[Dialogue] [Oe List ...] Thoughts on Parker's paper

Thu Sep 16 16:36:48 CDT 2010

Herman,

It's interesting that just the day before your email arrived I had been going back through Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" which I first read about 10 year ago.  For the record, I have generally thought of facilitation as a tool used to accomplish a broader mission and have on occasion been concerned that the ICA since 1988 and we who identify with it may have tended to reduce our mission to just "be" facilitators rather than to "use" facilitation as a tool.  I do not believe that is the case today with ICA-USA.

Freire's insights have great relevance for today's "new" pedagogy as we try to define it.  For one, he insists that education/learning is not a subject (teacher) to object (learner) proposition.  Rather it is a subject to subject interchange moderated by each particpant's experience of the world, where teachers learn and learners teach.

He further insists that learning occurs through discovery, not by prescription--that the teacher's role is not  to impose his/her understanding on the learner, but rather to facilitate (to make easy) the learner's reflection on and dialogue with the world, arriving at the action necessary to transform the world. This dialogue, he insists, is inquisitive, not prescriptive, and those who participate in it are inquirers, not advocates of a pre-determined point of view.

Finally, Freire's definition of  "praxis" involves both "reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it."  Reflection without action, he insists, is a kind of idealistic intellectualism, and action without reflection is mere "activism."  The bottom line is, education is not for the sake of the domestication of the learner, but for the sake of his/her liberation in order that he/she may "...work, and working...transform the world."

In light of Bill's and Jack's ruminations about the future, I believe this has implications yet to be worked through.  Now that "the sage on the stage" has been replaced by the "guide on the side," I wonder how this would effect our pedagogical style were we again to teach RS-1, or as the Cocks and others do the PJD.  Clearly a new pedagogy is being called for.  I would respond to Bill that "everyone's mixed up and confused thinking" is precisely the caldron out of which will come not only the new pedagogy and learning, but also the action which will transform the world.  Freire says the present is not "well-behaved" or orderly but chaotic and messy, and the future, rooted in the dynamic present, is a "revolutionary futurity."  The future, he suggests, is not a problem to be solved, but an emergent transformation to be participated in.  The questions is, what kind of pedagogy will facilitate that?

Randy

--- On Wed, 9/15/10, Herman Greene <hgreene at greenelawnc.com> wrote:

From: Herman Greene <hgreene at greenelawnc.com>
Subject: [Oe List ...] Thoughts on Parker's paper
To: "'Order Ecumenical Community'" <oe at wedgeblade.net>
Date: Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 4:53 PM

I was in the room when Parker spilled out his thoughts now more carefully described in his paper. I identify with it. I like this sentence: “We are living in a time in which a ‘new pedagogy’ must come into being; not facilitation of everyone’s mixed up and confused thinking that yields a sense of hopelessness and cynicism except on a most reduced scale.”

Jim Wiegel was in the room too and when this came out he said something about how he couldn’t accept that what he was doing wasn’t worthwhile. 

I missed that period when facilitation was the order of the day. I’ve always been puzzled by it, but I have been very impressed and moved by what ICA people were able to do through human development projects and I am sure great moments occurred in the thousands of facilitation sessions led by ICA people. The Great Sacrifice went on far beyond when I left in 1975.

 I would put the turn to the world later than 1970-71, but it’s not important. We were either primarily the Ecumenical Institute when I left in 1975 or I missed something. True, RS-1 wasn’t being taught much anymore, the original LENS was, which I understand because mostly a methods course. 

I’m not trying to criticize, but method never was the key for me. 

So we get back to pedagogy. Not defined in Bill’s paper. For one thing, we would have to have something to say. I spoke with another order colleague recently who recalled her initial experience with EI. She said “They had an answer to everything,” and in a sense they/we did, though the answers we had then are not the answers for today.

Pedagogy, what would that mean today? Surely not the style of pedagogy of the past, but I drawing on the past I guess pedagogy would still mean stirring people deeply. Yet that has to be with profound content so that people are not only moved but also in-formed.

I can’t imagine a disciplined order like we had coming out of this group again. I can imagine their being a kind of ancestral tradition that goes back to those days with the deep spirit movement of our early days carried through all of us. I can imagine continued networking and connecting and sparks coming together at different places among us. I can imagine ICA in Chicago developing a presence, as it is, and I can imagine a revival of the Ecumenical Institute of Chicago.

My recent efforts have focused on the Interfaith Consortium for Ecological Civilization, which will come to be on October 19 in New York . This is certainly an expression of the pluriform religious about which Bill writes. (Outline attached.) I am hoping that ICA/EI connections around the world will help ICEC pull off the ecological civilization conferences mentioned in the draft. We’ll need facilitator/pedagogues . . . and something else—“dialogue” as a method.

I haven’t read Jack’s paper yet, but I will. I spoke with him in OKC and anticipate some of the ideas he shared there to be in his draft. 

I think if we were pedagogues we would be teaching about ecological civilization.

Herman

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