I want to pick up with some the points Joe raises, not only because my late post just so happens to follow his, but also because of some reflecting I've done on my own as of late. I'm just going to throw out a lot of not necessarily collected ideas and hopefully write myself into something productive.
Memory is something I've been interested in for quite some time, which probably explains why I spent two years of my life reading In Search of Lost Time. For the past year or so, I've wanted to revisit the novel, but have, understandably, found myself lacking the very thing the novel requires: time. Given a small surge in free time as of late, I've restarted the novel.
Additionally, my father is visiting for about a week, which means that we spend a lot of time reminiscing over what has been--not necessarily the "good old days," mind you, but the old days. And, as Joe points out in his post, these conversations are often spurred by objects: my father notices a picture on my wall of his holding me as an infant, which sparks recollections of coming in from second shift and staying up with me while my mother worked third shift. Or, not related to objects necessarily, having a drink on the screened porch during a rainstorm prompts my father to recall times he spent as a child at his grandmother's house. "It's amazing," he says, "that I remember it so well and I was only a child."
And this is the connection to Proust's narrator: objects do have tremendous effects on the narrator--an uneven patch of cobblestone, a Madeleine, a particular book in the library of an old friend--but these effects are sensory: the feeling of losing one's balance on the cobblestone, the taste of the Madeleine in a certain kind of tea, the feeling of seeing the images and reading the book in a particular place. One of the many themes of the book, at the most elementary level, is just that: we can recover lost time through object-interactions (transactions?). Rain felt, heard, and seen through a screen porch can transport an old man back his youth. So, memory, yes; sight-alone, no.
For me this is related to Roozen's interviews which, as Joe also points out, rely on the interviewee bringing in an object to spur recollection. Sometimes space and time between interviews helps with that. Roozen's main point seems to be that we can learn much from object-based reflective interviews that we might otherwise fail to see by, for instance, merely having participants draw their processes and surroundings (Prior and Shipka). Reading about this method is timely for me because I considered in the research proposal I just completed for research methods that Roozen's method (as outlined in earlier articles) could be useful for having students walk me through the maps that I ask them to make in class. But now I wonder if having the map is enough (or if having what seems like a "flat" map is enough). Couldn't other objects related to students' literacies be useful for mapping and a reflective interview that is aiming to learn how students compose theories of writing?
Obviously the kinds of recollections to which Proust's narrator speaks are not feasible in an interview setting. But I do wonder if a task that Yancey outlined in Reflection in the Writing Classroom might come close to inspiring this kind of reaction: Yancey writes about asking students to bring in one object associated with/representative of their literacy, and then to write 250 words about it. I wonder if this type of object-use could be helpful as students compose theories of composing. I am certain that looking to other modes could enrich this process. I have considered having students keep something like a commonplace book (print or digital) for collecting artifacts related to composing. Could this commonplace book help students to compose more robust theories and visual representations of those theories? Could this work enrich the kinds of reflective interviews that Roozen describes? Is it feasible to organize a class around this kind of work (commonplace book, concept mapping, reflective interviews/conferences with each student)?
Ultimately, I suppose I'm saying that memories are clearly an important part of the reflective process, so doesn't that warrant some kind of attention to the ways that memories are evoked, processed, and re-presented through reflection?
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