This week, I had an opportunity to observe a microteaching session. The person I observed was to deliver a 20-minute session on a topic of their interest. Luckily, I had reasons to be excited. I have always had an interest in the arts (my PhD concerned the psychology of aesthetics and the arts) and the session concerned “object-orientated ontology”, an art theory I had never heard of before. The session consisted of around 10 minutes of the speaker giving a lecture on the topic, and 10 minutes of the participants/observers thinking about an object that would enhance a non-human-central perspective (for this is what object-orientated ontology is about) – some key phrases in this task included “vicarious causation”, “inherent withdrawal”, etc. As far as I understood, object-orientated ontology concerns the act of going beyond human perception in understanding the world. Art, through artists such as Pierre Huyge and Pamela Rosenkranz (image below), can play a major role in going beyond human-orientated perception to a more object-orientated perception.
The experience was enriching, and I felt I learnt the importance of detaching ourselves from a human-centric perspective in our perception of the world. In fact, I believe object-orientated ontology represents a major intellectual movement nowadays. For example, in a research seminar, I recently came across “posthuman research” (e.g., Ulmer, 2017), which, similarly, postulates the importance of going beyond human-orientated understandings of the world when doing academic research (that said, one can always be skeptical. What are the limits of non-human-centric thinking when these activities are created by humans in the first place?).
However, what piqued my interest was the number of jargon that was used during the session. There came a point where my attention was waning because I could not understand some of the terminologies being used – coming from a science background, I had no reference point nor the vocabulary.
This got me thinking about my own lectures in statistics. Statistics is full of jargon, e.g., degrees of freedom, sampling distribution, central limit theorem, t-test, etc. For my students, many of whom do not come from a mathematical background, the encountering of such jargon must be a daunting experience. Relatedly, I always had in the back of my mind that good explanations (in a standard lecture rather than in a cramped 20-minutes microteaching session) consist of the minimisation of jargon; where jargons are necessary, each jargon should be explained in the plainest language possible. My ideas were reinforced during the microteaching observation. Moving forward, I will think more about the importance of clarity and simplicity in the face of academia, which is unfortunately inundated with jargon.
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Reference
Ulmer, J.B., 2017. Posthumanism as research methodology: Inquiry in the Anthropocene. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(9), pp.832-848.