Blurring the Boxes: Why and How

Attention to future directions is valuable at several levels: field, provider, and learning group. This article explores ways in which the teaching-learning transaction can address future directions through valuing reflection, diversity; and creativity As educators, we hear of the need to help ourselves, our agencies, our programs and our students think outside the box. Still, we must ask ourselves if our real challenge is to blur the boxes and, if so, how? Why Blur the Boxes? In my Studies in Change course, I contend we are living in the time of greatest transformation humankind has ever known--a time Charles Handy (1990) calls rapid and discontinuous or unpredictable change. I believe this is true and yet know that earlier generations felt the same. In research on the 1930s in the U.S. (Adrian, 1993), popular magazines of the time depicted people's fears that automobiles and electric lighting were undermining traditional community and family values. Electric lights opened the nights for work and play Automobiles were thought to undermine families when teens exchanged the hearth for the joy ride. The "box" of the 1930s--the modern era--was heavily influenced by rising scientific discoveries and theories. Evolution, atomic energy, artificial hearts, vitamins, and agricultural production were topics of discussion and awe. Scientific knowledge transformed life. Scientific assumptions, often invisible, became the model used to develop our institutions and frame our realities. We came to see these assumptions as truth rather than as human concepts or representations. Some modern era assumptions are shown in Table 1. We are moving into an era with many names including postmodern ("post" meaning beyond the modern). The "box" of the present continues to honor the discoveries of science and technology (especially the new sciences such as evolutionary biology, field theory, and chaos theory), but also finds value in knowledge created through arts, common sense, and more. Below is a comparison of some of the assumptions from the modern era and those of the postmodern era. Einstein is quoted as saying that no problem can be solved from the same consciousness (mindset or assumptions of reality) that created it. We must learn to see the world anew. I think this is the challenge we currently face as we move into a world beyond the modern. But to discount what we have learned in the past is either/or thinking. Our challenge in seeing the world anew is to both keep the best of the past and to embrace the new ideas and tenets of today's world. So rather than only thinking outside the box, let us teach ourselves and others, our agencies and our programs to blur the boxes of our thinking. How to Blur the Boxes Here are four approaches for blurring the boxes in our classrooms or agencies. 1. Encouraging storytelling as a way to connect us through shared human experiences, deepening relationships. Meg Wheatley (2002), organizational consultant and writer, believes that we are increasingly more fragmented and isolated from one another. This is the wrong direction to be going, she points out, as our world becomes more complex and seemingly frightening. We need everyone's good thinking to help understand the complex and interrelated problems and opportunities we face today. We need to embrace our diversity of people and ideas. Storytelling is an important way to embrace diversity. In a tape-recorded 1991 interview, Juan Moreno of Student Diversity Institute, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities said, "Each of us are living parables. Our stories are our wisdom. Stories offer us ways to live in authentic community through being able to connect with each other at the level of our essential beings." A Student Diversity Institute storytelling activity, which I use in classroom introductions, asks students to select and respond to one of five questions. …