“General Dynamics, Undersea frontiers - Electric boat” by Erik Nitsche (1960) (Source: https://www.galerie123.com/en/original-vintage-poster/36614/general-dynamics-undersea-frontiers-electric-boat/)
Rhythmic intelligence presupposes a mode of apprehension of reality that places the emphasis on the movements that are constitutive of it. From this point of view, it involves a sensibility that is found in « process-oriented » approaches. In order to grasp some of its features, I reproduce below a excerpt, translated from a 2018 article I published in the French journal Education Permanente*. This text summarizes some of the main assumptions that characterize a process-oriented approach and more specifically a processual approach to education and formation.
*Source: Alhadeff-Jones, M. (2018). Pour une approche rythmologique de la formation. Education Permanente, 217, 21-32.
Towards a process-oriented approach to adult education
Since Antiquity, a long filiation exists in philosophy, emphasizing the volatile and fluid aspects of phenomena, rather than their stable or substantial dimensions. In Western cultures, with thinkers such as Heraclitus, Leibniz, Bergson, Peirce, James or Whitehead, has thus emerged what some researchers identify as a process or processual philosophy, an approach that can be found nowadays in various academic disciplines (Helin et al., 2016; Nicholson and Dupré, 2018; Rescher, 2000). According to this perspective, understanding the world is based first and foremost on the study of the active and changing aspects that make up our reality, rather than on what constitutes its substance. Ontologically, the assumption is that every being (an object, a knowledge, a person, an organism, etc.) is not only the product of processes, but more fundamentally its manifestation. A process thus refers to a phenomenon « that consists of an integrated series of connected developments unfolding in programmatic coordination: an orchestrated series of occurrences that are systematically linked to one another either causally or functionally » (Rescher, 2000, p.22). The interest of this concept is that it allows one to relate phenomena that are constitutive of the real, which human mind tends to separate. Thus, a process refers to a complex set of occurrences having a temporal coherence that manifests itself by an organized sequence of events, involving in turn entangled processes.
Education and training are processes. This goes without saying, and yet it is often observed how they tend to be reduced to what they mobilize or produce (settings, knowledge, schemes, skills, identities, etc.), to the « abstractions » that symbolize them (titles, programs, policy), to the « objects » that materialize them (physical layout, infrastructure, etc.), while considering them, along with the subjects they affect (the learner, the working team, the company, etc.), as stable – even static – « persons », « elements » or « entities » endowed with relative autonomy and an intrinsic « nature ». From a processual perspective, the products, abstractions, objects and subjects that are constitutive of adult education should be conceived first and foremost in terms of the processes (ordered) and dynamics (disordered) from which they emerge and in which they participate, rather than in terms of the forms of equilibrium and stability that pre-exist them or that they express at a given moment in their evolution. From this perspective, the products, abstractions, objects and subjects that participate in adult education, as well as the environments in which they evolve, are to be conceived as being in perpetual movement: from the circadian cycles and seasons that punctuate the curricula, to the biological and psychological rhythms that animate the learners, including the alternating phases of learning, paced by schedules and calendars, social interactions or the succession of discourses, norms and social conventions, through which any educational setting (dispositif) and policy develops and evolves throughout history.
Like so many propellers, each « element » of education – whether formal, non-formal or informal – is in perpetual motion. From a processual perspective, its effects are to be conceived through the flows (physical, biological, psychological, social, cultural, informational, etc.) that are simultaneously distinct, variable and intertwined, that animate it and that emerge from it. Such an approach thus emphasizes the patterns that relate observed or experienced actions, rather than the nature of the aspects associated with them. One can then conceive of a educational process (certification, professionalization, emancipation, etc.) as being intertwined with learning processes, whose repetition and organization participate in transformational processes, whose emergence and succession contribute to developmental processes that recursively influence the other educational processes with which they interact. Such an approach therefore emphasizes what relates the different aspects of education (learning a gesture, changing perspective, the development of a professional identity, etc.) by focusing on the configurations through which they organize themselves over time, rather than considering the states or entities that pre-exist or emerge from them.
Process-oriented approach and rhythmic intelligence
The excerpt reproduced above opens up possibilities to envision the development of rhythmic intelligence. From a processual perspective, rhythmic intelligence refers to the ability to adopt an understanding of phenomena experienced or observed, centered on their changing and fluctuating nature, rather than their stable and substantial features. Such a posture thus implies a critical capacity to question the «substantialist» assumptions that are omnipresent in the contemporary imaginaire. It suggests being sensitive to the dynamics involved in the apparent stability of phenomena. More specifically, it supposes a particular attention to flows, patterns, complex causal relations, and the temporal organization of sequences of events, which are simultaneously distinct, variable and intertwined.
References
Helin, J. et al. (Eds.) (2016). The Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies. Oxford: University Press.
Nicholson, D.-J., & Dupré, J. (Eds.) (2018). Everything Flows. Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford: University Press.
Rescher, N. (2000). Process Philosophy. A survey of Basic Issues. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Cite this article: Alhadeff-Jones, M. (2021, March 1). Process-oriented approach and rhythmic intelligence. Rhythmic Intelligence. http://www.rhythmicintelligence.org/blog/2021/3/1/process-oriented-approach-and-rhythmic-intelligence