This blog insists on opening in the old format - on the last posting of last year- even though I have switched it over to the new Googlized Blogger. — my fault for not following procedures properly.
Sometime I will sort it out hopefully.
Today's thought:
What if we took seriously Gadamer's notion that translation is the paradigm of understanding, not a marginal or extreme version of understanding. And what if we took this pedagogically, not just philosophically. In other words, what if we took seriously that academic learning is always a 'contact zone' between different languages, registers, domains of life, ... ?
We would then design assessment tasks that ask for translation into other languages, idioms, registers, media. Instead of just working with a blunt opposition between 'the language of the discipline and its exponents' (our langauge) and the 'own words' of the student, an opposition that is paralysing for many students.
I believe these would be much more fruitful tasks for fostering understanding, and even for assessing understanding. They would also be much more manageable and rationally achievable tasks for students. And interesting, challenging, useful, and relevant, ....
What do you think?
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