Attitude, emotion, and the stories in science

I feel a bit obsessed with the "What Is Story?" #whatisstory thread, one of many of the myriad fascinating tentacles of "A Burr In Your Sock" #burrinsock which I describe as the UrPost of the #CLMOOC. Just happened a couple of weeks ago on "The Undressed Art: Why We Draw" by Peter Steinhart (Knopf, 2004). On pp. 68-69 he describes John James Audubon's efforts to draw birds accurately. The key for Audubon was to draw the birds "alive and moving." His journal projects emotions and attitudes onto the animals: flycatchers had a pensive attitude, herons "waded with elegance and stateliness."

 Steinhart calls this "finding intimate points of contact." He calls on artists and ornithologists to be seductive, in a way more like a movie maker than our stereotype of the dispassionate naturalist: drawings should "excite in each individual thus happily employed [in examining the drawing] the desire of knowing all respecting all he sees."
It is this call from an historical giant in the field of science popularization to inject emotion and the art of the storyteller into what had theretofore been seen as a task for dispassionate and objective "recorders of fact" that I want to remark here, in the context again of reminding us of our historical roots, and the centuries-old struggle around "the two cultures."
Again, this feels like another tentative push towards the surface of the subterranean rhizomatic connection-making process I feel going on to articulate something about how this "emotion-injecting" into science somehow relates to the qualms I have about monetization of our teaching and the denigration of learning which seems to result from so much of commercialization. It's not that the injecting of feelings with which to connect into science and reporting are inherently degrading, rather there is a difficult to disentangle connection between two distinct branches of that root insight, the one represented by Audubon and his lively birds, which I relish, and the other by Leni Riefenstahl and her inheritors in the advertising industry, against which I struggle. How do we engage our students in the emotional thrill of discovery, the childhood eagerness to explore, neither losing the objectivity of the scientist nor adopting the manipulative techniques of the hustler?

Finally, I want to point to something about the pairing of attitude and emotion. This is how the incorporation – literally, the "bringing into the body" – of our learning is so supported by physical making tasks. The body must perform the movements, observe the safety requirements, coordinate the actions, and then appreciate the result. Our task is re-articulate those corporeal processes into communication events.

Formulaic writing as the "Gateway Drug" to Genre Theory

I am now thoroughly convinced that Genre Theory in the context of the Anthropology of Communication provides a framework by means of which to liberate student voices and transform our teaching – not just our teaching of core literacy, but of the sciences, the arts, and of all the skills needed for civic and working life.

Periodic Table of Story Elements by Barbara Kloss http://scribblesnjots.blogspot.com/p/elements.html

This line of thinking was first sparked for me by what I now think of as the Seminal Post to #CLMOOC14 : "A Burr in Your Sock" by Kim Douillard. I experienced a level of collaboration, interchange (Ah Ha! Another opportunity for coining a MULTI Family word [and to play with nested brackets, of course] multichange now joins multinamics, multilogue, and one other multi which I've forgotten {another opportunity for a bracket |properly called squiggly brackets, according to one English Usage resource I consulted|} since I can return to this chain and add it when I remember!) multi-change (doesn't read right without the dash [I think]), growth, and expansion of a level I've never had in my life (except perhaps my initial talks with friends in college who introduced me to jazz, and surrounding the college course which introduced me to art) in terms of transforming my outlook profoundly.

That thread lead to the creation of my "Step In It!®" Writing satirical poster, my most stretchy Make in both series of the CLMOOC's, and even the whole year in between where I continued to participate often. There was something immensely satisfying in utilizing a genre new to me in what seemed to me like an effective and amusing manner. That was just the first step. Some weeks ago I realized that I was actually conducting a self-experiment with formulaic writing, since I purchased and bgan using Scrivener, a writing helper which, among other things, provides templates of structured steps and pieces for many genre of both fiction and non-fiction writing. I chose a template for "Thesis or Research Proposal" to begin drafting my thoughts on the six or seven figure research project around using string games to cultivate executive function which I promised myself should be well underway by 2024. That does give me ten years, but it is an ambitious goal, so I felt like I needed a well-formed brief. Then when a Writing Project colleague emailed me to ask if I would help her get started with Scrivener to write her novel during NaNoWriMo, I started another project with Scrivener around a dance and writing performance piece I'm planning to organize in collaboration with a movement teacher whose Web site I used to host, which gave me the opportunity to take her classes in trade for web work. So I came up with a collaboration as a way to get to work with her without having to pay for classes. Of course, it will probably be a lot more work and trouble to write a grant and organize a troupe to perform, instead of just paying for classes, but, as my initial sentence attests, I have grandiose dreams. And I got to use another Scrivener Template, the Persuasive Speech!

So here's my initial take on formulaic writing based on a commercial product so far: I really enjoyed using the templates, responding to the prompts and questions. It helped me a lot to organize my thoughts, prompted new thoughts,  and generated some language. The software didn't work at all as I had hoped--having labored through several steps of a template, I thought I could just take all those pieces and do a simple export which would combine them all into a single file I could edit elsewhere. None of the things I tried which sounded like they would do that worked. Of course, I never consulted the manual, looked in the Help Menu, or searched Google for a support forum. I don't  have close deadlines, so I'm not ready to go further...yet, but I probably will.

Will there be much trace of a Scrivener template when I finally do do something with either of the projects I started using their software? Probably not. Did using the software help me? Certainly. What this experiment has to do with my initial thought in beginning this essay is something I'm groping to say about the many ways folks monetize writing and education. The value I got from using Scrivener probably doesn't even approach what I would get by taking my drafts of the proposals I intend to write and posting them to the iAnthology Ning, or sharing them with a few friends and asking them for feedback. I will do those things as well, and of course share what I'm doing with the CLMOOC, but I think the original burr in the sock has something to do with the money part of this.

What I mean by formulaic writing as a "Gateway Drug" to Genre Theory is that discussing the way commercial formulae shape students' writing, treating these offerings as another Genre to teach, alongside and within a media literate panoptic (is multioptic even better?) understanding of the Anthropology of Communication, should give them some tools with which to deconstruct and reassemble a Five Paragraph Essay on the same critical terms as a sonnet or a hip-hop video.

The Four Questions of Genre Theory:

• What's the genre (Form, Structure, Framework, Constraints, etc)?
• How do we decode the contents? 
• Who is the intended audience? and 
• What's the stated or implied purpose of the Communicator in creating this artifact?

map quite nicely onto Talcott Parsons' Four Box diagram of social systems. But that's another post, and this one is already way too long...

The "Back Again Gang"

The “Back Again” Gang: Using the Revision Process to Develop “A Voice of One’s Own”

“...from here to there  and  back again.”

The idea of a return, a reuse, remix, repurposing of older work or others’ work, is of the essence of writing. 

British poster from World War II

If it is true in the most basic sense that “I write to find out what I think,” it is only in at least revisiting and rereading, that one understands what that thinking really is. The repetition, re-doing, is the hardest thing for children to learn. They are so eager for the new thing that they always want to be told by the authorities that they are DONE, that they can get whatever was the proffered reward for their compliance with the instructions that got them to put the words down on paper, or up in the cloud, and can MOVE ON. 


But no...they may not.

It is in that duplicative, over-again phase of the self-examination that the first glimmers of a productive interior multilogue begin to emerge, and it is in teaching the “joy of revision” (how’s that for a contradiction in terms!) that students can begin to appreciate the power of their own clarity, forged by a self-discovery process that depends on accepting their own recursive thought processes, and gradually learning how to incorporate the suggestions of others into that process, without surrendering their sense of ownership about the ultimate version, and truly begin to sense what it feels like to have “a voice of one’s own.”

I think it is crucial as we embrace, propagate, and demonstrate the multifarious and wonderful ways we can now create and then repurpose communicative content, amongst ourselves as a community of teachers, and with our students as a community of learners, that we remember how much of what we are doing is not all that different from what my third and fourth graders did in Writer's Workshop over twenty years ago or what I did with the moveable platen press the Westland School teachers went out and got for Group 4 at Westland School over sixty years ago, so that we could learn about printing.

It's String Time!

Today I had another of the many, many wonderful days I've had over the past school year, working as a substitute teacher at many different schools throughout our bird-filled valley. In almost every one of those classrooms, I've been able to incorporate at least a little string game teaching, and in several I've been able to have a few days to develop a real culture within the classroom around learning string tricks. One of the best features of that culture is the smiles, yelps, and generally exuberant responses I get from the kids when I can say, "It's String Time!"

I usually start the day with a demonstration of Jacob's Ladder, and perhaps another figure or two, depending on the age of the group and the demands of the lesson plan. Ideally I've seen a place or two in the teacher's plan where I can confidently say to the class, "If we get [Assignment X] done quickly, we'll have enough time so I can teach you the Fish Spear." Or – even better – I've had a chance to speak with the teacher and get permission to insert my string work somewhere, drop a worksheet from the list, or even run the whole day as I choose. Today's lesson plan looked packed, but as the day moved on it was clear we'd have two or three good string sessions. The students – second graders – for the most part had little experience with really using their fingers, and several openly whined "I can't" while being taught their finger calisthenics: stretching the fingers out stiff and wide, then bunching them straight up next to each other, then opening the middle (separate ring and little fingers on one side and middle and index fingers on the other {with both hands at the same time!}), and opening and closing those two groups of two fingers like a pair of scissors, then opening the outside (separate little and index fingers and leave the ring and middle fingers side by side in the middle), to make a kind of W shape; and then we go back and forth, back and forth, from one to the other.

It's challenging, but learnable, and a great example of the way the fingers can create the pathway for the mental command structure that later supports choosing to do something that one still can't quite actually do now. The next step in the finger calisthenics is to make a fist, then point at it sideways with the other hand, then switch, so that the pointing hand makes a fist and the fisted hand begins to point. Then do it again, and again, faster and faster, back and forth... Few people can do it right away with any dexterity. Part of the point is to create that dexterity, and also to fail at a task and experience frustration, and then make progress. Barring a neurological impediment, most people can improve with practice.

Both of these finger/hand games were taught to me as a child by my father, as fun and challenging games, of course, but also with the explanation that they are basic neurological tests which he learned in medical school. I've added a few simple flexes and stretches of my own, but they have none of the grace and charm of these more than a century old dexterity probes. They also make great one to three or four minute filler activities when the class is ready but the bell hasn't rung...

This post is a kind of meta-cognitive reflection for myself, about a full year spent teaching, at least two, often three or four days a week, doing the job of substitute as well as I can, an often boring and thankless job, and adding to most of those days a few minutes or a few hours of time pursuing my own agenda: to become a teaching artist who brings the joy of string games to as many people as I can, waiting for those moments when I can call out to the group of kids I'm sharing my day with, "It's String Time!"

I'm starting to collect some resources for the "Common Thread Doctrine," my boast that I can rewrite the entire K-12 Curriculum with ties to string games, at

http://originaldigital.storyworkers.org/

String games for lifelong learning

Ambidexterity, mathetics, and chiral differences: how string games can open a path to self-directed lifelong learning

As my first formal post to the #DLMOOC, I’d like to offer an attempt to integrate a variety of arguments I’ve offered over several decades about why to use string figures in the classroom into a theory of learning development which I’ve not heard articulated in this manner before.
When I first thought to bring string games into the classroom, I was teaching third graders in a bilingual program, and found that I could not effectively teach the computer keyboarding skills which were supposed to be part of the curriculum without first teaching the names of the individual fingers. Most native Spanish speakers, even those who are highly educated, do not know the individual finger names. Close study of the finger names helped students connect with the dexterity development that needed to be done concomitantly, and I always felt that the original objective – to improve keyboarding skills – is almost always achieved with string figure practice.

I've developed a few simple finger games, based on neurological tests my psychiatrist father taught me, which you can see me demonstrating in this clip from a Teachers Teaching Teachers episode I did with Paul Allison and several others last year. I call them “Finger Calisthenics.”

Here’s an enumeration of the learning benefits of string games:

• 1) ambidexterity [that one is obvious and uncontroversial, except most folks don't realize what a powerful brain booster ambidexterity is...]
• 2) executive function -- the crucial ability to delay gratification in the interest of some later payoff
• 3) developing connections across the two hemispheres of the brain, thus enhancing both logical and creative thinking
• 4) resilience -- being able to experience failure and keep trying
• 5) sequencing -- being able to manage and remember complex multi-step processes
• 6) storytelling and writing -- creating new understandings through articulating and expressing one's thoughts in spoken and written words
• 7) learning and teaching -- in a group setting, some kids always learn a particular figure more quickly than others, so they get immediately thrust into the role of teacher to other students, and gain better understanding of what's involved in teaching and more awareness of their own and others' learning styles

I'm developing a couple of projects that hopefully will become “mini-residencies” at two different school sites, where I plan to work with any interested teachers on identifying string games that fit with their existing curriculum plans, or adding an art/storytelling/writing unit which utilizes them.

Here's a link to my String Games Playlist on YouTube, and there are DIY videos for learning many figures. The fun is one of the main points, but the learning benefits are astounding – James Murphy tells an inspiring story about teaching a blind student trigonometry with string figures, and how in the course of the learning process, the student also acquired a marked increase in his ability to navigate independently, to the point of being able to ride the New York City subway!

Root&Branch

This is a first blog post for the Deeper Learning MOOC (#DLMOOC)

Making the loop for the Karok Three-Pronged Fish Spear

There was a short-lived progressive magazine during my youth called Root and Branch, and the idea that a plant has roughly as much root mass below the ground as it has above ground structure, combine to make these horticultural analogies to learning and brain function fascinate me. The idea that manual activities can stimulate the creation of brain connections, and that increased neural pathways in the brain afford possibilities for unrelated new learnings, amplify my enthusiasm for string figures as a hook for interesting curriculum.

The carnival barker part of my radical hippie youth activism experience wants to have me dress up like an EduBux Pitchman and promise a "comprehensive curriculum, K-12, tying every aspect of the CCSS to a corresponding string game or related learning." And if I got a 6-figure contract to focus on that, I probably could pull it off. But that's not the point.

Technology is being misused whenever there's not a lot of thought and discussion among staff, community, and with students, around the question,

"Who's telling the computer what to do?"

We must all be examining these tools, interrogating them, and using them to express our points of view and share our experiences in the world. Those processes then become secondary to the activities students do, with their hands dug into the stuff of the world, using our multi-communicative ambient tools to share as they learn.