As I was going through my notebook to see if I had once written about dialogical therapy (because I do not know what it is, but it sounds helpful in a Bakhtinian type of way: 'let's get all of the various perspectives out on paper' and not tainted with specific context like the 'talking cure' is), I came across an apposite note - and nothing on dialogical therapy. The note read: "Health - mental and physical - strangely not prioritised."
What happened to my voice?
How do I restore it back to health?
First, the diagnosis. I discovered something was wrong when I was trying to write my ideas, which are quite clear, but which could not be formulated in text because of decorum, which rhetoric recognises as structuring pedagogy and procedures of the discipline and governing the overall uses of language. In communicating, and communicating about communication on learning how to learn, the ideas must (obviously) be submitted to dictates of decorum. But how to get it right?
Then, I discovered another depth of the problem through comparison when I read the work of a very clear and authoritative-sounding writer who had assembled such a similar network of ideas as those I am working on, except her voice sounded like it was coming from a place of expensive good social dinners, which is definitely where I am coming from as I continue to make vegetarian pozole without the hominy and vegetables, which is to say, I continue to make chili - noted here for the recipe recommendation (which is to say, the acidic-hot 'sauce' added to the cooked beans towards the end).
Every time I begin to write, I look around to see if the enemy is approaching. I deploy theory like so many soldiers and leave a mess on the field. Or, I allow for Rothkoian approach and allow myself to paint the associations as they occur to me, but then remember I need to publish for academic reasons and drown that flight in declamation.
That's the melodrama - but if this were therapy, the emotions be brought out to play like children so as to have the opportunity to help them grow - so this type of story goes.
I am finishing off a paper that must be turned in today, but feel so strongly that so much academic writing (mine, in this case) suffers from the Midas touch, rendering the ideas it grasps 'unactionable' by pinning them down in respective bell jars, stripped from their vital context, smothered by the arcane which is necessary to respect a lot of complexity in a small space. Also, this language is so obviously not my own - with figurative like spoken languages, I am a fluent reader, not speaker, prioritizing the never finished work of comprehension. So I ask: is there a purpose for one who can listen but who is less able to speak?
Not all scholars (note: I am only an aspiring one) calcify and smother; just the majority. It is therefore a gift to do the academic job of delimiting a subject holistically: like choosing for the delimiting a statue whose finger happens to be pointing beyond the discourse.
Because I am pressed for time, which is to say, because it takes me so much time to write so little (or, sometimes, nothing), I will end this post with the B/Logroll links I prepared. I've decided to add a new feature to the series: ending by listing a blog or text whose author I'd like to have dinner conversation with.
B/Logrolling
Simon Sinek, "Most Leaders Don’t Even Know the Game They’re Playing In" (YouTube) seems to sum up the gist of his work in 30 minutes - with a very helpful section on how to relate to an emergent type of youth (insofar as one can speak of types...)
A Paris Review article on Fra Angelico that criss-crosses from the globe trotting associative to a silent monastery - also, made me think of how the enjoyment of Catholic religious art requires an understanding of history to be fully appreciated, as opposed to the Orthodox icon
The Community of Inquiry: Insights for Public Administration from Jane Addams, John Dewey and Charles S. Peirce (PDF) diss. by Patricia M. Shields which has a nifty section where the community of inquiry takes the form of an actual map: the graphic facts of a city assembled in Maps and Papers (Holbrook 1895) mapping out local evidence of problems for a community practise of politics. I like how this work could parallel nicely with CoPs, explained below.
I will make a note here on contemporary pedagogy: little of it - except nominally, occasionally - does the work to relate its approaches back to the tradition/trends it emerged from. Lave and Wegner popularised the so-called Community of Practice (CoP), which, by the way this term is cited in so much recent work, would appear to be an entirely contemporary phenomenon. But there's even a passage in Plato's Phaedrus that encapsulates something of CoP.
It is true that the genesis of CoP emerged from Lave's anthropological work - and out of the CoP of an IBM think tank if I remember correctly, but we know that ideas can surface in different environments at around the same time - Thony has written about this in the history of science.
But the uncanny similarities to Peirce/Dewey's approach combined with how CoP is being used in pedagogy makes these historical connections relevant. To illustrate, CoP was not just plunked down on a 'panopticon-style' classroom, but coherently fit with the constructivism that emerged through Dewey, who was influenced by Peirce's work on inquiry.
Dinner conversation I'd like to have with the author of this blog.
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