I’m reading around in Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head: The Eeatles’ Records and the Sixties, and it’s just as good as they say. I’d picked it up in a bookstore several years and landed on a song where MacDonald’s analysis completely rubbed me up wrong, so I put it back on the shelf. Yet ever after I keep reading how wonderful it is, and I realize I haven’t really given it a chance. This time, having just read Jonathan Gould’s great analysis/evocation/celebration/enactment of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” in Can’t Buy Me Love, I went straight to those songs (the greatest 45 r.p.m. release of all time, hands down) in the MacDonald book to see how Ian would measure up. His work on these masterpieces was every bit as good as Gould’s. And both of them understand the greatness of “Penny Lane,” which is a harder greatness to assess than the more obvious genius of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” That understanding means a lot to me, because I think “Penny Lane” is every bit the equal of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” with just as much depth and personal resonance and poetry and musical interest–and mind-expansion.

So I bought Revolution in the Head and brought it home. I’ve got Beatles Gear going too, and that’s a truly astonishing book in its own right–but that’s for another blog.

Tonight, I’m struck by Ian MacDonald’s description of Art School in the UK during the years preceding the 1960’s. And I’m thinking I need to find a book on the educational thought that produced these schools. If anyone knows of such a book–really, a survey of the Art School / Art College movement in the UK would be fine–please let me know. Anything that could nourish and help shape Lennon, McCartney (by association), and Townshend has my vote as a successful educational experiment. Listen to this:

The key to the English art shcool experience is that it was founded on talent rather than on official qualifications. In such an environment, one might interact wiht a wide spectrum of people, regardless of class or education, and draw from a multitude of activities often taking place in the same hall, separated only by screens. In addition to this, the quarterly dances–supplemented by more frequent one-nighters as the art schools became incorporated into the UK gig-circuit during the Sixties–provided opportunities for students to hear the top British R&B and jazz-blues groups, as well as visiting bluesmen from America. Already a crucible for creative fusion, art school as a result became the secret ingredient in the most imaginative English pop/rock.

Where do I sign?

The footnote tells a sad, familiar tale of how high-investment, high-yield education inevitable gives way to more regular, cost-effective mediocrity. To our shame, the mediocrity bears the name of the continent I live on:

After the affluent Sixties, English art schools began to follow other parts of the educational establishment by tightening supervision and examination and moving towards the North American model…. Many involved in the Punk/New Wave and early Eighties pop scene began as art students, but the number of art school ‘crossovers’ has declined markedly since then.

Let’s recap then: crucible for creative fusion and secret ingredient in the most imaginative English pop/rock vs. tightened supervision and examination, and tightened supervision and examination–the “North American model”–wins.

I guess no one guaranteed that all academic transformations would be for the better. Thank goodness the Beatles came along when we could afford John’s education. Sigh.

This is my 500th blog post.

To mark the occasion, I’m podcasting an interview I did with filmmaker Errol Morris back in March, 1997. The audio, alas, isn’t very good. I hadn’t planned to put the audio out at all, actually; the tape recorder was there as a backup to my notes, just as it was for the Ken Burns interview I did several years later (and with similarly iffy audio). I’ve cleaned the sound up as much as I could in the time I’ve had to devote to it. I think it’s at least listenable, and that the content of what Errol has to say is worth trying to listen through the bad sound.

Errol as at what was then called Mary Washington College as the 1997 Distinguished Visitor in Residence. He was with us for about a day and a half, during which time he screened a video copy of the workprint for his new film Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. He also spoke in five classes, attended several meals, and allowed himself to be interviewed nearly every moment he was here by a dedicated band of students from my film classes. I hope one day to put some of that material online as well.

For now, here’s the interview I did with Errol. I have far too much to say about this remarkable man and his work to even get started in this post. I’ll leave it at this: from Gates of Heaven to The Fog of War and beyond, his films have been as important to me as a film enthusiast and scholar as Welles’, Kubrick’s, or Hitchcock’s. I think Errol Morris will go down as one of the finest, most influential filmmakers who’s ever lived. He’s also a generous human being and an unforgettable conversationalist. I hear he can be difficult, too–but I’ve never seen that side of him. Even if I did, I’m sure he’d remain a hero.

If you haven’t seen Fast, Cheap, you should: immediately. If you haven’t seen his web site, ditto. And his latest series of postings on the NY Times blog site is remarkable.

Here’s the interview. Thanks, Errol–for everything.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (19.1MB)

Since I took up this work in 2003, I’ve met some great, great people. One of them is Liz Kocevar-Weidinger, Instruction and Reference Services Librarian at Longwood University. Liz is a very creative and imaginative person who understands the power of metaphor and has an uncommonly interesting strategic sense of how libraries can become vital partners with faculty and students. She’s a visionary.

Liz was kind enough to invite me to speak at the 2007 Virginia Library Association Conference. My topic was mobility and mobile learning. I had delivered an earlier version of this talk at the 2006 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Focus Session on Mobile Learning. Unfortunately, the audio recording didn’t work out for that talk. Thankfully, the recording worked this time, and in the intervening year I’d had a chance to revise, polish, and extend the original argument. For the VLA conference, I pushed into some new areas, trying to work in some of my recent thoughts having to do with intimacy, imagination, and emergence. I’m still working on those concepts, testing them as heuristics in several contexts. My thanks to Liz for the invitation and the opportunity.

I also need to footnote and thank Bryan Alexander for the idea that mobile devices can be compellingly intimate. In fact, Bryan’s talk at NLII 2004 was the first talk I ever heard on mobile computing, and for that matter the first time I had seen a Bryan Alexander presentation. A most memorable and fateful evening, one for which I remain very grateful.

As I tried to think my way through this topic during my prep for the VLA conference, I was struck by how much had changed from 2004-2006, and how much (perhaps even more) had changed from 2006-2007 when it came to mobile computing and mobile learning. In an era of continuing miniaturization and increasing sophistication in human-computer interfaces, it may very well be that “mobile learning” will soon be superseded by the simple term “learning.”

This time I really did miss a day–but as they say in Wikipediaville, “assume good faith“: “Well-meaning persons make mistakes, and you should correct them when they do…. Correct, but do not scold.” Consider me corrected, though there’s always the comment section if you’d like to help.

Yesterday was a complete blur of writing projects in quick succession, climaxing with the tardy delivery of my slides for Monday’s ELI Webinar. I’m confident I won’t even begin to do justice “Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0.” Given the time limits, the breadth of the topic, and my own ignorance, we’ll see an old phrase–“a lick and a promise”–given new life. That said, I admit that I did find myself getting a bit playful at times. Moonwalks are a serious and risky business, but don’t forget the golf club.

But enough talk about me. Apropos of Claudia Ceraso’s comment on my most recent Bruner post, I offer for your consideration this portrait of an active learner:

I’m no professional philosopher, still less a mathematician, but I understand just enough of Alex Ryan’s paper to see a little ways into the depth of this definition:

“Emergence is the process whereby the assembly, breakdown or restructuring of a system results in one or more novel emergent properties.”

Assembly, breakdown, restructuring: it seems to me that Web 2.0, like education, invites and expects these activities. (So does life, but don’t let on to the folks with good window seats; it will only upset them.) Of course, the definition does not say that the assembly, breakdown, or restructuring of a system inevitably results in one or more novel emergent properties. Indeed, it seems to anticipate that these activities will often not result in novel emergent properties. I note that Ryan’s definition does not give a name to what happens when the novel properties do not emerge. Chaos? Failure?

It seems to me that within the assembly, breakdown, or restructuring of a system, the teacher’s role, perhaps her or his primary role, is to shape and support the process of emergence. The activities must be authentic (real assembly, real breakdown, real restructuring–things could get broken) so that they have their best chance of resulting in emergence, which means there will always be the risk of flying apart into chaos and outer darkness. The other side of this idea is that not engaging in processes that can lead to emergent properties reduces both the risk of chaos and the chances of significant innovation–and understanding can be understood as a kind of cognitive innovation–to near zero.

On Monday I’ll be thinking about these issues, and others, in relation to using Web 2.0 in teaching and learning. I hope to throw some new thought-ingredients into the well-stirred Web 2.0 stew … or at least contribute an old boot and parsnips. I promise to talk about practical stuff, too. 🙂

Photo by Martin Argles, from a recent interview in The Guardian

Just when I think Jerome Bruner has extended my horizons all the way from Virginia to the Antipodes, I read something else by him that demonstrates how much farther I need to stretch. Two days ago I read what may be the single best essay on education I’ve ever read–and given some of the stuff I’ve been reading over the last four years, that’s saying something. “After John Dewey, What?” is collected in On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand (Harvard UP: 1962, rev. ed. 1979). I’m using the eighth printing (1997), so clearly the book’s got a considerable audience. I’d like to be among them to hear what they think about this book. I have the funny feeling I sometimes get when I’m immersed in a scholarly or literary author: I want to find the online discussion forum devoted to the author’s work, the fan sites that document all the errata and all the various editions and include multiple interviews with the writer, all the dense, prolific, easily accessed community-of-interest resources I take for granted in other areas (film, IT, consumer electronics, music). I know those materials are there, but they’re scattered, and they’re not flowing into a mighty online conversation. One day that will change.

But I digress.

What I’d like to do is reproduce each paragraph in this essay and follow it with commentary, observations, questions, and a considerable number of amens. If the Talmudic metaphor seems strange, here’s a stranger metaphor still: I’d like to be with this essay the way I’m with the crowd and the musicians at a concert. I’m not even sure what that means, so perhaps I’ll leave the metaphor alone for a more satisfying exegesis at another time. And I’ll leave the bulk of the essay for your reading pleasure.

For now, here are some choice moments in an essay I urge you to read as soon as possible. And once you have, or if you’ve read it already, please tell me what you think.

Bruner begins by quoting from John Dewey’s My Pedagogic Creed, written when Dewey was thirty-eight. Part of the second article of faith caught me by the heart immediately: “Education, therefore, is a process of living, and not a preparation for future living.” I might have that engraved on my tombstone.

Bruner is candid and rigorous about where Dewey fell short, and what in Dewey’s thought responded to a cultural context that is no longer the one we live in, but he’s also scrupulous about recording and probing into what endures, and what we forget at our peril. He responds to Dewey’s warnings about educational sentimentalism, and reminds us that we should not be reluctant “to expose the child to the startling sweep of man and nature for fear it might violate the comfortable domain of his direct experience.” Bruner rejects “the cloying concept of ‘readiness.'” He asks the vital question: “In what form shall we speak our beliefs?”–and goes on to state his own pedagogic creed.

Tonight, I offer two quotations from the first of Bruner’s own five articles of faith.

What education is. Education seeks to develop the power and sensibility of mind. On the one hand, the educational process transmits to the individual some part of the accumulation of knowledge, style, and values that constitutes the culture of a people. In doing so, it shapes the impulses, the consciousness, and the way of life of the individual. But education must also seek to develop the processes of intelligence so that the individual is capable of going beyond the cultural ways of the social world, able to innovate in however modest a way so that he can create an interior culture of his own. For whatever the art, the science, the literature, the history, and the geography of a culture, each man must be his own artist, his own scientist, his own historian, his own navigator. No person is master of the whole culture; indeed, this is almost a defining characteristic of that form of social memory that we speak of as culture. Each man lives a fragment of it. To be whole, he must create his own version of the world, using that part of his cultural heritage he has made his own through education. [Emphasis mine.]

In other words, the goal of a liberal arts education is to enable students to innovate and inquire within their own ongoing liberal arts education, that is, their lives. Bruner beautifully re-views Dewey: “Education … is a process of living, not a preparation for future living.”

The section ends with the paragraph, one that I think should be memorized and recited before, during, and after all discussions of curriculum (my that sounds prescriptive, but I’d like to try the exercise):

Education must begin, as Dewey concluded his first article of belief, “with a psychological insight into the child’s capacities, interests, habits,” but a point of departure is not an itinerary. It is just as mistaken to sacrifice the adult to the child as to sacrifice the child to the adult. It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can be fitted always to the child’s interests just as it is empty formalism to force the child to parrot the formulas of adult society. Interests can be created and stimulated. In this sphere it is not far from the truth to say that supply creates demand, that the provocation of what is available creates response. One seeks to equip the child with deeper, more gripping, and subtler ways of knowing the world and himself.

Much confusion about what it means to be truly student-centered could be mended by these words.

Bruner goes on to discuss “what the school is,” “the subject matter of education,” “the nature of method,” and “the school and social progress.” Each of those discussions is just as challenging, nuanced, and lucid as the bits I’ve quoted. What Bruner seeks to equip the child with, he has also bequeathed to me. I wish I had discovered this writer a decade ago. I am glad, very glad to be learning from him now.

My thanks also to my colleague Tom Fallace for piquing my curiosity about Dewey, a process that made this Bruner essay all the more resonant. I have so much to learn.

Laptops: I asked students to bring their laptops with them to class. Almost everyone had one. The few who didn’t had them on order but hadn’t yet received them. Over time, three or four of the sixteen got out of the habit of bringing theirs to class, but the rest constituted a pretty good yield in my view, and enabled some interesting learning opportunities.

One was what I’d expected (and hoped for): instant research journeys, and use of the class wiki for notes and other materials. It was a great day when we used the Internet to discover the explanation for “black Irish” that made sense of Jimmy Rabbitt’s insistence that Dubliners were “black and proud.” When the student at the end of the table found the resource and read it aloud, the entire class was charged with the discovery. That kind of serendipitous inquiry-fest is exactly what ubiquitous computing and connectivity should enable in classrooms–but it takes being alert to the possibilities.

I should have expected the other use, but I didn’t: students used their laptops to play for the class the music they were analyzing. Early in the class, I had played my own musical examples on CDs I owned or compilations I had burned. Of course I had my laptop with me as well, but it didn’t occur to me to use it to play music for the class. I play my music on my stereo, on CDs and on vinyl, and I also play my music on my iPod. I don’t use my laptop as a giant iPod–when I listen to music on my laptop, it’s streaming from Pandora or something like that. But these students really do use their laptops in a convergent manner: it’s a media center as well as a computer and an Internet device. Lesson learned. Next time I’ll assemble my examples on the laptop and play it back from there. No more boomboxes.

Play by play: I adapted an exercise from my earlier “Stranded” writing workshop and spent one day playing three songs for the class. For each, I asked them to narrate, as precisely as they could, what they were hearing, and to take that narration down in notes on their computers (on this day, we were in a lab, for better music playback and so everyone would have access to a machine). The results were fascinating. I asked them to send their notes to me so I could post them on the wiki. I didn’t get them posted. Why? Because there were multiple steps to get from Word format to MediaWiki format, and I hadn’t yet found the web service that did the quick-and-easy translation. My good intentions were then overtaken by events. Moral of the story: I should have had the students post their notes to the wiki. Good learning for them, low-threshold and brief requirement as well, and it will get done. I will be watching in the spring for ways to keep myself from being the bottleneck, even when it’s a last-minute inspiration I’m acting on.

The Final Project: In the preparation for the final project, begun in earnest about 2/3 of the way through the course, the students got bogged down in their discussions. No action items or organization emerged from those brainstorming sessions. I then intervened, more so than at any other time in the process, to get them organized and outline some basic project management steps to get and keep the ball rolling. The intervention was just what they needed, and things never got seriously off-track again. The intervention was not as much as they wanted, though: the students were very keen to have me tell them what the final project should look like, what they should do, what I was looking for, etc. I specified very precisely what I wanted–in the abstract. I refused to specify anything about the concrete form their project would take. A couple of students were unhappy with what they perceived as a lack of direction. I kept telling them the qualities the project must exhibit, the criteria it had to satisfy–but I simply would not tell them what kind of a thing it had to be, other than that it had to be a website. The result was better than I expected, and in some respects better than I had hoped. It was creative, funny, and showed (to me, anyway) a considerable amount of sophistication and understanding of the course materials. I was proud of their work, and they should be too. If the project was lacking something, it was probably ambition. It succeeded very well, but it didn’t aim quite as high as it might have, at least in terms of grappling with the harder questions in the course.

One more fascinating part of the final project, something that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t stepped back a bit, was the way certain leaders emerged. The person who had real web-design chops did a fine job of pulling everything together, and he got a lot of praise and gratitude from his peers. Ditto the person who was a born project manager, a leader who kept everyone on task and focused, and enjoyed that part of her talents. While not everyone bought in to the process as fully as they should have, it was a real treat to see the captains emerge, and indeed heartwarming to see how people responded to their leadership.

If you’re curious, take a look at the blog-aggregation site. There are some fascinating posts from each stage of the semester. Reading them over now, I see how far some of the students traveled from beginning to end–and how much this music came to mean to them as we traveled together. And every now and then, I’m sure I heard that pure and easy note, playing so free like a breath rippling by….

Thoughts more scattered than usual follow.

I have to admit that I’m a bit (okay, more than a bit) shy about this blog sequence. There were magical, beautiful moments in this class. There were also very disappointing moments, and some of them were because of my failures. I’m haunted–probably too haunted–by the gap between my conception of a learning odyssey and what I’m actually able to encourage and live up to myself. I’ll be teaching this class again this term, and I’m going to try to do better, but my best chance is always to let my fascination with the subject carry everything else along with it. When I lose myself that way, I find myself. Or perhaps when I ride the fascination I am better at getting out of the way–my own, and the students’.

There’s such an alchemy about teaching and learning that I feel a strange mixture of eagerness, awe, and trepidation every time I start again. I think back over this particular class and memories crowd to the fore: the Beatles argument, the two days I felt compelled to devote to the Beach Boys, the day we listened to James Brown’s “Night Train” together as we finished up Roddy Doyle’s “The Commitments,” the day a student identified a call-and-response moment in a Led Zeppelin song that I thought I knew inside out and suddenly opened an entirely new vista before me (it was all I could do to avoid jumping up right then and there with a Peanuts-esque “That’s IT!”), the way so many of the third presentations suddenly gelled into the kind of deep, thoughtful, rigorous, playful work I’d been hoping for–and trying to encourage–all along. The best blog posts, one of them quoting the last line of “Glimpses” in a way that made me think something had really resonated. One of those posts finding a YouTube tribute to the “female Elvis” whose obituary I had mentioned in passing that day. (By the way, YouTube was the single greatest resource for our class all semester long. I was worried about how we’d be able to share the music. I needn’t have.)

There were times I thought we wouldn’t get there. The day it became apparent I may have messed up the book order and left “High Fidelity” off the list. The day I tried to explain my follow-your-nose approach to research and left one student bewildered, apparently beyond recall. The day I asked the seminarians why they weren’t more lively in the question-and-answer period that followed their classmates’ presentations, and they replied that they didn’t want to ask questions for fear of making their peers look ignorant or stupid. I felt something rip inside when I heard their answer that day. A couple of them were passive and couldn’t be bothered to be answerable with questions, but for most of them it was the absolute truth: they didn’t look at the Q&A as a time to go deeper with what their classmates had already showed they knew, or to bring in interesting connections, or generally to take the level of engagement and enthusiasm and inspiration up a notch or ten. No, they were worried about catching their classmates out. And this in a class with no tests at all–but that’s another story.

Then there was the day when it became clear that I’d have to tell them they should blog twice a week, when I had hoped that with this small group and a topic of some urgency to all of us music lovers, I could just step back and let the blogging commence. That was certainly true for a few of the students. One in particular became a champion blogger within a week and I learned a ton from reading her blog (and told her so, too). But for most, especially at first, the overriding question was “how much do you want us to do?” I didn’t resent the question, really, but it was disappointing to realize how much their focus was task-oriented rather than inquiry-oriented (a facile dichotomy but I’ll leave it to advance the argument, for now). I know they were puzzled that we would be doing all this reading but they’d not be tested on it. I figure some found this a good reason not to read, or not to read very carefully. I used to be well-known for my regular reading quizzes, and I think those quizzes did a great deal of good as a constant indicator of the level and kinds of detail I expected them to attend to as they prepared for class. Somewhere along the way, though, I stopped giving these quizzes, probably because I grew impatient with them or tired of talking about them. I felt, and feel, that the time could be better spent. But as my wife always and rightly reminds me, much of what I need to bring concerns modeling, stepping students through certain paces. I will again attempt to find a balance between structure and emergence in this instance as well.

Then there was my own struggle to keep up with my evaluations of their oral presentations. Even with a (good) rubric sheet and recordings and copious notes, I found it hard to get the marking done. My mistake was not to evaluate the presentations right away, while I could replay the presentations in my head from memory, using my recordings and notes as supplements. Here I can find my biggest improvements next term. More structure for me.

I did not revise the syllabus with the students, exactly, though I’ve been powerfully influenced by the idea ever since I heard Barbara Ganley speak about it at Faculty Academy last spring. My version was to make it clear to the class that my revisions responded to my sense of the way the class work was emerging. I wanted them to understand that I did not view the syllabus as a “contract.” I tried not to abuse my privilege in this respect, and I tried to earn their trust so that any changes I made would  be seen not as “gotchas,” but as support for our work. I also put the syllabus on a wiki and asked students put their own contributions, notes, presentation materials, and so forth on the wiki. In that sense, their work enlarged and augmented (and completed, really) the outline my initial syllabus represented. I’m going to try to ramp up all these aspects next term. I’m also going to try to weave in more powerful, frequent knowledge-networking, specifically work with del.icio.us and online music resources. But I’m wary of piling too much on, as there were moments of what-do-we-do-now silence out of which some powerful ideas emerged, particularly the final project. (I’ll need to blog about this final project separately.)

I marked their oral presentations. I also evaluated their blog participation, their class meeting participation, and their class commitment generally. That evaluation was influenced by the self-evaluations I asked them to write at the end of term. I asked them to evaluate their own work on the final project, as well as their group members’ work (they had organized themselves, at my suggestion, into various task forces to construct the website). These self-evaluations also influenced my marks for their final projects. I explained to them that this was a chance for them to impress me not only with the quality of their argument but also, and primarily, with the quality of their reflection: its candor, expressiveness, and depth.

Most of all, though, I wanted for us all to listen with better ears. My strategy each day was to get us gripped, either by something I brought to the table or by a sudden insight or even a chance remark from one of the students, either in the class or in a blog post. And “gripped” here means not just fascination in the moment, though it certainly means that, too. In its larger sense, “gripped” means unable to let ideas alone, unable to keep from trying out an insight. If they could see that popular music could reward such scrutiny, they might be able to transfer that sense to other areas of their education, their lives. I can sum up my deepest joys in two ways: when students would point out a connection or a resonance I hadn’t expected or understood, and when students would say they found themselves listening to their songs more carefully and with greater interest than they had before, as they considered whether each song was rock, soul, or progressive. Sonic Youth, Backstreet Boys, Janis Joplin, the Kinks. Whatever. The students who gave the most to the class showed me, by the end, that they could stretch from Peter Guralnick’s patient, thorough, deeply committed Sweet Soul Music to the sparkling insights and arid bitterness of James Miller’s Flowers in the Dustbin to the rush and verve and swing and kerrang of Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobop. They could see, or begin to see, how these writers, and these musicians, were themselves gripped.

I feel pained by the disappointments, especially the ones I contributed to, but as I think about the best of what the class produced, I start to feel elated, too, by where we found ourselves going. I aimed to bring the class powerful readings, a sense of history (and historical disputes), and a varied palette of songs from the 1950’s to the present. I wanted them to understand that sophistication can increase commitment and joy, as well as a healthy (and sometimes corrosive) skepticism. We played records for each other, and thought about everything from the technological pseudo-folk-song of Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz” (Miller’s analysis here is brilliant) to boy bands, Britpop, and John Cage. We could take the measure of a season of astonishing cultural fermentation–and enjoy the blushful Hippocrene as well.

Perhaps the most startling moment of all came after the class was over, when a student in my freshman seminar commented on my Theme Parks and Sandboxes blog post. It was as if something I had been saying over and over, all semester long, had suddenly connected. Both he and I wish it had connected earlier. Yet I suspect that for this class, as for many, the deepest connections will occur in its wake, and that even if I had asked them to read my blog all semester long (that’s always seemed a little presumptuous to me, but maybe it shouldn’t) and had written that particular post at midterm, the ripeness that is all would not yet have come–to them or to me.

What’s lovely about blogging, of course, is that the connections endure, and the ripeness may always yet come.

Much left I would like to write about. I’d like to say more about each of the students. I made a study of them during the course, and thought hard about how to reach each of them, and how ready they were to be reached. I’d like to write about the first incarnation of this course, when I taught it in the summer of 2003 as part of the Advanced Studies in England summer program. I’d like to think through the freshman Writing Workshop I taught for many years in the late 90’s and early 00’s, often with my colleague  and partner-in-crime Bill Kemp, that we called “Stranded.” Since everything I did in Rock/Soul/Progressive last fall was in some ways influenced or inflected by everyone I was talking to, everything I was reading, and everything I was watching or listening to, I really should have a contributors acknowledgement page with a hundred or more names on it. I can’t end, however, without citing an essay that has long haunted me with its vision of an authentic self meeting the authentic otherness of the world, including all those other selves: Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature.”

I think that some part of me believes that careful attention to popular music can open more doors of perception than one usually finds in a course of study, but that may be largely the product of my own passion for rock-and-roll.

I see the students’ faces now, sitting around that table in Combs 348. I hear their voices, think about the apparent silences that their subsequent blog posts proved were not at all quiet, mull over the detachment they slowly overcame by the end of the semester. I think about the student who clarified a Blur song for me. The student who seemed so resistant yet wrote some of the most candid blogs. The student who shared with us how it felt to go home for the Thanksgiving holiday, and who thereby demonstrated the community we had begun to experience together.

I wish them well. I am grateful to them and hope that what I have learned will do justice to the work we did.

FSEM 100Y, Fall 2007. The University of Mary Washington had begun a program of freshman seminars the semester I left for the University of Richmond in summer of 2006. As I prepared to return to UMW for the Spring, 2007 semester, one of my first deadlines was for proposing a freshman seminar for Fall, 2007. Faculty were encouraged but not required to apply. I wanted to put that oar in the water, however. Many schools across the country were focusing on the “first year experience,” stressing its importance for bringing students into an intense community of learning that would strengthen and inspire them for the work they would take up during their college careers. I wanted to be part of that effort at UMW.

So I decided to propose a course built primarily out of heuristics and passion–though I didn’t put it exactly that way in the application. The heuristics were in the course title: rock for music derived from blues, country, or a mixture of the two; soul for music derived primarily from the gospel tradition; and progressive for music whose roots were in the various classical music traditions of Europe and, to a certain extent, of other cultures as well. These heuristics would allow us to ask questions about musical form, about performance practices, about musical history, and about cultural contexts. The overlaps and uncertain taxonomies were obvious from the start, but the categories were nevertheless useful as a way of focusing our analytical work and keeping us aware that the musicians we studied always located themselves within a tradition and within various communities of practice. A couple of times I brought up the connection between traditions and communities of practice within popular music and traditions and communities of practice within school. Once it came up in a particularly intense way at the end of a class session, and seemed to resonate within several students for some time afterward.

The passion was essentially a love for popular music, music that inspired social exchanges but also individual dreams, deep emotional bonds but also solitary, introspective pleasures.

I wanted to try to shape a course of study in which stronger and more precise analytical practices would emerge from an immersion in idiosyncratic but compelling musical histories, from oral presentations that would take the form of debates over whether a given song was rock, soul, or progressive, from novels deeply concerned with popular music, and from a final class project that would demonstrate what the students had learned in a way that would a) offer outsiders a powerful, entertaining, creative, and thoughtful experience of our work together and b) reflect as comprehensively as possible each part of the course of study, not just what was easiest or most obvious to include. Threading its way throughout the course was a dialetic between the US and the UK / Ireland. We read three music histories, two by US writers and one by a UK writer. We read three novels, one by an Irishman, one by a Brit, and one by an American. I assigned songs for the first two oral presentations, and I kept the dialectic going in those assignments. The students themselves chose the music for their final oral presentations.

As I look back on the course, I can see how every bit of the structure I built into the experience was there to support emergence. All the theme parks were inside a sandbox. It was a very risky instructional design, especially for the first time out. Yet I felt compelled to do it that way, for several reasons. One was that I wanted my freshmen to experience a fairly radical version of the freedom college grants the learner. I wanted them to see as vividly as possible that they would get out of it only what they put into it. Another is that the academic study of popular culture can quickly become highly inauthentic. “We murder to dissect,” and I think that’s particularly true of vernacular art–not because the art is not sophisticated, for it certainly can be and often is, but because it is so close to the essence of human yearning, joy, and anguish. There is a sense of immediacy, of voices emerging from direct and intense lived experience, that I feel must be respected. Not only respected, either: participated in. When Milton writes, “Come, knit hands, and beat the ground / In a light fantastic round,” the thought is not only a thought, but an invitation to keep time.

I’ll tell more of the story of this course tomorrow. For now, here’s a link to the syllabus (itself the product of some rather intense emergence at time–I was always scrambling to keep the revisions coming and keep them current), and here’s a link to the final project website, which I will eventually move to a more permanent location. I’ll have more to say about both of these tomorrow as well.

I’ve been re-reading this small and plangent volume. Claudia Emerson gave it to me eight years ago. It resonated very deeply with me then, and does so still. Though the lessons I need have changed over those intervening years, this inexhaustible book continues to anticipate and meet those needs. I think I will not ever stop learning from it.

A short quotation tonight:

“But they are difficult things with which we have been charged; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.”

Tomorrow I hope to start writing about my freshman seminar last fall.