What calls for thinking

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What calls for thinking

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the passage below is from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, originally published in 1916. In describing the elementary school experience of its protagonist, Stephen Daedelus, it highlights some of the routinized aspects of classroom activity:

A voice from far out on the playground cried:
-All in!
And other voices cried:
-All in! All in!
During the writing lesson he sat with his arms folded, listening to the slow scraping of the pens. Mr Harford went to and fro making little signs in red pencil and sometimes sitting beside the boy to show him how to hold his pen. [Stephen] had tried to spell out the headline for himself though he knew already what it was for it was the last of the book. ZEAL WITHOUT PRUDENCE IS LIKE A SHIP ADRIFT. But the lines of the letters were like fine invisible threads and it was only by closing his right eye tight and staring out of the left eye that he could make out the full curves of the capital. (Joyce, 1997, p. 37)

Routine and order pervade the time and space of this classroom: A call of "all in" brings the students into the classroom. At a pre-determined time, students are taken from one clearly defined space (the playground) to another (the classroom). The space of the classroom, as Joyce later indicates, is one that is ordered in rows, overseen from the head by the teacher (Mr. Hartford). Once at their places in the classroom, students are expected to engage in a highly focused activity: The work of writing in which students copy down sentences, and in so doing, learn how to form letters and also how to hold their pens. The interface or relational strategy here --the visual and motor space that is opened up for the writing student-- are constituted by page, pen, book and desk.

The body in Joyce's description is foregrounded in a number of significant ways. The arrangement of page, pen, ink and desk requires particular embodied comportment and even discipline: Students are required to sit still in their rows of desks, and to apply themselves to the physical and intellectual task at hand. The reason that the protagonist views this earnest activity as a passive onlooker in the description above is because his glasses had been broken in the playground. It is also in this connection that the dimension of lived body becomes important: Stephen’s experience here is of a person who is largely excluded from the space of the text and of writing because of a significant (albeit temporary) bodily handicap. He can only make out the most obvious letters or shapes when he squints.

CLASS BLOGS

A list, for quick reference.

Brenton: http://hermenwho.blogspot.com/

Judy: http://plarblog.blogspot.com/

Merilee: http://nigglingquestion.blogspot.com

Susan F. http://phenomenologicalinquiry.blogspot.com/

Gloria: http://infoglo.wordpress.com/

Terryl: http://phenomenologicalpresence.blogspot.com/

Iris: http://sednastories.blogspot.com/

Susan S: http://iam4summer.blogspot.com

The Experience of Pedagogical Openness, by Sandra Wilde

Beyond simply saying that the question of this article is clear from the title (“what is the experience of pedagogical openness?”), it is kind of challenging to be more specific: The focus of this short but thoughtful and provocative article is clearly on younger children, and on pedagogy in a broad sense, as it is practiced by parents, care-givers and teachers. So the question could be expanded to ask more specifically: “what is the experience of pedagogical openness in infants and younger children” (as opposed to youth or “students” generally). Phrasing the question in this way also helps to point to a paradox that the article raises only implicitly: It says that children are particularly “open” in that they can be spontaneous, living in the present, rather than being preoccupied by the past or planning for the future. But at the same time, it also says that children are in a sense closed, concealing a “life unseen, the other side of the world’s wholeness, the world yet to be revealed” (Smith, 1984, as quoted by Wilde). The child, in other words, is open, but also much about the child is hidden, keeping a large part of his/her experience (and what it needed for our own “wholeness”) concealed, to be revealed only at some point in the future. Unfortunately, the author does not seem to notice this tension.

The author DOES give significant attention, however, to the theme or the existential dimension of time, and does so in a way that was revealing for me. She observes how the experience of time in connection with pedagogical openness is one where the present “dilates”, and the past and (particularly) the future shrink in their importance. Quoting the French philosopher Helene Cixous, she says that in this experience of openness “time is not what goes by but what stays, what *opens* itself.” One is not engaged in an attempt to achieve some future outcome for oneself and for the child (e.g. to make an aggressive child less physical, to quickly put a crying baby back to sleep), but to dwell in and share the child’s present situation. In this context, the child is no longer seen as a “pain” or a “problem” --requiring “relief” or a “solution”—in a situation external from the adult. Instead, the adult enters into the present of the child by “suffering-with” him or her, and this allows the adult to approach the child in a rather different way. The author gives an example of how it enabled a teacher to see one child’s aggressive behaviour not as his or her problem seeking a solution, but as something that is effectively beyond the child, much larger than any technique of reinforcement or control would ever allow.

I’ve been studying the question of openness in online and offline pedagogical contexts, and I now see from this article how openness requires a disruption of our usual task-oriented or “future-oriented” time-frames: in which the present is (in a sense) sacrificed to the future, and the eventual realization of a goal (mundane or grandiose) in a few hours or a few months. It requires that we stop, and take the time to become attuned to someone here and now, not to what we want them to be (or to achieve ourselves) in the future.

Let me conclude by quoting a passage from the paper that’s not quite an anecdote, but that (with some more specificity) could be developed in that direction:

I can recall instances of parenting when the children and myself were tired and cranky, when my first impulse was to run from the situation. Sometimes I would desperately pack the children into the car and set off to fill our time with something distracting, like a trip to the zoo. Sometimes, this seemed to work. But if I was running from what really was needed, we would just end up cranky and overtired at the zoo and things would only get worse. Maybe I unknowingly hoped that the zoo activity would take care of them so that I would not have to do the work. (A parent)

Blog Recycling

This blog, which I used the last time I taught EDUC 506 on special topics, is now being put to use for the 2010 version of EDUC 506: "Hermeneutic Phenomenological Research and Writing."

Look here for examples of my own "anecdotal" and reflective writing, and some of my own thoughts on the papers and work we discuss!