More reading notes from long ago. The NYT mag issue on Money (June 10, 2007) has a number of interesting articles.
One is by Roger Lowenstein on the income gap. The perennial question of redistribution of wealth - but do the wealthiest CREATE wealth, thereby expanding the pie? Seems to me it would be easy enough to look at some stats on this and formulate some tentative propositions.
An article by David Leonhardt on Larry Summers, who is trying to make globalization benefit the middle class.
A bizarro article by Paul Tough about a teacher named Ruby Payne, who argues that the public-school teaching force, mostly of middle-class origins, needs to be educated differently in order to effectively teach the "lower" classes. Unsurprisingly, her seminars are pretty controversial. Tough makes a snarky comment about the rash of Foucauldian critiques blistering her in the pedagogy journals.
Then last, an article by Matt Bai about John Edwards' new War on Poverty. He writes, "Though inequality runs counter to what we think of as American values, there's no consensus that it actually reduceds growth - in fact, there are those who argue that inequality is a natural byproduct of growth. And yet, most social scientists seem to agree that, sooner or later, income inequality will exact a steep social cost, if not an economic one" (p 69).
(Just catching up on some reading notes)
The entire issue of the NYT mag for May 20 2007 is devoted to eco-tecture. There's an article on green architecture: the German EPA building in Dessau designed by Berlin-based Sauerbruch Hutton; the Netherlands Inst for Sound and Vision; the Rotterdam Shipping and Transport College; the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart.
There's an article on beautiful mysterious buildings by Shigeru Ban.
Great article on environmentalism in Curitiba.
A possible future student reading on tourism in Boston:
Bruce Ehrlich and Peter Dreier. 1999. The new Boston discovers the old: tourism and the struggle for a livable city.
In: The Tourist City, Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein, eds. Yale UP.
I enjoyed the brief learning unit on sports as a spur for urban economic development I prepared this summer. Here is another resource for it:
Charles C. Euchner. 1999. Tourism and sports: the serious competition for play. In: The Tourist City, Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein eds. Yale UP, 1999.
Gillian Rose has a new edition of Visual Methodologies out, 2007, Sage.
In theory-land, a useful reference book might be Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine' (eds) Approaches to Human Geography, Sage 2006. Philosophies, people, practices. Includes student exercises; billed as a beginner's guide to geographic research and practice.
Along that same line, today I read about a book that is a collection of autobiography/reflection by famous geographers. Pamela Moss, Autobiography in Geography. (14 essays)
Leslie Budd, Key concepts in urban studies. Sage 2005. I think this would help me be more familiar with the contours of the interdisciplinary field.
Governing Cities in a Global Era: urban innovation, competition, and democratic reform.
Robin Hambleton and Jill Simone Gross, eds.
Palgrave Macmillan, available 10/07.
See flyer with contents in my "future research" file.
Global Shift: Managing the changing contours of the world economy, 5th ed. Peter Dicken
New York, Guildford. 2007.
Supposedly a substantial revision. It's a tome: 600 pp.
Cities in a world economy, 3rd ed.
Saskia Sassen. 2006
This was too advanced for the intro global cities course, but would be ok (at least in parts) for an upper-level seminar.
I feel as though I have been on the road constantly for the last four weeks, and naturally, with traveling and preparing for interviews, output for my dissertation has suffered.
It's not all a loss, though: constantly refining my research talk (I'm doing it again for a conference in San Francisco next week) has really helped me to step back and think about the big picture issues I'm working on, and has helped me to see where the gaps are. (Just in time for my research trip in two weeks.)
1. A very penetrating (ie skeptical) question about the economic value of communist heritage tourism really pushed me to think about the other benefits of this brand of tourism, including the cultural colonization that I suspect is happening as Nowa Huta is re-evaluated as to place value. (That perennial question: "co warto zwiedzic" - what is worth visiting?) But can I show the causality? Discourse is more the answer than tourism, probably.
2. A question on Monday about the faddism of such tourism made me realize that I have to be always aware of the passage of time. What is true today may not be true tomorrow; communist heritage tourism is dynamic and changing, especially as the world "speeds up."
3. I feel I've made some strides connecting my method to humanistic geography. After years of bumbling around with linguistics, this feels really solid.
4. I am beginning to develop a better picture of the situation with the redevelopment of the steelworks and redevelopment in Krakow more generally, as I understand who the players are and what their relationships are.
I went to a little conference last Thursday that addressed not only the trends in digital literacy but also provided me with some interesting ways to think more generally about student learning. It's kind of sad that, at big places like this one, where there is a lot of research going on about effective teaching, we are MORE stuck in the impersonal lecture mode - generally acknowledged to be the LEAST effective way of teaching - than other, less research-oriented institutions.
First, where is digital literacy going? First, print stuff was just made digital. Next, technology was made mobile – anything that has a screen can receive “literary” content. Next was hypertextuality – the potential to use the software to do different kinds of reading and writing than the linearly oriented, usually single-author, usually single-medium types of the past. How can we use these technological advances in classrooms to become more effective teachers?
Thom Swiss from the English Department (he’s a poet) showed some innovative work: a museum installation – an interactive piece - called 'Text Rain.' A piece called 'Traveling' that combines a story running on a ticker-like scroll at the bottom (think CNN), and then the same story running in English and Korean simultaneously. 'Dreamlife' by Swiss and others, combining sound, text, and abstract moving images. All of these differ from traditional literature in that they are interdisciplinarily collaborative in their production (sound people, writers, visual artists, technorati) and that they require a different kind of reading skill – that needs the brain to multi-task to process multiple, different, kinds of information simultaneously.
Lee Ann Kastman Breuch presented a continuum of 4 phases of engagement:
1. Teacher provides structure, eg with writing prompts;
2. Students have more independence – eg posing questions to an explorer team they network with;
3. Students become collaborators – eg they create structures like blogs, fan fiction. (See www.fanfiction.net); and
4. Students are the leaders – eg creating wikis, podcasts.
More useful pedagogically, I think, is the taxonomy of John Biggs (see eg http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/deliberations/ocsld-publications/isltp-biggs.cfm ) as presented by Chris Anson.
What the student is: the student is responsible for success or failure; the teacher’s role is to evaluate and to weed out failure; students may be unmotivated or unprepared, and the blame is thus placed on students for failing to meet teacher’s expectations. This is the traditional chalk n talk paradigm: there is content; the students are judged on how much of it they can remember and spit back in the appropriate ways.
What the teacher does: this is the paradigm in which teachers are expected to use props, tricks, and an entertainment-centered mode to transmit not facts so much, but understanding. Here the teacher is responsible for (and judged on) the level of success (mastery) that students demonstrate.
What the student does: this is of course the student-centered thing based on evaluation of what the student can do because of the learning that has happened. The “easy” work that is traditionally done in the classroom (presentation of content) is now shifted to homework and outside-class work, leaving class time for the "hard" work of application and other activities (“flipping”). Students can’t escape learning. (Which presupposes, I think, a mindset like the first paradigm, in which students are presumed to find the idea of not-learning attractive.)
How does technology support this thinking? Blogs tend to be linear: post/response, post/response, although sometimes there are spinoffs. Wikis are much less linear. Podcasts or vidcasts tend to be much more carefully prepared than blogs. (I have also noticed that blogging is very informal, and that mechanical errors are rife.)
Some interesting examples of pedagogy in the third paradigm:
To enable students to explain a difficult concept, eg RNA replication: choose a metaphor, then work in teams to make a poster using that metaphor to explain the concept so a third-grade class will understand it.
To examine the truth of a particular theory, eg Adam Smith’s invisible hand: use a virtual market world (game theory), manipulate it, and then there will be market failure. THEN have the students do the reading, and do a 1-2 page reflection on what happened.
Apply different lenses to a literary work or problem, eg using different literary theories to explain: have groups of students read the theories and the work, then have a lit-crit battle. (This would also work in a course on geographical thought.)
These are all really great examples. I think that people don't use such strategies 1) because they are afraid to be different, and the chalk 'n' talk paradigm is safe and comfortable (and face it: it worked for the instructors; they all got their PhDs by mastering content delivered in that way); and 2) it takes a LOT of time to develop these sorts of experiences and manage them during class time. I've done a lot of experimentation with this stuff, and I've found that I've sometimes failed because I haven't been careful enough in providing the assumptions necessary to work through a problem or case.
I am beginning to develop a fairly complete dossier of job application materials. One item I have no clear place for is notes about courses I could teach, and the information I've dug up to support such courses.
Researching urban housing last week generated quite a few things. An excellent principal textbook for an urban housing policy course would be Alex F. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the US: an Introduction. Routledge 2006. Chapters on taxes, the low-income TC, public houisng, vouchers, subsidies for private rental housing, fair housing and CRA, and state/local policy considerations (incl some examples). Chapters are relatively standalone; the intro is a nice setup to the issues that matter.
I also grabbed a book edited by John F. Bauman, Roger Biles and Kristin Szylvian called From Tenements to the Taylor Homes, Penn UP. 2000. It's a history of policy, from garden cities in the early 20th century to policies under President Carter. 12 chapters deal with with specific acts or eras, about 20 pp each. Probably good for background reading for a course preparation and/or as additional or recommended reading for particular topics.
I also picked up Dolores Hayden's Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing and Family Life - which sounded familiar, and now I see it on my bookshelf as something I've been meaning to read for about 8 years. I have an older edition - it was revised and expanded in 2002. It would be good perhaps for the social relations component of a more general course on human geography.
Last but certainly not least is John S Adams' book for the Russell Sage Foundation called Housing America in the 1980s. It's designed to interpret the huge volume of census data from 1980 for the interested but lay reader. Worth skimming through as background for developing any housing course, as an introduction to census stats and a baseline for interpreting more recent results.