#SOL16: A Link in the Chain

from my art journal - Two Women, 2016

I.

It's the things you never needed, nor wanted to notice, that cut so deeply. Like this morning in Starbucks. I was waiting for a cup of mint tea when I overheard the barista say to a customer, "Boy am I tired. By the time my husband and I got home..."

Now, it wasn't her words. I stopped hearing her immediately. I couldn't tell you what she or the man she was speaking with said next.  No, it's not the words. Rather, it's the tone. Yes, the tone. The tone was too dear, too familiar. The intonation carried far more meaning than the words, tugged at a memory that didn't quite take shape.  I got the tea and then left.

Later, driving home from work I felt blind anger rising up, swarming about me. Nothing happened, I thought. Why am I feeling this? No reason surfaced.

It would be hours later when I remembered the woman and the sound of respect and love that was communicated when she uttered, my husband.  I knew the sound those words signified: love and respect. All of that and more was conveyed when she simply said, my husband.

And at that moment, she embodied all I had lost.


II.

Every utterance, Mikhail Bakhtin (1986) tells us is a "link in the chain of speech communion" (p. 76). I was thinking of this as I walked at dusk. It had been a two-walk day. I was out of sorts, unanchored. In accepting Rob's death, the sadness shifted a bit revealing more of myself draped in all of this sorrow. It hurts to see the darkness surrounding me.

While walkings, I was listening to On Being--an older interview by Pico Iyer of Krista Tippett. She  was speaking about her recent book about wisdom. She said,

...then there is also this paradox that we are so often made by what would break us. And I think this is where our spiritual traditions, where spiritual life is so redemptive and necessary, because this is the place in life that says — that honors the fact that there’s darkness — but also says “And you can find meaning right there,” right? Not — it’s not overcoming it. It’s not beyond it. It’s not in spite of it. What goes wrong doesn’t have to define us but, I mean, again, to come back to what wisdom is, as I’ve seen it, it’s people who walk through whatever darkness, whatever hardship, whatever imperfection and unexpected catastrophes or the like, the huge and the ordinary losses of any life, who walk through those and integrate them into wholeness on the other side. That you’re whole and healed, not fixed. Not in spite of those things, but because of how you have let them be part of you.

Mine is an ordinary loss, typical really. And it is the ordinary happenings--the losses and joys and sadnesses and confusions that link us. Our talk of these to one another bind us, helps us perhaps to honor the darkness that (in)forms such loss. Bakhtin writes, "Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication" (p. 96).  The woman behind the counter at Starbucks is a repository for the preceding voices, the dwelling place of memories where my husband resides.

What gets forged each day as I make my way is a kind of strength that knows surrender at its heart. The anger I feel stems, in part, from understanding that medical errors that could have been avoided but were not left Rob unable to climb two stairs, unable to reason, unable to know what was real and what was fantasy, unable to be the partner I had known or the consistent father to our son. It left him not able to write the letter he told me he wanted to write to Devon. And though we had five months left from the diagnosis, the sadder truth is that we had barely a week for once the first staph infection ravaged his body his decline was mostly vertical.

There's a darkness to all of this. And yes, I am angry that the carelessness of one doctor and the poor judgment of a second stole the little time Rob, Dev and I had; stole my husband's slim chance to live.

Tonight the moon is a waxing crescent and beneath it I am wondering what I am becoming. Here in this dark place, light breaks like hope.


Cited:

Bakhtin, Mikhail.  (1986). "The Problem of Speech Genres." Speech Genres, and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Rhizomatic Learning: Maps as Lived Performance, not as Artifact

Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways...A map has multiple entryways, as oppose to the tracing, which always comes back 'to the same.' The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged 'competence'...What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration (Deleuze & Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus pp. 12-13).

I've been thinking about the Common Core State Standards and the practice of using these standards, or the Common Core Curriculum Maps, or Heinemann's already made reading and writing Units of Study as 'the' maps curriculum writers in Districts trace in the development of local curricula that then gets handed to teachers to enact.  By their very nature, the made map, like a tracing of a map is an epic artifact, not a performance and learning requires performance. The epic world is sealed, untouchable and both learners and their teachers need to live in the middle of the work they compose.  

That's the map as performance which is rhizomatic.

The made map that one then traces cannot carry with it the intentions, contexts, complexities, misunderstandings, and nuances that (in)formed the original. Meaning always exists at points of utterance. This is why curriculum is better situated as complicated conversation (Pinar, 2008). Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) would tell us that "Discourse lives as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of the word" (Location 4116).  Curriculum taken from the Common Core, the Common Core Maps, or the prefab units of study will result in a mere tracing that "has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the axes of significance and subjectification belonging to it" (Deleuze & Guatarri, p. 13).

The authors of the Common Core Curriculum Maps say:

Educators may view the curriculum maps as “road maps” for the school year, using them to jumpstart the lesson planning process. As common planning tools, these maps also can become the backbone of rich, content-based professional development as teachers collaborate to refine the curricula for their particular schools and classrooms.

Folks, there are no made roads worth traveling at the cost of your freedom.  The entryways and exits have all been preplanned and the attractions delineated. Alongside that made map is a calendar to keep you and your young charges from dreaming, dallying, racing, reversing, erring, collapsing space, making a detour. 

No musing allowed/aloud.  

And there you are motoring about and you get an itch to go left and you just can't do it. The road you are on is an accident.  So what's a body to do? 

Live wide awake lives and let's call that "the content".  Dwell in the imagination and we might consider that akin to process. A little of each of these, along with consistent learner agency and we would find that would be enough.

Beaver Moon (11.10.11, M.A. Reilly)

The finest educators I know do this or try to do this as they labor under the mountain of predetermined 'content' and testing requirements.   I once taught middle school learners who decided early in the school year to remove most of the furniture from the room where we met and to organize the year as a collection of clubs they determined.  Although this was 1996,  one of the clubs a handful of students enacted was a gaming club and I was surely the student my students were teaching. We had a dance club, a reading long novels is great club, a solving community problems club, an editing club (my choice),  and a host of others that came and went as the year progressed. In the room which was carpeted, there was a very large table and a handful of chairs, a couple of easels, some computers and lots and lots of supplies (paints, pastels, brushes, software, cameras, books, magazines, newspapers, and so on).  In December of that year, about a dozen of us took to studying the moon for a month. We hand made art journals, collected and read related resources, interviewed a variety of people who had different expertise about the moon, and took to standing outside at night regardless of the weather for a full moon cycle.  Our journals were filled with our observations and became the texts we studied.  Beneath the club work, I threaded skills, strategies, and dispositions into the work we composed (as did the students) and I hoped it would keep them in good stead. I know that I still am studying the moon and the work 15 years ago continues to inform how I see.

"[T]he rhizome is not the object of reproduction" ( Deleuze & Guattari, p. 21). It is the made work that happens in the company of self and others.  At the time I was 'teaching' this middle school class, I was completing my doctorate at Teachers College/Columbia University.  There I was both teaching and participating in seminars where I was trying out ideas, discussing  and writing about what I understood to be happening with the middle school students.  It was in the middle of  all of this languaging with young teens, graduate students, doctoral advisor,  peers, and family that theories and practices merged, blurred, became a map made from the dialogic threads we composed. Again, Bakhtin (1984) is helpful.  He explains:

The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue (p. 276). 

Leaving Dublin (2008, Reilly)

Each year is new. Not repeatable.

A premade curriculum, neither you nor your student have made, will get you lost.

Annie Dillard says it well in The Writing Life:

Process is nothing. Erase your path. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs. I hope you will toss it all, and not look back.

'A Link in the Chain of Speech Communion'

Yesterday, my rather humble blog passed the mark of 20,000 visitors from 123 countries. A year ago I began the blog and truth be told, I am a bit amazed at the numbers as it had not occurred to me that a blog could or would attract such 'global' readership. 

Depending on your experience with social media, the power of blogging may be difficult to know, appreciate, and value.  I've noticed a lot of posts with titles such as: Why I Blog, Why Blogging Matters, Why Teachers Should Blog and so on and decided to weigh in on the matter.  I began blogging in earnest a couple months after meeting Will Richardson. I had started the blog in December of 2009 and made just one post which was generated in response to an assignment--something I would not recommend be done.  In 2009, the idea of blogging didn't mean anything to me, as I was uninitiated. I was taught the technical aspects of establishing a blog which were nothing more then point and click. Whereas I knew a fair amount about writing in a 1.0 world, what I knew did not necessarily help me to understand some key attributes of blogging: largely that it is social and rhizomatic.  The assignment once done only served to undermine my confidence.  I had nothing to say and I was saying it (not as eloquently as John Cage) and felt I had 'failed' blogging.  So when Will showed a screen shot of his blog to a group of us, I was pretty intrigued by a graphic displayed on it that showed the globe filled with lots and lots of red dots. Each dot indicated a visitor to the blog and frankly Will's globe was mostly red. 

I connected that day to a shift in understanding about how communication happens via blogs.  Although I had written a fair amount prior to blogging, my writing tended to be academic and published rather exclusively in professional journals that were juried. Some of those journals enjoyed significant readership.  In many ways though the academic writing world seemed based on a communication model much like Saussure theorized at the turn of the last century.  It was a linear transmission model. I wrote a text, some peers reviewed the text, the text was accepted for publication (with or without revision), a final version was submitted, the text was published and made available for others to read.  A concern with Saussure's communication model is that it assumed that a listener's comprehension mirrored the speaker's and so given that belief, the unidirectional representation seemed complete. Oddly, many academic journals seem built upon a similar mindset as dialogue is not facilitated. 

Blogging assumes a rather different model of communication: more akin to Mikhail Bakhtin's (1986) notion of dialogue as a "link in the chain of speech communion" (76) rather than an encoder-decoder model. A year later, I am understanding that blog posts are rhizomatic in ways print publication simply cannot be.  After meeting Will, I began to 'follow' him on Twitter, to read his posts, and to follow the hyperlinks within those posts to other posts. It was dizzying. In doing so I found other blogs I enjoyed reading, agreed and/or quarreled with, and after a bit of time found myself responding in print. Even when I did not post a response, I often followed the 'conversation'. At the same time, in part because of what I was reading, I became aware of a need to communicate my understanding of and concerns with the Common Core Standards. In many ways I had been entering that dialogue without writing and so in late August I found I had a lot to say and began doing so via the blog, beginning with the post, Nomadic Reading in a Standards-Based World.

Blogging is not simply about 'writing' and to think of it as a writing task is to make a mistake. Rather, blogging is about entering into a chain of speech communion, of which you are a link.  Depending on how you enter and re-enter, the chain often appears quite different and what you link/unlink shifts.  It would have been difficult, if not impossible for me to understand this without blogging and as I write this I am confident that there is much more that I don't realize from the place I am standing.

The only advice I offer today is to not assign blogging as a task for students to complete. Initiate learners by reading, listening and viewing blogs and leave the choice to commit to writing a blog to the individual. 

Colonizing Classrooms: ASCD

I was angry and disappointed by the time I finished reading Susan Ohanian's recent blog post about ASCD receiving and accepting a $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help "districts and states realize the capacity of the new standards to fundamentally change the learning experience of students."  

Ok, let's take a minute to dissect that intention.  Think agency and ask yourself, Where is the teacher's and students' agency in ASCD's intention?  

There is no agency by teachers or the students. 

ASCD is the actual agent.  Everyone else is a receiver (district, states, and students). Teachers are missing. I would surely agree that ASCD and its agents who carry out this task may well learn.  But know this: There is no positive learning without agency, be it by the teacher, administrator, or student. As Maxine Greene (1988) so wisely reminds us "A teacher in search of his/her own freedom may be the only kind of teacher who can arouse young persons to go in search of their own" (p.14).  It is the educator acting and the student acting that leads to meaningful learning.

Transactional theory (Rosenblatt, 1978) allows us to know that the standards are nothing more than marks on a page.  They, like any other marks on a page, have no meaning, until they are acted upon by a reader.  That transaction is where meaning happens and such transactions cannot result in the same meaning being composed by x # of individuals. Meaning, contrary to what ASCD says it is planning, cannot be packaged and sent ahead, like some manifest destiny run amok.  

ASCD says that it is "committed to translating high-quality research about how students learn into practical professional development for teachers".  Hmm. Translating.  Does ASCD believe that translation and meaning making are the same thing?  Meaning is made at points of utterance (Bakhtin, 1984). It is dialogic. “Language,” Mikhail Bakhtin writes, “is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others” (1981, p. 294). 

It is simply foolish to believe that an utterance will mean the same thing for everyone, and more importantly that marks on a page have a set meaning that remain static. What these core content standards mean is ALWAYS dependent upon the speaker's intentions.  If we eliminate the speaker, or in this case the teacher, and ship the standards ahead, we have nothing left but an empty law that district administrators will be expected to ensure happens through imposed practices and policies. These attempts will only create more division among educators. Consider William Carlos Williams who in The Desert Music told us:

The law?  The law gives up nothing
but a corpse, wrapped in a dirty mantle.
The law is based on murder and confinement,
long delayed...(p.109)

These understandings of meaning are fundamental.  As such, this is not a semantic argument, but rather a philosophical and theoretical one.  If we believe that the marks on the page someone has named as standards are that which will "fundamentally change the learning experience of students"--we have situated learning and learners as epic. An epic is a place where everything has been predetermined. It is a time not of the present where one singer sings of that time and no one including the singer can alter the events of that past.  They are sealed from the present moment where meaning always exists.  Epics cannot be a metaphor for learning, classrooms, or schools.

 Mikhail Bakhtin (1986) suggests that meaning: 

only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue...Such a dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched (p. 7, emphasis in original).

We want schools where administrators, teachers, and students retain their "own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched."  We do not want what ASCD states it will do: "translate the standards into multiple instructional techniques to ensure teacher understanding of the underlying concepts targeted in the common core standards". We know that meaning is made in classrooms between and among learners, that there are no "best practices" that exist outside of the context of teachers, students, school and community--no matter the intentions of ASCD who earns its money selling such promises through membership, books, DVDs, and packaged professional development.  Meaning cannot be sent ahead via the implementation of standards, no mater how one attempts to define that reality. 

Let us not be fooled into dressing up ASCD's attempt to colonize United States classrooms as professional learning. Learning requires agency, not translation. 

 

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The dialogic imagination. (Michael Holquist, Ed., & Caryl Emerson, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

------------------------. 1986. Speech genres & other late essays. (Vern W. McGee, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Greene, Maxine. 1988. The dialogic imagination. New york: Teachers College Press. 

Rosenblatt, Louise. 1978. The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Williams, William Carlos. 1962. Pictures from Brueghel and other poems. NY: New Directions Books.

Sisyphus in the New Year

When I was contemplating writing a blog, I found myself split between wanting to compose entries about art and wanting to post entries about teaching and learning. In striking a balance between, I have come to see that each (art and education) requires a mindfulness that (in)forms the work I do, fail to do, refuse to do, and desire to do. Mindfulness occasions deep living and profound pain. Consider Camus.

Towards the end of Albert Camus's "The Myth of Sisyphus," he notes:

"The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious."  

Sisyphus.

My work as an artist and a teacher requires a mindfulness of what cannot be named earlier than the present moment will allow and at the same time often requires a rehearsal of possibilities, as well as deep reflection.  As an artist-educator, even when I work deliberately, I know that the present when traded for a prescribed truth, often yields something cliched. It takes me time to understand what I have created and to assign it value--value that sometimes changes alongside reflection and a passage of time. All things reveal themselves in time and being mindful allows me (sometimes) the opportunity to come to know and understand an insight and to (re)present that insight in the work I create. Insight, as Camus suggests, is accompanied by pain that redresses absurdity as tragedy. The dilemma associated with consciousness is old. It is the dialogue that Socrates and Malcolm X might have had: Socrates says that the unexamined life is not worth living and Malcolm X  writes that the examined life is painful. Living deliberately as artist and teacher requires both. Avoid such dilemma and little of value is left.


When I reread Camus's essay, I thought about how tragic US education feels. 30 years into a career as a teacher, learner, and leader and I see that so much of the rhetoric reported in popular press and touted by those with significant power is blatantly foolish, situates learners (teachers, administrators and students) as widgets, and is based on a belief of certainty. In these days, certainty trumps thoughtfulness. Consider how certainty is privileged in the recent post by The Christian Science Monitor, Education Reform: Eight Chiefs to Watch. With the exception of the first educator, Jason Glass, the remaining school chiefs' agendas, as represented in the article, suggest certainty as the logic that informs their positions and ideas. These leaders' views are posited as representing the singular and truthful perspective, as if meaning could be determined before the utterance. In the article, it states that these leaders want to:

1. Reward effective teachers (What does "being" effective mean? Is being a singular state?  What is effective? Effective for whom? By what measures? In what context? Across what time period? In what subject areas? At what grade levels? By whose standards? Is it possible to be effective in one context and not another?)

2. Give greater school choice to parents (The word choice means a variety of things from choice within a public system to choice beyond the public system. What choice do these chiefs want? Who gets privileged to make a choice? Who does not?  What happens to our democracy if choice weakens public education? Is separate by equal okay now? Does a democracy require public education? Is there any correlate that suggests "choice" of schools yields higher student scores on state mandated test?  What do higher scores on state mandated test mean to a learner, parent-guardian, teacher, employer...?)

3. Get "tough" with teacher unions (Are the ills of public education [whatever those "ills" actually are] directly related to teacher unions? Are all unions the same? What is tenure?  How is tenure represented in states? What happens in the absence of tenure? In the presence of tenure? Can tenure be singled out as a factor of anything? Is the presence or the removal of tenure related to a student's achievement and if so, achievement at what?)


Mikhail Bakhtin writes that the word is overpopulated with the intention of others.  We seem to have failed to understand this and instead act as if a word had a singular and agreed upon meaning. This seems to be the case today as the understanding of "education terms" such as achievement, excellence, effective teacher, school choice, funding, toughness, unions and so on are offered with little substance and less context.  Yet, meaning is always tied to the utterance.  Separate it from the context and we have little to offer and less to know.

The "discussion" about public education in the United States is a lesson in hegemony. Select people with power tell the rest of us what is truth. Their truth is uttered often enough and it is repeated by other people of means, politicians, TV and print commentators, business leaders, writers, speakers, educators, parents, bloggers, tweeters, until the words are meaningless and a position becomes a given truth. No need to understand what we mean by a given word, the task is to just continue to babble the rhetoric, like some long forgotten Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill. No wonder we feel so tired and oddly stuck. This is the tragedy about which Camus writes;  the naked awareness that allows us to see ourselves and our situation at this moment in time.  Our situation is not only absurd, it is tragic as it is impossible to discuss anything without offering alongside some definition of term and intention. Discourse is dead.

What then is needed to challenge the one view truth being passed along as reality? Oddly, on the US Department of State's web page an interesting definition of democracy is offered.

Democracies make several assumptions about human nature. One . . . is that any society comprises a great diversity of interests and individuals who deserve to have their voices heard and their views respected. As a result, one thing is true of all healthy democracies: They are noisy. (US Department of State, International Information Programs, online)

As an artist and a teacher, representation and voice are critical. Agency is critical and requires local discourse.  Noisy would be so much better than the singular drone of "those we should be following." Let's stop following "those in the know"and instead engender local conversations.

The Issue of Representation in Schools: Be the Revolution

The issue of representation is the deciding issue in education in this century.

As the division between "economic haves and have nots" increases at accelerated rates and the clarity between actual and fictive is rendered less clear through personal, institutional, and national educational practices and beliefs—how we position and are positioned matters. Such action often sets a trajectory that for some children is nothing less than fatal, while for others affords them the kingdom.

Allow me to be specific. Across the last 30 years, in the K-12 public schools, I have heard teachers, administrators, parents, community members, and even students utter these statements.  Additionally,  I have uttered some as well:

• He's a shop kid.
• She tries, but she's special ed.
• I just got two bilinguals in my general ed class. Now what am I suppose to do? 
• Mrs. X, your son is just not honors material.
• You should see what my honors kids are doing...
• My special ed kids need me to take it slower. They are incapable of doing x. 
• Let's face it: bilingual students just learn differently.
• My honors-child cannot and will not be in class with non-honors children. They will slow him down.
• What are we going to do with all the level 1s? They are bringing down our school profile. 
• Place all the bilingual students in course x. No exceptions.
• Give me the band kids, they're fabulous in math. 
• These partially proficient kids need to be placed in... 

I want to suggest that as these phrases become accepted discourse at a school, the language and the meanings carried shape expectation by turning opinion into "the" truth.   Further, the language also homogenizes people who may share some similarities (perceived and real) by limiting their definition to a single group identification so that terms such as: bilingual, special education, honors, shop, band and so on carry specific meaning. In these scenarios, the child is no longer multifaceted. She is bilingual. She is special ed. Such categorization locates actual performance beyond the realm of possible by lodging it within an epic construct that becomes institutionalized and across time is often thought of a defining tradition: At School X, this is what we know to be true. As new faculty and students join existing faculty and classmates, they learn these truths and in doing so, essentially render a dynamic place of learning into an epic world where the "past is locked into itself and walled off from all subsequent times by an impenetrable boundary..." (Bakhtin).

As our beliefs about children solidify--it becomes more difficult to engage in new thinking; to consider other possibilities. Odd traditions find permanence in places where epic stances are the norm.  Again Mikhail Bakhtin states, "tradition isolates the world of the epic from the personal experience, from any new insights, from any personal initiative in understanding and interpreting, from new points of view and evaluations. The epic past is an utterly finished thing, not only as an authentic event of a distant past but also on it's own terms and by it's own standards; it is impossible to change, to re-think, to re-evaluate anything in it."

I think about all of the rhetoric regarding "reform" of schools and the too-easy placement of public schools as places of chronic failure.  I can't help but think while those who are often far removed from actual schools banter questions about reform and reform models from lofty places--those of us who actually work in schools could exercise a profound and lasting revolution by taking a single action.

If we consciously took a stance to resist categorizing children and instead dwell in possibility, the revolution would be upon us.  Rather than limit ourselves to definitions of children via fixed categories, imagine what might happen if we practiced seeing possibility in other and uncertainty in ourselves.  Imagine how different the learning trajectory for both child and self might be.

Profound change has always rested in our hands.  Now is the time to accept responsibility and shape the outcomes that are so possible.