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9 Mandala | The Changing Story
“Classrooms as a Mandala”
a collaborative digital story
The mandala of meaning-making, created by sands of our communal experience, are swept up and released into the waters of life, yet don’t disappear but are dissolved into living memories that we carry with us.
A mandala is…
An integrated structure
organized around
a unifying center
– Longchenpa
The essence of a mandala can be found in the circle as “mandala” literally means “circle” when translated from ancient Sanskrit. But a mandala is more than just a circle: it is a container of essence and a circle within a circle… we are a mandala. The idea is that our life is a cycle, repetitive yet whole, and that there is a distinct correlation between the orbits of nature and the nature of our humanity.
Mandala History
Mandala–like patterns have been observed across the ages from the Native American plains Indian tribes to Carl Jung’s “Jung Mandala”. Through the years, Celtic culture used the symbolic circle in the Celtic knot while Christian culture illustrated the intricate design of the mandala through the creation of labyrinths. Although no single culture is credited with the origin of the mandala, arguably the most common usage of it dates back to the 4th century BCE through Tibetan Buddhist art. The mandala is dynamic, depending on the culture utilizing it.
Mandala Creation
The center of a mandala is where a deity is said to reside, and the designs surrounding it are the temple and metaphorical path that one takes to reach the deity/enlightenment. After the site has been blessed by the four monks who will be creating it, grains of colored sand are arranged into the design over the course of days or weeks. The sand is filled in segments, with one monk working on each of the four sides. As each layer is constructed, starting from the center and working out, the monks wait for each other to finish before moving on. In this way, the mandala symbolizes the power of respectful collaboration.
Mandala Dissolution Ceremony
An enduring theme of the mandala is the impermanence of life. After weeks of meticulous effort to construct the mandala, it is dissolved. Once the mandala is swept away, the monks bless the sand and pour it into a nearby flowing water source. As the sand is released into the water it’s healing powers are able to spread to the rest of the world while also returning full circle back into nature.
Invisible Work
by Alison Luterman
Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don’t mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, “It’s hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,
and there’s no one
to say what a good job you’re doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache.”
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.
There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world’s heart.
There is no other art.
The Tools We Need
Bread & Wine
by Anna Bullard
Cloud of Chalk
Felt Eraser
The chalkboard eraser was invented in 1863 by John L. Hammett when he was giving a presentation and happened to discover that wool felt strips cleaned off a slate chalkboard better than rags. Many students who have attended schools with slate chalkboards may recall the all-important duty of going outside after class to clean the erasers, commonly done by clapping two against each other or by pounding them against a brick wall. While harvesting components of an eraser don’t necessarily negatively impact the environment, cleaning them caused a significant amount of chalk dust to get into the lungs of people, causing them allergies and coughs, which offsets the nostalgia for slate chalkboards many teachers feel as we continue the transition to white and smart boards.
Our Epiphany
Our classrooms are piles of grains of sand of ideas and knowledge that beg to be tediously compiled into colorful and dynamic mandalas that awe and inspire us. This mandala comes at a very real cost to us, though, in the form of time and effort and natural resources. Our epiphany comes about when we realize that teaching and learning are more than sitting in, or standing in front of, a classroom; we must know and accept the full impact our teaching has on the world if we’ll ever know and accept the full impact our teaching has on our students. –>
Our epiphany comes about when we realize that teaching and learning are more than sitting in, or standing in front of, a classroom; It comes about when we realize our impact on the world which includes our effect on our students.
How We Mark
Chalk
Chalk is composed of Calcium Carbonate, a compound created naturally from dead marine animal shells in aquatic environments. The first traces of chalk date back to prehistoric times when early man used it for cave paintings; it wasn’t until the 1800’s when the blackboard began to take center stage in the classroom, that the use of chalk began to appear in schools. Anyone who has experienced a 20th century classroom recalls the pesky chalk dust that can permeate a classroom. For this reason, chalk was feared to be the source of respiratory problems. As a result, chalk use has declined in past years as alternative methods of classroom writing have taken its place, most prominently the dry erase marker and whiteboard.
Dry Erase Markers
Dry erase markers consist of a plastic barrel and cap with a porous, pressed fiber element inside (such as felt) that holds the ink. The convenience of writing and erasing without getting chalk on your hands and in your lungs is a nice trade-off for a device that leaves you clean after using it, but the impacts on the environment are real. The plastic that dry erase markers is made of is almost always unable to be recycled and as many teachers could attest, they end up in the trash can faster than you can say, “where’s a marker that isn’t dried out?”
Questions as a Mandala
The University Avenue Project
by Wing Huie
In “The University Avenue Project” Wing Huie created a human mandala of sorts consisting of 500 photographs of people in a culturally rich urban setting. Huie handed each person a slate chalkboard and asked them a series of questions, and they chose one to answer, writing their response on the chalkboard.
The questions:
What are you?
How do you think others see you?
What don’t they see?
What advice would you give to a stranger?
What is your favorite word?
Describe an incident that changed you.
How have you been affected by race?
How would you answer?
About the Photographer
Wing Young Huie has been photographing the dizzying socioeconomic and cultural realities of American society, much of it centered on the urban cores of his home state of Minnesota. Although his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, his most well-known projects are large-scale public installations, including “Frogtown” (1995), “Lake Street USA” (2000) and “The University Avenue Project” (2010), which transformed major Twin Cities’ thoroughfares into epic photo galleries, reflecting the everyday lives of thousands of its citizens in the midst of some of the most diverse concentrations of international immigrants in the country.
From Slate to Circuits
Chalkboard
In 1801, George Baron of West Point Academy came up with the idea of a large blackboard which was the size of a wall; a larger version of the personal sized slate slabs students were already using. Aptly named, slate chalkboards are made from slate, a fine grained rock composed of clay and shale. These materials are extracted from the earth through a process called quarrying, which uses a combination of drilling and explosives to surface the rock, leaving dangerous footprint- creating pits that are many times used as either waste landfills or unstable water collectors.
Whiteboard
While writing notes on his film negatives with a marker pen, a photographer named Martin Heit noticed that he could erase his writing by wiping a wet rag across the glossy surface. Whiteboards are made in two forms: melamine and porcelain/enamel. Melamine whiteboards are typically found in home offices where the whiteboard is used sparingly, due to the weak nature of melamine. Porcelain surfaces, on the other hand, are much more durable and are the type of whiteboard most commonly found in classrooms. Composed of nickel, cobalt, and glass heated to over 1700 degrees Fahrenheit, porcelain whiteboards have been a classroom staple since their commercial debut in the 1960s.
Smart Board
In 1986, David Martin and Nancy Knowlton had an idea to create an interactive board that had the simplicity of a whiteboard, but with the capabilities of a computer. Five years later, the smart board was born. The smart board is the first interactive whiteboard of its kind, fostering collaborative community in the classroom through the touch control of computer games and software projected onto the whiteboard screen. Since smart boards are a relatively new technology, their popularity has not peaked as it continues to rise in popularity; by 2011 more than 2 million smart boards had been installed worldwide.
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