"Staying
within the lines"
Re-imagining
What is "Elementary"
in the Art of Schooling
David
W. Jardine, Tanya Graham, Annette LaGrange, Hanne Kisling-Saunders ã
2000
Preambling Within the Lines
It is hard to imagine exactly where to begin in describing fully
the complexities, and the overwhelming contingencies and
interdependencies of ordinary classroom events, especially when
something happens. We have always fantasized that, if only we had enough
video equipment, tape recorders, or patience or ears, or research
assistants; if we could write well enough, with fine grain and detail
and desire; if we would produce a record of events fast enough, we could
overcome this difficulty and surmount this odd feeling of
"lack" (Loy 1999). We have found, after many painful attempts,
that this feeling of lack can never be filled with "enough".
Therefore the children’s art work in this paper seems nearly
unimaginable, even to us who were there to witness its emergence. The
classroom conditions within which the children’s work in this paper
was produced were, on the face of it, dead ordinary. This classroom was
in an ordinary, middle-class Canadian elementary school, full of
ordinary children, working under the same deadly ordinariness of
curriculum demands and report card deadlines as any other. The only
visible differences were that they were surrounded by the works of
various artists and were given the odd gift of time to think about, to
talk about, to argue over, and to practice for themselves, the alluring
ins and outs of this work and its disciplines. These children were
deeply presumed to be able of more than the sometimes shocking
trivialities we often expect of young children in the early grades of
school.
The living context that cultivated this work was longer than a
year because some of the children followed one of the teachers from
kindergarten to Grade One. So these are the real contexts that embody
this work: a generous sense of time, the solid belief that our children
should be surrounded by works of grace and beauty, and the equally solid
belief that, in such alluring times-places, good work, far outstripping
our images of children’s ability, can happen.
I
With Christmas approaching, the
laments of the student-teachers in our undergraduate Early Childhood
Education methods classes were almost inevitable. Practicum was starting
and the photocopied black-line Santa faces, all ready for colouring and
gluing, were already beginning to appear, an appearance as consistent as
the disappearing of red and green construction paper through
school-system supply cupboards.
We had wonderful, difficult
discussions in our class about these Santa Faces. Where do they come
from? What do they tell us about our images of children, of teaching, of
the work of schooling, about art, about creativity, about visual
literacy, about craft, about the returns of light into the world that
Christmas portends, about the nature of "the gift" (Jardine,
Clifford & Friesen, in press) as an image of teaching and learning,
about the Europeaness of our schooled presumptions?
We talked about how deeply
disappointing are some of the taken-for-granted practices inside
elementary schools and about how the (shared and contested) disciplines
and traditions and ancestries of human life so often and so seemingly
easily become black-line-mastered in the practices of schooling. Many of
the "activities" these student teachers confronted contained
no body, no richness, few real pleasures. The students spoke of a sort
of strangulated "thinness" to a lot of school-work, and sense
of seemingly deliberately holding back the beauties and difficulties of
the world that we and our children readily experience outside of
schools.
We talked about how our image
of "the basics" seems to have been co-opted by such images of
"thinness" and we quarrelled over where this image of
"the basics" in elementary education actually comes from, and
what this has done to our ability to imagine the fulness of the human
inheritance(s) we are entrusted to pass on to our children.
We commiserated over our own
experiences of such black-line Santa Faces and the wisps of cotton balls
stuck on our fingertips and having too much glue, and precisely what
sorts of satisfactions and disappointments we ourselves had felt over
doing such things ourselves as parts of our own schooling.
We talked about how easily
young children are willing to trust the teacher's images and
understandings of the world and therefore, how many children, even by
Grade One, have already come to "enjoy" such "art
activities." We talked, therefore, about the difficult position of
the beginning teacher who is sometimes faced with children who are
already inculcated into a thin and hyperactive (Jardine 1996) version of
"schooled activities."
In a horrible turn of events,
children's enjoyment of such activities can be too easily offered as an
adequate pedagogical case for their continuance. Worse yet, such
enjoyment can sometimes be offered as an adequate reason for dismissing
(as "theoretical") any critical consideration of what such
activities actually portend about the lives of our children and our
lives with them in schools. Such critical considerations can be simply
seen as speaking against children's enjoyment or against the confident
voice of "practical experience": "I’ve taught for years
and my kid's really like it!"
One thing we settled on in our
class is that no one could quite remember or decide precisely whose
"black-lines" these actually are. Their origins have faded
from view. Such activities seem to be perpetuated in schools, year after
year, in the midst of a sort of personal and cultural amnesia. They seem
to just happen, with no rich or satisfying pedagogical
trace-lines attached. They have become, in a strange sense,
unaddressable, mute, authorless, anonymous, impersonal, almost automatic
in their regular, yearly appearances. However, it is ironic that, given
such anonymity and impersonalness, attempts to question them and their
nature and place and prevalence in our schools often seems profoundly
personal, like a vaguely offensive affront to the genuine
good-heartedness of teachers and to their generous willingness to share
all they have with student-teachers. As one teacher attested, nearly in
tears, during a Professional Development Day when one of the authors
raised questions about the thinning out of much of the world’s
beauties in our elementary school classrooms: "I’ve been doing
the sorts of things you described for years, and I don’t think that
I’ve ever actually harmed a child."
This was clearly a courageous
statement that attests to the personal and emotional depth of our
mutual, often unvoiced and unnoticed and unquestioned investment in the
taken-for-granted, well-meant practices of schooling. It is unfortunate,
however, that, in the face of this courageous admission, none of those
present could find how to continue what had been a thoughtful and
difficult conversation about weak practice for fear of having anything
that was henceforth said taken as a personal insult. In the end, what
started out as personal courage ended up as a sort of public cowardice
on everyone’s behalf. What this attests too, among many threads
of implication, is the ways in which "the personal," however
unintendedly, more deeply entrenches each of us into an odd
powerlessness to speak out about what we witness in our schools.
II
In light of our conversations
about Santa Faces, our curriculum class began to talk at length about
wanting children to understand the deep, delicious, disciplined
character of the world. Our talk was organized, in part, around a
passage from David G. Smith's (1999, 139) brilliant and often
frightening essay "Children and the gods of war":
It is as if young people ask
for, above all else, not only a genuine responsiveness from their elders
but also a certain direct authenticity, a sense of that deep human
resonance so easily suppressed under the smooth human-relations jargon
teachers typically learn in college. Young people want to know if, under
the cool and calm of efficient teaching and excellent time-on-task
ratios, life itself has a chance, or whether the surface is all there
is.
We played with Smith’s images
of "thinness" and "surfaces" by looking at the thin
plastic "wood veneer" surfaces of the desks we were using at
the University. They are flat and easy to keep clean and clear of any
traces of anyone having been here before (or after) us; they require
little care, little attention, little notice, and they refuse any
attempt at cultivating a sense of craft, relationship, memory,
obligation or commitment; they resemble wood, but they are obviously
fake, obviously cheap. They are not interesting or memorable or
important or worthy of note. Nothing can especially happen over
them. In fact, they are designed so that little will happen. They will
simply eventually "break" and be replaced by equally thin,
non-stick surfaces; and all this will happen without our remembering,
without our having to directly suffer such passing.
(All of this akin to black-line Santa Faces: little will happen,
it’s just an "activity" with a lesson-planned
date-time-place-rationale-objectives-materials-plan-closure-assessment-follow-up
that will simply eventually "be done" (usually in about twenty
to forty minutes) and sent home and be replaced by the next worksheet
activity.)
We talked of how exhausting it
is to surround ourselves with a world which not only does not need
"[ours or our students’] continuity of attention and
devotion" (Berry 1977, 34), but is precisely designed to prevent
the necessity, even the possibility of such attention and
devotion. We spoke of ecological issues of disposability, immediacy,
distraction, consumption and what we and our children become when this
is what we surround ourselves with (Jardine, in press). We toyed, then,
with how surrounding ourselves with such disposibility produces an
"unsettledness" (Berry 1977) which, in consequence, not only
produces a sort of experiential acceleration (since nothing especially
requires much care and attention [see Jardine 1996;]) but also
aggravates a sense of "lack" and "want" (Loy 1999;
Smith 1999a, 1999b) that then pushes us into even more (eventually
itself unsatisfying) consumption.
One student called out
"Life Long Learning!" and we all initially laughed over an
eerie shock of recognition. This phrase no longer sounded like simply or
only good news. And, as with the teacher mentioned above, none of us
have ever meant any harm with such a phrase. However, suddenly, under
its surface charm lay questions as yet unposed.
We eventually bumped up against
Martin Heidegger’s (1977) contention that, in surrounding ourselves
with such a thin, consumptive surface world, we ourselves become
"disposable," part of a "standing reserve" (111) in
the service of, in our case, the machinations of schooling. After all,
with this photocopied black-line Santa Face, what difference in the
world does it make that this child filled it in and did such
gluing and colouring? This child is simply one of a long line of
thousands and thousands of children who have given themselves over to
the replicating continuance of the anonymous appearance of such
black-lines year after year. Not only does the worksheet become an
object of producing and consuming; children become producers and
consumers and, worse yet, a great deal of their time in schools, their
lives in schools, are consumed with momentary, eventually
unrewarding "activity." Children themselves–because
they are, after all, spending an enormous part of being a child
in school–become produced and consumed, oddly bought and sold.
Think, for example, of the rank-order postings of school achievements,
or how grade point averages determine a student’s marketable
saleability to a University or a good job.
We then took up Smith’s
challenge, Is this odd, fractured array of thin, meagre surfaces all
there is to this world we are passing on to our children? It was clear
when students reflected on their own elementary school experiences and
on the nature of many of the classrooms in which they were placed as
student teachers, that fragmented, thinned out and isolated bits and
pieces are often what counted for "the basics" in elementary
schools. We then asked: is there some way of speaking about age,
character, memory, inheritance, ancestry, work, discipline and care as
themselves "basic" to the living disciplines with which we are
entrusted as teachers? Are the things we taken-for-grantedly surround
ourselves and our children with in schools worthy of attention? Do they call
for (Heidegger 1968) something more than a surface-gloss, momentary
"activity," a momentary "distraction?"
These, of course, are very tough questions.
Therefore, when we ask,
following David Smith, whether "life itself has a chance," we
are never speaking solely of the life and experiences of the
child or solely the life and experiences of the teacher. We are
speaking, as well, for example, of art as a living discipline,
i.e., as a discipline full of lives, in which there is some life, some
vigour and character, a discipline in which a child might find their own
liveliness able to live itself out in the presence of a whole, living
world of relations and traditions and shared and contested ancestries.
III
After "The Scream"
by Edvard Munch
Students in our University
curriculum class spoke of still somehow wanting to keep the children
"together," within a bounded space of work, working, somehow,
"on the same thing"" or in the same place, together,
somehow. We talked of how these Santa Faces perhaps were designed to
fulfill such promise: they are a "parameter" of sorts,
circumscribing the work, making it vaguely topical and seasonal, giving
a sense of boundedness and clarity, circumscribing and limiting choices
and demands. However, students consistently report that when they are in
classrooms where such activities are commonplace, it feels, as one
student-teacher put it, "more like a ‘classroom management
class’ than an ‘art class.’" Moreover, students reported
that, during such activities, time always seems to be running out
(typical of the time of the machine, the time of production and
consumption, as Wendell Berry [1983] suggests). There is, with such
activities, a sort of build-in franticness and distraction, even a
low-level near-panic. Several students in such elementary school
settings reported witnessing four, five, once even up to eight different
hand-out photocopied "activities" occurring in a Grade One
classroom before morning recess. We speculated as to whether the
demands of schooling (e.g., the wonderfully cryptic and monstrous
"covering the curriculum") created the need for such
"activities" or whether these are two beasts feeding off each
other, each finding in the other its excuse to continue unquestioned.
We agreed that if that
franticness and panic is all that "staying within the lines"
can mean, we’d rather not. We wanted "something else."
What has happened in many
elementary school classrooms is that the stupefying character of
black-line Santa Faces have sometimes been replaced with what could be
understood as their equally abstract opposite. Rather than beginning
with anonymous, authorless, impersonal black-line masters, classroom
work is organized around the personal, authorial, creative, unique,
individuality of each child. Each child thus becomes, theoretically at
least, their own "master." As is so often the case in
educational theory and practice, we find ourselves riding another
pendulum (Throne 1994) by simply inverting the situation we despise.
In rolls "the metaphysics
of the genius" (Jardine & Batycky, 2000) where each unique
child becomes an artist, an author (Jardine 1992). We find ourselves
standing helpless before the generative uniqueness of each child (Arendt
1969; Jardine, Clifford and Friesen in press a), declaring
"you’re the ‘god’ of your own story" (Melnick 1997,
372). And, in such declaration, we declare ourselves unworthy or unable
to do anything but "facilitate" their creative urges.
IV
"Roses" by
Renoir | After "Roses" by Renoir
At the first round of parent-teacher interviews in October, one of
the parents commented while viewing her child’s work. "I just
can’t believe what these kids are capable of! This isn’t colouring,
this is actually drawing. You gave them a blank piece of paper and they
did this? I can’t believe it!." To be honest, I think that
this is somewhat sad, that this is so unbelievable to a parent. I mean,
why shouldn’t a child be capable of this? But then again, I didn’t
just "give them a blank piece of paper." Our water-colour
project involved viewing and critique art work of the Group of Seven and
practising the blends and bleeds of colour on different papers. I
believe that this provoke the children into thinking about possibilities
for their own works and thus helped them to begin developing their own
internal "lines."
Instead of being ready weakly,
"staying within the lines" can point to the sensuous,
immediate presence of the materiality of a real, living world that roils
within the bounds of a particular style of art or the (debatable) limits
and (equally debatable) generosities of a particular living tradition,
or the work of a particular artist, or the intensity of a particular
creation, like Vincent VanGogh’s Cafe Scene at Night (1888):
The children whose work is
found in this paper are from kindergarten and Grade One. These children
have carefully studied such paintings and the lives of those who made
them. They played with moist workings of watercolour paint on different
papers, or the pulls of wet chalks and dry chalks, absorbencies. They
measured the spatialities had with moving Leo-Leonian tears of papers
placed apart, leaving emptiness-forms in between things. They practised
layering colours. They laboured over imitating "the masters,"
not in order to be mastered by them, but in order to feel the labours of
the works that surrounded them and to learn some worldly limits, and how
the limits of Matisse draw out of them different things than the limits
of Renoir, open them to different worlds of relations and
interrelations, different demands and desires and possibilities. They
rested over lovely books with lovely illustrations and learned the
intimacies between reading the text and reading the pictures.
They practised these arts,
developing, each in their own way and within the limits of their own
lives and experiences, a feel for the various materialities of these
worlds, these odd, debatable inheritances. They experimented in class
with the pulling of a horizon line downwards or upwards, invoking the
Greek ghosts of proportionality and figure that will arise again in the
Grade Six mathematics class and beyond. They sketched out the lives of
different artists–hatreds of women found in dancing ballerinas with
the master-artisan always picturing himself full of distain and
distance-- listening to their own words being read out in the classroom
and speaking with their parents about the inevitability of the nude form
that they’ll be encountering. Now the children were surrounded, not
only with large prints of the work-world of the Impressionists, but with
their own work gathered on walls together because each child had
journeyed, so to speak, to the same rich, contested topography, the same
rich, contested "place."
Suddenly, there are
"lines" everywhere, but they are not solid, they are not
uncontested or unambiguous, they are not "givens," and they
are not always straight and linear. Instead of keeping children
"together" within the bounds of the abstract black-lines of a
Santa Face (or abandoning them to its abstract opposite of
"uniqueness"), children can be kept "together"
within the more sensuous, more ambiguous, more tangled, more rich, more
compelling, more variegated, more demanding, more disciplined lines of a
particular, located, encultured, historical, image-filled, worldly
inheritance. However, the sense in which children are now
"together" is such that they must entering into the
ongoing, living conversations that constitutes such inheritances.
They must enter into the "real work" (Snyder 1980) of this
world because this world is its real work; it is its
"gathering and collecting" (Gadamer 1989, 106)
intergenerationally, through time, in a located and specifiable history
and place. Their individual presence and witness to such inheritances
becomes visible as essential to the living character of those
inheritances. In fact, "only in the multifariousness of
such voices do [such inheritances] exist" (Gadamer 1989, 284).
Suddenly, these children were
no longer alone, either with their own Santa Face that seemed to arrive
from nowhere except school, nor with their own "creativity."
They found themselves together in a place with a highly
contested, rich, alluring shape and history and character. With these
experiences in hand, a whole part of the world opened up for the
children, a free-but-limited range of possibilities, avenues to be
explored. It is as if the children had been ushered into a
"place" that had character and that allowed and housed and
took good care of certain possibilities that are now free to explore and
transform, to refuse or take up, to expand or imitate or combine or
break apart.
Rather than squelching
creativity, the techniques and terminologies and visual literacies they
learned helped form and shape and solidify and protect and open up their
creativity to possibilities and limits that cannot be found within the
subjectivizing metaphysics of creativity and genius (Gadamer 1989;
Jardine & Batycky 2000). Instead of this Romantic image of creative
genius, children’s creativity was able to be strongly held in the
embrace of the world and was able to present itself through such
holding, such embrace. Through these limited, within-the-lines
creations, the difference and delicacy of each child's hand and eye and
heart became visible. Moreover, and this cannot be emphasized too
strongly, these differences became visible in relation to each other,
and because of these relations. The "field of living worldly
relations" into which the children and teachers were ushered
allowed and provided for (a wide range of) difference. These art worlds
were strong and resilient and contested enough to hold the full range of
different children together in relations of kind, so that the fields of
their differing, living relations could be worked out and not
just worked on. Here, in this place, each child just might make
a difference and not just be different.
This child still stands
in a long line of thousands who have brought forward, for example, Van
Gogh’s work and world, but now, it is a bloodline full of
characters and faces and histories and questions and contestations and
vigorous debates and tales to tell and different takes on the tales that
have been told or left unsaid. One wonderful example, given the cultures
of the children in these particular classroom, was Van Gogh’s (and
Europe’s) late nineteenth century "orientalism." The work
these children were entering in to was rich enough and real enough that
such a debate became possible because of it.
The practicum students in the
Early Childhood Education class agreed: this is a strong (albeit
rather frightening at first glance, rather intimidating) sense of
"classroom community," where we gather together in our
differences over something worthy of our attention. The trouble
is, of course, that this by itself leaves as yet unaddressed questions
of what is worthy of our attention.
V
After Monet’s "Waterlilies"
We’ve just returned from
taking another group of practicum students to the school and again, a
similar response not yet noted: the unanticipated, bewildering, sensuous
pleasure of experiencing such works. That first reaction was nearly
autonomic: a gasped intake of breath, and the immediate desire to look
more closely, to remain here, to go back and forth, to let the
bewilderment settle in and to let the realities of what they are seeing
take hold. All the students admitted that these children’s works are beautiful.
This is good work.
It might have been
theoretically possible, sitting there a wee bit stunned in the school
hallway, to enter into some ethical or epistemological quarrel, and
raise claims of "how do you know it is good work?" or
"what is good work?" or "who is to say?", but that
sensuous first moment was undeniable, even though we might be able to think
our way out of its demand and its address.
Endbit
Perhaps it is because this is my first "official" year
of teaching, that I find the preceding questions and the hundreds of
other similar questions swirling in my mind to be challenging,
frustrating and inspiring all at once. At the same time, I feel
fortunate to have all of these seemingly endless, complex questions to
ponder, rather than believing in simple answers. (Tanya Graham,
Personal Reflections, 1998)
Back in our practicum methods
class, a student-teacher remarked, partly in amusement, partly in
confusion and disgust, that she had been handed the very same
black-line master of Santa's face some 18 years before, in her own
E.C.E. class.
Three classes later, she
brought in her own Santa face, browned from age, missing some cotton
balls, pulled from a box in her mother's basement. We began, again, the
slow and painful turns of re-imagining what is elementary in these arts
of schooling.
REFERENCES
Arendt, H. (1969). Between
Past and Future. New York: Penguin Books
Berry, W. (1977). The Unsettling of America. San
Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
Berry, W. (1983). Home Economics. Berkeley: North Point
Press.
Clifford, P., Friesen, S. & Jardine, D. (1998). Pedagogy and the
gift. JCT Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice,
Bloomington, Indiana, October 1998.
Gadamer, H.G. (1989). Truth and Method. New York:
Continuum Books.
Heidegger, M. (1968). What calls for thinking? New
York: Harper and Row.
Heidegger, M. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology.
New York: Harper Books.
Jardine, D. (1992). Naming children
authors. Readings in Canadian Literacy. 10(4),
53-61.
Jardine, D. (1996). "Under the tough old stars":
Pedagogical hyperactivity and the mood of environmental education. Canadian
Journal of Environmental Education, 1 (Spring 1996), 48-55.
Forthcoming in Jardine (in press).
Jardine, D. (in pressa). Unable to return to the gods that made them.
A chapter in Jardine, D. (in press) "Under the tough old
stars": Ecopedagogical essays. Connecticut: Foundation for
Educational Renewal.
Jardine, D. & Batyky, J. (2000) Disrupting the metaphysics of
genius: An exploration of a case of "room behaviour."
Unpublished manuscript.
Jardine, D., Clifford, P. & Friesen, S. (in press). Scenes from
Calypso’s Cave: On Globalization and the pedagogical prospects of the
gift. Alberta Journal of Educational Research.
Jardine, D., Clifford, P. & Friesen, S. (in press a).
"Standing helpless before the child." A response to
"Social difference and the problem of the 'unique individual': An
uneasy legacy of child-centered pedagogy." Canadian Journal
of Education.
Loy, D. (1999). Lack and Transcendence. New York:
Humanity Books.
Melnick, C. (1997). Review of Max Van Manen and Bas Levering’s Childhood
secrets: Intimacy, privacy and the self reconsidered. Journal of
Curriculum Studies, 29(3), 370-373.
Smith, D. (1999). Children and the gods of war. In David G. Smith
(1999). Pedagon: Interdisciplinary essays in the human sciences,
pedagogy and culture. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 137-142.
Smith, D. (1999). Globalization and education: Prospects for
postcolonial pedagogy in a hermeneutic mode–Introduction. Interchange,
30(1), 1-10.
Smith, D. (1999a). Economic fundamentalism, globalization and the
public remains of education. Interchange, 30(1),
93-117
Snyder, G. (1980). The Real Work. New York: New
Directions Books.
Throne, Jeanette (1994). Living with the pendulum: The complex world
of teaching. Harvard Educational Review, 64(2).
|
