Tag: teaching

579: “Acquiring New Meanings” (Vandana Kalra & Shilpa Gupta)

                Vandana Kalra: “Do artworks keep evolving, acquiring new meanings, even after leaving the artist’s studio?”
                Shilpa Gupta: “They do […] [One example] would be an outdoor light installation which is currently being shown on Lake Zurich. In the 2004 work, lines from a ruled book rise and get transformed into three interwoven languages—English, Urdu and Hindi—all saying, ‘I live under your sky, too.’ Fifteen years ago…”
                -From Vandana Kalra’s interview with artist Shilpa Gupta on September 6, 2020

                Sometimes writing the trick of writing pretends that these words exist somehow “out there,” steady and stable, meaning the same thing year after year and place beyond place. I love staring at that illusion until I blink and see through it. Every piece of writing I really connect—like every piece of art that inspires or humbles me—is always acquiring new meaning.
                I first read this interview with Shilpa Gupta 2021, a few months after it happened. Since then I’ve returned to it: the webpage and the words are the same, but the meaning is different, just like Gupta’s light installation meant different things while changing times and places in 2004 to 2020. Perhaps that’s on my mind because a series like Uproar is a kind of transformation through time. I can go back and read the posts from 2015 or 2017 or 2020, and the pixels on my screen pretend they’re the same, but for me they never are. Sometimes what I wrote back then is a realization that has grown into the soil of my life, so now it’s a practice, and it’s surprising to see the seed being planted. Sometimes a quote I wrote about sounds completely different to my ear then it did then: not a seed but a shovel, or not a shovel but a mirror, or not a mirror but a crack in a mirror, or not a crack but a wildflower I admire as I pass by. 
                It’s not just our gardens that change. Our tools shift in our hands, too. When I started teaching a mentor told me, “I’ve been assigning The Catcher in the Rye long enough to go from seeing myself in the teenager to seeing myself in the older teacher.” When I pay attention to the readings I assign students, they all change, year after year: not just in how I see myself in them, but in how they connect to the world around them and in what they make possible.

by Azlan

577: “[A Tool] Made By Someone Else” (Min-zhan Lu)

                “[Because of how I was taught, it seemed that the tool of language] was made by someone else and was then acquired and used by me. How the others made it before I acquired it determined and guaranteed what it produced when I used it.”
                -Min-zhan Lu, From Words To Silence, p. 445 

                Today I started teaching a seminar for university instructors to come from across campus and discuss what we’re doing when we teach writing, and how we can do it better. It’s a wonderful, experimental, interdisciplinary conversation, with people joining from around the world and from many different fields. Sometimes—at first—it can be hard to get on the same page. We all come from different disciplines, and so we have different ways of talking about writing and writing instruction. Today we suddenly landed on that shared page by remembering Min-zhan Lu and asking: well, what are you doing when you write? In your learning, what is the tool of writing for?
                For assessment, said several instructors. Reflecting on their own educational journey, another added: writing is how I put together my thoughts. Another: writing is where I build the puzzle that I hope to share with you, inviting you to rebuild it and  work with it in your mind. Another: writing is where I release some of a day’s stress. Another: writing is one place I go to understand who I am and where I’m headed. All these answers, and the tensions between them, led to the first great conversation of our seminar. When writing is being used to judge how well you did, it can be hard to take up writing as a tool for weaving together all the threads of a complex thought. But we like that tapestry. And I like the reminder: when we’re working together across perspectives and trainings, we can step back to ask, what do our tools do? What do we want from them? Who told us to use them that way, and what other things might I want to do with this shovel, this pen, this question?

                And because I love writing as a puzzle you get to remake for yourself, here’s a riddle from the poet Symphosius (late 7th or early 8th century) as translated by Richard Wilbur. The question is (as the question so often is) what am I?

                “Long daughter of the forest, swift of pace,
                In whom old neighbors join as beam and brace,
                I speed on many paths, yet leave no trace.”

by Azlan

573: Little Red Riding Hood

                Today I was talking with a student about Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” (1697) and Jacob Wilhelm Grimm’s “Little Red Cap” (1812) and all the other versions of Little Red that we’ve met in books, TV shows, games, conversations, and our own or shared imaginations. This student didn’t like that the parents never tell Little Red why the forest can be dangerous, or go with her to teach her how to navigate its dangers. Now that my student mentioned it, I don’t like that, either. I started wondering about a version of the story where the parents and the child listen to each other, learn from each other. Help each other. I started imagining a version of the story that started with a different family and a different Little Red.
                One of my favorite things about folk tales is the way they invite us to ask what if, what else, what if we turned another way, or learned together, or met each other anew. So sitting together, while my student wrote her version, I wrote (and I’m just going to give you the beginning!)

                There once was a wolf called Little Red Patch because she’d been hit in the side by a hunter’s bullet when she was only a pup, and ever since, the fur there had grown red. Despite the wound and maybe a little in response to it Little Red had also grown curious. She was curious about the birds in the sky, and sometimes got dizzy from staring up for so long as she listened to their singing. She was curious about the glistening stones in the river and sometimes she dove into the water to touch them. She was curious about the woodcutter nearby and sometimes followed her nose toward the cooking smells that came from his cabin. Her mother told her to be careful.
                “Sometimes humans are scared of us, and they can attack the people they’re scared of,” said mother wolf. “Sometimes they just don’t want to share the food of the forest so they kill us. You can’t go to the woodcutter’s house!”
                Little Red listened to her mother, and for three days she swam in the river looking at the stones and watching how quick the fish were. But…

                In this version of the story Little Red is still curious. But what if Little Red tries to listen to her mother while still feeling her curiosity? What if her mother sees her curiosity, and decides, not to teach her a lesson, but to help her learn how to move safely? What—we might wonder—then. Or maybe your wonder goes off in another direction?

by Azlan