Re: zpd of tadpoles

Kathryn_Alexander who-is-at sfu.ca
Sat, 12 Jun 1999 12:47:08 -0800

ethel, thank you for gracing my whimsey with your generous response. To be
honest, this small miracle of change and growth,
well, it mainly moves me to think through or as Jane Flax, calls them,
participate with my own feeling -thoughts that they provoke. this project
started because I desired to hear frogs in my backyard this summer

so for now the thoughts flip between "change/ transformation /learning"
more meta-morphic than morphogenic

I think I want to respond to Bruce's message, and to your one that
follows, where you write of your concerns about defeating death via worms,
and spectres of eugenics. I think I can nod to your fears, we think that
certain kinds of knowledge can deliver us mastery over life and death, but
we do not ( or rarely consider how this knowledge changes us - wht are
then the consequences of possessing that knowledge - what kind of
ethics, poetry or social justice models might need to be in place as
well, to balance/ antidote respond to such knowledges. could be we
just have begun to fathom the printing press, bullets, fertilizer, let
alone new technologies......

I have little background in ed. of psych. (prior a literature and poetry
student) before I waded my way into education. Now I mainly grapple with
the constitutative capacities of texts, to mediate social scripts and
identities

tadpoles return me to a a place where I have little discourse - and there
I can watch - perhaps see something profound, for which language has not
prepared me. I think perhaps we don't really know much about the simple
events of our own development, as persons as or human beings.

( mainly the squiggley beings are charming - I wonder do tadpoles "know"
they are going to become frogs) when I sprinkle the food flakes into the
basin, the bigger ones flip on their backs to skim algae and food from the
surface of the water, as they show their bellies, I can see the curl of
their gut, and lately frog-like appendanges bulging under the clear dome
of their bellies.

A scrap of poetry from one of my earlier days -

I am disturbed that the impossible dream talks baby0
talk, the first language convolutes bone strucutre, coiled
presumably molusk-like on the inner casement, to get
the true story read the pearly vowel rings.

Inside her cheedk a tree frog basoons, and all along we
had suspected freckles.

>A little comparative psychology is called for...I love the fact that you
>are interested in watching these changes, and I do not mean to interfere
>with the poetry. Look at Maier & Schneirla, a book written in l935 which
>is still the best exposition of concepts of integration in developmental
>change and phyletic differences among species...and some clues to zpd
>although it was not called that then. Ethel
>
>

"science does not vanquish mystery" Annie Dillard "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"

*****************************
Kathryn Alexander, email ...... kalexand who-is-at sfu.ca
Doctoral Candidate, FAX .........(604) 291 - 3203
Faculty of Education, SFU(message).....(604) 291- 3395
Simon Fraser University,
Burnaby, B.C. V5A 1S6