Monday Forces Me to Confront Serendipity
Jan. 20th, 2025 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI keep trying to figure one thing out, and then learning very tangentially related things that lend powerful insight and add major information to longstanding questions. 2025 is apparently all about Serendipity Stalking Me. Good luck out there. It’s not good enough to be careful what you wish for. Serendipity may come for you as well.
Today, the dead bird delivered to my doorstep (metaphorically) by my very much undomesticated feline Serendipity (these are all metaphors) was the phrase “curricular hoarding”. Here’s what happened.
R.’s cousin H. sent me a YouTube link which I will not be sharing here. It was a fairly long cleaning video, about how to help clean and organize houses of people with ADHD. Emphasis was on crating in clear plastic, not moving things far from where they are found, only throwing out clear trash (candy wrapper type stuff) and storing Like with Like (all women’s shirts together). The person who does the video identifies as autistic and I don’t doubt them. I found it all quite relatable, and a more recent one about “autistic depression” with less heavy editing of the voice (to remove pauses) was even more so. I hit the subscribe button, which is rare for me. That was last night.
This morning, H. and I discussed the video, and then I did a little research online to try to find someone who did similar work but who was not located in the Midwest. And inadvertently, I learned a bunch of stuff about the deep online history of this creator that made me go over, hit the unsubscribe button, and share a reddit link with H.
So then I sat with it for a minute, mildly annoyed that here was something that on the surface was so relatable and appealing about hoarding and autism and ADHD, and yet the person producing it was so problematic, I could not trust the content at all. And then I thought, PubMed! I love PubMed, mostly because it’s got a really great search engine and so much of what one reaches through PubMed is findable in full text form (either there, or draft elsewhere or whatever). I searched on hoarding, and the first result to pop up is Romanelli’s 2020 piece on curricular hoarding. Not even remotely what I was in search of. BUT!
We have so many complicated tools and tasks that did not used to exist, and we need time and space to learn and teach them. But if we just stack them on top of all the old stuff, we won’t be learning or teaching anything very well. And THAT is what curricular hoarding is about. I think. But wow, it is super hard to find anything out there about it that isn’t in pharmacy education land.
Romanelli’s work is specific to pharmacy education (you can see why it is critical over there). What I want to know is how long has this phrase been in use with this meaning. Academics are people and many people are pretty insightful, so presumably, some academics have been aware of this problem and concerned about it for a while, right?
From 2013:
https://www.ohio.edu/sites/default/files/sites/faculty-senate/files/Process%20for%20Offering%20Approved%20Undergraduate%20Programs.pdf
“WHEREAS Ohio University's move to Responsibility-centered Management (RCM)
includes a robust role for UCC in monitoring and preventing inappropriate program and
course duplications and curricular hoarding;1”
The “1” refers to:
1 See the draft "Responsibility Centered Management Academic Quality Indicators" at
http://www.ohio.edu/provost/rcm/manage/upload/Draft-Academic-Quality-Indicators.pdf
It’s not at that location, but let’s go find it and see what Serendipity hits me with next!
ETA:
I finished Your Table Is Ready. It’ll make for an interesting book group discussion altho it might be one of those where everyone but me DNF’d it.
Today, the dead bird delivered to my doorstep (metaphorically) by my very much undomesticated feline Serendipity (these are all metaphors) was the phrase “curricular hoarding”. Here’s what happened.
R.’s cousin H. sent me a YouTube link which I will not be sharing here. It was a fairly long cleaning video, about how to help clean and organize houses of people with ADHD. Emphasis was on crating in clear plastic, not moving things far from where they are found, only throwing out clear trash (candy wrapper type stuff) and storing Like with Like (all women’s shirts together). The person who does the video identifies as autistic and I don’t doubt them. I found it all quite relatable, and a more recent one about “autistic depression” with less heavy editing of the voice (to remove pauses) was even more so. I hit the subscribe button, which is rare for me. That was last night.
This morning, H. and I discussed the video, and then I did a little research online to try to find someone who did similar work but who was not located in the Midwest. And inadvertently, I learned a bunch of stuff about the deep online history of this creator that made me go over, hit the unsubscribe button, and share a reddit link with H.
So then I sat with it for a minute, mildly annoyed that here was something that on the surface was so relatable and appealing about hoarding and autism and ADHD, and yet the person producing it was so problematic, I could not trust the content at all. And then I thought, PubMed! I love PubMed, mostly because it’s got a really great search engine and so much of what one reaches through PubMed is findable in full text form (either there, or draft elsewhere or whatever). I searched on hoarding, and the first result to pop up is Romanelli’s 2020 piece on curricular hoarding. Not even remotely what I was in search of. BUT!
We have so many complicated tools and tasks that did not used to exist, and we need time and space to learn and teach them. But if we just stack them on top of all the old stuff, we won’t be learning or teaching anything very well. And THAT is what curricular hoarding is about. I think. But wow, it is super hard to find anything out there about it that isn’t in pharmacy education land.
Romanelli’s work is specific to pharmacy education (you can see why it is critical over there). What I want to know is how long has this phrase been in use with this meaning. Academics are people and many people are pretty insightful, so presumably, some academics have been aware of this problem and concerned about it for a while, right?
From 2013:
https://www.ohio.edu/sites/default/files/sites/faculty-senate/files/Process%20for%20Offering%20Approved%20Undergraduate%20Programs.pdf
“WHEREAS Ohio University's move to Responsibility-centered Management (RCM)
includes a robust role for UCC in monitoring and preventing inappropriate program and
course duplications and curricular hoarding;1”
The “1” refers to:
1 See the draft "Responsibility Centered Management Academic Quality Indicators" at
http://www.ohio.edu/provost/rcm/manage/upload/Draft-Academic-Quality-Indicators.pdf
It’s not at that location, but let’s go find it and see what Serendipity hits me with next!
ETA:
I finished Your Table Is Ready. It’ll make for an interesting book group discussion altho it might be one of those where everyone but me DNF’d it.