Dear Marie,

Thank you. I feel in very strong accord with all you say here and think you
have expressed it beautifully.

It strikes me as relevant in this context to attach* Chapter 4 from
'Inclusional Nature'. This includes a section on 'neoteny' - the creativity
of children and child-like and how this may be acknolwedged and drawn out -
as well as a description of the evolution of my 'Life, Environment and
People' course, based on my understanding of the fundamental nature of
evolutionary creativity through 'natural inclusion'. Essentially I have
tried to develop this course as an exemplar of 'education for diversity',
which brings out varied talents, by contrast with 'education for
monoculture', which takes a very partial (in all senses of that word) view
of 'giftedness'.

You have seen some of the extraordinary artwork produced by students
studying this course, and Jack has this recorded on film. Perhaps it might
be apt for you, Jack, to share some of this imagery with the group?

Warmest


Alan


*I am pasting it in below, as the server won't accept it as an attachment.

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Keep on Rolling: Dynamic Indeterminacy

To Coin an Evolutionary Phrase: Contextual Transformation

With the coin and river as metaphors for the dynamic balancing of complex 
selves as flow-forms, a new understanding of evolutionary processes comes 
into view. To my mind this understanding is very different from the notion 
of natural selection. The potential nihilistic havoc of the linear snake 
confined angrily within the walls of its pressure-cooker container is 
transformed into an exploration of curved inner, outer and intermediary 
space with endless possibilities.

Hence we move on from explaining evolution as a progression of extinctions 
and survivals ? annihilations of those individual contents judged 
externally to be ‘not good enough’ and their resultant replacement by their 
‘betters’ ? to appreciating it as a process of continual contextual 
transformation. Instead of seeing ‘ends’ as determinate places of absolute 
closure, we can envisage all ‘endings’ of local flow-forms, as they 
surrender their vital energy-space, simultaneously to be indeterminate 
openings that release potential for new creative expressions, as I alluded 
to in my painting shown in Figure 5.  The apparent loss of ‘one’ is 
simultaneously the source for emergence of ‘another’ in an open-ended 
process mediated through open-ended flow-forms that whilst individually 
distinct never completely lose their inclusional spatial connection.  The 
vital energy-space of ‘one’ thereby becomes embodied in rather than 
annihilated by the ‘other’, and emerging forms creatively re-express and so 
honour rather than vanquish, the submerging ancestral forms from which they 
emerge. Past and future are inseparably coupled through rather than 
dislocated by the dynamic, permeable bodily boundary of the ever present.

Correspondingly, I feel that to impose closure on this indeterminate, 
open-ended process - as orthodoxy has been doing for so long, both in 
theories and in management practices aimed at control, is ultimately to 
commit a kind of ‘mass suicide’. To avoid this fate, we need to recognise 
the games of closure that we continually play in trying to stave off the 
uncertainty of the void that we fear so terribly. Not only that, but we 
need to find ways to hold possibilities open, both for ourselves and for 
our offspring, to keep on rolling, as I allude to in the painting shown in 
Figure 11.


INSERT PICTURE HERE





Figure 11. ‘Holding Openness’ (Oil painting on canvas by Alan Rayner, 
2005). Light as a dynamic inclusion of darkness continually brings an 
endless diversity of flow-form to Life.

If we want to know how to embody this holding openness in our own lives, I 
suggest that we need to look no further than a vital ingredient of natural 
evolutionary processes that our compulsion to impose closure has led us to 
set aside and treat only as a curiosity.


Forever Young ? ‘Neoteny’, Sex and The Nurturing Of Natural Recreation

In the first chapter I described some of my formative experiences of joy 
and pain as a child trying to make sense of the world, whilst subject to 
the powerful external influence of my parents and teachers. I told of the 
incongruity I felt between my perceptions of the world as a child, and the 
way I was increasingly being instructed to think and act by my elders. I 
had a sense that my child’s eye view of the world was not acceptable to 
those powerful elders. So, it seemed that I needed to adopt their views as 
quickly as possible if I was to have any chance to survive, let alone 
thrive, in the world that they patrolled as fearful guardians.

Under my elders’ influence, my vital, living spirit seemed like an innate 
wildness, which, if let loose, would wreak havoc in my own life and 
everyone else’s. It needed to be brought under control, disciplined and 
informed by the knowledge and practice of my forefathers. This process of 
disciplined information gathering dominated my learning experience. It 
seemed forever before I could at last fly the nest and launch myself into 
the world of productive work. I wondered what was the point of being a 
child and having to go through this exhausting, exhaustive process. I 
thought about mortality as a terrible waste of all the investment made in 
the accumulation of knowledge and experience whilst growing up. I began to 
fear death almost as much as a waste of every body’s and especially my own 
time on Earth as from any deeper existential angst. How could Nature be so 
perversely wasteful, making childhood a necessary evil ? a means to an end 
? that we all somehow had to get through before we could have any prowess 
in the world, only then to die?

In September 1976 our first daughter, Hazel was born, making me a father. I 
was allowed to be present at the birth, even though it was a forceps 
delivery, because I had displayed my scientifically objective sang-froid by 
making a chart of my wife, Marion’s, duration and periodicity of 
contractions in the preceding few hours. This chart persuaded the doctors, 
if not Marion herself, that this was no ‘false labour’, but the ‘real 
thing’, and that birth was imminent. But my chart-making masked an inner 
emotional turbulence and anxiety that grew to dizzying proportions as Hazel 
was pulled brutally to ‘safety’ when her placenta relinquished its role, 
her heart started to slow, and she emerged bluish, bloody and creamy before 
gasping, crying and turning pink. On the small side and a couple of weeks 
premature.

>From that moment, I experienced what up to then I could only imagine ? the 
extraordinary combination of loving and fearful emotions that comes with 
the responsibility of bringing a new, oh so small, oh so seemingly fragile 
life into the world. My previous perceptions of childhood and adulthood 
began to invert. Now I had to experience, from the other side, the process 
of helping to nurture a child through to adulthood. I had to watch by as 
the outside world put this child through endless harsh examinations and 
subjected her to criticism and fear before she was finally accepted into 
the career of her choice ? as a child and adolescent psychologist! And I 
wondered what was the point of subjecting her to all this exhausting, 
exhaustive process. As I have done again, with my younger daughter, 
Philippa as she has endeavoured to develop and apply her love and 
ecological understanding of flowers to enrich wasted landscapes. As I do, 
again and again as a University Teacher, watching generations of students 
come and go through the ‘system’, in danger of having their love 
extinguished and replaced with cynicism.

Do we really have to bully our children so much? What is it we are so 
scared they might become if we don’t impose closure on their wild creative 
energies? What might we and they be missing as we groom them prescriptively 
for adult roles in our socially constructed world of fixed boundaries? What 
is the point of having children if we wish them merely to be reproductions 
of those of us who have come before, carrying all the baggage of our past 
acquisitions, force-fed with pre-packaged knowledge and ready to 
regurgitate? If that’s all we have children for, then maybe we really are 
wasting both our energy-space and theirs, and failing to learn one of the 
most obvious lessons that there is to be drawn from the natural world.

I think that some vital aspect of life goes missing when our quest to 
outwit our mortality and so not lose what we have invested so much store 
by, leads us vainly to try to make children into reproductions of ourselves 
- especially if human cloning becomes common practice. We lose the 
rejuvenating scope for responding co-creatively to and with our 
ever-changing living space. We set a course for ourselves that is Hell-bent 
on stasis - a self-perpetuation that can only end in premature 
degeneration, as with the arthritis suffered by poor young Dolly, the first 
‘successfully’ cloned sheep.

The obvious, but strangely overlooked point is that unlike ‘clones’, 
children, as the offspring of sexual coupling made between male and female 
under the shadow of oxidative death, cannot be regarded biologically as 
‘reproductions’ ? more of the same!  Rather they are wonderfully diverse 
recreations, emerging from the varied recombination of DNA from their 
parents within the watery context contained by their bodily boundaries, 
which relate dynamically to the circumstances of their living space. The 
abiding characteristic of these diverse recreations is that they play as 
they explore and experience the ever-changing shape of their spatial 
context. In this child’s play, the possibilities for serendipitous 
evolutionary discovery and creativity are endless.

The evolutionary importance of the capacity to explore playful 
possibilities is evident in a phenomenon long recognised, but perhaps 
little understood by biologists, which is known as ‘neoteny’. This 
phenomenon, the retention of juvenile characteristics by adult forms, is 
believed by many to have brought about some of the most dramatic 
innovations in the evolution of life on Earth. For example, the 
monocotyledons - predominantly narrow-leafed flowering plants like lilies, 
grasses and palms are thought to have evolved in this way from broad-leafed 
ancestors (dicotyledons). The entire line of back-boned creatures or 
vertebrates, including human beings, is thought to have evolved from the 
larval stages of sea squirts. We human beings are thought to be neotenous 
apes. We live through many years of childhood, growing very slowly before 
attaining adulthood and even then retain a playful curiosity and 
imagination, if we allow ourselves to, which lies at the heart of our 
inventiveness. Many of our domestic animals are thought to have endeared 
themselves to us through their child-like characteristics of affection and 
malleability. We owe so much it seems, to the playing field of our 
evolutionary childhood. Yet we continually try to suffocate it at birth. 
Why?

The fact that we human beings tend to dismiss our childhood experience as 
little more than a flight of fancy, a costly preparation for adulthood, 
when our serious life’s work begins, may be the product of the 
psychological and bodily changes that accompany adolescence. Ironically, 
these changes are often represented as the onset of conscious awareness. 
Actually, I think they represent the rationalization and consequent 
imposition of closure upon our wider consciousness of void space, through 
which we make our universe and its contents seem more definite, describable 
and predictable than they really are. Although these changes may be 
essential to our adult ability to be ‘better informed’ and so care for, 
protect and educate one another, their influence can become abusive if we 
use it to impose closure upon our intuitive powers and the variable reality 
of dynamic Nature. They do not, in themselves, bring the kind of wisdom 
that the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, described as ‘the understanding of 
how all is steered through all’.

These psychological changes both reinforce and are reinforced by the 
cognitive illusion to which we all become increasingly susceptible during 
adolescence. As we approach adulthood, especially in traditionally male 
roles, we seek to see more clearly as a means of finding, catching and 
grasping food, making our way through the world, and avoiding and 
protecting ourselves and our loved ones from danger.  We therefore tend to 
become more and more dependent on our eyesight to inform ourselves about 
the world around us. By the same token, the role of our other senses 
diminishes, along with our emotional responses, as our skins thicken and 
harden and our nervous systems become inured and habituated to the 
uncertainties of our outside world.

In this way, as we strive for independence we literally lose touch with 
reality whilst claiming to have a greater grip on it. This is because our 
binocular vision, whilst giving us the seeming clarity and depth of field 
by which we can sort one ‘thing’ out from another, also narrows our focus 
to whatever lies in front of our noses. We lose sight of spatial context 
and begin to see the world as an assembly of hard-lined, independent, solid 
objects surrounded and isolated by emptiness. It is as though we acquire a 
subtle knife, which we use to cut ‘figures’ free from their contextual 
‘background’, so that they appear to move independently through, rather 
than reciprocally with space.  Even when we perceive interconnectedness, we 
tend to envisage this explicitly as a ‘web’ of hidden ‘threads of meaning’ 
rather than as communicative channels of included space.

Only if we somehow manage to retain or reclaim and value our juvenile 
sensitivity to our outsides, so that our seeing includes our feeling, can 
we gain the kind of open-minded wisdom that Heraclitus spoke of. We may do 
this in a variety of ways, all of which tend to mark us out from others in 
modern society as ‘unusual’ or, more disparagingly, as ‘abnormal’ or even 
‘insane’. We may retain strong spatial connections between our left and 
right brain hemispheres, a feature reportedly characteristic of women and 
dyslexics. We may maintain a low availability of the neurotransmitter, 
serotonin, in our brains, a feature said to be characteristic of 
‘sufferers’ from ‘obsessive-compulsive disorder’ (like me - as well as some 
more famous people, thought to include Charles Darwin, Howard Hughes, 
Winston Churchill, John Bunyan, Saint Therese, Samuel Johnson?, for which 
reason it might more aptly be called ‘openly creative disorder’!). We may 
deliberately reduce availability of serotonin by taking hallucinogenic 
drugs, meditating or trepanning (drilling holes in our skulls) as with 
Gurus and shamans. We may gain a sense of inner-outer reciprocity through 
experiencing the buoyancy of bodies immersed in fluid space. We may gain an 
all round view by gathering together around a common space in circles like 
those of aboriginal and pagan cultures, and sharing our unique local 
perceptions, so that a holographic image of our situation emerges 
collectively.

But, meanwhile, the orthodox preclusion of such perspectives by the 
compulsive closure that divides the world absolutely between something or 
nothing (matter or space) has constructed an enormous edifice of 
mathematical, scientific, philosophical and governmental space-excluding 
and thereby love-excluding logic. We impose this logic upon the child-like 
creativity issuing from the wild uncertainties of the void that we try so 
hard to avoid. As I allude to in the following poem, and the painting shown 
in Figure 11, we tend to become grave as we approach the Grave. We impose 
our seriousness upon the delights and joyful laughter that find connection 
with our vital, playful spirit through openings to a world beyond fixed 
limits.


RECREATIONS OF A PLAYFUL UNIVERSE

Oh, how we laugh!
When Some Thing
Touches Our Spirit
Tickles Our Imagination
Recalling Our Place
In a Playful Space

A common enjoyment
Of a Common Enjoinment
Recreations
Of an Ever Present
Folding

Dynamic Boundaries
Pivotal Places
Incomplete Surfaces
That make distinct
But Never Discrete

Unique and Special Identities
Possibilities Realized
That Can Never Be Bettered
And can never be Severed
>From a Context Within and Beyond
That Makes Us Content
Belonging Together
Adoring Our Differences
Inseparable in Our Incompleteness

Our Self-Insufficiency
That Unites Us in Love
A Receptive Space
A No Thing Place
That Keeps Us Coherent
Within and Without
Enveloped and Enveloping

No Need For Rules
No Need For Rulers
With Space in Our Hearts
To Include Other as Us
A Diverse Assembly
A Joyous Relief
Reciprocating Each Other’s Movements
Dancing in High Spirits


Oh, how we cry!
When Made To Deny
Our Communion With Other
No Mother, No Brother
No Sister
To Assist
Our Passage
Through Pain

But a Father Severe
A Tyrant Authority
To Cut Us Off
Within Fixed Boundaries
In Isolation

Pretending Independence
Making Comparisons
Striving To Remove
What’s Not Good Enough
In Pursuit of Perfection, Control, Prediction

A rationalistic Ideal
A Uniform Whole
A Self-Sufficiency
Tolerating No Hole
No Breathing Space
No Place for Grace

Demanding Reproduction
More of the Same
A Perpetual Cloning
With No Room to Err
No Room to Wander or Wonder

A Solid Object
With Space Outcast
An Infinite Outsider
Offering No Possibility
Of Excitement or Joy

A Purified Presence
A Divine Right
Freed From Wrong
An Unreal Abstraction
Motionless
Emotionless
Random Disunity
Divine DisContent

A Need For Rules
A Need For Rulers
No Space in Our Hearts
To Include Other as Us
A Monoculture
A Dull, Flat Field
Where Conflict Abounds

So, For Heaven’s Sake, Father!
Take a Look at Your Wife!
Isn’t She Sexy?
Get a Life!
Be Your Self!
Give Us Guidelines, By All Means
But, Please
Don’t Hold Us Against Them

Stop Repeating Yourself!
Put Away Your Severing Knife!
Or, at the very least
Make a Hole that Heals
And Recreates -
Lets Us Play!


INSERT PICTURE HERE


Figure 12. ‘Recreations’ (Oil painting on canvas, by Alan Rayner, 2004). A 
playfully spinning wheel of black and white human figures relates in turn 
with erupting volcano riven with red gold lava streams, floodlit enchanted 
wood and lily pond cascading into pale reflective sea.


Breaking Symmetry ? Travelling by Tube and Helter-Skelter

So, an important way of holding openness and keeping on rolling for us 
human beings is, indeed, through having children and retaining and enjoying 
rather than closing down their playful possibilities. Along with that we 
can keep our minds alive to possibility throughout our lives, in a way that 
as neotenous apes we appear supremely gifted in being able to do as long as 
we allow ourselves to. In keeping our minds alive to possibility we can 
simultaneously transform our behaviour to attune with our ever-changing 
circumstances.

But there is one way in which we are limited, and this limitation can 
itself impede our holding openness, oddly enough by leading us to perceive 
that we either possess, or should possess, the individual ‘freedom’ that we 
call ‘independence’.  Like many other animals, which can’t rely on their 
sources of nutrition and other resources simply to fall into their mouths 
like manna from Heaven, we are obliged to move bodily around a 
heterogeneous world in order to find and take in what we need to keep our 
lives rolling. Consequently, rather than being able to spread themselves 
out by continuing to grow indefinitely, our bodies have become confined 
into local, seemingly self-contained individual forms that spend much of 
their lives rushing around by means of various kinds of locomotion.

Our development is therefore fundamentally determinate - encapsulated 
within bodies with limited life spans that cycle between egg and adult 
phases, from which death appears as a place for exit rather than entrance. 
No wonder we’re so inclined to take a particulate view of the world when 
our own bodies appear to have such a discrete and transient form. But 
perhaps if we were, or could imagine ourselves to be, plants or fungi, for 
example, we might develop a very different kind of view of the limitations 
and possibilities of our bodily existence. I suppose that may partly be why 
I myself have tended to take such a different view from what many might 
consider the ‘norm’. In having spent so much of my life studying plants and 
fungi, and trying to understand them, I have tried to imagine how the world 
might look from their perspective.

Unlike animals, which move bodily from place to place by means of 
locomotion, many plants and fungi spread themselves from place to place by 
means of growth. This is related to the fact that they absorb rather than 
ingest the sources of energy they need. Such absorption is maximized by 
producing as much intermediary surface area as possible between inner and 
outer spatial domains.

Relative to that of many animals, the development of many plants and fungi 
is therefore much more outwardly expressive than inwardly contained and so 
can be regarded as ‘indeterminate’ or ‘dynamically bounded’. The 
possibility for further expansion persists throughout life and need have no 
specific limit within the confines of ‘adulthood’. Correspondingly, in Utah 
a ‘single’ aspen plant, covering an area of 43 hectares has been 
discovered, made up of around 47,000 tree trunks and estimated to weigh 
almost 6,000 tonnes. And there are some even larger (in terms of acreage) 
single fungal identities known to exist, thousands of years old and still 
spreading.

As I mentioned earlier, these indeterminate plant and fungal body forms 
develop in a rather wonderful way, whereby death, as an opening, can 
literally be seen to nurture the recreative possibilities of new life 
within their own body boundaries. They characteristically form elongated, 
tubular structures, variously known as hyphae, roots, shoots etc, which 
grow at their tips. These tips have a parabolic shape and can be thought of 
as places where the organisms remain ‘forever young’, forming boundaries 
that are deformable and responsive to changing contextual conditions as 
they explore the ever presence of their living space. Behind these tips a 
cylindrical structure is formed whose boundary may become rigidified and 
made impermeable to different degrees, depending on circumstances. In 
trees, for example, a relatively impermeable layer of bark, containing the 
corky material known as suberin is formed. This insulates the interior from 
external stresses and prevents drying out, whilst still containing local 
openings called lenticels that enable the structure to breathe. Continued 
production of tubular woody tissue and bark then bring about ‘secondary 
thickening’ of the structure and a consequent increase in its diameter.

The ever-young growing tips of plant and fungal body forms are sustained by 
resources gathered in by and redistributed from other places, which 
literally ‘pass on’ and ultimately die. Plant leaves, for example, pass on 
the sugars that they produce through photosynthesis, and eventually lose 
their greenness and change to red, yellow or brown as they ‘senesce’ and 
drop to the ground, where the residual nutrients they contain are 
remobilized by decomposition. The centres of fungal mycelia (collective 
gatherings of branched hyphal tubes) die off as their resources are passed 
on to the actively growing margins of those annular formations sometimes 
called ‘fairy rings’. Death in the interior of plants actually produces the 
woody tissues through which water and mineral nutrients are distributed 
from roots to shoots. These tissues then ultimately become dysfunctional ? 
when air gets into the pipelines, so disrupting their water supply, and 
then become decayed, leading to the ‘hollowing out’ that we often see in 
mature trees. Mulch often forms at the base of these hollows, and it is not 
uncommon for the trees then to re-root into this, in effect feeding 
directly from their own re-cycling remains. Everywhere in non-human nature, 
new life is fed by the passing on of old life. There is no ‘waste’.

But how do these tip-growing, elongated, tubular structures arise in the 
first place? In addressing this question we can begin to see how 
back-to-front orthodox linear analysis and explanation are in relation to 
the reality of natural dynamic form and formations. Natural, 
electromagnetically lined (stiffened) space is primarily curved and hence 
non-linear. Linearity, where it occurs, is a natural product and not a 
primary ingredient of non-linear form. To render, as in differential 
calculus, natural curved space form down into discrete linear ‘building 
blocks’ that are then assembled into shape is a kind of ‘reverse 
engineering’, which puts the cart before the horse. It cannot in any way 
faithfully represent, as opposed to artificially simulate natural 
evolutionary process. When we try to model nature in terms of such 
abstraction, any conclusions we draw will inevitably be topsy-turvy and 
liable to misrepresent reality profoundly.

Throughout my life I have retained a child-like delight in watching the 
behaviour of raindrops on a windowpane or car windscreen. In some 
mysterious way I find this both fascinating and deeply comforting. What I 
love watching most of all is the way a little rounded, surface-tense 
droplet - a bit like the cushions of the moss, Tortula muralis, shown in 
Figure 9 - gathers itself together as smaller droplets coalesce with it. 
Then, suddenly - Bang! - Off it goes as a little rivulet with a parabolic 
tip races across the glass.

I get the same kind of feeling, drawn out over a longer period, watching 
fungal spores and plant seeds germinate. A phase of swelling in all 
directions, associated with uptake of resources from outside and softening 
of the lining seed wall or cell wall, is superseded by the emergence of a 
germ tube, which brings the inner world out of itself into sensitive 
exploration of the outer world. The dormancy of an encapsulated ‘survival 
package’ almost cut off from its outside in a condition of suspended 
animation is broken as its boundaries are mobilized and life is re-awakened 
and regenerated with renewed vigour. Wow! But something even more 
fundamental than the near-stasis of dormancy is broken during this dramatic 
transition.

The most condensed form of energy-space, dynamically balanced between 
reciprocal inner and outer attractions, is that of a sphere. As any soap 
bubble will inform you, this is the form in which the area of intermediary 
boundary surface exposed to the outside - and its associated ‘tensions’ - 
is minimal. It is also the form that can be sliced into two equal and 
opposite halves by an infinite number of planes of radial symmetry. 
Correspondingly, its surface has ‘centres’ everywhere because there is no 
location on this surface that can be regarded as any more central than any 
other. As this surface expands equally in all directions (i.e. 
‘isotropically’) its curvature decreases along with the proportion between 
its area exposed to the outside and the volume that it encloses, hence 
increasing the strain on its coherence. Moreover, an infinite ‘number’ of 
further centres are added to the infinity it previously contained, making 
nonsense of the idea of infinity as a singularity of unlimited discrete 
material contents, which I mentioned earlier. Sooner or later the gathering 
tensions become too much and are released by being redistributed into 
smaller, but more numerous, or elongated forms. The area of exposed surface 
in relation to volume contained by these forms is greater than that of 
their progenitor sphere, whose infinite radial symmetry has thereby been 
broken or reduced to a smaller number.

In biological systems, the breaking of spherical symmetry to produce a tube 
occurs, as I have alluded to earlier, in seed and spore germination, 
whereas the breaking up of this symmetry into smaller globular forms is a 
feature of early embryonic development and spore-formation. These processes 
of extension and ‘multiplication by division’ have the effect of increasing 
the intermediary boundary surface through which resources can be both 
gained and lost between inner and outer spatial domains. This ‘boundary 
maximization’, or ‘self-differentiation’, as I have called it (see 
earlier), is characteristic of patterns of growth or reproduction where 
external resources are plentiful. Where supplies are short, 
boundary-minimizing processes of ‘self-integration’ set in, which restore 
symmetry within various kinds of survival and storage structures. This 
restoration of symmetry is reminiscent of processes of condensation and 
solidification involved in phase changes between gas, liquid and solid 
forms, which occur as temperature decreases (see also a later section, 
concerning life as an embodied water flow).

As I mentioned earlier, both in biological nature and nature generally, the 
primary geometric form is that of curved energy-space. All other geometric 
forms, including those that we call  ‘linear’ - consisting of smooth, 
straight lines and flat surfaces - are derivations from primarily spherical 
form, not vice versa - as our analytical logic and methodologies would have 
it. For example the compression together of even-sized, flexibly bounded, 
spheres produces a hexagonal array, as found in honeycombs and crystal 
lattices. The deformation of spherical form resulting from energy-input 
from outside to inside can produce ellipsoidal and spiral as well as 
tubular forms. Indeed the latter forms often do spiral as they elongate, 
resulting from asymmetries in their deformability on either side of their 
central axis. These spirals not only occur in familiar examples such as 
snail shells, but also in plant stems and fungal hyphae, which have been 
found to rotate as they elongate. Indeed plant stems characteristically 
produce leaves in a spiral pattern corresponding with the ‘Fibonacci 
series’, which converges on the ‘irrational’ number known as the ‘golden 
section’ or ‘divine proportion’. The latter is the proportion between the 
larger and smaller sections of a length that is the same as the proportion 
of the larger section to the overall length - the hallmark of ‘classical 
beauty’ much used by artists.

Nonetheless, the cylindrical outward shape of plant stems and fungal hyphae 
can often be remarkably straight-sided, and their rate of elongation under 
constant conditions, once it has reached a ‘threshold’, is also often 
‘linear’, adding identical lengths over equal time intervals. This has led 
many to suppose that linear growth is primary rather than a derivative from 
non-linear growth, and to incorporate this supposition into geometrically 
unworkable mathematical models - as I once spent much effort trying to 
demonstrate towards the end of my mycological research days.


>From Out of the Sustaining Yolk to Under the Imperial Yoke - and the 
Liberation Possible in Going Beyond One Sided Rules and Rulers

A fascinating example of how we human beings derive linear from non-linear 
geometry, only then to impose the linear upon the non-linear in the 
mistaken belief that we are thereby increasing ‘efficiency’, can be found 
in our design of buildings and travel and communication systems. The way in 
which such imposition is also associated with very cruel and powerful but 
ultimately unsustainable hegemonic forces is demonstrated par excellence by 
the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

There is a dramatic difference in the nature of archaeological remains in 
England during the first few centuries AD, compared with before and after 
this period. Prior to this period, the geometry of human dwellings and 
sacred places was primarily circular, consisting of Neolithic, Bronze Age 
and Iron Age round houses, hill-forts and henges. Moreover, the 
communication paths and enclosures between and around them were circuitous, 
tending to follow the contours of natural landscape features - as they 
often do even in modern times. This is celebrated in the saying ‘the 
rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road’. But during the 
first few centuries AD, buildings, roads and enclosures became 
uncompromisingly straight-sided as they were imposed upon rather than 
yielded to the natural landscape.

This imposition of the rectilinear and straight and narrow occurred when 
England (the Scottish proved a little too wild to tame in this way!) came 
under the Yoke of Roman Occupation. Similar, but more recent examples of 
the imposition of such ‘gridlock’ upon natural landscape and aboriginal 
peoples can be found in North America and Australia. Such imposition is 
characteristic of all kinds of orthodox analytical methodologies, Cartesian 
mappings and architectural plans. Nature is required to conform with 
prescriptive rules and rulings, regardless of the contextual discomfort of 
those confined within or outcast beyond them.

The persistent notion that this imposition represents the epitome of 
disciplined efficiency and hence is to be desired and admired, has proved 
enormously costly both to human beings and to the living space that we 
share with non-human nature. It is founded on the unrealistic premise that 
the geometry of nature either is, or should be, primarily linear - an 
‘ideal’ homogeneous Euclidean ‘flatland’ or ‘solidland’. In adhering to 
this premise, we don’t even notice the very real wastage we bring about by 
trying to eliminate waste, because we exclude it from our one-sided systems 
of accounting in discrete freeze-frames of space and time. We are 
proverbially ‘penny wise and pound foolish’, except that the real costs are 
far greater than our monetary abstractions could ever portray. The real 
costs are to our humanity and the quality of our own and others’ lives. We 
might seek, according to the modern clarion call, ‘to Make Poverty 
History’, but we can never find how to accomplish this aim so long as we 
hide behind our abstractions.

In our imaginary inhabitation of ‘flatland’, we automatically assume that 
the shortest distance between two points - and hence the most efficient way 
of travelling from one to the other - is a straight line. When we impose 
this assumption on an undulating landscape, as in Roman road building, we 
neglect the influence of gravitational space in our accounting - as is 
apparent to any motorist travelling regularly along such a highway, from 
their increased fuel consumption and gearbox and engine wear.

By the same token, we assume that the most efficient way of packaging 
material, by avoiding ‘waste’ residues ‘outside’, is within rectilinear 
frameworks. So we habitually make building block constructions for 
ourselves to live in and fend off our neighbours whilst gouging out 
landscape to make way for road, rail and canal links. Historically at 
least, we have given little thought to the damage we engender in making 
these constructions. Nor do we consider the discomfort we ourselves feel as 
we try to circulate within the hard lines and musty corners of our homes 
and workplaces. Try to swirl water around a square glass if you want to get 
a feel for the incongruities from which this discomfort arises. We continue 
to pay for the apparent economies we make in the short term, long after the 
builder has left the scene, counting explicit financial gains whilst 
ignoring the ongoing costs for those living with the implications.

So, what hope can there be for us to escape from the yoke we have placed on 
ourselves? For such liberation to be possible I feel that our only recourse 
is to re-educate ourselves to grow beyond our desire for the false security 
of closure. We need to return the wiser from our excursion into flatland 
and learn from our immersed experience as complex selves, attuning with, 
rather than imposing upon, the non-linear nurturing presence of our living 
space.



Holding Openness in Education ? A Personal Experience of Lifelong Learning 
Put Into Practice

Upon returning from my own excursion into the Academic Wilderness in 1999, 
I wanted to bring a very different dimension to my role as an educator at 
the University of Bath. I wished to relinquish any semblance of being a 
dictatorial authority transmitting my expert knowledge and understanding to 
students in the hope that they would reproduce it in their examinations and 
careers. I wanted students to be lively recreations, hopefully influenced 
by my guide-lining spirit, not reproductive clones dully and dutifully 
following my prescriptions for their success. As I will describe again in a 
later chapter, I wanted to be an Arthurian gatherer-together of diverse 
perspectives, not an Authoritarian dictator of the status quo. In short, I 
wanted to transform the dynamic geometry of the educational process, rather 
than training exercise, in which both I as learning teacher and the 
students as teaching learners are engaged, so as to sustain an ever-present 
neotenous possibility for transformation.

And so I set about designing a new course, coded BB30108, about which I 
felt passionately inexpert, a real amateur ? literally meaning ‘lover in 
public’ ? in the midst of the professional practice enshrined by my 
Institution. I became intent on becoming a professional amateur, prepared 
to play with my disciplinary boundaries whilst still having a source of 
financial income to keep me going. But being a professional amateur in this 
way, as I was soon to find out, was no easy ride! In the following passages 
I will describe my own learning process, navigating the complexities of 
relating both to students accustomed to being recipients of authoritarian 
teaching and external assessors accustomed to transmitting ‘received 
wisdom’. I hope that this description may convey something of what ‘holding 
openness’ really means in an educational context, by way of remaining alive 
to possibility as we learn, teach and encounter resistances together during 
our unique individual experiences as dynamic inclusions of our living 
space.

After much thought about how to summarize its full scope and depth in a 
few, reasonably familiar words, I called my new course ‘Life, Environment 
and People’. In tune with the ternary theme of inclusionality, this 
three-in-one coupling connected ‘inner’, ‘outer’ and ‘intermediary’ as well 
as ‘Complexity, Uncertainty and Information’.

When I first presented course BB30108 in 2001, I stated my ‘intention’ to 
the biology and natural science students attending it as being:

‘To improve your and my awareness of the dynamic properties that underlie 
the functioning and ecological and evolutionary responsiveness of living 
systems, with a view to developing patterns of relating to these systems 
that enhance quality of life both for them and us’.

Four years later, I modified this statement as follows:

‘To provide an opportunity for us to reflect and learn together about how 
to apply our scientific and biological knowledge effectively and creatively 
in a social and environmental context. This joint reflection and learning 
will include an enquiry into methods of scientific enquiry, perception and 
communication in order to identify possible limitations in current thinking 
and prospects for the development of approaches that can enhance and deepen 
our understanding of human relationships with the living world’

I believe that this shift in the way I expressed my intention demonstrates 
my own practice as a ‘learning teacher’, open to the influence of those 
whose learning I was trying to engage with. It reflects my gradual 
transformation from a remote, ‘Authoritarian’ to a co-responsive, 
‘Arthurian’, style of educational leadership, which, as it turns out, 
actually enhances rather than diminishes the value of my unique knowledge 
and experience.

This shift also reflected my efforts to clarify the educational context of 
the course for those who had no actual experience of it but nonetheless 
felt in a position to judge its content from outside, in their own terms 
and without any consultation with me. Somehow I had to quell the disquiet - 
and resultant misunderstanding, misrepresentation and threats of closure - 
of those given executive authority by the University, whose orthodox 
expertise we appeared to contravene, whilst holding true to my educational 
values. I sought to do this by co-enquiring with the students about the 
application of this scientific and biological knowledge in the social and 
environmental context that ‘pure’ scientists often ignore and even treat as 
beneath their dignity. Moreover, I made perceptions of space and boundaries 
the explicit ground for our co-enquiry, for which my own life experiences 
and learning had prepared me only too well.  In this way I hoped to place 
both the students and myself to explore in a non-adversarial way the 
uncertainty and exquisite form of actual nature and human experience. Maybe 
our explorations could thereby help reveal the contextual space that is so 
vital to our understanding of life and its evolution, but is so dismally 
overlooked by orthodoxy.

It wasn’t long before I received my first lesson from the students during 
our opening session in February 2001. I described my intention and handed 
out detailed accompanying notes drawing on themes from my book, ‘Degrees of 
Freedom’. I informed them that after nine double sessions led by me, there 
would be three ‘Round-Table’ sessions about environment-related themes of 
their choice, these they would organize entirely themselves. I said that in 
order for me to assess their work and allocate marks, as I am obliged by 
the University to do, there would be a coursework component in which 
artwork would be welcome, as well as a formal exam. I explained the links I 
saw between art and science, and then provided a preliminary background to 
inclusionality and its departure from conventional ‘Newtonian’ thinking.

Within a week, the numbers of students attending the course had more than 
halved! Seeing ‘trouble ahead’, I wondered at my audacity and foolishness 
in attempting anything so far removed from conventional biology teaching. 
What on Earth was I doing? Why on Earth was I doing it? What might I be 
exposing myself to?

I asked one of the students what she thought was going on. Apart from the 
students’ natural fear of uncertainty and confusion in the face of 
assessment, she quickly drew my attention to what Jack Whitehead would call 
the ‘living contradiction’ between my intention and my practice. ‘Why don’t 
you include us in your discussion?’ she asked. ‘After all, you’ve given us 
copious notes, which we can read in our own time, so why not use the 
sessions to get us talking?’

Feeling rather chastened, I swallowed my dignity and took her advice. I 
laid my notes to one side and started to ask questions both of myself and 
of the students. Often these questions would superficially appear to be 
quite simple, e.g. ‘what is a gene; what is a cell; what is a body; what is 
death?’  But the answers to these questions were by no means simple, and 
often led to further and deeper questions. For example, I especially 
remember during one of the discussions about genes, a student asked, 
‘what’s the difference between a code and a language?’ This question 
quickly established the importance of context in giving varied meanings. 
On another occasion a student insisted that we could not escape our own 
‘selfishness’ in order to live in a more ‘environmentally sustainable’ way, 
however much we might pay lip service to the need to do so. This led to my 
recognition of the need to question our conventional view of ‘self’ as 
independent ‘individual’, and ultimately to the development of the idea of 
‘complex self’.

Almost immediately, the atmosphere within the class began to transform and 
attendance stabilized to a total of seventeen ? not a huge number, but 
viable.  It was demanding work for me to maintain a lively, but coherent 
and scholarly conversation, whilst not imposing a fixed direction or 
stifling the students’ views with my own ? and it still is. But the sense 
of pleasure coming from the students as they were able to express and hear 
diverse views and play with ideas was ample reward. This sense of pleasure 
was confirmed by the ‘feedback’ I received from them, by the quality of 
their coursework and the ‘Round Table’ sessions that they organized without 
intervention from me. One of the pieces of artwork submitted was of such 
quality and depth that I felt moved to award it 100 % of the marks 
available. To my huge surprise, even the external examiners were highly 
complimentary.

Greatly encouraged, I repeated the course in 2002 to more than double the 
number of students, using much the same approach. I took even more care to 
try to relate with rather than transmit to the students despite the 
impositional geometry of the lecture rooms. For example, I would sometimes 
move myself to the back of the class of desks laid out in rows facing the 
front. Once again, after some initial bemusement, the student response was 
highly creative and favourable. The ‘Round-Table’ sessions were of a higher 
quality than many conference workshops I have attended. I remember one 
especially where the students moved furniture around to contrast the very 
different atmosphere of confrontational ‘debate’ from ‘sharing circle’ 
styles of discussion about ‘genetic modification’.  Also, this time a much 
greater proportion of superb artwork was submitted as coursework - so much 
that I decided to mount an exhibition in the Biology Department. Several 
colleagues, both from within and outside Biology ‘sat in’ on the course and 
were very impressed with the depth and quality of the discussions. A 
Psychology PhD student also sat in to study the student responses and 
shifts in understanding. I learned from this study that the course was 
having a powerful educational influence, but I needed to be wary of 
esoteric language and appearing to ‘preach to the converted’.

I felt confident that my academic peers would again welcome what the 
students and I had been doing. I trusted that they would continue to see it 
as a very innovative development, taking Biology education into new avenues 
of exploration and exposition, highly relevant to the students’ future 
careers and responsibilities.

How wrong I was! The first thing I noticed was a kind of ‘deathly hush’ and 
some grudging comment during the Biology examiners’ meeting about the high 
marks I had awarded the students. This comment was accompanied by questions 
about how far the department wanted to go with this approach. But nobody 
actually said anything directly to me until months later, when it emerged 
that there had been complaints about ‘lack of rigour’, an ‘anti-scientific’ 
stance and ‘free-fall philosophy’ evident in students’ work that I had 
rated highly. I was called to see my Head of Department shortly before 
resuming teaching the course in 2003 and warned to be rigorous in my 
assessment of the student’s work, whilst being reassured of his support for 
my ‘academic freedom’.

I went on to teach the course in 2003 in a rather more wary frame of mind. 
Again the students responded favourably after initial bemusement and again 
they produced remarkably creative work. Against my wishes, however, my 
coursework marks were ‘scaled down’ before the examiners’ meeting, so as 
not to be out of line with those given in other courses. The examiners’ 
meeting passed by with quite favourable comment and only a hint of 
reservation, so I felt that I had at least averted the criticisms made in 
2002, but a while later, I again found myself confronted with adverse 
comments. I was asked to ensure that when I taught the course again in 
2004, I would give ‘poor marks’ to work of ‘insufficient scholarship’, i.e. 
making assertions unsupported by evidence or showing a lack of awareness of 
other points of view. I had no problem with this because it aligns with my 
educational practice, although I disliked the emphasis on penalty rather 
than reward. I was also asked, however, to agree to the exam papers being 
‘triple blind marked’ in order to reassure examiners about assessment 
standards. I had no option if the course was to continue, so I reluctantly 
agreed, even though independent marking by examiners with unequal 
experience is contrary to my educational values and principles.

In 2004, I had an even larger class. There were around seventy students 
including two studying psychology, which enriched the discussions. Once 
again the students responded very favourably and creatively and producing 
even more high quality artwork. Once again I set up an exhibition of their 
work in the Biology Department. Many, both from within the University and 
outside came to visit and expressed wonder at the creative expression and 
insights of science students ready to question received wisdom and see 
possibilities beyond. But amidst the excitement, I received a message from 
my Head of Department saying that colleagues had expressed disquiet about 
the ‘anti-scientific’ and ‘dogmatic’ content of some of the work. I was 
warned to ‘watch my back’ and to give this work ‘poor marks’. A while 
later, after the students had sat the exam component of the course, I 
received a call from one of the blind markers asking me what I meant by one 
of the questions. It transpired that these markers had been appointed 
without consulting or informing me, and in the case of at least one of them 
(and retrospectively both of them), were not people I could expect to 
appreciate the learning context of the course.

I began to panic, fearing greatly for the prospects of the students and the 
future of the course. As it turned out, I had good reason to be anxious. It 
emerged that, based on their own interpretation of the exam questions, the 
other markers had repeatedly allocated marks that were drastically lower 
than mine. I was obliged to argue that only my marks should stand, since 
only I had any appreciation of what the students’ answers might and might 
not be expected to include. Ultimately this was accepted in order, 
ironically, to keep the marks in line with those of other courses.

Then one of the other markers, who up until then I had regarded as a 
generous minded colleague who appreciated my work and intentions - he had 
even encouraged me to design the course - wrote a report on the lines of 
‘Is There a Problem With BB30108?’ This report was based purely on his own 
interpretation of the student work, and profoundly and damagingly 
misrepresented my scientific position and educational approach. For 
example, I was said to have criticised the dependence of thermodynamics on 
‘closed systems’, when I had made no direct mention of thermodynamics in 
the course. I was also said to have disregarded the importance of genes in 
the way life forms interact, something I would never do (though I do 
criticise genetic determinism). He suggested that I had made students think 
inappropriately even if I hadn’t intended to. He said that I had 
inordinately worried the students by seriously undermining all that they 
had been taught about science and that I should give a ‘health warning’ 
about the content of the course, warning the students that few people 
shared my views.  He made recommendations about how the course should be 
modified if it was to run in future, which, although well-intended, were 
inappropriate to its aspirations and unreflective of my own biological 
knowledge and understanding. I replied, pointing out the many ways in which 
I felt he had misrepresented the course and myself. He replied, re-stating 
his belief that I had misguided and confused the students in ways that had 
disturbed their appreciation of mainstream science. He said that although 
my colleagues were still well disposed towards me, they couldn’t understand 
why I had taken such a controversial stance.

Ten days after the Board of Examiners, I received a summons from the Head 
of Department asking me to attend a meeting with him to discuss the ‘future 
of the course’. When this meeting eventually took place, after I had taken 
a much-needed summer break, he drew my attention to very critical comments 
made by the external examiners on the grounds of ‘scholarship’, notably 
regarding the fact that the students had expressed views that closely 
reflected my own. He asked me to withdraw the course for the coming 
academic year, to modify it into a more acceptable form, and to run it 
again in a subsequent year, probably with a different title. I said that I 
would prefer to continue to run the course, and pointed out how some of the 
external examiners’ remarks about individual student scripts - which 
included such phrases as ‘scientifically worthless’ - actually demonstrated 
their own lack of understanding of the concepts addressed.  I said that to 
discontinue the course on the basis of ill-informed, easily refutable 
comments made by external observers unaware of the actual course content 
and mode of delivery would be a great disservice to the students who found 
it educationally very valuable. I showed him copies of the very favourable 
student feedback forms from the current year class.


Objections to Inclusionality - A Case of Autoimmune Disease and its 
Possible Treatment

So, could anything good come out of all this? As I reflected on my 
experience, it was the fear evident to me in the reactions of my usually 
generous-minded colleague that especially concerned me. There was something 
in these reactions all too reminiscent of those directed against other 
critics of neo-Darwinism in particular, for example, the late Stephen Jay 
Gould and against heterodox reformers in general. These reactions 
characteristically seem to have two aims. The first is to belittle 
criticisms of established thought or models, by making them appear as minor 
variations that can be added on to the same fundamental proposition. For 
example, special ‘epicycles’ were used to account for the complex path of 
the planets in the Ptolemaic Earth-centred representation of the universe 
and ‘drift’ is used to account for ‘selectively neutral’ genetic change in 
neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. In this way the mainstream idea can 
still be sustained within a kind of ‘pluralism’ that  ‘open-mindedly’ 
accepts some peripheral amendments, as long as they don’t become too 
powerful. It is very tempting, as a budding reformer, to accept this 
belittlement or to allow it to continue in the minds of the powerful in 
order to survive and at least divert the mainstream a little from its 
hegemonic course. This is because if the first aim isn’t achieved, the 
second aim is the elimination of what is perceived as opposition to the 
mainstream because it is so fundamental that if it were given any 
credibility at all, it could not possibly be ignored or marginalized.

Since the core belief of orthodox evolutionary thinking is in the 
extinction and replacement of objective units by force, there is embedded 
in this thinking what might be considered an ‘autoimmune disease’, which 
cannot admit any other possibility for fear of itself being extinguished. 
It cannot accept what it has defined itself not to be through a ‘double 
blind double bind’ based on the fallacy of the excluded middle. Hence it 
will automatically reject the inclusion of ‘other’ as an aspect of ‘self’, 
even though the need for such inclusion may be recognised. Pluralism safely 
and inconsequentially skirts around the inclusion of self within void, like 
froth at the mouth of the vortex. By contrast, inclusionality implies 
letting go of the concrete and immersing in the void as a dynamic 
embodiment of space. Letting go is made possible through recognizing both 
the fallacy of definitive orthodoxy and the opportunities for new 
understanding that open up when space is given room for inclusion in a 
non-Euclidean dynamic accounting for natural flow-form.

So in my efforts to convey an inclusional understanding of the dynamic 
nature of neighbourhood, I need to make the abyss seem less scary and more 
inviting. This is why I emphasize that inclusionality represents a 
paradigmatic transformation, where the old is incorporated, though 
radically re-interpreted and made vastly more applicable in a real-world 
context, within the new, as distinct from a paradigm shift where the old is 
made extinct by the new. This transformation is nevertheless very difficult 
to accomplish in the face of anyone who believes fundamentally in objective 
definition and so suffers from autoimmune rejection of the outer aspect of 
self as other.

Clearly, up until 2004, my efforts in my ‘Life, Environment and People’ 
course had inspired the students but alarmed the authorities, and I was in 
great danger of autoimmune rejection. Nevertheless, the course continued to 
run in 2005, with similar numbers attending, although under threat of 
closure if the external examiners again expressed concern. By then I had 
received much support from colleagues outside my own Department, who 
considered the course is needed and of high educational value. This helped 
me to stand firm in the face of great difficulty.

In 2005, students studying Management attended for the first time and 
showed great interest in understanding how ideas and knowledge about 
biological and human organizations could be linked. This corresponded with 
my intention to focus on application in a social and environmental context 
as a way of avoiding adverse reaction from anyone intent on defending 
orthodox scientific thought and method. It also widened the appeal of the 
course.

Two new forms of course assessment replaced the exam. These gave students 
the fullest possible opportunity to express their learning from the course 
in a balanced, scholarly way without requiring hurried responses that could 
so easily be misunderstood by external observers unaware of context. The 
first new course assessment asked the following question:

How, in your view, may the application of scientific and biological 
knowledge and concepts in a social and environmental context be influenced 
by our human perceptions of space and boundaries?

The second new assessment asked:

On the basis of the Round-Table Session in which you participated, consider 
an environment-related issue or question of your choice from as wide a 
variety of scientific, biological and other relevant perspectives as 
possible.

I also designed new criteria for evaluating the students’ work, which, I 
felt were much more in tune with the distinctive educational aspirations of 
the course. These were as follows:

Reflective Quality:- does the work accurately and thoughtfully reflect 
themes emerging during the course? Are the scientific ideas that are 
conveyed and/or challenged fairly represented, in a way that demonstrates 
sound critical judgement/ understanding/scholarship in your own learning?

Creativity:- does the work display imaginative  thought and (where 
applicable) practical resourcefulness in relation to the theme/subject 
matter addressed?

Communicative Quality:- does the work communicate a clear message and/or 
evoke imagination and thought?

Quality of Execution:- is there evidence of skilful work?

Endeavour:- is there evidence of care and effort?



Both internal and external examiners accepted that the course succeeded in 
its intention to encourage creative and critical enquiry by students and 
the course ran again in 2006. Even so, I have faced continuing difficulty 
over the fact that what I look for in terms of the above criteria does not 
always match well with what orthodox scientists look for when independently 
viewing work out of context and imposing their conventions. This difficulty 
has emerged because of the continuing requirement for biology students only 
(others are beyond the Department’s jurisdiction!) to have the work 
independently assessed by others who do not participate in the course. This 
‘double blind double bind’ has been difficult to negotiate with, as I admit 
in the following lines:

How Academic Orthodoxy Cannot Accept What It Needs to Accept to Make Sense

I will accept what you say if you can convince me to do so
For I am Fair and Open Minded
But to convince me you will have to show that I am wrong
When all I have to do
To be sure
Of my independent rightness
Is define what I am not
And have no need for further enquiry
Beyond the realm of my security

So I can wilfully
With Authority
Suppress the disquieting silence
Of your creativity
And be assured of the longevity
Of my double bog standards
Of excellent mediocrity

I have no need for receptivity
I can fix things for myself
For I am certain
Of my independence
Until you convince me otherwise
But then again I can be sure
That you’re not me



Facing Up to an Abstract Future: An ‘Either/Or’ Choice?

As fearfully deterministic creatures, up against the walls of the 
self-imposed closure of our security systems, the future can seem a 
formidable prospect, pregnant with hope and threat. There it is, divided 
off from our present and past (here today, gone tomorrow) lives by 
invisible hard lines that cut through the axis of time abstracted from 
space. Faced with this prospect, and especially the seeming finality of our 
individual deaths, we may feel obliged to make an ‘either/or’ choice.

On the one hand, we may choose to ‘live for the present’, ‘looking after 
number one’ by taking what we can from the world and one another in order 
to derive whatever satisfaction we can in the limited time frame of an 
individual existence. But in so doing, our lives can seemingly become a 
wasteland, devoid of meaning, lacking connectivity - a flash in the pan. 
The individual aspect becomes dislocated from the collective aspect of our 
complex self as we relentlessly pursue our internal agendas without regard 
for others. We live unsustainably by sacrificing the future to the present, 
a pattern that we may call hedonistic, greedy or selfish, but nonetheless 
regard as an inevitable ingredient of human nature, for which we may suffer 
guilt.

On the other hand, our desire for continuity in some form or another, if 
not necessarily in our own bodies, can lead us unsustainably to sacrifice 
the present to the future.  Our imagined destination takes precedence over 
our living journey in acts of self-denial perversely intended to improve 
our lot. We dedicate ourselves to a goal or end by any means, however 
painful and damaging that may be for us in the interim, and use the 
language and presence of authority figures to talk ourselves into believing 
in this destiny.

The remote prospect of the future, beyond the veil of our immediate 
present, becomes a dictatorship, to whom or which we abandon our inner 
identities and needs. Serving this dictatorship requires that we know in 
advance what it will judge to be right and wrong. So we try to second-guess 
this dictatorship by making our own judgements about right and wrong, and 
in the process can leave aside whatever truly compassionate feelings we may 
have about human frailty. We may even, if we judge compassion to be right, 
ruthlessly reject others who we deem to lack compassion and consign them to 
one kind of Hell or another, within or beyond this world. For example, we 
may declare ‘War’ on terrorism and set about eliminating its perpetrators. 
In this duplicitous way, we prepare the ground for the ideological 
conflicts expressed inwardly as mental torment and outwardly as Holy War, 
Civil War, Genocide and all forms of retributive justice.

Seeing true compassion - unconditional love of and respect for our 
neighbourhood as an implicit inclusion of our complex self - disappear in 
the gap between our hedonistic and judgemental tendencies, has been a 
lifelong concern for me. Aware of how both my analytical ‘head’ and my 
unforgiving ‘heart’ can in their different ways overrule my own compassion, 
not least in the austere way I am prone to view myself, I have wanted to 
understand how love and respect make intellectual as well as emotional 
sense. Correspondingly, my work on inclusionality has been about 
identifying and dissolving the ‘clot’ that currently blocks the connection 
between reason and emotion so that they no longer appear contradictory but 
can make a common, complementary sense. I have wanted to discover how to 
transcend the closure that imposes an either/or choice between one form of 
self-denial and another. How can we live joyfully and lovingly in the 
present without compromizing the evolutionary vitality of our neighbourhood 
and offspring? That is the deep question - far deeper than immediate 
concern about legislative or technological mechanisms can comprehend - 
underlying what environmentalists call ‘sustainability’. It is about how we 
regard future and present, and how their relationship influences our 
relationships with one another and our living space.

The problem I have therefore concerned myself with is that loving 
compassion makes no sense in rationalistic terms that impose closure by 
abstracting time from space, as neo-Darwinism and its contribution to the 
emergence of fascism, eugenics, the Holocaust and ‘Selfish Gene’ make 
abundantly clear. This abstraction has a very profound influence on the way 
we regard ourselves as human organisms engaged in an evolutionary process.


An Emerging Theme ? Life on Earth as Embodied Water Flows Beyond the 
Capabilities of Information Processing Machines

In March 2002, at a conference in Karlstad, Sweden, I found myself pitted 
against an unusually generous-spirited neo-Darwinian. We were addressing 
one of those deceptively simple questions that I use in my ‘Life, 
Environment and People’ course: what is an organism? My ‘opponent’, as he 
liked to regard himself ? even to the degree of allying with one of the 
vampiric figures in my painting shown in Figure 1 ? became increasingly 
frustrated with my refusal to contest his argument that an organism is an 
information-processing machine. As a great believer in adversarial debate 
as a means of establishing ‘truth’, he desperately wanted me to compete 
with him in his own terms, to argue that organisms ‘are not 
information-processing machines’? and so did some of the audience. I would 
not argue that, but rather I see functionality ? what organisms do and how 
they are equipped to do it ? as only an aspect of their much more 
fundamental, space-including nature. So, without antagonism (which I see as 
a source of ‘heat’ rather than ‘truth’), I simply described what I feel to 
be the deeper view that has emerged, during my conversations with students 
and others, of organisms as ‘embodied water flows’.

It’s one of those strange paradoxes of modern biology that we attribute 
evolutionary success to the quality of our DNA, but when we search for the 
possibility of life on other planets the first ‘thing’ we look for is 
water. To my mind, this paradox epitomizes how readily we dislocate content 
from context, and hence time and matter from space as we try to find 
‘solutions’ to our problems of understanding and interacting with nature in 
the hope of improving our abstract future whilst disregarding the 
‘solvent’. We know implicitly all along that the solvent is present and 
vital, but our focus on the explicit leads us to disregard it.

It is this dislocation that leads us to regard organisms purely in 
functional terms as independent machines - clockwork automatons - of one 
kind or another. Indeed that’s exactly how Descartes viewed all organisms, 
in the absence of consciousness, apart from human beings. It opens the way 
for profound abuse and cruelty as we judge and rank one another’s 
performance in order to choose the best and discard the rest in our quest 
to improve our destiny. If we perceive ourselves, or feel ourselves to be 
perceived as ‘good machines’ we become megalomaniacs and conformists. If we 
perceive ourselves, or feel ourselves to be perceived as ‘bad machines’, we 
become depressed, suicidal and spiteful or look for some external saviour 
in the form of a God or Technology - some form of Higher or Artificial 
Intelligence that does not suffer from our capacity for ‘error’.

As I will discuss more fully later on, I personally know only too well how 
it feels to oscillate between what I envisage as the ‘Twin Tower’ 
viewpoints of myself as ‘good machine’ and ‘bad machine’ when the channel 
connecting my reason with my emotion gets blocked. Compassion either for 
others or for myself doesn’t get a look in. I then need some space in my 
machine to regain my balance, and love and respect the capacity for error 
in others and myself that is the source of our creativity and receptivity 
as indeterminate flow-forms in close correspondence. So it is that I can 
drown my sorrows in the water that we land-inhabiting human beings so 
easily lose sight of, which nonetheless accounts on average for around 70 % 
of the mass and 99 % of the molecules in our bodies. As I allude to in the 
following verse and painting shown in Figure 13.


INSERT PICTURE HERE


Figure 13. ‘Landed, Stranded’ (Oil painting on canvas by Alan Rayner, 
2004). A reflection upon the evolutionary inversion from aquatic to 
terrestrial life.


I used to be
Within the Sea
An identity
Of You and Me
Submerged
In Commonality
Of Sounding
Between Airy Heights
And Bottom Depths
Waving Correspondence
Through Inseparable Togetherness
Of Content with Context

But, Now,
Dry
Abstracted
Space comes between Us
A separating distance
An unbecoming Outside
Alienating Forms
As Fixtures
Stranded in Isolation
Entities
Non-identities
Conflicting
Oblivious of Our Belonging
Together

Oxygen
Now, moving Fast
Not Languidly
Tans our Hides
Protecting Our Inner Spaces
Against its own
Consuming Presence
Supporting Combustion
Burning Us Out

But all this sealing
Removes Our Feeling
Setting Our Content
At Odds with Our Context
So that we push
Against the Pull
With Backs to Front
Itching to Relieve
Unbearable Friction

And So Now
Just Let’s Go
And, with Loving Fear
Dive into the Clear
And Swim Where it’s Cool
To be In With the Pool
Together


I see water as the solvent and bathing fluid that brings space into the 
Earthly lives of organisms, the receptive medium into and through which 
life forms gather and distribute the energy that puts them in motion via 
photosynthesis, chemosynthesis, digestion, respiration, transport and 
translocation. Water provides the continuity between generations, through 
and in which genetic information can flow and be exchanged and expressed in 
endlessly diverse forms. Water is and always has been the indeterminate 
dynamic pool in and through which organic forms of life thrive, diversify 
and respond to and influence their surroundings and neighbours - an 
‘artists’ medium’ whose properties both constrain and contribute to life’s 
heterogeneity and versatility.

A start can be made towards understanding the dynamic role of water in life 
by asking what possibilities for innovation and relationship exist in just 
a single droplet of water - like those droplets I described earlier, 
swelling fit to burst upon a window pane. Inclusionally, this droplet is a 
pool of energy-space, a dynamic context whose surface-tense boundary is the 
informational interface between its inside and outside. The surface area of 
the droplet can be altered by assimilating or discharging energy sources 
across its boundary. Assimilative processes result in expansion. At low 
input rates, this expansion is isotropic (equal in all directions), thereby 
minimizing the resultant increase in surface exposed to the outside. At 
higher rates, ‘symmetry-breaking’ occurs, the droplet polarizes into a 
rivulet or subdivides into branches that are distinct, but not discrete. At 
even higher rates, the droplet may dissociate into smaller droplets and 
ultimately molecules. Viewed at a snapshot in time, these forms may appear 
to be individual units but this ignores their common space life histories. 
Such life histories are only apparent when viewed dynamically, whence their 
indeterminate capacity for expansion and change reveals discreteness to be 
an illusion of isolated observations.

Assimilative processes bring about ‘self-differentiation’. These processes 
generate the exponentially increasing amounts of exposed free surface 
characteristic of individual and population growth. As the surface 
generated by self-differentiation takes shape, its possibilities for change 
become constrained by what has already been produced. Moreover, since this 
surface cannot be fully sealed, it inevitably dissipates as well as gathers 
sources of energy and so is only sustainable as long as supplies don’t run 
out. If self-differentiation were to continue without the replenishment of 
external energy sources it could therefore only end irreversibly in a 
boundless, fully incoherent condition. Processes of ‘self-integration’ 
counteract the dissipative effects of self-differentiation through the 
coalescence, sealing in and/or redistribution of boundaries, so conserving 
energy within the system and enabling it to rejuvenate. In the case of 
water, vapour may condense into droplets, droplets may coalesce into pools 
and pools freeze into a myriad of ice forms with a release of stored energy 
accompanying each reduction in exposed surface.

Such are the creative possibilities for differentiation and integration of 
form even in a droplet of pure water. Now, allow materials to be 
incorporated or dissolved within the droplet’s contents, changing their 
viscosity, matric, electrical and osmotic potential, or added to the 
surface of the droplet to form an insulating coating or envelope. Harnessed 
in this way, the dynamic potential for elaboration of diverse water forms 
becomes even greater. These forms’ permeability, deformability, and 
continuity and consequent receptivity, responsiveness and conductivity can 
thence be varied according to whether their circumstances are appropriate 
for gathering in, exploring for, conserving or recycling energy sources. As 
they gather sufficient energy to begin to flow, they will, over time, both 
create and follow paths of least resistance in their surroundings, as in 
river systems. By taking substance out from their catchment, much as a 
hypha of a wood decay fungus might dissolve and absorb wood substance in 
the course of its growth, rivers effectively create their own inductive 
space.

In those embodied water flows that we have come to regard as organisms, 
materials added to and enveloping water constrain and enable the expression 
of diversity over scales ranging from the boundaries of molecular to social 
and ecosystem domains. These materials may be organic or inorganic. They 
may originate outside the organism’s boundaries; they may be synthesized 
within, by gene action, or they may be produced by interaction at 
boundaries between internal and external reagents. They include the 
carbohydrates, fats, proteins, nucleic acids and other metabolites found in 
living cells. They include the oxidatively cross-linked hides, bark layers, 
cuticles and cell walls that protect and contain the living contents of 
innumerable forms of plant, animal and fungal life as they move or grow to 
form branching trajectories through space and time. They include the 
calcium-enriched shells and coatings of invertebrates and algae. They also 
include the earthy highways, byways, dams and buildings created by animals 
ranging from termites and earthworms to moles, beavers and human beings as 
they open up and seal off paths of least resistance in their surroundings 
to provide shelter and avenues of communication.

In modern times, the dominance of analytical approaches to the management 
of life processes has led to an increasing focus on internal genetic 
‘information’ as the principal means by which the form and functioning 
(‘phenotype’) of organisms is determined, subject only to the moderating 
influence of external environmental variables. Consequently, bioengineers 
and biotechnologists have sought means of altering this information to suit 
human requirements, raising many concerns about the ethics and effects of 
such genetic engineering on human health and the environment.

Viewed inclusionally, in the continuous dynamic context of harnessed water, 
phenotype is not, however, as genetic determinism would have it, a direct 
genetic function of environmental variables. Rather, genes are variables 
whose influence, along with other factors, on boundary properties affects 
the pattern in which water is arrayed and re-arrayed as life rolls on 
receptively and responsively, beyond the capabilities of dry machines 
operating in fixed frames of space and time.


The Long and the Short Run: Time Management is not Energy Management

When we lose sight of their deeper, contextual, flow-form nature, we render 
all organisms, including ourselves, clockwork automatons, driven by the 
abstraction of time that I think is the inevitable product of our avoidance 
of void space. Our lives become frantic ? a mad rush to ‘achieve’ more and 
more in less and less time. In our haste to get better all the time, to 
become more efficient survival machines, we begin dispensing with what 
doesn’t appear to fit with our abstracted future projections. In attempting 
to cut costs, by excising or disregarding those needy aspects of ourselves 
that we deem too costly ? requiring care and affection ? we cost ourselves 
dear in the long run, forsaking what’s vital to both our individual and 
collective quality of life. Our lives become arid, unsustainable wastelands 
as we forsake the connectivity and fluidity that enables us to attune with 
our ever-changing living space. That is the cost of being driven by 
abstraction ? we end up getting nowhere fast, like the demented Red Queen 
of ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ and neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory.

It all has to do with how we regard what we call 'efficiency' and can 
confuse this with other measures of ‘performance’ such as efficacy and 
productivity. When we measure efficiency in terms of speed or productivity, 
what we and other organisms 'do' in a fixed time frame, we lose sight of 
the energy cost of increasing performance. Correspondingly, we lose our 
compassion both for ourselves and for our neighbourhood when we rank one 
another as 'clockwork machines', regardless of context. Taken to extremes, 
we can literally kill one another and ourselves in our pursuit of the 
time-savings that we envisage to be the basis of evolutionary fitness and 
social and commercial success. In the latter case we equate 'time' with 
that other great abstraction of space-excluding logic, 'money'. This is the 
essence of unsustainability and how humanity has been driven crazy by 
abstraction.

In nature, 'efficiency' is more about ‘ergonomics’ ? conserving energy ? 
than the ‘economics’ of human productivity in discrete intervals of 
abstract time. And conserving energy is about inner-outer attunement - 
correspondence of content with context. The distinction and relationship 
between 'time costs' and 'energy costs' is evident in the difference 
between a 100 m sprinter and a marathon runner. The former cuts time costs 
by disregarding energy costs, allowing a short high performance run, but 
consequently cannot sustain him or herself for the long run. The latter 
minimizes energy costs by attuning inner with outer context (unless you're 
collapsing in sweltering heat) and so has the stamina to keep going and go 
further and faster in the long run, which includes space.

So 'short-term’ economic management, based on cutting 'time costs' at huge 
energy-cost, in a high performance dash spurred on by relentless 
competition is grotesquely dissipative (wasteful) and unsustainable. We 
might 'get there fast' but can't stay there. A homogeneous community 
selectively constituted in the short term solely of high performance 
dashers through the discarding of those judged 'not good enough' is 
dysfunctional in the long run. Yet that is what our focus on time 
management in modern human organizations is Hell-bent on producing. By 
contrast a community where there is a place for all kinds, operating and 
communicating over diverse functional, spatial and temporal scales, guided 
by the relative (but not absolute) opening up and closing down of 
opportunity can keep going indefinitely. If it can keep going indefinitely, 
there is no absolute time frame to judge the collective or individual 
performance of its membership within. Such is the nature of the natural 
communities and ecosystems of Earth's Biosphere. Such could be the nature 
of sustainable human communities attuned with the natural economy of 
conserving energy rather than obsessed solely with saving time. They could 
be places for compassion, work, rest and play. Places for acknowledging one 
another's unique idiosyncratic contributions as complex flow-form selves 
with inner, outer and intermediary aspects, both in the short and in the 
long run that includes the space that is inseparable from time, which is 
inseparable from energy. Places where death feeds life rather than where we 
feed death with life to serve our obsession with perfecting ourselves as 
clockwork machines.


Everlasting Stillness or Diffuseness: The Consequence of Preserving or 
Discarding the Lining of Space

Just as abstracting time from energy-space, to serve as a relentless 
drumbeat against which to measure our performance can make our secular 
lives frantic, exhausting and turbulent, so, in order to ‘rest in peace’ we 
may take this abstraction even further. Having consciously or unconsciously 
isolated time, we may seek to eliminate ‘it’ entirely. We can then bring an 
end to our rolling ever onwards, in one or other kind of tranquil place 
that we may call ‘Heaven’ and distinguish from another kind of place of 
eternal torment, which we may call ‘Hell’. There are two contrasting ways 
in which we may do this, which appear to me to lie at the heart of the 
distinctive orthodox traditions of our currently predominant world 
religions.

On the one hand we may seek peace, love and compassion in everlasting 
Light, and hence seek purity through the elimination of all trace of 
Darkness, which we regard as sinful. This is what might be labelled 
(although perhaps rather too simplistically) as the western orthodox 
tradition of Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions, which are in turn 
associated with the orthodox ‘impositional logic’ of absolute closure that 
I have been questioning throughout this chapter and book so far. It is like 
trying to remove the fluidizing, ‘solvent’ space from its electromagnetic, 
‘solute’ electromagnetic lining, leaving only the latter on which to focus 
all our attention and aspirations. Hence, we get hooked on the solid 
precipitate of living energy-space as the place to attach our material 
desires and longings and sell our souls out to. We adore the regularity of 
inert, pure, linear form, implicit in Euclidean geometry and Platonic 
solids as the epitome of timeless, static perfection. Ironically some may 
even go so far as to describe it as ‘Sacred Space’, of which this form is 
an exclusion.

So far, avoiding the void, has been my main focus in this text due to my 
experience of western anti-culture. But we may also actually seek it as the 
place of absolute formlessness where all the sufferings arising from the 
desires we attach to the electromagnetic linings of our lives are absolved. 
This is the eastern mystic and orthodox Buddhist tradition. Rather than 
Adam’s curse, the void becomes a blessing, a limitless presence of absence 
with infinite creative potential. We can find it through silent meditation, 
letting go of attachments to our life-linings and floating away into a 
timeless drift of nothingness.

But then we may ‘get lost’ in the pure dissolution of a primordial soup 
lacking any form of distinction. We lose the identity given to us by the 
electromagnetic linings we have sloughed in the process of becoming a 
Universal One rather than one of a Heavenly Host of Many ‘Above’ alienated 
from and so eternally at war with the Darkness of their common 
communicative space ‘Below’. Becoming pure solvent, we lose the 
differentiation through which we conflict, but which we also need in order 
to relate and interact with one another in a community of diversity.

It seems to me a sad irony that both these traditions seek love, yet find 
it in what they perceive as opposite locations that they each try to remove 
or remove themselves from. As each reciprocally disowns the other, so we 
overlook the wonderful, joyfully creative opportunities of living and 
loving together in the inclusional dynamic couple of living light and 
loving darkness forming the complex self solution of nature. We are left 
with either eternal darkness-excluding self-satisfaction or eternal 
formlessness as the best we can look forward to at the end of our time.

Through my conversations with those holding deeper theological knowledge 
than me, I discover further sad irony in that the originators of these 
reciprocal traditions were by no means so one-sided in their own 
perceptions and aspirations. The one-sidedness comes literally as an 
‘afterthought’, through the abstraction of a time frame from energy-space 
and leading to the imposition either of absolute closure or absolute 
opening by those both assuming and given authoritative status within their 
social context. The same kind of ‘afterthought’ or ‘rationalistic backfill’ 
as my friend Ted Lumley calls it, is evident again and again during the 
evolution of human thought in the suppression of an original inclusional 
awareness by the imposition of rationalistic objectification enshrined by 
definitive language. Although this imposition leads to apparent 
simplification and greater certainty, it actually complicates the 
flow-dynamic of nature through the insertion of unnatural barriers. This is 
evident in the eclipse of aboriginal and childhood views by more ‘grown up’ 
cultures; of Heraclitus by Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle; of Kepler by 
Newton and of Poincaré by Einstein. So powerful is our personal and 
cultural desire for some kind of absolute ending of uncertainty through the 
removal of one aspect or the other of energy-space and consequent fixing of 
abstract time that we never seem able to let our inherent inclusional 
awareness be. We keep having to rediscover it, only to struggle to hold on 
to its openness as our definitive desires, mathematics and language attempt 
to regain control and security.

But hope remains because as ever-flowing forms, we can both relax and 
stiffen, so as to hold openness lovingly and respectfully within and around 
our bodily and mental boundaries as we correspond with our dynamic 
circumstances. We can, as complex selves, both be content in the unique 
local identity given to us by our dynamically transforming boundaries, and 
be context in our spatial connection with everywhere. If only we can find 
ways of expressing and holding on to this awareness of our three-aspect 
nature in the face of our definitive desires and methodologies.

What orthodoxy disowns is not, to my mind, evil, but rather a vital 
inclusion of a living and loving nature. It is the act of disownment that 
brings us to grief.


Holding Openness in Evolution as a Learning Process of Co-Creative 
Exploration

In the long run, then, with space included in its embodied water flow, we 
can see biological evolution as a correspondence course of life-long 
learning, a process of contextual transformation through inner-outer 
harmonic attunement in the ever-changing now. It is not so much what 
organisms ‘do’ in their independent right, that makes them fit, but how 
they correspond with their living space that makes them fitting. When we 
hold openness in our learning experience, we reflect in ourselves what life 
and evolution are all about.



----- Original Message -----
From: Marie Huxtable
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: 05 January 2007 01:13
Subject: Re: My Achilles Heal - Testimony of a 'Gifted' Child



Dear Alan

If ever I loose heart I will reread your paper and remember why I am doing
what I am doing. We often think about the damage that comes from those
labelled 'not gifted', your story is a powerful reminder of the damage that
comes from labelling people as 'gifted', which similarly defines them and
their futures.



My concern with the current implementation of English government policy on
gifted and talented education is that it puts a strong emphasis on defining
a population, identifying children who fit the definition, and using
simplistic measures of the effectiveness of provision.



I did not realise how culturally determined this policy is until I read
Joan Freeman's observations on cultural differences:



The major cultural dichotomy affecting educational provision for the gifted
and talented is between the largely Eastern perception - 'all children have
gifted potential' - and the largely Western one - 'only some children have
gifted potential'. (Freeman,2002 p9)



She clearly demonstrates that 'gifted and talented' is a north European
construct and it is not a universal truth. Pip also helps me to understand
the diversity of understandings I am also encouraged by Freeman's
reflection that:



'The human spirit survives most attempts to be categorised, selected and
treated in accord - for good or ill.' p188 I very much appreciate your
paper as evidence I can draw on as I work on responses to the
implementation of government policy on 'gifted and talented education'.
There are other understandings of 'gifts and talents' that contribute to
inclusive and inclusional educational practice and theory but they are not
well known - Dweck's work on fixed and growth mindsets for instance. I find
it heartening to hear of Kevin's enthusiasm for your story and hope that
more people will begin to question the prevailing wisdoms defining and
identifying children as 'gifted and talented', and move to constructing
their own understandings of 'gifts and talents'  and researching creative
possibilities for learning with children as they generate, reveal, develop
and share the gifts and talents they wish to bring more fully into the
world they wish to live in.

To me a gift is in its creation, offering and valuing... it is not an
entity or fixed product and is given freely, openly, without imposition or
demand. For me your gift was in the creation of your story with others in
mind, your sensitive open offering and its worth to you; you appear to
welcome but do not demand a response of others to add to its worth
generatively. Your work on inclusionality as a dynamic awareness of space
and boundaries that are connective, cocreative and reflexive is
significantly influencing my understandings and practice, which I think you
will recognise in what I write and, I hope, in my practice. What I have
lacked are forms of evidence that communicate such a concept that is
relational and flowing and Jack's video collage and narrative is offering
me a way forward.

I look forward to further responses like Jane's, Kevin's and Pip's where
they focuss on what they find valuable in what you offer as they help me
gain a little insight into other peoples constructs of 'gifts and talents'
and make me question my understanding of what 'world leading standards of
judgment in the creation of a world of educational quality' may be.



Dweck C (2000) Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and
Development; Florence: Psychology Press

Freeman J (2002) Out-of-school Educational Provision for the Gifted and
Talented Around the World: A report to the DFES



----- Original Message ----
From: A.D.M.Rayner <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thursday, 4 January, 2007 4:48:39 PM
Subject: Re: My Achilles Heal - Testimony of a 'Gifted' Child


Dear Kevin,

That's good to know! Thank you. I have been moved and encouraged by the
responses to my essay from group members. Thank you all. I'm glad so many of
you found it so accessible and non-esoteric - I find it very difficult to
achieve that, but it's good that I managed to on this occasion.

I guess my general plea on behalf of all gifted children (i.e. all children)
is 'don't single us out; don't try to make us 'independent'; let us belong
where we belong'.

Warmest

Alan


PS I am pasting it in below, as the server won't accept it as an 
attachment.


----- Original Message -----
From: Kevin Eames <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 04 January 2007 13:28
Subject: Re: My Achilles Heal - Testimony of a 'Gifted' Child


> > Dear Alan
> Thanks for your humane and concise analysis. I've gone back to it again
> and again, and it's provoked much reflection. It's also an 'offering'
> which will be of direct practical use. I teach at Wootton Bassett School,
> and, on behalf of Bath Spa University, tutor the action research group
> there. One of the teachers in the group is enquiring into her practice in
> supporting gifted students, and I know that she will be delighted by your
> thoughts.
> Thank you again - it's great to come across something that
> teacher-researchers can make direct use of!
> Kevin Eames
>
>
> Dear All,
> >
> > Here's my latest offering.
> >
> >
> > Maybe it's a gift.
> >
> >
> > Warmest
> >
> >
> > Alan
> >
> >
>


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