subtext

I am adventurous, I eat pickles on my hamburgers now,” my oldest son bragged this morning. He was being sarcastic, albeit honest, about his eating habits. His comment made me think about the importance of taking risks, unsettling the normative patterns of my life. A few weeks ago I bemoaned in this space about why I couldn’t make up my mind whether to continue in my Doc program or not. I am going to continue in the program; I will probably continue to whine and worry about it nonetheless. However, I do enjoy thinking about all the stuff that makes up my field. I also enjoy thinking about how all of the stuff that is tangential to Language and Literacy influences all the stuff that makes up Language and Literacy. In a recent article in the newspaper, the influence of friends on each other’s habits and life, ranging from smoking to depression to obesity to autism was recounted. It is not a surprise that we are influenced by those around us. I think everything and everyone we come in contact with, to a greater or lesser degree, influences us. This is not a one way shaping, we in turn influence everyone else. It is not a compromise, nor a consensus: “Superior learning lies in knowledge more widely distributed across units, with common rather than disparate interpretations. Huber, following Morgan and Ramirez, (1983), writes of such knowledge as “holographic” in that each unit carries at least a rough picture of the whole” (p. 13 Salomon and Perkins). I think it is more of a genetic metaphor rather than a holographic one, where the DNA for the whole is contained in each cell. The knowledge of the culture as a whole is determined by the mass of individuals acting together. It is not just individuals acting alone (as the Romantics were wont to say), but individuals acting in and as groups. In my class, again and again, a theme that comes up, in the literature we read, is the balance between being a part of the whole and apart from the whole. I don’t think it is an either/or binary, but rather an ongoing dance where the two parts merge and reemerge, changing and changed. “As pointed out by Damon (1991): Even when learning is fostered through processes of social communication, individual activity and reflection still play a critical role. Sometimes . . . individual activity may build on collective questions and insights. Other times, however, individual activity may need to resist the collective illusions created by a group . . any paradigm that assumes a one-way, deterministic relation between the collective and individual knowledge construction is over simplistic (Damon as cited in Salomon and Perkins, p. 17). My classes combined with all of the education books I have read, the literary-crit theory, the philosophy, and poetry, all combine to create how I have come to think about what it means to learn, teach and live. They are like the pickles on my son’s hamburger, perhaps leading to a larger view of what there is to be a part of in the world.