Timed Session Plan
Introduction to the aim of the session, which is to explore the multiplicities of our perspectives and our viewpoints in forming knowledge about an object
- Map out session: object observation, discussion
- I will go into a brief history that situates my teaching practices, but if you don’t understand some of these words, please let me know. Oftentimes in the academia, or in the world, we are meant to understand these linguistic or vocabulary trends and turns, such as decolonising curriculum, without understanding what these terms mean. I think it’s important to unlock their meaning and history, instead of assuming comprehension.
Slide 2 (4-5 minute session):
- Ask someone in class to volunteer an object
- Divide tasks of knowledge collection: 2-3 people engaged in descriptive analysis; 1 person engaged in extra-textual online research; volunteer engaging in knowledge that is solely derived from one’s relation to that object
- Show padlet QR code
Slide 3 (preliminary discussion 5 minutes):
- What do we notice of the observations?
- Are they easy to categorise?
- What was difficult about the assignment?
Slide 4+: Teaching Component (5 minutes)
- Unpacking the session alongside the theory that supported the activity
Key Decisions
This session was scaffolded around my introduction to material culture, autoethnography and evocative objects workshops, building upon activities and theories which I planned to build with discursive participation, object-based research and collaborative knowledge production. In this activity, I explored the relation between vision and objectivity, emotional learning, familial memory and pluralities of knowing (see Jay, 1988; Crewe, Woodham, and Golyn, 2019; DeRocher, 2018). Initially, I asked a participant to volunteer their personal belonging. This was crucial to highlight the differences between knowing an unknown thing through observation, and an emotionally connected object. Each participant was then asked to review the object through their varied lenses, creating a composite profile of the object. After the session of observation, I offered an unpacking of the exercise through the framework of theory, which led into a brief discussion before running over time.
How the session unfolded/feedback
The session largely unfolded as I anticipated, with the some of the participants observing what was the unknown object through visual language. In unpacking the observations, I illuminated how modernity forged a hierarchy of senses through visuality, folding in Martin Jay’s concepts around scopic regimes and cartesian perspectivalism into the explanation (Jay, 1988). One feedback comment was that the density of the theory required more time to unpack. I acknowledge this as one of the main challenges to teaching theory. It requires not only a concise explanation of the dense terms, but time to distill and retain the knowledge. In my longer sessions, theory is not only supported by an exercise, and an explanation, but an assigned seminar reading to enrich the learning outcomes. Unfortunately, theory often is difficult to unpack, and I too acknowledge that it needs a longer amount of time to understand. It often requires multiple sessions, building concepts in relation to one another,. I found that the time restrictions of this timed activity was reflective of the restrictions of the unit constraints. Time seems to be a problem when it comes to developing theoretical comprehension. It is also an issue that I do not know how to resolve, as like many of the other issues highlighted in the PgCert sessions, it seems increasingly an institutional problem. And I don’t think the solution is to dilute the theory. I think paring down the theory itself may be helpful, and I will make sure to fold it through tangible examples related to the everyday.
One aspect that threw me slightly off in the conversation was one participant’s insistance that the way we see, through what I explained as cartesian perspectivalism and the camera obscura, was the way we see the world. It was my argument, drawn from Jay and other scholars, that this singular way of seeing the world was defined by power systems, but I was confronted with a confidence that I did not anticipate (see Jay, 1988 and Crary, 1988). I unfortunately had no time to fully unpack and address the comment. One challenge of the activity was the push and pull between my timed session and facilitating discussion. I always seem to privilege the latter and perhaps do not get through the materials that I have scheduled, which also reflects the practices of my own sessions often. I moved on to draw upon research on family archives and collective knowledge practices to map how our relation to objects enriches or complicates our knowledge and understanding through emotional histories. One feedback comment was that highlighting family archives could be alienating and excluding for people who didn’t have families. In my own sessions, the theories of the family archive are nestled within multiple other kinds of frameworks that we may read objects through. I acknowledge this potential for exclusion, and will ensure that going forward if my sessions are condensed into one or two theories, I will choose more inclusionary frameworks. I continued to write about this microteaching in another blog post, where I thought about play and how it was vital for creative practices.
References
Crary, J. (1988) ‘Modernizing Vision’, in Vision and Visuality. Ed by. Foster, H. Seattle: Bay Press.
Crewe, V.A., Woodham, A., Gloyn, E. et al. (2019) ‘We are what we keep: The “family archive”, identity and public/private heritage.’ Heritage and Society, 10 (3). pp. 203-220.
DeRocher, P. (2018) Transnational Testimonios: The Politics of Collective Knowledge Production. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press
Martin, J. (1988) ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ in Vision and Visuality. Ed by. Foster, H. Seattle: Bay Press.