Towards a poetics of ‘formative space’

Embodied narratives and ways of knowing in the context of the

contemporary Academy

Francesco CappaAssistant Professor, Università di Milano-Bicocca

& Gaia Del Negro PhD Student, Canterbury Christ Church University

Scenario• It was noticed how the field of higher and adult education has been

influenced by growing pressures of neo-liberal ideologies and policies that are changing the conceptualization of learning into vocational, performative and a solitary duty (Ball, 2008; Biesta, 2010; Field, 2006).

• Concerns were raised about a commodification of the educational relationship (Furedi, 2010; Molesworth et al., 2011) in the context of ‘the university’ as an institution becoming increasingly ruled by pedagogically empty “excellence” claims (Reading, 1996).

• Barnett (2011) lamented a loss of ‘mystery’ in the way learning and knowing are understood, since a ‘linguistic power structure’ in education has come to rule out what is not overtly explicit.

• According to Barnett (2011), in higher education we are witnessing a ‘failure of imagination’ in pedagogical practices that are increasingly subjugated by pure market logics.

• In this framework, if “enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside”, and if “in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose” (Tolkien 1988: 49-50, in Curry 1999), then:

• How can we think of this ‘enchantment’ in the perspective of learning and adult education?

• We take it with Curry that “re-enchantment is not about re-introducing a former condition where it no longer exists; rather it must be a matter of recognizing, articulating and encouraging Enchantment—or more exactly, the conditions for Enchantment that exist now” (Curry, 1999, p. 407).

• What are these conditions about, in relation to higher and adult education? • Wonder, i.e. an ecological sense of connection in how a subject knows the

world, herself and others in the world (Curry, 1999) seems to indicate a fundamental aesthetic dimension in knowing, in Batesonian terms.

Enchantment

Aesthetic languages• Why an aesthetic dimension in processes of research and education,

particularly in a sometimes dis-enchanted academic context, is important? • “By aesthetic, I mean responsive to the pattern which connects”

(Bateson, 1979)

• Aesthetic representation celebrates connectivity, “the real stuff of life”, through stories (Bateson 1979, in Formenti 2014).

• By way of telling stories in language we coordinate with others and build shared meaning (Maturana)

Our research project• Interrogating knowing and becoming a professional in education

• Two groups in two universities: Milano-Bicocca (Italy) and CCCU (UK)

• Research with PhD students, academic researchers and professionals studying in HE

Methodological references• Learning biographies (Dominicé, 2000)

• Co-operative inquiry (Heron, 1996)

• Compositional approach to research-formation (Formenti, 2008)

• Biographical research (Merrill & West)

Operativity of metaphors in Education

• “Its [Cultural Psychology] main objective is to study the genesis of the relationship with knowledge, seen as a construction that emerges from the encounter between the subject and the object of knowledge. […] Our subjects are strongly embedded in their local social, economic, political and cultural environments.” (Fabbri and Munari, 1990, p.335)

• “We in fact condense as particular metaphors our ways of learning, our ways of studying, our ways of dealing with problems, our ways of designing, that is our ways of organizing knowledge.” (Fabbri, 2004, p.78)

• Metaphors build bridges in knowledge laterally, by way of recognition by the observer of similar forms of description (abduction, in Bateson)

• Metaphors as a ‘cognitive operative tools’, they organize certain actions that a subject does on its object of knowledge

• Relationship between personal representations and the history and cultural tradition of our (and other) metaphors

• Operativity of metaphors in Education, bringing in the sensuous materiality of our knowing processes (manipulating artworks)

Embodied knowledge

“Living systems are cognitive systems and living is knowing” (Maturana, 1993)

“All doing is knowing, all knowing is doing” (Maturana & Varela, 1987, p.26)

“Everything we do is a structural dance in the choreography of coexistence” (ibid, p.248)

Space of play

“This intermediate area of experience, unchallenged in respect to its belonging to inner or external (shared) reality, constitutes the greater part of the infant’s experience, and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work” (Winnicott, 1971, p.19).

The evocative object• “Moving in the world of objects, we live in an evocative world that is that

only because objects have their own completeness. The integrity of an object, the character of its thingness, has a potential to start evocative processes.” (Bollas, 2009, p. 102, our translation)

• “There are many different ways of thinking, and one of the ways in which we think of ourselves happens through the use of evocative objects.” (ibid, p. 9)

• “We do not just see them [the objects]. We experience them.” (ibid, p. 104)

• The role of Artworks as expressions of relationship to knowing and of possibilities of learning?

• “Thinking that develops from encounters in reality, in comparison to thoughts that emerge from the mind only, bring the mark of life” (ibid., p.109)

Aesthetics of being• “We don’t know why we choose objects, but one reason is certainly their

‘potential of experience’, in that each object offers ‘types of experiences of the Self’.” (ibid., p.112)

• May the use of objects speak of the construction of the forms of a professional self?

• “The world of objects is an ‘extraordinary vocabulary for the person who expresses an aesthetics of Self through her precise choices and her particular uses of what constitutes it’” (ibid., p.115)

• “Life is sometimes articulated as an aesthetic, a revealed form of the way of being of a person. I think that a specific drive exists to model life, and the force of destiny is the uninterrupted attempt to choose and use objects in order to give lived expression to the real Self” (ibid,, p.113)

Towards a poetics of ‘formative space’

• Starting from our experience of research with these two groups, in these two contexts, we would like to offer our observations regarding a possible aesthetic re-enchantment of the academic space, in the sense of propitiating and making space for wonder to happen.

• Space of play, embodied knowledge, and evocative object in the research space seem to construct some conditions to explore more beautiful and ‘spacious’ stories, that produce:• A pleasure of playing, and a pleasure of knowing and of knowledge• Relational and beautiful thinking, connecting the relationship to

oneself, the other and the ecology of ideas (formation in Pineau) • Recognition of the ‘scientific’ value of knowing to the expression of the

self, both through the use of creative and autobiographical writing and through the use of other languages

Thank you.

francesco.cappa@unimib.it

g.del-negro148@canterbury.ac.uk

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