Dear Phil and Steve-
First of all, thanks, Steve for your question about chronotope and Phil for
your helpful answer.
Phil wrote,
"I agree, chronotope is a slippery metaphor - sometimes I find it easier to
think more concretely of genre and discourse."
I have very ambivalent feelings about Bakhtin's notion of chronotope. On the
one hand, I'm so excited to read Bakhtin's literary analysis where he used
the notion of chronotope but on the other hand, I agree with Phil about "a
slippery metaphor." My solution is to use the notion in a concrete analysis
of educational (or other) practice like Bakhtin did in his literary
analysis.
Below is my uncompleted and very rough draft of such analysis of traditional
classroom. I'd really appreciate your feedback.
Eugene
-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Chappell [mailto:phil_chappell@access.inet.co.th]
Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2003 6:46 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: RE: Space and time in chat
At 14:38 26/7/03 -0700, you wrote:
In reading through the discussion of Bakhtin etc. by Eugene and Jay, I find
myself struggling with the term chronotope - this notion is not yet sinking
in. I could use some ABC's and a general orientation to grasp the finer
points being made. Jay, Eugene, anyone? Thanks!
Steve,
Let me give my tuppence worth, after consulting Morson and Emerson's
"Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of Prosaics". I have firstly quoted two
paragraphs.
"In its primary sense, a chronotope is a way of understanding experience; it
is a specific form-shaping ideology for understanding the nature of events
and actions...Actions are necessarily performed in a specific context;
chronotopes differ by the ways in which they understand context and the
relation of actions and events to it."
"All contexts are shaped fundamentally by the kind of time and space that
operate within them. Kant, of course, argued long ago that time and space
are indespensible forms of cognition, and Bakhtin explicitly endorses this
view. But he differs from Kant by stressing that in chronotopic analysis,
time and space are regarded "not as 'transcendental' but as forms of the
most immediate reality"...time and space vary in qualities; different social
activities and representations of those activities presume different kinds
of time and space. Time and space are therefore not just neutral
"mathematical" abstractions".
This latter points is referred to by Jay and Eugene in their last turn of
Eugene's post.
They (Morson and Emerson) go on further to discuss several properties of the
chronotope in relation to Einstein's ToR - a chronotope is a fusion of space
and time; there are a variety of senses of time and space: in a sense we are
living in a heterochronic universe; chronotopes are historical in that they
are dynamically, or dialogically related; chronotopes are the ground for
activity rather than simply being present in activity..."the ground
essential for the representation of events".
I agree, chronotope is a slippery metaphor - sometimes I find it easier to
think more concretely of genre and discourse.
Does this constitute part of an ABC of chronotope?
Cheers,
Phil
_____
Axiological chronotope of traditional classroom
Eugene Matusov, University of Delaware
To apply the notion of educational axiological chronotope to an
analysis of traditional classroom, I will use Bakthin's parallel analysis of
the chronotope of the Greek romance (Bakhtin, 1991, pp. 86-110). The
traditional lessons are remarkably similar to each other, and are in fact
composed of the very same elements (instructional steps): individual lessons
differ from each other only in number of such elements, their proportional
weight within the whole lesson and they way they are combined. One can
easily construct a typical composite schema of this lesson, taking into
account the most important individual deviations and variations. Such schema
would go something like this (this verbatim is taken and modified from
Bakhtin, 1991, p. 87).
The lesson begins with the "all-knowing" teacher and the
"ignorant" students assembling in a closed space insolated from the outside
world: its noise, demands, and people for a certain amount of time.
Classroom walls, classroom door, and classroom windows (to a less degree)
are brackets of academic learning from the rest of the world in order not to
distract the ignorant students from all-knowing teacher and the teaching. As
the lesson going by, the curricular gap between the all-knowing teacher and
ignorant students is decreasing as knowledge moving from the "all-knowing"
teacher to the "ignorant" students. The ignorant students are moving in the
space of curricular knowledge to become like the all-knowing teacher who
causes and helps their movements by organizing new knowledge taught in the
lesson in smaller bits of information that the ignorant students are able to
swallow and digest. The traditional teaching is usually organized in the
format of lecturing, modeling, asking known-answer questions to lead, probe,
and test the students. After the material is explained by the teacher, the
students are required practicing the taught material by applying to learning
task in school and during homework. At the end of the instruction that may
take several lessons, the students are supposed to "know" the taught
material which can be demonstrated on the teacher's demand via exams and
tests that finally define good and bad students with regard of the taught
material. Although, students are led from grade to grade, from class to
class, from subject to subject, from topic to topic, from test to test, from
exam to exam, but classroom routine remains very much the same. The
traditional school is passing by its students. The students rarely discuss
outside of the class what didactically happens inside class and they rarely
discuss inside class as part of their lessons that happens in their lives
outside of the class. Such is the schema for the basic components of
traditional teaching.
Didactic space of traditional teaching
The didactic space defines itself through the following questions,
"Where are we didactically in the lesson? Are we in math or in social
studies? Are we in fractions or in long division? Are we in presentation of
a new topic or in practicing learned skills? How does 'the didactic map'
look like? How do the participants perceive the didactic space?" The
didactic space is fully pre-designed by the teacher and the whole
educational bureaucratic apparatus involving school boards and the state
departments of education without much of students' inputs.
The didactic map of traditional teaching has 'hierarchal' and 'topological'
aspects. The hierarchal aspect involves nesting levels: like geographical
map of a federal country (the biggest hierarchal level) consists of states
(the second hierarchal level) which consist of counties (the third
hierarchal level), and so on. The hierarchal aspect of the didactic
curricular map of traditional teaching involves: 1) the biggest curricular
level of academic subjects (e.g., math, English, social studies), 2) the
second level of topics (e.g., fractions, long division), and 3) the third
level of instructional steps (e.g., presentation of the topic, testing).
The topological aspect of the didactic map involves the issues of location,
size, and shape of each of the nesting units. Topologically, the subject
units of traditional teaching are unidimensional, linear, and independent
from each other (i.e., being on somewhere the 'math territory' does not
position one on the 'social study territory' in any way). Thus,
unidirectional linear continuum is the shape of the subject unit in
traditional teaching. Its size is potentially unlimited as an endeavor of
the academic discipline representing the curricular subject (i.e., there is
no potential stop in study of math). The curricular topic in traditional
teaching is a section of the subject continuum. It has its location in the
sequence of other topics-sections on the subject line. It also has its
length - duration. Similarly, instructional steps are line subsections
inside of a topic-section that have their sequence and duration.
The biggest hierarchical unit on the didactic map is an academic subject:
traditional curricula are divided on separate academic subjects such as
math, English, PE, social studies, arts and crafts, and so on. The choice of
the subjects is shaped by the history of schooling and its role in the
society. For example, such academic subjects as teaching dead languages
Ancient Greek and Latin disappeared from the curricular space of traditional
schooling as it becomes more middle-class oriented rather than upper-class
oriented (Labaree, 1997).
The second hierarchical level of the traditional curricular organization is
topical. Topics can be hierarchically related to each other (e.g., the
Fractions and the Addition of Fraction), chronologically related (e.g., The
Civil War and The Reconstruction), loosely related in juxtaposition (e.g.,
The Integers and The Decimals), or unrelated (e.g., The Phrase and The
Writing Persuasive Compositions). The topical organization is dictated by
"importance" of the topics for students' future as defined by the three
major educational goals shared by the society (Labaree, 1997): democratic
participation (e.g., does this topic promotes democracy), social efficiency
(e.g., does this topic help promote skills require by the modern economy),
and social mobility (e.g., will the topic be on a high-stake test?). In
addition, a curricular topic can be chosen to teach just because of a school
tradition - it is in the textbook used by the teacher or in the commercial
curricular "unit."
The third hierarchical level of didactic topology is intratopical and
involves certain instructional steps of "covering curriculum" such as a
presentation of a topic, practicing the topic with the students, and testing
students' knowledge of the topic.
The first topological level of the didactically spatial organization of
traditional teaching is sequential: the sequences of the curricular topics.
The topical sequence is often defined by the questions: 1) what topics the
students have to know to move to the next topic; 2) what the topics are more
fundamental; 3) what the topics are more abstract or more concrete; 4) what
the topics are more relevant/familiar to the students; 5) what the topical
sequence is developmentally appropriate; and so on. There is a growing
realization of a lack of consensus among educators and discipline
specialists about the topical sequence in their subject area (Hiebert,
personal communication, March 2003).
Finally, the second topological level of the didactically spatial
organization of traditional teaching is calendar, durational, and temporal.
It is a projection of the curricular topical sequence on the linear time
continuum of class meetings and assigned homework: when in the school
calendar each topic will occur. This time continuum involves a mixture of
both physical and institutional aspects because it involves days, weeks,
months, as well as lessons, terms, semesters, academic years, grades (e.g.,
third grade versus second grade curricula), schools (e.g., elementary school
math curricula versus middle school math curricula). It is also about time
duration for each predesigned curricular topic both in terms of physical and
institutional time: how many lessons, weeks, months, terms, grades, and
schools a particular topic takes place. Thus, this spatial level of
traditional teaching is essentially chronotopic because it combines the
didactic space - the predesigned curricular topics and their sequence - and
the local time of traditional teaching - the physical time continuum - as
well as the didactic time - instructional considerations for defining the
duration of each curricular topic on the physical time continuum the class
meetings and homework.
In sum, the external didactic space of traditional teaching designed by the
teacher is the abstract-alien world removed by the classroom walls, by rows
of the desks directed at the teacher, by Ritalin, by all attention
techniques focusing the students on the teacher and the teacher-defined
classroom activities from the students' ontological world. Traditional
curricula are decontextualized in a sense that they are bracketed from
students' ontology, from their life and life experiences, as well as from
local classroom contexts of the students and the teacher spending time
together in the classroom. This external didactic space opposes the
students' (and the teacher's) ontological real space. In the real world, the
students set their own goals, develop their own chain of actions, and check
the consequences of these actions in the world's response for fulfillment of
their set goals. In the didactic space of traditional teaching the students
do not have their own goals besides to do what the teacher asks to do, their
chain of actions has to follow the teacher's prescription, the consequences
of their actions is defined not be the world' response but by the teacher's
(often arbitrary) judgment of the students' academic progress. The
separation of the traditional didactic space for the local classroom space
and from the participants' ontological space leads to its self-containing
and irrelevancy.
So far, we were discussing the didactic space of traditional teaching as
designed by the teacher externally. Let's discuss how the space is perceived
internally by the class participants. The students of traditional classroom
often perceive the didactic space axiologically by setting value-judgments
and emotional flavors on specific curricular topics they studied:
interesting vs. boring, like-it vs. dislike-it, relevant vs. irrelevant,
useful vs. "busy work", easy vs. difficult, and so on. For example, this is
students' reactions to a statement, "Today we are going to study poetry" -
"BORING!" "Yak," "interesting", "Not again!", "exciting." Thus, each
curricular topic has some emotionally axiological valency for a student,
sometimes even before the topic being taught. The student's emotionally
axiological valency to a specific curricular topic is defined by the
student's ontological - whole-person - reaction to the curricular topic, its
teaching, the teacher, the classroom, and the student's progress of studying
it as defined by the teacher, the classmate, and the student him/herself.
Unpackaging such student's statement as "I like fractions because I'm good
at them" would probably lead us to evidence that the student successfully:
1) fulfills classroom assignments set by the teacher, 2) meets the teacher's
expectations regarding learning the topic of fraction, 3) is seen by the
relevant classmates as "being good at fractions" (e.g., being better than
many other classmates), 4) supports his/her high social status and
cultural/academic capital in area of the fractions in the classroom, 5) has
his/her positive identity investment in the topic of fractions, 6) has
reverberations to the broader activity, status, identity, and societal areas
like being good at and in math, school, institutionalized education,
societal institutions, citizenship, and so on.
Didactic time of traditional teaching
The didactic time defines itself in the following questions, "What
didactically happens in the classroom? Why does it happen? How do the
participants perceive it?" The didactic time of traditional schooling can be
characterized as "covering curricula" by the teacher. It is a very
chronotopic category since the didactic time in traditional schooling
defined through didactic space as spreading teaching and learning through
it.
The teacher covers curricula through organized preemptive guidance
that supposed to cause learning in students. As Bakhtin (1986) pointed out,
meaning making process involves answering to questions. Meaning making
process in a traditional teaching is organized by the teacher in a series of
preemptive question-answers that the teacher asks and answers either by
him/herself and/or by the students. Essentially, traditional teaching is
modeled after informal everyday guidance when a person seeking information
or knowledge asks questions of another person who may know the answer.
However, in traditional teaching the person who asks and answers the
questions is the same - the teacher. The traditional teacher tries to
preempt the students' possible questions by figuring out the questions in
advance before the students ever ask the questions. Thus, the nature of the
questions is changed: in informal everyday guidance-learning situations, the
questions are often asked by the learner and they have the
information-seeking nature while in traditional teaching, the questions are
mainly asked by the teacher and they have the answer-known nature (Matusov,
Bell, & Rogoff, 2002; Matusov & Rogoff, 2002; Mehan, 1979). Thus, the
traditional teacher creates an "imaginary learner" whom he or she guides.
This imaginary learner asks questions that the teacher replies (or leads
actual students to reply).
Covering curricula through a questioning-answering process
predesigned by the teacher usually unfolds through mainly three
communicative formats (and their mixture): 1) a monologic lecture, 2) a
rhetorically interactive lecture, 3) a teacher-students interaction
controlled by the teacher. A monologic lecture consists of answers to the
imaginary learner's questions that are not present in the lecture. Only
answers are present which puts a lot of demands on a listener who in order
to make sense of the monologic lecture has to reconstruct the implicit
questions that these answers are aimed to address. For example,..
Didactic axiology of traditional teaching
Didactic axiological chronotope of traditional teaching
Local classroom space, time, axiology, and chronotope of traditional
teaching
Ontological space, time, axiology, and chronotope of traditional teaching
Unity of didactic, local, and ontological chronotopes in traditional
teaching
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