When teachers are gurus: The paradoxical relationship between authenticity and autonomy for learners pursuing Tibetan Buddhist education abroad

• In Event: Peace Education Across the Lifespan: Identity, Agency, and Belonging in Learning Spaces

Proposal

Introduction

If a Tibetan monk teaches a Buddhist text to diverse international learners who have not completed the traditional monastic prerequisites, could this still be considered ‘authentic’ educational experience? What if learners prefer that the monk uses dialogical pedagogy and ‘real world’ examples, rather than the scholastic approach dominant in monasteries for the last 500 years, because it is more culturally responsive to learners’ backgrounds? This project analyzes diverse learners’ conceptualization and pursuit of authentic educational experiences in transcultural circumstances by employing Charles Taylor’s (1989; 1990) method of ‘philosophical anthropology’ to empirically explore how learners make ‘’qualitative distinctions concerning worth’. To see what a concept means, Taylor says, one must investigate how it is ‘lived out’.

Analytical Framework and Inquiry

Formulations of authenticity in education literature can be grouped into three types, according to their emphasis on: the role of autonomy in agent’s capacity to ensure that learning motivations, goals, and outcomes correspond to each other (e.g., Cuypers & Haji, 2007); the applicability of content to one’s life and concerns (e.g. Newman et al. 2001); or, dialogue as the means by which we discover ourselves and others (e.g., Freire 1970; Splitter 2008). These range from a Heideggerian concern with the exercise of autonomy in shaping what one cares about (Kreber et al. 2007) to a socially-oriented conception in which connection to the world beyond oneself is its sine qua non (Sarid 2015). While valuable, these formulations provide limited insight for understanding educational authenticity in specifically transcultural contexts, where the educational value of encounters with Others (Said 1995) often hinges on the degree to which they facilitate travelers’ engagement with Other knowledges, objects, and norms that may undermine the very sense of autonomy many argue is central to authentic education (Bialystok 2017).

I therefore draw also on Wang’s (1999) tourism research to enrich this framework for understanding authentic education specifically in transcultural contexts where members of ‘host culture’ (e.g. Tibetans in exile) are themselves engaged in struggles over the meaning of cultural authenticity (Blondeau & Buffetrille 2008). This study therefore responds to the question: How are authentic learning experiences conceptualized and cultivated in quasi-institutional religious programs by learners who voluntarily travel to new cultural contexts and their educators?

Methods

My methodological approach blends Taylor’s (1992) philosophical anthropology with Burawoy’s (2009) Extended Case ethnographic method. The former provides conceptual tools to probe the ‘moral or evaluative framework’ in which perspectives are embedded. The latter provides a logic for selection of field sites and participants such that collected data necessarily speak to theory outlined above (Burawoy 1999). To investigate how learners who travel to India to pursue spiritual education with exile-Tibetan Buddhist teachers and communities, I conducted roughly 30 days of participant observations in Buddhist classes, ceremonies, and informal gatherings. I also conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews that probed the spiritual-educational motivations and goals of 28 adult learners and teachers who voluntarily engage in quasi-institutional courses and retreats adapted from ‘traditional’ Tibetan Buddhist practices. Interview questions and coding (in process) centered on the motivations and construction of learners’ goals, the processes whereby they pursue them, and the measures whereby they could determine if they were achieved. Following Burawoy (2009) I pay special attention to instances in which data appear to violate existing theory.

Preliminary Analyses

Participants’ data suggest that ‘autonomy’ is multivalent and neither unequivocally good nor essential to authentic education. That is, while learners esteem autonomy exercised in ‘pre-learning’ processes, such as finding an appropriate teacher or researching the practices one might vow to undertake, once these have been accomplished, students’ desire for autonomy or to shape pedagogy and curriculum become tantamount to an arrogant expression of doubt in the teacher, thus reinforcing precisely the sense of self-importance that is inimical to progress on the Buddhist path (Trungpa 2002).

Many participants reckoned that the more they attempted to exert autonomy in shaping learning processes and the goals to which they lead, the less authentic their education became, for two reasons. First, participants stated that an authentic education is precisely that which leads to overcoming the fundamentally selfish impulse to control social and mental situations. For learners and educators, the ‘autonomy’ of the unenlightened, mired in self-defeating ignorance, is that which needs to be transformed - not protected - if the education is to be authentic. Moreover, disciplined devotion to a virtuous guru figurates students’ progress by demonstrating their subjugation of the ignorant mind unwittingly enamored with control. Second, participants often saw their exertion of autonomy as inimical not only to Buddhist goals (adumbrated above) but to intercultural learning goals as well: learners stated that they had come to India specifically in order to curtail their autonomy by reducing distractions and undertaking physically and psychologically demanding retreats. In interviews, this emerged as learners’ general dissatisfaction with ‘tak[ing] Buddhist classes back home’, which were often impeded by friends, work, and entertainment because ‘other than class, my life was pretty much the same’. But here in India, “we are on [the locals’] schedule, learning with their methods, and, hopefully one day, in their language.”

Thus, for them, the choice to adapt - rather than expect experiences responsive to their own cultures - seemed to participants a disposition conducive to being an immersive traveler who learns deeply with and from Others – the principal purpose of their journey to India. Ultimately, participants’ frequently understood the authenticity of their educational experiences in terms of the purity of the intention, the depth of the commitments one made, and the discipline with which one keeps them: all of these invoke a notion of autonomy central to authenticity but in ways quite different than how the relationship has been conceptualized by most philosophers and psychologists of education (Bonnett & Cuypers 2003).

Significance

This paper uses data from atypical transcultural educational situations to problematize the taken-for-granted relationship between educational authenticity and autonomy and builds on theory in the philosophy (Sarid 2015) and anthropology of education (Allen 2010) by examining different conceptions of the meaning and locus of educational authenticity in contexts characterized by transcultural interaction.

Author

• Andrew David Frankel, Denison University