Feed

Appelbaum, Peter.  (2008).  Children’s Books for Grown-Up Teachers:  Reading and Writing Curriculum Theory.  New York, NY:  Routledge.

5.  Feed

In this chapter teacher education and curriculum theory overlap; using cultural studies, consumer culture and popular culture, to interrogate the purpose and value of technology.  In M.T. Anderson’s Feed (2002) younger citizens are implanted with a chip that constantly broadcasts; older citizens carry around a backpack feed that performs the same function(s) as the implanted chip.  The chip is integrated into the physiology of the body, and the corporation that controls the chip can decide whether to repair a chip or not based upon the consumer choices of the individual.  The primary character in this story decides that she will make consumer decisions outside of the norm, her chip malfunctions, and the corporation decides not to fix her chip.  The malfunction causes her death.

The analogy here is clear.  We are bombarded daily with consumer choices; students come into the classroom with electronic devices that are broadcasting constantly and which are considered distractions from the business of “education” and “learning”—Appelbaum questions these various points of view, including using Foucault’s technologies of self and care for self.

School(TM) is trademarked, of course.  In this world of constant, non-stop interconnectivity and marketplace ideology, school is a series of training exercises in using the feed, as there seems to be no need to “learn” anything.”  (p. 83)

How is our world the world of Feed?  First, teacher education is one of certification “in which all concerned imagine that we are achieving precise expectations in the refinement of technical skills” (p. 84).  Secondly, “the world of the feed raised for curriculum and teacher education has to do with technologies of vision” (p. 86).

…the feed is an amalgam of all technologies of vision, and thus stands in for the holistic totality of all technologies of vision.  As a key commodity and cultural resource, a technology of vision is the result of enculturation. (p. 86)

Appelbaum proposes, however, that “we want to declare important concepts of curriculum theory to be key discursive tools of teacher education” (p. 86):  currere, auto-ethnography, queering, and youth culture.  “Commodification and production of meaning through cultural resources are processes of education, much as counter-transference and splitting are processes of individual development” (p. 86).

Trapped in the feed

Core experiential encounters within an elementary pedagogy course might include on-campus discussions of assigned readings, workshops on alternative assessment, theater games focusing on student-selected “moments” of curriculum encounters, and semi-weekly “field experiences” (p. 87).  These activities give potential teachers “the sorts of curricular encounters we expect to be crucial elements of the ‘teaching/learning’ they will be engaged in as teachers some day” (p. 87). But do students buy into these encounters?  If students come to the course not having had these encounters previously, is this enough to influence what these students will do in their own classrooms?

Appelbaum claims that educational reform discussions imply a “deficit model” where teacher practices must shift before teacher ideology (p. 88).  For instance, an “assumption is that they can adopt the skills and practices of inquiry facilitation and participation, skills and conceptual understanding that they ‘lack,’ through the practice of such experiences” (p. 88).

What would it mean for prospective teachers to taste or consume “inquiry” or “alternative assessment,” as ideas, as objects of relation?  What would the educational encounter “be”?  What might it mean for people to breathe in and physically metabolize the fragrance, stench, aromas, and odors of inquiry or assessment, literally, to be “in-spired”?  (p. 89)

Complicity

Deleuze

nomadic epistemology

three “nomadic” opportunities:  youth leadership, voice and participation in democratic institutions

“Neither ‘selling out’ nor ‘buying in,’ such a political turn…” (p. 91)

difference, disparity and desire

“but are given outcomes to strive for” (p. 92)

“each field placement could be examined as a case study in action research” (p. 92)

Anderson, M. T.  (2002).  Feed.  Cambridge, MA:  Candlewick Press.

Tags: just notes, unfinished