Monday, April 13, 2015

Off the Page Writers Series [17/4/15]



This Friday I'll be flying down to Palmerston North to chair a session in Massey University's "Off the Page" series of writers events at the City Library from 6.30 pm (there'll also be an open mike reading from 5:45-6:30). These events are jointly sponsored by the School of English and Media Studies and the Palmerston North Public Library.

The panel I'm in charge of will be focussing on short fiction, and includes renowned writers Owen Marshall, Jaspreet Singh, and Tracey Slaughter. Books by all three of the panelists will be available for sale from representatives of local independent bookseller Bruce McKenzie Books.



Owen Marshall
photograph: Liz March


Owen Marshall needs no introduction, I should imagine: he is, after all, probably the most celebrated virtuoso of short fiction in New Zealand. I've never met him before, though, and am greatly looking forward to it.



The amazing Jaspreet Singh, whom I met for the first time yesterday at the Signalman's House in Devonport (aka The Michael King Writers Centre), where he's staying before flying down to Palmerston North to take up the Massey University writer-in-residence position there for the next ten weeks, is probably better known for his two novels Chef (2010) and Helium (2013), but actually began as a short story writer.

His first book, Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir, published by Véhicule Press of Montreal, won the 2004 QWF McAuslan First Book Award. He tells me he has a number of other short stories in stock, but of course commercial publishers will persist in preferring full-length novels ...



I have to say that I'll be particularly excited to introduce Tracey Slaughter to the audience, though. Bronwyn and I are both great admirers of her work, and we're therefore very pleased to announce that Pania Press has just published her novella The Longest Drink in Town. You can find out more about this publication here, and if you'd like to order a copy of it, please try here.



Cover image: Bronwyn Lloyd / Cover design: Ellen Portch & Brett Cross


Tracey has a somewhat larger collection, Deleted Scenes for Lovers, due out from Victoria University Press in early 2016, but this is her first stand-alone book since Her Body Rises (Random House, 2005) - though of course her stories have appeared in many, many magazines and anthologies since then.



The Longest Drink in Town is available in an initial print-run of 100 copies.

Friday, March 13, 2015

Ramon Llull and Curriculum Mapping



Ramon Llull: Ars magna (1305)


Yesterday I went to an interesting meeting where it was explained to us just how the - relatively new - concept of curriculum mapping could help us improve our teaching programme. There are many forms that this can take, but the one which was explained to us consisted of a listing of the "graduate attributes" considered essential for students in particular degrees or subject areas within degrees, together with a list of the papers we teach, and a series of boxes to fill in confirming that we do indeed teach those particular things.

So far, so harmless: useful, even (perhaps). I note in particular the following passage from the wikipedia article on curriculum mapping, which concludes:
The curriculum needs to be perceived as a 'work-in-progress', a 'living and breathing' document, whose ultimate owners are students. Curriculum mapping is a 'process', not a one-time initiative. Traditional curriculum mapping software are just tools available to make the review process easier.
There's no doubt that obtaining an overview of something as complex as a major within a degree can be very difficult - and hence an impressionistic sense that "we must talk about that somewhere" often stands in for certainty that we really do cover things with the requisite detail and emphasis.



One example of a dynamic system which functions extremely well would be the periodic table of the elements. Dmitri Mendelev originally lined up the elements (on little cards) according to their atomic weights as a kind of after-dinner parlour game. He observed that at a certain point he needed to start a new row in order to match up the same kinds of elements with one another: in his system there were six rows, but this has been subsequently enlarged to fit in hydrogen and helium.

The point is that it wasn't till some time afterwards that the reasons for this periodicity were discovered: the fact that it was the number of protons in each nucleus that dictated their place in the scheme. The atomic weight, the factor he was using, was a far cruder indicator. Nevertheless, the whole system - with certain modifications - worked, and enabled him to predict the existence of various new elements which were subsequently discovered in nature (or, in some cases, fabricated in the laboratory).



Ramon Llull: Tree and Wheel (1305)


I guess the other thing curriculum mapping reminds me of, though, is the Catalan polymath Ramon Llull's wheels (and trees) of science from his 1305 work the Ars Magna (or Great Art). Basically his idea was that if one could summarise all the attributes of God - which come down to Goodness, Greatness, Duration, Power, Wisdom, Will, Virtue, Truth, and Glory - into one wheel, which interlocked with other wheels of natural elements, planetary influences, and bodily humours, it should be possible to make a kind of machine for generating knowledge.

Any question (theoretically) could be coded onto the wheels and receive a satisfactory answer which must be demonstrably true, since these things were guaranteed to be so by the very nature of the First Cause.

I suppose it's apparent at once how much information theory and digital computers owe to Llull's pioneering work (not dissimilar, in its way, to that of Alan Turing: at any rate in the over-simplified form portrayed in The Imitation Game, the recent film about him).



I guess the main problem with Llull's system, from a modern point of view, is the arbitrariness of the terms he was using. How, for instance, does God's Glory differ from his Virtue? Llull could no doubt have explained the distinction with great cogency, basing it on the best models of theological commentary available to him, but the results might still be a bit unconvincing.

He himself felt no doubts, however. When he visited Tunis in 1314 and tried to explain to a crowd of Muslims that the logic of his system demanded that they all immediately renounce their beliefs and convert to Christianity, he was greeted with a volley of stones. Though rescued by a group of Genoese merchants, he died the next year, probably as a result (though he was in his 80s, so it may not have been).

His other model for generating truth from interlocking ideas is the Tree of Knowledge (L'arbre de ciència). This, too, suffers from the lack of an empirical basis for the words and concepts he regarded as primary and undeniable.



Curriculum Mapping (civil engineering) (University of Hawai'i at Manoa)


Now my own feeling about all such exercises in codification is that they tend to promote uniformity and lessen creativity and originality. It isn't that I think that either of these aspects should predominate in any course design: institutions must maintain some control over just what is being taught in its classrooms, and how that ties in with other classes in the same discipline. By the same token, though, teachers are individuals, and teach in their own ways - and have to teach differently according to the particular students they're faced with.

There's no reason per se why a system such as curriculum mapping should interfere with that necessary freedom a teacher must feel to temper their teaching style to particular complex circumstances. That is what we're hired to do, after all. But (as a colleague of mine has put it): "templates control pedagogy." Once you have a particular model, there's a tendency to see everything in terms of that set of predetermined categories.

Nor is it enough to ask teachers to list all the possible variations from the existing curriculum categories and try to revise them accordingly. The mere fact of having to list such categories puts the assumptions behind them further and further off the agenda. The categories become real. Departures from them have to be justified and explained. What began as mapping has become prescription.

In this particular case, the battle is already lost (or won: depending on how you look at it). The curriculum mapping exercise will go ahead, and we're all soon going to be spending a good deal of time debating just how the projected learning outcomes of our courses match up with the graduate profiles of our degrees. And it's hard to argue against that process - in the abstract, at any rate.

I do feel a niggling doubt when I think of Ramon Llull, however. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that disorder always increases. While there can be local exceptions to that rule (the entire evolution of life on earth, from less to more complex organisms, might be seen as one such exception), it's beyond doubt that chaos tends to increase, and that attempts to arrest it in its tracks can have strange consequences.

For myself, I would predict that the more regimented course content and course outcomes become, the more creative classroom practice will become. If one wished to draw an analogy with poetry (as I so often do), it's just as futile to privilege content over form as it is to prefer form over content. Neither can function without the other, and it's only the proportions and relationship between the two which is really worthy of debate.

Our accountability as teachers to the students we teach must be taken very seriously: this does entail looking carefully at what we cover and how. On the other hand, bored, unmotivated students learn little. Nor do they rejoice at the idea of being cogs in some giant wheel of information. The best way to convince students that you really have something of value to teach them is to invoke your own creativity by learning along with them.

For Llull, the universe was sewn up. Everything that needed to be known was already known - it was just a matter of explaining that clearly, in words of one syllable, to potential dissenters, and then the millennium could be proclaimed!

That's not how knowledge works, though. Ideas change. Models shift. What we teach in 2015 is very different from what we were teaching even a couple of decades ago. Who would ever have though of demanding "digital literacy" from students then? We have to leave some space to react to changes when it comes, and any new mapping systems we devise must start with that very firmly in mind.



Tuesday, January 27, 2015

When Love Comes to Town (14 Feb 15)



Brydee Rood: Accumulation (2004)


Well, for anyone who's curious to hear four weird old geeks reading out love poetry of their own composition, fear not & say no more: here's the event for you!


When Love Comes to Town:
Poetry Reading by David Howard, Michele Leggott,
Jack Ross & Fredrika van Elburg


14 February 2015, 1.30pm, Drawing Room

Michele Leggott (Poet Laureate 2008/2009), Jack Ross (editor Poetry New Zealand), and Fredrika van Elburg (Dutch poet) will join the current Otago Wallace Resident David Howard to celebrate St Valentine's Day by reading love poetry.

This event is free to attend however seats are limited, please RSVP to enquiries@wallaceartstrust.org.nz.


For more, and for bios of all the participants, please visit the webpage here.

And if you don't know where the Pah Homestead is, here's the address:

The Pah Homestead, TSB Wallace Arts Centre
72 Hillsborough Rd, Hillsborough, Auckland
Open Tues to Fri, 10am – 3pm
Sat & Sun 10am – 5pm
T 09 639 2010




Midworlder: Pah Homestead (2010)


Looks like the kind of place you could film The Shining, doesn't it? It's certainly a beautiful old building: a great place to give a reading, in fact.



Poetry at Pah (14/2/15)