Contemplative Learning and Inquiry across Disciplines

Olen Gunnlaugson, Edward W. Sarath, Charles Scott, Heesoon Bai, Olen Gunnlaugson, Edward W. Sarath, Charles Scott, Heesoon Bai

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781438452401, 9781438452395
• eBook ISBN: 9781438452418
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

Contemplative approaches to higher education have been gaining in popularity and application across a wide range of disciplines. Spurring conferences, a growing body of literature, and several academic programs or centers, these approaches promise to contribute significantly to higher education in the years to come. This volume provides an overview of the current landscape of contemplative instruction, pedagogy, philosophy, and curriculum from the perspectives of leading researchers and scholar-practitioners. Contributors come from a variety of disciplines, including education, management and leadership studies, humanities, social sciences, the arts, and information science. Drawing on diverse contexts, the essays reveal the applicability of contemplative studies as a watershed field, capable of informing, enriching, and sustaining the many disciplines and instructional contexts that comprise higher education. Chapters discuss the theoretical aspects of the field; the details, experiences, and challenges of contemplative approaches; and the hopes and concerns for the future of this field.

Part I

Contemplative Studies

A New Academic Discipline

1

Contemplative Pedagogy in Higher Education

Toward a More Reflective Academy

Arthur Zajonc

There is no logical path leading to these laws [of nature], but only intuition, supported by sympathetic understanding of experience.

—Albert Einstein (cited in Miller, 1996, p. 369)

The colleges and universities of the world evidence the profound commitment we have to our future. What more can one want from an educational institution than a great faculty, terrific facilities, and a brilliant student body? Isn’t this a bit of heaven? As you walk around campus, remind yourself that all these big buildings, the faculty, staff, and many billions of dollars annually—all this is directed toward something totally invisible, the minds of those student attending. The cultivation of the human being is the single raison d’être for this investment. So what could be the problem, why are faculty at countless schools occupied with questions of general education, pedagogy, and curriculum? What could possibly be wrong in paradise?

Problems in Paradise

Are the critics of American universities right when they say, as Harvard College’s former dean Harry Lewis emphatically states, “Harvard and our other great universities lost sight of the essential purpose of undergraduate education.” They are neglecting the central task of helping students “learn who they are, to search for a larger purpose for their lives, and to leave college as better human beings” (Lewis, 2007, p. xv). Echoing Lewis’s sentiments, former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman argues in his book Education’s End that the true purpose of higher education has been lost, namely, a deep exploration concerning “what life is for.”

A college or university is not just a place for the transmission of knowledge but a forum for the exploration of life’s mystery and meaning through the careful but critical reading of the great works of literary and philosophical imagination. (Kronman, 2007, p. 6)

Stanley Fish in his recent New York Times op-ed, writes for many when he laments the monetization of higher education that measures education’s “value” purely in terms of financial return on investment. And in a 2009 New York Times op-ed, the President of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust, wrote about “The University’s Crisis of Purpose” (Sept. 1, 2009):

But even as we as a nation have embraced education as critical to economic growth and opportunity, we should remember that colleges and universities are about a great deal more than measurable utility. Unlike perhaps any other institutions in the world, they embrace the long view and nurture the kind of critical perspectives that look far beyond the present. … As a nation, we need to ask more than this [utility] from our universities. Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. Human beings need meaning, understanding and perspective as well as jobs. The question should not be whether we can afford to believe in such purposes in these times, but whether we can afford not to.

Each of these leaders in higher education points beyond utility and financial gain to a larger mission that higher education has and should continue to embrace. Depth, breadth, meaning, understanding, and perspective are the words used. What is the task of the university? To instruct in a discipline, surely. But beyond this, what? The author and poet (and English professor) Wendell Berry (1987) sums it up this way in his essay “The Loss of the University”:

The thing being made in a university is humanity. … [W]hat universities … are mandated to make or to help to make is human beings in the fullest sense of those words—not just trained workers or knowledgeable citizens but responsible heirs and members of human culture. … Underlying the idea of a university—the bringing together, the combining into one, of all the disciplines—is the idea that good work and good citizenship are the inevitable by-products of the making of a good—that is, a fully developed—human being. (p. 77)

This is a formidable mandate: the making of the human being. To begin with, what is the image we have of the human being these days? Who sits before us in the classroom, or works beside us at the lab bench? What does it mean to be human? This image informs our approach to teaching and learning either consciously or unconsciously. In my view we suffer today from a profoundly impoverished image of the human being and of our world. We have a diminished and inadequate ontology. What is needed is a truer, multidimensional understanding of the human being that will in turn lead to a comparably rich, multidimensional education. Only then can we hope that, through the collaborative effort of teachers and learners, we might, as Wendell Berry puts it, “make human beings in the fullest sense of those words.” I want to explore with you some of the lost or neglected “dimensions” of ourselves and of higher education. Only when we knit together the multiple strands of learning and teaching will we have an education that addresses the depth, breath and meaning dimensions of life.

The Several Dimensions of Higher Education

Space is multidimensional (three-dimensional, if we leave aside relativity and string theory). Our learning, too, is multidimensional. Before turning to the role of contemplative pedagogy explicitly, I need to set the stage considering the importance of breadth in integrative education.

As an undergraduate, one is asked early in one’s studies to declare a major area of disciplinary concentration: physics, English, neuroscience, French, and so on. This is a first axis or straight-line highway put down through the vast territory of learning. The full mastery of a single area of human knowledge or endeavor is of signal importance. One eventually comes to stand at the shoreline that separates what is understood and what is not. It is the province of discovery, innovation, and the new. But is mastery of a single domain really enough?

Ever since Diderot and D’Alembert codified the map of knowledge in their eighteenth-century Encyclopédie, universities around the world have adopted the divisions they made with the consequence that thousands of colleges and universities offer an essentially identical set of disciplinary concentrations. Lines are drawn by the dominant power (in this case the leaders of the French Enlightenment) and centuries later we are still living with that legacy. Did Diderot and D’Alembert get it right? Should there be any lines at all? Should the axes through the intellectual landscape be more like meandering creeks or twisted footpaths than linear highways? Are we constrained to walk one path only?

Wendell Berry remarked that the idea of the university is “the bringing together, the combining into one, of all the disciplines.” Interdisciplinary teaching and research bring individuals together from diverse disciplines to tackle problems using multiple lines of inquiry and expertise. Yet simple juxtaposition of different views is no guarantee of a genuine synthesis or creative insight. For that to occur, the community of discourse must be internalized so it can live within a single person with sufficient intensity to overcome the mind’s inertia, its resistance to change. The whole is then reflected in the individual, and in such measure that it can become an active force that liberates and animates.

When Albert Einstein was an obscure young clerk at the Berne patent office in Switzerland, he joined up with two new friends and together they created the tiny Akademie Olympia. Einstein had recently completed his studies in physics at the ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule) in Zurich (the MIT of Switzerland). His friends Solovine and Habicht were not scientists but students of philosophy and mathematics, respectively. Over the three years that their little academy existed, from 1902 to 1905, the group read and debated such books as Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, Spinoza’s Ethics, Mill’s A System of Logic, Mach’s Analysis of Sensations, Poincaré’s Science and Hypotheses, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. They hiked the magnificent Berner Oberland, in the evenings Einstein entertained them with his violin, they would eat what they could afford (i.e., not much), and they talked; above all, they talked. Einstein’s breadth of thought was greatly extended by the intensive, wide-ranging, intellectual intercourse he had with Solovine and Habicht. In looking back on the Olympia Academy, Solovine said, “Our material situation was far from being brilliant; but, in spite of that, what enthusiasm we had, what a passion for the things that really mattered” (cited in Clark, 1984, p. 80). And Einstein noted similarly, “We had a wonderful time in those days in Berne in our cheerful ‘Academy,’ which was less childish than those respectable ones which I later got to know only too well” (American Institute of Physics, 2004).

Einstein appeared out of nowhere in 1905, the year the Academy ended, when he published four landmark papers, including his discovery of special relativity and his equation E = mc². He would later remark on the importance of Ernst Mach, David Hume, Henri Poincaré, and other authors read in the Academy, for his accomplishments during that astonishing year of creativity. Through his friends and their intensive conversations, he had succeeded in integrating into his own thinking the breadth of thought these giants offered, their critical stance, and divergent views, and Einstein was deeply helped thereby. Of Ernst Mach, for example, Einstein would write, “I see Mach’s greatness in his incorruptible skepticism and independence …” (Clark, 1984, p. 80), an independence that appealed to Einstein’s own personality. The Academy offered a community of ardent intellectual conversation that animated Einstein and opened him to fresh notions of what space, time, matter, energy, and light really were. The consequent revolution wrought by Einstein has still not been fully appreciated.

Contrast Einstein’s experience with our curricular strategies for ensuring breadth of study. The juxtaposition of one course next to the other, as is common with distribution requirements, is not in my view, a satisfactory way of addressing the issue of breadth. We need models of engagement much more like the Olympia Academy than a sushi menu. Who would you invite to an incandescent conversation on science, art, philosophy, social justice, environmentalism … ? With whom would you hike the Sierras, and what books would you have in your backpack? Broaden yourself by engaging difference. The observations and thoughts of others are doors that open onto rooms whose existence you may never have imagined. Those others include the voices of great thinkers and artist of the past, as well as your contemporaries. Treated in this way, we can internalize the breadth of our world and civilization, and are the richer for it.

As rich as interdisciplinary study and research can be, it fails to integrate the “vertical” dimensions of human experience and inquiry, of human aspiration and action. It’s as if one were content with the geometry of Flatland, blithely unaware of a missing dimension to space. Higher education should include both labors of ascent (anodos) and descent (kathodos), as well as the complementary modalities of vita contemplativa and the vita activa, which comprise the largely neglected vertical dimension to education whose absence is so lamented by Lewis and Kronman, among others. What are the distinguishing features of the vertical dimension, why are they significant, and how does one integrate them into higher education? Here I believe we find a special role for contemplative pedagogy in higher education.

True insight requires the student or researcher leave the constraining cave of everyday conventional thought in order to see more clearly and by a new light. One labors not only to understand but to create, for here is the place of the new. While we cannot engineer creativity or manufacture insight, we can ask after the conditions, practices, and capacities that support innovation and insight. The conditions for creativity are several, but three of the most important are the ability to engage with paradox or contradiction, to sustain that engagement over long periods of time, and to nurture the moment of insight so as to bring it into a lucid mathematical form. In the genesis of both the special and general theories of relativity, we witness a classic instance of these three conditions and their relation to the contemplative and reflective dimensions of research.

Einstein tells us that the sought for “principle [of relativity] resulted from a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen” (in Schilpp, 1949, p. 49). Thus, ten years before discovering the principle of relativity, he began to think about pursuing a beam of light at the speed of light. He wondered: What would a light wave look like in such a situation? Could he catch up with light, rendering it stationary? But that would be in direct conflict with the recently established theory of electromagnetism by James Clerk Maxwell. This was the contradiction he contemplated for the next ten years and that led to his discovery of special relativity.

The general theory of relativity was likewise born of a paradox, what Einstein called the “happiest thought” (“der glücklichste Gedanke meines Lebens”) of his life. Sitting in his chair in 1907 at the Bern patent office, he suddenly wondered how he could distinguish between himself sitting in his chair in the gravitational attraction of the earth, and being accelerated up. As he pondered the two situations, it seemed like the two different situations would be indistinguishable experimentally. Billions of people sit in chairs every day without having this thought! Or, consider the opposite situation. If he, Einstein, were to fall off a tall building, gravity would literally disappear as far as all experimental effects could determine (at least until he hit the ground!). This has become enshrined as the “equivalence principle” in physics: that is, gravity and acceleration are “equivalent.” But it would not be until 1916, nine years later, that he would find a way to complete his general theory of relativity. The circumstances of his final resolution to the problem are remarkable and valuable to us in our considerations of higher education in support of the creative act.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• An Introduction to Contemplative Learning and Inquiry Across Disciplines
• Part I: Contemplative Studies: A New Academic Discipline
• Part II: Domain Specific Perspectives
• Part III: Contemplating Change: Individual and Collective Transformation in Contemplative Education Environments
• Part IV: New Frontiers of Contemplative Learning and Instruction
• Author Biographies
• Index
• Back Cover