When a teacher initiates an EQ (or a driving
question in PBL), the
inalienable right of an individual has already been threatened, and an awake
person’s inner knowing automatically bars the door. Gnosis, the direct access to ultimate knowledge, opens from the
inner heart and sniffs out surely the wolf in lamb’s clothing even when the
beast lacks self-knowledge or acts out of the unconscious, assuming that the
professional garb authorizes external control. Teachers who have been dominated by external controls
throughout their education and have been trained to post the objective, the EQ,
and to enforce the code of conduct are subject to semi-conscious presumption of
control.
The path toward authenticity plummets
into multiplicity. Neil Gaiman
gives a quantum diffraction of multiplicity in a conversation between Shadow
and Sam in American Gods:
“It’s not easy to believe.”
“I,” she told him, “can believe
anything. You have no idea what I can believe.”
“Really?”
“I can believe things that are true
and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody
knows if they’re true or not . . . that light is a wave and a particle, that
there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time
(although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be
two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions
of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares
about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal
god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends
and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless
universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck” (American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary
Edition: A Novel, HarperCollins. Kindle Edition, pp. 348-9).
The ability to hold multiplicity does
not mean a person cannot choose a better action among alternatives in a specific
contextual situation (e.g., Forms
of Ethical and Intellectual Development).
Essential questions are not to be
answered, certainly not corralled in objective tests, and yet they are to be
explored and the primary guide for that comes from the inner heart. Exploring essential questions stirs the
heart of education; many are reaching toward such education as in Connected
Learning and MakerFaire. I believe
they’re at the heart of our UMCP I-Series courses, including the one I love to teach. The way we search in Good
Stories—Teaching Narratives for Peace &
Justice comes in developing resonance in archetypal stories (e.g., “Illumination,” “Main
Idea on Auto-Pilot Makes Nonsense”).
What we should expect from our search
for essence is not answers and not even happiness, certainly not fame or
fortune. As stressed by Elyse and
others in the #CLMOOC, it’s more toward passion (e.g., “Writing as
Making/Making as Writing). Again, let’s not get fixated on bliss,
for passion is as distinguished by suffering as by happiness. I tend to choose the term vitality as a
distinctive quality of approaching essence.
For those of us who play and work in
story land (that is, in literature, rhetoric, and broader composings), capacity
to explore for essences, thus for resonance and for vitality, can be expressed
in the term “literacies.” Literacies
can be conceived as a capacity to work/play along the edge of consciousness in
order to resource vitality, to enhance relationships (including building
community), and to strive toward peace and justice. Such a perspective on literacies affirms the need to go
deeper than the surface, to engage technologies into play—yes, because play
releases the imagination and persistence and the escape from fear of failure
that are needed to reach toward justice that allows individuality. Play also erases cognitive fences that
cut literacy off from intuition, flow, and other forms of knowing.
And that’s a good place to take the
invitation. Go play. Like in #CLMOOC.
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