Ethics Afield

And now, at last, the conclusion to “Practices and Practicing in Human Moral Development.”

VI. Postscript on the Practice of Mimetic Pedagogy

So much for the formal conclusions of this brief investigation of human moral development through the lens provided by Merlin Donald. Questions remain, of course, especially concerning how a “mimetic pedagogy” might actually work in a college classroom. This postscript will provide some initial sketches for a mimetic pedagogy, to be developed further in other contexts.

Because it is bound up in modes of cognition prior to language, mimetic pedagogy is bound to be somewhat elusive: talking about mimesis, or spinning theories about it, is already a step or two removed from mimetic cognition itself! The thing will be not just to talk or write about mimetic cognition but to engage in it, to develop it through practice.

A notable point in Donald’s account is that pedagogy as such arises within mimetic culture. Even without language, a teacher may demonstrate or model a particular process or technique (e.g., properly knapping a stone hand-axe), or the limits of what is acceptable in social relationships. By perceiving intentions, and by imitating and rehearsing, the student may thus be inducted into shared ways of doing things and into the shared meanings and expectations of social life within a community. Donald (1991) goes so far as to suggest that a teacher in mimetic culture would need to perceive the cognitive capabilities of the students, the limits of what they can learn at their current stage of development. He connects this suggestion with Vygotsky’s (1978) account of the “zone of proximal development,” an estimate of what is cognitively within reach of a given student at a given time, an estimate which may inform the practices of teaching and learning.

The most immediate point of contact with mimetic cognition, then, might be with the concrete practices of a university classroom, even down to the arrangement and orientation of furniture, with its implications for the social relationships and lines of authority among the participants. In a classroom devoted to instruction in practical ethics, there may be shared practices of discussion and deliberation, and expectations regarding emotional expression, the dynamic of assertiveness and deference, and social status, all expressed through prosody and tone, gesture, and relative position within the classroom. With more or less awareness and intention, the teacher will model the nonverbal practices appropriate – or not – to the task at hand.

Beyond the classroom, learning practical ethics is in part an induction into shared practices in particular social domains, perhaps most notably within professions. Formation as a professional requires tuning in to the shared expectations of a community of practitioners, only some of which are captured in explicit codes of ethics. In addition to explicit, written “standards of practice,” there are more subtle expectations for behavior, expressions of relationship and authority, and perception of the diverging intentions among people in different social roles (e.g., professional/client or professional/manger), and even modes of dress.

More concretely, in the classroom, teachers of practical ethics might contrive myriad ways of drawing students’ attention to the many aspects of tuning in to concrete social situations without a word being uttered.

One approach might be to bracket off narrative and theoretical cognition as much as possible in experiencing and responding to a problem situation. It might be revealing, for example, to have students watch a dramatization of an ethically fraught situation with the sound turned off, to see how much they can infer about the relationships and the stakes of the situation just from the expressions, gestures and concrete actions of those involved. Likewise, they might watch the dramatization of such a situation that includes the prosody of spoken language – the musical cadence and projection of verbal expression – without recognizable words.

A further elaboration would be to ask students to resolve a concrete practical problem that requires cooperation, but forbid them to speak or to resort to gestures that make use of or reference to symbolic language (e.g., sign language, or the “sounds like” convention in the game of charades).

Less dramatically, case studies and more open-ended problem situations offered to students for their consideration could be made as rich as possible in the mimetic aspects of the social situations involved. This can be accomplished through effective storytelling, but role-playing scenarios, simulations and some kinds of games could also serve to immerse students in the rhythm and the prosody of interaction, and to the dynamics of awareness and responsiveness as they unfold in real time.

When students develop options for responding to concrete problem situations, they could be encouraged – or required – to make those options as concrete and detailed as possible, a series of specific tasks to be carried out, rather than broad, abstract aspirations regarding the best outcome. For example, imagine the story of a problem situation that ends with an engineer talking on the phone to a contractor, with much depending on what the engineer does or says next. A well-framed, concrete option for responding to that situation would have to begin by specifying what the engineer should do with the phone – hang up or keep talking? – with attention to the nonverbal meaning of each of those gestures in that social context.

The crux of the matter is that such exercises in mimetic cognition provide opportunities for students to rehearse various aspects of mature moral practice through trial and error. To be more precise, students would be drawn into an iterative process of attending and responding to situations in imagination or in role-play, with guided opportunities for reflection, self-assessment, adjustment, and adjustment between iterations.

Introducing practice exercises into the classroom involves breaking up the complexity of mature moral practice into phases or components, isolating specific tasks or skills for focused rehearsal. A direct analogy with this approach would be the use of scales, arpeggios and other exercises as the foundation for mature musical practice; another would be with the use of targeted drills to develop and to refine control of specific muscle groups in athletic training. Examples of ethical “muscle groups” could including dealing with the push and pull of emotions; perceiving the unspoken intentions of others; seeing a situation from different points of view, including those points of view associated with defined roles (e.g., engineers v. managers); and the importance of timing.

These and other pedagogical tools would themselves need to be developed and refined – and incorporated into the practice of teaching ethics – through an iterative process of trial and error.

References

Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Harvard University Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (M. Cole, v. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds.). Harvard University Press.