Pedagogies of the Imagination: Mythopoetic Curriculum in Educational Practice

273 Pages·2008·4.835 MB·English

by  Timothy Leonard, Peter Willis (auth.), Timothy Leonard, Peter Willis (eds.)

Timothy Leonard
Peter Willis
Editors
Pedagogies
of the
Imagination
Mythopoetic Curriculum in
Educational Practice
(cid:2) (cid:3)(cid:4)
Pedagogies of the Imagination
Mythopoetic Curriculum in Educational Practice
Timothy Leonard • Peter Willis
Editors
Pedagogies of the Imagination
Mythopoetic Curriculum in Educational Practice
Editors
Timothy Leonard Peter Willis
Saint Xavier University University of South Australia
Chicago, IL Mawson Lakes, SA
USA Australia
ISBN 978-1-4020-8281-8 e-ISBN 978-1-4020-8350-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008926560
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Foreword
I have long admired the mythopoetic tradition in curriculum studies. That admiration
followed from my experience as a high-school teacher of English in a wealthy
suburb of New York City at the end of the 1960s. A “dream” job—I taught four
classes of 15–20 students during a nine-period day—in a “dream” suburb (where
I could afford to reside only by taking a room in a retired teacher’s house), many of
these often Ivy-League-bound students had everything but meaningful lives. This
middle-class, Midwestern young teacher was flabbergasted. In one sense, my
academic life has been devoted to understanding that searing experience.
Matters of meaning seemed paramount in the curriculum field to which Paul
Klohr introduced me at Ohio State. Klohr assigned me the work of curriculum
theorists such as James B. Macdonald. Like Timothy Leonard (who also studied
with Klohr at Ohio State) and Peter Willis, Macdonald (1995) understood that
school reform was part of a broader cultural and political crisis in which meaning
is but one casualty. In the mythopoetic tradition in curriculum studies, scholars
labor to understand this crisis and the conditions for the reconstruction of mean-
ing in our time, in our schools.
In the United States at least, the most known recent reference to the mythopoetic
was not educational but gendered, associated with the controversial men’s movement
of the 1990s (see Savran 1998, p. 169). Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990) stayed on the
hardback bestseller list for more than a year; Bill Moyers’ PBS profile of Bly (“A
Gathering of Men”) sold 27,000 videocassette copies and 10,000 transcripts. No one-
man phenomenon, by the mid-nineties, Peter Filene (1998, p. 241) reports, men could
read 24 different “mythopoetic journals” and walk into more than 40 men’s centers.
In the classified ads of Wingspan: Journal of the Male Spirit (circulation 120,000),
men were invited to attend various kinds of men’s events (Filene 1998).
Bly’s figure of the archaic “wild man” represented an essence of atavistic
masculinity which presumably all men could reclaim. The “men’s movement” was
a response to the recurring crisis of masculinity (see Pinar 2001, pp. 321–416,
855–860, 1139–1152), engendered this time by the post-Fordist family structure
with its two working parents, by the stress and alienation of contemporary corporate
life, and by the feminist movement. Bly asserted men must get back in touch with
their male psyche and “the nourishing dark[ness]” (1990, p. 6) within. During the
v
vi Foreword
first decades of the twentieth century, Pamela Caughie (1999) points out, D. H.
Lawrence had expressed ambivalence toward the healing processes Bly endorsed—
those conducted through rural retreats and so-called “native” rituals, such as drum-
ming and dancing—but “he [Lawrence] too associated a primal maleness with a
nourishing darkness, figured as paternal, and attributed the crisis of masculinity in
his day in part to women’s self-assertion” (1999, p. 155). Indeed, David Savran
asserts that “Bly’s ‘mythopoetics’ remains a ‘white mythology,’ firmly rooted in
imperialistic fantasies,” themselves gendered (1998, p. 196; also see Stoler 1995).
Like the “mythopoetic men’s movement,” Caughie argues, Lawrence’s cosmogra-
phy imagined new gender relations in terms of “spiritual renewal, not social and
material change” (Caughie 1999, p. 155).
Not so this collection. Timothy Leonard and Peter Willis introduce the collection
by acknowledging the urgency of such change. Through the processes of mytho-
poesis, they suggest, such change may be stimulated. The choice is not, then, spiritual
renewal or social-material transformation: the argument here is that the former can
occur through the latter. It is only a spiritually impoverished people who could
mistake standardized examinations as measures of educational progress. It is a
people bereft of meaning who could cast about for external representations of it.
This analysis is reminiscent of those subjective senses of colonialism and of post-
colonial reparation legendary activist Frantz Fanon theorized (see Oliver 2004,
p. 15; Sekyi-Otu 1996, p. 238).
That the human mind is a function of imagination is, Leonard and Willis tell us,
the unifying thread of the mythopoetic project. Threatened by certain forms of
hyper-rationality and intensified by placelessness (see Bowers 2000, p. 65), simply
releasing the imagination is no solution, as the history of the racist imagination (see
Pinar 2001, p. 1129ff.), for example, reminds us. Perhaps that is why Patricia
Holland and Noreen Garman (this volume) emphasize the moral in the mythopo-
etic, why Leonard and Willis underscore its political and progressive character, and
why, in another volume, Mary Aswell Doll (see 2000, p. xiv) associates the mytho-
poetic with women visionaries. The curricular forms such a moral mythopoetics
can take are outlined in several of the essays in this volume.
In their conclusion to the collection, Timothy Leonard and Peter Willis summarize
these forms. I supplement these with one outlined by Mary Aswell Doll in her
remarkable study of Samuel Beckett. “Beckett’s work,” Doll (1988, p. 5) suggests,
“lends itself wonderfully to a mythopoetic method precisely because it breaks
form.” It rejects the “gridlike certainty” (1988, p. 5) that Leonard and Willis
associate with the current cult of abstraction and hyper-rationality, materialized
in standardized examinations. In this rejection, Doll tells us, Beckett’s mythopo-
etics neither denies the past nor clings to it, allowing us to “read patterns afresh”
(1998, p. 5). Through the study of this text, we can read patterns afresh and in so
doing reconstruct the meaning of curriculum. As Timothy Leonard and Peter
Willis remind us, that project is urgent.
William F. Pinar
Foreword vii
References
Bowers, C. A. (2000). Let them eat data: how computers affect education, cultural diversity and
the prospects of ecological sustainability. Athens: University of Georgia.
Bly, R. (1990). Iron John: a book about men. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Caughie, P. L. (1999). Passing and pedagogy: the dynamics of responsibility. Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press.
Doll, M. A. (1988). Beckett and myth: an archetypal approach. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press.
Doll, M. A. (2000). Like letters in running water: a mythopoetics of curriculum. Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Filene, P. G. (1998). Him/her/self: gender identities in modern America. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Macdonald, J. B. (1995). Theory as a prayerful act: collected essays (ed. B. Macdonald).
New York: Peter Lang.
Oliver, K. (2004). The colonization of psychic space: a psychoanalytic social theory of oppression.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Pinar, W. F. (2001). The gender of racial politics and violence in America. New York: Peter Lang.
Savran, D. (1998). Taking it a like a man: white masculinity, masochism, and contemporary
American culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sekyi-Otu, A. (1996). Fanon’s dialectic of experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Stoler, A. L. (1995). Race and the education of desire: Foucault’s history of sexuality and the
colonial order of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Acknowledgments
The completion of this extensive project has been made possible through the assistance
and support of family, friends, and colleagues enriched and energized by an early
meeting in July 2005 at the University of Melbourne in Australia that many of our
chapter writers attended.
In the course of this study, we have met and been inspired by writers and thinkers
whose wisdom and grace helped us find a way through impasses of educational
theory, research method, presentation, writing style, and the like. Many of them
have of course provided chapters in this text while others have provided inspiration
in other forms. We would like to thank and pay tribute especially to Maxine Greene,
Professor Emeritus at Columbia Teachers College, New York for ongoing inspiration
and challenge to action and aesthetic education. In many ways ideas and reflections
in the chapters of this collection are a continuation of conversations with her and
her writings over many years.
In the USA, we would also like to thank Bill Pinar and the JCT colleagues for
support and challenge together with Noreen Garman from Pittsburgh, Paul Klohr in
Columbus, Bill Doll at Louisiana State University, and Domenica Devine at Georgia
Southern University. In Australia, we would like to thank Jamie Bradbeer for his
constant encouragement and support and colleagues from the University of South
Australia at the Centre for Research in Education, Equity and Work (CREEW) in the
Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies (HRISS): Alan Mayne, Alan
Reid, Roger Harris, Michele Simons, Tom Stehlik, and Miriam McLean.
Thanks as well for valuable help with editing, proofing, and formatting to the
CREEW/HRISS editorial team: Pam Carden, Anne Morrison, Paul Wallace, and
Kate Leeson and for ongoing support from the Springer team in the Netherlands:
Maria Jonckheere, Astrid Noordermeer, and Bernadette Deelen.
We would like to thank finally and especially our partners who have shared our
work: Mary with Tim and Eileen with Peter.
Timothy Leonard and Peter Willis
ix
Contents
Foreword ......................................................................................................... v
Acknowledgments .......................................................................................... ix
Contributors ................................................................................................... xiii
1 Introduction ............................................................................................ 1
Timothy Leonard and Peter Willis
Part I Mythopoesis and Curriculum Theorizing
2 Watching with Two Eyes: The Place of the Mythopoetic
in Curriculum Inquiry ........................................................................... 11
Patricia E. Holland and Noreen B. Garman
3 The Shadow of Hope: Reconciliation and Imaginal
Pedagogies ............................................................................................... 31
Peter Bishop
4 Myth in the Practice of Reason: The Production of Education
and Productive Confusion ..................................................................... 53
Aidan Davison
5 Care of the Self: Mythopoetic Dimensions of Professional
Preparation and Development .............................................................. 65
John M. Dirkx
6 Imagination and Mythopoesis in the Science Curriculum ................. 83
Timothy Leonard
7 The Mythopoetic Body: Learning Through Creativity ...................... 93
David Wright
xi
xii Contents
8 Autobiography and Poetry .................................................................... 107
Peter Hilton
9 The Resilience of Soul ............................................................................ 125
Patricia Cranton
Part II Mythopoesis in Educational Practice
10 Imaginal Transformation and Schooling ............................................. 139
James Bradbeer and Abdul Ghafoor Abdul Raheem
11 Idealism and Materialism in the Culture of Teacher Education:
The Mythopoetic Signifi cance of Things .............................................. 157
Rod Fawns
12 Spiritual Grounding and Adult Education .......................................... 169
Leona M. English
13 Ignatian Spirituality as Mythopoesis ................................................... 177
Gerry Healy
14 Mythopoetic Spaces in the (Trans)formation of Counselors
and Therapists ........................................................................................ 189
Frances MacKay
15 Critical Pedagogy and the Mythopoetic: A Case Study
from Adelaide’s Northern Urban Fringe ............................................. 203
Brenton Prosser
16 Capacity and Currere ............................................................................. 223
Mary Doll
17 Thinking, Feeling, and Willing: How Waldorf Schools
Provide a Creative Pedagogy That Nurtures
and Develops Imagination ..................................................................... 231
Tom Stehlik
18 Getting a Feel for the Work: Mythopoetic Pedagogy
for Adult Educators Through
Phenomenological Evocation ................................................................ 245
Peter Willis
19 Conclusion: The Mythopoetic Challenge ............................................. 265
Timothy Leonard and Peter Willis
Index ................................................................................................................ 267