In a writing workshop we were told to pick a rock from a container of rocks then write about it. After a quick quandary over which rock I should pick, my indecisive nature coming fully into play as I fingered them all, I took the one I had first picked up. Much of my life is reflected in that moment in choosing my reflective stone. I dither over everything I do eventually following my first impulse, even if I actually pick up the trail I chose much later than the moment of choosing. So I slowly move along in a kind of shambling twirl of a dance in a direction I am unsure of and to rhythms, which often seem contrapuntal to everything else in my life.
I pick up this rock again. It has been a long time since I last wrote for this space. I found comfort in it before so I decided to make an effort and write here again.
Work (not school, because I work there) is now into its third week. I was given an AP class this year much to my chagrin. When peers hear that I was not thrilled, they think it is because of the second prep. When I try to explain why I don’t like the AP program they look at me uncomprehending. Don’t get me wrong: the students are great, smart, insightful, articulate, literate; everything one wants in students. I just hate the unending focus on testing, when the focus should be on the students and their interaction with language.
I re-read an interaction I had with the texts we read in Urrieta’s Identity class in the spring of 2007. I really did like that class and still think about it a lot. here it is:
“L.S. Vygotsky, to the limited extent he wrote about personality, was like Mead in his view of self as a complex emergent phenomenon, continually produced in and by individuals in their interchanges with others and with the culturally transformed material world” (Holland and Lachicotte , in press, p. 4.)
We make the world we live in, or at least the way we see and understand the world, through the exchanges we have with others and they have with us. We are both transforming and transformed by the people we come in contact with in an ongoing continual process. Our identities are shaped, as well, by the world(s) we inhabit (Figured Worlds), as are the world(s) shaped in turn by the identities we take on. We “self-author” our roles, which are provided us in the worlds we enter; at once being determined by the social world and improvising our “selves” in the role.
I want to start singing the Beatles, “Within and Without You” as I read this stuff. The self is formed by the social world, yet at the same time the social world is formed by the interaction of various and divergent selves in interaction with one another. The “world” is always already there, yet we can somehow through our agency (the stories we tell?) instigate change in this always already there space. I imagine an intermeshing complex of world and self, kind of like a lava lamp, in what Lenot’ev called “a reciprocal transformation between the subject-object poles” (Leont’ev 1975, p. 9), where most of the change happens along a permeable border/skin that allows an intermingling of the two “poles” in an ever-changing symbiotic whole.
As an English teacher and a student in the Language and Literacy program, in addition to the Vygotsky, the Voloshinov article resonated with my interests in composition, voice, and storytelling in creation of the self and the “figured worlds” we inhabit through language. “Their restructuring was based on experience with native language as the medium through which consciousness and ideas are generated” (Voloshinov, 1929, p. 83). I try to encourage my students to see themselves as writers who can use the experience they already have, and the “natural” way they have of speaking to create meaning in and around the texts they are reading as well as meaning in the world they inhabit. I want them to see that they are an integral part of the linguistic exchange, not merely poor recipients of a monolithic language. The “word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant”(p.86). In addition to hoping they see themselves as being engaged participants in the language, whether they be native speakers or second language learners, but they have an ability to effect society through their active engagement with the language.
Because of the mediating power of language between the individual and the social situation, whether it be in a classroom or the society as a whole, it becomes important that my students see language as the tool it is, both to shape themselves and the world. “It is a matter not so much of expression accommodating itself to our inner world but rather of our inner world accommodating itself to the potentialities of our expression, its possible routes and directions” (p. 91); and since the flow of changer and changed is reciprocal, in order to change the world, which would change the self, one must, as does the society in which one finds oneself, change the word.
subtext 