Showing posts with label narrative. Show all posts
Showing posts with label narrative. Show all posts

Monday, April 8, 2019

The big picture.


Preamble.

I hadn't blogged twice in a day for months. Then Maha made a comment on Twitter. It was a response and a appreciative comment to a blog post I shared with her.


The big picture

Sorry this is an inane rant.
So this (the map above) is the (a) big picture.

This is a perspective that I was brought up with.

This is a perspective that I was educated with.

My father was born in 1907, the year on the map of the World.

It's a big world made smaller with all of that pink.

The pink here represents the British Empire.

The pink represents the worldview of some people in 2019, they still hark back to it in their attitudes, arrogance, their bank balances and their politics.

[BREXIT]

[JOHNSON, FARRAGE, REES AND MOGG]

[THE COMMON (cough) WEALTH]

There is this idea that all of this and all of that land belongs to "us" and not to "them".

That is the big picture - power.

[POWER AND CRICKET AND AFTERNOON TEA AND GREENWICH MEAN TIME]

BIG PICTURE = BIG POWER.

Power built on military domination, torture, slavery, expropriation, exploitation, land of hope and glory, "Christianity", Inanity, songs, prayers and lies.

 "OUR HISTORY" - THE BIG PICTURE.

PROGRESS THROUGH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY.

PROGRESS THROUGH FREE MARKET EXCHANGE.

PROGRESS THROUGH DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM.

(Altenatively: progress through Chinese Communist Party etc )

PROGRESS THROUGH SUPERIOR VALUES.

There are still people who hold onto an irrational reverence to science being an explanation for all.

[I had a class with people who told me this only a few days ago...]

There are still people who hold onto an irrational hope in strong men being an answer to politics.

[TRUMP, PUTIN, BOLSONARO, ORBAN, MUSSOLINI, NETANYAHU, HITLER, etc]

There are still people who hold onto an irrational bigotry that white people are innately superior.

[WHITE SUPREMACISTS, KKK, etc]

There are still people who hold onto an irrational belief in their "god" granting them the right to kill.

[TOO MANY TO MENTION]

There are still people who hold onto an irrational belief that humans are simply men and women and nothing in between.

[TOILETS, GENDER CORRECTION SURGERY]

There are still people who hold onto an irrational belief that Western societies are built on meritocracies or goodwill.

[LIBERTE, EGALITE, FRATERNITE, THE STATUE OF LIBERTY]

There are still people who hold onto an irrational belief in "individual success", the primacy of the individual.

We love stories of good and evil.

[AXIS OF EVIL, GOD the DEVIL]

We love ideas of heroes and villains.

[MANDELA - MANDELA]

We talk of saints and monsters.

[POPE(S)]

The big picture is a comforting lie....for those who like the picture.



[GOD SAVE THE QUEEN THE FASCIST REGIME, THEY MADE YOU A MORON]

We love our myths, our legends, our narratives, our plays with neat beginnings and endings.


POWER NOW INCLUDES PINK POWER!!!

Of course now, if we wear rose tinted spectacles,  we might think of pink representing a new trendy, liberal, more caring Britain.



 Uncomforting Exceptions to the big picture...

Somewhere in all of that pink there is a little land called Brunei.

"The British" no doubt found support for a pet exotic, a Sultan convenient.

They kept him sweet over the years with Eton, baubles, bullets and flattery.

They oiled the wheels of his Rolls Royces, with the oil that came cheap.

They fêted his presence in their big picture with our majestic Queen.


Now that ex-pink has it in for all the pinks present.

Brunei introduces death by stoning as punishment for gay sex

Big picture of big building.


Post scriptum
Sigh, sometimes, often even, we get sparked by comments and words taken out of context.


(It's been too long a while that Maha and I have not interacted)

Sparks can light candles or bonfires.



I fear that the story in the Guardian about a tiny country and its tyrant will spark more islamophobia and more "big pictures" with more big headlines.

I wonder when we will be able to appreciate the beauty in people's expression of spirituality, or sexuality, the value of all people over that of oil, pf the value of life over material possessions, of the reality of our common humanity, and to accept a more equitable, more complex, less graspable, less controlled, more moving collage.

Post post scriptum.

The big picture is that this post is a mark of individual privilege and servitude- a few data points for those who have access to the means to interpret "big data" and use it for their ends.



Looking at all that blue doesn't make me yearn for the pink but makes me wonder how it will affect the stories people will tell their children...

Footnote and conclusion.

We are indeed slaves to what brings us freedom....

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Sunday, March 12, 2017

Fiction, Faction, Fact...

What counts is not what is, but what your dream is.

I have been thinking about the gravity of facts and the liquidity of fiction.

How little of our lives is governed in fact?



What percentage of human disasters are down to natural catastrophes?



What percentage of human disasters are down to the dreams of others?

A family is wiped out by greed.

"Affaire Troadec: il a tué toute une famille à cause d'un héritage."

A whole people is wiped out by fiction.
"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

 "Mein Kampf"


An election is lost and won by a faction because of facts or because of fiction?


A referendum is lost and won by a faction because of facts or because of fiction?



What do facts matter if the beliefs of those in power deny your right to exist?



The "facts" that matter to you or those experiences which you consider to be "facts" will surely be determined by your beliefs.

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” 
― Albert Einstein

 A classroom preface.

 I looked at the notes for the class, they had spent the week before learning about learning styles...

"All you need to know about 'the learning style myth' in two minutes."

A classroom.


I was sitting in the classroom last week with ten other teachers.

Six of them were sitting with me in a room in France, four of them were sitting in rooms in Finland, The USA, The UK and Poland.

What brought us together was a class and common interest in education.

What brought us together was friendship, curiosity and a desire to learn.

What brought us together were questions.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Albert Einstein

We were able to connect because of a smartphone and a Google hangout.

The phone was passed around the space so that the teachers in France could speak either individually or as a group with the distant teachers.

During the discussions, one common experience emerged - that of measurement.

We spoke of PISA, we spoke of "publish or perish".

Surely this obsession with "measurement" is grounded in belief, which if we decide so,  has little to do with education, perhaps a lot with "discipline" and "standards".

Surely the question we must ask is "whose standards are we attempting to satisfy"?

Surely the role of education is to demonstrate the weight of liquid in what appears to be solid.

As recent events in global stockmarkets have shown, economics is based on volatile liquidity.

Experts, always sound so "solid" and reliable until they are proved not to be.

Bernie Madoff 's 50 Billion Dollar Ponzi  Scheme.

When we talk of a "bottom line", it is perhaps an "economic reality" but therein lies the reality of power and a dominant ideology and the many lies which hide the manner of exploitation.

One of the teachers, Terry Elliott from Kentucky,  talked of "unschooling"  his kids which was, he termed "radical".

This fact was greeted by surprise and by interest by the other teachers present.

When I hear my kids talking of school in terms of incarceration, I wonder how crazy I am to send them there.

We spoke of the "Finnish miracle" with Maritta Riekki in Finland and learnt how "miracles" are sold.

The French teachers were particularly interested to get a first hand opinion of how Finnish education worked, as they had been sold the need to become more like the Finnish by the powers that be.

Often Maritta said, "less is more," the most important part of education is not facts but getting kids ot ask question and to think for themselves.

 New dreams.

Many facts that we appear to be stuck with at the moment are the result of obsolete dreams.

There are those who will always hark back to a better time in the past and promise to take us there.

There have always been those with terrifying dreams.

There are those who will happily supply the means to achieve those dreams.
What we need are new dreams.


Education must not be about plying facts of the few, it must be about enabling new dreams for all.

Image: Trump as Gargoyle.

 Footnotes.
faction1
ˈfakʃ(ə)n/
noun
noun: faction; plural noun: factions
  1. a small organized dissenting group within a larger one, especially in politics.

    "the left-wing faction of the party"

    synonyms:clique, coterie, caucus, cabal, bloc, camp, group, grouping, side, sector, section, wing, arm, branch, division, contingent, set, ring, lobby; More
Origin
late 15th century (denoting the action of doing or making something): via French from Latin factio(n- ), from facere ‘do, make’.
faction2
ˈfakʃ(ə)n/
noun
  1. a literary and cinematic genre in which real events are used as a basis for a fictional narrative or dramatization.

    "the current vogue for faction seems about to overwhelm narrative history"
-faction
ˈfakʃ(ə)n/
combining form
  1. in nouns of action derived from verbs ending in -fy (such as liquefaction from liquefy ).
Translate faction to
Use over time for: faction

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Saturday, March 19, 2016

Dear Maha


Maha this article appears at an appropriate moment for me. 




I was speaking with a Polish friend of the language of occupation which oppresses generations of people, victims of the violent abuse of others. 

He kept repeating the idea that present generations could not really usefully unpick the past. 

At the same time he kept saying that he refused to accept the words: "Polish concentration camps" - these are German he insisted.  


I talked of reparation as recognition of crimes against humanity - the descendants of slaves, victims of all sorts. 

I asked him if he considered that it was acceptable that the descendants of the manufacturers of Xyclon B benefited from capital extracted from genocide while black descendants of slaves were still suffering from systemic discrimination and deprivation. 

I asked him whether he imagined that years of occupation/colonisation had not determined narrative, language, relations of generation upon generation.  

There is the discourse of guilt - guilt of being a man, white, elite, German, straight, English, Banker...

We do not choose our birth.

We find ourselves brought to a world in which the rules by which we will live are predefined. 

We are recognised, branded even by the language of others:

White, black, man, queer, weird, woman, English, small, snob, loser...

I have spent many years unpicking discourses which were branded into my body, into my lens to view the world, into my relations with others. 

Years of research, genealogical, psychoanalytical, nexus analysis, critical pedagogy, leads me to the writing of this at present.

I refuse to accept that this is our only destiny - that this is God's will. 

I refuse to accept the belief that we can not learn to free ourselves from mental slavery (to borrow words of Bob Marley).

Indeed, I believe that this must be our struggle, our common struggle for our children.

We must unpick the colonisation of our minds, bodies, spirit, as children of the slaves and the slave-owners, as mothers, as fathers, as sisters and as brothers. 

There must be recognition.

There must be reparation - material and/or symbolic. 

There must be a desire to create new relations between men, women, animals, plants and the ecosystem of which we are part. 

It were time that we gave up dreams of unjust "progress" - material gain for a few at the expense of the many. 

There are victims of abuse in all sectors of our societies. 

There is only one way to grow, as far as I can see. 

It entails loving dialogue, compassion, forgiveness and a common determination to imagine anew in the light of what we must learn from these stories. 

There may be need for active resistance to violence. 

Lives will be lost.

We are all lost unless we fight for justice and for peace.

Thank you for holding up a light.

We shall need such lights to guide a way.

Love to all at DigiPedLab Cairo.

Simon
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Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Toying with complexity

"What difference do you think you can make - one single man in all this madness?" 

 Terence Malick. 
The Thin Red Line.
The forces laid out on the floor were aligned in battle order.

The infantrymen were placed in front of the artillery with the cavalry waiting in the wings.

With one glorious charge the cavalry shattered the enemy lines, men fell like ninepins.

Victory was sweet.

I had it all planned out in my mind.

"I will join the marines. I want to be a commando."

The storyline changed over the years.

I was watching a conference of Dave Cormier.

At first I thought nothing of it.
I watched it again.
I thought nothing of it.

Then I read a comment stream.

I don't know why.

Boredom perhaps.

There was a conversation going on between Viplav Baxi and Dave Cormier.

Viplav Baxi Awesome Dave Cormier! I loved your talk and you made a really clear and cogent argument for change. Kudos! Will probably follow up with some thoughts on the Cynefin framework - I really don't believe that anything is really that "simple".
LikeReply8 hrs

Dave Cormier will be buy that sometimes refying to simple is a useful expedient?
LikeReply7 hrs
Viplav Baxi Just worried that simplifying what is not simple may reify current practices
LikeReply7 hrs
Viplav Baxi So by saying 'what is the capital of France' is 'simple' to google and answer maybe reifying the mindlessness of rote
LikeReply7 hrs
Viplav Baxi And justifying traditional practices of assessment for those 'kinds' of questions or knowledge
LikeReply7 hrs
Dave Cormier Think about all the things we reify in learning to drive a car. If you tried to understand each of the steps you'd be overwhelmed.
LikeReply7 hrs
Dave Cormier So we say 'pressing the gas pedal makes the car go faster'
LikeReply7 hrs
Viplav Baxi You are right of you are focused on the outcome. But is that education?
LikeReply7 hrs
Dave Cormier Viplav i'm never in favour of justfiying assessment smile emoticon
LikeReply7 hrs
Dave Cormier Viplav sometimes. Education is just social shaping. We can shape it a bunch of different ways
LikeReply7 hrs
Dave Cormier I'm in favour of shaping the main instrument of education towards complexity
LikeReply7 hrs
Dave Cormier But sometimes i just want to 'learn' how to use my coffee roaster. Tell me what to do. I"ll do it.
LikeReply7 hrs
Viplav Baxi Reading Dewey right now. So introspecting. He writes that etymologically education means just a process of leading or bringing up. When we have the outcome in mind-that is when we talk in terms of shaping into the standard form of social activity
LikeReply7 hrs
Viplav Baxi If we stick to the former definition then we lead to instead of design to
LikeReply7 hrs
Dave Cormier all we can do, i think, is try to broaden the definition of education in inclusive ways. i think 'changing the definition' is probably more tgan we'll be able to accomplish
LikeReply6 hrs
Viplav Baxi Broaden the definition?
LikeReply1 hr

There was one comment of Dave Cormier which sparked my thinking:

"I'm in favour of shaping the main instrument of education towards complexity."

 "How can education not be an illustration of complexity?" I thought to myself.

Then I read:

 "But sometimes I just want to 'learn' how to use my coffee roaster. Tell me what to do. I'll do it."

 I thought of ritual, of habitual, of process, of story.

I remembered a comment of my grandmother, aged 80.

 "When I look at myself in the mirror, I just don't recognise myself."

 I remembered a comment of my mother, aged 75.

"When I look at myself in the mirror, I just don't recognise myself."

 They were unhappy with a plot-line which had escaped them.

I remembered a slogan on a t-shirt.

This is not the life we ordered...

I thought of climate change.

I thought of the people gathered together in some hangar, just North of Paris, hugging each other at their part played in some historic agreement.

Heroic.
"What difference do you think you can make - one single man in all this madness?" 

 Terence Malick. The Thin Red Line.

I was watching a trailer for a documentary entitled 'The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson.'



In the documentary, a man faces up to his imminent demise:

 "The idea that death is imminent makes you realise what a wonderful thing it is to be alive."
Wilko Johnson.

 He becomes hyperaware of the joy of his existence.

"Everything lifted off of me. The present, future, past, it was all concentrated down into the moment...I'm alive."
Wilko Johnson.

"How does one 'shape education' towards complexity?" I thought to myself.

What is life if not complex?

What is education if not story?

Is complexity compatible with story?

"Everything lifted off of me. The present, future, past, it was all concentrated down into the moment...I'm alive."
Wilko Johnson.

What are these stories?

I thought of Terence Malick.





I don't know why.

"What difference do you think you can make - one single man in all this madness?" 

Terence Malick. The Thin Red Line.




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