Words, Meanings, Muddles, and Social Upheavals
About 15 to 20 years ago, I started giving my students, who were aspiring elementary school teachers, a list of “banned words” for the particular course in science teaching methods. I used the word “banned” for dramatic flare, but many students took it literally, even though I discussed in the introduction the baggage attached to certain words and how we need to be very careful about using words or, in some cases, phrases. However, the reaction of some students, who took the word “banned” literally, was actually a case in point. “Banned” carries a lot of baggage, but that baggage is not the same for every person reading or hearing that word. So, in reality, I am not sure that it is at all possible to read or hear any word, phrase, or longer piece of writing and interpret that word or those words literally. And, by “literally,” I am referring to the dictionary definition or factual information contained in a word, phrase, or sentence.
But, let’s step back for a moment. Our concern here is the communication of meaning. However, even this statement has a lot more going on beneath the surface than the mere meaning of the words as defined in a dictionary.
When I say the word “communication,” what comes to mind?
Think about this for a few seconds. Do you get an image in your head of “communication.” What sorts of things immediately come to mind? Are there any particular emotions that arise when you think of “communication”?
This sort of reflective exercise is quite interesting. You can repeat this exercise with the same word, but at different times and in different contexts, and you will likely see different sorts of reactions to the word. You also can do this with a variety of words in different contexts. And, to make this exercise even more intriguing, have other people join you in examining what comes to mind when you hear or see a particular word or phrase. Versions of this sort of exercise have been used in an extensive amount of research over the past half a century or more in different settings and different cultures.[1] However, when you start playing around with this exercise, you begin to realize how variable the meanings are that are held by different people and even within yourself at different times. Of course, there are shared features of meaning among individuals, even across cultures.
In most of our communications with other people, whether that is face-to-face, in writing, by audio only, by video over the Internet, or through the arts — theater, visual arts, music, and dance, — we assume people have the same understandings of words or other representations that we do. But, this is a huge assumption, that is never entirely true. The arts are probably the most “honest” in this regard. Artists, at least most of the artists I have known or read about, do not present their artwork with this assumption, but rather with an assumption of allowing people to make connections to their own experiences and meanings through their artwork. I am no exception here. When I write or talk, I expect people to understand what I’m saying. However, my wife and friends are generally quick to remind me that they do not understand what I say. When I write poetry, which is not often enough, I have less of that expectation. And, when I present my photography as an art form, rather than as snapshots, my expectations are to arouse some sort of emotional response without the expectations of communicating a specific meaning. A recent example of a photographic exhibit of this sort was just put online a month or so ago: “A Personal Photographic Portrait of 1970’s New York City.” In putting together this exhibit, I struggled with creating thematic “chapters” or “rooms” that were not too confining or leading. I also was not concerned with selecting artistically “good” — whatever that is — photos, but rather with the feelings that could be triggered by different sets of photos. I wanted people to browse with an opportunity to feel something and connect to some piece of history.
Meaning is another complicated word and concept. The writers of dictionaries think they are providing the “meanings” of words, but such meanings are mostly devoid of context and lack the robust nature of meanings that are deeply embedded in multiple contexts. Gregory Bateson claimed that, “Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all.”[2] But, this connection between context and meaning is a matter of degree. There is a continuum from no context to deep embeddedness across multiple contexts. Dictionaries provide only minimal context.
Several decades ago, I was investigating the nature of children’s understandings of natural phenomena, objects, and organisms. As my research assistant and I started examining and categorizing excerpts of the transcripts of children’s talk, we noticed a distinctive pattern. Like with so much of Gregory Bateson’s writing, you rarely have much of an understanding of what he talks about on the first reading or until you see some manifestation of his ideas, which is exactly what happened when we started analyzing our data. In this instance during our data analysis, the pattern in children’s talk leapt out and slapped us in the face. What we saw was the manifestation of contexts of meaning.[3] There was a diversity in specific meanings along with shared specific meanings, but the more generalized types of information or features were shared among all of the students.
Over the years, I have been tweaking and expanding this notion of contexts of meaning. However, the gist of such contexts is that the general features of these cognitive contexts include:
- some dynamic intertwining of emotions, values, and aesthetics;
- memories of personal experiences;
- dynamic bits and pieces of what we might think of as school-type conceptual and factual knowledge, which may be accurate or inaccurate, or some combination of the two extremes;
- images;
- beliefs;
- social and idiosyncratic interpretive frameworks — or those almost automatic features that affect our understandings, but which are based on some combination of personal experiences, socially shared information, and so forth that submerge into unseen interpretive lenses;
- assumptions and presuppositions;
- biases;
- humor;
- maps, models, and other abstracted representations;
- relationships;
- metaphors;
- analogies;
- imaginative fantasies.
These features of contexts of meaning appear to be shared across cultural, social, and even age differences.[4] I also am beginning to see that at least some of these features are shared among dogs and other animals. Dogs certainly seem to draw on emotions, personal experiences, images (including visual, auditory, and olfactory images), certain interpretive frameworks that have developed based on their experiences, humor, certain abstracted representations, and, especially, relationships.[5]
These features of our meaning-making processes are not discrete and separate “parts.” They are features, in one sense, of our humanity or, more accurately, of our living systems. These features are deeply intertwined and interdependent upon one another. And, maybe even more importantly, they are not static and do not occur in any sort of linear fashion. For instance, we may go to work one day, whether that is a factory, a classroom, an office, or a construction site doesn’t really matter, but the way we feel, the way we interact with others, and our overall sense of the workplace context is different to one degree or another from one day to the next. We may have had an argument with some company that billed you in error just before leaving for work. Or, we may be excited about an upcoming vacation. Or, maybe your boss is being unnecessarily nasty on a certain day. Each day is different. Nothing stays the same. Even with specific concepts, the meanings associated with those concepts are undergoing more or less continual change. This is a dramatic example, but three years ago, if I asked you to talk about a particular restaurant, you would have expressed certain emotions, aesthetics, factual details, and so forth. However, if I asked you to talk about that restaurant now, you may include many of the same features and details, but there is a high likelihood the idea of eating out at a restaurant has been changed by the Covid-19 pandemic, which will be reflected in how you talk about the restaurant now. Such changes in the meanings we hold are not dependent on such dramatic circumstances, but occur all of the time as new information is taken in and as we see new relationships between ideas. The important caveat here is that what we notice in our own or others thinking and meanings is only a tiny glimpse of that meaning. We cannot fully capture the entire context of contexts of meaning. But, in that glimpse, we can get a sense of how dynamic our understandings and meanings are.
Here is an interesting exercise that may allow you to get a glimpse of your own thinking and meaning-making, as well as your child’s or a friend’s thinking and meaning-making. Select a word of your choice. It can be one of these words: flowers, spiders, Moon, money, river, or whatever. Then, take 15 to 30 minutes to write down words or phrases and/or draw everything that comes to mind when you think of this word. Avoid writing in sentences or paragraphs. What you write down can include any sort of idea, emotion, or reaction of any kind. Do not filter or judge what you write. Just let the ideas flow. — After you finish, enter a date and time on a real calendar or in your computer or phone calendar to repeat this exercise with the same word in 2 or 3 months time. When you complete the second version of this exercise, compare what you’ve written down. How are the two versions different? What kinds of things contributed to the differences?
Now that we have explored the notion of meaning a little bit, let’s return to communication. As we have seen, for any given word or idea, people have different understandings and meanings associated with that word or idea. There is a varying ratio between shared understandings and meanings and idiosyncratic understandings and meanings. When talking with others, we can never be sure what that ratio of shared to idiosyncratic meanings is or upon which set of meanings others are going to focus.
During my career as a teacher and then as teacher educator and researcher, I was bombarded with miscommunications that arose from assuming that others understood what I was talking about. It took me quite a while to realize exactly what was happening. And, it happened all of the time with colleagues. Two of the popular and related concepts in education and educational research that reached a peak in the mid-1980’s through the 1990’s were “constructivism” and “conceptual change.” Some teachers and a large number of researchers threw these terms around while assuming everyone else understood exactly what they meant. If I was a betting man, I’d put my money on the status that not one person shared the exact meanings of these terms. In fact, many people probably hold fairly divergent understandings and meanings of these words. Simply stated, constructivism is the idea that people of all ages construct knowledge.[6] The word itself communicates certain assumptions based on the static and mechanistic views suggested by “structure” and how one might build or construct some building. Most people seem to have varying meanings and understandings that spin off from these assumptions of linear notions of constructing. At the same time, there is a group of individuals who see constructivism as a dynamic, fluid, and non-linear process of meaning-making, but again with all sorts of idiosyncratic spin-offs.
In addition, the same sort of widely varying meanings are at play among people who talk about “conceptual change.” The originators of this idea developed this theory as an explanation of how big conceptual frameworks and beliefs change.[7] They based this explanation on the work of Thomas Kuhn and his explanations of scientific revolutions.[8] They intended their description of this process to help teachers and researchers understand the difficulties and issues involved in teachers’ expectations that children change strongly held big conceptions and beliefs, such as, creationism vs. evolution, many physics conceptions that use words that have contradictory meanings in everyday language, such as, force, pressure, momentum, etc. They did not intend that conceptual change be a formula for actually trying to change smaller concepts or even those big conceptions and beliefs. But, that is exactly what happened. As soon as they published their paper, researchers began trying to define sequential sets of steps to change students concepts and big conceptions. And, a large number of these efforts never addressed the ethical issues involved in trying to change someone else’s beliefs. The originators of conceptual change theory described processes of belief change that were based on any given individual’s decision to change a conception or belief. They were not suggesting that teachers or anyone else attempt to change someone’s strongly held conceptions or beliefs. In fact, they thought such efforts were not even likely to succeed.[9]
In our everyday informal conversations, in our formal conversations and talks in workplaces and other contexts, and in our informal and formal writing, we are continually “gambling” on our assumptions that others understand precisely what we are trying to communicate. I am sure all of us have had glimpses of communicative glitches, where you say something and you get a response that is quite different from what you expected. Or, you get glimpses of just the opposite, where you respond to other people and they give you a quizzical look or respond to your response in totally unexpected ways. Some of these miscommunications are due to how we perceive — hear or read — some communication. Sometimes we do not hear all of the words, so we automatically fill in the gap with another word we think might fit. At other times, our own expectations, filters, and biases change the initial information into something that aligns with these expectations, filters, and biases.
Here is another set of explorations. Play around with these and see what happens. From time to time, I will answer questions or respond to statements by referring to a different meaning of a word used in the question or statement. I’ve done this with my own students, colleagues with whom I have a closer relationship, friends, and my own children. Their reactions to my misaligned responses have varied from looks that communicate some version of “what the hell are you talking about” to expressions of perplexity and confusion. I rarely have received a chuckle. You may want to play around with this sort of thing and see what happens. In addition and in the midst of informal and formal conversations with people, stop the conversation at an appropriate place in the flow, and ask people what they think you mean when you use a certain word. Try to dig deeper into the meaning than mere dictionary-type answers. It also may be interesting to see how the meanings of a particular word differ between formal contexts and informal contexts.
In addition to the extensive variation of meanings associated with the words and phrases we use, there are certain sets of these variations that have particularly heavy emotional and belief-based “baggage.” The word “evolution” for some triggers very little emotional reactions, while for others this word triggers an intense mix of anger, fear, resentment, righteous indignation, and so forth. And, now in times of social and political upheaval, all sorts of words and phrases trigger a wide variety of emotional reactions. We have become more sensitized to everything happening around us — our sense of place, our identities, our feelings of safety and security, etc. — are all under threat. We grasp onto anything to feel more secure, which can include everything from dwelling on anger and hatred to clinging to a certain sets of beliefs or to trying to ignore what is happening while trying to maintain some sense normalcy. All of these ways of reacting to what is going on around us and to what is being communicated to us by others are fundamental strategies to help make us feel more secure and to avoid the uncertainty of life’s situations. We are living in a time period where the carpet upon which we are standing is being ripped out from under us. We don’t know what is underneath this carpet. It could be a magic carpet over an expansive cliff. It can be just plain frightening.
And, some people are taking advantage of the heightened emotional sensitivity. Rational arguments are no longer effective at addressing our contexts of meaning. People, mostly politicians, big corporate entities, and reactionary groups, have figured out how to continue manipulating people. That avenue to manipulation is through the emotions. They can bypass reasoning and tap into the power of emotions while resonating with personal experiences that further heighten the emotional intensity. Politicians are particularly good at using this strategy, especially rightwing politicians around the world. Leftwing politicians still seem stuck on the power of reasoning and are failing miserably at tapping into even a different set of emotions. The Right is playing off of fear and hatred, two very powerful emotions. The Left could, but do not, tap into more positive emotions associated with love, caring, empathy, and even a positive twist to fear — fear of losing our ways of life, fear of the increasing devastation of climate changes and disease. Notice how the Right does not address the fear of devastation and disease, because the way to address these is not with hatred and anger, but with caring and empathy.
We can destroy living systems rather easily through killing individual living systems or introducing and promoting activities that will destroy social and ecological systems. Such actions are actually quite easy to do. It is much more difficult to “fix” a living system that is veering off into destructive patterns or even to live in ways that do not disrupt viable social and ecological systems. In fact, trying to fix a living system with one linear and usually technological solution usually results in unexpected and unwanted ways that may be even more problematic. What we need to do is to work together in ways that set up contexts that allow for living systems to re-set themselves. Some of the ways each of us can begin to create such contexts is to start communicating with one another in ways that are both clearly meaningful and warmly human. We need to be careful about assuming that others understand the words and phrases we use. We need to be careful about the emotional baggage that our words carry. We need to be aware of the complexity and changeability of meaning in ourselves and others. We need to communicate the meanings we hold as a way to connect to our shared humanity. We need to try to manifest, to “be,” the qualities of our deeply human contexts of meaning, while trying to pacify the negative emotions of hatred and focus on caring and compassion. If we continue focusing of our hatred and even dislikes of others, we will only play into the divisiveness that will destroy our social and ecological systems.
FOOTNOTES
[1] ••• Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. New York: Cambridge University Press. ••• Winner, E. (1988). The point of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ••• Macnamara, J. (1984). Names for things. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ••• Lemke, J. L. (1995). Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics. New York: Taylor & Francis. ••• Gee, J. P. (1990). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. New York: Routledge.
[2] Page 14 in Bateson, G. (2002). Mind and nature: A necessary unity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
[3] ••• Bloom, J. W. (1990). Contexts of meaning: Young children’s understanding of biological phenomena. International Journal of Science Education, 12(5), 549–561. ••• Bloom, J. (1992). The development of scientific knowledge in elementary school children: A context of meaning perspective. Science Education, 76(4), 399–413. ••• Bloom, J. W. (1992). Contexts of meaning and conceptual integration: How children understand and learn. In R. A. Duschl & R. J. Hamilton (Eds.), Philosophy of science, cognitive psychology, and educational theory and practice (pp. 177–194). State University New York Press.
[4] ••• Bloom, J. W. (2006). Creating a classroom community of young scientists (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. ••• From research conducted in collaboration with Jayashree Ramadas, Chitra Natarajan, Sugra Chunawala, et al., Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Mumbai, March, 1994. ••• Bloom, J. W., & Dagher, Z. (1993, April). The meaning children attach to the notion of Earth and life on Earth: A comparative study between North American and Lebanese children. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, Atlanta.
[5] ••• Bloom, J. W. (2021, July). The dynamics of meaning expression and communication among people, dogs, and other creatures. Paper presented at the 2021 Biosemiotics Gathering, Stockholm, Sweden (and on Zoom). ••• Bloom, J. (2021). Learning about relationships and more from my canine teacher. Medium. November 29.
[6] A few of the huge number of resources on constructivism: ••• Steffe, L. P., & Gale, J. (Eds.). (1995). Constructivism in Education. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbuam. ••• von Glasersfeld, E. (1995). Radical constructivism. New York: Routledge. ••• Vygotsky, L. (1962). Thought and language (E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[7] Posner, G. J., Strike, K. A., Hewson, P. W., & Gertzog, W. A. (1982). Accommodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change. Science Education, 66(2), 211–227.
[8] Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd, enlarged ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[9] ••• From numerous conversations with George Posner between 1988 to 1998. ••• Posner, G. J., Strike, K. A., Hewson, P. W., & Gertzog, W. A. (1982). Accommodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change. Science Education, 66(2), 211–227.
