Hi HEALers:
At our next time together we'll explore a piece of the health education and active living puzzle you are each addressing in different ways in your main assignment. This is what we have been calling the "pedagogical relationality" of health education, health promotion and health care practices.
We work in institutions and settings that provide the general frameworks for our relations with others, and we speak in the terminology of procedures, programs, courses and curricula that provide the general direction for our interactions with others. But those frameworks and that terminology do not necessarily capture the moment to moment interactions and relationships we create with our clients, students, patients, participants, parents and the communities we serve.
Pedagogy is ultimately a relational practice of 'the particular.' It is a way of being responsive to particular people whose lives are unique and whose circumstances are idiosyncratic. And yet, given this particularity, there are still some general ways to understand this responsiveness, certain generalizable practices that work better than others, and theoretical perspectives that highlight essential commonalities within and across diverse fields of pedagogical practice.
European pedagogical theory (from the geisteswissenshchaftliche pådagogic tradition for the German speakers) defines the key focal points as: the pedagogical atmosphere; the pedagogical situation; the pedagogical relation; and the pedagogical stance. We've spoken already about the atmosphere. (I said I would send you a reading on the pedagogical atmosphere, but I think you already have a good sense of what it entails, so I would rather you spend time on readings that go further than this notion.) So, let's look more closely at the pedagogical relation, the situations in which it is called for and the stances, as well as the postures, positions, gestures and expressions, that demonstrate very visibly the practices of being responsive to and responsible for others. Let's also keep our analysis of pedagogy rooted in the practices of heath education (and health care and promotion) and in those practices that are consistent with active living.
A. Consider how pedagogical relationality has a 'vitality' to it. Having looked now at 'vitality,' we can regard this helpful, caring relationship as one that is potentially animating, health-inducing, and sustaining at physical, psychological, emotional and wider energetic registers of significance, including the social, cultural and ecological registers. From the (phenomneological) point of view of lived experience, the (peak)vitality of the pedagogical relationship is experienced in its physical, emotional and world-connecting intensities. A short hand word for this is 'flow' (and 'play' too).
Have a look on the internet at Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's articulation of the psychology of flow. You can find a decent TED talk he gave at:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on Flow
http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html
This talk is a bit dry, so also have at look at an interesting website and the entertaining and informative flow description given there.
Insphyre: What is Flow?
http://www.insphyre.com/flow-arts/
Rebecca Lloyd and I have taken this idea of flow and incorporated it within the practice of fitness classes and personal training. Again, this is just one example of experiencing "interactive flow" as the essentially lived meaning of HEAL. I've attached a published article that outlines what we mean by "interactive flow" in relation to the pedagogy of fitness teaching. It is titled "Interactive flow in exercise pedagogy."
B. Now, consider how the relational dynamics and the energy registers of interactive flow are evident in your own HEAL practices. Consider how they are apparent, to a greater or lesser extent, in the narrative pieces you've written in your major assignment drafts. My purpose in selecting the 'Mane Event' as our Saturday field trip on the 22nd is for you to observe the sheer physicality of interactive flow in a context that will be foreign to some of you. I say "sheer physicality" because horses don't talk (in human words at least) and so the interaction with them is all about body language and the energy and vitality resonances that can be created through receptive posturing, positioning, gesturing, and the expression of clear intentions. We will use some observational formats for this day which I'll give to you on Friday. But for the moment, I've attached two further articles that get at the pedagogical dynamics of human-horse connections.
There is the one I wrote on "Becoming horse in the duration of the moment: The trainer's challenge" which is, as you will now come to expect, a rather philosophical treatment of human-horse pedagogy. A companion piece is by Karen LaRochelle who wrote this paper as a course assignment in another our our MEd programs. Karen describes one of the practical horse communication sessions I ran for teachers and how it connected to her sense of being with others and being part of a more-than-human world. Her piece, which she game permission for me to share with you, is called "Interbeing and interspecies communication."
C. These writings about the physical (and active living) aspects of interacting with others touch on a theme that ecological and environmental writers take up and that has to do with our pedagogical responsiveness to matters of health, sustainability and even 'flourishing' that are not confined to just our human relations and interactions with one another. David Abram's work has been mentioned a few times already in our class discussions. I'd like to pick up on some of his work, and that of other eco-phenomenologists and eco-pedagogues, at we consider the broad reaches of the vitality of our pedagogical relations with others. We'll see if and how our field trip prompts thinking in that direction. Again, for the moment, you can get the gist of David Abram's environmental work and writings on the internet. I suggest the following Youtube talk:
David Abram at the SEED Language of Spirit Conference
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrLxEKgTGZ4
Okay, this has been another lengthy email. By now you can see some method to the madness, which is that we prepare ourselves for face-to-face class connection with one another and, where possible, create the very engagement with one another that is illustrative of the "issues in curriculum and pedagogy" that we are reading and writing about.
I will send you one more group email before we meet this coming Friday evening about the logistics of the Saturday field trip. A very practical issue of managing curriculum and pedagogy in health education and active living is dealing with risk and liability waivers. It's a necessary detail, and one that I'll leave for a separate email.
I trust you are enjoying this beautiful day.
Cheers,
Stephen.
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