Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

We live in the Kairos (Grk.), an era of radical uncertainty, wherein predictability is a victim of indeterminate, discontinuous change, and events seem only to make sense within chaos theory. Still, the Kairos is an auspicious time and a critical place, a cross-roads defined by synchronicities, anomalies, and transformations that require our appropriate and just measure of response to the marginalization and splitting that cripples our communities, nation, and planet. Two images serve as guides: the archer and the weaver. The former points to hitting the mark; the later to finding openings, that is, passing the distaff of our discernment through the opening formed by the warp weave of praxis.

In the education sector, STEM curricula enhance learners’ epistemic drives toward control and certainty through instrumental and calculative reason and self-affirming narratives, reducing the dissonance of not-knowing, unlearning, and reframing that is necessary to break symmetry into emergent, self-organizing forms, leading to a reverent openness to new learning. The arts and humanities, folklore and mythological studies, and depth psychologies must necessarily augment STEM’s epistemology of scientific materialism, thereby engendering a sense of surprise, wonder, and intentional reception of intimate learning and ways of integral being.