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Category Archives: Theoretical Frames

LLED 601 Week 5

Constructivism at an international Shakespeare conference

As a theme I would like to explore in relation to this week’s readings on constructivism, I will mention an international conference I attended this summer. In the sunny Mediterranean town of Montpellier, I was at the European Shakespeare Research Association conference to discuss some findings that involve the digitization of First Folio text happening in Japan. It was an eye-opening experience for me, but in terms of constructive learning, far from the ideals of Piaget, Dewey and Vygotsky. It felt more along the theme of oppression written so evocatively by Freire. Little evidence did I find in France for the Shakespearean sense of freedom (Greenblatt, 2010) and even less for a democracy where everyone can read and have an opinion about the plays (based on the tradition that everyone could understand a commonly spoken language while watching a play). Instead, there was an educated hierarchy represented at the conference, where only certain skill-levels could fully understand the deeper meaning of Shakespeare’s words. The professors at the top of this food chain had reputations to uphold, insisted upon their (usually) singular way of reading the text, and while others convened to listen to lectures, those on top did not seem to be too willing to construct ideas about the plays (unless of course they had a book on the same topic as someone else). The closing plenary speaker articulated my growing suspicion that I had come to the wrong place to learn about the latest ideas in Shakespeare scholarship, by showing a slide of a related text (Robert Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit) and declaring that “anyone who doesn’t know what this is doesn’t deserve to be in this room.” As the French would say, incroyable!

Pre-show at the Berliner Ensemble’s Richard II
Domain d’Or, Montpellier

Romanticism often gets looked down upon, even though for Dewey it was a major influence. At ERSA, the Germans seemed to get blamed for perpetuating myths about Shakespeare, yet the Berliner Ensemble’s production of Richard II was inspired theatre, one of the highlights of the conference. There is a connection here to be sought with John Dewey and his fondness for the Romantic poets, such as Coleridge (Garrison, 1999, para. 21) in forming his philosophy of education. One person’s delights can lead to higher levels of thinking about other topics in their lives. Contrasting to these enlightening moments glanced at in Jim Garrison’s entry on John Dewey is his growing mistrust of Social Darwinism, which he saw as control via an undefined notion of being fit to survive. Happily for most readers, Dewey was not a racist, and perhaps for the American readers that he also had reservations about Soviet Communism. Those who try to impose order on a society are no better than the oppressive “bankers” that Freire writes about in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It will be important to remember that English burnt down the Globe Theatre the second time it was built, part of the Reformation, and if it wasn’t for other countries noticing how enjoyable Shakespeare’s plays are, there would be little evidence of his plays past the late 17th century.

Scene from Peines d’amour perdues (Love’s Labour’s Lost)

Another connection I will make between the constructivist ideal and this eye-opening conference centers upon the participants themselves. While their devotion to Shakespeare scholarship cannot be questioned, many of them traveling great distances to attend this annual conference, there seemed to be little joy in watching versions of the plays. The opening night production of Richard II was well attended, but many left at the intermission (which came a few minutes shy of midnight, so understandable for most long-distance travelers). Before the show, during the welcoming dinner, local university students had prepared scenes from Shakespeare plays, a program called “purple passages” in both French and English. It was a brave sight, many of these young theatre students presenting before a renown collection of scholars, but as for the aural pleasures, it was hard to make out any of the actors’ words over the din of table conversation. Similarly, the same group of actors performed the first three acts of Love’s Labour’s Lost for this dwindling crowd on the closing night. I loved seeing (and hearing) the French construction of this play, and by this time not at all surprised to see the people who should be most interested in how students make meaning from the play (they are all professors, after all) grouping together for more chat in cafés and bistros around town. A banker’s holiday, it seems.

Dining alone at French bistro

Not so much to write about Piaget this week, and I am finding it a struggle to write positively about the Canadian Journal of Education article I selected which refers to both Dewey and Piaget, but confuses sociocultural and cognitive constructivism. While searching for James Paul Gee’s video “Books and Games”, I came across this intriguing item: Howard Gardner, Noam Chomsky and Bruno della Chiesa discuss the influence of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. At one point, around the 30 minute mark, they even put in a word or two about Dewey’s school.

Reference

Garrison, J. (1999). John Dewey. In M. Peters, P. Ghiraldelli, B. Žarnić, A. Gibbons, R. Heraud (eds.) Encyclopaedia of Philosophy of Education. Retrieved on September 26, 2013 from http://www.ffst.hr/ENCYCLOPAEDIA/doku.php?id=dewey_john

Greenblatt, S. (2010). Shakespeare’s Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

LLED 601 Week 4

Some inspired and dramatic choices for this week’s reading list, starting with the image suggested in the first paragraph of Rosenblatt’s (1978) The Reader, the Text, the Poem: a darkened stage, two chair and a book. Much of this discussion recalls one of the novels I had just finished rereading, from Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series. Whether it was Lost in a Good Book (2002) or The Well of Lost Plots (2003), I cannot recall, but the scene played out could have just as easily been restaged in Rosenblatt’s discussion. Miss Havisham, I believe, was telling her rookie Jurisfiction agent Thursday about the role the reader plays in the creation of a narrative. The author seems to get all the creative credit, her point echoing Rosenblatt, while the people who choose to read the book (and at what point in their lives the reading happens) become so generalized as barely to be mentioned in any discourse on literacy.

Maggy Roberts, created for Jasper Fforde's Lost in a Good Book

© Maggy Roberts, click this link for her webpage.

Throughout the chapters, Rosenblatt invokes poets, playwrights and other authors but they merely seem incidental. Perhaps what she really wants to draw attention to is the fact that she has read this poem, seen that play etc. On a similar note, Bakhtin slyly slips in a quotation from Gogol’s Dead Souls which made me smile… oh, those Russians! Back to Rosenblatt, the Robert Frost experiment she describes is a wonderful examination of what goes on inside the reader’s head, minus any background knowledge they bring to the text – what might have happened if one of the student recognized the stanza? New word of the day comes a chapter or two later, where she contrasts “efferent” (p. 24 et passim) with the aesthetic sense of reading. Here I may need to reflect upon the classroom discussion for her idea to sink in, so stay tuned to the comment section below. Of course, the chapter I am figuratively dying to read is not included in this excerpt, but someday soon I will catch up on her discussion of timelessness texts for Hamlet and The Waste Land.

Something Rotten illustration sketch by Maggy Roberts

Now for Bakhtin’s article, I must admit that I was efferently carried away from the meaning that he was making, by a very simple mistake. What seems like a lifetime ago, I was an actor in small productions around town, and I got really excited about a production of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; I was advised by one of the director I was working with to read as much of Stoppard’s plays as I could, and set about collecting and enjoying those. A few weeks before I shipped myself off to Japan, for what was to become the next phase of my life as a teacher, I found in the library a new collection of plays called the Coast of Utopia. It was a trilogy that followed the ups and downs of Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Here’s where the mistake comes in, as any reader might start to sense in this lenghtening digression: when I saw on the class reading list an article by Bakhtin, my mind immediately leapt to the conclusion that we were going to reading about that guy from the Stoppard play I never got to finish reading. Wonder what Ferdinand de Saussure would think about me unconsciously substituting a “un” for the “ht” (not withstanding the Russian characters Бахт’н and Бакунин that signify their surnames as originally given to them)? Ah well, plenty more to write about the actual Mikhail Bakhtin in the comment section below 😛

Ferdinand de SaussureFerdinand de Saussure by Jonathan Culler

View my progress updates

Finally, one author who can’t escape so easily is the one who barely wrote anything during his game-changing career as a philologist and professor of linguistics. Kind of silly to dwell on these biographical details, when so much of what is written about his theory of language is worth discussing here, as opposed to the comment section below. yet out of respect for this proto-linguist, i want to bring any thought I have about Culler’s text into the classroom to discuss. One of the greatest shifts from my Master of Educational Technology and the current Literacy Education PhD programs is the amount of face-to-face time instructors and students. If there is not a rousing discussion on the sounds and utterances de Saussure observed coming from round the tables, I don’t think there will be much more I can add to this online discussion that will set the record straight.

LLED 601 Week 3

“Standing a head taller” is an empowering theme that Soviet cognitive psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky mentions from time to time, and he notices this quality most with the children he observed throughout his career. In these cases, imaginative play allows a child to internalize the activities of older individuals, learning and developing in the “zone” which continues to motivate the mind throughout one’s life. Most people seem to believe this development stops at a certain age, adulthood (anywhere between 13 and 24, according to different cultural beliefs), but I would argue that we continue to see ourselves a head taller, especially those who embrace the idea of life-long learning. For the majority who became adults and stopped the imaginative play, a good reminder will come when a person visits a place from their recent past: an old school, first job site or even the home to which, we are told, we can never go back. Recalling the feelings of that time when we hoped and dreamed to be grown up might make one feel a head taller than they were, but children get to live this experience everyday, a head taller than they are. Perhaps this is why someone like Vygotsky wanted to surround himself with these young active learners, as he could share in their enthusiasm to try new things for the rest of his tragically shortened life he knew, at the age of 26, he was going to live.

In the pages of Mind in Society, Vygotsky vents some of his frustration at adults who accept that things are the way they are, contemporary psychologists like Ted Thorndike and Jean Piaget, and their view of adulthood as the end of the developmental line. Equally frustrating is their search for the lower limits of ability, the beginning of a developmental stage where children or certain animals could do some things or not do some things. Given the proper amount of observation, children will never cease to impress open-minded adults that there are not many things they can’t do: anything that can be imagined could be played out. Vygotsky and his team had the right amount of patience for such viewings of children, infants and people with cognitive exceptionalities as able learners who go through a process of interpersonal (the mind in a society) and intrapersonal (internalizing society) adaptation. Attempts to get candy from a shelf or using coloured cards to recall instructions for a game of questions, both experiments described in this book, meet the participants at their level of cognitive ability. While he share opinions and gives respect to other constructivists and behaviorists in their respective fields, it seems a challenge for Vygotsky to accept their limiting theories; both “Problems of Method” and “Interaction between Learning and Development” are places where Vygotsky hashes out how quickly these theories fall apart. Setting limits is akin to censorship, something Vygotsky struggled with professionally in Soviet Russia.

Borrowing a quote from another Soviet author who faced censorship and limitations, Mikhail A. Bulgakov’s “manuscripts don’t burn” is very applicable. It is impressive how so much of Vygotsky’s thoughts survive on paper, and how many decades later his ideas are finally catching hold of minds in a far wider society than most people would have imagined. Somehow I know Vygotsky would have imagined it like this.

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