Southern Oregon University
Resource Center for
Studies in Liberatory Education
(RCSLE)
Liberating Liberal Education
Much has been said about the meaning of "liberal," the L in COPLAC.
Liberation is the direct aim of Liberal Education.
Liberation, not merely of the individual,
but of the civilization that comprises
the liberally educated citizenry.
While we boast of our aspirations at SOU, and have made some significant movement towards embodying the liberatory ideas we espouse, we have much room for progress in fully realizing the practice of liberatory education.
What does it mean to be "liberated?" The term has become omniously ambiguous in this age of groundless wars against people that we, the aggressor, then declare liberated. Are the politicians who make the deceptions and run the wars liberally educated? Or, as David Orr asks, "Education for what?" To answer that question is to see more clearly how the practice of teaching, as much or more than the content, liberally educates or fails to educate the students. Is it possible to teach for liberation when the faculty and administration are largely captives of economic incentives for "subservience education" and discouraged with disincentives for "liberatory education?" How do we begin to think about liberating liberal education? How do we liberate ourselves from the chains of our own subservience education?
If we are to become more than a well-oiled career mill for a reckless middle class, students need to learn how to learn in ways that foster their independence. In short we need to empower student learning. This can be accomplished simply, but comes at the cost of abandoning essentialist thinking about content. It requires rethinking prevailing paradigms linking economic rewards to strict measures of productivity. It also requires abandoning traditional reward systems. Grades, as they are traditionally used, are a disincentive for student independence. They enforce subservient learning and re-enforce patterns of subservience in the student. Liberatory grading has been successfully implemented at other COPLAC schools. Can SOU begin planning for an upgrade to its grading system? These are some questions we face as a University as we move toward a fuller realization of our role in helping to build a liberated citizenry.
The mission of the RCSLE is:
- to develop the concept of "liberatory education" as it applies to students at SOU
- to demonstrate and conduct dialogue on teaching practices that support liberatory education
- to explore alternative uses of grades
and grading systems that
support liberatory education
- to serve as a source of relevant literature, arguments, debates, and dialogues about liberatory education
- to raise awareness of pedagogical diversity at SOU, and to promote liberatory approaches to teaching practice
What is liberation?
What is a liberated civilization? Liberation from what ______________?
What is liberal education? What is liberal about liberal education? What is liberating about liberal education?
What is liberatory education? Education for what _____________?
What is "academic freedom" . . . freedom to __________? . . . freedom from ___________?
What is "subservience education" . . . . service to _________? sub-serving what ___________?
What is education for? Education for what _____________?
What is an educated citizenry? Educated for what_________________?
Is liberatory education compatible with subservience learning? What does liberatory education serve?
Who or what does the liberally educated and liberated citizenry serve?
Doxastic dimensions of teaching practices: thoughts, judgments, opinions, desires, wishes, fears.
Doxastic dimensions of student predispositions: thoughts, judgments, opinions, desires, wishes, fears.
What are the underlying belief systems? How is teaching practice predispositioned by belief system?
What is empowered learning? Where does the power come from? Power over ________? or Power to __________?
How does the economic reward and incentive system reinforce subservience education and discourage liberatory education?
What is essentialist education? How is essentialism embedded in the teaching tradition?
Can University Seminar serve as a model of liberatory teaching practices?
Who or what is "in charge" of liberatory education? Is that an oxymoron?
Creating incentives for liberatory teaching practice?
Liberating liberal education?
Internet Sources:
sometimes strange, directions; the ability to
analyze a problem, imagine solutions, weight
them by some rational criteria, and commit to
one; understanding the methodologies of
investigation of various types of knowledge,
so as to acquire the ability to become one’s
own best, lifelong teacher; a healthy skepticism
of facile arguments and easy solutions, and, a
profound distrust of simplistic analyses; a toleration of,
even affection for, ambiguity and complexity; an ability to
imagine and share the perceptions and feelings of different
individuals and different cultures and different times.”
COPLAC members have discussed the need to make a more conspicuous historical linkage
between the liberal arts and freedom and citizenship leadership. For example, they have explored
the similarities in the conception of the liberal arts for both classical Rome and modern America.
In the former, the Latin term liberales referred to people, and the artes liberales became “the arts
worthy of free men.” These Roman freemen qualified as citizen-participants in decision-making
for their cities and state. To exercise wise leadership they had to acquire the “artes” necessary to
good governance—not only the ability to read and write, but to speak convincingly in public, to
be persuasive in both written and oral argument, to use sound reasoning, and to understand
something of the world around them.
During the Middle Ages in Europe, the purpose of the liberal arts changed markedly. Predicated
on the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry,
and astronomy), it became an education of language and reasoning for the elite—for kings,
noblemen, clerics, and the rising merchant class. The founders of the American republic, in the
aftermath of the Revolution, sought a new purpose: to use education as the basis for creating an
informed, enlightened citizenry capable of making the new democratic experiment work.
Thus, a profoundly revolutionary idea took root and flourished on American soil: that, if
political and economic power were to be vested in ordinary people, the people would need as
much education as they were capable of acquiring individually. As Thomas Jefferson put it:
“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and
if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion,
the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion by education.”
(reprinted from http://www.coplac.org/pdfs/COPLAC.pdf)
What Is Education For?
Six myths about the foundations of modern education,
and six new principles to replace them
by David Orr
"The plain fact is that the planet does
not need more "successful"
people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers,
restorers,
storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who
live
well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join
the
fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have
little
to do with success as our culture has defined it."
". . . the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses. Process is important for learning. Courses taught as lecture courses tend to induce passivity. Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the "real world." Dissecting frogs in biology classes teaches lessons about nature that no one would verbally profess. Campus architecture is crystallized pedagogy that often reinforces passivity, monologue, domination, and artificiality. My point is simply that students are being taught in various and subtle ways beyond the content of courses."
One of the articles in The Learning
Revolution (IC#27)
Winter 1991, Page 52
Copyright (c)1991,
1996 by Context Institute
Learning How To Learn:
8 Tools Of Independent Learning
These tools are needed if a person is going to be an active generator of information and not just a passive recipient. They are described by Feuerstein as "parameters of mediated learning" and are included in the COGNET program under the following labels:
Inner Meaning * Being aware of and developing a significance inside yourself that provides intrinsic motivation for learning and remembering.
Self Regulation * Controlling your approach to learning by using metacognition (thinking about how you are thinking) to determine factors like readiness and speed.
Feeling of Competence * Knowing you have the ability to do a particular thing. Lack of this tool often results in laziness and other avoidance behaviors; presence of it results in feeling confident and motivated to learn.
Goal Directed Behavior * Taking initiative in setting, seeking, and reaching objectives on a consistent basis.
Self Development * Being aware of your uniqueness as an individual and working toward becoming all you can be.
Sharing Behavior * Communicating thoughts to yourself and others in a manner that makes the implicit explicit.
Feeling of Challenge * Being aware of the effects emotions have on novel, complex, and consequently difficult tasks; knowing how to deal with challenge.
Awareness of Self Change * Knowing that you change throughout life and learning to expect, nurture, and benefit from it.
"The belief that all people have the capacity to become critical thinkers and to work to solve their own problems lies at the heart of popular education methodology. Participants in a popular education setting are active subjects, not passive objects. Taking an active role helps people learn better. It helps them care more about what they are learning. A facilitator who works this way becomes a co-learner with the participants. Indeed, the facilitator should take guidance from the participants throughout the planning and workshop process. Whenever possible the facilitator should incorporate the personal experiences of the participants into the work.…"
Education for Liberation Network
Liberatory Pedagogy Glossary
Paradoxes of "Liberatory" Education
Critical Pedagogy
its definitions,
history, key concepts, and major theorists--and links to other critical
pedagogy resources on the web
The right to freedom of thought is situated at the core of what it means to be a free person. It is essential to the most elementary concepts of human freedom, dignity, and self-expression. It’s what gives us collective confidence that the future will improve upon the past.
The Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics (CCLE) is a network of scholars elaborating the law, policy and ethics of freedom of thought. Our mission is to develop social policies that will preserve and enhance freedom of thought into the 21st century.
Subversive Tactics of Neurologically Diverse Cultures Ine Gevers
"In this existentialist-humanist mode of consciousness, on the other hand, we “are” agnostic, and consciously recognize our models as our creations. In this state, we “are” model-relativists, “sophisticates” and actively creative; all perceptions (gambles) are actively known as gambles. We consciously seek to edit less and tune in more, and we look especially for events that do not neatly fit our model, since they will teach us to make a better model tomorrow, and an even better one the day after. We are not dominated by The “Real” Universe since we remember that the linguistic construct is just our latest gamble and we can make a better one quickly.
The ideas we have been discussing . . . are profoundly threatening to all dogmatists, not just to materialistic dogmatists. Powerful churches, political parties and vested (financial) interests, for example, have a strong desire to program the rest of us into the particular “Real” Universes that they find profitable, and to keep us from becoming self-programmers. They want to “take responsibility’ for us, and they have no wish to see us “take responsibility’ for ourselves."
—Roger Jones, Physics as Metaphor
Journal of Cognitive Afffective Learning
CURRICULUM AS MYTHIC IMAGE
Greg Nixon
To sum up, experience of world as being—as subject and object united in the image—is reduced as soon as we adapt to the limitations imposed by our senses. The first reduction of the image and of experience within it is supplied through the brain and central nervous system. The second reduction occurs through the entrance into the cultural world of symbols (such as language), something more than a re-presentation: a reduction of experience-in-itself but an expansion of mind and objective time. Now we continue our dutiful reductionism in the field of curriculum and education. We separate, categorize, and channel young minds into socially productive activities. Personal experience and imagination are seen as luxuries left for leisure time—if there is the energy left to support them. It is as though we have drawn the waters from the ocean of being and over time have channeled the flow into rivers, streams, and creeks until they all disperse as drainage into the desert. There is no return, no renewal or revitalization, only the progress and accumulation of seepage.
Certain areas of curriculum theory have for decades been attempting to inspire curriculum thinking from the position of the arts and humanities as opposed to the usual reduction to scientific data and professional recommendation. A reconceptualization (see Pinar 1975; Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, Taubman 1995) is said to have taken place. Though many mythopoetic approaches have been successfully undertaken, it may be that up until this time an in-depth mythopoetic rationale, oxymoronic as that may be, for curriculum theory has never been attempted. With the archaic experience of the image, the apotheosis of imagination as described in archetypal psychology, and the call to awaken life "to a drunken marriage with divine feeling" (see epigraph or ask Lamia), I hope this needed epistrophe has at least been suggested."
AN ASSIGNMENT FOR THE CAMPUS
(an excerpt from David Orr 1991)
If education is to be measured against the standard of sustainability, what can be done? I would like to make four propsals. First, I would like to propose that you engage in a campus-wide dialogue about the way you conduct your business as educators. Does four years here make your graduates better planetary citizens or does it make them, in Wendell Berry's words, "itinerant professional vandals"? Does this college contribute to the development of a sustainable regional economy or, in the name of efficiency, to the processes of destruction?
My second suggestion is to examine resource flows on this campus: food, energy, water, materials, and waste. Faculty and students should together study the wells, mines, farms, feedlots, and forests that supply the campus as well as the dumps where you send your waste. Collectively, begin a process of finding ways to shift the buying power of this institution to support better alternatives that do less environmental damage, lower carbon dioxide emissions, reduce use of toxic substances, promote energy efficiency and the use of solar energy, help to build a sustainable regional economy, cut long-term costs, and provide an example to other institutions. The results of these studies should be woven into the curriculum as interdisplinary courses, seminars, lectures, and research. No student should graduate without understanding how to analyze resource flows and without the opportunity to participate in the creation of real solutions to real problems.
Third, reexamaine how your endowment works. Is it invested according to the Valdez principles? Is it invested in companies doing responsible things that the world needs? Can some part of it be invested locally to help leverage energy efficiency and the evolution of a sustainable economy throughout the region?
Finally, I propose that you set a goal of ecological literacy for all of your students. No student should graduate from this or any other educational institution without a basic comprehension of:
- the laws of thermodynamics
- the basic principles of ecology
- carrying capacity
- energetics
- least-cost, end-use analysis
- how to live well in a place
- limits of technology
- appropriate scale
- sustainable agriculture and forestry
- steady-state economics
- environmental ethics
Do graduates of this college, in Aldo Leopold's words, know that "they are only cogs in an ecological mechanism such that, if they will work with that mechanism, their mental wealth and material wealth can expand indefinitely (and) if they refuse to work with it, it will ultimately grind them to dust." Leopold asked: "If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?"
Liberation of Liberal Education
Subservience and arbitrary reward systems.
Steven
L Jessup
Clandestinct
Created 7 March 2006
The views and opinions expressed on this page and all of it daughter pages are strictly those of the page author, and are not official statements of Southern Oregon University.