Stepping in tune with being

I’ve been thinking about “withitness,” that elusive necessary quality of teaching. It’s something more and deeper, I think, than merely having “eyes in the back of your head,” but closer to what Lil’wat elder Lorna Williams calls Kamúcwkalha: acknowledging the felt energy indicating group attunement and the emergence of a common group purpose.

I’ve been observing becoming-teachers, so beautiful in their earnestness, eagerness, teaching their first lessons. Their focus, for the most part, understandably, is on the lesson, on their own next step or misstep. They aren’t able yet to look up, to teach with, to move in tune, attuned.

And here? Is it possible to be attuned to Other online?

Perhaps this explains our ever-increasing focus on data mining and learning analytics, a practice that has spilled, now, into our classrooms, too. Without our students before us, we seek other markers to tell us how we are doing.

But what do we learn from our data? Only more about the virtual worlds we create, the spaces constructed by our ideas. Parsing the data we mine, we find myriad ways to get more clicks, more compliance, more control to perpetuate what we’ve made.

What has data to do with you? With me? With the children? With us?

Data keeps our head down, focused on our own next step or misstep.

How do poets look up to see, to touch, even across centuries? Robert Bringhurst writes:

Poetry is one among the many forms of knowing, and maybe it is knowing in the purest form we know. I would rather say that knowing freed from the agenda of possession and control – knowing in the sense of stepping in tune with being – is what we mean by poetry. (Everywhere being is dancing, 2007)

How do we step in tune with being? Even here.

What is teaching and learning freed from possession and control?