Mastodon

mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

civic

By

The story that won’t die

A shiny orange VW van parks on the edge of a cliff at sunset.
The hero’s journey can’t be our only meta-story.

This week on Civic Hall’s Civicist blog: the story that won’t die returns. Andrew Slack uses examples from popular films and franchises to illustrate a subset of “We will win!”, the tale of the orphan who goes up against the evil empire and, after a tense confrontation, is victorious.

Star Wars.

Superman.

The Lion King.

Jesus.

When you rack up how much suffering empires inflict on our world and how these empires cannot fail (or are often too big to fail), it seems as though no organizing in the world can ever set about the transformations required to create the healing that is necessary for our planet and each other.

But we have one piece of hope: since the time that we were Wizard of Oz obsessed toddlers, we have memorized the story of the Orphan and the Empire. And if these stories teach us anything, ultimately, regardless of the odds, in a battle of Empires and orphans: always bet on us, the vulnerable orphans. Because in this story, the story of humanity—we are going to win.” —Andrew Slack

Myths are stories that we use to orient ourselves in the big, wide world, and to organize our perceptions about the world and one another.

Myths told our ancestors where evil comes from, how to secure the crops and assure a good harvest, how to set up basic family dynamics, why people should pay attention to the community mystics, how old enemies became enemies, and why old friends are still old friends. Myth tells us all of these things, even in our time. And so, Slack argues, it doesn’t make sense to develop organizing patterns that don’t take our dogged story-telling into account.

Passing up Campbell’s Journey of the Hero in our understanding of how to inspire and mobilize is ignoring the core raison d’etre of why we even organize. It’s the equivalent of trying to make the human race better with no regard for what drives us as human beings.” —Andrew Slack

I agree with Slack on the power of story and the value of uncovering and amplifying our most functional myths. I do worry that we can grow dependent on the hunch and hope that success is inevitable—and that dependence isn’t in fact functional.

There are two common paths. On the one hand is the belief that all action is futile because the world is ending and success is not possible; and on the other, the belief that victory is assured and we need not be concerned because “we are going to win.” Humans are ingenious creatures who always find a way, we say, so why stress about social transformation now? It’ll happen. Bigotry will age out. We’ll invent an escape from 2°-calamity.

There’s also a third path, one that involves building the discipline to work regardless of anticipated results. That discipline is essential for any change that’s so big it’s multi-generational: when you begin to realize you won’t see fruit bearing in your lifetime, you still need motivation to build that fruit tree anyway.

More than one meta-story will be necessary.

By

Christy—On Education and Entropy

“The most powerful symbol in the universe is the “=” sign: it’s a commerce between worlds, symbolic or real. That commerce is the heart of education— greasing the skids between one side of the equation and the other. Remember that the “-” symbol marks a mere subtraction, the one-way interaction present in much of our teaching today. The one-way sign is also emblazoned on every tombstone where the date of birth is only separated by the “dash to death” of the death date. We do not need education to be only a dash to entropy. We need to consider entropy in the evaluation of our teaching, testing, and education systems.” —Dr. Lowell Christy, Cultural Strategies Institute

This week, Lowell pointed me to some new research on the importance of conversation quality in language learning. The instructional designers who developed World Book’s Early World of Learning back in the 1990s certainly knew this—but it somehow didn’t become common knowledge for educators being advised to boost the quantity of words they exposed learners to.

From the New York Times:

“A growing body of research is challenging the notion that merely exposing poor children to more language is enough to overcome the deficits they face. The quality of the communication between children and their parents and caregivers, the researchers say, is of much greater importance than the number of words a child hears.

“A study presented on Thursday at a White House conference on ‘bridging the word gap’ found that among 2-year-olds from low-income families, quality interactions involving words — the use of shared symbols (‘Look, a dog!’); rituals (‘Want a bottle after your bath?’); and conversational fluency (‘Yes, that is a bus!’) — were a far better predictor of language skills at age 3 than any other factor, including the quantity of words a child heard.

“‘It’s not just about shoving words in,’ said Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and lead author of the study. ‘It’s about having these fluid conversations around shared rituals and objects, like pretending to have morning coffee together or using the banana as a phone. That is the stuff from which language is made.'”

Language skills development and socialization through relationship are related, and the “commerce at the heart of education” requires a relationship of equality that is not part of the conventional education system.

This fall, I’ve been doing some slow writing/thinking offline on the 18th-19th C Age of Conversation. The Seventh-day Adventist community missed out on that Age because of its belief in separating from “the world” and its rules about the salons and coffeehouses that hosted the conversation culture. The church’s founders warned members away from these conversation spaces and some of its leading writers and philosophers, but because they did not introduce a comparable analog, the community missed an important “language-learning” developmental stage. My sense is that it hasn’t yet developed either a non-defensive listening culture or a healthy respect for the chaos and uncertainty that supports learning.

In the absence of these features, perhaps expectations about civility and clarity in the denominational conversation are premature, but I do hope some micro, in-relationship changes will be possible.