Monday, May 25, 2009

Transformers R Us (Like it or not)


Transformational Transformative
Transformational Learning Trans-
formative Eucating

A form translated to another form without loss of
“content” (spirit, idea, essence): change & continuity
simultaneously, singularity & multiplicity, theme &
variation, sameness & diversity, you say tomahto,
I say tomato. Transforms.. .

By analogy, transformational grammar: modeling the
underlying continuity of rule and structure generating
infinite sentences out of a finite source in the same way
three chords in progression can manufacture countless
country & western songs as well as rock and roll
number one hits.

Transformation. Metamorphosis .

In computer programming*: it used to be said
proficiency in 3 languages is needed:

X) Program Language—in which a computer program
is written, modeling to fit the IDEA with the physical
requirements of the machine

Z) User Friendly language—which lets the user/abuser
interact on screen to do his business, write novels, pay
bills, play hangman..

Y) Translator Language: which separates and relates
program and user: transformative language sustaining
& maintaining the radically incommensurate differences
between program language and user/abuser language.

(Have you seen program language suddenly bleed onto
your screen ? Pentecostal! looks like glossalahlia—
speaking in tons of angles. Alien.)

Environmentalists talk about Deep Ecology in ways I
suspect parallel deep transformational and generative
grammar. Beneath surface sentence proprieties: the
taxonomies and conventions of syntax and speech
formalities, proper punctuation and avoidance of
the split infinitive & dangling
elements.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a triadic parallel
analogy with genotype, phenotype, and the typical
organism in real time, or with archetype, stereotype,
and the allo-typicalities we love to celebrate as diversity
in our day-to-day operations.

.....................................Y) Transform on the
......................................e hand and the other
X) Form on the one hand Z) Reform on the other

..........................transformational grammar
deep grammar......................................... surface grammar

.........................................stereotype
archetype...................................................... allotype

.......................................phenotype
genotype........................................................ Chicken Little

.....................................translator language
program language................................... User/Abuser language

Loose thinking, not ready for prime time or Chronicles
of Higher and Higher Education. Summer time
speculation. Putting IT in play.

IT, I said.
Do I always have to be spelling IT out?
ITerations on transformations, say. IT takes
something like 3 ways of talking, I bet, and not
just one. 3 realms, 3 territories so to speak if
transformative learning is to be articulated
for educational consumption..

Sort of like building an Ice Cream Parlor in Hell
without doing injustice to hot and cold. Got to
be enabled to talk Ice Cream, Hell, and Parlor
—without collapsing, conflating, and confusing.
(Variant transform: Ivory Tower Talk, Moat
Talk, and Outlying Territory Talk) Proficiency
in 3 languages—whatever the token topics,
if I want to be transformationalist-savvy.

(*Borrowing from Douglas Hofstadter’s, Goedel,
Escher, Bach—a computer scientist's study in recursive,
self-referencing systems. Won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980 so
this talk of the 3 languages needed for
programming may
have taken new form by now. Transformed)



No comments:

Post a Comment