Doug was a tall, dark-haired, quiet student who had excellent posture. He would be content to daydream most of the period, if I didn’t distract him. Doug hadn’t done well in middle school science classes and seemed content to do poorly in my mixed grade class in Environmental Science. He never asked questions or volunteered any constructive comments until we were studying the biology of stream invertebrates as indicators of ecological health.
A fleeting remark by me about my not knowing exactly when the different aquatic insects emerge as flying adults ignited the sportsman/scholar in Doug. He raised his arm straight and high and proudly announced, “I do.” The normally reticent student was now outspoken and went on to explain that he knew not only when the different species emerged, but also precisely how they looked as adults, larvae or nymphs. He actually had made exact replicas of the various invertebrate forms as lures and would be glad to help me and the class understand them better. Doug became one of my best “assistant teachers,” especially on our field trips. He patiently guided his fellow classmates through the somewhat arcane species I.D. vocabulary while sharing his considerable knowledge of the invertebrates’ life histories as well as their value as fishing bait.
Most teachers realize that student ownership of content facilitates effective instruction, and that the more relevant we make our academic material, the more students are engaged and ready to cooperate in learning. Serendipity helped me engage Doug and he, in turn, helped engage the other students. The challenge is how to deliberately frame our instruction so that we can involve most or all of our kids in meaningful learning while embracing their specific personal concerns and/or interests.
Too many young people feel cheated and are furious. Many see their parents desperately worried about being able to feed and house the family. Students also feel disrespected, having to go to school buildings that are in disrepair and where there aren’t enough textbooks. The feeling, “Why should I bother learning this stupid subject in a world as mean and crazy as this one?”, has intensified. Is there a way to instill student ownership of their learning while defusing inherent student anger or apathy? The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method may be one of the answers.
Rosemary A. Plumstead has been using this technique to teach New York City public school students for more than 31 years. In a recent article published in “The Science Teachers Bulletin”, Ms. Plumstead recounts how she used the Aesthetic Realism method to instruct biology students at LaGuardiaHigh School in Manhattan in the complex details of our immune system’s inflammatory response. This was during the months following the attack on the WorldTradeCenter. Even though her students were angry, suspicious and in some cases, terrified by the situation in their immediate neighborhood, Rosemary guided them through a process that “changes anger to respect for knowledge and people.” For example, she asked, “Do you think there’s a difference between the inflammatory response of the immune system, and how WE can get inflamed- swollen with anger?” After several self-critical answers by her students, Ms. Plumstead asked, “Is there anything you can learn about yourself from the way the neutrophils respond to a hurt?” A student replied, “Well, they try NOT to let it spill over into the whole body. That’s different from what I do, I let my anger affect everything.”
Rosemary helped her students personally realize that “the same world that can be chaotic and even terrifying has a permanent, sensible structure of opposites” that relate to art, science and to each of us. This “aesthetic oneness of opposites” is the means to understanding a subject – reading, writing, mathematics, history, science – through recognition of its inherent beauty and emphasis on how it relates to students’ lives. Ms. Plumstead makes her point clear. “The human immune system puts together wonderfully the opposites of general and specific.” It sends a general force (white blood cells) to defend an injured site while it also sends specific microorganisms (T and B cells) to target antigens. She offers other examples of how the immune system illustrates the opposites of for and against. In the process, her students see that they can be for the world–have respect for it– and at the time be against injustice. They can be accurate, useful critics, and this makes them proud and much kinder. To me, this method of teaching integrates the very nature of our world, duality, into a learning framework that is, at once, personally relevant and universally applicable.
Sameness and change - these opposites are permanently present in the ordinary, everyday turbulence we experience. The human body is a relation of opposites– many (cells) and one (body), power (mind) and delicacy (risk of concussion), junction (spinal cord) and separation (individual neurons), firm (bones) and flexible (cartilage)– the same opposites are present in sports, dance and self. As students become more aware of these inherent qualities of life, they tend to find more hope in their lives and harbor less contempt for themselves and others. The founder of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel, put it this way, “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
The ultimate goal of education in Mr. Siegel’s point of view is “to like the world” and, in turn, to create “good will – the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes one stronger and more beautiful.” Good will is produced as one internalizes the oneness of opposites-toughness and tenderness, criticism and praise, assertion and yielding. In other words, as a child sees, for example, how an algebraic equation is a making one of the known and unknown; how high and low, and depth and surface, are together in earth science; how a noun becomes more itself as it is changed by an adjective, the child can more readily understand how his (her) own life is constructed and appreciate its good and bad elements as whole and worthy of as much respect as nature, art and science deserve. Coincidentally, contempt or the “lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it” is decreased as good will is generated. Contempt facilitates unkindness. To see the world, not as something to know, but as something to grab and own as much as possible is sheer contempt. Education should help students to get as wide a sense as possible of the world and as precise a sense as possible of themselves. Education, according to Mr. Siegel is simultaneously freedom and structure and when effective, always is an individual self merging with the outside world. This merging of opposites facilitates the student’s being proud of the world and proud of his (her) own mind. From that unity, good will is made, kindness is engendered and hope is encouraged while anger, frustration and fear are reduced.
References: Plumstead, Rosemary A., The Science Teachers Bulletin, Vol. 71, No. 1, Fall 2007
http://plum-education.blogspot.com
http://www.aestheticrealism.net
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