> I owe the list some clarification and Malcolm neatly presents a leadership
> dilemma -- how to provide 'safety' in an unsafe situation. My definition
> of a safe environment is one of safety of self.
Dear organlearners,
I introduced the concept of "sponsored safety" in terms of the Afrikaans
word "geborgenheid". Bill, in a previous response you said that you liked
this concept. Others also replied, giving their own inputs. Joe Koenig,
for example, stressed the 'ownership' of the exploring learner. All these
inputs caused you to learn. Thus you are now able to go one step further:
to try and uncover what exactly a safe environement is.
I think that Malcolm Burson's input was quite worrying to some of us,
namely, that sometimes we need an unsafe environment to peomote learning!
It is almost as if his input is a contradiction to what some of us had
said. But it is not, and I intend to show why.
First, I have to admit that although the concept of "sponsored safety"
rang true for me when I first encountered it in 1971 while studying for a
teacher's diploma, I had immense difficulty the next eight years to
provide an environment of sponsored safety for my pupils and students.
Everybody used this term in an intuitive sense, but nobody could give me a
scientific delineation of what it means. Some tried to explain it in terms
of trust and others in terms of resources, but it did not clarify things
for me. Furthermore Malcolm's thesis was also a worry to me - somehow
unsafety played a role!
The etymological origin of the word "geborgenheid" was much more
explanative to me, but unfortunately, only in an intuitive manner. The
etymological origin of the word is very much the same as that of the
Scottish words "burough" and "burgh" - a fortified haven like a castle
where one can safely perform one's daily tasks, whatever they are,
provided one acts in a civilised manner.
So I tried to model safe learning environments in terms of the latter
meaning. Then suddenly, somewhere in the late seventies, I got my first
clue from that gigantic thinker Alfred N Whitehead. He said somewhere that
the task of education is to create the future in a civilised manner. It
was a magnificant clue. I began to realise that "sponsored safety" is very
much related to promoting creative learning. This fired my desire to know
even more what creativity itself is. And eventually it turned out that
creativity indeed provides the answer, provided we accept the tenet 'to
learn is to create'.
Creativity is probably the most complex topic to be studied.
Unfortunately, owing to its complexity, it is one of the last barely
scratched topics remaining. One peculiarity of creativity is that it has
'two sides' to it, just like any language. On the one side of a language
we have grammer (syntaxis) and on the other side we have meaning
(semantics). Similarly, we have in creativity one 'side' which I prefer to
call the dynamics (meaning, content) of creativity and the other 'side'
which I prefer to call the mechanics (grammer, form) of creativity.
The dynamics of creativity is concerned with the quantitative aspects of
entropy production: forces and fluxes, chaos, order, emergence, digestion,
cross inductions, etc. The mechanics of creativity is concerned with the
qualitative aspects of entropy production, namely the seven essentialities
of creativity. Two of them are, for example, identity-categoricity and
associativity-monadicity.
When Malcolm Burson's viewpoint "unsafety" is applicable, it is nothing
else than promoting the dynamics of creativity. Well done Malcolm -
building up stress to produce entropy can become quite unsafe! When Bill
Hobler's viewpoint "safety" is applicable, it is nothing else than
promoting the mechanics of creativity. In fact, what Bill has
accomplished, is to use one of the seven essentialities as his definition
for "sponsored safety", namely identity-categoricity! Well done Bill.
To summarise, a learning environment is safe when it promotes creative
learning. This means that an organisation which does not promote the
creativity of every person in it, is a very unsafe environment in the
absolute meaning of the word unsafe. In other words, each learning
organisations has to promote the creativity of all its members as its
first priority and not the learning of such members. Only then will
learning flourish because TO LEARN IS TO CREATE.
Rol Fessenden was the one person who clearly stressed the creative facet
when he said that the 'tools' for creativity should be provided in a safe
environment. Thank you very much Rol - your sensitivity for creativity in
many of your contributions gave me much pleasure.
Finally, just to stir the fire again which has been dead for some time
now. In one of my earliest contributions I wrote that for me morality is
to promote the creativity of all my fellow humans. In other words, there
is a very close relationship between morality and an eviroment which
sponsors safety. An environment which is morally objectionable, is not
safe for learning any more.
Best wishes
- --
At de Lange
Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education
University of Pretoria
Pretoria, South Africa
email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
--"Mnr AM de Lange" <AMDELANGE@gold.up.ac.za>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>