Windows and Mirrors: Media Artists' Door

"With access to mirror texts, students are able to see that their narrative matters, and with access to window texts, students learn to understand and appreciate the narratives of others."

The above is a quote from Chad Everett's guest blog post on Scholastic.com about the need each student has to be able to see herself in each field of study, and to read about success stories about people like her that open up new worlds of possibility as she imagines goals and dreams for her future.

I learned from personal experience as a white cis hetero able man that it's equally important for students of dominant identity groups to see and read stories about a diversity of peoples. I found out the hard way many times how little I knew about how to live in a country with all kinds of folks. I have so much to learn from listening to stories about non-dominant life experiences that are very different from my own.

One thing I'm doing this year is dramatically upping the mirrors and windows in my Media Arts classroom. This room serves 7th to 12th grade students, so I selected artists that meet a variety of audiences and whose well-known work is appropriate for at least portions of this age range. All of these featured artists identify as women, people of color, and/or LGBTQ.

The photos are up on a door that leads into a maintenance closet. The door is always locked. I am thinking of telling the kids that the key to unlocking this door doesn't look like a regular key. It's a work of media art they need to make. It's a story that only they can tell.

I could maybe arrange for a surprise to be behind this door on the last day of class, heehee!

Here's a list of the artists (I'm sure I'll be adding to it!)

Intisar Abioto
Haifaa Al-Mansour
Pedro Almodovar
Ana Lily Amirpour
Kathryn Bigelow
Luis Buñuel
Jane Campion
Niki Caro
Gurinder Chadha
Lisa Cholodenko
Ta-Nehisi Coates  
Ryan Coogler
Sofia Coppola
Alfonso Cuarón
Guillermo del Toro
Maya Deren
Lena Dunham
Ava Duvernay
Nora Ephron
Reggie Fils-Aimé
Nina Freeman
Tavi Gevinson  
F. Gary Gray
Vi Hart
Aureia Harvey
Todd Haynes
James Hong
Laura Hudson
Robin Hunicke
Alejandro González Iñárritu
Patty Jenkins
Miranda July
Wong Kar-wai
Merritt Kopas
Akira Kurosawa
Spike Lee
Annie Leibovitz
Kasi Lemmons
Penny Marshall
Steve McQueen
Shigeru Miyamoto
Hayao Miyazaki
Mira Nair
Yoko Ono
Yasujiro Ozu
Tyler Perry
Kimberly Pierce
Sarah Polley
Prince
Gina Prince-Bythewood
Zoë Quinn    
Dee Rees
Anita Sarkeesian
Cindy Sherman
John Singleton
Will Smith
Penelope Spheeris
Julie Taymor
Gus Van Sant 
Lana Wachowski
Lilly Wachowski
Glynn Washington
Carie Mae Weems
Lina Wertmüller 
Lindy West
Oprah Winfrey
John Woo
Jennifer Yuh Nelson
Karla Zimonja

Online Teaching: My First Gantt Chart

As I'm preparing to teach an online class for the first time this coming semester, there is a lot of communication that needs to happen in the absence of face-to-face contact.  When there are no walls to post charts, calendars, and other important information, how do teachers help students learn where to look for it all?

First of all, the learning management system creates the organizational structure that replaces the drywall and whiteboards.  I'm working with Canvas, which has built-in tabs for syllabi, course overviews, calendars, announcements, and literally everything else pertaining to the class.

Taking an online class is a different learning experience.  Ease of access and freedom from scheduled regular classes during the school day are traded in for strictly enforced due dates and the need to stay on top of one's own calendar.  Scheduling for skype conferences and google hangouts, for example, needs to be done ahead of time before the deadline to meet that responsibility rolls around. Accountability comes into sharp focus in online classes.

This is even more important in project-based classes, where long term assignments that are student-driven can take weeks to complete, and procrastination can result in some serious difficulty for both teacher and student.

A great visual way for the teacher to communicate how many days a student should devote time to an assignment is by using a Gantt chart.

(From Wikipedia)

I made my first Gantt chart last night using Google Sheets.  I was going to use Smartsheet.com, and I might still use it for future classes, but anyway Google Sheets was an easy option.  I'm teaching a project-based class called Music Theory and Digital Composition.  This chart details classwork for the first week:

What's evident right off the bat is looking at what a student needs to focus on for each day of the week.  Is the work balanced evenly throughout the unit?  With a Gantt chart, I can tell students visually what I think the easiest way to tackle the workload is, and then students adjust according to their own schedules in order to meet each due date.

The 48 Minute Music Project is the one I'm hoping students work on over time.  Some students might wait until Friday to start it, but they might run into some obstacles with time-consuming workarounds.  I'll communicate this concern in the assignment instructions.

In the interest of creating some kind of rhythm to an otherwise asynchronous environment that characterizes the online class, each of my units are one week long.  If I were creating Gantt charts for longer timelines, I might opt to use Smartsheet.com, which has more flexible options for representing visual timelines.

Facilitative Leadership Training: Day 3

I'm learning about Facilitative Leadership, a program put together by the good people at Interaction Institute for Social Change (@IISCblog).

The top 3 things I learned on the final day of training:

It's all about the meeting.

1. How to plan a meeting.  I thought I knew how to do that.  The corners I cut in creating agendas the day before and getting people the info within 24 hours was all well and good, but I learned that every bit of planning that I can do ahead of time for the meeting pays off.  

2. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of intervention." They say it pays off, and in the greatest currency I could wish for: Meetings that go smoothly.  Members that don't mutiny.  Most importantly, the meeting is more efficient in accomplishing goals and moving the team forward.  

 

3. This last one has taken awhile to sink in (with this late blog post, I've certainly given myself plenty of time to think).  It's that soapbox moment, when I get passionately argumentative about a controversial topic.  I used to think that every time I did this, I was being heroic.  I learned that leaders just don't do this every chance they get.  Who would follow that person?  In Facilitative Leadership they don't call it a soapbox, they call it a ladder:

Every once in awhile there's that particular piece of data that triggers someone.  When I'm "up my ladder," you'll probably find me spewing my beliefs forth from my lofty height, and maybe the conclusions I've drawn and the assumptions I've made.  Am I interested in a conversation?  Perhaps I'm more interested in grabbing my pitchfork and marching.

It's usually later when I look back on that moment sheepishly.

Between Wednesday, when I learned this, and Monday, as I write this, I caught myself up my ladder at least a half dozen times.  I'm proud to say I apologized a couple times, and I even stopped myself once before I even began.  

Baby steps!

-B

 

Facilitative Leadership Training: Day 2

I'm learning about Facilitative Leadership, a program put together by the good people at Interaction Institute for Social Change (@IISCblog).

The top 3 things I learned today:

1. The Iceberg! How to go from micro to macro with a problem you're solving:

The iceberg exercise asks the participants to keep an eye out for "levers" in any of the different depths that can be pulled to make a change.


2. Consensus!  And what happens when you can't get it.  Turns out I found myself as one of the people creating an obstacle to consensus with an issue I felt strongly about but not many others did.  I felt a lot of involvement, a lot of ownership (see the graphic below)

3. This wonderful quotation from the Facilitative Leadership text made a big splash in our group:

Facilitative Leadership Training: Day 1

I'm learning about Facilitative Leadership, a program put together by the good people at Interaction Institute for Social Change (@IISCblog).

Here are my top 3 highlights from today's training:

1. In the triangle below, I learned that Process and Relationships are equally important to success as Results.  "You must unlearn what you have learned." -Yoda

2. There are three parts to a discussion: open, narrow, and close.  What I didn't know was that I, like most people, am most comfortable in one of these parts over the other two.  This means that if I'm discussing something with a person whose preference is to open the discussion while I'm a closer, we could have some trouble communicating together if we're not aware of it :)

3. This wasn't from the curriculum, but I talked to a colleague in the training who taught me to find out "where everybody gets their cookies." This is a way of saying that each person identifies a different source of reward from his or her job, and we're always trying to get to that place.  For the people we're working with, learn their source in order to create win/win scenarios!