Now if I could remember…

and describe one incident, I would be set for writing this paragraph. I don’t have many memories, graphic internal movies of real incidents. It’s more like this – we are standing in line for something, we are surrounded by people, there is a woman nervously jiggling her car keys, my mother says to her, in a hostile, aggressive tone of voice – “You can jiggle those keys all you want, lady, but it’s not going to work!” – or something to that effect. Now that really happened. The woman looked shocked and surprised, everyone around us shifted uncomfortably, I was frozen on the spot, completely unable to move.

Imagine someone doing this at a party…

and you have a basic idea of what it was like to be in public places with my mother. Her outlandish clothes, the incomprehensible and unpredictable verbal jabs she would take at unsuspecting people, the strange gestures she would make with her hands, or her body, her compulsion to reach out and touch me – my face, my hair, my arm, with a stroking, brushing gesture. It is coming back. I think, worse than the actual incidents of excruciating discomfort of having people look at her and recoil, was the anxiety of anticipation, of not knowing when she was going to do something, but not knowing what, or when. Every excursion into public spaces was a walk through a minefield, never knowing when an explosion might occur.

How to write about this…

the embarrassment I felt as a child growing up with a schizophrenic mother. I am making a link between my own autobiographical experience and that express by Spiegelman in Maus II, when his father returns a half used box of cereal with a piece of fruit cake in it to a grocery store. I could easily identify with Spiegelman’s mortification. Now I want to add my own story to this short paper, but I’m having a hard time remembering the details of what actually happened in those moments. I pulled out some old photographs, to see if I could remember an actual incident and found the picture of my mom doing a headstand.

I’m ready to write…

my short 5 page paper on cognition, art, expression, communication, and education. I’m excited about the sequence and the connections that are coming together. I’m challenged by one element of the autobiography. I hope I can write my way through it. I have this photograph of my mother standing on her head. Does that say enough? I’m going to use it as a starting point. I don’t have my scanner here. The only way to get the photograph into the computer is to take a photograph of it.

With that pesky detail out of the way…

I can move onto designing a writing process that will address production issues. Perhaps the first step is to identify the production process, to work through the steps of producing a professional academic manuscript. I know there are plenty of books and papers out there that I could consult, but something tells me I need to work through this for myself. Often I do this and realize I have re-invented the wheel, only to understand that I needed to re-invent the wheel to make it my own.

Part of the challenge…

is similar to what I have had to work through with my studio practice. I could not have sold any work from my studio if I had not believed it was possible to sell my work, if I had not believed what I produced was worthy of selling. It is the same issue with my writing. I have never identified myself before as a professional writer. A central issue in developing a professional writing career in academia is going to be orienting my identity, my sense of myself and what I am capable of, as a high caliber writer. This is a self esteem and self image issue, preliminary to text production methodologies. Well, I have come this far. I’m not going to let this interrupt my progress. It is helpful to realize the issue at this level.

I am determined to develop a writing practice…

that works for me as well as my studio practice. In the studio I have no problem tackling an idea, exploring materials and working my way through to a satisfying expression. I can take some satisfaction in the validity of my work coming out of the studio because I have examples of my efforts hanging in people’s homes, the work has enough depth to resonate and stand on it’s own. I need to develop a practice that will bring the same determination into my writing. I need to develop confidence that I can write scholarly papers that will stand on their own, that will be of sufficient quality for publication.

What I need to do with this course…

what I want to do with this course, is shift my focus away from Seeds and focus on my own cognitive processes. After my talk last night, I realized that what I am working on, to integrate ICT into teaching and learning, is to broaden teachers conceptions of what constitutes a learning activity in their educative practice. I don’t want to privilege ICT, I don’t want to privilege arts activities, I don’t want to privilege science activities. What I want to work on is the expansion of notions of what students need in order to engage in cognition, that those activities are going to be necessarily personal and idiosyncratic, and there can be room made for those activities as a pedagogical and ethical imperative. This is where the issue of social justice comes into the project. If I was not able to engage in the material practices that facilitate my own cognition, I would not be able to succeed in academia. I simply cannot extract the depth of meaning, or make innovative connections between theoretical texts and my own experience, without ‘making things’ as part of my learning process. When I am arguing for engagement with ICT in education, at the centre of my thesis is an argument for cognition, for academic success accomplished through a myriad of methods, selected and developed by the learners. ICT, art, electronics, gameplay, scientific method, craft, meditation, journaling, mechanical engineering: whatever propensity the learner brings to the learning, there has to be a way for these activities to be folded into pedagogy and curriculum. I believe, because it has been true for me, that this approach to education will contribute to engagement, retention, and a society capable of modifying and adapting its practices to create sustainable, just, and healthy social and cultural institutions.

Even the process of producing…

the graphic elements for each blog post stimulates my thinking process and locates me within my own learning and knowledge acquisition. For this short series, these fragments of an image of a New York intersection remind me of ideas of mapping, of mapping my experience, and making sense of it in relation to the landscape I find myself within. The idea of traffic has been with me for a long time, of playing in traffic, and as I begin to have a very preliminary grasp of cognition and the physiological processes of cognition, I see traffic as a metaphor for the way my brain works – with packets of information shunting across neuronal networks, converging to form larger streams, arteries that are heavily used, smaller routes little used, the way Google maps can focus in one a specific composite of geography and even provide different views of that scene, but I cannot ’see’ beyond the scope of the Google map frame. My images of New York streets are like Google maps on hyper zoom. My consciousness can only take in as much as it can comprehend in a given moment. My attention has to shift off of one thing to be able to take in another.

Later that evening I was discussing…

my experience with my good friend. I realized that the issues that were coming up around these objects were precisely the issues that I want to be investigating. I learned that I am not using art processes to support my cognitive activities as much as I am using material processes. What is supporting my cognition is engaging with material explorations as a methodology to process and synthesize my phenomenological experience of the texts (because this is a text based class). I have used material explorations as a methodology to process and synthesize other life experiences as well, in fact, that has been a central impulse in my studio practice. It has helped me understand my own compulsions and obsessions with materials, to see my activities through this lens. I make sense of my experience through material activities. When I make notes from Edelman with a fountain pen on absorbent paper, douse it in cooking oil, and glue it to a composite print of a New York intersection, key parts of that text from chapter 9 shifted from a foreign, external state, to a familiar, internal state.