Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Monday, May 3, 2010
Discourse Community Prezi
I've been experimenting with Prezi. Here's my brief presentation on Discourse Communities. Mac users should view with Safari. Follow the link for the full view.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
A Violence Without
By Matt Rader
Recently, I had the opportunity to return to the high school I graduated from in the Comox Valley and speak to Grade Eleven English students about poetry. As it happened, the classroom I spoke in was the same classroom I took Literature Twelve in and where I first read Chaucer, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, etc. Many things have changed in that classroom, but I am pleased to report the carpet remains the same unnameable pattern of oranges and browns and blacks. It was a good experience for me being back there and facing those young people, but there are many things about poetry and poems I did not say and wish I did. Here are few of those things:
I have a difficult time being a cheerleader for poetry. As much as I love some poems, most poetry leaves me cold.
But it's more than that. The best poems are not engaged in a competition. There is no singular victory they must achieve. We do not need to get drunk and cheer poetry on to make it continue. The best poems do not come down on one side or the other.
The best poems celebrate "the drunkenness of things being various." And at the same time "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things." The best poems can't be nailed down.
But the best poems are not ambiguous. The best poems are particular. They do not want to be one thing, but they do not want to be everything, either. Everything is just one more singularity (Think of the word "universe." Now think of the word "unicycle.")
The best poems appeal to your body. To your senses through your imagination and through the sounds the words make in you mouth and your head and your throat. The world appeals to your body. You know everything you know through your body. The best poems are like the world.
Poems require courage. When they are revelatory, they are only revelatory to those with the courage to see what has been revealed. When they are pure delight, they are only delightful to those with the courage to be delighted. When poems are transformative, they are only transformative to those with the courage to be transformed.
Wallace Stevens wrote that poetry is "a violence within protecting us from a violence without," a typical Stevensian move--the word "without" in this context can mean both what comes from outside oneself and the absence of poetry, or "a world without poetry"--and Seamus Heaney, paraphrasing him, called poetry, "our imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality."
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Confidentiality or Bullying?
By Tina Rader
The practice of confidentiality is commonly used in professional communities and industries everywhere. While differing professional groups might have different criterion for what information is kept confidential there is agreement that information about the client/patient/ consumer is to be shared with that person. There is agreement that a team of professionals might meet to discuss their ideas regarding what they might plan/offer/suggest to the individual but at no time are treatment plans/ therapeutic decisions or direction undertaken without consultation or discussion with the client.
The one glaring exception to the accepted standard practice of confidentiality exists in the educational system. Our schools have a notion of confidentiality that is directly contradicting the principle that informs other professional practices. Take the common practice of holding "Parent Teacher" meetings. Parents meet with the student's teacher and discuss that student's performance and progress. Teachers and parents devise strategies for managing difficulties whether learning or behavioral without the benefit of the student's input. Students are not only uninvited to these meetings, parents are instructed that their child or youth are not to attend.
Read the full text here.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
From "Creative Writing Classes: What Are They Good For?" By Matt Rader
Two attitudes towards training in literary arts arise repeatedly and regularly in introductory creative writing classes. These attitudes often persist, in various forms, through each level of university arts training and are shared by instructors and students alike. And this is why creative writing classes make people want to smash their heads against a wall. Preferably, a hard wall.
Without dismissing the "real politic" of working in a human institution such as a university (as the joke goes, there are two kinds of people who hate professors: those who didn't go to university and those who did), and while acknowledging the pragmatic decisions instructors, students, and administrators alike need to make on a daily basis, I assert that both these attitudes arise from a failure to turn reflective and critical thought towards training in literary arts, particularly in universities. As with any discipline, the goal of such training is only ostensibly mastery of craft because mastery of craft, whether in medicine, engineering, music, mathematics, or creative writing, will always be of extremely limited use if it is not accompanied by a well trained mind, one that has, through training, a better chance of turning one’s eyes “in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky” and thereby contextualizing craft and deploying it in innovative, imaginative, and useful ways. One can become very skilled at hammering nails into a porch but unless your goal is to use up a lot of nails, whittle away some time, or to cause pain to the barefooted, the usefulness of this skill resides in the mind's ability imagine it in other contexts and for other purposes. Likewise, the usefulness of training in literary crafts such as plotting, meter, and dialogue resides not only in the way these crafts are deployed in literature but in how they assist in exercising the imagination.
There are, as John Gardner says, no rules for literary composition. None that any good student or instructor would submit herself to without “proof” in the sense that Dewey uses the word. What Scarry is saying in her comment about the comet is the same thing that Gardner is saying when he dismisses rules, and what Dewey is saying when he demands “proof:” that education, in literary arts or otherwise, is not about answering all the questions that have and can be raised, but rather about conditioning the reflexes of the mind (I’ll leave the question of mind and noetics for the moment, but, to be clear, I would include the way the body “knows” as part of the “mind”) to be in increasingly better positions to recognize those questions when they come before us....
The vision of education as primarily dissemination of discipline specific knowledge from educators to learners is an illusion that distracts instructors and students alike from the much more pragmatic insight that, as Dewey says, “one can teach others to think only in the sense of appealing to and fostering powers already active in them.” The best instructors assist students to both discover the scope of the "powers already active in them" and the limitations of those powers. An individual transforms from student to learner when she begins to recognize how those limitations might actually be leveraged to her advantage--think Dumbo or that episode of the Brady Bunch when Greg and size-sensitive Bobby get locked in a meat-locker and Bobby discovers he's small enough to wriggle through the window and open the locker door from the other side....
It is here, at the site of self-reflection, that learning occurs and where literary training must be aimed. The ability to scope and strike this site despite the distractions of disciplinary hubbub and institutional clatter distinguishes the most effective creative writing educators and learners.
Read the complete text here.
Without dismissing the "real politic" of working in a human institution such as a university (as the joke goes, there are two kinds of people who hate professors: those who didn't go to university and those who did), and while acknowledging the pragmatic decisions instructors, students, and administrators alike need to make on a daily basis, I assert that both these attitudes arise from a failure to turn reflective and critical thought towards training in literary arts, particularly in universities. As with any discipline, the goal of such training is only ostensibly mastery of craft because mastery of craft, whether in medicine, engineering, music, mathematics, or creative writing, will always be of extremely limited use if it is not accompanied by a well trained mind, one that has, through training, a better chance of turning one’s eyes “in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky” and thereby contextualizing craft and deploying it in innovative, imaginative, and useful ways. One can become very skilled at hammering nails into a porch but unless your goal is to use up a lot of nails, whittle away some time, or to cause pain to the barefooted, the usefulness of this skill resides in the mind's ability imagine it in other contexts and for other purposes. Likewise, the usefulness of training in literary crafts such as plotting, meter, and dialogue resides not only in the way these crafts are deployed in literature but in how they assist in exercising the imagination.
There are, as John Gardner says, no rules for literary composition. None that any good student or instructor would submit herself to without “proof” in the sense that Dewey uses the word. What Scarry is saying in her comment about the comet is the same thing that Gardner is saying when he dismisses rules, and what Dewey is saying when he demands “proof:” that education, in literary arts or otherwise, is not about answering all the questions that have and can be raised, but rather about conditioning the reflexes of the mind (I’ll leave the question of mind and noetics for the moment, but, to be clear, I would include the way the body “knows” as part of the “mind”) to be in increasingly better positions to recognize those questions when they come before us....
The vision of education as primarily dissemination of discipline specific knowledge from educators to learners is an illusion that distracts instructors and students alike from the much more pragmatic insight that, as Dewey says, “one can teach others to think only in the sense of appealing to and fostering powers already active in them.” The best instructors assist students to both discover the scope of the "powers already active in them" and the limitations of those powers. An individual transforms from student to learner when she begins to recognize how those limitations might actually be leveraged to her advantage--think Dumbo or that episode of the Brady Bunch when Greg and size-sensitive Bobby get locked in a meat-locker and Bobby discovers he's small enough to wriggle through the window and open the locker door from the other side....
It is here, at the site of self-reflection, that learning occurs and where literary training must be aimed. The ability to scope and strike this site despite the distractions of disciplinary hubbub and institutional clatter distinguishes the most effective creative writing educators and learners.
Read the complete text here.
White & Epston on "Narrative Therapy"
Those social scientists embracing the text analogy...[think that] to make sense of our lives and to express ourselves, experience must be "storied" and it is this storying that determines the meaning ascribed to experience. In striving to make sense of life, persons face the task of arranging their experiences of events in sequences across time in such a way as to arrive at a coherent account of themselves and the world around them. Specific experiences of events of the past and present, and those that are predicted to occur in the future, must be connected in a lineal sequence to develop this account. This account can be referred to as a story or self-narrative. The success of this storying of experience provides persons with a sense of continuity and meaning in their lives, and this is relied upon for the ordering of daily lives and for the interpretation of further experiences. Since all stories have a beginning (history), a middle (present), and an ending (or a future) then the interpretation of current events is as much future-shaped as it is past-determined.
The structure of a narrative requires recourse to a selective process in which we prune, from our experience, those events that do not fit with the dominant evolving stories that we and others have about us. Thus over time and out of necessity, much of our stock of lived experience goes unstoried and is never "told" or expressed. It remains amorphous, without organization or shape.
...[P]ersons organize and give meaning to their lives through the storying of experience, and in the performance of these stories they express selected aspects of their lived experience...[T]hese stories are constitutive--shaping of lives and relationships.
The text analogy advances the idea that the stories or narratives that persons live through determine their interaction and organization and that the evolution of lives and relationships occur through the performance of such stories or narratives. Thus, the text analogy is distinct from those analogies that would propose an underlying structure or pathology in families and persons that is constitutive or shaping of their lives and relationships.
White, Michael, & Epston, David, (1990) Narrative Means To Therapeutic Ends. New York Norton & Company p. 10-11.
The structure of a narrative requires recourse to a selective process in which we prune, from our experience, those events that do not fit with the dominant evolving stories that we and others have about us. Thus over time and out of necessity, much of our stock of lived experience goes unstoried and is never "told" or expressed. It remains amorphous, without organization or shape.
...[P]ersons organize and give meaning to their lives through the storying of experience, and in the performance of these stories they express selected aspects of their lived experience...[T]hese stories are constitutive--shaping of lives and relationships.
The text analogy advances the idea that the stories or narratives that persons live through determine their interaction and organization and that the evolution of lives and relationships occur through the performance of such stories or narratives. Thus, the text analogy is distinct from those analogies that would propose an underlying structure or pathology in families and persons that is constitutive or shaping of their lives and relationships.
White, Michael, & Epston, David, (1990) Narrative Means To Therapeutic Ends. New York Norton & Company p. 10-11.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Narrative Therapy
"The term 'narrative therapy' has a specific meaning and is not the same as narrative psychology, or any other therapy that uses stories. Narrative therapy refers to the ideas and practices of Michael White, David Epston, and other practitioners who have built upon this work. The narrative therapy focus upon narrative and situated concepts is the therapy. The narrative therapist is a collaborator with the client in the process of discovering richer ("thicker" or "richer") narratives that emerge from disparate descriptions of experience, thus destabilizing the hold of negative ("thin") narratives upon the client."
Narrative therapy. (2009, December 9). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:15, March 3, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Narrative_therapy&oldid=330569948
Narrative therapy. (2009, December 9). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:15, March 3, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Narrative_therapy&oldid=330569948
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