Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address

by Elizabeth Ellsworth

Making the Geologic Now announces shifts in cultural sensibilities and practices. It offers early sightings of an increasingly widespread turn toward the geologic as source of explanation, motivation, and inspiration for creative responses to conditions of the present moment. In the spirit of a broadside, this edited collection circulates images and short essays from over 40 artists, designers, architects, scholars, and journalists who are actively exploring and creatively responding to the geologic depth of "now." Contributors' ideas and works are drawn from architecture, design, contemporary philosophy and art. They are offered as test sites for what might become thinkable or possible if humans were to collectively take up the geologic as our instructive co-designer-as a partner in designing thoughts, objects, systems, and experiences. A new cultural sensibility is emerging. As we struggle to understand and meet new material realities of earth and life on earth, it becomes increasingly obvious that the geologic is not just about rocks. We now cohabit with the geologic in unprecedented ways, in teeming assemblages of exchange and interaction among geologic materials and forces and the bio, cosmo, socio, political, legal, economic, strategic, and imaginary. As a reading and viewing experience, Making the Geologic Now is designed to move through culture, sounding an alert from the unfolding edge of the "geologic turn" that is now propagating through contemporary ideas and practices. Contributors include: Matt Baker, Jarrod Beck, Stephen Becker, Brooke Belisle, Jane Bennett, David Benque, Canary Project (Susannah Sayler, Edward Morris), Center for Land Use Interpretation, Brian Davis, Seth Denizen, Anthony Easton, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Valeria Federighi, William L. Fox, David Gersten, Bill Gilbert, Oliver Goodhall, John Gordon, Ilana Halperin, Lisa Hirmer, Rob Holmes, Katie Holten, Jane Hutton, Julia Kagan, Wade Kavanaugh, Oliver Kellhammer, Elizabeth Kolbert, Janike Kampevold Larsen, Jamie Kruse, William Lamson, Tim Maly, Geoff Manaugh, Don McKay, Rachel McRae, Brett Milligan, Christian MilNeil, Laura Moriarity, Stephen Nguyen, Erika Osborne, Trevor Paglen, Anne Reeve, Chris Rose, Victoria Sambunaris, Paul Lloyd Sargent, Antonio Stoppani, Rachel Sussman, Shimpei Takeda, Chris Taylor, Ryan Thompson, Etienne Turpin, Nicola Twilley, Bryan M. Wilson.

Genres: Education

240 pages, Paperback

Published August 17, 1997

About the author

Elizabeth Ellsworth is a writer and artist.  Solid, Broken, Changing is her young adult novel with scifi and cozy hopepunk elements. It's inspired by her experiences of co-existence on a radically changing planet Earth.

With Jamie Kruse, she co-directs smudge studio (smudgestudio.org), based in Brooklyn, NY and Belfast, Maine. Their projects connect daily life experiences to vast, generative forces of geological and cosmological change.

Reviews

[Wildflower_girl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Formerly a student of film studies, Ellsworth takes some of the theories she learned there and applies them to the theory of teaching. Just as films/film-makers make a decision about who the viewer is and adjusts the story accordingly, a teacher makes similar choices (whether consciously or subconsciously). Powerful stuff... and helps you think about the power you wield when you stand in front of a classroom.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most powerful books on teaching and pedagogy that I have read. It informs my thinking about my practice regularly. It is not an easy read, but it is worth spending some time on the content.