Throw the First Capston (& transform)

Capstone: our Graduation Speech

From a speech Margo Flood sent to the whole
community to help us anticipate our graduation
speaker: Ray Anderson. .

I’m sampling.

If you put a gun to my head and forced me to
choose the specimen that most represents
the whole of the Anderson speech,
this is it:

Redundantly:

Our universities, however, continue to teach
and operate in the system that is destroying
the biosphere. Adherence to the old mind-set,
the old curricula, obsolete pedagogy, and
shortsighted planning are producing
graduates who are trained to perpetuate
the destruction of the biosphere.

It’s possible this is Chicken Little talk, and me,
Henny Penny. But I’ve harbored these sentiments
most of my so-called “career” –not in terms of
“biosphere.” Noosphere maybe.

End-days attitudes & frames of mind-set are with
us always. Existential, along with angst, anxiety, guilt,
perfectionism, peer pressure, the old struggle-for-
power-paradigm we weave so well. How could it
be other wise?

No one in my family is concerned with effects of
an old educational mind-set, old curricula, obsolete
pedagogy, and short sighted planning. As far as I
can tell, none of my colleagues are either.
Dong Ping maybe.

We choose our tokens of concern--or they choose us::
manifestations and embodiments standing for a gut,
visceral, illogical, non-rational Swannanoa river
of collective consciousness running through us.

Owww, oooo, damnit: something’s wrong, feel it
in my bones. The sky is falling. The sky is falling.

Stuck in my own old mind-set: life-time love affair
with the rectification of obsolete pedagogy.
“Let me organize that for you! ”
Said to be the Devil’s first
words to God. My lucid
schemes.

“Sam, if educating was supposed to be the way you think
it's supposed to be, then it would be, for crying out loud.”
My students notion of IT IS WHAT IT IS. State of the Art.
Always.

Transformative Education.
“Get Real.” & then maybe: "Keep it Real."

How the pros talk about it (listen to the sound).

"Transformative learning is the expansion of consciousness
through the transformation of basic world view and specific
capacities of the self; transformative learning is facilitated
through consciously directed processes such as appreciatively
accessing and receiving the symbolic contents of the unconscious
and critically analyzing underlying premises “
(Elias, 1997, p. 3).

That’s the intellective approach.

“While this learning process is certainly rational on some levels,
it is also a profound experience that can be described as a
spiritual or emotional transformation as well. The experience of
undoing racist, sexist, and other oppressive attitudes can be
painful and emotional, as these attitudes have often been developed
as ways to cope with and make sense of the world. This type of
learning requires taking risks, and a willingness to be vulnerable
and have ones' attitudes and assumptions challenged.”
See hooks and Freire

Affective approach.

A pox on both houses, I say.
(Gary Hawkins might call them:
the 2 ECO systems)

Can you hear IT?
The SOUND of Acadeemia?

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
(W.Stevens)

He who is without spin: throw the first capstone.

xxxooo, Sam