meaning making: a university curriculum framework for the

i

Meaning Making:

A University Curriculum Framework

for the Twenty-First Century

Anthony David McKenzie

BA, DipEd (Monash), MSc (Hons) (University of Western Sydney)

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Charles Sturt University, Australia

2014

iii

Table of Contents

Table of Figures ........................................................................................................................................... iv

Table of Tables ............................................................................................................................................ iv

Certificate of Authorship .............................................................................................................................. v

Acknowledgments ....................................................................................................................................... vi

Publications and presentations arising from this research ........................................................................ vii

Abstract ....................................................................................................................................................... ix

Glossary ....................................................................................................................................................... xi

Prologue. Context, focus and method of inquiry ......................................................................................... 1

Part A. Studies in textual composition, interpretation and communication ............................................. 31

…Chapter 1. Holism: At the still point of the turning world ....................................................................... 33

…Chapter 2. Realism: On being grounded in my own world ...................................................................... 75

…Chapter 3. Feeling as progenitor of understanding ................................................................................. 99

…Chapter 4. Muddy waters: Giving mystery its due ................................................................................ 121

…Chapter 5. Contemplating the learner development literature in higher education ............................ 153

Part B. Meta-interpretation and synthesis: Towards a university curriculum framework for the twenty-first century .............................................................................................................................................. 203

…Chapter 6. ‘Meaning making’: An integrating concept for holistic education ....................................... 205

…Chapter 7. Towards a curriculum of becoming for the twenty-first century ........................................ 237

End matters .............................................................................................................................................. 267

…Epilogue ................................................................................................................................................. 269

…Appendix 1. Transforming Australia’s Higher Education System: Reform agenda [2009] .................... 289

…Appendix 2. Interpreting my research project in terms of Davey’s Eleven Theses ............................... 290

…Appendix 3. A cameo version of Wilber’s Twenty Tenets ..................................................................... 303

…Appendix 4. Wilber on systems theory versus hermeneutics: Why both are important ...................... 304

…Appendix 5. Muddy waters, the unknown, and the Welcome Stranger ............................................... 307

…Appendix 6. Davey on Sprachlichkeit, meaning-in-itself and the meaningful ....................................... 309

…Appendix 7. The Twenty Memories exercise ........................................................................................ 311

…Appendix 8. A curriculum of becoming: Potential responses, possible ways forward (detail) ............. 321

…References ............................................................................................................................................. 335

iv

Table of Figures

Figure P1. Sample pressures on academics and students ..........................................................................15

Figure P2. Visual representation of models A and B ..................................................................................17

Figure P3. Map of thesis structure ..............................................................................................................19

Figure P4. Hermeneutic concerns in textual interpretation .......................................................................21

Figure 1.1. Wilber’s integral model ............................................................................................................46

Figure 1.2. Eye puzzle .................................................................................................................................64

Figure 2.1. Three journeys of becoming .....................................................................................................93

Figure 3.1. Emergence from the sleet ........................................................................................................99

Figure 3.2. The dynamics of an individual’s meaning perspective .......................................................... 101

Figure 3.3. Young Tony as carer ............................................................................................................... 103

Figure 3.4. Young Tony as actor ............................................................................................................... 103

Figure 4.1. Kosmic landmark-spotting, practising openness, becoming educated ................................. 124

Figure 4.2. Opening up on the journey to understanding ....................................................................... 151

Figure 6.1. The hermeneutic circler, voracious for understanding.......................................................... 214

Figure 6.2. The nested domains of capability .......................................................................................... 222

Figure 6.3. The allure of transcendent understanding ............................................................................ 235

Figure 7.1. Conceptual hybrid vigour: Lived experience as research, research as lived experience ....... 239

Figure 7.2. The journey to understanding: Sense of self in the world – crystallising past and future in the continuous present .................................................................................................................................. 245

Figure 7.3. The triple hologenesis framework for curriculum renewal ................................................... 253

Figure 7.4. Graphic representation of a conceptual model of an elegant curriculum of becoming ........ 258

Figure 7.5. Sample questions to help a course team conceive the optimal, multi-dimensional gradient of student learning within an undergraduate degree program ................................................................... 259

Figure 7.6. Keeping your eyes on the prize: holistic, institution-wide single-mindedness in a curriculum of becoming ................................................................................................................................................. 262

Figure E1. Congruence between research phenomena and research products ...................................... 272

Figure E2. The core curriculum goal of roundedness and its halo of self-reflexivity ............................... 275

Figure E3. What are you doing, Crofton? I’m squibbling! ........................................................................ 287

Figure A1. Eight ‘native perspectives’ [Wilber] ........................................................................................ 305

Figure A2. Major methodologies [Wilber] ............................................................................................... 306

Figure A3. Conceiving the genesis of collective understanding and intent in course team practice of an emergent curriculum of becoming .......................................................................................................... 328

Table of Tables

Table 2.1. Scope and structure of Archer’s argument ................................................................................77

Table 2.2. Corporate and Primary Agents contrasted in ancient India and China ......................................90

Table 3.1. Personal memories of self as performer/director .................................................................. 116

Table 4.1. Illuminations of Davey’s text from a poem and vice versa ..................................................... 139

Table 5.1. Bereiter’s six kinds of personal knowledge ............................................................................. 164

Table 5.2. Understanding meaning making: three terms for triangulating the idea of transcendence .. 184

Table 5.3. Phenix’s three dimensions of transcendence ......................................................................... 185

Table 5.4. Qualities of life inhering in transcendent experience and their significance for education (Phenix) .................................................................................................................................................... 186

Table 6.1. A farmer instructs his fencing contractor: exploring under-reported dimensions of educating for ‘lived capability’ with reference to Bereiter’s six kinds of personal knowledge ................................ 223

v

Certificate of Authorship

I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and that, to the best of my

knowledge and belief, it contains no material previously published or written by

another person nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the

award of any other degree or diploma at Charles Sturt University or any other

educational institution, except where due acknowledgment is made in the thesis. Any

contribution made to the research by colleagues with whom I have worked at Charles

Sturt University or elsewhere during my candidature is fully acknowledged.

I agree that this thesis be accessible for the purpose of study and research in

accordance with the normal conditions established by the Executive Director, Library

Services or nominee, for the care, loan and reproduction of theses.

vi

Acknowledgments

Thank you to staff at the CSU Education For Practice Institute (EFPI) for assistance on

various matters over the years. Thank you to Ros Allum for technical checks to the

manuscript and advice. I acknowledge the group of higher degree research students at

EFPI who encouraged and challenged me over the years. Thanks to the research group

at EFPI whose workshop sessions contributed to my understanding of a range of

qualitative research concepts and skills.

I want to thank Debbie Horsfall, Stephen Loftus and Maree Simpson who at

different times acted as my Associate Supervisor. I greatly appreciated your support

and ideas.

Joy Higgs was my Principal Supervisor throughout my candidature. It has been

both a challenging and transforming experience. Thank you Joy for everything.

I also thank staff who participated in the Twenty Memories exercise in 2011. Your

engagement and feedback added significant depth to my critique of the exercise as a

potential tool to foster staff and student self-understanding.

Finally, to my family, thank you for your understanding when I was otherwise

engaged, and for your encouragement.

vii

Publications and presentations arising from this research

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Simpson, M. (2013). A university curriculum of becoming: A 'fit-for-

greater-purpose' education for the professions. Paper presented at the 6th International

Conference of Education, Research and Innovation, Seville, 18-20 November, (pp. 6441-

6450). ISBN: 978-84-616-3847-5. Retrieved from

http://library.iated.org/view/MCKENZIE2013AUN. [Principal author]

Loftus, S., & McKenzie, A. (2013). Thinking about curriculum. In S. Loftus, T. Gerzina, J. Higgs,

M. Smith & E. Duffy (Eds.), Educating health professionals: Becoming a university teacher (pp.

115-128). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense. [Second author]

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Simpson, M. (2012). Being a university in the twenty-first century:

Re-thinking curriculum. Journal of the World Universities Forum, 4(4), 1-18. Retrieved from

http://wuj.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.173/prod.316. [Principal author]

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Simpson, M. (2012). Meaning making capability for twenty‐first

century university education. In Proceedings of the 2012 Practice-Based Education Summit, The

Education For Practice Institute, Charles Sturt University, 3-4 April, Sydney Olympic Park,

NSW, p. 13. [Principal author]

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Simpson, M. D. (2011). Being a university in the twenty-first century.

In Proceedings of the Fourth World Universities Forum, Hong Kong Institute of Education, 14-16

January, Hong Kong. Retrieved from http://u11.cgpublisher.com/ proposals/

157/index_html. [Principal author]

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Simpson, M. D. (2011). Designing and enacting a university

‘curriculum of becoming’. In Proceedings of the Practice-Based Education Summit, The

Education For Practice Institute, Charles Sturt University, 13-14 April, Bathurst, NSW, p.

11. [Principal author]

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Simpson, M. (2010). A vision for curriculum renewal. In Proceedings of

CSUED 2010: Educating for 2020 and Beyond, Charles Sturt University, 9-11 November,

Bathurst, NSW, p. 28. [Principal author]

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Loftus, S. (2009). What is the best thing a university can do for its

students in the twenty-first century? In Proceedings of CSUEd 09 Conference: Leading and

Learning in University Education, Charles Sturt University, 26-27 November, Thurgoona,

NSW, p. 50. [Principal author]

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Horsfall, D. (2008a). Exploring the practice–pedagogy middle ground:

progress report on a hermeneutic inquiry into education for practice. Paper presented at the

WACE Asia Pacific Conference. Work Integrated Learning (WIL): Transforming Futures -

Practice ... Pedagogy ... Partnerships, Manly Australia. Australian Collaborative Education

Network, pp. 370-376. Retrieved from http://www.acen.edu.au/resources/docs/WACE

_ACEN_Asia_Pacific_Conference_2008_E-Proceedings-1.pdf. [Principal author]

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Horsfall, D. (2008b). University leaders and communities of practice:

exploring the dynamics of institutional transformation. Refereed abstract. HERDSA 31st

Annual Conference. Conference Handbook, p. 62. Rotorua, NZ: Higher Education Research

and Development Society of Australasia, Inc. [Principal author]

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Horsfall, D. (2006). Critically reviewing one's own primary value

beliefs – A case history. In G. Whiteford (Ed.), Voice, Identity and Reflexivity: Proceedings of

the Second RIPPLE Qualitative Research as Interpretive Practice Conference 2005, pp. 12-18.

Albury, Charles Sturt University, 22-24 September. [Principal author]

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J. & Horsfall, D. (2005). Guidelines for assessing progress of learning in

complex domains. In Kinshuk, D. G. Sampson and P. Isaias (Eds). Proceedings of the IADIS

International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA),

International Association for Development of the Information Society, pp. 469-472.

[Principal author]

viii

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Horsfall, T. (2005). Meaning making in occupation-based university

education. In Proceedings of Research for a Healthy Future, Faculty of Health Sciences HDR

Colloquium, p. 39. Lidcombe, NSW, 1-2 December. [Principal author]

McKenzie, A., & Higgs, J. (2005). Learning meaning making in occupation-based university

education. In Dean’s Research Seminars: Delivering Better Health Care (p. 51). Faculty of

Health Sciences, The University of Sydney, 11 May. [Principal author]

ix

Abstract

This thesis addresses the question, how can university education equip students to

survive and thrive in the twenty-first century? I present the argument that higher

education needs, above all, to focus on the experience of human meaning making.

This stance is underpinned by the following arguments.

Life is a hermeneutic journey. Human meaning making may be

conceptualised as the lifelong, life-wide pursuit of understanding. Growth

in understanding is the realisation of an ever more complex, comprehensive and

coherent sense of self in the world.

Authentic professional identity is an expression of authentic personal

identity. A student’s journey to graduation is a journey to becoming a

‘novice rounded, grounded practitioner’ in a chosen profession, but also a

journey to becoming a responsible, contributing member of society and a

journey towards self-realisation. These are emergent outcomes of a

university curriculum of becoming.

A university curriculum of becoming is a holistic and collaborative

blueprint for teaching. Professional education curricula have become ‘fit

for purpose’ endeavours. If Australian universities are to enable students to

realise their potential as persons and professionals it is critical that they

transcend a limited ‘fit for purpose’ thinking by imagining a ‘fit-for-greater-

purpose’ education. ‘Greater purpose’ points to an education that is richer

in an open-ended way compared to one designed to achieve pre-

determined and delimited outcomes.

The very idea of curriculum is innately transformative. For individual

teachers and course teaching teams, conceiving of teaching as curriculum

practice becomes a design problematic, a belief to be tested, an aspiration to

be realised. A curriculum signifies a belief that it is possible to create an

optimal learning environment for the cultivation, in each student, of the

capabilities envisioned in the university’s graduate outcome profile and the

particular course’s learning outcomes. It is belief in the possibility of

designing for curriculum coherence and integrity to provide a ‘fit for greater

purpose’ education.

This thesis is an account of an inquiry into two research questions:

How can a reappraisal of ‘meaning making’ open fresh ways of conceptualising and

addressing universities’ educational challenge in the twenty-first century?

How might a twenty-first century Australian university enact a ‘fit-for-greater-purpose’

education?

This research was conducted within the tradition and following the conventions

and modes of inquiry of philosophical hermeneutics. The thesis is a consolidated

report on a series of studies portraying the researcher’s hermeneutic

interpretations of a set of selected texts, chosen for this study by virtue of the ideas

they contain and their capacity to illuminate the research topic.

x

In this study I make a contribution to the world of ideas that informs the practice of

higher education in the twenty-first century. In particular, I show how bringing a

meaning making and greater purpose focus to higher education could improve the

culture of university life – and the learning and teaching embedded in it – and

bring about richer outcomes for graduating students. I show how an elaborated

theory of meaning making provides a set of ideas that could provide new ways of

viewing and addressing the higher education challenge.

xi

Glossary

becoming gebildet

‘Becoming educated’ in the sense implied in Bildung. See Bildung.

Bildung Bildung (German) is a central idea in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. It ‘has a variety of plain and obscure meanings, which respectively imply formation, cultivation, and education’ (Davey, 2006, p. 37). See discussion, pp. 122-129.

centripetal / centrifugal

understanding

‘The insights that speculative experience affords have both a centrifugal and a [centripetal] moment.’ For example when my sense of self undergoes a change (when I realise I am no longer whom I used to be) I must abandon my earlier self-understandings. There is dissipation, loss; it is a centrifugal moment of understanding. In the same moment I reconfigure, bring together again my new self-understanding; this coalescence is my moment of centripetal understanding. ‘The oscillation between the centrifugal and the centripetal aspects of understanding is central to Gadamer's approach to speculative experience’ (Davey, 2006, p. 116). See also footnote 12, p. 133.

conceptual artefacts1

A term used by Carl Bereiter referring to ideas in Popper’s World 3 that can be manipulated and used as tools for a particular purpose. However, Bereiter comments: ‘conceptual artifacts are not just tools. Some of them make assertions about the world that we may want to judge as true or false. Some of them may function like recipes which is not quite the same as functioning as a tool. Even as tools, they may themselves be objects of inquiry. We can inverstigate how they work, what their limitations are, and how they might be improved. Conceptual artifacts relate to one another in ways that physical tools cannot; one of them may imply or be implied by others. This creates the possibility of assembling them into larger and more integrated structures – which suggests treating them more as building materials than as tools’. (Bereiter, 2002, p. 476)

cortesia ‘Courtesy’ in Italian and Spanish, taken up in philosophical hermeneutics to elaborate its concept of tact. Davey: ‘Becoming gebildet involves the acquisition of such 'tact’. However, becoming tactful is not a matter of acquiring a prevailing norm or mode of behavior. It also involves an inner apprehension of one's ethical dependency upon the other for insights into one's own possibilities. George Steiner's invocation of cortesia carries this greater ethical weight. Rooted in the ancient etiquettes of welcome, cortesia negotiates the places where in text or in conversation we acknowledge and receive the approaching other.’ (Davey, 2006, p. 89)

empiricism See science.

epistemic cognition

‘Epistemic cognition is an aspect of metacognitive understanding involving knowledge about the nature and limits of knowledge, including knowledge about the justifiability of various cognitive processes and actions. […] Although differing as to specifics and terminology, most theorists of epistemic cognition have postulated a developmental sequence from objectivist to subjectivist to rationalist conceptions of cognition over the course of adolescence and early adulthood, with substantial individual differences in the extent of progress through these levels. The objectivist construes knowledge as absolute and unproblematic. Justification, if considered at all, is simply a matter of appealing to direct observation or to the pronouncements of an authority. Such epistemic conceptions are typical of children and commonly seen in adolescents and adults as well. […] Subjectivist conceptions of cognition involve relativist epistemologies. Knowledge is deemed to be uncertain, ambiguous, idiosyncratic,

1 In this thesis I used Australian English spelling; quotes are rendered according to their authors’

spelling.

xii

contextual, and/or subjective; justification in any strong or general sense is considered impossible. […] Finally, some individuals appear to make progress in late adolescence or beyond toward a more rationalist epistemology. Without returning to earlier notions of absolute and final truth or abandoning insights regarding context and subjectivity, the rationalist believes there are justifiable norms of inquiry such that, in some cases, some beliefs reasonably may be deemed to be better justified than others. Theory and research on epistemic cognition, then, are consistent with a view of rationality as metacognitive in nature and developing, at least in some cases, well into adulthood.’ (Moshman, 1998, p. 964)

the epistemic fallacy

‘A philosopher would commit the epistemic fallacy by analysing being in terms of knowledge […] For the transcendental realist it is not a necessary condition for the existence of the world that science occurs. But it is a necessary condition for the existence of science that the world exists and is of a certain type. Thus the possibility of our knowing it is not an essential property, and so cannot be a defining characteristic, of the world. Rather on a cosmic scale, it is an historical accident; though it is only because of this accident that we can establish in science the way the world is, and in philosophy the way it must be for science to be possible.’ (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 29)

flatland ontology Wilber’s term. In the context of the integral (four quadrants) model, the ‘Right-Hand path’ is ‘flatland’ because, he argues, interiority (in his sense) is not recognised by either the atomists (Upper-Right) or systems ‘wholists’ (Lower-Right). It is a two dimensional space. When Wilber writes that ‘They are the two camps of flatland ontology’ (Wilber, 2000, p. 132), ‘ontology’ is a term relevant to readers who subscribe to his notions of holarchy, emergence, becoming. Wilber has a rich view of ontology, and the term may not resonate with some of the people whom he sees as representing flatland thinking.

goal-responsive thought

Goal-responsive thought is the antithesis of conditioned-responsive thought. Conditioned-responsive thought is a mode of meaning making expressed by living the life that circumstances have prescibed. Goal-responsive thought is expressed in a life lived by embracing the undetermined future as a stimulus for creative action (McKenzie, 1996, p. 99).

higher education Australian usage; covers university and post-secondary vocational education.

holarchy A term first coined by Koestler (1967, p. 103), popularised by Ken Wilber, who defines holarchy as a hierarchy of holons. See discussion, Chapter 1, ‘From holism to holarchy’ (p. 42 ff).

holon Wilber: ‘Reality is not composed of things or processes; it is not composed of atoms or quarks; it is not composed of wholes nor does it have any parts. Rather, it is composed of whole/parts, or holons.’ (Wilber, 2000, p. 41) See also holarchy.

the human phenomenon

As used in this study, the human phenomenon refers to humanity’s footprint on the geophysical landscape as well as its cultural and spiritual legacy across time and space; but in terms of this thesis it has a potent presence in the continuous present. Figure 7.2 depicts ‘sense of self in the world’ as crystallising past and future in the continuous present: the human phenomenon encompasses the achievements and the spirit of persons great and small. See also ‘world’.

integrative Drawing discreet elements into a common space.

A Wilber view:

What makes Ken Wilber especially relevant in today’s world is that he is the originator of arguably the first truly comprehensive or integrative philosophy, aptly named “Integral Theory”. As Wilber himself puts it: “I'd like to think of it as one of the first believable world philosophies …”. Incorporating cultural studies, anthropology, systems theory, developmental psychology, biology, and spirituality, it

xiii

has been applied in fields as diverse as ecology, sustainability, psychotherapy, psychiatry, education, business, medicine, politics, sports, and art.’ (Integral Life, n.d.)

A Melamed view: ‘valuing a holistic and organic connectedness to people and things’. (Melamed, 1987, p. 18)

integrative learning

Learning in which new understandings are accommodated within and thus enrich ones’ existing global understanding/frame of understanding.

the Knowledge Age

Bereiter (2002) uses the term in his book title but does not define it succinctly. He does not differentiate it from the Information Age (Bereiter, 2002, p. ix). Kenneth Megill give a useful description:

‘We can look at the Knowledge Age as the "Fourth Wave". My colleague, Herb Schantz, first used the term "fourth wave". He took Toffler's notion of the "third wave" (the information age) and observed that the information age is just a transition to the knowledge age. Toffler identified the first wave as agricultural, the second as industrial, and the third as the information age. Schantz said that the information (computer) age is the last stage in the industrial age and we are now in the transition to the knowledge age (Megill, 2013, p. 61) […] If we can understand the nature of knowledge work, we can begin to understand the nature of the post-industrial society into which we are emerging. The theory of knowledge management that is developing recognizes that knowledge work is the practice of making knowledge explicit. Knowledge work has quite different characteristics from other work. It is at its very heart collaborative in nature […] Knowledge work […] makes something new. Creative work (of which knowledge work is one kind) is not simply a matter of inputs and outputs (although there are inputs and outputs). It is a matter of ‘making’ something new – something which did not exist before. For the knowledge worker this is normally a judgment, a conclusion that rises to the point of certainty in the mind of the people doing the work […][It] has an unpredictable outcome. The goal and purpose of the work can (and should) be identified in advance, but the answer to the question or questions that give rise to knowledge work is not known in advance […] Knowledge workers create knowledge by taking data and information and applying their own experience, judgment, know-how, assumptions (culture), background, and values in order to reach a conclusion. When this is done for a living, these conclusions need to have value for someone else who is willing to pay them. Knowledge is a reasoned conclusion. Knowledge is relevant information embedded in experience that is readily available in a timely manner for users to make timely, valid decisions that increase the productivity of a set of work processes. No amount of information or data will answer the question, “Is it a good idea to …?’ (Megill, 2013, p. 63)

Kosmos Wilber: ‘The Pythagoreans introduced the term “Kosmos”, which we usually translate as “cosmos”. But the original meaning of Kosmos was the patterned nature or process of all domains of existence, from matter to math to theos, and not merely the physical universe, which is usually what both “cosmos” and “universe” mean today. So I would like to reintroduce this term, Kosmos. The Kosmos contains the cosmos (or the physioshere), the bios (or biosphere), nous (the noosphere), and theos (the theosphere or divine domain) – none of them being foundational (even spirit shades into Emptiness).’ (Wilber, 2000, p. 45)

Life, The Universe, and

Everything

Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (42): ‘In the first novel and radio series [of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams], a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer, Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42 [ – a fine example of British humour]. The Ultimate Question itself is unknown.’

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Answer_to_Life,_the_Universe _and_ Everything#Answer_to_the_Ultimate_Question_of_Life.2C_the_Universe.2C_and_Everything_.2842.29.

xiv

lifeworld In German, Lebenswelt. The world as I experience it. According to phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, all human activities, including the objective sciences, arise from within the lifeworld . Every scientific inquiry reflects the concerns of a specific community and serves its needs. Warnke notes that ‘Husserl grounds the notion of scientific objectivity itself in the “fluid springs” of life … the concept of scientific objectivity turns out to be itself a historical one; it is not a transcendent idea to which all forms of knowledge must adhere, but rather a standard suited to certain kinds of knowledge with certain purposes and goals (Warnke, 1987, p. 36). See also discussion in Prologue, p. 5ff.

linguistic being For philosophical hermeneutics, linguistic being is a quality or dimesion of being-in-the-world concerning our relationship to the language world. It is not an idea that can be contained in a single statement but Davey offers this glimpse of it: ‘The speculative theory of language involves a language ontology wedded to the conviction that "with a word, one is never alone." As individual language speakers, we derive our linguistic being from a collective language world that does not exist over and against us but expresses its being in and through how we speak. A word or concept is never solitary but resides within a web of associated meanings and uses. Philosophical hermeneutics opposes the instrumentalist (nominalist) view of language which maintains that a knowing subject (individually or collectively) determines the meaning of words. The language ontology of philosophical hermeneutics insists to the contrary, that whatever our chosen usage of terms, it will always convey or mean more than we imagine or intend. The etymological provenance of words is not under our control. The weight of a term's received meaning can sometimes take command of what we intend by it. Whatever we say will be inflected by the incalculable nuances and associations of inherited meaning lodged within our linguistic horizons. It is not always we who speak but it is we who are spoken through. To the discerning ear, the "speculative turn" in language occurs when the presence of inherited frameworks of meaning start to resonate in someone's words.’ (Davey, 2006, p. 24)

logic of emergent coherence

In a constructed argument, this is ‘the rationale lying behind a writer's sequence of thought when the sequence of thought embodies within itself an emergent or unfolding meaning’ (McKenzie, 1996, p. 51).

meaning perspective

‘Meaning perspectives, or generalised sets of habitual expectation, act as perceptual and conceptual codes to form, limit, and distort how we think, believe, and feel and how, what, when, and why we learn. They have cognitive, affective, and conative dimensions. These habits of expectation filter both perception and comprehension’ (Mezirow, 1991, p. 34).

nihilism ‘A theory promoting the state of believing in nothing, or of having no allegiances and no purposes.’ ‘Nihilism’, ("Nihilism," 2008)

noosphere ‘A postulated sphere or stage of evolutionary development dominated by consciousness, the mind, and interpersonal relationships: creatures evolve: a new biosphere emerges, and with it a new noosphere. Origin 1940s: from French noösphere, based on Greek noos “mind”'. ‘Noosphere’ ("Noosphere," 2010)

noumenon, noumena

‘Noumenon, plural noumena, in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich) as opposed to what Kant called the phenomenon – the thing as it appears to an observer. Though the noumenal holds the contents of the intelligible world, Kant claimed that man’s speculative reason can only know phenomena and can never penetrate to the noumenon. Man, however, is not altogether excluded from the noumenal because practical reason – i.e., the capacity for acting as a moral agent – makes no sense unless a noumenal world is postulated in which freedom, God, and immortality abide.

‘The relationship of noumenon to phenomenon in Kant’s philosophy has engaged philosophers for nearly two centuries, and some have judged his passages on these topics to be irreconcilable. Kant’s immediate successors in German Idealism in fact rejected the noumenal as having no existence

xv

for man’s intelligence. Kant, however, felt that he had precluded this rejection by his refutation of Idealism, and he persisted in defending the absolute reality of the noumenal, arguing that the phenomenal world is an expression of power and that the source from which this power comes can only be the noumenal world beyond.’ ("Noumenon," n.d.)

paradigm A paradigm is a notional framework that provides the parameters, the morés and language forms required to construe meaning in a given discipline of knowledge. It is `notional' in that it is a fabrication inferred by theorists to account for the coherence of dialogue within a given community of discourse. Thomas Kuhn coined the term in 1962 and had a major impact on thinking about the nature of scientific inquiry. When Kuhn first used the term he argued that a paradigm eventually outwears its usefulness, and is replaced by another. Later Kuhn stepped back from his earlier insistence on the incommensurability or incompatibility of paradigms, and replaced the earlier construct with the notions of exemplar and disciplinary matrix. For Kuhn a disciplinary matrix is ‘the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on, shared by the members of a given community’ – a major part of what he previously called a scientific paradigm (T. S. Kuhn, 1970, p. 175). See also Oldroyd (1986).

perennial philosophy

Ferrer points out that the idea has been used in different ways in the western philosophical tradition, but common to the various uses ‘is the idea that a philosophical current exists that has endured through centuries, and is able to integrate harmoniously all traditions in terms of a single Truth which underlies the apparent plurality of world views. According to the defenders of the perennial philosophy, this unity in human knowledge stems from the existence of a single ultimate reality which can be apprehended by the human intellect under certain special conditions […] modern perennialists maintain not only the existence of an experiential contemplative consensus about the ultimate nature of reality, but also the objective truth of such a vision (i.e., that it depicts “things as they really are” once divested of individual and cultural projections.’ (Ferrer, 2002, pp. 73-74)

personal identity A term used by Margaret Archer referring to the second of four manifestations of human being: self, person, agent and actor. In Archer’s social theory one’s personal identity is grounded in one’s prior, continuous sense of self. Individuals draw on people’s emergent properties (PEPs) to accommodate and find a balance for the competing human concerns arising from the natural, practical and social orders of reality.

Science Bortoft comments:

‘Science is […] concerned with the cognitive perception of the world, albeit in a more comprehensive way than our ordinary, everyday cognitive perception. We could say that science is a higher level of cognitive perception. But there cannot be any fundamental difference between science and its everyday counterpart. The intrinsic features of the process of cognition must be the same wherever it occurs. So, contrary to widely held belief, science is not a special activity which is uniquely different from all other kinds of cognitive activity. It is epistemologically no different from the everyday process of cognitive perception […].

‘All scientific knowledge, then, is a correlation of what is seen with the way it is seen. When the “way of seeing” is invisible – as it is in the naïveté of what Husserl called “the natural attitude”, which just takes the world for granted – then we live on the empirical level where it seems to be self-evident that discoveries are made directly through the senses. In this “natural attitude” we have no sense of our own participation, and hence we seem to ourselves to be onlookers to a world which is fixed and finished. Forgetfulness of the way of seeing is the origin of empiricism, which is still by far the most popular philosophy of science, in spite of all the discoveries in the history and philosophy of science which show that it is a philosophy of cognitive amnesia. This is certainly the philosophy of science which is usually communicated, often implicitly, by the way that science is taught in schools and the way that it is presented in popular books […].’ (Bortoft,

xvi

1996, pp. 138-139)

self-organisation and emergence

‘Self-organization can be defined as the spontaneous creation of a globally coherent pattern out of local interactions. Because of its distributed character, this organization tends to be robust, resisting perturbations. The dynamics of a self-organizing system is typically non-linear, because of circular or feedback relations between the components.’ (Heylighen, 2001, p. 253)

Bereiter: ‘Connectionism is one part of a much larger research movement aimed at providing scientific explanations of emergent phenomena. Self-organization is an idea that ties together many different research programs carried out at various levels of description from the atomic to the cultural. Adopting the way of thinking about knowledge and mind that I have been trying to put across […] amounts essentially to acquiring a mind set that sees learning, thinking, knowing, and the creation of new knowledge as forms of self-organization […] Self-organization and emergence are the rule in nature, and it can hardly be otherwise, unless you introduce the guiding hand of a deity. New structures have to arise from what already exists. The complexity has to result from structures and processes that do not themselves embody that complexity. Understanding self-organization always requires that we consider two levels and try to understand how the lower level phenomena can produce the higher level phenomena.’ (Bereiter, 2002, pp. 199-200)

Bereiter says that understanding knowledge and mind in this way means considering four different kinds or levels of self-organisation: 1. From neurons to mind. 2. From individual behaviour to social organisation. 3. From adaptation to niche construction. 4. From physical construction to knowledge construction (Bereiter, 2002, pp. 200-203).

Setting in life English translation of Sitz im Leben from German. The term was originally employed in ‘form criticism’ of biblical literature. The life and times of a period are studied in order to identify different literary forms of text. Then specific texts are analysed to discern the provenance and purpose of discreet passages, based on a recognition that whole texts as received from antiquity can be early edited amalgams of separate source documents. In classical hermeneutic interpretation of biblical texts then, the richer one’s understanding of a text’s setting in life, the better informed one is in peeling back its author’s/editor’s intentions or its provenance and purpose more generally. The concept, setting in life becomes useful in hermeneutic research where the goal is to interpret a text because it focusses attention on conditions at the time when that text was written. Appreciating those conditions helps in the interpretation of the text.

simplicity Ockham’s razor is a principle in science that ‘gives precedence to simplicity; of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred’ (Ockham's razor, 2014). Similarly, the optimal simplicity rule states that a theory or a design should be as simple as appropriate, but no simpler.

Profound simplicity raises the question of the richness of conceptualisation within a text (image, etc).

Optimal simplicity is concerned with the communicative power of a text, etc. How can I most economically communicate the richness of my idea?

Everyday simplicity is unquestioned simplicity.

supercomplexity In this thesis I follow Barnett’s conceptualisation. Bamett claims the work of the university has changed because we have entered an era of ‘supercomplexity’. He describes ‘complexity’ as a situation where ‘one is faced with a surfeit of data, knowledge or theoretical frames within one's immediate situation […] Simply keeping abreast of the field may seem to be nigh on impossible […] But, in addition to these cognitive and operational challenges, […] [one] is also increasingly faced with challenges to his or her own self-understanding […] professional life is increasingly becoming a matter not just of handling overwhelming data and theories within a given frame of reference (a situation of complexity) but also a matter of handling

xvii

multiple frames of understanding, of action and of self-identity [a situation of supercomplexity]. The fundamental frameworks by which we might understand the world are multiplying and are often in conflict. Of the multiplication of frameworks, there shall be no end.’ (Barnett, 2000, p. 6)

thought G. M. Edelman:

‘Consciousness is considered by some to be the same as thinking. I think this is too crude an identification, for thought has additional acquired components: a complex of images, intentions, guesses, and logical reasoning. It is a mixture of several levels of mental activity. At its highest and most abstract reaches, it is a skill, one that depends on symbolic abilities. With the exception of the spatial abilities exhibited in artistic thinking and the tonal and rhythmic activities of musical thinking, higher thought depends strongly on both language and logic, on an inner dialogue between the thinker and another ‘interlocutor’ of whose existence the thinker may not be aware. This is the ‘two in one’ to which Hannah Arendt (1978) refers in her book The Life of the Mind. She points out the distinction in German between Vernunft, pure thought or reason, and Verstand, understanding with a direct connection to the cognitive processes of perception, feeling, and the like.

‘I am not sure this distinction is useful in scientific terms but it does serve to emphasize how far thought can go. The thinker in the mode of pure thought is so immersed in a specific attentive state related to the project of thought that he or she is truly ‘abstracted’ – unaware of time, space, self, and perceptual experience. One may say that in the pursuit of these levels of meaning and abstraction, ‘thought is nowhere’. But this is simply a metaphor to express the individual's degree of removal from awareness of other parallel activities of the mind.

‘Whatever the skill employed in thought – that of logic, mathematics, language, spatial or musical symbols – we must not forget that it is driven by the Jamesian processes, undergoes flights and perchings, is susceptible to great variations in attention, and in general, is fueled by metaphorical and metonymic* processes. It is only when the results of many parallel, fluctuating, temporal processes of perception, concept formation, memory, and attentional states are ‘stored’ in a symbolic object – a sequence of logical propositions, a book, a work of art, a musical work – that we have the impression that thought is pure. Because thoughts are driven by other thoughts, by images, and by an imagined goal. we have the impression that there is a domain of Vernunft – a place where the thinker (in an absorbed attentional state) is nowhere and in no definable time. The path from this impression to Platonism and essentialism, both biologically untenable, is a short one’. (Edelman, 1992, pp. 173-174)

* metonymic: using the name of one thing for that of another to which it has some logical relation, like ‘sceptre’ for ‘sovereignty’ (Delbridge, Bernard, Blair, Peters, & Butler, 1991). See also Edelman quote, p. 208.

threshold concept

‘A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress. As a consequence of comprehending a threshold concept there may thus be a transformed internal view of subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view. This transformation may be sudden or it may be protracted over a considerable period of time, with the transition to understanding proving troublesome. Such a transformed view or landscape may represent how people ‘think’ in a particular discipline, or how they perceive, apprehend, or experience particular phenomena within that discipline (or more generally). It might, of course, be argued, in a critical sense, that such transformed understanding leads to a privileged or dominant view and therefore a contestable way of understanding something. This would give rise to discussion of how threshold concepts come to be identified and prioritised in the first instance.’ (J. Meyer & Land, 2003)

xviii

transitivity Transitivity is assumed in rational choice theory about individuals' preferences for actions; for example, ‘if action a1 is preferred to a2, and action a2 is preferred to a3, then a1 is preferred to a3’. ('Rational choice theory', n.d.)

transvaluation An alteration of values; a re-evaluation (Barber, 2004). In philosophy, transvaluation (or revaluation) of values was ‘Nietzsche's project of reassessing the worth of things commonly valued positively or negatively’ (Schacht, 2005). Archer defends a modified version of Charles Taylor’s take on transvaluation. ‘Transvaluation entails progressive articulations of our first-order emotions. To begin with many initial feelings may remain fairly inarticulate […] In such cases we may seek further understanding, by interrogation of self and of circumstances, and through this the feeling may be transformed one way or another […] Second-order revision can […] be indefinitely elaborated as we analyse further our understanding of imports and discard previous interpretations, both of which are transformative movements in this process’ (Archer, 2000, pp. 226-227).

ultimate concerns

Archer’s term, paraphrased as ‘deepest concerns’ in this telling extract: ‘When we seek to be loved, regarded and respected, not only are these things not for sale, but also they are something like a terminus in that they do not lead on to further ends which could be achieved by an additional dose of instrumental rationality. Ends like these, to which we are ultimately committed, are those things which we care about most. As such they are both extensions and expressions of ourselves, but also ones which can be irreducibly social. In other words, those social relationships to which we are committed as our deepest concerns (marriage, family, career, church, community) are not for the agent the ‘means to his flourishing but its constituents (Hollis, 1989, p. 174).’ (Archer, 2000, p. 79)

Weltanschauung See worldview

world In general, if I do not qualify the term ‘world’ in this work, the scope of its reference (its intended meaning) may be taken to be comprehensive – life, the universe, everything. However the context of its use should also be considered. ‘Our human world’ is the notional space in which the ‘human phenomenon’ unfolds. In line with Wilber’s concept of holarchy, the human phenomenon is in part a biophysical phenomenon, but beyond that, the human world encompasses the physiosphere, the biosphere, the noosphere and the theosphere – the whole Kosmos; see p. 44.

In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for Martin Heidegger, Wheeler discusses what it is about the ‘world’ that enables Dasein [Being-in-the-world] to be said to dwell in it; see Wheeler (2013).

worldview An individual’s partly tacit personal philosophy of living and sense of everything.

Philosopher, Heinrich Rickert’s sense of worldview was woven into his view of philosophy. ‘Worldview (Weltanschauung) was a buzzword in early twentieth century German culture. Life-philosophers and anti-rationalists used the phrase ‘Weltanschauung’ to designate the inherently elusive and obscure source of all cultural life and thinking […]. On this reading philosophy is nothing but the conceptual articulation of pre-theoretical worldviews that are inextricably related to the historical, psychological, and cultural conditions of individual philosophers. Worldview philosophy was extremely critical of all attempts to describe the discipline as a science, that is, as a purely theoretical enterprise. Rooted in existentially grounded worldviews, philosophy is an expression of the whole human being and not merely an impersonal conceptual construction of the one-sided ‘theoretical man’. (Staiti, 2013)

See also worldspace.

worldspace Wilber uses ‘worldspace' in preference to ‘worldview’ because for him the latter term carries the ‘pan-psychic’ connotation ‘that, for example, cells share a developed cognitive map of the external world, which is a bit much’. This comment relates to Wilber’s sophisticated integral theory, the fine detail of which goes far beyond the scope of this thesis. Wilber: ‘[…] for

xix

most purposes, I will usually adopt the more general term “worldspace”, which means the sum total of stimuli that can be responded to […] the regime of any holon translates only a particular range of signs (it registers only a circumscribed band of stimuli); the band of common translatable signs is a holon’s worldspace.’ (Wilber, 2000, pp. 568-569)

1

Prologue.

Context, focus and

method of inquiry

A personal reflection from the author

Throughout my whole working life I have been an educator

concerned with values and valuing. Using a rigorous research

strategy my goal here is to draw together the diverse ideas,

scholarship and approaches that have imposed themselves on my

professional thinking over the years and to draw them into an

actionable synthesis for teaching in higher education in the

twenty-first century.

This inquiry has been executed within the interpretive research

paradigm. Interpretive research provides a setting and modes of

inquiry equal to the challenge I accepted: to explore our common

human need to make meaning and find meaning or purpose, even as

each passing day sheds new light on the problematics of existence,

asking us to reconsider the beliefs and understandings that satisfied

us previously. Within this broad approach my research focused on

meaning making in university education. By the closing chapter of

the present work, I aim to celebrate with the reader the rich and

powerful idea that for each of us, global understanding is the holistic

conception of the connectedness of all things.

Introduction: Orientation to the purposes, substance and character of this inquiry

Examining my key concepts

1. ‘Global understanding’: making sense of ourselves and/in the world

2. Playing a meaningful role in the world

3. The importance of ‘lifeworld’ and ‘setting in life’

4. Life as a hermeneutic journey

5. Meaning making as curriculum focus and outcome

The context of my inquiry

Popper’s World 1. The bio-physical context: Questions of resourcing

Popper’s World 2. Questioning the learning and teaching experience

Popper’s World 3. Troublesome knowledge

The scope of my inquiry

My method of inquiry

Philosophical hermeneutics

My research design challenge

My method: Studies in textual composition, interpretation and communication

Overview of my method

Key concepts in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics

Interpreting my method in terms of Davey’s 11 Theses on Philosophical Hermeneutics

Content map

2

Introduction: Orientation to the purposes, substance and character of this inquiry

I wish to make a case about university education for the professions. Against the

backdrop of various teaching traditions, I am going to argue that universities today

have an opportunity to reconceptualise the very nature of their educational challenge

by centring on a more holistic and organic appreciation of the way human beings make

sense of themselves and the world. I contend that making meaning in the context of the

person and the world they live in is critical for both life learning and university

education.

The title of the thesis is Meaning Making: A University Curriculum Framework for the

Twenty-First Century. The term, ‘meaning making’, despite its apparent lack of

precision, its ordinary ‘every-day-ness’, will be shown to offer a more inclusive,

‘integral’ view of human understanding than that which underpins mainstream

education theory and practice. The canvas before me is huge. Not only do I articulate a

fresh way of conceptualising humankind’s quest for understanding; I discuss how

universities could employ this perspective as they face the challenges of twenty-first

century education for the professions.

In my opinion this task requires a re-appraisal of the appropriateness and

effectiveness of current conceptions of teaching, learning and curricula. In this thesis I

contend that curricula must go beyond preparation for work to include preparation for

being a member of society, for curricula to focus on becoming (developing potential)

and for twenty-first century university graduates to be meaning makers (not just learners

and practitioners), who look beyond their immediate time and space to find their place

in the cosmos.

We humans need a word like ‘cosmos’ – or ‘Kosmos’, from the ancient Greek, as

Ken Wilber points out (Wilber, 2000, p. 45) – to name the unity of conception that we

infer and crave. ‘Unity of conception’ is related to the notion of hermeneutic

consciousness and both terms underpin the idea that life is a hermeneutic journey, a major

motif in this thesis. I shall develop the argument that there is room in our framing of

the educational challenge for a concept of ‘global understanding’.

The fundamental philosophical position underpinning my thesis is philosophical

hermeneutics. Philosophical hermeneutics is ‘the philosophy of learning and becoming

(Bildungsphilosophie)’ (Davey, 2006, p. 5) which is realised in research action primarily

by the use of the hermeneutic circle through which the parts of the researcher’s

investigation and understanding are progressively evolved into the emergent

interpretation of the research phenomenon. The choice of this philosophy was made to

reflect: a) the phenomenon under investigation i.e. how the notion of hologenesis, the

3

coming to be of wholes, can contribute towards enhancing university education, b) the

research process i.e. hermeneutic textual composition, interpretation and

communication, and c) the goal and ultimately the product of the research to produce a

‘curriculum of becoming framework’ for higher education.

Following the philosophical hermeneutic tradition I shall be interrogating and

interpreting a number of texts in order to address my two research questions:

1. How can a reappraisal of ‘meaning making’ open fresh ways of

conceptualising and addressing universities’ educational challenge

in the twenty-first century?

2. How might a twenty-first century Australian university enact a

‘fit-for-greater-purpose’ education?

Examining my key concepts

The first question allowed me to rethink university education by examining selected

texts from diverse disciplinary perspectives in order to imagine a different kind of

practice. The second question launched a reflective inquiry into questions of purpose in

education. It led to the conclusion that notwithstanding the trend today towards

commodified learning and teaching, universities have opportunity to think about the

greater purpose of university education and to create a holistic student focus for course

design and teaching practice. The enabling idea for such transformation of intent

among practitioners is that students stand to gain by continuously integrating each

day’s new learnings into their existing frames of understanding, thus realising an ever

more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world. I contend that it is this

integrated ‘sense of self’, not a set of received knowledge, that is the greater and

essential purpose of university education, also termed ‘higher education’.2 This

means making space in curriculum design for personal epistemology (one’s

assumptions about knowledge and knowing) and personal ontology (one’s journey of

becoming). It places growth in understanding – the linchpin of all student capability

development – at the centre of the curriculum. Broadening curriculum thinking to

embrace these foundational dimensions is a central idea in my curriculum of becoming

framework.

My thesis contains five key concepts that provide the foundation for my argument.

These will each be introduced and discussed in this section. They will be further

developed and critiqued in subsequent chapters.

2 An underlined word plus a flag denotes a glossary term; the Glossary appears directly before this

Prologue.

4

1. ‘Global understanding’: Making sense of ourselves and/in the

world

In 1975, American educational theorist, James Macdonald, wrote on the nature and

purpose of curriculum theorising. He closed his essay thus:

It is a difficult task to formalize [the] diverse and wide ranging field

[of curriculum theory]. Yet it is an exciting venture for persons

whose dispositions lead them in this direction. There is an article of

faith involved which is analogous to Dewey's comment that

educational philosophy was the essence of all philosophy because it

was 'the study of how to have a world'. Curriculum theory in this

light might be said to be the essence of educational theory because

it is the study of how to have a learning environment (Macdonald,

1975, p. 12).

Macdonald’s insight gets close to the central concern of this study. My central

concern is with the design of a university curriculum or learning environment and its

relationship to how we make sense of ourselves and the world. The latter I believe

needs to be considered on the widest scale imaginable – what ‘all this’ (Life, The

Universe, and Everything3) means. The driving belief behind my interest in taking

this dual focus was that curriculum practice, the implementation of a learning

environment design, will achieve more robust and fulsome outcomes the more closely

it mirrors or accommodates the way humans experience self and world – cognitively,

socially, physically, emotionally,

ethically, spiritually – not in separate

compartments, but as an organic,

dynamic, integrated whole.

The word ‘world’ holds rich connotations. In Popper’s ‘three world’ schema, the

challenge for the meaning maker is how to realise an ever more complex,

comprehensive and coherent sense of self in something that spans and somehow holds

together, holds in tension Popper’s three worlds – the biophysical world, the world of subjective

experience, and the world of ideas. To not do this is to limit one’s achievement of coherent,

complex and comprehensive understanding.

3 Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (42): ‘In the first novel and

radio series [of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams], a group of hyper-intelligent

pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe,

and Everything from the supercomputer, Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes

Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42 [ – a fine

example of British humour]. The Ultimate Question itself is unknown.’ Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_to_Life,_the_Universe,_and_Everything#Answer_to_the_Ultim

ate_Question_of_Life.2C_the_Universe.2C_and_Everything_.2842.29.

Regrettably, while this idea makes such profound, such obvious sense to me, I do not hear my colleagues using such language. Work remains to be done.

5


Like most people I live my life according to my understanding – or sometimes my

untested assumptions – about how things ‘work’ and hold together. Most of the

activities that I have some control over, and that manifest my presence in the world,

are undertaken either habitually, or volitionally, or somewhere between these poles. I

live and act in the tacit belief that I am playing a meaningful (worthwhile) part in a

meaningful (worthwhile) universe. We play a number of social roles, we cultivate our

various public and private personas, not just as expressions of an innate survival

instinct: for most of us, most of the time, we don’t question the belief that civilisation,

the planet, are worth the trouble, what you keep getting up for in the morning. At least

that’s what human being feels like to me. It all … means … something. And as I sense

all this, I express myself, we all express ourselves, articulating the meanings we have

conceived, and collectively, we bring the world into being: ‘When we say that

meanings materialize, we mean that sensemaking is, importantly, an issue of language,

talk, and communication. Situations, organizations, and environments are talked into

existence’ (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005, p. 409).

Making this argument raises the question of whether such a reality and goal has

anything to do with university education. This thesis argues that finding purpose in

life lies at the core of every individual’s meaning making challenge (see point 4 below).

So whether or not such speculation is assessed in a university degree program, the idea

of pursuing purpose in living adds texture to one’s studies, to one’s lifelong pursuit of

understanding, and, through both these impacts, enriches one’s professional formation.

From a teaching point of view, one’s personal teaching philosophy inevitably colours

the student learning experience somewhere along the line, however explicitly or

implicitly such ‘vibes’ are expressed. Students can learn much from what is not spoken.

This aligns closely with philosophical hermeneutic thinking4.


In this study I make use of two terms relevant to discussion of both the student

experience and this thesis – Lebenswelt (lifeworld) and Sitz im Leben (setting in life).

Both terms have a philosophical hermeneutic ring. Lifeworld plays a key role in my

articulation of one’s coming to understanding, while setting in life is a more technical

term within hermeneutic theory. Both terms connote a larger possibility, entity or state

of affairs within which the elements/specifics of the thing reside.

Sitz im Leben or setting/situation in life was a term first employed in ‘form criticism’

of biblical literature. The life and times of a period are studied in order to identify

different literary forms of text. Then specific texts are analysed to discern the

4 The sayable ‘brings the unsayable into the world’ (Heidegger. 1971, p. 74); cited in Davey (2006, p.

166).

6

provenance and purpose of discreet passages, based on a recognition that whole texts

as received from antiquity can be early edited amalgams of separate source

documents5. In classical hermeneutic interpretation of biblical texts then, the richer

one’s understanding of a text’s setting in life, the better informed one is in peeling back

its author’s/editor’s intentions or its provenance and purpose more generally. The

concept, setting in life becomes useful in hermeneutic research where the goal is to

interpret a text because it focusses attention on conditions at the time when that text

was written. Appreciating those conditions helps in the interpretation of the text.

Lifeworld, by contrast, derives from the discipline of phenomenology, found

notably in the work of Husserl but also taken up by other philosophers including

Gadamer. The concept emerged in the context of philosophical discourse on the nature

of human understanding and the epistemology of objective scientific inquiry. For

Warnke, Husserl’s lifeworld ‘is the horizon of subjective modes of givenness upon

which the objectified world of the natural sciences is erected’ (Warnke, 1987, p. 35)

(italics added). In Husserl’s own words, ‘The lifeworld, for us who wakingly live in it,

is always already there, existing in advance for us, the ground of all praxis whether

theoretical or extra theoretical. The world is pre-given to us […] as horizon’ (quoted in

Warnke [1987, p. 36]). Thus lifeworld is

a general view of the universe and man's place in it which affects

one's conduct. For Dilthey philosophies are world-views6, and fall

into three types: materialism, pantheistic vitalism, idealism. Husserl

contrasted culturally and historically relative world-views with

‘scientific’ philosophy. Scheler argued that we cannot avoid a

world-view; but we should choose it reflectively and by a valid

method. Jaspers investigated the roots of world-views in our

subjective experience’. (Inwood, n.d.)

Relevance of both terms to this inquiry. The overarching question posed in this

thesis is, how can university education equip students to survive and thrive in the twenty-first

century? ‘Surviving and thriving in the twenty-first century’ refers to their quality of

5 An example is provided in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible concerning the Passion narrative in the

Gospel according to Mark, which is considered to be older than the accounts of Matthew or Luke. The

commentator asked how Mark’s narrative came to be fixed so early, then continued: ‘Obviously

because the salvation event … here is given as it was needed for preaching purposes from the very

beginning of the Christian Church. It opened the eyes and ears of hearer or reader to the

eschatological action of God. And further, the Christian Church was forced by its Jewish environment

to interpret the Crucifixion in the light of Jesus’ resurrection … Here again Form Criticism

demonstrates that even the Passion narratives have their Sitz im Leben and a Christological purpose’

(Black & Rowley, 1962, p. 684). In the same volume, concerning Old Testament studies, a

commentator notes that study of a text’s Sitz im Leben encompasses ‘the political, social and cultic life

of Israel at some given point in its history’ (Black & Rowley, 1962, p. 170). 6 c.f. my spelling, ‘worldview’.

7

life, their post-graduation lived experience. That same dimension needs to be studied

during their time at university to avoid phenomenal disjunction/mismatch in research

design: mere procedural description and analysis of the university experience cannot

adequately explain human becoming. My overarching research question requires that I

consider students’ lived experience. Can these two constructs – lifeworld and setting in

life – help us understand and appreciate students’ lived experience? What I present

now is an application of these terms to my study rather than a strict implementation of

their usage in the literature.7,8

If I think about a university setting in life, it’s as if I have special lenses that register

not just the visible landscape but also cultural, economic, political and psychological

realities that impinge on students’ learning (such as the pressures on teachers and

students already referred to); or rather, that is the scope of my meaning making

challenge. Thus setting in life is a multi-dimensional (multi-reality) space anchored in

the natural and constructed environment. If I think about a university lifeworld, I think

about the ‘space’ in which students ‘live and move and have their being’ in their

journeys to qualify for their chosen vocations.9 Lifeworld connotes ‘what we conceive

as our world’ but also encompasses our world-view or, as Wilber prefers, our world-

space. Within a community, world-view refers to widely-held values and tacit beliefs

that characterize that community. To use Husserl’s phrase, the lifeworld exists ‘in

advance for us’ (Warnke, 1987, p. 36), this by virtue of our language inheritance. So

while it is in a sense pre-given, for me (for my thesis) it is an organic thing, as language

is, because my lifeworld evolves with me in my ‘linguistic being‘. In this thesis

therefore, I sometimes allude to a student’s personal lifeworld as that unique world of

thought that provides the context for individual meaning making; I thus take

advantage of the idea that lifeworld is in part a personal achievement.

Textual interpretation, meaning making in general, including scientific inquiry,

operates within what I have called the flux of language in time (as will be depicted

7 Gadamer himself acknowledged that lifeworld is ‘one of the very few new words proposed by a

philosopher that has had a success of its own in ordinary language’. ‘Many scholars’, notes Gadamer

approvingly, have used it in their own ‘independent analyses of the social and historical world in the

context of a phenomenological anthropology’ without signing up to Husserl’s transcendental

phenomenology (Gadamer, 1977, p. 183). 8 As already indicated, setting in life is a technical term in literary form criticism. I am in process of

exploring in the present argument the extent to which the construct might be usefully applied to a

university learning environment. Understanding a text’s setting in life is needed to richly interpret

that text. The interpretive sequence is: □ seek understanding of the setting in life; □ seek

understanding of the text; □ continue following the hermeneutic circle. By applying setting in life to a

university learning environment, students are like ‘texts’; we will better understand them and their

learning experience by better understanding their setting in life, their learning environment, and then

continue our interpretive cycle. 9 The language here generalises and projects a rose-coloured view of the nature of university education

but I invite the reader to allow this while my larger argument develops; I am not begging the

question but following a logic of emergent coherence (McKenzie, 1996, p. 51).

8

shortly in Figure P4).10, 11 Here is the paradox of my lifeworld: it is the frame in which

my meaning making takes place, yet equally, ‘mind is that meaning making entity

continuously constituting itself through our acts of sensation, perception, intuition,

hypothesising, reflection, analysis and emotion, in the world’ (McKenzie, 1996, p. 54).

My lifeworld and I co-exist interactively in the flux of language in time.

Both terms, setting in life and lifeworld, are integral threads in the fabric of this

thesis. It will be important to bear in mind the value of the lifeworld construct as an

input into, a frame for, and an outcome of, learning, meaning making, living, being,

becoming.


As used in this study, ‘meaning making’ refers both to the act of making meaning,

making sense of a thing, as well as the idea of finding meaning or personal fulfilment,

realising individual potential, an idea

that recalls Maslow’s (1954) self-

actualisation. This thesis is about

meaning making as phenomenon and as

experience, in both its observable and felt manifestations. The term ‘meaning making’

is used to incorporate and go beyond ‘sense making’. I follow Weick, Sutcliffe &

Obstfeld’s (2005, p. 409) use of the latter when they write that ‘Sensemaking … is the

primary site where meanings materialize that inform and constrain identity and

action’. But for me, as mentioned above, meaning making also involves fostering one’s

‘global understanding’, a hypothetical and tacit agglomeration or synthesis of all one’s

discreet understandings (plural). This formulation helps me make sense of my primary

value belief that the defining feature of human kind is the fulfilment it gains from

growth in understanding (McKenzie, 1996).

As a general rule humans make sense, make meaning of their surroundings and

experiences throughout their waking hours, voluntarily and involuntarily, if brain

function is working normally. That statement refers to the baseline sense of ‘meaning

10 For Gadamer, Husserl’s elaboration of the lifeworld concept shifted ground over time (Gadamer,

1977, pp. 187, 194), but it was still an essential and central concept in his mature view that our big

challenge in future (if we so choose) will be for everyone to self-reflect ‘in a “universal praxis” of

humanity that is ready to be led consciously by phenomenology’ (Gadamer, 1977, p. 195). Gadamer

demurred at this reification of phenomenology; however, the more pressing matter for Gadamer in

his essay, The science of the lifeworld, was the continuing yet limiting belief that the knowledge

underpinning our practical decisions in life arise from the application of science. Gadamer argued

that science ‘will never prevent us from doing anything we are able to do […] The future of humanity

demands that we do not simply do everything we can but that we require rational justification for

what we should do […] I agree with the moral impulse that lies at the basis of Husserl’s idea of a new

kind of lifeworld praxis, but I would like to connect it with the old impulse of an authentic and

political [i.e. non-science inspired] common sense’ (Gadamer, 1977, p. 197). 11 In this Prologue figure numbers are prefixed with ‘P’, in the Epilogue, with ‘E’, in appendices, with

‘A’.

‘Meaning making’ refers both to the act of making sense of a thing as well as the idea of finding meaning or personal fulfilment.

9

making’: that of perception and pattern recognition in data coming (to some extent)

into conscious awareness, the comprehended and the as-yet-incomprehensible. This

could be a single-minded effort, although humans also have the capacity to multi-task,

for example to drive a car without having an accident, even when being mentally

preoccupied with yesterday’s altercation with Jim, or this morning’s conquest. We

sometimes make meaning on different levels simultaneously.

However in this study I focussed on a higher order, longer-time-frame sense of

meaning making. The central and organising motif for this meditation on and

appreciation of human meaning making will be the philosophical hermeneutic concept

of hermeneutic consciousness (Davey, 2006, pp. 38-109). Life is a hermeneutic journey and

story, which is to say that to realise our individual potential as persons of substance we

need to develop our capacity to engage meaningfully in the world, which requires that

we strive for growth in understanding of the longer-time-frame kind – what I am

calling ‘global understanding’. As already indicated I argue that growth in global

understanding is the progressive realisation of an ever more complex, comprehensive

and coherent sense of self in the world. Such growth is the outcome of approaching life

as a hermeneutic journey.


If we provisionally accept that curriculum practice will achieve more robust and

fulsome outcomes the more closely it mirrors or accommodates the way humans

experience self and world (cognitively, socially, physically, emotionally, ethically,

spiritually), and if it makes sense to recognise a longer-time-frame sense of meaning

making as being integral to human self-actualisation, then we are faced with a

significant challenge to curriculum practice. A university education for the professions

will achieve a greater purpose if it

somehow meshes professional

formation with students’ journeys of

personal becoming. To live a

meaningful life and make a meaningful contribution to society university students

must become meaning makers, not just learners or knowledge acquirers/users. The

difficulty of tying the elusive ideas in this paragraph together is ameliorated as we

envisage the journey of personal becoming and the journey of ‘making + finding

meaning’ as different facets of a single phenomenon – different terms to describe the

process of becoming whole, of realising individual potential. Supporting this

metamorphosis – helping students to ‘become themselves in new ways’ (Barnett,

2010a, p. 14) – is the core challenge of the model of curriculum presented in this thesis.

In this section I have outlined several concepts that will prove to be fundamental to

my thesis: □ GLOBAL UNDERSTANDING, □ PLAYING A MEANINGFUL ROLE IN THE WORLD,

This view aligns with my contention that authentic professional identity is an expression of authentic personal identity – see Abstract.

10

□ THE IMPORTANCE OF LIFEWORLD AND SETTING IN LIFE, □ VIEWING LIFE AS A

HERMENEUTIC JOURNEY and □ MEANING MAKING AS A CURRICULUM FOCUS AND

OUTCOME. The preceding discussion has shown that these idea clusters are

conceptually interdependent. Each of them will be further elaborated and interwoven

as my argument progresses in subsequent chapters. I turn now to the context of my

inquiry.

The context of my inquiry

From the outset, I locate my thesis in the contexts of learning and teaching in twenty-

first century university professional education. How I do this is significant in itself.

Everything is context, wrote a long-forgotten newspaper columnist, as if we live in

one seamless, interconnected world and universe.12 Ideas have a knack of taking root,

of swaying our minds, our worldviews (a meaning making product; recall that

‘meaning making’ is the focus of this thesis) and our habitual ways of construing

ourselves and the world (a meaning making process). The ‘everything’ idea certainly took

root in me; actually I think it was there already, buried deep.13 A chapter that is

intended to lay out the contexts of a doctoral thesis on meaning making capability

confronts a problem. How does one begin to delineate the parameters of an inquiry

into meaning making if everything is context? We know from the thesis title and

abstract that the focus of interest is twenty-first century university professional

education, which locates the inquiry in a specific time frame and a specific field of

human activity. But what should I include and exclude? I engage with this question

commencing in the next paragraph. In all this, however, I tread cautiously. The phen-

omenon I examine in this study is curriculum design and teaching practice in

university professional education with reference to meaning making capability as

process and outcome. The question becomes, could a reconsideration of meaning

making allow us to re-imagine university education for the professions? This thesis

shows how it can, but I must qualify my ‘can do’: my equivocation concerns our limits

in fathoming the process of understanding at the heart of the meaning making

experience; see Chapter 4.

12 c.f. ‘Everything is put into question because everything is a context within a context forever’ (Wilber,

2000, p. 46). 13 Hence my immediate heart-felt embrace of it when I read the column headline, like greeting a long-

lost friend. Nicholas Davey would see this as part of hermeneutic experience:

A thought that occurs to us or strikes us seems plausible or convincing not because it strikes us

ex nihilo carrying its own epistemological credentials as it were, but because we recognize it as

another or different aspect of a subject matter we have a past acquaintance with. The new

thought is persuasive because it foregrounds what was held within a known contextual

background. The new thought reconfigures the subject matter we were previously acquainted

with, permitting it to be understood in a new way (Davey, 2006, pp. 102-103).

11

I previously made reference to Karl Popper’s classification of ‘the world’ into ‘three

worlds’. Even though he was writing in the 1970s (see Popper [1972]), this schema still

has resonance, value for present day authors including several authors chosen for this

study – Bereiter (2002, p. 64), Wilber (2000, p. 149) and Archer (2000, p. 105). For

Popper, the world of human experience reveals itself to us in three guises: the

biophysical world, the world of subjective experience, and the world of ideas. I will use

Popper’s three worlds as a heuristic to describe the context of my inquiry.

Popper’s World 1. The bio-physical context: Questions of resourcing

Public universities in Australia are principally funded by the Commonwealth

Government for their teaching programs. Government higher education policy and

funding have a broad-ranging impact on teaching and therefore also on students’

university experience including their learning experience. In this discussion I draw

from one public domain document: the Australian Government’s Transforming

Australia's higher education system policy statement (DEEWR, 2009, p. 5).14

The Australian Government’s higher education policy statement is potent: ‘the

Australian Government will make an unprecedented investment in our universities

and tertiary education system to drive comprehensive reform across the post-

compulsory education and training sector’, because ‘Higher education is integral to

achieving the Government’s vision of a stronger and fairer Australia’ and because ‘It

fuels economic development, productivity and high skilled jobs and supports

Australia’s role as a middle power and leader in the region’ (DEEWR, 2009, p. 5). The

Government ‘is committed to ensuring that Australians of all backgrounds who have

the ability to study at university get the opportunity to do so’ (DEEWR, 2009, p. 12).

Much could be written about the Government’s higher education policy, but for

the purposes of my thesis I will just raise several matters; they are all relevant to my

account of the context of this inquiry in so far as they influence the lifeworld and the

setting in life – in this context, ‘practice environment’ – of teachers and students.

One policy goal is to lift ‘attainment’, which the document conceives as the level of

education of given age groups within the total population. The educational attainment

circa 2009 was 32% of 25–34 year olds holding a bachelor degree or higher, whereas the

policy is to lift this attainment to 40% by 2025. In addition to the goal of a net increase

in numbers graduating from university, an explicit element of the Labor Government’s

social agenda is to increase participation in higher education of under-represented

sections of society; thus higher education providers now have financial incentives to

14 At the time of writing the current Labor Government had used its legislative and funding powers to

create what some practitioners experience as a ‘pressure cooker’ environment for learning and

teaching. When the Government changes, policy settings for higher education will change to a lesser

or greater degree, but pressures of some kind are inevitable.

12

enrol and support persons from a low socio-economic background (low socio-

economic status or SES), Indigenous people and people with a disability.15 The policy

statement indicates that ‘The proportion of low SES students enrolled in higher

education in Australia has remained static at about 15 per cent over the last two

decades, yet this group makes up 25 per cent of the broader population’ (DEEWR,

2009, p. 12). This gap is to be closed.16 The value position driving this policy is fairness,

recognizing that there are endemic disincentives for entering higher education in the

setting in life of people from these social groups. Consequently, the policy affirms that

‘Better measures of low socio economic status will be developed which are based on

the circumstances of individual students and their families’ (rather than on their post

code, which was how they were identified in the report data); and continues: ‘and

performance funding will be based in part on how effective institutions are in

attracting these students’.

Alongside the push towards increasing and widening participation in university

study is a push to lifting standards in teaching and student learning outcomes

(DEEWR, 2009, p. 5). The Government does not just want significantly more

enrolments from its target social groups: it wants them to ‘complete’, i.e. graduate. And

at the same time it wants those programs to be quality programs. ‘The establishment of

the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) will place a renewed

emphasis on learning and teaching quality as the bedrock of the Australian higher

education system’ (DEEWR, 2009, p. 15).17 The tensions implicit in all this for

curriculum developers, teachers, teaching and learning support staff and of course

students themselves are considered in the next section.

15 The Bradley Review of Higher Education, (DEEWR, 2008), on which the policy statement was largely

based, included a recommendation for increased disability support funding as part of the access and

participation agenda. This is being done through the Higher Education Disability Support Program;

see http://education.gov.au/higher-education-disability-support-program. The policy statement noted

that its Equity Support Program would be replaced and incorporated into its new funding

arrangements (DEEWR, 2009, p. 14). 16 ‘Once students from disadvantaged backgrounds have entered university the likelihood of them

completing their course of study is broadly similar to that of the general higher education population.

Often, however, they require higher levels of support to succeed, including financial assistance and

greater academic support, mentoring and counselling services. The Government has therefore

allocated a further $325 million over four years to be provided to universities as a financial incentive

to expand their enrolment of low SES students, and to fund the intensive support needed to improve

their completion and retention rates’ (DEEWR, 2009, p. 14). 17 TEQSA ‘will enhance the overall quality of the Australian higher education system. It will accredit

providers, evaluate the performance of institutions and programs, encourage best practice, simplify

current regulatory arrangements and provide greater national consistency. TEQSA will take the lead

in coordinating this work and establishing objective and comparative benchmarks of quality and

performance. The agency will collect richer data and monitor performance in areas such as student

selection, retention and exit standards, and graduate employment. It will evaluate the performance of

universities and other higher education providers every five years, or whenever there is evidence that

standards are not being met. If problems are identified, TEQSA will be able to recommend sanctions

up to and including withdrawing the right to use the title of “University”’ (DEEWR, 2009, p. 31).

13

Popper’s World 2. Questioning the learning and teaching experience

The afore-mentioned policy statement on higher education acknowledges the

significance of the student experience in meeting its policy goals:

Although student satisfaction levels remain high, Australia has

fallen behind its major competitor countries on key teaching and

student experience indicators and drop-out rates remain high at 28

per cent in 2005. Similarly, the dramatic rise in student-to-staff

ratios – from about 15:1 in 1996 to over 20:1 in 2006 – is probably a

significant contributor to the relatively low levels of student

engagement. A positive student experience has an impact on

student retention and further study. Maintaining and improving

the quality of teaching, learning and the student experience is a

critical factor in the success of universities and other higher

education providers, both domestically and in the international

education market. This is particularly important for adult learners

who comprise a large proportion of students who require

additional support.

To achieve the Government’s ambitious attainment targets there

will also need to be an increased emphasis on improving the

student learning experience in order to boost retention, progress

and ultimately, completion rates. (DEEWR, 2009, pp. 14-15)

What constitutes ‘student satisfaction’ mentioned in this statement? Various

survey items are used to ‘quantify’ the private, inner domain of the student experience

of university life and study, producing population data used to gauge Australia’s

national performance against economically and culturally ‘comparable’ countries.

In the preceding pages I have given a brief account of the Australian Government’s

higher education policy including its policy on improving the student experience. The

policy statement offers a coherent strategy to harness the potential of the Australian

higher education industry to help achieve the Government’s social agenda and nation-

building targets, but at what cost to those at the chalkface (or whatever the blended

learning equivalent metaphor might be)? And in terms of the logic and structure of my

argument here, can the concepts of setting in life and lifeworld provide useful keys to

appreciate the context-driven rationale for this thesis? I shall now consider the student

experience through the lenses of setting in life and lifeworld. I approach the context-

sensitive student experience alongside the context-sensitive teacher experience: in the

world of thought of this thesis, how students are feeling colours the teacher experience;

how teachers are feeling colours the student experience.

14

The National Tertiary Education Union website in Australia provides access to a

2012 union report concerning a strategic directions paper from the University of

Tasmania. One surveyed union member, Academic 10, made this comment about the

institution’s UTAS Academic directions paper: ‘At present, it comes over to most people

as a punitive extension of Performance Management to create the UTAS Academic

who never sleeps or stops working’ (NTEU, 2012, p. 12). (I pause to empathise with my

colleague18.) I argued earlier that a teacher’s teaching philosophy inevitably colours the

student learning experience somewhere along the line, however explicitly or implicitly

such ‘vibes’ are expressed. If a teacher’s teaching philosophy can have an unspoken,

potentially benign effect on students’ learning experience, accumulated external

pressures on an academic’s life can likewise leave their unintended mark, inevitably to

the detriment of students. What’s more, students, like their teachers, are themselves

pressure points in their own private settings in life, and these pressures also impact on

their learning experience. In Figure P1 I offer a speculative, fictional vignette that

names some possible pressures, good and bad, typically experienced by academics and

students.

18 Also recall this earlier comment: student ‘drop-out rates remain high at 28 per cent in 2005’ (DEEWR,

2009, p. 14). This matter-of-fact statement probably papers over the lived experience for some of the

28 %, where the moment of withdrawal was traumatic and life-changing. I pause to empathise with

my fellow students also.

15

Academic (teacher–researcher)

Student

I bring my personal and family baggage with me to work. I need a life outside work. There’s a ‘me’ inside that I neglect too much.

Having a future in my school depends on how I manage my roles in research, publications, teaching and administration, not to mention involvement in my professional association …

and contribute to my course team as we scramble to keep up with the university’s curriculum renewal program.

My main subject is taught offshore by a Malaysian partner institution. My head of school expects me to develop cross-institutional quality assurance processes.

I’m acutely aware that three of my subjects are due for overhaul. Only one will be done this year given other commitments, so next year I’ll be teaching two subjects that I know are short-changing my students.

I really want my students to engage, but when they do they put more demands on me!

I think I’m holding it together as best I can. I know there are plenty of students here who really struggle to stay afloat when the workload gets overwhelming. Some of my friends find our first year subjects really hard. If the teachers want us all to get through there doesn’t seem to be a very clever strategy to help us get there. I find it ok but students who are battling say they don’t know where to go for help. Some of them seem to have holes in their knowledge but they don’t know what they are. Then there’s your whole personal situation – whether you really want to be here at all, why am I doing this course … do I really want to be an accountant … there’s the financial pressure … problems back home … having a good time … and if you watch the news you wonder if the whole thing’s going to come crashing down. I do want to graduate though.

Figure P1. Sample pressures on academics and students

I have spent some time above sifting through aspects of the challenge of making

sense of the student learning experience. I now move on to Popper’s World 3.

Popper’s World 3. Troublesome knowledge

Popper’s World 3 is the world of ideas. Clearly ideas are an important part of my

phenomenon of inquiry: ideas, concepts are the raw materials of conceptual

knowledge, and therefore university courses are substantially about orientating

students to bodies, structures of ideas, enabling them to work with ideas. Teachers and

learners work with ideas as tools of trade. Given the central role of ideas in my

argument, how does Popper’s World 3 figure in the context or background to this

inquiry? What is the state of knowledge today as it relates to student learning? I will

make three brief comments.

The first comment relates to what Ron Barnett terms the ‘supercomplexity’ of the

knowledge domain. As teachers and students question what they should teach/learn,

their difficulty is compounded by the ubiquitous supercomplexity of the knowledge

explosion (Barnett, 2000). Knowledge as information is expanding exponentially as

16

new discoveries are made and new solutions invented. Then, overlaid on this activity,

new ways of determining relative merit are appearing. New frameworks of

categorisation and critique are being invented or hybridised to find ways of describing

and diagnosing the world, of validating those diagnostic tools, etc., ad. infinitum. Rival

claims beckon from all sides. Barnett describes the new conditions of supercomplexity

as a constellation of fragility characterised by uncertainty, unpredictability,

challengeability and contestability; he says that we inhabit a world ‘in which all our

frameworks are contestable and are contested. It is a fragile world, a disturbed world’

(Barnett, 2000, p. 63). Living and working in a supercomplex world is an acquired skill

and requires a certain disposition. I return to Barnett in chapter 6.

The second issue is the relationship between our inherited structure of the

knowledge domain (pure and applied sciences, humanities and social sciences, arts,

business and management, etc.) and how a curriculum is structured. The issue is about

the utility, the appropriateness of our inherited disciplines of knowledge (academic

domains) as new ideas and discoveries are made, as new disciplines emerge and others

gather dust. While interdisciplinary research teams are readily formed across faculty

boundaries, faculty-based course of study sometimes have difficulty crossing those

same divides.19 Education for the professions is education for the real world, and real

world practice always involves capability sets that cross discipline-based faculty

boundaries.

The third point concerns the implications for learning environment design of

‘troublesome knowledge’, a term used by Meyer and Land in conjunction with the idea

of ‘threshold concepts’:

A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening

up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about

something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or

interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner

cannot progress. As a consequence of comprehending a threshold

concept there may thus be a transformed internal view of subject

matter, subject landscape, or even world view. (J. Meyer & Land,

2003, p. 1)

19 ‘Service teaching’ is an arrangement where the faculty owning a course ‘buys in’ teachers from

another faculty where the curriculum requires it; however the cost involved is a disincentive to enter

such arrangements.

17

Grasping a threshold concept may well be troublesome because it does not mesh

with one’s current structure of understanding. Troublesome knowledge is ‘knowledge

that is “alien”, or counter-intuitive or even intellectually absurd at face value’ (J. Meyer

& Land, 2003, p. 2). Confronting troublesome knowledge has been called a ‘liminal

experience’ – ‘a suspended state in which understanding approximates to a kind of

mimicry or lack of authenticity’ (J. Meyer & Land, 2003, p. 10).

I chose these three issues – supercomplexity of knowledge, taxonomic structure of

knowledge and knowledge imponderables – because each in a way forms a context for

this inquiry. Supercomplexity potentially gives rise to anxiety for both teachers and

students as individual concepts or whole clusters of thought within the current

favoured position, the mainstream view, are challenged by clammering alternatives.

Tradition asserts that our current taxonomy of knowledge should continue to underpin

the organisational structure of universities, whatever the consequences for curriculum

practice. And troublesome knowledge means trouble for students and teachers while

ever curriculum design neglects the strategic importance of teaching for threshold

concepts.

________

A reflection on my ‘three worlds’ rendering of the context of this inquiry. Texts that

purport to give an account of the context or setting in life of something are invariably selective,

even when that ‘something’ is a holistic concept, like Popper’s three worlds model. So far in

this thesis I have used two holistic concepts that can be usefully compared to shed light on what

I want to say here, as shown in Figure P2.

Figure P2. Visual representation of models A and B

By its very nature or by definition, ‘human experience’ is a container, catch-all idea. Model

A is a working representation of irreducible dimensions of human experience that together form

a comprehensive, integral view (a view with integrity, a conceptualisation that does justice to

18

the phenomenon itself). Model B was Popper’s distillation of the ‘primary colours’ of the world

of human experience. I daresay others beside Popper have attempted to classify ‘world’

according to their own purposes; my main point here is that models are intended to represent

the true or essential nature of a thing in a way that seeks to communicate that truth or essence

to others. Neither model A nor model B asserts that the labels within it possess any ‘real’

existence. In each case rather the labels and the model as a whole point to, seek to convey the

larger idea behind it.

I raise this to emphasise that while Popper’s model is an attempt at a catch-all idea, I simply

used the model as a device to organise my discussion of the context of my inquiry. While

everything might indeed be context, the reader might be disappointed if I address nothing other

than context to press my case.

The scope of my inquiry

This study makes a contribution to the field of curriculum theory for professional

university education, taking into account the special characteristics of the twenty-first

century, including the supercomplexity of knowledge, worsening global

environmental problems, the widening gulf between rich and poor and … the dearth of

coherent, holistic, well-grounded theories of university curriculum for professional and

personal formation. The overall argument is summed up in the table of contents and

also Figure P3. Part A comprises studies in textual composition, interpretation and

communication; indeed, this formulation is a condensation of my overall research strategy.

Its recurrence in this thesis serves as a concept organiser - my research strategy organiser

– for the reader. Texts by Smuts, Wilber and Bortoft (recalling Goethe) are explored to

seek a rich and literature-based understanding of holism (Chapter 1). Margaret

Archer’s social realism is the focus of Chapter 2. Chapters 3 and 4 consider texts by

Campbell and Davey to acknowledge the necessary place of mystery in meaning

making. Chapter 5 surveys texts by selected educational scholars whose work aligns

with or raises questions for my thesis; the argument forms a conversation with a range

of approaches to curriculum theorising. I am attempting to broaden the discourse.

In Part B I synthesise ideas from my textual studies in Part A into my meta-

interpretation. In Chapter 6 I present my conception of meaning making, which holds

together making meaning, a cognitive achievement, and finding meaning or self-

actualisation, realising individual potential, an ontological achievement. In Chapter 7, I

present my framework for a university curriculum of becoming for education for the

professions. In the Epilogue I take a step back and critically reflect on the achievement,

implications and future of this way of approaching education for the professions.

Important note: my key authors were chosen and prioritised for study according to

their potential in contributing to the logic of emergent coherence of this thesis. The

omission of many other writers with something to say on aspects of this work is

19

Figure P3. Map of thesis structure

Critical reflection on my

argument and my research frame and

strategy

Part A. Studies in textual composition, interpretation and communication

Part B. Research products (meta-interpretation and synthesis of texts)

Chapter 6.

A hybrid conception of

meaning making

Chapter 7. A

design framework for a curriculum of becoming

Introduction,

key concepts, context and method of inquiry

Prologue

Epilogue

Figure P3. Map of thesis structure

Chapter 4. Muddy waters,

philosophical hermeneutics, mystery – Nicholas Davey

Chapter 1. Holism: Jan Christian Smuts; Ken Wilber; Henri Bortoft recalling Goethe

Chapter 3. Feeling as progenitor

of understanding – Sue Campbell

Chapter 5. Learner

development in higher education – Carl Bereiter, personal epistemology, practice knowledge & curriculum theorists

Chapter 2.

Social realism: Margaret Archer

Thesis making: Attuning to welling

harmony and merging of themes

20

justified by the coherence of what I have achieved following my philosophical

hermeneutic method. It is clearly not the final word; in philosophical hermeneutics

there is never a final word. The value of this work lies in the transformations in

practice it may inspire.

My method of inquiry

In this section I present the way I conducted this inquiry. My approach was guided by

my commitment to and emergent understanding of philosophical hermeneutics.

Philosophical hermeneutics

In this section I give an introductory account of the nature of philosophical

hermeneutics prior to a fuller discussion in Chapter 4.

What is hermeneutics? A useful starting point for this discussion is the succinct

yet wide angle, multi-dimensional description given in The Oxford Dictionary of Literary

Terms. Hermeneutics is the field of theorising textual interpretation

concerned with general problems of understanding the meanings of

texts. Originally applied to the principles of exegesis in theology,

the term has been extended since the 19th century to cover broader

questions in philosophy and criticism, and is associated in

particular with a tradition of German thought running from

Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey in the 19th century to

Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer in the 20th. In this

tradition, the question of interpretation is posed in terms of the

hermeneutic circle, and involves basic problems such as the

possibility of establishing a determinate meaning in a text, the role

of the author's intention, the historical relativity of meanings, and

the status of the reader's contribution to a text's meaning. (Baldick,

2008)

Baldick defines hermeneutics as ‘the theory of interpretation’. My formulation –

Hermeneutics is the field of theorising textual interpretation – acknowledges that the

word ‘theory’ is commonly used to denote a particular school of thought about a

matter. There are various schools of hermeneutic thought and practice alongside

philosophical hermeneutics, such as depth hermeneutics, postmodern hermeneutics,

critical hermeneutics, and the hybrid method, phenomenological hermeneutics. In this

sense the academic discipline of hermeneutics is a field of philosophy in which the

various problems associated with textual interpretation are tackled within or across the

various traditions.

This conceptualisation of the textual interpretation task is portrayed in Figure P4.

The hermeneutic circle is a critical idea in this thesis and is explained later in this

21

Prologue and in subsequent chapters. The term, lifeworld in the figure was explained

earlier. ‘Flux of language in time’ relates to Baldick’s comment about the ‘historical

relativity of meanings’.

Figure P4. Hermeneutic concerns in textual interpretation

Figure P4 visually represents some key concerns in textual interpretation as raised

in the Oxford Dictionary definition of hermeneutics. It highlights the fundamental

importance of an author’s lifeworld in text conception and the fundamental

importance of a reader’s lifeworld in text interpretation. It accentuates the gap between

the text author’s world of meaning and that of the text reader. As we shall see later,

philosophical hermeneutics encourages contemplation on that difference because in it

lies unending scope for new understanding for the reader.

Probably the most influential writer in contemporary hermeneutic discourse is

Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer provided an extended discussion of hermeneutics in

his paper, The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem. He was grappling with – in his

own words – ‘the central question of the modern age’: how our natural view of the

world, arising from daily living, relates to ‘the unassailable and anonymous authority

that confronts us in the pronouncements of science’ (Gadamer, 1977, p. 3). He saw

the main challenge for philosophy since the 17th century as mediation between the

scientific worldview and our everyday experience of the world. This work involved

‘reconnecting’ the ‘objective world’ of science and technology ‘with those fundamental

orders of our being that are neither arbitrary nor manipulable by us, but rather simply

demand our respect’ (Gadamer, 1977, pp. 3-4).

Reader’s lifeworld Author’s lifeworld

The flux of language in time

Author’s

intention

Text

conception

Reader

interpretation

Reader’s

perspective &

purposes

The text

22

Insight into Gadamer’s conception of philosophical hermeneutics is provided in

Nicholas Davey’s Unquiet Understanding: Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics (Davey,

2006).1 For Davey, as for Gadamer, ‘Hermeneutic realism entails a commitment and a

willingness to surrender to the undeniable reality of finitude, to limit-experiences, and

to the possibility of horizons of meaning that are presently not our own’ (Davey, 2006,

p. 8). Davey elaborates on this perspective in his Thesis Four: Philosophical Hermeneutics

Seeks Otherness within the Historical, as the following extract shows.

Philosophical hermeneutics and the historical stance that informs it,

strive to do justice to the integrity of the world [lifeworld?] lying

beyond the self. It does not seek to assimilate the historical other

within its own horizon, nor to become fully immersed in the other's

'form of life.’ To translate (subsume) the other into one's own voice

renders the strange familiar and converts what ought to be a dia-

logue into a monologue. To suspend one's own horizons and be

translated into the other's 'form of life' renounces (albeit

temporarily) one's own way of 'knowing how to go on.’ Neither

assimilation nor immersion constitutes what philosophical

hermeneutics conceives of as understanding […] By neutralizing

the provocation of the other, assimilation and immersion diminish

the likelihood of those disruptive experiences of limit which are

integral to the possibility of understanding as philosophical

hermeneutics conceives of it. Recognizing the integrity of the other

is therefore fundamental to philosophical hermeneutics. It is not

sameness – neither rendering the other the same as ourselves nor

becoming the same as the other – but difference that is vital for

philosophical hermeneutics. It is difference that preserves the reality of

alternative possibilities that are not our own. (Davey, 2006, pp. 7-8)

Davey’s comments here expand on the claim associated with Figure P4 – that the gap

between the text author’s world of meaning and that of the text reader not only exists

but needs to be preserved; hence the separated lifeworld rings in the figure. Davey

speaks of surrendering ‘to the possibility of horizons of meaning that are presently not

our own’. This notion is particularly relevant to my thesis. In a university curriculum

of becoming, the student journey is meant to be transformative; students are learning

much that they didn’t previously know and often becoming people (e.g. members of a

1 Davey’s book distils but also critiques and extends Gadamer’s thought. He writes: ‘Nietzsche implied

that philosophers should submit themselves to the laws they postulate. Gadamer should not be

exempted from this maxim. Since Gadamer insisted that the meaning and significance of a body of

thought extend beyond what its author may have intended, it is not inconsistent for an essay devoted

to philosophical hermeneutics to strive to go beyond what Gadamer actually states about

philosophical hermeneutics’ (Davey, 2006, pp. 3-4).

23

profession) that they had not been before. In addition, this vision wants and expects

students to become different or ‘greater’ people than they were. To do each of these

things requires an openness to learning, encapsulated nicely in the notion of

surrendering ‘to the possibility of horizons of meaning that are presently not our own’.

Consider students facing this challenge, and the potential inspiration and growth

they can find in their learning. The words in the text box create just such a vision. I

created these words for a

student play. They have

value here in setting the

scene and methods for

meaning making.

Yes, ‘the other’ holds

possibilities that are pres-

ently not our own, but

therein lies the possibility

of future growth in

understanding. Developing such a disposition in a community of learners (students

and teachers) relies in part on our cultivating patience and humility, qualities not

always highly exhibited and prized in timetable-driven education, so enacting a

university curriculum of becoming may need something of a change of heart and mind

and practice. This will probably require some reform to a university’s setting in life and

lifeworld, to the extent that we can influence them. I raise this again in the Epilogue. As

a researcher engaged in philosophical hermeneutic inquiry, I also need to cultivate

patience and humility. Philosophical hermeneutic practice can be a ‘muddy waters’

experience; see Chapter 4.

Given all this, how has the philosophical hermeneutic perspective on human

understanding informed my research methodology? On the face of it this is a

straightforward matter: I am seeking to understand and critique university education

through the composition and interpretation of relevant texts. Yet the matter was also

complex.

My research design challenge

From the beginning of my candidature I was convinced that ‘fostering meaning

making capability for twenty-first century university professional education’ was a

worthwhile, even critically important question to pose in these supercomplex,

2 Opening stanzas and chorus of a song, Global Frame of Mind, composed by me for a Singleton High

School original theatre production in 1981.

Take a brush and paint your horizon Ring the world you know and understand

This is the world you believe in The key to your mind is at hand.

When your sight is all blurred by a smokescreen And there is no horizon line

Don’t be afraid of being uncertain It’s just a sign, a sign of the times.

Draw a ring around your world With that line you define who you are

The mystery stars must have a place in your vision ‘cos I’m in a global frame of mind 2.

24

environmentally and geo-politically highly fragile times. The implications of 9/113, the

global financial crisis, global warming and other malaises were engulfing us all in that

period, and as I have indicated, universities – in this everything is context world – have

been grappling with questions of purpose (explicitly or otherwise) even as they

address their particular resourcing and performance challenges4. I was also from the

beginning greatly drawn to the idea that that it should be possible to use this inquiry to

instantiate the kind of understanding that would emerge about human meaning

making practice in my research design. Very early I conceived this thesis as a series of

studies in textual composition, interpretation and communication (my research strategy

organiser).

This was a bold idea. However, the scale of the design challenge only really

became clear for me as I read Davey’s Unquiet Understanding (which I explore at some

depth in Chapter 4). Specifically, Davey draws attention to an idea central to

Gadamer’s thought, represented in English as ‘the will to method’. Gadamer expressed

reservation about method-driven inquiry (in his comment about ‘methodological

sterility’), and contended that statistical research narrows thought, the antithesis of

hermeneutic reasoning. Davey writes persuasively about the danger of adopting ‘the

will to method’: ‘philosophical hermeneutics is not fearful of method per se but of the

idolization of method. It is fearful of such idolization because the latter castigates

attuning oneself to the plural voices of subject matters as irrational subjectivism’

(Davey, 2006, p. 105). In the following extract Davey starkly encapsulates the

differences between philosophical hermeneutic inquiry and the scientific method. I

include the whole passage because of its central importance to my research approach

and because of its economy and elegance:

The divide between philosophical hermeneutics and scientific

method involves a clash of sensibility. Hermeneutic consciousness

orientates itself toward understanding as a mode of becoming. Its

celebration of becoming subjects the interpreting subject to

continual challenges, opening possibilities for transformation and

transcendence. Methodological consciousness seeks stability and

order and to subject the world to the norms of its own mode of

enquiry. Philosophical hermeneutics, it must be stressed, is not

involved in any grotesque denial of the unquestionable

achievements of method in science and medicine. Neither is it

3 Terrorists shocked the world by dropping New York’s Twin Towers like two packs of cards on 11

September 2001. 4 Such agonising is reflected for example in the discourses within the World Universities Forum. ‘The

World Universities Forum, the Journal of the World Universities Forum, and The University Book Imprint

and News Weblog seek to explore the meaning and purpose of the academy in times of striking social

transformation’ (Source: http://ontheuniversity.com/ ideas/scope-concerns/).

25

concerned with those embarrassing claims made in arts–science

debates about the superiority of one mode of reasoning over

another. The issue for Gadamer and indeed for Iser and Duerr is

simply that there is not one royal road to knowledge. Philosophical

hermeneutics recognizes that cognition is multiform. Indeed, when

the subject matter to be understood is constituted by a constellation

of related fields of concerns, cognition must itself be perspectivally

multiform. Philosophical hermeneutics does not demand the

exclusion of method from cognition but only that the latter should

not monopolize cognition and subvert its multiform nature. For the

will to method to deny the rights of cortesia to other routes to

knowledge is to become party to the gradual silencing of the voices

of inward cognition. To silence those voices and to cap the aquifers

of inherited meaning from [… whence] they spring betrays in the

eyes of philosophical hermeneutics a perturbing nihilism which is

suspicious of the risks and challenges that our linguistic being

affords. The defense of Bildung that philosophical hermeneutics

argues for in such a sustained manner is precisely an attempt to

acknowledge, to learn the ways of, and to remain open to not just

the voices of inward cognition but to those of the different and the

other. The practice of becoming gebildet [cultured, educated] is the

practice of being able to respond to the challenges of translation

and transcendence when they arise. (Davey, 2006, p. 106)

My research design challenge then was to know how to proceed. I felt so much at

home in the philosophical hermeneutic world of thought5 that I knew I must follow its

spirit: what other research philosophy could provide a more appropriate ethos for my

inquiry into human meaning making capability? And yet, at the core of this ethos, this

mindset, sits a suspicion of method. My solution, as already intimated, is contained in

my research strategy organiser: I would conduct a set of ‘studies in textual

composition, interpretation and communication’, and to do so in the spirit of philos-

ophical hermeneutics. How this worked out in practice is the subject of this thesis.

My method: Studies in textual composition, interpretation and

communication

In this Prologue I provide an overview of my method then in subsequent chapters I

elaborate and critique my method as follows:

5 Recall for example ‘my immediate heart-felt embrace of […] [‘Everything is context’] when I read the

column headline, like greeting a long-lost friend’ (Prologue, footnote 13).

26

a) In Chapter 4 I elaborate on the ‘muddy waters’ aspects of philosophical

hermeneutics

b) In Appendix 2 I provide an in-depth interpretation of my research method

in terms of Davey’s (2006) 11 Theses on Philosophical Hermeneutics

c) In the Epilogue I critically review my research strategy.

Overview of my method

In the foregoing discussion I have touched on a number of issues germane to the

choice and justification of my research methodology. I have chosen to adopt a

philosophical hermeneutic approach that funnelled my hermeneutic interpretations of

my selected texts. This approach neatly matches that of my research strategy organiser

– studies in textual composition, interpretation and communication – and reflects my

vision of learning as a progressive unfolding of understanding.

Selecting my text set

Philosophical hermeneutics as both philosophy and method belongs within

the interpretive research paradigm. Through this paradigm the researcher’s

goal is to pursue an interpretation of the research phenomenon (in my case,

how the notion of hologenesis, the coming to be of wholes, can contribute

towards enhancing university education) and design a set of research

questions and strategies that can credibly enable this interpretation to

occur. The process of philosophical hermeneutics involves hermeneutic

textual composition, interpretation and communication. My tasks as a

researcher in framing my emergent research questions and composing my

text set (i.e. those texts determined to be most relevant to addressing these

research questions) involved extensive reading over three years to:

a. identify the key questions that facilitated the achievement of my

research goal:

How can a reappraisal of ‘meaning making’ open fresh ways of

conceptualising and addressing universities’ educational challenge in the

twenty-first century?

How might a twenty-first century Australian university enact a ‘fit-

for-greater-purpose’ education?

b. develop a set of texts that would best enable these questions to be

addressed. This was the first phase of textual (or text set)

composition. The first phase of reading was expansive and

extensive. Many hundreds of major works as well as minor texts

were identified. The task of identifying texts that were most

pertinent to my emerging research questions involved two

processes: (i) personal reflection to challenge my ideas (both long

27

held practice knowledge arising from my long history as both

learner and teacher, and emerging ideas from my reading), and (ii)

external scrutiny and critique as I presented my emerging ideas on

potential texts to my supervisors, doctoral peer group and

audiences at conferences and seminars.

c. refine my text set. This was the second phase of text set composition.

To focus my text set into a manageable and relevant collection I

examined themes across the extensive list of texts I had read and

identified five key concepts that transcended the large potential

collection of texts. See previous discussion of these concepts:

1. Global understanding: Making sense of ourselves and/in the

world





d. choosing my final texts (Phase 3). The decision was made at this

point to choose a selection of major works by key authors in the

field whose work could interrogate and illuminate these concepts

deeply. The text selection criteria appropriate in philosophical

hermeneutic research therefore were (i) the capacity of the chosen

text to extend the hermeneutic dialogue and (ii) the potential for the

chosen text to address gaps in the evolving interpretation. Since this

was to be a hermeneutic study, not a literature review, it was

inconsistent with the research philosophy and strategy to review the

literature widely in the textual interpretation phase. The key texts

were presented in the earlier section, The scope of my inquiry.

Interrogating and interpreting my text set

The second core component of hermeneutic inquiry alongside textual

composition (or development of a text set) is textual interpretation. The

main strategies employed in textual interpretation in philosophical

hermeneutics following the Gadamarian tradition are: hermeneutic circle,

fusion of horizons, and dialogue of question and answers. These are discussed in

detail below.

It will be seen that clarity about the philosophical hermeneutic qualities of my

research and interpretation will unfold in the telling of that research. The picture that

emerges will be seen to involve three key concepts in Gadamer’s thought: the

28

hermeneutic circle, fusion of horizons, and dialogue of question and answers. My claim to be

conducting philosophical hermeneutic research will also be supported by the timbre of

my questioning. This approach in itself will allow me to illuminate the nature of

hermeneutic communication, by demonstrating how one can convey multiple, finely

interconnected themes about product and process in a single hermeneutic

communication.

KEY CONCEPTS IN GADAMER’S PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS

□ The hermeneutic circle – the idea that we can use understanding of the

parts of something to contribute to a clearer idea of the whole; and that our

clearer idea of the whole then helps one make new sense of the parts; then

the process (the cycle) is repeated repeatedly: the cycle becomes a spiral.

Bontekoe (2000) applies the model in many different settings. The notion of

hermeneutic circle has been used in a number of academic literatures such

as: in journalism – Berger (2010); in psychology – Erdi, Banyai, Ujfalussy, &

Diwadkar (2011). Now I am using it to encapsulate my position on

individuals’ meaning making by asserting that life is a hermeneutic journey

and story. The dual intention behind this assertion is (1) to make a value

claim on behalf of the human species and (2) to make explicit what is

mostly tacit, too often overlooked in education discourses.

□ Fusion of horizons. Davey frequently uses ‘horizon’ in relation to meaning

and understanding (see Chapter 4). It is a spatial metaphor that for me

connotes the idea of a ‘world of thought’. More will be said in the Epilogue

about the idea in my song lyric (see text box, p. 23) that by drawing a ring

around our world, that line (or horizon) in a sense defines who we are. The

concept of worldview will be drawn into that account as well. In

philosophical hermeneutics pursuit of understanding typically occurs in

the context of other persons or their texts (see next listed item). Fusion of

horizons is the goal of shared understanding – the bringing together of the

two separate world-view rings of Figure P4, and yet, as already noted,

philosophical hermeneutics insists on maintaining the ‘otherness’ of the

other, because therein lies the hope of yet further understanding (Davey,

2006, pp. 7-9).

□ Dialogue of question and answer. This idea is part of the rich picture of

philosophical hermeneutics considered in Chapter 4. In brief, this dialogue

is

a dialectic that oscillates between the questions of what a thing

is and what it is not. It is not that the question of what a thing is

29

is left hanging in the balance but rather that what the thing or

subject matter is resides in the balance, shimmering as it were

between the disclosed and the withheld. Philosophical

hermeneutic [sic] is plainly committed to the thesis that rather

than obscuring the nature of what a thing is, it is precisely the

relations of the language-world that create the space for a

subject matter to reveal itself. Once again, primacy is given to

the generative space between words. In rejecting Plato’s

dialectic of ideas, Gadamer’s argument affirms that his dialectic

of question and answer has nothing to do with what lies

beyond words (logoi) but with what emerges between them.

(Davey, 2006, pp. 194)

INTERPRETING MY METHOD

IN TERMS OF DAVEY’S 11 THESES ON PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS

As noted earlier the concept of hermeneutic consciousness as used by Davey (2006) will

be shown in this thesis to support my notion that life is a hermeneutic journey and

story. In preparing my research strategy I read Davey’s work deeply and considered

the implications of his 11 theses for my strategy – see Appendix 2.

In summary, my research strategy builds on Davey’s thesis as follows:

The questioning was appropriately and persistently

philosophical hermeneutic in timbre.

Rich understandings emerged after luscious periods of lack

of clarity.

My research strategy organiser – studies in textual

composition, interpretation and communication – helped me

distinguish between these three kinds of human interaction

with texts as I engaged with my chosen texts and waited for

their messages to draw my thinking out.

I resolutely pursued my goal to better understand the

phenomenon of understanding as a natural human need.

Davey’s distillation of Gadamer’s philosophical

hermeneutic mindspace proved to be a ‘perfect fit’ research

approach for the two phenomena investigated – □ the

human need to understand and achieve personal potential;

and □ the uncertainty and stresses in contemporary

education for professional practice.

30

My meta-interpretation and synthesis of my text set allowed

me to experience the hermeneutic in-between space 6 as a

tectonic plate, as I was drawn to apparently irreconcilable

positions. My articulation of the philosophical hermeneutic

underpinnings of my conception of meaning making was

thereby grounded in personal experience. This I trust has

infused my text, my argument, with the conviction arising

from the witnessing of experiential truth, verisimilitude.

Late in the whole journey a double-barrelled expression

came to mind as a description of what I have experienced

and achieved: Lived experience as research, research as lived

experience. This became a methodological mirror image of

one feature of the conception of meaning making that is

progressively unfurled in this thesis – the idea of lived

hermeneutics.

6 See Appendix 2, Thesis 8.

31

Part A. Studies in textual

composition, interpretation and

communication

33

Chapter 1. Holism:

At the still point of the turning world

My purpose here is to offer a broad and rich appreciation of our –

civilisation’s – inherited, collective, dynamic understanding of the

concept of holism. The notion of holism is an underpinning idea for

both themes in this inquiry – how we make sense of ourselves and

the world (research question 1), and how universities might give

students a more consciously integrated course learning experience

than they appear to do at present (research question 2).

In this chapter I have a strong desire to share with the reader my

sense of awe at the ‘beauty of fit’ between the conception of holism as

found in my chosen set of texts (and beyond), and the use to which I

have put that conception in addressing my two research questions.

Sharing the ‘awesomeness’ of conceptualisation at the heart of this

thesis really means writing in such a way that the reader is able to

experience something of that sense of wonder, even if this goal goes

beyond the norm in academic writing. (I point out here that as a

reader of academic texts I most enjoy texts, am most struck by texts

that engage me on a broad front and not exclusively in my logic-

seeking mind. I want my writing to possess or develop that power.)

My main organising principle in composing Part A is to present the

results of my interpretations of my chosen texts; however that is

only one of the principles governing the conception and organisation

of the material covered in this chapter. Another principle arises from

my declared goal of communicating my awe to the reader. These two

intentions between them steer the growing tip of my line of thought.

What I offer here is an essay on holism as it undergirds and inspires

the wider argument of this thesis. It is a situated argument in that

my eventual purpose – addressing my two research questions – is

pervasive.

34

Overview Jan Christian Smuts’ Holism and evolution

Retracing the whole-forming tendency in space-time

The atom

The cell

The mind

Personality

Ken Wilber’s Sex, ecology, spirituality

From holism to holarchy

The integral model

What Wilber’s vision means and doesn’t mean for my thesis – acknowledging Wilber’s critics

Henri Bortoft’s The wholeness of nature

Making sense of ‘wholeness’ and the ‘wholeness of nature’

The vantage point of the knower in knowing

The pure phenomenon of colour

A different way of seeing

Conclusion: welling harmony, haunting dissonance

Overview

If all the themes of this thesis were envisaged as the planets of a solar system, the idea

of holism would be their still point, their sun.1 My aim in this chapter is to draw out the

intrinsic connotations of the term holism from three texts, in preparation for elaborating

my teaching stance on meaning making and my teaching stance on university

curriculum practice.

‘Holism’ rolls easily off the tongue, and is not infrequently heard when educators

talk or write about their work. For example while this thesis was in preparation the

Charles Sturt University (CSU) University Strategy 2013-2015 declared that CSU

‘develops holistic, far-sighted people who help their communities grow and flourish’

(Charles Sturt University, 2012). Sometimes I wonder whether ‘holistic’ is being used

knowingly or rather as a placeholder for something only superficially grasped or dimly

perceived. What the field needs is a new discourse on holism in education. It is thus

timely that I contribute an in-depth explication of how the word is used in relevant,

peer-critiqued literatures. As I said, holism is the still point around which this thesis

revolves. My hope is that this work will help practitioners embrace the idea fulsomely

and use it knowingly.

In this chapter I engage with three texts – Jan Christian Smuts’ (Smuts, 1961),

Holism and Evolution, Ken Wilber’s (2000), Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of

Evolution, and Henri Bortoft’s (1996), The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way Toward a

1 The sun occupies a constant position relative to planets in its solar system. The chapter subtitle, ‘at

the still point of the turning world’, is taken from T.S. Eliot’s (1963a) ‘Burnt Norton’ in his Four

Quartets.

Chapter map

35

Science of Conscious Participation in Nature.2 My account of my three textual

engagements is the product, the synthesis of three trains of thought. First, in each case,

I wanted to understand the author’s text as written and as it came to me, reading it

within a more or less different setting in life and lifeworld. This constitutes a study in

textual interpretation. I asked myself: how does following the hermeneutic interpretive circle

shed light on the meaning of the parts and the whole of each author’s text? What is that whole?

Second, I was in the process of composing my own thesis. I needed to anticipate the

place that each textual interpretation could play in my own argument. My three textual

interpretations are also therefore studies in reflexive textual composition. Third, my

thesis claims to incorporate studies in textual communication – to shed light on the

meaning making that resides in an author’s intended communication with his/her

reader. I address this third dimension at the end of this chapter as I reflect on how the

chapter sheds light on my anticipation of my reader’s meaning making needs in

reading this.

1926: ‘Holism’ enters the human lexicon. As the Oxford English Dictionary indic-

ates, the term ‘holism’ was coined by Jan Christian Smuts ‘to designate the tendency in

nature to produce wholes (i.e. bodies or organisms) from the ordered grouping of unit

structures’ ('holism', June 2013). Smuts elaborated his ideas in Holism and Evolution,

first published in 1926.3 For Smuts, it is

when we come to consider organisms that we see the whole [as]

creative in a full and proper sense. In thought we distinguish

between the deductive and the inductive – between the deduction

of the particular from the general, the drawing out, unfolding, or

explicating what is given, and the reverse inductive process, the

integration or synthesis of the given parts or elements into a new,

more complex content. The action of organisms proceeds on the

analogy of induction. We have seen how the characteristic feature

of organic process is metabolism, the transformation of the given

materials into something quite new, of the inorganic into the

organic, of the organic material of one kind into that of an entirely

different kind. Creative synthesis is the inmost nature and character

of all organic actions and functions. (Smuts, 1961, pp. 128-129)

2 If I were offering a fuller exposition of holism I would also include Bohm’s (1980) Wholeness and the

Implicate Order. Bortoft dedicated The Wholeness of Nature to Bohm, who introduced Bortoft, a

postgraduate research student of his, to the problem of wholeness. 3 My interpretation of that seminal work in this thesis is based on the Compass Books (Viking Press)

edition, 1961, which includes an introduction by Edmund W. Sinnott (1888-1968). The Wikipedia stub

item on scientist, Sinnott notes that after World War II this prolific writer was especially concerned

with the place of science in society. In his teaching he sought ‘to explain the organism as an

integrated whole from the sum of its parts, processes and history’. His surname appears variously as

Sinnott and Sinnot.

36

In the first of my three text studies I consider what the significance of holism was

for Smuts. In this, as in all discursive textual interpretation, we do well to remember

the setting in life and the lifeworld of its composition, and to ponder why the text

took on the voice and the particular structure of ideas that it did.

Jan Christian Smuts’ Holism and Evolution

In the introduction to the Compass edition of Holism and Evolution, Edmund W. Sinnott

(see footnote 3) pointed out that Smuts is chiefly known as a former Prime Minister of

South Africa and a world statesman, that he fought against the British in the Boer War

but with them in World War I. He described Smuts not as a ‘man of science’ but ‘an

intelligent layman with no preconceptions, no confirmed habits of thought, and no

commitment to a scientific orthodoxy’; and suggested that sometimes such generalists

are able to ‘obtain a clearer picture of the issue [at hand] than the professional man of

science’, a phenomenon especially detectable at the interstices of science and

philosophy. For Sinnott, Holism and Evolution represented such a breakthrough (Smuts,

1961, p. ix). Smuts himself saw the work straddling that space, addressing ‘a hitherto

neglected factor or principle of a very important character’:

This factor, called Holism […], underlies the synthetic tendency in

the universe, and is the principle which makes for the origin and

progress of wholes in the universe. An attempt is made to show

that this whole-making or holistic tendency is fundamental in

nature, that it has a well-marked ascertainable character, and that

Evolution is nothing but the gradual development and stratification

of progressive series of wholes, stretching from the inorganic

beginnings to the highest levels of spiritual creation. (Smuts, 1961,

p. v)

Smuts wrote that his book would deal with three primary concepts – life, mind and

personality – in the light of the holistic

principle, and consider the implications

of this for our understanding of

evolution (Smuts, 1961, p. v). The work

comprises 12 chapters. Chapters 1-3

present an argument calling for ‘reform’

of our fundamental ways of thinking

about space, time and matter, a

discussion that emphasises a continuity

of evolution from matter to life. The

remaining chapter titles indicate the big

themes of the book:

‘The difference between matter and life is […] a difference in the character of their activities. So far from matter being pure inertia or passivity, it is in reality a mass of seething, palpitating energies and activities’ (Smuts, 1961, p. 51).

‘… matter in its colloid state in protoplasm discloses properties and manufactures substances, such as chlorophyll and hæmoglobin, which are necessary for the functions of life, and which go far toward bridging the gap between the two. In its colloid state we thus see matter reaching up to the very threshold of life’ (Smuts, 1961, p. 36).

37

4. The cell and the organism ~ 5. General concept of holism ~

6. Some functions and categories of holism ~ 7. Mechanism and holism ~

8. Darwinism and holism ~ 9. Mind as an organ of wholes ~

10. Personality as a whole ~ 11. Some functions and ideals of Personality ~

12. The holistic universe

Retracing the whole-forming tendency in space-time

In his interrogation and elaboration of his concept of the whole, Smuts tried to confine

himself to prevailing concepts from the physical and biological sciences about the atom

and the cell. The challenge was ‘to understand what is involved and implied in the

processes of the small centres of unity in Nature’ (Smuts, 1961, p. 120). He wanted to

do this using the language of science; he believed that using philosophical language in

theorising life and mind could become a barrier to biologists, who ‘might react in the

opposite direction, and seek refuge in purely mechanical ideas and explanations of the

phenomena of life’ (Smuts, 1961, p. 121).

In his chapter, General concept of holism, Smuts described the general features of a

whole in terms that accommodate the chemical compound, water, as well as higher

order wholes:

It is very important to recognise that the whole is not something

additional to the parts: it is the parts in a definite structural

arrangement and with mutual activities that constitute the whole.

The structure and the activities differ in character according to the

stage of development of the whole; but the whole is just this

specific structure of parts with their appropriate activities and

functions. Thus water as a chemical compound is […] a whole in a

limited sense, an incipient whole, differing qualitatively from its

uncompounded elements Hydrogen and Oxygen in a mere state of

mixture; it is a new specific structure with new physical and

chemical properties. The whole as a biological organism is an

immensely more complex structure with vastly more complex

activities and functions than a mere chemical compound. But it

must not be conceived as something over and above its parts in

their structural synthesis, including the unique activities and

functions which accompany this synthesis […] The combination of

the elements into this structure is […] creative of new structure and

new properties and functions […] At the start the fact of structure is

all-important in wholes, but as we ascend the scale of wholes, we

see structure becoming secondary to function, we see function

38

becoming the dominant feature of the whole. (Smuts, 1961, pp. 104-

105)

For the purposes of my argument it will be instructive to sketch out Smuts’ discussion

of holism at work as we ascend the scale of wholes.

THE ATOM

Smuts offered readers a basic primer in the structure of matter based on his reading of

the current state of knowledge of his time. Some of the intricate detail he provided on

the chemical structure of various elements and the inferences and connections he drew

may seem arbitrary and/or mistaken, judged by our more complete picture of these

matters today … until we remember to evaluate this work in terms of his setting in life

and lifeworld. Such detail must have seemed worthy of inclusion to Smuts in order to

locate his case about holism within the bigger picture of scientific discourse, to

demonstrate that the holistic interpretation of the world had its roots in the world that

science sought to understand.

So what, for Smuts, did the inanimate order have to tell us about the holistic

tendency? Essentially it was the unfolding of order out of chaos: ‘When there was

achieved the marvellous and mysterious stable constellation of electrical units in the

atom, a miracle was wrought which saved the world of matter from utter chaos and

chance’ (Smuts, 1961, p. 84). For Smuts the story of evolution and the story of holism

were one.

THE CELL

Smuts wrote:

To use a metaphor, the cell is the point where matter or energy

aroused itself from its slumbers and became active from within,

with activities and functions which reveal its inner character and

nature, so to say. It is a new structure in which energy becomes […]

a new form of activity, becomes functional, […] endowed with a

power of self-help and self-control, with special characters of

selectiveness and reproduction, which constitute a unique

departure in the universe. (Smuts, 1961, pp. 64-65)

Sinnott, writing about Smuts’ text in the early 1960s, judged that

The chief importance of this book for our day is that it emphasizes a

problem in evolution, and in biology generally, that has received

too little attention from students of the life sciences, largely because

it is relatively intractable by means of the methods employed in

most biological research. This is the problem of organisation, of

39

how a living thing is so coordinated and regulated in its various

parts and activities that it becomes an organism. (Smuts, 1961, p. x)

In Smuts’ view, the needs of the whole, the organism, are paramount, as seen for

example when an organism is wounded or ill:

The very nature of the cells is to function as parts of a whole, and

when the whole is broken down an unusual extra task

automatically arises for them to restore the breach […] simply as a

matter of interior economy and domestic regulation in the

organism itself. (Smuts, 1961, p. 81)

Thus the ‘regulative universalising process of structural order’ was a primary

characteristic underpinning an organism’s metabolism (Smuts, 1961, p. 232). Another

innovation at the dawn of life was the emergence of individuality as an integral part of

that advance. Not only in communities of creatures like ants and bees but also in

communities of cells in an organism, the individual retains its distinctiveness even as it

serves the whole (Smuts, 1961, p. 83). The parallel characters of regulated, internally co-

operative structure and individuation thread their way through the next stages of

evolutionary advance.

THE MIND

In Chapter 9, Mind as an organ of wholes, Smuts maintained that ‘Mind is, after the atom

and the cell, the third great fundamental structure of Holism. It is not itself a real

whole, but a holistic structure, a holistic organ, especially of Personality which is a real

whole’ (Smuts, 1961, p. 224).

Smuts was curious about the different ways that mind is approached in

psychology and within a holistic framework. Psychology (of the day) examined mind

as a separate entity from the body. Smuts believed psychology would ‘always have to

remain content with an intensive cultivation of its central area only, and a sharing of

the […] outlying territories with the natural and biological sciences’ (Smuts, 1961, p.

228). He continued:

For Holism Mind is but a phase, though a culminating phase, of its

universal process […] We have to trace the connections of Mind

with the earlier phases of matter and life; we have, so to say, to lay

bare the foundations of Mind in the order of the universe. Mind as

an expression of Holism, Mind as an organ of Holism: that is our

problem. (Smuts, 1961, p. 228)

For Smuts, the individuality of parts within a whole, evident at the level of the cell,

is greatly expanded at the level of mind, and yet this is counterbalanced by the mind’s

40

‘universalising conceptual-rational’ property: ‘the individual becomes conscious of

himself [sic] only in society and from knowing others like himself; his very capacity for

conceptual experience results mostly from the use of the social instrument of language’

(Smuts, 1961, p. 225). Significant also in Smuts’ account of mind as an organ of wholes

is its bifurcation into conscious and subconscious domains. In the subconscious

the forgotten experience of the individual life as well as the

physiological and racial inheritance exercises a powerful influence.

It is this influence that proves decisive for our fundamental bias,

our temperament, our point of view, and our individual outlook on

persons and things. It is of an intensely holistic and unanalysable

character; it is even possible that our neural endowment carries

with it more in the way of sensation and intuition than appears

from the special senses; that the sensitive basis from which they

have been differentiated has continued to develop pari passu 4 with

them and today forms a subtle holistic sense, a capacity for

psychical sensing or intellectual intuition which explains our

holistic sense of reality as well as other obscure phenomena, such as

telepathy. (Smuts, 1961, p. 226)

The next eulogy-like extract deserves a place here not just as a record of Smuts’

approach to mind but also of his passion.

In Mind we reach the most significant factor in the universe, the

supreme organ which controls all the other structures and

mechanisms.5 Mind is not yet the master, but it is the key in the

hands of the master, Personality. It unlocks the door and releases

the new-born spirit from the bonds and shackles and dungeons of

natural necessity. It is the supreme system of control, and it holds

the secret of freedom. Through the opened door, and the mists

which still dim the eyes of the emergent spirit, it points to the great

vistas of knowledge. Mind is the eye with which the universe

beholds itself and knows itself divine. In Mind Nature at last

emerges from the deep sleep of its far-off beginnings, becomes

awake, aware and conscious, begins to know herself, and

consciously, instead of blindly and unconsciously, to reach out

towards freedom, towards welfare, and towards the goal of the

ultimate Good. Mind is thus the organ of control, of knowledge and

of values. (Smuts, 1961, p. 229)

4 pari passu: on equal footing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pari_passu) 5 In the sense that a human mind controls its host organism.

41

One could almost describe the tone here as exuberant, delirious; Smuts’

aforementioned desire to use the colourless language of science was overridden in this

case. He went on to place the emergence of mind in the context of the evolutionary

wholes that preceded it, in order to emphasise the striking newness of this particular

evolutionary advance. His account of the advance of holism is represented in terms of

increasing complexity in composition, structure and function. At the stage of the

organism he was awed at the co-operation and unity of action of the various systems of

a tree or animal: ‘The inner co-ordination and self-regulation in organisms […] is

indeed something marvellous [… And yet] Mind with its uncertainties, its aberrations,

its failures, seems a mere bungling experiment compared with this massive certainty

and regularity’ (Smuts, 1961, pp. 230-231). For Smuts,

Mind is no mere continuation and development of the organic

process, but largely a fresh experiment in the universe, an

experiment still in the making, and by no means in every respect a

successful one. Mind […] is a superstructure on the basis of the pre-

existing physical and physiological structures, and it carries on the

task of Evolution on somewhat new lines of its own. (Smuts, 1961,

p. 231)

‘Mind with its uncertainties, its aberrations, its failures, seems a mere bungling

experiment …’ (Smuts, 1961, p. 231). I try to imagine Smuts’ thought and feeling

process giving rise to this train of thought. The accomplishments of mind fully

warranted the eulogy quoted above, yet given his own personal history, spanning the

Boer and First World Wars, witnessing

human suffering, human evil in his own

society and beyond, I think Smuts felt

compelled to allude to humanity’s dark

side in his account of mind.

PERSONALITY

Smuts:

Personality is the latest and supreme whole which has arisen in the

holistic series of Evolution. It is a new structure built on the prior

structures of matter, life and mind. The tendency has been to look

upon it as a unique and isolated phenomenon, without any genetic

relations with the rest of the universe. Our treatment, however,

shows it to be one of a series, to be the culminating phase of the

great holistic movement in the universe.

Mind is its most important and conspicuous constituent. But the

body is also very important and gives the intimate flavour of

Ponder point. A meaning maker’s setting in life colours his/her lifeworld which is refracted in turn in the texts that document his/her meaning making life story.

42

humanity to Personality. The view which degrades the body as

unworthy of the soul or spirit is unnatural and owes its origin to

morbid religious sentiments […] The ideal Personality only arises

where Mind irradiates Body and Body nourishes Mind, and the two

are one in their mutual transfigurement. (Smuts, 1961, p. 261).

The foregoing account of Smuts’ interest in holism has omitted much, in particular

his concern for the ‘holistic universe’ (Chapter 12); however I shall at least consider this

at the conclusion of Chapter 1 when I draw my separate accounts of my three chosen

texts together.

Ken Wilber’s Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

Wilber’s (2000) Sex, Ecology, Spirituality reads very differently from Smuts’ Holism and

Evolution. Much had happened between 1920s and 1990s in the fields of inquiry that

informed both men’s interests, and their academic backgrounds were also very

different. That said, I will demonstrate that the two texts have one thing in common:

both writers seem to me to express and evoke a sense of awe at the majesty, the

wonder of the ever transforming, ever becoming Kosmos (see below) (although Smuts

expressed it differently). I offer a critical appraisal of Wilber’s work from the context of

my thesis argument at the end of this section on Wilber’s book.

I included Volume 6, of The Collected Works of Ken Wilber (i.e. Sex, Ecology, Spirit-

uality, Part One) in my text set6 because of its relevance to my exploration of the idea of

holism, not because I am a member of the integral movement, which I am not. Sex,

Ecology, Spirituality was first published in 1995. My interpretation relates to the second

edition, published in 2000 and since released in e-book format. While my account

focuses on Sex, Ecology, Spirituality itself, I do occasionally interpolate from other, more

recent Wilber writings (for example, the four quadrants model presented in Wilber

(2000), now known as the integral model).

The 551 pages of argument and 300 pages of supplementary material of Sex,

Ecology, Spirituality are essentially broad-ranging elaborations of two ideas – holarchy

and the integral (four quadrants) model. First, I discuss holarchy and its associated

concept, holon.

From holism to holarchy

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality is a major work in which Wilber staked out his position on the

meaning of ‘all this’, a position that is based on the concepts, holon and holarchy:

6 ‘Text set’ refers to the texts chosen as the data set for this hermeneutic inquiry.

43

Arthur Koestler coined the term holon to refer to that which, being a

whole in one context, is simultaneously a part in another. With

reference to the phrase, ‘the bark of a dog’, for example, the word

bark is a whole with reference to its individual letters, but a part

with reference to the phrase itself. And the whole (or the context)

can determine the meaning and function of a part – the meaning of

bark is different in the phrases ‘the bark of a dog’ and ‘the bark of a

tree.’ The whole, in other words, is more than the sum of its parts,

and that whole can influence and determine, in many cases, the

function of its parts (and that whole itself is, of course,

simultaneously a part of some other whole …).7 (Wilber, 2000, p. 26)

[T]he organism in its structural and functional aspects is a

hierarchy of self-regulating holons which function (a) as

autonomous wholes in supra-ordination to their parts, (b) as

dependent parts in sub-ordination to controls on higher levels, (c)

in co-ordination with their local environment. Such a hierarchy of

holons should rightly be called a holarchy. (Koestler, 1967, p. 103)

Wilber depicts the nature and ramifications of the concept of holarchy8 in his ’20

tenets’.9 Tenet 1 logically triggers the rest. Here is a short version of Wilber’s

explication of tenet 1:

Reality as a whole is not composed of things or processes, but of holons.

Composed, that is, of wholes that are simultaneously parts of other

wholes, with no upward nor downward limit […] Since reality is

not composed of separate [so-called] wholes, and since it has no

parts – since there are only whole/parts – then this approach

undercuts the traditional argument between atomism (all things are

fundamentally isolated and individual wholes that interact only by

chance) and wholism (all things are merely strands or parts of the

larger web or whole). […] This approach also undercuts the

argument between the materialist and idealist camps. Reality isn’t

7 Textual interpretation must be context-sensitive, in the light of which I use ‘we’ in this thesis to refer

to different collectives; the particular referent in each case can be inferred from the particular context. 8 Wilber uses both ‘holarchical’ (e.g. p. 103) and ‘holoarchic’ (e.g. p. 104); the ‘o’ in the latter is probably

a typographical error. 9 Wilber’s tenets attempt to describe what all holons have in common when they interact. The tenets

are grouped into 12 categories; indeed, ’20 tenets’ is Wilber’s way of referring to this account even if

there is no official version of 20 items. (These two webpages – http://www. emrgnc.com.au/tenets.htm

and http://www.mysticriveryoga.com/20tenetsofevolution.htm – follow different numberings.)

Wilber does offer a shorter ‘Reader’s Digest’ version of the account, as contained in Appendix 3; it

does not attempt to distil the whole treatise and is more of a selective sampler of the thinking.

Providing a distillation of the whole treatise lies outside the scope of my thesis.

44

composed of quarks, or bootstrapping hadrons, or subatomic

exchange; but neither is it composed of ideas, symbols or thoughts.

It is composed of holons.

This is important for philosophy […], particularly for many of the

‘new age’ paradigms that now trumpet ‘Wholism’. ‘Transfinite’ […]

means that the sum total of all the whole/parts in the universe is not

itself a Whole, because the moment it comes to be (as a ‘whole’) that

totality is merely a part of the next moment’s whole, which in turn

is merely a part of the next … and so ad infinitum […].

Thus holons within holons within holons means that the world is

without foundation in either wholes or parts (and as for any sort of

‘absolute reality’ in the spiritual sense, we will see that it is neither

whole nor part, neither one nor many, but pure groundless

Emptiness, or radically nondual Spirit).

The Pythagoreans introduced the term ‘Kosmos’, which we usually

translate as ‘cosmos’. But the original meaning of Kosmos was the

patterned nature or process of all domains of existence, from matter

to math to theos, and not merely the physical universe, which is

usually what both ‘cosmos’ and ‘universe’ mean today. So I would

like to reintroduce this term, Kosmos. The Kosmos contains the

cosmos (or the physioshere), the bios (or biosphere), nous (the

noosphere), and theos (the theosphere or divine domain) – none

of them being foundational (even spirit shades into Emptiness).

(Wilber, 2000, pp. 43-45)

Tenet 1 not only triggers but also insists on/requires all the others – they form a

logical whole – for those, that is, who really believe that we live in one seamless,

interconnected world and universe10, that the whole of reality is composed of holons,

all the way up and all the way down. But what does this mean? How does that change

things? People who are seized by this idea are also – judging by the language used

within the integral movement – committed to draw out its ramifications for their whole

sense of self in the world, and their actions – their being in the world to borrow

Heidegger’s term; hence Wilber’s 20 tenets, hence Sex, Ecology, Spirituality and Wilber’s

10 Recall Context of inquiry in my Prologue.

45

whole opus, and hence the integral movement:

Wilber mainta ins

a complex stance in

relation to holism. On the

one hand, in the in tro -

duct ion to the volume,

he opens with a

discussion on extreme

postmodernism and its

pluralistic relativism,

noting that at a certain

point in the development

of human consciousness –

in the later ‘vision-logic’

stages – ‘pluralistic rel-

ativism increasingly gives

way to more holistic

modes of awareness,

which begin to weave the pluralistic voices together into beautiful tapestries of integral

intent’ (Wilber, 2000, p. ix). His embrace of ‘holistic’ here is unequivocal. On the other

hand, Wilber places ‘wholism’ in opposition to ‘holarchy’, as we just saw.

Wilber’s account of holons and holarchy is complex, which was inevitable, given

that it purports to identify commonalities between holons and holarchies throughout

manifest existence. Given the sweep of tenet 1, Wilber needed to find categories of

explanation that would hold true for holons and holarchies across Popper’s three worlds

(see Prologue), bearing mind the supercomplexity of knowledge rampant in each of

them. He drew from a wide range of authors from many traditions to build his case –

an intentionally, deeply trans-disciplinary approach.

The integral model

To gain a coherent picture of Wilber’s vision, the 20 tenets need to be complemented

with his four quadrants or integral model, which presents four ways of viewing a holon; see

Figure 1.1. The vertical axis of the model is concerned with number; thus the top half of

the model depicts singularity and the bottom, plurality. The horizontal axis concerns

viewpoint; thus the left side of the model depicts an interior view and the right side, an

exterior view.

A peephole onto the integral movement

‘Integral theory is an all-inclusive framework that draws on the key insights of the world’s greatest knowledge traditions. The awareness gained from drawing on all truths and perspectives allows the Integral thinker to bring new depth, clarity and compassion to every level of human endeavor – from unlocking individual potential to finding new approaches to global-scale problems.’ (http://www.integralinstitute.org/)

‘We live in a time of unprecedented challenges and opportunities. Never before have we had the power to imperil our species and our planet, and never before have we had the power to heal our species to the degree we can today – bringing people to new levels of prosperity, well-being, health, and maturity. The choices our generation makes will determine whether we leave behind us an evolving civilization and a fertile earth, or a failed species and a plundered planet. We have the power to do both. Part of the power available to us is the integral vision. It is our remarkable privilege to be able to realize this vision ourselves, to embody and express it in our lives, to use it to better understand the world, and to let it use us as willing instruments to help heal our world. What greater privilege could there be than to use this profound vision to play our role to serve, help, heal, and awaken all beings?’ (Walsh & Wilber, 2009)

46

Figure 1.1. Wilber’s integral model

Source: Wilber (2000, p. 198)

The integral model offers a way of conceiving holarchy, conceiving evolution,

conceiving (to use my own term) hologenesis, the coming to be of wholes (McKenzie,

1999), in all its sequenced, multi-layered richness. There are several matters that

warrant consideration.

In the first place, by mapping a left hemisphere, the model insists on giving due

recognition to the ‘within’ of things. For Wilber there is a sense in which the twenty-

first century holon, ‘I’ (read ‘Tony McKenzie’, ‘Ken Wilber’, you, etc.) can empathically

‘know’ cell life or atom life ‘from within’ because cells and atoms – indeed all lower

holons in the human past – are already part of me, just as, in a teleological sense, I was

always foreshadowed in them. Wilber visualises himself alongside a collective of

empiricists, reflecting respectively on how we may know the world:

It is through an interior feeling of the shades of myself that I might

reasonably know the shades of other holons – which is how they

know me too; for we are all ultimately in each other, in various

degrees, and right now. Gravity pulls at the minerals in my bones

just as surely as it pulls on the distant planets; hunger churns my

belly as it does in every starving wolf; the terror in the eyes of the

gazelle being eaten by the lion is not alien to me, or to you; and is

47

not that joy in the song of the robin at the rising of the morning

sun?

Nobody is more wary than I of the dangers of what Lovejoy called

‘retrotension’ – reading ‘higher’ thoughts and feelings into ‘lower’

forms simply because we humans feel them – the anthropomorphic

fallacy […] Thus, we do indeed want to try to avoid retrotension,

but this still leaves us in a far different place from the empiricists,

who stare blankly at the rose and wonder how the epistemological

gap shall ever be bridged, as if they were staring at an alien

creature materialized from a wholly different dimension. They

actually refer to it, with a puzzled expression, as ‘knowledge of the

outer world’. But I can know the outer world because the outer

world is already in me, and I can know me. All knowledge of other

is simply a different degree of self-knowledge, since self and other

are of the same fabric, and speak softly to each other at any moment

that one listens.11 (Wilber, 2000, pp. 115-116)

In the second place, Figure 1.1 is a significantly more detailed version of the four

quadrants model. The simpler version, which appears before the detailed version in

Wilber’s book, does not include the diagonal cross nor its captions. The simpler version

is useful for gaining an overview of the model. The following comments convey the

model in Wilber’s own words.

The entire Right half […], the exterior half, can be described in ‘it’

language (or ‘object’ language) and can be studied empirically […]

The entire Right […] is something you can see ‘out there’,

something you can register with your senses or their extensions

[…] The components of the Right half […] are, in themselves,

neutral surfaces […] you don’t ever have to engage the interiors of

any of those holons: you don’t have to engage in introspection or

interpretation or meaning or values […] The Right-Hand path has

two major and warring camps: the atomists, who only study the

surfaces of only individuals, and the wholists, who insist that

whole systems, and not individuals, are the primary object of

study […] They are the two camps of flatland ontology: that

which can be seen, detected with the senses, empirical through and

through […]

[…] it is a legitimate and altogether necessary story. It is just not

the whole story […]

11 This requires our attentiveness. Remember this when we get to my account of Bortoft’s book.

48

The entire Left half of the diagram, on the other hand, cannot be

seen with the eye of flesh […] Whereas the Right half can be seen,

the left half must be interpreted […] To reconstruct meaning, (the

Left-Hand path) I must engage in interpretation (hermeneutics); I

must try to enter the shared depths, shared values, shared

worldviews of the inhabitants […] I must resonate with the interior

depth of the inhabitants. The depth in me (‘lived experience’) must

empathetically align itself, intuitively feel into, the corresponding

depth (or lived experience) that I seek to understand in others, and

not simply blankly register an empirical patch. Mutual

understanding is a type of interior harmonic resonance of depth: ‘I

know what you mean!’ (Wilber, 2000, pp. 131-133)

The third matter to raise about Figure 1.1 is Wilber’s developmental trajectory of

the evolutionary holon in space-time, drawing on various reported schemas,

particularly work by Jűrgen Habermas, Jean Gebser, Erich Neumann, L.L. Whyte,

Georg Hegel and Joseph Campbell (Wilber, 2000, p. 124). According to Figure 1.1, the

evolutionary phenomenon and our place in it must be mapped across the four

dimensions of the model if the mapping is to be done richly (which, from a vested

interest, human point of view, it surely deserves). If a dimension is a kind of space, the

development (‘story’) within it can be thought of as a ‘strand’. Wilber writes that ‘The

four strands are the interior and the exterior of the individual and the social, or the

inside and the outside of the micro and the macro’ (Wilber, 2000, p. 125). In Figure 1.1,

the diagonal cross presents 13 steps on each of the four quadrant’s axes. The reader is

able to visualise 13 concentric ovals or rectangles passing through the 13 points on each

axis. Here then, in the 13 nested forms, we have 13 stages in the unfolding of the

evolutionary phenomenon.12 ‘In evolution in general, and human evolution in

particular, we are tracing four different strands, each of which is intimately related and

indeed dependent upon all the others, but none of which can be reduced to the others’

(Wilber, 2000, p. 125). The four strands develop, unfold, together. Consider with me the

reverberations that insight makes with some of my previous statements: □ humans

have the capacity to multi-task, for example to drive a car without having an accident,

even when being mentally preoccupied with yesterday’s altercation with Jim (p. 9);

□ curriculum practice will achieve more robust and fulsome outcomes the more closely

it mirrors or accommodates the way humans experience self and world, cognitively,

12 ‘13’ works, if I understand Wilber’s intention, as a theoretical ‘best-fit’ proposition for the story of

human emergence, for the time being. The logic of his overall position requires a nested stance and a

number of stages, but it is nonetheless something that may need ‘smoothing over’ on questions of

detail. Conceiving a theory of everything is not plain sailing. It is offered in the spirit of ‘let’s see how

well this position holds until it needs tweaking’. To not put the model forward if you’ve had the

vision would be weak-kneed. Meanwhile, unfortunately, critics can be quick to shoot and ask

questions later. (Thinks: I betray a certain sympathy here.)

49

socially, physically, emotionally, ethically, spiritually (p. 4); □ we can envisage the

journey of personal becoming and the journey of ‘making+finding meaning’ as

different facets of a single phenomenon – different terms to describe the process of

becoming whole, of realising individual potential (p. 9); □ authentic professional

identity is an expression of authentic personal identity (Abstract). It is not hard to have

a sense of the layers that constitute one’s daily lived experience; what Wilber’s integral

model does is project that idea onto our sense of time and our sense of personal

development; and offer an interpretation of the significance of the whole evolutionary

phenomenon in a Kosmic setting – in other words offer a theory of everything.

Examine the four diagonal axes with me. Drawing on and integrating various

developmental schemas from the literature, Wilber proposes 13 stages in the past and

future development of the evolutionary phenomenon. Examine each series of captions.

(I shan’t give a detailed account; refer to Wilber [2000].) In the upper right (It)

quadrant, development is traced in terms of the biophysical structures that

corresponded with each stage of holonic evolution. In the lower right (Its) quadrant,

the interest lies in the external systems that provided contexts or structures for each

stage. In the upper left (I) quadrant, the focus is on mind rather than brain, on inner not

outer developmental phenomena. In the lower left (We) quadrant evolution is

portrayed in terms of the worldview or worldspace at each stage.13

Before leaving the integral model, I add a post script on Wilber’s ongoing

exploration of its potential implications. In 2012 he posted an article to the Web on the

topic, Systems theory versus hermeneutics: Why both are important, an extract from which

is included as Appendix 4 of this thesis. Given my choice of hermeneutics as my

research method in this study, it is noteworthy that Wilber identifies the lower left

quadrant as the home of hermeneutics, which is ‘first-person interpretation within

circles of “we”’ (Wilber, 2012).14 From the perspective of this thesis, we all stand to gain

from inclusion of this ‘shared indwelling’ viewpoint in making sense of our human

13 Wilber observes that ‘The lower levels possess a ‘worldview’ – by which I mean a common

‘worldspace’ – to precisely the same degree that you believe they possess a degree of consciousness

or prehension. If [holonic] depth is consciousness, which I believe it is, and if lower holons possess

depth [which flows from the notion of holarchy], which I believe they do, and if any holon exists only

in a system of relational exchange with other same-level holons, which it does, then any holon

possesses a shared depth with its peers, and that is a ‘worldview’ or ‘common worldspace’ in the

broadest sense […] feel free to pick up the argument at the point in evolution where you feel that

some form of rudimentary consciousness or prehension enters the scene; presumably, by the time we

reach humans, we can all agree that shared worldviews exist, and these shared worldviews are

simply the inside feel of a social holon, the inside space of collective awareness at a particular level of

development; it is not just how ‘I’ feel, it is how ‘we’ feel (Wilber, 2000, p. 126). 14 The article is also of relevance to this thesis in that, arising out of the integral model, Wilber

elucidates ‘eight primal […] perspectives that all holons have available to them. Far from being some

sort of abstract systematization, these eight native perspectives turn out to be the phenomenological

spaces from which most of the major forms of human inquiry have been launched’ (Wilber, 2012); see

Figure 2, Appendix 4.

50

world. Sidelining (failing to support) a hermeneutic contribution to our (humankind’s)

twenty-first century research effort neglects the field where perhaps the richest

discoveries about ourselves and this human world might be found.

What Wilber’s vision means and doesn’t mean for my thesis –

acknowledging Wilber’s critics

The name, Ken Wilber and the ‘integral philosophy’ he conceived and promotes,

attract superlative claims, but he has also had his critics. In this section I acknowledge

Wilber’s followers and his critics, I reflect on the phenomenon of Wilber-focussed

critique, positive and negative, and introduce a perspective from Coan (1989) that

helps me make sense of Wilber-focussed discourse and the integral movement. Later in

this thesis I link that discussion to my thesis-wide reflexive case study in textual

composition.

I have already made reference to the ‘integral movement’ and quoted from

material on the websites of The Integral Institute and also IntegralLife. The inset gives

further examples of what is claimed. I will not give further space to pro-Wilber

commentary: my herm-

eneutic interpretation of

Wilber’s book has itself

articulated the most

relevant parts of

Wilber’s vision for my

thesis. What I will do is

point to less eulogis-

ing commentaries. This

will be a brief and

critically selective sortie

into Wilber criticism

given the particular way I

am using Wilber’s text in

my argument, which I

explain shortly.

The first objection I will cite relates to a critical idea within my theory of a

curriculum of becoming. It occupies the space between the present and the future,

between being and becoming: it concerns realising individual potential over time. The

Laetus-in-Praesens website is associated with the online Encyclopedia of World Problems

‘According to Jack Crittenden Ph.D. […] “the twenty-first century literally has three choices: Aristotle, Nietzsche, or Ken Wilber.” […] Tony Schwartz, the president, founder, and CEO of The Energy Project […] has referred to Wilber as “the most comprehensive philosophical thinker of our times.” Roger Walsh M.D., Ph.D., the well known professor of Psychiatry, Philosophy, and Anthropology at UCI’s College of Medicine, believes “Ken Wilber is one of the greatest philosophers of this century and arguably the greatest theoretical psychologist of all time." And in commenting on the scope and impact of Ken Wilber’s philosophy Mitchell Kapor, founder of Lotus Development and the co-founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation, mentions that “After reading Wilber, it is impossible to imagine looking at the world the same way again”. What makes Ken Wilber especially relevant in today’s world is that he is the originator of arguably the first truly comprehensive or integrative philosophy, aptly named “Integral Theory”. As Wilber himself puts it: “I'd like to think of it as one of the first believable world philosophies …”. Incorporating cultural studies, anthropology, systems theory, developmental psychology, biology, and spirituality, it has been applied in fields as diverse as ecology, sustainability, psychotherapy, psychiatry, education, business, medicine, politics, sports, and art.’ (Integral Life, n.d.)

51

and Human Potential.15 (Laetus in Praesens, ‘Joy in the Present’, was the motto of the

Florentine Academy.16) The ‘Kairos’ component of the website is a subcollection of

resources, including an article entitled ‘Entelechy: actuality vs future potential’ (Judge,

n.d.), which draws on one of John Heron’s many arguments against Wilber’s theory, as

presented in Heron (1997).17 According to Judge, entelechy is

an inherent regulating and directing force in the development and

functioning of an organism, the actualization of form-giving cause

as contrasted with potential existence (with which future

orientation is strongly associated) […] John Heron (A Way Out for

Wilberians) offers a useful insight into the role of entelechy in his

critique of the approach of Ken Wilber:

The problem here, it is important to note, is not with a theory

of teleological forces, or entelechy, or chaotic attractors, or deep

structures, or however one chooses to name it. The problem is

the irreconcilable tension in Wilber's evolutionary theory

between the unprecedented, undetermined, innovative, self-

transcending emergence (199518: 47-48) of human holons and

the predetermined linear actualization of their inbuilt spiritual

code, entelechy or deep structure. The distinction between

surface and pre-programmed deep structures does not resolve

this tension; on the contrary it makes it worse by undermining

human creativity with an account of its inescapable

superficiality. The incoherence can be resolved by a deeper

view than Wilber's: by holding that a person's, or a culture's,

inner spiritual potential or entelechy consists of seeded

patterns of possibility, the selection from and linear

actualization of which is indeterminate and a matter of deep

creative choice. The built-in code is not a linear programme,

but a deep map of options, through openness to which our

15 This encyclopedia and the Latin-named website appear to be elements of a wiki. Its focus may be

inferred from the encyclopedia’s list of sub-projects: World Problems Project; Global Strategies and

Solutions Project; Integrative Knowledge Project; Human Development Project; Human Values

Project; Transformative Approaches Project; Metaphors Project. Source:

http://kairos.laetusinpraesens.org/encycom_ee. 16 Source: http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/docs/present.php. 17 According to Wilber, ‘John Heron has published several attempted criticisms of my work. The longest

and presumably the most serious was posted on the Net as A Way Out for Wilberians’ (from Ken

Wilber’s response to John Heron - http://www.integralworld.net/heron.html). Heron’s critique is posted

on the Integral World website at http://www.integralworld.net/WilbErrs.htm. In Sacred Science

(Heron, 1998), Heron cites 1997 as the publication date for A Way Out for Wilberians, and cites

http://www.sirt.pisa.it/icci/WilbErrs .htm as its web address. That link no longer works. 18 This is a reference to the first edition of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality.

52

creative choices are made. We co-create our path with inner

divine life impulse and the possibilities it proffers. This more

coherent idea, incidentally, leads on to a theory of the valid

diversity of spiritual paths, rather than to the assimilative

totalitarianism of Wilber's system [(Heron, 1997)]. (Judge, n.d.)

I see the opposing ideas of Wilber and Heron as a stand-off, a difference of opinion that

arises from their fundamentally opposed meaning perspectives and worldviews. I

return to this stand-off at the end of this section and again when I deal with the

hermeneutic meaning maker’s challenge of confronting and accommodating rival

worldviews in Chapter 4 (‘The muddy waters of thesis writing’); that is one of the things

in question in this thesis.

Second, a stumbling block for John Heron and also Jose Ferrer, both of whom

argue for a practice-based, experiential spirituality19, is what they see as the monolithic

nature of Wilber’s theory, that is discernible (from their perspective) in his ‘disinterest’

in pluralistic expressions of psychic advance. Thus for example Ferrer observes that

‘Wilber conflates all pluralistic approaches into an artificial pluralistic relativism that is

both self-contradictory and morally pernicious’ (Ferrer, 2002, p. 225). In reaction to

Wilber’s identification of pluralistic approaches with ‘vulgar relativism’ –

what is right is simply what individuals or cultures happen to

agree on at any given moment; there are no universal claims for

knowledge or truth; each person is free to find his or her own

values, which are not binding for anybody else. (Wilber, 1999b, p.

117)

– Ferrer maintains that

many forms of pluralism, contextualism, and even moderate forms

of relativism can be maintained without falling into the

performative contradictions and anarchy of vulgar relativism. What

is more, as the participatory vision shows, pluralism may have

ontological, metaphysical, and even spiritual foundations and its

19 ‘practice-based, experiential spirituality’: Note the compound nature of this term. ‘Practice-based’

connotes Margaret Archer’s idea when she writes about ‘the primacy of practice’ in shaping the

individual’s sense of self (see Chapter 2, this thesis). My intention here is to distance the contested

concepts of experiential meaning making and learning, as found extensively in this thesis and the

education literature, from Ferrer’s use of ‘experientialism’ in his Revisioning Transpersonal Theory

(Ferrer, 2002). For Ferrer, experientialism is ‘an understanding of transpersonal and spiritual

phenomena [solely] in terms of individual inner experiences’ (Ferrer, 2002, p. 183). For Ferrer, Heron

and others, spiritual growth occurs in community. But that is not the focus of the argument of this

chapter, and needn’t delay us here. Philosophical hermeneutic dialogue is enacted via words, and

because words are fluid, we should not expect everything to be neatly resolvable whenever we seek

clarification about a particular matter.

53

adoption can have deeply emancipatory implications for spiritual

growth and understanding. (Ferrer, 2002, p. 225)

In Sacred Science, Heron considers Wilber’s ‘gender-laden perennialism’, where

‘perennialism’ here connotes Wilber’s loose alignment with the tradition of the

perennial philosophy. Heron says that an ‘emerging self-generating spiritual culture’

of the kind he (Heron) aspires to

is not at all the same as the current field of transpersonal studies,

which is dominated by male theorists, some of whom uphold the

dubious notion of a perennial philosophy, which seeks to elevate

and universalize one traditional strand, Hindu-Buddhist

nondualism, and make it the controlling paradigm for all past,

present and future spiritual belief and experience […] It does not at

present permit, at the level of practice, any genuine experiential

spiritual inquiry. It only allows experiential training within a

traditional school of practice, frequently a Buddhist one among

western transpersonalists, in which controversial, antique

assumptions about the human condition are built into the protocols

of meditative practice. These assumptions are in fact never

questioned, but held firmly in place by benignly authoritarian and

invariably male teachers […] This [approach] talks of spirit

exclusively in terms of consciousness, emptiness and form to the

exclusion of spirit as life, fullness and process. It is the striking, yet

very one-sided, voice of a small elite of male high spiritual

achievers. While a radical transformation of consciousness

undoubtedly occurs, the problems lie with its nature, the way it is

defined and the imperialistic use to which that definition is put.

(Heron, 1998, pp. 3-4)

A number of commentators have remarked on the ambitiousness of Wilber’s

synthesis of everything we (all) have learned about ourselves and the world, including

where all this seems to be going. Of course, the broader one’s ambition, the wider open

one is to criticism. I have provided a small sampling of commentaries that challenge

Wilber’s theory, whether at the level of his assumptions, his bias, his methods of

argument, or concerning particular issues. As indicated earlier, my selection of

Wilber’s text was governed by my purposes in this thesis. Attempting a broad analysis

of Wilber criticism lies beyond the scope of my argument, but this does not affect the

credibility of my case because of the stance I take towards all three authors considered

in this chapter. Wilber, like the other two authors, was chosen to provide a rich,

literature-based rendering of the concept of holism. Beyond that, all three texts are fine

54

examples of individuals’ responses to

their need to understand. Exploring the

dimensions of such a need is one of the

aims of this thesis; the point here is, as I

have proposed, that we grow in understanding by seeking an ever more complex,

comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world. Holarchy asserts the

interconnectedness of everything, and so the quest for understanding can have no

boundaries. Sex, Ecology, Spirituality is Wilber’s most detailed attempt yet at a

comprehensive account of perceptible experience, of life, the universe, everything, in

the sense that holons go all the way up (telescopic lens) and all the way down

(microscopic lens) throughout space-time. Holarchy for Wilber is the singular key for

interpreting reality. Sex, Ecology, Spirituality gives an account of how the diversity of

human efforts to make sense of ‘all this’, as recorded in relevant scholarship, can be

seen to form a single story, that of the evolution from matter to life to mind to spirit.

Understandings from all traditions and cultures, as reported in all scholarship, offer

particular refractions of the Kosmic phenomenon (specifically, the evolution of

consciousness). It is Wilber’s epic quest for an ever more complex, comprehensive and

coherent sense of self – or non-self – in the world, not the status of his theory in academia

nor the persuasiveness of any given element of his position, that is important to my

argument. I will now draw on an article by Coan to place Wilber’s achievement in the

context of other attempts to trace the evolution of human consciousness.

Richard Coan published an article in 1989 entitled ‘Alternative views on the

evolution of consciousness’ (Coan, 1989), in which he sought to make sense of the

diversity he found in the psychological literature in explaining the evolution (‘the

origin and growth’) of consciousness; in particular, how different theorists construe the

direction in which psychic evolution is headed. What he found was that theories of

psychic evolution can be classified using a schema he had previously published about

theories regarding the ‘optimal personality’, according to the relative emphasis they

place on ‘five basic modes of fulfilment’ in conceptualising development:

(1) efficiency – efficient functioning in either the intellectual, social,

or physical realm

(2) creativity – production or realization of original form or original

experience

(3) inner harmony – absence of conflict, a cooperative functioning of

all parts of one's being

(4) relatedness – orientation toward positive interaction with others

(5) transcendence – participation in a realm of being that extends

beyond individual being, an experienced dissolution of one's

separate individuality. (Coan, 1989, p. 169-170)

‘The defining feature of human kind is the fulfilment it gains from growth in understanding’ (McKenzie, 1996, p. 102).

55

Coan found that theories of personality highlight a particular pattern of conscious

functioning, and so he was not surprised to find that ‘just as they [the modes in his

schema] correspond to alternative ideal goals in personality development, they

correspond to possible goals for the evolution of consciousness’ (Coan, 1989, p. 170).

For Coan, Wilber’s theory (as portrayed in his earlier writings20) primarily fits his

category 5, the goal of transcendence, but also reflects values belonging to category 1, the

goal of efficiency, and thus, like Sri Aurobindo’s theory, blends Eastern and Western

thought (Coan, 1989, pp. 187, 184).

Coan delves into the varieties of consciousness and understanding found in

different times and cultures, and concludes that ‘given all the ways in which conscious

experience can vary, it is quite clear that the variation cannot be described adequately

in terms of points along a single continuum of degree or level of consciousness’ (Coan,

1989, p. 189). And yet, speculating on long term development, Coan can foresee the

eventual possibility of an emergent common direction of growth. This possibility arises

from Coan’s emphasis on the importance of flexibility, of openness to other experience,

which he says is characteristic of the higher levels of attainment across all five modes

of progress:

I would argue that within any of the five modes of fulfilment, the

highest levels of attainment require flexible access to alternative

forms of awareness. To some extent, this means access to forms of

awareness that are central to other modes of fulfillment. One

implication of this position is that paths of development or

evolution leading initially toward different goals may ultimately

converge in a stage of multiple realization. (Coan, 1989, p. 192)

Given the diverse developments we see in different cultures, I

believe it is difficult to maintain the position that the evolution of

consciousness has followed one universal course throughout the

human species. An alternative position is that there are many

possible pathways, each emphasizing a somewhat different aspect

of consciousness and leading toward a goal defined in terms of

maximal development of that aspect. The dominant emphasis could

be inward or outward, rational or intuitive, individualistic or

communal, and so forth. The five modes of fulfillment point to

some of the available possibilities, but there is more than one

20 Coan’s paper is dated 1989. Wilber acknowledges that his theory has undergone phases of

development; see The five phases: http://www.integralworld.net/phases.html. See also

http://www.kheper.net.

56

possibility within each of them, and various combinations are

conceivable.

I believe there is yet a third position we must consider. Surely,

there are alternative pathways leading in different directions, but in

all likelihood, people tend at some point to recognize a need for

potentials that have been neglected. Current trends in both the East

and the West illustrate this fact. Furthermore, there is an obvious

virtue in having flexible access to all modes of consciousness. As I

have argued, the highest level within any one mode may require

this flexibility. The obvious implication of this line of thought is

that, while there are many evolutionary pathways, they all tend

naturally to converge, moving toward an ultimate condition

characterized by full realization of all potential modes of perceiving

and processing conscious data and an ability to utilize each of them

whenever it is most appropriate to do so. (Coan, 1989, p. 197)

In drawing this section to a close, I am aware that my interpretive study of Sex,

Ecology, Spirituality and by extension, Wilber’s evolving vision and the integral

movement phenomenon, ends somewhat ambivalently, as this is where I find myself at

this point. I note Coan’s comment that ‘Wilber (1977, 1979, 1980, 198121) has done a

masterful job of integrating ideas from a variety of systems in an effort to construct a

comprehensive theory of psychic evolution’ (Coan, 1989, p. 186). Version 12 of the

AQAL chart22, released in 2012, shows the even greater sophistication of the synthesis

claimed by integralists today. On the other hand, as I will demonstrate in Chapter 2,

my model of a university curriculum of becoming, which exudes my belief in the

importance of groundedness in living and in educational/curriculum design, firmly

establishes the social realist roots of my argument. I thus find myself drawn to many of

the constructive sentiments in the work of Heron and Ferrer – about, for example, co-

operative inquiry and spirituality – as I continue to reflect on my own meaning making

and spirituality. I expand on this dilemma in Chapter 4.

The foregoing really only gives a taste of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. I return to Wilber

at the end of the chapter and in Part B to raise some further important ideas. I now turn

to my final text in this series on holism.

21 Wilber, K. (1977). The Spectrum of Consciousness. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House. Wilber,

K. (1979). No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth. Los Angeles: Center

Publications. Wilber, K. (1980). The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development.

Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House. Wilber, K. (1981). Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of

Human Evolution. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday. See also 2nd ed.: Wilber (1999b). 22 AQAL: Wilber’s abbreviation of ‘all quadrants, levels (stages), lines, states and types’. The AQAL

chart is described as a ‘comprehensive integral map’. Retrieved from http://formlessmountain.com/

AQALchart12.jpg.

57

Henri Bortoft’s The Wholeness of Nature

The subtitle of Bortoft’s (1996) book – Goethe's Way Toward a Science of Conscious Partic-

ipation in Nature – provides a clue to the intention within the main title. The central

argument of Bortoft’s book is that Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) developed a

philosophy of science predicated on the possibility of direct experience of nature in its

wholeness. Such a possibility is of immediate, profound interest to me and my

unfolding thesis argument in that my definition of growth in global understanding is

the progressive realisation of an ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self

in the world. Wholeness, holism is, as I intimated earlier, the still point around which all

my thesis themes revolve. The relationship between Goethe’s interest in nature and

mine in meaning making will emerge for the reader in its own good time.

Making sense of ‘wholeness’ and the ‘wholeness of nature’

In Part 1 (Authentic and counterfeit wholes) Bortoft organises his argument about

‘authentic wholeness’ in three stages: □ he offers select examples of wholeness to allow

a better understanding of the concept; □ he contrasts authentic with counterfeit

wholeness to be seen in the relationship between a whole and its parts, thus

demonstrating ‘how the whole can be encountered through the parts’; then □ he argues

‘that the way of science developed by […] Goethe exemplifies the principle of authentic

wholeness’ (Bortoft, 1996, p. 3). I shall touch on all three as appropriate to my

argument.

Bortoft writes:

through the growth of the science of matter23, the Western mind has

become removed from contact with nature. Contemporary

problems, many arising from modern scientific method, confront

people with the fact that they have become divorced from a realistic

appreciation of their place in the larger world. At the same time,

there is a growing demand for a renewal of contact with nature. It

is not enough to dwell in nature sentimentally and aesthetically,

grafting such awareness to a scientific infrastructure which largely

denies nature. The need is for a new science of nature, different

from the science of matter and based on other human faculties

besides the analytic mind. A basis for this science is the discovery

of authentic wholeness. (Bortoft, 1996, p. 26)

So what is wholeness? Bortoft commences with several examples from the human

and natural worlds, the first being the hologram. He notes that ‘the particular property

23 The term, ‘the science of matter’ refers to the tradition of science arising from a scientific method

founded on a particular view about empiricism. I take this up shortly.

58

which is of direct concern in understanding wholeness is the pervasiveness of the

whole optical object throughout the [laser photographic] plate […] What can be seen

straightaway about wholeness in this example of the hologram is the way in which the

whole is present in the parts’ (Bortoft, 1996, pp. 4-5). His next example is the common

experience of viewing the star-studded night sky, a vista made possible ‘by means of

the light “carrying” the stars to us, which means that this vast expanse of sky must all

be present in the light which passes through the small hole of the pupil into the eye.’

Other observers elsewhere see the same vista, so that ‘we can say that the stars seen in

the heavens are all present in the light which is at any eye-point […] If we set off in

imagination to find what it would be like to be light, we come to a condition in which

here is everywhere and everywhere is here. The night sky is a “space” which is one

whole, enfolded in an infinite number of points and yet including all within itself’

(Bortoft, 1996, p. 5). Bortoft points out that modern physics provides other examples

where wholeness is intrinsic to the material universe at both macro and nano scales.

His conclusion both accentuates the nature of wholeness and leads into consideration

of how we can make sense of it:

Just as there are no independently separate masses on the large

scale […] there are also no independent elementary particles on the

small scale. At both levels, the whole is reflected in the parts, which

in turn contribute to the whole. The whole, therefore, cannot simply

be the sum of the parts – i.e. the totality – because there are no parts

which are independent of the whole. For the same reason, we

cannot perceive the whole ‘by standing back to get an overview.’

On the contrary, because the whole is in some way reflected in the

parts, it is to be encountered by going further into the parts.

(Bortoft, 1996, p. 6)

Bortoft’s third example of wholeness is the experience of hermeneutic meaning

making on reading a text. Reading for understanding requires attentiveness, not

assertiveness: ‘True interpretation does not force the text into the mold of the reader’s

personality, or into the requirements of his [sic] previous knowledge’. He maintains

that the meaning of the text ‘must have something to do with the whole text’, and here

the difference between ‘whole’ and ‘totality’ is revealed, in that ‘we do not need the

totality of the text to understand its meaning’. Rather, ‘the meaning of the text is

discerned and disclosed with progressive immanence throughout the reading of the

text’ (Bortoft, 1996, p. 7). Bortoft sees a parallel between the meaning structure of a text

and the optical form of a hologram. The totality (the sum of words) of a text is

comparable to the pattern of marks on the hologram plate, whereas the meaning of the

text corresponds to the whole picture conveyed in those marks. Sometimes a reader

59

will suddenly grasp the meaning of the whole text when a single passage illuminates it.

For Bortoft,

The whole is not the totality, but the whole emerges most fully and

completely through the totality. Thus we can say that meaning is

hologrammatical. The whole is present throughout all of the text, so

that it is present in any part of the text. It is the presence of the

whole in any part of the text which constitutes the meaning of that

part of the text. (Bortoft, 1996, p. 8)

We can appreciate the nexus between parts and whole of a text in the reading or the

writing of a text, even texts of a single sentence. Bortoft points out that the hermeneutic

circle does not follow logical reasoning, which would see a flaw in the idea of accessing

the whole through the parts and simultaneously accessing the parts through the whole.

Thus,

Logic is analytical, whereas meaning is evidently holistic, and

hence understanding cannot be reduced to logic. We understand

meaning in the moment of coalescence when the whole is reflected

in the parts so that together they disclose the whole. It is because

meaning is encountered in this “circle” of the reciprocal

relationship of the whole and the parts that we call it the

hermeneutic circle. (Bortoft, 1996, p. 9)

Reading Bortoft feels as though his case is progressed as his train of thought spirals

on and out, drawing the relevant underpinning concepts into his discussion as

required. From the outset Bortoft

makes a distinction between authentic

and counterfeit wholes, but to help

readers appreciate the difference richly

he must first give an account of Goethe’s concept of ‘pure phenomenon’, and that story

is tied up in turn in a lengthy discussion about Goethe’s extended research into colour

against the backdrop of a scientific community drawn to (swayed by) Newton’s theory

of the colour spectrum. I cannot traverse all that territory here. What follows here is a

highly selective account, shaped according to my present purposes. The various micro-

arguments that follow will cohere progressively in widening rings of significance for

my global argument.

24 Doesn’t this ponder point illustrate how meaning making in textual composition is unbound,

munificent, fecund, perhaps scatter-gun? The emerging whole of this thesis suggests to me at any

point in its unfolding, albeit with lesser or greater persuasiveness, which details belong and which

don’t, and if they belong, which details warrant main text or inset or footnote or glossary or appendix

status. If I tallied all such weighings up, I would not be surprised at the time they have taken me.

Ponder point for another time and place: what other metaphors besides ‘hermeneutic circle’ might illuminate textual composition as the progressive communication of the whole?24

60

The vantage point of the knower in knowing

We cannot perceive the whole ‘by standing back to get an overview’ (p. 6). Bortoft’s

apparent coolness towards scientific objectivity (e.g. see inset ) will

probably sound heretical;

today we take as given the

need in scientific

research to eliminate or

minimise observer bias.

The important point here

however is that he is not

discussing research involving randomised sampling and control groups, a research

tradition that has transformed civilization.25 He is anticipating another paradigm we

might call ‘holistic research’ (like the project I am presenting here, I would add) where

the patterns we wish to explore and the inferences we hope to draw span unlike things,

where the concepts in the research question resist boxing and categorisation.

Researchers of this persuasion need to find a way of honouring the whole that waits to

be revealed.

‘We should not think of the whole as if it were a thing’ (Bortoft, 1996, p. 14), on a

bench, alongside its constituent parts. In everyday awareness, ‘the whole which is no-

thing is taken as mere nothing, in which case it vanishes’ (italics added): we don’t have

a detection device for wholes. In the case of reading for understanding, the whole (the

meaning) ‘becomes present in the parts’, and yet in contrast to the parts we can see

before us, ‘the whole is an absence’ (Bortoft, 1996, p. 15). A first step towards a more

holistic science and holistic meaning making generally is supported by the notion of

‘active absence’ which he articulates in the following argument.

Bortoft draws on the distinction made in developmental psychology between

receptive and action modes of organisation. From infancy we develop the action or analytic

mode of interaction with our environment which flows from our learned perception of

an object-filled world. Bortoft notes that ‘This kind of consciousness is institutionalized

by the structure of our language, which favours the active mode of organization. As a

result, we are well prepared to perceive selectively only some of the possible features

of experience.’ He continues: ‘The alternative mode of organization, the receptive

mode, is one which allows events to happen […] Instead of being verbal, analytical,

sequential, and logical, this mode of consciousness is nonverbal, holistic, nonlinear,

and intuitive’ (Bortoft, 1996, p. 16). He accepts the necessary role of the analytic mode

25 For a more sanguine view of mainstream science – the other side of the coin – see Bortoft’s comment

given at the Glossary item on Science. That there are two sides of the coin just reminds us that quality

research is contingent on careful choice of research paradigm and method in the light of the research

question. See also http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/horses_ for_courses. You get what you pay for.

‘Newton’s approach to light and color illustrates the extraordinary degree to which modern science stands outside the phenomenon, the ideal of understanding being reached when the scientist is as far removed as possible from the experience […] There is little wonder that the successful development of physics has led to an ever-increasing alienation of the universe of physics from the world of our everyday experience’ (Bortoft, 1996, p. 18).

61

in biological survival, but discerns an associated characteristic. Because we are not

directly aware of our mode of consciousness, ‘we inevitably identify this world as the

only reality. It is because of this mode of consciousness that the whole is “nothing” to

our awareness, and also that when we encounter it, we do so as an “active absence.”’

Foreshadowing the direction his argument takes from here, Bortoft reflects that ‘If we

were re-educated in the receptive mode of consciousness, our encounter with

wholeness would be considerably different, and we would see many new things about

our world’ (Bortoft, 1996, p. 16).

The pure phenomenon of colour

Bortoft gives a detailed account of Newton’s and Goethe’s respective experiments with

light. Newton had set up an artificial situation, directing a small beam of sunlight

through a prism onto a wall. Bortoft notes that the spectrum of colours refracted in this

way was a known phenomenon at the time, but Newton offered a new explanation –

that the colours were constituents of the sunlight, separated by the prism. Goethe

believed Newton was wrong, based on Newton’s view that coloured light is darker

than colourless light: combining darker lights to produce brighter light did not make

sense. Goethe’s work on the colour spectrum was carried out over an extended period

in various natural conditions. This work evolved from and confirmed the view that

colours are not constituents of light but that the phenomenon of prismatic colours

occurs at the interface between light and dark surfaces (Bortoft, 1996, p. 19). (Bortoft

provides details of how his readers may replicate Goethe’s experiments [Bortoft, 1996,

pp. 40-49]).

So how did Goethe arrive at the idea that the prismatic colours emerge from the

interaction of light and darkness? It was important that the phenomenon be explored

simply, in nature. A guiding principle would become ‘what Goethe first called ‘das

reine Phänomen (the “pure phenomenon”), and for which he later used the term

Urphänomen (“primal or archetypal phenomenon”)’ (Bortoft, 1996, p. 20). Bortoft

outlines how Goethe made sense of the naturally occurring changes of colour of the

sun and the sky in the course of a day. The atmosphere of Earth is the medium through

which we observe the sun and the ‘sky’. Goethe ‘found the primal phenomenon of

color in the color phenomena which are associated with semi-transparent media. When

light is seen through such a medium, it darkens first to yellow and then orange and red

as the medium thickens’ – as when the afternoon sun appears ‘moving’ from zenith to

horizon. ‘Alternatively, when darkness is seen through an illuminated medium, it

lightens to violet and then blue’ (Bortoft, 1996, p. 20) – as when the sky changes colour

at dawn.

Bortoft concludes that

62

Once Goethe had found this primal phenomenon he […] could see

how these shifts were at the root of more complex phenomena such

as the prismatic colors. One result is that a dynamic wholeness is

perceived in the prismatic colors – a wholeness totally lacking in

Newton’s account. In other words Goethe’s presentation describes

the origin of colors whereas Newton’s does not. […] with Goethe’s

account, one can understand both the quality of the colors and the

relationship between them, so that we can perceive the wholeness

of the phenomenon without going beyond what can be

experienced. (Bortoft, 1996, p. 20)

So, for Bortoft, for Goethe, we cannot perceive the whole by standing back to get

an overview: we must change our vantage point for apprehending the phenomenon,

and we must adjust the way we see.

In following Goethe’s approach to scientific knowledge, one finds

that the wholeness of the phenomenon is intensive. The experience

is one of entering into a dimension which is in the phenomenon,

not behind or beyond it, but which is not visible at first. It is

perceived through the mind, when the mind functions as an organ

of perception instead of the medium of logical thought. (Bortoft,

1996, p. 21)

Earlier I reported several of Bortoft’s examples of wholeness as a step towards

differentiating between authentic and counterfeit wholes. In the final example in this

account of Bortoft’s text, we are able to glimpse something of Goethe’s notion of the

wholeness of the pure/primal phenomenon of colour. In the following extract Bortoft

shows how Goethe distinguished the real thing from the counterfeit:

In terms of the category of wholeness, the primal phenomenon is an

example of the whole which is present in the parts. Goethe himself

said as much when he called it ‘an instance worth a thousand’ and

described it as ‘bearing all within itself. It is the authentic whole

which is reached by going into the parts, whereas a generalization

is the counterfeit whole that is obtained by standing back from the

parts to get an overview. Looking for the Urphänomen is an example

of looking for the right part – i.e., the part which contains the

whole26 […] For example, Goethe was able to ‘read’ how colors

arise in the way that the colors of the sun and the sky change with

26 As we saw earlier in the example of the hologram, the whole is present in every part. The issue for

Bortoft/Goethe here rather is discerning an unnamed whole in the first place, when its constituent

parts are at that point also therefore not yet identified.

63

the atmospheric conditions throughout the day. Because there were

no secondary, complicating factors, this for him was an instance of

the primal phenomenon of the arising of colors. This phenomenon

was perceived as a part which contained the whole, and it was, in

fact, through the observation of this particular phenomenon that

Goethe first learned to see intuitively the law of the origin of color.27

Yet, the way that the colors of the sun and the sky change together

does not stand out as a phenomenon until it is seen as an instance

of how colors arise. The search for the primal phenomenon is like

creative writing, where the need is to find the right expression to let

the meaning come forth. By analogy, we can say that Goethe’s way

of science is ‘hermeneutical’. Once the primal phenomenon has

been discovered in a single case, it can be recognized elsewhere in

nature and in artificial situations where superficially it may appear

to be very different. (Bortoft, 1996, pp. 22-23)

I have already noted that my readings extracted from the wealth of Bortoft’s texts

were highly selective, based on my larger purpose in mounting my argument.28 I now

move on to explore his discussion arising from Goethe’s ‘way of seeing’. If, as fore-

shadowed, this thesis is about giving university students a more holistic education,

finding a holistic way of seeing clearly piques my interest.

A different way of seeing

Bortoft spends considerable time challenging conventional scientific wisdom on the

nature of cognitive perception and it is relevant to my global argument to summarise

his case here. The issue in question is whether there is a non-sensory element in human

perception. Bortoft makes a powerful case that, as Norwood Russell Hanson put it,

‘there is more to seeing than meets the eye’ (Bortoft, 1996, pp. 50, 126). This is a critical

issue for Bortoft:

If we want to know what scientific knowledge is, we have to learn

to recognize the extra, nonsensory factor which transforms sensory

experience into cognitive perception. This means learning to

recognize the fundamental incoherence of empiricism as a philos-

27 ‘the law of the origin of color’: ‘Goethe’s method was to extend and deepen his experience of the

phenomenon until he reached that element of the phenomenon which is not given externally to sense

experience. This is the connection or relationship in the phenomenon which he called the law (Gesetz),

and which he found by going more deeply into the phenomenon instead of standing back’ (Bortoft,

1996, p. 21). 28 I am passing over extended discussions both on Goethe’s work and that of other prominent names in

the history of science. For details, see Bortoft’s text.

64

ophy of science. This has to be done first, before we can understand

the nature of Goethe’s scientific consciousness. (Bortoft, 1996, p. 50)

He builds his case using the image in Figure 1.2 and two other eye puzzles.

Figure 1.2. Eye puzzle

Design: Jackie Bortoft. Source: Bortoft (1996, p. 50)

People commonly experience visual chaos when first viewing the image in Figure

1.2. Some will then suddenly see the head and upper neck of a giraffe. Others will see it

once they are told the ‘solution’ to the puzzle. The question arises, what happens in

that moment of recognition? Bortoft points out that the visual data has not changed,

and thus the change is not a change in sensory experience. It is, rather, what Hanson

called ‘organisation’, ‘the way in which elements are appreciated’ (Bortoft, 1996, p. 52).

For Bortoft, ‘The nonsensory perception of organization […] is in fact the perception of

meaning.’ In the example of suddenly seeing a giraffe, ‘The nonsensory wholeness or

unity, which we see the instant this patchwork becomes organized, is the meaning,

“giraffe”. This is not the meaning of what is seen, but the meaning which is what is

seen.’ This distinction is important to Bortoft’s argument. The explanation hinges on

the idea of the intentionality of consciousness and contrasts between primary and

secondary meaning and between the constitutive mind and the reflective mind. Bortoft cites

Husserl’s view of consciousness having the structure of intentionality, that

consciousness always has a focus, an object of interest.29 Likewise, in cognitive

perception, ‘there is an indissoluble unity between the conscious mind and the object of

which it is conscious’; it is ‘the intentionality of consciousness [that] explains the

transparency of the dimension of mind in cognitive perception and the origin of the

empiricist fallacy’ (Bortoft, 1996, p. 54). Because we are so focussed on the object of

29 Bortoft gives two sources of his summary of Husserl’s approach to consciousness: Stuart & Mickunas

(1974) chaps. 1 & 2, and Koestenbaum (1975).

65

interest we are unaware of cogitation. The act of seeing goes unnoticed, as does ‘the

meaning that is what is seen’, and the meaning is taken to be the sensory object. This is

where Bortoft relates cognitive perception to the constitutive mind via his notion of

primary and secondary meaning:

Hence we are left with only a secondary notion of meaning, namely

the meaning of what is seen. This is secondary because what is seen

is meaning already. It is this primary meaning, which is constitutive

of what things are, that is overlooked by the Cartesian distinction

[between the observer and the observed] and the naturalistic

attitude of empiricism […] The difference here is really between the

constitutive mind and the reflective mind. But since the former is

transparent in cognitive perception, ‘mind’ is usually identified

with the latter alone. However this is only a secondary function of

the mind, which depends on there being a world which is already

constituted and can therefore be taken for granted. (Bortoft, 1996, p.

55)

Bortoft suggests that a typical empiricist explanation of the giraffe sighting would

be

about seeing being the experience of sensory impressions which are

caused in the organism by stimuli from the ‘outside world’.

According to this widespread viewpoint, seeing the world is a

purely sensory experience. But what happens to this story when the

giraffe isn’t there, and yet the array of visual stimuli is the same?

The answer is that, contrary to empiricism, the giraffe is in the

seeing and not out there on the page. More precisely, the giraffe is

the way of seeing which sees the giraffe (Bortoft, 1996, p. 125) […] We

have found a nonsensory factor – the organization – but this now

leaves us with the question of what it is that organizes the blotches

in the act of seeing. The answer is that it is an idea […] it is the

giraffe idea (not the idea of a giraffe) […] The giraffe is the

organising idea in the seeing. We could almost say that it is the

seeing idea, to emphasize that it is not the idea of what is seen (i.e. a

mental picture). (Bortoft, 1996, pp. 128-129)

Bortoft is not the only writer who has struggled to verbalise the role of the observer

– or rather the observer’s lifeworld – in what is observed; I recall Maturana and

Varela’s ‘way of seeing cognition not as a representation of the world “out there”, but

rather as an ongoing bringing forth of a world through the process of living itself’

(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 11). What Bortoft has done I think is to highlight the

66

problem of cognitive perception, challenging the assumptions underpinning the

empiricist approach to scientific research and to meaning making generally. Citing

work by David Best, Bortoft underscores the pivotal role of our cultural inheritance (as

distilled in language), of mind, in how we see the world, in the example of someone

suffering total loss of memory. If a man loses direct contact with his familiar world, he

would not directly see a ‘tree’ because he has no sense of what a tree is. As a rejoinder

to the empiricist approach Bortoft remarks that ‘Eliminating all concepts would not

therefore achieve a direct encounter with the world. On the contrary, it would only

achieve the end of the world’ (Bortoft, 1996, p. 131).

What we take to be material objects are really condensations of

meaning […] The world which we encounter in cognitive

perception is really a text and not a set of material objects. They are

material objects, of course – otherwise how could somebody sit on a

chair! But they are more than this, and it is this ‘more’ that we see

[…] We are accustomed to thinking of mind as if it were inside us –

‘in our heads’. But it is the other way around. We live within a

dimension of mind which is, for the most part, as invisible to us as

the air we breathe. (Bortoft, 1996, pp. 131-132)

Perhaps the present discussion might be thought of as being only rather tenuously

linked to the topic of this thesis – fostering meaning making capability for twenty-first

century university professional education. But is that because of what university

professional education looked like last century, because of our well-established

preconceptions about what university education needs to be like into the future? How

fundamental a change dare we imagine for university education across the twenty-first

century? As the planet continues to strain to breaking point, could the new way of

seeing that Bortoft is suggesting, help to

bring about a less environmentally alienated

humanity and thereby a less threatened

planet? Might we, for example, imagine a

curriculum in which we as learners really

are part of the world we observe, one in

which we learn to take responsibility for the

world we bring forth, the world we talk into

existence (to repeat Weick, et al.’s (2005, p.

409) expression)? Food for fecund

thought.

‘The world which we encounter in cognitive perception is really a text’.

Meaning makers are its authors.

More food for fecund thought.

‘We live in a time of unprecedented challenges and opportunities. Never before have we had the power to imperil our species and our planet, and never before have we had the power to heal our species to the degree we can today – bringing people to new levels of prosperity, well-being, health, and maturity. The choices our generation makes will determine whether we leave behind us an evolving civilization and a fertile earth, or a failed species and a plundered planet. We have the power to do both. Part of the power available to us is the integral vision.’ (Walsh & Wilber, 2009)

67

Our exploration of holism and associated ideas in this chapter now needs to be

drawn into some kind of synthesis because the larger thesis needs adequate space for

its own unfurling. Deliberate gaps (due to both intended focus and space constraints)

remain in my accounts of Wilber and Bortoft especially, but I shall endeavour to draw

the more important themes into the final section.

Conclusion: Welling harmony, haunting dissonance

In this section I conclude my separate interpretations of Smuts, Wilber and Bortoft by

reporting and making sense of each writer’s finale. The unifying focus of this section is

to see if and where the interests of these writers in the three books chosen are

converging, in the light, as always, of my larger purposes. From the perspective of my

thesis at large, the emergent question here is, what do these three texts tell us about the

way ‘holistic’ is understood and used, as a basis for articulating a holistic theory of

curriculum and for arguing why this is vital for twenty-first century professional

education. (In later chapters, where appropriate to my argument, I will return to these

three texts to pick up ideas, whether or not I have covered them in this chapter.)

Smuts. My account of Holism and Evolution briefly traced Smuts’ story of evolution

to the stage of human personality which, as we saw, is a whole composed of the

individual human being’s mind and body. What I haven’t done yet is consider Smuts’

final chapter.

In his final chapter, The holistic universe, Smuts considers the significance of

Holism30 for ‘our general world-view [or worldview], our Weltanschauung’. His

starting point is a discussion of the capacity of the science of his day to interrogate the

world through the lens of Holism. Can science work with Holism? (This approach –

tackling his worldview question with reference to the assumptions and standard

operating procedures of science – acknowledges the trickle-down effect of the

collective sense of ‘how things work’ from science to the population at large. Even

though the wider population doesn’t know a lot of science, we gladly weave the

achievements of science and technology into our daily lives and have a sense that

things do all hang together somehow.) Smuts again scrolls through the advance of

Holism in evolution to reinforce his claim that ‘Holism is basic to [the universe’s]

constitution, its multitudinous forms and processes, its history in the past, and its

promise and potency for the future’. However he foresees resistance to his theory of

Holism from science. While scientists may accept that the concept may have

philosophical value, Smuts fears they will not see any scientific value in it ‘as it cannot

30 I use upper case here to indicate that I am referring to the large idea that Smuts sees underpinning the

evolving universe; elsewhere (except for direct quotes) I follow a ‘minimal caps’ rule.

68

be brought to the test of actual facts and experiments.31 Holism […] is not a matter for

Science; it is an ultra-scientific entity or concept’ (Smuts, 1961, p. 321).32 This for Smuts

would be ‘too narrow a view’ of science’s sphere of operation. The procedure of

analysing the elements of a phenomenon is necessary but not sufficient:

details must be supplemented by a description which will take us

back to the whole embracing those details […] wherever an object

shows structure or organisation (as every object does) a full

description of it would involve at the very least an account of this

structure or organisation as a whole […] And where many objects

show similar or related structures, a proper description would

involve an account of the ground-plan of organisation affecting

them all. (Smuts, 1961, pp. 322-323)

For Smuts working with Holism should prove no more difficult for science than

working with life and mind initially were:

Holism is really no more than an attempt to extend the system of

life and mind, with the necessary modifications and qualifications,

to inorganic evolution, and to show the underlying identity of this

system at all stages of Evolution […] Holism is a concept and a

factor which formulates and accounts for the fundamental ground-

plan of this series. (Smuts, 1961, p. 325)

Wilber. The germ of Wilber’s whole argument is contained in the integral model

we have already seen. (Holarchy is a theory of everything after all.33) The little extra

space available to Wilber here will be devoted to giving a glimpse of how Wilber might

feel, being part of such a process.

The names given to the latter stages of human evolution in the top left quadrant of

Wilber’s model needn’t be detailed here, except to indicate that holarchy is the

evolution of matter to life to mind/consciousness to spirit. Therefore to ask how Wilber

might feel being part of such a process means asking how he might feel about or

interpret his experience of becoming more human, a microcosm of the flow that is the

evolution of matter to life to mind/consciousness to spirit. As I noted at the very

31 Sinnott’s already cited comment would still have some currency today: that the problem of the

internal organisation of organisms is neglected in the life sciences ‘largely because it is relatively

intractable by means of the methods employed in most biological research’ (Smuts, 1961, p. x). 32 Consider how far outside scientific thinking Smuts’ argument would have sat. Smuts’ objective in

writing Holism and Evolution was ‘to make a modest contribution towards the reform of the

fundamental concepts of matter, life and mind, to assist in breaking down the apparently impassable

gulfs between them, and to interpret them in such a way as to present them as successive more or less

continuous forms and phases of one great process, or as related progressive elements in one total

coherent reality’ (Smuts, 1961, p. 50). 33 Wilber published A Theory of Everything in 2001 (Wilber, 2001).

69

beginning of this chapter, I sense that

Wilber is awed by it all, but deeply

concerned at the same time. How we

make sense of our own becoming affects

what will emerge. We pilot our own

destiny; being human carries a heavy

responsibility. In addition, Wilber

insists that willing embrace of the

higher realms of consciousness-

spirituality is not a private thing nor an other-worldly thing:

Spirit manifests always and simultaneously as the four quadrants34

of the Kosmos. Spirit (at any level) manifests as a self in a

community with social and cultural foundations and objective

correlates, and thus any higher Self will inextricably involve a wider

community existing in a deeper objective state of affairs. Contacting

the higher Self is not the end of all problems but the beginning of

the immense and difficult new work to be done. (Wilber, 2000, p.

522)

Wilber has every reason to be both awed and not a little anxious.

Bortoft. I shall deal here with two matters, both relevant to an understanding of

Goethe’s scientific consciousness: ‘exact sensorial imagination’ and ‘seeing compre-

hensively’.

‘Exact sensorial imagination’ (exacte sinnliche Phantasie) is Goethe’s term for a

faculty we can develop that will allow us to visualise a phenomenon in a sensory way.

‘Goethe’s way of thinking is concrete, not abstract, and can be described as one of

dwelling in the phenomenon’ (Bortoft, 1996, p. 22). In the case of his work on colour,

Goethe believed that the organization or unity of the phenomenon

is real and can be experienced, but that it is not evident to sensory

experience. It is perceived by an intuitive experience – what Goethe

called Anschauung, which ‘may be held to signify the intuitive

knowledge gained through contemplation of the visible aspect.’

(Bortoft, 1996, p. 21)

To convey the concept of ‘seeing comprehensively’ I shall rely on an extended

passage from Chapter 6 of Bortoft. (In passing, I draw attention to the masterly way in

34 Wilber is referring here to the four quadrants of the integral model.

‘all depth [consciousness] must be interpreted. And how we interpret depth is crucially important for the birth of that depth itself. New depth allows us new interpretations; the new interpretations cocreate and give birth to that depth, help unpack that depth. Unpacking the depth is the emergence of that depth. And thus, let us oh-so-carefully unpack this precious Gift of spiritual intuition.’ (Wilber, 2000, p. 522)

70

which Bortoft interweaves and explicates various difficult concepts in terms of each

other – a fine exemplar of textual composition.)

A brilliant example of seeing comprehensively instead of

selectively is provided by Wolfgang Schad's study of the wholeness

of the mammals35 […] Schad sees each kind of mammal

comprehensively, seeing the belonging together of its various

features (such as size and color) in a natural whole, so that the

animal becomes understandable in itself without needing to be

explained in terms of something else. But the individual mammal

kinds are not seen in isolation from one another, as if they could be

understood separately. Each kind of mammal is seen in the context

of the other mammals in the group to which it belongs, while these

groups in turn are seen in the context of the larger families of

mammals, and so on until (with a few exceptions) all the mammals

are seen in the context of the larger orders of rodents, carnivores,

and ungulates. Each level is nested within a more comprehensive

one in the perspective of ‘multiplicity in unity.’ A concrete organic

order emerges – not a system and not an abstract schema – which

includes diversity instead of neutralizing it in favor of what is

common. The effect of seeing comprehensively in this way is that

diversity appears as self-difference, so that at each level which is

considered, the concrete organic order appears as the manifolding

of a single organism. Thus the rodents appear in the light of the

intensive dimension of One as One rodent. This is not to be thought

of as a rodent which is composed of many component rodents

added together. It can be understood intensively in the manner of a

multiperspectival figure – like the duck/rabbit36, but extended to

many perspectives instead of just two. Each one is the One rodent,

but every one is only a one-sided manifestation. Similarly, there is

One carnivore and One ungulate. These are in no way to be

confused with a common plan for carnivores or what all ungulates

have in common. The unity of ‘multiplicity in unity’ is

comprehensive, whereas that of ‘unity in multiplicity’ is abstract.

Ultimately there is One mammal, with the rodent, carnivore, and

ungulate as one-sided manifestations.

35 Wolfgang Schad (1977), Man and Mammals. Bortoft describes Goethe’s work on colour as

demonstrating his ability to see comprehensively (Bortoft, 1996, p. 291); whether Goethe used the

term Bortoft does not say; he does imply (Bortoft, 1996, p. 295) that Schad used it. 36 A single image that can be seen either as a duck or a rabbit; this is one of the other two eye puzzles

Bortoft used earlier alongside the giraffe.

71

When the mammals are seen comprehensively in this way, intrinsic

relations begin to become visible, and we see connections between

organisms which otherwise are perceived as being separate from

one another. The separation is overcome, but not by introducing a

connection externally between the organisms – such an external

connection is like linking two things with a third, and therefore

itself belongs to the level of separation. When we see the

connection, instead of introducing one, then it has more the

character of a nonlocal connection (to borrow a term from quantum

physics). When their belonging together is perceived, the organisms

do not have to be linked together. The separation is overcome, but

not on the same level as the separation – which therefore remains as

separation on its own level. The intrinsic belongingness of the

organisms is a more subtle aspect of the phenomena than their

separation.

There is a helpful analogy with language here (which will be

explored further below). When we read a text, the meaning we

perceive is different in kind from the letters which we see on the

page. In the act of reading, the sensory and the nonsensory are

perceived differently and yet simultaneously. This gives us the

impression that the marks and the meaning are experienced as

being on different levels. We could say that the separation of the

letters is overcome in the act of reading the meaning of the word,

but this does not mean that the letters on the page have become

joined together. The overcoming of the separation is not an external

connection, at the level of the letters on the page. The meaning we

read is a connection of a more subtle kind than the connection

which belongs at the level of separation. The separation is not

overcome on its own level, and therefore it does not disappear

when the letters are read comprehensively as the meaning of the

word. In the act of reading we have the experience of two different

levels together. We can understand what a mistake it would be in

this case to try to overcome separation on its own level: a subtler,

different kind of connection would be lost, and with it the

possibility of reading. The higher cognitive function which is

experienced in seeing comprehensively in Goethe's science is

analogous to reading. The sensory particulars are equivalent to the

letters, and the intrinsic connection which is their belonging together

is equivalent to the meaning. We called this a nonlocal connection

72

in the previous paragraph to emphasize that it is different from the

local connection which introduces external links on the same level

as the separation to make things belong together, and thereby misses

the subtler possibility which is the equivalent of reading. What the

experience of the Goethean way of science brings us to is the real-

ization that this subtler kind of connection is a dimension of the

phenomenon itself, and not something which is just added to it by

our minds.

As has been mentioned above, this requires an enhancement of

seeing and cannot be attained with the kind of seeing which is

attuned to the bodily world. Goethe's way of science is itself a

practical training for such an enhancement of seeing. Schad's book

itself can be used for this very purpose. If it is read slowly and

thoughtfully, and we work in our imagination to enter into the

connections and relationships he describes, then this activity of

reading will itself contribute to the formation of a new organ of

perception in us. We begin to get the taste of the subtler kind of

connection described above, as well as to exercise the capacity for

seeing in the perspective of "multiplicity in unity". (Bortoft, 1996,

pp. 293-295)

One could write a whole treatise on the passage just quoted, but interpretation

knows no end, as hermeneutists well know, and I am almost out of space-time for

Chapter 1! I am not avoiding the challenge of interpreting it here. Bortoft’s passage

works on its own in the context of my argument to this point by explaining some key

concepts in his book, only some of which I have raised. The one point I will mention

now is the deft way in which Bortoft shows that the ‘belongingness’ of the class

mammalia is of a more subtle quality than the boundaries separating the individual

species within the class – a subtler quality on a higher plane of conceptualisation. This

understanding helps shed light on our previous discussion on the nonsensory factor

integral to the appearing of the giraffe. Thus we begin to understand the question, how

may we perceive and conceive the whole?

Three texts – Smuts, Wilber, Bortoft. Smuts and Bortoft have a straightforward

enthusiasm for holism, or at least the idea of the whole, of wholeness. Wilber’s

preferred terms are ‘holon’ and ‘holarchy’; while he uses ‘holistic’ positively, he avoids

‘holism’ altogether and rejects ‘Wholism’ in so far as it implies (in Wilber’s mind) that a

final whole is possible at the nano or macro ends of the nested series. Bortoft displays

no interest in that issue, and Smuts would not have seen Koestler’s/Wilber’s writing on

73

holarchy and would thus not be aware of the connotations that Wilber sees in

‘Wholism’.

There are, on the other hand, some significant harmonies to be heard across the

three books. All three authors write engagingly about their arguments, and all three

provide concepts and/or ways of thinking that will allow me in subsequent chapters to

construct a theory of holistic curriculum and more broadly offer a more holistic way

forward in twenty-first century university professional education. That so much of the

foregoing discussion focussed on wholes in the biophysical realm (Popper’s World 1)

may have surprised the reader, given the title of the thesis, but as we learned from

Wilber, holons evolve across all quadrants, and in any case, the main purpose of this

chapter was to delve into the semantic history of ‘holism’ (and its associated terms) as

the basis for articulation of a theory of holistic curriculum.

At the top of this chapter I said that I would address the question of textual

composition at chapter’s end by reflecting on how the chapter sheds light on my

anticipation of my reader’s meaning making needs in reading this. I will make one

comment on the matter at this stage, and build on it as opportunity arises in later

chapters. I table my decision to let Bortoft’s extended passage on Schad etc. to speak

largely for itself, rather than rely more on my own reworking of the argument. In that

decision I had elegance of argument in mind, but I was also working on the

assumption that the reader would like to grasp the concept of seeing comprehensively as

economically as possible. I wanted an elegant, economical but also richly meaningful

solution to a particularly complex compositional challenge. My chosen solution –

quoting Bortoft at length – meant introducing several technical terms that Bortoft had

already explicated but that I had not. I ran the risk of actually confounding the reader

with terms that had not been explained. One moral of this story is that textual

composition is a gamble; or, more positively, that hermeneutic communication is an

adventure.

The rationale for this chapter, as mentioned earlier, hinges on the expectation I

have been developing: that a rich notion of holism may have relevance for the two big

foci of this thesis – the nature of understanding and the possibility of curriculum

design for integrative learning. While I have drawn attention to aspects of these

matters in this chapter, the full significance of holism for hermeneutic understanding

and for curriculum will be discussed in Part B. In the meantime, to conclude this

chapter on a fitting note, I recall a statement by James B. Macdonald, quoted in the

Prologue: ‘Curriculum theory … might be said to be the essence of educational theory

because it is the study of how to have a learning environment’ (Macdonald, 1975, p.

12). My thesis argument, as depicted in Figure P3, seeks insights from a set of

judiciously selected texts which I hope will progressively offer the reader a kind of

74

‘welling harmony’ as we aspire to imagine a fit for greater purpose learning

environment for twenty-first century university professional education. That harmony,

I trust, will cohere in a mutually supportive synthesis of my dual arguments. The idea

of holism is central to this enterprise. Holistic curriculum is possible and desirable

because holistic conception, holistic meaning making is the most complete way of

engaging meaningfully in our human world.37

37 The structure of this thesis has been designed to reflect my goal of illuminating the phenomenon of

hologenesis, the coming to be of wholes. Thus it reflects the practice of hermeneutic textual

composition, interpretation and communication which mirrors this process.

75

Chapter 2.

Realism: On being grounded

in my own world

I foreshadowed in the Abstract that the curriculum of becoming

framework advanced in this thesis aims to support students in their

journey of becoming ‘novice rounded, grounded practitioners’ in

their chosen professions, of becoming responsible, contributing

members of society, and of realising their individual potential.

Chapter 1 laid a conceptual foundation for developing a picture of

the human attribute of ‘roundedness’, and in this chapter I do the

same for the attribute of ‘groundedness’ by presenting my

hermeneutic interpretation of Margaret Archer’s Being Human:

The Problem of Agency. Basically I am arguing that groundedness

is about being human in the real social world; the word vividly

characterises the situatedness of individuals whose actions make a

difference for good. I draw from my chapters 1 and 2 when

examining roundedness and groundedness as curriculum desiderata

in Part B.

At least for the foreseeable future, humankind must continue to keep

one foot on the ground, because we cannot live without earth, air,

fire and water. True, more and more humans are finding stimulus,

self-realisation in virtual, technology-enabled worlds, but

technology itself is resource hungry, and while ever we remain bio-

physical beings we need bio-physical sustenance. In the global

supermarket we sometimes forget our absolute dependence on

nature, and overlook the fact that Earth’s capacity to keep

sustaining life is being undermined by rampant human resource

depletion. A twenty-first century curriculum of becoming will need

to find ways of reaffirming humankind’s relationship with the

source of life, thinking that needs to be applied at various scales of

social organisation because the problems we face owe their intensity

to the complexity of the global economy, lifestyle, lifeworld. The

social realist account of the human phenomenon presented in this

chapter offers a perspective that allows my curriculum of becoming

model to offer a framework for practice

76

that will develop graduates disposed to and able to care for the

world1 as we know it.

I came across Archer’s book quite late in the process of selecting the

texts that would form my foundation text set for this study. I was

already well advanced in answering my second research question on

university curriculum for the twenty-first century, central to which

is the idea of educating for personal ‘being’ and the question of

agency. These two themes are as central to Archer’s whole text as

they are to its title. I soon recognised that Archer’s text could be

used to provide strong support for my curriculum of becoming

model and that it could also inform my theorising about meaning

making. In this chapter I present an account of Archer’s argument

as it bears on mine. In the larger thesis I will show that the social

realist way of approaching the human phenomenon undergirds and

also provides a language for elaborating the WHAT and the HOW of

a curriculum of becoming.

Margaret Archer on ‘being human’

Self-consciousness: my ‘continuous sense of self’

The primacy of practice

The private source of public meaning making

Towards a social realist account of ‘the human phenomenon’

Why social realism matters

Margaret Archer on ‘being human’

Margaret Archer is a social realist. Her book, Being Human: The Problem of Agency is a

cogent defence of this school of social theory in the face of twentieth century

postmodernism. While I was reading Archer’s work I was struck by the incisiveness of

her insight and the robustness of her categories of explanation and her global position.

In my judgment, here is a social theory equal to the task of accounting for the way

societies, cultures, work, a realistic theory in the sense that it takes account of human

nature, expressed in individual achievement as well as in our social inheritance, across

cultures and across time. Archer’s version of social realism is one that investigates

human societies as if individual gestalt experience – how we embrace reality, how we

relate to the world – matters. In this chapter I survey Archer’s argument to gauge the

1 As a general rule, if I do not qualify the term ‘world’ in this work, the scope of its reference (its

intended meaning) may be taken to be comprehensive – life, the universe, everything. However the

context of its use should also be considered. In the context of the above paragraph ‘world’ certainly

refers to planet Earth, yet as I progress my argument in this chapter it may also be seen to connote

our human world; see also ‘world’ in the Glossary.

Chapter map

77

extent to which this proposition offers a key to Archer’s thesis. I also discuss how

satisfying her overall position is in making sense of the human phenomenon as

conceptualised in this thesis. ‘Individual gestalt experience’ is a term I coined for this

thesis: it will help me fill out my position on meaning making and, as I argue in this

chapter, it enables me to demonstrate the powerful relevance of Archer’s argument to

mine.

Archer’s table of contents provides a succinct overview of her global argument.

The eleven essays (introduction, nine chapters and conclusion) are organised into a

four part structure as follows:

Table 2.1. Scope and structure of Archer’s argument

Introduction

Part I. The impoverishment of humanity

1 Resisting the dissolution of humanity

2 Modernity’s man

3 Society’s being: humanity as the gift of society

Part II. The emergence of self-consciousness

4 The primacy of practice

5 The practical order as pivotal

Part III. The emergence of personal identity

6 Humanity and reality: emotions as commentaries on human concerns

7 Personal identity: the inner conversation and emotional elaboration

Part IV. The emergence of social identity

8 Agents: active and passive

9 Actors and commitment

Conclusion: the re-emergence of humanity

Perhaps the thing to strike one at first glance from this bird’s-eye view of the

argument – a reader’s initial interpretive hunch about Archer’s main thesis – is the

symmetry or perhaps the cyclical nature of her story about humanity. We see that

where she starts the story some setback has occurred to humanity, but that by the end

of the story a renaissance has taken place. We need to delve into the book itself to

understand what she means. I will now distil and comment on the essential ideas of

Archer’s argument as they relate to this thesis.

Self-consciousness: My ‘continuous sense of self’

Archer’s fundamental stance concerns the central place of a person’s ‘continuous sense

of self’ in accounting for

human society and

human experience. (For

me ‘central place’ means

viewing it as the still point

of our turning world, or

I foreshadowed in the Abstract and Prologue the central importance of ‘sense of self in the world’ both to my concept of global understanding and to my theory of a university curriculum of becoming, and so Archer’s text was, I thought when I first read her, a way of undergirding my engagement with both my research questions. Furthermore, the sense of self is the locus for my claim that authentic professional identity is an expression of authentic personal identity.

78

the one diffuse, ubiquitous quality in the Noosphere2 without which things in our

human world would not hang together as they do). The ‘storyline’ inferred above from

the book’s table of contents is not so much a story about humankind as a history of

sociology since the Enlightenment. Given my need to economically and elegantly distil

the essence of Archer’s argument, I will begin by examining her social realist position

on our individual sense of self; the opposing views from other sociological traditions

will be noted in the process of giving my interpretation of Archer’s social realism. (This

is not an impartial account of Archer’s case but one that must simultaneously build

mine.)

Archer writes: ‘The realist approach to humanity […] begins by presenting an

account of this sense of self, which is prior to, and primitive to, our sociality. Self-

consciousness derives from our embodied practices in the world’ (Archer, 2000, p. 7).

Herein lies the distinction between the

realist view and what she calls the

‘Modernity’s Man’ tradition since the

Enlightenment, which takes the goal

of rationality to be the key for

interpreting the human phenomenon. If

a social theory is going to perform its

purpose – in my terms, describe the

human phenomenon, explain how it is

that it is that way, in all its variation and

splendour, in all its weakness and shame – Archer insists that it needs a framework of

analysis adequate to the task. It is no surprise therefore that she finds the framework of

rationality to be seriously limited, not attuned to the breadth and depth of how we

experience ourselves and the world.

Archer’s next point about our sense

of self is that ‘it emerges at the nexus of

our embodied encounters with the world’

(italics added), which distinguishes the

realist position from the other main

sociological tradition, which she labels

as ‘Society’s Being’. In opposing that

approach, Archer argues that

2 Noosphere: ‘a postulated sphere or stage of evolutionary development dominated by consciousness,

the mind, and interpersonal relationships: creatures evolve: a new biosphere emerges, and with it a new

noosphere. Origin 1940s: from French noösphere, based on Greek noos “mind”'. ‘Noosphere’ (2010)

‘”Modernity’s Man”, as the projection of the Enlightenment tradition, worked strenuously at stripping down the human being until he or she had one property alone, that of rationality. Rationality was treated as pre-given, and therefore none of our relations with the world contributed anything to making us what we are. Yet, this model of homo economicus could not deal with our normativity or our emotionality, both of which are intentional, that is they are ‘about’ relations with our environment – natural, practical and social’ (Archer, 2000, pp. 3-4).

Society’s Being “is the social constructionists’ contribution to the debate, which presents all our human properties and powers, beyond our biological constitution, as the gift of society. From this viewpoint, there is only one, flat, unstratified, powerful particular, the human person, who is a site, or a literal point of view. Beyond that, our selfhood is a grammatical fiction, a product of learning to master the first person pronoun system, and thus quite simply a theory of the self which is appropriated from society.” (Archer, 2000, p. 4)

79

One of the most important properties that we have, the power to

know ourselves to be the same being over time, depends upon

practice in the environment rather than conversation in society.

Instead, the sequence which leads to the emergence of our selfhood

derives from how our species-being interacts with the way the

world is, which is independent of how we take it to be, or the

constructions we put upon it. Each one of us has to discover,

through embodied practice, the distinctions between self and

otherness, then between subject and object, before finally arriving

at the distinction between the self and other people. Only when

these distinctions have been learned through embodied practice can

they then be expressed in language. (Archer, 2000, pp. 7-8)

When Archer writes that ‘self-consciousness derives from our embodied practices in

the world’ (italics added), she is, by extension, implying that interpretations, theories of

society, must be grounded

in the world of human

experience, in particular,

our experience of

ourselves … as if my sense

of self is the still point of my

turning world, and as if that

insight, universalised across

humankind, becomes the

anchor point for interpreting

the human phenomenon.

The concept of practice,

embodied practice, is a

vital interpretive key for social realist inquiry.

The primacy of practice

Integral to Archer’s high view of sense of self (self-consciousness) is the idea of practice.

To assert the primacy of practice is a refusal to accord primacy to

language, and this is what is maintained in relation to the

emergence of self-consciousness. The effect of asserting it is to make

the embodied practices of human beings in the world more

important than their social relations for the emergence of selfhood,

meaning a continuous sense of self, and for the development of its

properties and powers, meaning reflexivity, which only exists in

potentia for every neonate. The primacy of practice refers both to its

□ In this context I recall Bortoft/Goethe’s concept of finding the whole in the parts (Chapter 1). We may imagine what meaning/theory could be drawn from exploring the universal phenomenon of human reflexivity (self-consciousness) within our individual experience of it. If we think of reflexivity as a continuous sense of self in the world, is this not in fact a key or prism for understanding the human phenomenon, whether we are sociologists or meaning makers of other kinds?

□ It was only several pages ago where, synergistically, we saw Wilber rejecting an ‘other-worldly’ approach to spirituality, arguing that human evolution progresses holistically across the four quadrants of the integral model; thus personal spiritual development (upper left quadrant) is associated with changes in the other three quadrants. Even private spiritual transformations are rooted in the earth and in community. We may infer that Wilber and Archer accept in their own ways the need for social theory to fully accommodate and account for our gestalt experience of the world.

80

logical and substantive priority in human development. This is not

simply a matter of it coming before anything else, though

temporally it does just that; it is also a question of viewing

language itself as a practical activity, which means taking seriously

that our words are quite literally deeds, and ones which do not

enjoy hegemony over our other doings in the emergence of our

sense of self. (Archer, 2000, p. 121)

How does Archer attempt to convince her readers of the significance of, and

relationships between, embodied practice, deeds and sense of self? She starts by revisiting

previous writings to defend her position ‘that our sense of self, as part of our

humanity, is prior and primitive to our sociality’. Her argument arises from the idea of

‘human embodiment’. It is a reaction to a view put by Harré (1983) that humans arrive

at a theory of self only after society’s linguistic environment has given them the means

of conceptualising it. Archer points to the way higher animals must have body self-

awareness and intentionality when on the prowl or when hovering overhead before a

dive-bomb kill, because they negotiate obstacles with perfect precision as they execute

their purpose. Archer sees a continuity of consciousness between the rudimentary self-

awareness and intentionality of higher animals and our own; to deny higher animals

that is to make their behaviour inexplicable. She concludes that these characteristics are

innate: they cannot be social gifts (Archer, 2000, pp. 121-122).

Also significant for Archer is her judgment that new-born babies are capable of

‘continuous practical activity in a material world’ (Archer, 2000, p. 122)3 to meet their

immediate physical needs. Archer disagrees with Harré’s view that self-consciousness

can only be acquired by social appropriation: for her, from day 1, babies start

differentiating between self and otherness.

Harré is quite correct to be looking for a theory (of the ‘self’) rather

than an entity, but he is seeking the wrong kind of theory in the

wrong place, in society rather than in our embodied practices and

environmental relations […] Unless I learn very early on to draw a

line between myself and the world, I am literally incapable of any

practical action, and it is in this practice that I learn to theorise in

this way, one which is simultaneously a theory of self and of

otherness. (Archer, 2000, p. 123)

Even though Harré acknowledges private knowledge Archer says he insists that it is

first ‘distributed throughout the collective, so that a team is required to complete the

3 Archer deploys this quote from Marx.

81

activity successfully’ (Archer, 2000, p. 123). Archer argues instead that the shared

properties of the species emerge because

each and every surviving member has realised one potential of

their species-being, viz to know the difference between ‘self’ and

‘otherness’. It does this because our species‘ survival cannot delay

practical action in the environment until the linguistic concept of

self (as ‘I’) has been acquired, by the semantic displacement of ‘I’

from the concept of the person. (Archer, 2000, p. 123)

Archer is careful to distinguish between ‘sense of self’ and ‘self-concept’. She

accepts that ‘self concept’ is part of our social endowment; it is ‘sense of self’ that is

‘prior and primitive to our sociality’ (Archer, 2000, p. 124).4 ‘The “self” (Moi) is

everywhere present […] There has never existed a human being who has not been

aware, not only of his [sic] body but also of his individuality, both spiritual and

physical’ (Mauss [1989], quoted in Archer, [2000], p. 255).

One’s sense of self is certainly contingent on the power to discriminate between

self and other, but because Archer’s ‘sense of self’ is a ‘continuous sense of self’, she

must also consider the role of memory5 in sustaining that sense over a lifetime:

necessarily, our continuous sense of being the same self over time

makes appeal to our memories. Memory is central to the notion of

selfhood which I am defending here, as primitive to any socialised

conceptions. Without it I would lack the Lockean ‘continuity of

consciousness’ which, together with my embodiment, makes me a

particular human being. (Archer, 2000, p. 137)

As part of Archer’s sustained critical discussion of Harré’s view of personal being,

she acknowledges work within discursive psychology aimed at understanding how, as

Harré puts it, ‘the conversational reconstruction and validation of memories are public

and collective processes’, understanding ‘how people represent their past, how they

construct versions of events when talking about them’6 (Archer, 2000, p. 139). She

4 ‘There is a persistent tendency, especially prevalent amongst sociological imperialists, to absorb the

sense into the concept, and thus to credit a human universal to the effects of culture. Imperialism is

probably assisted in these manoeuvres by the correct belief that conceptualisation is indeed

indispensable, but this is coupled with the erroneous conviction that concepts have to be linguistic.

Consequently, to imperialistic thinkers, the acquisition of concepts is held to be essentially dialogical

in form. The sense of self advanced here is conceptually formed (it cannot be otherwise), therefore

what I have to vindicate is not its atheoretical character, but rather its monological form of emergence

from our embodied practices’ (Archer, 2000, p. 125). 5 Archer adopts Stephen Rose’s definition of memory as ‘an emergent property of the brain as a

dynamic system rather than a fixed and localised engram’ (Archer, 2000, p. 139). Engram: ‘a presumed

encoding in neural tissue that provides a physical basis for the persistence of memory; a memory

trace. Also called trace’ ("engram," n.d.). 6 The second quote is by Middleton and Edwards, quoted approvingly (writes Archer) by Harré.

82

concedes that this is part of the picture, but in order to buttress her overall position that

sense of self is prior and primitive to our sociality, she argues ‘speculatively’ for the

notion of memorising as active practice (Archer, 2000, p. 141), a generalisation

encompassing the differential memorising practices of children and adults. The case is

rendered within the logical frame of biological memory, a position arguing that the

functioning of human memory serves adaptation of the species: there is competitive

advantage in children having one dominant memorising strategy and adults another.

Thus children are equipped with visual or eidetic memory, while adults rely more on

declarative memory, which is linguistically dependent.7 The biological-cognitive

workings of memory and the value of each form of memory for children and adults

respectively are suggested in the following three short excerpts. (Going to this level of

detail at this place in Archer’s argument will serve my larger purpose in later chapters.

Space does not allow me to establish the connections that Archer painstakingly draws

between these shards of her argument. These shards are intended to create a

minimalistic, holistic (holographic) impression of the nature of the global argument):

Embodied memories are most resilient and function much as

Merleau-Ponty described them, that is as the body remembering

without any linguistic intervention. (Archer, 2000, p. 139)8

The nervous system is plastic to experience and is in continuous

dynamic selection vis-à-vis challenge or constraint from the

environment. Obviously, a flexible memory with the ability to

remember or not, according to environing circumstances, would be

of considerable interest to adaptation. Clearly it is not in our

adaptive interests to remember everything. A living storage system

will be selective rather than perfect.

Our childhood memories come back to us as snapshots or short

film clips which are often vivid, coloured and interestingly

‘atmospheric’ […] Still, today, when I catch the smell of new cut

hay, I am back in the field at three years old, sitting under a stook

[etc.…] knowing that all was very well with the world. Yet, when I

try to visualise the route to the library from the front door of the

London School of Economics, which I must have traversed

hundreds of times during my six years as a student, I simply cannot

7 Declarative memory is psychology’s version of Gilbert Ryle’s ‘knowing that’, while procedural memory

coincides with Ryle’s ‘knowing how’ (Ryle, 1945). Procedural memory (remembering bodily what to

do) guides practical action in children well before they can explain what they are doing. It is also

more persistent than declarative memory, as seen in adults who lose declarative memory but can still

perform learned skills (Archer, 2000, p. 143). 8 ‘Embodied memories’: a way of describing learned psycho-motor skills; see also comment on

procedural memory, previous footnote.

83

do it. What accounts for this eidetic phenomenon and its virtual

demise in the adult (Archer, 2000, p. 140)? Speculatively, the

answer seems to lie in memory as active practice. […] what is

salient to us is perceptually filtered. We commit to memory on a

need-to-know basis, blocking out and preventing de-selected

material from burdening our memories […] young children lack

such criteria of relevance and hence selectivity. ‘At birth, we may

guess, all types of input may seem to be of about equal relevance

[…] At this time eidetic memory, which doesn’t prejudice the

importance of things, is vital, because it gives the greatest possible

range over which inputs can be analysed’ (Rose, c. 1992). (Archer,

2000, p. 141)

Archer’s case for the primacy of practice over language/sociality in the formation

of selfhood, self-consciousness, concludes with a wider account of her conception of

practice: she maintains that ‘it is through the activities of embodied practice that we

develop the powers of thought at all’ (Archer, 2000, p. 146). Embodied practice

becomes a way of thinking about, theorising ourselves and our experience. It is an

integrative category in the sense that it is ‘the source of differentiation (of the self,

subject/object, subject/subject), then the source of thought (the basic principles of logic,

namely identity and non-contradiction)’.9 Practice, embodied practice, is thus the

source ‘of language and the discursive domain in general’ (Archer, 2000, p. 151):

what is central to human beings are not ‘meanings’ but ‘doings’.

This is a fundamental challenge to the hegemony of language,

because language itself has been presented [in Archer’s argument]

as one doing among other non-linguistically dependent doings. The

fact that our embodied and our practical knowledge develop in

direct interplay with nature and material culture, respectively,

entails that many of the things that humans know have not been

filtered through meanings belonging to the discursive order. To

reinforce the point, much of our practical knowledge cannot even

be fully translated into propositional meanings, but can only be

conveyed linguistically in the form of metaphor. This is of consid-

erable importance in resisting those who see the entirety of human

9 Concerning the principle of non-contradiction: several pages further on Archer notes and rejects

Bourdieu’s treatment of practice. ‘Bourdieu maintains […] that the logic of practice […] breaks with

the principle of non-contradiction in its nullification of transitivity. This position,’ she writes, ‘is

simply regarded as untenable here, because without obedience to the principle of non-contradiction –

whose abrogation would allow the simultaneous assertion of p and non-p […] – we can communicate

nothing at all […] Indeed, without obedience to the law of non-contradiction it becomes very questionable

whether we are even able to think at all’ (Archer, 2000, p. 151) (italics added).

84

life as rule-governed, by the social meanings attaching to any of our

doings. Such popular views […] necessarily make epistemology

prior to ontology. Social realism reverses this relationship, and can

do so because it sees practice as pivotal. It is our doings in the

world which secure meanings, and not vice versa. (Archer, 2000, p.

189)

We should not be surprised to find a social realist account of the human phen-

omenon placing such store in practical action. Archer does not reject the role of

language, of social interaction and culture more broadly in influencing the way we

think and the way we see ourselves. Her point rather is that practical action, embodied

practice is a category of explanation that is more fundamental than other conceptions

of being human. We could say that practical action is a concept that allows us to see

our continuous sense of self, our powers of thought, and our speech deeds developing

organically through each other.

The private source of public meaning making

Archer’s case for the centrality of our continuous sense of self and the primacy of

practice places importance on our ‘inner life’, which refers to the ‘inner conversations’

of our reflexive meaning making. The argument introduces the concepts of ‘human

concerns’ and ‘ultimate concerns’. I summarise her argument here.

□ Unspoken meaning making – fertile inner conversations that are inter-

woven with our audible speech deeds and practical actions. We don’t

privately rehearse everything we want to say out loud, but we do do a lot

of it, consciously or otherwise. That is when private meaning making goes

public. Archer:

As human beings we know that we live a rich inner life: that

we are in continuous communion with ourselves and that we

engage in a continual running commentary with the events

going on around us. We are aware of how our inner lives

monitor our responses to external situations in which we find

ourselves and indeed modify some of the circumstances to

which we willingly expose ourselves […] an inner dialogue

which silently voices sentiments like, ‘Isn’t he ever going to

stop talking?’ […] They are more than sotto voce asides as daily

life goes by […] the commentary is interwoven with our

[spoken] responses themselves: they are part of the action.

Certainly we may wish that his interminable speech was over,

but we also monitor ourselves to […] simulate a polite,

attentive demeanour […] The inner life enjoys its own relative

85

autonomy […] Sometimes we would like to turn it off […] Yet

even when […] we are fully absorbed in action, the

commentary only becomes discontinuous but does not

disappear. (Archer, 2000, p. 193)

Archer writes that such inner conversations are a universal human

experience. Because they sometimes impede and sometimes trigger and

merge into our actual speech acts and interactions with others, the

phenomenon ‘cannot be relegated to the domain of personal psychology as

if separate from sociological concerns’ (Archer, 2000, p. 194). That is, our

inner conversations are of fundamental relevance to sociological inquiry. Here

Archer goes close to arguing what I claimed earlier – that theories of society

must be grounded in the world of human experience, in particular, our

experience of ourselves.

For even the most private of

individuals, the inner self

leaves its distinctive mark

on the world.

□ Archer uses the idea of ‘human concerns’ as a generic description of what

triggers selves to act, to engage. She examines human concerns before she

builds her detailed case about the personal and social dimensions of human

development. She follows this sequence because, as we have noted, Archer

sees all expressions of our humanness emerging out of our embodied

practice in the world, driven by our human concerns. But what are these

‘concerns’? The answer is closely tied to our affective lives. Emotions are

‘commentaries upon our concerns’. Archer writes that this

is a straightforwardly realist definition which presumes that

emotions are about something in the world (they are

intentional or […] intensional in nature). Thus as Charles

Taylor puts it, we speak ‘of emotions as essentially involving a

sense of our situation. They are affective modes of awareness of

situation’ [italics added]. They are thus relational to something,

which is what gives them their emergent character, and that

something is our own concerns which make a situation a

matter of non-indifference to a person. (Archer, 2000, p. 195)

Concerns are modes of awareness of situation, expressed in our emotions. For

Archer, this definition allows us to acknowledge the ‘judgmental element’

The pieces of my logic of emergent coherence start to match up and resonate with each other. As I proposed in the Abstract, growth in understanding is the realisation of an ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world.

86

present in or associated with our affective experience.10

□ Living with competing concerns. For Archer we inhabit three orders of

reality – the natural, practical and social. Everyone faces a dilemma because

we hear emotional commentaries on concerns that spring from all three

orders of reality (Archer, 2000, p. 220). These concerns constitute ‘emergent

commentaries, relating to our physical well-being, performative achievement

and self-worth in the natural, practical and discursive orders respectively’

(italics added). Because we inhabit these three domains concurrently, we

need to be alert to three clusters of commentaries at the one time. How do

we juggle these sometimes incompatible voices? This is where Archer

distinguishes between first- and second-order emotionality. Archer notes

‘broad agreement’ in the literature that subjects review their immediate, raw

flush of emotions (first-order emotionality), made possible by the faculty of

reflexivity, but there are divergent views about the outcome of the revision

process (second-order emotionality) (Archer, 2000, p. 222). Archer broadly

aligns with Charles Taylor’s concept of evaluative reflection or

transvaluation, but ‘shorn’ of Taylor’s leaning towards an intuitive factor11

(Archer, 2000, pp. 223, 225, 226). She maintains that ‘the movement from

first-order to second-order emotionality entails a shift from the inarticulate

to the articulate, from the less adequate to the more adequate

characterisation and from initial evaluation to transvaluation’ (Archer,

2000, p. 227). Thus the inner conversation thickens. ‘The dialogical process

is one which aligns our predominant concerns with our pre-eminent

emotions, but in this process both elements will undergo modification

because of the interplay between them’. (Archer, 2000, p. 230)

10 For social realism this definition of emotions reclaims our affective lives from charges of subjectivism,

emotivism and emotional irrationalism. Concerning the last: we ‘are not free to make what we will of

a state of affairs, independently of how things are. (Indeed some of the inner dialogue is precisely

about the relationship between our epistemology and our ontology, and to miss this is to condemn

our emotionality to a living out of the epistemic fallacy’). The definition also avoids a problem

inherent in emotional cognitivism ‘which reduces the emotions to mere expressions of a full-blown

commitment system and thus denies the active role that a commentary plays towards a concern. This

properly includes the modification of concerns themselves – within the framework of the internal

conversation – which any cognitive theory rules out by definition in favour of expressive

monologue’. Archer outlines several problems faced by those cognitivists ‘who maintain that our

emotions derive from our cognitive interpretations, imposed upon reality, rather from reality itself.’

(Archer, 2000, p. 196) 11 For Archer, Taylor’s account ‘succumbs to an ethical intuitivism which confers morality directly upon

our emotions […] Its basic error is to conflate our concerns with our emotional commentaries upon

them. Concerns are judgments of worth and cannot be reduced to our human reactions towards

them. Conflating worth with being can only result in anthropomorphism because it elevates our

epistemic judgments over the ontological worth of their objects’ (Archer, 2000, p. 225).

87

As we deal with our competing concerns we arrive at our ultimate concerns, which

we associate with our own personal identity, or, we might say, by which we know who

and what we are. It is from within a person’s ‘vivid inner life’ that the properties and

powers of her personhood emerge (Archer, 2000, p. 248). Archer closes Part III by

reflecting on one’s scope for individual self-determination. In Part III her emphasis was

on our power to chart our own destiny, a sentiment that stands in opposition to both

‘Modernity’s Man’ and ‘Society’s Being’ thinking, wherein ‘denial of human autonomy

and authenticity dismisses the power of personal identity to shape our lives around

what we care about and commit ourselves to’ (Archer, 2000, p. 249). She notes that Part

IV, The emergence of social identity, necessarily involves a discussion of the limits to our

freedom, which arises from our embeddedness in a specific location (our involuntary

placement in the three orders of nature, practice and society). Being constrained is a

condition of being human (Archer, 2000, pp. 248-249).

________

So far I have presented a number of Archer’s ideas relating to her commitment to

the centrality of our continuous sense of self and the primacy of practice. Part of the

persuasiveness of Archer’s argument for the centrality of our personal ‘sense of self’ in

making sense of our individual gestalt experience is how seamlessly it meshes with

other constructs beyond it within her theory and how satisfying that overall position is.

The continuous sense of self is thus by no means the end of the social realist account of

the human phenomenon. What remains to be done is to take in the wider picture.

Towards a social realist account of ‘the human phenomenon’

In Archer’s account of being human, practical action constitutes the medium in which

our continuous sense of self forms. But can sociology provide a persuasive account of

‘all this’ – the broader phenomenon, today’s human world, as executed, as recollected,

as anticipated? In addressing this question I begin with the following passage at the

conclusion of Part II, The emergence of self-consciousness, one that foreshadows and

distils the broad sweep of her theory:

there is much more to the human being than a biological bundle of

molecules plus society's conversational meanings. In fact, between

the two, and reducible to neither, emerge our most crucial human

properties and powers – self-consciousness, reflexivity and a

goodly knowledge of the world, which is indispensable to thriving

in it. Thus it is in and through practice that many of our human

potentia are realised, potentials whose realisation are themselves

indispensable to the subsequent emergence of those 'higher' strata,

the individual with strict personal identity, who is also a social

Agent and Actor. Because so much happens, in practice, between

88

the 'molecules' and the 'meanings', analysis of the human being

cannot just be a simple division of labour between those (partial)

explanations, furnished by the neurobiologist, which are then

completed by the interpretative understandings of sociologists, and

immediately transform an organic parcel into a socialised being.

Indeed, it has been argued here that a human being who is capable

of hermeneutics has first to learn a good deal about himself or

herself, about the world, and about the relations between them, all

of which is accomplished through praxis. In short, the human being

is both logically and ontologically prior to the social being, whose

subsequent properties and powers need to build upon human ones.

There is therefore no direct interface between molecules and

meanings, for between them stretches this hugely important middle

ground of practical life in which our emerging properties and

powers distance us from our biological origins and prepare us for

our social becoming. (Archer, 2000, pp. 189-190)

________

Aside: Because my project, this quest for richer understanding,

is a hermeneutic study, it is fitting that I highlight Archer’s remark

about the preconditions for hermeneutic interpretation.

Hermeneutic meaning making is grounded in the flesh and blood

world of practice: (if) I have no experience of the world, (then) I

cannot make meaning. My motivation for this inquiry is an

immediate example. I noted in the opening pages of this work that

my interest in tackling my two research questions arose out of a

career in teaching at various levels. I trust that my immersion in

that whole series of practical teaching challenges, and my desire for

more for all my learners over four decades, is paying dividends now,

by inspiring me to ask really rich questions of myself and the field.

As I noted earlier, my claim to be conducting philosophical

hermeneutic research will be supported by the timbre of my

questioning.

________

Part IV constitutes the finale of Archer’s argument, in which the setting of the

human story moves to the social order, and the plot is about the dynamics between

individuals and collectivities and between freedom to choose and station in life,

explored through the role concepts of agent and actor. Throughout the whole journey of

living, we must remember, the unique and continuous sense of self does our

89

navigation for us. (The literary and journey metaphors used here are mine; ‘agent’ and

‘actor’ are Archer’s.)

At this point several terms need explanation. The category of agents refers to two

forms of social membership – Primary and Corporate Agents. Primary Agents are

collectivities sharing the same life-chances […] humanity enters

society through the maternity ward doors and we immediately

acquire the properties of Primary Agents through belonging to

particular collectivities and sharing their privileges or lack of

them […] we are always born into a system of social

stratification and it is crucial to my argument that ‘privilege’

and ‘under-privilege’ are regarded as properties that people

acquire involuntarily and not as roles that they occupy through

choice […] The quintessential features of all stratification

systems, namely ‘propertylessness’, ‘powerlessness’ and the

lack of prestige (together with their opposites), are thus

distributions determining life-chances, rather than an array of

roles with clearly defined normative expectations. (Archer,

2000, pp. 262-263)

Corporate agents are

Organised interest groups [that] represent the generation of a

new emergent property amongst people (a PEP [see below]),

whose power is the very special punch that they pack as far as

systemic stability and change are concerned. Only those who

are aware of what they want, can articulate it to themselves

and to others, and have organised in order to attain it, can

engage in concerted action to reshape or retain the structural

and/or cultural features in question […] they include self-

conscious vested interest groups, promotive interest groups,

social movements and defensive associations. (Archer, 2000, p.

265)

Archer uses Max Weber’s interpretation of ancient Indian and Chinese societies to

illustrate the difference between Corporate and Primary Agents and to show how

membership of the two classes remains fixed when structural and cultural factors

conspire to do so (Table 2.2).

90

Table 2.2. Corporate and Primary Agents contrasted in ancient India and China Source: After Archer (2000, p. 270)

Corporate Agents Primary Agents

Cultural factors Hegemonic ideas embedded in Brahmin/Literati subcultures

A population lacking the capacity to think outside the reigning cultural mindset

tied to tied to tied to

Structural factors Monolithic social structure: the elite holds wealth and power while …

… the population has no ability to oppose the status quo.

I just mentioned PEPs, but for Archer there are three categories of emergent human

accomplishment – PEPs, SEPs and CEPs. People’s emergent properties (PEPs) are the

properties and powers that characterise the first stage of human experience as

elaborated in Part III of Being Human and as already presented in this chapter. These

PEPs are closely tied to the primary PEP, our continuous sense of self as a unique

subject. Structural emergent properties (SEPs) and Cultural emergent properties (CEPs) are

structural and cultural factors that shape, but do not determine, the contexts in which

agents find themselves (Archer, 2000, p. 269). Both SEPs and CEPs are possessed by

Agents and Actors. SEPs relate to concepts referred to as structural factors while CEPs

are related to cultural factors (when used for analyses such as that in Table 2.2).

How do all these and numerous other, here-unmentioned elements of Archer’s

social theory come together? At the start of Part IV Archer offers this overview – one of

numerous miniature versions of the global argument:

In contradistinction to both ‘Society’s Being’ and ‘Modernity’s

Man’, social realism introduces a stratified view of ‘the subject’

whose different properties and powers (PEPs) emerge at each

level. To anticipate, the four strata involved are the self, the

person, the agent and the actor. The latter two are undoubtedly

our ‘social selves’ which emerge respectively through our

involuntary embroilment in society’s distribution of resources

and our voluntary involvement in society’s role-array.

However they are themselves dependent upon the prior

emergence of a continuous sense of self and are co-dependent

with the emergence of personal identity, which reflectively

balances its social concerns with those embedded in the natural

and practical orders of reality. The emergence of our ‘social

selves’ is something which occurs at the interface of ‘structure

and agency’. It is therefore necessarily relational, and for it to

91

be properly so, then independent properties and powers have

to be granted to both ‘structures’ and to ‘agents’. This is what is

distinctive about the social realist approach. It grants the

existence of people’s emergent properties (PEPs) and also the

reality of structural and cultural emergent properties (SEPs and

CEPs), and sees the development of agents and actors as

relational developments occurring between them. Conversely,

‘Society’s Being’ is a downward conflationary view in which

‘agency’ becomes an epiphenomenon of ‘structure’, whilst

‘Modernity’s Man’ is a version of upwards conflation in which

it is ‘structure’ which is the epiphenomenon of ‘agency’.

(Archer, 2000, pp. 254-255)

Why social realism matters

Time to consolidate the thrust of the argument of this chapter

At the top of the chapter I proposed that social realism investigates human societies as

if individual gestalt experience matters. I undertook to survey Archer’s book to gauge

the extent to which this proposition

offers a key to her argument, and to

consider how satisfying her overall

position is in making sense of the

human phenomenon … with tantalising

ramifications (it seems to me) for the

theory of meaning making being

presented in this thesis.

What was the rationale behind this strategy in terms of my larger purpose? A

simple logic is operating here, but it is a logic of emergent coherence. □ I have started

pointing to but have not yet adequately elaborated my notion of individual gestalt

experience (the short version was how we embrace reality, how we relate to the world)

and its intimate connection with ideas of ‘roundedness’, of human becoming (personal

ontology). I am asking the reader to suspend disbelief for the time being, because these

concepts will be richly unpacked in Chapter 6. □ I would say that my strategy makes

sense in terms of the unfolding logic of my thesis, provided I can establish my

proposition that individual gestalt experience does indeed faithfully interpret Archer’s

intent. □ What I still need to do is (1) to establish a conceptual affinity between Archer’s

social realism and individual gestalt experience; (2) progress my unfolding position

that individual gestalt experience matters in living and in professional practice: show

that the way we embrace reality matters in work, in living, and therefore also in

university professional education curriculum practice; and (3) entwine argument 2 into

‘Life is a hermeneutic journey. Human meaning making may be conceived as the lifelong, life-wide pursuit of understanding. Growth in understanding is the realisation of an ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world’ [Abstract]. In Part B I locate such thinking at the hub of the human phenomenon and at the hub of a university curriculum of belonging.

92

my fundamental theory of global understanding as the realisation of an ever more

complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world. Some of what remains to be

done will be taken up later as my argument spirals out in an ever more comprehensive

embrace. What I want to do here is clinch my assertion that individual gestalt

experience matters in Archer’s thesis.

If the short version of individual gestalt experience is how we embrace reality, how

we relate to the world, what more can be said? For the purposes of this thesis

individual gestalt experience refers to how we perceive the world coming to us and how we

receive her, longitudinally, cumulatively – the relationship we maintain with her. For a start,

our five sense organs provide the channels of welcome. Then, to borrow from my

Model A, The way humans experience self and world (Prologue, Figure P1), there are

six expressions of my humanness awaiting the coming of the world: my cognitive

capacity, my sociality, my physicality (the five sense domain), my emotionality, my

ethical sense and my spirituality. She (the world) may take me by surprise in any of

these modes of my being, bearing in mind that in gestalt experience, compartments of

being are not watertight: it is always the unitary ‘I’ who receives her. Importantly, I

receive the world within her myriad of appearances; as we saw from Bortoft (Chapter 1),

the whole is to be perceiv-

ed holographically, within

its parts, as William Blake

also so movingly intimat-

ed.

Importantly also, I want to expand on the practice aspect of our relating to the

world, in line with Archer’s assertion of the primacy of practice. Given my particular

focus in this thesis on meaning making as both sense making and realising individual

potential, I want to draw earlier comments about life as a hermeneutic journey into my

rich notion of individual gestalt experience: to argue that individual gestalt experience

is my ‘continuous present tense’ sense of self in the world – whether clearly articulated for

myself or held in hope as a future becoming – in my twin journeys of growth in global

understanding and towards self-actualisation. My individual gestalt experience is

ineluctably anchored in the story of my life. The lifelong metamorphosis unfolding in

my twin journeys can perhaps be compared to, perhaps glimpsed in the micro-scale

experience of the movement, in Archer’s terms, ‘from first-order to second-order

emotionality [in that such movement] entails a shift from the inarticulate to the

articulate, from the less adequate to the more adequate characterisation and from

initial evaluation to transvaluation’ (Archer, 2000, p. 227). That is to say,

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake, Poems from MSS: Auguries of Innocence, Lines 1–4, circa 1803 (Bronowski, 1958, p. 67)

93

IN SO FAR AS

individual gestalt experience is

my ‘continuous present tense’ sense of self in the world

AND IN SO FAR AS

growth in global understanding is the realisation of

an ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world

THEN TO THAT EXTENT

Archer’s description of the movement of first- to second-order emotionality –

‘a shift from the inarticulate to the articulate,

from the less adequate to the more adequate characterisation

and from initial evaluation to transvaluation’

– really does work also as a description of the unfolding nature

of growth in global understanding

and of the process of human self-actualisation.

So how can second-order emotionality function

as a cameo of one’s twin journeys of becoming?

Answer: all three journeys, we might say, give us time and space,

give us opportunity to find a way through the complexities of living,

to attune ourselves and our actions to our ‘ultimate concerns’ (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1. Three journeys of becoming

On each path we progressively discover how to express what was unexpressed

(naming); we keep making sense of experience (interpreting); and we evaluate

94

experience in the light of our concerns (critiquing). Divining our ultimate concerns is

the means by which we know who and what we are.

In the light of the foregoing, in what sense can Margaret Archer’s Being Human be

seen as an artefact of her own pursuit of understanding? To what extent is Being

Human an attempt to give a persuasive account of the broader human phenomenon –

today’s human world, as executed, as recollected, as anticipated? And does individual

gestalt experience matter in Archer’s account of the human phenomenon? I address

these questions by quoting two passages from Archer’s two book-end texts – her

Conclusion and her Introduction. Together they capture her global argument with

power and vehemence. I quote them at length, then draw the various strands of

thought in this chapter into synthesis.

TEXT A.

In conclusion, I want to argue that three of our major problems in

social theory are in fact interrelated. These are the 'problem of

structure and agency', the 'problem of subjectivism and objectivism'

and the 'problem of agency' itself. All hinge, in various ways, upon

the causal powers of people, their nature, emergence and efficacy.

Bringing real people back in, as robust and stratified beings,

presents solutions to these problems which cannot be solved by the

alternative strategy of impoverishing humanity. This

[impoverished strategy] tackles these issues by simply evacuating

agency itself. It is a scenario on which humanity grows weak so

that society can grow strong. This currently dominates social

theorising and has been shown throughout this book to be no

solution at all. On the contrary, it will only be the re-emergence of

humanity, meaning that due acknowledgement is given to the

properties and powers of real people forged in the real world,

which overcomes the present poverty of social theory. The most

important of these properties and powers is the 'inner

conversation', as the mode of articulation between people and

reality. Its exploration represents a new terrain for social theorising

to discover, and if it does so it will also make the discovery of the

enchantment of humankind. For value rationality is alive and well

and flourishes as part of being human. (Archer, 2000, p. 306)

TEXT B.

The 'inner conversation' [can be viewed] as the process which

generates our concrete singularity. The internal dialogue entails

disengaging our ultimate concerns from our subordinate ones and

95

then involves elaborating the constellation of commitments with

which each one of us feels we can live. The 'inner conversation' is

about exploring the terms of a liveable degree of solidarity for the

self in its commitments, and the unique modus vivendi to emerge is

what defines the uniqueness of personal identity. Whereas self-

identity, the possession of a continuous sense of self, was held to be

universal to human beings, personal identity is an achievement. It

comes only at maturity but it is not attained by all: it can be lost, yet

re-established.

In short, we are who we are because of what we care about: in

delineating our ultimate concerns and accommodating our

subordinate ones, we also define ourselves. We give a shape to our

lives, which constitutes our internal personal integrity, and this

pattern is recognisable by others as our concrete singularity.

Without this rich inner life of reflection upon reality, which is the

generative mechanism of our most important personal emergent

property, our unique identity and way of being in the world, then

we are condemned to the impoverishment of either 'Modernity's

Man' or 'Society's Being', neither of whom play a robust and active

role in who they are. They have been rendered passive because

they have been morally evacuated; since they themselves are not

allowed to play a major part in the making of their own lives.

Realism revindicates real powers for real people who live in the

real world.

However, we do not make our personal identities under the

circumstances of our own choosing. Our placement in society

rebounds upon us, affecting the persons we become, but also and

more forcefully influencing the social identities which we can

achieve. Personal and social identity must not be elided, because

the former derives from our relations with all three orders of

reality, whilst our social selves are defined only in social terms.

Nevertheless, the emergence of the two are intertwined […].

(Archer, 2000, p. 10)

In what sense can Margaret Archer’s Being Human be seen as an artefact of her own

pursuit of understanding? This question is relevant to my thesis theme of realising

hermeneutic understanding, central to which is the comprehensive scale of her

meaning making challenge. Ronald Bontekoe expresses the idea with nice clarity;

96

according to Bontekoe, the hermeneutic circle implies that the quest for understanding

knows no bounds:

Given that the hermeneutic circle involves the constant bringing to

bear of new information into increasingly adequate interpretations

of the object, hermeneutical inquiry has no natural resting place, no

point at which it can suspend its operations with a sense of the job

well and thoroughly done, short of an understanding of the entire

world, and of the entire world, moreover, as an integrated world.

Thus we find Hans-Georg Gadamer, for example, remarking at

times upon what he calls an ‘ultimate need of reason: to be able to

preserve a unity within the totality of what is’ (Gadamer, 1983, p.

2). (Bontekoe, 2000, p. 10)

The hermeneutic circle is evident in Archer’s text on two different planes: Being

Human is an artefact of Archer’s pursuit of understanding both within and beyond the

discourses of social theory. First, as is clear from my account of her key arguments, her

book is a major critique of the world of social theory, as concentrated in the two

traditions that Archer labels ‘Modernity’s Man’ and ‘Society’s Being’. In text B just

quoted, Archer argues that only when ‘due acknowledgement is given to the

properties and powers of real people forged in the real world’ that ‘the present poverty

of social theory’ will be redressed. Second – if I was insightful when I proposed that the

defining feature of human kind is the fulfilment it gains from growth in understanding

(McKenzie, 1996) – Archer’s Being Human is an expression of the universal, innate,

human propulsion to find comprehensive explanations, framed within one’s setting in

life, lifeworld, worldview. From my perspective Archer has crafted a persuasive

explanation of why ‘things’ – human history and civilisation – hang together in the

way they do. She weaves a complex, sometimes complicated argument, but this is

because she is ‘impelled from within’ to take a new direction, to offer a way out of

what she calls ‘the present poverty of social theory’. Thus she gives a re-appraisal of

the multiple and conflicting assumptions and frames of reference that populate the

sociological literature. I daresay the plethora of technical terms used in her theory

could be daunting for non-sociologists. However, beyond the discursive cacophony of

her battles with the proponents of ‘Modernity’s Man’ and ‘Society’s Being’, Archer’s

vision is quintessentially simple because it is quintessentially human. She offers a

social theory formed from categories of explanation that make equally credible sense of

societies as different as Dickens’ London, Hitler’s Germany and Gandhi’s India; and

yours and mine. On the one hand, she says, ‘we are who we are because of what we

care about: in delineating our ultimate concerns and accommodating our subordinate

ones, we also define ourselves’; and yet on the other, ‘Our placement in society

rebounds upon us, affecting the persons we become, but also and more forcefully

97

influencing the social identities which we can achieve’ (text B). Herein lies the tension,

raised earlier, between the individual and the collective. It is in view of all this that I

have argued in this chapter that in Being Human Archer attempts to give a persuasive

account of the broader human phenomenon – today’s human world, as executed, as

recollected, as anticipated.

So does individual gestalt experience matter in Archer’s account of the human

phenomenon (bearing in mind that this is my term, not hers)? Her account is one that

views people as meaning makers, grounding their continuous sense of self in their own

life story. We are all, individually, arbiters of our own reality. Clearly Archer’s claim

aligns with my definition of individual gestalt experience as one’s ‘continuous present

tense’ sense of self in the world. Her theory works for me because her concept of continuous

sense of self is already working for me as the still point of my turning world of meaning

making. The continuous sense of self is the ubiquitous presence in my lifelong journey

of growth in understanding and self-actualisation. It becomes the fundamental category

of explanation upon which to make sense of self in the world – of all this – including

theories of society. As I indicated above, for me Archer’s vision is quintessentially

simple because it is quintessentially human. And thus I find her overall position

satisfying in making sense of the human phenomenon … with tantalising ramifications

(it seems to me) for my theory of meaning making. I take up the implications of all this

for my theory of understanding and my model of a university curriculum of becoming

in Part B.

99

Chapter 3.

Feeling as progenitor of

understanding

A beginning

One’s meaning perspective: on the relevance of my stance as hermeneutic meaning maker

Vantage point: on the influence of my stance as hermeneutic meaning maker

Investigating affective experience

A point of entry into Campbell’s and my arguments

Affective experience

Affective expression

From affective expression to affective explanation

The endless enigmas of self-knowledge

My critical overview

The relevance of my argument for twenty-first century university education

A beginning

Figure 3.1. Emergence from the sleet1

In Chapter 2 I considered Archer’s case that our

actions are triggered by our ‘human concerns’,

and that these concerns are modes of awareness

of situation, expressed in our emotions. In this

chapter I will further interrogate the place of

feelings in human experience and in meaning

making. My goal in this chapter is to present a

sound argument that affect is primal and

ubiquitous in human experience and needs to be

factored in to a study on human meaning

making. I will also examine the relevance of this

argument to my thesis context of university

professional education in the twenty-first century.

The title of this chapter, Feeling as progenitor of

understanding, is intended to be an evocative

figure of speech. I want it to sow the seed-thought

1 Artwork by Jos A. Smith ([email protected]), from Morse, J., Mathews, N., & Seeger, P. (1971).

The Sierra Club Survival Songbook, San Francisco: Sierra Club. All rights reserved.

Chapter map

100

that affect and understanding may enjoy a complex, ambiguous, fecund relationship.

Let me commence by working outwards from ‘progenitor’, literally (1) a direct

ancestor, (2) an originator, as of an artistic movement (Delbridge et al., 1991), but which

for me also carries connotations of movement, of birthing, of becoming, because it is

essentially about intergenerational life and growth.

At first glance, our experience of the transformation of pre-feeling into tangible

expression might be viewed as a metaphor or portent of the sometimes fuzzy

experience of meaning making. This argument could be expressed in the form, ‘Just as

our feelings can give the impression of welling up from nowhere, so can thoughts’. It is

reasoning by analogy. However the more enticing view of meaning making being

presented here is that our upwellings of feeling form part of our process of making and

finding meaning. The immediate application of this view to curriculum design may be

elusive but, as I will argue in Part B of this thesis, some dimensions of the enactment of

a curriculum of becoming are concerned with human potential (human becoming) and

thus resist being bundled with those more tangible educational outcomes generally

considered to be measurable. We cannot measure tomorrow. If educators design

learning experiences only in terms of what can be measured – recall that in the

Prologue I described how universities are being pressured to ‘perform’ in terms of

student achievement – our students’ ‘becoming’ may fall short of what some of us hope

for.2 One of the significant contributions of this thesis to our understanding of meaning

making will be a recognition of, a coming to terms with the idea that ‘lack of clarity is

the prior state of growth in understanding’ (McKenzie, 1999). For me ‘coming to terms’

with this claim involves ‘valuing it essentially, even obscurely’. If we accept this view

we will be more inclined to give ourselves and our students permission to linger

happily in a ‘muddy waters’ episode, savouring the experience, in our efforts to

understand, as opposed to thinking that lack of clarity is a bad thing. The image of

someone emerging from the sleet (Figure 3.1) evokes the idea of emergence from lesser

to greater clarity in an affecting way.

In her book, Interpreting the Personal: Expression and the Formation of Feelings, Sue

Campbell (1997) inquires into the phenomenon of affect from the disciplinary stance of

philosophy of mind. One of Campbell’s achievements is her articulation of the

elusiveness of much of affective experience, its mystique and its origins in what I have

in a different context called the ‘Realm of Unknowing’ (McKenzie, 1999). I will shortly

2 My argument here is for the time being putting aside the very real and strong desire of many

students to be able to focus solely on things that they will need to do well in in exams. I take up this

issue in Appendix 8, section, Reflections radiating from potential responses from students.

101

use Campbell’s text as a springboard into an exploration of the ‘muddy waters‘ of

making meaning from and through our feelings. First however I want to reflect on my

choice of Campbell’s text as a significant source for my thesis – what in particular led

me to make this choice.

One’s meaning perspective: On the relevance of my stance as

hermeneutic meaning maker

We accumulate meaning. It snowballs. In the moment, we make sense on the basis of

past sense made. In this chapter, as I offer my interpretation of Campbell’s book,

Interpreting the Personal, I will use my own prior experience of making meaning as a

test case for reflexively investigating the meaning making phenomenon. In that spirit I

ask: in what sense was I already primed to embrace Campbell’s position as central to my own?

How was I pre-tuned to her argument? My answer hinges on Mezirow and colleagues’

concept of meaning perspective:

Meaning perspectives, or generalised sets of habitual expectation,

act as perceptual and conceptual codes to form, limit, and distort

how we think, believe, and feel and how, what, when, and why we

learn. They have cognitive, affective, and conative dimensions.

These habits of expectation filter both perception and

comprehension. (Mezirow, 1991, p. 34)

If I am going to use the concept of meaning perspective in an account of human

meaning making practices, Mezirow and colleagues’ definition is holistic enough for

my present purposes. I am proposing that one’s meaning perspective is both reflected in

and fashioned through one’s past experiences of meaning making (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2. The dynamics of an individual’s meaning perspective

The stance I adopt, the fore-understandings I bring with me in any act of textual

engagement, colours my interpretation. However fluid my ‘meaning perspective’

might be over time, it is my present tense meaning perspective that does the filtering

that Mezirow points to. The ‘meaning perspective’ construct can thus be viewed as a

logical link in a theoretical account of meaning making. We can employ the term to

102

help make sense of and discuss how each individual’s life story – my cumulative

experience of meaning making – impacts on how I conceive myself and the world, and

thus on who I am. Every individual’s meaning making experiences are unique because one’s

meaning perspective is thoroughly informed

by one’s unique life experience. The

question for my present argument

becomes, how did my life experience colour my meaning perspective and therefore the

sense I made of Campbell’s text and my use of her theory of affect in my own thesis?

Vantage point: On the influence of my stance as hermeneutic

meaning maker

I point here to several episodes in my life that will help me convey a sense of how well

primed I was (in my view) to appreciate and embrace Campbell’s theory of affect.

One episode was my master’s research in the 1990s. The thesis described an action

research project that sought to develop recommendations for a distance education

program for primary producers (McKenzie, 1996). I was interested in seeking a fresh

view of the meaning making experience in order to inform curriculum design for

practice. In a leap of metaphor I conceived ‘landmark-spotting’ as a representation of

meaning making. For me, the power of this metaphor lies in its emphasis on the

uniqueness of individual meaning making. In a sense a landmark is recreated each

time people scan a landscape – they either re-value the significance of the landmark or

tacitly concur with such valuing by others.4 Just as in the case of visual perception in a

physical landscape, so in the case of meaning making: what I value and how I think

determines how I render my world. Landmark-spotting is a personal, subjective

occurrence, albeit culturally informed.5

How is this pertinent to my present argument? In that same research there was one

line of inquiry of particular relevance here – a collaborative learning simulation called

the Twenty Memories exercise. My co-researchers and I agreed to reflect upon and

seek meaning in our various life stories through a prism that ‘landmarked’ 20

significant moments or memories.6 Memories were to be chosen as significant in the

sense that they shed light on the persons we took ourselves to be when we did the

exercise. One memory I considered was a photo of myself as a young child holding a

pram with a doll and a soft toy (Figure 3.3). For me the photo symbolised what I regard

as my caring nature. Another memory I considered for my set of twenty was also based

3 From ‘A Global Frame of Mind’, by Tony McKenzie and Daryl Chute. Finale of A Medieval Frame of

Mind, Singleton High School drama production, early 1980s; see p. 23. 4 Landmark-spotting is thus what some writers call foregrounding. 5 Many writers have theorised the role of culture and/or language in shaping the lifeworld from which

we draw meaning. Archer (see Chapter 2) counterbalances that way of thinking by asserting ‘the

primacy of practice’ (Archer, 2000, pp. 121-153). 6 Landmark-spotting thus serves as a conceptual tool in the process of identifying one’s 20 memories.

‘Draw a ring around your world With that line you define who you are.’3

103

on a childhood photo – young Tony sitting on the steps of our St Kilda flat ‘play-acting’

a reading of Shakespeare (Figure 3.4). That photo represented what I see as my

‘performer’ leaning, a quality that I would express as child, adolescent and adult

through home ‘productions’, child drama teaching and the performing arts. In my

mind these two photos were vying for the twentieth spot in my selection of 20

memories. I return to the significance of that dilemma shortly.

Figure 3.3. Young Tony as carer

Figure 3.4. Young Tony as actor

Another episode was a workshop I facilitated at the 1997 Women of the Land

Gathering at Tocal Agricultural College, Paterson in New South Wales. The forum was

an opportunity for women on the land to jointly explore issues of common interest and

also seek ways of supporting each other by working together in tough rural times. My

workshop was titled Muddy waters, the unknown and the Welcome Stranger. This was the

first time I had used ‘muddy waters’ as a metaphor to engage learners cerebrally,

emotionally and imaginatively in the possibility that ‘being open to the obscurity

before the clarity can be one of the

nicest things’ (McKenzie, 1996, p. 134).

The workshop handout provided

participants with a ‘felt rationale’ for

spending time together on such ideas;

see Appendix 5.

I also recall two earlier pieces of reflective writing expressing my disposition

towards being open to the obscurity that precedes the experience of clarity. Now they

help me convey my attraction to the notion of the mystery of pre-feeling’s flowering.

The first is a ‘place name’ I created during my master’s thesis writing; the other, a

metaphor from a poem I composed in 1990. The place name was ‘Realm of

Unknowing’; the metaphor: ‘phial of unknowing’. Muddy waters, Realm of Unknowing

and phial of unknowing are all expressions of my deep interest in the mysterious source

of personal meaning-feeling / feeling-meaning:

‘Self-acceptance is a landmark in personal development, but sometimes the waters get muddy, and self-acceptance starts to feel more like resignation. Could there be more to me than I thought? Welcome, Stranger.’

From workshop blurb, Gathering program

104

Of the Realm of Unknowing ...

‘that primal domain of personhood forever beyond conscious reach, where thought,

feeling and intent are one – or more accurately, where such distinctions are

unthinkable’

McKenzie (1999)

Of the phial of unknowing (extract) ...

... Against the backdrop of constellations

the sojourn within unfolds.

Then journey on, journey in ...

Reflections are reflections of reflections

and every private journey is the journey of us all.

And dance with us.

The patterns that beguile –

in heaven's canopy

in the filigrees of living

in the warp and woof of your knowing unknowing –

we are One

the patterns are

Any wonder

the deep darkness at the bottom of the well

draws you back to the black of yourself?

Darkness

inviting

cascades of

echoing

plugged up of sense

dense darkness

velvetless

untexture.

The phial of unknowing is forever.

If it should well up,

do not refuse.

In pores of openness

the spores of entreaty are burgeoning.

McKenzie (1990, pp. 8-9)

105

I will now offer my illumination of Interpreting the Personal. In the final section of

the chapter I will reflect on how well-primed I was to accept Campbell’s ideas.

Investigating affective experience

This chapter was ambitiously conceived in the sense that I wanted to use my account of

Interpreting the Personal to drive my case that affect has a fundamental role in meaning

making and as a consequence deserves attention in the design of a fit-for greater

purpose university curriculum.7 (This was before I had heard of Margaret Archer and

the text studied in Chapter 2 of this thesis, Being Human, which also has quite a lot to

say on these matters. I refer to this convergence of thought at the end of this chapter.)

The discussion provides an illustration of hermeneutic textual interaction in the

process of rendering my thesis argument.

A point of entry into Campbell’s and my arguments

One point of entry into two arguments (Campbell’s and mine)? Thanks to the nature of

language, of text and cognition, it is theoretically possible to nest an account of

Campbell’s argument within my broader argument, and to broach both via a common

idea.8 Campbell writes:

although my feelings cannot always be said to have a clear

propositional content, when I express a feeling, I am nevertheless

attempting to communicate a kind of meaning. I am attempting to

communicate the significance or importance to me of some

occasion. (Campbell, 1997, p. 111)

Before I comment on this quotation I shall first outline Campbell’s position on affective

experience and how she sees the reactions by those around us to our acts of affective

expression. We will then be in a position to consider Campbell’s and my positions on

affective experience as meaning making. The ramifications of these explorations for

curriculum design for a fit-for-greater-purpose twenty-first century university

education will be considered in Part B.

7 I say ambitiously conceived because of the difficulty of the challenge, given my impression, drawn

from daily interactions with numerous colleagues, all apparently committed to my institution’s

embrace of ‘curriculum renewal’, that ‘fuzzy’ ideas – I would call them ‘nuanced’ ideas – don’t get a

hearing, as if they are on a frequency not of this world. This deeply felt experience of mine became

the substrate in which the uncertainty efflorescence metaphor took form in my ‘curriculum of becoming

mindspace’ (theory or theorising); but we get to this in Appendix 8 (see p. 328). 8 In such cases the unfolding line of thought of the text will be more immediately concerned with either

argument A or B at any given point, but by the end it should be possible to have faithfully presented

both cases.

106

Affective experience

For millennia, fiction, poetry and other

creative arts across all literate cultures

have explored the phenomenon of

human feelings. In Interpreting the

Personal, Campbell mines those sources

for vignettes of people to expound her

theory of affect.

Campbell writes of feeling as a general class of experience. Within that class she

distinguishes ‘classic emotions’ from ‘free-form feelings’. ‘Classic’ or standard

emotions refers to are those which are seen within a particular period and culture as

‘familiar’ (Campbell, 1997, p. 2), easily recognisable10. The remainder are, in Campbell’s

words, ‘free-form’, i.e. not conforming to experiences thought to be standard.

Campbell’s need for her ‘free-form’ category is palpably conveyed in her writing. She

reflects:

I cannot reliably construct my domain of investigation from the

leftovers of philosophical lists because I want especially to attend to

what might never have made it on to the list in the first place.

(Campbell, 1997, p. 4)

When she writes about constructing her domain of investigation she is alluding to

an underlying question in her argument: where may we find an adequate theory of

affect? She opens her argument by giving a historical perspective on emotion theory.

While philosophers have been happy to recognise the role of desire in an explanation

of human action, ‘emotions and other affective experiences’ have been sidelined; they

have not generally been included in accounts of action because they are not viewed as

a ‘unified psychological category’ (Campbell, 1997, p. 2). She says most philosophers

who engage in theorising emotions analyse a limited number of familiar emotions as

the basis for a broader theory. For example, she notes Rom Harré’s comment: ‘In this

work, we will be dealing in detail with about a dozen emotions only. But our aim is

9 Alfred Edward Housman was a poet and classical scholar (Housman, 1896). 10 ‘Historically the emotions often have been included in a description of the conative faculty because of

their obvious role as powerful motives. Hobbes, for example, placed desire and emotion in the same

psychological category, a genus of simple passions (appetite, desire, love, aversion, hate, joy and grief

[Hobbes, 1971, Chap. VI]) […] We might try to fix our domain of investigation by working with a list

of the classic passions: love, fear, anger, envy, pity, jealousy and the like. We could analyze some set

of these passions and suggest something like typical conditions for emotional experience. But should

we, like Gilbert Ryle, include vanity, a moral vice, or more appealingly, go back to Hobbes and

reinstate pusillanimity, that temperamental characteristic of making a big deal out of small

difficulties? It is difficult and suspect to provide an analysis of emotion or to use emotions in an

explanatory structure for action or behaviour without being very sure what we are talking about.’

(Campbell, 1997)

For example: ‘Through their reins* in ice and fire Fear contended with desire’ (Housman, 1896).9 * ‘reins’ (Middle French): kidneys; believed to be the seat (organ) of the feelings or affections

107

exemplification, not salience to life’s little problems or completeness in the scientific

sense’ (Campbell, 1997, p. 3).

Campbell sees a ‘serious methodological problem’ in such approaches. She illustrates

her concern with a vignette from Janice Keefer’s novel, Rest Harrow – Anna’s dilemma

when writing to her special person about whether to use the common signature phrase,

Love, Anna. ‘How would she ever finish this letter ... How could she write “love” when

she’d never said it?’ For Campbell, people frequently experience states that do not

coincide with the classic emotions.

Often our feelings are too nuanced, complex or inchoate to be easily

categorised. The complexity of an emotional life is both a value and

a danger. It is through the attempted expression of our feelings that

we come to understand and convey what is of significance to us.

But when we try to express our feelings to others, we are frequently

misunderstood, and our experience is often distorted. My study

begins from the conviction that any adequate theory of emotions should

account for the value of the variety of feelings that give meaning to

people’s lives. (Campbell, 1997, p. 5)

When she writes that ‘our feelings are too nuanced, complex or inchoate to be

easily categorised’, I am reminded of my Realm of Unknowing (p. 102), whose very

raison d’être in my allegorical landscape of meanings is to be a home for inklings yet to

be differentiated as thought, feeling or intent in awareness.11 Perhaps we are most truly

ourselves in our moments of heightened awareness of inklings of personal significance

that we cannot encapsulate nor plumb ...



do not refuse.


the spores of entreaty are burgeoning (p. 102).

Poetry can be an art of poignant enigma. Earlier in the phial passage the poet

savoured ‘the warp and woof of your knowing unknowing’. Now he finds himself

expressing a thickly inter-woven (warping-

woofing) thought-feeling-intention (‘... do

not refuse’ etc.) in the tactile,

experiential world. We may wonder

whether reverence for one’s phial or

11 ‘My allegorical landscape of meanings’: Campbell uses the phrase ‘continental maps of the mind’ and

associates it with Ryle’s idea of ‘a continental geography’ as a metaphor for philosophy; she notes

that similar imagery is not uncommon in the philosophical literature (Campbell, 1997, p. 5).

Another writer might dismiss the extract as meaningless because it is too confounding. Yet poets and poetry lovers are able to brave such lack of clarity; sometimes they luxuriate in it. For poets, lingering in muddy waters is core business.

108

Realm of Unknowing (whether tacit or acknowledged) could be an enabling

predisposition for articulating hopes of a warping-woofing timbre. This would be close

to saying that our frame of mind or worldspace penetrates our thoughts and aspirations,

just as Mezirow’s ‘meaning perspective’ does. In such moments of reverential feeling a

meaning maker might be a living embodiment of the value position:

That shadowland in the distance,

that’s my Realm of Unknowing,

and I treasure it absolutely.

As Campbell pens her thought about our feelings sometimes being ‘too nuanced,

complex or inchoate’, I think she seeks to express her deep valuing of our affective life

– demonstrating yet another realisation of our (humankind’s) in-the-moment,

existential, profound valuing of something essentially–obscurely – thus exhibiting a

thoroughly philosophical hermeneutic approach to textual composition.12 It’s a

disposition also expressed in the title of her Introduction – The rich smell of hiddenness.

Campbell borrowed this phrase from one of her literary sources – Rick Bass’s An

Oilman’s Notebook: Oil Notes (Bass, 1988, pp. 16-19). The experience in question is an oil

field worker’s struggle to convey his experience of the search for oil. ‘The rich smell of

hiddenness’ is how Bass expresses his experience when oil first bubbles out of the pipe.

Until that moment he cannot find words to convey his feeling. He writes, ‘I don’t know

yet, without drilling, how to bridge that gap. It is the frozen sea within me’ (Campbell,

1997, p. 5). The comment is tantalisingly ambiguous; it illustrates what Campbell calls

the inchoate or not yet formed nature of free-form feelings. One reading would be to

see the frozen sea metaphor as an approximation of Bass’ idea, noted earlier in the

narrative extracted by Campbell, that language is inadequate to capture what he is

feeling – knowing where the oil is, yet not having it, the experience of effectively being

rendered wordless (a kind of frozenness) in the face of a welling, overwhelming

‘something’. In this extract Bass finds himself struggling to express ‘what it feels like’

using a technique reminiscent (for me) of my phial of unknowing passage, in the sense

that in both texts the writers play with notions of movement to problematise the

12 According to philosophical hermeneutics we do well to read between the lines – and the words – of a

text. Gadamer, cited in Davey:

Every word breaks forth as if from a center and is related to a whole, through which alone it is a

word. Every word causes the whole of the language to which it belongs to resonate and the

whole world view that underlies it to appear. Thus, every word, as the event of a moment, carries

with it the unsaid … The occasionality of human speech is not a causal imperfection of its

expressive power; it is, rather the logical expression of the living virtuality of speech that brings a

totality of meaning into play without being able to express it totally. All human speaking is finite

in such a way that there is laid up within it an infinity of meaning to be explicated and laid out.

That is why the hermeneutical phenomenon also can be illuminated only in light of the

fundamental finitude of being, which is wholly verbal in character (Gadamer, 1989, p. 458)

(emphases added). (Davey, 2006, p. 74)

109

human experience of lack of clarity, or its cousin, experiencing the ineffable (‘that

cannot be uttered or expressed’ [Delbridge et al., 1991]).

As I have indicated, Campbell’s thesis emerges out of a demarcation she draws

between ‘classic emotions’ and other, less ‘well behaved’ intimations (her ‘free-form

feelings’). The classic emotions are ‘conceptually well behaved’ in the sense that they

align with, in a sense conform to, the terms we use to describe them. (The classic

emotion experiences conform to their named categories in the sense that

cultures/communities have conventional behaviours by which to express them [Campbell,

1997, pp. 6, 12]). But Campbell is persuaded that an adequate theory of affect must pay

equal attention to experiences that have proven too … hard? ... for philosophers to deal

with:

I wish to give an account of […] ‘affect’ […] as a category of interest

in what people have to say about their lives, of understanding or

explanation of people’s behavior, and of interaction between or

among people. I wish, in this way, as William James wished, to

account for the aesthetic sphere of the mind, ‘with its longings, its

pleasures and pains, and its emotions’ […] Like Bass [she writes], ‘I

have fallen in love with [an] underground geography. (Campbell,

1997, pp. 5-6)

Here I pause to consider what vast, idiosyncratic webs of meaning I as Campbell’s

interpreter am capable of – as we all are, in our own private worlds of meaning

making. I feel very comfortable

embracing Bass’ and Campbell’s

admissions of love as my own. ‘My own

private Holy of Holies’ is a place-name

that enters my thoughts as I struggle

with these themes – another way of

construing the notion (raised earlier) of

showing reverence for one’s phial or Realm of Unknowing. Borrowing a religious term

(Holy of Holies13) to express a secular sense of profound presence before oneSelf as

intimated earlier in the phial of unknowing passage (‘back to the black of yourself’)

may have limited appeal in a secular age, but perhaps non-religious people will not be

averse to using religious imagery to help make sense of inner experience. Religious

believers, who presumably will have an experiential affinity for the Holy of Holies

13 ‘HOLY OF HOLIES ([…] Hebr. […] "Bet Ḳodesh ha-Ḳodashim," II Chron. iii. 8, 10; R. V. "the most

holy house"): That part of the Tabernacle and of the Temple which was regarded as possessing the

utmost degree of holiness (or inaccessibility), and into which none but the High Priest – and he only

once during the year, on the Day of Atonement – was permitted to enter.’ Retrieved from

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/art icles/7830-holy-of-holies.

Perhaps we are most truly ourselves in our moments of heightened awareness of inklings of personal significance that we cannot encapsulate nor plumb.

I mean struggle pleasurably – a case of lingering happily in a ‘muddy waters’ episode, savouring the experience, in my effort to understand.

110

idea, should be well-placed to evaluate this secular use of it because they are likely to

invest much in the concept, as they know it from within. I ask: is there a sense in which

approaching one’s own inner sanctum calls for reverential solemnity independent of one’s

religious leanings? I identify with Campbell’s and Bass’ expressions of love for what I

am calling the Realm of Unknowing, and hereby complement these with a notion of

reverence in this investigation of meaning making.

Beyond a consideration of the nature of affective experience, Campbell addresses

two associated major themes – affective expression and affective explanation. I turn to these

now. My coverage of Campbell’s themes here is governed by the needs of my own

argument, yet I aim in the process to do justice to her gestalt position.

Affective expression

A second major theme of Interpreting the Personal flows elegantly out of her account of

the nature of affect, and that is the central importance of expressing how we feel.

Campbell argues that it is in such ‘making evident’ that that feeling is ‘individuated’,

rendered graspable to self and others. She writes:

Personal significance is a type of meaning, and its determination is

subject to the same public conditions of interpretability as other

types of meaning. How we feel is to be understood in terms of how

we behave insofar as this behaviour is interpretable. Expression

individuates or forms feeling, and expressive behaviour is itself

publicly individuated. (Campbell, 1997, p. 12)

For Campbell, the passage about Bass’ passion for oil illustrates one of her core

arguments, that ‘to understand affect... is centrally to understand both the activity of

expression and the risks of expressive failure’ (Campbell, 1997, p. 6). Bass is

experiencing a compound longing – his longing for oil coupled with a longing to be

able to express his initial longing. His awareness of the risk of expressive failure

heightens the intensity of his global feeling. Campbell’s main focus in the first part of

the book is therefore to elaborate the relationship between ‘feeling’ and ‘expression’ as

an enabling discourse to help us make sense of ‘the range of people’s affective

experiences’ (Campbell, 1997, p. 6) in our daily lives. As a philosopher Campbell

understands that a theory of affect must illuminate and account for the entire

phenomenon including the possibility of layered, reflexive, internally dissonant

affective states like Bass’.

Campbell is touched by the significance of Bass’ longing ‘to make us understand

his passion for finding oil’. She asserts that ‘one of the greatest pains of the aesthetic

sphere is our inability to articulate our pleasures, pains and longings’ (Campbell, 1997,

p. 6). Later in her study she shows that it is in expressionist theories of art, rather than

111

in the broad philosophical literature of mind14, that we can find illuminations of the

role of expression in affective experience. Aesthetic theory has capitalised on the

complex meanings of the English word ‘expression’ to represent what is in itself a

complex phenomenon (1997, p. 70).

Two themes emerging from Campbell’s discussion of aesthetic theory are

especially germane to my concerns here. The first is that she acknowledges the

‘centrality of the aesthetic impulse in life – what might be called the ordinary

importance of art’ (Campbell, 1997, p. 70). In my present investigation into the nature

and significance of understanding, as in Campbell’s inquiry into the nature and

significance of affect, we do well to strive for more rather than less generally applicable

explanations. Art and artistic endeavour are quintessential expressions of human

experience, and yet it is not only in the aesthetic sphere – in the expression and

interpretation of experience in art and craft – where pleasures, pains and longings are

rendered. Of course. They are everywhere where people participate in human

endeavours and possess the ‘expressive resources’ to render them. Our ongoing

struggles to have others understand the things that are important to us – that is, to

understand us – require that we use our individual capacities for self-expression,

whether in art/craft or in the transactions of daily living.

The second point I mention here, consolidating and extending earlier discussion, is

Campbell’s endorsement of the linking of feeling and expression within expressionist

theories of art. These theories do so by representing expression as an activity and

feelings as unique to a given situation. She writes:

The classic expressionist theories that I have discussed all give an

account of expression as an activity that individuates, objectifies, or

embodies an affective experience in a way that contributes to its

uniqueness. All are, as well, intensely committed to vindicating the

importance of the uniqueness and variety of affective experiences.

All expressionist theories are committed to the existence of nuanced

and nameless feelings that are neither reducible to sensations nor

the sorts of states that are adequately captured by the categories of

the classic emotions. Expressionist theories are the only body of

theory in which the free-style feelings that I wish to defend15 make

a sustained philosophical appearance. (Campbell, 1997, p. 71)

14 Campbell notes that different theorists have taken stances that reflect their particular positions on

what she calls ‘the status of the mental’. She notes for example that Ducasse would say that our

psychological states are formed before we express them. ‘This commitment is reflected in his parallel

views of language, as a medium not through which we think, but in which we encode our thoughts’;

in this view expression is ‘an activity of objectification’, not individuation (Campbell, 1997, p. 73). 15 Bass’ layered ‘feeling-for-oil’ state is an example; Campbell provides and explicates a number of other

examples as well.

112

Expression is ‘an activity that individuates, objectifies, or embodies an affective

experience in a way that contributes to its uniqueness’ (Campbell, 1997, p. 71). I find

a pleasing parallel here to my argument that one’s meaning making experiences are

unique because one’s meaning perspective is thoroughly informed by one’s unique life

experience. If this paragraph seems like a dislocation, a gear shift from a discussion on

‘affect’ to one on ‘making/finding meaning’, remember that I am arguing that feeling is,

in itself, part of an individual’s process of making and finding meaning. Campbell

essentially avows the same position – that ‘when I express a feeling, I am... attempting

to communicate a kind of meaning’. In this chapter on the tandem themes of affect and

understanding I am following ‘a logic of emergent coherence’ (McKenzie, 1996); by the

end I anticipate that the reader will be persuaded that arguing for one position

(expression individuates feeling) within a case for a more general position (expression

individuates meaning) offers plausible working theories for both phenomena. My main

point here is to acknowledge and value the uniqueness of both individual affective

experience and individual meaning making.

From affective expression to affective explanation

What is affective explanation? For Campbell,

the category of affective explanation is the category of explaining

behavior through what we take to be the personal or

autobiographical significance of that behaviour for its subject.

When people express a feeling, they are trying to make clear the

meaning or significance of something in the context of how they

view their lives. When we identify, recognise, or respond to

behavior as expressive of feeling, we are attempting to understand

or interpret how something is significant for a particular person.

(Campbell, 1997, p. 126)

‘[A]ffective explanation is the category of explaining behavior through what we

take to be the personal or autobiographical significance of that behavior for its

subject’ (Campbell, 1997, p. 126). This description places affective explanation at the

core of meaning making. To paraphrase and personalise affective explanation: if I want

to convey to you or others what I make of your bearing, your presence before me, I

should try to read the evidence (your bearing) as an expression of the essential you. I

should see your demeanour, especially the way your face looks at me and to me, as

emanating from the things that are most important to you. But also note how this

statement adds a further nuance to the meaning of another of Campbell’s primary

constructs, affective expression, thus emphasising the practical link16 between

16 ‘Practical link’: considering how this theorising of human behaviour might be expressed in human

lives.

113

expression and explanation. To expand on Campbell’s reference to affective expression

to render it in a wider context of significance I provide the following account of the

passage from affective experience to affective expression.

When I express a feeling state,

that expression is a key to what is important to me,

embedded as I am in my setting in life,

swayed or not swayed as I am

by the lifeworlds and values and interests of those about me,

conceiving self and world according to my meaning perspective,

the brain-child of my unique journey in life.

In large measure affective explanation is the societal corollary of affective

expression. Through affective expression I make evident the significance of an experience

in terms of what matters to me – what Archer calls my ‘concerns’ (Chapter 2). Affective

explanation constitutes the construction by others of how I am displaying my concerns

in my emotional state, in my affective expression. In the introduction to her final

chapter, Campbell offers a condensed recapitulation of her argument to that point. I

will use it here to further draw out what she means by affective explanation. Campbell

writes:

In this study, I have offered the thesis that the category of feelings

has a unique role in a comprehensive theory of psychological

explanation: that the expression of feelings through a diverse range

of nonlinguistic and linguistic resources is the attempted

communication of personal significance. To develop a model for

affective meaning, I have moved attention away from the most

readily named of feelings – the classic emotions – toward feelings

that are more personal, local, inchoate, or even idiosyncratic. I have

argued that what we feel can be individuated through expression to

sympathetic interpreters and can be distorted or constricted in

interpretive communities that are unsympathetic. The necessary

public nature to expression gives others ways of controlling our

affective lives.

I have developed the theory partly through a critical hermeneutics

of philosophical and feminist work on the emotions. Traditional

philosophical attention to emotions as a small group of highly

conceptualized feelings that might seem to find expression in easily

identifiable patterns of behavior has obscured the importance of

expression in the formation of our complex and nuanced emotional

lives. Significantly, theorists, in neglecting expression, also have

neglected the role of interpretation in the formation of affective

114

meaning and have failed to account for the many ways in which

individuals and groups are emotionally manipulated through the

unsympathetic or hostile interpretive practices of others. Feminist

theorists have been particularly sensitive to the political

manipulation of the emotions and have been attracted to social

constructivism as an account of affective meaning where social

response plays a dominant role in constituting the personal. In

Chapter 5, I expressed the concern that a theoretical commitment to

the social construction of emotion, with its emphasis on

conventional emotion categories, supports restrictive and ethically

problematic interpretive practices. I argued that interpreting others

within the narrow range of categories set by emotion types will

restrict the range of affective significance that can be determined,

and thus, restrict the significance to people of their own lives.

(Campbell, 1997, pp. 165-166)

Several matters raised here by Campbell are not central to my argument, like the

social constructivist stance of some emotions theorists, but I quote the above extract in

full in order to provide the reader with an overview of the scope of her argument. This

is not to say that some of these ideas may not have ramifications for future theorising

about education for self development. For the time being I highlight her closing

sentence. Campbell’s theory of affect has significance for my theory of meaning

making in the sense that her inclusion of non-standard feelings in the phenomenon of

affect is a bulwark against our trivialisation of ourselves, how we construe our sense of

self. Reflexive affective experience is how I know who I am, what I stand for. I can

reflect on my inner life through the lens of the classic emotions and see a caricature of

me; or I can search out the muddy waters within, I can stand, reverential, in my inner

sanctum, attending an ever richer, ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent

sense of self in the world, pursuing self-actualisation.

115

The endless enigmas of self-knowledge

‘[T]hey are trying to make clear the meaning or significance of something in the

context of how they view their lives’ (Campbell, 1997, p. 126). For me there is a strong

implicit presence in this statement of a sense of self; it is this implicitness that is the

missing link (for me) in Campbell’s logic. My thesis requires that I make this presence

explicit. My meaning perspective is the brain-child of my unique journey in life. My

meaning perspective is the organ of my essential self in meaning making mode. My concerns

and ultimate concerns, to use Archer’s terms, are values that are not so much value

propositions as value-memories, whose connotations blur into primary value beliefs; a

primary value belief is ‘the conscious realisation of what our tacit (unconscious) values

are’ (McKenzie, Higgs, & Horsfall, 2005, p. 13). ‘Value-memories’ carries the additional

connotation of values expressed in specific occasions in my past. I cannot express the

personal significance of anything without a sense of self that connects me to my past.

My past is the living field from which

my value system nourishes and sustains

itself. The point is, my historical sense

of self is central to all this. I can

illuminate Campbell’s definition of

affective explanation and my account of

the passage between affective

experience and affective expression by

referring to my earlier-mentioned

landmark-spotting metaphor and my

20th memory dilemma – choosing

between two childhood photos: Young

Tony as carer and as actor (Figures 3.3

and 3.4).

The Twenty Memories exercise was deliberately designed as a self-discovery

learning tool: memories were to be chosen to help participants understand and convey

how they saw themselves at the time of doing the exercise. My 20 memories would in a

sense be my autobiography, a study of the ‘essential me’, circa mid-1990s. The

important thing here is not in fact my so-called ‘dilemma’. I certainly did want to

capture both personality traits (carer and performer) in my self exhibition/explanation.

However I had already chosen four other memories that also involved my theatrical

persona, as shown in Table 3.1.

Ponder point. ‘Value system: a deeply ingrained set of valuing biases that makes it possible for us to judge what is more important to us, and what is less. My value system is the engine room of my value judgments; with it, I weigh up the importance of this sliver and that sliver, of this factor and that. All of this goes on below consciousness; whatever the trigger, we make a rounded, composite human response to each landmark. The milestones of my life are all my landmarks, and my complex relations with them […] what I see is what stands out from the background; what stands out is what I value; yet where do my values come from, if not from what I see?’

From Appendix 1, The world of open learning: Adventures for distance learners, McKenzie (1996, p. 135)

116

Table 3.1. Personal memories of self as performer/director

Memory Personal significance

‘Reading’ Shakespeare ‘Augmented’ reality: a parental contrivance for the camera (Figure 3.4)

Puppet Show Shows that my little sister and I put on under the house for kids in our street

Theatre School Attending theatre school in Paris

School Play: It’s a Child’s World

Culmination of drama class improvisations at Singleton High School, early eighties

School Play: A Medieval Frame of Mind

Culmination of drama class improvisations at Singleton High School, early eighties, including song, A Global Frame of Mind

Given that the ‘exhibition’ already had my theatrical leaning well and truly covered, I

chose Tony as carer for my 20th memory. So how does all this illuminate my response to

Campbell’s book? I will now review my reconstruction of my experience of the Twenty

Memories exercise in the light of Campbell’s theory of affect and my elaboration of the

nexus between affect and understanding:

I had designed the twenty memories exercise as a tool for testing some ideas about the

central importance of sense of self to one’s meaning making practice. When I put myself

through the exercise I found myself in muddy waters, in the Realm of Unknowing,

barely conscious of inklings not yet formed into thoughts, feelings or intentions. And

yet I wanted to create a ‘true’, life-like exhibition of me.

I had these two photos to choose between – Young Tony ‘reading’ Shakespeare and

Young Tony with pram, doll and soft toy. The adult Tony had attached symbolic

meanings to each snapshot even though neither situation held such significance for the

child. Both snaps seem to be ‘cute’ parental set-ups. I still do not know how my parents

got me to pose with the pram like that. ‘Coy’ comes to mind as I look at Tony in the

photo, but it is a complex pose – complex to me as interpreter now.

Why did I see complexity as I tried to make sense of the symbolism I had

superimposed on these photos in the Twenty Memories exercise, and still try now, as I

write this? In fact I didn’t need either photo to represent my carer and performer

personas because both were covered in other memories selected for the exhibition. Was

the parental stage direction implicit in these photos significant for me? (I am guessing

one or both parents ‘set me up’ for each shot.) My parents had met when they were

assigned to the same troupe in the Entertainment Unit of the Australian Army in

World War II, so maybe I have subconsciously seen their attachment to the stage as a

hidden influence behind my own theatrical proclivity. But of course there will always

be things about ourselves that defy understanding. I will never know whether being

set up by parents for childhood photos left their mark on Young Tony the Puppeteer

for example.17 There are two things arising from this reflection that have a bearing on

17 As noted in Table 3.1, producing puppet shows for neighbourhood children was one of Young Tony’s

occupations.

117

my argument: (1) that hermeneutic meaning making knows no end; and that (2) ‘lack

of clarity’ is an appropriate description of the state prior to growth in understanding:

that it is fitting to treasure the free-form feelings that Campbell defends. In my terms,

we do well to dwell in muddy waters, waiting for understanding to bloom.

Realising my Twenty Memories exhibition became one of the landmarks/

milestones of my lifelong journey as meaning maker. Yet because the milestones of my

life are all my landmarks and my complex relations with them, my set of 20 significant

memories is also time-bound and fluid. There is no end to hermeneutic self-discovery.

The make-up of my 20 memory set, ‘exhibited’ to myself and my master’s degree co-

learning group in the mid-1990s will always be contestable, always demand to be re-

appraised, because every day brings new experiences for my value system and

meaning perspective to accommodate.

My critical overview

At the beginning of this chapter I said I would consider if and how my own history of

meaning making had predisposed me to embrace Campbell’s theory and draw her

argument into mine. I have endeavoured to evince this throughout the preceding

discussion. My meaning perspective is formed out of my historical past, thoroughly

laced with my value-memories. My past is a living field in so far as my past experiences

change in importance to me over time as my value system evolves in response to my

lived present. The glimpses of my past experience provided here should be sufficient

to satisfy the reader that my reading of Campbell was a resounding ah-ha experience,

for I had experienced so much of what she writes about. Campbell’s theory of affect

had the ring of experiential truth for me.

I have actually gone further than adopting Campbell’s position as my own. I am

suggesting that my Realm of Unknowing construct, tied to my definition of growth in

understanding as the realisation of an ever more complex, comprehensive and

coherent sense of self in the world, and to my metaphor of muddy waters as a

worthwhile lack of clarity experience, makes explicit what is implied in Campbell’s

concept of affective experience. I return to this matter in Part B.

I am also intrigued by the degree of alignment between Archer’s and Campbell’s

theses as depicted in this and the previous chapter. In particular, both authors

emphasise the inner dimension of human being in colouring the way we present

ourselves to others. For Archer, human concerns and ultimate concerns, as witnessed in

our emotions, steer our actions, our being-in-the-world, while for Campbell, ‘the

expression of feelings through a diverse range of nonlinguistic and linguistic resources

is the attempted communication of personal significance’ (Campbell, 1997, p. 165).

While Archer’s main interest lies in elucidating a social theory that makes sense of

human selves in the world across cultures and across time, Campbell lingers on

118

affective experience itself in order to savour something which she says is sadly

neglected in contemporary psychological and philosophical discourse: she redefines

affective experience by moving away from the classic emotions to what we might call a

‘non-classification schema’. She insists that affect is the inner experience of what is

important to me (my human concerns, my ultimate concerns, in Archer’s terms):

The concern … [of chapters 2 and 3] is to link the concepts of

feeling and expression in such a way as to make it possible to talk

from within philosophy of mind about the range of people’s

affective experiences. This linkage cannot be directly defended on

the basis of an agreement on the logic of the concepts, for there is

no such agreement. The claim that expression is an activity of

individuating feelings is a central positive proposal of the study

and one with an obvious and appealing consequence. The richer

and more discriminating our ways of expression, the richer and

more nuanced our affective lives. (Campbell, 1997, p. 50)

How encouraged I am therefore to be tabling my Realm of Unknowing construct in

the context of an Archer-Campbell comparative textual study. From my standpoint it’s

as if Archer’s, Campbell’s and my arguments were waiting for each other to come

together. The Realm of Unknowing offers a way of conceiving and representing one’s

muddy waters experiences to oneself and others. In my lifework of making sense of

myself in the world, of fulfilling myself, which includes making apparent to the world

what is important to me on the inside, from time to time I find myself in muddy

waters. The Realm of Unknowing is a place I can imagine myself in when I dimly

perceive inklings that are not yet thoughts, feelings or intentions. I invite the reader to

re-imagine Figure 2.1, Three journeys of becoming, as representing three journeys all

emanating from the Realm of Unknowing. The figure emerging from the sleet (Figure

3.1) could also be passing into sense-perceptible reality from the Realm of Unknowing.

Both Archer’s and Campbell’s theories in a sense have made a tent-clearing for an

unarticulated, inchoate interior space. That is the place I call Realm of Unknowing.

The relevance of my argument for twenty-first century university education

In Part B of my thesis I elaborate in depth the potential benefits of offering colleagues

and their learners the notion of a Realm of Unknowing. Here I provide the core link

between this chapter and that application argument by foreshadowing two claims that

I will defend in Chapter 7:

that we make room for affect in the curriculum because of its role in our

continuous reflexive appreciation of our sense of self in the world

119

that we make room for affect because of its role in shaping who we are,

our meaning perspective and thus our meaning making practices,

our view of the world, and our manner of engagement with the worlds

of knowledge and practice – and with the people we encounter and deal

with in this practice.

On a final note I reflect on how appropriate it is for my theorising about a Realm of

Unknowing within the affect-expression space so highly valued by Archer and

Campbell to emerge in a study dedicated to offering new directions in university

education. Archer and Campbell both wrote their respective books to make a scholarly

contribution to their respective fields. This thesis also aims to achieve this goal but, in

addition, it is offered to educators as a stimulus and a framework for re-appraising and

hopefully transforming the practice of university education.

121

Chapter 4. Muddy waters:

Giving mystery its due

Paths to understanding

Bildung and ‘becoming educated’ on the hermeneutic journey of living

Three muddy waters moments

Henri Matisse, muddy waters and aesthetic expression

The muddy waters of religious questioning

The muddy waters of thesis writing

Diving for pearls

This thesis comprises studies in textual composition, interpretation and

communication, in which philosophical hermeneutics is the governing mindset of

practice. So far I have given several accounts of what this means to me and how it is

being manifested in my thesis writing. At this point I progress to a fuller immersion in

the philosophical hermeneutic way of thinking necessary to progress my argument. I

noted in the Prologue that I have drawn in particular on three modes of engagement in

hermeneutic inquiry: the hermeneutic circle, fusion of horizons, and a dialectic of question

and answer. In this chapter I illuminate these concepts as I present my hermeneutic

engagement with Nicholas Davey’s Unquiet Understanding: Gadamer's Philosophical

Hermeneutics (Davey, 2006).

Paths to understanding

The account of the journey to understanding in this chapter is conceived within the

philosophical hermeneutic frame of reference. It gathers together and renders coherent

the outcrops of my theorising on hermeneutic meaning making and associated

reflection on experience, already included in this study. Growth in one’s

understanding of a text can be represented as an attempted ‘aligning of horizons’, in

which I as text interpreter examine where I stand in relation to where the author stands

on the matters in question. This idea is central to the concerns of philosophical

hermeneutics and is one that I examine in greater depth in this chapter.

As the chapter title implies, the primary theme of the journey to understanding as

represented here is the stance or attitude a meaning maker may usefully adopt in the

journey towards understanding. It was this idea that prompted my adult education

workshop, Muddy waters, the unknown, and the Welcome Stranger in 1997 (see Appendix

Chapter map

122

5). My aim in this chapter is to offer a

theory of meaning making that uses the

concepts of muddy waters and the Realm

of Unknowing as metaphors capable of

supporting the formative process of

becoming educated, (‘becoming gebildet’).

Before I offer a key to the structure of

this chapter’s argument, several clusters

of ideas need introduction.

Bildung and ‘becoming educated’ on the hermeneutic journey of

living

‘Becoming gebildet’ is derived from the German word, Bildung, which is a defining idea

for philosophical hermeneutics. The following excerpt by Davey nicely sets the scene

for my argument:

No term in Gadamer's philosophy is more worthy of undergoing a

form of Heideggerian Destruktion2 than the concept of Bildung. The

term has a variety of plain and obscure meanings, which

respectively imply formation, cultivation, and education […] The

concept plays a central role in philosophical hermeneutics. It

emphasizes that hermeneutic understanding is formative in that the

deepening of hermeneutic experience prepares for further, more

demanding experience. Hermeneutic understanding involves the

process of comprehending what a text or dialogue imparts and in

addition the development of a practice, of a preparedness or skill in

changing mental perspectives. The nurturing of such preparedness

is an integral element within the refinement of a hermeneutic

discipline. The formation of these virtues is what is meant in part

by Bildung. Acquiring a mental openness and a flexibility of

response toward the strange and unexpected is to have become

experienced in the discipline. This process of formation, of

acquiring experience by acquaintance, is what is rendered in

German as having become gebildet. (Davey, 2006, pp. 37-38)

1 From notes for a workshop presented at the Women of the Land Gathering, C. B. Alexander Agricultural

College, Tocal, Paterson NSW, 11 October 1997. 2 Wheeler (2013) points out that Heidegger’s critique of Cartesianism in Being and Time is the only

developed example of what Heidegger called ‘the destruction (Destruktion) of the Western

philosophical tradition’. The intention was ‘to show that although the tradition takes theoretical

knowledge to be primary, such knowledge […] presupposes the more fundamental openness to

Being that Heidegger has identified as an essential characteristic of Dasein [Being-in-the-world]’.

‘… like the novelist who is half in love with muddy waters, I hope that in this workshop, by digging down into our lifetime experience, we too will learn to become more respectful of the heart of darkness. Understanding is something that grows, like approaching headlights. If we acclimatise to the Realm of Unknowing, adjust to the sensation of being immersed in the deep end of a lifelong search, our expectation of

growth in understanding will be rewarded’.1

123

This quote only gives a bare bones account of Bildung and becoming gebildet. A

richer sense of their significance for philosophical hermeneutics will continue to

emerge in the following lines, and in due course will be drawn into my theory of

meaning making and my theory of a curriculum of becoming. At this point I pause to

ground this discussion in the central concerns of my practice and my thesis. Davey’s

foregoing passage reads as an account of what I as an educator yearn for in my

learners; Figure 4.1 (next page) evokes this teaching goal. ~~

In developed countries, ‘getting an education’ is taken for granted. From my

standpoint ‘getting an education’ as commonly construed is a far cry from ‘becoming

educated’ in the philosophical hermeneutic sense: it’s the gap between getting a

qualification and what we might call being made anew – being formed and transformed

in the very same experience/journey. Simply put, this thesis argues that a university

curriculum of becoming as a concept or ideal – as a blueprint for transformative

practice – not only provides students with a qualification but also fosters their

becoming.

We must now delve a little deeper into Bildung; here I record what Davey confirms

about Bildung and also what he disallows.

First, his argument by negation. Philosophical hermeneutics is sometimes

criticised for what is assumed to be its conservative, even reactionary

apologetic for the past, but Davey shows why this is a mistaken reading of

Bildung:

The notion of Bildung as a culturally transmitted stock of

knowledge links it with the concept of tradition. Conservative

interpretations of Bildung associate it with the handing-on or

with the inculcation of (so called) traditional values. As the

foregoing remarks about the formative and essentially

interpretative nature of the Bildung and Bildung haben suggest,

philosophical hermeneutics is not just, as Habermas and

Caputo have argued, a thinly disguised apologetics for an anti-

Enlightenment view of tradition. The seminal point overlooked

by such critics is that the German term Überlieferung

emphasizes a process of transmission rather than the

maintenance of long established customs. That which is ’given

over' (tradere) in the form of practices or outlooks is not merely

received as an unmediated given but assessed and assimilated

according to the contemporary concerns of the world into

124

Figure 4.1. Kosmic landmark-spotting, practising openness, becoming educated

Figure 4.1. Kosmic landmark-spotting, practising openness, becoming educated Image: Chair on empty beach, Zeeland, The Netherlands. Photoshopped. By Chemtec (Fred Fokkelman). http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1354628. All rights reserved. Quote 1: Davey (2006, p. 37) Quote 2: from Muddy waters, the unknown, and the Welcome Stranger. Notes by Tony McKenzie for a workshop presented at the Women of the Land Gathering, C. B. Alexander Agricultural College, Tocal, Paterson NSW, 11 October 1997 (See Appendix 5).

‘Hermeneutic understanding involves […]

a preparedness or skill in changing mental perspectives […] Acquiring a

mental openness and a flexibility of response toward the strange and

unexpected is to have become experienced in the discipline’1.

‘We set ourselves the goal of continuously pushing back the frontiers of

global understanding, of letting go of today's sense of everything as

tomorrow's questions appear on the horizon. My noble calling is to

progressively open myself to the mystery within

and the mystery without’2.

125

which it is received. Apart from the additional question of how

selective the past is in transmitting its own character, what a

given horizon understands as its past, is not the past simply

transposed into the present but a presently interpreted and

partially constructed past. What is transmitted as tradition is

not necessarily received as transmitted: reception is

interpretative. (Davey, 2006, p. 50)

Davey’s argument here is crucial to my research product, my design

framework for a university curriculum of becoming. While the practice of

meaning making is irrevocably anchored to each meaning maker’s personal

past (see Chapter 3), both philosophical hermeneutics and my curriculum of

becoming are quintessential expressions of goal-responsive thought – tied, as

if by gossamer silk, to the undetermined, indeterminable future.1

Second, Davey also describes Bildung in a positive light. In the next extract,

we find him exploring the implications of Bildung as culture, as

‘cultivation’:

One meaning of Bildung is culture. Bildung haben can mean to

be or to become cultured. To be cultured supposes an

acquaintance with the various stocks of knowledge and

attitudes that constitute a given culture. Yet acquaintance with

such knowledge does not of itself enable one to become

cultured. Once again, it is the process of becoming

intellectually and spiritually tempered by the experiences one

undergoes during the acquisition of such knowledge that

matters. In that it attests to the transformative educative

process of formation through engagement and involvement,

philosophical hermeneutics embodies a defiant defense of the

humanist tradition. That which makes the process of becoming

gebildet difficult to grasp is that although it may require a

sound training in the language and history of a culture, such

formation is not reducible to a matter of training alone […]

Whereas it is in the nature of technical training to offer known

and, therefore, predictable responses to problems, immersion

in a cultural discourse does not teach predictable answers. This

1 In my masters project the Twenty Memories exercise allowed my co-learners to

understand, from their own life experience, the difference between conditioned-responsive and goal-

responsive patterns of thought and behaviour. In the former, an individual lives the life that

circumstances have prescribed; in the latter, an individual uses the undetermined future as a

stimulus for creative action (McKenzie, 1996, p. 99).

126

is because within such discourses there are not 'problems’ to be

solved but difficulties that can only be understood more

deeply. The process of 'becoming cultured’ does not involve

the acquisition of predictable responses to known problems but

the accumulation of sufficient practical experience within a

discipline so as to offer a spontaneous and yet informed

response to a question permitting it to be grasped in a new and

unanticipated way. Indeed, it is precisely the ability to risk

informed but spontaneous judgments which the humanities

aim to foster […]

Becoming cultured (Bildung haben) is enabled by being rooted

in a given culture (Bildung). It is exhibited by the successful

acquisition of a practice understood as the ability to make

appropriate, insightful, and indeed unpredictable judgments

capable of transforming our understanding of the cultural

process out of which they emerge. There is, in other words, a

complex ontological interdependence between Bildung haben

and Bildung. Bildung haben requires the prior existence of a

specific Bildung. However, no Bildung or culture can sustain its

being without being renewed by the various processes of

Bildung haben which constitute it. Bildung is therefore also

ontologically dependent on Bildung haben. The being that is

Bildung is transformed by the understanding it facilitates. As

we shall see, being open to the risks and challenges posed by

the transformative powers of ’understanding’ and, what is

more, knowing how to navigate that openness is regarded by

philosophical hermeneutics as a qualitative mark of having

become gebildet. (Davey, 2006, pp. 39-40)

This passage holds rich implications for grounding the philosophical hermeneutic way

of thinking in my account of meaning making and my curriculum of becoming

framework. Life is a hermeneutic

journey on which what ‘matters’ ‘is the

process of becoming intellectually and

spiritually tempered by the experiences

one undergoes during the acquisition’

of ‘the various stocks of knowledge and

attitudes that constitute a given culture’

(Davey, 2006, p. 39).

Embracing life as a hermeneutic journey means ‘being open to the risks and challenges posed by the transformative powers of “understanding” [disposition] and, what is more, knowing how to navigate that openness [capacity]’. This capacity–disposition alignment (my term) ‘is regarded by philosophical hermeneutics as a qualitative mark of having become gebildet’ (Davey, 2006, p. 40).

127

At the semantic level, Davey draws attention to a nuance separating the noun,

Bildung, from the verb, becoming gebildet. He does so via another distinction made in

the German philosophical tradition between understanding as outcome, rendered by

the noun, Verständis, and ‘that which the process of understanding brings about’,

rendered by the verb, verstehen.

Acquiring facts and information about a practice [Verständis] does

not per se make a good practitioner. Yet one cannot become a good

practitioner without acquiring such information. What is important

here is the transformative capacity of the process of engaging with

a subject matter. Only by exposing oneself to the experiences that the

practical acquisition of the facts and skills pertinent to a given

discipline expose one to [verstehen], is it possible to become a good

or, rather, a more understanding practitioner. Philosophical

hermeneutics includes, then, as part of the event of understanding,

the transformation of awareness and attitude that can occur as a

result of engaging with a given subject matter. It is vital to grasping

the way Bildung operates within philosophical hermeneutics that it

too should be understood as functioning as a substantive entity and

as a formative process. (Davey, 2006, pp. 38-39)

In this particular extract Davey draws Verständis, verstehen, Bildung and Bildung haben

into a single matrix of ideas or argued position. We saw previously that Bildung has no

single English equivalent, but variously connotes formation, cultivation/culture, and

education. Likewise becoming gebildet is like a journey played out in front of multiple

translucent backdrops, or movement within multiple frames of reference or

terminology sets. We need to develop tolerance for nuance and overlapping intentions

within these terms, but what is fundamental is that the noun–gerund tension is

ubiquitous in lived hermeneutics, just one reason why we do well to give mystery its

due.

From an educationist’s standpoint, Davey’s argument in the previous quote

expresses the same high view of experience and immersion found in the education for

practice literature; the ACRL Information Literacy Immersion Program2 is one

example. Education for the professions cannot be richly achieved unless the whole

workplace experience, actual or simulated, is somehow part of the course learning

experience. However we do need to exercise caution when asserting the relevance of

the philosophical hermeneutic mindset to education. Davey’s interpretation of

2 The American Library Association’s ‘ACRL Information Literacy Immersion Program provides

instruction librarians the opportunity to work intensively for several days on all aspects of

information literacy’. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/issues/infolit/professactivity/iil/

immersion/programs.

128

becoming educated is revealed in his comment that ‘philosophical hermeneutics

embodies a defiant defense of the humanist tradition’ in that ‘it attests to the

transformative educative process of formation through engagement and involvement’

(Davey, 2006, p. 39). He finds ‘troublesome associations’ in the term Bildung. ‘If

Gadamer wishes to stress what is (supposedly) at the term's core – the invocation of an

unending educative (experiential) process – the term's association with a specific

bourgeois educational ideal needs to be decisively broken’ (Davey, 2006, p. 40). Davey

traces this unfortunate association to the ‘failure of such commentators as John Caputo

to draw the distinction between Bildung (a specific cultural form) and becoming gebildet

(a process of educative formation)’ (Caputo, 1987, pp. 96-97). Whereas, for Davey,

once the above distinction is firmly drawn, the more radical nature

of Gadamer's approach to Bildung becomes apparent. For Gadamer

to advocate a bourgeois conception of Bildung would deprive the

term of its formative spontaneity. Now, given the link between

hermeneutic experience and becoming gebildet, limiting the

spontaneity of the latter by restricting it to a specific educational

program weakens the central ethical claim of philosophical

hermeneutics regarding keeping oneself open to the other and to

the different. (Davey, 2006, p. 44)

For Davey, the mistake such writers make is that they focus on the (‘nouned’) entity,

Bildung3, to the neglect of the (‘gerunded’) ‘becoming gebildet’. The charge that

Gadamer’s defence of Bildung is an ‘apology of a bourgeois mode of education’ is

undermined by Gadamer’s insistence on the formative spontaneity inherent in

Bildung4, or, perhaps more helpfully in this context, in the formative process that

constitutes becoming gebildet.5 We could say this formative spontaneity involves a

3 As a noun Bildung finds itself construed as a thing, but what kind of thing? A ‘thing’ we strive for.

Pursuing Bildung

involves recognizing the metaphysical contingency of received traditions and stocks of

knowledge which establish understanding's initial orientation. Philosophical hermeneutics

conceives of such stocks as being built up, consolidated, and perpetuated by the communicative

interactions that constitute a cultural community. When thought of as specific cultural tradition,

Bildung constitutes the historically formed but metaphysically contingent ground upon which the

possibility of understanding rests (Davey, 2006, p. 41). 4 Davey’s formulation: ‘That Bildung is linked to a notion of spontaneity undermines the charge that

Gadamer’s defence of the term is an apology of a bourgeois mode of education’ (Davey, 2006, p. 44). 5 The wordiness here is unfortunate but I must take care to interpret and represent Davey faithfully.

For philosophical hermeneutics, as I noted earlier, there is a complex ontological interdependence

between Bildung and Bildung haben. They do not survive without each other. The same could be said

about Bildung and becoming gebildet, because we are dealing here with the multi-dimensional

construct, Bildung. What is strongly explicit in Archer’s thesis (as I demonstrated in Chapter 2) and

only implied in Davey’s is that human being is an abstraction that always needs to be grounded in

practice. Such an approach has the effect of integrating the various dimensions of Bildung in individual

gestalt experience (see Chapter 2). Action in the world is primary, out of which we can make meaning

endlessly.

129

capacity for discernment and embrace of that which is other, different, as well as a

disposition to keep oneself open to the other, the different6 – qualities I am presently

elaborating as qualities needed in order to be at home in muddy waters. When Davey

writes that one limits the spontaneity inherent in becoming gebildet by restricting it to

(i.e. by identifying it with) a specific educational program, I hasten to insist on the

utopian purpose of my unfolding curriculum of becoming ‘thoughtspace’. In this thesis

I depict the curriculum of becoming as a conceptual framework for designing

institutional curricula. Its value lies in its capacity to help course teams to create

institutional curricula that, in the measure to which they are realised, not only provide

a qualification but also foster self-actualisation. When I present the framework in

Chapter 7, it will very clearly be offered as a framework for curriculum design and not

a curriculum in its own right. It does not compromise the spirit of philosophical

hermeneutics being presented here by purporting to be something that could replace

an existing institutional curriculum; indeed it does not.

How this chapter’s argument is structured. Given my need to present a case that

simultaneously stands as a hermeneutic interpretation of Davey’s text and progresses

my own argument, my rendering of Davey’s argument will, in the remainder of this

chapter, be organised around – anticipating and/or responding to – three selected

situations not provided by Davey in which the human subject was having a muddy

waters experience. That is, they were exploring unknown territory in a way that

allowed immersion in the unknown and valuing of it, prior to realising understanding.

For convenience I will refer to these episodes as muddy waters moments, whether they

occupied a short or expansive time frame. My critical appreciation of Davey’s

argument will be orchestrated in a way that responds to and draws out the significance

(for my thesis) of these muddy waters moments.

Three muddy waters moments

Henri Matisse, muddy waters and aesthetic expression

The first muddy waters moment is contained in an extract from Campbell’s Interpreting

the Personal, the book I interpreted in Chapter 3; it concerns an aesthetic ‘choice’ taken

by Impressionist painter, Henri Matisse, as caught in a documentary film. Here is

Campbell’s discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of what the film maker

captured:

In The Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty illustrates a perplexity in

theory of expression by describing the filming, in slow motion, of

Matisse making a single brush stroke on the canvas. Matisse,

6 A page or so before this one I coined the term, ‘capacity–disposition alignment’. I also noted Davey’s

assertion: ‘Acquiring a mental openness and a flexibility of response toward the strange and

unexpected is to have become experienced in the discipline [of one’s hermeneutic practice]’ (Davey,

2006, p. 37).

130

himself, was apparently moved in watching the film. The brush

‘could be seen meditating, in a suspended and solemn time …

beginning ten possible movements, performing in front of the

canvas a sort of propitiatory dance, coming so close several times as

almost to touch it, and finally coming down like lightning in the

only stroke necessary’ (Merleau-Ponty & Lefort C. (Ed.), 1973, p.

44).7 The ‘only stroke necessary’ implies, as Merleau-Ponty well

knows, that Matisse made the right expressive choice, and this

notion of correctness may, in turn, tempt us to posit a referent in

comparison to which we, or at least Matisse, can know that this was

the right choice. This referent we may call ‘the object of expression’,

whatever it is, and how and wherever it exists – a sentiment, a

scene outside the artist's window, or a vision in the artist's mind.

Whatever this object, Matisse's brush strokes accurately represent it

to us.

We are less tempted than we once were to disfigure the artist into a

ghostwriter of the real world or a mere scribe of inner artistic

vision. The complexities, mysteries, and integrity of artistic choice

and creativity make a view of a preexistent referent copied into art

naive, and this is precisely why Merleau-Ponty uses this example to

make a point about the nature and problem of expression:

[For] if at the end of the film Matisse believes that he really

chose, on that particular day, between those possible strokes

and, like Leibniz's God, solved an immense problem of

minimum and maximum, he is mistaken … It is true that the

hand hesitated, that it meditated. It is therefore true that there

was a choice, that the stroke was chosen so as to satisfy ten

conditions scattered on the painting, unformulated and

unformulable for anyone other than Matisse, since they were

defined and imposed only by the intention to make this

particular painting which did not yet exist.’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1973,

pp. 44-45) (italics in original)

In other words, the particular with reference to which we judge

expressive success and failure is formed through the very act of

expression, and Merleau-Ponty means this to be a fully general

7 Campbell notes that ‘Although Merleau-Ponty put aside this work in the early 1950s, there is no

evidence that this was a gesture of repudiation’ (Campbell, 1997, p. 50).

131

comment about the nature of expression. (Campbell, 1997, pp. 50-

51)

Chapter 3 of Unquiet Understanding (Davey, 2006) is entitled ‘Intimations of

meaning: Philosophical hermeneutics and the defense of speculative understanding’.

Davey’s primary aim in that chapter is ‘to demonstrate how a careful reflection on the

notion of “speculative understanding” can successfully address the question of the

interiority of understanding’ (Davey, 2006, p. 110). Chapter 4 is entitled

‘Understanding’s disquiet’. Several strands of thought in these chapters (and beyond)

have a more or less direct bearing on Matisse’s moment of indecision, but they all have

bearing on the larger moment of this thesis. The challenge for the reader here therefore

is to make sense of the following basket of ideas both at the micro (Matisse vignette)

and macro (thesis) scales. As I lay out these strands I invite the reader to first hold

them ‘playfully’ as separate forming

‘clouds’, then watch as they engage with

your style of meaning making, to see

how and to what extent they might talk

to each other, what meaning might be

emerging for you. The richness of

Davey’s thought in these extracts and

the welling prospect of something

significant emerging here are sufficient

grounds I believe to justify the space I am giving Davey’s own words8 …

□ ‘There is clearly a tension between the emergence and the

sheltering that constitutes the form niveau10 of a work of art

[…] Its truth is not constituted simply by its laying bare its

meaning but rather by the unfathomable depth of its meaning.

8 If self-directed learning for the reader is implied here, this is not to say that by chapter’s end I won’t

have strongly articulated my argument; I will have. This thesis examines hermeneutic experience via

a study of hermeneutic textual composition, interpretation and communication. The proof of the

pudding (the argument) is in the eating (in the savouring of being spoken to in a philosophical

hermeneutic tone of voice). 9 ‘Something is meaningful.’ Davey favours the term ‘meaningful’ over ‘meaning’ when the latter term

stands for the philosophical concept of ‘meaning-in-itself’: ‘though there is no end to the question of

meaning, the lack of such finality does not dissolve the possibility of meaningfulness’ (Davey, 2006, p.

197). See Appendix 6 for an extended discussion from Davey’s Chapter 4. 10 ’Form niveau’ or ‘form level’: Perhaps Gadamer was drawing some kind of parallel between self

expression in hand writing and in art. ‘In 1625, Camillo Baldi, medical doctor in Bologna, wrote about

form niveau in his publication, Trattato come da una lettera missiva si conoscano la natura e qualita dello

scrittore’ (Bernard & Reed, 1985, p. 159). The approach is illustrated in the following: ‘Width [of the

writer’s stroke] is a centrifugal movement, striving away from the center (the Ego) to the “you”. It

shows besides goal-orientation, ambition, eagerness, impulsiveness, desire for freedom and broad-

mindedness, and if it happens to be in a low form niveau, superficiality and carelessness’. (Bernard &

Reed, 1985, p. 267)

‘Something is meaningful not because a final interpretation has been reached but because something is brought to light by an unexpected conflict of interpretations […] The experience of meaningfulness […] depends upon keeping linguistic horizons and perspectives in play […] This implies that language’s vitality and the possibility of an experience of meaningfulness depends upon the ability of the word to pass continually in and out of different relationships. Closing the play of language implies the death of understanding’ (Davey, 2006, pp. 199-200).9

132

Thus by its very nature the work of art is a conflict between

[…] emergence and sheltering’ (Gadamer, 1994, p. 107); cited

in Davey (2006, p. 196).

‘What Gadamer says of the work of art can also be said both of

the Sache [a given subject matter] and the word.’ ‘Heidegger,

Gadamer, and Adorno all insist upon the enigmatic nature of

Sachen [subject matters]. In speaking to us, a Sache discloses

something. It reveals something but such emergence is not the

negation of concealment per se but a revelation of a continued

sheltering in the dark. It is the coming into presence of the

withheld dimension of a Sache's meaning that gives it weight,

resonance, and enigmatic character’. (Davey, 2006, p. 196)

I pause to ponder. If what Gadamer says of the work of art can also be said

both of the Sache and the word (Davey; see previous paragraph), then we may allow

ourselves the freedom to consider Davey’s discussion as bearing in some degree on

any or all of them. Consider with me the value of viewing Matisse’s breakthrough

moment – when his brushstroke ‘was chosen so as to satisfy ten conditions scattered on

the painting, unformulated and unformulable for anyone other than Matisse’ – not as

the eradication of obscurity but, metaphorically speaking, as a satisfying rendering of

dappled light and shadow. Matisse’s conception of the subject of his painting was his

Sache. If thought, feeling and intent are indistinguishable in the Realm of Unknowing, it

is not surprising that we experience traces of such ambiguity in this world, such as

when we try to logically disentangle feeling from meaning from art, or disentangle

feeling from meaning in art.

I have not come across anything like my placename, Realm of Unknowing, in the

philosophical hermeneutic literature. I am not surprised by this, because it has a

noticeably fairy tale or mythical ring about it, which would not suit the erudite tone of

that literature.11 My reason for my repeated references to ‘Realm of Unknowing’, and

‘muddy waters’ here is that they are part of my conception of meaning making, which

underpins my design framework for a university curriculum of becoming, and are thus

intended for a different (i.e. education) audience. In the world of university education,

teachers and students need a language that will enable them to realise in themselves

the intent of such a curriculum. In that context, ‘Realm of Unknowing’ and ‘muddy

waters’ may have roles in enabling our lifework of becoming. I think they do, if we are

going to take that journey knowingly, the way of living I am in process of defending.

11 Davey uses ‘realm’ in these terms: ‘realm of meaning-in-itself’, ‘realm of lived, contingent

meaningfulness’.

133

□ What then was Matisse’s Sache of concern? What ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ was he

so anxious to express? Davey’s account of philosophical hermeneutics

offers a useful perspective on this question. The first relates to the question

of ‘how a subject comes to be addressed by the truth claims of certain

experiences’ (Davey, 2006, p. 112). While Davey’s text is concerned with

hermeneutic experience generally, I will draw out its ramifications for

Matisse’s muddy waters moment of aesthetic expression. In a discussion on

‘the speculative motion of hermeneutic experience’ (Davey, 2006, pp. 116-

128), Davey affirms that

The insights that speculative experience affords have both a

centrifugal and a […] [centripetal] moment.12 In coming to

realize that its substantiality is of a nature different to its

previous self-conceptions, a subject [person] is thrown beyond

itself, forced to abandon previous subjective self-

understandings (the centrifugal), and, in the light of what is

newly revealed to it about its substantiality, made to

reconfigure its self-understanding (the centripetal). The

oscillation between the centrifugal and the centripetal aspects

of understanding is central to Gadamer's approach to

speculative experience. (Davey, 2006, p. 116)

Davey embraces Gadamer’s conviction that ‘Words that bring

something into language are themselves a speculative event. Their

truth lies in what is said in them and not in an intention locked in

the impotence of subjective particularity’ (Gadamer [1989, p. 489],

cited in Davey [2006, p. 109]). In the next quote Davey draws

material together from a number of sources to convey what

Gadamer meant:

12 Concerning centripetal and centrifugal aspects of understanding: ‘Understanding […] is a passion

and is passionate, something that we both passionately care about and are drawn toward. The

passionate nature of understanding is reflected in the latter's centripetal and centrifugal aspects. The

centripetal aspect of understanding that disrupts our presuppositions involves suffering (passio) those

insights that challenge our grasp of our narrative identity. Linguistic being places us within

determinate historical horizons. Not only do we suffer such thrownness but we are deeply vulnerable

to and must endure alterations in or attacks upon its content. The centrifugal aspect of

understanding, which reveals an unexpected and telling insight, reflects the active (passionate) nature

of pathos. It impels us toward what we love or harken to. Thus, the centripetal and the centrifugal

aspects of understanding are related. The pain of disappointed expectancies mirrors the extent to

which we have been drawn to something. This suggests that what philosophical hermeneutics aims

at is to keep the centripetal and centrifugal play of language in motion. The dialectic of the word is a

dialectic of constant expectancy and disappointment. Yet it is only by seeking out and residing within

the oscillation of the centrifugal and centripetal aspects of understanding that translation and

transcendence can be guaranteed’ (Davey, 2006, p. 218).

134

Gadamer's phenomenological approach to speculative

experience assumes that in our experiences of music, art, and

literature, something speaks to us: 'The first thing with which

(aesthetic) understanding begins is that something speaks to

us'13; we recognize 'that there is something clearly true about …

(what) is said' to us.14 The experience of being open toward

what is said constitutes the universality of hermeneutics' truth

claim.15 This does not allude to a universal truth-content which

hermeneutics is privileged to uncover but to a shared

experience concerning how artworks address us, albeit each in

our own way.16 The speculative truth claim clearly contains a

moment of self-implication in it. Such claims are not merely

statements about ‘what is the case’ but are statements that we

grasp as truly illuminating our experience of their object. They

seize us in such a way as to make it difficult for us to turn away

from them: they make too much sense for us to deny them.

Philosophical hermeneutics reflects a central claim of Hegel's

phenomenology. The ‘principle of experience carries with it the

unspeakably important condition, that in order to accept and

believe any fact, we must be in contact with it; or, in more exact

terms, we must find the fact united and combined with the

certainty of our own selves'.17 Humboldt, too, grasps these

moments of understanding as directly addressing our being: 'I

now understand fully how one can know nothing of mankind,

of life and of the world that one has not brought to birth deep

in one's own being, or rather, that one has not proved upon

oneself'.18 The issue of the speculative truth claim of art is not

strictly epistemological. It does not primarily concern the truth

value of the way the world is represented in art. What it

concerns is the phenomenological fact that when art or

literature addresses us in a profound and penetrating way, we

know that we are truly being addressed. We recognize that our

own self-understanding is potentially at stake, that our self-

13 Gadamer (1988, p. 77) 14 ‘Aesthetics and hermeneutics’. In Gadamer, (1977, pp. 95-104). Davey cites the 1966 hardback edition;

the article has the same page numbering in both editions. See also Gadamer (1989, p. 442). 15 ‘The universality of the hermeneutic problem’. In Gadamer, (1977, pp. 1-17). Davey cites the 1966

hardback edition; the article has the same page numbering in both editions. 16 ‘The failure of Habermas to pick up this nuance in Gadamer’s argument suggests that his critique of

the universality of hermeneutic’s truth claim is based on a misunderstanding’ (Davey, 2006, p. 264). 17 Hegel, cited by Adorno, (1993, p. 59) 18 Humboldt (1969, p. xviii)

135

conception is at risk. In effect, the experience of knowing that

there is something clearly true about what an artwork claims is

already to have undergone a speculative reversal. It is to know

that we are not the judges of art but that it is we who are

susceptible to art's judgment. (Davey, 2006, p. 116)

Philosophical hermeneutics is not intent on uncovering ‘a universal

truth-content’ but ‘a shared experience concerning how artworks

address us’. As Matisse held his stalled brush, I imagine tension in

the air, because aesthetic expression, because aesthetic experience,

make us vulnerable: our self-conception is at risk. (Davey relates such

speculative experience of truth to the philosophical question of ‘the

struggle to discern objectivities within the subjective voice; see

footnote 34 on p.149.)

To recapitulate and further elaborate earlier discussion, expressions

– smiles, words, brushstrokes, etc. – can be speculative events of

centripetal – centrifugal oscillations. Furthermore, ‘In Heideggerian

terms, it is precisely because certain aspects of […] [an art] work are

intelligible that the unseen presence of the full mystery of a work

can be brought to light. As he remarks in the essay On the origin of

the art work, the sayable ‘brings the unsayable into the world’

(Heidegger [1971, p. 74]; cited in Davey [2006, p. 166]). We all do

well, as I said before, to give mystery its due, whether in art or in

our linguistic being – in our words. Davey:

The closing arguments in [Gadamer’s] Truth and Method do not

mention Heidegger's conception of the withheld and yet,

somewhat appropriately, it is implicit within Gadamer's notion

of the self-presencing of language. Being, Gadamer writes, is

self-presentation and all understanding is an event of being

(Gadamer, 1989, p. 484). Being 'is' the events in which it

presents itself. Being 'is' its appearances, its images, its

interpretations19, and, as he asserts elsewhere, 'Being that can

be understood is language' (Gadamer, 1989, p. 474). However,

the decisive point is not stated by Gadamer, namely, that […]

the event of being that language facilitates brings forward not

just the disclosed but also the withheld. The withheld manifest

in the disclosed would have no presence were it not brought

forward by the disclosed. The disclosed and the withheld are

19 Weinsheimer (1991, p. 123)

136

not opposites but coinhere in one another. There is, in this

respect, no openness on the one hand and closedness on the

other. To the contrary, a perception of meaning acquires its

clarity, resonance, and allure precisely because it intimates the

presence of the withheld. (Davey, 2006, p. 166)

I now move on to the second muddy waters moment chosen to organise my

account of Unquiet Understanding – an existentially unsettled moment refracted in a

poem I composed in 1997. As previously indicated, this thesis comprises hermeneutic

interpretations of selected texts; the poem in the next section is one of these.

The muddy waters of religious questioning

Before presenting my poem, I set the scene with another quote from Davey; in this

section he is in the process of questioning the nature and role of language in pursuit of

the meaningful:

To seek to pass beyond the interplay of different alignments of

meaning in pursuit of the final interpretation is to smother the

randomness and contingency upon which new determinations of

meaning depend. […20] The continuous play of language and the

logical undecidablity of interpretation do not prevent defensible

decisions being arrived at in favor of one interpretation rather than

another. That the play of language prevents the issue of the

decideability from being put beyond argument guarantees that new

insight, understanding, and the possibility of hermeneutic

transcendence can be kept within the bounds of discursive

exchange. Nevertheless, despite all the logical possibilities, we do

opt for or are drawn toward one interpretation rather than another

(Davey, 2006, p. 209). Such a choice may seem, logically speaking,

to be arbitrary and the result of random acts of subjective volition,

but from a hermeneutic perspective such acts are far from arbitrary.

20 Davey continues:

In the name of foundation, the play of meanings from which the vitality of language springs is

stifled. Gadamer's argument against the grounding of dialogue in 'first principles' is clear. It

parallels Searle's remarks about the mistaken need for metaphysical foundations: 'The real

mistake of the classical metaphysicians was not the belief that there are metaphysical

foundations, but rather the belief that unless there were such foundations, something is lost or

threatened or undermined or put in question' (Searle, 1983).

A typographical error appears in Davey’s citation. Davey would have drawn the Searle quote and

citation from Searle or from Hekman:

Searle, J. (1983). ‘The world [sic] turned upside down’, New York Review of Books, 30(74-79). Retrieved

from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1983/oct/27/the-word-turned-upside-down/, cited in

Hekman, S. (1986). Hermeneutics and the sociology of knowledge. London: Polity. Note: Searle’s article

was entitled, ‘The word turned upside down […]’.

137

The field of hermeneutic assumptions that form our horizons21

guides any opting for a certain interpretation. It influences what is

judged fitting, plausible, or appropriate. It is not merely a matter of

an interpretation's internal coherence but of whether the

interpretation coheres with and expands what we already know

and take an interest in. As Gadamer's transformation into

structure22 shows, what is grasped as meaningful is taken hold of

not because it is the meaning-in-itself but because it illuminates a

nexus of meanings we are interested in and involved in. This

confirms a claim of philosophical hermeneutics, namely, that it is

the relational nature of linguistic meaning that makes epiphanies of

the meaningful possible. (Davey, 2006, p. 210)

I am about to present a poem I wrote in 1997. It relates to my cultural inheritance

within the Christian tradition. There is no assumption made here about the standing of

the Christian inheritance in relation to other traditions including atheism and

agnosticism. As we have seen, philosophical hermeneutics lays great importance on

Bildung as a shaper of understanding. Christianity had a strong influence on the way I

construe self and world, and because I am using my own journey as meaning maker as

a case study in this inquiry, the poem is relevant because, in the light of what I just

said, I deem it to be so.

21 I indicated in the Prologue that Davey frequently uses ‘horizon’ in relation to meaning and

understanding. Note Davey’s usage here. I return to this feature of Davey’s thought shortly. 22 Transformation into structure: see footnote 30, p. 142, and associated discussion in main text.

138

A Christmas Unwrapping

From ‘The Nomadic Songs of Postmod Tom’

Words and music by Tony McKenzie

in collaboration with the Late Twentieth Century Doubting Thomas Within.

[1] Shepherds huddle near a fire one silent night in Palestine

At once the curtain, darkness parts, it seems to be a sign.

A choir of angels fills the sky, a child is born today

Go to him, be swept away.

[2] Sages from the East are searching for a living spring

we do not weary for we seek the secret key to everything.

A slowly-moving star unfolds that journey's end is near

Our gifts, our very lives we bring.

[3] Fathomless dark baby eyes, royalty is beckoning

What is this that stirs inside me when I look at him?

I begin to understand that heart and mind hold out one hand

My world is whole in Storyland.

Stillness, like a mountain all around me

silence, a galaxy within.

This heart of darkness is the womb of understanding.

[4] Beneath the vault of heaven ancient storytellers gazed

into the starry night and wondered what it means to be amazed.

In the locket of the mind our stories hibernate a while

then stir when time is ripe to know.

[5] Changing into something new appeals to grubs, appeals to me

And thoughts like grubs inside my head search conscientiously.

Here's a hole, is this the way? I hear an ocean calling me.

Will tears dissolve into the sea?

[6] The world grinds on but I hear whispers of imagining

The certainties of childhood just a memory of a dream.

Pearl of wisdom swathed in darkness, inner depths are yet to glow

Holy worlds from holy hearts grow.

Stillness, like a mountain all around me

silence, a galaxy within.

This heart of darkness is the womb of understanding.

7 September 199723

I had been a practising Christian believer since childhood, but by the late twentieth

century the ‘practice’ was more and more at odds with who I was. The poem was an

23 1997 was the same year I gave the Muddy Waters workshop; see Appendix 5 for workshop handout

and perhaps reflect on the one lifeworld refracted in these two disparate texts.

139

expression of the tensions that had been bottling up over decades. In some ways it

expresses a declaration of independence from the ‘stories’ of Jesus’ birth, and by

extension, from the pressure of owning and owning up to the believer’s badge. But

between that sensibility and glimmers in the poem of a more mystical stance, I find –

do you find? – traces of an interest in themes of being and becoming in a linguistic

(‘enworded’) setting? In order to explore such an interpretation, and inversely, to better

appreciate Davey’s book, I now present a table that gives several quotes from Davey

and my commentaries or reflections on them.

Table 4.1. Illuminations of Davey’s text from a poem and vice versa

‘Philosophical hermeneutics looks upon

linguistic being as a ‘mysterium’ […] an

ineffable and irreducible source of

understanding’.24

… we do not weary for we seek the secret key to everything … Here's a hole, is this the way? I hear an ocean calling me. | Will tears dissolve into the sea? … Pearl of wisdom swathed in darkness, inner depths are yet to glow | Holy worlds from holy hearts grow … Stillness, like a mountain all around me | silence, a galaxy within. | This heart of darkness is the womb of understanding.25

‘Hermeneutic encounters with the

different, with finitude, and with limit,

suggest that understanding involves an

experience of transcendence.

Understanding is the process of coming

to understand that when we understand,

we understand differently.

Understanding is not only dependent

upon but makes a difference. The

difference between what we once

understood and now understand is itself

understood. As a result, our

understanding of ourselves, of our past,

and of the world we find ourselves in,

acquires new coordinates and

reconfigures itself accordingly. When we

understand ourselves differently, we

have “moved on”. Transcendence does

The poem is in two parts. The first part uses the

language of traditional Christian belief. The

identity of the voice is in flux: it is reasonable to

infer that the affirmations of devotion of the

shepherds and the sages are also the authors’

own, or were, in his earlier period of belief and

faith. (Belief is predominantly cognitive,while

faith is holistic – heart and mind hold out one

hand).

In the second part, the language is more

postmodern. Postmod Tom (the Doubting

Thomas within) knows full well that

postmodernism is sceptical of everything, and

yet these lines do not spurn the poet’s earlier life

experience as practising believer. Rather, they

reconfigure them, one might say nostalgically.

The poet has moved on. The certainties of

childhood belief are now just a memory of a

24 Davey (2006, p. 27) 25 Poetic meaning can be at once tantalising and elusive. Davey asserts that ‘language is a totality of

meaning and that, furthermore, this totality no longer demarcated the boundary between language

and world. Language and all that it holds is grasped as world. The totality of this language-world can

neither be transcended nor brought into expression. Nevertheless, it is implied in every linguistic

expression and, furthermore, lends itself to an infinity of interpretations. The transcendent is not that

which surpasses language. It is not an “impossible”, as both Derrida and Hamacher imply. Rather,

the transcendent is taken back into language and is inherent in every linguistic expression. As such,

the transcendent disappears into an inexplicable but immanent totality of meaning’ (Davey (2006, p.

201). See also Appendix 6.

140

Table 4.1 cont’d.

not betoken surpassing the range or

grasp of human experience. It does not

concern what lies beyond experience but

what lies within it or, much rather, it has

to do with experiencing those

fundamental shifts within passages of

experience that can quite transform how

such passages are understood.

Hermeneutic transcendence involves the

transforming experience of coming

knowingly to see, to think, and to feel

differently.’26

dream; and yet in Storyland his world was, and

we may infer is, whole. Transcendence does

not betoken surpassing the range or grasp

of human experience. It does not concern

what lies beyond experience but what lies

within it. The poet’s new-found pearl of wisdom

glows progressively from within. This heart of

darkness is the womb of understanding.

Hermeneutic transcendence involves the

transforming experience of coming

knowingly to see, to think, and to feel

differently.

‘Philosophical hermeneutics contends

that some features attributed to religious

experience are not specifically religious

but are, as the instance of hermeneutic

transcendence exemplifies, integral

elements within the dynamics of

profound experience itself. The example

of hermeneutical transcendence suggests

that what has been appropriated as

religious experience properly belongs to

an experience of linguistic being […] The

invocation of the mysterium of linguistic

being attempts to clarify rather than

mystify the ontological dimensions of

understanding.’27

The ’ancient storytellers’ reference in stanza 4 is

tricky. On one level it relates to the version of

events imaginatively recreated in the first part of

the poem, recalling the oral then written

accounts of the first Christmas story from the

Synoptic Gospels. These texts articulate

Christians’ beliefs about what happened or at

least what they are content to celebrate.

In the second part a shift in conception occurs.

In Davey’s terms, in linguistic being, the

mysterium is a ‘thought limit’. Now the

storytellers have perhaps stepped out of time;

perhaps they ponder the heavens as mystics

might. Pursuit of an ever more complex,

comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the

world sooner or later calls into question the

nature of human amazement as part of the larger

question of the nature of human experience – a

truly hermeneutic question. The invocation of

the mysterium of linguistic being attempts

to clarify rather than mystify the

ontological dimensions of understanding.

Attempting to clarify means for example

attempting to bring into language our

experience of the ineffable – what it means to be

amazed – progressive growth in understanding.

‘… though philosophical hermeneutics

addresses the centripetal moments of

understanding, it is also concerned with

the disruptive moments of

understanding and, furthermore, with

the relation between them.’28 ‘The

For Davey philosophical hermeneutics is

concerned with both the centripetal and

centrifugal (disruptive) moments of

understanding and how they interpenetrate. A

Christmas Unwrapping offers a view of how

both dynamics can be captured in an art work of

26 Thesis Five: Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterprets Transcendence. (Davey, 2006, p. 8) 27 Davey (2006, p. 28) 28 Davey (2006, p. 112)

141

Table 4.1 cont’d.

continuous play of language and the

logical undecidablity of interpretation do

not prevent defensible decisions being

arrived at in favor of one interpretation

rather than another. That the play of

language prevents the issue of the

decideability from being put beyond

argument guarantees that new insight,

understanding, and the possibility of

hermeneutic transcendence can be kept

within the bounds of discursive

exchange. Nevertheless, despite all the

logical possibilities, we do opt for or are

drawn toward one interpretation rather

than another.’29

words, and similarly in one’s understanding.

Simultaneously it illustrates how quite

divergent moods can be transformed into a new

synthesis where the elements are held in tension

together, signalling transcended understanding.

‘The poet has moved on. The certainties of childhood belief are now just a

memory of a dream; and yet in Storyland his world was, and we may infer is,

whole‘. Davey:

Concerning the question of wholeness, Gadamer speaks of

structures ‘which hang together’, with everything within them in

place, containing nothing conventional or stale (Gadamer, 1986, pp.

113-114). The speculative insight, whether achieved through the

languages of art or philosophy, does not discover a preexistent

whole but, rather, makes whole. The dispersed and fragmented,

that which is outside itself, appears mended and is made whole.

The speculative insight forges a wholeness of experience which

when experienced throws the hermeneutic subject back on itself. It

is in these moments that the speculative reversal takes place: the

hermeneutic subject is dispossessed of its ability to make assertions

about the world and finds itself made subject to an assertion about

itself and its world. When Gadamer speaks of the ‘truth' claims of

art or of tradition he is not concerned with questions of

epistemological legitimacy but with the fact that we find ourselves

truly addressed by such claims. Contrary to our willing and

sometimes contrary to our expectancies, they call to us. Irrespective

of the question of whether what they claim is true, we acknowledge

29 Davey (2006, p. 209)

142

them as true claims because

they truly claim our

attention. We cannot turn

aside from them, sensing that

our very being is implicated

in their claims. What the

speculative insight reveals, therefore, is a claim, a way of looking at

the world, a narrative completeness that stands on its own,

confronts us, and addresses us as if it were a subject and we were

predicated to it, subject to its claims. (Davey, 2006, p. 124)

In Gadamer’s words (cited in Davey),

The being of all play (art) is always realisation, sheer fulfilment,

energeia which has its telos within itself. The world of the work of

art, in which play expresses itself fully in the unity of its course, is

in fact a wholly transformed world. By means of it everyone

recognizes that that is how things are … From this viewpoint ‘reality’

is defined as what is untransformed, and art as the raising up of this

reality into its truth.’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 113) (italics in Davey)30

‘Fusion’ or ‘collision’ of horizons? While ‘fusion of horizons’ is a recurring term in

hermeneutic literature, I have already suggested that within the philosophical

hermeneutic worldspace the idea of reaching shared understanding (a fusion of

horizons) with another is more a goal than a possibility.31 For me Davey’s dramatic

reference in the following quote to a ‘collision of horizons’ conveys something of the

angst of pursuing understanding:

In addition to the formative capacity of linguistic being, there is

also the transformative capacity. The transformative capacity

relates to both the speculative and epiphanic functions of language

in that it reveals what was there before, that is, the hidden,

forgotten, or unseen connections between language worlds. The

transformative capacity of language opens us to both our own

horizons and to those of others. The capacity to understand more

requires a collision of horizons and is dependent upon ongoing

30 Davey’s text continues: ‘The "transformation into structure” claims that by means of art and the

speculative insights it affords, the reality of what it deals with becomes more what it is. Instead of

reality or a subject matter being the object of a hermeneutic subject's address, transformed reality

subjects the hermeneutic subject to its address’ (Davey, 2006, p. 125). 31 ‘… philosophical hermeneutics insists on maintaining the “otherness” of the other, because therein

lies the hope of yet further understanding (Davey, 2006, pp. 7-9)’ (Prologue). This is not to say that we

can’t reach common understanding with another, rather, that that common understanding is always

only ever partial.

c.f. The glimpses of my past experience provided … [in Chapter 3] should be sufficient to satisfy the reader that my reading of Campbell was a resounding ah-ha experience, for I had experienced so much of what she writes about. Campbell’s theory of affect had the ring of experiential truth for me (p. 117).

143

encounters with the other and otherness. (Davey, 2006, p. 48)

(italics added)

Ongoing references to a researcher’s personal experience in conceptualising and

writing a doctoral thesis would in most cases be out of place, but not so here, (a)

because a major theme of this thesis is the nature of growth in understanding and (b)

because I am using my experience as a case study, in dialogue with my chosen other-

authored texts, to illuminate that phenomenon. It is highly pertinent to my argument

therefore, periodically, to sift through my collisions of horizons experiences. A movie

scene of a motor collision can be rendered as instant graphic upheaval or in slow

motion, movement blurred, voices dulled, music from another world. In A Christmas

Unwrapping, I offer ‘felt experience’ snapshots of two phases of my life journey. While

the refrain at the end of each passage invokes an other-worldly mystical experience,

the two passages themselves – further accentuated by comments in this chapter –

suggest that as the poet I see both continuity and discontinuity between these two

worlds.

The muddy waters of thesis writing

Confronting and accommodating rival worldviews

In this section I explore the third muddy waters moment chosen to illuminate Davey’s

interests in Unquiet Understanding: I revisit an apparent clash of worldviews alluded to

in Chapter 1 – the so-called ‘stand-off’ between Ken Wilber and critics like John Heron.

Finding a way of fairly representing both positions and positioning myself in relation

to them was a muddy waters moment for me. I felt I was being pulled in two opposing

directions, and this was made worse as my Chapter 2 took shape. I will explain.

I had raised two sticking points from Wilber critics. One was, as Heron put it, ‘the

irreconcilable tension in Wilber's evolutionary theory between the unprecedented,

undetermined, innovative, self-transcending emergence of human holons and the

predetermined linear actualization of their inbuilt spiritual code, entelechy or deep

structure’ (Heron, 1997). For Heron, Wilber’s theory undermines human creativity

because it only operates on the surface; beneath the surface, evolutionary advance is

prescribed (entelechy). The other sticking point was Heron’s and also Ferrer’s

antipathy to Wilber’s perennial philosophy, which, Heron writes, ‘seeks to elevate and

universalize one traditional strand, Hindu-Buddhist nondualism, and make it the

controlling paradigm for all past, present and future spiritual belief and experience’

(Heron, 1998, pp. 3-4). The issue is thrown in bold relief in a passage by Richard Tarnas

in which he contrasts the perennial philosophy lifeworld from that of the International

144

Transpersonal Association

founded by Grof in the

1970s. In Chapter 1 I

recounted how Coan’s

(1989) paper provided a

theoretical manoeuvre

that might one day

resolve the second stand-

off32, but for now, that

stand-off is as real as it

ever was.

What I as hermen-

eutic meaning maker was

confronting therefore was

the challenge of accomm-

odating rival worldviews.

Then, as I drew Margaret

Archer’s social realism

into my thesis argument

(Chapter 2), things got

worse: I had a sense that

Archer’s position was

more compatible with Heron’s and Ferrer’s experiential ‘spirituality in practice’ than

with Wilber’s vision:

[…] my model of a university curriculum of becoming, which

exudes my belief in the importance of groundedness in living and

in educational/ curriculum design, firmly establishes the social

realist roots of my argument. I thus find myself drawn to many of

the constructive sentiments in the work of Heron and Ferrer –

about, for example, co-operative inquiry and spirituality – as I

continue to reflect on my own meaning making and spirituality.

(Chapter 1, p. 56)

I was worried that I was attempting to synthesise irreconcilable positions into my

position.

32 ‘ […] within any of the five modes of fulfilment, the highest levels of attainment require flexible

access to alternative forms of awareness. To some extent, this means access to forms of awareness that

are central to other modes of fulfillment. One implication of this position is that paths of development

or evolution leading initially toward different goals may ultimately converge in a stage of multiple

realization’ (Coan, 1989, p. 192).

‘In a sense, the pioneers and leading theorists of transpersonal psychology [ – i.e. those who fell into the perennial philosophy camp – ] had two aims. They wished to legitimate their new discipline and the ontological status of spirituality in the eyes of empirical science, the dominant force in the modern world view. Yet they equally sought to legitimate spirituality and their discipline in their own eyes, which required them to satisfy those standards and assumptions of empirical science that they themselves had internalized in the course of their own intellectual development.

‘The belief in a pregiven objective reality – whether spiritual or material – that could be empirically validated; the further conviction that this reality was ultimately single and universal, independent of the diversity of human interpretations, and that its deep structures could be described by progressively more accurate representations as the history of thought advanced; the corollary belief that on this basis, sharply bivalent assess-ments, either affirmative or rejecting, could be made of all "competing" spiritual and psychological perspectives, and that hierarchical rankings of religious traditions and mystical experiences as more or less evolved could thereby be estab-lished according to their relative accuracy in representing this independent reality: all these principles, derived from the scientific ideology of modernity, were carried forth into the transpersonal paradigm. And in being carried forth, they at once helped legitimate the paradigm and yet increasingly began to engender internal tensions, theoretical incoherencies, and even internecine conflicts.

‘In practice – on the ground level, as it were, in its lived reality – the transpersonal tent from the beginning was an extraordinarily embracing, tolerant, richly pluralistic community of seekers and scholars, students and teachers’. (Tarnas, 2002, pp. x-xi) (italics added)

145

So can Wilber’s vision be harmonised with philosophical hermeneutics? Wilber

would say that his approach is thoroughly hermeneutic. It is hermeneutics that Wilber

uses to defend the entire left half of his four quadrants model:

Almost from its inception, and down to today, social theory has

divided into two often sharply disagreeing camps: hermeneutics

and structural-functionalism (or systems theory). Hermeneutics

(the art and science of interpretation) attempted to reconstruct and

empathetically enter the shared cultural worldspace of human

beings, and thus bring forth an understanding of the values

contained therein. Structural-functionalism, on the other hand,

dispensed with meaning (in any participatory sense) and looked

instead at the external social structures and social systems that

governed the behaviour of the action system.

Both were holistic, in the sense that both situated individual existence

in a larger network of communal practices and insisted that the

individual could not be understood without reference to the holistic

background of shared practices. But they were, almost exactly,

representatives of the Left-Hand and Right-Hand paths, with

hermeneutics asking always, ‘What does it mean?’ and structural-

functionalism asking instead, ‘What does it do?’

To reconstruct meaning (the Left-Hand path) I must engage in

interpretation (hermeneutics); I must try to enter the shared depths,

shared values, shared worldviews of the inhabitants; I must try to

understand and describe the culture from within […] The depth in

me (‘lived experience’) must empathetically align itself, intuitively

feel into, the corresponding depth (or lived experience) that I seek

to understand in others, and not simply blankly register an

empirical patch. Mutual understanding is a type of interior harmonic

resonance of depth: ‘I know what you mean!’ (Wilber, 2000, p. 133)

However when I read Wilber’s critics’ representations of Wilber’s position (see above

references to Heron, Ferrer and Tarnas) there appeared to be tension points (collisions

of horizons) where Wilber’s interests interface with philosophical hermeneutics.

Consider this passage from Davey:

To claim that Bildung and the process of becoming gebildet are

genuinely formative is to claim that they are, metaphysically

speaking, without intrinsic essence […] In this respect philosophical

hermeneutics follows both Nietzsche and certain postmodern

146

idioms of thought in denying a necessary ground to understanding

and interpretation. […] the invocation of Bildung is central to the

claim of philosophical hermeneutics that the absence of a

metaphysical ground for understanding does not render its claims

arbitrary […] The claim that both Bildung and becoming gebildet

have no intrinsic essence has a curious consequence. If becoming

gebildet entails the ability to enter a dialogical relationship with the

unfamiliar and unusual, the claim implies that the outcome of such

an engagement is neither certain nor predictable. If so, Gadamer's

conception of becoming gebildet as the practised pursuit of a

dialogical openness toward the unpredictable is, philosophically

speaking, distinguishable from the bourgeois conception of Bildung.

Philosophical hermeneutics does not posit an ‘ideal’ humanity that

education should anticipate and be disciplined by (Grondin, 1995,

pp. 111-124). If anything, philosophical hermeneutics implies that

humanity is a species whose very essence is always in question.

Philosophical hermeneutics is not prescriptive in this respect. It

does not state what ought to take place within in the process of

becoming gebildet. To the contrary, it attempts to discern what takes

place. It views the formative aspects of Bildung not as the

acquisition of a given theory but as the consolidation of a practical

process, a process of becoming open to interaction and exchange.

(Davey, 2006, pp. 44-45)

So there I stood, facing an argument that becoming gebildet (a) involves growth in

understanding which is metaphysically groundless (having no intrinsic essence); and

(b) requires that one enter ‘a dialogical relationship with the unfamiliar and unusual’,

the outcome of which is necessarily uncertain and unpredictable. If (as Davey

maintains) philosophical hermeneutics implies ‘that humanity is a species whose very

essence is always in question’ (Davey, 2006, p. 45), what was I to make of Heron’s

picture of ‘the assimilative totalitarianism of Wilber's system’ (Heron, 1997).33 I was

acutely aware that the process of becoming gebildet is of a very different order, unfolds

on a different plane from that of ‘the predetermined linear actualization of […] [human

holons’] inbuilt spiritual code’ (Heron, 1997), that just as in philosophers’ discourses

over the nexus between mind and brain, we need to avoid conflating one language set

with another. However my suspicion that the incompatibility between Wilber’s and his

critics’ positions reflected another incompatibility – between Wilber and philosophical

hermeneutics – were aroused. Given my intention of embodying the philosophical

33 Wilber delivered telling blows to Heron in his response to Heron’s ideas and emotive language

(Wilber, 1999a), but the inset giving Tarnas’s argument (p. 144) also makes a telling case.

147

hermeneutic ethos in my argument, I resist concluding that Wilber’s position is

incompatible with the philosophical hermeneutic consciousness conveyed in the Davey

extract. Be that as it may, however, as I pointed out in Chapter 1, Wilber, like the other

two authors examined in the chapter, was chosen to provide a rich, literature-based

rendering of the concept of holism, and that beyond this, all three texts are fine

examples of individual responses to their common need to provide a comprehensive

account of the way things are, from their respective disciplinary stances. There is no

need for me to reconceptualise my thesis. Philosophical hermeneutics urges us to

actively seek out the other, the different, in our efforts to understand: ‘it is only by

seeking out and residing within the oscillation of the centrifugal and centripetal

aspects of understanding that translation and transcendence can be guaranteed’

(Davey, 2006, p. 218).

The most difficult muddy waters moment of my thesis writing thus resided in my

challenge to confront and accommodate rival worldviews as I developed and

expressed my position. How does all this help illuminate my interpretation of Davey’s

interpretation and elaboration of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics? I take up this

question in the next section where I reflect further on the Wilber v Heron/Ferrer/Tarnas et

al. dispute.

Diving for pearls

In discussing the process of this inquiry (Prologue) I wrote that I would show that a

reconsideration of meaning making would allow us to re-imagine university education

for the professions, but I acknowledged my equivocation about such a claim, one that

concerns our limits in fathoming the process of understanding at the heart of the meaning

making experience. In the concluding section of this chapter I revisit some of the ‘pearls’

discerned already in this wading through the muddy waters of philosophical

hermeneutic thought and practice.

The three muddy waters moments discussed above were chosen to help illuminate the

philosophical hermeneutic understanding of the journey to understanding and related

themes woven into Davey’s Unquiet Understanding. We are now ready to consider

another passage from that book:

A thought that occurs to us or strikes us seems plausible or

convincing not because it strikes us ex nihilo carrying its own

epistemological credentials as it were, but because we recognize it

as another or different aspect of a subject matter we have a past

acquaintance with. The new thought is persuasive because it

foregrounds what was held within a known contextual

background. The new thought reconfigures the subject matter we

were previously acquainted with, permitting it to be understood in

148

a new way. The sense of certainty with which we are seized when

we see that a new idea ‘fits’ by making new sense of what went

before, is not the certainty of method but the certainty of life, the

certainty of that which shows itself to be the case. (Davey, 2006, p.

102)

I can shed light on Davey’s point about the persuasive ‘new thought’ from my

third muddy waters moment. (Here now is my answer to the question raised earlier –

how does all this help illuminate my interpretation of Davey’s interpretation and elaboration of

Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics? – which was the essential purpose of this chapter

within the whole thesis.) In the next paragraph, I apply the ‘new idea’ Davey speaks of

to the way I resolved the various colliding worldviews I had drawn into my thesis. The

resolution is achieved through my reflexive philosophical hermeneutic practice.

Wilber v Heron/Ferrer/Tarnas et al (including Archer). As noted in the earlier

discussion, I was attempting to synthesise apparently irreconcilable positions into my

position. What a predicament I faced. And yet, as Davey points out, ‘despite all the

logical possibilities, we do opt for or are drawn toward one interpretation rather than

another’ (Davey, 2006, p. 209). What I am about to make explicit is something whose

claim has been awaiting its revelation all along. Wilber’s position makes total and

compelling sense within the logic and frame of reference of holarchy. The Heron/

Ferrer/Tarnas case makes perfect sense within the logic and frame of reference of

experiential, participatory spirituality. Archer’s position offers a satisfying and

persuasive account of the human phenomenon within her frame of reference. In what

feels to me like a gargantuan collision of horizons, I am able to hold these colliding

worldviews in creative tension together within the logic and frame of reference of

philosophical hermeneutics, thanks to my ultimate purpose in this inquiry – to develop and

offer a university curriculum of becoming framework to the field. It was my curriculum

design enigma that created the particular conditions of uncertainty that I have single-

mindedly and holistically tried to address here. This is my frame of reference. ‘The new

thought reconfigures the subject matter we were previously acquainted with,

permitting it to be understood in a new way’ (Davey, 2006, p. 102). Davey continues:

Furthermore, although it is the subject matter that shows itself, it

nevertheless shows itself to us and, in so doing, is able to transform

our understanding of it. In other words, individual subjectivity

cannot be eliminated from the disclosure of subject matters:

thoughts occur to us, insights strike us, ideas speak to us. The

subjective element within such a cognitive process cannot be

removed. Speculative thinking in the way that Gadamer

understands it involves, then, a becoming gebildet, an attuning of

149

oneself to the many voices of subject matters, a being prepared for

the genuinely educative challenge of listening to and responding to

their claims and a willingness to change accordingly. (Davey, 2006,

pp. 102-103)

My thesis is the articulation of what began as a hunch that germinated in my mind,

influenced by my meaning perspective, watered by my life’s journey and my needs as

an educator. The long process of selection of texts for this hermeneutic inquiry,

challenging my hunch (i.e. thesis as proposition) and refining my emerging argument,

was shaped by the topic I had chosen for this inquiry: ‘Meaning Making: A University

Curriculum Framework for the Twenty-First Century’. From the beginning I knew the

solution would need to be holistic; that it needed to be grounded in the ‘real world’ of

human experience. Looking back now, although I had not considered including a text

on participatory experiential learning for my core text set, I was always strongly drawn

to experiential learning facilitation in my adult education practice (as my Muddy Waters

workshop illustrates), and was therefore open to insights from the field described in

Ferrer’s book title, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human

Spirituality (Ferrer, 2002). If I were commencing this research now, a work such as this

would probably be included in the core text set, which simply demonstrates that

meaning making and growth in understanding are phenomena well and truly

anchored in time and place – my nascent argument and I were not ready to include

such a text then.34

Reflecting on all this, I see something of potential value to others who may choose

to conduct philosophical hermeneutic research. It concerns the organic relationship

between thesis text composition and finalising one’s text set. The process of textual

composition involved crafting a text set, but this process was not one that could be

done at the beginning of the research against a determined and delimited set of criteria

because the research deliberately pursued the process of being open (as is most

relevant to interpretive paradigm research) to the evolving findings. Instead, my

research began after many years of engaging with the literature and practice of higher

education. My research questions emerged out of this fertile and eclectic field of ideas.

My initial (formative) selection of texts reflected my entry horizons of understanding.

34 ‘If the speculative experience of truth entails recognition of self-implication, a process of recognition

must be involved. If recognition is entailed, remembrance is implied, and if remembrance is

suggested, so too is forgetfulness. These conceptual associations point to the fact that the speculative

experience of truth with its centrifugal and centripetal motions is driven by the dialectical tensions

between anamnesis (forgetfulness), mimesis (the recognition of the same), and mynemosyne (memory or

recall). Philosophical hermeneutics follows Heidegger in denying that the latter are merely

psychological categories. They manifest themselves in the hermeneutic subject but as key aspects of

its understanding. They reflect different aspects of our substance, those of our being, of our cultured

“placedness” or “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) and of our linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit). Once again we

can see a key motif of philosophical hermeneutics operating in the argument, namely, the struggle to

discern objectivities within the subjective voice’ (Davey, 2006, p. 117).

150

Throughout my doctoral candidature across eight years my evolving horizons derived

from the research and my ongoing engagement with the literature, in search of texts

that could critique and extend these horizons. The final thesis reflexively documents

this evolving process. The text selection criteria appropriate in philosophical

hermeneutic research therefore are (a) the capacity of the chosen text to extend the

hermeneutic dialogue and (b) the potential for the chosen text to address gaps in the

evolving interpretation.

A fitting note on which to conclude this chapter is to relate the muddy waters

experience to my primary thesis theme of ‘becoming’ – of the fundamental interest in

ontology in my university curriculum of becoming. The next passage by Davey is not

explicitly discussing muddy waters/lack of clarity, but for me such experience is to

some degree present whenever someone considers a hermeneutic claim:

A hermeneutic claim can be persuasive, then, partly because of its

extensive and intensive capacity to show that it fits into and

illuminates a wider set of interests and allows us to reconfigure

them in unexpected but entirely plausible ways. Overlooked

alignments of meaning appertaining to our self-understanding can

suddenly make us think differently about ourselves. An alteration

in how we think about ourselves can alter how we relate to the

outward or extensive aspects of historical and cultural meaning.

This confirms that a condition of the experience of meaningfulness

– what makes us opt for one interpretation rather than another – is

ontological. We can be inclined to select between interpretations on

the basis of what they reveal about the complex and ever-shifting

alignments of social and cultural meaning we are already placed

within. Philosophical hermeneutics prioritizes the ontological

placement of the interpreting subject in order to emphasize that the

epiphany of meaningfulness is not an arbitrary subjective act.

(Davey, 2006, p. 210)

Reaching a new peak of understanding (an epiphany of meaningfulness) is not

arbitrary but rather part of an individual’s journey of becoming. Reaching a peak is

never the end of the journey, however, because new horizons of meaning await us,

which means that my muddy waters quest for an ever more complex, comprehensive

and coherent sense of self in the world is as open-ended as my next breath.

Hermeneutic consciousness is sustained by a disposition of radical openness, not only

towards the other, but also to oneself (Figure 4.2).

151

Becoming gebildet is ‘an attuning of oneself to the

many voices of subject matters, a being prepared

for the genuinely educative challenge of listening to

and responding to their claims and a willingness to

change accordingly’ (Davey, 2006, p. 103).



do not refuse.


the spores of entreaty are burgeoning

(McKenzie, 1990).

Figure 4.2. Opening up on the journey to understanding

Image: ‘The Walk of a Lifetime’ by Kaslito | © Carlos ‘Kaslito’ J. Afonso 2013 | http://kaslito.deviantart.com/art/The-walk-of-a-lifetime-349443268 | [email protected]

Understanding is the goal of lived hermeneutics, and it is realised in proportion as we

acclimatise to the muddy waters experience. We continue to interrogate hermeneutic

experience in Chapter 5.

153

Chapter 5. Contemplating

the learner development literature

in higher education

Realising personal potential is an ontological quest.

To be human is to ask questions.

Introduction

Knowledge, knowing and learning

On ‘understanding’ and ‘being knowledgeable’ – Bereiter

Connectionism

Folk theory of mind, objects in the mind, and educational practice

Teaching knowledgeably for ‘being knowledgeable’?

Being knowledgeable: World 2 encounters World 3

The Bereiter thesis in perspective

Personal epistemology

Practice knowledge and practice epistemology

The self-knowing self-checker

Curriculum–pedagogy thinking

Curriculum for transcendence

William Pinar on education as a learning journey

Adult and higher education theorising

Segue

Introduction

As the chapter title suggests, my concern here is learner development, and so the

educational design challenge for this chapter becomes, how can a curriculum be enacted

that creates the optimal conditions for fostering the holistic personal growth and professional

formation of all students enrolled in a given professional education program? What may be

gleaned from the higher education, general education and related literatures to provide

undergirding ideas or conceptual elements of my promised curriculum of becoming framework?

While my goal in this project has been to conceive and articulate an alternative

approach to curriculum thought and practice in higher education, my argument also

relates to the mainstream of educational literature.1 My intention in this chapter is to

round off my hermeneutic engagement with judiciously selected texts in Part A with a

1 Like Barbara Hofer, I am drawn to Paul Pintrich’s view (as distilled by Hofer) ‘that learning,

motivation, self-regulation, and personal epistemology need to be understood across ages and

educational contexts’ (Hofer, 2005, p. 97). My case for reconceptualising university professional

education is founded on an appreciation of the wider human phenomenon, cradle to grave. My

proposed definition of growth in global understanding has ramifications for education at all levels.

Chapter map

154

big picture view of themes also pertinent to the above questions. The texts chosen for

this purpose are more directly related to the educational context than those discussed

in earlier chapters. Central to my whole argument is that the twin goals of □ creating the

optimal conditions for fostering the holistic personal growth and □ enacting the professional

formation of future practitioners is best seen as a single hybrid goal of a fit-for-greater-

purpose education. Aiming to achieve a fit-for-greater-purpose education for the

professions requires it.

Knowledge, knowing and learning

In this section I interrogate several critical aspects of the teaching challenge. First I

engage with Carl Bereiter’s Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age in pursuit of rich

and cutting edge perspectives on the concepts of mind, knowledge and teaching for

understanding. Next I survey selected texts to consider if and how the literature of

personal epistemology might support my curriculum of becoming notion. I then ground

my discussion of personal epistemology theory by drawing from the literature of

practice knowledge and practice epistemology. I conclude this section by considering ‘the

self-knowing self-checker’, in which I expand on my review of the personal

epistemology discussion.

On ‘understanding’ and ‘being knowledgeable’ – Bereiter

Carl Bereiter published his Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age in 2002 (Bereiter,

2002). Bereiter’s argument has relevance to my thesis in terms of the depth and breadth

of his view of ‘understanding’. While my focus so far in this thesis has been on what I

call ‘global understanding’ – as a way of meshing my interest in meaning making as an

educational activity with the philosophical hermeneutic way of thinking – we now

need to consider how ‘teaching for understanding’ is/could be practised in education.

Perhaps that will serve as a point of entry into educational design dialogue with my

colleagues and the field. As I establish common ground with them in terms of our view

of teaching for understanding, I can ask them and the field at large to consider

implementing my curriculum of becoming framework, relying as it does on my

representations of global understanding, hermeneutic consciousness and lived hermeneutics.

Bereiter scrutinises much more than the nature of human understanding in his

argument. His critique of education practice and vision for the future offers numerous

potential synergies with the kind of practice I am proposing here.2 However, this

discussion of synergies must await another time for exploration. I have selected

‘teaching for understanding’ as a thematic organiser for my necessarily selective report

on Bereiter’s text given the scope of the thesis and the expanse of Bereiter’s work.

2 While Bereiter is explicitly addressing school education and I, university education, in fact we are

both questioning the fundamentals of what it is to teach and learn in the sense that we are both

problematising understanding.

155

This quote from Bereiter is a useful point of entry into his and my arguments:

To get serious about teaching for understanding, as I see it, means

treating understanding as something that warrants attention in its

own right, over and above the attention we give to performance.3 It

means giving attention to what it is that needs understanding, to the

problems of understanding it, and only further down the line to

how we will assess it. But this implies that understanding is a state

that enables performance, that it is not the performance itself. How

can we characterize this state, without falling back on the folk–

cognitivist notion that it is a characteristic of objects in the mind?

The answer, I believe, lies in considering understanding to be

neither something in the mind nor a set of overt performances but

rather a relation between the knower and an object of

understanding. (Bereiter, 2002, p. 100)

Bereiter’s book is a powerfully argued call for educators to move beyond what is

known in the literature as a ‘folk theory of mind’ to one that adequately accounts for

the way humans interface with the meaningful in their lives, one that is reconcilable

with advances in cognitive science, specifically, with connectionism. I will sketch out the

lines of argument he develops that are particularly pertinent to my thesis. My

discussion will concentrate on two phrases from the above quote: ‘objects in the mind’

and ‘objects of understanding’. In the process I also explore how Bereiter deals with the

notion of knowledge: seeking clarity about ‘understanding’ also requires clarity about

‘knowledge’. Understanding why ‘objects in the mind’ and ‘objects of understanding’

are incompatible ideas and why the distinction is important for educators is to

understand the kernel of Bereiter’s position. A third anchor for this discussion will be

Bereiter’s reference above to a ‘folk-cognitivist notion’; he makes extensive reference to

this idea, using the widely-used term, ‘folk theory of mind’. First, to set the scene for

my scan of Bereiter’s argument, a description of connectionism is warranted.

CONNECTIONISM

Connectionism ‘demonstrates how a brain could be knowledgeable – that is, could

retain and take advantage of the results of experience – without anything that could

properly be called mental content’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 24). Bereiter provides a helpful

sketch of the context of connectionism’s arrival:

3 Bereiter is wary of approaches where understanding is regarded not as ‘some distinctive form of

human competence’ but as residing in performance, in demonstration of achievement. He sees this as

‘empiricist reductionism’, exemplified he asserts in David Perkins’s ‘performance perspective’:

Our ‘performance perspective’, in brief, says that understanding is a matter of being able to do a

variety of thought-demanding things with a topic – like explaining, finding evidence, and

examples, generalizing, applying, analogizing and representing the topic in a new way’ (Perkins

& Blythe, 1994). (Bereiter, 2002, p. 99)

156

Artificial intelligence models based on the container metaphor

[view of mind] offer only two ways for a mind to ‘know’

something. Either that something is explicitly represented in the

mind, in something like a sentence, or it is logically inferable from

things that are explicitly represented. Yet a great deal of what we

seem to know does not plausibly belong in either category […] To

provide a more plausible account [of brain functioning], the

philosopher Michael Polanyi (1964) invoked the concept of tacit

knowledge. The most obvious examples are knowledge embedded

in skills – for instance, the knowledge of ballistics implicit in

throwing a paper wad into a wastebasket. But […] there is also tacit

knowledge involved in purely cognitive acts, such as predicting

and explaining. (Bereiter, 2002, pp. 29-30)

The idea of tacit knowledge did not make a lot of headway until the early 1990s4: it

seemed too insubstantial to work with. Until then, cognition specialists largely saw

knowledge as ‘explicit symbolic representations’ and saw thought as the manipulation

of these representations using specific rules – the container view of mind again.

However the emergence of connectionist thinking5 provided a new approach to

artificial intelligence design. Bereiter:

If the rule-based kind of artificial intelligence I have been

discussing up to this point is based on a metaphor of the mind,

connectionism may be said to be based on a metaphor of the brain.

It is the brain conceived of as a lot of interconnected units,

activating or inhibiting each other by energy transmitted over their

connections. Connectionism is not a theory. Indeed, from the

distant vantage point of education, it serves more as an antitheory.

It serves as a source of concrete demonstrations that you can have

something like a mind that has something like knowledge, but that

does not contain any identifiable rules, propositions, or other

symbolic representations of that knowledge. (Bereiter, 2002, p. 31)

See the Glossary item for self-organisation and emergence for more.

Bereiter’s overall argument has prompted me to keep an open mind on how my

curriculum of becoming framework should be shaped. Regarding connectionism,

4 Bereiter, writing in 2002, wrote ‘about a decade ago’. 5 Bereiter cites ‘a monumental two-volume work’, McClelland, Rumelhart & the PDP Research Group

(1986) and Rumelhart, McClelland, & the PDP Research Group (1986) as signalling the birth of the

connectionist movement. It ‘has had a profound influence on cognitive science in all its many

branches’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 24).

157

Bereiter acknowledges that at present connectionist models ‘do not have much of

practical value to contribute to pedagogy’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 36). His reason for

weaving connectionist ideas into his argument was ‘to provide a handle on a new way

of thinking about knowledge and mind’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 36).6

FOLK THEORY OF MIND, OBJECTS IN THE MIND, AND EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE

For Bereiter,

folk theories are whatever theories or conceptual frameworks

people pick up from popular culture and use in their daily efforts to

make sense of events and plan their actions. We all acquire folk

theories and are apt to go on using them until we get far enough

into some endeavor that we need specialized knowledge. Folk

theories, thus conceived, are not necessarily rigid things, insensitive

to evidence and closed to novelty. They change as new facts and

ideas are absorbed into popular culture. (Bereiter, 2002, p. 9)

Bereiter points out that ‘in our daily lives we function according to the psychology and

epistemology we acquired in early childhood’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 9). Culturally imbued,

‘commonsense’ psychology and epistemology together constitute what scholars call

folk theory of mind. Commonsense psychology in the Western world7 proposes that

we have a mind containing ‘immaterial objects such as ideas, memories, facts, plans,

goals, and principles’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 7). Commonsense epistemology asserts a

relationship between the things in our mind and the external world. Thus, for example,

behaviour is an expression of people’s beliefs and desires. Typical six year olds

understand that they can infer other people’s beliefs from their words and actions and

from the facts of a situation (Astington, 1993). In this view of the world, when one’s

mental objects truly correlate with observable reality/experience, they constitute

knowledge; when they don’t, they constitute false beliefs (Bereiter, 2002, p. 7).

Bereiter takes issue in his book with how mind is conceptualised in education, and

so to mount his argument he spends time in the early part of the book discussing the

idea of mind. Bereiter:

Although higher learning may turn some of us into behaviorists

who reject the notion of mind, idealists who deny there is a reality

to which beliefs correspond, or antifoundationalists who deny there

is a basis for comparing one belief with another, in our daily lives

6 Bereiter says that to find such a handle one should have an ‘experiential feel for how connectionist

networks work’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 36). He provides a description of two kinds of word processor spell

checker to give the reader a second hand experience of connectionist processes (Bereiter, 2002, pp. 37-

41). 7 Bereiter’s qualification.

158

we function according to the psychology and epistemology we

acquired in early childhood. There seems to be no practical

alternative. That is probably true, as far as everyday life is

concerned. Folk theory of mind is so intricately woven into the

social fabric that there is no telling what would be left if we tried to

remove it. Consider such socially important concepts as lying,

pretending, promising, knowing, and joking. Everything from a

criminal court decision to the fate of a friendship can turn on

whether one of these concepts is thought to apply. But each of these

concepts distinguishes a relation between something overt and

something in a person's mind. Joking is saying something untrue

but without the intent that others will believe it; lying is the same

thing but with the intent to be believed. The capacity to hold a

theory of mind seems to be an evolved capacity, with evidences of

it in other primates (Premack & Premack, 1996). As humans

evolved talents for cheating, lying, pretending, promising, making

truth claims, and joking, the ability to detect and distinguish among

these became important survival skills (Barkow, Cosmides, &

Tooby, 1992). A complementary notion, however, is that only

having a theory of mind enables us to do such things.

Chimpanzees, according to this reasoning, are not by nature less

deceitful than we are, they are simply not as good at imagining

themselves into one another's minds. (Bereiter, 2002, pp. 9-10)

Where would we be without a concept and theory of mind? I noted in Table 2.2

(Chapter 2) that Archer’s Primary Agents in ancient India and China were populations

lacking the capacity to think outside the reigning cultural mindset. ‘Mindset’ is a useful

concept in all kinds of discussions about contemporary culture; it is etymologically and

conceptually rooted in the concept of mind. Be that as it may, Bereiter does not support

the approach of positing the existence of mind then defining it and its relation to the

brain; rather, he advocates starting ‘with the idea of a mentalistic level of description’

(Bereiter, 2002, p. 18). Whenever we talk about what we or others know or believe,

remember or forget, want, like or dislike, or what people are experiencing or feeling,

we are talking mentalistically. In Bereiter’s view it is not possible to be engaged in

education without recourse to such language (Bereiter, 2002, p. 18).

To recap and extend the above discussion, the folk theory of mind refers to what

‘mind’ is commonly taken to mean. It could be described as the uncritical habit of

assuming the mind is a container of chunks of knowledge.8 In my usage ‘habitual

8 A theory or a habit? Bereiter qualifies his use of the term ‘theory’ in this expression; a folk theory is

not necessarily a real theory in the sense that a real theory ‘is a set of propositions vulnerable to

159

assumption’ has the character of tacit belief, of disposition – an outlook that feels

comfortable. As Bereiter encapsulates such a disposition, ‘It is just the way things are’

(Bereiter, 2002, p. 7). Folk theories provide ‘an aura of certainty rooted in direct

experience’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 8). It is not just knowledge chunks that populate the

mind, in this view, but ‘the whole carload of mental luggage’, including ‘beliefs,

desires, memories, ideas and dreams’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 8). This habit–belief–disposition,

still lurking (according to Bereiter) in the modus operandi of much teaching practice

today – in the assumptions that underpin that practice – is an anathema to Bereiter, as

his book tellingly reveals. The statement that the folk theory of mind is an anathema to

Bereiter is deliberately unequivocal. I sense that Bereiter is so persuaded that the folk

theory of mind is inadequate as the cornerstone of education in the Knowledge Age

that he will continue to pit himself against it, try to expose its inadequacies. He seeks

not just to demonstrate the outdated status of the folk theory of mind in teachers’

approach to their practice, but also to expose the tangled tentacles of its reach, the

unacknowledged ramifications it holds for the way we teach. Bereiter does not say that

teachers have a literal and explicit commitment to this view; its impact is more

undercover. Even teachers who do not use rote learning as a teaching strategy may in

staffroom conversations betray their tacit belief in the need for students at exam time to

cram ‘stuff’ in their heads – a classic case of the container view of mind syndrome at

work.

Bereiter is very good at calling the status quo into question. He opens his book

with a curious phenomenon in present day (circa 2002) North American elementary

schools – an uneasy stalemate between two clamouring teaching agendas:

Millions of dollars are being poured into high-tech equipment that

is used mainly to produce the kinds of ‘projects’ that in an earlier

day were produced using scissors, old magazines, and library

paste.9 At the same time, and in the same schools, a back-to-basics

movement has teachers obsessively concerned with covering

traditional content and preparing students for tests. (Bereiter, 2002,

p. 3)

counterevidence’. Bereiter uses the term ‘because it is a common and handy usage’ (Bereiter, 2002, p.

7). 9 Bereiter paints a vignette of parents being awed at their children’s computer skills, having entered the

classroom to find ’11-year-olds morphing images, changing coloration, and taking a figure from one

image and planting it in another’. They are awed because they do not understand what their children

are doing, even though the techniques the children are demonstrating ‘can be learned in two or three

hours’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 4).

160

Teachers at all levels10 are professionally responsible for how they teach. It would be

reasonable for society to assume that teachers’ training and qualifications warrant that

they are part of a profession that knows how to plan and deliver an appropriate,

outcome-oriented education as students progress through the curriculum, that what

students do in the class-

room each day is part of a

large jigsaw puzzle,

constructed on the basis

of what is known about

human development and

learning processes. And

yet, in Bereiter’s view, as I

read him, the container

view of mind, that lingers

like a trace element

wherever practitioners

have not intentionally and

convincingly moved on

from it, is not up to the

task as the cornerstone of

how we teach in the

Knowledge Age.

TEACHING KNOWLEDGEABLY FOR ‘BEING KNOWLEDGEABLE’?

The expression ‘being knowledgeable’ is a term Bereiter uses to describe, according to

his vision, an educator’s teaching goal for his or her students. But what kind of

pedagogical knowledge underpins teaching for being knowledgeable?11 Behind this

question lies another: in what kind of landscape of thought about knowledge are

educators’ perceptions of it shaped? The second question opens up a plethora of

possible lines of response that lie beyond the scope of this study12, but the following

argument by Bereiter is one that is germane to my thesis:

Growing recognition of the economic importance of knowledge has

brought all kinds of players into the knowledge arena who have no

10 Including university teachers of course, whether or not they use the label. 11 My thesis is clearly about more than teaching for being knowledgeable, but being knowledgeable is

part of growth in understanding and thus teaching for being knowledgeable is part of a curriculum of

becoming. 12 I return to the first question shortly in ‘The Bereiter thesis in perspective’.

The phrase, ‘cornerstone of how we teach’, should not be taken to mean that alternative, unambiguously defined cornerstones exist, waiting to be substituted in the construction of the teaching enterprise. Nor does it imply that practitioners recognise that the system they help maintain has certain conceptual underpinnings. Consider how Bereiter assesses the influence of behaviourist theory on school education in America. He acknowledges that for a time behaviourism had an impact on classroom practice, but the practices inspired therein did not challenge the underlying folk theory. He continues:

‘Furthermore, behaviorists in education have continued to rely on the traditional epistemology for much of what they do. Questions of what to teach and in what order, all the details and strategies of conveying content to the learner, are left to the wisdom and traditions of teaching. Often the creation of a behaviorist program of instruction starts by taking a conventional textbook or curriculum guide and breaking it down into separately teachable bits. Thus, the epistemological assumptions frozen into textbooks and teaching practice are preserved. The same is true of assessment. Often the so-called "behavioral objective" merely specifies test items the student must pass, the items themselves being grounded in folk theory that treats learning as the accumulation of items of mental content. The reason for behaviorism's limited effect on education is not subversiveness or cultural lag on the part of educators; the reason is that behaviorism was never able to provide an alternative conceptual framework for teaching subject matter – facts, concepts, and the like’ (Bereiter, 2002, pp. 10-11).

161

particular theoretical perspective on knowledge. Unhampered by

philosophical or psychological strictures they can shift

indiscriminately between treating knowledge as stuff in people’s

heads and treating knowledge as stuff out in the world, to be found

in books, patent applications and the like. (Bereiter, 2002, p. 6)

Bereiter points to the looseness in popular use of the terms, learning organisation and

intellectual capital. ‘Learning organisation’ is used for organisations committed to

continuous improvement and also to those whose business is knowledge creation.

‘Intellectual capital’ (as argued by Stewart [1997]) can refer to knowledge that supports

individual human capability but also knowledge used as negotiable property (Bereiter,

2002, p. 6). Teachers are not immune from such imprecision in how these and other

learning-related terms are used. It is one thing for teachers to develop in students a

critical awareness of how terminology needs to be used appropriately in professional

practice; it is quite another for them to reflect critically on the strategic pedagogical

reasons for what they do in the classroom with these two distinct conceptions,

knowledge-in-here13 and knowledge-out-there. What actually is my role (a teacher might

ponder) in supporting my students’ to become knowledgeable? Why does seeking clarity about

‘understanding’ also require clarity about ‘knowledge’? How, specifically, do my planning and

interventions in the classroom optimise understanding? What can I do differently, how can I

think differently, to facilitate growth in understanding and transformative learning more

effectively, for all my students? What concepts can we draw on to answer such questions

in a Knowledge Age way? Colleagues interested in exploring the potential

complementarity between teaching for understanding in Bereiter’s sense (broadly

reflecting the cognitive science tradition) and teaching for global understanding in

mine (an extension of the philosophical hermeneutic tradition) should find fertile,

challenging reading in Bereiter’s book.

As I noted above, Bereiter argues that we rely on folk theories ‘until we get far

enough into some endeavor that we need specialized knowledge’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 9).

In the field of education, this is when it is necessary to reappraise the adequacy of folk

theory of mind, of the ‘mind as container’ metaphor, in teaching for understanding.

Why educators need a new way of thinking about mind. Bereiter recognises that

there are currently significant advances being made in pedagogy, but ‘for the most part

they are being conceived and articulated within the framework of folk theory of mind’,

which will be their limiting factor (Bereiter, 2002, p. xii). Bereiter’s main focus in his

book is knowledge, or rather, the concept of ‘being knowledgeable’, but if educators

have no richer conception of mind than that of a mental filing cabinet, it’s little wonder

that ‘knowledge’ is downplayed in education – consider its relatively low status in

13 Knowledge as an attribute of capability for example, not mental objects.

162

Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Bloom, 1956) and the impact of that schema

on contemporary teaching practice – in favour of ‘chimerical “higher order thinking

skills”’ or ‘multiple intelligences’ (Bereiter, 2002, pp. xii, 6); here we could add ‘digital

literacies’, which has also gained traction in online/blended learning discourses in

recent years. I concur with Bereiter’s broad intent, or more to the point, wish to

acknowledge the place of all the forms of knowledge in Bloom’s taxonomy and other

terms used in the literature to represent educational challenges. In particular, as

Bereiter argues, we need to refine our conceptions of the importance of being

knowledgeable. When he characterises higher order thinking skills as ‘chimerical’, my

immediate reaction is to regard it as hyperbole, although I would be interested to hear

why he used the term.

Achieving the conceptual change needed to reinvigorate the role of knowing in our

teaching will be difficult:

Developing a richer conception of knowledgeability, however,

depends on adopting a view of mind that can support such a

conception. The new conception of mind that has been taking shape

in cognitive science in the past decade, and that I hope to advance

here, is not easily adopted as a way of thinking. It takes work, and

the motivation to do such work is hard to drum up if you cannot

appreciate the point of it until you have done it. (Bereiter, 2002, pp.

xii-xiii)

Perhaps a useful framework for helping educators to distinguish between

knowledge as an element of capability and knowledge out in the world – both of which

are important in education – is Popper’s three worlds schema (Popper, 1972). (In my

Prologue I used Popper’s three worlds as a heuristic to describe the context of my

inquiry; I said the world of human experience reveals itself to us in three guises: the

biophysical world, the world of subjective experience, and the world of ideas.) That schema is

certainly fundamental in Bereiter’s position. When he wrote that he considers

understanding ‘to be neither something in the mind nor a set of overt performances but

163

rather a relation between

the knower and an

object of understanding’

(Bereiter, 2002, p. 100) he

was asserting the impor-

tance of a relational view

of knowledgeability .

Education in part involves

supporting students in

becoming acquainted

with and developing ever-

deeper participation in

World 3, the World of Ideas.

I defend this idea in the

upcoming section, ‘Prac-

tice knowledge and

practice epistemology’, but in the meantime we prepare for that argument by

considering the permeability of the membrane separating Worlds 2 and 3.

BEING KNOWLEDGEABLE: WORLD 2 ENCOUNTERS WORLD 3

In this section I offer a more detailed account of what Bereiter construes as being

knowledgeable. First I examine his representation of various human expressions of

being knowledgeable (World 2), then illustrate how we can experience a transition

from World 2 into World 3, a metamorphosis from being knowers to knowledge builders –

the permeable membrane again. (The three worlds schema is, after all, simply a schema

attempting to make sense of one light shaft onto the human phenomenon. We all know

this because we all experience the integrity, the wholeness, of all this – life, the

universe, everything.)

Bereiter offers a revised version of a typology of personal knowledge he previously

co-published with his wife and colleague Marlene Scardamalia (Bereiter &

Scardamalia, 1993). Bereiter sees the categories as works in progress, but believes the

revised version offers more to the field than the earlier version did (Bereiter, 2002, p.

137). Table 5.1 summarises the categories.

□ Bereiter’s book is a powerfully argued call for educators to move beyond what is known in the literature as a ‘folk theory of mind’ to one that adequately accounts for the way humans interface with the meaningful in their lives.

□ Compare Bereiter’s argument with the relational view of understanding posited (in quite different language) in philosophical hermeneutics: ‘… what is grasped as meaningful is taken hold of not because it is the meaning-in-itself but because it illuminates a nexus of meanings we are interested in and involved in. This confirms a claim of philosophical hermeneutics, namely, that it is the relational nature of linguistic meaning that makes epiphanies of the meaningful possible’ (Davey, 2006, p. 210).

□ The challenge for the meaning maker is how to realise an ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in something that spans and somehow holds together, holds in tension Popper’s three worlds – the biophysical world, the world of subjective experience, and the world of ideas. To not do this is to limit one’s achievement of coherent, complex and comprehensive understanding.

164

Table 5.1. Bereiter’s six kinds of personal knowledge

Statable knowledge

Can be expressed in ‘sentences … diagrams, formulas, stories or enactments’, thus being available to others for appreciation, review, critique. ‘Admittedly it is a very fuzzy line that separates what is statable from what is not, and the line may shift depending on the time of day or on how much effort one puts into formulating an idea. But it is still well worth trying to distinguish statable knowledge because of its unique cultural significance’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 137).14

Implicit understanding

‘Those aspects of our knowledge that characterize intelligent relationships to things or situations in the world … It is knowledge gained from experience and it probably owes little or nothing to formal education. … Implicit understanding is more like perception than like having propositions in the head (Clancy, 1991)’. We often need to predict what will occur in daily life, and so we draw on ‘residues’ of relevant past experience, even though ‘the knowledge on which the prediction is based is largely unspecifiable’. In risky situations we sometimes act instantly, ‘as if by reflex. And yet the reflex-like response is conditioned by our past experience in ways that make it reasonable to think of there being a residue of knowledge that makes the response an “intelligent” one’ (Bereiter, 2002, pp. 138-139).

Episodic knowledge

While semantic memory is memory for meaningful content, whether statable or implicit, episodic memory concerns one’s past experiences: ‘Remembered episodes can be retrieved and considered in new contexts.’ Reasoning based on consideration of situations (case-based reasoning) is reasoning by analogy. ‘[E]ffective thinking and problem solving make flexible use’ of reasoning by analogy and by deductive inference. ‘It could be questioned whether memory for episodes in itself constitutes knowledge […] but there can be little doubt that the recall of past experiences is an important part of knowledgeability’ (Bereiter, 2002, pp. 140-141).

Impressionistic knowledge

‘Beyond statable knowledge and beyond our more confidently held implicit understandings lies a realm of feelings and impressions that also influence our actions […] What distinguishes impressionistic knowledge [from the other types of personal knowledge] is that the feelings are the knowledge […] To achieve a creative goal you have to make decisions of uncertain result. The reason creativity isn’t mere chance is that creative people become very adept, within their particular fields, at making risky choices that turn out to be good ones. They go by feeling, impression, or what in this context is often called intuition. Creativity remains clouded in mystery, however, unless we accept impressionistic knowledge as knowledge that grows and improves with experience like any other […] When we speak of connoisseurship or of a person’s having “standards” in language, literature, art, musical performance, cinema, professionalism, or personal integrity, we are talking about impressionistic knowledge’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 142).

Skill Being skilful in something has cognitive and subcognitive elements. If I’m told a child knows how to read he or she can corroborate this assessment by reading, which demonstrates the skill. Knowing how, or know-how, is the cognitive element of a skill. The subcognitive element is the improvement in performance arising from psycho-motor practice. Even though such improvement is learned Bereiter sees no point in attributing the improvement to increase in knowledge: a physical training regime of push-ups results in improved skill not primarily due to increased muscle mass but to ‘your nervous system’s learning to distribute the work more efficiently to the muscle fibres you already have’. It is improvement of a subcognitive kind (Bereiter, 2002, p. 143).

14 Bereiter points out that statable knowledge is the explicit part of what cognitive scientists call

declarative knowledge, but for writers like John Anderson the latter term also encompasses ‘vast

stretches of unarticulated, largely unconscious knowledge’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 137).

165

Table 5.1 cont’d

Regulative knowledge

A range of constituents, ‘from explicit principles that may be debated and codified as codes of ethics or by-laws down to idiosyncratic personal knowledge, such as how you as a social worker deal with your aversion to assertive people. It may include knowledge of all the kinds discussed so far, but it is always knowledge pertaining more directly to the actors than to what is acted on’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 146). This category includes what Bereiter and Scardamalia (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993) previously called self-regulatory knowledge, metacognition being an example15; and also that which pertains to ‘collective activity’, or, given Bereiter’s examples of art and science, perhaps knowledge creation in the social domain.

In lived experience the boundaries between the different kinds of personal

knowledge are not clear-cut. Bereiter gives the example of painting a room. If you only

do this occasionally you won’t have well-developed, instantly accessible techniques. To

solve a problem you may recall a past situation (episodic knowledge), ‘but for the most

part the residue of past painting episodes is experienced simply as confidence you will

know what to do as the need arises’ (Bereiter, 2002, pp. 148-149). Defining the point

where tacit knowledge ends and skill begins in situations like this is not possible. We

might well ask why this matters, whether there is a practical application for Bereiter’s

taxonomy of personal knowledge, particularly when the boundaries between his

categories can be hard to delineate. (Bereiter would approve of such a challenge; he

positions himself as a pragmatist [Bereiter, 2002, p. xi].) In Chapter 6 (Table 6.1) I

illustrate how the taxonomy can be used to explore the subtleties of a workplace

situation. As I indicated before, Bereiter sees his taxonomy as a work in progress. From

my perspective, if it illuminates professional practice or lived experience, it has value,

until something richer can be found.

Bereiter writes of ‘the substrate of implicit understanding’, carrying an implication

that statable knowledge builds on, relies on such understanding. Importantly for

teachers, this substrate is where misconceptions can linger, with detrimental effect on

learning and performance. He expands on this theme with reference to science

teaching, where typically the learning and assessment tasks equip students to develop

and articulate the required statable knowledge, while their implicit understanding,

whether sound or flawed, remains hidden, unchecked (Bereiter, 2002, p. 156). Earlier I

made reference to Mezirow et al.’s notion of meaning perspective, which forms the

basis of their associated term, perspective transformation (see Mezirow & Associates

[2000]). Bereiter’s interest in this phenomenon is shown when he asks how people can

be offered a different lens to view the world. He says that is what changing implicit

understanding involves, and it is why misconceptions can be so hard to correct

(Bereiter, 2002, p. 157).16

15 Bereiter cites Swanson’s definition of metacognition: ‘the knowledge and control one has over one’s

thinking and learning activities’ (Swanson, 1990, p. 306). (Bereiter, 2002, p. 145). 16 Twice on p. 157 Bereiter refers to ‘intuitive understanding’ but implicit understanding, the category

in his typology, works just as well (C. Bereiter, personal communication, 13 May, 2013).

166

He notes that implicit understanding ‘evolves gradually through experience […]

David Hawkins reminded us that conceptual changes that took centuries for scientists

to work their way through cannot be expected to happen with students in a couple of

lessons’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 157). Later, in his chapter on educational planning, Bereiter

reflects on meaning perspective resilience, without using the terms ‘meaning

perspective’ or ‘resilience’:

When new information runs smack against something we thought

was true, we may take notice ... But we naturally take no notice of

the vast amount of knowledge that is as good today as it was

yesterday, or of the new learning that just happens, without pain or

effort. Paradigm shifts are not a daily occurrence. Once in a lifetime

is more like it. And even then, our chances of grasping the new

paradigm if we have not grasped the old one are about nil.

(Bereiter, 2002, p. 228)

There is no magic answer for teaching for perspective transformation, however

Bereiter’s book has much food for thought to help us teach for understanding, and this

thesis also offers ways of framing Bereiter’s challenge. Bortoft’s work (described in

Chapter 1), my elucidation of my growth in global understanding construct, and the

upcoming section on the self-knowing self-checker are all concerned with this challenge.

Being knowledgeable is about

how we relate to objects of understanding (Bereiter, 2002, p. 100).

The more intimate my relationship to the world of ideas and to language

the more articulate I can become.

When I grasp an object of understanding, I understand it.

In that moment, my sense of self in the world has expanded –

it is more sophisticated on the scales of complexity, comprehensiveness and coherence

than it was before.

Bereiter observes that statable knowledge and skill distinguish themselves from

the other categories by their greater visibility to onlookers, ‘and so it is not surprising

that they should have received almost all the attention of educators and others who

trade in knowledge’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 148). Statable knowledge has traditionally been

the overwhelming focus of student assessment. Actions, like playing the violin, may be

evaluated on face value, whereas an assertion of statable knowledge, such as when the

modern violin first appeared, must be evaluated according to validity criteria

appropriate to knowledge. Furthermore, Bereiter illustrates how statable knowledge can

be seen afresh through a connectionist pedagogy lens, one (it seems to me) warranting

further attention in assessment design for assessing being knowledgeable:

167

If I pick up a violin and play it, my performance can be discussed as

music or as demonstration of skill. But if I say, ‘This is how the

violin was played when it was first invented,’ and then proceed to

play, I have made the playing part of an assertion. It may now be

treated as knowledge […] Statable knowledge is thus the World 2

counterpart of World 3, the world of abstract knowledge objects.17 It

is the personal knowledge that we can objectify and thus bring into

the social processes of knowledge building (Nonaka, 1991).

(Bereiter, 2002, p. 138)

Becoming more knowledgeable necessarily engages us in World 3 encounters: we

relate most intensely to those fields of inquiry that grip us most forcefully. People who

want to be part of a wider community socialise as whole persons; they take their

personal knowledge with them out into the world. In so far as they have cultivated a

personal desire for growth in understanding, they will seek out opportunities to enter

World 3 through participation in dialogues of ideas with others. Participation in

dialogues of ideas may or may not engender new knowledge or enlarge the quantum

of knowledge, but, to use Davey/Gadamer’s term, it certainly allows us to become

gebildet18 (see Chapter 4), which includes becoming knowledgeable. Helping students

to cultivate a personal desire for growth in understanding is a key intention of a

curriculum of becoming.

THE BEREITER THESIS IN PERSPECTIVE

Bereiter’s intention in Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age was ‘to show that by

adopting a new way of thinking about knowledge and mind, educational thought can

be freed to do the job it must do if education is to earn its place in the Knowledge Age’

(Bereiter, 2002, p. 25). In essence Bereiter’s case is that while the container view of mind

doesn’t conflict with some teaching practices (like encouraging cramming for exams), it

is conceptually feeble when it comes to supporting the more difficult teaching

challenges in this Knowledge Age, like writing a critique of a writer’s or website’s

analysis of a protracted conflict. Bereiter’s term, ‘objects in the mind’ connotes that

obsolete view of knowledge, whereas ‘objects of understanding’ refers to the World of

Ideas which knowledge builders, potentially students, work with in Bereiter’s vision

for education.

Earlier I posed the question, what kind of pedagogical knowledge underpins

teaching for being knowledgeable? The implied circularity in my question was

intentional. We cannot really teach ways of seeing if we have not seen in those ways

17 The expression encountered at the top of this section on Bereiter, ‘objects of understanding’, refers to

what he calls ‘abstract knowledge objects’ here. They are the stuff of World 3, frequently also called

‘conceptual artefacts’. 18 ‘Become gebildet’: ‘become educated’ in the sense implied in Bildung. See discussion, pp. 122-129.

168

ourselves. My discussion of Bereiter’s book has not been comprehensive enough (given

the other demanding themes claiming space in my thesis) to consider this question in

depth. I pose it more for rhetorical effect. If anyone had a persuasive answer to this

perspective-transforming question for teacher educators, he/she would be in great

demand. Innovation that requires looking through a different lens, requiring

fundamental conceptual and cultural change, cannot be expected to happen quickly

nor painlessly. A more exhaustive study of Bereiter’s book will provide practitioners

and researchers with potentially fruitful starting points to investigate the question.

At the top of this chapter I stated that Bereiter’s book is relevant to my thesis

because of the breadth and depth of his analysis of teaching for understanding. I

suggested that inviting university educators to consider the merits of my argument for

a curriculum of becoming would be aided if we could find some kind of common

ground on our view of teaching for understanding. While this may be true, it should

now be clear that Bereiter’s forthright critique of the tacit folk view of mind, that still

(in his mind) underpins many teachers’ thinking, places his argument outside the pool

of conventional wisdom silently informing many teachers’ classroom practice. Thus it

is questionable whether Bereiter’s argument could serve as an automatic attractor as I

seek to find common ground with colleagues, and the field generally, in terms of

defining our raison d’être for teaching and our concept of teaching for understanding.

That said, my proposal for curriculum innovation will appeal to the field to the extent

that it addresses what is perceived to be a pressing need; the same can be said about

Bereiter’s thesis.

The focus of this chapter was to establish how my argument relates to the

mainstream of educational literature. What this section on Bereiter’s Education and

Mind in the Knowledge Age aimed to do was not to describe how the field currently

approaches teaching for understanding, but rather to suggest empathic connections

between Bereiter’s thesis and mine. In Part B of this thesis I show how Bereiter’s work

has informed my position on meaning making and my design framework for a

university curriculum of becoming, and how his ideas, only some of which have been

covered here, could inform future extensions of my work.

Personal epistemology

Contemporary educational psychology literature reveals avid interest from researchers

in the field of personal epistemology. This field of scholarship is of significance to my

argument to the extent that it interrogates the questions: Does a meaning maker’s (i.e.

learner’s) understanding of ‘truth’ and stance on the validity of a particular knowledge claim

impact on his or her understanding of the matter itself? How does one’s stance on the nature of

knowledge and ways of generating knowledge – one’s personal epistemology – change over

time? Given what we have already seen about the foci of philosophical hermeneutics in

169

Chapter 4, especially its unrelenting embrace of openness to uncertainty and its stance

on the open-endedness of understanding, and given that I have already identified

philosophical hermeneutics as the practice and way of life underpinning my research

product (my design template for a university curriculum of becoming), I need to show

how my work aligns with the personal epistemology literature. This will be my focus

here.

Barbara Hofer, who wrote the introductory article for a special issue of Educational

Psychologist journal on personal epistemology (Hofer, 2004b), is a prominent researcher

on this subject. In a subsequent contribution to that journal honouring her late

colleague, Paul Pintrich19, Hofer defines personal epistemology as ‘an identifiable set of

dimensions of beliefs about knowledge and knowing, organized as theories, progressing in

reasonably predictable directions, activated in context (Hofer, 2001), operating both

cognitively and metacognitively (Hofer, 2004a)’ (Hofer, 2005, p. 98) (italics added). In

the same paper Hofer critically reflects on the state of the field:

In recent comments on the multiple perspectives on the construct [of

personal epistemology], Pintrich (2002) stated, ‘If we are clear on

our assumptions and models, then progress can still be made on

understanding how and why personal epistemologies are related to

cognition, motivation, and learning in academic contexts’. This

acknowledgement of distinct paradigmatic approaches (Hofer,

2004c), which include viewing personal epistemology as a system of

beliefs (Schommer-Aikins, 2004), the development of reflective judgment

(King & Kitchener, 2004), a set of fine-grained resources (Louca, Elby,

Hammer, & Kagey, 2004), the social construction of epistemological

reflection (Magolda, 2004), and a metacognitive process (Hofer, 2004a),

has helped illuminate what distinctions are meaningful and

whether a unified model might emerge (Bendixen & Rule, 2004).

Overall, the interdisciplinary nature of the field and the

multiparadigmatic nature of the models may be more a blessing

than a problem to transcend, as we each strive to clarify different

pieces of the puzzle. What remains important are conversations

across those traditional boundaries and awareness that we are all

contributing to the same project. (Hofer, 2005, p. 99) (italics added)

19 Citing a paper committed to honouring the passing of a research colleague poignantly reminds me

that the trajectory of research does have a human and therefore also a mortal correlative. ‘Linguistic

being places us within determinate historical horizons. Not only do we suffer such thrownness but

we are deeply vulnerable to and must endure alterations in or attacks upon its content’ (Davey, 2006,

p. 218).

170

‘ … understanding how and why personal epistemologies are related to

cognition, motivation, and learning in academic contexts’ (Pintrich, 2002). Imagine a

state of affairs where scholars reach agreement on how learners adopt a suite of

perspectives or acquire beliefs that determine how they stand in relation to what they

are reading/learning. While such understanding would no doubt help teachers as they

design, for example, learning experiences for evaluating various sources of information

(like using online sources critically20), such achievement could even more tellingly

inform the position I am in the process of developing here – a claim that

the hermeneutic journey of living or lived hermeneutics

can be a way of life, a lifestyle that nurtures hermeneutic consciousness.

As educators we want and need to understand what is happening in our students. This

is true for educators today and will be just as true for educators one day engaging in a

curriculum of becoming, in which teachers and learners all aspire to greater

hermeneutic consciousness.

But what is this consciousness? Davey:

One of the difficulties of getting to grips with what philosophical

hermeneutics means by Bildung is clearly linguistic. Once an entity

is named, there is tendency to believe that it stands for something

specific. The named takes on the character of the name. However, it

is clear that philosophical hermeneutics does not mean by Bildung a

historically determinate form of culture or technical training. The

word refers to a fundamentally experiential formative process, to

the development of a mode of consciousness. In this respect,

philosophical hermeneutics insists that Bildung is an instance of a

universal that only becomes intelligible in relation to subjective

consciousness, to the process of becoming gebildet. Bildung, it turns

out, has little to do with subjecting the individual to the form of a

supposed universal but with drawing out and refining that which

is phenomenologically universal within the intense subjectivity of

interpretative practices. The development of a consciousness of the

in-between21 – the process of becoming gebildet – is an integral part

20 See for example Mason et al. (2010), Searching the Web to Learn about a Controversial Topic: Are Students

Epistemically Active? 21 Davey explains this idea in his Thesis Eight: Philosophical Hermeneutics Affirms an Ontology of the In-

between:

‘… hermeneutics is based upon a polarity of familiarity and strangeness … the true locus of

hermeneutics is this in-between’. Such a discourse concerns the interaction between ‘two

negotiating subjects’; however the ‘in-between’ space is not geo-temporal but what Davey calls

‘the disclosive space of the hermeneutic encounter itself. It is this space which subjectivizes

[grounds and personalises] the participating individuals’ (Davey, 2006, pp. 15-16).

171

of what philosophical hermeneutics regards as Bildung. (Davey,

2006, p. 59)

Here Davey brings us to the nub of why my curriculum of becoming framework

sits so very comfortably in the philosophical hermeneutic tradition, and in the process

allows me to situate my thesis vis à vis the field of personal epistemology. Consider

this:

Interpretive practice engenders

growth in understanding, the realisation of

an ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent

sense of self in the world. It is becoming gebildet.

Achieving ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent understanding

of self-and-world-in-relationship constitutes a journey towards wisdom.

The ‘wisdom’ that accrues as I visit my Realm of Unknowing in imagination or

meditation, as I linger in muddy waters episodes, as I ponder who on Earth (who in

the world) I was/am/am becoming, even as I pursue my more externally-oriented

educational goals, is the wisdom of lived experience, is experiential wisdom. As in the

process of becoming gebildet, so in the hermeneutic journey of living: I slip effortlessly,

reverentially, into a mature acceptance of (i) the nature of things – even though I can

never master the ‘it’22 – and (ii) how I may become more fully myself. My stance towards

understanding is relational, my journey, ontological–epistemological–spiritual23, for

those who like to think of it thus. Philosophical hermeneutics as articulated in

Davey’s Unquiet Understanding gives

glimpses of how such a journey into

hermeneutic consciousness is expressed

in a human life. If charted onto one of

the maps of epistemological development available from the personal epistemology

literature, the journey would probably be shown to ascend the particular model’s

stages of epistemological development; but as things stand in personal epistemology

theory, such an exercise may not deliver a very practical outcome; more on this shortly.

Bildung ‘has little to do with subjecting the individual to the form of a supposed

universal but with drawing out and refining that which is phenomenologically

universal within the intense subjectivity of interpretative practices’ (Davey, 2006, p.

59). Here Davey contrasts a ‘supposed universal’ construct with the subjective experience

of meaning making. This gives me an oblique yet fruitful way of framing my concern

See also discussion on Thesis 8 in Appendix 2.

22 In the philosophical hermeneutic way of thinking, the answer to the riddle of the universe (‘42’) will

never be reached. In tension with this truth is the human quest for comprehensive understanding. I

consider the reverberations of this irreconcilable tension in Chapter 6. 23 In the Realm of Unknowing, epistemological–ontological–spiritual distinctions are unthinkable.

Bildung ‘refers to a fundamentally experiential formative process, to the development of a mode of consciousness’ (Davey, 2006, p. 59).

172

about the epistemology of philosophical hermeneutics and how that flows through to

someone seeking to become gebildet. We can better appreciate Davey’s point by linking

it with his later discussion of ‘speculative understanding’. In his Chapter 3, Davey

critiques Gadamer’s published position on the subjective/objective distinction in

accounts of the pursuit of understanding, of truth. First he interprets Gadamer’s

published position:

Philosophical hermeneutics is philosophical in that it strives to

discern objectivities within the subjective voice. The concern with

tradition, with Bildung and with die Sachen [subject matters]

endeavors to articulate the historical and ontological ‘truths’ that

inflect that voice. The articulation of a hermeneutic practice that

strains to discern such objectivities in both the spoken and the

written is integral to a conception of language as a world disclosive

power. It is a fundamental claim of philosophical hermeneutics that

though the practised communicator may know how to invoke

them, the objectivities that emerge through his or her words are a

linguistic event. An epiphany of meaning is not reducible to

subjective intentionality. 24 (Davey, 2006, p. 109)

Here Davey is discussing the pivotal place of language in pursuing understanding. For

philosophical hermeneutics, when I speak or write, the objectivities embedded in my

words – intimations that correlate with what happened or what ‘is’ – are, as Davey

puts it, the historical and ontological ‘truths’ that inflect my voice (Davey, 2006, p. 109).

Davey endorses the philosophical hermeneutic stance of not seeking to discredit the

subjective but rather treating it as ‘the site through which the hermeneutically “real”

discloses itself’ (Davey, 2006, p. 109). However, he writes,

in its attempt to move away from the subjectivisms of romantic

hermeneutics, [Gadamer’s] philosophical hermeneutics overlooks a

key function of subjectivity. The ‘truths’ that are speculatively

disclosed through speech or writing must be subjectively

apprehended in order for them to become effective. Although the

truth of a hitherto unperceived aspect of a Sache [a subject matter] is

not any the less true for not being apprehended, its hermeneutic

appropriation by a subject is vital if that Sache is to function within

a linguistic community and if it is to enable a subject to think

differently about an issue. Gadamer appears to overlook this.

(Davey, 2006, pp. 109-110)

24 See also footnote 34 of Chapter 4, p. 149.

173

The above extracts from Davey (2006) nicely illustrate the kinds of issues that could be

dilemmas-in-contention as a philosophical hermeneutic interpreter’s personal

epistemology evolves.

The foregoing discussion was triggered in part by my intention to establish how

my position and my upcoming research product are situated in relation to personal

epistemology theory. Hofer’s 2005 paper offers an insightful overview of a field in flux,

as the following excerpts suggest (italics added):

‘The challenges discussed here include the nature of the construct,

the developmental progression and link to cognitive development,

methodological issues, domain specificity versus domain generality, and

linkages to other constructs’. (Hofer, 2005, p. 97).

‘The issue of dimensionality, initially raised by Schommer, has

continued to be an important one. Our claim was that

epistemological theories consisted of four dimensions that were

consistent across existing models, grouped under the nature of

knowledge and the nature of knowing. In the first group were the

certainty and simplicity of knowledge, and in the second, the source of

knowledge and justification for knowing’ (see Hofer [1997] for

details). ‘Although there appears to be little disagreement about

these four dimensions other than whether dimensions related to

learning might also be included, as noted previously,

measurement of these constructs as beliefs has been particularly

difficult, a problem also experienced by Schommer, who found

“source of knowledge” conceptually compelling yet empirically

elusive (Schommer, 1994).’ (Hofer, 2005, p. 98)

‘Our examination of the developmental stages proposed by

multiple researchers (Baxter Magolda [1992]; Belenky et al. [1986];

King & Kitchener [1994]; Kuhn [1991] and Perry [1970]) suggested

a relatively uniform understanding of the general trend of

epistemological development, regardless of the model (Hofer &

Pintrich, 1997). The typical progression indicates movement from

a position of dualism or absolutism, in which individuals view

knowledge as right or wrong, to a relativistic stance in which all

opinions appear equally valid, and finally toward a position from

which individuals become constructors of meaning who can

evaluate claims, justify their knowing, and make commitments

within a relativistic context. Depending on the scheme, this might

be accomplished in anywhere from three moves to nine,

distinctions that typically provide further differentiation of the

174

developmental process, but the overall trend appears consistent.

However, most of these schemes were devised with studies of

college students and in some cases older adults, but very little

research had been conducted with individuals younger than

college age, leaving a rather large gap in the developmental

trajectory, as Paul [Pintrich] and I noted in our review. More

troubling yet, what little research existed at younger ages seemed

to identify the same stages and patterns, a difficult phenomenon to

explain …’ (Hofer, 2005, p. 99).

Hofer’s snapshot of the field of personal epistemology research was written in 2005,

however my characterisation of the field as a ‘situation in flux’ still holds today.

A curiosity awaits a reader of the special issue of Educational Psychologist journal on

personal epistemology research. The penultimate article by Louca et al. (2004),

‘Epistemological resources: Applying a new epistemological framework to science

instruction’, is barely mentioned and certainly not incorporated into the synthesis of

special issue articles by Bendixen and Rule (2004), ‘An integrative approach to personal

epistemology: A guiding model’. Louca et al.’s abstract gives a flavour of the

dramatically different position of the authors vis à vis the other authors in that issue:

Most research on personal epistemologies has conceived them as

made up of relatively large, coherent, and stable cognitive

structures, either developmental stages or beliefs (perhaps

organized into theories). Recent work has challenged these views,

arguing that personal epistemologies are better understood as

made up of finer grained cognitive resources whose activation

depends sensitively on context. In this article, we compare these

different frameworks, focusing on their instructional implications

by using them to analyze a third-grade teacher’s25 epistemologically

motivated intervention and its effect on her students. We argue that

the resources framework has more predictive and explanatory

power than stage- and beliefs-based frameworks do. (Louca et al.,

2004, p. 57)

Louca et al.’s approach stands in stark contrast to the other articles in the special

issue. I am not going to adopt a stance on it or any of the frameworks synthesised into

Bendixen and Rule’s ‘guiding model’, except to make two points: (i) Louca et al.’s

argument, showing how stage-, beliefs- and resources-based frameworks either would or

would not help the case study teacher address her teaching quandary, was

25 Trisha Kagey, Montgomery County Public Schools

175

persuasive26; (ii) the epistemological resources framework, in eschewing the more

ordered, label-heavy, stage- and beliefs-

based frameworks, may give curriculum

of becoming practitioners more scope

for creatively addressing the personal

epistemology challenge than its rivals

can. (I intend to consider this further on completion of these doctoral studies.)

Practice knowledge and practice epistemology

Given the applied nature of this study (my primary focus on educating for the

professions) the foregoing discussion on being knowledgeable needs to be augmented

with a consideration of being knowledgeable within the context of professional

practice. Here I consider two questions: □ how is practice knowledge recognised and used

within a professional community of practice? □ is a profession’s reflexive critique of its

professional knowledge base – its ‘practice

epistemology’ – relevant to professional

preparation programs for that profession?

This section features my interpretation

of Richardson, Higgs and Dahlgren’s (2004) Recognising practice epistemology in the health

professions, the introductory chapter in their edited book, Developing Practice Knowledge

for Health Professionals. While the book is concerned with the health professions, much

of their broad argument may be translated into one that would relate to other

professions.

The authors’ pithy rationale for the book provides a useful entry point into this

discussion:

An appreciation of the wide variety of sources from which

knowledge is generated in professional practice is critical to the

development of practice of each individual member of the health

professions. Understanding the ways in which different forms of

knowledge arise from and become integrated into practice

knowledge can help to identify the sources of knowledge which are

relevant to the clinical practice, research and education of each

profession. This provides a basis for developing a theory of practice

26 Their own framework proved much more useful (by helping a teacher teach in response to observed

signs of pupil learning difficulty) than the others in their analysis. But what are these ‘resources’?:

We have begun to sketch an alternative view of naïve epistemologies as made up of resources,

units of cognitive structure at a finer grain size than stages, beliefs, or theories (Hammer & Elby,

2002), analogous to di Sessa’s (1993) phenomenological primitives (‘p-prims’) in intuitive

physics. Rather than attribute to children any general epistemological beliefs or theories, we

understand them to have a range of cognitive resources for understanding knowledge (Louca et

al., 2004, p. 58).

Personal epistemology in this view recognises a learner’s ‘cognitive resources’, a loose-fitting, open-ended category, a kit-bag capable of expansion as personal epistemology theories proliferate or complexify.

‘Practice epistemology refers to the nature of knowledge and the processes of generation of knowledge which underlie practice.’ (Richardson, Higgs, & Dahlgren, 2004, p. 5)

176

knowledge that is an epistemology of practice or practice

epistemology. A central tenet of practice epistemology is the

recognition of the impact of the setting or situation on the quality,

nature and extent of knowledge which is used and generated.

Professional knowledge is that which is relevant to and grounded

in the practice context (Richardson et al., 2004, pp. 1-2) […] This

book examines some of the challenges presented in the

understanding, explication and valuing of an epistemology of

practice. That is, of knowing how we come to know about what we

do in practice and being able to identify the […] characteristics of

our professional knowledge base. (Richardson et al., 2004, p. 5)

In my view a profession that does not seriously and continuously question its own

practice epistemology might be compared to an individual who has not progressed far

on the journey of personal epistemological development (see Glossary entry for

epistemic cognition); that is, on the journey to understanding.

Like me, Richardson et al. are concerned for the status of practice epistemology in

the professions. Consider these two statements:

□ ‘We need to gain a deep understanding of the nature of the

knowledge that underpins our practice in order to create a

framework for professional debate which can facilitate optimal

practice quality and development.’ (Richardson et al., 2004, p. 6)

□ ‘The problems inherent in the everyday world of practice form a

framework for developing knowledge which has its origins in the

reality of practitioners' lived experience (Eakin & Heather, 1992).

However, different beliefs about knowledge and its role in practice

can lead to different rules for determining whether this knowledge

is accepted as true, real or valid (Pallas, 2001). Differing beliefs

about what counts as knowledge, what counts as evidence for a

claim of knowledge, and what counts as a warrant or guarantee for

that claim are central in determining what a profession knows

about its subject matter (Pallas, 2001). Development of a

profession's knowledge base can be limited if the nature and

dimensions of the knowledge underpinning practice are not well

understood by the practitioners.’ (Richardson et al., 2004, p. 6)

The authors cite the ‘evidence-based practice’ (EBP) mantra often heard in the

corridors and training sessions of practice as a source of concern. A profession

177

operating as a community of practice would reflect on and consider this concern as a

concern of practice epistemology:

Where an extreme view of EBP is adopted, demands for scientific

evidence can be validly provided only through research carried out

through randomised controlled trials. Such research ignores the

individual, concentrating instead on manipulation of variables to

provide a generalisation of ideas (Robinson & Norris, 2001). Under

this limited definition of EBP, much client-focused work carried

out, by the allied health professions in particular, does not attract

the credit it deserves. The value of a breadth of professional

knowledge which embraces the difference in perspective and the

relationship between expertise and practice-generated knowledge and the

important part played by practice wisdom in professional

judgement needs to be more appreciated. Practice wisdom refers to

the capacity to generate, use and critique a range of different forms

of knowledge at high levels of skill in achieving successful

outcomes of health and social care interventions. (Richardson et al.,

2004, p. 7) (italics added)

So, to my first question – how is practice knowledge recognised and used with in a

professional community of practice? – I respond: it all depends on the maturity of the

particular profession’s practice epistemology. Practice epistemology is the field of

inquiry in which the nature of professional judgment, the driver of practice in a given

profession, is articulated and critiqued. In the health professions, for example, practice

epistemology might ask how useful EBP, practice wisdom and professional artistry (Higgs,

Jones, Edwards, & Beeston, 2004, pp. 194-195) are respectively in explaining actual acts

of professional judgment; or ask how the three concepts respectively might inform /

shape / impede professional judgment.

In relation to my second question – is a profession’s practice epistemology relevant to

professional preparation programs for that profession? – Richardson et al. argue that ‘health

professionals need a judicious working knowledge of their practice epistemology in

order to understand what drives their actions, to realise how they can demonstrate this

understanding in their practice and to recognise how they learn from this

understanding and develop their professional practice’ (Richardson et al., 2004, p. 5).

Here the authors refer to practice epistemology both as the collective epistemology of

the profession and the individual practitioner’s epistemology grounded in and shaping

that individual’s practice.

Practice epistemology is the space in which the practitioners who constitute a

profession reflect on how they practise and why, both as members of a practice community

178

and as individual practitioners responsible for their own practice and practice judgments. But

why should practitioners-in-training be asked to worry about abstract theoretical talk?

There are two points. First, professional judgment is a three worlds phenomenon.

Making professional judgments, like being knowledgeable, necessarily draws us bodily

(World 1) into an experience (World 2) that has an explanation (World 3). As we have

seen, Bereiter has made a strong case that school education should enculturate students

into World 3, and I have proposed the same brief for university education for the

professions. In this way of thinking, novice rounded, grounded practitioners-in-

training need time to grow into the practitioner role, and this must include the ability

and the disposition to fill their practitioner shoes knowingly. Students in training for the

professions need time to make critical reflection-on-practice habitual, which centrally

involves questioning one’s acts of professional judgment including one’s grounds for

each judgment.

The self-knowing self-checker

Meaning making in the sense being advanced in this thesis truly personalises personal

epistemology – individual epistemological development – by locating individual

meaning making inside personal ontology. The journey is epistemological–ontological–

spiritual – I am deliberately holding these terms together as a single hybrid idea – because the

knowing is reflexively self-referential: we grow in global understanding by seeking an

ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world. Are there problems

or obstacles in professional education curriculum practice today that such a position

might help overcome? We come to that in the Epilogue to this thesis. My purpose here

is to set the stage for that account.

One of my aims in this chapter was to consider if and how personal epistemology

theory as expressed in the literature can help us understand how a learner’s personal

epistemology impacts on her or his understanding of self and the world. I did not find

that question addressed in the special issue of Educational Psychology devoted to

personal epistemology research, nor in the wider literature, but that is not to say that

personal epistemology theory cannot venture into such problems, if equipped with

conceptual tools appropriate to the task.

In Chapter 1 we noted Bortoft’s view (following Norwood Russell Hanson27) that

‘there is more to seeing than meets the eye’ (Bortoft, 1996, pp. 50, 126). Consider the

possibility that the ‘non-sensory factor’ that Bortoft referred to is intimately,

inescapably governed by one’s meaning perspective, which in turn, as I have argued28,

27 Hanson, N. R. (1969, p. 61). Perception and Discovery. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. 28 See Figure 3.2 and surrounding discussion.

179

is shaped by one’s unique life experience. Reading Bortoft’s account of the non-

sensory factor in perception may or may not challenge and transform a reader’s

perspective on objective reality or empirical research. If it does cause a shift in outlook,

if the individual experiences an expanded ‘uncertainly threshold’, a wider ‘uncertainty

comfort zone’, then that reader’s

personal epistemology can be said to

have evolved. In such a transformed

meaning making space, one accepts and

feels comfortable in having outgrown

another element of one’s childhood certainties. One continues the journey enjoying a

more adult relationship to the world. Note the affective and nascent conative29

inflections of that statement. I do not assert, but I invite the reader to consider the

possibility that having a shift in meaning perspective, be it seismic or subtle, means

that, for the individual concerned, everything from that point on will be cast in a

different hue, through which one can interpret experience from a wiser vantage point.

The suggestion here is that one’s personal epistemology affects one’s meaning

perspective and consequently how one sees the world.

At this juncture I need to introduce a new theme to my argument. Here is an

extract from my master’s thesis that builds on my landmark-spotting metaphor:

I was persuaded, after the false start of The World of Open Learning30,

that I needed to pursue my goal in other ways. In that module I had

tried to take my role play distance learners with me on a [learning]

journey, but by using my picture language, I had not created an

adequate context for learners to spot their own landmarks, and

thereby have a self-centred experience of landmark-knowing. In this

study we shall think of landmark-knowing as a particular kind of

meaning making. It is the direct, experiential understanding of the

subjective nature of all perception and cognition. Are you detecting a

shift in my argument? It is not a shift but an elucidation, now that

the idea of landmarking is becoming clearer. I have extended the

original use of the metaphor from landmark-spotting to landmark-

knowing. I want to retain both terms. For the sake of this inquiry, I

propose two, nested constructs:

• Landmark-spotting is a perceptual act, a direct experience of the

world. The observer recognises something standing out from its

29 Conation: that portion of mental life having to do with striving, and covers both desire and volition

(the will to act). 30 A simulation distance learning package created for that research project.

That would cast the self-knowing self checker concept in an interesting light – an idea intensely, generously suited to playful, creative, introspective mulling. Near the end of this chapter I focus on ‘playful’ meaning making.

180

background. Landmark-spotting is becoming conscious of

something perceived with the eye or conceived in the mind.

• Landmark-knowing encloses landmark-spotting on a more

abstract plane of reasoning – it is reflexive landmark-spotting; it

is proto-epistemic cognition. It signifies a subtle shift in

consciousness in which one begins to perceive all knowing as

landmark-spotting in the very act of spotting (the reflexive

form), or in retrospect (the reflexive-reflective form) (McKenzie,

1996, p. 66).

I now describe one facet of the exercise design that supports the epistemological

development of participants by refining their understanding of their own reflexivity.

The Twenty Memories exercise asks participants to nominate 20 memories or events

from their past, memories that shed light on how they see themselves today, and then

to record ‘a comment that you might have made on that occasion, or a thought that

might have passed through your mind’. This instruction was explained as follows:

Tip. What kind of thought or comment? At this stage, try to form your

comment or thought from your world at the time. Try to keep your

present perspective and scale of values at bay. The comment could

relate to the surface level of the experience; or, it may show some

tendency towards self-reflection, but only if – and only as far as –

you were capable of it at the time. Ponder point. Was I capable of self-

reflection of this kind, and was it a common thing for me to do at that

stage of my life? Our challenge in this activity will be to make an

intuitive judgment about the gap between our reflective capacity,

then, and now. Playing Twenty Memories will give us a way of

considering this question.

Two aspects of the exercise design are noteworthy. First, the instruction to trawl

through one’s past for twenty significant memories offered participants a self-centred

experience of landmark spotting. My

account in Chapter 3 of my dilemma in

choosing my twentieth memory

landmark31 was a dilemma because the

choice hinged on the fluid, unfolding

sense of self experience – a floating

anchor point. Second, landmark-

knowing encloses landmark-spotting on

a more abstract plane of reasoning. Thus

31 See Table 3.1 and surrounding text.

A landmark is recreated each time people scan a landscape – they either re-value the significance of the landmark or tacitly concur with such valuing by others. Just as in the case of visual perception in a physical landscape, so in the case of meaning making: what I value and how I think determines how I render my world. Landmark-spotting is a personal, subjective occurrence, albeit culturally informed.

181

a landmark-spotting event is in the same breath (is in itself) landmark-knowing to the

extent that one’s personal epistemology has grasped, embraced the subjectivity of all knowing.

The requirement to record ‘a comment that you might have made on that occasion, or a

thought that might have passed through your mind’ supports participants in reaching

out for a reflexive-reflective form of landmark-knowing.

Participants found this task difficult but they were satisfied in the end that they

had completed the task as requested, that is, they were able to imagine themselves in

earlier stages of their lives and to engage imaginatively with the concept of the

progressive unfolding of reflective capability. That reinforces my belief in the value of

having a self-centred experience of landmark-knowing.

A reader who has been struck to the core by Bortoft’s account of the non-sensory

factor in perception and who consequently accepts a less certain account of the basis of

knowing – more complex than is asserted in the doctrine of unbiased, objective

observation – has, in terms of the landmarking metaphor, thereby experienced a subtle

shift in consciousness in which one begins to perceive all knowing as landmark-

spotting.

Here then is the crux of the matter

for my argument. I wish to link the

constructs, landmark-knowing and

meaning perspective to offer a credible

account of how personal epistemology

impacts on hermeneutic consciousness, lived

hermeneutics and thereby on our episodes of

meaning making, reaching new

understanding. The next wordflow seeks

to encapsulate and suggest relationships

between key ideas canvassed in this and

earlier chapters.

Judging by the published literature, researchers use ‘personal epistemology’

as a construct in part to examine and perhaps gauge learners’

state of readiness to understand,

which flows into

the maturity of understanding they achieve.

Arising from this research project, another approach to this educational goal32

is for meaning makers themselves to explore and cultivate their own personal

epistemology

32 Readiness to understand, quality of understanding achieved

‘The nonsensory wholeness or unity, which we see the instant this patchwork becomes organized, is the meaning, “giraffe”’ (Bortoft, 1996, p. 52). ‘The error of empiricism rests on the fact that what it takes to be material objects are condensations of meaning’ (Bortoft, 1996, p. 53). Once I embrace this view of perception, I am complicit in the view. Hereon I begin to perceive all knowing as landmark-spotting in the very act of spotting (the reflexive form), or in retrospect (the reflexive-reflective form) (McKenzie, 1996, p. 66). My global understanding state has at its disposal ‘finer grained cognitive resources’ (to use Louca et al.’s [2004, p. 57] term) – not only a ‘giraffe idea’ but also the precious gem that for me living is landmark-knowing.

182

using a self-centred experience of landmark-knowing.

My personal history of affective experience …

my personal history of meaning making

shape

my meaning perspective

my meaning perspective engages in

a self-centred experience of landmark-knowing.

Landmark-knowing encloses landmark-spotting on a more abstract plane of reasoning

– it is reflexive landmark-spotting,

in which I heighten my readiness for understanding

by reflecting on who on Earth I was/am/am becoming.

Cultivating an ever richer sense of self in the world through, for example, the

Twenty Memories exercise or other hermeneutic learning experience,

allows me to ‘see’ my future landmark-spotting events in the new light of

my continuously transforming, ever richer sense of self in the world.

Landmark-knowing is hermeneutic consciousness, is lived hermeneutics.

In the year following my graduation from my master’s degree I mused thus in my

Muddy Waters workshop handout:

Perhaps a good novelist is someone who is half in love with muddy

waters, who knows how to bring to life the blurry world in which

our deep perceptions of things must be questioned; the novel is a

world where characters can find their root definitions of themselves

and the world becoming less convincing, and we as readers share

in that disorientation, that existential doubt. (McKenzie, 1997, p. 1)

(see Appendix 5)

Realising personal potential is an ontological quest. To be human is to ask questions. I

want my learners to embrace the quest for realising individual potential by pursuing

the quintessentially philosophical hermeneutic ideals of becoming different to oneself

and becoming more. In the sense that linguistic being is a mysterium (Davey, 2006, pp.

27-31), I can happily and justifiably search out the muddy waters within, I can stand,

reverential, in my inner sanctum, attending an ever richer, ever more complex,

comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world, pursuing self-actualisation.

Curriculum–pedagogy thinking

In my years in formal education since I started kindergarten in Croydon (Victoria)

Infants School in 1952, to now, the educational enterprise in the school sector has, in

various times and places, both resisted and embraced change, including change in

curriculum and teaching practice informed by a continuous process of asking why

educators do what they do. And yet while school education maintained its long

183

tradition of conceiving the whole longitudinal student learning experience as

something to be conceived within a framework called ‘the curriculum’, until recent

years, in higher education, no comparable mindset–language existed for shared critical

reflection on practice:

‘Curriculum’ is a term that has been given little currency, or at least

little profile, in higher education in Australia. Either a limited

‘content’ focused use of the term is assumed, or the term is used as

a vehicle for the discussion of critical issues in higher education e.g.

‘inclusive curriculum’, ‘learner-centred curriculum’, ‘international-

ising the curriculum’. (Hicks, 2007)

In this section I acknowledge several aspects of the stances adopted within the higher

education sector to the curriculum construct. Through these reflections and

interpretations I explore and critique the core ideas in my curriculum of becoming.

Given the longer history of interest in curriculum theorising for the school than for

the higher education sector, I selected authors not on the basis of their stated sector of

concern, but for the relevance of their approaches to this thesis. The themes raised here

are compatible with William Pinar’s view that curriculum theory is not simply a hybrid

discipline drawing on other social sciences – not merely, as Huebner called it, an

environment rather than a knowledge-producing field. Curriculum theory for Pinar is a

substantive discipline evoked in the term currere – the academic study of the experience

of the educational journey (W. Pinar, 1975, pp. 398-399). I will provide more on this

shortly. The forthcoming discussion arises out of my own history of interaction with

education theory and practice. I draw from these sources: □ Pinar’s collection of essays

published in Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists (W. Pinar, 1975) and his What is

Curriculum Theory? (W. F. Pinar, 2004); □ selected works by higher education theorist,

Ron Barnett; □ the literatures of graduate attributes / educating for capability; and

□ writings about teaching through the arts to foster individual expression, sensitivity,

and to experience vicariously those challenges and illuminations that one’s students

have not experienced nor cannot experience in person.

Curriculum for transcendence

Phenix’s ideas are not found often in the education literature when measured by

volume. In this section I examine Phenix’s notion of curriculum for transcendence,

drawn from his chapter, Transcendence and the curriculum (Phenix, 1975), in Pinar’s

(1975), Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists. Given my several references earlier

to ‘spiritual’, a discussion on transcendent experience is relevant to my argument. In

the following account I draw heavily on Phenix’s own words, not only because his

conception of human transcendence resonates so deeply with so much of what I have

presented so far, but particularly because he offers a philosophically credible

184

interpretation of ultimate human values applicable to education. Phenix provides a

philosophical rationale for my curriculum of becoming framework.

In Transcendence and the curriculum, Phenix set out to consider the value of the idea

of transcendence in interpreting and evaluating educational theory and practice.33 I

wanted to see if and how it might shed light on hermeneutic meaning making, bearing

in mind Davey’s Thesis 11, that philosophical hermeneutics views linguistic being as a

‘Mysterium’ (Davey, 2006, pp. 27-31). Even though I am no longer a religious believer

(as my discussion on A Christmas

Unwrapping in Chapter 4 showed), my

stance is nuanced, equivocal, agnostic:

in Chapter 3 I asked, is there a sense in

which approaching one’s own inner

sanctum calls for reverential solemnity

independent of one’s religious leanings? I

was not put off by the knowledge that Phenix used ‘some of the conceptual apparatus

of modern philosophical natural theology’ (Phenix, 1975, p. 324).

Phenix defined transcendence as ‘the experience of limitless going beyond any

given state or realization of being’. Consider his explications of three related terms:

infinitude, spirit and idealization (Table 5.2). The first two are drawn from the theological

literature, while the third is ‘central, for example, in the nontheistic, naturalistic

thought of John Dewey’ (Phenix, 1975, pp. 324, 325).

Table 5.2. Understanding meaning making: three terms for triangulating the idea of transcendence

infinitude ‘the never-finished enlargement of contexts within which every bounded entity is enmeshed’. Asserting the finiteness of anything begs the question of what lies beyond; ‘finite’ only has meaning when placed against its negation, ‘infinite’.

spirit ‘the name given to the property of limitless going beyond. To have a spiritual nature is to participate in infinitude. Reason refers to the capacity for the rational ordering of experience through categories of finitude. Spirit makes one aware of the finiteness of the structures imposed by reason. To say that persons are beings with spirit is to point to their perennial discontent and dissatisfaction with any and every finite realization. Thus it is sometimes said that spirit finds its exemplification more in the yearning impulses of feeling and the innovative projects of the will than in the settled conclusions of intellect.’

idealization ‘The essential quality of transcendence is manifest also in the secular concept of idealization […] Every actuality is set within a context of ideal possibility. Every end realized becomes the means for the fulfilment of further projected ideals, and this is a process that is generic to human experience. Much the same idea is implicit in Dewey’s concept of continuous growth – of that valuable growth that leads to further growth […] This vision of continuous, progressive reconstruction of experience as the norm of human existence is a non-theological interpretation of the fundamental religious concept of transcendence.’

Source: Phenix (1975, pp. 324-325)

33 Phenix died in 2002: http://www.tc.columbia.edu/news.htm?articleID=4094&pub=6&issue=109

Ponder point: If one has brushes with the ineffable within, might participation in a faith community be a way of exploring the reverberations of that experience with others, if one is so inclined? The alternative is to conduct such collaborative inquiry in secular settings, which, as we saw in Chapter 4, is what interests Heron, Ferrer and others.

185

Phenix offered a three-part perspective on transcendence: temporal, extensive and

qualitative transcendence, which I summarise in Table 5.3.34

Table 5.3. Phenix’s three dimensions of transcendence

Temporal transcendence

‘Temporal transcendence refers to infinitude of process. The experience of temporal passage in its essence is a consciousness of transcendence, for it manifests an ineluctable going beyond […] To be humanly alive is to experience each moment as a new creation, to know that this moment, though continuous with the past, is yet a distinct and fresh emergence, which will in turn yield to still further novel realizations’ (Phenix, 1975, pp. 325-326).

Extensive transcendence

According to this idea, ‘Limitless going beyond is experienced […] in respect to inclusiveness.’ In philosophy this dimension is expressed in the doctrine of internal relations: ‘nothing exists in isolation, but always in relation. Reality is a single, interconnected whole, such that the complete description of any entity would require the comprehension of every other entity […] The theological expression of the principle of extensive transcendence is supplied by the doctrine of monotheism and of the divine omnipresence […] transcendence toward wholeness […] is one hallmark of religious orientation’ (Phenix, 1975, pp. 326-327).

Qualitative transcendence

‘This dimension refers to the consciousness of limitless possibility of going beyond in degrees of excellence […] no actual occasion or finite grouping of occasions constitutes a complete qualitative achievement, but that beyond all such realizations higher fulfillments [sic] are possible’ (Phenix, 1975, p. 327).

For Phenix, transcendence was universal, ‘an elemental and ineluctable aspect of the

human condition’ (Phenix, 1975, p. 327). Consider how much less human we would be

if we were locked out of his three named dimensions. Of course we humans tend also

to be intimately conscious of our finitude. Our ‘boundless creative lures’, our

‘outreachings for wider relations’ and our ‘strivings for ideality’

challenge the status quo of finite realisations, cause persons to

negate transcendence in order to save themselves from the

threatened dissolution of actual attainments. The denial of

spirituality […] is evidence of this flight from transcendence.

(Phenix, 1975, p. 328)

This human predicament of being caught between the hope and the fear of

transcending is for me a potent echo of my own human predicament in writing this

thesis and in my desire for my students to gain the courage, vision and strategies to

transcend the limits of the apparent and learn about the delights of learning through

muddy waters. I alluded to it in Chapter 4, The muddy waters of thesis writing, where

part of me was drawn to Wilber’s vision of an holarchic Kosmos, while part of me

insisted on digging my toes in the sense-perceptible world. Within hermeneutic

consciousness, in linguistic being, of course, there is no end to interpretation, and

complete understanding is unachievable; that also is our human condition. I sense that

there is welling harmony as the themes of my chosen texts are elaborated.

34 The concept ‘may be analyzed into at least three dimensions’ (Phenix, 1975, p. 325).

186

Transcendence is relevant to curriculum, Phenix argued, because certain qualities

of life associated with transcendent experience also ‘play a decisive role in teaching

and learning […] these general human dispositions provide a set of criteria for a

transcendence-oriented curriculum as contrasted with one that is predicated upon the

neglect or denial of transcendence’ (Phenix, 1975, p. 328). Phenix’s portrayal of these

‘qualities of life’ or aspects of experience is summarised in Table 5.4.

Table 5.4. Qualities of life inhering in transcendent experience and their significance for education (Phenix) Legend (relevant dimension of transcendence – see Table 5.3):

T temporal transcendence | E extensive transcendence | Q qualitative transcendence

Hope T

Transcendent experience engenders hope, ‘the mainspring of human existence’ in the sense that ‘conscious life is a continual projection into the future’ (Phenix, 1975, p. 328). We venture into the unknown with anticipation.

It can be argued that widespread loss of hope is one of the principal causes of the educational problems that beset contemporary America. When widespread social dislocations, dissolution of customary norms, dehumanization and other malaises of social and cultural life cause people to feel impotent, no technical improvements in the content or methods of instruction will induce people to learn well. On the other hand, those who are buoyed by strong hope can overcome substantial formal deficiencies in program or technique (Phenix, 1975, p. 329).

Creativity T

‘To be human is to create […] not an exceptional activity reserved for […] gifted persons; it is rather the normal mode of behavior for everyone. Dull repetitiveness and routinism are evidences of dehumanization. In this respect the institutions and practices of education have often inhibited, rather than fostered, humaneness, by inculcating habits of automatic conformity instead of imaginative origination […] the educator who affirms transcendence is characterized by a fundamental humility manifest in expectant openness to fresh creative possibilities. To be sure, he does not ignore or discount the funded wisdom of the past. He does not regard it as a fixed patrimony to be preserved, but as a working capital for investment in the projects of an unfolding destiny.’ (Phenix, 1975, pp. 329-330)

Awareness E

‘Openness outwards’ (complementing openness to the future), expressed in the dispositions of sympathy, empathy, hospitality, and tolerance.

In acknowledging transcendence, one adopts a positive attitude toward all other persons, other cultures, and other social groups, in fact, toward all other beings, including the objects of nature. Accepting transcendence frees one from the self-protecting isolation that regards the different or the unfamiliar as a threat to be avoided. Alienation is evidence of the flight from transcendence, and separation and exclusion are manifestations of the primary sin of striving for self-sufficient autonomy.

No teaching can occur without a predisposition toward relation on the part of the teacher who seeks to shape the life of the student and to mediate to the student his (the teacher's) life of relation with the circumambient world. Nor will the student learn effectively in the absence of a hospitable openness to that world and to those who assist him in establishing satisfying relationships with it. This factor of sensitivity is the main theme in Buber's pedagogical theory. For him, the clue to significant education does not reside in the specific methods or contents of instruction, but in the presupposition of the primacy and the power of the elemental relation, which is the source of all being. He sees the primordial relation as a reality in which one may confidently dwell, and within which the particular categories and connections of reason and practice are secondarily discriminated. This assumed indwelling by the teacher in transcendence can help to release the student's powers of awareness, thus providing

187

Table 5.4 cont’d

strong catalysis for learning. In turn, teachers who are inured to self-defensive closedness may be liberated to wider sympathies by sharing in the relatively unspoiled freshness of young people who affirm the world and celebrate the possibilities of ever-deepening relationships within it. (Phenix, 1975, pp. 330-331)

Doubt and faith

Q

‘Faithful doubt’.

Tillich argues that really serious doubt – the radical questioning of any and every alleged finality – is only possible to one who is grasped by a transcendent faith, that is, who enjoys a confidence that wells up from the creative grounds of being and does not rest on any objectified security structures […]

The educator rooted in transcendence helps to foster a constructive disposition toward doubt, that is, a spirit of criticism . Such a spirit is to be distinguished sharply from the destructive doubt of the cynic or skeptic or from the attitude of indifference engendered by dilettante sophistication. The latter dispositions are essentially faithless, in the sense that they presuppose the futility of any sustained quest for truth or right on the grounds that the perennial struggle of mankind to achieve demonstrable securities has proven unsuccessful. Abandoning the search for ultimate certainties, the skeptic unwittingly cuts the ground from under serious inquiry itself, thus discrediting even his own activity of doubting […]

The teacher who is spiritually aware does not seek to protect himself from the insecurity of uncertainty, perplexity, and irremediable ignorance. He does not try to hide behind a screen of academic presumption and professional expertise, embellished with mystifying jargon. Nor does he confuse the role of teacher with that of authoritative oracle. He does not expect or encourage his students supinely to accept his beliefs or directions. On the other hand, he shares with conviction and enthusiasm the light that he believes he possesses, and encourages his students to do the same, resolutely resisting in himself and in his students the paralysis and sense of futility associated with skepticism [sic] and indifference. (Phenix, 1975, pp. 331-332)

Wonder, awe and

reverence (Not classified)

One’s sense of infinitude predisposes one to a spirit of expectation (my paraphrase), which is the source of the desire to learn:

thought grows out of wonder, which in turn is rooted in the spiritual act of projecting ideal possibilities. Thus instead of regarding human learning primarily as a means of biological adaptation35, it may be thought of as a response to the lure of transcendence […] Wonder refers to the suspenseful tension of consciousness toward the unknown future in response to the attraction of unrealized potentialities. It includes the vague adumbration of enriching relationships yet unestablished but beckoning. It is the hovering shadow of an answer resident in every question seriously asked. Awe is the sense of momentousness excited by the experience of transcendence. It is the source of persistent interest in learning and of patient efforts toward realization, born of the sense that the human career, as well as the cosmic enterprise of which it is a part, is an affair of capital importance. Reverence betokens a recognition of one's participation in transcendence as a surprising and continually renewed gift, in contrast to the view of one's existence as a secure possession and as an autonomous achievement. The reverent disposition saves one from the arrogance of self-sufficiency which interferes with openness to creative possibilities in learning, and issues in a spirit of thankfulness for the gift of life that makes study a welcome opportunity and not a chore and an obligation. (Phenix, 1975, pp. 332-333)

35 Phenix is distancing himself from what he saw as Dewey’s approach.

188

Two questions give food for thought. How much less of a human being would I be if the

five qualities listed in the table were excised from the potential me (and likewise, the potential in

every learner)? And, if these qualities are at the core of who I am becoming, why would any

twenty-first century university not consider them as worthy touchstones in conceiving a fit-for-

greater-purpose curriculum?36 A view of the human condition that sees all these noble

qualities of experience as emanating from humanity’s essential attraction to

transcendence provides a rich, fecund foundation for my depiction of meaning making

and my curriculum of becoming framework. That is to say, both these thesis products have

their roots in a philosophy of transcendence that transcends religious differences; in

quoting Phenix here I align both products to his philosophy of transcendence:

Consequences for the Curriculum

The acknowledgment of transcendence suggests a curriculum that

has due regard for the uniqueness of the human personality. If a

person is a creative subject, then the core of his selfhood can never

be defined in terms of objective formative patterns that are common

to a social group. To be sure, for practical purposes provision must

be made to enable the young to participate effectively in the

common life. But it makes a great difference whether the patterns of

culture are regarded as essentially constitutive of the personality or

as resources for use by a personality whose springs of being lie at a

deeper level than any social norm, that is to say, in transcendence.

A curriculum of transcendence provides a context for engendering,

gestating, expecting, and celebrating the moments of singular

awareness and of inner illumination when each person comes into

the consciousness of his inimitable personal being. It is not

characterized so much by the objective content of studies as by the

atmosphere created by those who comprise the learning

community. Its opposite is the engineering outlook that regards the

learner as material to be formed by means of a variety of technical

procedures. In contrast, the curriculum of transcendence requires a

context of essential freedom, though not of anarchy, which is the

correlate of indifference and of skepticism about the structures of

being. Freedom in the school of transcendence is based on openness

to fresh possibilities of insight and invention and provision of

36 Question 2 might be criticised for implying that a fit-for-greater purpose education is something that

universities should aspire to provide, that the proposition is contestable on a range of grounds.

Nonetheless it is a position I am in process of defending. I confront the obstacles in the Epilogue and

Appendix 8.

189

ample cultural and interpersonal resources for the formation of

unique structures of existence.

Concern for Wholeness

The lure of transcendence is toward wholeness. It follows that the

educator in responding to that incitement creates a curriculum that

fosters comprehensiveness of experience. The argument for

education of the whole person in the last analysis rests on the

consciousness of transcendence. (Phenix, 1975, p. 333)

In Table 4.1 I juxtaposed A Christmas Unwrapping with excerpts from Davey (2006)

and my meaning making from the juxtaposition. I suggested that poetic meaning can

be at once tantalising and elusive, and noted Davey’s assertion that

language is a totality of meaning and that, furthermore, this totality

no longer demarcated the boundary between language and world.

Language and all that it holds is grasped as world. The totality of

this language-world can neither be transcended nor brought into

expression. Nevertheless, it is implied in every linguistic expression

and, furthermore, lends itself to an infinity of interpretations. The

transcendent is not that which surpasses language. It is not an

‘impossible’, as both Derrida and Hamacher imply. Rather, the

transcendent is taken back into language and is inherent in every

linguistic expression. As such, the transcendent disappears into an

inexplicable but immanent totality of meaning. (Davey, 2006, p.

201)

We should not be surprised to find Phenix and Davey each drawing his own

significance from the word transcendent. What intrigues and lures me is the degree of

possible accord in these two uses. The ineffable awaits us around every corner,

linguistic and physical, the conceived

and the lived. I return to Phenix’s

vision of transcendent curriculum in

Chapters 6 and 7.37

37 The degree of possible accord within Phenix’s and Davey’s uses of ‘transcendent’ might sound

pivotal for my argument. Alas, so is so much else of what I have been discussing. I cannot harvest

such a rich field of ideas as well as tie up every loose end. A PhD candidate is expected to elucidate

his argument clearly. What I hope I am doing in a sustained way is articulating and demonstrating

the pleasure–frustration of meaning making of the philosophical hermeneutic kind. There is always

more to be said on a matter, but that must await another occasion.

Recall my earlier musing: What more could I hope for than for my students to learn not to waste the muddy waters moments that await them around every corner (Figure 4.2).

190

William Pinar on education as a learning journey

Phenix’s essay, Transcendence and the curriculum, is a chapter in William Pinar’s edited

volume titled Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists (W. Pinar, 1975). Chapter 10 of

that work is by Pinar and is titled Currere: Toward reconceptualization. In contrast to

various other scholars’ approaches to curriculum, Pinar, writing in 1975, saw

curriculum theorising as currere – the academic study of the subjective (‘internal’)

experience of the educational journey, which for the sake of convenience he defined as

experiences ‘associated with educational institutions’ (W. Pinar, 1975, pp. 399, 401).38

‘The study of currere, as the Latin infinitive suggests, involves the investigation of the

nature of the individual experience of the public: of artifacts, actors, operations, of the

educational journey or pilgrimage’ (W. Pinar, 1975, p. 400). Pinar argues that asking

appropriate questions constitutes the study of currere, and the insights flowing from

such inquiry is knowledge of currere. ‘It is its own knowledge, and while its roots are

elsewhere [other disciplines], its plant and flower are its own; it is another species, a

discipline of its own’ (W. Pinar, 1975, p. 402). He provides examples of the kinds of

questions that might be raised in the study of currere, but for my present purposes the

intention behind such questioning is conveyed in the next extract where he engages

with Maxine Greene’s Curriculum and consciousness (Chapter 18 of the same 1975

collection). Greene proposed that a learner (‘reader’) enter ‘diverse realms of

experience’ in imagination, ‘move within his own subjectivity and break with the

common sense world he normally takes for granted’ (W. Pinar, 1975, p. 402), but Pinar

wants more than this:

Yes. But what is the nature of ‘movement within one’s [the

student’s] own subjectivity, the dynamics of breaking with the

commonsense, taken-for-granted world?39 What is involved? What

is one’s experience of this? What does it mean to go beyond oneself,

how does one articulate it, understand it, experience it? What is a

38 More recently he has described curriculum as ‘complicated conversation’. The intention behind this

metaphor is reflected in the following extract published in 2004:

‘Curriculum is,’ we suggested, ‘a extraordinarily complicated conversation’ (W. F. Pinar,

Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995, p. 848). Because the curriculum as it has been

institutionalized in schools today is so highly formalized and abstract, it may not be obvious

how we might conceive of curriculum as ‘conversation,’ as this term is usually employed to refer

to more open-ended, sometimes rather personal and interest-driven, events in which persons

dialogically encounter each other (Freire, 1968) […] Thirty years of ‘back to the basics’ and

‘accountability’ render Silberman's dated description chillingly current: ‘It is not possible to

spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the

mutilation visible everywhere – mutilation of spontaneity, of the joy of learning, of pleasure in

creating, of sense of self’ (Silberman, 1970, p. 10)’. (W. F. Pinar, 2004, p. 186)

The intention behind ‘complicated conversation’ is consistent with Pinar’s employment of currere in

1975. In this necessarily brief acknowledgment of Pinar’s work currere offered palpable resonance

with my argument, as I highlight in Chapter 6. 39 Pinar notes that Huebner used this term.

191

search for meaning? What does it mean to reconstruct curriculum

materials in terms of one’s consciousness?

Clearly, language analysis is no help here. Nor would be the so-

called empirical methods of the behavioural sciences. Those tools

are designed to answer a different order of question. What is

required is a self-hermeneutical, phenomenological method that

will help the investigator gain access to the lebenswelt [lifeworld ],

or that realm of lebenswelt associated with currere. (W. Pinar, 1975,

p. 403)

In Chapter 6 I mount the case that my conceptions of meaning making, growth in

global understanding, hermeneutic consciousness and lived hermeneutics are capable

of fostering self-reflexive awareness of one’s own journey of growth in understanding,

which encompasses the inner experience of one’s educational pilgrimage.

Foreshadowing my argument in Chapter 6, as I mull over Pinar’s train of thought,

from my setting in life and lifeworld, I am reconfirmed in my primary value beliefs that

□ ongoing personal reflection on the idea of an ever more complex, comprehensive and

coherent sense of self in the world is an ontologically valuable way of conceptualising

one’s own life-long, life-wide journey of growth in understanding, and that □ the

defining feature of human kind, and the essence of transformative, transcendent being,

is the fulfilment, the satisfaction experienced from the change of state we gain from

realising (both recognising and manifesting) this understanding.40 Sense of self in the

world becomes a floating yet intuitively graspable key to understanding along the road

of a meaning maker’s hermeneutic journey of living.

Adult and higher education theorising

What remains to be done in this chapter is to acknowledge four other trains of thought

in the adult and higher education literature that could potentially support the

curriculum of becoming framework to be elaborated in Part B. It is noteworthy that

they have also been part of the educational landscape through which I have travelled

in my own practice and professional meaning making, thereby being part of my

professional lifeworld . The first two may be considered as ‘upstream’ interrogations of

the curriculum challenge, offering ways of thinking about and/or addressing my initial

challenge in this thesis (Abstract) – how can university education equip students to survive

and thrive in the twenty-first century? The other two are more directly concerned with

teacher-learner interactions, thus ‘downstream’, more immediately within individual

teachers’ capacity to implement.

40 A new, much enlarged rendering of ideas that I first canvassed in McKenzie (1996, p. 102).

192

One. Educating for capability / graduate attribute development. I only began life

as a university academic in 1998 when I was employed by The University of Sydney –

Orange Agricultural College (Orange, New South Wales). At that time the College was

taking a fundamental look at how it could best develop the capability of its

undergraduate students. Perhaps the most-cited work on this subject at the time was

Stephenson and Weil’s (1992) Quality in Learning: A Capability Approach in Higher

Education41, based on the UK experience. It was the report of a Royal Society of Arts'

Higher Education for Capability project, and became a guide for many UK universities in

the 1990s.42 The authors opened their Preface with an Education for Capability Manifesto:

There is a serious imbalance in Britain today in the full process

which is described by the two words 'education' and 'training'. The

idea of the 'educated' person is that of a scholarly individual who

has been neither educated nor trained to exercise useful skills; who

is able to understand but not to act. Young people in secondary or

higher education increasingly specialize, and do so too often in

ways which mean that they are taught to practise only the skills of

scholarship and science. They acquire knowledge of particular

subjects, but are not equipped to use knowledge in ways which are

relevant to the world outside the education system. This imbalance

is harmful to individuals, to industry and to society. A well-

balanced education should, of course, embrace analysis and the

acquisition of knowledge. But it must also include the exercise of

creative skills, the competence to undertake and complete tasks and

the ability to cope with everyday life; and also doing all these

things in co-operation with others.43

It was such a state of affairs that the education for capability movement was conceived

and funded to address.

A more recent Australian study into universities’ approaches to fostering graduate

attributes, funded by the then Australian Learning and Teaching Council, published its

report in 2009, which observed that

Australian universities’ choices and decisions about curriculum

play a major part in their efforts to develop graduate attributes.

Different understandings about how graduate attributes might be

developed by students are implicit in the graduate attributes

41 Now out of print but available in pdf format at http://www.johnstephenson.net/qinlintro.htm. 42 From John Stephenson’s webpage, http://www.johnstephenson.net/qinlintro.htm. 43 The Manifesto was issued in 1979 by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures

and Commerce. Retrieved from http://www.johnstephenson.net/qinlintro.htm#Preface.

193

curricula choices made by institutions and more generally,

decisions about curricular policies and approaches can delineate

the range of graduate attributes strategies available to staff and

students in ways that foster or inhibit the achievement of graduate

attributes. (Barrie, Hughes, & Smith, 2009, p. 11)

The report noted that various curriculum models are used to support the development

of graduate attributes in students, including □ a double degree commencing with a

generalist capability-focussed bachelors degree, comparable in some cases to a liberal

arts degree44; □ a single degree with a capability-focussed first year; □ a dual-strand

curriculum aimed at capability development in one strand and discipline-based

competence in the other; □ an integrated approach where capability development is

embedded in the academic program; and □ extra-curricular opportunities for capability

development (Barrie et al., 2009, pp. 11-12).45

So what? In a sense my position on capability development is similar to my

position on teaching for being knowledgeable. In the same way that this thesis is about

more than teaching for being knowledgeable, so it is about more than capability

development; but it must include teaching for being knowledgeable, and it must also

include capability development. After all, it is, as I elaborate in Part B, about realising

in students an ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the

world, and about a fit-for-greater purpose university education that graduates novice

rounded, grounded practitioners.

Two. Barnettian interrogations of higher education. Ron Barnett is Emeritus

Professor of Higher Education at the University of London. His University webpage

distils his wide ranging interests thus:

I have a particular interest in the theory and conceptualisation of

higher education and for the last thirty years, I have been trying to

develop a social philosophy of the university. I have also been

trying to offer conceptual resources that might help universities to

realise their potential for personal and social wellbeing.46

At this point I open a window into his thinking where it resonates with my unfolding

curriculum of becoming framework. I will have more to say about his work in Part B.

44 As provided typically in colleges in North America but now also at The University of Melbourne. 45 The Graduate Attributes Project (GAP) was funded in such a way that the majority of Australian

universities participated in a sharing of experiences. A collection of posters showing diverse

responses to the graduate attributes challenge is available at

http://www.itl.usyd.edu.au/projects/nationalgap/resources/ thumbs.cfm. 46 http://www.ioe.ac.uk/staff/LCEN/LCEN_3.html.

194

Barnett contributed a chapter titled Framing education for practice in an edited

volume, Education for Future Practice (Higgs et al., 2010). In it he considers the question,

‘how might higher education be framed so that it might do justice both to the

challenges of practice in the contemporary world but yet also do some justice to its

liberal if not emancipatory promise?’ (Barnett, 2010b, p. 18). He argues that higher

education has in some measure moved away from the ‘reflective practitioner’

paradigm (Schön, 1995) and turned substantially towards the concept of ‘communities

of practice’ (Lave & Wenger, 1999): that the social dimensions of learning and knowing

are now more prominent in educators’ thinking than concern for students to ‘become

themselves’ (Barnett, 2010b, p. 19). In a world where professional practices are

‘radically’ unpredictable and contestable, Barnett finds the communities of practice

framework wanting; he challenges any suggestion that the resources to tackle such

conditions (conditions of supercomplexity47) can be found within communities of

practice. Rather, he continues,

I suggest that the necessary resources can be found in three

domains working together in some combination. Those domains

are those of (i) the individual, with his or her own cognitive

capacities, and personal and social dispositions and qualities […];

(ii) the totality of society's institutions, those institutions – at least in

their totality – being characterised by openness and a level of

responsible critique; (iii) the culture of society being receptive to

ideas (and giving space to 'public intellectuals' in society). These

three domains together form an ideal empirical framework by

which resources – conceptual and practical – might emerge that are

adequate to the instability and insufficiency of contemporary

practices.

Given Barnett’s characterisation of the supercomplexity of the contemporary lifeworld,

it is unsurprising – and of critical importance – that he should call for nuanced strategies

formed from nuanced ideas to articulate a way forward for higher education.

Barnett has much of value to say about the task of equipping graduates for the

contemporary world. Consider his powerful call for a richer conception of the kind of

critical consciousness new graduates will need in a fit-for-greater-purpose (my term)

role in the world:

Postmodernism and the idea of discourse together usher in a plastic

sense of human being, the self and self-identity fragmenting to

become a collection of identities reading a number of texts. A

47 See Barnett (2000), Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity (1st ed.). Buckingham: The

Society for Research into Higher Education and Oxford Universit Press.

195

durable self can only be sustained, if at all, through critical self-

reflection and authentic – and thereby, critical – action.

The university is taking on a parallel message, but is acceding to a

narrow interpretation of critical self-reflection as that of supplying

self-monitoring capacities for the corporate world. In that vein, too,

the university is accepting that it should be more oriented to the

realm of action, but here critical action is understood as being

critical of contemporary practices so as to bring off undisputed

ends of economic well-being and organizational projection. The

university’s conception of critical abilities widens to include the self

and the world but is held within limits, which threatens to thwart

the attainment of the emancipatory promise of critical being.

(Barnett, 1997, p. 63)

Barnett’s work has been significant for me in my own journey of engaging with the

higher education predicament, as depicted for example in the journal article, ‘Being a

university in the twenty-first century: Re-thinking curriculum’ (McKenzie, Higgs, &

Simpson, 2012).

Three. Threshold concepts and ‘muddy waters’ liminality. Meyer and Land have

played a central role in a new field of educational scholarship that brings together three

concepts: threshold concept, troublesome knowledge, and liminality.

A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening

up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about

something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or

interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner

cannot progress. As a consequence of comprehending a threshold

concept there may thus be a transformed internal view of subject

matter, subject landscape, or even world view. This transformation

may be sudden or it may be protracted over a considerable period

of time, with the transition to understanding proving troublesome.

Such a transformed view or landscape may represent how people

‘think’ in a particular discipline, or how they perceive, apprehend,

or experience particular phenomena within that discipline (or more

generally) […] (J. Meyer & Land, 2003, p. 1)

A threshold concept can of itself inherently represent what Perkins

(1999) refers to as troublesome knowledge – knowledge that is

‘alien’, or counter-intuitive or even intellectually absurd at face

value. It increasingly appears that a threshold concept may on its

196

own constitute, or in its application lead to, such troublesome

knowledge […] (J. Meyer & Land, 2003, p. 2)

Difficulty in understanding threshold concepts may leave the

learner in a state of liminality (Latin limen – ‘threshold’), a

suspended state in which understanding approximates to a kind of

mimicry or lack of authenticity. Palmer (2001), in a discussion of

liminality and hermeneutics, reminds us that the insights gained

when the learner crosses the threshold might also be unsettling,

involving a sense of loss:

The truth or insight may be a pleasant awakening or rob one of

an illusion; the understanding itself is morally neutral. The

quicksilver flash of insight may make one rich or poor in an

instant (Palmer, 2001, p. 4). (J. Meyer & Land, 2003, p. 10)

Palmer identifies a ‘quicksilver flash of insight’ rendering a learner rich or poor in an

instant (Palmer, 2001, p. 4); a third possibility is that crossing a threshold into an

enlarged meaning space is a mixed blessing, as is so often the case in human

experience. The scholarship of threshold concepts clearly has relevance to any

curriculum framework committed to fostering growth in student understanding for the

professions. The concepts of

troublesome knowledge and liminality

may also allow practitioners interested

in my muddy waters notion to open new

avenues of inquiry into the potential

applications of that idea in teaching for

being knowledgeable and also in

fostering students’ epistemological

development.

Four. Plumbing the rich depths of meaning making through the arts. My final

focus in this catalogue of adult and higher education themes of special relevance to my

argument concerns texts about using the arts to foster individual expression, to be moved,

and to experience vicariously those challenges and illuminations that one’s students have not

experienced or cannot experience in person. First I will mark out the territory that a

curriculum of becoming potentially occupies, then illustrate how the arts might be

enlisted to enrich the student learning experience in areas not typically covered in

existing curricula. Marking out the territory commences with quotes from two authors

we have already encountered – Richard Coan and William Pinar.

See for example Jensen’s paper on preparing students for physiotherapy practice: ‘In teaching, we see threshold concepts as those that are necessary to learn in order to fully understand a subject. For example, once you understand that patient function is a critical, threshold concept in physical therapy, you can never go back to thinking about just performing a list of examination procedures. Threshold concepts are typically transformative, integrative, irreversible, and disciplinary’ (Jensen, 2011, p. 1677).

197

* Richard Coan. In Chapter 1 I drew from Coan’s 1989 article, ‘Alternative views on

the evolution of consciousness’ (Coan, 1989). In it Coan refers to an earlier work (Coan,

1974) where

I stressed the importance of openness and flexible access to various

kinds of experience as both a precondition of and a consequence of

personal growth.48 If we regard richness of experience or a

realization of the full range of human potentials for experience as a

desirable goal, then we must at the same time value the experiential

flexibility that such a goal requires. Flexibility implies access to all

possible modes of perception and cognition and all possible ways

of regarding self, others, and the world. It would mean having full

use of all sensory and imagery modes, being able to direct attention

to various kinds of content, and being able to perceive in either a

focal, analytical manner or in a more global and diffuse manner. It

would mean having access to various modes of thinking,

understanding, and judging. Flexible access to different modes of

viewing oneself would mean being able to see oneself as a clearly

separate individual or as nonseparate, being able to see oneself as

an integrated whole or as fragmented, and being able to experience

one's full subjectivity or to regard oneself with detached, analytical

objectivity.

Flexibility means having access to various modes of experience that

are suspect in our society, modes that we tend to label pathological.

Most depth psychologies recognize at least implicitly, however,

that everyone has a ‘crazy’ side. The ‘normal’ [person] is cut off

from this side of experience by such mechanisms as repression,

while the psychotic [person] is stuck in this realm. Both suffer from

a lack of flexibility. Any mode of experience is limiting to the extent

that we lack access to other modes. To this extent, both

individuality and mystical unity can be traps. Abstract thinking

presents problems if we do not have access to concrete reality,

while concrete thinking alone provides a very limited kind of

understanding. (Coan, 1989, pp. 191-192)

48 Coan’s subject was the optimal personality, not curriculum; however, Coan’s explicit interest in this

passage in understanding the nature of personal growth makes it highly relevant to my argument

here.

198

* William Pinar.

The point of public education is to become an individual, a citizen,

a human subject engaged with intelligence and passion in the

problems and pleasures of his or her life, problems and pleasures

bound up with the problems and pleasures of everyone else in the

nation, on this planet. ‘Through education,’ Megan Boler reminds,

‘we invite one another to risk “living at the edge of our skin,”

where we find the greatest hope of revisioning ourselves’ (Boler,

1999, p. 199).49 (W. F. Pinar, 2004, p. 249)

The two starred quotes above help us contemplate the breadth of any project focussed

on supporting holistic human growth … as a curriculum of becoming is …

Come. I will show you what it’s like to live at the edge of your skin,

at the edge of your possibilities.

This is living a transcendent, unfolding life.

Within every moment we

open ourselves – heart, mind –

as we make sense of our own lives and those around us.

We understand and embrace the world …

Come. Take a deep draft of life, for in that draft we sensitise

ourselves to the variations of others’ experience. To be insensible

is to be cut off from them, unable to appreciate their lives …

Coan’s text invites us to consider the possibility that an individual will more fully

realise her own potential the more fully she50 sensitises herself to the immeasurable

range of potential human experiences of others. Were we to adopt this as a working

heuristic, to see where it might take us, we would soon adopt his corollary: that we

also need to ‘value the experiential flexibility that such a goal requires’. The Coan

extract then goes on to list the various dimensions in which we would need to cultivate

experiential flexibility.51

How might an educator value the experiential flexibility that such a goal requires?

For a curriculum developer or a teacher this would involve creating conditions

favourable to the cultivation of students’ ‘experiential flexibility’, their capacity to be

49 The Boler quote appears on p. 199 of the edition I could access; Pinar cites p. 200. 50 From time to time I refer to ‘the common person’, which is rendered either ‘he’ or ‘she’. Sometimes I

write ‘he or she’ (or the reverse). The intention is to achieve economy of expression and gender

balance. 51 The reader is asked to suspend judgment on what is practicable given the culture and psychological

temperature of university life. What I am presenting here is a blueprint, an ideal. I deal with the gap

between what is conceivable and what appears to be doable in the Finale of this thesis.

199

sensitive to everybody else, that is, to embrace the implications of being human. In my case, I

have learned that the arts are the natural home of ideas for teaching aimed at fostering

individual expression, sensitivity, and vicarious identification with others. Because the

scope of that topic is boundary-less, I cannot do justice to it here, so will instead cite

one author whose work illuminates my present theme. In a book chapter titled The role

of play in adult learning, Lanie Melamed (Melamed, 1987) selects one learning activity –

play – and points to some of the life- and person- affirming outcomes that a pedagogy of

play offers52:

Through play (the 'work' of children) the individual learns to

concentrate, to exercise imagination, to solve problems, to try out

new ideas and to develop a sense of control over his or her life.

Discovery and intensity are combined with exhilaration and

enjoyment, an integration which many adults envy. (Melamed,

1987, p. 13)

Twenty five years ago, it was assumed that childhood needs did

not resurface once 'adulthood' was reached. Equipped with the

rudiments of logical thinking and physical maturity, adults were

supposed to remain developmentally quiescent for the remainder

of their lives. Today, research in adult development is overturning

notions of the 'ageing' adult and the 'developing' child. Instead,

learning and development are viewed as a continuous process

throughout life in a somewhat predictable manner (Kidd [1973];

Loevinger & Wessler [1970]). Without a sharp demarcation between

childhood and adulthood, it seems entirely possible that

experiences which contribute to human growth and development

will be more similar than disparate. If this is true, then play and

adult learning need no longer remain antithetical. (Melamed, 1987,

pp. 13-14)

The research on which Melamed based her chapter was a sociological study

conducted with a group of women which she saw as significant for the definition of

52 If play sounds like a strange example of artistic activity it may be regarded as improvised role play,

which is a performing art.

200

play that emerged53:

The interpretation of play which emerged differs notably from

popular definitions. Clearly, play for the women I interviewed is an

attitude or a way of being in the world rather than an activity.

Unlike organized play which is instrumental and purposeful, the

play they describe is intrinsically motivated and personally

rewarding. It is more likely a 'happening' than something which is

planned for, or takes place in our scant 'leisure' time. Fleeting and

idiosyncratic, it comes and goes within the moment; what seems

playful today may not be at all so tomorrow (Melamed, 1987, pp.

14-15).

Play is an attitude or a way of being in the world rather than an activity. Thus for

example participants regarded lively dialogue in a learning context as ‘playing with

ideas’ where participants can develop their own personal ideas or ‘try on new ideas

and be willing to appear stupid while fumbling to understand’ (Melamed, 1987, p. 19).

Critical to this playful approach to learning is feeling at ease. One participant mused

that ‘I learn best when I am relaxed and feeling good about myself […] When I’m

feeling playful I know I am feeling centred. That’s when I’m most open to learning’

(Melamed, 1987, p. 19). Moreover, the playful spirit is a shared experience; in a sense

playfulness, like trust, are emergents from group process:

The union of trust and playfulness often forms the basis for a

group's cohesion and best work. Repeatedly, participants talked

about competition and being judged by others as a major inhibitor

to playful living and learning. Griffith (1982) […] finds a spirit of

playfulness directly related to letting go of the need for control and

the ability to express oneself freely in mature interdependent

relationships. (Melamed, 1987, p. 19)

53 ‘The quest to understand the links between play and adult learning led me to nine women, mostly

over the age of 40, white, and middle class, who considered themselves playful. Inspired by Maslow

(1971), I decided to tap the wisdom of those who had successfully integrated play into the fullness of

their lives. The women were professionally employed in jobs varying from artist to film-maker,

therapist and adult educator. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data, stimulated by

guided fantasy and imagery in order to probe for deeper, less cliché-ridden meanings of play. The

data were analysed according to principles of grounded theory and interpreted with the aid of

hermeneutic and participatory research methods within an emancipatory or critical context. This

eclectic approach borrows from the work of qualitative researchers who affirm play as a way of

reaching understanding (Phillips [1973], Schwartzman [1978]) […] Because the study emerged from a

desire to understand my own experience, it seemed necessary to begin with women rather than a

mixed gender population.’ (Melamed, 1987, p. 14)

201

The importance of creating an atmosphere of trust in a collaborative learning situation

is generally appreciated, but playfulness and whimsy are not so well recognised as

enabling factors for rich learning. Fostering a playful ambience in a learning context is

a vital ingredient when employing approaches from the arts to foster individual

expression, sensitivity, and vicarious identification and empathy with others. Melamed

identified five qualities that distinguish this pedagogy:

During the course of my study, five areas emerged as particularly

compatible with a playful approach to living and learning.

Although play is not an isolated phenomenon in these themes, its

threads intertwine, enrich and humanize each of them. The areas

are:

□ Relational – the capacity for cooperation and connectedness

□ Experiential – validating and learning from experience

□ Metaphoric – intuitive and right-brain thinking

□ Integrative – valuing a holistic and organic connectedness to

people and things

□ Empowering – facilitating transformation in ourselves and

the world(s) we inhabit (Melamed, 1987, p. 18).

Space does not permit a review of Melamed’s whole chapter, but already we are in

a position to see that play, the playful spirit, and activities drawn from the arts more

generally, might have application in a curriculum of becoming. I return to Melamed’s

essay in my Chapter 6.

Segue

We have reached the end of Part A of this thesis, in which I presented my hermeneutic

engagements with a selection of texts, all bearing to some degree on an evolving

understanding and appreciation of a vision of a curriculum of becoming, one that

progressively gelled over the seven years of my candidature. This journey began for

me with a belief that published curriculum theory for university education for the

professions had some way to go to articulate a framework for a fit-for-greater-purpose

education for the professions. In my view this thesis provides a way forward. I present

and explain my proposed framework in Part B.

203

Part B. Meta-interpretation and

synthesis: Towards a university

curriculum framework for the

twenty-first century

205

Chapter 6.

‘Meaning making’: An integrating

concept for holistic education



The more intimate my relationship to the world of ideas and to

language




it is more sophisticated on the scales of complexity,

comprehensiveness and coherence than it was before.

One. A social realist conception of meaning making

Two. On thought

Three. On language

Four. The hermeneutic pursuit of meaning

The nature of the challenge

Linguistic being … through a glass darkly

Five. Graduate capability development and ‘being knowledgeable’

The nested domains of capability

Being knowledgeable

Six. Sense of self (in the world), personal identity and professional identity

Seven. Transcending oneself and ontological openness

Segue

This research is about professional education in the twenty-first century. My thesis

focuses on:

(a) meaning making, specifically, about assisting students preparing for entry

to the professions to realise an ever more complex, comprehensive and

coherent sense of self in the world, which becomes the still point of their

turning world, their reference point for their being-in-the-world as

practitioners and persons; and also

(b) a fit-for-greater purpose university education that graduates novice

rounded, grounded practitioners and a contributing member of society.

Chapter map

206

In this chapter I deal with (a), and take up (b) in Chapter 7. In the Epilogue I

consider the implications and potential applications of this work for university

education practice. The relevance of my conception of meaning making to my

design framework for a university curriculum of becoming will become more

persuasive the further my argument progresses. In this chapter I present seven

clusters of emerging themes from Part A and beyond. They serve as vantage points

from which to contemplate the conception of meaning making being offered here

as the pivotal inspiration for the curriculum of becoming framework to be

presented in Chapter 7. The chapter map above offers an overview of the kind of

territory we are about to traverse.

ONE. A social realist conception of meaning making

Social realism deals with everyday conditions of workers through a critical lens on the

social structures that create these conditions. In Being Human, Archer contends:

The properties and powers of the human being are neither seen as

pregiven [as the rationalist Enlightenment tradition (‘Modernity’s

Man’) would have it1], nor as socially appropriated [as the social

constructionist tradition (‘Society’s Being’) would have it2], but

rather these are emergent from our relations with our environment.

As such, they have relative autonomy from biology and society

alike, and causal powers to modify both of them. In fact, the

stratified view of humanity advocated here sees human beings as

constituted by a variety of strata. Each stratum is emergent from,

but irreducible to, lower levels because all strata possess their own

sui generis [one of a kind] properties and powers. Thus,

schematically, mind is emergent from neurological matter, consciousness

from mind, selfhood from consciousness, personal identity from selfhood,

and social agency from personal identity. (Archer, 2000, p. 87) (italics

added)

In Chapter 2 when I engaged with Archer’s Being Human, my intention was to

prepare for my argument that (a) ‘groundedness’ (in being human) is a crucial

graduate attribute for professional practice in the twenty-first century, and that (b) the

rationale for teaching for groundedness is strongly supported by social realist theory. I

weave that theme into my curriculum of becoming framework in Chapter 7. Archer’s

1 ‘”Modernity’s Man” is a straightforward version of Upwards conflation: all properties of society can

be derived from the doings of this rational man, along with others like him’ (Archer, 2000, p. 86). 2 Archer (2000, p. 4). ‘”Society’s Being” is a classic version of Downwards conflation: all the

recognisable properties of human beings come from their joining in “society’s conversation” […] The

reductionism of both “Modernity’s Man” and “Society’s Being” are resisted in social realism’ (Archer,

2000, p. 86).

207

work is also central to my hybrid conception of meaning making as holding making

sense and finding personal fulfilment in the one conceptual space.

For Archer it is ‘only as embodied human beings that we experience the world and

ourselves: our thought is an aspect of the practice of such beings, and thus can never be

set apart from the way the world is and the way we are’ (Archer, 2000, p. 145). It is

Archer’s realist stance that permits her to embrace the propositions, ‘the way the world

is and the way we are’. Realists refuse to have these twin pillars waffled or

philosophised away. In the same way, I

hope, my strong identification with the

principle of the embodiment of persons

prevents some of my less tangible

musings to become obscured or

forgotten. In Archer’s view, our

thinking life is organically enmeshed in

our embodied practice. Another way of

approaching this matter is the

expression, ‘lived experience’. To me, lived experience is a holistic concept

encompassing and holding together one’s inner life and its bodily manifestation as one

engages with the world. The expression, ‘experiencing the world and ourselves’

(Archer, 2000, p. 145), like my ‘sense of self in the world’, is close to the self–not-self

differentiation in the developmental psychology literature. Together – as both

expressions imply – self and world constitute the domain of the meaningful. This gives

me confidence in depicting growth in global understanding as the realisation of an ever

more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world.

In the light of such a position, consider the implications of Archer’s thesis (in the

first quote of this section) for my social realist conception of meaning making. Archer

depicts the human phenomenon at the level of the individual as a series of ‘becomings’,

from neurological matter to social agency – holonic evolution in Wilber’s terms. This

view is relevant to my present theme of the nature of meaning making in that our need

to make sense of things and to find meaning or purpose in our lives(x) is expressed even as our

‘becomings’ unfold(y) – they are played out within those unfoldings. Indeed, these two

statements (x and y) are two formulations of the one marvel – the human phenomenon.

A social realist theory of meaning making as I am shaping it here

acknowledges and values at least two principles:

□ ‘The properties and powers of the human being’,

including our thinking life, ‘are emergent from our

relations with our environment’ (Archer, 2000, p. 87); and

‘we are a part of the cosmos. However, communion with the cosmos is relative as it may be entirely conceptual or entirely somatic and everywhere in between’ (Solare, 2011).

‘I can know the outer world because the outer world is already in me, and I can know me. All knowledge of other is simply a different degree of self-knowledge, since self and other are of the same fabric, and speak softly to each other at any moment that one listens’ (Wilber, 2000, p. 116).

208

□ ‘lived experience’ is a holistic concept encompassing and

holding together one’s inner life and its bodily

manifestation as I engage with the world.

The journey to understanding for an individual bears some resemblance to a

discourse within a disciplinary community. In Chapter 2 I gave an account of Archer’s

realist social theory, which she assembled via a process of extensive engagement with

two traditions in social theory that she finds inadequate. The result, presented in Being

Human, is a persuasive defence of categories of explanation that make equally credible

sense of societies as different as Dickens’ London, Hitler’s Germany and Gandhi’s

India; and yours and mine. An individual seeker of understanding will probably not

exhibit the rigour, breadth and depth of an academic discipline in their respective

quests to ‘make credible sense’ of things, but a common desire for coherence drives

both. Aspiring to such understanding in

one’s relations with the world is

aspiring, in the language of

philosophical hermeneutics, to become

gebildet, never forgetting to keep one

foot on the ground, because it is the

only ground we have.

TWO. On thought

This thesis is constructed on a particular view of the nature of thinking. At this point I

pause to ask how the concepts of consciousness and thought stand in relation to each

other; clearly, meaning making and thought are related processes. Gerald Edelman’s3

comment nicely conveys the character of thought:

Thought cannot be pursued except against a conscious backdrop.

But a biological theory of consciousness provides only a necessary

condition for thinking, not a sufficient one. Thinking is a skill

woven from experience of the world, from the parallel levels and

channels of perceptual and conceptual life. In the end, it is a skill

that is ultimately constrained by social and cultural values. The

acquisition of this skill requires more than experience with things; it

requires social, affective and linguistic interactions. Thoughts,

concepts and beliefs are only individuated by reference to events in

the outside world, and by reference to social interactions with

others, particularly those involving linguistic experience. (Edelman,

1992, p. 174)

3 Gerald Edelman is a Nobel Prize winner and Director of The Neurosciences Institute, San Diego.

A twenty-first century curriculum of becoming will need to find ways of reaffirming humankind’s relationship with the sources of life – earth, air, fire, water – thinking that needs to be applied at various scales of social organisation, because the problems we face owe their intensity to the complexity of the global economy, lifestyle, lifeworld (foreword to Chapter 2).

209

What an eddy of ideas! The eddy widens for me as I draw into the pool themes

from my final chosen author in Part A, Lanie Melamed. Thought is the idea that links

the two mentioned concepts of mind and learning:

The mind as a multidimensional tapestry reflects current scientific

assumptions about the nature of existence. The principles of

linearity, stasis, and causation, once assumed to describe the

universe, are being replaced by a vision which is circular, pulsating,

stochastic (random) and interconnected (Bateson, 1972). Like other

forces in the universe, human activity is also a playful blending of

adventure, surprise, energy, circularity, trial and error, and

interconnectedness […] Despite the fact that most formal learning

experiences emphasize deliberate and conscious processes, the vast

bulk of learning takes place in the unconscious.4 Unfortunately,

‘most adults learn to distrust this non-verbal, non-representational,

and unconscious learning because it is difficult to verbalize and is

often perceived as illogical and irrational’ (Brundage &

Mackeracher, 1980, pp. 17, 18). A playful approach to learning

helps us engage and connect with parts of ourselves which are

usually dormant, inaccessible, or well-defended. In the process we

shuffle, sort and arrange the various images and symbols which

have been stored from life's experiences. (Melamed, 1987, pp. 16-17)

Clearly, play for the women I interviewed is an attitude or a way of

being in the world rather than an activity. Unlike organized play

which is instrumental and purposeful, the play they describe is

intrinsically motivated and personally rewarding. It is more likely a

4 I have not verified the standing of the claim that most learning takes place in the unconscious, but

Scientists have long known that there are two learning systems for such patterns of movement

[as buttoning a shirt or playing an instrument]; with the implicit system, we learn without being

aware of the fact and without conscious training, such as through simple repetition. The explicit

system, on the other hand, we use when we consciously train and are aware of what we are

learning. (Science Daily, 2010)

Research into dopamine D2 receptors in the basal ganglia has demonstrated

a correlation between D2 receptor density and both forms of learning […] the evolutionarily

oldest part of the basal ganglia – the limbic striatum – was only involved in implicit learning […]

‘We probably have certain fundamental learning systems in common not only with rats, mice

and other mammals, but also with the most primitive vertebrates, which also have a limbic

striatum’. (Frederick Ullén, Karolinska Institutet and the Stockholm Brain Institute).

(Science Daily, 2010)

The psycho-motor skill acquisition supported by the limbic striatum referred to in Science Daily

would appear to be associated with procedural memory; see Chapter 2, footnote 8, p. 82. There is a

disjunction between the kinds of learning apparently supported by the limbic striatum and that of

Melamed’s participants’ experiences. Melamed’s argument about ‘non-verbal, non-representational,

and unconscious learning’ is clearly building on what is known of the role of the unconscious in

human experience.

210

'happening' than something which is planned for […] Fleeting and

idiosyncratic, it comes and goes within the moment; what seems

playful today may not be at all so tomorrow. (Melamed, 1987, p. 15)

Melamed’s account of her participants’ experiences – their exhilarating,

intrinsically motivated, fleeting, idiosyncratic ‘playing with ideas’, their ‘fumbling to

understand’ (Melamed, 1987, p. 19), offers a colourful example of, in Edelman’s words,

thinking ‘woven from experience of the world, from the parallel levels and channels of

perceptual and conceptual life’ (Edelman, 1992, p. 174). For me Edelman’s ‘parallel

channels’ might include sightings (‘perceptions’), old and new, that trigger fresh

patterns of association (‘conceptions) for these women in the continuous present tense:

’we shuffle, sort and arrange the various images and symbols which have been stored

from life's experiences’ (Melamed, 1987, p. 17). ‘Parallel levels’ suggests metacognitive

re-examinations of previously taken-for-granted understandings. Melamed paints a

picture of deliriously organic meaning making among her participants! Thought itself

is playful if entered into playfully.

THREE. On language

At this point in my overall argument I emphasise the place language holds in

philosophical hermeneutic thought to underpin my conception of meaning making. In

the Epilogue (Confidence and equivocation), I refer to a ramification from my conception

of meaning making for the development of students’ language skills in a curriculum of

becoming.

Central to philosophical hermeneutic thought is the view that it is language, not

ideas, where the excitement lies in the pursuit of understanding. The emphasis is not

on the playfulness of thought (as described in the previous section) but on the

playfulness inherent in the hermeneutic interpretation of texts: ‘To abjure [repudiate] the

certainty of concepts for the sake of the play of language exposes one's understanding

to those unexpected shifts of perspective that Gadamer's dialectic of experience

articulates so well’ (Davey, 2006, p. 216). Here is a glimpse of Davey’s sense of the role

of language in philosophical hermeneutic practice, from his Chapter 4, Understanding’s

Disquiet.

Language for Gadamer is always more than what can be stated

within it. Language is not merely a process of objectification: it has

a generative and formative capacity. Philosophical hermeneutics is

concerned with language as ‘event’. It reflects on what comes into

being by means of language. Consistent with what we have argued

above, a sense of difficulty and the presence of the withheld are two

of the entities language brings into being. Language does not

therefore stand opposed to a realm of the unsayable. To the

211

contrary, it is language that allows the unsayable to have its place in a

given speech world. This conception is central to Gadamer's

speculative theory of meaning. Every word, he argues, carries with

it the unsaid: ‘The living virtuality of speech brings a totality of

meaning into play, without being able to express it totally’ (Gadamer,

1989, p. 458) (emphasis added). Whether its form is philosophical or

poetic, the illuminating power of speculative language stems not

from what it objectifies in predicate form. Rather, it springs forth

from that which the said lights up of what is not said […] It is the

speculative that reveals the presence of the withheld within the

said, demonstrates that interpretation has no closure, and exposes

the essentially enigmatic nature of linguistic being. The speculative

allows the unsayable its place within language […] In short, the

unsayable does not exist apart from language. It is precisely the

sayable that allows the unsayable to come forth.

The unsayable is not a noumenal5 entity beyond language: there is

no element within the unsayable that cannot in principle be put into

words. Each association of meaning, each philological connection

lying beyond what is immediately said can in principle be

articulated […] What cannot be objectified, however, is the whole,

that is, the huge complexity of possible perspectives that surround

a given work. The speculative dimension of language points to that

complexity. Yet the fact that such a complexity cannot be expressed

is neither indicative of an intrinsic opposition between language

and the unsayable, nor of a failure of language. What it reveals is

the finite nature of language. Though language can evoke a totality

of possible meaning, it cannot articulate it. (Davey, 2006, p. 181)

Further insight into the role

language plays in the philosophical

hermeneutic pursuit of understanding is

conveyed in an extended passage from

Davey in Appendix 6 of this thesis.

FOUR. The hermeneutic pursuit of meaning

Meaning making as construed in this study encompasses making meaning (making

sense) and finding meaning or purpose. In our still commonly compartmentalised

5 Noumenal: see Glossary, noumenon, noumena.

Example: ‘[Gadamer] implied that language is a totality of meaning and that, furthermore, this totality no longer demarcated the boundary between language and world. Language and all that it holds is grasped as world. The totality of this language-world can neither be transcended nor brought into expression’ (Davey, 2006, p. 201).

212

approaches to scholarship, these two human pursuits are typically considered in

isolation from each other – the psychology–philosophy divide – whereas I am arguing

that they be held together to see where that might lead us in this quest for a fit-for-

greater-purpose university education for the twenty-first century. In this section I

synthesise Part A discussion as it relates to the pursuit of meaning.

It is not uncommon today to hear educators express a desire to teach for more

holistic outcomes. For me this is a confirmation of the value of my hybrid conception

of meaning making. Because human

experience is one/holistic, there is no

inherent reason for educators to accept

the conventional demarcations, be it

making versus finding meaning, or that of

knowing, acting and being, which are Barnett’s three irreducible dimensions of graduate

capability in the twenty-first century (Barnett [2004], [2012], Barnett & Coate [2005]).

The principle here is that it is just common-sense to teach in a way that is consistent

with the outcomes one desires: that achieving a holistic graduate outcome is best

fostered via a holistic learning experience. I present that argument in Chapter 7. The

focus here is on one of its constitutive ideas – that part of the holistic outcome that

relates to the quality/timbre of understanding achieved.

Davey’s declared aim in his Chapter 3 is ‘to demonstrate how a careful reflection

on the notion of “speculative understanding” can successfully address the question of

the interiority of understanding’ (Davey, 2006, p. 110) (my italics). ‘Interiority of

understanding’ is a term that resonates with my suggestion in Chapter 5 about the

critical role of a learner’s meaning making history in shaping her meaning perspective

and thus her meaning making in the present. It is consistent with Wilber’s four

quadrants argument (see Chapter 1) that we do well not to ignore the left half of the

universe of meaning making possibility.

My thesis is that meaning making can be an integrating concept in university

professional education. This achievement requires recognising that meaning making is

a holistic and uniquely personal experience and must be treasured and nurtured as

such in educating the whole person – matching our education practice to the kind of

outcome we desire.

In the following section I examine the nature of the meaning making challenge,

then unpeel the philosophical hermeneutic concept of linguistic being, a discussion that

also clarifies Davey’s representation of speculative understanding.

Example: the Charles Sturt University draft University Strategy 2013-2015 declared that CSU ‘develops holistic, far-sighted people who help their communities grow and flourish’ (Charles Sturt University, 2012, p. 2).

213

The nature of the challenge

As I pointed out in Chapter 2, according to Bontekoe, the hermeneutic circle

implies that the quest for understanding knows no bounds:

Given that the hermeneutic circle involves the constant bringing to

bear of new information into increasingly adequate interpretations

of the object, hermeneutical inquiry has no natural resting place, no

point at which it can suspend its operations with a sense of the job

well and thoroughly done, short of an understanding of the entire

world, and of the entire world, moreover, as an integrated world.

Thus we find Hans-Georg Gadamer, for example, remarking at

times upon what he calls an ‘ultimate need of reason: to be able to

preserve a unity within the totality of what is’ (Gadamer, 1983, p.

2). (Bontekoe, 2000, p. 10)

‘An ultimate need of reason: to be able to preserve a unity within the totality of

what is’ (Bontekoe, 2000, p. 10). The goal of comprehensive understanding referred to

by Bontekoe is an ultimate need of reason, in that reason relies on the principle that

‘things’ ‘work’, ‘hold together’, implied in Gadamer’s phrase, ‘unity within totality’. It

is what the naïve, wide-eyed Piggy in

William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies

clung to. Davey’s account of the

philosophical hermeneutic stance reads

very differently: ‘Unlike reason,

understanding does not seek wholeness or completeness but ever-new interpretative

relations. It is precisely upon the generation of new interpretative tensions which

understanding's resistance to nihilism's entropy depends’ (Davey, 2006, p. 183).

There is thus a difference in the Bontekoe and Davey positions on the question,

does hermeneutical inquiry, like reason, have comprehensive understanding in its sights or not?

I simply acknowledge the difference and point out that Bontekoe’s text covers the

hermeneutic tradition generally while Davey’s re-interprets Gadamer’s philosophical

hermeneutics.

There is a further thing to add. I have not resolved a question of importance to my

thesis. Where do I stand on the concept and allure of ‘everything’? Recall my comment

in the Prologue: We humans need a word like ‘cosmos ’ – or ‘Kosmos’, from the ancient

Greek, as Ken Wilber points out (Wilber, 2000, p. 45) – to name the unity of conception

that we infer and crave. While ‘crave’ was perhaps an exaggeration, my own sense of

the human phenomenon is that deep down we all to some extent find the idea of ever

Piggy told Ralph there is no such thing as ghosts. ‘Cos things wouldn’t make sense. Houses an’ streets, an’ – TV – they wouldn’t work’ (Golding, n.d., p. 131). There was an explanation for everything.

214

more complex, comprehensive and

coherent understanding satisfying

and/or comforting; or, more to the

point, that even entertaining the idea of

embracing such a goal is itself, potentially, a

sense-of-self-in-the-world-shaking, life-

changing moment of transition. (That’s the

educator in me speaking.)

Figure 6.1. The hermeneutic circler, voracious for understanding

Image © Charles Barsotti ([email protected]). Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The history of civilisation is

the story of the battle between our higher and lower selves.

I like to think of myself as a carer

even though I seem increasingly to think of my own needs first;

I like to imagine myself in pursuit of ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent

understanding

even though I fritter away so much of my time.

A curriculum of becoming seeks to cultivate

our higher selves.6

6 We saw in Chapter 1 (p. 69) that Wilber, in the Jungian tradition, writes about the ‘higher Self’

(capital ‘S’) (Wilber, 2000, p. 522). In my own journey, I am yet to deeply understand how my ‘higher

self’ stands in relation to the ‘higher Self’. My treadmill.

‘My life experience overlays my genetic potential to form my cognitive phenotype, creating the context, boundaries and raw material for growth in understanding. However rich or poor our lifelong learning environment might have been, all we can do as aspiring open system learners is to set out from where we are, voracious for understanding’ (McKenzie, 1996, p. 103). (See Figure 6.1 for an oblique take on the ‘everything’ quandary.)

215

What I am alluding to

here is our shared higher

self ‘inkling’ that it all

means something: ‘philo-

sophical questions are

important to everyone, whether or not one chooses dedication to academic study. In

fact, to be human is to naturally reflect upon philosophical questions’ (Stefanovic, 2013,

p. 17). There is so much to understand, and so, the hermeneutic circle of endless

questioning is a treadmill: another turn of the wheel, a wider perspective on things, but the

going can be hard. Wasn’t Bontekoe correct to assert that entering the hermeneutic circle

implies there will be no natural resting place, no point at which I can dismount, ‘short

of an understanding of the entire world, and of the entire world, moreover, as an

integrated world’ (Bontekoe, 2000, p. 10)? There is a compelling case for coupling my

hybrid conception of meaning making to Bontekoe’s implied view (or rather my

interpretation of his argument) that one’s higher self will find pursuit of ever more

complex, comprehensive and coherent understanding tough going. The hermeneutic

circle is the prize for and the price of being human. And yet, if Stefanovic is correct in

attributing philosophising to all of us (see her quote above), isn’t the ‘prize’ half of my

(prize+price) equation something to capitalise on when conceiving life as a

hermeneutic journey, when theorising a university curriculum of becoming? We just

have to find ways of connecting with students’ sometimes highly camouflaged higher

selves. In saying this, I acknowledge that others might not experience such natural

delight in this challenging complexity, particularly undergraduate students coping

with multiple subject demands and looming exams. In the Epilogue to my thesis I

discuss how this Utopian vision might be used by course teams surrounded by

deadlines and other deadening demands.

As a philosophical hermeneutist I not only accept that comprehensive

understanding (aka ‘42’) is an impossible dream but that also, like Davey I suspect, I

relish all the muddy waters moments that still stand between me and its realisation. If

it is my reason that propels me to aspire to comprehensive understanding, then I

simply, humbly, gladly embrace the complexity and contradictions of being human, of

being drawn in different directions at the same time.

Muddy waters moments can and do sometimes feel like obstacles to achieving

clarity, richer understanding. And yet, for philosophical hermeneutics, in my

understanding, the muddy waters experience is that through which new

understanding emerges, which is becoming gebildet …

My workshop [in 1997] was titled Muddy waters, the unknown and

the Welcome Stranger. This was the first time I had used ‘muddy

The noble calling to our higher selves: ‘We set ourselves the goal of continuously pushing back the frontiers of global understanding, of letting go of today's sense of everything as tomorrow's questions appear on the horizon. My noble calling is to progressively open myself to the mystery within and the mystery without’ (McKenzie, 1997). See Appendix 5.

216

waters’ as a metaphor to engage learners cerebrally, emotionally

and imaginatively in the possibility that ‘being open to the

obscurity before the clarity can be one of the nicest things’.

(McKenzie, 1996, p. 134) (from p. 103, this thesis)

Lest the reader is questioning how all this relates to preparing students for

professional life, I restate my position. I value the idea of teaching in a way that is

consistent with the outcomes one desires, and believe that achieving a holistic graduate

outcome is best fostered via a holistic learning experience. This means, as I indicated in

the Prologue (p. 4), that curriculum practice will achieve more robust and fulsome

outcomes the more closely it mirrors or accommodates the way humans experience self

and world, cognitively, socially, physically, emotionally, ethically, spiritually. In a

curriculum of becoming

all staff (teaching, professional, administrative, grounds, dining etc. staff) will

engage with students attuned to how they ‘work’, and students will reciprocate.

Given time we can all learn to respond in kind, even the most unresponsive

students and colleagues

student learning is about a world and a field of practice where ‘whole person

experience’ is deeply embedded in learning experience design. Only thus will

students be adequately prepared for holistic practice.

Here I have been discussing students’ course experience. The student course

experience is their preparation for how they will relate to and engage with their

colleagues and clients post-graduation. We can best prepare them for rounded,

grounded, reflexive, engaging, agential practice by cultivating these expressions of

personal and professional being throughout their course-long journey. But there’s

more. A university curriculum of becoming for the professions must reflect a deep

understanding of the world of practice. My position may now be stated as follows:

A ‘fit-for-greater-purpose’ education of future professionals,

however that is construed, will more fully realise its goal the

more closely it reflects the ways practitioners currently make

sense of their professional setting in life and their role, and the

ways that sense of calling might be transformed.

Discourse (theorising) on a curriculum of becoming for the professions is thus centrally

focussed on the world of practice and on the meaning made of that world and practice

by current and future practitioners.

The perspective I just described reassures me about my research framework for

this project. I conceived the design on a belief that there is a compelling implicit logic

217

connecting my two research questions7; that is, enacting a ‘fit-for-greater-purpose’

education will be shaped primarily by how we conceptualise meaning making and

how that experiential understanding is expressed in our relationships and our

teaching. The main contribution of this thesis to university curriculum theorising lies in its

bringing together of the goal of holistic practice with the goal of hermeneutic understanding and

transcendence:

Making sense of the bigger picture is the integrative capacity we

need to cultivate in students to enable them to survive and thrive

in the twenty-first century. Fostering hope and a self-and-world-

transforming vision of a more holistic and wholesome practice

for the future can then (in concert with the enlarged sense made)

enable students to enter the field as novice rounded, grounded

practitioners, making a difference for good from day 1.

Anticipating my argument in Chapter 7, the above statement points to the importance

in curriculum praxis of keeping the curriculum WHAT and HOW questions in the one,

rich, open-ended discourse. The curriculum WHAT resides in the permutations of the

problem of describing what it means to be a novice rounded, grounded practitioner in

a given field. The curriculum HOW resides in deciding how to create a learning

space/journey that will foster the metamorphosis of students from novices-in-training

into novice rounded, grounded practitioners on graduation. Keeping the WHAT and the

HOW in the one, rich, open-ended discourse means recognising that they are so

interrelated that they need to be considered as one.

Making sense of the bigger picture. In Chapter 1 I showed that Wilber’s vision

offers a way of approaching the goal of comprehensive understanding. His tool or key

for making logical sense of ‘everything’, for binding everything together, is the holarchy

principle. Holarchy asserts that there is

no end to the nested series of holons

(Wilber, 2000, p. 43): ‘there is system,

but the system is sliding: The Kosmos is

the unending All, and the All is

composed of holons – all the way up, all

the way down’ (Wilber, 2000, p. 47).

So where does Wilber’s holarchy stand within my argument? My interpretation of

Wilber’s integral vision, as elaborated in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, has the status of a

study of Wilber’s hermeneutic meaning making through my hermeneutic meaning

7 (1) How can a reappraisal of ‘meaning making’ open fresh ways of conceptualising and addressing

universities’ educational challenge in the twenty-first century? (2) How might a twenty-first century

Australian university enact a ‘fit-for-greater-purpose’ education?

Wilber: ‘I would like to reintroduce this term, Kosmos. The Kosmos contains the cosmos (or the physiosphere), the bios (or biosphere), nous (the noosphere), and theos (the theosphere or divine domain) – none of them being foundational (even spirit shades into Emptiness)’ (Wilber, 2000, p. 45).

218

making. Studying the phenomenon of the integral vision and the movement it has

spawned (including interpretations of both by others) – treating the phenomenon as a

composite text – can help us to better appreciate hermeneutic consciousness, provided

we approach that task reflexively,

keeping an eye also on how we as

meaning makers already approach the

‘everything’ problem.

Linguistic being … through a glass darkly

As should already be clear, the meaning making practice I am defending here is what

is known in philosophical hermeneutics as ‘hermeneutic consciousness’, which is an

expression of linguistic being. The strongest defence of my hybrid conception of

meaning making arises directly out of the philosophical hermeneutic thought space.

This defence would appear to reside at the juncture where speculative understanding

meets Bildung meets ‘becoming gebildet’ meets linguistic being. The question I will

speculate on concerns how we may approach and relate to the philosophical hermeneutic ideal

of linguistic being.

Philosophical hermeneutics can be seen to view linguistic being as a mysterium but

also acknowledge a limit to the possibility of explanation. Davey again:

hermeneutical transcendence suggests that what has been

appropriated as religious experience properly belongs to an

experience of linguistic being. In its approach to the mysterium as a

thought limit, philosophical hermeneutics anticipates the recent

poststructuralist rapprochement with religious thought (Caputo,

2002). If, however, an experience of linguistic being as a mysterium

does not belong to another […] level [of] experience [i.e. religious

experience], how is it present in our ordinary experience of

language? […] The invocation of the mysterium of linguistic being

attempts to clarify rather than mystify the ontological dimensions

of understanding […] Although [it is] the source of interpretation

and speculative insight, linguistic being cannot itself be directly

experienced in the modes of understanding it makes possible.

Though it cannot be brought under the control of method, it

nevertheless abides within every thought and word. (Davey, 2006,

p. 28)

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Philosophical hermeneutics does not provide for disembodied, armchair investigations.

219

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

– But who is that on the other side of you? T.S. Eliot (1963)8

What is philosophically invoked as the source of understanding

(linguistic being9) can only be approached through the speculative

experience of language. The philosophical impetus within

philosophical hermeneutics seeks to elucidate a subjectively

experienced intimation of that linguistic objectivity that abides

within and has been present within us all along. In so doing it

guides us toward a sense of that which though beyond

conceptualization remains within and is revealed by every

speculative experience of language. (Davey, 2006, p. 28)

The poem extract by Eliot is another reminder that poets and poetry lovers are half

in love with muddy waters, lack of clarity, that sometimes they luxuriate in it. At times

a poet’s voice captures our imagination, enthrals us with just a whisp of one image

fragment slurring into another. While a passage may recall this or that story from our

cultural inheritance (see examples, footnote 9), living poetry brings us to our own next

moment of transcending understanding. Poetry works its magic on us one person at a

time: the whisp and slurry of words conjure meanings out of our own private worlds of

significance. For me, for example, ‘the third who walks beside you’ could be linguistic

being personified. Linguistic being defies description, will not wear our words – for we

cannot find quite the right words – and yet abides within every thought and word,

closer to me than … the next thing I might say. If she is not there when we look, we can

8 T. S. Eliot (1963c, p. 350). Extract from What the Thunder said, in The Waste Land, 1922.

‘In his footnotes to this verse, Eliot explained that the lines “were stimulated by the account of one of

the Antarctic expeditions [Ernest Shackleton’s] ... that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their

strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be

counted”’ Shermer (2010).

‘This passage also parallels the story of Christ's resurrection in Luke 24:13-35. In this story, two of

Christ's disciples meet a stranger on the road as they are travelling to Emmaus. The stranger is the

resurrected Christ, but the disciples do not recognize him as they continue together to Emmaus.’

Source: http://wasteland.windingway.org/360/who-is-the-third-who-always-walks-beside-you. 9 As a concept, linguistic being, like my Realm of Unknowing, will always escape boxing in words, but

different expressions shed light on their various facets. Of linguistic being, Davey writes: □

‘understanding and interpretation function within the spaces opened and generated by the relations

that constitute our linguistic being’ (Davey, 2006, p. 183). □ In a hermeneutical exchange between

persons ‘both negotiating parties exchange and transform their understanding by virtue of the fact

that the linguistic being of each penetrates that of the other’ (Davey, 2006, p. 176). □ ‘What is in a

word? Within the word for Gadamer lies “an experience of linguistic being”. To experience linguistic

being is to experience and partake in the vital movement of the word and its dialogical dynamics.

Philosophical hermeneutics is grounded in such an experience of language. It reveals why dialogue is

central to philosophical hermeneutics’ (Davey, 2006, p. 248). My challenge is to find a way of

describing the meaning making experience in a way that makes muddy waters alluring, not opaque

for my colleagues, for the field, for learners.

220

seek other ways of conceiving, personifying, enfleshing her.10 ‘What is philosophically

invoked as the source of understanding (linguistic being) can only be approached

through the speculative experience of language’ (Davey, 2006, p. 28).

So far in this chapter I have explored aspects of thinking, saying and evoking the

unsayable through language via parallel philosophical and poetic narratives. My

interpretive moment with the Eliot

verse provided an example of the way

poetry can evoke the presently

unsayable through language. If the

reader shared my ‘something-like-

momentary-held-breath’, or the mental

equivalent, as the two figures on the

road seemed fleetingly to be on a

journey with linguistic being, that was a

shared association of ideas and a shared

speculative experience of language. If

the mental switch needed was too great

– to conceive an entity, linguistic being

(an abstract construct invented to make sense of meaning making experience), as

taking human form – all that says is that your strategies for poetic personification

appear to be different from mine. Notwithstanding, my essential argument is that the

speculative experience of language is (a) of central importance to my conception of

meaning making and will thus help shape my framework for a university curriculum

of becoming, and (b) may offer meaning makers a way of bridging the making meaning–

finding meaning split (if such is the case) in their own journeys.

FIVE. Graduate capability development and ‘being knowledgeable’

In this section I bring together the notion of graduate capability development and

Bereiter’s ‘being knowledgeable’, along with his typology of personal knowledge,

which I discussed in Chapter 5. I also introduce a model that colleagues in my

institution and I developed in the early 2000s – the nested domains of capability. My

eventual aim is to show how the conception of meaning making emerging here

together with my curriculum of becoming framework (presented in Chapter 7) will

provide a way for universities to enact a ‘fit-for-greater-purpose’ education for the

professions.

10 I do not wish to impose my reading of Eliot on the reader; rather, I am illustrating how poetry can

have its way with us.

□ ‘being unsayable is not something that is strange to philosophical hermeneutics. The complex constellar nexus of any meaningful phenomenon is not something that can be articulated as such. This does not place it beyond language, for its presence is only approachable via the perspectival nature of interpretation. All meaningful phenomena contain an element of an intrinsic otherness insofar as that which is meaningful always points beyond itself’ (Davey, 2006, p. 182).

□ ‘the illuminating power of speculative language […] springs forth from that which the said lights up of what is not said […] It is the speculative that […] exposes the essentially enigmatic nature of linguistic being’ (Davey, 2006, p. 181).

221

The nested domains of capability

The nested domains of capability model was conceived around the time that academics

at our institution were considering how best to implement its commitment to graduate

capability development (McKenzie, Morgan, Cochrane, Watson, & Roberts, 2002).

Members of Faculty Board along with rural industry stakeholders had crafted a set of

‘rural management capabilities’, which we agreed were essential attributes of

graduates of our Faculty of Rural Management. And yet a degree of uncertainty still

hovered around the collective understanding of what graduate capability is (a delicious

philosophical hermeneutic question). As we recounted in the journal article that our

model was reported in,

alI undergraduate degree programs presently offered by our

Faculty draw on a common pool of units of study which to a

greater or lesser extent have a disciplinary focus. Thus, students are

introduced to knowledge-skill sets that could be portrayed in terms

of disciplinary capability. Over time, both within the framework of

their units of study, and particularly within the capability portfolio

program, students progressively discover how these discrete

knowledge-skill sets converge into a larger, more integrated pool

one we might label as professional capability. Plumbing deeper again,

in the dark waters of human being, stretched out across the whole

of a lifetime, we all seek to further cultivate our individual ways of

doing and of being in the world – the attributes that define us as

persons. Personal capability is a hypothetical stratum of experience

within which all our acquired capabilities are integrated into the

persons we take ourselves to be. (McKenzie, Morgan, Watson,

Cochrane, & Roberts, 2003, p. 124)

Our conception of these three nested domains of graduate capability is shown in

Figure 6.2.

222

Figure 6.2. The nested domains of capability

Source: McKenzie et al. (2003, p. 124)

We explicated our model with the vignette of a farm manager and a fencing

contractor:

Is it also possible to think of the three domains of capability

actually operating together in an individual’s professional life? Yes

it is. One can think for example of a farmer giving instructions to a

fencing contractor about which trees to clear and which ones to

leave alone. Disciplinary capability refers to that pool of knowledge

that informs, for instance, the farmer’s choice of species suitable for

fence posts, and those species whose root systems need to be left in

situ for soil stability reasons. Professional capability broadly covers

the knowledge and behaviours recognised by that professional

community as being necessary for effective practice: this might

include the generic graduate attribute lists of universities, plus

profession-specific attributes, such as knowledge of the

professional culture. In our present vignette, the farmer draws on

his communication skills (a professional capability) to engage with

the contractor across a range of considerations, and elicits responses

to ensure that the contractor has understood the complexity of the

task. Personal capability refers to one’s deeper and wider dynamic

personality qualities – for example, one’s sense of humour,

governed by one’s accumulated attitudes across a range of issues,

and one’s tacit value system and sense of self. We could invent

several moments in our imaginary farmer-contractor role play,

where each one’s humour comes into play in their banter, and

within which the final verbal contract is agreed on. Here is the

Disciplinary capability

Professional capability

Personal capability

223

moment of compact itself where two persons’ worlds of thought

enter into a fleeting alignment. (McKenzie et al., 2003, p. 124)

The value of our model and associated explication for the conception of meaning

making being presented here lies in the elegance of its integration of what Archer calls

our human properties and powers. ‘Personal capability is a hypothetical stratum of

experience within which all our acquired capabilities are integrated into the persons

we take ourselves to be’ (McKenzie et al., 2003, p. 124).

Consider with me now what further light might be shed on Bereiter’s typology of

personal knowledge by overlaying it on the farmer-contractor vignette I just presented.

In Table 6.1 I consider what we know (or what we might imagine) is significant,

meaningful, about the hypothetical farmer–contractor meeting. (Here I am speculating

on a real or simulated/imaginary slice of life. We can give it credence to the extent that

it possesses ‘the ring of truth’, the touchstone of ‘verisimilitude’, according to the

measure of one’s individual gestalt experience.)

Table 6.1. A farmer instructs his fencing contractor: exploring under-reported dimensions of educating for ‘lived capability’ with reference to Bereiter’s six kinds of personal knowledge

Bereiter’s six kinds of personal knowledge Farmer and contractor ways of knowing in this episode

Statable knowledge. Can be expressed in ‘sentences … diagrams, formulas, stories or enactments’, thus being available to others for appreciation, review, critique (Bereiter, 2002, p. 137).

The farmer points out which tree species on his property may be used for fencing and which ones must be spared.

Implicit understanding. ‘Those aspects of our knowledge that characterize intelligent relationships to things or situations in the world … It is knowledge gained from experience and it probably owes little or nothing to formal education … Implicit understanding is more like perception than like having propositions in the head (Clancy, 1991)’. We often need to predict what will occur in daily life, and so we draw on ‘residues’ of relevant past experience, even though ‘the knowledge on which the prediction is based is largely unspecifiable’. (Bereiter, 2002, pp. 138-139).

The vignette as described does not indicate the depth or breadth of the farmer’s understanding of the question of soil stability, but our students might well have pointed out that protecting the stability of soil on a farm is not just a checklist item in property management. Rather it is one manifestation of an ethos, an imperative to care for the farm biosystem. That ethos and imperative was a defining feature of our then Bachelor of Ecological Agriculture program. Values and a philosophical stance lie beneath an ecological agriculturalist’s day to day management decisions. Respecting and nurturing students’ implicit understanding of their living relationship to their property (present or future), expressed in their management practice over time, is an authentic dimension of a curriculum when teaching staff themselves possess such implicit understanding. When they don’t, it isn’t.

Episodic knowledge. Episodic memory concerns one’s past experiences: ‘Remembered episodes can be retrieved and considered in new contexts […] It could be questioned whether memory for episodes in itself constitutes knowledge […] but there can

Episodic memory comes into play as a living part of our meaning making in the world of practice. I can imagine incidents from the farmer’s past experience of poor fencing installations informing his comments to the contractor. In the vignette the light-hearted banter between the men could very easily have included stories from both their pasts.

224

Table 6.1 cont’d

be little doubt that the recall of past experiences is an important part of knowledgeability’ (Bereiter, 2002, pp. 140-141)

Such interaction could be reviewed not only in terms of episodic knowledge but also as an example of fusion of their horizons (of understanding) via banter.

Impressionistic knowledge. ‘Beyond statable knowledge and beyond our more confidently held implicit understandings lies a realm of feelings and impressions that also influence our actions […] What distinguishes impressionistic knowledge [from the other types of personal knowledge] is that the feelings are the knowledge […] To achieve a creative goal you have to make decisions of uncertain result. The reason creativity isn’t mere chance is that creative people become very adept, within their particular fields, at making risky choices that turn out to be good ones. They go by feeling, impression, or what in this context is often called intuition. Creativity remains clouded in mystery, however, unless we accept impressionistic knowledge as knowledge that grows and improves with experience like any other (Bereiter, 2002, p. 142).

The bare bones account of the farmer-contractor conversation does not illustrate impressionistic knowledge, but imaginative extension of the storyline can provide examples. Imagine the farmer running his fingers over a decaying fence post as he recalls an earlier, bungled fence construction. His face does not betray how he feels about how the previous owner instructed his contractor about choosing timber for the fence. The desire to conserve farm resources, to not waste them, expressed in his instructions, is really a ‘thought-feeling-intention’ rolled into one.

I can also imagine the contractor interpreting the farmer’s wishes by choosing trees of the permitted species balancing several goals: achieving optimal shade for livestock, optimal soil stability where the risk of erosion is greatest, as well as optimal aesthetics regarding the landscape and/or the fence. Choosing trees for a farm fence is a complex cognitive–aesthetic skill.

Skill. Being skillful in something has cognitive and subcognitive elements. If I’m told a child knows how to read he or she can corroborate this assessment by reading, which demonstrates the skill. Knowing how, or know-how, is the cognitive element of a skill. The subcognitive element is the improvement in performance arising from psycho-motor practice. (Bereiter, 2002, p. 143).

We don’t know from the vignette how much hands-on work the farmer does, but we know the contractor will shortly be felling and splitting trees, setting the fence line, spacing and positioning holes, sinking and securing them, building the end assemblies, etc. He has probably refined all the skills required over many years. His hands know what to do, whether he is consciously directing them or not.

Regulative knowledge. A range of constituents, ‘from explicit principles that may be debated and codified as codes of ethics or by-laws down to idiosyncratic personal knowledge, such as how you as a social worker deal with your aversion to assertive people. It may include knowledge of all the kinds discussed so far, but it is always knowledge pertaining more directly to the actors than to what is acted on’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 146). This category includes what Bereiter and Scardamalia (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993) previously called self-regulatory knowledge, metacognition being an example.11

In the vignette the farmer draws on his communication skills (a professional capability) to engage with the contractor across a range of considerations, and elicits responses to ensure that the contractor has understood the complexity of the task. The farmer appears to be demonstrating his capacity to monitor his own and the contractor’s demeanour and behaviour in the very process of the briefing session. He seeks to reassure himself that this contractor won’t do a shoddy job like the previous one apparently did. His metacognitive parallel processing of the situation directed at achieving his private agenda – a well-executed farm fence – is an example of regulative knowledge.

11 Bereiter cites Swanson’s definition of metacognition: ‘the knowledge and control one has over one’s

thinking and learning activities’ (Swanson, 1990, p. 306). (Bereiter, 2002, p. 145)

225

The speculative use of language in Table 6.1 – contemplating the significance of the

surface line of argument as well as reading, ruminating between the lines – illuminates

my conception of meaning making as a fundamental hybrid category of knowledge. It

comprises making sense (a cognitive event) and finding meaning or realising oneself (an

ontological event). In my mind’s eye the farmer was being a farmer in every turn of

phrase and action. In terms of framing and stimulating higher education for the

professions in the twenty-first century (including ‘vocational’ education), our challenge

is to help students ‘find their vocation’, in the sense of choosing a profession (vocation)

in which one can become more fully oneself … to which one can give oneself. It has

been said that in giving oneself, one finds oneself – a speculative use of language again.

I recognise that today people not infrequently change careers because of the changing

job market, so ‘giving oneself’ is really giving oneself to one’s profession, or one’s

present occupation, rather than to one’s lifelong (single) career: it is an outward-, not

inward-looking gesture. (When people change profession they bring one chapter to a

close and open another; another vision awaits them, another self-giving.)

Being knowledgeable

The picture of meaning making that is gelling here is that it is both holistic in nature

and organic in its relation to the rest of our experience. As shown in my discussion of

the farmer-contractor vignette (Table 6.1), being a farmer includes being able to call on

relevant statable knowledge to do what needs doing. In professional life statable

knowledge is constantly called for, and

so education for the professions must

include teaching for being knowledge-

able as a central activity, without

neglecting the other forms of personal

knowledge.12

Bereiter’s thesis, while written specifically about school education, nevertheless has

much to contribute to curriculum and pedagogy practice in higher education. One

argument that would seem to have a degree of transferability is his insistence that

educational institutions13 should focus on student development in areas which they are

better suited to handle than other parts of society are (Bereiter, 2002, pp. 233-235). First

Bereiter points to the traditional idea of a liberal education. ‘Almost everyone would

credit liberal education with some virtues, and it generally requires […] some kind of

planned and managed program aimed at learning’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 236). He asks

rhetorically what institutions need to do beyond providing a liberal education to

12 Bereiter discusses what teaching for all six forms of personal knowledge might look like; see Bereiter

(2002, pp. 239-241). 13 Bereiter refers to schools. If I see a valid translation of his argument into higher education I draw his

argument into mine and substitute educational institution for school.

In the same way that this thesis is about more than capability development, so it is about more than teaching for being knowledgeable; but it must include capability development, and it must also include teaching for being knowledgeable.

226

prepare students for today’s challenges. For Bereiter, a more relevant and coherent

account of the challenge of educational institutions today may be gained by framing

the role of formal education as follows: ‘The purpose for which formal education is uniquely

suited is enculturation into World 3’ (Bereiter, 2002, p. 236). He continues:

World 3 is the world of artifacts that may be discussed as

knowledge – theories, factual assertions, problem statements,

histories, interpretations, and many other products of human

thought. World 3 is not limited to accepted, verified, or important

knowledge objects. It can include discredited theories, crank

notions, unsolved problems, and new ideas that may or may not

gather a following. In this respect World 3 is more inclusive than

the canons of liberal education. This inclusiveness goes a long way

toward eliminating the split between established knowledge and

students' constructive efforts, because it places the ideas created by

students in the same world as the ideas handed down from

authoritative sources.

This brings us to enculturation. To me, enculturation into World 3

means joining the ranks of those who are familiar with, understand,

create, and work with the conceptual artifacts of their culture. It is

tempting to shorten this statement by saying it means becoming

part of the community of knowledge workers, but this implies a

level of solidarity and shared identity that does not exist […]

Here is […] a different slant on what it means to be enculturated

into World 3. In discussing shortcomings of the idea of mental

content, I have referred to a kind of knowledge that consists of

‘knowing one's way around’ in some domain. Suppose the domain

is a large park […] Those who know their way around in this park

do not constitute a coherent community […] They have different

knowledge and interests related to the park […] But […] their

mutual knowledge – their knowing their way around in the park

and all that entails – affords them possibilities of productive

interaction not open to the casual visitor. Just so, knowing one's

way around in the world of conceptual artifacts affords a wealth of

possibilities not open to people who know that world only from a

distance, if at all.

Painting with a wide brush, let us say that the World 3 students are

to learn their way around in is that of the disciplines represented in

a modern university (what those disciplines are, how they are

227

practiced, what they treat as foundational – these of course vary

from time to time and place to place and are often in dispute) […14]

There are, however, students who come to university or college

already enculturated to World 3 and generally knowing their way

around in it, even though they still have a lot to learn. They know

something of the classics and of what thinkers of the past were up

to. They have a sense of history and a grounding in mathematics

and science that extends beyond received knowledge to include

some experience of really doing history, mathematics, and science.

They have not just acquired itemizable knowledge. They have

already joined, as novices, the ranks of those who are familiar with,

understand, create, and work with the conceptual artifacts of their culture.

Regardless of how one might feel about the virtues and limitations

of this kind of education, it would have to be acknowledged that

enculturation to World 3 is something schools are structurally well

suited for and that no other institution could do as well. The

detachment of schools from the practical activities of life affords the

opportunity for study and reflection. Their social organization

affords opportunities for extended discourse, which is the engine of

progress in World 3. The essential resources are books and other

knowledge media, which schools are in a good position to provide.

(Bereiter, 2002, pp. 236-238)

If formal education means being enculturated into World 3, as Bereiter proposes, it

means fostering knowledge workers, whether amateur or professional: ‘Knowledge

workers create knowledge by taking data and information and applying their own

experience, judgment, know-how, assumptions (culture), background, and values in

order to reach a conclusion’ (Megill, 2013, p. 63).15

Where my thesis separates itself from Bereiter’s above line of argument is that I am

seeking to sketch the form of a fit-for-greater-purpose education for the professions, an

education for practice, which absolutely needs to enculturate students in their chosen

14 Bereiter continues:

Most university students, it must be granted, do not learn their way around in that world. They

learn their way around in a small part of it. And many do not even do that. They take courses.

They learn facts and advance their understanding of some aspect of the real world – its

geography, economics, history, or whatever – and acquire some professional competence, but

research indicates that many of them never become engaged with the problems of the

disciplines they study (Entwistle & Ramsden, 1983). They may hardly make any contact with

World 3 at all, their academic efforts being wholly occupied with acquiring learning (World 2)

and dealing with the material world (World 1). (Bereiter, 2002, p. 238) 15 ‘knowledge workers’: see Glossary item for Knowledge Age.

228

field of practice – in World 2. However, they are not just entering into a profession, they

are graduating from a university; they are university graduates. This fits with Bereiter’s

case that their university preparation must enable them to be knowledgeable in

Bereiter’s sense of the term – to be enculturated into World 3 – as well as realise the

other desiderata of a curriculum of becoming described in this thesis.

SIX. Sense of self (in the world), personal identity and professional identity

In this section I elaborate my claim in the Abstract that

authentic professional identity is an expression of authentic

personal identity. A student’s journey to graduation is a journey to

becoming a ‘novice rounded, grounded practitioner’ in a chosen

profession, but also a journey to becoming a responsible,

contributing member of society and a journey towards self-

realisation. These are emergent outcomes of a university


In a review of Edelman’s Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind

(Edelman, 1992), Robert Coles observed that ‘The whole planet is a mere spot in an

infinity of space, and the entire span of our self-awareness is a mere moment in an

infinity of time’ (Coles, 1990). What draws me to Coles’ observation is in no way its

explicit down-playing of the planet and self-awareness, but the choice of these two

entities juxtaposed in this way. The cosmological sweep of the comment urges a reader

to respond, yes, but from a human standpoint they are both remarkable and awe-inspiring.

The idea of landmarking self-awareness (sense of self) rather than any other element

within human experience against a vast planetary backdrop serves my argument in two

ways:

First, it echoes my argument in Chapter 2 that Margaret Archer’s text portrays

our unique and continuous sense of self as pivotal in adequately accounting for

the human phenomenon. (What would planet Earth look like today if we had

no sense of self?)16 The phrase ‘sense of self’ conveys something less

immediately graspable for us than things visible to the eye, but as human

beings we know what it is to have a sense of humour, a sense of colour, a sense

of foreboding, and a sense of self.

If I should meet you for the first time

would you pause to greet me?

We're all the same, we passers-by

16 For example, if the history of civilisation was a history of zombies, what would have to be excised

from human civilisation’s footprint?

229

we trains in the night,

we all hump our particular yesterdays

we all herald our particular tomorrows (McKenzie, 1990).

As the poet, I know I am the only one who lugs my personal past and

anticipates my personal future on my journey. That knowing is one radiation of

my sense of self.

Second, it brings to mind my position that the meaning making construct truly

personalises personal epistemology by locating individual meaning making

inside personal ontology. The hermeneutic journey of living is epistemological–

ontological–spiritual because the knowing is reflexively self-referential: we

grow in global understanding by seeking an ever more complex,

comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world.

For this doctoral study I redeveloped the Twenty Memories exercise from my

masters project17 (which I referred to in Chapter 3) and administered it to a group of

volunteers at Charles Sturt University in 2011.18 My purpose was to consider ‘what

educational dividend might be gained by acknowledging sense of self as a valid and

crucial element of professional and personal formation, of “self-realisation”, in the

university curriculum’ (McKenzie, 2011c, p. 2). Participants in the study were told that

‘The twenty memories exercise in the present study will allow us to experience from

the inside the uniqueness of each participant’s meaning perspective’ (McKenzie, 2011c,

p. 2).

Participant 10 (‘Frank’) was one of several colleagues who gave me feedback via a

private interview as well as in a group discussion. Participants had been prepared for

the task with some optional pre-reading which included this passage:

the Twenty Memories exercise was first conceived as part of an

action learning activity with a group of adult learners in my

masters research. I wrote […] that Twenty Memories could be

construed ‘as a story of my life, as my personal myth’. I interpreted

the group experience in this way:

The processes experienced by participants in Twenty Memories

including the follow-up survey and sharing seem to have quite

a lot in common with myth formation in a given culture, in the

sense that both activities landmark things considered most

17 McKenzie, A. D. (1996). Improving the Effectiveness of Distance Education for Farmers. (Unpublished

master’s thesis), University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury, Richmond NSW. 18 Volunteers were teaching staff and one educational designer. Appendix 7 comprises the following:

The twenty memories exercise briefing memo, Twenty Memories exercise instructions, and Next steps

memo.

230

important. They are interpretations in the present of the

meaning of the past. The value of the Twenty Memories

exercise in fostering growth in understanding seems to warrant

further research; after all, Gergen and Gergen claim that ‘we

use the story form to identify ourselves to others and to

ourselves, [and that] one can scarcely underestimate the

importance of stories in our lives and the extent to which they

serve as vehicles for rendering selves intelligible’ (Gergen &

Gergen, 1988, p. 17). (McKenzie, 1996, p. 95)

My sense of self ... is my unique gestalt awareness in the present,

but it is also my living personal myth, because no sooner do I

reflect on my past than I reinvent that past according to the dictates

of my meaning perspective now: I habitually re-run fragments of

my life story in moments of nostalgia, remorse or other mood, yet

always zooming in on those elements that hold greatest power for

me in the present. My meaning perspective is a dynamic, time- and

place-sensitive filtering system; or at least that is what the above

statement suggests was so in my 20 memories ‘text’. A worthwhile

question that I will continue to explore is, what does this mean for

meaning perspective theory and for the broader theoretical position

I am developing here?

Muñoz Palm, in her Spanish language paper, ‘Professional identity

of the occupational therapist’, refers to Jacques’ (1999) view that an

individual […] is both author of and character in his or her own

history. While we each have our own empirical past out of which

we fabricate our history/myths, there is a sense in which ‘the

individual [sense of self? personal-professional identity/self-

concept? meaning perspective?] is constructed by the history [or

rather empirical past]’. (Muñoz Palm, 2008, p. 111) [italics added]

In the document, How do I understand meaning making?, I suggest

there is a kind of ‘symbiosis’ in the interplay between my meaning

perspective and my artefacts of meaning making – my ‘texts’, the

textual and artistic traces of my meaning making history:

The symbiosis is between, on the one hand, a writer’s text or

entire opus, something empirically present; and on the other,

the writer’s meaning perspective – an intangible, a conceptual

construct, conceived to explain the meaning making

experience.

231

I invite you to reflect on this. Would you agree with me, as I muse

in the other document, that ‘meaning making is a symphony of epic

proportions: my past colours my present which colours my past’?19

In my private interview with Frank, we discussed how he saw his personal and

professional identities relating to each other and whether the distinction was

meaningful to him. Frank teaches in an applied scientific field and he told me he is not

by nature a reflective person, yet our conversation brought into Frank’s mind thoughts

that will very likely continue to ruminate for him. (This is a reasonable expectation;

several participants commented on how the Twenty Memories experience had taken

grip of them. It is innately human – a ‘higher self thing’ – to keep returning to the

central question, who am I?, if conditions are favourable.) Frank asked me to clarify

what I meant by personal and professional identities. I referred to my nested domains

of capability model (Figure 6.2 above), pointing out how it is possible to see our

disciplinary capabilities and our broader professional capabilities as being held in a

hypothetical container we might call personal capability. The nested capability model

can help us grasp and untangle the terms, personal and professional identity, because

who I am (personal identity, professional identity) may be inferred from what I can do

(capability), or rather what I do do (practise) in my various roles. Frank responded by

reflecting on how he sees the nested capability set playing out in his experience. He

pondered why he gets good feedback from student evaluations of his teaching. ‘Do

students enjoy my courses because of the […][technical content], because of the way I

teach it, or because of the way I treat them and react and interact with them? It’s

probably all of the above.’ I had not given Frank the farmer/fencing contractor

vignette20 so it is noteworthy that in his comment Frank demonstrated a creative,

nested conceptualisation of disciplinary–professional–personal capability.

I pressed Frank to say more about his personal identity. I asked whether trying to

encourage and empathise with a student with some problem was a personal ‘Frank’

quality, something belonging to his sense of self. He answered with a story from his

time in the army:

In my army days it was rather scary at times. I was a good athlete

and I coped easily, it didn’t worry me the way it did for some of

them. But we had one fat guy. One day we were sent on a 24

kilometre march. For the last 15 kilometres six of us carried him on

our shoulders … instigated by me. ‘Come on guys,’ I said, ‘we have

to go as a platoon.’ I was only 18 at the time. I suppose that was me

wanting to make sure everyone was ok.

19 Step 3 task memo to participants in the Twenty Memories exercise (11 December 2011). 20 See ‘The nested domains of capability’, this chapter.

232

Authentic professional identity is an expression of authentic personal identity. For

me Frank was searching for a way to engage with my abstract question by questioning

his own make-up. It was clear to both of us that his caring trait is part of his personal

make-up. (Remember that my caring trait was important to me in my Twenty

Memories exhibition.21) To be true to yourself you express your instinctive values and

ways of relating in your dealings with the world. If you do this in a professional

context you are exhibiting your authentic professional identity. If you do it in a non-

work context you are exhibiting your

authentic personal identity. Either way,

anticipating my argument in Chapter 7,

you are exhibiting groundedness,

presence.

SEVEN. Transcending oneself and ontological openness

‘Hermeneutic transcendence involves the transforming experience of coming

knowingly to see, to think, and to feel differently’ (Davey, 2006, p. 8) (Statement 1). It is

the experience of growth in global understanding, wherein I realise an ever more

complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world (Statement 2). These

two statements – Davey’s and mine – both attempt to express what their authors make

of our human experience of meaning making. What I am arguing is that every

transformation of understanding is sloughing off yesterday’s understanding for

today’s, wherein, in Davey’s words, we come ‘knowingly to see, to think, and to feel

differently’ (Davey, 2006, p. 8). My assertion just now that statement 2 elucidates

statement 1 opens up the possibility of embracing the self-referential nature of meaning

making generally and hermeneutic transcendence in particular. (‘It is’ suggests a kind

of equivalence; and, indeed, sense of self is ineluctably self-referential.) We not only

see, think, and feel differently; we do so knowingly, reflexively – we know

experientially that we and our world have changed. And it is not just a private

achievement:

[Gadamer] reinvokes the value of experientially acquired wisdom

(paideia). Philosophical hermeneutics endeavors to show that what

is learned from experience extends beyond the strictures of

formalized method. It offers a gentle (but pointed) reminder that

philosophy is more than a love of formalized knowledge.

Philosophy participates in a dialectic of shared experience and

refines a sense of the communal, of belonging to something larger

than oneself. (Davey, 2006, pp. 5-6)

21 See Figure 3.3 and surrounding discussion. For Frank and I both, teaching is a caring profession.

A key aspect of the learning trajectory from novice-in-training to novice rounded, grounded practitioner is the quality of presence, without which personal agency is not expressed.

233

(In this context I point out that Archer does not deny the importance of belonging to

something larger than oneself; she simply asserts that our continuous sense of self

predates our entry into society’s conversation.)



it is more sophisticated on the scales of complexity, comprehensiveness and coherence

than it was before.

The enabling orientation and disposition for hermeneutic transcendence is radical

openness – the state of being cognitively, epistemologically, emotionally, spiritually,

ontologically open. It is a mode of receptivity that humans display in some measure in

some of their engagements in the world. As I proposed in Chapter 2, individual gestalt

experience refers to how we perceive the world coming to us and how we receive her,

longitudinally, cumulatively – the relationship we maintain with her. I suggested that

she may take me by surprise in any of the modes of my being: my cognitive capacity,

my sociality, my physicality (the five sense domain), my emotionality, my ethical sense

and my spirituality. In the hermeneutic journey of living, my self-actualisation unfurls

in proportion as I explore the world with open heart and mind.

I have at several places in this thesis drawn on religious or mystical language to

build or illustrate my case, leaving open (for the time being) the possibility of a

transcendent experience not overtly related to – or not ideally described with reference

to – linguistic being. On the other hand, perhaps they dovetail elegantly. (Philosophical

hermeneutics requires me to remain open to disclosures yet to be discerned.) The

following extract by Davey suggests how Phenix’s conceptions of transcendence and a

curriculum of transcendence may find echoes in philosophical hermeneutic thinking.

Davey writes that at the centre of Gadamer's dialectic of experience

is the experience of learning through suffering (pathei mathos): we

become wise through suffering and our knowledge of things is

corrected through deception and undeception (Gadamer, 1989, p.

356). Yet it is not suffering that is prior here but something else. It is

that which makes us vulnerable to such suffering in the first place,

that which gives us the resolve to endure it and to remain open to

the future no matter the hurt it might contain. The stress

philosophical hermeneutics places upon the word always striving

to go beyond itself and upon experience seeking to surpass itself,

suggests that it is indeed a conception of love that animates the

desire for hermeneutic translation and transcendence. Hans

Waldenfels offers an illuminating parallel between the ontological

primacy of language and certain notions of divine love.

234

In his remarkable study of Keiji Nishitani, a Japanese philosopher

with whom Gadamer was acquainted, Waldenfels speaks of God as

the continual self-emptying incarnation, a constant dying toward

being, a groundless, selfless, and motiveless coming-into-being

which continually and radically points away from itself and yet is

selfless in its perpetual dissolution of itself (Waldenfells, 1980, p.

160). Love is understood as the 'total surrender' to this silent

outpouring […]

Philosophical hermeneutics celebrates language's divine-like

powers of world creation. It understands how the play of language

guarantees that thought never achieves congruence with its desired

object and is, accordingly, kept in motion. For the skeptic [sic],

presenting language in this way generates the view that there is no

final (logical) terminus to interpretation: the meaning of words

remains enigmatic, never fully disclosed and always partly

withheld. However, philosophical hermeneutics understands that it

is precisely the enigmatic nature of language and meaning that

draws us out of ourselves. (Davey, 2006, pp. 216-217)

In a hermeneutic meaning maker’s

journey to understanding, to becoming

gebildet, insight awaits those who pause

to wonder what it means to be

amazed, what the phenomenon

signifies. I include Figure 6.3, Arvy Budiarto’s 2005 photo, Tree of Light, as an unspoken

evocation of such mysteries.

22 I used ‘wonder’ one way, Phenix, another, yet the context of each instance, the words surrounding

each usage, offer food for fecund thought. Perhaps my idea, ‘wonder what it means to be amazed’

connotes ‘ponder on the significance of experiencing the ineffable for the domain of reflexive

experience and for me-on-my-inner-journey’.

‘Wonder refers to the suspenseful tension of consciousness toward the unknown future in response to the attraction of unrealized potentialities’ (Phenix, 1975, p. 333).22

235

Figure 6.3. The allure of transcendent understanding

Tree of Light. © 2013 Arvy Budiarto | http://www.rv35mm.com/2013/05/12/the-tree-of-light/ | [email protected].

The endless enigmas of the not-yet-quite sayable! …

Philosophical hermeneutics is committed to the view that

hermeneutic transcendence is possible because of the language

relations we stand within. Insofar as these relations enable the

enigmatic and the withheld to come forth, their emergence drives

the always-more-to-be said. Their coming forth drives the impetus

toward hermeneutic transcendence and toward the becoming

different to ourselves which engagement with the different and the

other makes possible. (Davey, 2006, p. 183)

Segue

In this chapter I drew together key understandings from Part A – my interpretations of

others’ texts. Here I have offered seven vantage points that together give a rich picture

of my hybrid conception of meaning making as the core phenomenon and product of

my thesis. It was this notion of meaning making which drew my curriculum of

becoming framework from me. This is what we now turn to in Chapter 7.

237

Chapter 7.

Towards a curriculum of becoming

for the twenty-first century

We have come a long way together, you and I, through language

complex and lyrical, technical and evocative, dry and hopefully, at

times, elegant. Much of my argument so far has been expressed in

the language of philosophical hermeneutics. This was not just

because philosophical hermeneutics was my chosen ‘method’ of

research but also a result of my decision to draw heavily on

philosophical hermeneutic thinking to shape my articulation of my

hybrid conception of meaning making. To my knowledge

philosophical hermeneutics as portrayed by Davey has not so far

made significant inroads into higher education as a way of

framing/articulating the educational goal of teaching for

understanding. The present thesis opens up this territory of

unknown potential.

My strong focus on philosophical hermeneutics has meant that some

of the foregoing discussion has been peppered with perhaps

unfamiliar and abstract terms, and the discourse itself (whether in

quotes from other authors or in my own discussion) has at times

been rendered complex if not convoluted, as if obscured by the

technical terms, although this is not to say that over time a more

accessible language won’t be found to support and sell this

curriculum of becoming praxis. My interspersed use of poetry,

reflection, speculation and images sought to allow the reader to

appreciate more richly, interpretively and holistically what the

abstract, scholarly and theoretical language was presenting1. For

philosophical hermeneutics, the sayable is limited to what I

presently understand, but what lies behind a text is the space

awaiting illumination. Texts (including images) can evoke the

presently unsayable. Muddy waters beckon.

In the Prologue I noted Macdonald’s claim that curriculum theory

is ‘the essence of educational theory because it is the study of how to

have a learning environment’ (Macdonald, 1975, p. 12). If

curriculum is a learning environment, it is the ‘space’ in which

educational transformations are enabled. Macdonald’s concern

about how to have a learning environment is potent because it asks

1 ‘Whether its form is philosophical or poetic, the illuminating power of speculative language […]

springs forth from that which the said lights up of what is not said’ (Davey, 2006, p. 181).

238

practitioners to acknowledge the cultural, political, economic and

administrative realities operating in a given situation and how they

predispose a curriculum to take a particular form. The scope a

course team has for shaping its students’ learning environment is

similarly constrained by the team’s collective imagination and by

the kinds of curriculum theory or models that it brings to bear on

the design problem. In this chapter I draw my many themes together

by distilling my design framework for a curriculum of becoming for

university education for the professions. Had I understood the scale

of the task when I first discussed the project in 2004 with Joy Higgs,

my Principal Supervisor, I might not have attempted it – it has been

a mammoth task of discovery and ideas construction – but even way

back then, before I knew where my theorising might take me, I had a

dim, muddy waters sense that there had to be a more fulsome way of

enacting a university curriculum. In this chapter I present and

illuminate my framework.

The environment shaping my vision

A framework for a curriculum of becoming

Part 1. Principles undergirding a curriculum of becoming for professional education

Teaching for understanding in a curriculum of becoming

The transformative intention of a curriculum of becoming

The holistic goal of a curriculum of becoming

Part 2. The core space

Part 3. The four fields of the curriculum

Part 4. Shaping the curriculum process

Cultivating consensus on the curriculum HOW

Cultivating intentional course communities of belonging

Curriculum: a learning space for journeys of endless openness

The environment shaping my vision

Before I present my framework for a university curriculum of becoming, I will provide

a sketch of the practice environment in which these ideas emerged.

How it took shape. The framework as I present it in this chapter is derived in part

from systematic reflections on my experiences as an educator. These include (a) my

previous university work as an educational designer and later the coordinator of the

University’s in-service program in learning and teaching for new academic staff and

(b) my university work during my doctoral enrolment. Working full time and

researching part time meant a demanding workload for me, but working concurrently

in these two roles seemed to me to produce conceptual hybrid vigour and reflexivity,

Chapter map

239

whichever role I was acting in. A slide and commentary from my presentation at the

2009 CSU Ed Conference conveys something of that experience (Figure 7.1):

Figure 7.1. Conceptual hybrid vigour: Lived experience as research, research as lived experience

Source: McKenzie (2009).

Alongside my abstract textual interpretation research I am trying to

be a critically reflective practitioner in my day job, as I work with

others to develop strategies and tools in educational design and

staff professional development at CSU. Praxis is the deft

interweaving of theory and practice. My text interpretations and

my day job thinking fulsomely inform each other. (McKenzie et al.,

2009)

This was a period of concerted effort at Charles Sturt University to change curriculum

practice in order to produce a particular style of graduate, as depicted in the CSU

240

Graduate Commitment. It

seemed to me that the

University, like me,

wanted to equip students

to survive and thrive in

the twenty-first century,

but I found that I needed

to develop new ways of

formulating the problem

and communicating my

ideas to my educational

designer colleagues and

the wider university

community. My research

question arose from this

quest. I reflect on this in

the Epilogue.

A framework for a curriculum of becoming

The ‘curriculum of becoming framework’ is a four-part family of ideas that offers an

interpretation and broad framework for university curriculum design: it is generic or

content free and is intended for use with any professional preparation program. It can

be thought of as a collection of word pictures, a ‘mindspace’ or perhaps a ‘liquid

curriculum blueprint’.

A welling theme of this thesis is that a fit-for-greater purpose university education

can be defined as one that graduates novice rounded, grounded practitioners. It is

visionary rather than representing an actual/particular curriculum. The framework is

not designed for use as a curriculum template; it is more like a way of thinking about

how a course team might prepare learning experiences for their students’ course-long

journey. For this reason the framework does not run counter to philosophical

hermeneutic thinking.2

2 In Chapter 4 I noted Davey’s comment that the association of Bildung ‘with a specific bourgeois

educational ideal needs to be decisively broken’ (Davey, 2006, p. 40). However, because the

curriculum of becoming framework is not a curriculum itself, it does not conflict with Davey’s view

that Bildung as education should not be associated with a particular institutional ideal or educational

practice (Davey, 2006, p. 44).

From the Charles Sturt University Curriculum Renewal website (current as at July 2013):

‘CSU has made a commitment to all CSU undergraduates that, as well as gaining an in-depth understanding of their chosen disciplines and professions, they will have access to:

• A supported transition into the first year of university; and thereafter throughout the undergraduate student experience;

• Employability and generic skills such as effective communication; analytical skills; critical and reflective judgement; problem-solving; team work; and time-management;

• The opportunity for international experiences and to develop an international perspective in their discipline or profession;

• An engagement with the responsibilities of global citizenship;

• The opportunity to develop cultural competence;

• The opportunity to engage meaningfully with the culture, experiences and histories of Indigenous communities;

• Understandings of financial, social and environmental sustainability;

• A firm understanding of ethics;

• Education based in practice;

• Engagement in activities that foster web-based proficiency;

• Threshold disciplinary outcomes (to be developed).

‘The CSU Graduate Commitment will be achieved through a process of ongoing course design. The result of this course design will be called “The CSU Degree”.’

Source: http://www.csu.edu.au/division/landt/curriculumrenewal

241

Part 1. Principles undergirding a curriculum of becoming for

professional education

Here I reveal three formulated principles that give shape to a curriculum of becoming

for professional education in the twenty-first century. They are meta-distillations of

themes from my thesis. This section prepares the ground for my account of the

framework itself.

TEACHING FOR UNDERSTANDING IN A CURRICULUM OF BECOMING

The first thing to identify about my curriculum of becoming framework is to show how

it redefines teaching for understanding.

Reading Bereiter reveals his keen interest in the complementarity between his

concepts of teaching for being knowledgeable and teaching for understanding. I

contend that both of these are essential for professional education in the 21st century.

For me, both concepts come together in his discussion on the ‘poverty of educational

futurism’ inherent in much literature and discourse about lifelong and ‘just-in-time’

learning.3 Bereiter poignantly describes a hypothetical brewery stock handler who

loses his job at age 40. His

only immediate prospects are for jobs that will not pay enough to

keep up his mortgage […] ‘Just-in-time’ is already long past for

him. ‘Just-in-time’ may have been back in high school, when he

might have mastered algebra but didn't, or even before that when

he might have mastered the fundamental literacies and acquired

the understanding-seeking habits of mind that would have put him

on a different track of lifelong learning. For everyone does, of

course, learn throughout life. It is all a matter of what, how much,

and to what purpose. (Bereiter, 2002, p. 226)

This man, whom opportunity seems to have passed by, went through formal education

according to Bereiter’s storyline not acquiring the knowledge-skill sets and habits of

mind that would have made him more employable today, whatever combination of

contextual factors were at play. A critical educational challenge is to equip students to

survive and thrive in this dynamic century, as well as to be equitable and tailored in

our teaching and administrative arrangements, so that no-one falls behind where they

might be as learners, given optimal stimulus and support. The ex-brewery worker’s

education as experienced was not a ‘survive and thrive’ preparation for life. Bereiter’s

attention then moves to consider the kind of learning space (metaphorically speaking)

3 Part II, Education and knowledge work, Chapter 7, Educational planning: Reacting to the future, ‘Learning

how to learn’ (Bereiter, 2002, pp. 224-227).

242

– ‘curriculum’ in my usage – that is needed to address such a complex challenge. His

sequence of thought appears to call for deep lateral thinking about our challenge:

If it is difficult to learn boring subjects, it is even more difficult to

learn frightening ones. Yet if people are really going to thrive in the

Knowledge Age, they must be prepared to learn things that are

boring, things that are difficult, things that are threatening to the

ego, things that require going back and learning kid stuff, and

things that they associate with people or positions they don't like.

Furthermore, they should be prepared to do more than learn what

is immediately relevant. They should be exploring the potentials of

new knowledge, seeing what opportunities it may open for them.

(Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2000)

All things considered, the best preparation schools could provide

for future learning is the broadest and deepest possible

understanding of the world – of the three worlds, actually, as

defined by Popper (1972). The deeper the understanding, the more

likely it is to be helpful in understanding the next new thing. And

understanding can have motivational benefits as well. We are less

likely to be bored or frightened by things if we can make at least

some connection between them and our understanding. Although

teaching for deep understanding may not seem like an adequate

prescription for the uncertainties of our rapidly changing world, it

has to be judged against the alternatives. Most of what schools can

do in the name of ‘learning to learn’ and ‘lifelong learning’ does not

in any way address the problems brought about by rapid change.

At best it is aimed at helping kids fare better in school – a worthy

objective, but hardly what the futurists are telling us we need.

(Bereiter, 2002, p. 227)

I absolutely concur with this view4. While educating for the professions in higher

education has very particular needs to address compared to those of school education,

‘understanding’ is the same ubiquitous factor that allows each student to achieve an

integration of learnings. When Bereiter says the best preparation for the future ‘is the

broadest and deepest possible understanding of the world – of the three worlds,

actually’, I immediately interpret his words through a philosophical hermeneutic lens.

Given the flux within each of Popper’s three worlds, and given that understanding is

holistic (Bortoft, 1996, p. 291) and integrative, the broadest and deepest possible

4 Bereiter’s book mounts a sustained argument to support his position, the detail of which goes beyond

the scope of my thesis.

243

understanding inevitably needs to be ever open, ever renewing, ever integrating. I

cannot conceive a closer explication of my definition of global understanding (an ever

more complex et cetera sense of self in the world) than Bereiter’s formulation, and both

positions are thoroughly hermeneutic. We have opportunity in education for the

professions to support students in developing their own personal understanding of

practice as well as a personal praxis of understanding.5

Bereiter’s critique and vision for school education thus, by extension, offers much

that can be taken up in a framework for a university curriculum of becoming. I pause

here to reflect further on the experience of intentionally, of knowingly embarking on

the hermeneutic journey of living, and on the importance of placing this learner

experience at the heart of a curriculum raison d’être.

Reflections on being drawn or not drawn to understanding.6 In Chapter 6 I spent

some time reflecting on my claim to covet comprehensive understanding, but in fact

my social realist definition of growth in global understanding bypasses the question of

travellers ever wanting or expecting to reach the end of the journey, because it is a

process in which we aspire to and realise an ever more complex, comprehensive and

coherent sense of self in the world. This statement is in complete accord with

philosophical hermeneutic thinking: we never reach the end of the journey, because

there is no end to hermeneutic circling. The ‘treadmill’ experience (Figure 6.1) can be

very real.

New insight always awaits me (while I’m on the complicated, continuing and

unpredictable journey to ever more complex et cetera understanding). For Davey this

characteristic of the hermeneutic journey offers unalloyed promise, notwithstanding

the hardships involved, and part of me absolutely shares that positive spirit. And yet I

also confess to knowing a lazier me, for whom the inner journey is readily, often

postponed. (Similarly, exam-focussed university students could also prefer to pursue

the direct and less expansive path.) As I intimated in Chapter 6, a curriculum of

becoming seeks to cultivate our higher selves. I meant this in the sense that it is the

higher self, not his lesser twin, who will more likely be open to viewing life as a

hermeneutic journey, one that involves making room for conscious reflection on the

experience from time to time. Commitment and effort are involved. Here I recall Bereiter’s

comment about ‘the understanding-seeking habits of mind’ that would have put the

unemployed brewery worker on a different track of lifelong learning. In a curriculum

5 Two of the themes of this thesis spring to mind to explicate ‘personal praxis of understanding’ and

perhaps warrant later investigation: □ cultivation of understanding-seeking and cherishing habits of

mind to engender a disposition of radical ontological openness, which is a prerequisite for ongoing

growth in global understanding; □ the self-referential experience of growing epistemologically; see

epistemic cognition. 6 Being drawn or not drawn is contingent on which ‘me’ is ascendant at any given time; see discussion

this page.

244

of becoming, cultivation of understanding-seeking and cherishing habits of mind

engenders a disposition of radical ontological openness, which is a prerequisite for

ongoing growth in global understanding.

On the hermeneutic journey of living we simultaneously pursue understanding

and meaningfulness, both in the world out there and in our inner life. As the

curriculum of becoming idea takes root in teachers’ imaginations and practice, perhaps

my hybrid definition of meaning making – making and finding meaning – might help

teachers and students conceive of both journeys, outer and inner, as one …

There the world is

all humanity of her

all rocks all waters

all airy spaces

Take a full draught

wait upon her

and see opening up before you daily

new shades of knowing. (McKenzie, 1990) (See Figure 7.2)

245

Figure 7.2. The journey to understanding: Sense of self in the world – crystallising past and future in the continuous present

Image: Disappear. © Kevin Saint Grey | http://kevinsaintgrey.com

Everything is context, wrote a long-forgotten newspaper columnist,

as if we live in one seamless, interconnected world and universe.

‘Sense of self in the world’ spans the domain of the meaningful:

‘one journey’, spanning my experience of the material, social and conceptual worlds

and my inner life.

Meaning making in the sense being advanced in this thesis

truly personalises personal epistemology

by locating individual meaning making inside personal ontology.

The journey is epistemological–ontological–spiritual

because the knowing is reflexively self-referential.

As I proposed in Chapter 6 (and as Bereiter intimated several pages back),

understanding the bigger picture (and how to create it) is the integrative capacity we

246

need to cultivate in students to enable them to survive and thrive in the twenty-first

century. Such pursuit of understanding also engenders hope7 and a self-and-world-

transforming vision of a more holistic and wholesome practice for the future that can,

in harness with the enlarged sense made, enable students to enter the field as novice

rounded, grounded (R,G) practitioners, making a difference for good from day 1.

The above statement points to the importance in curriculum praxis of

understanding the WHY or context of curriculum and then keeping the curriculum

WHAT and HOW questions in the one, rich, open-ended discourse. The curriculum

WHAT resides in the permutations of the problem of describing what it means to be a

novice (R,G) practitioner in a given field. The curriculum HOW resides in deciding how

to create a learning space/journey that will foster the metamorphosis of students from

novices-in-training into novice (R,G) practitioners on graduation. Keeping the WHAT

and the HOW in the one discourse means recognising that they are so interrelated that

they need to be considered as one.

I conclude this section with two ideas. First, if, as Bortoft claimed, explanation is

analytical, whereas understanding is holistic (Bortoft, 1996, p. 291), growth in global

understanding integrates discreet understandings into an immanent, integrated

picture, but it also integrates thought, feeling and intent, mirroring the Realm of

Unknowing on this side of awareness.8 It rakes over the past for ever-new insight, but it

is also thoroughly forward-looking and goal-responsive. Second, a whole field of

scholarship is needed (1) to make richer and practical, actionable sense of an

integrative (global) understanding that enables us to appreciate the

interconnectedness of everything, and (2) to explore the potential value of the global

understanding construct in personal epistemology and personal ontology theory.

7 Hope is one of the qualities inhering in transcendent experience and thus necessarily also at home in a

curriculum of transcendence (Phenix, 1975); see Chapter 5. The ‘also’ here is effectively redundant

because a curriculum of becoming is a curriculum of transcendence in the philosophical hermeneutic

sense. 8 Thought: discreet understandings | Feeling: hope | Intent: a self-and-world-transforming vision

247

Perhaps this thesis will

help that happen. Wilber’s

work on his integral or

AQAL model9 may offer

such an enterprise some

fruitful lines of inquiry.

THE TRANSFORMATIVE INTENTION OF A CURRICULUM OF BECOMING

I start with an extract from Archer’s Being Human to peel back the notion of

transformative intention. Can social theory explain the phenomenon of individuals

attempting to ‘make a difference’ in the world? Here she gives a social realist

explanation of the concept of ‘social identity’ as an emergent property of persons as

they step up to the plate to make a difference for good, which is the externally

observable manifestation of the social realist’s transformative intention:

Our human powers are not confined to the confines of the extant

role array [the range of social roles in a given society in a given

epoch] – to how we merely live out that which we have become in

society at a given time. Equally, we can reflect upon the role array

itself (and its wider institutional and systemic context) […] and we

have the human power to commit ourselves to others in the pursuit

of structural transformation. Without subjective feelings of

grievance about objective oppression, subjective discontent about

objective discrimination, or subjective resentment about objective

inequalities, none of the familiar structural changes would ensue in

society. Yet, if we do succeed in this objective transformational

activity, then we will have created new objective positions in which

different tracts of the population have the chance to acquire a social

identity – to express their subjectivity, because now objectively able

to do so.

Therefore, role-taking could conceivably be a thin hermeneutic tale

told from within a 'form of life', and confined to the present tense:

but role-making must be a thick account of the objective

intertwining with the subjective, thus combining two sets of causal

9 AQAL: Wilber’s abbreviation of ‘all quadrants, levels (stages), lines, states and types’. The AQAL

chart is described as a ‘comprehensive integral map’. Retrieved from http://formlessmountain.com/

AQALchart12.jpg.

As we saw in Chapter 1, Wilber is fervent about the inner and outer dimensions of experience. ‘I can know the outer world because the outer world is already in me, and I can know me. All knowledge of other is simply a different degree of self-knowledge, since self and other are of the same fabric, and speak softly to each other at any moment that one listens’ (Wilber, 2000, p. 116).

In a web article (included here as Appendix 4. Wilber on systems theory versus hermeneutics: Why both are important), Wilber names eight native perspectives from which to view the world – two perspectives (the inner and the outer) for each of his four quadrants.

248

powers which are embedded in the same world […] Emergence is

about interdependence: […] objectivity and subjectivity [are] part

and parcel of one another, where the emergence of our social

identities is concerned. The social identity of each human being

who achieves one is not only made under circumstances which are

not of their own choosing, but is partly made out of them, which is

why some can fail to attain such a social identity if circumstances

are objectively unpropitious. Central importance has been given in

this book to the ‘inner conversation’10 in making us who we are,

because of the ultimate concerns we endorse and the manner in

which we then live them out […] the 'inner conversation' is a matter

of referential reflexivity in which we ponder upon the world and

about what our place is, and should be, within it. Social reality

enters objectively into our making, but one of the greatest of human

powers is that we can subjectively conceive of re-making society

and ourselves. To accomplish this entails objective work in the

world by the self and with others. The story to tell is about the

confluence of causal powers – those of external reality, and our own

which emerge from our relations with it: the two ultimately being

mediated through the 'internal conversation'. It is the only story

really worth telling, for it is about the transcendental power of

human beings to transform the social world and themselves: that

they can simultaneously change meanings is only one chapter of it.

(Archer, 2000, pp. 314-315)

In one of the publications arising from this thesis I mused (with my doctoral

supervisors) about inner conversation and the inner voice. This paper reflects on the

universal human stirring of hope, which underpins the transformative/transcending

disposition in human experience:

‘Inasmuch as we have some future

we reserve the right to hope ... endlessly.

A university curriculum of becoming is nothing

if it does not place our dreaming centre stage

as we search for something more.’

This statement serves as a foretaste, an anticipation of the argument

to follow. It gives expression to the authors' collective inner voice.

(McKenzie, Higgs, & Simpson, 2012, p. 1)

10 The statement in the 2000 Cambridge University Press edition referred to 'inner conversion' at this

one point but the author has confirmed that ‘inner conversation’ was the intended term. (Archer,

personal communication, 1 August, 2013.)

249

[…] if (as the international media attest) the perceptible world is

changing so profoundly before our eyes, why should our mindsets

be resistant to change? Perspective transformation should not be

considered abnormal but rather the change process experienced by

meaning makers every day as they continuously draw new

learnings into their existing frames of understanding. It lies at the

heart of our educational endeavour. For example, it is

transformative to think that 'striving to achieve one's individual

potential' segues naturally into 'making a difference for good'. For

the public good need not be seen as a 'do-gooder burden', certain to

frighten off self-motivated achievers: explorer Charles Sturt

admitted to personal ambition, but in the very same sentence

asserted his commitment to making a difference for good.11

(McKenzie et al., 2012, pp. 5-6)

Action to ‘make a difference’ in the world – like Charles Sturt’s explorations – has its

origins, says Archer, in internal conversations about the world and about what

people’s place is, and should be, within it. For some prospective ‘actors’, conditions are

not ‘propitious’ – the external situation is too resistant to structural transformation –

and in the language of social theory, ‘social identity’ is denied to the would-be change

agent. Happily, history tells of many successes. Archer points out the ‘intertwining’ of

objective and subjective factors in any attempt to make a difference for good, echoing

Wilber’s insistence on holding the interior and exterior halves of his prism (his integral

model) together to gain a richer view of a phenomenon.

In my paper above, the would-be change agents engage in inner conversation

tinged with hope (McKenzie et al., 2012, p. 1), hope being the enabler of action for

transformation. This idea effectively links the present discussion on the transformative

intention of a curriculum of becoming with Phenix’s ‘hope-tinged’ curriculum of

transcendence (see Chapter 5). According to the 2012 article, it is (perspective)

transformative to think that 'striving to achieve one's individual potential’ segues

naturally into ‘making a difference for good’ (McKenzie et al., 2012, p. 5). In

imagination I can almost hear Charles Sturt’s inner conversation as he reflected on the

tectonic plate where his personal ambition faced his altruism. Private illuminations

from such inner conversations are part of one’s growth in understanding of self-in-the-

world.

11 ‘Charles Sturt University (CSU) is a national, regionally-based Australian university. Its motto, stated

on its coat of arms, is For the public good, a reference to the aspirations of the Australian colonial

explorer, Charles Sturt, after whom the University is named. Sturt noted that, aside from personal

ambition, his inland explorations were motivated “chiefly with an earnest desire to promote the

public good' (http://www.csu.edu.au/about/history/emblems)” (McKenzie et al., 2012, p. 2).

250

A curriculum of becoming endeavours to engage the thoughts, feelings and

intentions of the community of learners in the possibility and allure of making a

difference for good in the world. It is a holistic conception of transformation spanning

both inner experience and experience of the world, and it will require a significant

change in perspective of students and teaching teams:

In the curriculum of becoming mindspace, learners themselves are

part of the flux that is the learning domain. When it comes to

curriculum renewal, corning to terms with the idea that 'the

transformation is us' will require a change in the mindsets of staff

and students, a change that may be especially challenging for

scholars trained in the scientific disciplines.

[…] members of teaching teams need to live out and share their

personal understandings of their own commitments to making a

difference for good. We need a more explicit and fundamental

commitment to individual human agency in higher education and

therefore a curriculum that nurtures learners' sense of self, because

that is the seedbed for individual agency. We need a new

curriculum mindset, one that honours the rich understanding that

awaits us, teachers and learners together, as we accept the validity

of subjective, personal and interpersonal understanding. (McKenzie

et al., 2012, p. 5)

THE HOLISTIC GOAL OF A CURRICULUM OF BECOMING

In a university curriculum of becoming for the professions we aim to graduate novice

rounded, grounded practitioners. What do I mean by ‘rounded’ and ‘grounded’?

‘Rounded’ practitioners. On one level ‘rounded’ refers to ‘holistic presence’: such a

graduate possesses the essential qualities for filling one’s roles (both vocational and

societal) in a satisfying, harmonising, internally consistent and action-enabling

ensemble of characteristics. The six expressions of being human which I have proposed

– cognitive capacity, sociality, physicality (the five sense domain), emotionality, ethical

sense and spirituality – all support a graduate’s holistic appreciation of each episode in

his or her professional practice. It would be hoped that in pursuing one’s own holistic

development and agency, that new graduates will also engage with their clients in

consideration of their holisitic situation. Consider the implications of such a position as

I place it beside two of the goals of the CSU Postgraduate Diploma in Midwifery, circa

2012:

251

To provide a supportive learning environment in which students

can fully develop their potential to become midwives with a

woman-centred focus; […] To utilise clinical opportunities that

enhance the process of developing into practicing [sic] midwives

who have an empathic, holistic, and culturally sensitive approach

to their work.12

The midwifery course team members must have consciously or tacitly appreciated the

principle of having a ‘holistic appreciation’ of the situation, seen in their specification

of a ‘woman-centred focus’. In imagination I can see how such an attribute of practice

might play out during a delivery. The midwife is totally present for the patient and, by

extension, the baby. All six forms of personal knowledge are on the ready to guide the

midwife as she attends to mother and baby’s needs.

For me that crystallises the notion and enactment/practice of ‘holistic presence’, an

attribute I would want all graduates of a curriculum of becoming to demonstrate

fulsomely in any field of practice. (This must not be construed as self-fixation. What I

am arguing for here is cultivation of a disposition–capability for holistic appreciation of the

situation together with a disposition–capability for holistic presence or holistic ‘being there’ for

one’s client, alongside the other responsibilities of care in the practice context.) On

another level however is a further aspect of roundedness, one arising out of a meaning

maker’s habit or decision to consciously embrace life as a hermeneutic journey (strive

for hermeneutic consciousness, open oneself to linguistic being). Being rounded for

such travellers also refers to reflexive meaning making about self and world, because

inner and outer belong together. It is knowing experientially about the quest, the

treadmill; it is facing and embracing the questions, macro and micro, that arise from

one’s practice and one’s being-in-the-world. Being fully rounded is being rounded

knowingly.

Teaching for holistic (rounded) presence and engagement cannot be achieved by

prescription. That is why my framework for a curriculum of becoming is best seen as a

‘mindspace’ or way of thinking, or better still, as a way of thinking–feeling–intending-

engaging. Teachers both as individuals and as members of a course team can begin to

attune themselves to this different conception of teaching by reflecting on how

transparently they embody holistic presence. Hermeneutic consciousness is not realised

through disembodied, armchair investigations (p. 216, this thesis), and similarly,

teaching for holistic presence/enactment is not a pursuit of armchair erudition. The

goal of graduating novice rounded, grounded practitioners calls on staff to embrace the

conviction that ‘we are all in this together’. In such courses we inhabit the mindspace of

a curriculum of becoming, or we are somewhere else, otherwise engaged.

12 Course profile, University intranet.

252

In this context it is fitting to recall the discussion in Chapter 3 of the centrality of

affect in our lives and the potential value for hermeneutic meaning makers – people

who embrace the idea of the hermeneutic journey of living – in looking out for a Realm

of Unknowing on their inner journey. ‘Like Bass,’ Campbell writes, ‘I have fallen in love

with [an] underground geography’ (Campbell, 1997, pp. 5-6). In a curriculum of

becoming we make room for affect because of its role in our continuous reflexive

appreciation of our sense of self in the world. We make room for affect because of its

role in shaping who we are, our meaning perspective and thus our meaning

making practices, our view of the world, and our manner of engagement with the

worlds of knowledge and practice – and with the people we encounter and deal with

in this practice.

‘Grounded’ practitioners. ‘Grounded’ refers on the one hand to being attuned to

one’s environment which, in the context of my thesis especially covers one’s world of

professional practice (including the world of the practitioner’s clients and one’s wider

communities of concern in society). On the other hand, ‘grounded’ refers to being

grounded in or ‘attuned’ (or present) to oneself. A passage from Archer suggests how

such a dual attunement (to environment and self) makes sense from a social realist

perspective. At the end of her book she recapitulates her Part III argument about the

exercise of our human powers and ‘the part played by our reflexivity in the emergence

of our personal identities’:

Identity was held to hinge upon our concerns in the world, and the

dilemma facing every human being was that inescapably each one

of us has concerns in the natural order (about physical well-being),

in the practical order (about performative competence) and in the

social order (about self-worth). Each concern entails intentionality;

it is about features of the world. Since it is the prioritising of our

ultimate concerns, and the accommodation of other concerns to

them, which gives us our unique personal identities, then who we

are subjectively depends upon our involvement with the objective

world.

The reflective powers which give us our capacity to acquire

personal identities are dependent upon our ability to prioritise our

concerns in the world, including the social world […] If our

personal identity represents our unique subjectivity, then who we

are is formed by our, admittedly fallible, reflections upon the

world, meaning its natural, practical and social orders. (Archer,

2000, pp. 312-313)

253

‘… who we are is formed by our […] reflections upon the world.’ One’s

continuous sense of self is the prior emergent from which personal identity arises at the

individual scale, and from which the human phenomenon13 evolves, in all its variation

and splendour, in all its weakness and shame, at the scale of human civilisation. (If this

is a debatable claim, it is also tenable. Everything identifiably human about us and the

human phenomenon is ultimately rooted in our reflexivity, integral to which is our

sense of self.) The ‘still point of the turning world’14 turns out, from a social realist

viewpoint, to be our continuous sense of self, in the language of this thesis, our sense of

self in the world. What else therefore would I want to be more organically grounded in

and attuned to than self-in-the-world?

As I now present my framework, consider with me how the curriculum goal of

graduating novice rounded, grounded practitioners might colour a university’s whole

approach to education for the professions.

Part 2. The core space

I can best orientate the reader to my curriculum of becoming ‘word picture collection’

(including graphics) cum ‘mindspace’ cum ‘liquid blueprint’ through the following

figure:

Figure 7.3. The triple hologenesis framework for curriculum renewal

Source: After McKenzie et al. (2012, p. 13). To re-publish this diagram you first need to obtain permission from the original publisher, Common Ground, at [email protected] .

13 Dickens, Hitler, Gandhi, you, me, and all the others, and what we represent/ed … 14 ‘… at the still point of the turning world’, is from T.S. Eliot’s (1963a, p. 191) ‘Burnt Norton’ in his Four

Quartets.

254

The system on the right side – identified as Teaching teams – has a fluid, recirculating

process happening. It’s as if working on the curriculum WHAT and the curriculum HOW

together, achieving consensus on and congruence between them, has the effect of

transforming a teaching team into an intentional course community of belonging. And on a

macro view, the closed system called Teaching teams is part of a wider becoming,

enacting a curriculum of becoming and graduating ‘novice rounded, grounded

practitioners’. The three concepts within the closed system, H1, H2 and H3, are three

expressions of hologenesis, the coming to be of wholes (McKenzie, 1999) – three

emergent manifestations or cultivations. In the next section I describe the features of

the closed system on the right.

In what sense is this framework potentially capable of transforming education for

the professions in the twenty-first century? The idea of hologenesis is eminently suited

to the idea of a curriculum of becoming because both are organically emergent

conceptions and both are fully at home with the flux of change. Education for practice

will never be stable, for two reasons. In the first instance, educating for practice is

absolutely committed to meeting the needs of clients, which are infinitely variable and

changeable over time. Two, it is a supercomplex world of ideas in which we live, and

there will always be educational theorists and practitioners who conceive what they

regard as better ways of educating for the professions. Debates will proliferate into the

imaginable future.

Part 3. The four fields of the curriculum

What kind of graduates do we need for the twenty-first century? In this section I offer

an approach that course teams may consider as they seek consensus on the curriculum

WHAT.

A critical element of my curriculum of becoming framework for transformative

practice is a four fields of curriculum interest schema. At the 2011 Practice Based

Education (PBE) Summit15, there was keen interest among university educators for

practice in making sense of their institutions’ stances on how to educate for practice in

the face of not knowing what we didn’t know (both WHAT and HOW questions) and

thus not knowing how to frame adequate questions for ourselves. From my hybrid

perspective as educational designer, academic staff developer and curriculum of

becoming theoriser, I was keen to focus discussion on the concept of curriculum

elegance. In my paper at the Summit I expressed ‘the radical thought that the more

elegant a curriculum design, the more integrated or holistic the student’s course-long,

course-wide experience can be’ (McKenzie et al., 2011). An elegant curriculum

15 McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Simpson, M. (2011). Designing and enacting a university ‘curriculum of

becoming’. Paper presented at The 2011 Practice-based Education Summit, 7, 13-14 April, Education

for Practice Institute., Sydney, Australia: Charles Sturt University. Transcript available

http://csusap.csu.edu.au/~tmckenzi/downloads/PBESummit2011.pdf.

255

modelling approach offers a way through the complexity of curriculum design and

renewal: it provides course teams and students with a common language with which

to describe the goal and processes of a ‘fit-for-greater-purpose’ education for practice.

The goal of a university curriculum of becoming is to graduate ‘novice rounded,

grounded practitioners’. To this end, a university curriculum of becoming cultivates

individual development in four dimensions – my four fields of curriculum interest

schema:

Field 1. Understanding and knowhow required in the chosen field of

practice

Field 2. Uncertainty dexterity – a capacity to function and thrive in

conditions of incomplete information and uncertainty

Field 3. Social presence – a capacity to work with others and lead

Field 4. A deep sense of self as a foundation for moral judgment and

personal agency. (McKenzie et al., 2009)

The idea is simple. Consider what learning will be needed in a professional

preparation program to enable our graduates to exhibit presence as well as value in

their workplace interventions. ‘Presence’ means, for example, accepting that when

called on to act or make a judgment in one’s chosen field of practice, novices-in-

training (our students) will one day have to eyeball their client or patient or board

room or shop floor or farm property, self-confident in uncertainty. A curriculum of

becoming provides opportunities for students to be present, ‘in the moment’, in

simulated practice learning experiences. This capacity needs to be nurtured

progressively, and students need to experience how this feels from early in their degree

program. ‘Presence’ is being grounded. A curriculum of becoming is essentially a

culture wherein learners embrace and grow in groundedness, in presence (McKenzie,

2011b).

Elegance in curriculum design strives for optimal simplicity16. In the light of the

above, consider the following extract from my PBE Summit paper. In one sense this

takes us into the HOW of curriculum but it also concerns the WHAT, which just

underscores my argument that the WHAT and the HOW need to be kept in mutual

discussion:

Elegant curriculum favours holistic student learning experience. At

the level of daily student living, we could probably identify various

ways in which rules of engagement in a study program, such as the

administrivia that always accompanies subject assessment, distracts

student attention from the real business of meaning making and

16 Optimal simplicity: see Glossary entry for Simplicity.

256

perspective transformation. More rules, more assessment criteria,

more hardship. By contrast, elegance is a design principle that

appeals to our human pleasure in simplicity. Think Japanese or

Swedish interior design. [And, I should have added, it is not a

matter of aesthetics here, but of clearing space in order for students

and teachers to be able to think and feel and dream – to realise an

ever more complex et cetera sense of self in the world.]

Elegant curriculum is a design concept. An elegant curriculum

design is one that □ aspires to realise a holistic outcome and □

provides students with a holistic learning experience. We see both

these qualities in our curriculum of becoming mindspace […] There

are design reasons why we should aim to create an elegant learning

environment, but according to curriculum of becoming theory there

are also pedagogical/epistemological/ontological reasons why we

should aim for elegance of design. One of the central themes in my

PhD research is the notion that life is a hermeneutic journey […] I

want to join dots that are still in process of forming on the page.

The most enigmatic and tantalising dots are those that concern

unfolding ‘global understanding’ in human experience; and ‘inner

curriculum’ – enigma variations17 to the inner ear. (McKenzie,

2011b)

Part 4. Shaping the curriculum

CULTIVATING CONSENSUS ON THE CURRICULUM HOW

The central curriculum challenge is finding a way of framing and orchestrating

learning in each degree program to ensure that graduating students are novice

rounded, grounded prac-

titioners. The integration

of the four dimensions of

capability cannot be left

to chance, not even from

day 1 of the learning

journey. This is not about prescribing student learning but rather, of ensuring that

students progress in all four dimensions of capability as an integrated learning

experience.

Graduates can only be justifiably self-confident in situations of uncertainty if they

have integrated, enfolded the four named dimensions of graduate capability into their

17 Composer, Edward Elgar, called one of his orchestral works, ‘Enigma variations’.

Field 1. Understanding and know-how required in the chosen field of practice | Field 2. Uncertainty dexterity – a capacity to function and thrive in conditions of incomplete information and uncertainty | Field 3. Social presence – a capacity to work with others and lead | Field 4. A deep sense of self as a foundation for moral judgment and personal agency. (McKenzie et al., 2009)

257

‘being-in-the-world’. This is a sophisticated and subtle metamorphosis, nurtured by

the curriculum over time:

students’ journey to job-readiness requires that they be taken on a

staged, continuously integrating, diverging–converging journey in

meaning-making and capability development in [the] four fields of

interest. The intent here is that the four areas of interest … are made

ubiquitously explicit or implicit across the whole curriculum, and

that student development as practitioner-in-training occurs

holistically–progressively. Achievement at the end of each year

should see students developing in all four areas. (McKenzie, Higgs,

& Horsfall, 2008a, p. 396)

After the 2011 PBE Summit I prepared a follow-up presentation and posted it to

my webpage, in which I demonstrated in greater detail how course teams could go

about conceptualising curriculum design in a three dimensional conceptual space, in

order to foster progressive, continuous integration of capability development

throughout a degree program. The notion of an elegant 3D conceptual model took form18,

as depicted in Figure 7.4.

18 The notion of an elegant 3D conceptual model took form as I played with ideas inside TUFTS

University’s online graphics/data management freeware, Visual Understanding Environment or VUE

(http://vue.tufts.edu/). The VUE environment is a 2D space but because it allows layers it can be used

to conceptualise and create a multi-layered curriculum design. Other software programs may offer

these and/or other features to assist in course planning.

258

Figure 7.4. Graphic representation of a conceptual model of an elegant curriculum of becoming

Note: In this example, one integration event incorporates learnings in all four dimensions and is therefore displayed in all fields, vertically aligned.

In this approach a distinction is made between two classes of learning event within the

course journey, located in two kinds of learning space – learning spaces and integration

spaces. ‘Learning events’ refers to the sequence of learning experiences organised

within units of study, while ‘integration events’ are the learning experiences commonly

called summative learning and assessment experiences across each teaching session.

As Figure 7.4 shows, the 3D conceptual model of an elegant curriculum of becoming

comprises four ‘playing fields’ stacked together, representing the four dimensions of

graduate capability. Each field represents the span of a course of study with alternating

bands of learning and integration sites, white and shaded respectively. Figure 7.4

illustrates a three year program of six semesters; the template can be adapted to suit

any course configuration.

The elegant curriculum conceptual model provides a language and structure with

which course teams will be able to conceptualise and plan the student learning journey.

There will be a number of critical questions that course teams will wrestle with in the

design process. Figure 7.5 describes one way of considering the student learning

journey from the perspective of the four dimensions of student self-realisation.

259

Figure 7.5. Sample questions to help a course team conceive the optimal, multi-dimensional gradient of student learning within an undergraduate degree program

Notes: (a) Sample questions are indicative only. (b) Questions taken from McKenzie (2011a)

The idea of an elegant 3D conceptual model of curriculum holds untapped

potential for supporting course teams who are drawn towards the idea of enacting a

curriculum of becoming within their programs. It offers them the possibility of a

curriculum design capable of delivering a holistic learning experience, as students

integrate each day’s new learnings in all four dimensions into their existing frames of

understanding and being-in-the-world.

In all of this, it must be emphasised, students themselves govern the kind of

integration that is achieved, step by step. This is because, as I have made very clear, the

meaning made of something is the result of the filter of an individual’s meaning

perspective which, in turn, is shaped by that individual’s unique meaning making

history. This whole discussion about creating a curriculum framework is predicated on

the idea that students cannot graduate as novice rounded, grounded practitioners

1. Understanding and knowhow

2. Uncertainty dexterity

3. Social presence

4. Sense of self

How might the learning gradient be described? Might the Field 2 learning experience consist in

a series of problem situations of increasing complexity and uncertainty, as categories of analysis and problem-solving become more

rubbery, fluid, insubstantial?

How might the learning gradient be described? This may vary considerably according to the target field of practice. If there is only one

course journey, perhaps the Field 3 experience is an integration with the other layers, but

shared with others.

Work backwards from the final integration site.

If this is what our graduates need on graduation, how shall we optimally organise

and sequence the Field 1 experience?

How might the learning gradient be described? A journey inwards? A journey towards

groundedness and personal agency? What might groundedness and personal agency mean

within the target field of practice?

260

unless they have integrated learnings in all four fields of curriculum interest into their

being-in-the-world. It is each individual student who embodies that integration, giving

it the colour of his or her own uniqueness.

There is another dimension of enacting a curriculum of becoming, the HOW, that

deserves mention – the cultural, policy, management and administration settings that

impact on any educational program. In the period of pursuing this research I posted a

fictional piece to the web that asked how the ambitious, visionary goal of my

curriculum of becoming framework can best be facilitated by an institution, and

offered the notion of a genuinely global, burnout-resistant, collegial, enabling and

empowering operational plan. The institution described in the following extract was a

figment of my imagination19:

The question becomes, what conditions at the institutional, faculty,

school and course team levels will favour rather than impede

achievement of the vision?

• ‘genuinely global’. Bearing the fruit of ‘novice rounded,

grounded practitioners’ is a university-wide vision at […]

[my fictional institution]. All students in all our professional

preparation programs will graduate as novice rounded,

grounded practitioners […] As the University responds to

the Commonwealth Government’s agenda to broaden

participation in university education, exemplary education

for practice will be realised in the context of more diverse

student cohorts, possibly characterised by wider ability

ranges and more richly diverse life experiences as the raw

material for identity formation.

• ‘burnout-resistant’. New ways of working are needed to

achieve this assured, consistent higher quality outcome

while also ensuring that teaching staff gain personal and

professional satisfaction, not debilitating stress from their

engagements.

• ‘collegial’. The vision is one for all graduating students,

but such an outcome cannot be realised fulsomely unless

all members of course teams including casual and sessional

staff and staff of onshore and international partner

institutions have embraced the goal and accepted shared

responsibility for achieving it. Gone are the days when

19 ‘A figment of my imagination’: I wrote fictionally, as if my vision was in process of implementation

somewhere. Writing in this vein played a part in my journey to understanding. I see it as part of the

process by which this thesis has achieved the congruence it has.

261

individual academics are protective of their own areas of

teaching; course teams are collectively responsible for all

teaching into their programs.

• ‘enabling and empowering’. An enabling operational plan

will aim to ensure that conditions are ripe for the kind of

team collaboration needed to realise the vision. An

empowering operational plan will support course teams as

they learn how to practise within ‘a curriculum of

becoming’.20

This brings us to the third manifestation of hologenesis in the metamorphosis of

curriculum design and implementation practices into a university curriculum of

becoming.

CULTIVATING INTENTIONAL COURSE COMMUNITIES OF BELONGING

In this section I explicate the notion of a course community of belonging with special

reference to the experience of teaching staff at Charles Sturt University (CSU), as I have

observed and construed it. I consider that the whole framework offered here provides

worthwhile insight and strategies for anyone involved in tertiary education, especially

education for professional practice.

At CSU, in the period of this research project, the concept of ‘course team’ has

increasingly been recognised as important in providing a coherent student learning

experience and in achieving the University’s curriculum renewal agenda. A comment

about the notion of course team will prepare the way for an account of the

metamorphosis I claim is needed before course teams can enact a curriculum of

becoming. In discussions with colleagues I have put my view that responsibility for

determining the quality and qualities desirable in twenty-first century graduates (the

curriculum WHAT) lies squarely with the course team – notwithstanding the

prescriptions or expectations of professional accrediting bodies – and it’s the course

team’s job to reach consensus on the optimum process of student learning to achieve

that outcome (the curriculum HOW). But why should the course team shoulder these

two heavy responsibilities? It is because a University’s collective intelligence on and

about each field of practice is concentrated in that course team, and because course

team members, as professional educators, need each other to achieve the global

graduate outcome they are paid to achieve. Their own professionalism and capability

is realised and demonstrated when their graduating students bear the novice rounded,

grounded practitioner hallmark. Course teams themselves need to create the

conditions under which all team members – including sessional staff, including casual

20 Olsen [aka McKenzie] (2009)

262

markers and staff of onshore and offshore partner institutions – will want to

collaborate to achieve the team goal/mission.

Course teams are commonly able to gain specialist advice on curriculum and

teaching matters from education and technology specialists, and it is worthwhile

regarding such advisers as members of the course team. Professional student support

staff who are often more directly involved with student learning issues than teaching

staff also have much to contribute. Thus educational and technology advisers and

professional student support staff also have a role in supporting curriculum renewal,

as if all staff have a common goal.

We are now in a position to consider how course team members can contribute to

the implementation of a curriculum of becoming by seeing themselves as members of

an emergent course community of belonging. Figure 7.6 serves as an introduction to

the concept:

‘The novice rounded, grounded practitioner’ – a single-minded rallying point and harbour, focussing the efforts of all university staff

The course team – the university’s collective intelligence unit on the qualities of a novice rounded, grounded practitioner in a given field of practice, working as a community of belonging to shape and realise the course goal

Advisers and teaching support staff working in teams and as individuals, finding collective purpose in communities of belonging to maximise the quality of support for course teams, or directly contributing to student transformation

Figure 7.6. Keeping your eyes on the prize: holistic, institution-wide single-mindedness in a curriculum of becoming

Note: ‘Keep your eyes on the prize’ was the title of a popular protest song of the 1950s.

The ‘novice rounded, grounded practitioner’ becomes a holistic, single-minded rallying

point for everyone supporting student transformation. It is both the goal, the desirable

composite graduate learning outcome, as well as the concurrent learner-development

strategy. Learners are learning how to be capable rounded, grounded learners as well

as novice rounded, grounded practitioners.

263

According to the triple hologenesis model of curriculum renewal (Figure 7.3), as a

course team progressively finds consensus on the curriculum WHAT and the HOW, it

‘cultivates’ itself, or transforms, metamorphoses into an intentional, common-goaled

course community of belonging. In one of my fictional pieces I wrote:

The defining feature of a community of belonging is that members

have a strong bond to the community and a strong, shared

commitment to the work and welfare of the community. In return,

the community has a strong commitment to every member and his

or her capacity to contribute fulsomely to its ‘being-in-the-world’

(Heidegger, 1962) and its activities. It is out of this reciprocal

relationship that the community can pursue its goals effectively,

elegantly, responsibly. In the context here of realising a curriculum

of becoming, a course community of belonging is one whose

primary, essential character is expressed in a shared resolve to

conceive a rich, evidence-based, dynamic (continuously

reconfiguring) picture of the rounded, grounded graduate for the

profession or career concerned – outcome consensus – and to make

the course a fertile and supportive learning environment in which

students naturally undergo their professional transformation –

process consensus.

There is one, as-yet faint afterglow to this story. I want you to know

that there’s one course team here [in my fictional narrative] that is

exploring an innovative expansion of the notion of community of

belonging. The team wants students to be an integral part of the

course community. They say there will be nothing to lose and

everything to gain from welcoming students into the community of

belonging because staff and students are ‘in this together’. Paul

Ramsden, in his 2009 report to the British Secretary of State titled

Teaching and the Student Experience, argued that the UK

will need different kinds of student experiences to enable its

graduates to contribute to the world of the future. We must

extend our students, whether they study in traditional or less

traditional ways, enabling them to find resources of courage,

resilience and empathy that traverse national boundaries. To

do this will require a clearer sense of relative responsibilities.

We will not be able to take the student experience forward

unless we see it as a joint venture between students and those

who provide higher education. (Ramsden, 2009)

264

‘Student experience’ is a hugely powerful idea because it is broad

enough to encompass the learner’s gestalt awareness and

understanding of the whole process of his or her studies and

professional formation – potentially a habitual and metacognitive

critique of self and of all who help shape that experience, whether

positively or negatively. In an inclusive course community of

belonging staff and students create the learning environment

together, supporting each one’s professional identity formation and

self-realisation. Entertaining the idea of staff and students accepting

shared responsibility for the student experience may be fantastical

but it is not too far removed from Ramsden’s seminal idea. Of

course it pushes Ramsden’s idea somewhat. A devil’s advocate

might ask whether achieving consensus among staff within a

program is realistic, let alone consensus between staff and students.

But difficulty in imagining something is no reason not to imagine.

Even if staff and students fail to achieve strong consensus on where

they are travelling to, engaging in this dialogue will generate its

own benefits.21

To conclude, a further extension of this latest train of thought is warranted. I need

to re-open the idea, ‘Even if staff and students fail to achieve strong consensus on

where they are travelling to …’. The statement comes exceedingly close to the heart of

the matter. In the context of education for the professions, questions like Why am I here

… What am I doing here … are career-toned versions of the philosophical questions that

Stefanovic says we all ask at some

time. In the heart murmurs of many of

us, it all means something! Does this mean

that self-reflection on one’s professional

formation may not be all that different

from self-reflection along the journey to understanding and self-realisation? Could

these two threads of self-reflection come together at points along the way? That is a

ponder point, which segues nicely into the final heading.

Curriculum: a learning space for journeys of endless openness

In the pursuit of learning and self-realisation, open is the least we can be, given the

allure of understanding and the possibility of striving to realise our individual

potential, in our careers and in ourselves. Earlier in this chapter I referred to my

curriculum of becoming framework as a ‘word picture collection’, a ‘mindspace’, and a

21 Olsen [aka McKenzie] (2009).

‘Philosophical questions are important to everyone, whether or not one chooses dedication to academic study. In fact, to be human is to naturally reflect upon philosophical questions’ (Stefanovic, 2013, p. 17).

265

‘liquid blueprint’. (I try to join the dots. I struggle to find the words.) In my view the

framework presented here with its attendant conception of meaning making offers an

alternative way of thinking about education for the professions. I will keep an open

mind, but I am convinced that what I have established in this thesis deserves

consideration by the field in our common pursuit of excellence in education and

responsiveness to changing situations and evolving expectations of university

graduates.

The last word goes to my presentation at the 2011 CSU PBE Summit:

In this presentation we confront the abyss, the distance between

what our institution says its degrees will deliver […], and the

present, however staff would care to characterise it. The rhetoric is

about curriculum renewal, and yet from our perspective –

embracing as we do the view that curriculum is the space for

meaning making shared by the learning community, us and them,

staff and students – curriculum renewal is possible to the extent

that we all embrace the idea that ‘the transformation is us’

(McKenzie, 2007). […] As Pinar proposed,

Curriculum ceases to be a thing, and it is more than a process.

It becomes a verb, an action, a social practice, a private

meaning, and a public hope. Curriculum is not just the site of

our labour, it becomes the product of our labour, changing as

we are changed by it (W. F. Pinar, 2004, p. 188). (McKenzie,

Higgs, & Simpson, 2011)

267

End matters

269

Epilogue

Critical reflection on my argument

My grounds for confidence in my evolving position

Congruence of research

Elegance and credibility of research products

Confidence and equivocation

Concerns raised by my Devil’s advocate

Critical reflection on my research frame and strategy

Coda

Critical reflection on my argument

I begin this last discussion with a question I posed in Chapter 5:

Meaning making in the sense being advanced in this thesis truly

personalises personal epistemology – individual epistemological

development – by locating individual meaning making inside

personal ontology. The journey is epistemological–ontological–

spiritual – I am deliberately holding these terms together as a single

hybrid idea – because the knowing is reflexively self-referential: we

grow in global understanding by seeking an ever more complex,

comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world.

Are there any problems or obstacles in professional education

curriculum practice today that such a position might help

overcome?

For me, this question nicely expresses the logic of my research design. What began

as a hunch at the outset of this inquiry has been demonstrated to my satisfaction: that

my hybrid conception of meaning making (as making sense and finding

meaningfulness in learning and living) does point the way to a persuasive solution to

my second research quest, understanding how to provide a fit-for-greater purpose education

for the professions in the twenty-first century. In the first part of this chapter I elaborate on

two substantial grounds for my confidence in making this assertion. Following that, I

consider potential responses to curriculum of becoming thinking.

Content map

270

My grounds for confidence in my evolving position

CONGRUENCE OF RESEARCH

One of the four dimensions of graduate capability in a curriculum of becoming is

uncertainty dexterity, a capacity to function and thrive in conditions of incomplete

information and uncertainty. In an uncertain, supercomplex world this is an essential

attribute in the workplace and in our daily lives, not least for researchers like me. My

thesis as a whole could be viewed as a tectonic plate story – the author’s struggles

astride an in-between place, actively

interrogating two irreconcilable

attractions. I open this section with a

reflection on where I stand in relation to

my global argument, because this will

shed light on the equivocation lurking

within the phrase, ‘my evolving

position’. My equivocation – the incomplete and emerging nature of the position I am

holding – is an appropriate place to open this discussion because it colours what I have

to say about my grounds for confidence in my position. It actually

constitutes/instantiates my first ground for confidence.

I became acquainted with Barnett’s concept of supercomplexity in 2000, the year his

Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity was published. Reading it

illuminated and confirmed for me my experience of and attraction to muddy waters. It

is not only our words, but also our private anchorages (our trusted frameworks and

support mechanisms) that

… strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still. (Eliot, 1963a, p. 194)

In such an environment as ours – in the twenty-first century – uncertainty dexterity is a

survival skill, which is why deft and sensitive enculturation into its mystique is a

central part of a curriculum of becoming experience. The second of the four fields of

curriculum interest challenges curriculum developers with questions like this:

Source: Figure 7.4

See Appendix 2, Thesis Eight: Philosophical Hermeneutics Affirms an Ontology of the In-between.

I recall this comment: Part of me was drawn to Wilber’s vision of an holarchic Kosmos, while part of me insisted on digging my toes in the sense-perceptible world – the old roundedness|groundedness antinomy again.

How might the learning gradient be described? Might the Field 2 learning experience consist in

a series of problem situations of increasing complexity and uncertainty, as categories of analysis and problem-solving become more

rubbery, fluid, insubstantial?

271

Uncertainty dexterity happens also to be central to approaching life as a hermeneutic

journey:

Hermeneutic understanding involves the process of

comprehending what a text or dialogue imparts and in addition the

development of a practice, of a preparedness or skill in changing

mental perspectives. The nurturing of such preparedness is an integral

element within the refinement of a hermeneutic discipline. The formation

of these virtues is what is meant in part by Bildung. Acquiring a

mental openness and a flexibility of response toward the strange

and unexpected is to have become experienced in the discipline.

This process of formation, of acquiring experience by acquaintance,

is what is rendered in German as having become gebildet. (Davey,

2006, pp. 37-38) (italics added)

Any theoretical stance that addresses research questions like mine will very likely

equivocate on the stability of its findings because of the stresses arising from our ever-

changing setting in life, and because of the super-fluid texture of one’s sense of self in

the world – each individual’s floating anchor point. Any theoretical stance rooted in a

philosophical hermeneutic way of seeing the world will gladly equivocate in the sense

that every account of understanding, every explanation, every text, can be nothing

other than partial and provisional.

My first ground for confidence in my position in this thesis is the

palpable congruence between my two research phenomena – (1)

the human need to understand and achieve personal potential and

(2) the uncertainty and stresses in contemporary education for

practice – and my two research products – (1) my hybrid account

of meaning making and (2) my response to the question of a fit-for-

greater purpose education for the professions in the twenty-first

century (Figure E1).

272

Figure E1. Congruence between research phenomena and research products

The congruence I have described in this section establishes credibility for the

research approach followed in this inquiry. The theme of credibility continues in the

next section.

ELEGANCE AND CREDIBILITY OF RESEARCH PRODUCTS

In this section I defend the credibility of the two major products or outcomes of this

research: my theorisation of meaning making and my curriculum of becoming

framework. I do so by asserting their design elegance and their capacity to enable the

development and enactment of a fit for greater purpose education for the professions.

In Chapter 7 I invoked the design concept of elegance in defence of my curriculum

of becoming framework. The issue was how an institutional and course team

commitment to elegance in curriculum design and delivery could provide a more holistic

student learning experience. Here I adopt the same strategy to assert the elegance of my

proposed goal of a university curriculum of becoming. (I am artificially separating

‘goal’ from ‘curriculum design’ momentarily to push my case.) I argue that elegance of

273

goal is more likely than not to enrich the student learning experience as well as student

achievement on graduation. The following wordflow casts the issue in bolder relief.

The more ROUNDED the ‘goal as outcome focus’,

The more rounded student achievement is likely to be

assuming action to achieve the goal moves the situation compellingly forward.

The more ELEGANT the ‘goal as curriculum brief’,

the clearer team members are

about how to LIVE the course desiderata of roundedness and groundedness

for the field of practice concerned

and how to TEACH for cultivating those desiderata.

Less distracting ‘noise’ surrounds the teaching effort

for both teachers and students,

and cohort achievement becomes less diffuse and haphazard and random.

This reasoning makes more sense if related back to Figure 7.3, The triple hologenesis

framework for curriculum renewal.

In a course curriculum of becoming, everything is interconnected.

There is a reciprocal cause-effect relationship between

□ the course team’s deliberations on the curriculum WHAT

(to translate the generic curriculum goal – rounded, grounded practitioner – into

profession-specific terms)

and

□ the HOW (curriculum structure and teaching practice),

and

□ the team’s metamorphosis into a course community of belonging,

which manifests in stronger relationships and stronger mutual support

for individual growth in understanding and becoming.

This means that elegance (as well as appropriateness) of goal is a key part of the

emergent realisation of a curriculum of becoming. But how may we recognise and

agree on degrees of design elegance in curriculum goals?

I asserted my view in the Prologue that curriculum practice will achieve more

robust and fulsome outcomes the more closely it mirrors or accommodates the way

humans experience self and world – cognitively, socially, physically, emotionally,

ethically, spiritually. This is the approach I am advocating.

By contrast, a different way altogether of approaching education for the

professions is simply to listen to what the professional bodies say graduates minimally

need to achieve to be able to function effectively in their particular field of practice, and

to construct curricula which provide graduates with these capacities. Sceptics might

say, well, at least that is doable. Clearly, however, that approach would not provide a

274

fit-for-greater purpose education. (‘Greater purpose’ points to an education richer in an

open-ended way than one designed to achieve pre-determined and delimited

outcomes.) An inordinately more fulsome way of thinking about curriculum is

crystallised in Barnett’s characterisation of it1:

The way forward lies in construing and enacting a pedagogy for

human being. In other words, learning for an unknown future has

to be a learning understood neither in terms of knowledge or skills

but of human qualities and dispositions. (Barnett, 2004, p. 247)

I agree with this statement. Likewise, I agree with Bereiter’s judgment that

All things considered, the best preparation schools could provide

for future learning is the broadest and deepest possible

understanding of the world – of the three worlds, actually, as

defined by Popper (1972). (Bereiter, 2002, p. 227)

In the language of this

thesis, Barnett’s solution

represents a core of

roundedness, holistic

presence , while

Bereiter ’s can be

discerned within a

hermeneutic halo of self-

reflexivity that rings the core of the goal. Figure E2 wordlessly, metaphorically evokes

this idea.

1 Barnett writes of pedagogy. Throughout this thesis I have used curriculum to be the larger concept

that encompasses pedagogy.

In one sense ‘rounded’ refers to ‘holistic presence’: such a graduate possesses the essential qualities for filling one’s roles (both vocational and societal) in a satisfying, harmonising, internally consistent and action-enabling ensemble of characteristics. The six expressions of being human which I have provisionally proposed – cognitive capacity, sociality, physicality (the five sense domain), emotionality, ethical sense and spirituality – all support a graduate’s ‘holistic appreciation’ of the matter at hand in his or her new field of practice.

275

Figure E2. The core curriculum goal of roundedness and its halo of self-reflexivity

Image: Halo in the night (cropped) | © Vincent Favre | http://vincentfavre.deviantart.com/art/Halo-in-the-night-112440159 | [email protected]

The notion of a central core of roundedness or holistic presence with a halo of self-

reflexivity (Figure E2) came to mind for me as I reflected on the ideas above the figure.

Given the importance I place on design elegance, I immediately responded emotionally

(excitedly) to the lunar halo photo because of its unspoken rightness/credibility,

simplicity, elegance and its evocation of wholeness and beauty. However, I ask myself

if its translation into words – a core of roundedness (holistic presence) surrounded by a

hermeneutic halo of self-reflexivity – is elegant enough. I turn to this question now.

276

For me a design project achieves elegance if it richly and economically serves its

purpose or its greater purpose. Just before the lunar halo image I juxtaposed three

positions on the appropriate focus for education for professional practice in the twenty-

first century. (I repeat my clarification that Bereiter’s focus in Education and Mind in the

Knowledge Age is school education. His analysis and contribution have been included in

my argument because his concepts of knowledgeability and teaching for

understanding are equally relevant in school and higher education.2) Given the

different perspectives/settings in life of the three analyses, the following comparison

table (E1) is presented to succinctly consider one thing – the idea of elegance in

expressing a curriculum goal; in other respects a comparative analysis of these three

positions may not be appropriate. (Barnett and Bereiter would probably have things to

say about how the table depicts their positions, but the only thing that concerns me

here is the concept of elegance related to curriculum goal statements, not balanced

representations of others’ positions.)

Table E1. Evaluating curriculum goal statements in terms of design elegance

Barnett Bereiter McKenzie

Product Theorising a pedagogy for human being

Theorising education for knowledgeability and understanding

Theorising a curriculum of becoming for education for practice

Focus (curriculum goal)

Learning for an unknown future

Capacity ‘to thrive in the Knowledge Age’3

Graduating novice rounded, grounded practitioners

Critical element/s human qualities and dispositions

knowing, acting, being

patience, perseverance,

resilience, humility3;

the broadest and deepest possible understanding of [Popper’s three worlds] (Popper, 1972)’

holistic presence

self-reflexivity

groundedness

So, in what sense is it reasonable to claim design elegance for the curriculum goal

and the framing of the intended student course experience proposed in this thesis?

2 Where Bereiter’s argument diverges from mine is that he says the school sector is better equipped

than any other agent to enculturate students in World 3, while the other desiderata of a liberal

education can be achieved through a variety of avenues. University education for professional

practice is an altogether different exercise. Importantly, for the reasons argued in this thesis, the other

desiderata of a liberal education cannot be left to chance, if we are going to attempt to graduate

novice rounded, grounded practitioners. 3 ‘Yet if people are really going to thrive in the Knowledge Age, they must be prepared to learn things

that are boring, things that are difficult, things that are threatening to the ego, things that require

going back and learning kid stuff, and things that they associate with people or positions they don't

like. Furthermore, they should be prepared to do more than learn what is immediately relevant. They

should be exploring the potentials of new knowledge, seeing what opportunities it may open for

them’ (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2000).

277

The curriculum goal. The concept, ‘graduating novice rounded,

grounded practitioners’, is elegant both in terms of simplicity and

richness, given the elaboration of ideas underpinning this goal in this

thesis. Its simplicity lies in its pithiness; its richness lies in the

comprehensiveness and implied holistic interconnectedness of its

conception. This formulation seems, on considered critical/holistic

reflection, and in terms of the desiderata of this thesis, to offer a sound

balance of simplicity, credibility and richness/completeness. According

to the argument I have elaborated here, this formulation encompasses

and expands Barnett’s and Bereiter’s curriculum goals (Table E1).

The framing of the intended student course experience. In the

Prologue I asserted that curriculum practice will achieve more robust

and fulsome outcomes the more closely it mirrors or accommodates

the way humans experience self and world – cognitively, socially,

physically, emotionally, ethically, spiritually. This is a concept that can

be used when gauging the relevance and effects of curriculum practice

– or the likely impact of implementing a curriculum framework – on

the lifeworld and wellbeing of students on their journeys of

professional formation. The question becomes: are students

equipped/prepared on all key fronts for the journey that awaits them?

The concept also has a bearing on how the world of practice, including

the lifeworlds of clients, is reflected in the portrayal of that world

within the curriculum. The question becomes: does the slice of life of

the world of practice provided in the course render that world

realistically and holistically in students’ preparation journeys? On both

counts I have not found a curriculum framework for professional formation

that honours the human drive for meaning and individual gestalt (rounded,

grounded) experience as richly as my curriculum of becoming framework

does. To my knowledge there are not many people around using this

kind of language or researching in this vein.

If I argue that elegance of curriculum goal and elegance of curriculum design and

delivery both impact on the timbre of the student course experience, that argument will

evince credibility, particularly for those institutions which are already investing

substantial resources into improving the student experience. Because governments4

4 ‘A positive student experience has an impact on student retention and further study. Maintaining and

improving the quality of teaching, learning and the student experience is a critical factor in the

success of universities and other higher education providers, both domestically and in the

international education market. This is particularly important for adult learners who comprise a large

proportion of students who require additional support.’ (DEEWR, 2009, p. 15)

278

and the higher education literature5 both support initiatives to improve the student

experience, and because institutions are already making significant investment in this

area6, one plank of my argument, my logic of emergent coherence, is already looking

robust.

It should now be clear that I do put that argument – that elegance of curriculum

goal and elegance of curriculum design and delivery both impact on the timbre of the

student course experience: the wordflow on p. 273 put the case succinctly. If that

argument evinces credibility, then the framework and its underpinning conception of

meaning making both deserve serious consideration, particularly from those

institutions which are already investing substantial resources into improving the

student experience.

Essentially, my argument and framework put meaning making at the core of

learning and of practice, claiming that it is this overarching capability that could help

both learner and graduate make sense of and contribute knowingly and successfully to

their learning–practice worlds. From the feedback I received during my ongoing

presentations about my research, I anticipate that there will be course teams ready to

embrace this vision. There could be other teams prepared to take up the curriculum

framework but remain unconvinced about my position on meaning making since this

is not a familiar part of curriculum rhetoric and practice. In such cases, however, I

anticipate that meaning making may enter their conversations in due course, as the

integrity of the framework and its underpinnings insinuates itself into their shared

language worlds.

Ergo, I’m satisfied. To be true to my philosophical hermeneutic roots, my higher

self needs to keep a watching brief, and, of course, collaborate with fellow travellers to

engage in an ongoing critical reflection on the framework and its underpinning

conception of meaning making, endeavouring to keep abreast of this challenging,

5 Nelson et al. draw an explicit connection between the nature of students’ experience of the first,

transitional year at university and the degree to which the university holistically manages that

transition. ‘Enhancing the student experience in their first year at university requires: students to

encounter curriculum that is sensitive to their realities, adequate and timely access to support

services, and opportunities for them to become part of communities of learners.’ ‘[…] enhanced

transition requires – • Curriculum that engages new learners in their learning: this curriculum must

be embedded, integrated and coordinated with institutional practices across the academic,

professional and administrative domains to seamlessly support new learners through: □ An

awareness of and timely access to support services […]; and □ A sense of belonging through

involvement, engagement and connectedness with their university experiences […].’ (Nelson, Kift,

Humphreys, & Harper, 2006) 6 According to the job description of the Director of the Charles Sturt University Student Experience

Program (SEP), the Director ‘ensures that all projects within the SEP’s realm (such as [student]

Transition [to university]) are aligned to the key principles of Participation, Success, Engagement,

and One University (and that they deliver as promised).’ Retrieved from

http://www.csu.edu.au/student/transition/transition-team.htm.

279

changing world – more lived experience as research and research as lived experience. Lived

hermeneutics for practitioners of education for the professions expects no less.

CONFIDENCE AND EQUIVOCATION

‘Quietly confident, but also contemplative,’ conveys my present mood. At this point I

need to emphasise the fluid or unfolding and therefore unfinished nature of this

curriculum blueprint. While I have claimed congruence of research and elegance and

credibility of research products, there are doubtless areas important to this vision that I

have not drawn into my argument. Similarly, as others experiment with the framework

in their courses – they will draw other variables and experiences into their interpretive

implementation of the framework.

Some of the areas I would like to further explore in future research are language

and digital epistemologies. In relation to student language capability, I ask: does my

adoption of philosophical hermeneutics as the underpinning philosophy of my

conception of meaning making hold any implications for student language

development within a curriculum of becoming? Consider this comment from Chapter

6:



The more intimate my relationship to the world of ideas and to language


My argument has not ventured into the literature of digital epistemologies; nor have I

considered the ways that the new environment of hypertexting and tweeting et cetera

appear to be changing the language practices of younger people in particular. It is

possible that such communicators are evolving new ways of making sense of self (or

multiple personas) in the world. But can they also read, digest and interpret works on

which their civilisation was built? A case needs to be made to course teams that

adopting the conception of meaning making presented in this thesis needs to be

supported by a strategy to help students develop their capacity to express what their

journey to understanding means to them, in media appropriate to conception and to

audience. Education for professional practice needs to foster articulateness (just as

Bereiter argues for fostering enculturation into World 3). There is likely to be an

improvement in articulateness as students are enculturated into the World of Ideas, but

the process would be further supported by some formal coverage of speaking and

writing within the curriculum. Professionally appropriate writing ability is already

assessed in many programs, but the question needs to be asked afresh in the light of

my global argument.

280

Concerns raised by my Devil’s advocate

What do I see as standing in the way of the embrace and enactment of this vision by

the field, and can I mitigate potential concerns?

The big obstacle. The main obstacle is hard to disentangle. From one angle it looks

like the contemporary, mainstream, substantially western distaste, in business, in

politics, in academia, for Utopian dreams. As soon as I suggest that my liquid blueprint

is Utopian, I run the risk of alienating many people.

How can I mitigate colleagues’ antipathy to Utopian thinking in curriculum design

and in personal ontology?

Utopian curriculum theorising. I could, for example, point out

that education has a Utopian underbelly, because we think we can

bring out the best in students, and help them realise their potential.

Then I could point to the congruence and credibility of this

research, and push this argument further by extending the liquid

blueprint idea, which allows us to conceive a curriculum goal as

liquid, needing continuous reappraisal. This is part of the course

community of belonging’s ongoing challenge, but it is also a

significant part of their raison d’être.

The goal of a curriculum of becoming is to graduate novice

rounded, grounded practitioners which, because it is so general – it

is deliberately generic across known fields of practice – it is likely

to maintain relevance into the foreseeable future. However, the

inherent flux in practice means that the translation of the generic

goal into course-specific and profession-specific curriculum goals,

aims and objectives will (recalling Barnett’s supercomplexity

argument) always be contestable and contested. The liquid

blueprint goal of a curriculum of becoming thus becomes a hugely

powerful shorthand way of concentrating course team efforts on

their Utopian yet thoroughly holistic and thoroughly relevant

curriculum challenge.

Utopian personal ontology theorising. Educators have a Utopian

underbelly because we think we can bring out the best in students,

and help them realise their potential. As I have taken pains to

elaborate in this thesis, in a curriculum of becoming, life is a

hermeneutic journey wherein we consciously admit to and

embrace our human need for growth in understanding. It is a

thoroughly ontological quest.

281

Just as we can only form new meanings for ourselves out of our previous experience of

meaning, so, I will speculate, the range of our epistemological doubts will be governed

by our existing level of reflective judgment. The black hole is only as deep as I perceive it

to be, from where I stand. It's as if the inner eye adjusts progressively to darkness, as

the outer eye adjusts to light […] I can begin the transition into landmark-knowing7

from wherever I am.

There is no time like the present. The potential I aspire to may still be fuzzy or beyond

imagining; but […] if my calling is to create a personal world of thought, then the

thought, the mindfulness I cultivate today flows into, forms the substance of my final

mature world order: goal-responsive thought can be self-fulfilling. (McKenzie, 1996, p.

98)

My big knotty problem is not just about Utopian antipathies then. Perhaps more

fundamentally it is about the very idea that a lived hermeneutics ethos and goal could

be infused into (some would say an already overcrowded) curriculum for professional

practice. The proposition that it could be so infused has major implications not only for

how teaching staff view their teaching role. It also has implications for how they view

themselves, how they even go about viewing themselves. It ultimately drills right down

into their own sense of self in the world – their conception of what ‘all this’ means.

While it may be difficult to imagine colleagues changing pace and changing outlook to

enter this way of living, for me such a change of heart and mind is perhaps the limiting

factor for enacting a curriculum of becoming. We cannot really teach ways of seeing if

we have not seen in those ways ourselves. A major message of the triple hologenesis

model of curriculum renewal (Figure 7.3) is that each sub-process is so interdependent

on the other processes that progress in each is harnessed to progress in the others. No

change of heart and mind, no change in practice, no community, no novice rounded,

grounded practitioners.

As I write, I feel overwhelmed by the predicament just described. And yet perhaps

the essence of the transformation needed is simpler and not as foreign-sounding as I

have been making out. I would therefore hope to mitigate concerns that colleagues

might voice about the ontological turn of my argument by emphasising two things:

If course teams aspire to become an inclusive community of

belonging that includes students, then staff and students can be

greatly buoyed in the knowledge that we are all in this together. The

challenge of appreciating the qualities of a rounded, grounded

practitioner in their chosen field of practice is a shared challenge in

which all members have something of quality to contribute,

because each one has a unique experience of being human.

7 Landmark-knowing: see Chapter 5, ‘The self-knowing self-checker’.

282

In cultivating openness to other community members and to self,

as in confronting the black hole of epistemological or existential

doubt, we can take heart that the starting point is always where we

are now. There are no prerequisites apart from who we are. The

journey may be daunting, but we progress tentatively, in steps we

feel we can take.

There may be professional development implications for this, but the most

promising way forward I see is for course teams themselves to take responsibility for

charting their own destiny. The kind of transformation of intent and practice required

in this vision will not be achieved if outsiders assume what team needs will be and

create professional development programs around them. On the other hand facilitation

of the process of envisioning and interpreting/realising curricula could be very helpful,

as could resources developed to expedite it, but only in response to the needs course

teams have identified. The institutional challenge is to create conditions favouring such

metamorphosis. Refer to my discussion on a genuinely global, burnout-resistant, collegial,

enabling and empowering operational plan, p. 260.

A more detailed discussion of potential responses from the field and possible ways

forward is offered in Appendix 8.

Critical reflection on my research frame and strategy

As foreshadowed in the Prologue, one element of my research strategy was to interpret

my research project in terms of Davey’s Eleven Theses on Philosophical Hermeneutics.

This was an ongoing process in the latter stages of this project, and was executed in

parallel with the other unfolding trains of thought and strategising. Davey’s

introduction to his 11 theses is both crystalline and pertinent to my case:

Philosophical hermeneutics betokens a reflective practice. While it

addresses hermeneutic questions of aesthetic, historical, and

philosophical understanding, it reflects philosophically on the

ethical dimensions of interpretative practice: how to orientate

oneself toward and how to interact with the claims of the other be it

a text, a person, or a remote historical horizon? Practises are,

however, informed by the received historical labyrinths of working

traditions. They cannot in consequence be definitively articulated.

Though the practice of philosophical hermeneutics cannot be

conceptually captured, its nature can be discerned among the

spectrum of philosophical refractions that a variety of interpretative

perspectives bring to light. This essay argues that as a practice,

philosophical hermeneutics is more a constellation of philosophical

outlooks than a specific philosophical system or method. The

283

character of these outlooks becomes more apparent when

juxtaposed against one another. We shall, accordingly, present

eleven theses concerning philosophical hermeneutics with the

purpose of bringing more of its implicit nature to light. (Davey,

2006, p. 3)

His 11 theses are as follows:

1. Hermeneutical Understanding Requires Difference.

2. Philosophical Hermeneutics Promotes a Philosophy of Experience.

3. Philosophical Hermeneutics Entails a Commitment to

Hermeneutic Realism.

4. Philosophical Hermeneutics Seeks Otherness within the Historical.

5. Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterprets Transcendence.

6. Philosophical Hermeneutics Entails an Ethical Disposition.

7. Hermeneutic Understanding Redeems the Negativity of Its

Constituting Differential.

8. Philosophical Hermeneutics Affirms an Ontology of the In-

between.

9. Philosophical Hermeneutics Is a Philosophical Practice Rather

Than a Philosophical Method.

10. Philosophical Hermeneutics Is a Negative Hermeneutics.

11. Philosophical Hermeneutics Looks upon Linguistic Being as a

‘Mysterium’.

In Appendix 2 I present a matrix in which I juxtapose my summary/interpretation of

each thesis with a reflection on how that idea impacted on and/or could be discerned

in: □ my hybrid conception of meaning making; □ my curriculum of becoming

framework; and □ my research strategy. A kind of symmetry and synergy (hybrid

vigour) and symphony is implied. In a nutshell, I am making a large claim:

Aspiring and learning to ‘live’ hermeneutic consciousness

Has untapped potential for teachers and learners and researchers.

I have instantiated a phenomenon I call

the hermeneutic journey of living.

It involves enacting meaning making as making sense and realising one’s potential.

It can be fostered by a curriculum of becoming

that transforms novices-in-training to novice rounded, grounded graduates.

It can be researched within a philosophical hermeneutic frame of reference,

encapsulated as

‘lived experience as research, research as lived experience’.

284

Finally in this section I reflect on my experience of writing this thesis. My

candidature commenced in 2005, and the argument, arising from my hermeneutic

engagements with my featured texts and others, unfolded in the eight years of this

project. Alongside my scholarly efforts, my imagination roamed freely, drawing

inspiration and fertile ideas from expansive slopes and plains. While the major focus

has been on a select group of texts from various disciplinary perspectives, some of my

own writings found their way into the thesis, because they are artefacts and

distillations of past sense made, past hopes longed for. (This was appropriate because I

have used my own experience of meaning making as a case study to illuminate the

meaning making phenomenon.)

I set out in this project to conceptualise a framework for a curriculum of becoming.

It has materialised on paper as an instantiation of Pinar’s vision:

Curriculum ceases to be a thing, and it is more than a process. It

becomes a verb, an action, a social practice, a private meaning, and

a public hope. Curriculum is not just the site of our labour, it

becomes the product of our labour, changing as we are changed by

it. (Pinar, 2004, p. 188)

The transformation is us. We create a curriculum of becoming by inhabiting that space

and, in a sense, merging into that space. (Words strain and crack as hermeneutic

transcendence beckons.) Inner and outer curriculum serve a single purpose.8

What kind of research framework and strategy supported such fluid, open-ended

and provisional research outputs as my hybrid conception of meaning making and my

curriculum of becoming framework?

The questioning was appropriately and persistently

philosophical hermeneutic in timbre.

Rich understandings emerged after luscious periods of lack

of clarity.

My research strategy organiser – studies in textual

composition, interpretation and communication – helped me

distinguish between these three kinds of human interaction

with texts as I engaged with my chosen texts and waited for

their messages to draw my thinking out.

I resolutely pursued my goal to better understand the

phenomenon of understanding as a natural human need. I

embraced Bortoft’s (1996, p. 291) claim that understanding

is holistic, which provided a rationale for my hermeneutic

8 Refer to Appendix 8, p. 331ff, for a discussion of ‘inner curriculum’.

285

inquiry into the concept of holism in Popper’s three worlds.

Hermeneutics (in particular, Davey’s distillation of

Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutic mindspace), proved

to be a ‘perfect fit’ research approach for the two

phenomena investigated (Figure E1).

Being thoroughly attuned to the idea of holism

(roundedness) in combination with my strong commitment

to a social realist conception of education (groundedness)

allowed me to experience the hermeneutic in-between space

as a tectonic plate, as I was drawn to apparently

irreconcilable positions. My articulation of the philosophical

hermeneutic underpinnings of my conception of meaning

making was thereby grounded in personal experience. This

I trust has infused my text, my argument, with the

conviction arising from the witnessing of experiential truth,

verisimilitude. Therein lies the lived credibility of my case.

Late in the whole journey a double-barrelled expression

came to mind as a description of what I have experienced

and achieved: Lived experience as research, research as lived

experience. In Figure 7.1 I indicated how the execution of two

responsibilities during this project – my institutional role

and my researcher role – generated what felt like hybrid

vigour in ideas creation. I was living out the ideas that were

crystallising into my vision. The expression, ‘lived

experience as research, research as lived experience’ is my

research method version of one of my substantive research

products – the idea of lived hermeneutics, that is, treating

each day as an occasion for realising en ever more complex

et cetera sense of self in the world.

Whereas in Figure E1 I claimed a persuasive congruence between

my research phenomena and research products, here I assert

congruence between my research approach (lived experience as

research, research as lived experience) and a research product (the

lived hermeneutics construct).

I look forward to pursuing these ideas with practitioners and researchers.

Coda

The image of the moon and its halo (Figure E2) can say more to us than the figure title

suggested. Consider …

286

Take a brush and paint your horizon

Ring the world you know and understand […]

Draw a ring around your world

With that line you define who you are

The mystery stars must have a place in your vision

‘cos I’m in a global frame of mind.9

The school theatre production from which this song extract was taken was a modern-

day interpretation of medieval artist, Pieter Brueghel. The song was my reflection on

Brueghel’s way of seeing the world, reflected in his art. For me, ‘a global frame of

mind’ is what I aspire to but also one that I already claim to possess in some measure,

as we all could; after all, understanding is holistic (Bortoft, 1996, p. 291) and emergent,

approaching us as the Welcome Stranger, out of the mist.

In Chapter 3 I proposed that Archer and Campbell both:

emphasise the inner dimension of human being in colouring the

way we present ourselves to others. For Archer, human concerns

and ultimate concerns, as witnessed in our emotions, steer our

actions, our being-in-the-world, while for Campbell, ‘the expression

of feelings through a diverse range of nonlinguistic and linguistic

resources is the attempted communication of personal significance’.

(Campbell, 1997, p. 165)

In one refraction, embarking on life as a hermeneutic journey is all about discerning

our own reflexivity, our ‘halo’. And how do we do that? By drawing it around us. With

that line we define who we are. In Campbell’s terms, we express our feelings and

thereby say something personally significant about ourselves, that is, we define

ourselves in revealing what is meaningful to us. In Archer’s language, our actions

express our inner conversations. Like Matisse, we pause over the canvas, then place

our brush as only we could.

Hermeneutic textual composition is

self-expression, opening up, giving

others glimpses of the colours of my

inner life, my worldview, me. Like

this thesis squibble.10

9 Excerpt of a song, Global Frame of Mind, composed by me for a Singleton High School original theatre

production in 1981. The song provided a reflective commentary on our theatre piece about the life

and work of painter, Pieter Brueghel. The scene in the Finale was an interpretation in song and

movement of Brueghel’s Storm at Sea (image displayed at http://www.abcgallery.com/B/bruegel/bru

egel146.html). 10 An allusion to the comment by the child in Figure E3 about ‘squibbling’, i.e. scribbling. Freehand,

free-wheeling, meditative doodling can be a powerful way of workshopping associational thought in

pursuit of ontological openness.

I recall Maturana and Varela’s ‘way of seeing cognition not as a representation of the world “out there”, but rather as an ongoing bringing forth of a world through the process of living itself’ (Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 11).

289

Appendix 1. Transforming Australia’s Higher Education

System: Reform agenda [2009]

‘The Government is proposing a phased 10-year reform agenda for higher education and

research to boost Australia’s national productivity and performance as a knowledge-based

economy.

‘Key reforms include:

‘Real action for real participation – attainment, access and engagement: transforming access to

higher education through a major package designed to radically improve the participation of

students from low socio economic backgrounds (low SES) in higher education, and enhance

their learning experience

‘A Growing Higher Education Sector: promoting greater diversity and quality within the

tertiary sector by phasing in a new system to allocate funding on the basis of student demand;

support to encourage more students to choose teaching and nursing and to study overseas; and

support for the renewal of student services and amenities

‘A Sustainable Tertiary Education Sector: providing funding certainty and creating a more

sustainable higher education sector through higher indexation of teaching and learning grants

‘Sustainable Investment for Research: ending historic funding cross-subsidisation by

increasing funding for the full cost of university research, and enabling universities to strive for

research excellence in areas of strength

‘Transforming Australia’s Tertiary Education Infrastructure: a massive upgrade of university

and TAFE infrastructure to meet the teaching and learning requirements of students, teachers

and researchers now and into the future

‘A New Era of Quality in Australian Tertiary Education: establishing the Tertiary Education

Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), which will provide the foundation for enhancing

quality and accreditation in higher education

‘Income Support for Students: landmark reforms to student income support which will

redirect assistance so that it reaches the most needy students to boost both their higher

education participation and attainment

‘A Fair Deal for Australia’s Regions: supporting regional tertiary education provision with a

review of regional loading, encouragement to explore new models of delivery and access to

new structural adjustment funding for the sector

‘Improving Tertiary Pathways: building stronger connectivity between the higher education

and vocational education and training sectors

‘A New Relationship between Government and Educators: a relationship built on mutual

respect, trust and agreed funding compacts.

Source (extract): DEEWR (2009, p. 9).

290

Appendix 2. Interpreting my research project in terms of Davey’s Eleven Theses

Note: Unidentified page numbering in this appendix refers to Davey (2006).

Interpreting Davey’s 11 theses Research focus: Life as a

hermeneutic journey and story

Research focus: Curriculum as a

hermeneutic journey and story

My research method

1 Thesis One: Hermeneutical Understanding Requires Difference

Integral to the pursuit of understanding

is the preservation of difference. In

oneself, it means actively seeking to

expand on one’s past understanding –

‘being different to myself’. In dialogue, it

means not trying to close the gap

between me and my interlocutor, but

rather valuing the difference, because of

the potential it holds for fresh revelations.

This gap is the hermeneutic differential. (p.

5)

Reflecting on ‘being different to

myself’ brings to mind my journey of

growth in global understanding, the

realisation of an ever more complex,

comprehensive and coherent sense of

self in the world. In Chapter 3 I related

my difficulty in selecting my

twentieth memory, and my not being

able, even now, to plumb the

significance of my theatrical/artistic

‘proclivity’ for the person I was, and

am, and am becoming. ‘Being

different to myself’ is not a simple,

unidirectional, past-present equation.

Philosophical hermeneutics is ‘the

philosophy of learning and becoming

(Bildungsphilosophie)’ (p. 5).

Embracing the idea of lived

hermeneutics as a lifelong quest for

continuous transformation of the

mind – continually sloughing off

yesterday’s understanding for today’s

– is the enabling disposition for

creating one’s own ‘inner curriculum’

within a curriculum of becoming or

other educational experience. It is the

fundamental challenge for students

and teachers.

Recognising and bringing to mind

points of similarity and of difference –

vis à vis my chosen authors when

interpreting their texts and when

composing my synthesis – was an

extended process of negotiating with

difference and otherness.

2 Thesis Two: Philosophical Hermeneutics Promotes a Philosophy of Experience

For philosophical hermeneutics, lived

experience is where our framework of

understanding is put to the test.

‘Dwelling on the experience of

interpretation, philosophical

hermeneutics concerns itself with an

interpretation of experience’ (p. 6). Other

traditions (for example in science or

Becoming adept at philosophical

hermeneutics in the workplace, the

community, or in one’s inner life, is

not the outcome of training in a

particular method:

‘Philosophy participates in a dialectic

of shared experience’; or, we could

say, philosophical hermeneutics is the

Becoming adept at philosophical

hermeneutics in learning and

teaching situations is both a private

and a shared journey. A curriculum

of becoming is a designed learning

environment that awaits and nurtures

such unfoldings.

‘As encounters with texts (and others)

are lived, learning from experience

derives not just from that which is

encountered but from the character of

the encounter itself’ (p. 6). My

immediate setting in life on Orange

campus within the broader context of

my personal life journey shaped my

291

philosophy) where methodological

correctness has ascendency, lived

experience, and the lessons we draw from

it, are often dismissed as relative and

subjective. By limiting oneself to a

rigorously defined methodology and

mindset, the ‘wider, more complex,

dimensions of human encounter,

experience and learning’ are neglected (p.

6). Gadamer challenges ‘received,

regulatory frameworks’ and ‘reinvokes

the value of experientially acquired

wisdom (paideia)’ (p. 5). (pp. 5-6)

shared reflexive practice of living. It

refines our ‘sense of the communal, of

belonging to something larger than

oneself’ (pp. 6-7).1 It is the lifework of

acquiring experiential wisdom.

research questioning and

engagement, thus colouring my

findings and output.

3 Thesis Three: Philosophical Hermeneutics Entails a Commitment to Hermeneutic Realism

For Davey a hermeneutic encounter with

a text potentially puts me in touch with

myself in a new way: ‘philosophical

hermeneutics attempts to discern in what

we do (interpretation) the real character

of our being’ (p. 7). This lies at the heart

of the philosophical hermeneutic vision;

it is what propels me towards my

encounter: philosophical hermeneutics

‘seeks an encounter with the real and is,

therefore, plainly committed to a form of

hermeneutic realism’ (p. 7). The emphasis

in such encounters is not on the effect of

my subjectivity on the interpretation (on

Schön’s (1995) reflection-in-action

comes to mind here. The depth and

penetration/coverage of reflection

invited in Thesis Three represents

that towards which we may aspire,

but the doing of philosophical

hermeneutics arises out of one’s lived

experience, however contemplative or

action-oriented one’s lifestyle might

be, however long we sit still.

Hermeneutic realism is very

comfortable with social realism as a

mode of being (see my account of

Archer’s (2000) realist social theory in

Students’ course-long, course-wide

journey in meaning making to

prepare themselves for their chosen

careers and places in the world will

be enriched in proportion as they

commit to and enact the call of

hermeneutic realism as articulated

here.

During the period of my PhD

research I was struck by the lack of

interest from some CSU colleagues in

my various attempts to communicate

what I was doing. We were

committed institutionally and

professionally to realising ‘curriculum

renewal’, according to which vision

students would embody a noble set of

characteristics on graduation. We all

apparently embraced this goal, and

yet my attempts to engage colleagues

in ideas from my ‘curriculum of

becoming mindspace’ (see chapter 7)

1 Gadamer ‘reinvokes the value of experientially acquired wisdom (paideia)’ (p. 5).

292

my meaning making) but on how such

experiences change me. ‘They become

individual experiences of finitude in

which the real limits of … [one’s own]

understanding are encountered’ (p. 7);

and furthermore, as in realist encounters

with literature, sooner or later I encounter

the experience of suffering. Thus in acts

of textual interpretation, or more broadly

of any living encounters, new

understanding uncovers the limits of my

earlier perspective and disposition (I

consciously become ‘different to myself’

[Thesis 1]). (pp. 6-7)

Chapter 2). Life as a hermeneutic

journey and story is a lifestyle choice

in which textual composition,

interpretation and communication are

my modes of meaningful engagement

in the world.

evoked little interest. Perhaps they

were following a different perspective

or strategy. Dealing with their

disinterest in my ideas was a

powerful trigger for becoming

‘different to others’ and ‘different to

myself’ as I quietly reflected,

theorised and wrote. This thesis gives

an overview of the delirious–painful

experience of straddling my two roles

– institutional and research – in

conceiving and expressing this vision.

Philosophical hermeneutics holds

considerable promise as a research

approach in the humanities and social

sciences, but calls for unfettered,

fulsome transparency and resilience.

4 Thesis Four: Philosophical Hermeneutics Seeks Otherness within the Historical

When interpreting texts from the past I

do not try to render (represent,

‘assimilate’) that past lifeworld in terms

of present day conceptions or

sensibilities; nor on the other hand do I

shed my assumptions and ways of seeing

to ‘immerse’ myself in that other world.

Rather I enter ‘dialogue’ to seek out the

differences of stance between us, that text

and I. Davey asserts that ‘Recognizing the

integrity of the other is … fundamental to

philosophical hermeneutics’ (p. 7). By

insisting on the otherness of the other I

What is the purpose of asserting the

relevance of Thesis Four to a twenty-

first century meaning maker’s

guidelines for making sense of self

and the world? It stands as a

reminder of my absolute situatedness

and the absolute situatedness of every

other meaning maker, past and

present, in each one’s setting in life. It

purges me of any temptation to

congratulate myself on my

achievement relative to what others

have achieved. Second, it reminds me

Every field of professional practice

has a history. Developing a historical

perspective on the evolution of a

practice vis a vis its broader lifeworld

is an integral part of understanding

one’s profession and therefore

deserves space in a professional

preparation curriculum. Thesis four

suggests a way of grounding such

inquiry within the student’s own

professional identity formation.

Recognising and valuing one’s

journey in meaning making – past in

the present and present in the past –

was an emergent theme in my

master’s thesis. The Twenty

Memories exercise, developed and

trialled then, was used in data

collection within this study because of

its potential to focus groups of

learners’ attention on their personal

lives as sites of reflexive meaning

making; see Chapter 3 and Appendix

8.

293

embrace ‘the possibility of horizons of

meaning that are not presently my own’

(p. 8). In this way my (albeit partial)

understanding of the other keeps

challenging me to reappraise my own

position. (pp. 7-8)

that the stories of the past form an

inexhaustible treasure trove for

enriching my understanding.

5 Thesis Five: Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterprets Transcendence

‘Hermeneutic encounters with the

different, with finitude, and with limit,

suggest that understanding involves an

experience of transcendence.

Understanding is the process of coming

to understand that when we understand,

we understand differently […] The

difference between what we once

understood and now understand is itself

understood. As a result, our

understanding of ourselves, of our past,

and of the world we find ourselves in,

acquires new coordinates and

reconfigures itself accordingly. When we

understand ourselves differently, we

have 'moved on.' Transcendence does not

betoken surpassing the range or grasp of

human experience […] but what lies

within it or, much rather, it has to do with

experiencing those fundamental shifts

In Thesis Five Davey uses

transcendence to crystallise the

essential nature of understanding:

‘Hermeneutic transcendence involves

the transforming experience of

coming knowingly to see, to think,

and to feel differently’ (p. 8).2

In Chapter 5 I aligned myself with

Phenix’s definition of transcendence

as ‘the experience of limitless going

beyond any given state or realization

of being’ (Phenix, 1975, p. 324); see

discussion of curriculum for

transcendence. Can this view of

transcendence be accommodated

within Davey’s? For Davey, what

‘matters’ ‘is the process of becoming

intellectually and spiritually

tempered by the experiences one

undergoes during the acquisition’ of

Interest in spirituality as a desirable

dimension of professional formation

in various practice fields may be

found in the higher education

literature (for example, de Jager

Meezenbroek et al. [2012], Chiu,

Emblen, Van Hofwegen, Sawatzky, &

Meyerhoff [2004], Carson, Soeken,

Shanty, & Terry [1990].) My

curriculum of becoming mindspace

may be seen as a space for exploring

connections between spirituality,

growth in understanding and sense of

self. Spirituality as transcendence is

speculatively impregnated in my

gestalt position here. The implications

for my curriculum of becoming

framework are still in muddy waters.

My research approach in this inquiry

is encapsulated in my research

strategy organiser: case studies in

textual composition, interpretation and

communication. In muddy waters, in

this dense thicket of words, I have

endeavoured to evoke moments of

hermeneutic transcendence. In this

thesis text I am reporting and

hopefully communicating my growth

in understanding as an outcome of

this research.

2 It is, as I have argued in this thesis, the experience of growth in global understanding, wherein I realise an ever more complex, comprehensive, coherent sense of self in the world.

c.f. comment in Thesis One, column 3: ‘Embracing the possibility of lived hermeneutics as a lifelong quest for continuous transformation of the mind – continually sloughing off

yesterday’s understanding for today’s …’

294

within passages of experience that can

quite transform how such passages are

understood.’ (p. 8)

‘the various stocks of knowledge and

attitudes that constitute a given

culture’ (p. 39). Furthermore, for

Gadamer, ‘The essence of what is

called spirit lies in the ability to move

within the horizon of an open future

and an unrepeatable past’ (Gadamer,

1986, p. 10). Yet tightly woven into

Davey’s text is the idea that we are

without essence: ‘because as human

beings we have no intrinsic essence,

we are able to constitute and

transform ourselves continually

throughout our hermeneutical

encounters’ (p. 56). These are deep

claims that require further thought.

6 Thesis Six: Philosophical Hermeneutics Entails an Ethical Disposition

Hermeneutic experience involves an

ethical stance towards others and

otherness. ‘Self-consciousness is

profoundly dependent upon what lies

outside it, that is, upon the otherness of

different language horizons, of different

cultures and persons’ (p. 9). Philosophical

hermeneutics does not emphasise or

privilege inwardness of experience; it ‘de-

centers subjective experience and brings

the subject to an awareness of its

profound dependence upon cultural

realities that are not of its own making.

The argument is that it is not strictly

Having an appreciation of my

dependency on the other ensures that

I value the other. This is why Davey

asserts that ‘hermeneutic experience

also socializes’ (p. 9), which carries

with it an ethical disposition. But

does recognising my ‘profound

dependence upon cultural realities

that are not of […][my] own making’

(p. 9) require that I conclude that ‘that

it is not strictly speaking I who

understand’? I have aligned myself

with Archer’s case that sense of self

pre-dates socialisation. Archer’s clear

Designing a university curriculum of

becoming will challenge educators to

align the learning experience as

closely as possible to the way humans

experience self and world,

cognitively, socially, physically,

emotionally, spiritually. Applied to

the world of professional practice,

Thesis Six gives a credible account of

how an ethical stance emerges out of

the nature of hermeneutic experience.

Giving students an integrated

learning experience is in part about

helping them find their own ethical

As I argue for my interpretation of

and relationship with Thesis Six in

adjacent columns, as I draw it into the

pool of my curriculum of becoming

mindspace, I demonstrate consonance

between my approach to curriculum

and the experience of hermeneutic

understanding. The goal of

hermeneutic consciousness is finding

its way into my fundamental

orientation to the world-as-other. The

question then becomes, what are the

implications of this for lived experience

as research, for research as lived

295

speaking I who understand. Whatever I

understand, I come to understand

through the mediation of another. It is the

other who (in the form of a person, text,

or painting) brings me to understand

something. The event of understanding is

not an individual achievement but

presupposes an ethical encounter with an

other. The event of understanding also

depends upon that which transcends the

understanding subject, namely, the

hermeneutic community in which the

subject participates and through which

the subject is socialized. Yet socialization

within an interpretive horizon is not

merely a condition of hermeneutic

experience: the event of hermeneutic

experience also socializes.’ (p. 9)

valuing of an ethical disposition is not

defended using the language of

philosophical hermeneutics. More

straddling of views in contention is

called for in the journey to elusive

understanding.

stance as persons and as

professionals-in-training. Applying

Thesis Six in course team building

and in the design process will be part

of the task of implementing a


experience? I am sure that I will need

more time for that question to fully

gestate.

7 Thesis Seven: Hermeneutic Understanding Redeems the Negativity of Its Constituting Differential

‘The charge that a given understanding is

particular in relation to a “whole” body

of other interpretations is simultaneously

negative and affirmative. The invocation

of what an interpretation is not (i.e., not

the whole of the matter) also reveals what

the interpretation is (i.e., one element of a

larger nexus of mutually related

understandings). Such a “dialectical”

shift in perception does not negate the

negative aspects of hermeneutic

understanding but refigures them

Life is a hermeneutic journey in

which I seek an ever more complex,

comprehensive, coherent sense of self

in the world. With hermeneutic

understanding I am content that my

sense of self in the world will forever be

partial, yet that does not diminish my

desire to set out daily from where I

am, voracious for new understanding.

Hermeneutical transcendence awaits.

Four worthwhile questions for

students in professional preparation

programs could be: How might

‘practice wisdom’ unfold in the first ten

years of my professional practice? How

might I cultivate practice wisdom? Is

practice wisdom or remuneration more

important to me? How can practice

wisdom enhance professional

competence? These questions are

predicated on a view that practice

wisdom draws on hermeneutic

‘The hermeneutic differential that

formally blocks understanding from

completing itself, perpetuates the

motion necessary to keep

understanding open to the possibility

of further responses to a subject

matter’ (p. 14). I reflect on this in

terms of the hologenesis of this thesis

text and what that might mean for

research adopting a philosophical

hermeneutic approach. I wanted my

thesis to convey the difficulty

296

positively.’ (p. 14) See footnote3 for five

‘salient points’.

Philosophical hermeneutics recognizes

the 'power of negativity.’ It strives to

remain open to the different and to learn

from the teachings of such suffering.

Philosophical hermeneutics displays the

eclat of a life-affirming mode of thought

that recognizes that the (tragic)

endurance of its own negativity contains

the promise of its redemption. It

understands that the possibility of

hermeneutic transcendence follows on

the affirmative embrace of its own

negativity.’ (pp. 14-15)

consciousness; this understanding

arises from a philosophical

hermeneutic disposition and position.

inherent in adopting a clear stance

about the nature of the journey to

understanding. I had to be both all-

knowing narrator but also make the

‘suffering’ involved in hermeneutic

textual composition palpable for the

reader.

3 The following five points are quoted directly.

1. The ‘negativity of experience’ may disrupt one's expectancies of a text but it also opens unexpected alternatives. An awareness of the finitude of understanding

exposes one to different interpretative possibilities.

2. The very limitedness of one's understanding provides a position from which one can negotiate with other forms of interpretation. Such limitedness does not so

much indicate the incomplete or distorted nature of one's understanding as provide the foundation for one to understand ‘more.’

3. Gaining an awareness of that which limits one's understanding (other horizons), strengthens a sense of belonging to an expanding whole. Becoming conscious of

the limitedness of understanding is a precondition of hermeneutical transcendence.

4. A grasp of what makes one's understanding perspectival (i.e., being in a relation to other perspectives) allows one's understanding of a subject matter to become

more complete (multiperspectival).

5. The hermeneutic differential that formally blocks understanding from completing itself, perpetuates the motion necessary to keep understanding open to the

possibility of further responses to a subject matter. (Davey, 2006, p. 14)

297

8 Thesis Eight: Philosophical Hermeneutics Affirms an Ontology of the In-between

‘Philosophical hermeneutics indisputably

aligns itself with the Heideggerian

argument that understanding is a mode

of being. Gadamer articulates this mode

as a “being in-between”, in that

“hermeneutics is based upon a polarity of

familiarity and strangeness […] the true

locus of hermeneutics is this in-between”

(Gadamer, 1989, p. 295)’. (p. 15) Such a

discourse concerns the interaction

between ‘two negotiating subjects’;

however the ‘in-between’ space is not

geo-temporal but what Davey calls ‘the

disclosive space of the hermeneutic

encounter itself. It is this space which

subjectivizes [grounds and personalises]

the participating individuals.’ (p. 15) It is

in this notional space where the parties

meet and come to discern where their

perspectives diverge; but it can also be an

encounter in which I-in-the-present

recognise a gap separating my-now-self

from that-self-in-the-past. ‘The differential

space of the in-between’ arises ‘in the

processes of hermeneutical encounter,

which invites us to allow those who see

things differently to enlarge our world

[…] The locus of our understanding

invariably involves being in between

what, on the one hand, we have

There is a kind of transience implied

in thesis eight where, as T.S. Eliot

intimated: ‘Words strain, Crack and

sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay

in place, Will not stay still’ (Eliot,

1963a, p. 194).

What holds particular relevance for

my curriculum of becoming

mindspace here is the suggestion that

transience, impermanence, are

qualities inextricably fused with the

pursuit of understanding.

Understanding is liquid gold that can

well up or bleed away. If life is a

hermeneutic journey, if Prufrock

measures out his life with coffee

spoons (Eliot, 1963b, p. 14), I trace

mine with the tent clearings I leave

behind me, for I have moved on.

Gadamer’s ‘being in-between’ brings

to mind Meyer & Land’s (2006) notion

of liminality in the literature of

threshold concepts. Educators recognise

the cognitive difficulties learners

experience when discipline-specific

concepts lie beyond their ken;

supporting learners across those

thresholds becomes an educational

design then teaching challenge. The

challenge of the view being presented

here is: what is the educational

design/teaching challenge if the

learning difficulty is bound up in

questions of students’ personal

identity, selfhood? If and when such

learning difficulties are suspected,

perhaps a synthesis of threshold

concepts theory and philosophical

hermeneutics theory may suggest a

more broadly informed, more

fundamental learning experience

design solution. The curriculum of

becoming mindspace is a tentative

step towards finding a way of asking

the relevant questions.

As I recall the many times in my life I

have resorted to language to plumb

the unfathomable depths of what it is

to be human, I see this latest effort

(this thesis) as an effort to pull it all

into some meaningful pattern, an

artefact of a moment in a lifetime, a

landmark on the journey to

understanding.

298

understood and what, on the other hand,

we intuit we have yet to understand.’ (p.

16)

Being hermeneutically aware can occur

on two planes. On one level I perceive

difference between my past and future

self. On another I have a sense that ‘I’

exist somewhere between what I see as

myself and what others see. ‘In the eyes

of philosophical hermeneutics to be a

subject is always to be in between. A

being who resides in the in-between is a

being whose being is always open,

vulnerable, and in question’ (p. 17). (pp.

15-17)

9 Thesis Nine: Philosophical Hermeneutics Is a Philosophical Practice Rather Than a Philosophical Method

What is at issue here is how philosophical

hermeneutics and positivistic science

stand in relation to each other. Davey

notes a mutual recrimination across the

divide between these traditions.

Gadamer's ‘slighting of the objective and

universal pretensions of scientific method

has needlessly drawn to philosophical

hermeneutics the hostile charges of

subjectivity and methodological

arbitrariness’ (p. 17). In Davey’s view, the

Life is a hermeneutic journey and

story. How exciting it is to form a love

affair with language, wherein our

human quest for understanding can

be expressed. Thesis Nine draws us

into a philosophical rationale for

living life as if growth in understand-

ing and love of language matter. It is

a reminder that rationales for practice

are important if that practice is to be

given credence. The boundary

What do I want our students to

experience? I hope they too will thrill

at the quest for growth in under-

standing. I claim in this thesis that

‘the defining feature of human kind is

the fulfilment it gains from growth in

understanding’ (McKenzie, 1996, p.

102), as if growth in understanding is

central to the human condition. If the

curriculum of becoming mindspace

being elaborated here gains traction,

‘That understanding remains a

perpetually unfinished task renders

suspect the certainty claimed by the

adherents of method’ (Davey, 2006,

pp. 20-22).4 My choice of

philosophical hermeneutics as my

approach for investigating meaning

making capability was not only

judicious because of the striking

symmetry between topic and

‘method’ – the fact that my ‘method’

4 ‘By definition, no translation or interpretation can claim completeness. In this respect, philosophical hermeneutics seems rather partisan in its opposition to method. It trumps an

epistemological claim (a methodological claim to universality or completeness) with an ontological claim concerning either the finitude of understanding or the inability of

propositional language to capture the full nature of a subject matter’ (p. 20-22).

299

significant issue is how subjectivity is to

be conceived. To press his case he draws

on Gadamer’s arguments against

Nietzsche’s nihilism. One argument

was to claim an objectivity potentially

residing within a subjective voice; the

other was to reject any claim that

interpretation is groundless; rather, it ‘is

rooted in specific ontological structures’

(p. 18). In mounting these arguments

Gadamer was pointing towards ‘an

ontology of practice’. Davey deploys

between hermeneutic philosophical

scholarship and lived hermeneutics is

perhaps best thought of as permeable.

then Thesis Nine will provide a

rationale and compass point for

practice.

instantiates my argument, reflects my

phenomenon. Very clearly, had I

faltered, had I researched

understanding via an approach

driven by ‘the will to method’, it

would have been an exercise in which

the instruments (the conceptual tools)

available were not capable of

calibration to the nuanced subject

matter at hand.

the same tactic to defend philosophical hermeneutics from positivism. It is nihilistic (the argument goes) for positivists to expect objectivity and methodological

rigour from philosophical hermeneutics, as if ‘there are or ought to be ways of thinking and seeing purged of every element of historical and cultural determination’

(p. 18). To demand that interpretation of texts be decontextualised ‘would deprive them of the cultural foundations upon which their drive and focus depends’ (p.

18). Davey suggests that Gadamer employs ‘an intellectual maneuver’ which invites us to think differently about the issue in contention. The charge that

philosophical hermeneutics is characterised by subjective prejudices and methodological arbitrariness suggests, Davey writes, a ‘limited epistemological

understanding of the concepts subjectivity and objectivity’ (p. 18); yet by rethinking them in terms of their ontological dimension we come to see them differently.

‘Philosophical hermeneutics can suggest that subjectivity is not a block to greater objectivity but rather a gateway to it. Subjectivity (in the sense of having a distinct

but negotiable point of view) can be regarded as enabling.’ For Davey, it is ‘when our expectancies and “prejudices” are challenged that we begin to learn’ (p. 19).

According to philosophical hermeneutics, interpretation requires that we challenge any and every claim to universality by viewing it against its contextual

background ‘of hidden or forgotten assumptions (Vorverstandnisse)’ (p. 19).

In terms of the subjectivity/objectivity divide, ‘objectivity can no longer be understood as the absence of subjectivity. Objectivity can be rethought

phenomenologically as a critical recovery, as a widening and, perhaps, as a deepening of the enabling assumptions that guide the subject's perspective in the first

place. A subjectivity blind to its formative assumptions is a danger to philosophical hermeneutics and scientific reasoning in that it runs the risk of becoming

nonobjective, that is, of becoming inconsistent with its enabling presuppositions’ (p. 19).

Such a mode of inquiry is a conscious ‘application of part/whole figures of thought’ (p. 19), and the result is a more adequate view of a matter. It is not a method so

much as a style of reasoning, one that is of necessity bound to our human experience of language. It involves a way of working that eschews ‘the will to method’5

5 For Davey ‘will to method’ refers to the orientation of those who rely on a particular methodology to capture a phenomenon. He argues that philosophical hermeneutics avoids

the pitfalls of this approach to research or understanding.

300

which is expressed through apodictic (statemental or propositional) language. The will to method is cast aside simply because ‘there is more to understanding our

linguistic being than understanding the nature of propositions’ (p. 24). (pp. 17-26)

10 Thesis Ten: Philosophical Hermeneutics Is a Negative Hermeneutics

In its wariness of the will to method,

philosophical hermeneutics presents a

negative face: it deems any claim to

universality as just one possible

interpretation among others – ‘a “whole”

body of other interpretations’ (p. 27).

Every interpretation arises out of its own

worldview (Weltanschauung), which is

historically situated and fluid over time.

But any epistemological negativity

attributed to philosophical hermeneutics

is counterbalanced by ontological

affirmation, ‘an ecstatic, almost

untheorizable, awareness of the

inexhaustible possibilities for

understanding’. Ontologically speaking,

declaring what an interpretation is not

contains the germ truth of what it is, ‘one

element of a larger nexus of mutually

related understandings. The affirmation

speculatively illumines the presence of

horizons of meaning which inform but

nevertheless transcend that

interpretation’. (p. 27)

Humans know only too well how a

single experience may be taken,

interpreted in different ways. The

issue is not that different

interpretations need to claim

exclusive jurisdiction over the

interpretation. It is likely that a single

event will have particular layers of

significance for me and different

layers for others. Philosophical

hermeneutics is a philosophy of

experience, and it is only natural that

its perspectives reflect the

fragmenting–compositing routines of

meaning making.

Humans may know deep down that

meaning is particular to the

immediate circumstances but they

may never have thought about it. An

important task of a curriculum of

becoming is to help students develop

their reflexive capability and habit.

Philosophical hermeneutics provides

us with a language, with concepts to

help make sense of making sense.

There is an important place in a

university curriculum of becoming

for both epistemic and ontological

cognition (Greene, Azevedo, &

Torney-Purta, 2008) formation.

Reflecting on my PhD research

journey as I write, I recall a thought

from my past: ‘Layers upon layers is

my life’ (McKenzie, 1996, p. 170). And

another: ‘Being open to the obscurity

before the clarity can be one of the

nicest things’ (McKenzie, 1996, p.

134). Against a backdrop of

academia’s increasingly performative

expectations, I realise that this thesis

took time to gestate, and it was

important for the kind of outcome I

wanted that I practised patience, hope

and awe at its slow unfolding.

Negative–positive, pain–pleasure, are

one.

11 Thesis Eleven: Philosophical Hermeneutics Looks upon Linguistic Being as a ‘Mysterium’

Linguistic being is ‘the source of

interpretation and speculative insight’,

yet it ‘cannot itself be directly

Struggling to express the ineffable is a

defining quality of living life as a

hermeneutic journey and story.

A university curriculum of becoming

has a role in cultivating awe for that

which we do not understand. This is

I will be interested to watch how the

field (a) responds to my curriculum of

becoming framework and its

301

experienced in the modes of

understanding it makes possible.’ It is ‘a

mysterium, an ineffable and irreducible

source of understanding’ (p. 28). While

Gadamer’s speculative theory of

language draws on theologian, Bultmann,

philosophical hermeneutics sees

hermeneutical transcendence not as a

religious phenomenon but a

quintessentially, profoundly human

experience. ‘What is philosophically

invoked as the source of understanding

(linguistic being) can only be approached

through the speculative experience of

language’ (p. 28).

‘Philosophical hermeneutics believes that

precisely because our experiences of

truthfulness, of beauty, or of love cannot

be fully objectified in language, it is

necessary to struggle toward and to seek

out the appropriate words for such

experiences. When such words work,

they open speculative pathways into a

deeper understanding of what the subject

matters of intense experiences both entail

and can, indeed, command of us. To turn

one's back on the difficulty of finding

such words or to refuse the attempt on

the grounds that only apodictic speech is

legitimate, demeans and impoverishes

the complexities of human experience. It

territory that the creative and

performing arts inhabit playfully.

Where to now, curriculum designers?

undergirding hybrid conception of

meaning making, and (b) if this work

does make inroads into practice, how

its instantiations will be researched.

Perhaps a multiplicity of approaches

will have value:

‘If I approach the other dialogically

my approach is not combative:

sharing a concern with the other over

certain subject matters allows,

potentially, the other's viewpoint to

question the adequacy of my own

perspective, to illumine its limits, to

expose its blind points, or to reveal its

advantages. The process is mutual,

for the perspective of the other is also

exposed to my own. In either case,

different perspectives can be enriched

or become "more" by mutual dialogic-

al exposure. The encounter can

promote a mutual transformation of

orientation toward a given subject

matter. The practice of philosophical

hermeneutics does not seek agonistic,

dialectical engagement with the other

[…] Philosophical hermeneutics is

more concerned with the dialogical

encounter with the other and with

that which speaks through the other.

The ethical orientation of hermeneutic

practice entails a quiet modesty.’ (p.68)

302

also spurns in nihilistic fashion what

human life and learning depend on,

namely, the ceaseless endeavor to extend

and deepen experience’ (pp. 30-31). (pp.

27-31)

303

Appendix 3. A cameo version of Wilber’s Twenty

Tenets

Source: Introductory section of chapter 3, The pattern that connects’ (Wilber, 2000, pp. 40-42)

‘We begin with the sciences of wholeness, or dynamic systems theory. The rest of this chapter

and all of chapters 3 and 4 will be devoted to exploring some of the basic conclusions of the

modern evolutionary sciences, with a view toward their possible integration in a larger scheme

of things.

‘What follows are twenty basic tenets (or conclusions) that represent what we might call

"patterns of existence" or "tendencies of evolution" or "laws of form" or "propensities of

manifestation." These are the common patterns or tendencies, recall, that modern systems

sciences have concluded are operative in all three domains of evolution – the physiosphere, the

biosphere', and the noosphere – and tendencies that therefore make this universe a genuine uni-

versum ("one turn"), or an emergent pluralism undergirded by common patterns – the "patterns

that connect." (At this point, I don't want to get involved in intricate arguments over whether

these are "eternal laws" or simply "relatively stable habits" of the universe, and so I will be

satisfied with the latter.)

‘These patterns (listed as the Twenty Tenets below) are drawn from the modern evolutionary

and systems sciences, but I would like to emphasize that they are not confined to those sciences.

As I mentioned earlier, we are now looking at the "half" of those sciences that seem accurate,

and we have yet to examine the half that is extremely questionable (this will begin in chapter 3).

As we will see in great detail, the problem with virtually every attempt to outline the common

patterns found in all three domains of evolution is simply that the patterns are presented in the

language of objective naturalism ("it"-language), and thus they fail miserably when applied to

domains described only in I-language (aesthetics) and we-language (ethics) . Every "unified

systems attempt" that I have seen suffers from this crippling inadequacy.

‘I have been very careful, therefore, to cut these tenets at a level and type of abstraction that is, I

believe, fully compatible with it-, we-, and I-languages (or the true, the good, and the beautiful),

so that the synthesis can proceed nonviolently into domains where previously systems theory

was intent upon subtle reductionism to its own naturalistic and objectifying terms. (All of this

will, as I said, be discussed in detail, beginning in chapter 3.)

‘Finally, a small warning. Many readers have found these tenets to be the most interesting part

of the book; others have found them too abstract and rather boring. If you are of the latter, I

should mention that they will be fleshed out and made obvious, I trust, in the succeeding

chapters. In the meantime, a Reader's Digest version of them might go as follows:

Reality is not composed of things or processes; it is not composed of atoms or quarks; it is not

composed of wholes nor does it have any parts. Rather, it is composed of whole/parts, or

holons.

‘This is true of atoms, cells, symbols, ideas. They can be understood neither as things nor

processes, neither as wholes nor parts, but only as simultaneous whole/parts, so that standard

"atomistic" and "wholistic" attempts are both off the mark. There is nothing that isn't a holon

(upwardly and downwardly forever).

‘Before an atom is an atom, it is a holon. Before a cell is a cell, it is a holon. Before an idea is an

idea, it is a holon. All of them are wholes that exist in other wholes, and thus they are all

whole/parts, or holons, first and foremost (long before any "particular characteristics" are

singled out by us).

‘Likewise, reality might indeed be composed of processes and not things, but all processes are

only processes within other processes – that is, they are first and foremost holons. Trying to

decide whether the fundamental units of reality are things or processes is utterly beside the

point, because either way, they are all holons, and centering on one or the other misses the

304

central issue. Clearly some things exist, and some processes exist, but they are each and all

holons.

‘Therefore we can examine what holons have in common, and this releases us from the utterly

futile attempt to find common processes or common entities on all levels and domains of

existence, because that will never work; it leads always to reductionism, not true synthesis.

‘For example, to say that the universe is composed primarily of quarks is already to privilege a

particular domain. Likewise, at the other end of the spectrum, to say that the universe is really

composed primarily of our symbols, since these are all we really know – that, too, is to privilege

a particular domain. But to say that the universe is composed of holons neither privileges a

domain nor implies special fundamentalness for any level. Literature, for example, is not

composed of subatomic particles; but both literature and subatomic particles are composed of

holons.

‘Starting with the notion of holons, and proceeding by a combination of a priori reasoning and a

posteriori evidence, we can attempt to discern what all known holons seem to have in common.

These conclusions are refined and checked by examining any and all domains (from cellular

biology to physical dissipative structures, from stellar evolution to psychological growth, from

autopoietic systems to spiritual experiences, from the structure of language to DNA

replication).

‘Since all of those domains operate with holons, we can attempt to discern what all these holons

have in common when they interact – what their "laws" or "patterns" or "tendencies" or "habits"

are. And this gives us a list of some twenty tenets, which I have grouped into twelve categories

(some of these are simple definitions, but for convenience I will always refer to the entire list as

"twenty tenets." There is nothing special about twenty; some of these might not hold up, others

can be added, and I have not tried to be exhaustive).

Appendix 4. Wilber on systems theory versus

hermeneutics: Why both are important

Extract, Wilber, K. (2012). The Kosmos Trilogy Vol. II: Excerpt C. The ways we are in this together. ‘Part I. Introduction – Systems theory versus hermeneutics: Why both are important’. Retrieved from http://integrallife.com/integral-post/ways-we-are-together.

[Note: figure numbers changed to match numbering scheme of this thesis]

‘In this Excerpt, we will focus on the collective or communal dimensions of being-in-the-world

(the Lower-Left and Lower-Right quadrants) – the actual nature of intersubjectivity and

interobjectivity – especially as seen in hermeneutics (or first-person interpretation within circles

of “we”) and in systems sciences (or third-person observation of networks of “its”). After some

preliminary suggestions as to the important differences between those approaches – neither can

be reduced to the other nor replace the other – we will then focus the rest of this Excerpt on

hermeneutics and intersubjectivity, and devote most of the next Excerpt to systems theory and

interobjectivity.

‘Primordial Perspectives of Being-in-the-World

‘In this Excerpt, we will take as examples actual occasions (or holons) in each of the four

quadrants, and then consider what those holons look like or feel like from the inside, and contrast

that with what they look or feel like from the outside. In other words, we will be considering

what an “I” looks like from the inside and from the outside; what a “we” looks like from the

inside and from the outside; and so on with an “it” and an “its.” These are schematically

indicated in figure [A1] – the insides and outsides of holons in the four quadrants.

305

Figure A1. Eight ‘native perspectives’ [Wilber]

‘The result, as you can see in figure [A1], is an outline of 8 primal or indigenous perspectives

that all holons have available to them. Far from being some sort of abstract systematization,

these 8 native perspectives turn out to be the phenomenological spaces from which most of the

major forms of human inquiry have been launched. Some of these major modes or paradigms of

inquiry are indicated in figure [A2].

306

Figure A2. Major methodologies [Wilber]

‘We will be discussing all of those items more carefully in the following sections. For now, our

simple introductory point is that by honoring all of the indigenous perspectives of being-in-the-

world, we can more graciously arrive at an Integral Methodological Pluralism that embraces the

many modes of inquiry that human beings are already practicing in any event – and they are

practicing them because these methodologies are “real” by any meaningful definition of that

word. The various methodologies – from empiricism to hermeneutics to behaviorism to systems

theory – are as real as the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives that enact them. The

attempt to privilege any single methodology is simply an attempt to violate the other native

perspectives that support different practices, a violence that any genuine Integralism – guided

by nonexclusion, enfoldment, and enactment – would surely want to avoid.’

307

Appendix 5. Muddy waters, the unknown, and the

Welcome Stranger

Notes by Tony McKenzie for a workshop presented at the Women of the Land Gathering, C. B.

Alexander Agricultural College, Tocal, Paterson NSW, 11 October 1997

. .

Perhaps a good novelist is someone who is half in love with muddy waters, who

knows how to bring to life the blurry world in which our deep perceptions of

things must be questioned; the novel is a world where characters can find their

root definitions of themselves and the world becoming less convincing, and we as

readers share in that disorientation, that existential doubt.

As an adult educator, my intention in this workshop is not to conduct a navel-

gazing exercise, however fruitful that might be; I am interested, rather, in the

human experience of meaning making, of growth in understanding.

. .

This won't be a writer's workshop, but like the novelist who is half in love with

muddy waters, I hope that in this workshop, by digging down into our lifetime

experience, we too will learn to become more respectful of the heart of darkness.

Understanding is something that grows, like approaching headlights. If we

acclimatise to the Realm of Unknowing, adjust to the sensation of being immersed

in the deep end of a lifelong search, our expectation of growth in understanding

will be rewarded.

. .

Our preferred patterns of thought, our acts of visual perception, our strategies for

analysing situations and propositions, are private behaviours that form our public

behaviour: they lie below conscious awareness, yet they define the way we create

a life for ourselves. And they are highly personal: we each interpret the world

differently; we operate in a lifeworld with a population of one. I have a unique

meaning perspective from which to create my sense of self in the world. If we put

100 gagged people in a room and had a method of monitoring and recording their

thoughts, we'd have 100 very different recordings, sweeping through many

varied worlds of thought. In the visible world, we flick in and out of our

immediate physical location, and in and out of our private worlds of thought. My

public face, my public conversations might only give a merest hint of the rich

texture of what goes on in my head over time.

. .

While it is necessary most of the time to concentrate on the matter at hand, we

stand to gain a more global understanding if we cultivate an awareness of our

multiple modes and worlds of thought. We do this by learning to observe

ourselves as if from the outside, and by developing competence as open system

learners. This is the path towards a more accepting understanding of ourselves

and others. We start to understand our own understanding. The idea of growth in

understanding has much in common with the idea of perspective transformation; it

simply asserts that understanding keeps transforming itself, like the snake that

sheds its skin every year.

. .

As we grow in understanding of ourselves, we enrich our understanding of

everything else. The open system learner finds that the line we use to separate

'self’ from 'not-self’, that is, everything else, masks the deeper unity behind all

things. Open system learners accept that growth in understanding is the defining

feature of human kind, and that it is a lifelong process. If growth in

understanding is so central to human experience, perhaps having a name for it

will enable it to enter the thinking of teachers, learners and curriculum planners.

308

. .

We set ourselves the goal of continuously pushing back the frontiers of global

understanding, of letting go of today's sense of everything as tomorrow's questions appear

on the horizon. My noble calling is to progressively open myself to the mystery within and

the mystery without.

. .

Modern life seems to get more and more hectic, and the demands that are placed

on us get heavier and more complicated. There is no better time than now to grant

ourselves the right to some interior space in which to cultivate understanding.

. .

WHY TAKE THESE IDEAS SERIOUSLY?

1. There is evidence to suggest that maturity of global understanding affects

our capacity to deal effectively with certain kinds of problems. This has

been reported in the case of university courses in general systems theory

(Salner, 1986). On the level of personal human experience, perhaps we can

all recall occasions when, despite our best efforts, something just wouldn't

make sense, we couldn't put the pieces together in a coherent, meaningful

way. According to open system learning theory, growth in understanding

offers an ever wider frame of reference in which to analyse and make the

jigsaw whole.

. .

2. Growth in understanding involves more than sharpening our intellect

and reasoning skills. It involves a special kind of thought, thought that

broods in the Realm of Unknowing, a space in which thought, feeling and

intent are one. The solutions it offers are 'whole person ' solutions, robust

solutions, because they are responses to our deepest needs.

. .

3. Theories and philosophies are sometimes judged by what they can

deliver. Because understanding may be cultivated by deep reflection on

our sense of self in the world, it is a learning opportunity that is available to

all. Open system learning can enrich our lives whether we're engaged in

formal education or not, which is timely for a world where formal

educational opportunities are beyond reach for more and more people. It

is a theory and philosophy of human liberation in times of growing

competition, inequality and materialism.

. .

4. Open system learning is more than a theory of learning; it is a way of

approaching the world, pursued over a lifetime. In this light, lifelong

learning becomes more than a buzzword of governments and institutions.

In my special private space, I meet the Welcome Stranger, the Open

System Learner within. In this space I discover a hope, a will and a way to

renew my understanding ... transform my personal being ... recreate my

public self. Isn't this where I begin to change the world?

. .

The Welcome Stranger walks towards us out of the mist. Understanding is

emergent. ‘Could there be more to me than I thought?’ The answer is self-

fulfilling.

Your task. As you read each segment, record your immediate reaction in the box

provided.

I'm very positive/I'd like to think more about it

I'm mildly positive/I'd need to think more about it

I'm unsure

I'm mildly negative/this doesn't really interest me

I strongly disagree/I feel strongly against this

309

Appendix 6. Davey on Sprachlichkeit, meaning-in-itself

and the meaningful

Excerpts from ’Keeping the word in play’, Chapter 4, Understanding’s disquiet, Davey (2006, pp. 201-203)

‘If language were like music and could be conducted, then vivace (keep it moving,

keep it lively) would surely be written at the top of its score. However, the issue here

involves a more fundamental equation of stasis and death. Because Hamacher and

Derrida equate meaning-in-itself with a transcendent beyond the contingency of

language, they nurture a false opposition which, though they inflict it on philosophical

hermeneutics, is not in fact found within it. When Gadamer wrote, “Being that can be

understood is language” (Gadamer, 1989, p. 474), he implied that language is a totality

of meaning and that, furthermore, this totality no longer demarcated the boundary

between language and world. Language and all that it holds is grasped as world. The

totality of this language-world can neither be transcended nor brought into expression.

Nevertheless, it is implied in every linguistic expression and, furthermore, lends itself

to an infinity of interpretations. The transcendent is not that which surpasses language.

It is not an “impossible,” as both Derrida and Hamacher imply. Rather, the

transcendent is taken back into language and is inherent in every linguistic expression.

As such, the transcendent disappears into an inexplicable but immanent totality of

meaning. At this point philosophical hermeneutics adopts a position quite different to

those of its critics. Meaning in the sense of a fixed totality becomes self-effacing. The

more any hermeneutic quest seeks out meaning as something in-itself, the more the

quest for meaning dissipates or defers itself […] within the universality of the

language-world, the more a specific interpretative tendency seeks out “meaning,” the

more it will collide with different and unforeseen horizons of meaning. In other words,

it is precisely the impossibility of “meaning” within the world of Sprachlichkeit

[linguisticality] that permits the emergence of the meaningful. The fact that meaning

can never be resolved into an in-itself permits a space in which the event of

meaningfulness (the collision of different interpretations) can arise. The absence of

meaning-in-itself opens a space in which different forms of interpretation can mix and

collide (Davey, 2006, p. 201). The vitality of inhabited, contingent meaning derives,

then, from an ineliminable emptiness which is simultaneously being filled and emptied

by the meeting of different hermeneutic perspectives. Iser forwards a similar

argument. There is no essential subject matter underlying interpretation. For a subject

matter to function within a contemporary horizon it has to be translated from the

receiving language into the language in which it will be applied. This opens an

ineliminable space between the understanding of how a subject matter operates in one

linguistic register and how it might be applied in another. However, as we have

already implied, it is not just translation that perpetuates such a space. Understanding

too is dependent upon the existence of a space it can never close. This reinforces the

claim that the emergence of the meaningful is dependent upon the absence of meaning.

‘If meaning were realizable in itself, if meaning could be completed and made

final, nothing more need be said about it. The “to and fro” of further articulation and

explication would end. The hermeneutical space of the in-between would be filled.

There would be no difference between what had been understood of a subject matter

and what had yet to be understood of that subject matter. The vitality of the word, and

310

with it the motions of understanding, would cease. The realm of meaning-in-itself

would, in other words, be uninhabitable. What makes the realm of lived, contingent

meaningfulness habitable is precisely what prevents it from being a realm of meaning

in itself. It is a space that is neither full nor empty but one that is constantly filled and

emptied by different configurations of meaning. Any attempt to refine our

understanding of what has come forth into that space seeks in effect to close it. Yet

such attempts invariably make even starker the connections of the precise meaning

pursued with other networks of meaning. Thus, the anticipated meaning dissolves in

prominence as other unanticipated meanings come forth. The dialectic of the word is

kept in motion by the constant inhalation and exhalation of associations of meaning.

The centrifugal and centripetal aspects of language uphold the vitality of the word. It is

the inherent instability of linguistic meaning that allows different configurations of the

meaningful to simultaneously come forth and pass away.’ (Davey, 2006, p. 202)

‘Meaningfulness is constituted by the constant play of linguistic Entgehen [avoid,

escape, evade] and Vergehen [vanish, slide, elapse, wither, decay]. No longer should the

flux of the meaningful be conceived of as a purgatorial state that imprisons language

between an unrealizable future meaning-in-itself and an unredeemable past meaning.

To suppose that language is stretched between the being of an unrealized meaning-in-

itself and the nonbeing of lost or dissolved meaning is, once again, to impose on

language a schema of opposites more characteristic of the rigidities of reason. It is to

succumb to that nihilism which denies the vitality of inhabited meaning by maintaining that the

realization or redemption of language lies in an unattainable state of completeness.

Philosophical hermeneutics resists such nihilism by insisting upon the continuous

fusion of genesis and extinction within language. It suggests that deconstruction's

approach to language is in fact insufficiently dialectical. Deconstruction privileges the

centrifugal dimension of interpretation and overlooks the centripetal movement, a

privileging that once again disrupts the vitality of the word.’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 203)1

1 Davey continues:

Deconstructive thought clearly emphasizes the centrifugal aspects of language. The more we try

to retrieve what are imagined as past unities of meaning, the more we fragment them and

capture only their traces. Equally, the more we move toward an anticipated meaning of a text,

the more we dissolve what we would move nearer to. Such forms of analysis seemingly pose a

challenge to hermeneutics because of their denial of meaning-in-itself. However, this denial

threatens hermeneutics only if it is assumed that the Holy Grail of philosophical hermeneutics is

meaning-in-itself. Once this assumption is rebuffed, philosophical hermeneutics is far from

being disrupted. As we have contended, philosophical hermeneutics is not in quest of the end

interpretation but in pursuit of what interpretation does, to wit, open unanticipated, overlooked,

or new modes of meaningful involvement with a subject matter. The concern of philosophical

hermeneutics is with achieving a plausible case for meaningfulness, not with making claims

about meaning-in-itself. Returning to the point, why does deconstruction assume that meaning

only recedes into an unrecoverable past or points toward an unrealizable future? Does not the

notion of inhabited meaning or meaningfulness suggest something contrary to this assumption?

If the notion of lived meaning is conceived as a temporary and illuminating configuration of

meaning, the past and future need not be understood as points that recede into the what-was

and the yet-to-come. As we shall see, because a configuration of meaning has become past does

not mean that certain of its aspects can no longer travel toward us in the present. (Davey, 2006,

pp. 203-204)

311

Appendix 7. The Twenty Memories exercise

Three documents are presented here:

1. The Twenty Memories exercise briefing

2. Twenty Memories – an exercise in classifying moments of experience

[Instructions and materials – playing cards not included]

3. Twenty Memories exercise – Next steps memo.

The Twenty Memories exercise briefing1

Tony (A D) McKenzie PhD Student, School of Community Health, Charles Sturt University Teaching and Staff Development Coordinator, Learning and Teaching Services, Charles Sturt University 5 June 2011

I referred to this study in the CSU What’s new newsletter by the caption,

‘professional identity meets sense of self’

A few thoughts to put this study in context:

Why the caption, ‘professional identity meets sense of self’? CSU projects itself as a university for the professions, so it is only to be expected that both EFPI2 and RIPPLE3

1 My thesis title: Meaning making capability for 21st century university education: case studies in textual

composition, communication and interpretation. This is an interpretive paradigm research project

following a philosophical hermeneutic/reflexive hermeneutic approach. 2 One of the CSU Education for Practice Institute’s seven key research areas is ‘understanding

professional practice and professional identity development’ (Higgs, 2010, p. 14).

3 The professional identity construct and its situatedness in a specific institutional or

professional practice context is articulated on the website of the CSU Institute for

Professional Practice, Learning and Education (RIPPLE):

Professional identities and cultures: Subjectivity, the body and space

RIPPLE researchers are interested in these questions as questions related to professional

identity, and in relation to the professional cultures in or against which professional

identities are formed and maintained.

RIPPLE researchers recognise that identities relate in significant ways to professional

cultures that are associated with particular practices and institutions, or particular

professional practice fields. They understand that professional cultures include

residual, dominant and emergent elements, all in dynamic interplay. They also

recognise that professional cultures involve long-established meanings and values that

are sedimented into practice traditions, alongside new and emergent meanings and

values that contest, modify and sometimes supplant those established positions. They

are also aware that institutions and practice fields may create conditions under which

local professional cultures can be, to differing degrees, both healthy and poisonous.

Thus, for example, RIPPLE researchers are investigating issues concerning the

bureaucratisation, technologisation, de-moralisation and de-professionalisation of some

professional work.

312

advocate and conduct research into aspects of professional identity. But the professional identity question also clearly has relevance in practice-based education (PBE). How are we to understand the process by which our students progressively assimilate into the culture, the ways of knowing, doing and being characteristic of a particular field of practice before and after graduation?

Cusick (2001) and Denshire (2002) both consider ways in which personal factors influence one’s professional practice in the field. If so, what might this imply for PBE?

The idea of professional identity has already captured attention in CSU curriculum renewal discourses (see for example EFPI, 2010, principle 7), but ‘sense of self’ is a more elusive idea. Rom Harré (1983), makes a distinction between ‘person’ and ‘self’ (p.76). My personal identity is what is publicly recognised. My credit card or university staff number validates my personal existence. I pay rates – ergo, I exist. But ‘selves are psychological individuals’ expressed in a tacit, holistic synthesis (my words) of ‘perceptions, feelings and beliefs’ (Harré, 1983, p. 76). While ‘self-concept’ is essentially understood in the literature as a belief system, ‘sense of self’ connotes how I experience that self-concept (p.78). ‘Self’ refers to ‘the personal unity I take myself to be, my singular inner being, so to speak’. For Harré, ‘while “person” is an empirical concept which distinguishes beings in a public–collective realm, “self” (in the sense I am using it ...) is a theoretical construct acquired in the course of social interaction (Harré, 1983, p. 26).

I developed the Twenty Memories exercise in the nineteen nineties as part of an action research inquiry to explore participants’ ‘sense of self’ within a larger inquiry into adult vocational education practice. In my present PhD research I continue where I left off then, asking what educational dividend might be gained by acknowledging sense of self as a valid and crucial element of professional and personal formation, of ‘self-realisation’, in the university curriculum.

Another defining idea in my master’s thesis was Mezirow and associates’ definition of meaning perspectives:

Meaning perspectives, or generalised sets of habitual expectation, act as perceptual and conceptual codes to form, limit, and distort how we think, believe, and feel and how, what, when, and why we learn. They have cognitive, affective, and conative [wanting, willing] dimensions. These habits of expectation filter both perception and comprehension (Mezirow, 1991, p. 34).

The twenty memories exercise in the present study will allow us to experience from the inside the uniqueness of each participant’s meaning perspective. We will have an opportunity to consider together whether conscious awareness of one’s uniqueness as a meaning maker might also deserve attention in university curriculum design.

As I made sense of my reading and reflecting in my master’s, I adopted the idea of ‘landmark-spotting’ as a metaphor for meaning making . As in visual perception, so in meaning making: we individually determine what is significant in the field of view. In this

RIPPLE researchers are investigating social subjectivities in professional education, and

exploring the various sites of professional life, or of professional practice more

generally – including the body as an intimate site of practice.

Further, this means, among other things, attending carefully to the places and spaces of

professional practice, learning and education, and to the question of scale. Work is also

underway on transitions, both literal and symbolic – that is, movement between and

across professional sites and their associated meanings, values and ways of knowing –

which always involves negotiations of identity and culture.

Source: http://www.csu.edu.au/research/ripple/about_us/professional_identities.htm

313

sense landmarks are recreated each time a visitor takes in a landscape, and meaning is made each time someone intuits or judges what counts as the most important thing on the page or in the experience.

Three worthwhile questions:

o If I could develop a richer awareness of my individual meaning making habits and preferences would I be in a better position to engage critically in the world?

o Are my individual meaning making habits and preferences likely to be associated with my individual life experience?

o Might students stand to gain something in their journeys of professional and personal formation by reflecting on the influence of their respective cultures and life stories on how they make sense of themselves and the world?

References

Cusick, A. (2001). Personal frames of reference in professional practice. In J. Higgs & A. Titchen (Eds.), Practice knowledge and expertise in the health professions (pp. 91-95). Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann.

Denshire, S. (2002). Reflections on the confluence of personal and professional. Australian Occupational Therapy Journal, 49, 212-216.

EFPI. (2010). Guidelines for good practice in professional and practice-based education (Version 1: May 19). The Education For Practice Institute, Charles Sturt University, Sydney.

Harré, R. (1983). Personal being - a theory for individual psychology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Higgs, J. (2010). The Education For Practice Institute Three Year Report 2007-2009. The

Education For Practice Institute, Charles Sturt University, North Parramatta. Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative dimensions of adult learning. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass.

314

Twenty Memories – an exercise in classifying moments of experience

Material supplied:

• Instructions (below). • 1 master sheet for you to write down your brainstorming reflections about your life

story (final page). • 1 set of 20 Memories playing cards.

Instructions

Please read through all the following instructions before commencing the activity.

Stage 1

Recall 20 or more events in your life, important or at least typical of your life experience .

For each event, write down:

• a short title for the event (example: My first day at school) • a comment that you might have made on that occasion, or a thought that might have

passed through your mind.

Use the master sheet to record your ideas as they come to mind. Later you may have to prune the number of your events back to 20. In the initial stages, write down all the contending events in the order in which they spring to mind.

Tip. What kind of thought or comment? At this stage, try to form your comment or thought from your world at the time. Try to keep your present perspective and scale of values at bay. The comment could relate to the surface level of the experience; or, it may show some tendency towards self-reflection, but only if – and only as far as – you were capable of it at the time.

Ponder point. Was I capable of self-reflection of this kind, and was it a common thing for me to do at that stage of my life? Our challenge in this activity will be to make an intuitive judgment about the gap between our reflective capacity, then, and now. Playing Twenty Memories will give us a way of considering this question.

Tip. ‘Wide' and `narrow' band events. A narrow band event is one that happened in a particular time and place. A wide band event is more like an experience that occurred over a period of time; it might be a series of recurring episodes that merge together in memory. You may choose events of any band width, provided they stand out from the background as a distinct pattern in your life experience.

Tip. How open should you be? Your master sheets are your own private working documents. However, you will also be writing an event title – or a code name known only to yourself – on each card, which will be returned to Tony. If you choose to filter out material because it is too personal, or if you decide to identify only the surface of a deeper experience, the important thing is to be reflexively aware of the processes at work behind your editing decisions.

Stage 2

Now decide which 20 events you wish to include in this mini photo album-like summary of your life. List the events in the order in which they came to mind.

Refer to the 20 cards provided. On the top of each numbered card, write the title of the event, or a secret code name that will be meaningful to you. Use a separate card for each event.

315

Stage 3

Now we will use the Fields of Judgment Chart on each card to make comparisons between the events we have chosen. There are seven qualities listed in the chart. It is now time to try to compare – or rather, recognise the shades of difference in – your chosen life events.

For each field of judgment, rank the events or memories in terms of the criterion specified. Detailed instructions are given under the heading of each field of judgment below. Read through the rest of these instructions before you begin; please make sure you read the two guidelines that follow the fields of judgment.

Fields of judgment

Field A. Chronology

Sort the events in the order in which they occurred in your life (to the best of your memory). Lay the cards out in chronological order. For the earliest event, write the rank number `1' in the space provided for field A. (You have `ranked' this event as first in the series.) Fill in the rank numbers 2, 3, 4 et cetera in the field A space on each of your cards.

When putting events in chronological order, wide band events should be ranked on the basis of the mid-point: an event lasting six years is centred on the third year.

Field B. Clarity rating

In field B you will classify your events according to the degree of clarity or vividness with which each event stands out from surrounding events. (If your first day at school was much like your first month at school, it may be less vivid than the day you got engaged.) Sort the events in order of vividness, from low to high clarity, and record the rank order of events in the space for field B.

Field C. Timefast rating

‘Timefast’ is like colourfast: the colour (or the memory) has not faded. In field C you will classify your events in terms of your present assessment of the accuracy of each memory. Has each event weathered the passage of time very well in your memory? Record the timefast ranking of events from low to high timefast values.

Field D. Satisfaction rating

In field D you will classify your events by the amount of satisfaction you gain now from each recollection. Lay the cards out from low to high satisfaction gained, and number each card in the space provided for field D.

Field E. Passion rating

In field E, arrange your events in order of level of emotion expended at the time (to the best of your memory). Try to give an `emotional temperature reading' for each event. Sort and number events from low emotion (cool-headed) to high emotion (warm-blooded) experiences. You are not grading experiences into good or bad categories. Note also that calmness is a `low emotion' state. So, deeply moving experiences that created a feeling of inner peace will score a low temperature reading.

Field F. Importance rating

In field F, rank these events according to their importance in shaping you as a person.

316

Field G. Influence rating

In field G, arrange your events according to the amount of influence you had on the unfolding situation.

Guidelines

• Dealing with complex experiences. Each field of judgment deals with a distinct quality of experience, but as we know, human experience is multi-layered. If the intensity of an experience is lessened by any factor, slide the event towards the middle of the distribution. Example: You remember pushing an intensely unpleasant experience out of everyday consciousness. You may give the event a `high passion' rating; or, you may rank it closer to the middle of the passion field because, in repressing the experience, it became (for the time being) less unpleasant.

• Events that come a dead heat. You may find that you can't always give a consecutive ranking of 20 items, that on occasion, two or more items are inseparable. In such cases, give the items an `equal place' ranking. Example: You can't separate five events in the middle of the range. Instead of ranking them 8–12, rank them all ‘=8’. Note that the next item must be ranked ‘13’.

This approach can simplify the ranking task. But also, by grouping items together, we may make connections we've never made before; this can lead to new levels of self-understanding.

317

Events of a lifetime master sheet

Event | Event title | Key thought or comment at the time

A _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

B _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

C _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

D _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

E _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

F _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

G _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

H _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

I _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

J _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

K _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

L _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

M _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

N _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

O _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

P _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

Q _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

R _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

S _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

T _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

U _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

V _______________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________

318

Twenty Memories exercise – Next steps Your name:

Seeking a process that will suit everyone – please send your responses to A, B & C to Tony ASAP

A. I suggested in the information sheet for this study that

Participants will ... be given an opportunity to join a voluntary small group discussion with other participants to reflect together on the exercise and potential applications of such approaches to foster self awareness among students and staff.

While waiting for several participants to send in their cards or charts I have been thinking about the kinds of questions I would like to ask you, and I realise that a one hour meeting probably won’t allow the group to delve thoroughly into the 11 draft questions I have listed at the bottom of this document. Most of the questions could be handled either in a group discussion or by individuals responding in writing. (Question 3 would need to be amended if we decide not to have a sharing session.) Could you please indicate your preferences about the next step:

Please tick i, ii, iii OR iv:

i. I would like an opportunity to share my experience with other participants and

hear about theirs.

ii. I would prefer to respond in writing to a set of questions. iii. My preference is to have an initial sharing then an opportunity to respond in

writing.

iv. Other. What?

_____________________________________________________

B. Are there any questions in the list below (questions 1 – 11) that you would prefer not

to be asked? Please note: there will be no pressure on you in the sharing session (if held) to respond to any question. A question will be posed and participants will be free to comment or not to comment. _______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

________________

C. Proposed question 10 below refers to ‘a compilation chart anonymously showing participants’ clarity and timefast rankings’. Would you agree to your rankings of these two fields being included in a chart to be shared with other participants? Your memory captions would not be included. Creating this chart will allow us to ponder on and critique the inclusion of these two fields in the exercise. It means we can consider whether the distinction between them is meaningful and worthwhile.

319

Would you agree to your rankings of these two fields being included in a chart to be

shared with other participants? YES NO

Draft questions for our sharing session or individual comment – please don’t answer them

yet

The Twenty Memories exercise and you

Note: admitting to ambivalence or to needing more time is perfectly in order!

1. Did you have trouble making sense of or using any fields of judgment (clarity etc.)?

Which one/s? What was the problem?

2. Are there any two ranked fields which, if placed side by side, appear to hold particular

significance in illuminating your private sense of self, whether or not you can say how

or why? OR, does the exercise as a whole tell you anything new about your private

self, or reveal something in a new light?

3. How would you describe your approach to selecting 20 memories from your lifetime’s

experience? Compare your approach to that of other participants. Does your chart feel

more like a mini-biography or more like an account or exploration of who you are? In

hindsight, if you were commencing the exercise now, might you approach the task

differently?

4. Has this exercise helped you reflect on the values that underpin your interpretation of

yourself and the world? Can you say something about this?

5. Can you give two words or phrases that describe the way you feel about participating

in this research study?

The Twenty Memories exercise and the curriculum

6. Do you believe that people, like students preparing for work and living, stand to gain

anything by:

a. spending some time to better understand/appreciate themselves? Why or

why not?

b. reflecting on their personal meaning making biases in their studies and their

lives? Why or why not?

7. Do you agree with the idea implicit in this study that the 20 memories exercise or

something similar could be used to foster students’ sense of self somewhere in an

undergraduate degree program?

8. In my theorising for my PhD I have developed a loose family of ideas that I am calling a

‘curriculum of becoming mindspace’. One of the propositions is that the

undergraduate curriculum should aim to cultivate students’ sense of self as the basis

for moral judgment and personal agency.

320

a. How foreign-sounding is this value statement to you?

Very foreign-sounding

Moderately foreign-sounding

Not at all foreign-sounding

b. In what circumstances (in what kind of world) might you and your teaching

colleagues consider cultivating students’ sense of self somewhere within the

curriculum (e.g. as a private and optional activity in an ePortfolio ‘personal

learning environment’)? If you already aim to achieve this in your teaching,

could you say how you go about it?

c. In the Twenty Memories exercise briefing document (provided as an optional

pre-exercise reading) I referred to the two constructs, ‘professional identity’

and ‘sense of self’. I suggested that while professional identity is a recognised

concept at CSU, sense of self tends not to appear in curriculum

documentation. Would you be willing and able to join a conversation with me

and other participants at a convenient time to explore possible associations

between professional identity and sense of self in a theory of a university

curriculum of becoming? YES NO

9. Are there any aspects of your experience of the exercise not touched on in these

questions that you would like to draw attention to?

Improving the Twenty Memories exercise?

10. [If participants agree to share their rankings – refer to item C in the shaded box at the

top of this document] Consider the compilation chart anonymously showing

participants’ clarity and timefast rankings. What does this chart say to you?

11. How could the 20 memories exercise be improved or extended?

321

Appendix 8. A curriculum of becoming: Potential

responses, possible ways forward (detail)

Potential responses to curriculum of becoming thinking

Here I foreshadow and briefly reflect on possible responses that my framework might

encounter from university management and course teams. I also consider the degree of

acceptance that a curriculum of becoming might gain from students.

REFLECTIONS RADIATING FROM POTENTIAL RESPONSES FROM STAFF

Imagine with me a staff seminar in which I as presenter make the following comment

to members of a course team:

In hermeneutic dialogue, ‘the other’ [the position of one’s

interlocutor] holds possibilities that are presently not our own, but

therein lies the possibility of future growth in understanding

(Davey, 2006, pp. 7-8). Developing such a disposition in a

community of learners (students and teachers) relies in part on our

cultivating patience and humility, qualities not always highly

exhibited and prized in timetable-driven education, so enacting a

university curriculum of becoming may need something of a

change of heart and mind and practice. This would require some

reform to a university’s setting in life and lifeworld, to the extent

that we can influence them.1

This short extract in fact comes un-edited from the Prologue to this thesis. In our

imagination exercise just now I did not indicate whether anything was done before my

seminar presentation to prepare the audience for it, or what I may have said before the

above quote. The vignette highlights two aspects of the question of how this vision

might be communicated to the field.

1. Language and ideas. My thesis has traversed a wide field indeed. Note

how ‘field’, because of the known integrity and boundedness of its referent

(the terrain it refers to), subtly influences the reader to view this ‘thesis-as-

text’ as an integrated ‘thesis-as-position’, to imply that the thesis argument

has integrity. To the extent that this is so, communicating curriculum of

becoming thinking should on one level of discourse acknowledge the

complementarity/harmony/congruence between my two research

phenomena and their respective research products (Figure E1). However

this does not imply that the curriculum of becoming framework cannot be

1 See wordflow, p. 273.

322

laid out to course teams before getting too caught up in the hybrid

conception of meaning making and its corollaries concerning the so-called

epistemological–ontological–spiritual journey of living hermeneutically.

We are all wonderfully complex beings. We may gainfully ask what each

seminar listener’s ‘pressing need of the day/year/lifetime’ was, as they

listened to my imaginary presentation, and how that need – or all the

listener’s needs, layered,

infinitely receding – might

have influenced the manner

of his or her listening.2 The

course team in the vignette

comprised individuals with unique lifeworlds and meaning perspectives,

and so long as the language I used for my presentation was carefully

chosen, some members might have preferred to hear something about my

conception of meaning making before hearing about my curriculum

framework. Others (maybe the time-poorest staff) might have liked me to

move directly to the framework.

Communicating the import of this thesis to the field will find its own

expression in its own time. I take heart from the view that my framework

for curriculum transformation will appeal to the field to the extent that it

addresses what is perceived to be a pressing need. Some elements may be

found to hold greater practical value in some settings, and others in others.

Some elements may need to wait longer than others for take-up. The whole

vision will perhaps forever remain a Utopian crystallisation, but perhaps

even that will contribute to others’ dreamings. Needless to say, this ‘liquid

blueprint’ framework will continue to morph after this thesis is presented. I

wait in hope to see a full implementation.

2. The demands of openness. Perhaps the need for ‘radical ontological

openness’ (Chapter 7) can be more vividly conveyed to colleagues in the

adage, ‘Being open to the obscurity before the clarity can be one of the

nicest things’ (McKenzie, 1996, p. 134), but some staff may be equally closed

to philosophical and poetic language, while others will lean one way or the

other. In addition to the language question, there is also the substantive

issue of colleagues’ capacity or inclination for openness. Doing curriculum

renewal in a triple hologenesis way (Figure 7.3) asks all course team

2 Fictional invention allows us to simulate lived experience and in that simulation to catch glimpses of

how it is, or at least how it feels.

Our needs radiate from the continuous present in all six dimensions of our humanness, and although we are skilled at focusing on the matter at hand, they are an intrinsic part of us and shape our being-in-the-world.

323

members for continuous reciprocal openness to support the team’s

transformation into a community of belonging. Embarking on life as a

hermeneutic journey does involve radical ontological openness. The

reassuring thing is that we can learn openness. As we open, we learn and

become confident to open a little more.

The extract from my imaginary seminar made reference to reforming a university’s

setting in life and lifeworld, to the extent that we can influence them. I touched on this

idea in a 2007 submission to a review of the CSU learning and teaching professional

development program of the day:

In 2006 Charles Sturt University adopted a vision of institutional

transformation. The University strategy and plans 2007-2011

declaration (Charles Sturt University, 2006) elaborates the many

dimensions of change that will be needed if the institution is to

realise its vision to become ‘a national university for excellence in

education for the professions, strategic and applied research and

flexible delivery of learning and teaching’. The metamorphosis

challenge is simply a way of thinking about the multiple

dimensions of change as they are being experienced by the

University workforce. The heralded change will (or needs to) be a

metamorphosis because the vision will only be realised – some of

us, notably the Vice Chancellor, believe – as our ways of thinking and

doing are transformed with all the structural and cultural changes in

progress: the transformation is us. (McKenzie, 2007) (italics added)

‘The transformation is us’ encapsulates the ethos of the triple hologenesis vision of

curriculum renewal and the broader notion of a curriculum of becoming, and is fully at

home in a philosophical hermeneutic view of the world.

REFLECTIONS RADIATING FROM POTENTIAL RESPONSES FROM STUDENTS

Generation Me students (born since 1970) ‘like to know exactly what

they need to do to earn good grades and they become stressed

when given ambiguous instructions. Spell out the rules and

requirements carefully, and you will get better results from

Generation Me.’ (Twenge, 2009, p. 403)

There have been numerous studies (for example Greenberger [2008], Jovic [2006],

Strauss [1997]) that point to shifts in styles of ‘presence’, including attitudes, interests

and study preferences, in undergraduate students from pre- to post-1970 born cohorts.

324

This confirms impressions from experience of teachers today, not infrequently heard in

lunch-room conversations. This comment might be typical:

Our students increasingly seem to be time jealous and want only

the executive summary of our lectures and of their texts – they

increasingly want the quick and easy path, preferably by-passing

the feeling brain. Truthfully one student said to me at the beginning

of this session – ‘Just tell me what the exams questions are – I’m too

busy to read all this stuff’. Similarly our students are being

established to be more narcissistic and less empathic in the last

decade or so – as assessed by themselves and by others. (M. D.

Simpson, personal communication, 16 June 2013)

Potentially, therefore, contemporary students could be even harder to convince

than academics of the intrinsic value of committing time for reflection on philosophical

questions relating to self-identity and purpose in life. The Twenty Memories exercise

conducted with CSU staff in 2011 provided a clear message that the exercise as

presented would not suit young undergraduate students and would be too risky to

attempt.

I noted above my view that my framework for curriculum transformation will

appeal to the field – to researchers, teaching practitioners and university leadership –

to the extent that it addresses what is perceived to be a pressing need. The same

applies with students. We are unlikely to see students join the hermeneutic treadmill

for its own reward, especially in western cultures. On the other hand, the glass half-full

interpretation of the 2011 iteration of the Twenty Memories exercise offers support for

making space somewhere in the curriculum for personal growth related to sense of

self. I take this up in the next section.

Ways forward

Four pathways that arise from the broad sweep of thesis themes are sufficiently

developed to raise at this time. They are responses to a question posed in Chapter 5: are

there any problems or obstacles in professional education curriculum practice today that my

curriculum of becoming framework might help overcome?

THE TWENTY MEMORIES EXERCISE

In the discussion just concluded, I undertook to explore if and how the Twenty

Memories exercise might have a role somewhere in the curriculum to support personal

growth related to sense of self. A scan of the three documents in Appendix 7 at this

point will give the reader a sense of this tool.

325

There were two strong messages flowing from participants in the 2011 iteration of

the exercise. The first is that the exercise is an effective way to help more mature people

– such as members of a course team – to reflect on their own sense of self as it relates to

their own life stories, and by extension, and on a metacognitive plane, to reflect on

their own meaning making experience, that is, make sense of their sense making over

their lives. This latter development can take participants into the dimension of personal

epistemology by inviting them to conceptualise their own lives as journeys in

epistemological development – journeys in understanding what is true or reliable

knowledge. But that’s not all. Because the exercise is to landmark 20 memories out of a

lifetime’s experience and to rank them according to seven different ‘fields of judgment’

– for example, importance rating, ranking events or memories ‘according to their

importance in shaping you as a person’, i.e., how you see yourself today – participants

catch glimpses of their own uniqueness because of the uniqueness of their meaning

perspectives, which are coloured in each case by the individual’s preferred meaning

making style and history. Arising from the process of private reflection and group

sharing of experience, participants can have private illuminations of the mystery that is

the hermeneutic journey of living, a journey that is epistemological–ontological–

spiritual because the knowing is reflexively self-referential: we grow in global

understanding by seeking an ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in

the world. (As expected, different aspects of the exercise were significant for different

participants, and a range of responses was given. One concern was the requirement to

rank memories rather than rate them on a simple scale; scientists in the group were

suspicious of this aspect because they knew they could not replicate the fine

distinctions required in the exercise if they attempted the exercise again. Others did not

view this as the focus of the exercise, although I commented that repeating the exercise

every five or ten years may offer one fresh illuminations. The phases of individual

reflection and optional group sharing did not realise all the insights described above;

thus my comments here describe the potential of the exercise rather than what it

demonstrably achieved in 2011.)

The second message was that the exercise as presented to participants should not

be given to young undergraduate students. There were two concerns. One is that the

exercise has potential to encourage participants of any age to open up old wounds,

which could be psychologically harmful to the individual concerned. (This possibility

was acknowledged and dealt with in the ethics application, and is why I only included

staff members in the exercise.3 One staff member who initially showed interest in

participation withdrew when she learned what the exercise entailed; she said her own

past was too painful to revisit.) The second issue was the effect of one’s maturity on the

3 Two participants were mature age higher degree students but they also had teaching roles.

326

likely depth of one’s engagement with the task. Participants did not believe first year

students in general4 would be capable of the deep reflexivity required to draw personal

development benefit from the exercise; indeed, some students would not have the life

experience to allow them to richly understand some of the language used.

Participants did however agree on the value of something like the Twenty

Memories exercise to help students get in touch with their inner selves. There was

general support for my proposition that self-identity is something we could all

profitably nurture, and as I intimated in Chapter 6, Frank saw value in reflecting on the

relationship between

professional identity and

sense of self. Several

others agreed. Two

participants noted that

aspects of the exercise

(themes covered or

experiences) are touched on in their courses. Some participants suggested a kind of

phasing in strategy where first or second year students draw on a handful of life

memories as the basis for an experiential activity; however one participant commented

that the value of the exercise for him arose from the complexity of having to deal with

a larger number of memories/events.

I will rework the exercise before using it again. Meanwhile, in terms of my

argument, given the outcome of the 2011 iteration of the exercise, I rephrase an earlier

question: are there any problems or obstacles in professional education curriculum

practice today that the Twenty Memories exercise might help overcome? Using Twenty

Memories in its current form (with some adjustments) as a professional development

activity has potential to help members of a course team find a common language for

understanding the fourth field of interest in a curriculum of becoming: a deep sense of

self as a foundation for moral judgment and personal agency (McKenzie et al., 2009).

Reaching shared understanding and consensus on that is part of the intentional

metamorphosis of a course team into a course community of belonging and part of the

hologenesis of a curriculum of becoming.

THE UNCERTAINTY EFFLORESCENCE METAPHOR

Uncertainty – a fester of our time, or lure? Barnett and Davey both have highly attuned

interests in uncertainty and the contestability of any and every language anchorage.

Barnett

4 Comments applied particularly to internal students who at CSU tend to have come to university

straight from high school, rather than to distance education students who are overwhelmingly

mature age.

‘How are we to understand the process by which our students progressively assimilate into the culture, the ways of knowing, doing and being characteristic of a particular field of practice before and after graduation?’

‘Might students stand to gain something in their journeys of professional and personal formation by reflecting on the influence of their respective cultures and life stories on how they make sense of themselves and the world?’ (McKenzie, 2011c)

327

surveys the important raisons d'être that universities have looked

towards to help them reconceptualise their future role in society,

now that their claims over knowledge have blurred5. Some have

tried substituting economic activity, education for work as their

raisons d'être; some have turned to ideas of democracy, justice,

citizenship and community; some, to propositions about realising

human potential; some, to the role of critique; while others embrace

the pursuit of emancipation. But he finds, on inspection, that all

these grand themes are inadequate rationales for the university of

the future. They are inadequate because

they rely on some sureness, some sense of stability and some

sense of the enduring. No such stability or durability is

available to us in the modern world. Whether in terms of ideas,

of values, of what is to count as knowledge, or of our own

sense of ourselves as having secure personal identities, we

have to accept that we are in an age of change and uncertainty

(Barnett, 2000, p. 58). (McKenzie, 2000, pp. 206-207)

For Davey on the other hand, the open-endedness and innate unpredictability of

the hermeneutic journey to understanding offers unalloyed promise:

□ The very limitedness of one's understanding provides a position

from which one can negotiate with other forms of interpretation.

Such limitedness does not so much indicate the incomplete or

distorted nature of one's understanding as provide the foundation

for one to understand ‘more’ […] □ Gaining an awareness of that

which limits one's understanding (other horizons), strengthens a

sense of belonging to an expanding whole. Becoming conscious of

the limitedness of understanding is a precondition of hermeneutical

transcendence. (Davey, 2006, p. 14)

Both perspectives are important to my framework. Barnett’s keeps us grounded in

the setting in life and lifeworld of students, who face their own respective obstacles

and struggles on their journeys to graduation. Davey’s is important because the

philosophical hermeneutic way of thinking gives us concepts with which to consider if

and how my hybrid conception of meaning making can be made real – relevant and

experientially ‘true’ – for today’s university students.

5 ‘Universities can no longer present themselves as if they have some kind of proprietary control over

the growth of knowledge. “The expanding knowledge universe exceeds our capacities to process it

and to understand it” (Barnett, 2000, p. 43). (McKenzie, 2000, p. 76)

328

Arising from my textual interpretations and reflections on theory and practice in

this project, a ‘metaphor as tool’ took form that is infused with the spirit of my adage

that ‘being open to the obscurity before the clarity can be one of the nicest things’

(McKenzie, 1996, p. 134): an uncertainty efflorescence metaphor. The next quote and figure

are taken from my handout for a workshop for educational design colleagues in 2010

(figure number adjusted):

0.5 -

0.4 -

0.3 -

0.2 -

0.2 -

0.0 -

-0.1 -

-0.2 -

-0.3 -

-0.4 -

-0.5 -

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T

Scenario. You are

dreaming. An arum lily

is growing, and as you

gaze you begin to think

it has an aura.6 Figure

A3 might help you

visualise this mental

image, but perhaps you

can also conceive

continuous incremental

transition from solid

form to diaphanous,

ever-blurring, dimming

insubstantial glow …

Figure A3. Conceiving the genesis of collective understanding and intent in course team practice of an emergent curriculum of becoming

Source: McKenzie (2010)

The workshop handout continued:

[…] Consider this mental image as a metaphor for the design and

enactment of curriculum, of students’ course-long learning

experience. Consider the lily dream as a representation of the

unfolding design-to-practice phenomenon –

of the emergence and dynamic maintenance of the course

team’s understanding of the holistic goal of the course – of

what constitutes a ‘rounded, grounded practitioner’ in the

profession or industry concerned, and what particular

‘value-adding’ or ‘branding’ the institution seeks to bring to

its graduates; and

6 I have not alluded to Goethe/Bortoft’s interest in the apparent transitions of white water lily petals

into stamens (Bortoft, 1996, pp. 81-82) because it has no bearing at all on my metaphor.

329

of the ever-developing collective capacity of the course team

to shape students’ course learning experience.

The arum lily and its aura allow us to contemplate degrees of

certainty in our conception of curriculum. Figure A3 depicts the lily

dream in a two dimensional space. The horizontal axis of this

‘graph’ represents the duration of a course offering as experienced

by students and staff, while the vertical axis calibrates ‘greater’ to

‘lesser’ ‘observability’ – the 'tangible-ephemeral continuum' of the

learning environment, represented by the ever-fading aura of the

lily. In such a view, principles and practices that are observable,

readily, consensually definable, are close to the lily's golden spadix.

Much of the ‘constructive alignment’ thinking commonly applied

to subject and course design coincides with the tangible end of the

observability continuum. Beyond the persuasive logic of that

discourse, consensus becomes harder to realise. Mulling and

discourse turn to notions of curriculum coherence, and beyond these

lie gossamer promises of curriculum integrity.7 They are harder to

agree on because they are less easily recognised. 'Integrity' features

are more ephemeral, diaphanous auras, emergent, yet no less

important from a curriculum design viewpoint if we are serious

about Barnett and Coate's curriculum mantra of 'knowing, acting,

being' (Barnett & Coate, 2005). (McKenzie, 2010)

The aura in the lily dream is, perhaps surprisingly, described in positive terms as an

‘efflorescence’. This is a higher self, ‘glass half-full’, Utopian way of conceiving

increasing uncertainty. It aligns with the philosophical hermeneutic view that the

7 ‘Curriculum coherence refers to the constructive alignment of the functional elements of a course, but it

also recognises the supporting, subordinate position of subjects vis à vis the course that those subjects

support. A course needs to be designed holistically such that final, global student performance is

realised progressively, as week by week, students integrate the learnings of course subjects into their

existing frames of understanding’ (McKenzie, 2007).

‘The Macquarie Dictionary [Delbridge (1991)] defines integrity as the state of being whole, or in

sound, unimpaired or perfect condition […] For a curriculum to have integrity, at the very least, □

teaching staff need to be informed and committed, both to the intent of the curriculum and to its

implementation; □ curriculum development is accepted as being qualitatively different from grafting

and pruning; with every significant addition or subtraction, the whole needs to be reviewed; □ the

various elements of the teaching, assessment, student support and administration subsystems

support each other, and moreover, contribute to a larger synthesis. According to this view, integrity is

an emergent property of the whole curriculum, an efflorescence drawing on certain qualities of staff, the

institutional understanding and culture of curriculum development, and the coherence potential of the

curriculum's various functional components. We might think of this as the educational equivalent of a

finely-tuned engine or unspoiled ecosystem’. (McKenzie et al., 2002) (italics added)

330

open-ended and innately unpredictable journey to understanding takes us to in-

between spaces that invite/provoke hermeneutic transcendence.

Could this tool be used to help overcome any problems or obstacles in professional

education curriculum practice today? Educators and academics generally are highly

adept at analysing and arguing matters on which ground rules and definitions are

agreed, but, as my workshop handout argues, are less sure-footed as uncertainty

spreads its fog and renders agreement on concept and even problem definitions

elusive. At the further reaches of the lily’s aura, root definitions of self whisp into air.

The uncertainty efflorescence chart is a tool that could help course teams, in their

unique disciplinary/professional contexts, problematise – and seek shared

understanding of – the gradient of uncertainty in what they are attempting, in terms of

the curriculum WHAT and HOW. By changing its title, the chart could also conceivably

be used with students, supporting their conceptualising of their own private meaning

making journeys; or again, with course teams, as they try to conceptualise their

metamorphosis into course communities of belonging.

TRANSFORMATIVE LEADERSHIP

Who is equipped to lead a transformation of the kind being presented here? What is

that transformation? Is curriculum renewal simply a matter of educational practice, or

is it also a question of changing institutional culture? In my view, given my stance on

meaning making, it goes even further, into how members of the community of learners

construe sense of self in the world or, if you will, personal ontology … life, the universe,

everything. What (if any) preparation would be needed before a course team or

institution could embark on transition to a curriculum of becoming? I envisage

disinterest or opposition

from university

management and course

teams if the framework

were to be presented

‘before the field is

properly prepared’.

However this statement

overlooks the importance

of allowing a curriculum of becoming to unfold organically from the stakeholders

themselves.

In Chapter 5 I commented that my proposal for curriculum innovation will appeal

to the field to the extent that it addresses what is perceived to be a pressing need. What

kind of ‘pressing need’ might this curriculum of becoming framework be marshalled to

address? As an example I return to the declaration in the Charles Sturt University

‘Before the field is properly prepared’ is an agricultural analogy but it actually betrays more of a marketing or social activist than a scholarly mindset. This in turn raises the question of why I embarked on this research. My higher self had two motives: I wanted to add to the theoretical discourse on the nature of education for the professions, but I also wanted to make a difference for good in education for practice. Time will tell whether the conception of meaning making and the curriculum framework presented here make any inroads into the discourse of education for the professions (or other fields of theory) or into the practice of education for the professions.

331

University Strategy 2013-2015 that CSU ‘develops holistic, far-sighted people who help

their communities grow and flourish’ (Charles Sturt University, 2012, p. 2). If an

institution or a course team were to decide that achieving this aspirational goal had

become a pressing need, the curriculum of becoming framework with its underpinning

conception of meaning making, aimed as it is at providing a fit-for-greater-purpose

education for the professions, would be a useful resource when setting the parameters

of the project.

Assuming that an institution with a pressing need wanted to explore the potential

and the feasibility of enacting a curriculum of becoming, what kinds of processes might

be considered? How could an institution work towards introduction of a curriculum of

becoming in a way that is consistent with a curriculum of becoming ethos? (A nobler human

end is never realised through a lesser human means.) Curriculum renewal as

conceived here needs to unfold organically from the stakeholders themselves, in

particular, from institutional leadership and course teams, if the will is there. In a

presentation at the 2008 HERDSA Conference, I defended the possibility of

transformative leadership, whether individual or collective, as an

emergent within a stimulating and supportive community of

practice. We conclude that the self-renewal or transformation of a

university depends on a symbiotic relationship between (A)

enlightened leadership and (B) transformative communities of

educational practice engaging in all [of Popper’s] three worlds of

university leadership. In a university context in particular, A and B

themselves do not reach their potential in the absence of the other.

(McKenzie, Higgs, & Horsfall, 2008b, p. 62)

The notion of symbiotic relationship between leaders and teams is the principle here

that can help overcome the problem of setting directions for professional education

curriculum practice today. The context in which a curriculum of becoming can blossom

is one where institutional leadership and course teams exhibit agency in their

respective fields of responsibility to sustain the metamorphosis.

INNER CURRICULUM:

GIVING CURRICULUM SPACE-TIME TO NURTURING SENSE OF SELF IN THE WORLD

One of the central themes in my PhD research is the notion that life is a hermeneutic

journey […] I want to join dots that are still in process of forming on the page. The

most enigmatic and tantalising dots are those that concern unfolding ‘global

understanding’ in human experience; and ‘inner curriculum’ – enigma variations to the

inner ear. (McKenzie, 2011b)

332

Just as the school education sector has until recent years been supported by a

stronger scholarship of curriculum than higher education has, so that sector has been

more alert to many of the themes of this thesis. The concept I saved to conclude this

study is ‘inner curriculum’, as a way of encapsulating my big themes; yet the concept is

not new in the school sector. Consider this extract:

The inner curriculum is a school’s plan for addressing the inner life

of students. This includes their emotions, imagination, intuition,

ideals, values, and sense of spirituality. The inner curriculum can

be inserted any curriculum that is currently in place and is

comprised of four elements:

1. Intrapersonal. The intrapersonal element involves one’s

emotions, intuition, and spirituality. In dealing with emotions,

students must identify feelings, then connect them to external

events or situations. Intuition teaches students how to use their

general impressions or sense of knowing apart from logic and

emotion. Spirituality here is defined apart from any religious

context. It is simply honoring the inner. Here one looks for

symbols, images, and impressions and then assigns meaning.

Meditation, guided imagery, power writing, and mythology are

techniques that are often used with this intrapersonal element.

2. Expressing the Intrapersonal. With this element students give

expression to what is discovered in the intrapersonal element

above. The arts are often used for this. Music, dance, visual art,

drama, poetry, and creative writing can all be used as separate

curricular elements or used across the curriculum. Also,

personal metaphors, journal writing, and small group

discussions where students are engaged in honest dialogue can

also be used to express intrapersonal elements.

3. Interpersonal. This element involves understanding one’s self in

the context of a group, culture, or social setting. Activities here

include cooperative group activities, values clarification, moral

dilemmas, and an aesthetic response to literature.

4. The Human Condition. With this element students seek to know

themselves in the context of humanity. The goal here is to begin

to understand what it is to be human and to find similarities

over time and across cultures. Comparisons using mythology,

literature, and history as well as newspapers and current events

can be used to this end […]

333

The activities in the inner curriculum are designed to lead to a

better understanding of oneself, which in turn makes it less likely

that the conscious mind will be ruled by unconscious forces

(Bettleheim, 1984). By bringing unconscious images, wants, and

feelings to consciousness one is then free to act upon them. Also,

neglecting the inner, subjective world of the psyche increases the

likelihood that students will experience meaninglessness, psychic

fragmentation, or some form of affect disorder (Jung [1938], Smith

[1990], Sylwester [2000]). Educating the whole person means

restoring balance between inner and outer lives, what John Miller

(2000) calls soulful learning. (Johnson, 2003, pp. 1-2)

Johnson’s whole article is well worth reading. In the context of this argument,

‘inner curriculum’ may offer a way forward for individual teachers wanting to make a

difference in their students’ journey to professional formation and their self-realisation.

(Johnson sees ‘self-actualisation’ as a central goal of inner curriculum approaches.

‘”Self-actualization is the state where one is able to accept and express of [sic] one’s

inner core or self and begin to actualize those capacities and potentialities found there”

[Maslow, 1968]’ [Johnson, 2003, p. 5].) In my submission to the review of the CSU

induction program in university learning and teaching in 2007, I wrote:

The design problem being addressed in this [Metamorphosis

Challenge] project is this: how should academic staff design and present

their downstream educational activities in situations where the broader

learning environment is perceived to have shortcomings? The value

proposition that undergirds the metamorphosis challenge and

gives it momentum is the simple belief that to optimise student

learning we sometimes need not only to do what our course or

subject documentation requires but to add something more. That

'something more' is simply what the academic him or herself

wishes to infuse into his or her teaching to enrich the learning

experience and better equip students for their future professional

and personal lives – outcomes that in an ideal world would have

been specified in the course curriculum document. (McKenzie,

2007)

I was addressing the problem faced by many CSU teachers of needing to support

students in their classes ‘tomorrow’, in the face of the knowledge (readily inferable

from the University’s own statements) that ‘upstream’ course curriculum settings were

sub-optimal. I went on:

334

They would do this by crafting richer teaching objectives than

might be legitimised within formal program documentation. One

can begin to see here how a proliferation of metamorphoses of

individual academic teaching practice might create demand for

upstream change, even as faculties, as part of their own

organisational renewal, work on these same upstream curriculum

settings.

The challenge of achieving curriculum design coherence and

integrity is likely, in these ever-more-rapidly changing times, to be

more and more elusive; or once achieved, the needs and goalposts

will morph into something else. In these supercomplex times, using

something like the metamorphosis model8 is likely to become a

mainstream technique for getting by as an academic. (McKenzie,

2007)

Is there a problem or obstacle in professional education curriculum practice today

that the notion of inner curriculum might help overcome? Yes. If an individual teacher

has classes to give tomorrow, when the goal of providing a holistic course-long, life-

wide transformative learning experience for all students has not yet been translated

into that course’s professional/disciplinary context, let alone enacted, ‘inner

curriculum’ gives this teacher a way of conceptualising the ‘something more’ he/she

can bring to the class in the morning. This could include fostering the four aspects of

self-actualisation (according to Johnson): ‘□ Discover and understand oneself […] □

Express one’s inner core […] □ Find one’s passion and act on it […] □ Discover one’s strengths

or particular talents and learn how to use them to solve problems’ (Johnson, 2003, pp. 5-6). Of

course, planning learning experiences to support these outcomes probably doesn’t

often happen overnight, but the critical thing here is the agency of the individual

teacher, who can make a difference for good in all manner of ways, regardless of the

quality of course curriculum documentation – the documents that drive formal

institutional practice.

Beyond this, inner curriculum may have value to use with students to encourage

them to take responsibility for their own learning and transformation. The qualities

and dimensions of inner curriculum proposed by Johnson (2003) are clearly integral to

what I proposed in my curriculum of becoming framework, and deserve to be

acknowledged in course documentation.

8 I did not define the metamorphosis model but inferred it was tied to an early version of my four

fields of curriculum interest schema together with an agential commitment to infuse ‘something

more’ into one’s teaching to enrich the student learning experience.

335

References

Adorno, T. W. (1993). Hegel: Three studies. (S.W. Nicholson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Archer, M. S. (2000). Being human: The problem of agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Arendt, H. (1978). The life of the mind. San Diego, Ca: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Astington, J. R. (1993). The child's discovery of the mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.

Baldick, C. (2008). Hermeneutics. In The Oxford dictionary of literary terms (3rd ed.): Retrieved

from http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199208272.001.0001/acref-

9780199208272-e-532

Barber, K. (2004). Transvaluation. In The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Oxford Reference: Oxford

University Press Online. Retrieved from

http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195418163.001.0001/m_en_ca0072

355.

Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1992). The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the

generation of culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Barnett, R. (1997). Higher education: A critical business. Buckingham: Society for Research into

Higher Education and Open University Press.

Barnett, R. (2000). Realizing the university in an age of supercomplexity (1st ed.). Buckingham:

Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.

Barnett, R. (2004). Learning for an unknown future. Higher Education Research & Development,

23(3), 247-260.

Barnett, R. (2010a). Being a university. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Barnett, R. (2010b). Framing education for practice. In J. Higgs, D. Fish, I. Goulter, S. Loftus, J.

Reid & F. Trede (Eds.), Education for future practice (pp. 15-24). Rotterdam: Sense.

Barnett, R. (2012). Practice-based education: Future possibilities. In J. Higgs, R. Barnett, S. Billett,

M. Hutchings & F. Trede (Eds.), Practice-based education: Perspectives and strategies (pp. 241-

252). Rotterdam: Sense.

Barnett, R., & Coate, K. (2005). Engaging the curriculum in higher education. Maidenhead, UK:

Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.

Barrie, S., Hughes, C., & Smith, C. (2009). The national graduate attributes project issues papers:

Issues Paper 4: Curriculum. Sydney: Australian Learning & Teaching Council / The

University of Sydney. Retrieved from

http://www.itl.usyd.edu.au/projects/nationalgap/resources/GAPpdfs/Issues%20Paper%204

%20-%20Curriculum.pdf

Bass, R. (1988). An oilman’s notebook: Oil notes. In D. Halpern (Ed.), Our private lives. New

York: Anataeus.

Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. New York: Ballantine Books.

Baxter Magolda, M. B. (1992). Knowing and reasoning in college: Gender-related patterns in students’

intellectual development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Belenky, M. F., Clinchy, B. M., Goldberger, N. R., & Tarule, J. M. (1986). Women’s ways of

knowing: The development of self, voice and mind. New York: Basic Books.

Bendixen, L. D., & Rule, D. C. (2004). An integrative approach to personal epistemology: A

guiding model. Educational Psychologist, 39(1), 69-80.

Bereiter, C. (2002). Education and mind in the knowledge age. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum

Associates.

Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (1993). Surpassing ourselves: An inquiry into the nature and

implications of expertise. La Salle, IL: Open Court.

336

Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (2000). Process and product in problem-based learning (PBL)

research. In D. H. Evensen & C. E. Hmelo (Eds.), Problem-based learning: A research

perspective on learning interactions (pp. 185-195). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Berger, C. (2010). Knowledge of journalism in the hermeneutic circle. Brazilian Journalism

Research, 6(2), 17-25.

Bernard, M., & Reed, J. M. (1985). The art of graphology. Albany, NY: Whitston.

Bettleheim, B. (1984). Freud and man's soul (2nd ed.). New York: Random House, Inc.

Bhaskar, R. (1998). Philosophy and scientific realism. In M. Archer, R. Bhaskar, A. Collier, T.

Lawson & A. Norrie (Eds.), Critical realism: Essential readings. London: Routledge.

Black, M., & Rowley, H. H. (Eds.). (1962). Peake's commentary on the Bible. London: Thomas

Nelson & Sons.

Bloom, B. S. (Ed.). (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: Handbook 1. Cognitive domain. New

York: McKay.

Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the implicate order. London: Ark Paperbacks.

Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis.

Bontekoe, R. (2000). Dimensions of the hermeneutic circle. New York: Humanity Books.

Bortoft, H. (1996). The wholeness of nature: Goethe's way toward a science of conscious participation in

nature. Edinburgh: Floris Books.

Bronowski, J. (Ed.). (1958). William Blake: A selection of poems and letters. Harmondsworth, UK:

Penguin.

Brundage, D., & Mackeracher, D. (1980). Adult learning principles and their application to program

planning. Toronto: OISE Press.

Campbell, S. (1997). Interpreting the personal: Expression and the formation of feelings. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press.

Caputo, J. D. (1987). Radical hermeneutics, repetition, deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Caputo, J. D. (Ed.). (2002). The religious. Oxford: Blackwell.

Carson, V., Soeken, K. L., Shanty, J., & Terry, L. (1990). Hope and spiritual well-being: Essentials

for living with AIDS. Perspectives in Psychiatric Care, 26(2), 28-34.

Charles Sturt University. (2006). University strategy and plans 2007-2011. Retrieved from

http://www.csu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/49981/University-Strategy-and-

Plans.pdf

Charles Sturt University. (2012). University strategy 2013-2015: Retrieved from

http://www.csu.edu.au/division/plandev/strategy/2013_2015/CSU-Strategy-2013-2015.pdf

Chiu, L., Emblen, J. D., Van Hofwegen, L., Sawatzky, R., & Meyerhoff, H. (2004). An integrative

review of the concept of spirituality in the health sciences. Western Journal of Nursing

Research, 26(4), 405-428. doi: 10.1177/0193945904263411

Clancy, W. J. (1991). Situated cognition: Stepping out of representational Flatland. AI

Communications, 4(2/3), 109-112.

Coan, R. W. (1974). The optimal personality: An empirical and theoretical analysis. London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Coan, R. W. (1989). Alternative views on the evolution of consciousness. Journal of Humanistic

Psychology, 29(2), 167-199.

Coles, R. (1990). Review of the remembered present: A biological theory of consciousness

(Gerald Edelman). Retrieved from http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM19

9009203231225.

Davey, N. (2006). Unquiet understanding: Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. Albany, NY: State

University of New York Press.

de Jager Meezenbroek, E., Garssen, B., van den Berg, M., van Dierendonck, D., Visser, A., &

Schaufeli, W. B. (2012). Measuring spirituality as a universal human experience: A review

337

of spirituality questionnaires. Journal of Religion and Health, 51(2), 336-354. doi:

10.1007/s10943-010-9376-1

DEEWR. (2008). Review of Australian higher education: Final report: Department of Education,

Employment and Workplace Relations. Retrieved from

http://www.innovation.gov.au/HigherEducation/ResourcesAndPublications/ReviewOfAus

tralianHigherEducation/Pages/ReviewOfAustralianHigherEducationReport.aspx

DEEWR. (2009). Transforming Australia's higher education system: Department of Education,

Employment and Workplace Relations. Retrieved from http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-109846.

Delbridge, A., Bernard, J. R. L., Blair, D., Peters, P., & Butler, S. (Eds.). (1991). The Macquarie

dictionary. Macquarie University, Sydney: The Macquarie Library Pty Ltd.

di Sessa, A. A. (1993). Toward an epistemology of physics. Cognition and Instruction, 10(2-3), 105-

225.

Eakin, J. M., & Heather, M. (1992). A critical perspective on research and knowledge

development in health promotion. Canadian Journal of Public Health, 83(suppl. 1), S73-76.

Edelman, G. M. (1992). Bright air, brilliant fire: On the matter of the mind. Harmondsworth:

Penguin.

Eliot, T. S. (1963a). 'Burnt Norton', 'Four Quartets'. In Collected poems 1909-1962. (pp. 189-195).

London: Faber.

Eliot, T. S. (1963b). The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London:

Faber.

Eliot, T. S. (1963c). The Waste Land. V. What the Thunder said. In Collected poems 1909-1962.

London: Faber and Faber.

Engram. (n.d.) Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved from http://dictionary.reference.com/br

owse/engram.

Entwistle, N. J., & Ramsden, P. (1983). Understanding student learning. New York: Nichols.

Erdi, P., Banyai, M., Ujfalussy, B., & Diwadkar, V. (2011). The schizophrenic brain: A broken

hermeneutic circle. Some new insights and results. Paper presented at the Neural Networks

(IJCNN), The 2011 International Joint Conference, 31 July-5 August. doi:

10.1109/IJCNN.2011.6033619.

Ferrer, J. N. (2002). Revisioning transpersonal theory: A participatory vision of human spirituality.

Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Seabury.

Gadamer, H.-G. (1977). Philosophical hermeneutics. (D. E. Linge, Ed. & Trans.). Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Gadamer, H.-G. (1983). Reason in the age of science (F. G. Lawrence, Trans.). Cambridge: MIT

Press.

Gadamer, H.-G. (1986). The relevance of the beautiful. London: Cambridge University Press.

Gadamer, H.-G. (1988). On the circle of understanding. In J. M. Connolly & T. Keutner (Eds.),

Hermeneutics versus science: Three German views. South Bend: University of Notre Dame

Press.

Gadamer, H.-G. (1989). Truth and method. London: Sheed and Ward.

Gadamer, H.-G. (1994). Heidegger's ways. Albany: Stae University of New York Press.

Gergen, K. J., & Gergen, M. M. (1988). Narrative and the self as relationship. In L. Berkowitz

(Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 21, pp. 17-56). San Diego: Academic

Press, Inc.

Golding, W. (n.d.). The Lord of the Flies. Global Village Contemporary Classics. Retrieved from

http://gv.pl/pdf/lord_of_the_flies.pdf

Greenberger, E., Lessard, J., Chen, C., & Farruggia, S. P. (2008). Self-entitled college students:

Contributions of personality, parenting, and motivational factors. Journal of Youth and

Adolescence, 37(1193-1204).

338

Greene, J. A., Azevedo, R., & Torney-Purta, J. (2008). Modeling epistemic and ontological

cognition: Philosophical perspectives and methodological directions. Educational

Psychologist, 43(3), 142-160. doi: 10.1080/00461520802178458

Griffith, G. (1982). Images of interdependence: Meaning and movement in learning and teaching.

(Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Department of Adult Education, Ontario Institute for

Studies in Education, Canada.

Grondin, J. (1995). Sources of hermeneutics. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Hammer, D. M., & Elby, A. (2002). On the form of a personal epistemology. In B. K. Hofer & P.

R. Pintrich (Eds.), Personal epistemology: The psychology of beliefs about knowledge and knowing

(pp. 169-190). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Hanson, N. R. (1969). Perecption and discovery. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

Harré, R. (1983). Personal being - a theory for individual psychology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. New York: Harper and Row.

Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language, and thought (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). New York: Harper.

Heron, J. (1997). A way out for Wilberians. Retrieved from http://www.integralworld.net/WilbEr

rs.htm.

Heron, J. (1998). Sacred science: Person-centred inquiry into the spiritual and the subtle. Retrieved

from http://www.human-inquiry.com/SacSciFINAL.pdf.

Heylighen, F. (2001). The science of self-organization and adaptivity. The encyclopedia of life

support systems, 5(3), 253-280.

Hicks, O. (2007). Curriculum in higher education in Australia - hello? Paper presented at the 30th

HERDSA Annual Conference, Enhancing higher education, theory and scholarship,

Adelaide, 8-11 July.

Higgs, J., Fish, D., Goulter, I., Loftus, S., Reid, J., & Trede, F. (Eds.). (2010). Education for future

practice. Rotterdam: Sense.

Higgs, J., Jones, M., Edwards, I., & Beeston, S. (2004). Clinical reasoning and practice

knowledge. In J. Higgs, B. Richardson & M. A. Dahlgren (Eds.), Developing practice

knowledge for health professionals (pp. 181-199). Edinburgh: Butterworth Heinemann.

Hobbes, T., & C. B. Macpherson (Ed.). (1971). Leviathan. Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican Books.

Hofer, B. K. (2001). Personal epistemology research: Implications for learning and teaching.

Educational Psychology Review, 13(4), 353-383.

Hofer, B. K. (2004a). Epistemological understanding as a metacognitive process: Thinking aloud

during online searching. Educational Psychologist, 39(1), 43-55.

Hofer, B. K. (2004b). Introduction: Paradigmatic approaches to personal epistemology.

Educational Psychologist, 39(1), 1-3.

Hofer, B. K. (2004c). Paradigmatic approaches to personal epistemology: Introduction to the

special issue. Educational Psychologist, 39(1), 1-3.

Hofer, B. K. (2005). The legacy and the challenges: Paul Pintrich's contributions to personal

epistemology research. Educational Psychologist, 40(2), 95-105. doi:

10.1207/s15326985ep4002_4

Hofer, B. K., & Pintrich, P. R. (1997). The development of epistemological theories: Beliefs about

knowledge and knowing and their relation to learning. Review of Educational Research, 67,

88-140.

Holism. (June 2013). OED Online: Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/

87726?redirectedFrom=holism.

Hollis, M. (1989) Honour among thieves. Vol. I, xxv. Proceedings of the British Academy.

Housman, A. E. (1896). A Shropshire lad (1st ed.). London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Treubner & Co.

Cited in the OED Online –

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/161631?rskey=zfhKbk&result=9#eid26263875.

Humboldt, W. (1969). The limits of state action. In J. W. Burrow (Ed.). London: Cambridge

University Press.

339

Integral Life. (n.d.). Who is Ken Wilber? Retrieved from http://integrallife.com/contributors/ken-

wilber.

Inwood, M. J. (n.d.). Weltanschauung The Oxford companion to philosophy Oxford University

Press. Retrieved from

http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199264797.001.0001/. acref-

9780199264797-e-2688.

Jacques, M. G. (1999). Psicologia social contemporanea. Petropolis: Vozes.

Jensen, G. M. (2011). Learning: What matters most. 42nd Mary McMillan Lecture. Physical

Therapy, 91, 1674-1689.

Johnson, A. P. (2003). Language arts and the inner curriculum. Detroit, MI: Renaissance

Community Press. Retrieved from

http://www.wholeschooling.net/WS/WSPress/Inner%20Curr%20Johnson%202-03.pdf.

Jovic, E., Wallace, J. E., & Lemaire, J. (2006). The generation and gender shifts in medicine: An

exploratory survey of internal medicine physicians. BMC Health Services Research, 6(55).

Judge, A. (n.d.). Entelechy: Actuality vs future potential. In Kairos @ laetusinpraesens.org.

Retrieved from http://kairos.laetusinpraesens.org/present3_x_pre_h_1

Jung, C. G. (1938). Psychology and religion. Binghamton, NY: The Vail-Ballou Press, Inc.

Kidd, J. R. (1973). How adults learn. New York: Association Press.

King, P. M., & Kitchener, K. S. (1994). Developing reflective judgment: Understanding and promoting

intellectual growth and critical thinking in adolescents and adults. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

King, P. M., & Kitchener, K. S. (2004). Reflective judgment: Theory and research on the

development of epistemic assumptions. Educational Psychologist, 39(1), 5-18.

Koestenbaum, P. (1975). Introductory essay. The Paris lectures by Edmund Husserl. The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff.

Koestler, A. (1967). The ghost in the machine. Bungay, Suffolk: Pan Books.

Kuhn, D. (1991). The skills of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1999). Legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice. In

R. McCormick & C. Paechter (Eds.), Learning and knowledge. London: Paul Chapman.

Loevinger, J., & Wessler, R. (1970). Measuring ego development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Louca, L., Elby, A., Hammer, D., & Kagey, T. (2004). Epistemological resources: Applying a new

epistemological framework to science instruction. Educational Psychologist, 39(1), 57-68.

Retrieved from http://www52.physics.umd.edu/elby/papers/Louca_Elby_et_al_epistem

ology.pdf.

Macdonald, J. B. (1975). Curriculum theory. In W. Pinar (Ed.), Curriculum theorizing (pp. 5-13).

Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.

Magolda, M. B. (2004). Evolution of a constructivist conceptualization of epistemological

reflection. Educational Psychologist, 39(1), 31-42.

Maslow, A. (1954). Motivation and personality. New York: Harper and Row.

Maslow, A. H. (1968). Toward a psychology of being. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Maslow, A. H. (1971). The farther reaches of human nature. New York: Viking Press.

Mason, L., Boldrin, A., & Ariasi, N. (2010). Searching the Web to learn about a controversial

topic: Are students epistemically active? Instructional Science, 38(6), 607-633. doi:

10.1007/s11251-008-9089-y

Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1992). The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human

understanding (R. Paolucci, Trans. Rev. ed.). Boston: Shambhala.

Mauss, M. (1989). A category of the human mind: The notion of a person; The notion of self. In

M. Carrithers, S. Collins & S. Lukes (Eds.), The category of the person. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

340

McClelland, J. L., Rumelhart, D. E., & the PDP Research Group (Eds.). (1986). Parallel distributed

processing: Explorations in the micro-structure of cognition: Vol. 2. Psychological and biological

models. Cambridge, MA: MIT/Bradford.

McKenzie, A. (1990). Sherd 900725. Omega Australia News(Winter).

McKenzie, A. (1996). Improving the effectiveness of distance education for farmers. (Unpublished

master's thesis), University of Western Sydney, Richmond, NSW, Australia.

McKenzie, A. (1997). Muddy waters, the unknown, and the Welcome Stranger. Notes by Tony

McKenzie for a workshop presented at the Women of the Land Gathering, C B Alexander

Agricultural College, Tocal, Paterson NSW, 11 October.

McKenzie, A. (1999). A ferret tail-chase - the perpetual closed loop of open system reflecting-

theorising. Paper presented at the Issues of Rigour in Qualitative Research Conference,

Association for Qualitative Research. Bundoora, Vic.: Association for Qualitative Research.

Retrieved from http://www.aqr.org.au/wp-content/uploads/conference1999/McKenzie.htm.

McKenzie, A. (2000). Supercomplexity and the need for a practice and scholarship of self-

reflexiveness in university research and teaching. Staff and Educational Development

International, 4(3), 205-216.

McKenzie, A. (2007). The metamorphosis challenge. Unpublished submission to the 2007 review of

the CSU Foundations of University Learning and Teaching program. Charles Sturt University,

Australia. Retrieved from

http://csusap.csu.edu.au/~tmckenzi/csuteachdev/Metamorphosis.htm.

McKenzie, A. (2010). Contemplating and doing emergent curriculum: Notes for a course design

workshop for educational designers, Bathurst, 23-24 June 2010. Australia: Charles Sturt

University. Retrieved from http://csusap.csu.edu.au/~tmckenzi/coursedesign/Contem

plating_and_doing_emergent_curriculum.pdf.

McKenzie, A. (2011a). Elegant 3D curriculum modelling in VUE. Self-published Web resource.

Retrieved from

http://csusap.csu.edu.au/~tmckenzi/downloads/Elegant_3D_curriculum_modelling_in_VU

E.pdf

McKenzie, A. (2011b). How an elegant 3D curriculum modelling approach offers a way through

the complexity of the CSU Degree Initiative. Unpublished position statement. Retrieved

from http://csusap.csu.edu.au/~tmckenzi/coursedesign/revisiting%20curriculum%20ele

gance.pdf.

McKenzie, A. (2011c). The twenty memories exercise: Briefing for a sense of self reflective

activity. Unpublished.

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Horsfall, D. (2005). Critically reviewing one's own primary value

beliefs - a case history. In G. Whiteford (Ed.), Voice, Identity and Reflexivity: Proceedings of the

Second RIPPLE Qualitative Research as Interpretive Practice Conference, pp. 12-17. RIPPLE,

Albury, NSW.

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Horsfall, D. (2008a). Exploring the practice–pedagogy middle ground:

progress report on a hermeneutic inquiry into education for practice. Paper presented at the

WACE Asia Pacific Conference. Work Integrated Learning (WIL): Transforming Futures -

Practice ... Pedagogy ... Partnerships, Manly Australia. Australian Collaborative Education

Network, pp. 370-376. Retrieved from http://www.acen.edu.au/resources/docs/WACE

_ACEN_Asia_Pacific_Conference_2008_E-Proceedings-1.pdf.

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Horsfall, D. (2008b). University leaders and communities of practice:

Exploring the dynamics of institutional transformation. In Proceedings of the HERDSA 31st

Annual Conference, 1-4 July, Rotorua, NZ, p. 62. Retrieved from

http://conference.herdsa.org.au/2008/program.cfm.html.

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Loftus, S. (2009). What is the best thing a university can do for its students

in the twenty-first century? Paper presented at the CSU ED Conference, 26-27 November.

Charles Sturt University, Australia. Presentation available here:

341

http://csusap.csu.edu.au/~tmckenzi/downloads/csued09.bestthing.wmv. Text only:

http://csusap.csu.edu.au/~tmckenzi/downloads/CSUED09.Mckenzie.Higgs.Loftus.docx,

Thurgoona, NSW.

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Simpson, M. (2011). Designing and enacting a university ‘curriculum of

becoming’. Paper presented at the 2011 Practice-Based Education Summit, The Education for

Practice Institute, Charles Sturt University, 13-14 April, Bathurst, NSW, p. 11. Retrieved

from http://csusap.csu.edu.au/~tmckenzi/downloads/PBESummit2011.pdf.

McKenzie, A., Higgs, J., & Simpson, M. (2012). Being a university in the twenty-first century:

Re-thinking curriculum. Journal of the World Universities Forum, 4(4), 1-18. Retrieved from

http://wuj.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.173/prod.316.

McKenzie, A., Morgan, C. K., Cochrane, K. W., Watson, G. K., & Roberts, D. W. (2002). Authentic

learning: What is it, and what are the ideal curriculum conditions to cultivate it in? Paper

presented at the Annual international conference of the Higher Education and Research

Society of Australasia, Research and Development in Higher Education, volume 25 (CD-

ROM), Edith Cowan University, Perth. Retrieved from http://www.herdsa.org.au/wp-

content/uploads/conference/2002/papers/McKenzieA.pdf.

McKenzie, A., Morgan, C. K., Watson, G. K., Cochrane, K. W., & Roberts, D. W. (2003). A left

brain, right brain conversation loosely tied to the nuances of 'authentic curriculum'. Staff

and Educational Development International, 7(2), 121-134.

Megill, K. (2013). Thinking for a living (2nd ed.). Berlin: de Gruyter.

Melamed, L. (1987). The role of play in adult learning. In D. Boud & V. Griffin (Eds.),

Appreciating adults learning: From the learners' perspective (pp. 13-24). London: Kogan Page.

Merleau-Ponty, M., & Lefort C. (Ed.). (1973). The prose of the world (J. O'Neill, Trans.). Evanston,

Ill: Northwestern University Press.

Meyer, J., & Land, R. (2003). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: Linkages to ways of

thinking and practising within the disciplines. Occasional Report 4. Enhancing Teaching-

Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses Project, Higher and Community

Education, School of Education, University of Edinburgh. Retrieved from

http://www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk/docs/ETLreport4.pdf.

Meyer, J. H. F., & Land, R. (Eds.). (2006). Overcoming barriers to student understanding: Threshold

concepts and troublesome knowledge. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative dimensions of adult learning. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass.

Mezirow, J., & Associates. (2000). Learning as transformation: Critical perspectives on a theory in

progress. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Miller, J. P. (2000). Education and the soul: Toward a spiritual curriculum. Albany, NY: State

University of New York Press.

Morse, J., Mathews, N., & Seeger, P. (1971). The Sierra Club Survival Songbook. San Francisco:

Sierra Club.

Moshman, D. (1998). Cognitive development beyond childhood. In D. Kuhn & R. Siegler (Eds.),

Handbook of child psychology (5th ed., Vol. 2. Cognition, perception, and language, pp. 947–

978). New York: Wiley.

Muñoz Palm, R. C. (2008). Professional identity of the occupational therapist. TOG (A Coruña)

[Internet journal], monag 2, 110-125. Retrieved from http://revistatog112.113owl.com/mono/

num112/palm_ing.pdf.

Nelson, K., Kift, S., Humphreys, J., & Harper, W. (2006). A blueprint for enhanced transition:

Taking an holistic approach to managing student transition into a large university. In

Proceedings First Year in Higher Education Conference. Gold Coast, Queensland. Retrieved

from http://eprints.qut.edu.au/4557/1/4557_1.pdf.

Nihilism. (2008). In S. Blackburn (Ed.), The Oxford dictionary of philosophy (2nd ed.). Oxford:

Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://www.oxfordreference.com.

Nonaka, I. (1991). The knowledge-creating company. Harvard Business Review, 69(6), 96-104.

342

Noosphere. (2010). In A. Stevenson (Ed.), Oxford dictionary of English (3 ed.). Oxford: Oxford

University Press. Retrieved from http://www.oxfordreference.com.

Noumenon. (n.d.) Encyclopædia Britannica: Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EB

checked/topic/420847/noumenon.

NTEU. (2012). Draft: NTEU response to “Opening UTAS to Talent: The UTAS Academic”.

National Tertiary Education Union [Australia]. Retrieved from

http://www.nteu.org.au/library/view/id/2623.

Ockham’s razor (2014). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/424706/Ockhams-razor.

Oldroyd, D. (1986). The arch of knowledge: An introductory study of the history of the philosophy and

methodology of science. Kensington: New South Wales University Press.

Olsen [aka Tony McKenzie], K. (2009). A CSU 'curriculum of becoming'? A reverie. Retrieved from

http://csusap.csu.edu.au/~tmckenzi/kimolsen/index.htm.

Pallas, A. M. (2001). Preparing education doctoral students for epistemological discovery.

Educational Researcher, 30(5), 6-11.

Palmer, R. E. (2001). The liminality of Hermes and the meaning of hermeneutics. MacMurray College.

Retrieved from http://www.mac.edu/~rpalmer/liminality.html.

Perkins, D. (1999). The many faces of constructivism. Educational Leadership, 57(3), 6-11.

Perkins, D., & Blythe, T. (1994). Putting understanding up front. Educational Leadership, 51(5),

4-7.

Perry, W. G. (1970). Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years. New York:

Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Phenix, P. (1975). Transcendence and the curriculum. In W. Pinar (Ed.), Curriculum theorizing:

The reconceptualists (pp. 323-337). Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.

Phillips, D. L. (1973). Abandoning method: Studies in methodology. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Pinar, W. (Ed.). (1975). Curriculum theorizing: The reconceptualists. Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.

Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. M. (1995). Understanding curriculum:

An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses. New York:

Peter Lang.

Pintrich, P. R. (2002). Future challenges and direction for theory and research on personal

epistemology. In B. K. Hofer & P. R. Pintrich (Eds.), Personal epistemology: The psychology of

beliefs about knowledge and knowing. Mahwah. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Polanyi, M. (1964). Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. New York: Harper and

Row.

Popper, K. R. (1972). Objective knowledge: An evolutionary approach. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

Premack, D., & Premack, J. (1996). Why animals lack pedagogy and some cultures have more of

it than others. In D. O. Torrance & N. Torrance (Eds.), Handbook of education and human

development: New models of learning, teaching and schooling (pp. 302-323). Cambridge, MA:

Basil Blackwell.

Ramsden, P. (2009). Teaching and the student experience. Report to the British Secretary of State.

Retrieved from http://www.dius.gov.uk/higher_education/shape_and_structure/

he_debate/teaching_and_student_experience.aspx.

Rational choice theory. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_

theory.

Richardson, B., Higgs, J., & Dahlgren, A. (2004). Recognising practice epistemology in the health

professions. In J. Higgs, B. Richardson & M. A. Dahlgren (Eds.), Developing practice

knowledge for health professionals (pp. 1-14). Edinburgh: Butterworth Heinemann.

Robinson, J. E., & Norris, N. F. J. (2001). Generalisation: The linchpin of evidence-based

practice? Educational Action Research, 9(2), 303-308.

Rose, S. (c. 1992). The making of memory. London: Bantam Press.

343

Rumelhart, D. E., McClelland, J. L., & the PDP Research Group (Eds.). (1986). Parallel distributed

processing: Explorations in the micro-structure of cognition: Vol. 1. Foundations. Cambridge, MA:

MIT/ Bradford.

Ryle, G. (1945). Knowing how and knowing that: The presidential address. Proceedings of the

Aristotelian Society, New Series, 46 (1945 - 1946), 1-16. Retrieved from

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544405.

Salner, M. (1986). Adult cognitive and epistemological development in systems education.

Systems Research, 3(4), 225-232.

Schacht, R. (2005). Transvaluation of values. In The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford:

Oxford University Press. Retrieved from

http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199264797.001.0001/acref-

9780199264797-e-2551.

Schad, W. (1977). Man and mammals. New York: Waldorf Press.

Schommer-Aikins, M. (2004). Explaining the epistemological belief system: Introducing the

embedded systemic model and coordinated research approach. Educational Psychologist,

39(1), 19-29.

Schommer, M. (1994). Synthesizing epistemological belief research: Tentative understandings

and provocative confusions. Educational Psychology Review, 6(4), 293-319.

Schön, D. A. (1995). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Aldershot,

England: Arena.

Schwartzman, H. B. (1978). Transformations: The anthropology of children's play. New York:

Plenum Press.

Science Daily. (2010). Unconscious learning uses old parts of the brain. Retrieved from

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100406093520.htm.

Shermer, M. (2010). The sensed-presence effect: How the brain produces the sense of someone

present when no one is there. Scientific American. Retrieved from

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-sensed-presence-effect.

Silberman, C. E. (1970). Crisis in the classroom: The remaking of American education. New York:

Random House.

Smith, C. D. (1990). Religion and crisis in Jungian analysis. Counseling and Values, 34, 177-186.

Smuts, J. C. (1961). Holism and evolution. New York: Viking Press. (Original work published

1926).

Solare, R. (2011). Further elaborations on the nature of science. Blogpost, Emergent Culture.

Retrieved from http://emergent-culture.com/further-elaborations-on-the-nature-of-science/

Staiti, A. (2013). Heinrich Rickert. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall

2013. Forthcoming URL http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/heinrich-rickert/.

Stefanovic, I. (2013). Philosophy as lived. Holistic Science Journal, 2(2), 17-18. Retrieved from

http://holisticsciencejournal.co.uk.

Stephenson, J., & Weil, S. (1992). Quality in learning: A capability approach in higher education.

London: Kogan Page.

Stewart, T. A. (1997). Intellectual capital: The new wealth of nations. New York: Doubleday.

Strauss, W., & Howe, N. (1997). The fourth turning: An American prophecy: What the cycles of

history tell us about America's next rendezvous with destiny New York: Broadway Books.

Stuart, D., & Mickunas, A. (1974). Exploring phenomenology. Chicago: American Library

Association.

Swanson, H. L. (1990). Influence of metacognition and aptitude on problem solving. Journal of

Educational Psychology, 82, 306-314.

Sylwester, S. (2000). Unconscious emotions, conscious feelings. Educational Leadership, 58, 20-24.

Tarnas, R. (2002). Foreword. In J. N. Ferrer, Revisioning transpersonal theory: A participatory vision

of human spirituality. (pp. vii-xvi) Albany: State University of New York.

344

Twenge, J. (2009). Generational changes and their impact in the classroom: Teaching Generation

Me. Medical Education, 43, 398-405.

Waldenfells, H. (1980). Absolute nothingness: Foundations for a Buddhist-Christian dialogue. New

York: Paulist Press.

Walsh, R, & Wilber, K. (2009, December 16). The State of the Integral Enterprise. Part 3: Key

Ideas for a World at Risk. [Blog post] Retrieved from http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/571.

Warnke, G. (1987). Gadamer: Hermeneutics, tradition and reason. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the process of sensemaking.

Organization Science, 16(4), 409-421.

Weinsheimer, J. (1991). Philosophical hermeneutics and literary theory. New Haven: Yale University

Press.

Wheeler, M. (2013). Martin Heidegger. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy. (Spring 2013 Edition). Retrieved from

http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/heidegger/.

Wilber, K. (1977). The spectrum of consciousness. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House.

Wilber, K. (1979). No boundary: Eastern and Western approaches to personal growth. Los Angeles:

Center Publications.

Wilber, K. (1980). The Atman project: A transpersonal view of human development. Wheaton, IL:

Theosophical Publishing House.

Wilber, K. (1999a). Ken Wilber's response to John Heron. Retrieved from

http://www.integralworld.net/heron.html.

Wilber, K. (1999b). Up from Eden: A transpersonal view of human evolution (2nd ed.). Wheaton, Ill:

Quest.

Wilber, K. (2000). Sex, ecology, spirituality: The spirit of evolution (2nd Rev. ed.). Boston:

Shambhala.

Wilber, K. (2001). A theory of everything. Boston: Shambhala.

Wilber, K. (2012). The Kosmos trilogy Vol. II: Excerpt C. The ways we are in this together. Part I.

Introduction – Systems theory versus hermeneutics: Why both are important. In Integral

Post. Retrieved from http://integrallife.com/integral-post/ways-we-are-together.

meaning making: a university curriculum framework for the

Documents