Notes on Notes on Remarkable Things, I

The blogosphere keeps leading me to more wonderful things. Dorine Ruter (I’m sorry to omit the umlaut) linked to my post below. I saw the link as a trackback, and went to Dorine’s blog, where I read her fascinating account of experiments by Christine Brons in using video to facilitate analysis of teaching and learning. It will be no surprise to any parent, but still a wonder to all human beings, to read that the brain of a two year old is so complex that one must freeze the video frame every three seconds to take stock of the rich responsiveness of that toddler in a learning situation–even when the learning is indirect because the teacher interaction is happening with another child.

My own learning took several leaps forward by reading Dorine’s post. Her use of my own post in an even richer context helped me learn a great deal about my own experience and questions. Her meditation on those questions resonated very powerfully with my own mulling, but took it all forward another step, just as a rich conversation will do. She introduced me to Christine Bron’s work, which I will now investigate (though to date there is no English version available–time to learn Dutch). And by going to Dorine’s Bloglines blogroll, I found yet another blog that I have added to my own desultory reading list.

And of course Dorine lives in the Netherlands, and I have never met her, though on this day she was a true colleague and mentor. Astonishing.

In some respects, the indirect commentary, the distributed conversation, the citation paradigm of blogs that quote and link to other blogs and the trackbacks that make the citations immediately visible, all pry loose some things that might otherwise stay stuck. Or to put it another way, the distributed conversation is less about back-and-forth and more about building toward something we will all have created. In that way, it actually feels more permanent. To see some of my own ideas not just replied to, but actually used in another context, is a very powerful motivator and deeply satisfying. Scholars have always found these satisfactions, but they’ve never come so quickly–or with such creative energy a consistent part of the experience.

Sometimes it’s hard not to be awestruck by what blogs enable.

3 thoughts on “Notes on Notes on Remarkable Things, I

  1. Isn’t this type of reflection what pedagogy is all about? I imagine that one could learn a great deal about one’s own teaching from reviewing videotapes of class discussions, especially with someone who has experience in doing so. And yet, I suspect this would be considered beyond the pale in higher education. After all, what does this have to do with being disciplinary practitioners?

  2. I guess I’d say that there’s always value in thinking about thinking, whether from the vantage point of neuroscience or the vantage point of more typical forms of reflection. Then I’d say that success in any discipline at the level of the Ph.D. almost perforce means that some kind of thinking-about-thinking has happened. The key, then, is not so much thinking about “pedagogy,” which I deliberately put in scare quotes, as thinking about one’s own practice as a thinker and learner and then a) making those practices visible to the class, b) asking the students to reflect on their own practices as thinkers and learners to make them visible to themselves, each other, and you, and c) together agreeing to own the responsibility and commitment inherent in using individual practices to serve the larger goods enabled by communal mental activity.

    In this way, pedagogical methodology recedes, and self-awareness comes to the fore. Part of why I resist most (not all) pedagogical methodology is that in some respects (not all) I feel it can deaden self-awareness and imagination just as surely as those fabled yellowed lecture notes.

    What’s described in Dorine’s post is not so much methodology as it is informed awareness that feeds and results from deliberate reflection. Perhaps that’s a methodology. But think too about the toddler. She’s teaching herself. What is *her* method? To what extent is most of this issue about genuine contact with thoughtful others? Now we can think about what “genuine” means….

  3. Just as I was grateful to have stumbled upon your intitial Notes, I am now happy that my musings found some resonance with you in return. I’m never sure if there will be a ‘giving’ after all my ‘taking’ from so many wonderful and inspiring people!

    Commenting on yourself and Steve:

    With the complex (and often abstract) thinking you’re dealing with in higher education, it’s not likely that you can view the exact level of understanding of a student when recording his/her behaviour on video. (Learning about syntax, semantics and ‘quality of writing’ is a bit less easy to visualize than learning what a zipper is!)

    But keeping your senses focussed on the student’s cognitive process and looking beyond the regular written and verbal assignments might give you indeed this “informed awareness” that then helps you facilitate this student’s learning. After all, being a teacher means you’re facilitating the learning process of your student, right?

    And without being able to define (right now) what the concept ‘genuine’ really means to me, it feels right to say this is all very much a matter of “genuine contact with thoughtful others”. Thanks for that one.

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