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| Celebration of Writing Day at EKD |
You know how it is
that sometimes you have a feeling, but it’s not solid enough to walk on. I’m sensing it’s important to talk
about what the engaged body brings forward, especially now in digital media
production, in the making of images, moving them around on the timeline,
mixing, messing around, reaching for the feel.
Amid this, a signal’s
beeping: You better make a meta-track!
We’re being summoned to theorize the practice, and do it now—right alongside
when producing. It’s crucial,
right now, while bringing technology increasingly into our children’s hands
that we companion craft with squeezing out the words and thoughts that want
naming. We need to select, even
develop, applications that support our students doing this.
This is about the
hands-head circuitry, with each bowing to the other instead of perpetuating the
one-way, top-down cognitive dominion.
And let’s not flip-flop into mindless handwork that denies the potential
genius of crafting.
While most of me
says “Go on,” I also feel smacked from two sides. Is forcing words onto play a sacrilege, or is this an act of
consciousness? I suppose working
at the edge of consciousness always carries an electric charge, like Zeus’
lightning strikes at anyone who might steal fire from gods.
Richard Sennett
probes into The
Craftsman. Hair on the
back of my neck tingled when metamorphosis,
Acteon and Pandora, burst onto page 123, like the effect/affect named in Robert
Bly’s Leaping
Poetry. Sennett
argues plateau-leaps in craft cannot be adequately treated as “just so”
evolutions: “The just-so account supposes that change has to happen in a just
certain way, each step leading implacably to the next; the maker could do and
think no other” (p. 122).
Not so, Sennett
asserts. He builds off John Ruskin’s
defense of the craftsman as much more than a dim-witted mechanical worker. “Ruskin’s sense of tradition is that
the errors, imperfections, and variations that attend any practice are handed
down from generation to generation; the mental
provocation of these uncertainties is not rubbed away by time” (p. 123, emphasis
mine). The active mind patrolling
for possibility runs along the potter’s fingers.
Are Ruskin and
Sennett suggesting that tacit hand-knowledge gets transmitted from user to user
and that languaging the craft scaffolds the leaps? When Brian
Boyd builds the case that our cognitive evolution moves by storytelling and
that this positions today’s civilization to cooperate, to make peace as never
before, does this also mean that our digital media craft needs our mutual
theorizing if we are to play our part in advancing peace and justice?
Wading in
craftsmanship along with Sennett’s discursive explorations of it put water-wings
under my crafting with digital media.
They buoy up my gurgling enthusiasm that wants words to make me believe
DMP fits in the academy and in the composing community. I’m trying to make the case that when
we’re savvy professionals, we can tack onto our digital media production a
track that articulates errors and imperfections into the “mental provocation of
uncertainty” and forward into the imagination of social justice and personal
identity.
Taking a mini-break
from drafting this blog, I checked my twitter feed and hit on a recording
from last night’s Connected Learning hangout in which danah boyd calls for
social-media engagement to be recognized for legitimate
knowledge-production. It’s as
important as traditional textbookish stuff.
As we make our way
through the resistances around CL, DMP, and all technologically-enriched 21st
century learning, the linkage through hands, head, and heart must be clear. I hear William
Stafford’s lines: For it is important
that awake people be awake, . . ./The signals we give . . . /should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
