Friends
Victor’s mail on other ways of knowing came as I was writing this mail
to the group. I also realize this is the right time to post such a
mail, without fear while discussion on fear of posting is taking
place!
May for once spring clear
without my contriving.
If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~
I hope the members of the group won’t mind this unusual mail with this
strange request to read this mail the way poetry is read and to allow
understanding to take place rather than thinking, reasoning and
forcing ‘understanding’. I am writing this mail to seek support and
collaboration. Years of observing and documenting children have given
me insight into how children learn the real world- both the process
and the content. In fact, the very act of teaching and instructing is
detrimental to their cognitive development which is what is getting
promoted in modernity. Clearly, my research is not on HOW TO TEACH
CHILDREN but on how and what children learn naturally as we are
biologically equipped by life to LEARN and CREATE KNOWLEDGE
autonomously. In the present context instead of discovering and
creating the training is for analysis of secondhand information.
Denial of autonomy is the denial of democracy, denial of respect for
life. (Humberto Maturana talks about Autopoiesis but strangely
recommends the Montessori method to teach children! There also other
strange terms like the self-organizing system, embodied knowledge etc
which the mind keeps on producing to create distraction)
Feel free to write to me directly.
As I mentioned I have been on to an unusual research both in terms of
the content and more so in terms of the process. The content of my
research has been how we learn the real world and how learning the
printed word has rewired our total system- cognitive system, the
formation of mind and worldview. The unusual aspect of my search/
research is that the research is not based on reading and thinking but
by experiencing the world around me with awareness and paying
attention.
I stopped reading completely for a couple of years and I feel this
has rewired the COGNITIVE HABIT which I had acquired due to schooling.
I started seeing, being present to what is happening around me without
the mental commentary, the agreement disagreement play and artificial
mental categories. My life with the ‘illiterate’ people gave a glimpse
into another way of knowing.
To sum up what I understood is the following. Literates learn the WORD
whereas the so-called illiterates learn the WORLD. The reverse of this
is that the literate’s cognitive system, their worldview and even
their beingness is formed/ shaped by the printed word (static,
certain, linear, sequential, categorized, lifeless, fragmented and so
on ) whereas the cognitive system, worldview and the beingness of the
‘illiterates’ are formed by the REAL WORLD (alive, in process,
simultaneous, re cyclic, dynamic, ever-changing, tentative, holistic,
life-sustaining……….)
The realm in which UNDERSTANDING is taking place is in the realm of
language for the literates and for the ‘illiterates’ it is happening
in the realm of experience. The denial of the body, experience, senses
is what happens due to the preoccupation with literacy. Mind overtakes
and numbs the senses and the body. The masculine takes over the
feminine! In the context or in the paradigm of modernity ‘inclusion’
is a mere word. The very nature of modernity is hierarchical,
fragmentary, exclusive……..What I mean by modernity is mediated knowing
as opposed to direct knowing.
What I have written may be rejected out rightly by few but I hope some
of you would be willing to explore, another way of knowing leading to
totally another paradigm. Let me also remind you that a fragmentary
paradigm whose nature is to keep on fragmenting will not be able to
truly understand holistic paradigm! That would require transformation
at the being level. (an example is the notion that there is man's way
of knowing and woman's way of knowing. There is the fragmented way of
knowing which excludes the feminine qualities and holistic way of
knowing which includes both.)
Just to give a taste of the experiential paradigm let me illustrate
with an example.
I ran a school in Pune from 2011 till 2014 in a very revolutionary
manner by letting children do what they felt like and we documented
their activities. Based on our three years observation on drawings by
children we see a strong connection between what children experience,
what children do spontaneously (play, the toys they make) and the
drawings they do.
Drawing (unguided) is, in fact, a cognitive tool for children to
understand the world!
I have studied the so-called play (playful exploration is
misunderstood as an activity called the play), 'making' of the
so-called toys and also the drawings children do on their own. It is
very clear that children are learning the WORLD they experience
through all these activities and there is a clear logic to their
'play'. Through ‘play’ children re-experience the world, re-explore
the way the world looks, the way thins functions and its possibilities
and toy is nothing but a means to explore these. And through drawing
children are exploring the three-dimensional world in terms of
two-dimensional space. In a way, drawing is the 'play' that children
do on the two-dimensional surface.
This aspect of drawing is not explored well due to two reasons. One
is that writing is given over importance even though it is not a
cognitive tool and secondly by keeping drawing as part of the
so-called art. (Like play and toy art is an adult category!) Drawing
needs to seen as the tool that will help the child to observe the
world around. In fact, this what children do naturally if they are not
instructed and trapped into adult categories. Almost all children draw
and then for some reason most stop drawing. Only the encouraged
'artists' continue. But everyone learns to write even though it is a
much more complicated task. Adults around must have done something to
us that we are now scared to draw.
The way child 'learns' to walk where adults have no role in correcting
the child how to walk should be the way to let children draw (and
everything else). No corrections, no comments, no praises. Just
letting children be. One has to create the environment for drawing by
allowing children to draw where they want and with what they want.
And as we (children) get entrenched in the linguistic world from age
3, 4,5 the real world of senses and experience recedes from our being
and in fact language and concepts begin to dictate our ‘imaginary’
experience. To regain the primacy of experience drawing needs to be
promoted as only the senses can help us to ground ourselves into the
beingness of nature. But as I mentioned earlier drawing needs to be
understood as a functional tool to help in observation and hence it
may need to be disassociated from the so-called art, self-expression
etc. (playing and making toys are preferable but schools may not allow
this spontaneous and autonomous playing and toying)
See the article 'Draw the world to know the world'
http://www.teacherplus.org/focus/draw-the-world-to-know-the-world
and the site http://cognitiveimportanceofdrawing.weebly.com
--
Jinan,
TEXT DISTORTS, DIGITAL DESTROYS, WORLD AWAKENS
http://existentialknowledgefoundation.org/
http://rethinkingfoundation.weebly.com/
reimaginingschools.wordpress.com
http://sadhanavillageschool.org/
https://www.youtube.com/user/sadhanavillagepune
https://www.youtube.com/user/jinansvideos
www.re-cognition.org
http://designeducationasia.blogspot.com/
http://awakeningaestheticawareness.wordpress.com/
https://independent.academia.edu/JinanKodapully
09447121544
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