"Take me to your leader", truants and the classroom as a space between things.

Whenever I watch those “take me to you leader” science fiction movies I am less worried by the essentially bipedal nature of the aliens than I am by the large number of kids in the crowd scenes who must obviously be truanting from school.

You have just got to know that if aliens landed in New Zealand between the hours of 8.30am to 3.30pm they wouldn’t realise that earthlings in New Zealand had a nymph form at all – all our 5 to 18 year olds are shut away in classrooms – the irony in this sequestering of our young is that we shut them away from the outside world in classrooms so that they can learn about the world outside the classroom.

I have always argued - that a significant weakness of doing all our teaching and learning in schools and classrooms is their very isolation from the real – I believe that one of the reasons schools cannot ever deliver what they promise in terms of learning what it is to be human is because of their disconnect from the real. Our schools are places identified in part by their isolation and the way they remove a large chunk of the 5 to 18 year olds in society from everyday life between the hours of 8 to 4pm each day.

I like having the things I hold most dear shaken and undermined by new thought. Which is why I am enjoying Sherry Turkle’s start up essay in The Inner History of Devices.

Turkle’s essay looks at the relationship between an ethographer and the subject. In exploring this relationship she refers to Virginia Woolf’s description of “the writer’s space’ as “a room of one’s own.”

I am always looking out for metaphors that help me understand teaching and learning. If learning at school is all about learning how to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of our own thinking about the curriculum of what it is to be human, then there is something in Woolf’s “room of one’s own” sentiment, that might help me better understand how classrooms might work.

“In its safety and containment, writers open themselves to the kind of reflection, [.... ] where feelings don’t conform to a predetermined script.” Turkle The Inner History of Devices P6

“Safety” and “containment” are good descriptors for the physical classrooms we have dotted across the country. And providing learning experiences that encourage students to reflect upon their learning in a way that does not “conform to a predetermined script” seems a worthy endeavour.

Turkle develops Woolf’s idea further when she describes psychoanalysis as needing

“a space between things,” “a space that is “transitional,” a space removed from everyday life; it is a liminal space located between things. There, relationships are not based on time worn hierarchies but develop in new meaning filled encounters.” Turkle p6

This confronts and undermines my thinking. For Turkle argues that a space removed from everyday life is essential for relationships to develop - in meaning filled encounters between ethnographer and subject.

Can I extend this argument for a space removed from everyday life to classroom spaces where relationships can develop – in meaningful encounters between teacher and student/s?

I was interested in Turkle’s description of how an ethnographer creates environments where “what is there can emerge” and in thinking how this differs from what we do as teachers in classroom environments.

Turkle emphasises that

“Ethnography is not a passive practice; understanding the experience of others demands active listening. Nor are ethnographers trying to get something out of their subjects through clever questioning. They are trying to create an environment where what is there can emerge.”

Active listening versus “telling,” and getting rid of all that initiation elaboration response teacher clever questioning – now that would be an interesting change in classrooms.

I have to think about this more deeply because developing meaning filled encounters is such a sought after outcome in classrooms.

P.S. Turkle’s distancing from the real reminds me of Sidorkin’s dialogue thinking. I have always loved Sidorkin’s argument for a removal from the real in his three wine dialogue theory where wine allows deep conversation and dialogue by removing the individual from group identity.

The first drink conversations establish a group, they provide “a common text, a shared experience, an initial conversational event. ….It establishes a common set of references, a shared language for the following conversations.”

The second drink conversations occur when individuals within the group “…. challenge, deconstruct, actively agree or disagree with it, they commend and ridicule. We understand things by breaking them, turning them upside down, taking a bite, or dissolving with saliva—literally with edible objects, figuratively with texts. The idea is to enmesh the self into the text, to break down the whole, to salvage whatever is left from a common meaning for individual sense-making. We understand by trying to co-author the text, to interpret it, and to offer our interpretations to those with whom we listened together. “

By the third drink – the conversations see individuals escaping the group identity “People take things lightly, they give up on convincing each other, they talk with their emotions, while often pretending to make sense of each other. …Talking nonsense, and having a good laugh about it is obviously better than endless discussions and polarization of opinions. When people miss the third drink phase, their conversation ceases to be a source of happiness, and becomes a beginning of their misery. For different opinions to coexist, there needs to be a nurturing broth of a carnival, where all things seem to be possible, and all become laughable.”

There is obviously more to creating space between things than I first thought.