by Christine Little
Director of Global Learning & Organizational Development
Habitat for Humanity International
The meeting was stalled with 40 people standing in clusters around the edges of the room. They were stuck, frustrated, and looking for me help them out. For a day we had moved through the safer activities of the meeting, working in small groups, gathering input for the content of a purpose statement, discussing and charting the stickier points of process and structure.
But this question was a high risk question. "Which of these points are you personally committed to putting some action to?" There was no hiding from that question in a small group. There was no hiding from it in the creation of more elegant bullet points. It could not be anonymously penned on a flip chart or jotted onto a sticky note right before darting out the door.
This question was personal. It was confrontational. It confronted them with their own freedom to choose - am I committing to what we can create in this room, or am I opting out?
Since reading Peter Block's compelling book "the answer to how is yes," (and having been in an even more compelling two-day workshop with him) I have rethought the way I design for safety in dialogue.
"Threat can work against dialogue. If I will be ridiculed for a wrong answer, I am likely to withhold my answers until I am sure they are right. If honest opinion gets punished, I may opt for the safe, comfortable, slightly less honest dialogue that frequently fills meeting, training and conference rooms.
Threat can work against dialogue. If I will be ridiculed for a wrong answer, I am likely to withhold my answers until I am sure they are right. If honest opinion gets punished, I may opt for the safe, comfortable, slightly less honest dialogue that frequently fills meeting, training and conference rooms.
Safety can also work against dialogue. Exposure is the price for meaningful dialogue. And significant change -- the ultimate pay off for learning -- is not safe, painless or easy. It requires courage. Our design and facilitation would do well to promote courage rather than safety. Courage is ultimately more useful for the world.
I have facilitated, and participated in, elegantly designed processes that made it easy to hide, to play it safe or to avoid meaning. In these gatherings, dissent has been put on the "parking lot" so that it can't derail the process in the room. Questions and reporting techniques keep the dialogue manageable (especially for the facilitator), but they neutralize expressions of doubt, confusion, and disagreement.
I still use small groups. I still sequence activities to move from easy to more difficult. I don't call on individuals to confront them with the question I think they are dodging. But I also create space for individuals and for the group to participate in more courageous dialogue.
Here are some ways I have changed my approach to design and facilitation in pursuit of courage over safety:
I use questions that examine doubt, commitment and personal choice. "Head" questions can generate good information - we need them to get the ideas out there, but "gut" questions can bring a group to confront its choice.
I have greatly reduced my reliance on clever techniques that gather information in manageable bites. The SNOW cards, graphic organizers and two-word answers that I favored in order to boost dialogue, generate more information and create safety, were also diminishing some of the meaningfulness of the dialogue. They have their place. But the frequently served my need for time management and control more than they served
I build time into my design to process with the group how they are functioning (individually and as a group) in the meeting room. Block notes that the meeting itself is a metaphor for the organization. It is rich with data, and often partly invisible to people in the room. It is worthwhile to examine what it means if people are quietly agreeing to decisions in the meeting, then frenetically trying to lobby the CEO at break.
I stay with the group when the tension builds, when they are stuck, or resisting, or polarizing, but I don't give into the temptation to save us all by quickly designing a safer task.
This last part takes the most courage from me. I am proud of my capacity to design tasks, ask the right questions, keep the group engaged in the work. I like to be the person in the room who can design the environment and the work in such a way that a group produces what it set out to produce. The trouble is, if the session is mainly a demonstration of my design capacity, it may not actually be a demonstration of the commitment of the people in the room to carry forward what they have planned.
As we stood in that meeting room, the tension grew. The participants stopped talking about their own dilemma and switched to talking about how the meeting was being run. They said I was asking the wrong question. That we needed to go back and get the wording of the bullet points right first. That the categories were all wrong.
In my own mind, I could already hear how the story would be told about this failed meeting. "Two wasted days! The CEO sitting in the room for two days! All those wasted airfares. And the problem is she got the design all wrong." It was an act of will not to break the tension by moving them into small groups and giving them the task of rewording some bullet points. That would have guaranteed an output. But the bigger prize -- personal commitment to the decision -- would have been lost.
After a torturous 20 minutes, something shifted. The group took control of the meeting. They started moving the tables around so that the room was better designed for the work. They very quickly formed groups and figured out their own process for collecting and reporting. I had designed some questions for them, but I didn't even put the flipchart up. My questions no longer mattered. They had decided to commit, and they already knew what had to be created in the next two hours. All I needed to do was sit down and let them work.
The final diary of my Classroom Timer
The dramatic account in the words of Rory McLean, former Lead Developer of my team and Humorist Maximus NOTE I do keep a bag with markers, mp3 player, pens, a bell and a timer in a box for use in my classroom sessions. I never thought it would become the subject of such drama :-)
Tuesday:
Another day in the box with the other "toys". I'm crushed up against a cupie doll that has eyes and ears that expand when you squeeze it. I can't believe a serious electronic device like me if forced to share space with a cupie doll...I have three split times for Christ's sake...this is outrageous...I should be in a hand-crafted box. What's worse is that my backside is crushed against the cupie doll and I don't know what else expands when he's squeezed. I pray that nobody sits on the box.
Wednesday:
I can't really tell what's going on since the plastic box is so cloudy. Adriano might have a training class...maybe I can finally get out of here. He's running around, showing a screen to everyone. It looks like the zoom button screen. I can't tell. Maybe we're training some FBA folks.
Thursday:
No meeting...damn. Adriano did open the box to take the bell for a little bit. When bell returned he said it was just the weekly departmental meeting and they would ring him some nobody could abuse Kenny for more than three minutes each.
Friday:
I can't take it any longer. Some people say they like the smell of markers but try smelling "grape" for five days straight. Makes me want to vomit.
...But I do have a plan. I'm setting off my alarm and that should get attention.
Late Friday Night:
The alarm didn't get Adriano's attention. Trinh was here a few minutes ago, but she couldn't locate me and left.
Saturday:
Alarm is still going off...but nobody can hear me. I feel so lonely. The drain on my batteries is scaring me.
Sunday:
No hope. Alarm is starting to make sick chirping noise. No energy left. Tell Adriano I was always there for himmmmmm.....
Tuesday:
Another day in the box with the other "toys". I'm crushed up against a cupie doll that has eyes and ears that expand when you squeeze it. I can't believe a serious electronic device like me if forced to share space with a cupie doll...I have three split times for Christ's sake...this is outrageous...I should be in a hand-crafted box. What's worse is that my backside is crushed against the cupie doll and I don't know what else expands when he's squeezed. I pray that nobody sits on the box.
Wednesday:
I can't really tell what's going on since the plastic box is so cloudy. Adriano might have a training class...maybe I can finally get out of here. He's running around, showing a screen to everyone. It looks like the zoom button screen. I can't tell. Maybe we're training some FBA folks.
Thursday:
No meeting...damn. Adriano did open the box to take the bell for a little bit. When bell returned he said it was just the weekly departmental meeting and they would ring him some nobody could abuse Kenny for more than three minutes each.
Friday:
I can't take it any longer. Some people say they like the smell of markers but try smelling "grape" for five days straight. Makes me want to vomit.
...But I do have a plan. I'm setting off my alarm and that should get attention.
Late Friday Night:
The alarm didn't get Adriano's attention. Trinh was here a few minutes ago, but she couldn't locate me and left.
Saturday:
Alarm is still going off...but nobody can hear me. I feel so lonely. The drain on my batteries is scaring me.
Sunday:
No hope. Alarm is starting to make sick chirping noise. No energy left. Tell Adriano I was always there for himmmmmm.....
Conflict Resolution Training: Aim high
We published - with the author's permission - an article about the purpose of conflict resolution training in government agencies. I feel Geoff’s article applies not just to Conflict Resolution Training but to many other Federal Government training classes . Enjoy!
Conflict Resolution Training: Aim high
The cardinal rule of organizational behavior is that what gets measured gets done. Applied to training, the means the criteria used to evaluate a course not only dictate how it is designed and delivered, they also shape how trainees interpret and apply the course content.
This article discusses how three approaches to evaluation used by government agencies affect the extent to which conflict resolution training has a positive impact on the workplace.
Compliance
The purpose of many training courses is to comply with a statute, regulation, Executive Order, or agency directive that requires certain categories of employees to receive training on a particular subject within a designated timeframe. These mandates rarely, if ever, require employees to retain or use the knowledge
or skills conveyed to them. They require only that certain information be transmitted. As a result, agencies typically track only whether such transmission occurs.
One method is documenting content and attendance. For live training, this means ensuring that employees' names appear on sign-in sheets, and that the video or PowerPoint slides they view and the manual they receive contain the requisite content. A second method for documenting the transmission of information
is requiring employees to answer questions designed to test
their comprehension of the material. Both methods provide a clear audit trial for proving compliance with a training mandate, but they reveal nothing about
what employees do when they return to the workplace.
As a result, these measures provide no incentive to provide quality training. The simplest and quickest ways to convey information are passive: requiring students to listen to a lecture, watch a video, or read materials on a website. Unfortunately, these are also the least effective methods for training adults. In theory, testing would create a demand for quality, but in reality this often is not the case. Since the agency's goal is documenting compliance, it wants as high a pass rate as possible. Retraining, retesting, or, worse yet, having to discipline employees who fail tests is an administrative burden. The easiest ways to ensure a high pass rate are to teach to the test (stress the material covered in the questions) and to make the questions as easy as possible to answer. If they are warned during a course that certain actions are illegal and could lead to prosecution, disciplinary action, or other adverse consequences, employees are likely to adjust their behavior accordingly regardless of how the course is evaluated.
But if the course is intended in whole or in part to inspire rather than command certain behaviors, the agency's apparent lack of concern about what they do when they return to their workstations is likely to strongly influence employee behavior.
The message that usually comes through loud and clear is that this course is just another bureaucratic interruption of their real work.
Reaction
Training in conflict resolution skills is often used to react to perceived problems in the workplace. If there are a lot of disputes, why not provide training in how to resolve them? If communication seems to be lacking or ineffective, communications
training seems like a sensible response.
Are lawyers and other agency personnel spending a lot of time or money on litigation?
Training in negotiation or mediation skills might help. The methods typically used to gauge the success of this type of training are attendance and participant feedback. At the end of the course, employees are asked to rate various aspects
of the training. Participant evaluations provide an incentive to make a course enjoyable and provide valuable information about what participants like and dislike.
But there is a serious downside to assuming that if employees like a course they will
use what they learned in some beneficial way. Without any proof of a return on investment, it is hard to justify spending money on training. Many theoretically sound ideas fail to hold up in real world testing. Furthermore, as is the case with compliance training, if an agency does not commit to measuring the impact of skills
training on workplace behavior, employees may assume the agency is more concerned with "looking good" by reacting to a problem than it is with changing how things are done.
Everyone in the federal sector has seen flavor-of-the-month initiatives that come and go faster than celebrity marriages.
Performance
An agency may commit to bettering its performance on a mission- related goal and determine that training is a means to this end. Training in conflict resolution skills may further such agency goals as reducing complaints or grievances; improving
employee satisfaction or productivity; or lowering sick leave abuse, attrition, or transfer requests.
Measuring the impact of conflict resolution training on employee performance creates a powerful incentive to provide top quality training. Measuring impact also makes it imperative to incorporate training into a comprehensive plan for promoting positive
change. If employees are tasked with achieving a goal and are informed that training will help them achieve it, they have a strong incentive to figure out how to apply the skills they learn productively. It all gets back to the simple rule that what gets measured gets done. If the measure of success for conflict resolution training is workplace performance, employees get the message that improving performance matters.
Since impact on a mission-related goal cannot be measured until well after a course ends, content, attendance, testing, and course evaluations are useful for ensuring a course is on track. Used as tools instead of goals, these measures can play a constructive role in promoting effective training.
The downside of measuring success by employee performance is the increased risk of failure. Content and attendance are a breeze to control, and good trainers can easily ensure that employees pass tests and review a course favorably. But
staking your reputation on how others perform post-training may seem downright scary. Just remember there is tremendous power in letting go. If an agency demonstrates its belief in the skills it is teaching and the employees it is teaching them to by committing to measurable results, employees will strive
to live up to expectations.
Geoff Drucker is the Director of Federal Dispute Resolution with the McCammon Group and can be reached at 703.582.9971 www.mccammongroup.com
Conflict Resolution Training: Aim high
The cardinal rule of organizational behavior is that what gets measured gets done. Applied to training, the means the criteria used to evaluate a course not only dictate how it is designed and delivered, they also shape how trainees interpret and apply the course content.
This article discusses how three approaches to evaluation used by government agencies affect the extent to which conflict resolution training has a positive impact on the workplace.
Compliance
The purpose of many training courses is to comply with a statute, regulation, Executive Order, or agency directive that requires certain categories of employees to receive training on a particular subject within a designated timeframe. These mandates rarely, if ever, require employees to retain or use the knowledge
or skills conveyed to them. They require only that certain information be transmitted. As a result, agencies typically track only whether such transmission occurs.
One method is documenting content and attendance. For live training, this means ensuring that employees' names appear on sign-in sheets, and that the video or PowerPoint slides they view and the manual they receive contain the requisite content. A second method for documenting the transmission of information
is requiring employees to answer questions designed to test
their comprehension of the material. Both methods provide a clear audit trial for proving compliance with a training mandate, but they reveal nothing about
what employees do when they return to the workplace.
As a result, these measures provide no incentive to provide quality training. The simplest and quickest ways to convey information are passive: requiring students to listen to a lecture, watch a video, or read materials on a website. Unfortunately, these are also the least effective methods for training adults. In theory, testing would create a demand for quality, but in reality this often is not the case. Since the agency's goal is documenting compliance, it wants as high a pass rate as possible. Retraining, retesting, or, worse yet, having to discipline employees who fail tests is an administrative burden. The easiest ways to ensure a high pass rate are to teach to the test (stress the material covered in the questions) and to make the questions as easy as possible to answer. If they are warned during a course that certain actions are illegal and could lead to prosecution, disciplinary action, or other adverse consequences, employees are likely to adjust their behavior accordingly regardless of how the course is evaluated.
But if the course is intended in whole or in part to inspire rather than command certain behaviors, the agency's apparent lack of concern about what they do when they return to their workstations is likely to strongly influence employee behavior.
The message that usually comes through loud and clear is that this course is just another bureaucratic interruption of their real work.
Reaction
Training in conflict resolution skills is often used to react to perceived problems in the workplace. If there are a lot of disputes, why not provide training in how to resolve them? If communication seems to be lacking or ineffective, communications
training seems like a sensible response.
Are lawyers and other agency personnel spending a lot of time or money on litigation?
Training in negotiation or mediation skills might help. The methods typically used to gauge the success of this type of training are attendance and participant feedback. At the end of the course, employees are asked to rate various aspects
of the training. Participant evaluations provide an incentive to make a course enjoyable and provide valuable information about what participants like and dislike.
But there is a serious downside to assuming that if employees like a course they will
use what they learned in some beneficial way. Without any proof of a return on investment, it is hard to justify spending money on training. Many theoretically sound ideas fail to hold up in real world testing. Furthermore, as is the case with compliance training, if an agency does not commit to measuring the impact of skills
training on workplace behavior, employees may assume the agency is more concerned with "looking good" by reacting to a problem than it is with changing how things are done.
Everyone in the federal sector has seen flavor-of-the-month initiatives that come and go faster than celebrity marriages.
Performance
An agency may commit to bettering its performance on a mission- related goal and determine that training is a means to this end. Training in conflict resolution skills may further such agency goals as reducing complaints or grievances; improving
employee satisfaction or productivity; or lowering sick leave abuse, attrition, or transfer requests.
Measuring the impact of conflict resolution training on employee performance creates a powerful incentive to provide top quality training. Measuring impact also makes it imperative to incorporate training into a comprehensive plan for promoting positive
change. If employees are tasked with achieving a goal and are informed that training will help them achieve it, they have a strong incentive to figure out how to apply the skills they learn productively. It all gets back to the simple rule that what gets measured gets done. If the measure of success for conflict resolution training is workplace performance, employees get the message that improving performance matters.
Since impact on a mission-related goal cannot be measured until well after a course ends, content, attendance, testing, and course evaluations are useful for ensuring a course is on track. Used as tools instead of goals, these measures can play a constructive role in promoting effective training.
The downside of measuring success by employee performance is the increased risk of failure. Content and attendance are a breeze to control, and good trainers can easily ensure that employees pass tests and review a course favorably. But
staking your reputation on how others perform post-training may seem downright scary. Just remember there is tremendous power in letting go. If an agency demonstrates its belief in the skills it is teaching and the employees it is teaching them to by committing to measurable results, employees will strive
to live up to expectations.
Geoff Drucker is the Director of Federal Dispute Resolution with the McCammon Group and can be reached at 703.582.9971 www.mccammongroup.com
No more ties!
"For some people the knowledge one person already has before a learning experience is like a collection of old ties, with each tie being an element of the held knowledge. When new knowledge becomes available (in a training session)the knowledge acquisition process is mechanically simple: I add more ties to my collection.
All I have to do is put every new tie in the next space in the rack, every new information in its proper place. This kind of knowledge applies to fact and memory learning and is helpful to learn the capital of Ukraine or your aunt's phone number!
Educational Researchers call this kind of process "rote learning".
There is another kind of knowledge acquisition process: the one that is used to build expertise (the one most adult training is all about). Rather than adding another tie to the collection, this kind of new knowledge looks more like the creative problem-solving we perform when we are confronted with a strange new object (for instance a red L-shaped container filled with M&M's.)
Rather than simply putting "one more tie in the drawer" I have this additional strange new thing and I am now creatively:
-investigating what the new object is,
-comparing it to something I already have,
-trying to understand what it can do for me,
-evaluating if I am interested in keeping this object in the house.
For this last kind of activities it becomes critical:
• The Collaboration of others
• Realistic Manipulation and Hands-on Action
• Sustained Dialogue and critical Reflection-on-action.
All of us can agree on how different a tie is compared with a red L-shaped container filled with M&M's. Unfortunately people continue to assume that the process of building expertise is like a mechanical "adding a new tie to a collection" and not like problem-solving, the puzzling and demanding mental work we perform when dealing with something new, weird and strange like a L-shaped container.
How can we convince them? Email me your answer!"
All I have to do is put every new tie in the next space in the rack, every new information in its proper place. This kind of knowledge applies to fact and memory learning and is helpful to learn the capital of Ukraine or your aunt's phone number!
Educational Researchers call this kind of process "rote learning".
There is another kind of knowledge acquisition process: the one that is used to build expertise (the one most adult training is all about). Rather than adding another tie to the collection, this kind of new knowledge looks more like the creative problem-solving we perform when we are confronted with a strange new object (for instance a red L-shaped container filled with M&M's.)
Rather than simply putting "one more tie in the drawer" I have this additional strange new thing and I am now creatively:
-investigating what the new object is,
-comparing it to something I already have,
-trying to understand what it can do for me,
-evaluating if I am interested in keeping this object in the house.
For this last kind of activities it becomes critical:
• The Collaboration of others
• Realistic Manipulation and Hands-on Action
• Sustained Dialogue and critical Reflection-on-action.
All of us can agree on how different a tie is compared with a red L-shaped container filled with M&M's. Unfortunately people continue to assume that the process of building expertise is like a mechanical "adding a new tie to a collection" and not like problem-solving, the puzzling and demanding mental work we perform when dealing with something new, weird and strange like a L-shaped container.
How can we convince them? Email me your answer!"
Seek persistent disequilibrium
Neither constancy nor relentless change will support a creation. A
good creation, like good jazz, must balance the stable formula with frequent out-of-kilter notes.
Equilibrium is death. Yet unless a system stabilizes to an equilibrium point, it is no better than an explosion, and just as soon dead. A Nothing, then, is both equilibrium and disequilibrium.
A Something is persistent disequilibrium -- a continuous state of forever surfing on the edge between i never stopping but never falling. Honing in on that liquid threshold is the still mysterious holy grail of creation and the quest I of all amateur gods.
From
Kevin Kelly OUT OF CONTROL THE NEW BIOLOGY OF MACHINES
good creation, like good jazz, must balance the stable formula with frequent out-of-kilter notes.
Equilibrium is death. Yet unless a system stabilizes to an equilibrium point, it is no better than an explosion, and just as soon dead. A Nothing, then, is both equilibrium and disequilibrium.
A Something is persistent disequilibrium -- a continuous state of forever surfing on the edge between i never stopping but never falling. Honing in on that liquid threshold is the still mysterious holy grail of creation and the quest I of all amateur gods.
From
Kevin Kelly OUT OF CONTROL THE NEW BIOLOGY OF MACHINES
Disambiguation of Software Implementation!
To be sure, if the technology were totally
“disambiguated”, univocal in producing
its effects and impacts, hosting
would consist of straightforward adaptation
and alignment.
The latter is precisely
the picture of the world of implementation
as portrayed by structured information
systems methodologies: systems
are objects, knowledge is data, work is
business process, and people are emotionless
decision makers who have to align their preferences and adjust to the
changes rationally planned for them.
It is the “de-worlded” world of business reengineering
models, where designers, consultants and managers juggle around boxes and arrows to come up with solutions that optimize pre-selected performance
criteria. The intricacies and uncertainties of hospitality, hostility and ambiguity
are ruled out from such a de-worlded world of abstract organizations, but
equally ruled out is the “organizingness” of everyday life as experienced by the
members of the organization.
It is precisely such “organizingness” that helps
technology become integrated in the
workflow, “aligned” and “understood.”
Unfortunately “organizingness” cannot
be represented geometrically: it is made
by real world participants from absorbed
coping, care, being there amidst ambiguity,
intimacy, sporting hospitality as well
as tamed hostility towards what the new
and the unknown is disclosing.
Claudio Ciborra
“disambiguated”, univocal in producing
its effects and impacts, hosting
would consist of straightforward adaptation
and alignment.
The latter is precisely
the picture of the world of implementation
as portrayed by structured information
systems methodologies: systems
are objects, knowledge is data, work is
business process, and people are emotionless
decision makers who have to align their preferences and adjust to the
changes rationally planned for them.
It is the “de-worlded” world of business reengineering
models, where designers, consultants and managers juggle around boxes and arrows to come up with solutions that optimize pre-selected performance
criteria. The intricacies and uncertainties of hospitality, hostility and ambiguity
are ruled out from such a de-worlded world of abstract organizations, but
equally ruled out is the “organizingness” of everyday life as experienced by the
members of the organization.
It is precisely such “organizingness” that helps
technology become integrated in the
workflow, “aligned” and “understood.”
Unfortunately “organizingness” cannot
be represented geometrically: it is made
by real world participants from absorbed
coping, care, being there amidst ambiguity,
intimacy, sporting hospitality as well
as tamed hostility towards what the new
and the unknown is disclosing.
Claudio Ciborra
The Importance of Robust Dialogue
From "Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done" by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan
In the typical corporate meeting-a business review, for example-the dialogue is constrained and politicized. Some people want to shade and soften what they say to avoid a confrontation. Others need to beat those they are talking to into submission. In groups that contain both types of people (which is the case in many meetings), dialogue becomes a combat sport for the killers and a humiliation or bore for the passives. Little reality gets on the table, and the meeting doesn't move the issues forward much.
Now think of a meeting that produced great results-that got the realities and ended with a plan for results. How did it happen?
Dialogue alters the psychology of a group. It can either expand a group's capacity or shrink it. It can be energizing or energy draining. It can create self-confidence and optimism, or it can produce pessimism. It can create unity, or it can create bitter factions.
Robust dialogue brings out reality, even when that reality makes people uncomfortable, because it has purpose and meaning. It is open, tough, focused, and informal. The aim is to invite multiple viewpoints, see the pros and cons of each one, and try honestly and candidly to construct new viewpoints. This is the dynamic that stimulates new questions, new ideas, and new insights rather than wasting energy defending the old order.
How do you get people to practice robust dialogue when they are used to the games and evasions of classical corporate dialogue? It starts at the top, with the dialogues of the organization's leader. If he or she is practicing robust dialogue, others will take the cue. Some leaders may be short on the emotional fortitude required to invite disagreement without getting defensive. Others may need to learn some specific skills to help people challenge and debate constructively. These people should be able to get help.
But the key is that people act their way to thinking because they're driven for results. If you reward for performance, the interest in performance will be sufficiently deep to sponsor a dialogue. Everybody needs to get the best answer, and that means everybody must be candid in their exchanges - no one person has all the ideas. If someone says something you disagree with and you rudely tell him he's full of hot air, a lot of other people aren't going to speak out next time. If instead you say, "Okay, let's talk about that. Let's listen to everybody, and then make our choice," you'll get much better responses.
In the typical corporate meeting-a business review, for example-the dialogue is constrained and politicized. Some people want to shade and soften what they say to avoid a confrontation. Others need to beat those they are talking to into submission. In groups that contain both types of people (which is the case in many meetings), dialogue becomes a combat sport for the killers and a humiliation or bore for the passives. Little reality gets on the table, and the meeting doesn't move the issues forward much.
Now think of a meeting that produced great results-that got the realities and ended with a plan for results. How did it happen?
Dialogue alters the psychology of a group. It can either expand a group's capacity or shrink it. It can be energizing or energy draining. It can create self-confidence and optimism, or it can produce pessimism. It can create unity, or it can create bitter factions.
Robust dialogue brings out reality, even when that reality makes people uncomfortable, because it has purpose and meaning. It is open, tough, focused, and informal. The aim is to invite multiple viewpoints, see the pros and cons of each one, and try honestly and candidly to construct new viewpoints. This is the dynamic that stimulates new questions, new ideas, and new insights rather than wasting energy defending the old order.
How do you get people to practice robust dialogue when they are used to the games and evasions of classical corporate dialogue? It starts at the top, with the dialogues of the organization's leader. If he or she is practicing robust dialogue, others will take the cue. Some leaders may be short on the emotional fortitude required to invite disagreement without getting defensive. Others may need to learn some specific skills to help people challenge and debate constructively. These people should be able to get help.
But the key is that people act their way to thinking because they're driven for results. If you reward for performance, the interest in performance will be sufficiently deep to sponsor a dialogue. Everybody needs to get the best answer, and that means everybody must be candid in their exchanges - no one person has all the ideas. If someone says something you disagree with and you rudely tell him he's full of hot air, a lot of other people aren't going to speak out next time. If instead you say, "Okay, let's talk about that. Let's listen to everybody, and then make our choice," you'll get much better responses.
Knowledge Construction Worker
Knowledge Construction Worker
OPEN-MINDEDNESS in CONVERSATIONS
By Loren Ekroth
It’s hard to keep an open mind during heated
conversation, isn’t it? People get identified with
certain ideas and assert them fervently. They
offer “Yes, but . . .” responses to those with
different or opposing views. They don’t really
consider evidence against their own views.
Why Are People Closed-minded?
Once a belief has been established, it is hard to
change. Often our beliefs are set early in life
as a result of our up-bringing and limited
exposure to other belief systems. For that
reason, the majority of people share the
religious faith and political beliefs of their
parents. The adage says, “The way the twig
is bent, so grows the tree.”
Beliefs are maintained by selective exposure to
information. Media research demonstrates that
individuals privatize themselves by paying most
attention to those media that support their beliefs
and much less to media that offer contrary ideas.
As well, birds of a feather DO flock together,
so we surround ourselves with people of like
mind in our clubs, churches, and workplace.
Once polarized in our beliefs and opinions, we
tend to ignore or dismiss contrary evidence so
as “not to be confused by the facts.”
Benefits of Open-Mindedness
Being open-minded carries certain benefits,
among them the ability to be less swayed by
specific events and to be less susceptible to
manipulation and suggestion. Open-minded
people are more thoughtful and not so easily
roused to anger because they can actually
consider alternative views without upset.
(Think of how beneficial open-mindedness
would be for you when your Uncle Dick goes
on a political rant with you during a holiday
get-together! You could hear him out with
civility and not ruin your day.)
How to Increase Your Open-Mindedness
Here are two exercises attributed to Catherine
Freeman, a therapist and coach:
1. Take a position opposite to your own on a
controversial topic such as abortion or gun control.
Generate at least 3 reasons to support this opposite
position, the more the better. (This method is
similar to what college debaters are required to do:
to argue both sides of proposition with reasoned
argument.)
2. Recall a time someone wronged you and
come up with some reasons why they may have
done that inadvertently without intent to harm.
(Also, The “Work” of Byron Katie has a simple,
clear steps of 4 questions that is profoundly
helpful in getting un-stuck from judgements.
(Details at www.thework.org.)
To an in-law firmly convinced of his
rightness on a number of political issues, I
say “I agree that we disagree.” I don’t try
to change him, and he offers himself as a
model close-minded person. I can usually
listen to his views without becoming upset,
and once in a while I’ll change my thinking.
My intention is not that he change, but only
that he be thoughtful when we talk. For me,
that is a more attainable goal than change.
OPEN-MINDEDNESS in CONVERSATIONS
By Loren Ekroth
It’s hard to keep an open mind during heated
conversation, isn’t it? People get identified with
certain ideas and assert them fervently. They
offer “Yes, but . . .” responses to those with
different or opposing views. They don’t really
consider evidence against their own views.
Why Are People Closed-minded?
Once a belief has been established, it is hard to
change. Often our beliefs are set early in life
as a result of our up-bringing and limited
exposure to other belief systems. For that
reason, the majority of people share the
religious faith and political beliefs of their
parents. The adage says, “The way the twig
is bent, so grows the tree.”
Beliefs are maintained by selective exposure to
information. Media research demonstrates that
individuals privatize themselves by paying most
attention to those media that support their beliefs
and much less to media that offer contrary ideas.
As well, birds of a feather DO flock together,
so we surround ourselves with people of like
mind in our clubs, churches, and workplace.
Once polarized in our beliefs and opinions, we
tend to ignore or dismiss contrary evidence so
as “not to be confused by the facts.”
Benefits of Open-Mindedness
Being open-minded carries certain benefits,
among them the ability to be less swayed by
specific events and to be less susceptible to
manipulation and suggestion. Open-minded
people are more thoughtful and not so easily
roused to anger because they can actually
consider alternative views without upset.
(Think of how beneficial open-mindedness
would be for you when your Uncle Dick goes
on a political rant with you during a holiday
get-together! You could hear him out with
civility and not ruin your day.)
How to Increase Your Open-Mindedness
Here are two exercises attributed to Catherine
Freeman, a therapist and coach:
1. Take a position opposite to your own on a
controversial topic such as abortion or gun control.
Generate at least 3 reasons to support this opposite
position, the more the better. (This method is
similar to what college debaters are required to do:
to argue both sides of proposition with reasoned
argument.)
2. Recall a time someone wronged you and
come up with some reasons why they may have
done that inadvertently without intent to harm.
(Also, The “Work” of Byron Katie has a simple,
clear steps of 4 questions that is profoundly
helpful in getting un-stuck from judgements.
(Details at www.thework.org.)
To an in-law firmly convinced of his
rightness on a number of political issues, I
say “I agree that we disagree.” I don’t try
to change him, and he offers himself as a
model close-minded person. I can usually
listen to his views without becoming upset,
and once in a while I’ll change my thinking.
My intention is not that he change, but only
that he be thoughtful when we talk. For me,
that is a more attainable goal than change.
Bitter price of iconic image
It is 35 years since the Olympic protest of Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Both later paid for it, writes Steve Dilbeck in Los Angeles.
Evening is still coming as Tommie Smith sits on a wooden bench and looks over the Santa Monica College track, his young charges heading off for the day while the football team continues to work out.
He gives them all a long look, smiles a peaceful smile.
"None of these kids know who I am," Smith said. "They don't have the slightest idea. To them I'm just 'coach'."
In the late afternoon, John Carlos is trying to talk on the phone from Palm Springs High, but he has to keep barking out instructions to students.
Carlos, too, found few knew who he was when he arrived on campus.
"When I came here 17 years ago, they didn't particularly know," Carlos said. "A few years later a textbook came out and they happened to see my picture and name in the history book."
The defining moment that elevated Smith and Carlos beyond American sports figures and into history books happened 35 years ago yesterday in Mexico City.
It was during the 200 metres victory ceremony at the 1968 Olympics. Smith had won in world-record time; Carlos had captured the bronze.
As they stood on the victory platform and the US anthem began, they bowed their heads, and, each wearing a black glove, raised a clenched fist in a black power salute. Australia's Peter Norman, who won silver, wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge in support of the pair.
It remains one of the most vivid Olympic images - a picture once seen, never forgotten. It was a courageous, non-violent protest, benign but impassioned dissent. They meant to bring further attention to civil rights issues, to give pride to African-Americans, and they succeeded.
But the reaction was as swift as it was negative. In the US there was outrage from many white Americans. People saw heads bowed as disrespectful towards the American flag. They mistakenly saw the clenched fists as supportive of the Black Panthers.
The Associated Press report described them "in a Nazi-like salute". Chicago columnist Brent Musburger called them "black-skinned storm troopers".
The outspoken Carlos made the kind of comments that only inflamed the establishment. After the ceremony he said: "We're sort of show horses out there for the white people. They give us peanuts, pat us on the back and say, 'Boy, you did fine.' "
The International Olympic Committee demanded the US Olympic Committee ban them from the Games, but it refused. The next day the IOC said if the sprinters were not banned, the entire US track and field team would be barred from further competition. The USOC caved in.
Smith and Carlos were withdrawn from the relays and expelled from the Olympic Village. When they returned home, Smith and Carlos were ostracised. Jobs became scarce. They received death threats and their homes were attacked.
"One rock came through our front window into our living room, where we had the crib," Smith said. "It seemed like everybody hated me. I had no food. My baby was hungry. My wife had no dresses."
Even today, there are those who remain angry and full of hatred.
"There are still threats," Carlos said. "I was never concerned about those punks. I just let them know it will be remembered, that life doesn't stop when you leave this planet."
After graduating, Smith was given an honourable discharge from army service for "un-American activities" That probably did him a huge favour, since the Vietnam war was raging and the body count growing.
"I was going to 'Nam," Smith said. "I could see myself in rice paddies. I believe there's a God. Sixty-eight had its downfall, but it had its protection for me. I might not be alive."
Carlos had two brothers serving, but after his protest both were immediately discharged.
Smith borrowed money to complete his education and get his teaching qualification. He tried gridiron for a few years with the Cincinnati Bengals, then finally got a job as a track coach in Ohio. In 1978 he moved to Santa Monica College, where he has been a social science and health teacher, and coaches track and field.
Carlos had an even more trying time, working as a security guard and bouncer, among other jobs.
"I'd get minimum wage and then go to Vegas and roll the dice to get it up to something to feed my family," he said. "We had to chop up furniture, the kids' beds, to stay warm."
Looking back, the first thing that comes to him is basic.
"That I survived," he said. "That I still have any sanity.
"My first wife is deceased as a result. She took her life because she couldn't deal with the pressure from the results of Mexico."
Smith, one of 12 children, was born in 1944 in Clarksville, Texas, where his father was a "dirt farmer".
After the family moved to California, Smith would help in the fields for up to 10 hours a day,
even as he began to excel athletically in high school. His talent won him a scholarship at San Jose State and he was soon a world-class sprinter.
When he returned from Mexico, he went to visit his father, still working the fields. His father could not read but had heard people were angry at his son.
"He kind of looked at me, looked up and down, and said in his southern drawl: 'You know, I've been hearing a lot of things about you. Everybody been telling me you did something wrong. You stuck a hand up or hit somebody or something.'
"I said that's not truthful. He said: 'Well, you're telling me that and I'm going to believe you. You're my son.' First time I shook hands with him in my life." Carlos is from Harlem, where his father was a cobbler and his mother a nurses' aide.
"My mom and dad never saw me run a single race," Carlos said. "They were always working every weekend. They were just trying to raise us."
One of five children, Carlos lived with his family in an apartment behind his father's shoe store and across from the Savoy Ballroom, where the best big bands and jazz groups of the day played.
Carlos and his friends would help people out of cabs or sing and dance outside the club. "We were out there hustling," he said.
Then he would retreat to his apartment, where he could hear Duke Ellington lead his band or Frank Sinatra sing.
Like Smith, Carlos was a multisport star, who ultimately wound up at San Jose State.
People often assume the pair were great friends
but, in truth, they were never close. They never competed at the same time at San Jose State. They never forged some great plan should they both make the podium. At best, they are cordial to each other.
"I don't think John Carlos likes me, even now," Smith said. "I don't think Carlos likes very many people. That's just his demeanour. I'm more of a human person. I will not sit and talk to him. I talk to him on the phone."
Smith lives near Los Angeles, Carlos in Palm Springs, but they have never been to each other's home. And to this day, they disagree on exactly what happened in Mexico, whose idea the protest was.
Harry Edwards, another former San Jose State athlete, had formed the Olympic Project for Human Rights and wanted black athletes to boycott the Games. Before the team flew to Mexico, OPHR members decided to compete and protest individually.
In the 200m, Carlos - who had beaten Smith in world-record time at the trials - led early before Smith closed to win in 19.83, still a world-class time.
But a stunned Smith said he heard Carlos claim he allowed him to win because the gold was more important to him. Smith said his wife later confronted Carlos and he said it was true.
Carlos said: "Tommie can say whatever he wants. All I can say is, I respect Tommie Smith as one of the greatest sprinters in Olympic history."
The two also disagree on whose idea the podium protest was.
After the race, the two and Norman had to wait two hours in a tunnel before the ceremony. Smith said he had the gloves and was trying to determine exactly what to do with them.
"The thought process was of power or strength, and I didn't know how to do it except just hold my hands up like in church," Smith said. "I've been religious all my life. Praise God with your hands up in church, with your head bowed. I thought this would be a good thing for me to do.
"So I told John: 'This is what I'm going to do. I have another glove if you want it. You are welcomed to do, and you do what you think is necessary.' I said if you want to do it, just watch me and follow my lead."
Carlos tells it differently: "He had the gloves, I had the idea."
While Smith said his head was bowed in prayer, Carlos said his was in reflection.
"I reflected on my father, who had fought in the the First World War. I reflected on when I was seven or eight and my mother would be working a lot of nights and away from her family. I reflected on the ignorant-ass teachers sent into the urban parts of the city who had no business being there. There was much to reflect upon."
What both agree on is, despite everything, they have no regrets.
These two supposed radicals, combative outsiders, have spent their lives teaching the young. Both remain very religious.
"They wanted to build us to be arrogant, militant, unruly African-Americans," Carlos said. "Anything but individuals serious about life, serious about their country, and its responsibilities to its citizens.
"People looked at us like we were subversive. We were like birds busting out of a cage."
Smith said: "I was always an advocate of equal rights. Not that I wanted to whup the white man, or get whupped by the white man, because I saw that happened to my father. I wanted to be equal to the man doing the whupping. Give me equality."
Yesterday both were due at San Jose State, where a ceremony was planned to honour their protest. The school hopes to raise funds to erect a statue next year.
"What's so surprising about it is, on a positive note, it's the brainchild of a 23-year-old white student," Smith said.
Thirty-five years have passed since two sprinters made a stand, made a difference, made history.
"We still have a way to go," Carlos said, "but we can see some distance for where we were."
Los Angeles Daily News posted with permission
Evening is still coming as Tommie Smith sits on a wooden bench and looks over the Santa Monica College track, his young charges heading off for the day while the football team continues to work out.
He gives them all a long look, smiles a peaceful smile.
"None of these kids know who I am," Smith said. "They don't have the slightest idea. To them I'm just 'coach'."
In the late afternoon, John Carlos is trying to talk on the phone from Palm Springs High, but he has to keep barking out instructions to students.
Carlos, too, found few knew who he was when he arrived on campus.
"When I came here 17 years ago, they didn't particularly know," Carlos said. "A few years later a textbook came out and they happened to see my picture and name in the history book."
The defining moment that elevated Smith and Carlos beyond American sports figures and into history books happened 35 years ago yesterday in Mexico City.
It was during the 200 metres victory ceremony at the 1968 Olympics. Smith had won in world-record time; Carlos had captured the bronze.
As they stood on the victory platform and the US anthem began, they bowed their heads, and, each wearing a black glove, raised a clenched fist in a black power salute. Australia's Peter Norman, who won silver, wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge in support of the pair.
It remains one of the most vivid Olympic images - a picture once seen, never forgotten. It was a courageous, non-violent protest, benign but impassioned dissent. They meant to bring further attention to civil rights issues, to give pride to African-Americans, and they succeeded.
But the reaction was as swift as it was negative. In the US there was outrage from many white Americans. People saw heads bowed as disrespectful towards the American flag. They mistakenly saw the clenched fists as supportive of the Black Panthers.
The Associated Press report described them "in a Nazi-like salute". Chicago columnist Brent Musburger called them "black-skinned storm troopers".
The outspoken Carlos made the kind of comments that only inflamed the establishment. After the ceremony he said: "We're sort of show horses out there for the white people. They give us peanuts, pat us on the back and say, 'Boy, you did fine.' "
The International Olympic Committee demanded the US Olympic Committee ban them from the Games, but it refused. The next day the IOC said if the sprinters were not banned, the entire US track and field team would be barred from further competition. The USOC caved in.
Smith and Carlos were withdrawn from the relays and expelled from the Olympic Village. When they returned home, Smith and Carlos were ostracised. Jobs became scarce. They received death threats and their homes were attacked.
"One rock came through our front window into our living room, where we had the crib," Smith said. "It seemed like everybody hated me. I had no food. My baby was hungry. My wife had no dresses."
Even today, there are those who remain angry and full of hatred.
"There are still threats," Carlos said. "I was never concerned about those punks. I just let them know it will be remembered, that life doesn't stop when you leave this planet."
After graduating, Smith was given an honourable discharge from army service for "un-American activities" That probably did him a huge favour, since the Vietnam war was raging and the body count growing.
"I was going to 'Nam," Smith said. "I could see myself in rice paddies. I believe there's a God. Sixty-eight had its downfall, but it had its protection for me. I might not be alive."
Carlos had two brothers serving, but after his protest both were immediately discharged.
Smith borrowed money to complete his education and get his teaching qualification. He tried gridiron for a few years with the Cincinnati Bengals, then finally got a job as a track coach in Ohio. In 1978 he moved to Santa Monica College, where he has been a social science and health teacher, and coaches track and field.
Carlos had an even more trying time, working as a security guard and bouncer, among other jobs.
"I'd get minimum wage and then go to Vegas and roll the dice to get it up to something to feed my family," he said. "We had to chop up furniture, the kids' beds, to stay warm."
Looking back, the first thing that comes to him is basic.
"That I survived," he said. "That I still have any sanity.
"My first wife is deceased as a result. She took her life because she couldn't deal with the pressure from the results of Mexico."
Smith, one of 12 children, was born in 1944 in Clarksville, Texas, where his father was a "dirt farmer".
After the family moved to California, Smith would help in the fields for up to 10 hours a day,
even as he began to excel athletically in high school. His talent won him a scholarship at San Jose State and he was soon a world-class sprinter.
When he returned from Mexico, he went to visit his father, still working the fields. His father could not read but had heard people were angry at his son.
"He kind of looked at me, looked up and down, and said in his southern drawl: 'You know, I've been hearing a lot of things about you. Everybody been telling me you did something wrong. You stuck a hand up or hit somebody or something.'
"I said that's not truthful. He said: 'Well, you're telling me that and I'm going to believe you. You're my son.' First time I shook hands with him in my life." Carlos is from Harlem, where his father was a cobbler and his mother a nurses' aide.
"My mom and dad never saw me run a single race," Carlos said. "They were always working every weekend. They were just trying to raise us."
One of five children, Carlos lived with his family in an apartment behind his father's shoe store and across from the Savoy Ballroom, where the best big bands and jazz groups of the day played.
Carlos and his friends would help people out of cabs or sing and dance outside the club. "We were out there hustling," he said.
Then he would retreat to his apartment, where he could hear Duke Ellington lead his band or Frank Sinatra sing.
Like Smith, Carlos was a multisport star, who ultimately wound up at San Jose State.
People often assume the pair were great friends
but, in truth, they were never close. They never competed at the same time at San Jose State. They never forged some great plan should they both make the podium. At best, they are cordial to each other.
"I don't think John Carlos likes me, even now," Smith said. "I don't think Carlos likes very many people. That's just his demeanour. I'm more of a human person. I will not sit and talk to him. I talk to him on the phone."
Smith lives near Los Angeles, Carlos in Palm Springs, but they have never been to each other's home. And to this day, they disagree on exactly what happened in Mexico, whose idea the protest was.
Harry Edwards, another former San Jose State athlete, had formed the Olympic Project for Human Rights and wanted black athletes to boycott the Games. Before the team flew to Mexico, OPHR members decided to compete and protest individually.
In the 200m, Carlos - who had beaten Smith in world-record time at the trials - led early before Smith closed to win in 19.83, still a world-class time.
But a stunned Smith said he heard Carlos claim he allowed him to win because the gold was more important to him. Smith said his wife later confronted Carlos and he said it was true.
Carlos said: "Tommie can say whatever he wants. All I can say is, I respect Tommie Smith as one of the greatest sprinters in Olympic history."
The two also disagree on whose idea the podium protest was.
After the race, the two and Norman had to wait two hours in a tunnel before the ceremony. Smith said he had the gloves and was trying to determine exactly what to do with them.
"The thought process was of power or strength, and I didn't know how to do it except just hold my hands up like in church," Smith said. "I've been religious all my life. Praise God with your hands up in church, with your head bowed. I thought this would be a good thing for me to do.
"So I told John: 'This is what I'm going to do. I have another glove if you want it. You are welcomed to do, and you do what you think is necessary.' I said if you want to do it, just watch me and follow my lead."
Carlos tells it differently: "He had the gloves, I had the idea."
While Smith said his head was bowed in prayer, Carlos said his was in reflection.
"I reflected on my father, who had fought in the the First World War. I reflected on when I was seven or eight and my mother would be working a lot of nights and away from her family. I reflected on the ignorant-ass teachers sent into the urban parts of the city who had no business being there. There was much to reflect upon."
What both agree on is, despite everything, they have no regrets.
These two supposed radicals, combative outsiders, have spent their lives teaching the young. Both remain very religious.
"They wanted to build us to be arrogant, militant, unruly African-Americans," Carlos said. "Anything but individuals serious about life, serious about their country, and its responsibilities to its citizens.
"People looked at us like we were subversive. We were like birds busting out of a cage."
Smith said: "I was always an advocate of equal rights. Not that I wanted to whup the white man, or get whupped by the white man, because I saw that happened to my father. I wanted to be equal to the man doing the whupping. Give me equality."
Yesterday both were due at San Jose State, where a ceremony was planned to honour their protest. The school hopes to raise funds to erect a statue next year.
"What's so surprising about it is, on a positive note, it's the brainchild of a 23-year-old white student," Smith said.
Thirty-five years have passed since two sprinters made a stand, made a difference, made history.
"We still have a way to go," Carlos said, "but we can see some distance for where we were."
Los Angeles Daily News posted with permission
FORZA PRODI! BERLUSCONI A CASA! a.k.a. 2006 Italian elections
Luigi Barzini, scriveva, quarant'anni di fa, per spiegare il fascino dell'Italia nel mondo e la «pacifica invasione» dei turisti:
«L'arte di vivere, quest'arte screditata creata dagli italiani per sconfiggere l'angoscia e la noia, sta diventando una guida inestimabile per la sopravvivenza di molte persone».
E' ancora così.
L'Italia quotidiana - soprattutto se uno non ci deve lavorare - piace e convince. Nel nostro Paese tutti si sentono qualcuno; e, giustamente, reclamano attenzione.
Permettimi di citare un passaggio dal mio «La testa degli italiani» (negli Usa, «La Bella Figura. A Field-Guide to the Italian Mind», out Aug 15). Scrivo, verso la fine:
«Un negoziante amichevole sotto casa compensa una notizia spiacevole in televisione. Ecco perché nelle classifiche sulla qualità della vita precediamo Paesi come gli Stati Uniti, la Francia o la Germania: perché le consolazioni artigianali valgono quanto le organizzazioni industriali. Certo, nel prodotto interno lordo non risultano: ma nella contabilità personale si vedono eccome. (...) In Italia conosciamo il piacere della conversazione, e il gusto dell'osservazione personale: l'apprezzamento su un abito è gradito, altrove sarebbe sospetto. In Italia le famiglie difendono il rito dei pasti; e i ragazzi stanno riscoprendo quello, non altrettanto fondamentale, dell'aperitivo. In Italia chi lavora è riuscito a trasformare in una cerimonia anche l'abitudine più breve: il caffè espresso bevuto in piedi in un bar».
Secondo te, queste cose non sono importanti? Secondo me, sì. Certo, se fossero abbinate ad affidabilità , onestà e organizzazione sarebbe meglio: in questo caso, diventeremmo una sorta di paradiso in terra. Invece siamo un purgatorio colorato, pieno di interessanti anime in pena.
By Luigi Severgnini
«L'arte di vivere, quest'arte screditata creata dagli italiani per sconfiggere l'angoscia e la noia, sta diventando una guida inestimabile per la sopravvivenza di molte persone».
E' ancora così.
L'Italia quotidiana - soprattutto se uno non ci deve lavorare - piace e convince. Nel nostro Paese tutti si sentono qualcuno; e, giustamente, reclamano attenzione.
Permettimi di citare un passaggio dal mio «La testa degli italiani» (negli Usa, «La Bella Figura. A Field-Guide to the Italian Mind», out Aug 15). Scrivo, verso la fine:
«Un negoziante amichevole sotto casa compensa una notizia spiacevole in televisione. Ecco perché nelle classifiche sulla qualità della vita precediamo Paesi come gli Stati Uniti, la Francia o la Germania: perché le consolazioni artigianali valgono quanto le organizzazioni industriali. Certo, nel prodotto interno lordo non risultano: ma nella contabilità personale si vedono eccome. (...) In Italia conosciamo il piacere della conversazione, e il gusto dell'osservazione personale: l'apprezzamento su un abito è gradito, altrove sarebbe sospetto. In Italia le famiglie difendono il rito dei pasti; e i ragazzi stanno riscoprendo quello, non altrettanto fondamentale, dell'aperitivo. In Italia chi lavora è riuscito a trasformare in una cerimonia anche l'abitudine più breve: il caffè espresso bevuto in piedi in un bar».
Secondo te, queste cose non sono importanti? Secondo me, sì. Certo, se fossero abbinate ad affidabilità , onestà e organizzazione sarebbe meglio: in questo caso, diventeremmo una sorta di paradiso in terra. Invece siamo un purgatorio colorato, pieno di interessanti anime in pena.
By Luigi Severgnini
The Danger of sliding on the Learning Curve!
While training becomes more and more critical for people and organizations, it is increasingly turning up in the headlines of daily news as a failed solution to problems, as a big solution for big problems or as a justification to do something controversial.
Here are a few examples I have collected in the last months from newspapers, the internet and in general public discourse to explain what I mean.
Training is often seen as the failed solution to many problems.
"Poor training" is said to be the cause of failed expensive software implementations across federal agencies, "Lack of training of the intervention personnel" is indicated as the reason for weak responses to natural disasters. Perpetrators of human rights abuses on prisoners have been defined as "…staff lacking training on the guidelines against torture". Do we need a "Training anti-defamation league" to respond to these allegations?
Training is also seen as the "silver bullet" for solving big problems.
"Better training for teachers", is the solution to the nation's failing public schools system. "Increased funds for training" should solve high unemployment rates and poor GDP growth. Surprise: "Training" is also the solution for abuse from caregivers in nursing homes. It makes you feel mighty as a trainer, doesn’t it?
Training is often the justification for doing something controversial.
"Training purposes" justify no respect for the privacy of your call to a customer service center as "your phone call may be recorded". "Poor training, supervision" justifies the acquittal of officials on trial in brutality cases. Lately I‘ve ever heard that the reason for the war in Iraq was to "bring effective training to the Iraqi". A workshop would have been obviously cheaper!
The lesson learned here is that you need to be careful with training: you are dealing with work that is highly controversial, highly visible and often not fully understood.
In fact unreasonable expectations, lack of accountability or clear definition of boundaries of training responsibilities can kill the best training work before it even starts.
What can you do to prevent or limit all this from happening in your training initiative?
How can we design training and play it "safer"?
Here are a few examples I have collected in the last months from newspapers, the internet and in general public discourse to explain what I mean.
Training is often seen as the failed solution to many problems.
"Poor training" is said to be the cause of failed expensive software implementations across federal agencies, "Lack of training of the intervention personnel" is indicated as the reason for weak responses to natural disasters. Perpetrators of human rights abuses on prisoners have been defined as "…staff lacking training on the guidelines against torture". Do we need a "Training anti-defamation league" to respond to these allegations?
Training is also seen as the "silver bullet" for solving big problems.
"Better training for teachers", is the solution to the nation's failing public schools system. "Increased funds for training" should solve high unemployment rates and poor GDP growth. Surprise: "Training" is also the solution for abuse from caregivers in nursing homes. It makes you feel mighty as a trainer, doesn’t it?
Training is often the justification for doing something controversial.
"Training purposes" justify no respect for the privacy of your call to a customer service center as "your phone call may be recorded". "Poor training, supervision" justifies the acquittal of officials on trial in brutality cases. Lately I‘ve ever heard that the reason for the war in Iraq was to "bring effective training to the Iraqi". A workshop would have been obviously cheaper!
The lesson learned here is that you need to be careful with training: you are dealing with work that is highly controversial, highly visible and often not fully understood.
In fact unreasonable expectations, lack of accountability or clear definition of boundaries of training responsibilities can kill the best training work before it even starts.
What can you do to prevent or limit all this from happening in your training initiative?
How can we design training and play it "safer"?
A passage I like from "Trust" by Jack Gibb
Cosmic humor and light-heartedness. Sometimes I think I have consciously developed a humorous side as an effect to balance my inner heaviness. I see this polarity between the tragic and the comedic in many people, certainly in myself. Even in my heaviest grief I often see the comedy being played out. Whether it seems to come to us from the outside or from inner sources, humor can be healing, restorative, and inductive of wellness.
My speech professor in college used to say, often, that "whenever someone laughs there is someone hurting and in pain." He was aware of the hostile side of humor. I am too. But there is a gentle, warm, and caring aspect to comedy that is divine and healing. In the past, it has sometimes been difficult for me to see the lightheartedness in pain and tragedy, particularly in relation to myself. Ability to see the restorative qualities of humor is increased by the ability to make a perceptual shift, to create a new perspective.
Sacredness and purity. I sometimes find myself caught up in a deep anger towards people who seem to be evil in intent and action, and, at the same time, feel a deep compassion for people who are hurting so bad inside that they feel they must punish the world in some way.
I have a vivid memory of a scene on the beach at Laguna Hills in California. On one windy afternoon, on my "coffee break" from a workshop I was conducting nearby, I saw a small boy of about four years of age, walking along and sobbing at the cold wind, and complaining to his father. His father turned around, saying something about "men don't cry," and slapped his son's face very hard several times, finally knocking the boy to the ground.
Understanding the father's righteous anger at his unmanly child, and his inner need to punish when seeing the world as he did, I still found it very difficult to keep from going up and protecting the child, perhaps hitting the parent, who seemed to me, from the way I saw the world, to be doing an outrageous thing. I felt incapacitated by my awareness of the dilemma in me, my strong polar feelings, and my caughtness in the midst of my own unresolved beliefs. Empathy and non-action. Rooted in polarity.
......I get caught up in this dilemma and polarity when I read about child abuse, preparation for war, active discrimination against women and blacks, the helplessness of the unemployed, and a variety of other "evils" that exist in our world. About equally, I have an "understanding" of the reactive defensiveness and pain in people that are led to murder or punish. I feel a strong compassion for these people that is at least as strong as my compassion for the people who are abused.
My speech professor in college used to say, often, that "whenever someone laughs there is someone hurting and in pain." He was aware of the hostile side of humor. I am too. But there is a gentle, warm, and caring aspect to comedy that is divine and healing. In the past, it has sometimes been difficult for me to see the lightheartedness in pain and tragedy, particularly in relation to myself. Ability to see the restorative qualities of humor is increased by the ability to make a perceptual shift, to create a new perspective.
Sacredness and purity. I sometimes find myself caught up in a deep anger towards people who seem to be evil in intent and action, and, at the same time, feel a deep compassion for people who are hurting so bad inside that they feel they must punish the world in some way.
I have a vivid memory of a scene on the beach at Laguna Hills in California. On one windy afternoon, on my "coffee break" from a workshop I was conducting nearby, I saw a small boy of about four years of age, walking along and sobbing at the cold wind, and complaining to his father. His father turned around, saying something about "men don't cry," and slapped his son's face very hard several times, finally knocking the boy to the ground.
Understanding the father's righteous anger at his unmanly child, and his inner need to punish when seeing the world as he did, I still found it very difficult to keep from going up and protecting the child, perhaps hitting the parent, who seemed to me, from the way I saw the world, to be doing an outrageous thing. I felt incapacitated by my awareness of the dilemma in me, my strong polar feelings, and my caughtness in the midst of my own unresolved beliefs. Empathy and non-action. Rooted in polarity.
......I get caught up in this dilemma and polarity when I read about child abuse, preparation for war, active discrimination against women and blacks, the helplessness of the unemployed, and a variety of other "evils" that exist in our world. About equally, I have an "understanding" of the reactive defensiveness and pain in people that are led to murder or punish. I feel a strong compassion for these people that is at least as strong as my compassion for the people who are abused.
COLLABORATIVE LEARNING IS BETTER: 1 reasons and one bit of research
“…O! It drives all joy away;
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little
ones
spend the day,
In Sighing and Dismay.”
William Blake,”The School
Boy”
What you want Baby, I got What you need Do you know I got it? All I'm askin' Is
for a little respect"
Aretha Franklyn
16 Teaching is expensive; Collaborative learning is inexpensive
Why do managers who would not blink to authorize a multimillion dollar new technology infrastructure project find no budget for training departments? Because there are less tangible results for training and more difficulties to get everyone on board about it.
Even when money is spent on learning, organizations normally overspend on traditional teaching rather then on collaborative learning. That makes collaborative learning look like it’s not a good investment. If the old advertising saying: "I do not know which 50% of my budget is wasted" would apply to traditional teaching, would the number be higher or lower than 50% in your organization?
Organizations are more accustomed to spending on teaching. They are almost resigned to it and would rather spend their budgets on expensive teaching and invite “keynote speakers” than giving voice to the many internal experts or financing relatively inexpensive “learning space” retreats, “internal knowledge circles” meetings or simple off-site sessions for “project lessons learned".
Which one is easier: inviting "the expert" to talk or getting twenty managers away from their offices to talk about ways to improve their organization? While management-celebrities need no explaining, the second option, though inexpensive, is much harder to sell in its simplicity and possible far-reaching results.
A RESEARCH: COLLABORATIVE VS. COMPETITIVE LEARNING
A common observation is that people are unable to work productively together – in meetings, for example. With so many examples of group work as ineffective and conflict-ridden, how does collaborative learning make people suddenly work well in groups, become open to possibilities, and have fun? Why in a collaborative learning session do people suddenly interact more productively and are stimulated by the content?
Johnson and Johnson, the fathers of collaborative learning researched the subject and demonstrated that: Cooperative learning strategies work better than individualistic or competitive ones. The strategy and experience of Cooperative learning scores higher in the following areas:
Ability to motivate to learn more about the subject area being studied;
Ability to create of a positive attitudes toward both the subject area and the instructional experience;
Ability to work productively in a group and collaborative competencies;
Ability to understand how a situation appears to another person and how that person is reacting to it. (Called “cognitive and affective perspective-taking” with the opposite as egocentrism);
Ability to promote constructive socialization and expectations toward more rewarding, pleasant and enjoyable future interactions among students.***
***(Additionally to think critically and use higher reasoning strategies; to generate beliefs that one is personally
COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS Adriano Pianesi 2006
WARNING! If you think adults learn like children, please read on.
Children are natural learners and their readiness to learn is rooted in biological development. Adult learners need to take a break from “doing things” before they can get into the “learning mode”. Adult learners view learning as a solution to cope with something that is impacting their immediate circumstances. For adults, learning is often sought out as a way to solve a problem or to deal better with something new. As such adult learners are “problem-centered” and want to immediately apply new information or skills to current problems or situations.
Children have a limited experience base. Adult learners have a powerful resource for the learning process: their rich life experience; and they use it actively as they continuously relate new knowledge and information to previously learned information and experiences. Unfortuately adult learners are more set in their ways, and are much more likely to reject or explain away new information that contradicts their values, beliefs and opinions. Children in turn, are open to new information and will readily adjust their views.
Unlike adult learners – children do not deal with the anxiety of the “un-learning” process and the confusion before reconstructing new knowledge. Adult learners have pride and in a classroom environment not perceived as safe or supportive major issues of self-esteem and ego tend to degenerate into conflict. Adults perceive any lack of skills or knowledge as a gap to fill as quickly as possible to defend their acquired sense of professionalism and competence.
Children do not question the learning content importance. Adults have different ideas about what is important to learn and why.
Children can be easily segmented by age when they come from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, etc. Adults are very different from each other and are much harder to teach in a group as an individual entity.
Children have a limited experience base. Adult learners have a powerful resource for the learning process: their rich life experience; and they use it actively as they continuously relate new knowledge and information to previously learned information and experiences. Unfortuately adult learners are more set in their ways, and are much more likely to reject or explain away new information that contradicts their values, beliefs and opinions. Children in turn, are open to new information and will readily adjust their views.
Unlike adult learners – children do not deal with the anxiety of the “un-learning” process and the confusion before reconstructing new knowledge. Adult learners have pride and in a classroom environment not perceived as safe or supportive major issues of self-esteem and ego tend to degenerate into conflict. Adults perceive any lack of skills or knowledge as a gap to fill as quickly as possible to defend their acquired sense of professionalism and competence.
Children do not question the learning content importance. Adults have different ideas about what is important to learn and why.
Children can be easily segmented by age when they come from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, etc. Adults are very different from each other and are much harder to teach in a group as an individual entity.
Chapter 3 Overprogramming from I.Illich:Tools for Conviviality
6J (0196)
The balance of learning is determined by the ratio of two kinds of knowledge in a society. The first is a result of the creative action of people on their environment, and the second represents the result of man's "trivialization" by his manufactured milieu. Their first kind of knowledge is derived from the primary involvement of people with each other and from their use of convivial tools; the second accrues to them as a result of purposeful and programmed training to which they are subjected. Speaking the mother tongue is learned in the first way, while some pupils learn mathematics in the second. No sane person would say that speaking or walking or nursing a child is primarily the result of education, while competence in mathematics, ballet dancing, or painting usually is. 6J1 (0197)
The relation between what can be learned from ordinary living and what must be learned as a result of intentional teaching differs widely with place and time. It depends very much on rituals. All Muslims learn some Arabic as the result of prayer. This learning evolves from interaction in a context bounded by tradition. In much the same manner, peasants pick up the folk-lore of their region. Class and caste also generate opportunities to learn. The rich acquire "proper" table manners or accents and insist that these cannot be taught. The poor learn to fend in dignity where no education could teach the rich to survive. 6J2 (0198)
Crucial to how much anyone can learn on his own is the structure of his tools: the less they are convivial, the more they foster teaching. In limited and well-integrated tribes, knowledge is shared quite equally among most members. All people know most of what everybody knows. On a higher level of civilization, new tools are introduced; more people know more things, but not all know how to execute them equally well. Mastery of skill does not yet imply a monopoly of understanding. One can understand fully what a goldsmith does without being one oneself. Men do not have to be cooks to know how to prepare food. This combination of widely shared information and competence for using it is characteristic of a society in which convivial tools prevail. The techniques used are easily understood by observing the artisan at work, but the skills employed are complex and usually can be acquired only through lengthy and programmed apprenticeship. Total learning expands when the range of spontaneous learning widens along with access to an increasing number of taught skills and both liberty and discipline flower. This expansion of the balance of learning cannot go on forever; it is self-limiting. It can be optimized, but it cannot be forcibly extended. One reason is that man's life span is limited. Another-just as inexorable-is that the specialization of tools and the division of labor reinforce each other. When centralization and specialization grow beyond a certain point, they require highly programmed operators and clients. More of what each man must know is due to what another man has designed and has the power to force on him. 6J3 (0199)
The city child is born into an environment made up of systems that have a different meaning for their designers than for their clients. The inhabitant of the city is in touch with thousands of systems, but only peripherally with each. He knows how to operate the TV or the telephone, but their workings are hidden from him. Learning by primary experience is restricted to self-adjustment in the midst of packaged commodities. He feels less and less secure in doing his own thing. Cooking, courtesy, and sex become subject matters in which instruction is required. The balance of learning deteriorates: it is skewed in favor of "education." People know what they have been taught, but learn little from their own doing. People come to feel that they need "'education." 6J4 (0200)
Learning thus becomes a commodity, and, like any commodity that is marketed, it becomes scarce. The nature of this scarcity is hidden-at a high cost-by the many forms education takes. Education can be programmed preparation for life in the future in the form of packaged, serial instructions produced by schools, or it can be constant communication about ongoing life through the output of the media and through the instructions built into consumer goods. Sometimes these instructions are attached to the item and must be read. In more thoroughly designed goods, the shape, color, and provoked associations speak to the user about the way the item must be handled. Education can also become a periodic remedy for workers whose original training gets left behind by industrial innovation. When people become obsolete and need constantly to renew their educational security, when the accountant must be reprogrammed for each new generation of computers, then learning has indeed become scarce. Educator becomes the most vulnerable and confusing issue in the society. 6J5 (0201)
Everywhere the direct cost of training rises faster than the total output. This has been interpreted in either of two ways. One interpretation assumes that education is a means to a social end. From this perspective the capitalization of man through knowledge inputs is a necessary requirement for higher productivity. The disproportionate growth rate of the educational sector means total production is nearing an asymptote. To avoid this, ways must be found to increase the cost-benefit ratio in education. Schools will be the first victims of a drive for rationalization in the production of knowledge capital. In my opinion, this is unfortunate. Although the school is destructive and quite inefficient, its traditional character protects at least some rights of the pupil. Educators freed from the restraint of schools could be much more effective and deadly conditioners. 6J6 (0202)
The second interpretation starts from the opposite assumption. According to this view, education is the most valuable output of institutional growth. The transition to a stationary state in the production of goods and perhaps even of energy will usher in an explosive growth in the production of invisible commodities such as information, education, and fun. In this argument the marginal utility of education also decreases, but this is no reason to limit its production. Some economists go even further. In the name of a misnamed quality of life they want to put the breaks on the manufacturing sector when it interferes with the growth of the service sector, seemingly unaware of the stultifying effects of escalating treatments. In neither of these two views is a distinction made between learning by the use of convivial tools and learning through manipulation. Both views skew the balance of learning by increasing manipulative teaching and crushing autonomous questions. Those who treat education as a means for production and those who treat education as the supreme luxury product agree on the need for more education. They upset the balance of learning in favor of more teaching. They assume that a modern world is inevitably so alien that it has passed beyond the reach of people and can be known only by mystagogues and disciples. 6J7 (0203)
The transformation of learning into education paralyzes man's poetic ability, his power to endow the world with his personal meaning. Man will wither away just as much if he is deprived of nature, of his own work, or of his deep need to learn what he wants and not what others have planned that he should learn. The overdetermination of the physical environment renders it hostile. Radical monopoly makes people prisoners of welfare. Men overwhelmed by commodities are rendered impotent and in their rage either kill or die. The corruption of the balance of learning makes people into puppets of their tools. 6J8 (0204)
Poets and clowns have always risen up against the oppression of creative thought by dogma. They expose literal-mindedness with metaphor. They demonstrate the follies of seriousness in a framework of humor. Their intimate wonder dissolves certainties, banishes fears, and undoes paralysis. The prophet can denounce creeds and expose superstitions and mobilize persons to use their lights and wits. Poetry, intuition, and theory can offer intimations of the advance of dogma against wit that may lead to a revolution in awareness. Only the separation of Church and State, of compulsory knowledge from political action, can redress the balance of learning. The law has been used, and can be used again, to this purpose. The law has protected societies against the exaggerated claims of its priests, and can protect it against the claims of educators. Compulsory school attendance or other compulsory treatment is analogous to compulsory attendance at a religious ritual. The law can disestablish it. The law can be used against the rising cost of education, and against the use of education in the reproduction of a class society. 6J9 (0205)
To understand the rising cost of education, we must recognize two facts: first, that nonconvivial tools create educational side effects which at some point become intolerable and, second, that education which employs nonconvivial tools is economically unfeasible. The first recognition opens our eyes to the possibility of a society where work and leisure and politics would favor learning and that could function with less formal education; the second recognition permits us to set up educational arrangements that favor self-initiated, self-chosen learning, and that relegate programmed teaching to limited, clearly specified occasions. 6J10 (0206)
Throughout the world, highly capitalized tools require highly capitalized men. Following the Second World War, economic development penetrated even "backward" areas. Spot industrialization created an intense demand for schools to program people not only to operate but also to live with their new tools. The establishment of more schools in Malaysia or Brazil teaches people the accountant's view of the value of time, the bureaucrat's view of the value of promotion, the salesman's view of the value of increased consumption, and the union leader's view of the purpose of work. People are taught all this not by the teacher but by the curriculum hidden in the structure of school. It does not matter what the teacher teaches so long as the pupil has to attend hundreds of hours of age-specific assemblies to engage in a routine decreed by the curriculum and is graded according to his ability to submit to it. People learn that they acquire more value in the market if they spend more hours in class. They learn to value progressive consumption of curricula. They learn that whatever a major institution produces has value, even invisible things such as education or health. They learn to value grade advancement, passive submission, and even the standard misbehavior that teachers like to interpret as a sign of creativity. They learn disciplined competition for the favor of the bureaucrat who presides over their daily sessions, who is called their teacher as long as they are in class and their boss when they go to work. They learn to define themselves as holders of knowledge stock in the specialty in which they have made investments of their time. They learn to accept their place in society precisely in the class and career corresponding to the level at which they leave school and to the field of their academic specialization. 6J11 (0207)
Industrial jobs are arranged so that the better-schooled fit into the scarcer slots. Scarce jobs are defined as more productive, so people with less schooling are barred from access to the more desirable goods produced in the new industries. Industrially produced shoes, bags, clothes, frozen foods, and soft drinks drive off the market equivalent goods that had been convivially produced. As production becomes more centralized and more capital-intensive, the screening process performed by tax-supported schools not only costs more for those who get through it, but double-charges those who do not. 6J12 (0208)
Education becomes necessary not only to grade people for jobs but to upgrade them for consumption. As industrial output rises, it pushes the education system to exercise the social control necessary for its efficient use. The housing industry in Latin-American countries is a good example of the educational diseconomies produced by architects. All the major cities in such countries are surrounded by vast tracts of self-built favelas, barriadas, or poblac’ones. Components for new houses and utilities could be made very cheaply and designed for self-assembly. People could build more durable, more comfortable, and more sanitary dwellings, as well as learn about new materials and systems. But instead of supporting the ability of people to shape their own environment, the government deposits in these shantytowns public utilities designed for people who live in standard modern houses. The presence of a new school, a paved road, and a glass-and-steel police station defines the professionally built house as the functional unit, and stamps the self-built home a shanty. The law establishes this definition by refusing a building permit to people who cannot submit a plan signed by an architect. People are deprived of their ability to invest their own time with the power to produce use-value, and are compelled to work for wages and to exchange their earnings for industrially defined rented space. They are deprived also of the opportunity to learn while building. 6J13 (0209)
Industrial society demands that some people be taught before they can drive a truck and that other people be taught before they can build a house. Others must be taught how to live in apartment buildings. Teachers, social workers, and policemen cooperate to keep people who have low-paying or occasional jobs in houses they may not build or change. To accommodate more people on less land, Venezuela and Brazil experimented with high-rise tenements. First, the police had to dislodge people from their "slums" and resettle them in apartments. Then the social workers had to socialize tenants who lacked sufficient schooling to understand that pigs may not be raised on eleventh-floor balconies nor beans cultivated in their bathtubs. 6J14 (0210)
In New York people with less than twelve years of schooling are treated like cripples: they tend to be unemployable, and are controlled by social workers who decide for them how to live. The radical monopoly of overefficient tools exacts from society the increasing and costly conditioning of clients. Ford produces cars that can be repaired only by trained mechanics. Agriculture departments turn out high-yield crops that can be used only with the assistance of farm managers who have survived an expensive school race. The production of better health, higher speeds, or greater yields depends on more disciplined recipients. The real cost of these doubtful benefits is hidden by unloading much of them on the schools that produce social control. 6J15 (0211)
Pressure for more and better conditioning of people in the name of education has led schools over their second watershed. Planners make programs more varied and complex, but their marginal utility thereby declines. Compulsory attendance has been extended to the point that it now can be defined by teachers as independent study on the city streets, or as a field project supervised by the weavers of Teotitl‡n del Valle. 6J16 (0212)
Parallel with the growing pretensions of school, other agencies discovered their educational mission. Newspapers, television, and radio were no longer just media of communication. They were pressed into the service of socialization. Periodicals expanded to accommodate all fit news, which meant that a few professional journalists got vast readerships, while the majority was reduced to token representation in the ""Letters to the Editor" section. 6J17 (0213)
The industrial manufacture and marketing of knowledge reduce the access of people to convivial tools for self-initiated learning Witness the fate of the book. The book is the result of two major inventions that enormously extended the balance of learning: the alphabet and the printing press. Both techniques are almost ideally convivial. Almost anybody can learn to use them, and for his own purpose. They use cheap materials. People can take them or leave them as they wish. They are not easily controlled by third parties. Even the Soviet government cannot stop the samizdat circulation of subversive typescripts. 6J18 (0214)
The alphabet and the printing press have in principle deprofessionalized the recorded word. With the alphabet the merchant broke the monopoly of the priest over hieroglyphs. With cheap paper and pencil, and later with the typewriter and modern copying devices, a set of new techniques had in principle opened the era of nonprofessional, truly convivial, communication by record. The tape recorder and camera added new media to fully interactive communication. Yet the manipulative nature of institutions and schooling for the acceptance of manipulation have put these ideally convivial tools at the service of more one-way teaching. Schools train people in the use of constantly revised textbooks. They produce readers of instructions and of news. The per capita purchase of nontechnical books by high-school graduates declines with the increased percentage of people who finish high school. More books are written for the school-trained specialist, and the self-initiated reading of books declines. More people spend more time hooked on the curriculum defined by new principals: the publisher, the producer, and the program director. Every week they wait for Time. 6J19 (0215)
Even the library has become a component of a schooled world. As the library got "better," the book was further withdrawn from the handy bookshelf. The reference librarian placed himself between people and shelves; now he is being replaced by the computer. Putting the book into huge deposits and into the hands of computers, the New York Public Library has become so expensive to operate that it now opens only from ten to six weekdays and is open only partially on Saturdays. This means that its books have become the specialized tool of readers who live on a grant to stay away from work and school. 6J20 (0216)
At its best the library is the prototype of a convivial tool. Repositories for other learning tools can be organized on its model, expanding access to tapes, pictures, records, and very simple labs filled with the same scientific instruments with which most of the major breakthroughs of the last century were made. 6J21 (0217)
Manipulative teaching tools raise the cost of learning. Now we only ask what people have to learn and then invest in a means to teach them. We should learn to ask first what people need if they want to learn and provide these tools for them. Professional teachers laugh at the idea that people would learn more from random access to learning resources than they can be taught. In fact, they frequently cite as proof for their skepticism the declining use of libraries. They overlook the fact that libraries are little used because they have been organized as formidable teaching devices. Libraries are not used because people have been trained to demand that they be taught. Neither are contraceptives, and for analogous reasons we have to explore. 6J22 (0218)
People must learn to live within bounds. This cannot be taught. Survival depends on people learning fast what they cannot do. They must learn to abstain from unlimited progeny, consumption, and use. It is impossible to educate people for voluntary poverty or to manipulate them into self-control. It is impossible to teach joyful renunciation in a world totally structured for higher output and the illusion of declining costs. 6J23 (0219)
People must learn why and how to practice contraception. The reason is clear. Man has evolved in a small corner of the universe. His world is bounded by the resources of the ecosphere, and can accommodate only a limited number of people. Technology has transformed the characteristics of this niche. The ecosphere now accommodates a larger number of people, each less vitally adapted to the environment-each on the average having less space, less freedom to survive with simple means, fewer roots in tradition. The attempt to make a better environment has turned out to be as presumptuous as the attempt to create better health, education, or communication. As a result there are now more people, most of them less at home in the world. This large population can survive because of new tools. In turn, it spurs the search for even more powerful tools, and thereby demands more radical monopoly; this monopoly, in its turn, calls for more and more education. But, paradoxically, what people most need to learn, they cannot be taught or educated to do. If they are voluntarily to keep their numbers and consumption within bounds, they must learn to do so by living active and responsible lives, or they will perish-passive though well informed, frustrated yet resigned. Voluntary and therefore effective population control is impossible under conditions of radical monopoly and overprogramming. An efficient, specialized birth control program must fail in the same way that schools and hospitals fail. It can start with a futile attempt at effective seduction. It will logically escalate to enforced sterilization and abortion. Finally, it will provide a rationale for mega-deaths. 6J24 (0220)
Voluntary and effective contraception is now absolutely necessary. If such contraception is not practiced in the very near future, humanity is in danger of being crushed by its own size rather than by the power of its tools. But this universal practice cannot possibly be the result of some miracle tool. A new practice, inverse to the present, can only be the result of a new relationship between people and their tools. The universal practice of effective contraception is a necessary premise for the limitation of tools which I advocate. But equally, the psychological inversion that will accompany a limitation of tools is a premise for the convivial psychological pressure necessary for effective contraception. 6J25 (0221)
The devices needed for birth control are a paradigm for modern convivial tools. They incorporate science in instruments that can be handled by any reasonably prudent and well-apprenticed person. They provide new ways to engage in the millenary practice of contraception, sterilization, and abortion. They are cheap enough to be made universally available. They are made to fit alternate tasks, beliefs, and situations. They are obviously tools that structure the bodily relationship of each individual to himself and to others. To be effective, some must be used by every adult, and many of them must be used every day. Birth control is an immense task. It must be accomplished within one decade. It can be accomplished only in a convivial manner. It is ridiculous to try to control populations with tools which by their nature are convivial while conditioning the population by formal education to fit more effectively into an industrial and professional world. It is absurd to expect that Brazilian peasants can be taught to depend on doctors for injections and prescriptions, on lawyers for conflict resolution, and on teachers for learning to read, while asking them to use the condom on their own. But it is equally fanciful to expect that Indian doctors will allow illiterate but well-trained hospital assistants to compete with them in the per. formance of sterilizations. If the public realized that this delicate intervention could be equally or even more carefully performed by a layman whose attention, dexterity, and programming skills were refined in the weaving of saris, doctors would lose their monopoly on all interventions which are economically feasible for any majority of people. Professional taboos and industrial tools stand and fall together once truly rational, postindustrial tools are available. Only the convergent use of convivial tools in all significant areas of need-satisfaction can render their use in each sector truly effective. Only among convivially structured tools can people learn to use the new levels of power that modern technology can incorporate in them. 6J26 (0222)
The balance of learning is determined by the ratio of two kinds of knowledge in a society. The first is a result of the creative action of people on their environment, and the second represents the result of man's "trivialization" by his manufactured milieu. Their first kind of knowledge is derived from the primary involvement of people with each other and from their use of convivial tools; the second accrues to them as a result of purposeful and programmed training to which they are subjected. Speaking the mother tongue is learned in the first way, while some pupils learn mathematics in the second. No sane person would say that speaking or walking or nursing a child is primarily the result of education, while competence in mathematics, ballet dancing, or painting usually is. 6J1 (0197)
The relation between what can be learned from ordinary living and what must be learned as a result of intentional teaching differs widely with place and time. It depends very much on rituals. All Muslims learn some Arabic as the result of prayer. This learning evolves from interaction in a context bounded by tradition. In much the same manner, peasants pick up the folk-lore of their region. Class and caste also generate opportunities to learn. The rich acquire "proper" table manners or accents and insist that these cannot be taught. The poor learn to fend in dignity where no education could teach the rich to survive. 6J2 (0198)
Crucial to how much anyone can learn on his own is the structure of his tools: the less they are convivial, the more they foster teaching. In limited and well-integrated tribes, knowledge is shared quite equally among most members. All people know most of what everybody knows. On a higher level of civilization, new tools are introduced; more people know more things, but not all know how to execute them equally well. Mastery of skill does not yet imply a monopoly of understanding. One can understand fully what a goldsmith does without being one oneself. Men do not have to be cooks to know how to prepare food. This combination of widely shared information and competence for using it is characteristic of a society in which convivial tools prevail. The techniques used are easily understood by observing the artisan at work, but the skills employed are complex and usually can be acquired only through lengthy and programmed apprenticeship. Total learning expands when the range of spontaneous learning widens along with access to an increasing number of taught skills and both liberty and discipline flower. This expansion of the balance of learning cannot go on forever; it is self-limiting. It can be optimized, but it cannot be forcibly extended. One reason is that man's life span is limited. Another-just as inexorable-is that the specialization of tools and the division of labor reinforce each other. When centralization and specialization grow beyond a certain point, they require highly programmed operators and clients. More of what each man must know is due to what another man has designed and has the power to force on him. 6J3 (0199)
The city child is born into an environment made up of systems that have a different meaning for their designers than for their clients. The inhabitant of the city is in touch with thousands of systems, but only peripherally with each. He knows how to operate the TV or the telephone, but their workings are hidden from him. Learning by primary experience is restricted to self-adjustment in the midst of packaged commodities. He feels less and less secure in doing his own thing. Cooking, courtesy, and sex become subject matters in which instruction is required. The balance of learning deteriorates: it is skewed in favor of "education." People know what they have been taught, but learn little from their own doing. People come to feel that they need "'education." 6J4 (0200)
Learning thus becomes a commodity, and, like any commodity that is marketed, it becomes scarce. The nature of this scarcity is hidden-at a high cost-by the many forms education takes. Education can be programmed preparation for life in the future in the form of packaged, serial instructions produced by schools, or it can be constant communication about ongoing life through the output of the media and through the instructions built into consumer goods. Sometimes these instructions are attached to the item and must be read. In more thoroughly designed goods, the shape, color, and provoked associations speak to the user about the way the item must be handled. Education can also become a periodic remedy for workers whose original training gets left behind by industrial innovation. When people become obsolete and need constantly to renew their educational security, when the accountant must be reprogrammed for each new generation of computers, then learning has indeed become scarce. Educator becomes the most vulnerable and confusing issue in the society. 6J5 (0201)
Everywhere the direct cost of training rises faster than the total output. This has been interpreted in either of two ways. One interpretation assumes that education is a means to a social end. From this perspective the capitalization of man through knowledge inputs is a necessary requirement for higher productivity. The disproportionate growth rate of the educational sector means total production is nearing an asymptote. To avoid this, ways must be found to increase the cost-benefit ratio in education. Schools will be the first victims of a drive for rationalization in the production of knowledge capital. In my opinion, this is unfortunate. Although the school is destructive and quite inefficient, its traditional character protects at least some rights of the pupil. Educators freed from the restraint of schools could be much more effective and deadly conditioners. 6J6 (0202)
The second interpretation starts from the opposite assumption. According to this view, education is the most valuable output of institutional growth. The transition to a stationary state in the production of goods and perhaps even of energy will usher in an explosive growth in the production of invisible commodities such as information, education, and fun. In this argument the marginal utility of education also decreases, but this is no reason to limit its production. Some economists go even further. In the name of a misnamed quality of life they want to put the breaks on the manufacturing sector when it interferes with the growth of the service sector, seemingly unaware of the stultifying effects of escalating treatments. In neither of these two views is a distinction made between learning by the use of convivial tools and learning through manipulation. Both views skew the balance of learning by increasing manipulative teaching and crushing autonomous questions. Those who treat education as a means for production and those who treat education as the supreme luxury product agree on the need for more education. They upset the balance of learning in favor of more teaching. They assume that a modern world is inevitably so alien that it has passed beyond the reach of people and can be known only by mystagogues and disciples. 6J7 (0203)
The transformation of learning into education paralyzes man's poetic ability, his power to endow the world with his personal meaning. Man will wither away just as much if he is deprived of nature, of his own work, or of his deep need to learn what he wants and not what others have planned that he should learn. The overdetermination of the physical environment renders it hostile. Radical monopoly makes people prisoners of welfare. Men overwhelmed by commodities are rendered impotent and in their rage either kill or die. The corruption of the balance of learning makes people into puppets of their tools. 6J8 (0204)
Poets and clowns have always risen up against the oppression of creative thought by dogma. They expose literal-mindedness with metaphor. They demonstrate the follies of seriousness in a framework of humor. Their intimate wonder dissolves certainties, banishes fears, and undoes paralysis. The prophet can denounce creeds and expose superstitions and mobilize persons to use their lights and wits. Poetry, intuition, and theory can offer intimations of the advance of dogma against wit that may lead to a revolution in awareness. Only the separation of Church and State, of compulsory knowledge from political action, can redress the balance of learning. The law has been used, and can be used again, to this purpose. The law has protected societies against the exaggerated claims of its priests, and can protect it against the claims of educators. Compulsory school attendance or other compulsory treatment is analogous to compulsory attendance at a religious ritual. The law can disestablish it. The law can be used against the rising cost of education, and against the use of education in the reproduction of a class society. 6J9 (0205)
To understand the rising cost of education, we must recognize two facts: first, that nonconvivial tools create educational side effects which at some point become intolerable and, second, that education which employs nonconvivial tools is economically unfeasible. The first recognition opens our eyes to the possibility of a society where work and leisure and politics would favor learning and that could function with less formal education; the second recognition permits us to set up educational arrangements that favor self-initiated, self-chosen learning, and that relegate programmed teaching to limited, clearly specified occasions. 6J10 (0206)
Throughout the world, highly capitalized tools require highly capitalized men. Following the Second World War, economic development penetrated even "backward" areas. Spot industrialization created an intense demand for schools to program people not only to operate but also to live with their new tools. The establishment of more schools in Malaysia or Brazil teaches people the accountant's view of the value of time, the bureaucrat's view of the value of promotion, the salesman's view of the value of increased consumption, and the union leader's view of the purpose of work. People are taught all this not by the teacher but by the curriculum hidden in the structure of school. It does not matter what the teacher teaches so long as the pupil has to attend hundreds of hours of age-specific assemblies to engage in a routine decreed by the curriculum and is graded according to his ability to submit to it. People learn that they acquire more value in the market if they spend more hours in class. They learn to value progressive consumption of curricula. They learn that whatever a major institution produces has value, even invisible things such as education or health. They learn to value grade advancement, passive submission, and even the standard misbehavior that teachers like to interpret as a sign of creativity. They learn disciplined competition for the favor of the bureaucrat who presides over their daily sessions, who is called their teacher as long as they are in class and their boss when they go to work. They learn to define themselves as holders of knowledge stock in the specialty in which they have made investments of their time. They learn to accept their place in society precisely in the class and career corresponding to the level at which they leave school and to the field of their academic specialization. 6J11 (0207)
Industrial jobs are arranged so that the better-schooled fit into the scarcer slots. Scarce jobs are defined as more productive, so people with less schooling are barred from access to the more desirable goods produced in the new industries. Industrially produced shoes, bags, clothes, frozen foods, and soft drinks drive off the market equivalent goods that had been convivially produced. As production becomes more centralized and more capital-intensive, the screening process performed by tax-supported schools not only costs more for those who get through it, but double-charges those who do not. 6J12 (0208)
Education becomes necessary not only to grade people for jobs but to upgrade them for consumption. As industrial output rises, it pushes the education system to exercise the social control necessary for its efficient use. The housing industry in Latin-American countries is a good example of the educational diseconomies produced by architects. All the major cities in such countries are surrounded by vast tracts of self-built favelas, barriadas, or poblac’ones. Components for new houses and utilities could be made very cheaply and designed for self-assembly. People could build more durable, more comfortable, and more sanitary dwellings, as well as learn about new materials and systems. But instead of supporting the ability of people to shape their own environment, the government deposits in these shantytowns public utilities designed for people who live in standard modern houses. The presence of a new school, a paved road, and a glass-and-steel police station defines the professionally built house as the functional unit, and stamps the self-built home a shanty. The law establishes this definition by refusing a building permit to people who cannot submit a plan signed by an architect. People are deprived of their ability to invest their own time with the power to produce use-value, and are compelled to work for wages and to exchange their earnings for industrially defined rented space. They are deprived also of the opportunity to learn while building. 6J13 (0209)
Industrial society demands that some people be taught before they can drive a truck and that other people be taught before they can build a house. Others must be taught how to live in apartment buildings. Teachers, social workers, and policemen cooperate to keep people who have low-paying or occasional jobs in houses they may not build or change. To accommodate more people on less land, Venezuela and Brazil experimented with high-rise tenements. First, the police had to dislodge people from their "slums" and resettle them in apartments. Then the social workers had to socialize tenants who lacked sufficient schooling to understand that pigs may not be raised on eleventh-floor balconies nor beans cultivated in their bathtubs. 6J14 (0210)
In New York people with less than twelve years of schooling are treated like cripples: they tend to be unemployable, and are controlled by social workers who decide for them how to live. The radical monopoly of overefficient tools exacts from society the increasing and costly conditioning of clients. Ford produces cars that can be repaired only by trained mechanics. Agriculture departments turn out high-yield crops that can be used only with the assistance of farm managers who have survived an expensive school race. The production of better health, higher speeds, or greater yields depends on more disciplined recipients. The real cost of these doubtful benefits is hidden by unloading much of them on the schools that produce social control. 6J15 (0211)
Pressure for more and better conditioning of people in the name of education has led schools over their second watershed. Planners make programs more varied and complex, but their marginal utility thereby declines. Compulsory attendance has been extended to the point that it now can be defined by teachers as independent study on the city streets, or as a field project supervised by the weavers of Teotitl‡n del Valle. 6J16 (0212)
Parallel with the growing pretensions of school, other agencies discovered their educational mission. Newspapers, television, and radio were no longer just media of communication. They were pressed into the service of socialization. Periodicals expanded to accommodate all fit news, which meant that a few professional journalists got vast readerships, while the majority was reduced to token representation in the ""Letters to the Editor" section. 6J17 (0213)
The industrial manufacture and marketing of knowledge reduce the access of people to convivial tools for self-initiated learning Witness the fate of the book. The book is the result of two major inventions that enormously extended the balance of learning: the alphabet and the printing press. Both techniques are almost ideally convivial. Almost anybody can learn to use them, and for his own purpose. They use cheap materials. People can take them or leave them as they wish. They are not easily controlled by third parties. Even the Soviet government cannot stop the samizdat circulation of subversive typescripts. 6J18 (0214)
The alphabet and the printing press have in principle deprofessionalized the recorded word. With the alphabet the merchant broke the monopoly of the priest over hieroglyphs. With cheap paper and pencil, and later with the typewriter and modern copying devices, a set of new techniques had in principle opened the era of nonprofessional, truly convivial, communication by record. The tape recorder and camera added new media to fully interactive communication. Yet the manipulative nature of institutions and schooling for the acceptance of manipulation have put these ideally convivial tools at the service of more one-way teaching. Schools train people in the use of constantly revised textbooks. They produce readers of instructions and of news. The per capita purchase of nontechnical books by high-school graduates declines with the increased percentage of people who finish high school. More books are written for the school-trained specialist, and the self-initiated reading of books declines. More people spend more time hooked on the curriculum defined by new principals: the publisher, the producer, and the program director. Every week they wait for Time. 6J19 (0215)
Even the library has become a component of a schooled world. As the library got "better," the book was further withdrawn from the handy bookshelf. The reference librarian placed himself between people and shelves; now he is being replaced by the computer. Putting the book into huge deposits and into the hands of computers, the New York Public Library has become so expensive to operate that it now opens only from ten to six weekdays and is open only partially on Saturdays. This means that its books have become the specialized tool of readers who live on a grant to stay away from work and school. 6J20 (0216)
At its best the library is the prototype of a convivial tool. Repositories for other learning tools can be organized on its model, expanding access to tapes, pictures, records, and very simple labs filled with the same scientific instruments with which most of the major breakthroughs of the last century were made. 6J21 (0217)
Manipulative teaching tools raise the cost of learning. Now we only ask what people have to learn and then invest in a means to teach them. We should learn to ask first what people need if they want to learn and provide these tools for them. Professional teachers laugh at the idea that people would learn more from random access to learning resources than they can be taught. In fact, they frequently cite as proof for their skepticism the declining use of libraries. They overlook the fact that libraries are little used because they have been organized as formidable teaching devices. Libraries are not used because people have been trained to demand that they be taught. Neither are contraceptives, and for analogous reasons we have to explore. 6J22 (0218)
People must learn to live within bounds. This cannot be taught. Survival depends on people learning fast what they cannot do. They must learn to abstain from unlimited progeny, consumption, and use. It is impossible to educate people for voluntary poverty or to manipulate them into self-control. It is impossible to teach joyful renunciation in a world totally structured for higher output and the illusion of declining costs. 6J23 (0219)
People must learn why and how to practice contraception. The reason is clear. Man has evolved in a small corner of the universe. His world is bounded by the resources of the ecosphere, and can accommodate only a limited number of people. Technology has transformed the characteristics of this niche. The ecosphere now accommodates a larger number of people, each less vitally adapted to the environment-each on the average having less space, less freedom to survive with simple means, fewer roots in tradition. The attempt to make a better environment has turned out to be as presumptuous as the attempt to create better health, education, or communication. As a result there are now more people, most of them less at home in the world. This large population can survive because of new tools. In turn, it spurs the search for even more powerful tools, and thereby demands more radical monopoly; this monopoly, in its turn, calls for more and more education. But, paradoxically, what people most need to learn, they cannot be taught or educated to do. If they are voluntarily to keep their numbers and consumption within bounds, they must learn to do so by living active and responsible lives, or they will perish-passive though well informed, frustrated yet resigned. Voluntary and therefore effective population control is impossible under conditions of radical monopoly and overprogramming. An efficient, specialized birth control program must fail in the same way that schools and hospitals fail. It can start with a futile attempt at effective seduction. It will logically escalate to enforced sterilization and abortion. Finally, it will provide a rationale for mega-deaths. 6J24 (0220)
Voluntary and effective contraception is now absolutely necessary. If such contraception is not practiced in the very near future, humanity is in danger of being crushed by its own size rather than by the power of its tools. But this universal practice cannot possibly be the result of some miracle tool. A new practice, inverse to the present, can only be the result of a new relationship between people and their tools. The universal practice of effective contraception is a necessary premise for the limitation of tools which I advocate. But equally, the psychological inversion that will accompany a limitation of tools is a premise for the convivial psychological pressure necessary for effective contraception. 6J25 (0221)
The devices needed for birth control are a paradigm for modern convivial tools. They incorporate science in instruments that can be handled by any reasonably prudent and well-apprenticed person. They provide new ways to engage in the millenary practice of contraception, sterilization, and abortion. They are cheap enough to be made universally available. They are made to fit alternate tasks, beliefs, and situations. They are obviously tools that structure the bodily relationship of each individual to himself and to others. To be effective, some must be used by every adult, and many of them must be used every day. Birth control is an immense task. It must be accomplished within one decade. It can be accomplished only in a convivial manner. It is ridiculous to try to control populations with tools which by their nature are convivial while conditioning the population by formal education to fit more effectively into an industrial and professional world. It is absurd to expect that Brazilian peasants can be taught to depend on doctors for injections and prescriptions, on lawyers for conflict resolution, and on teachers for learning to read, while asking them to use the condom on their own. But it is equally fanciful to expect that Indian doctors will allow illiterate but well-trained hospital assistants to compete with them in the per. formance of sterilizations. If the public realized that this delicate intervention could be equally or even more carefully performed by a layman whose attention, dexterity, and programming skills were refined in the weaving of saris, doctors would lose their monopoly on all interventions which are economically feasible for any majority of people. Professional taboos and industrial tools stand and fall together once truly rational, postindustrial tools are available. Only the convergent use of convivial tools in all significant areas of need-satisfaction can render their use in each sector truly effective. Only among convivially structured tools can people learn to use the new levels of power that modern technology can incorporate in them. 6J26 (0222)
Growth as an Intimate Relationship between Learning and Unlearning
By Munir Fasheh, Arab Education Forum mfasheh@yahoo.com
A common fear I have in starting with words (for example with unlearning) is that words might become the reference, might become more real than reality as we experience it. My fear is that I might slip back into the habit I acquired in schools and universities and describe reality and my experiences, and interpret them, in a way that would fit the words rather than the other way around. In other words, my fear in starting with words is the tendency of using and applying the words in a mechanical way; i.e., to be used by the words rather than to use them. My guess is that many of the words I use today, and which I feel are full of life, would not be as powerful and meaningful as they are for me today, if I had started with them. If I have to summarise my struggle with the dominant system of knowledge, I would summarise it by saying that it has been a struggle to unlearn having words as my reference and learn to have life as my reference. My starting point has been shifting to my surroundings and experiences and being attentive and contemplative of them. By "walking this path," I came across words that I found appropriate to what I was experiencing, and to which I gave meanings that were in harmony with my experiences, reflections, convictions and circumstances. In other words, meanings grow from an existential soil (daily living, cultural, and social), and get nurtured by it, just like plants and humans grow and get nurtured from the surrounding earth soil. It is hard for me to think of growth with no soil nurturing it. Growth never starts with concepts. They might enhance it at a later stage.
What I expressed above came to my mind as I started writing about learning and unlearning (this is the first time I write about unlearning as a main theme). My mind and imagination, as usual, wandered back to dig into my life and look for instances where the word "unlearning" took place in some way, and try to find appropriate meanings for it. I quickly realized that I had diverse experiences, which naturally gave different meanings to "unlearning." Some meanings reflected uprooting people from the natural soils in which they live, while other meanings re-nurtured their connectedness to that soil.
A lot of the unlearning of the first kind is what takes place as children enter schools. Every child enters school with a lot of "knowledge" and understanding, which is anchored in the soil of daily living, which naturally includes the cultural social soil. In school, that "knowledge" and understanding have to be unlearned, ridiculed, and forgotten, and gradually be replaced by "plastic" information and knowledge, in the sense of having no roots in the "soils" in which the child lives. Such knowledge is like plastic flowers, which can be bought ready made and brought into the house and put in a vase, and become instantly part of the decoration in the house. What is worse is that they often replace pots with real soil, real flowers and real smell. Plastic flowers are much easier to acquire and much easier to take care of. Similarly, students in schools "buy" ready knowledge, which becomes instantly part of their decorative knowledge. If we teach, for example, the formula for gravity to students, they can instantly claim that they know it and can start using it! Plastic knowledge is much easier to acquire, use, and be tested on. In this sense, technical knowledge (which usually has no roots in any soil) is much easier to acquire than life-knowledge. To diagnose a child as "depressed," for example, and to prescribe an "appropriate" treatment, is much easier than creating an environment that helps change her/his mood; much easier than creating a happy environment in a home where children grow healthily. The second type of "knowledge" is something that cannot be learned from textbooks and professionals, but through living, loving, caring, and interacting with wise people.
A main perception, which I acquired at a young age (probably like others who have gone through schools and universities), is that we need knowledge and science in order to replace the "wrong" conceptions we have about the world. This may partially be true, but to leave out "knowledge" that children acquire through living (and which they come to school with) is either a sign of ignorance or lack of innocence. I don’t remember one instance where other systems of knowing (other than the one in official curricula, regardless as to whether they are decided by governments or professionals) were considered legitimate or even discussed, nor do I remember that what I came to school with was ever mentioned and considered part of knowledge or the curriculum. Professionals and officials decide the curriculum; all what students have to do is to learn what is in it, and then prove that they learned it through passing tests that are mainly verbal. No serious questions concerning the curriculum are allowed, anywhere, if they touch deeper issues, such as "Doesn’t having a curriculum hinder learning at a deeper level? Doesn’t it detach children from life? How can we justify the same content and same tests to students who are so different?" and so on and so forth. The fact that real learning takes place through interactions, experimentations, articulations, and discussions with life and with real people is usually left out. In their place, ready and polished answers, techniques, and theories are presented as the main acceptable knowledge.
The most striking experience in my life that combined learning and unlearning in an intimate and healthy way is one that I never get tired of mentioning and describing (because it never ceases to be inspiring for me) is the "discovery" of my illiterate mother’s math and knowledge. She continues to be an invincible treasure for me every time I find myself in a situation where I need to look at things from a radically different worldview. It is a fascinating story about how learning and unlearning were intertwined as integral parts of my growth and understanding. Since then, I have been busy learning in a way that included unlearning much of what I have learned in schools and universities. I have been busy, for example, healing myself from (i.e. unlearning) the assumption that thinking is superior or higher than living or doing. At the same time, I have been learning how to be attentive to my surroundings and faithful to my experiences and inner voice, and how to use words rather than be used by them.
These became main guiding principles for me in the learning-unlearning process. It is very hard for me today to think of a situation where I would learn something meaningful without unlearning being part of it, or of a situation where I am unlearning something without learning being part of it. In this sense, learning and unlearning are as intimate as the growth and death of cells in a living body. It is hard to think of a healthy body that grows without cells forming and cells dying at the same time. Similarly with growth in understanding: it embodies both learning and unlearning.
The ‘discovery’ of my mother’s knowledge ‘forced’ me to unlearn meanings that I acquired for words such as math, knowledge, literate, and illiterate, and to acquire new meanings concerning them. Unlearning ready meanings and learning new meanings represent, for me, a most crucial factor in growing. Regaining the importance, ability and habit of independent investigation of meanings of words that I hear, read and use has become increasingly a central theme in my thinking and work, and in my living in general. I say "regaining" because it has been part of the culture and civilization I was nurtured by, a part that is completely ignored by educational systems in the region. One of the fundamental and most inspiring ideas of the Islamic culture is al-ijtihad, which is the right and duty of every Muslim to put an effort in understanding the Quran. That is, meanings are never final and no person has absolute authority in terms of meanings. In my teaching and work, I have tried to embody this principle in all areas of growth and understanding. This independent investigation of meaning naturally embodies unlearning and learning as necessary ingredients in any healthy growth: unlearning ready meanings and terms, which we acquire through education, mass media, and other institutions, and learning (actually constructing) new meanings that are rooted in, and spring out from experiences, convictions, culture, and surroundings.
In addition to helping a person or a community grow, investigating and constructing meaning is most crucial to freedom, creativity, and being truthful as well as in building knowledge and understanding. In a healthy mind, the person (whether aware of it or not) is constantly forming and creating new words, new expressions, and new meanings and constantly seeing new relationships among ideas and meanings. It is a healthy mind that feels free and confident to discard dominant terms, even if experts and professionals use them (but do not make sense to the person), and feels free to radically change meanings to be more in harmony with the one’s experiences, convictions and realities. An education that does not leave room for people to independently investigate meanings is a questionable enterprise.
The realization of my "illiterate" mother’s knowledge helped me unlearn several dominant assumptions and myths and, at the same time, helped me learn new "myths" and convictions. To describe my mother as illiterate and me as literate, in some absolute sense, reflects a narrow and distorted view of the real world and of reality. [It is like describing a person who has no car as "car-less," forgetting or ignoring that s/he has legs, and focusing instead on one way of moving as being superior.] I unlearned the myth that a literate person is better than an illiterate person, that an illiterate person is not a full human being, that s/he is ignorant, that by becoming literate a person would be magically transformed and poverty and ignorance would be wiped out, that a literate person is freer than an illiterate person, and so on. On the other hand, it helped me formulate a conviction that became central in my thinking and work: that every person is a source of meaning, knowledge and understanding, and every person is logical. Becoming aware of my mother’s ways of living and knowing helped me unlearn hypocrisies that I learned in schools and universities (such as saying what teachers and professors expected me to say in order to pass their tests), and helped me learn again what I practiced as a child: to say what I mean and mean what I say (a statement that is alien to institutional logic and to career-oriented professionals). It took me several years before I was able to admit my new convictions publicly. I was simply risking my career, prestige and reputation.
I started with the idea that a big problem in being literate is substituting words for life, and considering concepts more real than reality. I struggled a lot to unlearn that concepts are more real than reality, to free myself from the hegemony and tyranny of words, from the meanings and connotations that were propagated with the words, often by design, since the values that govern the world today are winning and control. I unlearned that science and technology are neutral, objective and basically good. The catastrophes that the world seem to be marching fast towards are created mainly by literate people, fully armed with science and technology, such as polluting air, land and ocean; controlling minds; and creating tools of total destruction. Nothing, for example, has done as much irreversible harm, in terms of polluting the human body and nature, as the science of chemistry during the past 100 years!
I referred in this reflection to two types of unlearning: one that ignores what people learn from life (like what happens to children as they enter schools), and another that is related to healthy and natural growth (as opposed to cancerous growth). I find the word "growth" to be very appropriate in describing the intimate relationship between learning and unlearning. In the life of a community as in the life of a person, where there is no growth there is decay. Growth does not refer to unfolding knowledge that is already there. New understanding does not mean adding, or even discovering, something that one was not aware of before. Growth and understanding refer to new consciousness of knowledge itself, to new perception of self, to new realization that one is a co-author of meaning and a co-partner, co-creator and co-builder of life and reality. Growth and understanding refer to constant newness, not in the sense of bringing something ready from outside, but of inventing constantly new words, new meanings, new perceptions, new relationships, and new consciousness.
This implies freedom and dynamism at a level different from what they usually refer to. It often requires breaking the idols and boundaries that are set by professionals, institutions, and conventional wisdom. It is a manifestation of the integrity of creation.
A common fear I have in starting with words (for example with unlearning) is that words might become the reference, might become more real than reality as we experience it. My fear is that I might slip back into the habit I acquired in schools and universities and describe reality and my experiences, and interpret them, in a way that would fit the words rather than the other way around. In other words, my fear in starting with words is the tendency of using and applying the words in a mechanical way; i.e., to be used by the words rather than to use them. My guess is that many of the words I use today, and which I feel are full of life, would not be as powerful and meaningful as they are for me today, if I had started with them. If I have to summarise my struggle with the dominant system of knowledge, I would summarise it by saying that it has been a struggle to unlearn having words as my reference and learn to have life as my reference. My starting point has been shifting to my surroundings and experiences and being attentive and contemplative of them. By "walking this path," I came across words that I found appropriate to what I was experiencing, and to which I gave meanings that were in harmony with my experiences, reflections, convictions and circumstances. In other words, meanings grow from an existential soil (daily living, cultural, and social), and get nurtured by it, just like plants and humans grow and get nurtured from the surrounding earth soil. It is hard for me to think of growth with no soil nurturing it. Growth never starts with concepts. They might enhance it at a later stage.
What I expressed above came to my mind as I started writing about learning and unlearning (this is the first time I write about unlearning as a main theme). My mind and imagination, as usual, wandered back to dig into my life and look for instances where the word "unlearning" took place in some way, and try to find appropriate meanings for it. I quickly realized that I had diverse experiences, which naturally gave different meanings to "unlearning." Some meanings reflected uprooting people from the natural soils in which they live, while other meanings re-nurtured their connectedness to that soil.
A lot of the unlearning of the first kind is what takes place as children enter schools. Every child enters school with a lot of "knowledge" and understanding, which is anchored in the soil of daily living, which naturally includes the cultural social soil. In school, that "knowledge" and understanding have to be unlearned, ridiculed, and forgotten, and gradually be replaced by "plastic" information and knowledge, in the sense of having no roots in the "soils" in which the child lives. Such knowledge is like plastic flowers, which can be bought ready made and brought into the house and put in a vase, and become instantly part of the decoration in the house. What is worse is that they often replace pots with real soil, real flowers and real smell. Plastic flowers are much easier to acquire and much easier to take care of. Similarly, students in schools "buy" ready knowledge, which becomes instantly part of their decorative knowledge. If we teach, for example, the formula for gravity to students, they can instantly claim that they know it and can start using it! Plastic knowledge is much easier to acquire, use, and be tested on. In this sense, technical knowledge (which usually has no roots in any soil) is much easier to acquire than life-knowledge. To diagnose a child as "depressed," for example, and to prescribe an "appropriate" treatment, is much easier than creating an environment that helps change her/his mood; much easier than creating a happy environment in a home where children grow healthily. The second type of "knowledge" is something that cannot be learned from textbooks and professionals, but through living, loving, caring, and interacting with wise people.
A main perception, which I acquired at a young age (probably like others who have gone through schools and universities), is that we need knowledge and science in order to replace the "wrong" conceptions we have about the world. This may partially be true, but to leave out "knowledge" that children acquire through living (and which they come to school with) is either a sign of ignorance or lack of innocence. I don’t remember one instance where other systems of knowing (other than the one in official curricula, regardless as to whether they are decided by governments or professionals) were considered legitimate or even discussed, nor do I remember that what I came to school with was ever mentioned and considered part of knowledge or the curriculum. Professionals and officials decide the curriculum; all what students have to do is to learn what is in it, and then prove that they learned it through passing tests that are mainly verbal. No serious questions concerning the curriculum are allowed, anywhere, if they touch deeper issues, such as "Doesn’t having a curriculum hinder learning at a deeper level? Doesn’t it detach children from life? How can we justify the same content and same tests to students who are so different?" and so on and so forth. The fact that real learning takes place through interactions, experimentations, articulations, and discussions with life and with real people is usually left out. In their place, ready and polished answers, techniques, and theories are presented as the main acceptable knowledge.
The most striking experience in my life that combined learning and unlearning in an intimate and healthy way is one that I never get tired of mentioning and describing (because it never ceases to be inspiring for me) is the "discovery" of my illiterate mother’s math and knowledge. She continues to be an invincible treasure for me every time I find myself in a situation where I need to look at things from a radically different worldview. It is a fascinating story about how learning and unlearning were intertwined as integral parts of my growth and understanding. Since then, I have been busy learning in a way that included unlearning much of what I have learned in schools and universities. I have been busy, for example, healing myself from (i.e. unlearning) the assumption that thinking is superior or higher than living or doing. At the same time, I have been learning how to be attentive to my surroundings and faithful to my experiences and inner voice, and how to use words rather than be used by them.
These became main guiding principles for me in the learning-unlearning process. It is very hard for me today to think of a situation where I would learn something meaningful without unlearning being part of it, or of a situation where I am unlearning something without learning being part of it. In this sense, learning and unlearning are as intimate as the growth and death of cells in a living body. It is hard to think of a healthy body that grows without cells forming and cells dying at the same time. Similarly with growth in understanding: it embodies both learning and unlearning.
The ‘discovery’ of my mother’s knowledge ‘forced’ me to unlearn meanings that I acquired for words such as math, knowledge, literate, and illiterate, and to acquire new meanings concerning them. Unlearning ready meanings and learning new meanings represent, for me, a most crucial factor in growing. Regaining the importance, ability and habit of independent investigation of meanings of words that I hear, read and use has become increasingly a central theme in my thinking and work, and in my living in general. I say "regaining" because it has been part of the culture and civilization I was nurtured by, a part that is completely ignored by educational systems in the region. One of the fundamental and most inspiring ideas of the Islamic culture is al-ijtihad, which is the right and duty of every Muslim to put an effort in understanding the Quran. That is, meanings are never final and no person has absolute authority in terms of meanings. In my teaching and work, I have tried to embody this principle in all areas of growth and understanding. This independent investigation of meaning naturally embodies unlearning and learning as necessary ingredients in any healthy growth: unlearning ready meanings and terms, which we acquire through education, mass media, and other institutions, and learning (actually constructing) new meanings that are rooted in, and spring out from experiences, convictions, culture, and surroundings.
In addition to helping a person or a community grow, investigating and constructing meaning is most crucial to freedom, creativity, and being truthful as well as in building knowledge and understanding. In a healthy mind, the person (whether aware of it or not) is constantly forming and creating new words, new expressions, and new meanings and constantly seeing new relationships among ideas and meanings. It is a healthy mind that feels free and confident to discard dominant terms, even if experts and professionals use them (but do not make sense to the person), and feels free to radically change meanings to be more in harmony with the one’s experiences, convictions and realities. An education that does not leave room for people to independently investigate meanings is a questionable enterprise.
The realization of my "illiterate" mother’s knowledge helped me unlearn several dominant assumptions and myths and, at the same time, helped me learn new "myths" and convictions. To describe my mother as illiterate and me as literate, in some absolute sense, reflects a narrow and distorted view of the real world and of reality. [It is like describing a person who has no car as "car-less," forgetting or ignoring that s/he has legs, and focusing instead on one way of moving as being superior.] I unlearned the myth that a literate person is better than an illiterate person, that an illiterate person is not a full human being, that s/he is ignorant, that by becoming literate a person would be magically transformed and poverty and ignorance would be wiped out, that a literate person is freer than an illiterate person, and so on. On the other hand, it helped me formulate a conviction that became central in my thinking and work: that every person is a source of meaning, knowledge and understanding, and every person is logical. Becoming aware of my mother’s ways of living and knowing helped me unlearn hypocrisies that I learned in schools and universities (such as saying what teachers and professors expected me to say in order to pass their tests), and helped me learn again what I practiced as a child: to say what I mean and mean what I say (a statement that is alien to institutional logic and to career-oriented professionals). It took me several years before I was able to admit my new convictions publicly. I was simply risking my career, prestige and reputation.
I started with the idea that a big problem in being literate is substituting words for life, and considering concepts more real than reality. I struggled a lot to unlearn that concepts are more real than reality, to free myself from the hegemony and tyranny of words, from the meanings and connotations that were propagated with the words, often by design, since the values that govern the world today are winning and control. I unlearned that science and technology are neutral, objective and basically good. The catastrophes that the world seem to be marching fast towards are created mainly by literate people, fully armed with science and technology, such as polluting air, land and ocean; controlling minds; and creating tools of total destruction. Nothing, for example, has done as much irreversible harm, in terms of polluting the human body and nature, as the science of chemistry during the past 100 years!
I referred in this reflection to two types of unlearning: one that ignores what people learn from life (like what happens to children as they enter schools), and another that is related to healthy and natural growth (as opposed to cancerous growth). I find the word "growth" to be very appropriate in describing the intimate relationship between learning and unlearning. In the life of a community as in the life of a person, where there is no growth there is decay. Growth does not refer to unfolding knowledge that is already there. New understanding does not mean adding, or even discovering, something that one was not aware of before. Growth and understanding refer to new consciousness of knowledge itself, to new perception of self, to new realization that one is a co-author of meaning and a co-partner, co-creator and co-builder of life and reality. Growth and understanding refer to constant newness, not in the sense of bringing something ready from outside, but of inventing constantly new words, new meanings, new perceptions, new relationships, and new consciousness.
This implies freedom and dynamism at a level different from what they usually refer to. It often requires breaking the idols and boundaries that are set by professionals, institutions, and conventional wisdom. It is a manifestation of the integrity of creation.
Teaching is old-fashioned; Collaborative learning is state-of-the-art
We have had developments in the art of teaching adults. We have new research and ideas. So then why are we teaching people the same way we have always done? The learning research of the last 50 years keeps repeating: adults are not to be taught as kids, interactivity and learner autonomy improves learning. Why on earth are we still in the Stone Age when it comes to teaching?
Let’s be honest here: today lecturing is still the prevalent way of having adults learn. The most we can get is “interactive” lectures, which are still one-way communication based on the assumptions of an old model. When will we throw this old-fashioned model away and start from scratch? Why do we prize the latest technology for computers but despise it for adult learning and human interactions?
I am often exposed to the old-fashioned ritual of training that is still prevalent today. It does not work, at least as well as it could. Collaborative learning uses the power of a group to bring about learning. It acknowledges the latest research on adult learning that favors handing over the stick of the learning process to the learners themselves. Revolutionary? Hardly since the ideas and its supporting research has been around fro half a century. Hard to implement? Evidently.
Asking "Are there any questions?” at the end of a lecture does not change the dynamics. Why do you think people hardly ask any questions after this tip of the hat to collaboration? They have been shown throughout the lecture that their input does not count, so they do not give it. Traditional teaching is about having answers for questions. Collaborative Learning is about questioning reality and the answers that you have. Together.
Let’s be honest here: today lecturing is still the prevalent way of having adults learn. The most we can get is “interactive” lectures, which are still one-way communication based on the assumptions of an old model. When will we throw this old-fashioned model away and start from scratch? Why do we prize the latest technology for computers but despise it for adult learning and human interactions?
I am often exposed to the old-fashioned ritual of training that is still prevalent today. It does not work, at least as well as it could. Collaborative learning uses the power of a group to bring about learning. It acknowledges the latest research on adult learning that favors handing over the stick of the learning process to the learners themselves. Revolutionary? Hardly since the ideas and its supporting research has been around fro half a century. Hard to implement? Evidently.
Asking "Are there any questions?” at the end of a lecture does not change the dynamics. Why do you think people hardly ask any questions after this tip of the hat to collaboration? They have been shown throughout the lecture that their input does not count, so they do not give it. Traditional teaching is about having answers for questions. Collaborative Learning is about questioning reality and the answers that you have. Together.
Can trainers learn from Rosa Parks?
As I waited for 6 hours to pay my respect, I started thinking…
_______________________________________________________
Parks showed power of one
"Her feet were not tired. At least, no more so than usual.She always hated that legend so let us, in this, the week of her death at age 92, set the record straight. And while we're at it, let's correct another misconception: It's not precisely true that she refused to give up her seat to a white man. The seats next to her and across the aisle were empty, vacated by blacks who had heeded the bus driver's command to get up. So there were places for the white man to sit.But under the segregation statutes of Montgomery, Ala., no white man was expected to suffer the indignity of sitting next to a black woman. So driver J.F. Blake asked again. And Rosa Parks, this soft-spoken 42-year-old department store seamstress just trying to get home from work, gave him her answer again. She told him no.Her feet were not tired. Her soul was exhausted.On Dec. 1, it will be 50 years since that drama played out. Fifty years since police took her away. Fifty years since black Montgomery protested by boycotting buses. Fifty years since community leaders tapped as their leader the boyish-looking new preacher, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.That moment in Court Square was the birthplace of the 13-year epoch called the Civil Rights Movement. You could make a compelling argument it also spawned the modern world.None of which Rosa Parks could have foreseen that December evening. All she knew was that she was tired, sick of acquiescing, accommodating, accepting foolish white laws and white people who said she wasn't good enough to occupy a bus seat. Something had gotten into her that wouldn't let her go along any more, something that turned a lifetime of yes into an electric moment of no… “
(By Leonard Pitts)
_______________________________________________
Rosa decided at one point that “no” was the right answer. It was because the limit was passed. The “no” was in reality a “yes” to those values that the civil rights movement fought so hard for.
What does this have to do with trainers? In the last few years, the ethics responsibilities of business leaders have grown significantly beyond compliance to include the mandate to build ethical cultures in organizations, where trust can grow and thrive and where employees themselves become the security network for corporate ethics. Ethics is about decision. “No” is a decision we should make sometimes.
Are trainers people of integrity? A person of integrity is one who is consistent and congruent, who “does the right thing,” even when doing so is challenging. Integrity for trainers means walking the talk, maintaining a learning attitude, and standing behind every suggestion, recommendation, and prescribed action. As hype and exaggeration permeates the training industry at a disheartening level, trainers that can say no offer a steadfast resource for effectiveness.
If I look at my work, I believe the main situation when tough choices become tinged with difficult moral dilemmas is dealing with resistance in the class.
THE POWER” IN THE CLASS
According to John Heron, in any course a trainer can manage the different aspects of Programs design, Objectives, Needs Analysis, Learning Activities etc…using three modes of facilitation: The hierarchical mode, the cooperative mode and the autonomous mode.
In hierarchical mode the trainer directs the learning process, exercises power over it, does things for the group, manages group feelings, provides structures for learning.
In the cooperative mode power over the learning process is shared: the trainer enables and guides the group to become more self-directing in the various forms of learning, helping group members to decide on the program, to give meaning to experiences, to do their own confrontation, and so on. The trainer’s views, though influential, are not final but one among many.
In the autonomous mode the trainer does not do things for the group, or with them, but gives them freedom to find their own way, exercising their own judgment without any intervention on the trainer’s part. It is the subtle art of creating conditions within which people can exercise full self-determination in their learning.
A trainer should be explicit about which mode he or she is in and learn to be flexible in moving from mode to mode in light of the changing situation in the group. Regardless, we should thank the Rosa Parks in our classes! Thank God they resist!
THE “POWER OF NO” in the CLASS
Real learning takes time and effort. When training for lasting change, let’s deal with resistance in organizations with curiosity and open communication. Before trying to convince someone, let’s learn more. A great way to learn is to explore people's responses — especially the responses that strike you as resistance. Every response carries valuable information, clues about the work, the worker, the workplace or about what we are “really” trying to do to people. It can help us maybe by changing the mode we should operate.
We should actively encourage active discussion, questioning and challenging. This Socratic approach to learning makes for great explorations and for a much more thorough, stimulating and enjoyable learning experience that the learn-from-the-wise-one approach. Simply because some 'authority figure' says something is true doesn't make it so - intelligent learning requires that everything is tested and thoroughly challenged! So trainers need to encourage trainees to discuss, question, and challenge.
OTHER IDEAS TO INCREASE RESISTANCE
Let them out-number and plot against you! Consider Ken Blanchard's comment: “None of us is as smart as all of us.” The work needs to happen in learning teams in which we draw upon the skills and experiences of everyone taking part in the training. Small learning teams are friendlier, less inhibiting, and engender a higher degree of inter-personal respect. The benefits of this 'learning team' approach are quite remarkable and have to be experienced to be fully appreciated.
Learning hurts! I think we should never hide that it takes time and error to learn. Get the essentials on applying the knowledge - and you recognize the potential for further exploring each topic after the training.Leave them alone! Let them think for themselves and make their own discoveries. What's more, nothing is 'sacred'; everything is open to challenge and discussion. We need to refuse to cram hoards of people into our courses - even though doing so would be more profitable - because to do so would reduce the quality of the learning experience - and the quality of the fun the trainees will have.
Doing. Period. Learning a skill is not accumulating information. It is behavioral rather then intellectual. Trainers should respect people’s intelligence, integrity and individuality. Never talk at them or provide trainees with pre-digested ideas-to-be-absorbed. Get trainees 'hands on' with what they are learning through practical exercises, activities, reviews, and games.
So in summary: freedom to your learner is job number one. Your challenge: you may have to get out of their way, they may have to disagree with you. It looks like is bad but it is good. Really.
_______________________________________________________
Parks showed power of one
"Her feet were not tired. At least, no more so than usual.She always hated that legend so let us, in this, the week of her death at age 92, set the record straight. And while we're at it, let's correct another misconception: It's not precisely true that she refused to give up her seat to a white man. The seats next to her and across the aisle were empty, vacated by blacks who had heeded the bus driver's command to get up. So there were places for the white man to sit.But under the segregation statutes of Montgomery, Ala., no white man was expected to suffer the indignity of sitting next to a black woman. So driver J.F. Blake asked again. And Rosa Parks, this soft-spoken 42-year-old department store seamstress just trying to get home from work, gave him her answer again. She told him no.Her feet were not tired. Her soul was exhausted.On Dec. 1, it will be 50 years since that drama played out. Fifty years since police took her away. Fifty years since black Montgomery protested by boycotting buses. Fifty years since community leaders tapped as their leader the boyish-looking new preacher, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.That moment in Court Square was the birthplace of the 13-year epoch called the Civil Rights Movement. You could make a compelling argument it also spawned the modern world.None of which Rosa Parks could have foreseen that December evening. All she knew was that she was tired, sick of acquiescing, accommodating, accepting foolish white laws and white people who said she wasn't good enough to occupy a bus seat. Something had gotten into her that wouldn't let her go along any more, something that turned a lifetime of yes into an electric moment of no… “
(By Leonard Pitts)
_______________________________________________
Rosa decided at one point that “no” was the right answer. It was because the limit was passed. The “no” was in reality a “yes” to those values that the civil rights movement fought so hard for.
What does this have to do with trainers? In the last few years, the ethics responsibilities of business leaders have grown significantly beyond compliance to include the mandate to build ethical cultures in organizations, where trust can grow and thrive and where employees themselves become the security network for corporate ethics. Ethics is about decision. “No” is a decision we should make sometimes.
Are trainers people of integrity? A person of integrity is one who is consistent and congruent, who “does the right thing,” even when doing so is challenging. Integrity for trainers means walking the talk, maintaining a learning attitude, and standing behind every suggestion, recommendation, and prescribed action. As hype and exaggeration permeates the training industry at a disheartening level, trainers that can say no offer a steadfast resource for effectiveness.
If I look at my work, I believe the main situation when tough choices become tinged with difficult moral dilemmas is dealing with resistance in the class.
THE POWER” IN THE CLASS
According to John Heron, in any course a trainer can manage the different aspects of Programs design, Objectives, Needs Analysis, Learning Activities etc…using three modes of facilitation: The hierarchical mode, the cooperative mode and the autonomous mode.
In hierarchical mode the trainer directs the learning process, exercises power over it, does things for the group, manages group feelings, provides structures for learning.
In the cooperative mode power over the learning process is shared: the trainer enables and guides the group to become more self-directing in the various forms of learning, helping group members to decide on the program, to give meaning to experiences, to do their own confrontation, and so on. The trainer’s views, though influential, are not final but one among many.
In the autonomous mode the trainer does not do things for the group, or with them, but gives them freedom to find their own way, exercising their own judgment without any intervention on the trainer’s part. It is the subtle art of creating conditions within which people can exercise full self-determination in their learning.
A trainer should be explicit about which mode he or she is in and learn to be flexible in moving from mode to mode in light of the changing situation in the group. Regardless, we should thank the Rosa Parks in our classes! Thank God they resist!
THE “POWER OF NO” in the CLASS
Real learning takes time and effort. When training for lasting change, let’s deal with resistance in organizations with curiosity and open communication. Before trying to convince someone, let’s learn more. A great way to learn is to explore people's responses — especially the responses that strike you as resistance. Every response carries valuable information, clues about the work, the worker, the workplace or about what we are “really” trying to do to people. It can help us maybe by changing the mode we should operate.
We should actively encourage active discussion, questioning and challenging. This Socratic approach to learning makes for great explorations and for a much more thorough, stimulating and enjoyable learning experience that the learn-from-the-wise-one approach. Simply because some 'authority figure' says something is true doesn't make it so - intelligent learning requires that everything is tested and thoroughly challenged! So trainers need to encourage trainees to discuss, question, and challenge.
OTHER IDEAS TO INCREASE RESISTANCE
Let them out-number and plot against you! Consider Ken Blanchard's comment: “None of us is as smart as all of us.” The work needs to happen in learning teams in which we draw upon the skills and experiences of everyone taking part in the training. Small learning teams are friendlier, less inhibiting, and engender a higher degree of inter-personal respect. The benefits of this 'learning team' approach are quite remarkable and have to be experienced to be fully appreciated.
Learning hurts! I think we should never hide that it takes time and error to learn. Get the essentials on applying the knowledge - and you recognize the potential for further exploring each topic after the training.Leave them alone! Let them think for themselves and make their own discoveries. What's more, nothing is 'sacred'; everything is open to challenge and discussion. We need to refuse to cram hoards of people into our courses - even though doing so would be more profitable - because to do so would reduce the quality of the learning experience - and the quality of the fun the trainees will have.
Doing. Period. Learning a skill is not accumulating information. It is behavioral rather then intellectual. Trainers should respect people’s intelligence, integrity and individuality. Never talk at them or provide trainees with pre-digested ideas-to-be-absorbed. Get trainees 'hands on' with what they are learning through practical exercises, activities, reviews, and games.
So in summary: freedom to your learner is job number one. Your challenge: you may have to get out of their way, they may have to disagree with you. It looks like is bad but it is good. Really.
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