Reflecting Allowed

Only through the humanities can we prepare leaders of empathy, imagination, and understanding—responsive and responsible leaders who embrace complexity and diversity.
– Peter Solovey, President of Yale

I beg to differ.

Beautiful as the humanities are, this quote gives them far more credit than they deserve. 

I think if we replaced “the humanities” with “interacting deeply with different others with humanity”, it might fit.

Sure, you can gain empathy through reading the points of view of others and feeling what they feel through novels and music and film. But that is nothing like living for an extended period of time with people different from yourself and experiencing their joy and suffering. 

Sure, you can gain imagination vicariously by studying the humanities, but you can also become better at imagination if you develop a close friendship with someone whose culture is extremely different from your own and try to learn to see the world through their lens.

Understanding, responsive, responsible leaders do not learn any of this by studying it. They learn it by living it. By experiencing it. You do not understand, respond and become responsible for something you study in college or elsewhere. You become that by enacting it and perhaps reflecting on it in an academic environment – but you don’t develop it there unless that environment encourages you to live those experiences. 

Humanity is not the purview of the humanities. It should pervade all our learning and all our behavior. Nurses need to be empathetic and I don’t think they need humanities to develop this – they just need someone to get out of their way and allow them to have human emotions even as they learn to become professional caregivers. Computer scientists need to be empathetic, to better create things that meet the needs of other people – and I don’t know how the humanities can help with that, but I do know how working closely with other people can. Political scientists need to be responsive (God, do they need to be responsive!) but that comes from dialogue with people, not by studying humanities. 

This is not at all a rant against the humanities. I think the humanities inspire a great deal of beauty and enrich our lives and hearts and minds and souls in so many ways. I can’t live without them. But I don’t think any course of study itself achieves any of those things the president of Yale is suggesting. I think all of those things develop with human experience, and you don’t need to be a humanist to do that.

Unless I have misunderstood something. Please enlighten me. I am objecting to the “only through the humanities” (historically theoretical disciplines which I believe can promote all of these things but that they are not sufficient nor necessary in themselves for this, whereas deep interaction with “other” human beings is necessary – but probably not sufficient – for this)

We might ask ourselves as faculty development professionals, do we offer programs that incorporate the processes that enable deeper understanding, discovery, or transformative change? Are we aiming for increasing knowledge and skills as primary program outcomes, but falling short of creating opportunities in which faculty can critically reflect, reconceptualize, and engage in soul learning? Wouldn’t it make sense to imagine that at some point, in some faculty members’ careers, they will seek deeper understanding and affective as well as cognitive transformation? Are we considering how, and are we willing to offer a palette of opportunities that include a broader array of learning and development? Though time and budgetary resources are stretched, must we provide only the most popular programs, and not venture into opportunities that may promise a different kind of development?

– Connie Schroeder 

I found myself thinking a lot about transformative learning these days because my boss just got promoted to Associate Provost for Transformative Learning and Teaching. 

I am guilty of occasionally using the term, even while knowing there was a theory on it put forth by Mezirow. I’m not surprised by (or I remember from earlier reading) the different dimensions of transformative learning, that it involves critical reflection and can influence beliefs, self-awareness and behavior. After I read up a bit again now. I am particularly struck by the importance of the “disorienting dilemma” to challenge learners’ assumptions. I was wondering how far we do it in our classee, recognizing that different learners will have different moments in the class that do this for them. I’m thinking that maybe we do need to do some of this in facdev.

I’m thinking maybe I went through a disorienting dilemma while I was in the US because my assumptions were challenged so deeply in ways I was not at all expecting. Not at all.

I was thinking how uncomfortable it was (God it was painful and still is) and how far I want to do this with students for their own good without pushing them over the edge of sanity. Is there literature on dangers of aiming for too many disorienting dilemmas?

Yday I watched an episode of an English/Indian drama called The Good Karma hospital. It was really full of  potentially disorienting dilemmas:

1. There was an English woman who came to India to get a kidney transplant (and an a Indian doctor who treated her like scum for doing this unethical task of buying a human being’s organ). In Egypt the law is against this, but if someone offers or is family, it’s ok, as long as it’s not bought. But what do you do if it’s your child who needs a kidney transplant but you can’t find a match within your family? The reality is that people buy. And I under that Iran has a system to regulate this but it doesn’t turn a blind eye
2. There was a poor man who got run over by a car. In the end, his leg was about to be amputated because they couldn’t afford to pay for a vascular surgeon. However, the direcror of the hospital pieces some clues together by coincidence and discovers the car that ran him over belongs to a famous vascular surgeon and makes a deal with him to do the surgery and she won’t report him. Is this ethical? Moreover we discover later it was the surgeon’s daughter who was driving…. These are useful questions to tackle from different ethical perspectives (consequential, value-based, etc)
3. There was a famous movie star who was trying to get drugs out of the hospital for a drug habit she has. A nurse who was dazzled by her wanted to help her while the doctors tried to stop the movie star. The nurse tried to talk the woman out of it, but in the end failed and gave her the drugs. To me this one seems less controversial, but it’s still a situation (if abstracted) that someone could face

On another note, this Good Karma Hospital thing drove me nuts because of all the derogatory speak about India. I understand it’s realistic about how English people would view India, and I’m hoping that watching it regularly will be a transformative experience, challenging people’s assumptions about India!

On another note. My personal belief is that personal experiences of difference are a much stronger disorienting dilemma than theoretical discussions. I do think that if you have the personal experience but don’t get the opportunity to reflect in a supportive environment, ig can be damaging. But as a teacher you can’t always know when this moment will happen for each learner, so I’m curious if anyone has had experiences implementing this. It feels like a more structured model for critical pedagogy and difficult to imagine in practice but I’m pretty sure I can find papers on it as a practice with research data.