This blog aims to explore the educational challenge of the twenty-first century. Today’s offering will describe one more way of joining some of the dots to produce a pattern – a way of thinking – which I believe is relevant to the question of how we should be teaching today. Today’s key dots: cultural understanding, hermeneutic consciousness, human phenomenon, lived hermeneutics.
Mention ‘cultural understanding’ or ‘cultural awareness’ to school teachers in Australia and they will probably think you are referring to the national school curriculum (see Australian curriculum - Intercultural understanding). Both terms conjure up what is regarded as an essential dimension of school education in a multicultural society. Teachers in other countries will probably also identify with such language; it is part of what I call teachers’ ‘glass-half-full’ view of their calling – a belief that it is their job to help students become the best people they can be. For many teachers, that student ‘becoming’ includes respecting, even treasuring diversity within the human family. Perhaps this statement encapsulates such aspiration:
(A) Being human is an opportunity to serve the wider good. (B) Accepting others is an intrinsic aspect of our humanness. (C) We each have a capacity to become more accepting of others. (D) Expressing generosity of spirit in our relationships is enhanced as we understand and value the best in each other, recognising our common humanity even within the things that make us different. (See http://bit.ly/1TCYT6z)
The term, ‘hermeneutic consciousness’, is drawn from the field of philosophical hermeneutics (Davy, 2006, pp. 38-109). In my mind hermeneutic consciousness is progressive attunement to the implications of the hermeneutic circle for our lives, and how we make sense of that. Making sense of a text or work of art or any human construction draws one into a cyclical or spiralling reasoning process (a ‘hermeneutic circle’). I approach a work with an innate appreciation of the part/whole relationships in its constitution. I have an expectation that as I make sense of the particularities of the work, my conception of the whole takes clearer form. In turn, my enhanced conception of the whole gives me a stronger vantage point as I continue to interpret the nature and purpose of the parts. This switching back and forth between the elements and the whole operates in all human meaning making, which is why there is value in thinking of a human life as a hermeneutic journey and story.
Teaching will take on extra nuance as we encourage students to think of meaning making as the realisation of an ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world (McKenzie, 2014a, p. 2). Perhaps a whole new field of reflective practice awaits us – a reconsideration of the embedded and embodied context of human meaning making, which for me is both making sense and finding meaning or purpose within: cognitive and personal/ontological development in the one crucible, realised in and through each other.
But there’s more …
"One’s continuous sense of self is the prior emergent from which personal identity arises at the individual scale, and from which the human phenomenon evolves, in all its variation and splendour, in all its weakness and shame, at the scale of human civilisation" (McKenzie, 2014a, p. 273).
The human phenomenon refers to humanity’s footprint on the geophysical landscape as well as its cultural and spiritual legacy across time and space (McKenzie, 2014, p. vi). It is a catch-all term that spans everything we know about ourselves and the world. It is as broad as humankind’s entire opus of artefacts, knowledge and lived experience. It is our collective inheritance and all our private and shared hopes and aspirations, as refracted in our texts, our art and our lives (McKenzie 2014b). As social beings, humans inevitably draw their wider awareness of others into their sense of everything. Could it be that by making the ‘human phenomenon’ an explicit category in the curriculum we might make hermeneutic consciousness a more intentional teaching goal, and ‘lived hermeneutics’ an aspirational way of life, in the same way that we might aspire to be wise?
In 2016 some members of Orange CultureHub Inc. (Australia) envisioned an ‘i witness’ program to encourage local school students and members of the community to
"observe, interpret and express what is important to them in the world of their experience, however micro or macro their chosen field of view. There is a sense in which becoming reporters – observers, interpreters, communicators – is an integral part of being fully human, because watching out for others arises out of understanding them and the conditions that shape them, and showing concern. If this is so, it challenges educators to ask how they can help their learners develop this capacity and habit" (McKenzie, 2016).
The main roll-out of the i witness program is now set for 2017, but a small steering group is presently setting plans. One promising idea is to frame the notion of human phenomenon in terms of our place in country, an idea drawn from Australia’s rich Indigenous world of thought. Consider these drafting board ideas …
The special i witness theme for 2017 will be cultural awareness, but cultural awareness is not simply another curriculum add-on. We want to encourage participants to play with the idea that cultural awareness needs to be considered in the light of who we are and who we are becoming. We will challenge participants to create their own unique interpretations of human experience ‘in country’ – in situ – whichever people, whichever country takes their imagination. i witness 2017 will be an opportunity to celebrate our common humanity but also document and question what we are doing to that country we call Earth. My sense is that Indigenous people have much to share with the rest of us about relating to country and how that shapes us. We see deeper cultural awareness blossoming through participation in the program for i (eye) witnesses themselves and also their audiences.
I am coming to the view that engaging students and community members in something like the proposed i witness program is a concrete way of acknowledging the value of hermeneutic consciousness in cognitive–ontological (personal) development. Using such a large idea as human phenomenon as our context for meaning making, focusing on the hybrid whole, self-in-world, and drawing our new understandings into the unfolding narratives of our lives, will help us to imagine what ‘lived hermeneutics’ could mean for us.
Clearly thoughts and conversations about the i witness program – and also about the role of education in the twenty-first century – have a long way to go; but we are excited by what could lie ahead.
References
Davey, N. (2006). Unquiet understanding: Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
McKenzie, A. (2014a). 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.
McKenzie, A. (2014b). Human becoming reconceived: An educator's dream-wish for the planet. Screencast. Retrieved from http://youtu.be/Xm3ZEx3t6LU.
McKenzie, A. (2016). Announcement to Orange district teachers: i witness program comes to Orange. Archived web announcement.
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