Dear Sara,

Like others who have already responded, I find your message here very rich 
and evocative. I also very much appreciated your previous 'venting'! I sense 
so much in common with your experience and feelings - not least the pleasure 
derived from seeing your co-learners' eyes light up and the distress of 
being able to envisage a remedy for the greatest of all human ills, only to 
have your credibility and path to communicating this blocked in each and 
every way by the very 'brain damage' you are trying to alleviate.

I do, however, see a danger for you, and for others (including me) who may 
share your feelings, in some of your discourse.

To be blunt: Please don't forsake the 'vertical' (what I might call the 
'figural') in your quest for the 'horizontal' (what I might call the 
'transfigural'). The inclusional 'middle' way is to understand each as a 
dynamic inclusion of the other, not to alienate or conflate them.

What your young friend 'saw', I'd venture to suggest, was not 'all oneness' 
but 'each in the otherness'. He saw that the rationalistic perception of 
'space' and 'object' as discontinuous neither makes consistent sense nor is 
consistent with our sensory experience. As I wrote recently in my paper in 
'Environmental Economics':

"All that may ultimately be needed to unlock ourselves from this unnatural 
confinement imposed by abstract rationality is the simple understanding that 
space cannot be cut, confined or excluded and so is a continuous presence 
throughout and beyond the energetic boundary interfacings of natural figures 
as flow-forms. By the same token, boundaries are energetic interfacings 
between inner and outer realms, not fixed limits. This simple move from 
regarding space and boundaries as sources of discontinuity and discrete 
definition to sources of continuity and dynamic distinction provides the 
basis of what, in ecological and evolutionary terms has been called ‘natural 
inclusionality’."



I have attached a short paper about the relation between vertical/radial and 
horizontal/tangential, together with a painting of the inclusion of each in 
the other enables 'compassion to fruit', which relates in turn to the poem 
pasted below.



I hope these offerings may help you in retaining the 'figural backbone' with 
which to resist the impositional self-definition of purely analytical 
thought, which is unable to incorporate the transfigural, 'intangible 
presence' in its 'stance' and 'substance'.





Warmest



Alan






----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Salyers, Sara M" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2010 9:25 PM
Subject: Re: Intangible Presence


Geisha, thank you.
(I should add that one other thing my  young friend 'saw' was that there 
really wasn't any space or object.) I'd agree with your conclusion! What we 
are and what we do would seem to be one and the same thing. Another 
artificial distinction, such that it is considered possible to teach that 
which you do not know, have not  done and have never been! And if we can't 
cut up being and doing like that, then presumably we can't cut up kinds of 
knowing...  So ultimately we must all be in the business of enlightenment! 
And I think that, maybe, committing to that greatest of all goods for others 
*whom we love* is somehow the key to our own.

 Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I was really touched by the grace of your 
reply - the more because I had already started composing an apology to the 
group for what was, in part anyway, a moment of venting. I have been deeply 
angry and distressed of late, not in a hot and furious way, but in a 
hurt-to-my-soul kind of way.  My invective against public education might 
have been a clue as to why! And it would be a relief to share the reason 
with you and the others here. As this is the one place where I can do this 
safely, I hope you will bear with me. (I certainly don't expect anyone to 
read it all they way through!)

I want to base my doctorate on the concept of 'horizontal teaching'. We have 
a vertical (hierarchical) society, with vertical religions, vertical 
learning and a vertical education system. Tinkering with the vertical may be 
useful but, if the vertical is the x axis and the horizontal is the y axis, 
then we have a absolutely no model for what the y axis would be. And we have 
dire need of one. Not only the reason for my need to vent, what follows is 
also the real 'story'  behind that proposal - perhaps the most important 
part.

When I began college teaching, just a year and a half ago, 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 had already signed up for an AR project, as part of a professional 
development opportunity, during my induction week. But I knew nothing about 
AR beyond the remarkable presentation given by my luminous now mentor, Dr. 
Annie Gray. In the meantime I began teaching developmental reading to three 
classes of disenfranchised and disconnected, shut down and, (as I now know), 
wounded students. I think I was probably a fair teacher: I found that I was 
good at coming up with explanations that made things more easily 
comprehensible, good at setting boundaries and keeping them, and very good 
at organizing and dividing my time in and out of the classroom. And then, 
around about the third week, I fell in love. (This is still utterly amazing 
to me and I can neither talk nor write about it without inexplicable tears 
forming!) Everything changed. I became consumed by the need to be, do or 
find whatever it was that my students needed in order to be happy, 
successful and - most of all - empowered. I did all kinds of things - did 
them fast and organically, without always thinking out the 'whys and 
wherefores', because love dictated them: I discarded the whole idea of 
teaching writing for writing's sake. I began teaching students instead of 
writing… and then I began doing something else entirely - showing them who 
they really are with writing merely as a medium. (And I was lucky to be in a 
department where it was safe to do that.) I found that I was aware of the 
'energy' both of individual students and of the class as a whole so that I 
could redesign lessons spontaneously to meet the need of the moment. And I 
could 'see', in a really profound way, what was going on in my classroom.

One of the first things I saw, was that the English they had to learn had 
nothing to do with any of them. In the same moment that I recognized this, I 
realized that they had been taught a foreign language as if they ought to 
know it already, as if it were the correct version of their 'own', English. 
That insight led to deeper inquiry, which led to my developing an incredibly 
simple assignment to let them acquire formal/universal English in the 
natural way that we all learn language as children. This became my AR 
project and is being officially piloted by our department next semester.

In order to discover the source of the ' shut down' and even hostility among 
my students, I researched developmental education, the politics of 
education, education history. I found the answer. Compulsory education 
wasn't designed for learning but for programming. Drill-and-skill teaching 
actually shuts down the executive function of the brain; neurologically this 
resemblers a lobotomy. But the brain is plastic and can recover given the 
right stimulus.

I read Knowles, discovered Androgogy and recognized that colleges and 
universities still practice modalities appropriate for children (below the 
age of ten) rather than adults. So, I redesigned every single component in 
my syllabus - including grammar and the language acquisition component - to 
be metacognitive. I started and still start, every semester with exercises 
in self analysis, texts on education history (programming the workers for 
the mines and assembly lines), written discourses on active and passive 
learning… After all, one can write about anything or become a critical 
reader using any text. So then, the exercises should work as components in 
the program in and of themselves and not as tools to help students become 
fluent in a language they do not care for. No? So means and ends are 
reversed here. In fact, I discovered, the exercises themselves should be so 
powerful and so compelling - so relevant - that the students will 'swat 
away', (as one swats away mosquitoes), their dislike of the English in which 
they must think and write so as to achieve their objective of self 
knowledge - or self empowerment.

I went to work on the students own self-fulfilling prophecies getting them 
to identify and rewrite them, used positive SFP practice in my classrooms 
and got them to research the scientific journals and write about it for 
themselves. I saw community developing and built in more and more exercises 
to foster that. (Sharing personal SFPs, peer profiling, peer support 
groups.) A sense of community has become the norm for me and my classes. I 
have been 'subbing' (standing in for the instructor) this week for two other 
classes. So natural has the culture in my own classrooms become, that I 
experienced a real sense of shock upon discovering that most of the students 
in those classes did not know each other's names.

Last semester, as a result of my AR project and its impact but mostly, (she 
told me), because she had recognized and been moved by the strength of my 
love for my students), the reading program co-ordinator, Pam S., assigned 
herself to observe my class. (I should say here that she's fueled by just as 
intense a love herself!) She meant to stay for an hour of the 2.5. hour 
class. But at the break, she asked if she might stay for the remainder. She 
told me later that she had watched me change direction and tack with the 
needs and moods of the class as though there were no boundaries between us; 
that I held them "like a magnet"; that the love in that room was palpable 
and the focus and thinking levels quite unlike what is expected in a 
developmental class. Pam was invited and came to our end of semester 
celebration dinner as part of our 'group' and she asked me, if I would teach 
a course which is about to be axed by the college. (She also asked me to 
film myself in class so I had two reasons to do that this semester!)

To my amazement, she wanted to see whether I could 'do something' with the 
program, primarily through the language acquisition strategy but through 
whatever else I might come up with, anything that might make it work. This 
turned out to be the Basic Language Arts class from whom I have learned so 
much this semester. Their existing syllabus was horrific, tests and quizzes, 
drills and exercise - a syllabus to mold the students into the competent 
readers and writers that grade school had failed to produce. But the college 
program, it turns out, has also failed to do that…. and has been failing for 
the past twenty five years, (twenty five years!!!) As a result the whole 
program is to be axed. (This actually means that the students have been axed 
as irremediable. That the program was execrable and totally unworkable, does 
not occur to those in power.) Meanwhile, I have been redesigning much of it 
as I go, 'pathfinding' as Pam calls it. (Only the 'capstones' remain.) And I 
have been nothing but exhausted all semester.

Can I tell you about these students? Do you know about them? Once you 
understand the neurological lobotomy, (yes, actual brain damage), that can 
result from drill based 'education' you understand the glazed, switched off, 
lightless minds that face you in this classroom. And so, when you fall in 
love with them, it's like having a knife in your heart all the time. I found 
that, whatever process I'm engaged in, it takes much longer with these 
students and this has made me look long and hard at what it is I'm striving 
for. What is, 'it' and what signifiers would tell me if 'it' arrived?

This week, I discovered two things.

First, I discovered what 'it' is - well, a bit about it anyway. Yesterday, 
my Basic Language Arts class came in right behind a class I'd been 'subbing' 
for and the students immediately wanted to know how I'd got into the lab 
without them seeing me. I explained about having been there already, 
standing in for another instructor and they began joking about my 'going 
off' with other students and asking, rather indignantly, whether I still 
loved *them*. And though it was all in jest, it was also clear that they 
understood that I really *do* love them and that, in return, they really do 
feel as if I belong to them in some exclusive way. Later we sat in a circle 
to discuss a text they must critique, and how 'narrative detail' works to 
tell the story. Instead of the complaints that would once have had to be 
answered - mostly that they would rather get on with writing than talking - 
there was, instead, a general agreement that this was both enjoyable and 
immensely helpful. My students were thinking critically and enjoying it, 
enjoying one another, enjoying communicating. I looked again and realized 
that I could see something in most of those faces that had not been there 
before. It was a light - and a kind of life and energy. It wasn't a blazing 
light but it was there. I thought of the medicine teaching that says that 
the power of a person (the spirit) is visible in the 'shine of the eyes'. I 
also realized I had seen this same thing appear before, in past students and 
that I saw it when I met those who have stayed in touch and in whom it is 
still growing. That light, spirit, energy.. whatever it may be... this is 
the 'it' I strive for, (to help to set free or to unlock or to help to 
rescue). And whether it is cause or effect I do not know, but the process of 
co-creation with others and reconnection (to self, to others, to ideas, to 
possibility), and that light, (spirit, insight, power) - these things are 
completely and utterly interdependent. That is true.

Then, as if something or someone wanted to make sure that I didn't dismiss 
this insight either as imagination, or as something too ephemeral to be 
important, at the end of my class one of my students stayed to talk to me. 
She wanted to discuss the differences she felt in herself and in the way she 
saw her own potential - and the differences she had begun seeing in other 
students in our class. I did not tell her that I too am being unmade and 
remade every day by them. Or that all I really do is move rubble and show 
them what's already there, already them - that which is already astounding. 
Or that there is a 'something' that becomes present sometimes that is not me 
or them but all of us together (perhaps something that Bache calls 
'Transpersonal Psychology' - thank you Joan!) and something that is within 
and more and still greater than that, (perhaps the Spirit).

Here is discovery number two. Next semester is the last one in which the 
college will be accepting these students. They are just too 'backward' to 
profit from our wonderful program (of course 'they' are the problem) and so 
will be entrusted to the tender mercies of adult education - which around 
here means more of the same drill and kill. The grant Pam was hoping to 
write for the program that I was helping to develop, will likely be 
redundant, as any program for such students within the college will be 
disallowed. The Board of Regents has made its decision. We must have more 
certification. We must have more certifiable outcomes. We must have 
education for jobs (*specifically* for jobs) and so businesses will be asked 
to come to the campus to tell us how they need us to 'train' their workers. 
We must have more lobotomized souls…

I simply cannot bear this. I feel agonized and helpless. And what am I doing 
here? If it were possible to get the Board to listen, and if they were 
willing to sit long enough to hear about the way that we create each other 
and create our own potential and how *this*, not specific job-based 
outcomes, is what will free the intelligence and creativity and potential in 
*all* our students, they would only say, "Yes, but will it get them a job 
and help keep businesses in our state?"

I can get these students through and that will be something. But it is a bit 
like knowing that there is a cure for cancer and that the drug companies 
don't want it because it doesn't  serve their interests. And it is even 
worse when you love the victims so much. Sorry for being bleak. Thanks for 
letting me 'talk' it through and - if you have read this far - for listening 
to me .

with love

Sara

________________________________________
From: Practitioner-Researcher [[log in to unmask]] On 
Behalf Of geisha rebolledo [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2010 11:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Intangible Presence

Sara, what  a piece !!! How wonderful  you expressed such deep thought!!! In 
some parts "I got lost in translation" but I got the feeling of what you 
wanted to say. The light in the train where your student was reading, and 
finally saw the light is a beautiful methafor , that describes awakenings 
which is related to "the business of spiritual rehabilitation" which in the 
end is our role as teachers.
We need to be enlighted then in order to develop the spiritual ,the 
intangible, in  order to foster cocreation with our students .  Thank you. 
G.



> Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2010 23:04:37 -0400
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Intangible Presence
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> 'Crippling mutilations'.... exactly what I see every day in my classes 
> among those students (developmental/remedial/transitional) whose great 
> gift to the rest of 'academia' (at least for now), is that they bear such 
> obvious emotional, spiritual and intellectual wounds from the vertical, 
> soul-slicing, reality dissecting, inhuman, non-relational, indoctrinatory, 
> (and supposedly 'fact based', objectivist), consumer/worker-programming 
> that we *still* call public education, that they testify to that 
> mutilation not only on their own behalf, but on behalf of all of the 
> rest... the great mass of those whose wounds are hidden beneath a cloak of 
> academic success.
>
> I'm in the business of rehabilitation, as a colleague helped me to realize 
> just days ago. And what is clearer than daylight - to me at least - is 
> that it is . To see, to articulate and to understand the nature and 
> character of the violations done to our humanity in the name of 
> objectivism is essential. (Ha! There's *nothing* objective about any 
> program with an agenda - even a program of soulless - and soul 
> destroying - dissection and vivisection of every living experience and all 
> of creation.) It's a matter of pathfinding.
>
> In some Native American traditions there is a practice, derived from or 
> associated with 'contrary' or 'clown way' that has been described as 'non 
> doing'. The premise behind non doing is that, when we stop the incessant 
> 'doing' with which we create our reality, what is already there is... 
> extraordinary, luminous, incandescent, powerful and true. The difficulty, 
> of course is in the non doing. Non doing doesn't imply an absence of 
> action, but an absence of that action by which we construct the world we 
> 'know' usually achieved by an utterly different sort or class of action. 
> Thus, treating your 'remedial' students as though they were budding 
> Einsteins is a kind of non doing. Shutting up the incessant voice of 
> knowledge in your head is a kind of non doing. These non doings place 
> pressure on the construct of the world/self (totally and utterly 
> interdependent constructs) such that for periods of time we actually 'stop 
> the world'. When the world (i.e. the construct that has been constructing 
> you while you construct it), stops - then what is there is, well, 
> intangible presence among other things. It is certainly miraculous. I 
> cannot remember who raised the idea of tacit knowledge but within the same 
> tradition, (described by Castaneda,Victor Sanchez and, lately, Miguel 
> Ruiz) there is something called 'Silent Knowledge'. This is a vast and 
> ever present 'emanation' and sense/resource/energy that is entirely unlike 
> discrete, sliced up, objective-disconnected 'knowledge'.
>
> I have recently been a kind of mentor for a young explorer of this 
> territory. It was a matter of urgency that he begin this journey in 
> earnest (his conclusion) because the '3 am demons' were running his life 
> and it was pretty clear that he wasn't getting any happier or healthier. 
> After a few weeks of not-doing (or non doing) which involved not analyzing 
> everything to death and holding himself in a state of awareness of - for 
> instance - the fact that the same rain was dripping form the dog, and the 
> tree, and the roof and so on and on or the fact that as he breathes out 
> the trees breather in and then vice versa, a very odd thing happened to 
> him. He was on a train - a grubby, drab, smelly train traveling through a 
> drab and industrial landscape when he closed the book he had been reading 
> and looked around. He became aware that everyone and everything in the 
> compartment - including the space between people and objects - was the 
> same thing and that same thing was light. "And the light is love." He said 
> that he knew with 'silent knowledge' (you can't explain that so he cannot 
> explain this for himself even though he *knows* it absolutely), that 
> everything was a reflection of everything else.
>
> I suppose what I am saying is that we are engaged in a kind of not-doing 
> here and that it may not be possible to define the result - though most of 
> us would call it something like 'miraculous'. It is possible, all the 
> same, to be terribly practical about the strategies which, because they 
> stop the world with its in-built self fulfilling prophecies and cut away 
> the foundations of those edifices of 'what we know is true' (so it is 
> unremittingly and soul destroyingly so), reveal the miraculous and uncloak 
> the intangible presence. These are what are and always were already 
> present. And while we can't quantity or even define *these* results, I can 
> sure as h-ll quantify a 'low-end' 'remedial' student (three such at last 
> count in fact!) who is now making straight B's in College level English 
> after just 15 weeks in my class last semester. Not what we 'know' to about 
> 'such students. So the outcome may be ineffable and intangible yes - but 
> impractical, no way. :)
> love to all
> Sara
>
> Jack - I'm looking at 'horizontal teaching' as the unifier for my paper. 
> (I've got the camera!!)
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Practitioner-Researcher [[log in to unmask]] On 
> Behalf Of Jack Whitehead [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2010 4:00 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Intangible Presence
>
> On 27 Oct 2010, at 20:06, geisha rebolledo wrote:
>
> Hi !!! Again thank you very much. I am writting about my praxis and 
> practice in the classroom using Action Research and Living Theory.I am 
> very interested in what Roy mentioned. Would you say them that Tacit 
> Knowledge could be intangible too??? In the case of a teacher in the 
> classroom is it part of praxis ? How can you define it ?Please send me the 
> reference of POLANYi, from this part of the world he is not known. 
> Greetings, G.
>
> Hi Geisha and all - Below are some of the ideas I've used from the work of 
> Michael Polanyi in my own research that you might enjoy.
>
> I've just finished two days of workshops on living theory and action 
> research at the Pedagogical University and the University of Saint Thomas 
> in Maputo, Mozambique, and am just about to start 6 days of workshops and 
> conversations with Delysia, Lee and colleagues at Durban University of 
> Technology here in South Africa. I'm hoping to share some of our action 
> plans early next week, along with Joan's, Marie's my own, Andy's and 
> Sonia's in which it might be possible to pool flows of our life-affirming 
> and life-enhancing energy as an intangible presence that attracts us 
> closer together in collaborative enquiries into improving practice and 
> generate knowledge.
>
> Love Jack.
>
>
>
> Quotes from Michael Polanyi's (1958) Personal Knowledge: Towards a 
> Post-Critical Philosophy. London; Routledge and Kegan Paul.
> Chapter 10 Commitment
> Fundamental Beliefs.
> I believe that in spite of the hazards involved, I am called upon to 
> search for the truth and state my findings. (p.299)
> Chapter 11 The Logic of Achievement
> In the rest of this book I shall outline some views on the nature of 
> living beings, including man, which clearly follow from the acceptance of 
> my commitment to personal knowledge. Having decided that I must understand 
> the world from my point of view, as a person claiming originality and 
> exercising his personal judgement responsibly with universal intent, (my 
> emphasis) I must now develop a conceptual framework which both recognises 
> the existence of the other such persons and envisages that fact that they 
> have come into existence by evolution from primordial inanimate 
> beginnings. (p. 327)
> Chapter 13. The Rise of Man
> I have arrived at the opening of this last chapter without having 
> suggested any definite theory concerning the nature of things; and I shall 
> finish this chapter without having presented any such theory. This book 
> tries to serve a different and in a sense perhaps more ambitious purpose. 
> Its aim is to re-equip men with the faculties which centuries of critical 
> thought have taught them to distrust. The reader has been invited to use 
> these faculties and contemplate thus a picture of things restored to their 
> fairly obvious nature. This is all the book was meant to do. For once men 
> have been made to realize the crippling mutilations imposed by an 
> objectivist framework – once the veil of ambiguities covering up these 
> mutilations has been definitely dissolved – many fresh minds will turn to 
> the task of reinterpreting the world as it is, and as it then once more 
> will be seen to be. (p. 381)