PRESENCE

PRESENCE

       A new principle/practice!  This one is based on a favorite adage from THE DEATH OF A SALESMAN by Arthur Miller:  The salesman’s wife says: Attention must be paid.

       Dialogue Education is rooted in that respectful behavior: attention!  That word comes from the French: attendre: listen!

Learning to Listen… 

       In a recent conversation with my friend and mentor, Paula Berardinelli, we talked of the power of such attention in the act of teaching/learning. Paula had just returned from an amazing experience with a group of professionals in Silicon Valley. They consistently remarked on her attention to each of them.

       I said: “Paula, we should have a principle/practice that captures that skill, that attitude, that concept of deep respect.”

       Paula replied, “ I think of it as presence, Jane.”

       Presence it is: Real Presence!  Looking into the eyes of a learner, listening with your toes, paying attention to learners from the first steps of designing, through your study of their response to the LNRA, through every learning task in the course. Like a mother hen with scattered chicks, we attend to each one as if she were the only one. We are present to all and our presence is operative in the learning. No one escapes our caring, our attention.

     Attention must be paid, indeed.

A SILENT FLOOD

    On Sunday October 5, I walked barefoot into the kitchen and felt the small rug in front of the sink wet under my feet.  I noticed other signs of water on the kitchen floor. I sent an urgent note to my friend, Jose, a competent, helpful carpenter-electrician-builder.

     He kindly came to my home Sunday afternoon and declared emergency status!  “This is serious, Jane.” I had called Jose two weeks before to examine the threshold strip between my hall and kitchen, which was coming loose. It was dangerous in that I or my friends could trip on it and fall. He promised  at that time to come with a wood threshold strip which he could hammer solidly into the flooring.  That loose strip proved to be another clue to the silent flood  which was flowing, drop by drop from the plastic piping to the ice-maker of my fridge into the floor of my home: kitchen and adjacent halls.

      Jose was not as concerned about the destructive water as he was about the accumulated mold which is dangerous to our health. He and his team ripped out my kitchen: flooring, sink, cabinets, and moved dishwasher, stove, fridge, washer and dryer to the back deck!  I sat in chaos on my back porch…while six blowing machines roared as they dried the soaking-wet wood.

      I sat on the back porch, surrounded by in the chaos, for a week while the driers roared. I slept at my friend Karen’s home and struggled with State Farm Insurance agents who told me I had no claim to insurance because the lead was slow, not sudden. Facing this huge cost and weeks of reconstruction, I got more and more

stressed and depressed. 

       Saturday morning I awoke at Karen’s home and announced: "I am going home to clean what remains of my house within an inch of its life." I did that, and now sit, by the fire, in my living room on a Sunday afternoon after a visit and a lunch treat from a good friend.  I am newly aware that the silent flood saved my life from disease caused by the accumulating mold. I await the next weeks of reconstruction and the joy of a beautiful, and safe, new kitchen! What can I say but: Praise and Thanks!

                               IMAGINATION

      My teacher and mentor, Walter Brueggemann, has written a book entitled The Prophetic Imagination. Another of my teachers, Dr. Joaquin Montero of Chile, is designing a way to get accessible and effective primary health care to 400 million Latin Americans. Now that is the prophetic imagination at work.

       What do you imagine? 

        I love my true story of a day in a graduate classroom at the School of Public Health University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was the professor of Public Health Education 502, saying to the twenty or so 30 year old graduate students: “Friends, this (Dialogue Education) is how your children and grandchildren will learn. It is coming…”

         The Public Health graduate students scoffed:” You are so naïve! This is a university. It will never change!”

         I offered a story: “Friends, when I was growing up in New York City in the early forties, my dear mother would never allow us to go swimming in the public pools in the hot summer. 

     ‘I do not want any one of my three girls to spend her life in an iron lung,’ Mother argued.

          Silence in the graduate classroom! Staring eyes: finally, “What’s an iron lung?”   Not one of them had ever heard of an iron lung.

          “Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case. And I propose that you can imagine a world in which your grandchildren will ask, ‘Granpa, what’s a gun?’ Dr. Jonas Salk imagined a world without iron lungs. It is our turn, now.’’