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"not walls of cement,
but...
the melodies of your temperature"
Eugenio Barba
The task of re-conceptualizing
an on-line graduate student journal appears, at first glance,
to be simply a matter of reorganization. How will we encourage
scholars of all levels of experience to participate? Who will
be on the editorial board? How will the peer review system
work? Those of us assigned to the task, take a breath, ready
to deal in matter of details, when the first question is posed.
Yes, but what is our purpose?
Educational Insights was first started
in 1990 as a publishing venue for graduate students. In 1995
the then co-editors, Gary Rasberry and David Penberg, decided
to move the journal from hard copy to cyberspace. Originally
in response to funding concerns, this decision has proven
prophetic in terms of 21st century communications and hermeneutic
meaning-making. While the initial journals were limited to
linear text presentation, there is now the opportunity to
explore pedagogical and curricular positioning through sound,
video, linear and non-linear text. The journal anticipates
from its contributors/authors ways of writing anew, presenting,
performing on-line between, above and beneath the lines. The
challenge becomes a practice of restraint; the intertextual
opportunities are so pregnant with possibility.
Seated around the table, language snags our
opening conversations as we reinvent Educational Insights.
The first item on the agenda is the review of the Editorial
Board. The words are barely out of my mouth, when I am interrupted.
"Let's rename it. Editorial Board is too conventional:
it speaks of hierarchy, structure, standard academic text."
"I like it!" protests
one participant, "Editorial board has a nice constructivist
ring to it." What about Editorial Commune? Or Gathering?
Collective? Each word carries its own history, metaphorical,
theoretical, and experiential meaning, irritation or opening.
A word like collective, we learn through our conversation,
has a different meaning for those who understand it as communal
practice, than for those who experienced first hand the restrictive
impact of the collectives established during communist rule.
Finally, Editorial Circle is chosen, "non-hierarchical,
all-embracing" and yet, even this seemingly innocuous
label becomes suspect, when, for a short while, the on-site
editorial/production team begins referring to itself as the
"Inner Circle."
The Editorial Circle, as we move from conceptualization
to production, emerges as a valued source of encouragement,
conversation and generation of ideas for proposed issues.
Evolving is a conversation that refuses to delineate between
graduate student and tenured faculty. Borders and boundaries
are crossed: this is an inaugural issue, it is but the beginning
of a conversation for which we have great hope. We are on
an intertextual journey; there are stumblings, slippery deadlines,
editorial misreadings....but slowly, patiently, there is evolving
a sense of a new space of possibility, even within moments
of the seeming impossibility of rebirth.
Hand over hand hauling
in the netted light,
the holes in the representation,
the holes in the visible.
Peggy Phelan
How is it that our first themed
issue came to be enRaptured con/texts? Initially, the
desire was to rupture text, to break with standard academic
forms of writing research. In the intertwining of hope with
subversive action, the word rupture was replaced with enraptured,
so as to speak to the enchantment of new academic positioning.
"Yes,
but we must remain vigilant. Not all texts are enraptured."
We are stopped. A moment of risk. A moment of opportunity.
"What
if we place Ted Aoki's backslash between con and text?"
And with this metonymic interruption, enRaptured con/texts
names our intent.
"Between closing and beginning
lives a
gap, a casesura, a discontinuity.
The betweeness is a hinge that belongs
to neither one nor the other.
It is neither poised nor unpoised, yet
moves both ways...
It is the stop."
David Applebaum
Our intent is to give recognition
to the "con" that is the business of academics;
that our texts are lenses on the multiple rewritings possible
of education; the wanting and seeking of desire and heart
within curricular pursuits; the rewriting of texts that breathe,
weep, explore new ways of being in pedagogy. And always, the
gentle reminder that we ourselves must be wary of being charmed
by our own pedagogical stance. And so it is that enRaptured
con/texts becomes the ambition of Educational Insights,
and the theme of our relaunch issue.
Who we choose to be as educators,
theorists, researchers and practitioners is revealed in our
praxis and in our writings. Influences may be the children
who have moved us to care; personal experiences that sharpen
the focus through which we view education. In a heartful essay,
Sylvia Wilson, challenges educators with her question, what
does an education based on progressive development have to
say to a child who is living another reality? when the prognosis
is loss, and hope of a future is the sharing of a journey
between mother, caretakers and child, day by precious day.
What does education have to learn from such a child?
"Singing the space
there are meetings
and I am transformed ..."
Eugenio Barba
So it is that Dennis Sumara invites
us to enlarge the space of possibility by paying attention
to detail, to the ordinary, to ritual. He speaks to the need
to pause, and see again the pedagogical eloquence of a worn-out
shoe, or how the extraordinary can shift perspectives, and
encourage us to see anew.
And in the shifting of perspectives,
walljamming: a project to reimagine academic community
reminds us of the larger project of the university, and the
academic discourse that shapes and is shaped by our presence.
Walljamming is a collective graffiti, alternatively an angry
and hopeful rant against the academic walls that restrict;
in search of fissures that let the light come through...
"but tell
me,
where do the children play?"
Cat Stevens, 1970
Educational Insights seeks to
create an opportunity for discourse that welcomes new ways
of being in scholarship; to publish work that provokes, evokes,
and shifts perceptions and conceptions of educational research,
pedagogy and curriculum. This, our first issue then becomes
one that writes anew interruptions, imaginings, diversities
of expression in education. enRaptured con/texts is to be
understood as a multiplicity of possible conversations that
will be realized in future issues.
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"It
must be said that we understand ourselves only by a long
detour of signs of humanity deposited in our cultural works
... Henceforth to understand is to understand oneself in front
of the text ... exposing ourselves to the text and receiving
from it an enlarged self."
Paul Ricoeur
The task of reconceptualizing
an on-line graduate student journal appears, at first glance,
to be simply a matter of re-organization. How will we encourage
scholars of all levels of experience to participate? Who will
be on the editorial board? How will the peer review system
work? Those of us assigned the task, take a breath, ready
to deal in matter of details, when the first question is posed.
Yes, but what is our purpose?
Purpose? In the matter of details, purposes
stump us, for purposes invoke the Cartesian cogito
which seduces us into doubts, and doubts make us say silly
things like: "We think therefore we know," and we
crave for immediate answers which makes us scramble and stumble
in turns, all the while mumbling: "Give me a method!
Show me a method! for we wish to know more about building
an academic journal." And no sooner do we say this, that
the journal-as-concept encroaches the journal-as-imagined,
and more mumblings follow until the soft voice of a poet in
our midst whispers: "Imagine a meadow of wild flowers."
A cheer erupts, "Hurrah for poets! Hurrah for wild flowers!"
and in a quick poetic pose we grow silent to imagine the glorious
meadow that the poet invokes.
The editors of the journal take a breath, and
after a while two questions arise: What are our discourses
to be, such that we preserve the fullness, the copiousness,
and the irreducibility of the various uses of language? How
are we to gather together the diverse forms and flavours of
the game of language - the copia of story-telling that informs
none other than our educational projects? And once asked,
these questions erupt a polysemy that leads us through a troubled
Camelot, and like the virtues of courage and lion-heartedness
that once thrived in such places, language attempts to recover
its own virtues in a dialectical waltz with its temporal twin
- Discourse. Together as one, it begins to question our quotidian
existence and our assumptions; question itself and stretch
its own codes and laws from phonemes to sentences to texts
and beyond into myth and narrative, urging the speaker-writer-reader
to dwell at the limits of language and its animus.
It seems almost naive to assert that
in such excursions, our discourses become charged with not
only exposing the permanent spirit of language in the way
it refers to our manifold ways of being in the world, but
also with the capacity to open up the mythos of communities
- the mythic symbols that have become rooted within cultural
frameworks. We come to better understand ourselves and our
projects, and our biases and prejudices, and perhaps become
ready to engage anew our political and social institutions
that our mythical structures have founded.
As language wishes to make itself festive
and rebellious once again, it whispers, and then shouts for
those who wish to hear: "Never cease to challenge the
already-said; always seek out the yet-to-be-said; never cease
to find other ways of re-reading human history; never close-off
the plurality of human interpretations; and always hold up
high the virtue of human praxis." Such a language desires
a free and shared movement of a social, political, and cultural
imaginaire, and gives permission to its finite disciple
- the speaker-writer-reader - to subvert the regulating order
of language, to dig deep into its unexplored resources and
articulate paths of discourses that are guided by "an
ethic of the word."
"the smallest
act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of
the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes
one word, suffices to change every constellation."
Hannah Arendt
To enrapture text is also such a moral
and political effort, and cannot be engaged by alienating
the hermeneutics of the context and the ethics of the word.
Such an alienation almost dooms the educational project at
hand into oblivion, for the paradigm of text always speaks
and writes out of the confluence of an original community
of interlocutors. It is in this original community - distinct
in its own culture and ways and yet plural in its human ways
- that the notion of polis arises and to which the
text refers as its first order of duty. Polis, that
Greek word of antiquity is more than just a space of a physical
gathering. In Arendtian thought, Polis is an organization
of people arising out of acting and speaking together. Polis
is a moving Camelot. It resides in family gatherings as much
as it does in academic journals and it can manifest itself
'anywhere and any time.' Here speech is much more than two
or more subjectivities communicating with each other through
speaking. In an Arendtian Polis, speech is also action,
never one without the other.
And as the spoken discourse of a Polis
moves into the written discourse of a cyber Polis,
the reciprocal expressions of speech and action are no less
important. At the core of this movement, however, alterations
of the language occur and the word and the world
undergo transformations. Here, the text finds its second order
of duty, although the first-order reference to the world of
experience is never entirely lost. The textualized dialogue
- fictional or otherwise - seeks to emancipate the reader
from a synchronous discourse of the here-and-now, of the
vis-à-vis, and into a diachronous discourse
of the has-been of the past and a yet-to-be of the future.
We are after all heirs to both. The intentions of the author
are transcended into the intentions of anyone who can read
and a vast polysemous laboratory of multiple fields of experiences
and readings emerge. The new world of the text enraptures
the context of the being-who-speaks.
"Who are you?" says
the text as it confronts the being-who-speaks. "Who are
you in your human praxis? Who are you in your virtues and
your projects?" The desire for a new discourse in education
arises, one that never ceases to ask the "Who" to
account for and be responsible for its actions and speech
lived in the world. Such a discourse re-enters Camelot to
once again claim the lion-heartedness, the original courage,
and 'be ready to risk disclosure.'
"quaestio mihi factus sum."
" a question have I become for myself."
Saint Augustine
And such becomes the
ambition of this Journal.
Educational Insights seeks to
create an opportunity for discourse that welcomes new ways
of being in scholarship; to publish work that provokes, evokes,
and shifts perceptions and conceptions of educational research,
pedagogy and curriculum. This, our first issue then becomes
one that writes anew interruptions, imaginings, diversities
of expression in education. enRaptured con/texts is to be
understood as a multiplicity of possible conversations that
will be realized in future issues.
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