> I have thought about the same transparency/fusion with respect to the
> difference between spontaneous speech and writing. When I speak "I
> don't know what I mean until I hear what I say" but in writing there
> is nearly always some degree of attention to the wording in advance of
> actually typing/writing the text and also in editing the draft before
> addressing it to an audience. [I wonder, where does sending messages
> to this listserv come on this continuum?]
Gordon,
Because writing is radically different--you know well that there is a
litany of people having pronounced themselves on this point--Ong,
Ricœur, Derrida--though it has been lost to some folks.
Listserv is perhaps somewhere in between because--right or wrong--we
think to share some context with others, only to find out sometimes
that we don't.
Also, the "I don't know what I mean until I hear what I say" is a very
interesting saying, for it runs counter to the rationalist approach,
which presumes that thought precedes speech rather than that speech and
thought are contemporaneous, and that we stop speaking when we have
reached something like a stop order. This also means that grammar is an
emergent phenomenon. . .
> Applying this difference in degree of transparency to classroom
> interaction, I have suggested that it is not very effective to ask
> teachers to think about the formation of the questions they ask in
> terms of the actual words that they speak, e.g. "what makes the hands
> turn on the clock?" v. "What do you think might cause the hands to
> turn on the clock?". Instead, it seems more effective to ask them to
> focus on the action for which the wording is the mediating operation,
> e.g. Goal = to involve the students in offering their ideas about the
> phenomenon, rather than Goal = for students to give the correct
> explanation of the clock mechanism.
I agree with you--in fact, as soon as you ask teachers to think before
they ask, they begin to be out of tune with the unfolding event. . . I
sometimes decided together with the coteachers I worked with to post
stuff in the back of the room or at the pipes on the ceiling, which
allowed them to ask interesting questions without having to stop and
think. . . We posted terms like "elaborate", "justify", "explain" and
seeing these the teachers built these into their questions, therefore
encouraging students to expand on what they are saying.
What you asked teachers to do is take a different position with respect
to their lifeworld, a different stance--I am thinking in terms of
Merleau-Ponty--and out of this different stance ask different questions
without stopping to reflect.
Michael
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