Intersecting Dichotomies and Carey Price: Reflection from March 24, 2019

I’m not sure I was getting the kind of traction I was hoping for last class during our discussion.  So at the risk of beating a dead horse – or of even just perpetuating a line of thinking that nobody is really that interested in – I’ll give it another go here in the reflections.

I was hoping that we would take some time to identify and describe the dominant, assumed paradigm that was guiding much of our facilitation and begin to imagine other ways of knowing that might place value on process and meaning differently.  Instead we collapsed into a dichotomous discussion on the merits of structured versus unstructured facilitation.  In fact, we already know that different situations and participants require varying degrees of structure to ensure meaningful, shared activity – so our discussion embodied a false dichotomy in a manner that gave life where none more need be given. By and large, our group articulated what we already knew.  Nobody argued that facilitated activities should always be entirely unstructured, and nobody argued that facilitated activities should always be tightly structured. What we completely failed to articulate were the constraints within which many of us are practicing and evaluating: the institutionalized education system born of a Eurocentric worldview.

Historically, the dominant paradigm doesn’t need to be continuously described or revealed – we perpetuate the model by participating in the model.  When participation meets critical mass the model is assumed to be total.  Other paradigms are pushed to the margins, or so entirely subjugated as to be defacto extinguished. And while this may seem like survival-of-the-fittest-paradigms (I might watch that reality show), it doesn’t satisfy an ethical understanding of community or shared society. Because even our paradigms are inherently dialogic, our society can be reasonably judged by the way it holds space for other ways of knowing. 

I would argue that community musicians should, at the very least, be liminal to the dominant paradigm.  When you are near the edge, it’s easier to identify where paradigms may encounter one another, or even overlap. A community musician can be like an explorer or scout, transmitting back to the centre what they have seen from the outer rim. We can do so using music: an excellent vehicle for transmitting ideas, if not the concrete structure of their practice.  The community musician can also see the centre of the dominant paradigm from near its boarder, and speak truth to power from this important perspective. These are the tenets of rich, complex community: community that reflects the dialogic and dynamic humanity of its participants,

When we are tired, near end of term, or when it’s 9PM on a Wednesday night in March, I understand that holding space can be hard. 

I find it hard. 

I found it hard.

I was inarticulate, and unable to skillfully disrupt in service of deeper knowing for our class.  And quite frankly, the sentence preceding this one contains a pretty presumptuous notion, and might even be indicative of some kind of philosopher’s messiah complex. And yet I persist.  I persist because when it’s late, or when you are tired, or when you are suffering from a Vitamin D deficiency (or when you fear you might be losing touch with reality) is precisely when one should practice holding space. Alternative paradigms are represented by people alternative to the dominant.  And someday when it might really means something, when it is really important to hold space for the other, it will be hard and we’ll be grateful we put in the practice.

I was watching the hockey game tonight and my beloved Carey Price put on a show – guiding the Montreal Canadiens to a point in a game they had no claim to.  Carey Price is an indigenous athlete, working on a Hall of Fame career – an extremely unlikely path for someone who’s culture is marginal to the dominant discourse.  Alternative to the game being called in English and French – buried in the airwaves – was a call in Cree: the first time a hockey game had ever been officially called in the language of one of Turtle Island’s indigenous peoples.  I like to think that Price was holding space for that call by occupying the crease for the entirety of the match: the privileged status of the goalie is that he is liminal to the field of play, integral to the game, and constant in his presence.