Ghostwriting journal 4: ambiguity & uncertainty

A series of journals in which Lance Peng contemplates his teaching practice.

Ambiguity, it turns out, is everywhere in teaching. Not just in the big theoretical sense but in the tiny emotional shifts of the classroom, in the between certainty and not-knowing, in the uncomfortable but generative spaces where I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing and perhaps neither are my students.

And that’s the bit I keep returning to: ambiguity not as an obstacle but as a strategy. Uncertainty not as a gap but as a dimension.

When I try to tease apart the difference, I realise I’ve been operating with both for years, sometimes deliberately and sometimes by accident.

Ghostwriting journal 3: AI-dentity and emotional labour

A series of journals in which Lance Peng contemplates his teaching practice.

Experimental week!

This week was my big experimental session....the one where I leaned into the AI stuff. AI-dentity. Emotional labour. The unsettling weirdness of being seen (or mis-seen) by a machine. I’d been planning this session for weeks.

And it turned out to be one of my favourite teaching moments this term.

Remix Culture: the comfort of nostalgia in uncertain times

A post by Michael Smyth

In the city of Bristol UK, during the summer of 2020 a bronze statue was toppled by protesters, dragged through the streets to the harbour and thrown into the sea. In the grand scheme of things, this might seem like a small local disturbance, but what it actually raised were much more fundamental questions about our relationships with the past and how these are affected by the present and possible futures. The statue was of Edward Colston, a 17th century merchant and slave trader who was born in Bristol. Colston’s memory had been divisive for years, with some thinking history can’t be changed and others campaigning successfully for his name to be erased from streets, schools and venues. The toppling of the statue served as a powerful reminder that the past is intimately bound up with futures and critically that the past is also a contested space. It is subject to many different interpretations when viewed through the lens of the present.