Who Gets to Noun? Fran, Language, and Standards

American Bus Stop V: Prison (M.A. Reilly 2010)

I. Context

I'm reminded of Fran, a 20-something mom who taught me so profoundly as I sit outside reading from Gregory Orr's (2013) River Inside the River.  In one poem, "To Noun," Orr writes (p.18):

Nouns were a giant
Confining--
Adam felt the sounds
He made
Build bars around
The things he saw. 

It hurt and thrilled him
To see how meekly
Each thing
Entered that cage. 

How snug it fit;
How smug he felt.

Who gets to noun?  Who gets to build bars around the things seen and be hurt and thrilled by such action is a question worthy of our time, our work, our energies. Years ago  I wrote an ethnography about ordinary courage, faith and chaos.  I was an adjunct instructor at a community college teaching a Developmental Writing II course which was mandated for students who had not passed the college's entry test. Instead of teaching the course as it had been strongly suggested (issue grammar worksheets, essay writing prompts, and practice sample test. Then repeat.) by the department head, I created the course with more of an inquiry bent.

Prior to the start of the semester I am reading Annie Rogers’ research about ordinary courage in girls' and women's lives and am finding her work to be fascinating. In discussing the etymology of the word courage, Rogers (1993) writes that in 1051 it simply meant “the heart of an age.” By 1300, courage means “to speak one's mind by telling all one’s heart” (p. 271). Towards the end of the 1400s, courage no longer is related to the heart, but rather commonly means facing danger without fear. In thinking about this work, I wonder how my students and I might investigate and document examples of ordinary courage in our lives.  It doesn’t occur to me that such interest may be connected to my own middle class life. I am largely ignorant at this point that many of my values may not be the values my students bring to class.  What I don’t know as I plan and revise the course is that nine out of the eleven students I will teach are all working class poor--half of whom are single moms in receipt of welfare services. 
             During the semester I introduce students to Rogers' definition of courage inviting them to author a memoir, collect an oral history from someone who is different from them (gender, race, etc.), and create a portfolio based on artifacts they created and collected. Through these projects I hope to occasion their growth in uncovering and witnessing courage in their own and others' lives and provide them with opportunities to develop their writing by composing texts related to themselves and others they find interesting.  (From Chapter 1)

I interviewed students multiple times in one-to-one situations and with their permission was able to study what they said and wrote in notebooks, essays, interviews, and commentaries about read texts. Fran helped me to begin to think about issues of power--to consider, Who gets to noun? I had been so enmeshed in the study and practice of teaching method, that the harder-to-see issues of power and consent were largely missing from my view.  Fran changed that.

II. Learning from Fran

During that semester Fran, the other students, and I wrote and read one another's writing alongside memoirs and essays authored by Jimmy Santiago Baca, James Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Charlotte Nekola, as well as oral histories collected by Stud Terkel.  Our interactions with the texts we wrote and read helped me to learn much about these students. For example,  Fran clothed and feed her family on $322 of welfare assistance per month.  Her only additional income was a $50 payment from her son's father, $140 in food stamp and a rental allowance that covered all but $100 of her monthly rent. Fran was at college (although barred at the time to take further courses until she passed the college entrance exam) as part of a condition to the welfare assistance she received. I was married, at that time had no children, and apart from teaching one class and doing some consulting work, I enjoyed a full scholarship to Columbia University where I was earning a doctorate.  Of course we were each more and less than these easy categories suggest, but nonetheless it was difference that first caught my ear as I listened to Fran talk.

When Fran was 17 she became pregnant.  Her boyfriend at the time, who was not the father of the baby was violent she tells me. She miscarried in her fourth month because her boyfriend beat her up. She told me the story through long pauses--her head bowed, eyes staring at the ground. "The place they put me. Right next to the nursery. In the hospital, right next to the nursery. I was sittin' seeing all those babies. It was hard." Neither Fran, nor her parents, pressed charges, although her stepfather "took the shotgun and was gonna kill the guy."  Fran explained that she just wanted to forget all about it, "to not think about it no more." (from Chapter 3)

She would tell me that is why she did not like to write. It caused you to remember, She said that choosing violent men as partners was familiar and say this with some laughter. "I just seem to have radar for them."  Later, she said softly, "I'm always fearful when I write. All the writing I get is bad news."

"It's always written down," she tells me. "The stuff you don't want."
"Like what?"
"Gettin' evicted, going to court, shit with the police." (from Chapter 3)

She continues adding child custody, child care payments, and welfare to the list.

Language hurts.  The who who gets to noun is not Fran.  She is acted upon.  A great confining.

I didn't understand that slim truth about language and pain prior to Fran.  That is not to say I had not experienced pain by what had been said/not said, but I didn't get it so viscerally.  In Fran's life, men nouned and women functioned more like silent conjunctions, ever joining.

Naming is a power.  It's one of the reasons I worry with our ongoing romance with state and national standards here in the United States.  The people who get to name them, hold great power.  They act. Everyone else is acted upon. They are like Adam building "bars around/ The things he saw."

It's the absences we need to account for.  The things not inside the bars that are ever so hard to see, to notice, to be brave enough to name.  It is the tensions between the things that get named and the things that are set off stage that we experience under the broad banner of reform.

A Read Aloud Unit for Grades 3 & 4 that Addresses Big History

from ebook: Excerpt From: Mary Ann Reilly. “Deepening Comprehension through Independent Reading & Reading Aloud in Grade 4.” Blueprints for Learning, 2013. iBooks. https://itun.es/us/b60EL.l.

In a read aloud ebook I made a few years ago, one of the units, From Stardust, focuses on the expanse of history that David Christian speaks about in this Ted Talk. This read aloud unit is designed for intermediate grade children and makes use of the following children's books.

I list the resources in the order they appear in the ebook. The ebook is downloadable and is free.

Kelsey, Elin. (2012). You Are Stardust. Illustrated by Soyeon Kim.  Toronto, ON: Owl Kids Books.

Schlickenmeyer, Max. (3.2.2012). The Most Astounding Fact - Neil deGrasse Tyson. Video. Retrieved 1.21.13 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D05ej8u-gU

from Bang! How We Came To Be

Rubino, Michael. (2011).  Bang! How We Came To Be. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. 

Screen Shot from ebook.

Nicolson, Cynthia Pratt. (2007). The Jumbo Book of Space. Illustrated by Bill Slavin.  Tonawanda, NY: Kids Can Press. 

• Chapter 17: “Cities of Stars: Galaxies and Beyond” (pp. 192-197)

from  When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer. Illustrated by Loren Long

Whitman, Walt. (2004). When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer. Illustrated by Loren Long. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

Katrieneliz. Learn'd Astronomer 2 0001

Retrieved 1.22.13 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=namVUer-bk8”

Using Lines of Flight to Create Clear Spaces in Standards-Based Curriculum

At the Edge of a Dream (M.A. Reilly,  2009)

How might lines of flight de/colonize classrooms?

Deleuze and Guattari suggest that new ideas need “clear space”in which to establish a foothold. This is a space devoid of the old rules, regulations, norms, and practices associated with the existing ideas. The new assemblage needs to be differentiated from other competing or existing assemblages. This process of opening up clear space is termed “deterritorialization” and is followed by a process of “reterritorializing” where new rules are coded for the new concept. To dominate effectively, there is a need to cut off a return to old methods, processes, practices, etc., thereby preventing the old practices re-imposing themselves over the new. The escape from “striated space” 5  (deterritorialization) to “clear space” is known as a “line of flight” (p.163). 

Michael Reardon,  Louis Sanzogni, and Arthur Poropat, 2005/2006

I have been fascinated by the idea of lines of flight as a means to de/colonize classrooms for some time. I appreciate the explanation offered by Reardon, Sanzogni, and Poropat (2005/2006) about the relationship between clear space and lines of flight and wonder how clear space might be introduced into standards-based classrooms as an initial method to open curriculum and pedagogy to possibilities.  These methods are lines of flight. 

Deleuze and Guattari's notion of concept creation is one way that space can be cleared in a more deterministic curriculum, such as those that are standards-based. Diana Masny (2012) explains that

Concept creation is precisely creating concepts to push thinking beyond what is assumed or given, to what could be. One way in which Deleuze and Guattari go about doing concept creation involves a process of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. (p.9)

So concept creation asks us to take a concept and to look beyond the prescribed meaning. As Claire Colebrook (2001) explains:

Concepts are not amenable to dictionary style definition, for their power lies in being open and expansive. For this reason, we have to understand them through the new connections they make (p.17).

It is the new connections to be made that allow for space to be opened. Further, creating concepts is most often linked with problem finding. Again Masny explains:

Concept creation is the result of looking at a problem/paradox to see how it functions and what it can produce (not solve). What problems produce is the creation of concepts. And the creation of concepts allows us to think differently about a problem (p.180).

Thinking differently is an outcome of creating concepts. Gilles Deleuze in Difference & Repetition notes:

For learning evolves entirely in the comprehension of problems … learning to swim or learning a foreign language means composing the singular points of one’s own body or one’s own language with those of another shape or element which tears us apart but also propels us into a hitherto unknown and unheard-of world of problems. To what are we dedicated if not to those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and our language? (p. 192, as quoted in Masny & Cole, p. 180). 

What is the problem in learning to do X? Encountering another leads to disruption or as Deleuze and Guatttari would name, deterritorialization. Deterritorialization opens a line of flight to a world of uncertainty and in doing so provides an opportunity "to disrupt overcoded learning and teaching practices" (Masny & Cole, p.181) such as the curriculum that yielded from state and national standards.

The rhizome is in motion.





Works Cited

Colebrook, Claire. (2001). Gilles Deleuze. New York: Routledge.

Deleuze, Gilles.  (1995). Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.

Masny, Diana &Cole, David R. (2012). Mapping Multiple Literacies: An Introduction to Deleuzian Literacy Studies.  New York" Continuum.

Reardon, Michael, Sanzogni, Louis and Arthur Poropat. (2005/2006). Towards a rhizomatic method for knowledge management. International Journal of the Management, 5 (5), 159-168.

Knowledge Building, Knowledge Of in Contrast to Knowledge About

Feet at School (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Something to think about from:

Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2006). Knowledge building: Theory, pedagogy, and

technology. In K. Sawyer (Ed.), Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (pp. 97-118).

New York: Cambridge University Press.

(1). Knowledge building pedagogy is based on the premise that authentic creative knowledge work can take place in school classrooms—knowledge work that does not merely emulate the work of mature scholars or designers but that substantively advances the state of knowledge in the classroom community and situates it within the larger societal knowledge building effort. This is a radically different vision from contemporary educational practice, which is so intensely focused on the individual student that the notion of a state of knowledge that is not a mental state or an aggregate of mental states seems to make no sense. Yet in knowledge creating organizations it makes obvious sense. People are not honored for what is in their minds but for the contributions they make to  the organization’s or the community’s knowledge. 

(2). Since the 1970s, cognitive scientists largely focus on two broad types of knowledge, declarative and procedural (Anderson, 1980). This distinction now pervades the cognitive literature as well as educational psychology textbooks that take a cognitive slant. The declarative-procedural distinction has proven useful in rule-based computer modeling of cognitive processes, but its application to education and knowledge creation is questionable (Bereiter, 2002, ch. 5). From a pragmatic standpoint, a more useful distinction is between knowledge about and knowledge of something. Knowledge about sky-diving, for instance, would consist of all the declarative knowledge you can retrieve when prompted to state what you know about sky-diving. Such knowledge could be conveniently and adequately represented in a concept net. Knowledge of sky-diving, however, implies an ability to do or to participate in the activity of sky-diving. It consists of both procedural knowledge (e.g, knowing how to open a parachute and guide its descent) and declarative knowledge that would be drawn on when engaged in the activity of sky-diving (e.g., knowledge of equipment characteristics and maintenance requirements, rules of particular events). It entails not only knowledge that can be explicitly stated or demonstrated, but also implicit or intuitive knowledge that is not manifested directly but must be inferred (see Bransford et al., this volume). Knowledge of is activated when a need for it is encountered in action. Whereas knowledge about is approximately equivalent to declarative knowledge, knowledge of is a much richer concept than procedural knowledge. 

Knowledge about dominates traditional educational practice. It is the stuff of textbooks, curriculum guidelines, subject-matter tests, and typical school “projects” and “research” papers. Knowledge of, by contrast, suffers massive neglect. There is instruction in skills (procedural knowledge), but it is not integrated with understanding in a way that would justify saying “Alexa has a deep knowledge of arithmetic”—or chemistry or the stock market or anything else. Knowledge about is not entirely useless, but its usefulness is limited to situations in which knowledge about something has value independently of skill and understanding. Such situations are largely limited to social small talk, trivia games, quiz shows, and—the one biggy—test taking.