A Different Three Rs for Education: Reason, Relationality, Rhythm (Value Inquiry Book Series 176)

A DIFFERENT THREE Rs FOR EDUCATION Reason, Relationality, Rhythm VIBS Volume 176 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Pete...

Author: George Allan | Malcolm D. Evans

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A DIFFERENT THREE Rs FOR EDUCATION Reason, Relationality, Rhythm

VIBS Volume 176 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Peter A. Redpath Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno Mary-Rose Barral Gerhold K. Becker Raymond Angelo Belliotti Kenneth A. Bryson C. Stephen Byrum H. G. Callaway Robert A. Delfino Rem B. Edwards Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Francesc Forn i Argimon William Gay Dane R. Gordon J. Everet Green Heta Aleksandra Gylling Matti Häyry

Steven V. Hicks Richard T. Hull Mark Letteri Vincent L. Luizzi Adrianne McEvoy Alan Milchman George David Miller Alan Rosenberg Arleen L. F. Salles John R. Shook Eddy Souffrant Tuija Takala Anne Waters John R. Welch Thomas Woods

a volume in Philosophy of Education PHED George David Miller, Editor

A DIFFERENT THREE Rs FOR EDUCATION Reason, Relationality, Rhythm

Edited by

George Allan Malcolm D. Evans

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

Cover Design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1699-X ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Printed in the Netherlands

CONTENTS ONE

TWO

THREE

Introduction: A Different Three Rs for Education in Context George Allan and Malcolm D. Evans 1. Why a New Approach to Educational Reform is Needed 2. The First Different R: Reason 3. The Second Different R: Relationality 4. The Third Different R: Rhythm 5. Concluding Thoughts What is a Process Perspective on Teaching and Learning? Malcolm D. Evans 1. Becoming is a Process 2. Creativity is in All Creatures 3. The World is Interconnected 4. All Experience is Emotional 5. All Individuals are Constituted by Their Internal Relations 6. Conclusion On Learning to be Good George Allan 1. The Standard Ways 2. The Process Ways 3. Pathways to Goodness 4. Socratic Goading

1 1 3 7 11 14 17 17 18 20 21 23 24 27 28 30 33 41

FOUR

43 Romancing Education: Whitehead on the Love of Learning Foster N. Walker 1. Romance Can be the Beginning of a Serious Love Affair 43 44 2. The Work of Romance is Serious Play 3. A Romance Story: Learning to be a Teacher 46 4. The Romance of Dialogue and Partnered Dialogue-Journal s 50 5. More on the Romance of Dialogue: Student-Directed 55 Class Inquiry 6. Romancing Education: A Whiteheadian Vision 58

FIVE

Genre, Relationality, and Whitehead’s Principle of Relativity: How We Write Daniel Royer 1. Genre’s Recent History 2. Whitehead and Genre

61 61 64

vi SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

CONTENTS Whitehead and Environmental Education Pete A. Y. Gunter 1 Whitehead’s Philosophy of Nature: An Historical Prelude 2. Some Concepts of Nature 3. Education 4. Education and the Earth Finding Flow through Discipline and Imagination William J. Garland 1. Three Stages of Learning 2. Flow Experiences 3. Relating Flow to Learning 4. An Example: Teaching Logic 5. Another Example: Teaching Literature 6. Conclusions Nourishing Relationships that Nourish Life Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore 1. A Word of Warning: A Revealing Movie 2. A Word of Possibility: A Revealing Case Study 3. Relational Education 4. Relating with Self 5. Relating with Community and Culture 6. Relating with People of Difference 7. Relating with the Earth 8. Relating with Social Structures 9. Conclusion They Wear Their Learning With Imagination Christelle Estrada 1. Describing the Content and Process for Practice-Based Professional Development 2. Three Foundational Assumptions 3. Student Authors as Advocates: Elementary School Case Study 4. Peer Tutors as Advocates: Middle School Case Study 5. Making Sense together with Colleagues 6. Practical Questions: Seeking Harmony and Discrepancies 7. In Summary: The Political Question is a Human Question 8. Concluding Synthesis and Creative Choices

75 76 77 80 82 87 87 88 91 93 96 100 103 104 105 106 107 109 112 114 116 118 121

122 124 128 130 132 134 136 138

TEN

Contents

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Teaching Etcetera M. Jayne Fleener and Stacy Reeder 1. Language Games Approach 2. Modernism and the Mathematization of Reality 3. Language Games and a Change of Aspect 4. Wesley’s Change of Aspect 5. Students’ Experiences of Mathematics as Patterns and Relationships 6. Changing Ways of Seeing Mathematics 7. Understanding Teaching Etcetera

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ELEVEN Reason: A Gift to be Nurtured Malcolm D. Evans 1. Why be Concerned about Reason? 2. What is Reason? 3. Can Reasonableness be an Aim of Education? 4. Is Critical Thinking Important? 5. What is the Reality of Reason in the Classroom? 6. Epilogue

142 143 144 145 146 150 151 155 155 157 159 161 163 166

TWELVE Educational Spiritualities: Parker J. Palmer and Relational Metaphysics John B. Bennett 1. Introduction 2. Objectivism and Cultures of Fear 3. Community 4. Hidden Wholeness 5. Paradoxes 6. Conclusion

169 171 176 178 179 182

About the Contributors

185

Index

189

169

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One INTRODUCTION: A DIFFERENT THREE Rs FOR EDUCATION IN CONTEXT George Allan and Malcolm D. Evans 1. Why a New Approach to Educational Reform is Needed The increased complexity of contemporary life calls for a new approach to educational reform in the United States. Our current educational practices were designed for a simpler kind of world than now exists. Anchored in rural eighteenth century America, and subsequently adapted to the industrial transformations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these practices are no longer sufficient. Recent proposals for improving education, however, have been rooted in this same eighteenth century perspective, and so are proving to be as inadequate as the practices they seek to improve. Prescriptions for bettering the quality of American education are plentiful these days. Think tanks, business associations, teacher unions, university scholars, the federal government, state governments, and local school boards—individuals and groups of every sort have been offering proposals for reforming how students should be taught and how schools should be administered. Some from this seemingly wide range of options have been implemented on an experimental or even a permanent basis, backed up by attention-focusing financial penalties and incentives. For example, charter schools are often created as paradigms of excellence for other schools to emulate. Voucher programs are implemented as a way to use the mechanisms of free market competition to improve the quality of the educational services a school provides. High-stakes tests based on national norms are mandated, gathering student achievement data that is used to compel schools to make specified improvements in organization, pedagogy, and teacher competence. The contributors to this book are certainly in favor of the lure provided by good role models, the tonic of competitive advantage, and the importance of high standards of academic excellence. But we are also acutely aware of the limitations to each of these strategies. The charter schools approach, for instance, seems to presume that the problem with most schools is the absence of creative initiative, and that success in one context is readily transferable to other contexts. Yet successful teaching is deeply contextual and the barriers to innovation are all too often inadequate resources not inadequate imaginations. Moreover, if the model schools attract a

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GEORGE ALLAN and MALCOLM D. EVANS

disproportion of the better students, the abler teachers, and the available funds in a region, as they often do, then their success comes at the expense of the other schools. Ironically, they deny the other schools precisely the resources and talents those schools desperately need in order to emulate their supposed role models. Vouchers are an interesting strategy for distributing students among a range of schools based on their and their parents’ interests instead of, as traditionally, on a shared neighborhood. We should be skeptical, however, about the relevance of an economic mechanism for maximizing profits as the best approach for fostering character and for developing the powers of appreciation, critical thinking, and good judgment we expect of adults. Unformed minds and unformed lumps of plastic are not the same. What works for promoting the production of high quality widgets is not necessarily going to work for promoting high quality education, and quite likely will impede it. Although everyone is in favor of educational excellence, high academic standards and standardized tests are quite different things. Precisely what is required for a test to be standardized—formulating questions for which no unequivocally correct answers exists—excludes assessing a student’s ability to make warranted judgments about ambiguous alternatives or to imagine fresh ones. Yet a first-rate education is every bit as much about learning to choose wisely and think creatively as it is about acquiring specific information. An even more serious deficiency in the current roster of reform initiatives is that these strategies are typically proposed by advocates of some singleminded—and hence close-minded—ideological viewpoint, which they seek to impose on those whose viewpoints are different. These self-confident advocates are not confined to one end of the political spectrum. Political liberals can be as close-minded as their conservative counterparts, multicultural postmodern relativists as self-righteously assured of their hold on truth as Christian fundamentalists. Unfortunately, but predictably, these clashing absolutists attempt increasingly to use political power to defeat their opponents. A good way to secure this power is by the strident excesses in word and deed that attract the attention of the mass media, and that thereby lead to the increased financial support that nowadays seems the necessary condition for political success. Attempts at compromise, at reconciling differences through an open exchange of views, are rare. The consequence of operating in this politically and ideologically charged atmosphere is devastating. Reformists are all too eager to substitute quantity for quality—to equate the extent to which students remember specific information with the quality of their learning, to reduce the effectiveness of teachers to the score distributions of their students, to judge a school solely by student test scores, attendance records, and graduation rates. This loss of subtly and nuance in appraising educational achievement means a disregard or outright disdain for the very complexity we have said is the salient feature of our times.

Introduction: A Different Three Rs for Education in Context

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If any educational reform is to be adequate, it must take a broader and more inclusive approach than has so far been the case. Reform cannot be based on simplistic characterizations of what the problems are and how they can be solved. Precisely because these problems are complicated, addressing them calls for insights from a variety of perspectives, none by itself sufficient to the challenges we face. As a beginning for what must be a shared inquiry, we think it makes sense to say that twenty-first century America would benefit from an educational process that possesses, at minimum, three characteristics. (1) Our schools should teach students a more complex way of reasoning, one that is holistic, that emphasizes systems of connection. (2) Our schools should teach students a more complex concern for how we might relate to others, one that is open to novelty, that emphasizes the importance of differences to achieving the common good. (3) Our schools should teach students a more complex grasp of the rhythmic character of how we reason and relate, one that appreciates change, that emphasizes the creative skills needed in a dynamic world. Hence we have called our book A Different Three Rs For Education. The traditional three Rs—reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic—are still indispensable, to be sure. They are necessary to any genuine sort of learning, but they are no longer sufficient. They need to be enriched, expanded, deepened by integrating them with an additional three Rs—reasoning, relationality, and rhythm—which have become equally important in our complex world. This introductory essay sketches a context for the twelve essays that follow. We will indicate what we mean by these different three Rs, and we will suggest their relevance to the educational challenges posed by complexity. We see the skills of reasoning, relationality, and rhythm as crucial ways by which students can gain the ability to respond intelligently and creatively to the world in which they are growing up. We believe that it will be through enhancing the proven virtues of traditional education by teaching these skills, instead of through the mindless imposition of politicized quick fixes, that genuine reform in American education is most likely to occur. 2. The First Different R: Reason Our world is becoming a global village. We see this development most clearly in the way electronic communication has expanded the horizon of our immediate experiences. Wars are no longer foreign, fought in far off lands beyond our caring, when the fighting is reported live and around the clock on our home

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television sets. Business establishments are no longer local when our phone call for a hotel reservation, at a destination half a day’s drive from home, is answered by a clerk located half a world away, most likely somewhere in India. Ease of communication leads to the creation of relationships no longer limited by distance, to trade arrangements and business organizations that are international in scope. Our grocery stores are stocked with fruits and vegetables that are out of season where we live, and they prominently display items associated with the cuisines of many other cultures. Those war clouds gathered in a country we cannot even find on a map may drive up the price of our weekly shopping cart or put our young adult children in harm’s way, even though where we live the sun is shining and the only uniform in sight is worn by our friendly neighborhood police officer. What is true for our emerging global society has always been true for the natural world. Everything is connected to everything else. The old cliché that politics like the weather is always local is as false for the weather as it is for politics. The local rain storm we are experiencing is part of a regional lowpressure system, the trajectory of which is being shaped by the jet stream, which has been pushed from its normal location by the El Niño shift in Pacific Ocean currents. Figuring out what the reasons for global warming are is a difficult and controversial undertaking because those reasons are too complex and interdependent to be captured by a simple formula in which, given conditions a, b, c, then consequences x, y, z must necessarily follow. Not only are we unsure we know all the relevant conditions, we also are unable to predict all the consequences to which those conditions are likely to give rise. Learning to be sensitive to the presence of these various complicated forms of connection, and learning how to utilize them, requires us to expand our sense of what it means to use our reasoning powers, to think rationally. Traditional ways of thinking are linear. They involve collecting discrete bits of information and organizing them in a sequence that leads from cause to effect or from premises to conclusion. We search for a specific organism or chemical pollutant that we can identify as being responsible for the green scum in the pond water. We attempt to identify the nation, leader, or action that was the cause of World War One. The culprit was Germany, or maybe France. Perhaps Tsar Nicholas was really to blame, or actually the war was a consequence of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo. We observe that Socrates is a person, and we believe that all persons are mortal; it follows necessarily, we argue, that Socrates is mortal. Linear thinking is highly disciplined. It calls for us to engage in detailed analysis: breaking a complex problem into its simpler components, then linking these components together into a causal or logical chain that leads us along a pathway from the initial problem to its solution. It insists that we be selfdisciplined: able to exert step-by-step patience in our inquiry, avoiding the ever-present temptation to jump hastily to an attractive and seemingly inevita-


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ble conclusion or to generalize our results prematurely, claiming they have the implications and ramifications we want them to have. Reasoning of this sort, exhibited in the standard canons of scientific method and the investigative techniques of Scotland Yard, remains the fundamental core of what counts as good thinking. Linear reasoning is no longer sufficient, however. It needs to be enhanced by a new way of reasoning, one that is nonlinear and holistic, that emphasizes patterns of connection. This kind of thinking asks us to look for the form underlying the bits of information, the structure that puts them in a context. It attends not to cause-effect sequences but to relational networks. It asks about all the various factors interacting in that scummy pond environment. How have these factors been changing, and how are these changes altering the pond’s ecology? The scum may be the result of no single change, no single causal intrusion, nor even of the compilation of several of them. The scum might have resulted from the way the network of interactions among the components has been altered. If so, the pond can best be cleared not by destroying an offending component but by readjusting the processes involved, the ways the various components are functioning—restoring the ecological health of the organic system we call a pond. Similarly, we need to determine what the complex web of political, economic, and cultural connections were in Europe during the early years of the twentieth century. How did their interplay lead to World War One? Perhaps a war can start that no single government intended. The actions they take, each innocuous in itself, can destabilize the established balance of power, creating conditions that no one component nation is able by itself to reverse. All the major powers were to blame for the war, although none of them was its cause. Aesthetic reasoning is a form of nonlinear thinking with which we are all familiar. In music, we hear a melody as a linear sequence of notes of different lengths and tones. Yet we also hear the pattern those notes express, for the melody is not just the notes but also their rhythmic structure and beat. We play the tune in different keys or in differing styles: as a waltz or a martial air, as a funeral march or as syncopated jive. Furthermore, a piece of music involves more than the melody line. Our experience is enriched when we provide the tune with chords that give it an undergirding harmonic structure—perhaps scoring it for a mixed quartet of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass voices. These chordal voices can be made quite complex, each with its own melody and rhythm, yet woven together with the other voices, their differing patterns forming a single unifying pattern. A further enrichment of our musical experience comes when we are able to hear the general musical form within which all these patterns develop. The melody might be structured as a fugue, made the theme for a sonata, or used as the initial statement in the andante movement of a symphony. Holistic thinking involves looking for all the possible ways in which a solution to a problem might be derived from a given set of established facts and

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relevant concepts. We begin by identifying as many premises-conclusion inference trees as possible. How many different but equally valid pathways are there to a solution? How many different solutions are valid given our starting point? We engage in an imaginative exploration of the web of logical connections relative to our problem. This exploration may involve thinking inside the box, undertaking a disciplined exploration of overlooked aspects or dimensions of the problem as initially formulated. It may involve thinking outside the box, creating alternative ways of structuring that problem, differing hypotheses that by putting a new frame around it point to novel solutions. Nonlinear thinking is thinking in terms of systems of interconnectedness in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Systems have features their components do not have. The wave of my hand with which I greet a person is more than the molecular rearrangements required by the gesture. The wave is effected by some of my muscles altering the location of some of my flesh and bones, and this system of bone and flesh and muscle is composed completely of molecules. The waved greeting is a feature of my arm, however, not of its component molecules. Similarly, our moral character as persons is more than any particular sequence of our actions. That character is the pattern those actions exhibit, perhaps our tendency to help others or, alternatively, to think only of ourselves. I am a good person if I usually do good deeds, even though sometimes what I do is bad and most of the time my actions are neither good nor bad. I am still a good person even though I am asleep. Reasoning in the new sense of nonlinear thinking is as rigorous and selfdisciplined an undertaking as is traditional linear thinking. We are not engaging in fanciful acts of intuition or mysticism, but focusing on the system of which our object of concern is a part, and on the systems of which that system is a part. Thinking in terms of wholes means always paying attention to the wider contexts in which our problems and their possible solutions are embedded. Teaching students to think in nonlinear ways means teaching them to think contextually. A rose is a rose, to be sure, but its meaning changes depending on context. A red rose may be understood as an example of a biological species. It might be offered as evidence of my love, however, or as an apology for having betrayed that love. It could serve as the logo for some commercial enterprise. For the supporters of the Lancastrian succession, it expressed their political defiance. We do not fully know the rose we see until we know its meanings, the contexts within which it is nested. Teaching critical thinking means teaching students to think in a nonlinear way, because it involves teaching them to look beyond the established boundaries, toward a wider context. The art of thinking in a critical fashion involves being skillful in examining boundaries—conditions of acceptability, of what makes obvious sense, of what is reasonable and proper—that are presupposed in assertions about what is true, good, or beautiful. These presuppositions needing examination are not only someone else’s but also our own. Students learn


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to think critically when they are asked to imagine alternative boundaries: new contexts, new ways of seeing, interpreting, valuing. These new perspectives justify, call into question, or recast the meaning of the original assertion. Students, for example, often presume uncritically that they know what “survival of the fittest” means. They should learn to be unwilling to let that presumption remain, however. They should take the time to explore the context in which that phrase is properly understood, to find out what fitness and survival mean in neo-Darwinian biology. If they do, they will not treat fitness as merely a tautology, arguing that to be fit means to survive. Nor will they be tempted into becoming social Darwinists, thinking that what is fit is what is morally superior. They will see survival of the fittest as a statistical statement about the greater likelihood that, in a given population, organisms with a trait that gives them a slight advantage in a given environment will have more offspring than those lacking that trait, and so eventually will outnumber them and finally replace them completely. If critical thinking requires this sort of creative imagination, then teachers should foster learning environments that shun dogmatic closure. Closure is always necessary, of course. To get anything done, we need to take what we believe is true and right and put it to use instead of questioning it. We do not want our students to become ineffectuals, unable to think or act because they are all the time fretting about the adequacy of their current beliefs. The problem is not closure but dogmatic closure—absolute thinking. We are absolute thinkers if we are unable or unwilling ever to question our frames of reference and to explore other possibilities. We presume that we know all that needs to be known, and so we are blind to the limits of our knowledge. To learn to reason in a nonlinear fashion means shedding such blinders. It means overcoming blindness due to parochial thinking, opening our eyes to the wider world’s relevance, to the importance of what is not ours, nor our kin or kind. It means overcoming blindness due to present-focused thinking, opening our eyes to the importance of the past and future, to the relevance of our biological and cultural heritage and to the significance of the long-range consequences of our choices. It means overcoming blindness due to either/or thinking, opening our eyes to the ambiguities in our lives, to subtle gradations of value, multiple influences and complicated linkages, to webs of mutual dependence. The new kind of reasoning we need to teach students is one that opens their eyes to the wonderful complexity of their world, and equips them with the skills by which to appreciate it fully and shape it creatively. 3. The Second Different R: Relationality An obvious expression of the growing complexity of our lives is that our neighborhood, hometown, nation, and world are becoming more diverse. Some

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of this diversity has been there all along, but denied or disdained; some is the result of increased mobility and immigration. America is unquestionably a multicultural nation, the wide variety of its citizens’ cultural heritages increasingly a reflection of the world’s cultural diversity. This burgeoning pluralism brings with it new patterns of responsibility. The people we are responsible for have changed. They are no longer limited to the immediate members of our families or to our friends in the neighborhood, because our families are scattered across the nation and the world and most of our neighbors are new to the neighborhood. We are all the time interacting with people whose looks, emotions, ideas, and actions are different than our own, and whose children go to school with our children, play with them on the same athletic teams, and take them out on dates. A function of citizens in a society is be responsible for the common good. We can easily imagine a time not all that long ago when the form and content of this good was clear to any thinking person. Whatever our superficial differences, we were the same in the things that mattered most. Commonalities of religion, ethnicity, and values defined our sense of common good. They were not merely accommodations of the moment, but long-established customary ways of relating with one another. We talked in what we took to be unaccented English, dressed in what was obviously a proper manner, agreed on what was right and wrong, and prayed to the same God, because that is how our parents and their neighbors behaved and believed. The importance and character of our common good was as self-evident as the need for clean water and fresh air—it was everywhere and at all times our support and comfort, a necessary condition for our well being. Educational institutions were designed to prepare young people to accept responsibility for this shared world. The school curriculum focused on teaching the basic facts, beliefs, values, and attitudes required for becoming a contributing adult member of a community marked by stable enduring relationships. For example, a recognizable common good has existed among the white inhabitants of the Upper Midwest since they first began settling that land in the last half of the nineteenth century. These Northern European immigrants and their families built the churches, schools, libraries, universities, factories, farms, towns, and cities which supported a shared sense of what was good and proper. Predominantly Lutheran and Scandinavian, they could with only minor problems absorb later influxes of Scottish Calvinists and Irish Catholics. As the region has become more diversified, however, the nature of the common good has become more elusive and obscure. Influxes of Mexican Catholics and Buddhist Hmong, Japanese technicians, and Somali taxi drivers, plus an upsurge of the indigenous Ojibwe with their casinos and tribal colleges, have meant that what was once taken for granted is now constantly in dispute. How can a society have a common good for which its members feel responsible, if it has nothing important in common any more?


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Governments at all levels have increasingly found it expedient to abandon their traditional concern for promoting the common good. Instead, politicians find their chances for reelection dependent on responding to special interests. They receive the financial support needed to run a viable campaign in exchange for providing their benefactors with various advantages, entitlements, and subsidies. Is the idea that we should be responsive to the needs of everyone in our community a viable notion in an era dominated by special-interest politics? Can a new, explicitly pluralistic, sense of a common good be developed that counters this fragmenting tendency? Learning how to respect our differences, and how to benefit from them, means learning how to becoming weavers—learning to make whole cloth from contrasting threads. A common good is not the precondition for a vibrant, successful community, as the traditional way of understanding relationality had insisted. The new sense of relationality appropriate to a diverse world is one that realizes commonality is something to be achieved, an outcome to be wrought. Our common good needs to be made instead of found. Community is a fabric to be fashioned by transforming divisive incompatibilities into creative tensions. Just as genetic diversity is key to how a biological lineage can survive environmental upheavals, so cultural diversity is key to our long-range survival and betterment as a nation. Relationality in this new sense can be achieved only if the members of a community have developed the skills required for reconciling differences, for weaving them together in creatively useful ways. To be able to do so requires learning how to see things from more than one perspective. We must develop a keen sense of empathy for those who are different than we are, whose viewpoints and attitudes, whose look and smell, are other than our own. A habit of empathizing with strangers encourages intellectual and moral curiosity. It fosters a sense of adventure, kindles our interest in exploring novel ideas and unmapped environments, in making new friends, developing new relationships. Empathy involves getting beyond second-hand knowledge, the mere facts of the matter, to first-hand interaction. One kind of knowledge is involved in knowing that the Appalachian Trail runs from Maine to Georgia; a different knowledge is gained by walking the trail. A big difference exists between loving humanity in the abstract and caring lovingly for a particular person. The warp upon which the woof threads of diversity can be woven are encounters of a third kind. Social interaction does not require the mutual mirroring of cultural clones, not does it entail the mutual combat of mortal enemies. It depends on the mutual self-transformation of those who open themselves to what they are not, and find the experience educative. Reconciling our differences does not mean obliterating them. Relationality in the sense relevant to life in a pluralistic society finds our differences an opportunity instead of an obstacle. Weaving is a good metaphor because it suggests that elements with sharply differing features can work together to create a single fabric, the value of which is a function of the ways in which its parts

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contrast and complement one another. Our neighborhoods and our nation need interest groups that take account of the whole society not just themselves, whose interest is in reconciliation, harmony, cooperation, consensus-building. Learning to compromise our demands for the sake of a common good is not to sacrifice them but to transform them. In the long run, after all, the common good is our good. We and our students need to realize that relationships never have outer boundaries that neatly separate “us” from “them,” the important from the trivial. The possibility always exists that we and they might have more in common that we had thought, that our disagreements are not fundamental. Finding this common ground with our opponents requires changing the horizon of our concerns and commitments, recasting the range of those to whom and for whom we are responsible to encompass people, beliefs, and possibilities we had once thought uninteresting or dangerous. Finding a way to bring unity to our diversity—to incarnate e pluribus unum in our daily lives—means developing a habit of always looking for more complex kinds of relationship. We need to learn how to fashion more expansive and more profound ways of relating to other human beings. We need also to push back the horizon of our relationships to include what is not human, to encompass all of organic and inorganic nature. An obvious example of the importance of achieving a common good is the need of a community to secure the quality of the minimum commonalities of healthful air, water, and soil. If we were to teach a class in which our aim was to help students develop the skills of relation-building we have been discussing, this issue would make a first-rate case study. Our class might focus, for instance, on the problem of maintaining potable water in a community. In any community, highly valued activities exists that may threaten the purity of the water supply. We seldom think of the production of goods everyone needs as a potential source of harm, but in our complexly interdependent communities conflicts of this sort are endemic. As a case study, we might invite our class to examine the consequences of new approaches to hog farming. Hogs are increasingly being raised on specialized large-scale farms because to do so is economically efficient. These hog farms create high concentrations of manure, however, the runoff from which results in a sharply increased potential for water contamination. Neighboring small-scale farmers and downstream townspeople seek legislation or court edicts forcing these hog farms to close. If they are shut down in order to protect clean water supplies, however, the result will be a rise in the price of meat and, by eliminating an important tax source, an increase in taxes. What meets the needs or desires of one group harms the needs or desires of another group. What are the boundaries of each group’s responsibilities? Wherein lies the common good? What are the new relationships needed if a common good is to be fashioned?


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Traditionally, a situation such as the hog-farming dilemma is resolved by one side winning in a political and juridical conflict. This approach is reflective of an ethic of aggressive competition, seeing conflicts as win-lose situations. The hog farmers go out of business or the townspeople endure a decline in the quality of their drinking water. No common good is established and alreadystrained relationships are exacerbated. This approach is not illustrative of the relational skills we have been advocating. Another alternative, one consistent with the relationality that we want our students to learn, is to develop a win-win strategy in which both sides gain together more than either one could have gained alone. This approach is based on a different ethic, an ethic of synergistic interest in which others are seen as collaborators not enemies. It takes two to tango, after all: each partner doing different but coordinated things in order to create an aesthetically pleasing dance. Students should be invited through an examination of conflict dilemmas to learn how to see relational possibilities for the emergence of a novel situation in which adversaries have been transformed into partners in a tango both created and from which everyone benefits. Application of this ideal to the hog-farming case study is by no means a simple matter. Powerful economic, social, political, and cultural relationships are at play. These forces are very real in the complex society of the twenty-first century. By being aware of all the various contextualizing relationships relevant to the problem, and using strong reasoning skills in exploring their implications, students may learn—in concrete first-hand ways—that, even within situations marked by seemingly irreconcilable differences, a common good can be achieved. Students may find that negotiated adjustments, improved technology, and alternative economic activity could be outcomes of a collaborative instead of agonistic relationship. They may find a way to reconcile economic activities such as hog farming with communal needs such as an adequate supply of potable water. Achieving win-win outcomes is only an ideal, of course, but the ideal is what counts. We will never weave whole cloth unless we aim at doing so. We will never have a society in which conflict of values is reconciled unless persons in every community are able to understand and to utilize the relational skills we think are important. Teaching students how to imagine and then fashion reconciling relationally complex wholes is a new responsibility American educators need to shoulder if they are to prepare us adequately for living in our complex, frequently chaotic, often conflictual, pluralistic world. 4. The Third Different R: Rhythm The old stabilities are becoming unstable as the pace of change accelerates. Change always brings with it new opportunities: fresh beginnings, novel approaches, reforms, and improvements. Too much change, however, and the

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solid ground from which we hoped to launch our innovations is undermined. We begin to feel overwhelmed, not knowing what we can count on anymore. We wonder if we are riding a whirlwind of collapsing values, as the accustomed order of things seems to be sliding ineluctably toward one or another form of anarchy. The traditional response is to reaffirm those eternal values that mitigate against this continual onslaught. Resisting the fast flowing currents of time and history, these values serve as fixed standards by which we are able to measure our achievements and guide our choices. What we claim to be true, good, or beautiful is correct or incorrect, objective or merely subjective, depending on how well it conforms to these standards. We question not the existence of these values but their relevance; they strike us as unsuited to the needs of a world in constant flux. An alternative response, which we advocate, is to take change as fundamental, to deny the existence of fixed and timeless realities. The absence of anything unchanging does not mean, however, that everything is merely wild fluctuation. The changes we experience have a periodic rhythm to them. The rapid alterations are not random but ordered. We are vividly aware of these rhythms, for they are everywhere—cyclic rhythms of day and night, summer and winter, birth and death; progressive rhythms of growth, development, learning. Nature and life are fundamentally rhythmic. The variety of the ways these rhythms have been discerned, known, utilized, celebrated, and even worshiped is nearly infinite, constituting motifs as diverse and ancient as the earth itself. To live effectively in a rapidly changing world, we need to have a more complex grasp of the rhythmic character of how we reason and relate. Thinking in terms of patterns of connection is not enough. We also need to see these patterns as dynamic, always undergoing mutation, altering not only in content and form but altering even in the fundamental laws by which they are governed. Accepting altered patterns of responsibility it not enough. We also need to realize that what has altered will continue to alter. Our empathizing, reconciling, reformulating skills need constantly to be revamped. In order to find our bearings amid this welter of rhythmic processes, we require normative standards. They need not be fixed timeless standards, however. It suffices if they are merely enduring—standards that persist but in a way that reflects the evolving character of the things for which they are guides. When the tried and true ways of doing things, the seemingly invulnerable old standards, have been swept away by the rising waters of new developments, what we need is not new standards but new versions of the old standards. New times may make old truths uncouth, but we can best arrive once more at couth not by attempting to start from scratch but by revamping what we already have. The new times require remodeling the old, not tearing it down. We need the old


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standards in a revised version, a version renovated, repaired, adapted to the changing conditions. We should realize that the standards guiding our beliefs and actions are habits of the heart and mind. Habits change, but they change slowly, preserving continuities. Their rhythms are cyclical, but the cycles alter. The wheels do not simply spin in place; they move the cart forward. The American Constitution and its initial ten amendments, for instance, has been amended further only a few times during its two and a quarter centuries of existence. It is fundamentally the same document ratified in 1789. However, it has constantly been reinterpreted over the years by the Supreme Court, the meaning of its words stretched to take account of circumstances beyond the ken of the Founders. The nation created in the latter years of the eighteenth century was a collection of English farmers and merchants spread out along the Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts Bay to the swamps of Carolina. It is now a nation extending to the Pacific Ocean, predominantly industrial and urban instead of agrarian, without slaves or indentured servants, multiculturally diverse. The Constitution has changed as the nation changed, but slowly, preserving continuities as its old rhythms were adapted to novel conditions. The standards by which we live are open-ended not in the sense of being blown willy-nilly in the wind, but in the sense that they evolve in response to an evolving world. We must recognize that in our ever-changing neighborhoods and nation, in our emerging global village, no such thing as a definitive education can exist. For an individual or institution to function there must be definiteness. Some set of basics must be taught each new generation of young people, some fundamental core of knowledge and skills needed to equip them for adulthood and citizenship. These basics express our shared worldview, our commonsense understandings and practices. They are composed of the great books and robust methods, the lives of heroes and the great turning points in history that define who we are as individuals and as a people. They are our current and historical differences woven into a coherent fabric of education, a curriculum of study we have judged is warranted by our community’s traditions and needs. These fundamentals are corrigible, however; they are open to improvement. We are all the time debating them, attempting to persuade each other that some ingredient of the core is old fashioned or false, that some neglected or novel item should replace it or complement it. Once upon a time, all American school children read Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars in Latin and learned physics by watching the experiments their instructors performed for them. Later on, they learned of Julius Caesar by watching Shakespeare’s play, and ran for themselves the standard physics experiments assigned in their lab manuals. Today, students may not know who Julius Caesar is but are familiar with the twentieth century’s two Gallic wars, and they run simulated physics experiments of their own devising on laptop computers.

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The core of our curriculum is thus always open to amendment, renovation, improvement. Individual teachers, whole school systems, and sometimes even the entire country keep inventing new versions of its old educational ways, adjusting what is taught, and how and why it is taught, to shifting conditions. A curriculum is much like jazz. It succeeds by expressing basic rhythmic forms in novel and improvised ways, creating value through a constant interplay of structure and freedom. Students need to learn how to discern these rhythmic structures of change. Classrooms should be designed to help our students develop the creative skills they need to foster and to cope with these rhythms. As in our earlier discussions of reason and of relationality, here also the key is interactive learning. We need to create classroom situations, and become involved in community situations, in which students are immersed in processes that can be understood and utilized only by identifying their rhythmic character. How do the monarch butterflies develop and where do they come from; where do they go and what happens when they die? Is there any justification in saying that we had to defend South Vietnam to prevent another Munich, or that the American Republic is in danger of becoming a new Roman Empire? Is opposing gay liberation like opposing the emancipation of slaves or like opposing pornography? We think and feel and act in terms of the analogies we find between things that are familiar and those we find unfamiliar. Students should be able to distinguish false analogies from genuine analogies, and to find and fashion new ones as better ways of organizing the flux of experience. By adding a jazz-like rhythm to their education, we will enable our students to become creative agents in an ever-changing world, to be flexibly adaptive innovators instead of passive victims. We will help them become adept at anticipating problems no one else is noticing and proposing solutions that restructure things in ways no one else has imagined. Stimulated by this reconstructive inventiveness, our students will be motivated to attempt to remold their goals and ours, their methods and ours, in the light of altered conditions. In doing so, they and we will recognize the valid constraints imposed on our choices by customary practices, by established rules and laws, by received wisdom. But these constraints will be interpreted freshly so that they are not mere impediments slowing us down but instead are resources that contribute significantly to the long-term effectiveness of what results from our efforts. 5. Concluding Thoughts The twelve contributors to this book find grounds for their approach to teaching and learning in what is often called “process thought.” Our views are deeply influenced by the ideas of three philosophers: Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Dewey. Bergson was a French philosopher who emphasized the dynamic, open-ended, creative flow of things. Whitehead was a Brit-


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ish philosopher whose thought centered on the dynamic interplay of flow and permanence, of the constant creation of what is concretely determinant from the perishing of old achievement and the influx of new possibilities. Dewey was an American philosopher who advocated experimental inquiry as a problem-solving technique, and who was a major figure in progressive education. We are all members of a professional organization called the Association for Process Philosophy of Education (APPE), which was founded to bring together school teachers, college faculty, education theorists, and philosophers who think that the quality of what goes on in our classrooms—whether it be elementary, secondary, or postsecondary—can be enhanced by the ideas of process thinkers in general and Bergson, Whitehead, and Dewey in particular. We will each have some explicit things to say about the character and relevance of their ideas. Our position is that philosophy is as foundational as psychology and sociology for effective pedagogy. However, our essays focus on the classroom, not the philosophers. We draw insights from these process thinkers as we try to articulate how today’s processes of teaching and learning might be improved. Our aim is to put these philosophers to work, to use their ideas as a standpoint from which to catch sight of some possibilities for how to go about improving teaching and learning. Our notion of enhancing the teaching of basic skills such as reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic by the three further Rs of reasoning, relationality, and rhythm is the result. We hope our readers will find our ideas stimulating—and therefore useful.


Two WHAT IS A PROCESS PERSPECTIVE ON TEACHING AND LEARNING? Malcolm D. Evans The educators and philosophers who have written the essays in this book have a process perspective on their educational practices. In this chapter you will explore what is meant by that phrase. If asked, each of the authors would offer you a different definition of a process perspective. The anecdotes, shared experiences, and commentary of the several authors will reveal in part, the nature of a process perspective in educational contexts. Let me offer a working definition that may be helpful to you, especially if process philosophy and its related process perspective are new to you. A process perspective on education is an outlook on the particulars of teaching and learning that reflects an awareness and internalization of selected core process philosophy concepts. In the sections below I will discuss these concepts as axioms of process thought that may be helpful to you as you read the essays comprising this book. The core concepts are: (1) becoming is a process; (2) creativity is in all creatures; (3) the world is interconnected; (4) all experience is emotional; and (5) all individuals are constituted by their internal relations. A process perspective is an outlook that is neither simple nor easily acquired. Reflection on some of the basic concepts and on your personal experience with the actualities implied by the concepts is necessary. As you read this chapter and this book you will confront some new values and you may modify others. You will find that simply being aware of a process perspective is, itself, a process that will affect your professional posture. Such a process is quite obviously personal and singular. A process perspective cannot be imposed—it must be felt. 1. Becoming is a Process Of the many philosophical concepts that I might bring into this discussion on a process perspective, the one that is highly relevant for educators is becoming. Rarely do educators think of students as becoming. Yet, after a moment of reflection, you will agree that what is wanted is for them to become something: improved writers, better mathematicians, finer craft persons, responsible citizens. Students are learners who become more competent, more understanding, more insightful, and more imaginative. They are in a process of becoming, in myriad ways, at every moment. At our hands, before our eyes, students are

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changing from one form to another: from neophyte to expert, from incompetence to competence, from inappropriate to appropriate behavior. Recognizing the process of becoming is an early step toward acquiring a process perspective. Becoming is a process shaped by events and occasions from which choices and decisions are made. As the emphasis on the R of relationality in this book makes clear, our experiences, past and present, and our future possibilities influence our becoming. This idea is hardly new to educators who have long known that the actualization of the potentialities of our students is dependent on the interplay of genetics, nurture, nutrition, environment, and experience. Actualization of potential is a process—a complex, multi-faceted process—by which any person may, through the experience of learning, become a novel human being. The process of becoming is one of acquiring definition by consciously or unconsciously choosing among alternatives that are currently experienced. Students may become more competent as they choose to add to their existing knowledge and skills. Athletes make progress toward their goals by choosing and acting upon training possibilities compatible with their goals. Our becoming may be negative if we choose wrongly from the alternatives before us. Educators, however, are interested in those processes that lead to constructive change and toward a condition Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” (William Garland writes of this in chapter seven, this volume). Process philosophers and educators agree that within educative events a flow of relationships can develop that shapes our becoming. A process perspective provides a teacher with a frame by which that flow is recognized and nurtured. Anecdotal accounts of the process of becoming in classrooms will be found in chapters by William Garland, M. Jayne Fleener and Stacy Reeder, and Foster Walker. 2. Creativity is in All Creatures According to the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, creativity is the “universal of universals” (1929b, p. 21). Nothing is more fundamental. The concept of creativity is not only a key concept in Whitehead’s philosophy, but also a basic idea in a process perspective on teaching and learning. We can easily accept the notion of creativity. You and I see the evidence of it all around us as we observe living things and the phenomena of birth, growth, and change. If all creatures, events, and occasions have creativity, then every student possesses creativity. The creativity evident throughout the world and specifically in our classrooms is the source of the educational ideas—reason, relationality, and rhythm—presented in this book. As you read the essays written by educators and philosophers, you will sense throughout an implied awareness of creativity.

What is a Process Perspective on Learning?

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Creativity, as presented here, is a broad, fundamental concept of process thought; much more than the clever creativity of rearranging the given in an aesthetic endeavor. It is the force that drives the world. Whiteheadians refer to creativity as “the concept that must account for the perpetual ‘creative advance into novelty’ that is the cornerstone of Whitehead’s process philosophy” (Sherburne, 1981, p. 33). The fundamental force Whiteheadians call creativity others have called by many names, but few fail to recognize the creativity in the world and within human beings in particular. That creativity, within the world and in the hearts and minds of every person, fuels the “creative advance to novelty.” How does this perpetual advance to novelty affect what a teacher does? Perhaps this foundational idea for teaching and learning is best understood if you think of the process of becoming as a three-stage sequence: (1) the past as containing the seeds from which a new present will come; (2) the present as containing the elements from which continuing parts for a novel future will come; and (3) a future that is the integration of past and present experiences from which yet another novel future will come. In the concrete reality of teaching, the seemingly simple idea of creative advance becomes vastly complex. All of the realities of prerequisites and sequence, assessment and mastery, quality and appropriateness of curriculum, instructional strategies and materials are interwoven in a creative process resulting in novel teaching and learning. All of human learning is a process of advancing from the known into the unknown. As Whitehead says, “The ‘creative advance’ is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates” (1929b, p. 21). Few people think of learning to read, acquiring a foreign language, or using tables of logarithms as creative acts. They may not be intrinsically creative, but the power of creativity and the creative advance to novelty are present in those activities. Educators need to be aware that in every moment of teaching and learning our students are becoming something different from what they were. The essays in this book by Mary Elizabeth Moore and Christelle Estrada provide wonderful examples of creative advance in teachers and students. You and I, at this moment, are becoming something different, something novel—you as you read and ponder meaning in this essay, I as these sentences are being written and rewritten to clarify that meaning. Both of us are involved in a creative advance to novelty. The different three Rs discussed in this book—reason, relationality, and rhythm—are readily perceivable elements of that creative advance. Improvement of our ability to reason and to think critically, expanded awareness of human and inanimate relations, and better understanding of periodicity, cycles, and rhythm are evidence of creative advance. Teachers endeavor to build new knowledge on the foundation of the known. They usually review what is known before introducing new material and they expect that what has been taught will lead to new learning. This creative process repeats itself not only in educative

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settings but also in every experience. It repeats itself “to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature” (Sherburne, 1981, p. 218). Creativity in a process perspective, as Whitehead reminds us, is “the universal of universals.” Your understanding of creativity from a process perspective enables you to more fully appreciate the other axioms of process thought presented below. 3. The World is Interconnected All our experience is related and all things—ideas and people; the inanimate and the living; the past, the present, and the future—are connected. Our common sense affirms this. So does process philosophy. Whitehead writes, “there is nothing which floats into this world from nowhere. Everything in the actual world is referable to some other actual entity” (1929b, p. 244). An educator with a process perspective, even when the focus of teaching is on a single concept, realizes that ramifications abound. The world is full of complex matters for which identifying single causes is foolish and misleading. George Allan and Pete A. Y. Gunter make this clear in their essays in this book. A process philosophy view reflects the relatedness of central educational concepts such as teaching, learning, knowledge, change and growth. The discussion of relationality as a different three R in the preceding and other chapters enlarges on this notion. The concept of connectedness directs us to recognize and appreciate that students, schooling, curriculum, society, ideals, ideology, family, and self are all interdependent and do not exist as things apart. Educators who come to accept the interrelatedness and interdependence of the many dimensions of educating have taken an important step toward understanding a process perspective on teaching and learning. A process perspective enables us to be aware, as Gregory Bateson has written in Mind and Nature, of “the pattern which connects” and of “a dance of interacting parts” (1979, pp. 13–14). Both quoted phrases are important for an educator. A “pattern which connects” is what happens as learning takes place. The connection of previously acquired knowledge and new information in patterns makes sense to the individual, thereby creating new knowledge and insight. The interacting parts do indeed dance, coming together in a creative advance to novelty. In the previous chapter the authors refer to “alternative patterns,” “complicated forms of connection,” “network of interactions”—an emphasis on looking beyond what is singular and obvious. In the complex global societies in which you are teaching and in which your students will mature, you will find few singular distinctive absolutes but many interconnected dynamic occasions. Seeking the patterns which connect, and endeavoring to understand them, is a strong part of a process perspective for teaching and learning.


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Awareness of the interconnectedness of the world enables both student and teacher to be fully engaged, emotionally and intellectually, in a process of learning. Lack of such awareness is like stumbling around in the dark; much is unseen or overlooked. Being aware of possible connections enables learner and teacher to probe deeper and to find more meaningful uses and interpretations of information. If I go outside my immediate concern, educating, to look at the relationality of ecology to economics, of work to human dignity, or of nature to human spirit, I find that thousands of relationships are taken for granted or often not considered at all. Neither teacher nor student can consider all of the possible connections within an instructional task, but to ignore exploration of manageable relationships is a disservice to the ideal of educating from a process perspective. Gunter’s ecological examples and Moore’s accounts of travel experiences, found in later chapters, more fully illustrate the place of connectedness in a process perspective. 4. All Experience is Emotional We human beings are visibly emotional creatures. We can be happy, sad, joyful, miserable, angry, loving, fearful, fearless, and more. We are well aware of our emotions in response to events and actions in our lives. We express joy as we engage in happy events. We show fear when we encounter danger. Our bodies are poised for fight or flight in stressful situations. Scholars and teachers think of themselves and others as primarily intellectual, but human beings are basically emotional creatures. Emotion precedes action, emotion accompanies action, and emotion remains with us when action has ceased. The axiom “all experience is emotional” is given careful consideration by educators who exhibit a process perspective. Let us turn to an exploration of that axiom. Teachers at all levels and in diverse institutions experience daily a range of emotions within themselves and in others. Much of teaching is based on emotion. Not so, you may say; but as teachers seek to motivate students, to urge them toward mastery, the relationship is indeed emotional. These emotions may be joy or anxiety about something novel—“will this be on the test next week?”—or fear about displeasing the teacher, perhaps failing to impress a special student friend. John C. Bennett, in his essay in this book, reveals the complex emotionality in teaching and learning at the higher education level. Whitehead’s three stages of learning are illustrative: the excitement of romance, the pride of precision, and the glow of satisfaction (Whitehead, 1929a, pp. 17–19). The different three Rs—reason, relationality, and rhythm— discussed throughout this book are charged with emotion. The fact that all experience—yours, the students’, and mine—is emotional should cause us to accept responsibility for managing our classrooms with the emotional nature of the students in mind.

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The idea that human beings are primarily emotional should not be strange to educators whose work is grounded in psychology and human development. Study of the psychology of learning and human development makes clear the emotional nature of learners. Teachers know that the wiggling elementary school child, the adolescent with raging hormones, the college student with cleverly disguised purpose, are all emotional creatures. Victor Lowe’s assertion that “Human experiences are natural events and their basis is emotional, not intellectual” is readily understood (1966, p. 30). The intellectual is important, even critical, but the emotional side of persons provides motivation, selfdiscipline, and intended achievement. The process perspective on teaching and learning being presented here is derived from Whitehead’s philosophy of organism—a process philosophy. He was never reluctant to express a well-phrased alternative to conventional thinking, as the quotation below shows: Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum” is wrongly translated, “I think, therefore I am.” It is never bare thought or bare existence that we are aware of. I find myself as essentially a unity of emotions, enjoyments, hopes, fears, regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions—all of them subjective reactions to the environment as active in my nature. My unity—which is Descartes’ “I am”—is my process of shaping this welter of material into a consistent pattern of feelings. (1938, p. 166) Whitehead’s language about shaping this welter of material is the frame for understanding both the place of emotion in our lives and the role emotion plays in learning. As people are engaged with events, emotions are aroused and they influence thought, behavior, and relationships. Our natural response is to endeavor to construct a unity of these new relationships. That endeavor is both conscious and unconscious. You may process new relationships by asking yourself “How does this material, this event relate to me and past experience?” At other times you may simply react with fear, joy, understanding, or acceptance. We are always, as Whitehead tells us, a unity of emotion seeking to shape relations into consistent patterns. Teachers need to appreciate the emotional nature of our students. In the essays in this book—particularly those by Moore, Estrada, Walker, and Bennett—you will find strong evidence of the connection of emotion and learning. Whitehead’s stages of learning—romance, precision, and generalization—are full of emotional implications (1929a, pp. 17–19). The stage of romance in particular is one of high emotions—curiosity, joy, anticipation. The discipline of the stage of precision involves different emotions; as does the stage of generalization. Robert S. Brumbaugh names this last stage satisfaction instead of generalization (1982, p. 119). Satisfaction is emotional, a sense of completion, perhaps a goal reached. In educational


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settings both generalization and satisfaction are to be found and sought. Emotion as well as intellect is present whether the task is one of generalization from newly acquired knowledge or simple satisfaction of task completion or goal attainment. Brumbaugh says of Whitehead, “Even on the small scale of single assigned problems, he wanted the student working out the exercise not only to do it, and do it right, but also to realize that he had done it!” (ibid., p. 120). This recognition that emotion attached to the notion of doing intellectual tasks oneself is missing in the usual practice of educational drill and rote learning—a fact of educating of which teachers with a process perspective are well aware. F. Bradford Wallack summarizes the Whiteheadian position on emotion and experience in this quotation from her book, The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead’s Metaphysics: Human experience is characterized by emotion more than anything else. This is another point wherein the Whiteheadian philosophy diverges from many traditional philosophies. Human beings are primarily emotional and not primarily conscious, or ideational, or knowledgeable, or perceptive. Emotion is fundamental in human experience because this is what all people share with other animal natures and, in the form of energy, ultimately with all actual existences. (1980, pp. 55–56) 5. All Individuals are Constituted by Their Internal Relations Pertinent to the idea of process perspective are Whitehead’s concerns with internal and external relations. He wrote, “We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he described as primary attributes of physical bodies are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions and within actual occasions” (1929b, p. 309). Human beings, at least in the modern world, focus on the external relations among people, between people and objects, and among objects. This focus tends to make us less mindful of the internal relations that are engendered as we encounter diverse objects, events, and persons. Internal relations are intimately connected with feelings. The emotions discussed previously and the internal relations now being considered are significant aspects of teaching and learning and of a process perspective on educating. We can easily think of teaching as composed of various “external” events: teachers lecturing students, students studying texts, objective assessment activities. This perception, however, is limited and fallacious, for it is based on a misunderstanding of what is meant by external relations. Charles Birch, Whiteheadian biologist and philosopher, writes, “A relation is external when it does not affect the nature of the thing affected” (1990, p. xii). From the Whiteheadian view presented by Birch, very little of what transpires in a classroom is truly external. Objects and events may frequently be outside the persons af-

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fected, but they are not external in the sense that the term is used here. Relations in the classroom, including even those with the teacher’s desk or the lecturer’s podium if perceived as loci of authority and power, are not external but internal relations. Think for a moment of the different internal relations that may exist in a classroom in which the furniture is arranged in a circle. When you read Daniel Royer’s essay in this book you will see an extensive treatment of relationality and the processes of teaching and learning. The distinction between external and internal relations is clarified by Birch’s further comment: “An internal relation is different. It is part of the entity to which it is related” (ibid. p. xii; emphasis added). Virtually everything in a classroom affects the students inwardly: classroom environment, instructional strategies, interest, relevance, time of day, social relations—and you can name more “external” events that in fact are in an internal relation to students. If you think of what a teacher does as the only cause of learning, you are missing a central principle of learning. What is learned is also dependent on the nature and quality of the learner’s internal relations. If you accept the premise that learning is the result of internal relations that are constitutive of the character of an individual, then you may want to think even more than you have about the power of internalized experience. Our internal relations, how we feel about something and how we act in relation to those feelings, make us what we are. Internal relations are manifested in strong interests, enthusiasm, curiosity, perseverance, friend-ship, confidence, and other behaviors appreciated by teachers. But be aware: different relations make for different purposes, and seemingly identical experiences result, because of internal relations, in different behaviors, interpretations, and actions. A process perspective on teaching and learning creates in educators a compelling awareness of the place of internal relations in human learning. 6. Conclusion I will not pursue these axioms. They appear to be commonsensical but are complex in theory and practice. It suffices simply to ask you to be aware of the complexities that surround and confront you as you practice your profession or prepare to do so. At the beginning of this chapter I identified the authors of the essays in this book as educators and philosophers who have a process perspective. This chapter has been written to connect that perspective with teaching and learning. The essays that follow were written from at least three perspectives: (1) the editors’ request for essays related to a different three Rs for education—reason, relationality, and rhythm; (2) the professional experience of each author as an educator; and (3) the process perspective individually and collectively of the authors. These essays are richly diverse, but their common ground is Whiteheadian process philosophy and the perspective that internalizing process philosophy creates in persons open to it.


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This book was written for educators and other readers interested in educating. It is not about a philosophy, but about the presence in these pages of a specific stance—a process perspective—that is evident throughout. WORKS CITED Bateson, Gregory. (1979) Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Dutton. Birch, Charles. (1990) A Purpose for Everything: Religion in the Postmodern World. Mystic, Conn.: Twenty-Third Publications. Brumbaugh, Robert S. (1982) Whitehead, Process Philosophy, and Education. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lowe, Victor. (1966) Understanding Whitehead. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Sherburne, Donald W., ed. (1981) A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Wallack, F. Bradford. (1980) The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead’s Metaphysics. Albany: State University of New York Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929a) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Free Press, 1967. ———. (1929b) Process and Reality. Corrected ed. Ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978. ———. (1938) Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press, 1968.


Three ON LEARNING TO BE GOOD George Allan You and I would probably agree that something students should learn while they are in school is how to be good. We acknowledge, of course, that the primary responsibility for nurturing good children lies with their parents and with religious institutions. After all, we say, beliefs about right and wrong, good and bad, are private matters and have no place in schools that are publicly funded. We recognize, however, that morality also has a public dimension which is every bit as important as the private—and here school teachers are thought to be especially crucial mentors. For primary and secondary education, we argue, the goal of moral education should be to prepare students to be “good citizens.” A democracy, more than any other form of government, depends on people who respect the rule of law, deal honestly with one another, and are loyal to the nation and its ideals. For higher education, we think students should learn to be “ethically responsible” doctors, lawyers, managers, teachers, and government workers. When scandals explode into the headlines—the Watergate cover-up, Enron’s accounting practices—we wonder why the law schools or MBA programs failed so miserably to teach their graduates the moral constraints entailed by their responsibilities as elected political officials or corporation executives. Courses in “ethics” or “values clarification” are the usual way in which this moral education is provided, although the tendency is for the courses to shrink into course units and for what was once required to become elective. This marginalizing of what is said to be crucial results from our inconsistent but nonetheless insistently negative view of ethics as a subject for study. We quite often dismiss moral education as frivolous, a waste of time, a detour on the road to acquiring the skills needed in order to become a productive member of the work force and a functional citizen. We recognize the importance of arithmetic and general science, spelling and grammar, keyboard arts and auto mechanics—but who needs to sit around sharing their feelings about smoking pot or just saying no? We should learn algebra and organic chemistry, American history and managerial economics, dental hygiene and mechanical engineering—but who needs to attend the special lecture on the morality of human cloning or the small group discussions on ethics in the workplace? I will explore in what follows the reasons for this love-hate attitude toward moral education. And I will suggest how I think a “process approach” to ethics would improve our appreciation for why it needs to be an integral aspect of education from kindergartens to elder hostels.

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GEORGE ALLAN 1. The Standard Ways

Ethics has two standard approaches. One is hedonistic: a good is whatever I desire, an object of my interest, something to which I am attracted. Something is good if I like it, if it brings pleasure; it is bad if I am repulsed by it, if I find it painful. Good in this hedonistic sense need not be selfishly defined. I may enjoy helping others, or I may take pleasure in working collaboratively to achieve a common goal. Perhaps I find satisfaction in service to a cause greater than myself. Nor need good in this hedonistic sense be a matter of eating, drinking, and making merry with no concern for the morrow. Jeremy Bentham, for instance, proposed a complex set of factors we should take into account when calculating which of two courses of action would be likely to bring us the greater pleasure, and he argued that the best choice with respect to national policies is the one that optimizes the common good, the one most likely to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number of the nation’s citizens. Yet no matter how naive or sophisticated the calculations, no matter how selfish or altruistic the goods, values for a hedonist are subjective preferences. Goods are thus immune to criticism: either I have that desire or I do not. If I want a chocolate ice cream cone, prefer listening to Mozart, or advocate regime change in Iraq, then for me that activity is good. Others may prefer vanilla, tune their radio to a hard rock station, or demand an autonomous Palestinian homeland. These ends are subjective and so beyond criticism, but the means for their attainment can be framed and critiqued by rational analysis. Is it good for the United States to launch a preemptive unilateral invasion of Iraq? Is suicide bombing the best way to force Israeli concessions? Should you eat ice cream of any sort if you have high blood pressure? The social sciences are scientific precisely because they focus on the question not of ends but of means, for which objectively verifiable methods exist for deciding what is best—for deciding, that is, what is most likely to succeed. For hedonists, the principle tool of morality is cost-benefit analysis, a calculation of the most effective means, the optimizing strategy, for attaining ends determined by individual or collective preference. The other standard approach to ethics is law-based: values are normative measures. A good action is one that conforms to such a norm. We are good when we follow the rules, adhere to a moral code, obey the command of an authority figure. I may want some ice cream, but my parents insist that first I must eat everything on my plate. It might be easier to complete the essay assignment by borrowing a few paragraphs from someone else’s essay, but plagiarism is an unacceptable academic practice. I may hate those who have murdered my children, but the Ten Commandments says I should not kill another person for any reason. Immanuel Kant argued that this command against taking another’s life is a command not of God but of reason, that its imperative de-

On Learning to be Good

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pends not on my religious beliefs but on my recognition that the very notion of what is means to be moral entails treating all persons as of infinite worth. To this way of understanding morality, ethics and legal studies are twin disciplines. According to some, the laws of the State are subservient to the laws of ethics: we hold certain moral truths to be self-evident and we are justified in rejecting the authority of any government destructive of our right to life, liberty, and pursuit of the happiness those truths legitimate. The moral law is superior to laws made by human beings, and is itself subservient to divine law as found in sacred scripture or certain ecclesiastical pronouncements. According to others, the laws of the State are supreme, the acts of its legislature or the edicts of its executive normative, unless altered by subsequent acts or edicts. All law is of human origin: contingent, historically limited, culturally biased. Whether the origin of law be human or divine, the principle tool of this approach to morality is textual analysis. Ethical judgment involves determining how best to interpret the meaning and applicability of a rule, how best to find and apply the general law that governs the particular action or possible course of action under consideration. When it comes to education, these two ethical approaches turn out to be surprisingly similar. For both, education is basically a matter of teaching students the appropriate rules. For hedonists, those rules have to do with means only. They are instrumental rules, directions for how to get to some end. For law-based approaches, these rules have to do with the ends that are appropriate to seek, not just with the means for doing so. They are intrinsic rules, directions for the conditions governing the pursuit of any ends and every means. The seven hedonistic criteria Bentham says we should apply in calculating which action will bring the greatest happiness constitute a complex rule that can be memorized, and then tested for by administering an objective examination—listing the criteria, explaining them briefly, putting them to work in calculating the worth of a particular action. Similarly, the Ten Commandments are a set of rules, which can be learned and an objective test devised for measuring a student’s knowledge of them—listing the commandments, providing a brief explanation for each, indicating which commandment covers this or that specific action. And yet, is the person moral who can recite such rules? Does a close reading of Bentham or Kant make students any happier? Do they become better citizens by reading what is emblazoned on the Decalogue plaque that hangs on the wall behind the teacher’s desk? Obviously not, and yet most cries for increased moral education in our schools and colleges seek little more than this— a tract, a book, or a lot of books to be read, some phrases to be recited, some stories to learn, a test or two to be taken.

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GEORGE ALLAN 2. The Process Ways

A process approach to ethics finds a basic problem with each of the standard approaches. Moral laws are abstractions. To treat them as unchanging objective givens is to commit what Alfred North Whitehead calls “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (1925, pp. 51–55; see also 1929, pp. 7, 18, 83). The laws of nature are not cosmic directives instructing the atoms on how they should behave. They are descriptions of those behaviors, statistical generalizations about the ways in which things are interacting, by means of which we can predict how they are likely to interact in the future. Similarly, a moral law is a generalization about human behavior—not about how people actually interact, but about how they would need to act were their actions to accord with God’s will or the laws of the State, or were they by their actions to fashion a community in which all persons are treated as ends in themselves. Likewise, desires are socially constructed. To treat them as innate subjective features of individuals is to commit what Whitehead calls the fallacy of “simple location” (1925, pp. 49–51, 58). Our wants are not merely expressions of inner biological drives, the welling up into our overt actions of what has been pre-programmed by our DNA, devices by which our genes selfishly manage to perpetuate themselves through generation after generation of their human hosts. Nurture is everywhere entwined with nature. Our cultural upbringing, our family traditions and neighborhood practices, our patriotic loyalties and our revolutionary zeal, are key aspects of what leads us to find certain things important enough to be interesting and interesting enough to be worth pursuing. But these cultural influences are not disembodied forces shaping us willy-nilly. They are descriptions of specific actions of specific individuals, carried out on behalf of institutions that are the result of earlier actions of other specific individuals. In both these cases, the fallacy is to think that the conditions for good are fixed—that the moral laws are timeless, the desires preestablished. From a process perspective, in contrast, the conditions of our beliefs and actions are the result of earlier beliefs and actions. What is possible for us to be and what we choose to do are emergent, fragile, and transformable achievements. Students grow morally not only by improving their understanding of good and its conditions but by altering those conditions. When we achieve our goals, we not only fulfill our desires but also improve the character of what we desire. When we successfully embody a moral law in our actions, we not only do what is right but also reshape the meaning and import of that law. As people become better they make a better world, and as the world becomes better it stimulates the emergence of better people. Growth entails decay, however. A process ethics is “meliorative” but it cannot be “progressive.” There exists no predetermined ascent from the worst


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to the better and then onward to the best, no natural law, genetic code, or divine promise that guarantees a better outcome. A process ethics sees moral improvement as never more than a contingent possibility, a hope worth working for but one always at risk. Imagine, for instance, what it would be like if there were a sunset clause on the Ten Commandments, so that it needed to be rethought and reworked every few years in a manner sensitive to the ways things have changed. We and our students would need to write the shalts and shalt nots in chalk on a blackboard instead of carving them into stone. We would always be busy erasing this word or adding that word, altering a clause or a whole sentence, until we had something we thought expressed our understanding of what we should and should not do. This approach, this constant tinkering with the shalts and shalt nots, would not be our arbitrary invention of the moment, however, for the Ten Commandments are what we would be reworking. We would be trying to express in our own time and place what our ancient Hebrew predecessors were trying to express in theirs. They talked in terms of burning bushes and tablets handed directly from a tribal god to its political leader, of former slaves expelled from one land and intent on enslaving another. We live in a different sort of desert and family ties are not the way we form our tribes, but we too think it good to honor our parents and restrain our inclination to kill, rape, or plunder as we please. We too want to pull down idols to the false gods and to worship the one true God, even though our idols and our God are as different from those of the Hebrews as is our science and our literature. These attempts to translate traditional moral commands into our currentday vernacular are how we make them a part of ourselves. We cannot digest our moral ends and normative ideals unless we first chew them up, mixing them with the dissolving acids of our own ongoing concerns, turning them into sources of the energy we need in order to live. We would choke on a categorical imperative were we expected to swallow it whole, and yet that is precisely what a standard approach to ethics seems to expect of us. It says that we should wolf down our ethical truths whole and neat, and it expects us to then upchuck them on demand. This approach is terribly wrongheaded. Students in our ethics classes should learn to be better persons not regurgitation experts. Alasdair MacIntyre’s distinction between “values” and “virtue” is relevant here. Values are qualities assigned to or discerned in external things —features of objects and events, whether actual or ideal, remembered or anticipated. Hedonists, as we have seen, argue that these things are of value because we desire them, whereas law-based moralists argue that they are of value because they reflect or incarnate a normative measure. The value of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is the daring harmony of form and color it expresses, the horrific bombing of innocents it commemorates, or the willingness of art collectors to pay a steep price to acquire it. Virtues, in contrast, are qualities of self—habits of mind,

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feeling, and action, in particular the habit of aiming at excellence, at doing things well. Picasso is a virtuous painter because of his exceptional skills at artistic invention and execution, or because of the profundity of his insight into the human condition, although his virtue as a husband or citizen might be questionable. Or let us return to the example of the Decalogue. According to the standard approach to ethics, I should respect my parents either because the Fifth Commandment requires that I do so or because doing so accords with my enlightened self-interest. In the first case, the value is law-based, my actions guided by the value I recognize that law to possess. The respect I show my parents is justified by the value of the duty that commands it or by the value of the God who is its author. In the second case, the value is hedonistic, lying in the reproductive success that results from those who practice reciprocal altruism. It pays in an evolutionary sense to respect my parents as I would want them to respect myself and others. A process approach to ethics, in contrast, focuses on virtues, not values. It says that the respect I have for my parents is the style of my relationship with them, a way of treating them that is an expression of my character. Insofar as I am virtuous, I am the sort of person who is mindful of others and who shows particular concern for those of whom I am an offspring. I am not following a rule, whether law-based or hedonistic, but being true to myself, which self includes as one of its essential features a respectful interest in and concern for my parents. Learning to be good in the sense of learning to be virtuous is not something that can be directly taught. Virtue is not a piece of information, like rules are, that can be transferred from one brain to another, spoken by a teacher and inscribed by students in their notebooks. To learn to be virtuous, students need to have experiences that call for moral judgment. They should be put in situations requiring them to assess the relative worth of specific competing courses of action, to make choices that include or exclude, to weigh alternatives and take other viewpoints into consideration. Having made such judgments, students, with the help of their teacher and other students, should then be asked to assess their choices, examining why they were made and to what effect. These judgment-making experiences can be about first-hand right-now issues, or they can be in the form of case studies, simulations, fictional stories, exemplary biographies. The key is that the students engage these issues, that they deal with them in ways that have explicable reasons, and that they then be open to the criticisms of others. Coaching is a form of this sort of indirect teaching: creating game experiences for athletes and then Monday-morning quarterbacking their efforts. Rules need to be learned—the rules governing the game, to which both a team’s members and its competitors must adhere, and the rules unique to each team that govern the plays and play strategies it can use in its effort to win a particu-


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lar contest. We would laugh at a football coach who thought it sufficient for the players to be able to recite accurately what their assignments for a given play are or to chalk out the play in Xs and Os on a blackboard. Of course they should know these things, but knowing the play means much more than that. It means being able to run it successfully in a game situation, including the ability to adjust the play’s details in the light of the responses of the competitors as the game unfolds. The virtuous player, the star athlete, is the one who can play the game well, who makes good choices in ambiguous circumstances, whose style of play is exemplary even though always too tailored to the specifics of each game to ever be replicable. 3. Pathways to Goodness We cannot teach our students virtue, but under our tutelage they can develop some of the habits of thinking and acting by which they will become better persons than they were. We can nurture the sprouting of their virtue, stimulate its growth, weed out interfering distortions. But only the students themselves can become more virtuous. The stages of increasing adequacy in the scope and depth of a student’s moral practices are suggested by the pathway Whitehead describes in Adventures of Ideas (1933, pp. 284–296) that leads to what he calls “Peace,” the grasp of which is the highest expression of civilized experience. Let me trace that pathway and suggest how it might be traversed in a classroom setting. When we are young, Whitehead says, we tend to be self-absorbed. We are typically immersed in the joys and sorrows of the moment, quick to laugh and quick to cry, at one moment extremely generous and at another extremely cruel. Our experiences are relatively disconnected, each for its own short span filling fully the horizon of our concern. We seek vivid, novel experience, satisfying immediate desire, but these actions are not selfish so much as shortsighted. Whitehead sees the fledgling possibilities for moral growth implied in this craving for vivid experience. When we are young, he argues, we are “peculiarly susceptible to appeals for beauty of conduct” (1933, p. 287). We can become enamored of doing some unusual thing just for the joy of doing it—trying out new attire, new speech, new behaviors, new beliefs for the sake of their novelty, intent on overcoming the always present threat of the boredom that shadows our every moment. We surrender ourselves absolutely—even if only momentarily—to the sheer fact of the experiencing. Insofar as we are caught up in such extravagances, we have a first intimation of Peace. We sense “the harmony of the soul’s activities with ideal aims that lie beyond any personal satisfaction” (ibid, p. 288). Instead of admonishing our third-grade students to honor their father and mother, let us organize a Parents Day, featuring stories or poems about parents

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that the students have written or found themselves. They perform their texts, reciting the words in various voices, enacting the events, costuming themselves in illustrative ways. The visitors laugh and applaud, and over punch and cookies congratulate the author-actors on what they have done. Perhaps the texts have been collaboratively produced and performed, perhaps each student’s effort is a solo undertaking, but in either case they are caught up into a collective extravaganza, the whole class’s common project. The event is about parents and for them, yet the focus is on the inventive things the students are doing— the silly doggerel about eating your vegetables recited in a rabbit costume, the sad tale of the lost fawns told in the frantic tones of the doe and buck searching after them, the somewhat vulgar Simpsons routine performed in yellow face. Great fun to plan and to do, an exciting possibility successfully pulled off, a vivid moment shared with other students and with the parents, giggled about for days afterwards. An event beyond the ordinary, enjoyed both for what was done and for the delight it brought everyone. The third-graders have explicitly honored their parents in some trivial but genuine ways: inviting them to “their” event, organizing it around a parental theme, performing for them, hoping they will find it all enjoyable. More importantly, however, the students have fashioned something that lured them momentarily beyond themselves, that gave them a glimpse of the contrast between their own self-perpetuating activities and other kinds of activity. And they felt that contrast as good. These experiences may eventually modulate into a hunger for fame, says Whitehead. We seek more substantive, less ephemeral, satisfactions. Our aim is more egoistic now, involving delight in our own powers and a growing concern that there be some objective evidence of the importance of our achievements. Our actions betray an unspoken craving to “stand conspicuous in this scheme of things” (1933, p. 289)—not merely to find enjoyment in what we do, but to want it recognized by others as in some sense an outstanding achievement. Such an aim suggests goods that are not of our own making, values intrinsic to other things and persons. Our quest requires others for its realization: an appreciative audience of admirers. The third-graders did not undertake their Parents Day project for the praises showered on them, but they basked in the praise when it came. The accolades they received were not the goal of their endeavor but instead, as Aristotle says should be true of happiness, a byproduct. The praise can easily become a goal, however, and a legitimate teaching strategy would be to organize a subsequent class project around this feature. A contest of any sort will do. A fourth-grade science fair, for instance, is a competition among individuals in which success is measured by criteria independent of the preferences of the participants. Their parents’ praise is no longer sufficient. Mothers and fathers become sources of support, encouraging and helping train their children for the rigors of the competition, but the praise that counts is that of the judges whose objectivity is assured by their not being parents or teachers.


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Students who have a colored ribbon hanging from their poster displays stand conspicuous in the science fair scheme of things. They may have selfishly sought this fame, but they earned it by bringing their imagination and technical skills into line with the standards of excellence stipulated by the fair and, more generally, with those stipulated by established methods of scientific research. Competitions can be among groups instead of individuals, of course: athletics, debates, academic quiz shows, and marching band contests are familiar occasions in which success requires team effort. Individual and group efforts are also typically measured against external standards in noncompetitive contexts. The success of a new dramatic production or orchestral performance is assessed by the intensity of applause, the numbers attending, and the critical reviews that appear in the newspapers. In all these instances, students find themselves living in a normative world not of their own making, and discover the satisfaction that comes when their creative efforts exemplify those norms. Too much help by their parents— demanding their participation, doing the hard tasks for them, trying to bend the rules or influence the judges—will undermine this growth in their virtue. The students’ fame must be deserved, the fruit of their own efforts, their own selftranscendence. By avoiding the pitfalls of excessive support, parents can sometimes manage to negotiate the difficult path leading from their primary role as sources of encouragement and praise to their being also among those authorized by the wider society to make objective judgments about what is or is not praiseworthy. When children look to their parents for judgments they think will be later echoed by official judges, they honor their parents for their ability to legitimate their budding sense of the objective value of what they have achieved. We may appreciate our admirers at first merely because they appreciate us, or because they have the authority to recognize the quality of our achievements. Eventually, however, we may come to admire these admirers for themselves, for their admirable qualities, and for the intrinsic worth of the goals they admire. Instead of valuing others as instruments by which we can attain our ends, we recognize their worth as akin to our own. Their virtues are an expression of the same qualities of humanity as ours are. Love is how this recognition is lived: not merely esteeming another person, not merely acknowledging their virtue, but wanting that virtue to flourish. Our love for an individual, says Whitehead, means that “the potentialities of the loved object are felt passionately as a claim that it find itself in a friendly Universe” (1933, p. 289). The world should be such that its harmonies do not exclude, nor even merely tolerate, but instead sustain and nurture the achievements and possibilities of those we love. Nor should our loved ones be limited to family and friends, although that seems a most natural place for us to begin. Our childish love for our parents is markedly deepened when we come to love them because we recognize

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ourselves in them, loving them as we love ourselves, honoring them not only as our caretakers but also as fellow human beings. Heroes are our surrogate parents. Having heroes of all sorts is important to our moral development, heroes both living and dead. We imagine ourselves being Bret Favre as he and his Green Bay Packers win another snowy victory in frigid Lambeau Field. We aspire to sing an aria as well as Luciano Pavarotti or the blues as well as Ruth Brown. We cry even now over the untimely death of John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Dean, Mozart, or Antigone. We take a coach, priest, teacher, or politician as our role model. Having read the King Arthur legends, we are ready to pull some version of Excalibur from the stone and join in the quest for some new kind of Holy Grail. We love our heroes for who they are, not for how they can help us—although by imagining ourselves as them or as their comrades, we discover new ways for being who we are and new standards by which we might be measured. Teachers should all the time be introducing students to new heroes and new kinds of heroes. The heroes of pop culture and professional sports need no classroom to be identified, but unsung heroes need attention drawn to them. It should not have taken 9/11 to identify police officers and fire fighters as people engaged in dangerous but socially important—hence heroic—occupations. Other kinds of jobs are heroic because difficult even if not dangerous: scientists, homemakers, entrepreneurs, social justice activists. Biographies should be assigned frequently, stories and whole novels read, videos watched, field trips arranged, websites visited, people who lead all sorts of lives invited to talk with the class. For Veterans’ Days, our fifth-graders might be asked to bring pictures to class of family members and neighbors who are veterans, and to write up accounts of their war experiences, all of these materials then made into a Power Point slide show and presented in the school’s Assembly. The fifth-graders might create a similar compendium of “This Year’s Heroes” or “Our School’s All-Time Greats.” A family genealogy project might involve asking our sixth-grade students to trace back their ancestors three or four generations, then to interview their living grandparents or great-grandparents about what they did when they were their grandchild’s age, what challenges they met, what aspirations they had. These stories, shared with others in the class, honor the students’ fathers and mothers by locating them in a family history, a story worth telling to others, a story the last chapter of which is about the students themselves. They are their parents’ story continued, as their parents are continuations of their grandparents’ stories, all of them participants in something greater than any one of them. Our love for virtuous individuals—for mothers and fathers, heroes and saints, leaders and geniuses—can now modulate into love of country. Love of other individuals leads us to a love for the community of which they are members. We may do so at first for utilitarian reasons, because we realize that our


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country provides the basic environment for securing the lives of loved ones and for assuring proper opportunities for their development. Moral maturity involves more than this, however. It means coming to love our tribe or clan, our city or nation, as having intrinsic worth. Patriotism is the expression of this love, the loyalty we give to our traditions and to the political institutions by which they are embodied. It is loyalty to a common good that is more than any individual’s preferences, that links us together with more predecessors and successors than those who appear in our family tree, widening the range of those whom we call our ancestors and our descendants. Patriots are loyal to a patris, to their parental land. As our heroes are surrogate parents, so also are our communities. Patriotism is away in which we honor our father and mother. Whitehead finds an example of this way of honoring in the farmers of the Roman Republic, in particular the patriotism of one of its generals, Regulus, who returned to Carthage and certain death. He did so in order to keep the promise he had made when a prisoner there, that if he were sent to Rome bearing Carthage’s peace terms, he would return should Rome reject them, which rejection Regulus then counseled Rome to make. He voluntarily faced the extinguishing of his life, “and yet in thus sacrificing himself, his personal existence rose to its full height” (Whitehead, 1933, p. 290). Those Roman farmers exhibited a distinctive grandeur, says Whitehead, who “generation after generation, amid all the changes of history” (ibid.), assented to the worth of what Regulus did, as attested by their continual retelling of his story and by their own equally self-sacrificial deeds for the sake of that same patrimony. Those genealogical studies the sixth graders undertook could be expanded the next year into a study of the periods in American history when their parents and grandparents were seventh graders like themselves. Tracing family lineages on back to immigrant arrivals would be particularly interesting, since it might turn out that our students’ ancestors had come to this country at different times and for differing reasons, some seeking freedom from persecution and some in bondage to their persecutors, some arriving very recently and some settled in the area long before the coming of Europeans. Turning these family stories into aspects of a single story about the origins and development of the United States would rescue history classes from being a dreary recitation of names and dates. Our students would be attempting an account of how various the people were who became “we the people,” how it could actually be that e pluribus unum. Patriotism is not uncritical allegiance, however. It can never be my country right or wrong, because our loyalty is not simply to a nation as such but also to its ideals. We love America because of the hope for it articulated by the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address, a hope we find brokenly but nonetheless genuinely incarnated in civil society, the Constitution, the various laws passed by federal and state legislators, and

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decisions promulgated by the courts. We should love our country despite its flaws, and give proof of that love through our efforts to overcome those deficiencies. Among our national heroes are those who gave the last full measure of their devotion to correcting the wrongs they saw marring the American dream. From Thomas Jefferson through Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt, from Jonathan Edwards through Jane Addams to Martin Luther King, Jr., patriotism has been constantly expressed by reformers insisting that American practices be measured against American ideals, our “is” brought closer to our “ought.” From their example, we come to learn that the virtue of our nation depends on individuals who are not self-regarding, who are motivated by ideals other than personal gain, who devote their lives to a possibility worth struggling to realize no matter what it costs them in pain or loss. What we hope for may be more important than who we are. As Whitehead puts it, “Such conformation of purpose to ideals beyond personal limitations is the conception of that Peace with which the wise man can face his fate, master of his soul” (1933, p. 291). Students should become actively involved in issues where something of genuine worth is at stake. These should be situations where everything important is disputable, not only the question of how best to attain some worthwhile goal but also what that goal itself should be. Our eighth grade class need not set out to save the world or even to improve the quality of their city, town, or village, although obvious ways exist in which those lofty goals can be given local civic expression. It would be a helpful beginning simply for our students to explore possibilities for improving what goes on in their classroom, perhaps enhancing its physical features, perhaps improving how lessons are conducted. These are issues about which students already think themselves well informed, about which they are passionate and often dogmatically opinionated. Flushing out their various ideals for bettering things and then creating a forum in which these differences can be debated is a good way for our ninth graders to appreciate the complications of any reform—giving clear articulation to vague notions of what a better situation might look like, accurately understanding the views with which they disagree, exploring alternatives not initially imagined by anyone, working out compromises that might actually work, figuring out how to implement change within constraints of time, money, skill, and commitment. These are the lessons of citizenship in a democracy, ideally expressed. They are therefore precisely the way by which students can learn how their nation’s ideals inform but never mirror its reality—and how these lessons are occasions for creative action, not passive acceptance or debilitating cynicism. We honor our parents and our nation by doing our best to live up to their hopes for us, to their dream that we might grow up in a way that fulfills our potentialities.


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The next widening and intensifying step in our moral maturation is to recognize that we will fail in the effort to realize such ideals, yet to recognize also that this failure does not mean the loss of the ideal but its affirmation. What perishes discloses its ideals as still worth striving for. We should not be so naive as to think that our hopes will always be fulfilled, or even that our successes will endure. Good guys do not always finish last, but neither is there any guarantee they will finish first. Life, as JFK once remarked, is unfair. No fairy godmother exists, nor any knight on a white horse, no deus ex machina, who will appear at the last moment and right all wrongs. Striving to do good is good, and sometimes we actually succeed. Our world, in many important ways, is a far better place than it once was. But these good things are all the time perishing, and new wrongs and terrible evils are all the time arising in their place. “Amid the passing of so much beauty, so much heroism, so much daring,” says Whitehead, “Peace is then the intuition of permanence” (1933, p. 286), of dreams that outlast those who dream them. Suppose that something we have accomplished is overturned later on; suppose that what we hoped to achieve is never achieved even for a brief moment. Nonetheless our efforts were not in vain. First of all, the ideal we struggled to realize is still there to be realized. Indeed our struggle on its behalf may turn out to be the occasion when it was first taken by others to be a possibility worth seeking. Times change and our past accomplishments may no longer have any relevance, but the ideal of which they are the realization may still be worthwhile, although requiring fresh shape and substance. What is needed is sufficient sensitivity to the nature of the perishing, the reason for the demise or the failure or the misdirection. We need to see clearly what was done and to see it in comparison to what could have been done, then to recognize that what could have been done can yet still be done in some new way. A sports season is an appropriate, even if trivial, example of ideals worth struggling for. When the tenth-grade soccer team loses its opening game, the coach does not dwell on the loss except to help the players see where they made mistakes, where they could have done better. The team then practices with the correction of these inadequacies at the top of their agenda, and the next game tests whether they have improved, whether they have learned the lessons of their defeat. The initial loss is indeed a loss, a blot on their record, a negative that cannot be erased. But the possibility for victory they took into that game remains a possibility, reaffirmed for the second game and pursued with the insights gained from the team’s initial failure to achieve it. Victory is not an idle dream. It is a realistic goal shaping the team’s approach to each game throughout the season, a goal always changing in its details but sustained as a source of motivation and focus right through to the final game. We would celebrate the success of a soccer team that managed to win all its games, to realize its ideals every time, but we would also admire a team that played each game with fresh resolve, constantly renewing its victory aims, even were it never to

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win. In this sense, what matters is not the wins and loses but how the athletes have played their games. Tests administered as part of a course of study should have this same character. They should not merely measure our achievement levels at a particular point in the course. They should also be diagnostic of how we can improve. The tests should be like athletic contests: each a preparation for the next, each both a measure of what we have done and a way for us to learn how to do better. I once taught a course in which a student could take the exam over a particular unit whenever he or she wished. We would then go over the results, figuring out why the student had come up with a wrong answer exploring why the right answers were right. The student would then go study some more, until ready to retake the exam. This cycle of test and critique would continue until the student had achieved an A, at which time he or she could proceed to the next study unit. This testing strategy was used in a self-instructional college level course in symbolic logic, but it could easily be adapted to the needs of our eleventh grade class. Spelling tests, for instance, should involve retaking a test until all the words are spelled correctly. Learning a foreign language requires attaining proficiency at one stage before moving on to the next. Indeed, all subjects are fundamentally cumulative. Unless the first things are well-learned the later ones will be poorly grasped, for the chain of our knowledge is no stronger than its weakest link. Good teachers, like good coaches, encourage their students to take both their successes and their failures as learning experiences, as diagnostic moments in an open-ended developmental process. Success and failure are relative measures: our aim should always be toward the better. We can never honor our father and mother in some definitive manner. They deserve more honor than we can give, and today’s honoring cannot rest on the laurels of yesterday’s. Yet the honor we give them each day is precious, and if we are sensitive to how our efforts are received, why they sometimes succeed but sometimes do not, then we will find different and better ways of honoring our parents as we and they grow older. And the same holds for how we honor our surrogate parents, our aunts and uncles, our role models and mentors, our neighbors and our nation. This attitude leads on to the ultimate sense of Peace, to what Whitehead calls our embrace of the “Unity of Adventure”—the realization that our ideals and efforts are not isolated but are part of a community of other aims and efforts. We are, all of us, to some extent and with some degree of self-awareness, struggling to realize what we think is the best future possible for ourselves and those we love, for our society, for humankind, and for all creation. We also realize, each of us, that we have failed in this effort or soon will, but that in doing so we are joined by every other agency in the world, whether past, present, or future, whether human or otherwise. So we are all striving, all failing, and all disclosing ideals that call us back to renew the strife once more. “In this


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way the World receives its persuasion toward such perfections as are possible for its diverse individual occasions” (1933, 296). We have progressed significantly in our moral maturing when we sense that we are part of this unity of adventure, that our dreams and our efforts to realize them are part of a shared enterprise—what Loren Eisley calls “the immense journey” of our species, our planet, and our cosmos into the unknown. 4. Socratic Goading If being good is not a value but a virtue, then the teacher’s task is to discomfort students with respect to their current moral condition. We teachers should offer our students neither moral comfort nor moral condemnation. Our task is to be a Socratic goad, disclosing the inadequacy of each student’s present goodness and the lure of some better good. Neither we nor they are ever virtuous but instead always becoming virtuous, always only somewhere along the way toward that unattainable ideal. Learning to be good is the task of a lifetime. The pedagogical difficulty is that students are at different locations along this moral pathway. Each one needs to be goaded in a different way, each needs our full attention. And yet we find ourselves in classrooms filled with fifteen, forty, or four hundred students instead of on one end of that famous log where Mark Hopkins sat across from the single student he was teaching. Moreover, our own moral development has much to do with our approach to teaching, our motivation and imagination, our willingness to try anew and to try the new, the energy to sustain our efforts in times of frustration, indifference, or hostility. Yet this disparity in everyone’s moral development is an opportunity not an obstacle, for it describes the community we share. The variation in our virtues is an occasion for mutual help, a situation especially apropos since the higher forms of morality involve a quest for common goods. Some of us are not more virtuous than others, some of us are further along in our own moral maturation than others are. We each live along his or her own moral pathway, and these pathways are as different as the distance along them we may each have moved. We can help each other nonetheless, because our paths have much in common. From our vantage point we can see what someone else cannot, and our advice, taken or ignored, will make a difference. The moral development of our students can be measured by observing the sophistication of their responses to a morally problematic situation. Yet what is important for us, our students, and our country is not the quality of the results, but whether the student has developed the habit of growing morally. The question is whether the student has developed a character marked by selftranscending openness. The worth of a student’s learning, and hence of the teacher and the school, is to be found in the qualities of character developed— in the student’s capacity for continued moral improvement, in the teacher’s

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capacity for pedagogical improvement, and in the community’s functional capacity for reform, for increasing justice and furthering the common weal. Insofar as we want our students to learn to be good persons, good scholars, and good citizens, we should locate that good in their increased capacity to improve, not in their actual achievements. Insofar as we want to be good teachers, we should locate the value of our teaching not in how well our students score on multiple choice tests, but in how well they have mastered strategies of problem solving, assessment, and judgment, how creative their imagination is and how subtle their insights. Good teachers are good at goading their students and good students are good at goading themselves, other students, and their teachers. Perversely, this understanding of what constitutes the heart and soul of education is neglected these days, to our common detriment. Neither we nor our students need any but the most minimum moral virtue in order to recite the Ten Commandments, enumerate the dimensions of the Hedonistic Calculus, and list alphabetically the civic virtues we prize as Americans. Alas, however, unless our students learn in our classrooms how to become virtuous in ways that go far beyond that minimum, and so are able to bring their virtuous habits with them as they take up the adult responsibilities of parenthood, vocation, and citizenship in a democracy—unless they are learning in school, as also at home and in their neighborhood activities, how to be good—unless their education is a moral education in the sense I’ve discussed, our traditions will eventually wither. And our nation—along with all those values we so fervently cherish—will all too soon perish from the earth. WORKS CITED Bentham, Jeremy. (1789) An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. New York: Prometheus, 1988. Eisley, Loren. (1957) The Immense Journey. New York: Random House. MacIntyre, Alasdair. (1984) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1925) Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1967. ———. (1929) Process and Reality. Corrected ed. Ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978. ———. (1933) Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press, 1967.

Four ROMANCING EDUCATION: WHITEHEAD ON THE LOVE OF LEARNING Foster N. Walker 1. Romance Can be the Beginning of a Serious Love Affair A few years after leaving school, I experienced an intense joy and empowerment of self-initiated learning—a veritable romance with inquiry—that had been completely absent from my school experience (Walker, 2000). I had to recall early life and out-of-school activities to find any previous taste of this passion for my own understanding of things. When I began teaching children I wanted to convey this experience to them, and to a large extent did, holding to the vague notion of interest. However, I had no consistent guidance from a systematic grasp of the natural unfolding of learning, and many residual assumptions from my experience of school still shackled my pedagogical imagination. That is, until I encountered Alfred North Whitehead in his book, The Aims of Education and Other Essays. Whitehead showed that the predominant character of the learning of young children, and the secret of its joy and success amidst all difficulties, is what he calls “romance” (1929, pp. 15–21). He further showed that the general pattern of any human learning, in which intelligence is allowed to proceed with its natural rhythm, begins with a stage of romance, and proceeds through stages of “precision” and “generalization.” Generalization evokes a new romance stage and so a new three-stage cycle begins. Under circumstances favorable to this pattern, intelligence is at its peak effectiveness, and experience is intensely alive. The loss is incalculable to teachers, to students, and eventually to the whole society, that Whitehead’s ideas on romance as the proper departure for any learning and development have been largely ignored in school and university pedagogy. Yet this neglect is not altogether surprising. Educators must usually have intuited that in some way he would upset the whole apple cart. What interested him was the alteration of the whole equation of learning when a romance stage is added. When Whitehead points out that “in our conception of education we tend to confine it to . . . the stage of precision” (1929, p. 18), he implies that seriously allowing romance would change the whole conception and practice of education. At the very least, the precision with which teachers are familiar is not the precision stage that emerges naturally from a specific learner’s romance

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stage. And the generalization with which we are familiar as mere application is not a generalization stage emerging from a precision stage, which itself arises from a particular stage of romance. To see how this is so, let us now examine the nature and purpose of the romance stage as the natural and necessary birth of learning and of development, ordained as part of the very order of life itself. 2. The Work of Romance is Serious Play Why is it so difficult for the world of teaching to take seriously the romance stages we are all familiar with in our experience of out-of-school learning? Of the many factors, the basic ones are tacit assumptions. Just one, affecting our whole way of life, would probably be enough to block educational progress. This is the notion that serious learning is unmitigated hard work, and so must be imposed on children and young people regardless of how they feel, since they are just concerned with play. This assumption derives from the rigid division of work and play that permeates adult life in every sphere, and easily spawns the ideas of work as drudgery and play as playing around. In the notion of the romance stage, however, Whitehead presents this division of work from play with a challenge so radical we find it difficult at first to comprehend, in spite of its simplicity as actual experience. The romance of learning and development is at the same time the most serious work and the most intensely playful engagement, whatever the age and involvement of the learner. How could this be so? Whitehead is using the word “romance” to capture the way natural learning begins as the opening up of a new understanding of anything. The romance can be a moment or period of wonderment, an experience of sudden shock in knowing that one does not know something, or that something is utterly beyond one’s comprehension yet seems important to know. What is emerging in the romance might be fascinating, absorbing, or it might be a frightening lack of understanding, a sense of crisis or frustration. All energy gathers to fill the lack. An acute sense of aliveness emerges, a great intensity of feeling: feeling the importance of understanding something; feeling frightened or excited; feeling unaccountably confident in spite of the vagueness, the lack of precision. One is in love with finding out and with wanting to find out. It may be a brief episode, it may be long drawn out. In either case, it may not be hurried or harried. Without the intensity of romance, without its richness of feeling, no desire or energy to know anything can exist. Then so-called learning is driven by mindless obedience or fear. However, if a romance stage is encouraged, an intense desire to know arises from the person’s own internal generation of energy. This takes the form of an insistent inquiry, where the urgent feeling is love, not fear. Since no such thing as mere energy exists, or even mere energy of motivation, let us look still more closely at the complex character of romance energy. The word “motivation” is a vague specialism, and “interest” is too bland

Romancing Education: Whitehead on the Love of Learning

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to capture the reality of what happens. The phrase “a feeling of the importance” of the learning seems ponderous, but I think it is considerably more helpful. Whitehead stresses that in a natural and genuine engagement with learning something—that is, where we are really interested in this learning—“we commence by appreciating . . . importance” (1929, p. 3). This appreciation does not activate energy of engagement by merely intellectual assent, but by a feeling of the importance, a feeling of a value that matters. Life, energy, and action begin with intensity of feeling, which is also intensity of valuing. The world of work as drudgery does not take seriously feeling and the immediate feeling of value. The teacher who sees this omission clearly will begin immediately to think about what it takes to catalyze a romance stage, or to encourage one that is already arising. The first step is a new sensitivity to, and respect for, feeling as the carrier of essential energy. The student within whom romance feeling arises can quickly become a new creature who is a joy to be with—a student who wants to learn. It follows that the quality of feeling in the complex relationship of teaching and learning will change, not least with respect to en-joyment. Here teaching is directed to encourage a self-creation of understanding, not a passive reception of symbols and operations of authority figures. It will be richer in question and suggestion than in telling. A self-creation of understanding implies an energetic concern for meaning and truth. To restate a basic truth: for their aliveness and wellbeing, humans need to make sense of things. They want to know—not believe, or suppose, but know. Knowing for oneself, the only real knowing, is direct insight, which, as Whitehead puts it, may be “vague as to detail,” and is “yet the basis of all rationality” (1938, p. 31). He also calls insight revelation: “Revelation is the primary characterization of the process of knowing” (1936, p.167). Romance, with the vagueness typical of the pre-precision stage, provides the enormous energy and focused attention required for insight, together with the individual interest in exploration that is implied in the very notion of insight. Without adequate opportunity to refresh the quest for compelling meaning and truth—which requires romance—life is a slow stagnation of vitality, a soul death. This stagnation is, disastrously, slow enough and universal enough for it easily to be regarded as an unalterable part of life. To see this, and the responsibility it suggests, is to sense what Whitehead means when he says with such uncompromising forthrightness, “cursed be the dullard who destroys wonder” (1929, p. 32). We can see why the precision and generalization stages, implying an emergence from an individual’s romance stage, are not the exactitude and application of ideas familiar to the usual world of education. The precision with which we are familiar is that of a specialist, an often textbook precision imposed in disconnection from any romance of the student in relation to that subject-matter. This exactitude follows from nothing in the student’s present stage of understanding. It represents not a stage in the unfolding of a student’s learn-

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ing, but a stage in the teacher’s presentation of a curriculum. And any application is also, for the same reason, not the individual’s natural generalizing movement into seeing what he or she can do or envision with new understanding, since it too is composed of operations imposed by authority without regard for any rhythm of the individual student’s expansion of understanding. In effect, therefore, pedagogy as we normally encounter it lacks not only systematic encouragement of romance, but also has no precision and generalization stages. The learning is not so much an organic expansion of an individual’s understanding as the accumulation in memory of the products of adult operations. It is not so much growing as copying. How, then, might we alter pedagogy to avoid so great a tragedy and enjoy the fruits of so great an opportunity? I will attempt a reply in the form of some stories from my own experience of teaching. 3. A Romance Story: Learning to be a Teacher Soon after joining a faculty of education in its philosophy of education area, I confronted thirty fourth-year education students at the start of their philosophical studies. I was well aware that education students were usually bored with classes in philosophy of education, and I was sure that the lack of a sufficient romance stage in philosophy of education was a key factor. I wondered how I could meet this need. I wanted beginning teachers themselves to have an adult experiential knowledge of romance, and the precision and generalization arising from this, to incorporate into their own ideas and practice of teaching. With a little experimentation, I came up with a practice that was so effective a romance in philosophy of education, and so satisfying to the students, that it became a regular part of my teaching at this level. Soon after the first class, I asked the students to write an assignment. Their task was to write a true story, with changed names, of their experience of two or three teachers whose classes they had been in, either in school or university, choosing what they considered to be both positive and negative experiences. In relation to their stories, I asked them to begin a written reflection on what exactly they considered good and bad teaching, and to speculate on what might be essential to any good teaching. At first the students were nervous and unsure of their reasoning, as I expected. I assured them a serious attempt was being requested, not a precise achievement. After all, I wanted to evoke a romance, so it would have been a confusion to demand a premature precision. Some of these papers were voluntarily read out in class, and the events and ideas discussed openly together, in small groups and as a whole class. Many of their stories provided concrete examples for much of what developed during the whole span of the three-month course. The principles we extracted from the stories we then connected with


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powerful philosophic ideas that have inspired or ruined educational endeavor for over two thousand years. So this approach enabled the students to have the distinctly individualized entry into learning required for a romance stage; for love does not emerge from an imposed structure demanding a mass response. As Whitehead points out, “mankind is naturally specialist,” and “in education wherever you exclude specialism you destroy life” (1929, p. 10). The students felt the importance of what they were doing because they were pursuing an intensely individual reflection on actual experiences that had significantly affected them, and because they anticipated a generalization to something they would find truly beneficial in their own teaching. In the romance activity an entire cycle was intimated, like an entire melody anticipated in the introductory notes of the theme. Moreover, the students were encouraged to allow the relative vagueness of romance in their inquiry, to muse seriously but in a loose and relaxed way in their first reflective penetration of their own educational experiences. They were assured that future classes would enable them to make precise what they had discovered. Of course such promises must be honored. At first, they were unsure of my integrity, and occasionally suspicious, quite understandably. The predominant trend in academic, business, and technical teaching everywhere is to move immediately to learn the precision of the experts, and to stay there. Vagueness is often seen as woolly, immature thinking, and the apparent clarity of the textbook can have nearly divine status. Whitehead wrote a whole essay arguing that the confused preoccupation with clarity to the exclusion of respect for vagueness has been the ruination of education (1936, pp. 156–176). In the process, he shows that every clarity is surrounded first by vagueness, and then impenetrable ignorance. Two times three is six, for sure, but what on earth is a number? More speculatively, why is there a universe that needs number? We have absolutely no idea. Impenetrable ignorance. For me, as a teacher, there was a very sobering implication in all of this. If I had rejected the students’ vagueness of philosophic expression with disparagement and made them learn my or some other philosopher’s relative clarity, it would not be their clarity. It would not be the vehicle in which they could express whatever clarity and precision they had actually come to in their understanding. In effect, I would be rejecting their minds in favor of someone else’s. What should I think of myself as an educator if I actually reject the student’s mind? Is it not my task to help develop that mind? And so I felt constrained to make comments as suggestions, not as criticisms, and to applaud such precision as had been achieved, and to acknowledge good ideas regardless of their exactitude of formulation and interrelation. All this had to be reflected in the grading. I had not consciously assigned personal story writing with the history of human story telling in mind. This history, however, could prove illuminating. The overwhelming evidence is that story telling is the form of mind and lan-

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guage most distinctive and appropriate to the human species. Unquestionably, the subtle use of story can be an educational powerhouse for awakening minds to new and deeper possibilities, concentrating attention to laser sharpness, and all that is carried in the rich intensity of complex and intelligent feeling that Whitehead calls romance. Whitehead categorizes the psychological character of the whole of childhood as the first great natural period of romance learning. One implication of this claim is well known from Piaget’s research: the use of the abstractions of “formal operations” are mostly inappropriate during this period. A more immediately practical implication is that the concreteness of alive ideas hiding in the wings of story should be utilized to the full by the teacher who respects romance. Following the romance of the story assignment in my own course, I found that the less exciting and quite demanding work of precision of understanding was fairly willingly and effectively undertaken as the term progressed, provided the more abstract level of inquiry was kept explicitly connected with the kinds of experiences my students had written about. Why was the labor of precision not unwelcome drudgery? Surely it was because the attempt at precision was a making precise of what they had themselves unearthed in the romance of their first inquiry. It was a precision continuing from, and thus energized by, their own romance and their own cycle of inquiry. Although the initial vagueness was acceptable for the sake of the power of a genuine romance, I did not consider precision and generalization as unimportant or stodgy. The second and third assignments called for balance. The second, around the middle of term, usually asked students to do a precise critical assessment of some piece of literature we were using. One option of the final assignment was a clear encouragement to generalization. The students were invited to return to a scene of their story, rework it to illustrate educational effectiveness, and then to state the philosophic principles that would justify that change. Alternately, they could use philosophical process and ideas we had explored to create a beginning philosophy of education of their own. In this course and others, I would regularly make small presentations for the sake of underlining in a precise way what had been elicited in discussion. Yet the bulk of class activity was fairly spontaneous interchange, as a whole class or in small groups, guided towards the disciplined joint inquiry of dialogue. These activities kept the initial energy of romance, generated by the stories, continually refreshed. The clash of differences evoked by an exchange of ideas provided a challenge to illusory certainties. They created a sudden switch from the secure sense of knowing to the insecurity of not-knowing, as unexamined beliefs were exposed and unseated. This kind of insecurity is one main source and form of romance energy: knowing that one does not know, and having a strong urge to know. However, this can easily degenerate into aggressive


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argument or safe and empty politeness if it is not facilitated with firmness, and a clear sense of what makes for genuine inquiry together. Spontaneous open inquiry needs to be granted space, but is often more powerful when as much a surprise to the teacher as to the students. But even here, for this to be supported, the teacher will have to be clear about the value of inquiry and romance. I recall a story told to me by a teacher, a friend of mine, who stopped her secondary school class when she intercepted a love note between two students. To their surprise, she asked why they thought love is so important. After initial banter, a serious inquiry arose, facilitated by the teacher, who knew how to facilitate open inquiry. After a while, the impetus died, and the students returned content and refreshed to regular exercises. Such spontaneous interludes became a regular feature. This teacher loved the beauty of authentic, spontaneous inquiry, and so took advantage of every opportunity to make space for it. What exactly did she love? She loved the originality, the freshness, the friendly and civilized relationship, the new questions, the vague, suggestive words inviting precision, the intensity of everyone’s involvement, the urgency of communication, the warming sense of the person in everyone involved, the frequent humor, the occasional anger—the aliveness, the intelligence. In the open discussions and group inquiries following the return of the first assignment in my course, I was easily able to exploit another of the assignment’s features. The students’ reflections on how they were affected by different teaching approaches and personal characteristics of teachers had the beginnings of a consciousness of the social impact of organized education. The reflection soon extended to this course. For example, the usually spontaneous inquiry of the class, carefully facilitated as to tone, was extremely vital and engaging. The students very much enjoyed it. An overall atmosphere of friendliness and cooperation existed, undoubtedly affected by my efforts to let them know I was there to support any serious effort and not to pick holes in their immaturity. The experience of communal solidity became strong enough for many to eventually voice a serious challenge to the common ethos of aggressive competition and its divisiveness. In the open possibilities of the quality of relationship in the classroom lies a potent opportunity to give students years of experience in warm and collaborative relationship, which inevitably will have some larger individual and collective effect. The sensitivity to individual feeling, the high level of enjoyment, the freshness of creative endeavor, the inspiration of spacious freedom of direction, the individuality of work, all of which are intensely characteristic of the romance stage, tend to produce warm, easy, collaborative relationships, and a willingness to accept less interesting but necessary tasks. In such a relaxed atmosphere, students find it much easier to appreciate individual persons in their uniqueness, and to drop the prejudices of role, gender, race, age, and anything that creates divisiveness. This is relationship which tends to evoke the finest

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potentials of communal human being, which are also those most urgently needed everywhere. However, let me also emphasize what an almost ridiculously small and simple change was this reorientation of teaching to include romance—one slightly different type of assignment. I stress this because, although a serious overall inclusion of the usually excluded factor of romance is a major change in both the conception and the practice of education, the first and tentative attempts in this direction are, and no doubt should be, on a small scale. 4. The Romance of Dialogue and Partnered Dialogue-Journals My choice of that first assignment, so different from what the students were used to, did not suddenly occur to me as a strange and random idea. I had for many years been experimenting with different kinds of assignment and evaluation, and from that experience I adopted the following as a regular practice. First, even where the topic is part of the syllabus, I leave the assignment openended for the students to find and take their own direction of inquiry. Second, I encourage them to choose a form of writing that best facilitates their thinking, be it an essay, an imaginary dialogue, a journal, a series of letters, or a short story. With any kind of assignment I try to give a written response in enough detail to make it into a small dialogue. Not just in assignments, but in every aspect of my teaching, I had gradually introduced more and more elements of dialogue, oral and written. I did this at first to allow students to avail themselves of potent modes of learning. Central to this approach was my realization that inquiry itself is the primary activity of mind, and that dialogue is the natural and effective human spur to inquiry, in so far as it relies on language communication. However, dialogue is a very special use of language for the purpose of joint inquiry, which exploits the power of many minds working together. Unfortunately, our familiar modes of language communication are not designed for this. Ordinary conversation, which is chaotic in process, and can have many different purposes, is an example. Some oral discourse, like discussion and debate, easily tends to destroy joint inquiry with adversarial relationship instead of a mutual concern for the truth. Problem-solving is often taken to be a mode of inquiry that assumes an adequate knowledge is achievable of what the real problems are. This assumption is a confusion, and part of the reason Paulo Freire calls dialogue “problem-posing” education (1968, p. 66). Most joint investigation in school and university is not dialogue but a relatively friendly discussion or problem-solving session. In short, people know the word “dialogue,” and have a vague association with conversation and inquiry, but they know neither its exact meaning and purpose nor the distinctive features of its practice. With students, quite early on, I encourage some initial dialogue about dialogue itself as a unique mode of human relationship, and not just as a way of


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speaking. After all, silence has an extraordinary quality of silence, and listening, at first impossible for most people, is crucial to dialogue. And in a real sense there can be dialogue without speech (Buber, 1926, pp. 19–20). Dialogue can usefully be characterized as a special form of relationship: a friendship through inquiry. People are drawn together by their desire for insight into important truths, and for transcendence of opinion and ideology. Part of this attraction is their realization, however vague, that mind arises between people, as a relational creation, instead of residing in them individually. For the activity of mind, we need others in the supportiveness that is the friendship of dialogue. Without a kind of proto-dialogue between mother and infant, the child will show developmental problems that often have serious consequences individually and socially, and perhaps permanently (Spitz, 1973, pp. 147–178). Dialogic learning is no creative accident in human affairs. All this should not be a surprise if we recall what Whitehead is famous for arguing repeatedly— the very being of everything is interwoven with and dependent upon everything else; the universe is organic. Therefore, “every organism requires an environment of friends” (1925, p. 206). So also, then, does the operation of the mind of the human organism. Organized education has too often, to the detriment of everyone, ignored this. Friendliness of dialogue is possible because a chief cause of divisiveness is systematically reduced and sometimes absent altogether in dialogic learning: inflexible positions. Having a position implies that one thinks one knows beyond need of revision. The interchange of different positions then produces retreat, submission, or attack. People truly in dialogue are in dialogue because they are aware that they do not know things they are sure they need to know. Socrates characteristically begins conversation with an attempt to show the other that his knowledge is actually confusion. If this illusory certainty is relinquished, they can enter into dialogue proper on the basis of knowing that they do not know. Clearly, therefore, dialogue must be a most potent way to engender educational romance. For the energy of romance learning arises with the recognition of a hole in meaning and knowing, and the desire to find how it should be filled. Romance thrives on the realization of not-knowing. If a student new to an area of learning can be encouraged to write an assignment as an imaginary (and open) dialogue, this is a perfect beginning. For the student’s not-knowing is precisely what makes the dialogue a lively and appropriate vehicle of romance learning. However, because the unfamiliarity of dialogue creates insecurity, initially it helps to work in the safety of and in collaboration with the whole class. The way I have often begun a class is to divide the students into groups of two or three, and present them with questions or provocative quotations in the agreed area of learning. I then give them a period of time to begin a small group open inquiry in response to their choice of quotation, before jointly con-

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verting their conversation into written dialogue. At the end of the period, we reconvene as a whole class, and participants in each group read their dialogue, as far as it has been written. Each group member reads the voice that was his or her own. This presentation can take on the vitality of theater, and has resulted in some of the most spirited, funny, and often moving sessions I have experienced as a teacher. Sometimes the listening students will break into spontaneous applause after the reading of the dialogue, so impressed are they with the intelligence of their classmates’ progressive inquiry. Indeed, invigorated by the romance energy, students regularly have penetrating insights so effortlessly they do not realize the value of what they have said. After a few exercises like this, many students feel ready to undertake the creation of their own written dialogue. However, although a lone attempt can be useful, it is not necessary. I have found that fine work often comes from two or three students producing a written dialogue or essay together. If the project is an essay, the joint preparation constitutes the dialogic element. Students regularly opt for collaborative assignments. However, much more significant is a strong and continuing evocation of romance intelligence, also evident in a variant approach, the partnered exchange of journals as a dialogue through writing. The dialogue-journal began as a joint research project with a colleague and two classes of willing university students. It is a journal of inquiry, not a diary. Literature on the educational use of journals in school, including journal exchange between the teacher and student, abounded. But nothing has been published on a dialogic journal exchange between students. After three months of our experimental classes, students began to surprise us with a comment we were to hear frequently in the future: dialogue journals were the most useful and illuminating thing they had done at university (Walker, 1991, pp. 240– 255). This response was beyond anything we had expected. The journals stimulated a powerful romance energy in the subject area, which moved steadily and naturally into precision and some generalization. We began to get reports that students were signing up in our courses just for the dialogue-journals. As we studied the journals during the term and after the end of the course, we were continually inspired by the unusual level of thoughtfulness, and often the rapid development of sensitive relationship. Results were the same in subsequent courses, and I have used partnered dialogue journals regularly ever since. One pair of students were married as a result of becoming dialoguejournal partners! Some students have carried on the exchange privately for a year or more. Occasionally, a student will adopt journal inquiry as a lifetime practice—as I have since I was about twenty. The basic approach is simple. Students usually work in pairs. Each student has an inquiry journal, writes in it each week, and then exchanges journals with the partner. Partners respond in each other’s journals to what they find written there, return the journals, and the cycle is repeated. Ease and natural-


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ness of writing is helped with the agreement that spelling, grammar, and so on are not to be evaluated or commented on. This goes on for the rest of the term and constitutes a major graded assignment. The journals are checked after about four weeks. They are collected in at the end of the semester for assessment, and quickly returned by mail (Walker Guidelines). Such an unfamiliar assignment is first demonstrated in class, with immediate guidance. After dividing students into pairs, I take one or two classes to show some previous journals, work through some fresh journal entries, and some exchanges. The pairs meet each other, and as a whole class we have some discussion of the entries and responses. We also go through the detailed instructions and evaluation scheme for the project. Then the pairs are on their own, though they can consult with me privately if they wish. Usually I know nothing of what is happening until the check, when I read the journals, a few weeks later. With the students pursuing dialogue-journal partnership, a solid assurance existed that all precision and generalization would be an outgrowth of their romance, since I focused my activity on encouraging their creative inquiry. This learning was the primary part of their individual work during the course. Let us explore for a moment just what kind of learning this was. The whole adventure of journal writing and journal dialogue was itself a powerful romance learning for the students. And in the twists and turns of the partners’ probings and responses to each other there was a frequent reigniting of romance around specific issues that arose. Provided the activity made sense in terms of the course, my role here, as any teacher’s proper role in the face of the necessary freedom of romance, was the occasional question, suggestion, and provision of opportunity and materials, all given in the spirit of an interested observer, supportive and non-directive. Nonetheless, the teacher is still the one who has experience in the activity, and so the one who understands the difficulties, the traps, the fears, the unseen possibilities, and from there can offer a kind of encouragement others in the situation cannot give. A teacher is in a position of extreme sensitivity, for romance is in a special sense a place of not-knowing, and so of vulnerability. Like any teacher in this situation, I did not know in advance how I would best be able to help, or if I would be successful. My task was a romance exploration: to find, in the moment, from my intuition of many kinds of factors unique to that moment and the people involved, what would protect and perhaps further evoke the emergence of that moment. What exactly is the delicacy of this teacher-student relationship? Certainly it involves trust. It involves respect. Its friendliness is crucial. But surely, in an authentic and unsentimental way, it involves precisely what the term romance suggests—love. Alternatively, as Martin Buber puts it in his discussion of dialogue and educating, the teacherstudent relationship is one of “communion” instead of “compulsion” (1926, p. 118). And this, I would think, is a key ingredient in teaching and learning that

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takes it beyond, and yet including, the narrowly functional learning of specific theoretical and practical tasks, to the sphere of educating proper. What is involved in learning is what I will term organic, as opposed to accumulative, understanding. Accumulative understanding is completely necessary, and very limited. It includes the familiar acquisition of a bit of information here, and another bit of information there, what time the bus leaves, and how to solve an algebraic equation. We cannot move through even a small portion of any day without it. And still it involves only a minimal activity of mind as inquiry and motivation, and a maximum of memory. Organic understanding, however, as the term suggests, is not a process of addition, but of the growth of a living creature, where the learning is a transmutation of ideas into a change in the whole being. As Whitehead puts it, “Its nearest analog is assimilation of food by a living organism.” (1929, p. 33). In however small or large a way, that irreversible change in the very self of the person occurs that we lamely try to put in words as a change in “worldview.” Becoming someone new has a potent romance that is exciting and threatening, and energy, alertness, and motivation are at their highest. If this self-development on its cognitive side is deliberately envisaged and consciously encouraged, we have educating. But what kind of change will this be? An educator accepts enormous responsibility for encouraging a self-development of the best possible kind, and no doubt when Whitehead refers to education as “religious,” and elaborates on “duty” and “reverence,” he has this in mind (ibid., p. 14). What teacher is perfectly suited for this? None, of course. Educators are always learning to be more true to the responsibility, and their life of teaching always has this romance of furthering their own organic understanding and self-development in the midst of their pedagogy. My contention is that if, as I attempted with my contribution to the dialogue-journals, the teacher-student relationship has the quality of love, of communion, the best possible chance exists that all will slowly transform themselves in the direction of “receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling” (ibid. p. 1). As an integral part of this process, with freedom and romance learning intensely present, the activity of mind as inquiry is at a maximum. Its precision and generalization, if the teaching is suitably adjusted to those stages, will give the greatest effectiveness and depth to the learning of specific subject matters. In terms of the students’ satisfaction of life, and later contribution to the quality of human life in general, we have here, in the activity of dialogue-journals, both an example and an opportunity for this most happy outcome of pedagogy. I am very confident of the life-long relevance of the dialogue-journal work I have encouraged, when all the relevant details are in place (Walker, 2000, pt. 3).


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5. More on the Romance of Dialogue: Student-Directed Class Inquiry There exists very little dialogue in the world. Apart from a few isolated individuals like Socrates, dialogue is a recent development and is, to my knowledge, entirely outside of organized education. This is curious, since Buber’s groundbreaking discussion of dialogue as far back as 1926 was specifically applied to educating (Between Man and Man). In the sixties, Freire was creating the first large group dialogue as twenty-person “culture circles” in adult literacy education in Brazil (Freire, 1926). Admittedly, he was exiled for this! In the seventies, in London, a psychotherapist, Patrick de Maré (1991), and later the physicist, David Bohm explored median (15–40 persons) group dialogue as “sociotherapy” (1991; 1996). Gareth Matthews conducted beautiful research showing that elementary school children can be excellent in group dialogic inquiry, even in philosophy (1984). Somewhat later, Theodore Roszak, in his book on computers and education, argues that all secondary education should have a dialogic component (1986, p. 215). A combination of Socrates, Buber, and Freire first influenced me to go beyond my periodic encouragement of loose discussion in small groups, and introduce serious group dialogue in my teaching. After some experimentation I settled for what I called the “SDI”—Student Directed Inquiry. I later called it, more accurately, Student Directed Class Inquiry (Walker, “Guidelines”). I was teaching educational philosophy to students of education specializing in elementary education, which had once been my own area of school teaching. I wanted these education students to learn about self-directed learning, about dialogue, about mind as inquiry, about romance as the beginning of organic understanding—but in a way that they could experience all this, and so introduce it in practice, as teachers, later on. It had to be learning through doing. The class divided into groups of three or four, and over several weeks each group engaged in the following activities. Let us look at group X. It worked together thoroughly studying an assigned piece of literature relevant to the course topic. I joined in periodically and helped, where I could. Students in other groups gave this piece of literature only one reading, without group inquiry. They wrote presentable questions on it, expressing points of their uncertainty. On an assigned day, group X was the “teacher” of the class. The teaching was not imparting information about their piece of literature, for the class was already familiar with it. The group taught in the sense of guiding and facilitating a class inquiry into important issues arising from the literature. If inquiry is the activity of mind, we do not just read and remember. We read to get powerful resources for inquiry. On an assigned day, the class handed group X its written questions. Learning to find good questions and word them clearly for communication is essential to inquiry and dialogue. We had explored questioning together, dis-

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tinguishing authentic questioning from merely academic questions, and authentic consideration of a question from answering. Group X read out one question at a time, then guided the class to a disciplined dialogic exploration of the writer’s meaning of the question, then its importance, and then the truth of the matter. Of course they muddled, lost inquiry and fell back into the habit of lecturing, and slipped in and out of adversarial debate. Their experience was a romance in really learning what is needed for inquiry and for dialogue, and what destroys it. It was a romance in learning a different kind of teaching. When everyone seemed satisfied, or fed up with the question, they went on to the next one. Each group went through this same process. Afterward, in a form of writing of their choice, using a piece of literature of their choice, each student completed an assignment critically assessing that literature. After all the preceding processes, they were in a natural and excellent position to move into this precision stage. The last assignment encouraged them to put the emphasis on generalization—in this case, a generalization to their overall understanding of their vision as educators. I was given every indication over the years that in the main the students never forgot the ideas that were part of their work in this course. How could they? The initial engagement with them was one of romance, and the movements through the three-stage cycle were organic. The ideas changed the students, and they carried the ideas as part of the way they understood their lives and the world. They certainly did not learn them for an examination; they could not possibly. I never gave an examination after about 1979. All this is possible, even if difficult, if one is clear what is really important to do, and if one is moved to, is in love with, doing it. Let us look for a moment at these ideas, and their adventures through the student’s mind, under different conditions. Why do some people love ideas, while others prefer to keep away from them? Why are some people utterly changed by ideas, and others just spout them impressively, and protect themselves from feeling, and depth, by directing attention to shallow intellectual excitement? Jacob Needleman, going back to Pythagoras, has an illuminating exploration of this age-old problem for culture and education. He makes a division between two kinds of idea: “ideas proper,” or “great ideas,” and “concepts” (1983, chap. 3). Ideas proper challenge us to do and be something new. They become part of who we are. That is the effect they have. Concepts are necessary but much more limited in effect. They are functional tools to get specific practical tasks completed effectively. We change the face of our world with them, but we ourselves are not changed in any fundamental way by them. Ideas proper—great ideas—can be treated merely as interesting possibilities, and never touch our lives. They are then like concepts, except that they do not fulfill any practical function. They have neither the benefit of great ideas nor that of concepts proper. Needleman calls these hybrids “conceptualized ideas.” They become the stuff of mere intellectual excitement and persuasive


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rhetoric. His categorization is useful, and what he refers to with this clarity is an experiential fact. This fact is also a tragedy if critically important ideas are confusedly disempowered in human affairs by being reduced to even less usefulness than practical concepts. Only a very short step is required for these to be further reduced to the mind-numbing baggage of Whitehead’s “inert ideas” (1929, pp. 1–2). How do ideas become corrupted in that reduction? Part of the answer, an essential part, is that they are first engaged without romance, and acquired in a process of accumulative learning. No doubt that is why Einstein apparently said his intellectual imagination took two years to recover after leaving school. If we encounter an idea in the spirit of romance, and move through the individualized precision and generalization of organic understanding, we feel that idea as a significant challenge to our current thinking—at the depth of self-hood. That is, the idea touches the fundamental outlook from which we live. Thus a continuation of the encounter changes us. The learning is not accumulation, but self-development. In this case, it becomes part of a mature, positive vision, perhaps leading eventually to wisdom. Whitehead stresses that the romance spirit of learning is absolutely essential to the birth of wisdom (ibid., p. 30). If no romance exists, the idea is manipulated through pre-established stages of precision and generalization simply because school demands it. Then at best it becomes a task-specific concept—for example, an ideological weapon. Alternatively, it could become a useless conceptualized idea—a “head-trip.” If entirely lacking any appeal, it will become an inert idea. None of these possibilities allows the idea to be a factor in the maturation of vision. It will tend to encourage minimal activity of mind, or if an inert idea, it will more seriously harm the development of the mind (ibid., pp. 1–2). Such thoughts as these were on my mind by the time I began to experiment with the SDI, and they were clamoring for pedagogical application. The social ramifications of the SDI, with its obvious respect for interrelated romance, dialogue, and inquiry, are not hard to see. SDL is collaborative learning all the way through, requiring sensitivity of relationship, and team spirit or community responsibility. Such learning was all excellent learning, of potentially lasting benefit. Attention to the romance stage always has the effect of sensitizing human feeling and relationship. Pedagogically, attention to romance is close attention to interests and difficulties, warmth and supportiveness, humor and mutual admiration, which begins to grow, spreading among the students themselves. They start to forget their conditioned competitiveness and isolating ambitiousness, and begin to learn and appreciate a different way of being human together. Regarding the general poverty of relationship and universal indifference to feeling, they shift to being part of the solution instead of part of the problem. I am not simply referring to humanizing projects and social action, but the effect on society of adults for whom education has, as Whitehead puts it, been very much “the

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guidance of the individual towards a comprehension of the art of life” (1929, p. 39). 6. Romancing Education: A Whiteheadian Vision Let me make it explicit that Whitehead’s discussion of romance is a part of his vision of right education. Considering education, he soberly referred to the Benedictines, whose power of vision saved the store of truly civilized values from the barbaric flood of the Dark Ages (ibid., pp. 44, 58). He also refers to George Bernard Shaw’s idea of a commonwealth in which “work is play and play is life” (ibid., pp. 43–44). In light of such vision, attention to romance has the possibility of making a vital contribution to the quality of the human future. In this way, the educator sees romance not as an isolated idea, but as part of the whole sweep of ideas relevant to the future of humankind. Suddenly a dynamic sense emerges of sober high purpose in being a certain kind of teacher—being, in fact, in the profoundest sense, an educator. This sense is the pedagogical romance I am advocating here, the “larger knowledge and firmer purpose,” the examined teacher’s life that is worth living—even the ultimate satisfaction of “merging personality in something beyond itself” (ibid., p. 40). As a simpler statement of more manageable dimensions, I could sum up my thesis in this way: romance learning is the only learning that can disturb the limits of one’s current thought deeply enough to generate self-development. Otherwise, at best the learning is a set of useful concepts carried around like a tradesman’s belt of tools, and the larger possibilities of intelligence to create depth and intensity in life are untouched. At worst, we get inert ideas, where, in Laurens van der Post’s words, “what we call being ‘civilized’ is not living but a mere existence, ‘tame’ to the point of deadliness” (1975, p. 97). This deadliness is, as Whitehead puts it, “soul murder” (1929, p. 57). Against it, he insists, whether with reference to the teacher or the student, the “essential idea remains, that work should be transfused with intellectual and moral vision and thereby turned into joy, triumphing over its weariness and its pain” (ibid., p. 44). WORKS CITED Bohm, David. (1991) Changing Consciousness. With Mark Edwards. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco. ———. (1996) On Dialogue. New York: Routledge. Buber, Martin. (1926) Between Man and Man. Trans. Robert Gregor Smith. London: Collins Fontana Library, 1973. de Maré, Patrick, et al, (1991) Koinonia: From Hate, Through Dialogue, to Culture in the Large Group. London and New York: Karnac Books. Freire, Paulo. (1968) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press.


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Matthews, Gareth B. (1984) Dialogues with Children. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Needleman, Jacob. (1983) The Heart of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Roszak, Theodore. (1986) The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking. New York: Pantheon. Spitz, René A. (1973) Dialogues from Infancy. Ed. Robert M. Emde. New York: International Universities Press. van der Post, Laurens. (1975) A Mantis Carol. Covelo, Cal.: Island Press. Walker, Foster N. (1991) “Giving Dialogue a Place In Foundations Teaching: A Research Report on the Use of Peer Dialogue Journals. ” Proceedings of the 1991 TriUniversities Conference. Eds. K. Therrien and N. Kach. Faculty of Education, University of Alberta, 1992. ———. (2000) Enjoyment and the Activity of the Mind: Dialogues on Whitehead and Education. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ———. (n.d.) “Guidelines for the Use of Dialogue Journals. ” Foster N. Walker. #4, 2017-90 Ave. S.W., Calgary, Alberta , Canada, T2V OX4 or (403) 281-8730. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1925) Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1967. ———. (1929) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Free Press, 1967. ———. (1936) “Harvard the Future” In Whitehead’s American Essays in Social Philosophy. Ed. A. H. Johnson. New York: Harper, 1959. ———. (1938) Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press, 1968.


Five Genre, Relationality, and Whitehead’s Principle of Relativity: How We Write Daniel Royer 1. Genre’s Recent History Much has been written in recent years about the categories of thought and language that shape the forms of our thinking. George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things comes to mind as a book that is full of evidence and illustration that the mind gains much advantage over the world with its ability to map one conceptual domain onto another. Lakoff’s arguments illustrate the power of metaphor, and the British paleo-anthropologist Steven Mithen, as a further example, has suggested that the evolution from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon is marked precisely by the ability to switch cognitive frames: thinking metaphorically may have been responsible for the Paleolithic genesis of art. The search for the origins of art and science through speculation about the prehistory of the mind has precedent in the heroic, speculative efforts of Immanuel Kant. But unlike Kant, Lakoff and other contemporaries view such categories as “metaphors we live by,” social constructs, not absolute and categorical obligations. Certainly much of Kant’s foundationalist epistemology has been refuted or corrected in the last century, but the idea that we apprehend the world about us through conceptual schemes—social, linguistic, cultural, aesthetic, or otherwise—is so widely held nowadays that it is sometimes difficult to avoid the vicious relativism these views can sometimes fall prey to in their effort to update Kant. Whitehead scholars view Alfred North Whitehead’s epistemology—his explanation of the way that we apprehend the world about us—to be his philosophical forte. David Ray Griffin has recently argued that Whitehead untangles issues that vexed Kant and subsequent philosophers. I do not intend to trace the convoluted paths of this “unsnarling” of the perennial mind and body problem. Whitehead’s non-foundationalist account of how we “prehend” the objective world about us does receive a kind of non-technical elucidation in the discussion of genre below. Genre—like language, art, metaphor, and other vehicles of cultural communication—is omnipresent, constantly shaping the way we perceive not only discourse but all other kinds of social action as well. From the first apprehension of “friendly smiles” to later understanding “round things,” “scary things,” “knock knock jokes,” and “signs with rules,” children quickly learn to “read” typified situations and respond appropriately and rhet-

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orically. In fact, one well-argued view of what learning to write is all about explains writing as a child’s semiotic “symbol weaving” activity in response to recurring social and rhetorical patterns (Newkirk, 1989). Genre is ubiquitous, and once we note how it works, like the metaphors we live by, we can begin to notice how it frames up the world around us, mediating and filtering what we see and do not see, guiding our social and textual expectations. As Carolyn Miller concludes: “what we learn when we learn a genre is not just a pattern of forms or even a method of achieving our own ends. We learn, more importantly, what ends we may have. . . . [F]or the student, genres serve as keys to understanding how to participate in the actions of a community” (1984, p. 165). This kind of broad sketch of the relation of thought and language to learning and writing instruction has been a starting place for teachers seeking to reconceptualize writing instruction. The most important of such efforts for language arts teachers can be found in two books published over thirty years ago at the beginning of what came to be known as the “process movement” in writing instruction: James Britton’s Language and Learning and James Moffett’s Teaching the Universe of Discourse. These books outline slightly different and much fuller philosophical backdrops than the one I sketched above. I agree fully with their goal of casting the language arts not as cookies cut from the curricular dough but as the connected lattice of dough left over when the cookies have been removed. This is Britton’s metaphor of the systemic importance of language arts, and his effort to recast the importance of the language arts in general and writing instruction in particular kicked off a new generation of writing theory and instruction. The last three or four decades of writing instruction have been dominated by the kinds of questions that emphasize the dynamics of writing experience, not the upshot or final products of that experience. Thus, the teacher’s banner slogan has been “teach process, not product” and the result has been mostly positive. Before the “process revolution” in writing instruction, teachers focused instruction on the final form of a written product, its formal characteristics and conventional features that make it look like other successful pieces of writing. Since then, teachers following process models have been more inclined to focus instruction on what is going on in the writer’s experience—cognitive and social—that contributes to successful written products. The shift has been subtle at times, at other times quite overdone, but it has no doubt changed a whole generation of writing instruction. With every new movement or revolution there comes eventually a counterstatement, and for many such a statement has been voiced by those promoting recent genre theory. Seen perhaps more as “post-process” than “counter-process,” genre theory has called attention once again to products. But this is no ordinary educational pendulum swing; instead, genre theorists have pointed out that genres are far more than mere products. The conventional understanding of genre is just that: conventional. A particular set of conventions,

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so the story goes, take on the characteristics of a “type” of writing and eventually this pattern of types becomes a genre, a form learned and mimicked by other writers. Thus we have the office memo, the quarterly report, the detective novel, the sonnet, and countless other “text types” for aspiring writers to try and master. Recent genre theory complicates this conventional understanding. Consider a young writer learning to write the “book report,” “lab report,” “research paper” or some other conventional genre of school discourse. One strand of early genre theory emphasized the importance of learning genres as such, a kind of stocking up on the lingua franca of school discourse. The best way to succeed in the academy, as this view goes, is to master the genres that dominate its discourse. Thus, Australian educators, who were among the early proponents of this approach, were teaching products once again, and many writing theorists felt this was a pedagogical step backwards to the pre-process days. But as other scholars began to explore the pedagogical implications of Carolyn Miller’s “Genre as Social Action” and explicate and disseminate the complexity of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on genre, the concept of genre came to mean teaching writing as a way of teaching how written language functions in—and is a product of—its social contexts. To learn how to write a book report or lab report is not just to learn a set of school conventions, but to learn as well the way these conventions get work done in their social context. According to this new view, learning a genre is about learning something much more than the container-like features of certain forms. It involves learning about the rhetorical exigencies and social circumstances that shape a genre and press it into service to begin with—for example, business memos now use block style because of relaxed formality and increased demands for speed and efficiency in the workplace. Whereas formerly the student was memorizing headings to be followed and noting how many paragraphs were needed to satisfy the conventions of a book report, now a student is responding to his or her own rhetorical exigency, such as the need to publish a review in a student magazine or familiarize other students with a new set of books. Of course other implications and teaching strategies have followed from recent models of genre theory. But broadly speaking, the instructional change has been from static, passive concepts to dynamic, active concepts. Genre conceived as mere form emphasizes the reception of texts instead of their production. These familiar dichotomies—reception/production, reading/writing, text/context, individual/society—have too often become the governing abstractions that organize our understanding of what is possible as writers and teachers of writing. Consequently, genres take on the static role of “formal cause,” of that into which our writing efforts are poured. The result is that genres are normalizing. Our goal as writers is to make our prose look like it is supposed to look and to conform to a pattern (no small achievement), while we slight in our composing how it is our efforts contribute to a context, create some effect in

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the world, make something happen, or do something in response to rhetorical exigency. No wonder genre has traditionally been more interesting to readers than to writers: while students of literature in the schools learn how to “name that piece of writing” (for example, a sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter), students of writing have inferred that genre is a constraint instead of the creative matrix of the medium and craft of composing. Conversely, when new conceptions of genre cause us to conceive of genre as an “efficient cause,” that by which our writing efforts become, a very different dynamic is made possible. The dichotomies that formerly loomed as normalizing and static forces in our writerly experience now recede into the background. Into the foreground comes our knowledge of how writing works in the world, how text/context, individual/society, reading/writing constitute one another. Whereas before we defy convention at our peril or break out of it only as an expression of “genius,” the student who understands genre as efficient cause now takes up a genre for some rhetorical purpose. Consider Aviva Freedman’s comments on this new role for the student writer: Knowing a genre is also knowing how to take it up: the manners are reciprocal. What do you do with a form, if you've never been taught to fill one out? What do you do with theoretical writing, if all you have learnt to read with is narrative? How do you take up parody, if you've never met the parody or the genre that it spoofs? Using a text is primarily a matter of understanding its genre and the way it plays it—recognizing it, certainly, but also reading its tactics, its strategies, and its ceremonial place. Learning to write, equally, is learning to appropriate and occupy a place in relation to other texts, learning to ensure that the other chap will play the appropriate game with you and learning to secure a useful uptake: the rules of playing, the rules of play, and the tricks of the trade. (1987, pp. 121–122) This approach encourages writers to think of genre as a tool of writing, as a factor that good writers learn to manipulate. 2. Whitehead and Genre Significant historical changes in pedagogy are sometimes the result of changes in philosophical thinking. A premise of this collection of essays is that philosophy can change the way we think about teaching and learning. In the discussion below I will provide a background for the notion of “relationality” and its importance to a particular current of thought in American philosophy and education. I will then turn my attention to how relationality can help us better understand genre theory and its impact on teaching writing. Relationality has a long history in American education. The early progressive movement might be viewed as a quest to develop approaches to learning


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that pay close attention to the relational context of human life and learning. John Dewey’s famous Democracy and Education—a book that is now quite old to those always on the lookout for something new to fix what is broken in the schools—looks at schooling in the relational context of American democracy. That book seeks to mend the strict separation of the individual and society and other static bifurcations that halt personal and social educational progress. He was not alone in this quest. Whitehead and Dewey share in a peculiarly American intellectual tradition that is sometimes called the “pragmaticprocess” tradition. The pragmatic tradition in American philosophy engaged all of the traditional philosophical problems and developed its response in the voluminous writings of Charles Peirce, William James, Dewey, Whitehead, and several others. Although some may think of pragmatist philosophy as having mostly to do with theories of knowledge and truth, these same philosophers also developed fruitful ideas about metaphysical concepts such as “being” and “relationality” and, of course, “process.” Thus, the pragmatic-process tradition is a rich and wide-ranging set of philosophic concepts, and Whitehead’s process philosophy has a central place in this family of ideas. So partly what it means to be a “process” philosopher is to share the task of developing metaphysical ideas that hinge on the notion of process as a basic concept that helps us to understand reality. Not to presuppose some metaphysical notions when speculating about the nature of reality, learning, and other human activities is impossible. Whitehead was among a group of American thinkers who found it helpful to critique the prevailing substance metaphysics and start fresh with a process ontology that entails relationality as one of its key concepts. The relationality of philosophic ideas—what is known as systematic philosophy—is simply the principle that the various aspects of our ways of understanding the world are most powerful when they work together. If we speculate about the basic nature of reality—about how we know, about what is beautiful, about what is right or wrong, about what we value, about how we learn—our ideas are more productive and convincing if they fit together, if they shed a mutual light on each other and these various aspects of human experience. Whitehead was a process philosopher and a systematic thinker. Of course he wrote on different topics and he did not try to say everything at once. So when approaching Whitehead’s work, keep in mind that he did not work out his ideas in distinct containers. His deepest notions about being and becoming typically inform in some way his most practical ideas about learning or how to teach business students. Indeed, I believe that Whitehead’s most important ideas about education and learning are not found in his explicit discussions about educational topics, but in his difficult metaphysical ideas. One such idea is the “principle of relativity.” This principle, as Whitehead uses it, takes us closer to explaining why the contributors to this book have identified the idea of relationality as central to re-envisioning education. Keep-

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ing this much clear is important—although a close connection exists between the words “relationality” and “relativity,” the former is more broadly suggestive while the latter has a particular and peculiar meaning in Whitehead’s system. Whitehead writes: [A]ccording to this principle [of relativity] an actual entity is present in other actual entities. In fact if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity. The philosophy of organism is mainly devoted to the task of making clear the notion of “being present in another entity.” (1929, pp. 79-80) Actual entities are the particulars of experience. Not physical atoms or material building blocks, but rather a fundamental component, having the character of an event, from which things both mental and physical are derived. The principle of relativity claims that each new event takes account of every other event in its past, that past events are included or repeated in each new event, some being more relevant than others in its formation. This principle of relativity is at the heart of Whitehead’s deep, speculative system of thought. Fortunately, we need not argue for Whitehead’s thesis as a metaphysical proposition in order to see its value in thinking about education and learning. In order to appreciate the “Different R” of relationality, we can take a look at Whitehead’s principle of relativity in particular as a way of helping us better to understand the repetition of particulars within genre conventions and thus not only how we learn to mimic genres (that is, learn to write) but also how we learn to move beyond received conventions and create novel variations on those conventions. Scholarly interest in genre has developed out of interest in language, social contexts, discourse communities, and philosophy—all in search of more contextual ways of understanding what happens to writers when they write. Empirical studies have looked at many contexts, from the elementary classroom to tax accounting firms. These studies are available in well-known journals in those fields and readers interested in the particulars may want to follow these leads. What I want to focus on below, however, is a more general notion about the repetition of particulars—a key concept in Whitehead’s principle of relativity, which in turn, is one of four or five fundamental concepts in Whitehead’s systematic philosophy. This principle of relativity, which includes the notion that particulars are repeated in experience, offers a fresh view of what it means to use genre to guide composing efforts and what it means to be creative or offer novelty against the received background of existing genres. When we shift our focus from genre as form and text-type container to a view of genre as a dynamic reflection of human social and rhetorical experience (as the source of these text types), we can begin to see the power and im-


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portance of relationality and Whitehead’s principle of repetition at work in a quite ordinary realm of literate experience. This new conception of genre casts form and content into the larger arena of meaning-making activities (as opposed to meaning containers) and asks us to view genre as a dynamic component in every rhetorical situation. My understanding of Whitehead’s metaphysics leads to the view that all of our seeing, all of our awareness and grasping of reality—conscious and unconscious—is characterized by a repetition of particulars given to our experience as types, a symbolic representation of one order of experience atop of another, “all the way down.” Language and genre—at different levels of abstraction— selectively mediate our communication and perception to the extent that as forms they carry the past into the present as they embody past particulars and hand them over to us. Others apart from Whitehead have made similar observations about the nature of experience. Consider the following proposition by Bakhtin, whose work is the theoretical source of much recent discussion of the nature of genre: Each genre possesses definite principles of selection, definite forms for seeing and conceptualizing reality, and a definite scope and depth of penetration. . . . One might say that human consciousness possesses a series of inner genres for seeing and conceptualizing reality. A given consciousness is richer or poorer in genres, depending on its ideological environment. . . . The process of seeing and conceptualizing reality must not be severed from the process of embodying it in the forms of a particular genre. . . . Thus, the reality of the genre and the reality accessible to the genre are organically related. (Bakhtin and Medvedev, 1985, 131–135) This is relationality at work at much deeper and more complex levels than we ordinarily attribute to genre as most of us became acquainted with the concept in schools. But then so much of what most of us experienced in schools derives not from Whiteheadian process ontology, but from educational philosophies with Aristotelian overtones and a tacit substance metaphysics. Aristotle’s predilection to classify is not unrelated to his substance ontology. When reality is finally understood as independent parts, each requiring nothing other than itself (and perhaps God) for its existence, the educational upshot is pervasive. Indeed, Aristotle’s own classification of text types is still studied in schools today; but more significantly, the received notion of text types conceived according to mutually exclusive container characteristics has gone unchallenged until recently. The point is not that mere categorization of texts is “wrong” or that genres conceived as mutually exclusive containers do not sometimes have a pedagogical purpose, but that the ancient substance ontology misleads and for centuries never spurred anyone to look past this abstraction. The effect has been to limit

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our understanding of the way language, text, and context work together as mutually constitutive components of experience. This conceptual limitation has had significant pedagogical consequences, not least of which is that our approaches to teaching writing have too often been static and non-rhetorical. Even when “teach process, not product” has prevailed in our pedagogy, the vicious dichotomy has created a contempt for product so that odd maxims like “we want good writers, not good writing” often accompany these views. Viewing genre as a fluid outcome of relational patterns in human experience and rhetorical situation will help us see ways to move past lock-step or static models of teaching writing, help us reintegrate process and product, and teach writers to become more intelligent creators and consumers of genre itself. To recognize a genre is to recognize certain patterns as having been repeated. These patterns could have to do with the physical aspects of a document, but also a nearly infinite number of other physical, textual, and rhetorical features such as style, language, word choice, line length, use of white space, ink, paper size, and font. When a writer puts all of these things together, taking up the conventions in a way that is appropriate for rhetorical context, and somehow does so in an interesting or novel manner, we call that writer a good writer. This task, of course, is not simple and those who complain, “why can’t students write!” may underestimate its complexity. Repetition is ubiquitous in experience. Whitehead makes the startling claim: “Tear ‘repetition’ out of ‘experience’ and there is nothing left” (1929, p. 136). What he means is that at the very foundation of experience is the repeated particulars of past experience, our own and that of the whole history of the universe. And at the same time, each new moment of experience is objectified or included in all other future moments of experience. This connectedness and solidarity among all things is expressed in the principle of relativity. Our experience does not arise out of nothing, but out of the repeated particulars of our past. On the whole, something new in experience is quite uncommon. Mostly we experience subtle variations of repeated things, and we must marshal our imaginations and muster up our creativity to produce something truly novel from our experience. Discourse genres have emerged as repeated patterns of response to recurring situations. When enough people have formal weddings, soon a “wedding invitation” will emerge as a textual response, and such invitations take on similar discursive patterns, in part, because they are responses to similar social situations and rhetorical exigencies. The situation determines the discourse pattern as much as the discourse pattern tells us what “kind” of a wedding we should prepare for. Repetition of social/rhetorical situations is a primary reason we have genres in the first place. Just like language at a lower level of abstraction—they provide a way for us to eschew novelty in ordinary experience and to gain rhetorical leverage from the expectation we all have that repetition is ubiquitous in experience. Nobody wants to write two hundred novel wedding


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thank-you notes, and nobody wants to receive one. We want to receive thank you notes and read obituaries, business memos, and sonnets that satisfy our expectations of the genre or we may, when taken too far, begin to feel the rhetorical act has itself begun to subvert its purpose with too much originality. Repetition is a key feature of clear communication because it leverages the advantage of recurring situation to some situated, rhetorical end. The form of our discourse becomes the means by which we put that discourse to work. And to learn to write well has everything to do with learning to manage these forms as rhetorical possibilities, not as formal products. Although the pedagogical emphasis on the classical conception of genre’s formal features might produce, on the one hand, sheer repetition, monotony, conformity, and redundancy, the deconstructionist critique of this emphasis has led to the ahistorical notion that novelty (new genres) could emerge out of nothing at any moment in history. The everyday consequence of this line of thought is evidenced in a kind of “genre fetish” among those (mainly academics, of course) who would make novelty an end in itself and “create new genres” not in response to situational or rhetorical exigency but out of the felt need to politicize conversations about discourse. If we take Whitehead’s metaphysics as our guide to understanding experience in general, we can see how the speculative structure he describes helps us understand the experience of writers and genre. With regard to novelty, I have already pointed out that repetition is far more common. If we analyze a particular moment of ordinary experience, we discover it is full of kinesthetic and pneumonic repetition, feelings repeated as we recall past events, focus on the present, or anticipate future events. Of course much more can be analyzed in a given moment of experience than what is repeated, but Whitehead would say that repetition is a fundamental feature from which additional and subsequent phases of experience occur. Nevertheless, repetition is just the beginning. Any given moment of experience begins with what is repeated from the immediate past. If we are angry, we tend to stay angry until these feelings gradually give way to others. But how do they “give way” if experience is dominated by repetition? The answer is that repetition is not the whole story in our experience. It is the beginning point, providing the raw data of subsequent experience, but not always the final story. The nature of higher orders of experience is to entertain possibilities and imagine how a given moment of experience might be different from the moment it inherits. Thus we give up our anger as we consider (consciously or not) other ways of being. In composing, genres serve as abstract forms of situated, rhetorical response. Genres take their shape from such experience repeated, and like words and language they stand in where novelty would be a vice. As words and language stand as a “good enough” abstraction for complex feelings (I’m angry!), genres work in similar ways but at a higher level of abstraction. The business

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memo, the thank-you letter, the wedding invitation, the book report all contain words that carry out communication, but the genre itself sets the stage of rhetorical possibilities as it both dictates and anticipates the rhetorical exigency. Thus, genre is among the givens, the raw data, the things repeated. In addition to these received components of discursive practice, the writer imagines possibilities, considers novel variations, and works out fresh ways of adding to what is received or already present in the situation. As the writer takes up the rules of play, the tricks of the rhetorical trade, he or she begins to add something new to the world of discourse. In this manner, the significance of inter-textuality, discourse community, and the public world of discourse become just as important as the subjective privacy of the so-called lonely writer. Singular writers are just as much a myth or abstraction as so-called discourse communities—real abstractions, but, like all abstractions, merely shorthand accounts of the fuller story. Take, for example, the young student composing a science report on kinds of heat transfer. A form of “science report” may exist that the teacher has developed over the years in response to the need to gather from students certain kinds of work and assess certain kinds of knowledge. Such a report is likely a subgenre of what schools more generally call report writing or academic writing. This teacher begins instructing students by showing examples of the genre, by offering sample papers, or by outlining the general expectations about the structure of the paper, which include such things as required content and headings. The formal pattern might require the use of images or charts. It might require a concluding section headed “Heat Transfer and the Modern Home.” Any number of conventions might develop over the years as the genre gradually takes its shape from the writers themselves and from the rhetorical exigency—in this case a teacher’s effort to create a learning situation and assess how well students have understood the scientific concepts. Once the genre has developed and is in place as a given in this discourse community, a large number of purposes, constraints, and educational goals are ready-made and present in the genre. The power of the genre lies in the many years’ worth of pedagogical aims and expectations that are contained within the genre. These particular aims and expectations are repeated or handed over as subjective aims for each new student taking up the genre. Such power can also be a problem when these aims and expectations want to change but the genre remains codified. Educators must be careful, ready to revise assignments. Nevertheless, the teacher merely needs to assign the paper in this genre and a whole set of learning tasks are entailed, for better or for worse. Also entailed within the genre is an entire set of possibilities as to what the writing could look like, what the student might learn, and the textual shape that learning can take. Genre itself does a lot of work in this case. The set of possibilities is theoretically infinite, but not unlimited.


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In this example, the school science report is revealed as itself a contingent form, a genre developed in response to a recurring educational and rhetorical exigency. The academy is full of such genres that are just as real (and contingent) as codified forms whose origins can be traced back to Shakespearian poetry with fourteen lines. That is the first thing to note in this example: genres are contingent and derivative of recurring situations. This does not make them any less real or valid as genres than traditional, entrenched forms of discourse. To criticize a genre as not being “real” or as being a construct of a local institution, or to elevate some genres as “more real” or legitimate than others, reveals a shallow understanding of genre. Lab reports, five-paragraph themes, one-act plays, the course syllabus, and the short story all have equal status as “genres,” albeit with varied textual, cultural, and educational usefulness. This observation brings up a second point: a genre is capable of freeing itself from its originating exigency and surviving on new rhetorical, social, or cultural grounds. The Shakespearian sonnet is a good example of this unmooring. The question of what counts as being called a genre and what is merely a familiar form is a technical question and not relevant to these considerations. The main issue here is that genres are not absolute forms; they are forms contingent and derivative of experience—like language. A third consideration relevant to the student’s science report has to do with the place of novelty. Ezra Pound said “make it new,” yet outside the poetic community, few writers have really understood why newness, as such, offers any special advantage. Sometimes a novel contribution like The Cantos survives for artistic reasons, but where genius does not win out nearly all writing survives because it gets some work (aesthetic or otherwise) done in the world. Therefore, genre plus novelty, we learn, is not enough. Situation and rhetorical exigency is the fulcrum on which genre leverages novelty. The formula for success in the work-a-day world (including our schools) requires this trio of components: genre, situation, and novelty. Mere repetition of genre forms is dull, uninspired, and it ploddingly responds to the rhetorical situation if at all. Mere novelty likewise ignores the relevant rhetorical situation, indulging unrelated aims or self-serving ends of its own design. Genre plus situation plus novelty, however, coordinates past, present, and future in a way that advances discursive practice in productive ways. The artful coordination of these three elements is often called “good writing” because the past is carried into the present and is thus taken into account, the present rhetorical situation is measured and weighed, often noting a contrast to what could be the case in light of what is the case, and the future is anticipated and added to in creative ways. This analysis is abstract, but it should be clear that the successful science report begins by including and assuming the educational aims and expectations handed over from past experience; that it not only repeats certain expectations implicit in the genre, but also takes account of the present rhetorical and social situation that gives these received components contemporary meaning; and that

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the received past, conditioned by present circumstance, is handed over to a new moment of experience as a synthesis that will somehow invite fresh responses. Whitehead’s principle of relativity describes this relatedness of things with its insistence that every new thing must be a potential object or beginning for something else. How novelty gets introduced into this process and how genres include change without subverting the genre is the remaining issue needing illustration in this example of the student science report. Novelty does not exist independently of past instances of actual writing. No novel forms or ingredients are waiting in the wings, waiting to see the light of day by way of a new piece of writing. This does not mean that something new is not possible. On the contrary. But understanding novelty is about understanding potentiality, and understanding potentiality is bound up with understanding the way in which the developing immediacy of the writing moment (whether that moment be word, sentence, paragraph, chapter, or book) takes account of what is given and contrasts that given with what might be. Whitehead says “immediacy is the realization of the potentialities of the past, and is the storehouse of the potentialities of the future” (1938, pp. 99– 100). As noted above, genres repeat particular forms and their possibilities, and so carry a payload of potentiality. The immediacy of a writing moment (regardless of the duration or physical time involved in that moment) provides an opportunity to realize what a particular genre makes available to the writer; but it also provides an opportunity for that writer to make hybrid additions to the implicit potentialities. A writer who is “stuck” sometimes needs only to reconceive slightly the genre, or to shift genres completely, in order to begin entertaining an entirely new set of possibilities. Also, as a writer composes, he or she can consider ways of adapting the genre’s implicit potentialities to the rhetorical situation at hand and integrating those components with varieties of imagined content, shape, and form. The imagination has before it the entire universe of discourse representing possibilities for any one writing moment. Every piece of writing is numerically novel as we count essays turned in on Friday. For some students, this kind of novelty may itself be an achievement. Novelty of thought and form, however, is an achievement of craft or aesthetic dimension. As everyone who has ever given serious attention to composing knows, the nature of writing is such that it compels us with its creative possibilities—sometimes even when the most mundane of genre forms provokes us in the initial immediacy of a writing moment. It compels because of the creative tension existing among the givens of genre, the present exigency, and the potentialities latent in the universe of discourse. These thicker dimensions of experience are what Whitehead’s philosophy helps writers to see and appreciate. According to Whitehead, experience begins with the repetition of the past but in some cases moves on to originative phases that entertain conceptual con-


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trasts. When this happens, what might be displaces what is as the dominant focus in experience. We can thank genre for helping students see what kind of things are possible, but finally the integration of new ideas and novel variation is what moves the good writer on to fresh forms of expression. In Whitehead’s writing classroom (if you will), the prevailing student question would not be “How good is it?” but rather, “How good could it be?” Where substance philosophies prevail, we reward piecemeal achievements. We study genre as separate from rhetorical situation, as separate from discourse convention, as separate from audience expectation, as separate from language itself. Given the relational experience described by Whitehead’s philosophy and his insight that particulars are repeated, I would urge educators to search out the connections, emphasize the contexts, and develop teaching practices that leverage the advantages of the relational solidarity of all writing experience. WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail M., and Pavel N. Medvedev. (1985) The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Trans. Albert J. Werhle. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Britton, James. (1970) Language and Learning. Baltimore: Penguin. Dewey, John. (1916) Democracy and Education New York: Macmillan, 1961. Freedman, Aviva (1987) “Anyone for Tennis?” In The Place of Genre in Learning: Current Debates. Ed. I. Reid. Geelong, Australia.: Deakin University Press, pp. 91–124. Griffin, David Ray. (1989) Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem. Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press. Lakoff, George. (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, Carolyn. (1984) “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70: pp. 151–167. Moffett, James. (1968) Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Newkirk, Thomas. (1989) More than Stories: The Range of Children’s Writing. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929) Process and Reality. Corrected ed. Ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978. ———. (1938) Modes of Thought. . New York: Free Press, 1968.


Six WHITEHEAD AND ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION Pete A. Y. Gunter What have poets or painters had to say about the land from Robert Frost to John Denver, from William Wordsworth to the Duino Elegies? The possibilities are endless—by which is meant, the educational possibilities. There exists, and is intended to exist, more to this learning process than educational possibilities as these are usually Philosophers have often taken the rap for their scientific errors. Aristotle thought that the brain was an organ used to lubricate the eyes. Hegel embarrassed philosophy in the early nineteenth century by insisting that earth, air, fire, and water are really the basic elements from which oxygen, iron, and the rest of the periodic table of the elements are derived, and by proclaiming that life can exist in the universe only on earth (Inwood, 1980, p. 15). In the words of John N. Findlay, “the fixed stars [are] for him a mere backcloth to the central stage on which we are the supreme performers” (1970, pp. xviii, xxi). The American philosopher and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce once admitted, ruefully, that metaphysicians do get it right—after the fact, and if they pay sufficient attention to the science of their times (1877, p. 75). Unfortunately, some do not seem to have paid sufficient attention. Citing a philosopher, therefore, who was both well up on the sciences of his time and even, on important points, ahead of his time is a pleasure. The philosopher is Alfred North Whitehead. The points on which he scored involve several basic sciences, including scientific ecology. From Science and the Modern World through his last major work, Modes of Thought, he describes a world in which dynamism, interconnection, and interdependence prevail throughout. His description applies to everything from the social structure of an atom to the intricate social relationships of human societies. His entire philosophy of nature is “ecological.” It should come as no surprise, therefore, that he found this active sustaining interdependence to be clearly present in what we would now call plant growth associations and ecosystems. Along with his grasp of ecological principles, Whitehead maintained that the organisms which make up the world, from the lowest to the highest, have value. He thus provides a basis not only for understanding scientific ecology but also for our belief in the value of nature. The basic reason for Whitehead’s belief is simple, though it is developed by him with complex subtlety. All organisms feel, not just human beings and a few other higher organisms. These

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feelings may not be intense—they are often minimal—but they are no less real for that. Value exists throughout nature. Explaining Whitehead’s system and its implications for our understanding of nature will require some doing. The first two parts of this essay will be devoted to that task. But the main import of this essay concerns not the environment but how to convey it. That is, it concerns environmental education. Here the focus will be different. Just as explaining Whitehead’s concept of biological ecology will require a very general account of how he understands nature, so the implications of his thought for environmental education will require a thoughtful survey of his philosophy of education. Luckily, these two parts of Whitehead’s thought support each other. His holistic philosophy of education demands that the interrelations between the “parts” of knowledge be taken seriously, just as his holistic philosophy of nature is based on the insistence that societies of all kinds must be understood through their dynamic interdependence. Similarly, just as in his philosophy of education abstract technical thinking needs to be complemented by direct appreciation of art, architecture, and literature, so in his philosophy of nature an understanding of the social interrelations of organisms needs support from our abstract analysis and our experiences. We too are organisms, interrelating. Thus Whitehead’s inherently interdisciplinary philosophy of education easily suits a subject-matter as complex as environmental education, which functions by relating fields as diverse as mathematics and poetry. This is incidentally not true of all important recent philosophers. To go, say, from Edmund Husserl to scientific ecology and environmental education would be a difficult transit. For Whitehead it is scarcely a single step. 1. Whitehead’s Philosophy of Nature: A Historical Prelude Since the beginnings of modern science in the seventeenth century, philosophers have been confronted with several puzzles. Among these is a sharp bifurcation, which puts consciousness and value on one side, in subjectivity, and mere matter and motion on the other, in the world. This cutting in two of reality seems inevitable, once people believe that what is real “out there” is a machine or machine-like. Made up of bits of inert matter (“inertial masses”) moving without purpose in empty space, nature can have little if any inherent value and nothing resembling mentality. Although the external world is supposed to be inert, purposeless, and without feeling, our dog, Rover, is part of this world. It follows (trust me) that Rover has no feelings. Rover is a complex machine. If we cut off his tail an inch at a time, though he may seem to be taking a dim view of the proceeding, we are merely shortening the machine. No feelings are involved. And it would be the worst kind of sentimentality for us to have any special feeling about it.

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Nor would the poet be advised to write a poem to the glories of the sunset. The glory, like the color, is “in our heads.” In itself the sunset is colorless. What is true of dogs and sunsets is true of birds, insects, and plant growth communities. They are, in themselves, as valueless as they are colorless. To those readers who might believe that I have drawn a caricature of early modern thought in its dealings with mind and nature, let me point to René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy. Descartes defined nature as a mechanism composed entirely of geometrical relations. Having thus defined “material substance,” he defined “mental substance” as nonmaterial and unextended, and as (except for God) existing only in human beings. The result is the famous Cartesian Dualism: the bifurcation of reality carried to its ultimate limits. This dualism, which I have been outlining in the previous paragraphs, far outlasted Descartes’s statement of it. His physics was replaced by that of Sir Isaac Newton, but Newton’s physics was also mechanistic. It too excluded mind from nature, continuing the need for dualism through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The scientific situation did not change until the turn of the twentieth century. Then two new approaches to physics emerged, significantly shifting our picture of physical nature: quantum physics and relativity physics. In the first, inert and changeless Newtonian mass particles metamorphose into pulses of energy (quanta); in the second, Newtonian space re-emerges as a multiply interrelated and dynamic space-time. The world of physics now seems alive, not inert: active, not passive. This change of viewpoint, or “paradigm shift” as we would now call it, signaled for Whitehead the need for a change in philosophy as well as in science. In the new physics we have moved from a world of particles located in a vast empty space that resist change to fleeting pulsations whose interrelations make up space. Nature becomes process: “We are in the present; the present is always shifting; it is derived from the past; it is shaping the future; it is passing into the future. This is process, and in the universe it is an inexorable fact” (Whitehead, 1938, p. 73). From the subatomic “particle” to the emergence of complex organisms, from the first cell to the Shakespearian sonnet, nature is alive and pregnant with life. 2. Some Concepts of Nature That nature is not a machine, that matter is alive instead of inert, that living things embody awareness, has been said before: by romantic poets, by German romantic idealists, by mystics of all stripes. What distinguishes Whitehead from all of these is, first, his belief that a new turn in the sciences supports such a viewpoint and, second, that newly crafted philosophical concepts can make a nonmechanistic concept of nature intelligible. The extent to which he is willing to go to develop these concepts can be seen from the “Categoreal Scheme” in

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Process and Reality, where forty-five categories are defined, permitting myriad mutual cross applications. These categories are often expressed in a terminology invented by Whitehead, a terminology which is helpful once mastered but which functions as a formidable barrier until then. In what follows, I propose to deal with only two fundamental Whiteheadian notions: prehension and concrescence. Though these terms hardly suggest the full power and subtlety of his thought, they do make possible an accurate understanding of Whitehead’s philosophy of nature. The fundamental activity of the entities in nature is described by Whitehead as “concrescence.” If the things that make up the world are active, he reasons, to some extent they make themselves. Otherwise everything that exists is a simple function of the past, and the present produces nothing. Whitehead thus states: “The concrescence is the building up of a determinate satisfaction. . . . [W]ith the attainment of a fully determinate ‘satisfaction’ the creativity thereby passes over into the ‘given’ primary phase for the concrescence of other actual entities” (1929, p. 85). Leaving aside some of the Whiteheadian terminology, the meaning is straightforward enough. Each pulse of existence, each fundamental event, is within its limits self-creative. Having reached its optimum, it provides aspects of itself for the use of other entities in nature. Each concrescence—each new coming-to-be—feeds on its own past and the past of other things in order to become what it is. This means that each concrescence is preceded (and followed) by multiple “prehensions.” Whitehead defines prehension as a unification from a vantage point of characteristics of the thing prehended: “This unity of a prehension defines itself as a here and now, and the things so gathered into the grasped unity have essential references to other places and other times” (1925b, p. 69). Perception is perspectival, but is not mere geometry. It is causal, material, effective. The glint of light on water gives us a flat, blue expanse, yet it literally strikes us. The heat from a brick wall affects us along with the granular rectangular shapes, and to that extent we are changed. Perception is participation in the world. My perceptions are prehensions which enter into my character. Put it another way: in the real world things exist because of other things. Each entity (Whitehead calls them “actual occasions”) creates itself, but within the limitations imposed on it by its environment, that is, by the other things. Those other things, in turn, shape themselves out of the welter of the world, including our presence to them. Whitehead, as a mathematician and physicist, sees the network of shifting causal (cause and effect) relations constituted by prehension on the analogy of relativity physics. No big empty space exists in which things happen. Space is dynamic, relational, thing-dependent. As already noted, the things here in question are conceived on the quantum analogy as events. Nature is seen by Whitehead, as by many in twentieth-century physics, as dynamic, active, interrelated. What holds for physics, he believes, is true also for biology and sociology—and for the objects they study.


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It follows that we live in an “ecological” universe: one in which, if organisms compete with organisms, the results involve mutual coexistence. We find this easy enough to understand when it involves the higher organisms. Whitehead’s extension of his “principle of sociability” to subatomic particles, atoms, and molecules probably will seem strange. But this is because we are so used to imagining them, in Newtonian terms, as small hard particles. For quantum physics these entities are active pulses of energy, in some ways acting like waves, in others like particles (a complex story, which can only be hinted at here). These, Whitehead argues, are very simple organisms, prehending each other, responding, achieving mutual adjustments which arrive at stability. Farther up the scale, cases of mutualism provide a good example of what Whitehead means. A lichen is an organism consisting of an environing mold coexisting with a chlorophyll-bearing microorganism. The mold provides the shelter; the green plant provides the nutrition. Neither plant can exist without the other. Whitehead does not hold that sustaining relations in nature are often as close as those displayed in mutualism. But his perspective on nature allows him to view even the simplest entities in nature (such as those that make up a hydrogen atom) as creating stable organisms. We should hardly be surprised, therefore, that when he comes to typify large-scale living systems, Whitehead makes remarks like the following: The trees in a Brazilian forest depend upon the various species of organisms, each of which is mutually dependent on the other species. A single tree by itself is dependent upon all the adverse chances of shifting circumstances. The wind stunts it; variations in temperature check its foliage; the rains denude its soil; its leaves are blown away and are lost for the purpose of fertilization. You may obtain individual specimens of fine trees either in exceptional circumstances, or where human cultivation has intervened. But in nature the normal way in which trees flourish is by their association in a forest. Each tree may lose something of its individual perfection of growth, but they mutually assist each other in preserving the conditions for survival. The soil is preserved and shaded; and the microbes necessary for its fertility are neither scorched, nor frozen nor washed away. (1925b, p. 206) It follows that—in spite of the popular stereotype—raw strength and sheer aggressiveness do not guarantee success in nature. Whatever the “fittest” may be, it cannot survive through a regime of unlimited predation. Cooperation is essential: A forest is the triumph of the organization of mutually dependent species, further a species of microbes which kills the forest, also exterminates itself. Again the two sexes exhibit the same advantage of differentiation. In

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PETE A. Y. GUNTER the history of the world, the prize has not gone to those species which specialized in methods of violence, or even in defensive armor. (ibid., p. 206)

Whitehead’s philosophy is ecological when it comes to ecology. But it is also ecological throughout, insisting on the reality of sustaining interrelationships at every level of nature. One final fact needs to be added, however briefly. It concerns the breadth of experience as Whitehead understands it. One aspect of this breadth has already been adumbrated: that all real entities (since they prehend and concresce) experience. Human experience, with its qualitative rhythmic character, is for him not a stranger in the universe. It is analogous to the experience of other organisms, notably the higher organisms, though the analogy diminishes with the elaborateness of organism. Whitehead’s notion of experience is broad in another sense, however. In contrast with theories of perception that portray experiences as made up of atoms of perception (“sense data”), he insists those experiences have both discrete clear aspects and vague indiscrete aspects, both equally real. He calls the first way of experience with its crisp clear data, experience in the mode of presentational immediacy (1929, pp. 61–65). He terms the second sort of experience, experience in the mode of causal efficacy (ibid., pp. 116, 121). This was suggested earlier in the examples of the experience of sundazzle and of confrontation with the hot brick wall. We find clear distinct factors in experience, yet experience, literally, strikes us. Both aspects of experience, Whitehead insists, are important. The vague dynamic aspects of experience are important, as are the vague aspects of music, of landscapes, of human relations. 3. Education Whitehead’s ideas on education are scattered throughout his writings, notably in Science and the Modern World and The Aims of Education. Once again, I am not able to probe the minutia and the remote implications of his philosophy. What follows is a schematic simplification, but one which, I hope, goes to the heart of his thought. Whitehead sees education as twofold. There exists, first of all, the aesthetic side of knowledge. It consists of direct acquaintance at any level: art, architecture, nature, human affairs, travel. It deals with its subject matter in wholes or as a whole. In direct contrast stands technical thought, with its drive towards practical mastery. One thinks here of engineering, or mathematics, or chemistry. The reader will be able to add others. Whitehead states: This professional training can only touch one side of education. Its centre of gravity lies in the intellect and its chief tool is the printed book. The centre of gravity on the other side of training should lie in intuition without


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an analytical divorce from the total environment. Its object is immediate apprehension with the minimum of eviscerating analysis. The type of generality, which is above all wanted, is then appreciation of variety of value. I mean an aesthetic growth. (1925b, p. 199) We need to understand the virtues and the vices of both “centres of gravity.” The so-called “liberal” education, with its emphasis on breadth of knowledge and diversity of appreciation, prevents narrowness of vision and sustains imagination. But it may fall into the cluttered vagueness of the dilettante, the mere impressionism of the amateur. The antidote to this alternative lies in the mastery of some technical subject-matter, and involves the discipline and focus necessary to achieve this mastery. These two approaches are often viewed as contradictory: sometimes as in destructive conflict. They are like oil and water, each good in themselves but difficult to imagine blending harmoniously. Yet the blending is precisely what Whitehead believes should occur. The dualism between romantic and analytic can be overcome by adding a third category: generalization. Knowledge, he holds, involves three steps. Understanding these steps involves a reconsideration of the fundamental characteristics of each: The stage of romance is the stage of first apprehension. The subject-matter has the vividness of novelty; it holds within itself unexplored connexions with possibilities half-disclosed by glimpses and half-concealed by the wealth of material. . . . We are in the presence of immediate cognisance of fact. (1925a, pp. 28–29) Romance carries us forward to the full life of the mind. It encourages exploration and vivid freshness. But it lacks restraint, and system, and clarity (ibid., p. 33). The necessary corrective of the romantic stage is precision: “It is the stage of grammar, the grammar of language and the grammar of science. It proceeds by forcing on the students’ acceptance a given way of analyzing the facts, bit by bit. New facts are added but they are facts which fit into the analysis” Whitehead, 1925a, p. 29). The stage of precision requires the previous stage, which forms a background of “disclosed ideas with possibilities of wide significance” (ibid.) from which the quest for precision begins. But thought—and education more generally—does not stop with some particular analysis, however successful. What has been learned so far is the basis for still further, wider possibilities. “The final stage of generalization is Hegel’s synthesis. It is a return to romanticism with added advantage of classified ideas and relevant technique. It is the fruition which has been the goal of the precise training” (Whitehead, 1925a, p. 30). Whitehead, who hated “inert ideas” (ibid., p. 13), is far from believing that analysis and precision are the

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end-product. They are a means toward new ideas and new applications of ideas—toward generalization. 4. Education and the Earth What has been said so far provides the barest sketch of Whitehead’s philosophy of education. But it is sufficiently basic that it can be applied in a general way to particular cases of environmental education. Here is an example. In the past, environmentalists have looked for vast tracts of wilderness to set aside: as far from people as possible. At Blue Mound, Texas, Gilliland Elementary School has gained possession of a twenty-seven acre tract ruined by a cement company (Gunter, 2000, pp. 23–32). The tract contained the remains of a creek, a pond, some remaining prairie, and some woods. Teachers at the school were pleasantly surprised to learn, in the course of pursuing a long-term ecological restoration project, that the project made possible new ways of teaching the most varied subjects and of doing so in an integrated way. For example: suppose that it were decided to plant several species of hardwood tree in a given, now denuded, area. What is the size of the area? How many trees can/should be planted there, and how far apart? How much potting soil and/or root stimulator will be required? At what cost? The student here learns or at least uses basic mathematical skills. But what kind of trees, given the Texas climate or lack of it, will grow here? What is their life span? What will the grove look like in thirty years? What kind of under-story shrubs and other plants should be planted? What sorts of birds and insects will be likely to take up residence? How do these creatures depend on the forest and also help to sustain it (predation and all)? From mathematics the student moves easily to biology. (Which is not to say that more mathematics cannot be taught in relation to biology.) But what about the nature and structure of the soils, the geology of the region, the pH and b.o.d (biological oxygen demand) of the creek water, and their effect on aquatic plants and animals? From biology we pass easily to geology and chemistry. Nor need the progression stop there. Why do we like a restored landscape—with few but interesting exceptions—better than a ruined one? understood. The student involved in restoring life learns something about the value of life—without suffering preaching. Equally hard to find in the contemporary welter, students can return later to explain to their children (or to themselves) that they planted those trees or saved this creek: having a part whose significance will last beyond the few years spent in a particular school. Not far (twenty-plus miles) from Flower Mound stands the Elm Fork Education Center, named for the Elm Fork of the Trinity River to the east. The Educational Center is on the campus of the University of North Texas. The area that it utilizes (1700 acres) is alongside and to the west of the river. Here the opportunities for environmental education are in a sense directly opposite to


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those at Gilliland Elementary. There, we start from ruins. Here, we start from essentially (though not perfectly) wild nature. There, the problem is reconstruction. Here, it is appreciation and insight. The program is many-sided and deals with students at every level short of the university. The levels of knowledge and the approaches to knowledge vary accordingly. With the younger students, romance predominates; as the program advances, precision takes over. Ideally the end product approaches the level of generalization, as students are invited to design and carry out research programs of their own. But the effort at all levels is the same: to get the students (here K-12) to understand and appreciate the countryside where they live—and hence countrysides far removed from their own—the species that inhabit it, and their interrelations. One-morning or one-week trips are options. To the students these will be adventures, but of different kinds. Some involve standard environmental study, from microscopic study of water through botany to an introduction of scientific methods. Other trips will introduce the students to archeological digs with reflections on the coming of humans into the Americas, the early Spanish explorers of the Southwest, and the early pioneers in the area. Still others will concentrate on making the student aware of the species of plants and animals native to the region. I will stop a moment to explore Whitehead’s treatment of the stages of human thought: the ages at which different sorts of knowledge come into play. These, too, amount to rhythms, no one of which is fundamental, but which are important in assessing how to educate. The age of eight to twelve or thirteen, he states, “is the first great period of the utilization of the native language and of developed powers of observation and of manipulation” (1925a, p. 32). In this period, students focus on the achievement of writing, spelling, the basics of arithmetic, lists of simple facts. All of these are elements of precision, but, Whitehead observes, they are subrhythms, caught up in the “great romance” which bears the child onward. The success of the Montessori schools, he speculates, is due to its recognition of the dominance of romance at this period in the child’s life (ibid. pp. 33-34). The three years twelve to fifteen “should be dominated by a mass attack upon language, so planned that definite result, in itself worth having, is thereby achieved” (Whitehead, 1925a, p. 34). Here Whitehead stresses the spirit of precision. But at the same time—and this is a measure of the complexity of his approach—he points out the necessity of teaching science at this stage, but of teaching it in a “romantic” spirit. What he means by romantic, however, is not an invitation to vagueness and idealistic exhortation, for “all training in science should begin as well as end in research, and in getting hold of the subject matter as it occurs in nature” (34). Whitehead does not specify the details of guidance and of experiment in this period. His plea for a more romantic approach to

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science, and for science teaching immersed in nature, certainly make sense in any effort to utilize environmental education. But the matter does not end here. The dialectic moves on, into a year’s period of generalization for language and of precision in science, ending roughly at the age of sixteen, through which the student can come to understand the development of mechanics, physics, chemistry, algebra and geometry. Interesting, even puzzlingly, he nowhere mentions biology (though that can easily be corrected.) The point is not the details of Whitehead’s approach, however, but his insistence on the “rhythmic” character of human development and learning, and on the polyphonic (many-phased) character of these rhythms. Clearly, his is no lock-step vision of the curriculum. Whitehead’s insistence on the importance of the rhythms of psychological development is particularly relevant to environmental education. His belief in the inherent interconnectedness of nature is equally relevant, but in a different way: relevant for education K-12 and beyond, but also for what might be called “broad public education.” Once again the key is his notion of the social individual, the reality of each single organism through its dependence on the organisms that make up its environment. To educate a child concerning nature is not only to identify specific species but to explore the ways in which each occupies a specific niche. Some birds are birds of forest edges, others of prairies, others of deep woods. Some inhabit marshes, or beaches or cliffs. The tie between a bird and its world in such cases is close. Take away the habitat and the organism vanishes; take away the organism and there will be changes—large or perhaps infinitesimal—in the habitat. These examples may be thought banal. But they point to a basic truth that needs to be driven home: in nature things are interconnected, often intricately, often in ways we do not fully understand. Barry Commoner’s “Everything is connected with everything” (1967, p. 150) is an exaggeration. But in things environmental it is a useful exaggeration, suggesting the myriad connections found and yet to be found. Even a cursory understanding of a philosophy of nature like Whitehead’s leads to an appreciation of Commoner’s maxim. When conservationists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set out to conceive—and to conserve—nature, they tended to think (1) in terms of remote untouched places, (2) redolent with scenery, and (3) capable of being roped off. They thought in terms of wilderness fortresses, beautiful to the eyes, around which, in effect, high walls could be built. One would wish to preserve any such fortresses (which make up the bulk of the National Parks System). But this fortress mentality was one-sided from the beginning, and is now thoroughly out of date. In its place a new concept of conservation is emerging, one much nearer the Whiteheadian inspiration. I will, for lack of a better name, term it “relational-component conservation.” I will cite two examples of this emerging mode of thinking and conserving: the Big Thicket Natural Area of Southeast Texas and the Chicago Wilderness.


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The Big Thicket is a moist subtropical remnant wilderness. A national park of 420,000 contiguous acres was proposed there in the 1940s. It failed to transpire, with the result that later environmentalists were forced to take up a new approach. The result was something unique: the Big Thicket National Biological Preserve (1984) of stream corridors connecting “units,” selected to represent each of the major plant growth communities of the region (Gunter, 1993, p. 229). If a vast fortress is not possible, then it makes sense to think in terms of relationality (by means of stream corridors) and the components to be thus interrelated (the “representative” units). This kind of conservation can take place around or even in urban or urbanizing areas. Hence the Chicago Wilderness—which, Chicago scarcely being untrammeled and virtually uninhabited, sounds like a contradiction in terms. If one looks carefully at the region around Chicago, however, the contradiction begins to dissolve. From southeastern Wisconsin through the counties in and south of Chicago into northeast Indiana, the countryside is “overflow land”: land formed by the overflow of Lake Michigan at the end of the last glacial period. Unlike the land surrounding it, this is a sandy, rocky, wooded, moraine-and-prairie landscape: “The current classification system . . . recognizes four main types of forested communities, two of savanna, two of shrub lands, four of prairie, and six of wetlands, as well as cliffs and lakeshores” (Chicago Region, 1999, p. 18). In 1904 Chicagoans passed legislation making it possible to establish forest preserves in Cook County. In 1913 the Illinois General Assembly passed legislation authorizing the creation of forest preserves districts in the rest of Illinois. Gradually the system of preserves has grown to include well over 80,000 acres of federal, state, and local lands (county preserves and city parks), along with privately owned nature areas, nature preserves, and scientific areas (see Sullivan, 2000). Meanwhile a similar patchwork of state, city, and country parks intersticed with private preserves has grown up in the Big Thicket region. In both cases stream corridor connections exist connecting some areas, but are lacking in others. In both, efforts to create the connections are proceeding—efforts only intermittently successful. Extensive environmental areas like the Big Thicket and the Chicago Wilderness have two educational uses, one narrow, the other limitless. Like the Gilliland Primary School project, they provide opportunities for ecological restoration and the kind of learning associated with it; like the Elm Fork Center they make possible nature exploration and monitoring. But they also make possible a kind of public environmental teaching, stressing both environmental study and active environmentalism on a broad, even a regional scale. Not all education occurs in the classroom.

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Chicago Region Biodiversity Council. (1999) Biodiversity Recovery Plan. Chicago: Chicago Region Biodiversity Council. Commoner, Barry. (1967) Science and Survival. New York: Viking. Findlay, John N. (1970) Foreword to Philosophy of Nature. by George William Friedrich Hegel. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hegel, George William Friedrich. (1817) Philosophy of Nature. Trans. A.V. Miller. Foreword J. N. Findlay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Gunter, Pete A.Y. (1993) The Big Thicket: An Ecological Re-evaluation. Denton, Tex.: University of North Texas Press. ———. (2000) “Leopold's Land Ethics, Texas and the Big Thicket: An Obligation to the Land.” Texas Journal of Science, 52.4, (Supplement) (November), pp. 23-32. Inwood, Michael. (1980) “Introduction.” In Hegel: Selections. Ed. Michael Inwood. New York: Macmillan. Pierce, Charles Sanders. (1877) “The Fixation of Belief.” In Pragmatism: The Classic Writings. Ed. Horace Standish Thayer. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1982. Sullivan, Jerry. (2000) Chicago Wilderness: An Atlas of Biodiversity. Chicago: Chicago Region Biodiversity Council, 2000. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1925a) The Aims of Education. New York: New American Library, 1961. ———. (1925b) Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1967. ———. (1929) Process and Reality. Corrected ed. Ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978. ———. (1938) Modes of Thought. New York: Capricorn Books, Putnam, 1958.

Seven FINDING FLOW THROUGH DISCIPLINE AND IMAGINATION William J. Garland 1. Three Stages of Learning A constant challenge of teaching is structuring the educational situation so that students will find learning both interesting and challenging. This is a recurrent theme in Alfred North Whitehead’s thoughts about education in The Aims of Education. Here Whitehead claims that learning has a natural rhythm, one which manifests itself in three stages, which he characterizes as romance, precision, and generalization. The stage of romance encompasses our first encounter with a new subject matter. This is the time for adventure and discovery, imaginative visions of new possibilities, seeking and savoring a wealth of new experiences. In this stage we accumulate new facts without being concerned about exactly how to categorize them. Instead, our minds are captivated by visions of an indefinite welter of new possibilities. The stage of precision is the stage of discipline and systematic organization. Here we attend to the multitude of facts we have encountered in the first stage and organize them in terms of conceptual frameworks. This is the stage of exact formulation and careful analysis. The stage of precision is the natural successor to the stage of romance. The mind craves order, system, and exactness so that it will not wander aimlessly amidst the wealth of new facts it has encountered in the stage of romance. The drive toward discipline and precision is just as natural as the drive toward the freshness of new experiences. In fact, learning things for which you presently have little inclination can be a valuable aid for character development. As Whitehead remarks, “it is necessary in life to have acquired the habit of cheerfully undertaking imposed tasks” (1929, p. 35). The third and final stage in learning is the stage of generalization. This is the Hegelian synthesis of romance and precision. As Whitehead put it, “It is a return to romanticism with the added advantage of classified ideas and relevant technique. It is the fruition which has been the goal of precise training” (1929, p. 19). Following the lead of Robert S. Brumbaugh, I would claim that “mastery” is a better term for this stage than “generalization” (Brumbaugh, 1982, p. 45). The term “generalization” suggests a mere theoretical competence, and this is not what Whitehead has in mind. In this third stage, we have mastered a field of study in the sense that we have developed habits of thinking which we can automatically apply to our subsequent actions (1929, pp. 36–37). This is

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the stage in which both power and style can emerge. We gain power from the mastery of a subject matter because we now have the techniques we need to increase our precise knowledge exponentially; we can categorize each new fact we encounter without pause or hesitation. We gain style in the stage of mastery because we can act efficiently, without any waste of effort or imagination. As Whitehead puts it, “Style is the ultimate morality of mind” (ibid., p. 12). Whitehead seems to be making a descriptive claim when he asserts that learning proceeds according to these three stages. He is claiming that human beings naturally go through these three stages when they encounter a new subject matter and that to try to reverse the order of these stages is counterproductive. Whitehead often compares the acquisition of knowledge with the ingestion of food. For example, he says, “ the ordered acquirement of knowledge is the natural food for a developing intelligence” (1929, p. 30). Note that if the food is not acquired in the proper manner, the mind may reject it altogether. “When you have put your boots in a trunk, they will stay there till you take them out again; but this is not at all the case if you feed a child with the wrong food” (ibid., p. 33). Furthermore, Whitehead claims that the experience of learning something new is an intrinsically enjoyable experience. He expands on his viewpoint that the human mind is a living and growing organism, not a passive mechanism. Whitehead agrees with Aristotle that the natural impetus for mental development is interest and enjoyment. This is why the stage of romance is crucial to the learning process. Learning should be a natural activity which is pleasurable in and for itself (1929, p. 31). However, Whitehead is enough of a realist to acknowledge that this is often not the case. Traditional educational systems have ignored the natural rhythm of learning by insisting on discipline and precision without establishing an initial interest in the subject-matter at hand. The result is that the minds of the students have been crammed with facts in which they have little interest and have been fettered with irrelevant procedures and techniques. Such a system of education dulls the minds of the students and leaves them with “inert ideas”—ideas which they have passively received and which they will soon forget (1929, pp. 1–2). Whitehead claims that this type of education is not only useless, it is positively harmful. The result is that students have contempt for learning when they should relish in learning as the intrinsically enjoyable activity it can ideally be. 2. Flow Experiences Some of Whitehead’s themes concerning learning and education find striking parallels with the work of a contemporary psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, former professor and chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. Like Whitehead, Csikszentmihalyi deals with the issue of how human beings can add meaning and enjoyment to their everyday lives.

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He has done extensive research into the characteristics of what he terms “flow experiences” or (equivalently) “optimal experiences.” Flow experiences are marked by an intense enjoyment of what seems to be an effortless activity in which we find ourselves to be completely immersed. I think a parallel exists between Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of a flow experience and Whitehead’s view of learning as an intrinsically enjoyable activity. The advantage of Csikszentmihalyi’s viewpoint is that it is firmly grounded on extensive research into the nature of these “flow experiences” and the conditions that are conducive to their occurrence. Flow experiences typically occur when we are using high skills successfully to meet high challenges. Csikszentmihalyi has drawn some significant conclusions about the nature of these optimal experiences, based on interviews, questionnaires, and other data collected by his teams for over thirty years from thousands of respondents. Initially, his teams interviewed only people who invested large amounts of time and energy in activities that required high levels of skill but for which they were not compensated through the usual measures of money, recognition, or social status. Instead, the persons involved pursued these activities solely for the rewarding experiences they gained from them. Examples of persons who met these criteria were rock climbers, composers of music, poets, chess players, and amateur athletes. Later, his teams expanded their interviews to include quite ordinary people who were asked to record and describe their experience when they were doing what they enjoyed most. Here they interviewed many Americans, but also many people living in Europe and Asia. On the basis of these extensive interviews, Csikszentmihalyi has isolated certain characteristics which are common to these many instances of optimal experiences. According to Csikszentmihalyi, six major components usually constitute flow experiences. First, flow experiences usually result from engaging in a challenging activity which demands the exercise of certain skills. The ideal situation is one in which we are using our skills to meet successfully the challenges inherent in the activity. Mental activities can promote flow experiences as effectively as physical activities; mental skills can be just as important as physical skills. For example, Csikszentmihalyi observes that the two flow activities most often reported were reading and socializing with other people. These activities would not ordinarily be classified as physical but they still would be considered activities which can lead to flow experiences. Not surprisingly, sports and games are the activities that come most readily to mind as sources of flow experiences. For example, playing chess can provide flow experiences for those who have the requisite skills, and so can activities such as rock climbing, dancing, and playing musical instruments. Some typical expressions for flow experiences are “being in a zone” or having a moment of “aesthetic rapture” (1997, p. 29). Csikszentmihalyi notes that, in all these activities,

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“Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act” (1990, p. 52). Second, the activity must have clear goals and provide immediate feedback so that we can determine whether we are progressing toward our goal. Again, the clearest examples of such activities come from games and sports. A tennis player has clear goals which are specified by the rules of playing tennis. She must hit the ball before it bounces twice and return it between the white lines of her opponent’s court. Furthermore, she knows immediately whether she has been successful in performing this operation, and every successful volley will inspire her to make the next shot successfully. Yet flow experiences are also possible when the goals of the activity are not as clear and the feedback is more ambiguous. For example, take the activity of writing a novel. A writer may begin with the general goal of writing a novel about characters who interact at a vineyard in Rhode Island. At any given point in time, the writer may not know exactly what the finished novel will be like, but he should be able to say whether the chapters he is writing capture the spirit of his main ideas. The writer must have some internal criteria of successful writing by which he judges the product of each day’s activity. Goals and feedback are still present in an activity such as creative writing, even though articulating them with precision and definiteness is more difficult (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p. 57). A third feature of flow experiences is that they require us to focus attention on the task at hand; we cannot attend to irrelevant details when we engage in activities that promote flow. Instead, we must concentrate on the activity with an intensity that blocks out our usual preoccupation with the exigencies of everyday life. This concentration of attention brings order into our consciousness and allows us to immerse ourselves in the enjoyable activity. It also provides the rationale behind calling optimal experiences “flow experiences.” We seem to be involved in an effortless movement which seeks to perpetuate itself. Of course, the flow activity is not quite the effortless movement it seems to be; we must develop the skills and invest the energy required to perform the activity with excellence. Nonetheless, while we are engaged in flow, the activity seems to move forward of its own accord (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p. 54). The fourth feature is that flow activities involve a sense of control. When we are playing a game or engaging in a sport, part of our enjoyment comes from the fact that we have developed skills which can affect the outcome of the activity. This is true even in activities that involve substantial risks, such as rock climbing. The fact that rock climbing involves objective risks is one reason behind its attraction, but another reason is that the climber can develop skills which will minimize the risk that she will stumble or fall. The paradox here is that we must give up the safety of familiar routines in order to discover whether our skills are equal to the challenges of a demanding activity. Those


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who successfully exercise control in the face of danger will be rewarded by the exhilarating experience known as “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, pp. 60 ff). The fifth characteristic is that we often lose self-consciousness when we engage in flow activities; we experience a rare sense of unity with other entities in our environment. For example, the rock climber can develop a “sense of kinship” between her own body and the stones, the wind, and the sky (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p. 64). This loss of self-consciousness enables the self to grow; it can expand our boundaries beyond the petty concerns that engage us in much of the course of everyday life. This characteristic is the clearest connection between flow experiences and learning. In order to continue to have flow experiences, we must develop new skills to meet the new challenges presented by our chosen activity. Flow experiences act as a “magnet for learning”—they constantly encourage personal growth to meet the challenges of novel situations (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997, p. 33). A final feature of flow experiences is the transformation of time. We get caught up in the rhythms inherent in the flow activity and lose track of the passage of time. Most people report that time seems to pass more quickly when they are involved in flow. For example, chess players can lose track of the passage of time when they are intensely involved in the movements and strategies of the game. The same thing can take place when two friends are involved in a conversation. They are surprised to find that two hours have passed when it seems to them more like ten minutes. 3. Relating Flow to Learning I will now specify some of the conditions that favor the occurrence of flow experiences. These conditions are clearest in respect to games and sports, since those activities are expressly designed to allow their participants to have optimal experiences. A game such as tennis has a clear set of rules which sets it apart from other activities. We must learn these rules and abide by them if we want to participate in the game of tennis. Various skills must be developed by those who want to play tennis well, and these skills will enable us to meet the challenges posed by the game. Furthermore, a dynamic relationship exists between our skills and the challenges we face in playing the game. Flow occurs most easily when our skills in an activity exactly match the challenges we face. However, skills and challenges rarely remain in this desirable state of equilibrium. The challenges of the game may exceed my skills; I may be facing a better player who beats me in every match. The solution to this problem is to improve my skills so that I can win now and then. By contrast, I may develop my tennis skills to the point that I am a much better player than my usual opponent and thus find games with her less enjoyable. The solution to this problem is to find some way to increase the challenges of the game (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p. 52).

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The game of tennis also establishes clear goals and provides immediate feedback concerning our success in reaching these goals, as we have already noted. An immediate goal is simply to return the tennis ball to the court of the other player. A more strategic goal is to hit the ball so that your opponent will have difficulty returning it to your court. The feedback is also immediate and clear, since one player is always awarded the point in question. Playing tennis demands that we concentrate our attention on the events taking place within the framework of the game and suspend our preoccupation with the affairs of everyday life. The best tennis players have mastered the game to the extent that they often seem to be engaged in a flowing and effortless activity; for example, consider a well-played match between Venus and Serena Williams. These observations are more difficult to apply to the construction of positive learning situations. Learning situations are quite different from games and sports, since learning is usually thought of as a chore, not as something we do for the intrinsic enjoyment of doing it. Learning a new subject is burdensome because we are forced to conform our own activities to the parameters of something that is new and different. We are often initially reluctant to invest the time and effort this process requires. Furthermore, the goals of learning are different from the goals of games and sports. We engage in sports for entertainment and relaxation, while “learning” has the same seriousness of purpose we associate with “working.” I am not denying that flow experiences can occur in the process of learning something new, but the intensity of such flow experiences usually pales in comparison with the excitement of playing a game of soccer or chess. Nonetheless, I contend that the enhancement of flow experiences can serve as a worthy goal for education. It would be wonderful if we could structure the educational process so that students could experience the type of satisfaction they attain when they are engaged in games and sports. An intimate connection exists between Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow experiences and Whitehead’s view of the rhythmic nature of learning. From the theoretical standpoint, flow is most closely related to Whitehead’s generalization or mastery stage of learning. This is partly due to deficiencies in both the romance and precision stages. The problem with the stage of romance is that it is too diffused and scattered to generate flow. The romance stage of learning elicits strong motivations to explore new areas of experience, but it lacks the discipline needed to develop skills for organizing and assimilating these new facts. The stage of precision can furnish this discipline, but this stage makes such rigorous demands upon learners that it is apt to extinguish the initial interest provided by the stage of romance. What we need for flow experience is the synthesis of the features of romance and precision, and only the stage of mastery can achieve this goal. These observations pose a problem for my claim that flow experiences can constitute a worthy goal for education. Very few of the students we encounter


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in the classroom will ever gain the kind of mastery of the subject matter that is most conducive to flow experiences. Instead, most students fall into one of two main categories. The first category is that of “amateurs”—these are the students who have an initial interest in the subject, at least enough curiosity to enroll in an introductory course. Students in an introductory course are also amateurs in the sense that they lack experience or competence in the subject at hand. Indeed, one reason they might have for taking the course is to gain these things. My second category is that of the “apprentices.” Apprentices are those students who wish to develop some expertise in the subject matter and are thus in the process of developing the relevant new skills and techniques. For example, college students who major in a certain subject can be said to be apprentices in that area of learning. They are trying to model their own activities after those supplied by the “experts” in the field whose writings they are studying or by whom they are being taught. What is missing from this classification is the category of “master” or “expert.” Very few of the students we teach from year to year can be described as experts in the area they are studying. In fact, very few even have expertise or mastery of the subject matter as their goal. They are content to be either amateurs or apprentices—or, worst of all, neither. They are enrolled in the course for some external reason, one that has nothing to do with an intrinsic interest in what they are studying. With these facts in mind, how can we realistically propose flow experiences as a worthy goal for education? The solution is to realize that the term “mastery” encompasses a wide spectrum of capacities and that flow experiences can occur at any point in this spectrum. We do not have to master a whole area of study in order to have the rewarding experiences that come from successful activities. Instead, we can master specific facts and techniques in the process of learning something new, and these more limited accomplishments can provide us with flow experiences. Exploring a new area of study is always a process, not a static result, and each new step in this adventure of learning can yield its own rewards. 4. An Example: Teaching Logic I will now apply the theories of Whitehead and Csikszentmihalyi to teaching introductory logic. The initial problem is to discern a stage of romance in relation to logic. Logic is primarily concerned with developing skills in recognizing correct and incorrect patterns of reasoning. This process demands a precise understanding of basic logical concepts and extensive practice in applying these concepts to novel situations. Little room exists for an initial stage of romance, one in which students can explore the domain of reasoning without the aid of systematic techniques. This makes it difficult to convince most students that studying logic is worthwhile as an end in itself. Most students who enroll

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in my introductory logic course do so because of extrinsic instead of intrinsic motivation. They have little interest in learning the formal principles of reasoning just because this is an exciting area of study; instead, they want to learn logic for the sake of some external goal, such as preparing for a standardized test (for example, the Law School Aptitude Test). I suspect my situation is representative of most educational institutions in the United States. Csikszentmihalyi contends that extrinsic motivation is not necessarily a bad thing, however. Although inferior to intrinsic motivation, external motivation is superior to not having any kind of goal at all (1997, p. 23). The important thing is to have some reason for submitting to the discipline of learning something new. Learning logic is similar to learning to play a game such as tennis. In both cases, rules need to be learned, techniques need to be mastered, and strategies need to be developed. Practice is also essential to developing good skills in reasoning. No one can learn how to play tennis simply by reading books or watching videos on the subject. No substitute exists for practicing the different techniques of the game under the skilled guidance of a tennis professional. The same holds true for learning logic. Understanding intellectually the principles of good reasoning is not enough. We must also put these principles into practice so that they become second nature to us. But doing so presupposes a willingness to invest the time and energy needed to develop these habits. The teacher can do some things, however, to make the discipline of logic more palatable, if not enjoyable. The first is the choice of a good textbook. The book I have used successfully for several years is A Concise Introduction to Logic, by Patrick Hurley. This book has features that facilitate the teaching of logic. First, the overall organization of the book exemplifies strategic planning. Each chapter is divided into six or seven sections, and each section is usually appropriate for one class’s work. Hurley explains important concepts clearly and precisely, and he uses several visual aids throughout the text. For example, he has clever diagrams which illustrate the three immediate inferences called conversion, obversion, and contraposition. These diagrams make it easier to gain an intuitive grasp of exactly how each immediate inference proceeds. Hurley provides a plethora of exercises at the end of each section, and these exercises usually increase in difficulty as they proceed. He gives the correct answer to every third exercise in the back of the book. This arrangement allows students to check their progress at definite intervals and to get immediate feedback as they work the exercises for the section in question. I encourage my students to work the starred exercises before they look up the answers in the back of the book. If they get the right answer, then they have immediate confirmation that they have understood the material. They can also experience the enjoyment that results from performing an activity well. If they do not get the right answer, then they know that they need to review the exposition of the relevant concepts in the preceding section in order to discover how to work the


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problem correctly. In this way, working the exercises can be a self-corrective activity. It can promote a kind of “programmed learning” in which a student proceeds step-by-step from easier to harder exercises and checks her progress as she goes along. A second technique for maintaining interest is using examples from many different areas of human experience to illustrate logical concepts. For example, in his chapter on the nature of arguments in logic, Hurley incorporates numerous quotations from recognized authors on a variety of subjects and excerpts from letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines. He also strives to represent opposing views on a multitude of contemporary philosophical issues, such as abortion, euthanasia, animal rights, and environmental protection. These quotations usually have an immediate appeal that goes beyond whatever logical principle they are used to illustrate. This feature adds to the enjoyment of reading the text and working the exercises; it also serves to remind students that logic can be readily applied to significant dimensions of human life. Effective techniques also exist for checking the progress of the students at the end of each section. Doing so is important because the later sections in a chapter usually build upon the concepts and procedures introduced in the earlier ones. I assign homework every day and then call on students to present their answers during the last twenty minutes of each class meeting. Sometimes they can answer from their seats; sometimes they must go to the chalkboard and actually work the problem in class. Then I review the work of each student and comment on the results. The most interesting cases involve a wrong answer or an incorrect procedure. These errors gives me a chance to give a fuller account of the logical concepts at stake in the exercise and to explain how these concepts apply to this particular problem. Of course, using tact is always necessary in correcting the work a student does in the classroom. Otherwise, she can suffer embarrassment and frustration, emotions which clearly militate against the attainment of flow experiences. We must remember that logic is a discipline in the strictest sense of that term. It is permeated by well-established principles and techniques for drawing inferences from what we know to what we want to find out. Logic operates primarily within the stage of precision; it has definite concepts to be understood and definite techniques of reasoning to be mastered. In most situations, only one correct answer exists to a given problem. Even though there may be several correct ways to perform a lengthy deduction, we must all arrive at the same point at the end of our procedure. Logic offers little leeway for alternative interpretations. It forces us to reason in accordance with parameters that demand our conformity. Nonetheless, adequate opportunity exists for students to have flow experiences in their study of logic. All that is required is a willingness to invest the time and energy necessary to understand the basic concepts and master the relevant methods and techniques. Every new section in a logic book holds the

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promise of some degree of flow experiences for a student who approaches that section in the proper frame of mind. Ideally, the student will be interested in learning about the new concepts and procedures and open to the challenges the new material presents. She will read the section carefully and thoughtfully, focus on the diagrams that illustrate the relevant concepts, and tackle the exercises at the end of the section only after she feels she understands the material sufficiently. Then she will work the exercises in the order in which they are listed and check the answers for the starred exercise so as to monitor her progress. In this ideal scenario, the conditions for flow experience are clearly present. Each new section of the book contains challenges but presents opportunities to develop the skills needed to meet the challenges. The goals of each section are clearly evident and immediate feedback is provided concerning our progress toward reaching these goals. The only missing ingredient is motivation. The student must somehow be convinced that the rewards of understanding the concepts and techniques are sufficient to justify a considerable expenditure of effort. Let me briefly indicate some broader reasons for studying logic. In contrast with its rigor and precision, logical reasoning also has an aesthetic dimension. A fine piece of logical reasoning is beautiful and elegant, even though this is a feature of logic that few students in an introductory class can appreciate. Logic offers us an insight into formal patterns of thinking that can be delightful to contemplate; perhaps this is the ultimate reason for learning it. An effective teacher will communicate her enthusiasm for logic and her enjoyment of its aesthetic dimension through the zest with which she approaches the subject. By doing this, she will lure some students into investing the time and energy necessary to experience these rewards themselves. As Whitehead remarks, “It should be the chief aim of a university professor to exhibit himself in his own true character—that is, as an ignorant man thinking, actively utilizing his small share of knowledge” (1929, p. 37). 5. Another Example: Teaching Literature Now I will turn to a very different subject, literature. Here I will use the example of teaching Henry David Thoreau’s Walden in a course on American philosophy. Learning to interpret great works of literature is quite different from learning the techniques of logic. As Robert Brumbaugh points out, understanding logic depends upon our ability to gain formal insight into the properties of deductive arguments. The goal of studying logic is to master techniques that are conducive to this formal insight into logical relationships. A kind of inevitability is connected with logical argumentation; in a correct deductive argument, the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. When we have performed a deduction correctly, we realize that only one correct answer exists, given the parameters of the problem. We do not have the feeling that a penum-


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bra of open possibilities exist; instead, we have a feeling of closure. We have discerned just how to work the problem (see Brumbaugh, 1982, p. 77). The interpretation of a great work of literature presents us with a different kind of challenge and requires different skills. There exists no “one correct way” to interpret the meaning and import of Thoreau’s Walden. Thoreau’s writings has many different levels and dimensions, as is evident from a cursory glance at the titles of recent works on Walden. The interpretation of literature has an open texture missing from the study of logical arguments. This open texture also makes room for discussion and debate; it turns the study of literature into a social instead of an individual endeavor (see Brumbaugh, 1982, p. 80). Even though the instruction of logic takes place in a classroom setting, the purpose of this activity is to promote individual insight and competency. Class discussion of logical concepts is usually addressed to the clarification and further illustration of the material. Things are drastically different when the interpretation of literature is at stake. Here group discussion is integral to an effort to discern the various themes and meanings implicit in and suggested by the text. The study of literature requires a broad array of mental capacities, such as appreciation of historical contexts, attention to psychological nuances, fertility of imagination, and the ability to empathize with a wide variety of fictional characters. These capacities go beyond the ability to draw the correct conclusion from a given set of premises. Whereas learning logic can give us a feeling for the necessity of logical implication, the study of literature can open our minds to visions of new possibilities. When I have used Thoreau’s Walden as a text in my American philosophy course, I have found that it resonates with the concerns and interests of the college students of today. Students are especially attracted to Thoreau’s admonition to simplify and disencumber our lives through a “return to nature.” Due to this resonance, there exists an initial interest and fascination with this text that is usually absent in the students who are taking an introductory logic course. In Whitehead’s terms, I can presuppose that students will approach their reading of Walden in a spirit of romance; they will look forward to an opportunity to learn more about how Thoreau lived and flourished in a small cabin at the shore of Walden Pond for two years. Their initial attitude means that I do not have to work as much on stimulating an interest in reading the text. I can concentrate my efforts on channeling this interest in fruitful directions. My task as an educator is to help the students develop the kind of critical and analytical skills they need to interpret the text and distill the main principles of Thoreau’s philosophy. We are able to move from the stage of romance into the stage of precision. Several techniques are helpful in getting students to hone their analytical skills in interpreting Walden while encouraging their continuing interest in the material. First, I assign short weekly journals in which students write up their

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response to some issue that interests them in the readings. This technique encourages students to remain in the stage of romance because it gives them freedom to react to whatever they find noteworthy. At the same time, it promotes the development of precision because the students must articulate their views in a (hopefully) cohesive and coherent way. The journals also give me helpful feedback about how well the students are understanding the readings and what issues in the readings they find important. A second technique is to ask several students to prepare reports on specific parts of the Walden text to present at the next class meeting. I always ask for volunteers for these reports, although each student must give one such report during the semester. These student reports have traditionally been a popular part of the class requirements. Preparing and presenting a report can empower students because it enables them to research a topic independently and to present their findings to the class. These reports also promote disciplined thinking because I spell out certain parameters for the reports in terms of style, organization, and argumentation. I also ask students to raise several questions for discussion at the end of their report. This incorporates an evaluative element into the report and encourages group participation. During a recent semester, a student named Tappan presented a report on Thoreau’s view of nature that showed remarkable insight and sophistication. Her main thesis was that Thoreau uses his detailed descriptions of natural events to draw moral implications about how human beings should live their lives. She talked in particular about how Thoreau uses the various seasons of nature to symbolize the cycles of human life. The most remarkable aspect of Tappan’s report was the diagram she put on the board to illustrate Thoreau’s vision of the interconnectedness of natural entities. The diagram depicted a man standing on the bank of a pond with grasses growing at his feet and a frog sitting on a lily pad in the pond. In the background the sun was shining from behind the white clouds in the sky, while in the distance rain was falling from a dark cloud. Tappan explained how each separate element in the picture contributes to the harmony and well-being of the ecosystem as a whole. Then she showed how this cycle of interdependence symbolizes the interrelatedness of the various stages of human life. I was impressed with both the imaginativeness of her diagram and the comprehensiveness of her vision of Thoreau’s philosophy. Her report led to a lively discussion of the significance of Thoreau’s view of nature. In a later class meeting, another student, Emily, related a personal experience that bore a striking resemblance to Thoreau’s life at Walden Lake. During the previous summer, she had spent six weeks at her parents’ cabin in a forest in northeast Georgia. She had no electricity, no telephone, no computer and none of the conveniences and luxuries that we take for granted in everyday life. Furthermore, she lived in the cabin by herself for the full period of time. Of course, there were important differences. Emily had an automobile and made


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several trips to the nearest town to purchase food and other items. She did not build her cabin, as Thoreau had done, and she did not grow (or catch) her own food. Nonetheless, Emily was confident that her stay in the woods put her into closer touch with the rhythms of nature and enabled her to sort out her personal priorities at a crucial time in her life—the summer between her junior and senior years in college. She thought that her experience gave her valuable insight into some of the problems connected with the typical affluent lifestyle of middle-class Americans and the possibility of living in a simpler and more natural way. Her account of her experience led to an extended discussion of whether it would be possible and beneficial to put Thoreau’s experiment into practice today. As these examples show, the study of literature has inherent advantages that promote flow experiences for both the students and the instructor. Students often have an initial interest in reading a new literary text that contrasts with their initial reluctance to undertake an intellectual discipline such as logic. A great work of literature also has a richness and inexhaustibility to it; we often notice new themes and new dimensions every time we read it. The “open texture” of literature stands in sharp contrast to the fixed and determinate nature of logic. Some differences exist between these two subjects, however, which seem to favor logic. One advantage to studying logic lies in the fact that the goals are clear and the feedback is immediate. For example, this occurs when we are working the exercises in the logic textbook and checking our answers as we go along. By contrast, the goals of studying literature are more vague and the nature of the feedback is less clear. There exists no one correct way to interpret Walden, even though some interpretations are surely more adequate than others. Moreover, what counts as feedback is closely related to the nature of our goal, so the vagueness of one factor will carry over into the other one. The most important feedback is whatever can monitor our progress toward an understanding of the literary work as a whole. What would constitute mastery of a literary work such as Walden, especially in light of the fact that different interpretations are possible and plausible? We can take some guidance from Brumbaugh when he claims that the goal of reading a work of literature is “concrete seeing” or “concrete appreciation” (pp. 85ff). A careful and attentive study of Walden will give us a concrete vision of an “experiment in living” which is vastly different from the way most of us live today. The goal of this study might be to enter imaginatively and empathetically into Thoreau’s account of his life in the woods. What would it be like to be in Thoreau’s shoes at that particular juncture of history and culture? Intrinsic value can be found in the act of appreciating what Thoreau was like as a concrete individual who wanted to live much more abundantly than most of his contemporaries. Incidentally, if Thoreau’s own testimony is reliable, he succeeded in this endeavor. As he says in his journals, “My life was ecstasy.”

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A quite different goal is the evaluation of the literary work we are reading. Suppose we can reach some sort of agreement about the nature of Thoreau’s view of human life, society, and nature. To what extent is Thoreau’s philosophy accurate or correct? Can we formulate any criticisms of the moral implications Thoreau draws from his life in the woods? What arguments can we give either for or against the way of life Thoreau advocates? Raising such questions is crucial to having a philosophical encounter with Thoreau. These questions can also lead us to independent philosophical reflections; we can engage in the activity of philosophy ourselves and reap the enjoyments this activity affords. Herein lies another difference between studying logic and studying literature. When we are learning the rules of argumentation, raising critical questions about the legitimacy of these rules is not appropriate. We must simply accept the rules as part of the framework within which the activity of argumentation takes place. By contrast, raising questions about the correctness of Thoreau’s view of human life is appropriate, provided we grant that we cannot formulate a “correct version” of this view. We might agree with Thoreau’s concern for the individual and his relationship with nature and yet disagree with his view of the proper relationship between the individual and society. A much wider range of evaluation is both possible and appropriate in the study of literature. This again illustrates the “open texture” of literature in contrast with the “closed” nature of logic. 6. Conclusions Let me bring together some of the themes I have addressed in the previous sections. In Sections 1–3, I presented Whitehead’s theory of the stages of learning and drew parallels with Csikszentmihalyi’s view of the nature and conditions of flow experiences. In Sections 4–5, I illustrated these theories in reference to logic and literature. Here I drew the contrast between the “closed texture” of logic and the “open texture” of literature, and indicated how this difference affects the flow experiences available in learning each subject. Now I will draw some more general conclusions about these two theories of learning/experience in relationship to practical matters of teaching. Ideally, I would like to provide definitive answers to questions that naturally arise concerning the applicability of these theories to the educational process. I would like to be able to specify when students do and do not experience flow in their study of logic and literature and indicate how to create conditions which will enhance the occurrence of flow experiences. Alas, these are the questions I cannot answer. I have done no research designed to deal with such questions, and I am not aware of the existence of such research by others. As a result, the only evidence I have for drawing conclusions is piecemeal and anecdotal, not comprehensive and systematic. This evidence is based upon the


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evaluation forms that students fill out at the end of each course and informal discussion with various students who have taken both courses. On the basis of this limited evidence, my conclusion is that students have more flow experiences when they are reading and discussing Walden than when they are learning the principles of logical reasoning. The students in my American philosophy course say that they like Walden because of its accessibility and relevance. Thoreau deals with familiar themes from the early history of the United States, and he does so in a way that speaks directly to students. Students also find the class reports beneficial and fruitful; they experience the satisfaction of mastering a portion of the material and communicating their results to the class. By contrast, students from my classes on introductory logic have been far less enthusiastic about their learning experiences. Many of them complain about the drudgery of daily homework assignments and the irrelevance of the techniques of logic to their everyday concerns. Some students in each logic class report a much more positive experience. They say that the daily homework is helpful and enables them to gain a mastery of the skills and techniques, and they see the relevance of these techniques to other aspects of their lives. However, these positive evaluations of logic are definitely in the minority. I do have anecdotal evidence that indicates that student attitudes toward the value of logic can change with the passage of time. Occasionally, I encounter students who have taken the logic course in years past and are now professionals in some field of endeavor—most notably, law, business, or the priesthood. These students convey an appreciation for the kind of disciplined thinking that logic develops. They often recall the logic course as a difficult one that has proved to be useful in later life. In particular, lawyers often report that knowing the techniques of argumentation and the varieties of fallacious reasoning has been beneficial to them professionally. They sometimes even wax lyrical about their new appreciation of the virtues of submitting to the discipline of logical reasoning. We can explain the differences that emerge from student evaluations of these two kinds of courses in many ways. The American philosophy course is an upper-level course. It is typically a small seminar course (ten to twelve students) that meets one afternoon a week, and the emphasis is on student discussion of the works we read. Since this is an elective course, students typically enroll in it due to an initial interest in the subject matter. Normally, about half of the students are philosophy majors and the other half come from other disciplines such as English literature, history, American studies, political science, economics, or a science. The introductory logic course is quite different. It is a lower-level course that meets three times a week in a large classroom, and the method of instruction is a combination of lecture and in-class review of the daily homework. Logic is also an elective course, but students often enroll in the course due to extrinsic reasons, such as preparation for a professional

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school exam. Unsurprising, students report greater satisfaction with the American philosophy course than the logic course. In spite of these problems with determining the nature and extent of student flow experiences, I think my investigation has definite implications for the process of education. It provides us new parameters for conceptualizing the kind of teaching we do. As educators, we should be concerned with promoting satisfaction (Whitehead) and flow experiences (Csikszentmihalyi) for our students, because these are precisely the experiences that will serve as “magnets for learning.” Students who find satisfaction in their learning activities will be motivated to devote more time and energy to them. Thus, the enhancement of flow experiences can serve as a worthy goal for education, even though more investigation is needed to determine exactly how we can best pursue this goal. WORKS CITED Brumbaugh, Robert S. (1982) Whitehead, Process Philosophy, and Education. Albany: State University of New York Press. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper. ———. (1997) Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. Hurley, Patrick. (2003) A Concise Introduction to Logic. Belmont, Cal. Wadsworth Publishing. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Eight NOURISHING RELATIONSHIPS THAT NOURISH LIFE Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore Recently I was in a group of adults who were asked to reflect on mentors in their lives—mentors outside our families. As we shared with one another, we were struck that everyone in our group had identified teachers. One named a high school coach; another, a junior high math teacher; another, an internship supervisor; another, a doctoral advisor. As each person told his or her story, we discovered that common features were found in those experiences. Our mentors had been people who cared for us, respected and believed in us, encouraged us to give the best of ourselves, listened, and said a wise or challenging word at just the right time. We also realized that many of these people never knew what influence they had on us personally. Such is the nature of educational relationships. They bear common features, but no two are alike. They have potential to connect us with the best of ourselves and with the fullness of the world. Schools are places where relationships happen quite naturally; in fact, they are unavoidable. These relationships can be powerful shapers of identity and character, and they can also be destructive. When we discuss A Different Three Rs for Education, relationality is the one that will happen whether we intend it or not; yet, attending to relationality can focus its power and contribution to the world’s flourishing. In this chapter, I will focus on five aspects of relationality that emerge from respectful teaching and communal learning: relationships with oneself, with community and culture, with people of difference, with the earth, and with social structures. The study begins with a word of warning, exploring the risks of relational education through a high school’s rough and tumble story of transformation (told through a movie). The study proceeds with a word of possibility, exploring possibilities of relational education through a case study in graduate education. The chapter then moves to analyze the five features of relational education noted above, drawing upon other case studies in the process. Together, the cases form a collage—a picture of relationality—from which much can be learned regarding relational teaching and learning (see also my essay on “The Relational Power of Education”) (Moore, 2005). Any picture of relationality needs to be grounded in complexities of real life; hence, I have chosen to reflect on narratives and case studies. Any picture needs also to be large, reaching in many directions; hence, I draw upon more than one case. Even so, every picture and every discussion is partial; this one is no exception. The purpose of

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this chapter is to stir imagination regarding relational education so that our readers—people who themselves are students, teachers, administrators, parents, and public citizens—can continue the discussion and extend the range of imagination and possibility. 1. A Word of Warning: A Revealing Movie Before proceeding with the formal analysis, a word to the wise is needed. The subject of this chapter is dangerous. The ideas seem meek and mild, but they promise to turn educational systems and community structures upside down. They are, and will be, controversial. Consider the 2003 movie Radio, inspired by a true story of Hanna High School in Anderson, South Carolina. Coach Harold Jones (Ed Harris) takes an interest in a young man with obvious learning disabilities (Cuba Gooding, Jr.). The young man is James Robert Kennedy, but Coach Jones calls him “Radio”—the one word the boy will speak when they first talk. Radio’s normal day consists of pushing a shopping basket through the streets of the town while his mother works ten or more hours a day in the local hospital. Most people ignore him or cast a fearful, disapproving eye in his direction. Yet, one incident, when Radio picks up a stray football, catches the attention of Coach Jones and his team. The situation is complicated by race; the Coach and team are mostly white, and Radio is black. The teammates—distracted by this disabled black guy who stands outside the fence everyday and has not returned their stray football—respond by grabbing Radio, binding his arms and legs with tape, and leaving him in a shed, terrified. Coach Jones, discovering their prank, is furious. He promises that the team’s practice will be long and exhausting the next day, and it is. Relationships grow gradually as this story unfolds, but Coach Jones is intentional and persistent. He involves others from the beginning, asking the Assistant Coach to take Radio a water bottle—the same coach who soon after offers Radio a burger and a radio. When Coach Jones involves the football team, he says: “See the young man over there. . . . He goes by Radio, and he’s going to be helping us out for a while. And we’re not going to have a problem with that!” They quickly respond, “No sir!,” though their words are quickly seen as empty when they find opportunities to pester Radio outside of the coaches’ sight. One father is also chagrined, especially after a game when Radio’s presence on the sidelines seems to have interfered with the Yellow Jackets’ game. After the game, he says to Coach Jones and the men gathered in the local barbershop: “Quite a show you put on out there tonight, Coach. I just wondered if you run a football program or social club.” These words point to the troubles that follow relational education. It is often seen to be an interference with the more important purposes of education— to foster achievement in academics, sports, and other areas of human endeavor.

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A football program, or a center for academic excellence, is easily contrasted with a social club. Thus, the relevance of education that builds strong, healthy relationships is often pushed aside, or even held as suspect. Radio further reveals that the prejudices of a town and the prejudices of a school are intertwined. Building relations within a school can be threatening and transformative for the larger community. Transformation does not come quickly or painlessly. A persistent leader (Coach Jones) helps; so does the beautiful spirit of the one who has been cast out and ignored (Radio). A question-posing, cautiously open principal also helps, and other supportive people help as well. Even so, major conflicts emerge, each threatening to unravel what has been accomplished; yet, each conflict opens to deeper relations and greater acceptance. What happens over the course of the story is a gradual unfolding of respect and love for this young man, who is best described by his mother: “James is a good boy, Coach. He got hisself a good heart. Most folks just don’t take the time to see it, is all.” The movie bears witness to what can happen in a school and in a town when people work together to create time and space to look for the good heart of others, particularly those others who have been cast aside. With the realism and possibilities of this movie in the background, we turn to an analysis of relational education. The only way to do such analysis with credibility is to embed it in narratives of living communities, as the movie itself, however fictionalized, is embedded in a true narrative. 2. A Word of Possibility: A Revealing Case Study To probe the meaning of relational teaching and learning, I share a case study of a particularly intensive form of relational education—a travel seminar. Such a case heightens the visibility of educational relationships. These are always present, of course, even in large lecture classes, but they are less intense and obvious in daily classrooms. The travel seminar group of twenty-three graduate students and faculty (led by David Jenkins and Elizabeth Bounds, Candler School of Theology, Emory University) traveled to Cuba to study social, religious, political, and economic features of that country, and to study the relationship between Cuba and the United States, where the travel group originated. The group was composed of half students and half faculty, with two of the faculty as leaders. The travelers had diverse backgrounds and experiences, including diverse ethnic backgrounds (African American, European American, and Asian). To prepare for their journey to Cuba, the group had four bi-weekly sessions. These included lively sessions with Cuban scholars and the informative mentoring of a Cuban student. To stir curiosity and images of Cuba, the study group also read a Cuban novel and watched movies revealing different aspects of Cuban life. For bi-weekly preparation, the group read about Cuban geogra-

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phy, history, religious life, political and social dynamics, ideological diversity, and gender and racial complexities. The journey itself was nine intensive days of visiting churches and ecumenical centers, service agencies, a theological seminary, cultural landmarks, hospitals, a farm, a cemetery, local markets and streets, and a jazz club. We engaged with people in many walks of life: church leaders, coordinators of service agencies, university professors, middle school and university students, and people we met on the streets and in other public places. Being a theological group, we also spent time with religious communities where people worshipped, reflected on their faith, engaged in social analysis, and served their communities. More than once, the travel group was awakened by yet another person to yet another view of the complexities in the Cuban and global situation. Visits also included centers serving the poor and reflecting on needs in the local community and country. The travel seminar group traveled to local projects to observe the people’s work in community organizing, educational projects, and local industries and crafts. Part of the group visited a farm where people raise organic vegetables and herbs for community-serving organizations in their area. The people there also prepare canned tomatoes and vegetables for the local community, produce energy with a replicable bio-gas technology, and provide seminars and consultations in which they share their discoveries with others and encourage people to share their own projects and discoveries, thus spreading expertise in ever-widening circles. In addition, the seminar group wandered the streets of Cuba and visited with people along the way. They enjoyed the welcome of Cuban people; experienced moments of significant meeting; discovered some of the complexities in international, religious, and socioeconomic relationships; and developed bits of understanding that would influence them for many years to come. 3. Relational Education With this case study in the background, we turn to the nature and promise of relational education. In the spirit of honesty, however, we should reiterate that all education is relational, for good or for ill. The educational process can foster destructive and distorted relationships, as well as life-giving ones. The travel seminar group in the case study was partially aware of that, recognizing some of the beneficial aspects of our journey for U.S.-Cuban relationships and some of the detrimental ones. For example, we realized how more than two centuries of unbalanced, and sometimes oppressive, bi-national relations have led the two countries—often with little recognition of the complex history—to engage in dangerous threats and counter-threats. We realized that our travel seminar could be one small step toward building more genuine understanding and respectful relationship. We also realized that our seminar


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could contribute to our misunderstandings of Cuba; would surely involve our contributing to the emerging dollar economy in Cuba with all of its ambiguous values; and could potentially build healthy mutual relationships or destructive relationships, or both. Further, we realized that we would not be able fully to comprehend the complex relationships. We could only hope that our presence and engagement with Cuban people, and theirs with us, would be more lifegiving than death-dealing. Such is the nature of relational education. Education has to do with knowing, and, at its heart, knowing is relational. We discover knowledge when we relate with people, ideas, actions, and movements of the ages; we discover knowledge when we relate with the intuitions, internalized realities, and dreams within ourselves. To affirm these realities is to recognize that knowing is relational by nature, and not simply because educators want people to get along with one another. We cannot know an era of history if we are not attuned to the narratives of that era and at least to some of its particularities and complexities. We cannot know science if we are not awake to the movements of animals and plants, soil and water, protons and neutrons. We cannot know literature if we are not captivated by its stories and questions, words and rhythms. With this awareness, we turn to relational education, looking for connections that are created, supported, and transformed as people work together in a learning community. Because we are looking for real connections, we will engage with the case studies (Cuba and two others) throughout the discussion. This engagement will make clear that relationality is not an abstraction separate from living communities, and it will point to the large range of educational settings in which relationality is embodied. 4. Relating with Self Education is a process of self-discovery, self-critique, and self-enlargement. I do not mean that the self is the primary subject of all education; yet, the self is always involved and always transformed. When you consider the relation between individual learners and educational institutions and processes, you can see the fundamental role of “self-development” in that process (Whitehead, 1929a, p. 1). Individual students learn in distinctive ways, and they finally shape the form of their own education, either with or without the encouragement and support of teachers. This assertion sounds antithetical to relational education, but it is actually a recognition that learners exercise agency as they engage in an educational process, whether seeking, researching, resisting, absorbing, analyzing, or constructing knowledge. The Cuba seminar provides an insightful source for reflecting on relationality within and between selves. The seminar was not planned to focus people on themselves, but people’s lives were changed. The moments given to formal reflections on our experiences were particularly revealing. People often began

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their reflections with introductions such as: “I realize for the first time . . .”; “I am moved to see . . .”; “I am shocked to hear . . .”; or “I have discovered how . . .” They used words to describe their self-discoveries—wonder, affirmation, shame, knowledge, lack of knowledge, and so forth. The actual purpose of the Cuba seminar was not directly focused on relating with the self. The course syllabus stated: This course is intended to introduce students . . . to the relationship between the church and state within Cuba, to the work of the church in Cuba, to theologies emerging from Cubans and Cuban-Americans, and to the ethical dilemmas in relations between the United States and Cuba. (Bounds and Jenkins, 2003) Nonetheless, the Cuban seminar left the community of learners and most individuals within it changed. Such a learning experience reveals how formative education can be in fostering the multifaceted development of individuals and their relationships with themselves and others. The multi-faceted nature of these relationships is informed by the educational reflections of Alfred North Whitehead. Philosopher and mathematician that he was, he recognized that people know through their feelings as well as through their intellect. He recognized that human knowing often transcends definitions and verbalizations: “Yet mothers can ponder many things in their hearts which their lips cannot express” (1926, p. 65). This knowing is a kind of internal knowing that emerges from relating with oneself. For Whitehead, both feeling and intellect are part of learning; one is not narrowly associated with emotional experiences and the other with academic experience; they represent two sides of an organism’s life. He explains that “emotional experiences illustrate a conceptual justification, and conceptual experiences find an emotional illustration” (1929b, p. 16). While this view perpetuates the idea that emotions illustrate concepts, placing emotions in a secondary position, the view reveals that intricate relationships lie within every person. These relationships are tapped, reshaped, and deepened in the process of education. The quality of these relationships is enhanced when education is at its best. The leaders and participants in the Cuba seminar were intentional in nourishing relationships that would nourish life, but not fully so. The selection of participants was carefully done, with intentions of fostering a community of mutual teaching and learning. The pre-journey class sessions prepared people with information and insight that would enhance their learning from the Cuba experiences and would open them to whatever experiences the journey would bring. All of these things contributed to significant learning, including learning that nourished relationships with the self. The post-journey class sessions revealed something more confusing, however: people had difficulty incorporating their new knowledge into the rest of


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their lives. Having experienced an intense and satisfying community life on the Cuba journey, people came together in these final sessions with unexpressed expectations and some degree of exhaustion, having given up their spring break for the seminar. Instead of enhancing self-learning, the post-journey sessions enhanced informational learning and ethical wrestling, but contributed less to the more integrative work of relating with self. The leaders for these sessions opened issues well, but people seemed awkward in engaging the issues, more quick to divert discussions than in earlier sessions. Perhaps people needed an opportunity to explore the issues in relation to personal and communal transformations that had taken place through the seminar. Perhaps people needed time to consolidate and expand their self-knowing—to reflect upon re-entry experiences, new knowledge, personal transformations, new or deepened social commitments. Many students did such consolidation and expansion as they prepared their final projects. In these projects, the fruits of relating with self were particularly evident as students integrated the entire semester’s work into their particular foci and unique interests. This analysis reveals the power of nourishing relationships with the self in order to nourish life more broadly. Such a relational practice was strongly present in most moments of the Cuba seminar, whether initiated consciously or spontaneously. It was nearly absent in other moments, especially when participants hesitated to engage fully in the complex, dynamic relationships that were part of the learning process. What is important to recognize, however, is how such a course—embracing the multiple dimensions of reading, dialogue, selfreflection (in a journal), travel with a learning community, and individual projects—can enrich relations with the self. 5. Relating with Community and Culture We turn now to another important aspect of relational education—relating with community and culture. Education is a process of discovering, analyzing, critiquing, deepening, and transforming relationships with community and culture. These processes were a self-conscious aspect of the Cuba seminar in that the central purposes were to acquaint the community with Cuba, build stronger consciousness of Latin America in the sponsoring institution, and engage faculty and students in contextual analysis and theological reflection. To these ends, the class read and discussed texts, and they worshiped and built community together. They also analyzed the multivalent readings, lectures, and experiences, engaging in particularly deep analysis as they traveled together through Cuba. Alongside these activities, students also kept a journal, recording discoveries, reactions, and interpretive insights. In so doing, participants reflected continually on their what they were seeing, hearing, and learning. Travel seminars are particularly conducive to nourishing relationships with community and culture, whether they are offered as a single opportunity

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(such as the Cuba travel seminar) or a series of opportunities (such as a pattern of annual journeys). In fact, the relationships that are nourished in such intense learning events are often transformative, enlarging travelers’ understandings of one or more cultures, and enhancing their relationships with people in a particular community or land. Such seminars usually evoke cultural sensitivities and intercultural concerns, as well as communicating knowledge about a particular culture. Further, they usually enhance the community that travels together, as much as the communities in which they travel. A few examples of the transformative influence of travel seminars have been analyzed and published. Some of these have involved peoples who were living in inherited traditions of conflict (see, for example, Krondorfer, 1995, and Mayer, 2003). How does this kind of educational experience translate into the daily life of a school, especially one with people of diverse ages and interests? Here we seek illumination from another case study—a Native Canadian high school designed to foster relationships with Native culture, with the school community, and with the larger Native community. The Cuba travel seminar was a course expressly designed to nourish participants’ relationships with community and culture; however, the Joe Duquette High School is designed to nourish such relationships in every aspect of its life. This Saskatchewan school is grounded in assumptions of relationality and purposes of healing, as seen in its mission statement: The Joe Duquette High School (The Saskatoon Native Survival School) is a healing place, which nurtures the mind, body and soul of its students. The school offers a program of studies which affirms the contemporary world of Indian people. The school supports the uniqueness and creativity of the individual and fosters self-actualization in a cooperative environment. Our focus is on healing all members of the school family. Consequently, our philosophy expects: a caring, a forgiving, and a believing environment. (Haig-Brown, et al, p. 46) This statement of mission gives straightforward attention to wholeness and relationships, not as supplementary to the educational process but as the core. The emphasis is on: nurturing mind, body, and soul; affirming Native culture and individuality; attending to the whole school family (students, teachers, administrators, parents, and larger community); and building community. In fact, these values are evident in the daily and weekly life of the school. One telling story took place on a recent visit to Joe Duquette, when Waylon Badger led me on a tour of the school. One of Waylon’s responsibilities is to relate with young people who are having difficulty staying in school, either missing classes or dropping out altogether. When I asked Waylon how he relates with the youth, he explained that he spends time with them and their families, getting to know them. Often the young people are spending much of their


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time on the streets (as he did when he was a youth), so he goes wherever they are. He recognizes that many of them are simply trying to find some fun, since much of their lives are filled with too much stress for fun. Waylon sees one of his roles as helping them realize that school can also be a place of fun. These conversations often draw the young people back. Waylon’s accent on fun is striking, coming from his recognition that joy is important to human life, and that schools can be places where people connect with others and find joy. Ideally, such joy comes from the whole of human life; so Waylon relates with youth and with their parents. He also attends to urgent needs when necessary, such as helping a young person shift living conditions. Like Waylon, the entire staff at Joe Duquette seeks to embody the school’s mission statement through healing relationships that nurture and support individual youth, the “school family,” and “the contemporary world of Indian people.” One can also see the values of the mission statement embodied in practices that an ethnographic research team described as they spun the story of Joe Duquette (Haig-Brown, et al): (1) Daily sweet grass ceremonies in classrooms, followed by Talking Circle using a talking rock to go around the circle) (2) Regular involvement of elders, who lead ceremonies, tell stories, and teach skills and traditions (3) Occasional ceremonies with sage and cedar, pipe ceremonies, and sweats (4) Healthy Lifestyles Program with monthly assemblies on topics chosen by the youth, plus longer sessions in classrooms and in other contexts, such as the gender circles (5) Cultural camp for one week every summer, with traditional ceremonies, setting up tepees, interaction with elders, cultural workshops, and outdoor activities (6) Open admission and expected attendance (awards for good attendance and a requirement for re-admission if a person misses 5 consecutive days—all in the spirit of valuing the person’s presence in the community) (7) Courses in regular academic subjects, plus Cree language, drumming, dancing, singing, sewing and beadwork (8) Involvement of a social worker and school staff who are available for counseling (9) Afternoon Support Circle for those with special needs, plus gender circles that meet regularly (10) Referrals to Native-run treatment facilities when needed; (11) Infant care program for children of unwed moms (and others) (12) Emphasis on staff collaboration and communal decision-making (13) Administration through Parent Council, Department of Education, and Catholic School Board, working through a liaison committee and management committee.

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This list reveals a strong relational bias in Joe Duquette School. Youth are encouraged to relate respectfully with one another, as in the daily sweet grass ceremonies and Talking Circle. They are encouraged to relate with their cultural traditions—studying Cree language and arts, engaging with Cree elders, and participating in traditional ceremonies. They are encouraged to relate fully with their families, through the active role of the Parent Council and an infant care program for students’ children. They are encouraged to relate with people and resources in the larger society, such as social workers, social agencies and treatment facilities (especially those sponsored by the Native community), the Department of Education, and the Catholic School Board. What we see here is relationality that is designed to maximize good relations among all persons in the community, and to do so in ways that foster personal, communal, and cultural well-being. This school is not a soft and fuzzy institution grounded in cultural naivety, but one that seeks to respond to human needs and cultural values. Many youth in the school are struggling with personal fears, alcohol and other drugs, family disintegration, criminal records, and other oppressive realities. All inherit the history of cultural domination directed against their people and cultural traditions. The school is designed to build a healthy community, contributing to cultural regeneration. It is also designed to provide structure, guidance, and censure to youth who yearn to live fully and freely as contributing members of their community. Relating with community and culture is attending to the central educational values espoused by Whitehead, namely duty and reverence (1929a, p. 14). The unique combination of duty and reverence is the key. Duty is based on a sense of community and mutual responsibility for community life. Reverence has to do with awe, or encouraging people to revere all of life, which includes revering the preciousness of every being, every community, and every culture. Reverence does not mean an unconditional appreciation of everything that happens in the world and every human deed. It mean appreciation for life itself— revering the Spirit of Life, the communities that bear life, and relationships in all their best guises. These and other dimensions of reverence are developed in my book Teaching from the Heart (Moore, 1998b, pp. 220–224). Duty calls people to accountability for their actions in the larger world, while reverence values the spirit of life that abides in every human being, every culture, and every creature of the planet. Relational teaching and learning foster both, as is well embodied in Joe Duquette High School and in the Cuba travel seminar. 6. Relating with People of Difference Relating with community and culture awakens people to difference, whether differences within a particular culture and community or differences between diverse communities. Relating with people of difference is an inevitable and


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critical aspect of relational education. Relational education is a process of dancing with diversity—encountering diverse peoples, perspectives, practices, and life patterns, and allowing them to raise critical questions and new possibilities (see also Moore, 2000). Such encounter with diversity was clearly a goal of the Cuba seminar. It was embodied in formal course requirements and in the multitude of experiences woven into the semester of study and the nine days of travel. As in the previous section, however, we need to ask if relationships with difference only take place in specialized educational events such as a travel seminar. To answer that question, we turn to our third case study, El Oro Way Elementary School. El Oro Way School is home for elementary-age children from twentyseven different countries and ethnic communities now living in Granada Hills, California. The five hundred children of El Oro Way speak twenty-three different languages, and many have recently immigrated to the United States. The principal, Juanita Manning, beams as she tells the story of the school, proudly pointing out that El Oro Way is Spanish for “The Gold Way.” She talks about how children learn to relate with one another, how teachers bring creativity and sensitivity to their work, how parents participate in basic decision-making and the teaching-learning process, and how the problems (which are many) are all manageable because teachers and parents are so dedicated to provide the best education possible for their children (Manning, 2001). El Oro Way is clearly a community of difference. Children speak diverse languages, draw upon diverse cultural traditions, have diverse abilities, learn in diverse ways, and live in diverse family patterns. Yet, this school has a sense of wholeness. The diversity is taken to be an opportunity instead of a problem. Children who have been in special education in the past are mainstreamed in all of the classrooms, assuring that every child is placed in a class that can be nurturing and challenging for him or her, and assuring that every classroom of students will have the opportunity to learn from and with children with special needs. In El Oro Way Elementary School, the learning community includes students, teachers, administrators, and staff, but it also includes parents and community leaders. Further, the learning community includes the diverse languages and cultures represented in the school and the diverse subject matters that children and teachers study together. The faculty and administration of El Oro Way are intentional in attending to each unique student and to the student body as a whole. They intentionally attend to the multitude of communities that their students represent, and they seek to build relationships within the school community as a whole and with the larger culture (and mix of cultures) in which the school exists. In the words of this chapter, the students are encouraged to relate with self (including their cultural and personal uniqueness) and with the larger community and culture (sharing their diverse cultures while building community with one another). The El Oro Way faculty and administration seek to

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build community in many different ways, involving parents in the process. Sometimes they focus more on diversity, studying and sharing different cultures. Sometimes they join in common work, such as preparing a giant wall mural of the American flag with red and white handprints provided by each child. If education is to help people relate with difference, schools such as El Oro need to lead the way. These schools may be formed out of necessity, such as a rapidly changing neighborhood or immigration patterns. Yet these very schools often develop the most promising educational models for the future. They reveal that education can take place in a widely diverse learning community. They reveal that diversity-by-necessity can inspire creative teachers and administrators to create community schools marked simultaneously by difference and unity. Such schools can teach everyone in the learning community to respect and learn from the gifts of everyone else—however different their cultures, life patterns, abilities, or language. This requires special skills in teachers and administrators, who are not afraid of difference and who develop the art of negotiating difference, sometimes by painful trial and error and always with abundant listening and determination. No teachers or administrators are prepared for this work; it is a work that North American societies are just beginning to develop. At the same time, we can find pockets of possibility as we turn to schools that have become experiments by necessity and, thus, models for the future. 7. Relating with the Earth Relating with people of difference is akin to relating with the earth. Both are understood in popular ideology as foreign and distant from the immediate community of people who know and care for one another. Yet, relational education focuses on teaching that relates people with the earth’s movements and the earth’s future. Education is a process of appreciating, receiving from, learning from, and caring for the earth. The case studies of this chapter have educational elements of relating with the earth. The Cuba travel seminar involved studying ecological realities in relation to social, economic, and religious ones. It also involved visiting a theological seminary with an organic farm shared with the local community, and it involved visiting a non-profit farm and bio-gas operation designed to contribute simultaneously to the well-being of the earth and of human community. All of these operations were established to serve local communities and to be a model for other communities. Similarly, Joe Duquette High School is involved in the ecological quality of the community, particularly through its practice of Cree traditions that enable people to live in close, caring relationship with the earth. The ceremonies and cultural camps are particularly important in teaching people to relate with the earth.


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El Oro Way Elementary School is novel among public schools in ways of teaching children to relate with the earth. The El Oro Way Schoolyard Habitat is 38,000 square feet of land that was once a dumping ground filled with weeds and debris; the National Wildlife Federation now certifies it as a preserve. Three founding parents recognized the potential to transform this land for useful purposes, and with grant money and a donation from the city of Los Angeles the School District acquired the property. The school now has an outdoor classroom where students can study seven ecosystems. The Habitat contains trees and plants with plaques dedicated to families and corporations that have contributed human or material services. Parents, children, and staff gather the first Saturday of each month for a “Habitat Workday,” and a project is presently underway to connect children with Attention Deficit Disorder to the Schoolyard Habitat through the focusing practice of photography. For some time, philosophers and educators have been calling attention to the interconnectedness of all things. The fact that an earthquake in one part of the world can contribute to a tidal wave several hundred miles away, or that the flapping of butterfly wings in one place can be measured on the other side of the globe, reveals a connectedness that no one would have imagined a hundred years ago, except a few mystics and shamans. This interconnectedness is amazing and wonderful in one sense, but it is also terrifying, especially when we think of how war and oppressive politics in one time and place can gather momentum and diminish or destroy millions of lives for decades, even centuries, into the future. Terror, pain, and fear can pass through the giant web of relationships, as surely as justice and compassion. Whitehead is a generative theorist for reflecting on relationships with the earth. He espoused the now commonplace assumption that all of reality is related. More particularly, he believed that all things are internally related with one another (1925, pp. 163–65, 174–76). Human relations with the earth and sky are not just the apparent and occasional relationships that we hold in consciousness, but also the subtle relations in an ecological system—the relations that people and other creatures take into themselves and make their own, both consciously and unconsciously. Because of internal relations, human beings are affected by full moons, dust storms, sunshine, and rainy days. Teachers can describe exactly how these natural phenomena affect students in their classes, whether in hyperactivity, sluggishness, or excitement. Similarly, the earth is affected by the actions of human creatures—such as over-grazing, over-building, and over-consuming. These too affect teachers and students in classrooms, although they are often oblivious to such influences except in times of natural disaster or major change. People adjust to the changes and go on with life without full awareness that their adjustments may be subtle ways of colluding with forces that destroy their lives and the natural world around them. When an ecosystem is healthy, it sustains the life of all beings with the nutrients they need and a sense of well-

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being. This is true even though life and death are part of the natural life cycle of any ecosystem, and plants and animals live and die in their interactions with each other. When an ecosystem is disturbed, the animals and plants sag; many die; and human beings often decline in physical, psychological, and spiritual health. Education at its best facilitates people in becoming more conscious of these relations—more attuned to the earth’s movements around and within them. Such education will foster interaction with all aspects of the natural world; teachers will encourage students to study about, learn from, and care for that world. Some of these practices are evident in the case studies, but the possibilities are limitless. The efforts cannot end with one annual event or one earth project. Education that promotes relationality will foster interaction with plants, animals, sky, and water in many forms. These interactions will offer alternatives to the individualistic, non-relational approaches that often characterize education in North America, offering an alternative ecological approach to education and nourishing relationships that nourish life. (These ideas are developed more fully in other publications: Moore, 1998a; Moore, 2000; Bowers, 1995; Bowers and Flinders, 1990, esp. pp. 233–50.) With such education, the fullness of relations might enter more fully into human consciousness, delight, and ethical practice. 8. Relating with Social Structures Thus far, this chapter accents different forms of relationality that might be supported in the practice of education. Stepping back, we can see that building relationships with social structures is basic to nourishing all other relationships. Education is a process of relating people with social and political structures that can nourish the life-giving possibilities in all relationships. This aspect of relational education harkens back to John Dewey’s understanding that educational experiences are at their best when they open people to other learning experiences in the future (Dewey, 1938, pp. 58–60, 67–72). The accent on relating with social structures also resonates with his accent on the social and purposive nature of experience (Dewey and Dewey, 1915, pp. 121–31). The accent of this chapter intensifies and enlarges upon Dewey’s ideas, putting forth a more radical understanding of educational relationships. Relational education is not an end in itself, but a way of awakening people to relational realities, critiquing those realities in dialogue with others, and expanding the possibilities for building life-giving relationships in the future. We can see the dynamics of such relational education at work in the Cuba seminar. An implicit motivation of the seminar was to transform the culture of Candler School of Theology toward more active contextual awareness and engagement with large socio-religious and socio-political realities, particularly in relation to one of our close international neighbors. This motivation was real-


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ized in the sense that both faculty and students reflected spontaneously on these questions before the end of their journey, planning ways to invite the rest of the school community into discussions about Cuba and theological education in their own context. Upon their return home, both faculty and students sponsored dialogues with the larger community, engaging others in imagining a long-term transformation of the school’s educational culture and practices. Such actions of relating with social structures were not explicit in the syllabus of the Cuba seminar, nor scheduled as one session among others. Yet they were intended, albeit open-ended, outcomes—a trajectory toward which much of the explicit curriculum moved. Actions of students and faculty after the actual journey (especially their sponsoring of community dialogues) reveal that the seminar did indeed awaken participants to their relationships with, and responsibility to, larger social structures. The other case studies are also revealing. El Oro Way Elementary School is responding to a need in the larger social structure of California by providing education and building human relations among children, parents, and teachers who represent the state’s diversity. El Oro Way is also preparing people to live and lead in that culturally diverse society. Similarly, Joe Duquette High School is filling a gap in Canada’s educational system by providing an educational community for Cree people who long to recover their traditions and live well in the larger world. Joe Duquette is also preparing people to live and lead in a culturally diverse society, but a society in which Cree people are able to live as Crees and contribute their unique gifts and values to the larger society. These two schools, and others like them, reveal important educational qualities for connecting people in practical and meaningful ways with the larger society. Education that relates people with social structures will take many forms, as the case studies reveal. Such education might be intentionally evocative, intentionally diverse, or intentionally deep in one culture. That statement only reveals the surface, however, because the most evocative and diverse educational communities need to be bound by some form of common commitment or unity, and the most culturally specific schools need to be open to wide diversity. El Oro Way and Joe Duquette reveal these very contrasts. Teachers in these schools have become skilled in negotiating conflicts and seeking alternate solutions to problems that seem, at first, to have only one conceivable resolution or, at best, two contradictory ones. They have become skilled at finding a third or seventh alternative, thus, allowing conflict to blossom into new possibility. The value of confrontation in education is further developed in my essay on “Ethnic Diversity” (Moore, 20000) and in Ministering with the Earth, (Moore, 1998a, pp. 69–94). The essay proposes that education include both confrontation and efforts toward convergence; in this way, diversity and unity can be actively reshaped in the process of education.

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Relating with social structures also means that education is active, bringing diverse subject matters into relation with one another for the sake of the larger society. The separation of different subjects from one another, and the separation of all subjects from the practical concerns of life, is deadly. Either practice fosters boredom and disembodied knowledge. What is needed is adventurous exploration of connections between religion and politics, mathematics and history, literature and science. What is further needed are active projects in which students are invited to draw upon knowledge in diverse subject areas to respond to a real concern in the world in a way that actually responds to that concern in a concrete way. Such education relates students to the larger social structures and helps them to relate the subjects they are studying in active, practical ways. Such education responds to Whitehead’s urging that people engage in “straying across country” with their ideas, instead of traveling always in familiar ruts (1925, p. 197). Relating people with social structures further means an open-ended educational process. We have said that relating with difference is important, as relating with the earth is also. Such relationships open people daily to new discoveries and to uncomfortable challenges of letting go of prejudices and commonsense ways of thinking. The world is constantly changing; neither individuals nor communities and cultures stay the same. Education that connects people with reality will connect them with a changing reality. Students are not simply learning the way things are in order to develop theories and skills to function. They are also learning the way things are changing in order to develop openness and flexibility in thinking and acting. They are relating with the social order that is and the one that can be. Even in the Cuba travel seminar and in El Oro Way and Joe Duquette Schools, with all of their emphases on understanding cultural traditions, teachers and students daily explore complex worlds. They learn to value the past; they also draw upon the past to analyze and learn from the current world and to contribute well to the future, which is still open. When students are faced with such a complex way of relating with cultural and intellectual traditions, they are equipped to relate more fully and adequately with the social structures. They are not preparing to be victims or dominators, but agents of history in relation with peoples and ecological realities of the past and present world. 9. Conclusion Education is a process where relationships happen naturally. One sees this in the cases of this chapter, and also in Radio—a movie inspired by a true educational story. As I said at the outset, such relationships can positively shape identity and character, but they can also be destructive. Building good relationships is vital if schools are to nourish the lives of students and faculty, and positively influence the larger community. This is difficult, however. Often


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other values—winning football games or gaining academic recognition with students’ test scores—are held so highly as to discourage schools from actively building the positive relationships that actually foster growth in individual students and in the institution as well. Ignoring the relational challenges can lead to neglect, oppression, and even active abuse. In Radio, the townspeople, represented by one vocal leader and an antagonistic school board, actively discouraged a relational approach. Rather, they encouraged people to fear change and be suspicious of educational approaches that would broaden the circles of relationship and deepen the quality of relating. In this chapter, we have explored the nature of educational relationships, giving special attention to a central question: How can schools nourish lifegiving relationships, even in contentious and overwhelming social situations and even in times of global peril? The movie Radio and the case studies of this chapter have provided snapshots of intentional relationality. Hopefully, they have stirred readers’ imagination about real possibilities for relational teaching and learning. The challenge of this chapter is to draw educational insight and future vision from this analysis of cases. What is most important is to project an educational future in which teachers, administrators, students, and community folk work together to nourish relationships that nourish life. These will surely include the aspects of relationality discussed in this chapter: (1) Relationships with self. Education can enhance critical self-awareness and character-development when it raises students’ awareness of their deepest passions, values, and concerns. (2) Relations with community and culture. Education can encourage respectful relationships within the learning community, with the larger community, and with the larger cultural matrix, thereby contributing to lifegiving relationships within families, communities, and cultural movements. (3) Relations with peoples of difference. Education can enhance knowledge, appreciation, understanding, negotiation, and even reconciliation across communities of difference; all of these qualities can make lasting contributions to healthy human relationships and global well-being. (4) Relations with the earth. Education can engage students in many forms of interaction with the natural world, thus enhancing ecological consciousness, delight, and ethical practice. (5) Relations with social structures. Education can be interactive, public and purposive, leading to cross-disciplinary reflection, communal analysis, critique, and constructive action within school structures and in the larger society. Other aspects of relationality could be added. This chapter is hardly the first or last work on relational teaching. It simply offers an invitation to engage with

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one another to discern patterns of relationality that presently exist and to critique and reform them. The underlying hope is to nourish relationships that can nourish life in the entire human and earth community, and that is a work for people to do together. WORKS CITED Bounds, Elizabeth, and David Jenkins. (2003) “Politics, Ethics, and the Church of Cuba.” Syllabus. Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga., Spring 2003. Bowers, C. A. (1995) Educating for an Ecologically Sustainable Culture: Rethinking Moral Education, Creativity, Intelligence, and Other Modern Orthodoxies. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bowers C. A., and David J. Flinders. (1990) Responsive Teaching: An Ecological Approach to Classroom Patterns of Language, Culture, and Thought. New York: Teachers College Press. Dewey, John. (1938) Experience and Education. New York: Collier, 1977. Dewey, John, and Evelyn Dewey. (1915) Schools of Tomorrow. New York: Dutton, 1962. Haig-Brown, Celia, et al. (n.d.) Making the Spirit Dance Within: Joe Duquette High School and an Aboriginal Community. Toronto: James Lorimer. Krondorfer, Björn. (1995) Remembrance and Reconciliation: Encounters between Young Jews and Germans. New Haven: Yale University Press. Manning, Juanita. Interviewed by Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore. October, 2001. Mayer, Gabriele. (2003) Post-Holocaust Religious Education for German Women. Munster, Ger.: LIT Verlag. Moore, Mary Elizabeth Mullino. (1998a) Ministering with the Earth. St. Louis: Chalice Press. ———. (1998b) Teaching from the Heart: Theology and Educational Method. Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press. ———. (2000) “Ethnic Diversity and Biodiversity: Richness at the Center of Education.” Interchange 31.2-3, pp. 259-78. ———. (2005) “The Relational Power of Education: The Immeasurability of Knowledge, Value, and Meaning.” Interchange 36.1-2, pp. 23-48. Rich, Mike. (2003) Radio. Revolution Studios and Columbia Pictures. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1925) Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1967. ———. (1926) Religion in the Making. New York: New American Library, 1974. ———. (1929a) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Free Press, 1967. ———. (1929b) Process and Reality. Corrected ed. Ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978

Nine THEY WEAR THEIR LEARNING WITH IMAGINATION Christelle Estrada Imagination is a contagious disease. It cannot be measured by the yard, or weighed by the pound, and then delivered to the students by members of the faculty. It can only be communicated by a faculty whose members themselves wear their learning with imagination. (Alfred North Whitehead, Aims of Education, p. 97) Educators in public education throughout the country are under siege. Why? State and federal legislators assert that quantifiable gains on standardized tests equal “student achievement.” Throughout the country schools and districts are ranked and labeled as failures or put “on probation” if gains are not made. Rankings are made public so that parents can be given the choice to move their children to a “successful” school, one with high test scores. The ideology of the free market has been translated into the realm of education. Higher student “achievement,” equated with teacher performance, is commodified and advertised on the web so that communities can benefit from increased real estate prices or not. In response to ever more pressure, beleaguered school districts, whose funding is increasingly based on test results, unintentionally threaten students’ well being by cutting fine arts programs, school libraries, and other enrichment approaches that might not be quantifiable. Dwindling resources are funneled into test preparation materials offered by textbook companies, technology venders, or state approved service providers. Within the context of this punitive kind of “accountability” cycle, exemplified by the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act or No Child Left Behind, key questions have been eliminated from the public discourse because the results cannot be quantified. What is the purpose of education? What knowledge is of most worth? What is the value of public education? How does formal education, in the context of schooling, influence our life’s journey as human beings? The philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead offers us deep insight into these questions because he assumes that “the learned and imaginative life is a way of living, and is not an article of commerce” (1929a, p. 97). A process philosophy of education provides a divergent and concrete view of what the life of schools and school districts can become.

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CHRISTELLE ESTRADA 1. Describing the Context and Process for Practice-Based Professional Development

The summer was coming to an end and teachers were bringing their selfdesigned projects to share with me in my role as the Director of Professional Development Services. Presenting the project to the teacher’s advisor/mentor is the culmination of a process that provides teachers with the opportunity to design their own Master’s Equivalency Program of study. Negotiated into the teachers’ contract to support teacher excellence, this approach to career enhancement validates the nature of lifelong learning for teachers who want to become distinguished educators and remain in the classroom instead of becoming administrators. Every program is collaboratively designed with the Director of Professional Development Services who uses the principles of both adult learning and practice-based professional development to guide the constructivist process. The premise is that practice-based professional development situates teachers’ learning in the context of their own teaching within their school community. This approach has been described as “knowledge-of-practice” and assumes that, through inquiry into their own classrooms, teachers “make problematic their own knowledge and practice as well as the knowledge and practice of others and thus stand in a different relationship to knowledge” (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2001, pp. 46–48). The inquiry stance of a teacher challenges what is, and is linked to relevant questions that elicit the commitment to investigation and action that actually changes practice to benefit students. The interview with the Director of Professional Development has two primary goals. The first purpose is to help teachers discover what interests them as professionals, what still romances them, what matters to them enough to be intrinsically motivating. The second is to help teachers become clear about what will be relevant to their actual teaching, making a difference for their students through the application of what they themselves are learning in their course work. The process is designed as a collaborative protocol with three components: (1) attentive listening; (2) clarifying questions; and (3) open questions. Attentive listening might be described as inclining the ear of one’s heart, as stated in the sixth century rule of Benedict of Nursia, the founder of Western monasticism. Time becomes a space for waiting, pausing, rephrasing, and being present to the interests of the other, in this case the teacher. Clarifying questions help the listener understand the context: the what, who, and where of the teacher’s situation. Open questions are intended to help the teachers better understand themselves: understanding interests, ideas, assumptions, and beliefs about their own learning and teaching, and also understanding the needs of the students to whom they are committed. The one question that seems to free teachers from their preconceived notions about a Masters Equivalency Program

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which they assume is designed to fulfill requirements is: What do you really want to do that will make a difference for you and your students? Within this context of adult collaboration I will explore, through two case studies, the impact of practice-based professional development on both student and adult learning. Using the written reflections of teachers and students in one elementary school and one middle school, I wrote two Case Studies and then sent them to the two teachers for their feedback and approval. Two colleagues with whom I work closely collaborated with me in the analysis of the narratives. My assumption is that concrete experience provides the opportunity for an on-going exploration of and inquiry into educational “practice.” My operating definition of “practice” is based on the work of social theorist and philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre. For MacIntyre a practice is: [A]ny coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and the good involved, are systematically extended. (1998, p. 71) Educational practice leads the practitioner with others to actualize internal goods that are inherent in and constitutive of excellence, and in the process expands the practitioner’s abilities and ideas. Those pursuing internal goods do so not because of legislation or convention or any other instrumental goods. Their aim is not to further ends such as compliance, status, or power. Instead, practitioners come to discover in a practice something beyond their current understanding and experience of themselves, something to be valued for its own sake. George Allan makes a similar point in his essay in this volume “On Learning to be Good,” when he states that process ethics is meliorative. When practitioners actively pursue excellence or, in this particular case, exemplary teaching, their concrete experience with students creates possibilities as yet unimagined. Both teacher and student learn from and with each other and in the process develop the capacity for continuous improvement. Engaging in practices within institutional life provides us with incredible challenges. The social and political dilemma is that institutions are necessary for the organization and sustenance of practices, but they continually threaten “to corrupt practices and demoralize practitioners” by subordinating the pursuit of internal goods—such as satisfaction and creativity—to external, instrumental goods such as efficiency, profit, or test scores (Knight, 1998, p. 11). In the context of institutional life and the political climate of “No Child Left Behind,” how can educational practices within schools and district offices be cultivated? Throughout this essay, which is more of a creative synthesis than

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explication, Whitehead’s constructs of romance, precision, and generalization provide the touchstones for understanding the deeper rhythms of educational practice. 2. Three Foundational Assumptions This collaborative inquiry process emerges from three foundational assumptions about “learning,” defined as how we come to understand. The first foundational assumption is that the best indication of what we will learn is what we already know. As teachers we are exhorted by teacher educators to “activate prior knowledge,” helping students to identify what they already know so that they can connect new knowledge to their existing conceptual framework for a clearer understanding. Bernice McCarthy, building on the work of Jean Piaget and David Kolb, explains this movement from concrete to abstract and abstract to concrete as the very process of learning: from “experiencing to reflecting, to conceptualizing, to tinkering and problem-solving, to integrating new learning” (1987, p. 60). When we honor people’s experience, provide space for them to explore their own thinking as inquiry into unknown possibilities, we become advocates for them discovering more. We acknowledge that they are the experts of their own lives, or as Jane Vella writes in her classic, Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach, “Learners are not objects, but subjects or decision makers of their own learning” (2003). When we explore with others their interests and previous experiences, we create the possibility of romancing them as learners into the realm of creativity. Romance, according to Whitehead, “is the stage of first apprehension” with the vividness of the novel experience holding “within itself unexplored connexions with possibilities half-disclosed by glimpses” (1929a, p. 17). Being an advocate for someone’s learning propels us into the center of another person’s felt-significance or what matters to her; we share the clear light of a person’s insight into his authentic “concern.” As the writer of the Russian classic, the Philokalia, suggests: We are becoming pilgrims who make our path by walking. The extension of this metaphor would be that our walking is with the other, who is as yet unknown to us. The second foundational assumption is that we are always learning, always making sense of our world. The brain seeks out patterns, is stimulated by complexity, and thrives on conditions that challenge us just beyond the realm of our current ability. The cautionary tale is that we are more likely to think what we have always thought. Why? The familiar is safe. The cognitive dissonance of “too much challenge” is most often perceived as a threat to our customary view of the world. In brain research and language acquisition theory, when a threat is perceived the limbic system kicks in and the “rational” mind shuts down. We automatically “downshift.” Our perceptual field narrows and we are less able to


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engage in intellectual tasks that require creativity, higher order thinking, and open-ended questioning (Caine and Caine, 1991, p. 64). Mind and body are intimately connected, and so with adrenaline pumping we decide to either “run” or stand and “fight.” We defend our current ideas as if we were an established self, existing in time, engaging in what Reinhold Niebuhr calls the defensive ethic. The result is that we separate ourselves from “different” others for our own protection, reducing any chance of perceiving an interrelated world. Patterns of interaction and relationality are minimized as a result of the perceived threat. Consequently, the possibility of actual meaningful interaction with others, socially, politically, or intellectually, cannot happen. The romance of the adventure of ideas is killed by the risk of too much challenge. John B. Bennett in his essay in this volume, “Educational Spiritualities,” expands on this notion of perceived threat to self in his discussion of fear and objectivism. One reaction to threat and the fear it generates is control, using power to get distance from that which challenges us. As a result, the way we come to know the world is to keep our experience of it manageable. We fragment and objectify experience. We reduce it to inert facts and relatively easy solutions. The pain generated from this habit of thinking and pattern of reacting comes from the isolation and self-sufficiency that we choose in order to control our world. Perhaps the most compelling question is: How can we learn from every experience no matter what it is? Both Whitehead and Buddhism challenge our usual conception of a substantial self by making the case for a radical interrelatedness that defies the perception of objects simply located in space and time. In Buddhism the movement “beyond ego or self to non-self or selflessness” liberates the mind from clinging to an “I” where none exists and discounting the “other” where none is (Rinpoche, 1997, p. 138). We become more open to learning in each moment, challenging our own assumptions about who we are and what we think, becoming more willing to change. We wake up to our experience as it arises. For Whitehead the ontological principle is that momentary experiences or actual occasions “are the final real things of which the world is made up” (1929c, p. 18). To accept that nature consists of momentary experiences and perpetual perishing is to confront the real possibility of continuous learning and change. The intention for practice-based professional development is to provide space and time for the kind of professional conversation that collapses time and space into “the flow” experience articulated by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Fear of the unfamiliar drops away and the distinction between past, present, and future is dispelled. Our interactions with each other provide an unspoken challenge: the possibility of being changed forever by our encounter. We are confronted by questions with every personal and professional interaction: Can we let go of our assumptions about who we are and who we want others to be so that novelty can enter into our lives and transform us? What are

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those evocative moments, learning possibilities where risk and opportunity come together in surprising ways? These questions challenge our capacity to learn in every moment. William Garland in his essay in this volume, “Finding Flow through Discipline and Imagination,” provides additional insights into the flow experience. Optimal learning happens when goals are clear, feedback is timely, and the difficulty of the learning task challenges a person’s skills within the zone of that person’s capacity to act intentionally. New experiences are integrated into our previous experiences and we are changed by the learning. In practice-based professional development, learning is conceived as both encounter and dialogue, with the goal of creating the conditions for an optimal experience. It is designed to be both authentic and relevant because the adult learning is situated within the classroom context, affecting both teacher and student. What makes this approach to professional development authentic? In conversation with the teacher’s adviser, adult learners decide for themselves the goals of their own learning and begin the journey into unknown territory. It is an adventure that always starts with a relevant question about the teacher’s own learning in relationship to his or her students’ learning. In the fifth century a young wealthy, living a life of luxury and decadence, saw that way of life destroyed with the sack of Rome. In an attempt to make sense of these catastrophic events and find the true purpose of life, he went up into the hills and lived the austere life of a hermit. But as in the case of most hermits seeking solitude and enlightenment, many followers gathered around him, assuming that he had discovered some truth. After persistent cajoling, much like Gotama Siddhartha 800 years earlier in India, he decided to renounce the path of the hermit and fashion a middle way by creating a community of learners, living by a common agreement. The first words that Benedict of Nursia wrote explains how a diverse group of individuals could become a community of learners who both challenge and advocate for each other. The founder of western monasticism began the common rule with: “Incline the ear of your heart” The third foundational assumption is that all learning is social. What is the difference between surface knowledge and deep understanding? Or from a Whiteheadian perspective, how do the rhythms of education create the life of the spirit, engaging our “aesthetic emotions,” and providing “us with vivid apprehensions of value” (Whitehead, 1929a, p. 40)? How do romance, precision and generalization “weave in the learner’s mind a harmony of pattern” (p. 21)? My assumption is that the social nature of learning creates space for the rhythms of education to happen. This belief arises from my own interactions with my parents and the students with whom I have had the privilege of learning. We have interests. In this case I define “interests” as what are personally relevant to us in the specific context of our lives. When we have opportunities to express our interests with various people in different contexts, we begin to


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know more about “something” and we come to understand it from various perspectives. The interaction with others provides the opportunity to enlarge our “knowing about” so that we come to understand more deeply. Through this “coming to understand” we are able to apply concepts in multiple contexts, making connections across those contexts in imaginative ways. A simple example might provide clarity: To know about Gertrude Stein or about Whitehead is very different from understanding the ideas which “drove” their work, and farther yet from applying their ideas to other contexts, especially our own. Both Stein and Whitehead had social gatherings for conversations about ideas; they were adventurers with others. A simple example can shed light on what rhythmic learning is as related to my assumption about the social nature of learning. I have a seven-year-old friend named Sam. Sam loves dinosaurs. For his fourth birthday I gave him a set of plastic baby dinosaurs. A week later when I visited him, he not only knew all the names of the dinosaurs but his pronunciation of their tonguetwisting names was impeccable. His parents nurtured this romance with books from the library, reading to him every night. A few weeks later on my next visit he knew the intimate details of the lives of dinosaurs. He had gone from romance to precision because of his love for the gargantuan beasts, the compelling mystery of their existence and disappearance. Later that year he told me about the ideas of scientists who were trying to explain why dinosaurs no longer existed. Yes, Sam now understood the concept of extinction and began to apply this generalized concept to other endangered animals. Two years ago when I visited Sam in Chicago I read one of his favorite books; I had given it to him for his fourth birthday. It was about Javelinas, a boar-like beast living in the southwest. When I saw a story on national news about the effect that the drought was having on them, driving them into suburban neighborhoods in Arizona, I called Sam to inform him of their plight. “I know what they can do,” he exclaimed with incredible compassion. “They can round them up and take them to New Mexico where they have a big river.” “Yes,” I responded with surprise, “the Rio Grande.” Sam’s on-going inquiry into the natural world arises from “concern,” a Quaker word that expresses “an affective tone originating from things whose relevance is given” (Whitehead, 1933, p. 176). Sam does not just validate Whitehead’s assertion about the on-going rhythm of the educational adventure. He exemplifies a deep understanding that connects him to the world, the natural environment, and the decisions of human beings in relationship with it. This indeed is what Whitehead describes as the purpose of education: guiding towards an understanding “of the art of life” (1929a, p. 39). Family, community, and friends provide Sam with opportunities to express himself, spinning a “web of significance” together, creating a culture of deep learning, beyond what can be quantified or delivered (Geertz, 1973, p. 73). Schools can

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become learning communities when teachers and students create environments where the culture of understanding transcends the established curriculum and all the usual ways we tend to think about the importance of discrete “facts.” 3. Student Authors as Advocates: Elementary School Case Study The two case studies in this and the following section represent dedicated, compassionate educators who wear their learning with imagination, creating a space for Whitehead’s ideas to become real: romance, precision, generalization through life-transforming relationships. A fifth grade teacher in a school with a homogeneous student and teacher population decided to continue her learning by taking the English as a Second Language (ESL) Endorsement courses. These courses are designed to help teachers adapt their teaching to meet the learning needs of students who are English Language Learners. Salt Lake City School District is an urban system with approximately 22,000 students and over 100 languages, including African dialects. Though the teacher had taught in a very diverse school on the Westside of town ten years previously, she was currently working in a school with little diversity, cultural, linguistic, and economic. She writes about her real dilemma: I had absolutely no diversity in my classroom. I knew when these kids got to Junior High (in two years) they would live diversity. I knew I had to . . . give students learning experiences that would help them value each culture. . . . I wanted them to have time where they met with a class from another part of town and get to know some students with different cultural backgrounds. . . . The idea of writing books for ESL learners came to mind and I couldn’t get rid of it!!!!!!! The teacher designed a series of experiences for her students to help them broaden their perspectives. The principal came in to visit with her class, speaking and reading only in Spanish. She describes the experience: “He never spoke a word of English for the twenty minutes he was with us. We shared out about that experience and tried to imagine how it would feel day after day.” The teacher also made it clear that students not speaking English might be in a classroom where no other student spoke their same language. The following day the students were visited by an Extended Learning Program teacher who worked both in their school and in a school on the Westside. She did a lesson on the needs of English Language Learners, immigrants, and refugees coming to Salt Lake City. The follow-up exercise was to generate topics for writing that might help students feel welcomed. With this background knowledge, the teacher invited two young adults, one from the Sudan and one from Mexico, to share their experiences in coming


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to Utah. The fifth grade students asked questions that would help them better understand the needs of newcomers. Once more the students generated writing topics: television, home pets, transportation, school, Utah, technology. After each student selected a writing topic the real challenges began, because what the teacher was learning in her coursework was fundamentally changing how she had previously designed the project. She was learning that English Language Development is not the only issue, but that content-based instruction was a method of helping students gain specific content as well as develop English. The teacher writes about her own new learning: I was realizing that many ESL students were proficient in their own languages, they did not like or need to be “talked down” to. As I connected this back to my own classroom, I realized that is what we were doing with our books. The students were trying creative ways to teach vocabulary out of context!! This was the hardest part of the whole process. I had to go back to my students, explain to them what I was learning about in my classes, and tell them we were going about it from a wrong angle. These students were just like them, they wanted to learn in a fun and interesting way. They were smart and basically knew what they knew in their own language. The teacher and students worked through the dilemma together. She made sure her students worked in small groups to discuss how they could make changes to what they already had written to make it more interesting. When the students finished their own books with illustrations, each worked on a page for the classroom book that would go with the collection. The teacher decided to make the sharing of her class’s published books with students at the Westside school even more special by making bookmarks so that each student could write a personal message on it. Some messages were: “You are so lucky to be learning two languages.” “I hope my book helps you.” The teacher also thought about how the actual sharing experience might be designed. “We also filled some baggies with gummy worms so students could eat them as we read our books to them. We then prepared extra blank bookmarks so the ESL students could write messages to us after we shared our books with them.” The day came for the Eastside fifth graders to meet with two classes from the Westside school, a second grade and a fifth grade class. The teacher writes about this experience: This was the greatest activity of my whole 15-year career!! . . . Each of my students took a student and found a spot in the library. They read their books to them. Some students surprised my kids because they could speak some English. . . . And after the students wrote a message on the book-

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CHRISTELLE ESTRADA marks for my kids, they returned to class. . . . Our experience came to a close and my kids loved having the bookmarks!! They read them over and over again asking me what they said. We returned to our classroom, had donuts, and celebrated our successful experience. We talked and processed the experience and the students wrote about it in their journals. The librarian at the Westside school said that these books are some of the most popular in their library. . . . [T]heir very favorite is the classroom book that shows all the authors’ pictures and story.

The teacher’s final comments are about what she learned from the entire experience and what she would do differently. Her culminating insight is: “The next time I do this I think it would be wonderful to have the students we write for write for us. How great would it be to have a collection of books written by ESL students in their own language!” 4. Peer Tutors as Advocates: Middle School Case Study The middle school teacher designed her Master’s Equivalency project so that she could identify the benefits of using English Language Learners as peer tutors in her mild/moderate/severe special education program. During her coursework for an ESL Endorsement, through a collaborative partnership between the local university and the school district, she would integrate what she was learning and directly apply it to her teaching context. More specifically, the goal was to enhance her understanding of language development, effective teaching strategies, assessment, and evaluation of L2 learners (second language acquisition) along with her special needs students. With this goal in mind, she began to recruit ESL students as peer tutors. With input from counselors, ESL staff, teachers, and administrators, the teacher met with the potential tutors, giving them an overview of the program and their responsibilities as tutors. They also visited various classes to determine the most appropriate placement. Through a collaborative screening process the counselors determined a class schedule that would best meet individual needs and provide the most positive experience for both tutors and students. During the 2001-2002 school year, four ESL peer tutors with level three proficiency were peer tutors. The following reflections summarize some of the benefits of a peer-tutoring program for English Language Learners. Cooperative learning as an instructional approach provided an opportunity for the tutors and students to work together in a meaningful way, accomplishing a common goal together. In the process of tutors helping the special-needs students complete specific tasks and using a wide variety of information, they themselves became more proficient in using language and applying it to different contexts. The wide range of diverse learning needs and multicultural perspectives created an inclusive environment in which English Language Learn-


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ers and special-needs students became advocates for each other. Peer tutoring created a bridge for quality social interactions that fostered authentic friendship relationships. The advocacy went beyond the classroom, extending throughout the school: in the lunchroom, the hallways, and at assemblies. Inclusion as a theory became a fact and the special-needs students were more accepted throughout the school. In reflecting on their yearlong experiences, the peer tutors began to think of themselves in new ways and to project that self-understanding into possible future careers in education, the medical professions, health fields, and human services. A young woman from Mexico wrote: “While being in this class I have become more patient. I have become more accepting of everyone and my Spanish has also improved since I translate for Jorge. I’ve enjoyed being in this class and having the opportunity of working with the kids.” Another ESL student wrote: “I met some really cool people being a peer tutor and I learned lots too. I learned to have patience with people who are having a harder time learning. And I grew more as a person in the sense that I am more accepting of everyone.” The special-needs students also reflected on the impact the peer tutors had on their lives by drawing pictures and writing about their experiences. One student wrote about his peer tutor: “She helps me with money count. I like her because she is so nice and pretty.” Another Spanish-speaking student commented: “She helps me learn. She translates English and Spanish. She is my friend. She is good at Spanish.” One ESL student reflected on her experience by drawing a picture of the student she was tutoring. She writes: This picture is about Alexandra. “The ball hit the sky,” she told me the day during baseball. Alexandra has such an imagination. She treasures little things like sticks and rocks. I have learned more from her this year than anyone in my entire life. She loves everyone unconditionally and makes you smile no matter what. Being a peer tutor has probably been the best experience of my life. I will never forget it. In the teacher’s concluding reflections she writes that with “the increase of ESL students it is critical for educators to collaborate to meet the needs of all students.” What she discovered from this self-designed project was that “diversity . . . provided rich experiences for a holistic environment.” She calls “inclusion a two-way street” where the needs of English Language Learners and those of special-needs students actually create a context for both academic progress and “personal growth through meaningful, relevant” experiences.

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CHRISTELLE ESTRADA 5. Making Sense together with Colleagues

I asked two colleagues to join me in reflecting on the two case studies: first individually and then using a process to structure our discussion with an eye to collaborative analysis. These two colleagues work with me in the Professional Development Department and our habit is to use various protocols to reflect on our work together, get feedback from each other, and re-design our approaches to our own or our joint work. We used a series of reflection questions for individual writing and then, during the discussion, identified common patterns or insights across cases from our conversation. The questions for reflection and analysis were: (1) What did teachers do? (2) What did students do? (3) What did teachers and students learn together through their experience? (4) How did they learn what they learned? (5) What struck you as significant in each case? (6) What are you now thinking about your own practice as an educator? Perhaps the larger methodological question is: Why analyze the case studies in a collegial manner? Based on the work of Harre and Secord and that of Moore on ethnogenic method, I believe that the stories people tell about their lived experiences reveal meaning because a person’s perceptions provide a personal perspective on external reality. The focus of this method is not on the correspondence of perception to reality. Instead, it assumes that individuals are agents of personal and social change and that we can understand human action through language. My assumption was that reflecting on these case studies with other colleagues would provide insight into our own practice as educators committed to both adult and student learning. The following summary of what Harre and Secord argue articulates my stance: A human being (1) has the power to initiate change; (2) can perceive that which is other than himself, and is aware of that awareness; (3) has linguistic power (Harre and Secord, 1972, pp. 86–95). Whitehead also provides clarity on the function of philosophic method through two premises: “theory dictates method” (1933, p. 220) and “every method is a happy simplification” (ibid., p. 221). The value of a theory does not depend on its truth claims. It depends on the extent of its “useful application” in a range of contexts, and the identification of its limits or failure in other specific contexts (ibid.). Understanding the relation of theory to method is essential because “the relevance of evidence is dictated by theory” (ibid.). Thus, the relevant evidence I have considered is clearly shaped by my three assumptions about learning and by my stance as a process philosopher of education, specifically by the belief that all learning is social. This being said, what emerged from our collaborative inquiry? In both case studies teachers sought the help of other colleagues in designing the details of their projects, students worked with each other in innovative and genuine ways, and teachers supported their students in this collaboration. Teachers


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created situations based on the needs of students around issues of diversity. In one case, it was English Language Learners with Learning Disabled Students within the same school community. In the other case, it was a very homogeneous student group with a linguistically and culturally diverse group of students in a different part of town. The students in both case studies reflected on and talked about what they were learning through their experience with those who were different from them. Students learned about themselves through their work with each other, with other students, and with their teachers. Their understanding of themselves became a creative synthesis of what they experienced with others. In one case, both teacher and students had to reconceptualize what they were doing because the teacher discovered how her assumptions about English Language Learners had created a project about vocabulary out of context. She was truthful with her students and had the courage to clearly communicate to them her own new learning, her deeper understanding about commonalities between the two groups of students. The teacher trusted that her students would adjust what they were doing. She supported them in making sense of the new idea she had introduced into the project. Both teacher and students were confronted with the unexpected, a novel insight, and together they changed not only what they were doing, but how they were thinking. In the Middle School case, the English Language Learners began to think about the future in new ways based on what they experienced themselves becoming—more patient and more understanding. They felt they were making a difference in others’ lives and could continue to do that in the future through professions in education, health, and human services. How did they learn what they learned? One colleague wrote: “Experiencing collaboration and a process of growth through meaningful work. Through a process of reflection on what was done, changing to meet needs, tweaking work to become more meaningful.” Another colleague wrote: “Investigation, questioning, taking action, reflecting, making changes, reflecting again and then beginning again with investigation.” Teachers and students created conditions for diverse students to do authentic work together. The authentic work was in response to the needs of those students who they perceived were very different from them. In their response, teacher and students created a new space for “genuine meeting” (Buber, 1981, p. 47), for an experience that confirms “each other in their individual being.” English Language Learners and the Learning Disabled students were no longer seen as limited or in “need of completion.” Instead, the experience provoked students to think about their own lives in new ways (ibid.). For the elementary students, other languages and the students who used them became valued. For the middle school tutors, they began to learn more about what they themselves could become. As colleagues working together, what did this experience of “making sense” mean to our own educational practice? One colleague numbered three

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things that came to mind about her own practice: “(1) the power of creativity through meaningful work; (2) constant reflection on what was/is working and what changes need to be made; (3) the power of allowing others to experience growth through collaboration.” The other colleague wrote: It “reinforces the need to always think about creating experiences that are authentic and within the context. That’s when learning seems to occur.” And as a member of the triad, I wrote three questions in an attempt to challenge my own collaborative work within the district office: (1) How do we listen to each other to understand difference as a value? (2) How do we “move” groups of people toward action for a common good? (3) How do we assess the benefits of our collective action? The common element in our collaborative analysis is the power of collective experience, of working together in authentic ways that provoke reflection and change. We were three colleagues making sense of narratives that described two very different learning communities created by teachers and their students. These learning communities were events, a result of self-designed projects, made real through a process of emergent creativity and imagination by each member of the community. This practice-based, relational approach to professional development stands in sharp contrast to the simplistic policies in current federal legislation, reducing experience to test scores and teacher quality to subject area majors. More than fifty years ago, Whitehead warned us about the “efficient gentlemen sitting on boards” deciding what knowledge is of most worth and how it should be tested (1948, p. 145). He also suggested that the task of the philosopher, if we are to “venture upon productive thought” (1933, p. 222), is to use a method of inquiry by which we can elucidate harmony and expose discrepancies (ibid.). The intrigue of being a process philosopher in an urban school district lies in finding ways for students to examine life more closely to experience it more fully. For me the practice of philosophy is questioning methods with a “passionate demand for freedom of thought,” the compelling search for the unattainable, “a tropism to the beckoning light—to the sun passing toward the finality of things” (Whitehead, 1929b, pp. 65–66). Philosophy to me as to Whitehead is “analogous to imaginative art. It suggests meaning beyond its mere statements” (1938, p. 117). And challenges me, along with my colleagues, to see educational practice not as merely a means to an end, but as the “school of the virtues”: justice, courage, and truthfulness to promote the common good of society (Knight, 1998, p. 10). 6. Practical Questions: Seeking Harmony and Discrepancies As a humanities teacher in an urban high school I had a question, in twelve inch letters, taped on my wall: How can an individual effect the community?


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Another way to pose this question might be: What difference will I have made in the end? Both questions speak to impermanence and to unimagined possibility. Susanne Langer, a colleague of Whitehead at Harvard, suggests that “in our questions lie our principles of analysis, and our answers may express whatever those principles are able to yield” (1979, p. 4). Simply stated, my stance as a process philosopher shapes and is shaped by my practice as an educator in twenty-first century North America. The metaphysical character of experience as described by Whitehead frames how I think about what I do and who I am becoming, with thought and action intertwined. Whitehead asserts that our present momentary experience is connected to our immediate past, and that within the present is a future occasion of experience as possibility, an unrealized potential. Marcus Aurelius, philosopher and emperor of Rome in 180 A.D., captures the sensation, dilemma, and challenge of a process perspective: Some things are rushing into existence, others out of it. Some of what now exists is already gone. Change and flux constantly remake the world. . . . We find ourselves in a river. Which of the things around us should we value when none of them can offer a firm foothold? Like an attachment to a sparrow: we glimpse it and it’s gone. (Aurelius, 2002, p. 71) What hope do we have in a world of impermanence? For Whitehead and for Buddhists, change and flux is the hope. The basis of Whitehead’s metaphysics is the ontological principle of creativity: each actual thing is only to be understood in terms of its self-creation, which is a synthesis of its relationships. No such thing as a substantial self exists, static and inert, derived from the circumstances of life. Counter to both Descartes and Newton, Whitehead asserts that there exist no substances enduring through time, but instead only events or occasions of experience. Whitehead’s worldview calls into question Aristotle’s and John Locke’s foundational premises about primary substances and the mind as “an empty cabinet receiving the impress of ideas” (Whitehead, 1933, p. 276). According to Aristotelian logic, no reality is in process nor can there be interconnections of substances, only isolated entities. The world is made up of objects and subjects and one cannot be the other. Thus the subject-object dichotomy is born, reigning supreme with Newton’s clockwork universe and technical rationality. What are the educational implications of this philosophic stance? In 1982 at a Seminar on Issues in Communication at the Claremont Graduate School, John B. Cobb, Jr., noted Whiteheadian philosopher, explains: “The world is composed of happenings instead of enduring entities. And each happening is a unification of relationships to everything in its world.” We are created by our relationships and our becoming is just that, nothing else. From a linguistic perspective, as “moderns,” we focus on nouns and adjectives eschewing preposi-

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tions and conjunctions. Connections are irrelevant. From a pedagogical perspective, ideas are delivered and pressed upon a passive recipient, a tabula rasa, the “learner” defined as empty vessel. The interrelationships that create us, and create who we are yet becoming, are by and large discounted because of a foundational assumption. Whitehead articulates the assumption as: [T]he fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from its being. It is this assumption that I call “scientific materialism. (1925, p. 17) I stand firmly with Whitehead in rebellion against the grand assumption of scientific materialism. What might this rebellion look like in my own educational context and practice? Applying process philosophy in a culturally and linguistically diverse urban school district is simple but complex and, therefore, intrinsically satisfying—however mystifying this stance might be to others. My grand assumption about an application of process philosophy in my context is: We are all learners together and the creative process of becoming a community of learners is what we are meant to learn. The process of becoming community is an inquiry stance with colleagues, together exploring the discrepancies and discord between practice and ideas, ferreting out fine distinctions and rich variety amid the welter of experiences. The adventure of an inquiry stance is to not dismiss discord or discrepancies since embedded within them is the possibility for unimagined innovation. The preservation of individual significance creates the strength and intensity of collaborative experience, a movement toward a harmony of the many becoming one, always increased by an intuition of the future in the present. 7. In Summary: The Political Question is a Human Question Teachers are easy prey for legislators and political opportunists who believe they should be purveyors of an inert knowledge bound in textbooks that are state approved. The fear of an ever more diverse student population feeds the delusion that difference means a fractured society, which portends balkanization and social revolution against the values of the free market and capitalism, most often conflated to mean democracy. The accountability movement as defined by federal legislation, No Child Left Behind, uses external rewards and sanctions to motivate professionals who are committed to children. Policies have become mechanisms to create a teacher-proof curriculum, standardize experience, privatize public education under the guise of parent choice, and ultimately trivialize the greatest adventure


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of an idea, that of democracy—of government by the “thinking” people who learn to question, to dissent. In 1948, Whitehead talked about the “democracy of the future” in which every man and woman will have an education that supports a “free intellectual life . . . directly related to their immediate lives as citizens and as workers, and thereby elicits speculations and curiosities and hope which range through the whole universe” (1948, p. 127). As a proponent of Whitehead’s adventure of ideas, I question the methods of current federal legislation, its implications for educators and students, families and communities. I suggest that accountability, as currently defined and implemented, is a simplistic orthodoxy designed to maintain advantage, a method based on the false god of scientific and economic materialism. A public policy that replaces inquiry with moralizing and convenient political rhetoric—President George W. Bush’s “soft bigotry of low expectations”—marginalizes conflict, contestability, and unpredictability, leading people to one conclusion: bureaucratic authority creates order for the sake of power and status in the global economy. If we reduce the complexity of public education and its relationship to the larger society to the teacher, then we never really have to address the issue of economic disparity or the lack of public commitment to children’s health care and emotional well-being. We become a people anesthetized and defensive, threatened from the outside by the unknown “other” and from the inside by the irrational fear of difference. Then how is it that we make sense of our experience? This is the heart of philosophic method, irrevocably shaped, for good or ill, by the inadequacy of language as an expression of our insights. What do the case studies tell us about real education as the art of life, about what knowledge is of most worth, and about a world where people can be advocates for each others’ learning, where authentic collaborative teacherstudent work means that we are learning together in the environment that our relationships have created? The subject-object dichotomy is overcome. Whatever is of “concern” to the other inheres in us. Teachers, wearing their learning with imagination, are engaged in educational practices that promote justice, courage, and truthfulness in individuals while simultaneously promoting the common good. Routineness and the anesthesia of triviality are overcome by a stronger aesthetic sense that is harmonious because the contrasts are real, the differences really exist! Whitehead gives us a clue about that aesthetic experience in describing Chartres Cathedral. The statues on the porch of Chartres are beautiful in the individuality of their detail, which creates the beauty of the whole cathedral. For Whitehead, the aesthetic power of Beauty is “a wider and more fundamental notion than Truth” (1933, p. 265). The ideal of a unity of contrasts, the many becoming one, is what leads us beyond ourselves and our ideologically frozen relations into a future of as yet unimagined possibility.

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CHRISTELLE ESTRADA 8. Concluding Synthesis and Creative Choices

Painfully conscious of the political climate of the United States in the early moments of the twenty-first century, I have struggled to make sense of my place in the changing educational landscape. In the midst of my struggle, I began reading Hannah Arendt’s essay on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in conjunction with Alasdair MacIntyre’s work on the social ethics of institutional life and Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. Arendt, a political theorist and Jew, commented that Eichmann represented the “banality of evil” which meant that he was essentially a lower-level bureaucrat who followed routine unquestioningly, without thought, safely constrained within a political culture of rhetoric and clichés—lies within lies designed to maintain status and power. She writes: The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable safeguards against the world and the presence of others, and hence against reality itself. (2000, pp. 48–49) Arendt asserts that the strange relationship between “thoughtlessness and remoteness from reality” constitutes the banality of evil. She also incriminates those members of the Jewish Councils who organized the deportations of their own people. From Arendt’s viewpoint they were complicit. Both of these assertions forced me to consider the structures of and relationships within the institutional life of public education, its response to federal and state legislation, and my role in it as an educational practitioner. MacIntyre suggests that “intellectual blindness” on moral questions, which are questions about promoting the common good, leads us to unthinking behavior, bound by rules and convention. We cannot exemplify a virtue, such as courage, justice, and truthfulness, by merely acting in “certain rule-governed ways,” but we must “do more than rules require” (1998, p. 143). What is MacIntyre’s solution to intellectual blindness? Similar to Buddhist teaching on compassion, he counsels that everyone is a “potential teacher and has therefore to be treated as one from whom we still may have something to learn” (ibid., p. 141). Or as Iris Murdoch, Irish-born philosopher and novelist, writes, “if we look outside the self what we see are scattered imitations of Good,” indefinably connected with the “inexhaustible variety of the world” (2004, p. 96). Arendt, MacIntyre, and Murdoch have helped me better understand my role within institutional life and have brought me back again to the power of being a process philosopher of education.


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A “learned orthodoxy” is what suppresses adventure and my experience in public education is indeed an adventure (Whitehead, 1933, p. 276). We can lose our footing and be overwhelmed by the mischief-makers of ill-conceived policy and the purveyors of scientific and economic materialism. We can become complicit because we tire of questioning methods, actions, decisions, and policies including our own. Or we can join with diverse others, discovering the aesthetic needs of society, pushing ourselves beyond what we have already experienced, courageously creating together a living art where impermanence is the tapestry of our lives and the future calls us “forward into the adventure of imagination” (ibid. p. 278). The choice is ours. When will we choose? ACKNOWLEDGMENT To the two teachers who provided their Master’s Equivalency Projects as Case Studies, Michelle Orgill and Pauline Schlagel, and the two colleagues who participated in the collaborative inquiry analysis, Michelle Bachman and Lori Hargraves. Also to Sharon Adamson for all the conversations about adult and student learning that we have had over the last year three years: And to Jan Broxton for her support and commitment to the dream of urban education as excellence for the future. WORKS CITED Arendt, Hannah. (2000) The Portable Hannah Arendt. New York: Penguin. Aurelius, Marcus. (2002) Meditations. New York: Modern Library. Buber, Martin. (1966) The Way of Response: Martin Buber Selections; from his Writings. Ed. Nahum Norbert Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books. Caine, Renate, and Geoffrey Caine. (1991) Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain. Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Cochran-Smith, Marilyn, and Susan L. Lytle. (2001) “Beyond Certainty: Taking an Inquiry Stance on Practice.” In Teachers Caught in Action: Professional Development that Matters. Eds. Ann Lieberman and Lyn Miller. New York: Teachers College Press. Geertz, Clifford. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Harre, Rom, and Paul F. Secord. (1972) The Explanation of Social Order. Oxford: Basil Blackwell and Mott. Knight, Kelvin, ed. (1998) The MacIntyre Reader. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Press. Langer, Susanne K. (1957) Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. Third edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. McCarthy, Bernice. (1987) The 4MAT System: Teaching to Learning Styles With Right/Left Mode Techniques. Barrington, Ill.: EXCEL. MacIntyre, Alasdair. (1998) “Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues, and Goods.” In The MacIntyre Reader. Ed. Kelvin Knight. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Press.

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Moore, Mary Elizabeth Mullino (1991) Teaching from the Heart: Theology and Educational Method. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1991. Murdoch, Iris. (2001) The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge, 2001. Rinpoche, Kkyabje Kalu. (1997) Luminous Mind: The Way of the Buddha. Boston: Wisdom Publications. Vella, Jane. (2002) Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1925) Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1967. ———. (1929a) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Free Press, 1967. ———. (1929b) The Function of Reason. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958. ———. (1929c) Process and Reality. Corrected ed. Eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978. ———. (1933) Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press, 1967. ———. (1938) Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press, 1968. ———. (1948) Essays in Science and Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library.

Ten TEACHING ETCETERA M. Jayne Fleener and Stacy Reeder What should we teach? This question permeates all of education. We will address it by pursuing Ludwig Wittgenstein’s advice that teaching should be guided by “teaching etcetera” (Genova, 1995), by teaching “that which ‘points beyond’” (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 208). Implicated by and inherent in Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy (1929b) and rhythms of education (1929a), John Dewey’s logic as inquiry (1938) and philosophy of experience (1925), and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of meaning (1953) and culture (1980), this paper will explore a way of envisioning teaching and experiencing learning from the perspective of “teaching etcetera.” We who have survived the education system have experienced teaching etcetera in one form or another. When we go beyond that which is “given” in class, using ideas, techniques, or knowledge outside of school or in different contexts, we have experienced teaching etcetera. For many of us who teach mathematics, we know the experience. We feel the joy of a new problem challenging us to rethink our mathematics, apply our techniques, and invent new approaches from those we have practiced in mathematics classes. We also know the frustration with students who have not gone beyond the specific exercises assigned as homework, who cannot apply their knowledge to different contexts, or who do not experience the joy of problem-solving challenges as we have experienced them. How do we provide classroom experiences that encourage students to “go beyond,” to experience mathematics as a way of meaningfully approaching their world and not as the drudgery of homework problems hastily done to avoid a zero on their grade? To offer a context for an emergent curriculum that follows the ebbs and flows of classroom discourse, providing opportunities for the teacher and the students to experience mathematics as a way of life and a system of meaning, we will explore how one middle school teacher teaches etcetera by considering the dynamics of his curriculum (Fleener, 2002) and the language games of his classroom. How he engages his students in and develops strategies for teaching etcetera will be explored. Teaching etcetera in this classroom, as considered through an examination of the language games of the class, will reveal a relational approach to mathematics teaching and learning, an inherent rhythm, as the beating of a heart, central to an emergent curriculum and on-going learning.

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M. JAYNE FLEENER and STACY REEDER 1. Language Games Approach

Wittgenstein describes language games as the emergence of meaning through contextual discourse. Unlike structural approaches to meaning (see Brown for a discussion and critique of structuralism), Wittgenstein’s language games approach emphasizes that language use and meaning are inextricable. Thus, like the difference between the rules of a game and the activity of playing a game, language games are the activity of meaning. So conversation in the classroom evolves and constructs meanings as language games are played out, instead of revealing underlying pre-existent meanings or passing on authoritative truths. The living dimension of meaning in mathematics classrooms is precisely the way mathematics conversation is played out as students and teachers negotiate meanings and evolve rules of the game. Unfortunately, the typical language games in mathematics classrooms treat mathematics like a foreign language and mathematics learning as an intricate game of translating the teacher’s or textbook’s abstractions by students who often find the process both unenlightening and discouraging. Mathematics, treated like a foreign language, is learned the way foreign language is learned by many students—in a classroom with little real-world experience gained by actually traveling to a foreign country and using the language there. Students learn to “conjugate” in mathematics, as they learn to conjugate a verb in Spanish or French class, but fail to be able to use their mathematics to interact meaningfully with their world—as foreign-language students, when placed in a land where the language is spoken, find they cannot communicate, or even remember their foreign language instruction. Communications in traditional mathematics classrooms are governed by the underlying “conduit” metaphor of meaning, suggesting that mathematical knowledge, ideas and meaning can be “transmitted” from the teacher or textbook to the students. Student learning as emerging meanings is thwarted when students are constrained by the teacher’s preconceived ideas about how students should construct meaning and describe mathematical relationships (Fleener, Carter, and Reeder, 2000). If “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life” (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 19), what kind of life is suggested by the language games of typical mathematics classrooms? As “knowledge-out-ofcontext” (Applebee, 1996, p. 21) or “inert ideas” (Whitehead, 1929a, p. 1), students may never experience mathematics as a way of meaningfully approaching their world, participating in the discourse traditions of mathematics as mathematicians instead of as students of mathematics. For most students, they experience the life of mathematics in classrooms as automatons— unthinking, unfeeling, and uninspired by mathematics. This approach to mathematics learning is endemic to the modernist perspective of mathematics as the queen of the sciences, as expressing objective truths and underlying realities. Individual experiences of mathematics as patterned sense-making and

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personal discovery are denied when the abstract world of mathematics is forcefed to students following a pre-designed and unyielding curriculum and where the game of “discovery” is a game of discovering someone else’s meanings and uses. While a handful of students play this game and become successful at it, even eventually becoming the rule givers and makers themselves, for the majority of students the typical language games of mathematics classrooms yield little joy in the playing of the game of mathematics. The language games of mathematics classrooms are fundamentally institutionalized in the very fabric of schools and society. The underlying assumptions of the modern mathematics curriculum can be found in the very roots of modernism. 2. Modernism and the Mathematization of Reality Edmund Husserl began his historical critique of modern mathematics by considering the impact of our modern approach of mathematizing reality. The mathematization of reality, initiated by Galileo and Newton, significantly altered our own language games about the inner workings of nature and our relationship to it. As described by Husserl: Its rationalism soon overtakes natural science and creates for it the completely new idea of mathematical natural science—Galilean science. . . . As soon as the latter begins to move toward successful realization, the idea of philosophy in general (as the science of the universe, of all that is) is transformed. . . . [T]hrough Galileo’s mathematization of nature, nature itself is idealized under the guidance of the new mathematics; nature itself becomes . . . a mathematical manifold. (1954, pp. 22–23) With the mathematization of reality, scientific methodology changed, allowing for predictive calculation. The world and all of nature, perceived as “a mathematical manifold,” became quantifiable, predictable, and controllable and mathematics lost its sense of being patterned relationship and a system of meanings. “By means of pure mathematics and the practical art of measuring, one can produce . . . a completely new kind of inductive prediction; namely, one can ‘calculate’” (1954, p. 33). Formulaic development and algebraic representation made mathematics as a way of experiencing patterns and relationships further removed for the average citizen. As described by Whitehead: The seventeenth century had finally produced a scheme of scientific thought framed by mathematicians, for the use of mathematicians. . . . But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome the inherent confusion introduced by the ascription of misplaced concreteness to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century. (1925, p. 55)

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While Whitehead may have believed mathematics to be of an abstract nature, revealing, perhaps, the work of a supreme and all-knowing power instead of the invention of mere mortals, his claim supports Husserl’s notion that modern mathematics has forgotten its own relationship to our concrete experiences of the world and efforts to make sense of those experiences. Instead of the abstractions of space and time as primitives, Whitehead (1929b) claims that the fundamental reality is relationship and that our failure in the modern era has been to abstract away from relationship as we move to focus on what is known instead of the knower. Husserl’s phenomenology, like Whitehead’s metaphysics, emphasizes experience and relationship over abstraction and form. “Mathematics and mathematical science . . . represents the life-world, dresses it up as ‘objectively actual and true’ nature. It is through the garb of ideas that we take for true being what is actually a method” (1954, pp. 50–51). The relationship between language games and the way of life they imply is important for us as we envision educational futures and reinvent schooling. Challenging the language games of schools includes revealing these underlying assumptions and replacing them with different visions of mathematics and mathematical experience that do not confuse the mathematical abstractions with the “real” mathematics and do not consider mathematics as “true being” instead of mathematics as “method.” Wittgenstein distinguishes between worldview (Weltanschauung) and world picture (Weltbild)—“A Weltanschauung forgets its status as a way of seeing and parades itself as the way of seeing” (Genova, 1995, p. 50). Modern mathematics and the mathematization of reality have become the Weltanschauung of the modern world. We cannot change our Weltanschauung except by changing our Weltbild, according to Wittgenstein. To change our ways of seeing the world, our Weltbild, to change our ideas about schooling and our classroom practices, to re-invent curriculum as dynamic and emergent and experience mathematics and nature as patterned relationship and a system of meaning, we need to change our Weltanschauung and challenge the mathematization of reality. We need what Wittgenstein refers to as “a change of aspect” (1953). 3. Language Games and a Change of Aspect Changing aspect, and thus changing our world picture, entails changing language games and changing not how we see but how we “see-as”: “I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience ‘noticing an aspect’” (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 193). To change our ideas about mathematics and mathematics teaching and learning, to view mathematics as a way of life and a system of meaning instead of as a measure of an underlying reality, to interact with our world in mathematical/meaningful ways. It requires us to

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change our language games, seeing the world as patterned relationships that we construct and mathematics as a powerful way to meaningfully approach and make sense of our world while not confusing the experience of patterns with underlying mathematical principles. What this “looks like” in very practical terms may not be any different from how we are used to seeing classrooms operate. But how these classrooms are experienced and framed, as students and teachers engage their world mathematically, is very different. The curriculum, treated as the basis for an on-going conversation instead of a preset plan of study, fundamentally challenges the language games of the classroom. Failing to change our classroom language games and thus failing to change how we see mathematics as a integral part of our experiences, we become what Wittgenstein calls “aspect-blind”: “Being aspect-blind makes one incapable of seeing shades of meaning and thus incapable of change” (1953, p. 214). We cannot change our ways of seeing-as without changing our language games in the classroom. Changing the language games of mathematics in classrooms is the only way to fundamentally challenge and ultimately change the underlying assumptions of the mathematization of reality and the implicit perspective on the objectivity and abstractness of mathematics. By challenging the mathematization of reality and the language games of mathematics, like becoming fluent in a foreign language, we may be able to teach etcetera. Certainly, changing our language games to support students’ ways of seeing and interacting with their world mathematically is an important step in teaching etcetera. By exploring how the language games of one teacher’s classroom are played and unfold, a perspective on teaching that provides opportunities to teach etcetera may be offered. Thus, by applying the language games approach to examining Wesley’s classroom dynamics, we may offer a way that “shows the fly out of the fly bottle” (Wittgenstein, 1953)—a way of envisioning mathematics classroom discourse that allows us to “see-as” differently and challenge the mathematization of reality underlying the current curriculum. When given opportunities to experience mathematics as patterned and connected, students may be able to experience teaching etcetera and allow their classroom mathematics to take them beyond the limits of their imaginations. 4. Wesley’s Change of Aspect By considering the language games of a teacher who teaches mathematics very differently (Reeder), a picture of how students may become engaged in the conversation of mathematics will emerge; offering a vision of such a picture may thus open the possibilities of teaching etcetera as opportunities for students to experience their world mathematically. Wesley’s own transformational story, his change of aspect, is also important as teachers struggle to make a similar transition in their classrooms. The

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experiences of students in Wesley’s classes, and our interpretations of them, are filtered through a way of seeing-as, an approach to sense making that is reflected in another dimension by Wesley’s changing ideas about mathematics, namely his own struggles with seeing mathematics differently. This is therefore a double-edged story: a story of classroom dynamics as the language games of mathematics teaching and learning get played out, and a story of individual teacher transformation as opportunities for teaching etcetera unfold. 5. Students’ Experiences of Mathematics as Patterns and Relationships Wesley is a middle school mathematics teacher in a southern plains state. He teaches pre-algebra and algebra in a suburban seventh grade center on the outskirts of a large city in the state and has received numerous awards and statewide recognition for his teaching. By traditional and non-traditional standards, he is considered a very successful teacher. Consistent with the sociomathematical norms (Cobb, 1995) of his classroom, Wesley routinely opened up spaces for teaching etcetera. In one class we observed, for example, students engaged in pattern exploration and representation as they explored the relationship between the number of tears of a paper and the number of pieces produced. Related to the context of school elections, he engaged his students in the problem of taking an 8½ x 11 piece of paper, folding it in half and tearing it, repeating this process to create voting ballots. Wesley: Hopefully we can see a pattern. How can we represent this in different ways? He encouraged his students to explore the pattern, not to be able to represent it as an exponential function as such, but to see multiple relationships and representations. After working for a while, he interrupted students working in groups to ask: Wesley: How can we generate a rule that will develop this pattern? While this focusing of inquiry may implicate traditional mathematics teaching, asking the students to now “come up” with the correct formula, he later interjects that he does not expect nor does he want students to come up with an algebraic expression for the sake of having closure to this problem: Wesley: This problem does cause a struggle. If we don’t get there by the end of class today I would hope that you would continue to think about it. I wrote on the board a couple of weeks ago, if you remember, “I don’t care what your [pauses] parents think.” Don’t take this home and your mom has four math degrees or your dad who is maybe an accountant says,

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“here’s how to do this and that’s just so and so.” I’m not concerned with your taking this problem home and having your parents help you with it. I’m trying to get you to think about this. I care what you are thinking about it. He encouraged his Algebra I students, as they explored how to generate a rule to represent this pattern, to “think about this,” and indicated in several ways on several different occasions both in this class and in others throughout the year: Wesley: I’m not concerned with your taking this problem home just to get the right answer to have it here tomorrow. I’m not diss’ing your parents —but that’s not the point. In an interview after class, he emphasized: “It’s about the thinking, not about the answer,” revealing his own commitment to students’ mathematical sensemaking and understandings. His approach to teaching etcetera reveals his underlying ideas about mathematics as pattern and relationship instead of computation and tools for deriving correct answers and formulas. His emphasis moves away from an underlying mathematization of reality to a pedagogical emphasis on students’ explorations and descriptions of their problem-solving approaches. His patience and willingness to not bring premature closure to a problem, encouraging his students to continue to think about the problem, provides the space for teaching etcetera as students are encouraged to continue to explore, process, and think about it. Wesley’s not summarizing class with “what we’ve learned today” also emphasizes his belief that learning does not come in neat, fifty-minute packages. He is concerned and provides opportunities for students to develop habits of inquiry emphasizing sense-making and exploration of patterns, using mathematics as a powerful way of representing these relationships. The language games of Wesley’s classroom emphasize students’ abilities to make mathematical sense of their world and create classroom expectations for students to solve mathematical problems themselves instead of trying to out guess or out wait the teacher until the end of class when the teacher will give them the right answer anyway. The language game is not one of learning to speak Wesley’s language but learning to find voice for their own ideas about and experiences with mathematical relationships. Notice, however, that the language game in Wesley’s classroom is not about inventing a new mathematics or negotiating meanings as separate from the discipline of mathematics. Students in this lesson were exploring functional relationships, first exploring mathematical relations as ordered pairs with cuts in the pieces of paper as the domain and number of pieces created as the range,

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then exploring relations as functions that have multiple representations, including algebraic and geometric representations. This is real mathematics allowed to develop and emerge for students as they are offered many opportunities throughout the year to explore patterns of relationship and learn the powerful way mathematics can help describe and represent these patterns. Like the learning of a foreign language, Wesley’s students were not learning the grammar of the language and play-acting dialogues (“Gutten Tag, Herr Müller!”), they were engaging in the conversation of mathematics through these explorations, as one does when ordering and experiencing a fine meal in a foreign country or asking for directions to find an historical site, or engaging in a complicated conversation. Different understandings and preferences allowed for different approaches, as different tastes allow for ordering different kinds of meals or visiting different sites. But all were experiencing Café Mathematica as a way of engaging in the study of mathematics. On this particular day, some students explored this problem using calculators, others continued to tear paper and make charts to organize their data, while others made and tested predictions by continuing to tear paper or by drawing representations of tearing paper. All of these different approaches were focused by efforts to find patterns in order to represent the relationship between the number of tears and number of pieces of paper resulting from the tears. Wesley interrupted students’ work with their partners periodically to restate a question asked of him to the class: Wesley: Todd asked this question. Could you take this information here and have the computer figure out the rule? (Students acknowledged this as an interesting question and approach, talking among themselves with their partners, one student in particular being overheard to exclaim “cool” to the prospect of having the computer find the pattern)—Yes, we could, and I would like for us to explore that, but for now that sort of defeats the purpose. Without too quickly pursuing this effort for a quick answer or without stifling it as not appropriate to their present mathematics learning, Wesley left the students at the end of the class with the challenge: Wesley: Some of you might want to take an Excel spreadsheet and try this. It would be really interesting to see what you come up with. This was not an assignment, nor a suggestion just for fun. Although he did not return to this problem the next day but built on other aspects of the problem where students explored patterns, students eventually learned how to take patterned relationships and have both the computer and the calculator represent these relationships as functions, as graphs, and as ordered pairs. Later in the

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year, students were building on these experiences instead of collapsing meanings into fifty-minute learning episodes or being satisfied to come to a quick answer. This seamless approach to learning is an aspect of teaching etcetera that is not easily captured by presenting teaching episodes of classroom dynamics. Representing the vision of teaching etcetera by exploring one class snippet as we have done here is limited because what makes this example meaningful is not just that students explored patterns this one day, but rather how the process of exploration built on their variety of experiences and multiple explorations throughout the semester. There existed neither the expectation nor the desire for closure for this particular problem on this particular day. Nor did the students have a sense of incompleteness since the activity itself had meaning and purpose. Developing these class norms for revisiting problems and thinking about mathematics as patterns of relationship was a deliberate process for Wesley. Students often experienced some discomfort with this approach, especially early in the year, and at times expressed frustration that their teacher was playing games with them. They recognized the “games” of his class to be different but, for most, by the second semester, they realized the game of mathematics they were playing was fully participatory. They were not “rewarded” for passively waiting for the answer or parroting the teacher’s ideas. They also learned their role in helping others play the game. For example, during one class a student asked: “When we work with our partners and we present our solutions do we just tell our answers or what?” Wesley turned the question back to the class. “What do I do?” he challenged them to reflect on his own role in the class. Wesley: Well I would answer that question with what kind of help am I giving you? I’m not into the “hint” game. I’m not really into the “explain” game. I want you thinking. Also what I’ve noticed over here with Todd and Craig’s group is that they’ve got their table out and their calculators and they are just kind of guessing and checking and that’s fine, but I am wanting us to maybe move away from the “guess and check” approach to thinking in terms of variables, but I don’t want you to just find the right answer. Maybe come up with a rule and then check it on paper. His own challenging, questioning and encouraging of students to explain their thinking was an expectation he had of them as they worked together in small groups and presented solutions in class. A similar part of the language game of his classroom was the invitation and expectation for students to challenge, question, and engage Wesley’s mathematics. Underlying his approach to teaching mathematics and his expectation that students explore patterns and relationships as fundamental to their sensemaking efforts are Wesley’s own ideas about mathematics. As he describes it,

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underlying changes in how he teaches were a part of his own transformation in how he viewed mathematics. Over a ten year period, Wesley came to see mathematics very differently. 6. Changing Ways of Seeing Mathematics As described above, Husserl explored how the mathematization of nature removed subjective experience of patterned relationship, elevating calculation as functional relationship over our experiences. The mathematization of nature forgets mathematics’ role as a system of meaning. Wittgenstein further explored how changing our ways of seeing the world required a change of aspect, a change in seeing-as. For Wesley, the process of changing his ideas about mathematics occurred over a ten-year period. There were, however, dramatic epiphanies as his transformation was marked with periods of revelation and shifts of understandings. Wesley’s own ideas about mathematics have evolved from thinking of mathematics as procedures, computation, and facts to considering mathematics as patterns, relationships, and systems of meaning. Although his changing ideas about mathematics and his approaches to teaching mathematics evolved together, over these ten years, it was not until he realized his ideas about mathematics were changing that he made sense of why his changing approaches to teaching seemed so “right” to him. His evolving tacit understandings of mathematics as the exploration of pattern, played out in his classroom with his students engaged in problem solving explorations, started to find voice as he experienced opportunities for perturbation while participating in summer professional development with a university mathematics educator over a period of several years. Referring to his early work with “Allan” he described: I think what Allan did back in ’91 for me was posing that question “what is mathematics”—it started me thinking. Until that point I had never thought about what mathematics was except basically nothing more than addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of fractions, decimals, and whole numbers for me as a middle school teacher. So I think this is what really started it. That’s when perturbation really started for me. He really caused some disturbance in my world with that question. Although, in retrospect, Wesley can cite this early experience and challenge to his thinking as crucial to his own changed thinking about mathematics teaching and learning, he was not initially conscious of the significance of this challenge. Wesley: Although, after that first meeting he had created some disturbance in my world, I don’t know at what point that became adapted as

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part of my vocabulary and part of my belief system, I wouldn’t know exactly when that transformation really happened and if you were to place it at a certain time—I don’t know. I do know that . . . about four years later I can imagine that I had come to a pretty powerful belief that mathematics is the study of patterns and relationships. Like changing a pair of glasses, the “change of aspect” or changed way of seeing mathematics required a period of “revisioning” or adaptation to the new light. He needed to experience mathematics as patterns, both with Allan and with his students, before his rethinking of mathematics as patterns of relationship made sense. There was no simple linear causality. The relationship between his beliefs about mathematics and his classroom practices supported each other and evolved as challenges to old ways of thinking took root. Wesley’s understanding of the significance of changing his ideas about mathematics now guides how he hopes his students experience mathematics in his classes. He continues to affirm his ways of seeing mathematics as pattern and relationship by providing opportunities for his students to experience mathematics that way and challenging their ways of seeing mathematics. Wesley: I certainly believe it is something that needs to be brought to the forefront and looked at in the classroom, so I try to make it not a constant but something we continually think about—you know, “what is math?”— to keep that at the forefront. The relationship among his changing ideas about mathematics, how he teaches, and how his students react to his teaching, are intertwined. He continues to explore the significance of seeing mathematics as patterns of relationship and the need for his students to experience mathematics in this way. Mathematics teaching, for him, like mathematics learning for his students, is not experienced as a dead art but as an emerging and ever-exciting dynamic of explorations as students are encouraged to experience mathematics as patterns of relationship. As he describes it: “I learn from the students and their different ways of looking at things and thinking about things continually, and that’s really exciting.” 7. Understanding Teaching Etcetera The artificiality of separating teaching from learning, focusing on the teacher instead of the student, or focusing on products of teaching instead of processes of interactions in the classroom, has been a problem for changing our ways of seeing the teaching-learning relationship as symbiotic not causal, dynamic not linear, and complex not controllable. Likewise, often missing in the debates about the teaching and learning of mathematics is the relationship between how

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we want students to learn, what we want students to learn, and, ultimately, why we want students to learn mathematics. Implicit in the descriptions of Wesley’s class and his evolving understandings of mathematics is the relationship his curriculum has with the discipline of mathematics and the discourse traditions of mathematics. Students do not engage in mere speculation “about” mathematics but in a very real sense are participating “as mathematicians” in the discipline culture of mathematics. They are becoming “fluent” in mathematics, learning the language games not of mathematics as a foreign language but mathematics as a significant way of interacting with and communicating about their world. This is not to say mathematics is a foreign language but learning mathematics by teaching etcetera implies becoming fluent in a tradition of sense-making that includes understanding mathematical relationship as patterns as well as exploring mathematical relationship through the cultural tradition of mathematics. Exploring mathematics as relationship thus includes the unfolding of mathematical understandings as being in relationship to a body of mathematical knowledge, not as a static body but as one continually evolving and transforming through the conversations of the mathematics community. What we miss in many attempts to provide opportunities for students to experience and explore mathematics is that they are learning to operate in this cultural tradition that, for many, is a foreign culture with strange mores and routines. Teaching etcetera is a mandate to develop habits of inquiry to go beyond the classroom and experience mathematics as a meaningful way to interact with and make sense of our world, but it is also a way of providing opportunities for students to interact within the culture tradition of mathematics, to become fluent in mathematics as fluency itself entails evolving linguistic relationships and understandings. The mathematics games of modern mathematics may inherently prevent this fluency from occurring. Reflecting Wittgenstein’s perspective that a change of aspect requires a change in ways of seeing-as, Davis, Sumara, and Luce-Kapler suggest that “teaching is about affecting perception” instead of “helping students to know what they don’t know” (2000, p. 26). As Wesley experienced a change in his own approach to mathematics by being challenged to question what mathematics is, Wesley challenges his own students, both in the kinds of activities in which they engage and by directly asking them to question what they believe mathematics to be. In order to have a “change in aspect,” we must change how we “see as.” Seeing mathematics as patterns and relationships challenges how we teach, what we think is important for our students to learn, and what counts as significant mathematics. It also challenges why we teach mathematics, directing our challenges to be critical of how students become conversant in the culture of mathematical ways of understanding our world and what, ultimately, it means to experience the world mathematically.

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“Why teach mathematics?” is not a question many are willing to ask, especially in times of economic, technological, and political instabilities. Mathematics is basically unchallenged as important for student learning. To ask “Why” is not necessarily to challenge the need for students to learn mathematics, but is to more fundamentally explore “If mathematics, Why?” Our answer, to teach etcetera, implies both a way of meaningfully interacting with and relating to the world as patterned and connected, and a way of becoming conversant in the discourse tradition of mathematics. Until our language games in the classroom support student learning of and developing expectations for mathematical understandings that treat mathematics as ways of interacting with, making sense of, and communicating about their world, superficial changes in the curriculum will fail to embrace the spirit of change implicated by the notion of seeing-as. A common mistake we as educators make is to assume that in order to make mathematics more real for our students, we should provide them with real-world problems narrowly construed, contextual lessons perceived to be of relevance to the everyday lives of children. At the other extreme, the abstraction of pure mathematics is of little relevance to their lives and has little meaning beyond the classroom mathematics lessons being taught. To teach etcetera in the mathematics classroom denies both of these approaches. It signifies, rather, a form of life, a way of seeing-as that allows for a “creative advance into novelty” (Whitehead, 1929b, p. 28), the experience of flow (Garland, this volume), and the complex interplay of the rhythms of learning. To see the world as mathematical relationship is to see the world differently, as dramatically differently as to see a smile as a smile instead of as a sneer or grimace. “If someone sees a smile and does not know it for a smile, does not understand it as such, does he see it differently from someone who understands it?—He mimics it differently, for instance” (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 198). Just as the teacher ends the lesson with the invitation that “you can fill in the rest” to imply that from the previous discussions students should be able to complete a proof or see the connections to other contexts, teaching etcetera is a way of extending the contexts of our classrooms so students can continue to engage in the language game of mathematics. Teaching etcetera is a way of “keeping knowledge alive.” Just as children playing a game of ball play with the rules to invent new games, so too, does teaching etcetera provide for the evolution of the social game we call mathematics. Teaching etcetera allows for both a way of seeing-as that encourages students to continue engaging in the language games of mathematics and a way of changing aspect or altering the rules of the game as it is played. In order to teach etcetera, we should be providing opportunities for our students to go beyond the limits and contexts of our lessons and extend meanings as they engage in mathematical language games and learn a way of life.

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Applebee, Arthur N. (1996) Curriculum as Conversation: Transforming Traditions of Teaching and Learning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, Tony. (2001) Mathematics Education and Language: Interpreting Hermeneutics and Post-Structuralism. Boston: Kluwer. Cobb, Paul. (1995) “Mathematical Learning and Small-Group Interaction: Four Case Studies.” In The Emergence of Mathematical Meaning: Interaction in Classroom Cultures. Eds. Paul Cobb and Heinrich Bauersfeld. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 271–291. Davis, Brent, Dennis Sumara, and Rebecca Luce-Kapler. (2000) Engaging Minds: Learning and Teaching in a Complex World. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. Dewey, John. (1925) Experience and Nature. Chicago: Open Court, 1981. ———. (1938) Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Holt. Fleener, M. Jayne. (2002) Curriculum Dynamics: Recreating Heart. New York: Peter Lang Fleener, M. Jayne, Andy Carter, and Stacy Reeder. (2000) “Language Games in the Mathematics Classroom: Learning a Way of Life.” Journal of Curriculum Studies, 36, pp. 445–468. Garland, William J. (2006) “The Rhythm of Learning.” In A Different Three Rs for Education: Reason, Relationality, and Rhythm. Eds. George Allan and Malcolm D. Evans. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Genova, Judith. (1995) Wittgenstein: A Way of Seeing. New York: Routledge. Husserl, Edmund. (1954) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Reeder, Stacy L. (2002) Emergent Mathematics Curriculum: A Case Study of Two Teachers. Diss. University of Oklahoma. Dissertation Abstracts International, 63, (05), 1756. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1925) Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1967. ———. (1929a) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Free Press, 1967. ———. (1929b) Process and Reality. Corrected ed. Eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1980) Culture and Value. Trans. Peter Winch. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan.

Eleven REASON: A GIFT TO BE NURTURED Malcolm D. Evans While the traditional three Rs—reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic—provide learners with the foundation for learning, the use of that basic knowledge and subsequent learning is what makes a difference in the quality of life for individuals and societies. Our uniquely human gift of reason enables us to acquire and use knowledge. You are invited to engage in exploration and explication of reason as a human quality to be nurtured through education. Let me set forth some of the most cogent reasons for us, as educators, to know and understand the several dimensions of reason, reasoning, reasonableness, and critical thinking. 1.Why be Concerned about Reason? Alfred North Whitehead’s famous epigram, “The function of reason is to promote the art of life” (1929, p. 4), puts the issue squarely in terms of a totality we sometimes forget as we hasten to cover material, to prepare for exams, or to explore interesting facts and events. “The art of life”! A wonderful, mind-opening notion! That Whiteheadian notion is a guiding frame for your consideration of reasons for reasoning. A more fundamental reason, I suggest, is that we live in a world of constant, rapid change. Our society is not only changing, it is increasingly complex, at times chaotic; to discern the way ahead is extremely difficult. The relationships of emotional, personal, and civic considerations often make clear reasoning difficult. Clarity of thought is required. Issues of environment, population, distribution of resources, public health, international relations, nationalism, and community—all problems of a highly technological, global society—require a level of reasoning not previously demanded I will shine the spotlight of inquiry on the skills and competencies required, using as a running example a commercially prepared biological study unit, Task Force Environmental Investigations Kit (Nolan and Nolan, 1997). That unit, composed of two CDs and supplementary materials, is about conflict in the Pacific Northwest between environmentalists and sportsmen on one side and industries—aluminum, agriculture, and transportation—on the other side. The unit requires students to examine alternatives to the status quo. One contentious proposal is to remove four dams on the Snake River, thereby allowing salmon full access to their spawning grounds. This proposal, if enacted, would impact everyone in the region. The conflicts resulting from this radical proposal, if they are to be resolved, require gathering data in useful form, analyzing the data, forming

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hypotheses, drawing conclusions, and advocating positions—all acts of reasoning with which students should be engaged daily. Of course, not all of education in schools and colleges is concerned with the big issues of society. Literature, texts, and a variety of media present information that must be grasped, related to prior experience and knowledge, and integrated. Reasoning well enables a student to think about an author’s purposes, facts revealed or hidden, biases present or implied, the validity of proposals and explanations, and values and ethics that are compatible with or in conflict with the student’s own. Disciplined reasoning and very systematic thinking are also necessary in the study of the natural sciences, social sciences, and mathematics. This book reflects a philosophical perspective. We should remember that point as we consider the concrete aspects of reason. From the philosophical notion of reason flows the concept of rationality and from that flows the educator’s concern with critical thinking. In these pages we are thinking philosophically about the grand concept of reason, a human faculty. As educators we are only casually aware of our philosophical roots but deeply aware of our obligation to develop in every student what Harvey Siegel calls “a love of reasons” (1988, p. 39). This love is a human capability that schools and colleges can polish into acts of reasoning. If we cannot reason well, then we forfeit part of the art of life while submitting unnecessarily to actions and reasons of others. Reason, supplemented by intuition and self-knowledge, is an essential part of the students’ personal responsibility for actions. As students pursue the issues of the Pacific Northwest, responsibility for transcending bias, such as wanting to protect the salmon at all costs or zealously insisting on the importance of economic over environmental concerns, becomes a critical aspect of learning to reason. Important as feelings are, they must be disciplined if reason is to prevail. In a later section we will take a long look at reasonableness, a key to personal responsibility for disciplined reason. Students face a bewildering array of academic and societal conditions. The nearly chaotic changes of the late modern and early postmodern worlds challenge our abilities to cope with, let alone control, the forces unleashed by ideology harnessed to technology. What is a student to make of an Orwellian world in which war is peace, protest is traitorous, plunder is good, greed is a virtue, and criticism is subversive? Skills, competence, and attitudes associated with reasoning must be an integral part of learning in the emerging postmodern world. The literature on “critical thinking,” “educating reason,” and “higher order thinking skills,” with a few notable exceptions, pays little attention to values and ethics. For young students, what is fair and what is right are important issues. The decline of salmon seems wrong to youngsters. They raise agerelated but important questions and observations: “What will the bears have for food?” “Salmon provide nutrients for the land.” “Salmon fishing is a popular

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sport.” “Aren’t all of us concerned about nature?” Concern with maintaining salmon stock, awareness of the importance of work and services to families and communities, preservation of resources, property rights, the common good— these are very important issues that bring conflicting values to the fore. Study of the unique problems of the Pacific Northwest reveals to students the dilemma of serious conflicts between parties. Students and all of us should recognize the place of reason in seeking to reconcile conflict and divergent values. These issues are very important, as we shall see in discussions of reasonableness and critical thinking later in this essay. As we mature, our sense of values and ethics may be so well integrated that we think little about them. Yet whenever we make a decision connected to another person, a sublimated condition of reasoning is involved. We frequently fail to acknowledge that reasoning is a reflection of our own aims—power, support, and friendship, which are all aspects of Whitehead’s “art of life.” Reasoning as developed in schools and in all of life should recognize the presence and force of unacknowledged aims and the importance of values in understanding the reasons of oneself and others. One more reason for disciplined reasoning is that our nation desperately needs that educated citizenry on which a democracy depends. The exercise of reason in school and in adult life is one essential component of democracy. Reason is a human capability that schools and colleges, committed to democracy, can polish into the act of reasoning—a vigorous trait of educated citizens. The social, economic, and political changes confronting students, scholars, adults, and youth are complex and interconnected. The problems of a highly technological, global society, if they are to be adequately addressed, require thinking that goes beyond simple, pragmatic patchwork. In these complex situations few certainties exists. What is the common good? Which are the higher values? How can severe conflicts be resolved in a manner that reflects democratic values? Are there respectful ways to engage in public dialogue or even vicarious school experiences such as the Task Force Environmental Investigations Kit? Maintenance and advance of democracy requires that we guide students in discussion of these questions and in the use of the gift of reason to make those discussions fruitful. 2. What is Reason? Before we proceed further in our examination of reason and its many implications for pedagogy, we should ask ourselves, “Just what is this human capability that is so relevant to educating?” Reason is a function of the mind; a complex intellectual and physical activity. The ability to imagine relationships and possibilities is what leads to new knowledge, to new insights, and, in keeping with the notion of art of life, to living better. Reason is the capability of persons to abstract, comprehend, reflect, relate, compare, and infer. Reason takes us beyond simple, clear thinking about a task at hand and leads us toward consid-

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eration of novelty. Is it not our human ability to reason that has brought humankind through changing technologies, complex social forms, and intellectual attainments? Reason is unarguably connected to experience and in Whitehead’s words, “every occasion of experience is dipolar. It is mental experience integrated with physical experience” (1929, p. 32). Thus, although we think of reason as a matter of the mind, the act of reasoning is founded on prior experience and experience is both bodily and mental. We now begin to see some of the complexities involved when we, as teachers, say to a student, “think.” Reasoning is not a simple process. It is not, as some would have it, a matter of mastering higher order thinking skills. Mind, body, brain, knowledge, emotions, context, relationships are all a part of reasoning. There must be a starting point: some sort of foundation, some form of experience. A child who knows no mathematics cannot reason mathematically, despite Plato’s wonderful account of Socrates and Meno’s slave boy determining the area of a geometric form. A student without knowledge of the geography of the Pacific Northwest or enough experience using concepts of space, time, and volume will not do well with the biology unit on the problems of salmon and industry on the Snake River. Some thinkers see reason as the basis of civilization; they may just be right. I think so, and you might well agree. After all, tool making, the use of fire, agriculture, the building of cities, inquiry into the nature of the universe, law, government are not activities of animals—they are actions resulting from the use of the human mind. The title of Gilbert Highet’s book, Man’s Unconquerable Mind, captures the right spirit. The mind of a human being is a wondrous thing. Its potential is virtually unknown despite the empirical studies of psychologists of every stripe and the far-reaching inquiries of a broad spectrum of philosophers. Although we as educators are fully aware of students’ bodies as well as their minds, we also know that the art and science of pedagogy occur in relation to the human mind. The focus of this essay or any discussion of reason must be on the mind. Although the human mind is a domain of great interest to both psychologists and philosophers, this essay and this book reflect a philosophical outlook on mind and learning. The essence of reason is judgment on the relevance of things novel or things familiar. Israel Scheffler tells us, “reason is . . . a matter of continuing responsibilities for evaluation, by logically pertinent means, of the credentials of beliefs and choices” (1973, p. 29). His views make us aware of the need for judgment and logic as a part of reasoning. We need judgment in addition to logical thinking simply because few matters in this world are brought to a close with absolute certainty. And always, a great need for judgment exists as to the validity of data and the premises of any argument. As students working in the Task Force Environmental Investigations Kit are directed to web pages of advocates of various positions, judgment as to the validity of their arguments, the information they provide, and their presuppositions becomes critical. Great


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ideas, simplistic ideas, fantastic ideas are constantly being proposed. Skill in finding, judging, and evaluating good reasons and clear purposes is absolutely essential. If you accept the premise that the essence of reason is judgment about information, arguments, and propositions, then you will agree that good judgment is a trait or behavior to be developed in classrooms from elementary school through graduate school. Scheffler, as a philosopher of education and logician, heightens our awareness of the need for logic as part of reasoning. Reason involves reasoning about reasons. The process of reasoning requires that there be an order and logic even to the most speculative ideas. When we speak of logic, we too often think of the syllogistic logic taught in college level philosophy courses. I doubt that such a structured approach to reasoning is relevant to the purposes of elementary and secondary education. What is pertinent is logical thinking— thinking that links premises, data, and conclusions. We call this critical thinking, a kind of reflective, analytical thinking using informal logic. Ordinary reasoning that occurs in the course of interpersonal relations, evaluation of information, political debate, study of unfamiliar ideas, and social commentary can be analyzed using informal logic (Groake, 2002). As we shall see repeatedly in references to study of the Pacific Northwest, informal logic and critical thinking intersect in a pedagogy that is supportive of critical inquiry. 3. Can Reasonableness be an Aim of Education? “Listen to reason!” “Oh, be rational!” “Can’t you be reasonable?” We have heard these phrases many times in our lives. They reflect aspects of how we think and of the philosophical theme of this chapter—reason. Each term has a distinct meaning and each of them is related to the others. Reason stands for systematic, logical thinking. Usually when the speaker, perhaps a parent says, “Listen to reason!” it means that the listener is being asked to honor the common sense or practical logic of information—frequently advice. Appeals to rationality, of the “Oh, be rational!” type are frequently heard when someone proposes what the listener takes to be an outlandish idea. And the sharptongued “Can’t you be reasonable?” may be associated with an exasperated listener. What do these petty examples have in common? They appeal to reasonableness, the topic of the next few pages. What is reasonableness? I turn to Nicholas Burbules, editor of Educational Theory, who defines reasonableness thus: “reasonableness concerns the capacity to enter into types of communicative relations in which persons together inquire, disagree, adjudicate, explain, or argue their views in the pursuit of a reasonable outcome” (1993, p. 3; emphasis added). He speaks of capacity; many other educators would talk of potential. The acts that Burbules mentions are all relational—to listen, to read about, to think with, to accept divergence, to display. They are an array of attributes most philosophers call dispositions.

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He names these dispositions virtues. Virtue is taken to be a strong trait instead of being merely a disposition toward. A condition of reasonableness that is too often overlooked in discussion of reason is the recognition and embracing of emotions such as feeling, empathy, and concern. A moment’s thought about this idea leads me, and I hope you, to understand that reasonableness certainly does require empathy and concern for others. Burbules writes: “In this endeavor [to be reasonable], respect for the force of reasons is crucial, as is the attempt to be clear, coherent, and accurate in what one says. But it is not everything” (1993, p. 8). He reminds us that reasonableness requires appreciation of the emotions of oneself and others. After noting these emotional elements, he then points to four traits that he deems central to reasonableness: objectivity, fallibilism, pragmatism, and judgment. Let us look at three of these traits. The kind of objectivity that Burbules is advocating—holding your own values while endeavoring to understand and appreciate the position of another person—is teachable, not in an isolated curriculum unit but by frequent guided interaction and by the “manner,” as Scheffler names it, of a teacher. The second trait mentioned by Burbules, fallibilism, merely means recognizing the possibility of error, of making a mistake. Burbules’s view on making a mistake, admitting an error, causes us to pause and think a bit. He writes, “reasonableness on this view, expresses a capacity for change prompted by one’s own recognition and acknowledgment of error, but also supported by a social environment in which the process is viewed with favor, not disdain” (1993, p. 6). Embracing pragmatism does not mean abandoning idealism for mundane objectives. It means that the reasonable person is tolerant of uncertainty, recognizes ambiguities, and is fully aware of the need for flexibility in any relationship involving the human condition. Although the idealism of youth may make acceptance of pragmatic solutions more difficult, students should be encouraged to energetically pursue the best solution that can actually be determined or obtained. The reasonable person—the person we want students to become— uses the human capability of reason to make sense of the world, however that world may be defined, to consider alternative solutions, interpretations, and courses of action, and to admit mistakes and reconsider actions. In general, reasonableness can be developed in the classroom, but it is not a set of personal qualities stemming from adherence to rules of reasoning. Reasonableness, I suggest, is as much a matter of heart and intuition as a set of behaviors learned through classroom teaching. Having said that, I strongly believe with Burbules that reasonableness is an important aim of education. He writes, “reasonableness is an educational aim because it is bound to and illuminates fundamental aspects of how the process of education itself occurs” (p. 9). As a teacher thinks of the goal of guiding the development of reasonableness, a conflict inevitably occurs with less reasonable considerations. This conflict results, partially, because in our society we are conditioned to think in


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terms of twoness, right or wrong, this or that. Reasonableness is not characterized by twoness, but by recognition that from many can come one. A student may be exposed to many ideas, none of which are a complete solution or answer, but from which may come a novel, reasonable, resolution. Students using the Task Force Environmental Investigations Kit work in small groups as they seek factual information about environment, industry, transportation, recreation, and community. There will be few “answers” but many viewpoints. Reasonableness, as argued by Burbules, enables students to deal effectively with ambiguous and conflicting data. In contemporary, pluralistic society not all reasonableness is considered reasonable. Even so, the educational aim of reasonableness should be pursued in the classroom. 4. Is Critical Thinking Important? The construct, critical thinking, is important for education at all levels of learning. Why is this so? Two basic reasons can be given, one personal and individual, the other societal. To gain some perspective on the first reason, the situation of the individual, we should look back at Whitehead’s position that the function of reason is the promotion of the art of life. He sees individual human beings as having a “three-fold urge: (i) to live, (ii) to live well, (iii) to live better” (1929, p. 8). We must bear in mind that individuals, who indeed have this urge, do not live isolated lives but live in community, a notion that brings us to the second reason for the importance of reason. To construct and maintain civilization built on the first notion requires that persons possess not only the skills to live well personally but also the ability to cope, manage, and direct events in a rapidly changing society. The society we have known has been based on reasoning within a frame of nationhood, civic participation, community, and a sense of the common good. In recent decades a frame of reference of economic materialism, market capitalism, military power, and individualism has arisen bringing with it fateful changes at both a personal and a societal level for all of us. The skills, attitudes, and behaviors of a competent critical thinker are needed as students, community, and nation are confronted with issues of war, peace, security, terrorism, environment, governance, and family. In older, stable societies critical thinking was unneeded and discouraged. In the twenty-first century every normal child, for that child’s sake and for that of society, should be educated toward becoming a competent critical thinker. Critical thinking is teachable. Educators at every level should assume responsibility for teaching it. Defining critical thinking will help to understand the implication of this declaration. Critical thinking is a complex educative process: one requiring recognition of the place of disciplined thought, emotions, reflection, relationships, integration, generalization, and evaluation—all part of an educative process. Critical thinking is often thought of as a set of

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generic skills applicable to all situations. You should be aware that scholars disagree over the issue of domain specificity or general applicability of critical thinking skills. We need only be aware of this issue, not concerned over it.. As educators focused on real teaching situations, we are inclined to say, “yes, both.” Reasoning skills in mathematics differ from those in poetry. Context is one determinant of skills required; another is final cause or purpose. Critical thinking should never be confused with rumination or casual speculation. It is a focused, disciplined act toward an outcome. Are there specifics of critical thinking to be learned? Yes, and I present for your consideration nine ideas named by the Foundation for Critical Thinking as “affective strategies.” They may be thought of as competences to be developed in students. You may, upon reflection, consider them characteristics that you would hope to see in all thinking persons. The affective strategies are: Thinking independently, developing insight into egocentricity and sociocentricity, exercising fair-mindedness, exploring thoughts underlying feelings and feelings underlying thoughts, developing intellectual humility and suspending judgment, developing intellectual courage, developing intellectual good faith or integrity, developing intellectual perseverance, developing confidence in reasoning. (Foundation (c), “Strategy List”) These strategies are not objectives for an instructional program, or a list of behavioral objectives. Think of them from the philosophy perspective urged in this book. If you do, the so-called strategies become descriptors of relational conditions. Critical thinking becomes, for an educator with a process perspective, a matter of examining relationships: for example, to your values, to truth, to credibility, to justice, to reasonableness. I see each one of these strategies as being significant as individual areas of instruction, but I see all of them at play in most critical-thinking situations. Challenging studies, particularly those posing markedly opposed values as in the Task Force Environmental Investigations Kit, call each of these strategies into play. Student who are strong critical thinkers will have integrated these strategies into their intellectual style. Earlier I used Israel Scheffler’s term “manner” to describe a teacher’s critical-thinking behaviors. I now suggest “style” as a descriptor of a student’s critical-thinking behavior. That style will reflect an underlying philosophy; one that supports the inquirer’s search for connections of ideas and events, assumptions and actions, behaviors and values in any effort of inquiry. Although I have directed to the philosophical foundations of critical thinking, much of the actual practice and teaching related to it is psychological. This essay will not examine critical thinking from a psychological viewpoint. However, in the daily work of the professional educator much that is psychological exists and cannot be ignored. The work of cognitive psychologists has been immensely beneficial to teachers and students. I would argue for keeping


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a philosophical perspective while embracing the work of psychologists that is in harmony with that perspective. Richard Paul touches on this when he writes, “One will achieve this understanding [of philosophy vs. cognitive psychology], only if one learns to step outside the framework of assumptions of cognitive psychology and consider thinking, thinking about thinking, and teaching for thinking from a different and fresh perspective” (1992, p. 585). I would modify this slightly and suggest that we do not want to step outside, in a sense of shaking off cognitive psychology, but instead to reach across a divide of academe and grasp that which is compatible with our philosophy. Is this possible? Yes it is, and ever so briefly I want to call to your attention the work of Jerome S. Bruner. Two of his books, On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand and The Culture of Education, show us the thinking of a renowned cognitive psychologist whose view of human learning is compatible with the philosophy expressed throughout this book. A reader who finds the mechanistic approaches of the study of the brain, artificial intelligence, rat psychology, and conditioned response of pigeons contrary to strongly held feelings about human learning will find in the educational writings of Jerome Bruner a wise and supportive friend. As we move to the next section of this essay, the application of the theory of critical thinking in the classroom, the intertwining of philosophy and psychology will become more apparent. 5. What is the Reality of Reason in the Classroom? Philosophy, if it is to have any validity in the real world, must return from flights of speculation and hypothesis to concrete reality. So must our theories. You have read pages of theory and philosophy about human reason and educating human beings in the use of the gift of human reason. The earlier running exemplar about the Snake River, salmon, environment, and industry supplied a context for commentary on aspects of reasoning and critical thinking. That image-rich, emotionally stimulating experience for middle school students is but one example of reason in a school setting. In this section we will examine two additional instructional settings and their implications for reasoning and critical thinking: (1) a lesson plan taken from materials prepared by the Foundation for Critical Thinking; and (2) the International Baccalaureate program, “Theory of Knowledge.” In these educational settings—and in any situation—content and method, knower and known, aim and cause are interwoven in a complexity that cannot be fully recognized by reductionist analysis. As we shall see, the task of applying the gift of reason to thoughtful critical thinking is a holistic and systemic one—information and technique become a unified whole as students confront new knowledge, novel situations, or challenging assignments. We turn first to teaching critical thinking and reasoning in the classroom as students are required to write an argumentative essay (Foundation (a).) A

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lesson plan linked to some of Richard Paul’s thirty-five dimensions of critical thought (Foundation (c) ) requires middle school students to use a sort of rubric as they engage in argument, analysis, clarification of issues and concepts, and evaluation of claims and evidence. The very mode of writing—argumentative, not narrative, persuasive, or expository—creates a heightened awareness of those elements of critical thinking. A purpose of this lesson plan is to develop dialectical reasoning— extended critical dialogue—in a whole class and in small group situations, and to develop individual competence in writing an argumentative essay. Writing individual essays is preceded by cooperation, collaboration, and purposeful interaction as students seek reasons, evidence, and arguments. Direct teaching may occur. The teacher may have whole class discussions of such basic critical thinking techniques as use of critical vocabulary, identification of reasons, analysis and evaluation of arguments, clarifying issues and concepts, evaluating evidence claims, and open-mindedness. The final product will be an argumentative essay that demonstrates an individual student’s level of critical-thinking competence. It may also demonstrate a degree of competence in dealing rationally with the issues to be confronted in a complex society. The next example of reason in the classroom, one drawn from the International Baccalaureate Programme (IB), is not a lesson in critical thinking. It is a course requiring students to use critical thinking and trained reasoning to seek connections that lead toward the goal of integrating three elements: traditional knowledge, ways of knowing, and. self-understanding. The specific course discussed here, Theory of Knowledge (TOK), “encourages students to become aware of themselves as thinkers, to become aware of the complexity of knowledge, and to recognize the need to act responsibly in an increasingly interconnected world” (International, 1999, p. 2). The TOK course assumes a basic level of critical thinking skill. It is not dedicated to adding to the students’ academic knowledge, although that may occur. The course seeks to establish connections between two principle components: “areas of knowledge” and “ways of knowing.” The connections are facilitated by “linking questions.” What is meant by these specific categories? Areas of knowledge include, as you might expect, mathematics, natural sciences, human sciences, history, and the arts. Surprisingly, and to the delight of some and dismay of others, ethics is also included as an area of knowledge. TOK does not merely reaffirm existing curriculum. Students and teachers revisit areas of knowledge in novel ways, essentially through questioning. Some of the questions reveal the special character of the TOK program. They are special questions about definitions of each area of knowledge, the basis and form of knowledge claims, methods of gaining knowledge, values reflected in the area, and perspectives on the form and substance of areas of knowledge. These are advanced concepts, educationally related to our examination of reason, but the questions utilized go well beyond fact and method—they go to the


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philosophical underpinnings of the IB program. They lead back to the philosophical roots of reason in the Western tradition. The second component of TOK is the ways of knowing. As presented in TOK, the ways of knowing differ from a construct of knowing viewed only from the perspective of cognitive psychology. Teachers and students think about questions raised within categories such as the nature of knowing, sources of knowledge, and justification of knowledge claims. Because knowing is a natural process, we tend not to think much about how we come to know. TOK requires students to address ways of knowing directly. The TOK goal of guiding students toward awareness of themselves as thinkers establishes a reason for their study of the ways of knowing, identified as perception, language, reason, and emotion. Students and teachers discuss the nature, strengths, limitations, and function of each of these categories—always with the aim of assisting students in their journey toward understanding knowing and themselves as knowers. A special emphasis is put on linking questions that make connections between elements of the TOK program. The categories of the linking questions are an interesting grouping of intellectually oriented concepts: beliefs, certainty, culture, evidence, explanation, interpretation, intuition, technology, truth, and values. The publication Theory of Knowledge states, “Questions are the very essence of TOK, both ageless questions on which thinkers have been reflecting for centuries and new ones, often challenging accepted belief, which are posed by contemporary life” (International, 1999, p. 3). Teachers are not left adrift in a sea of ideals, concepts, precepts and maxims. IB provides support material in the form of Theory of Knowledge: Lessons from Around the World (International, 2000). This is a set of twenty “lessons” which teachers are encouraged to adapt to their current need and to revise or supplement. One lesson, “The Map is not the Territory,” develops an understanding of how reality is represented, using different map projections. The philosophers mentioned earlier might well be pleased with questions about hidden assumptions and values, contrasting conceptual schemes, symbolism, and the relationship of representation to purpose. Students and teachers are confronted by a requirement for critical thinking that forces students to reflect on their naïve assumptions about maps and other graphic representations of reality. Students will use many of the reasoning skills presented in this chapter as they work through this lesson. The TOK program is unique. It is a required part of the two-year International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, which is designed for highly motivated secondary-school students worldwide. Clearly, the IB program, so intellectually exciting and worthy, is not for everyone. But everyone needs critical thinking and responsible reasoning. In an increasingly connected world of ideas, people, and places, rigorous reasoning even by ordinary people is a pressing necessity. The IB program cannot, and should not, be imported into

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most schools. But its broad concepts, only briefly described here, can be introduced into most instructional programs. The ideal of knowers who understand themselves as knowers and the ideal of linking knowers, ways of knowing, and areas of knowledge are educationally elegant. I recommend that students of education, and educators engaged in instructional design, study TOK and adopt and adapt its provisions where relevant. 6. Epilogue At the end of this chapter of discussions about philosophy and pedagogy, about reason and rationality, about reasonableness and reasoning, you may ask, “Why was this chapter written?” In simple terms, it was written to argue that the real world of complex, conflicting, issues, ideas, and events requires skillful application of our human gift of reason to the affairs of humankind. In the world of which we are now a part, from which we no retreat is available, we are besieged with advertising, political spin, ideology, conflicting data, deliberate misinformation, and irrational proposals. If there exists no retreat, no sanctuary from the insistent turbulence of a connected world, then only two options exist: to ignore the flood and be carried with it or to acquire the skills to think about the issues and take charge of our own destiny. The chapters in this book, in different ways, highlight the gift of reason and its importance in human society. In this chapter we explored the development of that wonderful gift into reasoning in ways that contribute to Whitehead’s “art of life.” Critical thinking, taught in school and university classrooms, has been presented as the means by which students are enabled to cope with complexity and to direct affairs of their personal and communal lives. Some critical thinking programs are mechanistic and rule-bound. Those presented here are more process-oriented and thus, more compatible with the process philosophy expressed throughout this book. The role of teacher as modeler and guide to reasoning, to love of reasons, and to competence in critical thinking has been emphasized. Paul Harris, a professor of education at Harvard, says: “to the extent that children are given all sorts of information about the world, they have to start discriminating among their informants. They have to start thinking about who is telling them the truth, who is offering rhetoric or propaganda” (Christou, 2000, p. 4). Discernment and discrimination need to be taught beginning at an early age by teachers and parents. But they need to be taught not only to young children, the focus of Harris’s professional studies, but also to adolescents, young adults, university students, and all of us who have to think about the sources of our information. Our human gift of reason, developed through education and applied in disciplined ways, enables each of us, student or citizen, to exercise our full humanity in a complex world. This is what this chapter is about and


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why it was written. May it be helpful to you as a teacher, parent, or citizen who cares about schooling and society. WORKS CITED Bruner, Jerome S. (1962) On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. Exp. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. ———. (1996) The Culture of Education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Burbules, Nicholas. (1993) “Rethinking Rationality: On Learning to be Reasonable,” Philosophy of Education. [Electronic version] URL=http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/ EPS/PES-yearbook/93_docs/BURBULES.HTM. Christou, Miranda. (2000) “Who Needs Imagination?: An Interview with Professor Paul Harris.” March 1. URL=http://www.gse.harvard. edu/news/features/ Harris03012 002. html. Foundation for Critical Thinking. (a) (n.d.) “Teacher Resources, Remodeled Lesson Plans: 6-9. Writing Argumentative Essays.” URL=http://www.criticalthinking.org/ resources/TRK12-remodelled-lesson-6-9. shtml#Essays. ———. (b) (n.d.) “Our Concept of Critical Thinking.” URL=http://www.criticalthinking.org/aboutCT/ourConceptCT.shtml. ———. (c) (n.d.) “The Strategy List: 35 Dimensions of Critical Thinking.” URL=http://www.criticalthinking.org/resources/TRK12-strategy-list.shtml. Groarke, Leo. (2003) “Informal Logic,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2003 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. URL=http://plato.Stanford.edu/Entries/ logic-informal Highet, Gilbert. (1954) Man’s Unconquerable Mind. New York: Columbia University Press. International Baccalaureate Organization. (1999) Theory of Knowledge. Geneva: International Baccalaureate Organization. ———. (2000) Theory of Knowledge: Lessons from Around the World. Geneva: International Baccalaureate Organization. Nolan, Ron and Susan Nolan, eds. (1997) Task Force Environmental Investigations Kit. Altos, Cal.: Digital Studios. URL=http://www.cyberlearn.com/force.htm. Paul, Richard W. (1992) Critical Thinking: What Every Person Needs to Survive in a Rapidly Changing World. Ed. A. J. A. Blinker. Santa Rosa, Cal.: Foundation for Critical Thinking. Scheffler, Israel. (1973) Reason and Teaching. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill. Seigel, Harvey. (1988) Educating Reason: Rationality, Critical Thinking, and Education. New York: Routledge. Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929) The Function of Reason. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.


Twelve EDUCATIONAL SPIRITUALITIES: PARKER J. PALMER AND RELATIONAL METAPHYSICS John B. Bennett Educators—especially we who are in higher education—are prone to study others instead of ourselves. We analyze concepts of reason employed elsewhere, but (as Malcolm Evans and others in this volume have observed) we often fail to reflect critically on the complex character of the rational competences we exercise and promote. We study the ethics of medicine, business, journalism, and so forth, far more than we examine the ethics of education or educators—even though thoughtful essays like the one by George Allan early in this volume lay out how learning to be good plays a central role in education. In the newer, related field of spirituality, we have begun to explore the spiritualities of business and health care, but have yet to spend much time looking at the spiritualities of education. I want to contribute to that exploration here by drawing on the work of Parker J. Palmer in order to shed light on two educational spiritualities—one is a common, if not prevalent, variety that I call insistent individualism; the other is a more fundamental and desirable spirituality of relational individualism. 1. Introduction “Spirituality” is a multi-faceted and richly contested word. Some people regard it as suggesting a mind-body dualism. Others dismiss it as reeking of cultism and spiritualism. I suggest we use it to understand the universal human longing for meaning and purpose in life. It may or may not be associated with religion. In either case, our spiritualities point toward the values and activities to which we are loyal and which we trust to provide us with perduring meaning and purpose. Our individual spiritualities are often apparent in the organizing narratives or stories through which we express—and perhaps reflect on—the values and activities to which we give our fundamental commitments. These are the stories in which we speak of our primary personal and professional identities— of who we most authentically are. Parker J. Palmer is among the few who have given both scholarly and practical attention to the constellation of reason, ethics, and spirituality in education. Known for his thoughtful work in support of greater community, Palmer addresses the importance of healthier spiritualities in education—particularly in

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the academy. These healthier spiritualities emphasize ethical integrity and incorporate generous and holistic concepts of reason. And he has attended to these issues from an unusual position. An independent scholar and teacher, Palmer has occasionally taught at colleges and universities, but remains unattached to any specific campus. He has also worked extensively with public school teachers—all graduates, of course, of institutions of higher education. As he tells us in a recent book, he has followed internal promptings instead of traditional career routes (2000). As a result, Palmer knows first hand the complexities of education and yet can speak without the personal investment, frequent defensiveness, and occasional hostility that burden teachers, professors, and administrators. He is a valuable resource for thinking about spirituality in education. In the following pages, I consider features of Palmer’s position. He desires to restore education to a life-giving activity and experience—one that reclaims the sacred at the heart of learning by uniting us with the world instead of distancing us from it. Reclaiming this kind of relationality means honoring difference through respecting otherness—allowing others to make a difference in us instead of ignoring them, or assimilating them to our categories. Implicitly relational in its philosophy and developed over a period of two decades, Palmer’s position is remarkably consistent. Points that he develops and elaborates later appear implicit within earlier writings. As we attempt to address some of education’s unraveled areas, his message is one we need to hear. Ambiguities exist in Palmer’s writings, however, that if addressed could strengthen his position and perhaps extend its reach. Use of a more explicit, thoroughly relational metaphysics such as Alfred North Whitehead’s can provide a helpful philosophical foundation and resolve some of the ambiguities I will identify. I consider three issues. The first is Palmer’s argument against what he terms objectivism—a widespread epistemology and implicit ontology and ethics that elevate a spirituality of fragmentation and isolation over one of community and collaboration. Whitehead’s relational ontology gives systematic support to the important critique that Palmer provides of objectivism and its educational pathologies. Whitehead’s philosophy also underwrites the alternatives Palmer wants to promote. The second issue is the importance of recognizing a broader common good, which education should empower us to work toward. Whitehead’s fullydeveloped and explicitly relational philosophy provides a comprehensive sense to the “hidden wholeness” to which Palmer often refers but less frequently explicates. Whitehead can help us see that individuality presupposes community—indeed, multiple communities nested within each other—though not in any reductive sense. We are individuals in and through the ties with others that constitute us—and vice versa—and in relationship with whom we construct and express our spiritualities.

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The third issue involves how we are to understand the rhythmic character of reasoning and relating—of seeing how contrasting things complement one another. Palmer relies exclusively upon the concept of “paradox” to explicate the relationship of opposites such as objective and subjective, or individual and community. I suggest that Whitehead’s thought allows a richer approach to this relationship, and offers the concept of inclusiveness as well. The aim of this essay is to follow Palmer’s lead, not to replace it. Palmer offers the educational community a concrete, thoughtful appraisal of its habits and hopes—of its practices that constrain and of those that liberate. More explicit attention to a relational metaphysical undergirding for Palmer’s appraisal can reinforce and extend the greater community to which he invites us. At the same time, Palmer’s rich description of the fabric of contemporary higher education helps to illustrate what otherwise can be distant and abstract Whiteheadian principles. 2. Objectivism and Cultures of Fear Palmer is unusually forthright in describing the dominant ethos of higher education. Our academic culture embodies the suffering that excessively privatized lives create for themselves—the kind of suffering that involves what Palmer calls “the pain of disconnection.” (Elsewhere in this book, several essays— including those by Evans and by Fleener and Reeder—also comment on elements of educational disconnection.) Palmer characterizes this pain as “a sense on the part of faculty of being detached from students, from colleagues, from their own institutional vocation and the passions that originally animated it” (1992a, p. 3). Instead of belonging to the community of scholars they thought they were joining, academics “find themselves in distant, competitive, and uncaring relationships with colleagues and students” (1998, pp. 20–21). Surely, Palmer speaks for many academics. For instance, Julius Getman, a senior law professor whose career spans appointments at three major research universities, writes of having entered academic life expecting that “universities provided an opportunity for caring relations, a sense of community, an atmosphere in which ideas were shared and refined, an egalitarian ethic, and a style of life that would permit time for family, friends, and self-expression.” Instead, he found that hierarchy and competition dominated, teaching and scholarship often seemed distant from the concerns of humanity, the marks of professional accomplishment were persistently elusive, and the personal meaning and satisfaction he had sought were often beyond his grasp (Getman, 1992, p. ix). All too often, primary and secondary teachers experience similar disappointments. Multiple factors are involved. Although Palmer does not dwell on economic considerations, we know the apprehensions that the uncertainty of institutional enrollments, legislative appropriations, and property tax support create. Who can be confident that today’s job will really be there tomorrow? We also

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know that traditional institutions find themselves in increasing competition with business and military providers of education—and with rapidly proliferating for-profit institutions and subsidiaries. Periodic proposals for voucher systems at the secondary level create the same apprehensions. These external economic challenges introduce anxiety and insecurity in what many educators had initially hoped would be a setting removed from the pressures of organizational competition, cutbacks, and downsizing. Caring for others recedes, replaced by an underlying self-preoccupation with one’s future. Adding to this overall setting, and claiming a good part of Palmer’s attention, is the all too pervasive competition within institutions, notably between and among colleagues—competition for such things as promotions and salary increases, or for personal standing in the school, campus, or discipline. These widespread, anxiety-generating competitions join with the numbing effects of routine and bureaucracy to dull the original passions that energized us when we first entered our educational careers. Exacerbating these pains of disconnection are the growing fragmentation that cultural pluralism seems to introduce within institutions at all levels of education, the widening disciplinary and age spreads that appear among teachers and faculty, and “the pain that comes from the generational rift in our society. . . . our general neglect of the young” (1992a, p. 4). Most of us are also troubled by recent increases in the public scrutiny and criticisms of primary, secondary, and higher education, mandates for improved outcomes and calls for national standards, and cutbacks in public funding and support. Underlying these pains of disconnection, Palmer insists, is the widespread presence of fear. “The teaching and learning enterprise in our society is riddled with fear. Fear, not ignorance, is the enemy of learning, and it is fear that gives ignorance its power” (1992c, p. 2). Throughout all levels of education there “is fear of exposure, of appearing ignorant, of being ridiculed” (1997, p. 25). In the academy especially, intimidation and fear pervade huge chunks of the enterprise—students, faculty, classrooms, and administrative structures. The expense is significant. “As a teacher, I am at my worst when fear takes the lead in me, whether that means teaching in fear of my students or manipulating their fears of me. Our relations as faculty colleagues are often diminished by fear; fear is nearly universal in the relations of faculty and administration” (1998, p. 36). Palmer is calling our attention to two points: fear pervades the lives of students, teachers, faculty, and administrators; and, reflecting an absence of authentic community, this fear is rooted in what he calls objectivism. Objectivism is Palmer’s term for epistemologies that emphasize a neutral stance toward knowing. These are theories claiming that for us to be selfconsciously responsible knowers we must keep the objects of our knowledge “at arm’s length,” disconnecting them physically and emotionally from ourselves. The goal of objectivism is to protect the purity of reason and knowledge from the messiness of subjectivity—from the multiple personal attachments


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that create individual prejudices and bias. The dominant way of knowing in education, “objectivism is the primary intellectual commitment of Western culture. It is a commitment to the notion that we cannot know anything truly and well unless we know it from such a distance that the ‘object’ of knowledge remains uncontaminated by our own subjectivity.” This is so “whether that ‘object’ be a piece of literature, nature, history, or human nature” (1992c, p. 3). Objectivism is a fearful way of knowing because it is driven by the everpresent need for sufficient power. Instead of the attractions of the romantic stage in the rhythm of learning to which others in this book have drawn our attention, objectivism means that we must seek power in order to remain in control, to avoid being challenged—possibly even changed—by the objects of our knowledge. Yet power is forever contestable; once in its grip we can only be fearful that we do not, or may not, have enough. Then the other can threaten our version of truth and goodness—the version with which we identify personally. As we encounter and engage diverse others, this fear of change paralyzes us when we contemplate having to surrender our trusted ways. Drawing the wagons ever tighter, we stagnate in the small circle of our own truths, in the “certainties” of our inner privateness. We cannot permit the world we study to have an internal relation to us, an interior connection with who we are. We cannot allow it to compel changes in our self-understandings and lives. The result is what I call a spirituality of insistent individualism. As the essays by Foster Walker, Pete A. Y. Gunter, and others show, allowing romance its proper place changes this dreary situation. Honoring the importance of romance in both teaching and learning reinforces the role of hospitality and openness to the new and the different in situations of learning. The intensity of romance generates the excitement and aliveness of experienced learning, bridging the gap between play and work—or that between personal and professional—that our society often creates. Romance substitutes wonder for fear, desire for apprehension—all in the service of making sense of things, of supporting a spirituality of purposiveness. However, the conflict that competition generates interferes with the unfolding of the stages of the natural pattern of learning, leading instead to premature, or even exclusive, concentration on abstract elements of precision at the expense of romance or generalization. Motivation to learn suffers, often replaced by boredom or discouragement. A pernicious epistemology, objectivism requires that we understand reality as disconnected. It portrays an atomistic world—one in which things and actions are essentially unconnected. Because our implicit metaphysics is atomistic in character, we see others as objects of indifference—or even as opponents—instead of as valuable members of potential communities. Because our world is fundamentally fragmented, we conclude that our selfishness and our pursuit of controlling power are warranted. Because we dwell in objectivism, we decide to seek domination of others and use them to pursue our own narrowly-defined ends. All too often we find ourselves exhausted by the competi-

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tions and external demands that objectivist understandings create at all levels of education. Passive students and aloof teachers are part of the considerable price for this restricted concept of reason and the metaphysics it presupposes. Dwelling in this studied “neutrality” of objectivism reduces our capacity to experience wonderment and surprise. It deprives us of the richness of others’ experiences. “It creates a specific spiritual pathology that diminishes our ability to know, to teach, to learn” (Palmer, 1998, p. 112). Ironically, it also diminishes the integrity that others and the things we know can provide—it curtails their ability as transcendent objects to refuse to be reduced to our claims about them, their power to correct our misperceptions and misunderstandings. Additionally, in separating our subjectivity as knowers from the known, objectivism also separates the known from our inner lives. As knowers we are only spectators of a world “out there”—one in which we do not live in any significant, personal sense. The objects in which we place our trust and to which we are loyal become ultimately self-referential and self-oriented—and they fail to enrich us. The other becomes simply another version of ourselves. Palmer reminds us that the remedy for objectivism is not to embrace an unfettered subjectivism. We want for our students and ourselves “a way of knowing that gives us the power to survive in the world.” We must be realistic. Yet, “we also need a way of knowing that gives the world the power to survive by transforming our lives” (1992c, p. 3). Palmer’s criticism of objectivism is a broad one, pointing to the importance of the connectedness of nature and the world, pointing also to the ecology of the classroom and the laboratory. For objectivism is not simply an intellectual mistake—something without practical consequences. As Palmer argues, epistemologies generate ethics. They influence our identities and the relationships we form. Through our “modes of knowing, . . . we shape souls by the shape of our knowledge.” Our modes of knowing become our ways of achieving and being—and the ways we recommend to our students. “Every epistemology tends to become an ethic . . . every way of knowing tends to become a way of living. . . . every mode of knowing contains its own moral trajectory, its own ethical direction and outcomes” (1987, p. 22). As an epistemology, objectivism spawns and highlights controlling behaviors. It lures us into unattractive competitions with colleagues—sometimes even with our own students—where our goal is victory over the other instead of mutual support and understanding. It promotes an ethic of competitive individualism and a spirituality of self-preoccupation. Pedagogies follow the same logic. Teaching becomes one-dimensional—a one-directional transmission of facts and authorized knowledge where the vulnerability of the teacher is replaced by the controlling power of the expert. Assessment becomes quantitative, ignoring the complexity of our times, the nature of reasoning, and the values and virtues we should promote. Students are poorly served by teaching philosophies and behaviors that emphasize facts and control. These pedagogies


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generate separateness instead of connection, control instead of reception, boredom instead of excitement, fatigue instead of energy, and fear instead of trust. They reflect and support spiritualities of isolation (and an impossible selfreliance) instead of openness and connection. Lives of Students. Education’s cultures of fear are reflected in the lives of our students. We easily dismiss students as passive and uninterested in learning, lacking motivation, and having short attention spans, no skills in conversation or teamwork, and sadly truncated concepts of relevance. Educators can regularly fall into creative, imaginative descriptions of how extensively deformed their students are, energetically debating whose are really the most sullen and uneducable (Bennett and Dreyer, 1994). In all of this, however, we retain the upper hand. Grades and other uses of the fear of failure are available to reinforce our control. As Palmer notes, matters then become self-fulfilling. “Nothing is easier than to slip into a low opinion of students, and that opinion creates teaching practices guaranteed to induce vegetative states even in students who arrive for class alive and well” (1993, p. 11). The truth, as Palmer sees it, is that students are often passive in class because they feel marginalized. Their unique experiences and talents are not engaged, often not credited or recognized by their teachers and faculty— sometimes not even by themselves. Appearances of student passivity and ignorance can therefore be misleading. Students have internalized their rejection, and so educators often do not recognize the level of fear with which they live. Our students are silent and even sullen, not because they are brain-dead but because they are filled with the same fear that has always haunted marginal people. It is the fear of having one’s voice denied once again, the fear of speaking one’s truth only to hear it called false, the deep down fear that perhaps it is true that one has ‘nothing of value to say.’ (1992c, p. 4) Lives of Educators. The culture of fear is embedded in the lives and hearts of teachers and faculty, not simply in our objectivist modes of knowing. Most obvious is the fear of revealing our fear to others—to colleagues or students. Ironically, this collective fear among educators generates a conspiracy of silence about the obvious. “Everyone who teaches knows that fear abounds in the profession—from the fear of not knowing the answer, to the fear of losing control, to the fear of never knowing whether one’s work has made a difference” (Palmer, 1992c, p. 5). However, instead of talking honestly with colleagues about our fears, we often prefer our privatized and isolated lives. Instead of seeing colleagues as sources of help and companionship, teachers and faculty committed to objectivism view them as potential challengers and threats. As a result, “we have a hard time talking to each other without falling into competi-

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tion and even combat, into an unconscious rhythm of defense and offense that allows for little openness and growth” (Palmer, 1993, p. 13). Instead of risk vulnerability by reaching out to help our students, we often protect ourselves by launching the preemptive strike. We grow a “shell of selfprotection” and declare our students “intellectually and morally bankrupt.” We mistake student fears for their disdain of us. “We cannot see the fears that haunt our students because we ourselves are haunted by the fear that our students have rejected us” (Palmer, 1992b, p. 11). Citing Erik Erickson’s distinction between generativity and stagnation, Palmer notes that “stagnation is the major occupational hazard of teaching.” It is evident in cynicism about students— cynicism that offers a measure of self-protection against the pain and hurt that students’ apparent indifference to our best teaching can bring. “Stagnation is the state chosen by teachers who are so threatened by students that they barricade themselves behind their credentials, their podiums, their status, their research”—ironically thereby reflecting and augmenting “the disengagement of the students these teachers fear” (1998, p. 48). This fear of the young exacts a steep price—“a mortal self-inflicted wound to one’s heart; cynicism cuts one off from the great cycle of renewal that goes on between the generations” (1992c, p. 5). It inevitably leaves us unfulfilled, disconnected from the ancient satisfactions of helping the young and less experienced. In sum, objectivism permits us to hold the objects of our knowledge at a distance and dissect them, analyzing them into component pieces. It is coldly instrumental in that it permits us to manipulate these objects and pieces, and rearrange them into patterns that serve our desire to control and to shape the world into more pleasing images and forms. It divorces our knowledge from our personal, subjective lives. These traits of objectivism become traits of an ethic: “an ethic of competitive individualism, in the midst of a world fragmented and made exploitable by that very mode of knowing. The mode of knowing itself breeds intellectual habits, indeed spiritual instincts, that destroy community. We make objects of each other and the world to be manipulated for our own private ends” (Palmer, 1987, p. 22). This, Palmer laments, is the spirituality that higher education often unwittingly promotes. 3. Community Palmer’s suggestions for a healthy educational spirituality center on our constructive relationships with others, not on our control over them. Understanding knowledge as involving relationship highlights the community among knowers and between knowers and known. It stresses the importance of mutuality and reciprocity within each community of learners. It involves a spirituality that values the invitation to change that attending to and caring for others involves, not the inoculation against inner change or challenge that insistent individualism provides.


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Objectivism is destructive of community by presenting a misleading picture of selves and of how we know. Objectivism presents selves as independent of each other, atoms of self-sufficiency dwelling in separateness. Reason is reduced solely to instrumental calculation and “the intuitive is derided as irrational, true feeling is dismissed as sentimental, the imagination is seen as chaotic and unruly, and storytelling is labeled as personal and pointless” (Palmer, 1998, p. 52). However widespread the rugged individualism of objectivism, our knowing is a complex relational process and involves far more than an egocentric, self-serving instrumentalism. As the other authors in this volume have argued, what Palmer calls objectivism runs counter to our deepest intuitions about our ultimate situation—that no matter how solitary and individualistic our selves, we live only in and through our relations with others. The kind of community most appropriate for schools, colleges, and universities advances the good of individuals as well as the overall educational mission and its objectives—the preservation, diffusion, and generation of knowledge. Educational community is different from other forms of togetherness. Palmer distinguishes it from therapeutic, civic, and marketing models of community, with their respective values of psychological intimacy, public mutuality, and customer-determined satisfactions. Each of the three has merit and contributes to a model of educational community, but none is adequate by itself or even in union with the other two. The therapeutic community holds that intimacy with the other is the highest value, the best thing for overcoming disconnection. But intimacy is fragile and rare. We cannot demand it. If we judge our relationships by this norm, they fall off to a handful and we lose our capacity for connection with the different and the stranger. By contrast, the civic model of community stresses common territory and shared resources, and our need to resolve public conflicts in order to maintain a healthy body politic. But this model also lacks a key educational feature. It determines truth through negotiation and compromise, but education cannot determine truth by majority vote. Likewise, the marketing model reminds us of the importance of attending with courtesy and civility to the other, but it is flawed by overlooking that the learner is more than a customer. Unlike these three models, educational community more adequately reflects basic assumptions about ontology and how we know reality. In our modes of knowing, Palmer steadfastly affirms, “our powers for forming or deforming human consciousness are to be found . . . it is here . . . that we shape souls by the shape of our knowledge” (1987, p. 22). The antidote to the “culture of fear” is educational community, understood to be a mutual vision of the educational life as epistemologically collaborative. Mary Elizabeth Moore’s essay illustrates this point engagingly. This kind of community—this togetherness of faculty members and of teachers, and of faculty, teachers, and students—occurs only when we treat others with respect instead of fear. It involves and flows from the openness in sharing and receiving that characterizes hospitality. It is

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not an artifact of technique. “Good teaching can never be reduced to technique. It always flows from the identity and integrity of the teacher” (Palmer, 1992a, p. 5). Community as togetherness occurs when teachers and faculty invest more energy in listening to each other and to students than in instructing or correcting one another. Community is created when members risk vulnerability to discuss their own teaching and learning in terms of their own identity and integrity. But this kind of continuing and thoughtful conversation requires leaders who invite it, and teachers and faculty who commit to appropriate, nonjudgmental procedures that advance instead of defeat it. Through this togetherness, we recognize the reality we study (and in which we dwell) as itself relational in character. Ultimately, Palmer asserts, instead of standing over against us, the reality whose truth we pursue is one with which we are already in relationship—one of creative advance. 4. Hidden Wholeness Quoting Thomas Merton, Palmer speaks of a hidden wholeness around us. In our individualistic age, we do not easily sense this underlying and connecting wholeness or our role in advancing it. Part of our inability reflects the grip of atomistic instead of relational frames of thought. These atomistic concepts of reality seep into our notions of reason, of ethics, and of spirituality. Reason becomes solely a matter of appraising the means-ends dimensions of things, ethics focuses on calculating individual advantage instead of the good life or the common good, and spirituality becomes simple self-preoccupation. Our ways of thinking let us down. The underlying problem, as Palmer observes, is that “the concept of self in Western culture does not emphasize a capacity for connectedness. For us, the self is a fierce and lonely thing, an atom, free-floating and self-governing, characterized by autonomy, but also by isolation” (1994, p. 2). Combat and defense in teaching and living become the norm and “we stop seeing them as the pathologies they are” (ibid.). The truth, however, is that the self is relational, not independent. As Whitehead helps us see, personal identity is a highly contextual nexus constituted by others to whom one in turn contributes. We are deeply interdependent. And the pursuit of truth is equally relational. “The hallmark of the community of truth is in its claim that reality is a web of communal relationships, and we can know reality only by being in community with it” (Palmer, 1998, p. 95; italics deleted). This, of course, is a metaphysical claim— an assertion about how things are. Palmer is telling us that the real world is one of wholeness, not fragmentation. Reality is connected; our experiences of separateness and isolation are not the whole story. Educational theory and practice need to reflect this reality. We need to integrate our minds and our hearts. The way out of disconnection and destructive individualism requires the self-knowledge that comes only


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through attending to one’s inner life. “Teaching, like any other truly human activity, emerges from one’s inwardness, for better or worse. As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together” (Palmer, 1998, p. 2). Decoding our own fears is necessary in order to understand the fears of others. For how we relate to others (students, colleagues, subject, and world) reflects the quality of our selfhood. Far from being academic in the pejorative sense, “the most practical thing we can achieve in any kind of work is insight into what is happening inside us as we do it” (ibid. p. 5). This is why the identity and integrity of the teacher are far more important than pedagogical technique. Above everything else, teaching is a connective activity. “To teach is to weave a community of relationships between my students, my subject and myself, to the end that students will develop their own capacity for connectedness” (Palmer, 1994, pp. 1–2). As the image suggests, weavers have major responsibilities. We must envision, display, and effect the relational connections—and do so in arid classroom moments as much as in fertile ones. Part of weaving the connections involves showing why they matter, the differences they personally make to us and the internal impact they properly have. But we often do this weaving defensively and protectively, not openly—and we ignore or hide the importance to us of our students and colleagues. “Community in the classroom cannot happen when power runs only one way, so if we want learning communities we must help students understand the power they possess” (ibid., p. 3). Likewise, colleagues possess “a deep reservoir of insight about teaching and learning” (Palmer, 1993, p. 8). Too often, though, we do not tap that reservoir because we privatize teaching. Relational metaphysics reminds us that the most productive, because the most basic, framework for understanding self and world portrays reality as a vast web of connectivity. It is a wholeness we uncover only in working toward it. In and through this web, we as individuals receive energy and influence from others, select and harmonize the influence we admit, and in doing so decide how we will contribute to the actuality of others. In Bernard Loomer’s aphorism: “we are at once communal and solitary individuals. But the solitariness of individuality is lived out only in the midst of constitutive relationships” (1976, p. 20). 5. Paradoxes I turn now to the third issue. The culture of disconnection that Palmer deplores is driven not only by fear but also by our habit of thinking in dualisms and polarities, in terms of either/or. This educational penchant for either/or thinking elevates separation; it celebrates analysis and fragmentation at the expense of unity and wholeness. It undermines the connectedness essential to good teaching and learning. Palmer chooses the term “paradox” to describe thinking of the

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world in terms of both/and. He argues that we need to embrace paradox—to acknowledge that we must attend to both complementary opposites, be they opposites such as subjective and objective, or those of personal and professional. This need is particularly the case with “profound” instead of empirical truths—those truths that involve the “perennial problems of being human” (1998, p. 62). Instead of being mutually exclusive, poles of a paradox point to a richer and more complex understanding. Life is not neatly compartmentalized. Heart and head belong together despite our “trained incapacity to see [them] work as one in our students and in ourselves” (Palmer, 1998, p. 64). When we teach and learn, “the subjective and the objective are intermingled. The personal and the professional are all wound up with each other. The emotional and the cognitive intertwine, and you can’t get people to think well without attention to the feelings that block—and animate—good thinking” (Palmer, 1992a, p. 6). What Palmer calls opposites are certainly intermingled and intertwined. We cannot live with only one part of each set. “The poles of a paradox are like the poles of a battery: hold them together, and they generate the energy of life; pull them apart, and the current stops flowing” (1998, p. 65). But Palmer uses “paradox” as an all-inclusive category and thereby risks diminishing its power and obscuring his argument. We can distinguish several different ways he uses the term. The components of one type, what Palmer terms the “profound paired truths of our lives” (ibid.). are indeed inseparable, such as his example of breathing in and out. To be whole, breathing requires both inhaling and exhaling. Somewhat similar examples are “action and rest, thought and feeling, tears and laughter [as] intimate and inseparable companions” (ibid., p. 64). In these cases, “paradox” is used to designate a wide universe of complementary activities—activities that can be discriminated into sequential components, each pointing to the other and requiring it. Another use of paradox is to delineate conceptual or definitional requirements of an entity or thing instead of an activity. For instance, Palmer suggests that the space for teaching and learning must be both bounded and open. He notes that “space without boundaries is not space, it is a chaotic void,” and yet he also observes that “for a space to be a space, it must be open as well as bounded” (1998, p. 74). Sometimes he has in mind the creative and tensive effect of paradox: “Paradox is another name for that tension, a way of holding opposites together that creates an electric charge that keeps us awake” (ibid.). At other times what he has in mind is better called a dialectic than a paradox. The relations between solitude and community are an example. But the more accurate description is probably that of inclusiveness. In descriptions of the fundamental educational setting, the category of inclusiveness works better than paradox to convey what is at stake. For example, our lifeworld as broadly construed is the context from within which we select those elements we choose to constitute our educational, personal, and profes-


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sional lives. It provides the broader background of covenantal relationships with each other from which we abstract those components that define the limited social contracts we construct with each other. Our lifeworld is the context out of which we often emphasize elements of objectivity while forgetting that these elements are but selective abstractions—and in forgetting, generate the dysfunctionalities that Palmer associates with objectivism. The root problem is an inadequate understanding—an inadequate metaphysics—which needs to be replaced. Objectivism is a partial abstraction from a whole that is more faithfully envisioned as through and through relational. Two conflicting epistemologies (and the ontologies they reflect) do not need somehow to be simultaneously affirmed in the tension of a paradox. One vision is more accurate than the other—more comprehensive in its description of reality and more faithful to our deepest intuitions. The other vision, objectivism, has its uses, but they are limited, and its overall standing must be seen as a selective abstraction that has come to masquerade as the whole. When we forget its partial and limited standing. we fall into error and fear and our spiritualities fail to fulfill. The answer is not to affirm a paradox, but rather to recognize an abstraction as an abstraction. For that reason, philosophical resources like those provided by Whitehead seem to provide a better route forward. The concept of inclusiveness also provides us a better way to understand the “hidden wholeness” to which Palmer refers. The hidden wholeness is the intricately connected and integrated world in which we dwell, the complex common good of which we contribute and from which we select—often forgetting in the process the broader context from which we have abstracted. Whitehead calls this forgetting the fallacy of misplaced concreteness—the fallacy of mistaking for concrete and complete what is only an abstraction. Palmer points in this direction, but his concepts do not serve him well. In sum, the educational values Palmer rightly honors are better protected by reflecting on our educational philosophies than by seeing the values as complementary opposites in a paradox. Using paradox in this inclusive sense risks trivializing its power. The challenge before us is to see our daily lives as including our professional work, the social contracts we negotiate with each other, and the limited epistemologies we construct for specific purposes—not to see them as poles of opposites that we must hold in balance. Since our daily lifeworlds are the inclusive context, our task is to construct and then dwell in healthier spiritualities, in ways of thinking and living that convert the contraries and oppositions that Palmer calls paradoxes into the broader frameworks that remind us of the fundamental relatedness and community we always already can enjoy—and that enable us to celebrate and extend, not ignore, them. As Palmer implies, the issue is pragmatic in that ultimately we are unable to live within the structures created by objectivism. The culture of fear is a natural reaction to a setting saturated with a faulty philosophy—however familiar and however accustomed we have become to coping with it. In that sense,

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embracing paradox is a healthy response to objectivism. We cannot live only with objectivism. However, instead of affirming the paradox of individuality and community, a better route is to see the self as emergent from community while also contributing to it. In short, the paradigm of inclusiveness instead of the paradigm of paradox (or continuum) has advantages. It provides clarity but retains differential structures of value. Objectivism has value, but only in a limited fashion. 6. Conclusion The traditions of education can continue to serve us—but they do so best when we choose ways of understanding and behaving that acknowledge both our individuality and our deep connectedness with one another, and with the world. As always, educators need to promote the ability of all learners to find and use their own voices—not to mimic the teacher’s voice or language but to discover and create their own relevant experiences and ideas. And this is best done through attending to others and conversing with them. The inadequacies of what Palmer calls objectivism and what various authors in this book have called linear thinking, habits and activities that fragment and separate instead of connect, and teaching behaviors that ignore or abuse the natural rhythms of learning and living—these routines and practices serve us poorly. They reflect and generate spiritualities that fail to satisfy and fulfill, and that take us in the wrong direction in a time of increasing social and global complexity. The expense of continuing to dwell in them becomes clearer each day. It is an expense we need not incur when better alternatives are available. WORKS CITED Bennett, John B. and Elizabeth A. Dreyer. (1994) “On Complaining about Students,” AAHE Bulletin, 46.8 (April), pp. 7–8. Getman, Julius. (1992) In the Company of Scholars: The Struggle for the Soul of Higher Education. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press. Loomer, Bernard. (1976) “Two Kinds of Power,” Process Studies, 6.1 (Spring), pp. 5– 32. Palmer, Parker. J. (1987) “Community, Conflict, and Ways of Knowing,” Change, 19.5 (September/October), pp. 20–25. ———. (1992a) “Community and Commitment in Higher Education: An Interview with Russell Edgerton,” AAHE Bulletin, 45.1 (September) pp. 3–7. ———. (1992b) “Divided No More: A Movement Approach to Educational Reform,” Change, 24.2 (March/April) pp. 10–17. ———. (1992c) “Reflections on a Program for the Formation of Teachers,” Occasional Paper. Kalamazoo, Mich.: The Fetzer Institute. ———. (1993) “Good Talk about Good Teaching: Improving Teaching through Conversation and Community,” Change, 25.6 (November/December) pp. 8–13.


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Parker, Palmer J. (1994) “The Loom of Teaching,” National Teaching and Learning Forum, 3.3. pp. 1–3. ———. (1997) “The Grace of Great Things: Reclaiming the Sacred in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning,” The Holistic Education Review, 10.3 (September) pp. 8–16. ———. (1998) The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998. ———. (2000) Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS GEORGE ALLAN is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Dickinson College. After receiving a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale, he was a member of the Dickinson College faculty from 1963 to 1996, and was academic dean from 1974 to 1995. He typically taught courses in ethics, social philosophy, American philosophy, and metaphysics. He used to participate regularly in an interdisciplinary humanities general education program, and more recently has taught Freshman Seminars on ethical dilemmas. He is a former president of the Association for Process Philosophy of Education and editor of its journal, Process Papers. Allan has published three books exploring the ontological foundations for social value, and two books on philosophical and educational issues regarding the liberal arts: Rethinking College Education, 1997, and Higher Education in the Making: Pragmatism, Whitehead, and the Canon, 2004. He has published numerous articles in metaphysics, social philosophy, philosophy of history, education, and philosophy of education, usually from a process or pragmatic perspective. JOHN B. BENNETT is Provost Emeritus at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. His scholarly interests include issues in academic ethics, administration and leadership, philosophy of education, and philosophy of religion. Although now retired, he taught a variety of courses over the years on introductory philosophy, ancient and modern philosophy, philosophy of religion, applied ethics and ethical theory, and world religions. He has written extensively on a collegial ethic that emphasizes the centrality to education of practicing hospitality. This concern is reflected in his recent books Collegial Professionalism: The Academy, Individualism, and the Common Good, 1998, and Academic Life: Hospitality, Ethics, and Spirituality, 2003. Bennett’s career encompassed work at four other institutions of higher education. He has published numerous essays and four other books. <[email protected]> CHRISTELLE ESTRADA is Director of Professional Development Services in the Salt Lake City School District, working with teams of colleagues across district departments to create the conditions for site-specific, practice-based learning experiences in response to adult learning needs. Estrada has been a member of the National School Reform Faculty since 1995 and has been involved in the design and co-facilitation of institutes and seminars on professional learning communities and facilitative leadership throughout the country. She received her Ph.D. in Education and Religion from Claremont Graduate University. After receiving her doctorate, Estrada co-founded a school-within-a school at Pasadena High School, The Center for Independent Studies, for students throughout the district who had not been successful on regular urban high school campuses. She is currently the President of the Utah Staff Development Council and teaches a Secondary Methods course at the University of Utah.

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She was the principal author, with the Annenberg Senior Research Fellows, of "Title I Re-authorization" published on the Annenberg Institute website, and has published frequently in Process Papers. MALCOLM D. EVANS, a public school teacher and administrator for thirty-six years, advocates the educational theory and process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Since 1973 he has brought to the attention of practitioners and theorists the educational implications of Whiteheadian process philosophy. He was instrumental in bringing the Anisa Model of Education, an early childhood program based on Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, into the public schools of Suffield, Connecticut. A founding trustee of the Association for Process Philosophy of Education, Evans served as Executive Director of that organization from 1987–2000. His essays on Whitehead and education have been published in Process Perspectives, Process Papers, and English Quarterly. He has made several presentations at educational and philosophical conferences, and is the author of Whitehead and Philosophy of Education: The Seamless Coat of Learning, 1998. <[email protected]> M. JAYNE FLEENER is the E. B. “Ted” Robert Professor and Dean of the College of Education at Louisiana State University. Her teaching and research have been in the areas of philosophy, computer science, mathematics, mathematics education, gender issues in STEM fields, and curriculum theory. She has served as the Chair of the Chaos and Complexity Theories Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association, participates on several advisory and editorial boards, and has served as PI/PD or co-PI on several US Department of Education, NSF, and private foundation grants. Fleener has taught mathematics and computer science at the pre-collegiate level in North Carolina, including teaching computer programming for the Duke University Talent Identification Program. Her recent books are Curriculum Dynamics: Recreating Heart, 2002, and Chaos, Complexity, Curriculum, and Culture: A Conversation (edited with Doll, Trueit, and St. Julien), currently in press. WILLIAM J. GARLAND is professor of philosophy at The University of the South, a small liberal arts college in Sewanee, Tennessee. After receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy from Johns Hopkins, he taught philosophy at Indiana University from 1966 until 1968. He has been at The University of the South since 1968 and was chair of the philosophy department from 1979–1989. His intellectual interests include traditional metaphysics, American philosophy, value theory, and (more recently) virtue ethics and business ethics. Undergraduate courses he normally teaches include ethics, introduction to logic, contemporary moral issues, business ethics, metaphysics, American philosophy, and nineteenth-century philosophy. Garland has published articles on Plato, White-

About the Contributors

187

head's metaphysics, the ethics of care, and Richard Rorty's philosophy of selfcreation and human solidarity. He is currently doing research on trust and trustworthiness in the business community. PETE A.Y. GUNTER is president of the Association for Process Philosophy of Education. A lifelong environmentalist, he has written widely on ecology and education, often in relation to the process philosophies of Henri Bergson and of Alfred North Whitehead. Professor Gunter's teaching has concentrated on the philosophy of natural science, the philosophy of art, and environmental ethics. He is best known for his books on Bergson's philosophy of science and philosophy of nature, Bergson and The Evolution of Physics, 1969, and Bergson and Modern Thought, 1987. MARY ELIZABETH MULLINO MOORE is Professor of Religion and Education and Director of Women in Theology and Ministry, Candler School of Theology, Emory University. She sees her primary work as contributing her small part to the repair of the world (tikkun olam). Moore’s books include Covenant and Call, Ministering with the Earth, Teaching from the Heart, and Education for Continuity and Change. She has also written many articles on religious education, process and feminist theologies, and justice and reconciliation. Moore is a former Director of the Center for Process Studies, Claremont, California, and presently serves on the Editorial Board of Process Studies and the Board of the Association for Process Philosophy of Education. <[email protected]> STACY REEDER is Assistant Professor of Mathematic Education at Oklahoma State University. While her primary interest is middle-level mathematics education, she teaches elementary/intermediate and secondary mathematics methods courses and is involved with pre-service teacher practicum supervision. She currently works with both in-service and pre-service teachers toward transformation of their mathematics understanding and a new vision of mathematics learning and teaching. Reeder’s publications have focused on emergent mathematics curriculum and the evolution of mathematics teachers' pedagogic practices. DANIEL ROYER is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. He taught high school for eight years in Kansas, and later earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Kansas. He is the managing editor of Process Studies and of Process Papers. His most recent publications involve the use of process and pragmatist principles to develop new practices for placement of students in university first-year writing programs. He teaches courses in workplace writ-

188

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

ing, writing in electronic environments, and document production and design. He lives with his wife and son in Grand Rapids, Michigan. FOSTER WALKER has been a school teacher in Britain and Canada, and a Canadian university professor of philosophy and philosophy of education. He has been involved in the education of teachers and their practicum supervision, and published many articles on educational theory and practice. He is author of Enjoyment and the Activity of Mind: Dialogues on Whitehead and Education, has published articles on Whitehead’s general philosophy and theory of education, and introduced university teachers to the application of Whitehead¹s rhythmic approach to development and learning. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, is a sessional lecturer in philosophy at the University of Calgary, is founder of the Calgary Dialogue Group, teaches philosophy of classical yoga to yoga teachers in training, and co-facilitates The Circle, a philosophical self-inquiry group for young people. <[email protected]>

INDEX actual occasions (Whitehead), 66, 78, 79. 125, 158 Allan, George, 1–15, 20, 27–42, 123, 169 amateurs, 93 Applebee, Arthur N., 142 apprentices, 93 Arendt, Hannah, 139 Aristotle, 34, 67, 75, 88, 135 art of life (Whitehead), 127, 155, 157, 161, 166 assessment, 174 Association for Process Philosophy of Education, 15 Aurelius, Marcus, 135 Badger, Waylon, 110–11 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 63, 67 Bateson, Gregory, 20 becoming, 17–18 Benedict of Nursia 122 Benedictine monks, 58 Bennett, John C., 21, 22, 125, 169–182 Bentham, Jeremy, 28, 29 Bergson, Henri, 14–15 Big Thicket Natural Area, 84–85 Birch, Charles, 23–24 Bohm, David, 55 Britton, James, 62 Brumbaugh, Robert S., 22–23, 87, 96–97, 99 Bruner, Jerome, 163 Buber, Martin, 53, 55, 133 Buddhism, 125, 135 Burbules, Nicholas, 159–61 Bush, George W. 137 change of aspect, 144–53 charter schools 1–2 Chartres Cathedral, 137 Chicago Wilderness, 84–85 Cobb, John Jr., 135 collaboration c. by students, 52–53, 128–32 c. by teachers, 122–25, 132 common good, 8–11, 134, 156, 161, 170, 178

Commoner, Barry, 84 community, 113–14, 136, 161, 170, 172, 176–78, 178, 181 connectedness, 20–21, 115, 179 creativity (Whitehead), 18–20 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 18, 88–94, 100, 102, 125 Cuba travel seminar, 105–10, 113, 114, 116–17, 118 culture of fear, 171–76 Davis, Brent, et al, 152 democracy, 137, 157 Descartes, René, 22, 23, 77, 135 Dewey, John, 14–15, 65, 116, 141 dialogue, 50–52 dialogue-journals, 52–54 disconnection, 171–76, 178, 179–80 ecological philosophy of nature (Whitehead), 75–80 education collaborative e., 137 environmental e., 75–85 moral e., 27–42 reform of e., 1–3 relational e., 103, 115–16 Eisley, Loren, 41 El Oro Way Elementary School, 113–14, 115, 117, 118 Elm Fork Education Center, 82–3, 85 emotions, 21–23, 44–45, 108 English Language Learners, 128–31, 133, 134 environmentalism, 114–16 Estrada, Christelle, 19, 22, 121–140 ethics, 27, 169, 178 competitive individualistic e. 174 egalitarian e., 1791 hedonistic e., 28–29, 32, 42 law–based e., 28–29, 31 process e., 30–33, 123 Evans, Malcolm, 1–15, 17–25, 155–169, 171 experts, 93

190 fallacies (Whitehead) f. of misplaced concreteness 30, 181 f. of simple location, 30 fallibilism, 160 feelings. See emotions Findlay, John N., 75 Fleener, M. Jayne, 18, 141–154, 171 flow experiences, 18, 88–93, 95–96, 99, 100, 102, 125–26, 153 Foundation for Critical Thinking, 162, 163 Freedman, Aviva, 64 Freire, Paulo, 50, 55 Galileo Galilei, 143 Garland, William, 18, 87–102, 143, 153 generalization (rhythm of education), 21, 22, 43–44, 45–46, 81–82, 87, 92–93, 124, 127, 128, 173 genre, 61–73 Getman, Julius, 171 Gilliland Elementary School, 82, 85 Griffin, David Ray, 61 Gunter, Pete A. Y., 20, 21, 75–86, 173 Harris, Paul, 166 Hegel, G. W. F., 75, 81, 87 hidden wholeness, 170, 178, 181 Highet, Gilbert, 158 Hopkins, Mark, 41 hospitality, 173 Hurley, Patrick, 94–96 Husserl, Edmund, 76, 143–44, 150 ideals, 38 imagination, 121, 126–28, 134, 137, 139, 145, 157, 177 inclusiveness, 180–81 inert ideas (Whitehead), 57, 142 inquiry, 51–52, 130–31, 139–40 interconnected. See connectedness International Baccalaureate Programme, 163–66 James, William, 65

INDEX Joe Duquette High School, 110–112, 114, 117, 118 journals, weekly, 97–98 judgment, 160 Kant, Immanuel,28, 29, 61 Kolb, David A., 124 Lakoff, George, 61 Langer, Susanne, 135 language games, 142–46, 147 learning disabled students, 133, 134 liberal education, 81 Locke, John, 135 Loomer, Bernard, 179 Lowe, Victor, 22 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 31, 123, 138 Manning, Juanita, 113 Maré, Patrick de, 55 mastery. See generalization Matthews, Gareth, 55 McCarthy, Bernice, 124 metaphysics, relational, 179 method, ethnogenic, 132 Miller, Carolyn, 62, 63 Mithen, Steven, 61 Moffett, James, 62 Montessori schools, 83 Moore, Mary Elizabeth, 19, 21, 22, 103–20, 177 Murdoch, Iris, 138 National Wildlife Federation, 115 Needleman, Jacob, 55–57 Newkirk, Thomas, 62 Newton, Isaac, 77, 79, 135, 143 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 125 No Child Left Behind, 121, 123, 136 novelty, 71–72, 153 objectivism, 170, 171–76, 181–82 objectivity 160 Palmer, Parker J., 125, 169–82 paradox, 171, 179–82 patterns, 96, 121, 142, 147–51. See also relationality

Index

191 Roszak, Theodore, 55 Royer, Daniel, 24, 61–73

patriotism, 37, 38 Paul, Richard, 163 Peace (Whitehead) , 33–41 peer tutor advocates, 130–31, 133 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 65 Piaget, Jean, 48, 124 Picasso, Pablo, 31–32 Plato, 158 play, 44 Post, Laurens van der, 58 Pound, Ezra, 71 practice–based professional development, 122–28, 134 pragmatic–process tradition, 65 pragmatism, 160, 181 precision (rhythm of education), 21, 22, 43, 45–46, 80–81, 83–84, 87, 92, 96, 97–98, 124, 127, 128, 173 principles (Whitehead) p. of relativity, 65–67, 72 p. of repetition, 67, 68, 69, 72–73 p. of sociability, 79 process perspective, 17–25 Pythagoras, 56

satisfaction. See generalization Scheffler, Israel, 158, 158, 162 SDCI. See student–directed class inquiry see as. See change of aspect Shaw, George Bernard, 58 Sherburne, Donald W., 19, 20 Siddhartha, Gotama, 126 Siegel, Harvey, 156 Snake River salmon, 155–56, 158, 163 Socrates 51, 55, 158 Socratic goad, 41, 42 soul murder, 58 spirituality, 169, 173–76, 178 standards, normative, 12–13 Stein, Gertrude, 127 story writing, 46–50 student authors (elementary school), 128–30, 133 student–directed class inquiry, 58–58

Radio (movie), 104–105, 118–19 rationality, 156 reason, 3–7, 15, 155–69, 169, 177, 178 reasonableness, 157, 159–61 reasoning, 96, 101, 162, 164 Reeder, Stacy, 18, 141–54, 171 Regulus (Roman general), 37 relationality, 3, 7–11, 14, 15, 18, 23– 25, 61–73, 103–20, 169–82. See also patterns repetition, 67, 68–69, 71 rhythm, 3, 11–14, 15, 84, 96, 125, 126–28, 141, 142, 147, 148, 148, 151, 171, 181 rhythm of education (Whitehead), 21, 22, 43–44, 88–82, 83–84, 87–88, 92, 100, 124, 126–27, 128, 141, 173. See also romance; precision; generalization romance (rhythm of education), 21, 21, 43–59, 80–81, 83–84, 87, 92, 97, 124, 127, 128, 173 romance of dialogue, 50–58

Talking Circle, 112 Task Force Environmental Investigations Kit, 155, 157, 158, 161, 162 teaching t. etcetera, 141–53 t. literature, 96–100, 101 t. logic, 93–96, 100, 101 t. mathematics, 141–53 t. virtue, 33–41 t. writing, 62–64, 69–73 Ten Commandments, 28–29, 31, 32, 42 tests, standardized, 40, 42, 121 thinking, 5 aesthetic t., 80, 97, 137 critical t., 6–7, 156, 157, 161–66 holistic t., 5–6, 76 logical t., 158–59 open–ended t., 125 technical t., 80 Thoreau, Henry David, 96–100, 101 vagueness, 47 value(s), 31–32, 41, 42, 75–76, 156

192 Vella, Jane, 124 virtue(s), 31–32, 33–41, 42, 160 Walker, Foster, 18, 22, 43–59, 173 Wallack, F. Bradford, 23 way of knowing, 174 Wesley’s mathematics class (middle school), 145–51, 152 Whitehead, Alfred North, 14–15, 19, 20, 22, 23–24, 44, 47, 51, 54, 58, 61, 65, 72, 77–78, 79, 80, 96, 108, 109, 112, 115, 118, 121, 125, 127, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 141, 144, 153, 170, 171, 178, 181. See also actual occasions; art of life; creativity; ecological philosophy of nature; fallacies; feelings; inert ideas; Peace; principles; rhythm of education Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 141, 142, 144– 45, 150, 152, 153 world picture (Weltbild ), 144 worldview (Weltanschauung), 144 writing instruction, 62–64

INDEX

VIBS The Value Inquiry Book Series is co-sponsored by: Adler School of Professional Psychology American Indian Philosophy Association American Maritain Association American Society for Value Inquiry Association for Process Philosophy of Education Canadian Society for Philosophical Practice Center for Bioethics, University of Turku Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Central European Pragmatist Forum Centre for Applied Ethics, Hong Kong Baptist University Centre for Cultural Research, Aarhus University Centre for Professional Ethics, University of Central Lancashire Centre for the Study of Philosophy and Religion, University College of Cape Breton Centro de Estudos em Filosofia Americana, Brazil College of Education and Allied Professions, Bowling Green State University College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology Concerned Philosophers for Peace Conference of Philosophical Societies Department of Moral and Social Philosophy, University of Helsinki Gannon University Gilson Society Haitian Studies Association Ikeda University Institute of Philosophy of the High Council of Scientific Research, Spain International Academy of Philosophy of the Principality of Liechtenstein International Association of Bioethics International Center for the Arts, Humanities, and Value Inquiry International Society for Universal Dialogue Natural Law Society Philosophical Society of Finland Philosophy Born of Struggle Association Philosophy Seminar, University of Mainz Pragmatism Archive at The Oklahoma State University R.S. Hartman Institute for Formal and Applied Axiology Research Institute, Lakeridge Health Corporation Russian Philosophical Society Society for Existential Analysis Society for Iberian and Latin-American Thought Society for the Philosophic Study of Genocide and the Holocaust Unit for Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Autonomous University of Barcelona Yves R. Simon Institute

Titles Published 1.

Noel Balzer, The Human Being as a Logical Thinker

2.

Archie J. Bahm, Axiology: The Science of Values

3.

H. P. P. (Hennie) Lötter, Justice for an Unjust Society

4. H. G. Callaway, Context for Meaning and Analysis: A Critical Study in the Philosophy of Language 5.

Benjamin S. Llamzon, A Humane Case for Moral Intuition

6. James R. Watson, Between Auschwitz and Tradition: Postmodern Reflections on the Task of Thinking. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 7. Robert S. Hartman, Freedom to Live: The Robert Hartman Story, Edited by Arthur R. Ellis. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 8.

Archie J. Bahm, Ethics: The Science of Oughtness

9. George David Miller, An Idiosyncratic Ethics; Or, the Lauramachean Ethics 10.

Joseph P. DeMarco, A Coherence Theory in Ethics

11. Frank G. Forrest, Valuemetrics‫א‬: The Science of Personal and Professional Ethics. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 12. William Gerber, The Meaning of Life: Insights of the World’s Great Thinkers 13. Richard T. Hull, Editor, A Quarter Century of Value Inquiry: Presidential Addresses of the American Society for Value Inquiry. A volume in Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies 14. William Gerber, Nuggets of Wisdom from Great Jewish Thinkers: From Biblical Times to the Present

15.

Sidney Axinn, The Logic of Hope: Extensions of Kant’s View of Religion

16.

Messay Kebede, Meaning and Development

17. Amihud Gilead, The Platonic Odyssey: A Philosophical-Literary Inquiry into the Phaedo 18. Necip Fikri Alican, Mill’s Principle of Utility: A Defense of John Stuart Mill’s Notorious Proof. A volume in Universal Justice 19.

Michael H. Mitias, Editor, Philosophy and Architecture.

20. Roger T. Simonds, Rational Individualism: The Perennial Philosophy of Legal Interpretation. A volume in Natural Law Studies 21.

William Pencak, The Conflict of Law and Justice in the Icelandic Sagas

22. Samuel M. Natale and Brian M. Rothschild, Editors, Values, Work, Education: The Meanings of Work 23. N. Georgopoulos and Michael Heim, Editors, Being Human in the Ultimate: Studies in the Thought of John M. Anderson 24. Robert Wesson and Patricia A. Williams, Editors, Evolution and Human Values 25. Wim J. van der Steen, Facts, Values, and Methodology: A New Approach to Ethics 26.

Avi Sagi and Daniel Statman, Religion and Morality

27. Albert William Levi, The High Road of Humanity: The Seven Ethical Ages of Western Man, Edited by Donald Phillip Verene and Molly Black Verene 28. Samuel M. Natale and Brian M. Rothschild, Editors, Work Values: Education, Organization, and Religious Concerns 29. Laurence F. Bove and Laura Duhan Kaplan, Editors, From the Eye of the Storm: Regional Conflicts and the Philosophy of Peace. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 30.

Robin Attfield, Value, Obligation, and Meta-Ethics

31. William Gerber, The Deepest Questions You Can Ask About God: As Answered by the World’s Great Thinkers 32.

Daniel Statman, Moral Dilemmas

33. Rem B. Edwards, Editor, Formal Axiology and Its Critics. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 34. George David Miller and Conrad P. Pritscher, On Education and Values: In Praise of Pariahs and Nomads. A volume in Philosophy of Education 35.

Paul S. Penner, Altruistic Behavior: An Inquiry into Motivation

36.

Corbin Fowler, Morality for Moderns

37. Giambattista Vico, The Art of Rhetoric (Institutiones Oratoriae, 1711– 1741), from the definitive Latin text and notes, Italian commentary and introduction byGiuliano Crifò.Translated and Edited by Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee. A volume in Values in Italian Philosophy 38. W. H. Werkmeister, Martin Heidegger on the Way. Edited by Richard T. Hull. A volume in Werkmeister Studies 39.

Phillip Stambovsky, Myth and the Limits of Reason

40. Samantha Brennan, Tracy Isaacs, and Michael Milde, Editors, A Question of Values: New Canadian Perspectives in Ethics and Political Philosophy 41. Peter A. Redpath, Cartesian Nightmare: An Introduction to Transcendental Sophistry. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 42. Clark Butler, History as the Story of Freedom: Philosophy in InterculturalContext, with responses by sixteen scholars 43.

Dennis Rohatyn, Philosophy History Sophistry

44. Leon Shaskolsky Sheleff, Social Cohesion and Legal Coercion: A Critique of Weber, Durkheim, and Marx. Afterword by Virginia Black 45. Alan Soble, Editor, Sex, Love, and Friendship: Studies of the Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love, 1977–1992. A volume in Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies

46. Peter A. Redpath, Wisdom’s Odyssey: From Philosophy to Transcendental Sophistry. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 47. Albert A. Anderson, Universal Justice: A Dialectical Approach. A volume in Universal Justice 48. Pio Colonnello, The Philosophy of José Gaos. Translated from Italian by Peter Cocozzella. Edited by Myra Moss. Introduction by Giovanni Gullace. A volume in Values in Italian Philosophy 49. Laura Duhan Kaplan and Laurence F. Bove, Editors, Philosophical Perspectives on Power and Domination: Theories and Practices. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 50.

Gregory F. Mellema, Collective Responsibility

51. Josef Seifert, What Is Life? The Originality, Irreducibility, and Value of Life. A volume in Central-European Value Studies 52.

William Gerber, Anatomy of What We Value Most

53. Armando Molina, Our Ways: Values and Character, Edited by Rem B. Edwards. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 54. Kathleen J. Wininger, Nietzsche’s Reclamation of Philosophy. A volume in Central-European Value Studies 55.

Thomas Magnell, Editor, Explorations of Value

56. HPP (Hennie) Lötter, Injustice, Violence, and Peace: The Case of South Africa. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 57. Lennart Nordenfelt, Talking About Health: A Philosophical Dialogue. A volume in Nordic Value Studies 58. Jon Mills and Janusz A. Polanowski, The Ontology of Prejudice. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 59.

Leena Vilkka, The Intrinsic Value of Nature

60. Palmer Talbutt, Jr., Rough Dialectics: Sorokin’s Philosophy of Value, with contributions by Lawrence T. Nichols and Pitirim A. Sorokin 61.

C. L. Sheng, A Utilitarian General Theory of Value

62. George David Miller, Negotiating Toward Truth: The Extinction of Teachers and Students. Epilogue by Mark Roelof Eleveld. A volume in Philosophy of Education 63. William Gerber, Love, Poetry, and Immortality: Luminous Insights of the World’s Great Thinkers 64. Dane R. Gordon, Editor, Philosophy in Post-Communist Europe. A volume in Post-Communist European Thought 65. Dane R. Gordon and Józef Niznik, Editors, Criticism and Defense of Rationality in Contemporary Philosophy. A volume in Post-Communist European Thought 66. John R. Shook, Pragmatism: An Annotated Bibliography, 1898-1940. With contributions by E. Paul Colella, Lesley Friedman, Frank X. Ryan, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis 67.

Lansana Keita, The Human Project and the Temptations of Science

68. Michael M. Kazanjian, Phenomenology and Education: Cosmology, CoBeing, and Core Curriculum. A volume in Philosophy of Education 69. James W. Vice, The Reopening of the American Mind: On Skepticism and Constitutionalism 70. Sarah Bishop Merrill, Defining Personhood: Toward the Ethics of Quality in Clinical Care 71.

Dane R. Gordon, Philosophy and Vision

72. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, Editors, Postmodernism and the Holocaust. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 73. Peter A. Redpath, Masquerade of the Dream Walkers: Prophetic Theology from the Cartesians to Hegel. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy

74. Malcolm D. Evans, Whitehead and Philosophy of Education: The Seamless Coat of Learning. A volume in Philosophy of Education 75. Warren E. Steinkraus, Taking Religious Claims Seriously: A Philosophy of Religion, Edited by Michael H. Mitias. A volume in Universal Justice 76.

Thomas Magnell, Editor, Values and Education

77. Kenneth A. Bryson, Persons and Immortality. A volume in Natural Law Studies 78. Steven V. Hicks, International Law and the Possibility of a Just World Order: An Essay on Hegel’s Universalism. A volume in Universal Justice 79. E. F. Kaelin, Texts on Texts and Textuality: A Phenomenology of Literary Art, Edited by Ellen J. Burns 80. Amihud Gilead, Saving Possibilities: A Study in Philosophical Psychology. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 81. André Mineau, The Making of the Holocaust: Ideology and Ethics in the Systems Perspective. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 82. Howard P. Kainz, Politically Incorrect Dialogues: Topics Not Discussed in Polite Circles 83. Veikko Launis, Juhani Pietarinen, and Juha Räikkä, Editors, Genes and Morality: New Essays. A volume in Nordic Value Studies 84. Steven Schroeder, The Metaphysics of Cooperation: A Study of F. D. Maurice 85. Caroline Joan (“Kay”) S. Picart, Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche: Eroticism, Death, Music, and Laughter. A volume in Central-European Value Studies 86. G. John M. Abbarno, Editor, The Ethics of Homelessness: Philosophical Perspectives 87. James Giles, Editor, French Existentialism: Consciousness, Ethics, and Relations with Others. A volume in Nordic Value Studies 88. Deane Curtin and Robert Litke, Editors, Institutional Violence. A volume in Philosophy of Peace

89.

Yuval Lurie, Cultural Beings: Reading the Philosophers of Genesis

90. Sandra A. Wawrytko, Editor, The Problem of Evil: An Intercultural Exploration. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 91. Gary J. Acquaviva, Values, Violence, and Our Future. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 92.

Michael R. Rhodes, Coercion: A Nonevaluative Approach

93. Jacques Kriel, Matter, Mind, and Medicine: Transforming the Clinical Method 94. Haim Gordon, Dwelling Poetically: Educational Challenges in Heidegger’s Thinking on Poetry. A volume in Philosophy of Education 95. Ludwig Grünberg, The Mystery of Values: Studies in Axiology, Edited by Cornelia Grünberg and Laura Grünberg 96. Gerhold K. Becker, Editor, The Moral Status of Persons: Perspectives on Bioethics. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 97. Roxanne Claire Farrar, Sartrean Dialectics: A Method for Critical Discourse on Aesthetic Experience 98. Ugo Spirito, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. Translated from Italian and Edited by Anthony G. Costantini. A volume in Values in Italian Philosophy 99. Steven Schroeder, Between Freedom and Necessity: An Essay on the Place of Value 100. Foster N. Walker, Enjoyment and the Activity of Mind: Dialogues on Whitehead and Education. A volume in Philosophy of Education 101. Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self. Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein 102. Bennie R. Crockett, Jr., Editor, Addresses of the Mississippi Philosophical Association. A volume in Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies

103. Paul van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology: The Philosophical Contribution of Günther Anders 104. Giambattista Vico, Universal Right. Translated from Latin and edited by Giorgio Pinton and Margaret Diehl. A volume in Values in Italian Philosophy 105. Judith Presler and Sally J. Scholz, Editors, Peacemaking: Lessons from the Past, Visions for the Future. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 106. Dennis Bonnette, Origin of the Human Species. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 107. Phyllis Chiasson, Peirce’s Pragmatism: The Design for Thinking. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 108. Dan Stone, Editor, Theoretical Interpretations of the Holocaust. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 109. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, What Is the Meaning of Human Life? 110. Lennart Nordenfelt, Health, Science, and Ordinary Language, with Contributions by George Khushf and K. W. M. Fulford 111. Daryl Koehn, Local Insights, Global Ethics for Business. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 112. Matti Häyry and Tuija Takala, Editors, The Future of Value Inquiry. A volume in Nordic Value Studies 113.

Conrad P. Pritscher, Quantum Learning: Beyond Duality

114. Thomas M. Dicken and Rem B. Edwards, Dialogues on Values and Centers of Value: Old Friends, New Thoughts. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 115. Rem B. Edwards, What Caused the Big Bang? A volume in Philosophy and Religion 116. Jon Mills, Editor, A Pedagogy of Becoming. A volume in Philosophy of Education

117. Robert T. Radford, Cicero: A Study in the Origins of Republican Philosophy. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 118. Arleen L. F. Salles and María Julia Bertomeu, Editors, Bioethics: Latin American Perspectives. A volume in Philosophy in Latin America 119. Nicola Abbagnano, The Human Project: The Year 2000, with an Interview by Guiseppe Grieco. Translated from Italian by Bruno Martini and Nino Langiulli. Edited with an introduction by Nino Langiulli. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 120. Daniel M. Haybron, Editor, Earth’s Abominations: Philosophical Studies of Evil. A volume in Personalist Studies 121. Anna T. Challenger, Philosophy and Art in Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub: A Modern Sufi Odyssey 122. George David Miller, Peace, Value, and Wisdom: The Educational Philosophy of Daisaku Ikeda. A volume in Daisaku Ikeda Studies 123. Haim Gordon and Rivca Gordon, Sophistry and Twentieth-Century Art 124. Thomas O. Buford and Harold H. Oliver, Editors Personalism Revisited: Its Proponents and Critics. A volume in Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies 125. Avi Sagi, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd. Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein 126. Robert S. Hartman, The Knowledge of Good: Critique of Axiological Reason. Expanded translation from the Spanish by Robert S. Hartman. Edited by Arthur R. Ellis and Rem B. Edwards.A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 127. Alison Bailey and Paula J. Smithka, Editors. Community, Diversity, and Difference: Implications for Peace. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 128. Oscar Vilarroya, The Dissolution of Mind: A Fable of How Experience Gives Rise to Cognition. A volume in Cognitive Science 129. Paul Custodio Bube and Jeffery Geller, Editors, Conversations with Pragmatism: A Multi-Disciplinary Study. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values

130. Richard Rumana, Richard Rorty: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Literature. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 131. Stephen Schneck, Editor, Max Scheler’s Acting Persons: New Perspectives A volume in Personalist Studies 132. Michael Kazanjian, Learning Values Lifelong: From Inert Ideas to Wholes. A volume in Philosophy of Education 133. Rudolph Alexander Kofi Cain, Alain Leroy Locke: Race, Culture, and the Education of African American Adults. A volume in African American Philosophy 134. Werner Krieglstein, Compassion: A New Philosophy of the Other 135. Robert N. Fisher, Daniel T. Primozic, Peter A. Day, and Joel A. Thompson, Editors, Suffering, Death, and Identity. A volume in Personalist Studies 136. Steven Schroeder, Touching Philosophy, Sounding Religion, Placing Education. A volume in Philosophy of Education 137. Guy DeBrock, Process Pragmatism: Essays on a Quiet Philosophical Revolution. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 138. Lennart Nordenfelt and Per-Erik Liss, Editors, Dimensions of Health and Health Promotion 139. Amihud Gilead, Singularity and Other Possibilities: Panenmentalist Novelties 140. Samantha Mei-che Pang, Nursing Ethics in Modern China: Conflicting Values and Competing Role Requirements. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 141. Christine M. Koggel, Allannah Furlong, and Charles Levin, Editors, Confidential Relationships: Psychoanalytic, Ethical, and Legal Contexts. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 142. Peter A. Redpath, Editor, A Thomistic Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Étienne Gilson. A volume in Gilson Studies

143. Deane-Peter Baker and Patrick Maxwell, Editors, Explorations in Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 144. Matti Häyry and Tuija Takala, Editors, Scratching the Surface of Bioethics. A volume in Values in Bioethics 145. Leonidas Donskis, Forms of Hatred: The Troubled Imagination in Modern Philosophy and Literature 146. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Editor, Interpretation and Its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael Krausz 147. Herman Stark, A Fierce Little Tragedy: Thought, Passion, and SelfFormation in the Philosophy Classroom. A volume in Philosophy of Education 148. William Gay and Tatiana Alekseeva, Editors, Democracy and the Quest for Justice: Russian and American Perspectives. A volume in Contemporary Russian Philosophy 149. Xunwu Chen, Being and Authenticity 150. Hugh P. McDonald, Radical Axiology: A First Philosophy of Values 151. Dane R. Gordon and David C. Durst, Editors, Civil Society in Southeast Europe. A volume in Post-Communist European Thought 152. John Ryder and Emil Višňovský, Editors, Pragmatism and Values: The Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume One. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 153. Messay Kebede, Africa’s Quest for a Philosophy of Decolonization 154. Steven M. Rosen, Dimensions of Apeiron: A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 155. Albert A. Anderson, Steven V. Hicks, and Lech Witkowski, Editors, Mythos and Logos: How to Regain the Love of Wisdom. A volume in Universal Justice 156. John Ryder and Krystyna Wilkoszewska, Editors, Deconstruction and Reconstruction: The Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Two. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values

157. Javier Muguerza, Ethics and Perplexity: Toward a Critique of Dialogical Reason. Translated from the Spanish by Jody L. Doran. Edited by John R. Welch. A volume in Philosophy in Spain 158. Gregory F. Mellema, The Expectations of Morality 159. Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins 160. Stan van Hooft, Life, Death, and Subjectivity: Moral Sources in Bioethics A volume in Values in Bioethics 161. André Mineau, Operation Barbarossa: Ideology and Ethics Against Human Dignity 162. Arthur Efron, Expriencing Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Deweyan Account. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 163. Reyes Mate, Memory of the West: The Contemporaneity of Forgotten Jewish Thinkers. Translated from the Spanish by Anne Day Dewey. Edited by John R. Welch. A volume in Philosophy in Spain 164. Nancy Nyquist Potter, Editor, Putting Peace into Practice: Evaluating Policy on Local and Global Levels. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 165. Matti Häyry, Tuija Takala, and Peter Herissone-Kelly, Editors, Bioethics and Social Reality. A volume in Values in Bioethics 166. Maureen Sie, Justifying Blame: Why Free Will Matters and Why it Does Not. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 167. Leszek Koczanowicz and Beth J. Singer, Editors, Democracy and the Post-Totalitarian Experience. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 168. Michael W. Riley, Plato’s Cratylus: Argument, Form, and Structure. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 169. Leon Pomeroy, The New Science of Axiological Psychology. Edited by Rem B. Edwards. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 170. Eric Wolf Fried, Inwardness and Morality

171. Sami Pihlstrom, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 172. Charles C. Hinkley II, Moral Conflicts of Organ Retrieval: A Case for Constructive Pluralism. A volume in Values in Bioethics 173. Gábor Forrai and George Kampis, Editors, Intentionality: Past and Future. A volume in Cognitive Science 174. Dixie Lee Harris, Encounters in My Travels: Thoughts Along the Way. A volume in Lived Values:Valued Lives 175. Lynda Burns, Editor, Feminist Alliances. A volume in Philosophy and Women 176. George Allan and Malcolm D. Evans, Editors, A Different Three Rs for Education: Reason, Relationality, Rhythm. A volume in Philosophy of Education

A Different Three Rs for Education: Reason, Relationality, Rhythm (Value Inquiry Book Series 176)

Education for a Democratic Society: Central European Pragmatist Forum. Volume Three (Value Inquiry Book Series 179) (Value Inquiry Book)

Postethnophilosophy. (Value Inquiry Book Series)

Feminist Alliances (Value Inquiry Book Series 175)

Plato's Cratylus: Argument, Form, and Structure (Value Inquiry Book Series 168) (Value Inquiry Book) (Value Inquiry Book)

Understanding Moral Weakness (Value Inquiry Book Series)

Problems for Democracy (Value Inquiry Book)

Inwardness and Morality (Value Inquiry Book Series 170)

History of Italian Philosophy (Value Inquiry Book Series Vol. 191)

The Expectations of Morality (Value Inquiry Book Series, 158)

Beyond Conceptual Dualism (Value Inquiry Book)

Bioethics and Social Reality (Value Inquiry Book Series, 165)

Taking Religious Claims Seriously. (Value Inquiry Book)

Environmental Ethics: Intercultural Perspectives. (Value Inquiry Book)

Africa's Quest for a Philosophy of Decolonization (Value Inquiry Book Series, Volume 153)

Pragmatism, Education, and Children: International Philosophical Perspectives. (Value Inquiry Book Series)

The rhythm of education (for boys)

Postmodernism and Education: Different Voices, Different Worlds

Bioethics and Vulnerability. A Latin American View. (Value Inquiry Book Series)

Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense (Value Inquiry Book Series 171) (Studies in Pragmatism and Values)

A Reason For Marriage

A Reason for Being

A Reason for Being

Pragmatism: An Annotated Bibliography, 1898-1940 (Value Inquiry Book)

Ethics in Biomedical Research: International Perspectives. (Value Inquiry Book)

Democracy and the Post-Totalitarian Experience (Value Inquiry Book, 167)

Value Education: Changing Perspectives

The Adventure of Education: Process Philosophers on Learning, Teaching, and Research. (Value Inquiry Book)

Book Three

Book Three

Book Three

A Different Three Rs for Education: Reason, Relationality, Rhythm (Value Inquiry Book Series 176)

Education for a Democratic Society: Central European Pragmatist Forum. Volume Three (Value Inquiry Book Series 179) (Value Inquiry Book)

Postethnophilosophy. (Value Inquiry Book Series)

Feminist Alliances (Value Inquiry Book Series 175)

Plato's Cratylus: Argument, Form, and Structure (Value Inquiry Book Series 168) (Value Inquiry Book) (Value Inquiry Book)

Understanding Moral Weakness (Value Inquiry Book Series)

Problems for Democracy (Value Inquiry Book)

Inwardness and Morality (Value Inquiry Book Series 170)

History of Italian Philosophy (Value Inquiry Book Series Vol. 191)

The Expectations of Morality (Value Inquiry Book Series, 158)

Beyond Conceptual Dualism (Value Inquiry Book)

Bioethics and Social Reality (Value Inquiry Book Series, 165)

Taking Religious Claims Seriously. (Value Inquiry Book)

Environmental Ethics: Intercultural Perspectives. (Value Inquiry Book)

Africa's Quest for a Philosophy of Decolonization (Value Inquiry Book Series, Volume 153)

Pragmatism, Education, and Children: International Philosophical Perspectives. (Value Inquiry Book Series)

The rhythm of education (for boys)

Postmodernism and Education: Different Voices, Different Worlds

Bioethics and Vulnerability. A Latin American View. (Value Inquiry Book Series)

Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense (Value Inquiry Book Series 171) (Studies in Pragmatism and Values)

A Reason For Marriage

A Reason for Being

A Reason for Being

Pragmatism: An Annotated Bibliography, 1898-1940 (Value Inquiry Book)

Ethics in Biomedical Research: International Perspectives. (Value Inquiry Book)

Democracy and the Post-Totalitarian Experience (Value Inquiry Book, 167)

Value Education: Changing Perspectives

The Adventure of Education: Process Philosophers on Learning, Teaching, and Research. (Value Inquiry Book)

Book Three

Book Three

Book Three

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