Moments of Why

This dive into my thought process this week is care of my friends in Australia, Miriam Reynoldson and Kate Mitchell. We had a lovely Zoom catch up this week and as I have mentioned a few times in different ways either here or on the podcast, it often takes being in community with others that are not part of your immediate instructional or geographical space to get you to think about things differently and with a new perspective.

So in this conversation we of course talked about a lot of higher ed things, but it was towards the end of the conversation that I started to reflect on the different goals and impacts that academics have, but also more specifically the impacts that educational developers, academic developers, and instructional designers have on pedagogical design and teaching and learning choices. And as a group of third space folk a lot of the professional development offerings that we support help instructors and members of teaching teams remember or even realize for the first time, the why of what they do. For a lot of people that why is harder to discover, and for a lot of people certain conditions can make that why disappear real quick.

But what I was expressing to Miriam is that it is often moments like being able to do the calendar jenga to be able to find time for us to have a call when our time zones are something like 14 hours apart that can mean the most. Being able to share virtual space with folk who have great things to say, good resources to share, and nice ideas to bounce around for feedback is incredibly valuable. But what it also does is make one appreciate those moments for what they are, a moment. 

The etymology of moment is from the Latin for movement or motion. And it is honestly truly moving to be able to be in that moment with folk that understand the world in ways that the group collectively appreciates. As a person who has done a lot of work on Bergsonian duree as a concept that appears both in literature but also in our pedagogies I think about these moments or of the moment a lot. And in relation to this conversation it occurred to me that when it comes to the whys we often tell people to remember, that we would be better served by changing perspectives to think about "moments of why" instead of this belief that our why will always be there and the same. This clip from The Hours is honestly the best minute of cinema. I return to it time and again. I watch it and mimic Meryl's hand gestures when she says "it was the moment, right, then." Every. Time. Because it so powerful, and that minute clip gives us such an understanding of the right-thenness of Bergsonian duree that we need to really have as part of reflective frameworks when it comes to our critical pedagogy.

So many folk are looking for their why, a why that might have been super clear before, but is now faded. And maybe the easiest way to try to engage back with the why, is to give ourselves some grace and framing that it is completely okay if the whys are fleeting, if the whys are of moment. If the whys are part of fond memories, a meeting, a sentence, a gesture, a conversation, an email, the perfect exemplar of a thing, like Meryl Streep in The Hours talking about moments.  Or even what happened this week as I was walking to meet a professor and another professor on the same floor but in a different department had their door open and they were deep in contemplation about midterm questions. I said hello, we chatted for a bit about being sure about questions addressing the knowledge level that was appropriate. I asked him if he had considered maybe asking the students to craft questions to go over in seminar as prep in terms of questions they would consider easy, or questions they would find more difficult to answer. He loved that idea and said they would implement this. And we made a joke about how this was a new service my office was offering for the fall semester where I would just walk around campus looking for open faculty doors and provide pedagogical guidance. A moment of pedagogical humour and appreciation. 

Maybe it is okay for us to just focus on the moments of why, instead of needing some long lasting character arc of why. So may your right-thenness be clear, and if it has been a while since your last why moment, may the next one be very soon. Because as the great philosopher Ferris Bueller said "life moves pretty fast..."

Change the Narrative Resource

Day 6. Meta's smart glasses offer promise for people with disabilities and unanswered questions about privacy. CBC. [9 minute podcast segment, with no transcript provided on the episode page sadly]