Lucie deLaBruere's List: PD Reading

• The promise of the digital is not in the way it allows us to ask new questions because of digital tools or because of new methodologies made possible by those tools. The promise is in the way the digital reshapes the representation, sharing, and discussion of knowledge

• I need to explain what I mean by building. Building, for me, means to work. And when I say work, I mean the opposite of thinking. I get this idea from a short essay by Peter Stallybrass that appeared in the PMLA in 2007. Stallybrass’s article has the provocative title “Against Thinking,” and in it, he argues that we think too much and don’t work enough.

   

  Thinking, according to Stallybrass, is the hobgoblin of big minds. Thinking is boring, repetitious, and “indolent” (1583). On the other hand, working is “easy, exciting,” and “a process of discovery” (1583). Working is challenging.
• This is a key insight that students and scholars alike need to be reminded of: tortured and laborious thinking does not automatically translate into anything of importanc
• In my own teaching, I’ve attempted to replace thinking with building—sometimes with words, sometimes without.
• collaborative construction and creative analysis
• collaborative construction, I mean a collective effort to build something new, in which each student’s contribution works in dialogue with every other student’s contribution
• something for themselves or for their professor. They are making it for each other, and, in the best scenarios, for the outside world. Collaborative construction obliterates that insular sense of audience inherent in more conventional student assignments. As for the concept of creative analysis, I mean that as a kind of antidote to the vacuous and shape-shifting term “critical thinking.” Creative analysis is the practice of discovering knowledge through the act of creation—through the making of something new. Rather than having students write papers, which often involves the worst aspects of thinking that
• creating something new for which no models exist.
• assembling mixed media combines, all the while through their engagement with seemingly incongruous materials, developing a critical thinking practice about the process and the product
• The very act of designing a game instead of writing a final paper changes the students’ sense entirely of what they’re doing and who their audience will be. Students know that a final paper will be read—hopefully—by only one person (if that). A game, however, already presumes an audience.
• As my students build—both collaboratively and creatively—they are also reshaping, and that very reshaping is an interpretative process. It is not writing, or at least not only writing. And it is certainly not only thinking. It is work, it has an audience, and it is something my students never expected.

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