I am Gavin Sealey and this is the Netstorms website.
I have been a school teacher and a youth worker during my career. And I have taught specific skills but I usually refer to myself as an educator rather than a teacher. The difference is a matter of feel. A teacher imparts knowledge and wisdom while an educator tries to draw it out of the learner in dialogic interaction. The word ‘educate’ is related to the word ‘educe’ which means ‘to draw out’. This is what I try to do in any dialogue and the process is I think more important to me that any outcome or change of conviction that might result from it. This is not to say that I take a neutral position on issues we are discussing but my business is never to teach you what to think and I avoid the extreme arrogance of believing I can teach you how to think, my business is to think with you, to check and challenge your thinking and invite you to do the same for me. This is the business of education, of philosophy, of dialogue. This ultimately is who I am and what I do and it’s why I post stuff to social media and on blogs like this.
What I do now is look to conversation, community and consciousness. Recently I’ve been helping groups set up community learning projects. What interests me is not running courses but creating persistent learning communities, contexts where we can explore our creativity with others who have or are developing the same interest in shifting the world and themselves into a more conscious, compassionate and creative direction.
I have a business, a company, Netstorms Limited, which I want to shift from supporting courses that I have taught or organised in the past to supporting the development and maintenance of communities using websites and other digital communication and creative media. The central aim of Netstorms is not to make money or to make websites or to deliver workshops (though I hope it will do those things), the central aim is to build conscious, caring, creative and conversational communities and for that I need the structure that a formally registered company gives and the support of those who choose to be associated with it.
Gavin Sealey.