Towards a poetics of ‘formative
space’
Embodied narratives and ways of
knowing in the context of the
contemporary Academy
Francesco Cappa
Assistant Professor, Università di Milano-Bicocca
&
Gaia Del Negro
PhD Student, Canterbury Christ Church University
Scenario
• It was noticed how the field of higher and adult education has been
influenced by growing pressures of neo-liberal ideologies and policies that
are changing the conceptualization of learning into vocational,
performative and a solitary duty (Ball, 2008; Biesta, 2010; Field, 2006).
• Concerns were raised about a commodification of the educational
relationship (Furedi, 2010; Molesworth et al., 2011) in the context of ‘the
university’ as an institution becoming increasingly ruled by pedagogically
empty “excellence” claims (Reading, 1996).
• Barnett (2011) lamented a loss of ‘mystery’ in the way learning and
knowing are understood, since a ‘linguistic power structure’ in education
has come to rule out what is not overtly explicit.
• According to Barnett (2011), in higher education we are witnessing a
‘failure of imagination’ in pedagogical practices that are increasingly
subjugated by pure market logics.
Enchantment
• In this framework, if “enchantment produces a Secondary World into
which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their
senses while they are inside”, and if “in its purity it is artistic in desire and
purpose” (Tolkien 1988: 49-50, in Curry 1999), then:
• How can we think of this ‘enchantment’ in the perspective of learning and
adult education?
• We take it with Curry that “re-enchantment is not about re-introducing a
former condition where it no longer exists; rather it must be a matter of
recognizing, articulating and encouraging Enchantment—or more exactly,
the conditions for Enchantment that exist now” (Curry, 1999, p. 407).
• What are these conditions about, in relation to higher and adult
education?
• Wonder, i.e. an ecological sense of connection in how a subject knows the
world, herself and others in the world (Curry, 1999) seems to indicate a
fundamental aesthetic dimension in knowing, in Batesonian terms.
Aesthetic languages
• Why an aesthetic dimension in processes of research and education,
particularly in a sometimes dis-enchanted academic context, is important?
• “By aesthetic, I mean responsive to the pattern which connects”
(Bateson, 1979)
• Aesthetic representation celebrates connectivity, “the real stuff of life”,
through stories (Bateson 1979, in Formenti 2014).
• By way of telling stories in language we coordinate with others and build
shared meaning (Maturana)
Our research project
• Interrogating knowing and becoming a professional in education
• Two groups in two universities: Milano-Bicocca (Italy) and CCCU (UK)
• Research with PhD students, academic researchers and professionals
studying in HE
Methodological references
• Learning biographies (Dominicé, 2000)
• Co-operative inquiry (Heron, 1996)
• Compositional approach to research-formation (Formenti, 2008)
• Biographical research (Merrill & West)
Operativity of metaphors in Education
• “Its [Cultural Psychology] main objective is to study the genesis of the
relationship with knowledge, seen as a construction that emerges from
the encounter between the subject and the object of knowledge. […] Our
subjects are strongly embedded in their local social, economic, political
and cultural environments.” (Fabbri and Munari, 1990, p.335)
• “We in fact condense as particular metaphors our ways of learning, our
ways of studying, our ways of dealing with problems, our ways of
designing, that is our ways of organizing knowledge.” (Fabbri, 2004, p.78)
• Metaphors build bridges in knowledge laterally, by way of recognition by
the observer of similar forms of description (abduction, in Bateson)
• Metaphors as a ‘cognitive operative tools’, they organize certain actions
that a subject does on its object of knowledge
• Relationship between personal representations and the history and
cultural tradition of our (and other) metaphors
• Operativity of metaphors in Education, bringing in the sensuous
materiality of our knowing processes (manipulating artworks)
Embodied knowledge
“Living systems are cognitive systems and living is knowing”
(Maturana, 1993)
“All doing is knowing, all knowing is doing” (Maturana & Varela,
1987, p.26)
“Everything we do is a structural dance in the choreography of
coexistence” (ibid, p.248)
Space of play
“This intermediate area of experience, unchallenged in respect
to its belonging to inner or external (shared) reality, constitutes
the greater part of the infant’s experience, and throughout life is
retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and
to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific
work” (Winnicott, 1971, p.19).
The evocative object
• “Moving in the world of objects, we live in an evocative world that is that
only because objects have their own completeness. The integrity of an
object, the character of its thingness, has a potential to start evocative
processes.” (Bollas, 2009, p. 102, our translation)
• “There are many different ways of thinking, and one of the ways in which
we think of ourselves happens through the use of evocative objects.” (ibid,
p. 9)
• “We do not just see them [the objects]. We experience them.” (ibid, p.
104)
• The role of Artworks as expressions of relationship to knowing and of
possibilities of learning?
• “Thinking that develops from encounters in reality, in comparison to
thoughts that emerge from the mind only, bring the mark of life” (ibid.,
p.109)
Aesthetics of being
• “We don’t know why we choose objects, but one reason is certainly their
‘potential of experience’, in that each object offers ‘types of experiences
of the Self’.” (ibid., p.112)
• May the use of objects speak of the construction of the forms of a
professional self?
• “The world of objects is an ‘extraordinary vocabulary for the person who
expresses an aesthetics of Self through her precise choices and her
particular uses of what constitutes it’” (ibid., p.115)
• “Life is sometimes articulated as an aesthetic, a revealed form of the way
of being of a person. I think that a specific drive exists to model life, and
the force of destiny is the uninterrupted attempt to choose and use
objects in order to give lived expression to the real Self” (ibid,, p.113)
Towards a poetics of ‘formative space’
• Starting from our experience of research with these two groups, in these
two contexts, we would like to offer our observations regarding a possible
aesthetic re-enchantment of the academic space, in the sense of
propitiating and making space for wonder to happen.
• Space of play, embodied knowledge, and evocative object in the research
space seem to construct some conditions to explore more beautiful and
‘spacious’ stories, that produce:
• A pleasure of playing, and a pleasure of knowing and of knowledge
• Relational and beautiful thinking, connecting the relationship to
oneself, the other and the ecology of ideas (formation in Pineau)
• Recognition of the ‘scientific’ value of knowing to the expression of the
self, both through the use of creative and autobiographical writing and
through the use of other languages
Thank you.
francesco.cappa@unimib.it
g.del-negro148@canterbury.ac.uk
Bibliography
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Bachelard, G. (1994). The poetics of space. Boston MA: Beacon Press.
Ball, S. (2008). The education debate. Policy and politics in the twenty-first century. Bristol:
Policy.
Barnett, R. (2011). Being a University. London: Routledge.
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. New York: Ballantine Books.
Bateson, G. (1979). Mind and nature: A necessary unity. New York: Dutton.
Biesta, G.J.J. (2010). Good education in an age of measurement: ethics, politics, democracy.
Boulder CO, Paradigm Publishers.
Bollas, C. (2009). Il mondo dell'oggetto evocativo. Roma: Astrolabio.
Bollas, C. (1995). Cracking up: The work of unconscious experience. Chicago: Psychology
Press.
Curry, P. (1999). Magic vs. enchantment. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 14(3), pp. 401412.
Denzin, N., & Lincoln, Yvonna S. (1998). Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials :
Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, editors. (Handbook of qualitative research paperback
edition 3). Thousand Oaks, Calif. ; London: Sage Publications.
Fabbri, D. & Munari, A. (1990). Cultural psychology. A new relationship with knowledge,
Cultural Dynamics, 3(4), pp. 327-348
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Field, J. (2006). Lifelong learning and the new educational order (2nd rev. ed.).
Stoke-on-Trent ; Sterling, VA: Trentham Books.
Formenti, L. (2008) La com-position dans/de l’autobiographie, in J. Gonzales
Monteagudo (ed), Pratiques De Formation/Analyses. Approches Non-Francophones
Des Histoires De Vie En Europe, 55, pp. 171-191.
Formenti, L. (2014). Towards a dialogic view of learning and narratives. 3rd Int.
Conf. on Culture, Cognition, Biography & Learning. Induck Hall, Pusan National
University (PNU), Busan, South Korea: Research Network CBLL.
Furedi, F. (2010). Wasted : Why education isn't educating. London: Continuum.
Hunt, C. (2013). Transformative learning through creative life writing: exploring the
self in the learning procese, Abingdon: Routledge.
Molesworth, M., Nixon, Elizabeth, & Scullion, Richard. (2011). The marketisation of
higher education : The student as consumer. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY:
Routledge.
Readings, B. (1996). The university in ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. London: Psychology Press.