One question, three threads
One question runs through everything I do: how a person orders what they know, and stays whole, when they are thrown into something they do not yet command. It is there in a Renaissance scholar holding a whole cosmos together, in a student under the pressure of examinations, and in a learner finding their footing in a language they do not yet speak.
Ordering what we know
I read the intellectual history of the Italian Renaissance, and at its centre is Fabio Paolini’s Hebdomades (Venice, 1589): a vast encyclopedic treatise built around the number seven, a commentary on a single line of Virgil deployed across seven books of seven chapters each. I read it as an attempt to hold body, nature, and the divine together in one architecture, without letting them fragment or dissolve into one another.
It grows from earlier work: a thesis on Leonardo da Vinci’s esoteric thought in his manuscripts, available on Academia, and a continuing study of Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and the philosophy of science. The question beneath all of it is the same: how a mind orders a whole world, and what that ordering asks of the person who attempts it.
Digited Hebdomad sets out the reading itself, and the public research notebook, kept in the open as the work grows, is Digited Notes.
Staying well under pressure
The same attention turns to people under load. I have written on fostering personal care in a digital age, and on teacher burnout in international schools: how it builds, and the conditions, personal and structural, under which it can be prevented. It is grounded in a Postgraduate Certificate in Mental Health and Wellbeing in Education.
For students in the diploma years, it becomes the practical art of carrying pressure: building a method, pacing the work, and keeping some balance while the stakes are high. The capacity to do the work and the capacity to remain well are not separate problems.
For students, this is the whole of Digited Secondary.
Learning the subject and the language together
I am drawn to what it takes to learn, and to be taught, in a language you do not yet command. I have lived and worked in countries whose language I did not speak, and I learned those languages not in a room set aside for language, but in the act of using them for something real. That is why I prefer CLIL.
Content and Language Integrated Learning treats the subject and the language as one task. The language is built inside the history or the science lesson, for the whole class, so that learners use the language to learn and learn the language by using it. It asks the subject teacher to be a language teacher too. I find it truer to how people actually become fluent, and kinder to the learner, than treating the language as a separate hurdle to clear before the real work can begin.
For teachers, this is Digited CLIL.
How they rhyme
Three threads, one question. In each, the capacity to think clearly and the capacity to remain whole turn out to be conditions of one another. They are meant to be read together, and I leave the connections for you to draw.
In contact
I work in English, French, and Italian, and I welcome scholarly exchange and enquiry.
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