carl rogers and communication

We seem to forget that people matter! Psychologist Carl Rogers put them first:

The person-centered approach, Rogers's approach to understanding personality and human relationships, found wide application in various domains, such as psychotherapy and counseling (client-centered therapy), education (student-centered learning), organizations, and other group settings.

Looking at his person-centered therapy:

Person-centered therapy emphasizes the importance of creating a therapeutic environment grounded in three core conditions: unconditional positive regard (acceptance), congruence (genuineness), and empathic understanding.

And in education:

PCT has also been applied in educational and youth counseling settings. Its emphasis on empathy, acceptance, and authentic communication makes it particularly effective for adolescents and young adults who are navigating identity development, interpersonal challenges, and emotional regulation. Additionally, the non-directive nature of PCT allows it to be used across cultural contexts where traditional therapist-led approaches may not align with community values or client expectations.

He's quite important, with his Humanistic Approach and Psychology:

In the landscape of 20th-century psychology and education, few figures loom as large as Carl Ransom Rogers. His person-centred approach to therapy and education has left an indelible mark on how we understand human growth, learning, and interpersonal relationships...

These ideas have had a profound impact on our understanding of child development and learning. They have influenced educational practices, particularly in Early Years settings, by promoting child-centred approaches that value each child’s unique perspective and potential for growth (Rogers, 1969).

Rogers’ work has not only shaped the field of psychology but has also had far-reaching implications for education, counselling, and even international diplomacy. His emphasis on empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard has influenced approaches to conflict resolution and peace-making on a global scale (Kirschenbaum, 2007).

From the Infed website, we go deeper into Carl Rogers, core conditions and education:

The strength of Rogers’ approach lies in part in his focus on relationship: "We cannot teach another person directly; we can only facilitate his learning".

Carl Rogers was a gifted teacher. His approach grew from his orientation in one-to-one professional encounters. He saw himself as a facilitator – one who created the environment for engagement. This he might do through making a short (often provocative, input). However, what he was also to emphasize was the attitude of the facilitator. There were ‘ways of being’ with others that foster exploration and encounter – and these are more significant than the methods employed.

He was particularly interested in Experiential Learning:

Rogers distinguished two types of learning: cognitive (meaningless) and experiential (significant). The former corresponds to academic knowledge such as learning vocabulary or multiplication tables and the latter refers to applied knowledge such as learning about engines in order to repair a car. The key to the distinction is that experiential learning addresses the needs and wants of the learner. Rogers lists these qualities of experiential learning: personal involvement, self-initiated, evaluated by learner, and pervasive effects on learner.

Here are a couple of (short!) videos:

The Humanistic Theory by CARL ROGERS - Simplest Explanation Ever - YouTube

Carl Rogers: Meaningful Learning and the Role of the Facilitating Teacher - YouTube

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trurl's electronic bard vs chatgpt

BBC Radio 4 does a 'bedtime story' most evenings - and this week, it's been The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem - Trurl's Electronic Bard.

As the BBC blurb says: Stanislav Lem's comic parables The Cyberiad, first published in the 60s, anticipate nanotechnology, our ambivalent relationship with the internet and debates around AI and creativity.

Published 60 years ago, The Cyberiad is indeed very relevant to today's 'debates'...

Especially in the last couple of years, there's been a lot of commentary:

Stanisław Lem’s The Cyberiad: I started on the part of the work called “The First Sally (A) or Trurl’s Electronic Bard,” and it hit me! The Electronic Bard is basically Lem’s prediction, from 1965, of ChatGPT. The Twenty-Third Sally, or How ChatGPT, The Electronic Bard, Created a Cacophony of Digital Storytelling in a Literature Class

"Have it compose a poem--a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!" The Lippard Blog: Trurl's Electronic Bard vs. ChatGPT

The science-fiction writer didn’t live to see ChatGPT, but he foresaw so much of its promise and peril. Thinking About A.I. with Stanisław Lem | The New Yorker

Rather creepily, one of Google's AI things is named after the story - as discussed on this Google Group's pages: Trurl's electronic bard

And here's a service which calls itself a Google bard ai detector AI Detector – Trusted AI Checker for ChatGPT, GPT5 & Gemini | JustDone AI

And to finish this bit, here's the full story - in digital format of course: Trurls-Electronic-Bard.pdf

AI news: Artificial Intelligence absorbs of Shakespeare’s sonnets to create original poem | Science | News | Express.co.uk [from 2020]

Finally, though, today's news from the BBC shows that it's not just poetry that AI is producing but pop divas: Sienna Rose: AI suspicions surround mysterious singer - BBC News

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what is 'enshittification'?!

A recent piece in the New Yorker on The Age of Enshittification looked at an interesting word: “Enshittification” was named the word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2023 and by Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary in 2024. The embrace of the term reflected a sense of collective frustration.

And a recent piece on this blog also looked at the term: 6-7 or parasocial or enshittification - what makes a good word of the year?: “The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

Back to the very beginning and end of the New Yorker piece:

Sometimes a term is so apt, its meaning so clear and so relevant to our circumstances, that it becomes more than just a useful buzzword and grows to define an entire moment. “Enshittification,” coined by the prolific technology critic and author Cory Doctorow, is one of these. Doctorow came up with the phrase, in 2022, to describe how all the digital services that increasingly dominated our daily lives seemed to be getting worse at the same time. Google Search had become enshittified, showing ads and product links instead of relevant website results. TikTok had become enshittified, artificially “heating” specific videos so that some would go viral, inspiring copycats and goosing engagement while frustrating creators whose output didn’t get the same treatment. Twitter would soon become royally enshittified in its reincarnation as X, losing its status as a global town square, as it tipped into Muskian extremism and rewarded grifters and meme accounts over legitimate news sources. Spotify, iPhones, Adobe software, e-mail inboxes—it was hard to think of a platform or device that wasn’t seeing a decay in user experience. Wasn’t technology supposed to endlessly improve in the long run? ...

The book stops short of fully extrapolating enshittification to national politics, but the term is certainly also relevant in that realm. If the playbook Doctorow describes involves promising benefits to people only to erratically renege on, and degrade, existing services, then Donald Trump is the enshittifier-in-chief. Under his second Administration, scientific research, diplomacy, corporate watchdogging, and social services have all gotten worse. The beneficiary, of course, is largely Trump himself. Perhaps the worst outcome of enshittification is that it drives us to expect things to be bad, and to assume that they will only get worse.

Which is where the piece by the inventor of the word comes in, in a piece which Cory Doctorow wrote for the Guardian this week: Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again - or: The US president is weaponising tech, but his tariffs and Brexit provide a surprising opportunity to gain back digital control of our lives:

We adopted laws – at the insistence of the US trade rep – that prohibit programmers from helping you alter the devices you own, in legal ways, if the manufacturer objects. This is one thing that leads to what I refer to as the enshittification of technology. There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product to make it work better for its users (at the expense of its manufacturer). But the Trump tariffs change all that. The old bargain – put your own tech sector in chains, expose your people to our plunder of their data and cash, and in return, the US won’t tariff your exports – is dead.

With lots more here:

Enshittification - Wikipedia

'Enshittification' is coming for absolutely everything | FT [February 2024]

What Is Enshittification? Definition, Effects, Mental Health Risk [November 2025]

What Does 'Enshittification' Mean And When Does It Happen? | HuffPost UK Life [November 2025]

Finally, for a look at this from two years ago when the term first came out, see this piece: Jay Doubleyou: controlling ai - part two: how chatgpt is ruining the internet:

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leopold kohr: opposing the cult of 'bigness' - and understanding that 'small is beautiful'

The idea that Small Is Beautiful was first popularised by the German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher over fifty years ago.

But his challenge to 'bigness' came from his mentor Leopold Kohr. And indeed, another of Kohr's pupils gave the lecture The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics - this being the educationalist and philosopher Ivan Illich who has featured several times on this blog:

During his life-time, this teasing leprechaun was recognized by very few as a man ahead of his time. Even today, few have caught up with him; there is still no school of thought that carries on his social morphology... Throughout his life, Kohr labored to lay the foundations for an alternative to economics; he worked to subvert conventional economic wisdom, no matter how advanced.

With more on Leopold Kohr from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics:

Believing in the effectiveness of returning to the local level to solve the problems affecting humankind, he saw small self-governing communities as best able to solve their problems with their own resources.

He was against 'bigness':

Leopold Kohr was highly critical of the claim that the world is split into too many states and opposed pan-nationalist, continental and global unions. He argued that the success of Swiss Confederation did not lie in a union between the French, German and Italian-speaking peoples, as that would lead to the domination of Swiss Germans and to the gradual decline of other groups. The reason that Switzerland remained diverse was that instead of having three nationalities, it was federated into 22 cantons, representing the actual cultural divisions of Switzerland. Kohr argued that number of autonomous cantons "eliminates all possible imperialist ambitions on the part of any one canton, because it would always be outnumbered by even a very small combination of other".[15]

According to Kohr, a European Federation of unequally large states would lead to a domination of a single nation and thus an erosion of dialects and smaller languages "with just the same inevitability as the German federation, in which 24 small states were linked to the one 40-million Power of Prussia ended up in Prussian hegemony". For him, a successful European unification can be based only on the Swiss model, which would entail splitting the existing nation-states into smaller ones on the basis of cultural and historical regions. He defends the concept of Kleinstaaterei by arguing that while in the Middle Ages, wars were common, they were brief and caused little to no devastation. However, after the consolidation of Europe into a few large states, every war that erupted between caused huge destruction and loss life.[15]...

Kohr also discusses the problem of cultural heritage and cultural assimilation. According to him, culture is a product of individuals, and since individual cannot prosper under a large power, neither can culture. He describes democracy as a "system of divisions, factions, and small-group balances", which slowly wither away under internal consolidation of a large state and with it the ability for cultural and intellectual flourishment.[27]

Following the banking crisis of 2009, the author Paul Kingsnorth wrote in the Guardian that this economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness':

One man who would not have been surprised by this crisis of bigness, had he lived to see it, was Leopold Kohr. Kohr has a good claim to be the most important political thinker that you have never heard of...

Drawing from history, Kohr demonstrated that when people have too much power, under any system or none, they abuse it. The task, therefore, was to limit the amount of power that any individual, organisation or government could get its hands on. The solution to the world's problems was not more unity but more division. The world should be broken up into small states, roughly equivalent in size and power, which would be able to limit the growth and thus domination of any one unit. Small states and small economies were more flexible, more able to weather economic storms, less capable of waging serious wars, and more accountable to their people. Not only that, but they were more creative. On a whistlestop tour of medieval and early modern Europe, The Breakdown of Nations does a brilliant job of persuading the reader that many of the glories of western culture, from cathedrals to great art to scientific innovations, were the product of small states.

To understand the sparky, prophetic power of Kohr's vision, you need to read The Breakdown of Nations. Some if it will create shivers of recognition. Bigness, predicted Kohr, could only lead to more bigness, for "whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions". Beyond those limits it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible endpoint: collapse.

Here are some very helpful reviews and summaries of The Breakdown of Nations by Leopold Kohr on Goodreads

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the return of the erasmus student scheme - and the esl/esol/tefl industry

Before Brexit, the UK benefitted from the Erasmus programme which enabled higher education students to study or work abroad as part of their degree, as well as staff to teach or train in over 30 European countries - which included places outside the EU.

The UK left the EU in 2016 and seemed to think the Erasmus project wasn't that important: U.K. Mourns the End of Erasmus Program in Wake of Brexit - The New York Times 

Here's a view from 2021:

The UK government’s decision not to participate in the Erasmus scheme is short-sighted and will undoubtedly have negative economic, political, cultural and linguistic consequences for a country trying to reposition itself globally. On the plus side, it is great news for the students of Northern Ireland that the Irish government in Dublin has committed to subsidise the Erasmus Year for Northern Irish students at an expense of more than 2 Million Euros. You cannot put a price on what this offers in terms of ‘soft power’ influence. The Conservative government in Westminster could learn a lot from their Irish neighbours.

Why Jettison Erasmus? The negative consequences for the UK of walking away

Before Christmas, it was announced that the UK will rejoin Erasmus student scheme in 2027 and in the latest EL Gazette, we get the view from the world of esl/esol/tefl:

The Erasmus scheme, known officially as Erasmus+, will be reopened to those involved in education, training, culture and sport from 2027...

“It’s incredible news – we are delighted that this opportunity is returning for our members as well as millions of people in the UK and the EU,” said Annie Wright, joint acting chief executive of English UK...

David Hughes, the chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said the announcement was “brilliant news” for staff and students of all ages in further education colleges...

Alex Stanley, vice president for higher education of the National Union of Students said: “In the time we have not been in Erasmus, the number of UK students studying in the EU, and vice versa, has plummeted. This announcement will expand opportunity through universities and vocational courses, strengthen ties with our European neighbours, and allow a generation of students the chance to study abroad at a much more affordable rate.”

Return of Erasmus a boost for UK ELT - E L Gazette

And English UK certainly thinks that "The return of Erasmus+ will boost UK ELT".

Finally, here's the official government page: The Erasmus+ programme - GOV.UK

Sounds good! UK to re-join Erasmus+ – here are six benefits of the European exchange scheme

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english teachers abroad: stories and histories

Here's a great book just out which shows the life of the TEFL teacher over the decades - as reviewed by the EL Gazette:

As this is a history of TEFLers and not a history of TEFL, it is certainly a first, and anyone who has ever taught English overseas will love it. Written in two parts, the first part of The Experience of Expatriate English Language Teaching outlines the everyday experiences of expat TEFLers as depicted in fiction, memoirs, biographies and autobiographies. The second covers the history of the ELT profession as reported by language tutors dating from Shakespearian times to the present. Being at various times erudite, sardonic and often self-deprecating, author David Wilson has provided a veritable feast to sit back and enjoy over the winter.

“A veritable feast”: The Experience of Expatriate English Language Teaching - E L Gazette

Here's the preface, available as a free download: the-experience-of-expatriate-english-language-teaching-sample.pdf

With more from the publisher: The Experience of Expatriate English Language Teaching - Cambridge Scholars Publishing

And from Amazon: The Experience of Expatriate English Language Teaching: Amazon.co.uk: Wilson, David B.: 9781036446031: Books

There are other accounts - but personal stories rather than a 'history':

Day in the Life of a TEFL Teacher | TEFL BARCELONA

My Life-Changing TEFL And Digital Nomad Experience | TTA

My TEFL Experience in Spain: A Great Experience Teaching English

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metaphor is everywhere - and is the stuff of language

Using metaphor is a very good way to communicate.

For example, in how to give a 3 minute presentation we learn that winning speakers made use of metaphor and other verbal illustrations to simplify a complex idea.

If we accept that we are by nature multilingual, then it's good to have an understanding of how metaphor works and that it is central to how in fact language works.

We live by metaphors, as in clichés, pragmatics and how we use language to connect us beyond the actual words used:

Metaphors We Live By - Wikipedia [metaphor is a tool that enables people to use what they know about their direct physical and social experiences to understand more abstract things like work, time, mental activity and feelings.] and Metaphors We Live By: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson - YouTube [Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphors aren’t just poetry, but a fundamental part of our brain conceptual system. That is, they’re central to the way we perceive ourselves, others, and the world.]

It goes pretty deep, whether it's the language of money... the language of religion... the language of love...:

The Bible is peppered with the language of debt. Sin, forgiveness, reckoning, redemption - all of these words actually derive from the language of ancient finance. What's more, this seems to be true in all the great religious traditions - not just Judaism and Christianity, but Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam - all of their texts are filled with financial metaphors, many of which relate to issues surrounding debt... We tend to think of these religions as teaching us that we must repay our debts. But the truth is that the financial metaphors in religious texts are oddly ambivalent. The original translation of the Lord's Prayer from 1381 reads "Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors". But do we forgive our debtors? Actually, most of us don't.

[There is in The Merchant of Venice] the ironic weight the actors gave to all the financial metaphors that Shakespeare deploys in the love plot. Bassanio’s pursuit of Portia is first announced as his scheme “to get clear of all the debts I owe”, because Portia is rich. He refers to Portia’s famed “worth”, and calls her a “rich” “gem”. He marvels: “Look on beauty, / And you shall see ’tis purchas’d by the weight.” And while Shylock demands the fulfilment of the “bond” that Antonio signed, the pledged lovers twitter happily about “love’s bonds”, and Graziano speaks of the “bargain” of their faith. At the end, Portia tells Antonio that he is going to be Bassanio’s “surety”, to guarantee his faithfulness.

Or, to look at a BBC piece on the words that help us understand the world: 

We use them so much in everyday language that we often don’t even notice them, but metaphors and similes help us think more deeply – and make sense of the world around us...

And here's a fascinating piece on The Ubiquity of Metaphor from the perspective of a behavioural scientists.

So, it's more than just a bit of 'fancy' or 'flowery' language: language is metaphor.

Let's look at some philosophy and whether someone can explain structuralism to me like I'm 5;

1: Levi-Strauss reckoned that the way we think about things has been set in place already by cultural factors (mainly language) - so the individual is almost a base through which ‘society’ does its work. Think about it like this - language existed before we were, and will continue after we will be gone, but we think through it and it constrains our understanding. The language allows understanding by contrasting together concepts, like dark:light. Would you understand dark if you didn't understand light? Then language goes one step further, and uses metaphor (or, if you like, myth) to allow even deeper understanding of something. So dark is to light as order is to chaos as Man is to Woman. You understand the first concept much more richly by linking it to your understanding of the other contrasts.

2: We actually understand things only through metaphors. Every word was once a metaphor - 'muscle' for example, came through the German word for 'mouse', because muscles looked like little animals moving under the skin. This extends up how we act out concepts. When we speak of 'knowledge', for instance, we understand it to be a 'space'. We 'shed light on that' or 'find common ground', or 'another perspective'. We therefore exchange knowledge freely, because everyone can stand in that space. Other cultures, for instance the Maori of New Zealand, understand knowledge to be a treasure. They therefore DON'T share knowledge except with (male) descendants, and don't particularly care if it's actually right or not, because it was a gift from their ancestors. See how this metaphor language stuff shapes society and understanding?

And let's look at the magazine Philosophy Now and A Gentle Introduction to Structuralism, Postmodernism And All That:

Structuralism arose on the continent, in particular in France, in the early 60s. The first ‘big name’ was Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, who took on Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading French intellectual and philosopher of the time, and didn’t so much win, as went unanswered (which from Sartre’s point of view was worse). Here was France’s main philosopher, Sartre, who usually had something to say about everything, being attacked in Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind, and yet not replying! The implication was that he couldn’t reply, and the intellectual mood began to move towards Lévi-Strauss’ intellectual position, which he called structuralism.

A simple explanation of structuralism is that it understands phenomena using the metaphor of language. That is, we can understand language as a system, or structure, which defines itself in terms of itself. There is no language ‘behind’ language with which we understand it, no metalanguage to explain what language means. Instead it is a self-referential system. Words explain words explain words (as in a dictionary), and meaning is present as a set of structures.

Helpful?!

To finish, here's something a bit strange(r)...

Going further, malaphors are when we get our metaphors mixed up [as in "it's not rocket surgery" instead of "it's not rocket science"!]

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