How to write a reflection on readings in this course: Find two or three 'stops' and write about them, and then end with a question!

 When we are reading, and especially when reading academic writing, there are often places where we can't continue to read smoothly through. It may be that a phrase, sentence or paragraph is densely written or hard to understand at first reading. Sometimes we have to stop to look up a word or an idea. Other times, something is so beautiful or speaks to us so deeply that we need to reread it -- or perhaps it is so irritating or enraging, or so much against what we know or believe to be true that we need to rail against it!

Sometimes the reading reminds us strongly of a personal past experience, or a film, or game, or another reading or story, and we need to stop to explore the connections. Sometimes a particular quote from the writing strikes us with its appropriateness (or the opposite!)

Sometimes there is something that seems to be disconnected from the rest of the writing, and we need to stop to figure out why it might be there.

There might be things that send us to find the author's bio, to try to figure out why they are so interested in something, or why they express things in a certain way.

Any of these, and more, can be considered a 'stop', and these are the things to take notice of in the readings. Your written blog reflections can be based around your 'stops' as you read... and since your reading group members will be responding, please leave them with a question or two at the end to help them get started in commenting!

David Appelbaum, The Stop (1995)




A "stop" is something that stops you (in your reading, in your observations, in your teaching/ learning). The metaphor is suddenly coming across a big rock in your path that stops you from smooth and continuous (and unconscious) walking. It must be attended to. It is a moment that allows for an opening to new paths, new ideas, new approaches if you are able to give it the attention it demands.

A stop in your reading might be something you didn't expect -- something confusing, or difficult, or exceptionally beautiful, or something you strongly agree or disagree with, or an unknown word or phrase. A stop touches you deeply in some way (by irritating, or moving, or perplexing you, for example).

The stops allow for a change of heart, a change of mind, a political and/or intellectual engagement, a reconsideration of strategy, or even a reconsideration of world view.

From Lynn Fels, "Coming into presence: The unfolding of a moment" (Journal of Educational Controversy):

"A stop is a calling to attention; a coming to the crossroads, in which a choice of action or direction must be taken, oft-times blindly, as experienced by Appelbaum’s (1995) blind man as he tap-taps the obstacles he encounters with his white cane—there are as yet unknown consequences of the subsequent action or decision as yet to be taken and embodied.

Between closing and beginning lives a gap, a caesura, a discontinuity.

The betweenness is a hinge that belongs to neither one nor the other.

It is neither poised nor unpoised, yet moves both ways . . .

It is the stop. (Applebaum, 1995, pp. 15-16)

A stop is a moment that tugs on our sleeve, a moment that arrests our habits of engagement, a moment within which horizons shift, and we experience our situation anew. A stop occurs when we come to see or experience things, events, or relationships from a different perspective or understanding; a stop is a moment that calls us to mindful awareness of Arendt’s appeal for renewal through action in the gap between past and future.

How we choose to respond and how that choice of action or non-action impacts on our lives and on the lives of those around us speaks to the risk, the opportunity, to the possibility of action. As media philosophers Taylor and Saarinen (1994) remind us, in spaces as familiar as the London tube, or as unmapped as cyberspace, we must “mind the gap” (p. 5). Applebaum’s moments of stop are moments that call our attention to the gap; moments that interrupt, that provoke new questioning, that evoke response, reflection, and hopefully, lead to meaningful and moral action."

Thomas Kuhn made the argument that scientific knowledge is advanced in small increments within a particular worldview or paradigm, but makes the great leaps through revolutionary paradigm shifts. These shifts involve the equivalent of 'the stop': an anomaly that is taken up as an invitation to a new coming-to-consciousness:

"Scientific development depends in part on a process of non-incremental or revolutionary change. Some revolutions are large, like those associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, or Darwin, but most are much smaller, like the discovery of oxygen or the planet Uranus. The usual prelude to changes of this sort is, I believed, the awareness of anomaly, of an occurrence or set of occurrences that does not fit existing ways of ordering phenomena. The changes that result therefore require 'putting on a different kind of thinking-cap', one that renders the anomalous lawlike but that, in the process, also transforms the order exhibited by some other phenomena, previously unproblematic. "