Professor Garland-Thomson was at a Disability Studies Conference I attended earlier this semester. After watching this video on her research into "Staring," although primarily focused on disabilties, I thought of how as teachers we in a way demand to be stared at by our students, as an indicator that they're paying attention to us. It's an interesting, performative relationship. Here's the link to the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jALsDVW63wo
So thought-provoking. One of the many, many topics we haven't been able to even touch this semester is the highly visual, embodied and 'on stage' nature of teaching, which in turn demands a certain kind of performance from students, i.e., staring. While I'm not a huge fan of participants staring at laptop screens in class, I also know that an upward gaze is not synonymous with learning. Cuts to the heart of how we think we know learning, or even the much more flat 'time on task,' is actually happening.
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