Tracing the Traces
For one week into 2021, we already seem on the path to a semester that will be, equally, if not more, stressful than what we experienced last term. And this is of course because as much as COVID asks us to stay in our bubbles to help the spread of the virus, what is happening in the world politically, socially, economically does not remain in a bubble. All of what happens in the world informs education, students, and educators in many ways. If we forget this in our course design, if we forget this in our pedagogy, we are setting and reinforcing barriers to education.
As a sensory scholar, I spend a ridiculous amount of time thinking about residue, haunting, lingering, and in turn the sources of residue, the traces if you will. This week I responded to my good friend, Margrit's tweet on precarity with the following:
"the residue of past precarity lingers and is embodied in a way that is impossible to forget. Because uncertainty leaves traces."
And precarity is just one of the aspects that lingers and haunts academics. Since the systems don't build in time to reflect on that lingering, doesn't ask us to stop to trace the trace, then we are bound and certain to repeat and carry it into so many situations. Historians (of which I am not one, but I do know many) very much reinforce how important the tracing of traces is to the context of what has happened in the world and will be likely to happen in the future. What happens when we stop tracing the traces? When we stop tracing the traces we function as a society, and in our own circles, academe, family, without context, like everything is in a self-contained bubble. This of course is untrue, and is exactly the type of thinking that is causing COVID to spread. Individualism is a product of not tracing the traces.
Systems are the traces we carry with us everyday. For academics, forgetting or ignoring those traces means ignoring the lexicographical ghosts that got us to where we are today. It is why most articles, books, and dissertations start with a literature review. You are asked to trace the field before you show where you fit on this map. The etymology of trace is from the Old French to line or outline, to follow. And yet, outside of our publishing lives (if we are lucky enough to have a publishing life), we act as though these traces don't exist, aren't important. It is one of the reasons I go back to etymology so often in my blog posts- I want to trace. I will even put a possibly unpopular opinion statement here: learning outcomes are important because they are a pedagogical tracing of traces.
We are all working through a traumatic time in history. If we do not acknowledge the traces that being part of this moment in history is having, the residue it is leaving (on bodyminds, on hearts, on emotions) then we are willingly ignoring a part of ourselves that is being actively haunted by our historical positionality. Ethically we are responsible to trace the traces. So maybe we need to find more real ways to acknowledge those traces in our work, especially in educational spaces. If we stop or ignore these important traces, they will just remind us over and over again, at times when we don't want reminding or aren't prepared to deal with them, that they are there.
Books I Read Last Week
I am also starting a new section of my blog this year where I post my GoodReads reviews of the books I have read instead of tweeting them out. I will of course continue to tweet things as I read them if I think it would be something that would be of interest to the larger HigherEd, academe, or educational/faculty developer community.
The Learner-Centered Instructional Designer: Purposes, Processes, and Practicalities of Creating Online Courses in Higher Education. By Jerod Quinn (Ed)
Promoting Inclusive Classroom Dynamics in Higher Education: A Research-Based Pedagogical Guide for Faculty. By Kathryn C Oleson.
Comments
Post a Comment