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ENABLING ENGAGEMENT IN A PLURALISTIC LEARNING COMMUNITY. Nouman Ashraf Senior Fellow Massey College University of Toronto Combating Hatred Conference February 4 th , 2010. Learning about our various communities is a critical part of a successful strategy. Learning Defined.
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ENABLING ENGAGEMENT IN A PLURALISTIC LEARNING COMMUNITY Nouman AshrafSenior Fellow Massey College University of Toronto Combating Hatred Conference February 4th, 2010
Learning about our various communities is a critical part of a successful strategy
Learning Defined • A complex, multi-centric, holistic activity, centered in making meaning, that occurs throughout and across the educational experience 3 3
Learning Reconsidered • ...as a transformative process that integrates academic learning and student development -- which can no longer be considered separate, but, instead,interact and shape each other as they evolve. 4 4
...included in a larger context that requires consideration of who students are, what they know, what their values and behavior patterns are, and how their family, social, and work experiences have influenced and affected them • Learning has to be contextualized 5 5
Life is an institute of learning; the life experiences of individuals comprise the framework of, opportunities for, and barriers to learning. Learning is never abstracted from the person and their experience. • Learning in context hooks Gilligan Friere Cross Habermas Knowles Mezirow Dewey Giroux 6 6
Perspective transformation is the process of becoming critically aware of how and why our assumptions have come to constraining the way we perceived, understand, and feel about our world; changing these structures of habitual expectation to make possible a more inclusive, discriminating, and integrating perspective; and, finally, making choices or otherwise acting on these new understandings. • What does transformative learning feel like? Mezirow 7 7
...the function of education, the goal of education -- the human goal, the humanistic goal, the goal so far as human beings are concerned -- is ultimately the “self-actualization” of a person, the becoming fully human, the development of the fullest height that the human species can stand up to or that particular person can come to... • Competence • Emotions • Autonomy • Identity • Interpersonal relationships • Purpose • Integrity • Development Self-actualization [development] depends reciprocally on learning Maslow, 1971 Chickering 8 8
The Student Experience Defined • The student experience is a confluence of conditions that exist in and around campus environments that impact the degree to which students engage with others, their environments, and develop knowledge and skills, and their own sense of themselves.
Growth in immigration is expected to be significant with real effects…
By 2017, 1 in 5 Canadians could be a member of a visible minority…
IDENTITY Hobbies Sexual Preference Thinking Style Community Leadership Nationality Ethnicity Faith Religion Local Knowledge Age Educational Background Passion Perspectives Sexual Orientation Level of Ability Life Experience Gender Skills Languages Class Life Experience Family Status
Cultural Learning: What’s the Value? • To engage in cultural learning is hard, sustained work…. Difference is confusing and threatening because we are forced to confront ideas and lives that often bring into question our own commonly held assumptions and beliefs. If we are unable to participate in dialogues that question our views of the world, then we have not been engaged in cultural learning. William Tierney, Building Communities of Difference: Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century
Can we align disparate interests? Position Feelings Beliefs Values Needs Experiences Interests
So, How do we create an organizational culture of engagement? After all, I’m just one person?
As a matter of fact, engagement of diverse communities in not a new notion… • “Observe the nature of each country; diet; customs; the age of the patient; speech; manners; fashion; even his silence...one must study all these signs and analyze what they portend”. - Hippocrates
