ON-LINE ISSUES

V.3 N.1, October 1995

Editorial: Chasing The Shadow of Experience

gary william rasberry
David Penberg

Editors

Electronic format or otherwise, this issue offers educational insights that come in many forms. To attempt to sort and categorize the contributions made by each of the authors would be to try to connect the dots on a complex, multi-faceted puzzle: extremely difficult and quite unnecessary.

Still, there are certain undeniable currents that bring each of the authors together and apart. For the electronic journal reader, hypertext makes the navigation of these educational waters -- whether it is in choosing to swim with or without the tide -- no less of an adventure; the richly convoluted relationship between reader, text and writer simply becomes less transparent in the surfing.

For those who choose only to touch down here, briefly, in the electronic editorials before bouncing off to somewhere with a fresher "best-before-date," know that "it is the shadow of the experience of teaching that we pursue here," as Madeleine Grumet has so aptly said, "hoping [to] catch a glimpse of its distortions and of the ground on which it falls."

In Lynn Fels' In Dialogue and Interaction with Grumet: Erasing the Line, we become intimate witness to "the night [Lynn] caught the moon reading over here shoulder." Lynn's rich prose, playful and self-reflexive, is inspired by and aspires to the poetry of Grumet's theoretical wonderings, so close to practice. Fels does not, however, remain moonstruck by the polished offerings of Grumet and sets out to lay down her own pathway of possibility.

Renee Norman also seeks artistic possibility within curricular unpredictability. Steeped in poetry and illuminated by glimpses into her classroom world, A Dramatic Conception of Curriculum: Artistic, Emancipated and Feminist Possibilities Through the Emotional, offers "images [that] provide the colours of hope and optimism and community for the curriculum dream."

In Messing About in the Theory/Practice Parabole, Jeanette Scott takes courage from the "seeking of strong questions rather than in the finding of right answers." Her Deleuze- inspired meditation plays in "the im/practical in-between," and extends the work of Aoki, Pinar, Grumet and others.

I will them/to peel back their skins/with fingers streaming light/into the river/of rhythms and meters/of transcribed heartbeats ...

Rishma Dunlop's poetry -- her writing and her teaching -- dwells with/in the language of lived experience in educational life. Written on the Body: Autobiography, Phenomenology and the Language of Teaching explores notions of the body, both as ideological construct and as undeniably present in our curriculum.

And we begin,/my students and I,/the route of mystery/unfolding in the/cadence of breath/iridescent poems/housed beneath the flesh.

Shirley Stirling opens "her secret journal" and invites us in to the Kalamak Indian Residential School where her troubling private world becomes disturbingly public. Seepeetza Revisited: An Introduction to Six Voices takes us through Shirley's attempts to make sense of -- or perhaps to make room for -- a series of voices that collide and overlap and connect. Throughout her journey, Shirley asks, sometimes with the shock of surprise, sometimes with the weight of recognition, "Whose voice is this?"

Doug Aoki. Remembrances of Love Past. Deception. Another of love's many faces, and an honest tactic used by Aoki in order to have us corroborate in deconstructing love itself. We are led, quite willingly, by Doug toward the Pop-cultured "Self-Help" section of our favourite bookstore, only to find ourselves at the check-out line piled high with Lacan and Foucault, Twain and Barnes; Flaubert's Parrot rubbing against Truth and Power. To paraphrase Doug, it is no surprise that the key to our remembrances of love past is memory. From the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography to the poet Rilke, Aoki's paper is a most memorable journey. Who could forget an intellectual rendering of When Harry Met Sally?

Welcome to Educational Insights. Connect the dots or jump the tracks. And as Italo Calvino recommends in one of his six memos for the next millenium: Festina lente, hurry slowly.