A Philosophy of Education

WAKE SHAKE and AWE!

When I earned my Bachelors degree in biology and philosophy from Framingham State College, I (rather naively) believed that successful education began with the individual, one’s own personal objectives, character, and habits. By the time I finished researching educational philosophy at Boston College, I had put into question the importance of role models, methods, and learning strategies for the development of individuals. And yet finally, only after several years of teaching, I began constructing my own philosophy of education based upon, and beginning with the community rather than the individual.

The community - its members and its activities - is what molds and prepares the individual to be a better learner, a better leader - and not the other way around. This becomes apparent to me every time I confront the fresh faces each “first day” teaching a new class at which point I reflect upon the people that widened my eyes, the challenges that kept me trying, the habits that formed, and the lessons that awed me during my own educational progression. Subsequently, my pedagogical aim has since been to wake, shake, and awe my students. This educational philosophy requires the help of not only one instructor, nor several, but a whole community.

When Aristotle said that all knowledge begins in wonder, I tend to agree with him given the supplementary statement that a good education involves setting the necessary conditions for that wonder to arise. For starters, “waking” the student is a key step to inciting wonder. It is a complex process however, and it must be done carefully and compassionately, just as is waking someone from a deep-sleep (in other words, you probably don’t want to dump cold water over his or her head, whisper too calmly, or shake the sleeper uncontrollably). Waking a student requires compassion, understanding and patience as well as discipline on the part of the educator. He or she may employ individualized strategies to raise awareness and attention to individual students’ interests, strengths, motivations, weaknesses, fears and biases. Of course this step often requires the help of external forces: helpful peers, critical faculty, probing activities, as well as a positive and supportive environment.

Yet, more often than not, college students are not 100% sure of their paths, strengths or interests. If this be the case, there is all the more reason to incorporate written, reading, visual, auditory, and oral activities into lesson-plans in order to awaken the senses more surely, and to reach-out to as many learning-styles as possible. (Some possibilities include the integration of appropriate film/lyrics/poetry into the classroom, creative role-playing and imitations, debating, holding small group discussions, allowing individual power-point presentations, peer-reviewing, and critical analysis of articles and argumentation in the news.)

“Shaking” the student is another important step in conditioning wonder and knowledge. In other words, “shaking” a student refers to jolting his or her (realized) preconditioned habits, as well as forcing him or her to jog and challenge his or her mind to step up to new horizons and become more efficient (thus encouraging the formation of new habits). In utilizing memory exercises, varied difficulties of reading material, critical thinking activities and creative-writing assignments, “shaking” things up prevents students from falling into the predictable, monotonous abyss that institutionalized education often represents to college students.

Finally, the breaking down of the stereotype, and often feared image of “going back to school,” needs to be achieved in order for the students to accept the natural flow of new, ideas and insights. Perhaps the best way to break down one’s old (repeated/worn-out) images and judgments is to replace them with striking, memorable, and self-created images and phantasms. And the best way to achieve this is to leave the students hanging, by asking open-ended questions, pointing out difficult paradoxes, raising controversies and contradictions, providing shocking alarming or even obscene (in the classic sense) displays for individual reflection. That is, by leaving the students in awe, with a sparked curiosity, one gives them the “space’ required for creating their own images, as well as interest and confidence to ask their own questions. It is with these questions, that one may find an added sense of wonder - which as I said before is the key to ultimate/long-term academic success. Every student, after all, is left to learn on his or her own at the end of each school day, within the community, as well as outside the community.

Like scientists, though, our students, peers, teachers and the community at large must actively observe, measure, and evaluate the strong points and weak points of the utilized methods and learning strategies. The classroom, therefore, is like a laboratory for teachers and students alike; for it is dynamic, flexible and ever-changeable according to the changing needs, capacities, and interests of the community members.