The world is full of bad teaching. And somehow we all get on with it, of course.

Still, I have found it typical that people perk up when they think of their favorite, electrifying teachers. These are people we think about for the rest of our lives, largely because they inform our interests and ways of looking at the world (ontology, value systems, networked ideas, etc) at early ages. Let's talk about teachers, and I want to be clear: everyone directs teachable moments in life (especially guardians and managers). I'm referring to people in explicitly assigned roles to teach. (This thus puts these thoughts largely outside of the realm of unschooling, I think, but I do not know enough to say—would love to understand more in this realm.)

"Why Education is so Difficult And Contentious": TL;DR because when we say education we mean indoctrination, and everybody—teacher, parent, politician, etc—has different opinions on how people should be. It's touchy to talk about forced indoctrination because it both engenders fascism and is the founding idea behind of public education. There are obviously gradients of imposition on the student. Illich supports the need for the pedagogue to connect student to resources, but not much more—a fairly "hands-off" view of the teacher by today's standards. Still, the connective moments are going to reflect the ideology of the pedagogue. 

Are teachers necessary for learning? No. Learning is between the student and the world. A quippish phrase I heard a couple times working at RenArts was "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it think." But education (structured learning with others) requires teachers, basically by definition. Teachers "lead to water" and apply social pressure to encourage partaking. 

What makes for a good teacher? Well, I maintain the chief goals of structured learning are to build agency and cultivate awareness in the student (and maybe share specific skillsets). So, what kind of teacher builds agency in the student and cultivates awareness to the extent possible? Some modes of teaching quickly follow: I believe the teacher needs to support open-ended, coherent, and honest activities. 

Without open-ended-ness, we lose exploratory and self-actualizing potential. Without coherence, students can get mired in lack of knowing where to start or end (but a little ambiguity isn't bad). Without honesty we lose touch with the world and how to work with our lived realities. By "honesty" here, I mean to be honest about application of material, about history of thought, and about context of the activity itself; as such, the best teaching acknowledges and works with its own context (/media) and the needs of the people in the room. 

I am trying to recall where I heard the phrase that "teaching is making space." The teachers frames the room, the activities, the needs, the expectations, the discussions. In doing so, they embed indoctrination into the teaching. In the effort of honesty in the classroom, these framing decisions needs to be made explicit for the students. The effective teacher must constantly wrestle with their internalized epistemologies and ego in seeking to constantly be aware of and share their own framings of the world. (When I ran a workshop for the Free School of Architecture in Summer 2018 on alternative learning communities, I mostly brought with me a long list of questions to answer in seeking to understand how one is framing a learning space.)

This need for constant "pariefracture" (a breaking of the frame, expanding the conceptual realm, or meta-level "zooming out"—my friend D.V.'s term) in teaching gave me quite a bit of anxiety, as a teacher, until reading Parker J. Palmer's book "The Courage to Teach," in which he outlines six paradoxes of teaching. I like these paradoxes in themselves, but the larger concept that resonated with me was the ability to treat a paradox not as a dead end (as one does in mathematics, generally) but rather as a challenge that can be pulled out and embraced as the dynamo of an ongoing practice. Teaching never resolves: you just wake up tomorrow and give it another shot. 

I think what I'm circling around, here, is how much of learning from a teacher involves inheriting their ways of looking, concurrent with the teacher's ways of looking being in constant, self-aware flux. We inherit snapshots of our teachers' worldviews, blend them together over our own substrate of grokking the world, and call it education.

Riding the dynamo,
Lukas

Hi Everyone—

Unfortunately, the time I had allocated to writing Gnamma this week got eaten up by scattered plans. I knew this would happen at some point, and I think generally when it does I'll share a little bit of otherwise unpublished things I've written.

So, this newsletter will be a short essay called "Tokyo and the Mini-Map," which I actually did publish on my website for a couple months on 3 August 2018, but I am not sure if more than 10 people ever read it. I've spruced it up just a nudge, and the writing intended for this weekend will be published next week. 

​I'm really happy about my commitment to share a newsletter a week in 2019, but when I read my letters thus far, the writing is less organized than I'd like. I'll be working on this going forward. 

Also, the LG Slack diffusion has increased my readership a lot. Please respond to these emails if you want to talk about anything therein or anything thereout. I'm all ears. 

~

I went to Japan for the first time recently with my friend Nathan, after a decade of mounting interest credit to a boyhood of manga, Miyazaki, and Nintendo. Much of what we enjoyed was just walking around. 

Tokyo in particular was dazzling in its balance of vastness and minute detail. Its differences from LA, the large city that I know best, are acute. I had been warned by friends that finding things in Japan, no less Tokyo, required patience, as there is no over-arching city structure, streets are rarely named, Google Maps spotty, and directions given completely relative. (Google Maps did prove immensely useful for getting within a ballpark, though.)

Meanwhile, Los Angeles, while not completely a modernist's dream, is mostly grids scaffolded by well-labeled arteries. I regularly wish Google Maps could give me directions in the just-precise-enough way that Angelinos do: "take the 105 to the 110 North and get off at Figueroa... go up a bit, past the school, then it'll be on your right." In LA, these major roads provide a fairly immutable reference grid for the city. Tokyo residents must have their own techniques for finding things to the necessary fidelity of their city. 

I picked up Fumihiko Maki's City with a Hidden Past at Tsutaya Books in Daikanyama and ate it up as Tokyo revealed itself. The book has some history on land use and the growth patterns that shaped Edo-Tokyo. Knowing just a bit about land use, expansion, and topography make a city richer and more legible. 

Modern Tokyo addressing can get you within a block of what you're looking for; sub-block specificity, including which door on which floor of which unmarked apartment building, still requires tenacity. (Kudos to the Japanese Post.) In chapter 5, the author notes that the denser the neighborhood, the more the street gets used as personal space, and more "neighborliness" is often exhibited through sharing in public. (Note this was written before super-dense high-rises existed.) The denser the neighborhood, too, the harder to locate things tucked away. We found that, when seeking something nearby, people were excited to help and occasionally went to lengths to help us locate it.

 

The Learning Gardens Slack, which has been, emergently, the "home" of the initiative, is shutting down in two months. This is a decision by me, Éd, and Morgane to encourage decentralization and distributed ownership of the idea. You could see whiffs of this coming in my earlier newsletter. 

The goal returns to the kernel of the initiative in the first place: encouraging people to make spaces to take on [learning] initiatives they believe in. A Slack may re-emerge, things may decentralize, circle around tools like Are.na and Twitter and Discord, one-off forums, group texts, email newsletters, IRL groups and meeting spaces. Or perhaps the whole thing will fizzle for a while until some future moment. We, the janitors, generally tried to keep our moderation and assertiveness minimal, but this represents a strong-armed push to catalyze something new. 

With this change forthcoming, I'm asking myself, what have we learned over 2.5 years of Learning Gardens as a public concept? 

If someone came to me today saying, "I want to start a group of people to study X together!" some of my first questions would be: Is X well-defined enough to rally a group behind it? If X is vague, is the group well-defined enough to organize? Do you have the bandwidth to deal with not only organizing "content" for the group, but also managing a social landscape or making the conditions such that it can self-manage? 

Let me clarify: X here doesn't need to be a "topic." It can also be a "mode of organizing." The medium can be the message, here, and a lot of the value in Learning Gardens has been in bearing witness to a variety of organizational schemes. (But I do recommend either a well-defined topic, well-defined group of people, or well-defined structure!) 

This comes as NO surprise to anyone who has run groups or shared spaces: good management takes a lot of energy. It takes either a lot of active management & conversation, or a lot of lead time to build a substrate of mutual trust such that self-management works. To keep people aligned in logistics, to keep momentum, to upkeep a value set that people connect with, to generate ideas of where to go next. If your group is one organized around discrete "events" (in-person meet-ups, skype-in conversations, workshops, publications, etc), it's important to remember that the bulk of the work happens around these things, too: in the preparation and post-facto follow-up. You, organizing, should prepare for this and think of it as a way to invite others to participate (rather than feeling like you need to take on the "extra-curricular" work by yourself). 

Redundancy in information-sharing is necessary. I've learned this lesson repeatedly, given a general desire to be a bit terse in what I put up online. Oversharing is necessary to get the point across, to get people to see it twice, to get them to come back. 

Online, even in a semi-closed gardens of the sort that Slack groups emerged to be, the line between "being there" and "not" is thin. We have a term for riding this line: "lurking." Lurking in its internet-native form can be quite positive. (If you "lurk" in real life spaces, you're creepy.) It allows for exploratory observations of new interests, for following along without the commitment of joining the room, for feeling a connection even when formal participation might be difficult or contentious. 

Learning Gardens is about learning, however, and one thing I strongly believe is that you do not learn passively. I don't want LG to be a loose social space: there is enough of that already. I want LG to be about communities formed through action. Latent in my thoughts around the decision to retire the Slack is the desire to see people turn a lurking tendency into an organizing (or participating) one. Trust is necessary for the vulnerability and confidence that breeds effective learning experiences, and trust is easiest to build when you know who else is in the room. 

Thanks to everyone who has made the Slack interesting and dynamic over these years. I am looking forward to what is next! Please drop me a line if you are in the Bay Area.

Joining the room,
Lukas

Hydrology is the study of water and its movement on and around the earth. It involves the study of resources management, rainfall, rivers, erosion, and more. UC Berkeley, my institution at present, has a handful of classes representing sub-fields including Forest, Vadose Zone, Groundwater, and Urban hydrology. 

As the semester begins, I've been sampling these classes and comparing them to the hydrology course I took last Fall. None have been well-structured in the prototypical sense, by which I mean, none have had clearly delineated landscapes of ideas or more than stunted branches of progression through concepts. And while I'm sure there are some options out there, none of the textbooks I've seen are clearly organized either. Studying hydrology seems to start in the middle of the content and spiral around itself, or touch on some ideas and neglect necessary components of intertwined processes. (Maybe the water is discussed but not the soil; maybe the soil is discussed but not the ecology.) What is going on? 

Well, how can we structure an understanding water in the first place? The only way to keep track of water and turn it into an entity—an identifiable stock—is to contain it. When we do this we can start talking about fluid mechanics and all the lovely physics we've developed around tangible, identifiable objects. But water  has a fickle relationship with its container: it escapes through the air, leaks out the bottom, erodes walls, drowns its territory, and invites rot. 

One might instead plan to keep water in motion, as a flux (fluid dynamics). This requires a containing body and adds ontological complexity. What is a river? The first half of Heraclitus' most famous quote is that "no man ever steps in the same river twice;" a river is an entity of flux, a "control volume" that engineers worldwide are accustomed to thinking with. This methodology requires imposing a static frame around a dynamic entity, and losing the full view of where the water came from, and where it's going. 

Basically, water doesn't stay put, but keeping it moving makes management difficult. Water resource management is a calculated keeping-track of reservoirs (quantity and various qualia) and flows which depend on hydrologic phenomena like rain, snow, and fog to maintain desired quantities. Whether in-motion or not, we can only start keeping track once the water is in our designated containers—an enormous technological imposition on an entity that loves to destroy the walls around it. These buckets are generally distinct locations we have designed to collect and command surface water (tanks, pipes, oceans, rivers): what about the other parts of the water cycle? 

Conversations with my friend Pierie have introduced me to the work of Mathur and da Cunha, and some of their work around "rain" as a metaphor for water, in its connecting atmospheric to surface water. Rivers, reservoirs, oceans—a focus on these keep us locked in a "stock" and "flux" view of the forms water takes and how we can commodify it. "Occult" forms of water (mist, fog, clouds) comprise a very small percent of volume of water at any given moment, but represent enormous amounts of water movement around the globe. Occult forms may serve as a better metaphor for how to think about water—more ephemeral, more amorphous, harder to avoid. We're in hyperobject territory, now, which feels like a more appropriate ontology than the dualistic and deterministic framing ever-present in typical engineering. 

The approach to hydrology that we're working against is one of water being *here* moving *there* as a contained entity to be extracted and put to use. Our little blue dot really has water everywhere, and it is only at the global scale that we can even think of the hydrosphere as a closed system. A lake, a river, and our human bodies just happen to be a high concentrations of water, with low concentrations of water in-between (as air, land, and drywall). All of it is being shuffled around by biotics and gradients in density, temperature, and energy. 

The nature of water is canonically chaotic and self-determined despite our best engineering. Water as an omnipresent flux hyperobject is the best ontology, for now, but this designation does little to help the contemporary hydrologist. Perhaps this is why everyone teaching the subject just says "fuck it, let's start with Darcy's Law."

Sopping wet,
Lukas

 

My favorite class last semester was Bill Dietrich's Geomorphology. Geomorphology is the study of earth (geo-) forms (morphology). Geomorphologists are, in essence, trying to answer the question: why are landforms shaped the way they are? And what makes them change? 

Why are hills generally convex? Why are some beaches rocky and some sandy? Why do some rivers meander, and others are ramrod straight? What forces make landscapes change over time? 

 

Some landform-shaping processes are quick, and some are slow. I did research on the process by which the Russian River, in Sonoma County, breaks through a berm of sand  that separates the river from the ocean ("breaching"). The berm takes weeks or months to get built by waves; high river flows cause the breach to happen over a few minutes, we think. Months and minutes are both tractable timescales of lived human experience, despite orders of magnitude difference. What about years, or decades? 

Morphodynamics on geologic timescales (e.g. tectonics) require data sets not based on observation but rather record interpretation. This has historically been the case, too, for decadal-scale processes and change. But satellite imaging now has around four decades of history under its belt, allowing us to now see, watch, and replay landscape change that may be too slow to personally photograph but too rapid to meaningfully interpret via proxy variables. This is why Google Earth Engine's Timelapse is so cool, and good multi-decade data sets by passionate people can make major contributions to understanding. This is a timescale over which rivers avulse, beaches erode, landslides complicate property rights, and the weirding starts takes place. 

Geomorphology (and, more broadly, Geology) is a young discipline within the Western canon of sciences. Given the outlook of the Anthropocene, the field little backing for much work to be done in anticipating how landforms will respond to increasingly tangled senses of "human-made" and "natural" environmental effects, whether local or global. But physical shifts alone are of course not the main source of worry. 

Decadal dynamics also happen to work on a timescale with large effects on lived experiences for humans. Decades are the timelines we think of when making homes, families, and bodies of meaningful work. Typically, landform elements have served as static reference points in cultural production—elevation markers, mythic hilltops, and property boundaries alike.

The earth is dynamic. Climate change will likely increase the rate of surface morphology change, bringing it closer to this timescale of lived experience. Land cannot, in the 21st century, be thought of as a fixed good. Our spatial reference points will shift anew and old memories will press a newfound urgency on to the landscapes we have. 

Eroding into the sunset,
Lukas

(p.s. One of the most amazing examples of this, to me, is the prevalence of rivers serving as international borders, despite a river being by definition a body of water that moves through space... and rivers love to move around)

Around three years ago, my friend Édouard and I were working on an idea. We saw a cohort of self-initiated learning groups around us, found this an inspiring and important way to work and socialize, and wanted to support this form by providing resources and connecting people together. At the time we called this idea "Sunday School" but a brainstorming session at a café in late-Summer 2016 had us renaming as "Learning Gardens."

Learning Gardens has since become a loose collection of people, projects, spin-offs, and, somehow, part of the landscape of design-oriented online social groups. It has also become an email address, a Slack group, a chain of quasi-related events. It has grown unanticipated tendrils, blossomed into wonderful connections, and nurtured chance assemblages of people who wandered into the same space. 

The crux of Learning Gardens has always been embedded in the name. Gardening is ripe with connotations—the gardener's presence, expectations of work and results, patience for slow growth, getting ones hands dirty, and chance cross-species encounters (intentionally or otherwise). Gardening as a metaphor is powerful today because it is a well-known and physical entity, helping ground digital, political, social, ephemeral, and more generally abstract working that has become so primal to the 21st century. 

Gardening, in the "community garden" sense more than the "jardin à la française," encourages collective resources, shared space, shared outputs, a maintenance-oriented practice, and a little bit of chaos. Gardens are not hard-walled (this would make them greenhouses), but they are separated from "nature" in as much as they are managed and curated towards a vision, however loose that is. 

We've always treaded carefully around how to define Learning Gardens. LG has been, for us, and hopefully others, a living and dynamic exploration of particular conditions, a shell to incubate growth, a container of language and dispositions. I prefer Learning Gardens be thought of as a substrate for growing a social space for learning (growing / making / exploring) together rather than any particular entity. It is too bad, perhaps, that the name is a noun, when I think we are more interested in it being an aura around a type of action, or a verb. 

Or, to quote Ian Hamilton Finlay,  "a garden is not an object but a process". 
(I recommend this essay on Finlay's gardening as poetry practice.)

Under sunshine,
Lukas

 

Hello!

Thanks for being here. My name is Lukas and this is my newsletter.

I want to give a brief description of this thing, partly for me and partly for you. 

This is the first of what I intend to be many emails. I got my first blogspot account in 2006, tumblr in 2008, and since 2015 I've vacillated between hosting blog posts on my personal site and fits and starts of a newsletter. One of my 2019 resolutions—which I generally take seriously—is to write and publish something here weekly (every Saturday). This is a recommitment to public sharing and development of ideas. I have always loved sharing myself on the internet, but have had more intensely mixed feelings lately about closed platforms and how to keep documents accessible despite a dynamic web ecosystem. A more finite email newsletter settles some of these nerves. 

In the time since abandoning my previous blogs and newsletters, my interests have congealed somewhat and I've started a Master's program, in environmental engineering. The discussion around the field in my graduate program has been startlingly narrow, at least as I've found it, especially given it is a realm of study that touches on an amazing number of other sets of ideas we call disciplines. (Environmental science, chemistry, biology, ecology, civil engineering, planning, [landscape] architecture, transportation, anthropology, psychology...) Limited space for broad conversation in my program, and the fact that school required I move away from places where I had established social lives, has lead to a sense of lacking in the kind of conversation that typically gives my thinking structure and makes for synthesis. My brain, right now, is a stewing mess. This writing is to be a starting place. 

The name, or name-at-present I should say, seeks to reflect my goals in writing. "Gnamma" is an Aboriginal term for a crevice or bowl carved into stone over time by water (and/or wind). There are multiple things I love about this term: that it is an emergent form, determined by various contextual forces; that an ephemeral media can carve into something enduring, and that it is an object that represents the process by which it is made by its form and location. 

Regular writing, here, aims to achieve analogous attributes. How can lines of inquiry emerge out of the messy ebb-and-flow of my  experiences, media diet, and graduate program? How can a little bit of regular writing in a fleeting medium carve out useful and lasting language and concepts? And how can the archive of this writing capture the process of me trying to build ideas? 

I've been (finally) reading Dr Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's *The Mushroom At The End of the World* which, by my read, invests a lot its energy in generating or asserting language useful for making sense of the contemporary condition. I am inspired by this sensibility. All language embeds within it mental models, so I see the act of building language as intertwined in building a set of self-consistent, or at least of symbiotic (non-contradicting?) mental models. The book loops back on itself a lot, as I suspect I probably will, too. That's fine. Redundancy is necessary to build things that can stick, for myself or for you. 

The goal is to make manifest the values I want to see in the world. Writing for my friends is the most intuitive starting point to me. (Note: the tone of the newsletter will likely be that of a message for a friend I haven't spoken to in a while.) Please write back!! Conversation is crucial. Share with me things that resonate, things that don't, and anything in-between. 

Thanks for making the time,
Lukas