Re: [xmca] I feel like flying: The playworld paper

[Beth Ferholt <bferholt@gmail.com>]

I am thinking about all the responses to our paper and thank everyone for
their fascinating comments.

More to come, but I am now at a conference on ethnography in education -- we
are staying up late to make sure Kiyo, Ana and I are ready to present our
use of film to create a cross-cultural study of playworlds in Finland,
Sweden, Japan, the former Yugoslavia and the US.

Yuan's words: "The whole event is like a film that has a satisfying
conclusion." -- and the title of this email from Mike -- made me thing anew
that the students' and teacher's ability to continue to play together in
their discussion, after their joint dramatic play, had the quality of film
that Vivian Sobchack calls "lived momentum" ("the brief flight into life,
out of the fixed frames and inexorable logic of the fated narrative" --
Catherine Lupton) .  Wartofsky describes this high, I think, when he writes:
"The fullest form of human existence is the self-conscious, and clear
recognition of oneself in the representation -- " -- that moment when you
see that someone else is creative as you are.  Which brings us back to
perezhivanie, as Mike pointed out in an earlier post, and to Pearl!

I will use this is the presentation tomorrow and thank you,
Beth

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 10:29 PM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

> Yuan-- Your message came in long melange of gmail messages, and I did not
> see how to respond just to it.
> But I found your analysis and sympathies very interesting and sympatico.
> mike
>
>
> David, the way I see it, the play discussion runs parallel to the play:
>  the
> main "argument" of Pearl as representative of her camp is that she did not
> know what to make newly added characters say. She took a stance and had
> difficulty coming up with what to say to support her stance, but she ended
> up with the best line, with support from others, winning people over and
> setting up for the finale. I see the preparation for and organization of
> the
> play have the two elements you suggest: what to do with different people's
> wanting different things, and resolving it within the confines the teacher
> set out; when the children (those who spoke, those who nodded, those who
> listened and agreed or disagreed privately) and the teacher participated in
> taking different perspectives of the problem by articulating and trying to
> comprehend what another was saying.
> I love the video clips, young children articulating and trying to
> articulate. They solved the difficult problem that their teacher declared
> insolvable. The whole event is like a film that has a satisfying
> conclusion.
> No wonder some children said afterwards, "I feel like I'm flying", in
> different ways.
> If I may borrow your terms, xmca can be thought of as a playworld of
> Guileless Deceit and Gratuitous Difficulty, asking and answering big
> questions, presenting different perspectives, taking of these perspectives?
> Yuan
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-- 
Beth Ferholt
Assistant Professor
School of Education
Brooklyn College
The City University of New York
2900 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, New York 11210
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