I would like to begin by saying that I had never heard the term "affordance" prior to this class.
Now after our Thursday chat on affordances may moons ago I had a general idea of what affordances were, but I set out to learn more about this new term and then find a way to us this new knowledge to think about my classroom and lessons in a different way (the main goal of our class, in my opinion). Through completing the readings I'd say that I succeeded in this, but in an interesting way.
We Can't Afford It was the reading that helped me understand the definition of an affordance the most. Now Gibson's definition says that affordances are "the properties of the environment with respect to an organism." So they are what an environment offers an animal, a sort of "potential energy". The terminology that helped me understand this the most explained that when speaking of affordances, we often use the suffix of "-ability". This clicked for me because it took me back to my days in Linguistics 200 learning about morphology (the study of word formation).
Warning: the information in the following three paragraphs appears slightly irrelevant to the overall topic of the blog, but I will explain.
Morphology teaches you to break apart a word and analyze each of its parts to determine its overall meaning. For example: the word "unlockable" has three morphemes, which afford (testing out my new vocab word) two possible meanings. Let's explore "unlockable" one meaning at a time.
The root of the word is obviously "lock": lock (verb) - the act of securing something. The order in which you add the morphemes alters the overall meaning of the word. To arrive at the first meaning, we will begin by adding the prefix "un-", a prefix indicating negation: unlock (verb) - the opposite of securing something. Then we add our suffix "-able", indicating ability: unlockable (adjective) - able to be unlocked.
Now meaning number two: our root is still "lock" but this time we will begin by adding the suffix: lockable (adjective) - able to be locked. Now we add the prefix: unlockable (adjective) - unable to be locked.
Did you follow that? If you didn't, that brings me to my next realization of affordances.
Now Gibson's Theory also mentions that one object doesn't always have the same affordances for everyone. Let's use the article "Socializing Affordances" as an example. This article, although surely packed with information, did not afford my comprehension. The reason behind this is the vocabulary that the article used. The article was largely based on social psychology and as a linguistics major, it was very overwhelming. The article affords the transference of knowledge but whether or not that information is actually transferred depends on the person reading it.
Where am I going with this? Well the first article made sense to me because it used vocabulary I was familiar with, whereas the other was unable to convey its message because of its vocabulary. Similarly, my rambling about morphology may have been a little overwhelming for someone who doesn't have a background in Linguistics.
What I will take away from these readings is the importance of choosing appropriate readings for my students. I imagine that reading about a topic you are unfamiliar with or uninterested in would become exponentially harder to comprehend when it is in a foreign language. Therefore readings that cover topics that already interest my students, or that they already have prior knowledge about, will best facilitate their comprehension. This realization may sound silly but I do often use Spanish news articles or Wikipedia pages in my classroom activities, and I will now pay a lot more attention to the topics I choose.
"Just as surfaces are stand-on-able and sit-on-able so also are they fall-off-able"
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