Enabling Human Potential to Unfold Within School Environments: Education as Dialogue and Narrative at Multiple Levels

1. Introduction

 

How can a paradigm shift take place within schools, towards pedagogies that foster social connectedness as well as diversity, and away from standardised instruction? The ‘Unfolding’ symposium held in the Netherlands in February 2017 – hosted by NIVOZ in collaboration with the Learning for Well-being Foundation – creatively addressed these challenging questions about education today.

 

Inspiring examples from everyday practice in classrooms and schools served as a powerful start to each session, in the form of high-quality short videos of daily situations specially filmed for the symposium (see below). Interviews followed with the teachers and school principals who were the protagonists of the films, and then mixed tables of practitioners and academicians mulled over the themes that emerged from the films and interviews. Only thereafter was the floor given to academic experts who proved more than willing to put theory at the service of practice. (In this way, the symposium reversed conventional formats that place experts from academe in the centre, with educators and other practitioners listening and responding rather than leading.

 

The insights and ideas generated – through the exciting process just described – highlighted ‘dialogue’ and the narratives that emerged… somewhat similar to the narrative that can unfold as each child discovers meaning and potential life purpose, in the school environment and beyond it, through dialogue with the world around.

 

2. Talking about good education

 

The choice of dialogue as the central mode of conversation within the symposium was deliberately made, in response to the subject under discussion.

 

Discussing what good education entails is complicated. How can we best talk about the unfolding of human potential, what is to be desired in that process and what responsibilities emerge for educators and others? Which core concepts will help us to describe all this? Much of the complexity stems from the moral dimension that is always involved in conversations about education, and also from the nature of education as a practice. Because of these two characteristics, simple conversations around these subjects tend to be unsatisfactory. How can dialogue enable us to do justice to the moral dimensions of education as well as to the significance of education as a practice?

 

The example below shows how conversations on good education inevitably include a moral dimension:

 

If we wish children to grasp and value the diversity of the human world through teaching them geography, we have several options. We can try to increase their knowledge by asking them to learn countries and their capital cities by heart. We can teach them about diverse norms in different cultures and societies. We can invite them to assess their own culture critically, to understand differences and to develop an opinion about the desirability of those differences.

 

But as soon as we start telling them about countries, we are making moral choices. Is the Crimea part of Russia, or the Ukraine? Is Taiwan an independent country, or is it part of China? And what about Tibet? Why do we – from a western European perspective – regard one country with a Muslim culture as an ally and another such country as a potential enemy? Is it possible at all to compare cultures while carefully avoiding the question of whether some aspects of those cultures are better or more desirable than others, and if so better for whom?

 

This simple example shows that it is impossible to avoid moral questions, even with an apparently straightforward subject like geography. The complexity only increases when we take into account that many classrooms now contain diverse groups of pupils from all kinds of different backgrounds. The way a teacher approaches geography is not just about imparting objective knowledge but – critically – about how one human being relates to another with respect to their different cultural backgrounds.

 

The second challenge when we talk about good education is the nature of education as a practice, with teachers continually having to choose from a multitude of possibilities. In making these choices, teachers are led by some of their more or less objective aims, by their personal beliefs about what is right and by practical considerations generated by specific situations. These entangled dimensions around the imperative to act contribute to the vulnerability of the teaching profession. If we do not acknowledge the situational complexity of education practice – for instance if we insist that discussions focus only on education based on objective facts that can be measured and compared across schools and educators – we are missing the crucial point about what makes conversations about good education so difficult. Very significantly, we are also ignoring important opportunities to improve education.

 

In short, if we intend to have a meaningful conversation about good education, we have to be able to exchange views and perspectives on the moral dimensions of education (which are inevitably subjective), and we have to stay as close as possible to educational practice while doing so. This is where dialogue comes in, and why the symposium embraced it.

 

3. Dialogue and narrative

 

Dialogue is, literally translated, about the ‘flow of meaning.’ A dialogue differs from our regular day-to-day verbal exchanges. We are very familiar with discussions that are directed to arriving at a conclusion as quickly as possible (‘efficiently’), based usually on the practical need to accomplish something in the short term. To do this, we interrupt each other, we try to convince others about our own viewpoint, we do not ask questions in order to avoid having to explore different points of view and if we are asked a question we sometimes choose not to answer it. The person who puts forward the ‘best’ arguments or who has used the ‘smartest’ tactics, ‘wins.’ Subsequently one perspective – that represents a partial interpretation of a certain situation – gains a dominance to which the others have to adapt.

 

This strategy is not very helpful if we wish to discuss issues and related questions that go beyond ‘getting things done’ within a time schedule. If, for instance, the subject relates to what ‘good education’ is – what different perspectives are applicable, and how people vary in their assessment of the value of those perspectives and act accordingly – we should enter into a dialogue instead. Engaging in dialogue requires us to let go of the idea that the conversation should lead to a concrete ‘result.’ It is about making room in the conversation and to avoid closing it down as soon as possible. To achieve this, we need to ask questions instead of making statements. We need to empathise with others instead of convincing them of our viewpoint. We need to talk very carefully and to abide closely by some important guidelines, instead of intervening in the conversation when and how we see fit.

 

The symposium’s use of dialogue enabled safe spaces to be created within the conversations at the tables, by drawing on several elements:

 

• the intimate atmosphere at the tables, with ten people from varying backgrounds gathered at each round table;

• the facilitative role played by a table host chosen from among the participants;

• a short introduction to the key elements of dialogue, with several ‘focus’ questions provided for the table host to choose from in order to frame the exchange.

 

Since participants knew the guidelines, and especially that the aim was not to arrive at a shared conclusion, they felt comfortable about confiding personal and sometimes intimate perceptions and experiences. The table hosts creatively followed guidelines that helped the dialogue flow around the ‘focus questions’ which were formulated in a way that would prompt people to talk about personal perspectives. On occasion, when fundamental differences were revealed, the dialogue offered a safe ‘holding space’ to explore these differences without pressure to resolve them.

 

With this element of dialogue built into the symposium, the conversations at the tables and in plenary sessions allowed narratives to bloom. This seems only logical in retrospect, because people give meaning to their experiences by telling stories. Narratives and stories are multidimensional in nature since we take a personal experience as a starting point to give words to how we think about a certain concept, and while we are telling our story we display our feelings in relation to events and relationships.

 

The point of a story is not to convince listeners, but rather to help them – and ourselves – to gain some insight into how we think and feel about a particular concept. Almost always we do this by relating an example from practice. Because it is our experience and our feelings that we are illuminating through the story, we do not have to defend ourselves. And other people can relate empathetically to the feelings we are sharing, even though their interpretation of a certain experience may differ radically from ours.

 

The personal narratives that were exchanged at the tables resonated in a natural way with the human emotional element that was already so real and visible in the films and in the related interviews that provided an opening impetus for each session within the symposium.

 

In this way, beginning with the ‘wholeness’ of the examples from everyday practice that were captured in the films, the symposium added the ‘wholeness’ of the experiences of the participants by inviting them to share their subjective personal stories, rather than reducing the richness of the filmed examples to generalisations by way of ‘objective analysis.’ A broad range of perspectives and interpretations unfolded that together formed the starting point for new insights and new shared meanings. Participants in the symposium could then better understand the complexity of the question of what good education is and they could address the paradoxes that emerge when we try to engage in creating good education in practice.

 

4. The wholeness of educational practice as captured in six short films

 

How can dialogue enable us to do justice to the moral dimensions of education as well as to the significance of education as a practice? We repeat this question that was posed earlier in the article, and we now propose to illustrate answers to it by drawing on six film clips that were shown at the start of sessions at the symposium. Each short film represents a dialogue with an inspiring teacher or school leader that took place within her or his everyday working environment. Each film also elicits a narrative about its protagonists that contributes to a meta-narrative about what good education is and how to create and maintain it through everyday practice. A seventh film about an inspiring teacher educator is expanded into a fuller narrative that follows in the next article and that provides an example of how the films described below could similarly be brought more fully to life. Links are provided to each film, after a short illustration of how it illuminates dialogue and narratives around good education.

 

Around 25 children below the age of nine sit in a relaxed manner around their teacher, Marianne Rongen, in the Wittering primary school in the Netherlands. Fundamental to education at this school, Marianne tells us, is that children experience sufficient room in their environment to explore and learn through discovery. Marianne therefore tells the children gathered around her about the possibilities that are available for them to choose between in the coming hour – for example sliding in the indoor gym, building with blocks, carefully experimenting with liquid and solid substances in a little laboratory or working with letters and numbers. Marianne facilitates a dialogue between each child and this rich learning environment without herself directing them, and her voice remains neutral and her face receptive to the children’s different responses. See video: