It’s early October and you’re looking at a sizeable pile of seasoned logs, pre-sawn to 12-15″ lengths. Your chore is to render the logs into serviceable firewood with winter approaching. You have a choice: you could do another round of sawing the logs into shorter lengths or you can balance individual logs on a flat surface and ‘have at’ each log with a sharp splitting axe or maul. 

Each method will reduce the size of the log to a desired smaller size but one method uses mass (axe) and gravity to work ‘with’ the existing character – the grain – of the log (wood) to produce uniquely distinct ‘splits’ of variable sizes. The grain of the wood is irrelevant to the other, industrial method of additional sawing that produces near-identical lengths.

Anthropologist-author Tim Ingold posits this analogy to emphasize a difference between two important prepositional differences: between working ‘with’ the natural cant of something versus working ‘against’ natural inclination. Here’s how he describes this (Ingold, 2024): 

compare cutting a log with a saw and splitting it with an axe. In the first case, you impose a system of fixed intervals upon the raw material of timber. Having cut the log into lengths, you can count them up. But in the second case, with the axe, you enter into the grain and follow a line of growth– a line incorporated into the timber when it was a living tree, growing in the ground. With cutting, you divide from the outside; with splitting you differentiate from the inside. Splitting, in short, is a process of what I call “interstitial differentiation”. 

I consider Ingold’s analogy simple yet profound, and well-suited to be applied to education, and the praxis of schooling, especially. One of the methods proffered above, sawing against the grain, is akin to imposing a curriculum in a classroom; it is a method externally imposed on a body regardless of internal differentiation, as Ingold describes. That differentiation would reveal the unique grain – the idiosyncratic characteristics – of each student. A ‘going with’ process implies following the personal, unique inclination of each student. 

Personalized or personalizing learning recognizes and works ‘with the grain’ of each living student. I have been an educator orienting my pedagogical relating to my students, young and older, in this way for close to 35 years, with young children as well as graduate students. Working with the grain, to me, means seeking to understand, to some degree, the unique dispositions and interests (the ‘grain’) of each student and modifying my approach to supporting their learning interests. No matter the age or background of my students, personalized learning yields results and internal satisfaction for students that extends into the horizon of lifelong learning, something that is rare – much rarer – than when imposing curriculum and externally-determined learning standards. 

As an experienced wood-chopper, I find it easier and more satisfying to work through a log-pile with a splitting axe than a saw, just as I find personalizing learning easier and more satisfying than imposing an externally-defined curriculum.

Reference cited:

Ingold, Tim (2024): How to imagine a sustainable world, Acta Borealia, 41:1, 7-15, DOI: 10.1080/08003831.2024.2334163