Complexifying Curriculum Studies

Reflections on the Generative and Generous Gifts of William E. Doll, Jr.

Molly Quinn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351365208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The essays in this volume bring together leading-edge scholars to illuminate the work of William E. Doll, Jr., as a key curriculum thinker of global impact, and introduce his work and influence to new generations of scholars, teachers, and students of education. Drawing on their individual contexts, contributors cover a range of topics and themes, including engagement with pragmatism, the work of John Dewey, and the inclusion of post-modern, chaos, and complexity theories to education and curriculum. Advancing our understanding and conversation of existing problems and possibilities in education, this collection serves as both an homage to Doll and a call for action and consideration of what matters in education.

1
Introduction—From “The Echo of God’s Laughter”

The Generative and Generous Gifts of William E. Doll, Jr., to Curriculum Studies

Molly Quinn

Donna Trueit (2012 a) in the title of a collection of his essays draws our attention to “‘the fascinating imaginative realm’ of William E. Doll, Jr.,” also inciting this favorite quote of his from Milan Kundera:

It is indeed a strange and marvelous world we have yet to bring into existence…. “There exists a fascinating imaginative realm, born of the echo of God’s laughter where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood” (Milan Kundera, 1988).

(Doll, 2006/2012 h, p. 231)

I could not take up the same, thus, for this collection, but I could at least appeal to such, and invoke “the echo of God’s laughter” via its framing in this introduction. For anyone who knows Bill—as he is familiarly called—well, intellectually at least, has probably heard him utter this Kunderan sentiment, the substance of which communicated herein he seems also to embody in his very person, and manner of engagement as a scholar, teacher, mentor, and colleague. “Fascinating” and “imaginative” certainly aptly describe him, as also his work; and even those who have but met him, without any particular pedagogical or scholarly inclination, would be hard pressed to forget his inexorable laugh.¹

In fact, in a 2001 tribute to Bill I made on the occasion of his 70th birthday at the “In Praise of the Post-modern Conference,” I actually began with God, and with laughter:²

In the Kabbalah, it is said that human beings are Divine Sparks, the glowing emanations of God’s creative light, each one unique and irreplaceable. However, some sparks burn brighter than others. Bill Doll is one of those rare individuals…. This towering yet remarkably inviting man stood before me, a veritable post-modern pastiche; a combination of Bostonian gentleman, North Eastern Intellectual, Mystic Philosopher-Sage, Boehemian Artist-Poet, Dr. Seuss, and Santa Clause: exuberant, big-hearted (albeit thin), playful, poetic— dare I say, eccentric; yet elegant, distinguished and wise. Gorgeous snowy white hair, the classical bow tie, and a laugh that could change the world.

It is more, though perhaps, than that Bill’s laugh is so unique, robust, jovial, infectious, and surely unforgettable. It is more, though perhaps too, than that his enlivening presence, pedagogy and thought are so unforgettably influential and surely inspiring. This collection of essays is framed in this way—a kind of polyphonic harmony or symphony of voices that are themselves each echoes of a sort of Doll’s divine laughter—as it also seeks to express something of/at the heart of his thought, teaching, work, influence, legacy, life, and person: certainly, an art born of spirit, and its expression of playfulness and delight in being in the world and creatively participating in its becoming. Such an art, too, embraces, embodies, dwells in, affirms, generates and calls us to that “fascinating imaginative realm…where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood” (Kundera, 1988, p. 164), indeed.

In his first landmark book, A Post-modern Perspective on Curriculum, Doll (1993) incites these ideas from Kundera as a way to frame his curricular conversations with the “fascinating imaginative realm” of post-modernism (and those emerging from complexity theory), and forward curriculum as a proliferative process—and “an art born as ‘the echo of God’s laughter’” (p. 151). He muses:

Meaning and understanding…emerge from the process of making connections, from interpreting our being-in-the-world…. Negotiating…passages—instead of laying out the truth of a proposition, term, or viewpoint—seems to be what curriculum is or should be. In “negotiating passages” each party listens actively—sympathetically and critically—to what the other is saying. The intention is…to find ways to connect varying viewpoints, to expand one’s horizon through active engagement with another. The engagement is a process activity that transforms.

(p. 151)

He identifies this vision, too, with his own “curriculum utopia.”

With utopian aspirations perhaps, I imagine this collection, too, as a kind of curriculum art born of such echoes, generative and complexifying reflections and conversations:³ via active, sympathetic, critical listening to Doll, in dialogue with him; illuminating varying viewpoints on his work; expanding our own horizons of being and becoming herein, and of curriculum studies; actively engaging in a transformative process of negotiating passages, making connections, interpreting being-in-the-world— celebrating, conversing, coming together through these encounters with Doll in the divine fascinating, imaginative otherness of his thought, pedagogy and person. And my hope is that this text might similarly—and transformatively—resonate likewise with its readers.

I intentionally use the word resonate here too—as it summons us pointedly back as well to the notion of echo. For in proceeding, I would like here first to play⁴ with, ruminate a bit further on, the terms by which I am framing this text—echo and laughter, and as drawn from Kundera, “the echo of God’s laughter,” whom Doll himself echoes oft in his work; before turning to preview something of the generative and generous gifts of William E. Doll, Jr. to curriculum studies—complexifying it so richly and beautifully—presented and reflected upon in this volume. And it is these offerings, having so aptly emerged⁵ from the authors’ engagements with Doll, which constitute and create the curriculum choruses that ring out and sing forth from this collection; they are hallelujahs, in the least, if not heavenly—resounding, in the parlance of Nietzsche (1883/1982), a sacred Amen, or “Yes to life”—treasures: (1) Of Influence, Inspiration, and Intellectual Adventure; (2) Of Engagement, Immersion, and Transformative Experience; (3) Of Play, Praxis, and Pedagogical Grace; (4) Of Method, Mystery, and Visionary Magic; and (5) Of School, Society, and the Sacred in Scholarly Tradition. To such I return—reverberate back to—in the section previews in this collection.

Of Echo in Doll’s Endowment

Of echo, there might be little further of which to speak, than to reiterate its sense as that which continues to reverberate after the original word has been uttered, as that which is reflected back to its listener. An echo can also signify something possessing shared characteristics with, or which is reminiscent of, the original—expressing a close parallel of an idea or feeling or moment (Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 1989).⁶ Original as Doll is, the authors of each essay here certainly—as gathered around and reflectively listening to his magnanimous (laughing) vibration—emit their own unique echoes of resonance with and reverberations from it; they also do so amid harmonious ideas, feelings, moments, that are shared; and generate thus novel utterances, iterations,⁷ rippling out, beyond, with growing complexity and creativity for us as well. Further, though, this very idea of the echo itself might be set forth as emblematic of something of Doll’s work and influence. This can be seen in his early interest in and echoing of Dewey’s thought and in his opposition to the linear, predetermined, pre-set curriculum issuing from the predominant Tyler Rationale.⁸ He asserts with Dewey that ends that are educational arise from within authentic action, emerge from present engagement with life; that:

Every experience is a moving force…. [,] the business of the educator to see in what direction an experience is heading…and direct it on the ground of what it is moving into.

(1938, p. 38)

Partial conclusions emerge…temporary stopping places, landings of past thought that are also stations of departure for subsequent thought.

(Dewey, 1933/1971, p. 75, as cited in Doll, 1993, p. 138)

And for Doll, happily, one can neither fully predict nor control these landings or departures, the echoes—meeting varying surfaces, refracting, ricocheting—generated in the interactions among such moving forces; yet can delight in the patterns of meaning made, paths of inquiry generated, and evolving transformations of experience, reconstructed educationally—as well as wonderful and wondrous conversations and people generously engaged therein. Says Doll (2012a) of his own unfolding path: “The academic genealogy is a joy to behold. There is comfort in knowing that one’s ideas will sprout elsewhere” (p. xviii).

From post-modern, post-structural, and complexity theories, too, Doll has poignantly illuminated the traces (Derrida, 1976, 1978), vestiges, shadows, and ghosts (e.g., of Dewey in Doll, 2002) of the past of curriculum echoing into and influencing its present and future, “the pattern that connects” (Bateson, 1972) and in profoundly nonlinear, complex, and iterative ways (with excesses and multiplicities of meaning). From the classic three R’s of readin’ ‘ritin and ‘rithmetic and modern rationale of Tyler emerges his four R’s for curriculum in a post-modern world: “rich in problematics, recursive in its (nonlinear) organization, relational in its structure, and rigorous in its application” (Doll, 2008/2012g, p. 171).⁹ He further develops this alternative—as he says, following Dewey who attempted to break from the paradigm of authoritarian control in which curriculum had been long mired and whose “ghost encourages us to keep on with this project” (2002, p. 53), with intellectual inroads as yet unavailable to him—via his five C’s¹⁰ of currere, complexity, cosmology, conversation, and community; emphasizing the whole of curriculum as a matrix, and system of relationships:

its continuity over time depend[ing] on its relational transformations and on the emergence of present structures from structures that were and into structures that will be…. Interrelating and dynamically changing.

(p. 43)

One cannot help but sense that Doll plays too with the traditional ABCs in his alliterative iterations,¹¹ also of sound—his three S’s¹² (2003/2012i), another holo-sonogram through which he elatedly sings curriculum divinations into possibility. Here, he seeks to honor science, story, and spirit in relation to education’s modes of thought—and the space(s) beyond and in-between; Bruner, Whitehead, Huebner, among a host of others, with Dewey, resounding here as well. Doll’s work, in this way, reverberates, a fascinating imaginative symphony of manifold voices, of generous and generative encounters with otherness and dialogues across/through difference and time; creative and complex conversations, opening up to the elevation and mystery of spirit.

In Greek mythology, in the least too, Echo, a mountain nymph, is the consort of Zeus, king of the Olympian gods. While the purpose of Echo’s dialogues with Hera, queen of the gods and wife to Zeus, were meant to distract, even to deceive, she did also indeed engage her extensively in complex conversation as well. Echo’s is a playful spirit, born of and inhabiting and cavorting about in the high and exalted places, in conversational art and companionship with the divine. Drawn in his own work to the hermeneutic tradition, and Hermes¹³—the trickster, Doll is apt to appreciate Echo’s mischievous adventures, as well, overturning the established order of things and reveling in that which it would define as diverting or excessive. As Wang (2016) of Doll’s pedagogy explains: “In the context of teaching, perturbations, errors and confusions that are traditionally dismissed as negative elements become key elements for initiating students’ intellectual reorganization to a higher level” (p. 46). From such emerging echoes wherein waste¹⁴ is actually essential—whether white waves of delight or turbulent tensions without sense or satisfaction—might be heard, understood, and engaged “the spirit of creativity hidden in every situation, yet to be born” (Doll, 2003/2012 i, p. 104).

With the excess, discarded, unusable, engaged—the inert and dead enlivened, the tension taken up—convention is challenged, knowledge is kept alive, conversation continues and creativity thrives. A story Doll relates about the guidance and insight of one ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction—From “The Echo of God’s Laughter”: The Generative and Generous Gifts of William E. Doll, Jr., to Curriculum Studies
• Part I Of Influence, Inspiration, and Intellectual Adventure
• Part II Of Engagement, Immersion, and Transformative Experience
• Part III Of Play, Praxis, and Pedagogical Grace
• Part IV Of Method, Mystery, and Visionary Magic
• Part V Of School, Society, and the Sacred in Scholarly Tradition
• List of Contributors
• Index