More conservative minds deprive coincidence of meaning by treating it as background noise or garbage, but the shape-shifting mind pesters the distinction between accident and essence and remakes this world out of whatever happens. At its obsessive extreme such attention is the beginning of paranoia (all coincidence makes “too much sense”), but in a more capacious mind it is a kind of happy genius, ready to make music out of people’s noise. Either way, the intelligence seriously is a constant threat to essences, for in the economy of categories, whenever the value of accident changes, so, too, does the value of essence. (Hyde, 1998, p. 100)
When Lewis Hyde writes about the “shape-shifting mind” (p. 100) in the above passage, he links the mythical figure of the trickster to the creative imagination of the artist. The trickster has a creative intelligence that blurs the lines between “essence” and “accident” because the trickster uses whatever she finds in the rubbish heap of the world to create things. Because the trickster uses whatever is at hand to make new things, the trickster’s creations are inherently provocative. This capriciousness, coincidence, or “accidental” creation is what Hyde considers to be an instance of creative intelligence, a kind of associative intelligence often demonstrated in the arts. As a liminal, amoral boundary figure neither fully god nor man, the trickster often creates accident and contingency, turning the snow-globe of the world on its side just as the detritus from the last shake has begun to settle. Hyde (1998) writes not to conflate the trickster and the artist, but to juxtapose trickster stories with stories of “imagination in action” (p. 14), seeing what those juxtapositions may reveal. I begin this chapter with the trickster not because I think Meg or any artist is a trickster, but because in the creative capriciousness
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that the trickster and the artist bring to contingency and accident, we see a kind of knowledge-making, risk, and learning encounter so often written out of the possibilities and practice of the professional and the organization of schooling. The trickster’s world- building and knowledge-making processes, like those of the artist and the teacher, are deeply aesthetic practices. As we saw in the last chapter, the push for stability and standardization often labeled “professionalism” undercuts the freedom to move and work in the experiences in the Mitchell County Schools and the Penland School of Crafts.
In my initial imagination of Meg’s work, I expected that her work bridged the disparate work of the Penland School of Crafts and the Mitchell County Schools. In its work as a bridge, I expected to encounter Meg’s artistic work as a distinct way of working in both of the organizations, but particularly distinct from ways of working common to schools. Looking at Meg’s artistic work as a communicative phenomenon articulated to both of these organizations, I was startled to see that her work had a parallel in the work of teachers in the Mitchell County Schools. One would think, then, that Meg’s work would seamlessly integrate into teachers’ work, since they were working through similar artistic processes despite calling one “teaching” and the other “art.” Yet, a notable tension emerged as Meg’s work as an artist became articulated to teachers’ work because the teachers would not acknowledge any similarities between their work and Meg’s. I expected to see Meg’s beautiful artist work as a resource for Mitchell
County School teachers, and what I found instead was that many teachers were already working as artists in the classrooms. The tensions still emerged, however – just not in the ways that I imagined. In this chapter, I discuss the essences of Meg’s work as craft and the ways in which those very essences find parallels in the work of teaching. The rub is
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that despite these parallels, most teachers do not identify as artists; in fact, many actively refuse that identification.
Mitchell County Non-Artists
Though Hyde contrasts the “conservative mind” and the “shape-shifting mind,” I do not think that these types of “mind” are static. Improvisation, art-making, and creation all require great skill and practice (Albers, 1944; Booth, 2001; Eisenberg, 1990/2007; Hyde, 1998; Sennett, 2008). Skill, indeed, must be practiced and consistently engaged. The teachers and educators whom I encountered in Mitchell County were often far more capricious, at least in the context of the bookmaking project, than the organization of schooling, writ large, might lead us to expect. John Dewey (1916/1997) and others (Crawford, 2009; Deetz, 1992; Gini, 2000; Higgins, 2005; Kincheloe, 1999; Sennett, 2008) insist that vocation itself is pedagogical, meaning that the work that we do in the world teaches us about the possibilities we have in the world outside of work. Seeing such artistic work throughout teachers’ processes of teaching made me wonder about these links between vocation and pedagogy, as inclined as I am to believe them.
At the heart of organizational scholar Stanley Deetz’s (1992, 2005) warnings about “corporate colonization,” for instance, is a deep sense that when corporate forms colonize our lives, we lose both the opportunities and ability to engage in other life- giving institutions like family, community, faith organizations, etc. Though corporate influences in the organization of education are only one part of its long history of standardization, Deetz’s concept is helpful. I argue that the organization of schooling and education forecloses our possibilities to acknowledge, support, and deepen teaching as an aesthetic way of working. Or, at the very least, that the organization of teaching and
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learning hinges on the assumption that teachers and students are more conservatively minded than creatively intelligent artists who can respond to contingency with creation and grace.
“We are experiences,” insists media and education scholar Elizabeth Ellsworth
(2005, p. 26), making a point about pedagogy and learning: we do not possess our own experiences; we emerge from them. Her premise is that if we do in fact emerge from experiences, then experiences of pedagogy, or places of learning, become remarkably important. Focusing on places of learning offers a different way of thinking and doing teaching and learning. Making a similar argument about the educative environment of teaching for teachers, philosopher Christopher Higgins (2005) summarily insists, “the educational imagination is still impoverished in this regard” (p. 442). Colloquially, experience is discussed as “an experience,” marked and delimited within particular boundaries that separate that experience from another. Though the bounds of experience are bookended by natality and death (Arendt, 1958/1998), we often make sense of experience by segmenting it into more discrete categories: “experiences.” I may well hold separate, for instance, experiences of working, of caring for children, of authoring, or of participating in the active life of a community. When writing of experience, Dewey (1934/2005) appears less interested in the reasons why we might desire to keep those moments of experiences separate from one another than in the conditions that mark and foster aesthetic experience.
Dewey sets out to look at the conditions that separate art from life, and the ways in which these conditions are so naturalized in the trappings and organization of our daily life that we believe that conditions that separate art and life are inherent in art and artists,