Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:08
greetings everyone and welcome to day four of i annotate 2021 i'm really happy to have you all here today welcome to our fourth keynote um that
00:00:21
will start in just a second as you probably all know now and you can tell if you can see the words on the screen i'm nate angel from hypothesis i want to actually get to the main business of this morning which is this
00:00:32
keynote that we've been long long anticipated and that is with um remy clear and ontario garcia and i'm not going to say a lot about them because uh i think uh many of you already know who
00:00:46
they are and they're gonna say a little bit about themselves i think by way of an introduction but i will just say that um it is through the work of these two fellows that um that i think has really changed the
00:00:57
conversation around annotation in general through the publication of this book and all the other work that they do that they're going to talk about today and that book um is called annotation and i was just looking i have my copy
00:01:10
sitting right here and now it's gone but i'm sure they'll show it off to you later and so without further ado i'm gonna pass the baton over to raymie who's gonna get things started um and i will back out of the way and
00:01:22
let them speak for themselves remy take it away hey thank you so much nate and thank you so much to everybody at hypothesis for organizing i annotate ontario my dear friend how are you i'm
00:01:34
good hey raymond how are you hi so i i just gave ontario a pop quiz a few moments ago and he you know sharp his attack i asked him when was the first time that we did a keynote together or at least at the same event
00:01:46
yeah i i didn't know it was five years ago which is the thing that was useful to know but is it aurora public schools i think just down the street from where where you are if you're not trying to disclose your your intel but uh
00:01:59
yeah so otero and i were in aurora colorado talking with some lovely k-12 colleagues and i saw ontario i think maybe for the first time um do something in his keynotes that i've always appreciated
00:02:11
which is to ask the question what are you reading so antaro what are you reading right now what am i reading right now i i just start so it's funny uh i'm reading uh we do this till we free us by miriam caba
00:02:24
uh it is a popular book that i think books are reading i recommend it as a thing i'm only part way through it but i knew her work i got a whole argument about this book i went to a tattoo parlor on um speaking of annotation i went to a tattoo parlor on
00:02:37
uh last friday and got a big argument about abolition uh with the guy who's permanently putting something on my body and so that was um around abolition so that was a fun thing to talk about um yeah christy i think it's an excellent book uh remy
00:02:49
what are you reading right now yeah um i'm reading a lovely text by dr cesare warren this is about centering possibility in black education uh this summer i'm teaching a class called school and society
00:03:01
and so given many things that are happening right now this seemed like an appropriate text and we'd actually love to hear from folks as we all begin to gather this morning like what are you reading um you know drop it
00:03:15
into the chat people are introducing themselves they're telling us where they are where they're from but you're very welcome in our chat this morning as we start this really kind of casual conversation what are you reading right now and if you want to take it a step
00:03:27
further i think if folks know there's a conference hashtag whether you're on twitter or you're on instagram take a picture of the book cover take a picture of your annotations put
00:03:39
it out on the feed and we can start to curate a list of what we're all collectively reading so thanks ontario we're going to start this conversation today with some reflections on tarot we've written a book together
00:03:53
we've put it out in the world we've invited people to mark it up and we've invited people to have what we're calling an anno convo an annotation conversation and this book it's been out in the world
00:04:06
for a few months now at least in this form and we can talk maybe a little bit later about its earlier iterations but we've received some really interesting responses and i'm wondering if you can help take us into this moment and this
00:04:18
and this bit of discourse yeah i i have a grumpy dog behind me who has feelings about this but uh a friend and colleague uh victor lee he's a professor here at stanford um and the current president of the uh
00:04:32
society for learning sciences um he he kind of went on a mini thread there's a series of tweets that is the first one um that he shared a couple weeks ago um it really just talks about you know growing up
00:04:44
right the fear of damaging and writing in books made it feel taboo right like who gets to write in books and what's it mean um and now you know as a stuffy stanford professor right he has plenty he clarified later he has plenty of
00:04:56
books that he can write in um and and but even then like it still creates something of an anxiety a feeling of anxiety to you know take pen to paper and write in the book in the way that i think remy you and i deliberately envision people writing in
00:05:09
our book right that we want people to do and so i think this makes us at least makes me think of you know who like who has the privilege who has the power to get to write in books where are those practices learned uh and
00:05:22
and what kinds of lessons are carried with the practices of annotation i i can give an example i think we'll share a couple of pictures of my classroom uh back when i used to be a high school teacher in a moment um but you know when i was a teacher i realized uh
00:05:35
what was really powerful for me was going to college and getting to write in books as an english major right getting to getting to mark things up and you know probably as a dumb 18 year old feeling smart trying to trying to jot my notes in
00:05:48
um i don't know faulkner or some other kind of problematic dead white author um and and i tried to replicate those practices when i was teaching my students and so i'd buy like the cheap dover editions of shakespeare or i'd buy my students their own copies of
00:06:01
um the autobiography of malcolm x specifically to teach them we would we would annotate and mark up the books at the same way right everybody underlined this sentence and write this in the margins as a practice of acculturating towards annotation
00:06:13
in a way that's a very different relationship to books than i think what kids are schooled to do in particular kinds of contexts i think that might be a starting place and remember what your thoughts were when um when victor started sharing this tweet on june 3rd
00:06:26
well of course it like you made me think a lot about notions of access and participation and it led eventually and victor and i went back and forth on twitter a bit again we've been having these conversations in various forms for for years
00:06:38
with readers and it got me to ask this question about these rights so to speak the kind of norms or these cultural practices some of which are literally written down and some of which remain unwritten that are associated
00:06:52
with annotation now i know that you shared this tweet in its other forms and other spaces and i believe that you got this response is that right yeah so i uh i will confess for a couple of you who follow me on instagram i'm trying to
00:07:05
figure out how to use instagram i do not know that platform well and so i i make messy stories and don't quite know what i'm doing so i took victor's tweet and just put it as an instagram story and then a good friend danny martinez a professor at uc davis
00:07:18
um powerful literacy scholar uh replied to me which then took his reply and put it made it public because that's what i do with danny but he wrote damn how about getting in trouble in school because you wrote on the los
00:07:30
angeles unified school district issued book uh damn in why you got to be racist like that right so he's both joking but kind of reminding you know particularly for uh the black and brown students that danny and i both taught as we taught in south l.a south
00:07:43
central los angeles and he and watts um you know the the idea of not writing of writing in books was something that just wasn't permissible right it's just something that's not allowed and i think danny ties this at least in
00:07:55
my interpretation of knowing him as a teacher it's kind of specifically two issues of race and class in a large metropolis like los angeles right so that you know annotation is specifically not something that is encouraged and is
00:08:07
actively discouraged um by systemic power in the country right so that that feel like a nice starting place i also just wanted because i'm trying to follow chat as we're talking which probably isn't the best uh active presence but uh danza i
00:08:19
appreciate your comment here right of like when you go back and look at your annotation and you can see uh it's like a different version of you that might have been annotating in the past and i think that's just a useful reminder of like the historical record which i think we'll
00:08:31
also get into as we keep somewhere so ontario remind us that you know annotation expresses power and this is a key argument that that we make in the book in a variety of ways but it's these are photographs that that you took right from
00:08:45
this is my very first classroom this was for people who are wondering this is room p75 uh at manual arts high school it was uh they call it a bungalow uh but it is just the portable building that should have been demolished years ago
00:08:57
and the first when i first went in that classroom uh in 2006 i think is when i when i was it was teaching in there uh there was a young tagger who i never met but whose presence like a ghost
00:09:11
uh just devoured every space of that classroom you you turn over this is the trash can on the left hand side it would say fonse wadi on the bottom of the trash can in marker and if you look at the power breaker uh on the right-hand side
00:09:24
uh this the same tiger had also tagged the the uh power breaker fonse wadi and i remember using the the white screen to pull down for an lcd projector and when i pulled it down the entire thing i don't have this picture was tagged fonse wadi and i just appreciate
00:09:37
the overwhelming presence of this young person who despite schools not allowing kids to annotate this this student had clearly made their presence well known within this classroom this was their domain much more than mine
00:09:50
um to two years later i would randomly you know it'd open up like a desk drawer and sure enough there would be a font say what either it's probably still there now which i i i'd love to think about it yes um this this this person
00:10:02
yeah i think that's the right word this person was prolific uh as an annotator of a particular space and context um and in the same way that lusd is trying to control and shape power around
00:10:14
annotation the student also is expressing a kind of enactment of power and so i think you know i think a couple other images will get into around graffiti but graffiti has been the thing that when i think about my classroom context my teaching context stays with me as an
00:10:26
analog annotation practice absolutely and so then tell us about this book because you also included this here and i think as i was looking at this and it's even talking it reminded me of something that we've written about in our book now
00:10:39
about annotation functioning as a resource that is leveraged like your student yeah across again text and social settings right and it expresses power on behalf of constituencies for their ideological
00:10:51
ends yeah so i don't know and maybe in chat i don't know if always running is a popular mainstream book but at least in south central where my students were this was a this was a popular memoir that many of my students read
00:11:04
um it is about uh gang life in los angeles um and as is told from the point of view of someone who experienced that life uh there's a couple of things i want to point to so this is the cover of the book it is blurry this was a picture
00:11:16
taken with a phone uh a decade and a half ago right so you just think of the the apple i guess um but there's two things i think through right there's there's a book cover and it gives you the content
00:11:28
information of someone's back tattoo and the title of the book and poll quotes there's an ugly label that the school has then annotated on top of it ar stands for accelerated reader uh it is a proprietary product
00:11:42
that allows students to know if they are allowed to read this book it tells you the level and the number of points they get for the book right so you get this assessment practice that is annotated on top of it that's fine and most of the books look like that at the school
00:11:55
and in a way that is pretty interesting to label and you can see that lower levels the books look dumber right they would use the word the language that my students would say they look like children's books that you're giving to teenagers right they become floppy picture books um and
00:12:08
so you think about the demoralizing reading practices around the ar system um but the other thing that's harder to see on here is that back tattoo picture on the cover of the book is also marked up by students who are tagging that cover right so there's
00:12:20
it's not just one tagger there's a conversation that's happening across different students uh crews tagging the cover of this book right so they see a gang a book about gang affiliation and they too are marking that with with
00:12:32
different kinds of affiliations and labeling and so you can read a kind of history and lineage of who's engaging with this book whether or not they're opening the cover is a different thing um but i think it's fascinating to think through like these three different kinds
00:12:44
of annotations that are happening on this one cover and the ways that they're enacting different kinds of conversation and power it may not be in relation to one another right i actually don't think the kids who are marking up their uh their crews are the same
00:12:56
care about the ar sticker and vice versa but it there is a parallel set of annotation practices happening there and i don't know i think maybe coming back to fonse wadi and whoever this this young tiger was right like there is
00:13:09
something about the world around these kids is constantly annotated everything around them has writing on it and whether or not it counts uh is the conversation that that to me has been as as we finished the book and think about like what we didn't get to put into it
00:13:22
this is what this is what i've been coming back to is like what counts and like who's it get who does it get to count for particular if i think about you know the students at this school as an example absolutely and so then speaking of students at the school and
00:13:34
writing around them and writing on their world yeah and helping to kind of author narratives on their world you know we happen to write again that annotation you know like these other media right megaphones tweets spray paints in this case
00:13:46
you know it's a tool that can be used purposefully what's the what's the purpose here what do we see you know this learner doing the lesson i want to share here uh and raymie i apologize guys i really
00:13:58
so that's the background for everybody else i dumped a whole bunch of pictures in our slide deck and ring is doing a masterful job of pulling them together and trying to figure out what the narrative was with all of these and it's doing great but trying to recognize like what how does
00:14:10
this picture relate to the always running picture so our school had some amazing murals and professional graffiti artists who came in i don't know what a professional graffiti artist is that's a whole other can of worm
00:14:22
but had renowned graffiti artists come in and um create these murals across the campus that were beautiful and so this was this had uh this talked about the family trailers there was like a family center that was um outside the parking lot at
00:14:35
the school um and the fascinating thing to me is you can see the kind of you know from from maybe maybe something closer to an objective lens the kind of artistic intent that people might differentiate from what they think is
00:14:48
quote unquote gang graffiti i tend to disagree with with these distinctions but i don't i think most people could see this as artistic and i realize that is a subjective statement um but what you're seeing is uh the
00:15:01
custodian painting over uh the the the tags uh here right so this is a beautiful mural that has now been painted back to um as a graffiti critic talked about in los angeles several years ago the
00:15:13
beijing of the la city right that uh all of the graffiti is just painted over with like ugly beige paint which somehow just makes it makes the city uglier than if the graffiti wasn't there to begin with and so there is there's something fascinating to me about
00:15:25
you know there was a purposeful label and use of this particular text that was applicable for school context uh and even then um our eyes in terms of interpreting the social context of what graffiti stands for
00:15:38
and as an annotation practice uh makes it invisible as a purpose and so it again becomes painted over by the school and this happened with most of the murals on campus as well they eventually all uh were seated to time and to
00:15:50
traditional authority in that sense i think there's there's a lesson here i'm not quite sure what the lesson is um but that's a really nice point here no that's great obviously i clearly misinterpreted the images i was throwing all this together but actually it's really quite apropos
00:16:03
because we're about to talk about redaction so redaction as annotation is really a nice little yeah through here that's great so what's going on here oh boy all right i promise these are the
00:16:14
i i put an embarrassing picture of myself in here so there's two more kinds of annotations move beyond graffiti and talk about um uh talk about maybe uh analog annotations so our school moved to a school uniform
00:16:27
um which the students didn't love and so these are the hands of my friend peter showing one student's annotation practices so what he would do the student who didn't want to wear the uniform would wear his hoodie in class every day
00:16:39
or into school walking past the security guards with just the collar of his school uniform as a means of demonstrating that the student was wearing uh the uniform and then would take off the car and would be able to uh
00:16:52
participate in school without actually wearing the uniform i think there's there was a brilliant kind of cloaking maybe maybe a little cloaking if it was with the hoodie that allowed the student to move in as an annotation practice the other side
00:17:04
is uh uh this was our bathroom pass that i'm demonstrating here they they gave every classroom a yellow construction safety vest that if you wanted to go the restroom you needed to wear this vest my students
00:17:16
found it really demoralizing i found it really stupid as a thing i also got a lot of trouble at my school maybe this is maybe this way it's coming across here um and so i told my students like this is an ugly vest uh one student suggested i could paint
00:17:29
it for you uh and so it's not a very good picture but what is what he painted was a big fist right like holding up like a fist on the back of the vest and i'm like that's pretty cool that fits in with the lines of solidarity and activism that was trying
00:17:40
to instill in my classroom um and so this was one of two days where this vest was allowed until when my students were and it got confiscated by the security guard when i talked to the principal about why like there's still a functional vest it still looked like the other hall passes
00:17:52
uh it got confiscated they said because it might be confusing they might not understand how the vest functioned and sort of something around you know i think that's right i think that that doesn't make a whole lot of sense of like why you would
00:18:05
confiscate the vest but i also understand why they did it i think it probably wasn't the best adult decision i made to have my student graffiti the vest for power for my students um but but there is something to think
00:18:17
through like what are the kinds of political choices right i think to the quote here right like every kind of annotation is a political annotation right uh it is an objection of the school uniform right to to take the collar and wear that as a
00:18:29
way to get into school is an objection to the ways that we dehumanize students by make them look like construction workers in order to go to the bathroom um on their campus and in order to you know uh embarrass them right i think there i think there is a lesson here for
00:18:42
students to think about um and the ways that we kind of you know it is i think the kind of cat and mouse game of school uh is useful to think through right it's oftentimes adults trying to squash young people's ingenuity is is where we
00:18:55
see uh contestations of power it's where we see the viral images of usually young black young uh black uh boys and girls who are being uh body slammed to the floor as the
00:19:06
viral images i'm thinking of by police officers right are about contesting particular kinds of racialized power in this country and so what's it mean to take sides and potentially act in solidarity with young people what does it mean to question
00:19:19
those mechanisms and at least to me how can we how can annotate function in that way right and i think this is a thing that we'll get into throughout this but the question that i would have uh maybe for you remy but for everybody is what are the ways that annotation
00:19:32
is doing good in the world right to the miriam kaaba book right we do this totally free us how how is how is annotation and for the 62 of you in the session right now how are your annotation practices making
00:19:45
this world freer right like and who is us right in that sentence right so i think those would be the things i would push as i was thinking about these images raymond so i feel like i'm just rambling at you oh this is great no because it relates so well in turn this is exactly
00:19:57
why this is why we're bringing ourselves into conversation with each other because our thinking is always changing as well and our thinking is also in this case you know kind of bouncing off of other people's ideas that have been even in this conference this week and i'm
00:20:09
thinking now about our colleague and our friend charizard bride she presented as a panelist about the relationship of annotation practices and digital literacies on monday and then on tuesday
00:20:22
she was listening to our other friend and colleague joe dillon who's again a k-12 educator here in the denver area speak about his practices engaging students in annotation and i
00:20:33
love what kind of charisse is saying in conversation with joe because it really echoes ontario what you're talking about as well at one point shari says we are privileged perhaps we being educators or we being adults
00:20:45
we are the ones who are privileged to be able to know what it is that students see and think really honoring the ways in which they are reading their world and then they can also write their world and it's up for us to design towards
00:20:58
those ends and to the question you just mentioned to design perhaps towards more liberatory more justice oriented ends yeah and so i love that charisse is reading joe's commentary and it echoes your questions and it ultimately again
00:21:11
for i think for us and for some of the questions that we've tackled in our work comes back to this core question of how do learners write annotation yeah right and again like do they write annotation in perfunctory ways
00:21:23
in ways that perhaps may be seen as irrelevant or is that a form of resistance and is that also a form of creative agency and so sitting with this question i think is also really important for us and so then here's the connection back
00:21:37
to redaction though right so here's the here's the the trailers and you know covering up of the murals and the graffiti but in a different way and so tell us like or to tell tell everyone a little bit about
00:21:49
how as we were writing our book our engagement with with isabella o'hare the poet and how we how we saw her work yeah and it's been you know she's been someone who's been in in loose conversation with us since
00:22:02
since uh reaching out to her to include this this image and this work in in the book right but you know i think as a as a blackout poet i think she's a other she probably identifies as a poet broadly but the genre here is black out poetry right so
00:22:14
she's taken the apology letters uh her her book it's a really powerful book uh is a collection of all of the of many apology letters from terrible predatory men who've been part of the uh uh identified as part of the metoo movement
00:22:27
or led to the institution instantiation of the metoo movement and so what you can see here is uh her taking uh harvey weinstein's apology statement uh blacking out most of the text and making
00:22:40
and remixing it into something uh much more critical and much more powerful right and i think it is at least for me when i said when i sat down and read through uh the book it is it is an emotional and powerful statement to think through
00:22:52
what's it mean to redact what's it mean to give voice when when things are voiceless i i've been particularly thinking about maybe some of you um since the new york times documentary have been thinking about britney spears and her conservatorship
00:23:04
and uh what's it mean for her to be literally be given voice in court after you know more than a decade of not having agency over her own actions uh yesterday and basically asking for the same free will that i think most of
00:23:17
us are afforded right as a kind of example here right it's it's not an annotation um i wouldn't argue i'd love to have the the theoretical conversation with some of you but there is something fascinating through like what's it mean to
00:23:28
extract voice to take voice from someone else's harmful words what's it what's it mean to find new voice from what's within there i think that maybe it is something like a um i don't quite know how trees work but i think you can tap a tree for maple
00:23:41
syrup if it's the right kind of tree in the right kind of context you find the right kinds of tools this is probably the right the right parallel but what's the what's the maple syrup from from the different kinds of statements that we might be able to pull
00:23:52
from didn't expect to go down the the maple syrup route no i don't know how degrees work that is absolutely correct well it's an interesting analogy because of course people don't ask trees for their consent when they tap them from
00:24:05
maple syrup which is how i'm going to bring it back to this because i know that at least this community uh from both technical perspectives but also from again more politically oriented perspectives have really grappled with the
00:24:16
relationship of annotation to consent yeah that's a question that we talk about in our book we touch on it we wrestle with it uh we have a section of our chapter about power that explicitly asks the question
00:24:28
can i annotate that and you know in engaging with isabel and getting permission from her her consent to feature her work we also know that she did not ask
00:24:41
consent to redact and share and then publish her versions of these sexual assault apology statements right and so i think that you know
00:24:52
we don't make in our book a blanket case that consent is irrelevant in fact you make a pretty powerful argument i think that it's really important to consider context yeah as a paramount uh element of the power dynamics and often
00:25:06
differential relationships that exist when engaging in the act of annotation yeah but i think that isabelle's work her poetry um and this particular use of redaction but also to the redaction of covering of
00:25:19
the graffiti you know it then relates to this question here who has the right to annotation yeah which i think is something that we should all really sit with whether we're educators in classrooms or whether we're designing
00:25:31
technologies that allow people to take notes wherever that may be it feels like uh in addition like i think if i was thinking about this with my students in my classroom today the same students in the fontswadi classroom
00:25:45
i i would i would think about that can i annotate that both from like a technical perspective but also the you know i think ethics is probably a thing we don't teach very well in schools but that should i annotate that and i think that that gets to
00:25:58
a deeper reflection of ourselves in relation to the world and you know to charissa's tweet from from a couple slides ago right like this is a i think you know probably the reason i spend so much time doing educational research when i could be in
00:26:11
the classroom probably being like i think i was a pretty good teacher and i don't do that anymore i don't have energy in the way that i did in the past is really because i think you know it's about believing young people as genius and as brilliant and
00:26:23
i think charisse is getting to this of you know how do we ensure that young people's voices are participating in the civic world around us right that is the large perspective of you know why why i've sold out and live in the academy to
00:26:36
some extent it's about trying to elevate young people's voice in civic society and you know i think i think that should i should i annotate that right is is the beginning kinds of conversation that young people should have
00:26:48
yeah i i can't not talk about the pandemic and i think we'll get to it um but an image i've been thinking about lately from uh same time i was in the classroom i remember teaching about hurricane katrina
00:27:00
my second year as a teacher um i was thinking about the ways that houses in new orleans were annotated uh to point to if bodies were in those ha in those houses and uh and other kinds of dangerous information right and i think about the
00:27:13
ways we marked up an another kind of graffiti graffitied these houses to indicate the kinds of damage and loss and trauma that occurred in different kinds of communities and so you know i don't think i don't think our nation has
00:27:26
anywhere near uh considered the ongoing trauma and harm and healing that's going to have to happen in this country as a result of the pandemic and the hundreds of thousands of people that have died um we've talked you and i have talked
00:27:38
about the new york times cover as a kind of example here as a as a memorial um but you know there's no there's no wide scale uh memorial in the same way that we think about you know for george floyd or for other kinds of
00:27:51
localized um loss uh and and murder that have happened uh and what's it mean for us to think through like how might annotation in that way remind us i think all of us have been hit personally by this by the pandemic um and if i lost or know
00:28:04
people who have lost people um or have been forever uh changed by it but what would it mean to take the scale of what happened in katrina right and to be able to visually see right um across this country the ways
00:28:17
that things have happened across the you know across across the world right but i'm thinking that this from a us perspective right now yeah absolutely and no and we're going to certainly in just just a moment here kind of touch on on on you know dual pandemics um
00:28:30
and how those are marked and remarked and memorialized um but you know just it's it's you know this is an interesting segue here because ontario you were just mentioning the importance of kind of youth civic
00:28:43
activism and the need as you were saying to really find ways of amplifying you know learners young people's visions of their futures um both within formal schooling and
00:28:56
outside of it and that of course resonates i think so so strongly with our keynote from yesterday yeah just a quick shout out to again our colleague we both know him well uh profile manuel espinosa and again his colleague in the right to learn dignity
00:29:08
lab frida silva um when they were giving their keynote here at iit yesterday they mentioned dubois as the freedom to learn um and i immediately jumped onto the internet archive thank you so much
00:29:20
internet archive and found you know this particular essay from 1949 there was a question towards the end of frida and profe's keynote
00:29:31
asking about the name of right to learn you know where does that come from and they mentioned this quote of all the civic rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5 000 years the right to learn
00:29:43
is undoubtedly the most fundamental um and i think that it's you know important for us to you know reference that prior orientation given even some of our commentary this morning to kind of hold this in our minds as well as we move into
00:29:57
some of our additional commentary yeah and i think that we're talking in some ways you know about maybe a more humble act an act of of annotation but this idea of again the right to learn as perhaps a broader umbrella to
00:30:10
the right to annotation again brings me back to you know these sets of relationships that we've now been kind of talking across the last few moments and i think is what we want to really orient everyone to today is that there are rights of annotation these
00:30:24
kind of again norms or cultural practices written and unwritten that then inform the way in which people write as annotation and again what is permissible and what is not yeah and ultimately
00:30:36
speaking to this broader question of the right to annotation and so we can see this across as examples again examples of redaction and expression or expression being covered by redaction and again how we understand more broadly
00:30:49
this right to learn yeah and it brings us here and so then ontario this brings us back to our pandemics right the pandemics that many people but of course in very different ways have been wrestling with buffeted by and
00:31:01
again as you said it reflectably changed because of not only over the past 15 16 months but of course for for centuries um and so i want to orient all of us to this this photograph um ontario and i have
00:31:14
shared it before and and we use it as to kind of again help expand this conversation about what counts as annotation so if you follow the link at some point you'll notice that this was featured in a new york times article
00:31:27
just over a year ago at a time when again protests in support of black lives specifically in response to brianna taylor and george floyd but of course many other injustices and also then the ongoing you know just
00:31:41
upheaval resulted in a wall a temporary wall but a wall being placed around lafayette square next to the white next to the white house and so in this photograph we see two learners two readers
00:31:55
two writers we see zeden cuevas and we see angelica cuevas the article doesn't specify if that's his mother perhaps an older sister or an aunt but here we see zayden and angelica cuevas
00:32:09
and you know ontario you and i both used to teach you know again people about zayden's age um you were of course telling us you know stories of your students earlier and so when we see this kind of an image i think it's a useful reminder for us
00:32:22
that we can reorient ourselves to these three tensions these three opportunities right around the rights of annotation to right as annotation and then the right to
00:32:32
annotation um and so you know we'll just riff a little bit more here but you know we seldom contest these questions with our cookbooks right you know when we open up our cookbooks and we
00:32:45
make marks about food that we eat we often don't worry about the rights of annotation and what is or is not permissible and whether or not writing annotation is something that should be
00:32:57
again contested and in some cases again to victor's tweet earlier into some of the conversations that you mentioned people have then different relationships to their everyday texts whether those everyday texts or
00:33:10
you know manuscripts from you know decades if not centuries ago you know or or the newspaper um but it ultimately again brings us back to the built environment and broader social and political
00:33:22
discourses right in that whether we're looking at the berlin wall or looking at again the debate around what is a monument and how is a monument quote unquote defaced or counter-storied
00:33:37
that we see these relationships in our everyday texts and our everyday social and political contexts again wherever we may look yeah right so i want to sit with the word every day
00:33:49
for a second but raymie because of this site i also want to i feel like i want to recognize a great pun i made in the chat that you can't see and just want to validate myself i'm calling what you have here on the text the mcconaughey principle because it's about all right all right
00:34:02
all right and that feels like an important movie quote uh just just to recognize that you know it's not great uh i when i think about every day and i think about everyday texts and
00:34:14
everyday people um i i am a mentor chris gutierrez um speaks to young people's everyday ingenuity and so i want to lift that language um and i know christina stomatis was in this chat too and she's
00:34:27
played with some of this in some writing that we've done together as well um and so you know i think about the ways that what's it mean to talk about everyday texts uh in contrast maybe uh or in attention to
00:34:40
school based text and the kinds of tensions of what danny was talking about about the lasd books that we can't write into right and so wall is everyday texts right whether or not you're allowed to write in them they they exist and think
00:34:51
about the you know we make the road by walking title um of you know uh the palo verde book as an example right like what's it mean to engage in everyday texts with quote unquote everyday people right
00:35:04
our examples like this have focused on uh graffiti on instagram on twitter uh except for the extent of the one ar book uh accelerated reader book most of the examples that we engage with
00:35:16
uh really are about places that kids tend to engage with thinking and learning and action and activism outside of what school counts what what counts as school as well as i think
00:35:29
what teachers might feel comfortable teaching about or teaching with right i think those feel like some real boundaries right in the same way that there's this wall erected around lafayette square there is a wall erected around schools sometimes literally right there is a big
00:35:41
fence around the school i taught in but also i think uh cognitively and figuratively in terms of what counts as what gets into school and what doesn't how porous is that boundary in terms of what's allowed to come into classrooms and not what's
00:35:54
surveilled uh what is illicit right i think those those might be some conversations that that i'm thinking about with all this right now absolutely absolutely um which i think just again is so helpful because here ontario you know
00:36:06
speaking to what is against sanctioned by schools we can see annotation again in some contexts and maybe not in la certain classrooms as an everyday literacy practice but again we've tried to shift the conversation here um i think for the sake of time i'm going to quickly move
00:36:19
through the next set of questions but i think again i hope that these are questions that resonate particularly for folks who are watching and listening and who are educators which is that in the work that ontario and i are doing we're seeing annotation
00:36:32
as an intertextual practice which raises for us perhaps a question of what discourses can learners join remix and resist through the kinds of intertextual practices this particular sign
00:36:45
for those who want me to read it out says if we can flatten the curve we can bend the arc so you see there again an intertextual play our students of course can make similar kind of intertextual moves themselves
00:36:56
again perhaps through annotation we see annotations multimodal right and so then a question arises what modes of communication amplify agency agency for perhaps a learner
00:37:08
like zaidan cuevas right as he helps to then shape what does democracy look like you know we see annotations dialogic and so as discourses come into conversation with one another you know how
00:37:22
might learners read and rewrite their world and again even again back to charisse and joe's kind of tweets and conversations at this conference it's incumbent upon us as educators
00:37:34
to then be responsive to learners and their reading of their world and then their writing and rewriting of their world which i think for us leads us to another important example here which is the role that annotation again
00:37:47
can not always but can serve as counter narrative and how can learners then kind of counter story injustices um and there are some pretty compelling examples of that and certainly the the heart of alexandra bell
00:38:00
comes to mind but as do a number of other examples and so again questions that we've been wrestling with as we work through our book again i'm just looking at my watch and i'm looking at the slides and so
00:38:13
i just want to really quickly move through a really rapid review of one other aspect of our work which is it's this invitation again as contested and maybe as problematic as it may be
00:38:25
to write in our book because again annotation is literally you know these are our digits and we can write in books and we invited folks to do that when this book was first drafted um actually i think that some of the
00:38:37
folks were with us today including some folks at hypothesis joined in this open peer review that we ran for the book in the summer of 2019 we had quite a few folks participate we got
00:38:49
a lot of useful feedback as we then work to our revisions and our thinking as again we've been sharing today and this led to the creation in our book of these custom illustrations
00:39:02
here are two examples where you're actually seeing digital pub pub comments annotations that we then wove into these illustrations which are full pages in the book and
00:39:15
it's now allowing readers to respond to us in this way so here's the original illustration as we mocked it up with these pub pub annotations and here's a reader handwriting their response and then
00:39:28
sharing it on twitter which is something that again you might do and others are doing and you know the rest of this deck just shows a few examples of folks who are taking that step and who are you know
00:39:40
making their thinking visible a quick shout out to the work that we'll be doing later this summer so i'm going to wrap it there in terms of sharing slides because i want to really engage i think with people and the chat and what's going on
00:39:51
here and so um thank you for folks who have been watching i haven't been able to see anything because i've been sharing my screen but we're going to just kind of like let the conversation
00:40:03
move forward q a responses and thoughts as we continue to have this this conversation with y'all yeah i'd say yeah throw some there's some questions in the chat if you'd like um i think yeah if you are if you
00:40:16
uh have not participated in the hashtag annoconvo i think there's a really robust um conversation that's happening with the book and with each other in that space uh and if you have participated in your books all marked up you should just buy another copy and
00:40:28
start over again i think that's that's the beautiful thing about books you can just do it dance i mentioned earlier and um see where you are wrong the first time you annotated it try again that'd be my encouragement
00:40:41
dave possum is like asking where's the online copy and my answer to that is who would want the online copy when you can get a handy print version that you can mark up with your own hands the online the online stuff is that that
00:40:56
is a tricky contractual situation between mit and e publishing as a messy space is probably is probably my real answer that the pub pub copy uh is still up behind it's up you can you can access it
00:41:08
now is that right um it's still up i i looked at it again this even this morning you know i will say though that because of the response that we got from folks during this open review
00:41:20
and you know i should say given our commentary a few moments ago that the decision working with a publisher like mit press to engage in an open review was part of our initiative to not only practice what we preached
00:41:33
but to again further kind of play in this very complicated space around power and voice and we knew that writing a book would go through a conventional peer-review process we knew that we would have some
00:41:46
anonymous experts give us feedback and that we would be accountable to their perspectives but we also knew that it would be useful to have many people
00:41:58
others some invited and some who just showed up tell us what they thought and so that was another way that we could work on notions of access and participation and power in our own production of the work
00:42:11
so that version is still online now because of that feedback we revised that version quite considerably you know you know prior to now what is the what is the book yeah i think the trade
00:42:25
uh yeah it's it's it's fascinating how i think in the same way that annotation might be stuck in time of a particular period when you annotate it uh our book is now fixed in time until until we make the second edition
00:42:38
and become millionaires from it um right this is it is a statement from a particular time and place um yeah so uh i think there's a couple q a e things yeah so
00:42:51
oh wonderful yeah well christina first of all thank you for the question um i think that there is let me let me say this a lot of people who study scholarly annotation or even more
00:43:04
specifically scholarly marginalia um have a particular literal attachment i will say to this idea that annotations are permanent and we can get into a whole kind of
00:43:17
technical side question about the permanence of notes that are added to texts and this idea of being anchored you know in a very kind of tight relationship in a very material way
00:43:29
but your question about maybe augmented reality and projections but also social media i think does help us to think about the more fleeting and in some ways the importance of
00:43:42
notes that are added to texts but that that permanence is not necessarily a given and i think that we could look at augmented reality we can look at projections like we saw on the monuments
00:43:54
last summer as very important very intentional active annotation of restoring of resistance of rewriting a narrative both in a literal and symbolic way but again those projections are not
00:44:06
anchored to that text forever but in a particular moment and then through perhaps media that captures that moment and then archives it we do see those relationships in a more proximal way
00:44:20
i think i agree i think the thing i'd add to that point though is i think everything at the right scale is temporary right even to an archivist archivist dismay um
00:44:32
and any kind of annotation be it an ar tool or an art installation um can be just as temporary as the first folios of shakespeare or of um a wall erected
00:44:45
around this country or around the white house uh and so i think that what i want to say is the temporary piece is we can think about the annotation actually christine to your work uh around jazz is like a riff on a particular time and moment right
00:44:58
it is interplaying with the current context um but also with the kind of statement in authorial attempt i i'll say i've been thinking a lot about temper temporariness i don't even know the right word like the right adjective is
00:45:11
here um uh because i think you know that the real dismal part of me thinks uh american democracy is not only in decline but is deteriorating rapidly and i would i would equip i
00:45:23
would i would uh i would compare this to something like cooling water right the everyday every insurrection uh every kind of atrocity on human
00:45:35
dignity that that is happening makes this makes the water of the american fabric that much cooler in a way that we're just not paying attention to but at some point we will flip from 33 that is 32 degrees fahrenheit and it will become ice
00:45:47
and we will suddenly see a world that is unrecognizable from the rest of us right at what point has annotation either prepared us for those practices with young people to the emancipatory practices that i think someone asked in the q a and at what point have we not prepared
00:45:59
young people for a new kind of landscape of where we're going right i think i think this is a real this the sounds may be lofty but i genuinely think this is where we're headed uh and probably much more quickly than i think a lot of us are comfortable thinking about in school in context
00:46:12
yeah jeremy well so let me just kind of riff here as well i think that we need to grapple more with it um an example from our drafting of the book that got
00:46:23
cut and it got cut because the historical record at least that we were able to dig into was hard to read is the removal of an explicit statement against the enslavement of people
00:46:37
to the king of england by those who drafted the declaration of independence it's clear that that initial draft of the declaration included a more explicit denunciation of
00:46:50
slavery and it's also implied in a number of historical documents that there was an editing process in which those words were removed um and so we can think of that again as some
00:47:04
form of editing redaction revision that included some kind of annotation um but the versions of the declaration that still exist don't show a clear enough use at
00:47:16
least in what we were able to access to show that particular annotation but scholars like daniel allen have written about this and of course her book um is is tremendous and so jeremy i'm with you i think there needs to be
00:47:29
much more thought around this but i guess my broader wrestling is that there is a social life of annotation and we can look across the historical record as well documented as that record may be
00:47:42
to see the ways in which annotation has been used um or at least is an indicator or a mark of things that have become oppressive things that have made them statements about
00:47:53
more libertarian futures um you know i'm also thinking about the fact that anyways there's just there's just too many examples of of annotations serving as marks of broader social injustice yeah so we should wrestle with
00:48:07
this jeremy i i agree i mean a kind of example like this i'm staying at my my in-laws right now it's probably this is like uh the not most exciting background uh here um but i walk my dogs around this
00:48:19
neighborhood and i walk past this elementary school actually my wife went to many years ago um and you know there's a big fence around the elementary school it's typical there's all these signs right some are social distancing signs some are about security cameras some are about school
00:48:32
policies and where visitors need to check in when the school's operating um and to some of the work that my colleague jonathan rosa speaks to as a racial linguist uh it's fascinating to me which kinds of signs are translated into
00:48:45
spanish and which aren't and so which signs are there about inviting community which signs are there about legality and which signs are there about communicating necessary and safe information right and so to me that
00:48:57
this is the opposite to some extent of it's still graffiti it's still it's still words on walls to some extent right but this is this is power and acting particular kinds of visions of who gets to be a part of this community and what kinds of ways and so i would just think like what are
00:49:10
the what are the signs when you walk into the post i guess i don't know if people were safely walking in the post office right now but you know when you're walking into a building what signs show up and what are they saying what language are they saying and who is it what kinds of assumptions is it
00:49:22
making about the the literacy practices of a social um social community yeah yeah i really i really appreciate yeah i appreciate both parts of this question yeah uh
00:49:34
i'm curious what free-form writing is and why schools wouldn't support it maybe as a starting place um as someone who has at some point in my life taught the five paragraph essay uh i think i know what not free form
00:49:47
writing is but why don't we make all writing free right let's let's use the word free um as a starting place there um gateway is interesting i'm not sure if i think of it as a gateway or if it is the creativity in and of itself like
00:49:59
that's what i wonder um is is the gateway gateway you know there there's also the arundhate roy quote that was really popular during the pandemic of you know pandemic is portal and we're going to step through this other public to this other
00:50:12
imaginative world that didn't happen right like a year and a half later we are still on one side of that portal and i think people are just as oppressed as they were before if not more so um and you know i think about you know what what
00:50:23
would a what would a gateway through annotation actually mean um for us to construct and you know in my opinion it doesn't make sense for two cis men to make a decision of what that gateway looks like
00:50:35
in 2021 um yeah yeah well yeah perhaps also in the same way that and the question perhaps thank you again for the question reminds me that there's still so much gatekeeping about whose texts and whose
00:50:48
narratives are included in schools um and so maybe annotation you know as separate from other forms of again creative writing analytic writing expository whatever kind of you know formal aspects of literacy instruction
00:51:01
um are kind of codified in school that annotation is a way to expand the register of whose ideas one is engaging with um and i think that you know we can as literacy educators and teacher educators
00:51:15
look to you know various social media discourses whether it's you know build your staff and people sharing you know images of books that they're reading to disrupt texts you know to the book chat to these other kind of literacy
00:51:28
education spaces where educators are trying to i think expand the register so to speak of what counts as quote unquote the canon and as a complement perhaps to those
00:51:41
kinds of efforts and initiatives annotation is one way of encouraging students to come into conversation with those perspectives those authors those ways of being as a way of recognizing that you know
00:51:55
there are many knowledges here and many voices that count in this kind of academic discourse yeah i love that i see chris mentioned the marginal syllabus in here remy have
00:52:08
you already talked about that elsewhere do you want to you want to give a shout out you know i'll give a quick shout out sharice actually did a really lovely job of mentioning it in the digital literacy session and i'll just say that you know we see this as another way of just encouraging the kind of
00:52:20
interest-driven more equity-oriented approach to professional learning that some teachers really thrive to engage with i see that joe dillon is here he's of course a co-founder and facilitator of that you know dear friend and colleague um
00:52:32
but again it's just leveraging the social affordances of annotation as a way to engage with critical conversation some people will pick that up some people will run with that some people will see that as a model
00:52:44
but it's like think again one project of many that is you know we don't have grand ambitions that it's going to become you know more than it already is yeah but it's a it's a model and it's perhaps at this point five years in it's proven a certain
00:52:58
point about how social annotation can play a central role in more equity oriented professional learning yeah i think the data piece is
00:53:13
interesting right i think that's the you know if a student's annotating whether or not they the idea of choice around this is fascinating right who gets to annotate and like are you expected to annotate um could be really useful as a
00:53:25
collection of data but what i would push on is data for whom and for what purpose right if it's about schools being able to speak to assessment metrics i could care less about that and i think that's actually particularly damaging personally
00:53:37
and i also get why schools want that right if it's students being able to see for themselves here's here's where my colleagues and my peers are thinking and here's how we might be able to work towards towards something that's uh intersectional and collective and powerful
00:53:49
then i think we can get to something pretty powerful um i might reimagine a quote-unquote canon if that's a conversation that still needs to happen right now in terms of what are the most important texts for young people uh in this part of the country in this in this
00:54:01
uh current context would be a starting point for me personally absolutely my friend hey we did it thank you look at this uh we you know i know that we've run up on our
00:54:14
hour and you know again just on behalf of you know folks who are here and who will also watch and listen later thank you so much for engaging with us as you can see ontario and i are are engaging in rough draft thinking
00:54:27
you know we're working through our thoughts about this and i think that there's a long you know history of that and there will continue to be a practice of that and our book is again just a point in time along that rough draft thinking
00:54:39
journey around these issues so thank you so much for thinking with us today um reach out be in touch connect and again thanks to the hypothesis and everybody organizing for giving us the space to to come forward yeah thanks
00:54:51
everyone
End of transcript