Hi Sara
Enjoying and learning from this discussion on the "paradox of individual existence". A resolution to the paradox I like, is this one " .. in some respects we are as all other human beings, in other respects we are as some, and, in another we are like nobody else; unites the notions of human universality, cultural specificity and individual uniqueness".
Lawrence
-----Original Message-----
From: Practitioner-Researcher [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Salyers, Sara M
Sent: 01 November 2010 07:01 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Journeys and Love in teaching
And this is where you and I must part company, Alan. For I hold that the paradox is crucial - indeed that it is everything. The paradox of individual existence - defined and discrete and opposed to the boundless, inclusional all-in-all, cannot be resolved because it is the deepest order there is. The attempt to resolve it will produce a falsehood as profound as the lie of cut space and objectivism.
Because of your unique insights and wonderful articulation and exploration of natural inclusionality, I have resolved an ongoing problem for myself. I had long thought that the separate individual (part of an objective, defined world) was a falsehood and I struggled with the implications for love, meaning etc. I had never been able to envisage the single encompassing sea that we all are but I had a sense that it was there. Pondering the shape and depth and face of inclusionality as you have drawn it has allowed actually me to step away from our own, every day paradigm just a little bit, so as to see it more clearly. And in the last few days the problem has resolved itself. Wave particle duality. (I have mentioned this!.)
I perceive that, like wave particle duality, our universe exists, simultaneously, in two completely opposed and contradictory states - in a paradox that could only be sustained by God (for my money!).
1. Reality is, in fact, a boundless all in all, in which there is no 'other', no distinction or separation of any kind (and, therefore no love between I and 'other'), no time and no space - just as Bohm's experiments suggest: a kind of singularity.
2. Reality is, in fact, that I exist as a definite and individual being. Here are boundaries, here separation such that I am *not* you - and thus I can know the joy and pain of encountering the 'other'; I can change and grow - move in time through space - I can reflect and explore.
They cannot both be true. And they are.
The latter is already verified as our common human experience; the attempt to deny it is like the calculation of angels on a pin head, or denial that the person experiencing himself really exists, futile and indulgent. Inclusionality is only verifiable through intangibles, ineffables and the strange borderland science of quantum physics. Reality No 2. we know only too well, and the other reality No 1 we may be coming to know, intuiting.
I suggest that the error of 'resolving the paradox' has already produced a lie of monumental violence for human beings. In our objectified, supposedly 'rational' world, we and our reality are taken apart like the pieces of a great clock and reduced to the sum of the parts. We are fractured, isolated and in terrible pain in our isolation. We live in that paradigm as particles who are beginning to postulate the wave and to recognize the evidence and the experience of the wave. For the present, the wave appears in moments and underlying order and we, in parallel, develop the faculties with which to recognize and describe it.
The dynamic between the all in all and the individual - the two utter contradictions - is like a blazing light. We construct holism and interconnection and chaotic order - infinity within the defined. We walk a tightrope (axis) between the hell of objectivism and a singularity in which the individual ceases to have meaning. Along that tightrope, balanced, as our earth is balanced in the only possible point in our galaxy where life can exist, lies the miraculous - not just the all-in-all but an *individual capable of experiencing* the all-in-all and being transfigured in it and by it - a blazing, transformational love that enables both I-thou and thou-*in*-I simultaneously. I dare to suggest that it is here, and here alone, that we can exist in the Living Light and Loving Darkness. Here seamlessness and attachment that can be cut, (as in the crucifixion, for me), exist at the same time. A kind of hypostatic union, if you will. Funny that early Christianity may have got that right. The deadly doctrinal squabbles might have caught on to something of our own condition in those debates (to the death) over whether Christ was only God or only man. ( Steiner tried to resolve the paradox by having the man Jeshua undergo a kind of divine possession - very inelegant!)
So, I suddenly discover!, here is my proposal for the interaction between boundless all-in-all, inclusionality, and defined, discrete individuality:
"Hypostatic union (from the Greek: ὑπόστασις, {"[h]upostasis"}, "hypostasis", sediment, foundation, substance, or subsistence) is a technical term in Christian theology employed in mainstream Christology to describe the union of Christ's humanity and divinity in one hypostasis. The First Council of Ephesus recognised this doctrine and affirmed its importance, stating that the humanity and divinity of Christ are made one according to nature and hypostasis in the Logos."
I choose this paradox. I choose both connection born of my separation and the boundlessness that make a nonsense of any idea of connection; I choose wholeness out of brokenness and also that which is, was and always will be indivisible and unbreakable. I choose to live with the difficulty of language. (Zen masters, Kabbalists, Tao masters, Sufis and Christian mystics have endured it so why not me?) I will use words like collective and connected and holistic knowing that they are a block to the truth of inclusionality (because each contradiction in a paradox automatically blocks/excludes the other) but I will also choose to know that these terms are both true and untrue at the same time. Most of all, I will look for the ineffable, the intangible presence that is NOT the offspring of inclusionality - but the offspring of the paradox - it requires the individual who is experiencing inclusionality in order to exist.
love
Sara
(And now I'm really behind with my classes.)
________________________________________
From: Practitioner-Researcher [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alan Rayner (BU) [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, November 01, 2010 4:35 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Journeys and Love in teaching
Dear Geisha,
Thank you so much for asking this, and for sharing your story of 'tangible loss'.
I once would have been happy to call my thinking 'holistic'. I was for four years external examiner for the MSc in holistic science at the world-renowned Schumacher College in Devon, UK. I have immense respect for much that holism stands for and has accomplished. I have equal respect for much that reductionism stands for and has accomplished. By the same token, I respect both 'individualistic' and 'collectivistic' philosophies. But I also see each as representing only a partial view of Nature, and each needing to be brought out of mutual opposition into the complementary mutual reciprocity of each within the influence of the other if the co-creative 'dynamic synthesis' of 'natural inclusionality' is to be made possible. Here I have come to recognise (and I always accept that I may be mistaken in this) that what both lack is an adequate acknowledgement of the influence of the 'intangible presence' of 'space', because each is rooted in the imposition of definitive discontinuity between 'one' and 'many' (whereas reductionism imposes definition at the scale of individuals, holism imposes definition at the scale of the group). What both therefore need in order to resolve their conflict, 'get real' and become co-creative, is to incorporate intangible presence into - and thereby to fluidize - their boundary definitions. It is their boundary definitions that unnaturally cut or confine space and thereby, to my mind, cut out or confine loving influence. This is why both, to my mind, block the flow between 'head' and 'heart', 'left' and 'right' etc and generate unnecessary paradox.
Language plays a very powerful role in sustaining space-excluding or space-confining definition. This is why I question the wisdom of the language of 'connectedness' (notwithstanding that I used to use it a lot myself). I don't think it does justice to the vital influence of 'intangible presence'. Where you and others speak of 'connection', I would rather speak of kinship, affinity, relationship etc. And whilst I recognise VARIABLE degrees of TANGIBLE interconnectedness or connectivity through branching, integrative CHANNELS OF COMMUNICATION, I am extremely wary of the COMPLETELY integrative all-connecting 'attachments' or 'ties that bind' into a 'web of oneness', which obscures the intangible omnipresence that (or even 'who', if you like) pervades all. Like some others, I see a compassionate need in places to be prepared to cut those attachments in order to release the possibility of co-creative evolutionary flow.
Quite simply, whereas tangible connections CAN be cut (by swords, scissors, restriction enzymes, barricades and death, for example) and continually reconfigured, intangible continuity CANNOT be cut and so provides an eternal, limitless pool of receptive ('loving') influence for tangible natural energy flow. 'Living Light is not possible without 'Loving Darkness'. Life dances in the dynamically balancing integration and differentiation of each in the other's reciprocal influence. Holism and Reductionism, Collectivism and Individualism, combine in the loving influence of intangible presence to co-create our local-nonlocal identities of self in neighbourhood and neighbourhood in self, as children of the cosmos. So long as they don't try to block one another out or subsume one another's identity.
Warmest
Alan
----- Original Message -----
From: geisha rebolledo<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, October 31, 2010 9:09 PM
Subject: Re: Journeys and Love in teaching
Hi!!
Thank you so much again Sara, Alan , and all, for this wonderful sharing. How to start? I have experienced hollism in different ways. Not only in the classroom as it was mentioned,with collegues , friends parents etc., through connection and change , but also with my dog, my two cats and one hen. Does this sound funny ? It may, but it is a feeling related to the way I have been connected to a certain ¨energy¨ that made us react in a lets called friendly way.Is that energy love ? could be, but I feel it is also related to the intangible that Alan mentioned. After my father went this year, I have become more sensitive to that energy. At the moment when he was leaving at the hospital, strange things happened: the light went off, all the equipments he had on stopped, even there were electricity emergency plants, and the nurses and doctors could´nt explain the situation, and another thing was the smell of flowers we felt at that moment that impressed us. During this year different things happenes that made me think he is still here. I cannot see him he is in another dimension but I can feel his intangible presence could I say that Alan ?? Why is that I keep asking, my answer is that we are connected , even thought people died the connection is still there.
So it may sound simplistic, because it is only related to my experience, and I cannot express the theory behind, but something inside me made me think that Hollism, love and the intangible are deeply involved, how? I can`t differentiate !!
Love, g.
> Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2010 13:00:24 -0400
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Journeys and Love in teaching
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> 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]>
"This e-mail is subject to our Disclaimer, to view click http://www.dut.ac.za"
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