This is a placeholder post because I don't have time to fully think about this right now. I came across this idea of a pedagogy of interiority while listening to a podcast interview with Irish poet John O'Donahue. He was being interviewed about his philosophy of beauty and its intersection with faith and religion. Not really relevant to my classroom, but then he brought up how the American education system doesn't seem to have a lot of room for beauty because of our surface orientation on accountability. Well, that's not exactly what he said, but that's what he made me think about.
I'm currently researching why my use of visual art in literacy curriculum has been so motivating for my students. After O'Donahue called for a pedagogy of interiority, he recalled the experience of attending a violinist's debut in New York. It was so beautiful, he said, that even the most hardened New York critics were moved to tears and a standing ovation after the first movement. He said the audience that night had shared an aesthetic event, one that may have touched an inarticulate place in the soul visited most often only in prayer and meditation (that's my interpretation of what he said). So in bringing visual art to the most routine of parts of my instruction, reading and writing, have I been creating aesthetic events for my students, arranging meaningful connections between them and what I ask them to read?
I am, as Louise Rosenblatt would say, an aesthetic reader. I hate having to use study guides and give tests or using methods like TPCASTT for analyzing poetry. The soul of the writing just gets sucked out of it when it gets reduced to multiple choice questions and busy work. Of course, my students may just be responding to my enthusiasm since I'm choosing to teach how I love to read.
Aesthetic theory is another up and coming area in schools of education. I suppose I should get a handle on it before it gets packaged as a curriculum reform.
Now that I find myself closer to 40 than 30, closer to veteran than novice, I realize that I stand on the far side of a generational divide. When I started teaching, I may have bumped into my students at concerts, or watched the same TV shows. Now, frankly, we inhabit different realities. They text message; I still handwrite notes. They have YouTube dates; I still tape the shows I want to watch on my VCR. Today’s school age generation has been characterized as understanding their American identities more as consumers than citizens (Kress), as living in “a kaleidescope world of representation, where sound image and print are constantly refracted by each other” (Millard, p. 3), as acquiring literacy from the screen rather than the page (Bearne, 2005), as learning to think by “seeing” information rather than reading it (Heath; Freedman), as postmodern producers and self-referential composers, and famously as “digital natives” (Prensky). Here they sit in twenty first century language arts classrooms with teachers who typically privilege word text over visual, aural, kinesthetic or any other kind of text, in a formalist or new critical pedagogy that situates them intellectually in the early twentieth century (Marshall). My learning disposition does not match theirs anymore. In school, I was taught to conform to convention; their functional literacy is about innovation (Kress).
Probably like many teachers, I teach like those educators I most admired as a student 25 years ago. And like many language arts teachers, I love to teach my favorite books from my school years. I struggle with the notion that the way I experience reading, learning, thinking—what I experience as a great text—that these may seem like antiquated notions to young people, or more disturbing, as useless, boring, obsolete. Even my sense of time is quaint compared to theirs. They live in a time of exponential change.
Maybe as I have heard, and must admit have said, during late afternoon office talk, “these kids just don’t like to think,” or “their junior highs didn’t teach them how to write.” However, it could also be true that I didn’t understand how they like to think and compose, what their comfortable and functional semiotic landscape looks like, or how to use it to ground my curriculum.
You know you're Minnesotan if you feel compelled to say out loud "at least no one died," but secretly you think if someone had died, at least people would bring casseroles and there would be some possibility of cathartic emotion. Instead, there is the relentless drip...drip...drip of ordinary catastrophes. Josh gets his tonsils out, then he gets the flu, then mom gets the flu, then Sophie gets the flu, then it snows, a lot, on March 31, and all we have to look forward to is that daddy will have the flu by Saturday. Can't say, "Sorry Josh. I know you feel worse than you ever have in your short life, but Momma needs to take a break and get a pedicure so that she can feel fifteen minutes of wellness and peace. Sorry, Sophie. You're fever is nearly 105, but Momma has a fever too and needs to lie on the bed and feel sorry for herself." Beware the Ides of March, indeed.
You know you're Minnesotan if you feel compelled to find blessings on a day like today. We had a mysterious credit on our account at the pediatrician's this morning, so no copay. Sophie's lollipop was vanilla, her favorite and a surprise inside the purple wrapper. It might reach 50 degrees today. It's pet show day in kindergarten.
It's April at last.
