Good Wednesday March 11th 470:

I have just finished reading all your blogs and following all your links and offering you all my midterm evaluations. Whewwww, that took longer than expected, but was a most pleasant experience. Thank you all for some really wonderfully thoughtful work.

After reading and thinking about all your stories about home – I have a question. Can we look at the values and stories of home we’ve told and imagine the other side of this metaphor: homelessness? I do not expect you to write about this, but I think that thinking about homelessness in context with our stories, is valuable. What do you think ‘home’ means to the people on the streets in Vancouver, or Calgary, or any Canadian city, the people we name ‘homeless’ and for the most part, avoid? Or, conversely, what does ‘homeless’ mean to you, in context with your ideas about home?

Having read through all your blogs and your dialogues, I have noted an interesting pedagogical dynamic. I can’t help but to note the differences between teaching this class in a classroom in an institution – and here, online. In the classroom, I often stop to discuss what it means to create knowledge through social relationships. When we listen to each other as we learn together, we seem, almost by nature, to begin to share stories, which means the class comes to engage not just with the assigned texts, but also with each other — as we learn through the stories we tell each other. That is what I mean by creating knowledge through social relationships, a pedagogy I have used for some classes for some years now.

Now here is what I am noting. Ironically, it appears to be easier to create this type of social and educational interaction online. In the classroom, there is more tension around stepping outside of traditional course content and pedagogy, in the classroom there is far more reticence to speak up about what “you don’t know.” In the classroom, we put chairs in a big circle and we work with a speaking stone – and, I never, well, hardly ever, lecture. I do tell stories; every other class is a presentation by students with lots of time for dialogue. So, you can see, in the classroom, I work hard to physically create a space that takes us outside of the space we are in: the institutional space.  Clearly, creating knowledge through social relationships, ours – is much easier online, and by that I mean simply that all the elements of orchestrating your work together as your teacher are moving along and intersecting with ease – great ease, wonderful ease.

Why do you think that is so? Why is it easier to work online to create dialogue and knowledge together, around subjects that are political and emotional, than it is in the classroom?

Here are some of my thoughts for you:

It was interesting to see how many stories about evil focused on a similar idea: stories are powerful tools of deception! Imagination is where evil begins?

It is interesting how many of our stories hold the sense of home with people, families – and how many of us have moved, crossed borders, learned new languages, and how many of us have expressed our value of home in the context of leaving one home and finding another. It appears to me that ‘home’ is always a story.

And, here are some comments I have offered around the dialogues on ‘the other’ – dichotomizing and the notion that western thought is representative of “human nature”

When I voyage around the world with students, this is what I say in my storytelling classes: You are only ever learning about yourself. It is not possible to know ‘the other’ – so just stop trying. Yes, listen to the stories, but understand that in the listening what you are learning about is yourself: how you feel, think, how you respond to that story. Yes, tell your stories to others, but you are not teaching them about yourself, you are teaching them about themselves. Can you see how this can work to enable students to actually exchange cultural knowledge? When you let go of the need to know, but rather discover the need to inter-act, to meet in the intersection of your encounters with others, then you begin to find common ground.

I think, in the western tradition, when we encounter “others’ who are different from ourselves, what we learn, is always about ourselves. I think it is impossible to know the other through the lens of Western thinking — because we construct the other for the purpose of disconnecting — like the” Imaginary Indian”. But, what we can come to know, or to recognize, is that the making of the “other” is how we define ourselves.

One important point I want to suggest, is the that the idea that dichotomizing and categorizing is “human” nature, as if it is a universal and inherent in all epistemological or philosophical systems, is a mistake. Dichotomizing, categorizing hierarchically is   a western way of coming to knowledge, of knowing: the urge for universalization of western patterns of thought – is also a western way of knowing. There are other ways of coming to knowledge, which do NOT require the process of dichotomizing, separating and categorizing that western thinking depends upon. So,this binary thinking is not “human nature.”

There are many Indigenous cultures in different geographical parts of the world with intellectual philosophies and epistemological systems which do NOT rely on breaking things apart and creating hierarchic categories in order to come to knowledge, but rather these systems of thinking work to connect and balance phenomenon and relationships in order to come to knowledge. But, just like orality and literacy, there is no need to separate the different ways of coming to knowledge, they are inter-connected, working side by side and sometimes meeting in the intersection.

Dichotomizing and categorizing are not universal cultural practices, rather they are Western intellectual practices, as is the desire to establish universal categories. It is possible that the “other” does not even exist in some intellectual practices. When ‘we’ study the “other” or “them” in Western intellectual practice, we first construct the other, and then we define ourselves through our differences. So, in this tradition, the only thing we ever lean about when we study the other – is, ourselves.

I am going to leave you with these thoughts, and a few of my favourite quotes from your blogs below — and compose a new blog re: Lesson 3:3 Hyper-texting Green Grass Running Water. I am also assigning your page numbers today. Check out Student Blog page to see your assigned pages.

Stories – Reading all my fellow classmates’ blogs got me thinking, most of our ideas of home stemmed from a story or a form of storytelling. I think this is a telltale (pun fully intended) sign of the kind of power story-telling has. The ability to bring us back to a place where perhaps distant can become vivid and close again. Stories carry the notion that there is a lesson to be learnt, a moral to be understood and an experience to be felt, although of course, not always the case. However, in the way we remember home, we often gravitate towards stories of our past. Stories seem to have the ability to bring us back.

I like how Chamberlin believes that “We need to take a cue from mathematics and the sciences and develop a greater comfort level with contradiction as a way of life” (233). My background lies in Physics, and while reading this chapter I kept thinking about how well his ideas fit with the way physicists have to approach certain theories. One of the fundamental principles behind quantum mechanics lies in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. To describe it simply. the principle states that you cannot know the exact position and velocity of a particle. As soon as it comes into contact with an interference (such as a human attempting to measure it), this changes the particle fundamentally; it collapses. If you want to measure its position, you can, but you will have no idea what its velocity is; and vice versa. This is because it holds the property that it is simultaneously a particle and a wave.

This is how I understood what Chamberlin was saying. Neither position, neither story is any more correct than the other, they are just different ways of approaching the same thing. In simple terms, the particle has both a vague sense of position and velocity (vague due to its wave-particle duality), but as soon as we attempt to look at it from one perspective, we cannot see it from the other. Chamberlin warns us not to forget that the other perspective is present. Both the bear and the soil stories provide important ways to imagine what happened, but they are both just stories. They both walk the border between imagination and reality.

 The process of approaching storytelling in this class has been incredibly difficult for me; as a prospective law student the idea of dialogue without debate is incredibly conflicting. However it is clear that this is the rule of law for stories, where previous events only influence (and do not shape) the stories that come after. I decided to play with the story and put our class in a cave having a party, an attempt to make a novel connection between our class and storytelling. But it has a serious implication; it does not suggest the existence of evil, but it does suggest the possibility of evil that can arise from a story. One of the most important details from this story is the fact that stories cannot be taken back; no give-backs or tradesies, redoes or re-spawns. We forgive but we don’t forget. With this in mind I want to turn to the residential schools of not long ago, and think about how there is a meta-narrative within the history of these schools. The attempts at assimilation are now part of the historical narrative between settlers and Aboriginals, and no matter what we do these events cannot be reversed. But on a deeper level, the settlers in fact changed the narrative that the Aboriginal students were learning, and they took those kids out of a native culture and taught them ‘white’ stories in an attempt to bridge the gap between Them and US. But this gap, which I will call the ‘otherness gap’, cannot be changed by dismantling the distinctions between Them and Us. Try as they might, the settlers could not reshape the Aboriginal communities but could only influence them, because the Aboriginal story had already been told and can never been swept away now that it exists. I think this is a crucial reason that dialogue rather than debate is essential in bridging the ‘otherness gap’ that currently exists between Western and Aboriginal cultures, because there is no debate to be had. There is no empirical right or wrong answer to the question of cultural superiority (if such a thing even exists), and our job is to understand this fact and to appreciate Them rather than preach about Us. Along this vein we see the importance on irreversible stories; a story can profoundly damage the relationship between Them and Us which will lengthen the ‘otherness gap’, making it imperative for us to attune ourselves to the consequences of the stories we tell.

NOTE: A tip to make your writing style even better: never end a sentence with a two letter word: it / at / on/ in/ by… you get the idea. Always proof-read looking for those two letter words at the end and rephrase the sentence. The word ‘it’ is not your friend – avoid this word, unless used at the beginning of the sentence for emphasis.