A few days ago, Steve Greenlaw sent me to Will Richardson’s excellent PowerPoint presentation on new Internet literacies in the Web 2.0 world. As is often the case with me these days, I’m just now moving from skimming to perusing. (Often this move accompanies a desire to procrastinate on some other job–but I digress.) The presentation is excellent, hitting all the right bases, pressing all the right emphases, when all of a sudden the bright line shines as I read this slide:

“Natives need immigrants.”

In one sentence, Will articulates something so profound that my head spins (and my heart leaps up). Digital natives, those who have grown up in the Web, need the strategies of defamiliarization, wonder, and revision that only an immigrant can bring. An immigrant, not an outsider: those who emigrate are committed to a new culture, but they also have a “beginner’s mind” that allow them to see gaps and tensions and undiscovered treasures that the native’s mind has long been accustomed to filling in, dismissing, or overlooking.

Now this metaphor leads us into even deeper waters. One of the things education must convey to students is the ability to make oneself an immigrant, to step back and defamiliarize the context in which one operates, but use that defamiliarization not as a gesture or location of cool, critical, detached, and potentially arrogant superiority (which is why I like Shklovsky better than Brecht and the verfremdungseffekt) but as a stage on the journey to even greater intimacy, community, collaboration, and effectiveness. Perhaps I am unfair to Brecht, but the role of the affections in his thought has never been clear to me.

The Russian formalists, including Victor Shklovsky (cited above), articulate not only a theory of art but one pole of the educational continuum: to “make the stone stonier,” as my friend Terryl Givens was so fond of quoting. Or to pull another Shklovsky quotation from the Wikipedia article:

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.

I do not accept Shklovsky’s remarks as definitive of art, mostly because I believe art can convey knowledge, not just perception. Or maybe it’s that I believe communicated perception is a form of knowledge. But I do think that a move toward defamiliarization, an unknowing, is always a part of what we feebly call “critical thinking.”

Not just skepticism in its usual connotations, for ardent commitment has its own defamiliarization to offer as well. Or as Van Morrison once sang, “I’m just a stranger in this world.”