Longhouse School

Can World-Building Impact the Educational Ideosphere?

This post covers the first three of Krall’s  five “movements.” The final two are discussed in the next post.

This study focuses on the work of Florence Krall who delineates a model of five “movements”: venturing, remembering, comprehending, embodying, and restoring. According to Krall, retelling a story in these five movements provides a form of control over variables. She calls each stage of personal history a separate lens, wash, or layer of analysis. By superimposing them, a triangulated story can emerge.

Krall summarizes the process:

We are asked to examine experiences from various perspectives: to recall significant educational experiences and to describe and order them; to stand back from these experiences in a state of critical self-awareness; to look at them from the viewpoint of others and to draw meaning from them by relating them to the larger social context. Finally, we are asked to take a new stand and to act intentionally upon the knowledge gained (Krall 468).

Krall explains she has used this approach in her work with graduate students while warning them that some scholars view the process with skepticism.

Movement 1, Venturing:

Venturing, according to Krall, starts with a disciplined regimen of writing thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) of experiences that have “special clarity” for the narrator (Krall, p. 469).

Tsunesaburo Makiguchi’s writing of notes could be viewed as his venturing movement. In the current study, the characters feel their posts have the “special clarity” and are important enough to warrant writing.

Krall next explains that the purpose of this construction of events is to start the process of distancing which is important for reflectivity and critical self-understanding. The goal at this stage is to clarify or discover central questions or issues. The writer now tries to suspend preconceptions, opinions, and judgment.

In the current study, the venturing data comprises the early posts about P-12 education submitted by various characters in the two Reddit communities. With time, however, “GuyAgiosNikolaos” (“Guy”), takes on the responsibility of “co-director” for Longhouse Elementary School and subsequently posts more frequently.

Readers begin to understand the personal context, the “what makes him tick” as a teacher, in his earlier posts where he had described his long history of childhood PTSD and additional trauma sustained during the war in Afghanistan. Readers learn he is an autodidactic learner who began alternative ways to earn college credits. He has sought a great deal of medical and alternative care to successfully manage his trauma. Now married, Guy became a father, completed his BA and MA degrees, obtained both teaching and supervision certification from his state, and has several years of teaching under his belt. He has also come to believe that his past trauma informs his work as a teacher, especially with children who have suffered intergenerational trauma or who have internalized marginalization.

In autoethnographic qualitative studies, hunches are data, too, as long as they are fully disclosed as such. The researcher’s “hunch” here is that much of the “tumbling out” of his posts will metaphorically correlate to “Global Citizenship Education” and “Value-Creative (Soka) Education.”

To note, in both communities there are also many posts that are not relevant to this study. However, for those many posts about the development of the Longhouse School, be the equivalent of Makiguchi’s unorganized scraps of paper notes stuffed into a drawer? Can they be considered as valid data points? They clearly are something tangible, but what? According to Barzykowski, Ilczuk and Kvilashvili (2024), there is considerable academic consensus that such data points are acceptable in qualitative research.

Movement 2. Remembering:

Krall holds that the “monologue” that results from venturing contains within it the key to central themes. The next charge is to “recall what stands out and to get at its essence, to open and keep open possibilities”; the point is to isolate and release instances in the story that stand out, “that shine like a light in [a writer’s] memory” (Krall 470).

In the Longhouse School story, the demarcation between the venturing and remembering movements is somewhat jagged and without a fixed boundary. But, as time passes on, the pace of the Longhouse narrative hastens and focuses as speculations morph into the pending realities of forming a school and the new movement. Here is the unmarked border where the demarcation line lies.

Movement 3, Comprehending:

Krall states that through the process of venturing and remembering, “common themes repeatedly surface in varied contexts” (Krall 471). But she warns that narrative description alone can risk lapsing into just “creative nonfiction” or self-centered “solipsism.”

Instead, it has to be directed to a dimension of exploring in greater depth. What helps? Krall suggests that the personal journey expressed in the narrative must be tethered to another view. In a sense, a solo becomes a duet. She also points out that this reflective process is one that often raises self-doubt.

Krall has observed that “not infrequently the most meaningful sources are uncovered serendipitously; the book that speaks most directly to [a writer’s] question seems to drop mysteriously into [his/her] hands” (Krall 472).

For GuyAgiosNikolaos, that serendipitous book was Daisaku Ikeda’s *The New Human Revolution-Volume1*, recommended to him by a Buddhist friend who thought that the narration about a start-up international Buddhist movement in 1960 could inform the co-founder of a start-up school. Vasyl Sukhomlynsky’s *My Heart I Give to Children* was the serendipitous work that attached to Lolita’s narration. Sukhomlynsky was a Ukrainian educator who describes his work teaching a kindergarten class—and sticking with them for ten years–in rural Ukraine after World War II.

At this point in the narrative, the Longhouse Daycare plans to very quickly pod a second school, Longhouse Elementary School (Longhouse Elem) by transferring the Kindergarten from Longhouse Daycare to the Elementary School for the two final months of the school year, welcoming two first-graders–because of critical personal situations—into a multi-graded K/1 class, and helping two teachers develop their early childhood skills.

“Bernie,” a character in prior r/SGIWhistleblowersMITA posts but not a Redditor, and Guy became co-directors and served as teachers for the two “seed” classes. Lolita signed a contract to be an assistant teacher for the following year and joins them at the end of June. They began an active and successful effort to recruit students, largely from Indigenous and marginalized communities, for the new school year’s first and second grades.

The comprehending phase is marked by seventy-six posts from Guy which cover three months of planning and the opening of Longhouse Elem. Guy’s posts are stylistically different from his venturing/remembering ones. They are identified by a numerical scheme, #1-#76. Each post is tagged with a “Longhouse School Theme” and concludes with keywords for the purpose of analysis. Each is also specifically tied to a passage in The New Human Revolution—Volume 1. 

Lolita’s posts are not nearly as frequent but they contain some of her favorite passages from Sukhomlynsky. She has read the book several times but she focuses on his descriptions of his students in their first year at the school. The scars of the Nazi invasion were deep and many of Sukhomlynsky’s children had lost parents. Another hunch: there is some kind of equivalence in the learning process between this highly evident and recent trauma and the intergenerational trauma in the DNA of the children from Indigenous and marginalized communities that will populate Longhouse.

The three teach the combined new K/1 classes, gaining insights into Early Childhood best practices and deepening their knowledge of the pre-Columbus Haudenosaunee. During the same time, the construction for an extension to the Daycare begins to wind down. Here, all laid out, was the future site of Longhouse Elem.

In the summer, Heidi, Lolita, Michael—all 17-years old—and Michael’s mother Anita join Guy and Bernie as “consultants” for two months of planning before the school opened.

To note, Krall, in the stage of comprehending, asks for an imaginative and not literal equivalence between the personal and “serendipitous” narratives. The goal is to secure structure and expand perspectives—not one-on-one correspondence.

From reading his book, Guy highlights numerable themes that inspire, resonate with, and amplify his own conceptions of curriculum, leadership, the heart of a teacher, program features, and the needs of the at-risk first and second graders they must prepare to teach. The intergenerational trauma that exists in both the Indigenous and underserved populations from where they are recruiting students is informed by many harrowing stories of Japanese emigres to the United States and Brazil.

Bernie is not an SGI member but Guy shares with her the main thrust of messages he is reading and she has much to offer in return as they become a team.