“study” … is what resists the neoliberalism’s logic of an instrumental linkage between teaching and learning, and makes clear that learning is a student-initiated response to what might have been taught.
– The Moment of Study in Learning that Resists Neoliberalism: Body Gesture, Time, and Play
Yet that is a lot because it is a question of being attentive to what is not there, to what can come or go away… and we do not know what it is.
– Jean – Luc Nancy
It is the middle of the night. In a sparsely furnished hut, a figure in robes is seated upright on a wooden stool. One hand is rested on the table before him and the other grips open a book with ancient characters in neat columns on its pages. On the table, a candle burns.
He does not pause. He has his eyes firmly fixed on what is to come. He thinks neither of the hours he has already spent nor of the hours he is to spend, reading the same script over and over again. He believes in mind over matter and tonight the goal is to commit the entire text to memory.
He is not playing.
Neither is he, however, studying.
Exams are over. Some students may have met targets and be looking forward to a well-deserved pause. This means they feel free to play since they no longer have to study.
There is thus, to their minds, a distinction between study and play. Study is structured and play is unrestrained. Educational philosopher Joldersma argues this is a false dichotomy, the resolution of which would reveal the secret to the joy of learning.
He says that far from being distinct from the latter, study is in fact, play. His ideas free students and teachers alike from fear of cause and effect. Teachers may believe that the responsibility for intended student outcomes fall squarely on their shoulders. They cause students to learn. Students may believe that if they do not learn what is taught, there must be something they are not doing right.
Joldersma (2020) suggests both these perceptions are inaccurate. By referring to the works of other educational philosophers such as Tyson E. Lewis, he distinguishes learning from studying: learning (as it is commonly understood) is a process “in which externally imposed outcomes are emphasized and where successful learning is thought to be measurable against externally enforced ends”. Studying is an “interruption and suspension of learning” which frees “the student from externally imposed methods and goals”. It is “an educational experience wherein the studier comes face-to-face with potentiality”.
The traditional understanding of teaching and learning is as follows. A teacher imparts knowledge and skills. A student diligently absorbs and trains to master what has been imparted.
Educational philosophers say this is never how students learn in practice, that there will always be a gap between what is taught and what is learnt. What a student eventually learns will always be determined by efforts to “traverse that gap” (Joldersma, 2020), through studying.
What this means for students is that they would have to spend time grappling with what has been taught. For teachers, it means allowing students the space required to learn (or study) on their own terms.
The following characteristics of study were identified:
a) It involves a gesture of hesitation and being open to possibilities.
b) It requires being in the moment (which is not the same as being in the now).
c) It takes play or a suspension of rules for the purposes of experimentation.
Let’s consider something deemed basic and fundamental; the sentence. It is not uncommon for students to form run-on sentences. A run-on sentence, “occurs when two or more independent clauses (also known as complete sentences) are connected improperly” (Walden University). This happens because of insufficient punctuation. It could also be due to splicing which is to use a comma to link two clauses which ought to have been separated.
An example would be, One evening when Jill was five years old a winged creature appeared at a porch light, flapping its big wings the creature launched off in the blink of an eye.
How do we teach what a sentence is to a student? We could use a definition – a set of words that is complete in itself, typically containing a subject and predicate, conveying a statement, question, exclamation, or command, and consisting of a main clause and sometimes one or more subordinate clauses.
Assuming a young student is not partial to contemplating words like “predicate” and “subordinate”, such an explanation would still beg the question of what is in fact, “complete in itself”.
We could offer corrections: One evening, when Jill was five years old, a winged creature appeared at a porch light. Flapping its big wings, the creature launched off in the blink of an eye.
This might pose two problems. It may not be obvious why the punctuation landed where it did. The sentences formulated this way may convey a meaning not intended by the student which could have been – One evening, when Jill was five years old, a winged creature appeared at a porch light, flapping its big wings.
A teacher might feel inadequate for being unable to teach in a way which helps the student see what a complete sentence is. Work ethics would dictate visible output and strain. The teacher may engage in extended teacher talk or create more worksheets. This will increase the load on both and sharpen the distinction between play and study. Teaching less to learn more is catchy precisely because it is counter intuitive.
What it does mean is, refraining from mere content delivery or overloading students with sheer bodies of information, concepts and procedures, so as to open up space and opportunities for transformative teaching (in terms of fostering critical thinking, creativity, innovation, and higher-order skills or competencies), that is, for “learning more” (Teo et al., 2013). This could mean allowing space for students to look at a thing themselves, ponder it, experiment with it and then to experience learning about it.
A process of self-initiated study might take the following form. The student looks at the run-on sentence even though there is no need to ‘do corrections’.
He does this deliberately and takes his time for some impressions to form. He decides to place a full stop after Jill was five years old but then pauses and does not do so. He wonders where else a sentence could end. This is to adopt a gesture of hesitation.
He is not thinking about the score he obtained on the story in which these sentences appear. He is also not thinking about what the sentences rightly separated might look like. He is in the moment.
Being in the moment here comprises retention which is “the present awareness of the just elapsed phase”, “an openness to what is present” and “awareness of the phase… about to occur” (Husserl, 1991, Gallagher & Zahavi, 2014 as cited in Joldersma, 2020). It is not merely a “vanishingly small punctual slice of time, with the past composed of previous slices and the future composed of slices yet-to-come”.
The student thinks about having decided against placing the full stop, where else he could place it and how the sentence might read if he does choose one possibility over others.
Feeling neither time pressure nor the need to conform to some standard, he starts to play with the arrangement of words.
When Jill was five years old, a winged creature appeared at a porch light one evening. In the blink of an eye, the creature launched off, flapping its big wings.
A winged creature appeared at a porch light one evening, when Jill was five years old. The creature launched off, flapping its big wings, in the blink of an eye.
When Jill was five years old, at a porch light one evening, flapping its big wings, a winged creature appeared in the blink of an eye, before launching off.
By studying sentence structure this way, he is actually learning about predicates, subjects and clauses. This type of student-initiated process has the potential to lead to attainment of objectives planned for higher levels in a formal setting. Watching the sentence turn this way and that might be rather fascinating.
Joldersma highlights three key differences between play and learning in a formal context. The latter is externally imposed, involves “a child siting in school completing a worksheet” and is aimed towards some measurable end. The former is self-initiated, involves toys and there is no destination in mind.
A toy has “affordances that encourage engagements and explorations”. A worksheet or a textbook can be a toy so long as it allows free play. If students free themselves of the need to achieve some measurable goal in a fixed time, they could learn very much.
The holidays then is just such a time when students are less constrained by expectations. As the days roll by, there would be different situations unfolding before them. Students are often told to pause and smell the flowers because otherwise they would just be moving from one station to another in a mechanical way.
Pausing is not always appropriate for all situations; there may be scenes which are launching pads and others which one wishes to see disappear just as suddenly as they appeared.
The good news is that students are now free to playfully decide where to place a comma and where to place a full stop to begin a new sentence.
The Brain Dojo
