Category Archives: self-knowledge

End of History Illusion

This idea upends a cognitive bias that may well have been valuable 100,000 years ago.

Add the actuality of contingency and the fragility of the appearance of stability of the personality is obvious.

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Filed under folk psychology, psychology, science, self-knowledge, serendipity

Working Away From the Center


Family Synergy Mandala(Stephen Calhoun)

Virgins with T-squares
and compasses, guarding
the heavenly blackboards.

And the angel of numbers
reflective, flying
from the 1 to the 2, from the 2
to the 3, from 3 to the 4.

Dead chalk and sponges
rule and erase
the light of the heavens.

Not the sun, moon or stars,
not the sudden green flash
of the lines and the lightning,
nor the air. Only haze.

Virgins without T-squares,
without compasses, weeping.

And on the dead blackboards,
the angel of numbers,
lifeless, laid out
on the 1 and the 2
on the 3, and the 4…

(The Angel of Numbers, Rafael Alberti, translated by Jerome Rothenberg)

The First Snow, Ever(Stephen Calhoun)

Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is: Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind’s eternal recreation. And that is the self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all goes well is harmonious, but which cannot tolerate self-deceptions. (Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections)

FB-Quiet-Window-Mandala-Film

So you see, in a moment during a patient’s treatment when there is a great disorder and chaos in a man’s mind, the symbol can appear, as in the form of a mandala in a dream, or when he makes imaginary and fantastical drawings, or something of the sort. (Carl Jung)

TW-Loosening-Mandla-I-Stephen-Calhoun

A mandala spontaneously appears as a compensatory archetype during times of disorder. (Carl Jung) [h/t carljungdepthpsychology.wordpress.com]

There are four notes, (suppose these to be notes-to-self,) that come all the way up and to the center when I reflect on why it is that the mandala has taken over my creative practice.

These are simple notes too, and these represent the starkest capture.

(1) Depressed at the rise of Trump and nihilist Trumpism.

(2) Demoralized at the failure to satisfactorily meet my worldly obligations.

(3) Understand the inner order reflected in the enthusiasm for manifesting mandalas is only a potential reordering, and the proof of this is in the outer disorder.

(4) Unhappy and tired in the wake of the sharp arrivals due to the constant processes of death and loss that have struck over the past years.

I wear my depression very lightly. Optimistic. Youthful outlook.

My contemplative practice is the first balancing act. I note my creative agency is powerful too, yet, I haven’t a clue as to what is going on, except to distrust to a niggling degree that I am on the right track. I have to suppose this distrust of my own creativity is something to work through at this rather early yet auspicious juncture. This has nothing to do with my personal qualification of my creative product, it has to do with what this feels like in the context of outer disorder. It comes as no surprise that powerful inner motives are working me over a bit at the expense of outer order.

There is in this a fraught paradox: betwixt the rush and rushing forward of inspiration and ideas, and, the yet to be shaped command to, in actuality, set this aside for the purpose of getting the house in order.

FB-Mandala-Five-One-Fifty---ExLg-Urban-install-(Stephen-Calhoun)

The energetic aspect is clear enough to me. After all, I am not painting mandalas or setting fine grains of sand to a blueprint. Once the mathematics clicked for me, the opportunity presented itself fully: there are all sorts of archival photographs which may lend themselves to manipulation. These photos now come up again to be resuscitated.

(One image in this post presents how this is done.)

Still, am I creating mandalas? What is coming up and out seem to me reductions too, and also pieces symbolize eyes and sphincters. The images that consist of patterns of concentric circles nevertheless are unitary objects. Also, the direction of experimentation already is disrupting the simple concentricity.

Severity Mandala

Yes, creating mandalas is soothing. It occurs to me also that this is of a piece with my artistic mission, and, this also puts in 2nd order cybernetic relations a deeper aspect of the kitschy facile gimmicks I am employing as propositions in various visual experiments. Those relations are about learning.

As for my own psyche, I’m waiting for the dream. The only dream that recently arrived was optimistic, and this seemed to me its fault.

A magical, sacred, and perfected environment of the Buddha, which
denotes the order and harmony of an enlightened mind, and built on their
perfect wisdom. The purified circle of an enlightened being, an environment
wherein the endless compassion of the enlightened one is expressed.”
(C.G. Jung: ‘Mandala Symbolism’)

Oh, there’s this–see its opening and conclusion:

Theoretical Foundation for Jung’s “Mandala Symbolism”
Based on Discrete Chaotic Dynamics of Interacting Neurons
Vladimir Gontar (International Group for Chaos Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel)

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Filed under analytic(al) psychology, art, artists, experiential learning, personal, psychology, self-knowledge, visual experiments, my art

Tying It All Together?

I am sometimes asked why I pay attention to astrology. Actually, I don’t pay much attention to it, but, for some, any attention paid to astrology begs the question of why a so-called pseudoscience could attract someone’s, or my own, attention.

If I sense that this question is hiding the questioner’s desire to hold me to some rational account, I have a tried-and-true response.

You do understand that as matter of a priori development with respect to Baconian science and its successors that astrology is demonstrably necessary to the later development of astronomy and cosmology?

The history of the development of stuff presents a chain of primitive precedents, and, over the span of a future, our current knwoledge might well be someday viewed as being itself primitive. This goes along with what I call my favorite bias, you know the one that captures the brute fact that as one figuratively steps backward in time, all precedents of any sort disappear.

(The epistemic value or utility of astrology in any of its useful forms is determined as a matter of a psychology of practical heuristics. As I have previously written, the astrological chart captures a projection of psyche inasmuch as dealing with its information invokes learning about the Self.)

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Filed under history, my research, philosophy, psychology, self-knowledge, serendipity

Spontaneous Dialectics In ‘Problem Depth’

Familiar Matrix series-blank

Problem-solving oriented version of a four-square matrix.

Familiar Matrix series 2

I’ve added (and overlaid,) two valence drivers–these are the typical pairing used to deploy evaluation of antipathy and sympathy, a basic starting point.

Familiar Matrix series 3

An intention for learning is articulated.

Two dichotomies are randomly drawn from the master set of 96 dichotomies, a part of the tool, Playing With the Opposites. These are next plotted, with Plot #1 placed first.

Comment:

The obvious location of a dialectical tension first jumped out from the upper left quadrant.

Bring creative work to the world pushes away the mysterious element in the actual problem, yet, this antipathy is conjoined with a sympathetic mystery located in the setting.

The question for further wandering or exploration is to, I propose, locate the nature of the sympathetic mystery in the setting of the problem, in the art world. This mystery’s nature would be something deeply obscured yet attractive as a matter of what little is known about it.

The other drivers, familiarity/unfamiliarity might serve as kernals for winding up/down the dialectical reflection.

In each quadrant of the matrix there are two dialectical loops given by each pair of valences. For example, in the lower right quadrant are:

Problem / toward / inner masculine // (2) Setting / away from / inner masculine

Problem / familiar / inner masculine // (2) Setting / unfamiliar / inner masculine

 

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Filed under adult learning, experiential learning, my research, self-knowledge

Direction of the Possible

changedirection

Man can live the most amazing things if they make sense to him. But the difficulty is to create that sense. It must be a conviction, naturally; but you find that the most convincing things man can invent are cheap and ready-made, and are never able to convince him against his personal desires and fears. — C.G. Jung, The Essential Jung: Selected Writings, p. 90

Teaching Cartoon-Possibilities

One day the Nasruddin went with some men a-fishing. They cast the net into the sea, and the Nasruddin cast himself into the net. ‘O Nasruddin,’ said they, ‘what are you about?’ ‘I imagined myself a fish,’ he answered.

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Filed under adult learning, experiential learning, psychology, self-knowledge, sufism

Roger’s Blues

Without wishing it, we human beings are placed in situations in which the great principles entangle us in something, and God leaves it to us to find a way out. C.G. Jung (Good and Evil In Analytical Psychology, Civilization In Transition)

My neighbor Roger Talbott recently retired from his post as a Methodist minister. I’m following his new blog Fear Not Online. At the moment he understands it will be concerned with the second half of life.

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Filed under adult learning, personal, self-knowledge

Thick Over Thin, Beyond the Need to Know, Deep Digging

Stephen Calhoun artist

twitter meme series via @sq1learning aiming to cause thinking/feeling

If one wants to get to the absolute bottom of something, presumably for many kinds of human somethings, the journey to reach the bottom will:

(1) take time
(Rule of thumb: if it seems like it will take too much time, you’re at the start of the right path)

[paradoxical dialectic #1]
(2) demand suspension of reactions
(3) cause encounters which elicit antipathy and sympathy

(4) require configuration of viable abductions at ‘ripe’ waystations (during the journey)

[paradoxical dialectic #2]
(5) be advantaged by one feeling through one’s self feeling through the subject
(6) be advantaged by enacted agency removed from the subject’s ideology/personal culture

(7) be advantaged by researcher’s understanding of the imposition provided by their own ideology

(8) be completed by the invocation and instantiation of negative capability

These dispositional elements support deliberate knowing (learning) and stand against the varieties of thin approaches, each of which is anchored in a singular routine to obtain, ‘not really needing to know much more than I can easily know without spending more time, and certainly not challenging myself to learn more–beyond where I habitually like to stop learning.’

(Substitute satisfyingly for habitually to capture the reflexive certainty, “know enough already, thank you!” Enough is equivalent to knowing all one needs to know.

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Filed under adult learning, experiential learning, folk psychology, my research, philosophy, psychology, self-knowledge

Morphing Fractals

Eternal One, Mighty One, Holy El, God autocrat self-originate, incorruptible, immaculate, unbegotten, spotless, immortal,
self-perfected, self-devised,
without mother, without father, ungenerated,
exalted, fiery,
just, lover of men, benevolent, compassionate, bountiful,
jealous over me, patient one, most merciful.
Eli, eternal, mighty one, holy, Sabaoth,
most glorious El, El, El, El, Iaoel,
you are he my soul has loved, my protector.
Eternal, fiery, shining,
light-giving, thunder-voiced, lightning-visioned, many-eyed… (The Apocalypse of Abraham 17.8-15)

Dionysian art […] is based on the play with intoxication/ecstasy [Rausch], with rapture [Verzu?ckung]. There are two powers in particular that trigger the self-for-gotten ecstasy [Rausch] of the nai?ve man of nature — the drive of spring and the narcotic drink. Their impacts are symbolized by the figure of Dionysus. The principium individuationis in both states is broken; the subjective disappears entirely against the force of the general-human, even the general-natural that is breaking forth. The festivals of Dionysus do not only create a bond between humans, they also reconcile the human with nature. -Friedrich Nietzsche

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Filed under creative captures, cultural contradictions, nature, philosophy, Religion, self-knowledge

Forced Choice

Forced-Choice

In sixty seconds,

(1) Pick your favorite.

(2) Pick your least favorite.

LearningCycle

Experiential Learning:
Fourth Annual Experiential Learning Conference June 16-17, 2016

Hunting and Gathering In the Cleveland Art Museum
(Thursday June 16, 1:45pm) facilitated by Stephen Calhoun, squareONE:experiential toolmakers

Hunting and Gathering sets eager learners to the playful of task of exploring and
discovering consequential relationships between their personal learning goal and novel data able to be hunted down and gathered in the galleries or environs of the Cleveland Art Museum. This experiential tool blends a model of collaborative experiential learning with a framework for deliberately animating a learning space.


Here listed are several aspects of experience and learning I am fascinated by, and, drawn to theorize about, in a most informal way. Other times, I rope in subjects and do experiments!

One–entanglements of contexts and their contextualizations; abductive contextualizing
Two–personal culture and the geneaology of individualized knowledge
Three–hidden contingencies, webs of uncertainty, biosemiotic fragility
Four–novelties, serendipities, oracles, synchrons

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Filed under experiential learning, folk psychology, Gregory Bateson, proto-post-disciplinarity, psychological anthropology, psychology, self-knowledge, serendipity, social psychology, organizational development

Inner Mounting Flames

NCL-Dennis-Sparling-quarry (source)

Back during my Middlebury Vermont chapter, Dennis Sparling and I spent some quality time naked at his family’s quarry in New Haven. This was over twenty-five years ago. Still, lying around naked and learning in the quiet way that being next to millions of cubic yards of clean, fresh water provides was glorious; and, retrospectively remains a bittersweet memory due to the loss of connections with such friends.

Dennis-Sparling

Nowadays, Dennis is on a mission.

“I see my responsibility after 45 years of intense struggles as an Artist; is to see and know the world as best I can; and pass on to those with fire in the belly, a way to survive life’s paradoxes and thrive with a great sense of humor and clarity of how to prosper as an artist and innovator; al-la Leonardo DaVinci’s mind and works.” D.S.

(If I tell you, ‘by all means’ I’m insisting,) please visit the Sparling Studio and watch the youtube video and read about his project.

Right before Dennis first hit the road, NPR in Vermont told his story.

Then last November, Louis Varricchio starts his article (in the Green Mountain Outlook) out with this fine summation:

It’s easy for those mythologically inclined to imagine how Vermont sculptor Dennis Sparling might have emerged in our universe via a fiery furnace from some other place in space and time—for all the molten, primordial elements comprising 10,000 years of human art, poetry, theater, science and engineering, which simmer just below the surface of the New Haven artist’s amazing corpus, have been sintered into one dazzling, clastic vision of the cosmos.

Here is a fascinating trend: experienced, learned, counter-culturally-inclined, and fired-up baby-boomers, realize that he or she has something to teach, something to transmit. This is their body of transferable understanding. And, this desire to transmit is congruent with their deep sense that the conjunction of western schooling and post-capitalism is failing the human spirit.

This capacity to go beyond the factors of conditioning is one of the obvious advantages of the human person. ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom

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Filed under art, artists, friends, personal, self-knowledge

Tiny Paper House

Wikkelhouse from Wikkelhouse on Vimeo.

I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty. ~George Santayana, “The Irony of Liberalism”

Be content with what you have,
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you. ~Lao Tzu

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Filed under experiential learning, Places, self-knowledge

System Attractions – Seek simplicity, and distrust it. (A.N. Whitehead)

Complex Matrix

What follows is brief foray into a schematic phenomenology about what comes easy and what comes hard. Ha! Don’t bother googling schematic phenomenology!

Complex Matrix 2

This schema is a picture of my general meaning-making relationship to two joined aspects of any system. This schema summarizes this relationship, so, it represents a Hard Simplicity itself. The schema is simple because it summarizes complexity and leaves out a lot of detail, it is hard because it isn’t in the least bit self-evident. If it needs explanation, it is to a degree, hard,

Imagine there is an axle at the intersection of the axis, and, so the matrix itself can revolve. The schema captures the usual starting configuration for me in the ecology of a human system. By way of explanation, more information is needed. So: I’m a very forceful intuitive and I tend throw myself right into such a human system. That this system is by definition complicated, and that the full grain of its complexity is not revocable, means, in summary, that, often, this complexity is hard for me to see. The negative habit is: I do not, literally, at the beginning, naturally care enough,  to see the fine grain of complexity. Bull, meet china shop.

At the same time, I have natural access to proven tools which allow me to discover and integrate systems elements, operations and data. This personal process operates on the continuum marked between Simple-Hard and Simple-Easy. Simple-Easy is the most accessible, is easiest for me. But, it isn’t satisfying, so I knock at the door of Complex-Easy.

What could be easier than that, right? And yet, maintaining simplicity is not only difficult, it is often ill-advised. In virtually any context—business planning, software development, pizza making—the immature simplicity associated with first drafts, early prototypes, and initial versions tends to be unsatisfyingly empty. Such partial solutions are necessary starting points but inadequate as final products because they lack the essential qualities found in more mature versions. Keeping things simple impedes progress, which is why we add things to our designs. We make them more complicated in order to make them better. It is only when we go too far that an epic level of complexity makes the final product unusable.

And this is where things can get a little tricky. Just because there is such a thing as too simple and such a thing as too complex does not mean the best solution sits in a mythical sweet spot between simplistic and complicated, as if the territory in question could be represented by a single straight line. Reality is more complicated than that, and straight lines seldom make for interesting journeys. There are bends in the road we need to be aware of. If we overlook them we’ll either end up following the road to a bad part of town or jumping off the tracks entirely. Dan Ward, The Simplicity Cycle: Soda, Swordsmen, and Road Maps | Simplicity Manifesto pdf

Attention and practice allow me to rotate the Hard-Complex into the realm where my proven tools are effective. Still, I’m not able to effectively drive my meaning-making and understanding of the Hard-Complex into the brightest light where, and at which point, my most positive and practiced tools for systems awareness are always a snap to access.

Rotation is not metaphoric in this respect: the polarities of the schema reflect that attention is largely deployed, and its focal point guided toward, the direction of the single poles of these basic classes. Where one side comes into greater resolution, the other side recedes.

There is a reflexive third order cybernetic aspect too: self-observation verifies that this blind spot exists when I turn my attention toward the deep grain of my own self-system.

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Filed under adult learning, experiential learning, my research, psychology, self-knowledge

Healthy Solipsism II.

INABOX

My working assumption is that when I’m learning about another person, I am learning about their personal culture and their sense of their identity and about their narrative and about all the weaving and stitching which provides the sensible and explanatory interconnects between culture/identity/story. However, I have introduced here my own terms, terms popular on planet Stephen C.C., but not in anyway presumptively are these same terms popular on your own planet.

And, even if some of the terms are in use on your own planet, the terms might not mean the same to you as the terms mean to me.

It would be much better for me to start out learning what are your terms, what are the terms commonly used on your planet; you know, the planet you live on.

If you and me are beginning the task of knowing one another, of engaging an interpersonal process of mutual construal, how do we collaborate to do the initial sorting? On my planet, one can also meta-sort; how about on your planet?

Here’s a mundane example. Take the developmentally normative imperatives given by the Experiential Learning Theory of David A. Kolb. These norms are the lingua franca of the community of practice. Three such norms are: flexibility, balance, and resilience. Each of us comes (away) from our unique planet to speak in common terms–and we have worked to cause such terms to be common and shared.

Yet, at the same time, (from the perspective of what my colleague Kenneth Warren termed “your promethean thrust,”) come counter-normative theoretical imperatives, conceptions, or injunctions. With respect to Kolb’s ELT, among these are: intuition, serendipity, enantiodromia, poetics, energetics, polarization, antipathy, inversion, paradox, abduction, and autopoiesis.

These ideas are part of the background, part of my background. For example, the force of enantiodromia–conversion into the opposite–may countermand balance.

The assumption that the use of a common language is not differentially connected to the hidden “it is just so” of personal culture (etc.) is an incorrect assumption–and is so even if such differentials are smoothed over by a presumption of solidarity.

That we are not trapped in our subjective cosmos is obvious enough. However, the ability to stand outside of one’s own cosmos means of course that something personal comes along for the ride! The intentional act of relational intermediation carries with it the possibility of also being a wise enaction of intermediation, where we step outside, and also step into, the common ground knowing fully what aspects of our self-system remain with our self.

In the cybernetic sense, interpersonal intermediation requires reconfiguration which is configurable by choice or by choiceless feedback.

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Filed under personal, psychology, self-knowledge

Yet, We Converse With Each Other

Hexagram44
Hexagram 44
Your name or your person,
Which is dearer?
Your person or your goods,
Which is worth more?
Gain or loss,
Which is a greater bane?
That is why excessive meanness
Is sure to lead to great expense;
Too much store
Is sure to end in immense loss.
Know contentment
And you will suffer no disgrace;
Know when to stop
And you will meet with no danger.
You can then endure.

QUESTIONS

What is your personal ideology, and, how does it track back to its source in your personal culture?

Do we not construct somewhat congruent collections of best explanations?

Everybody lives in their own subjective world, or, not?

PROVISIONS

Every individual is dedicated in explicable and inexplicable ways to their favorite: dispositions, habits of thinking and feeling, heuristic tools, automatic responses, etc..

Individual comprehension of what are apparently objective features of the world are: variable, often warrantless, and, these comprehensions are, finally, usually subjective..

The common ground is not itself beyond the intersubjective field.

Each person over time develops, tests, refines, and deploys, their unique folk psychological ideology and toolset.

Often this bundle of suppositions and provisional abductions about, for example, how one’s own mind and other mind’s work, is utilized as the first->second order means to understand another person. It is deployed as if it is comprehensive and commensurate to the task of understanding this other person.

This normal attitude and approach is used by many people who are innocent of its origins (from within their personal culture, subjectivity.)

As a practical matter, eventually meeting the challenge posed by hoping to develop accurate interpersonal and intrapersonal construal requires the negotiation of each other’s self conception, self conception in contexts, language, concepts, suppositions, and, linkages and intrinsic networks, and, all the other potential features of subjective deep beingness. Hey, these considerations are truly, mine alone!

Hexagram 44. Don’t negate me bro for the sake of flattening me so that I may tumble along in your own 2D world. If I wanted to be in your world, I’d have to have been you.

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Filed under adult learning, folk psychology, my research, personal, psychology, self-knowledge

Mindscapes

Learning to Dance In Bali from Fabio Peres on Vimeo.

heterogenistics | Professor Magoroh Maruyama

Endogeneous research::Research done by “objective” researchers coming from the outside suffers from several problem such as epistemological, cultural and social prejudices, misunderstanding due to different background and experiences etc. Endogeneous reseach on the other hand is research conducted by “people on the inside” i.e. people with an understanding of the social and cultural codes that exist in the community studied.

Mindscapes::A structure of reasoning, cognition, perception, conceptualization. design, planning, and decision making that may vary from one individual, profession, culture or social group to another.

Mindscapes (Epistemological Types)

H-type I-type S-type G-type
homogenist heterogenist heterogenist heterogenist
hierarchial independent interactive interactive
classificational random pattern-maintaining pattern-generating
copetitive uniquing cooperative cogenerative
zero-sum negative-sum positive-sum positive-sum
opposition separation absorbtion outbreeding
one truth subjective poly-ocular poly-ocular

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Filed under adult learning, Gregory Bateson, self-knowledge

Up And Down

cartoon

Our focus on the person is at once a great accomplishment and a significant risk. It is a great accomplishment because it signifies our recognition of every human being’s free participation in transcendent truth and goodness. Yet, it is also a risk because focusing so intensely on ourselves invites existential derailment in so many ways. We are likely to misunderstand ourselves. We might try to turn away from the insecurity or responsibility of personal existence. And prone as we are to self-love, is it prudent for us to articulate transcendent truth and goodness through a celebration of ourselves? The empirical evidence is not always encouraging. Surveying what has become of our articulation of the person, we cannot help but ask: is the modern turn to the subject a deepening of the Christian insight into the transcendent meaning of existence, or is it a Promethean revolt against God and the order of being? – Steven McGuire, Voeglin View

Is the modern turn to the subject a deepening of the Christian insight into the transcendent meaning of existence, or is it a Promethean revolt against God and the order of being?

Both, and moreover a revolt evoked from the flux of the order of being too; so: both/and.

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Filed under adult learning, cultural contradictions, philosophy, Religion, self-knowledge

Who Knew?

meta-chart

Peter Honey and Alan Mumford’s revision of the learning typology of David Kolb substitutes Activist for concrete experience, Pragmatist for active experimentation, Theorist for abstract conceptualization, and Reflector for reflective observation. Their theory seems to me to mix a more tangible conception of acting in light of cognition, in learning.

Dialectical differentiation:

  • Activist = Accommodating
  • Reflector = Diverging
  • Theorist = Assimilating
  • Pragmatist = Converging

I found the self-scoring forty question H&M assessment hanging out there on the internet. I filled it out and scored myself.

The stark black and white quality ofembedded in some of the questions in the short form H&M typological assessment seem to shout out their context-free ground. #32-It is best to look before you leap. #36-I’m usually the ‘life and soul’ of the party. (Yes/No)

The descriptions below strike me as being so idealized as to tilt toward the ridiculous. The characteristics of the four learning styles (Honey, P. & Mumford, A. (1982) Manual of Learning Styles):

Learning style Attributes Activities
Activist Activists are those people who learn by doing. Activists need to get their hands dirty, to dive in with both feet first. Have an open-minded approach to learning, involving themselves fully and without bias in new experiences.
  • brainstorming
  • problem solving
  • group discussion
  • puzzles
  • competitions
  • role-play
Theorist These learners like to understand the theory behind the actions. They need models, concepts and facts in order to engage in the learning process. Prefer to analyse and synthesise, drawing new information into a systematic and logical ‘theory’.
  • models
  • statistics
  • stories
  • quotes
  • background information
  • applying theories
Pragmatist These people need to be able to see how to put the learning into practice in the real world. Abstract concepts and games are of limited use unless they can see a way to put the ideas into action in their lives. Experimenters, trying out new ideas, theories and techniques to see if they work.
  • time to think about how to apply learning in reality
  • case studies
  • problem solving
  • discussion
Reflector These people learn by observing and thinking about what happened. They may avoid leaping in and prefer to watch from the sidelines.  Prefer to stand back and view experiences from a number of different perspectives, collecting data and taking the time to work towards an appropriate conclusion.
  • paired discussions
  • self analysis questionnaires
  • personality questionnaires
  • time out
  • observing activities
  • feedback from others
  • coaching
  • interviews

Original definitions

Honey and Mumford’s original definitions are as follows.

Learning style Honey and Mumford definition
Activist Activists involve themselves fully and without bias in new experiences. They enjoy the here and now, and are happy to be dominated by immediate experiences. They are open-minded, not sceptical, and this tends to make them enthusiastic about anything new. Their philosophy is: “I’ll try anything once”. They tend to act first and consider the consequences afterwards. Their days are filled with activity. They tackle problems by brainstorming. As soon as the excitement from one activity has died down they are busy looking for the next. They tend to thrive on the challenge of new experiences but are bored with implementation and longer term consolidation. They are gregarious people constantly involving themselves with others but, in doing so, they seek to centre all activities around themselves.
Theorist Theorists adapt and integrate observations into complex but logically sound theories. They think problems through in a vertical, step-by-step logical way. They assimilate disparate facts into coherent theories. They tend to be perfectionists who won’t rest easy until things are tidy and fit into a rational scheme. They like to analyse and synthesize. They are keen on basic assumptions, principles, theories models and systems thinking. Their philosophy prizes rationality and logic. “If its logical its good.” Questions they frequently ask are: “Does it make sense?” “How does this fit with that?” “What are the basic assumptions?” They tend to be detached, analytical and dedicated to rational objectivity rather than anything subjective or ambiguous. Their approach to problems is consistently logical. This is their ‘mental set’ and they rigidly reject anything that doesn’t fit with it. They prefer to maximise certainty and feel uncomfortable with subjective judgements, lateral thinking and anything flippant.
Pragmatist Pragmatists are keen on trying out ideas, theories and techniques to see if they work in practice. They positively search out new ideas and take the first opportunity to experiment with applications. They are the sort of people who return from courses brimming with new ideas that they want to try out in practice. They like to get on with things and act quickly and confidently on ideas that attract them. They tend to be impatient with ruminating and open-ended discussions. They are essentially practical, down to earth people who like making practical decisions and solving problems. They respond to problems and opportunities ‘as a challenge’. Their philosophy is “There is always a better way” and “If it works it’s good”.
Reflector Reflectors like to stand back to ponder experiences and observe them from many different perspectives. They collect data, both first hand and from others, and prefer to think about it thoroughly before coming to a conclusion. The thorough collection and analysis of data about experiences and events is what counts so they tend to postpone reaching definitive conclusions for as long as possible. Their philosophy is to be cautious. They are thoughtful people who like to consider all possible angles and implications before making a move. They prefer to take a back seat in meetings and discussions. They enjoy observing other people in action. They listen to others and get the drift of the discussion before making their own points. They tend to adopt a low profile and have a slightly distant, tolerant unruffled air about them. When they act it is part of a wide picture which includes the past as well as the present and others’ observations as well as their own.

source

My typological result is interesting to me because it captures the activist aspect that comes to the fore in my creative work, inasmuch as there exists a kind of elemental creative processing which seems to oscillate between reflection and experiencing. But, this typological result is not very accurate in my other learning realms, and this echoes in reverse the inaccuracy of the result shown by my Kolb learning Style Inventory, that captures accurately my style in expressly cognitive learning, yet completely misses the mark set by my learning style as a creative actor/agent.

Where the embodied and contextualized ‘agentic’ act fits, exemplified by committing to and instantiating a second order choice, remains under-conceptualized in both Kolb and Honey and Mumford’s related theories. Honey and Mumford were more on this case of deconstructing the element of embodied agency within experience back in 1982. Thirty plus years later the lack of the body, and thus the lack of an embodied mind, remains one of several weak spots in Kolbian theorizing about learning. Another weak spot is the inability of both instruments to flex for the sake of being able to encompass different modal learning contexts.

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And I mean every last round bit of it.

OneDaySon

(Gaston Bachelard, the phenomenology roundness; in: Poetics of Space) I should like to give an example of an image that is outside all realistic meaning, either psychological or psychoanalyti­cal.

Without preparing us, precisely as regards the absolute nature of the image, Michelet says that “a bird is almost completely sphericaL” If we drop the “almost,” which mod­erates the formula uselessly, and is a concession to a view­ point that would judge from the form, we have an obvious participation in Jaspers’ principle of “round being.” A bird, for Michelet, [Jules Michelet, L’oiseau, p. 291.] is solid roundness, it is round life, and in a few lines, his commentary gives it its meaning of model of being.1 “The bird, which is almost completely spherical, is certainly the sublime and divine summit of living con­centration. One can neither see, nor even imagine, a higher degree of unity. Excess of concentration, which constitutes the great personal force of the bird, but which implies its extreme individuality, its isolation, its social weakness.”

In the book, these lines also appear totally isolated from the rest. One feels that the author, too, followed an image of “concentration” and acceded to a plane of meditation on which he has taken cognizance of the “sources” of life. Of course, he is above being concerned with description. Once again, a geometrician may wonder, all the more so since here the bird is considered on the wing, in its out­ of-doors aspect, consequently, the arrow figures could accord
here with an imagined dynamics. But Michelet seized the bird’s being in its cosmic situation, as a centralization of life guarded on every side, enclosed in a live ball, and consequently, at the maximum of its unity. All the other images, whether of form, color or movement, are stricken with relativism in the face of what we shall have to call the absolute bird, the being of round life.

The image of being-because it is an image of being­ that appears in this fragment by Michelet is extraordinary for the very reason that it was considered of no significance. Literary criticism has attached no more importance to it than has psychoanalysis. And yet, it was written, and it exists in an important book. It would take on both interest and meaning if a philosophy of the cosmic imagination could be instituted, that would look for centers of cos­micity.

h/t Mike Dickman for sharing the cartoon on FB

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Teaching Cartoon: Principles

teaching cartoon

It would be, of course, much better, if this occasion were celebrated with no talk at all, and if I addressed you in the manner of the ancient teachers of Zen, I should hit the microphone with my fan and leave. But I somehow have the feeling that since you have contributed to the support of the Zen Center, in expectation of learning something, a few words should be said, even though I warn you, that by explaining these things to you, I shall subject you to a very serious hoax. Alan Watts

bonus:

Alan Watts .com
Alan Watts. org
Alan Watts Facebook
Alan Watts Seminar Series (iTunes-$19.99)

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Two Style Self-Reports

Archetype-Axes-3

Print out this post to utilize the two assessment forms.

Archetype Axis
Reflect on the make-up of your personality and assign 15 total points to select archetypal aspects. The scale of the point system is graded this way:
4 points – most dominant expression of particular archetypal element
3 points – next most dominant expression
2 points – strong expression
1 point – mild expression

Use the following distribution protocol:

Assign 4 points once
Assign 3 points once
Assign 2 points at least once
Assign 1 point

Use no more than 15 total points.

KOLB-9-STYLES

Kolb Learning Style ‘array’
Reflect on the make-up of your personality and assign 15 total points to select archetypal aspects. The scale of the point system is graded this way:
4 points – most dominant expression of particular learning disposition element
3 points – next most dominant expression
2 points – strong expression
1 point – mild expression

Use the following distribution protocol:

Assign 4 points once
Assign 3 points once
Assign 2 points at least once
Assign 1 point

Use no more than 12 total points.

Example (my own)

Archetype-Kolb-self-evaluation

note-I am misusing the Kolb Style array. However, my redeployment of it as a device for self-evaluation does provide me the means to better assert stylistic disposition in relationship to actual concrete learning contexts. The example here is generalized but takes into account–in a phenomenological sense–my real time introspective intuition on the nature of my own learning process. This is a more accurate process of evaluation than the formal instrument allows for.

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