If Spiegelman, and I…

are able to learn how to come to terms with difficult childhoods precipitated by parents unable to parent, through the work of representing our experiences in non-conventional expressions of our subjective experience, I do not know of more difficult subject matter to learn. Surely, if this attitude and approach works in these contexts, it is possible that it could work in other areas of learning.

From a sociological perspective…

we need to make a connection between our value-category memory system (our perceived life-world) and the phenomenal sensations we are experiencing when we are learning. Greene talked about the need for curriculum that facilitates the formation of conscious understanding in the learner by supporting connections between the learners past experiences and the demands of current learning situations. The learner needs to orient him/herself within moments of strangeness, moments when the inherited solutions to typical problems no longer seem to work. Greene, citing Phenix, talked about the learner achieving a state of self-transcendence, a state of duality within which the learner feels him/herself to be an agent and knower, at the same time identifying what he/she is coming to know. I argue that a curriculum that is designed to acknowledge moments of strangeness, moments where the learner is unable to solve problems based on inherited life-world knowledge, and also designed to allow for idiosyncratic meaning making beyond conventional representations of knowing through scholarly texts, is going to support academic success in a much wider variety of learners than is currently possible within the narrow confines of academically acceptable representations of knowledge.

The psychological element…

is discussed in Langer. There is a connection between Edelman’s theory and Langer’s theory. Langer suggests that there are times when we need representational resources that are non-verbal, alternate forms to articulate our subjective experience of phenomenal sensation. Langer proposed that the ability to express subjective experience in non-linguistic form can serve as a precursor to textual language. Langer argued that there are subjective experiences that are pre- or post- verbal, that need art forms to provide an initial attempt to formulate communication. I argue that there are concepts and experiences that are too difficult to be translated or interpreted immediately into textual language. When we are learning, we need to have alternate ways and means to interpret what we have learned, to bring the learning into focus, to distill and discern the phenomenal transform of our sensory perception, processed through our value-category memory system and then communicate our understanding to others.

The struggle continues…

Edelman (2004), Langer (1957) and Greene (1971). There is a connection here, between the physiological, the psychological and the sociological, that speaks to my argument that when we are learning, we need idiosyncratic and multiple modes and media to learn difficult things. It has to do with how language evolved to express consciousness entailed by the phenomenal transform of neural activity processed through value-category memory systems. The formation of symbolic and gestural systems of language constructed by multiple polymorphous sets. That there is no singular mapping for each representational state, rather a rich set of selectional non-representative repetoires give rise to conscious representation of subjective experience. This is the part that is coming from Edelman. I am suggesting that sometimes, especially when we are learning difficult concepts, we need to be able to express our subjective experience through multiple modes and media of language, prior to developing a linguistic articulation, similar to the ways we create conscious awareness of non-consciousness.

I think that gives me enough to go on…

for now. I’m going to add dictionary definitions of ambiguous, subjective, and experience. And I want to add Edelman’s theory of the relationship between C and C’ states, linked to Langer’s theory of mold, form, and abstract communication, and connect those to Edelman’s theory of representation. I do need to freewrite my way through these concepts.

Now if I could remember…

and describe one incident, I would be set for writing this paragraph. I don’t have many memories, graphic internal movies of real incidents. It’s more like this – we are standing in line for something, we are surrounded by people, there is a woman nervously jiggling her car keys, my mother says to her, in a hostile, aggressive tone of voice – “You can jiggle those keys all you want, lady, but it’s not going to work!” – or something to that effect. Now that really happened. The woman looked shocked and surprised, everyone around us shifted uncomfortably, I was frozen on the spot, completely unable to move.

Imagine someone doing this at a party…

and you have a basic idea of what it was like to be in public places with my mother. Her outlandish clothes, the incomprehensible and unpredictable verbal jabs she would take at unsuspecting people, the strange gestures she would make with her hands, or her body, her compulsion to reach out and touch me – my face, my hair, my arm, with a stroking, brushing gesture. It is coming back. I think, worse than the actual incidents of excruciating discomfort of having people look at her and recoil, was the anxiety of anticipation, of not knowing when she was going to do something, but not knowing what, or when. Every excursion into public spaces was a walk through a minefield, never knowing when an explosion might occur.

How to write about this…

the embarrassment I felt as a child growing up with a schizophrenic mother. I am making a link between my own autobiographical experience and that express by Spiegelman in Maus II, when his father returns a half used box of cereal with a piece of fruit cake in it to a grocery store. I could easily identify with Spiegelman’s mortification. Now I want to add my own story to this short paper, but I’m having a hard time remembering the details of what actually happened in those moments. I pulled out some old photographs, to see if I could remember an actual incident and found the picture of my mom doing a headstand.

I’m ready to write…

my short 5 page paper on cognition, art, expression, communication, and education. I’m excited about the sequence and the connections that are coming together. I’m challenged by one element of the autobiography. I hope I can write my way through it. I have this photograph of my mother standing on her head. Does that say enough? I’m going to use it as a starting point. I don’t have my scanner here. The only way to get the photograph into the computer is to take a photograph of it.

With that pesky detail out of the way…

I can move onto designing a writing process that will address production issues. Perhaps the first step is to identify the production process, to work through the steps of producing a professional academic manuscript. I know there are plenty of books and papers out there that I could consult, but something tells me I need to work through this for myself. Often I do this and realize I have re-invented the wheel, only to understand that I needed to re-invent the wheel to make it my own.