lord vishnu, creator and destroyer, standing on the head of the dwarf, Ignorance
Postcard, Cleveland Museum of Art, from my doctoral student, Zorphora Omabegho
One
evening,
when teaching Planning and Evaluation in Higher Education, I asked my
students
to describe my philosophy, basing their conclusions upon observations
of
my teaching and experiences in the course.
To my utter surprise the class quickly and unanimously declared my conceptual approach to be existentialist. I asked why, and they gave answers worthy of the course syllabus.
They said:
- I encourage students to find order and structure in lectures, assignments, activities;
- I anticipate that they will personalize the process of exploring and finding meaning in the work they do in class;
- They are encouraged to value subjectivity as a way of initially creating understanding which can later be tested;
- Tests of personal interpretation can be objective, but they should also be genuine investigations of the perspectives of others;
- Individual experience is not only a beneficial starting point for solving problems, it is probably where we all start anyway;
- When tacit knowledge (personal) is made explicit (public), it can be shared, and in the social exchange of this new knowledge (always novel if we are being open-minded) our reality expands.
- In classrooms we need to investigate knowledge that is true of the physical world; we should also find truth in knowledge that is personal, and in that which is socially constructed;
- As learners we need to examine what we believe we know, in order to see if we really believe it, and whether it deserves to believed;
- The individual aspects of knowledge acquisition occur autonomously, and need to be evaluated by the autonomous learner using individually constructed criteria;
- The debate, dialog and inevitable dissensus that occur also contribute to knowledge worth having and using.
That is how my students described what I do in the classroom. I am left with one question: Am I an existentialist?