Life As Paradox

            Yesterday we had our concluding seminar for the Environment and Natural Resource Use unit.  As with all other Seminar 10s, this one urged the students to think about how they could affect change in the world.  This particular one was focused on how students could utilize their talents and interests to think of a project they could create to help resolve some issue facing the world.  They were encouraged to think systematically about the issue, recognizing the interconnectedness between issues in order to create a project that could maximize their and its potential: instead of just a school to foster literacy for example, it could be a school where literacy comes hand in hand with environmental awareness.  Only eleven of our seventeen total students showed up, as has more or less been the trend in the past weeks.  Although I wish that all students would be interested in this work, I’m not disappointed that they’re not coming; the ones that do show up seem to want to be there.  However, there is still an underlying tone of complaint and frustration regarding ‘having’ to come to seminar, or ‘having’ seminar period, among those that do show up.

Midway through the seminar, we put the students into groups and had them think about the project they might want to create.  It took them about five minutes to gather up in their groups outside, as if they were anchored to their seats, and someone had to drag them to work.  Once outside, a complaint was voiced: “How am I supposed to come up with a solution to these problems in ten minutes?”  Do your best, we responded.  Use your time productively.  Over the course of the next thirty minutes, I heard a lot of laughing, and a fair amount of conversation of things unrelated to the topic.  Upon our return to the classroom, when asked to share, three students spoke up.  When ideas were presented, there was laughter and lightness when addressing issues of poverty, underserved urban youth, and women’s empowerment. 

            By that point, the feeling had already begun to arise in me: what a drag it was for them to be in this foreign country and study these issues; what a miserable life.  The lightness with which the themes were spoken about tipped me over the edge.  I battled inside myself for the next ten minutes while listening to the students speak.  Do I share my feeling?  I knew that if I shared my feeling, it would elicit a negative response from the students.  They would feel attacked, and as they’ve shown throughout the rest of the year, they would deflect the criticism back to the giver.  Instead of using the comment as an opportunity for self-reflection and growth, they would close up and push back.  I would become the enemy once again.  How many days would the mean looks, ignoring, and audible-yet-under-the-breath negative remarks last this time?

            This is one internal struggle that I’ve faced this year as a teacher:  the risk of becoming the bad guy at the cost of encouraging or modeling positive internal growth.  With this particular group of students, I have had to face this struggle time and time again this year.  It’s been a hard lesson: being a teacher doesn’t always mean being friends with your students.  It’s even more difficult given that these students are my community; I have to travel around with them for seven and half months.  Given that, it’s nice to have friends from the student body.  It’s a lot harder when people are angry with you…

The second struggle I had during those ten minutes of presentation had to do with what I’m learning about being a good teacher: balancing paradox.  Part of our liberating pedagogy is about meeting the students where they are.  This means that if they’re not ready to be somewhere, mentally or emotionally, one can’t force them there.  Parker Palmer, in his book The Courage to Teach, speaks of paradox in pedagogical design.  He suggests that in the ideal classroom, the space should be “bounded and open”, and “hospitable and charged”.  How could I express my feelings to the students about the disrespect shown to all those people whom these issues affect while not making them close up?  How could I talk to the students about how privileged we are to travel the world, studying these issues from a safe enough distance where we can make light of these situations, while at the same time honoring that they’re just not there yet, not ready to take these issues seriously?

Paulo Freire and Ira Shor suggest in their book A Pedagogy for Liberation:

“The liberating educator can never manipulate the students and cannot leave the students alone, either.  The opposite of manipulation is not laissez-faire, not denying the teacher’s directive responsibility for education.  The liberating teacher does not manipulate and does not wash his or hands of the students. He or she assumes a directive role necessary for educating.” (516)

Balancing my mental/emotional health with the desire to lead the students.  Balancing the paradox of teaching: pushing students to grow while meeting them where they are.

In the end, I had to listen to my inner voice.  The feeling was strong enough in me to have some physical effect: I felt myself shaking, adrenaline beginning to pump inside me as if readying myself for battle.

The outcome was as predicted, but I didn’t stick around long enough to hear the backlash against me.

Palmer writes:

“Good education may leave students deeply dissatisfied, at least for a while.  I do not mean the dissatisfaction that comes from teachers who are inaudible, incoherent, or incompetent.  But students who have been well served by good teachers may walk away angry – angry that their prejudices have been challenged and their sense of self shaken.  That sort of dissatisfaction may be a sign that real education has happened.” (94)

In these times, the times I’m afraid to go back out and interact with the group, I have to trust the words of Palmer.  I have to trust that I’m providing good education, regardless of the consequences.  I need the support of others to help me overcome my self-doubt, the doubt that is at once critical to my growth and also debilitating to my confidence: another paradox in which I live, and must learn to balance. 

In our program leader training last August, we had the rest of the leaders and staff fill in the blank to the following statement during one practice seminar:  To be human is _________.   One of my fellow leaders responded with “to live in paradox”.  Never have I felt more in agreement.

A Story of A Story

The truth about stories is that’s all we are.

-Thomas King

There is a note in one of my journals.  It’s scribbled in blue ink at the top of one of the lined pages, without a date, but I know it’s about a year old.  It reads: ‘imagined stories.'  It refers to the narratives that we humans are so adept at creating in our minds about our identities and our social realities.  In particular, this note speaks to the stories that we create, perhaps around one off-hand comment a friend made one day.  Perhaps this comment made our minds spin, and, like great novelists, we built a story around this comment:  "this person thinks this about me, because of this reason," so on and so forth.  This story, now a reality at least in our minds (and how easily we convince ourselves that it is indeed the reality), then shapes our next interactions with that person.  Maybe we shy away from this person the next time we see them.  Maybe we don’t speak as much, fearful of what this person already ‘thinks’ about us.  Maybe we speak differently.  Maybe we approach this person with fear now, or contempt, or indifference.  Perhaps this interaction then shapes all the subsequent interactions we’ll have with this person. 

Our new reality is thus shaped by an imagined story.

We live and learn by our stories and in our stories.  Stories are the mental architecture for the choices we make on everything from our destinations abroad to whom we’ll befriend and how we’ll use our time.  Most of our stories are unconsciously held.  For the most part, we simply live the stories that have been planted in us by parents and peers, and by the powerful images of wealth, power, fun, and beauty that bombard us daily.  As ones with the capacity for mindful choice, we also plant stories in ourselves.  We construct assumptions and expectations that mark our lives and give certain meaning to our global learning, for better or for worse.

- Richard Slimbach

Slimbach, author of Becoming World Wise: A guide to global learning, takes the idea of the story a step further.  Not only do stories shape our interactions with each other, stories shape our perspectives of the world.  In the context of his book, Slimbach claims that the stories of our family, our culture and our nation shape our outlook on life, and thus to a high degree, our interactions with other cultures. 

As a program leader on a global gap year, this idea could not ring more true.  Daily, as we meet, live, and work with people spanning the continents, and as we discuss an issue so embedded in stories as is ‘development’, our students are confronted with the stories that have been planted in them for the past eighteen years.

Development is only a word.  Some of the words that come to define it: growth, change, progress.  These words hold no particular value, but our stories give them value.  Growth becomes economic.  Change becomes industrial.  Progress becomes modern.  As we bump up with people from different families, different cultures, and different nations, we begin to see that reality is only our reality; that our reality is only our perspective; that our perspective comes from our story. 

Now in Ecuador, our group of global students is studying issues related to our environment.  In one of our seminars, it was revealed that the mindset leading to the industrial patterns of production and consumption came from an era in which there were at least 5 billion less people.  Forests seemed endless.  Places seemed empty.  Resources, it seemed, would never run dry.

We now know that this is not true. 

Forests, it seems are not endless, and we can actually impact an ecosystem so much that forests may not grow back there.  Empty places, places for the taking, are actually inhabited by people all over the world.  These empty places are actually places where people collect food, building material, and medicine, and where people may live seasonally.  Resources, it seems, are running dry: we have severely depleted the oceans fisheries, one of our once boundless sources of ‘free’ protein; clean, fresh water is ever harder to come by; fertile, arable land has now become quite infertile.   

We now know that this, the idea that nature is a boundless, never-ending provider of all things we need, that we humans can not detrimentally impact this endless fountain, is not true.

And yet we continue to live as if it is.

Al Gore, in An Inconvenient Truth, forms two equations:

Old Habits + Old Technologies = Mostly Predictable Consequences

Old Habits + New Technologies =  ?

Our mindset was not only framed by what seemed like our environmental reality, it was framed in our spiritual and ethical, individual and collective conscience.  Manifest destiny gave North American settlers the internal motivations to conquer the ‘wild,’ and to civilize the ‘savages’. 

Daniel Quinn, in his book Ishmael, paints us a picture of two competing narratives, one of a culture of Takers, the other of a culture of Leavers.  An attempt perhaps to reveal to a modern and dominating culture the destructive environmental impact that our story is enacting on this planet, he tries to dig to the roots of our story in order to help us see what shapes our decisions as a culture of Takers:

Every story is based on a premise, is the working out of a premise…Your entire history with all its marvels and catastrophes, is a working out of this premise. The world was made for man.  If the world was made for us, then it belongs to us and we can do what we damn well please with it. 

In a small side story, Quinn has a jellyfish describe its story.  Creation and evolution, it just so happens, ends with the jellyfish. 

How would it change our everyday decisions if our story was such that we humans were not the pinnacle of creation?  That the plant and animal species that inhabit the many ecological niches in which we also live were our partners on this earth?  That we were to share this home with them?  That our environment, living and non-living, and the resources it provides, was not strictly to be used, but perhaps to be cared for and shared? 

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people.  Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world.  But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as your does, they will live at odds with the world.  Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act like lords of the world.  And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will be bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.

   - Quinn, Ishmael

The truth is, most of us live unaware of our stories.  As Slimbach says, “Most of our stories are unconsciously held”.  We do what do, we buy what we buy, we live how we live, unaware of the story that shapes our every single decision. 

Is the world ‘bleeding to death at our feet’? 

If so, why?  What story do we live by that allows that?  

Who/What feeds us this story?

What can we do to change it?

To change the world requires that we change our consciousness, the stories we live by.  Look at the lives of people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Joan of Arc, or Helen Keller – those who lived from and for something that reached beyond themselves.  One quality seems to stand out above all:  a steadfast vision.  Despite opposition and personal limitations, they were able to firmly connect their personal interests to a future expectation of a more just and humane world…

Vision is an act of seeing, an imaginative perception of what should and could be.  It begins with dissatisfaction – even indignation – over the status quo, and it grows into an earnest quest for an alternative.  Global learning that serves the common good faces the world as it is and declares, ‘This is unacceptable – the despair, the dispossession, the exploitation, the contempt for human dignity – there must be another way.’  Then it dares to dream.  ‘Nothing much happens without a dream,’ declares Robert Greenleaf.  ‘And for something great to happen, there must be a great dream.  Behind every great achievement is a dreamer of great dreams’ (2002, p. 16).

   - Slimbach, Becoming World Wise

Everyday, I struggle to become aware of the stories that I create in my mind, based on my insecurities, about how people feel about me.  Everyday, I aim to become conscious of the stories that I weave, such that I may separate them from what has really happened, what is really happening, and approach people, and life, with more presence, more love, and less illusion.

I dream of authentic interactions with those around me, and I dream of authentic interactions with my home, this one Earth. 

What is your dream?