Dr. Tom Liam Lynch Presentation

          This post will be the third in my Field Experience Reflections series; if you want to read the two others you can find them by clicking on the three horizontal lines in the left-hand corner of your screen and then clicking on the page entitled “Field Experience Reflections,” or you can just click this link. In case you need a refresher on what exactly this series of post entails here is the required context:  I will be using these posts to reflect on my field experience by taking the concepts I learned about in special guest presentations and then thinking about how I might apply them to my own teaching. Alright, now that that little introduction is out of the way, let’s get to the reflecting portion of tonight’s entertainment.

EDIT AS OF 12/8/2020: Thanks to my professor, I have realized that I mention a picture of a cirrus cloud, but never actually put in the picture! My apologies and that mistake has now been fixed.

            As most of you have probably surmised based on the title of this post, the third guest speaker is Dr. Tom Liam Lynch, ^[1] who currently serves as editor in chief of InsideSchools and education policy director at The Center for NYC Affairs at the New School. Prior to his presentation, our class read chapter 6 in a recent book that he, my professor, and Pam Amendola cowrote entitled Integrating Computer Science Across the Core: Strategies for K-12 Districts as well as the introduction and any three essays from Lynch’s anthology entitled Strata and Bones. All of the chapters that I read—which in Strata and Bones included chapters 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6—involved ways in which we can integrate the sciences with the humanities, which in Dr. Lynch’s case is more specifically computer science with ELA; his virtual presentation expanded upon these same themes and it is safe to say that my dislike for strict disciplinary boundaries has been eroded even more due to his essays and presentation.

            Part of said dislike for disciplinary boundaries is due to my dislike of labels writ large, ^[2] which I think is why I felt an affinity for Lynch’s self-proclaimed animosity towards the artificial/false/fabricated boundaries between STEM and the humanities. More importantly, however, I also felt that Lynch made a persuasive argument: coding really is just writing to a different audience, ^[3] writing writ large is just using forms of technology to communicate, ^[4] and looking at the quantitative data of texts is just a form of distance reading. ^[5] I appreciated that early on in the presentation Lynch highlights that it’s not about the technology itself, it’s about deepening and expanding content area instruction through the use of said technology. That statement really stuck out to me, partially because it was a profound way to verbalize something I had been wrestling with for a while, ^[6] and partially because I believe that it highlights a theme of our entire course. Teaching with technology is never only about the technology, it’s about the ways in which we, as educators, use and employ said technology to enhance student learning, motivation, and engagement whenever possible.

Lynch continued his presentation by walking us through a distance reading of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which you can find here. On the one hand, after having read Lynch’s essays in Strata and Bones, I was already aware of the power, and the admittedly “cool” factor, that this kind of literary analysis has. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but feel skeptical about the conclusions you could obtain about novels from quantitative data. In my mind, it felt like a leap to be able to correlate, in this case, how many times a name is spoken with any statement about that character’s place in plot. However, once I voiced these thoughts, Lynch clarified that the questions or ideas you gain from looking at the data can become theories, but those then need to be proven by looking into the book itself. After that, any doubts I had were eased. Moreover, I appreciated his argument that combining perspectives of quantitative and qualitative data both gets deeper/fuller meanings from the text, but also gets students who are better at the former into the text as well as the students who are better at the latter into the text. Therefore, it’s the best of both worlds: literary analysis is made more accessible to different types of students while also enhancing the actual analysis. 

Given that I am a Secondary English Education major, the applicability of the concepts and insights I gained from Lynch’s presentation to my future teaching is innumerable. One way that I can use this in my classroom (and was also demonstrated by Lynch) is to have students use Voyant Tools and/or raw datasets that I have compiled for them ^[7] to look for any number of literary devices such as motifs, symbols, and themes. ^[8] By look for I mean both literally where it occurs in the text as well as its frequency and overall narrative trajectory—as in, is there a higher frequency of Heart of Darkness’ light motif in the beginning compared to the ending and if so, why do you think that is? What does it suggest about Marlow’s journey? Etc. Another way to utilize quantitative data and the accompanying visualizations is by having the students make predictions about the novel prior to starting it by creating a word cloud. Voyant Tools does this for you and the picture below is an example of one for Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

I have also created a lesson that has students input their works into Voyant Tools and use the resulting visualizations as a way to reflect on their writing throughout the unit and/or year. While I have mentioned Voyant Tools a number of times, and it is certainly a powerful and helpful (and cool in my opinion) tool, as Lynch made clear in his presentation, it can its limitations. I have been slowly learning about the programming languages of Python and R, and I would love to be able to create the visualizations I might show in class—or even help students use programming to create their own visualizations. Speaking of student work, I could, like Lynch did in workshops on Romeo and Juliet, have students look at charts of data and then physically draw a graph and discuss the possible interpretations of this graph.

           As much as I said a mere two paragraphs ago that the applicability of these concepts is innumerable, I’m realizing that most of the ways in which I would use this method is through variations of the projects I already suggested. I feel like there are other ways to apply quantitative data in my classroom that I’m missing either because of my own lack of experience and expertise or because I’m tired—both of which are likely, the end of a semester is always rough in my experience. Regardless, I learned a lot from Dr. Lynch’s presentation and I’m excited to be able to use technology in (hopefully) engaging and interesting ways in my future classroom.  

Thank you for reading!

 

  ^[1] I wanted to add that his three names impress me because they all sound nice together, but since it didn’t quite fit in the main body of the post here it goes into a footnote.

 ^[2] I could take this time (re: footnote) to go into a tangent about why I dislike labels, but I have neither the energy nor the time so [please insert lengthy and eloquent discussion involving Judith Butler’s essay on the repressive nature of labels, and how labels are cool until we give them too much power here]. As always, if you actually want me to go in depth about what I mean here, please just let me know in the comments and I will. :)

 ^[3] You can read my first reflection on coding here.

 ^[4] In my next field experience reflection, I’ll discuss how technology can be more broadly conceived than as only something that uses electricity (and I’m sure plenty of people would, understandably, argue even with that oversimplification).

 ^[5] In my previous field experience reflection post, I wrote about how teachers often focus on close reading, which is taking one passage of a text and analyzing it. Distance reading is the opposite of that, you are meant to look at the text as a whole rather than only one passage. While I didn’t use the same terminology, it is one of the components that I argue is needed when writing a persuasive literary essay.

 ^[6] I have always strongly believed that technology is not “bad” or “good” in and of itself. While it’s certainly a complicated topic with its own nuances, it always irks me when I have heard people bemoan the ways in which current society is deteriorating due to the increase in technology (e.g. cellphones) because technology is a tool that we use and control and if we want people to use it differently than we need to model what that means for them. As I said, it’s a complicated topic and there are exceptions that assertion of mine, but when discussing technology for educational purposes in particular, Lynch’s statement helped clarify some of my own thoughts on the matter. 

 ^[7] I don’t think that I would have the students create the datasets mostly because it would be tedious and time consuming work which could easily negate any of the student engagement gained from other aspects of this form of distance reading.

 ^[8] This is probably obvious to those of you readers who study English lit, but by themes I mean theme topics such as family, light/dark, good/evil, death, love, etc. A thematic statement is the sentence you create based on a theme topic and it is that statement which people often refer to broadly as the text’s theme.