Jibbon Creative

With the possible exception of those human encounters that Fritz Peris calls “intimacy,” all human communications have deeply embedded and profound hidden agendas. What passes for conversation is often more like the noise of a machine than real talk between people. We say what’s appropriate, and respond appropriately; we swim about in a language game which constructs not only who we are, but what we think and what we say. I think we have to be very conscious and careful players of this game. Because if we’re not careful, we can find ourselves believing it. Take for instance those 107 young men and women in NSW whose photos have drifted through the press as the ‘highest achievers in the HSC’ this year. Now sure, that sort of thing means something, but I for one don’t quite know what it is. I’ve taught HSC History and English and I do know that beautiful writing or profound critical judgement doesn’t assure a person of the highest possible ‘mark’ in the test. Oh it can come close, but only as close as the limited means by which people’s judgments can come to the complexity and subtle mystery of art. The tragedy happens when the wildness of true beauty is cropped and tamed according to narrow criteria of success. This factory can strip a person, and their works, of a vital ambiguity of thinking and feeling. And as a global community, it strips us of the creative potential to face up to the looming, complex problems of our age, and find solutions to them. “When oversimplification is not controlled,” wrote Neil Postman, “it produces both violence in domestic affairs and indiscriminate bombing of ‘enemy territory’ in war; it serves more to complicate the problem than to solve it.”

The first Waldorf school was founded in 1919 to serve the children of employees at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany. The people of Europe were staggering out of the devastation of the first world war – a beastly conflict which had come into being through propaganda and an inflexible, unimaginative gullibility on behalf of the general populace. It was to prevent such a catastrophe from happening again that the community of workers at the Waldorf factory petitioned for a new school for their surviving children. A school that would be independent of the State, and nurture a creative, spiritual capacity that would undermine the political certainties and isms that had coerced human beings into the horrors of WWI.

Yet war continues – and look at our pervasive mainstream schooling system: an assumption remains that children should attend a school, and there be taught according to an established curriculum, and tested regularly as to their knowledge and understanding of that curriculum, and finally, judged against it. It’s so pervasive that when you say it like that it sounds pretty fair and reasonable. In this country we appear to be marching toward a national curriculum, which means that if these young people sit down for their HSC exams in 2015, the hoops being jumped through will be of a slightly different colour and shape – something now being hotly debated by the big wigs in education. But they will be hoops just the same.

But the other type of education is actually the opposite. It denies any special privilege to one simplistic way of defining a subject, or an experience. If there’s a curriculum, it’s a sort of anti-curriculum that challenges concrete definitions and encourages people to accept greyness as reality, and be ever conscious that things in black and white are necessarily constructed and therefore limited. It’s an education that reveals the world to be a place of contested language. In an inverted education such as I’ve described, the important thing is to get ourselves away from doctrine and the tour guides of life and get ourselves lost in it. It’s almost as simple as that. Because I think learning is what happens to a person who has found themselves lost; it’s the capacity we have acquired to make a path in the wilderness. To make sense. In other words, learning is a radical and dangerous thing. It’s adventurous and risky. It requires us to walk in to complexity and build meaning from there, rather than look at it all from a safe distance with some simplified, pre-determined gaze. It challenges us to question the style or trend of the moment, to question the actions we feel we aught to take toward ourselves or others, to question the identities we make for ourselves and which others make for us based on our age, our gender, the colour of our skin.

So that’s the sort of adventure I have tried to encourage this year. Because it seems to me that there is, under the wild surface of what we think and feel, a deeper stillness of experience; a sacred emptiness just below the waves of names and stereotypes and the whole stormy game we make for ourselves. If we know how to hold our breath down there, we free our minds and our hearts from the pressures of being this or being that, and gain access to the very building blocks and colours of meaning. If we know that way of being, we can truly become, in the words of John O’Donohue, ‘the artists of our own lives.’

In his ‘Origins of Unhappiness,’ David Small lists twenty-four axioms sketching the basis of “a theoretical understanding of psychological distress as the product of a damaging environment rather than the expression of a damaged person.” Three important axioms in this list suggest that power, the magnitude of which increases with distance to the person is subjectively misconceived as of greater impact when of closer proximity. Here is an expression of the reductionist simplicity that I compare to a consciousness of complexity. This ‘illusory mythology’ can only be corrected, according to Small, by a more ‘objective view’ characterised by a ‘broader power horizon’. Small goes on to argue that only tangible structural/cultural changes can bring about tangible ‘psychological’ changes, in that the person is an ‘interaction’ of a body and world, and that that world is ‘structured of material power.’

I would say superficially that Small downplays the importance of language in his materialistic construction of meaning. He argues that psychology, in that it deals ‘essentially with an abstracted relation of bodies with worlds’, is devoid of the power to help a person change the circumstances which they embody as ‘meaning system’ in language. Infact, Small reduces our ‘meaning systems’ to a Marxian ‘superstructure’ which might only provide ‘clues as to body-world relations.’ I would debate this point, which I suppose would have to include the materialism at the core of Small’s thesis. His own idea of ‘power horizons’ speaks of a capacity in consciousness for power. Is it not the case that the error of proximal ‘bamboozlement’ is itself a fundamental expression of power? The victim of war would certainly feel it as such – and therefore, in the theatre of power, is it not the case that ‘meaning’ and ‘horizon’ are tangible concerns? The phenomenal conjuration of ‘body-world’ relations is in itself bound to this space of being-in-the-world; does that render it wholly abstract? Small seems to miss the language matrix of power completely – imputing language and meaning, in fact, with an immateriality is simply hasn’t got. But this may be too quick; I’ll read more of him and play on later.

Sitting on the sandstone under scattered cubes of sunlight – the amphitheatre at Gleneaon school. I’m feeling some idyllic awareness of freedom to plot my course through the day. I’m looking at a timetable and selecting where to go and what to do. Picture this: a program of seminars, demonstrations, workshops and so on – and you can come and go from them as you please. ‘A Discourse on Pedagogy’ at 1pm at the amphitheatre; ‘An experiment on Combustion’ at midday in The Lab. It could be worse.

When Ilich wrote his famous critique of institutional learning, he suggested an alternative structure of “educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.” After eleven years working in schools, I am less inclined to doubt his radical appraisal. So much of the good that happens in schools is essentially counter-institutional; acts and gestures that humanise and deinstitionalise in a context that is phenomenologically destructive to the fluid and reflective consciousness that is learning.

In the ‘disability’ sector, there is a push for independence emerging which finds expression in programs like ‘The Lab’ – a computer manipulation environment for children with Aspergers. It was originally set up as a skills, learning centre with the idea that the kids would take their new technological facility out into the workplace, enhancing their confidence. But something interesting happened, according to Project manager/co-founder Dale Linegar: “We thought giving them these skills [in using technology] might help make them more confident and think about IT careers. But we’ve found it kind of happens in reverse: the kids come in, and then because they make friends with other kids who also love technology, they go off and learn the skills by themselves.” So ‘The Lab’ is something perhaps close to what Ilich imagined; a sort of nodal sharing point or interactive zone within a learning web which spills over any physical spaces.

Ultimately, Ilich critiques the total paradigm of schools as the institutions of learning: “School appropriates the money, men, and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics, city living, and even family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education.”

So what can a Waldorf school do? Can it ‘de-school’ itself and offer itself instead as a hub within a broader network of learners? Can we say to those many parents who resist the place on account of its been a ‘private’ insitution – that it’s such a model, free from the ideologies of mass schooling, that is truly progressive? As Ilich explains, “no country can be rich enough to afford a school system that meets the demands this same system creates simply by existing, because a successful school system schools parents and pupils to the supreme value of a larger school system, the cost of which increases disproportionately as higher grades are in demand and become scarce.” In the environment of the school itself – if it was to be a learning hub in the sense imagined, what would it look like and feel like as an institution? It would certainly be focused not on the inculcation of knowledge or narratives, but on the discourse and sharing of common purpose or creative constraint. So there would be no, ‘this main lesson is on botany’ – or anything so reductionist. We would say that we were returning to look at the proliferation of the weeds in the Thora valley and to document progress. Or we were composing a collection of poems of our landscape and our stories to share with people around the world as an offering of our habits and presence on the earth.

“Equal educational opportunity is, indeed, both a desirable and a feasible goal, but to equate this with obligator;’ schooling is to confuse salvation with the Church. School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition.”

“The claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is paradoxical. The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the dealings of a teacher with his pupil. When the schoolteacher fuses in his person the functions of judge, ideologue, and doctor, the fundamental style of society is perverted by the very process which should prepare for life. A teacher who combines these three powers contributes to the warping of the child much more than the laws which establish his legal or economic minority, or restrict his right to free assembly or abode.”

Institute of Play.

Olson Kundig Architects.

The camp has perhaps unsettled my sense of purpose rather than inspired anything fresh. The simple, physical process of it brings in a certain muscular tranquility which if anything renders classrooms kind of absurd. But there is that business of narrative; the person on such a quest as that forges ahead and overcomes adversity and in the process constructs a certain story with themselves as protagonist. And in that is certainly a learning power; a concentration and refinement of that self-image which I know to be so important.

I was talking often to Charles on this hike about this business of the construction of Self and the role of narrative. At times we realised that to reduce it to narrative is a kind of reductionism too, in that what we take to be ‘narrative’ in the sense of structured schemas is clearly itself a kind of metaphorical projection which gives order to experience. So beneath even narrative process is a kind of mapping instinct – a process of applying order and especially ‘pattern’ to things which of themselves are spikes of some chaotic freedom.

We spoke thus of the narrative as a device for this function; a tool – and one that is inherently linguistic; which requires semantic flexibility; facility in language. So it is that the concept of complexity is again foregrounded. But in what new way? Certainty of the purpose of certain contexts, in the classroom or in a river, remains elusive. Is it enough to say that schooling is a chance to develop flexibility in language and the construction of meaning? Perhaps. Are certain curriculum ideas and concepts part of this process?

One idea which seems to reject all of this is the place-based learning paradigm. In some ways this displaces the individually-oriented platform of progressive education and posits children as a resource. In this process, the contexts of schooling are not geared even toward engendering or nurturing complex understanding and personal facility in language – rather they are socially valid contexts wherein children are engaged in solving real problems and applying themselves to meaningful tasks before anything else. Now I imagine that language facility, then, becomes legitimised as a tool for doing just that. So there is an audience always there, in the present or anticipated.

My latest idea is to present an assignment to the students on the camp, which spellings from their journalling. So, one picture, a map, a poem and a narration of the journey. This is due next week.

In the morning sessions, keep the journalling but open it up a bit, and no longer part of the folder. Then we gather for verse and review of previous day’s concepts. Then we spring into an activation of those concepts in art, movement, song, writing, presentation, debate, etc. We gather to share these constructions after thirty to forty minutes, leaving thirty minutes for a new question and story, which stays on the board.

WHAT IS A WEED?

ecosystem
weed
mutualism
conservation

In conversation with Andrew Hill today,  he offered his model of the morning ‘main lesson’ block. The interesting features here is the cycle where the morning drawing addresses an image from the previous day’s ‘new’ material; the writing addresses the previous day’s drawing. It’s a fascinating system which, in its activation, I imagine creates just the potential for connecting ideas that I am seeking.

Following morning circle, (poetry, song, movement, verse, recorder); the class meets to review the previous day’s ‘new’ content and an image or idea from that material is chosen for drawing. The review is a ten-minute exercise, the drawing some 30 minutes, with writing beginning at 9.55 to 10.35: so 40 minutes. Following the writing, new material is given in the form of a story, without questions or interruptions, leading to the break.

I inquired as to group work and collaborative problem-solving and Andrew suggested that such challenges take place within this structure – so the writing could for some days concern the group composition of a play script for performance; or in the drawing time, Movement could predominate. At least, that is my extrapolation.

So if I look at this through the filter of my existing structures – I see that the construction of pictures or movement works – the interpretation and visual constructions, takes place the next day after fresh content has been ‘taught’ and then reviewed in discussion. This is followed by written constructions which target concepts and ideas from two or more days before. This activation of the learning remains the same, I suppose, but it is delayed. So, take the problem of the height of the pyramid – I would tell that story on day 1, right before break. I would follow this on Day 2 with an illustration or movement work on the story following a review. I would then, on Day 3, ask students to either solve the problem and prepare a written presentation of the process, or retell the story in their own words.

Let me align this for a moment with the divergent, experimental and convergent phases of problem-solving. Actually, I’m learning that this is not really the ideal model – as much of this problem-solving work is in effect a means of bringing minds together who are to a large degree focused on the same objectives and who are colleagues in a work situation. It’s best, I think, to leave it alone for the time being.

But then, what is it all for? Am I working out the best way to brainwash?

These ‘hachuring’ lines have a beautiful, old-world aesthetic. It’s interesting the degree to which they convey depth, whereas the contour lines tend to flatten the elevations in the immediate perception of the map.

I must consider that such compositional responses as ‘the moment of conception’ (for example) can take a variety of ‘forms’ and indeed should, in order to develop the whole person. So, one could easily, after the visualisation – move it, or write it as poetry. Or, perhaps, rationalise it scientifically. Any challenge to use one’s vocabulary of a range of domains to construct an interpretation - that is quality, learning experience. This is precisely what I want – expression of impression.

“The urge towards expression through movement seems to be inherent in man today as much as in the past, and its repression will have damaging effects on mind and body” (Exner and Loyd:2).

“The value of the creativity with which we are concerned lies in finding combinations in movement which are personal and express individual ideas” (ibid:3).

“Dance describes the point at which a student or student group whose involvement with a particular theme takes them past the stage of being satisfied with movement experimentations. They will then take the step of selecting movements which they feel express most sensitively and clearly what they wish to ‘say’ and of organising them into a coherent and distinctive pattern” (ibid:3)

This is significant – I realise that the freedom of movement here is also an expression of resistance to dogma; that movement should thay thus, and not be confined to ‘dance’ – or rigid forms or translations – allowing for interpretation. As with poetry, do not use abstract ideas for movement – like inferiority – show.

“Programming, in the main, consists of a progression of tasks within certain frames, all giving scope to the students to use their own imagination and capabilities. Frames, far from being restrictive, seem to produce a greater concentration of effort and prevent students from going off on tangents” (ibid:65).

“Any creative movement lesson needs to be looked at from the point of view of what it can offer in the way of movement experience” (ibid:44).

This is surely one of the most important quotes on education that I have yet encountered. The process, then, is one of relating any study to the ‘principles of movement’ – that is, those elements of movement which are foundational. That is what we should mean by back to basics – back to the foundations. It’s vocabulary.

Interestingly I could apply the same idea to art – considering colour, line and shape as the foundations – and from there, measure whether or not a lesson offers something in the way of real experience experimenting with those elements; using the imagination to create in those parameters - or should I say mediums.

THAT IS WHAT I FELT TODAY, at that moment where I was thinking about the problem of representing/interpreting that reaching for the sperm which the ovum seems to do – from that visualisation – the ‘heat’ and ‘binding’ on impact. To have the vocabulary; the foundations, to actually make that expression – to realise my interpretation – that is freedom.

This is the transcendental that all curriculum areas have in common.

But can I learn from this and make it repeatable – so should the visualisation have offered a frame, such as, ‘the melding of opposites’ – this is what I did ‘to myself’ – as I think a good artist does do – they apply frames independently (consider what ? says about improvisation, for example). Because only when you have that framing, can there be ‘interpretation’ – and only where there is that demand for interpretation, is there the call to experiment – which is how we learn; from that experience base; it’s how we develop that vocabulary.

This is true empowerment – a counter discourse – only by reaching deeper to the elements is the human being challenged to explore different potentials and to create anew. Experiment with a possible relationship and patterns of core elements, like colour or gesture; force, metre, allusion.

In terms of questioning, that ‘study skill’ is really a ‘frame’ which provides some constraint within which the person can begin to create/interpret. This is the hard play where learning happens; learning ‘as experience’ – as a muscular and intellectual and emotional memory of experience/exploration.

I should note that much of my role as teacher in this scenario is to engineer this ‘frame’ in order to provide that context for learning; it’s like sport. So, when I talk about basketball, we talk about the limitations – and then people get good – with their bodies and minds – at working within that frame – that is the definition of a good sportsman. It’s also the definition of a good artist, and a good person. The teacher, then, providing tacitly the frame, is there to facilitate physical and intellectual experimentation, in order to enhance the range of their expression within the frame. It’s the perfect microcosm for the development of skill.

This is why we can talk about the curriculum as an art – because art is always that energy of interpretation.

What I now see is that all this time that I’ve fought so called ‘busy work’ was on account of what it denies in terms of ‘experience’ – that only by being challenged to create and exercise vocabulary and skills in a frame – in other words – only by ‘experiment’ with movement, language, syntax, colour, voice, muscle, instrument – can learning take place; there must be tangible construction. I must look again at cloze passages – I realise now, after ten years, why they are affective: they provide an immediate ‘frame’ wherein the learner is required to create; that is, to draw on their existing experiences, but also to, in the process of composition, experience again. It’s a small but clear example of what it is a dancer must do at a particular point of interpretation – at a particular ‘gap’ – the gap of creativity; because it must be bridged.

*

I’m reading Merrick on ‘Exploring Poetry’ and Ted Hughes’ ‘Poetry in the Making’ and the relevance to this journey is profound. Merrick outlines as approach to poetry which is very much aligned to the Waldorf school rhythms. Merrick suggests that the experiences surrounding the reading of a poem are as important to its meaningful power as the poem itself. Each poetry experience consists of a First Encounter, Development and Further Development.

“The First Encounter most often will be reading by the teacher, though other possibilities are suggested… Developments link the poem to other activities the pupils may already enjoy and feel easy with; the developments provide openings for pupils to formulate, refine and give expression to their sense of the poem. This includes providing opportunity for exchanging opinions and insights as they carry out shared activities. In this way they transform the poem from words on the page into felt experience. Where there is growing enthusiasm for a poem, there are opportunities for further developments (Merrick:9)”.

There are great examples in the work as to these developments – from movement and drama, to music and artwork. I imagine that this approach would be as valuable for any text – not only poetic works. So, I could potentially structure the day in this manner: the morning is ‘first encounters’; the middle is ‘developments’ – Merrick’s group work formulation for the first encounter is precisely what I have in mind. The process is one of absolute immersion in the text – processes that actively construct a clear understanding – this is the coming to terms – then the student can move on to interpretation.

Extracts from Ted Hughes: Poetry in the Making:

“‘Animals’ are the subject here, but more important is the idea of headlong, concentrated improvisation on a set theme. Once the subject has been chosen, the exercise should be given a set length, say on side of a page, and a set time limit – ten minutes would be an ideal minimum though in practice it obviously varies a good deal to suit the class. These artificial limits create a crisis, which rouses the brain’s resources: the compulsion towards haste overthrows the ordinary precautions, flings everything into top gear, and many things that are usually hidden find themselves rushed into the open. Barriers break down, prisoners come out of their cells.”

“Another artificial help is to give each phrase a fresh line. The result should be a free poem of sorts where grammar, sentence structure etc, are all sacrificed in an attempt to break fresh and accurate perceptions and words out of the reality of the subject chosen.”

“As in training dogs, these exercises should be judged by their successes, not their mistakes and shortcomings. Wherever a teacher can recognise and appreciate a hit, a moment of truth, it is a very poor pupil that does not soon get the idea.”

“In my experience, it is a help to give the pupils some time to carry the subject in their heads before they begin to write. I have always thought it would be productive to give out at the beginning of term some of the subjects that are going to be written about during the next weeks. The pupils would then watch the intervening lessons more purposefully, and we cannot prevent ourselves from preparing for a demand that we know is going to be made. Then when the time comes to write, it should be regarded as a hundred-yards’ dash.”

“In this, as in all the exercises that follow, the chief aim should be to develop the habit of all-out flowing exertion, for a short, concentrated period, in a definite direction.”

“All falsities in writing – and the consequent dry-rot that spreads into the whole fabric – come from the notion that there is a stylistic ideal which exists in the abstract, like a special language, to which all men might attain. But teachers of written English should have nothing to do with that, which belongs rather to the study of manners and group jargon. Their words should be not “How to write” but “How to try and say what you really mean” – which is part of the search for self-knowledge and perhaps, in one form or another, grace.”

*

What these texts all illuminate is the idea that we gain experience in creative expression under certain ‘framed’ conditions, or, as Hughes would put it, where there is a ‘hunting’ for a thing – an animal or tension or moment of breathlessness – and in that artistic construction is exercised holistic intellectual and muscular intelligence.

*

We see that this recent journey of mine has been complex and far ranging – I have begun from a very intellectual reification of the abstract ‘network’ and rendered all experience as necessarily constructed in this realm – on the way I ignored process, and undermined the moment as the fundamental place wherein learning resides. And that moment is physical and emotional, as well as intellectual. A poem cannot immediately be ‘questioned’ and intellectual constructions abstracted – the intellect is inspired where there is a ‘hunt’ – that is why it evolved. But the hunt is not the intellectual construction – that develops ‘in application’ in the hunt for something more fundamental and holistic; which is to seize the life essence of a thing; to play hard.

*

It means providing an immediate destination and progamming to provide the experience required to perform the project successfully. Each ‘main lesson’ is then a ‘short course’ or intensive. The really cool thing is that my role becomes tutor and director. I need to look at the opportunities on the calendar to find and use an audience. So, with this Autumn fair, for example, any ‘King Arthur’ skits which had been developed in movement over the main lesson could be performed in the float, as well as at the Autumn Fair at the school. It’s an ‘arts’ education – and that’s what we would display. That our children move, and think, and dream, and create. They themselves interpret the world, and are not bound to the translation of others’ interpretations.

*

You know, this feeling one has on the piano – of hunting this piece, which is like a silver movement in a deep mist – and rest seems so important – this dreaming wherein the structure, as a network, forms gently in the mind and literally ‘grows’ in a biological/chemical sense. So food is critical; nuts and proteins. And the structure needs a form, as it has in musical script. Like a spell.

But also I am thinking of that desire to share – to perform the piece; and the birth stories – that school can be a sharing place, as well as a place of ‘work’ – so that homework can be an important part of the process. The essays, for example, and poems – these should all find an audience in the class group; as should art works and movement pieces. A new angle to explore perhaps.

I wonder if in fact the Atwell “delivery” of poetry takes some ownership from the student. If we were working instead from a poetry anthology, then all my ridiculous photocopying would be unnecessary, and the students could wander through the collection independently, perhaps choosing favourites for their own presentation of verse.

Of courss, the problem is annotation. Bit I could encourage sticky notes and journalling instead. Perhaps that is indeed more fruitful, as the skills learned there are immediately portable.

I should not be afraid to direct the dialogue with a simple question to open – such as “Why the word ‘fire’ do you think?” Way leads on to way, after all, and one question will lead to others.