Artichoke

Institutionalised Immobility

“Institutionalised immobility of the spectator” is about to be reintroduced – school starts up tomorrow.

Students will be sorted, sequenced, sequestered by age (and in some cases gender and parental affluence) into government regulated, architecturally drab, spaces in places across the North and South Island.

The compelling claim that “Teaching is telling” and “Learning is listening” (Harpaz 2004) neglects, I think, the more recent and ubiquitous influence of “Teaching is screening” and “learning is looking”

Manovich’s counter cost to cinema’s “mobilized virtual gaze”, “Institutionalised immobility of the spectator” is all too real for student experience in 2005. They face hours, weeks and months of “institutionalized immobility” whether "interacting" with a computer screen or "listening" to a teacher.

Each year in the landscapes of eduspeak serious and serial meetings are called, focus groups gather, online communities connect, research is undertaken – well meaning reformers make action plans and bullet points for what is “accepted as necessary” and what is “imagined as possible”

The jargon is all -engage, motivate, excite, exhilarate, authenticate – the irony is that the sense of RE is quite lost from the REformers dialogue about student learning – lost from the consensual conversations about what we want them to learn.

In the recent past, and predictably the future recent we have imagined that the dynamic interactivity of the computer screen might rescue us from these interminable conversations and initiatives. But as Manovich (2001 p115) so eloquently argues –

“a screen is still a screen” …..

“As was the case centuries ago, we are still looking at a flat rectangular surface existing in the space of our body and acting as a window into another space.”

“We are still looking” “We are still looking” Yet we started learning from the first moist mucused moment of our Lowly Worm "oooch" out of the uterus. So what is going on in the institutions we have purpose built for learning? Why are we still struggling with creating learning communities?

I predict that whilst we remain helplessly predicated to the “institutionalised immobility of the spectator” paradigm we will not sort this. We need some thinking that can find the enduring understandings of human learning. Think back to when you last learned something worthwhile - What were the circumstances of this new learning? Compare these with the learning environments our young people will experience in classrooms tomorrow.

Reckon John Taylor Gatto is an excellent irritant to thinking about this issue -

“It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students' parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things.”

The rumble of wheels ... the howl of wolves.

Hear it in the radio, passion
Read it in the papers, passion
Hear it in the churches, passion
See it in the school yards, passion

Rod Stewart

I did “Read it in the papers” – Seems Rod’s lyrics have been elaborated in 2005 – Passion time is to be introduced into classrooms this year.

“OK listen up kids, for the next 55 minutes I want you to stop what you are doing and pursue your passion.” – In the next 55 minutes I will allow you, let me reframe that, I will mandate that you experience “Both hands are extended and then brought in toward the body while the fingers curl up” time. Passion Time - Works for me. - “Yeah Right.”

Manufacturing time for passion – allocating it a slot in the timetable –What will we think of next in our hapless pursuit of difference?

Take a moment to think of a time when your thoughts were captured by passion. Enjoy…enjoy …enjoy…. …..but, but, but not for too long.

Who allowed you passion?– Who told you the time that you should start passion and the time you had to finish?

Resettle your errant flights of whimsical desire and refocus - think about what this curriculum initiative is telling kids about the nature of passion.

Even if the time required for passion could be measured out and allocated throughout a timetable for teaching and learning, I am fascinated that we think it can it be extruded on demand and then capped like squeezing toothpaste.

Will it be a case of “Screw the cap on tighter Bernard – passion is leaking out around the edges?"

Don’t want to be portrayed as The ‘Determined Detractor’ or to be accused as a Seeker of Schadenfreud but do think this proposal worthy of a little thought before we recklessly implement.

If we tell the kids that this is the timetable slot for “passion time” what are we implying about the rest of the day – will we start the day with “ambivalence time” followed by “indifference time” before we break for morning tea. Perhaps pre-prandial study will involve moments of “inconsequential time” and a brief interlude of timetabled listlessness… arghhhh

If “voluntary manslaughter” is a killing done in the heat of passion provoked by acts of the victim such as to cause a reasonable man to act rashly and without reflection, then what is a timetabled moment of “voluntary learning”? - what is learning done in the heat of passion? Surely not rash learning, or learning without reflection.

Is possible that timetabled moments of passion, fervor, fire, zeal, and ardor [call it what you will] are intended to address the massive student disengagement with learning that afflicts and frustrates our attempts to educate. If this is the intent then wonder why our aspirations and expectations are so limited – should we not expect students to be passionate, to be engaged in learning throughout the day.

Suspect that “passion time” is an attempt to disguise Truman’s "There is nothing new in the world, except the history you do not know." dilemma of educational initiative - for what is “time to pursue a passion if not “Independent research”. Is simply yet another educational endeavour that uses jargon that obscures, neglects and distances the learner from the purpose of their learning.

This is surely an exercise in reinvention – fear it is more about the need to separate “the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves”, the struggle to establish a “point of difference” than any representation of a new pedagogy .

The traveler roams all around and has nothing but doubts: he is unable to distinguish the features of the city, the features he keeps distinct in his mind also mingle. He infers this: if existence in all its moments is all of itself, Zoe is the place of indivisible existence. But why then does the city exist? What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves.
P34 Invisible Cities Italo Calvino

The smallest number divisible by 1 through 8.

They lay sprawled over furniture and floor like discarded underwear – crumpled, disordered, hard to ignore, distracting of gaze, - one was sleeping on the wooden pew – sanctified sprawling.

Bet Boticelli’s “Madonna of the pomegranate” never imagined that her icon grasping infant would grow into a young man who would sprawl with such presence.

New Scientist has published Christmas reading entitled “100 Things to Do Before You Die (plus a few to do afterwards)”. Thought it unfortunate at the time given the Boxing Day Tsunami. I was interested in Home Lab: Measure the speed of light with chocolate, - involves chocolate and judicious use of a microwave and then there was Home Lab: Weigh your head – Though admit that I thought immersing your head in a bucket of water was distinctly something to encourage another into.

Searched the booklet for motherhood, for fertility rites, for ritual with ripe pomegranates and found nothing, ziltch, squat – closest article was “Learn to have multiple orgasms. Oh, don’t stop now ..” but did not read this since it will be irrelevant now I am embracing celibacy as one of three New Year Resolutions. Did not even allude to any moral equivalents to pomegranates and Persephone.

Ritual with ripe pomegranates is massively undervalued – and for that matter underrepresented in the new media. You might complain about the absence of the root vegetable dialogue in most communities but when you look for the pomegranate you find yourself in a pomegranate Serengeti.

An ancient middle-eastern icon of the womb, because of its blood red juice, flimsy membranes and numerous seeds (for numerous read 840 - the smallest number divisible by 1 through 8.) – the pomegranate was carved on the pillars of Solomon’s Temple as a symbol of fertility. It’s Hebrew name, rimmon, comes from rim, to bear a child. Descendant of Eve and all that.

Ahh that vexed status of motherhood. I read that Berber women drew a circle on the ground and flung a ripe pomegranate into the centre – seeds expelled prophesied future children. Those Ellen Bass “slick seeds” all over. What it could not have prophesied is the number of young men you will find sprawled over furniture and floor when you stagger through to feed the dog on a Saturday morning

Looking and lingering …

January is a month of measurement, a month of gently bewildered reflection, a month where I contemplate, a month where I find myself in relation to the moments of my past. January is a month where I am charged with establishing affinity and contrast again, and again, and again.

When all the measuring gets too hard, I withdraw to a place where I can smell renewal in the air. Renewal has that anticipated scent, that slowly ripening nectarines on the kitchen bench scent.

A checkup with the optometrist this morning allowed a professional to take over some of the burden of measurement. Affinity and contrast revealed the need for new lenses. Affinity and contrast saw me rewarded with a promise of “extended gaze duration”in 2005.

Gaze direction is one of the earliest human means of communication. That visible white area around the iris makes even the most discreet of gaze shifts noticeable. Have always, always enjoyed the “looking, lingering and longing” captured in a gaze.

Gaze duration is an indicator of cognitive processes (Rayner, 1998 Psychological Bulletin 124 372 - 422). Check out the research – not only will my cognitive processes be enhanced but

Initial results suggest a linear relationship between gaze duration and rated attraction, with lingering as an added significant factor.

Am I to experience renewal with enhanced “looking, lingering” abilities in 2005? The tantalizing physical reality; the tangible, the touchable implications of action research with extended gaze duration capture me. May even forgo my enrolment in Measurements of Muteness 101.

Landscapes for Thinking

Have spent last year having adventures - have been sometimes ordered, sometimes disordered, sometimes fluid, sometimes fixed, have been an agent of change and a subject of change. Have gained many new insights through adventures experienced and yet in another sense remain in equilibrium.

Much like the year before then …. all memory and desire stuff with thinking folded in afterwards… Well now you mention it …

Can we create some kind of collective consciousness that explains why we are here/ explains the meaning of being alive/ explains what it is to live? Henry Miller reckons the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

Reading the second phase media response to the tsunami – explorations of what it is to be and stay alive sees media calls for improved “prediction”. Predicting earthquake, and land-shake, predicting earth-quiver and land -shiver requires us to establish contrast and affinity, to explore landscapes for thinking.

“Landscape is a work of the mind, its scenery is built as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.”, (Schama 1995)

Can thinking be stratified? Can thinking be mapped? Can thinking be reduced to points, lines and areas? And if it can, just what is the relative position, elevation, textures, shape, colour, orientation, pattern, size, and value of thinking with regard to student learning outcomes? Are mountain ranges, subduction trenches, tectonic plates, and mid-ocean ridges useful metaphors for student thinking? And if they are, can we create landscapes for thinking?

And and and if we create landscapes for thinking, what topographies can we measure?

What can we measure?

There is a line between stupid ...

The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad. Dali

I have “always known” that there is a line between stupid and clever; for “always known” read “never challenged”. It is after all, commonly held opinion. Got an anecdote anyone?

Between mind numbingly stupid, and mind numbingly clever lies “a geometric figure formed by a point moving along a fixed direction and the reverse direction.” www.dictionary.com

Many will tell you that this line is “a fine line”.

It is possible that the people who told you about the fine line have not spent enough time trying to figure out where the line is. In truth I am beginning to wonder whether the notion of demarcation in the landscapes of clever and stupid is valuable at all.

Anyone who with vainglorious ambition has attempted the ascent of the line; anyone, marred by reckless curiosity, who sets out to circumnavigate the landscape of stupid and clever, finds a line so blurred, so smeared, so indistinct that terms like “fine” would never enter their vocabulary.

So what of the new professionals - ”experts” in the domain of stupid and clever who will tell you they can not only locate the line, but they can distinguish gradients on each side of the line – and even gradients within gradients - multiple fine lines as it were of stupidness and cleverness. Extraordinary.

Am off to celebrate the mundane, the humdrum, the day-to-day … yesterday was picket fence thinking … today I am exploring the life forms carving up the territory in the shower.

Virginity Rediscovered

White Picket Fences and Doris Day.

I am looking out at a newly spray painted picket fence. Intolerably white – reminds me of virginity rediscovered - the whiteness, the "Doris Dayness" and the picket motif combined. Can only be thankful that the dog has dug out anything that might resemble a cottage garden – else this pure and vestal imagery would blind me.

Emancipatory notions aside, it does make me wonder if a retreat to earlier times holds anything of value to our understanding of “What is it to be and become a person.” - the virginal status in 2005 is of course insignificant.

Am convinced that until we understand “What is it to be and become a person” we will never frame educational initiative in a way that will move us forward. We will never escape the emptiness, the exhaustingly meaningless experiences our teachers and students struggle through in institutions each day.

Am not clever enough to widely frame this thinking whilst blinded by the glare from “newly picketed white” but I can think in a more blinkered way. When I think about a recent educational past, - the stuff I sat and listened to in 2004, I think about a “soundscape” and “mindscape” littered with “At the end of the day…”,“What works”, “learning communities” and “paradigm shifts”

Am troubled by a nagging inner voice that tells me these superficial, populist catchphrases offered without insight and devoid of any useful creative meaning prevail because we have got the framing stuff all wrong. Is like imagining that you might rediscover virginity if only you could talk about Doris Day long enough. The dialogue only takes you so far.

Because we do not take the time or intellectual energy to unpack the ideas inside – “organization”, “community”, we helplessly conflate them. The conflation of “learning organizations” with” learning communities” represented just one of several examples of “well meaning but flawed” rhetoric widely espoused in 2004

What is “work”, and what is “individual” is similarly blurred. No one unpacked these ideas in 2004 – we slung the terms around without thinking, opportunism at best, cloaking ever cloaking the absence of any real understanding of what it is we ought to be doing in education.

In confusing and conflating these ideas we continue to allow the notion “that education is necessary, mandatory and never ending”(Illich & Verne, 1976 p9) to go unchallenged, some of us even embrace it.

Do believe these ideas are entrenched in our thinking much like the white picket fences. And do believe whilst they escape our critical gaze we will never, never, never understand “What is it to be and become a person.”

So will “What is it to be and become a person.” educational thinking be any different in 2005? I will be creating an MSExcel spreadsheet to tally all the times I hear “learning community” used without any critical analysis of the term.

I am calling it The Chinese Whispers of Eduspeak 2005. –An Attempt to Rediscover Virginity with Doris Day

But Piglet wasn't listening

The influence of Piglet’s wayward thinking on my character should not be underestimated. The connections are almost too easily made.

"Getting Tigger down," said Eeyore, "and not hurting anybody. Keep those two ideas in your head, Piglet, and you'll be all right."
..... But Piglet wasn't listening, he was so agog at the thought of seeing Christopher Robin's blue braces again.
He had only seen them once before, when he was much younger, and, being a little over-excited by them, had had to go to bed half an hour earlier than usual; and he had always wondered since if they were really as blue and as bracing as he had thought them.

The House at Pooh Corner
A.A. Milne

I give you

Exhibit #3: Ignoring advice, risk taking, overexcitability over undergarments, distracted and chronic agogness.

Is becoming clear that young people should be sheltered from books; they should not be allowed to read unsupervised until they are at least 30 years old. Am throwing out the library and buying another DVD player.

"I think I can, I think I can, I think I can!"

"I-think-I-can! I-think-I-can! I-think-I-can! I-think-I-can! I-think-I-can! I-think-I-can! I think I can - I think I can - I think I can I think I can--" And they did! Very soon they were over the hill and going down the other side. THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD - Watty Piper

Exhibit #2: Damn Foolery or The inability to led go of a helplessly futile idea

If only my parents had read me stuff from W.C. Fields instead.

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it." W.C. Fields

----

Hark at it hooting for help!

I am starting to unpack and uncover books from my early childhood. Thinking about what I have learned from reading - earliest experiences surface and bob around in the swash and eddy of memory.

I must have been about three years old when Noddy was bedtime reading ...and I still remember the tension in this passage ...

"My CAR! My car's fallen in!" yelled Noddy, dancing about in alarm. "Stop the ship! Pick up my car. It will drown! Hark at it hooting for help!"" Noddy Goes to Sea - Enid Blyton

Will record this as Exhibit#1: Separation anxiety and a helpless predilection for alliteration

Ahhh ... Will have myself sorted in no time ... just love causal thinking ....

The question I have is - What did you read as a child that still plays as an "explanatory refrain" in your memory?

The memory, the memory of molecules ..

Playing on repeat - Sugarbabes – "Too Lost in You"

If molecules can broadcast, then they should also be able to receive, they should be able to receive. Why am I lost in this anechoic room? It is “Hello darkness, my old friend. - I've come to talk with you again” again and again, and again.

Just know that DeGenere’s eagles would be confused. If the specific broadcast of one molecular species can be picked up by another,- "tuned" if you like by its molecular structure to receive it - then what I am looking for is a “Benvenisteian” matching of broadcast with reception - I guess I am seeking "co-resonance"

Suspect that the exclusionary effect of New Year’s resolutions – the effect of dealing to all that “when you know that you shouldn’t” thinking has bemused, befuddled and bewildered any co-resonance that might be reasonably expected to develop.

The biochemist in me is determined to get around this. How should I penetrate these “silence of sounds” barriers. If molecules have memory then the absence of physical contact should not be an issue.

Perhaps all I have to do is purchase extra “moments in time” crucial memory, to replace all the “when you know that you shouldn’t” crucial memory that has accrued over the holidays.

A quick search on Google is reassuring, a plethora of memory opportunities await the foolhardy ...

”You know that you're ready to upgrade your system with high-quality crucial memory, but you're not sure which memory is right for you. What configuration of memory do I need? What size? How many modules? Will this make a difference in my system performance?

Have entered all personal information, credit card details and post office box number – Dick Smith Electronics rules OK.

Because a vision softly creeping Left its seeds while I was sleeping And the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains

Sounds of Silence - Simon and Garfunkel

I would seriously consider fakin' it ..

I have spent the holiday building book shelves and moving books. Our library has been obscured, misplaced, concealed, even hidden if you like since early 2004 when with defiant disregard for both consequence and opinion we decided to “build on”, rather than to ”move on”.

Happenstance saw the early uncovering of dust laden copies of Bryson’s “Troublesome Words”, Castenada’s ”The Teachings of Don Juan”, Günter Grasse – all of them, all of them, Zola’s "Germinal", The Nibelungenlied, Satre's The Age of Reason , Böll’s Billiard’s at Half Past Nine,…… is only when I see what I have lived without that I begin to understand the intellectual paucity of the last 12 months – is no wonder that I am unhinged . I have been relying too heavily on Air New Zealand Inflight magazines, and www.dictionary.com as an irritant for thinking.

Escaped from moving books only to find myself detained in Albany waiting for a friend to have her nails removed – drank several long blacks whilst browsing “women’s magazines”. Is perhaps a sign that I am fated to remain grounded in the culture of popular media. Updated myself on the many essential issues that we struggled with in 2004 - covered everything from Camilla’s plastic surgery to Julia Robert’s twins before I came across the following attributed to Ellen DeGeneres

"Golden eagles have an interesting way of mating, where they connect in the air while flying at eighty miles an hour and then they start dropping and they don't stop dropping until the act is completed. So it's not uncommon that they both fall all the way to the ground, hit the ground and both of them die. That's how committed they are to this. I thought to myself, 'Boy, don't we feel like wimps for stopping to answer the phone.' I don't know about you, but if I'm one of these two birds, you're getting close to the ground... I would seriously consider fakin' it."

So what is the question here? Is it

What would you “seriously consider faking”? or

What would prevent you from answering the phone?

Ahh ... such mastery ... capturing the concerns of the age in just one quote – the omnipotent orgasm and the omnipresent cell phone, or is it the omnipresent orgasm and the omnipotent cellphone….?

Awaiting The Gentle Hum

... and ... and in truth "the slightly roostered morn"

The Gentle Hum
Michael Leunig
Poems 1972 - 2002

I wonder,
Will it all click into place?
I feel it might.
I had a glimpse
That things could all come right,
I'd wake up
On a sunny, slightly roostered morn
And wouldn't realise at first;
The rightness would take time to dawn.
And gradually
The thing would start to gleam;
This worried life I'd had,
This awful world, this painful mess -
It was, in fact, a kind of dream.
The penny would drop
Into my hand,
The penny that I'd lost so long ago,
And all the peace withheld and blocked from me
Would start to flow.
The gentle hum, the gold and silver light
Would all resume;
The fairies and the pixies,
The particles of dust
Caught in the sunlight in my room.
I'd pick up
Where I'd been so rudely interrupted;
I'd have it back again for keeps,
My dog, my brilliant grasp of life,
My backyard and my paddocks full of time,
The world all glad around me,
My rightful place,
My joyous leaps.

A little puff of scarlet amongst the wild corn.

From the neon sass of a "Finding Nemo" clownfish to the peridot flash of a golden poison-dart frog, the whole world is a pigsty of pigment. The feathers of an Eastern bluebird are saturated in such a fat, matte lapis blue, you wonder how the creature gets airborne, while the cardinal is that perfect, can-can shade of lipstick you can't even find in Paris. The face of a male mandrill looks practically patriotic, its brilliant blue and white cheek ridges bisected by a snout as red as the national debt.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/science/20colo.html?th

What captures you?

Have always thought that an artist has heightened metaperceptive abilities; that an artist must think about and be more alert to the nuances and possibilities of colour and texture than the rest of us.

What is it to observe the world through the artist’s eye? To be captured by colour – to filter the world as a "a pigsty of pigment", what an exhilarating and glorious existence …

Have a well worn copy of Il Libro dell'Arte by Cennino Cennini, the 15th Century guide to art that describes the character of ultramarine blue as

"a colour illustrious, beautiful and most perfect, beyond all other colours; one could not say anything about it, that its quality would not still surpass."

Is such powerful writing, you can taste the colour Cennini describes. So a writer can play with colour through words and create the same intensity of observation of the artist.

What of the poet? There is a passage in David Malouf's An Imaginary Life that has had held such influence over my thinking, it starts

" I was stopped in my tracks by a little puff of scarlet amongst the wild corn. Scarlet! It is the first colour I have seen in months. Or so it seems. Scarlet. A little wild poppy, of a red so sudden it made my blood stop."

Every once in a while I meet someone who startles and stops me in my tracks – “a little puff of scarlet amongst the wild corn”. I recognize them because of Malouf.

On expectations, illusions and dreams

On the rare occasions when our dreams succeed and achieve perfection—most dreams are bungled—they are symbolic chains of scenes and images in place of a narrative poetic language; they circumscribe our experiences or expectations or situations with such poetic boldness and decisiveness that in the morning we are always amazed at ourselves when we remember our dreams. We use up too much artistry in our dreams—and therefore often are impoverished during the day.
The Wanderer and His Shadow, Friedrich Nietzsche

Am thinking about "ideological cosmetics" - terms used to mask and misrepresent - what do I understand by the term "dreamer" - perhaps it is used as an ideological cosmetic, intended to undervalue and undermine the possible, to ensure the continuation and constraint of living within the status quo - living within the institution/ organisation/ society. To mask the ideas that might destabilise.

Perhaps to counter this "cosmetic - dreamer dismissive", and to minimise that accompanying sense of "impoverishment" I will have to tilt for more artistry in my day ...