Our Sympathies, Our Human Empathy
As Jack was writing the first part of the note below I e-mailed him to
suggest that we make a joint contribution to the e-seminar. He agreed, so
the first part of the note is from Jack, the second part is from me, and
the third part is from both of us:
From Jack
Yesterday was full of complex emotions. My son Jonathan works in the
centre of London and uses the tube to go to work. I’d taken Joan, his
wife, down to Bath station for the 7.40 Paddington train and knew that
she would be crossing London when I saw the news of the bombings at 10.00.
The family network of phones helped to check that they were OK. My
thoughts turned to the families and friends of the bereaved and injured
and of the injured themselves. Pat, your signature of Love in Mindfulness,
and Jane your thoughts and question: "there must be a better way to
communicate than through the destruction of life - it is our collective
failure to do sothat results in events such as this - how on earth can we
improve things?", resonate with me.
In the afternoon I showed Moira, the letter and three video clips from
Branko's posting of the 3rd July on Evidence of my educational influence
at:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0507&L=bera-practitioner-
researcher&T=0&F=&S=&X=58C7CF59007C613544&Y=edsajw%40bath.ac.uk&P=1225
The contrast between the hope and admiration we both felt in seeing the
quality of education that carries hope for the future of humanity, and our
own, and the distress on seeing the injured being cared for, from the bomb
sites, can be imagined. With the stark contrasts between these images and
understandings of both their implications for the future of humanity, I
wondered how they might be connected in our seminar in a way that could
enhance the flow of values and insights from the video-clips and note from
Branko.
Here is my first attempt to connect them, bearing in mind Peter's notes
about the start of the review process - a start that will hopefully help
us to inform our enquiries after the 23 July.
I think that similar points can be made about the creativity and
understanding of action research being shown by Vesna Smic, Marica Zovko,
Branko and the students and the creative and understandings being shown by
Kathryn Yeaman in her account of Creating Educative Dialogue in an Infant
Classroom at:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/module/kathy.htm
What the video-clips together with the commentary that forms the visual
narrative show me is a living understanding of inclusionality in which
everyone is working to improve their own learning and to help others
improve theirs. There is also the artistry of the educators in helping the
expression of freedom to create and co-create, together with the
importance of checking the validity of one's own beliefs. I feel certain -
this surprises me because I am not certain about very much in life - that
if we could help to enhance the flow of these values and understandings
into the world, the world would be a better place. Yet, given the
conditions of globalization and terror with which we are living, these
values and understandings appear to me to be necessary but not sufficient
to move the world to a better place.
From Yaqub
I share Jack's thoughts for the bereaved and injured and their loved ones.
I am a Muslim and not a terrorist. One of the names of God (Allah)
is 'love'. I have more than 100 dissertation supervisions since 1995 that
are joint human productions of an educational peace (salaam) and love
carried in my supervision in a multiracial, multifaith's Britain. I like
to share my students’ work on my web-site at:
http://www.rac.ac.uk/~paul_murray/default.htm
In listening to ex-New York Mayor Giuliani yesterday I could understand
the sentiment of , 'We can't let the terrorists wreck our lives - we must
go on', even if I could not empathise with it. I found myself wondering if
there was space in his response for the kind of inclusive human standard
of judgement I propose for a postcolonial critical pedagogy. Of course, we
can 'go on' after this, as we did before, without growth in our
understandings of the nature of the ideology and humiliation that is
driving the bombers and those who advocate terrorism. ‘Going on’ will
achieve inclusion. The particular syntax of 'we can't let the terrorists
wreck our lives' locks us into a permanent 'war footing' with Islam and
the Arab world. Instead we need democratic colloquia for human growth.
Together we could find ways to 'grow on', not merely 'go on', in ways that
express our loyalty to humanity. Don’t we need to continue to find
dialogue like Dan Bar On and Sami Adwan are doing with bereaved
Palestinian and Israeli parents? In this BERA e-seminar I am wondering if
we could explore educational standards of judgement that encourage us to
use a language of verbs and nouns. Critical theory requires critical
language, and a critical syntax is one of action and description. Does
anyone already have, or could we develop, a pedagogy and theorising that
includes a 'doing' language that helps us to 'see' what the world does to
us, and what we (can) do in the world, rather than reinforcing an
exhausted language of nouns that describe the 'new world order' but do not
stimulate growth inherent in talking about how to teach against global
capitalism and the new world order?
I am worried by rhetoric, such as that I heard from Blair, Bush and
Giuliani yesterday, that does not satisfy what I call 'convivencia
validity'. There is no hope in the language of 'us and them' that comes
straight out of the logic of the excluded middle, as Alan reminds us. As
Jack was worrying about Joan travelling across London because of her
exposure to the life-threatening bombing, so my mind was turning to the
dangers for Asma, my wife, and Hassan and Hussam, my sons, as they walk in
the West at a time when to be black and Muslim is shorthand
for 'terrorist'. Jane's wisdom that we are collectively responsible, to be
held to account collectively in our loyalty to humanity, and our failures
of imagination in this regard, truly resonates. Jane's words migrate
across all borders.
From Yaqub and Jack
As we look at the above contributions to this letter we are conscious that
the (postmodern) conditions we are living with include globalisation and
terrorism, and that we must take these into account by avoiding naïve and
simplistic analyses in our work. The way we are trying to do this is by
combining insights from my (Yaqub’s) understandings of postcolonial
critical pedagogy and scarification, Boudrillard's ideas of symbolic
exchange, obligation and humiliation, and Rayner’s idea of inclusionality.
The gradual transformation of our early naïve and simplistic
understandings of years ago hasn’t been easy. We have both coped with
feelings of intimidation that accompanied our feelings of non-
understanding as we faced a complex text. We are pleased we persevered in
understanding these complex ideas because they have contributed to the
growth of our educational knowledge. In analysing the conditions in which
we are living and working we are using Baudrillard's insight:
"Only an analysis that emphasizes the logic of symbolic obligation can
make sense of this confrontation between the global and the singular. To
understand the hatred of the rest of the world against the West,
perspectives must be reversed. The hatred of non-Western people is not
based on the fact that the West stole everything from them and never gave
anything back. Rather, it is based on the fact that they received
everything, but were never allowed to give anything back. This hatred is
not caused by dispossession or exploitation, but rather by humiliation.
And this is precisely the kind of hatred that explains the September 11
terrorist attacks. These were acts of humiliation responding to another
humiliation."
Baudrillard, J. (2003) The Violence of the Global. Translated by Francois
Debrix. Retrieved 21 June 2005 from http:/;
http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=385Initially published as "La
Violence du Mondial," in Jean Baudrillard, Power Inferno (Paris: Galilée,
2002), pp. 63-83.
We are integrating Baudrillard's insight in our use of Yaqub's
understandings that a postcolonial critical pedagogy is vital to the
expression of a loyalty to humanity (after Ignatiev, N. (1997), The Point
Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To Abolish It. Retrieved 17 May 2005
from http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html
So, in making our contribution to this review process, our judgements on
our explanations of our own educational influences in our own learning, in
the learning of others and in the education of social formations, will
include these insights in a way that we hope you experience as inclusional.
Love Yaqub and Jack.
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