#pedagogy tag

[pinkcupboardwitch]

genuine question, where would you recommend someone start with improving media literacy and critical thinking skills? :o

I love this question! Thank you - it really pushed me to figure out how to distill my own process, so it was very helpful for me too.

“Media literacy” is such a big topic that it can very easily get overwhelming, so I would recommend finding a specific type of media you want to practice these skills in first. This is handy because 1) it breaks the learning process up into a much more manageable goal 2) a lot of the mindsets you acquire here will be helpful once you start branching out into different media types, even if the specifics of that genre might be different.

For example, I’m a historian; I’m trained to read both historical documents and texts produced by other professional historians with an eye for particular characteristics. My personal specialty is the study of historical gender and medicine, which means that even when I’m reading texts from periods outside my own, or even modern media, I can pick up synergies of gender and/or medicine more intuitively than others. A really fun example of this is when I watched Blue Eye Samurai with a friend who is also a historian of the same period as I am, but with a focus on religion. A very obvious flag to me that Mizu is queer in some way is that they only realized they were attracted to [censored for spoilers] when they witnessed two men kissing. When I brought that up to my friend, he said he had completely missed that thread. He is, however, continually able to bring in sociological arguments that I miss, because he’s trained to see those patterns and I’m not.

A less intimidating way to approach these skills then, which are often very vaguely defined and have a reflexive anxiety about them because they feature so often in grading rubrics without being clearly defined, is pattern matching. Are you able to identify the patterns the authors are drawing on? And are you able to draw new connections between these texts that are unique to you?

Examples of specific specialties you might be interested as a way to get started could include political journalism, scientific reports, historical texts, or romance novels, to give you an example of the balance between specificity and generalization I usually find helpful. Once you have your set, start reading as many examples of that as you can. It’s more helpful to consume this material consistently, rather than amass a huge source base in a very short period of time. The goal here is to start picking up on patterns between the various examples you’re reading. Patterns of shared values, of similar ways of constructing an argument or a message, of different conversations going in between the authors of this shared space.

“Active reading” tends to get a bad rap because I think a lot of us have bad memories of being told simply to do it without ever being explained what it actually is or how to tell if we’re doing it. But it is a very useful tool. Instead of simply taking in information (that is, “passive” reading), we engage in a conversation with the information as we read. I find that the following is a handy checklist for me when I read material that’s new to me:

- What is the author’s message? How can I tell?

- Why are they presenting this message? Do their stated goals match their implicit goals, or is there a mismatch? How can I tell?

- Who is the message for? How can I tell?

- Do I agree with this message completely? With some parts of this message but not others? Not at all? Why? And how can I tell?

- If I don’t agree in part or entirely, what is my stance on the issue? (“I need more information to know my stance” is a perfectly good one to have)

(Note: this is biased towards my training as a historian. Someone trained in a different field, or even in a different method of doing history than I am, would likely have a different answer. But I find that this set is flexible enough to be used in many different contexts, not just academic ones.)

That “how can I tell” is, for me, the crux of the matter. Being able to answer that question pushes us to really pick apart the different strands of a text and helps us see the overall meaning of that text as something that is constructed, not inherent.

At first, you might need to consciously have this list next to you as a reminder whenever you’re reading your text of choice. You might even need to read a particular text multiple times, each time focusing on a single question from the list instead of juggling all five parts at the same time because it’s so hard to find those answers. That is totally fine! More than fine, it’s normal.

Eventually, as you get more and more comfortable with practicing this kind of thinking and reading, you’ll be able to do it in a way that’s less conscious and more like muscle memory. This also means that over time, it will get less tiring. Which is to say - at the start of this practice, it will be tiring, mentally and physically so. That doesn’t mean you’re lazy or stupid. It just means this is a part of your brain that’s starting a new exercise routine and is slowly building up endurance. “Learning things” is a skill in itself, and something that we can also practice and get better at. I know some very smart people who are terrible at learning new things and being beginners, because they’re so used to excelling at a very narrow sphere of activities.

This is such a long response already, but I hope it is helpful and makes sense! Just two more points for now, and please also feel free to jump back into my inbox or DMs if you have more questions about this.

Firstly, a very useful strategy I have found for getting more literate in genres and ways of thinking I am not familiar with is to ask an expert in that field to “check your work”. For me, this is scientific articles and @dr-dendritic-trees. Again, I’m a historian, I wasn’t trained to read science reports in any field, but I still want to parse the interesting science that comes my way. In the early stages of getting familiar with science writing, “checking my work” usually looked like me sending an article her way, asking her to translate it into layman’s terms, and then, armed with that prior explanation, reading the article myself to see if I could understand how she’d gotten there. As I got more familiar with the particular kinds of thinking that scientists are trained to do, I started reading the articles first, reaching a tentative conclusion, and then asking her if she agreed (example: “Their conclusion feels fishy to me but I can’t fully say why. Would you say that’s right?”). The goal here is not simply to acquire new scientific information. The goal is to practice thinking like a scientist.

(Incidentally, this approach is also why I encourage my students to use SparkNotes or Wikipedia if they’re really struggling with a particular text so they can get a summary of what’s happening. Once you know what’s happening, you can focus on the much more interesting and critical aspect: how the argument is constructed and how you can tell).

Secondly, Toulmin’s Method is another handy checklist for breaking down arguments that you can use as an alternative to or in conjunction with the checklist I provided above. I’ve taught it in my own classes and a particularly handy exercise I like to do with them is to practice going, “I agree with your X because ABC, and I disagree with your Y because DEF.” [example: “I agree with your claim because my own experience backs that up, but I disagree with your warrant because you’re falsely connecting these two elements.”]

This is so long! Thank you for asking the question and for reading all this! It’s probably pretty obvious that I care deeply about this topic*. This is a hard skill to pick up, especially if you haven’t consciously worked these mental muscles out in a while, but it’s also a profoundly valuable one, and one that greatly enriches our lives as people in a shared and communal world. I wish you the best of luck on your journey of practice!!

*for extra credit: how can you tell? ;)

EDIT: I said I only had two points left, posted this, and then immediately thought of two other exercises that are very helpful for practicing these skills! One, learn to write a précis, which is a very formal, four-sentence summary that is extremely helpful for organizing your thoughts. Two, learn to identify logical fallacies. A really central part of critical thinking is being able to recognize when others are not thinking critically and explain why.

[hierarchyproblem]

I had a PSHE lesson about climate change and I mentioned the school strike for climate stuff, and the kids were like, "wait. can we do that?" and I'm like, yeah that's really cool, you should absolutely be thinking about that, and after the teacher was like. You can't say it's OK for them to miss school you absolutely cannot say that

[chicago-geniza]

Today instead of doing anything productive I am thinking about a preliminary lesson plan where this essay would function as a "critical frame" for us to read Prus's "The Waistcoat/Kamizelka" and Peretz's "Bontshe Shvayg" and discuss:

November + January Uprisings

Positivism as an intellectual-historical response to the violent repression of the Uprisings, the Romantic literature & philosophy associated with them (including idealism!), & harsh state reaction in the Russian partition especially

Jewish vs. Catholic theology on worldly suffering (important)

Nietzsche

Polish & Yiddish print culture

Rhetorical vs. nonrhetorical speech, how each can be misconstrued as the other, willfully or otherwise (DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, BABY) - connect to Current Events as per

[iphigeniacomplex]

it’s very easy to tell the good satires and pastiches from the bad ones because the bad ones are too afraid to live within the form. like if you are doing work with fairy tales and you are refusing to look closer at the underlying logic and unspoken rules of what can seem at first to be a senseless form, you are not going to create meaningful work. to borrow a turn of phrase originally used by maria tatar, if you refuse to enter “the house of fairy tale” as anything more than a gawking tourist, you will miss the particular order to the way the table is set, the rooms that are locked vs the rooms that are simply difficult to enter, the set of the floorboards and the position of the furniture. whatever you build will then be a gilded imitation of how you believe the house of fairy tale ought to look, the table set according to your educated specifications and every door open. there can be no interrogation of themes from a writer who views the form as beneath them!

[r0tting-rat]

Studying pedagogy basically means spending hours on books telling u how sick and stupid the (modern) educational system is, except it's some guy from the 1760~ telling u that, and he's talking about how students will never learn anything if forced into terrible conditions and that such system will simply turn the "lil prodigies" into useless and mindless machines.

Anyway I have a test tomorrow. Guess the subject.

[hierarchyproblem]

Maybe depends a little on the subject and the school but uh. Speaking as a teacher, yeah it's not great here!

Catching up with a friend last night who'd spent a couple years teaching high-school-equivilent in England and unsure how much was bias/exaggeration and how much is UK schooling for 16 year olds being, like, a self-parody of teaching to the test.

Seems bleak!

[rontra]

i mean that could take a while but. okay

[gradling]

A friend of mine was talking the other day about how, during his lectures, he sets a timer on his phone for 15 minutes and then, when the timer goes off, stops for 1 minute to let students ask questions, ask him to go back to earlier points, or to just sit in silence for a minute (and let them process what they just heard) if they didn’t have questions, and then they move on for another 15 minutes and so on. I normally don’t lecture exactly because I’m either leading discussion or having students workshop writing, but I was introducing some concepts today and decided to try his method. And it worked SO WELL. I got more questions from the class than I normally do, and they were thoughtful and interesting questions! We did sit in silence for the second of the 1 minute breaks I had for them, but it wasn’t awkward because the silence had an expected, set duration. Definitely using this again next time I have to lecture.

[metamatar]

is there a way to search for tags used on a blog before?

[hierarchyproblem]

Some sort of stupid video about the coronation in form time today. Video ends with the narrator rhetorically asking “will you be watching the king’s coronation?” and like half the kids in the room audibly mutter “no.”

The kids are alright!

[luthienne]

Do you have a day job or do you support yourself entirely with music?

it’s very rare, the person who can support themselves entirely with music — at least in the usa the way contracts and freelancing work in classical music. i have several day jobs — one main one and then a couple of side sources of income (photography, editing). i’ve considered pivoting to private voice lessons but i really do enjoy my current day jobs and they give me the flexibility to take singing jobs with evening rehearsals and auditions

[essektheylyss]

I was reminded today that asynchronous courses means being able to listen to lectures at higher speeds and thank fuck

[caroloftheshells]

the thing is. it is indeed nprcore, and not JUST because of what music the individual tastemakers at npr/tiny desk happened to like at the time, and not JUST because npr is public radio whose money comes from the corporation for public broadcasting + whose member stations are owned by nonprofits w/educational ties, but ALSO because classical instrumentalism and presentational format and no audience noise and Verified Check Mark sound-source mapping and loop pedal grooves and "this performance contains explicit language and may not be suitable for all audiences" and concert black and jeans/flannel and travel mugs and left the camera running but also cut to somebody's hands shredding a flute etc.

[deanscasanova]

they are literally making me read books and critical theory for this masters degree about books. sick and twisted

[gillianthecat]

"Salmonellosis is far more common in the USA."

What the fuck does this mean? More common than in other countries? Than other types of food poisoning? Than it used to be? THAT IS NOT A COMPLETE THOUGHT!

[liesonthefloordramatically]

incredible news, everyone