Heading to Columbus Ohio today to teach at the 2011 Authentic Leadership in Action Institute with my friends Pawa Haiyupis and Tim Merry. We’re teaching a module on indigenous wisdom, ancient wisdom, universal wisdom. It’s new for me to be doing this, kind of a chance to sum up my last 20 years of learning, living and growing as a human being. I’m nervous and mindful of elder Herb Joe’s name for us: “poor weak human beings.”
I always feel humble coming to ALIA and this year I feel maybe more humble than ever. Our module is fully subscribed and many friends and colleagues will be with us. On the eve of the work I find myself far more curious about what I am about to learn rather than what I have to teach. And immediately that frame of mind brings me back in a deep and powerful way to the first steps I took learning about Anishinaabe culture and practice back in 1987.
So I sit here waiting to depart on a delayed flight to Toronto, grateful for all of the indigenous teachers in my life. Remembering Tom Little, Paul Bourgeois, Edna Manitowabi, Jake Thomas, Manny Boyd, Art Soloman, Marlene Castellano, Eddie Benton-Banai, Shirley Williams, Wayne Kaboni, Fred Wheatley, Bruce Elijah, William Commanda, Sylvia Maracle, George Cook, Umeek, Fred Johnson, Lila Brown, Cease Wyss, Dustin Rivers, Grace Nielsen, Willie Charlie, Leonard George, Pawa Haiyupis, Wally Samuel, Herb Joe, Satsan, Luana Busby-Neff, Taupouri Tangaro, Michael Elkington, Orlando Pioche, Mikk Sarv, Mick Dodson, Peter DuBois, David Newhouse and Sonny Diabo.
All of these men and women, some older, and some younger than me, are my teachers. they have shared some deep kindness with me, some important teaching that has brought me to a place of belonging either in myself or in the place in which I live, and I am grateful to them all, and many more besides.
As I head out on this trip, this quote seems important:
“The circle is one of the strongest shapes in nature. When we see the world from a Native American perspective, that circle shapes our vision. We find circles and the idea of the circle everywhere, from the shapes of most Native dwellings to the view of the world as a series of continual, repeating cycles. Human life, itself, is seen as a circle, as we come from our mother, the Earth, when we are born and return to that same earth when we die” . Lesson stories keep the Native people of each generation from repeating errors which their ancestors made. And today, because (as Sitting Bull is reputed to have said) “there are no longer just Indians here,” that circle of stories is desperately needed…”
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From an email sent to a friend of mine (a Mohawk, for context!) about the art of harvesting. It includes an uncited hat tip to the Cynefin framework, and focuses on his particular field of education:
Harvesting, as you know being from a tribe of long standing agrarian practice, (!) is constituted of all kinds of things. Mostly though, you need an artifact and a feedback loop. What is the tangible piece I can hold in my hand and point to, and how does it fold back into the system to create learning. many systems do well at harvesting the artifacts (evaluations, studies, reports) but do very little in creating an architecture for implementing the results. Think Royal commission. It’s the equivalent of harvesting the corn and then storing it on a shelf and inviting people over to come and look at it. Anyone in their right mind would call you crazy, but that is what passes for harvesting in the organizations and institutions of our day.
Within schools there is a special kind of problem with harvesting. When I work in organizations and communities I take great care to make sure that we harvest both the intentional results (evaluations against objectives and so on) AND the emergent results. If we are trying to do new things we need to work with the complex dynamics of emergence. Schools get stuck when they just look at how well the year went with respect to the goals they set out in the first place. It is a set of blinders that turns them away from emergent practice and limits innovation. You will not get much information about the new practices, instead you get a sense of best practices, which is fine but which, by definition, gets us stuck in the past.
The problem is that this analytical, reductionist view is driven in education by accountabilities which are more and more tight every year. Under the guise of spending tax dollars well, there is a real shackle being put on innovation and learning about new ways to do education. Much of the innovations is happening therefore in the private sphere, but the results aren’t being brought to public education. This is BAD harvesting. If someone has figured out a better way to grow corn (what if we planted beans and squash along side the corn?) but didn’t share it or have any way for that information to get to those that need it, well, that’s not working. People go hungry when they don’t have to, and that is happening in education. I’ll bet when you go to conferences mostly you hear about how well people are meeting their targets and you get presentations on best practices. But you are probably not hearing about the trials and tribulations of experiments that fail.
Evaluating emergence and creating the conditions for SAFEFAIL experiments (as opposed to the fail safe plans that every school authority wants) requires a very different mindset. Instead of “merit and worth evaluation” people are starting to use methodologies like developmental evaluation which works with emergence and complexity. I think you need both, and not to privilege one over the other.
At any rate, this is a long conversation obviously, but it comes down to a couple of things:
1. Start with understand what aspects of your work are simple, complicated or complex.
2. Choose in advance a harvesting methodology for each of these three domains.
3. Choose in advance a strategy for using the harvest from these domains.
4. Build a harvesting strategy into the work up front, as a key piece of design.
And as a special treat, here is an hour of me teaching harvesting at a recent Art of Hosting in Calgary.
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If you want to learn the way another culture thinks, listen to their stories. But don’t just listen to any stories; listen to the stories they have about how knowledge is gained. That gives you the key to understanding all of the other stories and teaches you everything you need to know about the experiences you need to have to gain knowledge.
Thinking about the Nuu-chah-nulth methodology of oosumich today which is the way of stilling oneself to listen to the world and enter a dialogue with the unseen. My friend Pawa says that prayer is the act of speaking to the immaterial and meditation is the act of listening. It takes at least that quality and depth of engagement with thoughts to reach beyond the material world to the source level.
Taupouri Tangaro says “access into the inner sanctums of hula knowledge is reliant on a vocal invitation.”. It begins with a murmer, a sound uttered into a void field. As you approach a moment or a place in which you are seeking knowledge, begin with a sound. Introduce yourself to the moment and to the place. Offer a song.
And the journey: I was re-reading Eddie Benton-Banai’s teachings about the little boy that brought the Midwewiwin to the people. Part of his journey was traveling through the dark part of the moon, the part the we know is there but that we can’t see. It is a call to go to the spiritual parts of ourselves that we know exist.
Easy. You can sit still in a beautiful place in the forest but can you sit in the beautiful stillness of a forest? That which you know is there bit which you cannot see. Anishnaabe epistemology relies on our ability to learn from both the seen and the unseen.
Tomorrow is the solstice. It is the longest night illuminated by a full moon that will be in eclipse. Layers of darkness and light. A time for exploring the complex interrelationship of light and dark, yin and yang, male and female, action and structure.
Listen to it. Sing to it. Celebrate!
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Johnnie Moore had an interesting thought this morning:
Jeff Jarvis talks about the Gutenberg Parenthesis. Those who bemoan the supposed short attention spans of the networked generation, typically measure this by the capacity or willingness to read a book cover-to-cover. This assumes that reading books is normal; but what about the vast span of human history before books? Perhaps we’re seeing a reversion to ways of knowing that were diminished by the printed word… to a more oral culture in which remixing is natural.
This reminds me of the book, The Alphabet and the Goddess which also suggests that reading had a powerful and not always positive effect on how we think and behave.
I left him my own thoughts…and I say this as a guy that loves books.
I think the issue is not attention spans so much as it is a breadth of attention. Before there was text humans needed to be incredibly aware of context, of everything that surrounded them of how things worked and what initial conditions led to certain kinds of results. This is important in agrarian societies, hunting societies, transoceanic travelling cultures and other kinds of indigenous land based ways of being.
What we have lost during the Gutenberg parenthesis I think is the ability to think systemically. Book reading has taught us to be linear and to expect a beginning a middle and an end. That is not the way the world works and I think we ignore it at our peril.
This is a little bit I think of what we will taste in our module at the ALIA Summer Institute this year.
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An email from a participant in a recent Art of Hosting-type workshop where I brought my juggling balls and taught juggling. One of the participants, a teacher, picked up the skill and left with my three balls in hand to evangelize play!
This may end up sounding like the silliest email ever but thanks for showing me how to juggle. I am really enjoying it. I have never found something that I am not hard on myself to perfect until now. I go outside, or inside and practice for a few minutes and if the balls drop, I just pick them up. Very cool. And I love feeling that I am improving. Yesterday I was showing my boss what I learned and I almost had to stop juggling because it was the longest I had gone. Then the balls fell and solved that problem! But one of the students as he got off the bus yesterday asked me what I learned at school and I told him I’d show him. I have never seen this child so enthusiastic about anything and when I was finally able to show the class, they all applauded! That was cool. But it was fun to be able to show the class something they could understand. Except there was another child who after my juggling display says, “what else did you learn”. So I go on to tell the class we learned a lot of what we are learning in preschool such as how to calm your body down. Then the same boy, “then what did you learn”, so I continue by saying I could host a world cafe. And again, “what did you learn”. I think this child has a future being a lawyer!
Far from the silliest email I have ever received. This is what makes teaching worth it, and why play matters so much.