I'm still reading, reading, reading. Not always what I'm meant to be reading, of course, but most of it's about education. (I do admit to having put in my footy tips. That required reading the team sheets.)
Some of what I read makes me wonder about this course I'm doing and how it stacks up against the very principles we're learning about, and whether the very methods required when we write our assignments are in themselves good educational practice.
I mean, take this quote from 'The Genius in Children', a blog by principal, father, educator and educational consultant Rick Ackerly. His ninth of ten purported educational myths is:
"You have to sacrifice your imagination, your inquisitiveness and your self to get through the eye of the needle to the next level of academic achievement." (My bold type.)
"On the contrary, imagination, inquisitiveness, integrity, grit, enthusiasm, inspiration, practice, perseverance, courage, etc. are the key disciplines of development of character and also the key elements of academic success. Fulfillment of self and mastering academic standards go hand in hand."
("This March on Washington, Where's the Dream?" July 20, 2011)
My fear is that this sacrifice is exactly what I'll have to adjust to if I want to pass this course. Referencing every single original thought and conclusion back to other people's evidence, rather than the evidence of my own 30 years' experience, feels very like the eye of that needle. My strengths are imagination, inquisitiveness, integrity and all those other key disciplines Ackerly mentions. I thrive on picking up the philosophical ball and running with it. But I have to tame my inspiration for long enough to drag my thought processes back through that tiny aperture of other people's research-based evidence.
My mind keeps diverting, you see. I read ten things that strike a chord, and immediately I want to write about it all and how it applies to my practice. Successfully applying what I learn to the context of my own learning spaces is surely the point of what I'm doing here. Yet my creative synthesis of the information is hobbled by constantly having to search the material again for where exactly it said that, who said it, and then having to go through the pedantic structure and punctuation of formal referencing. Dammit, I know I read it somewhere.
How on earth can any creative thought process survive that level of tedious interruption?
And it makes me feel that my own experience doesn't exist in this academic context, that it's worth nothing. If I've discovered something for myself and then find it's confirmed by a reading, it's the readings I must reference, not my reality. That's beyond irritating.
Yes, yes, yes, I know. Statistics, blah, blah, blah, scientific method, yaddah yaddah. I'll quote the Ackerly post again:
"As with parents, when schools try to shape children, they come out misshapen. Education is leading a person’s character out into the world to function effectively, creatively and gracefully within it. Drop "getting ahead" or "being behind". Help each child learn the skills they need to master real challenges."
("This March on Washington, Where's the Dream?" July 20, 2011)
Do statistics address individuality? Do statistics address individual character, or do they encourage us to treat children as a homogenous mass and teach to the common denominator? Are they a measure of truth, or a call to value only the common?
What I find interesting about research is not the fat bit of the Bell curve, but the range. That is the real truth of dealing with children. And so I am less interested in representing research as gospel, and more interested in advocating for the individual child by representing each individual's truth as worthy in itself. There is power in anecdote. Anecdote is what we must respond to in our daily practice, not averages.
So the method of recording my learning in this course is, to me, completely counter-intuitive. Not because I reject the fascination of reading the results of research, or reject the acknowledgement of others' intellectual property, but because the process is a ball and chain around my mental processes and because I see statistics as blinkers. The readings expand my mind- I know that- but does referencing them by a convoluted formal method within every second sentence really make me a better educator? And when the reader is forced to stumble through a lengthy set of referencing brackets mid-thought, does that make my words a powerful communication, or merely one that blindly follows an outdated paradigm? Does statistical research reveal truth, or encourage mediocrity?
I know what I think about all of that.
References
Ackerly, R: This March on Washington, Where's the Dream? posted to the blog 'The Genius in Children', July 20, 2011, accessed via Google 21.7.11
Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Creation and criticism
I found it.
I found the sentence in my $60 textbook which made it worth the outlay of almost half my hard-earned, pitiful daily wage. Here it is:
"It is claimed that the creative facility resides in one hemisphere of our brain and the critical in the other, and that our brains are not capable of creating and criticising simultaneously." (Marshall and Rowland, 2006, pg 196)
(Sorry about the indent-fail, purists. 'Tab' doesn't work like that in Blogger.)
Well, after reading that I stared at the wall until my partner was moved to ask me if I was alright. Staring at the wall is actually a good sign in me (a fact my partner still hasn't quite absorbed- but I digress). It means I'm deep in thought. You see, I know- know- that that statement isn't true.
Well, it's not true for me, anyway. And that made me think, is my brain innately different to other people's brains? Am I the only person who simultaneously creates and criticises as I write?
I haven't given my evidence. Backtrack.
When I wrote my sonnet 'First to Go', which won the Sydney Morning Herald Great Sonnet Competition 2000, the very first lines to form themselves in my head were the final couplet:
At last I stand. Let others judge: we know.
Your eyes demand it. I am first to go.
They came into my head fully-formed and perfect. They were created with not only the exact meaning I wanted to convey as a summary of the poem's content, not only with impeccable iambic pentameter and rhyme, but with something I originally deemed serendipitous and that struck me later as incredible: an internal rhyme, 'stand' and 'demand'.
So which of these elements are creative, and which are critical? The content, the meaning is what would normally be deemed 'creative', while the structure of a poem as formal as the sonnet- concluding punching summary, metre and rhyme- is usually the result of painstaking writing and rewriting over many hours, days or even months. To add a craftsman's touch like an internal rhyme for extra subliminal punch- well, that requires luck and creative judgement as well as bloody hard work.
Yet my poet's brain was able to create and criticise at once to produce a perfect couplet which I never touched from the moment it was born to the day the poem was published.
And thus to my thesis, formed whilst staring at the wall.
A successful poet's mind is intrinsically different to that of other people, in that it has sufficient cross-hemisphere communication to simultaneously create and criticise.
Yep, that thought was worth $60.
And that brings me to the value of reading material with which I disagree. This textbook has irritated the hell out of me, largely because I agree with nearly everything it says and resent the waste of money and time reading a text that preaches what I already know. It didn't make me think until I disagreed.
Here are the cognitive cattle prods that work for me:
Disagree.
Enlighten.
Yep, probably in that order. Followed at a distance of some zillion kilometres by...
Confirm.
If I read something I disagree with, my brain goes into overdrive to examine which of us is wrong- I'll call that 'argumentative mode'.
If I read something that provides an 'aha' moment, I go into reflective mode and start to apply the new information to familiar or recalled situations that have puzzled me- let's call it 'solution mode'.
And if I read something that confirms what I already know or believe, it slides into the bank of facts I can pull out at whim to prove I'm right about something, making barely a ripple unless it's so bleeding obvious that it causes irritation. (Sorry, Marshall and Rowland, but you generally send me straight to 'PIA' [pain in the arse] mode. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.)
I am a terrible know-it-all. It irritates the hell out of people. Sorry. It's not my fault that I was born with a retentive mind, but I could probably work on the delivery. I mean well, truly I do, and I do try to be diplomatic. I know I irritate people. I have an enduring image in my mind of my very first serious boyfriend breaking his guitar over the end of the bed and screaming 'You're always bloody right!'
(He wasn't my boyfriend any more after that. Not because he'd shouted an unpalatable truth at me about the balance of intellectual power in the relationship, but because he'd wantonly broken a beautiful musical instrument. End of story.)
So one of my big challenges in doing this course will be to be patient and wait for the things that provoke 'argumentative' and 'solution'. The other will be to cultivate some humility and try to assume that my lecturers will know more than me about some things- things that I will find useful in my practice- and will have the skill to both help me change my mind and shepherd me past 'PIA' mode.
(Warning: I'm singularly unimpressed by academic hubris. Knowledge had better be relevant and clearly expressed, or I'll get grumpy. I did like this line in Marshall and Rowland: "...terminology can easily degenerate into jargon if used carelessly or to impress" [pg 195], though I suspect the concept might be lost both on the average 17-year-old and some lecturers I've met.)
Cultivating humility will mean sometimes writing in the way that is expected, rather than trying to sneak around corners with my engaging (but sometimes academically inappropriate) personal literary style. That will be difficult and irritating for me.
(For example, I'll have to curb my fondness for parentheses, italics and truncated sentences that start with prepositions and conjunctions. Like this one.)
(Yep, that paragraph had both creative flair and intrinsic critically formed structure, and I did it simultaneously. I'm being a smart-arse, but it does support my argument.)
It will mean forcing myself to sift through haystacks of 'PIA' material to find 'argumentative' or 'solution' needles. Patience is not one of my virtues, not with adults. I can be patient pretty much all day, every day with children. By the end of that, I'm all 'patiented out', and that's when I'll be studying. There's a challenge in itself.
But rest assured, one little needle can go a long way with me. I've already used this one to darn a hole in my understanding of myself versus the rest of the world. Yes, I know, that wasn't what it was meant to teach me, but hell- since when has that mattered, as long as I'm learning something?
Dammit, there are those italics again.
References
Marshall, L and Rowland F (2006). A Guide to Independent Learning (4th edition). NSW, Australia: Pearson Education.
I found the sentence in my $60 textbook which made it worth the outlay of almost half my hard-earned, pitiful daily wage. Here it is:
"It is claimed that the creative facility resides in one hemisphere of our brain and the critical in the other, and that our brains are not capable of creating and criticising simultaneously." (Marshall and Rowland, 2006, pg 196)
(Sorry about the indent-fail, purists. 'Tab' doesn't work like that in Blogger.)
Well, after reading that I stared at the wall until my partner was moved to ask me if I was alright. Staring at the wall is actually a good sign in me (a fact my partner still hasn't quite absorbed- but I digress). It means I'm deep in thought. You see, I know- know- that that statement isn't true.
Well, it's not true for me, anyway. And that made me think, is my brain innately different to other people's brains? Am I the only person who simultaneously creates and criticises as I write?
I haven't given my evidence. Backtrack.
When I wrote my sonnet 'First to Go', which won the Sydney Morning Herald Great Sonnet Competition 2000, the very first lines to form themselves in my head were the final couplet:
At last I stand. Let others judge: we know.
Your eyes demand it. I am first to go.
They came into my head fully-formed and perfect. They were created with not only the exact meaning I wanted to convey as a summary of the poem's content, not only with impeccable iambic pentameter and rhyme, but with something I originally deemed serendipitous and that struck me later as incredible: an internal rhyme, 'stand' and 'demand'.
So which of these elements are creative, and which are critical? The content, the meaning is what would normally be deemed 'creative', while the structure of a poem as formal as the sonnet- concluding punching summary, metre and rhyme- is usually the result of painstaking writing and rewriting over many hours, days or even months. To add a craftsman's touch like an internal rhyme for extra subliminal punch- well, that requires luck and creative judgement as well as bloody hard work.
Yet my poet's brain was able to create and criticise at once to produce a perfect couplet which I never touched from the moment it was born to the day the poem was published.
And thus to my thesis, formed whilst staring at the wall.
A successful poet's mind is intrinsically different to that of other people, in that it has sufficient cross-hemisphere communication to simultaneously create and criticise.
Yep, that thought was worth $60.
And that brings me to the value of reading material with which I disagree. This textbook has irritated the hell out of me, largely because I agree with nearly everything it says and resent the waste of money and time reading a text that preaches what I already know. It didn't make me think until I disagreed.
Here are the cognitive cattle prods that work for me:
Disagree.
Enlighten.
Yep, probably in that order. Followed at a distance of some zillion kilometres by...
Confirm.
If I read something I disagree with, my brain goes into overdrive to examine which of us is wrong- I'll call that 'argumentative mode'.
If I read something that provides an 'aha' moment, I go into reflective mode and start to apply the new information to familiar or recalled situations that have puzzled me- let's call it 'solution mode'.
And if I read something that confirms what I already know or believe, it slides into the bank of facts I can pull out at whim to prove I'm right about something, making barely a ripple unless it's so bleeding obvious that it causes irritation. (Sorry, Marshall and Rowland, but you generally send me straight to 'PIA' [pain in the arse] mode. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.)
I am a terrible know-it-all. It irritates the hell out of people. Sorry. It's not my fault that I was born with a retentive mind, but I could probably work on the delivery. I mean well, truly I do, and I do try to be diplomatic. I know I irritate people. I have an enduring image in my mind of my very first serious boyfriend breaking his guitar over the end of the bed and screaming 'You're always bloody right!'
(He wasn't my boyfriend any more after that. Not because he'd shouted an unpalatable truth at me about the balance of intellectual power in the relationship, but because he'd wantonly broken a beautiful musical instrument. End of story.)
So one of my big challenges in doing this course will be to be patient and wait for the things that provoke 'argumentative' and 'solution'. The other will be to cultivate some humility and try to assume that my lecturers will know more than me about some things- things that I will find useful in my practice- and will have the skill to both help me change my mind and shepherd me past 'PIA' mode.
(Warning: I'm singularly unimpressed by academic hubris. Knowledge had better be relevant and clearly expressed, or I'll get grumpy. I did like this line in Marshall and Rowland: "...terminology can easily degenerate into jargon if used carelessly or to impress" [pg 195], though I suspect the concept might be lost both on the average 17-year-old and some lecturers I've met.)
Cultivating humility will mean sometimes writing in the way that is expected, rather than trying to sneak around corners with my engaging (but sometimes academically inappropriate) personal literary style. That will be difficult and irritating for me.
(For example, I'll have to curb my fondness for parentheses, italics and truncated sentences that start with prepositions and conjunctions. Like this one.)
(Yep, that paragraph had both creative flair and intrinsic critically formed structure, and I did it simultaneously. I'm being a smart-arse, but it does support my argument.)
It will mean forcing myself to sift through haystacks of 'PIA' material to find 'argumentative' or 'solution' needles. Patience is not one of my virtues, not with adults. I can be patient pretty much all day, every day with children. By the end of that, I'm all 'patiented out', and that's when I'll be studying. There's a challenge in itself.
But rest assured, one little needle can go a long way with me. I've already used this one to darn a hole in my understanding of myself versus the rest of the world. Yes, I know, that wasn't what it was meant to teach me, but hell- since when has that mattered, as long as I'm learning something?
Dammit, there are those italics again.
References
Marshall, L and Rowland F (2006). A Guide to Independent Learning (4th edition). NSW, Australia: Pearson Education.
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