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On 16 Dec 2007, at 16:40, Alan Rayner (BU) wrote: > Dear Jack and All, > > Here is a thought that I shared with our 'inclusional discussion > group' yesterday, but seems to me to be relevant to how as > educators we understand and enhance our influence. As educators, do > we think of ourselves as 'Responsive Receptacles' and/or as > 'Executive Obstacles' as we enter the 'classroom'? How do these > perceptions influence our way of being with students? ...... Hi All - Alan's questions take me back to 1971/2 with my first video- tapes of my classrooms. Using Alan's language I thought I was a 'Responsive Receptacle' in establishing enquiry learning with my pupils. The video showed that I was an 'Executive Obstacle' in that the way I was pre-structuring the learning resources (together with the way I was actually giving the pupils their questions!) wasn't open to making a serious response to a pupil's enquiries! What moved me on was the experience of seeing myself as a living contradiction as I viewed the tapes. My imagination responded to the video (I didn't feel that this was under my conscious control) with ideas on how I could modify my practice to support my pupils' enquiry learning. Some years later I worked with a group of six science teachers over a year to improve our practice in helping pupils with their enquiry learning and I think the report we produced may go some way to answering Alan's question on 'How do these perceptions influence our way of being with students?' The report is at http:// people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/writings/ilmagall.pdf and takes about 40 seconds to download with broadband. > On 16 Dec 2007, at 16:40, Alan Rayner (BU) wrote: > Dear Jack and All, > Where Do They Get Their Energy From? To my mind this is perhaps > the most fundamental question to be asked in the development of a > truly 'inclusional ecology'. The rationalistic self-portrait will > derive energy from somewhere locally internalized or externalized - > an 'internal or external executive FORCE'. The inclusional self- > imagination will channel energy from everywhere (i.e. non-locally) > through a local focus or 'receptive space'. Whereas the > rationalistic self portrait therefore imposes discontinuity between > organism and world, blocking off material content from spatial > context, the inclusional imagination will accept spatial continuity > throughout. > > From here we can recognise that inclusionally, 'self' is, like all > other locally appearing forms in the cosmos, a dynamically informed > responsive receptacle of inductive space, whereas, > rationalistically the 'self' is regarded as a whole, material > object that does things to other things, i.e. an executive obstacle. HI All, Like Alan I do think it is important to focus on energy, especially in our explanations of our educational influences. The psychologist Vasilyuk writing in 1991 pointed out that researchers had very weak conceptualisations of energy and values. I"m wondering if a focus on the expression of the meanings of flows of energy with values in our educational relationships might lead to new understandings of our educational influences. What I've got in mind are visual narratives that focus on video-clips and our interpretations of flows of life-affirming energy with values in our explanations of educational influence. I've tried to show this in the multi-media notes for a presentation on the 11 December in Adelaide at the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association at: http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/ acrawsajw111207.htm . In the notes I'm exploring the potential of responding creatively to Yaakub's idea of a cosmopolitan pedagogy. I'm not sure whether it is going to be possible to share these ostensive expressions of meaning in a way that can help to produce publically validated knowledge/explanations of educational influence with energy, values and inclusionality. I'm hoping that you'd like to explore this possibility of sharing meanings of energy, values and inclusionality from our educational relationships. Love Jack. >