Untitled (Love Songs, for Professor Ward Weldon)
Rent from DeepDyve- Untitled (Love Songs,1 for Professor Ward Weldon2)
312–970–07213
Notes
1. If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing (Barrie, 1911, p. 148).
2. Professor of Education Ward Weldon, of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), died on February 12, 2013. He was 77. A few days after Professor Weldon passed away, I walked past the door of his office and found it dotted all over with little pink Post-it notes expressing grief and love. I paused in the hall, looking over them carefully. Most moving to me were the number of notes that conveyed: “Thank you for singing to us.”
I was never a student in any of Professor Weldon’s classes, but as a doctoral student in Education, I spent time visiting with him here and there. Once, at late lunch, he mentioned that he routinely sings to students in his classes. I was astonished by this idea, and asked him what he sings and why and how, in Educational Finance classes, for example. “Do you think they think you are a little bit crazy?” I asked.
And then, he began to sing. In the middle of a crowded restaurant. Just to show me. He sang a folk song about a river, from beginning to end. It was shakily, gently, and happily delivered. I sat rapt, and fully understood why he sang to his students. I understood that these were love songs. And so, as I pondered the notes on his door, I was not surprised that students were moved to remember those songs above all else, and more, to remember the loving time of having been sung to. It is the feel of learning that lingers like an echo, because it is the feel that builds the meaning, in just the same way Peter Brook (1968) describes the echo of theatre:
When emotion and argument are harnessed to a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself—then something in the mind burns. The event scorches onto the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell—a picture. It is the play’s central image that remains, its silhouette, and if the elements are rightly blended this silhouette will be its meaning, this shape will be the essence of what it has to say.
(p. 136) [End Page 66]
3. Please call this number.
William H. Schubert (1986) writes that we should become aware of the ways that each of us is a curriculum for everyone we meet, just as everyone we meet is a curriculum for us. This means much more than we have matters to teach each other; it means that each of us embodies a complex set of knowledges that interacts in ever unexpected ways when we encounter other people who also embody unique knowledges of their own. This elegant conceptual proposition illustrates curriculum as a living metaphor.
Curriculum is conceptual art, and like the conceptual art in visual art discourse, it has a conflicted relationship with its objects (Osborne, 2011). Sometimes the curriculum becomes material as a lesson plan, but most often it is ephemeral or changing, jumping around or dead on the floor, flushing our imaginations with heat or off pouting somewhere refusing us, and all the while de-materializing and mystifying the everyday transaction between teacher and student.
What subject or objects appear for us on pondering the curricula of who we meet? This piece is an effort to consider those silhouettes.
References
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