The learning space is not a classroom; not any sort of physical space, perhaps not even a temporal space but is a place in the imagination where out emotions take root, ruffle their feathers, compare notes and parade in front of each other’ a space where our own intellect is suspended, disbanded from its usual analytical and derogatory function and is asked to keep its mouth shut. A place where ‘minds meet’ or ‘meld’ in a good old Star Trek spockian sense – his was the one true learning brain where the temporanetity of now was suspended and opened up to a multiple of other and then and possible whatevers and thens… and where 2 mutual souls or spirits stared at each other for the first time and apprehended each others presence, still comprehended the other and sought to find commonalities, alignments and future forward ways of looking out together down the Start Rite road to a glorious sunset – interrupted of course by the school and educational bells , ringing us back, ranging us back to the range of the hearth, the paddock and the typewriter until we find another learning space together, where comprehension is at its fullest and most momentous.
How to evaluate such spaces, place value on them, judge them or assign an arbitrary value to them? When everything about that quivering mass of learning protoplasm cannot be measured in crude linear or spectral ways; the quiver, the moment of mitosis is only rarely visible and then, once witnessed, a true wonder to behold, it a moment which captivates, spell binds us, blinds us and makes us lose our bearings temporarily until we rebalance; for its at heart a moment of unbalance, of being disbalanced, of being gently or radically transported from our ‘comfort zone’, our moment of balance, to such an extent that we think the world is going to topple and crumble – but it doesn’t, we put one foot forward in front of the other and continue to walk or stumble into our futures, rebalanced until we encompass or are absorbed by the next learning space and its transient, immeasurable, natural, continuing and ever echoing moments.
Nevermind the stories, nevermind the narrative, lets find the moments that last for us, the moments that last well beyond any normal sense of acceptable shelf life, the moments that continue to resonate out of the time they were born into, out of the space that brought them forth, out of the here and now and understand they are of the there, the here, the now and the what if?
For there is no narrative, no story, just a bead necklace of collected moments which we interpret as story because they’re bound together by the pathetic string of our desire for coherence – but all they are at heart are momentary, wondrous, jewel like moment of quivering, transitional, change and shift. It’s being in the moment that counts that time of flow, of ebb and flow, of breathing, of pulse, of being alive.
So how to evaluate mess? Through the jigsaw, pearl strong moments of temporariness, of the moments of ‘aha’, of satori, of the despondent eureka, of the ‘my god, what have I done?’ moments.
drnickombe 