In Deadening Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation , Shari Tishman underscores the importance of slow looking. Using an interdisciplinary lens, this engaging and informative book explores the historical foundations of dull looking, its awarding in diverse fields and strategies for educators on how all-time to implement slow looking in settings where meaningful learning is the priority. The book offers rich insights into the practice of ho-hum looking in diverse contexts and why dull looking matters in everyday life, writes Servet Altan .

Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation. Shari Tishman. Routledge. 2018.

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People in this modernistic historic period rarely slow downwards and wait around them. Cultures place then much value on doing and on progress that the wisdom and equanimity of slowing down to encounter across what 1 can view immediately is underestimated. Dull looking happens everywhere and tin oft announced every bit a passive land from the outside:

It simply means taking fourth dimension to carefully discover more than the centre can see at first glance. Slow looking happens anywhere people have a generous amount of time to observe the earth closely. Information technology is a common practice in everyday life: something we exercise when we take time to carefully examine an object, a painting in a museum, a family unit photograph or an insect on the sidewalk (viii).

The trend towards slowness may have begun before this decade when Daniel Kahneman's 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow became a bestseller, but the human action of and need for ho-hum looking runs the history of humanity. In Tedious Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation, Shari Tishman, lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Educational activity and a senior enquiry associate at Harvard Project Cipher, offers a detailed business relationship of the historical roots for wearisome looking, strategies of boring looking also every bit slow looking do in journalism, museums and schools.

Tishman takes her reader through early seventieth- to twentieth-century slow looking practices found in the works of influential thinkers and educators such as Comenius, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, Louis Agassiz, Kevin Armitage, Anna Botsford Comstock, Liberty Hyde Bailey and John Dewey. The detailed and vivid explanations provided throughout the book are accompanied by illustrations that invite readers to slow downwards and experience slow looking in their own lives. The volume consists of 9 chapters, each providing a different angle on why slow looking matters in different contexts. For this review, I focus on 3 contexts that the volume focuses on amidst others: namely, slow looking in journalism, in museums and in schools.

In Chapter Three, Tishman unwinds Paul Salopek's experiences of Out of Eden Walk as an outstanding example of slow journalism. Salopek, a reporter for National Geographic magazine, set out on a slow and very long walk on 10 January 2013. Salopek's walk began in Herto Bouri, Ethiopia, with the aim to traverse the pathways of the commencement humans who migrated out of Africa in the Rock Historic period. Along his ho-hum journeying, co-ordinate to Salopek himself, he connected with others, unpacked their stories and rediscovered some of his own:

Walking across the Earth, I take relearned the erstwhile anniversary of departures and arrivals. (Making and striking campsites, packing and unpacking rucksacks, an antique and comforting ritual.) I accept absorbed landscapes through my gustatory modality buds, by gleaning farmers' harvests. And I have reconnected with fellow man beings in ways I could never conceive every bit a reporter crisscrossing maps by jet and car. Out walking, I constantly run across people. I cannot ignore them or drive by them. I greet them. I chat with strangers five, x, twenty times a day. I am engaged in a meandering, three-mile-an-hour conversation that spans ii hemispheres. In this way walking builds a home everywhere (29).

Walking downwards a path for several hours may not ready the pulse racing for Salopek, but perhaps slowing the pulse is the whole point. Salopek'due south project includes inspiring stories for why slow looking matters and how it helps him to explore his own world and connect with others.

In Chapter V, Tishman highlights the vast opportunities museums present for practising wearisome looking. Looking for oneself is an innate knowledge-seeking behaviour, and museums provide stimuli which may provoke this equally well equally looking for museum objects. Today's museums are shaped effectually the idea of wunderkammer (meaning a cabinet of curiosities, a cabinet of wonders or a wonder room, 73) and stimulate the human impulse to curiously look for objects and reinforce responses to a work of art displayed. Whether for adults or young learners, museums are springboards for inquisitive and focused minds. Tishman encourages her readers to visit a museum to experience prolonged observation and wait for patterns of thinking for oneself and of museum objects.

In Affiliate Half-dozen, Tishman showcases the commonalities and differences betwixt museums and schools, and why slow looking matters for inquiry in education. While museums offer rich contexts for viewers to follow an unorganised pattern to serve their curiosity, schools more often than not provide an organised pattern of instruction to larn effectively. Tiresome looking lays the foundation for critical thinking and scientific inquiry as it demands that we explore what is at hand in detail and from different perspectives; ironically, withal, it appears that tedious looking may have been disregarded equally a value in full general education. Tishman criticises the lack of focus on slow looking in contemporary Western education as it mostly seeks to nurture the fast and deliberative mind. Like museums, she argues that schools should place more than emphasis on providing the environment and resources for experiential learning. These opportunities can include, but are non limited to, the experiential report of nature, such equally planting a seed and watching it abound, observing the lifecycle of a butterfly, etc.

A fundamental (and promising) premise that the book holds for us all is that slow looking is not a fixed entity. Rather it is a learned chapters and an epistemic virtue, a skill and a disposition that tin can be developed over time. Tishman asserts that there is no magic recipe for slow looking. She defines prolonged and mindful observation every bit essential ingredients for tedious looking. The book ends with a call to humanity: the more we (choose to) await, the more nosotros tin can see in this fast-forward world.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and non the position of the LSE Review of Books weblog, or of the London School of Economic science.

Prototype Credit: (Phil Roeder CC BY 2.0).

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