On Words

So here we are, the second last blog post of 2020. As I write this on the 13th of December it has now been 9 months since I have been at home with still the amount of lack of leaving my home. In fact the last time I left my house was 6 weeks ago if you can imagine, and that was to get my books out of the office at work. Before then I had not left my house for 8 weeks.  And when I mean not leave my house, I mean not leave my house. Literally the only out I have is to put bags in the trash and retrieve deliveries on the porch. Time really has no meaning anymore, which gets to the point of today’s blog which is meanings and words. 

I realized that I had been reading some rather philosophically and theoretically weighty texts over the past few weeks and it has caused me to delve deeper into thoughts of access and academic discourse. I have had many conversations with sessional faculty and graduate students over the years about how the inaccessibility of academic discourse works as a gatekeeper and a trigger for impostor syndrome. 

The use of words and how words never stop working was part of the discussion between Dionne Brand and Rinaldo Walcott during this week’s R.W.B Jackson Lecture hosted by OISE. This concept of words working or stopping to work is an extremely important one in the pandemic, especially when so many equity deserving individuals are positioned exactly at the front lines of continued low-waged pandemic work and response. There are a lot of words that are floating around during the pandemic that have completely lost their meaning or denotative weight. Like care for example. And when a word stops having meaning the thought process and praxis behind the word stops having meaning as well. The way the word works changes, but never stops working. In a pandemic where time is seemingly flexible and non linear and even torus in shape, having time and space to think is at a premium and time only works in certain ways for certain people. 

I often wonder what pedagogical design would look like with more time, with more space? I often wonder what a pedagogical design with care baked in would look like not just for the students but for the instructors and ultimately for staff? I often wonder what the long term effects of a pedagogy that is centred on a visual epistemology, as we have now, has on learners? Because right now we seem to have a lot of words that come up like care, like design, like pedagogy, like space but the weight of each of these words hangs in the pandemic contextual balance. A design with more time suggests a privilege of having more time to design. A design with care suggests systems and institutional factors where care is more than a word but rather a foundational framework. A pedagogy with sensory awareness suggests a non-ableist societal approach (and we all know that we are so so far from there still and yet sadly with a heavy sigh). 

In one of the texts I was reading this week I stumbled again on my old pal Henri Bergson and the tension between habit memory and image memory. Habit memory is more like recall, whereas image memory is more like recognition. In our remote teaching and learning environment we are working hard to create habit memory in a space divorced from image memory (pure memory). We are teaching and students are learning but these words mean different things to everyone right now (the words are working but they are working differently). It is only when we either confront the reality that our words have lost meaning or that our words now have new meaning that we can actually address the situation we find ourselves in higher education and also in our society in general.

Teaching now is not teaching of the past. Learning now is not learning of the past. Living now is not living of the past. Readdressing the academic frameworks and pedagogical discourses is but one way to try to find the space we need to possibly thrive and not just simply poorly survive. Notice all the hedging in that sentence. It is not by accident. Because words mean things, words do work….even if those meanings have changed.