(Slide #2)
Experience, Chance, Discovery, Insight
An interactive presentation and group exploration of the element of serendipity and novelty in programmed experiential learning, centered on a learning experience and discussion about the interplay of fortuity, learning style, sympathy/antipathy, deep meaningfulness, and, symbolic cognition.
This is the heart of “transformative learning”
the breaking in of another view,
over which we have no control,
of which we understand little,
but which asks us questions
and puts us in a position of listening.
adapted from Martin Palmer
“Masters in the Art of Living draw no distinction between their work and their play, their labor and their leisure, their mind and their body, their education and their recreation. They simply pursue their vision of excellence in whatever they are doing and leave it to others to decide whether they are working or playing. To themselves they are always doing both.” James Michener
(Slide #1)
(Slide #3)
The Experiential Learning Community of Practice (EL-COP) held their annual symposium yesterday. I participated and presented.
My presentation was an experiment in pulling a room full of learners through a very compressed phase of generating novel data, then forming an intention, then, instead of facilitation, taking questions and impressions, while offering to do the facilitation one-on-one.
As my colleague Ken Warren would put it, I implemented an amputation (of the facilitation.) I did this intentionally simply because I wanted participants to at least have acquired the set of data and developed their individual intention to learn. Hopefully somebody will take me up on my offer; although I will make some effort to compel closer colleagues to do so!
I spent several weeks back in February pondering whether I should: present research; do a mini demonstration, or, give the participants a shot at truly transformative learning by bringing them through half the usual squareONE process, and then offering to guide individuals through the entire process. I knew I couldn’t do a full group process in one hour; almost always it requires a minimum three hours.
Design Elements:
create an assembly of data
develop a personal focus
develop a charged intention-to-learn
explore a field of data
discover; then realize an objective; then propose a developmental action
(My presentation was the day’s capper. The whole Powerpoint moment was sucked into technological follies. I use Apple, I convert to Microsoft Powerpoint (from OpenOffice,) and stuck it on the USB thumb drive I assume can be read by a Windows laptop. Ooops, forgot to format the thumb drive for Windows. Plan B: use another participant’s MacBook, except it didn’t have the facility to import a Powerpoint. The result was I had to use the OpenOffice word processing document and couldn’t project the slides. Okay, here they are–all three of ’em.)
