The 2016 i witness program sponsored by Orange CultureHub Inc. will involve local school children in individual and group arts-based, reflective inquiry into the question, what’s happening in the world around me, and what does this all mean to me? Students will create works for the i witness exhibition of visual arts and/or the i witness extravaganza of performing arts within the 2016 Orange Youth Arts Festival. (See program webpage for details.)
There’s an afterthought that arises from my short thought piece, The thinking behind the i witness program: the realisation that engaging students in observation and reporting on our human world is in itself an expression of the human phenomenon. We are witnesses to the human world by virtue of our participation in humankind. Participation in and identification with the human phenomenon are both fecund and sobering ways of enriching our lives. Throughout our individual lifetimes we have the capacity to become ever more understanding of the phenomenon we collectively are. We can give added depth to such personal growth through conscious endorsement of the value of aspiring towards a meaning making perspective in our lives, what others (for example, Davey (2006)) have called ‘hermeneutic consciousness’, and by accepting that growth in understanding is achieved via a hermeneutic reasoning or meaning making effort.
Hats off to those Orange-district teachers who will give their students opportunity to be i witnesses in 2016. Information about the 2016 i witness program was first circulated through local schools early this year, but teachers still have opportunity to involve their classes. The 2016 i witness program is a golden opportunity for teachers to explore together the curriculum goal of cultural awareness. Consider these two underpinning beliefs: (a) observation and reporting are integral activities for participants in the human phenomenon – it comes with the Homo sapiens membership badge – but also, saying the same thing in more educational language, (b) we enrich our teaching as we align it with the nature of the human phenomenon:
"curriculum practice, the implementation of a learning environment design, will achieve more robust and fulsome outcomes the more closely it mirrors or accommodates the way humans experience self and world – cognitively, socially, physically, emotionally, ethically, spiritually – not in separate compartments, but as an organic, dynamic, integrated whole" (McKenzie, 214, p. 6).
References
Davey, N. (2006). Unquiet understanding: Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
McKenzie, A. (2014). Meaning making: A university curriculum framework for the twenty-first century. Saarbrucken: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. Available here: https://www.morebooks.de/store/gb/book/meaning-making:-a-university-curriculum-framework-for-the-21st-century/isbn/978-3-659-52667-1.