Constructivism in museum

Went to a thing at the art museum, a discussion of a Hopper painting, and he did a lot of "landscapes" in the 30s which kind of present man-made elements (like a railroad track) as part of the natural environment, and that kind of fit in here... we don't think of an old steel mill as "wilderness," but that's what we'd call a stretch of nature that was let go. So urban wilderness, not wasteland, I guess? In England, they of course do this better-- but then, they have tin mines the Romans abandoned in 300 AD, and yes, they look pretty cool now. Maybe Detroit will look that great in 2300.

Anyway, the husband afterwards said he enjoyed it but would have liked more "lecture," and I realized that the instructor (one of the curators) was engaging in "constructivism". 

Woolfolk (1993) defines thus: "The key idea is that students actively construct their own knowledge: the mind of the  student mediates input from the outside world to determine what the student will learn.
Learning is active mental work, not passive reception of teaching."

The curator said that they were trying this "closer look" model out, following the Frick example, where they led a discussion of a single painting. There was a cognitive element too, that is, we were being led to the skill of art analysis, to figuring out (especially) compositional elements. But it was mostly constructivist, with the curator asking questions, like "What strikes you most about the colors here?"

I say it's constructivist rather than, say, collaborationist, because there was, in that grim new term, a SME (subject matter expert) in the curator, who led the discussion. In fact, she said afterwards, if anyone had mentioned, say, how this resembled Wyeth's painting Christina's World, she would have led into a discussion of influences, but "the topic didn't come up." I found that interesting, because she would direct us to observations and questions and then answer them, or discuss them, but she wouldn't start a topic.

So the husband (we met at a university that prided itself on great lecturers, and we both love a good lecture) said he felt like we were learning how to "read a painting," but not really much about this painting itself, and "I don't really want to hear what the other students think because what do they know."

I mentioned that it wasn't really "the blind leading the blind," as I used to term that pedagogical trend in the 90s that forced the instructor into the role of another student (and a rather silent one at that), while the students fumbled their way to understanding something, which might be okay with a poem, but was pretty useless when it came to comma usage rules (they never did seem to find their way to the rules). At least now, the instructor was leading the discussion and answering the questions, not just prompting students to do the work.

Anyway, it was interesting to see this in action, and I did think it was constructivism really, as the learners did work together to get a comprehensive understanding, and shaping the learning, but with the subtle and expert facilitation by the curator.

http://www.imamuseum.org/collections/artwork/new-york-new-haven-and-hartford-hopper-edward

The painting in question. I noticed that the "shelf talker" or whatever they call the description/bio/title card on the wall next to the painting gave far more explicit "lecture-type" information, and so does the page on the website:

"This painting, named after an East Coast railroad line, was created during the Depression and depicts a landscape and desolate house. The prominent track evokes Hopper’s recurring themes of transience and the loneliness of the traveler."


The frontal view and the broad horizontal line of the railroad suggest a stage, underlining the separation between the viewer and the scene.
The crisp lines and sharp angles of the house are softened by the rounded, natural shapes of the trees, and the dark green balances the bright sky. Hopper’s compositions are often based on oppositions like this that unite to form a harmonic whole.

Which is a "better" pedagogy? Neither, I suspect, is "better," but the curator's discussion was probably better at teaching us to understand painting, and the information "lecture" was better at teaching us about THIS painting. Both work together, but maybe they have to be in different environments? Like the website is the "lecture," and the "classroom" is more discussion-oriented?

As a novelist and a fiction-writing teacher, I labor under the illusion that everyone else is fascinated by our creative choices, you know, why did you choose to hide the secret for 11 chapters and reveal it by accident rather than protagonist decision, or why did you choose that title? (Like the painting above is named for the railroad line that owned the tracks in front of the house... did Hopper want to call attention then to the railroad tracks particularly?) So I think one effective path of this constructivist approach could be learners asking questions and speculating about creative choices

Cooperation vs. competition

I was just up in Canada, in Stratford, at the truly great world treasure Shakespeare Festival. It's sort of easy to claim this for our own, first because it's within driving distance and the accents sound like us and Ontario looks almost exactly like Ohio.

But it's in Canada, you know? A different country! Their money has colors (and not just green)! They pronounce the "U" in "house" as a separate sound!

So we went to dinner with a couple there. They'd both lived in the US, so of course we asked if they noticed any differences. "A thousand subtle ones," one said, and gave a few examples. And the one big one-- Americans are competitive. REALLY competitive. Not "we won the gold medal in hockey the last Olympics" competitive (the Canadians are pretty competitive that way :), but the constant assessment-- am I better than he is? Is she dissing me? What's my place in this hierarchy? Who do I have to step on to get higher? <G>

Of course, being a competitive American, I snapped, "That might be exactly why we made it to the moon first, and you-- oh. Right. Canada doesn't have a space program, does it?" (Okay, that was low!)

But as I was working on my community of practice paper, I was noticing that these communities are usually cooperative. And it's especially striking because many of these kinds of communities (like professional networks) are actually composed of people who are kind of rivals-- Fifty attorneys in the same small city. 800 writers trying to get the attention of 6 big publishing companies. Four graduate students in the same program.

It's almost as if for the purpose of the community, they tacitly agree not to compete in this forum. That's essential, isn't it? Otherwise, can you trust? Like I've been in writing communities for a long time, and there's constant exchanges of information and wisdom. If I thought Amy Author over there was trying to undermine me to get some advantage in the marketplace, I can't trust it when she says, "Oh, Avon isn't looking for medieval novels this year." And for the community to work, we have to trust each other. Does that mean we can't compete? Or just not when we're in the "community center?"

My source for the early years of the COP I wrote about remembers that the cooperative spirit of the early year started breaking down once there was a "prize," when the "top rated" manuscripts were to be given evaluations and consideration by a big-name editor. Suddenly it wasn't a bunch of writers trying to improve and helping each other improve, but a group of competitors for the prize of editor attention. It was, in her mind, the beginning of the end (though the community still exists).

It still exists, so isn't that a success? The ones who participate now seem eager and willing-- but the emphasis seems to be more on making friends who will "vote you up" so you win the right to present to the editor.

My source has quit with some of the early members. They still keep in touch, but there's no community-- pairings, friendships, but not community.

So as I read Siemens, as he talks about connectivism and its value, I very much agree. But how does it work with American competitiveness? I have thought for years that the Millennial generation is much less competitive than my own, though I think the culture has been trying to force competition on them by making it clear that only 10% or so will be "winners" and everyone else I guess will be "losers." I love how hard the young people work to resist that, which is hard for many of them because they are such a compliant and pleasant generation and not very rebellious. They are so much more "connectivist" in the Siemen sense-- quick to form groups, eager to find consensus, skilled at cooperation. We are fortunate in this age of online that they are our students, as they are much more likely to be good at collaborating than the Gen-Xers, for sure.

Multiplicity: A Novelist's Journey

Multiplicity 

Patient: Doctor, I think I'm going crazy.  Sometimes I find that I'm talking to myself inside my head.

Doctor: Now, now, I wouldn't start worrying about it until someone starts talking back.

Patient: Well.... 

Admit it.  You've got a nagging doubt about all those voices in your head.  They not only talk back to you, they argue with each other.  Sometimes you get headaches because they stomp around and slam doors.   When you read Three Faces of Eve, you realized if someone wrote about your multiple personality syndrome, it would be Three Hundred Faces.

Oh, yeah, I know.  It's different for you.  You're not crazy.  Crazy people can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy, and you can.  Right.  Consider that time your spouse came in and found you dissolved in tears at your keyboard, and you looked up and said, "I couldn't help it.  I had to kill Joey off."  Who was more real to you at that moment, your living spouse or the dead Joey?

 It's always been like this for you, hasn't it?  While your little friends were dressing their Barbies up, you'd already endowed Ken with a dark secret, a dangerous smile, and a lethal set of double entrendres.  Other kids quit "making pretend" when they started making out.  Not you.  (You even found yourself murmuring "My hero!" after your first kiss, didn't you?)  And while your college classmates were struggling to understand Othello, you were already plotting the sequel, The Redemption of  Iago.

Then adulthood arrived, and so did shame.  Like Adam and Eve, you learned to keep a fig leaf over your private parts– it's just your private parts were inside your head.  You didn't tell your soap-loving best friend about how you managed to get her favorite characters back together.  And though you confessed every last little real-life crush to your significant other, you knew better than to reveal the fictional hunks leaning insolently against the doorways to your imagination.  You knew even the people who loved you the most just wouldn't understand. In fact, they'd think you were... crazy. 

And then the miracle happened.  You met a fiction writer, or took a writing class, or joined a writing group, and as you listened, what you heard spread wonder through you. Other people had voices too.  Other people– regular people, by the looks of them, with jobs and families just like you– muttered both sides of an imaginary conversation as they drove home through rush-hour traffic.  Other people bought three baby-name books years before they had babies; they too had mental sextuplets to christen.

Do you remember that moment when you realized you weren't alone?  And you weren't crazy?  It was liberating and joyous and it transformed your life.  All you had to do about those people in your head was ... write them down.  You just had to take all those secret jottings and connect them into a plot.  You could use all your elaborate theorizing on their childhoods and call it backstory.  You could take all those crazy floorplans of their castles and call it setting. Then you could give the characters the ending they deserved, and the entire universe, at least the one behind your eyes, would be restored to order, and you could call that plotting.

Since then, you've never looked back, have you?  In the community of writers, it's 
perfectly okay to spend more time decorating your hero's home than you ever spent on your own.  Your writing friends know better than to sneak out and dial 911 when you're discussing your villain's favorite poisons.  They listen sympathetically to your complaints that even after you've killed her mother and blinded her father, your heroine still insists on being as perky as Sandra Bullock.

All this support, however, has made you forget how deeply weird it is to live inside your characters while they live inside you.

  

But here I am to remind you of this paradox: Making fictional humans has the simultaneous effect of making authors both more and less human themselves.Non-writers, I think, assume that we paint from life, that we get our ability to characterize from close observation of our fellow "real people."  (Only writers, by the way, will understand why I put "real people" in quotes there.  It's not like our characters aren't real people too, right?) It's true, we do our share of people-watching, although I suspect for many of us it's more a matter of blocking the motion than deciphering the emotion– "So that's how a man yanks open the door and gets out of the car in one fluid movement!" We are properly appreciative of all the subtle variations of human psychology, and if we have a pen handy, we jot our observations down.

But just as often it's the reverse: We understand the people outside our head because we know the ones inside.  Like Walt Whitman, we contain multitudes, and all we have to do sometimes is ask, and they'll tell us who and what they are– and why.  It's all too easy to extrapolate from their revelations to the motives and values of everyone around us.  (When I was in graduate school in the English program, I took as an elective a Criminal Behavior psychology course.  Impressed with my paper on what combination of background factors produce what variety of crime, the professor asked if I were a social worker who worked with many offenders.  "No, " I replied, "I'm a writer, and I have a lot of villains.")

We need characters to fill every role, so we might take on the tolerant attitude of "it takes all kinds of people to build a world." Unfortunately, the tolerance we have for some of our characters can be disorienting when we try to apply it to their counterparts in the real world.  I can just imagine Thomas Harris's justification for bestowing connubial bliss upon Hannibal the Cannibal– "Serial murderers need a happy ending too!"  Let's just say, we might not be the best jurors for Jeffrey Dahmer's trial.

The problem is, once we construct the backstory for our characters, we realize everyone in the world has backstory too– traumas and issues and dark pasts that affect their present behavior.  So we search in their actions for some rich and complex motivation, which can make us more intuitive about other people's feelings than almost any shrink.  We know that the boy standing defiant on the playground is trying to conceal his loneliness and longing for a friend.  We know the girl looking up from her book is trying to get up her courage to approach him. That's the wonderful empathy of authors.

The problem is, while we're melting with sympathy for them, we're also plotting how, if we were in charge of this story, we'd have the school bully (hmmm... probably acting out because his father beats him, or maybe his mother's abandoned him?) taunt the boy and then the girl would rush to his defense–

In other words, we would turn those real people into characters.

It happens all the time.  We'll be watching the news, sincerely weeping sympathetic tears as some parent whose child has gone missing begs for her safe return... while idly thinking that there's something a bit off about the gestures and expression there, and wouldn't it be cool if it turned out that the parent actually murdered the child and buried her – That's sick.  (And it doesn't make us feel much better when it turns out, three days later, our fiction is actually fact.)

Or our best friend will be lamenting her mother's increasing frailty, and we'll mention our last heroine's conflict about putting her mother in a nursing home.  And we're surprised and ashamed when the friend snaps, "My mother's broken hip, alas, is real, not some subplot that's going to be wrapped up neatly by Chapter 14!"

But we do agree, don't we, that there is no reason for a husband to object to an entirely rational discourse on the allure of a  flinty-eyed tattooed Adonis ex-cop of a hero?  (And that is nothing at all like our justifiable irritation when he says, as he closes the cover of our latest release, "You know, I'd like to take your heroine straight to bed."  He's.... he's objectifying her!)

Let's face it.  Sometimes our amazing ability to bring characters to life gets a little scary.  It isn't just that our life becomes fodder for our fiction; sometimes, as we try out our characters' poses and test their value system, our life starts to imitate our fiction. It might start with the helpful query "What would my resourceful heroine do?" whenever we're confronted with a difficult decision.  But soon, we're taking self-defense classes because she's getting stalked.  Think of poor Stephen King.  He recalls the spookily cheerful driver of the van that nearly killed him as "a character out of one of my own novels." (And the driver died mysteriously, alone in his trailer-- of course it was a trailer-- a few months later... insert Twilight Zone music, please.)

There is magic in this ability of ours to imagine people so completely, but it's a dark magic too.  A wonderful empathy guides us to embody universal human issues in unique characters, who sometimes inspire our readers to realizations about their own lives.  But the obverse of writer's empathy is a sort of sociopathy that leads us to take a notebook to an aunt's funeral so we can jot down those telling details– the glint of the sun on the teak coffin, our uncle's fist closing hard around the stem of a lily and breaking it.

Only a sociopath, after all, could create people just to torture them with "conflict" and "motivation" and "poetic justice".  Only a sociopath could say, "I couldn't help it. I had to kill Joey off."  A sociopath... or a writer.

"There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer," Graham Greene remarked.  I think that is the paradox that ultimately makes us writers– the mix of warm beating love and icy determination.  But remember, the splinter pierces our heart first of all, and as long as we can feel that, experience the pain our characters experience, we will retain the humanity needed to imagine those inner voices into life, and make them become real for the "real people" who are our readers.

Failing Fast and Hard

These days, I feel like every conversation I have relates in some way to e-learning. :)

Was discussing work stuff with a cousin-- actually, he's my children's cousin, a bit older than they.. He works in "advertising," but it's actually web design and branding for (very big) companies. He said that his agency starts every project with the expectation that the team will "fail fast", get started on the site design and concept and learn quite quickly if they're headed in the wrong direction or screwed up something technical.

The "early failure" allows them to revise before they have too big an investment in the old design. He said that the teammates have to therefore have the ability to notice failure, accept it, and learn from it, all very quickly. This kind of resilience requires a surrender of ego and ownership, and I can see from my own experience at one job that this is quite difficult for many people. I once worked with a man who had a lot of talent, but regarded "failure" as a personal disaster, so that if someone would say, "There's a typo in line 4," he would would fire back an angry email about how he actually MEANT to have that typo or whatever it was. Really-- he couldn't accept even the minorest failure, and so it meant he never revised or corrected his work. Eventually he ended up at a standstill, too afraid to create anything new.

 I wonder if the "zero-tolerance" approach many young people are faced with now (in education and in life) doesn't kind of create that same resistance. Students are told they have one chance. "You can't get into nursing school if you get a single B freshman year," one of my students just told me. In other words, you can't become a nurse (and we need nurses!) if you get less than perfect in some unrelated class? What sense does that make?

In so many areas now, perfection is expected. In one college where I teach, we're supposed to enforce the strictest of deadlines (cough... I don't), so that if a student is late with a single assignment, she fails the class.  And of course, fail one class, and you might as well  hang it up, all your aspirations. (I do have to point out that, as always, them that has don't have this issue-- when I taught at a selective private college, students were always given second and third chances.)

What does this teach them but -- failure is permanent and disastrous? And the need to be perfect from the get-go paradoxically means there's no way to achieve success if you're less than perfect. Yes, a few students will achieve this way, but we really can't build a society of educated people on the 10% who can get it right right away, who don't actually need to learn by trying, who come to college fully prepared. We need the 90%, and within that 90% won't just be the student who needs more time or help, but the daydreamers and artists and inventors who need to keep coming at a work from different angles, taking something from each "failure" to build something new. Those learners are not going to get it right right away, because "getting it right" doesn't create anything new, and "getting it wrong" might.

Alicia

Thoughts about equilibrium and rewards

Technological interfaces create their own rewards for users-- that little thrill/threat when a link is pressed, or when we get a notice that there's new email.

Neuro-engineer Ken Beverley (private conversation) mentions the change as a result of technology as producing a physiological response of endorphins in the brain, which can be felt as a threat or a reward, but is inevitably a spur to some action. Saba (2003) discusses the distinction between "anticipating emergent behaviors" and "directing them," and posits that the interaction should allow for change without determining it. This acceptance of uncertainty is the start, perhaps, of training oneself to adapt to whatever the new situation is..

Rehearsal communities

In re: Community of Learning-- I recently attended a lecture by Michael Fentiman, the director of a new performance of Titus Andronicus, one of Shakespeare's first plays. It's generally not considered among his best, shall we say, and the director talked a lot about how different his own vision was. In his mind, this was a play like King Lear, about the loss of certainty and the descent into madness.

He acknowledged the difficulty of conveying this to the actors who had absorbed a great deal of scorn for the play. He drew upon his own training with two directors who had nothing in common except "their love for collaboration." Like them, Fentiman used the rehearsal time as what I now know to call "a community of learning," where the entire crew and cast explored the play, brainstorming various approaches and options. It was, he said, one of the most exhilarating experiences of his life, as each confessed what would drive them to madness and murder, what combination of love and fury would unseat their reason. From that, he was able both to develop and convey his own understanding of the play, what it meant, and how it could be presented to an audience.

A community of learning... and yet, in the end, there was still a play, and still a director: Something to be learned, and someone to decide how it was to be taught.

This is a different, more purpose-driven sort of community than the critique group Coddington (1997) analyzes, where the need to maintain the commonality of goodwill was paramount. In that, there was no text, and there was no teacher-- just a group of learners. Did it matter that they were mostly all at about the same level? That there could be no "teacher" because none of them in isolation knew more than the others?