March 30, 2016 - 21:09
A Few Windows into our Course 3/31 as we welcome Guest Teacher Qui Alexander
Empowering Learners
People who -- in the learning, teaching, listening, and healing they do as part of their work with others -- generate conditions for others’ self-empowerment and their own.
Holistic Approaches to Education and Health
Individual: mind, body, spirit (includes a range of learning and expressive modes)
Cultures/Communities: Individuals as constituting and constituted in these, their complex interactions
Earth: Individuals (non-human beings too) part of/coming from it (meaning there is quite a broad range of sources of information)
Time: history, lineage, memory, simultaneity, alternative interpretation always possible
From the Syllabus
This course -- likely not a good fit for those who relish traditional academic structure or a class in which knowledge delivery is the main mode -- is designed more like a workshop or studio where we do a lot of what we read and talk about, and where we refine questions and seek possibilities (not certainties) as a community of learners able to support, encourage, and inspire each other. In order for this to work, we all have the responsibility to keep communication channels open and to risk listening, questioning, disagreeing, changing, and at times being uncertain and uncomfortable. Gaining strength, trust, and capacity to risk in these ways is important to being an educator as it prepares us to lead with less fear of suffering and of the unknown, and with more capacity for compassion, critical inquiry, and creativity.
Basic Practice for Empowering Learners
1. Visualize the ladder. In the context in which you are working, get a sense of the relationships of power and hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, that are in force. Envision them as a ladder.
2. Visualize turning the ladder to its side. Consciously and mindfully shift your imaginative orientation so that rather than work as a ladder anymore, what was a ladder becomes a series of windows, or places you can listen or reach or sense into, that are not defined in advance by #1.
3. Visualize placing the ladder on the ground. This reminds you that what is happening is part of the earth and and co-creative with the universe.
4. Visualize energy coming up through the ground, through the sideways ladder, and up through your feet. This reminds you of rhizomic possibility and energy.
From Student Writing
How do we handle the fact that meditation practice can anesthetize? I want there to be some way of practicing that can be active in the world, without having to step out of it in order to feel emptiness and peace. Pema Chödrön’s writing partly addresses this, when she talks about the way our being affects those around us: “Times are difficult globally; awakening is no longer a luxury or an ideal. It’s becoming critical. We don’t need to add more depression, more discouragement, or more anger... This is the best way that we can benefit others.” She believes that living one’s individual life in a mindful way can profoundly impact others. Still, it seems as though sometimes the way she advises us to do that denies the importance of the external world, the changing of which is supposed to be her goal. One piece of advice she gives for facing anger or conflict is “regarding all that occurs as a dream.” While I can see the possible positive effect this can have as a mental exercise, this seems to be doing harm to the ability, both hers and others’, to fully be in the world.
“Domination cannot exist in any social situation where a love ethic prevails. Jung’s insight, that if the will to power is paramount love will be lacking, is important to remember. …when small communities organize their lives around a love ethic, every aspect of daily life can be affirming for everyone” (All About Love, “Values: Living by a Love Ethic”)
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Moving forward in this class, I would like to explore more closely the systemic disempowerment of our schools as opposed to the intentions of individual educators. The intentions of a single educator do not change the educational system we have. I think this is an interesting point though, since we can learn what is best from great educators and personal experience. Similarly, this class is titled "Empowering Learners" as opposed to "Empowering Education."
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I have been thinking deeply about the role of love in teaching, particularly in a conventional classroom setting because the education system seems established in such a way that it is a uniquely hostile space for love. So often, teaching and learning are established as two sides of binary, and teachers are asked to enter a classroom defensive of their role as an expert, unwilling to identify and explore the spaces where they could (and should) be a learner. . . . Someone who loves must be willing to learn for the very purpose of their loved one’s ability to grow and learn themselves.
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“. . . No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively.” . . . Can you be a part of the circle fighting for educational reform if you don't know the appropriate mediums to helping the communities you work for? Can you be a part of the movement if you are not working towards helping it?
From Empowering Learners Serendip site 2014 (lineage)
I came across another article about the Tibetan monks’ approach to mindfulness. It seems to really speak to our discussion yesterday about how the desired-based approach has an emphasis on community: http://huff.to/1eCh6Mr
"What's unusual about the Tibetans is that they have what I call an industrial-strength version of this discipline. These practices allow us to turn our sense of life as a battle, a struggle for survival against everybody else, into a communal experience of connecting with friends and the larger world."
Previously, I had equated mindfulness to almost be synonymous (if not very closely related) to the desired-based approach because when one is mindful, we approach our circumstances with "loving attention to them as they come and go, enabling a deeper connection to one’s highest values and purpose" (which is directly from our dictionary). Nonetheless, I found it interesting that within the last section the article about death, their idea of applying mindfulness was to accept what can't be changed and be present. It made me rethink about how we've been defining the deficit and desired based approaches to seeing the potential in our circumstances which has an emphasis on future opportunity and achieving future goals: In light of the Tibetan's approach to death, are there tenses to the desired based view (seeing it in the present and past) as well?
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From a Crucial Course Reading
Eve Tuck, "Suspending Damage," p. 419-20: Desire is a thirding of the dichotomized categories of reproduction and resistance. . . . This is important because it more closely matches the experiences of people who, at different points in a single day, reproduce, resist, are complicit in, rage against, celebrate, throw up hands/ fists/towels, and withdraw and participate in uneven social structures—that is, everybody.