Being Mindful

Mindfulness


Kira Campo wrote a terrific post today about being mindful.  She began by posting two images she made of a lake, taken at different angles on the same day.  Kira then asked her readers to take two minutes (a fair amount of time) to actually study the images and to note differences. She wanted us to explore being mindful of the different angle she used to frame each image. I did explore both images and found that I was able to create new categories apart from simply, lake. Both images fit into a category of texture as well (just look at that water).  The roughness of the water remained a constant across both image, although there were distinct differences. I am pretty sure I might have glossed this, had I not stopped to look again and used a tool to help me look closely.

Ellen Langer in Mindfulness, tells us that noticing novel distinctions leads to mindfulness.  In 'The Construct of Mindfulness', Langer and Moldoveanu (2000) note:

The process of drawing novel distinctions can lead to a number of diverse consequences, including (1) a greater sensitivity to one's environment, (2) more openness to new information, (3) the creation of new categories for structuring perception, and (4) enhanced awareness of multiple perspectives in problem solving (p.2).

I thought a lot about Kira's post, her observations and wanted to add to that dialogue.  It seems to me that in addition to changing the angle or perspective, the presence and absence of light and fog, alter landscape images allowing me to notice distinct differences as perspective is altered often in dramatic ways.  For example, take a look at these two images made two days apart of a reservoir near where I live.  No filters were used on either image and the post processing of each image was minimal.

Autumn. 10:52 a.m., Nikon D300, Manual, 1/320 sec, f/6.3, ISO 250, 170 mm (Lens: 70- 300 mm), Raw.

A Certain Grace, 8:26 a.m., Nikon D300, Manual, 1/400 sec. f/5.6. ISO 250, 200 mm (1Lens: 8 -200 mm), Raw.

Both images were made in the morning, using the same camera, different lens, and were shot from different locations in the reservoir. The presence of fog and partial sunlight in the later, colored the image differently.  Part of being a photographer is to notice novel differences and to remain open to new insights that are revealed while watching.  It is a familiar stance I would guess that is common to art makers.  Noticing, looking deeply, and remaining open to the unexpected is part of the ways many fine arts photographers work.

Differences in photographic images are certainly not rare and having artifacts to study also helps us to notice.   I wonder though, if any of the ways we can and do study images might lend itself to classroom-based learning that is mindful. What tools might we use to engender more mindful ways of being in classrooms? Ron Ritchhart and David Perkins (2000) in 'Life in the Mindful Classroom: Nurturing the Disposition of MIndfulness' outline a few conditions of mindfulness. 

There can be no deep understanding without the exploration and testing of ideas from various perspectives.  There can be no transfer without the constant refinement and reorganization of one's conceptual categories. Critical and creative thinking depend on an openness to new ideas and the ability to break out of one's mind-set (p. 29)

With that in mind, here are three wyas that lead to mindfulness.

Zooming

Kira asked her readers to take time to explore the two images. I am reminded here that exploration can lead to mindfulness. Simple tools can enhance our exploration. For example, I clicked on each image that Kira posted.  This allowed me to better see the images as each opened in its own window and was considerably larger. I could then zoom in on specific parts of the image using the zoom tool.  This allowed me to explore in new ways, to notice how the tree trunks were warped by the intense sunlight and the sections of the image where no color penetrated.  Similarly, learners can explore everyday objects using inexpensive magnifying glasses, as well as zooming tools readily available via the Internet and apps.  Use of these simple optic allows for a new perspective and new ways of categorizing what we are seeing.

Being Scout

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus offers Scout some advice:

"First of all," he said, "if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." (3.85-87)

Considering different perspective from your own is another way to be mindful. How different might our understanding of the lake images be if we were to experience the images from a boat on the lake? Riding in a hot air balloon? While struggling to swim? Context and perspective matter.  Helping learners to experience content from various perspectives can lead to mindfulness.

Conditional Ambiguity

Ritchhart and Perkins explain that conditional ambiguity is another method to trigger mindfulness.  Phrases such as could be or may be attached to problem scenarios enhance learners' problem solving capacity. When ambiguity is introduced using these conditional statements 'the learner is prompted to shift fro a passive to an active role.'  Instead of attempting to name a correct answer, conditional statements direct learners to consider possibilities.

Ritchhart and Perkins conclude:

...teachers develop in students both an awareness of situations where it is important to be mindful and a sensitivity to mindlessness traps. By necessity, this means that schools must focus more on developing understanding than imparting knowledge and skills through mere practice and repetition. Teachers must also guide their students in understanding the value of mindfulness and the costs of mindlessness so that the will have the inclination to be mindful.

How do you engender mindfulness where you work and with your students?

Sisyphus in the New Year

When I was contemplating writing a blog, I found myself split between wanting to compose entries about art and wanting to post entries about teaching and learning. In striking a balance between, I have come to see that each (art and education) requires a mindfulness that (in)forms the work I do, fail to do, refuse to do, and desire to do. Mindfulness occasions deep living and profound pain. Consider Camus.

Towards the end of Albert Camus's "The Myth of Sisyphus," he notes:

"The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious."  

Sisyphus.

My work as an artist and a teacher requires a mindfulness of what cannot be named earlier than the present moment will allow and at the same time often requires a rehearsal of possibilities, as well as deep reflection.  As an artist-educator, even when I work deliberately, I know that the present when traded for a prescribed truth, often yields something cliched. It takes me time to understand what I have created and to assign it value--value that sometimes changes alongside reflection and a passage of time. All things reveal themselves in time and being mindful allows me (sometimes) the opportunity to come to know and understand an insight and to (re)present that insight in the work I create. Insight, as Camus suggests, is accompanied by pain that redresses absurdity as tragedy. The dilemma associated with consciousness is old. It is the dialogue that Socrates and Malcolm X might have had: Socrates says that the unexamined life is not worth living and Malcolm X  writes that the examined life is painful. Living deliberately as artist and teacher requires both. Avoid such dilemma and little of value is left.


When I reread Camus's essay, I thought about how tragic US education feels. 30 years into a career as a teacher, learner, and leader and I see that so much of the rhetoric reported in popular press and touted by those with significant power is blatantly foolish, situates learners (teachers, administrators and students) as widgets, and is based on a belief of certainty. In these days, certainty trumps thoughtfulness. Consider how certainty is privileged in the recent post by The Christian Science Monitor, Education Reform: Eight Chiefs to Watch. With the exception of the first educator, Jason Glass, the remaining school chiefs' agendas, as represented in the article, suggest certainty as the logic that informs their positions and ideas. These leaders' views are posited as representing the singular and truthful perspective, as if meaning could be determined before the utterance. In the article, it states that these leaders want to:

1. Reward effective teachers (What does "being" effective mean? Is being a singular state?  What is effective? Effective for whom? By what measures? In what context? Across what time period? In what subject areas? At what grade levels? By whose standards? Is it possible to be effective in one context and not another?)

2. Give greater school choice to parents (The word choice means a variety of things from choice within a public system to choice beyond the public system. What choice do these chiefs want? Who gets privileged to make a choice? Who does not?  What happens to our democracy if choice weakens public education? Is separate by equal okay now? Does a democracy require public education? Is there any correlate that suggests "choice" of schools yields higher student scores on state mandated test?  What do higher scores on state mandated test mean to a learner, parent-guardian, teacher, employer...?)

3. Get "tough" with teacher unions (Are the ills of public education [whatever those "ills" actually are] directly related to teacher unions? Are all unions the same? What is tenure?  How is tenure represented in states? What happens in the absence of tenure? In the presence of tenure? Can tenure be singled out as a factor of anything? Is the presence or the removal of tenure related to a student's achievement and if so, achievement at what?)


Mikhail Bakhtin writes that the word is overpopulated with the intention of others.  We seem to have failed to understand this and instead act as if a word had a singular and agreed upon meaning. This seems to be the case today as the understanding of "education terms" such as achievement, excellence, effective teacher, school choice, funding, toughness, unions and so on are offered with little substance and less context.  Yet, meaning is always tied to the utterance.  Separate it from the context and we have little to offer and less to know.

The "discussion" about public education in the United States is a lesson in hegemony. Select people with power tell the rest of us what is truth. Their truth is uttered often enough and it is repeated by other people of means, politicians, TV and print commentators, business leaders, writers, speakers, educators, parents, bloggers, tweeters, until the words are meaningless and a position becomes a given truth. No need to understand what we mean by a given word, the task is to just continue to babble the rhetoric, like some long forgotten Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill. No wonder we feel so tired and oddly stuck. This is the tragedy about which Camus writes;  the naked awareness that allows us to see ourselves and our situation at this moment in time.  Our situation is not only absurd, it is tragic as it is impossible to discuss anything without offering alongside some definition of term and intention. Discourse is dead.

What then is needed to challenge the one view truth being passed along as reality? Oddly, on the US Department of State's web page an interesting definition of democracy is offered.

Democracies make several assumptions about human nature. One . . . is that any society comprises a great diversity of interests and individuals who deserve to have their voices heard and their views respected. As a result, one thing is true of all healthy democracies: They are noisy. (US Department of State, International Information Programs, online)

As an artist and a teacher, representation and voice are critical. Agency is critical and requires local discourse.  Noisy would be so much better than the singular drone of "those we should be following." Let's stop following "those in the know"and instead engender local conversations.