This is an invitation to dialogue about Harm Reduction. Before I lay out the groundwork for this dialogue I’d like to provide a short introduction to the container, Voice Thread.
If you’ve never used Voice Thread please be assured that it is very easy to use. The big triangle shaped arrows located at the bottom right and left of the screen move you through the slides. There are seven slides in this Voice Thread.
Each of the slides contains some content in the form of questions. Although Voice Thread is typically seen as a visual format, often used in art education, I have purposefully not included visuals. I did this because I did not want to prime or influence the viewer. I am trying really hard not to advocate for any one perspective rather I am hoping that each visitor will share their own unique views relatively removed from my own personal agenda in this area.
The slide topics are:
1. An Invitation to Dialogue – Title Slide
2. What is your understanding of the term Harm Reduction?
3. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – Questions about the pro’s and con’s, in your view.
4. How do you use Harm Reduction
5. Morality and Ethics
6. What else? – Add “other” stuff here.
7. Stories – An invitation to share stories about Harm Reduction
In the centre bottom of the Voice Thread screen is a button that says “comment”. When you click on this you will see options to comment by phone, voice recording, video, type or upload a prerecorded comment. I will try to include exemplars of video, audio and text and hopefully others will provide more as the thread evolves.
Please do not feel obliged to comment on all the slides or for that matter on any of them. Listening without commenting is also a form of participation. Do feel free to embed or link to this Voice Thread on your own blog or website. This application is built for sharing.
A couple of things to know about the recording options, first they start recording automatically after a few seconds, so be ready to speak. Second, you can delete and do over.
A few thoughts about Dialogue
Dialogue is a Greek term that means “flow of meaning”. It is essentially “an enquiry that surfaces ideas, perceptions and understanding that people do not have already” Issacs, 1999, p. 2). In this Voice Thread, the invitation is to dialogue and to take part in a process of enquiry.
There are four important processes and abilities that dialogue perpetuates. The first is to evoke people’s genuine voices. This means both speaking your own voice and encouraging others to do the same. This invitation is to add your genuine and authentic voice.
The second is to listen deeply. Really listening is hard work, most of us don’t listen really well. Instead we hear and while hearing think about what we want to say in response.
The third equally difficult ability is to genuinely respect others. This, for some, involves adopting the belief that there is coherence to all views. My friend Jane Katz uses the phrase “That makes perfect sense based on what you have experienced” in a program she teaches on managing emotions. Respect is about privileging all voices, not just the ones that sound like our own.
The fourth involves suspending that which we are certain of. If we want to expand our own perspective, to make it larger, more able to encompass the whole, we may have to un-attach ourselves from our truth for a period of time. To achieve dialogue requires integrating these four practices.
In my mind the practice of dialogue is similar to the activity of Rhizomatic Education or Community as Curriculum as put forth by Dave Cormier (n.d.).
A rhizome is type of root defined as being a “horizontal, usually underground stem that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes” (Rhizome, n.d.). I have adapted Dave’s suggested Rhizomatic premises below as a possible foundation of understanding for this process.
1. Experts do not create knowledge; it is co-created by individuals through dialogue and reflection. (Reflection being an internal dialogue)
2. Those facilitating the process suggest the context and create any needed scaffolding to contain the issue, which I have attempted with the questions on the slides.
3. We all have our own resources and our own unique experiences to draw on.
4. Collaborative, community led processes allows us to be more creative with our combined knowledge.
These ideas are not yet fully formed in my own mind so any feedback on them would be welcome. Right now I am seeing the questions on the slides as being like the nodes on a rhizome. I can easily shift to seeing each person being a node however.
So, again, welcome and let the dialogue begin…
References
Cormier, D, (n.d.) Dave’s Educational Blog. Community as Curriculum – A Research Project. Retrieved February 20, 2010, from http://davecormier.com/edblog/category/rhizomes/
Issacs, W (1999). Dialogic Leadership [Electronic version]. The Systems Thinker, 10(1)
http://www.dialogos.com/resources/files/systhink.pdf
Rhizome - definition from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/rhizome accessed February 20, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Rhyzomatic Education, Democracy and Open Space Technology
I’ve had a broadly productive couple of days. I keep chasing down one idea only to be led to another linked but independently fascinating concept. This scattering of attention started a few days ago when I revisited Dave Cormier’s treatise on rhyzomatic education or community as curriculum.
I was first introduced to this concept via Wiaoc09 - Fun & Games in Professional Development Online Conference when I took part in Dave's facilitated a session called You Can’t Collaborate Alone (UStream recording of the presentation is here.) That highly collaborative experience made sense to me; it felt right, despite my inability at that time to clearly articulate the concept to others. (I'm still working on that.)
Shortly after this I attended a residency at Royal Roads as part of the MA in Leadership program. Two related concepts were presented while I was there. The first, democracy, threaded through the entire residency. I’m still struggling to understand and define democracy but at least I’m in good company there.
In my view, the primary challenge with democracy as we know it, is that is assumes all voices are equal. This is not the case, again, at least from my experience. I think we can do better than democracy in its current form. I think we ought to be aiming for a system, in education, government, and work that looks and feels more like Helgeson’s Web of Inclusion.
The second related idea, Open Space Technology (OST), was introduced during the residency as a way to use a democratic process to facilitate learning. Harrison Owen is credited with inventing OST however even he suggests that it is a method of self-organizing that has been around since human began gathering in groups to get things done. There are four guiding principles and one law in OST.
Principle 1 - Whoever comes is the right people. You don’t need hundreds or thousands showing up, nor do you need the “leaders”. What you do need is that the people showing are invested and willing take action.
Principle 2 - Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Keep focused on the here and now.
Principle 3 - Whenever it starts is the right time. No clock watching, inspiration and creativity are impossible to schedule.
Principle 4 - When it’s over it’s over. Don’t waste time. Just do it and once done move on.
The Law is the Law of Two Feet. If at any time you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing – use you two feet and move to some place. Unhappy people are unlikely to be productive people.
Every time I read these I am reminded of Angeles Arrien’s Four Fold Way. Show up, be present, tell the truth and be open but not attached to outcomes. This of course brings me back to the idea of rhyzomatic learning and education.
I was first introduced to this concept via Wiaoc09 - Fun & Games in Professional Development Online Conference when I took part in Dave's facilitated a session called You Can’t Collaborate Alone (UStream recording of the presentation is here.) That highly collaborative experience made sense to me; it felt right, despite my inability at that time to clearly articulate the concept to others. (I'm still working on that.)
Shortly after this I attended a residency at Royal Roads as part of the MA in Leadership program. Two related concepts were presented while I was there. The first, democracy, threaded through the entire residency. I’m still struggling to understand and define democracy but at least I’m in good company there.
In my view, the primary challenge with democracy as we know it, is that is assumes all voices are equal. This is not the case, again, at least from my experience. I think we can do better than democracy in its current form. I think we ought to be aiming for a system, in education, government, and work that looks and feels more like Helgeson’s Web of Inclusion.
The second related idea, Open Space Technology (OST), was introduced during the residency as a way to use a democratic process to facilitate learning. Harrison Owen is credited with inventing OST however even he suggests that it is a method of self-organizing that has been around since human began gathering in groups to get things done. There are four guiding principles and one law in OST.
Principle 1 - Whoever comes is the right people. You don’t need hundreds or thousands showing up, nor do you need the “leaders”. What you do need is that the people showing are invested and willing take action.
Principle 2 - Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Keep focused on the here and now.
Principle 3 - Whenever it starts is the right time. No clock watching, inspiration and creativity are impossible to schedule.
Principle 4 - When it’s over it’s over. Don’t waste time. Just do it and once done move on.
The Law is the Law of Two Feet. If at any time you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing – use you two feet and move to some place. Unhappy people are unlikely to be productive people.
Every time I read these I am reminded of Angeles Arrien’s Four Fold Way. Show up, be present, tell the truth and be open but not attached to outcomes. This of course brings me back to the idea of rhyzomatic learning and education.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Homelessness Cannot Happen to Just Anyone | End Homelessness | Change.org
This blog post jogged my memory of a dream I had last night. Ok, not quite a dream, more of one of those epiphanies you have just as you're dozing off.
I woke up long enough to jot some criptic notes down on my iPhone, which is blindingly bright by the way, after your eyes have adjusted to darkness. The notes types into my iPhone last night are "the perfect storm", "poorest postal code in Canada, DTES", "residential schools & multigenrational trauma", "port city", "warm weather". That's it. That was my epiphany.
All of these things, I believe, have combined to create the Perfect Storm of drug addiction and homelessness in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES). Yes, I realize that its not BIG news to most. Indeed even to me, in the clear brightness of day it seemed kind of obvious. But maybe that's the problem. We just shrug and go "ya, so, we all grok the connection". But do we, really?
I was ready to put this post on the back burner when I came across the Homeless Cannot Happen to Just Anyone blog post. Dave Henderson, the author of the post says right up front that "military veterans account for an estimated 26 percent of the homeless population while comprising only 11 percent of the general population". What are the numbers for the Aboriginal population in the DTES? Bet they're higher.
Unlike Verterans Affairs we have done a very poor job of quantifying homelessness by (cultural) history. The Veterans Affairs folks know exactly who went to war, who saw action and what the longitudinal outcomes were and are. I've been working with Aboriginal and First Nations communities for decades and based on my experiences no one really knows how many of the homeless and drug dependent folks in the DTES have been impacted by multigenerational trauma. I think at some level we may be afraid to find out.
If we do find out by say doing an Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study and the results come back suggesting that the majority of folks in the DTES have scored in four or more catagories and that the vast majority had scored in the most impactful of the catagories - abandonment, other than by death of parent/caregiver, what would we HAVE to do?
I mean face it. We can't change Vancouver's weather, if we could the IOC would have done it already. We can't change the coastline, we will always be a Port city with better than avergae access to just off the boat drugs. We can't change the past however we can provide services and supports that have proven time and again to work to help people put trauma in context and to heal from it.
InSite is one example of a service that is using best practices to connect with people who are most affected by homelessness, addiction and have a history of complex trauma that in most cases began with an adverse childhood experience.
We need more of these kinds of relational based services, not less.
I woke up long enough to jot some criptic notes down on my iPhone, which is blindingly bright by the way, after your eyes have adjusted to darkness. The notes types into my iPhone last night are "the perfect storm", "poorest postal code in Canada, DTES", "residential schools & multigenrational trauma", "port city", "warm weather". That's it. That was my epiphany.
All of these things, I believe, have combined to create the Perfect Storm of drug addiction and homelessness in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES). Yes, I realize that its not BIG news to most. Indeed even to me, in the clear brightness of day it seemed kind of obvious. But maybe that's the problem. We just shrug and go "ya, so, we all grok the connection". But do we, really?
I was ready to put this post on the back burner when I came across the Homeless Cannot Happen to Just Anyone blog post. Dave Henderson, the author of the post says right up front that "military veterans account for an estimated 26 percent of the homeless population while comprising only 11 percent of the general population". What are the numbers for the Aboriginal population in the DTES? Bet they're higher.
Unlike Verterans Affairs we have done a very poor job of quantifying homelessness by (cultural) history. The Veterans Affairs folks know exactly who went to war, who saw action and what the longitudinal outcomes were and are. I've been working with Aboriginal and First Nations communities for decades and based on my experiences no one really knows how many of the homeless and drug dependent folks in the DTES have been impacted by multigenerational trauma. I think at some level we may be afraid to find out.
If we do find out by say doing an Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study and the results come back suggesting that the majority of folks in the DTES have scored in four or more catagories and that the vast majority had scored in the most impactful of the catagories - abandonment, other than by death of parent/caregiver, what would we HAVE to do?
I mean face it. We can't change Vancouver's weather, if we could the IOC would have done it already. We can't change the coastline, we will always be a Port city with better than avergae access to just off the boat drugs. We can't change the past however we can provide services and supports that have proven time and again to work to help people put trauma in context and to heal from it.
InSite is one example of a service that is using best practices to connect with people who are most affected by homelessness, addiction and have a history of complex trauma that in most cases began with an adverse childhood experience.
We need more of these kinds of relational based services, not less.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
What is Dependence?
Short narrated powerpoint discussing the terms "dependence" and addiction". Part of an online course.
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