Analyze

This news article focuses on the 140 "foreign schools" that the German state runs in different countries. However, only 30% of the schools' funding comes from the German government, while the rest is raised through fees paid by parents. The article reports that due to school closures, funding has dwindled rapidly and according to self-evaluations, 64% of schools face bankruptcy unless the German state offers emergency support. The article reports that back in November, the German government decided to foster the schools as a means of cultural and educational foreign politics.  A web conference to discuss the issue is planned for next week.

Our project could keep tabs on how foreign schools as spaces of transnationalism become reshaped during COVID-19.

I filled out a TA multiple choice questionaire recently about teaching during pandemic. Did I feel supported in access to remote teaching tools? Did I need workshops on how to run an online discussion, test prep,? etc.

What was unasked and therefore unstated is the trauma students are facing amid an administrative effort to carry on, do our best, and talks about our "Fill-in-the-Mascot" Family. In my class we hear stories of students forced to leave campus and return to unsafe family home environments. Many students lost their on-campus jobs, yet are still stuck in rental contracts, with full tuition fees, and reduced campus services. Many students discovered they were on-call "essential" workers which has played havoc with their health concerns and class engagement. We also have students with COVID19 trying to stay on top of their course workload because they are supposed to graduate this Spring. 

Meanwhile as I talk to students I hear that most of their classes are recorded lectures taught asynchronously. They tell us that they often binge listen to these at 1.5x speed just to get through them. --This is the mode of online learning that Robert Post in his NCA post describes as "effective and efficient" for the "tramission of information." I wonder who isn't he talking about.

In trying to teaching using zoom during the pandemic, Sharon Traweek and I have held synchronous online class discussions. Many students have told us this is their only synchronous class this quarter. We have tried to teach students to think critically in/of zoom as a built environment. To ask what  assumptions, hierarchies, epistemologies are built into our online classrooms. We have struggled to find ways to disrupt those pathways with alternative strategies.

In answer to the question what is being foregrounded and obscured? I think in all the reflection about the future of residential and online learning and about the multiple crisis Universities, as well as the rest of us, are facing; what gets obscured is how important and how difficult it is to teach to students that they must think critically with and about the tools they are given and expected to learn.

Backchannels Addition to this question:

A SLOW CONVERSATION ON COVID-19 BY MASCHA GUGGANIG AND NINA KLIMBURG-WITJES. 

04 May, 2020

See:  https://www.4sonline.org/blog/post/a_slow_conversation_on_covid_

After reading the essays attached to this question, I was left overwhelmed. I had to walk away before finishing them as it was just way too much...  Returning to any sense of a  “normal” state of affairs is undesirable. And, to remain in the present, I would convey that there is a greater need for mentorship and encouragement of independent thinking/doing.

There are further challenges more specifically related to appropriate ways of guiding and enabling kinaesthetic learning. Those teaching practical subjects usually taught out of a studio will face tactile challenges and many more.

In relation to the online educational spaces, it's really hard to read the micro-expressions of either solidarity or dissent in online interactions. It’s more than just exploring the literacy of online asynchronous online pedagogy, it’s about understanding the limitations of the tools, be that Zoom or Skype or another tool like Slack, Micro, Trello, etc. 

The central argument/narrative of the film is explaining what the Fukishima nuclear meltdown was and what was done to contain the explosions and the subsquent radiation that was leaking into the atmosphere. How to restore power to the plant in order to contain the fuel rods and prevent meltdown. Indirectly the argument was to persuade the public to be more informed about nuclear power and the affects it could have on the world- to learn how to prevent nuclear disasters; make emergency nuclear response teams.

It is made and sustained through interviews of people who were there in the powr plant during the event, the surrounding citizens in the villages, Americans who came to intervene on their citizens, and people in Japan's government. Film footage is used to support the argument. The scientific information that is provided for support in the film was saying the levels of radiation around the plant as the situation became better and worse, the structure of the power plant (briefly), how to stop a nuclear meltdown.

The stakeholders that are described/portrayed in the film was the fate of Japan, the nuclear disasters in th past that shaked Japan, preventing the same thing from happening. The kinds of decisions they had to grapple with before the aftermath is the powerfailure, the lack of generators, and the affect the water had on the plant, and the future of the fuel rods. During the event they had to figure out how to stop the meltdown, how to restore power to the plant, how to help the engineers who had no choice but to be stuck inside, how to save Japan from nuclear fallout,etc. The aftermath was how to get the plant up and running again, the future of nuclear power in Japan, how to clean up and prevent further contamination of the land surrounding the plant. Also the health,safety and preperation of further nuclear power plant endeavors.

Emergency response was portrayed in the film through the team of engineers who tried to contain the problem, those who laid pipes to attempt to pump water into the reactors, the team of firefighters who sprayed water into the reactors, and the miltary crew who dropped water over the exposed fuel pools.

Very little in this film failed to convice me. The information was well thought out and put together, the resources that were in this film were vaild and cannot be refuted because they are first hand accounts. This film does shine a negative light on nuclear power, which made me a little concerned because nuclear power is not always dangerous, but other then that nothing was done sloppily or had incorrect information