Imagined Time

December proposal defense

and Human Subjects approval

January invite participants

Febrary 1/2 day workshop 

One full day retreat

April  1st week

Introduction and Overview of the Study

Guiding Conceptural Frameworks and Empirical Foundations 

Research Methodology and Methods

The Participants and their Insights

June 3rd follow up contact/exchange with Participants

June 30th

Analysis and Interpretations of Data

July 15th

Summary, Implications and Recommendations
August
Defend

Immanence and Experience; The Irony of Writing What Cannot Be Said

"Now worry about how this emerges from mouths

and pages.  Fret on the exact order and precision.

There is still blood, bones and ash on the

move.  Restless and subterranean vowels,

eye contact, what isn’t said and the position

of the speaker

behind the curtain—these

spin the coin of our children-- round

sweet faces--

on a distant table.

If we stutter or drift, something terrifying

settles upon the sentence:  poetry perhaps,

demanding doubt, confusion, an apprehension

of meaning that refuses to be spoken."

(me in "The Grammar of Panic" from Working in the Emptiness)

"Every ancester sleeps in our moving bodies,
mine, yours, all of us descendants...
...bulbs,
laid them gently into their cold grave socks, singing
hyacinth, tulip, narcissus, crocus.  They're dumb
as bits of coal
and descending inward. Descendant. This trap door

we drop down every day, waking, say,
to no apparent history
but a simple room: edge of windown, a shirt
flung over a high-backed chair, the absent, usual coming
of winter light." (Marianne Boruch, "Thanksgiving" in Descendant)

What the Interior Tells

What the Interior Tells--The Maeutic begins at the beginning.
How can we be Seeing Things Hidden. What's hidden is not absent--it's here, just nascent--unrevealed but operational.   So to see something important sometimes we have to peek?  Maybe we need to acknowledge a beast or two along the way, know that all stories are fiction--even the true ones.  Maybe we have to dance across territory inside ourselves that seems to have been mapped by someone else.  Maybe it's a bitter thing at times, to realize that we've been framed and the by ourselves, no less.


Here's where it gets dicey.  Why something as scary and, well, Freudian as "psychoanalytic theory"? Because we have to start with our own damn self, eh?  Modernism caught on and gave birth to twins (fraternal)--Critical theory and psychoanalytic/pyschological theory.  The U.S. has biologized the psychological in such a way as to render it either micro (cognitive studies) or macro (sociological study).  But the middle path, the third way, whatEVER you want to call it--but a way for an individual interested in reflection to inform herself about her own thinking's situation (something critical theory does offer through auto-ethnography combined with any of the critical stances one would like to apply)--it's missing.

[Sure, we're goverened largely by the presses of social context, our behaviroal hits and misses, the feedback loop of being in the mileau. But to go inside and try to find a new angle on our own thoughts?  We get shunted to religion (which I have no quarrel with but it needs translation and "bridging" into the secular world we must navigate) or the counselor (implying that only a specialist can help us with our own minds).] 

The pantheon?  A World of Fragile Things (Ruti), Gender Trouble (Butler), Practice Makes Practice (Britzman), Novel Education (Britzman), Reinventing the Soul (Ruti), The Beast in the Nursery (Phillips), The Colonization of Psychic Space (Oliver), Bitter Milk (Grumet), Empire of Signs (Barthes), Blood Orchid (Bowden), When Learned Men Murder (Patterson), The Semiotic Challenge (Barthes), More Than Cool Reason (Lakoff and Turner), Semiotics (Innis), Philosophy in the Flesh (Lakoff and Johnson), Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (Lakoff).  Hidden: Therapeutic Action (Lear), Problems of Art (Langer), Sublimation (Loewald).  Not in picture: in press book The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (Ruti),

Context--the balancing act

It's a balancing act--To situate my specific cares within a context, in this case--foundations (philosophical, sociological and political) of curriculum.  Hidden from view: The Ideology of the Aesthetic  (Eagleton) and Introduction of Semiotics (Cobley and Jansz) along with my art display in the neighboring window (see post "So much beauty...") also hidden in this picture. 

The context: (Flinders and Thornton) The Curriculum Studies Reader, Beyond Critique: Exploring critical social theories and education (Levinson et. al. including yours truly), Democracy and Education (Noddings), Duino Elegies (Rilke), Happiness and Education (Noddings), Curriculum in Abundance (Jardine, Friesen, Clifford), Theory as Prayerful Act (Macdonald), Tractacus-Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), Curriculum: a river runs through it (Reynolds), Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee and Evans), a thousand plateaus (Delueze and Guattari), Philosophy of Education (Noddings), Methodology of the Oppressed (Sandoval).

Reflection Reflecting Reflectively

This is my all-time favorite picture of me.  Not me, really, of course…but this greeting card is evocative enough of a pivotal meaning for me; I’ve kept track of it for over ten years.  It is the haircut I had as a five year old. I’ve learned to respect the idea that I’m very likely researching what I cared about as a five year old.  My commitments and interests begin that far back, I’m sure; I posit they do for most of us.  Certainly psychoanalytic theory posits this--Madeleine Grumet, Deborah Britzman, Alice Pitt, Anne Phelan among others, propose that teaching and teachers can benefit from psychoanalytic ideas-- that they cannot escape them, in fact. “Impossible Profession” says Britzman of psychoanalysis but also of education.  The metaphor here?  We try to see who we are. But such work is a kind of koan--the "answer" is as much in the effort as in the vision.  Just look at the picture’s environment—an intimate place of industrial design meant to catch our waste and let us then sanitize and clean,  get a dirty job (one surrounded by all kinds of taboos and rituals) done, check ourselves in the mirror and go back into “the world.”  But what if this is the world, or, at least a world? 

Our subject's view is chancy--scaling multiple barriers. This gaze was not designed for her but she’s claiming it anyway she can. Improvising.  Can she make it?  I am amused to see that I inadvertently cut off the bottom of the picture which shows a pile of dirty towels beneath the child. (A strategy that failed?  The leftovers of others’ mess?  The intermediary step?)  Lastly: The reach of one cloth from the sideline is salient. Is this a help?  A random draping left from cleaning up? The ambiguity of it is poignant, I think.  Perhaps it’s both!  Perhaps it’s neither.  That cloth is "X" edging in from the margin and that feels freeing—like there is a way out, an after to this moment. 

The views are multiple:  my picture of this picture is a view, as well.  The frame of my office window holds up the card and the window holding the weather outside--interpreting, enhancing, disturbing and rendering (as art?) one moment in one day of one year of one life….like a snapshot, but better: a snapshot of a snapshot bridging times and places and, after all is said and done, ideas.  I like how this bad photo fades into the page in the upper right corner when place on a blank white page.  Where are the edges? 

W/F r(u)iting Tools.

 Writing Tools/Fruiting Tools Need I say more? 

Art as Philosopy as Education as Experience

So much beauty held to gether with such a thin line. Art is my immanence.  What would Wittgenstein say? It's taken me so long to get here--back to where I began. Small lights edge this randomly.  My son now 18 is a toddler in a silky nightie--he's always had strong aesthetic sensibilities.  His teacher's collage titled "In the Art Room" has always make me happy with it's depiction of all kinds of people (and their reflections and portraits) making art.  Buddha meditates in the corner with a peace crane his his lap.  Some things are hard even to paint.

Making stuff up from what's been done before and from what works for me

I should be to the methodology part. So I took a picture. Worth a thousand words? Perhaps not in the academy.

The Let Women Die bill was passed as wrote these words

Sometimes the reality of what lands on my desk is poignant beyond words.  I mistyped that as "beyond works" the first try.  Slips tell on us. Desktops, too?

Ideas that matter become matter? Then become what's the matter.

Reification:
My waking self is a reification of my dreaming self and my dreaming self, the same? 
The umbrella is upside down and it is raining outside. For now, this is a fine state of affairs.  Later, I imagine not. But that is only an imagining, like a dream.  Lucky me--to have an umbrella, to have a rainy day.  How's your umbrella today?

Wikipedia:
Reification in thought occurs when an abstract concept describing a relationship or context is treated as a concrete "thing", or if something is treated as if it were a separate object when this is inappropriate because it is not an object or because it does not truly exist in separation....This implies that objects are transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active, determining factor. Hypostatization refers to an effect of reification which results from supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist, an ontological and epistemological fallacy.

With Feminisms you can't tell the time. The time keeps telling you.

You can't tell the time. Galindo is always carrying her basin of blood, leaving footprints outlining the trail from court to bank to school to jail to home to town square.  When will we let Her free?

Early Childhood Care and Education radicalized me

The fanstasy of bootstraps has become a nightmare of ensnarement. How often do I say, when struggling, "what bad luck I've had" or conversely "what a messed up person I am"?  How often do I say, when revelling in well-being "Isn't it good I worked so hard for this?" Vanity, vanity, all is vanity and a crying into the wind. (Ecclesiaties)  There's more in this picture than meets the eye. Can it meet our heart?

The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge

The book's title says a lot.  It's a big book, too--858 pages, some of which I've read.  What mood is here?  Which objects speak the loudest, for you?  It's a bit busy.  But then, so is domesticity.

All Education is Elegaic

When I first posted this, I called it Literary Hedgehog All Out of Time.  Now I actually think it would be a better picture with only half of the sand run down.  What would you title this one?  And where should the sand be?

Right now Occupying Wall Street--gambles made/lost. A "son" Occupies Bloomington.

You can't roll a 7 with one die, eh?  Nest on its side on a widowsill overlooking the trees where hawks circle daily.  My nest empties out.  I'm still rolling.  What about you?