LEGO and Philosophy

In this blog post, Tyler Shores writes about his recent contribution to the book “Building Blocks of Thought: LEGO and the Philosophy of Play.

I recently had a chance to write about LEGO in the just released LEGO and Philosophy book. It’s the latest addition to the always interesting Blackwell Philosophy and Popular Culture series.

The LEGO and Philosophy book covers a number of thought-provoking topics – from LEGO and philosophical values, and questions of gender and race in LEGO mini figures, to Heidegger and ontology, and Lego and metaphysics. You can check out the book’s full table of contents on the Wiley website here.

In my chapter, “Building Blocks of Thought: LEGO and the Philosophy of Play” I discuss a number of ideas through LEGO, as well as exploring some thoughts on the nature LEGO itself as not just a toy or system of play –  but also as a medium for expressing thoughts and ideas. We may even consider LEGO as what Sherry Turtle has called “objects to think with.”

LEGO can serve as a helpful analogy for how philosophical thinking can lead us toward new connections between our thoughts and ideas. One of the things I point out is how LEGO and philosophy invite us to question the nature of play – as well as what philosophy means to us in an everyday context. In my chapter I suggest that play and seriousness in philosophy needn’t be mutually exclusive. In fact, it can be more helpful to think of philosophy as “serious play.”

Perhaps this is why LEGO has become so indelibly tied to education and learning unlike any other toy in the world. From the LEGO school in Billund, Denmark and the LEGO research from the MIT Media lab and of course Professor Paul Ramchandan the first ever LEGO Professor of Play at the University of Cambridge , LEGO, play, and learning seem to fit together as well as the studs and tubes that connect LEGO bricks.

In much educational research, we understand how play is both a means to an end and an end in itself. As Fred Rogers reminds us: “Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning.”

To discuss the new LEGO and Philosophy book, I had the opportunity to be a guest on the very cool Part-Time Genius podcast with Will Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur. Mango and Will are the creators of perhaps the world’s greatest online trivia source, Mental Floss. The Part-Time Genius podcast is their latest creation, comprising an eclectic mix of questions and fun topics. You can check out their podcast on Twitter and Facebook and iTunes.

Do you have questions or thoughts to share about LEGO and Philosophy? Feel free to get in touch via Twitter (@tylershores) or in the comments below. Thanks!

 

Tyler Shores is a PhD student in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. His research interests include the experience of reading in print and digital mediums, literacy, and the impact of digital technology in education. Tyler has published on social media, online culture, and philosophy. He received his Master’s Degree from the University of Oxford, and his experience includes working in online education at Stanford University, Google, and serving as a director of digital textbooks for an educational nonprofit organization.

My #PHDshelfie: Julie

As the intellectual cousin of the word selfie, a shelfie is a photograph of someone’s bookshelf. In the next few months, the FERSA blog will occasionally feature shelfies taken by graduate students in the Faculty of Education, accompanied by reflections about some of their favourite books. The first person to share a shelfie is PhD student Julie Blake. 

I’ve just moved house and right now books are less a matter of shelfies and more a matter of Asda carrier bags stuffed in cupboards. But I have organized one bookcase of PhD essentials and that’s what you can see here.

The top two shelves mostly house my data set: a pile of poetry anthologies specified or recommended by exam boards in England since the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1988. To the left of the orange research journals are books close to my heart. Glyn Maxwell’s  On Poetry is simply the best – and laugh-out-loud funniest  –  book written about teaching poetry: I’d give body parts to write as brilliantly as this. Next to that is Francis Spufford’s The Child That Books Built. I like the idea that childhood reading shapes the person, though in my case I should now either be in a crack SAS squad or in prison, having mostly read horror novels and SAS survival handbooks. Next to that is the Poetry By Heart anthology. Alongside my PhD research, I direct Poetry By Heart, a national schools poetry recitation competition I set up with Andrew Motion, the former UK poet laureate. This is the competition anthology. My name’s in it. I like that.

Before I committed to a PhD at Cambridge in poetry education I was going to read for one at Bristol in Historical Sociolinguistics so on the next shelf are key books for a journal article I’m finishing about the representation of early Jamaican Creole in 18-19^th century British newspapers. There’s also a biography of Peter Mark Roget of Roget’s Thesaurus fame. “Everyone knows his name; no-one knows his story.” That’s the pitch for my as-yet-unwritten screenplay that I’m not allowed to start until I’ve finished the PhD…

Below that are my intellectual touchstones. Edward Tufte’s books on different aspects of visual communication of information are still the best: beautiful, rigorous and challenging us to think harder about how we ‘see’ information. This will be an important thread in my thesis, one that underpins the use of a methodological tool-kit I’m adapting from quantitative approaches to literary and cultural history. Stanford’s Franco Moretti is my all-time hero; his Distant Reading is quite brilliant on how literary history can be better understood by working with number and pattern. Next to him is Uncharted, a popular book about using big data for cultural analysis written by the guys who created the Google n-gram viewer (go and play with it, but don’t blame me if those three chapters you promised your supervisor by Friday don’t get written…). Then there’s Matthew Jockers and his how-to book about R-coding the quantitative crunches that Franco Moretti writes about. Me and semantic topic modelling are about to become intimately acquainted…

When I left school, a rough-and-tumble London Comprehensive, one of my teachers told me never to forget where I came from.  Maybe I took it a bit literally, but that promise drives a lifetime commitment to mass education, as a teacher, a senior leader, a curriculum hustler, and now as a researcher.  It also drives my constant re-telling of the story of a day in 1979 when the curiously posh Mrs Thompson swept into our third year secondary English classroom in a state of high dudgeon and declared, “Just because you’re poor, it doesn’t mean you shan’t have poetry!”  I research school poetry anthologies because without school I would have had nothing but TV jingles. For this, Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes is foundational. In its extensive testimony, this book speaks over and over of the richness and expansiveness of people’s interior lives when they have access to reading widely, not only through schooling, but also at the many different sites in which working class people have historically had access to learning. Catherine Robson’s Heartbeats pursues a related line, insisting on the remarkable phenomenon of mass education and exploring the experience of poetry recitation as a significant everyday classroom practice in Britain and the US in the 19^th century. This is an academic who cites Nigel Molesworth and Jacques Derrida in one sentence and if in my thesis I manage to do something half as good with equally good intellectual cause I will know I’m done.

Professor Robson is my number two Fantasy League Examiner. Number one is Anne Ferry, just along the shelf with her pioneering monograph on poetry anthologies. I wish I’d had the chance to meet her. I owe her a huge debt of gratitude and I should have liked to thank her.

So, that’s my shelfie. What’s yours like?

 

Suggested Readings from Julie’s Shelf: 

1. Glyn Maxwell, On Poetry
2. Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built
3. Motion et al, Poetry By Heart: Poems for Learning and Reciting
4. Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
5. Franco Moretti, Distant Reading
6. Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture
7. Matthew Jockers, Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature
8. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
9. Catherine Robson, Heartbeats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem
10. Anne Ferry, Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Enquiry Into Anthologies

 

Julie Blake is in the fourth year of a part-time PhD at the Faculty of Education in Cambridge. Her thesis will examine the nature of the poetry specified for study by some 14 million people in England since its mandatory inscription in the National Curriculum in 1988. She is interested in digital and quantitative methods, large archives, and processes of mass cultural transmission. Follow her on Twitter at @felthamgirl.

A Tiny Clinic for the Soul? Beginner Readers and the Reading Nook

By: Emma Dyer, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

I visited the British Library in London a few evenings ago to listen to a talk given by Alberto Manguel, the author of The Library at Night and A History of Reading. Manguel, no stranger to poetic metaphor, described libraries as a “clinic for the soul” and spoke of learning to read as “akin to falling in love, like an epiphany or a contagion.”

Listening to someone talking with passion and authority about the places and spaces where readers read is something that I treasure, partly because it is so rare to hear anyone mention the built environment in connection with reading or even with learning but also because the primary research question for my doctorate is: Where do beginner readers read in schools?  This question has led me to explore the concrete spaces where beginner readers  read in schools and I have been poking around in dusty school corridors where children are to be found reading aloud to classroom assistants, and anyone else who happens to be walking by. At the other end of the spectrum, I discovered  thoughtfully-designed, child-scaled reading corners that are comfortable and secluded.

 

I’m especially interested in the materiality and physicality of reading. The avid reader often “seems lost in a textual world, cut off from the life of the body and the real world that surrounds it” (McLaughlin, 2015:1) but in my thesis, I argue that this erasure of the body in order to focus on the text is not a simple matter for the inexperienced reader. Reading involves a variety of complex physical procedures such as turning the pages of a book, moving one’s eyes in the right direction and sounding out the letters or words of the text. All of these tasks, when they haven’t yet been incorporated by the reader, can distract from the meaning of the text and as a consequence, the possibility of self-abstraction. So while avid readers can erase, or at least dull, their own physicality and surroundings to dive into an absorbing text, inexperienced readers may need a little more support from the environment in which they learn, for example, with the provision of seclusion and privacy;  qualities not generally associated with the school building.

I’ve co-designed a freestanding reading nook for my research: a tiny library or den about the size of the seating area inside a small car. The reading nook is made from toughened cardboard and has an abstract, blank quality to its design that means that children can project their own imaginative interpretations onto it: the five and six year old children who are using it in their classroom have described it as being like “a toy shop”, “a cottage”, “a tent” and “an igloo”. Three or four of them can sprawl across “the fake grass” with their books.  The doorway is deliberately designed to be too small for adults to use comfortably, although, of course, it must be accessible to them too. I’ve been surprised by how much of a sense of ownership the children have over the space and how much they love the dimness of the light inside. I hope that at least sometimes it feels like a tiny clinic for the soul for the children in their bright and busy classroom, where many hours each day are spent working at their desks.

I’m using a design research methodology adapted from a framework by Fallman (2008) which has encouraged several iterations of the reading nook in collaboration with an architectural studio in London and a manufacturer of postural support products for children in Sheffield. The realisation and installation of the reading nook has allowed me to observe how it is actually used by children and what they and their teachers have to say about it. The manufacturers of the model expected it to be demolished by the children within a week or so and yet it remains pristine and, it seems, cherished by the class. The class teacher and I both suspected that when she began to also designate it as a space for ‘time-out’ by sending a child there to calm down, then it might have negative connotations and be seen as a punishment space but that hasn’t been the case at all and the children are as eager as ever to use the reading nook and claim ownership of it. Above all, the children’s sense of pride in their own secluded place for reading in the classroom remains undimmed, despite the fact that the reading nook has been designed by me, an avid, experienced reader rather than the beginner readers themselves.

So that’s what’s next on the agenda: reading nooks designed by beginner readers. How different might they be?

References:

McLaughlin, T. (2015). Reading and the body: the physical practice of reading. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US.

Fallman, D. (2008). The interaction design research triangle of design practice, design studies and design exploration. Design Issues 24(3), 4-18.

 

Emma Dyer is in her fourth year as a PhD student at the Faculty of Education, as part of an AHRC-funded collaborative doctorate with SCABAL architects. She also co-curates a blog with Dr Adam Wood of Florence University  https://architectureandeducation.org/ and warmly welcomes contributions about the complexities of lived school design. She is on Twitter at @Emmamolim.