Abstract
Life generally, and school life specifically, is essentially dramatic. We never quite know what is happening next. This makes it necessary to theorize psychology in ways that the unforeseen may occur at any instant. Some of psychologists and philosophers that I am drawing throughout this book have recognized this need and therefore introduced in their theories the continued emergence, novelty, and creativity of passage and in the specious present. In Chap. 11, I provide a quotation stating the philosophical insight that we have no means of knowing the human body other than that of living it, which also means taking up on our own accounts the dramas that play themselves out in it and losing ourselves in it (Merleau-Ponty 1945). If mind and body are one, then psychologists may just as well theorize relevant educational phenomena in terms of drama that play themselves out in the body. I begin with an account of an event in my own teaching experience, which was dramatic in the common understanding of the term.
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Notes
- 1.
New research suggests that the focus on the internal and internalization arises from a preoccupation of Western psychologists, who have imposed their own theoretical predilection on their rendering of the works of Vygotsky, in whose works the terms internalization and interiorization actually occur very infrequently (Yasnitsky 2019).
- 2.
Recent research characterized the notion as a buzzword and metaphor, which Western scholar adopted from Vygotsky but used for their own intentions and without a clear theoretical framework (Yasnitsky 2019).
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Roth, WM. (2019). Dramatic Psychology. In: Transactional Psychology of Education. Cultural Psychology of Education, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04242-4_12
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