From the category archives:

teaching & learning

The author as researcher

16 May, 2009

in O internet, in Aotearoa, teaching & learning, writing & research

Simon at South America Bidsta has an interesting post on the relationship between the positioned individual and the ethnographic research they produce, noting drily that in “any other science, you might just call this ‘being transparent about one’s methods’”.

The post contains the challenge to reproduce the researcher’s exercise: to “write down ten things about ourselves–personal, political, demographic, academic or philosophical, that give an idea of who we are and where we come from, and that could influence how we carry out our research”. This challenge catches my attention for a number of reasons at present.  The main one of these is that I am involved in a group research project at work to which I am not contributing in the way I anticipated I would be able to contribute.  Tasks which I complete with ease in literary and cultural studies I find myself almost paralysed by in educational research.  Furthermore, a misconceived sense of responsibility towards my research partners also seems to retard the pace of my work.  (This is not to say that a sense of responsibility is in itself a bad idea, but rather that there’s something about the way in which I’m experiencing it that’s askew.)

So I’m up for completing Simon’s exercise with the slant that it’s a good time to reflect a little on how my own positioning as a researcher is affecting my contribution to this research project: I’m completing tasks quite different from those I thought I would when the project began.

[click to continue…]

{ 3 comments }

Table of the Elements

12 May, 2009

in commentatrix, teaching & learning

There’s always plagiarism in my courses, usually from people who are running out of time, or who anticipate gaps in their knowledge of what they want to cover with their writing, or who don’t believe in their ability to turn a phrase of their own on the topic at hand. I’m more-or-less confident, these days, that I always catch it. Many students expect to get caught, but feel it’s the only chance they’ve got at creating something that might pass.

[click to continue…]

{ 2 comments }

Language, School

21 February, 2009

in O internet, teaching & learning

The week just passed was enrolment week, when campus is rapidly shaken awake from its summer torpor.  Even though the week’s events don’t in theory have a direct impact on my daily responsibilities, it’s been hard not to feel by proxy the stress of my colleagues.  A particular kind of brittle cheer seeps through the floors and walls and imbues us all; our attention spans are a little shorter and our laughter a little louder and triggered by not much at all.

For the first time in my working life at preparatory programmes I am not facing a semester mad with contact hours, thanks both to some fairly assertive negotiating at my last development and review meeting and to the serendipity of a small research project coming under our auspices about now.  For one day a week, I am being paid to do research, even if is literature reviews in a field not directly my own.  I did not think I would ever achieve such a balance of first-semester hours, especially as colleagues around me add up their own personal tally and cry out aloud at the number.

[click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }

Facebook, here are your twenty-five things

2 February, 2009

in dogs, in Aotearoa, memes & quizzes, teaching & learning, we are family, writing & research

My fellow Norwich Terrier breeder and Facebook friend Magda has included me in the “25 things” exercise that is currently meshing with the tag option on Facebook’s notes.  This is the rubric

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

I am modifying this a little: since my Facebook notes are syndicated from my webpages, I am making the original post there, and since my Facebook friends are from so many different times and facets of my life, I am going to write five paragraphs for five things.  Those of you who’ve been my students will know my mantra “an academic paragraph is usually around five sentences”, and it’s time for me to test it here.  I will reserve the option to tag, knowing that many among you dislike it.

[click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }

The pipe

13 January, 2009

in teaching & learning

The exploration of Orientalism that the students and I conduct typically ends with a partial examination of this film, which is difficult to say the least.  I present it as an example of the ways in which Orientalism can work inside territories to which  Orientalism is also applied.

Thus you get a film made in an Orientalising manner about people–young, would-be suicide bombers–who describe the world in similarly essentialised, dichotomous and hierarchical terms.  While the ideology within the film is relatively easy to pinpoint, the ideologies that shape the film are more slippery.  It’s quite a challenging task.

[click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }

Truly truly, really really

9 January, 2009

in commentatrix, in Aotearoa, teaching & learning

My international students and I usually spend the last fortnight of our course together looking at Orientalism, making a consideration of its discursive (rather than, say, institutional) function.  One thing we discuss is essentialist images of Asia that circulate today.  This is what we have been doing this new year.

An obvious example at the moment is the Malaysia: Truly Asia campaign, whose television advertisements, as screened in this country at least, show a country apparently devoid of any actual Asian people, at the same time as promoting the country as part of an experience of geographical authenticity.  Everyone featured in the advertisements appears to be either a white tourist or a white-looking local.  I find this particularly discomfiting, as do my students.

[click to continue…]

{ 5 comments }

Hogwarts Revisited

21 December, 2008

in commentatrix, in Aotearoa, teaching & learning

A former student of mine contacted me some time ago to say her parents would be coming out from Kenya for her summer graduation, and inviting me to meet them.  So it was that on Friday I hied myself to the last of Concrete University’s December graduation ceremonies.  As I understand it, these were instituted some years ago so that international students could get capped before returning home or heading on to whatever is next.

I’ve been to many graduations, including my own and those of friends, but mostly as a member of staff.  The programmes in which I teach have their own conferment ceremony, at which staff turn out in academic dress and the dignitaries are bedeled in with the ceremonial mace, so with at least two of these a year that’s probably about twenty internal and university-wide graduations in the last twelve or so years.  For the larger ceremony, I prefer to go incognito and sit in the audience.  Academic dress is very heavy and the lights on stage hot.*

[click to continue…]

{ 6 comments }

My interest in the advertised position

8 November, 2008

in at home, commentatrix, dogs, in Aotearoa, teaching & learning, we are family

A letter in today’s post advises me that I have not been shortlisted for the lecturing job at a university well south of here, for which I had previously been longlisted.  In the interests of moving upward and onward, I though I would here list the things which I am very pleased not to have to renounce by way of relocating for the position.  In presenting the list in bullet-point form I nod my head to two powerful predecessors in the use of this form.  Unlike some in academia, I do not consider the use of bullet-points a sign of the decline of the age of reason.  At work I experience the kind of renown for my bullet-points that other women elsewhere might experience for their flowerbeds or crochet.  Towit:

[click to continue…]

{ 4 comments }

A foggy fair go

31 October, 2008

in commentatrix, teaching & learning

Both Señor Mojito and I work in environments with an international majority–he in the private sector, I in my small corner of the university–so my rehearsing to him of the thoughts that led to these piqued musings gave rise to some interesting discussion, of which I paraphrase my thoughts, informed by his, here.  Whenever I feel irked by something someone of a different culture is doing, I try very hard to think about it in terms of my own expectations.  What does it say about me that I am affronted?  In the case of the smoking Saudi students, it was a combination of two things minor and major.

[click to continue…]

{ 6 comments }

Cultural Difference

28 October, 2008

in commentatrix, teaching & learning

Between the two buildings where most of our teaching happens, there is a trail of cigarette butts so dense as to look like spilled confetti, or a paper model of strip lighting, and replenished frequently enough to give off a low tobacco odour as one walks along.  This trail is perhaps twenty metres long.

In pairs, in clusters, in informal figures of eight stand groups of our Saudi young men, and their classmates from other countries, drinking coffee or tea and chain-smoking.  To walk from one building to the other is to walk through their smoky haze, while new smoke is exhaled beside one, above one, across one’s path.

A lecturer, taking her bicycle from the stand, steps around the sign that says “No Smoking Within Six Metres of this Building” and reminds the young men sitting at a table of the sign’s existence.

“Sorry,” they say, holding their smoking hands down at their sides, not making eye contact.  She cycles off, and they continue, shortly joined by others.

I have sympathy for smokers: almost everyone close to me is an ex-smoker and I recognise the way that pleasure and addiction and choice tangle with each other in a Gordian Knot.  But these students seem somehow to have taken back the campus in the way it might have been in the 1950s, were it here situated then.  I mind the litter, and the smell, and I mind their insouciance, the way in which the rules, which rely on consensus, on smokers being willing to follow them, are so obviously ignored.  I also mind, somewhat, that this so bothers me.

{ 12 comments }

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →