A Psycho-Somatic Struggle Toward an Ecological Understanding of the Pedagogy of Computers and Writing

by Temi Rose

Premise: We are limited or extended first by acts of imagination.

Goals and purposes are murky, deceptive areas of educational discourse. We often hear the cliché that people are purpose-driven, goal-driven - and I think we see this especially in the United States where people seem almost incapable of sharing appreciative existential moments without entwining a commercial or acquisitive element. Nevertheless, I question the fundament of this overused proposition. The proposition as presently used implies that people arise with a purpose, that the discovery of this purpose is simply a matter of self-reflection, and that this purpose, once identified, will lead to some form of self-aggrandizement. What blatant utilitarian assumptions! It is my observation that we are driven (or inspired) to create purpose and meaning both in the universe that surrounds us and in the multiverse that is us, concomitant to our need for connection with others, to keep away our fear of abandonment and death. Educators can train students to set and achieve goals not simply for the purpose of winning the academic game but as a realization of autonomy's fundamental role in creating communicable meaning.

There is a vast body of evidence that human beings are meaning-makers. We make meaning out of anything and everything. Meaning-making appears to be a quality of human sentience. As we create relationship with those things that seem significant to us, we name both the things and the relationships we create, then we create metaphors to extend and communicate the meaningfulness of these things and our relationships with them.

The creation of metaphor is an act of teaching, of sharing meaning with others, of extending and participating in the dance of life (Gersie, 1990). The origin of awareness is probably due a great deal to survival and necessity but what makes us distinctly human, what distinguishes us from other sentient beings, is our ability to alter and create new meanings. And this is always done in the context of an other, in the context of communication, in the context of relationship with other human beings (Bateson, 1972). Therefore, our uniquely human meaning-making capacity is essentially and irreducibly social, relational, interpersonal (Shotter, 1993).

Postmodern concepts of relativity clearly owe a great deal to Einstein. But dear Albert was only one among many relativist thinkers. Tolstoy pointed out in War and Peace that Napoleon was as much a product of his time as he was a formulator and leader. Albert too was embedded and unfolding. Like Napoleon, we are embedded in and generating our time and place. Although chicken-and-egg ponderings do not result in conclusions, they can churn up a beneficial speculation. The famous argument as to whether light exists and operates as a particle or a wave was not resolvable into a singular truth. The open-endedness of the exchange has not damaged knowledge building in physics but rather has spurred us on to further intellectual and experimental pursuits.

We have not yet reached a state of awareness whereby a coherent, collaborative theory of light is conceivable. We are not yet able to realize a conceptual framework within which particles (object, persons) and waves (dynamics, relationships) are perceptible as unified. The best we can do is to parse our images, as we have parsed the land, ourselves, and each "other". We deal with succinct, distinct qualities, elements, and dynamics, one at a time, each as if opposed or supporting an "other" but what we have begun to realize, dawning as a vision on the horizon of western philosophy and reasoning, is that polarities might in their actuality be functioning as totalities (Ricoeur, 1991). Stating Popper's truth theorem in a slightly different way than he did, valid premises inevitably present their alternative (Popper, 1999). These alternatives are not inimical to the original premises but necessary to its actuality and comprehensibility (Prigogine, 1984).

Metaphor: Our ideas and thoughts, theories and formulations are the living coral reefs we continuously build while we live within them.

Western intellectual workers have spent millennia creating, maintaining, and examining hierarchical social and intellectual constructs. These constructs have served us well but have gradually thrown up social and intellectual challenges insurmountable within a strict hierarchical framework (Rogers, 1980). Since WWII, partly as a result of humanist and liberal shame in the face of intellectual collusion with fascism, intellectual workers have been attempting to deconstruct the rationales supporting soul-destroying systems (Arendt, 1954). Post-modernity has posed significant challenges to the certainties of absolutism (Bauman, 1995).

What has been observed about the origin of writing is that permanent and semi-permanent forms of writing were used for military-historical purposes, religious purposes, and business purposes (Schmidt-Basserat, 1977). The remains of these forms of writing abound. And yet we also know that although Sappho was one of the most popular writers of her time, passion for her words manifested itself in their memorization, in their living transmission so that few written copies of her work can be found. Yet we are certain that there were written forms of Sappho's poetry. It seems to me that formal, military-industrial, and political forms of discourse tend to be recorded in media whose permanence is in inverse proportion to the love with which they are written and received. Communication that is a necessity for the sustenance of living life in human society is transmitted through more fragile media that tend to vanish with the people who shared in its dissemination.

With the advent of affordable video equipment and community access television there arose a hope for the development of a grass roots media. Quickly this hope transferred itself to the budding potential in heterarchal computer communication. Computers today are used extensively for interpersonal communication. A case could be made that personal use of the communicative potential of computers equals or exceeds commercial and military use combined. Where does the educational use of computer media fall? Will educators choose to use computers more in a commercial and centrist mode or will we explore their collaborative heuristic for developing understanding through interpersonal relationship?

In his book Weaving the Web (1999), Berners-Lee stated that he had hoped that the collaborative potential of the world wide web would have been more widely recognized and used. I write in the hope that educators commit their energies to the grand experiment of creating viable forms of collaborative, diversified intellectual work. Only collaboration has the potential of creating truly new patterns of thought and action. How can the computers in our classrooms be used in ways that contribute to collaboration and a new constructionism not based on strictly analytical or engineering principles but on creative, imaginative resourcefulness?

Premise: All our thinking and understanding is based on our prior knowledge, our experience. (Cue background music: "It's the end of the world as we know it…)

The figure/ground nature of perception suggests that any thing that exists in the material world is held together, maintained, and shaped by the world around it. Similarly, any person existing is held together, maintained, and shaped by the world around her (Parker, 1990). This mutuality depends upon communication but in its essence is a manifestation of the will to exist (Fromm, 1976; Ruddick, 1989; Tillich, 1952). Atomic physicists realized that breaking the bonds that hold and coordinate atomic particles into a unified whole destroys the fabric of life itself.

Can technology, originally developed for military-industrial purposes be used in the field of education without destroying the will and willingness of teachers and students? I believe it can. In fact, traditional educational praxis has often been criticized for attempting to destroy the will of students. Technology could be used to balance the power between teachers and students, between old and new knowledge, between collaboratively created knowledge and hierarchically received information. We might utilize technology to usher in the revolution that the sit-ins and riots of the late 1960's did not (Bruner, 1986, 1990; Dewey, 1938).

Learning is change, alterations made to consciousness. Even as we design those changes and are pleased to see the alterations we, as teachers, have planned for our students, some alterations will shock us and perhaps not be as pleasant as we would have wished them to be. But we have created a premise that our old, studied information is more valuable than new knowledge based on contemporary experience and this premise will inevitably bring with it the alternative proposition that knowledge of contemporary living moments is more valuable (remember relevance?) than knowledge that has stood the test of time. Clearly a mutuality is necessary. The existence of continuous, open conversations between old and new knowledge is the outward and visible sign of a thriving culture. And it follows that a culture in danger of becoming ossified, dogmatic, or totalitarian can be revived with heavy doses of vital conversations.

Always the old is dying and the new is being born. By the time we ready our presentations and stand up to teach, what we have to say is old. The young are listening with their hands and minds full of newness that we cannot know. Some relational dynamic between us is necessary and it does not have to be based on hierarchical assumptions of intrinsic or ultimate worth. We need each other. They need to know what we know. We need them to pose alternatives. We are the subjects as well as the authors as we stand in front of our students.

Traditionally we only allow co-agentic learning at the very highest levels of authorship. Many years of training has been the prerequisite to entering the conversation as a partner who has enough authority to be given the rights of co-agency. But, although no amount of expertise or training gives one human being more value than another, our systems of education purport to increase the worth of persons by increasing their training. We take for granted that a nuclear physicist is more valuable to our society than an AIDS patient or a homeless person. On exactly the same grounds we take for granted that men are more valuable than women, that white people are more valuable than any other kind, and that what the teacher has to say is more important than what the student is trying to convey.

Is the agent of learning the teacher or the student? Is the one who conveys the information the agent or the one who receives the information? I would say that if both conversants are changed by engaging in an authentic conversation with unknown-answer, speculative questions as crucial as questions with predetermined answers, then the learning is likely to be co-agentic. And it follows that if both parties learn, if the learning is co-agentic, the knowledge will be more memorable and more relevant than knowledge simply transmitted and received - and this more memorable, relevant, co-created knowledge is far more flexible, i.e. transferable.

Rejecting the Standard Metaphor: I would like to make a strong finish that is not a BIG BANG! I want to come to a conclusion that is not violent, that refuses a victory that requires the annihilation of an enemy. I want to articulate a creative, feminist resistance to industrial and military purposes spreading like a cancer through educational discourse and praxis.

Perhaps the end of the world that the millennium predicted was really the end of the world as we have known it, the end of an idea of how the world ought to be. Even the traditionally ultraconservative Wharton Business school academics write in great detail of the importance of collaboration to sustain global competition. Perhaps what we are has never really changed, perhaps what changes is our way of interpreting what we can be. Perhaps now we are ready to notice that we are social beings, essentially collaborative, cooperative, capable of enhancing creative as well as destructive forms of conflict, continuously negotiating meaning. Life-skills have always been practiced but destructiveness got more press coverage (Spender, 1982a, 1982b).

Who determines the purposes of education? Only dealing with the United States for now, since our experience of democracy is quite unlike that in any other country, the mandate for public education has been justified as a necessary component in the maintenance of democracy. Democracy requires of its citizens participatory responsibilities. Whole political participation is understood to be deliberative rather than violent (Arendt, 1963). And careful deliberation is an acquired skill, requiring an education in discourse (Tarrant, 1989, 1991; Apple, 1979; Freire, 1989, 1993).

It is a feminist axiom that the way we presently story information and the type of information that we choose to store reflect patriarchal values (Argyris, 1980; Lather, 1986). Even if a woman achieves brilliant success in her lifetime, her work is made to disappear from written histories (Spender, 1982b). So each woman must recreate herstory each time she wishes to contribute to society. And she does so without access to knowledge relevant to her struggles to make meaning in her existential now. Just so the stories of those who have worked collaboratively, educatively, outside of industrial, military purposes has been allowed to disappear, making it onerous for those of us who wish to do that work today.

Finally, although conversations constitute knowledge, they do not always reveal knowledge coherently, meaning often develops gradually from a series of conversations and experiences. Instead of concentrating on technology's ability to tightly control lesson plans, exercises, and evaluations, we could explore ways to use computers to afford elements of mystery and ambiguity, to increase peer respect, and to encourage unforeseen directionality in educational communication. We need to be together to know because knowledge making is essentially a social, communicative event. Hierarchical conversations are lonely, enervating, and often humiliating. Collaborative conversations are often thrilling. Most of us will remember for years our best conversations. And we never forget, nor cease to be grateful for those souls who have conversed genuinely with us. I am suggesting that as educators, we now have sufficient pedagogic technique and technical ability to embed vital conversation in our curricula using computers and specifically, computers and writing to engage in and consciously explore the possibilities of collaborative knowledge building.

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