ENACTION
BOLD VISIONS IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH Volume 14
Series Editors Kenneth Tobin The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA Joe Kincheloe McGill University, Montreal, Canada Editorial Board Angela Calabrese Barton, Teachers College, New York, USA Peter McLaren, University of California at Los Angeles , USA Margery Osborne, Centre for Research on Pedagogy and Practice Nanyang Technical University , Singapore W.-M. Roth, University of Victoria , Canada Kiwan Sung, Woosong University , South Korea Heinz Sunker, Universität Wuppertal , Germany
Scope Bold Visions in Educational Research is international in scope and includes books from two areas: teaching and learning to teach and research methods in education. Each area contains multi-authored handbooks of approximately 200,000 words and monographs (authored and edited collections) of approximately 130,000 words. All books are scholarly, written to engage specified readers and catalyze changes in policies and practices.
Defining characteristics of books in the series are their explicit uses of theory and associated methodologies to address important problems. We invite books from across a theoretical and methodological spectrum from scholars employing quantitative, statistical, experimental, ethnographic, semiotic, hermeneutic, historical, ethnomethodological, phenomenological, case studies, action, cultural studies, content analysis, rhetorical, deconstructive, critical, literary, aesthetic and other research methods. Books on teaching and learning to teach focus on any of the curriculum areas (e.g., literacy, science, mathematics, social science), in and out of school settings, and points along the age continuum (pre K to adult). The purpose of books on research methods in education is not to present generalized and abstract procedures but to show how research is undertaken, highlighting the particulars that pertain to a study. Each book brings to the foreground those details that must be considered at every step on the way to doing a good study. The goal is not to show how generalizable methods are but to present rich descriptions to show how research is enacted. The books focus on methodology, within a context of substantive results so that methods, theory, and the processes leading to empirical analyses and outcomes are juxtaposed. In this way method is not reified, but is explored within well-described contexts and the emergent research outcomes. Three illustrative examples of books are those that allow proponents of particular perspectives to interact and debate, comprehensive handbooks where leading scholars explore particular genres of inquiry in detail, and introductory texts to particular educational research methods/issues of interest. to novice researchers.
Enaction Toward a Zen Mind in Learning and Teaching
By Domenico Masciotra
ORE, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada W.-M. Roth
Applied Cognitive Science, University of Victoria, Canada and Denise Morel
English Montreal School Board, Canada
SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM / TAIPEI
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 90-8790-033-3 (paperback) ISBN 90-8790-034-1 (hardback)
Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands http://www.sensepublishers.com
Printed on acid-free paper
All rights reserved © 2007 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
CONTENTS
Preface
vii
A. TOWARD A THEORY OF ENACTION
1
1
Enactive Being in Situation to . . .
2
On Networks and Spielraum
35
3
Relationality
53
4
Intelligent Enaction
79
B. ENACTION-DO
7
103
5
A Way to Deep Interiority
107
6
Becoming One with Nature
127
C. ENACTIVE EDUCATION
151
7
Enactive Practitioner
155
8
Toward an Enactive Curriculum
173
9
Enactive Teaching and Learning to Teach
195
References
213
Index
215
About the Authors
221
v
PREFACE
A learner, a teacher or any other professional is construed as a being in situation to do something: they function by acting in situation. To be in a situation to . . . refers to the situating|situated dialectic: A person becomes actively situating by engaging her possibilities; and she is situated by virtue of the constraints as well as the resources inherent in the circumstances she finds herself in. Enaction expresses the inextricable and interdependent links between the two opposite poles of the situating|situated dialectic. * ***
Everything happens in a person’s head! one might say. But is this really the case?
As far back as the 16 th century, Montaigne drew a distinction between a well-filled head and a well-made head and argued that it was preferable for a teacher to have a well-made head and to educate her students with that same goal in mind. Traditionally, the school’s mission has been to transmit knowledge, and as a result it was limited to developing well-filled heads. Nothing much has really changed since then. Throughout the world, the mission of formal schooling remains the transmission of knowledge, and the emergence of the knowledge society in contemporary life has only served to reinforce this conviction. While the current curriculum reform movements indicate a shift toward the well-made head—or at least that is what proponents of the competency-based approach and its constructivist orientations seem to suggest—in fact, except for a surface change in vocabulary, the new curricula remain organized around hierarchically embedded items of knowledge to be imparted to the learners This situation threatens to persist as long as the content and organization of learning, despite successive attempts at reform, continue to be limited to the head and to knowledge conceived as external to the person. Above and beyond these reforms, education is in need of a genuine paradigm shift, because nothing is ever only in the head. A total turnabout is called for: to paraphrase Karl Marx (1977), we could say that current educational systems place people on their head; it is time to put them back on their feet and stand them firmly in the world. In fact, we could look long and hard in someone’s head and still not find that little homunculus who memorizes and retains knowledge, who represents things in the form of images, who reflects and manipulates the strings of his marionette body, and who functions by removing himself from the world. The mind is not a cerebral homunculus imprisoned in the brain. The notion of ‘brain’ refers to the entire nervous system and it is not limited to the encephalon, which is, of course, an important part of it. The brain is ramified, through its nervous circuits, in the whole organism. It inhabits the organism, which constitutes its global biological structure. Education must therefore develop the embodied mind. To educate is to vii
PREFACE
intentionalize the acting body, to give it sense and direction. The more the body is intentionalized, the more it is transformed from a mere living organism into an enminded living body. Nothing, therefore, is only in the head! Cognition is distributed throughout the whole body. But that is not all. The enminded body cannot operate detached from the world: it is always a function of a person in action and in situation, of a being in situation to . . .. As phenomenology insists, being a person means being-in-the-world . The purpose of education is to create those conditions that best favor the emergence and growth of this being-in-the-world in all its totality and oneness. The realization of Being’s full potential depends on the simultaneous transformation of Being, the world and the in. The being is the person, the world is the person’s reality, and the in is the relationship between them, or what we refer to as relationality. For example, a person becomes a competent teacher by developing her whole being-in-the-classroom. Teacher training, however, is not typically conceived in this way. Most of its efforts are focused on the being-outside-of-the-classroom: courses on child psychology, on the philosophy and history of education, on subject-matter pedagogy and methods abound, expressly designed to fill the heads of novice teachers with everything they need to know before they take their first step into the classroom. It is as if one were to train an actor by having him learn the lines of his script and once this is done, saying, “Okay, go ahead, there’s the stage, the audience is waiting!” Teacher education is often characterized by this kind of training, which is then replicated in her own interventions in the classroom: She teaches her students decontextualized disciplinary knowledge—really, she teaches how to regurgitate verbal formulae—that has little to do with their life and experience, and at the end of the process, tells them, “Now you are ready for real life! You know everything you need to know! The world of work awaits you!” This way of proceeding ignores what is truly essential in learning, namely that it is only by acting in situation and reflecting on one’s actions and their results that a person becomes an actor-onstage or a teacher-in-the-classroom. This is the only way that a person can learn to play a role or to fulfill a function. Disciplinary knowledge is not the same as experiential knowledge and bears little in common with the wealth of lived experience on the stage, in the classroom, or in life. Should not teacher education be more concerned with promoting this experience, with developing the teacher’s cognition-in-action that emerges in classroom situations, and with fostering the evolving relationality between the teacher and her students? Should not the goal of teacher education be to create the best conditions for nurturing the teacher-teaching-in-theworld-of-the-classroom in all that she is and can become? Nothing therefore is only in the head or in its extension, the enminded body. Intelligence, cognition, emotion and action are all part of the global structure of a being-in-the-world, or in enaction, a term that highlights the inseparable union of a being and the world, or what we alternatively refer to as the situating|situated being or the being in situation to . . .. Enaction incorporates and at the same time transcends other perspectives, particularly those of constructivism, social constructivism, situated cognition, and distributed intelligence. From the perspective of enaction, the teacher—or any viii
PREFACE
other professional—is an enactive practitioner who functions by acting in situation, that is, in the situating|situated dynamic. The enactive practitioner displays situational intelligence: She knows, according to the situation she finds herself in, how to engage her best dispositions, how to position herself strategically and how to transform the situation to her advantage. She knows when it is time to act and when it is time to reflect; and she thereby distinguishes herself from the reflective practitioner , who assigns primary importance to reflection. Beyond its implications for classroom practice, enaction provides a new vision of education and the curriculum: The aims and goals that guide them and the programs of study that they include. In order to develop our theory of enaction, we introduce several new concepts and take a critical look at others. The most important new concepts are those of network of virtual actions, spielraum, relationality , maai, and availability . The concept of network of virtual actions refers to the action possibilities that a person enacts to situate herself, position herself and transform the situation in which she finds herself, or to reflect on it. A chess master, for example, engages more possibilities and does so more effectively than a novice chess player. In the situating|situated dialectic, the network of virtual actions corresponds to the situating pole of this dialectic. The concept of spielraum (room to maneuver) concerns the physical and social environment as the situating|situated person comprehends it, that is, appropriates it to herself, and renders it her field of action. This concept constitutes an alternative to that of representation: a person in situation and action does not represent the world to herself; rather, she presents it enactively to herself by transforming it into a spielraum, that is a spatiotemporal field of action. This concept throws light on the notion that cognition is not confined to the head but is distributed in a spielraum, including the material and human resources that it comprises. In the situating|situated dialectic, the spielraum corresponds to the situated pole. The concept of relationality refers to the dialectical subject-object relationship: the subject is the being who enacts a network of virtual actions and the object is the world transformed into a spielraum. Relationality expresses, for example, the relationship between a teacher’s (a being’s) network of possibilities and her class (the world) that constitutes her field of action, her spielraum. The concept of relationality highlights the fact that neither the subject nor the object has priority: The two emerge concomitantly in a process that evolves from symbiosis (where there is neither a “me” nor a world) to exteriority (a “me” confronted with the world) and finally to interiority (a “me” in harmony with the world). The concept of relationality provides an alternative to the rationalist hypothesis that posits a mind confined to disembodied logical structures that would allow a person to cogitate in her head outside of any context. The concept of maai refers to the spatiotemporal interval that separates two or more objects or persons ( MA) and the harmony in the encounter between objects or persons ( AI). It is a key concept for understanding the evolution of relationality. For example, the evolution of the gardener–garden relationship from symbiosis to exteriority and to interiority can be expressed in terms of the presence or absence of ix
PREFACE MAAI —distance ( MA)
and harmony (AI). In symbiosis there is no MA and no AI because the person is not yet a gardener and the terrain is not yet a garden. In exteriority, there is a gardener and a garden: there is a MA between them, but there is not yet an AI. Finally, in interiority there is a gardener/garden oneness and this oneness is a MAAI. A MAAI is distancing|not-distancing: it is a perfect operational situating|situated interval. The concept of availability refers to the full presence of an enminded body in the hear-and-now. The idea for this concept was presented to Domenico Masciotra by Manuel Monzon, the founder of the Manuel A. Monzon International Society for Mind-Body Development . (Domenico Masciotra expresses his sincere appreciation to M. Monzon for his profound and inspired teaching on this subject.) A high level of presence corresponds to what we refer to as the Zen mind, which is what allows a teacher, for example, to achieve deep interiority and unity with her class. The Zen mind corresponds to the highest level of professional practice. The interconnections among these five key concepts and others explored in this book constitute the essential components of a theory of enaction and offer a new vision of educational practice.
x
PART A
TOWARD A THEORY OF ENACTION
In the field of education, it is common to hear the claim that the learner must be active in order to learn. There seems to be a general consensus about this matter. However, if we ask, “What does it mean to be active?,” the answers vary considerably, and as soon as we consider the subtle details, the consensus dissolves. For some, “active” refers strictly to the act of learning and not to the benefit gained (that is, not to what is learned), which is considered to be static, imprinted on the brain in an inert form, as if what is gained did not involve a change in the living embodied being. In this view, learning is understood to be like eating: When I eat, I am active, but what I eat are nutrients, which are inactive. Thus, I memorize some content, I imitate a behavior, I select certain information, I analyze a text, I recite a poem, and so on. In other words, I undertake certain activities that help me to learn a particular subject matter. However, if learning requires me to be active, what I learn is conserved in my memory in a fixed form, like a written document that supposedly “contains” knowledge. Furthermore, according to this widespread interpretation, the act of learning operates on knowledge understood as information. Being active is thus a matter of processing and organizing information in the head, which results in knowledge, and not a matter of functioning in a situation. In short, it is assumed that being active does not involve being situated. In this first section, we develop a theory of enaction as an alternative to this obsolete interpretation of what it means to be an active being. In chapter 1, the learner—as well as the teacher, or any other professional—is understood as a person in action and in situation (PAS). The PAS is an integrated whole: A person is characterized by a power for action. This power is manifested in the person’s action, and this action cannot be understood apart from the circumstances (the situation) in which the person finds herself. Where then is knowledge? It is in the whole PAS. The example of a swimmer at an intermediate level in a learning situation illustrates how knowledge is located at once in the person, in her action and in the situation. The person: I engage all the resources (motivation, capacity for concentration, strength, and physical dexterity, and prior swimming experience) at my disposal to improve my crawl. The action: I swim, following the instructions and with the encouragement of the coach. The situation: At the moment, I am taking a swimming course that is given at a lake and the teacher believes that I am capable of crossing the lake using the crawl as long as I follow her instructions and she accompanies me in her dinghy to ensure my safety. The theory of enaction that we explore in this book explains and clarifies how knowledge can only be understood within the framework of a PAS. Several new concepts are introduced in this first section: enaction, being in situation to . . ., the situating|situated dialectic, network of virtual actions, spielraum, relationality, and 3
PART A
enactive intelligence. Each of these concepts contributes a piece to the puzzle of
understanding knowing and knowledgeability in ways other than a substance that resides somewhere between the ears and that can be recalled whenever required in whatever situation (in a supermarket, isolated in an examination room) and by whatever means (written test, multiple-choice test, interview). In chapter 1, the PAS is explained in terms of being in a situation to . . .. The expression being in a situation to . . . means that I am in a situation insofar as this situation emerges from the transaction between personal conditions and the environmental conditions confronting me. Even identity, who I am, is a result of this transaction. In other words, the situation emerges from the situating|situated dialectic. My personal conditions are the personal resources that I engage in order to situate myself in an adaptive manner. This situating endeavor represents my own contribution to the emerging situation and my capacity to enact it adaptively. The environmental conditions concern all the circumstances—including the physical and human resources—by means of which I am situated. These circumstances represent the situated part of the situating|situated dialectic and constitute the external conditions for the situation to emerge. According to this perspective, knowledge always refers to active experience that unfolds and develops within the dynamic situating|situated process. Knowledge is experienced in action and is situating as much as it is situated. It is also distributed, as the above example of a swimmer in a learning situation indicates. The term enaction translates this structural coupling of situating|situated. But how is all of this possible? How can we explain the situating and the situated as well as their dialectical relationship? How can knowledge be distributed? Three key concepts are invoked to throw light on the situating|situated dialectical process in and by means of which I learn, develop and enact my reality: The concept of network of virtual actions refers to the possibilities that I enact in my active experience of the situation; the concept of spielraum (room to maneuver) concerns the physical and social environment as I comprehend it, that is, appropriate it to myself, and render it my field of action; and finally, the concept of relationality refers to the inextricable links between my network of virtual actions and my spielraum. The concepts of network of virtual actions and spielraum are explored in chapter 2, whereas chapter 3 is devoted to the concept of relationality . Relationality refers to the “ in” of a being in the world. Developing my own ways of being-in-the-world implies transformations of the “being,” the “world,” as well as the “in.” As a being, I become, for instance, a teacher, a soccer player, a postman, a gardener, an actor, a physicist, a biologist, an economist, a psychologist, a logician, or a musician. The concept of networks of virtual actions applies to the development of the knowing subject understood as a situating-knower-inaction. The “world” may become the reality of transportation, professional sports, postal services, banking, theatre, pharmacy, biology, economics, psychology, logic, music, or the classroom (or school). In a particular situation, these realities are expressed in terms of spielraum, or room to maneuver, and constitute the situated part of a being-in-the world. The “in” expresses a subject’s rapport with the world or with his or her own spielraum. We use the term relationality to designate 4
TOWARD A THEORY OF ENACTION
this rapport. In real situations, relationality may take one of three forms: fusion with the world, separation from the world, or union with it. This means that the evolution of a being-in-the-world implies concomitantly self-development (as an actor, teacher, skier, or soccer player), the “cutting up” of the world into different realities (the reality of theatre, of school, etc.), and the construction of relationality. The concept of enactive intelligence does not refer to some “substance” located in the head: It is the property of a being in a situation to do something, for exam ple, to teach, to ski, to act, to cook. It refers to a person’s adaptive capacity with respect to self-mastery and the mastery of situations. Enactive intelligence is adaptive, emotional, rational, cognitive, distributed, ontogenetic, and multidimensional. These characteristics, which are not exhaustive, are outlined in chapter 4 to situate the notion of intelligence within an enactive perspective. We suggest that according to an enactive perspective there are at least three forms of intelligence: dispositional, positional, and gestural. Dispositional intelligence concerns self-mastery, positional intelligence pertains to the mastery of situations, and gestural intelligence refers to the real actions one enacts in a situation.
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