Bryant Griffith

Reframing Common Discourse Bryant Griffith

We live immersed in what appears to be a paradox between coherence and complexity. It is the gap between the modern presuppositions we largely live by and the emerging presuppositions we are testing which makes this seem chaotic. It is the pull of the individual and the collective and their multi-layered discourses. Your role as a teacher, as the one who crafts the magic of knowing, is to be the auteur, the author, the director, the conductor, who understands where the students are situated and inspires them to levels of understanding where they become the experts. You need to be the listener and the one to guide constructively the path which knits emerging personal meaning with understanding and shared knowledge. The outcome will be a text which you have never read, a piece of music you have never heard, and a portrait you have never seen. This is the collective voice of common discourse, and it is limitless. The groundwork for a common discourse, I suggest, lies in as-ifing, making meaning of a series of multiple possibilities. Each of us has been brought up in a society with a set of relative presuppositions about the way things work and what things mean. We can acknowledge different voices by thinking of them as a series of small cautionary tales, related to us and by us about the way things might be.