Hope for Humanity

When I first enrolled in the class, I was expecting new techniques of pedagogy, some digital components of coursework and a project-based structure--but I never expected a non-structured, seemingly non-focused curriculum, the daily panic-attack of a surprise homework load and the inability to plan ahead due to the non-presence of any syllabus at all. "I should drop it," I remember thinking, "I can't handle this in my last semester of school--and my first semester married--and my first semester working--and the semester when I'm in a hardcore capstone class." I stayed, because I've seen the potential for creativity in learning fluidly, with group members, in projects, and in a new medium--and I've seen the results without such encouragement... 

I made this myself. All rights out the window. 
Also, I just noticed this zombie could be in the middle of the Thriller dance. 

My mom just wrote a post for her parenting blog reflecting on her experience with pedagogy in home school with my little brother. She was amazed at the change she's seen as he's been allowed and encouraged to direct his own learning and become invested in that process: "In the past year, our Zombie child morphed into a more self-directed teenager with greater confidence in his own talent and abilities—a transformation nearly as incredible as that in the movie [Warm Bodies]!" She claims that several aspects of public schooling are "Zombie Makers," including low sleep, high stress, inefficient, focused-on-the-squeaky-wheel/overburdened teachers and, especially, a one-size-fits-all curriculum. You can read more of her essay on education-created zombie teens here. 

Albert Einstein quothe: "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its
ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life thinking it's stupid."

Humanism in the English Renaissance was intensely concerned with returning to classic education techniques, which, if followed together, would enable humanity like never before in history (except of course ancient Greece, haha), and create the perfect "Renaissance Man," able to speak, write, reason and make clever conversation. Erasmus of Rotterdam said famously, "It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is," but the next happiness, of course, was extending the mental and logical facilities of man to make him, as Hamlet says in Shakespeare's play, a "piece of work:"
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals...

Hamlet ends his speech, as usual, vacillating between opinions, "—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" but the vantage point of humanism is already established. The potentiality of man, enabled through education and speech/writing training, was almost limitless. In Erasmus's treatise on rhetorical strategies entitled de Copia, he comes up with 100+ variations on just one, boring sentence: "Your letter pleased me greatly."  To see some, click here.

What does this have to do with zombies? The emphasis of humanism was on the potential of human creativity, and through its course, our class has taken a necessary pulse in that vein of thought in order to arrive where we are now: not passified, individually grade-grubbing zombies, but an enlightened (if still amateur) team of Renaissance men and women (Sprezzatura), seeking out (Brave New Worlds) sources and ideas from previous centuries (ad fontes) and repackaging, refreshing and revitalizing (Humanism) them through our new media (Typographia), relying on our faith in God (Ploughboys and Bibles) and in each other (Humanism again!) as we go.


I found myself praying for unity and a sense of purpose, along with the strength to just carry on. 

It was partially a primary text and partially an assignment that answered my prayer, I feel, and changed my experience of the course--a video introduction of Michel Montaigne's Of Cannibals. In re-vamping the situation but retaining the original themes of the piece, I found new inspiration in the Renaissance artist and writer's take on previous centuries. It was exhilarating to find that with a webcam, , dark eye shadow, creativity and a little ketchup, I could do it, too--I could excite and inspire and amuse with the rest of youtube (the modern printing press, making public and simple what had previously been elite and closed to amateurs). The results of the class's video debuts launched us into a whole new aspect of pedagogy: getting the information to the masses in formats they were comfortable with (as in Plough Boys and Bibles) and working fluidly, in teams and as a class, as we did so (just like courtiers).


Though at the beginning of the semester I was ignorant about Erasmus or humanism's claims, I did recognize the stagnant signs of zombi-fied learning in myself. I don't think such drastic measures as we took are necessary to avoid the zombie'd student--and indeed, at the beginning, I found myself slipping into a stupified, anxious sphere from the inability to plan homework assignments ahead of time--but when I started really getting to know my teammates and trusting their creativity, I felt a change in the spirit of learning that enabled real scholarship ...in the form of puppet shows. Go figure, huh?

The Triangular Conversation

So, in terms of story-telling, it's often best to have a three-prong angle of attack on an issue.  There's the villain trying to do something, the hero trying to stop the villain, and a third person--the hero's boss, the hero's love interest, the hero's servant, the villain's servant, the hero's friend, whatever--that has a different perspective on things.

I subsequently wanted to create a group of three interesting and amusing characters who would have different stances, opinions, and knowledge of my two themes:  Brave New World and Sprezzatura.

And here they are:

It took me maybe twenty minutes to draw these figures, and manipulating them to give different expressions or movement isn't tremendously difficult. 

What I was thinking was that we could write up some short scripts and record them, and then layer the audio over a series of images of these characters.  That's REALLY easy to do in programs such as iMovie. 

Princess Leia is an aristocrat, technically, but she is rather indifferent to her position and upbringing.  However, she very strongly believes in girl-power, and she's good at practically every skill she picks up--shooting, speeder driving, rhetoric, espionage, and so forth. 

Aang is a kid who is supposed to save the world.  Plus, avatar joke.  He doesn't know very much about very much, so he gets to ask a lot of questions for the audience's benefit. 

Smiley McGee is a hardcore nobleman who embodies sprezzatura, but has some retrogressive views that clash with Leia's feminist stance.

Rental Computers, Southern Baptists, and Hurtles

Boy oh boy was I nervous at first about including video as part of our project. First of all, I like standing behind the camera, not in front of it.  But then when we viewed everyone's videos and I saw how some students had really great introductory videos both being on screen and off, I felt a lot more comfortable with the idea.

I agree that there are a lot of problems that go along with including videos (or any sort of multimedia).  It's time consuming.  We have varying skills with videos, video-editing, etc.  Some of us don't have the technology to work easily with videos at home (for example, my laptop kicked-the-bucket a couple of weeks ago and I've been using a rental computer... the webcam doesn't even work).

HOWEVER.  Opening ourselves up to using multimedia is brilliant because, as someone pointed out in class, it gives us a greater potential audience.  Some people would rather read through material.  Some would rather watch a video. We can provide both.  And knowing that we have video editing software available to us on campus solves the problem of personal computers lacking that capability.  The key, I think, to keep from getting stressed out is to set and adhere to time limits.  Now this doesn't mean you close your computer after working two hours on a project regardless of whether or not it's finished, but we have to set general limits.  It's easy to go overboard.  The results can be fantastic, but we also have to look realistically at what we need to accomplish.

Thinking about videos and multimedia in regard to the themes I am working on, I think both could benefit greatly from this idea.  Brave New Worlds is rather obvious.  There is a lot you can do there with the theme of exploration.  In addition, the idea of using multimedia is, in and of itself, a Brave New World.  The way we are going about the project is already an exemplification of the theme.

Plough Boys was a little harder to think about.  You say reformation, I think old men haranguing congregations about Hell fire and damnation.  Maybe that's just the ghosts of my Southern-Baptist ancestors clinging to my mind though.  But the more I thought about it, this idea totally works.  The Reformation was all about making things more accessible to the common man.  Multimedia is one way our project becomes more accessible.  But even more than that, think about it.  Sure, a big part of the Reformation was people reading the Word of God.  An even bigger part though?  Hearing it!  They weren't just reading.  They were going to church and listening to preachers.  What a better way to exemplify this that actually have an audio/visual component???

Anyway, that's the skinny on my thinking as we move ahead in the project.  There are a lot of hurtles to jump, but I'm excited to see where this goes.