Dear Learners,
Nick Heap wrote
>I appreciated Peggy's clear pen-portrait of what would be happening in
>her LO, it sounds an enjoyable place to work.
>Sometimes you can add even more insight by a) drawing a picture of what
>you see, "stick people" are fine b) SNIP Then boil it down to a vivid
>phrase in the form "verb/noun" like (say) "connecting thoughtfully). With
>support you can get an exciting phrase you remember for ever.
>I give below two links to short pieces about the above.
Nick,
If you are talking about the 'Tricia Lustig' I used to know then she has one
very lovely and talented daughter we'll call little "R" who once sat down
with me at a kitchen table and issued forth the most beautiful image of what
it "is" to be about six and a total personality, not yet broken on the
systems architectures of learning, it was a little mountain imaged as we
might recall;-) If you wish to know more about exciting phrases issuing from
verb and nouns beyond verbs and nouns you just get round a table with Tricia
and little "R" and she'll show you all about that 'kind' of 'facilitation'.
You will know I have a very refined sensibility about how to facilitate the
kinds of outcomes your contribution seems to point to the possibilities of. I
feel;-) for example one doesn't 'add even more insight' by drawing pictures.
I also feel one cannot 'boil down ' to vivid phrases, though I could offer
some;-) The art and discipline of pictures and images is only about ten
thousand years old, aesthetic dynamics three or four thousand years old.
There is much that might be learned from it's traditions by an LO or LI but I
offer this advice when it comes to facilitating people through creative
practice. To offer banalities is to consider those one facilitates as banal.
I have often wondered what really qualifies OD people to facilitate people.
It takes so many long patient years of study and practice to become a
psychotherapist, a surgeon, a paediatrician, a composer, a painter or
architect....how much care must we take when we step to the threshold of
some-one's interiority as imagination Nick? What happens to people when the
facilitator has gone if we trod on their dreams, what then? I have noticed
two things being increasingly touted on the facilitation circuits recently
here in the UK. Spirituality and Creativity. Few have the insight or wit to
see the close relation so that one might be the other. I think we must move
through these domains with a gentle touch Nick. That is both appropriate and
complementary.
Let me give you a phrase of guidance from Whitehead;-) - "the present is
still amorphous, unused, unfashioned." Keep yourself in that particle of the
present Nick. If you'd like a visual insight into the fusion of image and
word you might like to go to see
http://www.learning-org.com/images/VictoryMan.jpg
I copied it privately some time ago to friends but Rick has put it up,
like a flag today and perhaps to understand the 'possibility field' it
occupies you might like to read the LO contribution that it might most
easily sit alongside "Mixing the complex colour that we are" in November
in which I quoted Bateson, "I believe it to be the case that, as we climb
the ladder of sophistication from youth to age, from innocence to
experience or in general, from one rung of the ladder of logical typing to
another, we necessarily encounter the sorts of complexity exemplified by
the mystic, the schizophrenic, and the poet." (Bateson, Bateson, 1987:
173-4)
Anyhow, he is called "Victory Man" and he lives like an unfurled flag
within everyone, so please go look and see what you find there. The making
time of the image was about ten seconds;-)
I love these words upon some reflection;-) "From the matrix, the greatest
movement, flows the life of the work, with all its contingencies, its
powers and perils in the community of human minds."
Next time I run a workshop I will be sure to let you and Tricia know;-)
Love to you both and a gentle kiss to R;-)
Andrew
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