What for?
A blog about teaching for meaning making in the twenty-first century? Meaning making?
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This blog first appeared in 2016. It is now January 2020 as I revise this description of its purpose.
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The blog could be for you, dear reader, if you are interested in people, and/or nature, and/or the past/present/future, and/or how humankind rates its prospects for surviving the pressures we appear increasingly to be aware of all around us. Dear me, someone might be thinking, this guy needs to narrow his focus! But hold that thought I say. I’ll come back to the question of optimal breadth of focus in a moment. First I need to explain why my target group is both teachers and humanity at large in all its motley diversity.
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Educators, education managers and governments are familiar with the various processes of structuring educational programs for the earliest years through to adulthood and to third age learning. The essential argument of this blog is that education is best conceived as a support for learners on their lifelong, life-wide journeys in meaning making. Shaping the learning journey in response to the deepest human need for meaning and purpose provides a solid foundation for all the other outcomes that vested interests expect of the education industry. By fine-tuning our understanding of the innate human quest for understanding, and then fine-tuning our teaching, we can provide learners with the interior wherewithal for realising their potential as persons of substance. The meaning making approach to education advocated here calls teachers to a transformation of consciousness that will bear fruit in the progressive and never-ending perspective transformation of their students. Anyone at all who feels that something is missing in their lives may find the effort needed to consider these arguments to be worthwhile. (This means you, motley crew!) Perhaps we can’t hold existing approaches to education responsible for the unravelling of so much we used to take for granted in the international order, but we can, nevertheless, ask of the educational enterprise, what more can be done?
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As to the question of optimal breadth of focus in a text such as this blog: just as nothing lies forever beyond reach within an individual’s quest for understanding, so an adequate definition of the human quest for understanding needs to embrace that outward-boundness of interest within its scope. A definition needs to do justice to the thing it defines. What is meaning making when it’s at home? That is what we are here to explore together. Let’s dip our toes in!
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Tony McKenzie