Dear Sara,
Thank you for this very insightful response!
"Alan, I can feel your passion and warmth, so I wonder if you know that it
can kill off the joy and hope and incentive of our attempts to move towards
one another, (as through what Joan calls 'holism'), when someone dismisses
them, even the most radical of them, as irrelevant, misguided or potentially
'oppressive colonization'? I *do* understand the ground of your rejection,
your commitment to a deeper and truer reality, that lies behind the need to
correct/reject any perception and terminology that undermines the beautiful,
underlying truth of natural inclusionality. But it is so dismissive of
human spirit and intent, and of the miracles that come from this spirit and
intent, as to become a kind of oppression and colonization in its own right.
Which is what you yourself abhor..?"
Yes, I am all too keenly aware of this and it troubles and discomforts me
greatly. I have no wish to appear to dismiss anyone's efforts to enhance
their own and others' understanding of Nature and Human Nature. I have every
wish to encourage all kinds of enquiry. Natural Inclusionality is not
opposed to holism (or reductionism). But both holism and reductionism DO
BLOCK OUT the possibility of understanding Natural Inclusionality. That is
my dilemma. Do I go along with ways of thinking that block out what I do
indeed see all too clearly as the deeper truth that removes paradox?
Or do I try, as best I can, to point out how to get beyond the definitive
reasoning that produces the paradox? I feel duty-bound to the latter.
Warmest
Alan
----- Original Message -----
From: "Salyers, Sara M" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, October 31, 2010 5:00 PM
Subject: Re: Journeys and Love in teaching
Dear Joan and Joan! and Pip and Brian and Alan and all,
I cannot tell you much this, completely unexpected, conversation is
impacting me. I feel as if I am inside the same experience, and the same
heart, as many extraordinary others - all contending with with the same
limits and forces and all struggling to articulate our experience and the
wisdom that it seems to promise. How many of us, I wonder, are in this space
and looking for one another? What a huge and inexpressably wonderful gift. I
love... 'love filled fellow hillclimbers'. I am also thrilled, like Joan W.
by:
"This is very exciting. It is an holistic process in that everything is
linked and connected to everything else, so as any one element changes, then
it is predictable that something else will change, but the intriguing part
is that, as I watch and experience this change, I can never be sure WHICH or
WHAT or WHO will change at that point in the process. All I can be very sure
of is that SOMETHING or SOMEONE WILL CHANGE."
Actually, for me it's breathtaking and reminiscent of something that is
partially explored in the dynamics of Chaos - cause in one place is effect
in a completely difference and even apparently unrelated other place! In
some way, (I think through a paradigm that Alan has distinguished as natural
inclusionality), we are not just connected and interconnected but we
actually *are* all each other and because this is an empirical rather than a
poetic truth, we can see and, in our objectified world, even measure the
consequences of that truth! That you are applying this as a practice is
truly inspiring.
Alan, I can feel your passion and warmth, so I wonder if you know that it
can kill off the joy and hope and incentive of our attempts to move towards
one another, (as through what Joan calls 'holism'), when someone dismisses
them, even the most radical of them, as irrelevant, misguided or potentially
'oppressive colonization'? I *do* understand the ground of your rejection,
your commitment to a deeper and truer reality, that lies behind the need to
correct/reject any perception and terminology that undermines the beautiful,
underlying truth of natural inclusionality. But it is so dismissive of
human spirit and intent, and of the miracles that come from this spirit and
intent, as to become a kind of oppression and colonization in its own right.
Which is what you yourself abhor..?
I have more than 35 papers to grade so I will have to post this and come
back when (and if!) I get finished. But I would like to set up, as a way of
allowing the truth of natural inclusionality to stand undiminished by
concepts of wholeness or holism or interconnection, a complementary
position. This is the position which I hold, at present. (And all such
positions, as well as the truths on which they are founded, are only ever
'for the present; Ptolemy, Newton and Einstein have all had to give way to
the discoveries of deeper and greater truth that redefines their
perceptions.)
The boundless (boundary-less) universe in which all is in all, (arranged as
Bohm and Hiley have demonstrated empirically, much as a hologram is
arranged - except that there are no discrete/separate objects to isolate and
examine for evidence of the 'whole' ), is the most elegant and
close-to-the-trurth understanding that I can have of our own reality. It's
near impossible to grasp, especially for our conditioned minds, but I think
it is as profoundly important for the way that we see ourselves (and
therefore the way that we choose to occur) as Chaos and uncertainty,
evolution and the existence, or non existence, of God. And since everything
is all-in-all, we can see patterns repeating themselves like Mandelbrot
sets - everywhere we look, if we look! And one of those patterns is
wave-particle duality. Light breaks down into individual photons that
interact and behave as if with intelligence AND light never does any such
thing; it is a constant and consistent, uninterrupted wave. *Both* these
things are true at the same time. Perception plays an important part in the
apparent resolution of the paradox into one of these truths or another. But
the truth is that they are always and without exception both true at the
same time. It is not the truth that light is *really* a wave or *really* a
particle.
We are engaged in exactly the same paradox of being. We experience ourselves
as discrete, individual and profoundly alone. No one thinks with us within
our lonely minds or looks with us at the wonders of the earth. We live and
breathe and move through time in a kind of mental, solitary confinement. We
can scream that this is not the fundamental truth - but that changes our
human lot not one iota. Not one. This is the 'particle' aspect of the
duality - splintered, isolated and, without the ability to *experience* the
'wave function', broken. The perception that allows only the objectified,
splintered reality as possible is - I suspect along with many religious and
mystical traditions - the source of the mind's prison. That is why the
movement away from that perception and towards inclusionality is so
important and so profound in its implications. And the bottom line is that
it *is* a movement, from the position of the particle in a world whose rules
are consistent with 'cut space' (i.e. we are separate from one another in
our *experience* in every meaningful way), and towards the position of the
wave in which we are all-in-all. Somewhere in the oscillation between the
two is, I hope, our evolutionary 'home'.
But, in the meantime, from the point of view of the particle (which is as
true as the POV of the wave) there not only *can* be connection and
reconnection, but there must be. In that paradigm we can indeed examine the
'piece' and find that it contains the 'whole', empirically and
scientifically we can do this, because it is as true that we are the
particle in a reality whose 'laws' reflect that fact, as it is true that we
are actually all-in-all and boundless. (In which state of being I imagine
the evidence of particle paradigms might be just as intriguing to our
wave-minds as intangible presence is to the particle-mind!) Holism, such as
that which Joan describes, in which that interconnection and
inter-dependence produce change in one person simply because of change
occurring, elsewhere, in another is critically important in our 'particle
paradigm/perception' world because it allows the movement - as well as a
recognition of the real shape of that movement - within the wave paradigm.
We do not occupy the wave paradigm - it explains us and it an be fostered
and even, sublimely, experienced. But concepts of wholeness and connection
are, I submit, paradoxically just as true and valid from the point of view
of our individuated position.
We humans don't like paradoxes. We like 'either or' not 'either and'. (Chaos
taught me that one with a little help from medicine way!) It's the x an y
axis again - just taken a lot further. But if we can't hold the paradox then
we can hold one thing more important. How we are with one another, love and
humanity and really seeing one another, matters more than the truest truth
we can discover. When we begin to inspire and be inspired by each other, to
see each other and to experience the connection (which is *a true phenomenon
in our particle reality*) then something living and human and warm is taking
place. The lights are going on in the darkness; woe to us if we switch them
off whether they fail to grasp the underlying truth or not.
Much love
Sara
________________________________________
From: Practitioner-Researcher [[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Joan Walton [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Sunday, October 31, 2010 10:23 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Journeys and Love in teaching
Dear Joan, Sara and all,
I think this is a very important conversation. Sara, you are indeed
courageous writing in the way that you do. To talk about 'falling in love'
in this kind of context is definitely not the norm - and yet it it clearly
touches a chord with many people who want to be able to express their
experience of 'love' beyond the contexts in which that term is more
conventionally used. Connected to this, there is a real challenge in
exploring our respective experiences of 'intangible presence'. Even amongst
those of us for whom the term has meaning, we probably need to agree that
its nature is ultimately mysterious in nature - it connects with Jack's
'life affirming energy', and with my 'loving dynamic energy with limitless
creative possibilities' (which I sense to be infinite and eternal) - but
beyond forms of expression such as these which try to capture something of
what we feel, can we say any more in words, but rather need to explore it
through our different experiences of it? Which I think, Sara, is what you
do so passionately and powerfully in your writing.
A more creative and expanded use of the word 'love' is being explored in a
number of contexts. In my own faculty, the Dean Bart McGettrick has
included in his 'strategic map' that the work of the faculty is to "promote
education as a humanizing influence on each person and on society locally,
nationally and internationally", and to characterise all work "with values
arising from hope and love". There is now a beginning exploration about
what that means for the development of the faculty, and especially for the
focus of research activities.
I have begun a collaborative inquiry (based on a living theory approach to
action research) with pracitioners and managers from children's services in
Liverpool, initially in early years setting, but now into work with schools
extended services and services for children with disabilities, which
includes young people themselves and parents. An important part of the
inquiry is encouraging those involved to share what matters to them and so
many are talking with a passion about 'loving what they are doing'. I am
now being faced with a challenge, as a senior manager who thinks an inquiry
of this kind should be developed through all children's services, has
arranged for me to meet with their Programme Management Board (responsible
for strategic planning) - but I have been warned that they will want
evidence of impact (as is the norm here politically at the moment - if you
can't do that, then expect your service to be cut!!) - and evidence to them
means boxes that are ticked, and clear objective criteria that include
baseline indicators against which progress can be measured and monitored. I
cannot do what they ask in the way they currently expect - so I need to
think of a way of influencing the way that they think so that they will
accept a different kind of 'evidence'. So Joan, when you say:
This is very exciting. It is an holistic process in that everything is
linked and connected to everything else, so as any one element changes, then
it is predictable that something else will change, but the intriguing part
is that, as I watch and experience this change, I can never be sure WHICH or
WHAT or WHO will change at that point in the process. All I can be very sure
of is that SOMETHING or SOMEONE WILL CHANGE.
There is already considerable evidence of people changing, and influencing
those around them. And of course, this is where Jack's work on looking at
how you capture such changes using different forms of evidence become really
critical. These practitioners and managers are now comfortable about
talking about the 'love' they have for their work - and I would like to be
able to capture this as an integral part of 'good practice'.
Sara and Joan - I have also just sent your email chain on to a new EdD
student who talks so passionately about her work with autistic children -
who I think could have written similarly to how you wrote, Sara, she
certainly spoke in a way that reflects your experience. She has for so
long felt an 'outsider' (her word), and it is only since she started the EdD
in September that she is beginning to feel she belongs somewhere - and is
(for example) returning to writing poetry which she has not done for nearly
30 years. Your email chain will I know confirm her sense that she is part
of something greater ....
So thank you again for these contributions.
Joan
On 31 October 2010 06:35, Joan Lucy Conolly
<[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Dear Sara
Thank you for your generous and open hearted response. I really like
'transitional'. Thank you. I shall use that if I may and work at changing
the view of both the learners and us ... as 'transitional' teachers and
learners. Actually I belong/lead the Self Study for Transformative Higher
Education and Social Action project at the Durban University of Technology
and so our focus is on our own transformation and that of the learners and
everything that, and everyone else who, is transformable! People,
curriculum, policies, timetables, assessment, worldviews, structures, and
the list goes on and on. This is very exciting. It is an holistic process in
that everything is linked and connected to everything else, so as any one
element changes, then it is predictable that something else will change, but
the intriguing part is that, as I watch and experience this change, I can
never be sure WHICH or WHAT or WHO will change at that point in the process.
All I can be very sure of is that SOMETHING or SOMEONE WILL CHANGE. And it
is this absolute certainty that the process of holism is unstoppable that
assures me that even when it SEEMS that everything is 'going wrong'
SOMETHING/SOMEONE I CANNOT NECESSARILY SEE IS CHANGING, and all I have to do
is hang in there and wait for it to become apparent. 'Hanging in there'
means continuing to do what is right and doing it with the love that it
deserves. This is very hard. When things appear to be going wrong (as you so
aptly describe in your mail ... I recognize your situation well!) ... when
things APPEAR to be going wrong, I find it very hard to keep 'hanging in
there'... so I sympathise. I have come to think of this situation to be like
climbing mountains. The mountains where I live present the perfect
challenge. As I puff and pant up the hill I am facing, I look up and see the
'top', but when I get to the 'top', I see another hill in front of me, with
a 'top', ... and so on and on. Why then do I keep climbing the mountain?????
Because I know that there is a REAL TOP ... and if I just keep putting one
foot in front of the other, I WILL GET THERE. Of course it helps enormously
when there are other hillclimbers with me and together we encourage each
other, to keep putting one foot in front of the other. In the business of
transformation, the putting one foot in front of the other, is simply doing
what needs to be done with love.....
I hope you will forgive the simplicity of this analogy ...
Thank you for allowing the sharing of your situation. I sent it to many, and
in exactly ONE MINUTE I had a response from a friend in England applauding
your courage ... here it is....
"Dear Joanie
How do I get permission to use this in my own loved class of fellow
lecturers and collegues so that they can discuss what Sara said? I applaud
Sara with my heart and my mind for her sprit and courage, and you for your
wisdom in sending it further.
Charl"
And so I have told Charl how to join the listserve ... and she will, and she
will be another lovefilled hill climber, and who knows what Charl will bring
to the mix in the fullness of time.....
And so the process of holism goes on and on and on and on changing changing
changing ...
I send wishes for a love filled day ... believing that all is happening as
it should ...
Joan
-----Original Message-----
From: Practitioner-Researcher
[mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>]
On Behalf Of Salyers, Sara M
Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2010 11:08 PM
To:
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Journeys and Love in teaching
Dear Pip, Joan, Alan and Brian (and all)
I'm very, very grateful to you for your responses to something I wrote out
of a feeling of desperation and for the practical purpose of saving my
husband's sanity! (I've been a difficult, short tempered, distant and
downright prickly person at home for the past couple of weeks.) It felt like
a very selfish act, to thrust my own - lengthy - situation at everyone when
I know perfectly well that we are *all* facing our own difficulties -
especially Geisha. So it's very humbling indeed to be thanked for that. I'm
still learning about AR and while I can clearly see how the dynamics of
relationship supersede every other factor in terms of what kinds of
practice, growth, empowerment, achievement etc. happen in a classroom, it's
harder for me to see how or where to fit that into the AR model. I think I
would have responded to my own story by identifying with the experience and
perhaps by clarifying what I already understood. I wouldn't know how to
begin share it with anyone else in a way that made it useful. (Just as I
wouldn't know how to even find the things that Jack discovers in the
teaching videos, let alone extrapolate from them. But I love it when he
points them out!)
So, dear Pip, thank you so much, and please use anything I wrote in any way
that you see fit. I'm just an adjunct. I teach developmental writing (and
this semester, reading and writing), at Pellissippi State Community College
in Tennessee within an extraordinary department - the Tranistional Studies
Department. I do seem to remember that Jack recommended that paper by Moira
Laidlaw to me and it is high time I got hold of it. Thank you.
Joan, thank you also for your loving support and of *course* I don't mind
your sharing my story with whomever you wish. I absolutely agree that the
under-preparedness is even more (and more critically), a feature of us, the
teachers than of these students. I like 'underprepared' as a term much more
than the term 'developmental' but I like my own Dept's, rare epithet
'Transitional' students even better for the following reason: A student who
had not had the opportunity to learn how to read and write or do math would
be underprepared. It would be our job to help that student fill in the gaps
and prepare for the rigors of college. A student who has been through
thirteen years of a vertical, (colonizing) compulsory education system has
not simply lacked the opportunity to acquire the necessary skills. He has
undergone actual neurological damage. (That means you and me, too, I'm
afraid!) The ones *we* see in our classrooms have sustained the greatest
damage. So, before we can even begin to 'fill in the gaps' (at least
successfully), we have to reverse the damage. Thus, we help them to
transition from "learned helplessness" to empowered, from damaged to whole
and from programmed to be programmable, to independent thinkers. That means
developing programs whose primary function is this healing, (manifest in
re-engagament, 'alert relaxation', focus, reflection, self awareness et
alia) and which address the mechanical skills of language and, mathematics
as a *means to that end* rather than the other way around. In a nice irony,
the outcomes in terms of required benchmarks are satisfyingly higher, and
often quite a *lot* higher, than the norm. Teaching something other than, or
beyond, Math and English for their own sakes causes controversy and has
already put my own department into conflict with other, traditional
departments at my college. I won't bore you with the miserable details of
the war but it is reflected, of course, at State Board level. (I spent
months writing a kind of 'manifesto' for our department in order to help
raise awareness - among our own faculty as well as the rest of the college -
of what the Dept. is really taking on because, of course, when I became
fierce about my students I became fierce about a department that is actually
willing to rewrite the whole 'rule book' to help them.) I am just
overwhelmed right now at the odds stacked against us and the chances that
the light can prevail against the darkness, which seem very small. It feels
as if we're destined to 'go under'. At the instigation of the traditional
departments, full time jobs are currently being denied to those with
advanced degrees in anything other Literaure or Math, on the grounds that,
when our department folds and the individual courses return to control of
the English and Math Depts., they will no longer be qualified to teach our
students. The smug and delighted certainty of our removal, in the face of
the miracles coming out of this department, is infamous and utterly
debilitating. I'm just holding on tight to the names and faces of individual
students for whom I have been important. A single human soul matters as much
as a whole world - As Pip reminded me, what Mother Teresa said to a novice
who was in tears because she felt that all her efforts were just a 'drop in
the ocean', was, "Yes, but the ocean is made of drops." (I'm really,
*really* trying to remember that, Pip!)
Alan, forgive me but I intend, not to forsake but to ignore the vertical as
much as I possibly can, beyond acknowledging its importance! I *do* of
course, acknowledge it. I maintain, however, that if balance is an x/y axis
between which effective and powerful 'oscillation' can take place, then we
have a job in front of us to construct any kind of y axis at all. (Indeed, I
doubt we have a true appreciation of the vertical anyway, since we have no
working, established horizontal from which to look at it!) At least, that's
my intent if there remains any point in doing so when the multitude of
excuses for social engineering (and lobotomizing), under the dissembling
guise of education - with the backing of the Rockefellers, Carnegies and
their NGO offspring - seem set to sweep us, and everything I do and believe,
into historical footnotes.
Brian, thanks also. The strange thing is that I am only just *truly* coming
to see that the most important thing we can articulate isn't what works for
our students (as huge and revolutionary as that might be) it's the love
that gives rise to what works. That's quite a big step for me - the ideas,
articulation person!
Much love to all,
Sara
________________________________________
From: Practitioner-Researcher
[[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>]
On Behalf Of Brian wakeman
[[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>]
Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2010 5:09 AM
To:
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Love in teaching
Sarah,
You say:
something extraordinary happened. I fell in love with my classes: fiercely
and deeply in love with them. I have a fallen in love again each semester
and with every class, so far. I've never had any equivalent experience and I
know no adequate way to describe it. I can no more explain or define it than
I can explain the beauty of a baby's smile. One week I am with a bunch of
strangers towards whom I am well disposed and, I suppose, committed. The
next... they possess my soul. Though I cannot explain how or why this
happens, it is the only elegant explanation for what has taken place since
that first 'fall'. (I know that I am by no means alone in this teaching
experience, by the way, but I suppose we each respond to love in our own
ways.)
I've never seen these thoughts written before...... but it is something I
have felt so important in teaching, indeed in management of a school too.
Education has strong elements of the 'relational', of seeking the good of
students, affection, agape love, and the human chemistry of interaction
.
When students see the regard, when they feel the warmth of acceptance, the
genuine interest of the teacher in their world, their learning.....then the
hard shell bud cases can open to the sun.
I've observed it in 15 year olds, and in adult education.
.... and seen the 'joy' in the face of the teacher.
Thank you for expressing this.
Brian
"This e-mail is subject to our Disclaimer, to view click
http://www.dut.ac.za"
--
Dr Joan Walton
Director of the Centre for the Child and Family
Faculty of Education
Liverpool Hope University
Hope Park
Liverpool
L16 9JD
Phone: 0151 291 2115
Email: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
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