2020 (#51) : Jerome Bruner

“We teach a subject not to produce little libraries on that subject, but rather to get a student to think … for himself, to consider matters as a historian does, to take part in the process of knowledge–getting. Knowing is a process, not a product. (Bruner)

Transmit conventional ideas but encourage students to make the leap to the imaginable. (Bruner)

“We must not teach present fact, but to open up questions”
(Bruner)

“Knowledge is not a storehouse. You already “know” most of what you “learn” in science and mathematics. “Learning” is, most often, figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you currently think.”
(Bruner)

“that more is required to justify beliefs than merely sharing them with others. That “more” is the machinery of justification for one’s beliefs, the canons of scientific and philosophical reasoning. Knowledge, after all, is justified belief. (Bruner)

The humanoid mind/brain complex does not simply ‘grow up’ biologically according to a genetically predestined timetable but, rather, is opportunistic to nurturing in a human-like environment
(Bruner)

’Learning’ is, most often, figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you currently think. There are many ways of doing that. Some are more intuitive; others are formally derivational. But they all depend on knowing something “structural” about what you are contemplating-how to put it together. Knowing how something is put together is worth a thousand facts about it. It permits you to go beyond it.
(Bruner)

The teaching and learning of structure, rather than simply the mastery of facts and techniques, is at the center of the classic problem of transfer… . If earlier learning is to render later learning easier, it must do so by providing a general picture in terms of which the relations between things encountered earlier and later are made as clear as possible.
(Bruner)

the idea that in teaching a subject you begin with an “intuitive” account that is well within the reach of a student, and then circle back later with as many more recyclings as are necessary, to a more formal or highly structured account, until the learner has mastered the subject in its “full generative power.
(Bruner)

“…learners help each other learn, each according to her abilities. And this, of course, need not exclude the presence of somebody serving in the role of teacher. It simply implies that the teacher does not play that role as a monopoly, that learners ‘scaffold’ for each other as well. The antithesis is the ‘transmission’ model … (Bruner)

…I was struck by the fact that successful efforts to teach highly structured bodies of knowledge like mathematics, physical sciences, and even the field of history often took the form of metaphoric spiral in which at some simple level a set of ideas or operations were introduced in a rather intuitive way and, once mastered in that spirit, were then revisited and reconstrued in a more formal or operational way, then connected with other knowledge. The mastery at this stage then being carried one step higher to a new level of formal or operational rigor and to a broader level of abstraction and comprehensiveness. The end stage of this process was eventual mastery of the connexity and structure of a large body of knowledge… (Bruner)

Culture shapes the mind, it provides us with the toolkit by which we construct not only our worlds but our very conception of ourselves and our powers.
(Bruner)

Finding a place in the world … is ultimately an act of imagination.”[63] “The home, workplace, and social (friendship) circles have different values and beliefs, which complicates the individual’s ability to subsist within one culture. Therefore, people should be encouraged to identify and understand their perceptions of culture and go “beyond the cultural ways to innovate … to create … “Each must be his own artist, his own scientist, his own historian, his own navigator. (Bruner)

there is a reciprocal relation between education and the other major institutional activities of a culture: communication, economics, politics, family life, and so on… education is not a free-standing institution, not an island, but part of the continent. (Bruner)

“If school is an entry into the culture and not just a preparation for it, then we must constantly reassess what school does to the young student’s conception of his own powers (his sense of agency) and his sensed chances of being able to cope with the world both in school and after (his self-esteem). In many democratic cultures, I think, we have become so preoccupied with the more formal criteria of ‘performance’ and with the bureaucratic demands of education as an institution that we have neglected this personal side of education.
(Bruner)

“What we resolve to do in school only makes sense when considered in the broader context of what the society intends to accomplish through its educational investment in the young. How one conceives of education, we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of culture and its aims, professed and otherwise. (Bruner)

If I had it all to do over again, and if I knew
how, I would put my energies into reexamining how the schools express the agenda of the society and how that agenda is formulated and how that is translated by the schools. That, it seems to me, would be the properly subversive way to proceed. (Bruner)

“Any system of education, any theory of pedagogy, any ‘grand national policy’ that diminishes the school’s role in nurturing a pupils’ selfesteem fails at one of its primary functions. (Bruner)

“Ideally, school is supposed to provide a setting where our performance has fewer esteem-threatening consequences
than in the ‘real world’ presumably in the interest of encouraging the learner to “try things out. (Bruner)

human beings forever suffer conflicts of interests, with attendant grudges, factions, coalitions, and shifting alliances.”[83] But he insists, “There must obviously be some consensus to ensure the achievement of civility.”[84] To achieve consensus cultures have “interpretative procedures for adjudicating the different construals of reality that are inevitable in any diverse society.
(Bruner)

“In human beings, with their astonishing narrative gift, one of the principal forms of peacekeeping is the human gift for presentating, dramatizing, and explicating the mitigating circumstances surrounding conflict-threatening breaches in the ordinariness of life. The object of the narrative is not to reconcile, not to legitimize, not to even excuse, but to rather explicate…To be in a viable culture is to be bound in a set of connecting stories, connecting even though the stories may not represent a consensus.
(Bruner)

2020 (#50) : Bruner , Malaguzzi , Derrida

Storytelling performs the dual cultural functions of making the strange familiar and ourselves private and distinctive. If pupils are encouraged to think about the different outcomes that could have resulted from a set of circumstances, they are demonstrating useability of knowledge about a subject. Rather than just retaining knowledge and facts, they go beyond them to use their imaginations to think about other outcomes, as they don’t need the completion of a logical argument to understand a story. This helps them to think about facing the future, and it stimulates the teacher too.

(Bruner)

What we have to do now is draw out the image of the
child, draw the child out of the desperate situations
that many children find themselves in. If we redeem
the child from these difficult situations, we redeem
ourselves.

(Malaguzzi)

That which returns is the constant affirmation, the “yes, yes” on which I insisted yesterday. That which signs here is in the form of a return, which is to say it has the form of something that cannot be simple. It is a selective return without negativity, or which reduces negativity through affirmation, through alliance or marriage (hymen), that is, through an affirmation that is also binding on the other or that enters into a pact with itself as other.

(Derrida)

2020 (#49) : Malaguzzi , Bruner , Heidegger “Clarifying the meaning of our presence and our being with children is something that is vital for the child. the interaction – the context in which, the how, a thing is learned – that is key to a person’s understanding and development, rather than the mere fact that knowledge is acquired. we truly incline only toward something that in turn inclines toward us.”

It’s a constant value for the children to know that the
adult is there, attentive and helpful, a guide for the
child. Perhaps this way of working with the child
will build a different understanding of our role than
we have had before. Clarifying the meaning of our
presence and our being with children is something
that is vital for the child. When the child sees that the
adult is there, totally involved with the child, the
child doesn’t forget. This is something that’s right for
us and it’s right for the children.

(Malaguzzi)

‘stimulus and response’ as an extremely limited, atavistic model. It was clear to me that it was the interaction – the context in which, the how, a thing is learned – that is key to a person’s understanding and development, rather than the mere fact that knowledge is acquired.

(Bruner)

We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves
try to think. If the attempt is to be successful, we must be
ready to learn thinking.
As soon as we allow ourselves to become involved in such
learning, we have admitted that we are not yet capable
of thinking.
Yet man is called the being who can think, and rightly
so. Man is the rational animal. Reason, ratio, evolves in
thinking. Being the rational animal, man must be capable
of thinking if he really wants to. Still, it may be that man
wants to think, but can’t. Perhaps he wants too much when
he wants to think, and so can do too little. Man can think
in the sense that he possesses the possibility to do so. This
possibility alone, however, is no guarantee to us that we are
capable of thinking. For we are capable of doing only what
we are inclined to do. And again, we truly incline only
toward something that in turn inclines toward us, toward
our essential being, by appealing to our essential being as
the keeper who holds us in our essential being.

(Heidegger)

2020 (#48) : Malaguzzi and Derrida “recognize a new presence , this may seem to be passive, but it is really a very strong activity on our part. a more ancient, more originary experience.”

We need to know how to recognize a new presence,
how to wait for the child. This is something that is
learned, it’s not automatic. We often have to do it
against our own rush to work in our own way. We’ll
discover that our presence, which has to be visible
and warm, makes it possible for us to try to get inside
the child and what that child is doing. And this may
seem to be passive, but it is really a very strong
activity on our part.

(Malaguzzi)

So, this non-knowing . . . it is not a limit . . . of a knowledge, the limit in the progression of a knowledge. It is, in some way, a structural non-knowing, which is heterogeneous, foreign to knowledge. It’s not just the unknown that could be known and that I give up trying to know. It is something in relation to which knowledge is out of the question. And when I specify that is is a non-knowing and not the secret, I mean that when a text appears to be crypted, it is not at all in order to calculate or to intrigue or to bar access to something that I know and that others must not know; it is a more ancient, more originary experience, if you will, of the secret. It is not a thing, some information that I am hiding or that one has to hide or dissimulate; it is rather an experience that does not make itself available to information, that resists information and knowledge, and that immediately encrypts itself.

(Derrida)

2020 (#47) : Malaguzzi and Derrida “a project that is projected over a period of days, weeks or even months , being the authors of their own learning , there is a moment in which the photograph surprises you and it is the other’s look that, finally, wins out and decides.”

Our task is to construct educational situations that we
propose to the children in the morning. It’s okay to
improvise sometimes but we need to plan the project.
It may be a project that is projected over a period of
days, or weeks, or even months. We need to produce
situations in which children learn by themselves, in
which children can take advantage of their own
knowledge and resources autonomously, and in
which we guarantee the intervention of the adult as
little as possible. We don’t want to teach children
something that they can learn by themselves. We
don’t want to give them thoughts that they can come
up with by themselves. What we want to do is
activate within children the desire and will and great
pleasure that comes from being the authors of their
own learning.

(Malaguzzi)

There is finally a signature, which is not the signature one calculated, which is naturally not the patronymic name, which is not the set of stratagems elaborated in order to propose something original or inimitable. But, whether one like it or not, there is an “effect of the idiom for the other”. It is like photography: whatever pose you adopt, whatever precautions you take so that the photograph will look like this or that, there is a moment in which the photograph surprises you and it is the other’s look that, finally, wins out and decides. So, I think that in what I write in particular – but this is valid for others – the same thing happens: there is idiom and there is method, generality; reading is a mixed experience of the other in his or her signularity as well as philosophical content, information that can be torn out of this singular context. Both at the same time.”\

(Derrida)

2020 (#46) : Malaguzzi and Derrida “become better observers , work well together , every concept shelters or lets itself be haunted by another concept”

All of this pushes us to produce a higher level of
observation. We must move beyond just looking at
the child to become better observers, able to penetrate
into the child to understand each child’s resources
and potential and present state of mind. We need to
compare these with our own in order to work well
together.

(Malaguzzi)

… the contradictions (atopical:madness, extravagance, in Greek: atopos) of which we are speaking produces or registers the autodeconstruction in every concept, in the concept of concept: not only because hospitality undoes, should undo, the grip, the seizure, the capture, the force or the violence of the taking as comprehending, hospitality is, must be, owes itself to be, inconceivable and incomprehensible …

If every concept shelters or lets itself be haunted by another concept, by an other than itself that is no longer even its other, then no concept remains in place any longer.

Hospitality — this is is a name or an example of deconstruction.

Hospitality is the deconstruction of the at-home; deconstruction is hospitality to the other, to the other than oneself …

(Derrida)

2020 (#45) : Malaguzzi and Derrida “find each other in the forest. school as living organism.alliance. newness.”

We have to find each other in the forest and begin to
discuss what the education of the child actually
means. The important aspect is not just to promote
the education of the child but the health and happiness of the child as well.

We need to think of the school as a living organism.
Children have to feel that the world is inside the
school and moves and thinks and works and reflects
on everything that goes on. Of course not all children
are the same — each child brings a part of something
that’s different into the school.

(Malaguzzi)

That is what deconstruction is made of: not the mixture but the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new, and a break. The condition of this performative success, which is never guaranteed, is the alliance of these to newness.

(Derrida)

2020 (#43) : Malaguzzi and Derrida : “overactivity on the part of the adult is a risk factor , middle, neither/nor, element, either, matrix, means, the medium is shining”

Overactivity on the part of the adult is a risk factor.
The adult does too much because he cares about the
child; but this creates a passive role for the child in
her own learning.

(Malaguzzi)

… a presence both perceived and not perceived, at once image and model, and hence image without model, neither image nor model, a medium (medium in the sense of middle, neither/nor, what is between extremes, and medium in the sense of element, either, matrix, means). When we have rounded a certain corner in our reading we will place ourselves on that side of the lustre where the “medium” is shining.

(Derrida)

2020 (#43) : Malaguzzi and Derrida “feel active and important , rewarded by their own efforts , there is then some spirit”

Both children and adults need to feel active and
important — to be rewarded by their own efforts,
their own intelligences, their own activity and
energy. When a child feels these things are valued,
they become a fountain of strength for him. He feels
the joy of working with adults who value his work
and this is one of the bases for learning.

(Malaguzzi)

not toward death but toward a living-on [sur-vie], namely, a trace of which life and death would themselves be but traces and traces of traces, a survival whose possibility in advance comes to disjoin or dis-adjust the identity to itself of the living present as well as of any effectivity. There is then some spirit. Spirits. And one must reckon with them. One cannot not have to, one must not
not be able to reckon with them, which are more than one: the more than one/no more one [Ie plus d’un].

(Derrida)

2020 (#42) : Malaguzzi and Derrida “the children stretch their capacities and use their intelligences , give it the possibility of being thought”

It is also important for the teachers to enjoy being
with the other teachers, to enjoy seeing the children
stretch their capacities and use their intelligences, to
enjoy interactions with the children. Both parts are
essential.

(Malaguzzi)

I have constantly insisted on the fact that the movement of deconstruction was first of all affirmative – not positive, but affirmative. Deconstruction, let’s say it one more time, is not demolition or destruction. Deconstruction – I don’t know if it is something, but if it is something, it is also a thinking of Being, of metaphysics, thus a discussion that has it out with [“s’explique avec”] the authority of Being or of essence, of the thinking of what is, and such a discussion or explanation cannot be simply a negative destruction. All the more so in that, among all the things in the history of metaphysics that deconstruction argues against [“s’explique avec”], there is the dialectic, there is the “opposition” of the negative to the positive. To say that deconstruction is negative is simply to reinscribe it in an intrametaphysical process. The point is not to remove oneself from this process but to give it the possibility of being thought.

(Derrida)