Passing A Strange and Wonderful Curriculum
Notes and comment on Yi-Fu Tuan 1993, Passing Strange and Wonderful
Can one create an e-curriculum, a montage of quotes, via blogging that in turn helps us to consider Canadian curriculum theorizing as something strange and wonderful, both at the same time? How might we engage such ditigal performances?
The penalty for poor performance is not a dock in pay or social ostracism, but rather the nagging feeling of having missed a cue—of a certain awkwardness in one’s bearing and conduct toward others that reflects adversely on one’s image of oneself. We are all on stage, for at some level of consciousness I also judge other people’s facial expressions, gestures, and behavior. (p. 6)
How might we read the gaps in Tomkins' Common Countenance when....
The gaps seem tome like missing teeth in an open mouth. (p. 6)
How might we transform this medium of virtual
... life into art. (p. 6)
I rearrange my unkempt hair into semblance of order; I break an egg to cook sunny-side up. On another scale, pioneer settlers clear forests to create farms. (pp. 6-7)
Culture is speech. Humans use language not so much to convey factual information as to construct worlds, illuminating certain facets of reality while throwing others into the shade, and calling up images that demand appraisal and sometimes action. (p. 7)
And cyberculture is on the move...
The aesthetic impulse, understood as the “senses come to life,” directs attention to its roots in nature. But though rooted in nature (biology), it is directed and colored by culture. (pp. 7-8)
What direction is nature colored by digital technologies and their respective curriculum
How do the meaning of nature, culture, and the aesthetic differ, and, in particular, what is there about the aesthetic that makes it deeply a part of nature and culture and yet also endowed with traits uniquely its own? (p. 8)
There is no scenery to be appreciated from the belly of a rowboat. (p. 10)
Only paddling through its currere....
The dreamer’s “landscape” is often a mood, induced eerily by a particular feature (house, tree stump, dead bird) rather than by a topography. Even when the dreamscape seems to have a distinctive topographic character, the dreamer lacks the ability mentally to remove the self. In short, dream is immersion: the dreamer is a captive of the milieu and time in which she finds herself. (p. 10)
Timelessness of a child and sensory delight:
I watch and listen to my eldest son seeking to understand the concept of time in relation to space and place. This time daddy, after my nap, after nighttime, this time, or next time after the sun comes, or this time, or next time. He experiences time without comprehension of how to symbolize it with numbers, or letters. Time is orally understood in relation to nature's topography between sunrise and sunset.
At one extreme is a dreamlike immersion in sensations; at the other is the active (critical) enjoyment of scenery. Young children are particularly prone to dwell somewhere between these two. One environment that promotes this intermediate mode of being is the nook. A nook can be the tunnel behind the living room sofa, the space under the grand piano, but most satisfyingly it is an enclosure outdoors—natural cave, a hollow in the overgrown bush, a tree house. (p. 22)
As curriculum theorists how might we lose ourselves within the nooks of what we study, within the nakedness of and desire we call experience ?
Every theoretical motion is a dance. Unlike the mundane routine of wrote learning.
In routine factory work, what counts is the tangible end product, not the workers’ motions in its manufacture. Workers therefore tend not to see their bodies as instruments to be nurtured and trained. In sport, the goal is as precisely defined as in factory work: to reach a certain speed or height, to win against an opposing team. But unlike factory workers, athletes, to reach their goal, have to be highly conscious of the power and limits of their own bodies. The body is the athlete’s instrument of success. (p. 38)
In dance, a particular gesture or motion is both a part of a larger composition and an end in itself; it must be artistically flawless. To keep their bodies and minds as attuned as possible to the aesthetics of stance and motion, some dancers train themselves to be continuously conscious of the poetry of movement in everything around them—a newspaper blowing down the sidewalk, a bird landing on the telephone wire—and in everything they do, like setting the table and sipping coffee. (pp. 38-39)
Dance is the most ephemeral of arts. It is inscribed on air, not on paper, canvas, or stone. Except when captured by a movie or video camera, a work lasts no longer than the performance. Like composers, choreographers cannot expect their works to attain the degree of permanence—a reality to which artist and audience alike can return again and again—that writers, sculptors, and other artists in graphic media do as a matter of course. To the dance, the end of a perfect line of movement marks the end of a beauty never to be precisely recaptured. The beauty of dance lies in part in this poignancy—an existence so fleeting that it seems, paradoxically, to transcend time. (p. 39)
Agreeable urban sounds are unobtrusive. We seldom pause to consider their role in the daily theater of life. (p. 82)
Of experience...
1 comment:
Thank you Nicholas for sharing your thoughts and wonderful collection of quotes. I am particularly moved by the poetic consciousness of the everyday day dance you mention, an experience to which most are desensitized.
But consider what it may be like to truly experience "the poetry of movement..[from] a newspaper blowing down the sidewalk [to] a bird landing on the telephone wire" or soaring in flight? Does such consciousness lift one's spirits and carry them away on the wings of visceral flight? In many cases yes. It is glorious and moves some to capture the experience in poetic text:
“I sat one summer evening and watched a great blue heron make his descent from the top of the hill into the valley. He came down at a measured deliberate pace, stately as always, like a dignitary going down a stair. And then, at a point I judged to be midway over the river, without at all varying his wingbeat he did a backward turn in the air, a loop-the-loop. It could only have been a gesture of pure exuberance, of joy – a speaking of his sense of the evening, the day’s fulfillment, his descent homeward. He made just that one slow turn, and then flew out of sight in the direction of the slew farther down in the bottom. The movement was incredibly beautiful, at once exultant and stately, a benediction on the evening and on the river and on me. It seemed so perfectly to confirm the presence of a free nonhuman joy in the world (Wendell Berry as cited in Ackerman, 1999, pp. 5,6).”
We see here how the blue heron isn't concerned with sequential or chronos time; it is visible in his joyous, curvlinear flight. His flight didn't reflect the temporal nature of our fast moving world. His loop-the-loop folded time back on itself and revealed the joy that is possible within every living moment. Taking moments to free ourselves to experience the aesthetics of movement "in everything [we] do, like setting the table and sipping coffee." (pp. 38-39) changes the way we experience life. But is it always joyous or easy? Such sensitivity requires courage to feel one's wings outstretch in a lived and still-to-be-lived moment. To live and embrace the aesthetics of our everyday dance, we lose our protective coverings that let our vulnerabilities unfold.
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