Dissertation topics emerge, move to the fore, sink back, and are always a process. Mine is no different. I found material this week on the way K-12 curriculum comes to be. One of the books is about a post-modernist perspective on curriculum. Teachers and students co-create the learning within a matrix or frame provided. There is no expectation of clear and definable products at the beginning. Learning is messy. It is a rich conversation.
Robert Herrick, an 18th English poet, provided a metaphor for learning with a rushed dressing of a person, in this case a young woman. Learning is an art, an imprecise art which requires mistakes along the way and continuous refining that is never quite finished. It seems to get better with time. In that disorder, learners and teachers merge.
A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction,
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher,
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly,
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat,
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see wild civility,
Do more bewitch me, then when art is
Is too precise in very part.
