Reply To: Block 4

[Nicholas Hopwood]

Hi everyone

Here are some comments on the 3 minute presentations made in the final block. I cherished every minute and thank you all for your energy and enthusiasm. Several of you mentioned it felt like a safe space to talk through your ideas, and that is an accomplishment of us all, together, so thank you also for that.

The Designing Research Lab was conducted on land that was, is, and always will be, Aboriginal Land. I’d like to acknowledge the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation as the traditional owners of the land upon which we learned together, and pay respects to their Elders past and present as traditional custodians of knowledge in this place.

Ha
You started with a metaphor of love: how when we chase love it runs away, but when we stop chasing, it can come to us. You could tell from the comments from others that they felt this worked really well to convey what is interesting about flipped learning. They also thought your use of the arrow and apple diagram was very helpful. Personally, as with your Lego description, I felt I understood your study, and flipped learning, in a new way: it is not just the order of things that is being flipped (homework before class rather than after), but about giving students much more control over their learning, and multiple pathways to learning outcomes.

Yvonne
The audience was able to appreciate your passion for your work, and the importance of the parenting context in which your study will be located. There was a lot of conceptual richness to your talk that some found a bit hard to keep up with. I really liked how you linked Massey’s idea of trajectories back to what we did about our personal trajectories as researchers in Block 1. I also notice that you have made a lot of tough decisions about which theories to go with. There were really exciting glimpses of a more critical voice: people have been referring to Massey (you said), but only in a rather thin way… and they haven’t taken up trajectories so much. This is a big difference from earlier, when you tended to talk about theories as things to get your head around, rather than as things where you can see gaps and potential in their use.

Ros
We appreciated your measured and thoughtful presentation. It was fantastic to see a study taking up Indigenous methodologies, and when you mentioned yarning, this is something we all have experience of (from Block 2) and so can understand better now. I really liked how you mentioned using aspects of ethnography including listening, and hearing unique views. One reason I get so excited about ethnography is precisely for this capacity, but too many people practice ethnography as based on looking or watching. I think there is a really significant difference between the two. I think your sensibility around ‘answers that aren’t always readily visible’ is a wonderful way to capture something of what the research brings to a study, and look forward to hearing what of these more hard-to-notice aspects of the world you discover in relation to older urban Indigenous people’s engagement with technology.

Andrew
By asking us ‘who hates advertising’ you really found a way to bring us on board: by recognising its power on culture, society, and people. The gap you addressing was really clear – we know about awareness, but not about behaviour change. People recognised an elegance in your choice of non-commercial contexts as a way to have a clean-ness around behaviour change. Personally I really liked the openness you have about what phase 2 will involve, depending on what happens in phase 1.

Amanda
We were all struck by your effective use of statistics (1 in 4 of us experiences homophobia), and then the graph (the uptick for teenage boys), to bring us into your study. The number of times you said ‘so…’ in your talk really embodied what we were working on in the storyboarding in block 1 – it gave a great logic and flow to your proposal. People really thought your web diagram was helpful, too.

Margaret
It was wonderful to see a picture of your storyboard from block 1, and to hear that you carry it around in your pocket! Your audience was very engaged and ready to ask questions even though for many of us this is quite an unfamiliar context. I really loved how your work exemplifies how critical scholarship needn’t be nit-picking and finding problems, but rather pro-active: developing a means for people to critically look at the representation of women in documentary, and disrupting the assumption of the unmanipulated representation of women.

Alana
You explained how the end of the cartoon (about who controls energy supply) hides something: that the ‘nasty figure’ really does own renewable energy as well. We were able to follow you into your world of feminist theory + practice (praxis), about putting power back into the hands of the community. The way you described a body of work and then labelled it as the energy democracy field beautifully illustrated a non-alienating way of using technical language. We were left really clear that your niche is this: no-one is addressing gender relations in energy systems.

Emma
We were all impressed by how you used our unexpected reactions to the two photographs of women: it revealed perhaps a double standard that is no less powerful for being in the shadows of how we engage with such images. As you saw, once you raised the issue of class, a huge penny dropped, and a lively discussion followed. It seemed quite a few in the group were curious about the context given to one image (Instagram) while the other could have been put in a context (such as shown on a gallery wall). This seemed a helpful curiosity, especially as your research will involve an approach to photographing women that is somewhere between the two?

Mitchell
We appreciated your candour in being so explicit about a key shift in your thinking: from why don’t academics use assessment practices we know to be better for students, to one that positioned academics and their practices in a more complex web of relations. There was clearly theory at play here (Kemmis), though you made a clever choice to leave this unspoken in order to focus on other aspects, like your thinking about ethnography vs change laboratory designs. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how what the research might look like can change when it is less about fixing a fault in people and instead thinking about people, objects, systems, practices.

Yanru
You could see that the image of giraffes breathing above the clouds really got us curious and got us thinking! It was fantastic to hear how Chenail’s paper on keeping things plumb had helped you realise that your study isn’t so much about as effectiveness traced in behaviour change, but a question as the relationship between ecological ideology and language. You said ‘this is what I can contribute to this field’ – taking up a position as someone adding to a field of knowledge. This was fantastic! Others in the class also appreciated how you made deliberate and careful links to their works – like when you drew parallels between your work and the way ‘he’ has been critiqued in feminist work.