Co-teach 3
Co-teach,
One week down and my mind is already spinning. For today’s reflection, I thought I’d raise a small question that has come to mind over our first few classes: what is truth?
In preparing for this course, we’ve returned many times to the indispensable role of narrative and storytelling to both of our professions. Whether the words in a legal opinion or the images in a design project, we are trying to communicate and translate ideas to an audience—usually multiple audiences. But of course we make interpretative decisions in what we choose to represent and how we choose to represent it.
This observation is nothing new—it sounds in some ways like whatever version of Foucault one encounters in the secondary literature of any humanities discipline. But I think it’s important for us to raise the question in the context of our course. I am no relativist. I believe there are truths, and indeed, Truth. But that doesn’t mean that human efforts to represent truth are free from bias and distortion. We see it all the time in law, when advocates or decision makers focus on “one side” of a contested, adversarial narrative. I felt the same as you walked us through protest images. Both the images themselves and the ways in which those who captured and those who discussed the images chose to represent them reflected all kinds of interpretive decisions not readily apparent to the casual observer. Why this image? Why this frame? What happened just before, or just after, or just outside the frame? What aren’t we seeing? Why this lighting, or these colors, or these faces? What is staged and what is spontaneous, and does that even matter.
I wrote some related thoughts about truth a few years back after the grand jury decisions deciding not to indict the officers who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
I’m also struck by the role of trust in relationship to these questions of truth. When we rely on the representations or interpretations of others for our information, we have no choice but to trust those who are conveying the information. And at least some of the time, we are trusting their judgment as much as their knowledge or expertise. The same, of course, is true of students and their teachers.
John