#Ranciere18 - Keepin' Up With Socrates: Giant Steps Indeed

This giant step taken, the need becomes less imperious, the attention less constant, and the child gets used to learning through the eyes of others. Circumstances become diverse, and he develops the intellectual capacities as those circumstances demand. -J. Rancière The Ignorant Schoolmaster 51

Imagine trying to learn through the eyes of John Coltrane. If there were ever a song that could establish a hierarchy of who's the fiercest when it comes to musical performance what better challenge than Trane's maddeningly complex standard, "Giant Steps."  Just ask Paul Chambers, the bassist who recorded with Coltrane on his first of four official Atlantic Records releases (my favorite being Olé Coltrane, but that's off topic). 

Giant steps... Some can wax it better than others, but for most of us, our fingers compromise the notes as they struggle to keep pace with Coltrane's orbit of melodies and key changes. Again, just ask Paul Chambers: his recording during that famous session demonstrates the struggle all of us have keeping pace on Coltrane's path. And Paul Chambers was a masterful musician with an illustrious career, playing with all the greats. On this occasion, it was Chambers' last performance for Coltrane (at least in a studio). Perhaps it was time for the bassist to forge his own path. After all, there's little space for doing so when tracing the celestial orbit of a comet like Coltrane.

Playing alongside Coltrane in a session like "Giant Steps" is probably like discussing mathematics with Socrates. The pressure is cooking: Can you keep up? Can you find the hidden pattern? Do you know where he's going next? Pay attention. And again, please try to keep the pace; the metronome is ticking. If Socrates, for instance, put me on the spot and demanded to know the length of the side of a square whose area is twice the amount of another square whose side is the length of X, I think I'd have a hard time keeping up, staying calm, and forming my own coherent thoughts: I'd be a deer in the headlights, blinded by the light of Socrates. Decimated by the velocity of his oncoming orbit (see the Meno).

On Orbits and Revolutions: Tracing the Master's Secret vs. Mapping the Student's Journey

You don't learn with Socrates; you only learn through him, meaning through his eyes. But he's humble about it though. After all, he'd be the first to tell you that "he knows he knows nothing." Isn't that why the oracle proclaimed him wiser than the rest of us? He's emancipatory as well, right? I mean he did make the claim that even slaves could know higher-level truths of mathematics just as naturally as anyone else (see the Meno). He even asserts that such truths are in all of us.  Radical, right? His pedagogy obviously scared the hell out of the Athenian elites, proclaiming in a state of panic that he was corrupting the youth. So what's not to like here? Isn't this the kind of emancipatory revolution Jacotot and Rancière are attempting to achieve?

First, we have to examine our language games when it comes to speaking about truth procedures:

'Know yourself' no longer means, in the Platonic manner, know where your good lies. It means come back to yourself, to what you know to be unmistakably in you. Your humility is nothing but the proud fear of stumbling in front of others. Stumbling is nothing; the wrong is in diverging from, leaving one's path, no longer paying attention to what one says, forgetting what one is. So follow your path (Rancière 57).   

Thus, each one of us describes our parabola around the truth. No two orbits are alike. And this is why the explicators endanger our revolution... The coincidence of orbits is what we have called stultification... This is why the Socratic Method, apparently so close to universal learning, represents the most formidable form of stultification. The Socratic method of interrogation that pretends to lead the student to his own knowledge is in fact the method of [the schoolmaster]" (Rancière 59). 

Paths... Orbits... Celestial trajectories through the infinite cosmos. I love Rancière's articulation of truth procedure as an orbit or path that revolves around something we might call capital-T Truth (Rancière's structuralist professors might've called it the Real). This is not some kind of proclamation of the post-Truth era born out of the laziness of rhetoricians and spin doctors (thinking of Kellyanne Conway's audacious high-jacking of postmodern discourse with the sly suggestion of "alternative facts"). This isn't about facts. This isn't about science. Two things that are very real: just ask the climate scientists. We as teachers are so much more than fact checkers. This is about the power of intelligence, which can only be fully realized if a student is freed to find her own path, no matter how messy it may be. Rancière states, "The only mistake would be to take our opinions (orbits) for the truth (the center)" but this is only a conceptual error, not a procedural one, if the learner is engaged in her process (italics are my addition). In other words, proceed on your path! We are not celebrating every orbit willy-nilly at the expense of doing away with the center, but we are reminding the explicators that the master's method is not the center as well, which is the stultifier's conceptual error, an error that (unlike the student's) becomes procedurally problematic due to one's position as schoolmaster.

Class becomes a culture of compliance (be like me; trace my answers), and not an environment for emancipation. The Socratic method facilitates learning, for sure, but it's not going to emancipate the learner, (but to call it corruption would be absurd: We are not the Athenian reactionaries).

So specifically speaking, what is the objection then? In what ways is Socrates' method still in the service of stultification? Why is he so close, yet so far away?

On Slaves and Schoolmasters: Whose Work? Whose Path? 

Ever been to law school or known someone who has? My wife went, and I recall more tears than feelings of empowerment. Everyday she was her professors' Glaucon, subjected to questioning, trying to show she had the right answer - that she knew "the master's secret." The Socratic method can swallow a person whole, much like Coltrane's dizzying chord changes. By the end of it, one doesn't recognize oneself; one has been broken down and built anew, made into the likeness of a burgeoning lawyer (or a frenzied post-bop jazzmaster).

Ever visited a lively, discussion-based class, full of Socratic circles and all, and winced once the class began because it centered around the teacher, shaping an overly-eager-to-please group of students in his/her likeness? Constantly correcting, redirecting, or re-articulating the students' words, such that the messiness of students' conversations is dressed up in the likeness of the teacher's "more scholarly" way of saying things. I have seen this class. I've been this teacher; he still creeps up impulsively, like almost every day. But why does this explicating spectre still haunt my pedagogy? The answer: it's less work emotionally, or at least it feels that way, to supply a reproducible answer as opposed to verifying the integrity of the student's search. It's easier to plan for, it's easier to mark, and it's easier to provide feedback.

Rancière writes, "Only the lazy are afraid of the idea of arbitrariness and see in it reason's tomb. On the contrary, it is because there is no code given by divinity, no language of languages, that human intelligence employs all its art to making itself understood and to understanding what the neighboring intelligence is signifying" (62). It's hard work to verify the exercise of intelligence; no scantron sheet can account for it. The ignorant schoolmaster accepts this challenge to verify "that [the student] is always searching [because] whoever looks always finds. He doesn't necessarily find what he was looking for, and even less what he was supposed to find. But he finds something new to relate to thing that he already knows" (33). Not only is this hard work, it's full of uncertainties, and sometimes a teacher's learning gets in the way of "demanding the manifestation of an intelligence that wasn't aware of itself... of verifying that the work of the intelligence is done with attention... [T]he learned master's science make it very difficult for him not to spoil the method" (29). We as teachers have answers, and the students are keenly aware of it, which gets to the heart of where Socrates and Rancière (w/ Jacotot) part ways. Both believe that the power of learning is in everyone regardless of social standing. Both believe that anyone can be intelligent, the irony being that Socrates (Delphi's celebrated ignorant master) implies two more words to the end of his message: "Be intelligent like me." He does this indirectly due to a conceptual error (my method is the method, the center of all orbits) which becomes procedurally problematic ("Come, find the answer. I know you can do it! You're smart!"). The error, of course, was to fixate on answers instead of orbits. To declare the destination before mapping any kind of journey. The Hubble Telescope didn't have a destination in mind when it pointed its lens to the stars, and Rancière's metaphor demands us to look there too, not to caves beneath the earth (see Republic Book X). This is the difference: a pedagogical emphasis on finding the hidden answer versus a focus on searching for the sake of learning. And for Rancière, the stakes couldn't be higher because it's a difference between cultivating compliance or empowerment.

The Socratic Method

The Panecastic Method

While Socrates is busy proving the location of where the answer to the question resides (see Meno), Rancière demands that we recognize the non-locality of all intelligence. It's in all of us: Everything is in everything.  If we trace the masters, we will find answers, but if we map our own journey, we could discover the wonders that no one knew were there. Of course, learn the labyrinthine charts of Coltrane's "Giant Steps," but chart your own standard as well. We know you can; "your humility is nothing but the proud fear of stumbling in front of others. Stumbling is nothing; the wrong is... forgetting what one is. So follow your path" (57).

If you'd like to learn more about the practical work I've done to transform my class discussions from a Socratic style to one that's more "emancipatory," take a look at the OESIS webinar I did back in May, which can be found here:

https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/5313878514640577027

This has been a post for the #Ranciere18 Reading Project. Please feel free to comment and join the conversation.

If you want to get more involved, our google doc is here and our hypothes.is group is here. Email me at jcolley@theoakridgeschool.org if you want editing access to the Google Doc.

#Ranciere18 - Students Need to Take Responsibility for Their Learning. Do the Circumstances of Schools Make It Possible? A Guest Post by Joel Backon

A couple of comments before I begin. First, I am in awe of the blog posts and Twitter responses I’ve seen to date, and thank Jared for organizing this “book club”.  Second, Chapter Three, Reason Between Equals, seems to be the core of Ranciere’s argument. Consequently, I’ll try to tackle the first three sections and leave it to a colleague to handle the rest.

This portion of the book is about intelligence in the broadest sense of the word. As I understand it, young children appear to have a similar intelligence because they are driven equally by instinct and need (paraphrase of 51). One can infer from the next portion that lesser people “...develop the intelligence that the needs and circumstances of their existence demand of them.” (51) So most children are somewhat similar to lesser people. It is now easier to understand that some people exercise will, reflection, and veracity, qualities that propel them to new intellectual heights, as long as their self-knowledge is strong (metacognition) and they don’t follow the path of Icarus. As an ignorant schoolmaster, how am I to understand such a worldview? Does it not create the kind of caste system that was prevalent in the nineteenth century and was seriously challenged during the Sixties? Why isn’t it okay for people to know what they need to know without being classified as lesser people? Are we destined for an intellectual elite or will we be able to create a society that transcends needs and circumstances for higher callings, even if those callings are not the traditional prestigious professions?

Will we be able to create a society that transcends
needs and circumstances for higher calling?

I would like to argue that Ranciere is suggesting something here. If we ask students to take responsibility for their own learning, they will push beyond needs and circumstances because they will feel emancipated (Ranciere’s term - I would say empowered). That’s how the Flemish students learned French. Jacotot emancipated or empowered those students with clear goals and an expectation that they would be successful. His strategy is at the core of good teaching. I’d also like to argue that Jacotot’s strategy would be far more difficult today because we are cursed with knowing more about how kids learn. We are faced with institutional obstacles that grew out of the factory model of education and failed to disappear or be replaced. We now value autonomy, mastery, and purpose (Daniel Pink), and in doing so, have little use for grades, seat time, standardized assessments, late penalties, and detailed rubrics. They are designed to crush the wills of our students so they revert back to needs and circumstances. We must teleport Ranciere to the twenty-first century so he can help us retool our craft to ignite the best from each one of our students.

"We now value autonomy, mastery, and purpose... and in doing so, have little use f
or grades, seat time, standardized assessments, late penalties, and detailed rubrics."

Argument complete. I’m not an English teacher; literary analysis is not my strength. As a historian, I pick up artifacts from texts and try to reconstruct them into something meaningful that will propel us forward today. Trying to figure out exactly what Ranciere means is not a challenge I relish. Using his thoughts to connect with my own experiences and the world around me is more my cup of tea. Please analyze my argument at face value first, and then apply the literary analysis so I can better understand Ranciere’s intentions.

This has been a post by Joel Backon (@jbackon) for the #Ranciere18 reading project. Go here to see the google doc, and go here to join the hypothes.is group.

#Ranciere18 - Part of Your World - A Guest Post by Nick Dressler

It’s kind of fun to do the impossible

-Walt Disney

I’m not the kind of teacher who works for the summer, but don’t get me wrong: I like a good vacation.  Two weeks is about right.  Just enough time to take the family somewhere nice, see some sights, try some new food, maybe—procure a little inspiration.  Then it’s back home for summer school, a couple enrichment camps, and a little gardening before the term starts back up again in August.  Perfect.

This year, my wife and I found ourselves a little antsier than usual, so after school let out for the summer, we jetted off to the UK.  That’s right, reader: London, England.  The capitol of Western culture.  We hit the streets as soon as we landed and enjoyed a quick drink on top of some Yorkshire fish and chips.  Delicious.  When we finished, though, my imploring glance toward my wife was met with a silent riposte and furrowed brow that said it all: “This isn’t up to snuff; let’s get out of here.”  I’m not one to say no to my wife, so we moved on to France, straight away.  Paris, more specifically.  The capitol of Western culture.  Enchantee, Paris.  Immediately, we did the Paris café thing.  Dark coffee, magnifique.  The crème brulee, tres bonne.   Absolute paradise, it was; my little family seated under an umbrella beside some old-looking red brick streets, my little children wiping their cute little mouths of croissant crumbs with cute little napkins, not a care in the world; me—as we speak—drawing my laptop from my backpack for a hasty blog about education.  On my left wrist: a handy, ironic eighties calculator watch that most people think is a Walter White thing, or maybe an homage to that kid from Stranger Things, but the truth is it’s the same watch Ryan Gosling wears in Half Nelson; I bought it immediately after I saw that movie, when Bryan Cranston supported Frankie Muniz and those Stranger Things kids’ parents were seeing off the very decade the show would reference some two decades later.  That’s right: I out hipster the hipster, everyone.  I was there first.  On the other hand, literally, on my right wrist, I sport a blue, rubber Micky Mouse Magic Band with which I can purchase anything at any of the parks, eyes blinded to the bloody cataracts of capital streaming from my wallet.  It drips quietly, the money.  Gone without a whimper.  It also opens my hotel room door.  I am quite the contradiction, nowadays.

Oh, did I forget to mention?  By London and Paris, I meant their miniature, Mouse-sanctioned simulations, as featured at Epcot Center—my family and I are in Disney World, of course; we didn’t even need to cross the Atlantic and we were hand-delivered the highlights of Europe right to our faces, right to our eyes, right down our distended gullets.  Eliminated are the inconveniences of international travel: no extra flight, no unnecessary walking, no dirt or grime in the streets, no pesky foreigners, and no awkward fumbling through un petit peu de francais.  I don’t even need to crane my neck to view the top of the Eiffel Tower as the good people at Disney have condensed it down to just a third of its actual size. What we have is all we want, just a distilled version of England and France right here in the culturally comfortable humidity-hug of sun kissed Florida, USA.  Disney has even shipped in some incredibly qualified English and French citizens to work as waiters in these countries.  Anything for authenticity at Disney World; anything in the name of fun.

All disingenuity aside, I have to admit this Disney World is, if anything, creative, even if it triggers night sweats in Baudrillard.  I consider the different rides and shows and architecture examples of some very innovative people bringing worlds of fiction to life, which is, for me as an English teacher, part of the daily challenge of my job.  These guys, though, they’ve got it down.  Every single detail. Before we left for the park this morning, for instance, we took a dip in our hotel’s Finding Nemo themed pool where my six-year-old son heard audio from the movie piped into the water itself only to be heard when a swimmer dips his head beneath the surface.  Incredulous, he returned to my pool chair.  “You were right dad; Disney world is awesome!”  Just wait, my son, you haven’t even seen the parks yet.  It was like Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” all over again: I can try to describe it for him, but until he experiences it, he will not—he cannot—fathom my description. 

And here is where my two current ventures—Disney vacations and Ranciere texts—intersect (I’m the only one reading Ranciere at mini-France, believe it or not).  Disney world, with all its creative magnificence, stupefies us, which, as Kristen Ross explains, “implies a sense of wonderment or amazement” (7) to the point of inaction.  Disney is attractive, sure, and to the right audience, it can be inspirational.  I imagine, for example, a select group of young visitors go on to lead creative lives after sampling the Disney wares and might even offer their trip to Disney World as a formative experience.  But for the vast majority, Disney World is the goal in-and-of itself.  It’s not a starting point; it’s the end—save up enough money to get the family to Disney, swallow the oily spoonfuls of their fully ripened creative juices, return home, repeat.  For these, Disney world is not creative emancipation from the shackles of possibility that it might be for some.  No, Disney World is the illusion itself—that fetishized social opium that keeps the masses content, quiet, and, more importantly, homogenous.  The people at Disney don’t want my kids, their customers, to go on to lead creative lives, they want my kids to come back to Disney World, to watch their programming, to develop a sense of brand loyalty so my kids buy into the product Disney offers.  Going to Disney World alone becomes a sort of American Dream—a carrot just large enough to galvanize we languid mules through the drudgery of our quotidian lives, be it school or that inhuman rat-race known as the working world.

© BANKSY - photomontage of Napalm Girl by Nick Ut 

This is the problem with capitalism.  Not only are there winners and losers, but these positions are entirely liquid.  Winners don’t have to stay there de jure as they did by virtue of being born into the upper classes during feudalism.  Winners in a capitalism must necessarily become conservative to protect their spots at the top.  Generation upon generation legally exploit the lower classes of their product—their economic capital, their social capital, their creative capital—sometimes stupefying but always stultifying the ambitious proletarian to inaction, failure, and conviction of personal futility.

As part of the capitalistic superstructure, then, our schools must do the exact same thing, only we the teachers take on the role of Disney World and our stakeholders the park-goers.  Our job is to make the content stand on its head.  We’re supposed to interpret it, jazz it up, decorate our rooms with it, relate it to the lives or our students, to contemporary events—we spoon-feed material to our students the same way Disney stuffs our faces with their productions, and, trust me, they learn to eat it, and ask for more if need be.  And although some of our students go on to use what we have taught them to enhance their lives morally and materially, the vast majority learn to play our game simply to graduate to the next grade until they are eventually finished with the ordeal altogether, school being nothing more than a necessary obstruction to the commencement of their actual lives when they graduate from the university. 

I don’t think we teachers do this consciously, so don’t take this as an accusation, as such; however—and Ranciere is clear here—teachers who explicate, despite positive intentions, do nothing to raise their students and, in fact, create a stultifying gap between their intelligence and their students’ the same way Disney World does between their “cast-members” and their fans.  Disney claims only to show, to entertain, to present, not to encourage or improve.  They don’t want you to match their levels of creativity, they want you to hemorrhage bucketfuls of capital into their mouse-eared buckets because you cannot and never will be able to do what they do.  And you know it.  And after you spend your year regenerating your capital, they want you to do it again.  Same goes for schools.  Pay us to enrich you.  Take a break.  Go to Disney World, for crying out loud.  See France and England while you’re there.  See Morocco.  But after that, you come back and do it again and again.  Always come back to school, the unending circle of power from which there is no messiah and no redemptive nirvana.

From Sir Ken Robinson's Changing Education Paradigms

So what do we do?  Even if Ranciere provides what proves to be the perfect recipe for success, it’s not like our school system is in any shape even to absorb such a teaching philosophy—not when grade point averages, standardized test scores, and college scholarships rule the roost.  After all, Ranciere admits that, while Jacotot’s method proves students can and will learn anything they want to, what they want to learn might be nothing at all.  I don’t know about you, but if my students learn “nothing at all,” I am out of a job, and my progressive philosophy of teaching statement will do nothing to hinder the executioner’s ax.  So, again, what do we do?

I recommend starting small.  Winston Smith small.  We can’t expect a total overhaul of the school system at once; it’s the little rebellions that lead to reform.  Change what we can in our classrooms.  Pick one assignment if we have to—one activity, one policy, one discussion.  If we really believe what Ranciere says, we need to get the momentum moving in the right direction, and change will come.  Organic food hasn’t always been available at local chain grocery stores, has it?  But it is now.  Something changed for the better, and the results are there for all to benefit.

This has been a post by Nick Dressler (@nick_dressler) for the #Ranciere18 reading project. Go here to see the google doc, and go here to join the hypothes.is group.

#Ranciere18 - One Student, One Intelligence: A Case for Making Learning Personal, A Guest Post by Nick Dressler

My dog died yesterday. She was a thirteen-year-old epileptic basset hound on whom we spent an ungodly amount of money, first on an MRI to rule out a brain tumor as the cause of her convulsions, then on a surgery to remove a grapefruit-sized tumor from the base of her tail, and then on two medications that worked well to assuage her initial tremors but failed to control the fifteen or so consecutive seizures that saw her euthanized just eighteen hours ago. She brought us a lot of happiness over the years, Margo, and she led a full life surrounded by an adoring extended family and some creative, energetic children—neither of which makes the loss any easier, but both of which have generated memories more indelible than even her ashes in my mother-in-law’s backyard—Margo’s favorite place in the world.

I tell you this for no other reason than because I can hardly write anything anymore without some kind of personal anecdote as a lead-in. On one hand, such reflection plunges me into that concentrated mode of introspection necessary to disinter the amorphous abstract muck lurking somewhere between my subconscious internal dialogue and my primitive animal instincts. It puts me in the writing zone, so to speak: it’s like the squint and gaze needed before you view one of those Magic Eyes from the nineties (Remember Magic Eyes? Remember the nineties?). Just look past the picture—the thing—pull it away from your face, and there it is: the radically three-dimensional hidden image. Yes, the personal anecdote unlocks my ability to communicate from the depths whether or not there is even an audience to read what I write, and it ensures the authenticity, I find, of whatever comes next in the manuscript as the eventual subject of the piece rises from the same place as the memory of the actual experience that has formed me—whatever I am, whatever “I” is. Secondly, the personal story transports the reader from their real-life into the abstract thesis of the manuscript by creating a space in which writer and reader—the two parties in the transaction—find the common ground before splitting hairs later in the essay. You are human; I am, too such an introduction implies, and, as far as I’m concerned, that is the commonality required for the intercommunication of our deepest, most nuanced ideas. It’s a little bit like mapping out the exact longitude and latitude to set sail for a potentially lucrative undersea treasure hunt as opposed to selecting some random spot, jumping in, and having a look around. The sailing? Not the point, and it requires a different set of skills than does diving, but without it, good luck excavating that wreck—you won’t even make it to the diving, even though that’s what you set out to do in the first place.

I’ve taken a substantial amount of criticism for this habit over the course of my formal schooling. Less so in grade school, of course, but the disapproval increased in direct proportion to my progression through high school, undergraduate, and grad school. Don’t use a personal pronoun, obviously we’ve all seen that one, but also it’s a solipsism to assume anyone cares about your personal experiences. Wow. That’s quite a charge. I do see where the comment comes from: overreliance on the personal anecdote can imply a certain self-importance, I suppose, as if to suggest all of the writer’s individual experiences matter toward the discussion of some, perhaps, more important, more socially relevant discussion of literature, or philosophy, et al. However, this is true only for the idealist, who insists his ideas reign supreme over the natural world. The materialist, though, claims no power over the world around him and, as such, his experience is only an effect or symptom—one possible result—of the sum total of his external stimuli instead of some Romantic, magical idea he implemented of his own, God-given volition. I view each person as a puzzle piece in a larger, ever changing truth: we each have a bit of a picture on our front (our perspective), and the solipsism would be in believing as the guards in Plato’s cave do that said image is the total truth. In reality (again: whatever that is), these perspectives matter only when fastened together with their neighbors’ to unearth the larger, more complete picture—human nature, our species-nature, as Marx would have it. I see a lot of good, in the personal anecdote, maybe even a great necessity in sharing individual stories as toward the goal of communal understanding and so insist when a teacher chastises a student for sins against the old covenant of writing or history or what-have-you, that teacher fetishizes intelligence and divides society into those who have (the teacher himself, in this scenarios) and those who lack (the student)—convenient enough for the teacher: the only one who can give what he has. The student, in this case, pursues the approval and then the endorsement of the teacher in order to have learned the material, thus rendering powerful the teacher, the one who gives what he has, and leaving powerless the student, the one who takes what she has not. Good teachers subvert this relationship.

But how to do so? I’ve long theorized that our traditional school system creates two mutually exclusive versions of the same student—one who learns skills and content in school for school’s sake, and another who feels free, acts naturally, and learns life skills outside of the classroom. The first version switches on at the beginning of the school day and enters hibernation at the final bell; the second one, the real one, takes over during all the other times, the fun times, the authentic times, the times that involve emotion and common sense and personal growth and heartache and success. The second version actively switches to the first only to as a means to an end: a college admission, graduation, and reception into the workforce—exactly when the second version takes over full stop and real life can begin. When first version disappears so do the knowledge and skills it acquired as part of traditional schooling. Up in smoke. Floating around the atmosphere like the rocket that propels the shuttle through the Earth’s atmosphere before detaching itself never to return. And yet, for as many Marxist and/or Structuralist philosophers and cultural critics I’ve studied in my day, I never have come across someone who pinpoints a similar argument as the one I have limned here until I met Ranciere in The Ignorant Schoolmaster who suggests, “There is not a popular intelligence concerned with practical things and a scholarly intelligence devoted to abstract thought. It is always the same intelligence at work.” Right on the money. In other words: the classroom must be a place in which the school teacher encourages natural behavior from the students—the same behavior the student exhibits outside of the classroom. The student should bring herself as she is into the room every day and should practice skills each period that directly affect that authentic person.

To use a sporting analogy, since I used to play and coach basketball: one of the coach’s biggest challenges when designing a practice session is to engender the same intensity from the players that they naturally exhibit in the game so the plays and skills and techniques they learn in practice may be applied when the chips are down and each play actually counts toward the result of a contest—the reason the players play in the first place. It serves neither the coach nor the players if the coach creates two versions of each player—one who practices and one who plays the game—for the second version will not perform the skills of the first when the chaos of the game obfuscates the lessons learned in practice. One player who performs at the same intensity all the time, that’s the type who succeeds. The same is true for the student: one kid, one set of skills, one sense of humor, one subjective experience. Not two. Two only muddies the water. Encourage their authenticity in the classroom—practice equality as Ranciere encourages us to do—and the knowledge and skills they encounter and perfect will serve to ameliorate exactly that authentic person, and that person alone.

This has been a post by Nick Dressler (@nick_dressler) for the #Ranciere18 reading project. Go here to see the google doc, and go here to join the hypothes.is group.

#Ranciere18 - Week One: "Translator's Introduction" from The Ignorant Schoolmaster

Starting this week several of us are reading together (at a leisurely pace) a very important book for me as an educator. In many ways Jacques Rancière's 1987 polemic, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, has become a kind of motivational manifesto for me - a mantra of sorts that keeps me focused on what matters most in my role as teacher. My loyalty to its message, at times, has inspired mockery and disbelief in others: You can't possibly believe that all students are equally capable of being intelligent? After all, this is the book's central thesis: "ALL people are equally intelligent" (xix).

So what's your gut response to such a statement? Does one wince with disbelief? What do we mean when we say "intelligence"? What does it look like when it's being demonstrated? How can we measure it or should we even ask that question? 

Which of the following images, for instance, showcases a greater display of intelligence?

"The hierarchical division of head and hand" (xviii).

One of Rancière's targets is the myth that there are different types of intelligences that can be arranged spatially/directionally in terms of hierarchies (low to high). Such space reifies (or makes natural) the gap between the knowing and the ignorant; the explicators and the listeners; the capable and the incapable; the ones who must be heard (subject groups) and the ones who need not be heard (subjugated groups). But common sense says this is the case, right? I mean, some of us simply know things that others don't, and it's on us to tell them what they need to know. Right? If teaching were defined as the act of transmitting knowledge, then yes, perhaps this is just "how things are" and teachers are tasked with leading the ignorant out of the cave by showing them/explaining to them the Truth of things. But perhaps the task of the teacher needs to be re-conceptualized, not as "a kind of muscular theoretical heroism" to enlighten the masses, but as an authority who demands the equally intelligent to chart their own truth:

The problem is not to create scholars. It is to raise up those who believe themselves inferior in intelligence, to make them leave the swamp where they are stagnating – not the swamp of ignorance, but the swamp of self-contempt (101-102).

It is the explicator who needs the incapable and not the other way around; it is he who constitutes the incapable as such (6).

There aren’t 2 sorts of minds. There is inequality in the manifestations of intelligence, according to the greater or lesser energy communicated to the intelligence or by the will for discovering and combining new relations; but there is no hierarchy of intellectual capacity (27).

Whoever teaches w/o emancipation stultifies. Whoever emancipates doesn’t have to worry about what the emancipated person learns (18).

Emancipation is the idea that every common person might conceive his human dignity, take the measure of his intellectual capacity, and decide how to use it (17).

Our problem isn’t proving that all intelligence is equal. It’s seeing what can be done under that supposition (46).

The last quote here brings up some questions for me: Does R posit the equality of intelligences for strategic purposes alone? In other words, is he trolling/provoking us in some way? OR Is he simply stating upfront that one cannot prove nor disprove his thesis, therefore why not make Pascal's wager? 

A few more thoughts...

The Lesson of Althusser

Both Rancière's teacher and mentor, Louis Althusser may be France's most influential Marxist thinker from the 20th century. Rancière, however, turned his back on Althusser's anti-humanist, structuralist program, which can be seen in R's student-centered, agency-focused approach to pedagogy. Althusser was a big believer in the master-student relationship: "'The function of teaching,' Althusser wrote in 1964, 'is to transmit a determinate knowledge to subjects who do not possess this knowledge. The teaching situation thus rests on the absolute condition of an inequality between a knowledge and a nonknowledge'" (xvi). 

For Althusser, emancipatory education was only possible if we recognize the present impossibility for students to be equal (with each other or with the master) and instead focus our reformist energies toward distributing more equally the same quality of instruction (by well-trained, enlightened masters) among all students of all classes. I want to suggest that Rancière reverses this claim: It is impossible to make the distribution of instruction equal, but we can assert axiomatically that all students (and teachers) are naturally, equally intelligent. The hard work of pedagogy is ac/counting for this. If schools are unequal spaces for equal intelligences, the task of pedagogy becomes political, namely demanding those who are not "counted" in the unequal space of schools to assert their equal right to be counted. 

The image above does not make a case for unequal intelligences: each animal has the equal, verifiable capacity, but the learning space or environment created by the administration of the "same exam" does not equally verify or account for each animal's natural capacity. The space (and method of verification) is unequal, not the students.

The Practice of Equality: Our problem isn’t proving that all intelligence is equal. It’s seeing what can be done under that supposition.

Rancière speaks of his thesis as being an axiomatic starting point, a pure concept in Kantian terms that orders the way we experience the landscape of learning. Even if one thinks his claim is strategic or performative, and less a statement about capital "T" truth, there's still something of value to be investigated - namely, how the pure concept of equality reshapes the space-time continuum of our learning landscapes.

We as educators have a lot to say about the hard work of "closing achievement gaps," but the space-time continuum of a world occupied by unequal intelligences is one where the gaps can never be fully overcome. According to Rancière, the grim-visaged war of unequal intelligences will never completely smooth its wrinkled fronts. By starting with the pure concept of equal intelligences we begin to close the spatial and temporal distances between the learned and the learner, between the master and the student. 

Ultimately, we need to rethink starting points, instead of outcomes, which can make us sound reckless in the ears of certain administrators. I think of the example of the Hubble Telescope. No one knew what was out there or what would be the outcome of pointing the world's most expensive observation device into a void of complete darkness. I'm sure some people thought the original scientists were reckless for proposing it, but here we are years later still discovering the infinite wonders of a universe that proved to be much larger than anyone could initially have imagined. What can we do if we start with equality of all intellects? What have we mistaken for darkness that on second look could reveal an infinite amount of wonders beyond our imaginations?

This has been a post for the #Ranciere18 Reading Project. Please feel free to comment and join the conversation.

If you want to get more involved, our google doc is here and our hypothes.is group is here. Email me at jcolley@theoakridgeschool.org if you want editing access to the Google Doc.

Metaphors We Teach By, Part Four: On the Rhetoric of Change in Schools, Plasticity vs. Flexibility

Change is Hard

Me w/ Pat Bassett at Oakridge

Pat Bassett recently visited my school to deliver a talk on "The Big Shifts in Education,” and much of the discussion that Mr. Bassett encouraged us to explore focused on identifying the shifts and changes taking place on our campus as well as the ones we anticipate or desire to take place as the future continues to unfold. I remember one of Bassett’s slides that day projecting the provocative declaration: “If you’re not a school of the future, you won’t be a school in the future.” That’s a statement that should make one stop and think, perhaps inspiring a feeling of excitement and opportunity, while also leaving some of us with a lingering sense of anxiety. But why is that the case? Because change isn’t easy, and oftentimes it comes with many discomforts and unexpected mishaps. So what do we do to work through that? What kind of language do we employ to make sense of the difficulties that come with growth? It’s an important question because the language we use directly shapes and models the ways we make sense of important concepts such as change as well as concepts involving the relations of power. [1]  

Oftentimes when we implement a sudden change in our classroom procedures, policies, or routines, students react with resistance and hesitation, perhaps even distrust, because they too feel like they’re out of their comfort zone and fear the prospect of an unpredictable mishap. Change is hard, plain and simple. When thinking about such situations, what language does a teacher employ to get students to cope with the adjustment? How do we mobilize a class of students or an assemblage of personalities to move towards the change we want to happen? One might enact the figure of authority, for instance, and demand compliance: “You will do what I’m asking because I’m the teacher and I said so! Just trust me.” This of course relies on a model of central-command authority, which has its costs emotionally and relationally speaking. But what about strategies that are less coercive? One that comes to mind is the commonly-voiced idea of being flexible. The person or teacher who invokes this notion of flexibility no longer commands authority in the same straightforward way; instead this person coaches, encourages, and/or reasons with the frustrated student, gently urging him to recognize that the change being implemented is necessary (and therefore inevitable) and the student must understand, as a result, that the best response to the inevitable is to be flexible. Here we have the model of the facilitator/manager who molds and bends the student through intervention, encouragement, and persuasion, reminding the person to flex with and conform to that which is inevitable... Flexibility here serves as an interesting rhetorical figure, for it suggests the properties of being bendable and stretchable, as well as something that conforms or molds to stronger forces/harder objects. In other words, it too gives shape to a model that necessitates the exercise of unilateral power.

To empower students and encourage critical thinking, I think we need a more symmetrically balanced model of give-and-take that does not enforce the figure of flexibility upon the weaker partner, and I believe this is true for all modalities of relationships in a school (in other words, for all the siloed binary pairings of teacher-student; faculty-admin.; department-to-department; division-to-division; etc.), especially when coping with or embracing change as an educational community. How do we empower a student body or a staff to take ownership of the change in process? First of all, we need to think about the politics of our metaphors. What does it mean to be flexible? What if we thought about the connections & relationships of a school community, not as being made functional by the participants’ promise to be flexible, but as being shaped by the principle of plasticity?

On Plasticity as an Emancipatory Metaphor

Many people have a tree growing in their heads but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree. 
-G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 15

In Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain?, she explores the implications of a neuroplastic model for the brain, but she approaches her topic from a more literary-philosophical point of view, which makes her keenly aware of the ideological assumptions that accompany one's word choices, metaphors, and modes of articulation, even in the realm of the sciences. She writes, “Any vision of the brain is necessarily political. It is not the identity of cerebral organization and socioeconomic organization that poses a problem, but rather the unconsciousness of this identity” (52). In other words, any metaphor or mode of verbal representation we employ to make sense of what we mean by “brain” reflects certain assumptions and biases of how we think politics, power, and the social. As stated in the previous post, our models and metaphors reveal our assumptions, values, and desired outcomes as a society, a culture, or a given group of people. (I think of how functionalism for instance as an approach to philosophy of mind came hand-in-hand with our increased fascination with computing as a model for intelligence and problem-solving.) Malabou mentions one common vision for the brain which likens it to a rigid command center, “which gives rise to so many unsettling metaphors in the register of command and government: a controller that sends orders down from on high, a central telephone exchange, a computer…” (4-5). Of course, she discusses this in order to explore a newer, alternative model for brain-functioning, namely one that relies on the metaphorical notion of plasticity, which describes something as both receiving and giving form (commands), thereby having the ability to constantly connect, modify, repair, and re-map. 

The receiving and giving of form is what distinguishes plasticity from flexibility. Malabou explains it further stating, “The word plasticity thus unfolds its meaning between sculptural molding and deflagration, which is to say explosion. From this perspective, to talk about the plasticity of the brain means to see in it as not only the creator and receiver of form but also an agency of disobedience to every constituted form, a refusal to submit to a model” (6). “Neuroplasticity” as Google defines it is “...the brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment.” In other words, new research about the plasticity of the brain shows that the brain is less of a rigid command center and more of an ever-changing neuronal network whose form adapts, molds, and adjusts in response to the environmental exposures and encounters during its history and development as an organ. Our brain and its neuronal functionings also help shape the workings of the brain as well as its environment both in and outside the biological system of the body, meaning “…neuronal functioning and social functioning interdetermine each other and mutually give each other form, to the point where it is no longer possible to distinguish them” (9). We have not realized the entire reach of this useful concept, says Malabou, for neuronal plasticity entails freedom from unilateral demands for compliance. It's a give-and-take model and this means “...it is not just a matter of uncovering, in the name of brain plasticity, a certain freedom of the brain but rather… to free this freedom, to disengage it from a certain number of ideological presuppositions that implicitly governs the entire neuroscientific field and, by mirror effect, the entire field of politics” (11). Plasticity helps us envision how relationships could function in a more egalitarian, horizontal manner and therefore shifts our mindset in terms of how we cultivate partnerships for change. 

IMAGE CREDIT: Esther Beaton/Australian Geographic

Most of the time, however, we still rely on compliance to push things forward: “[Although] the brain is plastic [and] free, we are still always and everywhere in chains” (11). Catherine Malabou argues that “...today, the true sense of plasticity is hidden, and we tend constantly to substitute for its mistaken cognate, flexibility… [and] the problem is that [flexibility] grasp[s] only one of the semantic registers of plasticity: that of receiving form. Indeed, what flexibility lacks is the resource of giving form, the power to create, to invent or even to erase an impression, the power to style. Flexibility is plasticity minus its genius” (12). When we want to implement change, whether it be in a classroom or among a whole staff, we need to be more “genius” like our plastic brains by empowering all participants transparently and collaboratively. And I suggest we need to conceive of all campus-wide relations in terms of plasticity, as opposed to flexibility or other modalities of power relations. Like the wasp and orchid, plasticity is about aparallel evolution. [2] 

Examples: 
-When I suddenly decided to “gamify” my class last year (in the middle of the semester), it demanded a lot of adjustment out of my students, so it was important to be transparent, communicative, and open to student feedback and intervention. I constantly asked them for ideas and suggestions for improvement, and we molded to each other in the process of our shared exchange while embarking on this new experience together. 
-Recently, the leadership at my school has done a great job embracing plasticity over flexibility as we continue to challenge each other to embrace certain changes to serve our students even better: (1) Today, we’re hosting an “unconference” on campus where teachers freely lead and facilitate sessions that they deem most necessary and relevant for our needs as a school in relation to professional development. Usually the agenda for PD comes from the top-down. (2) Additionally, this semester we are launching several teacher-led (as opposed to department or divisional heads) research & design teams to discuss changes needed to meet our long range vision and goals as a school. 

It’s great to see the aparallel evolution of certain campus silos such that they are working together in a way where collaboration takes the place of compliance.  Jacques Ranciere put it nicely when he said, “He who bends others best is he who bends best himself” (85). My challenge to myself is to replace the demand for flexibility with the model of plasticity both as a teacher and as a collaborative colleague. Otherwise, relationships become a struggle for power, which reminds me of something else Pat Bassett said the other day: “Education is relational, not transactional.”

"Dendrites" - http://www.nica-institute.com/dendrites/

Works Cited:

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Print.

Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do With Our Brain? Trans. Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Print

Ranciere, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.