Tag Archives: leadership

Eloquent Questions in Education

Posted on March 31, 2012 by ivonprefontaine

Since attending the Servant-Leadership conference at Marylhurst University in Oregon, I am thinking more about eloquent questions in education. Eloquent questions assume no obvious answers and grew out the work of Giambattista Vico, an 18^th Century Italian philosopher. Eloquent questions were expanded on by Hans-Georg Gadamer, a 20^th Century German philosopher. Without obvious or assumed answers, dialogue and community take on new and important roles in responding to eloquent questions. When asked eloquent questions, I have to be aware of, mindful about, and attentive to my thoughts and feelings and to those of others who are present in conversation.

Several things contributed to this rethinking. Firstly, Dr. Shann Ferch, a keynote presenter at the conference and author of Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity: Servant-Leadership as a Way of Life, spoke about eloquent questions. “Gadamer’s notion of the eloquent or elegant question forms a philosophical bridge into the kind of assured personhood that opens real dialogue, develops authenticity in self and others, and forwards a view of human relationships that helps us transcend our own hidden self- and other-annihilation” (Ferch, 2012, p. 29). Dialogue and community set aside the personal agendas that so often drive discussions. Setting aside agendas calls forth authenticity that helps reveal a safe space and path forward to share what is important and common within a community centred on eloquent questions.

Secondly, Gen Y Girl Kayla Cruz began following my blog, for which I am grateful. She triggered questions with postings touching on generational differences that impact society in general and education specifically. I was already asking, “What reasons are there to build 400 new schools over the next 10 years in the province of Alberta? What areas will these schools serve? What conversations yielded those numbers to Thomas Lukaszuk, the Minister of Education and the workers at Alberta Education? What costs will result from building these trophy-schools? What does that mean in terms of school closures? Was there a conversation about the need for school as a building?” Initially, I thought these questions might be strictly based on infrastructure, but, thanks to Kayla, I am increasingly aware of other questions based on generational differences. “What impact will a different understanding of personal and professional life for Gen Y adults have on teachers in the classroom (I use that word classroom guardedly, because what the classroom will look like or be is also an important question)? If, as Kayla pointed out, there is a blending of life expectations for Generation Y or the Millennial Generation, “what does that mean in terms of teacher preparation, teacher recruitment, teacher retention, teacher satisfaction, etc?”

I have no concrete evidence, but, as I talk to members of Gen Y, including our sons, I get the impression that work of any form, without meaning and a feeling of real input, is not in the cards. The questions here are, “What purpose does work serve? Do we work to live? Or do we live to work?” Kayla, in several blog entries, linked articles that provided insight. One that caught my attention was The Beginning of the End of the 9-to-5 Workday in a section called Work-Life Balance at Time.Com Moneyland.

It seems an education degree prepares young people for more possibilities than just being a teacher. What should this uncertainty suggest to the movers and shakers who think they can predict a need for 400 schools over the next decade? The above-noted article inferred going to school will not be going to school for everyone. What will school look like in the next ten years? What role will the increasing ubiquity of technology play? These are not simple questions to be answered with a mechanistic process that has been failing for some time. Eloquent questions ask us to not have pat answers, but to continue to ask each day, “What does this mean today?”

We drove back from Sedona to Phoenix yesterday. In spite of my terrible fear of heights, it was an enjoyable three days touring the Sedona and Grand Canyon areas, with the spectacular scenery and their Native American ruins. The visits to three ancient Arizona dwelling sites of Native American Indians were interesting and provided yet another source of rethinking the need for eloquent questions. During an explanation at one of the sites, I was struck by the uncertainty around the possible reasons that led to that village being deserted.

Retrospectively, we look back and speculate and pose eloquent questions, knowing and accepting we can not provide an answer. Looking forward, we are ready to ask eloquent questions “in order to gather greater understanding” (Ferch, p. 29). There is no certainty looking forward just as there is no certainty looking back. Eloquent questions do seem to fit an unfolding, emergent, increasingly complex and uncertain world.

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Community and its Role in Learning

Posted on March 26, 2012 by ivonprefontaine

Community has been a recurring theme throughout the World Café conversations and events, with many descriptors alluding to communal practices and relationships needed for learning to happen. Reciprocity, connection, supportive, affirmation, and other words expressing interactions suggest community. The summary posters of the March 17, 2012 World Café Event confirmed this recurring theme of community and the table posters, to be posted, also bear this out. The theme of community is important not just in learning, but in life itself. Without community, can life and learning be as meaningful?

Parker Palmer recently shared in a Facebook posting: “Community does not mean living face-to-face with others—it means never losing the awareness that we are connected with each other…” This link is to a short video of Dr. Palmer discussing the Myth of the Individual.

The servant-leadership conference I attended in Portland reinforced that, although community continually evolves, as a value it can remain intact. Here are some examples.

Professor Shann Ferch, from Gonzaga University, spoke about the “beloved community” that the late Martin Luther King so eloquently referred to. It is the necessity to see each other, including oppressors and those who have done harm to us, as human. Dr. Ferch also quoted Viktor Frankl: “We are made to turn outward, toward another human being to whom we can love and give ourselves. … Only when in service of another does a person truly know his or her humanity.”

We easily dismiss these references to community as the extreme and needed actions and words of those in different settings. After all, Dr. King led the Civil Rights movement in its halcyon days and paid the ultimate sacrifice. Dr. Frankl survived the atrocities of concentration camps during World War II. What do their experiences have to do with simply getting through the day?

Kirk Young, a colleague from Gonzaga, elaborated on what could be understood as community in the form of a value. The communities we choose to belong to share one common ingredient: intimacy. Ferdinand Tonnies, a German sociologist, used the word gemeinschaft and described this form of community as “a tighter and more cohesive social entity. [It is] exemplified in family and kinship” suggesting when humans gather in community, intimate experiences can be shared. Members share the good, the bad, and grow together towards common purposes, thus are mission driven. Values and mission serve as glue for community.

John Dear, a Jesuit priest, proposed in The Rebel Jesus, a second, mostly unnoticed miracle occurred during the Sermon on the Mount: the forming of community. Community allowed people to see the human nature of each other as Jesus instructed those closest to him to organize the large group (some believe well over 5,000 people) into small, more intimate groupings of about 50 people each. Father Dear suggested that in these small communities, people interacted differently and shared as they made connections with those now close to them. People were no longer strangers; whereas moments before they were simply part of a large and increasingly hungry throng. In contemporary parlance, they were statistics.

By witnessing the humanity in each other, we are better able to form community and share intimacy without fear. Our humanity is the one thing we can claim to share with others and in this, we find purpose to gather and form community around the universality of human values.

Balanced Holistic Education and Values

Posted on March 5, 2012 by ivonprefontaine

As I reflected during a morning commute on a recent conversation, I discerned a glimmer of wisdom about the role values can play in learning and education. I use the word wisdom purposefully as it is not knowledge and represents an essential counterweight to compassion. Like my recent musings that passion without com-passion is potentially blinding and harmful, compassion without wisdom can be equally damaging. Discernment allows wisdom to emerge and helps us ask and answer, “What do we value that keeps us true to what we love?”

Discernment leading to wisdom is not ‘relativism gone wild’ where everyone is entitled to an opinion regardless of the cost it exacts on others. Compassion is patient, humble, and less judgmental, allowing wisdom to be more than one’s opinion or the reiteration of ‘edutrivia’. Wisdom individually and collectively springs from within to be shared.

Community values and community provide stable cultural anchors and emerge from relational and internal processes. Community, itself, is a value, but too often contemporary advanced society turns it on end and replaces it with expedient catch phrases: collaboration, cooperation, and team player. Values such as community, wisdom, compassion, and integrity also appear under the corporate and organizational rubric of corporate mission and vision exercises. I am not dismissing these activities, but question their arbitrary, hierarchical, and limited implementation as pronouncements from the executive suites. Can we actually engage community voices in what appears to be merely a greasing of bureaucratic wheels? Institutions truly serving community will reflect community values and not those of bureaucratic, technocratic elites seeking conformity arrived at through groupthink or oppressive processes.

What values do we want children to learn? Perhaps we would like them to care for themselves and, in the words of Martin Luther King, show compassion for the beloved community and act accordingly. Perhaps we would like them to make wise decisions as stewards of the Earth and its gifts. Perhaps we would like them to be one with Creation to provide a sense of integrity. Values emerge from within us, individually and collectively. What we want for children is accomplished by finding balance in learning ways to safely and reasonably express communal values. Learning as a cognitive exercise only will not produce the adults we desire; physical, spiritual, cognitive, and emotional balance is essential to educate children of the 21st Century to learn the values of that beloved community. It is an imperative. This no longer a new millennium. We are 12 years into it. Will we wait longer?