Episode 3: What If . . .? with Mike Dando

• Interested in reading more about Mike Dando's work around Hip Hop in education check out his article Re-Mixing Making: Examining the Intersections of Hip Hop Culture, Maker Spaces, and Social Justice Education” in The International Journal of Critical Media Literacy
• Listen to Mike interview an array of comic and narrative art scholars, artists, and creators check out his podcast Comics Schools
• Want to read more super hero narratives in a recent publication of Mike's The Best at What They Do: Re-Considering Perceptions of Public Education through Superhero Narratives

Child:
This episode of Pop and Play talks about what if possibilities. Haeny and Nathan were inspired to talk about what if after watching the Marvel series by that exact title. Let's jump right in to hear Nathan recapping the alternative reality superhero show.

Nathan Holbert:
The episode we watched imagines the alternate world that might emerge if Peggy Carter, not Steve Rogers became Captain America.

Haeny Yoon:
And while we get into that episode a bit, our conversation is mostly about this amazing prompt, what if? We bring in Mike Dando, Assistant Professor of English from Saint Cloud State University, to help us see the connections between comics, hiphop and speculative fiction, which for our purposes refers to fiction that invites us to imagine, what if things were different?

Nathan Holbert:
If you want to know more, be sure to check out our other episode, Future Dreaming with Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Olu Anamichan from last season of Pop and Play.

Nathan Holbert:
The sort of episode opens with this faceless watcher saying, "Time, space, reality, it's more than a linear path. It's a prism of endless possibilities where a single choice can branch into infinite realities, creating alternate worlds from the one you know." So that's like the entire premise of what's going on here. What did you think of this though? I mean, is this your cup of tea?

Haeny Yoon:
At first I did not realize it was going to be a cartoon or animated. I don't want to say cartoon because I feel like that has some kind of weird undertones to it, but-

Nathan Holbert:
We can call it that.

Haeny Yoon:
An animated-

Nathan Holbert:
I'm okay with cartoon. Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. You're okay with cartoon. Okay.

Nathan Holbert:
Absolutely.

Haeny Yoon:
So at first I was not expecting that. I was actually expecting it to be live action. So I was expecting it to be the actual people, so that was surprising to me. And usually I'm not animated series person, but I actually really liked it. I liked it. And like you, I thought that there were some things that didn't change. That maybe it was a person that was different, but the actual reality of it was still similar. And so now that you mentioned that, it's making me think about what is actually different? And I was thinking about the what if possibilities, right? Like what if in my own life, if I had done this instead of this, would the outcome have been the same or different? Who can help but think about that too? Because I think there were so many things that were actually the same, but that the process or the circumstances around it were just slightly altered.

Nathan Holbert:
I mean, I think this idea of asking what if, it seems pretty central, not only to kind of this TV show that we're talking about, but also just kind of a fundamental part of play, right?

Haeny Yoon:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
We're constantly asking... Play is in many ways, constantly asking what if?

Haeny Yoon:
I've been thinking about that a lot, because I've had to be on panels or things where we have to talk about play. And as I've talked about this before, but in early childhood play comes with a lot of curricular goals and things that we want to do. And there's whole curriculum that's structured around how to structure play for kids. And I feel like the idea of play is to expand our imagination and that means it's understanding or getting to things that we've never thought about before. And so if it's things that we haven't thought about yet or things that still have to come to be, then there's really no way that we could structure it or that we can put parameters around it, because we're all trying to learn and understand deeper, understand different things through how kids might play.

Nathan Holbert:
I want to respond to that because remember we talk about this a little bit in our episode about role playing games, that structure and constraints can be actually super generative.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Right.

Nathan Holbert:
Right. And so the idea of having some series of activities that are kind of structured or a set of choices for the player to make, that's not necessarily a bad thing and that's also not necessarily counter to the idea of play. This what if game has a very clear structure, right?

Haeny Yoon:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Nathan Holbert:
We take something that exists, we take certain characters, we take certain histories and we ask if we change a feature and then what happens? That's a totally structured game. Oftentimes in schools we sort of do things because they're "fun," but they're not actually meaningful in any way. They're sort of these one off experiences. And so I'm kind of conflicted in some ways here, because I love people just being able to play for the sake of play. And I think, to your point about early childhood education, a lot of the value in play is some of this imagination and some of this asking what if and some of this exploration and hypothesis generation type stuff. But I also think that just trying to shine something up or just putting a bell and a whistle on something so that it sounds more fun or it seems more playful, is actually kind of screwed up too. I don't know what to do with it.

Haeny Yoon:
Oh my gosh, Nathan, okay. No, I feel like that's a really good point because now I'm thinking two things from that. The first one is that I was just talking to someone about how, remember when you were a teacher, when you were in second grade, you had to make a circuit and it was so fun. That you put a wire through potato and put it in a battery and then you make it light up or whatever, but that you had no idea at the end of it.

Nathan Holbert:
What the hell you've done and why?

Haeny Yoon:
How circuits work. Yeah. And then I feel like the second thing I was thinking about was speculative fiction is also a social justice movement. It's not just about writing an alternative future. It's also to like dream up new futures. There is something that has... there's work that gets done in it which also disrupts the idea of what plan work are.So it's always like hard to define these things, but I think you're right. There is definitely something, if you're trying to accomplish something that just being fun is not enough. There has to be more to it.

Nathan Holbert:
Well maybe my beef here is really with just about how we define what the goals are, right?

Haeny Yoon:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Nathan Holbert:
Like if the activity is we're going to do an activity that is using some wires and batteries and potatoes and lights and things to do something cool. And if the goal of that is to engage kids in following instructions to build an artifact, or to explore the ways in which electricity might work or what an electricity might be able to do, that's kind of cool. You could do some pretty... That's a fine activity and that could be fun if your goal is, ah, this will teach them about electricity. You're sort of just lying to yourself.

Haeny Yoon:
So as we continue our discussion about speculative practice and speculative futures, we thought we'd invite our lovely guest. Who's wearing a Batman sweatshirt right now, Michael Dando to talk with us about what if and not just what if the show, but also what if and possibilities. So Mike, do you want to introduce yourself and tell us why you're qualified to talk to us today?

Micheal Dando:
You know what I can do the first part. Hi everybody, my name's Mike Dando. I am an assistant professor of English at St. Cloud state university in St. Cloud, Minnesota, where I work with secondary teachers, English teachers to be precise, middle school and high school teachers. I'm also an education researcher and I spend most of my time studying the intersection of pop culture, particularly comics and hip hop education and democratic engagement. So, particularly critical literacy development and multimodal literacies. So, I spend a lot of time asking what if we did it this way? What if we like... So I spend most of my time thinking about these types of speculative questions, plus I'm a giant nerd, but I look at the ways kids read the word and the world through the things that they are interested in, the stories they tell, the media they create, the media they consume. And not how that's used to teach, but what that teaches inherently. So I look at hiphop culture and comics, and there's a deep interaction and link between the two.

Nathan Holbert:
Can you give an example that you were saying that you use these things not to teach, but to help us understand teaching and learning? Can you give an example, like maybe with comics, what does that look like?

Micheal Dando:
I learned about the social contract from Spider-Man, because with great power must also come great responsibility. That's not like, I'm going to teach my kids about... I need to teach my kids about John Locke and enlightenment philosophy. Why would I do that? I know Peter Parker, it's in there already.

Haeny Yoon:
I guess in a nutshell, would you say that that's kind of what you mean by critical literacy is the idea of the tools of literacy to mobilize some kind of agency, right. For-

Micheal Dando:
Right. Exactly. I like what you said.

Nathan Holbert:
We're kind of talking about the playfulness of this activity. I'm kind of curious as an expert in these areas. Can you say a little bit about this game of what if and how it's been played in sort of comics and comic culture over the years? Is this like a new thing or is this like...

Micheal Dando:
And one thing I think that's... When we talk about mobilizing agency, I just want to put a pin in this here real quick is this idea of, we look at ways that kids already know that they're very... Students already know that they're very powerful and they have the capacity to make decisions for themselves and about themselves, they're experts in their own lives. But they don't often get to do that in a classroom space, we'll call it traditional classroom space. So if we're to ask the question, well what is mobilizing agency mean? It means taking that thing that exists and letting it rip. And not just manufacturing consent. It's not like pick a book off this list. That's not choice. That's not agency. All right, kids, you could pick five of these books. They're all dead white guys. Like that's not it.

Micheal Dando:
We talking about mobilizing agency. It's supporting our students in taking up and taking action for themselves to create, to speculate as Haeny was talking about. A better world, like to imagine and then envision a better world and then follow that through. So, that's what comics does. That's what comics does period. This is kind of what I was talking about with hip hop too, hip hop wasn't invented by grownups. Wait, it wasn't invented by record producers, it was invented by children who were making something out of nothing that were what if we could do something else with these records? What if we all got together and hung out? So hip hop in and of itself is a speculative thing. What happens if I touch the record and wiggle it, oh, it makes an amazing sound. And I can actually use that and then now we're talking bricolage, but a 14 year olds doing it. Which we don't necessarily think about, at least I don't, or I haven't in the past. I don't think about that automatically as the kids are incredibly powerful. The question is, what if we recognize that?

Haeny Yoon:
I mean, I was just thinking about your answer to the thing about power, which I loved, because it kind of annoys me when people talk about giving power to kids. Because there's no power that you have to give, because they're already powerful. It's the conditions that are around it that make it impossible for them to engage or initiate or use that. So it's not giving kids power because they already have it, but it's mobilizing it. Trying to find the conditions or the platforms or the genres that kind of bring that to life.

Micheal Dando:
So yeah, when we create... The speculative question, I think Heany that's important is what if we created those conditions where students could engage in culturally authentic practice, culturally sustaining practices? What do those conditions look like? Why are they important? How are they created? Why don't they exist? These are all speculative questions because we're imagining forward. And in some ways we're.... We're not just imagining forward. We're hoping forward.

Nathan Holbert:
Oftentimes in creative work, a set of rules that we construct or a set of constraints that we put in play to be creative and to be generative from. And so I'm wondering for you, as somebody who is an English professor who spends a lot of time with teachers who are learning to become teachers and in the classroom. What are some of those rules? What are some of those constraints that we might see that's part of being generative about speculative work?

Micheal Dando:
The rules are socially constructed. This is not me being glibber flippant. But because they are so socialized, they become invisible and it's our job to render them visible alongside our students. I'll say, look at the Avengers, even the green guys white. Do you know what I mean? I'm like, oh, I didn't think about it like that before. It's important I think to understand, not that there are no rules, but that the rules are what you make them, if that makes sense. Phenome talks about this, it's when you imagine, you don't just imagine from a blank slate. You have those things, but it's knowing what the ingredients are, you can remix them. And so when you are able to articulate what the rules are, then you can change the game. I guess that's the best way I can put it.

Nathan Holbert:
What I want to do is I want to sort of tease out the difference between teachers or educators or systems. It didn't have to be in a classroom. Sort of dictate top down, here's what play should look like, or here's what this activity has to look like. Versus the fact that look, when we watch kids playing, they're also following rules, they're rules that maybe they even invented or they've sort of, as you said, socially kind of constructed together, but they're emergent and they sometimes emerge through the kind of existing norms of a genre. Sometimes they emerge through kind of a dynamic interaction between the people that are involved in the game. But I think so, I think you're speaking of that here. I think that's a really important point is distinguish between those two things.

Haeny Yoon:
Not everything has to just proof come out of thin air and I think sometimes we think the most creative play is the one that just comes out of nowhere. We're just like sitting in the corner, imagining something. But sometimes really creative play can come from tools, and design, and structures or material that's actually out there. And I think about that with like speculative fiction or, in this case, the what if idea? And the what if series. That it's the materials and the tools that have been out there that help us imagine and reconstruct.

Micheal Dando:
When we look at speculative fiction and the what if, it's understanding, and this is a very, there's a West African concept called Sankofa. S-A-N-K-O-F-A, that means go back and get it, or roughly translated. It means go back and get it. Means the past informs the present, which directs the future. And that is a, it's okay. It's good. It's necessary to do. Especially, and this is kind of, I feel a lot in Afrofuturism too and Mark Dery talked about this and he said for lack of a better term Afrofuturism kind of questions, can people whose past have been stolen, how do and how might and how can they, I'm paraphrasing, can they envision a future? And that's an important thing. That's a difference between robots, like the Jetsons is not, I mean, it's speculative, but it's also not what we're talking about.

Nathan Holbert:
That was fantastic.

Micheal Dando:
Was great.

Nathan Holbert:
I thoroughly enjoyed it and that's what matters. So, we want to play like we do with all of our guests, we want to play a little game here. And I felt like in honor of this week's episode of what if, I wanted to kind of ask you Mike and Haeny as well, a couple kind of, what if questions. In sort of a superhero themed setting. So, I'm going to give you a question. I'm going to give you a couple options and I'd love to sort of hear your thoughts. All right. So we'll start out with you, Mike. Okay. So first question, I know you've got two wonderful children. What if you were looking for someone to watch your kids for a couple hours on a Saturday night, who would you choose? Would you choose Bruce Banner? Who we also know, as the Hulk. Ororo Munroe, Storm? Peter Parker, our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man or Kamala Khan, Ms. Marvel?

Micheal Dando:
Storm.

Nathan Holbert:
Why?

Micheal Dando:
Oh and why?

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Micheal Dando:
Cause she could make it rain and then they could run through the sprinkles. One, she makes a rainbow, kids are crying, she's like, what's up.

Haeny Yoon:
Very practical reason.

Micheal Dando:
I know my kids and I know if you can distract them, then they'll be fine. They're like angry and they're like, look at rainbow. And they're like, oh, nice. They get that from me. So, I would go Storm, but also she's the leader of the X-men so, she has to make teams work together, especially grumpy. My kids, not unlike Wolverine and other ones kind of like Cyclops. She asks, okay, you two have to get together on this one.

Nathan Holbert:
So this is one more question for both of you and in classic sort of what if style, can you name a moment you turned left instead of right this past year where you think your superhero origin story began?

Haeny Yoon:
This is a great question. Okay. So here's my turning point is, I was like, it was maybe, I don't know when it was, when I decided this, maybe it was the summer or something. And I ended up teaching this course on contemporary childhoods. It was just a really cool class with a bunch of really interesting, cool people. And I think that's where the idea of a memory and pop culture project came about. And so I feel like if I didn't do that, I would never have gone down this road and that would never have come into being. And I feel like that's the thing that's been taking over my whole life these last few months. Is to talk with people about pop culture and memory and childhood and it's been really fun.

Micheal Dando:
I think it was for me the decision and I was really, really fortunate to be able to, because we're in a pandemic, still are. And to say, I think we're going to go... They gave me an option of going virtual or going try it in person. And I think making the call to go virtual, even when I had the option to like, hey, you can go in person if you want. I think that really changed the trajectory of the year. I don't want to be a downer, but not only did I learn how to use zoom, but my students they kept showing up. They showed up in different ways of course.

Micheal Dando:
We engaged in kind and of different practices. I started a podcast called Comics School because I teach a course on comics and it's called the rhetorics of popular culture. And instead of doing lectures, I just switched to a podcast format. That was a pretty significant thing for me in terms of practice and being technologically conversant in zoom allowed me to be able to participate in, I wasn't freaked out at conferences or those digital spaces because I was, except for one who I won't, there was one disaster, but it wasn't my fault and we still ended up on zoom.

Haeny Yoon:
Okay, so Mike, what we like to do at the end of our show is to talk about what's popping because this is a podcast about the importance and the idea of pop culture and play in our own lives. And so we like to end with what's popping in pop culture. Like, what are you watching? What are you engaging with, with the world out there that you're really excited about right now or into?

Micheal Dando:
Everybody go see Shang-Chi, come back, finish the episode, but do that now. And I mean that sincerely, it is not just because that character in particular is one of my favorites or one of the most interesting of all time. But I think that it represents a significant paratematic shift in how we tell stories and about whom and for whom and through whom and with whom and all that kind of stuff. I think that the more people you get in a space to tell stories often times the better, and especially when those voices have been just invited. And by that, I mean that they've been perhaps present, but not foregrounded. So it's just like, oh, look, we have representation.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah right.

Nathan Holbert:
Right.

Haeny Yoon:
Nathan, what about you? What's popping.

Nathan Holbert:
Well, I'm going to stick with our kind of theme this episode and tell you that I have been playing and just absolutely loving the Spider-Man Miles Morales video game. And let me just briefly tell you the reason this game is so fun is, I've never played a video game that made me feel exactly like, even as a player that made me feel exactly like the character, the swinging through the city is the most delightful experience. The character true to the characters of Peter Parker and Miles Morales are both so joyful. You hear them as they're swinging going woo hoo. Yeah. Sort shouting as they're swinging through the city and so while you're playing it, you feel like you are also swinging through the city and you feel like you're also just having this delightful, joyful experience.

Nathan Holbert:
It's so fun. Everyone should try to play it at some point, find a friend that has a PlayStation. The New York itself is relatively accurate. They change a couple things, but you can swing up onto the dome of Columbia University and you can just hang out there for a little while and then hop down and people are like, "Hey, Spider-Man, how's it going?" and they'll take a little selfie with you. It's so great. That's what I'm into. What about you, Amy? What's popping for you right now?

Haeny Yoon:
I was trying to think of something like on the fly, but I'm just going to say the last thing I've been watching so mine's Gossip Girl and I realize that I'm building a certain kind of persona on this podcast. So then I watch Gossip Girl, and then they did a... It's not a reboot, it's sort of like a re, it's almost speculative. Okay. I'm just going to call it this speculative version of Gossip Girl. And what I really like about it is not just the drama, but they have a lot of queer characters. They have different kinds of gender fluidity. They have all kinds of different sorts of, it's not just about popular rich kids, but it's really about the ideas percolating at the surface and at the bottom at, at a deeper level on it so, that's how I'm going to intellectualize Gossip Girl.

Haeny Yoon:
I feel like it's a great show and the questions that made me think of, it made me think of the what if questions? Like what if when gossip girl was on the original one, like even just 10 years ago, that there were more queer representation? What if there were more gender fluid characters in it? What if there were relationships that were not heteronormative? Would it have been different a lot or sooner and how media kind of shaped some of that?

Nathan Holbert:
That's interesting. Cause I've not seen the new one at all, but I've seen bits here and there of the old one and-

Haeny Yoon:
Oh, you know you've been watching it straight through the [crosstalk 00:25:37]

Nathan Holbert:
Hey listen, I would tell you. I know that this is a safe space for that. That is awesome. Mike, thank you so much for being here with us today, helping us think through speculative fiction and speculative practices and bringing your extensive knowledge about comics and hip hop to this conversation. It's been really, really fun.

Micheal Dando:
It was so much fun, thank you for in inviting me to be a part of this. The work y'all do is just phenomenal and important and fun. And those, when you get a space that's all three of those. It's something special. So thanks for having me on.

Haeny Yoon:
Aww, thanks Mike.

Nathan Holbert:
It's been seven hours, but I'm sure there's 10 minutes in there that we can use.

Micheal Dando:
Thanks and a half.

Haeny Yoon:
Pop and Play is produced by Haney Yoon, Nathan Holbert, Lalitha Vasudevan and Joe Riina-Ferrie at Teachers College, Columbia University with the Digital Futures Institute.

Nathan Holbert:
This episode was edited by Jen Lee, Lucius Von Joo, and Billy Collins. For a transcript and to learn more, visit tc.edu/popandplay. Our music is selections from Leafeaters by Podington Bear used here under a creative common's attribution non-commercial license.

Haeny Yoon: This episode was assistant produced by Lucius Von Joo.

Nathan Holbert: Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.