We introduced the essential questions of the course, and we began working on the first one: How did you get to be the person you think you are? It seems that many if not most of us think immediately of family/home environment when we think on the above question, so we are starting our "autobiographies of the mind" right there. How we each see the world is indeed closely related to the effect our home environments, including parents or guardians, had on us.
We also began to learn about multiple ways-of-knowing (WOKs) -- Intellectual, Aesthetic, Scientific, and Contemplative/spiritual -- by focusing on conversation (one of the key methodologies of the Intellectual way-of-knowing). Each section made a list of ingredients that good conversations seem to include (see pix below). And I introduced Patrick Jenlink and Alison Carr's categorization of conversation into transactional, transformational, and transcendent varieties (you will see these words in the pix below also)...
So in talking about conversation we are already talking about and articulating the tools people use to make philosophies of life and/or worldviews. And to make a connection between this and our essential questions, conversation -- talking with the people in your home environment -- is perhaps the main way the worldviews of parents/guardians get conveyed to you. Through actions too of course, but conversation plays a big role. And BTW language/conversation plays a big role in the way worldviews get circulated throughout society, and in the way worldviews move from one generation to the next. So we're already getting in the 'society' part of self, society, and cosmos :)
See below the lists of ingredients that make for a good conversation... some overlaps... both are terrific lists!! (and again on the left side in each pic you see Jenlink and Alison Carr's three types of conversation listed)...
So, as I mentioned on the first day, we will be utilizing all four WOKs -- intellectual, scientific, aesthetic, and contemplative -- in our course. In the upcoming week we will dive into the aesthetic way-of-knowing via making models of the worldviews we inherited. And... we will likely introduce mindfulness meditation as one way to add the contemplative way-of-knowing to our toolkit. And... we will be including the scientific way-of-knowing through some of the content, and through the 'experimental' nature of this course.
The homework assignment is copied-and-pasted below. All in all, I think it was a good first week even though we had to miss a session. And... given that the first week of school is such a tidal wave anyway, it's probably more than okay to miss a session :)
Assignment: What I would like you to do is write in your journal (or, if you prefer — since this is homework— to type, use a Google Doc or other platform) about the essential question “How did you get to be the person you think you are?” (or, in other words, write about “the view of the world you inherited”). Focus this writing on the context of your family you grew up in (in whatever form family had for you). What view of the world did you inherit from your family? How would you describe it? What role did this inherited worldview play in making you the person you currently are? You can perhaps start by free writing in your journal, and making a list of adjectives that describe the worldview you inherited (the 10 a.m. folks already got started on this, but it shouldn’t be difficult for you 8:30 folks to do this afresh).
This assignment marks the beginning of you creating an autobiography that is less about what happened to you and more about what you and others close to you thought about what happened, and how events were framed. I guess I’m asking for something like an autobiography of the mind? What were people thinking? What were you thinking? How were you framing events? Where did your parents or guardians get their ideas and framings of the world? Feel free to mention things that happened, though, and the spatial environment, the house, the architectural setting you grew up in and how that impacted you. Also, by all means please make this your own, take ownership of it. Have some fun. Run with it. Who knows, it could become material for artworks? We will talk about these writings next week.
