Here’s a tangle of metaphors: perhaps we
could envision language as the sea in which we humans swim;
perhaps we could see it as the magnificent and many faceted
tool with which construct a world; a bridge by which we
contact others; a mirror in which we envision beauty and
love. And then, less loftily, we could also see it as the
mortar with which we cement ourselves and our stories to
other people and their stories; as the familiar walls and
rooms where we tend to stay; as a tangled labyrinth where
confusion and clarity fight it out.
Language is the medium with which we create our world,
our relationships, our culture and our sense of self.
But language is deceptively simple, changeable, moldable;
a force that we do well to be both aware of and wary
of its seemingly endless complexity.
Language is slippery,
duplicitous, and confusing. It can be both creative and
destructive. Despite an appearance of neutrality, language
is never neutral. It carries a heavy load of cultural,
socio-political, historical, connotations and implications.
The use of language both hides the user and gives him or
her away; language can indicate origins, class, race, cultural
history, education, intelligence, attitude, and mood.
Writers
are complicit in this confusion, and contradiction even
as they strive towards meaning, truth and clarity. Writers
are people who learn to use language in particular ways;
they choose their materials, one word, one punctuation
mark at a time, cluster them together, string them into
lines and build in hooks that writers hope velcro their
words together into a meaningful artifact for the reader.
And
the reader comes to written language with a similar hope,
that within the writer’s wor(l)ds they will find meaning
and understanding. But of course they bring their own sense
of language to this task as well. Every person who has
ever learned a language, has learned, and continues throughout
their life, to use language in an amazing variety of ways,
and for a whole variety of reasons. Some of these reasons
are more honourable than others. The great African writer,
Chinchua Achebe has pointed out, that when language is
interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, this
disjoinment can be a conduit through which horror can descend
on humankind.
As educators, we depend on language as the
primary medium of our craft. We are often particularly
skilled and innovative users of language. We are also people
who know some basic things about language even without
examining what we know. We know language is complex, that
is has levels and layers of meaning that we, if we are
not careful, use without thinking. And thus, if we fail
to examine at least some of the power dynamics and embedded
cultural history within the kinds, levels, inflections
and connotations of the language we are using, we run the
risk of harming rather than helping.
As educators, we are
also often aware that our society continues to invent new
and richly complex ways to use language, both to clarify
and communicate, as well as to obfuscate and to confuse.
In such a historically rich, complex and confusing time
as our, time, and in such a tangle, it would seem deeply
necessary that people, especially academics and researchers,
examine, always, the nature of the medium in which we work,
and be able to understand and detangle the myriad ways
and levels in which language is used.
As educators, language,
both written and oral, is the primary vehicle we use to
both communicate, educate, and then to assess the results
of such a process. Thus, as educators, it is also necessary
that we continually inquire into the ideas, practices,
and issues of language.
Thus, in the call for this issue,
we asked questions such as “Can we, should we, how do we,
disrupt/subvert/divert/expose the language of media, institutions,
education, politics? What is it we don’t hear? Is there
a language of silence? How does language foster inclusivity,
exclusivity? Is there a language of the commons: ownership,
heritage? Is there a language of presence and presentation?
How do we understand multiple literacies: visual, textual,
audio, tactile, or semiotic? What struggles, resistance,
confusions, subversions, silencing, shaping, slippage do
we find within our engagement with this most fundamental
activity?”
In addition, we asked,
how might we, as engaged participants in co-creating shared
discourse, come to understand, conceptualize and engage
with the complexities of language? In answer to that call,
the essays in this powerful issue of Educational
Insights engage with language on many levels; hermeneutics, curriculum,
music, poetics, and philosophy, and the fundamentals of
making language itself. With such a wide and diverse topic,
as editor, I was happy to see articles that challenged
this topic from many angles, and that offer the reader
such a wide scope of thoughtful and engaged essays with
which to enter into the labyrinth, and the laboratory,
that is “word.” The articles in this issue challenge us
as educators, writers, scholars and language practitioners
to engage with this fundamental tool of our existence and
to constantly call into awareness the ways in which we
use language to structure our practices and our lives.
Luanne Armstrong MFA Ph.D
Writer, Editor
RR 1 S.4 C.6
Boswell BC
VOB 1AO
Author of Blue Valley, An Ecological
Memoir, available
from www.maapress.ca |
