Orientations, Dispositions, and Stances in Art Education Research and Scholarship

“The state of being orientated in the pursuit of knowledge is short-lived.”

“Much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not.”

—Adam Phillips (2012, p. xi)

Two years ago, I first encountered Mark Lewis’ Algonquin Park, September (2001).¹ It was shown alongside several other works in an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, curated by Emmy Lee Wall. Titled Site Unseen, the exhibition included a selection of works from the Gallery’s permanent collection along with works loaned specifically for the show. Wall selected these works to examine how contemporary artists who work with lens-based media document aspects of the natural environment, and in doing so, return it to us as a place full of previously unseen qualities, relations, and potentialities. Thus, like many exhibitions, Site Unseen was framed and staged around a set of ideas, concerns, and curiosities.

Algonquin Park, September is a film that runs for 2 minutes and 43 seconds. Shot on Super 35 mm motion picture film with a 1:2:35 ratio and projected directly onto the gallery wall, it opens with a panoramic view of a lake in Ontario, Canada, that is shrouded in fog. This view of the lake remains for the duration of the film. The fog—which stretches across the entire film plane—moves slowly from right to left, in its own time, with its own rhythm, as it is animated gently by an invisible wind that also causes some ripples in the lake water in the foreground. As time passes, and it does, the fog dissipates but never burns off entirely. In dissipating, it reveals aspects of what it previously concealed in part—the lake itself; a cluster of tall fir trees growing close together on a landmass in the distance and surrounded by water; a glimpse of a blue sky; and two figures paddling a canoe. The fog, in its movement, reveals a world to me as the camera does in its stillness. As time passes, light increasingly fills the image. The lake, the trees, the canoe and its paddlers, and the sky become more visible. The increasing light also ushers in greater visual depth while the image seems to expand outward. Thoughts of wilderness, feelings of vastness, of the sublime, of loneliness rise in me, just like the fog—slowly, silently, and without direction. Just before the canoe reaches the left side of the film plane, the film ends.

On reflection, I found the slow, shifting movement of the fog mesmerizing. In some respects, it reminded me of watching a newborn calf trying to stand. Watching the determination of the struggling calf trying to get all four legs under its torso and in an upright position to support it, I know the struggle involves a series of movements that take place in time, and that takes time. In watching, you imagine what the outcome will be. If you have the patience and time to wait, what you imagine will happen will most likely occur. The calf will stand, albeit shakily. But the precise movements of the calf cannot be predicted in advance of the event taking place. Nor can such movements be repeated after they have occurred. These same feelings of anticipation and uncertainty within the realm of knowledge and certainty arise for me in watching the fog move in Algonquin Park, September.

Memories of being caught in fog return to me as I view Algonquin Park, September. The sensation of being in the midst of fog in the past, in other places and times, searching for my way out and on, taught me things about the condition of this phenomenon. Fog reduces visibility but enhances attentiveness. It presents a familiar place otherwise. It shrouds what is present but cannot be seen. Fog knows no boundaries and obeys none. It moves in ways that cannot be predicted. Observing the fog move slowly, without purpose or intention, I stay with Algonquin Park, September, wishing to see it through to the end, curious to learn whether the fog will disappear. I wait for its disappearance, wondering what will come into view as a result. In doing so, I comply with the demands of the film (perhaps they, too, are the demands of the artist): to be patient, to look carefully, to savor the slow movement of the clearing fog, to be attentive to subtle changes, to be curious about what gets revealed in time, and to fill in the gaps between what is seen and unseen, what is observed and imagined. As I watch the film, I understand that with every second that passes, I lose a piece of the work, but that loss is accepted with the hope of gaining the entire piece at the end, if only in memory. For things to appear, I recognize that something else has to withdraw from appearance.

In pointing his camera in one direction and not another, a whole world came into focus for Lewis (and subsequently for me as a viewer of his film). An image of a possible world was given, as the camera—that “observation station” Susan Sontag (1977, p. 12) called it—indiscriminately recorded everything that took place in front of its lens, within its focal range, and within the parameters of its frame. Like all cameras, Lewis’ camera did not tire of its subject. It did not discriminate between foreground, middle ground, or background. Nor did it give more attention to one aspect of the scene than another, even if one aspect—the lifting fog—occupies the entire film plane for the duration of the film, and thus demands much of my attention. And yet it seems to capture the many layers that make up the scene that is offered to me. My view of the scene is both enabled and limited by the camera and its recording capacity. It is also enabled and limited by the decisions the artist made: the viewpoint he selected, the length of time that he recorded, the direction in which he pointed his camera, the time of the day in which he made the work, the place that he chose to make it, and the environment in which he worked. And it is enabled and limited by my availability to take in the work and be curious about it on the day I encountered it. But also, my experience of encountering and spending time with the work cannot be thought separately from the conditions through which it was brought to me. Seen in a gallery as part of a special exhibition, Algonquin Park, September was introduced and framed by the curiosity of the curator, and the issue she sought to study by bringing a collection of artworks together. My sense is that something similar can be said of the experience of encountering the articles and commentaries that have been brought together in this issue of Studies—a special issue that focuses on the orientations, dispositions, and stances found in art education research and scholarship.

Not dissimilar from how Lewis responds to the things that reach out to him in a Barthian punctum sort of way, or show up for him in his travels (which ultimately leads to the identification of locations for his films),² the authors of these articles and commentaries (hereafter referred to as articles) responded to a call for manuscripts that invited them to think about what they are doing when they conceptualize, plan, and pursue inquiry and share research outcomes. In issuing this call, which was structured around the concepts of orientation, disposition, and stance, my hope was that an opportunity would be presented to scholars in the field to reflect on questions of intention, purpose, attachment, curiosity, and habits of inquiry, meaning-making, and representation. The special issue arose in part because of my curiosity. I was curious about how art education scholars think, what they think, and how their thinking is made manifest in the research that they conceptualize and conduct, as well as in the ways that they represent it.

In conceptualizing the special issue, I hoped that scholars would write papers that sought to nurture, extend, and complicate the ways we, as academics and educators, think and talk about as well as practice research in art education. This, they did. The articles published in this issue reveal the interests and investments of those who wrote them, the attachments they have built over time with others, with certain ideas, and with particular bodies of knowledge. They, too, reveal something about the frameworks for thought that contributors to this special issue invest, and the dispositions and stances that they adopt and assume in the conduct of research. The articles published in this issue also disclose ways in which their authors settle upon an idea, inhabit it, and make it their own by understanding it in relation to how others take it up and put it to work. In some cases, such an investment involves following an idea around to where it takes one—in and out of a range of fields, curious about where the idea goes, how it moves, what it moves, and how it changes and becomes formed otherwise during its travels.

Structured around the above-mentioned concepts, a handful of questions were presented to potential authors when the call for manuscripts was issued. These questions included the following: What do researchers turn toward and turn away from when they engage in their research studies? What dispositions of inquiry do researchers adopt and advance in pursuit of their scholarship? What stances do researchers take toward phenomena of interest?

Inviting scholars to reflect on the orientations, dispositions, and stances that they take up in their research presents an opportunity to learn something about their beliefs, values, perceptions, and curiosities. As Mary Ann Stankiewicz reveals in her contribution to this special issue, certain ideas, topics, questions, curiosities, and investments define the contours of the field from moment to moment. The work produced and circulated within the field becomes material for others to consult, to respond to, to be guided by, to refuse, or to depart from. As Irit Rogoff (2002) reminds us, referencing Gayatri Spivak, “It is the questions that we ask that produce the field of inquiry and not some body of materials which determines what questions need to be posed to it” (p. 26). Thus, it is the types of inquiry projects that scholars follow, invest time in, write about, and debate that shapes what can be imagined for the field. In her contribution, Stankiewicz also reflects on the different epistemological styles³ that she encountered, engaged with, moved into and out of throughout her long and distinguished career in the field of art education. Stankiewicz offers an account of how her attention was directed—divided at times—during her research and scholarly practices and investments. In being directed, her attention was cultivated, challenged, nurtured, given to flight, and opened to possibilities that previously did not appear as such.

You might ask: Why this special issue with this focus at this time? Interest in the study and practice of research has a long history in Studies in Art Education. The very first issue of Studies in 1959 was devoted to understanding research and its nature, practice, and implications for the field (Stankiewicz, 2015). Our commitment to research in the field has significantly increased and diversified since that first issue of Studies more than 60 years ago. Today more than ever, research holds a dominant place in the field. This is due in large part to the intentional efforts of NAEA, art education scholars and practitioners, and others⁴ to cultivate a research culture in art education. As a result, much of the research discourse, energy, and activity fostered in recent years has tended to focus on how research can improve practice and expand what is known about the nature and reach of art education as it is engaged in different places, contexts, and educational sites. With a focus on what research can do, these activities tend to prioritize and value research’s future-orientated potential—what José Esteban Muñoz (2009) would call a “doing for and towards the future” (p. 1).

With scholars conducting research to better understand some of the things occurring in the field, and to generate new areas of inquiry and study as well as to engage with the structures and methods through which research is carried out, produced, and reported, I thought that this issue of Studies might serve to advance additional understandings of things assumed already understood, and argued for, as well as things not previously contemplated or cultivated in the field. The articles in this issue, many of which have an autobiographical quality to them, turn our attention to other structures of inquiry and study, which are developed through a close reading of the work of philosophers, sociologists, historians, cultural critics, artists, educators, and others. For instance, in his contribution to this issue, Jack Richardson pursues the potential of a “philosophical orientation [to art education research] that privileges lingering in the search of research.” While acknowledging that “what we can think as possible is still constrained by language,” he encourages readers to think and do in ways that are neither limited nor constrained by what they already know, feel comfortable with, and turn to habitually. Richardson encourages his readers to loosen their grip on “preordained modes of thought and methods of inquiry” in an effort to broaden their research and meaning-making practices. He encourages his readers to imagine worlds beyond those given—worlds beyond those worlds that tend to be achieved through familiar modes of inquiry, interpretation, and representation.

To be curious about a scholar’s orientations, dispositions, and stances is to be curious about how they do their work and what their work does in the places in which it finds itself. Within a research context, the concept of orientation is potentially generative in the questions it prompts one to ask. For Sara Ahmed (2006), to be orientated is to “know where we are when we turn this way or that way” (p. 1). Thus, to be orientated is to know where one is located and situated in relation to things known or recognizable. Oftentimes it is only in moments of disorientation that we realize that we have been orientated all along and up to that point. To wake up in the early hours of the morning in a strange room and wonder for a moment—a split second—where one is, and to not recognize the layout of the room, and thus to be denied the comfort of familiarity, is perhaps what disorientation feels like. In moments of disorientation, one most likely seeks clues to reorientate ourselves—the door, the window, the light switch, the headboard, and so on in that unfamiliar room.

Thus, knowing where things are in relation to other things can help one to become orientated. For example, before I drive out of my garage to travel to my place of work, I know that once I exit the garage, I will need to turn my car right to face in the direction of my workplace, the University of British Columbia (UBC). I don’t necessarily register that I am facing west when I turn right upon leaving my garage, but I know that UBC is located on the west side of the city and that my garage door is facing south. To turn left in this situation would be to turn toward the east. It would take me in the opposite direction of where I intended to go. Thus, writes Ahmed (2006), “even when orientations seem to be about which way we are facing in the present, they also point us toward the future” (p. 21). So orientations suggest movement, a movement into what lies between us and what we strive toward.

To feel orientated, then (as mentioned above), is to feel that one has a sense of the layout and organization of that which surrounds them. As the above examples indicate, we are oriented when we know where we are when we turn this way or that. Further, to be orientated is more than simply turning this way or that way. It is to know where one is when one turns and faces this or that thing, object, or place. To feel orientated is to have a solid sense of where one is in relation to other things. To feel orientated is to feel a sense of direction and purpose. And it is to feel a sense of being at home in the world, knowing things about it, not fearful of losing one’s way (Ahmed, 2006).

Taking stock of one’s orientation, as I did in the company of Lewis’ Algonquin Park, September, and as the contributors to this issue do, presents moments in which we can acknowledge how we have become orientated, and how we could perhaps be orientated differently. Such moments are not strictly moments of disorientation. But they are ones in which our orientation becomes less stable and more open to change. Moreover, the state of being orientated in the pursuit of knowledge is short-lived. Knowing can quickly shift into unknowing. Understandings can be undone more rapidly than expected when gaps between what was previously known and what one needs to know widen. The introduction of different perspectives, other ways of saying or doing, can shift established perspectives. The smallest shift can cause the greatest change, just as the invisible wind in Lewis’ Algonquin Park, September lifts the fog slowly off the lake. If, as educators and scholars, we are open to pursuing what we yet don’t know, then the feeling of disorientation should not be an infrequent one, nor an unwelcomed one. As these articles suggest, scholars often find themselves being reorientated by the things that they encounter. They reveal that orientations offer different perspectives as well as different opportunities for movement. For these reasons, it could be said that in the search for phenomena of interest or of necessity, scholars seem to be always and forever engaged in becoming orientated.

When you read the articles and commentaries in this issue of Studies, you will likely notice that the authors turn toward certain bodies of knowledge, traditions of thought, and practices of inquiry to help them think with and through the phenomena that interest them. Such bodies of knowledge, traditions of thought, and practices of inquiry orientate them. In turning toward bodies of knowledge, theories of world making, and research practices, the authors discover and establish alliances and affinities between their thoughts and the thoughts of others. What they turn toward shapes the direction they take, and what they see, think, say, and know, while the direction they take shapes what they can say, do, think, or know. By engaging with the work of others, both inside and outside of the field of art education, new possibilities present for these scholars in ways that Ahmed (2006) has remarked: “Certain objects are available to us because of lines that we have already taken” (p. 2). This is the case with Courtney Lee Weida’s contribution to this issue. In her article, she suggests that the activities associated with making zines, with showing them, curating and collecting them, as well as studying them, are activities full of educational potential that orientate us to art-based inquiry practices in distinctive ways—in ways not previously thought or followed.

Through their writing, the authors in this issue reveal some of the ways in which they think with others, including how they return to familiar concepts again and again with interest in thinking them otherwise. Tyson E. Lewis’ contribution is a case in point. Lewis turns to the writings of French playwright, critic, and author Alfred Jarry to propose a ‘pataphysical turn for arts-based research. As Lewis shows, there is great value to thinking ideas with other scholars for the sheer pleasure of thinking in ways that are not bound by necessity or expectation, established in advance of the adventure of thought. In a similar spirit, Stankiewicz’s contribution explores some similarities between Sara Ahmed’s notion of orientations and Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of dispositions and habitus. While in her article, she draws more heavily on Bourdieu’s concepts of dispositions and habitus, she argues that Ahmed and Bourdieu meet in their commitment to phenomenology.

While the articles that follow suggest that their authors inhabit the field of art education with others, the ways in which they think, talk about, and study similar subjects are not identical and are oftentimes quite different. There is strength in this form of plurality that characterizes the field, especially when recognizing such difference enables ideas to move. With plurality, more correspondences are established. For instance, in Algonquin Park, September, one could say that the lake water, warmer than the air in the fall, causes the fog to form. But the lake water, too, enables the canoe to move across its surface in concert with its form, with the materials from which it is made, and with the aid of the paddles that the paddlers skillfully operate with determination, intention, strength, and coordinated movement. The speed of the invisible wind, which the lake water permits us to notice in the ripples that it causes, also contributes to the movement of the canoe.

Some of the authors in this issue trace intellectual histories, while others propose alternative choices, options, and opportunities for addressing aspects of the field that remain understudied or overstudied in and through certain theoretical constructs and frameworks. The contributions of Alphonso Walter Grant, Matthew Isherwood, and Christine Ballengee Morris and Laurie A. Eldridge to this issue are examples of these orientations to the production of scholarship. In his article, Grant builds upon and extends scholarship in the areas of Black visual culture and Black masculinities, suggesting that “first-person stories and counternarratives from marginalized perspectives [have] the potential to offer new ways of thinking about visual culture research in art education.” He offers several questions to his readers in an effort to encourage them to look again and examine how they interpret Black visual culture, Black identities, masculinities, sexualities, gendered positions, and whiteness. Grant’s contribution is critical for the advancement of research and thought in Black visual culture as well as for understanding aspects of the present moment in which we live, where we have witnessed the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of police, the fatal shooting of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta by police, along with the police killing of Breonna Taylor in her home in Louisville, Kentucky, and the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. We are also witnessing anti-Black racism and anti-racism protests across more than 100 cities in the United States along with the protests of solidarity that have been held in countries across the world—all of which call for a collective confrontation of systemic racism and structural and institutional inequities.

In his article, Isherwood considers the concept of queer aesthetic sensibility and reflects on its potential as a dispositional stance and force for making sense of things given, and things denied. Turning to the scholarly work of Maxine Greene and José Esteban Muñoz and the artworks of Felix Gonzáles-Torres, while also presenting some autobiographical accounts of growing up queer, Isherwood advances an account of sensibility that he suggests can put us in contact with the given in ways that reveal its unrealized (unnoticed) potential. Ballengee Morris and Eldridge provide an account of how they turn toward to their Indigenous values when doing research. For them, they write, “research in our field has often limited us to utilizing traditional approaches, when there are other ways of knowing.”

Similar to these contributions, others in this issue guide us, as readers, into new spaces of thought and representation by adopting particular conceptual frameworks. For instance, Ami Kantawala’s contribution is an example of this move, as she invites readers to consider what the concepts of framing, re-framing, and un-framing, informed by the work of Mieke Bal (2002), offer for conceptualizing and doing historical research. She offers an account of how she has put these three related concepts to work in her research. “The concept of framing could be adopted as a stance,” Kantawala writes, or it “could become one’s critical disposition in history writing,” she adds.

Like orientations, the ways in which scholars make sense of the world are shaped by the dispositions they carry with them or adopt in their efforts to make sense of what they encounter, as David Herman, Jr.’s contribution confirms. A disposition within a research context might be understood as the way in which scholars take notice when doing intellectual work. A disposition might also be understood as the way in which scholars attend to and entertain phenomena of interest, spend their time with those phenomena, and come to understand what they believe they perceive. Further, new dispositions are oftentimes cultivated in the practice of doing research. Implicit in all of these articles is a commitment to the concept of stance, understood as the position that scholars take up and assume in relation to their research objects, subjects, curiosities, desires, and inclinations. As the authors show, stance is disclosed and materialized in and through the judgments that scholars make.

Through their writings, several authors in this issue encourage us, the readers of Studies, to pay attention to what is present in the things we encounter but which might not be immediately visible. As Herman puts it in his contribution, “it is critical that we, as researchers, pay close attention to the unstable, changing, partial, fleeting, and indeterminate nature of our encounters with scholarship, participants, environments, histories, oneself, students.” This gesture of generosity reminds me not only of my experience of viewing Lewis’ Algonquin Park, September, but also the words of Maxine Greene. “Works of art,” Greene (2001) wrote, “do not reveal themselves automatically… they have to be achieved” (p. 15). Like artworks, research and scholarly texts do not typically reveal themselves spontaneously but need to be attended to carefully so that things that we would ordinarily miss during a quick first read or with a first glance would not go unseen.⁵ As Umberto Eco (1989) reminded us, “the reader of the text knows that every sentence and every trope is ‘open’ to a multiplicity of meanings which he must hunt for and find” (p. 5).

In closing, I’d like to finish by turning to the reader to explain again, but differently, why I was reminded of Lewis’ Algonquin Park, September and my experience of viewing it when I sat down to write this editorial. I have often thought about the experience of encountering that work, in a way perhaps not too dissimilar from the experience that Peter de Bolla had when he came upon Marc Quinn’s Self—an account he shares in his book, Art Matters (2001). Present to me on the day that I first encountered Algonquin Park, September is Lewis’ attentiveness to subtle movements and to how those subtle movements enhance stillness—the movement of the fog is slow and lethargic; the movement of the canoe, by comparison, is intentional and rhythmic as it cuts a line in the water revealing the surface of the lake. Lewis’ attentiveness teaches me something about the act of paying attention, about the virtues of patience, and what both the act of paying attention and the virtues of patience can produce. It also teaches me something about slowing down, taking notice, looking closely, spending time, remaining curious about what emerges in time and because of time, and of what takes form only for a few seconds before it becomes something else. And it teaches me something about the pleasure of staying with a moment, an idea, a set of curiosities and conditions while paying attention to what is given in form and perception. These are all good lessons for those of us who conduct research. It could even be said that the work functions as an antidote to the condition expressed in the epigraph above: “Much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not” (Phillips, 2012, p. xi).

Along similar lines, present in the articles in this special issue of Studies is each author’s commitment to bringing you and I, the readers of their work, into a relation with some of the qualities and values that conceptualizing and conducting research teaches us: waiting, watching, witnessing, observing, recording, acting in good faith, remaining open to the unpredictable, fostering relations of mutual respect, staying with uncertainty, attending to mystery, and bringing something into being that did not exist previously. In an effort to advance less instrumentalist approaches to conceptualizing and conducting research and scholarship in the field of art education, the articles selected for this special issue address us, their readers, in a manner that orientates us to the field, in which we have inherited and invested our energies in distinctive ways, while simultaneously revealing aspects of the field that enlarge our understanding of its potential and reach. In reading, selecting, and ordering the articles that follow, I was reminded of Umberto Eco’s claim about perceiving and engaging with artworks—a claim which I believe can be extended to the written text. Eco (1989) wrote, “every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it because in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective for itself” (p. 4). In ways similar to how viewers likely encountered Lewis’ Algonquin Park, September when it was on exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2018—available in the gallery alongside other works, not set apart in a room of its own for a discrete viewing experience, but with a bench placed in front of it nonetheless for viewers to sit, viewers who might encounter it midway through its showing, or maybe toward its end, or even at its beginning—as a reader, you will likely come to these texts, to the ideas, concepts, methodologies, frameworks for thought, and practices of inquiry embedded in them and advanced by them, from different positions, at different times, and with different needs, curiosities, and desires. In reading these articles, you will lend them form that may or may not correspond with the intentions of their authors—but in doing so, you will take them elsewhere, thus producing them anew.

Notes

¹ My sincere thanks to Mark Lewis for granting permission to reproduce a film still from Algonquin Park, September on the front cover of this issue of Studies, and for sharing with me a copy of the film for viewing as I prepared my remarks for this editorial.

² In interviews, Lewis has shared how he discovers the locations for his films. His process is unpredictable but responsive (Fischer, 2009). In his travels, as he passes through places on the way to somewhere else, things, objects, moments, scenes that are awaiting attention garner his. In some respects, to use Kathleen Stewart’s (2007) words, the things that present to Lewis and to which he responds are “a problem or question emergent in disparate scenes and incommensurate forms and registers; a tangle of potential connections” (p. 3).

³ Michéle Lamont (2009) describes epistemological styles as “preferences for particular ways of understanding how to build knowledge, as well as beliefs in the very possibility of proving those theories” (p. 54).

⁴ In 2012, the National Art Education Association (NAEA, 2020) launched the NAEA Research Commission, which seeks to “meet the ongoing research needs of the visual arts education field” (para. 1). Two years later, the Art Education Research Institute (AERI) was founded to create conditions for the study and advancement of theoretical and empirical research that seeks to address critical intellectual and practical issues in the field. The NAEA Research Commission and AERI have actively pursued their distinctive agendas, offering support and forums to discuss, debate, and share research outcomes. Other events and groups within the field, however, have also created conditions for critical engagement with the practice of research. For instance, in 2015, Brushes With History: Imagination and Innovation in Art Education History, a 4-day conference held at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York, focused on the nature and processes of doing historical research. Between 2015 and 2018, the Council for Policy Studies in Art Education organized its meetings around three research-focused themes: Field Work in Art Education, Shifting Concepts in Art Education, and Art Education and the Precarious Present. Several editorials published in Studies under the editorship of Mary Ann Stankiewicz (2015–2017) featured discussions of research, probing the why and the how of research practice. Under Senior Editor B. Stephen Carpenter II (2017–2019), the first of two special theme issues of Studies, “In the Shadow of Change: Ideologies and Methodologies in Art Education,” sought to examine the “ideologies that motivate and inform research in art education and the methodologies art education scholars use in their research to construct new knowledge” (Carpenter, 2017, para. 13).

⁵ Here I am reminded of the following account that Irit Rogoff (2002) shared in her chapter, “Studying Visual Culture”: “Often in class the students complain that the language of theoretical inquiry is difficult, that ‘it is not English.’ They need considerable persuasion that one cannot ask the new questions in the old language, that language is meaning. In the end almost always their inherent excitement at any notion of ‘the new’ wins the day and by the end of the trimester, someone invariably produces a perfectly formulated remark about discourse, representation, and meaning usually followed by a wonder-filled pause at the recognition that they have just uttered something entirely ‘different’” (p. 25).