(l)egos & (online) community building, some personal reflections on a week at #digped @digpedlab & (un)belonging
or another essay in which I misuse tumblr
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Before anything, I want to thank Adeline Koh & Anne Cong-Huyen for the work that they do through #dhpoco (post-colonial digital humanities), #transformDH, HASTAC, and FemTechNet in creating space for diverse voices and creative conversations in and around the (digital) humanities. And likewise to Hybrid Pedagogy, which welcomes voices from inside and outside academics to questions concerning (digital) pedagogy and (online) community building, and to the UW-Madison and the UW system statewide, which tries so hard to include all of us who live in Wisconsin in its mission of excellence and learning, in spite of everything. And especially the small group members who were invaluable to my learning and sense of belonging at the Digital Pedagogy Lab: Asako from Canada and Japan; Faron from Madison and Memphis; Allison from Pennsylvania and downstate Illinois; Lisa from Waukesha, WI, and the South; Fatma from River Falls, WI, and the Gaza Strip.
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some notes to myself re (online) community building
we need to know who each other are & where we’re from
we need to be willing to spend time finding that out
we need to slow down & take the time we each need--we shouldn’t be afraid to ask others for that or expect them to know what we need
we can find things out online & we can talk to each other
we need to introduce ourselves & ask questions when we can
we shouldn’t blame people for not knowing who we are/what we do/what we need if we don’t tell them, but we will, we do, and we probably should try not to be hurt by that
we need to find ways to explore and to understand frustration, personal and communal, in constructive ways
we need to express gratitude silently and out loud
we need to take responsibility not only for our own satisfaction but also for listening and responding to group needs if we are interested in community building
we need to build in enough time and space to process our thinking
we need to act out of generosity
we need to recognize that our personal work/projects are important but they don’t = the Work
I may not be the best person to get the Work done, or I may not have yet found the most efficacious place for myself in the Work (by which I mean the work of building a more just community/society--that is what all this is about, isn’t it?)
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I’m just going to admit it. I’m an academic tourist.
I became one a few years ago--at first with an eye to reentering the academic job market after fifteen years away (I know, how stupid, right?), and then just because I enjoyed it. I go to conferences for fun. Check out various disciplines and organizations. Sometimes I even give papers. Sometimes I blog about going and sometimes I Tweet. Sometimes I post about conferences and events before and after via Facebook. I am shameless, Academy. I respect neither your privacy nor your dignity, nor your compartments, and sometimes, I laugh at you. You are so serious, and you get so angry when someone doesn’t use language the way you define it. But let’s be honest. I envied you too. You have the job I thought I wanted / worked hard to get once upon a time but didn’t, and in my story-telling, you can be more than a little clueless, distant, unkind, arrogant. And yet. You know things. You have interesting ideas. I like to gather these up when you’re not looking and run home with them. I like to take them apart and put them together in unexpected ways, like the little packet of legos I got when I checked into the Digital Pedagogy Lab.
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Can I tell you a story about legos? Christmas of my oldest son’s kindergarten year. He asked for and got the Red Beard Runner, 691 little sharp pieces of terror on the high seas, and he refused to do anything else that day but make sure the set got built exactly according to its instructions and let me tell you, that took all day… This product-driven quest required his dad and me alternately and sometimes simultaneously, as we searched the box for pieces and helped him understand the instructions. But he was reading them. He was taking them in. He was putting that damned boat together himself with his own five-year-old fingers, and I couldn’t even tell you what our three-year-old daughter did that day. And that was just the beginning of a long and tyrannical relationship with the Lego company, not to mention a family dynamic that has taken more than a little while to set on a better course.
That’s all to say that Legos don’t have happy associations for me, with or without the instructions, even though I’ve got a 30-gallon tub of them stashed in the basement that I can’t bear to get rid of. And though I’m entirely capable of building them and reading the instructions, though I’m the one who made many of the purchases, I don’t have a lot of positive personal memories of exchanges that happened with and through Legos, though I do have positive memories of other toys, building and nonbuilding, that required less script, less technical skill, less propensity to terrorize their users, less possession of my child. I don’t know if that’s more than a little ironic considering how long it took me in my own life to let go of scripts, to value personal interaction, or just symptomatic.
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I’m not a particularly good communicator. That is, it never came easily. I’m still working on social skills that approach the ones my youngest son achieved naturally by seven or eight. As someone who actively struggles to communicate effectively with others, I value and think a lot about good inter-personal speech and writing and about group bonding and communication too. I know that it is based on knowledge, interest, appreciation, generosity, compassion. It takes time as well, a lot more time for some of us than others. It takes time to understand interpersonal communication styles with a goal to incorporating everyone in genuine and non-superficial ways, and it‘s not just a matter of making quiet people speak up or quieting those who seem to take up too much conversational space.
I was once in an educators’ workshop in which we spent almost the entire time going around the room telling 1) about ourselves and 2) our theory of liberation pedagogy. Not having thought about that before, I was a bit panicked--new words can be threatening, but of course, in traveling around the circle of teachers & leaders & activists, we each of us discovered our liberation pedagogy--what it meant, that we had it--and built in the process a more collaborative sense of the meaning of the term than if the workshop leader had lectured/explained/given us that meaning before hand. You may not call that “teaching,” and I suppose it isn’t in the traditional sense of an authority imparting information to a group of captives, but I learned in that circle, and more importantly, perhaps, wanted to act as a result.
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I am the white mother of two white sons and one of them is a computer programmer so I do take exception to making white men and programmers the enemy. I first realized that easy comments about “white men” being the problem might not be constructive when I looked around my dinner table at home after making one of those comments myself--I told you I was a slow learner when it comes to good communication--and realized that I had hurt my sons’ feelings. If the patriarchy hurts all people, and I believe that it does, my sons are no more to blame for its existence than anyone else.
I also worked for many years in a theatre program that my daughter belonged to with mostly white kids who were, among other things: neurologically atypical, suicidal, OCD, learning disabled, trans and transitioning, physically and cognitively disabled, ESL speakers, autistics and people on the spectrum, homeless, cutters, diagnosed with ADHD and PTSD, sufferers of panic attacks and eating disorders and anxiety, slow processors, abusers of drugs legal & illegal … That list isn’t to put each of those characteristics in parallel in terms of their objective impact, but just to say that a lot of stuff was going on in their lives that the theatre program had to account for all the time. And sometimes we did, and sometimes we helped make someone’s life a little better, and sometimes we failed miserably. And I don’t know which is worse: seeing someone die or worrying that you can’t do anything to stop it or not seeing it coming until it’s too late and worrying that you didn’t do something that might have helped.
Death, at any rate, makes you appreciate life, as Fatma said this past week.
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Each of my three kids struggled in different ways with school, as did I. I know about learning disability and being non-neurotypical. I know about loneliness and bullying and shunning. I know about mental illness. I know about being an outsider. I know about not being able to fit in despite desperately wanting to. I know about self-harm. I know fear and panic. I know remorse and self-reproach.
I also know about forgiveness and reconciliation. About transformation that can occur through deep listening and coming back to the table. About the power of good thoughts, prayers if you will, and continued concern and hope, even when it would be so much easier to walk away, even when blame, of self and others, is all you have the energy to do. About the power and the difficult work of love & of hanging onto someone by the tips of their soul. About recognizing and working toward wholeness--mental, physical, emotional, spiritual.
I know about these things through lived experience as well as through reading and data, and I know that you do too.
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Perhaps my continued curiosity about academic questions and methods doesn’t justify my continued presence in academic settings long after leaving the Academy. I haven’t taught a traditional classroom in 20 years now, though I teach occasional workshops for all ages and online and have appeared in classrooms, and I recently returned to community college to study art and design. I see myself as a learner more than a teacher, though I accept the fact that we are all teachers and bear communal responsibility for being good ones. And I’m comfortable, usually, in that role, though I wasn’t always, and I wasn’t this week at the Digital Pedagogy Lab. I don’t blame anyone for my discomfort. It was grounded in my own insecurities about what I know and don’t know and how I learn and when I feel like I don’t belong and how I get over the feeling of unbelonging.
It is entirely possible that I don’t belong here.
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My personal interest in the digital ranges from multimedia publishing, to the design of online writing & art, to the creation of inclusive digital experiences (think digital book launches and conversations), to programming and web development, to social networks, to online teaching, to building virtual communities that reflect the diversity of actual communities, to digital collaboration, to online activism and engagement, to online employment.
This is a set of activities that can be divided into ones that require relationships and ones that do not or might not. And it’s probably not hard to imagine that those things that I can do alone (like programming and web design and data mining) are more technically challenging but easier to facilitate than activities like collaborating on a Google document with strangers or motivating people to contribute work to a Twitter-based collective poem.
I came into the week at the Digital Pedagogy Lab knowing that the barriers to digital community building were high, but I still had some naive thoughts about the possibilities…. The way that the digital breaks down geographical barriers and allows for previously unimagined connection. The way that the digital breaks down temporal barriers to allow for communication that is instantaneous. I am leaving with less optimism, less naivete, around those possibilities, and that’s a good thing. I leave believing that our digital connections are no more and no less efficacious than the corresponding personal connections they refer to. No more and no less enduring. No more and no less useful in our own lives.
I don’t need 10K Twitter followers to have a meaningful life anymore than I need (or believe I deserve) 10K readers for my writing. Having three or four good readers, even one or two, who care about what I have to say, as I care about what they have to say, enriches and feels like enough for me. Adding numbers of unrelated readers doesn’t add meaning or value to my life, doesn’t make me or my work any more or less significant, doesn’t make me a better or worse writer-artist.
Maybe thinking of the digital as a tool rather than a revolution is not such a bad thing, if it means that I don’t privilege its importance above other tools at my disposal. Like my pen and notebook. Like my glitter and gluesticks.
My body and voice, on the other hand, are mine to deploy online and in person. I use them to the extent and in the ways that I can and with the overall goal of living a meaningful life. Being at Digital Pedagogy Lab last week was meaningful for me. I required it to be. And now I’m rethinking the extent and nature of my personal, occupational, and organizational digital presence. I’m not sure that my meaningful life--or my relationship and responsibility to the world--requires digital presence. I do know that it requires me.
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I left this week with a question I’d thought about before, but one whose relevance I hadn’t fully located in the digital: how do I know what I don’t know?
But I have other questions too including,
what/who am I responsible for?
what is the relationship between academic publics and public academics and is that best played out online or in person?
to what extent will the academic use of data/words/discursive levels to gatekeep and to alienate audience members continue in an age of the commons, and will that gatekeeping make academic knowledge (and academics) more or less relevant?
how/where/when do we negotiate common meanings for words and concepts if we want to talk across disciplines and occupations as well as across differences of race, class, gender, ability?
what do we ask of language and metaphor, like the lab, for instance? what does it ask of us?
what do we ask of each other?
how do we make a place for ourselves in a community, and what are the responsibilities and risks involved?
how do we make our personal/our lived invisibility visible to each other in ways that are constructive to group interaction and to community building?
if I’m exhausted by something at the end of a day/week, is it something I can reasonably ask myself to do?
who do we want to see us and why?
when communities come together/ when we think we speak the same language/ when we use the same word but it means something different or has different connotations…. how do we know and negotiate meaning? who decides?
what are the most important elements of community building?
how do you know when an event succeeds and what counts as success?
what is the role of struggle/ joy/ pain/ discomfort in learning in general and in your personal learning?
are blame & envy also ways of knowing? can I recognize & use envy to understand something about myself and to work for justice?
for me, being a mother has been an important way of knowing--from unschooling to learning about different personalities and learning styles and needs for fun & risk-taking to understanding the errors I’ve made after the fact--what are your ways of knowing besides being a scholar?
to what extent can both words and numbers be used to shore up our own positions as experts and impede relationships in learning circles?
to what extent are (un)belonging and mistake-making also ways of knowing that we have to be willing to engage?
what are the commonalities of transformative experiences, and can we speak of transformation with respect to the digital or digital communities?
can we use the digital to help people slow down and how? why would that be beneficial/not?
how do we negotiate speed inside digital communities?
who is not at the table? what does it mean to invite people into a space? how do we center and value voices that aren’t heard, aren’t even present?
what does it mean when you walk into a space/event and say to yourself, “I don’t belong here” and how do we recognize/ respond to that feeling in ourselves and in others?
how do we invite people to linger & what do we ask of them when we do that?
