AW: The Oral - Visual lives next door

[J. Richardson]

Hello all,  I've been catching up on reading these postings after spending
this week opening space with two different groups, two very different
experiences.

A personal story comes to mind when reading your generous and insightful
messages.  My son has opened space in his life to complete a Canada World
Youth program between Canada and Sri Lanka.  We had several rich discussions
prior to his leaving about the principles of opening space, the law of
mobility, resting in unrest, and very deep breathing.....

He and his Sri Lankan partner are currently studying sustainable coastal
community development along the Bay of Fundy in Canada.  I had the great
privilege to spend an afternoon with the two of them a few Sundays past.  My
son told me that he was responsible for teaching Kumara basic computer
literacy.  Kumara is just learning english and Scott (my son) is just
learning Sinhalese.  As I listened to his story, he revealed how together
they had discovered ways to learn.  Scott is eager to share anything he can
with Kumara, and vice versa.  Scott was feeling frustrated as he was just
getting through the names of the hardware and they quickly needed to move to
web research.  He wondered how he could ever get the idea of hypertext
across to Kumara.  They had some downtime and Scott decided to see if there
were any Sri Lankan newspapers on the web.  He found some.  He realized that
even though he had no idea what the words on the screen meant, he could show
Kumara hypertext.  He brought an english page up and using the mouse pointed
to a word that was underlined or in bold, clicked on it and showed Kumara
how it went to another page.  Then he brought the Sri Lankan newspaper up
and did the same.  He realized that he didn't need to know the language or
be an expert in web page coding and design to introduce the concept.  He
showed up, followed what had heart and meaning, let go of attachment to
outcome, and found the way......

Ahhh youth......... ever the teachers in my life!

J


----- Original Message -----
From: Visuelle Protokolle <mail at visuelle-protokolle.de>
To: <OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2002 1:05 AM
Subject: AW: The Oral - Visual lives next door


> Bernd, Chris and all:
>
> Bernd, you touched me like so many others with your description of your
> work, of your tasks. and Chris, you have to give so many astonishing
> insights. you say:
>
>   It seems to me anyway, that writing,
> >talking and sensing are all communication strategies, and while
> >certain cultural contexts will select some strategies over others,
> >all strategies are available to everyone
> >
>  "there" .... is a message
> >that is transmitted orally, although the reminders are all visual
> >and kinesthetic: dances, masks, carvings, and so on.  All of these
> >things "carry" the story with them.
> >
> >
>  Low context cultures, in my opinion, tend to be less
> >comfortable with the limited information that sometimes comes out of
> >Open Space small groups, where people have been too engaged in the
> >process of conversation to write down much of what was said.  ... reading
> the reports in no way helps to
> >explain ... why it was such a high ...
>
> When we get touched by descriptions of the life in oral/visual cultures,
we
> can look at the strange qualities of these cultures like in a prehistoric
> museum  and go home afterwards. go on living as usual, going to Open Space
> and writing texts as usual, with very limited information - and poor
> touching quality.
>
> Or we can realize, that the oral - visual type actually lives next door,
or
> even lives in us.
>
> For me it was always hard to understand how such a brilliant thing like
Open
> Space is normally documented in the most traditional and poor way, by
> writing texts. and even worse, because like Chris points out, Open Space
has
> all the potential of engaging people. when it was "such a high", and then
> some poor guys have to stay and make their homework and write something,
> produce more of the same, texts.
>
> I talked to Harrison Owen about that some years ago in an Open Sapace at
the
> lake of Starnberg in Bavaria, but seemed not to get his attention.
>
> We accompanied about ten Open Spaces and made visual protocols. mainly
> pictures, some words, no long texts. Everybody was happy. Sometimes people
> made their written reports as well, sometimes not. But what counted was
the
> pictures. People loved to find their contributions as pictures. And were
> astonished to "get the whole picture" at the end (and even in brochure
form
> a bit later), to really see what had happened in all the groups. We made
the
> astonishing experience, that is was sufficient to visit every group just
for
> about ten minutes to catch the story. we asked people to look critically,
> but seldomly were asked to correct or add something. once a consultant
said:
> only by your pictures I understood what happened. I know that I am good,
and
> would have brought in my view of the theme and would have gone home
proudly.
> By your pictures I suddenly realized the quality of the contributions of
the
> others, and how we enriched each other and together reached to a higher
> level!
>
> There we are! even in a low context culture we can reach  experiences of
> inner satisfaction, joy, understanding, just by awakening the oral-visual,
> sometimes visional guy in us. it is easy, it is fun, it goes deep, it is
> sustainable. which method could gain more from this fact than Poen Space!
>
> I believe that the Open Space method simply was not fully developed yet.
> maybe that is a sacrilege, but once I found the oral (Open Space) visual
> (Visual Facilitaion) combination to work so well, to work inside of us,
> mostly all of us, why be satisfied with less?
>
> Reinhard
>
> VISUELLE PROTOKOLLE
> Kuchenmueller & Dr. Stifel
>
> Munich Germany
>
> Tel: +49-89-202 447 48
>
> http://www.visuelle-protokolle.de
>
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