Language matters. Yesterday, I read a post on an educational blog. Essentially, the person argued that “data driven education” was stupid and education was “child driven.” I accept children make choices about what they learn. As a teacher, I used data, including their choices, to inform how I taught.
What I understood demeaned anyone who spoke differently than this person. It is in pluralism and diversity the essence of eloquent ambiguity that we appreciate the world and receive gifts.
Most people accept a world that is grey and their language appreciates the eloquence of ambiguity. Language has a way of fixing things as if they were more permanent. It is the capacity of humans to interpret and re-interpret that brings forth the elegance of the world.
Appreciate the world as it is
It does not arrive pre-packaged.
Embrace uncertainty and ambiguity
Let its eloquence emerge.
Open your heart
Receive unimaginable beauty.
There are no pat answers
Only an internal compass that guides you.
This is a path in Waterton Lakes National Park. A person only sees a short distance ahead when walking a path. What comes next is uncertain.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Related
About ivonprefontaine
In keeping with bell hooks and Noam Chomsky, I consider myself a public and dissident intellectual. Part of my work is to move beyond (transcend) institutional dogmas that bind me to defend freedom, raising my voice to be heard on behalf of those who seek equity and justice in all their forms.
I completed my PhD in Philosophy of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. My dissertation and research was how teachers experience becoming teachers and their role as leaders.
I focus on leading, communicating, and innovating in organizations. This includes mindfuful servant-leadership, World Cafe events, Appreciative Inquiry, and expressing one's self through creativity. I offer retreats, workshops, and presentations that can be tailored to your organzations specific needs.
I published peer reviewed articles about schools as learning organizations, currere as an ethical pursuit, and hope as an essential element of adult eductaion. I published three poems and am currently preparing my poetry to publish as an anthology of poetry.
I present on mindful leadership, servant leadership, schools as learning organizations, how teachers experience becoming teachers, assessement, and critical thinking. I facilitate mindfulness, hospitality retreats. and World Cafe Events using Appreciative Inquiry.
I am writing and researching about various forms of leadership, how teachers inform and form their identity as a particular teacher, schools as learning organizations, hope and its anticipatory relationship with the future, and hope as an essential element in learning.
Teacher as Transformer 
“Appreciate the world as it is
It does not arrive pre-packaged.
Embrace uncertainty and ambiguity
Let its eloquence emerge.
Open your heart
Receive unimaginable beauty.
There are no pat answers
Only an internal compass that guides you.”
Words are so important. Listening connects us. So glad I’ve found your blog again. As thoughtful and inspiring as I remember it.
I am glad you are back. Thank you for the kind words Carrie.
This is such an incredibly thoughtful post, Ivon; thank you!! Cher xo
Thank you Cher.
Only an inner compass ‘should’ guide us, indeed. If there are any ‘shoulds,’ surely this is one. I’m also piqued by your statement that language tends to ‘fix’ things, a statement I concur with. And it’s that very paradoxical quandary that the poet faces. How to construct with words a deconstructed brew that infers meaning which allows one to breathe in the essential aspects of the concept, itself. Ha! 😀
I think of myself as a John Dewey educator and he used the words “ought and is.” The wonder of the written word is it travels through time to be interpreted by new people in new times. That is the Derrida view of deconstruction and Dewey’s reconstruction coming together.
The powerful ending words under the picture made me go Ahh! How true that our path ahead can’t be seen very far. What lies ahead always has a touch of uncertainty.
It is the mystery of living.
Ambiguity
When writing or speaking if you don’t have the facts use ambiguity to create the illusion that you have research many sources without citing them:
Some have suggested, on the other hand, it has been said, an alternative view, it would seem, many have concluded, it is possible, it is reasonable to conclude, it appears, sometimes, scholars agree, scholars disagree, this remains unresolved, it could be, it may be possible – this list goes on. Saying something without really saying anything.
I think much of what we perceive and speak has ambiguity involved. David Bohm wrote about the difference between problems and paradox. From an educational perspective, I am more of a Parker Palmer teacher who understood the need to hold the tension of paradox. Somedays, that required I not say much, even if I did.
Huh ? This has me all ambiguitized.
Me too.