1b rpf brieftherapymin by René Pedroza

Brief Therapy

Mindfulness

Brief Therapy

Mindfulness The Teaching Change

RenĂŠ Pedroza Flores

Copyright © 2015 by René Pedroza Flores. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015919724 ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-5065-1029-3 Softcover 978-1-5065-1031-6 Ebook 978-1-5065-1030-9 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them. Cover design by: Mariana Vanessa Martínez Balderas numava24@gmail.com This book was funded by the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México.

Rev. date: 11/25/2015

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Index Introduction ��ix Chapter I BRIEF STRATEGIC THERAPY FOR THE TEACHING CHANGE ��1 Pioneers on brief strategic therapy: Milton Erickson and Gregory Bateson ��1 Brief strategic therapy from the Mental Research Institute (MRI) ��12 Brief strategic therapy for change in the pedagogical relationship ��25 Pathologies in the pedagogical relationship embedded in black pedagogy ��35 Chapter II EMOTIONAL CHANGE FROM THE TEACHER ��43 How to change the pedagogical relationship of the teacher on abuse and humiliation? ��43 The importance of emotions for the teaching change ��55 Teaching change as a meaningful life experience ��66 What does brief strategic change means to teaching change? ��79

Chapter III MINDFULNESS FOR THE TEACHING CHANGE TOWARDS PROPER TREATMENT ��93 Teaching change from Mindfulness: a change for life from the person itself ��93 Synergy between brief strategic therapy and Mindfulness for the teaching change towards a proper treatment. �� 107 Guidelines for the change as a self-acknowledgment process and development of full conscience. �� 121 A path for the practical approach of change towards proper treatment from the teacher �� 133 Sources �� 155

I’ve come to a frightening: that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous ... I can be a tool of torture ... or heal. G. GUINOT, Teacher and child.

This book is dedicated to my Little daughter, Lucero Hecely, who from an early childhood was mistreated at the daycare center, having sequels up until he puberty where she was able to solve a painful past. My sons Hegel Emmanuel And Edmundo Rodrigo are not assigned to oblivion, and I dedicate this book to them, as they have also been resilient before teaching abuse.

Introduction Within education, the reform has contracted the, no charter of citizenship, as every government includes in their political platforms education as the panacea for social development and economic growth. As an example, we find that in the film Waiting for “Superman” many presidential slogans are quoted which in time were used as flags to hoist education change: I am the president for education, the president of change, improving education in our nation is the priority. Similar discourses in our country have been present for at least six presidential terms, almost half a century of unfulfilled promises. Educational reality belies the fact that the education sector has received the attention expressed in speeches, reforms and policies. Problems of school failure continue and in some aspects are increasing; national exams’ results show on Math’s and in other subject a high number of failing students. Educational reforms in Mexico have been specifically applied in two dimensions: to the economical-occupational and to the pedagogical. In the first one, some changes on the forms of financing, salary diversification and quota and services management have been shown; in the former, design and application of new pedagogical and didactic methods.

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We are interested on placing ourselves in the pedagogical dimension of the reforms. The pedagogical methods have changed at different times with the purpose of improving the learning performance and the teaching quality. At some stages the objectives may have been reached; for example, the one related to the teacher being an excellent technical advisor on educational planning based on competencies. There is still a problem that educational reforms have not yet solved, a problem that has survived pedagogical improvement. Methods and learning relations change, where a parallel dilemma remains along with pedagogical change and with the teaching change. The problem of abuse. This problem of abuse is an issue that has lasted many years in the subject of education, and it has gained shape in the pedagogy of abuse that Alice Miller calls black pedagogy. Black pedagogy means aggression and humiliation. On the grounds of this pedagogy, students receive physical, sexual and pedagogical abuse. It is a pedagogy used by adults – parents and teachers – in order to educate children and teenagers, which is based on threatening, beating, blackmailing, humiliating punishments, yelling, words that denigrate: it is a horror museum. Naturally, children and teenagers are hurt physically, emotionally, and affectively. Students want nothing to do with school. Black pedagogy is part of school failure. Black pedagogy seen as the pedagogy of abuse and humiliations is an emotional health issue within the pedagogical interplay that requires to be given attention, so that the teacher may perform as a health and emotional wellbeing instead of acting as a supporter of mood disorders which may block or disable learning on students. A teacher who can guarantee joyous schooling and peace for students, and not a living hell. We all have the memory of a teacher who somehow abused. The objective of this book is to establish the possibility of the teacher’s emotional and cognitive change , based on a brief

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and profound vision in order to have a transition from abuse to a proper treatment, from black pedagogy to a positive pedagogy. A proper treatment implies a meaningful life change for the teacher as it represents the opportunity of assessing what he does and how he does it on the subject of emotional relationships with students. The teacher is in charge of building up this proper treatment, being him the agent who should change. Proper treatment is a teacherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s way of life, which does not arise from others. When teachers change, the pedagogical interaction system changes in which he participates. In this sense, the teacher is the craftsman of its own change and of the change in the way he relates to students and to the world. The teaching change towards proper treatment does not represent a good resolutions recipe, or a relation of didactic indicators, nor a list of pedagogical strategies. It represents constant work that the teacher must perform on himself. It is a job of personal psycho-emotional intervention, active, continuous and receiving feedback from the subjective experience and with behavioral experience. It is something which is perceived, it is sensed, looked at and, above all, lived in the everyday life. The conceptual basis of this sense of teaching change that we propose is originated in the Brief Strategic Therapy (BST) and Mindfulness (MF), from which although both are different practices, they have some common grounds which allow establishing a bridge between them so that the teacher can work on its own change. Both approaches hold a parallel story that began at the end of the sixties, sharing nuances such as the purpose of focusing in the present, the here and now. They also share the fact of focusing on the solution, and mostly in the possibility of changing starting with the effort of the person itself, taking into account the energy coming from the teacher. In this sense, the book represents an innovative proposal for the teaching change towards a proper treatment rooted in brief

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strategic therapy and in mindfulness, which gives name to this book: Mindfulness Brief Therapy. The Teaching Change. The book is aimed for everyone, as personal change is a matter of each individual. We are particularly inviting those dedicated to teaching, to read this book and mostly to live it. That is why, we invite the reader to vividly experiment its change throughout a creative and strict path where techniques of Strategic Problem Solving are provided – the fourth proposed model by BST-, as well as meditation techniques from mindfulness. Remember, a proper treatment represents the opportunity of having a healthier and happier life. The book is divided into three chapters: • First chapter. A brief review of brief strategic therapy, starting with its pioneers and up to the recent years. • Second chapter. Black pedagogy and the importance of the teaching change for a proper treatment. • Third chapter. Mindfulness and its relationship with brief therapy in order to accomplish the teaching change towards a proper treatment. Moreover, at the end a practical program of teaching change is presented, where mindfulness techniques with techniques of strategic problem solving are provided.

CHAPTER I Brief strategic therapy for the teaching change Pioneers on brief strategic therapy: Milton Erickson and Gregory Bateson Brief strategic therapy in the history of psychology set a new path in psycho affective disorders treatments, as it focused in the solution of the problem and in the short term treatment. Different authors have participated in the development. Without providing a detailed review, we will give essential aspects of each school. We are paying special attention to contributions we consider to be basic from Milton Erikson and Gregory Bateson1, as from the synthesis of both (as pointed out by Nardone and Watzlawick) emerges the strategic approach of ericksonian hypnosis and of the systemic vision and of betesonian communication

Haley (1973) considers Erickson as the father of strategic therapy, and Betson as the father of the interactional-systemic approach. 1

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Erickson was a pioneer on brief strategic therapy since the thirties on the last century. He was an acute observer of human behavior, discovering that every person holds a personal story with its own resources in order to overcome problems, in every human being there is an accumulation of learning which remain in the subconscious mind. Erickson describes that everyone possesses natural powers, which are not used due to the fact that we ignore we possess them; he insisted that natural powers could be used to solve problems applying them with suggestions and adequate motivating direct language for each individual. The conscious mind accumulates knowledge as it some sort of a learning, memories, and abilities storage system, and that whenever we recall them they are present in order to solve problems. Rosen (1989) recalls a quote by Will Rogers that Erickson would use: “…problem ain’t what people know. It’s what people know that ain’t so that’s the problem.– to which Erickson would add: The things we know bring more problems to us, but we do not know what we know” (p.53).

Many believe that the subconscious mind proceeds according to an external will2,the truth is that the unconscious mind produces a response in the right moment building and appropriate answer from the person itself. Erickson worked with the subconscious mind throughout hypnotic psychotherapy, understanding hypnosis as a therapeutically medical procedure and as a resource to analyze, understand and reframe human behavior. Erickson defined hypnosis as a special status of the conscience which appeals to acquired and stored learning in the unconscious in order to potentiate its own capabilities. Erickson

Particularly circus, show and bribery hypnosis..

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emphasizes the empowerment and the handling of the abilities that people can perform through hypnosis: “Within this special status of conscience we may find the different forms of behavior of everyday life and, although different on the degree and types of relationships they establish, they will always meet in the boundaries of normal. Abilities cannot be transcended through hypnosis, their expressions can only be empowered , though we may have not noticed that they exist in there. Despite the fact that hypnosis cannot create new abilities in a person, it can help handle those it already has” (Erickson, 2002; p. 115)

Hypnosis helps “find” solutions to problems with the same resources the person holds, it does not magically create new possibilities as it is untruly promised by the hypnosis we see in circuses. From the clinical point of view, hypnosis sets itself upon the patient and from there constructs intervention strategies, with hypnosis the attention is focused in what the person is: “Observe and listen truly to your patients. Pay special attention to the situation in which the symptom was produced. The patient’s personality is of crucial importance. In order to help, we must respectfully analyze what the person presents before us” (Erickson quoted by Procter, 2002; p.11)

Erickson insisted on the importance of the patient’s personality in the clinical treatment with hypnosis. In the 1954 article Hypnotic Psychotherapy, he points out three basic areas that were emphasized in his clinical practice: a) Ability to shape or adjust the wished therapy from the own dynamics and shape of the patient’s problem,

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appealing to the use of the patient’s own resources in order to build the solution. b) Work separately or jointly with the personality aspects and establish ways of inclusion. c) To set aside past experiences from the conscious influence in order to achieve an understanding of the situations, thus achieving good results in problems solution. Subject’s individuality was the support to Erickson’s approach. Each subject is unique and unrepeatable in the particularity of its personality, capabilities, learning, needs and disposition. Each one holds a conscious and an unconscious conduct, which defines variability among subjects. Erickson departed from the needs of the subject, scrutinized on its beliefs and oriented them to problem solution. He delimited the subject’s discomfort by being placing in the present in the development of the how in order to project the future, he was strategic, using stories, anecdotes, tales, metaphors as didactic and therapeutical instruments which contributed to the solution departing from the communication adapted to the patient’s individuality. That is why, Erickson is considered the pioneer of the brief and strategic approach. His main interest was to achieve change in the subject with its own resources (Rosen: 1989; O’Hanlon: 1993; Zeig: 2006; Pacheco: 2002). To Erickson’s contributions, Gregory Bateson’s were added. From the point of view of anthropology in the thirties of the previous century, Bateson offers along with the study of Naven ceremonies from the Iatmul culture of New Guinea a different vision to the then predominant structuralism and functionalism. Bateson (1990) on his book written in 1936 about Naven, set two objectives: one, to relate the new ways of thought of his time (theory of communication, cybernetics and logical mathematical), and a second one, to relate his findings

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to psychiatry. Within these objectives lies an epistemological position different to nominalism and realism by Plato and Aristotle. To Bateson, the theoretical interlocking are constructions performed by scientists that feed the hope of naïve realism. We can find in Naven a circular systemic vision with the idea of the process of knowledge cosmogenesis3which consists on differentiating the cultural and individual patterns from the interaction between subjects and of the subjects with culture that feedback change and continuity in the cultural system. An aspect which draws attention and of relevance to this work, is Bateson’s exposition in the notion of change from the subject and of culture as something progressive and self-corrective. At the end of the book Naven we find the following argument: “The substitution of the idea of purpose or adaptation under the notion of self-correction defined a new approach of the problems of the Iatmul culture. Cosmogenesis seemed to promote progressive change and the problem lied in the fact that this progressive change was no leading to a destruction of the culture as such. With self-corrective causal circuits as conceptual model, it was natural to ask now if there could exist in this culture functional connections that would allow control factors provided by an increase in the cosmogenesis tension to play a role. It was not enough to say that symmetric cosmogenesis happened by mere coincidence to counterbalance the complementary. It is necessary to ask now: Is there a means of communication that allows that an increase in the symmetric cosmogenesis provokes an increment on the corrective complementary phenomena? Could the system be circular and self-corrective?” (Bateson, 1990; p. 311)

Bateson defines this concept as: “… a process of diferentiation in the individual behavior norms resulting from the accumulative interaction among individuals” (p. 198).

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Bateson’s findings in the Iatmul culture led to the cybernetic exposition of the symmetric and complementary interactions that configure change, leading to the feedback process in the cosmogenesis in a circular way. There is a feedback in the social network that changes at the drop of a hat modifying individual’s conduct regulating the stability of the system by operating introjected learning about the culture. Cognitive and affective aspects are present in cultural behavior, which are considered by Bateson as behavior affective functions associated to the ethos expression of behavior. The affective function is defined as the relationship between cultural details and emotional needs of the individuals. Both aspects are considered as a whole for culture, and not separate as it seen by the approach of anthropological structuralism. The attention to the emotional factor leads Bateson to use the ethological category and the notion of ethos for the emotional emphasis of culture from a pragmatic point of view. In the cognitive field, he proposes the category of eidos related to the structure of culture manifested by the subjects. From the relationship between eidos and the ethological, the content of culture is constructed which guides and leads subjects in cognition and emotions. Bateson outlines a hypothesis from the circular relationship of both factors: “.. one in which individuals from one community are standardized by their culture: while predominant characteristics of a culture, those that can be easily recognized,, one from the other, in different contexts, are an expression of this standardization. This hypothesis is in a way circular. It is assumed that the predominant characteristics of a culture not only express, but promote the standardization of individuals (…). The eidos of a culture is an expression of the individual’s standardized cognitive aspects, while the ethos corresponds to the

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affective standardized aspects. The sum of ethos and eidos constitutes more those general characteristics of a culture which may be due to other types of standardization, that make up the total of the setting” (Idem., p. 50-51)

Duality represents a complexity of the system between the cognitive and the affective in the process of learning, learning keeps a relevant meaning in the cosmogenesis for the order regulation. Cosmogenesis unity is a subsystem of two people that potentially supports the cybernetic circuit of feedback in the aspects of eidos and ethos through the learning process that happens in communication. According to Bateson, communication is fundamental as it an interaction that creates networks that feedback the construction of the subjects and the construction of the system in a constant dynamics of cosmogenetic exchange which leads to stabilization or to the conflict regulation. There is a communication between subjects and from the subjects with the system, which implies that when a member of the system moves, the system is modified; when there is a pathological communication, it does not only affect the subject but the whole system as well. Bateson arrived to this conclusion when he studied schizophrenia in the family- the hypothesis is that a schizophrenic is the product of a familiar interaction4-,using his findings in the Iatmul culture, as each member has clear identified roles, change implies a change in communication that comes from the interacting subject with the existing system.

This hypothesis is relevant up to now as it is contrary to the psychiatry medical approach which arguments that schyzophrenia is the result of an organic “damage” that can be onlycontrolled with synthetic drugs.

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With the word schizophrenia Bateson (2006) refers to a recognizable and definable set of formal characteristics of personal interaction. As part of schizophrenia there is a double bind. This double bind is part of the theory of communication by Bateson, who in order to explain this resumes Rusell’s Theory of Logical Types. Bateson uses the term double bind to refer to non-solved sequences of experiences of the Logical Types of communication, associated to the inability to meta communicate. In other words, this double bind is the weakness of the function of the ego presented by the schizophrenic to discriminate forms of communication with itself and with others; this weakness consists in adequately “handling” at a communicational level the different logical types of expression, it is difficult to “decode” literalism, metaphor, the participation, the no participation, fantasy, humor, artificial laughter, friendship, the game of trust, being frolic, sarcasm. A situation of double bind represents a “trap” in communication as what it expresses has more sense in the context in which the relationship is presented. An example quoted by Bateson is that where a mother tells her son: Go to bed; you are very tired and I want you to rest. The son’s answer could be given in two different types of message: affirm a positive feeling from his mother to him (a Logical Type) or affirm a negative feeling from his mother to him (another Logical Type). In the first case, the loving concern from the mother to the resting feeling of the son; in the second, the wish from the mother to get rid of her son. If the son meta communicates at discovering that what the mother really wants, in her own loving manners, is for him to leave as she is tired of him, the mother will be furious by being judged; in the other case, the son will have to follow the game, he will have to learn to hide his capacity of meta communicating deceiving himself by deceiving his mother by playing along. If the son accepts the simulated feeling of his mother (which is

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not an actual solution for him), the mother is getting away from the son when he is trying to get close, the mother experiments a feeling of fear and disempowerment. If the son were the one getting away by meta communicating, the mother will feel insecure and worthless. The answer in each case is punishments: if the mother retracts, the punishment for the son is due to not considering his mother’s love; and if the son retracts, the punishment will be due to criticizing his mother. Bateson (1998) expresses it in the following way: “The child is punished for correctly discriminating what she expresses, and is punished for discriminating incorrectly: he is now trapped in a double bind” (244)5

Bateson implies the existence of six necessary ingredients for the existence of a double bind situation6: a) Two or more people, where one of them is the victim. b) Repeated experience until it becomes a regular expectation. c) A negative primary term that can become into any of the following forms: “don’t pay attention or I’ll punish you”

In this double bind there is no victim and no agresor, only people wrapped in a system with conflicts on its interrelation and communication that the subject learns in a permanent and continuous process. In the 1963 article, Bateson writes about it: “ –the doublebind should not be understood as the relationship of a brinder and his victim, but that stablished between people trapped in a permanent system that produces conflict definitions of the relationship” (Quoted by Winkin, 1994; p. 42) This version of the double bind was written by Bateson along with Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley and John Weakland in 1956; in a later work written in 1969, the aspect of reification which will correct this first version of double bind, will be considered.

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or “If you don’t do that, I’ll punish you”. The expressions are in a learning context that avoids punishment. d) A secondary term in conflict with the first one, which is communicated through a digital language containing the hidden meaning of the comment as in the previously mentioned expression –Go to bed; you are very tired and I want you to rest- that transmits a more abstract languages. Or in the case of the expression quoted by Bateson: Do not submit to my prohibitions, where we can find a conflict between the first and second sentence: should or shouldn’t I? e) A third negative term that prohibits the victim to escape from the field, can be portrayed throughout the love promise of a man to woman: I will never stop loving you as long as I love you as I do and that day will never come because I love you because you love me. An abstract third negative term: Does he love her in his own way or does he love her just because he does? As long as she loves him he will do too, or he loves her because she loves him as well, how to escape from the learning fields based in “understanding”. f) A set of conflicting terms where the victim learnt to perceive its universe in double bind interactions. This double bind is built in a context as an experience that tends to be recurring from the side of the victim, becoming a routine and with time, in an interaction pattern. There is the creation of subjects bind to themselves, to others, to others and their contexts; it represents an entanglement drawing from the communicative frame, and the adaptation leads to a possibility of creativity exiting the double bind with the own structural bind where it was created.

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There are three more aspects to the double bind. First, to the built binds in the victim’s context the therapeutical7double binds are added, which participate in the victim’s change. There are situations where double binds are built from the victim and situations where therapeutical double binds are built. Second of all, the double bind is not a thing nor can it be counted, it is not something that can be reified in the subject as pathology, or that it reifies the subject. The subject builds itself based on its “own” reality as a system that transforms into process; in the interaction and in communication the patterns of experience and of learning are created in a conscious and unconscious lattice of messages that guide conduct and which have adaptive feedback; thus, the subject itself creates its own double binds – there is no more double binds than those of which one is a prisoner-, the double bind holds the epistemology of interaction: “The tapestry of contexts and of messages that propose contexts- but that, as well as every other message have “meanings” only from contextconstitute the content of the called theory of double bind” (Idem, p. 305). Third, the theory of double bind exposes a theory of change that includes communication and learning; on this terms, change means a change on communication and thus, a change in learning as far as it is a communicative phenomenon, the subject does not learn a pathology but a pathology of the learning

Psychotherapy creates in the patient or in the psychotherapist double bind communications: “Psychotherapy itself is a communication context in many levels, with an exploration on the ambiguous lines between the literal and the metaphorical, or of reality and fantasy and, byt the way, different ways of playing, drama and hypnosis have been broadly used in the therapy (…). There are double bind situations created inside and by means of the therapeutical context (…). Sometimes they are not noticed in the sense that the therapist is imposing a situation of double bind similar to the one from the patient’s story, or that the patient is imposing a double bind situation to the therapist (Bateson, 1998; 254-255)

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apparatus, the way in interacts and communicates; the possibility of change is present, according to the subject’s creativity that changes the pathological learning apparatus. The contributions from Milton Erickson and of Gregory Bateson have provided the grounds to the therapeutical approach of interactionist perspective of the brief strategic therapy, by giving a different clinical psychological vision to the cognitive one by proposing a theory of change.

Brief strategic therapy from the Mental Research Institute (MRI) Erickson and Bateson influences different authors who gave shape to the approaches of brief and strategic therapy. Nardone (2006) identifies three major facets: the model focused to solution – “school of Milwaukee”8- headed by De Share; the strategic family model –“school of Washington”9- represented by Haley and Madanes; and the brief strategic model from the Mental Research Institute (MRI), the “Palo Alto school”. Each “school” has provided important contributions in the consideration of conduct problems. For the purposes of this book, we will consider the school of Palo Alto as we are interested in presenting its grounds on brief strategic therapy bind to the theory of change. Bateson started building up a team work with people from different theoretical and clinical disciplinary trends interested in the study of human behavior. In 1954 his team was comprised

A model focused in the solution of alcohol, drug abuse, among other treatments. Nurtured the strategic family approach dealing with sexual abuse, violence and other problems.

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by Jay Haley10, John Weakland11 William Fry12and Donald Jackson13. Once the experience with Bateson concluded, the members of the team went on their own way in the field of family and humor psychotherapy. Don Jackson founded the Mental Research Institute in 1959 along with Jules Riskin and Virginia Satir. Two years later Paul Watzlawik joins them and later on two former collaborators of Jackson, John Weakland and Jay Haley. It is a moment of important specialization and production of MRI into the field of family therapy. In a few years, in 1967, MRI became a space for research, training and psychotherapy clinic. In the same year the Brief Therapy Center Foundation was created with the participation of Richard Fisch, Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland and Artur Bodin, who resume the contributions of the pioneers of this brief therapy approach from Erickson and Bateson, and the intakes from the founder of the MRI, Jackson. A year later in 1968 Jackson dies, where Jay Haley leaves the MRI –which years later would be part of the model in Washington for strategic family model (Nardone: 2006)- and Virginia Satir, specialist in family therapy. Pioneer in family therapy, his relationship with Bateson began with the research related to communication, his role was to observe and register the work from different psychotherapists such as Milton Erickson, Frieda From-Reichmann, Don Jackson, among others. 11 Chemical engineer as a profession and studies of anthropology, distance collaborator to Margaret Mead (Gregory Bateson’s wife), was the first guestto the Bateson project. Joint author with Bateson of the weekly article: “Towards a theory of schyzophrenia”. 12 Psyquiatrist who studied the communicative meaning of paradoxes, dreams, humor, communication with dolphins and poetry, after leaving the MRI he founded the institute of gelotology dedicating himself to the study of humor and laughter, being then a pioneer in this therapeutical field. 13 Psyquiatrist and psychoanalist pioneer in the systemuc family therapy. 10

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We would like to stop for a moment at Jackson’s contribution, as it is crucial for the later story of the MRI. As a specialist in family interactions, Jackson sees family as a homeostatic unit where the structure of family interaction behaves as a system: a change in the patient brings changes to the family elements and there is a relationship between the models of family interaction and the categories of psychiatric nosology. To Jackson, there are four reasons that justified focusing in family interactions: “… because of the value of such study in the treatment of a patient; because of the possibility it offers to help other members of the family avoiding painful counter reactions; for the cheapness and rapidness that a therapy performed in collaboration provides; and, finally, for the possible consequences in the research of a psychiatric nosology that can be understood on its genesis” (Jackson, 1994; 245)14 Family homeostasis is kept together by a series of dynamic forces that, from the theory of communication can be described considering the set of family interactions as a closed information system with feedback mechanisms. For this psychotherapeutical intervention, we must see family as a whole, comprised by the others counting to the patient’s life, whether they are direct family – father, mother, siblings- and even other people. At this point, the therapist should consider the temporary dimension as the family is shaped of people who share everyday with the patient, as well as with relatives form childhood. We now go back to the story of MRI. At Jackson’s death, the leadership of the MRI was assumed by Watzlawick15 at The text from which the quote is taken, was written by Jackson between 1952 or 1953, we quote the text compiled by Ives Winkin, republished for the fourth time in 1994. 15 He was some sort of hinge between origin and future of the brief strategic therapy approach, a fact that we can see throughout his most important works written with collaborators who have been essential 14

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the beginning of the sixties, accompanied by Weakland16 and Fish. Watzlawick recognizes the legacy of three giants: Milton Erickson, Gregory Bateson and Don Jackson. Then, it is nurtured with hypnosis, the theory of double bind and family homeostasis. To the received heritage he adds his own contributions coming from the cybernetics and the theory of systems. Two of his major works were written in joint authorship with his colleagues: The book called Theory of human communication published in 1967along with Don Jackson and Janet Beavin; and the book Change, principles of problem formation and problem resolution published in 1974 in collaboration with John Weakland and Richard Fisck. Each participant personality at the MRI printed its own landmark which contributed to defining the outlines of the brief strategic therapy approach. A detailed description of each one of the contributions would represent a titanic task. We present a synthesis of aspects that, according to us, are relevant. We begin with the converging points of the different participant theorists throughout history. The protagonists of Palo Alto School achieved the homeostasis from meeting points and from the feedback obtained in different moments. Although not everyone came from the psychological discipline or from psychiatry, they shared the dissatisfaction provoked by psychotherapeutical methods used for the solution of human problems. They regarded them as long and with few results. They shared the concern to investigate non dominant therapeutical experiences that were in each of the moments: first, in the origin of the MRI the triad Watzlawick-Jackson-Beavin; after that, with the change of director of the MRI due to Jackson’s death, the triad Watzlawick-Weakland-Fish; and further, the duet Watzlawick-Nardone. 16 Develops an interactional and systemic point of view of individual therapy.

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successful in providing attention to human problems, they fixed their observations in the hypnosis performed by Milton Erickson and in clinical work on systemic family therapy by Don Jackson; everyone achieved preparation and experience in clinical hypnosis. They found in Bateson an alternative vision for the explanation of human change. They put together Erickson’s and Jackson’s clinical experience with the conceptual grounds of Bateson, which allowed them to use one same language. The research areas in interrelational psychotherapy and of the problem of communication led them to find common results in order to intervene in human situations, placing themselves in the here and now, obtaining positive results in the short term. They created a modus operandi centered in solutions (Watzlawick: 2008) The School of Palo Alto gave shape to the strategic approach of brief therapy, becoming a school of thought as it developed a new model of knowledge. It is a new paradigm that lies on premises different to psychoanalysis or to psychiatry. It perceives reality and mental disorder in a different way. The sentence each one constructs the reality that suffers afterwards is a clear example of this. Nardone and Watzlavick (2003) establish it in the following way: “The fundamental supposition is that the reality we perceive and the one we stick to, including the problems and pathologies, is product of the interactions between the point of observation, the used instruments and the language we seek to understand that reality. Thus, there is no such “true” reality, but a series of possible realities and different interactions between the subject and subjects of the reality” (p. 13)

This supposition has the basis of a constructivist vision of reality, assuming a radical point of view, reality is an invention. This breaks the positivist paradigm that affirms the existence

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of a unique and true reality. The concept of constructivist reality assumes an epistemological position which questions other concepts of the positivist tradition, truth, objectivity and linearity. We particularly refer to the concept of change that from positivism is seen as something lineal, objective and progressive. To understand the idea of change from the School of Palo Alto point of view, we must look at the epistemological position, to the psychotherapeutical orientation and to the intervention method in order to put into dimension the human person as a protagonist of the solution of its problems: a) The epistemological position. Watzlawick defined it as radical constructivism, because each one created its own individual world, there is an invented reality. He resumes contributions from quantum physics that sustains that energy is at the same time a wave and a particle, energy is materialized as a particle in the same instant that the observer is observing. The observer constructs reality. There are two realities, one which is grasped by the perception throughout the sensorial organs; and a second order, which corresponds to the attribution of sense and value that each individual gives to the world, there is an attribution of meanings to the world. In different parts of his work, Watzlawick reiterates that this point of view is not new, he makes reference to the expression by Epitect: Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them. Ernest Mach from the Vienna circle, pointed out that there was no material world, what there is a set of perceptions. He established the materialistic disontologization of reality as an objective truth. Heisenberg with the principle of indetermination, issued in the same sense: “Ontology of materialism lays on the illusion that existence, direct “reality” of the surrounding

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world, may be extrapolated within the atomic environment. This extrapolation is, nevertheless, impossible (1959, 121). Matter is not a reality, is a possibility. A capacity that only exists as a form. Heisenberg expresses that reality as such does not exist: the existing reality is a reality configured by one self. Going back to Watzlawick in the field of human conduct, reality is the result of communication; on his book The sense of sense, he quotes an example of how an error in communication creates a reality: “Almost a year ago in the General Hospital of the Italian city of Grosseto, there was a notable incident. A woman with acute schizophrenia had to be taken to Naples to receive psychiatric treatment. When the drivers of the ambulance arrived to the Tuscan hospital, they received order to direct themselves to a room in which the woman, ready and packed was sitting in the bed. But at the moment of asking her to accompany the, the patient a new schizophrenia attack as she resisted, show lose her personality and, finally, was injected to be calmed. When the ambulance was on its way, it was proven that it had been confusion. The lady in the ambulance was a lady from Grosseto who had visited someone.” (1995, 60)

An interpretation of the reality generated wrong communication, which led to a construction of reality. Everything fit in a depersonalization associated to the schizophrenia symptoms. Reality was given according to the perceptions of the orderlies; it was a way of looking at things. According to Watzlavick this is radical constructivism: “Radical constructivism is understood as a constructing and not as an ultimate truth, it represents a possible way of looking at things. To me, it is only about a matter of which the most useful and human construction, and that can also be said related to therapeutical work. In an epistemological

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sense, we must abandon the idea that science helps to the knowledge of the truth. It rather has the function of developing useful methods for very specific objectives that in a short period of time will possibly be substituted by more effective ones. It has nothing to do with an absolute truth (2014, 347)

The epistemology of radical constructivism (not lineal, absolute, nor determinist), provides in order to understand the change in human conduct, the idea of “looking at” the problem as a simple way and not as the ultimate truth. It is all about finding a more useful and human solution from the establishment of the singularity of the objectives. b) The psychotherapeutical orientation. Watzlawick defines it as systemic and interactionist, based on cybernetics. It is an orientation that abandons the lineal vision of psychotherapy placed in the question of the why. It travels in the circular thought breaking the paradigm of lineal why and on its place assumes the question of what for. The questions arising from it are on the basis of interactions of the subjects with the system: What is the position to be taken? What role does it take before circularities? How is it contributed? There is a pragmatic position for the problem solution. Pragmatism implies the deconstruction of the subject’s truths, a reeducation to construct life in a different form, it is a different way of looking at life, of modifying the problem. Watzlawick expressed it as learning: “If we begin from the conception that psychotherapeutical context is a learning space, the therapist becomes a teacher that shows how to think from an epistemological dimension” (Ceberio, 2006;155)

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Psychotherapy is an epistemic learning that builds the psychotherapeutical relationship from a human vision accepting the bind between patient and psychotherapist, an affective bind. Affectivity is the engine to change, in the interaction between patient and professional there is the root of the solution of the problem. It is not exaggeration to express that change is possible from affection, as expressed by Watzlawick: “Affection in the therapeutical bind enables interventions and changes. Affection sets a pattern of sensibility and plasticity, it provides the sense of feeling and the emotional factor in certain parts of messages, the one that contacts with the body and handles the space of proximity and distance, etc. What is more, it offers a relational model valid basically in those rigid and difficult places to express its emotions (2008a, 19).

The communicational game is digital and analogical, it sees the affections; within plasticity of the solution, as the system interacts subjects move. Pragmatics is complemented with the reformulation of the affective and semantic language. Feelings are printed and there is another way of looking at life. Psychotherapeutical orientation of brief therapy assumes the circular explanation; it is interested in the recursion of the system as its goal is the reformulation of reality on the second order, the reality that the patient constructs. For that, different techniques are used as together they provide a diversity of construction; on this sense, the plasticity of the patient and of the professional is a resource for change: “From this point of view, we could think that every strategy of the systemic clinic meet and depart from the “reformulation”, as the array that goes from the positive connotation, the talking, the client’s language, the circular questions, even the behavior requirements from different

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perspectives, has as main goal modifying the construction of the patient’s reality” (Ceberio, 2006; 165)

The techniques have as main end to feedback the system for the change, a new way of communicating throughout learning that constructs second order realities from and with circular explanations that feedback the plasticity in the interaction between patient and professional as part of the changing system. c) The intervention method. There is a diversity of methods in brief therapy; each member of this trend provides its own approaching specificities. Watzlawick emphasizes on the change of the reference frame of the person, he interferes with the reframing. It is a different way of looking at the problem, of finding another sense giving a different value to the overwhelming reality. Reframing means to change the point of view. Watzlawick defines it as: “…changing the frame or the conceptual or emotional perspective according to the ones in which a situation is experienced, then put it into a frame that fits similarly or even better with the “facts” of the same specific situation, changing all the sense (Nardone and Watzlawick, 2003;100). It is an ontologic change that modifies the reality of second order remaining the reality of first order of the person: ideas change but facts remain. Jay Haley applied ordeals in his intervention method. An ordeal could be defined as a crucial test or a pitiful experience, consisting in giving a harder task compared to the problem to be solved. Haley defines it as a technique that changes the attention area and thus the problem is solved: “It is easy to disaggregate the therapist: it consists on imposing an adequate ordeal to the person’s problem

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to be changed and, at the same time, more severe than the problem itself. As well as a punishment must be given according to the crime, in the same way the main requirement of an ordeal is to provoke a more profound uneasiness than the one of the symptom. If it is not harsh enough to fade the symptom, its magnitude may be increased until it does. On the other hand, it is convenient that the ordeal benefits the person; it is difficult to many to make something that benefits us and it seems to be the problem particularly to those seeking therapy (…) These ordeals may also include some kind of sacrifice for others” (1984, 17).

There is an ordeals menu that the therapist may prescribe: direct tasks, paradoxical, the therapist as an ordeal, and ordeals that involve more than one person. In all cases, the end is to provoke change in the person. The intervention process throughout an ordeal consists in change. Harley affirms that an ordeal is the real cause of change in any therapy. Hence, each therapist prints a personal seal to the intervention process, they share ‘general’ objectives. O’Hanlon summarizes them into four: modifications in the frame and constructs where the problem is placed, modifications in the vicious circularity that creates the problem, modifications of the person and the therapist from the solutions, and modifications of the person and the therapist with the reference system. These objectives are infiltrated by principles that derive from Erickson and that are resumed by most brief therapists: “1. People operate out of their internal maps, and not out to their sensory experience. 2. People make the best selection for them at any given moment. 3. The explanation, theory or metaphor used to relate facts about a person, is not the person.

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4. Respect all messages from clients.  5. Teach choice; never attempt to take choice away.  6. The resources that a client needs are part of their own personal history. 7. Meet the client at their own model of the world. 8. The person with the most flexibility or choice possibilities will be the controlling element in the system. 9. One person can’t not communicate. 10. If it is hard work, reduce it down. 11. Outcomes are determined at a psychological level (Lankton quoted by O’Hanlon, 1995; 27-28) The principle that stands out over the others is therapy centered in the person, considering its territories, maps, ways of communication, flexibility to change, and the path he or she decides to follow to solve the problem. The contributions to the intervention method of brief therapy have not stopped, one of the latest proposals is given by Nardone. This therapist is heir to a paradigm which was began by Erickson and Bateson, founder of the School of Arezzo is centered in developed brief strategic therapy. Part of a premise: intervention should adjust to the problem. It is a qualitative change in intervention as it implies going from the epistemological logic of a problem solution, to an operational cognitive therapeutical logic. Nardone expresses it in the following way: “In logic terms, it is about evolving from problem solving models that build each intervention on the basis of logicalepistemological and cognitive-operational levels towards therapeutical models primarily constructed on the operationalcognitive logical level that after an empiric verification become models of the cognitive-operational type (…) giving attention first to the constitutive-deductive logic, to then move to the hypothetical-deductive logic, so that the intervention is literally adjusted to the problem” (2012, 211)

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Nardone establishes the idea of solution in the popperian epistemology of unforgeable elements, the solution that does not work should be substituted by another one, result of a direct experimental application. He proposes an structure of the method in three phases, considering the experimental part: the first phase is where the problem or a series of problems are studied; second phase, the tried solutions are observed; a third phase, change the solutions that do not provided a result for others that have proven to be functional experimentally. In this process, a change in communication is present according to the person, his or her situation, the context and the relationship between the person and the professional Psychotherapeutical intervention under this method, is performed through a protocol in four phases: the first phase is a moment of observation and of creation of the therapeutical environment, using techniques to recognize suggestibility, tried solutions and persistent pathologies in the vicious circle; a second phase, where there is the constructions of a corrective emotional experience that breaks the person’s vicious circle; a third phase is a time to redefine changes, it represents a very long phase as it includes a hard work of prescriptions and redefining, so that the person can construct a new balance on the basis of his or her own resources; the fourth phase includes redefining the new equilibrium and the incentive to personal autonomy; it is found in the last session and the intervention process is explained in order to show the person his or her progress in the solution of the problem. During this epistemology process, psychological orientation and intervention give meaning to brief therapy. Change means changing the perception of the world constructing another reality. This collaboration can be repeated in different spheres of social reality. From the therapeutical grounds, it can be brought to education, as the school holds evil circles in the teaching and

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learning processes, which can be seen in school failure before the existing violence in interactions. It is necessary to change reality of the people who are part of a classroom in the field of education. The perceptions of the educational world may possibly be based upon the realities of second order that create pathologies. Schools are making students sick, children and teenagers would rather not attend school, and it has become a place that ends their expectations, dreams and wishes.

Brief strategic therapy for change in the pedagogical relationship The idea of change in education is constant before the structural problems and the academic-pedagogical processes pinned in the traditional culture of authoritarianism. Problems are places throughout the educational system, going from the conception of education up to the educational model practice in the classroom, where we can find problems of philosophical, political pedagogical, administrative, cultural and of human relations nature. The formative vision of human conscience based in the modeling of the child soul, cast doubt on the relevance of school built on ground of modernity, the desired means and results do not necessarily represent the dynamics of an active and participative child. Continuously there are reforms under the logical-pragmatic scope for the creation of the “New human being”. This has been happening since the XVIII century with the creation of modern school, when the myth of education as a manufacture started (Meirieu:2003); the temptation of creating and modeling the soul of the student, of producing the perfect human being. As Meirieu points out, this causes uneasiness, we are afraid. Nevertheless, it is made as part of the educational task, the person is shaped with a set of knowledge and wisdom arbitrarily chosen.

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Modern schooling takes shape under the Prussian model of schooling based on rationalist paradigms of perfection that produce homogeneity, fragmentation, discipline and control for the achievement of efficiency and efficacy of the person as a standardized product. This model has been adapted in the last two centuries to the progress of productive rationality. And in the present century, it adapts to the corporate changes on education based on competencies. The current didactic and pedagogical methods are different to those in the past. The teacher is now seen as a mediator or facilitator of the learning, and the student as the constructor of its own learning. Educational practice changes with the “new teacher”, as the formative and performance profile is based in the set of wished competencies which comprehend: conceptual domain (knowledge), procedures (abilities) and attitudes (values). The role of the “new student” changes in the same sense, to acquire portable, transferable and constructible competencies. Didactics and pedagogy are centered in dialogue, collaboration and diversity, the assume collaboration from conductism, cognitivism and constructivism. Educational practice based on competencies has struck in change and in the solution of practical, technical and instrumental problems of teaching and learning. Progress is evident in the cognitive aspect by being able to process a larger quantity of knowledge and information, by manipulating and using different strategies and technical resources, and by adding value to the reach of learning. Every day we can observe higher dynamics in school, teachers are more trained with the new methods and they develop different experiences of teaching. Students are educated and generate their own learning processes, according to their needs and capabilities. Change on the pedagogical and the didactic area are not enough to overcome behavior problems between teacher and

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student. The emphasis has been places in the acquisition of abilities and skills for the construction of knowledge drawn from previous learning. The way of teaching and learning has been changed, and with this it was hoped to see the way interactions in the classroom happen, moving into less tense and conflictive ways of socialization and behavior. Nevertheless, tension remains in the relationship within the classroom, some imposing-dominant behavior characteristics are still there, as well as negative-defying attitudes from the students. To this type of relationship between student and teacher we call it hostile model heritage, characterized by maltreatment, harassment, violence, stigmatization and abuse. Peraza (2011) describes hostility on students as part of the teacher, he points out that students are tired of boring, furious and bitter teachers who make them feel ashamed and ridicules them. Arellano (2011) in one of his research works addresses the topic of asymmetry in communication that generates conflict in the interpersonal relationships between student and teacher. He mentions that the teacher complains of students being apathetic, aggressive, disobedient, and inattentive and with bad behavior. The mutual reproach between student and teacher keeps and maintains vicious circles that impact on behavior, creating an adverse school environment for learning. Resistance is present: the teacher resists teaching “problem” students and the student resists learning from teachers who maltreat them and who do not understand them. Many times, this situation leads teachers to become tyrants and students to behave anti-socially. Interpersonal relationships in the classroom deteriorate before “misunderstandings”. The teacher emphasizes reading the problem of the students in terms of performance logic. If the student is distracted, if he is a rebel, if he does not perform school duties, the diagnosis from the teacher is that the student does not wish to study because he or she is not concentrated on its

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school performance. The solution is to demand and to ask for discipline. Despite the pressure, the student provides no answer to the expectations on his academic performance, which includes his or her “negative” behavior. The vicious circle is represented by asking the student more, where he or she denies doing it; the less the student “understands”, more pressure is set upon. If there is less understanding and more pressure, there is more risk of a conflict deriving into violence and school failure. The rehearsed solutions provide no results: incentives, talks, curricular change, teaching of values, etcetera, are not enough. Vicious circles in interpersonal relationships must be given attention from another perspective of change that completes the pedagogical and didactic efforts. One possibility is to address change from communication, as in the teacher-student interaction some slips of language may be present, and which disrupt sensibility disturbing behavior: emotions and mood are running high. Communication can create pathologies when messages are not clear or are not corresponding to the context of the educational practice of the here and now. Or, it can be a conduit to change in educational practice if there is some selfreflection. Pathologies that “pollute” interactions are present in interactions, the student and the teacher produce and move around message that affect their behavior. Imperative, reiterative and contradictory expressions are common (Arellano: 2011) as well as paradoxical (Nardone: 2004), which bother, hurt and make no contribution to harmony in the classroom. Communication asymmetry in the classroom leads to pathological interactions. Let us consider a few daily situations. The teacher in a very imposing and dominant manner tells the students to immediately obey by using imperative expressions: Don’t make any noise! Sit down! You’re very lazy!;or maybe the teacher constantly expresses the same idea: Why do you come to school of you don’t study? You are lazy and irresponsible! You are only

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wasting your time; or the teacher communicates in a contradictory or paradoxical way his or her messages: Great job, but you could have done it better this way! Or when he or she expresses verbally something and non-verbally the opposite: So now we can see you have studied! And then makes a disapproval grin and ends up with the phrase and you said you would study this time! Before the mentioned expressions, interpersonal relationships in the classroom may be lost as they create thoughts, feelings and actions that lead to weariness, confronting and neglecting of the teaching learning. The pathology in interactions makes the conflict to become violence and other behavior disorders, instead of facing the conflict creatively seeing it as an opportunity for change it becomes a mechanism of power and domain. Evidently, paying attention to all the problems in the classroom is of great relevance before the growing school failure. You could be asking yourselves, why pay attention to change from communication and not from the “academic” only? The answer is that every learning and teaching matter is of communicative nature, and to talk about change is to talk about learning. That is why, change leads us to learning and learning to communication (Bateson: 1998). By solving the learning problems, we are placed before an opportunity to learn to communicate in order to achieve personal change in terms of thinking, feeling and acting. Different approaches explain communication in the classroom. For example, if the emphasis is set upon meanings, the cultural approach is present as it addresses nonverbal, verbal, iconic, proxemic, kinetic communicative practices of the symbolic world of the subjects, which compromise their conceptions of reality in their interactions (Charles: 1988). By studying the cognitive content of messages in the teacher-student communication, the structural approach of communication prevails (Zarate: 2002). The approach of emotional intelligence

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stresses the acquisition of visual, hearing and emotional abilities that facilitate the capturing of the message in the interaction teacher-student (Keidar: 2005). Ethnographic studies where we can see typologies, make detailed registrations on basis of characteristics of the messages in order to identify and classify ways of communication. We can find the work of Cabrera (2003) who identifies in the learning process affective communication, authoritarian communication, conciliatory communication, flexible communication and hierarchical communication. The list of works related to communication in the classroom is extensive; it is a spectrum of theoretical approaches. This reflects the importance of the process of communication for interrelations within the classroom. There is an aspect that draws attention and which has not been given enough attention. That is, change in educational practice from the psycho affective incorporating the cognitive and the affective in the performed communication in the learning process, linked to the academic performance and achievement. It represent a different way of looking at the problem of academic learning, it means addressing it from the strategic development of the person under the therapeutical-pedagogic scope, that the person (docent or student) sees the solution to their problems from its own change, where communication plays an important role for that change. Communication entails a role nodal role for change in the way of expressing, thinking, feeling, and acting of a person. Pascal has a poetic way of revealing this importance: “The spirit and the feeling are made by means of conversations. The spirit and the feeling deteriorate due to conversations” (2001: 72).Communication can make or deteriorate in a circular way oneself or another. Change consists in being able to leave this double circle: on the one side, forming without deteriorating or form what has been deteriorated; on the other side, paying attention to oneself giving attention to another, without forgetting about one or the other.

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At the student-teacher bind, there is a complexity of relationships between conduct and context. This is a position based on the principles of Watzlawick (2008: 23). He points out that the observer of the human behavior broadens the attention scope directing it to the relationships among the parts of a system, to the conduct manifestations through communication. It is a pragmatic position of communication as interest lies in the relationship between transmitter and receiver, in the never ending connections within a system. Teaching-learning17 as a system is made up of communicative articulated relationships, because pedagogical experience creates an exchange process, of movement, of exploration, of feedback. It is of the foremost importance to capture the game of interactions in the educational system that corresponds to the person. There is an exchange of perceptions, feelings, volitions and actions that shape the way of being, thinking and feeling of people who participate in the same system of relationships, as in the classroom. The movement is the constant within the reference system of the person. The exploration is part of the change before the communication flows; and feedback disrupts the system as a whole. By considering as part of a system the learning, the observer of the conduct broadens the vision around the performance and achievement of students and teachers, because it surpasses lineal arguments that pretend to explain educational failure causes on the basis of one or several delimited set of variables. Many times learning problems are exclusively imputable to the cognitive capacity of students, or to their disposition to learn and to conduct disorders (hyperactivity, attention deficit, bullying), From here on, in order to simplify the teaching-learning expression, we will use the term learning system, to emphasise the idea of change as a person from who learns and who teaches: teacher and student are learning actors from the logic presented at personal change, both subject to learning in the way they interrelate.

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the student is regarded as unwavering explained by “x” variable or “y” as a set of variables. Nevertheless, the student is in constant change, movement, exploration and feedback from the setting of his or her relationships, there is a formation and con-formation, he or she is a trainee or trainer in a complex set of rules that guide the process of communication. Students communicate not only by means of their learning, they also express something in that communication to what happens or what is happening on their emotional state, this is valid to the different actors of the learning system. Chapters of human interaction are present in a set of conscious and unconscious actions from the people that may disturb or make learning efficient. Thus, observing conduct relationships within the learning system implies to understand within mood or within emotions the way of communication. For Watzlawick, every conduct is communication evident in many ways making a recurring and multifaceted whole, under complex variations in the order and the disposition of its elements in a verbal, tonal, postural, contextual conduct. Interactions in educational practice maintain this axiom of communication, in the relationship of learning it is impossible not to communicate, the teachers’ and students’ conducts swap from the paradoxical and the consistent, presenting combinations in the interpersonal relationships from the way of communicating. It is common to hear from teachers the attitude when coming into the classroom and in order to have students disciplined, they tend to be silent, sitting, and waiting for them to be quiet and sit by themselves. This represents a way of communication although teachers represent it with silence. Silence communicates different emotions to students who, in the end, give up before the meaning of the teacher’s conduct. Silence builds interaction patterns, changes student’s conduct by influencing them because they have understood

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the message, they imposed a different behavior which leads to a second axiom of communication: communication imposes conducts. Silence as a message has content and a relationship between teacher and student. The teacher requires imposing its authority making students be disciplined in order to begin the class. The message of silence holds two components: data transmission and understanding of communication. On the one side, communicates and on the other met communicates. Met communication deals with relationships, with the communicated context. This point is of importance in the teacher-student communication, as messages are not always clear and met communication is ineffective. For example, when the teacher shouts: Be quiet, don’t shout!”Or: “everyone in here is a bunch of lazy ones! You should follow X example!”. Meta communication leads to another axiom, it gives a guide to communicative sequence because it builds the rating of the sequence of facts. At the teacher-student relationship, conflict generates because each one registers one face of the facts sequence and from there value the relationship. For example: “I simply don’t learn because the teacher tells me off ” and “I tell them off so that they can learn”. This way of rating generates a conflictive type of relationship, ending up in school failure and an authoritarian position of the teacher. One more axiom of human communication present in this relationship teacher-student, is that there are two ways of communicating: analogue and digital. The first one, is nonverbal communication that includes body language, posture, grins, expressions, voice tone, sequence, etc.; the second one in verbal communication. Teacher and students express digitally the content of communication and analogically the meaning of the relationship. For example, the use of strategies throughout the class term are part of analogue communication and the exam is part of the digital one: Do we study to learn or to pass an exam?

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A last axiom brought by Watzlawickis symmetric and complementary interaction. It assumes the idea of cosmogenesis by Bateson, defines it as the differentiation process of relationships based in equality or in difference. A symmetric interaction happens when the participants tend to match their conduct, and a complementary interaction happens when the participants tend to a maximum differentiation in their conduct. In the case of the relationship teacher-student, it represents a complementary interaction as it is founded in differences, the teacher wields authority on the student; the relationship among students represents a symmetric interaction because they are equal. At educational practice, both types of interactions are present from the values, meanings and sense given that may operate on favor or against change from communication. It is a social and individual matter that deals with the historical, context, cultural and society momentum. Carr (2002), defines educational practice from a critical approach that recovers the mentioned aspects: “…the objective of critical approach consists in increasing rational autonomy of the professionals; and it is about making it happen interpreting educational practice not only as a moral practice, also a social one, historically placed, culturally implemented and, thus, vulnerable to ideological deformation (…) it can be considered critically respecting the way they support each other or in the way they stop progress and authentic educational change” (75)

In order to achieve rational autonomy and an authentic change, we also have to consider mental and emotional health, as they are not only presented in ideological deformation. They are present in the deformation of the interaction between student and teachers from the way of communication. In the learning interaction where every action communicates something, imposes conducts, establishes a sequence of facts, uses linguistic

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aspects and nonverbal ones as well, and is symmetric and complementary, we must see the study of it as something serious because depending on the form these set of aspects are presented, change will or won’t take shape in educational practice. Educational practice despite educational reforms keeps its traditional rituals. The forms of behavior are violent and cruel, ruled by complementary power relationships deriving into getting the worst out from students as he has to obey and be submissive; conducts are established without taking into account the mood and personal situation of the students, cancelling the possibility of expressing their feelings and desires, as restraining conducts are predominant whereas consequence we may find discomfort which leads to direct maltreatment through digital communication ( yelling, impositions, coarseness), or “indirectly” with nonverbal communication (hand signs, grins and bad gestures). These leads to pathologies in the learning interaction that can be translated into affective and emotional problems that impact in the conduct for academic performance.

Pathologies in the pedagogical relationship embedded in black pedagogy Everyone knows by own experience or because we have seen the suffering, anguish and resistance provoked when going to school, due to humiliations and maltreatment justified under the wing of knowledge and wisdom. Students defend themselves in order not to attend a space of emotional-pedagogical torture, they invent pretexts or may even hurt their bodies producing psychosomatic illnesses. Everything is futile before the parents-teachers alliance that set the future as a priority in education and quality of the learning. Two discourses hide a pedagogical practice oriented towards dominating students, being their masters, keeping the monopoly of knowledge and of teaching.

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Physical, psychological and emotional punishment suffered by students is not strange for everyone that it is said to be done for their own good in a society ruled and schooled by black pedagogy18 (Miller: 2012). This pedagogy begins at home and continues in school, cruel as characteristic. Miller studied this pedagogy, provides an account of the social meaning and of the harm caused at an early age due to these educational practices. Adult’s mental health should be traced back to their educational history in the family and at school. The child is harassed, chased, submitted to humiliations, beating and maltreatment disguised as good manners and didactic methods. One of Miller’s objectives by explaining black pedagogy is to show that in it we can find the roots to hatred and of will dispossession as the task of educating throughout time has been achieve the total control: “The biggest preoccupation from teachers has always been “obstinacy”, obsession, resistance and intensity of children feelings. Many times it has been said the fact that it will never be too early to begin with educating on obedience …” (p. 24)

Teachers have improved the tools to promote obedience; from physical control such as threatening, beating and pushing, they have gone to the analogical changey-eye, intimidating silence and ignoring the presence. Students suffer being hurt emotionally, which leads to frustration before school failure. At the dispossession of will, obedience and punishment are disguised

Miller retoma de Katharina Rutschky la idea de la pedagogía negra conformada por técnicas de condicionamiento temprano del comportamiento y acción de los infantes; su aporte, es proporcionar una mirada psicoanalítica y poner el acento en la repercusión para los niños y para los adultos.

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as dedication and unselfish commitment from the teacher as an apostle of education who before clumsy, retracted and “stupid” students assume their role in order to achieve their teaching mission come what may. Not long ago, a situation of abuse happened in an elementary school. A teacher following black pedagogy in her educational practice, the living hell of contempt pointed out by Miller (2009), constant humiliation from the teacher to the students because of the results in the Math’s exam: - Teacher: You’re a bunch of stupid students who answered silly things! I’ve put so much effort into teaching and look how you pay me out. Silence from hell, Little eyes lost in emptiness, fear can be felt from the children … - Teacher: I will go to your places one by one to tell you what you deserve. She does it. She goes from one place to another “telling them off” one by one. Each child is silent after being told off: some cry, others reflect anguish and anxiety by scrubbing their small hands or by doodling in their notebooks. - Teacher: Now you’ ll see! Juan, come to the board and solve this division. Juan goes to the board crestfallen, takes the marker, looks at the division, some time goes by and continues in the same position. - Teacher: What’s wrong with you? Do it now, can’t you? See what I tell you? You are good for nothing! We’re not leaving until you solve it. Juanito, continues being in the same position –he is blocked, humiliated-, starts to cry–he is emotionally suffering -. - Teacher: Don’t think that those tears will make me forgive you. The rest of the children are suffering as well due to the tension of waiting. This goes on for an hour and a half, until the bell rings for the end of the day, the end of the class for that day.

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What can we observe from the teaching practice? Expressions that hurt, insults, contempt, fear, fear, anxiety, anguish: a series of revolting feelings and emotions, traces that will stay in the heart and soul of Juanito. For the teacher, students keep on being stubborn and conspiring, and should be submitted to the iron grip for their own good. As Miller (2012) writes, this means humiliation under the teacher’s approval: “The conscious establishment of humiliation that satisfies the needs of the teacher, destroys the child’s selfconscience, becoming insecure and shy. Nevertheless, it is seen as a beneficial act” (p. 34)

The mood that the teacher produces in children is not important; what is important is the duty of demonstrating knowledge. Dispossession of self-consciousness of the children is a general rule of disobedience to accomplish educational standards- Children are defenseless as they have to obey and respect obedience rules established by the school, the teacher should be worshiped and granted with the sacred aura of respect. The principles of black pedagogy described by Miller respecting the way parents educate their children, is expanded to school. The experience described before is a sample of black pedagogy that rules in educational practice. There is a similitude between both ways of educating children at home and at school: abuse, humiliation, imposition, and control of emotions are present. Miller points out the content of black pedagogy promoted by parents: “a) That adults are owners (and not servants!) of the dependent child; b) That, as Gods, the say what is fair and what isn’t;

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c) d) e) f)

That their rage comes from the own conflicts; That the child is responsible of it; That parents have to be protected; That the living feelings of the child implies danger for the dominant adult; g) That the child must be “withdrawn from his will” as soon as possible; h) That everything should be done at an early age so that the child “won’t notice a thing” and cannot betray an adult” (Ibid. p. 66) The child at school changes from a dominating adult to another and the content of black pedagogy is the same: a) Teachers are masters of the obeying student; b) Teachers decide between right and wrong in the student’s learning process; c) Students don’t understand that their stubbornness provokes the teacher’s anger; d) Students don’t reward he noble and uninterested labor from teachers; e) Teachers should be respected despite the fact of being abusers; f) The questioning student represents a danger in the emotional stability of the teachers; g) Teachers have the authority to impose labels on students who are not easy to guide; h) That discipline is necessary for the sake of learning for the students, it is a clear lesson that should not be forgotten in order to avoid having some kind of problem; The method of black pedagogy is the method of repression and submission. Miller defines it as follows:

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“Methods to suppress vital spontaneity are: tricks, lying, cunning forms, dissimulate, manipulate, intimidate, take affection away, isolate, mistrust, humiliate, disregard, mockery, make someone feel ashamed and applying violence until the end” (Idem)

With the development of medicine provided by psychiatry, the list should be updated with the new control tools for children; diagnose psychological disorders, pointing out, stigmatizing, and drugs, applying violence until he or she goes crazy. Black pedagogy holds an ideology that promotes rules for behavior which should be appreciated as values and ethical content. Miller summarizes the characteristics of this ideology: “a) That the feeling of duty generates love; b) That prohibitions can finish with hatred; c) That parents deserve respect a priori, just for being parents; d) That children, a priori, deserve no respect at all; e) That obedience strengthens; f) That a high level of self-esteem is prejudicial; g) That a low self-esteem leads to altruism; h) That tenderness is prejudicial (blind love); i) That paying attention to children’s need is wrong; j) That severity and coldness constitute a good preparation to life; k) That fake gratitude is better than honest ingratitude; l) That the way of being is more important than being; m) That neither parents nor God would survive an insult; n) That the body is something dirty and repulsive; ñ) That the intensity of feelings is prejudicial; o) That parents are innocent beings and free of instincts; p) That parents are always right” (Idem, p. 67)

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The ideology of black pedagogy in school is similar to the one described by Miller: that to spare the rod is to spoil the child; a) Clear limits should be set to students; b) The student is not important, the result is; c) A firm hand is necessary for a student to understand; d) Power and control should always be in the hands of the teacher; e) To never show weakness before the student; f) To never show lack of knowledge or ignorance before the student; g) Competitions make a student be disciplined; h) To lead by the example ; i) Repression and authoritarianism from the teacher are for the good of the student; j) Educating through competitiveness makes responsible students; k) Cognitive performance is more important than feelings and emotions from the student; l) Low performance students assume own limitations, he cannot give any more; m) Loyalty to the teacher even though he is wrong, is to act ethically; n) Imposing silence in the students makes him learn; o) Taking a student out of the class is an example of control to keep discipline. The ideology of black pedagogy expands to all kinds of schools and of level of education. The way changes, the content is still the same. It is a dynamics to become familiarized throughout school years, going from basic education up to higher education. Abuse becomes a school tradition along with other methods of punishment and humiliation, children and teenagers carry with that all through their lives, they suffer blocking and sometimes

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lead to school dropout. What students feel by being abused is not a matter of interest to teachers, as their job is the cognitive learning neglecting an essential aspect for school training: mental and physical health of students. Teachers get children ill with abuse, they produce physical illnesses such as headaches, stomachaches, diarrheas, vomit, and colitis. They create disorders in mental health that may be seen in lack of sleep, food disorders, anxiety , and depression. Abuse leaves a mark throughout life. Abuse is replicated from generation to generation, our society is violent because it fosters black pedagogy under the idea of duty and obedience. Children today will be the teachers of the future, and by being trained under humiliation techniques, it is mostly sure that he will replicate the same methods. The circle of black pedagogy is making legions of abusers starting at home, in society and in school. This explains why structural violence exists from the paradoxical relationship of abuser and abused. Knowing the implications of black pedagogy in the soul of students has not been easy to be eradicated. This pedagogy survives to reforms on didactic methods, changes the way of achieving learning making emphasis sometimes on students, and others in teachers. During the last fifty years, we have been able to find it along with conductism, cognoscitivism, and competences. No matter how many reforms in the educational practice are made, educational objectives cannot be obtained if there are still teachers who promote violence and abuse. The roots to hatred are still vivid.

CHAPTER II Emotional change from the teacher How to change the pedagogical relationship of the teacher on abuse and humiliation? Teachers who replicate the ideology and methods of black pedagogy many times do it without noticing it. Their interest is focused in school learning, neglecting the psychological and emotional area of the same and of its students. The classroom becomes a space of non-healthy relationships. Mental health is at stake provoking disorders in conduct, contradictory thoughts and revolting feelings. It is crucial that teachers reflect on their own educational practice in order to notice black pedagogy within their practice. The first step would be self-observation which contributes to teacher change by recognizing their problems and by deciding how to solve them from intervention. The hypothesis that arises from the previous is that problems derived from black pedagogy must be considered in the context in which they happen, because the interactions between teacher and student express a logic that should be learnt for the meaning change of educational practice. 43

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Teacher change is dynamic under the perspective of the intervention method as the performed action has a double purpose: to know and transform. The teacher to know himself and to transform himself as a person. This requires a systematic work of research and action, finding out by means of observation records and recording the action in order to improve the teaching performance, because in the classroom interactions we can find psycho-emotional problems that restrict the learning development. In order to achieve the teaching change, there are several alternatives deriving from pedagogy and psychology. For the purposes of this work, we assume the brief approach19 because change in a person is understood as the change of the model of interaction between the “carrier” of the problem and his social context from the psycho affective aspect. A system of interactions is built, which moves in a circular way by existing a reciprocal influence from the communication among them. Communication generated relationships and is an essential conduit to change, as through it communication constructs society, and statement given by Watzlawick and Bateson, and later examined closely by Nardone (2004): “Here we lay in the dawn of the studies of communication as a conduit of change and obviously in the construction of models that are not rooted in a clinical tradition but in a psychosocial and anthropological tradition from which the fundamental conduit of change is communication: specially those models and techniques of communication or action capable of making the carrier of the problem change, and the people around in the particular type of construction of “reality” that supports the problem” (p. 21)

Particularly the contribuitons by Robert Fisch and Paul Watzlawick developed in the Brief Therapy Center of the MRI at Palo Alto.

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This conception meant that a change of epistemological paradigm in the study of interactions went from a lineal causality model to a circular causality model. The first one, on the grounds of the first law of thermodynamics which says that the idea of cause-effect in an unidirectional sense, in psychotherapy and in psych pedagogy meant that the symptoms are an effect to a cause that should be looked at in the story of the subject. The second one, according to the second law of thermodynamics which underpins the principle of circularity meaning that the effect has an effect on the cause (Ceberio: 2003), implies the feedback in the process of interaction within the system. This is what pragmatics in communication sustains, different to the lineal paradigm as there in no beginning and no end, there is a reciprocal influence among variables expressed from their relationship, as every relationship implies a communication, the study of interactions should start from this hypothesis of the idea of the double bind. Double bind is defined as a contradiction in communication. The person receives contradictory messages that block him before the disjunction that two opposite messages cannot be assumed and we cannot ignore them at the same time; or that if we assume one we deny the possibility of achieving the other. The person is submitted to contradictory orders in one single message. If the person is bind to the paradoxical message, the outcome is a pathological behavior derived from the pathological communication. Bateson (1998) describes the necessary ingredients to present a relationship of double bind: • Two or more persons. Of these, we designate one, for purposes of our definition, as the “victim.” The double bind can be produced from one person or from the combination of many;

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• Repeated experience of the double bind, it comes to habitual expectation. • A primary negative injunction that may happen under the following structure: “Do not do so, or I will punish you”, or “If you do not do so and so, I will punish you”. Here we select a context of learning based on avoidance of punishment rather than context of reward seeking. • A secondary injunction conflicting with the first at a more abstract level, and like the first enforced by punishments or signals which threaten survival. The notoriety of this situation is that the double bind is given by two individuals; one can deny what he paradoxically communicates to the other. Analogical and digital communication are present and expresses messages of the following type: “Do not submit yourself to prohibitions”, or “Do not think of what you must not do”. • A tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victim from escaping from the field, especially when the double bind has been imposed in childhood. • The victim learnt to “live” under double bind patterns, taken over by hallucinatory voices. The victim and those who generate the double bind act significantly in a context. The disorders derived from pathological communication are not real entities, they are a combination of exchanged messages produced in the context by which their meaning makes sense. As Bateson expresses: “The weaving of contexts and messages that propose contexts, but that just like all the messages have “meaning” only because of context, constitute the content of the so called theory of double bind” (Ibidem, p. 305)

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Double bind leads to sustain the idea that a relationship is always a process of double description, which implies that the learning if the weaving of contexts and messages should be understood as the external relationship of two beings. Black pedagogy at school is produced because of a double bind relationship, its content is not abstract entities but relationships: abuse, humiliation, aggression, violence, which are created in the context of a relationship with meanings. The methods and ideology of black pedagogy among people, is not something “natural”, or which lies in the person instinctively. The answer from students before abuse with black pedagogy, is a relationship defined from the exchange regulations of double communication. The lineal model still existing at school, despite educational reforms, where the teacher teaches and the student learns is limited to express complex problems by being aside from feedback. Considering the double bind theory, the relationship teacher-student is circular and offers, as Bateson establishes, a new type of learning: deuteron-learning. The teacher has an effect in the student who learns, and the learner has an effect on who teaches: “The issue results a bit difficult to understand as we have been taught to thing in learning as a matter between two units: the teacher “teaches” and the student (or experimental animal) “learns”. But this progressive lineal model became obsolete when we were aware of the cybernetic circuits of interaction. The minimal unit of interaction holds three components (…). We shall call these three components “stimulus”, “response” and “effort”. From them, the second is a reinforcement of the first and the third of the second. The response of the learner reinforces the stimulus of the teacher, etc.” (Bateson; 2006a, 148)

The feedback mechanism is the basic unit that provides the cybernetics for the knowledge of the circularity in interactions,

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the feedback (as pointed out by Ceberio), is the central axis of communication sciences as it is essential in interaction and double bind. Cybernetics of the second order gives way to the idea of self-reference, which means that the communication subject is entailed in the interaction system. One cannot be only an observer, as the lineal paradigm stated. The sole fact of being part of a system is guided by meaningful communication within the own system of relationships . With the second order cybernetics, as pointed out by Forester, the way of making science and of conceiving everyday relationships was transformed by including the observer in the system. The relationship teacher-student acquires a different scope with cybernetics of the second order, as the teacher takes part of the recursive system of teaching-learning is not immune to classroom interactions. At the pedagogical relationship the teacher is a self-referential of his observation field, which places the perspective in interaction. As expressed by Ceberio (2006)for the therapeutical scope: “Observation of a human being from a circular epistemology blocks individual vision of an isolated or noncontextual subject. The vision is directed towards an entity that interacts and generates a weaving of relationships, characterized by a context that grants meaning, full of information exchange that guides conducts of response/ emission in a permanent way. The inner question of the systemic therapist would be: who does what, to whom, when, since when, where, how, how frequently, with whom” (p. 54)

The teacher, as well as the therapist, move in a context of meanings in the pedagogical relationship; there is a difference in the nature of their duty, as for the teacher is to teach and for the therapist to contribute to the stabilization of the system, which changes the direction of the inner question of the systemic

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teacher: what am I doing, why am I not receiving an adequate answer, how am I performing, which are the constraints of my educational practice, how frequently do I “ fail” to communicate, what feelings do I provoke in my students, who am I as a teacher, how do I communicate in the pedagogical relationship, what do students provoke into me. At the classroom system, actions, thoughts and feelings of each member guide the sense of the interaction between them and in each one of them. In order to get to know oneself, the teacher must recognize himself in his context of classroom interactions, thus overcoming the lineal vision where he is placed as a victim of the students who miss to understand that whatever he does is for their own good; or maybe, that students are victims of an abusive teacher who generates pathological communication. At the double bind theory from the second order cybernetic paradigm, victim and abuser are “diluted”; teacher and student at black pedagogy are victims of a systemic game of interactions that they create and creates them as well. Action, thought and feeling of one of the members of the classroom system guides the response from the other and vice versa. Circularity is present along with feedback and vicious circles in the history of life of the people. In this sense, circularity for Ceberio is possible to understand from three reflective scopes: • “From the operational synchronicity of present interactions; that is, developed recursion in the here and now. • From the isomorphism of situations repeatedly produced throughout time. • Exchanging both positions: the interaction of the present process, which can be repetitive of relationship situations, lived in another momentum of the person’s history” (Idem. p. 60)

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Within the classroom, these three scopes are present: the synchronicity of the here and now along with the pathology in communication that produces a specific psycho affective state of the teacher and of the students, which affections learning; participants in the classroom system are “replicates” of vicious circles in their behavior, and tend to repeat similar or alike situations. Under the previously stated, we can establish the following hypothesis: black pedagogy at educational practice of the teacher is not an abstract entity; it is the result of the pathological pedagogical interactions among the members of a classroom as a system, building a recursive, synchronic and repetitive circularity that impacts psycho affectivity. That is, the pedagogical relationship between teacher and student generates feedback, vicious circles and “painful” personal histories tend to repeat. Black pedagogy is built in the pedagogical interaction between teacher and student in the classroom as a system, which leads to understand reality not as something given and definite, but as something built. Second order cybernetics holds a principle on its inceptions, from the circularity logic and where the observer “modifies” the observation that he performs on himself and of things. Constructivism has a long history in the field of epistemology, which dates back to pre-Socratic thought, and acquires a particular dimension with the development of second order cybernetics. At the contributions of quantum physics with Heisenberg–who is in the same line of thought as Kant- reality is not something a priori, it represents a reality built by oneself in the interactions with others, the “objective” reality as thought to exist at the same moment of knowing it, is changed under the eye of the observer. The reality is a belief that assumes the existence of an outside reality from thought, at constructivism reality

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is a creation of thought, of how we interpret and act implicit intentions within relationships. Heisenberg(1958) defines this: “The reality we can talk about is never an a priori reality; it represents a set known reality by us. If we object to this last formulation stating that indeed there is an objective world, independent to us and to our thoughts, that works or may function independently from us and from our thought, that functions or may function without our actions, and that it is what we really refer to when we make research, then this so convincing objection at first sight must be rejected pointing out that the expression “there is” comes from human language and, thus, cannot mean something that is not related to our way of understanding. To us “there is” only a world in which the expression “there is” makes sense (p.236)

There is a construction of pedagogical realities in the interactions registered by the observer that interfere in the description of his reality. The teacher constructs the concept that he has of each student that he transforms into a pedagogical reality, the construction is made upon a fashionable pedagogical theory. Schools create realities of good and bad; competent and non-competent; high performance or low performance; pass or fail. The building mechanism us learning. Learning is something built that constructs accepted or excluded subjects from the established standard on its theoretical frame. At the teacher-student relationship different realities which build the educational process come together. It is now common, from the educational model based in competencies, to outline the learning results on the basis of established criteria in rubrics, checklists, etc. These guides the achievement or not of competencies of a student. The defined criteria within the evaluation tools are established by themselves by a teacher or the faculty. In both cases, they represent pedagogical

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conventionalisms that build learning. The teacher constructs behavior of his students from the opinions he as about them based on the pedagogical reality that he aims on his educational practice. Something similar to the previously stated happens in the student by constructing his opinion around the teacher. Black pedagogy is the result of a construction that takes shape with ideology and the created methods; it is justified by teachers under the argument of an unselfish intention of doing well to the student. Nevertheless, the effects are devastating for the student, who has to submit to the ranting of the teacher’s opinion who wants to educate normal students. Under this situation, there are two present realities: the image built of the pedagogical ideal and the built meaning of the ideal. The first one, is a reality of first order as both, teacher and student are placed in a pedagogical ideal; the second is a reality of second order as each one gives meaning to the pedagogical ideal. The school world falls apart when the construction of the pedagogical ideal goes without saying, then we discover with horror that the pedagogical reality is not the fairy tale that we believed it was. Given meanings to black pedagogy are exposed due to humiliations, violence and failure, first order reality loses sense and a reconstruction of second order reality begins. Other meanings begin to be built from feedback in the pedagogical interaction. The idea of changing psycho affectively makes sense at educational practice of the teacher because his work becomes the art of knowing, signifying and resignifying 20 his practice; the teacher is the architect of the construction of pedagogical realities, because it participates in maintaining or substituting pedagogical constructions. 20

The first thing is to know what is done through observation, to then unravel the meanings that provide sense and values to the humiliating and abusive pedagogical relationship; last, change by cntructing new meanings of the pedagogical relationship.

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The resignification of the teacher is understood as the possibility of reframing its implicit meanings in the intentionality of the teaching action. The teacher is seen just as artificially differently as to the one he substitutes. Despite this, it has a different sense and allows him to develop an educational practice tending to overcome black pedagogy because the teacher is emotionally and cognitively reframed. That is, psycho affectively. With the reframe technique, the teacher interfering as a second order observer of his educational practice, compromises a restructuration of himself from the living context of a given situation, as expressed by Watzalawick (2008): “… restructuration means to change the own conceptual or emotional frame in which a situation is experimented, and place it within another structure that addresses “facts” corresponding to the same specific situation equally well or even better, completely changing the sense of them. The implied mechanism is not evident at first sight, especially if the situation itself remains unmodified or even non modifiable. What changes by means of the restructuration is the sense allocated to the situation, and not specific facts corresponding to this” (p. 123)

The idea of change and change itself is a construction from the recoding in a specific context. When we talk about change in psycho affectivity on educational practice of the teacher, it is according to the sense of change in the context where the new meanings, it is different to the general idea that when the teacher changes, the world changes; context changes and meanings change, thus leading to reframing. Change happens from the moment of observation which is the basis for intervention. There is a game of descriptions from the eye of the observer. Observations are made from built perception in meaningful contexts, they lack of scientific logic

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and we categorize the interactions on their context. We have the readings from reality with the possibility of the gathering of diverse meanings. First order reality that corresponds to the observed and second order reality corresponding to the way we categorize, qualify, report, describe or ask, converge in here. Change is sometimes seen as something hard to achieve, because we forget that we are the constructors of realities. A reality that becomes a qualifier in the construction system itself within the same process of construction, and which may hurt us. By trying to change this situation we provide the new construction with personal capabilities that surpasses us, sinking into fatality or granting it ghostly properties; we sink into the tramp of objectified realities. At the pedagogical relationship (as in any other interaction), it is common to walk over objectified realities as independent things at our reach. It is common to bump into expressions of fatalist teachers who forget that they are constructors of their own interactions: what can we do if this is what we have to perform; changes cannot be made, students nowadays are like this, they don’t obey because they are overprotected; I have to do things now like this, because I was asked to do so; the students are guilty of everything because they don’t commit to learning. They experiment an independent reality, constructing fetishism from their own construction, just as Marx wrote in the case of goods. Change represents a turning point in the stiffness of the contemplative observer of objectified realities, which implies interfering in change in a self-referential way, placing us as second degree observers, categorizing and qualifying a reality that is no longer satisfactory to us. This leads to the restructuration of meaning frameworks. To the teacher this represents a moment to be horrified before the objectified horror on its development as a reproductive system of black pedagogy. By looking at himself into the mirror, the teacher should observe how a meta reality works

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in the objectified reality, which allows reclassifying, recathegorise, and requalifying its status as teacher. In one word, it is possible to reinvent one self. By being in touch with feedback from meta reality builds his reinvention. By possessing new information feedback performs cybernetically and frees him from objectivist blocking. He builds a game of rules modifying the framework where intentions are printed. The teacher who complains from his students of being ungrateful and lazy, by observing meta reality of this objectified reality acquire new information that will facilitate meaning change to execute a different construction to solve that problem. This generates a new game of interactions and meanings. Change assumes intentionality of modifying the construction of the teacherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reality.

The importance of emotions for the teaching change It is an urgent need to pay attention to the affective aspect of the teacher in order to avoid the production of pedagogy that abuses and humiliates. Much has been written from different psychological and pedagogical approaches on emotional education of the child and of teenagers. Regarding teachers, emotional education has not been paid enough attention in books; the impact has been scarce. It is time to delve into this task. Throughout history we can register a number of pedagogical models that have put emphasis in children and teenagers formation. It is not a novelty to consider the emotional par in learning. Knaus (2003)makes a review of the heritage from pedagogues such as Rousseau, Locke, Peztalozzi, Hebert, James, Dewey. He then arrives to the conclusion that there are four axes in which the emotional education of children and teenagers is based on in the XX century: the right to develop their capabilities prepares them to the process of change, to have an active

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participation in the solutions and in the development of feelings and emotions. Emotional education “emerging” from the XX century, has received attention in the XXI century. Different experiences are retaking emotional learning. For example, Noemi Paymal in her book Pedagogy3000refers to different experiences such as the ASIRI method, the Kilpatrick method, the Shichida method among others. Paymal expresses that this set of experiences creates pedagogical synergy that promotes the integral-affective harmonious wellbeing of everyone. At the theoretical field of emotional education, there are several contributions: Gardner (1983 with multiple intelligences; Reuven Bar-On (1988)with the IQ; Peter Salovey and John Mayer (1993) with emotional intelligence; Goleman (1996) with the spreading of emotional intelligence; Steiner and Perry (1997) with emotional alphabetization; Bisquerra (2001) with emotional education for the wellbeing. Contemporary social situation lived through conflict, abuse and violence explains in a way, the boom of studies around emotional intelligence. As Goleman expresses, there is the deterioration of citizenship and emotional clumsiness of the contemporary world. There is an urgent need of education that gives trust and hope back to the world, where acts are based on the affective and emotional part. That is why Goleman proposes to provide intelligence to emotion, granting it an essential role to excitement for life. Emotions are present in actions and reactions; a wrong handling of the same, leads to abuse and self-abuse problems. This is the reason why it should be handled out cleverly in order to harmonize emotion and reason. There is a great number of works that address the role of the teacher in emotional education. For example, the teacher is seen as an enhancer of human development as he possesses emotional abilities that allow him to “mold” the socio-affective profile of

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students. Hue (2012),points out the abilities that the teacher must posses as emotional trainer: self-knowledge, self-esteem, emotional control, motivation, knowledge of others, giving some value to the other, leadership. Together they make emotional thought in order to achieve teacher wellbeing in the classroom. Thus, the teacher promotes on his students the knowledge and self-valuation in the assertive handling of emotions, recognizing other’s feelings in order to create a pedagogical relationship based upon affect. For Esteve (2006), the teacher is the constructor of the emotional climate in the classroom; he is the one who promotes essential channels of empathy in classes. The teacher constructs the climate considering two elements: identity regarding the way he sees himself inside the pedagogical relationship and the abilities for interaction and communication he has. At teaching practice, he can generate empathy or conflict: in the first case, assertive communication and a pedagogical one based on abuse and humiliation. A circle between action and virtuous reaction if empathy rules, or vicious if apathy does. Similarly to the previous, Bernal (200) points out that in communicative interaction the teacher influences in identity and motivation of the students. It means that the teacher leaves an emotional mark in students, that he impacts “emotional treatment” of the teacher in the subsequent development of the student. There is an emotional connection between student and teacher that lasts. Bernal quotes expressions from students remembering the connection with a teacher: The first year he made an impression on me, I didn’t like him at all, he was too serious, grumpy and I knew nothing of his classes. After that I go to know him and my way of thinking changed and matured, I didn’t see the teacher as someone odd”. “Knuckles would turn black due to nervousness when I saw him approaching…, being at the board made me sweat, come on! That teacher… oh god!”. “When he had

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to act like a sergeant, he really became one. He was very calm, very peaceful; he wouldn’t seem to be disturbed”(214-215) The teacher trains emotionally from his affective and emotional structure present in the educational practice. He is a promoter of emotional stability or instability which influences in the progress of learning of the student. That is why it is important to know who the teacher is affectively, how he handles his emotions, how he interacts with his students, if there is emotional wellbeing in him Emotional wellbeing from the teacher has been brought up by Bisquerra along with Hue (2009), where they express that within teaching practice there are recurring vicious circles before persisting dissatisfaction from teachers who house negative feeling, stress, family problems, lack of identity, weakness before social acknowledgment, students’ behavior, pressure from educational institutions, and competitiveness for stimuli. The proposed solution to this problem is to create virtuous circles of teaching wellbeing, changing conduct, feelings and knowledge of the teacher from self-esteem work and teaching empathy. A teacher with positive self-esteem and empathy on his pedagogical relationships is a teacher who keeps positive thoughts and feelings translated in a better relationship with students, tension reduction and pressure management in the classroom In order to achieve a teaching practice based on emotional education, it is necessary that the teacher holds affective qualities that may impact performance, creating virtuous circles of emotional wellbeing. Garcia (2009), quoting Rompelman, indicates that the teacher should pay attention to affective components in teaching, which are linked to the learning development. This implies reflection upon affective relationships because, as we have said before, affective climate fosters teaching development. We propose to pay special attention to teaching affectivity dimension placed in contact, feedback and

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understanding that comprehend humanitarian treatment and mental health between teacher and student. Emotional education demands from the teacher to change as a person, as he is the pivoting area in human development. The student is to be trained cognitive and affectively as an integral human being with a life projection. Bisquerra (2005) proposes a set of objectives of emotional education to optimize human development that integrates self knowledge and of others: “The general objectives of emotional education can be summarized under the following terms: to acquire a better knowledge of the own emotions; identify emotions from others; develop the ability to regulate our own emotions; prevent harmful effects of negative emotions; develop the ability to generate positive emotions; develop the ability to self-motivate; embrace a positive attitude before life; to live in order to flow, etc.” (97)

Undoubtedly, it is a challenge for the teacher to achieve these objectives as it means to “break” with the paradigm of black pedagogy and move into emotional pedagogy, to stop abuse and ruling under evil emotions that have created dissatisfaction and violence in students. The teacher should learn to flow within a positive psychology for the identification, development and handling of emotions: he must know himself, value and motivate himself as a person and as teacher. A teacher with a healthy self-esteem and identity is a teacher prepared for the cognitive and affective interaction, able to motivate his students in order to achieve an expression of feelings and affections the teacher continues with the task that begins in families regarding emotional expression. The teacher must pay attention to a set of needs to achieve effective emotional education. Cespedes (2013) indicates the requirements that an effective emotional teacher must have:

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• “Intuitive knowledge or be informed about children and teenagers, especially on the issue of their psychological characteristics and of their accomplishment tasks. • Know the importance of emotionally secure environments in the development of child affectivity. • Possess reasonable equilibrium of coping with conflict. • Use effective styles of authority management and of power. • Affective and effective communication. • A true call for teaching. • Permanent and sincere self-knowledge work. • Constant reflection of the system of beliefs and of his mission as a teacher.”(140) The effective emotional teacher is an informed teacher, an expert, balanced, with a call and self-analysis and self-critical capacity about human development of his students. He has to know who his students are, how they feel, the situations they live, what they are facing, their dreams and expectations, what they expect from him as a teacher, the mark he leaves on them. In one words, to know them in order to achieve their mission as educators. Hargreaves defines teaching as an emotional and moral profession. Regarding the emotional, he makes a paradox because emotions are the least monitored, and the ones that should be paid the most attention before change. In every teaching practice, emotion is present; it is impossible to perform teaching action without emotion: by expressing an idea, commenting on content, leaving homework, performing an evaluation, etc. Emotions are always communicated. Emotions are part of teaching practice along with cognition and conduct. By presenting through a conduct an action, this presents the emotion; by constructing rational and irrational thoughts, emotion is present. We share Hargreaves position when

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he expresses that emotions are in the heart of teaching. Teaching practice integrates interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships based on emotional and sentimental experiences. The teacher as well as his peers and students, expresses sadness, anger, happiness, etc., resulting from the relationships of learning and teaching. Bisquerra (2011) mentions the positive effect that emotions have, a smile or a comforting word, an affectionate grin, they all contribute to establish harmonious pedagogical relationships. Positive emotions impact in several aspects: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

“They broaden the visual field and attention focus. Generate a more flexible and creative thought. Favor the search for information. Generate more conduct repertoire. Allow constructive change, not defensive. Reduce doubt. A more indulgent judgmental opinion to others and to one self. Favor more satisfactory interpersonal and intimate relationships. Altruist conducts are generated. Favor resistance before adversities. Favor repair or counteract negative mood. Permit tolerance to physical pain. Improve the functioning of the immune system. Improve longevity. Allow to perceive better small daily rewards. Favor attraction, sympathy and attachment to others. Associated to a better cardiovascular health(less muscular tension, less ambulatory cardiac rate, etc.)” (Bisquerra, 2009; 58-59)

Positive emotions create a better emotional and physical state. On the contrary, negative emotions block communication,

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emotional and physical stated. Change from the teacher represents the opportunity of handling emotions to avoid creating a climate of black pedagogy, of tension, of emotional blocking and of resistance to learning that leads to school failure. Without exaggeration, the teacher is the emotional change factor. Unlike the studies that we have mentioned, and which provide relevant elements for the design of emotional abilities, or that introduce didactics for emotional work, we consider that emotional change from the teacher must build from himself. The intention is not to lead the teacher to an artificial didactic construction of heavy structure and microscopical crumbling, as it usually happens with educational planners based on competencies. Neither is it to measure or evaluate with milimetrical indicators subjectivity or inter subjectivity of the teacher. It is an impossible task in a quantitative society. We do not regard teaching change as part of the curricular change, as the curriculum is a straitjacket. Why this set of misgivings? The answer is simple. Because historical experience has shown that pedagogical and didactic models, curriculum structures may change, but black pedagogy persists. The importance is not whether it is pedagogy based in objectives or in competencies, or if it is a model based in Montessori, Piaget, or Summerhill. All in all, abuses, violence from the teacher are present. Black pedagogy is “poison ivy”; even if we try not to cultivate it, it appears again. . We will express and idea that may seem contradictory. Teaching change is not about changing the techniques or procedures a teacher does on his pedagogical interactions. Change represents the opportunity to self-acknowledgement and self-assurance as a person. The aphorism that remains in the inscription of the Oracle of Delphi: Know yourself, used by Socrates with his students; makes reference to the search of wisdom before deceit and self-delusion. Presupposes self-reflection from the person to “self-discovering”, recognizing oneself; as

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for the teacher, before so many “tendencies” that place him as mediator, facilitator, partner, tutor, his identity is lost in a cobweb of technicalities where the essence as a person is forgotten, the fact that he thinks, feels and acts according to what experience provides him with. Campoamor expresses this aphorism in the following way which according to us, is revealing: Improve yourself by learning about yourself. This is what we establish about the teacher, the teacher’s perfection as a person in a permanent process of self-learning, ok knowing oneself, of overcoming deceit and self-delusion which limit him to live wholeheartedly his teaching duty. It is a point of view which comes from philosophy on terms of virtue, and from psychology in terms of cognition. We will focus on the second as we are interested about change by itself from the mental health of the teacher, which deals with handling cognition, emotions and actions. Satir mentioned that every change represents learning. We share this idea and add that it is a relearning in order to live healthy, achieving an intimate contact. Motivated by Satir (2010) words, we would like to dedicate the following lines to the teacher and to the student, in order to achieve change in education: MY TEACHING21 I want to teach you without underestimating you Motivate you without hurting Appreciate you without envy Learn from you without appropriating Commit without blackmailing Dedicating myself without expecting something in return Accepting you by accepting myself If I can learn from you by teaching you, and if you achieve the same, we will have built education on our own intimate

This is, to an extent, a paraphrisis of Satir’s My Goals.

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contact, mutually surpass each other on our limitations; and I will have achieved my purpose of being a teacher in harmony.

The purpose is to achieve an affective and emotionally healthy human relationship. To this, change in education means being conscious of oneself through permanent learning. We resume humanist and phenomenological vision of education deriving from psychology, as it emphasizes personal growth and human development. Besides Satir, Rogers also considers humanism in education. Casanova, synthesizes Rogers’s contribution Rogers to education from the importance of learning: “He considers that the most important objective of learning consists in reaching personal growth, which is achieved by means of a conception of life based in freedom. All of this implies that the human being learns to use his feelings and attitudes to discover and guarantee a process of permanent self-learning” (1989; 599).

Being conscious of oneself is a continuous self-learning for the teacher, appealing to himself as the most important resource he has, opening the feelings and attitudes Pandora box. There is a connection between what has been summarized by Casanova about Rogers, and what Satir writes when talking about freedom, daring to change is to free to make things in a different way, in a better way to achieve personal growth The teacher is afraid of change, he feels secure by doing the same thing: he learnt it that way and he keeps on repeating it. Many times he ignores why he teaches in the way he teaches, simply because of the power of habit. That is why, reforms come and go and there is no impact in personal growth of the teacher, he is still the same and doing the same things. He is involved in

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the course of cognitive demands, in academic accomplishment, in fulfilling the program, in accomplishing the institution’s purposes, in complying with the aims of society. Accomplishing is a constraining issue to the teacher, it paralyses and limits him in the exercise of his freedom; maybe that is the reason why he cannot change, and he is blocked due to demands. The more the teacher tries to accomplish those demands, the more he gets away from his own freedom to decide to change and from his autonomy of making things in a different way. Teacher’s freedom in order to change depends on himself; it is a personal decision, which is why the teacher is responsible of his change and of his decision to not change. It is all about trying to be a better person, regardless of the imposed or consensual educational models. Nothing justifies abuse and humiliation; one must change by exercising freedom of personal growth. Satir (2010) identifies five types of freedom that lead to personal change: “The freedom to see and hear what is here instead of what should be, was, or will be. The freedom to say what one feels and thinks, instead of what one should. The freedom to feel what one feels, instead of what one ought. The freedom to ask for what one wants, instead of always waiting for permission. The freedom to take risks on one’s own behalf, instead of choosing to be only “secure” and not rocking the boat.” (25)

Rocking the boat means to change by exercising freedom of speech, of thought, of feeling, of asking, of having and of risking one self. Being honest and consistent with oneself is an ethic imperative form to the teacher. Psychologically changing the teacher on the basis of the five freedoms represents a personal

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empowerment. That is why, change is experiential, and not something we learn with emotional intelligence scaffolding. It is now time to establish our own concept of teaching change on the grounds of what we have said so far. Teaching change is a meaningful emotional experience because it deals with feelings, affections and emotions encapsulated in the cognitive area trying to mold thought forms, and automatically intends to scale ways of being and of feeling. In the following topic we will try to be more specific on this idea. We will close this issue with the proposition that by knowing one self, the teacher establishes an authentic relationship with his emotions present at all moments in his educational practice.

Teaching change as a meaningful life experience Teaching change is something that has been asked for and being made from the “tough” part, from performances by demanding efficiency in teaching as a process for the achievement of learning as a product. The old manufacturing system was brought again to life in education. The educational system moves around numbers: the bigger the number of graduates, the greater the misbelieve of being in the right path; or, the closer to the “first place”, the bigger the mistake of believing quality has been reached through efficiency. Thus, institutions compete to reach this first place in the ranking. Emotions in this dynamics have not been regarded as the enhancing part of human sensibility, but as the cognitive one. That is, we have to think about emotions in order to live them. Then, emotions are placed nowhere for them to be, they become competences, a race of abilities taking away their experience essence. They are not cognition, they are emotions. Experience is something that is lived, it can be pleasant or unpleasant, and it is a constant in life. Sometimes we enjoy, and others we suffer: it is ordinary. We must clarify that the

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experience we refer to is not factual, the one which reifies or transforms everything into facts, it is part of the psychologists duty assumed as the physical area of the soul, which keeps a distance from its subject. We refer to experience as a phenomenon to which phenomenological psychology addresses to as it is about bringing life to the person as part of human reality (Dasein). It is about providing life to emotions. From phenomenology emotion is conscience, as Heidegger and Husserl write: “-the first one says that -emotions are a selfassumed human reality which directs itself-excitedly to the world (…) – the second one expresses that- an emotion is precisely, one conscience” (quoted by Sartre, 2012; 21). Emotion is consciousness of being, it is intrinsic to the idea of know yourself. Emotion can be seen in conduct, but they are not a conduct. It can be heard about as an expression, but it is not a thought. Emotion is a way of learning about the world, but it is not the reason to it. We insist on delimiting emotion from conduct and of reasoning because before society of performance it is defined as a competence, and it is spoken about emotional competence as a set of abilities that deal with communication and conduct. It is attempted to educate in emotion, to teach to show and manage emotions by rationalizing actions. Undoubtedly this contributes to sociability as there is a reciprocal relationship between emotion, thought and conduct. Nevertheless, emotion is not a quality that goes from reason to reflection; it is an organized form of existence that through experience is interrelated. Csikszentmihalyi (2012), points out that there is an interconnection and modification between emotions, intentions and thoughts by setting the following example: “A young man falls in love with a young girl and they experiment all the typical emotions that lead to love. He believes that if he gets a new and flashy car he will be able to get his attention. Thus, from the moment the objective of winning money in order

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to buy a car permeates the objective of courtship; but, having to work extra time may interfere with fishing, producing then negative emotions that generate new thoughts, that at the same time may align the young man’s goals to his emotions…, as the torrent of experiences always carries many bits of simultaneous information” (38) The last line emphasizes the concourse of emotions, intentions and thoughts in experience, presented before oneself and the others as paradoxical. On one side, it is evident in conduct, in intentions; on the other side, in our conscience in the subjectivity of oneself. If there was an intention of phenomenology of experience, it could be said that experience is set in two momentums: in the objective and in the subjective, which change or transform the person. At the example, love makes the young man change, his intentions are set differently, his thoughts move between the rational and the irrational according to the emotions that move him, whether they are positive or negative. Then, emotions as Csikszentmihalyi writes, are the most subjective elements and, at the same time, the more objective. They are inner states of conscience amongst themselves and for themselves experimented by the person. They are acts in the exterior world that are experimented. Through emotions inner harmony and the conflict of conscience are expresses. From the metaphor of energy, emotions generate energetic states. That is, by conceiving emotions as energy, the author says, inner stated are produced on negative emotions such as sadness, fear that generates “psychic entropy” as part of the conflict of conscience. And also inner states are produced with positive emotions such as happiness, which generates “psychic negentropy” as part of harmony. Within this interpretative frame, teaching experience is expressed in these two paradoxes. Emotions of the teacher are registered subjectively, as a manifestation of his conscience of

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been a teacher. An also, they are manifested objectively in his conduct. That is how he generates psychic entropy or negentropy, conflict or harmony. Conflict is part of black pedagogy that maltreats and produces negative emotional atmospheres such as anger, sadness, pain, crying, bitterness, resentment. Harmony is part of a positive pedagogy which empowers emotions, feelings and affections such as happiness, the teacher’s joy. On the other side, teacher’s emotions are connected to conducts seen in the teaching space. So, if negative conducts are perceived, they generate conflict from emotions with an entropic energy and vice versa, where if positive conducts are perceived it generates harmony. For example, a teacher who expresses negative emotions such as anger, paint, resentment, he probably receives negative conducts such as contempt, offenses, aggression, which impact the development of learning by intimidating, damaging, emotionally hurting the student. And, a teacher who expresses positive emotions such as happiness, admiration, gratitude, will probably have positive conducts to praise, respect, encourage which impact favorably in the learning when the student is feeling happy, secure, motivated. This is why teaching change is established as the empowerment of harmony to achieve the homeostasis of the teacher’s teaching system, an educational practice based in the handling of emotions from the acknowledgment of one self so that the teacher promotes learning and positive emotional states in the student. Healthy emotions benefit human development. The question is: what does emotional change of the teacher mean in order to achieve harmony? First, we must clarify that we refer to emotional positive change of the teacher, the change which opposes to inertia of black pedagogy, change that sees the possibility of improving emotional health of the teacher. After that, we move to characterize positive change under the following terms:

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a) A positive emotional change from the teacher in his educational practice means a change in the pattern of life. A common phrase expressed socially to first time parents when the first child is born is: “A child changes your life”, meaning that there will be essential changes in the personal dynamics, that we will have to pay special interest to the material and affective needs of the child; it will not be the same, there will now be an experience of recognizing oneself as father or as mother. Something similar happens with emotional change in the teacher. Paraphrasing the previous phrase: emotions change your life. What we propose is that the life change is positive, oriented to gratification and human satisfaction of the teaching exercise, as it is not a technical-instrumental change of methods or strategies, or didactics. It is about changing the way of affectively and emotionally relating to others in a healthy way from the changing of one self. b) Positive emotional change of the teacher is an auto telic22 experience. Again we look at the richness of everyday language, a phrase which expresses in order to prevent of a repetitive conduct when there is a complaint: “How can I change if you don’t change first”. To try and change others first we have to change; I other words, change begins in oneself. There is one type of teacher use to make someone else responsible for their own problems, where sometimes they might be right. Though sometimes he won’t assume his responsibilities and blames the Estate for educational policies, institution because of the dynamics, students on their negative behavior created 22

Csikszentmilhalyi points out the it comes from the Greek: auto (by itself) and telos (means), and defines it as: “… an activity by itself, performed not hoping to obtain some future benefit,but under the vision that doing it is the reward itself” (2010, 109)

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under performance, parents for not paying attention to their children, and so on. Everyone is guilty except for the teacher. An auto telic teaching experience happens when he pays more attention to his activity, and not to the consequences or rewards which he expects to achieve. We could provide thousand of examples of not auto telic teaching experiences: maybe because the teacher does it due to pure obligation, for economical interests, to look good before others, or to achieve some kind of commitment. Auto telic experience lies in the teacher’s educational practice, where he receives rewards: “Teaching children to make them be good citizens is not auto telic, while giving classes because one has so much fun. What we can see in both situations is basically the same; what makes them different is that when the experience is auto telic, the person is paying more attention to the activity by itself, and when it is not like that, attention is focused in consequences” (Idem., 109-110). Teaching change as an auto telic experience happens when the teacher pays attention to teaching not due to external factors, but to the passion, enjoyment and sense it gives to his life. Emotional positive change from the teacher presupposes a relationship between thoughts, conducts and emotions so that the auto telic experience may flow. There is a relationship between these three aspect, they are not always lineal and they may be a goal; the common issues is misaligned, what we do is different to what one feels. Generally, the teacher thinks that his class is accordingly because he has planned it. When arriving into the classroom, he may have to improvise to adapt to the group according to conditions and mood. This may lead to tension, anger and a wrong handling of emotions. The result is different to what he

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thought it could be. There is no auto telic experience. At this point, we recall Sartre and Csikszentmihalyi as both establish that the interconnection between these three aspects builds conduct and phenomenological experience. Emotion emerges in communication and in behavior, it flourishes in conduct, manifested in thought, as it is conscience transforming the person. Regarding this idea, when the teacher’s conscience flows is when a symmetric interconnection between thoughts, behavior and emotions happens. A teacher who is focused on his task, motivated by performance, is a teacher that flows, who transforms himself. c) Emotional positive change from the teacher generates happiness. This topic is a continuation from the previous one. We first emphasized symmetry between thoughts, behavior and emotions as conscience which transforms the teacher. We now focus in harmonic experience when heart, will and mind are synchronized (Csikszentmihalyi: 2012). When the teacher lives his work, enjoys it, his mental energy is set on the task and he holds unyielding will for the achievement of his goal, which represents the experience of his own task. He achieves harmony, moving into a self-realization. According to these four points on positive emotional change in teachers, we would like to establish what we mean by achieving harmony. Achieving harmony means humanizing the teacher by having an emotional and psycho affective healthy life fortifying his auto telic experience through the flow of heart, will and wish manifested in the performance. A dedicated teacher is someone responsible of taking care of himself and of others; it is a person who enjoys, transmits positive energy, is healthy, not a hurting person, a vigorous teacher. Change from this perspective,

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updates and enhances creativity, curiosity, enthusiasm, and taste. Every moment at teaching is a challenge, not a routine; new dynamics in which the task is concentrated. Adversity is a challenge; obstacles are the means to grow. A student who does not learn is not reduced to a failing grade or to bad performance signaling. It is a challenge as behind every low grade, there is some kind of suffering.23 Discomfort from the student can be breath or healed by the teacher. We are interested in teaching change for wounds to be healed, to prevent those wounds, and to avoid hurting. The teacher is inside a maelstrom of instrumental change oriented to efficiency and efficacy, under the pedagogy of performance and competence. He is asked to be some sort of high performance athlete whose only purpose is to arrive to an expected goal despite his own ideals, interests, expectations, context, limitations, and potentialities; in one word, from what he is as a person and as teaching professional. To a point, this is a dynamics that disrupts the teacher. It disorients and sickens him. Stress, anxiety, depression are part of professional health of the teacher, the rhythms and demands are grueling. They go under conduct regulation models. The livelihood of teachers are pinned to economical control, to evil blackmail of performance in areas of educational quality, exams, performance benchmarks which apart from blocking professionalization, they represent mechanisms that hurt teacher’s emotional health. A teacher with some anxiety or a bad handling of emotions due to performance pedagogy becomes a teacher under questionable teaching capabilities, who may hurt or harm as his task is not a rewarding one. If we add narcissist and hedonist 23

With the idea of suffering, we are trying to illustrate that there is some emotional, affective, cognitive, phisiological or psychological discomfort. Something is not right cognitivo, fisiológico o psicológico.

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pedagogy to performance pedagogy, which are essential in the XXI century, the problem grows. Narcissist pedagogy is the pedagogy of ego, which along to performance pedagogy provides a teacher who is competing against himself. The teacher himself is not enough for him. Hedonist pedagogy is pedagogy of desire by desire itself, which together with performance pedagogy, creates a never ending running teacher with no goal, the aim vanishes when he reaches it without satisfying his own expectations. Thus, the teacher of the XXI century is a teacher who runs with no sense, competes against himself and emotionally hurts as he is not paying tribute to what he is expected to and his shadow is always one step forward. Being optimistic, this dynamics can be overcome from the change that the teacher undertakes as far as it concerns his job. As a teacher, the professor must focus on his task as something rewarding so that it can easily flow. Compliance or discomfort produced by the context are inalienable, and control their activity. A teacher may be able to express himself politically in one way or another, in favor or against educational policies. That is not something restrictive to his change. The truth is, it cannot be a reason or justification to maintain a humiliating and harmful pedagogy. We insist that the teaching change we propose is a meaningful change in the duty of being a teacher. That is, the teacher must have a purpose, be determined to achieve it and reach harmony of will, desire and heart. This idea is an adaptation of what was expressed by Csikszentmihalyi (2010): “…People who find meaning in their lives, usually have a goal that challenges them enough as to use their energy. A goal that may provide significance to their lives. We may refer to this process as achieving a purpose. In order to experiment the flow, goals to own actions must exist (…). The goal by itself might not be important. What is important is that it focuses attention of one person and

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involves him into a pleasant activity he can achieve (…). It is not important to find a purpose (…),it must also be taken into practical grounds and face challenges (…). We may call this resolution in the following of their own goals (…). What counts is the effort employed in reaching a goal, rather than if he has really began doing it (…). When an important goal is followed with determination and all the different activities are together in one experience of unified flow, the result is that harmony is incorporated to conscience (…). Purpose, resolution and harmony unify life and give meaning to it by transforming it in a perfect flow experience …” (322-324).

Change for the teacher means taking teaching as a challenge ready to be accepted. The teacher provides meaning to his duty by committing all his efforts to it. Change is a transformation in the professional sense, by focusing body and soul to an activity that feeds the spirit and that he performs consciously. The importance lies in the end, not the means. The goal may vary, the essential part is that the teacher gets involved on his task as a pleasant activity and that he is willing to perform it. Teaching acquires a different meaning for the teacher, going from considering teaching as an obligation or commitment, to see it as a purpose. This leads to establish the sense of being a teacher, from the phenomenological and conduct experience: who am I as a teacher? This is an existential question that shakes reasonable certainties of a pedagogical method of instrumental nature. It has nothing to do with the pragmatic sense of how to produce teaching, but with the idea of what it means to me being a teacher, what am I trying to achieve; Am I happy with my teaching duty? Am I achieving something as a person? Do I respect my student’s human rights? Do I avoid emotional wounds in students? The purpose is the search of a permanent

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reassurance, recognizing oneself as a teacher through experience in the transformation of his conscience. The purpose is to build a teaching spirit through the teaching praxis. The purpose has a practical referent, conscious activity of being a teacher. That is, practice becomes purpose; it represents the momentum of facing the challenges from being a teacher. Challenges are many, the field is changing, and the teacher must answer to pre established dynamics for heteronymous interests: to power games. The existential implementation of his purpose represent a humongous challenge as he has to find the sense of being a teacher besides many other things blocking his way: established curriculum, fixed competencies, scarce didactic resources, etc. The context of teaching is overwhelming, as the idea of the teacher as homo faber prevails. The teacher is submitted to the logic of success and failure. There is success if the manufacturing corresponds to constructed standards for the performance, inserted in the concept of efficiency. And of failure, if the goal established by the pre established markers natural to the concept of competitiveness. Thus, efficiency and competitiveness become the homo faber axis worried for quality. Teaching becomes an obstacle race that endangers the purpose of teaching. There are many who accept defeat and less who decide to risk themselves and move forward. Among the obstacles we can find prejudice, stereotypes, frustration, resentment, tiredness, fear, anger, indifference, incomprehension, suffering, emptiness. Historically and socially, the teacher is judged as responsible for the discomfort in society associated to ethics and values. It is believed that they do not do their job. Television presents teachers as lazy, unruly, condemned, stereotypes that hurt. The sense of being a teacher meets a wall finding deception, sadness and anger which cut the most firm purpose. The teacher gets tired of pushing over close doors. If they are opened any an initiative, conviction or desire to do

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their job differently, the door is closed again. There is mixture of feelings, fear before uncertainty, fear of not accomplishing his duty as constructor, fear of not being able to perform adequately and, at the same time, anger for feeling those fears, anger due to imposed requests. The easy way out is to stop being interested on their job. Colloquial phrases fill the halls at schools: Students look as if they are learning, it looks as if the institution paid for the hours, so I make it look as if I was working. The teacher suffers; he becomes emotionally, affectively, sentimentally and physiologically sick. Burnout syndrome is a clear effect of this. The teacher is tired, fatigued, with no dreams whatsoever, experimenting anhedonia, losing interest on the sense of his job. It is such an uncomfortable situation that we are not exaggerating on manifesting that the teacher reaches an existential emptiness. He feels as a prisoner being punished in a cell and condemned to chip stones in order to build the new man. In order to achieve the resolution of his purpose before such adversities he has to rethink his own securities and convictions. Question his role as a constructor because as Meirieu (2003) writes on his work Frankenstein teacher, if the teacher assumes himself as a monster manufacturer (making reference to the creation of Frankenstein), he is the monster: Frankenstein is not the monster, his creator is. The teacher role is not of a manufacturer, but of an educator, of an accompanying trainer, of a shaper who accompanies. It is a good beginning for the resolution of the purpose of being a teacher, which means a quantum revolution. The teacher has a relationship with the world, he is not an isolated being on a cell. He has some freedom. Self-fulfillment is possible from the teacher even in difficult conditions, because abandoning his idea of a manufacturer means assuming the figure of an educator, moving from homo faber to homo patiens, to think in different dimensions to the ones linked to manufacturing which should be heading into the idea of

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flowing, of harmony in self-fulfillment even in the worst teaching conditions. This idea is an adaptation that comes from Frankl’s works (2008): “Certainly homo faber is what we call a successful man. He recognizes only two categories and only thinks about them: success and failure. These two extremes move his life around a line of ethics for success. Different to homo patiens, not long ago his categories are no longer success and failure, but fulfillment and desperation. Under these two categories it is placed vertically to the line of ethics of success, as fulfillment and desperation belong to another dimension. From this inequality dimensional superiority is inferred, as this is where homo patiens may consider his life as fulfilled even during failure” (255).

The teacher’s experience may be fruitful by fusing in harmony responsibility, love, and plenitude even in the most hostile conditions as homo patiens. The merging of life holds the condiments of flow that Csikszentmihalyi mentions: purpose, resolution and harmony, where respecting the distances with, we observe that flow means existential harmony between conscience, self-fulfillment and love24. Teacher’s existential praxis supports 24

By quoting this idea of harmony, we thought about this quote from Frankl (2012): “In order to provide an example, let me consider twho phenomenon that are possibly the most human of all: love and conscience. They are both blunt displays of another capability merely human: self-transcendence. The human being transcends himself, either towards another human being or to another sense. I could say that love is the capacity that allows another human being to capture him on his most pure singularity.Conscience is that capacitytaht gives the possibility of perceiving the sense of a situation in its most pure singularity and in a final analysis, sense is something unique. As every person is.Lastly, each person is irreplaceable if not for someone else, to himself” (28)

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change as a meaningful experience of life. Appealing to the essential aspects of the human being, humanization of teaching. Each teacher is unique on his sense, essence and praxis. He is irreplaceable as he is part of human self-transcendence. It means being able to make of teaching a life experience, a pleasant, satisfactory, full and constructive encounter with himself and with others. The teacher as a support person establishes an affective relationship of teaching. The teacher is a person who handles his own emotions, feelings and affections in his teaching practice. That is why, his change is essential in order to overcome a pedagogy based on abuse and humiliation. The teaching change is a change of life.

What does brief strategic change means to teaching change? Many times, change creates insecurity among teachers. It is believed that the new modifies certainties and put into risk what we already have. Phrases such as better an “old devil” than the Devil.25-, are a clear example of resistance to change. It is a false supposition because it denies something that always happens, whether you decide to change it or not. Change is always present. Change does not occur even against certainties offered by immobility. Everything moves whether we realize it or not. It is something continuous in our lives, each day is different no matter how hard we try on seeing days as routine. Just as Heraclitus phrase reads: No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

This reminds us of Hamlet’s phrase quoted by Watzlawick: it is preferable to withstand those evil things that oppress us, than running away to new unknown ones.

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Everything flows. Change transforms people and the change of people changes change. This Word game makes sense, and in order to explain from Maturana’s view, we can express that change creates the elements that create it. In a social way, the system changes by changing people and people change by changing the system. There are those who are worried about a systemic change, and those who worry about change in people. We place ourselves in the second case: How does people change? How does the teacher change? There is more than one way to answer this; we will limit ourselves to one answer based in brief strategic therapy. A reason to this view is the constructivist vision that says that change is a construction. The idea of change in this theory is part of its essence, as it is focused in deliberate development for change. We follow a lead that was born in the Brief Therapy Center of the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, and then moves to the Brief Strategic Therapy Center in Arezzo, Italy. It is a path of almost four decades in which texts that have become a classic in order to understand change have been written. In this journey, Watzlawick figure has been central, first along with Weakland and Fisch, and then in a second stage with Nardone. The books’ titles speak for themselves: Change, Strategy of change, Change language, The art of change, Knowing through change, Lessons on change26. Every text is different to the other as change progressed, as the construction of change was transformed. It is a singularity that differentiates a text from another sharing the same conception. To observe this, we will work under these works in order to know about the theory of change together with the theory of change. The idea is to illustrate teaching change in the light of theory of change from brief strategic therapy.

This is the subtitle of Nardone’s book: Sailing without letting the sky knowing about it.

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A paradigmatic book is the one called Change, principles of problem formation and problem solution written by Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch, published in 1974. It talks about change in an original way from logic different to the conventional one. Group theory and logical type theory, to present change from constructivist logic. The central thesis is the persistence and change paradox, which despite the fact of being different between them they have to be meant together, can be seen at the beginning of the book under the following terms: “The French proverb according to which the more something changes, the more it remains in the same, is something more than a clever word game. It is a wonderful brief expression of the strange paradox that exists between persistence and change. It appeals more immediately to the experience that the most sophisticated theories have been established by philosophers, mathematicians and logical thinkers. And which implicitly point to a basic area that is frequently taken for granted: the fact that persistence and change have been considered together despite their apparently opposed nature. It is not an abstruse idea, but a specific example of the general principle that affirms that every perception and every thought is relative, and that they perform by comparison and contrast” (Watzlawick; 2007, 21). It is common that when it is about human problems we find this paradox, expressions such as I try to change but i simply can’t can be heard everywhere. We find them in teaching, the teacher makes an effort to change and the results are the same. Let’s consider the following: Why the more educational reforms and change in pedagogical models there are, black pedagogy of abuse and humiliation persist? What is wrong? As Watzlawick points out for paradoxical human situations: How can this undesired situation persists? Is it necessary to change it? It should be noticed that there is a change that cannot modify what we wish to change, although there is some change.

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For example, by changing the educational model for objectives based in competencies, there was some change. But problems that needed to be solved persisted, such as negative results on learning or violence and abuse. Then, there is a change which cannot change the state of things. That is why, there must be another change that actually changes the state of existing things. Watzlawick identifies two types of change. One which happens in a system, but which does not change it, and a second one that modifies the system. The first one is called change1 and the second one is called change2. He provides an example: “…a person with a nightmare can do many things inside his dream: run, hide, fight, yell, climb upon a Cliff, etc. But no change in any of these behaviors could end the nightmare. From here on, we will call this type of change, change1. The only way of leaving a dream supposes a change in dreaming by waking up. Waking up is not part of the dream any more, it is a change towards a completely different state. This type of change will be called from now on change2. (…) Change2 is then, a change of the change…” (Idem, 31)

The example is very illustrative. When there are many solutions (as in the dream), but the problem persists (the nightmare), we are facing a chnage1; and when the problem is solved (waking up), we are before a change2. Change1is an endless game of limited possible alternatives to produce a change2; it cannot produce a different warp from its own warp; and it has inherent properties which regulate its behavior. Properties of change1are27:

We simplified them to one word in terms of synthesising in order to illustrate the importance of each one of these properties regarding the limitation to achieve a change2.

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a) Invariability. Multiple phenomenon of change are experimented, where the system remains the same (running, hiding, fightingâ&#x20AC;Ś without being able to wake up). b) Circularity. There is variation in the process, where the result is the same because a causal circularity is produced among the members of the system (the more efforts is placed inside the dream (cause), the less you will be able to exit the dream (consequence). c) Uniformity. Everything remains the same, the phenomena of change experimented, are not observed because the thing remains the same (no matter what you do in the nightmare, it will still be a nightmare). d) Preservation. It is about changing with superficial changes that leave things as they are (in the nightmare, there is no action that provokes waking up). It is usual to find at school this type of change1. Many situations could be described, from the structural to the personal behavior. For example, in the structural way during the last six six-year presidential terms in contemporary Mexico, every president has expressed the same idea: education is the source of development and social wellbeing, where there will be some investment. Nevertheless, development and social wellbeing continue on being a pending situation, as well as investment in education, despite the fact that change has been tried out in many ways, and even the idea of reform has become something permanent. In a micro-environmental way, at teaching practices we also find a great number of change1 cases. Abuse and humiliation, essence to black pedagogy, still exist despite the change in pedagogical models. Emotional wounds are found in the conduct model, in the cognitive model, in the constructivist model, in the competencies model. Strategies are changed,

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sequences are established, evaluation is improved, and the use of new technologies is increased. Abuse multiplies by one or is added by zero. That is, it assumes its identity, continues being invariable, circular and reproducing into vicious circles. Change2 deals with finding new solutions (waking up) that finish in a never ending game (the nightmare) present in the change1. Waking up may happen as something abrupt, unpredictable and not logic many of the times. It represents a change of warp, a quantum leap produced outside the nightmare. It is change of premises, the existing regularity is broken, it means a change on the focus, change2 is the change of change, metaphorically represents waking up from the nightmare. Change is a real life situation, fed by the tried solution; that is, fire is tried to be put off by using gasoline. The solution is the problem. For example, in the French movie Entre les murs, professor François who teaches language, expresses to his students: I could stop being demanding, but it will take you nowhere. Throughout the movie we can see that the more it is asked from students, the less they reach anywhere. The solution to get to a place us by demanding. Nevertheless, the more demands there are, the opposite occurs and I gets them nowhere, the way is lot by so many explanations and clearing out. A common situation is teachers demanding from students to learn. The demand assumes different forms, and one of them is abuse and humiliation which block learning. The more abuse and humiliation, the more blocking and less learning. The less learning, the more humiliation and abuse, as well as blocking. These types of dead end alleys are common problems in the teaching practice before difficulties that cannot be solved. According to Watzlawick, the non solution to human difficulties is due to three aspects: “…it is necessary to act, but such an action is not performed (…) an action is carried out when it shouldn’t (…)

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the actions is performed at a wrong level.” (Idem., 61).This applies to the educational environment. The first mistake is denying that there is a problem by simplifying its difficulty. For example, to say that the problem of education is only financial, means it is been simplified and denied because the problem of education has other non solved difficulties, such as black pedagogy. The second mistake is the utopia syndrome which takes three forms: introjective, running away from reality full of personal usefulness and impossibility feelings. An example ca be when the teacher expresses I can’t deal with this anymore, no matter what I do students don’t learn, I am guilty, teaching is not for me. Delaying is giving time to time with fear or as a disappointment; why change the pedagogical model if we always do the same. The third mistake, the paradox, dead end alleys present in interrelationships. A paradoxical expression can be shut up! Watzlawick quotes a paradox in education, which illustrates change in education: “Within the traditional educational system, the teacher was recognized as an authority and he was the one who determined the topics to be learnt. In modern education, many actions to make his role be more democratic have been created through disturbing paradoxes. (….). It is expected that in general terms, teachers have the necessary competencies to decide on the value of the different subjects. There is not a “democratic” way by which they can ask students to commit to their studies. Nevertheless, if they democratically decide whether they want to continue on studying or not, and if they wish to attend school or not the result could be a total chaos. Then, the teacher can only use subtle methods to influence on students by guiding their mind into the “correct” path, by convincing them that it represents a way of “technical didactics”, and not of means covered by coercion, as coercion is an anathematized concept from the point of view of the ideal of spontaneity (Idem., 99-100)

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Change2 holds properties as a breakage of the attempted solution, builds other rules, creates a new warp and reorganizes the system. The problem is seen from the outside of the framework and restructures it. The properties of this kind of change2 are: a) Performs from what according to change1seems to be the solution, that for change2 the “solution” is the cause of the problem. b) Change2 is something strange, illogical, and disappointing in the change process. c) Change2 answers to a what?, instead of to a what for? It is focused in the here and now; it is interested in the solution, not in the problem. d) Change2 supports itself in self-reflectivity taking on from the restructuration technique. At change2 the problem is seen in a synthetic form, focusing in the solution of something illogical or paradoxical, in the here and now appealing to selfreflexibility in the art of restructuration. It represents a change of games and rules, intentional by intervening in overcoming the circularity of the attempted solutions from interpreting the personal solution in the world, through a different perspective. We must remember that brief strategic approach identifies two types of realities: a reality of the first order, a reality that seems external to us; and the reality of the second order, the constructed reality28. That is why, restructuration in change2 is about assuming another vision of the situation In order to exemplify the existance of a doublé reality Watzlawick (2002) quotes Epictetus: People are not disturbed by things, but by the views they take of them (…). Jasper: The world is what it is. It is not the world, but our knowledge, what can be considered as true or false” (43)

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by constructing a second order reality. A dilemma in change respecting changing or keeping the vision of the world before a problem means to adapt to the world of difficulties, or crumble that world, as said by Wtzlavick (2002), referring to the suggestion of the purpose of psychotherapy: “At this point, there are two possibilities: an active intervention which fits by greater or lesser degrees the environment to its vision of the world or, wherever this is not possible, proceeds inversely; that is, to fit its vision of the world to immovable data. The first of these solutions may be a matter of consult and assessment, though hardly about therapy on its strict sense; the second is the objective and the own goal of therapeutical change” (41-42)

This can be applied to change of the person’s change from restructuration. Change2 is a therapeutical change that liberates from the bondage of the interpretation of the world that sickens for being trapped in tried solutions, which are part of the problem that needs to be solved. We risk a supposition for teaching change: the teacher may find at self-reflexibility find solutions that allow a restructuration of the vision of the world around its difficulties, because personal change of the teacher as change2 is an answer to the pedagogy which abuses and humiliates. This answer is different to throne tried by the Estate once and over again, and political reformers, sociologists may criticize this point of view, as they still hope for a great change that will change everything and everyone. By now, we assume the point of view of personal change, the change for emotional, effective and sentimental health of the teacher, which along with his cognitive possibilities contributes to a positive pedagogy, pedagogy of emotional care. It is about doing well, from little details as a teacher, instead of thinking abstractly about general

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wellbeing. Watzlawick quotes an idea from Bateson, from which we arrived to the previous idea: Whoever wants to do good, must do it through little details. General good is an alibi of patriots, politicians and scoundrels. A narration quoted by Watzlawick y Nardone (1992) from Schimmel who illustrates this position before change: “Many centuries ago this way of looking at things was set in a fascinating tale: Sufi Abu Bakr Shibli after his death came into the dreams of a friend. “How has god treated you?”, asked his friend, to what the Sufi answered: “Right when I arrived to his throne he asked: ‘Do you know why I forgive you?’ And I said no: ‘Because of my good deeds?’ But god said no: ‘Not, not due to your good deeds’. So then I asked; ‘Because of my sincere worship?’ And god said: ‘No’. Then I asked again: ‘Is it because of my pilgrimage and my trips to achieve knowledge and illuminate others? And god answered again. ‘No. Not due to any of these.’ So I asked once more: ‘Dear Lord, then why have you forgiven me? And god answered: ‘Remember when in a cold Winter day while you were wandering around Bagdad’s streets you saw a hungry kitten that desperately wanted to find refuge from the cold wind and you had pity of him, picked him up and took him under your coat and took him home?’ Yes –I said-, Lord, I remember.’ And god said: ‘It is because you took care of that kitten, Abu Bark, this is why I have forgiven you” (32) “

Change lies within the small details which are not healed at first sight, just as with the Sufi who thought that he had been forgiven due to everything he had done, except for treating the kitten well, for saving him from death, due to the human feeling of doing good, an ethical position of the human being, doing good. Emotional change from the teacher represents an ethical position, it means to be free from the demons that lead

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the teacher to hell, to which he carries his students by leaving marks of violence and abuse. This liberation cannot be achieved once and forever, it is permanent because change is the only constant in our life. Change is a permanent duty of the teacher, by restructuring the crossroads of his practice, it is a fine art of becoming a better human being to overcome silent suffering in which he is trapped due to his constant efforts to change1. Change can transform into something pathological leaving traces in the minds and hearts, as hurt is done on behalf of change. For two years we have been looking to the ideal of true change, as if using a magic wand what will solve all the problems, forgetting about small changes. Perfectibility is still the objective of education, the new man, the ideal of manufacturing has led to a Frankenstein world. The teacher as a passive subject is awaiting the change dose that will transform him, he is immobilized due to fear, uncertainty or ignorance, a high wall of justification keeps him away, everyone is guilty of his not changing attitude except for him. The teacher changes without changing his behavior, replicates the same weaknesses in that change1without change. He has become a technical specialist of complex lattice of didactic planning in which the object of education is lost. When lost, no one knows him anymore. Is he a companion ? A mediator ? A controller Who is he ? The truth is that he walks in the dark hurting with his walking stick. He has fallen into an illusion of being responsible of the world’s salvation, a task dictated by the demagogue in education. The demand of cognitive change from the teacher has been a constant in educational reforms, where he is asked to do this or and tomorrow that. The result is tiredness and resistance of the teacher because his experience shows him that the same problems persist. The more it is asked for the teacher to change, the less he does so. A vicious circle of teaching reforms that have produced

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resistance to change. The teacher is asked to be reduced to technological solutions. The answer to the question who the teacher is. The answer from the actual state of education is technology. The teacher is a technology, that similar to sophisticated software pretends to perform controlled processes to obtain the same results in different areas, The teacher as technology controls his thoughts and emotions, he has been turned into a cyborg, a first order cybernetic device regulated by illusion of quality. A different answer to the question: Who the teacher is? Requires overcoming the vicious circle of tried intentions from educational reforms that have impacted unfavorably in the teacher’s mentality and practice. The teacher is a person, not a cyborg. We are not into the same line with the idea that a teacher can me malleable, reduced to a bunch of verifiable and measurable competencies under standardized instruments. The teacher is a person who thinks and feels by himself. We are interested on setting upon the table that the teacher is a person focused on himself, away from a warp of prescriptions. The teacher is a person with clear objectives, not ideal to be perfected, nor seen as a cybernetic mechanism. He is a person who builds his world presenting the possibility of his own change as the liberation of a role that suppresses and traps his self. Change2 of the teacher is a restructuration of his self in order to be free from the supposition that has to do adapt his vision of life into a reality that he had to live. From a brief strategic vision of change the opposite is pursued, to place the teacher as a constructor of reality in order to liberate his vision of life. Emotional change of the brief strategic teacher is the change of the change; that is, the change2 which has the following characteristics:

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a) It is intentional and self-reflective. It is a deliberate action of change from the reflection of himself, of the actions and of context. b) It is built under own objectives, not due to prescribed instructions. Change is given due to the distance of the needs of the teacher, not because of expressed requests by third parties. The teacher is the one who knows himself better. That is why, he traces his objectives of change. c) He uses a constructive logic which goes from the constitutive to the deductive. Part of the inherent of the construction of himself in order to deduct his strengthening and constant change management. d) The solution is the essential, not the problem. The problem are all the attempted solutions. That is why, it is all about trying to find from the paradox or illogical, never tried before solutions. e) What is important is what and how, not the maze of the why or the cause. The trap is either known about or suffered. It is about leaving the maze, how to leave, what do. Acting more than saying. f) Appeals to different solution strategies, such as cognitive and emotional restructuration of the self. The person has to act by itself on change, it represents its own strategy, interferes on his change directly and permanently. Brief strategic teacher change as presented, has some similitude with therapeutical approach, its theoretical grounds are the same, as well as the same technical approach. The intention is according to the approach, without reviving its therapeutical practice. That is, the intention is not to intervene teachers psychologically, or that teachers themselves are treated psychologically as this would practically be impossible. It is about defining the pattern of the meaning of change, and how the

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teacher can change this without applying a therapeutical method, but self-help We suppose that brief strategic teaching change is possible from self-help, from knowing oneself, from giving meaning to his practice from a different focus to the usual one. It is a complex task, self-observation to change has never been simple, it is not logical to know ourselves by knowing about oneself in the art of resignification of the teaching job. To see one self into the mirror is a construction of the self, there is a possibility of seeing oneself through a thousand images. The objective is for the teacher to observe more openly, by recovering ethics in emotional change.

CHAPTER III Mindfulness for the teaching change towards proper treatment Teaching change from Mindfulness: a change for life from the person itself There is a variety of self-help methods for personal growth based in the positive capacity of a person to solve all kinds of problems. In our case, we selected an option that could articulate two basic ideas: that the change29 is constant work from the person and that it is a process of acquisition of conscience from the conduct and phenomenological experience without judging it. These two conditions are met by mindfulness, because the essence of this method is to acquire full conscience of oneself. That is why the person must work on himself without judging. Another central point for the selection of mindfulness was that it is articulated with the idea of brief strategic approach of here and now. The present is what is important, to the causes of the past or the

When we talk about change we make reference to change2

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projections of the future. The here and now as a way of living under full conscience of the present. Mindfulness is a proposal that constructs second order realities because no matter what we do, it is there with us, it is part of us. We are always accompanied by us despite what we have lived. The truth is that we are here in a present that claims for our attention, for good or bad. At every moment we are there in actions, thoughts, emotions and affections. The mark of what is done at that moment is what stays in there or what is projected. The ideal past and ideal represent the interpretations we do of what was done. Past and future of suffering are also interpretations. It is a way in which we build our route in life. The present is where we are standing, what we do and how we do it calls at us, places us in a dimension of reality in which the conscious or unconscious form interferes. As teachers, practice is place in the present which can be enlightened by a glorious past, or not, and which can be illustrated or not with salvation utopia. The here and now claims full conscience of what is done and how it is done. The why has been hallucinating in the fantastic ideal of the manufacturing of the new men. It is time to make room to the teacher as a person who explores in his present the change of his self, untie the anchor of ignominy of the systemic promise of change, which has only brought permanence in pedagogy that harms the soul of the new generations. It is time to rescue the capacity of change from the teacher, which means not to democratize his job. There is a high purpose of freedom and ethics. Freedom of conscience which means working with emotions and ethics of emotions, humanize the teacher is a paradox in education. Due to the fact that education is essentially human, then why humanize something human. The answer is simple. Because of the complexity in it, humanizing is recovering that sense of the essential which is lost due to the

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sophistication of technology, in seeing the teacher as technology. Then, it is about moving the teacher away from technology. The mind of the teacher is full of the ideal of usefulness for a general wellbeing. But, as Bateson has said, the general ideal is the ideology of demagogues and obtuse politicians. We now bet for details of change in the teacher as a person who explores his sensibility and reestablishes ethical order of his emotions. The important factor is how we are going to handle the present, the own present. It represents the opportunity of growing as human beings, free ourselves from vulgar hedonism, selfishness and narcissism. This is also the opportunity for the teacher to know himself as a teacher, of self-observation, of self-reflection for the dimensioning of his behavior on his professional exercise, to achieve emotional change that helps avoid falling into the abuse and humiliation temptation. As Kabat-Zinn (1995) says, whether we like it or not, we are living in the present: “Whether we like it or not, the present moment in the only thing with which we can work. Nevertheless, we live into so much easiness as if we had forgotten that we are “here” and that we are “in” what we already are. At every moment we find ourselves in the crossroads of here and now. But when we are wrapped in oblivion, we forget where about it and then we become lost. Then the question of “and now what?” becomes a true dilemma. By saying “we are lost” I mean to say that we lose contact with ourselves and with the totality of our possibilities. We fall into a robotic way of seeing, thinking and doing. Then we lose contact with our inner self and which may be able to offer us more opportunities of being creative, to learn and to grow. If we are not careful, those cloudy moments may increase and become the biggest part in our lives.” (13).

The present is the only place in which we work, and we frequently forget about it. We get lost in a maze of all and

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nothing. Working on oneself means to be less of a robot, to acquire full conscience of seeing, to think and do on the profoundness of our identity in order to learn and grow next to the other self starting with little details that generate drastic, important and increasing changes. Mindfulness holds the philosophy of change through small details by acquiring attention or life conscience. For the teacher, this philosophy frees oneself from the emotional problems produced by a grueling dynamics of competitiveness and performance. The teacher may lead a healthy life liberating from stress, anxiety, dream disorders, food disorders, and the irrational utopia of superiority that impact on his practice making of him a silent villain who humiliates and abuses on behalf of educational quality. Mañas (2014) expresses the importance that the teacher acquires more life quality on his professional development: “We firmly believe that we can and must develop abilities to achieve peacefulness, be less stressed and be more calm in order to improve life quality and, specially, to educate better. These abilities depend on the development of the own conscience or mindfulness. Conscience is essential. Being conscious supposes being able to notice or perceive what happens inside and outside us. Being conscious means being able to notice, care, observe our own thoughts, emotions and corporal sensations. It also implies being conscious of the world around us, anything there is outside (people, sounds and smells). It is all about nurturing of a conscience which is reactive, contemplative and full of wisdom. It implies to learn to relate with ourselves in a model which is healthier. Being conscious sets us free. The development of conscience allows us to misidentify and transcend our own thoughts, emotions and sensations (I am not my thought, neither my emotion, nor my anxiety or my pain). Our conscience allows us to stop fighting or controlling what cannot be controlled, and to disown our

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behavior by abandoning compulsive and aggressive reaction before what happens inside and around us. Being conscious also allows us to have the possibility of developing certain wisdom and feelings of love and respect towards ourselves and to others” (194)

We share the central idea of the quote that reads that a teacher conscious of what surrounds him and his inner world, is a person of wisdom and sentiments of love, prepared to educate better. Such teacher transcends himself because he controls and handles his emotions and thoughts, leaving violent impulsivity behind, relating in a healthy way, specially buy inheriting this conscience to the world. It is hoped that black pedagogy becomes part of the past. Mindfulness provides this possibility of conscious cohabitation. The sense is within its linguistic root. The word Satipatthana comes from the pali30 language which is divided into sati that means ‘conscience, attention or memory’, and in English is translated into mindfulness; and into upatthana, meaning ‘placing close to’, which associated to mindfulness today, may be understood as ‘attend’ with mindfulness. The teachings of Buddha applied to the attention on health in the western world through mindfulness are very recent. At the end of the 1960, Jon Kabat-Zinn, a trainee in meditation and who had been a student of Korean Zen and yoga, introduced this practice for stress management. Kabat-Zinn founded at the Massachusetts University Hospital, the clinic for stress reduction. Twenty years later, mindfulness became popular through a television program (Collard: 2014); afterwards, it finds its development in areas such as medicine, psychology and education. Mindfulness has been defined in many ways. The best to us as it synthesizes the original meaning of Satipatthana, is the one 30

Exctinct language used in the teachings of Buddah.

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introduced by Kabat-Zinn (2013): “Mindfulness is, ultimately, an act of love… with life, reality and imagination; with the beauty of our being, with all our heart, with our body, with our mind and with the world. No matter how much you deny it, it is like this. That is why it is so interesting to systematically experimenting the nurturing of mindfulness in your own life; besides, it is healthy that your intuition seeking to this new form of relating to others with your own experience” (12) Mindfulness for teaching change represents a life opportunity, because the teaching duty is an act of love, despite the criticism this idea may receive, because shaping the minds and hearts of young generations implies a high dose of beauty within us. To let imagination flow in order to construct a reality in accordance means to nurture a healthy way of life in the classroom, to connect the conduct and phenomenological experience in another way, the return of a person, as Rogers said. That is why we like Kabat-Zinn’s definition as it provides us the opportunity of breaking with the vicious circle of attempted solutions to improve education from those who promise a general wellbeing. Being honest, Kabat-Zinn bets on change from small details. Those small details that sweeten the soul of students, which with a warm greeting or a gratitude expression may change their lives. It is not superfluous to say that mindfulness means conscience, attention and full memory of our situation in the world and of our destiny in the whole planet. It incorporates cognition and states of the soul,31 it is an active attitude of contemplation32, and it is constituted on the essence of personal We understand as state of the soul the set of feelings, affections and emotions; despite the fact that they are very particular within themselves; they are qualities in which we express our inner state –the soul- from and in spite of our experiences. 32 What we are establishing is a paradoxe, what we want to express is that the contemplation of being in the world leads us to an activity 31

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change which modifies the equilibrium of the social system. Personal change that has been receiving little attention from psychologists, comes from a transformation strength that may disrupt the existing order. To many, personal change falls into the self-help ridicule, and to others it is a utopia. To us, neither of the two points of view are correct, we consider personal change as an opportunity for transformation in order to improve our interactions with the world being in a world in the present, here and now. Personal change in mindfulness is a reflexive change in order to live a full life: “This full attention will be used for two purposes. One is for reflection. You will be contemplating all the objects and reflect on them. To reflect, first you must establish full attention or constant conscience. Before achieving it, reflection may induce to speculation. By quoting the Speech in pali, “Sati paccupat ̣t ̣hitā hoti. Yāvadeva ñān ̣amattāya pat ̣issatimattāya”, which means that “in order to reflect, we must establish full attention and to understand things clearly, the way they are, we must establish full attention, which is pure attention”. Before we reflect in an affective way (pat ̣issatimattāya), we must establish mindfulness paying full attention to what is established in the here and now. The second purpose of full attention is to understand things as they are (ñān ̣amattāya). To see rage as rage, not as part of me; pain just as pain, not as part of me. To see things just as they are. The more we relate to the present moments, we progressively start looking at things the way they are and thus live our life fully in the present moment. Wisdom necessary to live a life of peace gradually emerges from this (Dhammasami; 2013, 111). of change of our own securities and insecurities by achieving conscience of what we think, feel and do; that is why it is an active contemplation, different to contemplation which is, actually, a passive act.

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By being a reflective act, personal change is something active governed by the here and now. In the present things as they are and see become evident, we take away prejudice, interpretations and sense, everything which toughens human comprehension and prints discouragement translated into attitudes and behavior which do not allow a life in peace. Personal change represents harmony within ourselves in order to act before the world we have been placed in. Mindfulness being an active method based in contemplative meditation, results confusing to some. It is believed that it is reduced to a spiritual method far from life dynamics, and that it is something for people with time to withdraw themselves from the rush of immediate solutions, as a hobby. There are more doubts González (2014), makes a list of what mindfulness does not represent: it is not only a relaxation method, it is not about setting your mind blank, nor achieving beatitude, neither abandoning ourselves from reality, eradicating pain, reclusion in a monastery at Tiber, or a new religion Mindfulness has been subject to investigation in order to know the contributions to change of personal life and several benefits have been found. There are some nuances among different authors on the benefits. In general, they concur in the contributions to emotional health, as we present as an example in the following table:

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Table 1. Mindfulness benefits AUTHORS Ruth A. Baer Patricia Collard A major ability to be It helps overcome stress. calm and to relax. Sorting out fears and Superior levels of anxiety. energy and eagerness to live Less risk of stress, Pay attention to depression, anxiety, problems that wear out, such as sadness, chronic pain, addition or low depression and discouragement. immunological efficiency.

BENEFITS

Handling of emotions in order not to do things of which we might be regretful, such as eating too much, loose our grip or watch too much television. To achieve own goals.

More love and compassion for oneself, for others and for the planet.

For a more satisfactory and meaningful life. To be happy

Source: Collard (2014), Gonzalez (2014) and Baer (2014)

Alezne Gonzalez Live peacefully during change Concentration is what really matters Brain Works out and ages less.

For stress, anxiety and depression

To improve immunological capacity To improve attention and confront situations. Alleviate chronic pain Tune in with the interpersonal world. Strengthening psychological development.

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Mindfulness has provided such impact that its application has been consolidated in clinical psycho therapeutical practice. It is applied in different treatments: anxiety disorder, obsessivecompulsive disorders, planning and trying suicide, depression and anxiety, borderline personality disorder, food disorders, addiction, ADHD, posttraumatic stress disorder, psychosis, chronic pain management and personality disorders. There are several specific programs for the mentioned treatments (Didonna: 2014) While mindfulness began in the clinical field it has expanded into other areas: the familiar, labor, sportive, corporate, penitentiary and educational ones. At education, mindfulness has contributed in the consideration of several problems: Bumout syndrome, depression, anxiety, academic performance, self-esteem performance, reduction on bullying and better personal interactions among others. The benefits achieved with mindfulness are for every educational community: students, teachers, administrators and parents, we write the following:

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Table 2. Benefits of mindfulness in education EDUCATIONAL COMMUNITY BENEFITS

Students Better school performance

Teachers Stress reduction

Administration Parents Leadership Better improvement relationship with children Anxiety control Assertive Understanding Empathy communication children’s with needs classmates Better Improvement Between Self-esteem improvement. communication of management interaction with students. performance. between mother and father. Clarify Better Knowing Getting knowledge. professional oneself. involved in development. children’s school activities. Better Overcoming Less Establishment interaction black management of healthy with parents pedagogy. based on limits. and children. punishment. Happiness in the performance of activities. Harmony base don respect. Emotional, sentimental and affective wellbeing.

Source: Personal file

There is one experience from which after some years of practice, has come to the conclusion that mindfulness contributes to achieve a functional emphasis, an emphasis that regulates school’s accelerated flow on students and teachers. This experience is from Snel (2013): “Students and teachers, after applying a mindfulness program, are delighted and could appreciate more

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tranquility. Children became kinder towards themselves and towards others; they gained more trust and were judgmental in a more reflexive way” (24)

The teacher from the XXI century is overwhelmed due to excessive control and technification of his duty. His practice is based in distrust and accountability. The sign of educational management doubts from the teacher, everything must be placed under the view of evidence, evaluation is his practice device, and he is forced to enter into the game of competition. A teacher before a group has about 40 to 50 students, who have to be evaluated permanently as evaluation is the input from which he will be evaluated. He is asked to apply a pedagogical armor in every class, a heavy scaffolding of didactic planning: competencies, strategies, sequences, evaluations, etc. It is impossible to carefully follow didactic planning in the classroom because the pedagogical relationship is among people, not between people and objects. To this we can add a pile of portfolios of evidences to be evaluated. And if that was not enough, he is asked to find the milimetrical accuracy between process and product. The teaching task is intensive and grueling, the teacher has no time to assimilate what he is doing, and he is a programmed machine that produces a standardized student. The teacher is lost in his duty; the essence of education is reduced to a mechanical learning for life. These teaching dynamics brings a potential and real risk: dehumanization of the pedagogical relationship. The dominance of dogmatic duty cancels the possibility of personal change, the teacher suffers confinement in pedagogical freedom: he must accomplish with the shaping of his students whether he likes it or not, as his material, physical and psychological stability depends on it. The teacher faces a series of difficulties in different ways according to this context:

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• Unbalance between what must be taught and the time established to it. • Lack of time to apply didactic scaffolding in each class. • Problems with students. • Saturation of initial, continues and final evaluations. • Weariness to revise hundreds of evidence from group portfolios. • Excessive administrative attendance and accomplishment controls. • Low basic salaries and salaries based on incentives. • Insecurity on job permanence. • Demand of professional certifications and updating. • Disorganization on educational areas. • Sudden and imposed education reforms • Excessive academic load on the number of groups assigned. • Activities diversification: teaching, research and dissemination. • Lack of pedagogical resources. • Inappropriate or adapted facilities. • Lack of support. • Work which has been imposed and cannot be enjoyed. • Discontent with the educational model and dominant practices. These difficulties bring serious consequences to physical and emotional teacher’s health. The teacher becomes ill, and may of the times illnesses which should be considered by professionals, are taken for granted. Among the causes we may find: • • • • •

Psychosomatic illnesses. Suicidal thoughts and attempts Burnout syndrome. Impatience and irritability. Mixed feelings.

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Frustration and helplessness. Despair and lack of interest. Low self-esteem. Distrust and uninterest. Excessive work absences and low performance. Violent and risky conducts. Little resilience capacity. Obsessive conduct over accomplishment. Low tolerance to error. Cognitive and emotional weariness. Family problems. Social problems. Physical illnesses; migraine, gastritis, colitis… Muscular-skeletal illnesses. Otorhinolaryngology illnesses.

It represents a great number of difficulties and consequences which impact in the classroom. The teacher arrives to his job with load of emotional and material work that impacts his daily performance, which leads to black pedagogy. The teacher arrives swamped, tired, worn out and annoyed. He is a potential generator of negative, violent and explosive attitudes which possibly will be translated into abuse, humiliation and in emotional wounds for students. Suffering could now be a silent illness among teachers and students, and this is where the problem of violence arises evident in educational institutions around the world. By now, we are more interested on placing an alert in the need of teaching change. Mindfulness for teaching change represents an opportunity to recover the person inside the teacher. The purpose is that the teacher has full conscience of whom he is and he is expected to do here and now. It represents attention from the teacher towards himself in the practice of reflection, so that the teacher connects

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his environment to himself. Change represents a transformation of the subject from his own changing activity, because it modifies ways of being, knowing and feeling by connecting with the links in the present; this is because the here and now is the moment in which we can solve what is before the teacher. In this way, teaching is full of small details as true hurricanes of the great changes in education. Mental and physical health is possible with this teacher change, a change to an active life, different to the change given by a magical wand: In order to change, one must act. An experiential act.

Synergy between brief strategic therapy and Mindfulness for the teaching change towards a proper treatment. Emotional change from the teacher is needed for the persistence of the ideal in education in order to obey what has been established in prescribed pedagogical methods in educational reforms of different types that throughout time have fed an ideology that gives birth to black pedagogy. It is not uncommon to find teachers who practice and defend the boundaries theory which is used in the classroom. Only through discipline and psychological and physical control learning from students is achieved. This has lead for the teacher to appeal to a teaching method for obedience which weakens trust, affection and security of the students because he uses manipulation, intimidates, ashames, scolds, humiliates and uses violence. If we add physical and emotional health disruption that the teacher acquires in a suppressing context, the result is that the teacher consciously and unconsciously is a producer of black pedagogy. The types of abuse by the teacher, whether conscious or unconscious, include diverse forms expressed everyday. Body and soul are abused causing emotional, cognitive and behavior

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blocking, because physical, verbal and non verbal harassment arrive to the same crossroads, the destruction of the student’s conscience translated into rejection to school, as it represents an insecure place full of traps and violence. Absences, failing, school drop out, and every aspect of school failure. The teacher is not any better. He is trapped in a warp heavy as a block of cement falling into him and paralyzing him. He sees no end to this labyrinth of the professionalization based in educational quality. Paradoxes in the teaching performance: the oppressor oppresses it, he oppresses; and the oppressor suppresses it, he suppresses. A vicious circle of abuse which the teacher builds. We can find different forms of abuse in the teaching practice: Table 3 Types of abuse exercised by the teacher Type Physical

Psychological

Form Harassment Pushing Intimidation Beating Expelling from school Body punishment Yelling Hand gestures Harmful critique Discredit Ridicule Rejection Indifference Isolation Mocking Labeling and nicknaming Clinical diagnose Eye-gazing

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Sexual

Pedagogical

Intimidator silence Ignoring Scolding Insults Disregard Threatening Blackmailing Satire Passion letters or messages Insinuations through drawings Caresses Abuse Inappropriate language Insinuation through body movements Recess suspension High loads of homework Academic constraints Disciplinary prohibitions (speaking in class, going to the restroom, standing up, moving) Class expelling Extensive corrective making of sentences Cleaning duties: sweeping classrooms, cleaning windows, washing toilets) Prohibition to attend class enjoyed by the students (sports, music, theater) Eating food or drinking water is prohibited during class time

Source: Own file.

The school builds the museum of horror and torture, abuse manifestations are diverse. There are many usual ways of abuse than others; for example, psychological and pedagogical abuses are more frequent than physical and sexual ones. They all harm according to the way they are performed, student’s mood, impact received, etc. Teachers abuse in one way or another, present

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throughout school history. Everyone has suffered abuse from teachers in one way or another. Every action provided for the teacher change aimed to modify or setting a halt to abuse manifestations are welcome as they open the possibility of heading towards an education for a plentiful life through a positive pedagogy building up from small details. It is a hopeful vision of teaching change from the teacher. It is a path into emotional brief strategic change, founded in brief strategic therapy and mindfulness. It is about an oriented conceptual cooperation oriented to one aim: that the teacher knows himself and is transformed into a person who can handle his emotional health for the benefit of pedagogical relationships. The collaboration between brief strategic therapy (BST) and mindfulness (MF) is perceived as a double complementary relationship: similarities are strengthened and differences meet. The similarities we are interested on strengthening are: a) Focusing in the present here and now. The teacher is here at this momentum, it is now that he learns changes, the present is the reality in which he can interfere, the past is whatever was and the future is about to come. In the present things from the past are solved, and we act in the construction of the future. b) The search for himself. Despite the fact that the teacher does the same everyday, teaching, the opportunity of stopping for a momentum to give meaning to what he does is minimal because his dynamics is intensive and full of activities. That is why, having some time to know oneself offers him an advantage to give meaning to his work and thus, focus on himself developing self-regulation mechanisms that allow him to receive feedback in order to achieve a healthy practice by knowing his body, soul and task.

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c) Self-observation and reflection. Observation towards him, the teacher observes his performance and his inner self, transcending the apparent because reflection leads him to self-referentiality; he is a constructor of his own material and subjective reality. Through the material, he meets his way of making things and in the subjective, the way of being. At his psychological and emotional space the teacher self-observes and self-reflects in an integral way within his dimensions of the ego the representation of him (intra subjectivity), his connections with others are incorporated in him (inter subjectivity) and his social world is built by him (trans subjectivity)33. d) The sense of phenomenological experience. Teaching change is a transcendental change, the evanescent present synthesizing the past and the future where a transcendental constellation is created, what rises in the here and now. Phenomenological experience is improvement (Aufheben) of the change1 because it is a transformation of the conscience (Unkehrung des Bewusstein) towards the change2, as that motion of conscience gives as a result a new person, a new teacher; from a Hegelian interpretation, to assume a different form of conscience, a qualitative leap from the teacher From psychoanalysis, psychological space can be defined as the menatl representations of the subject, Vidal (2002) defines them as: “a)The intrasubjective space presents as contents, the representations of the ego according to itself, to his body, which imply as components the drive and desire a la pulsiónto fantasies and relationships with the object. b) The intersubjective space which holds the unconscious representation of others within psyche, including agreements and conscious pacts. c) Trans subjective space entails the representations of the real world within its social and physical dimension” (1). In our case, we consider these representations as an integral from in which the teacher recognises: himself, with others and in his context.

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into a new way of conscience of himself and for himself oriented to ethics in emotional change. e) Reality as the construction of the person Reality is a social construction where the teacher interferes deliberately for his change, he acts intentionally in order to create a second order reality. f) Placing himself in the solution, not in the problem. The problem lies in the circularity of attempted solutions; the teacher pretends to solve a problem of indiscipline with more discipline, despite the fact that it provides no result. Thus the more discipline is applied, the more indiscipline is generated. The attempted solution to solve indiscipline is the problem. That is why, focusing in the not attempted solution no matter ho logical it may seem, represents breaking with environmental adaptation, and making the environment to adapt to the solution actions. Differences are not minor as we are talking about two forms of conscience alternative states that many separate as territorial boundaries that interfere with approaching. Nevertheless, we risk ourselves into this addition because as the saying two heads are better than one, hypnosis declaring the poem I love you to meditation from Mario Benedetti, specially the last two stanzas: …I love you in my paradise this is to say that in my ideal country people live happily without even having permission if I love you it’s because you are my love my accomplice and my everything and in the street arm in arm we are many more than two

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We may consider a desideratum, as we believe the addition is possible because we are adding conscience alternative states. That is why, by maintaining the dimensions or forgiving the emotions excess, it possible to add red apples with green apples. They are in the end that, apples. The aspects we are interested on connecting synergically34 are: a) Self-observation (BST) along with full conscience (MF). Self-observation represents a way of achieving full conscience, non-judgmental knowledge that allows for imagination and creativity to move in a phenomenological field of the teachers; it is a life experience that achieves connection not only in the psychological space of the teacher, but also in the listening, seeing, feeling, tasting. That is, senses and feelings together as the unification of thought, acting and feeling as one object and the self of the teacher. b) Research-intervention (BST) along with experiential immersion (MF). Change is something methodical which may have some spontaneity dose; it is about tracing a systematic process which connects brain and heart. We want to avoid temptation of reductions, of giving full credit to reasoning or think that everything will be solved thanks to good will of feeling things positively. The object of investigation is the teacher who experiments throughout changes that he intentionally lives, and that at the same time the path of change may

Maybe the idea of synergy buffers arising critiques. Synergy is aimed to agreed acts for mutual benefit, our interest lies in teacherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s emotional health as a continuous process of self-observation and clarification of the full conscience. In other words, for the teacher to stop abusing, handling assertively his pedagogical interactions.

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be delivered along with unified experience of conscience between reality and self being. c) Non-ordinary logic (BST) along with the mind (MF). Establishing a world beyond duality between black and white is part of the teaching change. There is always more than one solution to life dilemmas, the solution may be where less thought. It is a matter of surprise, wit and creativity, without forgetting the time to ruminate. Then, complementary times to ruminate, of chewing things for a second time, represents the insight and the beauty of the mind, places where revealed truth comes to life accompanied by the sudden not knowing from where it has come, but the solution happened. d) The abilities of the therapist as a brief strategist to solve double bind, self cheating, paradoxes, to apply restructuration and psycho solutions (BST) with the abilities of mindful which are to observe, describe, participate without judging, under full conscience and effectively (MF). A mix between psychology and selfhelp as a self-therapeutical horizon for the teacher. The teacher is not to become an expert psychologist in conduct disorders, neither an expert n meditation. He will become a bridge that allows his acting in the change in an informed and free way. e) Ericksonian clinical hypnosis and meditation. To many, this may seem inconsistent or even wrong, because clinical hypnosis produces cognitive, psycho physiological, perceptual and conduct changes, while mindfulness meditation produces clarity and inner peace. The first one achieves change in the conscience with the dissociation between conscientious and unconscious. And the second one reaches full conscience. Their differences lie on content and objectives. There

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are similarities in their process and development; they connect within brain waves, by coinciding in the alpha and theta ones. At the alpha waves hypnosis achieves relaxation and meditation states of healing. At the thetas waves, hypnosis achieves a hypnotic state (full relaxation) and meditation profound meditation (full conscience). The neo dissociation approach accepts synergy between hypnosis and meditation as they are two of the multiple existing cognitive systems which can work simultaneously. At hypnosis with dissociation the conscience and unconscious may be operated simultaneously and independently (hosting of learning and experiences, go into different disrupted states of consciousness (from relaxation, to profound relaxation), go from the peripherical to the central conscience of the ‘self’, to the cosmic conscience, and in meditation disassociation is learning for regulation or control of the body and senses through breathing and attention. At hypnosis and meditation we find inductionconcentration as experiences, they share the principle of search for health and wellbeing. We agree with Diaz (no reference) who states synergy of hypnotic experience and meditation: “Selective and experience absorption of attention / attention works in the search of internal stimuli. Expression of no effort / having the sensation that the mind works by itself. Experience participation, not conceptual / intuitive and experiential living, not conceptual. Will to experiment / wish of exploring inner reality in order to reach new self-knowledge. Flexibility in the relationships space/time. If the space is indifferent and time is measured more slowly.

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Modification in perceptions. If, space-time and kinesthetic. Motor and verbal inhibition. If in the motor, at verbal it may seem a sublingual verbalization. “Logic of trance”, reduction of the reality verification. If Symbolic processing. If, intuitive. Temporary distortion. If Spontaneous amnesia. If, concerning the “self” experiences (7).

Teaching change according to what has been stated, is a deliberate action because it is something that is wanted, a difficulty in the body or in the soul needs to be worked out. Human conscience tells us what must be done. An example is the one of Antigone who defies installed establishment by his uncle King Creonte. The King prohibited Antigone to bury her bother Polyneices because he considers him a traitor. Antigone decides not to respect this decree because her conscience tells her that it is not human to leave the death without being buried. Neither is it human to continue with abuse. Abuse has to be solved for the teacher to have proper treatment towards students. Proper treatment has to be worked from the teacher in an intimate contact with himself, to make teaching be healthy and honest. Acting with integrity in order to strengthen the bonds of friendship and fraternity within pedagogical interactions. Proper treatment is a scope of life different to the pedagogical, the didactic and the circumstantial one. Proper treatment is propitiated, experimented and lived in each moment of action and expression, because it is in there where intimacy as a human being is manifested. Nothing justifies for the teacher not to make some effort to provide proper treatment. Proper treatment has been developed on relation to students. It has focused in identifying if the teacher applies certain capabilities which impact students. Roca (2010), identifies five capabilities to work with proper treatment: recognizing himself

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and others as human beings, empathy, resolution capacity, linguistic interaction and communication. Iglesias (no source), proposes five elements of proper treatment: acknowledgment, empathy, effective communication, equal interaction and negotiation. His proposals are focused on working with proper treatment as performance capabilities in which he has to pay attention in order to create affective climate with students. In our case, we talk about proper teaching treatment from another point of view. Our interest is that the teacher changes himself, that the verification period is the same; we are not denying the impact on students. It is not about a list of benchmarks or a list of capabilities for the teacher to develop. It is about the teacher being an emotionally healthy person in order to perform with honesty and harmony and lives constructing a healthy life. Proper treatment begins with intimate contact. We consider Satir (2010) who identifies four aspects for intimate change: self-esteems (how I feel with myself), communication (how I make myself be understood), and rules (what do I do with my feelings), and risk (how do I respond to making things different). Proper treatment comes from the teaching change, the teacher observes himself, and reflects on who he is, how he relates to others, how he expresses himself, and what he has to change. In this sense, what do we understand as proper teaching treatment? An attitude in life, a re-encounter with himself in a different way, one which invigorates self-respect and the wish to live plentifully, which feeds the conscience of the here and now integrating senses, sensations, feelings, thoughts that lead the life path of assertiveness, healing the body and soul wounds, constructing an atmosphere of healthy wellbeing, avoiding hurt and harm. Proper treatment for the teacher is a challenge to personal change, made at his own way. The teacher is the own constructor of his change, which can be seen in the proper treatment in his

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performance. We can identify four types of teaching treatment, along with its manifestations: Table 4 Types of proper treatment of the teacher with himself Type Physical

Psychological

Socio-affective

Manifestations Respect Pampering Cheering up Indulge Understand the body Healthy distance from sexism and machismo Recognizing oneself Trust on oneself Confidence Acceptance Consideration Integration Affect on oneself Dignifying Positive feelings Tenderness Assertive communication Motivation Generosity Meaning Self-esteem Being friendly Honesty and sincerity Handling of emotions Problem negotiation Boosting Solidarity Mutual understanding before problems Wellbeing

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Pedagogical

Constructive inner relationships Positive teaching Sympathy Academic liberty Permissive, not authoritarian Pay attention to existential doubts Seeing oneself as an emotional and cognitive leader Equality Full development Self-esteem continuity

Personal file.

A proper treatment can be achieved if there is emotional health, as he will perform with no violence or abuse whatsoever. A healthy emotional and cognitive teacher guides students positively, preparing for and facing adversity with his own psychotherapeutical and mediation resources. Undoubtedly he will be a proper treatment teacher because his students will create a personal vision of change. He will be a teacher who takes car of his students by promoting a happy life and healing of wounds. Proper treatment from the teacher arises from a change of relating with his students, students will show a change in the psychical, psychological and socio emotional, as well as in the pedagogical. The ways in which this proper treatment is reflected will be opposite to maltreatment.

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Table 5 Proper treatment from teachers towards students Type Physical

Psychological

Sexual

Form Avoid harassment Avoid pushing Avoid intimidation Avoid beating Avoid school dropout Avoid body punishment Avoid yelling Avoid hand gesturing Avoid criticizing in a harmful way Avoid discredit Avoid radicalizing Avoid rejection Avoid indifference as punishment Avoid isolation as punishment Avoid mocking Avoid labeling and nicknaming Avoid psycho-emotional diagnosis Avoid harmful eye-gazing Avoid intimidator silence Avoid ignoring Avoid harmful scolding Avoid insulting Avoid underestimation Avoid threatening Avoid blackmailing Avoid satiric comments Avoid sending passionate letters or messages Avoid making suggestive drawings Avoid making intimate touching Avoid sexual abuse Avoid inappropriate language Avoid making insinuating body movements

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Avoid sanctioning with recess suspension Avoid excessive homework Avoid academic constraints Avoid disciplinary prohibitions (talking during class time, going to the restroom, standing up, moving) Avoid classroom expulsion Avoid pages full of corrective sentences Avoid punishing with cleaning duties: sweeping classrooms, cleaning windows, washing toilets Avoid prohibition to attend class which students enjoy (sports, music, theater) Avoid prohibiting eating or drinking water during class time according to student’s needs

Source: Personal file.

To finish, teaching change based in proper treatment has two sides of a coin: full conscience of who he is in the present as a teacher and emotional health of students. Proper treatment as a personal construction brings transformation of pedagogical interactions by promoting a pleasant and healthy time at school.

Guidelines for the change as a self-acknowledgment process and development of full conscience. We have come to a point not any less complicated tan the previously stated. That is, how to approach teaching change from personal intervention. The main difficulty is how to gather into one single procedure two approaches that have theory own approved method. If one of methods is reduced, what was the case of creating synergy between them, what is the option at

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this point? We opted to assemble between the parts in order to make an unified intervention approach, made by a strategic position integrating hypnotic language (with and without trance) to meditation in the construction process of the not attempted solution for emotional and cognitive change of the teacher. Brief strategic therapy has constantly evolved the path began by Watzlawick along with Eeakland and Fisch in order to establish a theory of personal change which continued with Nardone. Nardone nowadays has dedicated himself to formulate his own emphasis on this theory of change. Nardone is a very prolific writer, of which books we can mention the fundamental contributions to recognize that the method of brief strategic therapy has strengthened throughout the years. The method used by Nardones is the method of intervention of action-investigation, which consists in propitiating change from a therapy made according to the needs of the patient’s problems. It is a flexible method that follows a guideline of intervention, it is not an easy-to-follow set with strict treatments, although it follows non-standardized protocols which reformulated according to investigation made from the application, where efficacy is evaluated. Throughout the experience with this intervention, acting and investigation logic, in recent years the method has been modified including a momentum for the strengthening of the solution. As Nardone expresses it, the brief strategic therapy method has had three development momentums: the traditional, use of protocols and advanced. The difference between the traditional and the use of protocols is minimum because the intervention guidelines continued in the same dynamics at the beginning, during change and at the end of it. Between the traditional moment and the advanced one, there is clear evidence because it modifies the process. The traditional method (or model, as Nardone calls it), has three phases: beginning of the game, unlocking of pathologies, and end of the game; the advanced

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method includes four stages: beginning of the game unlocking of pathologies, consolidation and reorganization of game rules, and end of the game. The increment of the third phase in the advanced method has to do with efficiency because the number of recurrences goes down to zero. The advanced method developed by Nardone (2006) has in each one of the four phases, three elements: objectives, strategies and communication. Next we present in a summary: a) First phase. Beginning of the game. • Objectives. To identify the problem along with the resistance from establishing a trust relationship with the patient, agree objectives and the beginning of intervention. • Strategies. A strategic dialogue is used along with the oriented restructuration to change, providing prescriptions. • Communication. Hypnotic suggestive language is used (no trance) and the language is comminatoryperformativity to ask for alternatives. b) Second phase. Unblocking the pathology • Objectives. Redefine and stimulate change. • Strategies. Restructuration, prescriptions and use of metaphors, anecdotes, stories, etc. • Communication. Hypnotic suggestive language (no trance) and comminatory-performativity language. c) Third phase. Consolidation. • Objectives. Results valuation, consolidating what was achieved or modifying strategies. • Strategies. Redefinition of changes for personal autonomy, changes perception and restructuration. • Communication. Less hypnotic language and also less comminatory.

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d) Fourth phase. End of the game. • Objectives. Complete personal autonomy of the patient and him assuming the responsibility of change. Closing of the intervention with three follow ups: three months, six months and a year. • Strategies: Explanation of what was done and clearing out the change process. • Communication. Illustrative descriptive and colloquial language. At the advanced model, there is something that was not part of the traditional model, the way of communication performed throughout strategic dialogue. Nardone goes one step further in the evolution of the model of brief strategic therapy, developing the model of strategic problem solving, where the patient goes from the role of victim to one that builds his destiny. Strategic problem solving can be defined as: “the art of using devices to obtain the maximum result with a minimal effort” (Nardone, 2010; 19). This model is made up of different phases: a) Defining the problem. It is the momentum to work with questions around the problem: what, who, where, when and how. This is the first step towards solution because it defines the problem along with its characteristics b) Determining and agreeing on the objective. Fixing the intervention focus to be achieved. c) Analysis and evaluation of attempted solutions. Revise all the failed attempts that tend to resist the problem to find the solution. d) The how to get worse technique. What solutions, besides the failed ones, can be set into track in the future and result into failure. To solve the problem, all the perspectives to make it worse should be tried out.

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e) The technique of the scenario beyond the problem. Imagining a scenario of solution beyond the problem, where the problem has been solved: the ideal scenario. It means to free the imagination for the solutions in order to contrast those solutions with real possibilities of making it. f) Climber technique. Tracing the path from the high part to the ground area, just as mountain climbers do, with the purpose of avoiding tracing routes that may get lost in the profound of the forest when starting from below to the top. In this case, it is about establishing the objective and clarify the solution stages in a descendent way: “When we have a difficult problem to be solved, in order to build an efficient strategy it is useful to go from the objective that we have to reach and image the immediate previous stage, then the next to this one and so on, until reaching the starting point” (Idem., 41) g) Correct the shot progressively. Sometimes the solution to a problem is not enough, it may be a starting point for other solutions that solve other problems, and other times, the achieved solution opens a less expected box of branches of solutions for the least considered problems. Strategic problem solving is the most complete model for our purposes. There are other brief therapy paths that practice other forms of working with change. We chose Nardone because of the strategic emphasis that he does of change from a constructivist perspective that mixes severity with flexibility: “…severity by itself represents death due to asphyxia, creativity is pure madness” (Bateson quoted by Nardone; 2010, 44).

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We now move to mindfulness with a parallel story to brief strategic therapy35,. Its first steps can be traced back to the end of the sixties with Jon Kabatt-Zinn’s work. From then until now, important contributions have been made. He has not followed one route; it is more a flourishing of different directions with one sense in common which is achieving full conscience. Mindfulness has no specific method, it is more a way of fully living, of tasting closer and feeling details of gratitude from the momentum. It resembles an antidote to accelerated dynamics and of stress we currently live in today, we could even say that it is a way of making easy even the hardest thing which is life. Everyone is facing day by day problems that make the world look difficult to cope with. Siegel (2011) expresses his point of view in the following way: “Emotional suffering in all its shapes and forms. We may be worried about the future, feel angry or sad, guilty or ashamed, annoyance over physical pain, or simply boredom and stress. Sometimes it is a subtle suffering: “We don’t feel good” or “Feeling a bit under the weather”. Other times it may occur that anxiety, depression, addictions, pain or other symptoms related to stress take over us until we cannot go any further or carry a normal life. Many of the times being a human is not as easy…” (22)

]Emotional suffering moves forwards until provoking body suffering, problems make us seriously ill. Solutions to aid this pathological psychological and body states are tried unsuccessfully. Problems tend to persist, to resist weakening the effort to change. Pathologies are understood as pathological We remind you that the book entitled Change: Principles of problem formation and problem solution was first published in 1974. It is a book which represents a milestone to theory of personal change of brief strategic therapy.

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atmospheres because they are repetitive forms of living a situation, where the attempted changes return keeping the problem and creating new problems. The illness remains and we spread it in our personal interactions: How to get rid of suffering and of anticipated defeat for the possibility of changing things? Mindfulness has a specific answer where suppositions of placing the present in order to achieve consciousness, placing ourselves in the present means to stop trying moving things, when they can stay on their place by moving the person. One usual routine is to try to change the external as something unrelated to ourselves, without stopping to think in the opposite way. Changing ourselves is possible to change the outside world as it favors the possibility of discerning correctly by correctly living the present. Trying to move the rocks from the road while suffering is not the idea, one should prefer to circumvent them with full conscience in order to trace the correct path, we are the architects of our own way. Just as Shapiro (2014) points out: “People are constantly pulling and pushing or trying to move ‘huge rocks’ from our lives to places in which we think they should be placed; this constant reaction and resistance towards what creates so much suffering. Mindfulness provides a way of relating, another way of being; it implies being conscious of the tendencies to resist to things as they are and stop trying to reorganize those huge rocks. It simply means to know where there is a rock here and now, and knowing what I like and which is ok (…). With mindfulness there is no need to change our own experiences, we simply learn from them and we acknowledge them in a profound and intimate way. In fact, learning the present moment by accepting it, does not mean we should allow unnecessary suffering, nor injustice. What is coming up at this very moment is received because it is already in here, and from here in a clear space we can consciously differentiate what is necessary and answer accordingly” (32)

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Mindfulness is a way of handling in a clear, correct and adequate way the problems from the personal life which have extended to different places of social reality. We resume them from their development in the field of psychology and of education. Despite the fact that mindfulness is not an inflexible method of steps to be followed in order to solve a problem, it holds basic rules for its practice. Miro (2013) identifies the following: a) b) c) d) e) f)

Observe Be conscious Let it happen Apply compassion Let it go, let it through Come back to the present

These rules keep company in order to be in the present with full conscience. It is a way of allowing ourselves be in the present. It does not mean placing ourselves in a present full of things that are happening to us, it does not mean stopping ourselves in what is happening right now but flowing in the instant of profound impact. Then, rules can be understood as a way of flowing, detaching us from disturbing thoughts, emotions and feelings. It is about flowing by itself in the own mental and affective forms we have to achieve full conscience. In the light of these a question arises: What attitude qualities are nurtured by the person in order to achieve full conscience of the here and now? There are different answers from the experiences of the mindful people. Kabat-Zinn (2012) points out eleven qualities of attitude: accepting, not judging, no action, patience, trust, vision, letting go, generosity, empathy, simplicity and being strong enough to know our weaknesses. Siegel (2010) establishes four qualities of attitude: curiosity, open mind, acceptance and love. Those are qualities of the person in its

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human development, it is not reduced to a matter of numbers or competition. They represent inner states. They are positive qualities, open to change from a loving position. And Shapiro (2014) mentions eleven qualities of attitude: no judging, no struggling, no attachments, no acceptance, patience, and trust, open mind (the mind of the participant), curiosity, letting go, and tenderness, no reacting and unconditional love. As we can see, they vary in number, depending on the specifications to be established. Apart from the number, there is certain implicit agreement of the quality of attitude going far from its division, falling into one which complies all the mentioned and including others that have not been considered. The quality of inclusive attitude (which we separate from mindfulness) is unconditional love that does not judge as it sets its grounds in trust in order to achieve an open mind that does not struggle with itself; it lets itself be guided by curiosity and patience without any attachment to the circumstantial world, neither to time and things. Its essence is the person itself through the revelation of its full conscience. The quality of inclusive attitude is “being alert”, evident as another characteristic of the way of living life with mindfulness. Being alert is approached by psychotherapy as fixing our attention in the end to be reached with therapeutical work. That end is achieved through the establishment of intervention objectives, strategies, techniques, as in the case of brief strategic therapy. To mindfulness “being alert” is some kind of a liberating experience. García (2008) presents a proposal to what it means “being alert”: 1. “Not conceptual: Being awake, but without being abstracted in the process of thought. 2. Focused in the present: There is no thought about the past or the future, but neither into what happens to us in the present because it drives us away from it.

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3. Lack of judgment: If we think in our own experience, it may be different to what it is (better or worse, that is, comparing it) because we have lost concentration. 4. Intentional: “Being alert” demands continuous intention of the subject in order to draw the attention towards something. In this case, to the present. 5. Based in participant observation: It does not consist n simply being a witness, it includes an experience of profound understanding of the body and the mind. 6. Exploratory: Always researching for more subtle ways of perception. 7. Non-verbal: An experience that cannot be described with words because it happens before they arise. 8. Liberating: Each momentum of “being alert” (mindfulness) is an experience of happiness, lack of suffering.” (363) Mindfulness as a way of life has its foundations in the way of being, thinking and feeling. This leads us to establishing that at least there are essential aspects which provide the mindful or the one who practices mindfulness, and those are: attitude, a place before existence characterized by the development of full conscience; rules that guide experience to be in contact with ourselves, the meaning of “being alert”. Once the ways strategic problem solving and mindfulness interferes are established, we would like to ser a bridge between them. This bridge does not mean making an ambiguous mixture where their sense is lost. It is mostly some kind of assembling of pieces to make a form, like in a puzzle. In a puzzle, every piece has different forms and corresponds to only one place in the set of the form. Each time one moves into the setting of the pieces, our imagination flies trying to discover what the form will be like,

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and it is not until finished that we are conscious of the capacity developed to make puzzles. The basis of the assembling is synergy, the combined action in the making of teaching change described in the previous paragraph, the joining forces in order to achieve that the teacher assumes his role of conscience of proper treatment. The role of conscience of proper treatment from the teacher is the piece from the puzzle that should be put together. The construction of a puzzle is done with concentration, dedication and patience; it is an activity that can be emotionally enjoyed. The setting up of strategic problem solving and mindfulness supposes something similar to the setting up of a puzzle, because of all the possible pieces to set the conscience of proper treatment from the teacher, they all have to be regarded with solicitude and caring for each one, because each puzzle is unique, it is a work of conscience, dedication and patience. The assembling is the integration of the inner world of reason with the states of the soul and the body manifestations, the unification of mind-body-soul as territory of the piece of conscience of proper treatment. A territory that requires exploratory maps if the end is to be conscious of the extension, and value of the richness in it. Assembling in this sense has two horizons: one which guides to draw maps to walk along the territory, and another to explore unknown territory. The way is made by walking, severity and creativity are necessary. Assembly with severity and creativity creates harmony, like a musical piece performed by a set of different tones as they come from different instruments. The richness of the pleasant expression lies in the way the piece is assembled in order to be executed. Severity is within musical and instruments techniques, creativity is the imagination and feeling is the harmony of the sensibility atmosphere. The assembly for personal change is

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similar to a musical assembly, because it is aimed to achieve a construction of harmony. We want construct the piece of teacher conscience for proper treatment with severity, creativity and harmony, a puzzle and a musical piece at the same time. It is a process that requires a starting point, understanding of experience and language. Every change begins at one place. In the way, the direction of change through changing is understood, and language gives shape to change. Teaching change towards a proper treatment is a new language that arises from the depths of mood and body states. The change is in the language, language is performance because it implies expressing transformation throughout change. Language becomes intention, sense and conduct. The language has to be understood because it is the starting point for proper treatment. It leads to a possibility of change towards a different form of seeing the teacher. By looking at himself from language, the teacher communicates with his body, with the moods of the soul and with knowledge from a logic focused in answers more than questions. Answers that are born from intimate contact and that are voiced in the body, feelings, affections, emotions and thoughts language. This reminds us of the old adagio Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them. From the answers built around abuse, will depend teaching change towards proper treatment. Answers in plural metaphorically make a cascade from which water falls naturally at its own rhythm and beat, units of time gathered in temporary subdivisions that offer true songs from nature. Answers for teaching change have their own rhythms executed at the natural beat of the teacher. It is a piece made at the exact measurement of teaching difficulties. Answers, as cascades are born naturally from hypnotic language and meditation language of the teacher. Hypnosis

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and meditation produce phenomenological experiences that are translated into behavior and conducts. A teacher who practices meditation achieves peacefulness and understanding of the here and now. And a teacher under hypnotic trance set into functioning unconscious learning and experiences to achieve the understanding of himself. The teacher naturally (with no previous reasoning), reaches an understanding of the here and now, in a cascade, with different beats, images, sounds, sensations, colors that emerge as answers, without thinking of them as such. Answers are not thought as such, they flow from the understanding of communications with his body, thoughts and soul states. The bridge between strategic problem solving and mindfulness is the person itself, in this case the teacher. Both approaches are assembled in the teacher to construct the piece from the conscience oriented to proper treatment. This represents harmonic work of techniques, rules and qualities that actively gather the pieces of conscience of proper treatment with severity, creativity and understanding in the intimate contact of communication from body, cognitive and mood language, because the cascade of answers for change is born in there.

A path for the practical approach of change towards proper treatment from the teacher We talk about a path in two senses as a crossroads previously traced in order to be followed, and as steps that set non explored routes by walking: the map does not make the territory. We believe that both forms of change are unyielding to one of them because they make a unit; each map we walk is a new map on the road. The road we want to walk is that of phenomenological experience as conscience of the world we build and of conduct experience as an objectual way of living in the world.

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We are placed between phenomenology and constructivism, because the interest lies on the transformation of the conscience being in the world, that the teacher males a qualitative leaps of conscience of being a teacher, as in this way he will move the world as a system. One small conscious detail in the world of pieces, maybe throughout a word, a gesture or a movement, becomes a transformation lever in human interactions. No matter how small or unnoticeable, we are making a different world for someone of for many. Tracing a path or walking along it, is a practical issue. The trace means unity between the one who does the tracing and the real representation of the road being traced. It represents the concretization of a practical duty. That is, a relationship between an object and a subject. Walking represent an experience that makes a person, it is a relationship of the person between his object and subject (inter subjectivity) and in communication with his world (trans subjectivity). That is why, the practical comes from praxis as transformation of the person by working with himself and in the world. Thus, we propose a practice so that the teacher transforms his part of conscience towards the quality of proper treatment. Referring to a path and not about a method has its advantages. The road lacks having the characteristics of the method, its severity of explicative confirmation. The method searches for the verification of the strength of repetition so that it may have some validity and trustability. The path depends on each individual on terms of uncertainty and irreversibility of the singularity. The method confirms its certainty at the quantitative demonstration; the path at the persona change. The richness of the path resembles that of a musical instrument performer, creativity is set into practice at the right moment of beginning an interpretation of a musical piece. In the case of the path, creativity appears just when walking happens. At the method, the

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result is obtained at the end of the stages, whereas in the path it happens from the beginning of the way. The way we propose arises from ways of feeling, thinking and being. That is, throughout the forms in which phenomenological experiences and conduct experiences happen. For that, we concatenate processes, techniques and resources of strategic problem solving and of mindfulness. Our horizon is teaching change towards a proper treatment to himself, to others (students) and to everyone. We resume the idea of sense contained in the escalator technique that Nardone proposes, in order to plan escalation towards proper treatment, just as escalators, we study the road to follow, we start from the top instead of the bottom, and we imagine the immediate previous stage, then the previous to this one and so until we reach the ground. This form of operating, Nardone says, avoids getting lost in the horizon. Another previous reminder before starting the route, and which comes from brief strategic therapy, is the idea that it is impossible not to communicate. And to this we add that by communicating we construct our world; that is, language means performance if we want to change towards a proper treatment, we begin by using positive language which leads that accompanies change. We identify as inner qualities for change: strengthening of selfesteem, handling of emotions, explanation of affections and feelings, empathy, assertive conduct, positive relationships and happiness. These inner qualities are evident in the way of being, making, feeling and thinking. They include a positive way of living life, a way that requires permanent construction work. They do not represent given qualities or definite, they are qualities that require of meeting with one self, it means knowing ourselves and knowing how to handle life situations under the perspective of proper treatment. Each one of these qualities supposes the potential existence of the others; they are inclusive; for

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example, fortifying self-esteem means having appreciation and consideration for one self. This contributes to relating to others empathically, or in order to achieve handling of emotions in the explanation of feelings and effects. Proper treatment from the teacher defined as a way of relating healthily; live together in love and harmonic bonds with one self, with students and with the whole world in order to establish friendship bonds that promote a healthy, protected and happy life inside and outside the school. A teacher who takes on proper treatment is a teacher who does not abuse and promotes happiness in students. The qualities of the teacher for proper treatment are defined in a positive way: a) Strengthening of self-esteem. The teacher recognizes the value of developing positive perception, appreciation, feelings and thoughts for being in contact with other. A teacher with a strong self-esteem is sure of himself, assumes the risk of being wrong and if he is wrong, apologizes or asks for forgiveness sincerely; he knows how to take decisions, relates healthily to what he has achieved by undertaking it; he is a good, happy, secure, simple person; knows how to listen, laughs at himself; he does not give up before deceit, he is tolerant; promotes students growth, is not worried about being liked by others, is spontaneous, he does not shield himself with students, he does not abuse from students, he gets involved in teaching and in profound learning from students; they are easy to approach, they do not boast from being the best, they are independent and autonomous; he does not blame others, awakens interest on students, knows how to handle envy and uncomfortable feelings and fights in order to achieve his pedagogical goals.

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b) Handling of emotions. It means the expression of emotions adequately, where we may remember Van Gogh’s phrase: Let’s not forget that he little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing. The teacher who handles his emotions expresses clearly and rightly his emotions. If he is in pain, he expresses that pain; if he is afraid, he expresses fear. A teacher who handles his emotions, questions his negative thoughts, promotes kindness among students, recognizes gratitude in actions, is affectionate with students, increments resilient capacity, avoids sickness in the body and the soul, causes no harm, provokes no humiliation, promotes psychological wellbeing of students, lives assertively in the here and now, achieves empathy with others, is in contact with everything around him (nature, cosmos) in a constructive and positive way. c) Explaining of affections and feelings. Affections as something transferred is part of the teaching practice. The teacher is either affectionate or not in his relationships with students. Feelings are the expressions from the teacher to his mood. A teacher who clearly expresses his feelings and affections, produces some kind of emotion during class time, offers affection, tenderness, understanding, help, caring, protects, provides security and autonomy, respects students physically and psychologically, learning freedom, motivates with words and non material and material incentives, accepts the feelings of students by not mocking at them or by being indifferent, creates an environment of cordiality and is worried for the sentimental and affective wellbeing of students in the learning process. d) Empathy. Profound contact with another person (empathy focused in the other) and with oneself

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(empathy focused in one self), the way of feeling what the other person is feeling, understanding the way of thinking of the other person, it is a way of sharing and creating by feeling well. A teacher with empathy feels and perceives intuitively students (they are synchronized), figures out a lie when students are trying to lie; abuse, being abused or seeing other being abused is unbearable for him; appreciates honesty; solidarity with students to the point of expressing somatization to whatever happens to one of them; is creative and is a leader. e) Assertive conduct. Expression and way of leading appropriately, clearly, directly and timely emotions, feelings, affections, thoughts in conduct. An example of assertively being is the famous quote by Benito Juarez: Among individuals as among nations, peace is the respect of others’ rights. A teacher with assertive conducts, respects students, firmly expresses his emotions, assumes his responsibilities, is sure of what he does, trusts on himself, correctly communicates what he teaches, is fair and promotes educational justice, is balanced, defends rights without judging or underestimating, is tolerant towards opinions from students, avoids yelling, scolding or insulting. f) Positive relationships. Double bind of one self (self-ego) and of one self to others (ego-themselves) constructing own benefit and for others. A professor who nurtures positive relationships is optimistic, overcomes resistance to teaching change because he is proactive, congruent, promoting happiness, not aggressive, neither manipulative towards students, appreciates students work, is proud of what he does and of students, encourages academic performance and seeks for academic prosperity of students and of himself.

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g) Happiness. As an inner state, it is the way in which he interprets the way of living life. Let us remember Dalai Lama’s definition: Happiness is the result of dividing satisfaction by needs. Happiness includes all the qualities of the teacher fore mentioned. A happy teacher achieves full conscience of things, lives each class under the term of surprise with a novelty, recognizing the pleasure of giving a class, practices and promotes relaxation and meditation among students, creates a climate of affinity, approaches and helps students, affirmation of fullness on teaching development, gratitude towards students’ achievement, satisfaction and capability of loving and being loved. For the development of the qualities of the teacher for proper treatment, we propose four momentums: Connecting with oneself, changing reflexively and warmth, consolidation and feedback. Change supposes knowing through conscience and experience. Due to how we relate to others, and in the case of the teacher of how he relates to students, a relationship based in proper treatment generates physical, emotional, psychological and pedagogical wellbeing. In this sense, our answer includes strategic problem solving techniques and of mindfulness in order to solve problems presented in the teaching practice which may lead to abuse, and with the sole purpose of making a qualitative change towards the form of the qualities of proper treatment from the teacher. In each one of these three momentums, self-observation, selfregulation and self-management are present in a twofold of the present: a) Self-observation. The teacher is placed as an observer of his own activity at the circumstantial present. At this stage of the present, he makes a double observation: introspective, describing his inner psychological

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experience, emotions, feelings, and affections, the way he lives and feels his pedagogical relationship; that is, the way his phenomenological conscience is manifested; and behavioral, describing the way in which the sensible experience is manifested through conduct; it is a dense description of the teacher, the objects by which he acts and the receptions who may be students, other teachers, administration, parents. The teacher in the present of full attention is conscious of the broad space in which he lives, breaks loose from circumstantial present by integrating it as part of him through de-identification from his thoughts, feelings, emotions and value judgments in order to see his experience more clearly and achieve full conscience, experimenting, living on his own life experiences and accepting them actively as they are. At the two stages of the present where phenomenal conscience and full conscience are manifested, the teacher lives together with himself and the world (particularly with his students), because he know himself on the inside, externally and profoundly b) Self-regulation. The teacher is capable of adjusting to change from regulating himself. He is the constructor of himself. He can interfere in his reality to change through learning. The teacher may change his way of being, thinking and feeling towards proper treatment. Change performs at a triple stage of reality: objectively, in the direct experience of the concrete pedagogical relationship; subjective, in the way of feeling the pedagogical relationship; and profound, by incorporating to full conscience the pedagogical relationship. Self-regulation of conduct and of emotions is regulated as a triple helix: live-feel-incorporate.

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c) Self-management. The teacher performs through cognitive, emotional and conduct automatic patterns, which are taken as information to deactivate them and generate new patterns of life. For example, if the teacher abuses through beating, it represents having distance from this conduct patter and manages a new deactivated pattern of the automatic mechanisms that accompany this pattern of conduct. Deactivation happens with action and full conscience. These three processes are part of change and are present from the beginning until the end. They tag along with phenomenal change and profound change. They support our proposal: Table 6 Proposal of brief mindfulness therapy Process

Momentums First Connecting with oneself Self-observation Second Self-regulation Change with a Self-management reflexive acting and warmth Third Consolidation and feedback

Source: Personal file.

Intentionality Intuition Perception Full attention Reflection Concentration Acting Self-conscience Reassurance Appraisal Full conscience

Goal Strategic dialogue Intimate contact Intervention Full action

Profound change Full change

The developed proposal is presented next:

First momentum. Connecting with oneself Contact with oneself is a momentum of intuition and perception, the impressions we have of ourselves without measuring

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reasoning. It is the way in which is presented the sensible reality captured by the senses from experience and life learning. This contact with oneself happens in two levels in the situation of the practical life and in the conscience of the momentum. In the first, it is the immediate knowledge of the sensible reality, it is exteriorized in feelings, ideas or emotional reactions; it is a moment of inner dialogue that communicates the way in which needs that are meant to be rectified are perceived, in order to be a teacher providing proper treatment. In the second, it is an intimate meeting with oneself through breathing, self-cleaning from the present of the sensible reality and placing oneself in the here and now of full attention Objectives • Establishing an empathic relationship with oneself. • Identify the needs that make it difficult to drive through proper treatment • Work on the two dimensions of the present: the present looking at the future and the present as being alert. Strategies • Profound breathing technique. • Strategic dialogue technique. • Technique to digest abuse and proper treatment. Process a) Profound breathing technique. Begin with the exercise of relaxation of profound breathing to contact with one self. The exercise may be memorized or recorded to follow the instructions of breathing:

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A. Mindfulness breathing exercise to connect with proper treatment Eyes closed, focus your mind in your nostrils. Begin to inhale and exhale naturally. Make a profound breathing filling slowly your lungs, your diaphragm and let your stomach expand. Let air be released little by little through your mouth. Now go back to a natural way of breathing; when inhaling say slowly “inspire”. This means you are calling the object. By exhaling, say mentally “exhale” (inspire, exhale, inspire, and exhale). Through inspiring and exhaling, if your mind wanders lets say, all the way to school, and you see the classroom, stop focusing in the breathing and set your attention in the classroom, in proper treatment towards yourself , with your students, and with everyone around you. When you see the classroom in your mind, write down “see, see, see” three or four times and after that, go back into breathing. Start to inhale, exhale again. If your hear someone talking to you in the mind, you should pay attention with some interest “listen, listen, listen” three or four times, and then go back to the primary object which is inhaling and exhaling. If you feel any sensation, emotion or feeling, direct your mind in that way and look at it profoundly “feel, feel, feel” three or four times and go back into breathing. Then let around three times of silence concentrating in your breathing, and to finish make a profound and slow respiration and open your eyes.36

b) Strategic dialogue technique. Making a strategic dialogue from the teaching performance of the experience, to indentify conscious and unconscious conducts and actions that limit having a proper treatment from the teacher. From the identification of the limits, we define the problem to be solved. It is recommended that in a narrative form, without judging or prejudice, simply flowing in an open and true way. This can be in two This exercise is our adaptation to the exercise presented by Dhammasami (2013: 33); the adaptation is in two perspectives: placing the experience of breathing in the classroom and the orientation of contacting with proper treatment.

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ways from the work of introspection (inner strategic dialogue) or through recording the real performance and watch the video, letting emotions and thoughts to flourish in order to visualize the problem. For example, it may be a bad handling of anxiety that leads to bursts inside the classroom through yelling and contempt towards students. c) Technique to digest abuse and proper treatment. Once the problem to be solved in the sensible present has been identified and defined, the next step is to go to the profound present using the technique of identification of abuse and proper treatment, in order to liberate tension arising from self-knowledge. The exercise can be memorized or recorded to follow the instructions of the breathing: B. Mindfulness exercise of teaching change towards a proper treatment Exercise preparation I want you to think, as a teacher, of two negative situations that have to do with abuse, which you do not wish to have, and two positive conditions of proper treatment that you would like to have (derived from the definition of the problem). In other words, think of desired and non desired things from your teaching treatment. We will begin the practice based on this scenario. To give you an example, “it is very easy for me to burst out due to my bad temper in the classroom, and I begin to yell and underestimate students. It happens every time I feel anxious due to class timing; there is no time for anything”. I have found these difficulties. Thus, I have become conscious of them and with a feeling of universal love to myself; my first wish is “to get rid of the yelling and disregarding”. In the second place, my wish is to handle anxiety. I will simply meditate “handling anxiety in order not to yell or disregard”. These are two of the most obvious wishes to me regarding negative situations. The two positive ones are being

Brief Therapy Mindfulnessâ&#x20AC;&#x192;|â&#x20AC;&#x192;145 empathetic and establish positive relationships with students. These are my two important things, hot topics to me in the present. I will incorporate them to my practice on proper treatment Step one Begin the breathing and as you concentrate in breathing, meditate on the following. In the first place, I choose myself as an object of meditation. I mentally say to myself: Now, handling anxiety, avoiding yelling and disregarding students, being empathic with them, moving ahead daily on my positive relationships meditating profoundly on my proper treatment, being happy and feeling profoundly happy (repeating it one more time). This paragraph is written based on the identification of the previous paragraph (preparation of the exercise). The way of writing it is through translating to the positive, avoiding negative phrases. Step two Next, I set my mind towards one person; for example, a student, visualizing and wishing like this: Now think in your students and express this: Good health and happiness are something positive and I want you to enjoy; an assertive, warm and friendly communication is what I want you to have; live together in class in a healthy way, for mutual benefit. Step three After that, we have to choose a neutral person. He or she can be someone from our school or someone from your society. That person must be someone you know, someone that is neither liked nor hated. He or she is completely neutral. Then, we direct our meditation to that person in the same way we did before37: good health and happiness are something positive, and I want you to enjoy it. An assertive, warm and friendly communication is what I want you to have; live together in class in a healthy way, for mutual benefit. Step four. When finishing the previous paragraph, the first one is mentioned one more time: Now handling anxiety, avoiding yelling and disregarding towards students, being empathetic with them, moving forward in my positive relationships, meditating profoundly towards a proper treatment, being happy and feeling profoundly so.

This exercise is an adaptation of the one presented by Dhammasami (2013: 50-52). The adaptation consisted in two aspects: the first one, linking the exercise to breathing; the second, orienting towards proper treatment.

146 | René Pedroza Flores Step five. Beginning the meditation Close your eyes, let your breathing flow naturally, inhale slowly and take the air inside you to the places where it is needed; exhale softly, by air leaving your body, leaves everything you no longer need. Make another two series of slow and profound breathing in the same way than the previous one; now38… focus on your breathing. Put your hands together, place them at the height of your chin at about 10 centimeters from it, in such a way that the tip of your fingers are together and the palms are separated; breath naturally at your own rhythm; with your eyes closed , concentrate in the tip of the fingers of your hands which are together… observe them… watch them closely… breath naturally… and as you breath slowly separate your hands, observe… feel… how a field of energy is formed between your hands as you move them and separate them slowly… as they separate, the field of energy grows and takes different shapes provided by your conscious mind, colors, sensations, sounds, light or nothing… wrap yourself into that field and let yourself be taken by your breathing slowly and profoundly… now that you are in that field, let your hands on your lap, breath profoundly at your own rhythm… listen slowly… Now handling anxiety, avoiding yelling and disregarding students, being empathetic with them, moving forward into my positive relationships, meditating profoundly on my proper treatment, being happy and feeling profoundly so (repeating it one more time). Now think in one of your students and express to him or her: good health and happiness are something positive and I want you to enjoy it; an assertive, warm and friendly communication is what I want you to have; live together in class in a healthy way, for mutual benefit. Think for a moment on someone else, whoever, and express to him: good health and happiness are something positive and I want you to enjoy it; an assertive, warm and friendly communication is what I want you to have; live together in class in a healthy way, for mutual benefit… Now handling anxiety, avoiding yelling and disrespecting students, being empathetic to them, moving forward into my positive relationships, meditating profoundly on my proper treatment, being happy and feeling profoundly so. Inhale profoundly and release air peacefully, observe the energy field around you, slowly, self hug position, feel how your hug lies in your chest, make a profound breathing when your arms lie on your chest, go back to natural rhythm of breathing and to the here and now, to this ]Where you find ellipsis, make pauses of about 3 and 5 seconds.

Brief Therapy Mindfulness | 147 present with everything around you, make a profound breathing, going back to your natural breathing and open your eyes at your own rhythm. You may stretch, move, yawn…

Second momentum. Change through reflexive acts and warmth This is a moment of visualization of the future from the present, avoiding falling into the trap of attempted solutions, appealing to self-reflection and full concentration. It is suggested to make a five-column chart writing down difficulties, attempted solutions, worst case scenarios, scenarios beyond the problem and small steps. The purpose is to make small changes increasing in time to end in radical change through action in order to achieve proper treatment from the teacher. Objectives • Identify the attempted solutions • Imagine the solution beyond the attempt • Go from breathing into action. • Begin change towards proper treatment through small steps. Strategies • Technique of dynamics of change • From breathing to action technique Process a) Begin by exploring the failed attempts. Things that have been done but were of no help at all, and have made the situation worse, as this is where the problem persists. After that, build solutions that could make the problem worse in the future, a previous step to imagining the non-attempted solution, and the start to make the first

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steps towards change. This can be written in a chart, setting as an example the one we established in the first momentum. Table 7 Dynamics of change Difficulty

Attempted solutions

Unhealthy anxiety before time limitations of class time, which ends up in yelling and disrespect towards students

Not to worry about time. Quiet down students constantly to make time be profitable. Stay quiet staring at students.

Worse case scenario

Scenario beyond the problem Impose Imagine what a worse the class would punishment to be like with students. no yelling, Ask students anxiety, nor who are disregarding: distractors a harmonious to leave the class, classroom. dynamic and Non-sense participative improvisation. where I, as a teacher, motivate and handle the class according to time in an assertive way.

Small steps

Wit and creativity rule. For example, begin with motivation, one thing at a time, creating a peaceful environment, etc.

Personal file.

b) Act under full conscience of what you do, remember that change lies within the small step made. It is now about from breathing into action. Memorizing or recording the exercises in order to follow the breathing instructions.

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C. From breathing into action mindfulness Close your eyes, and focus your mind in your nostrils. Begin to inhale and exhale naturally, make a profound breathing, slowly fill your lungs, your diaphragm and let your stomach expand, let air leave your mouth slowly. Now go back to your natural way of breathing, when inhaling say mentally “inhale”. This means you are naming the object. By exhaling, say mentally “exhale” (inspire, exhale, inspire, and exhale). Slowly take attention away from your breathing, and direct it to a class handling anxiety seeing yourself accompanying students, no yelling, no humiliation, wrapped in a cordiality and empathy atmosphere, visualize your positive relationship; maybe more thought about solution to problems will be present, let them flow, transform those thoughts into action, watch how now you have a proper treatment towards yourself, with your students and with nature and the cosmos, your actions are well received by your, look at yourself into action. Their attention is withdrawn, let it be as it will be found in your breathing, and your breathing will take you to visualize how you act with wit and creativity, you motivate students; anxiety is well handled because now you understand one thing at a time and you create a peaceful environment. Now make a pause and go back to digesting with your breathing that set of visualizations where you see yourself walking confidently towards a proper treatment, as you are making small steps that together make a qualitative leap in yourself as a person who is worried for his wellbeing and the one of his students. Observe your breathing, concentrate in your breathing, each time you inhale you take into you solutions and when the air leaves, you are set clear from everything which was blocking proper treatment; by air entering the body, proper treatment enters by means of your breathing, flow feely in your breathing for a few minutes (three or five minutes). Then make a profound breathing, and go back to your natural breathing, open your eyes slowly.

Third momentum. Consolidation and feedback At this last momentum, it is about reassuring the achieved change towards proper treatment appraising gained learning. One of the techniques to be applied is the one of correcting progressively the shot in order to find solutions as problems arise. A solution

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is a Pandora box, as other solutions may come to new problems. At proper treatment, each quality of the form of the conscience for proper treatment requires more than one solution. Besides, it also represents the moment of closure, of recognizing that full conscience has contributed to problem solutions by achieving intimate contact Objectives • Feedback the achieved solution. • Reassure the form of the proper treatment conscience. • Achieve peace with one self, with others and with the universe. Strategies • Inventory technique. • Benevolent love technique. Process a) Inventory technique. Make an inventory of pending situations that may arise form the achieved solution, it can be a list; then, classify pending things according to your change needs towards proper treatment and make a hierarchy so that you may start again the teaching change cycle. b) Benevolent love technique. Make an exercise of closure for full conscience; in this case we propose using the benevolent love discourse:

D. Mindfulness to proper treatment with harmony and peace Close your eyes, and with your eyes closes make a profound breathing, then inhale slowly through your nose and exhale softly through the mouth, repeat this a couple of times; now carefully observe a rose of the

Brief Therapy Mindfulness | 151 color you prefer, take it between your hands, consciously concentrated, explore it in detail, unconsciously see what you would add to it, perceive intensely its smell, its form, feel the petals, listen to it; now slowly start to take one petal at a time, as you take them you are entering into a full conscience with yourself, with others and with the universe, let yourself be taken by breathing, each time the petals are taken, you enter into a profound conscience, simply flow with your breathing, join your breathing profoundly… Now listen to the voice of universal wisdom from the benevolent love discourse… Consciously and unconsciously you are in the way of proper treatment… This should be done by an expert in kindness (proper treatment) and who wishes to know the path to peace; being capable, honest in action and word, simple on thoughts, of kind language, humble on its manners, not vain. Happy, not demanding, nor hectic about activities, frugal on its way of living. Calm in all six senses, wise, not arrogant, not too attached to families. Being wise at decisions, in order not to be judged by other later. Wishing happiness and security, for human beings to be happy. All human beings; weak or strong, tall or short, heavy built or light built, small or big; trying not to omit anyone, close and far, frequent or not. Born or not born everyone to be happy. No one cheating on another person, nor to be disregarded at any time. That no one, due to rage or bad will, harms someone else. Just like a mother takes care of the life of her son, her only son. Nevertheless, with an endless heart, one should harvest love towards human beings. Radiating benevolent love throughout the world, expanding it towards heaven and the depths, to the outside and to boundaries, free from hate and bad will. Standing or walking, sitting or resting, but awake. We should establish this full attention. It is said that one dwells in it. Not having wrong points of view, being virtuous and having a clear mind. Being free from sensual desire (which may be opposite to proper treatment), as one is not born into this world again Now focus on your breathing, make a profound breathing, then slowly inhale through the nose and exhale slowly through the mouth, repeat this way of breathing a couple of times; now observe carefully how the rose of the color that you have chosen begins to shape again, each petal goes back to make the rose again, one by one, each petal returns no the rose and you are back to the here and now, keep your breathing to a natural rhythm, now that the rose is set back, let it go softly through the air, your full conscience flows harmonically, healthily, watch how the rose

152 | René Pedroza Flores is lost slowly in the horizon, go back to the here and now, to this place in the present, sure of yourself with full conscience of proper treatment, keeping it now, forever. Open your eyes at your own rhythm and stretch yourself as if you had just awoken, you may yawn and stretch39.

We have full trust in the possibility of teaching swift under this proposal. It is a therapeutical and educational proposal because the teacher uses his own resources, experiences and learning in order to avoid abusing from the students, it is a way of being conscious of what he does and how he does it. The end is to achieve emotional wellbeing of the teacher and proper treatment towards students, by a way of overcoming black pedagogy which prevails at pedagogical treatment. This proposal is experiential, change is lived, experimented in the ordinary, there are no recipes to change, it means an effort and the least that can be provided is a compass that provides reference to the way traced by each one on their map, and which he is willing to walk through over drawing on his steps on an endless road, with only some areas to rest and recover energy. It requires assuming an explorer attitude in order to scan conscience’s terrain and spike at the top of the mountain the flag of emotional health and of proper treatment Some final considerations to be taken into account at the time of applying this proposal are: • It is recommended to make the process of each momentum gradually and it is convenient not to skip any steps in the process. • To each discomfort that needs resolution respecting abuse, and in order to lead it towards proper treatment,

The second paragraph was adapted from Benevolent love discourse from the Dhammasami (2013: 53-54) book. The other paragraphs are of our own.

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the path must be walked momentum by momentum. It is recommended to work one step at the time, not taking solutions all at a time. Dedicate exclusive time, without interruptions or distractions, to develop the practice for each momentum. • Not sparing on the time needed to perform the development of the three momentums. Despite the fact that there is not an inflexible proposal, it is recommended that time is considered according to the own needs and rhythms. • Mindfulness exercises should be recorded. For exercises “B” and “C”, the words in italics could be changed according to the solution given, the others remain the same. For exercises “A” and “D” they should be done as they are. • To identify the possible problems to solve, it is necessary to look at yourself in the mirror from the everyday performance as a teacher and listen to students on the performance. Last, we wish that with this proposal there is some advance on positive pedagogy based in proper treatment, where the teacher assumes his personal change as a way of life oriented towards a healthy, secure and responsible livelihood, in order to create a climate of kindness and happiness. Constructing a school where proper treatment from the teacher rules.

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