Integral Education: New Directions for Higher Learning

Expanding Our Vision in the Teaching and Design of University Science—Coming to Know Our Students

Expanding Our Vision in the Teaching and Design of University Science— Coming to Know Our Students Sue Stack Preface In this chapter I focus on two moments in a collaborative university action research project which aimed to improve teaching and learning within a physics faculty. I unravel some of the issues that lecturers grapple with: changing teaching cultures and beginnning a process of coming to know their students better. I juxtapose this with reflections on my own movement toward an integral/holistic teaching practice and my relationships with my own students as they move into self-authoring developmental stages. I write this article using epistemologies drawn from auto-ethnography (Ellis & Bochner, 2000), writing as inquiry (Richardson, 2000), impressionistic writing (van Maanen, 1988), and transpersonal research methods (Braud & Anderson, 1998), which aim to make explicit the interiority of inquiry. This style aims to capture the moment—its emotional heart space as well as its physical and theoretical aspects. It aims to give the reader a sense of the “real” through fictionalising a narrative and providing a sense of story and motion forward. It also aims to model a process of “becoming” and encourages the readers to reflect on their own experiences and thinking that have the potential for transformation. It contextualises self as “self situated in culture,” making apparent some of the underpinning paradigms and values which shape me as the writer, and thus asks the readers to reflect on the values that shape their own sense of what education is for. 257 258 Sue Stack Scene 1 It is the first week of the university year, 1999. I am sitting in a large resonant lecture theatre that might normally hold 300 students. There are 60 of us, swallowed up in the space, distant from the lecturer down at the bottom who is explaining the principle of refraction, prisms, and lenses with the aid of a slick PowerPoint presentation. Layers of information appear on each diagram with variables and formulas . Each slide builds on the others carefully, logically, beautifully, inexorably. I am transported back 20 years to my own undergraduate physics days. The topics haven’t changed; the teaching approach hasn’t changed. Now we have PowerPoints and printouts, rather than scribbling down misread notes from scruffy writing on blackboards, or overhead transparencies. But we are still captive to a teaching/learning process based on particular paradigms about education, the nature of learning, the nature of our students, the nature of knowledge, and the purpose of undergraduate science. Can it change, should it change, and what might help? I am sitting in this room as coordinator of a year-long Collaborative Action Research Project to improve the teaching of first-year university physics courses. Sitting near me are other lecturers involved in the project. I came to the project wondering how I could bring holistic and integral perspectives to the transformation of university teaching. What might it mean to be an integral/holistic teacher, or create integral science courses, or develop integral scientists? But I have to let those grand aims go and tune into this group of lecturers and their questions. After two days of brainstorming and more days of interviewing client departments to determine their needs, we have decided on some key values and purposes to underpin the development of new teaching approaches in physics courses. In particular, we ask how we can move from just a dissemination of a “body of knowledge ”—fixed truth claims—into a more inquiry oriented, student-centred approach? How can we induct students into the process of inquiry that a scientists might bring to their own leading-edge research to foster critical thinking and problem solving as they step into the unknown? Can we bring an inquiring mindset to the way we engage with the “body of physics knowledge?” What happens to this body of knowledge and its truth claims if we treat it as an object of inquiry? What is this “process of scientific inquiry?” I have mulled over this for some time, bringing Integral Theory (Wilber, 1997, 1998) and other lenses to my own experiences as a scientist and science teacher (Stack, 2007). I wonder whether the glue in scientific inquiry (e.g., sense of wonder, intuitive hunches, creative insights, personal passions, corridor dialogues) is often unacknowledged because the scienti fic method is seen as objective, evidence-based, procedural, logical, theoretically informed, and rigorous. How can we make the interiority (Wilber’s “I” and “We” quadrants...