It was Erik Erikson’s Childhood of Society in 1950 that moved the idea of learner identity into the Mainstream. He brought constructs set out be Freud and applied them to the every day. There was a very Western American ideal to the construct of identity from a positivist light. But what if Identity is developed as a negation of truth?

Identity flickr photo by fotologic shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license

Meanwhile Ardono was exploring non-identity as someone in Exile and trained the Marxist traditions Hegleian dialectics. Theodor Adorno was a member of the Frankfurt School. Marxist and Jewish scholars who fled nazi Germany and settled at Columbia University.

Ardono would express a negative, rather than a positive view of Identity. Ardono was striving an idealist social universality in a world of American pragmatism that celebrated individualism. What resulted is a mismatch of Freudian construct of identity and historical materialism. The dialectical tradition of Kant and Hegel allowed Ardono to explore identity as something an object took on against social universalism. Identity became a non-identifier

For Ardono, who was writing about identity as protestors were calling for more Praxis and less lecture (Frierian Criticality), he said no identity is born pure and they emerged as the result of a negation. It was a reaction to a rneconciled, unemancipated concept.

This plays into discussions on social media. Are algorithmic identities real? Who controls them? What does it mean for adolescents when Identity work is a commodity? How do we encourage the use to own your identity through technology?

A Poem on Identity work, gravity, and the selfie

How do we paint ourselves on the world? In many ways this question resonated in both scholarship and society. Who is I. Are we We? Do I have multiple Mes,

Learning Identity drives literacy. James Gee says Language has two goals, “scaffold the performance of action in the world, including social activities and interactions; to scaffold human affiliation in cultures and social groups and institutions.”

Yet in our schools we focus on literacy as a mans for information acquisition aguired through skill acquisition. But what if Gee is right and words are so much more?

We need to expand our Perspectives when it comes to langauge and encoruagr students to explore identities. As our methiod to do so, we are encouraging each other as reflective blogging

Domain Of One’s Own

Module Zero focused on you setting up your digital infrastructure to explore open pedgagogy and blogging as a teacher. Giving a student a URL is kind of like giving them a locler or letting them decorate a notebook. They make it their own. The language use becomes an Identity Kit, as Gee would say.

Identity drives so much of learning. Self-Efficacy scholars like Bandura and Zimmerman talk about increasing perfomance by encouraging students to interoogate abilities. Carol Dweck has written on the importance of a “Growth Mindset” all of these are driven by Learner Identity.

Identity Work

Adorno, developed the term “identity thinking” in his work on “negative dialectics.” A member of the Frankfurt School, a group of mainly Jewish scholars who escaped Germany and settled at Columbia University and developed critical theory, Adorno critiques the construct of self.

To Ardono “identity thinking” is a form of thinking which is the most expressive philosophical manifestation of power and domination.

“Dialectics seeks to say what something is, while identarian thinking says what something comes under, what it exemplifies or represents, and what, accordingly, it is not itself.” (1990:149), he wrote. What does this mean for learners

To Ardono “identity thinking” masked the object being identified. Much of this buils on Nietzsche and other Posr-Structuralist thinkers. Yet Ardono pushed us to move beyond simplistic notions of fixed identities. As teachers we have to embrace the dynamic, non-identical nature of both individual experience and the social world that projects identity back on to us.

Swann has introduced the term “identity negotiation " to talk about learning over time.

Identity Work in Blogging

The scholarship on technology has shifted towards the inclusion of principles related to the development of the autonomous learner. A “growth mindset.” A “self-programmable” learner. We see this in our instructional routines on like PBL, Genius Hours, or even traditional models such as Montsesori

The idea is the learner has agency within the system. Your blog is how you express your agency. Your agency is how you do the identity work as a reflective practioner.

Shop Pup from the Chaplains of Kyiv got called up to the Metaverse to Fight MechaHitler

Tongues of Perun

Peaking Backstage

In life you learn to reflect as a maker, learner, and teacher. We often say the word modeling, and it’s true learners will pick up a ton of stuff through mimicry and enculturation. What we often mean is making our thinking out loud and explicit.

I refer to these as backstage posts. You pull the curtain back and explain how you used some tool to make some thing.

For example, I am currently helping an NGO in Ukraine, the Military Chaplains of Kyiv, raise money to get two mobile charging stations for welding.

Mainly online.

You can’t just spam a link, fundraising or not, on social media. You will have your content limited by algorithms. So I am always looking for ways for simple storytelling

I do this by designing “Quotable Quote” posters. You can do that as a teacher. It’s a quick way that allows students to add on additional layers of visual meaning.

When fundraising it creates a recognizable brand and predictable, but spreadable content. A campaign is just text structure cut up over time.

Using Creative Commons Images

So how to do it?

And you don’t have to use AI.

I am not using LLMs or Generative AI, but simple photo editing of layering images. There are so many artists who donate work to the Knowledge Commons. I’d rather honor their legacy than just use tools that steal their work.

Don’t get me wrong. You can do amazing things as an AI artist. The prompts some designers creates are hundreds of lines long, but I like sharing using Creative Commons photos by people.

Antarctica: Karl the Welder flickr photo by eliduke shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA 2.0) license

I prefer to search Flickr. I can choose to pick images I am allowed to remix. Technically as a teacher who is writing this post for class i get a lot of leeway with fair Use under US Copyright law. Still, it is nice to use and share artists who allow you to use and share their stuff.

Then when I find an image I have a little tool built into my browser that will generate the HTML for a picture

This allows me to copy and paste the HTML into blog.

Flag of Ukraine ;) flickr photo by EugeniusD80 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND 2.0) license

Final Product

Then I use a photo editor to layer the images and get a final product that looks like this.

Our next post will describe the basic of layers in photo editing.

Sing new songs
in braids 
of cobalt crickets
strumming
divided tongues of fire
teaching and testimony
of truths torn from metal
arc of history as stories
bend
swords into
 plowshares

Support your local welder

In May I took part in the Ukrainian cultural heritage month for Wikipedia.

It is amazing to see how history has been forgotten, sometimes deliberately.

Bryulovs
brushes lick at a
Spider Web
cast in lands of dead souls
living in light
Dwelling in places always between
Justice 
 in strokes of an
artists pain. A limb
Lost. Life cast as
nothing.
Now
 Icarus's wings clipped
And carrier pigeons of
 death spill cotton into
 streets,
  silk convoys
of fire.
Carried by a cossack horse 
drinking from an enemy trough
And tadpoles in the sky
 blow bridge threads
To objects captured
 Anchor points to
A history erased.
Triangulating to a new
Frame.
Prose painting new
Victory
Shadows bent in smoke 
Like tridents raised
A radius spiraling
Valiantly to the sky
Awash in Romance

New crucibles
 play out in patterns
of repulsion and
  rejection
clawing at unfolding 
 seconds, unregretted words
of double talk generations

Does the mouse know?

The snap of hammer coiled
 around songs  in poems
of our future
cadence to  when the apocalypse
begins

Yet hunger drives
our rodent friend forward

In tongues not of the Ghetto
but  twisting cycles of God 
turning to Deep Purple
while
flare guns burn
everything to the ground

just for a bite of Cheese

Is that the real test?

Carried on
 broken butterfly wings
you see it
 voice embraced
in perspectives
cordially disassembled
in a frenetic dance of
 traditional imagery
Colors torn
bouncing in a monolithic
 unity
shadows cast upon
Camazots to Camelot
shine in Ardono's
 negative
 dialects
wings flap
 but no one 
flies

A light flickers
 commas of darkness
hide shadows casting
Laureates of lowlifes
        who
decided to starve
under street lamps,
 humming at
    age of 
failure
  a lone car passes, plastic bumper
missing
 They tear at empty boxes
 of wine, corners bent
soggy
 shrink wrapped words
poured over cracked curbs
and our Captain dines
while piano players take a helm
 over a Hostage's 
   last draw

Taking meals
   with Bonia
dried tongues
born of Bucha
 lapping at
 gaunt fingers
  ossified textures
dangling empty scraps
wrapped in
 cloth cut from
skeletons draping
  over starvation
twice visited
 in tongues half 
centuries forked
a barn burns,
  a dog barks
Politics imposed, with finality
linocut slips
  into Ether
as folks grow 
  into myth

Scalpels, dull and forgotten
Three Angels Sing Above the Street
calls silenced
withered flowers,
     cut by invaders carrying
     chauvinistic  scepters, drip in
     lust by false revival of minorities
    spirits who hunt smell
    of words in deadly games
These days of our distress
Blue moons silenced
In Pizza shops dripping from Dali paintings
fire from skies
     and joyless days
     same wine in stolen bottles
     and the same dregs
     poured over three glasses
days of glory, gone?
still they toil, hunchbacked and calloused
days of betrayal, now days of the gun
heavy with briny blood
      Does it have to be destiny?
      to see pain so perceived
      in miseries, time will forget
      we can plant poplar seeds
      in place of Headstones

Pnuema,
  breath, spirit
a void
Given to 
 walking about
    Place
a thing that 
surrounds  or
 Force taking
 up Space?
Pnuema,
breath, spirit
a void
  exists
  imperfect
fit in Atomists
Dreams of
 laughing
philosophers

In this episode we juxtapose Physics, phish, and Birmingham

Wither Solid States
Split on asymmetric winds
open to elements which
melt into struggles of 
 Birmingham
jazz greats and low-rent apartments
 spill into Cabana covered
streets, in a stifling heat
pushing against division lines

Transcript

Watchmen on
  Walls of Estrangement
search
 songs of yearning
lost in grins ear 
       to ear
Bobok babbling
as faith and deeds
 of dead ideas pull
  on political thought
         in a
Darkness of non-being
drawn from a well
 of prophets
in slippages of the 
        past

horned-fanged
truths spill
from faceted
faces as answers bleeds
from seeds piercing 
ears in sounds
 of balance slipping
in objectivity. A
 rapid response
to factual patterns and those
who dwell in slack jawed
wonder
three
warning bells sound

Cossack 
  fields
of Kalmuis
sing in Iron
  and Steel
While Zeal
of French Priests
and Facebook flings
 ring in horrors
 of flight
  and fancy
in Vanity of 
 Bodegas and Bonfires
Oceans away
 twisting blades in
 Defenestration of  Ancient
truths

vulnerable
  dark clouds
cast upon a
  better one
identity work
tossed in a 
4th revolution
 of ideas
diligent creators
in constant flow
  trafficked
resources
 old situations
new algorithms
 creates passivity
in expectations

Hypostases
  Fates
in peeling paints
curled under
knower now
  known to
natural states
  slip    past
temporality
   once fence
posts fall
   markers in
time
#smallpoems

Edifying characters
   bounce in
Foregrounds of exoteric
lies
   disguised in
generic matters
devouring
  complying 
thoughts now
  bought by
potential 
  philosophers
filling coffers
tapped in ticky-tacky
thought
 

Life once
actualized in
  poetry scours
for hidden treasures
in conditional and
  qualified language
for must we not
  educate the puppies
of the race
  into
intoxicating audacity
   entertained in
intricacies of a modified
   stance