Last week I posed the question “What is different in education during a prefigurative emergence?”
The answer I gave is that transmission from teacher to child is less important (but not unimportant) than creating the space in which young people can struggle with defining the contours of what the future might be like and what they need to become to co-create and thrive in that future.
Read MoreEducation is how cultures renew themselves.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-78) distinguished between three distinct types of cultures. In postfigurative cultures cultural transmission is predominantly from the elder to the younger members of a society. Young people do what their parents (and grandparents) did. Teachers reflect typical adult behaviour.
Cofigurative cultures arise when a postfigurative culture breaks down.
Read MoreHow can we best help another? By paying attention to them as a person with needs that we may suspect they have but will not know without giving our full attention - attention that is free of our own agenda.
I was talking with a friend about a young teacher whose focus in a primary setting is to (re)engage her difficult students.
Read MoreWe have all grown up with two mind states, not a natural state of affairs, but one that pertains anyway. We are better off, and those around us are too, if we spend as much of our time as possible in the adult mind (or “blue brain”), where we are confident, collaborative and creative and where the best learning takes place.
What prevents us from doing this is the second mind state – our “red brain” – which is really the childhood mind, hedged in with fixed beliefs and hair triggers, which has persisted into adulthood.
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