The above book is a very ear-marked book for me. Co-authored by my friend Ann Pelo, about every third page of my copy now has margin scribbles, notes, and underlines. I love this effort to get underneath the description and assumptions of teaching. I love the commitment to nuanced pedagogy.
Some of my love of this book is how it shapes my work with groups, teams, and communities. It helps frame so much of the deeper why for finding ways together, whether that be in the broad story of democracy and cooperation, or in the at-home stories of a family finding their way through these times.
From one of those ear-marked and loved pages, enjoy this below. And perhaps use it to set up facilitation with a group, wondering about perspective and equilibrium.
Participation in a community that learns… calls forward and strengthens in us the capacity to be in discourse with all sorts of perspectives. Perspectives that challenge us and perspectives that expand our thinking. Perspectives that rub us the wrong way and perspectives that move us. Perspectives that confound us and perspectives that tickle us. In community with colleagues, families, and children, all of us striving to be (and to support each other to be) as human as we can be, we are guaranteed the experience of disequilibrium. (p 202)
Thanks Ann (+ Margie). Here’s to any of us learning or reclaiming ability to lean to the disequilibrium of multiple ways of seeing in these times. Here’s to any of us finding clarity that lives respectfully in difference and similarity.
