patternsthatconnect

At the Blackpool Sequence Dance Festival 2011, in the Empress Ballroom of the Winter Gardens, attempting to learn brand new sequence dances, with a large group of people, I found it very difficult. It was wonderful and I loved it, especially as others took pity on us and helped us out, yet I really struggled to pick up 16 bars of steps in half an hour.

I could see many people, 20 years my senior and more, finding it quite easy to do what seemed an almost impossible task to me. What was it that made us different?

Maybe we could put it down to learning styles: this is not my favoured way of learning, I would rather read instructions first or have them explained to me in an environment where I could ask lots of questions, and then slowly piece the whole together part by part. I also seemed to suffer from ‘performance pressure’ that may have been absent in a smaller group or on my own.

It was possibly David Kolb that introduced the notion of learning styles, along the lines of: learning has a cycle of four stages and though all stages are required we may have a preference for a certain stage more than others. I have the impression that Honey and Mumford‘s learning styles are more or less the same as Kolb’s, but with more accessible labels, so we have Activist, Reflector, Theorist and Pragmatist styles. One implication of the theory is that we learn best when our own style is adequately catered for, Activists and Pragmatists preferring to learn by doing, Reflectors and Theorists favouring a more thinking approach etc. Learning professionals closer to NLP might use the distinctions Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic as learning styles.

But isn’t this somewhat limiting? “I don’t learn that way” “It’s not my learning style” could easily become an excuse to prevent further learning. Isn’t it rather that what is needed is learning at a higher level?

Gregory Bateson proposed that there are levels of learning, where Learning 0 is an habitual automatic response to a given stimulus, Learning 1 is a trial and error process of adaptation to the given environment, Learning 2 is a process of corrective change in the set of alternatives from which choices are made at level 1, and Learning 3 (which rarely, if ever occurs) is about our whole process of forming, exchanging and losing level 2 habits.

Learning how to learn in the situation I described above would be Learning 2, which would then mean that on future occasions I could participate more successfully in the trial and error process of learning the new dances in the large group in only half an hour. One way to do this would be to model the strategies of other dancers/learners, which would I suggest also be a more sophisticated use of NLP.

In yesterday’s blog I reflected on Peter Suchin’s claim that “painters …works model colour…” and on what the verb to model might mean in this connection.  I wondered if the painter might model colour in the sense of showing how it works, rather like one might model a system or a mechanical process.

This seems similar to the way that to model is used in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).

The process of modelling was Bandler and Grinders’ method for making the skills of potent psychotherapists, (communicators) available to others in a learnable and explicit form. That explicit form they called a model, and the method for creating the model they called modelling.

Grinders approach to modelling ( as described in Whispering in the Wind, by Carmen Bostic St.Clair and John Grinder, 2001) could be summarised in the following steps:

1. The identification of an appropriate person to model

2. The assimilation unconsciously of the patterning used by the person being modelled through imitative practice over an extended period of time positively eschewing any attempt to understand consciously what you are doing

3. The evaluation of ongoing results strictly through feedback

4. Upon reaching criterion, the sorting of behaviours mastered into two sets: A – the set of differences essential for eliciting the same responses as the person being modelled; B- the set of differences that was accidental or idiosyncratic to the person being modelled

5. The codification of the differences, describing them in a way that allows efficient and effective transfer of these differences to interested parties

6. The testing of the model through actual transfer (with appropriate modification).

Whilst this method of modelling is designed for modelling the behaviour of another person, and a more direct application of it might be in modelling another artist (say, Mali Morris the subject of the original article that my blog referred to), I am speculating that it could have application to the more abstract notion of modelling colour. The painter has identified colour as the subject to model, in working with colour the painter unconsciously assimilates its ‘patterning’ and codifies it in the work of art. (?)

Am I just going too far now? (see yesterday’s blog)

maybe now?

now?

photo of photo of photo of photo of a rose is a rose

I love this feedback loop, don’t you?

Somewhere Sean Scully says “what fascinates goes the distance”.  I have long been fascinated by things within things, infinite regress, self reference etc. and I am fascinated that I am fascinated by that. There’s that story, about William James, meeting an old lady who told him that the Earth rested on the back of a huge turtle.

Professor James: “But, my dear lady, what holds up the turtle?”

Old lady: “Ah, that’s easy. He is standing on the back of another turtle.”

Professor James: “Oh, I see, But would you be so good as to tell me what holds up the second turtle?”

Old lady: “It’s no use Professor” ( realizing he was trying to lead her into a logical trap) “It’s turtles-turtles-turtles, all the way down!”

A photo of a screen showing a photo of a screen showing a photo of a painting, made up of smaller paintings made up of smaller paintings…