I think that there are layers of letting go. There is the primary one you describe in the first paragraph--an aware sloughing off of the skin of coursework and curriculum and student and teacher and syllabus--the whole catastrophe. This is very hard unlearning. It requires a continuous monitoring of old metaphors and thinking in the light of ...well, you know not what.
The secondary letting go is individual baggage schema we each prize. We call it experience. It is an even greater unlearning. It is the matter of taking Coleridge's axiom, "the willing suspension of disbelief", to heart in ways that most of us are unwilling to do. We say we can do it, but such work is perceived as dangerous. It requires a vulnerability to and presence of the immediate, unmediated now. That is some scary shit, compadre.
trust the idea that people can come together to learn given the availability of an abundance of perspective, of information and of connection?
We are quite capable of doing this. We just have to remember what it was like to be an infant learning once more. Yeah, just open up a vein while you're at it. I will try, but how do I try to do this? First, I have to accept as given that everyone has best intentions at heart. That means that I have to have the very best intentions myself. Not perfect, but the best that I can muster. Second, I have to bring immediate and vulnerable stuff to the table. That means no bullshit to the best of my ability. Or even better, I will be honest. For example, I am trying to be straightforward about my worries here and about what I expect of myself and what I expect of others. And I have to acknowledge that I might be wrong, yes, totally wrong about all or part of what I have already written.
As a farmer, I am enamored of the idea of working in a field. I acknowledge that there are pre-existent, but not largely predetermined paths. I understand that there is mystery here and unknown unknowns that can play out like Taleb's black swans unbidden and unpredictable. As a farmer, I know that I am always working behind the arc of the future, a future that is as often as not curling and ready to collapse in gnarly waves crushing or carrying me forward into the present and then the past.
the class is made up of the collected paths chosen by all the students, shaped by my influence as an instructor and the impact of those external nodes they manage to contact.
I am simultaneously the best conformist and worst iconoclast I know of. I have had plenty of practice at doing what I am told. Plenty. At the same time I have found it quite impossible to do so. For example, my wife and I homebirthed all of our children in a time and place where finding midwives was a challenge. There were no certified nurse midwives. In fact, getting a physician to help with pre-natal care was problematic. We found exceptional help on the margins. Our midwife had gotten her training and experience working in Texas with very poor folks exactly like us. Our midwife's assistant opened up a world of knowledge that we didn't know existed. Our firstborn had some interesting complications including a cord wrapped around the neck. Thank God we had them. My point is simple--we only became iconoclasts because the issue was so personal and important, so important that we could not leave the work to experts.
Just like we could not leave our kids' learning to the not so tender ministrations of schools, public or private. Just like we can't leave our food and water and housing entirely to others. This behavior probably shouldn't be called 'iconoclastic' in the good ol' USofA, but it is.
I must get past my personal iconoclasm to get to the community. This will be hard for me. I have some experience last summer working with some fabulous folks from the National Writing Project. They took me on and I learned how to connect better. That community-centeredness is not foreign to me, it is just now always been the way I have gotten along best in the world. I love helping every Tom, Jane, and Harry, but I really don't like institutional groups all that much. I shy away from Rotarians and churches alike. This will be part of my continuing effort to get out of my comfort zone. God help me.
challenges canonical ways of doing research and representing others
scholars began illustrating how the "facts" and "truths" scientists "found" were inextricably tied to the vocabularies and paradigms the scientists used
to represent them
This reminds me of someone (scott or simon?) that they had always felt research was representing the researchers' views more than the participants'.
political, socially-just and socially-conscious act
autoethnography is both process and product. [1]
autoethnography is both process and product.
new relationships between authors, audiences, and texts
helped people make sense of themselves and others
closer to literature than to physics, if they proffered stories rather than theories, and if they were self-consciously value-centered
rather than pretending to be value free
Some values to me include the value of elevating participant voice, rather than imposing my own (this is still even hard in an autoethnog).
increasing need to resist colonialist, sterile research impulses of authoritatively entering a
culture, exploiting cultural members, and then recklessly leaving to write about the culture for monetary and/or professional
gain, while disregarding relational ties to cultural members
canonical forms of doing and writing
research are advocating a White, masculine, heterosexual, middle/upper-classed, Christian, able-bodied perspective
eschewing
rigid definitions of what constitutes meaningful and useful research;
also implies that other ways necessarily are
unsatisfactory and invalid.
Furthermore, scholars began recognizing that different kinds of people possess different assumptions about the world—a multitude
of ways of speaking, writing, valuing and believing—and that conventional ways of doing and thinking about research were narrow,
limiting, and parochial
autobiography
these experiences are assembled using hindsight
. In writing, the author also may interview others as well as consult with texts like photographs, journals,
and recordings to help with recall (DELANY, 2004; DIDION, 2005; GOODALL, 2006; HERRMANN, 2005). [5]
epiphanies
An ethnographer also may interview cultural members (BERRY, 2005; Nicholas, 2004), examine members' ways of speaking and relating (ELLIS, 1986; LINDQUIST, 2002), investigate uses of
space and place (COREY, 1996; MAKAGON, 2004; PHILIPSEN, 1976), and/or analyze artifacts such as clothing and architecture
(BORCHARD, 1998), and texts such as books, movies, and photographs (GOODALL, 2006; NEUMANN, 1999; THOMAS, 2010). [7]
That's why to me it made sense to use blogs, and to interview Dave for JPD and include it... But it's not "their" auto if they're not writing the analysis
ethnography, they study a culture's relational practices, common values and beliefs, and shared experiences for the purpose of helping
insiders (cultural members) and outsiders (cultural strangers) better understand the culture
participant observers
times of existential crises
When researchers do autoethnography, they retrospectively and selectively write about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being part of a culture
and/or by possessing a particular cultural identity. However, in addition to telling about experiences, autoethnographers
often are required by social science publishing conventions to analyze these experiences
Analysis + relation to culture are what differentiate autoethnog from autobiog
telling [your] story—and that's nice—but people do that on Oprah
What makes your story more
valid is that you are a researcher. You have a set of theoretical and methodological tools and a research literature to use.
This sounds UNBEARABLY ELITIST TO ME! He thinks coz he's a researcher his story is more valid, more important?!? More real? Just because another person is not a researcher does not mean their experience is any less valuable or worthy!
consider ways others may experience similar epiphanies;
Too much use of "must" in this article like it's almost prescriptive
researchers write ethnographies, they produce a "thick description" of a culture
understanding of a culture for insiders and outsiders, and is created by (inductively) discerning patterns
of cultural experience—repeated feelings, stories, and happenings—as evidenced by field notes, interviews, and/or artifacts
(
autoethnographies, they seek to produce aesthetic and evocative thick descriptions of personal and interpersonal experience.
by producing accessible texts, she or he may be able to reach wider and more diverse mass audiences that
traditional research usually disregards, a move that can make personal and social change possible for more people
Reflexive ethnographies document ways a researcher changes as a result of doing fieldwork. Reflexive/narrative ethnographies exist on a continuum
ranging from starting research from the ethnographer's biography, to the ethnographer studying her or his life alongside cultural
members' lives, to ethnographic memoirs
autoethnography differ in how much emphasis is placed on the study of others, the researcher's self and interaction
with others, traditional analysis, and the interview context, as well as on power relationships. [15]
Interactive interviews are collaborative endeavors between researchers and participants,
research activities in which researchers and participants—one and the same—probe together about issues that transpire, in
conversation, about particular topics (e.g., eating disorders). Interactive interviews usually consist of multiple interview
sessions, and, unlike traditional one-on-one interviews with strangers, are situated within the context of emerging and well-established
relationships among participants and interviewers (ADAMS, 2008). The emphasis in these research contexts is on what can be
learned from interaction within the interview setting as well as on the stories that each person brings to the research encounter
Now this can be part of the evolution of collab autoethnog, interviewing each other or at least posting comments asynchronously on the google doc of narratves
frame existing research as a "source of questions and comparisons" rather than a "measure of truth" (p.117). But unlike grounded theory, layered accounts use vignettes, reflexivity, multiple
voices, and introspection (ELLIS, 1991) to "invoke" readers to enter into the "emergent experience" of doing and writing research
(RONAI, 1992, p.123), conceive of identity as an "emergent process" (Rambo, 2005, p.583), and consider evocative, concrete
texts to be as important as abstract analyses (RONAI, 1995, 1996). [20]
community autoethnographies use the personal experience of researchers-in-collaboration to illustrate how a community manifests particular social/cultural
issues
Community autoethnographies thus not only facilitate
"community-building" research practices but also make opportunities for "cultural and social intervention" possible (p.59;
see KARDORFF & SCHÖNBERGER, 2010)
Co-constructed narratives view relationships as jointly-authored,
incomplete, and historically situated affairs. Joint activity structures co-constructed research projects. Often told about
or around an epiphany, each person first writes her or his experience, and then shares and reacts to the story the other wrote
at the same time
The rhizomatic learner, on the other hand, is for me a metaphor which expands our understanding of one thing (the process of learning) in the light of another thing (a botanical rhizome). The metaphor learning is a rhizome is similar, then, to the metaphor love is a rose.
I like doubters, complications, ideas that break down assumptions and build toward further questions, not answers.
the Tree of Knowledge is not an apple, in my belief systems.
It is a weed.
To ask how it has come to be that participatory networked practices are more likely to be framed as threats than opportunities for education in the 21st century.
Things written in print are either finished or not. They do not blend into each other; they do not create webs. They create canons, privileging some over others and erasing the steps of their logic so as to make it all appear natural.
But…and this is important…it was the free exchange of ideas and communications we valorized in that Enlightenment ideal. Not actually the small yet increasingly commodified paper packet. Yet we conflated the two. And in the process, we allowed the grammar of schooling to reinforce a Romantic identification of books, in particular, with all things noble about humanity.
People forget that this phrase has some of its origins in Mao's expression, "Let a hundred flowers bloom" and that it was piece of disinformation. Speak the truth, Mao implied, and the truth shall set you free. The real truth is that if anyone spoke the truth they were revealed as heterodox, as dissident.
Or maybe this is all about marijuana de-criminalizaton?
"Every street of Kabul is enthralling to the eye
Through the bazaars, caravans of Egypt pass
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs
And the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls"
Saib Tabrizi
All this talk of flowers and weeds and thousands reminescent (flourescent even) of 'a thousand plateaus', an idea that transcends 'rhizome' in D&G
Great video on D&G, pomo and Zizek. Thinking about taking the whole course, sticking it on Vialogues and having a conversation with myself and others. Sometimes you have to break through the thousand flowers, the thousand gardens, the thousand weeds, and the thousand shining suns to get through to a new plateau.