mental meanderings - you got me going Julie (long)

[Julie Smith]

Dear Chris,

I discovered something new today.  I learned that in extraordinary
moments that active, questing, creative process that I so dearly love
can transform into a deep resonance with another that metamorphoses into
stillness and silence.  What is left to do or say in that moment of
understanding?   Thank you.

Thank you, every one.  There are days I peer out my window, wondering if
I might see a glimmer of change in the physical universe in response to
what has been spoken here.  I wonder if the deep shifting I feel in
myself is mirrored out there in any way that I might recognize.   The
beauty, intelligence, and wisdom of this group never fails to amaze and
inspire me.

Chris, I can't think of a thing more to say to you except to ask when is
the publication date for your book?  It can't be too soon for me.  I'm
still in listening mode.  Consider me a rapt audience.  Please,
pontificate away.  Here, let me help you out with a question or two:
What if wanted to start an Open Learning Process program for school age
youth this summer?  What else might I need to know?

Julie


-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Chris
Weaver
Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2002 6:48 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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