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.
“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
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
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.
The thing I notice about the majority of alien films prevalent in my local video store in Kilbirnie is that at the end of the film, despite the often bi-pedal nature of the alien they do not usually integrate into society. No-one realises that they are already perfectly suited to bicycles, stairs or keyboards. Nor it seems do they want to learn, (with the exception of E.T whom I might add was introduced to these things by seemingly truant nymph form humans).
The danger of dividing up space into geographical chunks (even virtual ones) is it creates the them and us quandary, that we often ponder during many films in the Sci-Fi section.
Travelling to a room of ones own is certainly a way to resolve on a picture of place where ideas can be meditated on, but ideas and creativity cannot exist in a room by themselves. Irit Rogoff writes in Terra Infirma; Geography’s Visual Culture that terms like in-betweeness complicate what should be simply being at home (or belonging) and not being at home (foreignness).
I think Rogoff would have us believe you travel between these places by drawing conceptual lines, and I hope every human nymph form can find a place in their school where they feel they belong, and where they can be creative.
Posted by: www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawlon5JvY8CLPMa_G1xXNeCIVsD4Bo36wKQ | March 11, 2009 at 03:53 PM
I've just come back from a camp with 90 nine-year olds. It struck me (again) that the very children who are challenging in the classroom, are the ones who stand out at camp as being innovative, fearless, risk-takers and solution providers. We are doing these learners no favours by sticking them in classrooms for 12 years, for 7 hours a day. There must be a better way...
Posted by: Raenette | March 22, 2009 at 09:14 AM
“classrooms as the spaces of appearance”
Hi Fran,
Thanks so much for the new thinking from this ... and for Rogoff
Your comment made me rush off to Mt Roskill to check the SciFi contents of our local Blockbuster video outlet ... only to discover that it has been closed down for months and now functions as a two dollar emporium. Was not a waste of time however because I was quite taken by the “just starting to oxidise” replica swords and by an extra extra long faux gold belt that will be useful if I am ever invited to a toga party.
My lack of attention to the rituals of the household meant that I had to return home and ask “the provider of all weekend viewing” where we now rent video from, before I could ponder over how the alien is portrayed.
I think you are right – the genre sustains “us and them” thinking and I love the tensions you introduce in in Rogoff’s belonging and foreignness ..
You comment about “drawing conceptual lines” captures my attention ... I have been trying to think of explicit and practical ways in which we can do this with students whilst they are boxed in classrooms ... isolated from other humans and other places .... sorted by age, parental affluence ... and sometimes gender?
And then when I went off to read some of Rogoff’s writing I nudged up against a new way of looking at classrooms and possibly, but I am not there yet, another way of understanding what happens in “feedback” .. which may help me look at Geoff’s comments.
Rogoff’s writing makes me ask what would happen if we think of “classrooms as the spaces of appearance”?
Spaces where it is everyone present – “we the audience who produce the meanings through our 'being' and our acknowledgement of mutualities and imbrications”
How will this change what we understand is and might be happening in classrooms?
Posted by: Artichoke | March 22, 2009 at 11:21 AM
Ahh Raenette, your figures remind me of Hattie’s analysis of how our hours are spent and misspent in Visible Learning ...
On each of about 220 days, for around 13 years, children spent five to six hours in school, nine to ten hours at home and in their communities, and about eight to nine hours asleep. When this time is added together with weekend and vacation time, students spend about 15,000 hours in school over a lifetime; or about 30 percent of their waking time is spent in the hands of those legislated to teach them. They also spend twice that amount of time (29,000 hours) at home during these school years, and they also spend 26,000 hours in the care of parents and caregivers before they start formal schooling at about 5 or 6 years of age. John Hattie Visible Learning p 39
To paraphrase Hattie’s analysis ..... you could claim that
On each of about 220 days, for around 4 to 5 years, your camp kids have spent five to six hours in school, nine to ten hours at home and in their communities, and about eight to nine hours asleep. When this time is added together with weekend and vacation time, your camp kids had spent between 4,500 hours to 6,600 hours in school, or about 30 percent of their waking time is spent in the hands of those legislated to teach them.
You ask what is our collective responsibility to ensure that this 30% of waking time is spent in ways that enhance “being” rather than “betray” being? It is a great question ...
I wonder if a simple solution would be to rejig the school day so that a smaller percent of a kids waking hours was mandated to be spent learning in a classroom. Organise it so that we valued other learning - so that students could negotiate for up to 20 percent of their waking hours be spent learning @someplace else and only 10% be saved for learning@school. [I note that the allocation of the percentage split is arbitrary at this point]
And then we could think about how the hours could be organsied throughout the year - mornings afternoons or months in classrooms and months out in the world etc
Posted by: Artichoke | March 22, 2009 at 01:19 PM
nice post. The children who have some Good Character Education are also challenging in the class room. i think other need it too so that they can get the things out from their brains.
Posted by: Character | March 28, 2009 at 09:14 PM