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The Exploratory Practice Centre |
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REPORTS FROM RIO |
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| IPEL EVENTS |
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Inés K. de
Miller, 2003.
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FAZENDO
CONEXÕES ENTRE PALMER (1998) E A PRÁTICA EXPLORATÓRIA “…one
of the great tasks of our time is to “hear people to speech. Behind
their fearful silence, our students want to find their voices, speak their
voices, have their voices heard. A good teacher is one who can listen to
those voices even before they are spoken – so that someday they can
speak with truth and confidence.
What does it mean to
listen to a voice before it s spoken? It means making space for the other,
being aware of the other, paying attention to the other, honoring the
other. It means not rushing to fill our students’ silences with fearful
speech of our own and not trying to coerce them into saying the things
that we want to hear. It means entering empathetically into the
student’s world so that he or she perceives you as someone who has the
promise of being able to hear another person’s truth.” (p. 46) “If
we regard truth as emerging from a complex process of inquiry, the
classroom will look like a resourceful and interdependent community.” (
p.51) “For
objectivism, any way of knowing that requires subjective involvement
between the knower and the known is regarded as primitive, unreliable, and
even dangerous. The intuitive is derided as irrational, true feeling is
dismissed as sentimental, the imagination is seen as chaotic and unruly,
and story telling is labeled as personal and pointless.” (p. 52) “Knowing
of any kind is relational, animated by a desire to come into deeper
community with what we know.” (p.54) “When
I design a classroom session, I am aware of six paradoxical tensions that
I want to build into the teaching and learning space. 1.
The space should be bounded and open. 2.
The space should be hospitable and “charged”. 3.
The space should invite the voice of the individual and the voice
of the group. 4.
The space should honor the “little” stories of the students and
the “big” stories of the disciplines and tradition. 5.
The space should support solitude and surround it with the
resources of the community. 6.
The space should welcome both silence and speech.” (p. 73) “The
tension always feels difficult, sometimes destructive. But if I can
collaborate with the work it is trying to do rather than resist it, the
tension will not break my heart—it will make my heart larger.”(p. 84)
“Be
patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the
questions themselves…Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be
given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to
live everything. Live the
questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live
along some distant day into the answer.” (Rilke, in Palmer, p. 86)
“Implicit
in this exploration of how we know is an image of truth that can now be
made explicit: truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter,
conducted with passion and discipline…..We need to know the conclusions
in order to get in on the conversation. But it is not our knowledge of
conclusions that keeps us in the truth. It is our commitment to the
conversation itself, our willingness to put forward our observations and
interpretations for testing by the community and to return the favor to
others. To be in truth, we must know how to observe and reflect and speak
and listen, with passion and discipline, in the circle gathered around a
given subject. ” (p. 104) “Normally
when we are taken by surprise, there is a sudden narrowing of our visual
periphery…--an intense, fearful, self-defensive focusing of the
‘gimlet eye’ that is associated with both physical and intellectual
combat. But in the Japanese self-defense art of aikido, this visual
narrowing is countered by a practice called ‘soft eyes’, in which one
learns to widen one’s periphery, to take in more of the world. …Eyes
wide open with wonder, we no longer need to resist or run when taken by
surprise. Now we can open ourselves to the great mystery. Now we can
invite our students into the great affair that Diane Ackerman writes abut,
the affair called living and learning: the great affair, the love affair
with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity
like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick
sun-struck hills every day.” (p. 113)
“When
I remind myself that to teach is to create a space in which the community
of truth is practiced – that I need to spend less time filling the space
with data and my own thoughts and more time opening a space where students
can have a conversation with the subject and with each other – I often
hear an inner voice of dissent: “But my field is full of factual
information that students must possess before they can continue in the
field.”(p. 120) Palmer, P. J. 1998. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. |
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