultures (to use the shorthand)? The CDC guidelines, for
>> example, include the recommendations to “Stay home when you are sick,” but
>> also that other members of the household should “Avoid close contact with
>> people who are sick” and should “Choose a room in your home that can be
>> used to separate sick household members from those who are healthy.
>> Identify a separate bathroom for the sick person to use, if possible.”
>> This advice is simply not practicable for many households in Colombia.
>> There are not enough rooms; there is no second bathroom. In addition, many
>> infants and young children here are cared for by grandparents, or even
>> great-grandparents (many women here have a baby when young, so an infant
>> may have a grandmother who is in her late 30s and a great-grandmother in
>> her late 50s). The evidence shows that children don’t become very ill, but
>> they do get infected and they can infect other people, among whom elderly
>> caregivers will be the most at risk.
>> So I don’t think social distance and auto-quarantine will work in
>> Colombia. Consider what the Chinese did: they went door-to-door to identify
>> infected family members and removed them to massive collective quarantine
>> setttings. People in the West considered this to be draconian, even cruel.
>> But it made sense: much more cross-infection occurred in Chinese homes than
>> in places like restaurants.
>> Unless the authorities can come up with strategies that are more
>> appropriate to local circumstances and practices, there is likely to be a
>> rapid and elevated peak of infections in Latin American countries.
>>
>> And I see there is a related point here, on ageism:
>> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200313155256.htm
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Apr 7, 2020, at 1:56 PM, Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Hello, XMCA-ers -
>>
>> I don’t remember ever having read that this list was going to shut down
>> or even be allowed to fade away. So now I’m writing, as if in the dark, to
>> the whole list.  We’ve now got a major — maybe “the” major crisis of the
>> anthropocene on our hands and the distant but connected network represented
>> by the conversations on this list seem to me to be a treasure more precious
>> than gold - and I’m not speaking metaphorically.
>>
>> I am concerned about some of the people who have been pillars and
>> resources on his list, people whom I have reached out to over the years and
>> heard back from with information and perspectives that I would never have
>> been able to access on my own. Where are you now? What are you doing? Are
>> you safe and healthy? Do you have information about friends who are unable
>> to read or respond to this request?
>>
>> I hope to hear some responses to this message.
>>
>> Take care of yourselves, please —
>>
>> Helena
>>
>>
>> Helena Worthen
>> hworthen@illinois.edu
>> 21 San Mateo Road, Berkeley, CA 94707
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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