I much appreciated your last comments - Thanks for the Sanskrit
root "mens." You wrote:
if there is no
>trust between people, if there are reasons for doubt and suspition, if there
>is no respect shown or felt, what is learned, or made out of an interaction,
>will not be that what was *meant* (intended). And a system which is suposed
>to in-struct, to afford new instru-ments may cause effects opposite from
>those intended.
Yes. It's so well said. But in my own stubborn & resistant way,
I want to point out what I _didn't_ read in your comments.
In your comments (as I _did_ read them), the system that is
supposed to in-struct appears benign; the intentions encoded
in its instru-ments benign; the reasons for doubt and suspicion
somewhat mysterious, and what is learned in the
wake of doubt or suspicion is a misfortune. Would you agree that,
with respect to the Hoeg novel (which I know only from Yrjo's paper)
a lack of trust/respect was part of the meaning of the system -
implicated in HOW it meant, in its instru-ments? - If so, then
the instru-ments afforded by that system had to be mis-used,
or used in unintended ways, for trust to be made possible. (I
assume the rigid structure of the school to be one of its
instru-ments; it didn't allow for opportunistic uses.)
I guess what I'm saying is that the violence of the
silenced/not-heard, the resistance of the objects of our good
intentions to our good intentions, may be what the system(/we)
needs to hear.
I love the analogy you made to the blind person's stick:
>I also wanted to stress the emotional aspect of the process - we feel our
>instru-ments and their working in the same way a blind person feels not a
>stick in her hand but what the stick touches. If there is no feeling, there
>can be no learning, nothing to notice - a void at the end of the stick.
It raises another question for me - what creates or
approximates no-feeling at the end of the stick?
You suggest that it's the _emotional_ environment:
>I think that the quality of the emotion is of the greatest importance for
>understanding the interactive (inter-mental) nature of meaning making and
>development.
I agree, but with the following qualification, that by emphasizing
emotions (which may serve importantly to correct an emphasis on
analysis/objects) we risk treating one dimension of the
meaning-making system as separable from another. If the
environment includes the blind person and his stick, we need the
more systemic way of dividing things up, which Jay alluded to in
a message that just arrived, and which the "expanded" model of
development, with both horizontal & vertical axes, seems to
invite. I'm not sure what falls out from this, though.
I seem to be hitting the void at the end of my stick.
Judy
Judy Diamondstone
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
Graduate School of Education
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08903