Social change – a strange thing to dream of in the depths of slumber, but then again, I guess it’s been a long time coming for the things that preoccupy my daytime thoughts to infiltrate my night reverie as well.
I fell asleep to positive thoughts of my coursework in International Education and woke up with the wispy lingerings of a dream about social change. It wasn’t a dream about change itself, but more about the process: I was a student myself, and helping fellow students and educators with the process of coming up with a service project that would have maximum impact given the amount of resources (including their own time of course) they were able to contribute. At the end, it was, as always, about guiding them in finding the right questions to ask.
What does it mean? Perhaps it’s a result of being at the crossroads again, and unspoken anxieties surfacing about which specific direction to take, out of the many alleyways into which I could turn into (yes, dear friends, as go-with-the-flow as I may usually seem, the reality is that it’s always been anxiety-ridden – aren’t we all a bed of contradictions?).
Subconsciously, I realised anxiety’s been flitting through me only after a series of dreams about my teeth falling out and accidentally pooping in public, but I won’t go into those “gory” dreams/nightmares. I digress, as usual. Back to dreaming of change. Methinks this one’s a reminder to leave the anxieties by the wayside: to embrace the process, to focus on my strengths, to keep on the path, to facilitate change, to inspire changemakers, to help us learn to ask the right questions.
If we’re dreaming of change, we’ve gotta keep asking questions, and the right ones will hit us one day. Now which alleyway was I seeking to turn into again?
30 March update: Read an old Guardian article on Napping for Nature and got distracted by the bit on how getting less than 7 hours of sleep can prevent you from having your 5th REM session. Perhaps that explains the surge in the number of dreams I can recall on waking – I’ve been getting more than enough sleep these days! So people, let a bout of dreaming inspire you; take the old advice and get your 8 hours of shut eye! You’ll be doing good for your spiritual/creative life and the environment too!
…or perhaps I should have entitled this: “The Surprising Inspiration of Slumdog Millionaire”.
I finally caught the oh-so-very-uplifting Slumdog Millionaire last night, and on that high, I’ve been poking around the internet, trying to find out more about the film. As wonderful as this film is, what excites me even more is that it’s just one part of an amazing trail of inspiration. Slumdog Millionaire was adapted from the novel Q & A. The author, Vikas Swarup, was in turn inspired by Dr Sugata Mitra’s Hole in the Wall Project, which was in turn inspired by… I could tell you the whole long story, but it’s been a delicious delight for me to go through the process of tracing Slumdog’s inspirational “lineage”, so I’ll leave the pleasure to you. Suffice to say, you never know what wonderful things something you say, do, observe or create can inspire next, and not necessarily in the “field” you started out with, so do let it flow! And like I used to remind the boys in our leadership workshops, to challenge the process, we need to keep our minds open – we never know what will inspire us or where it could take us.
Me being me, naturally I’m most interested in delving more into Dr Mitra’s decade-old experiment in what he came to term Minimally Invasive Education. I remember reading about it a long time back. I’m not sure exactly how much of his findings have trickled down into practice in mainstream education today, but from experience, and the rhetoric that’s been bandied about so much, I’m guessing, in theory, it’s had a massive impact. Of course, theory and everyday practice are often two different stories, but it’s always essential to remember the big picture, and aspire towards it. That’s why I’m really appreciating this excerpt from Dr Mitra’s interview with BusinessWeek back in 2000:
“The teacher’s job is very simple. It’s to help the children ask the right questions.”
- Dr Sugata Mirta
We know this already, we’ve certainly been told enough times. But it always helps to go back to basics to remember why, so we remember why we need to hold the idea dear in practice.
That’s what I hope I remember to do: help people ask the right questions – just like Mum did with me when I was younger. How about you?
There was a time when I loved drawing, and I loved doodling and I loved making random things. So one fine day, when a well-meaning teacher asked us to start off the year by writing a short paragraph on ‘What I Want to Be’ so she could get to know us better, I naively shared that I wanted to be an artist. The days went by, nothing was mentioned about that paragraph, and soon it was forgotten, almost. Sometime long into that academic year, that teacher asked us to close our books, and to each draw a map of Peninsular Malaysia from memory. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the angle and bulge of the peninsula quite right. The teacher walked by my desk, and said: “How can you be an artist? You have no sense of perspective!” She happened to be the school’s Career Guidance Counsellor as well, but that’s beside the point. An adult, a figure-of-authority, a teacher, a person we’d been taught to respect, had basically told me to forget it – you can never be what you want to be – or at least that’s what I heard. Perhaps an angrier, angsty-er, more confident teenager would have taken those words as a challenge and would’ve made it her life’s mission to prove the teacher wrong. I wasn’t that kind of teenager, and I’d been well-trained by the school culture to tow the line of mediocrity – lie low, don’t draw attention to yourself, stay out of the line of vision and you’ll get by. I never quite was able to fully shake that mentality – somehow, I’d always felt like I was faking whatever confidence I displayed. Perhaps some of you feel that way too sometimes? Anyhow, I digress.
Life happens, and you let it take you where it will. Sometimes, it’d lead me down a path of creation, and sometimes it wouldn’t, but anytime I admired someone’s creativity, or was in a position where I had to create an original piece of work, I could count on that teacher’s words coming back to taunt me.
While lurking through countless artists’ flickr streams a few days ago, I decided enough was enough, I was going to exorcise that demon once and for all (is that possible?)! So I’ve resolved to doodle everyday, because nothing you or I say can help me create, except the act of creation itself. To make sure I actually do it, and to stop giving excuses (keep quiet, voice-in-the-head!), I’ve decided to give myself a target to upload a doodle-a-day to the internet so:
a. I’m not just responsible to my ever-forgiving journal that doesn’t mind if I don’t touch it for months on end; and,
b. I can’t self-censor.
If you like, you can check if I’m keeping on track through:
cynchang's Daily Doodles flickr set
But I’m missing the most important point I wanted to make. Most of all, I meant to share this story because the biggest lesson it has taught me is not that I can’t create, but that words are so very powerful; particularly words from a teacher to a student. It’s easy to underestimate how long a casual comment you make can stay with a young, open mind. I’ve tried to remember to make mine count. Are you making yours count today?
I’ve just started a course in International Education, and thought I’d share an excerpt from my self-introduction for the course:
Growing up in Victoria, racial differences meant nothing to my ethnically diverse playmates and I. Right before reaching school-going age though, my family moved from Canada to their hometown in Malaysia and then to Singapore. In these countries, I was introduced to different cultures, and more crucially, to racial politics and the subtle nuances of bigotry, at a very young age. Experience in different countries gives one the benefit of contrasting experiences with which to make comparisons, and so I was convinced that there was something wrong with the way my schoolmates only socialized within their own ethnic groups. Fortunately, being the “exotic” foreigner made me acceptable to all the ethnic groups, and that gave me the freedom to socialize with all. Without consciously knowing what I was doing, I pushed those boundaries, becoming the bridge that linked the different ethnic groups – because they all wanted to play with me, they all had to play together, regardless of the ethnic divisions they had learnt. Thus began my interest in bridging understanding between different cultures.
Through school, I continued exploring that interest; volunteering for school-organised community service projects in Vietnam and Burma. That led to my undergraduate major in Southeast Asian studies where I undertook service-learning projects in Indonesia, fieldwork in Thailand, and hosted a student fellowship of fifty Southeast Asian peers for one semester in Singapore, then received a travel grant to visit them in their hometowns; all to broaden my exposure and learning beyond my readings and lectures. These structured programmes gave me access to experiences that led to insight I could never have discovered through my own travels.
Ever grateful to that child who tried to bridge understanding between her peers, I’ve pursued my passion for promoting understanding and social change with an accidental career in international education; in areas that enable me to use my experience from the many international education programmes that I’ve benefited from, and pay-it-forward.
What about you? How did you get here?
The Corporation’s stranglehold on countless aspects of our lives, and the consumerist culture it breeds has always been something that’s really bugged me. Here’s a wonderful, yet simple explanation of the effects of our culture of consumption:
The Story of Stuff
The fact that mass media is being produced by an increasingly limited number of media conglomerates with a finger in every pie conceivable, and then some, has always been worrying for the resulting extremely limited spectrum of culture that the vast majority is exposed to. Despite the armour of cynicism we have supposedly developed to protect ourselves against the influence of The Brands, everyday, I continue to see evidence of the influence of The Corporation’s “carefully crafted” messages on the people around me, myself included (watch: The Persuaders), and particularly it’s influence on youth (watch: The Merchants of Cool). I’d venture a guess that most of us know or have known a 15 year old who, instead of making his own music, spends his days vegetating in front of MTV watching Limp Bizkit (feel free to replace with an era-appropriate band-name). And is it just me or does everybody else wince when a teenager you know declares himself a fan of McDonald’s on Facebook (nothing wrong? watch: Super Size Me, or better yet, read Felicity Lawrence’s Not On the Label)?
Sure, it’s a free world, and we’re free to make our own choices, and we consciously choose to buy into what The Corporation tries to sell us. Right? Wrong. Access to the production of traditional media such as newspapers, television and radio isn’t equal. How can you make a “free choice” when you are constantly bombarded with the same few messages crafted by the few who have the access? When mass media as a medium of transmission of information is looking more and more like a mere medium of transmission of advertising?
There are those of us who’ve made our choice. We’ve passed the first stage in media literacy – managing our media “diets”. We’ve switched off the television and stopped buying the glossy magazines. The second stage? Learning specific skills of critical viewing? Our choice of independent media is probably helping us discover what’s being left out of the regular media frame.
But it’s not just about those of us who’ve listened to the different sides, and made our choices. Far from it. Besides just our passive resistance, is there anything more we can do, or should do? What about those who just haven’t been exposed to various sides of the story – those who, to borrow the cliche, are still plugged into the system? Are they ready to be plugged out? What do they need to be ready?
Do we have the moral obligation to help the young people in our lives understand the forces and the reality behind the machine? Or are we, by doing so, forcing our views upon them? Somehow, I don’t recall The Corporations asking for our permission to force their agenda on us. All we can do, is try to present another side of the story. It’s up to them to make up their minds.
Creating one’s own media messages is another step in media literacy. Blogs (including my extremely inactive one) are just one of the many ways we’re slowly digging ourselves out of years of ingrained passive consumer mode into an active producer mode. Maybe that’s why the social networking website, Facebook, really excited me when it first became popular (I know, I know, there’s plenty of controversy about Facebook, but let’s not get into that, or at least try not to, for today) – the idea of an entire community of active content generators (whom, admittedly, have created plenty of frivolous content, but that’s not for us to judge). The point was that Facebook created a simple way for users to choose the content we wanted to generate. We could choose to generate frivolous content, or we could choose to generate socially relevant content. But the choice was ours, and that was media power to the people. And that reminded me of something I had long forgotten, the promise of what the internet revolution was supposed to have done. After years of just being a porn database (okay, so I exaggerate, a bit. watch PBS’ documentary, American Porn if you really, really doubt me), Web 2.0 has come to save the internet; to give it the new lease of life that will enable every single user to become an active content producer, not just a passive consumer. I’d almost forgotten that a decade ago, the internet activity I loved the most, was participating actively on internet forums, debating the different perspectives on the issues of the day. How that kid ended up degenerating into a passive consumer of the internet is an intriguing question, and one I need to ponder some more. What institutional or cultural forces exerted themselves on me when I slowly stopped writing, stopped drawing, stopped crafting – stopped creating? Whatever they were, I’ve taken stock, and I’m determined not to let them win. It’s never too late.
While we’re on the issue of creating, let me sidetrack and ask you to check out the charming Handmade Nation. I’ve decided to stop being ashamed of my fascination with the wonderful crafting revolution (Cyn, repeat after me, crafting is not frivolous) that’s taking over the world today, and celebrate it as yet another way people are taking back production from The Corporation.
To end off this awfully long-winded rant, is the find that inspired this post in the first place. The wonderful Steal This Film II really made me rethink my awkward acceptance of the American film and music industry lobby for intellectual property rights. We’re always told that it’s an issue of intellectual property and morality, and I’ve awkwardly accepted that as fact, but never probed, nor understood my discomfort (am I just a cheapskate? gasp, horror – a closet pirate?). But this film frames the debate in a much broader context – that the advent of the technology of the internet is a way to free society from the commodification of culture. Cultural products as a communal resource and product of the community, and not a commodity to be packaged and traded by a select few? It seems like such a simple concept, so why is it that this seems mind-blowing to contemplate? How many parts of the frame haven’t we seen all this while? Now I understand why I love the idea of Creative Commons (which I use, by the way) and why I love flickr and why I love it when people use my photos on flickr, particularly for advocacy, in ways I’d never have imagined using myself. See:
Now Public Men at Work article
Now Public Does Sitting in Front of the Class Make You a Better Student? article
Collaboration rocks! What will you create today?
I’d forgotten that my favourite social change opportunities mailing list, Idealist, had done a feature on dear ol’ Singapore, and yours truly was honoured to have her flickr image used as the Spotlight Singapore picture. So now I’ve become an “Idealist Photographer“.
I’m glad to have been of some service to a very useful online community, and one that’s served me well to boot. I’ve used Idealist to scout little known community organisations, and closed-publicity volunteer and job opportunities. And while I was at a Singapore think-tank, we used Idealist to advertise for research interns, and my, did it turn up a most wonderful international mix of interns!
Are you or your organisation an Idealist yet? Are there any similar online communities you like using?
I’ve been on a Paulo Coelho reading binge recently, and have found particularly resonant words in Eleven Minutes. Among the many gems contained within, is this wonderful reminder to have the courage to pursue all that is authentic and important to oneself. The dance of sacrifice pleases no one in the end:
‘Does a soldier go to war in order to kill the enemy? No, he goes in order to die for his country. Does a wife want to show her husband how happy she is? No, she wants him to see how devoted she is, how she suffers in order to make him happy. Does the husband go to work thinking he will find personal fulfillment there? No, he is giving his sweat and tears for the good of the family. And so it goes on: sons give up their dreams to please their parents, parents give up their lives in order to please their children; pain and suffering are used to justify the one thing that should bring only joy: love.’
It reminds me of something a wonderfully free-spirited friend said on Saturday: “Pursuing something your parents think is good for you, but which you don’t enjoy will only give them short-term happiness. In the long-run, they will derive no happiness from seeing you suffer something you don’t enjoy.”
Even though things didn’t end up quite the way I envisioned it would (does it ever?), I’m glad I embraced life and took a plunge that’s led me where I am today. How are you taking the plunge today? Start living the life you want, now, and eventually, the life you want will find you.
