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Hi again all

Great conversation - Alon, I feel for you in the environment that you describe. Sometimes my own feels like trying to run through a swamp in the fog, but I still hold to Parker J Palmer's injunction to 'teach from a heart of love'. I think this commitment helps to transform practice, and reflects Scott Peck's thesis in The Road Less Travelled. He reckons that love is at least as much a matter of commitment and values as of 'warm fuzzy feelings' that can fade with time, or be repressed by the pressures of life.

Je Kan, thanks so much for your penetrating and sincere response a few days back. I really benefited from reading it. For me, 'speaking for myself' as Bob Dick from Australia always says, the challenge of Living Educational Theories is that we are charged with stating our values, and then using sound forms of evidence to look at whether and how we are meeting our values in our own educational practice.

I would agree with Andrew and Sara in their reflections on video. As I've said earlier in this forum, it was seeing myself on video that first brought me up with a possible conflict between my Freirean ideals of 'liberatory education' and the rather more dictatorial image that I saw on the video!

And as far as Alon's point about stuff on the internet being there 'for ever and ever' is concerned, I found Foucault's response to such a challenge helpful. When he was confronted with a possible conflict between what he'd said at one point of his development and what he said later, Foucault wrote: l"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order" (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1972:17). I am certainly aware that my practice has changed over time; I hope for the better. And it is through the influence of people such as the Bath group, Jack, Jean, Moira; Australian colleagues Bob Dick, Ernie Stringer, Yoland Wadsworth, Kiwi Eileen Piggot-Irvine...you contributors to this forum...that I continue to develop. So thanks for these enlightening and challenging conversations.

Warm regards to all

Pip

On 21/05/2011 5:11 a.m., Salyers, Sara M wrote:
[log in to unmask]" type="cite"> 
Andrew, thank you. I am working to develop this level of courage in myself and my own practice. It's terrifying, feels like jumping off a diving board - a reasonably low one but it is scary enough! You provide the kind of encouragement that can only come from someone who has already jumped from the highest diving board and I appreciate it very much.

love
Sara


"I have come to a frightening conclusion. I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather... I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal."
Haim Ginott
________________________________________
From: Practitioner-Researcher [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Andrew Henon [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, May 20, 2011 1:07 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Vidio Mediation a reflective tool

Dear Practitioner Research Collegues

As our education in Britain is dragged kicking and screeming into the 19th Century let alone the 21st I wish to send you my insights and to signpost through my various lenses what I can, to help clarify some of the discussions re the use of Vidio as a text for documentation and recording of events and as a reflective educational tool. I am as interested as I can be concerning the ever developing palimset of intertextual content and an ever changing organic 'words' based language but I am still interested in non word based communication and none word based thoughts.

In 1991 I was studying for my City and Guilds Further Adult Education Teaching Certificate stage one at Yeovil College a Tertiary Community College in Somerset England. The course had a number of assignments and one of these was a ‘Micro Teaching Session’ of 20 minutes in duration as a student I was expected to plan and deliver the session and it would be observed and video documented. The video was them made available to us as individuals for our own observations and then shared collectively with the group during a group session. This process was rigorous, robust and substantial. What it achieved was a step change in awareness, mindfulness and intense focus. It also provided for strong peer review, critical debate and active reflection. It was one of the most painful yet enlightening teaching and learning experiences I have ever had. For me the process scrutinizes and interrogates behavior and actions it moderates or heightens the focus and can influence or adjust behavior 
either during or after the event, it is a most powerful aid to insightful learning.
The assignment provides for an intensified focused environment within which all the senses are heightened and adrenalin levels are high, the pressure is intense however the benefits are multiple and one gets a sense of how to control ones own responses and behaviors and to then reflect more fully and informed than merely text could provide alone. The digital and audio visual spatial age now offers us many forms of text and intertextuality and things are moving very fast indeed.
With the developments taking place in the technological digital development of higher resolutions RED video capture cameras of which High Definition is only a start we will enter a new era of recording and documentation well beyond the visible spectrum available to the human eye. Here we may begin to observe ‘Inclusionality’ in action. I am not suggesting that we will be able to smell, touch and live within virtual parameters of the ‘Star Trek Holo Deck’ I will leave this to Terry Flaxton visiting fellow at University of Bristol. You can click on the link below for an insight into current and future developments.

http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/vhwestterryflaxton.htm

Video and mediation of any kind can and does influence environments and behavior, reflection on media documented events can inform and contribute towards changed behavior. The medium allows for us to gain a huge amount of information that otherwise would not be captured for interrogation or enquiry.
When I combine my own living educational experiences with the use of video I am always surprised, sometimes shocked but all ways can be held to account, self questioning or when shared held to account by others. I have developed the courage to reflect at this level but I do not expect others to take it to the extremes that I have done through my enquiries. I can only recommend that it resonates with me and the Socratic approach (Whose words were only ever reported and documented second hand, or were they?) The tradition of face to face and word of mouth is after all still the strongest marketing tool.

Andrew Henon