You need this exercise when: You feel uninspired about your project – either at the beginning of it or when you feel like you have spent so much time with scientific literature that it feels like you have exhausted it and you need to gain more movement, space, and a change of perspective.
Time: 30 minutes free-writing a list, some space in-between to let it sink, 1 hour of scientific citing
Instead of just citing and relying on scientific articles, turn to other material, disciplines, and connections – the web that your project is sitting in. Think about its environment, its specific location, the places where it came from, what influenced it, how and where it has traveled, what it has been in touch with, where it had some points of tension or conflict, what it plays well with, where you can identify a parallel. Try to compile the list of non-academic objects, relationships, and phenomena and try to cite it as a scientific source. As additional challenge, turn it into an annotated bibliography.
Exercise:
You need this exercise when: you want your students to explore different sorts of sources and assemble their findings.
Time: 1 hour scavenging, 1 hour compiling
This CUNY list of activities is a great source for interactive exercises, such as this engaging research strategy, “The scavenger hunt”, “that foregrounds place and everyday technologies.” This is a great exercise to combine with “Writing the implosion: matter/material” to activate resources and multiple avenues of knowledge about an object and its context. Here is how it works: Give students a list of objects that they have to find. You can let them assemble these objects in different ways – a classic bibliography (trying to cite the objects as scientifically as possible), or in a more creative way.
Reflection exercise: to counter the idea of teachers as objective and neutral
You need this exercise when: you want to think more about your positionality
Time: 30 minutes free-writing
Instead of thinking of yourself as an empty canvas/objective vessel of knowledge, try and map out your standpoint. Where does your way of thinking come from? What’s the soup you’ve been swimming in? How does it influence the way you look at the world, take information in and transfer knowledge? How does somebody else’s standpoint create a larger picture of the world?
What schools of thought and learning traditions are you familiar with? What do you know about other traditions? Do you consider them in your practice? Why/not? Do you think your students know more, less, or the as much as you? Do you think knowledge can be measured and weighed against like that? What ways of knowledge transfer come to mind where people can contribute equally?
