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Recommended Reading
Inventions of Teaching: A Genealogy
by Brent Davis
Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates 2004
ISBN 0-8058-5039-2
Review by Jack Yantis
Teaching is a language-encrusted profession. Words such as nurturing, instructing, facilitating or caring are all reflective of the qualities teachers bring to the learning process, yet are these words really compatible? Might they refer to perspectives that are contradictory or even combative? Brent Davis, Canada Research Chair in Math Education at the University of Alberta, addresses these questions and many more in this elegant and visionary book.
Like an art restorer who has been given a painting that is covered with centuries of dirt and grime, Davis gracefully floats away the layers that teaching has accumulated since Socrates first taught Plato and his friends in the groves of ancient Greece. In his introduction, he identifies our academic obsessions with dichotomies and asks us to consider a fractal approach to making discernments, or what he calls "bifurcation" or branching. With this holistic view of opposites, he begins his exploration of the Western worldviews of the nature of the universe – metaphysical and physical. Moving from gnosis to episteme within the metaphysical and intersubjectivity and interobjectivity within the physical, he examines the various aspects of teaching that reflect these worldviews. A scholar with a refreshing love for the roots of words in order to restore their informative power (his insight into versus which is Latin for turning, bending or winding is only one examples,) Inventions gives today's teachers, educators and administrators a bracing reconnection to the diversity of teaching practices and how they weave into the vast range of intellectual thought in the West. His concluding genealogical tree of contemporary conceptions of teaching is a beautiful reminder of how all teaching is nested in the human connection to nature and the tree of life.
Jack Yantis has been actively involved in the worlds of performance and education for the last 25 yrs. He holds an MFA from New York University. Currently he is Associate Faculty, Center for Programs in Education, Antioch University Seattle, where he teaches integrated arts courses in their Teacher Preparation programs. He has taught in K-12 private and public schools in Washington State, Georgia and South Carolina. He is also a choreographer and director who has worked for several dance companies and community theatres and even still manages to dance himself. For more detailed information about Jack and his work in the world, go to www.jackyantis.com or email jmoving@mindspring.com.
©September 2005 New Horizons for Learning
http://www.newhorizons.org
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