Fractal Pedagogy: Perpetuating Systems

This has been a week of sine curves of emotion. I have felt such mixed emotions all week, from the pleasure of recording not one but two podcasts with people that I really respect, to my body not feeling really great and finding ways to deal with that, from having an article accepted to a journal with a colleague whom I also really respect, to recording a conference paper with great pedagogues about a topic I care a lot about but then facing an inaccessible system to upload the recording, from saying goodbye to another colleague as she goes on mat leave, to giving myself space to process all of that (and more) this weekend. These last 14 months have been a series of these ebbs and flows, but where even the highest crescendos are pulled down by the times we are living in.

Next week I am delivering a workshop with a colleague (I have said this before, but I will say this again, I am so ridiculously lucky to be able to work with this person) and I am very much looking forward to it. I also have been thinking a lot about it, because the workshop itself is about the times we live in and the forces enacted, and ultimately how we feel and how that feeling translates to pedagogy. Sometimes we have the words to express what these feelings are, and sometimes those words escape us, or there simply are no words and they need to expressed in other ways- through tears, through laughter, through heavy sighs. All of this thought about emotion and embodiment and what we carry with us as we navigate a pandemic world has me thinking of my favourite mathematical concept, the fractal. 

If you don't know about fractals and Mandelbrot sets you can look at this lovely explanation on Wikipedia, or think about a tie dye shirt pattern. Basically fractals are a perpetual repeating pattern, that as you inspect the aspects of the fractal more closely you will see that the smallest elements are actually in the same pattern as the whole. Those of you that know me and my love of Bergson and concepts of duree, will see how this is of course the exact type of framing that I love. I love things where parts are wholes, I love things where there is a residue of what was there in what will come, I love things where just when you think you understand it the frame of reference shifts. This is because I really just love math. I told Lillian when we recorded the podcast this week (spoiler alert) that often times I see myself as this meme. 

Fractals are a great way to think about educational spaces. I have previously (6 years ago in fact) written on this very blog about how Twitter is a space of fractal pedagogy. It is a liminal space where systems perpetuate as often happens in social media. For example, if folk tend to be access aware in their institutional or pedagogical spaces, they will probably be similarly aware in their Twitter engagements. However, fractal framing is also a really great metaphor for the perpetuating systems we see in HigherEd. Often if you delve deeper when something happens it is because of systems of inequity, systemic racism, or systemic ableism. Just like a fractal, disrupting those systems requires awareness and if there is a lack of awareness of all the systems that are being perpetuated they are simply going to continue and often times in turn these systems will show up in pedagogical praxis. Turtles all the way down as an Indigenous framing is wisdom that insightfully demonstrates how everything is balanced and built on interconnected concepts. (If this is something you want to know more about please listen to "The Truth about Stories" Massey Lectures by Thomas King. )

In this workshop we want to name the systems, to gently interrupt the systems, and provide a new framing of hope. Because golly gee don't we all need a bit of hope right now? We can't disrupt the systems that should be disrupted if we can't see or name the systems. We can't find a space of hope if we don't name that space of hope. So I guess today I would like us to all reflect on what our space of hope looks like and what we need to get there, not in a toxic positivity sort of way, I am so not into perpetuating that system either, but just so that we can find ourselves again, our mindfulness, and our truth.