The Illustrated Professor

Weight a Minute!

Laurence Musgrove — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:09:10 +0000

Here’s a handmade response to a recent directive from academic leaders here at ASU.

Our administration has initiated a rather hasty program review and prioritzation process. They’ve handed down a list of questions that we have been directed to use to conduct academic program review. Based upon those answers, we are to rate these programs according to a scale they’ve also handed down: programs will be rated as high, strong, good, new or in transition, must reassess or restructure, or candidate for disinvestment or elimination.

However, because the questions do not stipulate the relative weights of the answers we will provide, we have no way of connecting the answers to the ratings. We’ve been asked to comment on this process of program review, using the drawing above, I’ve recommended that they make the values of each answer more clear. The scale on the left could weigh a program and produce a result, but the means of measurement or values are hidden. The scale on the right makes visible the values at play. In other words: There’s an elephant in the room. And it’s beginning to stink up the place.

How Did We Wind Up This Way?

Laurence Musgrove — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:01:28 +0000

Here’s a handmade response to some thinking and discussion among faculty here concerning recent intiatives handed down from various parties, including academic leaders, who have a tendency of passing the buck up the power structure for having to pass the buck down the power structure. That is, many of the arguments provided for doing this thing or that thing (assessment, program view, quality enhancement) point to mandates from above rather than arguing for what the real value of doing this or that might be. I’m confident that many folks in public education feel this way.

First Days

Laurence Musgrove — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:54:31 +0000

As a way of introducing my research and writing students to visual thinking and graphic narration (the main topics of my version of this class), I asked them to draw the difference between two first days of school: elementary vs. college. They dove right in. Me, too. Here’s my drawing.

Draw Me a Picture of It

Laurence Musgrove — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 03:25:46 +0000

“I used to have a professor in medical school who, when a student gave a particularly murky answer, would hand him a piece of chalk, escort him to the blackboard, and say, ‘Draw me a picture of it’” (14).

This from Walker Percy’s chapter “The Delta Factor” in The Message in the Bottle as a way of arguing for the power of images to clarify and communicate what can’t be clarified and communicated any other way.

In this chapter, Percy attempts to draw a picture himself of the event (which he calls the Delta phenomenon) when “[m]an became man by breaking through the daylight of language” (45). This picture is a triangle (or Delta) that captures what naturally occurs between a person, a symbol, and the thing the symbol stands for. That is, it depicts the “ah-ha” moment when the person acquires or makes meaning in language.

Here’s an excerpt below with a discussion of Helen Keller and her Delta epiphany. (The last paragraph on the left page is particularly telling about the power of drawing.)

Syllabus

Laurence Musgrove — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 23:09:24 +0000

On the first page just after the required novels
And before the list of learning outcomes
I’d paste a photo of me from ‘73
Scraggly hair and wire-rimmed glasses
And then torn from my long gone journal
Some half poem or worry on the day
So they might see me and not me
Who could be their dad or worse
With these handouts and so much to read
How jealous I am I am almost crying
How much I love them.

———————————————————————————————-

I’ve posted this poem before, but it seems so appropriate semester after semester as I begin to prepare for a new round of classes.

This semester I’m teaching two classes and one independent study for a graduate student.

One class is a first-year research and writing class. The main topics for the course are visual thinking and graphic narratives, and we’ll be reading Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin, Will Eisner’s Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narratives, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and Art Spiegelman’s MAUS.

The second class is an American Literature class, and we’ll be reading a collection of poetry edited by Billy Collins (Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry) and a collection of short stories edited by Joyce Carol Oates (The Oxford Book of American Short Stories).

In the independent study graduate course, we’ll be reading selections around the theme of aesthetics in Christian literature. We’ll be looking at John Dewey’s Art as Experience, Walker Percy’s A Message in the Bottle, Northrop Frye’s The Great Code, and Flannery O’Connor’s collection of stories A Good Man is Hard to Find.

SXSW 2011 Panel Proposal

Laurence Musgrove — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:13:51 +0000

Here’s my panel proposal for SXSW.

When education serves the state’s desire for obedience and capitalist consumption, individual freedoms and democratic participation are in danger. This is most evident in the failure of schools to promote the creative and critical literacies students should practice when choosing what and how to read. Democratic values are at risk when many students exit the public education system hating reading and unaware of the aesthetic pleasures in literature. My research indicates that reading, at its best, is the cognitive embodiment of individual liberty. I ask students to draw a picture of what happens when they read, and these drawings indicate a taxonomy of five metaphors we use when we think and talk about reading, such as “consumption” and “transportation.” At the core of these metaphors is the central metaphor of all reading, “movement.” Thus, if all reading is ultimately about movement, it is also about the freedom to move–that is, the freedom to choose what and how to read. However, reading in school is rarely about choice, and with the advent of state-mandated testing, reading is now converted into a chop-shop of isolated bits of knowledge to be consumed and regurgitated on demand. My presentation is to be heard as a rallying call to action, a call to take back schools from the testing bureaucrats and return it to teachers who know that reading is the life-blood of democratic life.

dusk

Laurence Musgrove — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:47:29 +0000

Texts as Slaves

Laurence Musgrove — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:06:30 +0000

Here’s a handmade response to Alberto Manguel’s chapter titled “Reading the Future” in A History of Reading. In this chapter, Manguel scans the history of textual divination; that is, the use of texts to substantiate prophesy and power.

He writes, “Faced with a text, the reader can transform the words into a meaning that deciphers for him or her a question historically unrelated to the text itself or the author This transmigration of the text with the circumstances of the reader can enlarge or impoverish the text itself; invariably it imbues the text with the circumstances of the reader” (211).

Need More Bookshelves?

Laurence Musgrove — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:53:39 +0000

Here’s a handmade response to the final chapter in Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading titled “The Endpaper Pages.” In this chapter, Manguel acknowledges that his book was only a partial history and imagines what would need to be included in THE History of Reading, which of course can never be completed. As long as there are readers and writers, a new history of reading is always before us.

Strong Silent Type

Laurence Musgrove — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:54:56 +0000

Here’s a handmade response to a short piece by Ernest Patterson called “The Power of Narrative” in Robert Coles’ Teaching Stories. Patterson argues “that in order to fully uncover the richness and possibilities of literature in the classroom, one [the teacher] must strive for the courage and resourcefulness to honor the emotional response of the readers [the students]” (273).

Another way to put this: You gotta have the courage to shut yourself up and let students speak their minds and hearts.