Becoming and Our Students...

“We do not believe in ourselves until
someone reveals that something deep inside
us is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of
our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we
believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity,
wonder, spontaneous delight or any
experience that reveals the human spirit”
- ee cummings

Caring relations as the foundation for pedagogical activity

I do not mean to suggest that the establishment of caring relations will accomplish everything that must be done in education, but these relations provide the foundation for successful pedagogical activity. First, as we listen to our students, we gain their trust and, in an on-going relation of care and trust, it is more likely that students will accept what we try to teach. They will not see our efforts as “interference” but, rather, as cooperative work proceeding from the integrity of the relation. Second, as we engage our students in dialogue, we learn about their needs, working habits, interests, and talents. We gain important ideas from them about how to build our lessons and plan for their individual progress. Finally, as we acquire knowledge about our students’ needs and realize how much more than the standard curriculum is needed, we are inspired to increase our own competence.

   (Noddings, 1999).

Change......

Do your little bit of good where you are;
it's those little bits of good
put together
that overwhelm the world.

    - Bishop Desmond Tutu

 

 

Genuine Elders- Description.. keep an eye out for these folks...

“A genuine elder  possesses a good deal of wildness, perhaps more than any adult, adolescent or child.  Our human wildness is our spontaneity, our untamed vitality, our innocent presence, our resistance to oppression, and our rule –transcending vivacity and self-reliance that societal convention can never contain.  We are designed to grow deeper into that wildness as we mature, not recede from it.”

( Bill Plotkin )

Parenting Our Children...

 

Parenting is not meant to be a war against nature-the child’s original nature- but rather a collaborative dance with that nature.  This allows the child to learn her own dance of belonging, one that interweaves her original human nature and her cultural embodiment of self.  Creating such a fusion is an aesthetic undertaking, a work of art, for both the child and her parents.

 ( Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, p. 89 )

 

 

Education is always a vocation

rooted in  hopefulness.

     -B. Hooks

 

 

The student is infinitely more important
than the subject matter.
~ Nel Noddings, Caring