Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Moody’s Investor Services recently asserted that the rate of colleges and universities that will go out of business is likely to triple annually in the years ahead. Small, private independent institutions  of 1500 students or less will find it increasingly challenging to meet enrollment goals.  What are educational institutions doing to address this projected future?

To build toward sustainability, schools continue to increase online programs. Mergers will occur,  as will acquisitions and purchases of non-profit schools by proprietary institutions and groups. Online offerings will continue to proliferate. Nontraditional adult learners will be a premier target audience for enrollment and admission. International student recruitment methods and practices will change, due to travel bans, visa problems, and a general xenophobia sensed by students from abroad. It is expected that international student enrollment will decline this year, as it did in fall 2017. Higher education leaders are understandably  concerned with the present and future viability of their organizations.

In the face of the present challenges, traditional economic models in higher education are changing. Universities must balance costs, quality, and sustainability, on the one hand, with innovation and compelling learning experiences, on the other.  Colleges and universities are increasing considering and engaging in consolidations, partnerships, and mergers to decrease costs, enhance institutional strengths, and acquire infrastructure required to effectively deliver programs and support services.

By consolidating underperforming or noncompetitive offices or programs, some colleges and universities seek to add to their mutual capacity for producing educational effectiveness. Those schools may find that by consolidating, say, their individual offices of the registrar or financial aid,  into a single office that serves both institutions, they attain greater efficiency of function at a reduction of cost.

Entering into partnerships with third-party educational vendors is not uncommon today and is likely to increase. A few customized models are worth mentioning. Vendors, Wiley Education Services among others, offer, as part of their partnership selections, customized models: fee for services, co-investment, and tuition revenue share, to name a few.

The fee for service model provides services and solutions for targeted support of specific projects. Targeting needs to be addressed may include enrollment management or program development. This model is best suited for educational institutions that possess developed infrastructure, capital, and resources.

The co-investment or “risk sharing” model has both the third-party vendor and the university making joint investments in an educational project’s start-up costs and ongoing expenses. The university can pay either a flat amount annually or a portion of the projected expenses. This models best serves a school that has some infrastructure, capital, and resources to effectively maintain projects.

The tuition share partnership option has schools providing a share of its tuition generated revenue to the vendor. This partnership model option requires a limited up-front investment by a school and therefore carries lower risk. The vendor provides a suite of student life cycle support of a wide range of university services. This model works well for schools with limited infrastructure, capital, and resources.

While the consolidations of offices or academic programs or the entering into customized partnerships with educational third parties allow universities to maintain their distinct identity defined through their mission, vision, and values, mergers are a more radical option that may or may not result with their school’s brand identity and tradition intact. In the face of inevitable closure or acquisition by another institution, schools may intentionally choose to merge. Mergers can be beneficial to both organizations or not. Leadership and bargaining strength play significant roles in such outcomes.

IN 2017, the financially struggling 130-year old Wheelock College and its neighbor Boston University announced they had merged. In that case, the merger proved mutually positive, as the smaller Wheelock maintained its name, tradition, and niche in the field of educational psychology. A portion of Wheelock’s staff and faculty moved over to be employed by Boston University. As a result of the merger, it is now the Wheelock School of Education and Human Development-Boston University. A much different scenario took place at Mount Ida College, where a merger resulted in the loss of the college’s name and educational identity. Its 84 acre campus was divided up among different members of the Massachusetts State University System. Unlike the situation at Wheelock, alumni of Mount Ida have no current school to which to identify and support.

In the face continuing costs, dwindling enrollments, increased competition, failing public confidence, and a capricious economy, higher education leadership is well advised to consider multiple option scenarios that should include consolidations, partnerships, and mergers. Even so, small schools without a substantial endowment or ongoing financial subsidy will continue to close.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Chief Academic Officer & Accreditation Liaison Officer

University of the West

We daily observe across the University of the West campus an inescapable mutuality of our roles and functions. Our most creative work is frequently accomplished in collaboration with others at the borders of our different units. How might the university effectively build bridges to new and current initiatives, leveraging this mutuality to enhance a synergy of positive, sustainable growth?

To ensure quality programming, a healthy workplace environment, financial viability, and recognizable educational brand, UWest must address all decisions at all levels of operation from a whole-systems perspective, rather than from an exclusive focus on isolated parts. A systems orientation to organizational development eschews acting ultimately as if programs are “stand-alones,” isolated from the whole by one-off procedures or implementation strategies. We should be weary of office-based or program-related “languages” and mini-cultures that foster intellectual silos, undermining team-orientated work.

A whole systems approach reinforces our intuitive insight that no discrete function can be understood isolated from the complex whole of which it is an integral part. “Silo-ed thinking” is atomistic, reducing things to its smallest component and favoring reductionism. As such, one may miss the forest for the trees. Systems thinking is, by contrast, contextual thinking that uses the logic of “both/and” and honors the long-range view, while favoring collaboration. Working in silos favors “nothing but” thinking, as in, “I am responsible for nothing but what’s in my job description and program.” Whole systems thinkers understand that, without discernment of the complete context, organizational meaning is truncated and partial. As a result, our knowledge of any single part is misleading, compromising the whole. This is as true for an organization that is a university as it is for a proprietary corporate business.

UWest’s holistic educational commitment by definition requires a systems orientation toward daily operations that addresses two important elements: structure and process. Our planning and implementation must have sufficient structure, so that we are not reinventing processes when a new opportunity emerges, thus dissipating resources, human and financial. At the same time, our systems must be flexible enough to enable us to respond nimbly and creatively to student and faculty needs, as well as to the interests of our community partners and university trustees. How might we achieve organizational deftness to make smart decisions quickly?

When too many players are involved, it’s often difficult to quickly pivot in new directions or implement new measures. A strategy to overcome these issues is to convene “skunkworks” projects. These are experimental teams of faculty and staff serving to provide the campus an entrepreneurial function and granted a freedom from conventional university procedures that can constrain customizing ideas and seizing opportunities on and off campus. Skunkworks operations can inspire and define feasible initiatives for investment. The initial campus learning community initiative referred to as “Self & Society” sprung from exactly this source. A small group of faculty and staff gathered under the auspices of the Office of Academic Affairs, armed with a “let’s make-it-happen” philosophy.

That learning community of first-time college students stood firmly upon the existing general education structures and processes of student support, featuring academic advisors, course coaches, community service learning, dialog and meditation groups, interdisciplinary courses, diversity activities, field projects, invited guest speakers, and a developmental math sequence highlighting quantitative reasoning. The learning community linked academic and student affairs with the offices of the registrar, wellness, student success, enrollment, marketing, and financial aid. The President and his Executive Team monitored developments and provided support.

Our learning community is now expanding into an innovative Undergraduate Curriculum Transformation initiative, launched by President Stephen Morgan, supported by the Trustees, and currently in the design phase. The first two courses of “Life and Culture” are scheduled for a fall 2018 launch. An interdisciplinary faculty team of boundary-crossers, who are insightful collaborators and designers of articulated pathways from classrooms to the campus to the community-at-large, has been for several months diligently at work. They are building toward a campus-wide cooperative accountability for the new undergraduate experience.

At the heart of our new undergraduate curriculum lies the big vision of a coherent and unified program of interdisciplinary learning, linked by a block schedule, common inquiry, socially relevant themes that will alternate over time, high impact learning activities, student-centered pedagogy, community service, and significant faculty/staff collaboration. This is meant as an antidote to the piecemeal-style curriculum extant throughout higher education that lacks clear vision and purpose.

Within the transformed undergraduate curriculum, UWest students and parents will easily perceive a learning arc, moving from the development of individuals capable of independent thought and self-agency to compassionate citizens capable of self-less service for the common good. We believe they will appreciate the focus on the interior and exterior life of individuals and groups. In core courses in the first two years and offerings in degree majors in their final two years, students will inquire into what it means to be and live as a human being in community. Critical thinking, self-reflection, intellectual agility, and pursuit of truth through inquiry, research, group projects, campus employment, and career advisement will develop skills that cross-train the heart and brain, suitable for personal satisfaction and global citizenship. Mutuality will be our watchword and our ethic.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Chief Academic Officer

University of the West

Rosemead, CA

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                           January 30, 2015

Noetic education is my holistic critique of higher education and borrows salient points of view and practices from the arts and humanities, cognitive psychology, aesthetic education, systems theory, and the learning sciences. The fundamental point is that wholeness of being is healthier and more optimal than the narrow human development presently achieved by the fragmented nature of the academy, based too often on economic rationality, a disconnect between faculty interests and student needs, a shattered curriculum, and uncertain social purpose.

To properly educate a person requires attention be given to mental, physical, social, professional, and spiritual needs. It is essential to human wholeness that higher education nurtures the human spirit and its search for inner sense, leading to intellectual, psychological, and moral well being. When we learn to think with disciplined feeling, we relate to subject matters in terms of the human spirit, liberating ourselves from bondage of mindless habit, mechanized thinking, and fragmented talents. Noetic learning awakens a spirit of one’s entire being.

“Noetic,” from the Greek word nous, suggests multiple ways of knowing. Rooted in an epistemology of cognitive wholeness, Noetic education links objective and subjective learning. The analytical disciplines of higher education do not by themselves derive our full development. Noetic educational theory and practice enlarge the notion of intellect beyond instrumental reasoning to include perceptions of the body, since thinking and perceiving are not mutually exclusive. We need holistic systems that wed analytical skills of science, heuristic skills of the humanities, and expressive values of the arts. In that setting, abstract reason joins embodied intuition in service of mind-body-spirit liberation, expanding human consciousness.

Higher education suffers from limits of its rationalistic virtues. Learning unto wholeness means moving beyond seeing intelligence strictly as analytical efficiency and learning only in terms of what can be assed by tests of strict quantification. I do not propose, however, that we abandon the fundamental human project to grasp the world in rational terms. I do propose that we augment that project by adding tacit subjective knowledge, including self-reflection and contemplative practice. The goal is to achieve an intellectual pluralism that makes available to the mind more than objective logic, not less, and thereby implicating reason in creative expression, personal transformation, and ethical responsibility. Shall we finally implement programs of expansive knowing or continue to support impaired development?

An all-sided mind capable of thinking with the heart can escape the shackles of limited cognition. I advocate thinking that includes empathy with people, things, and events; I advocate feeling that includes a conscious and disciplined valuing of experience. At the heart of Noetic educational theory is practice of freedom – freedom to think imaginatively beyond ideologies or authoritative systems, freedom to creatively direct the human spirit and mobilize social action, freedom to become one’s own intellectual and artistic authority. Imaginative thought constitutes a poetic intelligence that is not a matter of right answers or correct use of language; it probes the essence of things, freely moving awareness through states of being.

A society that values cognitive freedom needs necessarily to support innovative forms of holistic education required of an informed citizenry capable of effective decision making and evaluation of competing claims to truth. Our humanity flourishes by creatively organizing experience in multiple ways. Noetic literacy integrates conceptual, aesthetic, and spiritual/transpersonal frameworks to help us assess events, synthesize knowledge, and gain insight into our personal and social humanity.

Noetic education advocates for continuous learning that touches the furthest reaches of being. Our personal evolution requires we learn from books and from one another as part of lived experience. Experiential learning enhances the endowed faculties of our humanity – reasoning, perception, judgment, moral preference, and intuitive discernment. Instrumental rationality and book learning by themselves partially educate a person, dividing the unity of critical and expressive knowing. From experiential knowing we learn that human intelligence is not simply a matter of how much can be grasped from books but how deeply we think and how responsibly we act when it is unclear what is to be done. It involves the integration of types of knowing with which to fashion a healthier self, capable of addressing intractable personal, social, spiritual, and ecological issues. As such, we may come to learn how to love, untying knots in the human heart.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                             January 20, 2015

Where does holism fit in the discussion among postmodernists relative to the idea of universal values, reason, truth, and reality? Is holism a form of postmodern theory and practice or a force counter to it? Is holism a modernist system of thought or an advance on it?

To answer these questions, we must first distinguish between modernism and postmodernism. The single greatest distinction here can be found in their different conceptualizations of truth and knowledge. Modernists retained the notion of an objective and discrete reality existing prior to human experience. They held to the universality of reason and progress on behalf of the enlightenment of humanity and sought unchanging values across borders of time, space, and culture.

Postmodern deconstructionist scholars have altered the Enlightenment notion of truth as beyond critique. They maintain a view of truth as social agreement within various cultural traditions. In an attempt to include the many view points and voices previously isolated or ignored by modernism, postmodern thinkers reject the modernist hierarchy of truths and certainties, favoring difference and multiplicity of equally valid but partial perspectives. This point of view is variously referred to as multiculturalism, diversity, pluralism, or heteronomy. Enlightenment reason is replaced by postmodern reason, a pragmatic, socially learned process for individual and collective action.

It is helpful here, perhaps, to discuss the two discrete but related brands of the postmodern project. Lacking a singular definition of postmodernism, scholars isolate two different forms: constructive postmodernism and deconstructive postmodernism. A characteristic of the two postmodernism is their kinship and their singularity. The kinship lies in their mutual efforts to respond to challenges of cultural renewal. I will address the singularity of difference below. I assert that our holistic theory and practice must be a form of constructive postmodernism. But what is meant by the term?

David Ray Griffin coined the term constructive postmodernism. For Griffin, constructive postmodernists seek to transcend and include aspects of the modern worldview by “constructing a unity of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious intuitions.” The critique of modernism championed by Griffin and other constructive postmodernists is not so radical as to preclude development of a new worldview of wholeness, consisting of the revision of some modernist beliefs and practices, such as the privileging of abstract reason above other cognitive modalities. Constructive postmodernists endeavor to salvage what is most worthwhile in modernist values of truth, rationality, selfhood, and historical meaning, integrating them with revisions of premodern values, including Spirit and a conscious natural world.

Therein lies the aforementioned disjunction between constructive and deconstructive postmodernism. Seeking to avoid radical individualism and relativism, constructive postmodernists place significance upon intersubjectivity, cooperation, and elements of the perennial philosophies of the premodern worldview. Constructive postmodernists usually refer to Alfred North Whitehead’s “process” cosmology as the source of their unequivocal rejection the mechanistic worldview of modernity and their primary inspiration concerning the project of interdependent wholeness of multiple perspectives. Whitehead’s process orientation moves away from dualism and determinism toward synthesis, interdependence, and dialogue.

Deconstruction scholars seek the disestablishment of traditional centers of power and authority, positing a notion of multiple “truths.” They seek to indicate that philosophical texts do not mean what they seem to mean, do not mean what the author intended, and in fact possess no discernible meaning at all. Deconstructionists aim at showing how the attempt by traditional philosophers to use language in such a way as to get beyond language and arrive at some translinguistic, transcultural, and transhistorical perspective ultimately fails.

To answer questions I raised earlier about holistic theory’s relationship to modernism and postmodernism, let us say that insofar as holism posits a fundamental unity of the universe and seeks meaning, it is related to modernism. However, in its attempt to move beyond modernist hierarchy and absolutism by honoring multiplicity and difference, holism is part of postmodernism. Even as it values scientific reasoning through analysis and inquiry, holism also prizes intuition through contemplation and subjectivity as means of realizing value from the world’s interconnectedness, and so it is a force that augments the rationalism of modernism.

Holism seeks to better understand the relationship between our higher self and Spirit within the contexts of culture and cosmos. It attempts to restore the link between ethics and behavior through engagement, relatedness, and cooperation. So, as it posits the interdependence of life, seeks a new unity of humanity and nature inclusive of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious intuitions rejected by deconstructionists, and values human wholeness through embrace of multiculturalism and multiple intelligences, holism is a form of constructive postmodernism.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                           January 15, 2015

Too often in our work, as in our life, we suffer overwhelm, confusion, or hurt. During such times, we can find fortification of our body-mind-spirit by wandering in the woods, listening to a soundscape of insects and birds, or gazing at the immense night sky. By giving ourselves over to the magnitude of nature, we distance ourselves from our cares and realize something of our deeper selves.

Rilke knew, “If only we could let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong…” Similarly, Gerard G. May in The Wisdom of Wilderness understands that learning in life and on the job means being willing to be cope-less. This doesn’t mean that we surrender our wits, or retreat into a desperate quietism. It means, instead, that we be present to life without artificially forcing issues into resolution. It means that to achieve a healthy relationship with our or another’s nature, we dim the ego’s glare of demands, enter the softer light of not-knowing, and attend creatively to what arises from the depths of being.

This inner harmony via education by nature is fundamentally a capacity for freedom and love. In this way, nature is a curriculum for learning survival skills and values. Walking among towering sequoias or along a shoreline of the majestic sea, we live more fully present to life, moving our awareness past emotional defenses, mechanized thinking, or conditioned behavior and closer to wellsprings of creative possibility.

Knowledge by presence means we are available to the transformational energies of life, embracing non-defensive openness, flexibility of thought, wonder, and a willingness to be changed by self-inquiry. We achieve healing from powerful entrainment, as our mental, physiological, and spiritual pulses synchronize with nature’s rhythms to create a new and sustainable peace within us. The practice of this wholeness constitutes a sacredness, a seeking of spirit profanely, regarding earth with respect.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                     December 29, 2014

Our global economy increasingly relies upon change, innovation, and renewal. A disciplined imagination is required for innovation to support value creation in all sectors and industries. Creativity is the essential ingredient for workforce investment, economic development, and financial prosperity. Today the market value of products and services derives as much from uniqueness and aesthetic appeal as it does from function and performance. Excellent products inspire us with their artistry, design, or beauty.

Creativity and talent provide a competitive advantage, reaching across businesses. Organizations seek employees who can creatively solve problems, communicate, and work in teams. Reflecting the state of the creative economy, David Pink declared in the Harvard Business Review that the “MFA is the new MBA.” Pink meant that a graduate degree in art is highly compatible with doing business. For example, nonverbal forms of knowing exemplified by artists are increasingly important for a company’s success. The arts are complimentary partners with many professions, creating conditions cognitive psychologists identify as ideal for learning.

Art plays an essential role in the holistic education of people as whole beings, capable of thinking with and through mind, heart, and hands. The variety of learning styles promoted by art and art making offer deep cognitive channels required for effectively ordering the self. By projecting ourselves in and through the arts, we fashion ourselves in salutary ways that align with the human spirit’s longing for wholeness. How does this happen?

To study the arts is to learn to “read” images across a spectrum of intellectual, artistic, cultural, and environmental domains, perceiving life through all mediums in which meaning is expressed. Artists regard their craft as a form of knowledge expressed in a language of images. Musicians think in music and not simply about music. Painters and sculptors think critically in color and forms, making choices, say, with pigment or stone. By thinking in the intersensory domain of images, we reconnect with our primal humanity and the basic impulses behind an aesthetic-artistic experience.

Innovators in all fields are “artists” not because they are prone to fantasies or states of disassociation, but because, like children, they harness playfulness to productive ends. Imaginative play is a capacity for shifting experience of reality. Walt Whitman wrote, There was a boy who went forth every day;/And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;/And that object became part of him …” Imaginative play, like art, constitutes a poetic intelligence that is not a matter of right answers or the correct use of language; it probes the essence of things, moving awareness into different qualities of being. Poet Cid Corman highlighted this poetic power of artists and children when he wrote: Follow/the stream:/Don’t go -/ but be/going.

Masters of modern art – Klee, Kandinsky, Picasso, Miro – found inspiration in the art of children. They understood that they must return to their child-like mind, tapping the wellspring of creative consciousness to support their personal and professional well-being. “All children are artists; the trick is to reclaim this when we grow up,” stated Picasso. Similarly, Baudelaire knew that “Genius is childhood recovered at will.” Children, artists, entrepreneurs, and designers share the principle of creative appropriation, freely using images for creative purposes of art, work, and life.

Poetic thinking in images allows us to see life as simultaneously literal and imaginal, subject to interpretation and change. This “seeing through” the literal to the possible carries evolutionary power, an antidote to the crippling attitude of this is the way things are. Realizing the danger posed by the illiteracy of radical literalism, Robert Frost asserted that unless we have a “proper poetical education,” we are “not safe anywhere.” Poetic intelligence is vitality and is life.

My point is that the arts are not simply expressive; they develop the very tools of thinking. Image making is the mind’s most fundamental activity of knowing. Learning results when our experiences provide, confirm, or modify images of the world and ourselves. As primary units of consciousness, images are not simply metaphors for ideas but relate to how we acquire, organize, and use information. This is as true for scientists as it is for artists.

Scientists, like artists, note the function of imagery in their work. A distinctive power of the poetic mind mentioned above is its ability to grasp the inner life identity of things and not simply to perceive similarities or outer relationships. Eugene Wigner, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics said, “The discovery of the laws of nature require, first and foremost, intuition, concerning pictures and a great many subconscious processes.” Jerome Friedman, another Nobel Prize recipient in Physics asserted, “Reasoning is constructed with movable images, just as poetry is.” Albert Einstein, who began playing violin at age six, said his discovery of the theory of relativity was the “result of musical perception.”

In addition to poetic thinking through images, prominent artists and scientists share other mental skills and operations: accurate observation, spatial thought, kinesthetic thought, identification of essential components of a complex whole, recognition and invention of patterns governing a system, empathy with objects of study, and visual, verbal, or mathematical synthesis and communication of results. When mathematical capacities of mind fuse with aesthetic perception through artistic experience, we undergo holistic transformations that generate inspiring images of animated, embodied thought and a fuller humanity.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                       December 19, 2014

Is technology anathema to soul? Does it necessarily reduce people to objects? Can technology engage us sensuously with others in a feeling community? Are computers a psychic extension of the mind-body-spirit instrument?

In trying to find the soul of technology, Robert Sardello positions technology within the context of culture.  He views technology as story, image, and value, as much as it is a mechanical means for getting work done. By viewing technology as culture and philosophy, he identifies technology as part of cultural systems of symbols developed over millennia. Following Sardello, It is helpful to the present discussion to speak of “poly-technology” to include mechanical, natural, and spiritual technology.

Today we use the word “technology,” derived from techne, to mean a mechanical ordering of things. For the ancient Greeks, however, techne did not mean technology in the mechanical sense, nor did it mean art in the sense of skill or proficiency. Techne meant knowledge that resulted from grasping beings as emerging out of themselves in the ways that present themselves in their essence. As an understanding of what it means to be at all, techne is identified with wonder, the basic disposition of philosophy and knowledge. For the ancient Greeks, as for Heidegger, to be technological meant to be aware of being, aware of soul.

An intimate relationship between technology and soul can be found within folk and indigenous traditions. Shamans, medicine men, sorcerers, and priests contact the world of spirits by use of ancient technology: drumming, dancing, or ritual music that narrates ecstatic flights of the soul. Sacred rattles, drums, and gongs trigger illuminating visions. Shamanic instruments of technology also include rock crystals, eagle feathers, magic sticks, bells, helmets, shields, and spears, animal skins and furs. Totems impart a natal kinship with powers of the earth. Herbology, pharmacology, and dream interpretation are also potent technologies.

In many ancient wisdom systems, technology is a tool of learning and knowledge, valued not simply for its utility but also for its essential truth and potential to trigger transformation.  Tools of technology in shamanic contexts also include embodied modalities of learning: seeing, feeling, touching, moving, hearing, and tasting – intersensory means of disclosing spiritual reality.

The ultimate “instrument” of transformation is the shaman herself: body-mind-spirit. Chanting of the Inuit involves an accelerated, rhythmic hyperventilation. Circular or continuous breathing is required to play the didgeridoo of the Australian aborigines and the long curved horns of the Tibetans. In Indian and Tibetan yoga traditions mantras realize effects upon consciousness with their sound quality alone, quite apart of their meaning content. Vision fasts and acts of sensory deprivation and stimulation among Ojibwa shamans initiate spirit contact. Directed imaging, personal and collective visualization, breath control techniques, and physical postures are used to develop special states of awareness that generate healing, insights, dreams, or visions.

Rather than dehumanizing shamanic practitioners, their technologies make them “theoretical” (thea-horetical), that is, possessing insight into truth and reality of Being. A law well known in the history of religions is referred to as “sympathetic magic”: one becomes what one displays, or like attracts like. Shamans are the mythical ancestors portrayed by their masks, ceremonial costumes, and ritual hats, undergoing a total transformation of the soul’s essence into something other. They are simultaneously not-themselves and not-not-themselves.

Soul is not simply individual and subjective; it is present whenever people enter into communal relationships wherein their feelings are engaged. John Seely Brown points out in New Learning Environments for the 21^st Century that college students with classroom laptops can engage in a transformational shift from “learning about” information to  “learning to be” practitioners in a community of practitioners.

Soulmaking via social learning platforms requires that students assimilate values, sensibilities, attitudes, and worldviews embodied in communities of practice. As such, computers and digital tools provide powerful forms of distributed cognitive apprenticeship that function globally and parallel the situation of shamans who apprentice themselves to power animals and tutelary spirits in supra-sensible worlds. Like shamans whose transformational learning is facilitated by tools of their technology, today’s students may undergo technology-assisted alterations of being, constructing new forms of the self as cognitive apprentices and members of immersive communities that are highly expressive, sensuous, and collaborative.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                            December 5, 2014

 He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that… Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it … is the formidable evil: there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudice.                          John Stuart Mill, On Liberty                                                                

Multiple perspectives inform broad understanding. Possessing a repertoire of true but partial worldviews is an essential part of social literacy for diverse communities. When human action is viewed through the lens of perspective taking, caring, understanding, and inclusion, we may achieve a picture of humanity transcending bigotry, sexual minority harassment, neglect of people with disabilities, nationalism, economic chauvinism, and misanthropy. Diversity is an educational issue and social justice issue, a key to learning about our full humanity in community.

Race, class, sexuality, and gender are unstable categories whose nature and influence are not fixed. Holding global perspectives can make clear that we possess fluid, malleable identities and possess simultaneous group memberships that can serve as starting points for understanding others. Geneticists who gather data about genetic variations and diversity insist that there is greater difference within races than between races.

An intimacy of self and other is inherent in the African word Ubuntu, translated as, “I am because we are.” Similarly the Japanese word Ningen means “between or among people” and points also to our inter-relational nature as beings who do not fully realize ourselves alienated from others. Thich Nhat Hahn argues that intersubjectivity emerges when self-regarding impulses are modified by knowledge that we are simultaneously intrapersonal and interpersonal. But while our human condition is “diverse,” it hardly guarantees racial harmony.

Dissent is kin to diversity, and so a diverse community is not conflict free; it is a place where conflicting perspectives offer opportunities to learn and change. “No” may be the start of a conversation about what constitutes someone’s commitment. People can let go of doubts that lead to violent resistance only if they can name and express them. Voicing dissent may lead to alternatives as to how we see, structure, and value things. Affirming “No” may start a conversation about what constitutes commitment, one’s constructive first step toward finding a positive role within a troubled context.

A healthy diversity-activated community provides historically slighted groups meaningful assurance that “community” is a living and authentic value with a plan of implementation of inclusion and not code for paternalism, colonialism, or chauvinism.

A community as a living system needs limiters and inhibitors of dissent and difference to grow and sustain itself as an interdependent entity. There can be no lasting transformation without inclusiveness, nor holistic learning without diversity.

A living system that has but one party empowered in ways that others cannot bring new and different information forward becomes pathological. Homogeneity means the part subverts difference and traumatizes the whole.

John Stuart Mill argued that any position, even if correct, is a “dead dogma” until one has to defend it against someone who believes the opposite just as fervently. Likewise, the Colville tribal people from Okanagan value a perspective referred to as En’owkin, understood as “Give me the viewpoint opposite of mine to increase my wisdom.”

We are in deep need of communities of vision beyond separate enclaves of unchallenged perspectives. For as Cass R. Sunstein, Law Professor, University of Chicago wrote, “There is the general risk that those who flock together…will end up both confident and wrong, simply because they have not been sufficiently exposed to counterarguments. They may even think of their fellow citizens as opponents or adversaries in some kind of ‘war’.”

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                     November 26, 2014

We are storytelling beings, homo narrans, as anthropologists have it. Neuroscience indicates that our brains are hardwired to structure lived experience as ongoing stories. We come to understand our life journey as a narrative we tell into meaning, draft after draft. We are and become our stories in the everyday business of life.

Similarly, the goal of a business is to tell a clear and compelling story, leading end-users to believe they have come upon a boon, something special adding value to life. The limitation of story, however, is that is tends toward flatland. Most corporate stories feature static, lifeless nouns, one dimensional identities, and events that can be explained and controlled by analytics, case studies, or reports. As such, story functions like a sign whose message is immediately graspable and without depth. Story owns the surface and traffics in the literal.

Great organizations, on the other hand, are carried forward by Mythos, a special event that serves as its founding experience, incarnated in a primal individual as a hero and depicted in its logo.  While providing excellent products or services, great organizations communicate meanings inherent in its Mythos, suggesting how we might live differently. Mythos is not an explanation or marketing copy but an occasion and a time for tapping the wellspring of innovative reality in narrative form, verbal, and visual.

Mythos arises from a highly charged, affective encounter with meaning and spirit, a transcendence of business as usual that we grasp as an idea and express as an image or organizational logo. Mythos traffics in the realm of active verbs, metaphors, and transformations, where meanings constantly compound one another into greater depth and where we are inspired.  Mythos functions not like a sign but like a symbol, suggestive, enticing, and transpersonal. Mythos breaks surface of the mundane into the numinous. Advertising and promotional collateral can only suggest but never capture its energetic and spirit.

Story gives chronological account of experience lived along the path of everyday life. Mythos breaks through at a point along the horizontal vector, rising vertically as an eruption of depth above the horizontal flatland. It breaks through conventions in thinking in favor of vital new prerogatives. Mythos is the vehicle of inspiration by which we encounter creative intersubjectivity in relation to the organization’s mission and core objectives. It is the fountainhead of ongoing innovation.

As someone like Steve Jobs, or even a group, may ascend the vertical vector in a moment of transcendence that lifts him out of himself (ex-stasis), providing an endowment of ideals from which all may derive innovation and gravitas. Creators, designers, and artists appear as carriers of Mythos, larger than life figures, arousing our esteem and fear. Great leaders serve as operational stewards of Mythos, an organization’s soul.