GO TO THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE FOR THE LATEST ENTRY OR COMMENT Hand of History SEIN Conference Bridgwater Welcome to the home page of the SEIN Conference, taking place this week in Bridgwater, a small rural town in Somerset in the South West of England. We already know that people have joined us from around the world, Welcome. If you wish to translate this page, click on your flag at the top right.
Today the conference has begun with a three hour meeting with Robert Samuels, General Director for SGI-UK Buddhist group at Taplow Court, Buddhist National Centre in Maidenhead near London. I wasn’t there and will receive the report tonight or tomorrow when they all get here to Bridgwater. This evening at about 7 everyone will be here to do gongyo and eat Bob, Bulgarian spicy bean soup I’ve been experiencing lately. I expect we’ll have an impromptu meeting before heading for Chedzoy, a village on the outskirts of Bridgwater, where some of the educators will be staying in a small B&B. The following are primary and informal discussions about the suggested future of SEiN and some ideas we are having. Everything is of course flexible and subject to change as required by all members of SEIN.This page will continue reports as we go through the conference and everyone is welcome to participate by leaving comments or questions, and to contact me if they would like to take part. Thanks everyone.
I can feel the hand of history upon us………
Today is not a day for soundbites, but I can feel the hand of history upon us. Today is the first day of the Soka Educators International Network week-long seminar in Bridgwater, Somerset, UK. It is fitting that Bridgwater is a post-modern industrial town and a total non-entity, since Soka, or value-creating, education is for the liberation and happiness of all people, however ordinary, however unacademic, wherever they live, whatever resources they have access to. This week will determine how the educators in SEIN, currently members of Soka Gakkai International Buddhist Organisation, proceed to find ways to support the world’s students and children by applying the ideas and beliefs of the founder of Soka Education, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi. Soka Education, or Value-creation in education, isn’t originally a Buddhist ideology. The connection is that the educator Makiguchi first founded Soka Kyoiku Gakkai (Society for Value-creating Education), in Japan in 1930, and later himself became a Nichiren Buddhist, realising that his humanistic ideas are in fact Buddhistic and are more powerful coming from the Buddhist faith. My personal desire, or mission, is to enable all educators to benefit from Soka ideas, whether or not they be Buddhists, so that these wonderful humanistic methods which enable children to be happy at schol and to develop as they should naturally, can be to the benefit of all children in the world. These ideas are based on absolute respect for each individual child, and are the human right of every child. Today some of the founder members of SEIN are getting together to discuss a variety of issues relating to SEIN activities, sustainable education and systemic analysis. They are: Stephanie Tansey, founder of humanistic schools in China and Turkmenistan, trainer in dialogue skills, author of the Handbook on Dialogue skills and founder of Dialogue workshops in Israel; Constance Haig, technical writer for an aerospace corporation; Jill Rees author here, consultant and trainer for sustainable education and acting teacher; Elissa Lewis, specialist in Systemic Family Therapy and the work of Gregory Bateson; Martin Rees, computer and webpage designer and trainer in Information Technology. Others may appear during the week. Some of our discussions wil be about, SEIN Forum 6 which is to start shortly and will be in Portuguese; Systemic Ideology and how it relates to education; implementation of Soka education in the wider educational sphere; as well as more Buddhist-linked topics. We are a Buddhist group, followers of Mr Makiguchi our mentor and founder of Soka Education, his disciple Josei Toda, educator, and his disciple and current President of SGI Daisaku Ikeda. These discussions are based on our Buddhist practise and are a faith activity. They will assuredly lead out into the secular world, enabling many more humanistic activities to proceed. This is my wish for this week’s discussions, and an espression of my desire to fulfil my vow to the Buddha to enable all beings to become absolutely fulfilled and happy in their own lives. I will report on these discussions on this site under Buddhist Education during the week. Anyone who is interested and the other SEIN members are asked to please contribute to the discussion. The current blog is on at the following site: http://sein2008.blogspot.com/ DAY ONE Tuesday 15th April 2008 
We had our first two meetings today, the Planning for SEIN and Website discussions. After that we trucked off to Costa Coffee - yes Bridgwater is so endowed - for a relaxing cappuccino. My view was that Americans would appreciate proper coffee but they said it was more like Italian stuff. Where is Starbucks when you need them? ey? ey? Below is a brief description of what went on in the meetings as I remember it and as applied to my notes. Please understand this may be amended and corrected, it is a first draft, but I feel it better to get it online asap. Planning for SEIN ALL DECISIONS AND IDEAS HERE ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE SO PLEASE FEEL FREE TO PARTICIPATE AND BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE. SEIN is a volunteer organisation, supporting Soka Education rather than an integral part of Soka Education. The word volunteer is in our mission statement. The planning meeting is about out intent, which is to form a just, sustainable and dialogical community. The aim is to make a 7 year plan starting from where we are. Rather than describe ourselves as a car, or some kind of unsustainable object, we like to think of our structure as being that of a tree, with ourselves being the lower branches, and aiming to raise capable people to take SEIN into the future. We must be planning for the next 1,000 years or 2,000 years, as Josei Toda advised. Josei Toda told the youth division of the time to nurture capable leaders, who should be encouraged to feel happy to work in line with SGI. Our aim is to become better Soka educators, to care for the individual. There are two aspects to SEIN, the intellectual and the applied/practical Soka education. We influence the SEIN community and the SEIN community influences us in turn. This led to raising the question, does the SEIN community support the individuals who come onto the site. In line with guidance received from senior leaders, we must always remember that Soka education, like Buddhism itself, must always be in a one-to-one relationship. Other senior guidance was that SEIN might develop as a kind of virtual Gakkai, with virtual districts. We are wary of the pitfalls of the pyramidal structure, and ascertained that we are talking about two kinds of support, faith and practical support, such as how to log on to the site and so on. It is important not to confuse the two, and we determined to chant about this and talk about it on Friday. Training must be based on the examples of the SGI, the three presidents, the master/disciple relationship and the Human Revolution. It was suggested that the Human Revolution might be a good subject for a future forum. Appreciative enquiry means finding out what each person wants to do and encourage them in that, working out how to fit that into SEIN. Our areas are: the Newsletter, the AGM, the Forum, the Blog and the Committee projects. The SEIN year goes like this: January Committee meets February Newsletter prep March Blog April Committee May Forum Planning June Forum and newsletter July Committee August Rest September Newsletter October AGM November Forum planning, conference planning December Forum, Newsletter The provisional timetable for SEIN goes like this: 2007 Exhibition, website 2008 Exhibition, Primer 2009 Improve Primer and website, eshibition 2010 Add Soka Education teachers online Institute for Research and Development 2011 Brazil Conference 2012 Soka training workshops in league with local Soka Education Divisions 2013 Makiguchi In Acton project Professional Development Training Meeting II Website planning Our programme needs more streamlined organisation, which is more transparent and which does not involve everything going through one person. Projects are Dialogue,Translation,Exhibition and Website. These all are done by the Committee. We all agreed that we need a unified website with links to our various activities, with potential for limitless growth. Constance and Rees are on this project. The areas to be included are: Forums Blog Exhibition Dialogue Library Glossary Newsletter Wednesday 14th April Meeting III Cardiff The influence of systems theory on Soka Education Present are Elissa, Jill, Stephanie, Constance, Kirsty. We drove to Cardiff with Rees, Bob and David in the morning, parked on the beautiful docks and walked round. Cadawallers has changed and is now expensive and not so good. ‘It used to be all old ladies sipping tea and eating lovely Welsh cakes,’ I said to Constance. ‘The trick is to find out where all the old ladies have gone now,’ she replied. The American contingent were delighted to be visiting Wales, didn’t fall for the joke about needing their passports, and were happy to pay for the cost of crossing the bridge. The sun shone on the Cardiff water, and the boat called out for us to take a trip. But no! Soka Education calls! Stephanie introduced the concept of SEIN as a support for people involved in education to fulfil the mission of the founder of Soka Gakkai, the educator Makiguchi, and welcomed Elissa as a systemic family therapist. We mentionned the close links between psychology and the family, and education and the classroom, and how in systemic theories all of the child’s social and physical environment plays a part in their education. Our endeavours must be collaborative as systems theory requires collaboration, one ‘expert’ can’t tell other
people their own solution, but may be able to lead them to find it for themselves. The therapist trusts that the person themself has the resources to solve their own problems and cannot pre-guess what dirction that will take. As in education and sustainable development projects, therapy may involve the use of stories, or narrative. The aim of these is to release a person from their previous fxed way of thinking and allow this person to be different, to explore ways to go forward. Kirsty said when she takes children on trips, they are able to do this becasue of the changed environment, and it can be very powerful. The other aspect of systemic therapy is that te therapist considers themself to be part of this unit, rather tan a sort of ‘mechanic’ or an expert who is ‘fixing’ the unit. This is similar to the buddhist concept of ‘dependent origination‘. Elissa suggested some books to further our understanding of systems theory, Francisco Varela ‘The View from Within’ Materana speaks of ‘autoparesis’ our conciousness in a structured self-concious. When this conciousness is detached from its fixedness it is like what Bateson called ‘perturbation. A change in the environment causes a change in our conciousness, and this is what learning is, as the Internal structure seeks to adapt. It receives ‘news of difference’, an alternative narrative, in line with the structured conciousness. This challenges the idea of instructive intervention, because the ‘news’ must be balanced with the lifestate of the individual, or the tendency will be to fix down more. Bateson also speaks of the need to feel love, emotion, human warmth. Etienne Wenger - Communities of Practise. We learn in our various communities of practise, so we should create communities of practise that optimise learning. This is the Buddhist idea of ‘en’, relation, creating a community, in your role, which is different in each of your communities. The individual has different levels of participation in each of his or her communities. A community has necessary elements, and the community persists. Finally we spoke of the master/disciple relationship in education. Wenger speaks of apprenticeship, not in the same way as Buddhists, but this shows that the basic idea of Master/Disciple is not obsolete in the Western tradition. Meeting IV - Soka Educators Division Meeting at Jill’s Present were Stephanie, Bob, Constance, Jill, Evelyn, Harriet What is the purpose of education? This is the regular 6-monthly meeting of the Soka Education Divison for the South West of England. Being so far dispersed is a problem for us with regard to attendance. We determined to address this. In this meeting, Harriet has taken part in the SEIN Forums and was pleased to meet with other members of the Forum. The meeting started with the idea that, while economic wealth and living standards have risen, human happiness has remained stagnant. This ma be becasue people are feeling increasingly disconnected with nature, with others, with life itself. The feeling of interconnectedness with nature needs to be taught now, whereas in the past it was perhaps more integral to daily life. We discussed human rituals such as heralding rain, chasing the winter away. Schools and communities can embed their own rituals. Before public education, education was by means of metaphor through story-telling, and seeing themselves ar=s part of nature.We gave some examples of the use of storytelling. You can make profound relationships with people by activities interacting with nature, such as gardening and caring for animals. Life itself is a story, expeerience of nature as a child is culture ecology transference. This is what led to the Earth Charter. It is important to enable children to connect in a personal way with nature. Friday 16th April Meeting V Following guidance from Sensei which we have not yet sourced, and for which we have to thank Michel in Brazil, Education should have the same influence in government as the fourth power, along with the executive, legislative and judicial powers. Education should not be subservient to political influences, therefor the bodies which deal wihth education must be transnational. This is the way to educate for global citizenship. SEIN is the first step towards an international educative body. In the past education was used to raise soldiers and factory workers. This was the reason education was made public in the 19th centruy. although individuals have always been idealistic, the basic organisation of educational institutions has alwasy been nationalistic. As soon as there is a global influence on educational institutions, the original nationalism is erased. In this way education can become the fourth power of an international earth charter. We made a basic plan for the next SEIN Forum, which will focus on the original translator of the Lotus Sutra Kumarajiva, and education as the fourth power which can be ‘translated’ to all people. We also wish to help make awareness of Soka University USA to students who may wish to find a global humanitarian ethos for their studies. THIS ENDS THE APRIL 2008 SEIN CONFERENCE IN BRIDGWATER AND CARDIFF UK Please continue to make comments etc. Thank you.
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