Category Archives: Meaning Making

What Our Theses Are Really About?

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In his 2012 book entitled “Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to a More Meaningful Life”, scientist and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci coin the term Sci-Phi to define a thinking practice with a crucial assumption that we must use both reason and evidence to guide and improve our lives. The book is about what philosophy and science together can inform us about the big questions of life, questions initially raised by Aristotle and other Ancient Greek philosophers.

           

Basically, Sci-Phi is short for “wisdom” and “practical advice” as he says. Science is not enough, and philosophy can and should be informed by the best science available, the same way that scientific knowledge should also be guided by our values. Going way back in time, the author quotes Kant who famously put that “experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play”. A practical example of that I talked about in a previous post is the question raised about the climate justice movement having the potential to blend environmentalist and social justice movements together, in a Sci-Phi way to address the scientific issue and the axiological issue we are faced with climate change.

 

The discourse Massimo is raising is by no means new. Kant himself started to articulate that thought is the give and take between sensibility and understanding. The world exists but so does the works of the mind. A version of academic neo-kantianism is concerned with blending new findings in science with the study of philosophy. Two aspects of such played an important role in our “old friend” Bakhtin’s early work as well: 1) The desire to relate traditional problems of philosophy to discoveries in the exact sciences. 2) The emphasis on unit and oneness as he tried to get to the world, the other side of Kant’s ideas, rather than the mind. His emphasis was in the “process”, the need to take others and otherness into account and emphasis on plurality and variety.

           

As I have been reading on Bakhtin’s work (Shawn correct me if I am wrong), there is this problematic notion of selfhood. We only exist in dialogue, because there is an otherness out there. Hence, there is a radical emphasis on Bakhtin’s work in regards to particularities and situatedeness. On this token, one can argue that Philosophy and Science were once united under the umbrella of “natural philosophy”, but because of changes in particularities and situations in its advancement, there is now a clear otherness between the two, perhaps an otherness that already existed in the “selfhood”of natural philosophy, but that needed to break apart in order for voices to be heard.

           

Going on another important tangent, the question of selfhood is a question of location.  In this sense, what voice is really talking when we talk? Utterance raises a question of authorship, so in a narrative there is always co-authorship among voices, being that everyday speech or complex literary work.  At first sight, one may say science fits within the complex text realm and philosophy fits within everyday life concerns, but I would think they truly co-exist and co-author all dimensions of life.

           

So I got to think, is our informal learning research the very exercise of give and take in the co-authorship? Do we try to make sense of this co-constructed dialogism among participants during an “every day “ experience that constitute a museum visit, being ourselves part of such co-construction of a narrative situated in time and space? Then, when we retell those stories through our thesis, that still consists of a co-constructed dialogism in the shape of a “complex literary work”. In publication, we are named as authors of our own thesis but we are just one of the voices speaking at the moment of writing, while other voices are not silenced only reframed within our situated words. In this sense, we are authors of nothing but the mere mechanical materialization of words in a page, words of a self AND an otherness in a situated time and space.

           

So, are our theses about science or are they about philosophy? Are we practicing Sci-Phi? I think we are, and I think it is about time that becomes explicit and accepted as a meaningful practice and, why not, a co-constructed way of knowing.

Finding Meaning in Reflective Research

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To follow on last week’s discussion of vygotsky, another central tenet of Vygotsky’s work is that in order to understand development (and therefore learning), the researcher has to observe it in the process rather than in its products.  He faulted the standard methods of psychological research of his day for focusing too much on training subjects to do particular tasks and then using those tasks to study cognition and development.  His basic claim was that by the time the subject had mastered the task, the researcher had missed the development and learning and was now documenting some sort of fossilized action instead.  He suggested alternative methods for creating conditions where learning, particularly the appropriation of meditational means and the development of concepts, could be brought into observation by the researcher working closely with research participants.

Those methods could be the subjects of future blog posts, but given last week’s topic of documenting personal sense making and how standardized ways of learning, testing, and research are not effective in generating or documenting personal sense, it’s interesting today to think about what sort of changes to research it would really take to arrive at rigorous ways of documenting the development of personal sense, including the role of emotions, values, beliefs, and biography in that development.

It seems that in part this kind of research itself still requires a substantial paradigm shift for researchers to stop “chasing” results/outputs as the key to understanding learning and to start encouraging this very chase itself as the subject of research.  In our theory group right now, we are reading Jerome Bruner’s Acts of Meaning. Bruner outlines where the cognitive revolution veered away from being able to really understand the road map where development takes place, especially given the role of emotional patterns and their relationship to reflective states of mind.  Bruner suggests that meaning cannot be pre assigned, so, like Vygotsky, he believes that meaning itself cannot be measured as an outcome of learning, but that learning can be seen in the process of making meaning.  He suggests further that meaning making is different from information processing. This does not discount the importance of understanding how human beings process information.  It does mean that education and learning have to be more than simply the business of training humans to use the tools that are necessary for life. Meaning, rather than knowing, should be the business of education as the ultimate way of “being.” This is very similar to Dewey’s arguments about the purposes of education in leading development.  Like Dewey and Vygotksy, Bruner is talking about cultural shift in education, but also in research.

Bruner turned to the exploration of how everyday thinking tools (or meditational means more accurately) were appropriated for complex meaning making that included both public, shared meaning and personal sense. In Acts of Meaning, he describes the role of narrative, especially jointly constructed narratives, in shaping individual biography and identity over time.  Retelling, re-narrating our experiences is in essence a reflective exercise in personal sense making, which also generates both public and shared meaning under the right circumstances. It is an exercise that brings to bear the very problematic of the so-called transformative education implicit in many of the other texts our group has been reading: the subjectivism, situatedness, and relativism circling human thinking and action and challenging the role of cognitive research. Accounting for such relativism and subjectivism not as gibberish or nonsense but as essential characteristics of human development, learning and behavior is to recognize the construction of meaning as transformative not authoritative. With that in mind, not only learning is a reflective state of mind but research itself should also be. What would a reflective research encompass? Perhaps it would be the type of research where its applied and flexible methodology consists of mediational means that lead to and promote a larger joint reflection between participants and researchers, allowing for a true dialogicality that moves quickly beyond the search for understanding of “fossilized” actions to the kind of active transformation of the research and learning situation that people like Dewey, Freire, and Vygotsky call for.

Such paradigmatic shift in the view of education and education research is nothing short of a “philosophical” debate between philosophy and science, our customary ways of knowing and seeking knowledge and how they came to be. The positivist characteristics of today’s research hindering the possibility for true dialogicality reflects nothing less than the human need to find some absolute truth and find it quickly. We can’t stand not knowing, not being able to trace down a beginning, middle and end for everything under some logical explanation. Embracing subjectivism and relativism as important pieces of the puzzle is recognizing there is no absolute truth when it comes to the human mind; it is to decrease the role of logic in favor of increasing the role of wonder in the process of knowing. This requires a cultural shift to assign reflective states of mind as the valued goal of education and research concerned with meaning making. Everything else would fall into place. Logicality can be unidirectional and give us tools for information processing, but dialogicality can’t. It requires exchange of reflections into retold narratives for it is the only way to unravel meaning making and acts of meaning.

Thanks to Susan O’Brien for her significant contributions to this post!

Making Meaning Making Personal

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Meaning making is an idea that seems to resonate with lots of people studying learning or creating contexts for learning.  We want visitors or students to make meaning of their experiences.  As a construct, meaning making seems to be a way to capture the active elements of learning as well as the uniqueness of each learner’s prior experience and knowledge and the open ended nature of free-choice learning experiences in general.

But what do we really mean by meaning making?  And how should we approach operationalizing it for research? For Vygotsky, meaning had two components – meaning proper and personal sense.  The component of meaning in Vygotsky’s work focuses attention on the shared, distributed, what Bakhtin would call repeatable, and “public” denotations of a word, gesture, action or event.  This is largely the aspect of meaning making that researchers have in mind when they are thinking about education. This approach to meaning encourages researchers to ask whether the students and learners are making the “right” meaning? Are the meanings that they are making recognizable and shareable with us, with more expert others, and with each other? Are they getting the content and ideas and concepts right? But this shared, public aspect is only a part of the whole of meaning that person makes.

For Vygotksy and generations of Activity Theorists, a more primary aspect of this shared, public, testable, and authoritative meaning is personal sense.  The construct of personal sense attempts to capture the very personal, biographical, embodied, situated connotations of words, gestures, actions and events. This is the realm of what those things mean for us as part of our personal narratives about ourselves, our experiences, sense of place or even sense of ourselves.  It is about how they resonate (or not) with our values, beliefs, judgments and knowledge.  As learning researchers, we often discount or ignore this hugely important aspect of meaning making, and yet when people visit a museum or learn something new, this element of personal sense may be in the forefront of the experience.  The realm of personal sense is where emotional experiences get burned into memory, where motivations and identities are negotiated, tried on, and appropriated or rejected. This is also the realm where we need the most help from learners as co-researchers.  We can measure and document the meaning aspect of their meaning making relatively easily, but we rely on them to report about the personal sense they are making. As researchers, we should add to our documenting of the development of accurate and sharable meaning and develop serious ways to embrace the notion of reflection instead. Experiences that support meaning making as personal sense making are effective in supporting the overall learning process because they are essentially reflective.

What kinds of dialogues with learners most support that reporting are an open question to me right now.  I’d welcome ideas here!

A Happy and Meaningful New Year

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It is that time again when the wheel of life spins very vividly and consciously in our minds. Another year has gone by and we turn to reflect on the things we did, did not do or wish we had done. It is a time of great emotional upwelling and energy renewal to continue this journey we are all in together, as we hold high hopes, expectations, wishes and commitments we have made to the future.

Have we moved forward in our professional lives? What were the stepping-stones we have jumped across? How many mountains are we still to climb? There is always going to be another one on the way. So it is important not to do it alone, and I think our group is unique in the sense that we really do it together, maybe not in synchrony but nonetheless together. I am grateful to have had everyone of you to share this turbulent academic life with.

Have we grown and learned as persons this last year? We are all individuals full of life and wonder, who bring so much meaning to life around. Were the meanings you constructed this year what you wished to construct? Maybe or maybe not, it does not only depend on you. We are in constant dialogue with ourselves and everything else around us, as Shawn discusses in his dialogicality explanation, the meanings we construct are not solely and absolutely meanings of our own.  Nonetheless they have real implications in our practical lives and I hope, when you look back in time today, you will feel your lives were indeed full of meaning.

What is 2014 reserving for us? We will never know until we come across it along the way, if there is something reserved at all. So build your wishes from the ground up, don’t get disappointed if your wishes are somewhat transformed along the way. Find meaning in all moments that come along, happy or sad, easy or frustrating, fulfilling or unrewarding, grab on to those pieces of an “out there” meaning puzzle for they are to become part of your own “meaning puzzle”.  Keep puzzling because that is what keeps the wheel going.

We are all in different places now, as some stayed home for the holidays, wherever home is, and some traveled to see family and friends in other states. Some will arrive at 2014 first as others wait in celebration, and we all will be celebrating in different ways. So I wanted to send you this New Year’s wish, a wish for an extraordinary time of making meaning and cherishing the people and the things around you contributing to that meaning.

If I was in Brazil at the beach today, I would be joining others in ritual and jumping waves at midnight for good luck, dancing our wishes and holding the hand of strangers in the hope for a better year and better times. I will close my eyes at the turn of the year and imagine I am jumping those waves. What will you be doing?

Have a wonderful day and see you all next week!