As the Beyond Pedagogy meeting dates continue, I’ll be creating posts for each of the books discussed and read in the group. Notes from the discussions, key points, and further questions will be added here for future reference. This is also a place to try to cull together the various side conversations I’ve been having with several of you over the last couple days.
For now, this serves as a place for participants to add comments, clarifications, and generally continue the discussion (albeit in a limited form) that began Thursday night.
Personally, I left the meeting with more questions than with answers, though I’d imagine that is rather intentional considering the nature and title of the book.
One member of our group wrote:
I still don’t see this happening on a large scale, so I need to work on liberating my imaginary. Even in schooling – it’s all about how much are people willing to give up? for teachers, how much control, over students and content, and delivery of content? I guess it’s all about norming…you know, tax relief v. pay fair share.
Another group member and I continued our discussion around the concept of “liberation in the imaginary” the kind of phrase that seemed to glow iridescently after our conversation, ripening with time.
Please add any other thoughts of comments if you have a place you are interested in further developing in further meetings. Where will the Spell of the Sensuous connect?
(I’ve tried framing this in term’s of Hesse’s Glass Bead game in an earlier post. Perhaps it’s easier, instead to quote the rather problematic Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler: “Speculate, reflect: every thinking activity implies mirrors for me…. The moment I put my eye to a kaleidoscope, I feel that my mind, as the heterogeneous fragments of colors and lines assemble to compose regular figures, immediately discovers the procedure to be followed: even if it is only the peremptory and ephemeral revelation of a rigorous construction that comes to pieces at the slightest tap of a fingernail on the side of the tube, to be replaced by another, in which the same elements converge in a dissimilar pattern.”)
i think that the large scale issue is the one nobody can ever get around. but the small scale (or personal scale) is the more relevant issue. for it is the individual that is the originating point of consensus.
i am not sure it is so much about how much people are willing to give up as much as it is about taking a different look at what it means to “give up”… maybe each person needs to ask what are they willing to gain. but this will obviously cause us to have to change.
in terms of the anarchy in education… students (and teachers more so) would have to be taught how to utilize consensus as a theory and practice. as a start i would think. and it would have to be in a separate space that would allow for what the rest of society was not ready for yet…
what did you call it.. a temporary autonomous zone?