Sounding Curriculum Voices
Leah Fowler
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge, Alberta
Logopoeia: Sounding syncope, shadow, and spiritus in provoking
curriculum
In
the beginning was the Word.
Really?
|
 |
 |
In the beginning IS
the word.
What is the sound
of the word? What about images of sounds? What
about our pre-linguistic, inchoate mutterings?
Want to be reminded, you, who played with your own sounds in the dark of your
cribs and caves? |
[Reader makes early, a-linguistic
sounds like a child exploring oral sound: Clicking,
fricatives, rrrrrrr, growl, sigh, hmmmmm, whistle,
birdsong, mmmmmMMMmmmm, yodelish-two-note drop, howl,
out-sighs, scream, drawing in of breath…intake…snort,
laugh, cry, arghh! Sigh…sssss, buzz, vzvzvzvzvzvz
(like revving a car), blowing wind…love-sounds,
gradually add interrogative sounds…Trumpet call.
Sounding out: Da, pa, father, Ma…mum, mother,
 |
m-other,
eiieeyyiiee, I…I…I…I? Wha...wheeee…we?]
[owl sounds…hoot into Who? WHO?
What?…What?
Where?
Where
should I meet you? |
Here,
over here, in the curriculum. Bring your language;
bring your mind, okay?
Why? Because we still need to know
more, know again. Curriculum is the place where we
do educational housework in the cognitive and affective
schema. You know, wash and wax ideas, scrub knowledge,
sweep misunderstanding, vacuum logical fallacies,
dust epistemologies. It’s gotta be done everyday,
every lifetime, every generation.
Why? Because we need to learn more
of our relationship of language to the earth.
Why? Because we are in need of a
better geology of thought…the planet is in trouble.
Yes, but we have to write essays.
Good, those are the core samples we drill in the ore
of human consciousness. Why? The intellect cries,
and wants to know and wants to understand.
 |
Metaphors, you
want more metaphors? Fine, language is both
vehicle and shelter.
What are my intentions?
[Chuckle]:
To move further up the evolutionary beach, I
suppose. |
Sometimes even to transcend the quotidian
vicissitudes. Just for a rest, now and then, I like
to hover and play and imagine, beyond my own, grounded
existence. I am not just a “human-doing.”
In human being, the outcomes are different.
Outcomes! Objectives? Intentions.
What, here?
Yes, bring your conceptual lust,
your intellectual desire, your knowing appetite. Bring
your curiosities. Ask your questions.
Yes, I have
a question: Why do you teach language arts?
[Sigh.]
More metaphors, never enough metaphors: language
is a temenos to hold difficult, beautiful, and
transitory human thought, a crucible for knowledge,
a double helix for human narrative. That very
process of thinking makes light and offers guidance
in the darkness. We keep losing our way.
Language can provide illumination
sometimes, so we can play and learn and live
our curriculum of being. |
 |
Okay, I get your intention to
provoke curriculum. What dis/plays do you have?
Sounds, images, words, artifacts.
Will there be activities?
Oh yes…there will be dancing,
and there will, of course, be more questions, all
kinds of questions.
What are we looking at?
Images. Poems. Texts. And what do
you make of your seeing?
What do you hear? What melody do
you listen for? What do you make of your hearing?
What do you smell and taste and touch,
directly in your study of the literal world?
That’s very dangerous you know.
There will be questions. Really provoking questions.
You have to do exams…there
is accountability you know. Standards. Outcomes, I
said. There is a curriculum to cover. [Gesture of
great quilt/blanket settling.]
But where does curriculum lie and
why is it so cold that it needs to be covered?
Can we provoke the curriculum
lie?
We hope so.
How?
By questions. By sound. By image.
By thoughtful language. By asking: what about the
listening, what about the sound of questions, what
about the music and rhythm, the melopoeia
of curriculum in this complicated conversation that Pinar (2000: 30) urges globally and locally? What
about the seeing, the images, the light, what about
the phanopoeia?
What about the language, the dance of the intellect,
the heartful revelation-making, the soulful ancient
apprehensive conceits, the logopoeia? What about the spirit of us evident in artifacts of
the imagination?
Something
in us desires to know, desires syncope in the expected,
desires shadow during daylight. Desires poeia as the world threatens to deconstruct itself. Desires
inspiritus in the too-too solid (was that sullied)
flesh? And we do seem to want uninterrupted clear
breathing associated with inspiritus, but we lately seem to have difficulty breathing when
it comes to curriculum.
We want
to be able to breathe new oxygen into fresh practices
of learning and teaching and we keep getting interrupted
in that quest. Perhaps, though, the interruptions
are the curriculum. And we know that interruptions provoke
us. Syncope is a word Rebecca noticed, and brought
to us, one that helps with understanding the nature
of interruption.
 |
Recently
I had a loss of consciousness. Literally. Stumbled
and galumphed my way out of a Christmas Eve, candlelight
service and collapsed on the concrete steps outside.
I seem to have had a transient cerebral anemia. What
I heard while drifting out of consciousness was a
choir, a flight of singing high mellifluous notes.
Logically it was a sounding from inside the cathedral
in Victoria. But really, I was unable to determine
which side of the mortal wall from whence the music
came. Like the ones Rebecca describes in her exploration
of melopoeia
and writing, and Wendy alludes to in the co-dwelling
of shadow and light, that recent physical syncope
caused in me a deep reconsideration of the curriculum
of being. In the days following such syncopes, I reach
for poetics as a helpful frame for understanding,
and so I return as I consider the topic of sounding
the curriculum. I reach for a particular kind of poetics
in this conversation with Rebecca and Wendy and with
you, the reader.
That poetics
is logopoeia, the managing force in my own inner education, I suppose.
Logopoeia
manages my senses and opens the questions that arise
from the fire of my memory, perception and imagination.
As always when I live with language, I want a narrative
history of the word, want to follow it home and looks
through its windows to catch glimpses of its etymology,
phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics as I
build a relationship with it. My old studies of Latin,
German, and French fail me with the meaning of logopoeia
because I did not study Greek…so what does logopoeia mean? As I reach for dictionaries, I think logo…logos,
hmm…something to do with the word or logic. I remember long ago reading something in
Aristotle about logo poeia…and poeia…might
that be about making, in a poetics? Of course that
will have to do with sound and sense and image if
we are brave enough to explore poetics, and startle
ourselves with unexpected images here, in poetics
of curriculum. (Of course, I think immediately of
Huebner, and Eisner, Grumet and Greene, and so many
others). But I interrupt myself.
Back to
the word: two parts logo(s) and poeia.
Logo—this
is a loan word to form compounds, from Greek logos.
Logos–1.
the rational principle that governs and develops the
universe. 2. Theological–the divine word or
reason incarnate. 3. derived from Greek word, saying,
speech, discourse, thought, proportion, ratio, reckoning
akin to speak.
Oh fine.
Like Carl Sagan is credited with his alleged saying,
if you want to bake an apple pie from scratch, first
you have to create the universe. If you want to sound
the curriculum, you have to return to the beginning
and we know: in the beginning was the word! In the
dictionary just before logos, I find logomachy –a
dispute about or concerning words…”a contention
or debate marked by the reckless or incorrect use
of words.” A cautionary definition.
Oh fine. Now there is a new logo-ethic
quality required and how can I say anything?
Silence. Thought between the words.
Back to de/fining.
In the dictionary,
right under logos, appears the word logotherapy.
Is that what we do in curriculum studies? Logotherapy is a “form of psychotherapy that stresses the
non-medical aspect, as by finding for a patient the
meaning and aim of existence as a human being.”
Hmm. Yes, but there is the poeia part…turn from page 788 to 1024 in Random House
Dictionary [isn’t that a great name for a publisher
of words and definitions?]. I cannot find that root
word except indirectly through the listed words “poem”
and “poesy” and “poet” derived
from Greek “to make.” Logopoeia: the act of attempting to make a “rational principle
that governs and develops the universe, to make a
divine word or reason incarnate.”
Etymology
helps: logopoeiea is a fundamental aspect of curriculum: imagining making
a better word, a better image, sound and way of being,
a better world, where all have a right to be present
and heard and learn, to be embodied and to dwell.
I have in my dictionary search returned to the primal
and difficult beginnings of being and the construction
of the world that each soul makes in its brief hour
on the living planetary stage.
Syncope. After having worked for more than twenty-five years
in curriculum, formally and informally, consciously
and unconsciously, I still look for what is beautiful
and true and just and meaningful, for what is possible
in the human enterprise. I ask: what DO I want to
provoke in curriculum? After all this time and study
and reading, what IS there to SOUND, or shall we just
have tea together and look at the spring blossoms
and smile and nod and watch the horizon and sing quietly,
draw freely, read randomly?
But something
in me does want more, because as Wendy says there
is a more-ness to the world.
As I write this, I remember a few days ago, a thirteen-year-old
girl sat amid half a dozen women scholars at a pot-luck
supper and just said out of the blue: “What
is the point of everything? I mean you are born, you
go to school, you get married and have kids, [I live
in Alberta: those are the options] you get old, you
die? Does it matter having lived? So to keep happy
I keep busy and think of other unimportant things.”
Her simple
sentences unnerved me. Obviously I have thought of
this question many ways as I am sure we all have,
but to have it stated so succinctly by someone so
young and already uninterested in the curriculum of
being was a shock, a syncope, a sudden noticing of
her poor curriculum. I wanted to answer her questions,
to share with her my life in poetics, phenomenology,
hermeneutics, narrative, but I said nothing—while
pondering deeply about how to connect through curriculum
in community, through relationships. Questions of
meaning sound and echo and reverberate into the conversations of
curriculum. What sounds, what images, what language
can now grow in the middle so that we can dwell together?
That is
what we have to learn: how to dwell together.
If we cannot find a way, then all is lost…politically,
culturally, relationally, existentially. I do not
know about you, but I feel urgency in finding some
of those answers, futilely wanting others to give
me texts to study that will help with all of this.
Yet what I seek is within
the texts of sound and image and language created
between and among us
that we must study together. And there, present within
the Alberta curriculum guides of language arts, the
objective of learning to dwell together
is alluded to in principle: #1 and #5 General Outcomes
English Language Arts state that “students will
listen, speak, read, write, view, and represent to
explore thoughts, ideas, feelings, and experiences
and to respect, support, and collaborate
with others.”
(Italics added).
That means
we cannot afford to spend our whole lives in the luxury
of selfish indulgence, amusing ourselves like disillusioned
thirteen-year-olds, thinking about other unimportant
things in a refusal to know. Jung spoke of the evil
of the refusal to know and its terrible cost, to individuals
and to communities local and global. I agree with
the Czech playwright, Vaclav
Havel, once dissident and then president who, I think,
prevented Czechoslovakia from following the blood-bath
path of the old Yugoslavia. In an address in Washington,
DC (February 21, 1990) he said: “If the hope
of the world lies in human consciousness, then it
is obvious that intellectuals cannot avoid forever
assuming their share of responsibility for the world
and hiding their distaste for politics beneath an
alleged need for independence” [Havel, 1997:19].
He inspires me when he says: “History has accelerated.
I believe that, once again, it will be the human spirit
that will notice this acceleration, give it a name,
and transform those words into deeds.” Havel
is passionate in his focus on human curriculum: “Without
a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness
nothing will change for the better, ecologically,
socially, demographically, politically, economically,
multiculturally, ethically”(op.cit.). In this
age of personal interests, I think we are in desperate
need of a new logopoeia in all curricula,
one where we put our heads together, use our languaging
intellects, and make something good of our being here
together.
Smith also
speaks of the need of learning to live together in
the house of being, which is language itself ( Smith,1983a,
cited in Pinar et al. 1995: 421). Smith and Heidegger
remind us that language is where we live. Their words
perpetually provoke a mindfulness about how we talk
about curriculum and how we “allow the voice
of language itself to speak through us” (422)
by speaking authentically. There is a challenge in this increased sophistication of
bureaucracy and techno-speak and return to commodification
of human resources.
But Aoki
(1993a) calls our easy blame on bureaucracy into question.
He “locates the problem of curriculum design
in poetical, not bureaucratic, language.” He
calls for a language to be “one that grows in
the middle” (422). That call still holds.
But that
middle is in jeopardy. If there are multiple political
and economic syncopes in image, in sound, in work,
in the poetics of curriculum, then the middle can
be ellipsed, left out, and I do believe that continues
to happen. The dark side of syncope is that it can
invite erasure, as it has recently with boards and
divisions focusing on grades and competitions. In
the name of (what some might call) fascist efficiency
of learning for high performance on standardized tests,
there is deep threat to the fertile middle. If the
middle, that process of sounding things out, of sounding
the depths and visions, is the dwelling place in learning,
then losing it is a serious matter. Instead, we want
to provoke those quick political directive statements
of outcomes and “cut to the chase” conceptions
of evaluation, and like Aoki, call for more dwelling
in the middle, through making images, and sounds,
and words together with our embodied intellects. It
may be in these syncopes of melopoeia,
phanopoeiea, and logopoeia that we really start to learn.
Syncope
also may be a necessary obsession (Sullivan, 2001)
where we notice our breath and talk, representation
and word. That very concentration calls for moving
breath from an unconscious to a conscious cognitive
act. Thought—logos—does that. Likewise,
I hope we can interrupt our automatic everyday talk
and thought and work in curriculum to open awareness
and responsibility about other ways of being and dwelling
in curriculum.
We play
and risk and talk about three ways of provoking curriculum,
rooted in traditions of poetry from Aristotle to Ezra
Pound to Luce-Kapler, Donawa, and voices and our students.
We hope for syncopes, shadows, and language to provoke
and balance for more meaningful dwelling.
Canadian writer Timothy Findley (1990)
inspires too toward a more meaningful dwelling:
I know
that human imagination can save us: save the human
race and save all the rest of what is alive and save
this place—the earth—that is itself alive.
Imagination is our greatest gift…if you can
imagine harmony, you can achieve it. Harmony, after
all, can be well defined as an absence of cruelty.
If I am a hiding place for monsters—and I am—then
I can also be a hiding place for harmony. At least,
I can imagine such a thing. (300)
Whether or not you agree with Findley
about the power of imagination and harmony, one of
the tools I suggest we may use to understand and provoke
curriculum and to labour in it, is the imaginative
logopoeia, the poetics of our embodied intellects.
Stuck for
answers in the sounding of the call for a poetics
of language and intellect, along with melopoeia and phanopoeia, I want to ask each of you about your own poetics of curricula. Are there
words for, do you have, a quantum, durable, light,
and essential poetics of curriculum studies that nourishes
life while it also teaches? Can we talk about such
poetic in the earthy and practical patter of “common
people”? Can we talk of books and bread, of
syncopes and openings, of inner interruptions and
outer margins at sites of contingency and possibility?
Can we, as Antoinette Oberg often says, enlarge the
boundaries of discourse about this?
Perhaps
there will always be a requiem for lost curriculum.
But along with logopoeia, please let Rebecca’s work with melopoeia and Wendy’s with phanopoeia also open ways for us to think and talk about other
necessary things that have been shunted aside and
now need to be sounded. Curriculum studies can be
a provocative site for language and thought, music
and voice, image and light to sound the human consciousness,
so we are able to breathe, dwell, and even be inspired,
amid the great difficulty of Being.
I, Aging
Curricular Icarus
What, too near the sun, good friend?
Fingertips are not enough to hold
melted wings
Insubstantial air of outcomes,
hard water of evaluations, no flight-thermal
for wings .
What was it you were flying toward,
good soul?
What now, as we plunge head-first
into the sea of curriculum?
Well, unpack image and fantasize
phanopoeia
fold sound, but mind the melopoeia or you might bump your head,
Search new horizon, new thresholds;
imagine logopoeia.
I wonder, Jane Hirshfield, if hope
is the hardest love we carry.
Regard nearby faces for other reflections
of being:
sound the work of the heart,
sound the word of connection amid
fear and syncope.
Against hermeneut’s geo-ethical
narratives all unraveled,
sound an educaritas.[i]
—Leah Fowler, February, 2003
Resources
Alberta Language Arts Curriculum
Guides and Program of Studies, 2002.
Andersen, H. C. (1908). Stories
from Hans Andersen. [Illustr. Edmund Dulac.] London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., &
Tiffin, H. (1989). The empire writes back: Theory
and practice in post-colonial literatures. London:
Routledge.
Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning.
Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press
Donawa, W. (2002). That unlikely
green. Unpublished poem. Victoria, British Columbia.
Elias, J. (1999). The prayer cycle. [CD]. Sony.
Finke, L. A. (1992). Feminist
theory, women's writing. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press.
Findley, T. (1990). Inside memory:
Pages from a writer’s notebook. Toronto:
Harper Flamingo Canada.
Foucault, M. (1984). What is an
author? In P. Rabinow (Ed). The Foucault reader.
New York: Pantheon Books.
Friedman, S. (1994). Craving stories:
Narrative and lyric in contemporary theory and women’s
long poems. In L. Keller & C. Miller (Eds.), Feminist
measures: Soundings in poetry and theory. Ann Arbor,
MI: University of Michigan Press. 15–42.
Grumet, M. (1988). Bitter milk:
Women and teaching. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press.
Havel,V. (1997). The art of the
impossible: Politics as morality in practice. Toronto: Knopf.
Hirshfield, J. (1998). Nine gates:
Entering the mind of poetry. New
York: Harper
Huebner, D., Hillis, V. (Ed.), &
Pinar, W. [Introd.]. (1999). The lure of the transcendent:
The collected essays of Dwayne. E. Huebner.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. [I have cited Dwayne
Huebner from course readings and discussions offered
during a doctoral seminar he taught at the University
of Victoria, summer, 1998. The 1999 date refers to
the subsequent publication of the course readings
by Lawrence Erlbaum.]
Lather, P. (1996). Troubling clarity:
The politics of accessible language. Harvard Educational
Revue, 60, 525–545.
Le Guin, U. (1979). The child and
the shadow. In U. Le Guin, The language of the
night. New York: Perigee. 59–71.
Luce-Kapler, R.
(in press). The gardens where she dreams. Ottawa,
ON: BorealisPress.
Morson, G. (1994).
Narrative and freedom: The shadows of time. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Nussbaum, M. (1990). Love’s
knowledge: Essays on philosophy and literature.
Oxford: Oxford.
Pinar, W. (2000). “Strange
fruit: race, sex, and an autobiography of alterity,”
in P. Trifonas (Ed.) Revolutionary pedagogies:
Cultural politics, instituting education, and the
discourse of theory.
New York: Routledge. 30-46.
Pinar, W. Reymolds, W., Slattery,
P., and Taubman, P. (1995). Understanding curriculum:
An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary
curriculum discourses. NewYork: Peter Lang.
Rich, A. (2002). Arts of the possible:
Essays and conversations. New
York: W. W. Norton.
Rich, A. (1991). An atlas of the
difficult world: Poems 1988-1991. New
York: W. W. Norton.
Schweikart, P. (1998). Reading ourselves:
Towards a feminist theory of reading. In R. C. Davis
& Schleiffer (Eds.), Contemporary literary
criticism: Literary and cultural studies. New York: Longman.197–219.
Sullivan, R. (2001). Labyrinth
of desire: Women, passion, and romantic obsession. Toronto: Harper Collins.
*Quotations from
Hildegard von Bingen appear on the CD Vision, produced by Tony McAnany for Angel records. (1994)
About the Author:
Leah Fowler, Ph. D.,
teaches undergraduate pre-service teachers and graduate
students at The University of Lethbridge in Alberta.
Her research and writing focuses on difficulty in
teaching and narrative research methods in curriculum
studies and language arts. Her new book (in review)
is called A Curriculum of Difficulty: Stories and
Narrative Analysis in Educational Research.
E-mail: leah.fowler@uleth.ca
