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Shifting Practices
Acting with Technology
Bonnie Nardi, Victor Kaptelinin, and Kirsten Foot, editors

Tracing Genres through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design, Clay Spinuzzi,
2003
Activity-Centered Design: An Ecological Approach to Designing Smart Tools and Usable Systems,
Geri Gay and Helene Hembrooke, 2004
The Semiotic Engineering of Human Computer Interaction, Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza, 2005
Group Cognition: Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knowledge, Gerry Stahl, 2006
Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design, Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie
A. Nardi, 2006
Web Campaigning, Kirsten A. Foot and Steven M. Schneider, 2006
Scientific Collaboration on the Internet, Gary M. Olson, Ann Zimmerman, and Nathan Bos, editors,
2008
Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design, Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie
A. Nardi, 2009
Digitally Enabled Social Change: Online and Offline Activism in the Age of the Internet, Jennifer Earl
and Katrina Kimport, 2011
Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana, Jenna Burrell, 2012
Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries, Gina Neff, 2012
Car Crashes without Cars: Lessons about Simulation Technology and Organizational Change from
Automotive Design, Paul M. Leonardi, 2012
Coding Places: Software Practice in a South American City, Yuri Takhteyev, 2012
Technology Choices: Why Occupations Differ in Their Embrace of New Technology, Diane E. Bailey
and Paul M. Leonardi, 2015
Shifting Practices: Reflections on Technology, Practice, and Innovation, Giovan Francesco Lanzara,
2016
Shifting Practices

Reflections on Technology, Practice, and Innovation

Giovan Francesco Lanzara

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or me-
chanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) with-
out permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and
bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lanzara, Giovan Francesco, 1946– author.

Title: Shifting practices : reflections on technology, practice, and innovation / Giovan Francesco
Lanzara.
Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2016] | Series: Acting with technology | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015039705 | ISBN 9780262034456 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Technological innovations—Case studies. | Technology—Social aspects—Case
studies. | Music—Instruction and study—Data processing. | Computer music. | Video tapes in
courtroom proceedings.
Classification: LCC T14.5 .L35 2016 | DDC 338/.064—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039705

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the memory of Donald Alan Schön
Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Prologue: On Negative Capability 1

I Studying Innovation as a Phenomenon 13

1 Innovation in Practice: A Contrasted Dynamics 13

2 Processes of Design: Discontinuities, Bricolage, and Drifting 19
3 Practice and Method: A View from the Swamp 21
4 The Path in the Woods 24
5 Studying a Process of Innovation as It Happens in Practice 28
6 Designing a Reflective Inquiry 34
7 First-Order and Second-Order Inquiries 38
8 Backtalk and Conversations 41
9 On Unremarkability 45
10 Theoretical Narratives 50

II Making Music in the Digital Medium: A Reflective Inquiry into the Design of
a Computer Music System for Music Education 55

Introduction 57

1 Tracking the Design Process 59

1 Entering the Stage: The Computer Music Project and Its Antecedents 59
2 The Early Design Problem: Upgrading the System 61
3 Designing the Computer Music Interface 64
4 Aspects of Designing: “Entry Points” and “For Instances” 73
5 Bridging Different Worlds: Two Experiments in Self-Observation 77
6 Knowing in Terms of What One Already Knows 85
viii

7 Learning to Make Music in the Digital Medium 87

8 The Emerging Educational Environment: New Objects, Descriptions, and
Activities 91

2 The Music Faculty’s Test of the System 95

1 The System’s Demo 95
2 The Music Faculty’s Responses 97
3 Engaging the System as a Teaching Tool and as a Medium for
Composition 98
4 Making Music: Composition or Programming? 104
5 Integrating the System into the Music Curriculum 108
6 Music LOGO as a Reflective Tool 112

3 Revisitations: Shifting Stories 117

1 The Backtalk and the Generation of Further Stories 117
2 A Further Round of Backtalk: The Demo as Cooptation 125
3 Accounting for the Shift: Toward a Second-Order Inquiry 128
4 Nature and Consequences of the Reflective Move 131
5 Evolving Understandings of the Design Process 133
6 Concluding Remarks: Telling a Story of Shifting Stories 137

III Encountering Video Technology in Judicial Practice: Experiments and Inquiries

in the Courtroom 141

Introduction 143

4 Entering the Temple of Justice 145

1 The Courtroom and the Criminal Trial 145
2 The VCR System and the Courtroom: Research Setting and Method 147
3 Intervention: The Observer as Enabler 148

5 Experimenting with Video Technology in the Courtroom 151

1 Hosting a Stranger: Displacement and Redesign 151
2 Early Encounters with the New Tool: Virtual Replicas, Courtroom Contingencies,
and Microinterventions 152
3 Design Probes: Seeing … Making … Seeing … 158
4 Learning to Use Videos in Judicial Decision Making 160
5 Nonverbal Behavior and the Legal Relevance of Visual Cues 169
 ix

6 The VCR and the Back Office: Building “Equipmentality” 175

1 Turning the Videotape into an Administrative Object 175
2 Redesigning Microprocedures 179
3 The Magistrates’ Working Habits and the Private/Public Use of the VCR 183

7 Reshaping Judicial Practice 185

1 Engaging with the Medium 186
2 Questioning the Grounds of Practical Knowledge 188
3 Reweaving the Fabric of the Practice 192

IV Further Inquiries into Shifting Practices 195

1 Two Worlds of Practice: So Distant, and Yet not Quite so Distant 195
2 Practices and Media 198
3 Making Sense of the Practice in the New Media 207
4 The Medium-Object-Representation Triad: A Digression on Mark Rothko’s Color
Field Painting 213
5 Transient Knowledge 217
6 Aspects of the Practice of Innovation 234

Epilogue: Reflections on Work Past 253

1 “A Very Difficult Game Indeed” 253

2 Between Empathy and Reflexivity 257
3 How Is Self-Observation Empirically Possible? 259
4 Reflective Experiments 262

References 267
Index 279
Acknowledgments

This book is the outcome of multiple waves of research over the course of many
years—each subsequent wave bringing up new problems and new ways of looking at
those problems, different interpretations of the data, new conceptual developments,
and new stages of reflection, only to be changed by the wave that would come next.
Hence time has been an important contributor to this book. Materials have been
incessantly reworked, over and over again, like pebbles on a shore. In a sense, there
has been a great deal of waiting on my part so that this book could come to being
and take the present form. Over the years, traces, or footprints, providing hints of the
character and direction of my inquiries have been left in several papers delivered at
conferences, workshops, and in a limited number of published articles.* In this book
the materials have been further elaborated, expanded, and organized in a new and
more complete form, producing what is substantially a new piece of work. I may say
now that this book offers an expanded account of the entire journey that I have
made.

* “Shifting Stories: Learning from a Reflective Experiment in a Design Process,” in The Reflective
Turn: Reflective Studies in Practice and on Practice, ed. D. A. Schön (Teachers College Press, 1990),
285–320. “Between Transient Constructs and Persistent Structures: Designing Systems in
Action,” Journal of Strategic Information Systems 8 (1999): 331–334. “Technology and the Court-
room: An Inquiry into Knowledge Making in Organizations,” Journal of Management Studies 38,
no. 7 (2001): 943–971 (with Gerardo Patriotta). “Reshaping Practice across Media: Material
Mediation, Medium Specificity, and Practical Knowledge in Judicial Work,” Organization Studies
30, no. 12 (2009): 1369–1390. “Remediation of Practices: How New Media Change the Way We
See and Do Things in Practical Domains, First Monday 15, nos. 6–7 (2010), http://firstmonday
.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3034/2565. “How Technology Remediates Practice: Objects,
Rules, and New Media,” Materiality, Rules, and Regulation: New Challenges for Management and
Organization Studies, ed. F. de Vaujany, N. Mitev, G. F. Lanzara, and A. Mukerjee (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
xii Acknowledgments

But I have not walked alone. Along the way, my thinking has been enormously
enriched by meeting and working with many scholars and students—in the end, such
experiences have made this book possible. My understanding of design practice
and reflective inquiry has been shaped by my long-lasting interaction with the late
Donald Schön, first as his student and then as his colleague, and through teamwork
with Victor Friedman, Wim Overmeer, and Shahaf Gal at the Theseus Institute
of Sophia Antipolis. Over the years, endless conversations and close collaboration
with Francesco Pardi and Claudio Ciborra, my dear departed friends, and with
Barbara Czarniawska, Jannis Kallinikos, and Gerardo Patriotta have greatly contrib-
uted to shaping my thinking. To all of them I wish to express my gratitude for having
shared with me the same passion for doing research and, above all, for having made
me appreciate the value of intellectual friendship. I owe them more than they can
guess.
My participation in the computer music development project was made possible by
Jeanne Bamberger and Donald Schön in the context of an MIT study on Project
Athena, a project for the adoption of the computer in undergraduate education. A
small research grant from MIT and financial support by Formez, Italy’s government
agency for education and innovation, allowed me to work for several months in the
computer music laboratory with Jeanne and the software developer Armando Hernan-
dez: they have been great research partners. I feel particularly grateful to Jeanne for
both hosting me in her laboratory and patiently guiding me along the meandering
paths of the music and computer worlds. Also, I want to thank the members of the
MIT music faculty who spent a lot of their time discussing with me the problems of
music education and the role of the computer in it. For the research on video technol-
ogy in judicial practice, I feel indebted to Giuseppe Di Federico, former director of the
Research Institute on Judicial Systems of Italy’s National Research Council (IRSIG/
CNR), for providing the financial and organizational resources for carrying out exten-
sive fieldwork in six major Italian courtrooms. In this endeavor, the long-standing col-
laboration of Francesco Contini and Marco Fabri of IRSIG/CNR has been precious. The
University of Bologna, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the
Stanford Center for Organizations Research, the European University Institute in
Florence have all been fertile nurturing grounds for ideas and research that fed into
this book. Finally, I owe special thanks to Giampiero Lupo for patiently helping me to
compile the index. The views expressed here, not to mention the errors, fall under my
full moral responsibility.
Acknowledgments xiii

I have said that I have not walked alone. Indeed, three persons have been my dear
and irreplaceable companions in the walks of life: my wife Grazia, my son Gianandrea,
and my daughter Marina. Without their presence and support I doubt I would have
ever been able to see the end of this.
This book is dedicated to the memory of Donald Schön—teacher, colleague, and
friend.

GFL
Bologna, June 16, 2015
Prologue: On Negative Capability

In November 1966, I happened to be involved in the relief operations of the great

Florence flood in Tuscany, when torrential and persistent rains caused the Arno to over-
flow and inundate the city. At that time I was a young student at the University of Pisa
and, together with other students took part in a university rescue team that, a few days
after the flood, traveled to Florence to provide whatever help was needed. When we
arrived on the site, we couldn’t believe our eyes. The city—cradle of the Renaissance—
was hardly recognizable. A three-feet-thick layer of mud covered everything; all around,
things had taken on the color of the mud. Half of the city had literally become the river
bed, and, in the lower parts, the water went up to the level of five meters, reaching the
first floor of the buildings. It was a scene of blight and disruption. People were shocked.
Many had lost loved ones who had been drawn into the muddy streams and swept
away by the force of the river. Private houses and public buildings were shattered, and
people were trapped inside. Cars, bikes, public vehicles, and other things were floating
everywhere, unusable. Shops and trades were ruined. Celebrated works of art were
encrusted with mud. Unique manuscripts and books of high historical value were
soaked in muddy waters and lost in the public libraries and cultural institutions. The
life of the city was suddenly interrupted. Basic means and tools for action were unavail-
able. Ordinary routines could not be executed. Nothing worked, and little seemed
to be recoverable. Basic utility infrastructures such as water, gas, light, and telephone
service had collapsed. Everything was disconnected. A gloomy silence hung over the
scene, and the mud, the somber color of the mud, gave everything a ghostly, unreal
appearance.
Yet, in the middle of the disaster, though in despair and in great need, people were
not completely prostrated: they were not passive at all. Struck by calamity, the citizens
of Florence—known since the time of Dante for their internal divisions and endless
daily quarrels occasioned by all kinds of motives, both menial and less so—soon began
collectively working toward the recovery of the city, showing an unsuspected level of
2 Prologue

solidarity and proving themselves highly capable at organizing and carrying out col-
laborative action. People who, in normal times, often behaved as rivalrous, quarreling
individuals within highly divisive groups now took effective community action, pro-
viding mutual help to one another and working hard at quickly reestablishing the basic
activities of daily life.
At the time, I felt as if I were watching an unplanned social experiment taking place
in a natural though stressed setting. The city became a sort of social laboratory, where
people rediscovered the experience of what it means to both face a seemingly impos-
sible, or even unthinkable, event and try to get things done with the few resources that
were available. The question for each and everybody was: What can I do here and now?
In spite of the difficulties, new forms of organizing emerged, and behaviors could be
observed that are not much seen in the ordinary, nonproblematic situations of daily
life. In the aftermath of the flood, the city turned into a large experimental setting
where new ways of doing things were tried out in spite of the disrupted situation—or,
perhaps, precisely because of it. Stories were being told, even witty ones, such as the
one of the “miraculous” therapeutic properties of district- or street-specific kinds of
mud for rheumatic pains and skin diseases.1 The river brought destruction, but it also
opened a space for innovation and opportunities for social discovery and learning.
New forms of community action emerged at the street and neighborhood level: special
long-term loans with low interest rates were offered by the local banks to help local
businesses; new techniques were invented for the recovery and restoration of paint-
ings, sculptures, ancient books, and antique furniture; and a deeper understanding of
the flood regimen of the river Arno was developed together with the installation of an
early warning system.

The Florence flood of 1966 was both an existential and an epistemic experience for me,
and the two were deeply intertwined. By landing there as a sort of parachutist, I was
thrown into a situation that I had never experienced before and for which I wasn’t at
all prepared. I was confronting a situation that demanded an engagement in action
before one could even make sense of what was going on. But taking action was difficult.
There was no specific “place to be” anymore. Time was reset and had to begin anew.
People strove to reestablish a minimal social order at the local level. The flood was
indeed a cosmological episode of the sort in which one feels suddenly lost, missing

1. In the quartiere of Santa Croce, a poster on the wall advertised the following: “People affected
by rheumatic pains are advised to visit the Spa in Via dell’Anguillara.” Another ad offered: “For
skin diseases the mud baths of Borgo de’Greci are highly recommended.”
Prologue 3

both the meaning of the situation and the cognitive means to restore meaning (Weick
1993a). The sense of displacement was so strong that I didn’t quite know what to do
there at first, and for a while I let myself be absorbed in the emotional and painful sight
of human suffering and material disruption. Though it is perhaps odd to say, I found
some relief in such moments of suspension, as they helped me relate to the situation
and begin to make sense of it. The emotional exposure to disruption moved me to
action. For ten days, my fellow students and I tirelessly rescued and cleaned antique
books and manuscripts soaked in mud in the basement of Florence National Library,
where our rescue team had been posted.
In the following years, the event returned to my mind in flashes over and over
again, often unexpectedly. It surfaced in the most disparate situations. In a way, it
became part of the underlying background of my existence, of what I now consider to
be my basic human experience. I have always lived with it. However, as I recalled the
event in my memory, I kept questioning its significance over and over again.
The Florence flood strongly influenced my subsequent style of both thinking and
doing research. It did so in ways that I could not realize at that time, but that I discov-
ered only later in the course of my life, when I went back to those distant times in my
remembrances and recurrently reflected on why that distant event was still so vivid in
my memory and why it kept coming back to me as an ambivalent, elusive ghost or,
perhaps, as a beacon for navigation. Retrospectively, I regard it now as a sort of imprint-
ing, a seminal experience that contributed toward giving me a particular sensitivity
and attitude toward what I perceive to be questions worth asking and researching. With
all the cautions and precautions that retrospective thinking demands, I believe now
that the event has played an important role in shaping my way of becoming alert to
emergent contingencies, of paying attention to phenomena, and of choosing the
things and problems that I perceive as interesting and worthy of being studied.
Basically, the event contributed to form my gaze as an observer, teaching me to see and
sense things in a particular way. It selectively shaped my way of approaching reality
and my cognitive style. I developed a keen interest in studying situations of practice in
which some event, change, or novelty interferes with, shakes up, or disrupts the smooth
flow of action and meaning, leading to a destructuring and, eventually, to a reshaping
of the situation and the practice. This sensitivity I find hard to express in words, but it
will hopefully be made evident in this book.
Since the time of the flood, I have seen specific events—discontinuities, disruptions,
and “accidents,” even small ones—as opportunities for change and redesign, for
exploration and innovation, but also as holes for penetrating into the underlying fabric
of a practice. I have come to appreciate ruptures and cracks in the texture of reality as
4 Prologue

“picklocks” for opening up multiple interpretations and paths of action. I have culti-
vated an analytical passion for the ephemeral, the inconspicuous, and the discon-
nected, focusing on phenomena and situations characterized by instability, transiency,
and restructuring, in which people coping with ambiguity, change, and loss of mean-
ing must strive to reposition themselves in situations of action. In such situations,
actors, things, and meanings must be reconnected from their state of disconnected-
ness. The texture of social life and material things must be rewoven. But familiar forms
of action cannot be easily reinstated, and one must resort to improvisation and brico-
lage, relying on makeshift arrangements that just “make do.” In such situations, the
observer is compelled to reposition him- or herself and to reflect on his or her own
stance as an observer and actor-in-situation.

Both the research work and the thinking that underlie the studies included in this book
are linked to that original event (the Florence flood) and seminal experience through
a subtle, often subterranean thread. In the years following the flood, as I engaged in
keeping track of processes of change and innovation in a variety of organizational and
institutional settings, I became gradually aware that, in my approach to the field work
and the research material, I transposed my early experience of the Florence flood (as
well as my experience, years later, of the 1981 Southern Italy earthquake) to the study
of how practices can shift and change owing to the sudden appearance of discontinui-
ties.2 In other words, I was seeing the phenomena of change and innovation in a domain
of practice as events and situations that shared many features with the more dramatic
events I had been involved with.3 At first, as I unreflectively carried over my previous
experience (and my identity as a researcher) to the new settings, I wasn’t aware of the
transposition, because the metaphorein was embedded in my own sensing of the situa-
tion and in the role I framed for myself in it as an observer and reflective intervention-
ist. The connection and the bridging were a gradual discovery that unfolded as I kept
reflecting on my own method of inquiry.
The questions that can be asked in the two different settings—the setting of a
disaster and the research setting—are quite similar:

2. My study of the organizational response to the aftermath of the 1981 earthquake in Southern
Italy is reported in Lanzara 1983.
3. For Wittgenstein (1953), seeing as is an act of interpretation. When I see A as B, I selectively
transpose some features of B to A, thus associating objects or situations that might look quite
dissimilar at first. In other words, selected features of B are used to structure A and to carry over
forms of action across contexts and situations, eventually leading to innovation (Lanzara 1993;
Schön 1979).
Prologue 5

What happens in an established social setting when a disruptive event, such as a

flood or an earthquake, breaks into the normal course of daily life? What happens in
an established practice or work setting when a novel artifact or tool for doing work
changes the familiar work routines?
As I further developed my ideas, it seemed to me that disasters and “accidents” in
general could be taken as metaphors for situations characterized by ambiguity and
uncertainty, where, perhaps less conspicuously and dramatically, an incoming event,
change, or innovation brings a discontinuity into an ongoing system of activities or
established practices, pushing individuals and organizations to redesign their current
routines, restructure the meaning of the situation and their practical dealings, and
reframe taken-for-granted assumptions and practices, thus repositioning themselves in
the new situation. Such situations, I claim, are not at all rare in our daily life and in our
current practices across a variety of organizational and institutional settings. We
encounter problematic situations all the times, and often they demand that we reposi-
tion ourselves and reshape our action. In situations of this kind, we experience a break
in the normal flow of events before we can even make sense of it: the smooth flow of
nonproblematic action cannot be sustained, and we have to slow down or suspend our
familiar routines, step back for a while, and think about them. Ordinariness is dis-
rupted by the discontinuity and must be reestablished through the patient reweaving
of the normal fabric of human life.

Uncertain and unfamiliar situations, in which ordinary experience and sense are
disrupted, require from the actors a great deal of the quality that poet John Keats has
called Negative Capability:
that is, when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason. (John Keats, letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 21,
1817 [Keats 1962])

According to Keats, Negative Capability is the distinctive quality that forms “a man of
achievement,” one who accepts moments of indeterminacy and loss of direction and
is able to capture the potentialities of understanding and acting that are revealed by
such moments.4 It involves the ability of being “content with half knowledge,” keeping
things in a sort of suspended animation (or in active suspension). Yet the state of sus-
pension does not necessarily lead us to inactivity, passive reception, or closure; rather,

4. Keats mentions William Shakespeare as possessing “enormous” Negative Capability and being
a paramount example of a man of achievement in the domain of poetry and drama (letter,
December 21, 1817, in Keats 1962).
6 Prologue

it is open to letting events follow their course and letting us be seized by the world as
it comes to us, being in a state of watchful alertness, but with no pretension or impa-
tience to fix an event’s direction, rhythm, and final ending. The idea of Negative Capa-
bility has some kinship with the existential attitude Martin Heidegger has called
Gelassenheit, the spirit of disponibilité before What-is (Heidegger [1927] 1962). People
endowed with Negative Capability are capable of being receptive to the world, pene-
trating into situations, objects, and living beings and, in turn, letting themselves be
penetrated by them.5 They are gifted with a particular sensitivity that enables them to
trace the erratic whirls of a leaf in the wind and make sense of them; to watch the recur-
rent, endless movement of the waves of the sea and appreciate how each of them is
similar to and, at the same time, different from the next one, and yet is unique; or, to
steal an image used by Keats, that helps them to understand the sparrow “picking
about the gravel.”6 We come to grasp these phenomena by sensing rather than know-
ing; in a way, we resonate with the phenomena before we actually know them.7 How-
ever, this disponibilité and existential openness to experiencing the uncertainty of the
world also brings with it a cognitive disposition: the indeterminacy enables us to pay
attention to things and features that in normal situations would go unnoticed and
therefore be considered unimportant. We come to see and appreciate things that can-
not be seen when we are involved in the nonproblematic execution of daily routines.
We are pulled to explore possibilities for sense-making and acting that would not easily
come to mind in ordinary situations. Discontinuities and fluctuations hide a potential

5. In another letter to J. H. Reynolds (Letter 62), Keats (1962) calls this attitude “diligent indo-
lence,” stating that he would rather be a flower than a bee: a flower opens the petals to receive,
whereas a bee goes buzzing around hunting for nectar, that is, with a purpose.
6. “If a sparrow comes before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel”
(John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817, in Keats 1962). Such taking part
requires being gifted with a capacity to feel rather than to reason.
7. In situations of this kind, sensing comes before understanding. Interestingly, similar ideas are
expressed, in a distant domain of human inquiry, by Francisco Varela, the late Chilean neurobi-
ologist and systems theorist, who found evidence that some insects respond to specific variations
in their surrounding environment by “resonating” or “buzzing” with appropriate frequencies,
which record their sensing of the variation and their coping with it. Based on his studies of the
human brain and taking inspiration from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Varela
argues that cognitive activity originally manifests itself through such sensing and that more
structured forms of knowledge result from successful coping and from ongoing interaction with
the medium (Varela 1994; this approach is more fully articulated in Varela, Thompson, and
Rosch 1991).
Prologue 7

for innovation for those who have tolerance for the uncertainty and ambiguity associ-
ated with the loss of sense and structure. These possibilities remain precluded to people
who do not possess the existential capability to experience a phenomenon free from
epistemological bounds.
Actors endowed with Negative Capability are able to maintain an existence, a
“being” in troublesome situations where any possibility of being and acting seems to
be denied or is hard to sustain. They accept their state of vulnerability and leverage it
into a means for acting and sense-making. Even in the midst of radical uncertainty and
in spite of the discontinuity that affects their normal course of life, they are able to
design and experiment with new routines and forms of action. Negative Capability is
the source of a particular mode of action: an action that surges from the void, from the
loss of sense and order, but is open to the enactment of possible worlds.
In this perspective, Negative Capability supports thinking and acting across con-
texts. Work is done not just within, but with or through the constraints of a given con-
text in order to reshape it and generate new forms of action. To produce innovation,
action needs not be radically new or revolutionary in the common sense of the term.
It need not set itself Faustian goals. Even simple, apparently inconspicuous actions
that trespass an accepted boundary and question what we take for granted, or actions
that establish new linkages and throw bridges across traditionally separate domains,
can be highly innovative, leading to seeing and doing familiar things in unprece-
dented ways. In this connection, Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1987) has transposed
the idea of Negative Capability to the domain of social and political reform, arguing
that it is a quality very much in demand when social actors set out to deny the “false
necessity” of the actual social and political order and strive to reinvent it by going
beyond the constraints and entrapments of the actual context. Revising and refram-
ing established institutional arrangements and the underlying cognitive imageries
requires being able to work through the discontinuity between the previous and the
emerging arrangements, suspended in a sort of nowhere land where the previous
order has been relinquished but the future one has not yet begun. In such an ambigu-
ous state, action is not (or cannot be) performative in the sense of reaching out for
clear goals, but is rather directed at exploring possibilities and experimenting with
patched-up, makeshift arrangements. As is the case of the immediate aftermath of a
natural disaster, one is caught in the contrasting pressures and the dilemmas engen-
dered by the discontinuity: some sense and order must be reestablished, but the stable
and solid ground on which we used to stand has collapsed, and we are left groping in
muddy waters. The rising anxiety collides with patience: anxiety pushes us to search
8 Prologue

for quick fixes, while patience demands high tolerance for ambiguity and time for
learning.

What is a discontinuity, then? And what constitutes a discontinuity empirically?

Ambiguously, a discontinuity is a perceived gap that should be “filled” so that the nor-
mal flow of action or the fabric of a situation can be restored, and, simultaneously, it is
a time and a place where something ends and something else begins. A discontinuity
marks both an ending and a new beginning. As an ending, it may produce displace-
ment and loss of meaning; as a beginning, it can be an entry point to a new situation
or state of affairs, where familiar objects and relations change and rules other than the
usual ones must be created, a place where the world as experienced so far no longer
holds up and things once familiar look suddenly unfamiliar. I like to think that a dis-
continuity can be a sort of gateway, a “stargate” connecting us to different worlds and
dimensions of reality.
It is useful to dwell a bit on our ways of conceptualizing a discontinuity. Let us focus
on discontinuity in time, which is what mostly interests us here. We tend to conceptu-
alize it as a spot-like event, drawing a clear-cut separation between before and after, or
between two sides of a well-defined ridge. But it need not be so. The line of separation
is often more blurred and shifting than our concept suggests. In other words, a discon-
tinuity may have a temporal span: it can last for a while, sometimes even for quite a
long time, and might not even be perceived as such by the people who live through it.
A historical discontinuity, for example, can take the form of a smooth transformation
to a different arrangement. One may thus travel through a discontinuity, and perhaps
even thrive in it, without even realizing that one is caught in it. A discontinuity, and
the sense of it, is often a retrospective reconstruction. But empirically what we call a
discontinuity is characterized by entangled processes, where things past never come to
a complete annihilation and things future never come to a complete unfolding and
fulfillment. In discontinuities, there is always transformation, recombination, and
reshuffling of elements.
Making sense of a discontinuity is not a trivial matter. On the one hand, before the
discontinuity, new features and odd things might emerge that we don’t perceive as
such or are not even able to see, but which we learn to see only after the discontinuity.
On the other hand, in the aftermath of the discontinuity, we may find many things and
features from before the discontinuity that are carried over across the discontinuity and
stay with us, though in a mutated semblance.
Owing to its peculiar features, a discontinuity can be turned into an epistemic tool,
becoming an opportunity for reframing knowledge. Pragmatic actors can use it to
Prologue 9

reshape the practice, and analysts can turn a discontinuity into a methodological
picklock. A discontinuity can be intelligently exploited to provide access to situations
of action. For example, one can treat dramatic events, such as the Florence flood or a
major earthquake, as large-scale social experiments (although that may sound a bit
cynical). But that can be done as well with smaller-scale and definitely less disruptive
happenings—for example, the introduction of an innovation, such as the appearance
of a new work tool or method in the workplace. Thus, events become opportunities to
conduct natural experiments in noncontrived settings and to set up laboratories for
testing theories and producing change (Lanzara 1983). Alternatively, discontinuities
can be deliberately produced by the observer-interventionist in order to carry out a
practical experiment in a situation of practice. Deliberately induced discontinuities can
be real or simply imaginary figments of the observer’s imagination. For the purpose of
observation and knowledge-making, the observer may, for example, deliberately stretch
out the situation observed by amplifying or distorting selected features in order to
bring to the surface phenomena that look inconspicuous or lie hidden behind the veils
of the ordinary. This, in other words, is a noncanonical, almost irreverent way of using
selective bias as an epistemic technique. By doing that, a microevent, apparently incon-
spicuous and uninteresting, is turned into a “macrocosm of meaning.”8 The purpose,
and the perspective, of the observer is not so much to strike a faithful representation of
the situation observed and achieve a presumably “objective” truth; rather, the observer
strives to dig up and reveal aspects that lie buried under the surface of reality and, being
perceived as ordinary, go unnoticed. This methodological procedure is based on an
iconic transformation of the real.

To study innovation as a phenomenon, then, one must search for situations of discon-
tinuity and rupture and explore them in depth, because it is in the occurrence of such
situations, minimal and transient as they may be, that a possibility for understanding
change and for intervention arises. In many instances, it is necessary to be able to
observe phenomena that are lurking under the surface or in the interstices of what we
consider obvious or ordinary (that is, what makes reality for us) and are not immedi-
ately remarkable. This requires a particular treatment of the materials similar to a
fictional technique. It consists of an iconic transformation of the real enacted through

8. This expression is used by Clifford Geertz to describe the world that the interpretive anthro-
pologist generates when he digs deeply into a specific social event or the detailed aspects of a
culture and unearths its unsuspected complexity. See, e.g., Geertz’s essay on the Bali cockfight,
“Deep Play” (Geertz 1983).
10 Prologue

the deliberate amplification or distortion of events and situations in order to reveal

hidden, inconspicuous, or peripheral aspects of them—aspects that do not lend them-
selves to straightforward observation. In iconic transformation, there is not just selec-
tion, nor is there free invention of new traits independent of the situation; rather, there
is a purposeful accentuation of traits.9 By virtue of such an operation of stretching, a
spot-like action, a mundane object, an inconspicuous event, or a microsituation can be
“blown up” into a macrocosm of meaning, giving rise to multiple worlds, structures,
and representations. It is as if one used a magnifying lens to gain selective access to
phenomena that the naked eye would not be able to observe.10 Such a procedure essen-
tially amounts to creating an active icon. It is not much different from the symbolic
operation of creating a brand for a product or a company for marketing and advertising
purposes. However, although in the business world the purpose is to enhance the prod-
uct’s desirability and demand in the market, here the strategy is oriented toward achiev-
ing the maximum effect in terms of meaning and theory making. These aspects of the
transformation make it similar to what artists do. Indeed, the transformation of reality
has always been the essence of art, where the fiction enables the capturing of the
essence of an object, the appreciation of a situation, or the representation of a value.
Novelists and figurative artists often use such techniques of transfiguration of the real
to produce unrealistic, hyperrealistic, or paradoxical effects, or strange worlds of all
kinds, fantasies that in their exaggerated form may reveal unexpected and surprising
features. In painting, for example, cubism has decomposed space and the human figure
by introducing multiple and simultaneous points of view in the same picture; surrealist
painting has exposed us to the sight of things that look more real than real objects, to
the point of looking strangely unreal. On their part, playwrights create characters by
accentuating psychological or moral traits so as to make iconic exemplars of human
types. Similarly, the novelist Italo Calvino, a literary scientist and experimenter in his
own right, has used descriptive and narrative techniques that zoom in on the object of

9. It is very close to the effect produced by a caricature that helps us capture specific traits or the
character of a person.
10. In the study of practices, a strategy of observation that has some affinity with the iconic
transformation of the real has been used by Davide Nicolini (2009). The strategy is based on the
metaphorical movement of “zooming in and zooming out” of practice. The zooming in and out
is obtained through switching theoretical lenses and repositioning in the field, so that certain
aspects of the practice are foregrounded while others are bracketed (Nicolini 2009). I should say
that zooming in and out usually entails size reduction and enlargement, not necessarily stretch-
ing or deformation of features—but bracketing and foregrounding, taken to the extreme, may
lead to iconic transformation.
Prologue 11

description to the point of transfiguring it, as in the close observation of the gecko
lizard in Palomar. And in another work, the novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, he
explores the elusive relationships between reality, fiction, and fakery by taking differ-
ent points of view to look at the same events and producing different versions of the
same story. In doing so, Calvino questions his own motives in the writing process, and
he explores the meaning of objectivity by bringing narrative technique to a sort of
metafiction. The reader is dragged into a labyrinth in which she or he becomes aware
that reality, or what she or he thinks reality is, is always at stake.

Even if this prologue comes several years after I worked on the two large studies that
make up the bulk of this book, it has been written to give the reader a sense of the spirit
that has animated my work throughout the years. I hope it will give the reader an
understanding of the kind of sensitivity that has guided my inquiries into processes of
design and change in practice settings. It is a sensitivity that perhaps existed only as a
dormant potential when I first engaged in this kind of inquiry; it needed only to be
aroused, and it was developed and refined over time through my very same research
experiences. As I understand it now, behind such sensitivity lies primarily a way
of interacting with things and humans, rather than, and before, a way of knowing.
Particularly, I have tried to study the details of phenomena in a way that makes visible
the intimate relationship that exists between the observer’s theories and methods and
the practitioners’ theories and practices. In this sense, theorizing, as I have tried to
practice it, is always grounded in some form of involvement with the research setting.
The reader will judge whether this way of interacting, or sensing, brings a valuable
contribution to understanding and knowledge-building.
The book is organized in four parts. In the first part, I discuss methodological themes
encountered in my studies and problems of the research design. In the second and
third parts, two extended, in-depth studies are presented, focusing on processes of
design and innovation in two practice settings—music education and criminal justice.
Technology adoption and reconfiguration of the practice take place in two institutional
settings—the music school of a leading academic and research institution in the United
States and the criminal courts of Italy. The fourth and final part articulates further
inquiries into theoretical issues emerging from the two studies and explores selected
aspects of the practice of innovation. An epilogue, with reflections on the work done
and the researcher’s role, seals the book.
I Studying Innovation as a Phenomenon

1 Innovation in Practice: A Contrasted Dynamics

Innovation is a process that entails the development of new capabilities—individual

and collective. If the process is successful, it leads to the emergence and diffusion of a
capability of doing something that could not be done previously, or at least not so
well and effectively. In the simplest possible terms, innovation involves learning how
to do new or different things, or learning to do the same things in a better and more
effective way.
A conventional approach frames innovation as a process leading to new material
products and production processes. Such a perspective neglects the cognitive content
of innovation, that is, the obvious fact that each new product or process is the material
expression and carrier of new forms of practical knowledge and new capabilities for
action. In the approach taken here, the relevant units of innovation—what actually
gets innovated—are not so much material products or techniques, but rather whole
systems of action and knowledge in a practice setting. As will be shown in the two
extended studies presented in parts II and III of this book, artifacts and other material
objects that come about as a result of innovation assume new functional positions in
organizational and semantic landscapes within which ideas, social relations, behav-
ioral rules, organizational routines, cognitive assumptions, meanings, learning modes,
and even institutional arrangements and normative mechanisms recombine in entirely
new ways, which are often unpredictable and sometimes surprising.
Entire practices may be affected by innovation. The convergence of the computer
with communication technologies has produced the combination and the embodi-
ment of a set of functionalities into technical devices that enormously expand the
individual capabilities for acting, networking and communicating at a distance. For
instance, the fast and widespread diffusion of mobile phones and smartphones has led
14 Part I

to a number of remarkable changes in individual behavior, mundane communication

modes, interpersonal relations, and social coordination. As a case in point, Sorensen
and Pica (2005) have shown how mobile technologies have remarkably changed the
patrolling techniques and the modes of operational policing of the London police in
recent years. Police officers and traffic controllers operating at the street level can now
rely on a powerful new means of communication that allows instant distributed coor-
dination among officers and headquarters; but, in order to make effective use of it,
they had to learn to tune in the technology to the “rhythms of interaction” character-
izing their intervention in critical situations. The practice of policing operations incor-
porates a virtual dimension that supports the conventional procedures and policies,
but may also interfere with them. These changes are not limited to specific professions
or practical domains, but affect both family and business relationships and the entire
world communication networks. People can coordinate and organize more easily and
rapidly. The curious thing is that such behavioral and structural shifts are not per-
ceived as conspicuous or dramatic changes at the individual level. Individuals gradu-
ally shift to new patterns of behavior and modes of communication without being
fully aware of it.
All processes of innovation involve transformation of artifacts, practices, and cogni-
tive frameworks. Any innovation brings about a change in the set of possibilities that
define what can be done and how. The invention of new ways of doing things may
bring about the radical restructuring of practical knowledge associated with the compe-
tent use of work tools and routines. New repertoires of routines emerge while previous
routines are relinquished or redesigned. In processes of innovation, individuals, orga-
nizations, and institutions must be able to build and stabilize new cognitive repertoires
and practical abilities. However, the emergence of new skills cannot happen without
simultaneously unlearning or forgetting previous behavioral patterns that are often
deeply engrained and will not be easily relinquished. In a process of innovation, there-
fore, we may observe both making and breaking systems and patterns of action,
destructuring as well as restructuring. Innovation can be a creative and destructive
process at the same time, as Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “creative destruction” captures
so aptly (Schumpeter [1942] 1975, 82–85). In a broader sense, innovation may involve
the making of a world different from the present one, that is, the enactment of a world
that in some important respects no longer conforms to (and no longer confirms) the
one that has been experienced so far.
For the above reasons, any innovation can be regarded as a practice-based phenom-
enon that may deeply affect the quality and structure of practical knowledge embodied
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 17. Why do most lessons in which pupils recite from the material assigned in
textbooks require little thinking? How can such lessons be made to stimulate
thinking?
18. Would you ever allow children to accept an incomplete generalization as a
result of their own experience and thought? An incorrect generalization?
 CHAPTER VI

THE DEDUCTIVE LESSON

The complete process of thought involves both induction and

deduction. Every general principle, unless it is self-evident, must
either be arrived at through the process of induction, or be accepted
without any attempt at verification. Having formed our
generalizations, we use them as a basis for further thinking. If we
find that the principle always holds, we are satisfied with its validity.
In this testing of the generalization tentatively made, the process of
thought is deductive. The fact is that in the process which we
designate as induction, deduction enters to verify our inference. In
the face of the problem which can be settled only by reference to
some established principle, we find ourselves questioning the
generalizations formerly accepted, and the process of thought in
solving our problem will involve induction as well as deduction. For
convenience we treat the problems of teaching under the two heads,
the inductive and the deductive lesson, according as one or the other
type of thought seems to predominate in reasoning required to solve
the problem involved.
Every one thinks deductively who has had sufficient experience to
form any generalizations. In the early life of the child we find the
psychological basis for deduction in the tendency to act in
accordance with ideas. Children define things in terms of their
function. Thus a hat is something to wear on the head; a drawer
something to pull out and push in; a shovel something to move the
sand with; and so for the other objects in the child world. A child
makes a dog in clay, draws a picture of a flower, makes a house of
his blocks—and in this way tests his ideas. Not all deductive thinking
ends in motor activity; but we can never be satisfied with our
deductions until we have established them experimentally. The
question concerning our ideas always is, will they work?
Whenever we offer an explanation of our ideas or of our actions,
the process of thought is deductive. Not that either adults or children
often state the general principle upon which they base their
statement or action. We are all only too prone to assume the general
principle. The foolish answers which children give may be logical
enough. From his very limited experience a boy may have
generalized that grass is something to look at and not to be walked
on, and that people always live in houses from four to ten stories
high, with many families in a house. Now, if such erroneous
generalizations have been developed, the way to handle the boy is
not to laugh at his deductions from these premises, but rather to
require him to state the generalizations upon which he has based his
thinking, and to lead him to discover their inadequacy. It matters not
what group of children one works with, this same need for a
declaration of the principle upon which the argument is based, the
generalization which covers the situation under consideration, will be
found essential. That teacher does much for the children who
frequently pushes them back to a statement of what they assume to
be true. This statement is not always easy to make. Even with adults
it is very common to explain action by reference to some feeling or
attitude which it is assumed has some basis in reason. Some
instinctive tendency, or a mode of feeling, thinking, or acting which
has become habitual, frequently explains, but fails to justify our
actions. The ability to state clearly what one assumes, and to claim
as valid only such conclusions as are based on premises which are
admitted to be true, is the mark of the man of unusual rationality.
There is no set of rules which a teacher may follow in order to
make the children she teaches logically minded. On the other hand,
all of her activity tends in some degree to encourage or to eliminate
the logical habit of mind. The teacher who dogmatizes continually in
her teaching can do little to overcome a like tendency in the children
by conducting exercises logically correct. The wrong emphasis on
correctness of the result, instead of correctness of the method
employed in getting the result, encourages much illogical work and
develops careless habits of thought. And it is just as true that an
open-minded attitude on the part of the teacher will be reflected in
the children. The teacher who insists upon the verification of
generalizations, who asks children frequently to give the ground for
the statements which they make, and who encourages reflection, will
engender logical habits of thought.
To recognize the wide application of the deductive method in our
thinking, one has only to consider what is meant by reflection. It is
well also in this connection to remember that the habit of reflection
distinguishes the educated from the uneducated man. It is not the
number of experiences which makes the difference between men,
but rather the use that has been made of those experiences. When
we reflect, we think over, organize, and relate our past experiences.
Suppose, for example, that some one makes the statement that
corporal punishment should be banished from all schools. If you
reflect upon such a thesis, you bring to bear your experiences,
whether of action, observation, or thought stimulated by reading
what some one else has said; and, as a result of your thinking, you
consciously or unconsciously assume a general principle under
which you feel satisfied that this question of discipline falls; and then
you will refer all of your experiences to this principle, testing its
validity by seeing whether or not it does uniformly hold. The process
of thinking which you have employed is essentially deductive. If
stated in the form of a syllogism, it might be expressed somewhat as
follows:—
1. Any action which tends to brutalize either pupil or teacher
should not be permitted in any school.
2. Corporal punishment tends to brutalize both teacher and pupil.
3. Hence corporal punishment should be banished from all
schools.
The process of thought employed has led you to search for a
general principle which you accept as true and which offers an
explanation of the position which you take in agreeing that corporal
punishment should be banished. If you are really reflecting, you will
not stop with this reference to a generalization apparently true.
Rather you will inquire whether in your experience the infliction of
corporal punishment has tended to brutalize you. You will also ask
yourself whether this is true of others, and to what degree. You will
recall specific cases of punishment of this sort, and will try to decide
whether the disadvantages or evil outweighed the good. Only after
such careful thought is the process of reflection complete, and it is
only then that you can feel satisfied of the soundness of the position
which you have taken. It will be noted that the process of thought
has been both inductive and deductive.
If children are to learn to reflect, they must have leisure to think
over their past experiences. There is danger that in our desire for
more knowledge and more activity on the part of our pupils, we may
give them little time for reflection. To ask a child to state the
significance of what he has done, to encourage him to examine
every assumed truth in the light of his experience, and to state
somewhat formally the result of his reflection is worth much more
than the new experiences which might have been gained in the
same length of time. The habit of reflection will be developed only
when sufficient time is given for children to stop and take account of
the experience which they have had, when respect is accorded the
experiences of the individual, and when the teacher requires such
work and guides children in the process.
An attempt has been made in the preceding pages to indicate in a
general way the significance of the deductive method in our school
work. It remains to indicate briefly the method of procedure in the
conduct of class exercises which are essentially deductive in their
nature. Such exercises will be found in any subject in which there is
developed a body of general principles. For example, the real test of
a pupil’s knowledge of a principle of arithmetic is found, not in
familiarity with the process of induction by which the principle is
derived, nor in his ability to apply this principle to the problems given
in the book, immediately following the rule, all of which fit the
generalization, but rather in his ability, when a miscellaneous list of
problems is given, to pick out the principle which applies to this one
case. The test of one’s knowledge of geography is found not simply
in the facts which he knows, but also in his ability to explain
phenomena or to anticipate situations by reference to a body of
general principles.
The problem: From what has already been said it is clear that in
deductive thinking, as well as when the process is inductive, the
occasion for thought is found in a problem to be solved. We wish to
know why a certain region is arid or what the possibilities of
agriculture are in another, and we, therefore, recall our knowledge of
the principles of geography in order to solve our problem. A moral
situation confronts us; we need to act; and in response to this
necessity we endeavor to refer the situation to some norm or
standard of conduct which we accept as fundamental. The success
of our work in securing clear thinking by children will always be
conditioned by our success in enabling them to realize the
significance of the problem presented for solution.
Finding the generalization or principles which fit the situation to be
accounted for or explained is the next step. In order to accomplish
this part of the process successfully one must be able to discover
that which is essential and to neglect the non-essential in the
problem to be solved. Suppose, for example, that the problem is:
Why has the greater part of Africa not been settled by civilized men?
The factor which is significant is the climate of this region, and it will
be of no use for the pupil to recall the size of the continent, the color
of its inhabitants, the fact that Livingstone made a journey across it,
except that by eliminating these facts he may be brought to realize
that none of them determine the situation, and hence he need no
longer pay any attention to them. It is the function of the teacher to
suggest to the pupil a number of alternatives and then to guide him
in his search for the determining factor. For example, the teacher
might ask: Is it because of the savage inhabitants, because of a lack
of means of transportation, because the country is overrun by
dangerous wild animals, or because of climate? Each of these
classes of facts may be known to the pupils, and each in turn may be
eliminated as non-determining factors until he comes finally to the
last. He must then, provided he decides that climate may determine
the availability of a region as a habitation for civilized man, discover
under what condition of climate civilized man fails to make advance.
He has thus fitted his situation, his problem, to the generalization
under which it falls, and has, in fact, taken the next step in the
process.
Inference: The inference that the greater part of Africa is not
inhabited by civilized men because of adverse climatic conditions is
arrived at just as soon as the pupil settles upon climate as the
essential factor. Just as in the inductive process we pass
immediately from the step of comparison and abstraction to the
statement of the generalization, so in the deductive lesson, when
once we have related the particular case under consideration to the
principle which explains the situation, we are ready to state our
inference. There is real value in making such a statement. The
further process of verification depends upon a clear and definite
statement of the inference; and the best test we have of the
completion of the preceding step is the ability which the pupil shows
to state his inference.
Verification: When the inference has been made, we have yet to
satisfy ourselves concerning the validity of our reasoning by an
appeal to known facts. Following the illustration already used, we
should ask ourselves what has happened in the past to civilized men
who have gone to Central Africa. We will be satisfied that our
reasoning has been correct, only if all of the facts we are able to
discover point unmistakably to the conclusion that the climate of the
larger part of Africa is unendurable by civilized men.
The element which needs most emphasis in deductive teaching is
the realization on the part of the teacher that the success of the
process is directly proportional to the independence with which the
pupil discovers for himself that which is essential in the situation
under consideration, his attempt to fit or relate the particular case to
the principle or generalization by which it will be explained, and his
willingness, when he discovers his error by an attempted verification,
to repeat the process. We do not think logically by having some one
else do our thinking for us, nor is our growth measured by the
uniformity with which we hit upon the correct solution of the problem
at the first attempt. Rather we may measure success by the power of
our pupils to criticize the reasoning which appears plausible until
carefully scrutinized, and by their readiness to retrace their steps and
to search for firmer ground when they have of their own accord given
up a scheme of reasoning which has proved invalid.

For Collateral Reading

W. C. Bagley, The Educative Process, Chapter XX.
I. E. Miller, The Psychology of Thinking, Chapter XVIII.

Exercises.
1. A class is engaged in deriving inductively the generalization that multiplying
the numerator of a fraction by any number multiplies the fraction by that number;
will there be any occasion for deductive thinking as the work proceeds?
2. A history teacher has tried to develop the generalization that taxation without
representation is tyranny. A girl in the class says that this proves that women
should have the right to vote. Analyze the process of thought by which the girl
arrived at her conclusion. Was the process essentially inductive or deductive?
3. Some people pride themselves upon the fact that they never change their
minds. What comment would you feel justified in making concerning their
processes of thought?
4. Why can the leader of a mob influence his followers to most unreasonable
action?
5. An eighth-grade boy remarked that he thought that we should forbid all
foreigners to come to the United States. How would you lead such a boy to change
his point of view by means of his own thought on the subject?
6. A class in grammar was required to commit to memory fifty rules of syntax
and later to correct sentences in which the mistakes in syntax were covered by the
rules already learned. Could you suggest a better way to teach English syntax?
7. What is the value of the miscellaneous problems given at the end of each
section of the arithmetic? A teacher of arithmetic went through one of these lists
and had the class indicate opposite each problem the case, or rule, which was
involved. Was this a good thing to do?
8. What sort of reasoning is demanded of a class in parsing?
9. Do you consider your teaching of arithmetic, in so far as it involves reasoning,
mainly inductive or deductive?
 10. In what sense is it true that in deduction we begin with a particular rather
than with a generalization? Compare the significance of the problem in induction
and deduction.
11. In some textbooks in geometry, the problem is stated, and then the proof is
presented step by step with a reference wherever need be to the principles
involved in developing the proof; what is the weakness of this sort of an exercise?
12. How can the teacher best help children who are unable to refer a problem in
arithmetic to any one of the principles which have been learned?
13. Children often make mistakes in reasoning which seem ridiculous to
teachers; how can teachers be most helpful in such situations?
14. Do you think it possible to teach children the meaning and significance of
reflection? How would you attempt to secure such insight?
15. Why would it be valuable for us many times to write the reasons for our
action before carrying into effect our plans?
16. What can you do as a teacher that will stimulate children to do their best
thinking? Is it possible that you may actually interfere or discourage them in this
part of their work? How?
 CHAPTER VII

L E S S O N F O R A P P R E C I AT I O N

Education aims not only to enable one to avoid error, to discover

truth, and to equip him with desirable habits, but also to develop the
power to appreciate and to enjoy that which is beautiful, whether in
literature, painting, sculpture, art, or music. It is not enough that a
man be able to make a living; he ought, as a result of his education,
to be able to enjoy life. Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture, “the
acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in
the world,” embodies much that is essential in modern education.
The ability to enjoy a drama of Shakespeare, a picture of Millet, or an
opera of Wagner, means the possibility of noble pleasure, of leisure
time spent in such a way that inspiration and strength, instead of
possible waste, or, even worse, degradation and weakness, result. It
is, then, a vital part of our school work to give opportunity for and to
encourage in every way possible the development of power of
appreciation.
Some of our schoolroom exercises ought to aim primarily to
develop power of appreciation in the several fields mentioned above.
Not that appreciation can be taught directly, but because there are
conditions which are negative in their influence. No one will ever
learn to appreciate music or literature or art because some one tells
him that he ought and that this is worthy and that unworthy. This sort
of teaching will result in hypocrisy and cant. On the other hand, the
best guarantee of development along these lines is found in
association with those who do genuinely appreciate. It is in this fact
that we find our first suggestion for work of this kind.
 Do not try to teach any one else to enjoy that which you do not
fully appreciate yourself. The fundamental qualification for the
teacher is power to appreciate. She must enjoy to the full that which
she hopes to make appear beautiful in the eyes of her pupils. It is
useless to ask children to enjoy one of Stevenson’s child rhymes, if
you find yourself unable to enter into the spirit of the poem. Pictures
may be hung on the wall and religiously taught; but children will not
want to buy good pictures, nor are they apt to frequent the art
galleries, unless they have associated with those for whom pictures
are a genuine source of pleasure. The best preparation for the
teacher who feels that her teaching is inadequate in those phases of
her work which involve appreciation is to plan to do what she can to
insure her own growth in this particular. Read more poetry, and
especially read it with those who derive great pleasure therefrom, if
you wish to teach poetry better. If you are familiar with the great
musicians, and have through your acquaintance with their work
developed some measure of appreciation for this type of expression
and for the method by which the musician has been able to build up
his wonderful composition, then you may rest assured that your
pupils will not find music uninteresting.
The question most frequently asked concerning the teaching of
those subjects in which we seek to develop appreciation is whether
one must command the technique involved in creation in order to
grow in power to enjoy the work of the masters. For example, must
one be able to read music in order to appreciate music; must one be
able to state the rhetorical excellence of Stevenson’s narratives in
order to enjoy his stories; is it essential that one fully appreciate the
technique of painting in order to get the most out of Corot? In
general, the answer is that such knowledge of technique may either
help or hinder one in his actual power of appreciation. It will hinder, if
the consideration of technique is constantly uppermost in one’s
mind; it will help in so far as knowledge of technique gives one the
feeling of excellence or perfection of form, provided always that it is
this beauty of the product which most engages the attention, and
that interest in technique is subsidiary. To express the same idea in
another way: if one’s knowledge of technique makes him overcritical
or oversensitive, he is apt to lose all enjoyment in his concentration
upon the technique, in looking for weaknesses, or in his feeling of
discomfort because of imperfection. What significance, it may be
asked, has this for our teaching? Mainly this, that we must remember
that appreciation is in large measure a matter of the emotions, and
that any attempt to overintellectualize the process will defeat the end
we desire to secure.
There is no other kind of work in which the attitude of the individual
at the beginning of the exercise is as important. There is a story told
of a teacher who wished to teach a beautiful poem, the burden of
which was the beauty of kindness to birds. She began with the birds
that the children knew—sparrows. In a short time the children
developed the notion, and very justly, that sparrows were a pest, that
they had driven away our song birds, and that it would be a good
thing to exterminate them. The children were ready to go forth to the
slaughter; and then came the poem with its admonition to kindness
toward birds. These children would, of course, have been more
impressed had this preparatory work been omitted entirely. Very
frequently for work of this kind, the very best preparation is found in
placing children directly in contact with that which you hope to have
them appreciate. Read the poem, play the music, expose the picture
to view, and allow them to do their work. Later a somewhat more
detailed treatment, possibly involving many repetitions, will give
opportunity for increased appreciation.
Children should not be forced to give expression to the feeling
awakened. The teacher may accept gladly such expression as
comes spontaneously. She may at times ask for a selection of the
part most enjoyed. Especially to be avoided are expressions such
as: “Don’t you think this beautiful?” “Don’t you enjoy this?” and the
like. Children under such stimulation are apt to say that they enjoy
whether they do or not. They are just as anxious to do the right thing
as are some of their elders. To be constantly directed, always told
what to admire, means lack of confidence in one’s own ability to
judge of excellence, or, even worse, the attitude of the hypocrite who
admires that which he thinks it fashionable to favor. It is probably
safer to judge of the success of work of this kind by the expression
on the faces of the children than by the words you may persuade
them to use.
In a lesson of this type the teacher does the best work when she
acts as interpreter. Success depends not so much upon initiative on
the part of the children as upon the ability of the teacher to
sympathize with the childish point of view, and to lead them to
greater heights by the force of suggestion growing out of her own joy
in that which she presents. It is by voice, by gesture, by suggestion,
and by explanation,—in all, by providing the most favorable
opportunity possible for appreciation, keeping herself as much as
possible in the background,—that the teacher makes provision for
the development of this power by children.
Much is gained in power of appreciation by giving opportunity for
creative work on the part of children. The group of children who have
composed a song, and who have labored diligently to make the
music which they have written fit the spirit and rhythm of the words,
will find a new meaning in the lullaby which they are asked to learn
to-morrow. Music will mean so much more than pitch, time, notes of
different value, and the like. Through their own attempt they will have
realized in the best possible way the fact that the music of the song
is intended to express feeling in harmony with the words that they
sing. The child who has attempted to draw a landscape will by virtue
of that fact grow in power to enjoy the landscape placed on the wall
for his enjoyment. And so for any other field in which we seek to
develop power of appreciation; to attempt to create for himself will
give the child a better understanding of the elements which go to
make up excellence, and the contrast between his own effort and
that of the master will greatly enhance the value of the latter in his
eyes.
Thus far in our discussions of the lesson for appreciation we have
interpreted it to mean the development of the æsthetic emotions.
There is another sort of appreciation which involves rather more of
the intellectual element, but which, so far as teaching method is
concerned, may probably be treated to greatest advantage in this
same connection. Indeed, there are cases, as in literature, where
both elements are involved. In the study of a drama of Shakespeare
we are concerned not only with the beauty of expression, but quite
as much with the portrayal of the lives of men and women as they
have acted and reacted on each other in their common environment.
In history we have this drama extended to include a nation or the
nations of the world in their relations to each other. In either case we
have the record of cause and effect, an account of social experience
fundamentally akin to our own. Appreciation here involves the ability
to follow the logical relations which are recorded. In proportion as
one becomes aware of the motives which have actuated men, the
relationships which have existed among them, the organization and
outcome of their activities, he has widened his own experience. This
possibility of a vicarious extension of the child’s social experience is
one of the reasons for giving history and literature a place in our
school curriculum.
Let us inquire what is involved in securing appreciation of this
type. Take, for example, the appreciation of the period just preceding
the Civil War. How are we to understand this remote situation? We
cannot observe directly; we cannot, as is the case in the solution of a
problem in our present experience, gather data by means of
observation; nor can we test our conclusions by experiment. Our first
great need is to have presented all of the facts possible. We may
read the historian’s account, or have it read to us; we may get hold
of the newspapers published at that time; read the debates which
took place in Congress; peruse the letters of men and women who
lived and wrote at that time; make inquiry concerning the number of
slaves, and the value of the Southern plantations worked by them;
try to find out why slavery had been abolished in the North, and by
every means possible familiarize ourselves with what men said and
did and the conditions under which they worked at that time. We
must have this material made accessible to the children through
books or by word of mouth before we ask them to follow the logical
relations established among these facts by the historian.
Appreciation has its beginning in the abundance of data supplied
which makes possible the imagery with which the children are to
work, and is consummated when the child has, through his own
efforts and by following the development of another, come to
understand the play of cause and effect, the organization and
relationship existing among these human activities. Work of this sort
has in the last step something in common with the inductive lesson,
but with this difference, that the children are in the main concerned
with appreciation of facts and of the relationships established among
them by some one else, presumably the expert historian. It is more a
matter of understanding than the discovery of new truth. Of course,
there are lessons in history in which the problem is just as distinct as
in any science, and where the work can be best described as
inductive or deductive reasoning.
And so likewise for literature. The author presents the situation,
and draws his conclusions, supposedly true to the logic of human
action. The teacher may need to supply details which are missing,
may need to guide the children in their attempt to follow the
interpretation of the author, but it must be mainly interpretation of
facts provided; and presumably, if great literature is studied, the
appreciation of the author’s interpretation of the human relations is of
vastly greater importance than the attempt at interpretation which the
children may make.
Appreciation does not mean quiescence,—far from it. Neither does
it concern itself primarily with the discovery of new truth or
excellence. Rather we aim to understand, and to enjoy, when the
æsthetic emotions are involved, the work of the masters. If we can,
even in some degree, lead children to think their thoughts, to
interpret human activity and human feeling as they have interpreted
it, we shall have most signally widened and enriched their
experience, and shall have made available for them for all their lives
a source of recreation and enjoyment, a storehouse of wisdom,
which may constitute their greatest indebtedness to our efforts in
their behalf.

For Collateral Reading

E. L. Thorndike, Principles of Teaching, Chapter XII.
E. A. Kirkpatrick, The Fundamentals of Child Study, Chapter XIII.

Exercises.
1. Why is it worth while to train children to enjoy literature, music, or painting?
 2. Do those who look at the pictures in the art gallery which have been specially
mentioned in the catalogue or guide book necessarily show any power of
appreciation of good pictures? What would be a better test of such power?
3. Why is it essential that you should enjoy a poem which you try to teach to
children?
4. What advantage is there in changing the pictures on the walls of the
schoolroom from time to time?
5. Is there any good argument for having children write poetry?
6. What could you do to grow in ability to teach art appreciation?
7. Does your technical knowledge of music interfere with your enjoyment of
good music?
8. What advantage is there in having children compose the music for a song
which they have written?
9. Why is it important that we arrange our poetry, music, and pictures with
reference to the seasons?
10. How would you hope to discover whether or not children enjoyed a new
picture?
11. Why ask children to choose from among three or four poems the one that
they will commit to memory, instead of requiring that they all memorize the same
one?
12. What value is there in reading great literature to children without comment?
13. In what way may a good history lesson differ from an inductive lesson in
geography?
14. Do you think it essential that children should always have problems to solve
in their lessons in literature?
15. Choose a poem which you teach in your grade. Tell what it means to you.
What may it mean to the children? Write four questions which you would ask to
help bring out meaning which might escape the pupils.
 CHAPTER VIII

THE STUDY LESSON

That it is the main business of the teacher to render her services

unnecessary cannot be too often reiterated. To be able to reason
clearly one’s self; to have control of one’s habits; in short, to know
how to use one’s energies to best advantage when the problems of
life are encountered, is the greatest benefit to be derived from
education. We shall concern ourselves in this discussion with study
as it involves controlled thinking, whether inductive or deductive; with
the most economical method of making knowledge more available
for use by increasing the possibility of recall; and with the possibility
of reducing certain knowledge or responses, whether physical or
mental, to the basis of habit.
In general, our problem in teaching children to study consists in
making them conscious of the best methods to be employed in
logical thinking, or in the formation of habits, and then in giving
sufficient practice in the use of these methods to make them the
habitual manner of reaction, as far as this is possible. It is true, of
course, that one who applies the logical method to a question of
mathematics or geography may be swayed by prejudice when the
question concerns politics or religion; and that the man who knows
best how to form desirable habits may be so bound by some other
that he will fail to achieve that which he knows to be desirable. Be
this as it may, if the school makes the child conscious of the most
economical methods of work, the chances for later efficiency are
greatly increased.
 Strangely enough, what we have been prone to call good teaching
has not always accomplished this desired result. It has too often
happened that the direction and help offered by the teacher have
tended to make the child dependent, utterly unable to do a piece of
work for himself. Even when children have supposedly been required
to do much thinking, the teacher has sometimes weakened her work
by continually stepping in to propose the next step whenever a
critical point has been reached. The argument which proves
conclusively that children do not learn to work independently is found
in their inability in the upper grades, in the high school, and even in
the college to use their time to good advantage.[11]
In teaching children how to study, the first step involves a clear
statement of the problem to be solved. The teacher who says “take
the next five pages” cannot expect that the children will do anything
more, so far as learning how to study is concerned, than waste time
in fulfilling her demands. We think hard when we have a problem to
solve. If it be true that children need to have an aim clearly in mind
when they are at work with the teacher, it is much more essential
that they should have clearly in mind the goal toward which they are
striving when they work alone. Whenever children are expected to
do any work at their seats or at home, the type of assignment
becomes a determining factor. It is a mistake to suppose that a
minute or two at the end of a recitation will be sufficient to make
clear to the pupils the problem involved in the work to be
accomplished during the study hour. The best time to make
assignments is when, as the subject is developed, a problem arises
which cannot then be solved. A good recitation ought to culminate in
the statement of the questions yet to be answered quite as much as
in a statement of what has been accomplished. If the class has been
kept intellectually alert, there ought to be raised by the children many
questions, which may be assigned either to the whole class or to
individuals for report at a succeeding recitation.
A very good incentive to study is found in making assignments to
individuals or groups for report to the whole class. Even if the
problem itself is not of surpassing interest, the desire to contribute
one’s share to the group project, and the wish to do as well as one’s
neighbor, will stimulate to greater effort. It would be well if teachers
tested their own work and the children’s comprehension of the
assignments made by asking frequently during the study period for a
statement of the problem. To read a book intelligently, to perform an
experiment to advantage, children must know what they seek. The
attitude which we hope to develop should lead a child to ask, when
in doubt, such questions as these: “What am I to try to find out from
reading this chapter?” “What am I to look for on the excursion?”
“What is the problem which we are now discussing?” “Is the report
which has just been made to the point?” “Did John’s answer have
anything to do with the question we are discussing?” and the like.
When children have learned to expect to work toward the
accomplishment of some definite result in thought as well as in
action, when they hold to the main issue regardless of the
allurements of subsidiary problems which should be held for later
investigation, when they become critical of the contributions offered
by books or by their companions, then, and not until then, have they
taken the first step in learning to study.
When children have become conscious of the meaning of the aim
or problem as an element in successful study, and when their
practice is guided by this consciousness, they will meet with another
difficulty in learning how to secure the data adequate for the solution
of the problem. Before leaving the elementary school, children
should know how to use dictionaries, encyclopedias, gazetteers,
year books, and the like. It is passing strange that college students
often seem not to know the purpose either of the table of contents or
of the index in the books which they use. It is pitiful to see a person
leafing through a book trying to find information on some question at
issue, when in a minute he could find in the index just the page or
section in which this topic is treated, and so spend the time gathering
data instead of wasting it in a random search for the information
desired. It is necessary to teach children to consult the indices and
tables of contents of books, and to give them frequent practice in
work of this kind, if they are commonly to employ this device or
method.
 Another help to the collection of data might very well begin to be
used in the intermediate grades of the elementary school; it is the
practice of noting, when more than one book or source of information
is used, just where the information is to be found, and something of
its nature. If the pupil consults more than one authority, the one read
last may raise questions which must be answered by a return to
those used earlier, and one ought to be able to turn directly to the
sources formerly consulted. Or it may be that a similar problem, or
one having much in common with it, will arise a week or a month
later, when a record of the sources of information consulted before
will lighten the work by half. A record of this sort could be kept in
notebooks, or, as is done by older people who know how to work, in
a card index. Of course work of this kind presupposes the use of
some books other than a single textbook; and to go very far in giving
children the command of the technique of study we shall have to
provide ourselves with more than a single book for a subject.
Another way by which children can be greatly helped is teaching
them how to take notes and how to annotate. There is no exercise
more valuable to the student, so far as his future work is concerned,
than practice in writing in a very few words the gist of a paragraph or
page. As they reflect later, they may want to know the argument of
this authority or that, but they must have it in condensed form or they
will be little better off than when they began their work. A very helpful
exercise is to have children to abstract, either orally or in writing, a
page or two of a book which they are studying, and to compare
results. In this work the problem is that which confronts the thinker at
every stage of his work, the selection of that which is relevant and
the discarding of that which is less significant. If we think logically,
among the mass of possible data we must always choose that which
in our judgment is relatively most valuable for our purpose. The
teacher in the organization of material for presentation in any subject
is confronted constantly with the problem of relative values. Not all
can be presented, even though relevant to the issue involved; hence,
choice must be made. And just so, if the child learns to study, to
conduct his own investigations, he must be made conscious of this
need of discrimination, and he must be given practice in its exercise.
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