ESPrit de Corps

I like Alan’s metaphor about blogging. First time blogging IS like your first kiss with someone… there’s a funny combination of excitement, anxiety and anticipation before you begin to write. Do you think about it a LOT, or just dive in and see what happens? To think or act?

There are great parallels here to Summer Seminar. How do we jump into this community and this work – especially if it’s the first time? I’ve been teaching an arts integration course to pre-service teachers this month and have been musing a lot about the ideas of ‘first time’ and ‘new’. This work is exhilarating and this work can also be scary. How, as participants and/or facilitators do we ride that edge? How do we support our own and others’ feelings of excitement around new firsts without triggering feelings of worry or self-judgment?

As educators, it is critically important to develop the capacity to evaluate what is right in front of us. You might say it is one of our strongest ‘skill sets’ […whoops, my first attempt at the previous sentence gave me the typo, ‘kill sets’, which is a mistake that points me in exactly the direction that I was intending to go…] Our evaluation habits that are so essential in the work of education can quickly become ‘kill sets’ that get in the way of the learning process.

Learning takes time, space, and a variety of entry modes. If we jump into our evaluation habits before allowing time for learning, the focus can move toward judgment and away from development. How to manage this? Protected time. While we certainly want to develop our capacity for judgment, we don’t want to do so at the expense of relaxed inquiry stance. If we cannot control our evaluation habits, then they control us by turning into negative habits of self-judgment.

Here is what I ultimately want to say about Summer Seminar and this work in general: Come and play with us. Practice entering a supportive space of inquiry where we are all learners, all riding that tricky edge of exhilaration and fear together. One way to that state of ‘first-time kissing mode’ is to simply dive in. The other way is to observe habits. Summer Seminar is good for noticing how and when our judgment capacities morph into ‘first-time killer mode’, then learning how to adjust or smack ‘em back as needed. The balance of ‘kissing’ and ‘killing’ takes practice; our time together provides that learning space.