Showing posts with label hope wheel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hope wheel. Show all posts

Thursday, February 10, 2022

Everyone Here Has Been Broken


If we could understand the nuances of empathy, often the missing link in ignorance and conflict, the world would truly be a better place for all.

We talk about personal space all the time. We commonly understand that invading one's personal space is a not-so-good thing to do. As with many things we say because we've always said them, I'm not sure we really understand what we're asking of ourselves when we commit to giving each other our 'space.' Perhaps we don't even understand what we're asking ourselves not to do. 

How well do we understand what we're referring to as our "space?" I'm not sure.

A thought experiment...

Let's say that in the context of human interactions we can identify C waves (connoting cognitive interactions,) E waves, (connoting emotional interactions,) and P waves, (connoting physical interactions.) To simplify cognitive waves can be described as any form of understanding, while E and P waves are variables that affect our ability to understand. In other words, how we feel about our learning, and the environment we learn within, are pivotal elements that determine largely how well we actually learn in the cognitive domain. Since Descartes we've generally accepted that C waves were the independent variable, but what if in fact E and P waves create authentic constraints; challenges to our ability to comprehend and fully understand the phenomenological realities, our environments, and the people we encounter within them?

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

The Birds Keep Singing...

 **This is a cross pollinated post from hopeallianceblog.ca, a new venture connected to my hopealliance.ca passion project. It's been a very long time since I posted to my beloved blog KARE Givers, and I have rediscovered many, many draft posts so it's time for me to get out of writing what I used to way too long ago. I'm feeling revitalized and rejuvenated... finally.

Hope without action is wishful thinking.

Hope without fear doesn't exist; that's called naivety.

Hope is the alpha. All fear, all resilience, all action is derived from hope, "the thing with feathers... that sings the tune without the words" as so beautifully described by Emily Dickinson in her poem entitled "Hope"...


  
As I sit at my desk in my office listening to the birds sing in the courtyard outside my window, I'm reminded of this beautiful poem and what it needs to teach us during this most fearful time. 

This global pandemic is the storm creating fear that what we need to become true, beautiful and good in the world once again may not happen the way we intend it to.

Resilience is the tune without the words perched in our souls allowing us to keep going despite this fear. 

The birds keep singing.

Their song is the action that can never stop at all in times of crisis and despair, because this is what turns hope from something we wish for, to something we can do.

Monday, February 2, 2015

Teaching Within the Culture of the Hope Wheel


Note: The following is an excerpt from the book "Innovative Voices in Education-  Engaging Diverse Communities." I wrote the closing chapter of this book, the one this excerpt (with minor changes) originates from.
A positive school culture is omnipresent and affects everything. People who work in positive school cultures would have a hard time defining them- they just are. 
The above statement came my way via Twitter some time ago. I've been thinking about it ever since. Does culture get thought about? What makes culture definable? Should we be able to define culture? Is there a template for a positive school culture?

If culture doesn't get thought about, it should. Perhaps this is the missing link in some schools... thinking about culture. There is lots of lip service paid toward the element of school culture, but how many actually make a deliberate effort to define their own school culture? With the assistance of my former colleagues during graduate school, I made the effort. The manifestation of our school culture evolved as a circular representation called the Hope Wheel.

I created the Hope Wheel during graduate school as part of my action research around emotional, social and moral education. I was struggling to visualize a paradigm that could encompass an intercultural perspective; one our very diverse school needed to shift toward. I returned to the roots of my professional teaching choosing a medicine wheel model to represent my evolving point of view. My experience working and living among First Nations people exposed me to timeless wisdom surrounding learning philosophy. To First Nations people, learning is the essence of living; it’s organic and natural, and for many, represented by the medicine wheel in one form or another.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

A "Starbucks" classroom...

 
We started with an inquiry question... "why aren't Starbuck's Coffee houses drive through only?" 

We discussed this question for quite some time... here's what we came up with:
  • They wouldn't sell as much coffee (to which we asked why, and the answer was "people like hanging out at Starbucks")
  • They like hanging out at Starbuck's for a number of reasons:
    • The smell
    • The coffee
    • The treats
    • The books (if the store is inside a chapters book store, which they often are in Canada...)
    • The leather couches
    • The fireplace on a cold winter day
    • The free wifi
    • The ambiance (we looked that one up...)
    • The public art (done by local artists)
    • The comradeship; hanging out with friends
    • The patio (on warm summer days)
    • The friendliness of the baristas (we looked that one up too)
    • The background sounds (music, chatter about interesting topics)
    • The "coolness" of it all... the environment as described by the above reasons. We felt it was a laid back, relaxed and enjoyable place to be
    • We even figured out that every time you turn around in a Starbuck's coffee shop, you run into something (and further realized that what you run into is usually for sale:). We realized that cramped spaces don't have to be cramped in a bad way if they're set up right, and if the folks within the spaces get along OK. So we came up with this model of learning and living, and put a giant version of it on our wall.

We reference the Hope Wheel often. We use it to contextualize our learning, to solve problems, resolve conflicts, set goals and teach others (that's the "Elder" part of what we do in the Responsibility phase of the north.) It has become the social, emotional and intellectual platform that our physical learning space is supported by. It's the model we use to think about things. You can learn more about this learning model here.

So we took a look at our classroom and decided that we could create this type of environment to learn in, sans the coffee perhaps:)

We decided that couches, books, free wifi, public art (done by students), comradeship, friendliness and the "coolness" of it all would be easy to emulate.

We got rid of the desks and put tables in their place. We found a couch and a coffee table. We hung (and continue to hang) art created by students. We put some mats on the floor. We created a private corner office that we take turns using each day. We already had free wifi. We created some cool lighting effects with a couple of lamps. Recently we even took a donation of a free electric fireplace! How cool is that?
So now we learn in a "Starbuck`s classroom," and we really like it.
Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog

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