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Greetings. I'm interested in the distinction David makes between “first-hand observation of objects” and “culturally embedded object or phenomena.” For me, it's important to question this distinction because it depends on a line I find more or less blurry and because I believe that the difficulty students face in engaging curiously with material they encounter has less to do with the nature of the material than with the context of the encounter.

As it happens, I studied 18th century British literature in college (at Yale in the early 1980's) because I was excited by the idea that people thought novels could be dangerous. I loved learning about the historical and critical context of the texts I read but I don’t think I was completely helpless without it, even at first, to find in the words, voices, or narratives something to wonder about, even if it were to wonder what the fuss was. It would have been inhibiting (in fact, it was) to think that only certain questions could count as relevant, that many of mine were naïve and at best preliminary, and that the only responsibility before me was to learn to ask correct ones. While I respect the goal of helping students refine their critical vocabularies, I see this as one legitimate goal among many. My sense is that students are likelier to approach reading with abundant curiosity when the pedagogical purposes inviting it are also abundant and include goals such as changing and being changed by reading and writing in and beyond (and criss-crossing) the academy. (I've been reading Howard's _Learning privilege: Lessons of power and identity in affluent schooling (Routledge, 2008); he argues that curricular openness to multiple perspectives, stories, and cultural frameworks is a useful strategy for interrupting privilege. Of course, it wouldn't make sense to assume that this justifies pedagogical free-for-all, or that it does away with any legitimate purpose for disciplinary knowledge -- merely that it makes for that cow a larger field.)

As to naturally observable phemonena, we know that we can't ever finally disentangle them from our stories of them. The activities of observation and representation engage prior knowledge, imagination, feeling and occasion new knowledge, imagination, and feeling. The things themselves are changing as are our perceptions. That sciences drawing on empirical observation discipline these complexities in various ways does not do away with them. Observation is culturally situated and mediated by language, and by my field, education. At the same time, life exceeds whatever we have, or have learned, to say about it; observation can exceed known, owned frameworks, as well.

My sense is that all or any of this might be more or less interesting to students depending on the imagined permeability of their encounter with it. In this, I am guided by Davis, Sumara, and Luce-Kapler (2000)in a book on contemporary theories of curriculum, _Engaging Minds_. The authors advocate for complex learning theories, through which, “rather than casting thought as a phenomenon that is about the world, thinking is recognized to be part of the universe. . . . [T}he universe is understood to change when a thought changes, because that thought is not merely in the universe or about the universe . . . Rather, learning is coming to be understood as a participation in the world, a co-evolution of knower and known that transforms both” (pp. 63-4).