Our LL room is large and dimly lit. We’re reading the King Arthur graphic novel together, projected large enough that the panels feel almost cinematic, and twenty fourteen-year-olds are leaned in toward the image of Merlin pointing at the water. A hand emerges from the dark lake. It’s holding a sword.
“Do you know this sword?” I ask. “It’s very famous.”
Twenty pairs of eyes shift toward me in unison, the way a flock turns mid-air without anyone giving the signal.
“It’s called Excalibur.”
“Excalibur!” They scream it. They laugh. The room breaks into excited chatter that has nothing to do with anything I said next, and for a moment I just stand there, genuinely unsure what had resonated so resoundingly with this particular group of Japanese teenagers and a sword pulled from a lake in a story that, on paper, belongs to none of their cultural inheritance.
I still don’t fully know what landed in that moment. Some of it is probably anime, or manga, or the dozens of RPGs in which Excalibur shows up reforged into yet another protagonist’s blade. But the not-knowing is, I think, the more honest place to start, because it gets at something I didn’t expect to be teaching that day: that the meaning those students made of Excalibur was never going to be the meaning I’d prepared to give them, and that this was not a failure of the lesson plan.
On Constructivism,
There’s a useful distinction buried in Catherine Fosnot’s writing on constructivism, the kind of line that sounds modest until you sit with it: validity, in our experiential world, is simply not the same thing as truth in the philosopher’s absolute sense. What I’d planned to teach was a fairly tidy symbolic reading, Excalibur as Arthur’s soul made visible, the sword as divine right given material form, something I could scaffold for them rather than ask them to extract on their own. What actually happened in the room was something else entirely, built not from my framing but from whatever each of those twenty students had already absorbed from a screen or a manga panel long before I ever projected Merlin onto a wall. Fosnot’s point, the one that took me longer than it should have to actually believe, is that meaning isn’t handed over intact. It’s constructed inside the constraints of whoever’s receiving it, which means that even when the stimulus is identical, even when it’s the same panel and the same projector and the same slightly ugly Arthurian linework, twenty different histories are doing twenty different kinds of work on it.
This is, I think, where the philosophical problem of other minds quietly slips into the classroom without anyone noticing. I can see the laughter. I can see the eyes shifting in unison. What I cannot see is what’s actually happening behind any of those twenty faces, which sword from which game or which show is doing the resonating, and so the question of whether we’re all sharing knowledge of Excalibur, or whether we’re each holding a private and untranslatable version of it, starts to feel less like an abstraction and more like the actual condition of teaching anything to anyone. The shift constructivism offers here isn’t an answer to that unknowability so much as a redirection away from it: instead of trying to access what’s happening inside each student, you watch what happens between the student and the room, the screen, the story, the moment of contact. Meaning isn’t sitting inside any one of us, waiting to be confirmed. It’s happening in the space between agent and environment, which is a less comforting place to locate knowledge but probably a more honest one.
The act of symbolic representation,
I think about Fosnot’s other claim, too, the one about representation being the thing that makes us human, the capacity to hold something internally and manipulate it into a shape that can be shared. A sword pulled from a lake is, after all, only ink on a page, and yet twenty teenagers turned it into something with enough weight to make them shout. Whatever they were doing in that moment of recognition wasn’t passive reception. It was active, symbolic, collective, the kind of shared meaning-making that J. Angelo Corlett gestures toward when he describes groups of people as capable of holding coordinated beliefs together rather than simply existing as a pile of separate minds. Twenty students laughing at the same word were not twenty isolated transactions. They were, briefly, something more like a single cognitive event, stitched together by a sword none of them had any business knowing and all of them somehow did.
What Excalibur taught me,
I don’t think I taught them what Excalibur means that day, not really, not in the way I’d planned to. I think what I actually witnessed was something closer to what happens whenever a second language gets handed to a learner: not a vessel being filled with correct content, but an old schema reaching out and absorbing something new into a shape no curriculum could have predicted. We talk often, in language education, about transmission, as though fluency were a parcel passed hand to hand until it arrives intact. But the room with the dim lights and the projected sword suggests something messier and, I think, more true: that knowing a language, like knowing anything, is built rather than received, and the building never quite resembles the blueprint.
Twenty pairs of eyes are still, in my memory, shifting toward me in unison. I still don’t know exactly what they saw. I’m no longer sure that not knowing is the problem.