I. Rhizome
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| Utopia (M.A. Reilly, 2012) |
Some days I
feel as if I may have awoken in someone else's life--so blessed am I. For the
last year I have been composing an educational consulting business (Blueprints for Learning: Designing
Educational Futures) built on the foundation of an adult lifetime of work.
It is ongoing effort and I have never been happier or more satisfied. 20 consultants join me and we work in
inner city schools alongside
principals, teachers, and children. In our organization, everyone teaches and
everyone learns. This is the closest we get to a motto. As I have been reflecting on the work at hand, I realize that
several of the tenets that (in)form my work as an artist and writer are also tenets
that shape this new business.
II. The rhizome
forms centers.
I think of my business as a rhizomatic learning community that is fluid (think river flowing).
We act as a collective who dwell in the middle of things and the learning
that emerges is informed by explicit and tacit knowledge. I so value the tacit.
We resemble a sea of "middles” continuously
formed and reformed by alliances determined by needs, interests, whim,
playfulness, directions, questions, redirections, assessments, errors, and
commitments.
In
contrast to more conservative designs, a rhizomatic business design understands
the necessity of joining and rejoining and is inherently unstable by act and
desire. Such thinking allows us to embrace error and in doing so allows
significant risk making and taking, kindness, and successes.
It is a curious
tension that arises when random and intentional acts are allowed, encouraged, designed,
and desired. By frequently embracing this tension, spaces of emptiness
arise. Whereas, I have intentionally selected consultants to work with
me--their work is not dictated by me (what a foolish undertaking that would
be). I have no program to sell and believe so much in the goodness and
brightness of each individual, that I know that it is in the joining and
rejoining of consultants alongside principals, teachers and children that
creativeness arises. It is this deep
belief in people, in the importance of error making and problem framing, and
the role of randomness and play that guides this business design.
III. Practicing Emptiness
As the CEO of Blueprints, there are spaces I design and some that arise by
chance where purposeful emptiness is privileged. We know that we are often
hired to design with educators ways that enhance and complicate children’s
learning and do so with measurable joy. Given the kind and brilliant people
I work with (both within the organization and within the schools where we teach
and learn), I am confident that everyone will find interesting, unique and
artful ways of filling that emptiness by naming, claiming or playing with it. That in doing so, we will have multiple opportunities
to join/rejoin and make sense of the work.
It is this practice of
mindful emptiness where lines of flight that (in)form our work are occasioned. Lines of flight give rise to seemingly
inconsequential noticings. Alongside
these, more profound meaning emerges. I
see this occurring in classrooms where we are working at the teacher and
student levels. These meanings produced, in turn produce more lines of flight. An iterative design at that and yet one that
will also break.
I appreciate the
clarity that Martin Wood and Sally Brown bring to the concept of lines of
flight. They write (2009):
A line of flight is essentially a movement of creativity, a practical act or a
way of living that wards off or inhibits the formation of ‘centres’ and stable
powers in favour of continuous variation and free action. (from here )
IV. Having
Nothing to Say
I’m learning
the value of having nothing to say and the need to talk especially. I think of John Cage who so wisely told us:
This
work with others is the rhizome. It is an art.
It leads into and out of powerful learning—that is often exponential as it does not follow along strictly linear lines, but instead occasions lines of flight that join and rejoin that which we could not have seen connected from where we once stood.
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| Dreaming About Spring (M.A. Reilly, 2012) |
This is the process that leads to such intense and meaningful learning--such as the 9-year-old who earlier today used his fellow classmates' learning to explain important tensions Charles Darwin experienced when naming emerging scientific findings alongside his religious beliefs. This child wisely told us that it wasn't about one or the other, but rather about what these differences formed together that most mattered.
Such is the rhizomatic moment when a community of learners recognize the lines of flight that lead to a collective understanding of something we had not named before.
