Rumi and Dichotomous Discourse
What is beyond right-doing and wrong-doing? The dilemma...
Moving into people management and remote work has been an invigorating and challenging experience. It’s inspired lots of self-reflection—on the interplay of the personal and the professional, the power of dialogue and connection, the tension between the technocratic and the adaptive, and the power of a secure self-identity. With the self-identity piece, I’ve revisited lots of my pre-teaching enterprises and experiences and reconsidered how they impact the work I engage in now.
Prior to coming to teaching at age 28, I pursued (very poorly I should add) lots of creative projects: visual art, poetry, other creative writing, musicianship, songwriting, etc. I’ve joked that upon receiving my B.A. in Communications in 2006 I decided to learn as much as I could about art (queue up The Story of Art textbook). At some point in that self-study it became clear I needed to know a little more about philosophy. Then, at some point (probably in Russell’s History of Western Philosophy) I realized that wasn’t going to cut it, and dug into religion and ultimately mysticism.
The reason I mention this here is because lots of that mysticism is bubbling up across the work I do now with people and project management, partnership dialogue, and educational research around the role of talk in teaching and learning—but primarily in adult learning. It’s no mystery that there are lots of contested questions in the education sphere—just take one traipse into #Edutwitter as an example. Yet, lots of rumination on the differences between monologue and dialogue have me circling back to this Rumi quote:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.Source: https://nationalpoetryday.co.uk/poem/out-beyond-ideas/
Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī as a 13th century Sufi mystic, poet and scholar whose work has achieved international prominence and fame. I was really moved and inspired by scholar William Chittick’s book The Sufi Path of Love which is a deeper dive into the poetry, philosophy and mysticism of rum. One of the key takeaways for me with Rumi—and with mysticism more broadly—is the idea of coincident opposites.
Rumi recognizes the natural reality of dualistic thinking, yet pushes others to ultimately adopt a position of non-dualism as described in the quote above. I used to make a joke about the New Orleans Saints winning the Super Bowl—something like the volume or ecstasy of the win was informed by the extent of losing over many years. Again, recently with my three-year-old roommates I’ve quipped that play is really one side of a coin—the other side being fight. So, thus, one is not possible without the other—the winning without the losing, the playing without the fighting, etc.
How does this apply in education, teaching and learning? Well, surely there are myriad contested ideas, differing applications, and beliefs or values evoked at all points of the teaching and learning process. Because of the thoroughgoing nature of teaching and all it encompasses, of course folks end up with deeply-seated beliefs about practices or approaches. Inevitably, these encounter different viewpoints and sometimes evolve into debates. This—with the rightful push for substantive education reforms which change outcomes for learners—have inspired a best practice discourse.
This is where I’ve been exceptionally inspired by the scholarship of Adam Lefstein around dichotomous discourse. Just the terminology of “best practice” can be fraught in the psychologically and emotionally taxing work of teaching and learning. Imagine—an observer or administrator or coach arrives, perhaps PL is delivered at the school site. There are claims about best practices for classroom management, student groupings, individual discipline, bell-ringers or do-nows, etc. Yet, teachers recognize the rich and complex context—shifting moment to moment—of their teacherly practice.
This is where I appreciate Lefstein’s claims around a preference for teaching dilemmas rather than teaching best practices. The conception of best practice sets up a dichotomous discourse—a realm of right-doing and wrong-doing—which may invite teachers to think they’re not getting it when they apply a best practice and it doesn’t work. The reality is that some practices work in some situations, and some do not. Framing the dialogue around the dilemma at hand rather than prescribing the best practice for each scenario is more representative of the reality teachers face, and more accommodating to the difficult decision-making required in management teaching and learning.