Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

A healthy society needs to be literate beyond language and number to support diversity of thought and expression. The current STEM-dominated academy with dependencies on calculative reason, predictability, measurement, and control disables unity of human faculties and, therefore, is both impaired and impairing.

By privileging instrumental reason over complementary learning modalities, higher education delegitimizes non-discursive and non-rational cognition associated with indigenous wisdom and the arts and humanities. This condition is enhanced when the academy prizes knowledge for its effective utility rather than its essential truth or potential for transformation.

My Healing Education initiative valorizes multiple ways of learning, knowing, perceiving, and being that includes rational mental operations of the hard sciences and subjective modalities of the arts and humanities linked together by the cognitive imagination.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Absence of multiple-perspectives-literacy leads to Othering. By assuming roles of socially disenfranchised or politically incompatible Others and co-engaging in projects across socio-cultural borders, we step back from our bias and privilege into much of what we previously devalued or dehumanized. In that moment, we question our life and worldview, pushing back limits of our stereotypical perceptions and expanding awareness of the human condition. Human beings possess fluid, malleable identities and possess simultaneous group memberships that can serve as starting points for understanding Others.

Scientists who study the genome find no biological basis for race. Sharon Bagley reports, “Geneticists find that when they add up the tiny genetic variations that make one person different from the next, there is greater difference within races than between races.” That fact makes it ostensibly prohibitive to disdain people, causes, or alliances as outliers on the assumption that they are not ‘our kind’. Our ethical responsibility for those with whom we are existentially connected is pre-requisite for social concord and requires we stand up against fascism and all forms of xenophobia despite intimidation from powerful actors.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

A vibrant nation needs communities possessing limiters and inhibitors of concepts, values, structures, and practices in order to sustain themselves as living interdependent entities. There can be neither lasting cultural transformation without inclusiveness nor whole-person development without difference.

Our socio-political views are, in the words of J.S. Mill, but ‘dead dogma’ even if they are true, until we defend them when challenged by someone holding the opposite position as fervently. We witness unhealthy social systems where a single group wields dominant, widespread influence that prevents consideration of divergent possibilities or information from different sources. In such systems, a fragmented part subverts significant difference and thereby traumatizes the community as a whole.

On the other hand, healthy, diverse communities provide historically slighted groups meaningful assurance that ‘community’ is an authentic value of collective membership and ownership with accessible plans for implementation of inclusion and redress of grievances and not code for racism, colonialism, chauvinism, or xenophobia.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Master teachers, such as Elliot Eisner and Parker Palmer, have long go pointed to the negative consequences on learning from brutal critique. That said, it should be understood that the version of the Socratic method based on ridicule and fear presented by the character of Dr. Kingsfield in the film “The Paper Chase” is in no way inherent to Socrates’ dialectic of questions and answers.

Rather, Socratic method seeks to reveal the values, biases, and assumptions beneath our beliefs. It does not aim to present irrefutable facts so much as to point out the uncertainty, complexity, and indeterminacy of life. Because students, along with their instructors, raise their own issues and questions, the dialectical process aims to empower them through greater understanding.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

The ongoing resistance of higher education to creative initiatives is regrettable but understandable. Creativity taps archetypal forces of creation and destruction, death and re-birth. Creativity demands we open to not-knowing, unlearning, and reframing, living the deep questions (Rilke) before solutions arise. In this state of ‘negative capability’, we stand immersed in ‘uncertainty, mystery, and doubt’ (Keats), musing at the threshold of reason without clear direction or conscious purpose. Ordinary awareness cracks, and we enter a novel space-time. In such ways, creativity concusses our academic training; we fear we’re out-of-control. The ideal professional image of ourselves is threatened. And so, we can understand resistance to creativity.

To face and move through the fear requires what I’ve referred to as an ‘existential intimacy of learning’ with intuitive, non-discursive, and tacit awareness currently overlooked in education due to an assumed need to control learning, so as to claim it has occurred and how. What is immediately called for across the Academy is an onto-existential shift toward embracing noetic modalities qualitatively different from conventional problem-solving approaches, processed at different levels of consciousness, and producing qualitatively unique learning outcomes and states of being.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

The prevention of human wounding inadvertently caused by education is our dire responsibility, every bit as much as the healing of learners so wounded. Failing in that, there exists a ‘sickness unto learning’ wherein education itself needs healing. Whether calculative reason is the only valid way to know or scientific knowledge the only legitimate form of knowledge are important epistemological questions presently challenged by noetic studies, integral theory, holistic educators, artists/teaching-artists, and the neurodiversity movement. School curricula and classroom instruction based on a reductive cognitive bandwidth of what ostensibly constitutes intelligence and being ‘smart’ causes harm to learners. As educators, we must learn more about learning and stop the human damage.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Beyond number-based and word-based knowledge, it is essential to our well-being to achieve aesthetic literacy. An aesthetically literate person is fluent in alternative modes of knowing and thus capable of learning from life experiences. Possessing aesthetic-literacy, one utilizes images to imaginatively unlock essential wisdom of ancestors and enter into diverse cultural designs and indigenous teachings that form the signposts of many peak artistic and cultural experiences along the human adventure. Without the noetic capacity to ‘read’ images, we remove ourselves from the great conversations of humanity begun in primeval times.

Images are the primary units of awareness giving form and substance to our concepts, feelings – to our very mind. Images are not simply metaphors for ideas. Because images are ultimately related to how we acquire, organize, retrieve, and use information, aesthetic literacy is an authentic mode of learning. Today’s general loss of our image-reading intelligence threatens us with dire consequences. It diminishes an audiences’ ability to find generative, life-enhancing meanings in theaters or concert halls; It deadens citizens’ capacity to perceive veiled messages and truths in political campaigns; it clouds the spiritual seekers’ discrimination among sacred, iconic artifacts; it makes communities vulnerable to manipulation by lobbyists, special interests, or hate groups; it strangles the organic form of our implicate selfhood.

However, reading extensively through the imagistic products of the cognitive imagination offers us a powerful antidote to the literal, reductionist mind, fixated on a hegemonic program of interpretation. We need to discern the rich epistemic value of images in stories, songs, paintings, poems, scientific systems, and more. Since images populate the mind and all the senses, the literacy advocated here envisions integration of somatic with rational understandings. Image literacy means one is fluent in the ‘languages’ of everyday life, discerning integral meanings to help us responsibly engage human and more-than-human others in complex personal, socio-political, aesthetic, and environmental contexts.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Our postindustrial information age is acutely aware of the role of method in the critical questioning of assertions of knowledge. “How do we, and how can we know this or that?” “What are the criteria, credentials, and standards that serve as foundations for truthful claims to know something?” While at first blush such questions may seem overly philosophical, our failure to adequately address them can and often does have injurious effects on learners.

Students frequently enter school with a hidden implicate identity, that is to say, a sense of selfhood existing before and beyond educational categorical identification. Their unique identity is largely shaped by unconventional ways of knowing and sense-making of the world. Students, whose core being stems from anomalous epistemologies, are often ridiculed as non-academic, shamed as ‘slow’ learners, or marginalized in tracks for learning-disabilities or transgressive students. Their multi-perspectival consciousness, fashioned from unconscious, instinctual, intuitive, or tacit everyday awareness, is not valued within the narrow cognitive portfolio of acceptable learning, labeled instead as a kind of katabasis, to be understood here as a fall from academic grace.

Consequently, noetic learners are often held back from grade-level progression not because they are not smart, but because their school suffers from a naive reductionism regarding the notion of intelligence. Education today lacks of a pluralistic view of knowing and knowledge and is therefore unable to recognize the value of alternative knowing within a vision of excellence and human wholeness. Neurodiverse learners, who if they lived in other cultural and learning contexts would be considered ‘gifted,’ suffer concussive outcomes in our schools from which many never recover. This is but one aspect of the current ‘sickness unto earning’ that plagues American education.

My noetic education project is a call to members of the Academy to do all they can to instigate shifts toward more integral ways of conceptualizing learning, knowledge, intelligence, and a more fully formed human being, as part of its generative mission. We must do what we can to end educational trauma.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Objectivity is one of several metaphysical assumptions of the hard sciences. Galileo established the position that only those properties accountable to mathematical measurement are (objectively) real. According to Karl Pearson, “The scientific man has above all things to strive at self-elimination in his judgements.” Subjective qualities like emotions are misapprehensions to be avoided. Every age has its defining depravity. Today, it is a flatland perspective upon the surface of life that – because it rejects interiority – results in forms of thinking that are detached, impersonal, rigid, and abstract. STEM knowledge that fragments the world, separates humanity from nature, splits spirit from the earth, and isolates body from mind must be viewed with an increasing intensity of suspicion.

While scientific method is a considerable system for observing and documenting details of the outer world, its foundational claims to the objective, rational basis of valid knowledge and the scientific mind divorced from personal feelings results in the ‘splitting’ of wholes into parts, including human selfhood and its relation to the planet. The result is a destabilizing retreat from Being and a crisis of rapport with Otherness. One’s existential duty, as articulated in the arts and humanities, is to engage human and more-than-human others with feeling and embodied relationality – and never as disembodied abstractions. Physicist Arthur Zajonc had it right when he opined, “We now truly stand in need, not as scientists but as a civilization, of the artist’s cognitive capacities.”