This was too good not to share!
from sunny Seattle,
Peggy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Samuels, Neil D" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>;
"Ailist@Lists. Business. Utah. Edu" <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 6:03 AM
Subject: [Ailist] Transparent Facilitation
Dear all,
This excerpt from a wonderful book "A Language Older Than Words" by
Derrick Jensen, came immediately to mind. It is lengthy, and worthwhile.
Neil
Neil Samuels
Senior OD Consultant- BP
630-605-4610
From A Language Older than Words by Derrick Jensen
When I returned to school in 1989 I began to teach. Or rather not to teach
but to participate in classes. I knew from my own experiences in school
that I wanted the classes to be different than what I had been put
through. I knew that the most important words any instructor had ever said
to me were, “Never believe anything you read, and rarely believe anything
you think.“… I knew I was somehow supposed to be helping students become
better writers, but I knew also that the best writing springs from
passion, love, hate, fear, hope. So by definition the class had to be as
much a class in life �C in passion, love, fear, experience, relation �C as
in writing. I knew also that we teach best what we most need to learn, so
thinking of the lessons of Crohn’s disease I knew I’d have to strive my
hardest to get members of the class, including myself, to begin to feel,
and to express that feeling through writing, and perhaps even our lives.
And finally, the night before I was first to enter class, I encountered
words by Carl Rogers, in his book On Becoming a Person, that seemed to
speak to my experience as a learning human being:
“It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively
inconsequential, and has little or no significant influence on behavior.
... I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly
influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning. Such
self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and
assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another. As
soon as the individual tries to communicate such experience directly,
often with a quite natural enthusiasm, it becomes teaching, and its
results are inconsequential. ... When I try to teach, as I do sometimes, I
am appalled by the results, which seem a little more than consequential,
because sometimes the teaching seems to succeed. When this happens I find
that the results are damaging. It seems to cause the individual to
distrust his [or her] own experience, and to stifle significant learning.
Hence I have come to feel that the outcomes of teaching are either
unimportant or hurtful. When I look back at the results of my past
teaching, the real results seem the same �C either damage was done, or
nothing significant occurred. ... As a consequence, I realize that I am
only interested in being a learner, preferably learning things that
matter, that have some significant influence on my own behavior. ... I
find that one of the best, but most difficult ways for me to learn is to
drop my own defensiveness, at least temporarily, and to try to understand
the way in which [another’s] experience seems and feels to the other
person. I find that another way of learning is for me to state my own
uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to
the meaning that my experience actually seems to have. ... It seems to
mean letting my experience carry me on, in a direction which appears to be
forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand
at least the current meaning of that experience.“
Of course I did not accept Roger’s words merely because he said them, but
I fit them to my own experience of learning, and soon, of “teaching“.
I walked in that first day of that first class, and the first thing I did
was to change the name from “Principles of Thinking and Writing,“ to
“Intellectual, Philosophical, and Spiritual Liberation and Exploration
for the Fine, Very Fine, and Extremely Fine Human Being.“ Many of the
students reached for their class lists to make sure they were in the right
room. As I took role, I asked each person what he or she loved. At first
suspicious, they began to open up within minutes.
I soon realized I could not give grades: it would be immoral to ask
someone to write from the heart, the give the writing a C. This created a
problem, since the department required I assign grades. I suggested
assigning grades randomly, but neither the students nor the department
liked that idea. So I suggested giving everyone a 4.0 This was fine with
the students, but not the administration. My next plan was to give
everyone a grade of 3.1415, or π. Math majors in the class thought this
was a hoot, but the administrators didn’t get the joke.
Eventually here’s what we (the students and I) devised. Because the way
to learn to think is by thinking, we would spend most class time in open
discussions of important issues: What is love? What is the difference (if
any) between emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and physical intimacy? Is
there such a thing as a universal good? What do you want out of life? If
you had only a limited time to live (which is of course the case), how
would you spend your time? Is the universe a friendly place or not? (This
last question, by the way, Einstein thought to be the most important a
person can ask.) Irish students took it upon themselves to teach us about
the Irish Republican Army, and African-American students taught us about
their own experience of racism. A Samoan man told us of his earlier life
in a gang. The sons and daughters of farmers told us what it was like to
grow up on a farm. Volleyball players told us of volleyball, and football
players of football.
Similarly, the way to learn how to write is by doing plenty of it, so my
main job in the classroom would be to cheerlead them into writing more.
The students could, of course, write anything they wanted about anything
they wanted. I would not judge any papers, but merely give the writers
positive feedback, and I would try to guide them wherever they wished to
go in their explorations. I asked (not told, but asked) students to write
about the thing they’d done in their lives they were most proud of, and
asked them to write about that which caused them the most shame. We took
the latter papers (mostly unread) into the hall and burned them, causing
police to show up one quarter to question us about vandalism. One student,
getting married the next summer, wrote her wedding vows as well as a
letter to her fiancé, to be delivered moments before he walked down the
aisle. Another, a wine salesman by trade, spent the quarter writing sales
pitches. Many people explored their own abuse, some wrote fiction. For
each piece of writing a person did, he or she received a check mark
(longer pieces received more). The final grade corresponded to the number
of check marks. If a person had thirty-four check marks by the end of the
quarter, for example, the grade was 3.4. Simple enough. The people in the
class wrote about five times as much as people in other sections, but
loved the work because it pertained to their own lives. When people wrote
pieces they particularly loved, we scheduled private conferences to go
over these pieces again and again until every word was magic. In the
context of sharing an important piece of themselves, suddenly even grammar
became crucial: the bride, for example, didn’t want the pastor stumbling
over her sentences or her groom wondering what the hell she was trying to
say. Given the opportunity to express themselves, these people wanted to
learn how to do that.
I asked each student to hand in a couple of pieces composed in different
forms of expression besides writing. Many brought in food, some paintings,
a few tape-recordings of their own music. A chef from Kuwait cooked us a
seven-course meal and showed us pictures of his country. Another student
brought a video-tape of himself doing technical rock climbing.
It took us a couple of quarters to realize something was still missing.
Experience. It’s madness to think all learning comes from putting pen to
paper. What about life itself? We decided that people would get check
marks every time they did something they’d never done before. People went
to symphonies, rock concerts, Vietnamese restaurants. They watched foreign
films (“That Akira Kurosawa guy can be pretty funny”). They get in car
wrecks (not for the check mark, but it having happened, they may as well
get credit). They got counseling (I hope not as a result of the class).
One fellow told his father for the first time that he loved him (a big
baseball fan, he watched the movie Field of Dreams over and over that day
to psyche himself up).
Something else was missing. I still had too much control of the class. How
to let go more? I didn’t know. Finally it occurred to me to break them
into groups, and ask each group to run the class for one two-hour period
(we generally met two evenings per week). They could do whatever they
wanted. One group wanted to play Capture the Flag. I thought, “What does
this have to do with writing?” But we did it, then wrote about it, and I
felt closer to that class after our group’s physical activity than I had
even after intense emotional discussions (besides, my team won).
Next class period we talked about the relationship between shared physical
activities and feelings of intimacy. Another group had us eat Popsicles
and watch cartoons, then draw pictures from our childhood with our
opposite hands (it broke my heart when one fellow shared his picture with
the class: ”This is my father taking me out in the woods to smoke my
first vial of crack”). In the same group we played Duck Duck Goose and
Hide and Go Seek in the basement of the near-empty building. Many of the
people were continuing students, and thus were older. Looking back, I don’t know how anyone could possibly say that he or she has successfully run a
writing class without having played Hide and Go Seek with overweight old
men, twenty year olds, middle-aged mothers of five, and a half-dozen men
and women whose native language is not English, all of them dead serious
about finding or not being found. One group taught us how to do the
Country and Western dance, the Tush Push. This was especially difficult
for me, a confirmed non-dancer. Because the room was too small, we did
this in the building’s central courtyard. Midway through one of our times
pushing our respective tushes, a couple of the department’s most
humorless administrators walked by, evidently having worked into the
evening. I smiled and waved.
Even this class taught me much. I had been working on letting go in my
writing for years by this point, and I sometimes became frustrated at the
baby steps many students were taking toward manifesting their passion in
words. But when it came to me attempting to let go in dancing, I suddenly
comprehended their inhibitions: I would push my tush only three or four
inches, while many who were too shy to open up in words were wildly
swinging their hips (including a fifty-year-old sheriff’s deputy I never
would have pegged for a tush-pusher). In another class we made marshmallow
figures representing our hopes and dreams. One fellow, a bow hunter, made
a big marshmallow buck with toothpick antlers, and a huge toothpick arrow
jutting from its chest; mine was a broken marshmallow dam with marshmallow
salmon swimming in a river of marshmallow (surprise, surprise). We played
blindfolded soccer in the classroom, with four people at a time
blindfolded, being told where to move by sighted partners (“Left, left,”
my partner shouted as I ran into the wall. “Oh, sorry, wrong way”). We
broke into groups, each group picking out of a hat the rough plot for a
screenplay (our group was to come down from a mountain to find that
everyone else in the world had disappeared), and then each person in the
group picked from a different hat a character to be played in the drama (I
was to play the actress Sharon Stone), after which we had an hour to write
our scripts, to be performed and videotaped in what we later dubbed “An
Exercise in Embarrassment.” For Halloween, we plopped sleeping bags on
the floor, sat around a flashlight surrounded by small pieces of wood
(simulating a campfire), ate s’mores, and told ghost stories. For
Valentine’s Day, we wrote stories about first loves, and memories of
hearts broken or overflowing. Mainly we had fun.
I did assign one topic each quarter that the people in the class had to
write on. It was the final paper. The assignment was for each of them to
walk on water, and then write about it. They had to decide to do something
impossible, do it, and then describe what it was like. A few people filled
their bathtubs with a quarter-inch of water, walked across that, and
considered themselves done. Other walked across frozen lakes. But one quit
smoking, another ended an abusive relationship, a very shy woman asked a
man out (he said yes), another woman for the first time admitted her
bulimia and sought help, one man told his parents he did not want to be an
accountant but instead an artist.
The people in my class, including me, did not need to be controlled,
managed, nor even taught. What we needed was to be encouraged, accepted,
and loved just for who we were. We needed not to be governed by a set of
rules that would tell us what we needed to learn and what we needed to
express, but to be given time in a supportive space to explore who we were
and what we wanted, with the assistance of others who had our best
interests at heart. I believe that is true not only for my students, but
for all of us, human and nonhuman alike. All we want, whether we are
honeybees, salmon, trash-collecting ants, ponderosa pines, coyotes, human
beings, or stars, is to love and be loved, to be accepted, cherished, and
celebrated simply for being who we are. Is that so very difficult?
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jane Magruder
Watkins
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 8:34 PM
To: [email protected]; Ailist@Lists. Business. Utah. Edu
Subject: RE: [Ailist] Re: [pcc-l] Summer reading
Dear Colleagues, Hi all,
I am looking for a scholarly article or two on the value of "transparent
facilitation". In my mind this is participant based or constructivist in
nature...any thoughts?
_______________________________________________
The Appreciative Inquiry Discussion List is hosted by the David Eccles
School of Business at the University of Utah. Jack Brittain is the list
administrator. For subscription information, go to:
http://mailman.business.utah.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/ailist
_______________________________________________
The Appreciative Inquiry Discussion List is hosted by the David Eccles
School of Business at the University of Utah. Jack Brittain is the list
administrator. For subscription information, go to:
http://mailman.business.utah.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/ailist
*
*
==========================================================
[email protected]
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of [email protected]:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
