Many years ago, during my second year of teaching middle school science in Brooklyn, New York, we took our students to a 5-day long, environmental studies program. The program took place at a summer camp during its off-season. It was late May in the Adirondack Mountains. We had taken these same students to a different program in Vermont the year before, which is where the students, who were new to the middle school, went this particular year. The principal of the middle school and several teachers went with the group to Vermont and several of us who had gone the previous year went with the “veteran” students to the Adirondacks.
When we arrived at the camp, the kids came off the buses and cars and started running around in their typical fashion, while cursing and laughing and letting off steam after a long ride. Shortly, after arriving, the camp personnel held a meeting, where they laid out the RULES. “This is an elite camp. There is no cursing. The boys’ cabins are off-limits to the girls and the girls’ cabins are off-limits to the boys. Blah, blah, blah…” And, so it went on for 30 minutes. We, the teachers, were looking at one another and rolling our eyes. The kids were squirming and rolling their eyes.
Afterwards the kids were sent to unload their packs in their assigned cabins. The teachers obediently went to the cabins to which we were assigned. When I walked into my boys’ cabin, they were diligently unpacking, while cursing and laughing and groaning about the camp personnel. I, of course, cursed at the kids to stop cursing. It broke the tension.
We then met for the first set of activities. It was hot and humid, and the black flies (if you are not familiar with black flies, they are small and aggressive biters) were eating everyone alive. The activities were boring and lifeless and mostly involved being talked at by the camp people.
The next day was rainy and very chilly. The kids and teachers survived another day of dreadful activities. And, the kids were amazingly patient with and tolerant of the people running the program, but their patience was running thin. In the middle of that night, a camp counselor came into my cabin and woke me up. “I just wanted to warn you that we’ve had 2 feet of snow and all of the power and phone lines are down, and the roads are impassable,” he whispered.
No one packed for winter. We arrived in shorts and sneakers. I packed rain boots and a raincoat, with a sweater and light jacket. In addition, a small group of our kids went on a 3-night survival trip… in sneakers and light clothing. By the time they arrived back at the camp after their first night out, they all had hypothermia. A few of the boys, who in most schools would be the troublemakers, leapt into action. They went around to all of the cabins talking other kids out of extra blankets to use to get their hypothermic classmates warmed up.
The entire trip became a survival trip, which in an odd way saved this trip. All of the rules were dropped and everyone helped in dealing with this unforeseen event. On the last day, the principal who had gone to the Vermont trip, showed up. The other camp had had the same snowstorm. He left that camp as soon as he could to come check on how we fared.
It took a disaster to prevent a disaster at the Adirondack trip.
In looking back on this trip, the school, the teachers, and the kids, a few things jump out at me now. Although I really liked the kids, the teachers, and the school at the time, I was still near the bottom of my multi-contextual-learning-about-teaching arc. I don’t want to call it a “learning curve,” because the learning doesn’t go up and then down, the learning just keeps going, while getting deeper and more integrated with one’s life. But, now with many years of experience and learning under my belt, I’m finding this story, and many others, to be very interesting. In one sense, which I will not go into here, there are glimmers of various themes that developed and grew into major guiding “frameworks” for my own thinking and practice as an educator and ordinary human being — by the way, I don’t like the word “frameworks,” because it is much too static. In the other sense, I can look backwards and see how “advanced” we were at the time, as well as to see how many of the ideas involved in complex systems were remarkably evident.
Relationships
As far as I can remember, as teachers, we never really talked explicitly about relationships. But, most of us seemed to work on developing relationships with the kids and with one another. Going to the camp and sitting through that awful initial meeting was a shared experience of shock and disappointment. The teachers knew it and the kids knew it. And, my going into the boys’ cabin and saying, “Stop the *$@#& !&%@#! cursing,” was a way of connecting into that shared sense of relationship. The kids laughed and we moaned together, while comparing how different this year’s trip was to the previous year in Vermont. But, the relationships went much deeper. We all showed our vulnerabilities, even though some of the kids tried to hide them. We also trusted and respected one another. The kids were never shy about giving teachers advice, any more than we were shy about giving them advice.
As teachers, we tried to work with the kids to share in the running of the school… in making decisions, dealing with issues, and so forth. We weren’t always successful in this endeavor, but I do think that such an emphasis played out in situations where they could step out and take control, such as with helping the kids with hypothermia on this trip and on a sailing trip where most of the kids were seasick and the ones who were not sick manned the helm and ropes, when the others couldn’t. No adults ever needed to tell them what to do.
Complexity
In order to understand complex living systems, we need to see the webs or matrices of relationships that are involved, that arise, and that disappear. There’s a fluidity in these relationships. When the kids were reprimanded in the beginning of the trip by people with whom they had no relationship, it broke the relational potentiality and trust. But, as a group of kids and teachers who had developed relationships of trust, at least some degree, the group “identity” and relationships were maintained. Had we, the teachers, sided with the camp counselors, we would have threatened the integrity of our complex system. As it was, the interaction between the two systems of the camp and our school group was problematic, but to our own group system, this interaction was more of an interruption or interference to our more established system. Our group system recalibrated and adjusted, while maintaining our own relationships within the system. After the snowstorm, our more established system recalibrated again and self-organized to meet the newly imposed demands. The camp system became irrelevant except as the source of local knowledge.
Improvisation
The highly structured and mechanized system of the camp with its strict set of rules and regulations (could be policies, laws, etc. in other contexts), had little flexibility to address drastic changes in the context. Even though the individuals within that system changed their approaches, the camp system faltered. The relational “structure” cracked. However, the school group system was inherently flexible. Middle school children are in the midst of testing limits, exerting their own control, and of becoming adults. Trying to restrict and solidify the boundaries and processes in this age group is self-defeating. But, this school’s approach provided the space and contexts for children to develop within a supportive environment and, in reflection, as a complex living system. As a result, flexibility was built-in. With such flexibility, the kids and the teachers were free to improvise. The notion of being a leader was not some static and singular entity. Yes, the teachers were leaders, but not autocratic. The children were free to jump in and be leaders.
Having been prepared for a spring trip, but finding ourselves in a winter environment, forced kids and teachers to improvise. My summer rain and shallow wading boots along with layers of socks became tolerable winter boots. Layers of clothing worked for everyone helped us deal with the cold. Improvisation became a survival strategy.
Learning
The learning that took place was more aligned to the type of learning described by Nora Bateson: Symmathesy or mutual contextual learning (SEE the symmathesy chapter in Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns). This type of learning is at the interface between contexts, systems, groups, and/or individuals.
Note that individuals, groups, contexts, and systems are all the same. Each of us is a context made of contexts, as are groups. Each of us is a system made of other systems and connected in various ways to other systems. You can even use “system” and “context” interchangeably.
We are not always aware of this kind of symmathesetic learning. It occurs in the immediacy and intimacy of our interactions with others and other contexts. It seems to me to be the most fundamental of learning that occurs at the level of perception. Although this learning is not the same as what we usually think of as learning, such as learning facts, concepts, theories, and so forth, symmathesy feeds the raw nuggets of information on relationships to this other area of learning that creates what we can think of as our individual and social epistemologies or sets of knowledge.