Hello,
Here is October’s Deep Dive essay. Apologies for it being a few days late - this was a tough one to wrangle into shape! I hope you find something in it that moves you.
Richard Seymour, in his TED talk How Beauty Feels, shows us this picture and asks,
What are you feeling about it? Is it beautiful? Is it exciting?
And then, after we’ve had a bit if time to look, he says,
Now I'm going to tell you what it is. Are you ready? This is the last act on this Earth of a little girl called Heidi, five years old, before she died of cancer to the spine. It's the last thing she did, the last physical act ...
Is it beautiful now?
Where do you feel that? It gets me in the gut, and the throat.
In my experience, there isn’t much serious thought given to the place of beauty in education. I think this is a mistake.
I understand it though. Schools are busy places, with a multitude of attendant pressures. There is so much knowledge for kids to acquire, so many skills for them to develop.
Beauty is slippery, ethereal, subjective. It easily slips into the ‘nice, but not essential’ pile.
And so, teachers spend time working out what kids know, and targeting their teaching on a kid’s unknowns so they can be turned into knowns, with the aim of turning kids into capable knowers, doers and achievers.
Who has time to sit in things and dwell? Who has time to be struck by something and enlightened? Who has time?
Howard Gardner, in his intriguing book Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Age of Truthiness and Twitter, argues that developing a deep understanding of those virtues is essential for understanding.
What I want when kids get through a K to 12 education is for them to have a sense of what their society thinks is true, beautiful and good; false, ugly and evil; how to think about it and how to act on the basis of your thoughts.
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our understanding of a topic is rich to the extent that we have a number of different ways of representing it and we can go pretty readily from one representation to the other.
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many of us understand the Spanish Civil War through Picasso's paintings or Andre Malraux's novels.
I'm saying everybody needs to work in his or her culture to figure out what are the important truths and beauties and falsities and uglinesses and moralities, and to spend time with those. [Emphasis added]
(Source: Howard Gardner, in an interview with Edge Magazine.)
Now, kids get presented with truths all the time: in school, we call it knowledge, and it has a sense of certainty and objectivity to it, despite often being contested and coloured by cultural values.
The same cannot be said for beauty. Gardner argues that,
Whereas truth is a property of statements, beauty reveals itself in the course of an experience with an object.
Isn’t that wonderful! What I see in this is that truth and beauty aren’t set up as opposites but as complimentary ideas. Think of how this essay started:
It’s true that the lines in the picture were shaky, the flower and butterfly innocently ill-formed. We can see these things, and be certain of them.
But you had time to have an experience with the picture. You were told the story behind the picture, and it deepened what you saw in it; its beauty revealed itself. If you’re anything like me you probably didn’t think this but, rather, felt it.
So, truth and beauty worked together to enrich your understanding of the picture.
Have you gone back to the picture? Can you put into words what you are feeling yet? Do you feel a deeper understanding developing each time you revisit it?
Gardner describes three ‘symptoms’ required for the experience of beauty to manifest itself
Interestingness: we need to have our curiosity piqued, attention drawn somehow, perhaps through surprise, shock, excitement, satisfaction, familiarty etc.
Memorability: the ‘thing’ stays with us, perhaps because it’s unusual or poignant and we are struck by it in some way.
An invitation to revisit: there’s a tingle that makes usfeel the urge to go back, we are drawn to it, want to recontemplate what it ‘said’ to us before.
As you can see, these are all intensely personal. They cannot be controlled by anyone other than you.
What’s important to realise though is that our encounters with beauty are influenced by where we are and the affordances it has. Teachers can shape that, pique interest, model being curious, give time for the experience to unfold, etc. In doing so, they signal that those are valued dispositions.
This poem is an absolute favourite of mine. It becomes more beautiful to me every time I re-read it.
Now, I can analyse the poem, pulling apart the parts of speech and intellectualising the way meaning is created, and this is a worthy pursuit because it helps me to understand how English ‘works’. In doing so, I’m bound to find a truth about loneliness and isolation that the poem is expressing. I can write this quite easily, and a judgement can be made about how much I know and can do.
But you know what, that’s not what I did. In fact, for all the poems I love, that process of knowing has been done way way late in the process of understanding. What has come first is experiencing the poem: having time for the poem’s beauty to revel itself is how I’ve come to love them.
I remember with this poem I was initially drawn to it’s unique handling of a seaside scene that’s familiar to me: it was interesting.
And I was struck by the cold, visceral descriptions of the setting, which were really poignant and reminded me of walking on beaches on the Wairarapa coast in winter: it was memorable.
This is a poem I read all the time, especially in winter, and each time I ‘see’ something new, although often it’s really hard to put into words. If someone was to ask me to express what I understood about its beauty, I think I might need another means of expression.
Guy Claxton, in his excellent book The Future of Teaching and the Myths that Hold it Back, discusses the 4E model as a way of conceptualizing how the mind works, and I think this gives an insight into the role of beauty in cognition. One of the E’s in this model is Emotional, and he says
Emotional means that feeling guides our thinking. Instead of seeing emotions as inferior to and subversive of our higher faculties of reason and logic, 4E researchers argue we would be lost without what Antonio Damasio calls the ‘emotional rudder’. Emotions signal salience and value … To be able to be ‘touched’ or ‘moved’ by something is at the very core of our real-world intelligence. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang is one of the scientists spearheading the application of social and affective neuroscience to education. She says,
“A revolution in neuroscience over the last two decades has overturned earlier notions that emotions interfere with learning, revealing instead that emotion and cognition are supported by interdependent neural processes. It is literally neurobiologically impossible to build memories, engage in complex thoughts, or make meaningful decisions without emotion”
I wonder if by ‘touched’ and ‘moved’ Guy has beauty in mind? Certainly, to me they cue that idea, perhaps as the ‘gates’ that can open us to experiencing beauty.
Most of all, this E - Emotional - shows us that to think deeply about things, to act on things, to remember things, first we must feel them. It’s through beauty that we feel most intensely.
The more time we can give for beauty to reveal itself, the better (deeper, more considered, nuanced) a learner’s understanding will be.
I hope you enjoyed this month’s Deep Dive essay. I’d love to hear your thoughts about beauty and its place in education.
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Bevan.