Pedagogic Creed
Education as Phenomenological Practice
“The phenomenological world is not pure being, but rather the sense that shines forth at the intersection of my experiences and at the intersection of my experiences with those of others through a sort of gearing into each other… … philosophy is not the reflection of a prior truth, but rather, like art, the actualization of a truth.”
“All we can do is speak with others as passionately and eloquently as we can; all we can do is to look into each other’s eyes and urge each other on to new beginnings. Our classrooms ought to be nurturing and thoughtful and just all at once; they ought to pulsate with multiple conceptions of what it means to be human and alive. They ought to resound with the voices of articulate young people in dialogues always incomplete because there is always more to be discovered and more to be said.”
Teaching and learning are practices that provide privileged access to liminal spaces. In these spaces, we are allowed to glimpse what we are not yet, to encounter what we are, and to consider what we might become. Metaxy (μεταξύ), a word Plato used to describe the uniquely human suspension in the space between, is a necessary condition of teaching and learning.
Educational moments begin with encounters, often unexpected, that intrinsically encourage further exploration, and require a transformation on the part of both the learner and the knowledge. We bring to those initial encounters what we are and who we are, and engage in an ongoing process of reformulation of old and new knowledge in a context that is unique each time we approach it.
It is impossible to separate the act of learning from the act of teaching. The space between learning and teaching is where quality, justice, virtue, truth, and beauty reside. Because it is not in our nature to permanently inhabit this space, we experience a collective social confusion with regard to those loaded words, but our experiential encounters with their elusive identities through the act of learning offer us guidance in their pursuit.
The most meaningful learning experiences are the unpredictable corollary discoveries that accompany established and attenuated learning goals. These experiences of authentic meaning-making are highly individualized and unplanned, and flow from each unique encounter between the ever-changing individual and the ever-changing collective.
The practice of teaching and learning has unintended consequences, and it is the responsibility of both the teacher and the learner to allow for this and to construct a supportive framework to manage those consequences. This requires engaging one’s education holistically, rather than as a collection of disassociated fragments.
Disciplines are often false containers, and our choices of compartmentalization of knowledge betray hidden value frameworks. A holistic education requires us to transcend established boundaries, to challenge the boundaries we, ourselves, impose, and to engage ideas across disciplines to honor their complexity, nuance, and interconnectedness.
Humans thrive when their inherent exceptionality is honored and celebrated. The elevation of context-independent expectations through established routines diminishes opportunities for transformative learning. Education should not be ruled by convention.
Teaching and learning are practices that help us choose to live deliberately.
A life-affirming education requires us to work towards eliminating labels of teacher and student. When learners can no longer discern the difference between those roles, the boundaries will have given way to a generative and collaborative framework for creation.
Education as Political Practice
“Each thing we see hides something else we want to see…”
“In the exploration of the unconscious, we come upon very strange things, from which a rationalist turns away in horror, claiming afterward that he did not see anything. The irrational fullness of life has taught me never to discard anything, even when it goes against all our theories (so short-lived at best) or otherwise admits of no immediate explanation. It is of course disquieting, and one is not certain whether the compass is pointing true or not; but security, certitude, and peace do not lead to discoveries.”
Each curricular and methodological choice defines a teacher’s political commitment. Everything that is brought into a teaching space, and everything that is omitted, is a political statement in response to the question, “What is worth knowing?” It assumes the acceptance of a values hierarchy that declares an active or passive commitment to specific content, interpretation, and moral underpinnings of curriculum. Our duty, and our challenge, is to understand and minimize our passive commitments.
In the service of a life-affirming education, it is critical that students are invited to participate in asking and answering the prior question of “What is worth knowing?” This work grounds out in a live curriculum, where the course of study is continually constructed, evaluated, and reimagined. A curriculum designed around this question allows us to celebrate our intrinsic interest in possibilities of future selves. This compulsion of becoming is at the core of our identity as learners. We should honor and preserve this compulsion above all else, working to continually reanimate it as the systems around us push us towards complacency and routine.
Education as Revolutionary Practice
“Urging all of us to open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions, I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom. ”
“...laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
“Into deep darkness fall those who follow action. Into deeper darkness fall those who follow knowledge.”
When we declare an active intention of changing and being changed by the process of learning, we open ourselves up to a continuous radical reevaluation of the world and our place in it.
The word “radical” warrants some attention. It is often associated with the new, the innovative, the disruptive. It implies profound change, possibly even with violent underpinnings. It carries tones of transgression, or, the practice of offending commonly sanctioned mores, social constructs, and belief systems. It is often paired with goals of revolution. While I am interested in a revolution of consciousness that calls into question and holds accountable many contemporary, accepted values in institutionalized educational frameworks, these ideas are not inherently new or innovative. Rather, they represent a worldview that can be found in the vestiges of canons of thought from diverse cultures and eras. There is a hint of universalism in these ideas, as many of them speak to a fundamental human desire to understand what it means to live as temporal creatures in a world that is veiled in mystery and contradiction.
Dominant values in contemporary institutionalized education often work to maintain existing systems. Our emphasis on numerical evaluation and our obsession with quantitative data, our insistence upon passive reception of concrete blocks of “knowledge” that are independent of the knower, our compartmentalization of disciplines, our structures of delivery and reception, all serve to reinforce a hierarchical social framework that preserves externally sanctioned authority and re-embeds existing power structures. The effects of this framework, two decades into the 21st century, with technology moving faster than our ability to comprehend its effects, globalization pushing us towards integration and collaboration with a scope never before seen in human history, and the sheer force of humanity on the planet raising new questions about sustainability, means that even the passive, system-preserving activities that have sustained us for so long will have radical consequences ahead.
The real question is whether our radical practice is intentional or accidental. Accidental radical practice maintains systems of stasis that we never consented to, and leaves us unprepared for a world that we can’t yet imagine. Intentional radical practice, on the other hand, offers us the possibility of a revolution that holds, as its purpose, the development of abilities that will help us face an unknown future with intention.
We are all responsible for learning to recognize the ways in which our socially-ingrained prejudices inform our habits and our practices. A revolutionary education should confront the challenge of decolonizing our frameworks of knowing at both individual and systemic levels. Additionally, we must be wary of the ways that those prejudices form lenses through which we interpret the world. When we begin to challenge the unconscious assimilation and practice of culturally-ingrained ideals, learning becomes life-affirming.
We establish agency as we transgress against the dominant values that we passively absorb, even (perhaps especially) when that transgression results in an intentional recommitment to ideas that we have inherited. This carries inherent risk, including the possibility that unpredictable discoveries may lead to unpredictable outcomes and will require participants to break with deeply-ingrained values. This experience of risk, is, in itself, a meaningful catalyst for transformative learning.
Education as Artistic Practice
“Expressing one’s subjectivity is how one links the lived curriculum with the planned one, how one demonstrates to students that scholarship can speak to them, how in fact scholarship can enable them to speak.”
“To call for imaginative capacity is to work for the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise.”
“Radical pedagogy needs a vision – one that celebrates not what is but what could be, that looks beyond the immediate to the future and links struggle to a new set of human possibilities.”
Curriculum is a live creation that becomes uncontrollable once released into the wild. It assumes a unique identity in collaboration with the individuals experiencing it, and it is transformed through that process.
As learning beings, we initially welcome a process where knowledge is absorbed and undone, repeatedly, through layered experiences (conscious and unconscious), in a context of ever-widening fields of perception, with a developing awareness of memory and anticipation that accompanies those perceptions. The methodology and architecture of education hold a great deal of power over the experience of content (as it is traditionally understood). Where we are learning and how we are learning communicates value as much as, if not more than, what we are learning.
The art of teaching requires an extreme sense of context-awareness and sensitivity to the physical and existential layers that permeate the experiences of participants. Teaching is performative when it ritualizes a framework of difference, when the learning space is imbued with intentions that encourage participants to suspend inherited beliefs and expectations and be changed by encounters with otherness
Arts Education
“When is it complete and when is it not complete? I don’t think one can say what one longs for…”
“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.”
“For although there is a bounding horizon, it moves as we move. We are never wholly free from the sense of something that lies beyond.”
While art is often presented and judged as a finished project, the process of doing art is equally characterized by opportunities for personal growth, revelation, and transformation. Working toward a performance horizon requires a commitment to saying, at some point, ‘I have done enough’, even as we simultaneously recognize that there is always more to learn, more to experience, and more to unravel. The space between inception and completion offers powerful insight into our limits and our potential.
The arts are uniquely positioned to liberate us from conventional pathways of thought and to support us as we challenge embedded social expectations. By intentionally broadening our understanding of creativity, celebrating our uniqueness, and performing together in ways that encourage empathy and compassion, we begin to experience the world as it could be. As we change and are changed by our surroundings, the arts offer us a place to refine our collective values and to model constructive engagement with far-reaching significance.
As a collection of disciplines that engage the boundaries and convergences of craftsmanship, sensitivity, imagination, authenticity, and creativity, the arts do not lend themselves easily to evaluative frameworks. We get tangled up in the spaces between subjectivity and objectivity, originality and derivation, accepted convention and ineffable experience, and the multiple meanings of mastery. The question of quality, or how we know what is “good,” is a foundational quandary in all artistic practice, and should be honored for its complexity in any attempts to evaluate one’s own artistic work or the work of others.
Music Education
“We seem to be sitting still, but we’re actually moving, and the fantasies of phenomena are sliding through us like ideas through curtains.”
“Art offers life; it offers hope; it offers the prospect of discovery; it offers light.”
Music, as a near-universal human phenomenon, allows us unique insight into transcendent human experiences that are often represented similarly across cultures. However, music is not a universal language. it represents a category of languages that have the capacity to enliven a sense of universality through shared experience of the ineffable, but it requires as much attention to nuance and complexity in its learning methodology as a study of human culture or human language might require.
Musical training should support a holistic approach to skill acquisition that is concordant with our inherent capacity to experience, appreciate, and be changed by music. The art of creating music should not be separated from the art of experiencing it. All roles of participation (composers, teachers, performers, audience, critics, keepers of history, to name a few) contribute to a collective with shared responsibilities and shared ownership in the act of creation.
The potential for conflict and convergence that is inherent in the study of music allows for the development of a platform to support meaningful engagement with challenging aspects of human behavior, with enough abstraction to minimize reliance on traditional patterns of conflict. This allows for the creation of new pathways to concordant understanding across differences that have ramifications far beyond music.