> I guess the
>argument that I was trying to make before was that it would be interesting
>to imagine the result for contemporary educational & psychological
>theorizing if such aspects of knowing were allowed to "interanimate"
>our discourses about learning.
>
>Deborah
(This is long and rambly; thinking out-loud writing)
"interanimate" - *good* word. I've been thinking quite a lot about this
feeling&knowing,
in part because i used to read & write & theorize quite
lustily in areas of "feeling" and "thinking", and then stopped quite abruptly...
for a lot of reasons;
but anyhow, when you wrote about "interanimating" "our" discourses
about learning, oddly enough, I thought of the many
days when I walked to school feeling sick to my stomach,
I was a nervous child, to put it delicately, (which I was), (ha ha,)
had a senstive stomach, is what I mean...
and how often I heard that later,
"my stomach hurts" and how often these visceral experiences accompany
learning.
these are, no doubt, not the "feelings" you were referring to,
but it is interesting, too, to think that "feelings" are "emotional", (and
as Tane
pointed out, culturally-organized)
and feelings are, as well, utterly
visceral, which is so bloody/squishy and physical, (not to say the body
ain't a cultural
project, of course) - and these, against the idea that feeling & knowing is
"emotions" and
"cognitions." I suppose, I am thinking about how feeling & knowing
include a host of response
and reactions within 'learning' contexts, and as I write this, I remember
why I stopped dabbling in the esoeteric musings on feelings&thinking;
I bumped into socio-cultural notions of "learning contexts" and
all that entails, and realized the idea of theorizing the human process outside
of the context was a misguided one: seductive, because it is simpler,
of course, to imagine that the human condition
exists in isloation of these complex contexts (*nice* alliteration di!)
but really, it is foolish to do so, to gather partial information
and generalize over the gaps and missing pieces.
in udder words, the inter-relations of "feeling" with "knowing" are
about the body, and memory, and what kinds of worlds the 'learners' are bringing
into the learning siutation.
Anudder thought: in my days of early childhood education teacher education,
we were "forced" (haha) to itemize 'learning' objectives which accounted
for
emotional development/cognitive development and, I was always so damned
perplexed about how a 2nd grade mathematics lesson could 'promote'
'emotional' "development" through its learning 'objectives.'
(In a side-car I'd say that Erikson's mimicking of Piaget's 'stages' of
development
made it easier for educational psychologists to include "emotional
development" in
teaching/learning theory 'cause
it's so nicely organized into a "staircase" model of development, matching
Piaget's
crap of cognition, ...it's so easy when it's sterilized into "stages", of
course...)
Anudder response may be along the lines of what Jay alluded to,
and which is more likely, (and also "intolerable" for
researchers,)
is that feelings/knowings are the same thing, basically; which is not to say
there are TWO categories, but that within these are a maze of
visceral/somatic experiences which we express in the language of "feelings"
and "knowings" (Again, in ECE, we were encouraged to instruct children
to "use your words" when expressing an emotional response, because
it was believed that this would diffuse the emotion into a thought process,
as thought they were distinct and differentiated processes...)
the body? as a feeling system? in learning theory?
("learning" theory, as an institution of its own,
of course,
is just as skeered of the child's body as the schools are.)
Adult bodies in learning contexts: different, of course, 'cause grown-ups
exercise their own body-police tactics, ( part of being an adult is finding
ways to
apologize for farting and lie about how you "feel").
Phenomenology might stop and contemplate the phrase:
I can't think now, I'm feeling conflicted.
or: I was angry and wasn't thinking.
to figger out what squiggly quirks (*nice* alliteration di!) lie beneath
our understandings of feeling/thinking-knowing... like, it's
interanimations of feelings-emotions-knowings-thinkings-rememberings.
Measure *that*! ha!
diane
"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right."
Ani Difranco
*********************************
diane celia hodges
faculty of education
university of british columbia
vancouver, bc canada
tel: (604)-253-4807
email: dchodges who-is-at interchange.ubc.ca