Guerilla Pedagogy – Page 2 – Criticism, Solidarity, Education

The First Bloom

Sadly, this week was full of business for me and it kept me away from hunting for mushrooms on a hike like I planned. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t see some exciting developments coming from the now growing mushrooms on my balcony! Nor does it mean I didn’t spy a few cute little fungus friends popping out of neighbourhood yards.

While out walking the other day I saw these little cuties.

Growing in a few small cluster these white capped young blooms had me curious. I’ve combed through my identification books but I don’t have confidence in what they are yet. I’ll keep looking though because now I’m set on knowing!

Despite the hinderance to getting out and investigating the damp undergrowth of the forests for mycological wonders I did learn some very interesting things about the cultivation of mushrooms and the surrounding political economy of mushroom growing and picking. First off, completely unbeknownst to me, white button, brown cremini, and portobello mushrooms are all one in the same! It’s something quite stunning to realize that so many of the foods available in our grocery stores may appear to be different varieties, when in fact they are identical, just at different stages of life. White button and brown cremini mushrooms are young blooms of Agaricus bisporus, while the portobello is the mature fruit. This species is particularly widespread, and is easily cultivated as it will grow readily in soil, on wood or sawdust, or on other decomposing matter. The ease of cultivation, relative shelf life, and versatile flavour have made this mushroom the staple fungus of casual North American cooking. What fascinates me more however, is the notable myco-phobia (that is fear of mushrooms) that permeates so many eaters here when compared the plethora of mushrooms in say European or east Asian culinary traditions. I have picked up a copy of Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World which explores the political economy of mushroom pickers that harvest the matsutake, a highly sought after mushroom in Japan. I think that investigating the wider social, cultural, and political-economic trends around mushrooms offers us some unique insights into global food systems and planetary food cycles.

Now onto the good stuff. My oyster mushrooms have bloomed!

These little friends are growing well, despite the trouble we’ve had maintaining the humidity they need in all this wind. The incoming cold front gusts run the risk of drying out the covering tent that these mushrooms grow in. Without proper humidity the oyster mushrooms run the risk of growing long stocks, small caps, and developing an unappetizing fibrous and woody texture. I’m keeping a careful eye on these new blooms to ensure that they stay happy and healthy, and with that I’m hoping to eventually get a second, third, and if I’m very lucky fourth bloom from this kit.

Mushrooms Take Care!

Today I thought I would share a little of what I have learned about Oyster Mushrooms, which are the variety of mushrooms I am attempting to grow in my apartment.

Earlier this week I received an exciting package in the mail. I opened the box and I found my beginners mushroom growing kit from a small farm up Island near Sayward. Oyster Mushrooms are a fairly easy to handle variety and when they grow they are delicious to fry or bake and add to stir fries or pastas. I’m very much looking forward to incorporating these newly grown mushies into dinner!

Maintaining this kit is relatively simple. You just need to maintain conditions that are optimal for mushroom growth. Luckily, with the fall here, the conditions are naturally occurring! I’ve set my mushroom kit up on my apartment balcony. Conveniently for the mushrooms, but not for me or any of the other plants I have been growing, recent construction has completely eliminated the sun I used to get. The indirect light, relatively cool temperature, and constant humidity I apply are all essential to the growth of good mushrooms. One very interesting thing that I have learned regarding the condition’s mushrooms are grown in is about the air quality they need. If the air is stale then oyster mushrooms can end up with long stems and small caps giving a woody fibrous texture to them. With too much air exchange however, the humidity becomes hard to maintain and they can try out and not fruit.

Throughout my preparations I have been exploring what the parts of a mushroom are called and how to identify them. There are three major sections of every mushroom (with lots of variety and exceptions); the mycelium (like roots), the stem, and the cap. The mycelium are the real bulk of the organism and are a beautiful network of tendrils under the ground. It’s here that the magic of decomposition and soil enrichment takes place.

The mushroom itself is nothing more than the fruiting body of the mycelium. On top of the cap we’ll find the scales, and under it the gills of the mushroom. Of course all finds of fungi appear in all different ways. Some don’t have clear caps or stems like the Chicken of the Woods.

West Coast Forager

Others have a clear cap but it looks nothing like what we normally expect mushrooms to look like, like morels.

This coming weekend I will be going out and taking a count of all the mushrooms and funguses I can find. I may even harvest a few to investigate more thoroughly at home. Once I get out and about we’ll get some photos up here to really dive into the parts of a mushroom and what kinds of wild fungi are around southern Vancouver Island.

Digital Citizenship and Fighting the Algorithm

Surprise surprise, the grump is here to complain about things again. This week, it’s the concept that seems benign at first glance, but scratching the surface reveals the icky hypercapitalist police state lying underneath; teaching youth about how to manage their online presence, and to take personal responsibility for the content they make available on the internet.

To start off, I should say that I don’t disagree in principle with teaching youth how to manage an online profile responsibly, given the realities of data collection and the impact that personal information can have on their futures. No kid, you shouldn’t thoughtlessly put the photos of you doing coke in a bar bathroom on your Facegram or your Instabook. A reasonable amount of technology usage in the classroom done within collectively and horizontally determined guidelines can be very empowering for our students. Handheld devices and internet communications will dominate their lives and as such we need to show that we trust them to use them respectfully in social settings. I think we can do this by working with our students to express needs that they have regarding technology, and needs that we as teachers have. Indeed, parents may very well hold the expectation that they can reach their kids and we need to mindful of that too. Together, balancing the use and non-use of social media platforms, digital devices, and other technological tools within a social classroom can cultivate a culture of technological usufruct without creating a feeling of dependency. But this take on online privacy, data protection, and image is quite small next to the real questions we should be guiding youth to engage with.

Something I felt was dearly lacking from our guest speaker’s presentation and initial TED Talk was a critical engagement with the ethical and political implications of our technologically mediated social world. We need to be engaging our youth not only in how to manage an online presence, but in questions of why this has become essentially necessary and if it is a good thing? Additionally, we need to be exploring questions of if it is just for future employers to be able to judge hires on their social media postings or for our information to be used to generate algorithms for anything from advertisements to determining where heavy policing happens. Particularly concerning was the presence of a police officer in BC’s digital safety video. Anyone can speak to the impacts of having your information online forever, but the purpose of having a cop tell youth this is to implicitly warn them that if he finds anything he doesn’t like, he’ll keep it and use it against them in the future if the ‘need’ arrises. Far fetched as it may sound, Victoria PD has history of trouncing privacy rules.

The most important part of so-called digital citizenship is not learning how to cultivate an impressive professional online profile and footprint. It is recognizing the ways in which big data tech firms have privatized access to personal information and use it to do everything from sell concert tickets to attempting to buy elections. We need to be empowering students to the belief that their data should not be a profit tool in the hands of private companies, or a tool for oppression in the hands of the forces of state violence (these two actors are more and more blurred)

Empowered technological engagement means knowing that technological relationships are only veneers over actually existing social relationships with material consequences. It means knowing you can fight for a technological future that cares for people and protects their rights, privacy, and livelihoods online.

Exploring Inquiry… and Mushrooms!

I was oscillating back and forth over what kind of project I was interested in exploring for our Free Inquiry assignment for quite some time. I wanted to be able to do something that I had been thinking of taking up anyways as this gives me a reason to stop procrastinating. There were two things I had been meaning to take up semi-regularly and learn a bit more about; birding and mushrooms. For the purposes of this assignment and blogging journey I have opted to go with the mushrooms, though maybe I’ll treat my obviously very wide audience to the occasional blurry bird photo.

Perusing through the information we have on ‘free inquiry’ was, to be perfectly honest, less than exciting. I agree that it is a relatively novel way for organizing educational projects for the majority of public schools in Canada, but it’s by no means a novel thing in and of itself. Essentially, this is research and personal exploration of a topic dressed up in corporate buzzwords like ‘inquiry’ and ‘innovation.’ This doesn’t take away from the power of inquiry based learning at all, but I worry about the discursive means by which it can be co-opted as the tool of private interests (ya’ll have already seen my take on that one in my look at the recent documentary we watched, so no need to go into it here). I do value research and exploration as a method of education. I come from a background in outdoor education and backcountry guiding where this method is key. We operate within the framework we have available to us (whatever means of movement for our camping trip we’re using – kayak, hike, etc..) but form our lessons based on the interests of our participants. I have lead countless trips in the Gulf Islands for example where our participants interests lead us to inquire about intertidal life, or geology, weather, or the history of the area. In each case our participants left our trip with new learning, new interests, and a feeling that they have what it takes to explore what they want.

Anyways, on to the main story. I’ve elected to start growing my own mushrooms and learning to harvest wild ones! There’s not much to say about this so far.

I’ve ordered a beginner mushroom growing kit from a farm up in Sayward on the north end of the Island, so that will take some time to get here. In the mean time I’m finally diving into a few books I have and calling on friends with experience to talk about wild mushrooms. My only hope is that I can live up to the style of David Arora, author of All That The Rain Promises and More. What a legend.

Educational Facelifts: Who Gets to Define Innovation?

Innovation is a fantastic word. It is very elastic. It can be used to mean pretty well anything, but always seems to correspond to some new toy, gadget, or shiny object that doesn’t actually change all that much, but is deemed absolutely essential to a person’s full actualization in the digital social world we inhabit. Every year we hear about a new iPhone – this time it’s bigger! This time it doesn’t have a headphone jack! (wow so courageous Apple, you must be very proud of your multimillion-dollar government contracts – oops sorry did I say that part out loud? I forgot you wanted to be seen as a built from nothing but gumption, completely private enterprise). But does a new iPhone really tick the box of innovation? What’s more, why is it that we are constantly berate with the conceit that only private business is capable of ‘innovation’?

The documentary Most Likely to Succeed, as per our recent viewing, peddles the same conceit. Throughout the documentary, armchair experts (notably almost none of them are educators) wax poetic about the failures of the standardized education system that has been run into the ground by ‘the government’. While many of the criticisms are well warranted such as the ills of a hyper focus on standardized testing and the enforcement of a one-size fits all model of rote memorization in order to get into college, the solution that the documentary offers begs its own question. For the director, (and head producer, billionaire owner of charter school management company, Ted Dintersmith – not a teacher) private charter schools can innovate because innovations is in the domain of the private sector. The final lines of the documentary warn us not to let federal or state governments interfere with education, implicitly stating that it is better left in the hands of the private sector. Importantly however, there is absolutely no engagement with the structural factors that have inhibited public education in the United States, nor is there an argument as to why only charter schools seem to be able to utilize novel organizational structures and new educational technologies.

I certainly believe that education systems need an overhaul. A cursory overview of any critical education periodical will show you the myriad ways that the current American structure (and in many ways the Canadian) does not work well for children and youth both in terms of what we know about knowledge and personal development, and in terms of preparing people for critically engaging in a complicated social world dominated by ruthlessly exploitative capitalism, violent white supremacy, resurgent fascism, and domineering cisheteropatriarchy. Innovation would be grand! I’d love to see some innovation! But knocking down the walls and bells in one kind private school that increasingly acts as a vehicle of resegregation is not how we achieve it. Nor is exploiting teachers on precarious, single year contracts. We achieve it by banishing private capitalist interests from education, by communalizing the social work of teaching, by funding public education and setting the space for autonomy in the classroom. Until we can do this, the idea of innovation in education will be as vapid and empty as it is in the tech world. Screw innovation, give me justice.

Citations Needed Podcast · Episode 110: The Shiny-Object Psychology of American Capitalist “Innovation”

Welcome, Blogging, and Onward General Ludd!

Welcome friends, to my new page for pedagogical musings and anti-capitalist rantings all bound up in our collective goals of inquiry and understanding new technological tools in the realm of education. I’ve never before set up a blog. I’ve certainly explored my fair share over the years, but truthfully, these were mostly one-off internet excursions looking for a decent recipe to try, and never lead to sustained engagement with any blog network. The process of setting my own up was easy enough, though frankly, somewhat dull. Of the millions of blogs powered by the WordPress engine, I can’t imagine how many lie dormant mere weeks after they start. WordPress, to its credit, has a fairly intuitive system for organizing everything, changing site themes, and adding content. Then again, given the terms of service which grants exclusive license of all content on these blogs to Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, I’m not surprised they want to make it easy to upload information and add to the marketization of access to people.

Though the process of setting a blog up I was struck by two thoughts regarding the usage of blogs. These fall into two distinct but related categories; the effects on students in terms of consensual relationships and dismantling classroom power structures, and the incursion of technology into education on capitalism’s terms.

For students, one concern I have about the use of blogs or tools like WordPress is on effective privacy management and intellectual property protection. As the WordPress terms of service point out, when content is posted to a blog the parent company gains the license to use it as it will. Now, often enough this will mean nothing for any individual blogger in their day to day life, but the idea that suddenly a student’s labour becomes essentially the property of a transnational corporation ought not sit well with educators. Capitalist and colonial education systems already operate as centers for the social reproduction of labour relations, using tools like WordPress takes the mask off and skips a major step by allowing for the direct exploitation of students as workers.

This is doubly concerning when we put it in terms of education around consent. I believe as educators we have a strong obligation to teach consent to our students in all their relationships. Grappling with the use of WordPress and other tools like it (including the newly ubiquitous Google Classroom) means that our consent education must show how capitalist technology relations in education operate on a fundamentally unequal basis. Permissions may be granted for technological use (from parents, but do youth really feel like they can truly consent? Consider peer pressure and the institutional pressure that tech use may be an obligatory part of their time in the classroom) but when the means of education, content production, and content distribution are only accessible by agreeing to let your labour become a source of profit for a tech company, is it really voluntary and enthusiastic consent?

I wonder perhaps if it is not more just for us as educators to take up arms the way the Luddites did 200 years ago. Ought not we try to hack and crash these systems and prevent the marketization and privatization of education the same way the Luddites destroyed looms and millwheels? I, like Ned Ludd and my working class ancestors before do not fear technological development, in fact I welcome it. But I want it working people’s terms, on students’ terms, for the commons, and not for the avarice of capital.