The Contingencies of Event Planning: Tinkering With and Hacking Into the AERA Conference Proposal

• In Event: Opening the Session: An Audience Rebellion

Abstract

1. Purposes:
In this paper, we interrogate the educational assumptions underlying conference proposals and presentations. More often than not, the conference genre is predicated on an unexamined embrace of learning theory. As we define it, learning is an intentionally guided act of anticipation through which the learner gains knowledge of a certain type for the purpose of fulfilling a specific goal, interest, or objective.  Our paper beings with a simple question: What if the conference presentation was not a place where learning takes place?  How can the conference presentation redefine its educational logic beyond learning?  If one were to re-conceptualize the conference as an opening for an unexpected event instead of a “show-and-tell,” what would it mean to "propose" a paper/panel/poster, the experiencing of which one cannot anticipate?
2. Perspective(s):
We draw upon recent literature in educational studies that emphasizes how tinkering and hacking are critical methods for (a) discovering and (b) suspending the logic of learning that dominates educational practices, in order to reflect critically on unexamined assumptions limiting the conference genre (see Biesta 2006; Lewis 2014; Lewis and Friedrich 2015). Much of this literature is informed by the works of Deleuze and Agamben, two important thinkers of hacking and tinkering respectively.
3. Modes:
We approach this issue from a philosophical and curricular standpoint, by asking how specific knowledge is produced and privileged, while other is marginalized. We then proceed to use tinkering and hacking as ways of suspending the assumptions embedded in these modes of knowledge production.
4. Data:
We will use our own experience from last year’s AERA conference (including transcripts, images, and journal entries) as a starting point for the reflection. For this presentation a space was opened where audience members could actively participate in hacking and tinkering with the popular teachers’ resource Teach Like a Champion (Lemov 2010). Our main question concerns writing conference proposals for such contingent educational happenings where the expectations of learning x, y, and z cannot be anticipated in advance. What are these educational happenings? Along with participants, we hope to find sketch out some tentative possibilities.
5. Results:
As long as the expectation for the conference is to share findings of work already concluded, the conference itself will have little relevance as a place for unexpected transformations for both audience and presenters. While individuals might “learn” something, only an opening for the event of the conference, and embracing the surplus generated in the act of engaging the audience/participants has the potential to disrupt the partition of the sensible already established between learned and learners, knower and ignorant. We hope to experiment and find such openings here.
6. Significance:
In our experience, the conference has lost its appeal as a site of study and intellectual engagement. Conferences are attended mostly for networking and socializing. Our work’s significance lies on reclaiming the unique place that the conference may have in transforming how we experience educational events, if it allows itself to be cracked open and its learning expectations suspended.

Authors

• Tyson E. Lewis, University of North Texas

• Daniel Friedrich, Teachers College, Columbia University

• David Backer, Cleveland State University