I am sharing a brief email conversation I had with Dr. Gokul Bhandari, from the Business faculty at University of Windsor, as we have mutual interests in bringing about a higher quality curriculum in higher education today (especially, in Business) that centralizes "Fear" as a subject and important force in determining so much about what is going on in higher education. Our first conversation on email (below) accompanies the diagram/model (above) that I have extracted from the ppt presentation Bhandari gave in Hong Kong recently with Desh Subba (founder of "philosophy of fearism")... Bhandari has a great interest in cybernetic systems and communication and would like to apply his quadrant model to "Fear" (I added the word "Fear" in the middle of his model).
Hi Dr. Bhandari,
Dear Dr. Fisher,
Thank you for your email. We had an interesting discussion on Fearism last week in Hong Kong. I had to speak in Nepali because of the audience but my main points were basically as follows:
1) Desh Subba's primary contribution is his compilation of Fear literature from various sources and disciplines.
2) What is lacking is a unified framework that ties together a myriad of fear related concepts. Without having such an integrated framework, it is difficult to propose solutions to overcome FEAR.
My interests:
I am an Information Systems faculty and a big believer in Systems Thinking (understanding relationships, patterns, context, communication and feedback) in any setting. My view is that the solution to FEAR can only come from providing the right information (or knowledge) to the right people at the right time using the right medium (communication and context). FEAR is also not a homogeneous concept. From information-centric viewpoint, FEAR has a unit of analysis (such as individual, cultural, societal, national, global etc.) and the provided information's level of abstraction must match with the unit of analysis. My hypothesis is that even if the information is factually correct, if the unit and abstraction levels do not match, that mismatch will engender FEAR.
I am highly interested in analyzing FEAR from the info-centric perspective.
The 4 quadrant model that I discussed is basically a standard micro-macro interaction of the Systems Thinking paradigm (not my creation). I was proposing it as starting point to analyze FEAR and its solution.
I have not published anything related to FEAR but given my current responsibility as an MBA Program Director, I would like to explore implore implications of FEAR on curriculum and pedagogy. Let us have the communicating going.
My inclinations:
Systems Thinking of Maturana and Varela, Communication-> Wittgenstein's philosophy of language
Thank you once again for reaching me out.
Best regards,
Gokul Bhandari
[btw. we are continuing on to develop the Fisher-Bhandari Model of Integral Teaching & Learning, that locates the "integrative" models of Knowing, Doing Being in higher education with Ken Wilber's critical integral theory and my own work on Fear... stay tuned for all that, as we have put in a proposal to a teaching and learning conference in Detroit in early 2018... I'll let you know more about our model as we pursue to bring "Fear" into the curricula of higher education, especially in Business]
