Tess Tanenbaum
- About
- Education
Biography
Dr. Theresa Jean Tanenbaum (“Tess” – she/fae) is a songwriter, scholar, speaker, poet, performer, storyteller, game designer, artist, activist, and practicing witch.
Current Courses
481Advanced Topics In Creative Technologies: Civic Engagement
Teaching Interests & Areas
I come from a nontraditional educational background, and I have carried the values and methods I learned there into my university teaching. The first pedagogical model that really allowed me to thrive was the self-directed learning context at the Johnston Center for Integrative Learning, where I completed my bachelor’s degree. Johnston’s unique approach to collaborative and negotiated pedagogy allowed me to find ways to adapt my courses to fit my needs and interests, but, more importantly, it taught me the importance of allowing students to take ownership of their own learning. I believe that students are most successful when they have input into the learning process.
To this end, I employ an "Ungrading" model in my teaching. Grades, in my experience are fundamentally inequitable, something I address directly in my syllabi: “Grading and hierarchical assessments are rooted in a kind of colonialist neoliberal mentality that is inherently unfair, ableist, normative, and contrary to the values that we will see articulated within the course materials. Grades, by their nature, cannot be decolonized or made to be more inclusive to the degree that I would like. Grading also relies upon the idea that every student is arriving at the course with the same degree of life experience and understanding of the topic, that each student has the same goals for the course, and that every student is able to learn at the same pace from the same activities and materials. It is normative in ways that are fundamentally counter to many of the ideas we will encounter in this class. For these reasons I encourage you to approach your grade in this class with a healthy degree of skepticism, and to focus your efforts instead on setting your own goals for the course and your learning within it.”
While I had some fears that these this approach might be met with resistance and anxiety from my students, instead many have embraced it, and I have seen students thrive under this model. As an educator I’ve found ungrading to be an especially powerful way to understand how my teaching fits into the lives of my students.
Research Interests & Areas
Dr. Tanenbaum’s work is playful, provocative, and interdisciplinary, frequently straddling the line between art, design, research, and activism. In her work she seeks to create possibilities for social and individual change, using participatory narrative to highlight how the identities that we inhabit in the world are contingent and negotiated. These experiences of transformative play create possibility models that are emancipatory, allowing oppressed and marginalized people to inhabit new identities that create possibilities where there were none before and reclaim power and agency denied to them
She recently left a tenured position as an Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine where she was a founding member of the Transformative Play Lab. Her most recent book on Playful Wearable Technologies, co-authored with Katherine Isbister, Elena Marquez-Segura, Ella Dagan, and Oguz Burak, was released by The MIT Press in early 2024. Her most recent album, Emotional Regulation, released under the artist name Moth Mother in October 2024, was written in response to the proliferation of anti-LGBTQ+ policies around the globe.
Tess’s current work is informed by faer intersecting identities as a queer, Jewish, polyamorous, disabled, neurodivergent, transgender woman, living in the rural Midwest where she owns and operates Moth Mother Studios. On any given day fae might be found writing (music, poetry, games, speculative fiction, memoir, or scholarship), working with faer hands, caring for animals, throwing pots, practicing circus arts, or hanging spooky mobiles from tree branches in her woods. Having cut herself free from the institutional demands of academia she is increasingly disinterested in boundaries, boxes, or categories when it comes to what she creates. The project currently animating faer is The Transition Diary: an autobiographical musical that fae wrote about marriage, gender transition, and self-discovery during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Her forthcoming game, Alchemist's Ink, is a handcrafted boutique analog gaming experience for four players that combines ritual, gameplay, theater, and narrative. Players draw magical tattoos on themselves and each other using a black walnut ink that she brewed on the winter solstice out of nuts that she foraged from her land.
Dr. Tanenbaum has been instrumental in helping create new, more inclusive, policies within the academic publishing world that make it possible for people to correct their names on previously published scholarship. In 2020 she co- founded the Name Change Policy Working Group to support other transgender people in advocating for inclusive identity policies within publishing and beyond. She has worked with Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the ACM, SAGE, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, and many other publishers to develop identity practices in publishing that safeguard the privacy of transgender authors seeking to update their scholarly records to reflect their correct names.