Pushing the sky away.

Then we were in the car...

We'd found a way out of those little timetabled boxes.

We don't realise how close freedom is.






Four hours to get up to Paris to get to the Nick Cave concert.

There was that feeling of apprehension.

Would we get stuck in a horrendous traffic jam around the Péripherique?

Would we find the right exit off the Péripherique?

Would we find the car park?

Then we had arrived.

We walked hand in hand through the autumn colours on the paths leading up to the Zenith.

And then we were there.

For two hours, we were taken up by the music, the emotion, the rage, the beauty of the performance.

There are moments which mark you.

The four hours drive through the night, through that fatigue that amplified the moment.

Excitement fighting against the will to sleep.

A road flashing by, fog in the Combrailles, eery headlights of anonymous co-travellers.

Pushing the sky away.

I got a Facebook message from Sébastien over in Lima in Peru.

At three o'clock, it was the last hour of the class, for him it was eight o'clock in the morning.

He had just come back down from the mountains.

He had a biblically bearded look.

We grouped around the phone.

Fifteen minutes of freedom...amplified by the small size of the screen.

"People say that I am lucky." he said.

"I'm not. I made a choice. I got a ticket. I was scared. Now I am free."

"When you are in those boxes, and you are surrounded by all those messages which make you feel helpless you don't realise how close freedom is."

"You are young, there is a world out there, there are generous people out there. I am free."

Pushing the sky away.

I was feeling hemmed in.

I tweeted Teresa over in the UK.

We chatted.

As we chatted that hemming feeling was transformed into something quite different.

I walked outside into the garden.

Blue Sky, a light breeze, a friendship.

lovely to hangout with @sensor63 and remotely enjoy the blue sky and sunshine in Clermont Ferrand! #warwler #cmc #oie @UNICollaborate

— Teresa MacKinnon (@WarwickLanguage) October 11, 2017

Constraints become canvasses.

We had already moved on.

“All of our days are numbered; we cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it. Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world, a little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it. If you can hold on to that flame great things can be constructed around it that are massive and powerful and world changing – all held up by the tinniest of ideas.” 
Nick Cave

Criss-crossing.

criss-cross

ˈkrɪskrɒs/

verb

gerund or present participle: crisscrossing

1. form a pattern of intersecting lines or paths on (a place).

   
   

   "the green hill was criss-crossed with a network of sheep tracks"

   • move or travel around (a place) by going back and forth repeatedly.

     
     

     "the President criss-crossed America"

   
   

We set up the meeting for 15:00 Finnish time. 

I am never quite sure whether in France we are one hour ahead or behind. 

Leena found the mistake...

It was one hour behind.

A week or so before, I had sat with a Maritta from Finland, Terry in the US, Teresa in the UK and Marcin in Poland on a smartphone and a group of French teachers talking about higher education in an age of technology and connectivity saturation.

They had talked of the lack of training in pedagogy in their context.

They had showed interest in the possibilities of continuing conversations between countries, of investigating the possibilities sharing their pedagogical practices and discovering those of others.

The days before I had been busy with facilitating exchanges between French, Polish and UK students as part of the CLAVIER project.

#clavedu @WarwickLanguage @RoselyneHenry1 @mcrustan @makle1 @MarittaRiekki @LauraTommaso1 #warcler #kracler to be continued... pic.twitter.com/zmq5zfv3yk

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) March 22, 2017

It was the third and fourth time that we had had physical exchanges with students from Poland and the UK.

It is these criss-crossing of paths which enable us to learn deeply and gradually to change together.

It is a slow at times pain-staking process.

I am currently reviewing and mapping out my reflection here in this blog concerning the CLAVIER.

Having written at speed, now I am going back slowly trying to get an overview, an other view.

Criss-crossing.

So there we were, Christine, Leena, Maritta, and myself in a hangout.

If with Leena and Maritta we have been in contact for two or three years, the time taken to really understand each others' contexts has been limited.

I had sketched out some possibly areas of converging interests for conversation during the hangout and sought to find out whether we might find spaces to work together.

Just before the hangout, I engaged in a short Twitter conversation with Jesse Stommel who I noticed had tweeted the following:

Higher education pedagogy, as a field, remains strangely marginalized to the point of being almost nonexistent at most institutions.

— Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) March 22, 2017

Thereon there was a rapid exchange of tweets between the US, the UK and perhaps elsewhere.

Meanwhile we concentrated on the hangout.

Time was short, it felt, only an hour to try and explain my thinking and to attempt to find some sort of common ground.

Retrospectively that was perhaps absurd.

We need so much time to make sense of contexts that we have never lived.

I think now of all the time - the five or six years of I have spent criss-crossing the English channel, getting to know the context of the language centre in Warwick University.

As I spoke more and more, I felt more uncomfortable.

I felt that the picture that I was painting was difficult for Leena and Maritta to decode or at least to translate into their very different context.

I am becoming to realise that there is a chasm between work in an English language centred philology department and traversal foreign language service like the one in which I am employed.

As we teachers we have much in common with the librarians with whom we collaborate.

We are subject neutral, even if we get to specialise over the years within specific departments.

It is this element about my work which I enjoy, the ability to cross disciplinary boundaries.

It seems that these question of boundaries, national, institutional, social, disciplinary are at the forefront of our concerns today.

During the hangout Christine had a back-grounded telephone conversation going on in her office which with the audio system became fore-grounded at times during the hangout.

Open conversation across boundaries is not without obstacles.

And yet we are thrown together by this "internet" this global network.

If some are free, have the power to pass through boundaries with impunity, we inevitably get pulled back into the little boxes within which we are grounded.



I am looking forward to Maritta coming to France in June so that we may deepen our understanding of our contexts and to speak of possible ways forward.

I am wondering whether Maritta, Leena and Christine will share their reflections on our meeting, will meet me and others on Twitter to connnect.

I look forward to reading and hearing more of their stories.

Will their student teachers finish by working with us in Clermont Ferrand?

Will their teachers exchange what it is to work in these strangely connected times?

Will we learn to work together over time?

Time will tell.

In the meantime I will continue my reflective path.

It is when those distant voices come to people our little boxes an instant and change it for ever that we realise that we do indeed share a common and for ever shifting ground.

It is that curious attachment which brings us together despite all our differences to meet and so to learn and to grow which fascinates me.

Of all the people who might have shared their attention, it was them, then.

I went back to Storify the conversation which had happened during our hangout.

Another line of thought to follow....

Boundaries and desire.

I have been reflecting on what motivates desire to act and what limits action in an institutional learning context.

As a teacher, there are varying constraints which limit action.

Some constraints are clearly desirable or even essential to our own existence, our identity or an institution's or a groups existence.

Faced with what is a considered unacceptable demand or threat, a person, a teacher even,  may be motivated to attempt to overcome, get around, ignore, physical, political, philosophical, pyschological, cultural, hierarchical...(other) limits.

Clearly what is acceptable to one person is not necessarily acceptable to another.

 The perceived risk of overcoming or simply ignoring constraints will clearly depend on the individual person or group.

At times, boundaries may be breached, or simply crumble and disappear.

Beliefs may over time change or be transformed.

Inside out, outside in.

Desire to act will depend on intrinsic and extrinsic factors.

Desire to fulfill a role in an (educational) institution will depend on a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic factors.

Can one say that purely intrinsic motivation exists?

Perhaps not in a professional setting at least.

He notes that question for another day.

He returns to the confines of he institution.

There are days when we would rather be elsewhere...

There are days when a feeling of professional responsibility, a desire not to let down one's friends or colleagues in the lurch or a fear of losing regular/irregular income only just outweigh the desire to walk away...

The desire to not lose face amongst one's peers weighs heavily.

There are people in all professional activities who hate every moment of their professional existence.

There are people in all professional activities who would rather leave the work to the others...

There are people in all professional activities who have an overwhelming desire for power over others....

Man and machine...  

I am a 'fonctionnaire' - a servant of the state, in service to an education system.

I am a cog in a vast machine. Like all cogs which 'malfonctionne' I am replaceable.

Within a university,educational 'cog's are given more freedom of movement than in schools.

I may define within certain limits the program for the students, (indeed it is my responsibility). I may define the methods, the means of assessment.  Teachers are rarely if ever observed.  Students need to be seen to be, or believed to be in class at particular times and grades need to be rendered to the administration every term.  If I am requested to attend particular training or meetings I go.

Complaints are to be avoided.

The smooth running of the institution's administrative machine is primordial.

Then the machine ground to a halt.

A few days later

What on earth was I thinking?

This is all so complex.

Hurried Conclusion.

This is all so complex.

OFF.

In a cage?

How do you do "anarchist pedagogies" in the context of formal curriculum #moocmooc ? Space for it even in specialised courses/modules?
— Lenandlar Singh (@Lenandlar) February 11, 2015

I noticed this tweet.

It made me think.

• Is being an anarchist pedagogue enabling learners to recognise the bars of the cage?
• Is being an anarchist pedagogue enabling learners to find the doors out of the cage?
• Is being an anarchist pedagogue enabling learners to build an explosive device to destroy the cage?
• Is being an anarchist pedagogue enabling learners to ignore the bars of the cage and talk about other stuff?
• Is being an anarchist pedagogue enabling learners to design their own alternative cage?
• Is being an anarchist pedagogue enabling learners to imagine that cages are unnecessary?
• Is being an anarchist pedagogue resigning from all attempts at pedagogy and walking out of the cage?

Then I started to wonder.

• Is the cage a country?
• Is the cage an institution?
• Is the cage a community?
• Is the cage a culture?
• Is the cage a narrative?
• Is the cage a body?

I am sorry, I have more questions than answers.

I have been watching the #moocmooc hangout, people were popping up and down, in and out in their screened boxes.

I enjoyed it.

They seemed to be having fun.

Some of them didn't turn up.

Some of them were not on time.

Somebody couldn't make it to the hangout.

I was left with the thought that community is hard work.

I was left with the sound of a song.

It authentically popped up here.

My body is a cage.

No body is perfect?



PS:
I have been hopping from post to post.
I apologise for this post. I have no idea what its point is. I shall think it over while I hop...

Throw me some seed if you will.