Integral Education: The CIIS Blog

Learning Together: Collaborative Education in the School of Undergraduate Studies

By ALEC MACLEOD, core faculty member in the Bachelor's Completion program

This article was originally published in Cambio, the newsletter of the Office of the Dean of Students at CIIS.

Having faith in human beings is not an action one can take; it is a belief one must hold. It must, as Brazilian educator Paulo Freire reminds us, come from the heart: “You need to love.” It is important to remember that while Freire’s critical pedagogy is one of the fundamental influences on the educational practice in the School of Undergraduate Studies at CIIS, the practitioner’s relationship with that practice is as important as the practice itself. The belief that our students can learn and grow and change—regardless of their age or background—is what shapes our approach to teaching and learning.

Because of our belief in the capacities of our students, we have viewed learning as a collaborative process from the beginning. And especially because we have recruited and admitted a largely adult student population (the average age is in the mid-thirties), we are able to rely as much on their knowledge and experience as on that of our faculty teams.
 
Our educational goal is not simply to deposit knowledge into the brains of our students, what Freire calls the “banking system” of education. Instead it is our goal to enhance their capacities for critical engagement with their knowledge and experience. First, the banking system of depositing and withdrawing information is inherently disempowering to the student, 
assuming as it typically does, that the student is at best ignorant. Second, in the multicultural information age it begs the question of what knowledge is to be deposited. Half a millennium ago when the idea of the university emerged, it was possible for the educated person to determine what were all the important books ever published and then read them. Today even a serious scholar is hard pressed to keep up with all the significant publications in her field. New fields and knowledge emerge constantly. Many of the jobs our graduates will be applying for in ten years do not even exist now. How can we know what particular knowledge will be relevant? What we can assist our students in doing is knowing how to find information, make discerning judgments about its validity, and engage critically with it to determine its relevance and utility in their lives.Therefore, we do not prescribe that students know a particular set of facts or read a particular canon. Instead we work with our students to identify their own learning goals and assist them in meeting them. In this way we affirm the value of what they bring to the endeavor as well as their ability to succeed. There are several key elements to this approach to learning.

First, we work to promote a critical relationship with all knowledge, in particular the assumptions that the students have developed in the course of their lives. We term this process of assumption analysis, “critical reflection.” Students are asked to identify the a priori assumptions, whether their own or those implicit in a text, and challenge them. Next, students identify and challenge the contexts that give rise to the assumptions. Then they are asked to imagine alternatives to these assumptions. Challenging assumptions does not necessarily mean that they are wrong; indeed the process of considering them may 
affirm them as often as reframing them.

Second, our approach is to see all the activities as opportunities for students to learn what is important to them. For instance, in the first semester all students are asked to write a research paper on the nature of the self. In our readings and class discussions we consider the self from multiple perspectives, such as psychological, sociological, biological, spiritual, and literary. Individual students pursue a perspective 
that has particular interest for them. Perhaps, as many of our students do, they want to pursue a degree in psychotherapy or counseling. In such cases they may wish to look at the self through a particular psychological school of thought or to view the impact on the self of a specific psychological condition. Others may choose a particular faith tradition, political framework, or social location.

Further, the opportunity extends beyond simply the choice of subject matter to form and approach. While in many educational environments it is—implicitly—the students’ task to intuit what the faculty want them 
to do, we reverse this dynamic. When students submit their papers, the goal of the faculty—and of their fellow students, who also give feedback—is to identify the writers’ objectives for the paper and support them in reaching those objectives.

Finally, we emphasize collaboration. This is evident in a classroom experience that is collaborative between faculty and students, and in our curriculum that requires students to work and learn collaboratively. We 
believe it is especially important that our students enhance their skills in working and learning across differences: differences in beliefs, differences in life experience, differences in social background.

We believe that these are the skills necessary for the world around us today. And our practice of education intentionally models and mirrors these skills. And first and foremost must remain our faith in human beings.

Exploring the Psychic Playpen: A Conversation with Author Carolyn Cooke

Interview by BRYNN SAITO, program coordinator for the Department of Writing, Consciousness and Creative Inquiry

Carolyn Cooke is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Consciousness, and Creative Inquiry and author of "Daughters of the Revolution," a novel to be published by Knopf/Doubleday on June 7, 2011. Her short story collection, "The Bostons," was a winner of PEN/ Bingham Award for a first book and a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway. Her fiction has appeared in AGNI, The Paris Review, Ploughshares and in two volumes each of "Best American Short Stories" and "Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards." For more information visit www.carolyncooke.com.

Your novel, Daughters of the Revolution, will be published on June 7. What is the novel about?

The novel begins with sexual revolutions in New England, the time of integration and busing and the beginning of co-education in previously all-male schools.

Yale became co-ed around 1969 and a huge collection of prestigious old prep schools in Boston began to admit girls around then. So many radical divides and challenges to the culture had surfaced—from the Vietnam War to the publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective and the introduction of the speculum as a tool of consciousness! The gritty atmosphere and sexual politics of the time impressed me profoundly. Of course, I was a kid.

What comes first for you in the writing process—the characters, a scene, a political movement you want to engage? How does the writing begin?

I recently borrowed a copy of that immense, gorgeous edition of Carl Jung's Red Book and spent about a week reading it in bed. What an experience, to immobilize yourself before a big book – the record of a personal, psychotic process. Writing is always autobiographical in the sense that it comes from you and through you – but, as for Jung, it’s not necessarily autobiography. For me, story starts with language, sound; I start to hear something.

My first book came out exactly ten years ago. Ten years! And Daughters of the Revolution is a very slender book—it's like a haiku of a novel. I also wrote a collection of stories in that time, called Amor and Psycho, which is coming out next year. So I procrastinated from the novel by writing the stories, which are about sex and angst. I write slowly and cut much, more like a poet than a novelist, maybe - always trying to make the words say more than they want to. The novel takes place over the course of 40 years, so a lot of time passes even though it's very compressed.

To hear you say you write a like a poet makes a lot of sense to me.  Your writing is so emotionally and linguistically precise, and lyrical at the same time.

I don't think anyone will confuse Daughters of the Revolution with poetry, but I did try to capture the tone of a period—from the early 1970s through the early years of the 21^st century—and also how the tone changed, and how that shift was influenced by economic policies and social realities and changes in sexual politics. That’s really what interests me—the tonal feeling. Not plot so much.

How did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Some people want to explore the psychic playpen; other people – artists and psychologists, for example – have to, they just can't not. One of our students was just telling me about a parent, gravely ill, who is devastated because she has so much in her mind, in her soul, that she feels is going to be lost when she dies. I agree that’s an intolerable situation – to feel that you haven’t been able to say something out loud to the world that only you can say.

I relate to that. There's the world in your mind and the urgency to get it out in order to be your most real self.

The world in your mind, exactly. It’s not fundamentally a matter of self-expression. It’s invention, creation – making something potentially better and stranger and more lasting than you are.

As an associate professor in the Institute’s Writing and Consciousness MFA program, what does “consciousness” mean to you?

Not every writer writes from an interest in consciousness; I'm not sure I think of myself that way. Some writers are more interested in storytelling, or plot, or pure abstraction, or ideas, or history. Many of our students have stories that they urgently want to tell that have some political or social dimension or point of view they feel hasn't been captured in language before.

Consciousness is who you are, but it’s not autobiography – it’s not factual, or even knowable. It’s not self-conscious; it’s open to larger currents. It reveals you in relation to other human beings, the knowledge we share that is beyond geography or culture. The more particular and precise you become in certain kinds of writing, the more other people are able to see something that you maybe didn’t even know or intend, and say, Wow, that's exactly how it is. My interest in consciousness isn’t really personal; it’s the way in which consciousness is shared.

That reminds me a line from a blog post of yours: “The job of the reporter is to give us facts and evidence, causes and effects. The job of the fiction writer is to refuse the simple story we thought we knew, to inscribe indelible marks on our soul.” So writing fiction is a different kind of truth-telling

Don't you think poetry is that, too?

Yes.

I think that's a real comfort to people who are starting to write: you don't actually have to know much in advance. It's probably better if you don't. “Telling the truth” isn’t just saying what you think you already know, it’s when you’re writing with your hand as much as from your head and you start trying to corral the unsayable, and the words start to make patterns that you suddenly know how to read.

Do you have any rules and rituals as a writer?

The only rule is that I have to do it all the time. Within that, I’m free. I love what Julia Whitty said about living like a monk to keep the portal open. I don't live like a monk, I live like a maniac, but I try to keep the portal (as I understand it) open and get to my desk before I really wake up. I try to write something before I get out of bed, or open my eyes.

Finding Balance, Surrendering to Sculpture

By TRICIA GRAME, visual artist and faculty member in the Department of Writing, Consciousness, and Creative Inquiry

This week, I attended a reception and talk for the new exhibition, Finding Balance: Glass Art in the Bay Area at the Village Theatre Gallery in Danville, where some of our Master of Fine Arts students in the Department of Writing, Consciousness, and Creative Inquiry will be showing their work in September. The exhibit will be co-curated by MFA Program Chair, Cindy Shearer and myself, and is titled Telling Stories Through Art. 

Randy Strong, a master glass artist, spoke about the meaning of balance in regards to sculpting. Strong has created glass sculptures for more than thirty-five years using this expensive, unpredictable, and fragile medium. It took Strong years to perfect his technical skills, but his addiction to his art and a lasting fortitude kept him yearning for more. He ended his talk by defining balance: "Balance is really about finding your spirituality or god." Sculpting glass offered him the solitude, sanctuary, and self-awareness to define this process for himself, and through it he discovered his voice.   

I thought about my own experience as a sculptor. My first exposure to the art of sculpture was as a little girl sitting in front of The Pieta at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Queens, New York. There, on the altar, was a reproduction of Michelangelo’s twenty-foot pure, white marble sculpture of the Virgin Mary with her dead, adult son, Jesus, draped limply on her lap. I was startled by this overpowering sculpture, and had no desire to look closely, or touch it. 

Years later, as an art student, I moved beyond this trepidation and began to feel connected to a higher being as my hands attached themselves to a block of earth. Now, as I sculpt, I attempt with apprehension to discover what lies within. There is a special kind of excitation that comes over me. I push my fingers deep into the center, pressing and manipulating this soft earth until it willingly surrenders.

Like other artists, I'm concerned with the interplay of hollows, planes, and contours, as well as the conflict between light, volume, and mass. Beyond that, I also believe in the sacred virtue that all life surges from a center, and expands from within. I search to reveal not only the outward physical realities, but, more importantly, the inward emotional language to enable a direct connection to the form and the process of creation. This experience is like watching my spirit give life to an image, fusing the receptive clay or intractable substance of stone into an organic shape with a vital rhythm. The form that emerges after I chisel, scrape and mold is a magical one, and it permits me the courage to speak through art.

My passion for the sculpted form took me to the islands of Malta in 1997, where hundreds of sculptures were found depicting full-bodied and/or pregnant women. Figures of rounded goddesses were chiseled and carved into limestone. I continued to return to this small Mediterranean island, where red ochre stains the walls of the temples and caves, perhaps symbolizing female energy and the cycle of life. Deeply inspired, I began working on a body of art interpreting the position of the prehistoric female using archetypes. 

A sculpture exists in space, just as a human being does; it's a three-dimensional work of art, which involves a special kind of interaction between viewer and object. As one becomes more engaged with the work, the work appeals not only to the senses of sight and touch, but also begins to manifest a divine silence. Sculpted forms are architectures of silence sending vibrations that travel to the center of your body. Spirit becomes reality through the sculpted symbol. Thus, finding your balance as an art-maker happens when you surrender to the work: the medium directs you in releasing your creative energy and you give birth to your being.

Jim Ryan: From Blue-Collar Wisconsin to Professor of Sanskrit

By ZACK ROGOW, senior editor at CIIS. His writings include a recent book of poems, "My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers," from Kattywompus Press. 

I spoke recently to Jim Ryan, professor and director of the Asian and Comparative Studies program at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). Ryan is a much-loved faculty member who teaches classes in Sanskrit and Indian religion.

“I grew up in the town of Wausau, Wisconsin,” says Ryan. “My parents both worked in factories, my dad in a papermill, and my mom in a plant that made small engines. Each of them spent thirty years on the line.”

In the mid 1960s, Ryan went to University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I had no intention then of studying Indian languages, but I heard that if you took Hindi, you could fulfill the language requirement all in one year. It was the first language course I’d ever taken. All I knew about India before that was Gandhi, who was a big influence on the peace movement during the Vietnam War and on the civil rights movement; the writer Tagore; and Ravi Shankar.”

Ryan excelled at Hindi, and by chance saw a poster for a junior year abroad in India. He was accepted to the program. When he travelled to India, it was the first airplane flight he’d ever taken. “I went to India,” he says, “and in a sense, I never came back.” He returned there several times to study Hindi,and Tamil, and to do research.

During his trips to India he became radicalized politically. “When I read the 'Communist Manifesto,'” Ryan recalls, “I said, ‘This is about me.’ And I looked at India—it was a case study in class oppression, with its caste system.”

When Ryan returned to the University of Wisconsin after his first trip, his advisor, George L. Hart III, said to him, “You don’t really know about India till you know Sanskrit.” Ryan devoted himself to studying the language, first in Wisconsin, and later at UC Berkeley, where he followed Professor Hart.

Residing in San Francisco in 1981 while finishing his PhD dissertation, Ryan did clerical work to support himself at Victoria’s Secret and Banana Republic. He was living near the Cultural Integration Fellowship, a center for East-West exchanges and the organization from which the Institute had grown, and he put up a notice there offering to teach Indian languages. When he went to check why no one had responded, a staff person directed him to California Institute of Asian Studies, the earlier name of CIIS. To his surprise, Ryan was hired to teach Sanskrit.

“I was working during the day filling orders for lingerie, and at night I was teaching Sanskrit,” he remembers. He has taught at CIIS ever since, and is now a full professor and one of the longest-serving faculty members.

During his time at CIIS, he has opened up to the spiritual side of his area of study. “I became a convert because no one tried to convert me,” Ryan explains. “If someone had told me, ‘You have to read 'The Life Divine' by Sri Aurobindo,’ I would have run away and never come back.”

He is proud to be listed as one of the “founding mothers” of the Women’s Spirituality program at CIIS, which started when Ryan chaired the Philosophy and Religion department. Ryan is renowned for his ability to intone the thousand names of the Hindu goddess Lalita in Sanskrit.

Even after thirty years, he still finds CIIS a stimulating place to teach: “Our strength in the Asian and Comparative Studies program is that we believe that practice in the tradition you study makes you a better scholar.”

Why should a student choose CIIS? “Because you will be taken account of as a whole person,” says Ryan, “including your spiritual aspirations and development. The students here are not student widgets. We give a place to the fuller narratives of people’s lives, allowing them to be fuller people.”

Why an Education in the Humanities Matters

By LYNNE H. ROFF, student in the Transformative Studies program, which is an online doctoral program. Lynn lives in Homer, Alaska.

Five days a week I read articles online in academic publications such as the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. At least once a week there is an article proclaiming the futility of a doctoral degree in the humanities. These invariably cite the weak job market in higher education, the dwindling likelihood of any financial recompense for the expense of graduate study in the form of a meaningful career, and the questionable psychological stability of anyone undertaking such a course in today’s academic and economic climate. I have only to pick up a newspaper to observe the dearth of employment opportunities for many if not most individuals in our country today.

Everywhere it seems people are wondering what to do to improve their living conditions and the well-being of their families. Increasingly, higher education is pressed to justify programs that cannot be immediately associated with gainful employment and to quantify educational content in the anticipation of financial outcomes in an era in which the avenues for creative social expression and individual employment are changing with dizzying rapidity. What are we to do?

The earth is in need of people who have an understanding of their respective cultures, who have a sensitivity to the cultural heritage of others, and an appreciation for the complexity and interconnection of human society and the environmental concerns of our world. Societies are in need of people who can invent, motivate, and organize sustainable systems of agriculture, economy, and development. Organizations are in need of creative and visionary people who can invent solutions to ongoing problems because they perceive human interactions in new and productive ways.

Today’s problems will not yield to yesterday’s methods. These needs can only be satisfied by individuals whose educational preparation equips them for creative and transdisciplinary perspectives situated within a complex humanitarian context. I am proud to be a student in an organization that is on the leading edge of these educational endeavors. I am grateful to be afforded the opportunity to study in an environment that encourages interactive learning and innovative research, and to be aided in that pursuit by the assistance of an organization whose interests so complement my own.

Education is not about earning a living so much as it is about creating a life. Though there is a place for quantitative outcomes, these measurements cannot hope to capture the essence and depth of individual experience. Individuals who are educated in the humanities create opportunities for themselves and others that are innovative, advantageous, and rewarding within social, spiritual, and financial contexts. These attributes are not luxuries in today’s social climate. They are necessities for the development of human civilization.

When critics decry the humanities for placing awareness of those who have come before us and those who are inhabiting this planet with us ahead of job training, we must hold to these understandings in the knowledge that education in the humanities is the study of human beings, and there is no better preparation for the needs of today’s society and the future of our world.

Triangles and Squinches: Alonzo King’s New Ballet

By CINDY SHEARER, program chair of the Department of Writing, Consciousness, and Creative Inquiry

Alonzo King’s essay and photographs are featured in the latest issue of Mission At Tenth, the Institute’s inter-arts journal.

I had the good fortune to see my friend Alonzo King’s most recent collaboration with musician Mickey Hart and architect Christopher Haas, “The Triangle of the Squinches.”

The word triangle made me think about a form with three sides, but in Alonzo’s work, “triangle” seems to be the space where three things meet—literally where movement and sound and set intersect. That intersection invites us to explore our real or imagined “squinches."

I did not know what squinches were—Did Alonzo made up the word?—but when I got home I looked it up—and discovered “squinch”, of course, is a word from architecture. A glossary of medieval art and architecture defines squinch as “The lowest voussoir [wedge-shaped stone] on each side of an arch. It is where the vertical support for the arch terminates and the curve of the arch begins.”

A squinch in Alonzo’s work is as much moment as it is solid form. If a squinch in architectural terms is the where line meets curve, in choreographic terms, it is where expected movement meets unexpected structure or expected structure meets unexpected movement.

John King of the San Francisco Chronicle writes:

“Malleability isn't an obvious architectural virtue. Buildings are supposed to be solid and true, rooted in place, not flexible but firm.

Yet San Francisco architect Christopher Haas has spent six months in pursuit of that trait: structural forms at once supple and strong that define space one moment, then yield to it the next.”

Haas’ “buildings” are first panels of shimmering elastic cords. The dancers pull on them or play them like harpsichords or literally walk across the stage plucking the cords. Second, they are ladders of corrugated boxes with moveable rungs. While some dancers push the ladders or pull them forward and back, others climb up or down. Movement of set or body is dance. Ordinary movement is dance.

Then there is complex movement—another dance. For example, one of the male dancers is on his toes and his whole body for a moment evokes standing on the edge of a precipice. It takes such extraordinary balance to do what he does—and for a moment, I hold my breath in the hope of keeping him still.

The dance throughout speaks to trust of oneself as much as it does about trust of others and how moments out of balance can lead back to balance.

There is what each dancer does and there is the triangle—where force and relationship and intention intersect. In some ways the dancers seem in their own inquiries—what are their relationships to the sound and the structure? But there is also the support they take from the structure created—by the set itself and the dancers who manipulate it.

What does it take to actually move—literally and symbolically, realistically and metaphorically? Alonzo lives in that intersection between the actual and metaphorical. He doesn’t distinguish them. He just invites us in.

"So often people ask me, 'How should I come (to see your dance company)?'” says King, in an an interview with KQED Arts.  “I say, 'Always come with receptivity.' People cut off their feelings, and they say (about the performances), 'Well, what does it mean?' And that's a legitimate question. And it should be addressed. But I say, 'Well, why don't you feel it?' You have the answer.”

CIIS' Bachelor of Arts Completion Program Launches New Focus on Critical Psychology

By SANDRA M. PACHECO, core faculty in the Bachelor of Arts Completion program

This article was originally published in Cambio, the newsletter of the Office of the Dean of Students at CIIS

Starting in fall 2011 students entering the Bachelor of Arts Completion program in the School of Undergraduate Studies will have the opportunity to select critical psychology as an academic focus.

Critical psychology reflects various theoretical and ideological approaches to psychology that are deeply concerned with social justice. It is not a subdiscipline of psychology, such as developmental psychology, social psychology, or counseling psychology. Rather it encompasses approaches taken by researchers, activists, and practitioners within these and other subdisciplines of psychology. Traditional psychology has historically begun and ended its analysis with the individual. Its main focus has been on the impact of systems on the individual.

As critical psychologists we are interested in the way various institutions—economic, social, and political—impact well-being at a societal level. This includes understanding how systems and constructs such as modernity, capitalism, institutionalized oppression, and “rugged individualism” repeatedly produce large-scale despair, dysfunction, and a sense of meaninglessness.

We make explicit how power is unequal in various institutional settings, which results in the status quo being reinforced, with research and practices in the field of mainstream psychology serving to corroborate power imbalances. Similarly, we explore how such systems produce individuals oriented towards ways of being in the world that reproduce domination, oppression, colonization, and environmental destruction.

For the past twenty years, both through my own experiences within the field of psychology and through those of my students from diverse backgrounds, I have found that more often than not students were already asking broader questions 
that typically could not be supported by the traditional scope of psychology. These questions were informed by their lived experiences that differed from the mainstream. Students who were most inclined to asking larger systems questions tended to be older and/or from historically marginalized groups. For many students, their experiences were only minimally reflected in the psychology texts and 
articles they were reading. Repeatedly questions emerged from students challenging assumptions of individualism, developmental stages, categorical identities, 
definitions of abnormal, and perceptions of competition as “natural,” to name but a 
few examples. Student asking these questions tend to have an implicit understanding that Western values promoted through our various media outlets and social political 
institutions are not universal norms but rather social constructions that are privileged, at a cost to social justice and well-being. At a more personal level they are more inclined to question the social systems that call for people to “get with the program” so as to be deemed normal, such as in issues related to gender, sexuality, or ethnic assimilation. It is not uncommon for a student in critical psychology to shift from “there is something wrong with me or the way I live,” to “there is something wrong with society’s view of me, or society’s 
concept of ‘the good life.’”

Critical psychology does not just call into question the level of analysis employed by traditional psychology, but also research assumptions. We call into question “taken-for-granted” knowledge and how knowledge has been acquired. We recognize that the field of psychology has emerged within a specific sociocultural historical context that has been dominated by middle-class European and American males using positivist methodologies that are deeply entrenched in a colonial mindset. Whereas scientific neutrality is assumed in traditional psychological research, critical psychologists recognize that research can never be neutral, that it, too, is produced within a sociopolitical context. We work towards more participatory 
research, drawing from indigenous and decolonial methodologies. These can include 
participatory action research, narratives, reframing, restoring, resistance, and envisioning, to name a few. In general, we wish to make more explicit the aims of our research, clearly articulating who stands to benefit, whose interest it serves, who was involved in the process, and how the information will be made accessible. Our research is informed first by the communities 
we serve.
 
Our Critical Psychology Focus in the BAC program will blend nicely both with our undergraduate interdisciplinary curriculum and with a number of our existing graduate programs, especially those already addressing diversity and social justice. In general, students in the Critical Psychology Focus will practice critical thinking. They will be repeatedly encouraged to engage in deep, conscious exploration of their own values and assumptions; and how these can be replicated in their research, activities, and practices. This general approach prepares them for graduate work in various fields. Aside from the above, our focus in Critical 
Psychology will be distinctive in that spirituality will also be explored.

Within many spiritual traditions, social justice and spirituality are not separate. We see this in liberation theology, mujerista theology, Zapatista spiritualities, as well as the writings of Eastern spiritual leaders such as Thich Nhat Hahn. At CIIS we are strongly positioned to inform new directions in critical psychology that recognize that, just as race, class, gender, and sexuality intersect to create distinct experiences in society, so do spiritualities.