Toward a Poiesis of Curriculum Donna Lynn Trueit Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2005 Complexifying the poetic: toward a poiesis of curriculum Donna Lynn Trueit Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Education Commons Recommended Citation Trueit, Donna Lynn, "Complexifying the poetic: toward a poiesis of curriculum" (2005). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2988. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2988 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. COMPLEXIFYING THE POETIC: TOWARD A POIESIS OF CURRICULUM A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Curriculum and Instruction by Donna Lynn Trueit B. S. N., University of Victoria, 1994 M. A., University of Victoria, 1996 December 2005 © Copyright 2005 Donna Lynn Trueit All rights reserved ii DEDICATION To Bill (Dr. William E. Doll, Jr.), without whom this inquiry would have been impossible: your optimism, imagination, faith, intellect and love inspire and sustain me. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project was made possible by the incredible, intellectual atmosphere of inquiry in Curriculum and Instruction at LSU, in the Curriculum Theory Project, developed and promoted by Drs. William Pinar and William E. Doll, Jr. In this academically rich, challenging, stimulating, and welcoming environment, I took up the invitation, graciously extended, to partake. I am so glad I did. I thank all those whose support and encouragement I received in small ways every day I attended classes or went to the library, faculty members, especially David Kirshner and Nina Asher, and C&I clerical staff, the fabulous sisters, Lois and Joyce. In the successful completion of this project, yes, but also in living in the south, and learning about myself and others, I have been aided or inspired by the following people whose particular contributions I wish to acknowledge. My major advisor William Pinar, who asked few, brilliantly insightful questions in guiding this project: Your leadership in the field, your vision for the future, and your relentless pursuit of scholarship are exemplary. Professor Petra (Munro) Hendry, whose penetrating analysis and questioning of assumptions, particularly regarding other “ways of knowing,” takes scholarship on gender issues beyond feminism, and enacts that scholarship as praxis. Professors Denise Egea-Kuhne and Wendy Kohli, who introduced me to the French poststructuralists, feminists Cixous and Kristeva, and Michel Foucault respectively. The fabulous C&I graduate students with whom I have shared classes, conferences, lunches, and “gatherings,” whose intellectual struggles and accomplishments have been inspirational: Steve Triche, Hongyu Wang, Nicole Guillory, Sean Buckreis, Ugena Whitlock, Laura Jewett, and Jie Yu. Sarah Smitherman, provided technical assistance—and so much iv more: surrogate daughter, unending source of local knowledge, junket tour-guide, willing and wonderful companion. Among this talented and hard-working group, I stand in awe, Brian Casemore, of your artful cultural scholarship, your insightful, sensitive, talented articulation of identity. Peggy McConnell, good friend, native New Orleanian, guide to New Orleans culture and history, poetic writer extraordinaire, a literary award awaits you. Please write. Kathy Dale, our daily emails, virtual morning coffee-ing, add depth to my vision—a binocular perspective—with encouragement, humor, and love. My sister Valerie whose confidence in my ability is unwavering and whose prayers make all things possible. I carry with me the memory of my father, Charles Trueit, with a grade 10 education, reading law to deepen his understanding of police work: your intellectual struggles, Dad, did not go unnoticed. My persistence and determination in questing—the hunt—are due to you. My mother Helen Trueit, children Jennifer Barber, Sarah Barber, and Luke Barber, and granddaughter, Maeve Carlin, nurtured and sustained me with their love and encouragement: your absent presence spurred me to completion. This project was larger, more enduring and much more demanding that I could imagine—certainly more than I told you it would be. I hope you will share my monumental sense of achievement and feelings of joy, as well as relief, at its completion. To the unbelievable Bill Doll, whose generosity defies description, you have opened a whole new world me and I am delighted to share it with you. To you all, my deepest gratitude. v PREFACE The visible is set in the invisible; and in the end what is unseen decides what happens in the seen; the tangible rests precariously upon the untouched and ungrasped. John Dewey1 This dissertation began as an attempt to theorize “conversation,” based on my experiences of learning, intuitively understanding conversation as a necessary element of my learning. I planned to build upon a chapter written for my Masters thesis entitled, “Conversation as a Mode of Research” (Trueit, 1996), elucidating what conversation is and how it works. I was further encouraged in this project when I found William F. Pinar’s (et al., 1995) reference to the field of curriculum as a “complicated conversation.” Seeking to narrow the topic, I was surprised and inspired by neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty’s (1979, 360) inference that conversation is poetic. This was, I thought, an odd claim when I first read it. I associated “poetic” with poetry, being imaginative, speaking metaphorically. I was aware that Walter Ong (1982), a medievalist, explicates the poetic aspects of speech in primarily oral communities: those Euro-Western communities prior to the printing press, where presence, situation and the oral/aural—rhythm, rhyme, flow of words—were important for understanding. From Ong’s perspective, conversation as oral discourse has a strong element of the poetic in it. This view seems to me true, but too simple. Rorty (1989) has more in mind about the poetic when he claims that the poet is “the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, [and] the vanguard of the species” (20). Rorty describes poets as those who “rebel more strongly against the fear of death than other men and women do” (24). Rorty considers Proust, Nabokov, Newton, Darwin, Hegel, and Heidegger all to be poets because “such 1 Experience and Nature, 1958. vi people are…thought of as rebelling against death—that is, against the failure to have created” (24). Poets are not just wordsmiths, they are creators. The intent of this dissertation is to complexify2 the poetic that Rorty talks about, to understand this concept in a broader and deeper sense. In reading Rorty’s later works, especially Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), I found he did indeed mean more. Rorty sees conversation as the discourse by which we envision the future, the discourse which gives us the new metaphors we need to think beyond modernity and its confines; the discourse upon which rests “intellectual and moral progress,” the discourse which gives us “an increase in imaginative power” whereby we can “make the human future richer than the human past” (87). These are vast claims, perhaps too vast, but in aligning conversation with imagination—thought itself—intellectual and moral progress, Rorty is putting forth his notion of progressivism and the social hope he finds there. I find this notion of conversation aligned with social hope inspiring, if overwhelming, as I think about education and the development of a new perspective on it. The phrase, thinking “beyond modernity,” is one I borrow from Cornel West (1993). William Doll (1993, 2002, 2005)3 explains “modern” and “modernity” as both a time period and a form of thought. Doll (1993) quotes David Griffin who refers to the straightjacket of modern thinking, that which began in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and/or the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Doll characterizes modern 2 The use of the word “complexify” here, and in my title, alludes to the connections I make to complexity theory. “To complexify” is to recognize differentiation, acknowledging “an increase in the intricacy of inter- relations,” with an implication of mysticism, “greatly assisted by the hand of life” (Oxford English Dictionary, online version). Complexity theory recognizes reductionism as an error characteristic of modern rationalism and plays with the generative possibilities of difference. For more on complexity theory, see Doll (et al., 2005). 3 Much of the theoretical work in this dissertation is influenced by, and has developed through, my relationship with William E. Doll, Jr., who is my teacher, husband, colleague, and best friend. vii thought, in part, as a cosmology reduced to mathematical and mechanistic principles, indicating the supremacy of (Cartesian, Euclidean) “right reason,” a subject/object split that has led to the hierarchical ordering of “reality”; universal and eternal laws pointing to certainty; inquiry directed at ascertaining causality, predictability, and control—in a linear fashion; a universe that can be broken down into atomistic