It was an ice storm in Arlington, TX. I knew the shit had hit that morning as I watched the Weather Channel’s harbinger of extremity, Jim Cantore, on screen in Arlington, TX. Expletive deleted. Let me start over.

I was in Arlington for a MOOC conference. No brainer. Texas can be chilly in the winter but the odds were that I would draw that breathtaking, low 60’s, high bluebell Texas sky. I would be downing froufrou drinks and littering the table with paper umbrellas all the while smiling at the thought of my colleagues getting ready for finals week. Serves them right.

I got Mr. Weather Death instead on the TV screen describing the ongoing ice apocalypse. All day weather loomed more important than learning, but the hard core MOOCers remained. That evening clutching my grubby drinks ticket I made my way through an industry-sponsored buffet. I sat down not to exotic froufrou but beer and chicken and shrimp on a bone china plate . It was cold, inches of ice on the dark grounds of the Arlington Sheraton, and I could see through the glass the outside table I should have been sitting at.

I was a shocked from a truly rococo series of self-pitying reveries by someone sitting opposite me. It was Dave Cormier. Which is not to say that I knew Dave. I didn’t know anyone at the conference so why was Dave sitting opposite me? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and an empty seat is just a place to sit.

I think I had been a fan of Dave’s work for quite awhile from his early work podcasting on edtechtalk where I had lurked off and on for many years. Somehow he had seemed taller on that show. We went back and forth for awhile until I mentioned hearing about some sort of MOOC he was sweeping into a pile somewhere online. No big deal, he says, a little this a little that. Why did I feel after he had gone that I had just been snookered into joining a little “this and that”?

I eventually got  a flight out of Arlington and as I heard the jet’s wheels jerking around in the ice that still dotted the runway  I wondered a bit about what this rhizo thing-y might entail.  That word, entail, was banished from my  mind as  the jet lifted in a white-knuckled glory.

Entail. An odd word. My trusty desktop version of the OED (my God what a glimmering time suck that app is!)  derives it from ‘intaglio’ –engraving. Think of tallies on a stick, entailings. It also denotes a legal concept where the dead can control from the grave how their holdings are bequeathed to the living… in perpetuity. Primogeniture laws are a classic example of entailment. So…by extension Dave has tallied his provocations on a stick, delicious tar-baby paradoxes on a stick. He has also bequeathed to us a wealth of ideas that we do not own, yet are allowed to use until we shuffle of the whole mortal coil bit. In theory these ideas are just ‘passing through’. We use the fruit but not  the root.

Here are some of the fruits I have eaten.

Classrooms are redolent with stinky blindspots that our noses have become inured to. (Howabout them mixed metaphors?) We don’t smell the cigarettes and sulphides from the leftover cabbage and kielbasa on the stove. I and mine are no exception. The structure of school imposes a double bind, a treacherous twisting of the tribe. We know what is demanded yet we know we ought not do it. And the problem is we can smell that rotting thing that we are asked to do, but can’t quite track it down to toss it even though it is squatting on the stove in the pot.

Rhizo14 has invited me and us to cast about for a way to de-reconcile and unbind from this corruption. For example, I have always seen how important communty is to learners. Now, by shifting my stance, I am seeing how what I have been doing in the classroom is anathema to the  community I purport to value. Now I know what I need to begin changing. Knowing how to do that, well…that is the work that has begun.

Some more fresh fruit.

Community is an organ of knowing and sensing just as much as our own eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin. We ‘see’ through our community. We come to know through it. Community is not just some network visualization of nodes and lines or even some metaphorized vision of that, rhizomes connected. I am reminded of the work neurophysiologists have done in the last ten years to discover the work of the glia in the brain.

For years the dominant textbook picture for the brain was the classic one–a neuronal node with myelin coated wire extending to another node and another wire all the way down until you create ‘mind’. Making the mind legible in this way has a big problem. The simplification is wrong and leads to blindspots, big ones. For example, what about the soup that these nodes and wires rests in, the glial cells. Even the name has a hilarious cirucularity. Glia means glue. The glial cells glue all the important stuff together. Why study glue? We already know what it does. It freaking glues, right? [Hands dusting together. Done and done.]. So we thought. So wrong.

The glia are as much a part of the ‘mind’ as the neurons. In fact the glia have their own potassium ion  chemical connection. They talk to each other in cascades of biochemical cycles that we are only beginning to explore.

My aside here is by way of showing that we must take into account the whole community in ways that we have not bothered to do before. We have to connect to the community like never before, more deeply and more shallowly. This can be as simple as asking learners what their expectations are yet not getting out in front of those hopes and shaping them to our own ends. That can be and  is a very frustrating tangle of roots.

The myth of old suggests you just have to cut through with a knife sometimes. More likely it is a patient sitting down with the fishing line and visualizing the untangling of monofilament slightly ahead of where you are. Messy, frustrating, and well beyond what we are expected to do in the classroom. Where we are versus where we ought to be is a growing gap. At some point we are faced with the decision to either continue minding it or leaping it and leaving behind the old ways. We can bridge it for awhile, but I am not sure that eventually the gap pulls those structures down as well.

I see how the analogies and metaphors have gone haywire above so I think I will stop and get out of my stymie by bringing in my ‘big bully brother’, architect Christopher Alexander. In his most recent book Alexander writes, “The purpose of all architecture is to encourage and support life-giving activity, dreams, and playfulness.” We need nothing less in education.

Alexander continues,

“Our work on the Eishin Project began, as promised in the contract, with the construction of a pattern language. We spent four to five months engaging students, teachers, and administrators in creating this new pattern language, which would spring from their hopes and dreams as well as the land itself.

The very first thing we did was spend two weeks just talking to different teachers and students, to get a feeling for their hopes and dreams. These talks were one-on-one and often lasted for an hour, for any one interview, during which we asked questions, talked, probed, explored dreams of an ideal campus, and tried to understand each person’s deepest visions as a teacher, or as a student….

This was not easy to do. It required much of both the interviewer and the person being interviewed. … In the context of present-day Japan, where most schools are massive concrete boxes, with an asphalt playground on one side, it was hard to overcome this difficulty. In any case, I always gently insisted…. In answer to this kind of gentle invitation, most people would begin to say something. Relucantly, hesitatingly, often with some embarrassment, they would begin to describe their feelings about things — shyly, as if it was not allowed, or if it was crazy for them to attempt it. …. For example, one teacher said something like this to me: “I imagine walking by a stream, small streams and islands, perhaps bridges, and trees hanging in the water — a place where I can walk quietly and think about my class, or collect my thoughts as I prepare to teach.”

We shall see that many of these shyly presented, hesitating thoughts and feelings, were deeply true. They represented a real truth, which was demonstrated empirically once the school was built.”

I love this profoundly simple invitation to emerge. It matches the one proferred by Dave on that icy Arlington night in December. It is being played out in a slippery, relational, communitarian way right now and over the past six weeks and into a future we know not WTF.

But there is a catch. It will not continue without the courage to continuously leap the gap, seek out our blindspots and keep on. As Machiavelli remarked:

“It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones. ”

That is the other legacy that our #Rhizo14 community has had  entailed to it.  Let us not be lukewarm defenders. I thank you all now and forever forward.