World-Building

This week in our discussion, the West Houston Institute Innovation Fellows talked about world-building and how that can apply to teaching innovation.

Comic Books as Modern Day Mythology

At the end of section five, Teampău recounts common attributes of comic book superheroes. Two of these relate to machines and technology. In my view, current superhero movies have certainly encompassed the popularity of technology. Having grown up on Star Trek, my dad indoctrinated me with all the ways the franchise predicted or created future tech. As I write this, my family has been bingeing season one of The Mandalorian (again) and Mando sums it up at the end of episode 3 when he sees a comrade flying via jet pack: "I gotta get one of those."

The best/worst gift I ever gave my husband (who has an M.A. in English) was a subscription to Marvel Unlimited. He's read thousands of comics and spends Saturday morning reading Squirrel Girl (about a Spiderman fangirl who learns to access powers) and Ms. Marvel (a Pakistani teenage girl in NYC) to our 7yo. These comics are examples of how far gender roles have come in comic portrayals. My husband tried to get our daughter to watch the original X-men, but she was thoroughly unimpressed with the fact that there was only one girl, and lasted only one episode. I have assigned the book Secret History of Wonder Woman in my intro history courses. Jill Lepore traces the history of WW's creator and aligns it with historical tropes, showing how the character grew and regressed with the times and who controlled it. Teampău expands this idea further, pointing out the global nature of comics and their use as political commentary in unstable or changing countries. Finally, Oxford University Press has launched a graphic history series, showing how academics are adapting this art form to scholarly/public consumption.

The prompt mentions the use of world-building by historians (such as myself). We try to paint an accurate picture of how the world was. That usually means I'm ruining their childhood somehow by dismantling myths of American heroes and locales. (#Sorrynotsorry) I seek to better use stories to make history come alive. 

Teaching Innovation: The Use of Useless Worlds

I have done a number of simulations in my history courses. One I adapted from my junior year Texas history course at SHSU called a "Dilemma" wherein students take on the role of a character in history (eg woman, soldier, loyalist, Native American, etc. in the Revolution) and have to make a number of decisions based on their circumstance. At first, this came with a lot of factual errors due to a lack of preparation. Now, when I do something like that, I make sure to provide specific primary sources and readings so that students make better inferences based on actual events rather than on stereotypes. In the words of Hollin, "Finding the right questions is perhaps the most difficult task in world-building."

I'm wondering how I might apply world-building as lived environments. I am not a fan of alternate history (eg what if Britain won the American Revolution?), but this experiment might be a way to greater show agency and resistance in history. For instance, I just finished lecturing about Indian Removal, but I titled the lecture "Cherokee Resistance". Maybe students can investigate and uncover ways agency exists so they can turn the traditional narrative on its head. This could produce innovative solutions by challenging assumptions.

Tolkien and Lewis on World-Building

In my own creative writing, I use a touch of fantasy, but I'm most grounded in the real world. So, my experiences with world-building are more "pure" I suppose. Same with when I'm trying to build worlds in my history classes. We've been reading Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe to our 7yo and she certainly enjoys the "primary world" to secondary world pathway. 

I can actually see how N.K. Jemison's approach to world-building would suit: "she applies two frameworks: one that focuses on macroworldbuilding (the creation of the physical environment in which the story will take place—planet, continents, climate, ecology, and culture) and one that focuses on microworldbuilding (the societies that result, in all their flavors of social stratification)." She argues that world-building is a "lesson in oppression" where "power relations between her characters are often a direct result of the lands they inhabit." I'm so keen for students to explore resistance to oppression within historical worlds.