Circulations

I was going to write a blog this week about trauma-aware pedagogy, but I decided that might be too much for me to delve into at the moment as I am working through some severe lack of trust and feeling of disempowerment as a result of the systems I have had to navigate lately. It is hard to expand on something when you are already feeling raw about the thing you want to expand on.

So instead I decided to focus on the concept of circulation and how knowledge circulates, how people circulate, and how modelling can help pedagogical praxis circulate. The roots of circulate and circulation are scientific in nature. It comes from the root of circle but it was first used as word in relation to chemistry to refer to vapourization and condensation.  So circulation is an interested word because it both suggests a freedom of movement, but also an enclosing or condensing of space into a circle. 

When I started to contemplate concepts for this blog I remembered when I was a teenager and we would hang out at the mall which was basically the only space my small town had for folks of my age to be. We would walk around the mall from end to end (it was a big thing when the mall added an extension where the end to end walking would take you from 5 mins to maybe 15mins). But there was a mall cop there (think Paul Blart but thinner, taller, in a blue shirt, with glasses and acne and who was only a bit older than we were) who used to walk around the mall and if he ever saw us stop walking or congregate in a group of more than 2 for any small length of time he would come up to us arms waving saying "circule, circule" (circulate, circulate in French). Basically we kept walking because if we ever stopped Paule Blartier would come and tell us to keep moving. (I won't get into how English folk were asked to circulate more than French folk cause that's a whole other blog post). All of our conversations were in movement. We would see other groups from our school or other schools doing the mall walk and we would wave, but could never really stop to have a conversation because we would be told to circulate. I mean we could go to the cigarette smoke filled arcade in the mall or outside where it was -32C with the wind chill, but there was no stopping in the mall area. 

It occurs to me that I basically spent my teenage years in some sort of walking meeting. This is how I gained information, found out the gossip, heard about the parties that were going to happen, found out about things happening at the French schools. We now talk about the benefits of walking meetings and how it is important to get outside and discuss things. We also don't necessarily talk about how those walking meetings could be ableist if not planned properly. But inside in the mall, our ideas were literally circulating through that space. The circulation of ideas in classrooms happens in different ways than this. Often it is not a space of physical movement, but more importantly it can be a space where there is a unidirectional sharing of ideas, from instructor to student. This is a space that can lack circulation, like a space with stale air; there are no dialogues, no building of ideas that could then in turn circulate to other areas or programs that the students are engaged in. 

I feel as though education has both a mandate and a responsibility to circulate, and circulate broadly. In a reading group I was in this week there was a discussion of dissertation supervisor lineage, and how this lineage perpetuates scholars from a small enclosed number of schools to exchange folk for years. This is a type of enclosed circulation that doesn't necessarily bring the open exchange of ideas and in fact that kind of circulation could lead to built in biases and discrimination.  An education that is committed to circulation may be one that circulates not just thought between courses, institutions, and countries, but it is also a circulation of practices that are contextually informed. This idea of circulation means that there is just a good of a chance that non-contextualized "best" practices will circulate than those that work in certain situations.

When knowledge and pedagogical praxis circulates, is shared, it often happens in small circles and then may build out to larger spaces and areas. This possibility for small and larger circulation means there is a responsibility to think about what could be circulated and the ethics of that circulation. When I taught communications in a program for folk who wanted to work in shelters and rape crisis centres, there was an understanding that anything shared in the classroom space would not be circulated. That the classroom space was a safe space for sharing experiences. However, what did circulate from those spaces is a set of contextual pedagogical and active listening practices that acknowledges those sharing and which are applicable in many other situations, and in fact I use those practices everyday in my educational developer role. 

Social media readily demonstrates how information (truth or not) circulates and quickly. I wonder though if there is enough time spent reflecting on how information, knowledge, concepts, and pedagogical practices can and does circulate from certain educational spaces. Virtual learning spaces demonstrate how that circulation of knowledge can span the globe in a click, or decrease the geographical gaps between learners. When September comes and different institutions do different types of in-person, online, hybrid things, will that circulation be lost? We use curriculum mapping to show how concepts map, build, and circulate in a program of study. Can we do the same for pedagogical practices? I guess the question for this week is, have you thought about how your pedagogical practices circulate? Have you thought about how the things you say and do in your educational spaces, or with the platform you have, big or small, can and do circulate more widely? We love impact metrics in academe (I am looking at you readers that do REFs or TEFs in the UK). Some things you say or do will continue to circulate long after you are no longer teaching, or no longer around. Take stock of those things; it can inform your teaching going forward, and it can change the way you frame what you say or do in the spaces where you engage.