[Xmca-l] Heathcote and Immagination

[Ed Wall]

Susan

     Coming a little late to this conversation and thinking about your comments last July on Vygotsky and imagination, I was wondering if any of that played a large role in your book. In particular and if so, how did Heathcote, one might say, pragmatically theorize imagination? It seems, given, what you have written in the present thread that she seems to have created moments through a stance that "respected and worked with the material they offered, drawing out significance, considering the implications and working dialogically with very alternative views from her own.” This, in some of the literature, is indicative of an imaginative ‘leap’ that is stabilized in the ‘waking state.’ In a sense, the moment becomes, in somewhat the sense of Barthes, ‘writeable.'

Ed Wall

> On Feb 24, 2016, at  5:32 AM, Susan Davis <s.davis@cqu.edu.au> wrote:
> 
> Thanks Robert,
> It’s great to have the book published as part of your series.  The book is
> called “Learning that matters: Revitalising Heathcote’s Rolling Role for
> the digital age”. 
> https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/imagination-and-praxis/
> learning-that-matters/
> 
> For those who haven’t heard of Heathcote before, she was a ‘master’
> teacher who achieved international recognition for her teaching practice
> in the 70s and 80s - in particular for pioneering processes such as Mantle
> of the Expert - which use role and fictional contexts to position children
> as ‘experts’ and active agents in investigative processes. She also
> invented this system called ‘Rolling Role’ which is a form of
> trans-disciplinary learning - where multiple classes work with the same
> common context, but from their particular frame or subject perspective.
> The beauty of it is that no one group ‘owns’ the outcome, but groups
> regularly ‘publish’ and share artefacts and outcomes throughout the
> process, with each group having to use and ‘roll’ the work of what has
> gone before.  It was a system she believed was perfectly suited for
> revisiting in the digital age… so that is what the book hopes to assist
> with… the Vygotskian and CHAT work was very helpful in conceptualising and
> understanding this work.
> 
> At times reading the work of Vygotsky and Heathcote it felt like they
> could have been writing about education today!
> 
> Educational experience, no less than theoretical research,
> teaches us that, in practice, a straightforward learning of concepts always
> proves impossible and educationally fruitless. Usually, any teacher
> setting out
> on this road achieves nothing except a meaningless acquisition of words,
> mere
> verbalization in children, which is nothing more than simulation and
> imitation
> of corresponding concepts which, in reality, are concealing a vacuum.  In
> such cases, the child assimilates not
> concepts but words, and he fills his memory more than his thinking. As a
> result, he ends up helpless in the face of any sensible attempt to apply
> any of
> this acquired knowledge. Essentially, this method of teaching/learning
> concepts, a purely scholastic and verbal method of teaching, which is
> condemned
> by everybody and which advocates the replacement of acquisition of living
> knowledge by the assimilation of dead and empty verbal schemes, represents
> the
> most basic failing in the field of education. (Vygotsky 1934/1994a, pp.
> 356-7)
> 
> 
> So – getting rid of the dummy run. On the face of it you
> have a rather interesting paradox in drama, because it looks like drama is
> entirely artificial and that the whole thing would be a dummy run – we are
> only
> pretending actually.  And we use words
> like pretend and play and in our culture it does suggest that it’s
> ephemeral
> and there’s no real work/life purpose for it…. So it seems to me we need to
> look and see what it is that makes something NOT feel like a dummy run…
> It seemed to me that one of the important aspects of not
> being a dummy run is that it matters now, we feel like its urgent now.
> (Heathcote 1993, Tape 9)
> 
> 
> 
> Cheers
> Sue
> 
> 
> Dr Susan Davis 
> Senior Lecturer | School of Education & the Arts | Higher Education
> Division 
> CQUniversity Australia, Noosa Campus |
> PO Box 1128, Qld 4566
> P +61 (0)7 5440 7007 | X 547007 | M +61 400 000 000| E s.davis@cqu.edu.au
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 24/02/2016 12:14 am, "Robert Lake" <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu> wrote:
> 
>> ​Susan Davis has published a book that weaves LSV, Dorothy Heathcote and
>> CHAT
>> into one seamless, present tense unfolding of "rolling role". If anyone
>> would like to write a review of it I can get you a copy. It has been five
>> years since Heathcote's passing and I suspect her work will become more
>> and
>> more  important in this era of standardized everything.
>> 
>> *Robert Lake*
>> 
>> https://www.sensepublishers.com/media/2709-learning-that-matters.pdf
>> 
>> 
>> For a sense of the dynamic of  Dorothy's pedagogy, scroll to about 5
>> minutes into this.
>> 
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owKiUO99qrw
> 
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