This evening we have a short NFB film by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer for you to screen:
Murray Schafer's "Listen" - https://www.nfb.ca/film/listen/
There's also this article about critical literacy that will relate to John Ames' guest teaching in the garden on Thursday:
Literate. Language Arts, Volume 92 Number 2 -
http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/LA/0922-nov2014/LA0922Art.pdf
My “stop” moment reading Harste (2014) included the following two sentences. “I think it is important that students understand that they have not read a book or a text until they have had a conversation about it with someone else... I also think it is important that students walk away feeling some social obligation to share their growing insights with the rest of the world” (p. 98). The first sentence struck me because we tend to think of reading as being a solitary activity, but Harste points out that reading must be a social event. The second sentence underscores this, and also relates to the concept of social responsibility, which is very important in African views of intelligence. I am fascinated by research that looks at implicit theories of intelligence, and this research points out that in contrast to Western views of intelligence that focuses on “smarts” or reasoning, many African conceptions of intelligence focus on how well one uses what one knows to benefit the community. I think this addition of social responsibility to views of intelligence is very important for education.
ReplyDeleteI found it very interesting in David New’s “Listen” to hear the idea of “sound overkill”. I reflected to just yesterday when I was at the beach in the evening waiting for my beach volley ball team to join me before the game. Here, I set up a towel and sat down watching the waves and the birds while looking for any ocean animals that may pop up. After about 5 minutes, I pulled out my phone and turned on my music. I wonder why I wasn’t comfortable just being in the moment with the natural sounds present in that scape. Next time, rather than adding sound to my life, I will take his advice and “reduce the number of sounds in …[my] life”. Real sounds are more exciting and more authentic than any recording could be (David New, 2009).
ReplyDeleteMy “stop” moment while watching David New’s “Listen” was when he said “the world is a huge musical composition, that is going on all of the time. We are the composers and we can improve it or destroy it. We can add more noises or beautiful sounds" (New, 2009). This made me think of our experience today when we were sketching out the natural and human made sounds we were experiencing in the garden. It was interesting how so many of us found the human made sounds such as airplanes and cars to be harsh or “jagged” and the natural sounds such as the wind and trees to flow more naturally or be “curved”. Personally, I enjoyed the natural sounds of the wind rustling the leaves and branches of the trees and birds chirping and felt that certain human made sounds such as the helicopter flying by, the tent moving, and car driving by interrupted my experience. This experience has made me more aware of how added noise can alter the experience of an environment.
ReplyDeleteI found David New's (2009) "Listen" to be a very powerful short film. What caught my attention from this film, was when he was describing how sounds from some societies (without technology) "commit suicide" (David New, 2009). We live in a society where technology is central to our daily routines: waking up to the sound of an alarm; watching Netflix; listening to music on transit; and so on. This made me reflect how society [and myself] so often take natural sounds for granted. Further, it stressed the importance of taking children outside, and disconnecting them from technology. This is where ECE activities like "sit spots" become valuable to children ... And valuable to adults too!
ReplyDeleteI'd like to comment on the following passage from the article Harste, Jerome, C. (2014). The Art of Learning to Be Critically Literate. Language Arts, Volume 92 Number 2 - "Students read the written text along- side the illustrations, carefully noting the juxta- position of image/words to engage in discussions about gender, literacy, picturebooks, illustrations, and so on. This allows us to extend the conversation to visual texts. Advertisements, commercials, and public service announcements (among others) need to be “read” as well as interrogated. By having students collect advertisements from teen maga- zines as well as from the magazines their parents typically read, larger systems of meaning are often exposed. Teachers in Toronto found that McDon- alds advertised their green salads in parent maga- zines, but in teen magazines, their Big Mac sand- wiches have the slogan, “Have you had your hands on any buns lately?” (p 99)
ReplyDeleteThe larger systems of meaning, in this context, being that of an innapropriate sexual suggestion in order to attract the demographic of the hormonally flared up (teens). I agree that it is supremely vital to get youth engaged in any form of critical literacy, especially in these kinds of marketing schemes. Teenagers might read this and take it as an acceptable form of communication; that this kind of language has been used in a widely publicized document, and is therefore, okay to be used in social settings. Obviously we live in a politically correct day-in-age where it is likely that this would not pass through Human Resources, but it is still important to look at the history of language-as-influencer.
I will tell an anecdote and attempt to try to tie my thoughts together on this subject matter that I feel relates to this course. Although it is not as obviously inapproriate as the above advertisement, I mentioned while we were gathered around the picnic table of children's toys at the Orchard Garden the other day, that the one of the origami sets had an advertisement on the back that, as a critical thinker, made me stop and question its legitimacy. It read "Why create a Zen garden when you can have dozens of origami pieces to ponder" (or something to that effect). I read this as a very obvious "put down" marketing scheme - and one that is, essentially, unesarry and perhaps even sways children into a consumerist mindset. Firstly, from a sustainable perspective, this is encouraging children to take on the idea that producing more "things" vs. "just being" (in this situation, a garden), is advantageous. Children may adopt the sense that it is superior to "do" and "create" more, rather than tend to care for a permanent but malleable space. In my perspective, creating more things is detrimental for the environment, as I try to encourage and adopt the life philosophy that "less is more". We need to start shifting our educational models to teach children to be critical of advertisments that may, in the long run, impact their subconscious cognition into believing that "creating more" (waste) is better than simply sitting in stillness with the Earth.
My mind often returns to the pedagogical notion of “enabling constraints” when a thing meets its opposition. In the video, when Murray Schafer suggests to “listen”, I noticed the juxtaposition of the urban noise of my surrounding against the natural acoustics. I am sitting in my room and I hear this juxtaposition. I decided to give in to it and imagine a musical composition that places this two concurrent and colliding world into harmony. Escaping the sounds that surround us is not always possible, but can we reimagine/mashup/remix to shift our perception, and make new “meaning”?
ReplyDeleteSounds (regardless of their nature), like any other aesthetic experience (scent, sight, etc…), are subjective and therefore elude various emotional reaction, memories, thoughts to different individuals; for example joyful tears recalling a particular experience in the past). Some infants find comfort and fall asleep to the sound of the vacuum cleaner, or the sound and movement of a running motor vehicle. I think what is important, as the article by Jerome Harste suggests, is to have the ability to read/interpret things critically. By learning to be critical literates, we empower our students/ourselves to choose to perceive, shift, reconsider, inquire about/of interpret/reinterpret their world and when necessary, be advocates for change, the kind of advocacy that considers and reconsiders all beings.
Reading tonight's article, The Art of Learning to Be Critically Literate by Jerome C. Harste (2014), struck me on several levels. It provoked me to think about literature in new ways. The notion of multiple literacies and literacy as social practice caused me to ponder. In fact much of the article deserves a second read in order to absorb the richness of the ideas put forth by Harste. As a primary teacher literacy is at the heart of my program. I am also passionate about teaching art. I just love the creativity it affords. I love the idea of bringing them together. I was struck by Harste statements that a good literacy is comprised of the three components of meaning making, language study and inquiry based learning all bound together with the arts included in every aspect of literacy. The notion that literacy should include art, movement, music, drama was for me a new idea. I feel it is an idea I need to revisit, play with, explore and learn more about in order to truly understand. I feel so fortunate for the experience we had today in the garden which allowed this otherwise rather abstract idea to become a reality. I was struck by how through our act of playing and doing the ideas discussed in the article I now have a deeper understanding of the ideas presented. Just as for kids, we as teachers need to muck about to learn at a deeper level. I believe Harste would have loved the dragonfly story art, music and drama created in the garden today.
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DeleteI totally agree. The fact that we did the mucking about today and then read the article made me think about the importance of practice (experiential learning) before theory/conceptualization. I wondered how different the depth and grasp of our understanding of the articles we have read so far would have been if we did the activities/practice before we read/discussed them.
While reading Harste's (2014) article on art and literacy, I was reminded of a piece of art, Bable, I saw at the Tate Modern in London. The artwork by Cildo Meirelles (2001) is a massive stack of hundreds of radios of that are all tuned to different channels and blaring music or broadcasts. It is both visually overwhelming and the noise is overpowering and it is intended to address the idea of information overload and failed communication. I thought it tied in nicely with the video as well since it was nearly impossible to do what R. Murray Schafer instructed and LISTEN.
ReplyDeleteAsking questions, to inspire or explore, drives the pursuit of knowledge. Jerome Harste posed a wonderful question that made me stop and re-evaluate: "What kinds of lives do we want to live and what kind of people do we want to be?" (p. 100). After three days, and a long educational journey, I feel incredibly connected to the notion of listening and slowing down. Schafer, at the end of his video, holds up a sign that says "listen." The visual clue stopped me. It stopped me from eating, petting my dog, and texting. In that moment I needed the reminder to surrender the time, listen, and be present. Bringing attention to the senses and giving the Place time is goal of mine.
ReplyDeleteAmy Flett
DeleteSeveral points in this article reminded me of the work of cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, whose research endeavours to answer the question, "does the language we speak shape the way we think?" Though this question has been debated for thousands of years of human thought, Boroditsky and her team has collected evidence to support the idea that, yes - language has a profound influence on how we think and interact with ourselves, our world and each other.
ReplyDeleteHarste references a video, 'The Power of Words', which contains the message, "Change Your Words, Change Your World." This is a sentiment echoed by Boroditsky's talk. Boroditsky presents examples of how language dictates how groups orient themselves, how they conceive time, how they use mathematics and how they categorize gender. Biases are inherent in our language, and these biased notions are taught to our children in everyday contexts, in conversation, advertisements, hit songs, etc. Harste "believe[s] that languages should be a part of a critical curriculum, and just as we ask our students to learn to read and write, so too should we ask them to understand how other languages work when designing, creating, and interpreting texts … By providing space for students to explore and create through a number of engagements, we emphasize the use of languages and the study of languages to encourage deeper and critical understandings of how languages work on us to act, believe, and reproduce culture."
The most striking example Boroditsky offers is regarding how different languages describe accidents. In English, we can say, "He broke the vase" or "I broke my arm", whereas in Spanish, the structure would be, "The vase broke." English speakers are more likely to remember who was involved in the accident, while Spanish speakers are more likely to remember the vase. This affects how we assign blame and the severity of this blame, and more broadly influences how we think of crime & punishment in our society. I see children policing each other using this shame-and-blame ridden language all the time. The implications of this way of thinking has real consequences on peoples' lives and social justice.
Boroditsky ends her talk with three questions she invites us to ask ourselves: "Why do I think the way I do? How could I think differently?" "What thoughts do I wish to create?"
Hartse concludes their article with a similar thought: "The real question that each of us has to ask is, 'What kind of literate being should inhabit the 21st century?' Asked differently, 'What kinds of lives do we want to live and what kind of people do we want to be?'"
-- Kristin Meier :)
DeletePS: See Lera's awesome TEDtalk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k
DeleteThe “Listen” film clip was very thought provoking for me. We have had the wonderful opportunity this week to focus more on tuning into our multiple senses. I was not very familiar with the term soundscape before today and Shafer’s comparison of a soundscape to a painting was a helpful analogy. A collection of sounds that together contribute to the whole. In viewing this clip this I was reminded of this afternoon’s activity of quietly sitting and listening to the abundance of sounds that surrounded us. Shafer’s reference to we being “the composers” was a “stop moment” for me. I hadn’t considered that we had control over the sounds in our world and that we can improve or destroy the composition. I love the idea of relating to the sounds around us as a composition, I also liked his phrasing “listen carefully and marvel”. I connected particularly to the word “marvel”, it reminded me of our conversations about “magical” as well as other words we use when trying to describe particular moments or events that we value highly and want to identify as particularly special. Definitely a theme for us this week...so many moments that have resonated as special.
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ReplyDeleteOn page 92, Jerome Harste writes that too often the study of language is reduced to phonics and spelling. I find a similar reduction happens often in school around art. Often, the focus of the lesson is on elements & principles of design (line, shape, texture) or image development strategies (scale, juxtaposition, elaboration) and the student artwork comes out looking the same. There is certainly a need to teach these formal skills (much like there is a space for phonics and spelling), but what about curiosity, criticality, exploration, ways of knowing, risk-taking and concepts?
ReplyDeleteThe conversation to widen literacy to include multi-modal ways of knowing and learning seems to be a long one - I wonder sometimes if teachers already do this in practice, whether intentionally or not. This way of teaching, happens readily when using the arts. Language arts can then be linked with written or oral student reflection, artist statement or documentation of process. The concept can be linked to any curricular content or student interest. As teachers, we are always doing this. Perhaps we are mis-identifying what art is. Students often want to show what they know through drawing or painting or building something. This is one form of art. There are certainly ways in which to formalize and expand abilities, but the communication of these ideas and the inferencing during class discussions about student artwork should be valued and practiced. Art doesn't need to be separate (although there is value in that) and done "over there". The new curriculum (much like this article states) says that engaging in art expands a sense of belonging and identity and opens up new possibilities and perspectives. It also says that it is a unique language for communication that is influenced by and influences the world around us.
So much of Wednesday's activities and information resonated with me as I feel so connected to the premise that the generalized term of arts is everywhere. So much emphasis is placed on academia and words that evoke the intellectual elements associated to curriculum that this article by Harste called out to me and internally I was saying: yes, yes! Sometimes being so connected passionately to something makes it difficult to find the right connection of words to relay and explain what it is that makes so much sense internally. When Harste said on page 96 about how "art renders back to us not simply what we see, but how we react to what we see and we know as a consequence of seeing" (Harste, 2014, p.96) this speaks to what I am trying to bridge between my experience with teaching young children, as well as teaching emergent teachers. The overall concept of art as a language speaks volumes to me and finding new pathways for people to communicate intellectual elements and relaying information results in better retention of information and both more clarity and diversity of understanding. This article invigorated me and has been a turnkey moment for me to see there are likeminded individuals to not only how I practice but how I think and truly believe the arts is a vehicle to propel the sharing of information further than traditional, more linear practices. Add to this the element of the outdoors and I feel re-inspired to share and know there is research and empirical evidence to support the inclusion of arts in education at every level.
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