The meaning of meaning

I’ve always had trouble with English teachers, primary school teachers, advisers, lecturers and the like who talked about children ‘making meaning’. I still hear it now occasionally but did a lot in the 70s and 80s and indeed there were books and articles with the expression in the title. Those who used it may have known what they meant but I never thought I did, which makes me think, still, that it was a mystificatory idea that served to conceal confusion.

Previously, people had only used the term ‘meaning’ in phrases like ‘the meaning of so-and-so’. As for ‘meanings’ plural, you got it in ‘word meanings’ and expressions like that -- ‘words and their meanings’ -- but never, I think, in isolation. Meanings were pretty well what you could find in the dictionary.

So what were these meanings that children were supposed to making? Well, I suppose they were the meanings of their written and spoken utterances or improvised dramatic actions, since it was always in relation to language or drama that the expression was used. There seemed to be a whole implicit theory in this way of speaking, that ‘behind’ the language was a non-language something that either preceded the utterance (less preferred version) or was precipitated by the utterance, in the course of speaking.

Well, then. First: if that was the implicit theory, it seems to have huge implications and needed spelling out -- and I don’t think it ever was. If it wasn’t, then ‘meanings’ were just a placeholder, like an algebraic x, for whatever the language or gesture meant, in the usual sense. It’s the implication that there’s some separate entity that children are making, to which language etc may be contributory in production but finally inessential, to which I object. Or rather, I object to the undeclared smuggling in, as if it’s unproblematic, of such a vast notion about the constitution of ideas.

I once took ages working in detail, in an effort to understand it, through the final chapter of Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, the classic source of insights into this area, and concluded that I didn’t understand it and that it was either seriously defective in failing to explain some essentials or was incoherent. Vygotsky can’t be blamed: he was dying and in a rush. But I've never found what to turn to by way of a satisfactory modern (post-1935!) treatment of the problem and I remain seriously confused.

As others surely must be, but I don’t hear much worry being expressed. The issue is almost never addressed in any contemporary writings on the teaching of English, for any theory of which one would have thought some account of language and thought would be essential. Essential, too, to an evaluation of how important the much-celebrated ‘multimodality’ is: is the role of visual media, for instance, in ‘making meanings’ as significant as that of language? on that depends (in part) the weight that should be given to it in education -- and how much time should go to media studies.

Thoughts on assessment

Even in Vygotsky’s time (1925-35) people knew (or he did, in the Soviet Union) that to get a useful reading of where a child was at in intellectual development you needed information not just of what they could do now but of what they’d soon be able to -- the Zone of Proximal Development or ZPD, for which one of my Canadian students, invited to publicise it with a bumper sticker, wrote ‘Zee Pee Dee Doo Dah, Zee Pee Dee Day’ (though Canadians usually say ‘zed’).

And how did you know about a child’s ZPD since it would be entered only in the future? a good indication was what he/she could manage now with just a bit of help.

Something of the spirit of Vygotsky’s insight needs to get into assessment in schools. In my own marking, where the strictness of the mark scheme didn’t prevent it, I tried to consider the student’s trajectory as well as his position in a moment in time. Two students with B- might be very different in terms of their promise and I wanted my marking to reflect that -- ideally by indicating both.

Judging promise is an inescapably subjective business. But I was paid as a professional, and what it means to be that is that you’re trusted to exercise judgement. I imagined myself placing a bet: who would you bet on to be the best writer in, say, three years’ time? The assessor’s situation, given he/she is properly qualified (educated and experienced), should be more like that of a wise boss hiring someone: all you can go on is what you know and can find out at present -- but on that basis you make your best guess.

So, who would you bet on for success in future? The person’s life chances are in your hands, but better that, I would judge, than in the robotic grasp of some mechanical scheme. The privilege of exercising judgement, though, brings with it the responsibility of constant effort to get better -- first by seeing how your bets work out, and second by betting alongside colleagues and discussing your reasons in what, in the CSE examination teachers' meetings in West Yorkshire c.1975, we used to call agreement trials.

Art and neuroscience

In the last couple of days I've chanced to look at three articles which discuss what studies of the brain and evolutionary biology have to say about art and literature. Two were in the London Review of Books and conclude ‘Not much’ (Terry Eagleton’s article [24.9.09] is entitled ‘Darwin is No Help’). The third is an article John Hardcastle sent me about the mutual influence of Vygotsky and Bakhtin and points out that their essential philosophies of science and criticism were poles apart, Bakhtin holding with the neo-Kantians that completely different methods were required for studying the physical world and the arts, Vygotsky that as we know more about the body/brain a unified science will become more and more possible, the key to understanding art lying in a study of the responses it evokes.

Vygotsky, though, wasn’t guilty of a crude reductionism that saw consciousness simply as a biological issue. He was impressed, of course, with the argument that at one level the material is all there is and, along with many others, was looking for ways of accounting for consciousness, will and aesthetic response within a single framework. One way was Gestalt psychology (the whole is different from the sum of the parts), but what they were moving towards was the now influential idea of emergence: while ‘the more complex aspects of reality (e.g.life, mind) presuppose the less complex (e.g. matter)... they have features that are irreducible, e.g. cannot be thought in concepts appropriate to the less complex levels’ (quote attributed to Collier 1994).

Why stories are important

The importance of stories in education usually isn’t well explained. It's just this:

Stories give us practice in creating imagined worlds from words.

By ‘imagined’ I don’t necessarily mean fantastic. Imagining includes simply entertaining in consciousness scenes, situations, states of affairs, people, things etc. that aren’t immediately present to our senses in the surroundings we’re in at the moment. Bringing these ideas into consciousness is a creative mental activity, though not a deliberate one.

We don’t have to try to learn to do this; it comes with language. Once language has developed to a certain point, words arranged in narrative – stories – make imagined worlds appear to us without our having to try. So, presumably, what regular and developing experience of stories does is teach us to get meaning from, first, less familiar linguistic elements (language different from that we experience in everyday speech, in vocabulary and syntactical structures, for instance); second, differences of register and style (to ‘place’ one style you need to know many) and, third, more complex narrative structures.

In this respect – getting good at using words as instigators, props and organisers of imaginative work -- it’s equally beneficial to be read to as to read for oneself, or indeed to listen to oral stories.

(One of the inadequacies of educational theory – at least at the level it’s usually taught at – is the failure to distinguish what we get by virtue of simply being human (which we are by virtue of a particular biology and living in human society) from what can develop in us as a result of particular sorts of cultivation. For example: everyone (almost) can talk; it seems good in school to provide for the plentiful exercise of this capability; but what can school specifically add, by attentive and directed regimes of experience and activity, to the talk we can all do anyway?)

The essential is to develop the capability that we gain with language itself to have language induce imaginative work.

What this in turn depends on – the prior step, as the Soviet psychologist Vygotsky explained in the 1920s and 30s -- is an ability to attach our other-world-making to ‘signs’ in general. It’s our ability to find meaning in signs that enables us to find meaning in one sort of sign, words. Signs, in this special semiotic sense, are simply things outside us that we treat as signs – the smoke, for instance, that we see not just as smoke but as meaning the presence of fire. Signs are things that are there (in the real world outside us) that we use to bring into existence in the mind things that aren’t there, such as the idea of fire. Meaning is that relation between the thing outside that acts as sign and an idea inside us. The thing outside us can be a visual or auditory thing, such as the sound of a spoken word or the appearance of a written one.

Sign-use (‘symbolic activity') may start in play, as Vygotsky suggests, when a stick becomes a sign that supports the holding in consciousness of the meaning ‘horse’; or, more obviously in our society, with television images and picture books. Such signs are crucially different from the smoke/fire one in that their ‘outside’ or material component is made, not found (a distinction that St Augustine had already formulated).

For Lucy at age 1 a picture of a lion was more than one more item in the visual environment; it already had a meaning and provoked imaginative activity, giving rise to the meaning ‘lion’, which must have comprised primarily some sort of mental image. Already the picture was functioning as a sign, inducing her to imagine a lion – indeed to create the concept of a lion, since she had not seen one in a zoo and probably had no other basis to go on than the image.

Hence the importance of picture books in developing children’s capacity to use signs, whether visual or verbal, as instigators and organisers of mental activity – of imagining and thinking.

And later on stories – in words -- teach us not just to enter into more and more sophisticated narratives but, more fundamentally, to live in the sorts of world that are made possible when we know how to exploit the meanings that words can get us into. (In education we surely just have to trust that they just in general do this; it's nonsense to specify a 'learning outcome' for a single experience of a story.)

Comic strips, of course, are a terrific in-between form, though not just that. They provide a medium for the transition from pictures to words at the same time as teaching us to follow narrative structure. But they're also capable of creating worlds and realities that are particular to them and continue to exercise a special power even on adult readers.