OUR NEED FOR A NEW PROFESSIONAL - THE PROFESSOR - OUR NEED FOR NEW TEACHING ETHOS

AUGURING THE WINDS OF CHANGE

TO THE TEACHER ?–

PLEASE RE –ENGINEER YOURSELF AS THE NEW PROFESSIONAL –

INTEGRATE

THE IDEAL WITH THE PRACTICAL

AND

SOCIO-SCIENTIFIC ISSUES WITH THE BEHAVIORAL ISSUES

OF YOUR STUDENTS

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider—

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—

should be clear; the darkness around us is deep.

— William Stafford's “Ritual to Read to Each Other”

YOU NEED COURAGE TO TEACH IN TODAY’S WORLD. In the last couple of years I slowed down my teaching career and have almost? finished my teaching career which was full of my? ‘Courage to Teach’ in the midst of all dirty malaise created by so called teachers and students alike.– Teaching profession more or less managed and manned by corrupt, unprincipled, and unworthy lot of so called Professors and Academic Administrators.? I have seen nothing to challenge its rough map of the way movements for social change through education unfolds. Change in academia is a major social change required. There are winds of change also -? More important, I have seen much to suggest that a movement toward taking seriously the “inner landscape of a teacher's life” has been gaining momentum, in the first two decades of the 21st century.

These claims may prove nothing more than my undying loyalty to my own ideas! But I believe there is solid evidence that a movement to reclaim the relevance of teachers' and learners' inner lives has become more visible, credible, and compelling since the last two decades, in 21st century. And that is the hope I have .... !! I hope future blesses us !!

There is a need for? -TEACHER – AS A NEW PROFESSIONAL ...... to lead a social change in EDUCATION TO TRANSFORM OUR SOCIETY ....... !!

Of course, this movement did not begin ten years ago. And its history has—as history so doggedly does—refused to conform to any model of how it is “supposed” to unfold. Change will happen in stages - All of these stages are ‘ideal types.' They do not unfold as neatly as my ?model ( which I will present here in this article? ) would suggests: they overlap, circle back, and sometimes play leapfrog with each other. But by naming them, however abstractly, we can distill the essential dynamics of a movement from its chaotic energy field.

Still, in the midst of history's messiness, it is possible to look back on the past decades and identify moments that signal a turning toward the kind of education I envision, in this article.

There are Conferences now exploring the inner lives of teachers and learners as meaningful signs of a movement related to the change I am talking about. But so many such conferences have been held in recent years that a detailed listing, while proving the point, would also prove tedious. So I want to cite just two other national gatherings that mark new stages in the expansion and legitimation of this movement.

In June 2000, a conference inspired by the Wellesley gathering was held at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, sparked by then-chancellor David Scott. Titled “Going Public with Spirituality in Work and Higher Education,” this gathering is worth noting because (unlike the Wellesley event) it was hosted by a tax-supported university that was willing to go public with spirituality in a way that such institutions have historically been loathe to do.

In February 2007, a conference titled “Uncovering the Heart of Higher Education: Integrative Learning for Compassionate Action in an Interconnected World” drew over six hundred people from two hundred sixty institutions to San Francisco. This one—whose sponsors included the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Council of Independent Colleges, the League for Innovation in the Community College, and the Association of Student Personnel Administrators—is worthy of note because national associations of this sort do not align themselves with topics that their member institutions find unpalatable.

In India there are ?significant signs that a movement is under way is the growing body of research and publications devoted to integrative teaching and learning, strong evidence that the national discourse on education is expanding to include inner-life issues.

Twenty years ago, efforts to study the educational “relevance” of religion and spirituality would have been regarded as uncouth by most academics. It seems clear that a sea change is under way when a peer-reviewed publication called the Journal of College and Character? attracts a wide readership with topical issues such the one online I remember : “Inward Journeys: Forms and Patterns of College Student Spirituality.”

It becomes clearer still that the tide is rising when Arthur W. Chickering, one of higher education's honored elders, serves as lead author of a book titled Encouraging Authenticity and Spirituality in Higher Education. And high tide cannot be far behind when the prestigious Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA conducts studies with titles like “Spirituality and the Professoriate: A National Study of Faculty Attitudes, Experiences, and Behaviors” and “Spirituality in Higher Education: A National Study of College Students' Search for Meaning and Purpose,” whose principal investigators are the distinguished educational researchers Alexander W. Astin and Helen S. Astin.

A CASE STUDY OF INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

Conferences held, research conducted, and widespread publication of articles, journals, and books are decent evidence of a movement. But the most compelling evidence comes when leaders—positional and otherwise, on the inside or on the outside—create force fields that challenge institutions to change. In the last two decade as a professor of practice through my courage to teach, I have watched many such stories unfold, large and small. Here is one of the larger stories – which you will read in writing of this article.

OUR NEED FOR A NEW PROFESSIONAL

OUR NEED FOR NEW TEACHING ETHOS

The Individual and the Institution

I know of no field where the new professional is not needed. Medicine may capture our attention because institutional deformations can lead to the high drama of physical death. But deaths of other sorts are everyday events in most professions:

The life chances of poor children approach zero when schools are more responsive to the rich and fail to encourage and support good teachers who are dedicated to educating the poor.

Clients seeking simple justice find that money, not law, is the best defense, and lawyers who want to devote themselves to pro bono work find it difficult to sustain their vocations.

Teachers who want their faith communities to side with the dispossessed sometimes find their goals, and souls, thwarted by institutional demands for members and money, pressured to lead more like CEOs than as a spiritualists.

Behind my call for a new professional who can confront, challenge and help change the workplace are two important realities.

First, the large and complex institutions of our society are increasingly unresponsive to external pressure, even on those rare occasions when a well-informed and well-organized public demands change.

I am not suggesting that the public could relax if more doctors, teachers, lawyers, and accountants became internal-change advocates; professionals willing and able to play that role will always be in the minority. Most will continue to lie low because they fear reprisals or are so overworked that they lack time and energy for advocacy. A vigilant public that speaks truth to power will always be needed.

And every professional who is willing to speak up needs public support, just as the public needs that person in order to achieve its goals. In our time, when the public is far too relaxed or resigned—in part because our society increasingly undermines any semblance of public life that might threaten the hegemony of power—the presence of internal change agents who heed and need the public could help revive our fading sense of citizenship.

The second reality behind my call for a new professional is less strategic, more philosophical, and easily as important as the first.

At the heart of every profession is an implicit affirmation that the mission of the profession must never be confused with the institutional structures in which it is pursued. The fact that we have schools does not mean we have education. The fact that we have hospitals does not mean we have health care. The fact that we have courts does not mean we have justice. The fact that we have churches, synagogues, and mosques does not mean we have faith. This iconoclasm does not come from cynical outsiders but from the roots of the professions themselves..

We need professionals who are “in but not of” their institutions, whose allegiance to the core values of their fields calls them to resist the institutional diminishment of those values.

EDUCATING THE NEW PROFESSIONAL

What would the education of the new professional look like? How might we prepare students at every level of education to be teachers, lawyers, physicians, business managers — to say nothing of parents and neighbors and citizens—who can challenge and help transform the institutions that hold such sway over our lives?

True to the spirit of this article, I am not going to explore techniques of organizational development. Such knowledge is valuable. But it is secondary to the “inner landscape” questions that interest me most: How can education help professionals keep their hearts alive in settings where people too often lose heart? What might help them stand up to and sometimes against the institutions from which their paychecks, and perhaps their identities, come?

I have five immodest proposals regarding the education of a new professional:

1.We must help our students debunk the myth that institutions possess autonomous, even ultimate, power over our lives.

2. We must validate the importance of our students' emotions as well as their intellect.

3. We must teach our students how to “mine” their emotions for knowledge.

4. We must teach them how to cultivate community for the sake of both knowing and doing.

5. We must teach—and model for—our students what it means to be on the journey toward “an undivided life.”

I want to examine these one by one.

1. We must help our students uncover, examine, and debunk the myth that institutions are external to us and constrain us, as if they possessed autonomous powers that render us helpless—an assumption that is largely unconscious and entirely untrue.

We professionals, who by any standard are among the most powerful people on the planet, have a bad habit of telling victim stories to excuse our unprofessional behavior: “The devil (boss, rules, pressure) made me do it.” We do this not only because it gives us a cheap ethical out but also because we are conditioned to think this way.

The hidden curriculum of our culture portrays institutions as powers apart from us, over which we have marginal control at best, powers that will harm us if we cross them. It is true that we may pay a price for calling institutions to account, finding ourselves marginalized, defamed, demoted, or dismissed. But as I argue, the biggest price we ever pay comes not from without but from within. It comes from violating our own integrity, from failing to live by our own deepest convictions and callings.

The extent to which institutions control our lives depends on our own inner calculus about what we value most. These institutions are neither external to us nor constraining, neither separate from us nor alien. In fact, institutions are us! The shadows that institutions cast over our ethical lives are external manifestations of our own inner shadows, individual and collective. If institutions are rigid, it is because we fear change. If institutions are competitive, it is because we value winning over all else. If institutions are heedless of human need, it is because something in us is heedless as well.

If we are even partly responsible for creating institutional dynamics, we possess some degree of power to alter them. The education of a new professional would help students understand and take responsibility for the myriad ways we co-create and re-create institutional pathologies. Such an education would call us to identify and examine our own shadows, as I try to do where I dissect the shadow called fear. Only when we name and claim our own shadows and become accountable for the darkness we create will we be able to evoke “the better angels of our nature,” inner sources of light that make both individuals and institutions more humane.

Think of any great movement for social change: the black liberation movement in the United States, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the undoing of apartheid in South Africa, the woman's movement around the world. Every one of them was animated by people who had been stripped of all external power. But these apparently powerless people moved boulders by drawing on the powers of the human heart—a power no one could take from them—in a disciplined and dedicated way.

The new professional will know about these often overlooked chapters of the human drama, about the dynamics of the human heart, about the remarkable ways in which “powerless” men and women have harnessed the power within to remake our institutions and our world.

2. If we are to educate a new professional, we must take our students' emotional intelligence as seriously as we take their cognitive intelligence.

We unconsciously give institutions more power than they possess because of what we are taught by this culture's hidden curriculum. But we consciously give emotions less respect than they deserve because of what we are taught by the explicit curriculum: “Don't wear your heart on your sleeve” and “Play your cards close to your vest.” The message is simple: if you want to stay safe, hide your feelings from public view. And conventional education elevates this folk wisdom? to the status of philosophical truth by demanding that we stifle subjectivity for the sake of objective knowledge.

But philosophers tell us there is no necessary conflict between human subjectivity and objective knowledge. In fact, as I have argued in all educational platforms I go - ?knowledge emerges from a complex interplay of the inner and the outer. And common sense tells us that the history of positive social change has been made only by people who wear their hearts on their sleeves—witness Rosa Parks, Václav Havel, Dorothy Day, and Nelson Mandela—people whose capacity to name, claim, and aim their feelings not only shaped their actions but also attracted millions to their causes.

So the education of a new professional would overturn the academy's insistence that students suppress their emotions in order to become technicians. It would help students honor and attend to their feelings, especially painful ones like anxiety, anger, guilt, grief, and burnout. Students would learn to explore feelings about themselves, the work they do, the people with whom they work, the institutional settings in which they work, and the world in which they live. They would learn that painful feelings are not signs of personal weakness, sources of shame, or irrelevant to the complex challenges of knowing, working, and living.

The education of a new professional would not teach emotional distancing as a strategy for survival. Instead, it would teach students to stay close to emotions that might become sources of energy to challenge and change institutions.

Academics sometimes dismiss this sort of appeal to the emotions as “touchy-feely.” Apparently they imagine that disdain will settle the issue! But the notion that good pedagogy requires attention to emotions has been demonstrated time and again across half a century of educational research. How Alice-in-Wonderland it is when academics—who pride themselves on being guided by facts rather than fanciful feelings—blithely ignore massive bodies of research because the facts take them out of their emotional comfort zones!

For an example of facts that should have settled this issue, look at education in mathematics. For a long time it was assumed that females failed at math because “their brains are structured differently from men's.” Then along came a new generation of pedagogues who said, in effect, “Folks, this is a no-brainer! Females fail because they're told early on that girls ‘can't do math,' so they come to class with minds paralyzed by fear. Help them free their intellect by dealing with their feelings, and they will do as well as males.”

And so it has been, because many math educators, and some in the sciences, began paying as much attention to emotions as to minds. In other disciplines, attention to the power of feelings to freeze or free the intellect has been more spotty. And I know of no discipline that gives serious attention to the fact that emotions such as fear can paralyze the will as well as the mind, crimping the capacity for transformative leadership that is the hallmark of the new professional.

3. The Facts Within the Feelings - My third immodest proposal is that we start taking seriously the intelligence in emotional intelligence. We must do more than affirm and harness the power of emotions to animate both learning and leadership. If students are to learn and lead well, we must help them develop the skill of “mining” their emotions for knowledge.

For the most part, academic culture honors only two sources of knowledge: empirical observation and logical reasoning. But we do not live by science alone. To survive and thrive, we also rely on the knowledge embedded in our feelings. In fact, science itself begins in the hunches, intuitions, and bodily knowledge that lie behind testable hypotheses. And people who do good work of any sort, however technical, understand that not everything they need to know can be found in data points and cognitive constructs. Good teachers, lawyers, physicians, and leaders bring at least as much art as science to their work—and art is rooted partly in the affective knowledge that eludes our instruments and our intellect.

But the subtext of most higher education is that emotions are the enemy of objectivity and must be suppressed. As a result, educated people tend to compartmentalize their feelings, acknowledging them in private life, perhaps, but regarding them as dangerous to professional life. Professionals are supposed to be in charge at all times (or so says the myth), and we fear that feeling too deeply will cause us to lose control.

So education gives us precious little experience, let alone competence, at extracting work-related information from our feelings.

“So what?”—until we realize that the capacity to translate private feelings into public issues, when warranted, has been an engine of every movement for social change.

Take, for example, the women's movement, which can be characterized, in part, as a journey from Freud to feminism. From the late nineteenth century halfway into the twentieth and twenty first century , women's feelings of isolation, marginality, and “craziness” were seen as personal pathologies, grist for the therapeutic mill if one could afford a psychiatrist. But when women began to understand that these feelings did not reveal a sick psyche but rather carried information about a social condition called sexism, it soon became clear that their true therapy lay in agitating for social change.

By translating “I feel crazy (or stupid or fearful or overwhelmed), so something must be wrong with me” into “I feel crazy, so something just might be wrong with the institution or society that I inhabit,” we make it possible to extract information and energy from our emotions. The new professional needs to know how to name and claim feelings, neither denying nor being dominated by them; discern whether and how they reflect in reality; ask if they have consequences for action; and, if so, explore them for clues to strategies for social change.

Of course, not all personal feelings yield knowledge about the world; some really are reflections of personal rather than social pathologies. Mining our emotions for truth requires as much discipline as mining the senses and the intellect—and at the heart of that discipline is the winnowing of information in community.

4. So my fourth proposal for educating the new professional is that we offer our students the knowledge, skills, and sensibilities required to cultivate communities of discernment. As we mine our emotions for knowledge, we need the same discipline we use to mine our observations and thoughts: communal sorting and sifting that helps us distinguish fool's gold from the real thing.

Whatever our data source is, the key question is always the same: How much of what I claim to know can be verified from viewpoints other than my own, and how much of it is my projection? A disciplined process of group reflection—whether the group is a team working on a long-term problem or two people assessing a crisis—helps us tell the difference between the emotions that illumine our environment and those that reveal our own shadows. Both kinds of knowledge are valuable, but they invite quite different responses.

Unfortunately, faced with the claim that feelings as well as facts must be addressed in the education of the new professional, many faculty will say, “I'm a biologist (or sociologist or philosopher), not a therapist. So don't ask me to be one.”

Fortunately, I am not making any such request. Therapy done by amateurs is usually an especially ugly form of psychological violence. But disciplined group inquiry led by a skilled teacher is one of the most reliable ways to extract information from data of all sorts, including emotional data. And the more experience we have with this kind of inquiry, the more likely we are to read our own feelings accurately when there is no time to summon a group.

What are the disciplines of dialogue that help us discover the intelligence in our emotions? I address that question in my book – ‘From Chaos to Serenity ...’ – It is a case of - A Hidden Wholeness ..... The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, where I offer a detailed description of the principles and practices that create a “circle of trust,” my name for the kinds of relationships that facilitate deep and difficult learning.

There is another reason, in addition to discernment, to teach our students how to cultivate community if we want to raise up a new professional. Every serious effort at social change requires organized groups of people who support each other in the demands of change-agentry and generate the collective power necessary to make a difference. These are the “communities of congruence” that I write about mostly in many of my articles , communities that emerge in the second stage of a movement as individuals start feeling the vulnerability that comes from living “divided no more” and seek the courage to keep on living that way.

5. This brings me to my fifth and final immodest proposal for the education of the new professional: we must help our students understand what it means to live and work with the question of an undivided life always before them.

This means, of course, that our own lives and work as mentors must reveal what it looks like to be living that question. I do not mean that we must achieve an undivided life before we can teach about it; if that were the case, few of us would qualify, and those few would not include me! And yet as an imperfect person in an imperfect world, I can reveal to my students what it means to wrap my life around this question: How do I stay close to the passions and commitments that took me into this work, challenging myself and my colleagues and the institution I work in to keep faith with this profession's deepest values?

Living that question can mean fulfillment or frustration or betrayal—by others or by oneself. Over time, it usually means all of that and more. Our students need to see how we, their elders, deal with these vagaries of fate while refusing to sell out either our professions or our own identity and integrity. And they need to see how, when we fail and fall down, as everyone does, we manage to get up again.

Modeling what it means to live as a new professional also demands that we create academic programs that are open to student critique, challenge, and change. We may offer a curriculum that claims to prepare students to be change agents in some other place, at some other time. But if the hidden curriculum of the program says “Don't mess with us!” the lesson our students learn is to stay safe by keeping quiet, which replicates the very problem that the new professional needs to help solve.

When students go year after year as passive recipients of education, small wonder that they carry their passivity into the workplace. What they have learned at school is that keeping one's mouth shut is a way to stay safe. But they have not learned—because we have not taught them—that opening one's mouth to challenge what is wrong is a way to stay sane.

The education of the new professional will offer students real-time chances to translate feelings into knowledge and action by asking questions and aiding the evolution of the program they are in. No, I am not thinking about an annual, scheduled student uprising ! I am thinking about an academic culture that consistently invites students to speak out about the program itself, rewards rather than penalizes them for doing so, and encourages faculty and administrators to be responsive to student concerns.

An educational program that emerges from a continuing collaboration of administrators, faculty, and students is much more likely to produce new professionals than one that leaves students disempowered.

THE FINAL? WORD FROM ME ........

Trace the word professional back to its origins and you will find that it refers to someone who makes a “profession of faith” in the midst of a disheartening world. Sadly, the meaning of the word became diminished as the centuries rolled by, and today its root meaning has all but disappeared. By “professional” we now mean someone who possesses specialized knowledge and has mastered certain techniques in matters too esoteric for the laity to understand and has received an education proudly proclaimed to be “value-free.”

The notion of the “new professional” revives the ancient meaning of the word. The new professional is a person who can say, “In the midst of the powerful force field of institutional life, where so much might compromise my core values, I have found firm ground on which to stand—the ground of my own identity and integrity, of my own soul—ground from which I can call myself, my colleagues, and my workplace back to our true mission.”

An education for transformation would raise up professionals in every field who have ethical autonomy and the courage to act on it, who possess knowledge and skill and embody the highest values of their vocations. Can such an education become a reality? Yes, of course, if we who teach can think and act like the new professionals we hope to raise up.

Here again is the excerpt from William Stafford's “Ritual to Read to Each Other” that serves as the epigraph to this article :

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk: though we could fool each other, we should consider— lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe— should be clear; the darkness around us is deep.

We “know what occurs” in our workplaces when the values we want to profess are disfigured, distorted, destroyed. We know that we often try to fool ourselves and each other about this fact. And we know that as a result, we spend too much time lost in the dark, alone and together.

The darkness around us is deep. But our great calling, opportunity, and power as educators is to shed light in dark places. In a world that needs new professionals—true professionals—in every institution, let us resist the temptation to respond with a fearful “no” or an elusive “maybe” and allow our lives to speak a clear and heartfelt “yes.”

THANKS FOR READING ....

sudhanshu