In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Encountering the (W)hole Integral Education as Deep Dialogue and Cultural Medicine Matthew C. Bronson and Ashok Gangadean Preface The crisis of our times, as we see it, is at root a failure of the human imagination and chronically entrenched hermeneutical patterns. Progressive educators feel the current call to relevance in their practice, to claim in the classroom and curriculum the power of human communities to forge a better, more sustainable, and just world. Yet all too easily, the project of connection and integration glossed under “integral education” ends up putting “old mind in new bottles.” Without new thinking based on deep dialogue, the integral project can generate new dogmas, new taxonomies, new ideological schisms that merely replicate, rather than intervene in the turf wars and real wars that embody the cultural pathologies of late modernity. We note that despite millennial efforts to leave the older dysfunctional patterns of minding behind and mature into truly integral patterns of life, these chronically entrenched ego-mental patterns continue to dominate all aspects of our lives—including our institutions and the educational practices of cultural reproduction that occur within them. So one focal theme is to bring this impasse out into the open—to articulate and disclose the extent to which such ego-mental patterns of minding continue to dominate our lives today and impede, repress, block, and marginalize genuine attempts to enter Holistic Rational Space for the advancement of our human condition at all levels. In this chapter, a philosopher and a linguist explore integral education as the confluence of the rivers of reason and grace. They present in dialogic form a notation for indicating the deeper integral logic that underlies and makes possible the 149 150 Matthew C. Bronson and Ashok Gangadean intelligible universe as revealed in sacred texts and everyday conversation. Models and exercises for enacting this approach are provided for courses in philosophy and introductory linguistics. The authors address the political and practical challenges of enacting integral education as an intervention in the status quo practice of “dichotomosis,” toxic either/or thinking, in the Academy and society. Issues of assessment and accountability are critical for integral educators who wish to maintain credibility and rapport with a mainstream that is increasingly streaming over a cliff. Deep dialogue across difference points the way to re-channel the force of the collective consciousness toward an ancient future worthy of our evolutionary potential and critical role as citizens of the planet. Dialogue of 5/17/08 (MB = Matthew C. Bronson; AG = Ashok Gangadean) Introduction: Opening the Door to Integral Dialogue MB: Here we are. I guess we can begin where we’ve begun before, which is here in this present moment, this time in 2008. The world continues to move along in its various paths. Many people believe, indeed, a consensus exists among progressive elements of society that we are passing through a moment of multiple crises where the survival and sustainability of the human and more-than-human worlds is quite literally at stake. Lots of wonderful groups and people are grappling with these crises productively, trying to think about what their part is to play and making some of the shifts that need to happen (Hawken, 2008). One has the feeling that time is short and, yet, certainly there is enough time for whatever important work one can do. And in the area of education, many people are responding by seeking sources of new thinking and ideas, paths of action that will intervene in the endless conflicts that seem to characterize our time. People are coming to the doors of the universities and to the research institutions and saying: “What do you have for us? What knowledge and models of being together can you contribute to the public sphere since you folks have the time and luxury to take a step back from the hullabaloo of everyday life and actually reflect? What is it that you can bring to the table, to the collective conversation?” I’d like to highlight by way of entering our dialogue the accountability and the responsibility that we have as educators to provide real solutions to the root issues of our day. A great deal of the educational enterprise is designed to stifle imagination, to pigeon-hole people and put them in the right occupational slots (Montuori, 2006; Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994, 2003). And certainly you as a professor in a liberally-oriented college (Haverford College) and myself also from a progressive...

Share