Last week I had a delightful talk with Angela Demmel about the difference between watching ballet and modern dance in terms of the amount of information and text you get to help you bring meaning to the art you are seeing. One gives you a complete narrative; the other expects you to construct your meaning with only 3 or 4 lines of text to point you in the right direction.
Then while completing a series of classroom walkthroughs, I had the pleasure of watching one of Cheryl Steeb's classes in which she posed the questions, "Is the organization of this essay arbitrary? Is anything a writer decides arbitrary?"
Over the weekend, I heard a great interview with Joss Whedon who recounted a conversation he had with Stephen Sondheim about the experience of finding audiences who see more than they intended or ever saw in their own work.
Whedon spoke eloquently to the point that the difference between craft and art was the difference between creating a work which attempts to embody something for everyone and creating a very specific and individual work to which everyone will bring their own experience and subtext. He told an amusing story of upbraiding some fans who claimed to have found some subtext that he did not believe existed in his work. After he accepted an invitation to visit their website and saw their deconstruction of the episodes in question, he issued an apology to them for discounting their analysis. He said that was when he started believing in BYOS or Bring Your Own Subtext.
So I started to think about how that applies in our classrooms. No matter what we think we are presenting in the class, and no matter how clear we think the "obvious" conclusions are, we always have to leave room for the students who bring their own subtext to our work.
When discussing curriculum design and classroom planning, we often speak about the need make our classrooms student centered. What can be easy to forget is that, regardless of where the locus of control in an assignment is, from the student's point of view it is always student-centered. They are always the author of their own learning, but one of the things we have control over is how easy or difficult we make it for them to bring their own subtext, bring their own experiences to the center of the curriculum.
Another way to think about this is the difference between a classroom in which learning is the central focus vs. one in which teaching is the central focus. How challenging is it for us as teachers to let go of our desire to always fill the void with our teaching, when sometimes it is more effective to let the students fill the void with their learning? Well, very challenging, of course.
I'm not saying that teachers are control freaks, but I have heard more than one of my colleagues admit that one of the reasons they became teachers was so that they could write on the blackboard. How disappointing then to arrive in the 21st century where the boards aren't even black anymore and students get to be the center of attention.
But I am encouraged as I do the classroom walkthroughs and I see teachers edging toward the turning over of the center to the students. I am heartened as I watch all of us doing the 23 things and making public our status as learners as well as teachers. And I am proud of us.
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3 comments:
So Shawna
Is it ballet or modern dance that tells the complete story or leaves room for interpretation. I think, of course, that ballet tells the story only one has to learn to read the art form. Modern Dance always seems to me to tell a story AND the viewer has more power over the meaning he/she receives than in ballet. I prefer ballet (must be the mathematical me) and find modern dance sometimes hard to interpret.
You are certainly right about students and context. It so often amazes me the variety and creativity that some students bring to our Geometry classroom. I only wish more of them would take the plunge rather than demand the "life raft" to proceed.
@ Peter P.
We were speaking of ballet as the form which gives an already prepared text to the viewer. When I sit down at a performance of Romeo & Juliet or Coppellia, I get an entire dance libretto that tells me exactly what the narrative is that the action is meant to convey. At a modern or contemporary dance performance, I may get only a title and 2 or 3 lines to reflect the artist's intent and I am left to fill the rest in with my own interpretation.
I like the freedom of bringing my own questions and answers to modern dance. I tend to get frustrated and bored with ballet because I think if the narrative is entirely delineated all that is left for me to do is appreciate the aesthetics. I also end up wishing they would just use some words if they wanted to be so specific about the narrative. If your conclusion holds (and I believe that it does), that means I am not very mathemetical.
I would say that THAT difference--the difference between RECEIVING meaning (through expository and even prescriptive narratives) and CONSTRUCTING meaning (by bringing our own knowledge base and sense of subtext to the context)--is the primary paradigmatic distinction between Classical/Traditional art and Modernist/Post-modernist art. You just won't find an omniscient narrator in a modernist novel (and I won't, but want to, cite Woolf here...). And you won't see the classical three-point perspective in a modernist painting, which is why I chose "Guernica" as a "template" for my students to learn more about how to infer, contribute to, make, and re-make "the" meaning(s) of a work.
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