Learning Together

by Jeff Bloom

THEMATIC CLUSTER: Making Sense of Making Sense

CATEGORIES: Learning, Context

TAGS: symmathesy, cognition, contexts, dogs, epistemology, knowledge, knowing, relationships, schooling, contexts of meaning

Over time, the survival of organisms in their environments requires that there be learning, and learning to learn, together.
~Nora Bateson (p. 169)[1]

Nora Bateson’s due-to-be classic paper on learning as “symmathesy”[2] has opened new perspectives on learning. This original work extends many of her father’s ideas into a cohesive perspective of the way living and social systems learn, which apply to how individuals learn as well as to how trees, forest ecosystems, and cultures learn. This view of learning does not address the typical school-type learning on which we typically focus. Instead, symmathesy, which translates into “learning together” or “mutual contextual learning,” focuses on the dynamic, interrelational learning that is taking place all of the time as systems continue to function and make contact with multiple other systems.

Each of these aspects may occur concurrently in processes that allow systems to learn about how to relate, how to do some particular action or activity, and how to respond to changes. This learning is at a deeper level, which often occurs beneath our conscious awareness. Symmathesy captures the fundamental dynamic of how we and all living things live, thrive, and survive in our worlds; how we learn together, and how we relate to our world. During everything we do, whether walking down the street, talking with a neighbor, or watching TV, we are learning through the processes described as symmathesy. The tree and the forest also are learning as different creatures pass by, create homes, and find food and water. They learn when weather changes and fires occur. They learn as plants grow and die and then decay. They learn as new trees begin to grow.

Calibration is the way we adjust to changing dynamics of various kinds. We calibrate as we develop and maintain relationships, and as we drive a car or ride a bicycle. We go about our daily lives within multiple contexts, including our personal epistemologies, our cultures, economic concerns, our family dynamics, and so forth. As we brush up against or enter new contexts, we learn, as when we have chance encounters in coffee shops or travel to new cultures, start a new job, or explore new places. We filter and morph our perceptions and experiences through lenses of bias. These biases can be the obvious ones of racism or sexism, but most biases are much more subtle. These are the biases of cultural knowledge and personal experiences, as well as a large variety of assumptions, expectations, fears, and aesthetic attractions or repulsions. The boundaries of contexts are the points of contact, where symmathesetic learning occurs. These boundaries can be our personal and intimate spaces[3], the fuzzy borders of our social and cultural contexts, work contexts, or experiential limits. For forests, the boundaries can be what are called the ecotones or the transitional borders between forest and field, forest and lake, or forest and power line easement. But, the forest’s boundaries also can be the edges of prior experience with climate. As temperatures rise, the forests are rubbing up against new conditions and limits of tolerance. Stochastic processes are those randomly emerging events and “ideas.” A gene mutation, the making of a new connection, a random encounter, and an unexpected change are elements of stochastic processes. They may present new problems and challenges or new possibilities. But, along with play, stochastic processes can be sources of creativity and new possibilities. Time and timing are the basis of dynamics and processes. Sequences, cycles, and loopings of all kinds are manifestations of time. Timing is critical to the way systems function, including the anticipation of future events based on past experiences. Marine snails that live on marsh grasses move up and down the grass in sync with the timing of the tides. If a clump of marsh grass is moved along with its snail companions to a laboratory with no tides, the snails continue to move up and down with the same rhythm of time. And, the grasses, I am sure, live with the expectation of the snails’ movements. Play is not just playing a game or doing something that is seemingly frivolous. Play is a fundamental process of learning. Play is involved in solving problems, developing relationships, and generating creative insights. Play in dogs is critical to developing relationships with their human and canine friends. Play is the work of artists, musicians, athletes, and scientists. Play probably is occurring in plants, fungi, bacteria, and protists, as they find ways to deal with new problems and changing environments. However, the scales of size and time create biases for our observations of play in these organisms.

The Path Less Traveled

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~Robert Frost[4]

In paraphrasing Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” I am pointing to the choices we make in everyday life. These choices are those of awareness. We can choose to be aware of how we learn through everything we do or we can choose to be unaware of our learning as we go through our daily routines. The idea of symmathesy is that we are learning all of the time, as are other living systems and other social systems. Such learning is not necessarily intentional learning, but learning along the way, along the paths we tread.

But, in speaking of “paths,” I want to describe a real, as well as metaphorical. walk in the forest with my dog. We can look upon this walk as a walk of learning on and off the paths most and least traveled. I will describe a prototypical walk that I’ve taken many times with my own dog. During many of these walks, we were joined by other dogs and their humans in the forest dog—people community. If you have never had such dog—people walks, you will need to imagine what this is like. Picture the settings and the encounters. This section of the paper is written with two alternating indented sections. The first indented sections are the story. The double indented sections are my explanations and interpretations of the story as symmathesetic experiences.

My dog, Mugetsu (a poetic Japanese word for “moonless”), was a 90-pound/41 kilogram, black and tan, female Doberman Pinscher. She loved to run and chase rabbits, lizards, and other moving things. But, she also was a sensitive and intelligent dog, who liked people and dogs, and always wanted everyone (dogs included) to get along with each other. She was considered by many as the “peacekeeper” in dog parks. Although many people fear Dobermans, they are gentle by nature, but will alert you to real or imagined dangers, like a UPS person delivering a package. They are working dogs, too. So, they often self-assign themselves jobs and look for opportunities to help. If I yelled at one of our cats – “Hey, cat!” – for doing something she shouldn’t, Mugetsu would run over to help keep the cat “in line.” When we raked the yard, she ran around picking up sticks and branches and added them to pile of leaves. She even helped a plumber dig and then fill in the holes he dug to repair underground pipes, which astounded both him and me!

So, let’s begin the walk….

As Mugetsu and I approached the trailhead, the towering Ponderosa pines of northern Arizona provided a nice, cool partial cover from the Sun. The sweet smell of butterscotch, the distinctive odor of Ponderosa pines, wafted through the air. We negotiated through some hilly and rocky parts of the path to arrive at a bend in the path where Mugetsu had a psychological meltdown some weeks before. When we had rounded this bend some weeks before, right in front of us there must have been two-dozen cottontail rabbits. She had never seen so many rabbits in her life. There was a long pause as she tried to contend with what she was seeing. And, while she was contending with this new information, I was standing there wondering why she wasn’t tugging at the leash and doing her excited shrill-barking. But, then after about 30-seconds, she let loose with her barking and the rabbits scattered.

After walking a few hundred more yards into the forest, I took off her leash, while hoping not to meet people on mountain bikes, which she also loved to chase (the bikes, not the people, but they rarely knew that). It’s the rare cyclist who stopped and got off the bike when she was chasing. Those who stopped were usually dog—people, who understood the game from lots of experiences with their own dogs.

As I unhooked the leash, she dashed off ahead, darting one way then another, but keeping me in sight most of the time. After a few hundred more yards of climbing the mountain, we stopped for a drink of water. On many walks, I talked to her while we were walking, but on this particular day, I didn't say anything unless I couldn’t see her or she had disappeared chasing a jackrabbit. A walk with no talk was powerful. I didn't really need to talk. We understood each other from having done this hundreds of times, and from developing an understanding of one another’s patterns and emotions. We could read each other pretty well.

So, we stopped. I pulled out a water bottle and poured her some water, while I took a few gulps. Then, we sat there for a while feeling the forest, the wind, the bits of sun making its way through the pine needles. We could hear a woodpecker, and people talking in the distance. She perked up to the distant voices. Are they friends? Do they have a dog? But, she then went back to scanning the forest and the mountain slope above us. Before long she lifted up her nose, then disappeared into the brush. She returned with a prize – a fully articulated deer leg… from shoulder blade to hoof. After a half hour of trying to get it from her, she relented and let’s me take it. I put it high into some tree branches.

We decided in unison to resume walking up the mountain. We left the trail and walked across the forest floor with grasses and twigs crunching as we walked. Then, a jackrabbit darted out from its shallow bedding behind a fallen tree, and Mugetsu was off. Her shrill barking faded into silence as the chase extended over what seems like miles. I took out my dog whistle and blew, then called her name. I started walking in the direction I last heard her. Five minutes go by, then 10, then finally she comes bounding back… and fortunately and as always, rabbit-less.

We stopped again for a drink and continued climbing the mountainside. At one point, we reached some large rocks with smaller pine trees struggling to get a root-hold in the cracks. It looked like there was an opening and trail on the other side, so I got down on my hands and knees and began crawling under the branches of the pine as Mugetsu pushed slightly ahead of me. Then all of a sudden, she stopped. She looked at me with a look I’ve never seen. She was terrified. I didn't see or hear anything unusual. I was about to push on, but with a gut-level decision, rather than a rationale decision, I turned around and headed back in the direction from which we had just come. As we proceeded, Mugetsu returned to a more relaxed pose. I started thinking that maybe there was a Mountain lion close by and she sensed its presence.

At this point, we started heading back down the mountain. She ran off while sniffing and looking at everything. Her whole forest world was home stomping grounds. She knew every square yard. As we descended, she began a beeline to one of her watering holes. The Forest Service had installed these partially open water catchment tanks for the deer, elk, mountain lions, and other creatures, including dogs. When I reached the watering hole, she was there drinking. I re-attach her leash, since this was the highest point of the typical mountain bikers’ route.

As we descended even further down the mountain, now joined by the leash, we ran into a dog and person with whom we are friends. I took her leash off, but stayed on high alert, while the two dogs wrestled and chased one another in and over fallen logs and bushes. After a few minutes, I re-attached the leash, and we walked down towards the trailhead. She stopped again at one of her favorite places for finding lizards. She darted around every log looking intently for the creatures, who knew the game and scooted to the opposite sides or under the logs. A few yards later, we passed by where she liked to dig for rodents. She dug out a hole a foot deep in a few seconds, stuck her nose all the way down, and sniffed repeatedly. Then, she went back to digging, then sniffing. She finally gave up, and we continued walking.

As we approached the trailhead, she pulled me over to a fence where three of her dog friends were out in their backyard. Everyone, including Mugetsu, got a treat and some petting before we returned to the car.

This story and its interpretation from the perspective of symmathesy also point to the development of "contexts of meaning"[5] as a personal—social epistemology (or frame of frames of knowing or knowledge). Symmathesy operates at deeper levels of our being and often not at a conscious level. We may be learning about all sorts of things of which we have little awareness. At another level, if we pay attention, we may notice that we are learning, maybe even uncomfortably, about relationships or some other aspect of how we connect with our surrounding environments or contexts. But, in these cases, we may not even know the extent and depth of such learning, we just glimpse it from the corner of our eyes, as Catherine Bateson suggests, as “peripheral vision.“[6] We learn about relationships and the contexts within which we live. We learn about ourselves. We learn about survival and how to flourish. But, we also learn how to fear and withdraw or fight rather than cooperate or negotiate. Learning as symmathesy is at the very core of how we function. However, symmathesy also provides the material for the development of our own ways of seeing and interpreting our experiences and our worlds — our own epistemologies.

I use the word, “epistemology,” in the sense that Gregory Bateson[7] used it. Rather than epistemology as the study and theory of knowledge and as a branch of philosophy, epistemology from Bateson’s perspective is the living knowledge of individuals or of specific groups of individuals (e.g., cultural groups, professional groups, church groups, et al.). From this view, we all have our own epistemologies, which are dynamic, intertwined sets of, for the most part, socially-mediated “learned” information. And, this epistemology is changing all of the time. Such knowledge is not like an encyclopedia with solidified, unchanging sets of information. Rather, our knowledge is in constant flux as old connections are revived, new information and connections are incorporated, and as contexts and our social dynamics change.

Although much of schooling has been based on the notion that students learn exactly what the teachers tell them, the fact is that all individuals learn differently. We fit new information into what we have already learned, what we have experienced, and intertwine everything across multiple contexts of emotions, values, aesthetics, beliefs, humor, and so forth. The entire process of symmathesetic learning is recursive. We are continuously learning throughout our days. But, this learning may not always meet our social, cultural, political, or educational “standards” of what is valuable, appropriate, good, and so forth. Symmathesetic learning is, in part, about surviving and managing our day-to-day activities. The alcoholic learns that a few drinks will help alleviate stress, help his social interaction, or deal with past and present traumas. The car salesperson (no offense intended) may learn that making customers into “objects” of some distain makes it easier to lose one’s own integrity and strong-arm people into buying cars even if the buyer can’t afford the car being sold. Many, if not most, politicians seem to learn quickly that setting aside ideals, such as honesty, openness, integrity, and so forth, they may have had will be most beneficial to them, their careers, and their abilities to gain prestige, power, and money. Such learning processes and changes are not necessarily intentional or conscious, especially in the beginning. Symmathesetic learning can be insidious. It can be particularly troubling to others who have to interact with the alcoholic, politician, CEO, car salesperson, and other with troubling patterns of learning.

Footnotes

[1] Page 169 in Bateson, N. (2016)

[2] Bateson, N. (2015)

[3] Hall, E. T. (1966)

[4] From Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” on page 9

[5] Bloom (1990)

[6] Bateson, M. C. (1994)

[7] Bateson, G. (1972/2000, 1991); Bateson, G., & Bateson, M.C. (1987/2005); Ruesch, J., & Bateson, G. (1951/2008)

References

Bateson, G. (1972/2000). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bateson, G. (Donaldson, R. E., ed) (1991). Sacred unity: Further steps to an ecology of mind. New York: Cornelia & Michael Bessie Book (Harper & Row).

Bateson, G., & Bateson, M. C. (1987/2005). Angels fear. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Bateson, M. C. (1994). Peripheral visions: Learning along the way. New York: Harper Paperbacks.

Bateson, N. (2015). Symmathesy: A Word in Progess. Nora Bateson's Blog.

Bateson, N. (2016). Small arcs of larger circles: Framing through other patterns. Axminster, UK: Triarchy Press.

Bloom, J. W. (1990). Contexts of meaning: Young children’s understanding of biological phenomena. International Journal of Science Education, 12(5), 549–561.

Frost, R. (1916/1931). Mountain interval. New York: Henry Holt and Company

Hall, E. T. (1966). The hidden dimension. New York: Anchor/Doubleday

Ruesch, J., & Bateson, G. (1951/2008). Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

© 2024 by Jeffrey W. Bloom