Come: Let us Embrace Contraries Together

Dear Colleagues,
 
First: consider  the sound of 2 hands clapping
for Professor Phil Otternesss.
 
If I could stand & deliver like Phil I wouldn’t be
writing & writing this old way. I wouldn’t be
worrying about alternative modes of educating
to cover my inadequacies as  public speaker,
as raconteur (like J. Casey), articulate &
coherent lecturer (like my departmental
colleagues).
 
There’d be none of this song & furry I send out
to mask my homeland insecurity in the classroom.
 
 Second: more Peter Elbow, from his embrace
                      of contraries.
                
                        *****
 
I had always assumed, as I think most people do,
that as students we should be organized, coherent,
and know  what we’re doing.
 
And that, as teachers, in addition to being organized
and coherent, we should teach only what we know
well; and that we should present to students the main
principles of what we are teaching—and thus…we
should stick to one discipline.
 
I had assumed that input always precedes output:
that first we learn things, then we can have ideas;
that we should not invite students to give their
own ideas till they have proved that they can
learn the ideas of others; that accuracy should
precede transformation.
 
Not having examined these assumptions,
I didn’t have enough sense to notice that
my experience had tended to be the other
way around.
 
Gradually I have concluded that we must adjust
our picture of what is natural in learning and
teaching—of what goes on in the mind: our
picture needs to be messier, more complicated,
more paradoxical. I concluded that my experience
of perplexity in learning, teaching, and writing—
and the solutions I’ve devised—can be of use.
 
Peter Elbow. Embracing Contraries: Explorations
in Learning and Teaching
 
Can you sense a difference between the way you
(personally, dear reader)  learn and the ways we
people talk about the ways we learn?
 
Can you actually tell how you learn,
have learned, go about consciously learning?
Put it in words and  images—your own experience,
anecdotal?   And if you can and do: do you sense
the inadequacy? The gap between the way you talk
about IT, and the  actuality of how-you-learn leaning
in and learning?
 
The way(s) you learned how to walk,
to talk, for example. Play guitar. Ski.
Read. Write. Skateboard.
 
How did you  learn to integrate the TRIAD,
what wellness-learning (sufficient to make it
a requirement)  led to your moral  and spiritual
development, learning that culminates in the
ability to sustain a senior capstone requirement?
 
I’m not saying you or we don’t know these things,  just
wondering about the learning-it-takes to know them.
How we would describe the birth of our   assumptions?
Questioning. Wondering how we learn what we learn?
Tell me what was going thru your mind when you learned
to ride a bicycle.
 
Put it on a spread sheet. Sequence and Stages
 Line it out. Check  it off  Steps to  the acquisition
of knowledge.  Even if it doesn’t do justice to
actuality, it will let us talk together about  the
phenomena and values we call  learning. so
that we might be able to institutionalize it
and  say what we do and even show that
do what we say.   And then, if we wanted to: we
could erase it all, and find new ways of talking
about it:  learning and learning to learn and maybe
even learning to learn to learn.
 
Consider this distinction:
 
In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle
states by precise inequalities that certain pairs of physical
properties, like position and momentum, cannot simultaneously
be known to  arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one
property is measured, the less precisely the other can be measured.
In other words, the more you know the position of a particle, the
less you can know about its velocity, and the more  you know
about the velocity of a particle, the less you can know about
its instantaneous position.
 
By loose analogy:  as long as we don’t quibble too much
about how we talk about how we learn, we can have a  decent
conversation and share the experience  of an agreeable sense
of velocity—making progress together about learning: how-to
( prerequisites etc capstones, etc.).  Alma matrix!
 
But if any one turns the conversation to question premises,
assumptions, controlling metaphors, definitions of crucial
terms permeateing  the ways we are talking about IT
(learning, in this case: but ANYTHING), well—
down and down we go, round and round we
go loving that old black magic we weave
so  well.
 
Loving, I say—the downward spiral, the abyss, the chaos of
conscious demoralizing & undercutting the very ground on
which  we  lever our universities.
 
Got to love it. the liberal art (position, place)  as opposed
to and complementing the liberal arts (velocipedic )
 
Embracing Contraries:
Embrace & Be Embraced.
 
xxxooo, Sam