Zachary J.A. Rondinelli

1. Statement of Philosophy:

As an English teacher, my goals are to establish an environment of learning that values the multiplicity of student identities, experiences, lived realities, and world-views that each brings into my classroom. I strive to support my students exploration of literature, language, and media in order to guide them as they collaborate and work together to develop the required skills and critical approaches that will ensure that they can both understand and interact with the world and all the multimodal forms of communication that it is built upon, as well as challenge the world around them when they are called to do so.

2. Factors of Influence:

Throughout my career as an English educator, I have been influenced by many theories, pedagogies, and ontological traditions. I try to approach my own practice with an open mind and often find that, as I try on new and different conceptualizations, I can usually blend these new (and, sometimes, even competing) ideas into my own framework. That said, there are key components of who I am as an educator that I simply cannot disentangle myself and my pedagogy from. Amongst those conceptualizations are the importance of multimodality as sponsors of literacy and transactional reading practice.

2.1 Multimodal Text Forms and Sponsorship

As an English Specialist, it feels vitally important to acknowledge the way that multimodality and various new multimodal text forms have given rise to a totally new communication landscape. Yet, it seems as though there is an overall reluctance to accept and embrace multimodality within the English curricular framework. Though there are many resources available, the purpose these new forms offer to education seems to be unacknowledged. 

Multimodality, as a form of communication, suggests that “everything in a culture can be seen as a form of communication, organized in ways akin to verbal language, to be understood in terms of a common set of fundamental rules or principles” (Hodge & Kress, 1988, p. 1). In Multimodal Discourse, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (2001) more clearly define “everything” as modes–or semiotic resources–that allow for multiple, simultaneous realizations of discourse within the meaning making process (Kress & van Leeuwen, p. 21). They further suggested that the modes do not have a single job, but rather “operate in and across” one another (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001, p. 2). 

In my own work, this has been most instrumental in my commitment to comics within education. One of the most influential thinkers for me was Dale Jacobs (2014) and his work, Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy. Here, Jacobs argues that "comics represent part of [the multimodal] landscape and, in the way they can act as analogs to other kinds of multimodal texts, comics open up several possibilities for thinking about multimodal literacy" (p. 4). This led me to embracing the concept of multimodal literacy as a fundamental part of my practice. As an advocate for comics and their power to sponsor literacy, I felt that finding ways to incorporate multimodal literacy practices into my classroom would not only help support my students' learning, but also prepare them for an increasingly multimodal world, as well.

2.2 Transactional Reading Practice

As an English educator, understanding the interpretive process of reading has always taken precedence (for me) over the structural process. During my training, it became clear that my preference was to approach and understand reading through the theoretical concept of reader response. This led me to the tradition of Transactional Theory developed by Louise Rosenblatt in 1978. In her work, Literature as Exploration (1978), she positions the act of reading for meaning as influenced by far more than simply the text, but also by the larger social world within which the reader and the text come together. 

Transactional Reading views the process of meaning making as situated in time and place; no interpretive event can be identical because what a text reveals to a reader is dependent on the knowledge and experiences the reader brings to a text (and these are always changing). To take this idea even further, every interpretive act also changes the text and reader since, once revealed, neither can return to the state they were in before the encounter. In this way, there is no such thing as a “generic” reader because Transactional theory suggests that each person brings different social, cultural, and political positions, prior knowledge, previous experiences, (etc.) to the text and that it is these external factors that are brought to bear upon the text enacting the revealing that occurs during the reading/interpretive encounter. Meaning making is, therefore, a two-way transactional process that occurs between the text and reader and what they offer each other (Rosenblatt, 1978).

As a teacher eminently concerned with the social, cultural, political (etc.) lives of my students–and how that impacts their engagement with literature–Rosenblatt’s theories spoke to me. Rosenblatt’s theoretical perspective has become an instrumental influence of my own classroom pedagogy. When one approaches the act of English/Literature studies in this way, we are acknowledging the two-way transactional process that occurs between the text and all our students. This opens an interpretive Pandora's box, permitting so many new horizons of interpretation to present themselves and placing our students in the centre of this learning. They become active meaning makers as opposed to active meaning discoverers. They quickly understand that their role is much more than determining what the author meant in any given situation, but rather they are co-constructing meaning in every new engagement creating critical appraisers of the work as opposed to passive consumers. 

2.3 Critical Pedagogy

Like the Critical Pedagogy theorists that I admire (Friere, Giroux, hooks, Mcaren, etc.) I believe that “teaching and learning is inherently a political act” and that “knowledge and language are not neutral, nor can they be objective” (“Critical and Anti-Oppressive Approaches to Teaching”). It is for this reason that exploring and developing critical consciousness in my students is at the forefront of my practice. Indeed, as Freire (1987) tells us “reading does not consist merely of decoding the written word or language; rather, it is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world” (p. 29). In their groundbreaking work, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World, Freire and Macedo suggest a view of literacy as analysis that focuses on “whether it serves to reproduce existing social formations or serves as a set of cultural practices that promotes democratic and emancipatory change” (p. 141). This speaks powerfully to the way that education–in our case English–can be a “liberatory practice” that acknowledges and recognizes “education as a way to freedom” (May-Varas, Margolios, & Mead, 2023, as cited in ““Critical and Anti-Oppressive Approaches to Teaching”).

As a part of my commitment to this practice, I am often thinking about ways to challenge the traditional textual make-up of our classes. I believe in amplifying voices that have been traditionally marginalized, as well as teaching students the critical evaluation skills to challenge canonical works of fiction for their contributions to systems of oppression. Indeed, while bringing in texts that reveal authentic voice to our students is vital and important, “antiracist literature instruction includes opportunities for students to apply their developing understandings of race and racism to their own lives and experiences,” which within an English classroom means seeing the mutually beneficial “relationship between the goals of racial literacy and the goals of typical literature instruction”  (Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides, 2019, p. 12). Furthermore, as David Pilgrim (2015) points out “objects of racial intolerance [of which canonical literature can and often is considered] can be used to teach about race, race relations, and racism–and that those lessons, shared through painfully honest dialogue, can result in less racism” (p. 27). Therefore, I have strived throughout my career to find a balance between bringing in texts that reveal authentic experiences outside those of my students and challenging canonical works with a critical lens.

3. Areas of Tension:

I often find myself caught between the systemic expectations of the English classroom and remaining true to myself and my personal philosophy. It can be difficult when joining into an existing departmental structure to find opportunities to try new approaches and strategies. Personally, this has been most evident for me in text selection.

Last year, I approached my Program Chair about teaching a video game in my ENG4C class. I had a very small class of nine boys and felt that this game–Braid (2008)--would be a perfect multimodal text form that students would buy into. I faced significant resistance at this stage, having to justify my rationale about multimodality, questions of how it would fit into the course structure, ways that I could evaluate their work, etc. Once I had convinced the department to let me teach it, it became apparent that we did not have the technological infrastructure to make it work. This felt like such a blow to me because I had fought so hard to make it happen. Ultimately, there still exists both a philosophical and technological tension within our schools to implement new and innovative ideas. Sadly, it is our students who suffer, as a result.

Even when bringing traditional monomodal texts into our classrooms (novels, for instance) as core texts, these tensions can arise. For instance, how do we heed the call to bring representative and diverse texts created by authentic voices in order to reveal truths and combat prejudice into our classrooms while also teaching students critical practices to combat the histories of oppression baked into the classic, canonical texts that have been contributing to the development of implicit biases through engagement with them? One of the many difficulties inherent in this dichotomy is, of course, ensuring that students “reach the depth of understanding necessary for fully grasping the complexities of systemic racism” (Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides, 2019, p. 13). It is, I think, often easier to simply focus on the work of revealing authentic experiences through authentic texts for our students because it means not having to confront the painful history and role that the literature we love has contributed to. That said, the critical skills required to evaluate and challenge what our students read can only be developed by exploring how the past not only reflected, but amplified and contributed to systems of oppression. For this reason, though I often find myself at odds with canonical literature, I also feel the importance of it remaining in the classroom. Finding the balance is a tension I am constantly faced with.

Another area where tension exists during the implementation of my personal philosophies is in classroom practice. I often set my classrooms up to be wholly democratic spaces; a place where students understand their role as leaders and recognize that the expectations are for them to take an active role in not just their learning, but the learning of their peers, as well. I view myself as a facilitator–or guide on the side–helping students to take ownership of their learning, rather than view me as the “expert.” Yet, I have often come across some combativeness amongst colleagues who view this approach as undermining the way the rest of the department functions. I’ve been challenged on why my students have so much freedom to choose their own seats, select from options in assignments, or identify their own ARP test days. It has been suggested that my choices  have negatively impacted the classroom community of others because students are comparing experiences. I find this particularly difficult because I never want to contribute to a negative classroom community–whether it be mine or other teachers. Yet, I also feel as though not remaining true to my principles could negatively impact my practice, my students, and my overall health within the field.

These can be difficult areas to navigate, but I have learned to value these tensions for they challenge me to think critically about my practice and to remain true to the things that matter most.

4. Conclusion

Throughout my ten year career, my philosophy has changed. It has shifted and evolved as I have continued to learn and grow as an educator and pedagogue. I believe in the value of life-long learning and do my best to remain open to all new experiences that I am faced with. That said, the core tenants outlined above have featured prominently in my positionality for years and, though even within them I have grown and adapted, I believe that they truly reflect my philosophy as an English educator. 

References

Borsheim-Black, C. and Sarigianides, S.T. (2019). Letting go of literary whiteness: Antiracist literature instruction for white students. Teachers College Press.

Freire, P. and Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: reading the word and the world. Bergin & Garvey.

Hodge, R., & Kress, G. (1988). Social semiotics. Cornell University Press.

Jacobs, D. (2014). Graphic encounters: Comics and the sponsorship of multimodal literacy. Bloomsbury.

Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. Arnold.

Pilgrim, D. (2015). Understanding Jim Crow: Using racist memorabilia to teach tolerance and promote social justice. PM Press.

Hey everyone! 

If you’ve got some time to kill (as many of us do right now...), I’d love it if you checked out my recent analysis/long-form essay on Tom King et al.’s Knightmare arc in Batman over at the Vault of Culture!

My essay, “Even Batman Has (K)nightmares: An Analysis of Form and Communication”, takes a look at how the various creative teams experiment with form as a way to communicate the narrative while challenging reader expectations!

You can read it here:

"On Fire" by KC Green (2013) was originally published for his website, GunshowComic.com. It has since become an internet meme that, more often than not, utilizes the first two panels of the comic as a way to say that a certain situation is, contrary to the dog's words, not fine.

I think that this comic/meme fits beautifully with Cozolino’s (2013) theories regarding cognition and stress, particularly as it demonstrates how stress could impact the three fundamental ways that brains serve our survival.

Cozolino mentions that the first way that the brain serves our survival is to assist in the appraisal of environments for positive and negative values and that the second is it's helpfulness is organizing our abilities to walk in a desired direction (p. 73). In the comic/meme, it would seem as if dog's brain has failed in these two fundamental ways; he not only does not recognize the severity of the negative value within his environment (fire and smoke), but refuses to move resulting in his... melting.

In this comic/meme, I would suggest that the fire are stressful triggers that can potentially impact our students' experiences, and the dog represents our students. As Cozolino says, "anxiety can be triggered by countless conscious or unconscious cues and has the power to shape our behaviours, thoughts, and feelings" (p. 74). Yet, this comic/meme seems to point out a breakdown in appropriate threat recognition; the dog accepts the fire (stressors) to the point of harming himself, rather than recognizing the danger and running (coping strategy). If we see the metaphor in the comic/meme (student trying to succeed in school), then the comic demonstrates how "the mechanisms of long-term well-being are sacrificed for the sake of immediate survival" (p. 78). If we see the house burning down around the dog as school, and the fires as stresses caused by school, then it can be said that school is detrimentally harming the dog/child and that they are willingly allowing these things to happen in the hopes of achieving immediate success.

Having discussed the comics and its link to the first and second fundamental way the brain supports survival, I should also discuss the third. The third characteristic that Cozolino discusses is the brains ability to learn from and remember previous experiences so as to allow us to use those experiences to inform situations in the future (p. 73). In 2018, Hit Reblog: Comics That Caught Fire, collected many of the most viral comics that have ever been created. Green's "On Fire" was, of course, included, but he also updated it with a new version of his comic... a sequel of sorts (please forgive the profanity... It's relevant, I promise).

I thought that the "sequel" was a really interesting companion piece that extends the conversation surrounding stress and how we handle it. In this version of the comic, the dog recognizes that dangers that the fire presents. They noticed that the house is burning down and that they are going to soon be overwhelmed (here, we get a very appropriate example of the brains first and second fundamental way to support our survival). Yet, it is a "sequel" published 5 years after the original. To me, this demonstrates that their principle; a new situation has presented itself, and the dog is now better able to handle the situation and respond appropriately. Sure, he still let it get a bit too far, but he recognized the risks involved in letting himself be melted once again (let's suspend disbelief here, shall we?) and fought back to preserve his own health. So while this very clearly "stressed brain" resisted the learning that came from the first comic, he ultimately succeeded in appraising his environment and acting accordingly (Cozolino, p. 74).

Personally, I think there is also a link to "humour" from the Cozolino reading, as well. I would love to hear if any of you have thoughts about the humour element (or a response to something I said) as it relates to "On Fire"!

References:

Cozolino, L. (2013). The Social Neuroscience of Education. Optimizing Attachment and Learning in the Classroom. W.W. Norton.

Please check out our latest issue (#4) of SEQUENTIAL: Canadian Independent Comic Book Magazine! It is available HERE at a choose your own price model and available by print at Studio Comix! 

I am really excited about my piece for this issue! “Look. See?”: Colour is Character in Beneath the Dead Oak Tree is a really great look at how the incomparable Emily Carroll uses colour to enhance her story! 

I hope you enjoy!

I’m really excited to share with you all the news that my first academic journal article has been published!

If you have any interest in reading my article, it can be found here (for free-woot, open access!): https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/tba/issue/view/892/147

I’ve always enjoyed watching YouTube football analyst, Brett Kollmann’s The Film Room channel, because he has one of the finest understandings of the discourse of football that I have ever seen. The videos that Kollmann produces often focus on a player or team that is seeing success (or having difficulties succeeding) in the National Football League (NFL) and goes into incredible detail about why this is based on previous game footage and an awe-inspiring comprehension of how the game of football is/should be played. It was after watching one of these breakdown videos, that I began to think about the ways that American football could be understood as a type of literacy.

As a result, I took advantage of the opportunity to explore some of the more complex ways that play designs (fairly common multimodal texts used in teaching football) revealed gestural modalities through encoding during my time as a student in Doctoral Seminar 1 (DS1). In what became my final paper for DS1, “Revealing Gestural Encoding: Exploring Multimodal Resources with Embodied Learning”, I suggest that football plays function as multimodal resources that encode gesture because “the icons used in the representation signify more than just the players positions, they signify the player’s themselves” (p. 5) and that as such, “while the multimodal resource helps the player know where they are expected [to be] it doesn’t tell them how to get there against a defender trying to prevent it” (p. 5), which leads to the requirement of personalized gesture when the play viewed on paper is put into action (Rondinelli, 2019). In other words, while the play makes it clear through visual and spatial modalities where the player needs to be in relation to the field at a plays end, it doesn’t give them any assistance as to howthey should get there when they are playing the actual game against an actual opponent.

Since working on that paper, I have fully embraced the idea that football should, indeed, be considered a literacy practice and that this opened up new opportunities to discuss how athletic popular culture impacts multimodal literacy development. Brian Street (1993) defines a literacy practice as the “many different ways in which we act out uses and meaning of reading and writing in different social contexts” (p. 139). As I will demonstrate, football provides the opportunity for a player to act out uses of reading in a particular social context, while viewing football allows one to act out meanings of reading in another context. Furthermore, when American football is viewed through the lens of popular culture, we can apply Donna Alvermann’s (2010) “three debates at the intersection of popular culture and literacy practice” (p. 544) as a way to frame how football can be used in the context of education and literacy development.

To support this idea, I want to extend my previous work. While the reading of playbooks certainly represents one of the literacy events (here defined as an instance in which a particular mode impacts a participants interaction with a text by influencing their interpretive processes and strategies) that make up the larger literacy practice of football, I have begun to recognize that it is far from the only, or even the most meaningful, literacy event in the sport (Heath, 1983). To the point, I have come to believe that the most meaningful literacy event in the sport of American football stems not from reading the playbook in pre-game study, but rather from the act of reading bodies as text either during (on the field) or after (in film study) the game.

As a player on the field, the act of reading bodies as text is much different from the act of reading bodies as text for a viewer; one of my closest friends knows this from experience. Andrew Ghaly has been an avid fan of NFL football for his entire life. He has also had the opportunity to play football at an extraordinarily high level as a wide receiver (WR) for both the Sydney (Australia) University Lions and the New South Wales Wolfpack. When I asked him to speak to the information provided by a playbook, he said: “[the playbook] only tells you where you’re going but what’s in front of you [on the field tells you] how you’ll get there” (A. Ghaly, personal communication, November 4, 2019). He would further clarify that, “if [the defender] is playing up on you, you tend to run your route a little bit deeper because you’re trying to make him think you’re going down field…[so] as soon as he flips his hips, that’s when you break” (A. Ghaly, personal communication, November 4, 2019). For Ghaly, the reading of a defender’s body (or the defender reading hisbody) is something that occurs before and during every snap of the football; to respond to the body as text is to alter and adjust gesture and motion in an attempt to confuse the defender who is also trying to do the same. In order to successfully beata defender (the goal as a WR is always to create space between you and the defender in order to make room to catch the football). Therefore, a WR must consciously and critically evaluate the gestural tendencies of the defender in order to preemptively predict what he plans to do. As a gestural literacy event (one player actively reading the body of the other player as a text in order to identify the best possible interpretive strategies) this fits within the larger schematic of football as a literacy practice. But, how does this shift when a player is watching versus playing?

In his book, Take Your Eye Off the Ball 2.0: How to Watch Football by Knowing Where to Look, former NFL scout, Pat Kirwan (2015), discusses how “football can’t be learned while it’s happening” (p. xiv) and it is for this reason that it is a mandatory requirement for football players to evaluate film of the defender that they will be going up against next week. The reason for this is simple; once you know the gestural tendencies of your opponent (say, the defender always lines up on the WR’s outside shoulder before backpedaling for a deep coverage defense)and can recognize his gestural discourses, you can design a response that will be most effective (for instance, call an option for an inside slant).Ghaly also spoke to the importance of film study as it relates to reading the body as text in preparation to compete against a particular opponent: “If [the defender] is giving me cushion but I know [from film] he’s going to always crash down, I’m gunna be playing it that way” (A. Ghaly, personal communication, November 4, 2019).In other words, from the perspective of post-game viewing, the player begins to build up a sort of lexicon about the defender they’ll be playing against that acts as a sort of gestural discourse analysis and allows them to fill their toolbox for the game with strategies to utilize against the defender. Interestingly, this reading body as text in a post-game setting informs the strategies that will be employed on-field, as well.

So, while this all leads me to firmly believe that American football exists as a complex literacy practice built upon a “multiplicity of literacies” (p. 139) it is also, undeniably, a popular culture phenomenon and begs the question as to whether or not it holds any value within the framework of literacy education (Street, 1993). Here, we can turn to Donna Alvermann’s (2010) three debates to support the usefulness of football as both popular culture and literacy practice.

In her work, Alvermann identifies three debates related to popular culture and literacy education focused on agency, transfer, and identity.As it relates to the debate of agency, football as literacy practice can be seen as a powerful informal site of learning that can be used to shape interpretive processes and strategies for students within a larger literacy network which would allow students to use the skills (discourses) established within the sport to support the creation (design through hybridization/remix) of their own body as text (Alvermann, 2010). This also feeds into the question of transfer, because it recognizes that informal and formal sites of learning are both meaningful (qualitatively similar) and, as such, can co-exist in a reciprocal relationship whereby literacy development within informal settings (such as the football field) can feed into literacy development in the formal classroom setting (Alvermann, 2010). For example, football as a literacy practice that promotes the development of gestural literacy skills is likely to also promote the development of a more nuanced recognition and understanding of body language as communication in drama class, or film/media studies. This would allow the students to not only utilize those skills in the creation of body as text within those classes, but also allow them a better understanding of the discourse by which they could discuss and analyze instances of it in other texts. Indeed, if we accept Street’s “ideological model of literacy” (p. 139) that recognizes a “multiplicity of literacies” (p. 139), then we must also recognize the power of football as literacy on the questions of agency and transfer(Street, 1993).

Finally, Street’s ideological model of literacy also works to support football as literacy practice in response to Alvermann’s question of identity. Street (1993) says, “whichever forms of reading and writing we learn and use have associated with them certain social identities, expectations about behavior, and role models” (p. 140). Indeed, as a way to engage youth in conversation about social or educational equity, football as literacy practice can guide students who have developed skills in non-traditional areas of literacy towards an identity formation that informs the acceptable practices of the classroom (Alvermann, 2010). Acknowledging football as a popular culture literacy practice provides teachers the opportunity to leverage it as a site of “identity construction” (p. 551) for students that allows “youth to speak their own truths into existence” (p. 551) by accepting it into the wider literacy conversation within the classroom (Alvermann, 2010).

When kids are learning to play sports, there is one rule that a coach will always tell their players to remember: “keep your eye on the ball” (Kirwan, 2015, p. xiii). However, when it comes to football as a literacy practice, it would seem as though keeping our eye on the ball has prevented us from recognizing the powerful opportunity that exists to leverage a massive popular culture phenomenon for the purposes of literacy education. When we focus on the ball, we miss the nuanced gesture of a WR who feints and stutter-steps towards an inward slant to get a defender off balance before bursting towards the sideline for an out route or the safety who sees the body language of the quarterback and anticipates his through for a quick interception. When we finally take our eye off the ball, it becomes clear that American football, both on and off the field, has a lot to offer literacy education.

References

Alvermann, D. (2010). Popular culture and literacy practices. In M.L. Kamil, P.D. Pearson, E.B. Moje, and P.P. Afflerbach (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (541-560). New York, NY: Routledge.

Ghaly, A. (2019, November 4). Personal interview.

Heath, S.B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11(1), 49-76.

Kirwin, P. (2015). Take Your Eye Off the Ball 2.0: How to Watch Football by Knowing Where to Look. Chicago, IL: Triumph Books.

Rondinelli, Z. (2019) Revealing gestural encoding: Exploring multimodal resources with embodied learning. Unpublished final course paper.

TED (April 2017 – Vancouver, BC)

Anil Seth: Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality

------------------------    

     I have always strongly believed in the idea that each of us perceives objects, experiences, texts, communications, and even the world around us, in extraordinarily different ways. It is likely that this interest is why I am so drawn to the postmodern philosophy of theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek (among others), whose work, through an admittedly far more pessimistic lens than my own, strives to find ways to explain or identify what is “real” and what is not. As I have been quite open about, technology, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), simulacra and simulation, hyperreality, and many other theories that probe the deepest questions about reality are quite constantly on my mind.

     I was lucky to stumble across Anil Seth’s (2017) talk from TED Vancouver, “Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality”, while preparing a revised draft of my upcoming journal article, “‘C’mon. Sell Me Another One’: Simulation, Sacrifice, and Symbolic Revolution in Mister Miracle (2017)”, based on the recommendations of one of my reviewers. When I watched the video, I immediately beca  me fascinated with his suggestion that all of human perception could be boiled down to the concept of “controlled hallucinations”. In response to the question of reality, Seth suggests that what we consider “reality” is simply a hallucination that we all jointly agree on, and he goes on to illustrate this idea with many wonderful neurological experiments, illusions, and techno-demonstrations (Seth, 2017).

     I believe that there is a powerful dynamic relationship that exists between the ideas of perception, cognition, and learning; we have to look no further than the “Ancient Question” of the External World problem (EWP) to identify this (Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl, 1999). The EWP discusses the dichotomous situation whereby we (people/human selves) can consciously recognize a world of external objects and independent properties, yet can only really experience them as “an endlessly changing chaotic flow of sensations” (Gopnik et al., 1999). Through his work with babies, Piaget interrogated the EWP, positioning his theory to acknowledge babies’ worldview as “complex, and as highly structured, as the adult view” (p. 16), yet simultaneously “profoundly, qualitatively different from the adult view” (Gopnik, et al., 1999, p. 16). Ultimately, this led Piaget to the determination that babies learning mechanisms were present and capable of providing them the necessary tools to construct rapidly changing pictures of the world based on their external experiences (Gopnik et al., 1999).

     I see a connection, even a dramatic extension, between Piaget, the EWP, and Seth (2017). In a manner reminiscent of Gopnik et al.’s (1999) description of our everyday experiences as “tiny events on the edges of our bodes, photons bombarding our retinas, molecules of air vibrating at our eardrums, flickers of pressure on our fingertips” (p. 60), Seth says that perception is nothing more than streams of electrical impulses fed into the brain based in response to the objects or things that we interact with in the world (2017). In this way, perception could be redefined as a process of “informed guesswork” where the brain, as functional “prediction engine”, combines external signals with pre-existing expectations and knowledge about the way that the world works in order to form it’s best guess surrounding what caused the signal in the first place (Seth, 2017). If we accept Seth’s premise of “perception as informed guesswork”, then the metaphor established by Gopnik et al., and hinted at by Piaget, of the “Scientist in the Crib” becomes even more powerful because what is scientific inquiry if not the elaborate evaluation of informed hypotheses and guesswork?

     While the video implies a monumental implication for perception and the EWP, there is also an implication about how consciousness impacts our recognition of the self. In one of the most interesting experiments Seth (2017) discusses, how a person hooked up to VR featuring a simulated hand can begin to assimilate the virtual, simulated hand into their conscious body (Seth, 2017). By simulating the arm to flash red in response to the person’s internal heartbeat, he demonstrates the ways that interoception (the way we experience our body from the inside) can impact our conscious perception of reality (Seth, 2017). What is revealed is that when the simulated arm flashing is in line with our internal heartbeat, the viewer begins to have feelings of assimilation (the virtual, simulated arm is actually theirs), while when they do not align it is much easier to perceive the arm as simulated (Seth, 2017).

     The implications here, I believe, could be enormous for providing some sense of whether or not babies do indeed have a “deeper conception of what it is to be human” (Gopnik et al, 1999, p. 29). Immediately following both of my sons’ births, my wife and I were encouraged to provide skin-to-skin contact to the baby as a way to comfort them and make them feel safe. While I loved providing this safety for my boys, I did wonder how the act of skin-to-skin functioned to create this phenomenon for a newborn. By considering the implications of Seth’s experiment with newborn babies, I wonder if it might be possible to extend this to learning about others, as well as self. If the newborn, who has just spent nine months deeply connected to another human, finds themselves traumatically extricated from that lived experience and supplanted into a new (separated) one, could we say that the skin-to-skin contact grounds their new experiences within a similar assimilation of reality? In other words, does the skin-to-skin, and by extension the sensation of a heartbeat that is different from their own, begin to provide the necessary neurological impulses required to identify the existence of other people who are not us? I find this idea incredibly fascinating.

     Of course, this only scratches the surface of possible correlations between Seth’s (2017) theories and cognition or learning. I found the video incredibly revelatory and can say it has certainly changed the way that I will think about my conscious reality. The three implications that his new conceptualization of reality, perception, and interoception reveals (the mental health implications for understanding neurological disorders/psychosis as a misperception of self, an argument against the posthuman call for a singularity of consciousness, and the fact that our individual experiences are only one potential way of being conscious) are each independently fascinating and provide fertile ground for continued interrogation within the context of cognition and learning. I look forward to considering these possibilities together.

References

Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A., & Kuhl, P. (1999). The scientist in the crib: What early learning tells us about the mind. New York, NY: HarperPetternial.

After reading chapter four of The Scientist in the Crib, I couldn’t get this photo-comic out of my head... Of course, we have begun to see the tide turn in computer-language recognition; Google and Amazon both have their own version of “home assistants”, not even to mention Apple’s mobile assistant, Siri, who started it all. Yet even eighteen years after the book was written, Gopnik et al. are still not really wrong... I own a Google Home and have spent a lot of time an energy turning my house into a “smart” one... while it works wonders for me, my wife has trouble with it because it doesn’t always recognize her voice. Dante, of course, tries to make her speak to him, but it is always to no avail. I think this demonstrates Gopnik et al.’s point that “all voices are different...so even simple sounds (like ah) sound different depending on who says them” (p. 95). Finally, when Gopnik et al. reminded us again that, “adults play an especially crucial role in language learning” (p. 101), I began to think about all the words and phrases that Dante and Enzo were learning from me as I spoke with Google. Each of my boys has a Google mini in their room, which my wife and I use to play white noise while they sleep or to play music for us to dance to when we want to have fun. Dante (for sure) has already begun the context dependant language learning that Gopnik et al. discuss because he knows to say, “Hey, Google!” (which sounds more like, “Hey Goo-Goo!”) when he wants her to play his favorutie song (”Hey Goo-Goo! Play Who Ledadogsout”). 

I tried to emulate that in my photo comic featuring a very young William Shatner (as Captain Kirk), Google, and a random young chap that I found on google.

References

[Captain Kirk in his bridge chair]. Retried from https://www.pinterest.ca/pin

/273945589809663249/?lp=true

[Captain Kirk leaning forward in his bridge chair]. Retrieved from https://exoplanets.nasa.gov

/news/1385/to-boldly-go-how-star-trek-inspired-nasas-planet-hunters/

[Google Home: Product image]. Retrieved from https://www.roundaboutlighting.com.au

/products/google-home-smart-speaker

[Young child in a high chair]. Retried from https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/allthemoms

I recently stumbled across a really fantastic environmental opinion piece in The Walrus, by Ziya Tong entitled “We Are Garbage” (2019). Simply put, the article is an exquisite piece of writing that really stands out as one of the best things I’ve read in recent memory.

Tong’s genuine concern for the environment, and what humanity is doing to it, is apparent from the very first paragraph; she is not shy about driving home immensely damning statistics surrounding our wasteful ephemeral habits. And while her evidences are very illuminating (she goes from discussing our planet’s orbital garbage to the impact of human excrement with an ease and natural flow that I genuinely envy), it is the way that she presents her argument that is so powerful. Saving her thesis for the final sentence of the piece, she tactfully identifies humanity’s hubris and, like a viper striking, damns us for it with eloquence and authority.

Her paper ends on a powerful punctuation statement that should shake all of us to our cores, not because it is new information, but because environmental advocates have been forced to lean into our unhealthy narcissism in an attempt to gain supporters for their fight. Tong states, “What we put into the environment, will eventually find it’s way back into our bodies”.

For me, this statement is bone-chilling.

How perverse is it that Tong’s central thesis could be reworded to say, “since you clearly don’t care about the environment, maybe you’ll stop littering and polluting the planet if we make it about you, you selfish bastards”.

I mean, am I wrong? Isn’t this what her statement silently implies? It is easy for us to ignore the impact that our wasteful habits have on the planet because, simply put, we aren’t able to empathize with it... yet, the moment that the impact is directed at us, and creates problems for us humans, it somehow becomes easier for to swallow? We become willing to join in and fight?

“Gosh, honey. I don’t want to ingest all those plastic pollutants in my tap water, let’s join the environmental fight!” ... In other words, it wasn’t our problem, but now it is.

Why are we not willing to unselfishly fight for the planet because the planet provides for us? Why are we not willing to take that extra step to recycle in order to protect the planet? Why can we not move away from plastics and other non-degradable garbage as a way to ensure the continued thriving of our planet? Why are good people, like Tong, willing to fight for the planet being forced to enlist the help of us fools who only give a shit because someone has stood up and told us that we’re being slowly, but certainly, killed by it at the personal, biological level too?

Tong would certainly be justified in writing this piece as infused with righteous anger, calling humanity out directly for their indecent behavior. That she doesn’t do that speaks volumes about her willingness to enlist any allies whatsoever in this fight, regardless of their allegiance.

Check out my latest feature: https://www.popcultureandcomics.com/post/pages-that-pop-books-of-magic-9-2018

Man, I really LOVE writing these articles!

This week’s column sort of came together by kismet! After having a really great conversation with some colleagues on Twitter about page layout/reading order, the very first page of the very first book that I chose to read this week just jumped right out at me!

Here it is! Page one from Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s Event Leviathan #1 (DC Comics). You can here what I have to say about it HERE!

Yesterday, I started my new newest feature article over at POP: Culture & Comics! It’s called “Pages that POP!” and it’s going to be a short and sweet analysis of one or two pages from some amazing comics! I’m particularly interested in the ways that the comics form is used to communicate to the reader!

This week, I chose to talk about a page from DC Comics’ Green Lantern #8 (2019) by Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp. Morrison’s crazy narrative stylings are fairly well-known throughout comicsdom, but Sharp is a (relative) newcomer. I was introduced to his work on the The Brave and the Bold: Batman/Wonder Woman (2018) which was just incredible!

Is there a more complete multimodal text readily available in our classrooms today than Shakespeare? 

As many of you know, my research is generally focused on comics as sponsors of multimodal literacy skills. I often advocate for comics’ ability to bring to the front of our mind oft-unacknowledged literacies (such as spatial, gestural, temporal, colour, and even parallel literacies as it relates to the iconic & linguistic registers), yet many teachers today fail to recognize the multimodal opportunities presented by the canonical works of Shakespeare himself.

In my experiences, Shakespeare is often taught today by providing the play text to students and having the class read together or have a CD recite the text for the class. 

Now, I’m not saying this is without value; there are obviously connections to oral communication and aural literacy built into this type of lesson. I don’t suggest that we need to abandon it all together, but what I am suggesting is that by doing only this, we’re doing a major disservice to not only our students’ needs, but also diminishing the power of a fantastic sponsorship tool.

I am not the first teacher to point out that Shakespeare’s plays were never intended to be read out of a printed book. 

His work needs to be LIVED! It needs to be EXPERIENCED! And they must be seen as they were intended to be seen; on stage.

This isn’t always possible in the “live” sense... but in our 21st Century Classroom, fully equipped with multimedia capabilities, finding recordings of staged versions of Shakespeare’s greatest works is easier than ever.

ON DEMAND versions of staged performances are available at both The Globe Theatre and The Stratford Festival websites, there are countless DVD recordings of staged performances, and YouTube has countless excerpts available for students perusal!

Shakespeare’s plays, and drama more generally, can better aid our students as they work towards the acquisition of many literacy skills, but as to the reason why staged versions are most appropriate to study in class, I want to focus on how they sponsor spatial and gestural literacy specifically. 

In terms of spatial literacy sponsorship, a staged production offers students a multitude of analysis possibilities. A stage, as physical space, has only a finite amount of area that can be used in design. As such, designers must maximize the allotted area in order to both communicate their intentions, as well as serve the practical function of a set.

As students explore different productions, they might consider why the stage was dressed as it is? What does it communicate and why? Does it serve a practical function? A metaphorical one? Being able to discuss the physical space and how it impacts the world around us is the corner stone of spatial literacy.

Through this exploration, they would also be forced to engage with spatial reasoning (a student’s recognition of three-dimensional objects in space and the conclusions that they draw from them), which is of course another vital part of spatial literacy. Assignments like sketching a set design and modelling scene-a-rama or diorama from a shoebox or other material would be an excellent culminating activity to evaluate the development of this type of literacy:

Gestural literacy is one that is almost easier to work with. As multiple staged productions are shown to our students, we can take the time to reflect on important moments within the play. Hamlet’s “To Be or Not To Be” speech might be scaffolded through the following: 1) Read and discuss the soliloquy out of context, 2) Read Act III, Scene I of Hamlet together as a class (re-inserting it into it’s context), 3) Watch one actor’s staged performance, 4) Discuss with the students what they saw (ask how his physical actions, facial features, bodily movements, motions across the space, etc. impacted the way that he communicated the message of the soliloquy), 5) Watch another, 6) Maybe even another... Ultimately, this can lead to a reflection or entire class discussion about the way that actors make choices in their portrayals that impact not only the soliloquy that they are speaking, but also the character as a whole. 

What I’m hoping to express here, is that there is so much more to be accomplished with Shakespeare than is currently being done. The benefit of putting aside the “old methods” of read-aloud not only provide better learning opportunities for our students, but will also reduce the time in which it takes to teach a Shakespearean text. A 4-week unit might go down to only a 2-week one, leaving more time in the semester to introduce other valuable texts. I would wager that student engagement with the source material would increase as well.

By adapting our current models for teaching Shakespeare into one more specifically focused on the performance itself, students are able to not only benefit from the skills that they would learn by listening to the it read aloud in class, but also enhance it with these other literacies that would be absent in the other model. It seems to me time to recognize that the Bard knows best... Let’s teach his texts, as they were meant to be experienced.

But that’s just me thinking out loud...

----------------------------

Batman #67 is chronologically the fifth part of the current seven part “Knightmare” epic that Tom King (and various guest artists) have created. That said, chronology really hasn’t mattered all that much in the grand scheme of this ambitious narrative and, to be totally honest, I haven’t really cared. What King and his collaborators have done with this arc is focus primarily on the dark psychology of The Batman; they’ve spent time digging into his fictional nightmares and have “twisted the knife” at pretty much every turn. But with Batman #67, King has demonstrated to us why he is so very clearly a powerhouse in the comics industry today. This may not have been an action packed issue, but it was beautifully constructed and demonstrated the narrative value of compositional rhetoric. 

The issue is titled “All the Way Down” and the very first page (indeed, even the placement of the title itself) communicates to us that King and co. are providing us with a narrative clue. A splash page to the bleed, complete with four vertically stacked inset panels, compositionally signal downward movement. In order to read the page, you need to physically position your eyes at the top of the page and move them downward. This manipulation of the natural reading process of comics continues throughout the issue and forces the reader to recognize the downward progression of the chase (Batman and the twisted Road Runner begin their game at the top of a skyscraper and will eventually end up below water in the sewers). Even when panels are horizontally constructed, they are often the only panel in any given tier, which still gives the illusion of progression downward as we consume the panel content and move down to the next.

The choice to present the issue as (mostly) absent of dialogue only further enhances the illusion of the chase. The reader is given no reason to slow down the narrative until Batman comes to a literal stop at street-level after falling through the skylight of a Gotham bar. The barmen’s bumbling and stuttering, an effective linguistic imitation of Batman’s own dazed experience, is the only moment where the reader is encouraged to slow down. As the Twisted Road Runner gets up and runs away, we are stuck tripping over the consonants of this newly introduced character: “B-B-B-B-B—The D-Dark Kn-Kn-Kn-Kn—The World’s G-G-G-G-G—The Caped C-C-C-C-C—“. 

From this point forward, the whole compositional make-up of the pages are altered. The reading is slowed down by a higher panel density than before and, while many are still vertical/rectangular in design, there are more panels per tier meaning more gutter space and more visual information to wade through. This, again, supports the narrative of the book as Batman himself trudges through the sewer water on his way to the final reveal and climax of the issue.

Hey everyone!

Marvel Comics has recently been publishing a new type of book that they’ve called: “Facsimile Editions”. These books are marketed as 100% replicas of some of Marvel Comics’ most enduring comics. 

Many of the books that they’re done so far are ones that collectors have been chasing for years and, as a result, are facsimile’s of expensive comics in the market. Last week though, they published an Alpha Flight #1 Facsimile Edition. This is a bit unique since Alpha Flight #1 (1983) is really not that difficult a book to find, nor does it carry with it the hefty price tag that other originals in the facsimile line-up would. 

So, I took the opportunity to do a comparison of the two books. As a proud Canucklehead, I obviously owned the original comic already. So it was the perfect opportunity. Check out my thoughts HERE!