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.

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.