Prelude-pre-release
April 1, 2008: The National Endowment for the
Humanities and The Mac Donald Foundation
for Collaborative Genius announced in
this weekend that
of
dollar grant to initiate their proposal for a Whole
Systems Educational approach to Sustainability.
At a conference call earlier in the week with the
Grants Review Board, members of the college
Strategic Protocol Design committee commented
on concerns that motivated them to apply for
recognition and support.
“The primary environment that demands attention,”
said Ian Robertson, Dean of Work “is the environment
of higher education itself—the intellective and affective
atmosphere that encourages staff and students to be
inventive, creative—so as to cultivate the collaborative
genius needed to address sustainability concerns of the
21st century.”
“The 'Vehicle of Change' role accorded to education
since the 1972 Stockholm Conference,” Robertson
continued, clashes with its role and status as a servant
of an unsustainable socio-economic system at odds with
the eco-spirit.”
“These problems are compounded by a prevailing
modernist/mechanist view of Education” interjected
Gwen Diehn, Chairperson of Integrated Studies, “ that
is essentially instrumental and that views the relationship
between Education and its social and political context as
essentially linear.
“The large social system”—urged Professor Gary Hawkins,
Director of Undergraduate Writing—“its values, cultures,
norms, expectations—has a greater effect both on people
and young people than its formal educational system does;
thus one can't expect its education to address adequately
the nature of an emerging Sustainable Society as a whole.
“No problem can be solved on the same level at which
it is generated, said Einstein,” (Dr. Carol Howard,
reminding us all), “and so the thinking has to be out
of the box. But also within the box—as well as the
back&forth itself: 3 different kinds of thinking to
be juggled.”
Dr. Paul Bartleby, head of the college Sustainability
Club and advocate for Transformative Educational
Practices insisted emphatically that
1) the tendency of a dominant social paradigm to be
self-sustaining and
2) the subordinate relationship of education to
society as a whole does not augur well for positive
movement toward sustainability in either education
or society.
More to the point: the Academic Affairs Office
sent a release explaining its rationale and unique
approach to Sustainability Education.
A) The college plans to address the subordination of
“SCHOOL” mode within the dominant, permeating
influence of the “church-state” hegemony & its
instrumental agenda to make the world a-better-place
in the very terms, frame of mind-set, methodology, and
values that brought about very Sustainability Crisis it
would resolve.
How? By fostering and growing a shared “cerebral-affective''
ENVIRONMENT of ongoing, open discussion, argument, in
pursuit of ideas and analogies across the curriculum: the
cultivation of what we call “Local Mind in Play” and
anticipating an emergent shared edifice for planning our
liberal art practice and curriculum for the 21st century.
B) QUESTION EVERYTHING: Our mantra and shared
shibboleth. To questioning our underlying operating
assumptions; our hidden and controlling metaphors,
turning up and over our unexamined policies and
procedures governing academic programs: giving
squinty-eyed scrutiny to our credit & grading constraints
& regulatory systems: assessing the effectiveness of
contact-hour addiction in view of e-media-information
now accessible as well as home-schooling and non-resident
modeling opportunities to learn in novel ways inconceivable
to the founding father-patriarchy of modernist
industrialized education of the previous century.
C) OPEN INQUIRY, The QUESTION EVERYTHING
attitude and mind-set will be stimulated by the shared
recognition that “stupidity” in the line of OPEN INQUIRY
is no academic crime but actually an infinite resource, and
that CLARITY as an academic obsession is a liability as
insidious as compulsive hand-washing. How else do under
lying hypotheses, suppositions, and faith-based inititives get
uncovered and brought to light for re-consideration?
It's an awful mess! Dirty business: foundational.
Fundamental!
D) Warren Wilson for years has provided an e-forum
called Faculty L which enables its staff 24/7/365 access
to each others' thoughts, concerns, ideas, questions thus
enabling an ongoing Committee of the Whole to address
(from scratch) what it might mean and take to theorize
and model and implement an internal environ-mental
Whole Systems Sustainable Sustainablity Academic
Curriculum appropriate to its already dedicated-to-
Outside-Environmental-Issues-&- Greening mission.
Although the award is generous, this is a low-overhead
proposal. The technology is already in place. It don't cost
a thing to have faculty communicate internally through
FacultyL and so the half-million dollars will be given to
the President to distribute over a three year period as
appropriate to all participating members of the total staff
—maybe figure some pro-rated dollar amount per e-mail
contribution, in which case it could be considered a form
of professional faculty development and advancement: a
kind of paid perishable publication aimed for home
consumption so to speak: a form of local food, self-
sustenance: collective cultivation of collaborative genius.
Some reporting, of course, to NEH and Mac Donalds funding
agencies, and perhaps submission to The Chronicles of Hire
Education, so that other colleges and universities might go
and do like wise
but not a like.
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