more on Nespor

This post relates a bit to what Melissa touched on in her last post -- embodiment of knowledge in conventional schools [like Thurber]; controlling student bodies; learning and bodies and privileged embodiment of particular knowledges. On pgs. 162-163 Nespor introduces the chapter on "kids, signs, and popular culture" by speaking about everyday learning/cognition or "learning in the wild" to use the popular phrase. Maybe it's because I am also taking Reed Steven's "everyday cognition" course [as are others in this class] and so I'm thinking about this stuff a lot, but I was struck by Nespor's turn to disembodied learning/knowledge production as something that primarily happens in school as opposed to being the consequence of particular forces or power structures that affect/shape schools among other spaces/institutions. Disembodiment as a function of school alone is hard for me to swallow. 

Drawing on Lefebvre, he argues that at Thurber official learning in school is disembodied; it is unrelated to kids' real lives - where they don't look "from a distance upon a world rendered on in books, paper" etc. In this binary framework, school becomes abstract space, where learning happens in your head and at your desk, history and English are in books [and as Melissa noted, science is in carefully designed and controlled lab "experiments"]. Real space happens elsewhere. 

Nespor goes on to argue that popular culture competes with school knowledge, that kids bring it to school, and that it holds more relevance for kids because they are interested in it, etc. I buy that. But I wonder about the link from embodiment & learning to pop culture & life outside of school. How is pop culture any more embodied or related to kids "real lives" than school? Are they not just different fantasy lands in a way? Or is it only that the second is better marketed? 

Sure, as compared to school kids spend more time thinking about pop culture, talking about it, watching/listening/buying it. I probably do too! But is learning or life in the context of interactions with the forms of pop culture experienced by the Thurber kids [TV shows, music, movies, televised professional sports] any more corporeal or any less comprised of gazing and abstract space than school? For Nespor, it seems to be more about kids' interest and affinity and time than about what is "real" and what is "abstract".  

I understand that Nespor seeks to show kids' facility with pop cultural knowledge [especially when they need to ridicule one another or to impress Nespor himself]. And that seems to be Nespor's point - he quickly transitions from embodiment of knowledge to everyday learning/experiences to pop culture. However, this chapter has got me thinking about what strikes me as a romanticization of bodies outside of school or life outside of school. I do it too. I think that it is vital to explore kids' lives outside of school if we want to understand development, learning, behavior, choices, values, trajectories, talk, students' interpretations of their experiences, etc. However, I reject the simplification that inside of school all learning is disembodied, that kids are always disembodied through through formal education [or that all kids experience this process similarly], and that outside of school life is groovy or more real or that kids learn more [not in different ways but more or better] and that there is freedom for body and mind. I certainly know kids for whom school is where their bodies and minds are most liberated, where they are most free, where learning is most embodied.

On another note, I found the discussions of kids' uses of pop culture fascinating, especially when Nespor brings gender and race analysis to bear on not only what the kids are saying but what they are accomplishing through their words and references. However, I wonder if it is possible to be an academic and not sound so tweedy when analyzing kids' pop culture talk? If not, I'm up a creek!