Advent-izing the Imagination

Along this same line of thinking. I have a book that I would highly recommend to everyone.This book is about transforming education and the way we teach, etc. but the subject matter and content can be used for continuing to think, learn and imagine other things similar to a peaceful world. We have a vision. We want that vision to come true. We begin the process of deciding and planning what it might take to get us there and we begin to practice what we believe will be an effective way, a moral and loving way, to help our vision become a reality. The authors are Parker J. Palmer (one of my favorite authors) and Arthur Zajonc. The title is "The Heart of Higher Education." Thought the title appears to be only about higher education, the "higher" is not limited to institutional learning. It is about the education and learning we could be doing all of our lives. Using our imagination plays a large part in this type of education. A "sub title" is A call To Renewal, Transforming the Academy through Collegial Conversations. They use Whitehead theories and results of lots of research on how we learn. It gives us examples of what has worked in the teaching process and how we learn best. Experience, Contemplation, and Transformation (Arthur Zajonc) One of the neglected dimensions of our education system concerns the transformative power true education possesses.---Our institutions of higher education seldom embrace a genuinely transformative view of the pedagogies they consciously, or more often unconsciously, adopt. Our view of the student is too often as a vessel to be filled or a person to be trained. Is this so surprising? A diminished athropology is a natural corollary to our diminished ontology. We need, therefore, to become more attentive to our students' intellectual, emotional, and character development and learn to see them as richly endowed, malleable beings open to cognitive and affective changes through pedagogical interventions and social formation. We should attend to the cultivation of our student humanity at least as much as we instruct them in the content of our fields. In the way higher education, both in the classroom and beyond, can balance its informative task with transformation, which is of equal or greater importance. Long after they forget the content they learned, who they have become will endure and determine much of the character and quality of their contribution to society and the personal satisfaction they take in life. True integrative higher education must, therefore, make use of the extensive investigation of and insights into the stages of cognitive, affective, moral, and spiritual development of the human being throughout life.------The next stage is the Self-Authoring Mind, in which the individual can internalize divergent points of view and author his or her own independent one. ------The achievement of self-authorship should be heralded as a central purpose of higher education. The task of university learning is thus most often to challenge the generally unconscious cognitive structures and moral habits associates with the Socialized Mind and to encourage the development of the new epistemological framework provided by the Self-Authoring Mind. ----The fifth and final order of consciousness "The Self-Transforming Mind." It is characterized by the release of the individualized viewpoint and the sustaining of multiple dynamically changing and even contradictory viewpoints at the same time. Granting one the possibility for the recognition of our multiple selves, for the capacity to see conflict as an over-identification with a single system, for the sense of our relationships and connections as prior to and constitutive of the individual self, for an identification with transformative process of our being rather than the formative products of our becoming.-----Research points us to the fact that we learn best through our relationships.----Transformative thinkers hold that a more intense, sustained, active and experiential modality of engagement is required in order to effect the deeper changes required for a new way of making meaning.----It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer. By lovingly holding the questions themselves, contemplating them well, we gradually, without noticing it, develop faculties of insight that allow us to see and live the answers. Living our way into the answers means to so change ourselves that we are capable of beholding and inhabiting a different world. The demands of that new world may well be great.----It is this exploration that leads to change. The moral admonition "discrimination is wrong" changes nothing in us. But truly "living the question" empathetically and imaginatively does change us and the way we make intellectual and moral meaning of our world. In this way we learn by becoming another, giving up one perspective for a different one. Such empathetic and imaginative experiences can drive the transformation of the individual from the Socialized Mind to the Self-Authoring Mind and perhaps even beyond that to the Self-Transforming Mind. ----Transformative learning rests on an enriched view of the human being, one that affirms our multidimensional nature and fundamental malleability. The methods by which we challenge our student, open them to change, will vary, but to be successful they should include cross-cultural studies in which world views radically different from their own are encountered and appreciated. Or one can look back sympathetically at other historical periods and the surprisingly different treatment given to social issues or natural phenomena. Finally, cognitive science and psychology are also rich with empirical studies that awaken us to the unconscious cognitive or moral processes underlying our judgments and actions.----Experience alone opens a door, but intellectual framing and reflection are required if meaning is to be made of the experience. ----As we will discuss later, true speaking and listening, genuine conversation , is the rich source for much of the change we seek in higher education.---The book states that in its most simplified form, being in a group, talking and listening to each person thoroughly and to "put ourselves" into their shoes empathetically, will help in our own transformation. You need others points of view to help you to discern your own beliefs, etc. But we must come to the point where we become Self Authoritative. "The Priest Hood of all Believers." Hope if you read this that it will spark some interest in reading the entire book. It is so amazing and they include lots of their research material as well as others that helped to form their own thinking on the subject. This book includes two of my most personal interests and "calling". Transformation and continued learning !!! I perceive my calling to be working with God in peacemaking-reconciliation-transformation so you can see a little of my love for these things in this book.