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A maker's hymn

#pedagogy #posthumanism #making #music #sounds #faith

This is a piece I wrote for a masters course in curriculum theory. It's a synthesis of everything I read that resonated with me that term. When I wrote this I was a career education consultant for my school division. It was an icky job for lots of reasons, but primarily because I was hired for my innovative classroom practice then subsequently stripped of all creative agency. Here, I let myself go fully off-script - considering making as a holy act of creation rather than capitalist production.

A Maker’s Hymn


A maker's hymn by A. Manera, CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

Artist's statement

A Maker’s Hymn explores tensions I hold within the realm of maker (now conflated with career) education - where my professional role as a consultant to see students acquire the knowledge, skills, and competencies to innovate and acquire capital in the world-that-is, pulls against my internal desires to see something completely different. I personally make and create for many reasons: subverting capitalist consumption, making sense of a problem, making things beautiful. Yet, as a public school educator, I’m surrounded by market logic[1] and am forced to appeal to it daily. I teach a product design course that emphasizes employable competencies like problem solving, digital fabrication, and teamwork. I encourage students to carry their individual passions and interests into the real world, where they can use (up) non-human things to make other things that feed the economic machine. The guiding principles of my consulting work mandate that I help other teachers be “future-focused,” that is, to get students acquainted with technology and ready for a future that curriculum-writing adults have dreamt up for them [2]. We prepare youth for release into a world that we promise is quickly changing, but feels like it’s caught in a loop[3]. Considering common practice and common attitudes, it’s hard to describe helping kids adapt to challenges and grow into careers that are a good fit for them as a bad thing - after all, it’s a common sense way to approach education.

This piece is a push against common sense: to reposition maker education from a vehicle for 21st century skills to a connective act of creation that diffracts the given future into innumerable possibilities. My argument relies on the ontology that everything is a part of something infinitely more. The opening swells and shimmering synthesizer establish the key to harmony for all other parts. This is the tie that binds: spirit, wahkotowin, ecosystem… whatever one calls all things and the connections between them. I understand this in the Ignatian sense that God is in everything and call it creation.

As a maker, I am both a part of creation and an agent of it. I was the only human in my workshop when this piece was recorded, but I was hardly alone. I became part of a maker-assemblage, a moment of creativity emitted from enmeshed parts of creation: instrument-Alena-chair-GarageBand-class readings-electricity. Posthumanist thought offers agency to all of these things, arguing that “we become-with each other or not at all” [4]. So, making is an inherently collaborative process that rejects the individualistic claim that “I made this thing.” Accepting this also means coming to terms with the idea that things exist, have relationships, become, and create without any human involvement [5]. To honour this, I recorded two tracks (representing nature and technology) in one take and looped them throughout the piece, left untouched by editing as a reminder that we can make without the dominative control over things we’ve been taught we should have. We must instead find space to contribute to creation in a harmonious way. I understand this becoming-with other things by what my friend Sheila told me about the Cree word/concept of 'wahkotowin' - that we should treat other people and more-than-human beings as our relations. Applying this ethic, the other parts of creation become unignorable and un-discardable. I’ve been making music with the same guitar and amplifier for over a decade. I’ve no desire to replace them, and if they broke I’d sooner fix them. These are the things I know best and we’re in an ensemble with the electricity that animates us and the late flora and fauna that became the coal we burned to generate it - and the not-quite-comfortable chair I’m sitting in. An eclectic group of bandmates, to be sure, but “the degree to which our kinships become the broadest and weirdest possible will determine how successful we are in (re)creating a livable planet”[6].

I imagine reciting the above during one of my makerspace PD sessions and the subsequent feedback I would receive from the director of my school division 'decision unit.' A pull toward common sense is invited into the piece. A noisy synthesizer drone that introduces a tensive static, taking up sonic space and being a “blockage to imagining alternative possibilities” [7].

Distributed agency in making and a relational ethic with all things is one of these alternative possibilities, where “humans of all sorts, with all kinds of divergent histories…merge with other species and non-sentient objects to create new assemblages and trajectories for the future” [6:1]. Common-sense-making asks students to solve the day’s problems in a way that serves the “dream predicated on unfettered economic growth and material prosperity” [2:1]. This implied future is a personal pursuit for which students are told they are ultimately responsible (take control of your future!), even though the future is really a shared accommodation. I contrast this results-focused making to Haraway’s idea of 'staying with the trouble': an action to take here and now, where makers might sit in the stirred pot of a problem space, making sense of it with all kinds of collaborators and ways of knowing (secular, religious, cultural and otherwise); a collection of events where components might come together and make things that nudge creation onto divergent paths toward futures that have never been featured on the taken-for-granted future menu.

As the hymn closes, common sense fades away, freeing harmonic space for exploration. The final guitar line leaves us with a prayer: a bid for connection with something greater, an invitation for surprise, and an expression of gratitude for the assemblage that came together to make something that is now a part of everything. Slightly changed, creation carries on into our open future. Amen.

References

  1. Smith, D.G. (2014). Teaching as the practice of wisdom. Bloomsbury. ↩︎

  2. Donald, D. (2019). Homo economicus and forgetful curriculum. In D. Zinga, S. Lilley, S.D. Styres, & H. Tomlins-Jahnke. (Eds.) Indigenous education: New directions in theory and practice (pp. 103-125). University of Alberta Press. ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. Smith, D. G. (2000). The specific challenges of globalization for teaching and vice versa. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 46(1), 17-26. ↩︎

  4. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. ↩︎

  5. Snaza, N., Appelbaum, P., Bayne, S., Carlson, D., Morris, M., Rotas, N., Sandlin, J., Wallin, J., & Weaver, J. A. (2014). Toward a posthuman education. Journal of curriculum theorizing, 30(2), 39-55. ↩︎

  6. Weaver, J. A. (2019). Curriculum SF (speculative fiction): Reflections on the future past of curriculum studies and science fiction. Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 13(2), 1-12. ↩︎ ↩︎

  7. Kumashiro, K. (2013). Against common sense: Teaching and learning toward social justice. Routledge. ↩︎