I liken this Bastow LSDA experience to a journey of the heart and mind.It's not like the type of "journey" you hear politicians and political apparatchiks talking about - the platitude for "do as I say but not as I do"...
Instead, I see #BastowLSDA as a personal quest for meaning and relevance, contextualised and interpreted differently by everyone who joins the course.
This journey can be taken in a myriad of ways:
- through armchair travel where one watches from the sidelines and feels like they are learning vicariously via osmosis simply by being enrolled in the course (and thus having the 'ticket' to show for their involvement);
- as part of a guided tour group where all the decisions are made by the leaders, but the tour highlights are experienced at some level (opting in and out of those optional extras depending on needs, wants and enthusiasm);
- as an independent traveller eager to grasp meaning and memories from every second of the experience;
- as a reluctant traveller, sitting with arms folded, closed, unreceptive saying "I've seen this all before"; or
- as an extreme traveller, seeking extreme experiences, stretching thinking and adrenalin to their limits and taking the virtual bungy jumps into the unknown.
I'm going to stretch the metaphor a bit further here, so bear with me...
How we travel is completely up to us.
What we take from this experience is dependent on what we want out of it, and what we are able or keen to put into it.
And, finally, the destination we reach relies heavily on the hard yards we've put in to get there.
A very 'Zen' view of LSDA Nikki and Yes! it is exactly like that and I think that is so for everyone involved. Personally, I am favouring armchair options dot points 3 & 4, but as you say people do choose their own journey.
ReplyDeleteI was at a 5 day conference in Kuala Lumpur years ago. One of the participants brought his wife along. During the day she went off and did whatever she liked while we sat in this plush conference facility working through our tasks with many fabulous people. One day we came out of the conference happy and satisfied and met up with my friends wife. She was quite a sight - covered head to foot in mud!
While we were enjoying ourselves in the conference she had gone to an elephant rescue centre and had taken the opportunity to get in the river with an elephant and give it a scrub down! She loved it, the elephant loved it and she came back absolutely filthy! Who do you think had the more memorable day? I can't remember what we did that day at the conference, but I do remember her, bursting with excitement and covered in mud.
With LSDA can take it easy in nice surroundings sipping our coffee and stay clean watching the proceedings or we can plunge in the river and scrub down the elephant, mud and all!
Interesting food for thought, thank you. I'll take the elephant challenge please, the worst I could do is... well I can just start again, the elephant won't mind ;)
ReplyDeleteI (as usual with Alan) loved that story...and I can see that courage in you too Hayriye to throw yourself into the fray and get dirty :)
DeleteI think I'm the independent traveller (although have definitely been the one running late for the bus this week!!). It's a good analogy and our role does depend a lot on choice but also on our prior experiences and beliefs. It's been interesting to talk about and see what my fellows in the Bastow team at school have got out of it - we've all got very different things but also have got what we each needed. Very much looking forward to the next couple of days of adventures!
ReplyDeleteThat's great feedback Gill - we could have developed a "this is what we want you to think" and "this is how you can make that happen in your school" sort of course (which would make some people happy) but that flies against our beliefs that you all, just like the students in your classrooms, come from very different places, contexts and preferences and you need to be able to draw from the course what resonates best with you...not what we WANT you to think but what YOU want to think and what you feel you next need to do.
DeleteDoes this make sense?
Love the all the analogies.
ReplyDeleteI am definitely a final dot person myself. I mean, if you're going to do something, then commit and go for it and do it with honesty, energy and integrity. Either that, or don't start in the first place.
However, as great as Nikki's extreme traveller analogy is, I would like to swap the bungy jump for an extreme flying fox - the sort that go so fast you have to REALLY strap yourself in for. Whilst you might be flying through the air at a superman-like angle, (with a chance that your underpants may indeed be stripped off you as you hurtle through time and space), you do so with a clear direction and some clarity of vision along the way. At the end of it, you arrive a long way from where you started, but no-where near where you began. That's my kind of extreme travelling.
Then I would go play with elephants in the mud.
Me too Clare - the call of the elephants is pretty appealing!
DeleteI like your flying fox too :)
Thanks for sharing that Nikki.
ReplyDeleteFeel like i'm grasping at all learning experiences. Love learning. Truly getting so much out of our face to faces, I feel thats how I learn best…
Independent traveller?… but independent on a slower ride than most.
We all have different travelling speeds Michelle...I guess the most important thing is that we do keep moving :)
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