article summarizing and report

6

Becoming Aware

In the preceding chapter, we observe how objects (perceptions) and ideas (concep- tions) emerge from acting in the world. In the specific instance we notice what appears to be a sudden appearance and recognition of the form that a hidden mys- tery object takes when it feels different (like a rectangular solid) from what it felt before (like a cube). But the objects that enter our lives do not have to be mysteri- ous, at once being of familiar kind and not having existed in parts of our familiar world up until an instant of insight. In the course of my life, I have had repeated ‘sudden’ discoveries, each of which left such an impression that I remember it to the present day. The phenomenon occurred to me (note the passive tense!) for the very first time while taking the daily bus ride to the city where I attended second- ary school. For years I had taken the trip when one day, ‘all of a sudden’, I saw the city’s renowned Marienberg Fortress from a point and under an angle where I had never seen it before. I was surprised over seeing something that I had never seen before and began to wonder about how it was possible that I had taken this trip for so many years but had never seen what I just had seen for a first time. Given the circumstances, there can be no doubt about the fact that I could have seen the view before so that this ‘fact’ existed retroactively. Some twenty-five years later, already in my late forties, I started attending closer to the phenomenon and to its implica- tions for epistemology and for educational practice. I had realized that precisely because I did not know about those views (‘facts’), I could not intentionally orient toward them. In one case, it was a giant feed silo next to a road that I had been cycling along for seven consecutive days for the purpose of simulating learning events; in another case, it was a little church on the way to work, which I had taken for eleven years before actually becoming aware of for the first time.1 For extended periods I was unaware of the existence of these things until, after having become aware, they were present in my awareness. In each case, the world in which I dwelled was enlarged, contained more things that I was able to act on, talk about, and make use of. It was only while writing this book that I found that George Her- bert Mead already conceived of the emergence of things, which he articulated in the context of science but that also are valid in our everyday lives: ‘Things emerge,

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and emerge in the mechanical order of things, which could not be predicted from what has happened before’.2 That is, these new things became objects that I could use in building and thinking. For years I thought about the phenomenon as some- thing that occurs suddenly, in a flash. It was only more recently that I began to attend to the phenomenalization of the seen from the unseen and therefore unfore- seen. It turns out that the appearance of a new thing is not sudden, as if occurring in a flash. Instead, it is an event* with its own temporality, which, admittedly, tends to be rather fast so that we do not attend to it as such. In this chapter, I de- scribe becoming aware as something that happens. Given the right circumstances, when something in the course of happening unfolds slowly enough, the phenome- non can be studied in its different phases. Between the 1960s and 1980s, there was a lively debate about the appropriate epistemology to be taken when studying student learning. Behaviorism, Jean Pia- get’s stage theory, information processing approaches, neo-Piagetian theories combining stage theory with information processing, and conceptual change all were part of a panoply of theoretical frameworks available to the learning scientist. Since then, however, constructivism, in its various forms, has risen to become a master theory (narrative) of how we learn. Yet there are a many different forms of learning that cannot be explained using a constructivist metaphor – especially the different forms of learning that have to do with the human capacity to be affected and suffer, that is, with passibility.3 With respect to learning, the inherent unavail- ability of the future and the openness of a happening (here sometimes denoted as event*) that becomes a definite event only after the fact, make it impossible for students to construct knowledge in the manner that this verb implies. The verb to construct is a poor theoretical choice because the verb is transitive, requiring a definite subject and object. It is a poor choice because we inherently cannot know what we will have learned, that is, the future knowledge that is the ex post facto object of the learning, which is revealed to us only as a consequence and end prod- uct of the finalized (learning) event. Indeed, numerous philosophers and psycholo- gists – including George Herbert Mead, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Lev S. Vygotsky – have pointed out that we do not know the contents of our own physical and discursive acts (i.e. what exactly we are doing or saying) until after the fact. That is, we neither ‘construct’ our physical actions and phrases nor construct the ‘meanings’ thereof to implement them afterward. Instead, these are emergent phe- nomena, unseen and unforeseen until after they have arrived. The unsuitability of the verb ‘to construct’ and the associated epistemology is familiar to pragmatic philosophers of language. Thus, for example, Richard Rorty uses the case of the ‘craftsman [who] typically knows what job he needs to do be- fore picking or inventing tools with which to do it’. He makes the contrast with ‘someone like Galileo, Yeats, or Hegel (a “poet” in my wide sense of the term – the sense of “one who makes things new”) [who] is typically unable to make clear exactly what it is that he wants to do before developing the language in which he succeeds in doing it. His new vocabulary makes possible, for the first time, a for- mulation of its own purpose’.4 Even the great poets are typically unable to make clear their aim until they have achieved it in the poem. That is, in the process of

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making something new, the poets not only are unaware of what they will have pro- duced in the upcoming future but also are incapable of describing and explaining precisely what they are doing, which, in retrospect, will have been something new. Painters, too, do step back from their paintings, a move that enables them to see revealed, a posteriori, what their preceding brush strokes have yielded. The content of the quotation thus also questions the possibility to be ‘metacognitive’ when you are creating something new, that is, when you are learning. These considerations suggest that becoming aware has the character of a hap- pening (which is known as event only after the fact) and of aspect dawning. The use of the expression stating ‘something is dawning on us’ suggests that whatever eventually appears first exists only in vague and unclear form before it becomes clear upon entering full light. After the new has entered the clearing, those who have become aware of and perceive something new (i.e. have learned it) describe what they have been doing using the new language and linguistic expressions and, thereby, produce an a posteriori account. From the history of science it is well known that a posteriori accounts are teleological and constitute a form of Whig history, which makes it appear as if the actors had aimed from the beginning at making what they only after the fact knew as having done and produced. I know this to be the case because I was a member of a scientific research team that at- tempted to refine the description of a particular phenomenon that was explained by a theory for which its creator had received a Nobel Prize.5 The data ultimately showed a very different pattern. This different pattern was dawning upon us only slowly. It eventually turned out that other research, too, had shown the same pat- tern. Our research report was written in this new light. We were in the same situa- tion as David Suzuki, a famous Canadian geneticist turned journalist and environ- mentalist, who wrote: ‘the report was a way of “making sense” of our discovery, of putting our results into a context and communicating it so colleagues could under- stand and repeat (if necessary) what we did. But it conveyed nothing of the excite- ment, hard work, frustration, disappointment and exhilaration of the search – or the original reason we started the search for paralytic mutants’.6 The result is that a posteriori accounts do not have predictive qualities and, therefore, like Monday morning quarterbacking, have no theoretical value: they do not explain a thing. In this chapter I describe and (begin to) theorize precisely that movement from being unaware to being aware while the poets and learners do not yet know what they will have come to know when they are done. This movement I denote by the term becoming aware. Becoming aware inherently is a process of learning, because af- terwards we are aware of something that we had known (been aware of) before. Becoming aware is a quintessential learning process that we need to know about because it involves parts that currently dominant epistemologies do not or cannot explain.

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Aspect Dawning

The dawning of an aspect refers to the arriving of a new thing in conscious aware- ness – which is not and cannot be the result of an interpretation. A clear example in the literature on learning events in the sciences (i.e. ‘discoveries’) exists in the ac- count of how the DNA structure came to be found. James D. Watson had created cardboard shapes of the four chemical bases that crystallographic analyses had shown to be present in the DNA molecule they studied and for which the research- ers wanted to find the structure. Watson describes what happened that morning as having begun to shift the cardboard shapes into different possible pairings without already having in mind the way in which the pairings would look like. At one point, it suddenly was dawning upon him: the adenine-thymine pair, which was bonded by means of two hydrogen atoms, had a shape identical to that of the gua- nine-cytosine pair. Everything seemed natural, and no fudging was required to make for the identity of the two resulting compound shapes. In his account, Wat- son describes shifting the different material shapes of his model bases in and out of various configurations. He had to do so because he did not know what he would ultimately know: two pairs, with members placed in particular ways, were identical in shape. This knowing is not only of the perceptual kind but also one of conceptu- al nature. Moreover, not knowing what the DNA molecule and its rungs will be looking like once ‘discovered’, he could not have a plan to intentionally look for it. He tried this and that – a form of event often referred to as ‘trial and error’. Quite accurately, he therefore describes that he was becoming aware that the adenine- thymine and guanine-cytosine pairs were identical. This awareness was both of perceptual and conceptual nature. For him to become aware, there had to be some- thing that he could become aware of: the configuration of the two pairs. These physical pairs preceded his awareness. Watson did not direct his awareness but rather, the identity of the shapes of the two pairs offered itself to him rather than him looking for them. He was moving cardboard shape looking what this moving gives. It was when he had become aware of the configuration that he knew it was what he was looking for – something like a reconfiguration of the colloquialism, ‘I know it when I see it’. Prior to that he did not know and, therefore, could not inten- tionally construct the shapes. The ultimate configurations were unseen, and there- fore unforeseen, until he saw them and knew that this was what he had been look- ing for without knowing that he was doing so. This is why we might see in his description a case of trial and error. But trial and error implies that we do not know and that we come to know something when it works, when it turns out not to have been done in error. Watson writes that he suddenly became aware – he had an epiphany. That is, he was describing an instance of insight, when something unknown up to a point came in sight. He uses the adverb ‘suddenly’, which has the sense of ‘all at once’ and ‘without preparation or warning’. Such a framing, however, obliterates part of the description, which also notes the coming of awareness and the becoming aware. There is a happening at work, a movement, at the end of which we are consciously

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aware. Watson does not write that he constructed awareness. As Rorty above points out, he could not construct it because he was becoming aware of the equally shaped pairs almost despite himself following his moving about of the shapes. ‘To construct’ means that he had anticipated in some way what the outcome of his ac- tions would be and he would have acted accordingly. The problem with the con- structivist metaphor is apparent in chapter 5, where I describe the pregnance of movement, that is, its generative nature and the emergence of the unseen and thus unforeseen. Because we cannot construct awareness – we would have to be aware of our future awareness to do so – the phenomenon also contributes to evolving a post-constructivist account of learning. We do not have to seek recourse to the discovery accounts of famous scientists – though there are recommendations on cultural-historical grounds to take the toughest and extreme cases for studying psychological phenomena. Instead, if we pay close attention then we can find evidence of the coming of awareness in the everyday classroom. We have already seen one example in chapter 5, where Melis- sa apparently explores and constitutes an aspect of the space surrounding her with the right hand (i.e. in the shoebox) while turning and touching her peer’s model with the left hand. Then, her facial expression changes quite rapidly, exhibiting astonishment; she puckers her lips, then picks up her clay model and shapes it into a rectangular prism. Now, after eight tactile explorations of the mystery object to- taling more than three minutes, the mystery object had given itself as a cube. It was during the eighth exploration that a new form was revealing itself to her hand. Here, too, we can say after the fact that she was becoming aware at that instant: the mystery object was taking the shape of a rectangular prism even though it had felt like a cube during, and as a consequence of, the seven preceding explorations. In another instance, I had studied a group of tenth-grade students in a course on static electricity. In one of the two groups recorded, the students had great pains to con- sistently reproduce an effect that the teacher had demonstrated. The teacher had rubbed some material, including an overhead transparency, and then held to it a little glow lamp (Fig 6.1). It lit up, which the teacher suggested was due to the stat- ic electricity. After having conducted 116 tests, following another series of incon- sistent results, Birgit, one of the four students in the group, stared at the glow lamp and then said something like, ‘Oh, it is broken. It cannot work!’ It is at that time that she had become aware of the fact that there were two electrodes, which Birgit (incorrectly) described as a broken lamp. Because she did not know that a glow lamp has two electrodes rather than one continuous filament like a classical light bulb, she could not intentionally look for it. There was then a movement from not being aware to being aware; and this part of the learning event – after all, she did

Fig 6.1 After 116 tests using the glow lamp, Birgit becomes aware of the gap between the elec- trodes. Three lessons later she becomes aware that one has to hold the glow lamp at the metal ends to make it work.

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come to know something that she did not know before – requires a new, post- constructivist form of description. The movement itself requires an appropriate theory that is consistent with the nature of an event* as emergent. Emergent means that there are aspects that we cannot predict what comes based on what we current- ly know. Moreover, the phenomenon is not one that is typical of the individual. Instead, ‘in so far as the individual takes the attitude of the generalized other to- ward the object there emerges an object that is universal’.7 The object, the gap be- tween the two electrodes, immediately is a universal thing, which can be seen in the fact that Birgit pointed it out to the teacher (as a material thing) and used it to explain the failure to achieve the successful investigation. The object immediately, that is, with its appearance, is social – rather than individual to be shared and nego- tiated with others, as constructivists want to have it. My studies – those pertaining to physicists invited as experts to provide read- ings of graphs from first-year university biology courses – show that we must not presuppose the givenness of what is on a page. Thus, one physicist, when stymied, was told by the research assistant that she had to look at the value of the curves but she answered, ‘I can’t help but see [the] slopes [of the curves]’. It is not that she interprets slopes: she cannot help but see slopes. Mathematically, instead of seeing the values of birthrates as a function of population size, she saw the slope as a function of the curve. In another study of mine what was to be seen as a graphical sign for a biological phenomenon arose in and from the verbal exchanges of two physicists who experienced the dawning of an aspect. In that case, approximately parallel lines came to be seen as indicating levels in a third dimension similar to the elevation lines on a geographical map. Finally, what there was to be seen in two representations in an experimental biology laboratory – an image of the micro- scopic slide contents and a graph – was not given but emerged in the course of the verbal exchanges over and about the two; and the pattern in which the generated data related emerged as a form of a quickly occurring but not sudden gestalt switch within the research team. Without a thing, without an aspect, there was nothing to be interpreted; the latter process could start only when a new (perceptual or con- ceptual) aspect had dawned. Describing the movement from the absence of a sign or thing to the presence of a new and unknown sign or thing precisely is the object of this chapter.

An Empirical Investigation

In chapter 2, I refer to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who, drawing on the crea- tive possibilities of their German language, write that consciousness is conscious Being. That is, Being does not have to be consciously aware of any structure in practical activity and, on evolutionary grounds, is not inherently so. This is why Martin Heidegger places dwelling and Being (Sein) before building and thinking (beings), which, thus, are the consequences – and thus possible because – of dwell- ing. We may experience the primacy of Being when we are ‘in the flow’ or during

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meditation, when we are not conscious of Being and do not make it present make present (again), that is, re-present. The issue also can be observed among children while growing up. Thus, even though children come to speak a language in gram- matically correct ways, they become aware of the grammatical rules and grammar only after already speaking their first language sufficiently well. It is only then that they begin differentiating subject, verb, object, and so on. Speaking is a mode of dwelling, but awareness of the parts of speech can come only when children al- ready know to speak correctly. Like the poets referred to above, children can de- scribe what they are doing with the words of their language when they already have learned this language, including that language with which they describe the grammatical rules. In this section, I provide an empirical account of the movement from being unaware to being aware (of something). Every single example of the phenomenon (becoming aware) already sketched in this preceding section would lend itself to deep analysis for the purpose of exhibit- ing the invariant features. However, none of the related studies produced enough data and sufficiently thick descriptions suitable to accomplish my purpose. Thus, the particular situation analyzed and described here is part of a growing database in which I document – in the form of descriptive notes, analyses, photographs, and other inscriptions – learning phenomena, especially learning phenomena of types that are not generally described in the learning sciences literature. For many years I have kept entries in my lab (research) notebook on particular learning phenomena (a) in which I had ‘suddenly’ realized something, that is, have had a ‘sudden’ in- sight or (b) when I tried remembering something but could not precisely because I did not know the thing to be remembered. The following is but one of those many instances I recorded, some of the very same nature under similar circumstances. Although insight frequently goes with perception, becoming aware pertains espe- cially to conceptual issues. On July 23, 2013, I have gone on a bicycle ride around the peninsula on which I live riding northwards along the highway (Fig 6.2) when I am becoming aware of my lips forming the word ‘temple’ just as I am passing something that I now re- member as a green ‘sign’. The ‘temple’ is still ringing in the ears just after and although it has gone. I am aware of having articulated the word ‘temple’ just after having completed it. A fleeting thought concerns the question whether an arrow (ß) has actually been there as well, but I am already past the two signs that are visible in Fig 6.2b and cannot not verify its presence. After the fact – when I will have passed by here a few days later, at which point I also take the photographs – the arrow clearly is there; and now that it is described, readers will see the arrow in the photographs (Fig 6.2). But in this case study, we have to place ourselves at a point in time when the subject (this author) is not yet aware of the existence of a street sign pointing the way to get to the temple. On that day, after just having passed what I now know to be a sign, I am becoming aware simultaneously of hav- ing formed the words ‘Indian temple’ and have come to grasp it as ‘Indian temple’. However, just before that realization and while the ‘Indian temple’ is on my lips, I am not aware of it – until the ending ‘-ple’ has been coming off them. At that in- stant, too, there is a fleeting image of greenness – gone but still resonating with/in

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me; I am associating it after the fact with the ground on which the ‘Indian temple’ has appeared. Having passed what I now know to be the street sign, I can no longer verify it. At that time I am becoming aware of three facts, each pushing its way into my consciousness where they become what they are: (a) I have not known of the existence of a sign pointing to an Indian temple; (b) I have not known that close to where I live – an area predominantly populated by white working and middle class (94%) and indigenous populations – there is an Indian temple; and (c) I begin pondering where the temple might be because I have never seen it or known of it; and I begin pondering whether it might be something like a meeting hall rather than a building that stands out because of its architecture. The type of occurrence just described is not singular. In the course of that sum- mer, I was tuned into this phenomenon and recorded many such events. For exam- ple, on that same day, I also recorded becoming aware of something that dawned into my consciousness in the form of a brown patch, which when I was already past, I will have seen as a dog. Something was dawning, and there was a move- ment from an indefinite brown blotch to a definite dog. On another day, riding my bicycle along the same familiar route, I undergo precisely the same type of event with another road sign that I have never seen before during the sixteen years of passing there (Fig 6.3). Every time that I have passed the spot since then, I have been wondering about the fact that for such a long time I had not seen the road sign and had not been aware of its existence – though now it stands out so prominently every time I am passing. Before that first time, I could not precipitate its presence in my consciousness. Here I focus on the movement by means of which the unseen comes to be seen and thus comes to be present in and to consciousness. It may in-

Fig 6.2 View of the highway during a bicycle trip while approaching an intersection. a. Farther away. b. About 100 m closer.

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deed be a movement from the invisible, and comes to be the present but unseen after it has entered the visible and therefore is seen. From these cases, described in greater detail for the ‘Indian temple’, we may learn five important lessons. First, we note that at least when we know and are aware of the road panel (‘Indian temple’), it is quite prominent – at least when we are close up (Fig 6.2b). Despite this ex post facto prominence, and despite having cycled past this place for years, I was becoming aware of it only on that particular day. Although we tend not to pay attention to such phenomena as part of our eve- ryday lives – these experiences do not come to stand out in our awareness as inter- esting phenomena at all – these are actually quite common. Both looking and the thing precede the awareness. Now that I know of the roadside panel, I can easily attend to its future appearance on the next bicycle trip that I take on this highway and I can talk about it and my initial encounter with it. That is, once I have become aware of the phenomenon I can make it present again (e.g. by re-imagining it), anticipate it, and do other things with it. But until the instance when becoming aware begins, and right to the presence of it in awareness, to construct is not an appropriate verb for describing my relation to it. Second, we note that there are temporal delays during the movement of becom- ing aware. The awareness of something green and the awareness of having formed with my mouth and lips what will have been the words ‘Indian temple’ were after- effects. That greenness initially was only indeterminate in my awareness in the same way as (a) a word is indeterminate when it only makes its way up to the tip of the tongue without actually emerging from our mouths and into our minds or (b) we almost come to visualize something without quite arriving there (called presque vue in psychology). There was something like an indeterminate greenness in-

Fig 6.3 I was passing this stretch of the road for sixteen years before I became aware of the road sign.

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scribed with white at the beginning of the movement of becoming aware without that I could know that such a movement was in its course. That is, even the de- scription ‘becoming aware’ is possible only after the fact, when I know that I was becoming aware of the thing that now exists in my awareness. Up until this point, it is an event-in-the-making or event*, where the nature of the ‘event’ is available only after the fact. That is, the expressions event-in-the-making and event* both are incorrect in a strong sense, for, while some happening is in its course, the what- ness of the ‘event’ is unknown. We know what is happening only when the hap- pening has come to the conclusion and when we know any outcome or products. At that point we can grasp what has gone on before as a specific type of event and thus name it (e.g. that dinner in Paris). It is only with hindsight that I will have been able to say that ‘something drew my attention’. In fact, this last expression shows that we live the phenomenon as one in which something else is acting (ac- tive tense of ‘drew’), and, being subject to this action, my attention is drawn (pas- sive tense). In the final stages of becoming aware, the preceding indeterminateness still is resonating, a sense of an emerging greenness, the sense of having moved the lips prior to comprehending what was happening as my (unintended) reading of a text. These movements still linger, though they are definitely in the past. This is what Edmund Husserl refers to as retention – that aspect of the (specious) present that has the character of pastness. By the time I grasp what there has been, a road sign that points to an Indian temple, I have already passed it. Perceiving and grasping also have ended once they yielded the perceived and grasped (note the past tense). The awareness of green was associated with something still resonating in retention, that is, after it already has gone from the retina. At best, there is a dim sensation that remains, not the awareness of some/thing or the awareness of a green color. Similarly, aware- ness of the what of the sounds coming off my lips has followed their actual move- ments. (Most people reading with their mouths forming the words are unaware of doing so.) More importantly, the grasp of the contents of ‘Indian temple’ has oc- curred even later than the awareness of the text. This relation between forming a word and comprehending it were becoming evident to me three weeks earlier, when I just had become aware of having passed a roadside sign. My becoming aware was correlated with the sounds /'ask ju:/ (‘ask you’), /a 'skju/ (‘a skew’), and /ǝ'skju:/ (‘askew’). It is in the movement through the different pronunciations that I was becoming aware of having passed what I subsequently knew to have been a realtor sign carrying the name ‘Paul Askew’. Once I had fully grasped, the thought emerges into my mind that the name lends itself to making jokes and that the per- son might have been teased or ridiculed for it. There is a clear movement, though while it is occurring, there is not and cannot be a sense of where it is going. Only while writing these lines, four years after the original event, do I learn about the fact that G. H. Mead has written about the phenomena in terms of a specious pre- sent that becomes extended so that a formerly unrecognized individual thing ‘has been drawn out of the shadows, and, in this novel temporal perspective … becomes one more figure in the world’.8 In none of these processes does something like construction occur – ‘receiving’ or ‘being subject to something other than our-

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selves’ are two better ways for describing and naming what we actually live through. Third, once I have become aware of the white-on-green-background inscription ‘Indian temple’, once it has become present in/to my consciousness, I can make it present again (re-). That is, whereas the same roadside sign had been in all likeli- hood on my retina before, I could not make it present again as the object of my intentional activity. Being aware (consciousness) is associated with the faculty of making something present again. The object that stands out over and against me is tied to the possibility to make it present in its absence – to represent it. But, as the empirical data show, there is a delay between presence and awareness of presence, the latter always only following the former. Philosophers make this difference thematic in various ways. For Heidegger, the difference appears in the above-noted distinction of Being [Sein] and beings [Seiendes], the latter including the things (signs, words) that allow the former to be made present again, to be represented, and therefore to be present in conscious awareness. For Mead, objects have a dis- tant character, which comes with the ‘promise or threat of possible contact experi- ence’ and where ‘the final contact is the experimental evidence of the reality of the promise which the object at a distant carried’.9 Objects – i.e. things that stand out – have this character of the distant thing even when they are close enough to be touched. Fourth, becoming aware is a movement in the course of which awareness be- comes what it is: awareness of something. But the awareness of something as something is only the endpoint of the movement. It is only its result. The move- ment tends to be so fast that under most normal circumstances we are not aware of it. We therefore refer to it as insight: something is coming (suddenly) into sight. Precisely because agency is shifted here, the verb to construct once again turns out to be inappropriate. Having become aware of becoming aware especially during bicycle trips, I come to think that in this particular kind of event attentional pro- cesses are slowed down to the point that they may become objects to be studied systematically. Thoughts come to me during bicycle training when and while I am not at all seeking to think about research. This, too, is a common aspect of innova- tion and a topic of study by neuroscientists, psychologists, and phenomenological philosophers alike. What I describe here is the coming of a thought, the becoming aware of an idea. We could construct this thought only if we already knew it in advance – like the craftsperson who knows from experience approximately what the end result has to look like – and, therefore, could represent it. But thoughts are more like the result of dialogical processes and, therefore are as unpredictable as the outcomes of all dialogical processes. The fifth important issue for theorizing learning pertains to the mode of becom- ing aware. Because I neither knew nor was aware of the road signs, or knew that there was a temple, I could not construct them. I can engage in any construction only if there is already something there. Again, there is a vast difference between constructivists, who literally turn everything on its (their own) head. They do not heed the suggestion of Marx and Engels that I repeatedly refer to above: not con- sciousness determines life, but life determines consciousness. It is the physical sign

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‘Indian temple’ that provokes consciousness into becoming aware rather than con- sciousness that ‘constructs’ the ‘Indian temple’. Moreover, I could not even con- sciously start off becoming aware, because the movement arrives at an object – I become aware of some/thing – and this object inherently is available only after the epiphanic event. Instead, I find myself comprehending after the fact rather than having intentionally produced comprehension. I could not make the sign the intent of learning precisely because I did not know (of) it. Rather, becoming aware gen- erally and becoming aware of becoming aware specifically is associated with a particular (passive) sensitivity, (willing) receptivity, and attention.

A Post-Constructivist Perspective on the Coming of Awareness

In this chapter, I direct attention to a phenomenon that under normal everyday condition tends to be so fast that we do not heed it, fail to notice it, and, therefore, that we are not becoming aware of it: the movement from unawareness to aware- ness, from not-knowing to knowing. The phenomenon is not just one of the per- ceptual kind; in fact, it is conceptual through and through, because in everyday life we do perfectly fine perceptually without conceptual awareness (e.g. we are una- ware of our surroundings while walking through a city and talking to a friend or colleague). That is, although it may appear on quick reading that this chapter is about perception, it is, on a deep level, concerned with awareness and therefore cognition and mind. In the classical constructivist approach, we learn by interpreting the world. This presupposes the existence of whatever is interpreted. Radical constructivists main- tain that we never have access to the world but perpetually are caught in the con- finement of our subjective minds so that even intersubjectivity is the result of a subjective construction. The present study shows that the constructivist presupposi- tion is unfounded. In this study, as in the third person studies of students and scien- tists referred to above, there is no evidence of some thing being in consciousness that the learner interprets. Instead, it is only at the end of the movement from una- wareness to being aware that something – a new object, a new sign, or a new idea – comes to stand out. That standing out over against the subject (a) is modeled on the emergence of the Self and the Other from social relations and (b) comes with a representative capacity (it is representable and there is something who makes it present by means of something other). My investigation shows that a distinction is to be made between a continuous seeing (understanding) of some aspect and the dawning (becoming conscious) of an aspect that has not existed for us before. I describe the movement denoted by becoming aware, that is, how we are becoming aware of something before it can become the object of our conscious and deliberate (constructive) activity. It is not that we see and understand something as something, that is, that we interpret it as something. Instead, we are confronted with the (perceptual, conceptual) thing that appears in our consciousness: we are patients rather than agents of this process.

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Even if we are asked to have to look differently at a situation, we sometimes can- not help but continue seeing it in the way we have done up to now – which is the case because we do not understand a thing according to an interpretation. Many may initially see one thing in images of the duck–rabbit (Fig 3.2b, p. 45) type, and, when asked whether they see another thing as well, may respond ‘I can’t but help seeing …’. The nature of the thing as an object is tied to multiplicity of perspec- tives so that seeing something as something always includes the perspectives of the generalized other. In chapter 5 I refer to Ludwig Feuerbach, who realized that something really exists only when the Other and I can agree on this existence, that is, when it exists for me as it exists for others. In a strong sense, therefore, we are confronted with what is given to our perception and understanding simultaneously. Individuals are positioned differently. The same (material, social) object may not be same for every individual – a phenomenon we are familiar with as soon as we move about in the world and in the different ways in which we are positioned with respect to the same thing. A material thing – commodity, word, or gift – has exchange value for one individual while simultaneously having use value for the recipient. This is tied to the different ways in which the individual Self is constitut- ed – buyer and seller, speaker and listener, or giver and recipient. Again, as noted above, the relation between individual and material thing reflects the relation be- tween people, and the relation between people reflects the relation between people and things. Mead, too, suggests that the existence of the object comes with the multiplicity of perspectives. There are many phenomena in the psychology of per- ception with which many readers will be familiar, including the dual images of (a) a vase / two faces, (b) an old / young woman, (c) a duck/rabbit, (d) the double Mal- tese cross, or (e) the double (Necker) cube. Such instances tend to be taken as the result of constructions, where a person is said to interpret some material substrate in one or another way. But saying that people construct what they see is not at all what happens (e.g. you do not construct the killer whale in Fig 3.2a [p. 45], but it gives itself after some gazing at the ensemble of black and white blotches). From a physiological perspective, the killer whale is seen when the eyes have followed a specific path given by the outline of what is seen (has become figure) and the sac- cades away from and back to it.10 As noted above, we generally cannot help but perceive something in a particular way (a graph, a mystery object), and sometimes only with extended effort arrive at perceiving the thing in a different way. Similar phenomena are reported when studies suggest that students look at graphs and are said to iconically confuse them with other images (e.g. maxima and minima of a sine curve and the turns of a race track). The way in which we come to see and understand, or rather, in which we are becoming aware, does not tend to be studied at all; and yet, when we do study it, it turns out to be not well described by means of the constructivist metaphor. Readers are familiar with the phenomena at issue here, though precisely when becoming aware has not arrived at its conclusion: the tip-of-the-tongue, presque vu, and I-forgot-what-I-wanted-to-say phenomena. In the tip-of-the-tongue phe- nomenon, something we are trying to remember or say has not quite made it to our awareness. We know we wanted to add to an ongoing conversation but forgot what

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we wanted to say. This would also be the case if I had not quite come to grasp that there had been something green, or if the ‘Indian temple’ had not quite made it into my awareness. We are aware that something was in the process of becoming aware, sufficiently into awareness to the point that we have experienced the early stages without actually becoming aware of the thing as such. In the I-forgot-what- I-wanted-to-say phenomenon, something that we were apparently aware of has disappeared and never made it into awareness so that we can no longer say what we wanted to communicate. But the disappearance is not complete, for there is a trace that allows us to be aware that something had been close to or already in awareness without there being a sufficient trace to know what it actually was. When we say that something ‘was dawning on me’, then we actually refer to a temporal nature of an appearance that was known as something only after it had fully appeared. The empirical evidence points to the fact that initially there is nothing in percep- tual experience that could be interpreted: in the way Birgit was unaware of the gap in the electrodes, I was unaware of the roadside sign. The upshot of this investiga- tion is that I cannot construct something as something if there is no thing to begin with. If construction were to be an appropriate description (metaphor), then I would have to presuppose the (material) presence of the thing (e.g. the materially inscribed trace of ‘Indian temple’) in the way carpenters have plans for the houses they construct. As this chapter shows, the written is not present in/to conscious- ness. There is a movement by means of which we are becoming aware. After hav- ing become aware I can then begin to ponder where there might be an Indian tem- ple, as suggested by the roadside sign. That is, whereas construction might be the appropriate metaphor for describing/theorizing what happened after I had become aware, and in the context of what I already knew (had been aware) concerning the geography of my municipality, that which is consistent with our understanding of learning, the arrival of something we had not known before, is precisely what es- capes such a description. Therefore, construction is not the appropriate metaphor for describing and theorizing learning. Passive receptivity as condition and becom- ing aware – a unit including unawareness and awareness as two of its manifesta- tions – constitutes a more accurate way of describing the arrival of the new, and, therefore, of learning. Mastery in learning, whether we consider a school student or a researcher, exists in the capability of letting the unseen surge into the visible by surprise. Because this occurs unpredictably, learners need to learn how to attend to these otherwise fleeting aspects of our lives. In this chapter I provide a description and analysis of becoming aware. The movement includes being unaware, latent awareness, and full awareness. Each of these three dimensions is but part of the whole movement that cannot be further reduced. Because of this, becoming aware is an appropriate unit/category – in the sense of the unit analysis that is to replace analysis by means of elements – of learning because it embodies change. Unawareness, latent awareness, and aware- ness are but manifestations of the whole unit. It is a true unit of learning because it is a (holistic) category of change (rather than the difference between two things). The phenomenon of becoming aware shows that there is more to learning than

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construction. There is an essentially passive dimension of learning that lies in the blind spot of constructivism with its exclusive focus on agency at the expense of passibility. Precisely because we are unaware of some thing that we will eventually be aware of, we cannot make it the object of our intention. In our world, it initially is part of the invisible that will have been an unseen only after it has entered the visible when it is seen. Even if we know that there is something that wants to be- come aware – sufficiently so that we are aware of the process without knowing what it is that wants to become aware – we still cannot do much about it, especially we cannot construct the thing or awareness thereof. Watson was looking for the structure of DNA without knowing what it was. He thus was not in the position of the person looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack. Instead, he is better thought of as someone going through the haystack looking for something that he does not know what it is or, at best, that he knows he might know when he sees it. Readers will have been many times in situations, where they were close to remem- bering something without ever getting there despite all their efforts to make this something present again. If learning were a simple matter of construction, then how the way in which we perceive something could be changed once we are told that matters are different than how these initially appeared to be. However, as described in chapter 5, even if told repeatedly by peers and teacher alike, Melissa continued to perceive a cube when tactually exploring the mystery object. In the way the physics professor re- ferred to above ‘could not help but see slopes’, Melissa could not but feel a cube. In that instance, something occurred that we might take as a lesson in (natural) pedagogy: another girl (Jane) actually comes up with a form of instruction that allows Melissa to move through a process of becoming aware that the mystery object felt differently. Whereas Melissa first touches the mystery object and then molds the clay or shows with the clay model why the mystery object is a cube dur- ing the first seven explorations, Jane demonstrates how the mystery object and its model can be felt simultaneously. When Melissa does the same using Jane’s plasti- cine model, we observe her undergoing a movement of becoming aware, which, once awareness has arrived, manifests itself in her face as surprise. A reshaping of her model follows. In this case, two movements occur simultaneously: an unper- ceiving of the mystery object as a cube and the simultaneous emergence of a rec- tangular prism. Becoming aware involves both processes: some thing or some as- pect of the ground disappears while simultaneously a figure appears. The figure itself, as object, comes with the property of representability. This is also why the object is instructable: Jane and Sylvia can endeavor to teach Melissa what to do so that she can become aware of the rectangular prismic form. In Jane’s instruction, we see what kind of pedagogies might work for teachers to assist their students more generally. For example, teachers might then think about strategies that have the potential of assisting the physicist Anne to change from seeing slopes to seeing the values of the curves. Pointing and tracing gestures may play an important role. There is a wide-open field of investigative possibilities concerning instruction that fosters becoming aware.

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The first-person study employed here provides us with a means to describe learning phenomena not accessible in other ways and, importantly, to draw conclu- sions with epistemological implications: the limits and limitations of a constructiv- ist metaphor for learning. Becoming aware may be the quintessential learning phe- nomenon – we come to be aware and know something that we had not been aware of and known before. Because of its essentially passive dimension, this learning phenomenon is not and cannot be described by means of a constructivist metaphor. The same method also underlies the next chapter dealing with the learning that arises in the encounter of illness.