#pedagogies

[fatehbaz]

The rise of the European empires [...] required new forms of social organization, not least the exploitation of millions of people whose labor powered the growth of European expansion [...]. These workers suffered various forms of coercion ranging from outright slavery through to indentured or convict labor, as well as military conscription, land theft, and poverty. [...] [W]ide-ranging case studies [examining the period from 1600 to 1850] [...] show the variety of working conditions and environments found in the early modern period and the many ways workers found to subvert and escape from them. [...] A web of regulation and laws were constructed to control these workers [...]. This system of control was continually contested by the workers themselves [...]

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Timothy Coates [...] focuses on three locations in the Portuguese empire and the workers who fled from them. The first was the sugar plantations of São Tomé in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The slaves who ran away to form free communities in the interior of the island were an important reason why sugar production eventually shifted to Brazil. Secondly, Coates describes working conditions in the trading posts around the Indian Ocean and the communities of runaways which formed in the Bay of Bengal. The final section focuses on convicts and sinners in Portugal itself, where many managed to escape from forced labor in salt mines.

Johan Heinsen examines convict labor in the Danish colony of Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Denmark awarded the Danish West Indies and Guinea Company the right to transport prisoners to the colony in 1672. The chapter illustrates the social dynamics of the short-lived colony by recounting the story of two convicts who hatched the escape plan, recruited others to the group, including two soldiers, and planned to steal a boat and escape from the island. The plan was discovered and the two convicts sentenced to death. One was forced to execute the other in order to save his own life. The two soldiers involved were also punished but managed to talk their way out of the fate of the convicts. Detailed court records are used to show both the collective nature of the plot and the methods the authorities used to divide and defeat the detainees.

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James F. Dator reveals how workers in seventeenth-century St. Kitts Island took advantage of conflict between France and Britain to advance their own interests and plan collective escapes. The two rival powers had divided the island between them, but workers, indigenous people, and slaves cooperated across the borders, developing their own knowledge of geography, boundaries, and imperial rivalries [...].

Nicole Ulrich writes about the distinct traditions of mass desertions that evolved in the Dutch East India Company colony in South Africa. Court records reveal that soldiers, sailors, slaves, convicts, and servants all took part in individual and collective desertion attempts. [...] Mattias von Rossum also writes about the Dutch East India Company [...]. He [...] provides an overview of labor practices of the company [...] and the methods the company used to control and punish workers [...].

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In the early nineteenth century, a total of 73,000 British convicts were sentenced to be transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). There, the majority were rented out as laborers to private employers, and all were subjected to surveillance and detailed record keeping. These records allow Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan to provide a detailed statistical analysis of desertion rates in different parts of the colonial economy [...].

When Britain abolished the international slave trade, new forms of indentured labor were created in order to provide British capitalism with the labor it required. Anita Rupprecht investigates the very specific culture of resistance that developed on the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands between 1808 and 1828. More than 1,300 Africans were rescued from slavery and sent to Tortola, where officials had to decide how to deal with them. Many were put to work in various forms of indentured labor on the island, and this led to resistance and rebellion. Rupprecht uncovers details about these protests from the documents of a royal commission that investigated [...].

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All text above by: Mark Dunick. "Review of Rediker, Marcus; Chakraborty, Titas; Rossum, Matthias van, eds. A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism 1600-1850". H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews. April 2024. Published at: h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58852 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[malick-elias]

With The One with Everyone.

[maggiecheungs]

Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation. Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized.

—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

[peach-moths]

Pov ur parents are divorced and ur the last kid to move out of home so you get roped into "helping" ur dad clean your brothers childhood bedrooms and he learns things about your childhood he didn't know before

A late high school years era teacher au comic based on a convo me and hera had about a Yoshi crash out centered around his (almost) empty and yet somehow still messy house and being over taken with the drive to clean it and mikey being the only witness to his crash out since he's the last kid living at home

Transcript:

Splinter(Yoshi): "Did Blue ever do his laundry?

Mikey: "Nah"

Mikey: "He'd beg each of us every week to clean his laundry for him"

Yoshi: "Did it work?"

Mikey: "No, he had to bribe us to do his laundry. How did you think I got chai lattes like twice a week, dad?"

Yoshi: "oh"

Yoshi: "I just assumed it was because Draxum was spoiling you. Not that you were swindling your brother"

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Company that makes millions spying on students will get to sue a whistleblower

Yesterday, the Court of Appeal for British Columbia handed down a jaw-droppingly stupid and terrible decision, rejecting the whistleblower Ian Linkletter’s claim that he was engaged in legitimate criticism when he linked to freely available materials from the ed-tech surveillance company Proctorio:

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/23/01/2023BCCA0160.htm

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/20/links-arent-performances/#free-ian-linkletter

It’s been a minute since Linkletter’s case arose, so I’ll give you a little recap here. Proctorio is a massive, wildly profitable ed-tech company that sells a surveillance tool to monitor students while they take high-stakes tests from home. The tool monitors the student’s computer and the student’s face, especially their eye-movements. It also allows instructors and other personnel to watch the students and even take control of their computer. This is called “remote invigilation.”

This is ghastly in just about every way. For starters, Proctorio’s facial monitoring software embeds the usual racist problems with machine-learning stuff, and struggles to recognize Black and brown faces. Black children sitting exams under Proctorio’s gimlet eye have reported that the only way to satisfy Proctorio’s digital phrenology system is to work with multiple high-powered lights shining directly in their faces.

A Proctorio session typically begins with a student being forced to pan a webcam around their test-taking room. During lockdown, this meant that students who shared a room — for example, with a parent who worked night-shifts — would have to invade their family’s privacy, and might be disqualified because they couldn’t afford a place large enough to have private room in which to take their tests.

Proctorio’s tools also punish students for engaging in normal test-taking activity. Do you stare off into space when you’re trying through a problem? Bzzzt. Do you read questions aloud to yourself under your breath when you’re trying to understand their meanings? Bzzzt. Do you have IBS and need to go to the toilet? Bzzzt. The canon of remote invigilation horror stories is filled with accounts of students being forced to defecate themselves, or vomit down their shirts without turning their heads (because looking away is an automatically flagged offense).

The tragedy is that all of this is in service to the pedagogically bankrupt practice of high-stakes testing. Few pedagogists believe that the kind of exam that Proctorio seeks to recreate in students’ homes has real assessment merit. As the old saying goes, “Tests measure your ability to take tests.” But Proctorio doesn’t even measure your ability to take a test — it measures your ability to take a test with three bright lights shining directly on your face. Or while you are covered in your own feces and vomit. While you stare rigidly at a screen. While your tired mother who just worked 16 hours in a covid ward stands outside the door to your apartment.

The lockdown could have been an opportunity to improve educational assessment. There is a rich panoply of techniques that educators can adopt that deliver a far better picture of students’ learning, and work well for remote as well as in-person education. Instead, companies like Proctorio made vast fortunes, most of it from publicly funded institutions, by encouraging a worse-than-useless, discriminatory practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/24/proctor-ology/#miseducation

Proctorio clearly knows that its racket is brittle. Like any disaster profiteer, Proctorio will struggle to survive after the crisis passes and we awaken from our collective nightmare and ask ourselves why we were stampeded into using its terrible products. The company went to war against its critics.

In 2020, Proctorio CEO Mike Olsen doxed a child who complained about his company’s software in a Reddit forum:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#moral-exemplar

In 2021, the reviews for Proctorio’s Chrome plugin all mysteriously vanished. Needless to say, these reviews — from students forced to use Proctorio’s spyware — were brutal:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency

Proctorio claims that it protects “educational integrity,” but its actions suggest a company far more concerned about the integrity of its own profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

One of the critics that Proctorio attacked is Ian Linkletter. In 2020, Linkletter was a Learning Technology Specialist at UBC’s Faculty of Education. His job was to assess and support ed-tech tools, including Proctorio. In the course of that work, Linkletter reviewed Proctorio’s training material for educators, which are a bonanza of mask-off materials that are palpably contemptuous of students, who are presumed to be cheaters.

At the time, a debate over remote invigilation tools was raging through Canadian education circles, with students, teachers and parents fiercely arguing the merits and downsides of making surveillance the linchpin of assessment. Linkletter waded into this debate, tweeting a series of sharp criticisms of Proctorio. In these tweets, Linkletter linked to Proctorio’s unlisted, but publicly available, Youtube videos.

A note of explanation: Youtube videos can be flagged as “unlisted,” which means they don’t show up in searches. They can also be flagged as “private,” which means you have to be on a list of authorized users to see them. Proctorio made its training videos unlisted, but they weren’t private — they were visible to anyone who had a link to them.

Proctorio sued Linkletter for this. They argued that he had breached a duty of confidentiality, and that linking to these videos was a copyright violation:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/#proctorio

This is a classic SLAPP — a “strategic litigation against public participation.” That’s when a deep-pocketed, thin-skinned bully, like Proctorio, uses the threat of a long court battle to force their critics into silence. They know they can’t win their case, but that’s not the victory they’re seeking. They don’t want to win the case, they want to win the argument, by silencing a critic who would otherwise be bankrupted by legal fees.

Getting SLAPPed is no fun. I’ve been there. Just this year, a billionaire financier tried to force me into silence by threatening me with a lawsuit. Thankfully, Ken “Popehat” White was on the case, and he reminded this billionaire’s counsel that California has a strong anti-SLAPP law, and if Ken had to defend me in court, he could get a fortune in fees from the bully after he prevailed:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1531684572479377409

British Columbia also has an anti-SLAPP law, but unlike California’s anti-SLAPP, the law is relatively new and untested. Still, Proctorio’s suit against Linkletter was such an obvious SLAPP that for many of us, it seemed likely that Linkletter would be able to defend himself from this American bully and its attempt to use Canada’s courts to silence a Canadian educator.

For Linkletter to use BC’s anti-SLAPP law, he would have to prove that he was weighing in on a matter of public interest, and that Proctorio’s copyright and confidentiality claims were nonsense, unlikely to prevail on their merits. If he could do that, he’d be able to get the case thrown out, without having to go through a lengthy, brutally expensive trial.

Incredibly, though, the lower court found against Linkletter. Naturally, Linkletter appealed. His “factotum” is a crystal clear document that sets out the serious errors of law and fact the lower court made:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aB1ztWDFr3MU6BsAMt6rWXOiXJ8sT3MY/view

But yesterday, the Court of Appeal upheld the lower court, repeating all of these gross errors and finding for Proctorio:

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/23/01/2023BCCA0160.htm

This judgment is grotesque. It makes a mockery of BC’s anti-SLAPP statute, to say nothing of Canadian copyright and confidentiality law. For starters, it finds that publishing a link can be a “performance” of a copyrighted work, which meant that when Linkletter linked to the world-viewable Youtube files that Proctorio had posted, he infringed on copyright.

This is a perverse, even surreal take on copyright. The court rejects Linkletter’s argument that even Youtube’s terms of service warned Proctorio that publishing world-viewable material on its site constituted permission for people to link to and watch that material.

But what about “fair dealing” (similar to fair use)? Linkletter argued that linking to a video that shows that Proctorio’s assurances to parents and students about its products’ benign nature were contradicted by the way it talked to educators was fair dealing. Fair dealing is a broad suite of limitations and exceptions to copyright for the purposes of commentary, criticism, study, satire, etc.

So even if linking is a copyright infringement (ugh, seriously?!), surely it’s fair dealing in this case. Proctorio was selling millions of dollars in software to public institutions, inflicting it on kids whose parents weren’t getting the whole story. Linkletter used Proctorio’s own words to rebut its assurances. What could be more fair dealing than that?

Not so fast, the appeals panel says: they say that Linkletter could have made his case just as well without linking to Proctorio’s materials. This is…bad. I mean, it’s also wrong, but it’s very bad, too. It’s wrong because an argument about what a company intends necessarily has to draw upon the company’s own statements. It’s absurd to say that Linkletter’s point would have been made equally well if he said “I disbelieve Proctorio’s public assurances because I’ve seen seekrit documents” as it was when he was able to link to those documents so that people could see them for themselves.

But it’s bad because it rips the heart out of the fair dealing exception for criticism. Publishing a link to a copyrighted work is the most minimal way to quote from it in a debate — Linkletter literally didn’t reproduce a single word, not a single letter, from Proctorio’s copyrighted works. If the court says, “Sure, you can quote from a work to criticize it, but only so much as you need to make your argument,” and then says, “But also, simply referencing a work without quoting it at all is taking too much,” then what reasonable person would ever try to rely on a fair dealing exemption for criticism?

Then there’s the confidentiality claim: in his submissions to the lower court and the appeals court, Linkletter pointed out that the “confidential” materials he’d linked to were available in many places online, and could be easily located with a Google search. Proctorio had uploaded these “confidential” materials to many sites — without flagging them as “unlisted” or “private.”

What’s more, the videos that Linkletter linked to were in found a “Help Center” that didn’t even have a terms-of-service condition that required confidentiality. How on Earth can materials that are publicly available all over the web be “confidential?”

Here, the court takes yet another bizarre turn in logic. They find that because a member of the public would have to “gather” the videos from “many sources,” that the collection of links was confidential, even if none of the links in the collection were confidential. Again, this is both wrong and bad.

Every investigator, every journalist, every critic, starts by looking in different places for information that can be combined to paint a coherent picture of what’s going on. This is the heart of “open source intelligence,” combing different sources for data points that shed light on one another.

The idea that “gathering” public information can breach confidentiality strikes directly at all investigative activity. Every day, every newspaper and news broadcast in Canada engages in this conduct. The appeals court has put them all in jeopardy with this terrible finding.

Finally, there’s the question of Proctorio’s security. Proctorio argued that by publishing links to its educator materials, Linkletter weakened the security of its products. That is, they claim that if students know how the invigilation tool works, it stops working. This is the very definition of “security through obscurity,” and it’s a practice that every serious infosec professional rejects. If Proctorio is telling the truth when it says that describing how its products work makes them stop working, then they make bad products that no one should pay money for.

The court absolutely flubs this one, too, accepting the claim of security through obscurity at face value. That’s a finding that flies in the face of all security research.

So what happens now? Well, Linkletter has lost his SLAPP claim, so nominally the case can proceed. Linkletter could appeal his case to Canada’s Supreme Court (about 7% of Supreme Court appeals of BC appeals court judgments get heard). Or Proctorio could drop the case. Or it could go to a full trial, where these outlandish ideas about copyright, confidentiality and information security would get a thorough — and blisteringly expensive — examination.

In Linkletter’s statement, he remains defiant and unwilling to give in to bullying, but says he’ll have to “carefully consider” his next step. That’s fair enough: there’s a lot on the line here:

https://linkletter.opened.ca/stand-against-proctorios-slapp-update-30/

Linkletter answers his supporters’ questions about how they can help with some excellent advice: “What I ask is for you to do what you can to protect students. Academic surveillance technology companies would like nothing more but for us all to shut up. Don’t let them silence you. Don’t let anyone or anything take away your human right to freedom of expression.”

Today (Apr 21), I’m speaking in Chicago at the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition Conference. This weekend (Apr 22/23), I’m at the LA Times Festival of Books.

[Image ID: A girl working on a laptop. Her mouth has been taped shut. Glaring out of the laptop screen is the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Behind them is a tattered, filthy, burned Canadian flag.]

Image: Ingo Bernhardt https://www.flickr.com/photos/spree2010/4930763550/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Eleanor Vladinsky (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canadian_flag_against_grey_sky.jpg

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[hierarchyproblem]

The idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the debased jargon of the behaviourists, “positive and negative reinforcements,” usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true. So many people have said to me, “If we didn't make children do things, they wouldn't do anything.” Even worse, they say, “If I weren't made to do things, I wouldn't do anything.” It is the creed of a slave. When people say that terrible thing about themselves, I say, “You may believe that, but I don't believe it. You didn't feel that way about yourself when you were little. Who taught you to feel that way?” To a large degree, it was school. Do the schools teach this message by accident, or on purpose? I don't know, and I don't think they know. They teach it because, believing it, they can't help acting as though it were true.

— John Holt, How Children Fail (italics in original)

[shitacademicswrite]

[junoinouterspace]

some refs i made for an au that i was inspired for after watching Abbott Elementary. I think these boys deserve a nice domestic au.

[evilcokito]

You called the teacher "dad" for the 6th time.

[finniestoncrane]

Could you possibly write a smut thingy with Egon Spengler as the reader(female) professor? Love your work!!

Egon Spengler x Fem!Professor!Reader, word count: 1k i am refreshing my memory on learning styles and turning my least favourite word into a positive thing with this one anon lmao ❤ he gog on my ped until i geeeeeeeeee👻 request info • prompt list • send me a request • kofi • masterlist minors DNI!! 🔞 cw: i've attmpted a bold reader once more, confident reader, masturbation/handjob, ruined orgasm ehehehe

As your students filtered out of the small seminar room, you noticed Egon trying to push against the currents, standing a whole foot taller than most of them, some of them more, and catching your eye with a small, awkward smile as he managed to get through the throngs.

He stood silently for a moment, awkwardly fiddling with his glasses before he spoke to you.

"Your attendance is impressive."

"Is that surprising?"

You teased him with a coy smile, watching the way he was flustered immediately. He was usually so firm, unflappable, especially given his line of research, but around you he seemed to lose all confidence.

"N-no, I was admiring it. Pointing it out. That almost seemed like more students going out than have your class on their schedules.

"What can I say? I know how to keep them interested."

You turned, walking to the desk in the corner of the room with a distinct wiggle to your hips. Egon's pupils widened as he watched you, mumbling to himself.

"I can see why."

"How can I help you, Doctor Spengler?"

He was snapped out of his daze, eyes flitting swiftly back up to meet yours in a panic. Not only had he been caught drooling over your backside, now he had to think of a lie on the spot.

"Uh... I wanted to... discuss with you the... importance of..."

It hit him, a strike of inspiration, a good follow-through from his previous statement.

"... The importance of adapting your teaching methods in order to engage with the largest proportion of students. I imagine it's something you're very familiar with, given how interested your students are. Is this something you work on? Or does it come naturally?"

You smiled softly, watching as he relaxed into his excuse and deciding to punish him, just a little, for not being more straightforward with you.

"Well, I think it might be slightly natural on my part. I can read people very well, Doctor Spengler."

"You can?"

He tensed up as you walked out from behind the desk, taking slow, purposeful steps towards him.

"Oh yeah, I know what's going on inside their minds. What they need... or what they want. You might even consider me an example of your psychic studies."

He swallowed deeply, pronounced Adam's apple bobbing in his throat as he pushed his nerves down, his face remaining as calm as was possible in the face of your bold approach. You were close to him, and only coming closer, backing him into the board on the wall, with nowhere else to go.

"So... how does this help with your students?"

Egon's efforts to keep up the facade were admirable, but you could see the slight blush on his cheeks, the way his eyes darted from your body to the ceiling, and youhad to admit that this more sheepish nature, as opposed to his often blunt and dry responses, was doing a lot for you.

"It helps to know how best to reach them. I know that some students prefer to listen and learn, that works for a majority. Audio and visual learning is the sort of default state. But others need a different approach, and it's important to facilitate that. I find it benefits those who can't just ask for help to offer them a more... tailored approach of my own accord."

He seemed to get the message, as his cheeks flushed a deeper hue, his glasses steaming up slightly in the center of the lenses. Sensing that you were perhaps offering a more suggestive opportunity to him than he had expected, he continued to play along.

"Can you... can you provide an example?"

"Of course, Doctor Spengler, let's take you for example! I think that you're probably the kind of person who learns better in a one-on-one environment. Perhaps you would be better suited to some private tutelage."

Ever stoic in appearance, even now as he felt his pants beginning to tent with his growing arousal, Egon nodded, considerate and firm.

"Yes, that does sound very appropriate."

"Mhm... and you strike me as a kinesthetic learner... Someone who requires a very tactile, hands on approach..."

He had begun to agree with you, but the words were strangled into a soft yelp as your hand met his crotch. You felt his cock pulsing against your palm, a twitch of the length as your fingers travelled up towards the belt of his brown slacks.

Undoing it with ease, you turned your attention to his fly, undoing it and reaching into the fabric to pull his cock free. His body fell against the wall, completely undone by that first gesture, quivering as you began to stroke him.

A heat rose within him, bringing with it a confidence that bolstered his own movements as he leaned his head down, nuzzling against your neck. His soft curls tickled at your skin, his breath soft, panting, into your ear as you worked his cock.

Egon's hands pulled at your waist, tugging you, bringing you closer to his body, wanting to feel you on him as he threatened to reach his climax. But as he began to cling tighter to you, body keening, you pulled away, watching him stumble after you. He bucked his hips once into the air, an instinctual urge to search for friction, to continue his impending orgasm, but instead all he found was your knowing, mischievous smile, arms folded across your body, eyes lidded as you watched him push his cock back into his pants.

"I do think that's all we have time for, unfortunately. But did you learn anything valuable from our discussion, Doctor Spengler?"

He grumbled a little, disappointment on his face.

"I think I did."

"Good. Well. If you ever need to recap anything, my office door is always open."

As you walked away from him, he raised an eyebrow, smiling with suspicion, but hope. He was quick to follow you, however, following like a lost puppy. If you weren't going to your office now, then at least he could take a seat outside and wait for you. He was very willing to put off the rest of his day's work for the chance at some more of your private tutoring.

[fatehbaz]

There was a line in the sand - a border, or rather the idea of one. This idea described a frontier, delineated a boundary. In 1852 transgression of this idea and the sovereignty it represented angered Bey Ahmad of Tunis. [...] [T]he government of [French] Algeria accelerated plans to undertake a tour of the frontier [...], to define the spatial limits of French power. [...] [T]he bey wrote a letter to the French consul [...]. The two powers had to work together, each having representatives present [...]. The response came from Paris. The prince-president (Napoleon III), the minister of foreign affairs, and the minister of war all agreed with the bey [...]. The barrier was real, the border inviolable, the idea held. So the bey and the president understood each other. [...] [But] [a]n internal letter [among French officials] explained the thinking behind the military's territorial violation: [...] it was necessary to "display clearly [the French military's] position on the frontier and to act to take possession of the country that we have claimed." This was important even if the act itself exposed the border's unreality. [...]

In such a way, belief in the border exposes a kind of irrationality at the heart of modern state power: the very basis of modern sovereign claims - territoriality - was an abstraction that only distance from the influence of local events could make appear real. The idea of the frontier that the French president and the Tunisian bey shared was the modern belief in the reality of borders, of their existence as barriers. That these two shared this idea tells us something about the appearance of modernity in the Maghrib in the late nineteenth century. [...]

---

Anxiety about the situation along the frontier was manifested not only in French military sorties and "inspection tours": we can also see it in the positioning in the colonial imaginary of migratory and transhumant populations as anti-modern. Seemingly unconcerned with national boundaries [...], these populations were cast as mere violent holdovers of the "traditional" practices of the Maghrib, soon to disappear before the progress of modern social organization and governmentality. [...] The [French] minister of war held that the government of Algeria should secure the border because unrest was "hampering the industrial development of the La Calle region and slowing the normalization of our authority among the tribes [...]." His reasoning did not necessarily reflect that of the cultivators who were accustomed to moving to lands on either side of the line drawn by Randon or moving their flocks within a generally elastic space. The dictates of imperial economics (i.e., mineral exploitation) were here locked into a territorially-bound sense [...].

The government of Algeria - which was at that point, legally in any case, the French government - [...] based claims to sovereignty on the ability to control violence [...]. This [French military] officer led soldiers across the northern Algerian-Tunisian border, stopping to talk with all the groups [...]. The minister of war wrote that, while this action was indeed problematic on the diplomatic scale, it was necessary and right on the local scale. "Our administrative interests cannot be left outstanding - our dignity itself is at stake in giving to the tribes evidence of our [power] [...]" and "this operation is necessary to tranquilize our tribes and organize the means of repression." [...] In effect, the local scale necessitated a processional display of state power [and literal physical violence] to ensure its claims, while the international scale necessitated the abstraction of fixed and territorialized power. [...]

---

[I]n the winter of 1876 [...], [t]he territorialized nation-state was finally achieved. This rosy picture did not last. Even after the French occupation of Tunis [...] in 1881, belief in the border failed to spread to the scale of local life and governance. [...] Certainly the border, even a border that had largely been agreed upon and understood at the level of high politics for nearly three centuries, was a problematic and vexed ides. Only those removed from its immediate reality seemed to believe in it.

Despite the continued efforts of those apostles of modernity on the Algerian side of the border, the border was never as fixed as they thought it should be. Concerned reports about it continued [...] to fill the saddlebags of imperial postmen well after the establishment of the protectorate in Tunisia. The “realness” of the border was a matter of both material reality and socio-juridical imagination. The border between the Regency’s tribes and those of the dey in Constantine, for instance, had existed (more or less) since the 1500s. But these were obviously different conceptions of what made the border. [...] The border would be “real” for these French officials when groups on either side stopped transgressing the imaginary barrier the Regency and France had erected. Vexing to the French imperial imagination was the apparent breakdown of the concept of state power based on maintaining the monopoly of violence in a certain region: “We reserve to ourselves the right to penetrate into the territory of neighboring tribes that breach the interests of our tribes or territory and to punish them emphatically.” [...] Beyond informing people of their legibility to the state vis-à-vis taxes, the point of the multiple tours, meetings, raids, and trades [...] was thus to show off the power of the French war-making apparatus in order to claim for it sole legitimacy. [...] [T]he land claimed by the French becomes practical, modern territory only when the people living there accept the claims to sovereign authority of the French - not before. There is effectively no border until the people believe there is and act on that belief. [...]

That this type of thinking was not the special purview of the “recalcitrant” tribes themselves is reflected in a letter a French advisor to the Tunisian army wrote to the French minister of war in 1862: “Some have wanted to have a frontier delimination between the Regency [of Tunis] and Algeria; it is necessary, as Your Excellency has recognized, that the frontier remain vague. Let us not commit the present, let us reserve for ourselves the future, and let us not raise barriers between the rich valley of the Medjerdah, and the metallurgic deposits and the cork forests of the Tabarka mountains, [and Algeria].” From his vantage point on the ground, this officer saw a different relationship between the border and the territorial position of sovereignty than did the president or bey. The importance of the imperial project was better reflected in not securing a border. But this understanding did not make its way up the chain of command. There a "real" border was necessary.

---

All text above by: Brock Cutler. "Believe in the Border, or, How to Make Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century Maghrib". Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 60. 2017. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[malick-elias]

Reclaiming Our Legacy

The following is a presentation delivered on the 28/07/2024 for the Jamatul Muslimeen Community in Trinidad and Tobago. Disclaimer: During the promotion of this talk at the social media level the leaflet addressed myself as a “professor.” I do not have any such titles and I conveyed to the organisers that they could use Shaykh or Doctor, both together or none at all. I seldom promote titles…

[sheisanimposter]

I understand why professors say teamwork is important when justifying group projects, even though I know it’s really about grading less papers. I’m a reasonable person, I get it.

But if you’re an instructor on this app I raise you this: if the project is about teamwork, why isn’t my grade?

I’m being graded on the end result of the project, not the teamwork. Yet no amount of teamwork is going to make that end result strong if there are people in my group who simply don’t care. And no, that isn’t how it works in the real world.

When I worked on group projects professionally, there were things in place to set the team up for success and monitor our work:

- there was usually pre-designated project lead who had leadership skills or a strong background knowledge on the project

- our slack channels usually had a supervisor in them for questions and accountability

- in my non slack work places we had project check ins with a supervisor

-in some cases we had project feedback surveys at the end or halfway through

I’m 33, I have professional and leadership experience, I could do this project by myself in a week and get an A because I’ve done similar work professionally. I also have ocd so “taking over” is something I’ve worked hard to reduce and I’ve learned to balance with “step up step back”.

By not doing all the work for a group of 20 something’s who barely experienced high school, I actually am practicing teamwork and leadership. I’m giving them info and prompts to try to help, but some of them simply don’t care and are hoping someone else will do all the work. Ultimately they can get away with that because my professor is grading us on the quality of our work, not how we got there.

My attempts to get people to meet, the prompts I gave my team to help get conversations going, and the info I provided to them that they didn’t use will not be graded. My professor will never see our discord chat. Instead I’m being graded on the work ethic of others. How is this teaching teamwork? How is this grading team work? How is it actually preparing severely undersocialized students (my classmates missed most of high school due to Covid and it shows) for the workplace?

So if you’re a teacher, professor or instructor who genuinely cares about teaching teamwork and not just grading fewer papers, here are some suggestions:

-designate a project leader: let the team choose and give that person extra credit

-do project check ins, it can just be a quick survey monkey to give people a chance to “tattle” anonymously. You have to actually read them and follow up on issues though.

-mandate that the group chat stays in canvas or that you’re included in the discord chat, that chat itself should be part of the grade based on how much people participated in and lead conversations

-give individual grades. This means not just grading based on the end result but on each persons portion of it. If one person made the whole presentation that’s going to factor more into their grade. If one section of a project is better researched than another that should factor into individual grades.

-TEACH TEAMWORK FIRST: college isn’t about learning by trial and error, we’re typically given material to learn before being graded on an assignment that proves our knowledge of it. So many current students were not taught teamwork or other social skills typically gained in high school because of COVID learning, don’t assume they know how to do things you take for granted. If the project is team based because you feel teamwork is important, the least you can do is give some handouts on communication and planning strategies that are used in real workplaces. It’s unfair to be grading students on something you didn’t teach them / that isn’t a prerequisite for your course. If your course doesn’t have teamwork knowledge as a prerequisite why are you assuming your students know anything about it?

[peach-moths]

Sketches of Casey for Rise Teacher AU

Casey and Raph attended the same college together all the way on the west coast. Raph stayed in school but Casey discovered the wonders of crab fishing and dropped out of school to pursue crab fishing (school was boring and stuffy anyway

[mostlysignssomeportents]

American education has all the downsides of standardization, none of the upsides

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

We moved to America in 2015, in time for my kid to start third grade. Now she's a year away from graduating high school (!) and I've had a front-row seat for the US K-12 system in a district rated as one of the best in the country. There were ups and downs, but high school has been a monster.

We're a decade and a half into the "common core" experiment in educational standardization. The majority of the country has now signed up to a standardized and rigid curriculum that treats overworked teachers as untrustworthy slackers who need to be disciplined by measuring their output through standard lessons and evaluations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core

This system is rigid enough, but it gets even worse at the secondary level, especially when combined with the Advanced Placement (AP) courses, which adds another layer of inflexible benchmarks to the highest-stakes, most anxiety-provoking classes in the system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement

It is a system singularly lacking in grace. Ironically, this unforgiving system was sold as a way of correcting the injustice at the heart of the US public education system, which funds schools based on local taxation. That means that rich neighborhoods have better funded schools. Rather than equalizing public educational funding, the standardizers promised to ensure the quality of instruction at the worst-funded schools by measuring the educational outcomes with standard tools.

But the joke's on the middle-class families who backed standardized instruction over standardized funding. Their own kids need slack as much as anyone's, and a system that promises to put the nation's kids through the same benchmarks on the same timetable is bad for everyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/28/give-me-slack-2/

Undoing this is above my pay-grade. I've already got more causes to crusade on than I have time for. But there is a piece of tantalyzingly low-hanging fruit that is dangling right there, and even though I'm not gonna pick it, I can't get it out of my head, so I figured I'd write about it and hope I can lazyweb it into existence.

The thing is, there's a reason that standardization takes hold in so many domains. Agreeing on a common standard enables collaboration by many entities without any need for explicit agreements or coordination. The existence of the ANSI/SAE J563 standard automobile auxiliary power outlet (AKA "car cigarette lighter") didn't just allow many manufacturers to make replacement lighter plugs. The existence of a standardized receptacle delivering standardized voltage to standardized contacts let all kinds of gadgets be designed to fit in that socket.

Standards crystallize the space of all possible ways of solving a problem into a range of solutions. This inevitably has a downside, because the standardized range might not be optimal for all applications. Think of the EU's requirement for USB-C charger tips on all devices. There's a lot of reasons that manufacturers prefer different charger tips for different gadgets. Some of those reasons are bad (gouging you on replacement chargers), but some are good (unique form-factor, specific smart-charging needs). USB-C is a very flexible standard (indeed, it's so flexible that some people complain that it's not a standard at all!) but there are some applications where the optimal solution is outside its parameters.

And still, I think that the standardization on USB-C is a force for good. I have drawers full of gadgets that need proprietary charger tips, and other drawers full of chargers with proprietary tips, and damned if I can make half of them match up. We've continued our pandemic lockdown tradition of my wife cutting my hair in the back yard, and just tracking the three different charger tips for the three clippers she uses is an ongoing source of frustration. I'd happily trade slightly sub-optimal charging for just being able to plug any of those clippers into the same cable I charge my headphones, phone, tablet and laptop on.

The standardization of American education has produced all the downsides of standardization – a rigid, often suboptimal, one-size-fits-all system – without the benefits. With teachers across America teaching in lockstep, often from the same set texts (especially in the AP courses), there's a massive opportunity for a commons to go with the common core.

For example, the AP English and History classes my kid takes use standard texts that are often centuries old and hard to puzzle out. I watched my kid struggle with texts for learning about "persuasive rhetoric" like 17th century pamphlets that inspired anti-indigenous pogroms with fictional accounts of "Indian atrocities."

It's good for American schoolkids to learn about the use of these blood libels to excuse genocide, but these pamphlets are a slog. Even with glossaries in the textbooks, it's a slow, word-by-word matter to parse these out. I can't imagine anyone learning a single thing about how speech persuades people just by reading that text.

But there's nothing in the standardized curriculum that prevents teachers from adding more texts to the unit. We live in an unfortunate golden age for persuasive texts that inspire terrible deeds – for example, kids could also read core Pizzagate texts and connect the guy who shot up the pizza parlor to the racists who formed a 17th century lynchmob.

But teachers are incredibly time-constrained. For one thing, at least a third of the AP classroom time seems to be taken up with detailed instructions for writing stilted, stylized "essays" for the AP tests (these are terrible writing, but they're easy to grade in a standardized way).

That's where standardization could actually deliver some benefits. If just one teacher could produce some supplemental materials and accompanying curriculum, the existence of standards means that every other teacher could use it. What's more, any adaptations that teachers make to that unit to make them suited to their kids would also work for the other teachers in the USA. And because the instruction is so rigidly standardized, all of these materials could be keyed to metadata that precisely identified the units they belonged to.

The closest thing we have to this are "marketplaces" where teachers can sell each other their supplementary materials. As far as I can tell, the only people making real money from these marketplaces are the grifters who built them and convinced teachers to paywall the instructional materials that could otherwise form a commons.

Like I said, I've got a completely overfull plate, but if I found myself at loose ends, trying to find a project to devote the rest of my life to, I'd be pitching funders on building a national, open access portal to build an educational commons.

It may be a lot to expect teachers to master the intricacies of peer-based co-production tools like Git, but there's already a system like this that K-8 teachers across the country have mastered: Scratch. Scratch is a graphic programming environment for kids, and starting with 2019's Scratch 3.0, the primary way to access it is via an in-browser version that's hosted at scratch.mit.edu.

Scratch's online version is basically a kid- (and teacher-)friendly version of Github. Find a project you like, make a copy in your own workspace, and then mod it to suit your own needs. The system keeps track of the lineage of different projects and makes it easy for Scratch users to find, adapt, and share their own projects. The wild popularity of this system tells us that this model for a managed digital commons for an educational audience is eminently achievable.

So when students are being asked to study the rhythm of text by counting the numbers of words in the sentences of important speeches, they could supplement that very boring exercise by listening to and analyzing contemporary election speeches, or rap lyrics, or viral influencer videos. Different teachers could fork these units to swap in locally appropriate comparitors – and so could students!

Students could be given extra credit for identifying additional materials that slot into existing curricular projects – Tiktok videos, new chart-topping songs, passages from hot YA novels. These, too, could go into the commons.

This would enlist students in developing and thinking critically about their curriculum, whereas today, these activities are often off-limits to students. For example, my kid's math teachers don't hand back their quizzes after they're graded. The teachers only have one set of quizzes per unit, and letting the kids hold onto them would leak an answer-key for the next batch of test-takers.

I can't imagine learning math this way. "You got three questions wrong but I won't let you see them" is no way to help a student focus on the right areas to improve their understanding.

But there's no reason that math teachers in a commons built around the (unfortunately) rigid procession of concepts and testing couldn't generate procedural quizzes, specified with a simple programming language. These tests could even be automatically graded, and produce classroom stats on which concepts the whole class is struggling with. Each quiz would be different, but cover the same ground.

When I help my kid with her homework, we often find disorganized and scattered elements of this system – a teacher might post extensive notes on teaching a specific unit. A publisher might produce a classroom guide that connects a book to specific parts of the common core. But these are scattered across the web, and they aren't keyed to the specific, standard components of common core and AP.

This is a standardized system that is all costs, no benefits. It has no "architecture of participation" that lets teachers, students, parents, practitioners and even commercial publishers collaborate to produce a commons that all may share and improve upon.

In an ideal world, we'd get rid of standardization in education, pay teachers well, give them the additional time they needed to prepare exciting and relevant curriculum, and fund all our schools based on need, not parents' income.

But in the meanwhile, we could be making lemonade of out lemons. If we're going to have standardization, we should at least have the collaboration standards enable.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/16/flexibility-in-the-margins/#a-commons

[hierarchyproblem]

The very natural mistake that [a colleague] and I made was to think that the differences between the children in our class had to do with techniques of thinking, that the successful kids had good techniques of thinking while the unsuccessful had bad, and therefore that our task was to teach better techniques. But the unsuccessful kids were not trying, however badly, to do the same things as the successful. They were doing something altogether different. They saw the school and their task in it differently. It was a place of danger, and their task was, as far as they could, to stay out of danger. Their business was not learning, but escaping.

— John Holt, How Children Fail