Subjunctive spaces of curriculum: on the

importance of eccentric knowledge

Dennis Sumara and Brent Davis

When education forsakes the middle

for the ends or the beginnings,

it is deadly.

(Grumet, 1995, p. 17)

In the middle …

In her response to the question of “what is basic” to education, Madeleine Grumet argues that most schooling practices have forgotten that learning that matters to anyone is rooted in history, context, and practice. It has no real starting points or finishing lines but, rather, is always and already in the middle—in spaces amid past and future, fixed knowledge and emergent interpretation, expectation and hope.

Grumet’s (1995) comments are presented as a caution to educators, urging us to resist the temptation to organise schooling around a set of foundations that are assumed to be universal and unchanging. What is basic to education, she contends, is an issue that can only be considered in terms of place, era, intention, desire. Grumet explains: “What is basic to education is neither the system that surrounds us nor the situation of each individual’s lived experience. What is basic to education is the relation between the two” (p. 16). What is basic, then, are the acts that link text, community, nature, and school. Education exists and consists in these sorts of junctions—that is, etymologically, “the places where things meet”.

More provocatively, perhaps, education is not just about the junctions, midsts, or meetings, but the manner in which things are brought together. Jerome Bruner (1986, 1990) refers to such acts of linking in terms of the subjunctive—that is, dealing with the “what ifs” of experience. Linguistically, the subjunctive is the verb form that is used to refer to contingent or hypothetical action. The subjunctive is used to flag imagined spaces; it is the glue of language that, when properly situated in the midst of assertions, transforms what is thought to be known into new possibilities for insight. In her novel Unless, Carol Shields (2002) adds that we also make use of other parts of speech to invoke the subjunctive:

A life is full of isolated events, but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to link them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define, since they are abstractions of location or relative position, words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, theretofore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet. (p. 313)

The subjunctive exists only in the middle, and it is perhaps for that reason that it is, as Bruner (1990) notes, one of the most difficult aspects of language to learn. Even so, it is perhaps the most important, required for all imaginative and propositional thought.

Unfortunately, much of formal education is conceived and framed in terms of absent middles, articulated as inevitable tensions or irresolvable dyads that include personalised/generic, mind/body, theory/practice, thought/action, knowledge/knower, self/other, and individual/collective. The list goes on. Such constructs, we would argue, have forsaken their pedagogical responsibility. They have replaced the need to interpret and propose—that is, the need to enter subjunctive spaces—with the impersonal and nonnegotiable slash. The assumption of contradiction has obviated the obligations to imagine and reconcile.

So, what if the slash were to be replaced by the subjunctive? How might education look if it not just tolerated but embraced possibilities like individual-yet-collective, public-but-also-private, and self-therefore-other?

In the middle, but not in the centre …

Or, phrased somewhat differently, what might this “middle” be that Grumet suggests is the place of our existence?

This is not an easy question in the context of formal education, where terms abound that seem to suggest a sense of middleness. For example, one might imagine that the middle could be construed as the core curriculum, currently defined in terms of those knowledge domains associated with literacy, mathematics, science, and social studies. The core curriculum is considered to be foundational (and central) to the development of the educated citizen. Where knowledge of the core curriculum is not seen as immediately applicable to daily life, it is understood either in terms of preparation for some future existence or, more indirectly, as supporting thinking abilities that will eventually prove useful. Even when learning processes are given primacy, knowledge is still conceptualised as an attainable object that floats between learners and context. Further, the word core suggests that the important knowledge is not only static but generalised and generalisable, to all populations, to all contexts.

The core that is curriculum is among a host of centring notions that are woven through the language of educational practice. Others include averages (e.g., on graded evaluations), norms (e.g., in developmental trajectories), centres (such as the central offices for administrators, ministers, funding agencies, etc.), and compromises (e.g., among disputing groups). What if these middles, these instances of “what is”, were replaced by “what if”?

An examination of the technological developments in Western society over the last 100 years shows that these evolutions did not emerge from the foundations of knowledge, or even necessarily from persons considered authorities. Many critical events in the 20th century were triggered by the eccentricities of individuals who strayed from beaten paths, pursuing personal obsessions that only a few could imagine would prove so influential. In other words, the collective intelligence of any society is rooted in the eccentricities—literally, the off centredness—of its citizens. In stark contrast, it seems that the modern school is organised around the unquestioned assumption that the collective good is best served by attending to the sorts of centrist notions mentioned in the preceding paragraph.

Perhaps, we are suggesting, what is basic to education—that is, what is in the middle—is not so much what is currently understood in terms of cores, averages, or centres, but, instead, what might be called an “eccentric curriculum”.

This phrase might at first seem oxymoronic and paradoxical. How might the middle—most crucial aspects—of formal schooling be ex-centred? This paradox is amplified by contrasting some of the synonyms of central core and eccentric. The former include common, normal, sensible, familiar, and regular. The latter include idiosyncratic, abnormal, foolish, queer, and irregular. While there are always attempts to regulate and authorise certain knowledge to be central (universal) to human existence, in fact all knowledge is both simultaneously personal and collective, eccentric and, as Grumet argues, in the middle.

We proceed with an example here, drawn from Dennis’s teaching.

A junction …

It is a bitterly cold day and I am giving a poetry-writing workshop to 32 preservice teachers who are enrolled in a course on teaching methods for the middle school English language arts classroom. To begin, I ask them about their previous experiences with poetry writing. Their responses are familiar:

We were told to just write what we felt.

We were told to write a sonnet for our Shakespeare unit.

I remember writing free verse poems.

We wrote a lot of haikus and poems with specific rhyme schemes.

From what the students tell me, it seems that poems were seen as artefacts that could either be plucked from the air or extracted from deep inside one’s inner being by those few students who had some gift or talent for poetic expression. I tell them to try to ignore everything they think they know about writing poetry. Then we begin.

Following some of the practices for teaching poetry articulated by Rebecca Luce-Kapler (2004), I start by spreading a collection of buttons taken from many different articles of clothing on a large table in the middle of the classroom and then invite students to choose one that is interesting to them. Once seated, I ask each of them to examine the button and decide what sort of article of clothing was previously attached to it and then to write down their decision. Next, I ask them to imagine the person who is wearing this article of clothing. I try to prompt their imaginings with a few questions: “What interesting place has this button been? What event has this button participated in?” I follow up with the instruction, “When you think you’re ready, take five minutes and write out the details of this place and event. Remember that detail is important. It’s more interesting to hear that the button has been in Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue in New York City at dusk on Christmas Eve amid a throng of busy shoppers than it is to hear that the button was out shopping for jewelry!”

The next part of the exercise involves the introduction of a bit of “accident” to the varieties of characters and narratives that have already been created. I ask students to pair up with someone and, with their partners, to share what was imagined and then to create a situation where their two characters meet. Once again I remind them of the importance of detail, and I give them another five minutes to invent the situation where the two buttons encounter one another.

As the participants are making their decisions about where and how their characters meet, I move around the room passing out envelopes that contain photographs that I have gathered from different collections. When the time for constructing the details about the meeting has elapsed, I ask the pairs of students to open their envelopes, examine the photographs, and answer the question, “What happened just before this photograph was taken?”

Giving only a moment to settle on a response, I then ask them to incorporate this event into the situation they just invented for their two characters. Next, I ask students to work together to write a few paragraphs to summarise their invented plot. Finally, I get them to show the class the buttons and photographs they have used and to read their paragraphs aloud. Even though they have only been working on this activity for about 15 minutes, the beginnings of imaginative fictional narratives are already appearing.

Next I present students with examples of several contemporary poems written by Canadian poet Lorna Crozier (1992). I read them aloud, pausing to draw attention to rhythm, tempo, line breaks, images, and other devices used by Crozier to create poetic effects.

For homework, I ask the students to collaborate with their partners to choose one of the poems that were read aloud. Their task is to use it as a model for a new piece of poetry—one that they are to create together using the plot developed from the button-and-photograph activities. I reemphasise to them that they must collaborate with one another throughout the process of creating the new poem.

The next day, I ask students to read aloud the small poems they have created. One poem, written by Margaret and Dwayne, catches our collective attention:

First Date

A sweater with puff sleeves.

A hockey game.

Upon discussion, it becomes apparent that part of this poem’s appeal has to do with its simple form. Very few words are used to vividly depict a situation that is ripe with interpretive possibilities.

Margaret tells the class about her experience of creating the poem with Dwayne:

I began with a small pink button that reminded me of a sweater my older sister used to wear. Dwayne had a button that he said reminded him of a winter coat he used to wear when he was in high school. When we talked about the two buttons, we decided that these two characters could meet on the downtown bus. They would see each other for weeks and not know that one was noticing the other—and then one day they would end up sitting next to one another.

The photograph that we were given showed a simple church in the background and a snow-covered parking lot in front. When I looked at the picture, it reminded me of going to church when I was a kid—but when Dwayne looked at it he was reminded of going to hockey practice on cold winter mornings. We thought of many possibilities, but eventually decided that our two characters would get into a conversation on the bus about a hockey game that had happened the night before, which would lead to each revealing how much they like hockey and then to a decision to go to a game together.

Writing the two paragraphs was easy—the plot and the characters were so clear to us. Dwayne and I worked on the poem online last night, sending ideas back and forth using instant messaging. We tried to copy the style of Lorna Crozier, who uses very simple structures with short phrases and everyday images. The poem that we started with was more of a narrative poem. It was a lot longer, telling the story of how these two characters met and so on. As we continued to work on it, though, we kept editing out more and more until we ended up with what we thought was the poetic essence—a poem that announced a lot of possibilities, but one that also had concrete details.

To me, it’s interesting how our final poem developed on the screen. I don’t think that either of us could say who wrote what.

Ex-centring …

So, what was the teaching doing here?

For us, teaching refers to any event that prompts a complex system to respond differently—a definition that we intend as a rejection of the pervasive anthropocentric assumption that humans are the only teaching species and the popular cultural belief that the outcomes of teaching are determinable and deliberate. This sense of teaching recalls the roots of the word, derived from the Old English tacn, “to point”. It foregrounds that the phenomenon of teaching can only be understood in terms of its effects on a learning system. In addition, and to render things even more complex, this conception compels a reconsideration of learning and learners. As is highlighted in Margaret’s final paragraph above, who or what is generating new insights and the nature of those insights cannot always (or even often) be understood in terms of just an individual.

An implication is that the teacher is not only another learner within the classroom, but an integral part(icipant) within a grander learning system. Along with all the other individuals, the clusters of individuals (such as Margaret and Dwayne), and the classroom collective as a whole, the teacher is teaching/learning. The teacher, that is, is constantly perturbating and being perturbated with/in the evolving, self-prompting system of the classroom collective. So far, an effective and familiar vocabulary for this sort of multilevelled complex choreography has yet to emerge in Western cultures, much less an orientation to the unimagined, not-yet-imaginable possibilities that are entailed.

In others words, this moment of teaching is all about subjunctive spaces— seeking out, opening up, dwelling in. And, on this count, to make sense of what is possible in the classroom, it seems to make sense to suggest that attentions should shift from the mechanics of teaching to the dynamics of learning. Actually, for us, the really important question is not “What is learning?” (although we don’t mean to diminish its significance), but “What is a learner?” This comment is prompted by one of the most prominent and persistent topics of debate in contemporary education: Should classrooms be teacher centred or learner centred?

For this debate to make any sense at all, one must assume a particular definition of learner—namely, a self-contained, insulated, and isolated individual. This assumption is also necessary if one desires to rank, personalise, and create authentic learning events. And, not insignificantly, it seems to be the conception of “learner” that is floating through much of the rhetoric of “personalised learning”. Even though, as Besley and Sokoloff (2004) note, the phrase tends to be taken up in different ways, the individual seems to be firmly positioned at the centre. In some interpretations, personalised learning is about ensuring “that the needs of individual pupils are known and understood and supported where possible by modern technology” (p. 4); in others, the term is tied to practices of “developing personal target setting, personal tutorials, … personalised pacing of learning” (p. 4.). The former, argue Besley and Sokoloff, is more fitted to classic notions of back to basics, whereas the latter seems to be more easily aligned with more progressive attitudes. Neither, however, even comes close to displacing the notion of learner.

There was a great deal of philosophical work done on this sort of displacement in the 20th century, particularly by structuralist, post-structuralist, and sociocultural theorists, to interpret this assumption. In brief, the argument is that all knowing is situated, distributed, and contingent. However, there remained a tendency to leave the individual at the centre of the discussion, as a sort of vortex in the flow of matter and energy.

More recently, studies of complex systems have provided a means to de-centre or ex-centre the individual in discussions of learning. Complexity thinking might be described as an “intertheory”. It is a discourse that has arisen in the midst of a diversity of interpretive frames that have come together in productive dialogue, in their concomitant desires to make sense of certain self-organising, self-maintaining, radically contextualised, and constantly adapting phenomena—that is, learning systems—that include (among many others) bodily subsystems, persons, social groupings, cultures, species, and the biosphere. In the process, discussions of complex dynamics have not only highlighted the overlapping, intersecting, and nested aspects of certain phenomena; they have also foregrounded how different discourses and disciplines might be understood as profoundly complementary. In effect, just as the above-noted phenomena can be described as learners, disciplines such as neurology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and ecology might all be seen as seeking to articulate some manner of learning theory to account for the particular adaptive behaviours of their specific interest. Concisely, for complexivists, everything is in the middle, but there are no centres.

In the context of schooling, complexity theory prompts us to pay more attention to the role of eccentricity in the production of collective knowledge. This shift in focus does not obliterate the individual learner, nor does it cast the learner merely as a by-product of surrounding activities. Instead, it encourages a more fine-grained analysis of how each person’s sense of self emerges with the eccentric collective body, and with knowledge that is both used and produced by eccentricity, primarily those learnings currently identified as subjunctive or eccentric.

Put differently, following arguments made by Dominick LaCapra (2004), educators are urged to reject both immanent and transcendent views of learning and identity, understanding that neither knowledge nor selves (or any other category of learning/learner) pre-exist one another; nor do knowledge or selves transcend their material or symbolic forms. Instead, they unfold from and are enfolded in one another. That is, the knowledge/identity/collective nexus comprises a productive eccentric form that produces its own elements and its own original products.

Returning to one of our opening points, then, in English grammatical structures, eccentric spaces are represented by subjunctive language such as what if, unless, even though, however, which are crucial to representing personal worlds and social relationships. They show time scale, tentativeness, movement, possibility. They help us to imagine other minds and to explore possible not-yet-experienced selves.

Of course, because they are oriented towards the yet-to-be-realised possibility rather than the established fact, subjunctive forms of language are troubling to educators. They do not point to core knowledge; instead, they gesture at something that might be made present, but that is clearly not represented. They are eccentric. As such, subjunctive forms of language are rarely considered when discussing the centres and the centralising tendencies of formal education. In fact, it may be that subjunctive forms cannot be considered in the context of contemporary conceptions of education.

We pursue this issue in the next section, taking a slightly different tack on the notion of eccentricity.

Educating the eccentric …

One (perhaps cynical) way of describing the contemporary project of schooling is in terms of a desire to ensure maximum redundancy among individuals. Why else would students be exposed to the same topics at the same time with the same expectations for minimum competence, distinguished only through the somewhat arbitrary and accidental detail of their year of birth?

Of course, some level of redundancy is vital for complex co-activity, and so we would emphasise that we are not condemning the practice of identifying common topics and concerns and using these to frame educational experience. However, we are critiquing it. As necessary as redundancy is to collective action, such an overwhelming emphasis on sameness can have an unfortunate side effect, in that it might “dumb down” the collective. That is, as currently operationalised, the emphasis on redundancy in formal schooling appears to be distinct (and even opposed) to diversity—which, as complexivists have developed it (cf., Johnson, 2001), is the root of a system’s intelligence. The pools of diverse interest, ability, tendency, and so on are what the system can draw on when confronted with a situation that demands a novel response.

Outside of schools there seems to be no difficulty with this idea. Societies are organised around not just possibilities for, but also expectations of, specialisation. This is also true of institutions of higher education, where it is understood that knowledge production is utterly dependent on the opportunity to select and pursue particular interests—in brief, to be eccentric.

The question then becomes: Can the public school tolerate the possibility of personal eccentricity?

We frame our response to this question with the example of wiki spaces. These are Internet sites where anyone can click on a page to revise, add to, or refute the ideas associated with an entry. Or, if a topic does not yet have a page, anyone can begin a new entry. While there is usually some monitoring of the site by administrators, wikis are collective projects where a community maintains the credibility of the entries. By way of specific example, Wikipedia.com has an editorial policy that is summed up in two sentences: “Those who edit in good faith, show civility, seek consensus, and work toward the goal of creating a great encyclopedia should find a welcoming environment. Wikipedia greatly appreciates additions that help all people.”¹

Wiki writing can be surprising, mostly because it requires a non-synchronous collaboration that is unlike what is experienced in face-to-face collaborations. In particular, it enables the formation of communities with no obvious centres, as people join together in the project of knowledge production, forming ex-centred communities, arising in the eccentric interests and competencies of individuals.

What becomes abundantly clear in these contexts is that the zero-sum logic that frames debates around self versus society or individual versus collective is simply wrong minded. Wiki spaces illustrate that individual and collective interests can be powerfully served at the same time—and this happens not in spite of diversity, but precisely because of diversity.

It is thus that we arrive at some troubling conclusions about personalised learning, at least as it has been popularly construed. To our reading, the personalisation that is proposed has nothing to do with those things, actions, interests, and obsessions that infuse personhood. It appears to be a renewed and renamed effort to tug educational action back to the centre—to consensus, to taken-as-shared basics, to the individual as the centre of learning, to core knowledge. Of course, that is probably to be expected. The phrase itself is an egocentric one.

This is not to say that the movement is entirely wrong minded. As we have argued, there seems to be great potential in an educational system that can tolerate idiosyncrasy—and if personalised learning is something that allows people to pursue interests and tangents in the context of collective action, then we would support the movement.

The point might be underscored by being a bit more explicit about the difference between the words centre and middle. The former is derived from geometry, specifically the Greek centrum, which was the fixed point of the two parts of a compass that touch the page. It is a defined element, an unchanging aspect, a discrete and unambiguous datum.

By contrast, middle derives from the Sanskrit madhyah, “between”. It is a notion that connects. Middles only arise when there are objects or events that are juxtaposed to form a between-space. And so the middle that is invoked by Grumet (which we used to open this article) is precisely the notion of the subjunctive. The middle is emergent possibility.

A middle is ex-centred.

References

Besley, S., & Sokoloff, P. (2004). Personalized learning: Just what is it? London: Policy and Qualifications Division, London Qualifications Ltd.

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Crozier, L. (1992). Inventing the hawk. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

Grumet, M. (1995). The curriculum: What are the basics and are we teaching them? In J. Kincheloe & S. Steinberg (Eds.), Thirteen questions: Reframing education’s conversation (pp. 15–21). New York: Peter Lang.

Johnson, S. (2001). Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. New York: Scribner.

LaCapra, D. (2004). History in transit: Experience, identity, critical theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Luce-Kapler, R. (2004). Writing with, through, and beyond the text: An ecology of language. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Shields, C. (2002). Unless. New York: HarperPerennial.

Note

1.&;&;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines

The authors

Dennis J. Sumara is Professor and Head of the Department of Curriculum Studies, University of British Columbia. His research focuses on experiences of literary engagement. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which, Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters: Imagination, Interpretation, Insight, received the 2003 National Reading Conference’s (USA) Ed Fry Book Award. He has also published extensively in the areas of curriculum theory, teacher education, and educational action research.

Email: dennis.sumara@ubc.ca

Brent Davis is Professor and David Robitaille Chair in Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education at the University of British Columbia. His research is developed around the educational relevance of recent developments in the cognitive and complexity sciences. He has published books and articles in the areas of mathematics learning and teaching, curriculum theory, teacher education, epistemology, and action research.

Email: brdavis@ubc.ca