a

alt-text

Alternative text or alt-text is rich descriptive text that describes an image. In a digital landscape, this text is read out by screen readers to people who are blind or low vision and who use that technology to engage with screen-delivered content. Often, if a user is only seeing a screen displaying a user interface with their eyes, they will not see the alt-text (Gagne in Nave, n.d.). Sometimes alt-text will be displayed to the visual user if they hover a cursor over an image, such as in the webcomic xkcd. In this example the technology is used to create a “metacomic” (Cook, 2016), which enhances the experience for an in-group of sighted readers who know to hover over the panels for additional content, though does not increase accessibility of the comic. In it’s most inclusive form, alt-text describes the relevant content and information shown by an image. This is practice enhances the content from the outset, not as an afterthought of accommodation.

In Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness we use alternative text (or alt-text) first and foremost to practice making the media we produce as accessible as possible. See “Making Accessible Media: Accessible Design in Digital Media,” offered by Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, for detailed information about how to do this and why it is important. Secondly, participants’ addition of rich description to their logs adds to the corrugation process in the education of attention. In the case of photography, still photos are “made poignant by the liveliness of situated relationality” (Jennifer Gagnon, personal communication, May 2021). Writing alternative text can be difficult. See notes on ‘Alternative Text for Images’ at the Accessible Syllabus for practical assistance.

arts of attentiveness

Arts of attentiveness are “modes of both paying attention to others and crafting meaningful response” (van Dooren et al, 2016).

b

becoming

The circumstance of being, emergent through relations with other beings (Ogden et al., 2013).

c

CLAS

CLAS is an acronym for UBC’s Collaborative Learning Annotation System, a media player used to share and comment on photographs, audio, videos, and pdfs. This is a UBC proprietary software, though if used by an instructor at UBC, participants from outside the university are welcome to use CLAS as a guest. It is in this software that the course participants will build their individual Logs and the class logosphere.

community

Community, as I understand it, exists in the sense of Deborah Bird Rose’s (2012) articulation of “multi-species knots of ethical time:” histories and futures, “multispecies gifts in this system of sequence, synchrony, connectivity, and mutual benefit.”

corrugation

Corrugation is what happens when experience folds into ideas folding into experience. It happens as a dance between attention, memory, and the passage of time. It is the action of dissolving the slash in im/material: appositional, palimpsest. See Day 20 for a more extensive articulation of this coming-together idea.

For resonant sentiments see TallBear (2015) and van Dooren (2020). A short description of the corrugation process has recently been published by The Urban Field Naturalist Project and can be found here.

d

e

education of attention

The education of attention as a phrase comes from the field of ecological psychology and refers to the process of coming to be in relation and learning to attend to sensory input from the environment of which we are a part. Novices’ attention is educated by engaging with mentors who guide and focus their attention on salient aspects, patterns, and processes occurring in place. The mentor, in a mentor-novice relationship, need not be human. We can be in an educative process through the action of attending, listening, watching, smelling, tasting, and/or touching as different actors in our surrounding environment solicit our attention. These practices and priorities have been known by Indigenous peoples throughout the world since the beginning (Cajete, 1994).

Andrew Joseph Sr. (2013, pp.24-29) details the methods his grandparents used throughout his childhood to train his perceptive capacities.

eyesight and awareness of surroundings and movement: “As soon as a child can follow movement by eye, the word weekst (wikst)–which means Look or, Did you see that?–is spoken.”
vibrations of sounds and actions
recognition of particular smells
to feel with hands or body whatever you come into contact with
taste, desire, and sharing
imitation of others: “act like your cat stalking a bird, now go get that chicken!”

encounter

“An encounter is always an interaction of translation and sense making” (Todd, in Kanngieser & Todd, 2021). Like Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. (2016), we too are interested in “the pedagogies of relationality that emerge when we encounter materials as active participants” (1). “[P]edagogies of relationality” resonate because we humans are always learning, especially as researchers, and especially as we are acutely participating in the encounters of which we are a part with the cultivation of attentiveness in mind. The mater-realities of encounter are of an always already assembled sort, “tangled webs of different length, density and duration, and whose consequences are experienced differently in different places” (Braun, 2006, 644). Encounters “affect us, provoke us to think and feel, attach us to the world and detach us from it, force us into action, demand from us, prompt us to care, concern us, [and] bring us into question” (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016, 1). These are pathways of translation and sense making.

enskilment

Enskilment “involves learning the situated and practical knowledge required to survive in particular places” (Butler, 2016, p.58). For further reading on this subject see Cox (2011), Gowlland (2019), Ingold (2000), and Grasseni (2007).

environment

The environment is composed of the relations, beings, substances, surfaces, chemicals and critters that surround, share, and permeate the body of a subject. Environments come in all shapes and sizes and include not only actual, but also imagined and remembered elements.

epistemology

“Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge. It asks questions people have long taken for granted: What is knowledge? What is intelligence? What is the difference between information, knowledge, and understanding? It is vital to debate the issue of knowledge/intelligence because of the needs of our time” (Aluli-Meyer, 2006, 279).

extension

“Knowledge that endures,” Aluli-Meyer (2008) explains, “is spirit driven. It is a life force connected to all other life forces. It is more an extension than it is a thing to accumulate” (3). Extension is movement and change simultaneous with capacity to navigate the new. According to Mencius, “people actualize virtue when they learn to extend knowledge and feelings from situations in which particular action is considered correct to analogous situations in which the correct action is unclear” (Varela, 1999, 27). Ingersoll (2016) calls this literacy, “a way of knowing that can be translated into other contexts” (30). This spirit-driven knowledge of extension emerges through “the intentionality of process, the value and purpose of meaning, and the practice of mindfulness” (Aluli-Meyer, 2008, 3).

Extension also relates explicitly to the idea of corrugation, the folding in and unfolding of story. An example of of this connection is demonstrated by the following quote from Deborah Bird Rose (van Dooren, 2020, 1): “When I go back to my notebooks, or to stories that I’ve told in one context that I want to return to in another context, they just keep unfolding. It hasn’t reached bottom; it never would reach bottom—there just isn’t a bottom.”

f

g

h

i

j

k

l

lands/waters

The concatenated word lands/waters is something I first read in the work of Marin et al. (2020) and have since adopted to highlight the way in which the English language struggles to see land and water as mutually constituent. This is especially evident in relation with riparian communities, for what are cottonwood trees if not vertical rivers (Harold Rhenisch, personal communication, 2020)? My use of this formulation is also a statement against commodification; inseparable from water, land cannot be sold or nationalized, for waters roam regardless of imposed boundaries (Neimanis, 2017), nor can water inseparable from land be bottled in petrified kin.

Land

Land is that which allows all beings to be and do; a concept that is as profound and complex as any could be. One can differentiate between “land,” which can indicate a “colonial worldview whereby landscapes are common, universal, and everywhere, even with great variation” (Liboiron, 2021, p.7), and Land, which Styres and Zinga (2013) capitalize when “referring to it as a proper name indicating a primary relationship” (p.313) and Liboiron employs to refer “to the unique entity that is the combined living spirit of plants, animals, air, water, humans, histories, and events recognized by many Indigenous communities” (p.7), or, “all the stuff that makes a place a place and not another place, from spirits down to dirt” (Liboiron in Harp & Callison, 2021, 5:05-5:10). In Manulani Aluli-Meyer’s words, “Land is more than a physical place. It is an idea that engages knowledge and contextualizes knowing. It is the key that turns the doors inward to reflect on how space shapes us. Space as fullness, as interaction, as thoughts planted. It is not about emptiness but about consciousness. It is an epistemological idea because it conceptualizes those things of value to embed them in a context” (Aluli-Meyer, 2008, p.4).

Finally, given the Land from which I am writing, it is important to highlight the “Syilx Okanagan understanding of the land as the tmxʷulaxʷ, which translates better as a life-force-place, rather than of land as location or ecology type” (Armstrong, 2009, pp.2-3).

locating

a.k.a. positioning

Here is an how Absolon & Willett (2005. n.p.) explain it:

Absolon: “We need to speak from our own position and in our own voice.”

Willett: “… It’s just my view and this is who I am. This is my mother. This is my father. These are my ancestors. This is where I grew up geographically. This was my experience as I grew up. And based on all of those things, this is what I think. …We locate because what you remember about what anyone
says depends in large part on who is doing the talking.”

logosphere

Somewhere in between the call and response of social media and the call and response of formalized scholarship. The primary content of participants’ logs will be the posts made three times per week. Logs will be available and accessible to other participants in the class to browse and learn with; this collection of logs we will call the logosphere. Attentive repetition can be isolating work. By sharing and engaging with each other’s logs, participants in the course can learn and build community even in the context of a largely individualized process.

The idea for this in-class call and response via personal (b)logs came from a presentation given by Christine Quist (2021) at the Cascadia Open Education Summit about her experience teaching horticulture remotely. Christine’s greenhouse teaching blog can be found here.

m

making and holding time and space

Related to and sometimes embedded within the practice of showing up is making and holding time and space. For me, this means not packing my schedule so tight that a “no” is a devastation. It means learning to be with, and expecting nothing in return. It means scheduling more time than a task takes to allow for crevices of creativity to form: a conversation over a meal, a walk the long way around, the recognition of a pattern only visible at a slow speed.

methodology

A theory about how knowledge is gained/produced/compiled/acquired and the frameworks used to go about gaining that knowledge.

“Theory, concepts, description: all these are made by human bodies for human bodies, even if these bodies are also more-than-human” (Neimanis, 2017, 63).

methods

The nitty gritty, practical, write-it-on-a-lab-report or report back to Mom: What did you do today? What will you do tomorrow? Methods are to methodology like practice is to praxis.

more/other-than-human

Translating from the Anishinaabe conception of mnidoo/manitou, A.I. Hallowell (1960) coined the term “other-than-human persons,” or simply, “other-than-human” (Manning, 2017). This term has been taken up by scholars in fields such as critical animal studies, multi-species ethnography, post-humanism, and more, as an attempt to categorize that which is incommensurate with categorization: every being that/who is not human. Are we not also both human and other-than?

n

o

Open Educational Resource

An open educational resource (OER) is a resource for education and instruction that is openly licensed for reuse, revising, and remixing by anyone. While the discussion about open textbooks currently occupy the spotlight, OER can come in as many forms as you can think of: a worksheet posted on someone’s personal website, a collection of blogs written by students (see Quist, 2021), a massive open online course or learning platform (e.g. Duolingo), or a course curriculum compiled on a blog. As scholar and champion of critical digital pedagogy, Jesse Stommel writes, “[t]he emphasis of open pedagogy can’t be on how we copyright, license, and share content. That can be one tiny piece, but it’s a mostly metaphorical one, and an offshoot of the deeper and more necessary social justice work: seeing students as full humans, as agents, not customers” (Stommel, 2018).

p

phenomenological

That which is experienced directly. Dolleen Manning (2018) explains phenomenological practice with a question: “[i]nstead of being in your head, […] what does it mean to be in this body in the world, and how do I encounter other bodies, and what is the knowledge that comes from that?”

presearch

Presearch is all of the things that happen before relationally accountable research can start: building and tending to relationships, reading, educating attention, drinking tea, telling stories, being with, and most importantly, listening. As researchers, we have to listen to the environments with which we would like to work, to the meshwork of relations, beings, and flows that allow us not only to do research, but to breathe, drink, eat, excrete, change shape, and participate. This praxis can also be thought of as becoming literate in the context of a specific research assemblage.

For articulations of this concept by other people in different words, you may want to listen to Max Liboiron (34:04 to 37:09) on the podcast Darts and Letters or read Chelsey Jones’s (2019) article, “That time I punched a boy in the forehead.”

practice

What you do. Sometimes, what you do over and over again. And sometimes in an attempt to change the way you do it, often for the “better,” whatever that means in the context at hand.

praxis

Why you do what you do, organized by principles, ethics, and values.

q

r

relational accountability

Wilson (2008) writes, “it is imperative to relational accountability that as a researcher I form a respectful relationship with the ideas that I am studying” (p.22). Ideas are part and parcel of a research assemblage. Cora Weber-Pillwax (2001) suggests that researchers should pay attention to “[t]he manner in which methods help to build respectful relationships between the topic of study and the researcher” and “between the researcher and the research participants” (cited in Chilisa, 2012, p.118). You are accountable to your relations, and those relations are entangled and entwined in “multi-species knots of ethical time” (Rose, 2012). It is rude to arrive to “do research” without first being invited, and without making and holding time and space for yourself and those with whom you hope to be working to build respectful relationships predicated on ongoing accountability (Liboiron, in Katic, 2021). Cultivating arts of attentiveness such that you can engage those arts to relate to and become in relation with a research assemblage is grounding work for forming respectful relationships with and in the research assemblage in question.

Gratitude and responsibility are deeply entangled with this understanding. Relational accountability, as we use the term here, can be likened to a multi-species version of what Dwane Donald has called ethical reationality: “an ecological understanding of human relationality that does not deny difference, but rather seeks to more deeply understand how our different histories and experiences position us in relation to each other. This form of relationality is ethical because it does not overlook or invisibilize the particular historical, cultural, and social contexts from which a particular person understands and experiences living in the world. It puts these considerations at the forefront of engagements across frontiers of difference.” (Donald, 2009)

For further reading on this topic, in addition to those cited above, see: Armstrong (2000), Absolon and Willett (2005), Starblanket (2018), and Reo (2019).

research

“Living your life, seeking knowledge, is ‘research” (Langford Ogemah, in Wilson & Restoule 2010).

“Research is listening, observation, experience, and speaking” (Jan Longboat, in Wilson & Restoule 2010).

“Find out what you are there to do, then do your work, respecting others” (Jean Aquash, in Wilson & Restoule 2010).

“Research is all about unanswered questions, but it also reveals our unquestioned answers” (Wilson, 2008, 6).

research assemblage

Use of the word assemblage stresses “the making of socionatures whose intricate geographies form tangled webs of different length, density and duration, and whose consequences are experienced differently in different places” (Braun, 2006, 644). This is a verb-become-noun, implying happening, movement, and change, while holding form: “a complex and dynamic process whereupon the collective’s properties exceed their constitutive elements” (Ogden et al., 2013).

When a research project is defined it will have boundaries, likely both permeable and malleable, though boundaries nonetheless. These boundaries will define a research assemblage in a variety and combination of geographic, temporal, hydro- and geo-logical, demographic, and more, terms in order to define a socioecological setting for inquiry. This verb in noun’s clothing allows for particularity of biosocial and spacio-temporal dimensions while holding space for inevitable movement and emergence.

research paradigm

“A paradigm is a set of underlying beliefs that guide our actions. So a research paradigm is the beliefs that guide our actions as researchers. These beliefs include the way that we view reality (ontology), how we think about or know this reality (epistemology), our ethics and morals (axiology), and how we go about gaining more knowledge about reality (methodology)” (Wilson, 2008, p.13).

s

sensory apparatus

“Empiricism is the belief that our five senses are the only modality in which to experience knowledge” (Aluli-Meyer, 2008, p.20); the sensory apparatus is a term used to imply a mechanism of sensing that lies beyond and within the five senses as they have been empirically constructed. “I am”, Manulani Aluli-Meyer expounds, “empirically configured by my past, and my senses and body were the tools and recording devices through which I retrieved and stored all data. Our senses are culturally shaped. … What this entails for your research is that you will need to slow down what it means to see something, hear something, or experience something. There is a wealth of diversity and knowledge in smells! An entire universe is found in how one catches a glance. It all shapes how you will gather data, think through findings, and report out” (2008, pp.5-6).

For further reading see Gibson (1966), Gibson and Pick (2000), and Joseph Sr. (2013).

showing up

“What I want future generations to know is that knowledge is not just from books or in the four walls of a classroom. Knowledge is taste, touch, see, and smell. And that ability to be there when it happens” (Richard Armstrong, in Okanagan Heritage Museum, 2021).

The ability to be there when it happens. That, in short, is the essence of showing up. Showing up can be saying “yes” to a dear friend who needs a hand, even when it is inconvenient for you. Or it can mean helping a potential future research collaborator chop firewood, when you are not a firewood-ologist, and you know that the time and energy you contribute to that process will not result in the collection of data. It comes in myriad shapes of volunteering your time, energy, and/or resources, whatever makes sense in the moment. Showing up is giving forward, to practice “continuous and multiple engagements with communities and sites of research” (Bhan, cited in TallBear, 2014, p.2). How we as researchers give and what we give are important to think critically about. And we are not alone, we can ask for advice from community, and partake in projects already ongoing, lending our capacities to further community goals.

solicitation

“To say that the world solicits a certain activity is to say that the agent feels immediately drawn to act a
certain way. This is different from deciding to perform the activity, since in feeling immediately drawn to do something the subject experiences no act of the will. Rather, he experiences the environment calling for a certain way of acting, and finds himself responding to the solicitation” (Dreyfus & Kelly, 2007)

storying

Researchers tell or participate in the telling of a story, using language in a particular way to convey that which has been deemed relevant: “storytelling is about the arts of becoming-witness, which include both attention to others and expression of that experience” (van Dooren and Rose, 2016, p.89). I believe that researchers have much to learn from storytellers. For her book “Indigenous Storywork” (2008), Jo-ann Archibald worked closely with and refers often to teachings from Elder Ellen White. White, reflecting on the importance of repetition for emerging storytellers, states, “[i]f they just read it, they’re just going to read it from page one to page two … without any input from them … They [should] start to read it, read a page at a time and [come to know] the story and [visualize] it, look between the lines, and go into the story themselves” (p.134).

Ananda Marin and Meghan Bang’s (2018) theorization of “walking, reading, and storying land as a methodology for making sense of physical and biological worlds” (p.89), rings familiar. la paperson (2014) cautions against settler “[p]lace-based education,” in which “place becomes something everyone can claim, can tell a story about. Place-based education,” paperson argues, “leads to restorying and re-inhabitation” (p.124). As a non-Indigenous person living with and being supported by these lands/waters, storying as part of my process of coming to know is always already fraught with this potential “re.” And while that fraughtness necessitates diligence, conscientiousness, and relational accountability on the part of the storier, on my part, the validity, utility, and beauty of storying as methodology remains. We can hold multiple stories.

t

theory of change

Any and all research is always grounded in a theory/theories of change, whether or not that/those theories are articulated explicitly (Liboiron, in Harp & Callison, 2021). Articulating a theory of change is the process of answering the question: How do you believe change happens?

transparent pedagogy

Foregrounding and explaining what will be done in the class, “being explicit about the process, purpose, and rationale of instructional activities” (Li, 2018, 1).

u

ungrading

Distinct from not grading, ungrading is an assessment approach that asserts students as those most informed about their own learning. In practice, instructors do not assign grades to class participants. There are different ways this can manifest, some of which are detailed in Jesse Stommel’s (2018) widely read essay, “How to Ungrade.” In this case, participants in Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness will be self-assessing their Attentive Repetition practice once a week.

universal design

“Universal Design is the process of creating products (devices, environments, systems, and processes) that are usable by people with the widest possible range of abilities, operating within the widest possible range of situations (environments, conditions, and circumstances). Universal Design emerged from the slightly earlier concept of being barrier-free, the broader accessibility movement, and adaptive and assistive technology. It also seeks to blend aesthetics into these core considerations” (Coolidge et al., n.d.).

v

w

walk

Walking in the context of this course and your Attentive Repetition practice is a shorthand for walk, roll, saunter, or stay in place. The important part is that you be outside. These “walks” can be done alone or with a companion, but never with headphones as to not isolate your sensory apparatus from your surroundings. Should you choose to walk with a companion, ensure your primary purpose of the walk, for at least half an hour, is to 1) consciously tune your attention to your surroundings, 2) have your attention solicited, 3) experience encounters, and 4) record those encounters using your medium of choice. If being outside is unsafe for you, doing this practice inside is acceptable.