Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 159

September 14, 2020: Nazis in America: Madison Square Garden

[On September 20, 1945, the first group of Nazi scientists repatriated to the US under Operation Paperclip arrived at a landing point in Boston Harbor. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of histories and stories of American Nazis, leading up to a special post on that fraught anniversary.]On three telling sides to a February 1939 Nazi rally in New York City.1)      Organizers: Thanks to prominent individual figures like the three on whom I’ll focus tomorrow (Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Father Coughlin), I think Americans have a general sense that there was support for Nazis in 1930s America. But that support was also organized, and one of the chief such national organizations, the German American Bund, was the force behind the Madison Square Garden rally. While the Bund was paralleled by other pro-Hitler organizations in the period like the Free Society of Teutonia and the Friends of the New Germany, it seems to me that the Bund were also singular in their desire to wed these pro-Nazi Germany sentiments with direct appeals to mythic images of American identity and patriotism (on which more in item 2). And the rally’s two keynote speakers reflect the Bund’s own multi-national, immigrant origins (not unlike America’s, if far more fully European): Bund leader Fritz Julius Kuhnwas a German immigrant who had become a naturalized American citizen in 1934; while Bund secretary and Kuhn’s right-hand man James Wheeler-Hill was a Russian (Latvian) national and recent immigrant known as “the boy orator of the Bund.”2)      George Washington: The rally’s February 20thdate was chosen very specifically—it was George Washington’s birthday, and the stage featured a portrait of Washington flanked by both American flags and Nazi flags/swastikas. After the rally opened with a performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Wheeler-Hill’s introductory speech proclaimed that “If George Washington were alive today, he would be friends with Adolf Hitler.” In my forthcoming book Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism , I argue that celebratory patriotism (like the communal ritual of standing for and singing the anthem) has throughout American history too often turned into mythic patriotism, the creation of myths about our history and identity that are generally used to exclude particular groups from the America being embraced (and to define those groups as un- and even anti-American). So it’s no coincidence that in Kuhn’s concluding speech, he argued that “The Bund is open to you, provided you are sincere, of good character, of white gentile stock, and an American citizen imbued with patriotic zeal.” 3)      Protesters: That speech of Kuhn’s did not go off smoothly, however—it was interrupted when Isadore Greenbaum, a 26-year-old Jewish American from Brooklyn (and future World War II naval sailor), charged the stage; Greenbaum was attacked by Nazi guards, pulled away by police, and charged with disorderly conduct (for which he paid a $25 fine to avoid a 10-day jail sentence). He wasn’t the least bit apologetic, later stating, “Gee, what would you have done if you were in my place listening to that s.o.b. hollering against the government and publicly kissing Hitler's behind while thousands cheered? Well, I did it.” Nor was he alone, as an estimated 100,000 anti-Nazi protesters gathered outside the Garden, dwarfing the 20,000 or so Nazi sympathizers inside. The protesters featured World War I veterans, members of the Socialist Workers Party, and countless other organizations and communities. This inspiring group in no way mitigates the troubling realities of the rally and its reflection of widespread American support for Hitler and the Nazis; but it does remind us that 1930s American patriotism, like every other element of our society and history, was deeply contested. Next NaziStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?

September 12-13, 2020: History through Games: Reacting to the Past

 

[One of the most consistent through-lines in my life as an AmericanStudier, from my own childhood through my experiences with my sons, has been games, both board/card and video. So this week I’ve analyzed a handful of games that offer complex lessons about our past, leading up to this weekend post on the wonderful Reacting to the Past pedagogical games!]

Three voices from whom I’ve learned about Reacting to the Past:

1)      FSU colleagues: My first exposure to RTTP was through two FSU colleagues with whom I’ve had the chance to team-teach our 1980s-focused Intro to American Studies course: Kate Jewell and Christine Dee. Kate in particular has (I believed) used multiple RTTP games in her courses, and hearing her talk about the Chicago, 1968 game convinced me of just how productive (and fun) such pedagogical games could be.

2)      Maria Gapotchenko: No educator I know is a more passionate advocate for RTTP than my friend and former Boston University Writing Program colleague Maria, though. Maria has both used games in her classes and taken part in them alongside colleagues (both at BUand elsewhere), and it was an extended conversation with her that made me certain I want to use RTTP games in my own classes at some point (post-COVID, though, as I think it really demands in-depth, in-person conversations). [Maria adds, "Another person I'd feature would be Greg Costikyan, especially his 'I'm proud of' pieces here."]

3)      Kathryn Lamontagne: Speaking of COVID, the demands of this hugely challenging new semester have meant that I’m not able to share a full Guest Post of Maria’s on RTTP. But she was kind enough to point me to this great piece by her BU colleague Kathryn, which makes the case for RTTP with eloquence and a great deal of specifics. Check it out, let me know if you’ve had the chance to work with RTTP (or if you do in the future), and good gaming, all!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other historical games you’d highlight?

September 11, 2020: History through Games: History Adventures

[One of the most consistent through-lines in my life as an AmericanStudier, from my own childhood through my experiences with my sons, has been games, both board/card and video. So this week I’ll analyze a handful of games that offer complex lessons about our past, leading up to a Guest Post on the wonderful Reacting to the Past pedagogical games!]On the interactive digital book series that extends one of my favorite genres to new audiences, media, and identities.While I’ve written a great deal over the years about books that defined my childhood, I’ve somehow never had the chance to talk about Choose Your Own Adventure books. Over my many years of reading CYOA books I must have checked out (literally, from the Cville public libraries) most of the original series, and over my years as a parent I’ve had the chance to share many of those classics (along with the new Choose Your Own Adventure card games) with the boys. We’ve also discovered and enjoyed a couple newer CYOA book series that engage more directly with American history: the You Choose Interactive History Adventure books, which include this truly thoughtful Salem Witch Trials text (one of the best representations of the Salem Witch Trials I’ve seen in any medium); and, to extend the focus of an earlier post in the series, the Oregon Trail Interactive History Adventure books, which are based at least as much on the video game as on that historical topic. Those new, overtly historical CYOAs really exemplify the power of this form of interactive storytelling for drawing readers into seemingly distant settings and histories.21stcentury interactive storytelling has of course gone far beyond books and card games (to take nothing whatsoever away from those two wonderful forms), and a new digital book series, History Adventures, World of Characters, utilizes the technologies of digital media to extend and amplify those CYOA elements and effects. (Full disclosure: I first learned about History Adventures when one of its team, Zack Gutin, reached out to me to see if I was interested in writing about them—the boys and I subsequently had a chance to read and play some of the series, and we found them very well done; I’m not receiving any compensation for writing about them, and the books themselves are free.) Created by Spencer Striker, a Digital Media Design professor at Northwestern University in Qatar, History Adventures is a free, open-access series that combines text and animated storytellingand uses branching paths to bring the CYOA format to a series of representative characters (five in the initial, April 2020 version 1.1, with more to come) and stories across 150 years of world history (1750-1900, with again more eras to come).We had a chance to try out all five initial characters and stories, and were particularly struck and engaged by the story of Agent 355, a Revolutionary War spy who works with the famous Culper Spy Ring against the British. My younger son created an extensive project on the Culper Ring for a 5th grade Revolutionary War unit a couple years back, and he both testified to the authenticity of the History Adventures portrayal and felt that he continued to learn through the experience of playing as a figure within those histories. My older son is a born storyteller and artist, and was particularly drawn in by the interplay between the animations and graphics and the text and story choices. I liked all those things too, but what I liked most was the diversity of all five initial characters, including Agent 355 (a Muslim and African American young woman). While of course the “You” that is the protagonist of Choose Your Own Adventure books could always be as diverse as the audience, I do have to say that in many (if not all) of the illustrations (at least in the original series), those unnamed main characters were depicted as white. That’s no more representative of the world and our histories than it is of 20th and 21st century readers, and it’s very nice to see an interactive storytelling form depict our histories and world in all their foundational, compelling diversity.Guest Post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other historical games you’d highlight?

September 10, 2020: History through Games: Video Game Action and Inaction

[One of the most consistent through-lines in my life as an AmericanStudier, from my own childhood through my experiences with my sons, has been games, both board/card and video. So this week I’ll analyze a handful of games that offer complex lessons about our past, leading up to a Guest Post on the wonderful Reacting to the Past pedagogical games!]On how two action-packed narrative games portray the past, and how a decidedly less active one has more to offer.I started my October 2018 Video Game Studying blog series with a post on Grand Theft Auto, the narrative game/series with action that remains, when it comes to its social and cultural significance at least, among the most controversialto this day. The same game company that produced GTA, Rockstar Games, would go on to release a second hugely popular narrative action series with even more overtly AmericanStudies content: the Red Dead games, set in the late 19th and early 20th century “Wild West” (they’ve also released L.A. Noire , a 20th-century-set detective action game about which I know a lot less, but which can’t possibly measure up to the greatness of Mean Streets in any case). Indeed, in the world of 21st century video games, I think the only ones that rival Red Dead for overtly historical content would be Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series : most of the games in that series are set in various historical eras around the world, and Assassin’s Creed III was set specifically during the lead up to and era of the American Revolution (the game takes place between 1753 and 1783).I’ve only played and watched bits and pieces of the RDseries (which includes Revolver, Redemption, and Redemption II) and ACIII, and as always will welcome further thoughts, different opinions, and any and all other responses in comments (or by email). But from what I can tell, while both series/games focus first and foremost on the combination of storytelling and action that defines this narrative action genre, both likewise work hard to create immersive representations of their historical periods, open worlds that players can explore beyond the strictures of the specific stories/quests. While Red Dead Revolver’s world was less open, Redemption in particular creates a powerfully multi-faceted early 20thcentury world, one that includes precisely the Mexican and Native Americancommunities whose absence I lamented in Oregon Trail. And Assassin’s Creed III, while featuring both alternative history and supernatural elements, goes even further in creating an open worldrepresentation of 18th century America, as its protagonist is half-Mohawk and the game delves into the world of his Mohawk village, community, and heritage. Without being the slightest bit pedantic, both these games and worlds offer compelling glimpses into their historical subjects.And speaking of immersive open worlds, there’s Walden, a Game . Set during the first year of Henry David Thoreau’s two-year sojourn at his cabin near Walden Pond, this unique video game does present players with various challenges related to surviving and thriving in nature throughout the seasons. But to say that Walden does not feature much action is to understate the case and miss the point: from what I can tell (and I’ve played significant portions of Walden on a couple different occasions), the ultimate goal of the game is to require a degree of inaction, of waiting patiently (or impatiently, but you’re waiting either way) for various events to take place. That element certainly reflects core aspects of Thoreau’s text and philosophy, but I would argue that it also captures an essential aspect of history that is generally missing from historical video games. After all, while it’s fun to imagine that we’d be a gun-toting outlaw or badass assassin in those respective time periods, it’s far more likely that our lives would be more mundane, and that our version of action would look more like catching a fish or taking a hike or making it through a heavy rainstorm. I don’t know any video games that do a better job portraying that sense of truly living in a historical moment and setting than does Walden, a Game.Last game tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other historical games you’d highlight?

September 9, 2020: History through Games: Careers

[One of the most consistent through-lines in my life as an AmericanStudier, from my own childhood through my experiences with my sons, has been games, both board/card and video. So this week I’ll analyze a handful of games that offer complex lessons about our past, leading up to a Guest Post on the wonderful Reacting to the Past pedagogical games!][NB. I wrote this piece for the Fitchburg Historical Society’s Summer 2020 newsletter, so it’s a bit longer than my usual blog posts, but it’s also too perfect for this week’s series not to include here!]
My sons and I have been serious board gamers for most of their young lives (they’re now 14 and 13 years old), but in this locked-down moment we have taken our board gaming to a whole new level. As usual that has meant multiple daily repeats of the same current obsessions, which at the moment includes a new favorite, the delightful card game Exploding Kittens; and a 1980s classic, Iron Crown Enterprise’s wonderful Middle-earth-set Riddle of the Ring. But this new reality has likewise required a deep dive into the backbench of our voluminous collection, assembled across many years, three apartments, and roughly three-dozen obsessions. At the bottom of one of our piles, hidden beneath larger boxes and thus far too long forgotten, was a game I had ordered from eBay many years ago: the 1971 version of Careers.
The original Careers (which we had played with my parents at their Virginia home, prompting our interest in ordering our own version of the game) was released by Parker Brothers in 1957. The 1971 edition kept much of the same design and gameplay, but offered, as the back of the box notes, “a bright, new board and some new career choices, like Ecology, which reflect the world of the 1970s.” And indeed, playing the 1971 game with two curious and thoughtful middle schoolers felt very much like entering a time machine and emerging in early 1970s America, to learn a number of interesting and at times frustrating lessons about that moment (and perhaps about legacies into our own).
As you might expect, gender was a particularly overt and eye-opening subject. The 60s women’s rights movement meant that the most blatant sexism of the 1957 edition—which featured for example a space called “Shopping Spree” in which “your wife” spent an exorbitant amount of your cash on hand—had disappeared. But the 1971 game still has a number of details which read quite differently in the era of #MeToo. In the “Big Business” career path, you can receive 4 hearts (a measure of happiness, but one often linked to relationships and love) for “Lunch with your secretary.” In the “Sports” path, you receive 2 hearts for “Play touch football with the girls.” And in the “Teaching” path, you receive 4 hearts when your “New principal is a bachelor,” which of course not only condones workplace romances with serious boss/employee and power dynamic issues, but also assumes that anyone going through the “Teaching” path is a woman (compared to the game’s overall default, which as these other “romantic” spaces suggest tends to be that the player is male).
That latter space likewise illustrates a second, somewhat subtler takeaway from the game: the cultural attitudes toward distinct career paths. Perhaps it’s because I’m a teacher so my sensitivity was up, but I found the attitudes toward teaching particularly striking. Besides that “bachelor” space and its assumption of teaching as a gendered (and romance-centered) profession, it’s interesting to note that teaching is the career which features the most happiness rewards, but through one specific and strange lens: of the three other happiness spaces in the path, two are framed as opportunities to not have to do the job at all (“Snow storm, no school” gives you 2 hearts; while the culminating “School’s out” space gives you 8, one of the game’s biggest happiness payouts overall). Taken together, these spaces create an image of teaching as a profession for women who are more interested in landing a powerful bachelor than, y’know, educating young people.
Perhaps the other most telling career path is “Space.” Just the existence of this career path at all reflects a very different historical moment than our own, the era of the 1969 Apollo XI moon landing and subsequent missions which made astronaut was one of America’s most desirable careers (as in the 1957 edition, “Space” is tied with “Sports” for the career path which offers the most rewards). Moreover, while some of the Space path’s rewards are for successes within the career itself (“Successful lift-off” offers 6 stars [fame], while “1st man on Mars” offers a game-high 16 stars), many others indicate that a career in Space is geared more towards celebrity than exploration. If you “Endorse Crunchies,” you receive a “$2000 fee”; if you “Sell your life story,” you “Collect $5,000”; and if you “Sell moon craters,” you “Earn $10,000.” Those financial rewards are second only to those available in the “Sports” path (and in both cases they are among the path’s culminating, most rewarding spaces), illustrating a pair of careers in which capitalizing on celebrity seems to be a chief pursuit.
While the American Studies scholar in me might have expected some of these details about 1971 attitudes, it’s also important to note a final category of lessons from the 1971 edition of Careers: unexpected, surprising details. For example, one of the biggest punishments in the “Politics” career path (and in the game overall) is the culminating “Caught with mink” space, which causes you to “Lose ½ your Fame”; I wouldn’t have said that the anti-fur and animal rights movements were prominent enough in the early 70s to occasion such a punishment (and it’s possible that they weren’t, as my fellow American Studies scholar father reminded me that VP candidate Richard Nixon had famously claimed that his wife Pat would never wear a “mink coat” in his 1952 “Checkers” speech). On the other hand, the “Big Business” career path features a number of surprising spaces which indicate just how fully (in the game’s imagining) the corporate world remained about cozying up and kowtowing to power rather than achievement or innovation: if your “Uncle is the treasurer” your salary goes up $1000 (which seems unethical and potentially illegal, but hey) and if you “Let Boss win at golf” it goes up $2000, while “Dent boss’s car” is one of the path’s negative experiences.
Perhaps the most surprising details are contained within the aforementioned, new “Ecology” career path. While the path is partly oriented toward scientific study (if you earn a “Science” degree in College you can enter Ecology for free), many of its spaces focus instead on the goal of living a more environmentally aware life. That includes both individual actions (both “Bicycle 50 miles to work” and “Invent self-destructing containers” earn you financial rewards) and collective goals (“A smog-free day” and “Swim in unpolluted river” both earn you happiness rewards). Since this was the only new career path in the 1971 edition, it’s fair to say that the creators wanted to emphasize both threats to the environment and opportunities for action with this addition to the game; just a year after the 1970 founding of Earth Day, then, the American environmental movement was clearly making an impact on national conversations and narratives.
Who said that homeschooling and play have to be two different lockdown activities? Next game tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other historical games you’d highlight?

September 8, 2020: History through Games: The Oregon Trail

[One of the most consistent through-lines in my life as an AmericanStudier, from my own childhood through my experiences with my sons, has been games, both board/card and video. So this week I’ll analyze a handful of games that offer complex lessons about our past, leading up to a Guest Post on the wonderful Reacting to the Past pedagogical games!]On three takeaways from the pioneering video game.I used “pioneering” there not just for the Dad Joke-worthy pun (although duh), but also because it highlights the most obvious and important historical issue with The Oregon Trail , one I wrote about in this blog post: the absence of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and really any ethnic American communities from its vision of the West. I didn’t notice that absence at all as a kid enthralled by the game, and that’s precisely the point: Oregon Trail played into stereotypical visions of American pioneers, and indeed like all popular art that traffics in stereotypes it also amplified and further entrenched those limiting images. I’m not suggesting that the game should have focused centrally on Native American communities, nor that a children’s video game had to include graphic depictions of war; every game has the right to choose its own subject and to present it in a way that’s appropriate for its audience. But a game set in the mid-19th century American West needs at least to include the communities and cultures that are part of that world, and on that question Oregon Trailcame up very short.With that most important thing said, there are also other historical lessons we can learn from what Oregon Trail’s designers did choose to include. Another one that would be easy to miss (and that I’ll admit I hadn’t thought about at all until brainstorming topics for this post) is the deeply solitary nature of the Trail as the game portrays it. I didn’t have a chance to play the game while researching this post, but as I remember it at least the player really doesn’t see any other wagons or people between leaving Independence, Missouriand arriving in Oregon. Perhaps players do encounter waystations for supplies or the like along the way, but I’m thinking here about other travelers, about the idea of wagon trains (which as I understand it were a typical way for families to traverse the Trail). I understand the game’s goal of forcing players to deal with all the myriad challenges themselves, rather than offering them the possibility of relying upon other families for aid—but that choice does seem to reinforce another stereotypical American image, that of “rugged individuals” (rather than what to my mind is a far more shared historical experience, of communal survival). I don’t want to emphasize only frustrations with the game’s portrayal of its historical subjects, though. After all, there are reasons why Oregon Trail was one of the most successful video games of its era, and indeed why it remains successful today, as it’s one of the only games from my childhood that my sons have also heard of and played. And one of the things I think Oregon Trail does best is capture the profoundly fraught and contingent nature of life (and death) in its mid-19th century moment. The most famous such element is the constant threat of illness, especially that damn dysentery. But while some such negative outcomes (like getting one of those diseases) were mostly due to chance and bad luck, many others emphasized contingency—how one bad decision could produce disastrous and even fatal outcomes, not only immediately (ie, if you choose to ford a river that’s too deep or wild) but also far down the road (ie, if you purchase the wrong supplies and end up stuck or dead hundreds of miles later). Given hindsight, the past can sometimes feel inevitable or predetermined—but it was of course just as contingent and unfolding as our present and future, and in its specific but significant way Oregon Trail highlighted those realities quite potently. Next game tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other historical games you’d highlight?

September 7, 2020: History through Games: War Games

[One of the most consistent through-lines in my life as an AmericanStudier, from my own childhood through my experiences with my sons, has been games, both board/card and video. So this week I’ll analyze a handful of games that offer complex lessons about our past, leading up to a Guest Post on the wonderful Reacting to the Past pedagogical games!]On three board games through which I learned a lot about war histories and stories.1)      Ambush!: Ambush!, which began with a focus on post-D-Day European campaigns and then expanded to include Italy and the Pacific as well, stands out as (by far) the best solitaire board game I ever played. But its style of gameplay also captures the uncertainty and constant danger of warfare as well as anything I’ve encountered: as the player moves his eight squad members across the board in pursuit of each unique mission, anything and everything can suddenly transpire: sniper fire, the arrival of an enemy tank, an encounter with a civilian, a mine or other explosive device being triggered. Awaiting the results of each move was, as board games go, as nerve-wrecking as it gets.2)      Sink the Bismarck!: Something about board games with exclamation points, I suppose. Inspired by one of the most unique naval histories in World War II, as well as the 1960 British film of the same name, Sink the Bismarck! was an incredibly complicated board game, and I’m not sure I ever played with every rule and feature (or even most of them). To be honest, I spent a good deal of time just examining the board, the pieces and cards, the rules and peripheral materials, learning not only about the game but also about the histories and stories connected to this famous German battleship, to the Axis and Allied naval armadas, and to all the complexities of naval warfare. I don’t think Michael Scott Smith would mind that outcome one bit.3)      Gettysburg: Ah, the genius of Avalon Hill’s Gettysburg, a game that was at one and same time deeply grounded in the battle’s histories (the board alone taught me a great deal about the battle’s locations and landscapes) and open to each player’s and game’s unique choices (I still remember the time I had J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry flank the Union lines and capture General Meade, winning the battle in one fell swoop; luckily for all Americans it didn’t really work out that way!). The battle and war are history, but the game made them come alive, made them new and meaningful for each player and experience. I owe much of my enduring love of history to precisely such effects.Next game tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other historical games you’d highlight?

September 5-6, 2020: Crowd-Sourced Fall 2020

 

[This week I start what is unquestionably the most distinct and strange semester of my 20+ year teaching career. So for my annual Fall previews, I’ve discussed some of the ways that my classes will and won’t be different this time around. Leading up to this crowd-sourced post full of Fall 2020 thoughts, plans, and solidarity from colleagues near and far—add yours in comments, please!]

Responding to my prompt about plans, ideas, concerns, and goals, thoughts from many of my friends and colleagues:

Amy Wehe: “Goal: create a feeling of belonging in my classes, even though my classes will not meet in person. Concern: I will be overwhelmed this semester.”

AnneMarie Donahue: “Plans - get kids writing personal experiences and views on social justice. Ideas - use Twitch as a means of teaching writing on a platform they know. Concerns - we are all gonna die. Goals - not die.”

Heather Urbanski: “Concern: adapting already hybrid course structure from F2F into fully online within technological resources and support available. Goal: Find a self-established routine that’s helpful without adding even more stress because of what I inevitably won’t get done when I want to because, you know, pandemic is still going on (on top of more individual personal life things).”

Dani Langdon: “Goal: Finish my application for the Doctoral Program in Education and Social Justice at Lancaster University. Plan: Do everything I can to keep from drowning. Concerns: ha! Umm everything?”

Katy Covino: “Goals: Balance challenge and care in my teaching. Concerns: Balancing challenge and care (in my teaching, parenting, remote schooling, living...).”

Amy Johnson: “Fears: afraid of getting complacent and letting down my guard about covid but also at the same time don’t want to be too fearful either...Plans: take two fall grad classes, learn to cook better/eat out less. Emphases: making a lfl with my mom and gramma!”

Sean Goodlett: “Fears: that the November election will drag on after the 3rd; that the Orange Boil on the Bottom of Satan will continue to occupy our collective mental space; that we won’t get COVID under control for many months. Plans: write, write, write; spend as much time with the boys as possible!”

Summer Lopez: Fears: collapse of democracy. Plans: prevent collapse of democracy.”

Kathryn Tomasek writes, “So many of us (we who follow you, we who teach, we who live in the United States) fear the all-too-possible ugliness of the period following November's election. This piece from the WaPoabout gaming results is terrifying.”

And Kelly Stowell puts it as clearly as I ever could: “Live through the semester productively. Scared.”

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What are you teaching or working on this Fall? Let me know for the weekend post!

September 4, 2020: Fall Semester Previews: What Doesn’t Change

 

[This week I start what is unquestionably the most distinct and strange semester of my 20+ year teaching career. So for my annual Fall previews, I’ll be discussing some of the ways that my classes will and won’t be different this time around. I’d love to share some of what you’ve got going on in a crowd-sourced Fall 2020 weekend post!]

On continuity and clarity at a chaotic and uncertain time.

For obvious and necessary reasons, I’ve spent the week writing—like I’ve spent a good bit of the summer thinking—about the many ways in which the Fall 2020 semester will be different from all those that have come before (and, I urgently hope, all those that come after, other than perhaps Spring 2021 when many of these factors will likely still apply). The critical part of the critical optimism I’ve tried to both preach and practice for so long requires that we recognize and engage with realities, even the hardest or toughest ones, and there’s no doubt that these deviations from the norm, these changes to many if not all of the essential elements and experiences of teaching and learning and education, constitute inescapable realities in Fall 2020. Moreover, precisely because they are different from most of our prior experiences, they require collective attention and engagement if we’re gonna respond to them as successfully as possible (which is why I’ve asked for your thoughts all week, and will share lots of them in the crowd-sourced weekend post).

But at the same time (in every sense), a moment like this also demands that we remember and celebrate those things which have not changed, those essential elements which not only endure but remind us of why we do what we do (now more than ever). This past Sunday, as part of my August “one good thing per day” series, I highlightedone of those enduring essential elements: my awesome, inspiring Fitchburg State students. That hyperlinked Twitter thread says much of what I would want to say here, so I’ll just reiterate how much I expect those students to rise to all the challenges of this moment—not in idealized or superhuman way, but precisely because of all the evidence I’ve accumulated across my 15 years of experiences with this community. Whenever I see fellow professors or teachers criticizing students, at any moment and doubly so in a moment like this, it just makes me sad, as it feels that that person has lost a core (I would argue the core) element to what makes this gig so important and so damn great. To quote Samwise Gamgee, I don’t mean to.

If our students comprise one clear continuity in this chaotic moment, another is what our communal conversations (whether on Zoom, in a Blackboard Discussion Forum, in person, or any other way) can and do model. I try not to idealize or mythologize what happens in college classrooms, as of course those spaces and discussions are in no way immune to the same divisive and destructive forces we see at work throughout American society in September 2020. But nonetheless, and notwithstanding the bullshit conservative critiques of academic indoctrination and the like, the goal of our work in those classrooms is indeed an ideal, and a particularly crucial one at this moment: to pursue together inquiries and conversations that can strengthen both our individual voices and skills and our collective, communal knowledge, understandings, and dynamics. Do we fall short of achieving that goal? Hell yes, every day and every semester. Does every week 1 represent another moment in which we can begin pursuing that goal once more? Hell yes it does.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what are you teaching or working on this Fall? Let me know for the weekend post!

September 3, 2020: Fall Semester Previews: Zoom

 

[This week I start what is unquestionably the most distinct and strange semester of my 20+ year teaching career. So for my annual Fall previews, I’ll be discussing some of the ways that my classes will and won’t be different this time around. I’d love to share some of what you’ve got going on in a crowd-sourced Fall 2020 weekend post!]

On one thing I’ve learned about teaching in a new format, and what I still haven’t figured out.

On or about March 3rd, I think it’s fair to say that I had dedicated roughly 30 seconds of my life (give or take 15 seconds) to date to thinking about the digital video communications platform called Zoom. In the six months since, it sometimes seems like I don’t go 30 seconds without thinking about Zoom—and while that’s fortunately an exaggeration, the fundamental fact is that I have had almost infinitely more conversations on that platform (and on Google Meet, which Fitchburg State uses for most of its official digital meetings and conversations; for whatever reason my personal preference so far has been for Zoom, however) over the last six months than I have had in person with anyone not biologically related to me. That includes all kinds of meetings and conversations, but it also and especially includes teaching—every time I’ve “met” with a class since early March, whether in the optional ways I instituted for my Spring classes or the more required ones I included in my undergrad, grad, and adult learning Summer courses (which I was able to plan from the beginning for the realities of teaching and learning in this brave new world), it has been on Zoom.

As of right now, the Fall semester will include some in-person meetings for four of my five undergrad courses (the fifth is an online-only course from the jump)—but even if that schedule goes forward (and my instinct is that we will have to switch to remote-only relatively quickly), the courses will be hybrid, meaning that those in-person meetings will be complemented by both asynchronous Blackboard discussions and synchronous Zoom conversations. When it comes to the latter, one definite thing I’ve learned is the value of Zoom’s “Raise hand” function—in my Spring classes I would ask a question and then wait for any attending student to chime in, but I believe a combination of digital shyness and an accurate concern that multiple folks might start talking at the same time led many fewer students to add their voices to our discussions. Over the summer, I started asking students to raise their hands whenever they had a thought or question, and then could call on them in order; that process has led to far more consistent and widespread participation in my Zoom sessions. For anyone hoping to have multi-vocal conversations over Zoom or any digital platform, I’d strongly recommend making use of such functions to create a more organized and participatory communal space.

While I have thus begun to figure out how to make Zoom work a bit better for my class goals (most especially that of a student-centered pedagogy which includes as many voices as possible), there’s one aspect of my pedagogy that I haven’t at all figured out how to transfer to this new medium: writing on the board. I’m sure any student who’s ever taken an in-person class with me would testify (as do a lifetime of chalk stains along the edge of my left hand, although fortunately most FSU classrooms now have whiteboards) to just how fully I make use of the board, and in a very particular way: highlighting specific things from each student comment, in order to validate their voices and contributions and at the same time build an emerging collective conversation about the day’s texts and topics on the board. I’ve considered a couple ways to approximate that process in Zoom conversations: purchasing an actual white board and writing on it while they talk (but that seems like it would potentially derail a Zoom discussion with all the stopping and starting, and would be hard for them to see as well); or sharing my screen and writing in Word (but ditto to the potential derailing, and I like students to be able to see me in these sessions). I’m leaning toward the latter, but as with every topic this week, would love to hear your thoughts and ideas!

Last Fall preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What are you teaching or working on this Fall? Let me know for the weekend post!