Education as Transformation

Education as Transformation is an international movement that seeks to create a more holistic model of teaching and learning. Central to this approach is the process of embracing, celebrating, and learning from religious pluralism as college campuses become increasingly diverse communities. It is believed that such a foundation of mutual respect will ultimately lead to a more stable and inclusive civil society.

Peter L. Laurence, director of the Education as Transformation Project, and Victor H. Kazanjian, Jr, dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at Wellesley College, are co-founders of the Education as Transformation Project. As a project advisor, BRC executive director Virginia Straus has participated in several events, including the National Gathering in September of 1998 that attracted over 800 participants.

We invite you to explore this important re-envisioning of higher education though an article authored by Victor Kazanjian which previously appeared in SGI Quarterly (April 2001) entitled Education as Transformation and an article about the 1998 National Gathering by Richard Wilson published in the BRC newsletter in Winter 1999 entitled Education as Transformation: Religious Pluralism, Spirituality, and Higher Education and through [BRAD: Please link these titles to the two documents below.]

For further information, please explore www.wellesley.edu/RelLife/transformation.

Education as Transformation

Victor Kazanjian

When I was first given a copy of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi’s The System of Value-Creating Pedagogy, I rushed to show it to a colleague of mine with whom I had been working for several years on a project to create a dialogue among educators on developing a new vision for higher education in America. Here, in a voice from another country, from an earlier era, was another expression of the highest ideals for education in which education is a process of liberation of mind and spirit resulting in a deep commitment to the creation of peaceful living for the individual and for society.

Only weeks before my first encounter with Makiguchi’s writings, I had read an article in the August 4, 1996 edition of the New York Times entitled "Colleges Setting Moral Compasses: Educators go from Mind to Soul." This article had captured my attention and the attention of a group of educators in the United States who were exploring the impact of religious diversity on colleges and universities. The article posited that one of the central questions facing educators today is the role of the college and university in shaping the moral and spiritual character of its students in the context of an increasingly pluralistic society:

"For much of American history, colleges and universities included in their mission the shaping of an undergraduate’s moral character. As these schools became secularized, such requirements fell by the wayside. But now, in a time of outward tension and inner searching, when many Americans worry about social decay and also show a growing interest in spirituality, students, teachers and administrators on campuses are asking whether colleges ought to try once again to build moral and spiritual character as well as intellect."

Gustav Niebuhr, "Colleges Setting Moral Compasses: Educators go from Mind to Soul." New York Times, 4 August 1996, Education Life section.

Beginning the Dialogue

During the fall of 1996, a group of 125 educators came together in small gatherings to begin a dialogue about these issues in higher education. Through these conversations we discovered that members of college and university communities throughout the United States were experiencing an emerging interest in religion, spirituality, and the cultivation of values.

Initially we discovered that the rapid growth of religious diversity on many campuses had created a new challenge for these institutions to provide religious life programs that welcome and support such diversity, while also creating opportunities for students to learn about and appreciate religious differences. Additionally, inasmuch as all institutions of higher education continue to be faced with the responsibility for preparing students for responsible global citizenship in a diverse world, these issues relate directly to the educational programs of these colleges and universities.

At the same time that religious diversity had captured our attention, there was also considerable interest in the role of spirituality in education and its relationship to engendering new levels of meaning and purpose for educational programs. We came to believe that these significant trends toward religious pluralism and spirituality insisted that we re-examine our institutional structures and programs in highereducation if we were seeking to be a positive force in building peaceful communities in a rapidly changing world.

One participant in these conversations was American author and educator, Parker Palmer whose words of vision inspired the group to take action:

"We have an opportunity to revision education [in a way that] would result in a deeply ethical education, an education that would help students develop the capacity for connectedness that is at the heart of an ethical life. In this education we come to know the world not simply as an objectified system of empirical objects in logical connection with each other, but as an organic body of personal relations and responses, a living and evolving community of creativity and compassion. Education of this sort means more than teaching the facts and learning the reasons so we can manipulate life towards our ends. It means being drawn into personal responsiveness and accountability to each other and the world of which we are a part."

Parker Palmer, To Know as We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey

A New Vision

Inspired by Palmer and other educators, we began to understand that learning must no longer be seen as amassing information to gain mastery over some aspect of the world, but rather as an attempt to understand one’s intimate connection to the world. In this kind of a learning community, spirituality might be thought of as that which animates our minds and our bodies, giving meaning and purpose to thought, word, and action. By examining one’s sense of purpose and meaning in the context of the campus setting, acknowledging the multiple levels of self operating within each individual at any given time (and multiple experiences that different people bring to their encounter with each other), colleges and universities have the opportunity to fulfill a fundamental purpose of education.

Donald Kennedy, former president of Stanford University, eloquently offers his perspective on the purpose of education in the preface to his book, Academic Duty. He writes, "The university is above all else about opportunity: the opportunity to give others the personal and intellectual platform that they need to advance the culture, to preserve life, and to guarantee a sustainable human future."

Inspired by this calling to create a new vision for higher education, the Education as Transformation Project was born. Initiated in 1996 and located in the United States at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the Project has brought together representatives from more than 300 colleges and universities across the country to engage in a national dialogue about religious pluralism, spirituality, and education.

The Project has developed two goals:

1. 1. To explore the impact of religious diversity on higher education and the potential of religious pluralism as a strategy to address the dramatic growth of religious diversity in American colleges and universities, and/or the desire of educational institutions to prepare their students for a religiously pluralistic world.
   
   By taking the research and theory on religious pluralism, putting it into practice, testing it and creating new models of religious and spiritual life on campuses, the Project seeks to re-define a vision for education in which students are taught to understand the diversity of religious traditions and to learn strategies of pluralism to engage this diversity in creative and productive ways.
   
   
2. To consider the role of spirituality at colleges and universities and particularly its relationship to: teaching and learning pedagogy; the cultivation of values; moral and ethical development; and the fostering of global learning communities and responsible global citizens.

By incorporating the research and theory on spirituality and education into dialogue about the educational programs of colleges and universities, the Project seeks to re-define a vision for education in which students’ spiritual development is seen as critical to their intellectual development, particularly as it impacts questions of the purpose and relevancy of learning and the creation of vital learning communities.

In September of 1998 the Project held its first National Gathering at Wellesley College, attracting over 800 representatives from 250 campuses and related institutions throughout the country. Supported by educational organizations such as the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century, the National Gathering was attended by college and university presidents, faculty, administrators, students, religious life professionals, and trustees who participated in plenary sessions, workshops, and roundtable discussions exploring issues of religious pluralism and spirituality in higher education.

In his welcoming remarks, Project co-founder and director Peter Laurence commented on the long-term vision of Education as Transformation: " … the college or university campus is our most promising experiment in religious pluralism. Students are in the process of discovering what it means to be in community while developing their own respective worldviews. Students who develop a sense of pluralism during this critical time of their development can later play a key role in the building of a more stable and inclusive civil society… If spirituality creates openness, then rediscovering the spiritual dimension of education offers students, and consequently all societies, the possibility of embracing diversity as a necessary step to the actualization of a global community."

Expanding the Scope

Two years later, the Project is the organizing center of an educational movement that has expanded internationally to include dialogue with institutions of higher education in Canada, India, Japan and South Africa. Project staff continue to work with educators facilitating dialogue around key questions and exploring the structural implications of issues of religious pluralism and spirituality on how we teach and learn. The Project has sponsored regional gatherings across the United States as well as working with individual institutions around different dimensions of the Project’s themes. The Project offers educational materials on religious pluralism and spirituality in higher education:

• Education as Transformation: Religious Pluralism, Spirituality, and a New Vision for Higher Education in America, a collection of writings by educators on the themes of religious pluralism and spirituality in higher education, was edited by Victor H. Kazanjian Jr. and Peter L. Laurence and published by Peter Lang Publishing Inc. in 2000.
• Creating Multi-Faith Spaces, a collection of case studies on institutions that have converted existing spaces or created new spaces for multi-religious programs and activities, available through the Education as Transformation Project offic
• Beyond Tolerance, an educational video on inter-religious understanding, highlighting Wellesley College’s process of institutional change from a mono-religious to a multi-religious community, will be available in the fall of 2001.
• The Spirituality and Education Series, published by Peter Lang Publishing and edited by Victor Kazanjian and Peter Laurence, will release two new books in 2001. One is a collection of essays on The Transformation of Campus Life, edited by Vachel Miller and Merle Ryan of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. It focuses on the implications of religious pluralism and spirituality in student affairs. The second book is a yet to be titled volume on a new dialogue between religion and education by Robert J. Nash, a professor in the College of Education and Social Services of the University of Vermont at Burlington and author of Real World Ethics.

Toward the Future

As we look towards the future, the Education as Transformation Project seeks to work collaboratively with educational institutions and related organizations around the world who seek to create a new vision for the role of education in society by fostering the values of understanding, interdependence, and peace. We are currently exploring the possibility of an international network of educators in dialogue using satellite communication as a medium to explore issues of education in different societal contexts. We are also currently developing a summer training institute for students and faculty who wish to bring these issues onto their campuses.

The imperative for this work is clear. If education is to play a positive role in the building of peaceful societies in a global context it must do more than train people in vocational techniques or indoctrinate them with particular political ideology. Educational institutions must be places of transformation of self, other, and world, a process that flows from a deep place within each of us. In her opening remarks to the Education as Transformation National Gathering in 1998, Diana Chapman Walsh, president of Wellesley College spoke these words:

"We seek to envision a whole new place--and space for spirituality in higher education, not as an isolated enterprise on the margins of the academy, nor as a new form of institutional repression and social control, but as an essential element of the larger task of reorienting our institutions to respond more adequately to the challenges the world presents us now: challenges to our teaching, to our learning, to our lives."

President Walsh’s words echo those of another leader in the future of education, President Daisaku Ikeda of Soka Gakkai International (SGI).

"It is people who will pave the way toward the future of our world, and there is no greater influence in the development of an individual than that of solid, human-centered education. Learning is the fundamental force that builds society and shapes an age. It nurtures and tempers the infinite potential latent in all of us, and it directs our energies toward the creation of values."

Daikasu Ikeda, from "A Matter of Heart," a speech delivered at Peking University, Beijing, May 28, 1990.

May the movements represented by these two leaders become as two great rivers flowing together to become a powerful force for the renewing of education in a way that brings humankind closer to the reality of peace.

Education as Transformation:
Religious Pluralism, Spirituality, and Higher Education

Richard Wilson

As classes resumed in colleges and universities in the fall of 1998, an extraordinary event occurred in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Over eight hundred participants, including presidents, administrators, faculty, trustees, students, alumni, and religious life staff from 250 institutions of higher learning throughout the country gathered to explore Education as Transformation. Key issues included the following:

• The impact of religious diversity on institutions of higher education and the potential of religious pluralism as a strategy to address the dramatic growth of religious diversity in America's colleges and universities.
• The role of spirituality in the educational process, particularly its relationship to teaching and learning pedagogy; the cultivation of values; moral and ethical development; and the fostering of global learning communities and responsible global citizens.

The National Gathering was called Education as Transformation: Religious Pluralism, Spirituality, and Higher Education. As project advisor and key organizer of this three-year project, Victor H. Kazanjian, Jr., dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at Wellesley College, worked with multi-constituent teams from more than one hundred colleges and universities. Many education-related institutions, including the Boston Research Center, helped bring this project to fruition.

The conference was intended to stimulate dialogue among educational professionals about two interrelated topics: first, the ways in which diverse spiritual traditions can enrich the educational experience--can make it "transformative"--without binding that experience to any one tradition and, second, the ways in which these traditions (and their practitioners) can interact with and enrich each other, discovering common themes while retaining their own "prickly" particularity.

Parker Palmer, senior associate of the American Association of Higher Education, sounded some of the key themes of the event in his pre-conference remarks. The author of The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life elaborated on the absolute need for teachers to explore their own inner life, to grow spiritually as well as intellectually, and to engage with students' hearts, not just their minds.

In his opening plenary address, "A Vision of Education as Transformation," Dr. Palmer focused on a critique of objectivism, the philosophical stance that maintains "we can know the world only by distancing ourselves from it." This is a "morally deforming" view, said Palmer; it is also "an unfaithful rendition of how human beings know." He suggested that the world's great religions offer an alternative epistemology distinguished by four main ideas:

• Truth is not merely propositional; truth is personal.
• Truth is communal, not competitive.
• Truth is not inert; it is interactive.
• Truth is transformational.

As an example of an alternative epistemology, Parker Palmer referred to Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock who, at the end of her long life, was asked the secret of her work. She replied, "You have to have a feeling for the organism." Pressed further, she said, "You have to learn somehow to 'lean into' the kernel." This was not, perhaps, the response you'd most expect from a great scientist, but it is a telling one, that puts feeling and relation, not analysis and distance, at the center of her successful scientific work.

Dozens of workshops were offered during the gathering, among them one co-sponsored by the BRC, a presentation on Soka University of America (SUA), an independent, coeducational, comprehensive institution of higher learning currently under construction in Aliso Viejo, California. Founded on principles of Buddhist humanism, the university will serve 1,200 residential, undergraduate students. Its core curriculum will introduce perspectives on the self; the roles that science, myth, and religion play in formulating how we view the world; the complexities of human rights in a pluralistic society; and the issues of war, peace, and nonviolence. SUA will provide a unique student-centered experience in cross-cultural learning.

One of the most original and memorable events of the conference was a multi-faith celebration that took place in the Wellesley College chapel. Students from variety of traditions shared their faith traditions through readings, songs, chants, skits, dance, and prayer. Each tradition maintained its individuality yet complemented the others, conveying the sense of a rich mosaic. This was an example of the pluralistic ideals of the conference in practice.

The second plenary session featured Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard University and author of Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras. Eck traced the development of her own interest in the religious landscape of the United States. As a scholar of Indian religions and a Christian, Eck described her own educational mode as "neither objectivist nor subjectivist, but . . . dialogical" which she defined as the process of engaging with difference, trying to understand it, then constantly reflecting on what that difference taught her and how it could change her.

"The stories of how our move from diversity to pluralism may take place . . . in the United States . . . are still being written," Eck said. She called on all participants to "write" them well.

The final major event of the conference featured Vincent Harding, professor of religion and social transformation at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, who spoke about "Taking it Home." He began with music: Sweet Honey and the Rock's powerful, a capella rendition of I Ain't Gonna Study War No More.

Harding lauded the earlier interfaith service: "We paid a visit to the future, and the future visited us. We were all sisters and brothers," he said, "from farther back than we remember, and will be far into the future." He thanked Diana Eck for reminding him that "before we can celebrate diversity, we need to be sure to encounter it--not to run around it, but to engage it, to look it right in the eye." This can be difficult, he pointed out. We can miss "the deepest levels of our alikeness because we want to skip over the rough parts."

"Diversity," he said, "is the path of the universe itself, and I want to enter more deeply in every possible way into the path of the universe. And so I seek out my sisters and brothers because they will take me home."