Two educational conferences: splitting minds, while breaking hearts

• In Event: Presidential Highlighted Session: The Transformative Potential of Embodied Learning

Proposal

That summer of 2015, representing the Transformative Education Forum-Global at two nearly back-to-back but very different educational conferences – one held in the hot August summer sun of the Portuguese “Eco-Village” of Tamera, the other on in the already cool September rain of the ancient University campus of Oxford – I felt more than ever the split in my two educational minds, and how that split rendered my heart.

For me, it was the cutting contrast between education of the left cognitively dominating rational and even “over-rationalized” mind vs. the right brain empathetic more far-seeing and feeling ability to truly hear and understand, literally to more completely learn. As an educator and educational theorist for the last 40 years focused on education of emotional, social and thus cultural intelligences, I had begun to believe that very over-dominance and over-dependence on the left brain hemisphere reinforced in Western Enlightenment education for "problem solving" increasingly focused nearly exclusively on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), was actually endangering our ability to problem-solve more complex, human, interdisciplinary and interpersonal global sustainability issues. That these issues demanded both left and right brain hemisphere abilities and skills sets connected together across the Corpus Callosum. That the imbalanced left-brain focus of this modern neoliberal education was causing actual atrophy of right-brain hemisphere more global, full human emotional, empathetic and creatively diverse abilities for complete problem solving on a shared planet. Essentially, observing the students increased standardized testing regimes and subject matter constriction towards STEM, I had increasingly begun to believe more actual evidence based understanding that we are more often adding to destroying rather than creating healthy, sustainable life on our shared planet. That indeed it was this cognitive dissonance actually reinforced by standard Western Enlightenment models of education, that was interfering with arriving at any holistically complete and truly “connected” systems solution absolutely necessary to real sustainability of all peoples and our planet at this critical point in human history.

At Tamera’s hosted “Eco-versity” there were not the 650 participants that I would gather with in Oxford a month later, but rather a tenth of that number. There was also no 25 page “Programme” with 300 separate presentations in multiple parallel sessions from dominant “leaders” in the field-of International and Comparative Education from several universities worldwide, along with UNESCO, UNICEF, DFID and many acronymic others coming from 60 countries and every continent, in attendance at Oxford. But at Tamera, though the numbers were far smaller, the diversity of “voice” actually heard was far greater, and the average age overall, far younger

It was a different voice that requested, gently but persistently and with no gavel or “Plenary Speaker” rights, to be heard. Simply, to be allowed to tell its own story in its own words and in its truly experientially-informed and embodied voice – this one from the Zapatista indigenous struggle for their own lands, that one from a Palestinian refugee trying to grow up in Jordan, another so gentle and so clear from a half indigenous Amazonian and half German split in herself, struggling to speak the wisdom of her grandmother through her own “higher” educationally trained and brilliant-as-a-light mind, trying to bridge these two worlds.

And thus in Portugal, for those many of us so trained by the Western Higher Education system it was at times a difficult and many times excruciatingly uncomfortable listening-learning of these experiences and empirical realities. And that “please just listen” request, always gentle -- sometimes barely whispered through the felt pain -- had to be made more than once: more than twice, more than in just one language, more than in just abstracted, de-emotionalized, academic and cognitive terms.

This was a “curriculum” spoken more in fragments broken by tears or the need to gasp a breath, than power-point text on screens and floating disembodied words. There was no technological backup, no slides, no video and no emotionally abstracted escape, though many – deeply uncomfortable at not moving directly over that pain to offer solutions – tried. Sincerely and from true honest intention, tried to jump directly to the scientific quantifiable, rational and thus “possible” solutions. That’s what our Western education had been most excellent at trying to teach us to be able to “do”. But also perhaps, it was being suggested if only we were still capable of hearing it, why our “solutions” had not and could not possibly solve the problems in a world where we refused to listen long enough with open hearts, to fully understand. That our “solutions” would never be true “solutions” if we continued to refuse to validate the critical evidence of lived and felt experiences, available to us only through empathetic, right-brain rather than only left-brain, cognitive disconnected understanding, thus missing the most important “facts” necessary for true resolution.

Author

• June Gorman, TEF-Global.org,