Clifford Geertz is one of the most famous anthropologists of the 20th century. His work is truly groundbreaking and in addition, he writes very well. I was reading his essay on Balinese cockfighting and in it he talks about different types of groupings of people. One term really resonated with me, namely that of a “focused gathering”. A focused gathering is not, in Geertz’s words, vertebrate enough to be called a group and not structureless enough to be called a crowd. It is instead a ‘set of persons engrossed in a common flow of activity and relating to one another in terms of that flow. Such gatherings meet and disperse; the participants in them flucatuate; the activity that focuses them is discreet – a particulate process that reoccurs rather than a continuous one that endures. They take their form from the situation that evokes them, the floor on which they are placed…; but it is a form, and an articulate one, nonetheless’.
The reason why I find this concept so attractive is that it describes my own vision of a supportive language learning environment. Instead of the static groupings of classrooms around other people’s preconceptions about learning and learners’ needs, focused gatherings meet and collaborate based around shared interests and shared motivations. Learners’ needs change and what may be an excellent learning partner on one day may not be on another. The fluid notion of a focused gathering seems far more conducive to situated and meaningful learning. The role of the environment (whether in the form of a bricks-and-mortar school or online language support software) is to facilitate this grouping and to help materialise the agency within it. A learning community then, rather than a classroom, encouraged and supported rather than decided and directed, a marketplace of learning exchanges, rather than an auction where the highest bidder (the most vocal student, the one most liked by the teacher) gets what he wants. Learning as focused gatherings, teaching as enabling focused gatherings….maybe Clifford Geertz was onto something.
Tags: anthropology, communities, philosphy