This week, I’ve been inspired by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Written in the late 1960s, they advocate in a polemical style for a new philosophy of education.

The book emphasizes process and relational ontologies. What do I mean by relational? They point out that anything we understand about the world is always understood in our minds and via our perception

Our perceptions come from us. This does not mean that there is nothing outside of our skins. It does mean that whatever is ‘out there’ can never be known except as it is filtered through a human nervous system. We can never get outside of our own skins. ‘Reality’ is a perception, located somewhere between our eyes.

Now my reading of this stance has it leaving out a critical point, one that I think is perhaps becoming clearer in the nearly 60 years since it was published, that not only is reality as we perceive it relational between us the observer and the observed “out there”, but also our mind itself is relational and extends far beyond the confines of our bodies. We “think” with the page on which we’re writing, the room in which we move, the communities with which we discourse. So yes: we should understand that every person experiences reality differently, but we should also understand this with an expanded understanding of “person” that is far beyond their nervous systems and their skins. Rather each learning subject is an experiential centre in an ultimately fully connected fabric.

So that’s relational, now what do I mean by process? Here the authors are inspired by among others A.N. Whitehead and Alan Watts, both also intellectual influences on me. They argue that our language itself encourages us to think in terms of ’things’,

The structure of our language is relentless in forcing upon us ’thing’ conceptions. In English, we can transform any process or relationship into a thing by the simple expedient of naming it into a noun. We have done this iwth ‘rain’ and ’explosions’, with ‘waves’ and ‘clouds’, with ’thought’ and ’life’.

Thinking instead more in terms of verbs and processes perhaps allows us to cling less to the precise taxonomy of this and that and rather have a posture of continued responsiveness to the unfolding, ever-changing flux of the thing itself.

This is a stance I hope to hold towards my research, giving it some form where appropriate but always tentative, always reconfiguring. This was reflected in the name I held for the first wave of my self-directed research: “___ Theory”, (aloud: “Underscore Theory”) a name designed to preserve a stance of openness.

Further, given the current area of focus of my work, which is the creation of cultures which foster creative and engaged lifelong learning and research, these stances remind me that for fellowship participants the fellowship will be as it is from their perspective and the fellowship will be changed and evolving through their participation in it.

And, if research, teaching and learning is not about “downloading a bunch of facts”—the unfortunate image from The Matrix of Neo popping a floppy disk into his VR la-z-boy and emerging seconds later to say “I Know Kung Fu” is the image we’re pushing against here—then it is instead about how the research process transforms the researcher (themselves a process), their relationships and their communities.

How might we understand what this is?

In order to understand what kinds of behaviours classrooms promote, one most become accustomed to observing what, in fact, students actually do in them. What students do in the classroom is what they learn (as Dewey would say) and what they learn to do is the classroom’s message (as McLuhan would say)

What will researchers in our fellowship program do? That is what they are learning.

Xavier’s research reflections. Next reflection.