Welcome
Challenges, obstacles, and losses in life can slow me down, and the big ones tend to stop me in my tracks. Like most human beings, I encounter struggle regularly, whether in my personal life, my professional life, in community life, in the world around me, in politics, international events, or in the natural world, of which I am a part. Sometimes change creeps up slowly over time, allowing me to gradually adapt. Sometimes change arrives at the door suddenly and dramatically, and tears down the house in one swift strike: a pandemic, a war, a wildfire.
With so many sources of unexpected change in life, human beings are pretty amazing at creative problem-solving, resiliency, innovation, and adaptation. Continually changing contexts and conditions have kept humans adjusting, acclimatising, and evolving on this planet for millennia. Adaptation is in our DNA. In response to the slow and sudden changes, humans have developed many strategies for leaning into challenges, overcoming obstacles, grieving losses, and moving through struggles. Those strategies and their accompanying skills in resiliency, in problem-solving, in taking time to process it all are all important; a growth mindset (Dweck, 2006) that supports the learning of those skills is also vital. Cheers to whatever gives you the strength, resolve, and agility to bounce back and grow.
That said, the development and practice of those skills is not really what this blog post is about. In this blog entry, I’d like to welcome readers to the in the midst blog and take you on a little exploration of what it means to be in the midst (Aoki, 1999).
Where does in the midst come from?
Japanese-Canadian curriculum scholar, Dr. Ted Aoki (1999) invited us to “move boldly into [what he called] the interspace midst […] two imaginaries, and claim[ed] that though it is a site of ambiguity, ambivalence, and uncertainty, it may be a site of generative possibilities and hope for newness, a site of becoming in struggle” (p. 27). Aoki (1999) wrote about this interspace as a hybrid space, where two distinct entities come together, and yet the space is, paradoxically, neither one of the two. He described this convergence as ambivalent and contradictory, yet also, generative, “an enunciatory space of becoming, a space where newness emerges” (p. 35).
American educational philosophy Dr. Maxine Greene’s (1993) process of ‘always in the making’ involves people “creating meanings, becoming in an intersubjective world by means of dialogue and narrative […], telling their stories, shaping their stories, discovering purposes and possibilities for themselves, reaching out to pursue them” (p. 213). The act of individuals “disclosing who they are to one another,” of sharing their individual differences through stories of their experiences creates “an entirely different in-between” space, where people can begin to truly see and recognize one another and to develop a sense of connection to and responsibility for one another (Greene, 1993).
I have come to understand this in-between, middle space as one that we co-create in relationship. This space only exists in our imaginations, until we enter it, begin to connect with one another, and set about co-composing the space as we interact in it. Our co-compositions and interactions happen in the midst of everything else that is happening, and thus our engagement in this middle, in-between, interspace is situated, in context, in place and time, and along the winding path of living and becoming. The in the midst space is a space in the making, as we are also in the making in it. As Greene theorized, our becoming together in the midst is what creates, shapes, and defines what that middle space is. Feelings of liminality, uncertainty, and illusiveness signal to me that I have entered an ‘in the midst’ space.
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