Material Metaphors

Going [Nearly] Non-Verbal

 

As much as I genuinely appreciate the digital ethnography work done by Wesch and his students, I'm irritated by the smugness of this video--the sense that it's somehow OK for students to dismiss books and classroom lectures as irrelevant so long as antiquated pedagogies take the blame.

I say all this, yet supposedly I'm one of the "good guys": I teach small classes where we mostly sit in circles and discuss current events and view wacky-but-insightful websites and interrogate visual literacy and collaborate with community organizations doing field work and hands-on curatorial work and writing and arts-integrated experimental learning . . . yadda yadda yadda . . . . Like I said, my classroom is not the sort directly critiqued by the video.

And yet . . . And yet I just spent 3 hours reading a book on metaphor theory--a densely written, scholarly text with almost no pictures. I had to retrain my brain to concentrate on the writing, sometimes reading passages to my slumbering dog and using colored pencils to sketch out the complex ideas unfolding in the text. And it was glorious. If I assigned this book my students might not read it unless I somehow coaxed them through it and helped them read it page by page. My personal techniques with the colored pencils and so forth could serve as models but ultimately learning from the reading of dense text is about sitting down and wanting to figure out your own methods for learning from words. According to Wesch's students (and they're probably right) most of my students would not read the book just because I assigned it--even if class discussions and reading responses were part of the assignment my students might not read the whole book but rather just enough portions to get the gist of it. Does that mean my students are lazy or does it mean that they're savvy consumers of text?  Neither. That's my point. That's my dilemma.

Of course, I could assign more interesting texts. And shorter texts. And texts composed as comic books. And podcasts. Yes I do all those things. But I'm still not convinced that reading 8 or fewer books per year is OK, or that I'm a good teacher if I exhibit empathy for students who believe books are an outdated source of relevant knowledge or entertainment.

We're living in this transitional phase where highly motivated teachers are doing everything we can imagine to navigate the space between how students want to learn and what we believe they need to learn. (Notice I didn't say the gap is between how they want to learn and how we want to teach. I'm operating under the assumption that we want to teach in whatever way will help them learn. An attachment to a particular pedagogy is not necessarily the problem here. I also didn't say the gap is between what they want to learn and what we want to teach--though I do believe that's part of the dilemma.) 

One of the things I believe they need to learn is how to actively (not passively) learn--and active learning doesn't just mean being entertained and engaged by the learning; it also means deliberately doing the learning. Among the things teachers like me need to learn are: how to teach them to be (and to want to be) active, deliberate learners of things--even things that might not appear to be immediately relevant to their personal lives; also we need to learn what is most important for them to learn--what things will spark their desire to learn more on their own, and how can we best equip them (intellectually, personally, and otherwise) to do that digging on their own?

So what does any of this have to do with books? A lot. 

My background is in rhetoric and composition studies. I believe that writing helps us learn. I believe that reading helps us learn. For a dozen-odd years I've taught writing in ways that I hoped would help students learn. The raison d'etre of academic writing is that it helps students learn what they're studying. We don't teach academic writing so that students will do academic writing for the rest of their lives (unless they become academicians). We teach academic writing because it helps students synthesize, interrogate, articulate, and otherwise engage and demonstrate what they're learning. Reading good scholarly writing helps them get better at it. Reading any kind of writing generally helps them get at least somewhat better at doing their own writing. In turn, getting better at writing typically entails getting better at thinking through one's ideas, composing them coherently, demonstrating knowledge. Our great hope is that compulsive Facebooking will somehow also enable students to remain sufficiently literate (as readers and as writers and thinkers) to continue strengthening their abilities to digest, interrogate, communicate, and demonstrate knowledge derived from non-Facebook sources.

I'm a reasonably optimistic person. I'm willing to set aside my Postman-esque concerns about Farmville and Twilight and so forth for now.

So it's within that context that I'm beginning this thought experiment: What if the purpose of first-year composition isn't to teach academic writing? This isn't a new question, really. Lots of us in rhet/comp do multimodal composition pedagogy--meaning we have integrated visual literacy and digital composition into our writing courses. What might be different about my thought experiment is that I'm removing the words altogether. If the purpose of the first-year composition course is to help students locate, synthesize, and demonstrate knowledge, could that be done entirely through the kinds of 3D assemblage my visual rhetoric students did last spring? Or via a primarily visual composition with a spoken or written explanation? Or via a community-engaged, applied learning project accompanied by reflection that might be spoken or written or sung?

The answer is No, to the extent that first-year composition is a service course to other academic disciplines expecting us to teach MLA/APA citation formats and grammar and the writing of literature reviews. But if our goal is to teach the acquisition of knowledge and the synthesis of ideas--would it become our job to teach composition as a cognitive act as well as a communication task? Would it require us all to learn how composition--the arrangement of information--connects with the acquisition and transmission of knowledge in all its forms? 

What then?

And shouldn't we already be teaching that?

A Pause Before Diving Back into the Blog

The academic year resumed and I dropped off-blog. I need to spend the next week or so catching up with the comments and reintegrating this writing into my day-to-day life. (Easier done once final grades are in.)

I'm wrapping up a spring first-year writing course with the theme "Genius" in which I attempted to establish a flexible space for exploring connections between academic writing, reflection, and the kinds of ingenuity that inspire us. I hoped that such an approach would enable my students and me to explore deeper and more diverse ways that a liberal arts education can help us tap our own creative potential.

As the years pass--I've now been teaching at this institution over 8 years--I find myself more committed than ever to the principle that what we do in first-year courses absolutely must include stimulating the creativity of our students. Some who share my commitment call it "critical thinking" rather than creativity. So be it. I'm using the word creativity right now because I need to emphasize a kind of openness, resourcefulness, ingenuity . . . playfulness too. These things aren't always encompassed in definitions or discussions about "critical" thinking. What I'm looking for includes joyful discovery and an expectation of/faith in serendipity.

We don't have time to wait for other people to be creative. We have diseases that need to be cured, an environment to heal, life-spans to extend, cycles of ignorance and brutality to halt and transform. We can't think of ourselves as "not creative" for doing so just perpetuates our own mediocrity. This all seems so obvious to me and yet all around me I see people who may, at best, purchase tickets to a performance or watch a nifty video on YouTube. Art-integration is approached too passively, if at all. People keep missing the connection between art and personal agency. They miss opportunities to pay closer attention to what they see and how it might connect to their own lives and work and vision for the world.

There are so many things I would do differently with the "Genius" course next time around.

One thing that nags me is the sense that I didn't do a good enough job of fostering ways for students to make meaningful connections between the creatives they admired and their own lives. We spent too much time wrestling with the notion of what "genius" is and looks like, not enough time doing things that would enable them to experiment with their own ways of knowing.

I keep thinking about that TED.com video about the use of origami by engineers.

What's leading me back to it, I think, is my current situation: the semester is ending; I'm planning to take more art classes over the summer. One in design, another in sculpture, probably some more weaving. I'm exposing myself to as many media and techniques as possible so that during the school year, when any art-making must come from my own time and talent (such as it is) I'll be better able to realize my vision.  There are things I need to make, compositions in 3D that have been calling me and that I just need to complete--get them out of my head and here on the table. But my skill set is limited. Heh. Not as limited as it was last year, though!

What studio artists and artisans have that everyday people don't is this: an ability to conceive of copious, diverse uses for things beyond the customary ones. I've discussed this before elsewhere. The resourcefulness thing. Into that category of artists and artisans I would like to add engineers, mechanics, chemists, nurses, cooks . . . people who do problem-solving in three dimensions. I emphasize artists because they are trained to think imaginatively at a level that most others aren't. It's their job to create something astonishing out of nothing. It's an intensification of creative purpose, almost an urgency. Musicians don't just make sounds; they make music. It's OK for them to just make nice music. But to some degree the musician won't feel like she's really doing her job if all the music she ever makes is merely nice or merely an accurate reproduction of the notes in an arrangement.

As someone who works with first-year college students every year within a liberal arts institution--the kind of place intended above all others to cultivate intellectual versatility for the betterment of our world--I can't ignore the opportunity (heck, the civic responsibility) to develop courses that do their share to construct the scaffolding needed for further creative inquiry. My field, rhetoric and composition, is rooted in the western academic heritage. And yet I still worry about appearing to neglect the teaching of writing in order to do the teaching of thinking. I want to do a better job of teachings style and grammar--but those things aren't all that I teach. I'm not teaching functional literacy; if anything, I'm teaching academic literacy. Academic literacy is about knowing why you are researching something, why you are writing about it, how it could matter (or not) and to whom. It's also about preparing yourself to do consequential work as a researcher and writer--learning how to draw upon what's known and make something new or different from it, and to generate more worth knowing.

Synthesis (more thoughts on writing as craft)

My arts-immersion sabbatical concludes this weekend with a final digital photography workshop. Though my project continues I wanted to pause here to synthesize some of the important points I've discovered (or re-discovered) for framing an academic writing course as a course in wordcraft: 

My Context 

The principles I'm assembling are intended to be portable. Even though for now I'm approaching this work mainly as a way to enrich my own classroom experiences, I'm hoping to share what I'm learning with other teachers in the future. I realize that my teaching style tends to be much more hands-on and improvisational--an approach that has been supported by fairly privileged circumstances: most of my college teaching has been done at small, private universities where my administrators have been highly supportive of [responsible] experimentation, community-engagement, and arts-integration, and where my classes have been relatively small: 16 to 22 students. I also periodically teach courses at an overseas institution with larger enrollments (now around 30 per class) and numerous restrictions (logistical and otherwise), but I've managed to retain my core approach there while also getting a "reality check" about how much of this stuff one can do as a normal, busy teacher with lots of writing students and not much time or help. 

Right now I'm concentrating on incorporating this approach into a first-year composition course that meets in a conventional face-to-face classroom, supplemented by a web-based course site. But I'm also interested in adapting some of this work to my web-based teaching and as time goes by will discuss that in more detail. 

Some Components of Craft 

Here I should also mention that I'm deliberately culling these principles from sources outside the "craft of writing" genre. I have a stack of those books--some read long ago, others waiting for me to finish this stage of my work before cracking the covers. But I opted to ignore them temporarily in order to give myself as fresh a perspective as possible during my mostly-non-verbal sabbatical. In other words, I wanted to see what artisans in other fields had to say about learning their craft(s), ruminating on that to see where it would take me before reading likely-analogous observations by writers. This seemed especially important because as a word-person I'm so accustomed to turning everything into a metaphor for writing. It happens automatically. I needed to breathe in a different space. So to the extent that I can isolate or sort of universalize the notion of craft, here's what I found: 

Craft has these components: 

1. Heritage 
2. Materials, Tools, and Instruments 
3. Rituals and Routines 
4. Techniques and Strategies 
5. A Community of Peers, Mentors, Apprenticeship, and Heroes 
6. A Making-Based Learning Structure 
7. Models, Counter-Models, and Radical Innovation 
8. Dispositions 
9. Habits of Mind 
10. Lots and lots of practice 

Heritage 

The craft has a history. Even though individuals may discover a particular craft on their own (ex: a child whittling a stick or banging a pot like a drum) the activity itself has a heritage, often one that crosses many cultures and regions. Over time, the fortunate craftsperson encounters more and more of the lore and traditions connecting her work to that of many generations. This background also helps her understand why others did the work--for what purposes and audiences, and with what consequences. 

Materials, Tools, and Instruments 

Customary materials, tools, or instruments are associated with the craft. The craftsperson may work with alternative materials, tools, or instruments as well, but her craft is built on or enriched by experience in and with the fundamentals (as when a laptop-habituated writer learns to use a notebook and pencil for anywhere, anytime writing). 

Rituals and Routines 

Whether self-taught or required by mentors, certain processes are essential to work done well. Most often these processes are related to the preparation of the craftsperson herself and her workspace, particularly when sharing a space, tools, or materials with others. Sometimes the materials and tools themselves necessitate the ritual or routine (as in the grinding of ink for oriental calligraphy or spinning yarn for knitting or weaving or the tuning of a guitar). The quality of these preparations is manifested in the completed work. 

Techniques and Strategies 

The craft has its "best practices"--tried and true ways of working with the materials. Here as elsewhere, the innovative and "original" craftsperson is likely to have mastered the customary approaches as well as and prior to developing her alternative techniques and strategies. 

A Community of Peers, Mentors, Apprenticeship, and Heroes 

At some point the fortunate craftsperson encounters colleagues--historically in the artisan-apprenticeship arrangement or by birth into a family of craftspeople, today also in school, local organizations, or on the Web. This group becomes the craftsperson's first creative circle or network, expanding over time, and it contains fellow novices with varying degrees of expertise as well as masters who become mentors. Some form of mentorship or apprenticeship enables the novice to be guided as she develops her skills, knowledge, and identification with the craft and its culture. Through this experience the craftsperson gains exposure to exemplary people and/or their works. 

A Making-Based Learning Structure 

Learning by doing. That is the heart of craftsmanship, whether learned alone or as part of a community. In either case, experimentation, trial-and-error, are key to improvement and understanding. When learning is done as part of a community or mentorship, the basic structure is likely to follow this process: demonstration and/or explanation, hands-on work or practice, critique by mentors and peers. Work is visible to others, often simply because they are sharing the space. Casual observation and feedback as well as more formal critique are habitual experiences that enable the craftsperson to benefit from other perspectives before, during, and after the creation of each work.

Models, Counter-Models, and Radical Innovation 

Often done by the Heroes (see above), particular works serve as sources of inspiration for craftspeople. Novices learn by replicating the originals and experimenting with alternatives. The most conventional and revolutionary ideas often become the basis for a dialogue or dialectic regarding the nature, contexts, and significance of the craft itself.

Dispositions 

Within the craftperson herself are three basic dispositional categories important both in terms of what she brings to the work and in terms of what her mentors will attempt to cultivate. (I culled the following directly from the book Studio Thinking by Lois Hetland et al. and will post a more complete citation later. Their work concentrates on visual artists working within a studio environment but translates well to other craft scenarios.) (1) abilities (both in handling tools/materials and in handling the planning and decision-making components of the work); (2) the craftperson's intrisinsic and extrinsic inclination to use her abilities; (3) her alertness to opportunities for employing these abilities. 

Habits of Mind 

This component involves the craftperson's approach to learning in general and to the craft in particular. It's a collection of ways of engaging the world. Like everything else on this page, the habits overlap with and are influenced by one another and with the other 10 components. The following list is a synthesis from a variety of sources--interestingly, many of these can be found as characteristics of active learning in K-12 education--but the sources most influential to my current version of the list are: Lincoln Center Institute's "Capacities for Imaginative Learning," Hetland et al's Studio Thinking (which uses the term "Habits of Mind"), Donald Schon's Educating the Reflective Practitioner, and Keri Smith's How to Be an Explorer of the World. 

(Note: This is a very rough draft. I'll need to return and re-synthesize this list to reduce its length and perhaps to separate those that are specifically about craftsmanship vs about the creative learning in general.) 

Identifying with your work: approaching each project as an experience in which you are intentionally developing a craft and your own craftmanship. 

Noticing deeply: making it a practice to observe your surroundings closely, expecting to see things worth seeing and when choosing something to observe, devoting substantial time to the experience, and returning to the site or object repeatedly to observe it from different perspectives noting new details. 

Using all your senses: being open to your embodied experience of any source of inspiration, both in terms of how it affects you (ex: a delightful fragrance, a painful emotion) and in terms of how you can use your body to experience it more fully (ex: representing your experience through movement or using senses other than your eyes to encounter additional dimensions of it. 

Questioning and dialogue: continuously questioning what something is what else it might be, being attentive to the ways it responds to your questions as well as to other sources of potential questions and responses. 

Persistence and resourcefulness 

Identifying patterns and making connections 

Experimenting / envisioning possibilities 

Experiencing, using, and exhibiting empathy: Seeing your work as having consequences for someone other than yourself—as a representation of social conditions, as an object to be used and/or enjoyed, as a product dependent on shared resources, as a touchstone for dialogue, etc.—and composing your work in a way that is responsible, ethical, and compassionate. 

Synthesizing / making meaning 

Taking action / expressing your insights and experiences 

Reflecting and self-assessing 

Contextualizing: Working in a way that is mindful of how your exploration and creation connect to works done by others and to sources of inspiration kindred to those informing or inspiring your own work. 

Lots and Lots of Practice

Malcolm Gladwell explains it best in Outliers, but you'll find the same criterion in numerous other sources: the baseline for mastery of anything is 10,000 hours of practice (around 4 hours per day, 5 days a week, for 10 years). One semester of college coursework is a drop in the bucket, but it's also potentially 300+ hours of practice.

If Critical Reflection Were a Craft, What Would It Look Like?

In a NY Times interview, sculptor Jack Russell (then director of the Brookfield Craft Center) differentiates craftspeople as those with "a reverence for the materials" as well as for the techniques and processes used to create a work. " My touchstone is that if an object shows respect for both the reality and the spirituality of the material and the process involved in making it, it's craft," he says.

When we discuss writing as a craft, the materials under discussion are words--our own and those of treasured texts, as well as (though perhaps not as much as before) the mark-making instruments we employ.

It seems to me that an arts-integrated writing curriculum would need to pay close attention to our material heritage as writers as well as to the intersections of wordcraft and other art forms. For example, an exploration of illuminated manuscripts seems appropriate, particularly if the curriculum were to extend beyond a single art-experience-as-heuristic sort of writing course and into a multi-course experience that delved deeply into the mutually informing practices and principles of creative genres.

For now, though, I'm trying to wrap my brain around a visual art/writing intersection that I'll continue to explore with my students this fall: critical reflection. In aesthetic education this is sometimes called mindfulness or it might be bundled with other ways of thinking carefully and critically and repeatedly regarding a subject or object. I'll continue to call it critical reflection.

In a teaching practice that attempts to making composing processes tangible and visible, the journal or sketchbook is the established way to generate artifacts of critical reflection.

But this can get tricky. On the one hand, we know that reflective writing during the creative process helps students achieve reflection-in-action (Yancey; Schon). On the other hand, art experiences are also intended to give students an experience of the oft-cited "flow"--which by definition is an uninterrupted experience of total involvement in the creative process (Csikszentmihalyi). Kristie Fleckenstein discusses this aim in terms of Ann Berthoff's "allatonceness" of meaning-making (69). So how do we get this timing right? Yancey has described reflection-in-action as something that can occur after the original text is done, as a kind of dialogue with the recently composed text, especially if it is intended to undergo further revision. In that regard, flow and reflection can be asynchronous. But what if I want my students to experience flow during critical reflection or as critical reflection?

Is it possible that the reflective journal or sketchbook could be the place where craftspersonlike "reverence" is recorded? 

Or is that going too far?

Perhaps the goal of the first-semester college writing course should be a sensitivity to and respect for the raw materials of writing--learning their lore as well as how to handle them, preserve them, experiment with them, and how others have done so.

Here's the question that intrigues me most: in this "guild" of reflective writing, who are our masters and what are their artifacts? Yancey's Reflection in the Writing Classroom is the most obvious example. She both demonstrates and explains the craft of critical reflection. Then we might look at reflective sketchbooks like these done by art students. But who else and what else and in what other genres?

A few works come to mind, such as Sarah Oblinger's altered book, Making What You Say True; Guy Maddin's documentary My Winnipeg; Joanne Leonard's photo memoir Being In Pictures.

Assuming we come up with some relatively objective criteria for identifying works as well-crafted artifacts of critical reflection, how might we examine those other genres and their processes and materials in order to enrich our understanding of critically reflective writing?

Image source: "Awl's well . . ." by Mr. Greenjeans

Arriving Late to the Fine Arts vs Crafts Debate

And perhaps it isn't a debate. Perhaps it's bigotry or snobbery or antipathy. I dunno. My field is English Studies where we have our own version of all this. Perhaps all disciplines do.

But my position as a relative outsider includes a lack of background reading on the division between "Fine Arts" and other kinds of art (aka Crafts?) which leads me to ask questions like: Why is it that the aesthetic education literature seems so careful to define its work in terms of "Fine Art" rather than "art" and in the process to exclude handicraft genres from the academic curricula aimed at accomplishing aesthetic and imaginative learning?

So far, in my limited explorations of the scholarship, I haven't come across anyone explicitly arguing that crafts be excluded from aesthetic education curricula but the careful use of the term "Fine Arts" and the omission of handicraft/folk art kinds of examples is consistent. There's a clear hierarchy here and the default terminology implies that the accepted wisdom assumes the "great works" to be studied would include paintings but not quilts. It's as loud and clear as the use of "he" as a pronoun in the days before non-sexist language policies . . . or in the days afterward.

Is it really true that kids would learn *less* or less well by studying, say, pottery than sculpture? 

Says who?

Maybe Friedrich Schiller, for one. According to Ralph Smith's handy lit review in Eisner and Day's Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education, Schiller's 18th century aesthetic philosophy specified that the Fine Arts offered the "immortal examples" of a culture's heritage, and that by studying such Beauty humankind would "[make] his way to Freedom" (164).

I need not summarize the history of the idea that Beauty promotes morality, civilization, and so forth. We get all that. My question is simply why today we continue to claim that Fine Art is where such Beauty is exclusively (or at least primarily) to be found. Lots of Fine Art is not beautiful or Beautiful. Profound, compelling, provocative, but not an instantiation of Beauty--at least not in the way Schiller means here. Some works of [craft] do have this transcendent Beauty. When that occurs, some decide these works merit an extraordinary leap into Fine Art. And yet lots of mediocre work is done in the fields of Fine Art as well . . . there are novices everywhere. So why bother making the distinction at all, particularly with regard to art as an instrument of imaginative learning? 

As Smith's article continues, he summarizes the contributions of Herbert Read and John Dewey, both of whom broaden the range of what is considered relevant art for aesthetic education and emphasize an approach that favors experience over reverence (165-66). These perspectives continue to be valued and acknowledged by art educators, but the fundamental definition of art, particularly within pedagogies incorporating observation-of and response-to art, remains that of Fine Art.

I gather that the genres categorized as "crafts" as opposed to "Fine Art" are genres that produce "functional handicrafts," which are by definition objects primarily intended to be instrumental rather than imaginative. Weavers produce cloth; needleworkers produce quilts and garments; potters produce vessels for food and drink, as do glassblowers; and so on. In that regard, crafts are artworks not primarily intended to spark or to express complex ideas and therefore such works are less well suited to aesthetic education curricula emphasizing aesthetic criticism, interpretation, and so forth. 

And yet . . . of course as a material culture researcher I can't leave it at that. All objects are embedded with lore, culture, meaning. All objects are worthy subjects of criticism (aesthetic and otherwise). Whether or not a hand-made vessel is intended to express the imagination of its artist, it does so. Granted, I'm the type who would also argue that mass-produced kitsch is worthy of such analysis. So where do we draw the line? I'll concede the purpose of that line is to point us to works of art that are exceptional instances of human/humanistic endeavor, perhaps also of transcendent beauty, capable of inspiring us to be better people, awakening our imaginations to new possibilities.  In that regard, I would say the Precious Moment figurine is disqualified (though rhetorically and culturally fascinating); also disqualified would be latch-hook rug I created in fourth grade. But somewhere between that latch-hook rug and Henry Moore's reclining figures lies all sorts of nonfunctional art/craft that is and is not worthy of further study.

I'm troubled by the idea that functional objects might not be considered aesthetically complex and imaginatively advanced. Is this an essentially western assumption? What of wabi sabi? What does it say about our humanistic capacities if we accept that our functional objects are, by definition, too "functional" to be [B]eautiful?  How might such a view limit our perception of other kinds of everyday objects--those found in nature, for example? 

I realize such questions have been pursued by others over the years, hopefully with greater insights and more satisfying resolutions. But I must voice them here because otherwise I'm too distracted by my internal monologue to concentrate on the aesthetic education literature before me.

Image source: Grecian Urn by electricinca

 

Shuttlecraft

On days when I'm feeling especially scattered I now find myself sneaking off to the weaving room, in much the way that last fall I'd go kayaking to unwind after stressful meetings. In each case I'm seeking a way to untangle a snarled mind. 

The shuttles we use are called "boat shuttles"; they're shaped like kayaks. 

The action of weaving, moving the shuttle back and forth across the warp, has not yet become meditative for me. I'm still too aware of each step, each count, each possible glitch. And to the degree that I do "lose myself" a bit I find that it shows up in the cloth. You can trace my thoughts by the weave structure: unpleasant memories appear as tightly constrained versions of my "M's and O's" pattern; interludes of contentment yield smoother, rounder O's and cleaner selvedge--or not. 

For a time I thought the pattern might reflect the music on my iPod: I set a Genius mix from Rufus Wainwright's "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" and got some Cat Stevens, Alanis Morissette, Talking Heads, Rolling Stones, Suzanne Vega, and Radiohead. I expected my beat--my rate of moving the shuttle back and forth, the rhythm and pressure as I beat each row--would match the beat of the music but it didn't seem to. Instead, it seemed to almost always reflect my stream-of-consciousness, a tapestry weaving itself in its own space and time according to its own teleology.

Image sources: Weaving shuttles by Shiny Red Type; kayaks by Drurydrama

Contemplating Collage

 

Later today I'll meet with my colleagues again to explore the uses of collage--specifically as a heuristic or as a way of doing critical thinking during (as well as through) visual composition--for our upcoming workshop with educators.

I'm still resisting the commonplace: I don't want this to be simply (yes, yes, I understand it's never so simple) a metaphorical exercise but instead an activity that draws upon a kind of aesthetic instinct as well as other dimensions of the composing process.

I don't want to over-talk the exercise and yet somehow I want the participants to experience (within a very short time frame--eek!) a way of exploring ideas that transcends verbal and visual and that culminates in a composition that speaks to them in complex ways over time.

The image above is one of my early experiments. My original plan for the workshop was to have everyone do something very much like this. It's modeled after Joanne Leonard's "Hand In" series, which was an exercise in constraints: she challenged herself to complete a series of collages that used a single, simple, repeated image: an outline of one hand in white pencil on black silhouette paper.

I love the basic design: it's simple but potentially sophisticated (at least, in Leonard's execution of it!) and for a workshop with mostly novices it seems like a lovely to create something complete and aesthetically pleasing guided by a model in a process that although somewhat imitative yields a work as unique as the hand of the artist outlined on the page as well as her choice of imagery.

But I worried that participants expecting to do collage (a genre associated mostly with masses of images rather than spare ones) might find this approach too limiting, and my colleagues agreed. So today we'll be exploring with alternative methods, visuals, options. I'm hoping to at least retain the hand symbol as a common constraint.

Beyond all that, though, remains the purpose: how do we communicate that this activity is intended to help us tap into a way of knowing that is aesthetic, cognitive, intellectual, emotional, instinctual?

I've been reading more of Maxine Greene's work on aesthetic education (as part of a course through the Lincoln Center Institute) in which Greene seems also to be struggling to find clear ways to explain, in layman's terms, what happens when we use art to learn. Her writing style is so fluid and her voice so authoritative that you might not perceive her composition as a "struggle" (and indeed she might not describe herself as "struggling" either) but as her reader, as someone who has thought about this sort of thing for years and is combing through Greene's writing to find a clearer expression of the academic and rhetorical aims of aesthetic education, I must say that I'm finding lots of lucid explanation that ripples through the subject without yet clarifying it. At least not in the ways I need. She is concerned mainly about art education period: What it means (or really ought to mean), why we should do it, how it works.  My concern is this: how does the process of making and engaging art help us do a better and more interesting job of teaching rhetorical ingenuity: identifying potential sources of insight, locating/mining/interacting with those resources, tapping into one's own prior knowledge and experience as ways of knowing and not-knowing, determining what kinds of knowing are needed by and for one's audience/oneself/those beyond who might benefit from your work, plus all that other rhetorical canon stuff (invention, arrangement, style, delivery, memory, taste).

Of course any educated rhetorician can rationalize the use of art to teach composition. What I'm looking for is more information: research data from other disciplines, explanations I haven't already thought of or read about elsewhere, and also I'm looking for more discussion of the creative process as something novices can authentically do with satisfying outcomes that aren't purely responses to "real" art done by experts.

But I digress. Sort of. Not really. As I search in Greene for a way to articulate the collage workshop I come across this from her "Notes on Aesthetic Education""

Surely we can learn to articulate more clearly what it is about making and attending that so often opens up new perspectives, that allows people to perceive new experiential possibilities, that offers them new symbolic languages through which to express themselves. Surely, when we are aesthetically educated, we can break through the either/or [of cognitive vs affective learning]. (19)

So far that's as close as I've come (see what I mean?) to what we're supposed to be doing with the collage. And perhaps "critical thinking" is too specifically Schonian a term for that process.  I am more comfortable calling it "deliberation."  I'm hoping that the collage-composition experience will be a deliberative experience in which the participants:

• Keep their minds open to sources of insight and inspiration from unexpected sorts of artifacts.
• Approach the collage activity as one of contemplation as well as of creativity. 
• Work with a "believing game" attitude: expecting the process to reveal something to them. 
• Produce something that feels complete and satisfying. 
• Generates an artifact they will want to look at again and again, one that intrigues them and speaks to them in different or nuanced ways over time.   

All of that is true of my collage above: Although my underlying purpose the day I made it was to compose a complex image that in some spoke to myself-concept as a teacher, the images I gathered were chosen rather serendipitously. I ended up cutting the above image from a full-page photograph of a group of masqueraded revellers in Spain from a National Geographic magazine. I drew my hand-configuration first and selected the image later as one that might lend itself to the composition As I slowly snipped the image and as I shifted it around on the page the activity became a meditation on not only what should go where but why and why not. I made decisions about the positioning of my hand or hands on the page that would ultimately feature the image and whether to keep the reveller's hand visible; I asked myself about the significance of the masks and about the fact that the mask remaining in my image is really on the top of a reveller's head rather than on his face. Is that somehow relevant to my self-concept as a teacher? And so on. 

Ultimately, I completed an image that I could explain in a variety of ways but, to be honest, I am still listening to what it has to say.

Image source: HB Hessler

Kaleidoscopic Composition

   

There are days--most days, actually--when I thank my lucky stars I'm a liberal arts professor. This is how I make my living: thinking and learning and experimenting with ways to help people compose and communicate constructive visions of the world. 

If I've done my job really well, they compose texts that generate knowledge for themselves and for others. The infrastructure of all this is a process that only partially reveals itself in words--it's a process of posing questions and exploring possibilities through research and cogitation and putting ideas out in a space or on a page and then translating those ideas into sentences perhaps with images or other media--the intellectual, ethical, and imaginative process itself is a substantial part of what we teach when we teach writing. Students should complete that process with greater insight and more substantial resources and information than they would have achieved without my help. That's what I mean when I say my job is to help them generate knowledge, not just communicate it. And if they've generated knowledge, something meaningful to themselves and others, they'll be better equipped to compose an artifact that articulates what they've learned. At that point it's my job to be sure they do so with style and precision.

[In teaching as in weaving, at least 50% of the work is preparation, and good or poor preparation reveal themselves in the completed cloth.]

But the raw materials come from finding and mining possibilities. The single question or problem or topic is magnified, narrowed, turned upside down, divided into bits and re-assembled, all to give the researcher-writer-artist an interesting way to approach the project.

This is why I spent yesterday afternoon at a big table with two colleagues, sifting through pictures of yoginis and monarchs and a desert cougar atop a cactus, contemplating collage and metaphor and teaching and writing.

What we're after is a way to create a short workshop experience that will enable us to share with other teachers the experience of using visual composition to generate insights. This is not a new idea in our field, which is one of our challenges, actually. Our workshop isn't intended to teach our fellow teachers that using images is a fruitful invention strategy (duh) but instead to foster an experience we can share with the group, who will have assembled at a conference to generate and exchange ideas about teaching and learning.

As we ponder a fresh and relevant approach to this workshop, one of the interesting things we're working on is the words we use to describe the purpose of the workshop. For example, if we say, "compose a collage that represents you as a teacher" or even "make a visual metaphor that expresses your teaching philosophy" we run the risk of encouraging people to concentrate on the product rather than the process. Each of those instructions sparks an answer, an outcome. A classically structured analogy of [A] in terms of [B].

And that's not our goal, really. People already know how to do that and do it pretty automatically, which means the generative process is truncated by the wording of the instruction. Granted, even if you have a preliminary idea in mind, the process of visual composition pretty much requires a period of deliberation and reflection (ex: my teaching philosophy is derived from constructivism and emphasizes experimentation and collaboration so I'd want to use images that somehow represent those qualities), the constraints and materials on-hand would lead me to make some decisions and slow down and think in some detail about the various dimensions of my philosophy that might be illuminated by my collage.) But we're not satisfied with that version of the workshop. We think we can do more.

So what's more?

For one thing, more = composing an image that moves or that lends itself to a complex or multidimensional interpretation. (Here too a challenge because most smart people can generate multiple interpretations of any image, so what we need to push for is a surprise, I think, an insight or way-of-seeing that comes from the process rather than from pure wit.)

For now, we've decided to describe the workshop's collage *not* as a "metaphor" but as a "complex image" in the hope this will help us all avoid leaping too immediately into a witty [A] as [B] mode (nor a Burkean ironic [A] in terms of [not B] mode ;-)

In my own collage experimentation with this project, the image I consider most successful is one I'm still unable to clearly articulate. It's a tracing of my two hands touching, fingers extended to create a triangle, with a masked character in the center (snipped from a National Geographic story about a masquerade festival in Spain). I like the aesthetics of the collage, and I like the way it resists a simple explanation. I'm not sure whether this is a kind of collage experience others would find meaningful, especially within a short workshop time frame, but I'm still considering what it might suggest or inspire.

Generally speaking, as a learner I'm extremely comfortable with ambiguity. It gives me lots to chew on. Although collage can be a wonderfully rich food for rumination, it's also such a familiar genre that I think people sometimes overlook its richness or perhaps become overwhelmed by it.

This is one reason I'm very much attracted to the kaleidoscope as a collage vehicle. People are familiar with kaleidoscopes and might take them for granted as toys but if you hand someone a kaleidoscope they're irresistibly drawn to make multiple images with it. In other words, it's rare that a person will look through the eyepiece at the image handed to them and then put the scope down. They're compelled to make their own image--usually again and again.

So let's think about what's happening there: the container of "stuff" is the same each time; the image is always different; the person holding the scope is making ephemeral art (I'm carefully avoiding lots of postmodern references and explanations here but go ahead and plug them in if you like) but its components are constantly there for further consideration, albeit from multiple perspectives, generating further ways of seeing; the artwork is inherently collaborative, facilitated by the maker of the scope and the user of it; if you diddle with it long enough (which may only be a few minutes) you'll encounter some surprises, some combinations or juxtapositions that are beautiful or unexpected. 

THAT is what I want my students to experience from research and writing.

THAT is what I want the workshop experience to accomplish.

THAT is my metaphor.

What shall I do about it?  

Is the process of composing a collage sufficiently kaleidoscopic?

Image: Hibiscus Kaleidoscope by ifijay

Goats and New Media

In the weaving studio yesterday I overheard someone discussing her next project, a rug she began some time ago with the spun wool of an angora goat that has since died. She has been searching her herd for just the right goat, whose donation of hue and texture will complement--but cannot duplicate--the existing yarn.

Dying the wool won't make them match; each goat's wool is distinctive.

I smiled as I heard all this. A palette of goats.

And I found myself pondering what other sorts of materials and resources exist that just haven't been on my radar. And what might I do with them? How might they speak differently than other materials I've used. Their conventional symbolisms of course are part of their rhetoricity. A sentence woven into bamboo cloth (something I've just completed, actually) communicates contextually and visually and culturally differently than the same sentence squeezed through a label maker or typed onto a blog.

Nothing new there.

But there's something exhilarating about recognizing the collaborative potential of livestock for the very first time.

Image source: Kris247

Research as a Design Problem

I'm listening to Mozart's Requiem and I'm almost too captivated by it to read or write another word. Let's see if I can write within it.

I logged on to record another development in my summer project. A colleague found a marvelous site on reflective writing in visual sketchbooks and it has me inspired to re-try using sketchbooks/journals with my fall students with an emphasis on the nature of researched writing as a "design problem."  I've taken this approach with my students before but never felt that I adequately conveyed the idea that I don't mean it as an artistic metaphor for the research process but as an adjective. Design is visual and it is conceptual and [academic] research is those things also.

Anyhoo, in an effort to walk the talk and to give my students a couple of [hopefully] clear models, I've decided to compose a digital sketchbook (a blog) and a tangible one, dedicating each one to a specific research project that is not directly tied to art.  (I have so many different projects underway that this commitment doesn't change my life much except to extract two of those projects from their existing journals/blogs/sketchbooks for the models.) Since anything I do for students tends to get done long before anything I do for myself this commitment is also likely to help me be more productive as well.

As I do the sketchbooks elsewhere I'll report on them periodically here on this blog, at least in terms of my evolving thinking about research as a design problem. (Update: I've begun a separate blog as a possible model of a digital research sketchbook for my fall students. There I've also done some thinking and writing regarding the design problem approach.)