stage-continuum flexibility • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Project	a philological sense of Our evolving

	stage-continuum flexibility gary e. davis	September 26, 2024

But I don’t mean to be elitist: Everybody’s at a stage of development which deserves due regard for its own integrity, its authentic era-ness of individuation, its ecosphere of understanding with implicate ecology, such that student work is evaluated relative to one’s demonstrated advancement of understanding, not relative to model emulation (e.g., mirroring teacher views or showing high fidelity to sources).

Scholarly competence which is not especially exemplary nevertheless earned entitlement for public availability, because one’s learning curve shows authentic engagement and integrity at a level which can be useful to others.

Leading minds are rare, and there is genuine need in the academic business for competent “instructors” to fill budgeted staffing levels. Thus, publishing only needs to be competent, and “teaching” only needs to be cogent presentation. We wish for better, but have to be reconciled to available resources.

No professor grades students relative to the professor’s own stage of develop-
ment. No peer reviewer expects a paper in their specialty to exemplify their own degree of specialization.

Clearly, developmental variability, all around—levels of student background, levels of scholarly sophistication—calls for sensitivity to degrees of exemplarity.

The tropical condition of exemplarity—the degreed reality of it all—is closely related to developmental differences “calling” for flexibility in receptiveness and responsiveness.

Interaction and analysis of interaction, discourse and analysis of discourse, which is insensitive to developmental differences can never be exemplary, let alone appeal to a degree which brings new talent into one’s specialty.

Nonetheless, the appeal of there being exemplars deserves to orient inquiry, learning, creativity, and resultant work. We need the models, the ideals, and the elusive appeal of exemplars. Mysteries of how leading minds may be brought into interplay may lead to new kinds of inquiry, creativity, discourse, and teaching which may be more or less exemplary.

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