Longing For the Known

Happiness is the Longing for Repetition (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I. Listening

The day is older now. The light nearly gone. The end of November and my son's friends who spent the weekend are gone and we are in the car.  I'm thinking about neighborhoods as we climb the hill towards home when I have this sudden image of my son years from now working as a writer. As I drive, I realize that I am mostly wondering what stories he will tell--what neighborhood he'll recall. Will he recall these days with fondness?

"Perhaps you'll be a writer," I say. 

"Could be," he offers. "I don't really know about my future. Kind of ruin it if I did." 

He says all of this matter-of-factly and it surprises me.  "How's so?"
"Not knowing. That's the only thing to know, right?"

I love these trips in the car with him. Somehow the distance between a mom and her teenage son is diminished when confined to a car. I really listen to him. I listen better.

"Do you ever imagine what you might be doing?" I ask.
"Mostly pushing at boundaries. Rethinking what it means to be a human being."
"What do you mean?
"Well, being human comes down to doing just three things: creating, discovering, and sustaining. That's how I see it. I want to create. Make stuff. I want to work in ways that I actively am discovering and through all of this I want to make the things I create sustainable."  

 "Those are admirable goals," I tell him.

"We need to be smart especially about sustaining the planet. We're fucking it up and we have to rethink our relationship.  We can't continue to take." 

"Do you think your generation might do things differently than mine?"
"Well we can't keep on the way we are now.  I mean with just a few owning most of the global markets, we're so out of balance. We've lost the local." 

"How do you imagine resettling the balance?"
"Hmm. Taking power back. Taking it back from the few who hold it now. I know that has to happen. Well, it's necessary and all,  but I don't see that going too well."

We drive on and I think of the many who have come and gone before this moment--those who have needed to resettle power--who have tried to resettle the balance.

II. Telling

There are two photographs I keep of my Da. The first was made in Maine while he was on a camping trip with my brothers and some friends. He is seated alone in a rowboat on a lake. He is holding a daisy in his hand. I called it his Hemingway moment. The light is harsh. It's the summer of 1967 and he's as still as the noon-day lake. Contemplative.

The second is of him 10 years later holding a protest sign at an environmental rally. The sign reads: "Hell No, We Won't Glow!"  Someone caught him turning towards the camera, chanting. He was protesting the U.S. government's attempt to dump radioactive waste in a woodland. My brothers and I would laugh when we'd look at this photograph as my father is wearing his customary black socks and sandals.  When we were teenagers, we tried not to walk alongside him when he donned what we considered ridiculous outfits. How could I have realized then that he was more Thoreau-like, walking to a drum he heard.

III. Stories We Tell

Well after we are home, I am thinking about the photographs and the car talk and consider that Milan Kundera was right. In small and profound ways, we all long for repetition. It is the longing for the known that makes us happy.

I think the repetition we most desire is realized, as it is revealed, in the stories we tell our children. It is these oral stories that give shape, in part, to lives.  Here, now, I want to believe that the stories my son hears from his father, his uncles, an elderly aunt, cousins, and me are what matter most. These stories represent a loving legacy we gift to him.

Family stories are all about the definition and the limitations of love. I wish my father had lived longer. I wish it with my full heart. I wonder what stories he would be telling his grandson.

Things Fall Apart: Schooling, Becoming, Not Being

Want (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I. Becoming

I read a lot that education is broken.  A worn and tired lot, that.

It's easy, perhaps even comfortable, to lay the brokenness we feel at the feet of public education as it saves us from looking more closely beyond the institution into a void we cannot quite name. Consistency which has held us so closely is less the friend we thought. We fear seeing beyond, for our public institutions are composed to reflect the current reality we believe is whole.

It is not whole.

Our vision of what reality is--a stable, coherent ground--has not worked with fidelity for some time. Claire Colebrook (2001) reminds us:

To see any thing as actual also requires the virtual synthesis of time: we see things only by retaining the memory of past perceptions and anticipating and connecting future perceptions (p.127).

Synthesis is a stream flowing. Becoming requires us to assemble/reassemble/deconstruct. There is no standing still.

Is this fracture, standing still in a stream that moves, not the impetus, in part, for our constant warring?  Our inarticulate speech?  Stability is myth--and it is costly. The internet connects as it disrupts the ways we are in the world and the ways we experience the world.  Its fastness allows us to experience the collisions. A tacit knowing. And experiencing what we have deemed as actual now as myth, perhaps fleeting at first--a glimpse we quickly move away from, has grown more consistent, shaking "foundations" we thought we knew to be true.

There is no one Truth. There is only flow.

We are always becoming regardless of Descarte's insistence on being.  This understanding has deepened across the last century disrupting the center we hold to that says stability is our core.  It is not. Think Yeats, who nearly 100 years ago told us "the centre cannot hold".

The poets know first.

II. Schooling

Public education is built on that faux rock that says we can code the world and transmit it and what we transmit is Truth, not someone's truth, but Truth with a capital T.  Schooling has been built on the belief that we can keep ourselves whole by teaching this truth to our children who can teach it to their children and so on.  Lost in this translation is the reality that we are coding, decoding and recoding often in ways that feel and are simultaneous.  Living connected lives across vast geographies helps us to know this even as we work to deny it.  And so we are a bit like Simon Laplace, hopeful that with some measurements at hand we can name the universe--that it will hold still for us as if we were somehow apart from it.

Nothing living holds still.

Power maintainers situate curricula and pedagogies as measurements of the known universe. Educational standards, high stakes tests, school-based grading and courses often work as the means to maintain the stability myth and alongside it the power of those who get to name. Social media offers us enough clear spaces to (re)name/(un)name the world.  We don't need to hold big power to do so. The power is not in us.  The power resides across the shifting and moving things we make/break/remake.  We are animals with language.  Again, Colebrook (2001) says:

We think of language as a ‘tool’ for speakers, rather than as a differential force that produces speaking positions (p. 76).

And as more and more people connect across these vast geographies, the universe that standards and test results portray reveal speaking positions, not Truth. We come to doubt and as that doubt is echoed we can see not only the cracks undermining the ground education sits upon, but we feel the stream rushing us along.

This movement is not lost on the young, who have less time invested in the maintenance of powerful and established mythologies.  Their knowing is not limited to their selves.  Technologies that connect the young also make more explicit that they are less the individual and more the collective--calling into doubt Wittgenstein's statement, "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

They are not silent. They are roaring, moving, connecting. And it is this that creates long tails of difference with regard to how learning is organized, named, needed, desired.  We need not (re)create the system of education as this continues the myth of ground. Education reform is a sordid redundancy.  Rising without our permission are alternatives that young people already turn to as they invent.  Think of them as tribes, as PLNs, as collectives, as affinity groups.

We know more than we can say, Polyani would tell us. That's where we are, tentatively but even as I pen this, the ground beneath is moving and we are moving too.

Learning is more flow, less rocks in the stream.  And so, the space we call school is being cleared.


Cited
Colebrook, Claire (2001). Gilles Deleuze (Routledge Critical Thinkers) (p. 127). London: Taylor and Francis.

Not as We Think They Are, But Rather as They Connect

Utopia (January 2012, M.a. Reilly)

"All things are bound together. All things connect." Chief Seattle

I. Un-situated Wholes

Understanding how things connect is the most important shift in learning I am undertaking.  I used to spend a considerable amount of time believing in the singularity of things: this is the way a thing is, and then working to assign significance to thing x.  I have been conditioned to think that things exist as singular states.

But nothing is, that is not in some manner connected to/with something else. When we fail to understand potential, possible connections we tell ourselves a partial story we believe to be whole.  Now telling partial stories is all we have. A challenge though is when we believe our stories represent the decontextualized whole of something.

Situating our noticings as separate entities may well lead to believing the stories we tell are representative of the whole of something.  There are no un-situated wholes.

II. CCSS and the Pre-fab Lesson

It is this absence of context that most worries me about the way we seem to be responding to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)--as if this document somehow represented a completed whole that we could pick up and apply directly to children like a topical cream to an itch. I keep returning to the video of David Coleman offering a model lesson "about what it might look like to take the Common Core State Standards in literacy seriously in a daily classroom and begin to show what kind of shifts that might mean." What continues to astound me is that any teaching and learning model could be offered that fails to include students.  Mr. Coleman delivers his model without the students.  One of the most important maturation shifts I see in teachers happens when they shift their attention from focusing rather exclusively on what they are teaching, to focusing on what children are learning and how they are expressing that learning. This shift represents important learning.

Mr. Coleman offers us a rather incomplete model, but truly it is not his offering that concerns me.  Mr. Coleman is not a teacher and to expect deep understanding of something as complex as the connections between teaching and learning is to expect too much.  Rather, I am deeply concerned by the large number of educators, such as state commissioners, superintendents and other administrators who have watched this model and have failed to articulate how partial an offering Mr. Coleman serves.

The absence of students in a national model lesson is a fundamental problem, not a semantic difference.  We need to ask ourselves:  Do we see teaching as connected to learning or do we see it as a solo act? 

III. Egg Cartons

In some ways this dilemma is akin to that which Dan Lortie (1975/2002) described years ago when he wrote about schools as egg cartons.  Lortie described schools as being more like "collections of independent cells" rather than "tightly integrated 'organisms'" (p. 16).

Standards seem to have been made and supported by those who posit schools as colletions of independent cells.  The single set of standards is used as a method to distribute culturally ordained knowledge to the masses.  There is a logic here that suggests that separateness can be maintained, while culturally determined things to know are spread across schools.  Such schema has an odd Plessy vs. Ferguson echo.

For those who understand learning as highly contextual and unfinished, the presence of a set of standards is seen as an unnecessary intrusion; one that disrupts learning by substituting a completed story for the story that must be made by those walking.  Here, the importance of understanding connections cannot be understated.

V. Art Making/Theory Speaking

The shift from thinking about how things are to understanding how things connect undergirds and frames much of the talk about public education and reform.  Understanding how things connect is theory making. As such, it will not fit in the pre-made box, as there is often an insight gleaned that could not have been predetermined as things align in real time.

Take a moment here and consider this: how often do you rename things already boxed?  Can prefab ever be an apt substitution for a thing made?

Each time I make a collage I hold in my hands this supple truth: how we connect thing to thing (in)forms how ideas get named and by whom.



Work Cited
Lortie, Dan. (1975/2002). Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

When Things Fall Apart: Slow Walking on Made Roads

I.

For the last year I have been writing about learning while walking.  This has been no accident.   And now as I leave my current job and step into that which I cannot define, I recognize that this is and will continue to be a time of significant growth and wonder, fueled by a disequilibrium that has not been soothed by simply taking the next job offer.  I am learning that there's real courage in saying no to job offers, especially in an economy as challenging as this one and with responsibilities to family.  Saying no is not easy.  And yet, I am reminded that simply agreeing to the next job offer that resembles what I am leaving at best 'resettles' my disequilibrium by providing a direction, a baseline, that repeats the same dynamic of schools as mechanistic places.

I want to compose schools as places where people work in the middle of things in fluid ways based on relationships and commitments we make/remake to one another.  I seek the rhizome, not the tree. I'm so tired of trees, too. (A nod to Deleuze & Guattari). I am saying no to organizations that rely on boxes, charts, roles, and polices to describe and limit its people.  These are systems of control.  They seem to fail--to fall apart as the systems initially embrace meaningful change, but then resettle in order to maintain power.

Such systems become more conservative, laying down rules of behavior with alarming predictability, issuing new organization charts, reshuffling the deck chairs if you will in an attempt to define ever 'new' boxes in which to stand.  Yet no amount of workplace shuffling will create the necessary occasions in which learning might flourish. Fear fuels control, stymies possibilities, replaces emphasis on making and sustaining relationships with marshaling people to choose different camps and guard territories.  Make no mistake,  a garden for learning cannot grow where chance has no foothold.

Meg Wheatley (1999) explains how schools systems aren't systems and yet within these non-systems, smaller systems arise.

"...most school systems aren't systems. They are only boundary lines drawn by somebody, somewhere. They are not systems because they do not arise from a core of shared beliefs about the purpose of public education. In the absence of shared beliefs and desires, people are not motivated to seek out one another and develop relationships. Instead, they co-inhabit the same organizational and community space without weaving together mutually sustaining relationships. They co-exist by defining clear boundaries, creating respectful and disrespectful distances, developing self-protective behaviors, and using power politics to get what they want.

Yet everyone who participates in a school district is a living being, responding to the same dynamics that characterize all other life. Within the artificial boundary lines and well-defended territories, people are self-organizing into real systems, reaching out to network with those who share similar beliefs or aspirations..." Meg Wheatley, Bringing Schools Back to Life

I am wondering if you would agree with Meg Wheatley.  Does her description capture what you know of schools--the dynamics?  Within school districts are there self-organizing systems among people who share core beliefs?  Can they remain viable, alive and to do so must they walk out and on? 

II.

Several weeks ago I had coffee with a friend and she shared how she had placed herself in a situation where she changed the ground rules of how she worked and what she did resulting in her leaving a well established position and venturing out on her own.  She described a ten year journey she is still composing.  These changes required her to step into not knowing, to unsettle her life and her family's lives, as she realized the box she had been standing in could no longer contain her spirit.  

Make no mistake, these matters are matters of life.

I recognized as I listened, even when I did not fully understand, that she was a kindred spirit and I leaned in to learn. A few weeks later I came across the book, Walk Out, Walk On and began reading it alongside a group of women--none of whom I have physically met, all of whom I recognize deeply.  I opened the book and was stopped when I read,  "When certainty collapses, it's often replaced by curiosity" (Location 134).  I knew that to be true and that alongside curiosity--anxiety, fear, and possibility co-mingle.  There are no simple causalities inside change, especially in the middle of things where bearings are at best blurry.

This book and my conversations online with these women (and now some men too) speak to my heart for I have walked out and am walking on.  I described it as being at the place of the comma: paused momentarily.  Walking on is about uncertainty, the difficulty in finding the language that allows me to name action taken as action. It is understanding that there are too many ready maps to follow, but they cannot be mistaken for the map that gets made by walking.


In describing what it means to 'walk out, walk on' Meg Wheatley and Deborah Frieze write (2011):

Walk Outs are people who bravely choose to leave behind situations, jobs, relationships, and ideas that restrict and confine them, anything that inhibits them. They walk on to the ideas, people, and practices that enable them to explore and discover new gifts, new possibilities...Whenever we choose to leave behind what confines us, whenever we courageously step forward to discover new capacities, then we can rightfully call ourselves Walk Outs Who Walk On (p.4).

Walk Outs who Walk On act like rhizomes.  They leave behind what cannot adequately define them, that which has felt ill suited, out of step and walk on to that which is self-determined and yet made and remade with others.   Again Wheatley and Frieze capture this well when they write:

Commotion is walking at the pace of the other, rather than at whatever pace you want to go. It is a horizontal movement that begins with being rooted in your own purpose and place, and then connects with others who are rooted in theirs (p. 25).

When the path can only be made by walking, the world I have known tilts and the center cannot hold.  Instead of trying to re-organize the world to fit the prescribed story, I am practicing a few behaviors, informed by beliefs that still feel very shaky.

Start anywhere, follow it everywhere. 
Make the path while walking. 
I have what I need.  No heroes needed.
Walk at the pace of the slowest.

Create spaces to listen to underprivileged voices.
Trust my camera to see what I had trouble seeing, my hands to make what I most need to learn.

Turn to one another.


The road before me is unmade.
Will send posts.

Works Cited:
Wheatley, Margaret & Deborah Frieze. (2011-04-11). Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.