educational models...

[Judi Richardson]

Re: [OSLIST] mental meanderings - you got me going Julie (long)Hello All --
another great conversation and I've been following it for the last day or
so. Thanks for kick-starting it Julie.  I have just taken the leap from a
Professor in a College to consulting -- couldn't wait til retirement for the
leap!  I also worked a great deal in the public education system.  And a
part of me agrees with what has been said.  I also want to bring to the
discussion the hundreds of deeply dedicated educators who are offering
alternatives in their own way -- I met several while opening space in
Fairbanks, Alaska.

On top of my part-time consulting and facilitating, for two years I used
Open Space Technology for a Business Law course I was to "teach" in College.
It was interesting to watch students adjust to and embrace the process, and
also those who didn't want any part of it.  As a transformative educator I
also chose other ways as well to explore curriculum rather than deliver it.
I delighted in using OST as one way, not the way.  Parker Palmer and John
Gatto also have some compelling writing on education.  In 1997 I
participated in a Spirituality in Education (Education and the Heart of
Learning) conference at the Naropa Institute.  The transcripts can be found
online at http://csf.colorado.edu/sine/trans.html the Dalai Lama also
contributed.

I also noted in the discussion that Julie wrote:  That by providing
open/safe/voluntary/equal space we're implicitly offering a new set of
rules and beliefs that can be approached and understood at the level and
pace each participant is prepared to comprehend?

Is implicit in that statement the assumption that when we facilitate using
open space technology that the space is open/safe/voluntary/equal?  In my
experience as a facilitator I do my utmost to open the space, I cannot
guarantee a safe, voluntary or equal space.

I also offer here the words of one of my "teachers" Tich Naht Hahn -- they
often speak to me in my "inquiries":

Instead of only criticizing our culture,
devote mind and body to practicing this simple way.
Then society and culture will grow out of you.
There should be no traces in our activity.
The trust is always near at hand, within your reach.
Before we act, we think, this thinking leaves some trace,
activity is shadowed by some preconceived idea.
When we do something with a quite simple, clear mind,
we leave no notion or shadow and our activity is
strong and straightforward.

Ciao

Judi

Judith Richardson
Pono Consultants International
Facilitating the Flow
    of Inspired Collaboration
www.ponoconsultants.com
(902) 435-0308

  -----Original Message-----
  From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU]On Behalf Of Chris
Weaver
  Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2002 11:48 AM
  To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
  Subject: Re: mental meanderings - you got me going Julie (long)


  Julie and Friends,

  Julie, you have such a gift for spinning out questions that are both
precise and open-ended and tantalize us with the secret heart of the matter.

  In fact, your questions about education resonate so with what I am working
on these days that I am squirming with excitement, with the challenge of
crafting a brief response.  Here are some of your words again, followed by
my own brass tacks & pigs ear...

  > ...For example, they
  > identify three simple beliefs/rules that are imbedded in our educational
  > system:
  >
  >         Only experts create knowledge.
  >         Teachers deliver knowledge in the form of information.
  >         Children are graded on how much of the information they have
  >         stored.

  Yes, I too think that these are fundamental rules, or unexamined givens,
that have an enormous effect on how self-organization manifests in schools
and school systems.

  > They hypothesize that the reason most educational reforms don't foster
  > much real change is because the underlying beliefs/rules aren't
  > changing...

  >...Hence, they say, to deeply change the educational system,
  > we must begin by changing the basic underlying beliefs of educators: we
  > must change those simple rules/beliefs that educators self-organize
  > around.
  >
  > Aye, there's the rub.  I'm wondering if people here agree with that.

  Yes, I agree with the part of that which suggests, "begin with a new set
of simple rules" (shying away, of course, from the mission of "changing
someone's basic beliefs" - I'd rather set out to roll in poison ivy.)

  > ...Do we initiate the kind of change we desire by challenging another's
model
  > of the world and attempting to replace it with our own, or do we simply
  > start with self-organization itself?  Arghhh.....  scratch that
  > question.  Faulty on too many levels.
  >
  > So let me go here..... is it self-evident that self-organization itself
  > (as we know it through OST) frequently expands people's beliefs and
  > understandings and the rules they operate by?  That by providing
  > open/safe/voluntary/equal space we're implicitly offering a new set of
  > rules and beliefs that can be approached and understood at the level and
  > pace each participant is prepared to comprehend?  That the process
  > itself is the answer to the problems we pose?  Or how about this: That
  > what matters is how we relate to each other, how we treat each other,
  > how we think of each other.  That everything else, every problem we
  > think we have, is a vehicle for testing THESE questions.

  Yes, yes, yes...and...

  > I keep asking questions I know the answer to..... so what is it?  Just
  > some mental meanderings on a malingering Monday morning?  Don't know.
  > There's still that unexpressed idea lingering at the edge of thought....
  > how to participate politely and lightly in the bettering of it all.....
  > finding new layers of comfort in the process we're in..... easing into
  > and resting in the goodness and fullness of what we already know.

  Thank you again Julie, because these last words, that "unexpressed idea,"
is a good articulation of a many-year search for me.  The search has been
restless, because what began within myself was called into the scale of an
elementary classroom, and what I learned in the classroom grew into
questions about the team and the school as a whole, and what was
accomplished in a school waited and grew and ached for three or four years
like a seed wanting to burst.

  You know that feeling?  That longing for an invitational methodology that
will catch the right wind and dance in the air like a milkweed pod?  (I
trust you do, with all the Open Space experiences that have sprouted in
Fairbanks.)  So I have been looking for a way to participate lightly and
politely in the bettering of entrenched schools and districts, and here's
the brass tacks & pig's ear of the moment.

  We have a program called "Self-Discovery Days" at our camp.  We marketed
it with a brochure, delivered to about a hundred public schools, all levels
K-12 across an eight county region in the North Carolina mountains.  Since
early September we have served about 1,500 students and their teachers,
primarily in one-day field trips.

  One of our big objectives is, in your own words, to provide
"open/safe/voluntary/equal space, and implicitly offer a new set of rules
and beliefs that can be approached and understood at the level and pace each
participant is prepared to comprehend."

  The process is not OST, but it is a big step towards OST, and marvelous in
its own right.  We have dubbed it "open learning process."  It shares with
OST: opening circle, talking circles, 90-minute sessions, freedom of choice
for participants, philosophy of invitation, and equality (teachers
participate in exactly the same manner as their students).  It differs from
OST in that: in most cases, the offerings, though open-ended and
interactive, are pre-planned by instructor/mentors on our staff; group sizes
have maximums (average ratio of 1:7); participants stay with the session
they choose, and do not move between them.  Sessions are all experiential,
in visual arts of all kinds, expressive arts, cooking, outdoor adventure,
gymnastics, edible wild plants...whatever our instructor/mentors want to
teach (and we are adding new instructor/mentors all the time from the
community).

  Teachers have signed up wanting a team-building, community-building field
trip.  But day after day I have seen their amazement.  What can happen with
sixty or a hundred kids in a single day based on a new set of simple rules
is astounding to all - including to me, even after many such experiences.

  We have recently changed our closing circle process into more of a
performance.  We have met in a circle three times already in the day as as a
whole, so for the closing meeting we swing the benches from circles into
rows in our main lodge (a fire's going in the fireplace and in the new
configuration it suddenly looks like a church revival back in the woods!)
Each group is invited to present or perform as a group.  Students talk about
the sculpture they made, or do back-handsprings, or do a skit, or tell a
group story, or dance.  Teachers have told me numerous times that their
students open up, interact, and express themselves in a way that they have
never seen before in their teaching careers.

  To me at this point, what is significant about this work is that I feel we
have found a methodology for a deep experience of self-organization that is
not just palateable but quite delicious, digestable, and healthy for
teachers and students of all ages in mainstream public schools.  The
experience is apart from their normal environment, but it is clear that
seeds have been planted and carried back, like wonderful burrs on people's
socks, purple and ringing like bells.

  And of course, the leap from participating in an Open Learning Process
event to facilitating one is not so great a leap (we have a training in
development).  And the leap from Open Learning Process to OST, for adults or
for youth, is a short leap indeed (we have facilitated straight-ahead OSTs
for high school student councils this fall too).

  Part of the palatability of Open Learning Process is that it feels safe to
educators because it keeps intact the structure of "teacher in charge."  To
me, this is not just all right, but necessary.  I have personally wrestled
and experimented in emergent curriculum, child-centered learning, democratic
schools, and the like for years.  My current belief about the essence of a
natural learning methodology for humans is that:  young people need mentors;
mentors need small groups; great mentors have always been space holders; and
the better their technical expertise with the technical aspects of their
craft, the better space-holders they are.  Being a space-holder with young
people is a position of authority in the deepest, richest sense of the word,
and there are as many ways to do this beautifully as there are people.

  And that, in a community, the kids need to choose their mentors.  And that
in the interactive play of life, they mentor each other continually.

  And that, through a rite of passage (perhaps of their own creation and in
their own time), children in a community transform themselves into
mentors...and then dance back and forth across that boundary for the rest of
their lives.  Or something like that.

  Thinking Julie of your questions about to teach algebra or not to teach
algebra...I hope that by the spring we are facilitating events with Open
Learning Process that are on a specific academic theme (algebra would be
just fine), where teachers in a school get together, find some other adults
who want to lead workshops, approach algebra from as many different
intelligences as possible, keep group sizes small and session times long,
and open it up.  At the end, you'd have a church revival about
algebra...(grin)

  That's enough for this morning.  I'm not asking questions in your artful
manner Julie, so pardon my pontificating...but goodness this is exciting
stuff.

  Chris Weaver

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