(Please insert "not" into the my last posting, i.e. "I would be the last to
disagree with Jay about NOT accepting our limitations". Attempting to
communicate within available time limits over things that need to be
considered in depth can lead to a lot of errors -- I beg your tolerance for
typos.)
It's a cautious optimism that I have, a sort of a steel-plated one that is
neither easily burst, nor easily moved, nor easily deterred. It exists in
the work I am doing presently with helping to create some partnerships
among schools, mediated by a college. In this research, aka knowing/doing,
enterprise we have some modest ambitions for creating learning
opportunities across traditional organizations in such a way as to
transcend and transform their traditional barriers. What I hope is for a
mild sort of inter-systemic change leading to intra-systemic change.
Persistance, dedication, and caring have been ever as important as optimism.
It has taken a lot of background research into school practices to identify
the ecological niches into which our "third-order" system could take hold,
and a lot of work by several dedicated people who are really good at
"making things go". My own orientational framework is activity theory,
(the only theoretical one in the project) taken on because this work is so
darned complex that it needed a coherent way of thinking about it. Since I
am not the only one making the decisions, and others are making really good
and timely decisions, based upon their craft knowledge, there are some
really pleasant and surprising developments. Of course, we also suffer
drawbacks.
It's a flat organization in the day to day decision making of the project,
but when you thrown in the ties to other existing systems i.e. schools,
environmental organizations, and a college, that each take actions to
affect our project, we are not really flat -- it is a matter of where you
draw the lines, how you define the boundaries. When I think of it in
contrast to a traditional hierarchical organization, and try to extend the
boundaries to the other institutions out of which the project grew, it is
far from flat! Instead, rather than its complexity extending along one
dimension, as an hierarchical organization does, its complexity extends
across many more dimensions! That is one methodoligical problem in its
concrete form - when/where to draw the boundaries. The other very
practical one has to do with reliability, because of the limited number of
people who have training and time to document and interpret what we are
doing to ourselves.
Just today we have taken significant action into recruiting another school
to our project. Completing this move will take further transformations
throughout, as we assimilate and accomodate together. It remains to be
seen how this modest scaling up (33%) will play out.
I find Jay's "it takes a village" section inspiring -- so much so that I am
writing far more to xmca than I can afford, because I think these ideas
really need to be pushed further. People design human systems all the time
without so much thought into how they are doing it, as some of us are.
Some systems survive well, despite how flawed we think they are. I am
arrogant enough (oh yeah - that's the other thing it takes, is arrogance)
to think we can do better.
I will be "off the air" until early next week, as I will be traveling back
to SC this weekend to teach, but I will look forward to reading very
carefully, when I get back, what has been posted in the interim.
Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Lesley College, 31 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]