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Building and Working from Awareness

It seems to me that philosophy and psychology are helpful to one another. This is because both philosophy and the actual human mind are working with the actual conditions of reality, which are existential. Because the process of learning is developing representations for the raw material of existence, the representations will have manifestations of existential paradoxes and truths - the same things that are understood through philosophy in the abstract. Thus, any neurosis has a parallel in philosophy, and any philosophical paradox has a parallel in a psychological condition.

The amazing thing is that awareness of these paradoxes, neuroses, and dead ends, when accepted and not denied or wished away, provides in itself its own resolution - a new acceptance of a reality with this paradox as a given within it.

Precisely this idea is how I believe thought and action, psychology, respecting the learner, and the mistaking of an embodiment of an idea for the idea itself are part and parcel of one single, interrelated, reality. I would like to make some remarks on these interrelated concepts.

Every person has awareness and is acting based on this awareness. Some people produce effective action. Others do not. Independent action is the result of awareness. In a sense, awareness and action are different perspectives of each other - awareness is the ``present'' side, and ``action'' is the future side - Dewey called action ``an invasion of the future.''

What, then, is the role of the teacher? I believe there are two: to help the student develop an increased awareness, and to work with the student in the action that comes from the student's awareness. Let me take a few examples. One student would like to become a productive member of society by learning a particular profession. She has trust in the requirements of the University to prepare her for productive and aware citizenship. Clearly, in this case, one role of the educator is to engage with the student in her action - which is, in her engaging with the classes which meet the University requirements. This will be fruitful. The other task of the educator is to foster increased awareness on the part of the student. First of all, to help her verbalize her trust in the requirements of the University, and then to go on to help her build an awareness of where this trust comes from, the benefits and problems with it. What are her assumptions? What about her personal history makes these assumptions a part of her world view?

In another example, a student does not see the value in the breadth that the professor claims to see and does not trust these University requirements to help her. In this situation, the educator must first question whether his sole intention is to have the student get a broad education, or whether he intends to have the student recognize the value of this breadth, and to act on it. (The educator might also be interested at this point in examining his own values and becoming aware of where they come from.) Now, as I've said, I believe it is my role as an educator to help the student increase her awareness, and to engage with her awareness. I'll discuss the results of not having this value later in this conclusion, but for now I would like to continue with how an educator with these goals might proceed. This student for some reason does not value breadth. This is her awareness. The trick is for the educator to validate the student's current awareness, while opening up the possibility for future growth. The only way to do this (I have discovered through my own experience) is to leave it up to the student to ultimately decide whether her perspective is limited. And the way to do this is for the teacher to be genuine about his values - to be able to communicate these values without making a judgment on the student. This requires what I call self-purification (I use Gandhi's term, though this is my definition): a substantial effort to figure out how to share one's feelings without making a judgment. In this particular situation, the Professor might tell a story about how breadth has helped him in his life, or share his anxiety that he will fail to help the student if the student doesn't discover the value of breadth (still leaving the ultimate judgment up to the student). Another important part of building and validating the student's awareness is listening to the student, being curious and attentive about what the student perceives as important and not important in their education and why.

Now I would like to describe what we have if the educator in this situation did not proceed with this approach, but instead insisted that the student ought to learn the breadth without making the choice out of the student's own awareness. Here, he is engaging in wishful thinking. He is wishing that this student were another student, who did trust him or the University enough to learn on faith - in which case, quite possibly that student would become aware of the importance of breadth (before, during, or after getting it). But that is not the situation. Instead, this student does not have this trust. If the educator proceeds as if she does, he is acting on a particular embodiment of the idea of learning which does not apply to the current situation. What would happen, though, if despite this lack of trust, the educator still insisted? What I have found is that this tends to ossify the learner in her devaluation of the activity the educator insists on. For some reason, in such situations it is not effective to insist that a learner learn something. It doesn't provide the validation and language for the learner to grow in awareness, both of which are required for a learner to become aware in a way that allows him to act.

Here is one more example of an educator in a difficult situation. An educator might feel a learner is too inclined towards action to the exclusion of reflection. Typically, in a university setting, this is when the educator insists that the student must do work with an ``academic'' basis. I would like to do an analysis of the situation, then describe the results if the educator does the insisting, and finally discuss the alternative. The learner in this situation has an awareness that leads to direct action, but not to analysis or to analysis of the action. If the professor insists on a direction at this point which does not respond to this student's awareness, he is attempting to have the student respond to an awareness that the student doesn't have; and whenever a person fails to validate another person's awareness, the person becomes more ossified in his current level of awareness and will be resistant to growing. (In fact, I think most people are operating at a real level of awareness years and years younger than their actual age, because of a situation where they were not validated that many years before. The alternative is for the educator to respond by helping the student to engage in the action which is meaningful for her, and to simultaneously work to help her increase her awareness of what she values (providing her with vocabulary of words, stories, myths, etc.), and (sometimes) why this is what she values, and what the limitations of her values are.

There are, of course, compromises that must be made in order to even be able to have a relationship (perhaps the need for accreditation for instance) In this essay, I don't want to argue that no compromises must be made, but rather to present some of the things whose recognition has helped me to grow, within the context of real-world compromises.