“The game as I conceive it,” Knecht once wrote, “leaves (the player) with the feeling that he has extracted from the universe of accident and confusion a totally symmetrical and harmonious cosmos, and absorbed it into himself.”
– Magister Ludi, Hermann Hesse
Abstract
This lengthy document begins with a discussion of the political act of conversing. It offers a meek-mannered confession and detailed explanation of said confession. It reviews the interactions of a reading group and then veers into another more stodgy confession: that the entire document is actually a call to action. By the end of this document, readers are encouraged to continue the work that stands Beyond Pedagogy and to pick up pens (or pound at keyboards) to find authentic educational change beyond the unhygienic standing water language pools that we so constantly wade through in today’s professional development models. You’ve been warned.*
*For those wary to jump into the entire document below, the Beyond Pedagogy group is now concluded. Future iterations of similar groups will commence in the near future. Those individuals interested in participating are encouraged to contact me (I’m not necessarily organizing new groups but can encourage and connect interested participants).
On Conversation
There’s something to be said for conversation removed from explicit purpose. That, in sitting down with a regimented agenda, a series of protocols beyond social niceties, and a timeline, there is a very definite loss in productivity. This may sound counterintuitive, however, think about the way a conversation unfolds with colleagues at lunch, in the car with a friend, over wine and starters at a restaurant; our natural inclination is of waywardness. We – as dialoguers – meander from point to point. Yes, these examples are ones without specific goals set in mind; however, they are the ways we develop, critique, and experience understandings and ideologies of the world around us.
Further, it is important to point out that such conversations, though void of standard meeting procedural paraphernalia, are not without vision. For all of us, a conversation is a moment of contention, of ideological territory being sniffed out, a moment of invested interest. We gain and procure through dialogue – a deafening yet invisible economy. Like the act of teaching, each discussion, each joke passed, each question echoed, is a political act. In voicing an “um,” a “like,” an ill-tempered or sardonic guffaw, we put ourselves on the line for judgment.
This rumbling of verbosity leads me to “an overwhelming question” (to quote Eliot): “Why not?” That is, why not remove the walls and pillars of organization from professional discourse? Even temporarily? As mentioned, we are all clearly invested in a common interest that arrives en masse on our campuses each morning (some members being tardy) and strives for some sort of decency in its education.
Confession
And so now I find myself winding down toward the natural base of the looming confession that needs to be made. Clearly, there was something I was remembering to tell you, but – like all good conversations – the purpose is occasionally occluded (our plumbing is now back to normal, fortunately). And so here we are: you, tentatively wondering if you should continue on the thin thread with which this narrative suspends itself; me, unsure as to how to broach the next step of this journey. And so, before patience wears thin and threads snap or unravel, let’s get it on the table: this missive, along with it’s unrelenting digressions and asides, serves as an official closing-of-the-books on the Beyond Pedagogy reading group. After seven meetings (one of which was purely digital), and several thousand pages, the initial group is now at a point of (belated) closure.
Initial Theory of the Group
As I explained at a debriefing of the Beyond Pedagogy group, the inspiration for it was The Glass Bead Game. Hesse’s novel, The Magister Ludi, though never quite defining the rules of the game, illuminate the futuristic society that somehow persists because of the role of the game. As such, the game’s Magister Ludi, somehow spins and weaves inter-subjective connections amongst and between different things (in the very abstract sense of the word). Perhaps the closest definite description:
Under the shifting hegemony of now this, now that science or art, the Game of games had developed into a kind of universal language through which the players could express values and set these in relation to one another. Throughout its history the Game was closely allied with music, and usually proceeded according to musical and mathematical rules. One theme, two themes, or three themes were stated, elaborated, varied, and underwent a development quite similar to that of the theme in a Bach fugue or a concerto movement. A Game, for example, might start from a given astronomical configuration, or from the actual theme of a Bach fugue, or from a sentence out of Leibniz or the Upanishads, and from this theme, depending on the intentions and talents of the player, it could either further explore and elaborate the initial motif or else enrich its expressiveness by allusions to kindred concepts. Beginners learned how to establish parallels, by means of the Game’s symbols, between a piece of classical music and the formula for some law of nature. Experts and Masters of the Game freely wove the initial theme into unlimited combinations.
With this idea in mind, the group is oriented – at least in execution – at stringing together the connections between different texts, ideas, and theories. The intersections of the ideas and personal experiences helps yield untended territory that will reap new knowledge. As such, it should be stated that the very key goal in all of this is to find new frames for understanding and approaching education. At the end of the day, I hoped we – as a group – were to have a more nuanced understanding of the learning process and how to work with individual students.
Additionally, the group, as a functioning Temporary Autonomous Zone, defined and flexed ideas outside the confines of specific agendas. As noted in the previous rant, the group was encouraged to deviate from specific topics, to wander freely between textual interpretations, questioning, and reflection. Additionally, group members allotted one another as facilitator throughout meetings and various facilitation strategies were developed, displayed and internalized for collective memory. In forgoing a specific protocol, group members defined meeting norms and behaviors – these too, in turn, were negotiated and revised.
The last guiding principle behind the group was just as idealistic. Sitting through countless meetings, training sessions, professional development gatherings, etc., I felt there was a rut in which we – as educators – had gotten ourselves into. Specifically, language was at fault. We use the same language over and over and dilute meaning, intentions, action. Pedagogy, assessment, data, “social justice”: the words are inflated and beyond recognition at this point. Similarly, we attempt to demarcate and name the world around us. SLCs, WASC, PI5+, COST, PLCs, CSTs, CAHSEE: the labeled terrain is an unfamiliar one and much different in topography than that of the actual students we are working with. Yes, I realize that such derivative denunciation of these terms is problematic. However, the idea here is that we’ve forced ourselves into a corner with a specialized language. In a very broad gesture, Beyond Pedagogy wanted to see what happened when educators looked outside the curtained realm of education discourse. Aside from a book about Kindergarten, all of the texts in the reading series were not directly related to the field of education: the group read non-fiction texts about the world beyond what happens at Manual Arts or LAUSD. Texts on mass media, the environment, human nature, anarchy, brainwashing became tools to experiment with opening up the language and logic that underpins the world as it functions on our schools’ campuses on a day-to-day basis.
History of the Group
Of course, all of that sounds good in theory. The group itself had its own growing pains, difficulties, and false footings in its journey onward and upward. Perhaps more than any other section of this report, this part will be most explicit; it describes what was and what did not in order to make clear the possibilities of what will be.
The books read over the months that the reading group was up and running were:
• Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber
• Dialectics of Seeing by Susan Buck-Morse
• Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram
• Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China by Jay Lifton
• Inventing Kindergarten by Norman Brosterman
• Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
• Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller
Aside from the Graeber “pamphlet,” which I had recently read, all of these were texts that had not yet been read by any of the reading group members. Additionally, writing style complexity varied across the texts: one text was a colorful coffee-table friendly book while several ventured into the complicated language of academia. As a result, one of the biggest challenges within this group was the limited amount of time between meetings. Seven texts (a few sprawling beyond 300, 400, and 500 page counts) piled on top of already demanding education schedules meant that often not everyone had completed reading ahead of time. As such, discussion would veer to and from the text. Not in itself a problem, though a more conscious effort to accommodate different reading paces needs to be considered in future meetings.
Related to this, the aforementioned schedules of the group members meant that attendance was never a consistent aspect of the group. Often a member or two was absent, a couple were no-shows and replaced mid-way through the series. Again, the time demands of this group are something worth seriously considering finding something more than intellectual growth to provide as compensation in future efforts. I would venture that, in an effort to expand the group potential in the future, something like salary points will need to be instituted.
Aside from limitations in time and attendance, a part of the group that needs to be addressed is the book selection. Specifically, for a group that is supposedly unhinged from specified regulation, it feels unnatural, unfair, undemocratic for all of the group’s texts to have been preselected by me. However, in an effort to fit into a grant proposal and to best illustrate the thematic broad-strokes of the group, pre-selecting the texts (for the first iteration at least) felt like the most direct rout for an entry way into circuitous, wandering conversation.
As a last point, I want to add that the conversations that took place within these groups (preserved as audio recordings for future use) were extremely valuable. The conversations illuminated past efforts toward a more inclusive educational practice, posed problematic challenges with today’s educational landscape, and pointed toward new areas for needed educational exploration. Initially, one of the goals of this group was to draft and present a model for change. Though the seven discussions that took place were of merit, there is not yet enough experience to present a fleshed-out, fully formed model for broader consumption. Instead, what follows are suggestions for developing the structures towards another PD model.
Another Confession
And now, after we’ve come this far, I find myself in the precarious position of both acknowledging that I’ve lost some (many) of you in this long-winded quest and fearing that I’ll lose more of you momentarily. Because, while this extended monologue began unsteadily and traipsed toward a standard review of the reading and discussion group, this entire effort is more a call-to-arms than a purposeless rant or standard-fare report. And although there is no specified format, academic report, or formal presentation, this is an effort to encourage others (perhaps you?) to continue the Beyond Pedagogy efforts. The value of face-to-face collaboration, discussion, and having one-foot outside of education is worth investing in. In the anti-method-method of Beyond Pedagogy is a libratory step away from past models of professional development and an embrace of true educational opportunity.
Brief Notes on New Models in Professional Development & Next Steps
I find my thoughts wandering back to the politics of discourse. Back to our initial point of origin. Back to the notion that we are giving something up in the imposition of regimented meetings and in the nature of today’s teachers’ professional development. What is a professional development that does not treat us as professionals? (I say this not pointing to a specific department or SLC meeting or PLC collaboration but to the model as a whole – again a problematic denunciation that will serve as an argumentative placeholder for the time being.) I feel that in winding down, the Freirean ideology I so regularly rely on will need to rear its head more resolutely. And so, in regards to that regimented PD, I turn to brother Paulo: “Manipulation, sloganizing, ‘depositing,’ regimentation, and prescription cannot be components of revolutionary praxis, precisely because they are components of the praxis of domination.” Next, I continue my Glass Bead Game by rubbing connections together between dialogue and the now existing strand of Freire: that praxis is of reflection and action; and – further – that, “Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed – even in part – the other immediately suffers. There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world.” In this respect, the next steps are a re-vocalizing, re-enunciation, revision(ing) of the Beyond Pedagogy vision: in order to reframe the world of educational discourse we must step away from it, again. That, in further iterations (not to be confused with reproductions) of the reading group, new meaning will be fostered.
In Tending the Wild, M. Kat Anderson describes the Native American practice of selectively burning deciduous or overly lush terrain in California. The effort was to properly cultivate the land and stands in contrast to traditional views of Native Americans simply living on the land instead of with the land. The text elevates Native American culture as more than a passive interaction with the land and more of a continuing, persisting dialogue with the earth. So too is the dialogue found within this group a promotion toward a more active participation in bettering the educational wilderness. (Freire, again, here to act as the glue to bind the metaphor: “Some may think that to affirm dialogue – the encounter of women and men in the world in order to transform the world – is naively and subjectively idealistic. There is nothing, however, more real or concrete than people in the world and with the world, than humans with other humans – and some people against others, as oppressing and oppressed classes.”) Beyond Pedagogy represents a similar, calculated deracination of the educational canon. With newly plotted land, the educational future is ours for the tending.