integral education - Blog - Fearlessness Movement

Culture of Fear & Education: New FearTalk 6 & 7

Posted by R.Michael Fisher on August 30, 2019 at 9:09pm

I'd like you to meet Debbie L. Kasman, an integral educator in Canada, someone I have just done a long dialogue with on fear in education. She is also taking on the writing of a book (with me) on my work making it more accessible to the populus, to school teachers, parents, etc. Check out the dialogue FearTalk 6:

This is 6th in the series FearTalks originated by fearologist Dr. R. M. Fisher. He invites Kasman to discuss fear and education, especially in the light of recent terrorism, mass murders and schooling communities reacting to it, including now the marketing of bullet-proof kid's backpacks. They discuss how fear is the opportunity (door) to fearlessness on the way to Love. A good video for school superintendents, policy makers, teachers, principals, parents etc. We talk about philosopher-theorist Ken Wilber in this video and the AQAL and Integral perspective, so for more on this see my video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPl3-... Debbie's Bio & Website (for more info.): http://debbielkasman.com/ Debbie L. Kasman, a Canadian educator interested in transformative, holistic and integral education, is the author of: “LOTUS OF THE HEART: RESHAPING THE HUMAN AND COLLECTIVE SOUL”--a former principal, acting interim superintendent, and student achievement officer at the Ministry of Education in Ontario with a career spanning over 28 years in Ontario. Debbie recently trained with Ken Wilber – a scholar of the Integral stage of human development. Wilber also taught and influenced Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra, Bill Clinton, and John Mackey. Debbie has lots to say about the need to transform education. She also writes about female leadership, equity and spirituality. The New-York Times Bestselling author, Daniel H. Pink, placed Debbie’s blog on his Reader Recommended List in December 2016. Four Arrows (aka Dr. Don T. Jacobs), Indigenous educator, is also referred to in this talk: See Fisher's book "Fearless Engagement of Four Arrows: The true story of an Indigenous-based Social Transformer" (Peter Lang, 2018).

See FearTalk 7 as well...

----------

ALSO, as an aside and complementary article on culture of fear and the role it plays in Education (especially, regarding higher education and the loss of intellectual inquiry) see Frank Furedi's article "he Campus Culture of Fear" --here's an excerpt from the article on the Internet:

A climate of fear is inhospitable to the cultivation of academic relationships and the pursuit of intellectual inquiry. Take the growing stigma attached to the term “controversial speaker.” Once, controversy was seen as essential to the workings of an academic community; nowadays, many university administrators fear controversy to the point that they have designed policies to marginalize or ban provocative speakers altogether, as the title of a Xavier University publication—Controversial Speakers and Events: Strategies for Risk Management—demonstrates.

Arguably, the most regrettable feature of the campus culture of fear is the toll that it takes on human relations. People censor themselves vigilantly. Like other academics, I have been warned that it’s unsafe to shut my office door when I talk to a student. And as relations between academics and students become less spontaneous and more formal, the ancient role of mentor or interlocutor gives way to that of service provider or bureaucrat. The psychic distancing of members of the academic community from one another is the unacceptable price we pay for our obsession with campus “safety.”

Frank Furedi’s new book, How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the 21st Century, will be published soon

----------

AND ANOTHER RECENT article on the negative impact of school lockdown drills that children in the USA are continually exposed to: see

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/05/lockdown-drill-fear/589090/

Critically Thinking and Theorizing About Education: Philosophy of Fearism

Posted by R.Michael Fisher on February 4, 2018 at 10:22am

There are many approaches to thinking, writing and teaching. What I have learned over my 45 years of teaching, more or less, professionally, with then getting three post-secondary degrees in Education as a field, is that it is good to continually reflect not only on our thinking and content, but on how we design curricula, how we imagine the nature of the human being, and how we actually teach in diverse conditions and to whom. Most people as content-experts are not trained to think this way, educatively.

I plan to write a few articles on adult/higher education and post them on the FMning, as it is especially important to examine how we teach about philosophy of fearism [1] (and the "Three Pillars" you've seen mentioned on prior blogs here). There is no doubt that I (like so many today) are very frustrated and critical of most public and generic education institutions, especially as so many of them have folded to economic efficiency (e.g., neoliberalism ideologies), and/or political regime's of authoritarian and repressive "revolutionary" even governments and their "reforms" they bring to higher education--but actually are "gutting" higher education and critical thinking all together. Then there is the ongoing critique I and many others educators have that the curriculums are so often reductionistic, parts-based, all about quantity, and the loss of a whole person being educated comes into question--and, many have called for a "spirituality" in higher education to meet the deeper needs and desires of our students, especially in very difficult times.

Most of you who have read my work know that I am in favor of spirituality as a goal of education, and as a context for overall human development, especially at the higher levels of consciousness. In this regard, I acknowledge there can be many troubling views of "spirituality" that may or may not include typical "religion" or religious type approaches to education. My own interest is mostly reflected in the spirituality conceptualizations of the integral philosopher Ken Wilber. I thus, open this series of FM blogs with a republishing of one of my pieces on an old website at the Center for Spiritual Inquiry & Integral Education (for alternative online higher education I founded in 2009):

Back in 2009, when I served as Director of Research and Education for Gaia House Interfaith Center, I was deeply steeped in reading Parker J. Palmer's The Courage To Teach (1). There was a local group of people from Gaia House community (Hugh Muldoon, then Director, and Michael Batinsky, Board member and a few others off and on) discussing the "integrative education" work of Palmer and his critique of higher education and his invitation to renewal. Our group co-sponsored talks on the SIUC campus for students and faculty on changes needed in higher education, of which one of those sessions was particularly geared to Palmer's contributions.

Palmer has had a great influence on many thousands of educators from all levels, but he has written most particularly in adult and higher education. I came across his book in 1998 (first ed.) during my graduate research because he had a chapter in that book on the "Culture of Fear" in higher education and its deadly consequences. That was right up my alley, and I so appreciated Palmer was one of the first, at least the biggest well-known, higher educator to call out the "culture of fear" as problematic.

Two interesting bits of research lately have made me very encouraged that Palmer's work, which I have also been a big critic of (2) from an integral educational perspective, is extending beyond his typical spiritual-liberal "green meme"-centric positioning. The first case was discovering that he was invited to speak at the 2007 commencement for the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in 2007. I thought to myself, wow, Palmer has never in his writing and talks, that I know of, ever referred to "integral" (3) in the tradition of Integral Studies, and CIIS is the premier institute in North America if not the world on integral philosophy and integral theory. Ken Wilber, and other important integral thinkers have influenced CIIS and taught there, although lately Wilber specifically has distanced himself from it's ideological direction into aspects of what he would call political correctness via "extreme postmodernism" (i.e., his critique of the "mean green meme" which he argues resists and largely attacks the manifestation of integral consciousness) (4).

The second case, just this morning, was coming across Palmer's new book with Zajonc, The Heart of Higher Education (5). It's unclear who brought Wilber's work to Palmer, maybe it was his co-authors in this new book. It is delightful to see they engage and cite two of Wilber's books (albeit, his earlier works only), but they also engage and cite the basic characteristics of "integral education" as given by students and scholars of Wilber and other integral philosophers. They cite Esbjorn-Hargens, Reams, and Gunnlaugson (2010), and the new book on integral education in adult and higher education (6). This is not an insignificant connection, and alignment of strategic importance for CSIIE. It seems there is a next wave of potential here to link critical changes in adult and higher education with integral theory, and Palmer with Wilber, specifically. All that is good news to my researcher's ears. I look forward to reading Palmer and Zajonc's book. And of course this all is directly related to CSIIE's new pilot study on contemporary integral adult/higher education (for that report go to Dept. of Integral and 'Fear' Studies, scroll down for a free pdf copy). We at CSIIE have two articles as spin-offs from that report underway. It seems things are moving in a positive direction for our organization right now.

So what did Palmer and Zajonc (2010) say about Wilber's contribution to their own thinking about "integrative education" (their preferred term)? I quotes from their book:

"True integrative education must, therefore, make use of the extensive investigation of and insights into the stages of cognitive, affective, moral, and spiritual development of the human being throughout life as articulated by such researchers as William Perry, Jack Mezirow, Robert Kegan, Lawrence Kohlberg, Sharon Parks, and Ken Wilber." (p. 102). All those theorists talk about stages of development in sequencing, more or less, and that "each one of which changes the fundamental way in which they [we] make meaning of the world."

[Wilber's work offers] "grounding the recent origins of integral education in the spiritual philosophy of the Indian write Sri Aurobindo" (p. 10). From Esbjorn-Hargen's et al., drawing primarily on Wilber's integral theory:] "While eschewing a definition of integral education, they [Esbjorn-Hargens et al.] enumerate the characteristics of learning and teaching with that model:

- exploring multiple perspectives

- including first-, second-, and third-person methodologies of teaching and learning

- combining critical thinking with experiential feeling

- including the insights of constructive developmental psychology

- multiple ways of knowing

- weaving together the domains of self, culture, and nurture [sp. nature]

- recognizing various types of learners and teachers

- encouraging 'shadow work' within learners and teachers, an exploration of the nonrational side of the human self (p. 10)

I find Palmer has used "integrative" as many would use "holistic." That's a longer argument, and it is also one that needs to be clarified, because Wilber's integral philosophy (and other integralists throughout history) are not so easily put in a box (nor "integrated") into the "integrative education" worldview of Palmer, or "holistic education" (although, many integrativists and holists try to do so). I agree with Wilber's integral critique of both those views, while at the same time embracing their best aspects. Palmer unfortunately doesn't seem to make that distinction in his new book, and I'm frankly not surprised, because I don't think he fully understands integral theory yet but it is great he is beginning to engage it and publicize it more popularly than Wilber and other integral theorists could ever hope to do. I'm delighted in thinking how many Palmer fans are buying his latest book and getting introduced to integral education at the same time. Wow!

Whatever the case, this is a very small beginning of stretching the dialogue from the integrative, holistic camps into the integral camp. I've been waiting for such an opening for a long time. Which isn't to say it hasn't be tried or done somewhat effectively in the past. It has, as I think of particularly Ron Miller, and Jack Miller as holistic education leaders who have embraced and been influenced in curriculum and pedagogy by integral thinking (especially Wilber, Steiner, Kegan). Anyways, CSIIE has a foot in this door, since 2009, to keep the conversation going, and surely it will be contentious at times, but that's how we stretch and grow and it seems never straightforward, nor as simple as theory and intellects may want it to be. This is obviously then, an invitation to all kinds of people interested in Palmer's work and holistic education, to enter dialogue with the integral worldview at CSIIE. I for one, look forward to that and will encourage it where I can.

Notes

1. Palmer, P. J. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's life. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. [see 2008, 10th anniversary ed. also by Jossey-Bass].

2. See Fisher, R. M. (2010). The world's fearlessness teachings: A critical integral approach to fear management/education for the 21st century. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, pp. 13, 212, 225-28. My basic critique is his overly-simplistic definition of "fear" and his non-engagement with my work despite sending it to him many times, and having a few email exchanges.

3. Albeit, Palmer does refer to the "integral life" of the higher educator or teacher, yet he has not in the past integrated integral philosophy or theory per se in that construction and the practices that go with it; much to my disappointment over the years, I may add.

4. One of the places he published on this, of many, is in his book Wilber, K. (1997). The eye of spirit: An integral vision for a world gone slightly mad. Boston, MA: Shambhala, pp. 303-04. Another good place is in Wilber, K. (1998). The marriage of sense and soul: Integrating science and religion. NY: Random House, pp. 34-35, 43, 119-20, 135-36.

5. Palmer, P. J., Zajonc, A. (with Megan Scribner) (2010). The heart of higher education: A call to renewal: Transforming the academy through collegial conversations. San Fancisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

6. Esjborn-Hargens, S., Reams, J., and Gunnlaugson, O. (eds.) (2010). Integral education: New directions for higher learning. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

------------

End Note

1. I am thinkiing of the educational (courses) and initiatives of late for The Fearism Study Center, and The Fearology Institute

Manifesto on Thinking About Thinking... Integrally

Posted by R.Michael Fisher on July 16, 2016 at 11:34am

Here is my latest art-i-fact as a cultural worker. It is some of my best thinking on thinking, on educating ourselves for the 21st century. I invite you to take a read of the Manifest%20Thinking.doc

Here is the Abstract to the Manifesto (for convenience):

Abstract

Someone asked me, “What do you do?” I replied, “I am an educator.” They said, “So, what do you teach?” I replied, “First, I design curricula based on how best to teach—thinking about thinking. Then, I teach others how to implement that curriculum so they get as excited as I do about the great human potential of thinking integrally across the globe.” The following manifesto is my first articulation of the ideas and rationale for why, after 40+ years of research and teaching, I have chosen to focus on thinking about thinking. I lay out the simple and complex versions of the problem—which, boil down to the problem of how humans self-regulate, self-violate, and typically fail to manage difference, diversity of perspectives and ways of thinking effectively. I offer some premises behind my integral design for Education and the ways it can be implemented. This is a work in progress, never to be left as written-in-stone. It can always be critiqued and improved. I invite anyone into this dialogue to improve learning about thinking itself and all the diverse ways of thinking that we all ought to have free access to. A first example of an Integral Thinking Curriculum is illustrated to begin the Global Thinking Agenda. You might think of this manifesto as a “calling” to gather together as humanity to a universal goal of equity and equality of opportunity for people to think about thinking as the foundation for all else that follows—the latter, which we might call “education.”

integral education (3)

Culture of Fear & Education: New FearTalk 6 & 7

Critically Thinking and Theorizing About Education: Philosophy of Fearism

Manifesto on Thinking About Thinking... Integrally

Note: this page contains paid content.