JOHN V. DAVIS
WILDERNESS RITES OF PASSAGE, VISION FAST, AND SCHOOL OF LOST BORDERS
ECOPSYCHOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH METHODS
CRITICAL THINKING, EXPERIENTIAL EDUCATION,
AND CONTEMPLATIVE EDUCATION ONLINE
AUTHOR: John Davis, Naropa University
REVISED VERSION: Feb 10, 2005
NOTE: This paper originated as part of a panel discussion on Contemplative Education at Naropa University, March 12, 2004. Other panelists were Frank Berliner, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Richard Brown, and Sharon Szabo. Jirka Hladis, director of Online Education at Naropa hosted and moderated the discussion.
I appreciate the aliveness of the discussion as we've come down the table, and it has helped me clarify what I want to say. Before I begin, I have a short anecdote that might put some of this discussion in context. As I was preparing, I looked up some notes I had made on critical thinking and contemplative education in 1993. I found a handout I had used for a presentation. At the top, it had a title, my name, and my college affiliation. Then, it had my e-mail address, and in parentheses, it said "Internet." I laughed out loud thinking that only a dozen years ago, we had to say what an e-mail address was. Can you believe how much has happened in 10 or 11 years in terms of the Internet? It's astounding to me. I don't have to explain what my e-mail address is, anymore. Sometimes I have to spell it out for people, but I don't need to explain it. So, it makes sense that we are coming together on this frontier of online education to compare notes and see where we are.
THREE TYPES OF EDUCATION
I will use a framework of three types of education with an eye to how the online environment supports or doesn't support each of them. These three are critical thinking, experiential education, and contemplative education. Each is valued at Naropa, although in most of higher education, critical thinking is most highly regarded, there is a limited place for experiential education, and contemplative education is little known.
Critical thinking is based on the careful examination of information and the assumptions behind it. Critical thinking develops the ability to carry an argument from premise through data to conclusion and implications. It calls for integrating information from different sources and taking different perspectives on the same information. Critical thinking enables seeing relationships between a variety of observations, between observations and explanations, and between explanations. Perhaps the most important contribution of critical thinking is its role in integrating multiple arguments into a coherent perspective and examining issues from multiple perspectives. Elegant critical thinking helps to find the wisdom in each point of view as well as discriminating their limitations and fallacies. I think we can see how essential good critical thinking is in a multidimensional, diverse world.
However, in addition to the importance of critical thinking, we should recognize its own limitations and fallacies. In other words, good critical thinking should turn on itself, self-reflexively examining its own hidden assumptions. Such an examination reveals the largely unquestioned assumption that rational, intellectual thought is primary, that thinking is the highest form of inquiry. I would argue that critical thinking is limited to the extent that it relies solely on rational, intellectual processes. Without going into more detail here, I would also point out that critical thinking, by itself and in isolation, tends toward the technological and mechanistic. And at the risk of perpetuating stereotypes, it tends to be more linear, masculine, Eurocentric, and capitalist, and less oriented to the feminine, indigenous, and egalitarian. By itself, critical thinking is only one tool in the tool box.
My second category is experiential education, where we learn by doing. This means not simply "knowing about," but knowing through direct encounter with the subject matter. Such experiential education means that the concepts being studied come alive within the learner in a personal way. Learning may lead to new insights and will almost certainly lead to a deeper understanding. Experiential education also means relating to the experience in an emotional, as well as a cognitive, way.
Finally, I include contemplative education in this framework. Others on this panel have described contemplative education, and its meaning is an ongoing discussion at Naropa. I will simply suggest here that contemplative education aims for the full and optimal development of the learner. It is characterized by a willingness to encounter oneself and the world with a radical openness and not-knowing. Contemplative education makes room for curiosity, surprise, delight, transcendence, transformation, and authentic encounter with others and the world. While the methods of contemplative education range from quiet reflection to ecstatic ritual, it requires the willingness and capacity to be still, to quiet the mind's usual labeling and categorizing, and to allow experience to unfold freely. It is inclusive of both critical thinking and experiential education, even as it brings a new dimension to the table. Through contemplation, the learner is drawn out of old ways of being into greater wakefulness, compassion, self-inquiry, embodiment, and service. It calls us to go beyond our familiar conceptual categories and rigid representations of self, others, and world, changing us in fundamental and profound ways.
ONLINE EDUCATION
I came to online education curious and, I would say, cautiously optimistic. I didn't know if it would work. It felt like a frontier to me, and I feel myself drawn to frontiers wherever they are. What I was reading twelve years ago sounded as if the internet was going to be important, if not revolutionary. For me, the best way to understand it was to get involved first-hand. I guess this is my own bent toward experiential education. So, I began developing a web page, and then I began integrating the internet and Web-based tools into some of my courses. I found these hybrids exciting and useful, and students responded well. Still, I was skeptical about going beyond what were essentially online textbooks and handbooks of exercises.
It wasn't at all clear to me that we could do good critical thinking, experiential education, and especially contemplative education online. I knew that we could teach programming; we could teach accounting; we could teach subjects that were heavily information driven. But, I wasn't sure we could teach online in a student-oriented way, in a human-centered way, and in an inspired - and inspiring - way. I wondered, could the subtleties and aliveness of critical thinking be translated into an online course? How in the world would one do experiential education in a medium that was so heavily text-driven and where we never actually "met" our students? And it seemed almost a joke to talk about the transformative qualities of contemplative inquiry through such technology. Nevertheless, it seemed worth checking it out.
At first, my questions were, what is this, and can it work? Now, with answers to these, I have two new questions about online education. First: In terms of the three types of education, can we do as good a job in the online environment as we do in the on-campus environment? Second, what can we do better online, than on campus? What's going to emerge through the medium of online education that we haven't yet dreamed of? How will the medium massage the message (to borrow from Marshall MacLuhan)? Will the message, itself, begin to evolve?
To the first question, I think the strong answer is yes for all three types of education. We're still exploring about how to do that best, of course, and there are some differences - both limitations and advantages - to teaching online.
CRITICAL THINKING ONLINE
It is clear to me that teaching critical thinking is not only possible, but perhaps more effective, online than in a face-to-face classroom. I appreciate the ways in which an online course enables us to respond to multiple learning styles. In most of my courses, in addition to background reading, I offer an audio lecture and a text lecture. Others have done more with video and multimedia presentations than I have. Students have the option to listen, read, or both as many times as they wish. The more modalities we can provide to students, the better we can respond with different learning style. The variety of learning styles we can respond to are not just cognitive, but the different styles of pacing and communication.
In my online courses, the depth of the discussion is vastly greater than what I find in on-campus courses. I think a lot of it has to do with the time available online. In a typical on-campus class we have less than 3 hours a week in class. In that time we do some gathering, some check-in, and a little bit of business. Maybe we sit silently for 5 or 10 minutes. I may talk for a bit, and then students and I engage in discussion. This is a standard paradigm in college and university courses. At the end of our three hours, everybody leaves. Once in a while, a student will come back, and we'll have a little more discussion, but basically we have about three hours a week together in a typical class. In the online environment, it's entirely possible for the course to be open all day long, all week long, and students really do take advantage of it.
Online, we can cast a broader net more easily, in terms of gathering information, theories, discussions, opinions, using the web, integrating the web into our courses. This is possible to do in an on-campus course, but it is more seamless in online courses.
The fact of needing to write down their thoughts helps many students to be more thoughtful, more clear, and more considered in their responses than they would if they were just speaking off the cuff. In online discussions, quieter or slower-processing students are drawn out more with less pressure to produce a quick response. Students who tend to dominate a discussion can still write as much as they wish, but their domination of the discussion is tempered because there is still room for everyone's input. As one student said, "I used to sit quietly in the back row of class, but online, there is no back row." Really, there are a lot of students who would sit in the back row and not say much all semester long, unless they were really forced or pulled out. But in the online environment, there's one row, and it's all the front row.
Online, we can easily share papers among all of us. This is an enormous support for critical thinking. In an on-campus class, students write their paper, they turn them in, and the teaching assistants and I get to read them, but it's just too much to then copy those papers and distribute them to everyone in class. In the online environment, however, everybody reads everybody's paper. If it's a large class, we break into small groups. Still, students are reading and responding to at least half a dozen other papers. They get multiple sources of feedback on their own work, and they get to go deeply into others' ideas and expressions. That's a useful learning process facilitated by the online environment that's difficult to do on-campus.
EXPERIENTIAL EDUCATION ONLINE
We are learning how to teach highly experiential subject matter online, from meditation to ecopsychology. As Frank Berliner has demonstrated, we can guide people online in learning meditation practices. Jed Swift, who teaches about human-nature relationships in his online ecopsychology course, assigns students a variety of nature-based experiential exercises and asks students to bring their experience back into the online classroom for discussion, comparison and contrast, and deeper exploration. I give detailed experiential exercises in each of my online courses, from solitary inquiries to group rituals in live chatrooms, and they continue to be highly effective and moving, both for students and for myself. These exercises elicit emotional resonance and depth, an edge of risk in self-disclosure, and bright, insightful, supportive commentary. Watching online students come to tears and laughter, as well as new understanding, is moving and not uncommon.
Experiential education, especially sharing experiences in class, brings intimacy and a sense of shared community into classes. I think this community of learners is an important dimension of education which derives from exploring shared experience. So many times, I have heard that online education cannot match the intimacy and personalness of a face-to-face class. It's ironic to me that, in many real ways, there is actually more intimacy in online courses. It's not just self-disclosure for the sake of self-disclosure, but pertinent self-disclosure which leads to a deeper intimacy. A number of students have said that because there is a certain degree of anonymity, they feel safer to disclose things that are more personal and more pertinent to the course.
CONTEMPLATIVE EDUCATION ONLINE
I feel this is the growing edge of online education at Naropa, and I feel we are doing it well. Students do come away from classes touched and moved in profound ways. They come away seeing themselves, others, and the world in fundamentally different ways. They are able to ask not just new questions, but new orders of questions. They are able to practice stepping out of a preoccupation with the content of their experience to explore the medium of experience in a more direct way. The integration of readings, lectures, analysis, experiential exercises, and focused discussion provides the groundwork for this transformation to take place.
It is true that we have a highly self-selected audience in our online courses. However, there is still a great range of learning styles and orientations. Some students take to the word-heavy online environment with comfort, some have to work extra hard without the nuances and richness of non-verbal cues of face-to-face communication. Some write volumes about their experience, some write a few lines, almost all struggle to write authentically without contrivance. Some readily grasp the irony of not-knowing as a foundation for understanding, some come to it more slowly. Yet, almost all students who come to these courses are able to expand their approach to understanding, regardless of personal styles or processing styles, and almost all report extraordinary personal change as a result.
One example of an advantage of an online course for contemplative education is the support for non-reactive presence. Contemplative education cultivates this, enabling us to be here in a fuller way, to listen to each other, and to let what we say to each other touch us without the reactivity that is so easy to get into, without going immediately into either a defensive posture or an overly accepting posture. It seems to me that reading and re-reading others' comments and being forced by the medium to consider my responses through the process of writing supports this kind of non-reactive presence in an online discussion. The time pressure, the sort of pressure cooker of a face-to-face discussion, tends to promote a more reactive kind of response. Other than this, I have yet to see much evidence that we can do contemplative education better online than in a face-to-face setting, but I am confident we can do it as well.
CAUTIONS
Each of those advantages has a disadvantage. Contemplative online education is, in a practical sense, extremely labor-intensive. It is harder, in my experience, for students to slide by in an online course (not that this is disadvantage, of course), and the demand on my time is greater. The benefits of flexible timing often turn into a liability in the crush of busy-ness and everyday demands. It takes an extra commitment from students to engage mindfulness practices and confront the automated and routinized qualities of their experience. It takes especially well-grounded, sensitive, and sharp teachers and teaching assistants to support contemplative education.
We use teaching assistants and meditation instructors heavily in our online classes, often with a ratio of 10:1 students to teaching assistants, and 5:1 students to meditation instructors. The disadvantage to having a class that's open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is the workload for both students and faculty. I often feel it is hard to keep on top of the discussions in an online course, to track what's happening, to read each of the posts, and follow the discussions. Maybe it is because the range of information about class dynamics is restricted, and I feel I have to listen harder. I am still learning about my own relationship to the time commitment of an online course, and many students say the same thing.
In my online courses, I miss the spontaneity that happens in face-to-face interaction. The course material get set up in advance, pre-recorded lectures happen in a vacuum, and then the discussions happen. It is not as easy to bring in new ideas and materials on the fly. There is definitely spontaneity in the discussions, but I miss the wild energy of exchange which develops when we are together, everyone on the edge of their seats. This seems to be because writing is slower than speaking, and perhaps more so because our discussions are primarily asynchronous. We are sitting at our computers, composing, posting our replies, and then waiting hours of days for the next part of the exchange. I have experimented with live chats, but again the medium seems to constrain the discussion. On one hand, non-reactive presence which seems deeper in my online courses provides for greater depth; on the other, spontaneity provides for a kind of creative energy that is more difficult to find in the online courses.
While community does develop online, there are also risks in discussions. For example, I don't know how many times we've gotten tangled up around jokes. Face-to-face, you would see the body language, the gesture, the tone of voice; you would see our tongues in our cheeks. Most of us had the experience with an e-mail that you've sent in a joking way that wasn't taken as a joke, and then the whole communication unravels. I am not prone to emoticons, but here is a place they can be useful. ;-) Statements online can come with a kind of directness or finality that face-to-face communication would not have. More often, I have found students being nicer and "softer" online than in on-campus discussions. Rarely, but sometimes, I have felt online students have said something, or said it in a way, that was more provocative or dismissive than they would have in an on-campus class. We have had to deal with hurt feelings in online courses. But if these conflicts are handled well, they, too, can lead to deeper intimacy. All in all, I have found at least as much intimacy in online education.
I value sincere disagreement and conflict as a precursor to deeper community and understanding, and I am interested in the element of confrontation and honest dialogue among students. I am curious about the inter-related dimensions of respect, confrontation, honesty, community, and understanding in online courses. Can we use the online environment to deepen genuine dialogue, even when it involves disagreement, while maintaining an atmosphere of respect? Are there ways this can happen more effectively and more deeply online?
CONCLUSION
What are the possibilities for integrating contemplative and transformative education into fairly conventional educational structures? What are the possibilities for online education? In particular, what are the possibilities for contemplative online education? These are the questions that brought me to Naropa initially and to online education at Naropa, specifically. While we are still learning and while I feel we are just beginning to see the possibilities, I am confident in my optimism. It is clearly possible to teach critical thinking and experiential education online, and I genuinely feel we are demonstrating that contemplative education is possible online.
There are things we can do now in print, audio, and video that we couldn't do before the advent of the printing press and recording equipment. There are going to be things that we can do in online education that we haven't yet imagined, and I'm really curious to see what those are going to be. In another dozen years, what will we find front-and-center that is just now on the horizon?
At the same time, the core of education remains the same. It arises from the intersection of the human condition and the human potential. It calls for unfolding and touching that human condition, promoting optimal experience and service, becoming as alive and present as we can be, and moving toward fulfilling our potential as human beings. Yet, while the essential task of education draws on these core human questions, its practice evolves, partly through the incorporation of new technology such as online education.
John Davis, Ph.D., is a professor and director of the low-residency MA program in transpersonal psychology. Correspondence may be sent to the author at jdavis@naropa.edu or John Davis, Department of Transpersonal Psychology, Naropa University, 2130 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder, CO, 80302, USA.
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