Well, I have to start by telling you that I am nothing short of gutted to note the absence of edgeblog 15. This is serious. I remember writing it and I remember posting it. There is no sign of it on either home or work computer. I have become to some extent reconciled to my failing memory, but the onset of imagined memories is a new step in a different direction. Don’t know what else to say on that front at the moment, so I’ll get on to what I actually wanted to talk to you about.
I could let you have the formal reference if you need it, but mainly I just wanted to reflect on this elegantly barbed comment with which Henry Widdowson once introduced his response to a critic:
I welcome his intention to take a critical look at my position. The problem is that this involves a reformulation of my position so as to make it more amenable to his criticism.
Without wanting to take up a position on this particular instance, I regularly find this phenomenon one of the more depressing features of our professional and academic discourse. It’s bad enough that we should be trained to ‘make space’ for our own ideas by attacking the ideas of others, but even if one does want to live in this world of displacive discourse, where someone else must be wrong before one can speak, it undermines the whole process if one then fails to represent one’s target in its best light. It drags us down to the level of the politicians I daily hear in the news misrepresenting the views of opponents, or fabricating arguments that no one has proposed in order to put their own views in a better light. If, on the other hand, we make a point of presenting other people’s arguments as soundly as we can, then we achieve two things immediately. First, we clarify what has already been contributed; second, if our re-presentation still leaves something to which we can further contribute, then we have really justified what we have to say as worth the saying. More generally, we might see ourselves as helping develop a world of augmentative discourse that would at the same time be more rigorous in its argumentation. The basic test is an extension of the one that Carl Rogers proposed: Would the person whose ideas I am representing agree with my representation? If not, what am I doing?
Ha! There, after such a heavy opening, that expression, ‘What am I doing?’ makes me smile, because it is also written on a sign, given to me by my friend, Bob Oprandy, that I have fixed at eye-level above my desk at work. I am one of those people (Or is it just me?) who is (a) not great at multi-tasking and (b) prone to be thinking, once I have started to do one thing, that perhaps I should be doing something else. So a constant reminder to focus on whatever it is that I am doing at any one time is always a very useful corrective to the possibility of being overtly engaged in doing one thing while thinking about something else. In contrast to Czikszentmihalyi ‘s concept of flow, this is more like eddy.
Ah, and speaking of Bob, all being well, I shall be off to Peru on 24 June to do some workshops with him and with the teachers at the Instituto Cultural Peruana Norteamericano in Lima. I’ve never actually tried pair and group work in Cooperative Development with gatherings of 200 before, so it’s clearly time that I did.
As our teaching term here has come to an end, I thought it was time for another edgeblog competition. The challenge is to provide a Hoeyan SPRE analysis of the attached text, The Golden Teeth, shamelssly cribbed from The Guardian.
You may feel that this advantages those entrants who have studied relational analysis with me. Well, doh!! This is edgeblog, isn’t it? What did you expect, something on intercultural sensitivity, multimedia sustainability or ecological psychology? Once again, there will be a blisteringly attractive prize for the winning entry, which needs to reach me before the end of July.
So, have fun in the meantime and keep in mind that golden rule: Represent others as carefully as you would wish them to represent you. (And if you find edgeblog 15, do get in touch.)
Best,
Julian
Oh, training will out. Here’s the reference.
Widdowson, H. (1998). Positions and oppositions: Hedgehogs and foxes. International Journal of Applied Linguistics8/1:147-151.
