Integral Education: New Directions for Higher Learning

Teaching Integratively: Five Dimensions of Transformation

Teaching Integratively Five Dimensions of Transformation Roben Torosyan A better-informed people is not necessarily a better-educated people. [Perhaps] the twenty-first century needs a new kind of learning and a new kind of leader to help us. [We need to] focus not just on the buildup of more knowledge but also on the fashioning of new relationships to the knowledge we already have. —Kegan & Lahey, 2000, p. 234 Introduction I teach to transform myself, others, and the world, and to realize I cannot change things. Many educators face related paradoxes. The word comes from the Greek para- for “beyond” and dokein for “to think”—literally “beyond thinking.” On one hand, for example, learners struggle with written grammar. But they also struggle to express themselves deeply, a skill which often requires deliberately ignoring errors and the internal critic. While educational theories help educators develop such dueling competencies , it can be overwhelming for us, let alone for our learners, to reconcile these often contradictory demands. As the epigraph above suggests, everyone needs to not only see relationships, but to form different relationships to what they see. To that end, this chapter first describes big picture conceptions of knowledge, then shows five overarching patterns that cross many domains of learning. After providing a caveat about the risk of such grand narratives, I offer some pathways for classroom application, in terms of (a) our curriculum or content, and (b) our pedagogy or methods. 127 128 Roben Torosyan Background: Interdisciplinary, Integrative, and Integral Education Big Picture Conceptions Since my teens, I have had a fantasy of organizing all of knowledge. I also loved the arts. When I got to college, I initially wanted to pursue architecture, the mother of the arts and sciences. I started by taking civil engineering prerequisites for architecture, but soon became part of that lower half of class that fell below the class average of a C. I eventually changed majors to art history, and there found inspiration in big ideas. I saw a lecture by Kirk Varnedoe that drew on the late nineteenth century novella Flatland (Abbott, 1884/2002) as a metaphor for the process of “going meta,” or getting above any phenomenon. In the 1900s several revolutions in perspective occurred, from art to physics to literature, denoting a zeitgeist or spirit of the times that used an especially reflexive kind of thinking. Such big shifts, I learned, were part of larger patterns of thinking throughout the disciplines and daily life. In 1990, I came across a “Roots of Knowing” (Hussey, 1988) approach to education, proposed by Rachel M. Lauer, a former chief psychologist for the New York City schools who had founded a “thinking and learning center” at Pace University. I later worked with Lauer for five years while writing my doctoral dissertation at Teachers College on her learning-centered methods for encouraging consciousness development (Torosyan, 2000). Lauer argued, for instance, that most thinking involves a cyclical “PEDA process” of perception, evaluation, decision-making and action (Lauer, 1971, 1983, 1996–97). Others suggested similar cycles. Schon claimed that we interpret experiences “through our repertoires of values, knowledge, theories, and practices that [we] bring to the experiences” (Zeichner & Liston, 1996, p. 16). Using such “appreciative systems,” we spiral from appreciation to action to reappreciation. For learning to then be transformative, as Jack Mezirow (1991) argued, learners need to “understand more clearly the reasons for their problems and the action options open to them so that they can improve the quality of their decision making ” (p. 203). As Lauer further showed, thought and action are filtered through an epistemology or way of knowing that conveys an often unconscious set of assumptions about what is true, real, or powerful, or how things work (Lauer, 1996–97). Development in such a worldview happens (and fails to happen) in individuals as well as across society from ancient times to the modern and postmodern revolutions. As Michel Foucault (1973/1994) postulated, “In any given culture and at any given moment,” things operate according to a characteristic “episteme,” a mode that “defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice” (p. 168). A sequence of development of mindset (Bateson, 1972; Bois, 1970) unfolds on the part of whole cultures or epochs. In Kieran Egan’s view (in Olson & Torrance, 1996), students recapitulate the discoveries that constitute their cultural history. 129 Teaching...