curving the x coordinate

Before the invention of the clock, re-occurrence may have been the means of quantifying our temporal stream: the repetitive nature of sunrise and sunset, pangs of hunger, moon faces, menstrual cycles, the succession of plants and the seasons were all used to understand and measure scales of time. It is interesting to consider what time might feel like without anything cyclical at all. Had we not been regulating the soul through these external structures, would a clock have come about so easily? Clocks themselves were originally invented modeling this repetition anyway and the fact that they are still shaped as circles with hands moving around them only to come back to where they began, points towards their ancestry. In order for us to conceive of rhythm as having any value at all in measurement, we would need to have it order aspects of our lives in such a way that our memory of their recurrence served us in some way (as in foraging, agriculture, hunting, as early examples). Had we only repetition of our own making as in drumming or dancing, etc., it is difficult to imagine these creations would last long enough or consistently enough for us to come to believe that such an ordering were anything but a rare patterning in the universe. I therefore tend to think that if there was no external cycling, we would not likely have built a clock and would likely conceive of time as something that flows at different rates at different times - in the way it appears phenomenologically in immediate conscious experience.

What this might mean is that quantifying time and the Cartesian technique of representing it using equal fractions originates out of our location in the Earth. A world trapped in chaotic orbit may have given rise to a "transcendental aesthetic" quite different from anything Kant imagined as necessary for the possibility of experience. Could we imagine that a graphing system where the x axis incorporates cyclical aspects of time? There are three possible ways of doing this that quickly come to mind: using a circle, a spiral, and a cylinder. Each structure has can provide us with new eyes by which to understand the dynamics of a graph-able situation. For example, a simple circle will show the different iterations that the system takes superimposed on itself and will therefore show the overall range of behaviour the object takes. The spiral will show undulations and variations clearly and it will be easy to compare the phenomena at any two or more stages within the cycle at the same point of development, but unfortunately it requires a progressively longer stretch of graph to represent equal amounts of time. This leads to a distorted understanding (but it may be partially resolved by drawing radial lines outwards from the centre point to represent segments of time). Cylinders circumvent this problem and may be easy to interpret if transparent.

The 4 Pedagogical Modes of Interaction and the Cultural Curriculum

According to Dewey’s (1916) “theory of experience”, I learn from every experience I have, which, for better or for worse, shapes me and my subsequent actions. Using this lens, I can see that every time I interact with another person, he or she becomes my teacher. If they behave in ways I have often seen before, they further stabilize that way of being for me, as I gradually form general understandings of things in the world through direct experience. These generalizations then become the basis by which I construct further experience, as Eisner (1997), paraphrasing Neisser (1976) explains: “The expectations we acquire from our examination of the particular become a part of our anticipatory schema” (p. 7). However, if I encounter someone doing something uncommon, they show me an alternative way of being in the world. This different way of being presents itself as a possibility, destabilizing slightly my customary schema.

What those around me teach me can be called a “cultural curriculum.” “Curriculum” had traditionally been thought of as the plan a school has for implementing learning (Jackson, 1992). However, the definition of “curriculum” has been significantly stretched and split apart in recent decades (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubman, 1996). The notion of the curriculum as a ‘plan’ has been thoroughly problematized (see, for example the ‘hidden curriculum’ in Jackson, 1968), as has the concept that a curriculum is a formative technology limited to learning that occurs within schools (Schubert, 1986). Schubert insists that a curriculum is present in different organizations, from businesses to families. I would add that it is also present in culture, and that it is this curriculum that is taught to me in my interactions with others, forming the basis of Dewey’s argument for the transmission of culture (1916).

I participate in the cultural curriculum not only as a learner but also as a teacher. For the same reason that I am always a learner, I am also always a teacher. Everything I do has some influence on those who come into contact with me, whether I reinforce their old experiences, present them new ones, or find ways to bridge the old and the new. At this time, I am writing this this blog, which I adapted from an old thesis proposal. I am teaching those in this internet cafe through my choices of when and how to study, what to eat and how to relax, and so on. In each case, I am presenting ‘how Ramsey writes a blog.’ Some of the staff here have seen me come in repeatedly over the last few years and have undoubtedly formulated a fairly sophisticated way of understanding my way of "being in the world" -as I have similarly done for them. It is really quite impossible to imagine a circumstance where those who observe me do not learn in some way. You, the readers, are also learning from me, so in some sense I am your ‘teacher.’ Perhaps you have never seen a blog like this one, in which case, you may come to some new understandings as to what the format or topic a blog can take. I believe that embracing the fact that the human relationship is essentially (though not exclusively) pedagogical is important because this perspective allows us to conceive more easily the mutually influential nature of human interaction and the responsibility that goes along with it.

In an extended sense of the word then, I am at all times presenting a “curriculum”. While the overall trend in Curriculum Studies has been away from curriculum development and towards attempting to ‘understand’ what curriculum is (Pinar, et al. 1996), some scholars, particularly those involved with action research (ex. Carson, 1990), realize that understanding requires that we engage in doing curriculum and that these two concepts really need to be united. In a sense then, I am conducting autobiographical action research, in that my goal is to understand what my curriculum is through trying to make it what I want it to be. In other words, my practice and my theory will be in a dialectical relationship, each one informing the other. I hope to show this process through the writing of this proposal. I can think of no more elegant a way of expressing this than in the well-known quote of Freire, which is applicable far beyond the emancipatory, Marxist context for which it was intended: “Action without theory is blind, just as theory without action is meaningless” (1970).

Moreover, because all of my observers are also teachers, also living and interacting and presenting ways of being in the world continuously, it is also true that they are my ‘student teachers’ insofar as they come into contact with me. When I realize this and take responsibility for it, I become a teacher educator. This way of framing our relationship is useful because it prompts me continually to remember that the interactions I have with those around me reverberate far beyond the fixed domains that are usually conceived of. I do not usually consider, in my daily interactions with others, that we are nodes within a cultural entity and that nothing I do or say to another stops when our interaction does. At all times, I am then a student, a teacher, a student teacher and a teacher educator. Each of these perspectives sheds a different light on the pedagogical nature of my relationship with others. My relationship with others is each of these four modes simultaneously, occurring phenomenologically prior to my grasping of these relationships with language. These relationships are inherent in the biological fact that we are co-interacting sensory systems.

art as ecology

Drawing plants as realistically as possible is many things at once: a type of meditation on and intense concentration on a unique pattern of creation; an ecological study of the location, behaviour, light effects, water retention capacities, development, morphology, and the creatures that form a community with the plant; an opportunity to research in a non-linguistic way without imposing interpretations; a respect for the plant that it offers knowledge of itself to us directly and at a rate we are ready for (rather than stealing its secrets through reading botany books, etc.). A plant never looks the same after being carefully drawn even once. Though not describable in words, its uniqueness has come forth through the care the artist has placed when sitting with it and seeing its lines and rhythms.

The goal of drawing is not self-expression, and art of this type is not a narcissistic striving for a personal style or uniqueness. If a style emerges eventually, it is in spite of the artist’s intentions and an expression of the same creative rhythm that is in the plant manifesting in the human. The drawing is an act of humility and a prayer in the face of a being that is infinitely more beautiful than any representation of it. The final product is almost irrelevant.