Common Senses

Socrates never wrote down his ideas. And we have applauded this method as... well, it's the Socratic Method. It seems if you are the first to do something (or at least the first to be able to have someone incredibly smart take notes for you--enter Plato), we might call you eccentric, but we might also name something after you and try to replicate your style because you are revolutionary. What is it they say, imitation is the highest form of flattery? True--and having a method named after you doesn't hurt, either.

Take a look at the "Big 3: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle"

Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." (At least, we think Socrates said that--we've socially agreed that he can have credit for this, so I won't push it.) Alright, I've examined. And, guess what?

I am just like Socrates! I like to ask questions! I don't like to take notes!

Wait a minute, though. That might make me a good rhetorician or a good philosopher. Buuuuut... I'm also pretty sure it makes me a very bad student. At least, I think it does. Good students pay attention, take notes, focus on writing things down. Questions are integral, but it is simply not acceptable in academic culture to think about the somatic metabolisms of knowledge and how embodied practices like physical note-taking--writing--might interfere with memory, processing, and the social construction (or deconstruction) of conceptual architectures in the classroom. In other words, a good student goes through the motions.

It never occurred to me until rather late in the academic game that my body was my learning site, as important to learning process as my mind. I am an intent listener who prefers to engage audio-visual information without the distraction of extensive note-taking. The interruption of my own writing inhibits my ability to build the memory frameworks of context and informatics that I rely upon in order to make sense of what I am learning. For someone like me, situated writing is not an accurate measure of focus. Writing "in the learning moment" is distraction--would indicate the desire for distraction. If someone did a "note check" to see if I had paid attention to a 3 hour lecture, one would be hard-pressed to find copious notes unless I had been trying to stay awake. Eek! The physical and mental act of writing is wonderfully exhausting and engaging--it competes too much for my attention. How can I run so many senses at once?

But, see, I am only one among many. I can't imagine I sense the world the same as my students, for example. Every day in my own classroom, I see students who represent very different, highly personal, intersections of what it means to embody learning. And in the same way that we have attempted to historically make sure that "attention" and "focus" aren't only taking place (it isn't enough to simply sit still and look forward) but are being physically disciplined into the bodily productions that are both expected (note taking in response to a lesson, for example) and productively normative (students must produce texts with the physical technologies that are appropriate to the scholastic environment--pencil, computer, bubble sheet, desk, etc.), we are also reacting with uncertainty and skepticism when we see our students' bodies learning in ways we cannot quite police. We aren't sure what to do when we see them learning in ways we don't know how to teach. This, I think may be at the heart of the strain of fear I hear in much of the conversation concerning digital literacy and literacy crisis--we don't understand what is happening.

Our bodies are adaptive, evolutionary. Writing is, too. And it is time we allow our classrooms to be, too. In "Distracted by Digital Writing: Unruly Bodies and the Schooling of Literacy" (2015), Stacy Pigg asks us to think about the nature of attention, the body, and digitality--the newness of it and our response to it. Pigg writes:

Discourse that identifies a contemporary attention crisis often involves implicit assumptions about literacy in at least two senses: first, it supposes that digital literacy causes distraction, and, second, it proposes that this inability to focus leads to decreased reading and writing abilities in non-digital contexts.

Pigg calls this entire assumption into question, but what fascinates me, too, is her insightful choice here of the word "senses." This word points toward the heart of what attention demands--a union of both physical sense and intellectual sense. Much of western academic history has sought to distract students from their physical senses--mostly through regimented learning schedules, feeding times, and a systematic requirement that students ignore their bodies even while the body is asked to perform and produce. But intellectual sense--cognitive learning--is rendered secondary when physical sense is not attended to. Ask yourself: how well can you compose when you are hungry or cold? Really? What digital writing has demanded is that we all--students, teachers, administrators, all of us--pay attention to the physical, embodied, sensory experience of writing and its effects on the intellectual. It has broken us out of our routine by changing the literacy medium--it has asked us to evolved. It might be easy to assume that the tool (the digital medium) is causing the distraction. But it may be that in learning the new, we are using our bodies anew to perform an all-too-familiar intellectual task--learning and writing--in a way that is asking us to sense the world with a new touch. 

The keyboard, the smartphone screen, the ________(who knows what that blank will be filled with tomorrow that we will get to learn)--they are all new. The new takes time and focus to learn. Communicating our ideas authentically and efficiency is no longer simply a matter of "know thyself": it is also a matter of "know thy technology" and how to let it be an extension of both body and brain. And as our technology evolves with us, the barrier between brain/body/technological platform is (arguably) becoming ever-reduced, presenting us with exciting questions not about distraction but about the possibility of growing symbiotically with these technologies and presenting our attentions (our identities?) in emergently coherent ways.  

Perhaps what I am advocating for is tolerance of the learning curve as we all adapt both body and brain to the new tools of our trade. The old rigid methods don't work anymore. The old rigid methods have never worked. I think harmony of body and mind are necessary to adaptation of any kind. (Consider this fantastic, modern, and forward-thinking article by Fleckenstein, Spinuzzi, Rickly, and Papper (2008): The Importance of Harmony: An Ecological Metaphor for Writing Research.) So as we all learn how to think about literacy--how to simply use the new literacies and tools of literacy as they emerge--I would say, yes, let us be kind to one another. And kind to ourselves. Revolution may happen quickly, but evolution takes a bit more time.

We're all in this together,

Rachael