c h a l q u i s t . c o m

 

 

 

 

Catching the World by the Tale

Networking Nodes

Transformative Education for Deep Homecoming

This site, which displays professional articles, interests, and resources compiled by Craig Chalquist, PhD, also represents a call for the type of educational work that transforms how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the living planet below and all around us.

 

“Deep Education” means formal and informal transdisciplinary pedagogies that take holistic learning a step forward by evolving our relationship with this living planet from that of alienated spectators, consumers, and exploiters to that of loving, responsible conversationalists in the human-nonhuman dialogue. Deep educators are “world therapists” and cultural mentors who work toward just communities that can continually reimagine and reinvent themselves through collaborations in which every citizen freely participates.

 

"Deep” also means encouraging the learner to probe through appearances, surfaces, and customary explanations--the “natural attitude” noted by phenomenology--to explore the motifs, images, collective fantasies, and other structural forces moving in the personal and cultural unconscious. These forces shape institutions, works of culture, and technologies alike and constitute the true foundations of our time.

 

Truly transformative education cannot be segregated into separate disciplines, bloated by abstract theory, or reduced to numbers and measurements, although it includes the latest scientific findings as well as lore from ancient wisdom traditions. Deep education might offer content or training, but always in service to evolving deeper, higher, and wider modes of consciousness and community. To do this it must shatter and mine old worldviews, melting down their accomplishments into educational containers for the surfacing "new paradigm" emphasis on ecology, interdependency, networking, information, and participation as basic modes of apprehension.

 

Education for this new paradigm cannot remain in the classroom, although aspects of it do start there. Deep Web learning draws on sources all over our planet to fashion new ideas, visions, and experiments centering on how to fashion just, sustaining, Earth-friendly communities in which world citizens feel truly at home. The global civilization capable of supporting such communities will be organized around new stories that frame human experience more interactively than models caught in fantasies of separateness, detachment, domination, or control.

 

My own version of deep education has taken me into fields such as depth psychology, ecology, various schools of psychotherapy, Living Systems and General Systems, deep ecology, human ecology, urban permaculture, ecopsychology, ecotherapy, terrapsychology, bioregionalism, ecofeminism, dream studies, mythology, Philosophy of Mind, phenomenology, and religious, alchemical, and historical studies, including Western spirituality. I have also been fascinated by the geography, ecology, history, and "soul" of California.

 

All along through assorted studies and courses I've taught, the goal has remained one of training and encouraging the kinds of "Round Table Knights of the World Soul" needed to facilitate an education in coming home as ethical-responsible adults to embodied self, Earth, and each other.

 

 

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Copyright © 2010 by Craig Chalquist.