Teaching Resonance

When I ponder the theoretical aspects of teaching and learning, I tend to gravitate toward two central ideas: interaction and resonance. Indeed, the intersection of these ideas undergirds my primary conceptual framework and research agenda.

This intersection can best be expressed by one of my favorite poetic passages, which is from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. The passage, which is actually the fifth way, goes as follows:

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Now if we can resist, for a moment, getting too caught up in the Modernist symbolism of the blackbird itself, there is a great deal that we can learn from these lines.

From a teaching and learning standpoint, an instructor’s statement, in whatever media, however brilliant or eloquent, is ultimately fleeting. It doesn’t live on as a matter of its own existence or making, nor in the consciousness of its receiver, but rather in how it is appropriated by that consciousness, in how it resonates in that consciousness in the “just after.”

The real question is how can we write resonance in the consciousnesses of our students? How can we design our instruction to maximize that resonance? Does it have to do with the acoustical design of the environment, in the way that we prepare our students to learn in our classroom? Or rather does it depend more on the way we play the content?