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

Tue May 26 14:37:57 PDT 2020

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!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!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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