This article was posted on IntrepidEd News on 23 March 2023.
I sometimes wonder whether reading is the cause of my insomnia. Reading is often what people do to help them fall asleep, but in my case it wakes me up. I can’t remember the last time I slept past 5:15. That feels luxurious. Getting out of bed at 4:30 feels normal—but it’s not by most standards—and even though I can’t go back to sleep, I still need that pot of coffee first thing to cope.
I think I wake up because I feel I need to get reading before it all starts. At 4:30, the house is quiet. Everyone is asleep, including the cats. I can just sit and read, undisturbed. I have time to myself. For an introvert in a job that requires constant human interactions, sitting with myself might be more refreshing than eight hours of sleep. Sometimes, I wish I had both.
I read about all sorts of things, mostly geeky nonfiction and nerdy novels (not enough novels). Reading exposes me to ideas, but I can seldom remember who said what, or even what those ideas were specifically. Maybe sometimes I remember enough of a quote to be able to look up the exact words. Yet rather than collecting others’ ideas, isn’t it more interesting to subsume them, to create new relationships, new amalgamations, to appreciate the ecosystemic nature of [thinking/feeling]1? Ideas are dynamic and iterative processes, verbs even, that express the fluidity of relationships. Let’s pause on that: ideas are verbs. Ideas are relational. Ideas are entangled in everything else.
I carry around a black Moleskine notebook everywhere I go. When I read, I underline passages that resonate within the ecosystem of my [thinking/feeling] and I transcribe these passages into the notebook as well as the ideas they generate. The ideas materialize—that is, they matter—through inter/intra-actions2 with the conditions in which I find myself. I may have had a conversation last week that irked me and now connect with a passage that sheds new light on that exchange. It may be really warm in the room and I’m not fully engaged with the reading because I’m uncomfortable. I may have to deliver a speech in a month from now and I’m mulling over what I will say. My pencil may have run out of leads and I can’t be bothered to fill it, meaning I don’t underline this passage (maybe it wasn’t really worth getting up for).
The past, present, and future blend into one another, intermingle, and give rise to events through their combinations.
Ideas are verbs, they are phenomena (also verbs). I often open my notebook to what I wrote months before and I ask myself what was I [thinking/feeling]? What transpired that made me consider this worth jotting down? How do my experiences since writing this down change how I inter/intra-act with this now? How does my handwriting, sometimes illegible even to me, rob the ideas of their power? How does my workload open or constrict possibilities for these idea-verbs to materialize? How does the cat, who is looking at me because it’s time for feeding, play a role? How can I translate these idea-verbs into an essay, conveying different idea-verbs to you, the reader I envision, and for what purpose? How does my concern for your [thoughts/feelings] influence the flow of my writing? How is this concern entangled in the past, present, and future, which lose meaning through their inseparability?
What or whether I write in my notebook depends on numerous events unrelated to the words I encounter on the page. The notes tell stories of what happened at that moment in time. Let’s take it further: even the words in a book have a story, that of the author’s choices and constraints, the editor’s scribblings, the politico-socio-ecological-climate in which the author composed the text. There are stories of texts consumed and produced prior to the book that are enfolded within its pages. There is an entire capitalist cultural-economic system within which the author and her entourage exist. There are as many different relational stories as there are numbers in the universe. Nothing exists on its own.
When we tell stories, we constantly make decisions about what to include and exclude. Telling stories is a discriminatory process. It is a co-emergence of matter and meaning that create worlds and through which we express and understand a particular reality. Our ethics determine what we include and what we leave out. Stories are ethical acts.
I want to commit an ethical act by telling unconventional stories of learning and assessment in schools, and by doing so, normalizing these stories.
I want to ignore the functional narrative that “progressive” educators have about the need to develop so-called 21st century skills, future-ready competencies, or the 4, 6, or 12 Cs. I want to quieten conversations about graduate portraits or mastering competencies. I want to ignore any talk of whole-child, student-centered learning frameworks.
I want to commit an ethical act against telling stories of individuals’ achievements, stories that emphasize separation even when they weave in words like collaboration and communication.
I want to commit an ethical act that gathers the stories of every participant—yes, even the other-than-human ones—into the unfolding of the world.
I want to tell stories that matter, composed by voices that matter because we matter the voices.
Learning is a relational, participatory process. It does not occur in isolation; it is entangled with/in the world. Learning emerges from inter/intra-actions with/in the environment and materializes as inter/intra-actions with/in the environment3. It’s akin to a river that shifts and meanders, sometimes flowing swiftly and other times slowing down, influenced by the obstacles and terrain it encounters. The river is more than water; it is also the rocks, the fish, the plastic bottle, the trees, the air, and the ocean. The river too is a relational process: it does not emerge without the rocks, the fish, the plastic bottle, the trees, the air, and the ocean.
How might we tell stories of learning that are relational and participatory? The telling of these stories is an ethical act because we respond to the world differently, we materialize learning differently, we value differently4.
I want to commit this ethical act of telling stories of connection, of how learning emerges through the infinite conditions of our lives: the weather, the surroundings, the table, the breakfast we ate, the political conditions, the argument I had last night, the trip I want to take but can’t, the teacher I had in 5th grade with whom I connected, the one in 11th with whom I didn’t, the challenges and joys I faced, the clarity in how I see how what is in front of me applies to me, how my colleague feels it doesn’t apply to her, the structures of power on socio-cultural scales, at the scale of this classroom, the smile on her face, the tiredness on his, the excitement of a project.
I want to tell the story of how you were part of my learning and I was part of yours, of how we are inseparable. I want to tell stories of how learning was enacted in ways that made the world a better place so that we value this enactment and not soul-less mechanistic achievement. I want to tell stories told by others, those who participated in our collective experience, including the other-than-human and more-than-human world—the bio-collective, all that lives that has an interest in the healthfulness of the planet.
Let’s all tell stories, not through marks or the grades on transcripts that tell no story at all. When we include the voices of all participants, we listen to/for the voices of those who were marked. This makes us response-able for our learning. This brings purpose and values to our learning, because we consider our relationships with participants in the process, through the marks we leave on ourselves, others, and the planet. Learning no longer disconnected from the marks we leave.
How we observe these marks is also ethical. As Werner Heisenberg, a pivotal figure in quantum mechanics, said, “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
When we consider learning, have we asked the people, the trees, the animals how they have thrived through our learning? Have we considered that, by asking different questions to different participants, we can write a different story?
What if, instead of assessing individuals as if they existed in isolation, instead of measuring the quantity of knowledge one acquired as if knowledge were things, instead of evaluating skills as if they were disconnected from the conditions in which they are applied… What if we told the whole story of our participation and that of others, our contributions and those of others, the parts we played along the parts others played in the creation of the experience, in bringing the learning to life.
What if we generated these stories in different ways, such as through testimonials; clips; photographs; quantitative, qualitative, and post-qualitative measures from many different parties; reflections, anecdotes, collages, sounds, and the noticing of the voices we did not include. How would the plots of our stories, with their protagonists, antagonists, twists, challenges, and comings of age emerge?
My notebook recounts tales of my [thinking/feeling], my learning journey, and the materialization of some ideas (when I put them into action) and the non-materialization of others (when I never consider them). It doesn’t exist (emerge!) on its own as it is itself the story of my inter-/intra-actions [with/as/for/in] the world. Turn to any page, and I may recount where I was, what I had eaten, my hopes, my company, the feline companion on my lap, how I subsequently penned (bringing an idea to life), how someone posed challenges to my writing, leading me to [think/feel] in novel ways, how another shared their inspiration, how I stumbled upon an unfamiliar author, how I continued to write, and how I continued to learn These are rich stories of emergence, of becomings, authored not by us as individuals, but by all participants.
We don’t have to write the same stories, tell the same narratives. We can commit ethical acts by telling different stories of connections, stories that materialize our selves and life.
1 I use the [x/y] to combine words that should never have been separated, but are through the words we use.
2 In the words of Whitney Stark, “Intra-action is a Baradian term used to replace ‘interaction,’ which necessitates pre-established bodies that then participate in action with each other. Intra-action understands agency as not an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces (Barad, 2007, p. 141) in which all designated ‘things’ are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably. Intra-action also acknowledges the impossibility of an absolute separation or classically understood objectivity, in which an apparatus (a technology or medium used to measure a property) or a person using an apparatus are not considered to be part of the process that allows for specifically located ‘outcomes’ or measurement.”
3 See The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi.
4 We respond with a different ethico-onto-epistemology.
Coconut Thinking 