Delight and Travel

Delight and Travel Dialogues in teaching and learning Wesley College St Kilda Rd October 10 2009 The chase John Brack http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/johnbrack/education/imagebank.html We may well ask of any item of information that is taught or that we lead a child to discover for himself whether it is worth knowing. I can think of only two good criteria and one middling one for deciding such an issue: whether the knowledge gives a sense of delight and whether it bestows the gift of intellectual travel beyond the information given in the sense of containing within it the basis of generalization. The middling criterion is whether the knowledge is useful. It turns out, on the whole, as Charles Sanders Pierce commented, that useful knowledge looks after itself. So I would urge that we as schoolmen let it do so and concentrate on the first two criteria. Delight and travel, then. Jerome Bruner (1979 ) Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press On Learning Mathematics in On Knowing: Essays for the left hand pp108- 109 Ithaka C. Cavafy (translated J. Mavrogordato) Setting out on the voyage to Ithaka You must pray that the way be long, Full of adventures and experiences. The Laistrygonians, and the Kyklopes, Angry Poseidon,—don’t be afraid of them; You will never find such things on your way, If only your thoughts be high and a select Emotion touch your spirit and your body. The Laistrygonians, the Kyklopes, Poseidon raging—you will never meet them, Unless you carry them with you in your soul, If your soul does not raise them up before you. You must pray that the way be long; Many be the summer mornings When with what pleasure, with what delight You enter harbours never seen before; At Phoenician trading stations you must stop, And must acquire good merchandise, Mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, And sensuous perfumes of every kind; As much as you can get of sensuous perfumes; You must go to many cities of Egypt, To learn and still to learn from those who know. You must always have Ithaka in your mind, Arrival there is your predestination. But do not hurry the journey at all. Better that it should last many years; Be quite old when you anchor at the island, Rich with all you have gained on the way, Not expecting Ithaka to give you riches. Ithaka has given you your lovely journey.. Without Ithaka you would not have set out. Ithaka has no more to give you now. Outline of the day (details within the booklet) 8:30 – 8:55 Registration – Coffee Common Room 9:00 – 11:00 Session One: Library Dr Julie Landvogt: Bring me that horizon: Working in the spaces of story 11:00 – 11:30 Morning Tea Common Room 11:30 – 12:45 Session Two: Library Readings and Discussion Groups Part One 11:35 – 12:00 Presentation Part Two 12:15 – 12:45 12:45 – 1:30 Lunch Common Room 1:30 – 3:00 School Presentations Allocated Rooms For rooms and abstracts, see in booklet 3:00 – 3:15 Concluding remarks Library Colleen Abbott 3:15 – 4:00 Drinks Common Room Special thanks to Colin Dobson and Wesley College for hosting the Ithaka Conference Bring me that horizon: Working in the spaces of story Julie Landvogt You may not believe me, but my title is not just an excuse to use an image of Johnny Depp. The film Pirates of the Caribbean finishes with yet another cunning escape from the worthy but boring careful rule-following military of Port Royal … and reunited with his ship and crew, our Johnny grabs the wheel and is off once more. “Bring me that horizon…” I’m happy to overlook a bit of skulduggery for the satisfaction of romance winning the day, and particularly for the sense that the closing of one adventure is simply the beginning of the next. Aiming for the horizon seems not a bad goal for us in education. There are no simple answers in teaching and learning– only more questions, and partial stopping points. In a recent discussion on The Book Show between Ramona Koval and the literary critic James Wood about How fiction works, Wood argued that the books he found most appealing are those which don’t try to reveal everything about a character, as if you can know them completely. His view was that “unknowability and mysteriousness characterise most of our relations with other people” and it is when novels take this on that they are most illuminating. Perhaps that unknowability is also what keeps us in teaching - we solve one set of challenges, at least for now, and see that another is around the corner; if a solution seems impossible, experience teaches that time (and some effort!) are likely to tell… I started getting ready for today in the usual way; clearing my desk, and then gradually, over several months, accumulating bits of paper with scraps of ideas, books and pictures seeming to promise inspiration or invite exploration, and old presentations to remind what I used to think so I can move onto now I think... Stuff piles on every available surface until the weight and disorder become oppressive and stressful and there is nothing to do but to start. Of course the clearing of space, and the accumulation of “stuff” for exploration, are part of the process, the work of writing; they are the preparation, or at least the first stages of the preparation. It’s an orientation, a tuning in, just as we construct for students in the first moments of a lesson. I used to think, now I think - is part of deciding where to go next. So you won’t be surprised that I found myself back with the Ithaka poem, which has served us pretty well for six years now – reminding us that any journey tests us with obstacles, monsters and temptation, but that it is the trip itself, not the arrival, which matters. Setting out on the voyage to Ithaka You must pray that the way be long, Full of adventures and experiences… The journey is in danger of becoming a pretty hackneyed metaphor for learning through experience; but like everything, it depends on the way we use it, on what we allow the image to offer. Someone – not even google has been able to tell me who – has said that there are really only two or three stories, and we tell them over and over again in slightly different ways. The first is the romance – boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl again. The second is the journey – the path from innocence to experience, from ignorance to understanding. A third is good versus evil. They are interlinked, often, of course, and it is the variations on the core story, the surprises, the challenges, the deviations from the expected tale, which illuminate new meanings. The common tale invites us in; it’s where we start. So when we began, it was with the journey story. The poem offered the idea that the experiences along the way are what matters, even if at the time they are not so pleasant. It echoed our knowledge of young people learning, and perhaps also ourselves; that it is not always simple, that the end is often not easy either to see or to be certain of. Most importantly, the poem stands revisiting; it offers different kinds of sustenance – images of the blue and white of island Greece, the romance and danger of trying tasks just beyond reach, the promise of understanding ... it calls to us in different ways at different times. The Laistrygonians, and the Kyklopes, Angry Poseidon,—don’t be afraid of them; You will never find such things on your way, … Unless you carry them with you in your soul, If your soul does not raise them up before you. The blind poet Homer, singing the story of the Trojan War and then of Odysseus’s travel home, little thought he would inspire films starring Brad Pitt, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom three thousand years hence. He was spinning a yarn that was part news story, part romance, part hero macho adventure; beginning from competing royal suitors for the most beautiful woman in the world through stories of loyalty and betrayal, lust and love, pride, humility and cunning. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl – good versus evil – journey towards understanding (or not) – Homer had it all. No surprise, then, that people have taken elements and made new stories from it, filling in the gaps – he knew the power of big ideas to engage and stimulate; he knew that from them people would think and learn. Today I am going to use the journey – elements of Odysseus’s journey, towards home after ten years at Troy - to think about and with what we have learned, over the last few years – and what all that means in going forward. Thus of course there are some ideas to revisit, some just for remembering and some to have a closer look at - four stages. o Setting off: Somewhere, over the rainbow… o Delight and travel: sustenance and challenge o Holding fast: the siren song o Arrival and onwards To begin, then, two elements without which we do not set out: a dream, and some kind of preparation. 1. Setting off: somewhere, over the rainbow… First: the dream. What does a dream need to have? It needs to connect at some level with what we know, so that we can believe in its possibility – but it needs also to promise something bigger – as writer Milan Kundera puts it, to imagine… Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

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