Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, 
There is a field. I'll meet you there.

Rumi

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.

Rumi

When I started teaching way back in 1973, I remember being required to keep a record book that was intended to capture my teaching ‘progress’. Ticking the relevant content item column indicated I had ‘completed’ this topic with the class. Content ruled! It seemed clear that my job as a successful teacher was to pass on the required content as efficiently and effectively as possible.

It was only later that I became more aware of the damage done by an approach that focused on right/wrong, either/or and focused on what the teacher taught rather than what the learner learnt.

Fifty years later, everything has changed. My focus is on creating a learning environment that moves beyond these binary opposites and creates a field in which the possibility of personal and societal transformation can thrive. It is an activist agenda in which I carefully choose content and methodology to offer participants access to selected core concepts as building blocks for growth.

It's edgy stuff, and I end each teaching session thoroughly exhausted and unfit for human companionship. I seldom sleep more than a few hours the night before I teach. I get up early that morning to rework my preparation in a quest for the perfect way to reach every student in exactly the right way. Afterwards, of course, I always find fault with my session and can identify every occasion on which I failed to take advantage of all the possibilities for magical learning that presented themselves to me. I’ve made peace with this obsessive behaviour as it somehow ensures that I show up for each class in a grounded and highly intuitive way.

The process of trying to capture this journey for this website has starkly shown me the impossibility of offering the reader a logical incremental progression of insights leading to ‘The Ten Steps of Good Teaching’!

I have also become exquisitely aware that my teaching choices and possibilities cannot exist in an independent and artificial classroom life. They are inextricably linked with the multiple factors and experiences of my life as well as the essence of who I was and who I am (and who I am on the way to becoming). It seems impossible to separate what I do from who I am. And I am clearly not bound by cognitive theories.

In many ways, this grand website project (just like my grandiosely intentioned teaching sessions) is doomed to a high degree failure. But I have made peace with this and have decided to draw inspiration for my approach from the roots of the word ‘complexity’. Complexity lies at the heart of the informing theory for my work. The word ‘complex’ means ‘composed of interconnected parts’ and originates from the Latin word plectere, which means to weave, braid, twine or entwine.

So I will start weaving my initial pre-content story and introduce three specific threads that have played a major part in influencing my teaching choices over the years. The separation of the central thread of who I am and what I bring to teaching into the sub-threads of ‘My Journey’, ‘Mathematics Education’ and ‘Methodology’ is in many ways artificial, as they all are involved in the weave. However, I invite you, the reader, to take the plunge by clicking on one of the options below and beginning to tug at the first thread of my learning.

cross