One Friday afternoon, two mothers (one with grown children, one with little ones) went walking--and talking. As the walk ended, the younger mother asked the older one, "Do your children get along? How can we raise our children, so that they will be friends with one another when they are adults?" That walk continues here, as Anne gives an account of the connections she and Corey made between their experiences raising children and their academic work as activists, academics and web-weaving-women, asking repeatedly how we can all get along. My daughter Lily made the first contribution to this conversation. When a colleague told me that she thought that my kids are able to travel so far, so easily, because I had made them feel so safe at home--I ran that idea by Lily (thinking, inside, that they travel so far in order to ESCAPE me). After some thought, she replied that I
This was a little hard for me to hear, the first time through, but I've come to be glad about my daughter's description of my legacy to her: I understand her to mean that I taught her not to expect the world to be otherwise than hostile; gave her permission to be guided by her own internal gyroscope; and nudged her always to be open to alteration. On the other hand... Lily later divided our family into two groups. The first of these
Ann Dixon, a new companion of ours in the world of mothering, and--as co-founder of Serendip--by-far our senior in the world of the web, said that she "used to think Serendip was about science." During the past few years, as she's seen its coverage expand to include both art and literature, she's found herself looking for a new way to describe Serendip's aim and scope. Its original "welcome" statement explained that Seeing, through Ann's eyes, that the center of Serendip is its playground, and that the site, as a whole, is "about uncertainty," Anne also thought she saw a connection between a) and b): because life and our understanding of it is always uncertain--and incomplete, the best way to "go about it" is to create in our classrooms and on-line spaces of structured play where, if deliberative self-censure happens less frequently, we might arrive at some unexpected places, worth examining....where the process and productivity of ongoing and ever-revisable conversation...becomes an open and constantly edited record both of the conversations we are having with one another and those we are conducting with ourselves, within our own heads...giving many of us a profound sense-and a record--of ourselves as thinking, re-thinking, ever-revisable beings. (The Grace of Revision, the Profit of "Unconscious Cerebration," or What Happened When Teaching the Canon Became Child's Play). Along with the essay on revision, Anne called up pages (and pages) of shared exploration of what Serendip is "about," in the form of (at least) five recent dialogues--with Emily Madsen, Anneliese Butler and Elizabeth Catanese (Bryn Mawr students who have participated in Serendip's forums), Paul Burgmayer (a high school math teacher who was certified in Bryn Mawr's Education Program), and Wil Franklin (a Bryn Mawr Biology Lab Instructor):
Pulling in, too, reflections generated this summer in the Working Group on Information--to a human story-teller, information is something that changes in a story the degree of uncertainty about something....There is no "information" unless there is such a change (information is not an intrinsic property of anything; it is fundamentally relational) --and then"squeezing" down all this "expansion," Anne offered a (trial) description of what Serendip is "about": Conceived with an awareness that life is not a closed system, Serendip is a website that explores the pleasures and productivity of uncertainty, by facilitating connections among ever-expanding numbers of contributors. Mightn't this be a good way for teaching (all of) our children "how to get along"? Corey?
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