Sean Sturm

Erratology and the Ill-Logic of the Seismotic University

Abstract With the tertiary education mantra of creativity, critical thinking and innovation in mind, we consider the critical-creativity of error. Taking the university to model social orthography, or ‘correct writing’, according to the norms of disciplines, we consider the role of error in the classroom. Looked at another way, error questions the norms governing norms and the instability of disciplinary grounds. Beyond correction, error involves a mis-taking, or taking another way. Tracing the origin of error we are able to reconstruct the social world in terms of which it is conceivable for a mistake of any kind to have been made. The university, we find, withholds worlds which are not new but are sources of creativity, and constitutes a pluriversity or poly-versity.

The University Beside Itself

Our title refers to the university as an object of invention, or discovery, rather than as an existing institution. In our experience, the university of discovery is “beside itself” in two senses. To be “beside oneself” means to be at a complete loss, not to know – or to know how to know – what to do.

“Drawing in the sand” as a tool for teaching coastal geography

Field trips are recognized as an essential component of the study of geography. They are popular with learners and teachers, but their value as learning experiences is largely assumed. What is needed are interactive and relevant learning activities like “drawing in the sand,” a participatory learning activity that has been introduced into an undergraduate geography field trip at The University of Auckland. It allows students of the course to engage actively and reflectively with the very environment that they are studying.

Situating e-learning: Accelerating precepts from the past

Abstract E-learning entails a different cognitive performativity from class or textual teaching and learning. It is critiqued through three case studies from lecturers working digitally in different ways. The authors’ various challenges in shifting from the classroom to the ‘digitas’ illuminate the risk of interpassivity into which ‘users’ are easily tempted. There are a few caveats about education’s headlong rush into e-learning. The paper details experiences of translating pedagogical philosophies and practical teaching methods from classroom to screen. Interrogating their teaching philosophies during this process led the authors to align e-learning with mediaeval mnemotechnics, spatially organised systems for structuring knowledge so that the learner develops holistically. In e-learning and mnemonics, spatiality and visual images are used as thinking devices. Placing e-learning on a vector with precepts from the past enables education’s core values to hold steady through the (sometimes discomforting) shift in cognitive processing and identity that ‘e-tivity’ demands.

An Art of Orientation: The Possibilities of Learning Spaces

Most research on learning spaces in universities considers the influence that spaces have on learners (Boys 2010; Markus 1993; Temple 2008). As such, it can contribute to the pervasive ‘probabilism’ of strategic planning in universities that is dominated by ‘learning management’. But what about the influence that learners can have on spaces: how spaces can learn from them and they can shape spaces? In this chapter, I traverse a range of concepts of learning spaces in universities, all of which construct different ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’ of how best to construct learning spaces, given the way in which learners relate to the spaces in which they learn. Ultimately, I aim to map critical-creative practices that generate new intensities in, and relations between, bodies, that is to say, new possibilities for learning. From these practices can emerge the contours of a participatory pedagogy that enables teachers and learners to see the university as a place given over to the free play of possibilities, a place of ‘possibilism’ (Hirschman 2003).

In the Wake of the Quake: Teaching the Emergency.

Abstract The university today finds itself in a global state of emergency, at once financial, military and ecological. Teaching must assume this emergency as premise and responsibility: it must consider the grounds of the classroom, both figurative and literal, and generate emergent lines of inquiry that address the pressing global and local situation. For us, that means that teaching must take the university’s grounds of supposedly universal knowledge to be constitutively unstable and to require a reflexive teaching method that puts in question disciplinary fields and discursive modalities of knowledge. And it must take in the physical grounds of the university too—because local space is increasingly articulated by technocapital interests that are fully implicated in this global state of emergency. Thus, we do not seek stability amidst such turbulence, but rather a seismotic overturning of the grounds of the university or, rather, a returning to its ground, through the deepened sense of purpose and place that ‘teaching the emergency’ provides.

The Tyre-Child in the Early World

Abstract This article considers the ‘creative education’ of influential Aotearoa/New Zealand art educator Elwyn Richardson, which is based on what he calls the ‘discovery method’: the ‘concentrated study of material from [students’] own surroundings’. Through a game that his students play with tyres, we explore the role that tools play in Richardson’s classroom and in the imaginary ‘worlding’ of his students’ play. By taking the ‘early world’ of the children’s development to be a product of the tools through which they describe it, we reveal Richardson’s educative process to be essentially technological. His idea of the whole child who emerges through a process of experience and observation—of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, in the well-known phrase of Wordsworth cited by Richardson—conflates the nature of the child and nature of the ‘natural’ world. By this act of ‘natural settlement’ not untypical of settler narratives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the child’s—and, by implication, other settlers’—relation to the world of nature is naturalized. Instead, we would argue that the child’s relation to nature is altogether unnatural: it is imprinted by the technological means through which she explores the world and makes it her own—and by which she is made over. The ‘tyre-child’ is no child of nature, but a child of technology (as every settler is a technological settler), for whom creative errors—acts of ‘mis-taking’ like the ones Richardson’s children make in playing with tyres—reveal an imaginary capacity at once theoretical and unsettling.