We depend throughout this book on the work of other scholars, rely on their words and ideas to think with-and-through, to take us deeper in. We smile, shake our heads at Bruno Latour’s fatherly caution that a “paper that does not have references is like a child without an escort walking in the night in a big city it does not know: isolated, lost, anything may happen to it.” And yet we do draw heavily on theory, seeking and struggling with and reveling in it to expand, elucidate, test the limits of our own experiences. Turning to others’ thinking gets us mired, helps us see things in new ways…
Some readers enjoy following these “escorts,” find the references compelling:
I liked it when the theorizing interrupted the storytelling, because then I felt like you were telling me what the point of the stories was.
Others worry that they lose us in these abstractions: The citations disrupt the reading in ways that almost seem to undermine…the very emotional and personal accounts…
I felt like you weren’t there! …so I didn’t believe what you were saying.
Others testify to a loss, not of us, but of themselves. Feel shut out:
I’d be more engaged if I had a sense all through that I was a member of the intended audience, and that the ideas would lead to some connection to my experience….I remain the reader who finds the abstractions dense.
I have dipped into it a few times and gotten stuck each time… sections pulled me in and I found them very engaging but, as they went on, increasingly difficult to understand and therefore a little intimidating, both intellectually and politically…. Has anyone else said that? I want to be able to push past that…. I don’t know if this is a priority…talking your readers through the content…
As we write and re-write, the titles of our chapters morph. In our initial proposal, each title figures an identity: we line up race, gender, social class, even as we acknowledge the leakiness of each. In a later version, each title names a place: the classroom, the jail, various field sites. Eventually we find ourselves shifting from
understanding less as a noun (an ascribed set of traits) than a verb, something through which we move (again and again), both in and out
—Clare, Kevin, Jody, Anne, ”Reassembling”
Moving from selves, to sites, to ways of being. And doing.
David Bohm explains that the edgy field of eco-linguistics focuses on how language structure influences and shapes our thinking, how conventional English usage—such as the usual ordering of subject-verb-object (as in “Anne calls the class to order”)–invites, even forces, us to imagine a world made up of separate entities that are fixed and static. Eco-linguists like Andrew Goatley experiment with changing such common structures, giving a more prominent role, for instance, to the verb, making sentences more reflective of unbroken, undivided movement (“Called to order, conversing happens…”?).
Slowly, our verbs themselves begin to shift, from root forms to present participles.
Gerunds take over, become subjects, complements, objects of sentences.
Titles. Entitled. Titling.
Moving from past to present tense.
…it’s by writing… by stepping back a bit from the real thing to look at it, that we are most present.
—Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama
Experimenting with presenting everything in the continuous present.
…altering “the experience of being in linear time,” “the way we normally separate and sequence the past, the present and the future…. Acknowledging the porosity of time, the fluidity of temporality…
—Jody, “Leaking”
And so puzzling some readers:
The most common source of confusion is the shifts in time… I find the present tense confusing—clearly these events were in the past…
…this way of presenting past events as they unfolded needs to be set up more clearly.
Or less?
Seeking a more relaxed, hammock-like way of thinking about what happens in educational practice, one in which the shared time we occupy in classrooms gives “space” to a more capacious sense of phenomenological time, one in which past, present and future are intertwined.
—Clare and Anne, ”Unbecoming”
We add some dates. Take out others. Mix it up.
Time-play is allusive. Sometimes incoherent or lacking a clear referent. Like some of our photographs.
All those images that force things to stop for a moment.
—Claudia Rankine, reprised in ”Silencing”
Elusive, evocative; not clearly directional. Or directive.
I wonder if there is a place to explain the contexts you include in this book, what led you to them, why you choose them for inclusion in the narrative.
…because of the complexity you have come to, I wonder if…you might acknowledge/explain your style in some way–help readers ease into the eloquent but many-edged sentences; the framing of your work and this project uses the somewhat postmodern (or beyond that?) language of partiality, complexity, etc., which might be a little overwhelming for some readers….do readers need some prep for entering the space (made) of this language?
Maybe we need a map. A friend, Betsy Reese, cautions that
Any map is selective. Not just a reduction, but a distortion, of what it represents. Looking at the world from one vantage point, losing the advantages of another.
Can we be so direct and explicit about what we are up to? Do we always know what we mean?
Do we lose, thereby, the evocative? The peripheral glance? Our own sense of on-going discovery?
Can we put into writing some form of
design for access, not knowing what we don’t know about our [readers and their] needs? How might…we acknowledge the unpredictability of uptake, the possibility of being taken unaware? Can we reimagine accessibility…as ambient ubiquitous interface, shaped by surrounding social forces?
—Clare, Kevin, Jody, Anne, ”Reassembling”
Can we write more simply? More accessibly? Do we want to?
Doris Sommer says that “books can sting readers who feel entitled to know everything as they approach a text,” that “the slap of refused intimacy from uncooperative books can slow readers down.” She argues that such inhospitality serves an important pedagogical function for the reader, meriting “a pause long enough to learn new expectations.”
Pausing.
The world asks us to be quickly readable, but the thing about human beings is that we are more than one thing…We are multiple selves. We are massively contradictory.
—Ali Smith, “An Onion of a Novel”
Less oriented to knowing, more to being with the unknown.
—Anne, ”Silencing”
A central story in this book is the unpredictability of what happens, when a range of unconsciousnesses, unknown to one another as well as to themselves, gather in a classroom. In letting dreams “interrupt” the narrative, we try to model in language what we experience while teaching and learning. A friend muses,
I’ve had some training in dream analysis—but the sense I was making, or thought I was making, of the dreams didn’t fit with where you went afterwards. I felt dumb: didn’t know what was going on, or what I was supposed to do with this.
Can you experiment with this text as a space where your own un/conscious has voice? Might you play, as Katherine Hayles suggests—skim, scan, select what you want to read—let the rest go for now?
Slow down…?
What about having two doors into the text….a sort of reader self-navigation? One for those who, like me, feel invited by narrative and find theory very hard work, and one for those who think theoretically and find their interests engaged with a rousing theoretical start? And make it clear which is which, and make it possible to get well into the book through either door?
Each of these intermissions offers other forms, other doors—to what we’ve spoken here, to other directions you might take, to deep time, the greater whole.