University of Wisconsin, Parkside (UWP)
California State University, Dominguez Hills
Created: April 30, 2011
Latest update: April 30, 2011
E-Mail to Jeanne in L.A.
E-Mail to Susan at UWP.

Just remember the pictures and the key words,
like "stewpot"

I'm a Stewpot on an old iron stove???

Now, wait a minute.

OK, the stewpot is my image, not Herbart's, so for goodness' sakes don't talk about Herbart's "stewpot." But I'll never be able to think Herbart without seeing a stewpot. And I really did once see an old iron stove like this, out in the Louisiana countryside, where "uncle" janvier (Yes, it means January, in Cajun French, as well as in really real French) had a farm we had been invited to. They showed me how to pick "okra" (without gloves). Okra has tiny stickers (thorns? not really). when we got back to the farmhouse, my hands hurt so badly that and that big old iron stove and a huge wood plank for a table is about all I remember. But I have never eaten okra since. In New Orleans, that was kind of a handicap, because they eat a lot of gumbo. Thank goodness my mother was a New Yorker.

. . .revising. The more technical explanations will be accessible on Dear Habermas, through the references. But it all takes a while, jeanne

That embeds his concept into my apperceptive mass. When I retrieve the stewpot, I retrieve Herbart's theory with it. That's how embedding works. It's kind of like pulling up a paper clip from a box and finding that one clip is linked to another, and you get a whole string of memories at once. The fish to the right of the stove are like paper clips. I guess when I drew this I was putting fish into the stewpot.

The stewpot represents the context into which the content (the experience) is added. What Dewey meant by "learn by doing" was that the result of adding content (experience) to context (unique collection of experiences) is your creative production of that experiential learning in your own unique context. One explanation for why practice works might be that as you add new examples of your experience, new associations are made (new paper clips caught and brought back to conscious memory from out of your apperceptive mass), thus embedding the learning even more deeply.

Here's a funky necklace I wore a lot this summer. Strangers kept stopping me to admire it, and then to ask what interdependence means. How would you answer that for the effects of race in criminal justice?

A Necklace that Says "Keep an Open Mind"

"Interdependence": A Reminder that Context Affects Interpretation

Consider that race has never been shown to exist apart from our conceptions of it. Southerners used to refer to "colored blood." You may still here "I haven't a drop of Indian blood." There is no physical measure like that of race. When I wrote my dissertation on integration in Los Angeles schools in the very early 1970s, race was defined as "what his mother says his race is." Some of the "blacks" in our sample were lighter skinned than the "whites."

There are so many misunderstandings of race floating about in today's society that context matters increasingly in an understanding of racial discrimination. Our experiences and beliefs have changed impreceptibly over many years to the point that some of us would be surprised by what we actually "believe," if we ever tried to sort it out.

It's probably a good idea to make your wearable art a little abstract. If a nice little old lady who might be offended by a discussion of race stops me to admire the necklace, I can switch to point out that it's made of Fancy Feast can pop tops. Behold: recycling and it's importance to global warming and global dimming. Now everyone loves my necklace.

Dear Habermas
by Jeanne Curran and Susan Takata
is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.