Dear Ana and everybody-
Thanks a LOT, Ana, for the useful references and elaboration on
Stanislavkii's system. I'm specifically interested in how the three
chronotopes that he developed are connected. The reason for my interest is
that in traditional school, at least ideologically, chronotopes are not
connected. Classroom management is not a part of academic curriculum; the
academic curricula have nothing to do with the students' ontology. How does
actor's ontology becomes intertwined with the character and scene? What can
education learn from Stanislavskii's system?
Eugene
-----Original Message-----
From: Ana Marjanovic-Shane [mailto:anamshane@speakeasy.net]
Sent: Saturday, July 26, 2003 4:40 PM
To: ematusov@UDel.Edu
Subject: Re: Space and time in chat
Hi Eugene and Jay and everyone,
I am looking at the Stanislavskii's "Stanislavsky on the Art of the Stage"
(1961, Hill and Wang, New York) which contains his "System and Methods of
Creative Art" and two other works. Stanislavski, of course never used the
term "chronotope". And the whole notion of chronotope is not something he
discussed in any technical terms. But in the whole "System" as well as many
other writings he constantly stressed the importance of:
1. understanding the "character" (dramatis persona): becoming educated
about the life of that character including his inner feelings, motivations
and wishes and outer circumstances, particular events, etc. (this is what
Eugene called "the chronotope of play ("didactic chronotope" in school)";
2. Stanislavskii insisted very strongly on the crucial importance of,
in Eugene's words: "2) chronotope of scene (here-and-now) (cf. "local
chronotope of the classroom")". For Stanislavskii, the chronotope of scene
is the social group of the people who are getting together on a project:
actors, directors, writers, and all others who work together on creating a
dramatic production. In that sense, Eugene's "local chronotope of the
classroom" is a great analogy. In addition, in Stanislavskii one can
repeatedly see the crucial importance of the state of the affairs in this
"chronotope" for the production of the art work, i.e. the relationships
among the participants, the ability of the actors to feel safe and accepted,
their ability to experiment and to make mistakes without being punished. For
instance: "How is one to create this enchanting magic carpet of life's truth
on the stage? .... Once you have chosen the path of creative stage work, you
can obtain results only if you become one happy family" (ch. IV of the
System and Methods of Creative Art"). Thus, if the "here-and-now" chronotope
of the dramatic production can be compared to the chronotope of the
classroom, and the chronotope of the play with the didactic chronotope, one
could immediately see that the social relationships between the participants
in the process of education are, in fact, going to impact on the
"educational product", i.e. students' learning and acquired knowledge. In
addition, the world of the theater, this "chronotope" of the here-and-now
scene, must be connected and "in sync" with the
3. "chronotope of the actor's past experiences (cf. "ontological
chronotope" although I think that ontological chronotope is not only about
past experiences, but it is also future oriented)". That's right. In fact,
for Stanislavski, it is the WHOLE life of the actor. "They (the actors) may
have their own private life which has nothing to do with their life on the
stage, and indeed they may have a score of other interests in which their
family may share to a larger or smaller extent. But the true artist is the
man to whom the theatre is the be-all and end-all of his entire life. His
affairs are part of the business of the theatre." (ch. IV of the System and
Methods of Creative Art").
What is important in Stanislavskii's System is the connectedness and harmony
between these, let's call them "chronotopes". In his "Work of the actor on
himself" ("Rabota aktera nad soboj"), he said (and I am attempting a
secondary translation: from Serbian (and not Russian!!) into English): "A
life of a man or a role, it is a continuous succession of objects and
"circles of attention": jumping seamlessly from the real life, to the life
on stage, to the imagined reality, to memories of the past, to imagining the
future... This unbroken continuity is of the utmost importance for an actor
and you have to strengthen it in your inner self."
Bakhtin's "chronotope" is without doubt a unit of analysis which can bridge
the gap between the level of the activity as a social system and the
activity as an individual understanding, and personal history and
development within a given social activity system.
I very much agree with Jay when he says "the chronotope does I think offer
us an important extension of our ways of characterising activity systems at
the collective and social-historical level, not just in reminding us of the
importance of space as well as time, but also in defining a unit of analysis
at this level, in which we cannot say what sorts of things people typically
do without also saying what those actions mean..."
and even more when he adds the part about meanings "...we need to think of
feelings in this sense as fully a part of meanings. We have all long ago
agreed that we have to characterise actions and activities in terms of what
they mean for the participants ... and we still need to remember that such a
sense of meaning must include also how we are feeling about what we do. No
meaning without feeling"
What do you say?
Ana
_____
Ana Marjanovic-Shane
215-843-2909 (home)
267-334-2905 (mobile)
Eugene Matusov wrote:
Hello Jay and everybody-
Thanks, Jay, for your reply.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jaylemke@umich.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 10:19 PM
To: ematusov@UDel.Edu
Subject: RE: Space and time in chat
I was very happy to see Eugene's message about chronotopes and educational
ethnography. It is just one of the topics that I raised at the recent
Ethnography in Education research conference at the U of Pennsylvania. (I
was asked to do a keynote address.)
Unfortunately I did not do a full paper, but my notes are linked from my
website at:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke/new.htm
<http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke/new.htm>
Thanks, Jay, for the paper!
The html powerpoint may only work if you have a very recent version of your
web browser, but the ppt file itself should work fine.
My major point was that ethnography increasingly has been emphasizing the
multiple sites of people lives and how we move among them, while educational
ethnography, for practical reasons but also because of not seeing schools as
tightly integrated into the rest of students' lives, has tended to stay
within the classroom or within the school. I linked this to my notion of
traversals and timescales, more or less saying that learning that matters
has to be, and is, learning that extends along the larger trajectories of
our/students' lives, and that these are never confined to classrooms or
school.
To add some flesh to the bones, it seemed to me that the notion of
chronotope can usefully unite the spatial traversals and the temporal
pacings, interruptions and resumptions, etc. of both activities-in-situ and
activities-across-places.Characterising the chronotopes of learning, in
schools and across home-school-elsewhere can be a rich project for
educational ethnography, and hopefully for formulating alternatives to
school-obsessed and classroom-myopic views of education.
Eugene usefully reminds us that Bakhtin, especially in his earlier essays,
always added the value dimension to his characterisations of how novelistic
worlds portray our human lives. This is still strong in his work on
heteroglossia (ideational and axiological unite to define a "social voice":
what we say of the world and how we feel about it). We lose something in
social science when we attempt to make value-free or value-neutral
descriptions of how people live ... even the effort to say simply what
people do and when and where they do it is misguided if it neglects to also
say how people feel about what they are doing. This is a very deep insight
in Bakhtin, and it is not surprising that it comes from his
literary-humanistic sensibility, which we appropriate today into social
science.
I just talked with Ana Marjanovic-Shane in "meatspace" (we both live in
Philadelphia) and she reminded me work by Stanislavskii (famous Russian
theater educator). Stanislavskii also focused on (at least) three
chronotopes for actor's work that roughly correspond to three chronotopes of
schooling that I described. Actor chronotopes are: 1) chronotope of play
("didactic chronotope" in school); 2) chronotope of scene (here-and-now)
(cf. "local chronotope of the classroom"), and 3) chronotope of the actor's
past experiences (cf. "ontological chronotope" although I think that
ontological chronotope is not only about past experiences, but it is also
future oriented). Ana promised to bring references from Stanislavkii..
(thanks, Ana!)
Take this in its strong form: there is no valid characterization, or even
description, of activity without a concern for evaluative orientations or
how people feel about what they are doing (good/bad, bored/surprised,
proud/guilty, enthusiastic/reluctant, etc.).
Yes. That is why is should be called "axiological chronotope" to include
value. Although, the term becomes a bit too long and awkward.
To some extent we also tend to lose sight of this key dimension of activity
when we abstract to the level of social-cultural activity systems, which are
of course very important to characterise. But it is easy to wonder how at
this level do the elements of feelings and evaluations enter? For they are
not the same for all participants, and indeed there are not often general
rules to assign value orientations to particular participants roles. The
distribution of value orientations may not be systematic when the activity
as such is the unit of analysis. Bakhtin's suggestion here is heteroglossia,
as sociologically re-interpreted to mean that the distribution of value
orientations becomes systematic in relation to participants social positions
in a larger system, across activities as well as in them. (Bourdieu makes
much the same point about habitus.)
I think we need to unpack the notion of "voice" (any help can be highly
appreciated). My students, preservice teachers, become so excited when I
stated that, in my view, the purpose of teacher education is to develop
their teaching voices. That seems to liberate them from any standardized
judgment that does not take their personal agency into account in changing
their performance. However, they challenge me, as an educational researcher,
to develop the same "voice-oriented" approach to all academic areas like
math, science, English. They said that it is easy for them to see open-ended
voice- and person- oriented approach in teacher education, art education,
even English education but it is more difficult to see it in math or science
education. What is a math voice as personal agency? What can be personal in
2+2=4?
So, I'm on the mission from my students to find answers to their questions.
I'd appreciate any help from XMCA community.
So far, I contacted Paul Cobb and Ellice Forman, as great math educators and
researchers, whom I tremendously respect. From reading they suggested, I've
come to a conclusion that constructivist folks avoid this question by
avoiding "teaching facts" (like 2+2=4). Although I understand that
educational priority can be on teaching concepts rather memorizing facts, I
think we should not surrender teaching facts to educational
decontextualists.
Of course activity theory wants very much to retain a humanistic
perspective, and at the level of the individual-in-activity, this is done.
But at the level of the activity system, we find ourselves with a notion of
social norms of activity, and that characterizes for us the possible and
typical attitudes and value orientations -- but not necessarily how they are
distributed among actual and possible subjects engaged in the activity,
especially differentially, or why the distribution is as it is.
Yes, and I think we should get away from mono-chronotopic view of an
activity system.
What do you think?
Eugene
So the chronotope does I think offer us an important extension of our ways
of characterising activity systems at the collective and social-historical
level, not just in reminding us of the importance of space as well as time,
but also in defining a unit of analysis at this level, in which we cannot
say what sorts of things people typically do without also saying what those
actions mean, not just in relation to an object or to typical social norms,
but with respect to our value orientations quite generally. Here again is an
important case where we need to think of feelings in this sense as fully a
part of meanings. We have all long ago agreed that we have to characterise
actions and activities in terms of what they mean for the participants ...
and we still need to remember that such a sense of meaning must include also
how we are feeling about what we do. No meaning without feeling.
JAY.
PS. I think Kevin's article is faithful to this conception in the many ways
that it tells us how the students feel about activity that takes place, or
move them, from one place and space to another, which has a different kind
of meaning for them.
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