A Hybrid Ride on Hybridity
Excitement, ExCiTeMenT, EXCITEMENT! There are many ways to look at it. And to look like it.
Po’s excited face just so happens to resemble mine, including when it comes to education. Indeed, I find it particularly important to discuss excitement in the educational context. Feminist professor and social activist bell hooks sees excitement as resulting from meaningful engagement with intellectual ideas and with each other in the classroom. I second that. I am going to go even further by saying that, based on my 12+ years of experience as a student in the education system, I believe excitement to be the key to a learning experience that is more enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. You may be asking yourself, how do we go about finding that excitement? You see, when Po’s dad Mr.Ping said . . .
. . . he was only referring to his special soup. Luckily, there is a secret ingredient to achieving excitement in the classroom and that is . . . embracing hybridity! First off, hybridity is, by definition, a mixture, and it can pretty much be between anything. As Pete Rorabaugh introduces in his article “Hybridity, pt.1: Virtuality and Empiricism,”
“A critical mind usually avoids binaries. We know that more than two political parties can exist, that gender is constructed, and that emphatic absolutes kill conversation. We live in a world of negotiated hybridity on a variety of levels.”
Hybridity is all around us, yet it is rarely thought of in an educational context unless it is in relation to the hybridity of online and in-person learning. As for the binaries, hybridity makes sure to challenge them and bring about excitement in the process. When it comes to education, excitement is the place of intersection between emotion and intellect. That being said, embracing hybridity must surely be a part of the process towards achieving excitement, as excitement is itself a hybrid!
Want to know one way to embrace hybridity? Learning through films! As a matter of fact, let’s do just that! We’re going to explore hybridity by looking at a film brimming with inspiration: Kung Fu Panda! Look at us go!
Sweet!
Without further ado, I would like you to join me on an adventure into the exhilarating world of Kung Fu Panda . . . observed through an educational lens!
Once on board, please keep your hands, arms, feet, and legs inside the vehicle and remain seated at all times! Off we go!
We are approaching the first stop . . .
Vulnerability
One can never get enough of Master Oogway’s wisdom. When it comes to education, letting go of the illusion of control, opening up, and allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, is essential. In “Hybridity, pt. 2: What is Hybrid Pedagogy?” Jesse Stommel argues for the importance of teachers being vulnerable by risking failure and modeling that vulnerability in their interactions with students. He explains,
“For me, though, there’s a delicate balance between being my performed, teacher-y self and being this more honest, vulnerable self. The same is true for myself as a student. This is just one of the many ways that I am hybrid.”
This idea is important because teachers’ vulnerability in their interactions with students is fundamental for an effective transmission of knowledge through more meaningful connections, which are a great way to embrace hybridity. Teachers’ vulnerability can, and ideally would also come in the form of showing excitement themselves, about their class and working with their students. This would, in turn, increase students’ excitement and make for more enjoyable intellectual exchanges for everyone! That is not all, as vulnerability is hybrid in other ways as well. For instance, it brings out the child in each one of us, and with it, that childlike excitement that characterizes kids’ approach to learning.
Think about it. Children have an ardent curiosity, ask hundreds of questions, and fully let go of the “illusion of control” because they know nothing of it, to begin with. This idea leads me to cognitive philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ “The Extended Mind.” In their paper, they talk about beliefs as cognitive factors that can be partly constituted by features of our environment,
“when those features play the right sort of role in driving cognitive processes. If so, the mind extends into the world.”
Children’s vulnerability and openness to the outside world are exemplary because they let their minds freely extend into the world, and they do so excitedly. As we grow older, we tend to hold ourselves back and contain that excitement and craving for exploration. We are, in a way, refusing to embrace the hybridity that comes with our minds extending into our environment, which is limiting, especially intellectually. Clark and Chalmers also mention socially extended cognition and that
“what is central is a high degree of trust, reliance, and accessibility.”
This ties back in with the concept of teachers’ vulnerability and how it can increase students’ trust and help us consider teachers as more reliable and accessible. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, educator and philosopher Paulo Freire introduces the term “teacher-student with students-teachers” where
“they become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow.”
Teachers can lead by example and play a significant role in encouraging students to embrace vulnerability in the classroom. The new connections that would be formed as a consequence, would in turn increase excitement and make the learning experience more enjoyable and beneficial for intellectual development. In fact, in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks asserts that everyone’s contributions in class are resources and that,
“used constructively they enhance the capacity of any class to create an open learning community.”
To have an open learning community, we need students and teachers to stay receptive. Vulnerability is at the heart of this. In fact, in all of its hybrid glory, it challenges the binary of “Performed (School-y) Selves / Real (Vulnerable) Selves” that Jesse Stommel brings up in his article. One way is related to teachers showing vulnerability as he explained. Another way it challenges the binary is how we students being vulnerable can result in allowing ourselves to be our true selves, which includes connecting to our inner child. Vulnerability also challenges the “Learning in Schools / Learning in the World” and “Passive Learning / Experiential Learning” binaries because we can channel that childlike excitement by embracing the extension of our mind, and learning from our environment and others around us as our minds extend and feed off from each other.
This is how vulnerability is itself a way in which we engage in hybridity. We are tearing down walls, opening ourselves up to the world, and creating bonds with others. Vulnerability helps our minds extend into our environment as we bring our childlike excitement and curiosity to the classroom! In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire emphasizes the idea that inquiry and curiosity are essential for humans and their intellectual and personal development:
“For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot truly be human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.”
Freire highlights that this kind of childlike insistent curiosity and hopeful excitement is what leads to knowledge. Vulnerability is what opens us up to that pursuit of hopeful inquiry through the extended mind in our world, with our world, and with each other.
By looking at children’s approach to learning to revamp our own, we sure are being vulnerable! Isn’t it fascinating?
As fascinating as the upcoming stop on our ride…
Games
A truly magical quote . . . the importance of being present. It is no less important in education. Students are often torn between stressing about past grades and worrying about future assignments. We rarely slow down, pause, and think of the present. We feel like we have destinations we need to rush to get to, so we forget to enjoy the process of learning, the journey of it all. When I think back to my time in high school, a lot of it feels like a blur for that exact reason. However, some of my most vivid memories from the classroom are the days when teachers incorporated games into the agenda for the day. Games are a hybrid of emotion and intellect, the intersection of fun and learning. The particular example that comes to mind is, wait for it . . . Kahoot! I remember when the teacher would announce, “You’re going to need your devices for Kahoot!” and then . . .
Talk about bringing that childlike excitement from earlier to the classroom in a . . . well, childlike game! Games challenge the binary of “Academic Product / Learning Process” because students are enjoying the learning process first, and thinking about the academic product second, which is why we are able to feel excited in the moment and stay present. Additionally, when we feel excited about something, we often remember it for longer. Indeed, in my personal experience, Kahoot wasn’t just fun, it was also a helpful tool to retain information. There were times during AP Government tests when I would recall a concept because I remembered a classmate hilariously screaming out the answer when playing Kahoot, “Y’all, it’s RED!” Fun times. Since Kahoot is an online game, it also challenges the binary of “Physical Learning Space / Virtual Learning Space” by adding technology to the hybrid mix. As Jesse Stommel describes in “Hybridity, pt. 2: What is Hybrid Pedagogy?” hybrid pedagogy
“is about bringing the sorts of learning that happen in a physical place and the sorts of learning that happen in a virtual place into a more engaged and dynamic conversation.”
Kahoot is a game that combines the nature of an online game with the physical interaction and atmosphere of excitement it creates in an in-person classroom, making use of technology as a tool to enhance the learning process for students and make it more enjoyable. Having personally experienced the difference that games make in raising a class’ spirits, I have often wondered why teachers rarely use them. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks explains that there is a tendency to undermine some educators’ commitment to engaged pedagogy since it is seen as not being rigorously academic enough. She opines,
“Ideally, education should be a place where the need for diverse teaching methods and styles would be valued, encouraged, seen as essential to learning.”
Unfortunately, the educational system seems to lean heavily on the “banking concept,” which, as described by Paulo Freire, is when education
“becomes an act of depositing, in which students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”
The banking method of education limits students’ critical thinking processes and thus our intellectual development. It also often crushes our excitement for learning and leads to a fear of risk-taking. I speak from experience. There was one class in high school that I felt constantly stressed about. The teacher read off the PowerPoints and tested us on information that wasn’t always on the slides. When she assigned projects, we just saw them as a way to improve our grades and did not take risks on them.
I could feel myself shutting off my creativity and limiting my work to something I was sure the teacher would like. It was my worst experience with the banking concept, and though it hurts me to say, I know there is even worst out there! We were sure craving some Kahoot.
You see, I am not pushing for classes to be constructed around games, I am simply encouraging incorporating more games in class agendas due to their power to make learning fun and exciting for students! Banking concept is afraid of embracing games because the fun component of their hybrid mix of fun + learning doesn’t sit well with the depository nature of banking education. Since banking concept is so limiting, it’s like it wants students to be afraid to take risks and stay in the boxes that it has created for us. Fortunately, games help students be less afraid of failure as they aren’t based on a grade. They help students break out of those boxes and they make students excited to learn! Let’s play! Hold on tight!
The last stop on our ride is straight ahead!
Code-meshing
When Po addresses his panda village, they take his advice to heart, as you can see. The older pandas roll down the hills while the baby pandas practice their soccer skills, all doing what they know best. Po realized that instead of teaching them to be like him, he should teach them how to be themselves, how to channel their own strengths! Why not let us students do what we do well? I have noticed a trend in the education system where we are encouraged to express ourselves freely . . . yet that freely really means within a structured context.
For example, in creative writing classes, students are often given different prompts that are open-ended and meant to be liberating. However, particular expectations are often ingrained in the prompts.
Standard English is one of them. In his journal article “Should Writers Use They Own English?” scholar and professor Vershawn Ashanti Young counters Stanley Fish’s argument for Standard English in academic writing and classrooms:
“A whole lot of folk could be writing and speakin real, real smart if Fish and others stop using one perspective, foot-long ruler to measure the language of peeps who use a yard stick when they communicate.”
This is a powerful message because the idea of establishing one standard way for people to express themselves undermines the original intent of having them communicate their thoughts and ideas freely. When it comes to education, where students are on a path of intellectual development, we should have the opportunity to express ourselves in our own unique ways. Young introduces code-meshing, which he defines as “multidialectalism and plurilingualism” in one speech or paper. Code-meshing is an important way in which we could embrace our identities and cultures, and express ourselves through language without being limited to Standard English. Young explains that,
“Code meshing use the way people already speak and write and help them be more rhetorically effective.”
This empowering concept emphasizes a push towards appreciating and respecting others’ diverse ways of self-expression. I believe the opportunity to code-mesh in some assignments would get students excited, similarly to when we got to present the traditional foods in our culture to our class in elementary school! I remember the pride that the presenters radiated and the admiration in the audience’s eyes on those days.
When I think of engaged learning, this is what I often imagine. Students expressing themselves and embracing their identities, and their peers listening attentively to them, fascinated and intrigued. When we students are given this opportunity, we are encouraged to really look within, in a self-awareness process that helps us be true to ourselves. This is crucial for intellectual development. Additionally, we are also learning from our peers, which, as mentioned earlier, also makes for a more efficient exchange of ideas because students become teachers for each other. This helps excitement grow in the classroom!
When building this fireworks cart, Po was resourceful and innovative. Now look at him fly! While Young focuses on code-meshing as the mixing of languages and dialects, it is important to note that code-meshing can come in different forms! I see:
- a student embedding a poem in an essay as code-meshing.
- another bringing in their experience from sports to an assignment as code-meshing.
- a speech in which one raps a particular verse as code-meshing.
All of these are ways in which we students could express ourselves more freely, and in my opinion, more successfully, through code-meshing. We can see the hybrid nature of code-meshing in the ways in which it is a literal mixture of languages, dialects, and codes, but also in how it creates interactions and exchanges of information between individuals. Code-meshing requires a significant amount of self-awareness from us students, which is crucial to our intellectual development. Self-expression is fundamental in education and code-meshing is a great example of how hybridity can lead to excitement. So, хайде, forza, vamos, let’s go! Code-meshing is the way to go!
And that concludes our Kung Fu Panda-inspired adventure on hybridity!
Don’t forget your personal belongings! Hope you enjoyed the ride!
Thank you for joining me on this journey where we saw a glimpse of how hybridity can deconstruct these binaries in education and lead to meaningful excitement in the classroom!
Hybridity truly is everywhere. Each stop on the ride represents a hybrid strategy to achieve excitement:
- Vulnerability, which is a state.
- Games, which are a tool.
- Code-meshing, which is a concept.
Notice that the difference in the natures of these 3 elements makes this formula for excitement hybrid itself! Sweet! We have what we need!
Now say it with me!
Excitement . . .
Banking concept . . .
SKADOOSH!
