Reading the news this morning, I stumbled across a review of Henry Singer’s documentary 9/11: The Falling Man, which centres on Richard Drew’s iconic, but apparently quickly suppressed, photograph of a person falling from the Twin Towers.
Archive for August, 2006
Planning History and Theory: Course Renewal
As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, I taught an undergraduate History and Theory of Planning course last term - my own (somewhat rushed) design, but with readings inherited from previous iterations of the course, and therefore a bit shoehorned into my organisation of the course. This term, I’m teaching into the postgraduate version of the history and theory course, which shares many of the same readings and some of the organisational elements of the undergraduate version. As it happens, the postgraduate version is also due for “renewal”, and I’ve been offered a postgraduate student’s dream job: being paid to read, so that I can refresh the reading list and reconceptualise the organisation of concepts presented in the course. While I’m at it, I’ll also rethink the reading list for the undergraduate version, if only to make my life easier if I happen to be the one who teaches that course next time around…
Course readings are intended to be refreshed every few years but, in this case, the course renewal process is also driven by the introduction of a new postgraduate planning history course - the hope being that the history course can provide basic factual knowledge that will enable the theory course to delve into more complex territory when exploring the relationship between planning theory and the broader historical context.
If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to post them here. For reference, I’ve posted the undergraduate Course Guide and PowerPoints below the fold. (The postgrad syllabus and lectures aren’t “mine”, so I won’t reproduce those here.) My temptation is to use the historical structure of the undergraduate course in rethinking the postgraduate one - with perhaps a bit more “hard” philosophy at the outset to give a firmer understanding of core concepts - romanticism, liberalism, Enlightenment, capitalism, etc. - that can then be traced through the course.
For That, You Get a Gold Star!
I just sat down to my current stack of grading, and realised that my son must have found it some time yesterday. On one of the assignments - one that, as it happened, had received a high distinction - he has placed the sticker of a large gold star.
Bad Motherswyvere
One of the strangest reviews of Snakes on a Plane you’re likely to read (hat tip Scott Eric Kaufman at The Valve)… It begins, though, with the following warning for those of us who have not yet seen the film:
Spoyler alert: If ye haue nat yet sene the performaunce of ‘Serpentes on a Shippe,’ rede nat of the romaunce, for it doth telle of the manye suprises and straunge eventes that happen in the course of the storye, and thus it mayhap shall lessen yower enjoiement of the performaunce yt self.
Visit Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Serpentes on a Shippe! if you’d like to be spoiled…
Draft Dodger
I’ve been receiving more drafts of student work than normal - a product of teaching the Research Strategies course, aimed at novice researchers, and the first year undergraduate economics course. This sudden rush of drafts has caused me to reflect on my own patterns in responding to draft work - thinking about what kinds of drafts receive immediate responses, and what kinds of drafts I pick up, then put aside, and then pick up again, and put aside…
I’m not talking, of course, about delays caused by extrinsic pressures - drafts that I can’t read because they arrive when I’m insanely busy, etc. There are periods when everyone’s draft work has to go on the “to do” pile. What I’m talking about, instead, are “intrinsic” factors - qualities that some drafts possess that cause me to put off commenting until my sense of guilt overwhelms my evident reluctance to respond.
On reflection, I’ve decided that the “ideal” draft is one that has done at least one thing reasonably well - understood its subject matter, provided a clear argument, offered a good structure, etc. I can then contextualise my suggestions with reference to that good element, showing how strengthening other areas of the paper will also strengthen the area already done well.
Really good drafts - the ones where I might point out a typo or awkward phrase, but where, essentially, the paper could have been handed in without revision - attract a bit of procrastination. I’m not sure how much of this procrastination is due to the feeling that I should “earn my keep” and make some meaningful suggestion on the draft, and how much results from mild annoyance that someone would ask me to read an essentially good piece twice.
My greatest dilemma, though, stems from two other kinds of drafts - the ones that seem to provoke the longest delay while I work out how to respond.
The Novelty Class
This term is the first time for a long time that I’ve been teaching only in courses I didn’t design. Teaching someone else’s course always stretches you in interesting ways: there will be materials you might not have assigned - or might not have known; approaches that sit outside your personal teaching comfort zone; and, sometimes, quite fundamental differences in educational philosophy…
Bracketing methods courses for the moment, my normal aim when I design a course at the tertiary level is to get students to understand that:
(1) academic texts are primarily arguments, rather than sources or authorities that can be cited unquestioningly;
(2) the kinds of arguments that people are likely to make, and the kinds of arguments that people find convincing, often have some identifiable and comprehensible relation to the historical period in which those texts are written and read;
(3) if a text seems to suffer from some glaring error in logic, which even an undergraduate can easily pick up now, but which was apparently missed even by senior scholars in another period, chances are more is at stake than an error in logic - something else has changed in our historical experience to make it easier for us to perceive that error;
(4) a similar phenomenon can be at work within a historical period, as scholars for disciplinary, biographical or other reasons produce works that emphasise some dimensions of their historical moment, while downplaying others that may be more visible to other scholars for their own disciplinary, biographical or other reasons.
These themes, I think, run through all of my courses, and mean that I spend a lot of my time in class actually trying to slow down students’ critical impulses, pushing for students to understand and, if possible, empathise with a body of thought, before they criticise. I think it is an extremely important skill to understand why a form of thought might appeal, why it might seem plausible to a rational person, why people of goodwill might pour their hearts and souls into it - even if you happen not to agree with the body of thought yourself…
From this foundation, it then becomes possible to discuss how you can offer criticism within this kind of framework because, as regular readers here would know, relativism is not my aim… In postgraduate courses, this issue can be discussed and debated directly in philosophical terms; in undergraduate courses, I handle it more often by example - by ultimately making criticisms, while linking them with historically-achieved insights.
This whole perspective is, of course, my own argument, so I’m hardly aiming for a “value neutral” position when I teach. Nevertheless, if I succeed (and I’m sure I don’t always succeed), I will have communicated that you really can make sense of positions with which you don’t agree - and that you therefore don’t have to dismiss the people who hold those positions - particularly when we’re talking about positions that fall within the political or social mainstream - as fundamentally irrational, or evil, or “ideological”, or whatever your favourite dismissive term of the moment may be…
Arsenic and New Homes
With the much-appreciated volunteer assistance of a colleague, I conducted a few pilot interviews in the Laurimar community centre yesterday, testing questions about the local knowledge and use of adult and child education facilities, child care services, travel patterns, and similar issues. This work will eventually feed into the development of a survey that will be administered in a more systematic fashion, in this and other developments in the region.
The community centre also hosues a Maternal and Child Health facility, which was closed the day we were interviewing, but which posts fliers and brochures in the hallway for people to browse. Most of the material was what you would expect to see in any MCH facility - information about immunisation schedules, numbers for after-hours health hotlines, tips on feeding, advice for getting young children to sleep. One brochure, however, warned of a more local health concern: arsenic from mine tailings left behind by Victoria’s gold mining industry. According to the brochure:
“Mine tailings that contain arsenic are spread over large areas of land, including land now used for housing… In many gold mining areas, mine tailings have been used for landscaping instead of normal soil.” From Arsenic and Health: Are You Living in an Area with Mine Tailings? - State Government Victoria, Department of Human Services, pp. 1-2
The publication then goes on to note that arsenic does not tend to build up in the body over time, and that small daily exposure therefore appears to have no ill effect, but that long-term health effects can result from higher levels of exposure over a long period of time, and that immediate acute poisoning can occur if a child consumes a handful or so of mine tailings. The publication offers practical advice for recognising mine tailings - they “look like clay or sand”, and “are usually white, pale yellow or grey in colour” (p. 2). It then warns you not to allow babies or small children to put dirt or sand in their mouths, as this could result in arsenic poisoning, to wash children’s hands often to clear away traces of arsenic - oh, and, while you’re at it: “Do not put mine tailing sand in your child’s sand pit” (p. 6).
If you’ve already made the mistake of filling your child’s sand pit with mine tailings, however, be sure to contact the EPA before removing the offending substance: there are special rules you’ll have to follow in the disposal process.
What struck me most about the publication, though, were the illustrations. The publication features a cheerful nuclear family - parents, four children and a dog - all demonstrating the right and wrong ways of dealing with mine tailings. The idea, I think, is to present the information in a non-threatening way. Maybe it’s just because I have a toddler myself, but some of the images seemed unintentionally macabre… This image, for example, portrays a smiling toddler contemplating a handful of sand. It was captioned in red bold ink in the text: “Eating small handfuls of mine tailings containing high levels of arsenic could be dangerous.” (p. 5)
I’ll never look at a sand pit the same way again…
Does My Advice Look Sarcastic in That?
I worry sometimes that the feedback I provide to students might come off as more critical or sarcastic than was intended. I haven’t had any students complain - even students who dislike my courses tend to rate me well on feedback provided. But I’m often giving feedback under extreme time pressure, and I sometimes find myself wincing in retrospect at the tone that comes across in my written words - even though I will swear that I was not feeling sarcastic when I was actually writing my comments.
Capital Ideas
I’m currently working on fleshing out the conclusion to a paper, essentially trying to demonstrate that it is possible to derive Habermasian norms from shared contemporary historical experiences, without having to assume a common human nature. Much of the paper covers ground already discussed often on this blog, but the conclusion does touch on some new ground - basically, on how we might try to understand the concept of “capitalism” in a way that avoids generating endless dichotomies between states vs. markets, regulation vs. freedom, and similar concepts. I’ll post the current, very rough, version of this section below the fold.
The section needs fixing in so many ways I’ve lost count, but what I’m mainly worrying about at the moment is whether the core definition I suggest for capitalism makes any sense. I’ll then need to do a lot more work than has been done in this sketch, to explain how you might actually put this definition into play, to explain why it is historically and socially plausible that certain political ideals should emerge at particular historical moments…
Well, That Was Exciting…
Apologies to anyone who tried to reach the site earlier today - my web host has been experiencing technical difficulties (of the sort that cause pages to be replaced with l33t messages…). They have been working valiantly to get everything back to normal, but the site may continue to experience slow response times and other random errors for a bit. Unfortunately, I have one of those days when I will be unable to road test the site properly until very late tonight. If you notice specific problems, please don’t hesitate to make a post here or send me an email - it will be extremely helpful.