reflective blog post (IV)
The introductory session for the PGCert, lead by Lindsay Jordan, took place in a rectangular, long room, with a presentation screen on one end, and a passage for walking past rows of student desks along the long edge of the room — meaning, if Lindsay was to remain at the front of the room (where the presentation screen was located) she would be situated rather far away from students sat towards the back of the room. Acknowledging this challenge, Lindsay casually remarked that the PGCert team sometimes discuss two modes of delivery, asking:
“Will you be the sage on the stage, or the guide on the side?”
Upon encountering the word ‘sage’, I couldn’t help but think about Marshall McLuhan’s brilliant and aphoristic book, The Medium is the Massage, (1967) which is famous (in part) for the way that spelling mistakes are embraced both inside and outside the book. The book describes the influence of media on our consciousness, on our bodies, and even our relationship to knowledge:
I’ve always admired the quote, “Now all the world’s a sage,”1 (a play on Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “all the world’s a stage”, or indeed, an extremely meta spelling mistake), as I am interested in the performative nature of acquiring, defining, and exercising wisdom.
With this in mind, if we (the learners) are to define the word ‘sage’ in Lindsay’s question as a merely performative signifier for knowledge, I wonder if a shift in power dynamic and autonomy of learning could be achieved.
- McLuhan, M & Fiore, Q (1967) The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Penguin Books p.14 ↩︎