"She's got absolutely no touch," my mother whispered over-audibly during the performance of Celia Buttercup.
"Phff, she's one of
her pupils, they're all the same," she puffed with a certain disdain, "well-drilled but no musicality."
That, I suppose gives a glimpse into the value system into which I was born.
So, I would like to thank Cath Ellis for inspiring me to write this post which is annoyingly keeping me from sleeping at 6.00 am in the morning.
Her
'Some thoughts on theory' has helped me understand better my relationship to theory and perhaps a certain amount of the conflict which existed in the early days of Dave Cormier's Rhizomatic Learning Course between people who had difficulty in understanding the others. I had read it before, but not paid it the attention that now I feel it deserves, I apologise.
In her post, she lays out what she considers well-reasoned advice in how one can participate in a course on rhizomatic learning based in part on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, a pair of French counter-culture heroes of 'deconstruction.' I confess to not having dwelt much of my previous life on their no doubt important (no irony) work.
Before I continue I would like to give a few references to my relationship with theory.
Taken in order of appearance, the following randomly remembered instants from my life, will illustrate what I consider to be the problem of much of education, at least in France and explain why I find Cath Ellis's suggestion to spend two hours a day making notes with D&G not the only way forward towards learning for an uncertain future.
Learning to teach.
On arriving in France, by accident, I had no means to make a living, and no means to communicate with the inhabitants beyond vague remnants of school French grammar classes and a few relics of disconnected vocabulary. (Ah yes, I also had been forced to read but not to act out Les Mouches of Sartre)
I could, I reasoned speak English and people would perhaps pay me to 'teach' them to speak. As I prepared for my first class, with a group of (for me) intimidating business people, I was in a total panic as to what I had let myself in for.
The Cambridge-stamped book which I had been given to 'teach', was in a language that I did not understand. Suddenly, I felt dispossessed of the very language which I had been brought up to speak. What on earth was the 'Present Continuous'? and why was I expected to press on a cassette player to hear some disembodied BBC sports-presenter give a commentary of a football match between Martians and Manchester United? I didn't question, Cambridge seemed like they would know better.
Learning to cry, learning to live.
It was not in my plans to find myself in ill health on my own, with an infant. It was not in my plans to find myself confronted by nervous and moral exhaustion. When you are at a low ebb, expressing it helps.
Critical analysis, my friends, is hard, it had never been in my plans. I thought that that sort of thing was reserved for loonies!
Deconstucting the language within which one has been bathed and bred is not straight-forward, is not something one can do by reading self-help books.
Others may be able to tag what they consider symptoms of an ailment you are suffering from, speak eloquently on theory of "transfer", be a walking catalogue of Freudian slips but when you are the subject in question it is of no succour to tag your pain.
They may be able to describe, discuss, deliberate, but ultimately they will have to have been there themselves to really start to understand.
It's absurd, it's uncomfortable, it's life.
I cried in class, it is not what I intended.
The students were much nicer than I had feared.
I tried jovially to tell them to do exercise 6.
My body knew better; that going through the motions of teaching wouldn't be enough to get through the day.
While they were filling in the gaps, I wept.
Needing theory so not as to feel alone.
"Epiphany", pronounced "epifaarnie" with the stress on the third syllable is all that I remember of the literature classes of the university teacher that I had the misfortune to have to follow during the year I spent studying for French competitive exams to qualify me to teach my language.
Katherine Mansfield was murdered in Clermont Ferrand in the mid 1990's.
I know this may be a surprise for you, but believe me, I was witness to the crime.
How do we allow teachers to get away with the murder of Lady Scarlett, or unsuspecting authors, artists, in the amphitheatre, 'with the literary criticism'?
I had a book of terms for literary criminals in my book-case, I mugged it up for the exams, I knew it perfectly, I had it off pat. I even got reasonably good at the game, could hold my own in the game of literary commentary, in the classroom.
It was fun. I like games, I fully understand that gamers get together and get off on serious lectures and the dreaded disco dance at the end of the conference.
We need company.
Needing theory, so as not to feel alone.
It came to me in a rush, when I was weeping. I started to get a taste for grammar (of all things!!). I started seeing English tense structures graphically, dynamically, simply.
It was bloody irritating. I drew pictures, I drew pictures, I drew pictures...they moved.
These pictures didn't exist in the Cambridge books I had been given to teach.
I spoke with the analyst, he suggested that I look into it, do some research.
I did research to keep me sane. I feared that I was not sane. I did it because I didn't want to be alone, to see what I saw.
It's so much more comfortable to be conform to expectations. I was rather surprised to discover that I actually enjoyed reading the books on time, prepostion, grammar, space, philosophy, it was fun.
I worried that I was turning into a nerd. I didn't recognise myself.
Making maps
When your plans don't
work, the plans that others give you, you rip them up and start again.
When you fear you have nothing more to lose, you begin to learn to live.
Certainty maybe comforting but it is no question an illusion...even certainty how to play Deleuze and Guattari.
Living critically on the edge of reason is not the same as being reasoned. Guattari was not working in a psychiatric hospital to keep the patients quiet, to give them their dose. He was a marginal militant doing ground-breaking work on the edge of the reasonable. You don't write Mille Plateaux by numbers, by formula, off pat. It is an embodiment of a deconstuction of a system.
Critical pedagogy
I don't believe that Dave Cormier's interest in Deleuze and Guattari is simply academic (though I may be mistaken), I do believe that he is putting his life and soul into including people in a pedagogy which he feels and reasons challenges many current educational practises...but not just.
There are many ways of dealing with our human condition made up of complexity, uncertainty, chaos. Language, music, dance, science, faith, would be among those means of making sense of this.
Theory has been developed over the years to help us live with our fate, theatre is another. Shakespeare didn't read Shakespearean literary criticism to write bloody Hamlet, he was immersed in a culture, he had to write, he did. Maybe his parents would have preferred him to conform and sew gloves?
If I am engaged in critical pedagogy, it is because I am unhappy at the games that some adults ask children to play to secure them (us) in their certainty. My daughter asked to play violin when she was five years old, a French academic musical school destroyed all joy, all curiosity she had for the instrument by making her spend three times as much time scribbling abstract notes on lines than on letting her make noise and listen.
My students weep in the belief that they will never speak English because the system makes them fill gaps in disembodied texts and then makes them feel bad when they can't make sense of it.
Yes, now I understand the need for defining terms, the reasons why articles in scientific journals are not necessarily poetic masterpieces or great rap. I understand that it takes time to get to grips with the world of Deleuze and Guattari, if you were not raised over a number of years in their shadow. It took me years to master French. I did it for love.
I am writing this for love. I don't want to hurt anyone.
Blogging, Bonnie Stewart writes
here in her article "the story of education: a Grimm fairy tale"
"requires you to dare to paint a map in your own voice".
Well Bonnie, I read some blogs over the years and at first thought,
'Blimey, I could never write that, with the long words and all!"
I lurked at conferences and thought
'Bloody hell, I could never speak with such assurance with all those references."
A few years ago, I would have freaked at the long words in the title.
Tonight I didn't; it made sense.
This makes sense much more now.
Guattari working with the lunatics in the asylum, got them to engage in theatre. The catatonics (the immobile ones) seemed to perk up a bit if he gave them a mask.
He was curious.
He asked one,
"Why do you move when you are masked?"
He continues the story;
"He never answered me, then one day he said, 'because it's not serious.'"
Rhizo14 worked for me because it was not too serious Cath.
This is my voice.
