gen-ed across the curriculum

Artistic & Pedagogical Differences
Turn them UP. Put them in PLAY.

What Kortlandt has described as Jane's
“occasional anti-scientific attitude: may be
more the dislike of a certain kind of science,
where the scientist works as a manipulator
and voyeur: elevated, protected distanced,
hiding behind the curtain.

That stance establishes a universe in which
observer prevails as operator while observed
endures as object.

Jane's alternative style placed observer and
observed in the same field, not only literally
and physically, but also, I believe, psycho-
logically and intellectually.

Dale Peterson, Jane Goodall:
The Woman Who Redefined Man.

We could say "pedagogical" differences.
Not just science: pedagogy as as part
or apart. Fiction either way: see monkey
do or do monkey too. A story about
animal behavior in the “wild” and what
it tells us of us, our human race--looking
at our image in the pond, so to speak..

IT's always about us, isn’t it? What ever
it is we see, study, write up, explain,
interpret, assess, evaluate, deliver at
airport Holiday Inn scholarly conventions,
serving on panels & committees to estimate,
consider forfurther funding, recommend for
further study: our tokens for talking about
ourselves —the House of US : our species
eco logic & sustainability parameters..

Imagine a meta-Jane observing all our
strategic planning and tactics: all good
from her standpoint: very interesting.
No such thing as a bad monkey, from
a Jane Goodall standpoint. Just watching
to see what she could see..

Studying monkeys in the wild,
teaching students in classrooms:
be apart, be a part. Pedagogical
differences. Artistic. Scientific.
Turn them up. Put them in play.
The differences: diversity across
the curriculum.

Jane would drop to her haunches, pick
a long blade of grass, stick it in the termite
mound & fish for local food. Do what the
monkeys do. Was first to see a chimp eat
meat, according to records. Not the
vegetarian so many assumed

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means. Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins