Encomium

In grade 9, at the age of 14, I had Mr. Sharpe, the English teacher, for my first high school homeroom class. On the very first day, he came into the classroom and without a word, started to write (in a beautiful cursive hand) on the chalkboard. “The motive for metaphor…” he wrote, then proceeded to fill all of the chalkboards in the room with his explanation. When he was done, he walked back to the first chalkboard, erased it and continued writing. He never stopped writing, or spoke a word, during that 90-minute class. 

Nor was that his only quirk of teaching. He was in the habit of writing, on foolscap paper, these seemingly unrelated treatises on such things as the history of language, or a caricature of one of the students who had expressed a dislike for the book we were reading at the time, and dropping these artifacts, without a word, onto the student’s desk. I’m pleased to recall that I received several of these transmissions, including an explanation of the physics of flight for 20^th-century airplanes, and another that quoted Aristotle, Søren Kierkegaard and Cyndi Lauper. Like most of the students to whom these comments were given, I was perplexed by their meaning and relevance to the course, but unlike them, I quickly grew to cherish these wacky but somehow fruitful scribblings because they gave me new ideas to consider and different perspectives to explore. I began to write poems and stories based on Mr. Sharpe’s notes, and though I found it too difficult to emulate the style of his favourite poet, e. e. cummings (see “In Just” at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176657), Mr. Sharpe and I enjoyed a correspondence throughout that year that has certainly formed the basis for everything from my preferred method of learning to my love of modern literature to my preference for wordy handouts.

Sometimes I wonder what Mr. Sharpe would make of the material covered in this course. I wonder if he would agree with Michael Tomasello’s final claim in The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition that “all human cultural institutions rest on the biologically inherited social-cognitive ability of all human individuals to create and use social conventions and symbols” (1999, p. 216), which I take to mean that our cultural achievements rest on the foundations of our ability to create and understand metaphor. I wonder if he would read Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity and interpret its fundamental educational paradox in similarly metaphorical terms:

if one needs an identity of participation in order to learn, yet needs to learn in order to acquire an identity of participation, then there seems to be no way to start. . . .In the life-giving power of mutuality lies the miracle of parenthood, the essence of apprenticeship, the secret to the generational encounter, the key to the creation of connections across boundaries of practice: a frail bridge across the abyss, a slight breach of the law, a small gift of undeserved trust – it is almost a theorem of love. (1998, p. 277)

And finally, I wonder if Mr. Sharpe would recognize his unpredictable yet stimulating foolscap notes in the last words of Mark Bracher’s Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation: 

To the extent that we can formulate pedagogical practices that help our students develop more capacious and complex identity structures, integrate more of the rejected components of their selves, and experience their sense of self more through benign identity contents and less through malignant ones, we will contribute significantly not only to our students’ psychological development and educational achievement but also to social justice and the reduction of human misery in the world at large. (2006, p. 207)

This is not to say that I don’t see omissions in the writing we’ve read for this class: I think the biological determinist perspective of Tomasello is a little limiting for understanding the ways in which learning can potentially occur, though I don’t necessarily dispute Tomasello’s version of events. I believe that Wenger’s myriad functions of communities of practice and their tools are overly structural for the fluid nature of exposure, practice and mastery of knowledge, again that may or may not take place. Finally, although Bracher’s radical pedagogy of supporting multiple identities within learners satisfies my own fantasies, and I feel comfortable in his context of literary studies, I see major issues of disconnect if historical thought and canonical works are no longer taught to students.

But these considerations are ongoing; I am sure they will remain, or be resolved, or be replaced with new considerations as I continue in this program of study. I will continue to puzzle out those concepts I don’t understand, disagree with those ideas that I think disadvantage certain groups or learners, and, when all else fails, write myself a little note or doodle (thanks, Mr. Sharpe), say, perhaps, one that turns lifelong learning processes into the metaphor of a blog: you work hard, share it with the people you can, thank your lucky stars the Internet exists, and sign off as gracefully as possible. 

Best of luck to everyone,       

     

Stephanie

References:

cummings, e. e. [in just-]. Retrieved March 31, 2012, from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176657.

Bracher, M. (2006). Radical pedagogy: Identity, generativity, and social transformation. New York: Palgrave.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

P.S. As this is a blog about endings, I couldn’t really leave without a final comment on 

The Best Endings Ever

1.       Post-scripts.

2.       Elmer Fudd’s sign-off from Warner Brothers cartoons: “Th-th-th-th—that’s all, folks!”

3.       The final bite of your meal that has equal parts sauce and food.

4.       Consummation (relate it to what you will)

5.       ….. 

A Dressing-Down for Not Dressing Up

Top 10 Hallowe’en Costumes I Have Worn (in no particular order):

1. Witch
2. Devil
3. Ninja
4. Ghostbuster
5. Flapper
6. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
7. A two-headed, four-armed monster
8. 1950s bobby-soxer in a poodle skirt
9. Hot dog liberator
10. Cowboy

Next to my birthday, Hallowe’en is my favourite holiday (okay, I know, my birthday isn’t a holiday, but the way I treat it, it really should be). I like the origins of Hallowe’en (check out http://www.albany.edu/~dp1252/isp523/halloween.html or http://www.halloweenishere.com/history.html for thoughtful, if short, discussions of the beginnings of Hallowe’en), its trappings (I can carve a pumpkin like nobody’s business), and its foods (specifically, candy). But most of all, I love dressing up, and costumes, and masks, and disguises.

Selecting a Hallowe’en costume was always a very deliberate process: you had to not look like a goofball in your costume, that was the most important thing. Then you had to wear something that could adapt to the unpredictable weather found in Southwestern Ontario in late October. Then you had to check with your friends to make sure your costume was unique (there’s nothing worse than showing up to trick-or-treat in the same sheet, for example). But the choice of costume always resonated deeply with me, because I believe that a costume should indicate some hidden feature of your personality, some half-concealed identity that you permitted the world to see on that night and that night alone.

Now, I’m sure you, and Mark Bracher, would have a fantastic time psychoanalyzing exactly in what ways I see myself as a Ghostbuster, for instance, or a revolutionary leader for the hot dogs of the world, but I stand by my claim. Imagine, then, how delighted I was to read this in Bracher’s Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation:

The strongest identities are those whose structures are complex enough to incorporate all significant components of the self in a manner that minimizes conflict among them, providing a time and place, a context, and a mode in which each component can be enacted in a way that produces minimal threats to other components. (2006, p. 59)

A strong identity, then, for Bracher, is one that works in conjunction with those contradictory parts of itself so that many/all elements can be expressed without undermining the overall identity.

This accurately describes my attempts to wear a costume and still see. My eyesight is catastrophically bad, so from the age of 9 I had glasses with lenses so thick that Coca-Cola bottles envied them. Now, picture trying to pull off a fantastic, historically accurate ninja costume while wearing 1980s glasses that looked something like this…

Yet, undubitably, my identity as a nerd who cared about school and reading was at least as valid as my perspective of myself as sly and disciplined and coordinated (!!), just like a ninja.

Similarly, the Hallowe’en costumes I chose were also a useful means of distinguishing myself from my peers, who were all pursuing their own identity elements in selecting their costumes. I can honestly say, for instance, that I know of no other 7-year-old who has ever asked – asked – to dress up as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, but I certainly felt an unspoken affinity to the role of the outcast, whereas I think my best friend that year dressed up as a princess.

Bracher references Greenspan in characterizing this understanding:

Greenspan describes this development in terms of an increasingly large context within which one’s identity is located. First the child differentiates a dyadic sense of me and you, where the child recognizes an other that is separate from but nonetheless linked with herself, such that her actions affect the other and the other’s actions affect her (Greenspan in Bracher, 2006, p. 61).  

Bracher situates this relationship as a reciprocal affective relationship, but the link between an other and oneself seems to have a greater effect on identity. Whereas Greenspan (via Bracher) sees this identity-shaping as occurring contextually (say, in the messy wig and pillow-enhanced hump of a Hunchback of Notre Dame costume), Tomasello, in his book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, finds instead a definition of learning that distinguishes humans from primates:

At nine months of age human infants begin engaging in a number of so-called joint attentional behaviours that seem to indicate an emerging understanding of other persons as intentional agents like the self whose relations to outside entities may be followed into, directed or shared. (1999, p. 61)

But the distinction between one and the other is paramount, whether identity is being shaped or learning is taking place. These two concepts, identity and learning, were for me merged in the attitude of my mother, who not only proposed the two-headed, four-armed monster costume, but bent umpteen wire hangers and bought me suspenders to hold up the whole contraption. She was fully supportive of my flair for the dramatic, making scary noises tapes to play at our front door long before the idea became a holiday industry, and never vetoed any preposterous costume idea. What I now understand is that both my identity (as a strange kid with weird Hallowe’en costumes) and my learning (to encourage and foster the dreams and passions of others) was wrapped up in my mother’s faithful dedication to creating or helping me create memorable Hallowe’en costumes. I am familiar with many ways in which I owe large parts of my various identities to my mother, but I confess, Bracher has led me to find this one anew.

And, since you asked, yes, I do have a costume in mind for Hallowe’en this year: I am dressing up as a Muppet. Which one? Well, that’s for my identity to know, and me to find out…

 

References:

Anonymous. 2012. Silhouette vintage large style designer spectacles. [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://www.theoldglassesshop.co.uk/categories/Choose-by-COLOUR/Red/.

Bracher, M. (2006). Radical pedagogy: Identity, generativity, and social transformation. New York: Palgrave.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

It’s Not You… And, Apparently, It’s Not Me, Either.

Dear True Love:

I know you weren’t expecting to get this letter from me, but there are some things I’ve been thinking about and I think it’s important for our relationship that I tell you them. 

First of all, I never did actually win you that teddy bear from the fair last fall – I waited until you went to buy some cotton candy, then I paid the ring toss guy $20 to pretend that I’d won it. Sorry. But you liked the bear, so that worked out fine.

Second, I don’t like avocadoes. Never have, never will. Every order of extra-guacamole nachos we’ve shared for the past four years has been a lie.

Third, I’ve been thinking a lot about our relationship lately, and I’ve come to realize that my identity is being shaped by who we are together, and how/whether or not we belong together. For instance, when I asked you about an engagement, I think you thought I meant something different (or I assumed so, judging from the way you ran from the room). What I meant was that we have to devote our energies to building something together, to sharing something, so that other people start to see us as a couple, and then we can meet other couples that also like to watch 80s movies or take their cats for a walk. I need you to start to contribute to the ways we are as a couple; if you do that, I’ll be able to start seeing myself as part of a couple. This relationship is a two-way street, you know.

I also need you to start being more imaginative (and no, I’m not talking about using the camcorder like that). I mean about taking risks, about seeing new possibilities for who we are and where we might be heading. Here’s a quotation from the book I’ve been reading, so try and think about it like this: “Imagination requires an opening. It needs the willingness, freedom, energy, and time to expose ourselves to the exotic, move around, try new identities, and explore new relations” (Wenger, 1998, p. 185). If there’s no imagination, I don’t think there can be an engagement from either of us in our coupledom. Basically, I’d like to play more with you. 

I also need you to put your energies with mine to move in the same direction, to align with me. I need to be sure that we’re on the same page, but I don’t want to bully or threaten you into anything you don’t want to do. I know that visiting my parents for dinner every Friday night, and hearing them list their friends’ illnesses, is a little bit boring, but I think that deep down, you want to be part of my family and you really care about them, too, so that’s all right.

If we can negotiate our relationship like this, by taking responsibility for it and making it what we want it to be, then I think we’ll be able to learn a lot. We have to see ourselves, and our relationship, as part of a social network that is constantly changing (unlike your habit of never refilling the toilet paper roll – what do you do when it runs out, anyway?...) and that affects the way we learn.

But, I would add, I think we can only work if both of us recognize that we don’t learn in a straight line. By which I mean, learning isn’t always about moving ahead, or reaching a goal, or totally commanding everything there is to know about a topic, or even a person. Learning is like a tide: it ebbs and flows, sometimes really strongly and sometimes so quietly you can’t even hear it coming, it trickles down like rain or it pours for hours, sometimes it pulls out things that were already there, and sometimes it throws something up at your feet you never thought you’d see. 

I know you don’t like it when I speak abstractly like this, but I’m actually trying to reach out and connect with you through this language, and these thoughts, and this letter. Listen to this: “a more plausible scenario is that all human cultural institutions rest on the biologically inherited social-cognitive ability of all human individuals to create and use social conventions and symbols” (Tomasello, 1999, p. 216). As a couple, we're also a symbol, but in order to make the idea of a couple work, make that symbol work, then we need to be engaged, and imaginative, and aligned. If we are, then we become part of social convention (like winning teddy bears at fairs or sharing plates of nachos), which involves ongoing learning processes. And I think we have to look at learning as a part of belonging together: we might learn new things (are you sure your tattoo says ‘belief’ in Japanese? Because it looks a lot like the word for ‘toothpaste’…), or something we never meant to learn (I had no idea your mother loved karaoke that much), or even forget some things (the dishwasher really isn’t going to empty itself, ever), but we’ll keep learning.

I want to keep learning, with you.  

Forever yours,

Pookums

PS. I know that this is important to you, so when we come home from work tonight, we can start to talk about us; we can even stay up all night if you like…

References:

Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Let's Go, Defence, LET'S GO!!

It’s the shuffling of your feet as you wait in line for the usher to check your ticket, it’s the jostling of other bodies as you climb the stairs to find your seat, it’s the tingling crinkle of cold in your nose as you breathe in the smell of the arena, and the crackle of the loudspeaker as the unseen announcer introduces the home team.

That’s right, friends and neighbours – it’s hockey night. In Halifax.

Tonight I’m going to a Halifax Mooseheads hockey game, and I’m thrilled. For someone who didn’t play many sports growing up, I have since found my competitive streak, and it’s manifested in cheering ardently and one-sidedly for whatever team I support (generally decided by choosing the team with the better uniform, or the team that is not expected to win, or the team that is playing against Australia). 

In fact, sports games seem to be the ultimate communities of practice: those people who support one team throughout their lives are easily within the boundaries of that group, hockey jerseys and ball caps featuring favourite teams are boundary objects that connect and disconnect (Wenger, 1998, p. 107) fans, even those people who go only occasionally to watch games have a role: as peripheral participants.

As a sports fan, I occupy a peripheral position with the community of practice of, in this case, Moosehead fans, who offer me “casual but legitimate access to a practice without subjecting [me] to the demands of full membership” (Wenger, 1998, p. 117). That is, I can go to the game tonight and cheer for the Mooseheads without having to pay season ticket-holder prices or knowing the name of every team player. I am on the edge of the community of practice representing regular Mooseheads spectators.

And frankly, I like it that way. Throughout my life, I’ve interpreted many of my experiences (and therefore negotiated meaning) as peripheral connections: I was smart, but not quite smart enough to finish a doctorate; I was an actress, but never committed to the practice enough to make it my craft; I was a Canadian living and working in New Zealand with residency status, but didn’t complete the paperwork to attain dual citizenship. I was and still am happy to move along the fringes of other communities, dipping my toe in to test the waters from time to time but not jumping in.

But I wonder to what extent are we ourselves creating boundaries around communities of practice? I’m sure that if I had the means, and interest, in purchasing Moosehead tickets from now until the end of time, I could easily do so and join that community of practice, but I’m making the choice to observe the boundary that identifies that group, and possibly even manufacture that border when it doesn’t exist. 

In 1975, Michel Foucault claimed in Discipline and Punish that our omni-surveillant society, in which everything is witnessed, recorded, monitored and accessible to others, has created people who take on the trappings of self-monitoring and self-regulation: 

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault, 1975, pp. 202-203)

Am I observing boundaries that aren’t even there? Have I become so sensitive to monitoring – to being inside and outside of communities of practice that I encounter, and subject to the practices of its members – that I’m imagining restrictions where there are none? 

And does everyone else do this, too?

I have been, for twenty years past, admittedly the greatest magician in the world. I have held my place with such style and flourish that I have raised what is really a very pretty achievement to the dignity of art. Do you imagine that in my best moments when I have had very distinguished audiences—crowned heads, as all magicians love to boast—that I have not thought fleetingly of producing a full chamber-pot out of a hat, and throwing it into the royal box, just to show that it can be done? But we all hug our chains. There are no free men. (Davies, 1975, p. 110-111)

Yet we know boundaries create exclusion and, in uninformed or malevolent circumstances, racism and homophobia and other prejudices. Instances of rioting between rival fans at football games, such as that which recently caused 79 deaths at a game in Egypt, are commonplace, and demonstrate the extent to which communities of practice can enforce the boundaries of its membership. Could we possibly be creating these boundaries that have life-or-death potential even in seemingly benign conditions such as a sports game?

Such is the urge to belong, and an interesting discussion that Wenger alludes to implicitly in his repeated cautions that communities of practice can have negative consequences as readily as positive effects. We learn these boundaries, perhaps add to them, and observe them, and transgress them at our own cost. Being on the periphery doesn’t save one from these risks, either; history is full of stories of those who refused to take sides and were annihilated for the same reason.

Gives a new twist to the old joke, “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out”, doesn’t it?... 

REFERENCES:

Davies, R. (1977). World of wonders. Toronto: Macmillan Canada.

Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

There are no small parts, but I was a small player…

I was six, I was dressed in a white sheet, and I was angry.

I had just found out that Anita DiPinto, and not me, had been chosen to be the Head Angel in our kindergarten class’s performance of the nativity story. Normally, this would not be cause for concern, but I think I knew, even then, that in the world of acting you were only as good as your last performance. I decided I would hone my acting skills with bigger and better roles (featuring a stellar Old Mother Hubbard in grade 3 and, later, a compelling turn at age 13 as the singing she-devil Vampira). I continued acting throughout high school and university, and, as of the last show I performed in (http://www.bedfordplayers.ns.ca/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=434 – that’s me in the pink), have appeared in more than 25 theatrical productions. Take that, Anita DiPinto...  

As I completed one production, then the next, and then the next, I began to recognize that I loved more than just performing. I liked the way that the cast of actors would develop its own inside jokes (like what a ‘Radiohead’ rehearsal is), that newer actors would be instructed by older actors to ‘cheat’ more (for the record, ‘cheating’ means to angle one’s body or object towards the audience), that technical terms actually contained specific instructions (for instance, ‘86ing the upstage spot’ means to shut off the spotlight focused on the rear part of the stage), and so on. Yet, despite minoring in drama, I recognize that it’s only thanks to Wenger that I now have a framework – communities of practice – through which I can understand how the meaning of this practice is negotiated.

The examples I mentioned above – a cast’s ‘Radiohead’ rehearsal, transmission of expertise from experienced to inexperienced actors, specialized technological understanding – correspond with Wenger’s conception of community, and precisely those parts that foster coherence: mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared resources (Wenger, 1998, p. 73). The ways in which an acting community of practice operates are represented clearly by these and other instances, but this community's negotiation of meaning, which, as Wenger states, is made up of alternating participation and reification, features these constituent elements linked much more closely than I would have guessed.

Most of the first rehearsals I’ve attended begin with the actors receiving a copy of the script, which is a reification of the playwright’s ideas. Wenger uses this term to “refer to the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into ‘thingness’” (Wenger, 1998, p. 58); a script is exactly that ‘thingness’. It contains the language and instructions for action that ‘give … form’ to a playwright’s ‘experience’ (in some cases, an imagined experience, but an experience nonetheless…).

But the script, reifying the playwright’s experience, has to then be realized, or turned into participation, in order for a production to take place. I can assure you, I have many memories of reading a script (reification) that called for surprising onstage interactions with others (participation). For instance, cast as Katharine in a university production of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, I performed on rollerblades for Acts I and II.* Onstage I’ve had to dance, weep and wear a tutu. And appearing in Judith Thompson’s Lion in the Streets, I as Sue was excited to portray the intensity and desperation of this woman, who crashes a neighbourhood dinner party to confront her husband about an extra-marital affair, until I read the stage direction “[…SUE begins a slow striptease]” (Thompson, 1992, p. 24).**

A good test of Wenger’s framework, especially as regards the nature of meaning-making, is the role of the audience in a theatrical production. Strictly speaking, many performers believe that the craft of acting is meaningless without a body to witness it. But an audience isn’t required in order to perform the script, or re-enact the experiences, so the place of the audience would appear to be outside the community of practice. However, Wenger neatly allows for the audience in his brief reference to complementary contributions:

Mutual engagement involves not only our own competence, but the competence of others. It draws on what we do and don’t know, as well as our as well as on our ability to connect meaningfully to what we don’t do and what we don’t know – that is, to the contributions and knowledge of others (Wenger, 1998, p. 76).

Many of the people close to me (wonderfully supportive people, all of you) would prefer to remove their own gallbladders rather than perform on stage, and though they can’t conceive of why I want to perform, or even how I can do so, they will be in the audience for more than one performance of the same show, and their contribution is meaningful, for me, beyond words.

The miscreants, misfits, misinformed and mistaken individuals who make up the community of practice of acting (and I number myself among them) are infinitely special to me, because of the negotiation of meaning that I have been fortunate enough to participate in for many years now and hopefully more to come. Wenger’s theory has given me a deeper appreciation of the function of this strange little hobby.

And now, end scene (luckily not, as in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, “pursued by a bear” )…

* Not, strictly speaking, a stage direction appearing in Shakespeare’s 1623 version of the script

** In case you wanted to know, yes, I did it, and I fear it’s preventing me from ever being considered as a serious actress.

REFERENCES:

Thompson, J. (1992). Lion in the streets. Toronto: Coach House Press.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

"Dr. Jones. Again we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away. "

I don’t know about you, but one of my favourite things to do is to go into an old-fashioned candy store (you know, the ones that are decorated in bright colours and carry candy for $1.75 each that you remember paying $0.10 or $.25 for as a child) and take a look at the trading card packs they have on offer. Do you remember these? Each package contained 5 – 10 small cardboard cards featuring pictures and information about a particular TV show, or movie, or celebrity (apparently there are also trading cards for sports teams, but I wouldn’t know about those; I am strictly a connoisseur of the fine arts variety of trading cards…). What stands out in my mind about these cards is the way in which the cards were numbered, so you could easily tell how many cards you may be missing from a complete set. If you were lucky enough to collect all the cards, the last one you usually got was the card that was exasperatingly difficult to find (as an aside: please contact the author if you have the snake-pit card from the “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” movie trading card pack). 

This nostalgic moment actually helped me find a way in to the thoughts I wanted to share in this week’s blog, so bear with me so I can make the connection clearly. 

In The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Tomasello, in discussing joint attentional skills –  where a human infant recognizes that beings outside itself desire things/can act to realize those desires, and interacts with objects and others to redirect attention – has neatly elided the consequences of exclusion from this interaction. What happens to an infant’s cognitive development if, for instance, an adult is not sufficiently present (that is, on a regular basis) to have these interactions with? Or when the adult is present but does not engage with the infant? What if the infant’s attempts at joint attention result in tense or emotionally unstable reactions (i.e., the infant points to a pet, which the adult then chases from the room)? These situations emphasize examples of exclusion, a concept I think is well defined as follows: “Social exclusion is a blend of multidimensional and mutually reinforcing processes of deprivation, associated with a progressive dissociation from social milieus, resulting in the isolation of individuals and groups from the mainstream of opportunities society has to offer” (Vleminckx and Berghman 1995: 46, cited in Roehrer Institute, 2003; italics mine). I fault Tomasello for not following his argument through to its conclusion: if an infant is deprived of social interaction (i.e., cannot carry out or is traumatized by failed efforts for joint attention), is cognitive development (read: learning ability) impaired? 

The reason why the question of exclusion and learning arose (let’s face it: I had a lot of questions while reading Tomasello) was because the same themes appeared in this week’s reading, chapters one and two of Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (1998). Wenger starts from the position that we are constantly involved with multiple communities of practice, including our relations, our workplaces, our education, our hobbies and any other type of “active engagement in the world” (Wenger, 1998, p. 4). Chapter 1, on “Meaning”, looks at the ways in which we make meaning; but, just as Tomasello did, Wenger sidesteps the question of exclusion. If “human engagement in the world is first and foremost a process of negotiating meaning” (Wenger, 1998, p. 53), then what happens to those people who aren’t engaged to the extent Wenger describes, the ones who are excluded from communities of practice? Are those who don’t have wide social circles, or pursue hobbies, also exempt from learning? And then we have to consider people who are involuntarily removed from their communities of practice: homosexual children forced out of their homes, workers who are laid off, or hobbyists whose skills are not longer welcome. Surely their exclusion – from engagement in that capacity – doesn’t affect their ability to learn. Yet that would be the logical conclusion of Wenger’s argument.

And now, let us return to the point of this blog: my highly prized “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” movie trading card pack. Recall that I said numbering the cards meant you were certain whether your set was complete or not? Well, as I remember it, missing a card from your pack meant that you went wild trying to find it, that one card that you didn’t have. Its exclusion from your pack meant that you gave it an even greater value, because of its rarity. In not discussing exclusion in either of their theories, I think both Tomasello and Wenger are constraining how learning happens. Regardless of whether it is through human infants’ cognitive development, or in communities of practice and their meaning-making processes, learning may be explained by a theory, but it is unlikely that that theory can account for all instances, just like the trading card pack didn’t give you exactly the card you needed every time. Indeed, for some, the chase of finding the missing card was far more exciting than opening a new pack to reveal exactly what you wanted. And just because you didn’t have that card – in my case, the precious snake-pit card – didn’t mean you threw the pack away. You held on to your collection of cards, and waited until that elusive/excluded card – the one that made your collection complete, just like the learning that lies outside of a constrained theory – appeared, at which point you grabbed it and kissed it and painstakingly added it to the full set of cards.

…. Or, perhaps, I just have a thing for trading cards. 

References:

Roeher Institute. (2003). "Policy approaches to framing social inclusion and social exclusion: an overview. Retrieved 25 January 2012 from http://www.philia.ca/files/pdf/SocialInclusion.pdf.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

I'd Never Taught a Met(be)phor

In 2003, I was working at a student learning centre at Auckland University in New Zealand, tutoring undergraduates and graduates in university-level writing.

The student sitting beside me was easily six feet tall, broad across the shoulders and a dazzling smile that was currently nowhere in evidence.

“I don’t know what that means,” he muttered softly, pointing to a written comment scrawled across the bottom of his first-year literature paper by his professor. ‘Structural issues’, read the remark.  

“Well, it means that your professor has some worries about how you organize your thoughts,” I said, taking up the paper to skim its contents, “so let’s see how we can make them a bit clearer.”

For several minutes, Lavea and I talked about what structure was, and how it could contribute to an easy-to-follow essay on, in this case, a short story by Ernest Hemingway. I could see from Lavea’s growing frustration that our discussion was bringing him no closer to those techniques that could clarify and organize his thoughts. I looked around, hoping for inspiration, and saw that his backpack carried a patch from one of the city’s local rugby clubs.

“Oh, so you play rugby. What position?” I asked him, searching for respite from Lavea’s growing despair and the chance to test an idea I had about teaching writing.

This was an inspired choice; for the next 5 minutes, Lavea barely stopped to take a breath in recounting the exploits of his Ponsonby rugby club, and his joy in playing the full back position at #10.

“Number ten basically runs the field, doesn’t he?” I asked Lavea. “Tells the other positions what they’re doing, and sets up the biggest plays? Directs the other players so they know exactly what’s coming; where the ball is going to be, and so on?”

When Lavea nodded in agreement, I pointed out to him that structurally, an essay was the same as a game of rugby.  The first paragraph of the essay had to do the same job as a #10; that is, point out what was going to happen, including the pieces of information used to move along the main idea of the essay (like a rugby ball). The final paragraph needed to refer to the strength of the information used and summarize the essay by showing that the discussion unfolded exactly as it was indicated in the first paragraph.

“So it’s just like a play,” I said to Lavea, who had gradually become more animated, even as we shifted the conversation from rugby back to his essay. “Does that make sense to you?”

“Um, it’ll help if I tell them what’s gonna happen?” he asked, peering at his paper.

“Exactly!” I said.

“But how do I keep it structural?” he asked, looking at me intently.

“Well, you can think of ‘structural’ in the same way as ‘organized’; in fact, that word might be easier to understand. How do you keep the players around you organized?”

“They know what they’re supposed to do, but each time, you have to tell them who goes first and where they should be so they can link up with the other guys,” said Lavea. Even as he spoke, I could see from his expression that he had made the connection between the two.

“Okay, so how can we change this essay around so that it’s more organized?” I asked him, but he had already taken the paper back from me and was beginning to flip through the pages with more purpose. He began to suggest paragraphs that could be rearranged, and discovered that the changes would make the essay clearer. Lavea’s demeanour changed completely during the appointment: he left excited and confident about resubmitting the paper. Though I don’t know how Lavea performed on that paper in particular, I do know that I saw him for several other appointments that year, and each time it was obvious he had understood and was applying the writing techniques we had discussed in prior meetings.

I recalled this incident with Lavea when I started to consider writing this blog about Michael Tomasello’s The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition; in particular, in Tomasello’s comments about metaphors and analogies put me in mind of my attempts to use metaphor, in this case a rugby game, to help Lavea understand and improve an abstract concept in writing, in this case, ‘structure’.

Metaphor-making identifies similarities across objects and/or events in order to express one thing in terms of another. As far as cognitive development goes, Tomasello writes in Human Cognition that children combine adults’ communicative purposes/intentions with their own skills in “categorization, perspective-taking, and relational thinking” (Tomasello, 1999, p. 169) to understand and form their own metaphors.

Yet Lavea was not a child, navigating complex linguistics for the first time in order to make his thoughts known, so clearly adults create metaphor differently than children first learning language. But how do they do so?

Northrop Frye pointed out in1963 that metaphor is inherently impossible: ‘As for metaphor, where you’re really saying ‘this is that’, you’re turning your back on logic and reason completely, because logically two things can never be the same thing and still remain two things” (1963, p 11). But adults have the linguistic mastery, and life experiences, to accept paradoxes. And my claim, backed up by evidence with Lavea and other students, is that a wealth of personal experience is essential to understanding metaphor. Without an array of personal occurrences to draw on, metaphors are by definition limited, perhaps not to the level of children learning the language, but certainly in a way that constrains future learning.

There is much to examine in the application of metaphor as a teaching device: current theorists, relevance across disciplines, even intercultural awareness so that metaphors do not contribute to sex-, gender-, age-, race- or ethnicity-related biases. I hope that much of my learning in the GSLL program will explore the field of teaching writing, and more specifically, how metaphors and other rhetorical devices can help adults struggling with writing techniques to define and command these techniques in their own writing work.

...And, in case you wanted to know, in 2003 Ponsonby District Rugby Club won the under-21 championship.

Kia kaha, Lavea.

References:

Freud, S. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved January 20, 2012, from BrainyQuote.com Web site: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/s/sigmundfre151797.html.  

Frye, N. (1963). The educated imagination. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.