Compassion, Curriculum, Culture, Language and Linguistics

When children learn language… they are learning the foundation of learning itself.  The distinctive characteristics of human learning is that it is a process of making meaning…. Hence the ontogenesis of language is at the same time the ontogenesis of learning.  
Halliday 1993 in Webster vol. 4 p. 327

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“What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving from the heart”                                                   Marshall Rosenberg 2015

Elizabeth Thomson

Hello.  This website is the professional presence of Dr. Elizabeth A. Thomson.

It is a place for me to share my thinking and my work on compassion, curriculum, culture, language and linguistics.  I enjoy thinking about these issues and rather than keep my work in a filing cabinet, unshared,  I prefer to make it available to people to participate in knowledge building in these disciplines.

I have become very interested in the language of compassion.  I have come across the work of Dr Marshall Rosenberg, a psychologist whose work espouses nonviolent communication as a road to peace, both in our everyday lives and for society and nation states.  He teaches a style of talking which is compassionate, from the heart, with the intention to make life more wonderful for everyone concerned.

From a linguistic perspective, I understand this style as a register, a particular configuration of language for a particular context.  I am calling this an interpersonal register of compassionate talk.

Through my business, Coaching to Clarity, I have launched an online course series in the register of compassion available on the Openlearning.com platform.  It comprises three courses:

  1. Connecting Through Talk – INTRODUCTION
  2. Connecting Through Talk – THE INGREDIENTS
  3. Connecting Through Talk – BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

Also, every now and then, I’ll blog as something will strike me as important.  I enjoy getting comments or questions on my work, so feel free to respond. At the moment, my blogging on this site is about the register of compassion and my travels.  I also blog on the Coaching to Clarity website.  Click here to go to the C2C blog.

For learners, teachers, academics and researchers in curriculum, language and linguistics, I have made a lot of my unpublished work available.  If you use it, please cite me.  I’d be interested to know how you use it as well.  I provide the links to my published works and the publishers as well.

There are some resources which are behind a password. If you’d like to review these, drop me an email and I’ll help you out.

Enjoy.