The tourist who carves his initials in a public place, which is theoretically “his” in the first place, has good reasons for doing so, reasons which the exhibitor and planner know nothing about. He does so because in his role of consumer of an experience (a “recreational experience” to satisfy a “recreational need”) he knows that he is disinherited. He is deprived of his title over being. He knows very well that he is in a very special sort of zone in which his only rights are the rights of a consumer. He moves like a ghost through schoolroom, city streets, trains, parks, movies. He carves his initials as a last desperate measure to escape his ghostly role of consumer. He is saying in effect: I am not a ghost after all; I am a sovereign person. And he establishes title the only way remaining to him, by staking his claim over one square inch of wood or stone. Walker Percy, “The Loss of the Creature,” from The Message in the Bottle.

Since I first read it eighteen years ago, Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” has so occupied my spirit that I find my work circling back to it in ways that both surprise and instruct me. Case in point: I recently gave a presentation at the SUNY-Oswego “Celebration of Meaningful Learning,” sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (and ably led by the redoubtable economist John Kane). As I prepared my talk, I kept thinking about the ways in which Web 2.0 can restore the “title over being” Percy imagines in the essay I’ve quoted from. Not on its own, of course: Web 2.0 is that perfect learning environment that is only as good as one makes it. Yet there is a good, or many good things, into which Web 2.0 can be made, and which can be made by means of Web 2.0. By contrast, LMS’s like Blackboard make it difficult, at times even impossible, for the learner to leave any lasting imprint on the learning environment of his or her sovereign personhood.

Percy’s alienated tourists (not a bad description for a lot of our students) leave their marks as graffiti. Though I didn’t think of it in these terms until the Percy essay re-emerged in my memory days afterward, I wanted to take the idea of alienation and turn it around to the teacher as well. If the teacher can’t see the traces of the learners’ sovereign personhood in the learning environment, the teacher is every bit as alienated and deprived as the student. Even worse, the teacher cannot see the very thing upon which she or he must meditate and with which he or she must commune for authentic learning to happen. It’s almost as if we’ve constructed avatars of ourselves and activated scripts that move them, herky-jerky, through the environments we’ve created, while we look on, mourn, and grow increasingly frustrated as our agency (and thus any hope for real change) vanishes.

The metaphor I chose was not that of graffiti but of fingerprints, and I tried to frame the argument by analyzing how traces of the learners’ attention and addressivity could be of use to the teacher. What learning environments have textures that retain cognition prints? How do we “dust” for such prints when we try to infer the learners’ minds? I told some stories, and tried to establish a small but precise set of terms that would help us understand why and how cognition prints (if the metaphor was helpful) might matter.

I kept returning to three main ideas: attention, addressivity, and intimacy. I’ve been working on them for awhile now, and I find they’ll work (for me, anyway) in a number of different contexts. Attention is the foundation (there’s obviously some phenomenology at work here, though I don’t invoke philosophy–rather, commentary tracks on LDs and DVDs). Addressivity is the social and ethical dimension. Intimacy takes the social and ethical and brings in the idea of personal change, as well as the ways in which our tightest bonds actually constitute our personhood (a shared sovereignty implicit in Percy’s oblique strategies in even writing and publishing “The Loss of the Creature”).

My talk on that October afternoon was followed by an extraordinary dinner in which several teachers were recognized for their outstanding work in the classroom and as advisers. They were young and old. They were well and ill. They were from varied disciplines. They all had a chance to speak, at length, about who they are as teachers and why they do what they do. (It struck me that this should happen at all awards dinners for teachers.) They all spoke of their passion, their curiosity, the strong (I would say intimate) bonds they felt with their students. I have never felt prouder to be a teacher than I did at that dinner on that night. What a noble, humbling, and needful calling we share. I felt myself missing my students, thinking with a pang of those I’d left behind at the University of Mary Washington, and also looking forward to the students I’ll meet at Baylor next term in a freshman seminar. Mostly I felt honored, thrilled in fact, to be in the room and learning from these teachers.

Earlier in the evening, the provost had come up to me with kind and warm words about my afternoon’s presentation. She said the folks who’d attended had enjoyed it and were still arguing over some of its main points. Which ones? I asked. She replied that the word “intimacy” had given them some pause. It’s a loaded word, I thought to myself, especially for those in professions like teaching–presumably because learning is such an intimate activity, but that gets us back to the initial topic, doesn’t it? But I didn’t say that aloud. I just mulled over the provost’s remark, and thanked her cordially and sincerely. As the provost walked away, I turned to the professor with whom I’d walked to the banquet hall through a brisk Lake Erie evening. She’d listened to my conversation with the provost, and now she leaned toward me as we continued to move in the food line. “I think intimacy is what we most crave, and what we’re most afraid of,” she said to me. Then she said, “I think you should write about intimacy in that book you’re going to write.”

And then came the meal, and the marvelous testimonials from the honored teachers.

A remarkable day.

John Kane and his crew made a DVD of my talk. I had it in my bag about three hours after I finished speaking–truly amazing turnaround. Within a day it was on the web, the source from which I uploaded the talk, in seven parts, to YouTube. Here’s part 1:

The entire talk in one part is on blip.tv. The slides for my talk are in Google Presentations, and embedded in a page on my blog here. I’ve put the audio-only version (with audio from my trusty Edirol R1 and essential Giant Squid external clip-on mike) up here as a podcast.

My thanks to John Kane and all at CELT and SUNY-Oswego who made my stay so pleasant and gave me the opportunity to think about these topics. I hope my remarks are useful.