2. The play of mind on mind

"Your education consists some 90% in reading (and listening),10% in writing (and then mostly not real writing, but faking things which are much too difficult for you) and talking, the play of mind on mind, almost none at all (occasionally you will ask a question in class). There is an ecology of the mind as much as an ecology of nature, and when we become aware of this, the dreadful imbalance of our present system becomes unmistakable."

--William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.

In Macomber's performances he talked with us A LOT about education because he thought deeply about it. He also knew that we, his audience, had some experience of our own in this area, so he built on it. He arrived at an astonishingly clear formulation of a fundamental problem in education by noting the absence of the play of mind on mind, otherwise known as talking or conversation. He placed the problem in the context of an ecological imbalance, likely borrowing the idea of ecology of mind from Gregory Bateson (pictured at right), which I think is very insightful. He gives percentages (reading vs. writing vs. talking), which I think are still fairly accurate. In Macomber's view, the idea that a learning-ecology --a school, a course, what have you-- would allot almost zero time for conversation needs to be seen as unthinkably imbalanced. My twelve and fourteen year old sons would call it nutzo rather than unthinkably imbalanced.However, it is equally clear, from other statements he made about education, that Macomber was not in favor of throwing reading and writing out of the picture altogether. He was not an un-schooler or anti-schooler. He says for example, "Reading is opening yourself to another mind, writing is exploring the contents of your own mind." But even his approach to reading and writing is focused, not surprisingly, on pruning them back so that the play of mind on mind --talking-- could bloom. He only assigned 150 pages of reading --only ONE of Plato's many dialogues-- over the course of an entire ten-week term. Again that is 150 pages in 10 weeks --which means 15 pages per week! He asked us to write in our journals, but he assigned no papers. This is again quite remarkable and, as such, it would be easy to misinterpret. Hear ye, Hear Ye: Macomber did not lack academic rigor. Quite the opposite.

He did offend some people by (somewhat cheekily) claiming to be a fan of CliffsNotes (similar to SparkNotes only earlier). Why would an exquisitely trained professor, someone who would have been required to read the very longest books by most difficult authors (i.e., Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Thomas Aquinas, and the like) be a fan of CliffsNotes? It was because he knew that in order to become conversant with an author or subject, one really only needed to be able to grasp the main ideas or principles and then, literally, start talking. The talk would do the rest: it would individualize the instruction, generate a playful sense of fun, and fill in all of the content between the main ideas or principles, all on its own. Many don't believe this is possible --which is not surprising given that few have experienced it, at least not in school. But such is indeed the beauty, majesty, and efficiency of conversation when it comes to learning. Macomber got this. He was a big fan of conversation precisely because he knew it was the key to the learning process.So, Macomber's serious yet humorous and also playful claim to be a fan of CliffsNotes invites closer inspection. If we look closely, the only reading assigned for the term --the Symposium-- is one of the greatest works of Philosophy of all time, and yet it consists of a collection of fairly short speeches, each of which represents a very condensed summary version of a particular theory of love. So it is a great work, yet it embodies the logic of CliffsNotes perfectly. It provides a simplified set of key ideas or principles about love. All Macomber really needed to do with this in order to complete a new picture of education --and balance the ecology of the mind-- was give us the time to talk about the Symposium and about his performances. And that's what he did. What an incredibly elegant solution to the problem of ecological imbalance in education.

With further regard to the seriousness and studiousness with which Macomber took the idea of play, consider this statement:

"Then start at once studying together and getting to know one another, having an intellectual and personal relationship. Get your personal and professional life, pleasure and achievement—the two sides of life—pulling in the same direction. Enjoy yourself studying. You'll study better. This has been America's great contribution to the theory of education—William James, John Dewey: we must make learning fun...

Yes, if we have encountered America's two great thinkers, William James and John Dewey, we know that we must make learning fun, to get the most out of ourselves. Everyone in this University knows as much about John Dewey, and almost as much about William James, as I do. And, yet we still go on acting as though these two great figures had never existed."

--William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.

So we see that Macomber was a serious student as well as a conversationally playful teacher. He actually read, paid attention to, and applied the insights of William James (pictured at right) and John Dewey, both of whom --a long, long time ago-- said that serious play was a key to education.Along the way Macomber also talked fairly often about conversation as a skill that we could get better at through practice. I mean who among us at an art school like UNCSA does not already know how to play? And how do we learn to play even better? We learn by playing --we practice. I think It is indeed important to note that highly-skilled musicians play music, and highly-skilled actors play roles in productions are called, well, plays :) Then note this: highly skilled Liberal Artists play conversation. It's their creative medium. It's their instrument. That's Macomber's point.He taught us this point by modeling, demonstrating, performing, nay playing conversation at a very high-level, in a very skilled, virtuosic way, having great fun all the while. The Symposium models the same things in a surrogate way, in its dialogic format, its humor, its soaring insight, its creative spark.

In one memorable instance Macomber gave us technical advice about how to play --seriously play-- conversation: he told us simply that when we were talking in our small groups we should strive to bring the quiet ones into the conversation if we tended to be talkative ourselves, and strive to speak up more if we tended to be the quiet ones ourselves.

He gave a similar kind of technical lesson one time with regard to writing and talking. He told us that if we really wanted to learn how to write we should fall in love with someone who lives far away, and if we really wanted to learn how to talk we should fall in love with someone who lives close by. Have you ever encountered better, more seriously playful, technical lessons than these?

On a more general level, as a way to get better at the play of mind on mind, Macomber often said things to encourage us to blend our informal non-school talk with our formal school talk. i.e., from above, "Get your personal and professional life, pleasure and achievement—the two sides of life—pulling in the same direction." He also said similar things on other occasions, such as:

"You can do it, all by yourself. Talking is easy. "What do you think about Plato?" is like "What do you think about your brother-in-law?" If I asked you what you think about your brother-in-law, you'd come up with something! And, it would be interesting. We'd start there. You might have a very one-sided or even nonsensical view of your brother-in-law, but we'd get started. What do you think of Plato, Kant, or anything else you are studying in the University? Silence. "God, I don't think anything! I can't think of anything to say!"

--William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.

"Don't talk simply about the Symposium, or Plato. Talk about yourself, your problems, things you’ve been through, your other courses, the movie you've just seen or book you've read—everything. Talk about one another. Show interest in one another. That's what's so tragically lacking in this day and age. People are simply not interested very much in one another, and don't try to draw one another out."

--William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.

So it's important to note that Macomber did think we needed to develop our conversational skills in college. He recognized that we had some talent, that we could indeed engage in the play of mind on mind pretty well, but he also knew we could improve our playing. In other words it was not his view that since we already knew how to talk there was no point in practicing our skills to develop them further. Quite the opposite. In some ways this fits the model of education at UNCSA perfectly. You were admitted here because it was recognized that you already know how to play well in Dance, Design and Production, Drama, Film, or Music. But the fact that you were admitted also should have communicated to you that the instructors here believed they could help you learn how to play better. The same holds true with regard to your conversational skills: we think you play good, and we also think you can play better!

According to Macomber, then, we learn to talk better by talking, and by being interested in one another. These abilities are utterly natural to humans --I mean we are highly social, highly communicative critters, and we are certainly curious about one another-- so why is it that when we get to college many of us can't think of anything to say (or are too afraid to say anything)? If you have ever spent any time around with four-year-old children, you know that they are often already amazingly good at conversation, and often utterly fearless. Then they start school, and all of this changes. Why? I mean think about this!

The overarching lesson school teaches conversational prodigies (which, again most human beings are at four years of age) is how to sit still, shut up, be intimidated (and then learn to write)! Most of us are told this over and over again, in many different ways, for about twelve years or so. Many of us never get over it. So is it any wonder that, when we get to college, we can't think of anything to say (or are too afraid to say anything)? How might this affliction be remedied? Macomber really is a good doctor in this: he prescribed a single, simple, powerful, effective medicine to begin a cure --start talking again! This requires first of all allocating time to talk, time to practice. Hence the quote at the top of this page: 0% of time allocated to the practice of talking is not going to do much for our skills-development in this area.

Becoming highly skilled conversationalists in the aftermath of misguided yet well-intentioned training may also require that we change the picture we may have formed of conversation, in particular the picture of how conversation looks in school settings. I mean we all know about context affects behavior. Someone who may never say a word in class may be ultra-chatty in other contexts. Some people may be talkative online and, again, rarely if ever speak in class. But we want some of that outside-of-class talk, some of that online chatty talk, even some of that gossip and spark, to happen in class. Why? Because talking is where the learning is. All knowledge is built in conversation. And conversation is fluid; if we start by talking about our brother in law or roommate we just may get around to talking about Plato, too. So we may need to re-picture conversation in school as active, noisy, productive, fluid, mercurial, and fun. Macomber puts this in an even larger context in the quote above; he suggests that we need to see conversation as having an important place in the ecology of the mind and the ecology of the school or course. If there is no time to talk, then there is an ecological imbalance. By the way, this idea of ecology represents a re-picturing education. It is very different from picturing education as a system, for example, which tends towards a mechanistic view.For people in arts contexts, I also think we also need to see or re-picture conversation as a fundamentally creative activity. Picture conversation as a dance and you are on the right track. If you succeed in getting this picture established in your mind you will in effect have a dance studio in your mind. How's that sound? This matter of picturing is extremely important! One of America's greatest philosophers, Richard Rorty, put it this way: "It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, that determine most of our philosophical convictions." So we have to talk about our pictures, we need to talk about how we see things. Joseph Campbell said much the same thing when he wrote, "If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.” If you want to improve your conversational skills you may need to change your picture of what conversation is. Try picturing Liberal Arts education as noisy, talkative, comfortable, very creative, and artful like a dance.

Finally, as Macomber notes in the quote above, you absolutely need to talk (and keep talking) about our brother-in-law, or your little brother or sister, and/or the people in your dorm hall, and you need to bring this kind of talk to class, and to your intellectual work. But you also need to expand your conversational network. You need to become conversant with some of the great Liberal Artists of all time, and of our own time. I mean if Plato or Walter Ong were on Facebook, you would want to friend them and start leaving messages for them, and posting questions to their walls. Ultimately we need to friend conversation itself as a medium because it will take us to a higher level of thinking, learning, creativity, and living (which is, again, the point of all this). For most of you, writing is already predominantly conversational (I'm thinking here of various forms of online writing, texting, etc.) so digital media has already extended your base of conversational experience. So we also need to get some of this electronic-media type of conversation into the educational context as well.

Once re-pictured or re-framed in the above ways, conversation can then ramp-up and spin-off into many forms. You might decide to read the Symposium on your own and then text some of your friends about it. This will get their attention :) and it could spark conversations that makes your relationships better. In my own case, re-picturing conversation spun-off in an interesting direction with regard to my doctoral dissertation (which is the big paper one has to write in order to get a PhD degree). My dissertation ended up being the transcript of a written conversation that took place in email over the course of a year. Someone other than me wrote almost half of the words in my doctoral dissertation. In fact it was this single experience that explains how and why I got interested in digital media. In this experience, I discovered that conversation is a wonderfully creative medium --as wonderfully creative and flexible as paint and canvas-- and I also discovered that writing need not be done in solitary confinement.

I mean I had been picturing writing as a solitary activity my entire life, and I had become a captive to this picture. Digital media helped me change my picture of writing, it got me out of solitary-confinement, then out of prison, and I haven't been back. (Notice that I am not writing here, I am talking to you.) I still seek ways to make my writing overtly conversational whenever I can. So, in my case, Macomber's prescription eventually worked its way into curing or fixing my picture of writing. My writing partner and I found a way to started talking again (by writing back and forth to one another) and this indeed made all the difference in the world. It changed everything.

The current social environment is characterized by conversations going on pretty much everywhere, and all of the time, face-to-face and using a variety of digital devices. Often these conversations are in writing. We also see conversations (or what passes as such) quite often now on other media as well, including on television, where it now seems to be a requirement that news presenters engage in some sort of banter with one another.Meanwhile, with few exceptions, schools have sought to bar the doors to the communication side of digital media and the internet, and have only reluctantly been willing to open up the doors to the information side. I can see the reasons for not wanting folks to be involved with devices during class time --but we should definitely discuss this issue together, possibly in the context of multi-tasking. It's one of the many areas where I have a lot to learn. But what I do know is this: almost all of the writing most of us do nowadays is conversational. So it strikes me a possible that we could adopt Macomber's logic and simply look for ways to develop and elevate (inside schools and courses) the skills of conversation-based writing and learning that are being practiced all the time outslde schools and courses. Within schools, conversational writing is almost never seen, let along taught and practiced. This strikes me as a problem as well as an opportunity. What do you think?

I'll begin to close this text with a typology of different kinds of conversation, proposed by Patrick Jenlink and Alison Carr:

"There are three broad purposes of conversation:

• Transacting: conducted for the purpose of negotiating or exchange within an existing problem setting

• Transforming: conducted when individuals suspend their own personal opinions or assumptions, and their judgment of others' viewpoints

• Transcendent: where the purpose is that of moving beyond or "leaping out" of the existing mindsets...

• --Patrick Jenlink and Alison Carr (1996). Conversation as a medium for change in education. Available online.

I like this typology and find it helpful as a tool. Working with it a bit, the types can often be found together and inter-linked. i.e., talking transactionally can lead to talking transformationally. So Macomber's advice to just start talking and to keep practicing remains salient. Also, it's possible to understand conversation as a progression through stages to greater complexity and hence greater learning. So staying with it, working with it as a process, otherwise known as persistence, may also enter in.

In complexity-theory terms, conversations actually undergo phase-changes as they develop, getting better and better through series of iterations. For example, when a conversation moves from a transacting phase to a transforming phase, one conversant may find that they are arguing for a position opposite to one they were arguing for earlier! I think we've all experienced this, and it can be seen as marking a phase-change in a conversation --from transactional to transformational, for example, if we use Jenlink and Carr's terms.

So we can build our conversational skills through awareness of conversational trajectories. Like dancers, we can improve our sense of timing once we get hold of the creative pattern involved in what we are doing. Again, this is a matter of picturing conversation as a dynamic, creative, and inherently complex and beautiful/artful phenomenon, and then --with added awareness of its phase-change property-- developing our skills further by helping the conversation move to greater degrees of complexity via our input into its complex system. To revisit the ecology metaphor, this is sort of like humans --once we picture ourselves as part of the natural ecology-- using our awareness to help the natural ecology do its work. See video on bottom right for a short explanation of complexity-theory. The video nicely explains and shows how just a few things in interaction are capable of generating an incredibly complex richness of detail. This is the way conversation operates: through its inherent interactivity rich learning is inevitable. It does the major work if we each just do our small part.

What I find interesting is that even when schools, teachers, etc. decide to go ahead and restore ecological imbalance by re-instituting talking/conversation, the know-how is often lacking. We know how to talk, yet in many cases we do not know how to talk in school. We just aren't accustomed to it. Hence it requires, well, talking about it --and then practicing. Practicing is what we'll do in DMA.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention a larger context here. In advocating that educators build on the conversational prowess that all humans seem to have --rather than canceling it via adhering to the standard mantra of sit still, be quiet, read, be intimidated, and learn to write-- Macomber was ahead of his time, and ahead of cognitive science in some ways. One of the key principles of how people learn, now verified by cognitive scientists, is this: people learn by building on what they already know. Another way to put this is that people learn by building neurological bridges between what they already know, and something new they are trying to learn, by putting the new concept or skill in terms that are already familiar or known to them. For example, in the above text I used the familiar metaphor of dance to describe how conversation works creatively. If I were trying to make the same point to a different audience of people who may not be familiar with dance, then I would be well advised to pick a different metaphor! If I were writing to an audience of plumbers or pipe-fitters I would probably compare conversation to grease rather than dance.

I would also be remiss if I didn't mention one more thing in this regard. We are currently living in a time when the cultural-youngers (AKA you :) are learning differently from the ways the cultural elders did. It all kind of comes down to this: You surf, They go to the library (which kind of ties this back in to Santa Barbara :) For example, thanks to the internet you are not dependent on teachers or libraries for information. You may take this for granted, but it represents a real difference between your generation and mine. It also means, in the present context, that the base of what you already know includes knowing how to find information and assemble it into knowledge in a unique way. I refer to this unique way as Katamari-style learning in a presentation I recently gave at a conference. This type of learning proceeds somewhat chaotically, yet there is an order to it provided by your own individualized interests and networks of associations. Educators are once more at a juncture: we can either choose to cancel what you all already know how to do, or we can learn how to build on it. In DMA I try to do the latter. Katamari refers to series of computer games in case you are unfamiliar with it. I am not a computer gamer, but I love using Katamari as a metaphor for how people learn. But is it descriptive? Is this how you learn?

Find below to a summary of the principles of the play of mind on mind