A Few Questions

Crossing Avon Avenue (Reilly, Newark)

"Historically, our working and learning lives have been overly coded," writes Renee Charney on the first page of her dissertation, Rhizomatic Learning and Adapting: A Case Sturdy Exploring Interprofessional Team's Lived Experience (unpublished). I am serving as a committee member for Renee who will defend her dissertation in a few weeks. That opening line, so bold, caught and held my attention as I read her work. Frankly, it's the finest dissertation I've read and I found myself wanting to write academically again.  I wanted to wade into that sea of middles that I have known and forgotten. I wanted to dwell in that storied world Renee (re)presents so invitingly and think about codification, standards, tacit ways of knowing, grief and stories.

As I read I wondered:

• What does it mean to live/work overly coded? In such a world, what happens to thought? Confidence?
• What leads us to embrace certainty? How does it comfort? Complicate?
• Are content standards a form of exploitation as defined by Holmqvist? (see here and here) Must we exploit?
• How do we unlearn? How do organizations unlearn?
• Are stories representations of middle spaces?
• How might storytelling trigger unlearning
• Can a nation heal through the stories and counter-stories it tells? How can we better hear counter-stories?