© 2015 Taylor & Francis

Concrete and abstract language

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

Concrete language refers to words that enable a reader to

respond sensuously to an experience. Sensuous experience can be visual (sight images), aural (hearing images), tactile (touch images), gustatory (taste images) or olfactory (smell images).

Example: The old man lay huddled on the pitted surface of the dusty and rutted road. His skinny arms clasped a ragged and dirty child. Its head lolled back and its eyes had a marble stillness. Near its open mouth, buzzed a large, blue fly.

Concrete language

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

The language of ideas or concepts. Its main purpose is to

reason through generalization and argument.

Example: There is no such thing as a just war. There may be just causes. But there can be no justification for the notion that arguments can be solved by force.

Abstract language

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

1. Write a short piece (one or two paragraphs)

expressing your feelings about a place.2. Circle abstract words and expressions.3. Underline concrete words and expressions.4. Would you describe your diction as mostly

abstract or mostly concrete?5. Consider: Why is it that when we think about

feelings our instinct is to use abstract words?

Feelings into words: Individual task

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

Notes from a Marine Biologist’s Daughter: On the Art and Science of Attention

Anne McCrary Sullivan

Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 70, No. 2 Summer 2000

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

What is the nature of the researcher’s attention? How do we learn to attend with keen eyes and fine sensibilities? How do we teach others to do it?

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“Notes from a Marine Biologist’s Daughter”

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As a case study of a woman whose life has been grounded in attention, these poems collectively raise significant questions about the nature of attention: how it develops; whether a model of intense attention has power for teaching attention; how attention to external realities might facilitate awareness of internal realities; how focused attention to an immediate reality may engage memory and/or imagination.

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

Aesthetic vision suggests a high level of consciousness about what one sees. It suggests an alertness, a “wide-awakeness” that Maxine Green has urged educators and researchers to learn from artists.

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

Aesthetic vision is always from a specific point of view, filtered by a specific consciousness. It is personal and situational. It includes emotion, imagination, and paradox. It embraces complexity.

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

Teachers who function with aesthetic vision perceive the dynamic nature of what is unfolding in front of them at any given moment. They know how to “read” students, respond quickly, and reshape the flow of events. They do not accept what they see is immutable. They have a finely tuned sense of how to move toward new pedagogical configurations.

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

My mother, the scientist, taught me to see. She taught me attention to the complexities of surface detail and also attention to what lies beneath those surfaces. She taught me the rhythms of tide and regeneration, and the syllables of the natural world rubbing against each other. In doing so, she made me a poet.

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

Task: “Stare at the grass until something happens.”