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July 18, 2005
Ivan Illich
Jeremy suggested that it might be worth looking at my work as an educator...in the light of my response when he asked me what I was doing..."looking at ways design and designers can work with people and communities, can promote and facilitate communities and communication, might create systems or objects or spaces or zones which allow greater levels of interconnectedness and connection...." I was trailing off..."When you work with students do you feel like a designer or a teacher? ...hmmm...
It's a good comment, and one that has sunk in over the last couple of days. I think I need to look at a few projects I have done with students and think and write about it. I remember this brief bio on Ivan Illich, and how much I connect with the ideas, particularly his ideas about the creation of educative, social life within society. His ideas connect and support my own leanings towards an opening-up of connections, a path of non-specialisation, and a valuing of the incidental interchange.
Jeremy also spoke about ethnography and I spoke of my knee-jerk reaction against it...what little I have read I felt was closing-down relationships and seemed patronising...it still seems to in it's foundations: "the PNG tribesmen smear goats blood on their foreheads to promote courage and stealth..."... However, I do realise how important it is to situate myself and not dismiss...I wonder whether education theory, and particularly some of Illich's work might provide some foundation for me....there's something about it that I can't quite put my finger on, something that connects....It connects with the DIY and the "facilitator of system" approach, it connects with my belief that my teaching work is really "the facilitation of an educative environment"...and it makes me feel like I am still playing with buckets in the sand...I have got no-where, if anything I might now be able to see how far my work with this MA has got to go...
Posted by Neal Haslem at July 18, 2005 11:16 AM