Jesuit Education: Crafting Collaborative Discourses of Professional Knowledge, Practice and Engagement for Social Justice

Jesuit Education: Crafting Collaborative Discourses of Professional Knowledge, Practice and Engagement for Social Justice

 

Anthony Joseph, PhD

 

Most of us today at some point or other are confronted with - there are more than a couple of different ways to do what you do best. Recall, for instance what Alfred Sloan of General Motors said, “A car for every purse and purpose.” They tried to design a different automobile that specifically targeted the lifestyle and budget of particular segments of their customers. Then there was Henry Ford’s approach. Ford was allegedly quoted as saying, “If I asked my customers what they wanted, it would be a faster horse.” So Ford gave them what he knew they wanted, but they didn’t know they wanted yet. When it comes to Education, do we even know what we want? Years before Alfred Sloan and Henry Ford, and till date, Jesuits continue to engage with education. Among their other pursuits, designing education and educational processes has been their primary and avowed mission. What are the Jesuits doing about Education today?

 

The goal of Jesuit education, since 1548, when ten members of the recently founded Society of Jesus opened the first Jesuit school in Messina in Sicily, continues to be the formation of “multiplying agents” and “men and women for others”. Though the school is normally called ‘Jesuit’, the vision is more properly called ‘Ignatian’.

 

The distinctive nature of Jesuit education Cura personalis (concern for the individual person) remains a basic characteristic of Jesuit education as described in Ratio Studiorum in 1599 and now detailed in Characteristic of Jesuit Education and the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP). The Jesuit Order, the first teaching order within the Catholic Church, since 1548, continues to inspire other Religious Orders and countless groups and organizations to a competent and committed preparation of professional and humane lifelong learners.

 

Jesuit Schools have long faced a variety of challenges in terms of sustainable development under the education reforms and curriculum reforms to meet the demands of a knowledge society. As Leaders of Learning Jesuit Schools are inevitably expected to develop human capital for the knowledge society within the competitive global economy, and to interact with its policy environment and know how to leverage pedagogical knowledge.

 

The recent mandate of the Society to restructure its governance has set off a series of Society Animation Programmes (SAP). Among other aspects, the significance attached to Jesuit Education, has attracted closer scrutiny particularly with regard to Innovation in Jesuit Education.

 

To face the many challenges in the world and to help develop an innovative and sustainable economy, Jesuit Education promotes active learning through innovation so that students can become active participants in their learning.

 

Jesuit Education aimed to create social value, is rapidly gaining popularity and becoming fundamental in the development of an innovative, sustainable economy. The Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm, that embraces an action-learning environment, is perfectly suited to the use of educational innovation tools. Thus, developing an action-learning environment with educational innovation tools, technology tools and pedagogical methods is becoming increasingly important to Jesuit Education.

 

The Journey from face-to-face to online teaching, has lead the Jesuits to engage with innovative challenges for schools in a knowledge society, knowledge management for school improvement and development, managing culture for knowledge management implementation, cultivating communities of practice for leveraging knowledge, nurturing teachers’ personal knowledge management competencies, institutionalising a school knowledge management system, and a knowledge management model for school development – situated within the social justice framework.

 

Magis, the philosophy of doing more, for Christ, and therefore doing more for others, guides the Jesuits as Leaders of Learning to continuously strive for Team Learning - transforming conversational and collective thinking skills, so students, teachers, why the entire Jesuit learning community can reliably develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of individual members’ talents.  Jesuit schools and education can and will face a challenging future with confidence if they WILL TO BE TRUE to their particularly Jesuit heritage.

Teaching and Learning: Exploring spaces for individual and collective interrogation of assimilated educational perspectives

 

 

 

 

It’s Teacher’s Day in India – Wishing all the TEACHERS a day to Remember, Rejoice and Renew.

When did you last feed somebody? We are not talking about family and friends. This question, I suspect, may seem odd to the western mind. In India, feeding the other, despite vestiges of despicable want and misery, is quite common place, from insects to evolved and evolving simians, everybody get a bite!

What is your image of a teacher? Have you ever imagined the teacher as one who feeds his/her learners? What If teaching in India, is understood as feeding? All of a sudden, one makes sense of the range of models that account for the act of feeding - the charity model, the throw away model, the religious compunction model and what have you … trust the diversity and complexity of our Nation to account for all the permutation and combination of models. Feeding in India is fine, but what about teaching in India - Teaching in India is, at best, a contested construct.

The systematic denigration of public education, notably by the States’ own acts of commission, omission and neglect, has led to the corporate takeover of public education resulting in myopic curriculum standardization. William Ayers, ‘In Teaching Toward Freedom’, contends that this promotes “a curriculum of facts: incontrovertible ‘Truths,’ uncontested and measurable, inarguable and beyond dialogue or debate” and vitiates against the development of the learners and "their fullest democratic humanity."

How many Teachers do you know of, who view their calling as organically related to teaching and learning, as concerned with internal capacity building in response to state-imposed accountability pressures, and as an existential process of writing one's autobiography through their day-to-day work?

Teaching and learning continuously challenges us to redraw the lines concerning how we teach, why we teach, and what we find when we help students become independent, restless, and engaged learners.  

The vision of the school should speak of the extraordinary possibilities awaiting discovery. Education is not simply about educating minds, but about developing whole persons - cultivating meaning, community, and moral responsibility.

While Teachers Day calls for Celebrations, the call to Renewal is a tough one – it demands of teachers to “let go” of the need to be right, safe, and certain. The call to renewal is a call to engage with Truth Skills.

Susan Campbell’s Truth Skills, in ‘Getting Real: Ten Truth Skills You Need to Live an Authentic Life’, could well applying to teachers in India. ONE Stop Being Right and Start Being Real TWO Experiencing What Is: To Get Where You Need to Go, Be Where You Are THREE Being Transparent: Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Hide FOUR Noticing Your Intent: Is It to Relate or to Control? FIVE Welcoming Feedback: It’s How We Learn SIX Asserting What You Want and Don’t Want: Supporting Your Feelings with Action SEVEN Taking Back Projections: Discovering Your Other Side EIGHT Revising an Earlier Statement: It’s Okay to Go Out and Come In Again NINE Holding Differences: Seeing Other Viewpoints Without Losing Your Own TEN Sharing Mixed Emotions: You’re Not Crazy, You’re Complex ELEVEN Embracing the Silence of Not Knowing: Entering the Fertile Void TWELVE Serenity, Presence, and Compassion

Teachers, in India today, and I suspect elsewhere as well, are at risk of intellectual docility and passive acceptance of assertions and assumptions that are arguably raised without substantiation. A tryst with Susan Campbell’s ‘Truth Skills’ could set off convictions - critical and visionary, dystopian and utopian.

An individual and collective interrogation of the assimilated educational perspectives and the world offers an ethically compelling vision with concrete proposals that can rally, empower, coordinate, and guide the efforts of activist educators and innovative teachers as they contribute their own brand of action to school reform, democratic community, and social justice.

Wishing all the TEACHERS a day to Remember, Rejoice and Renew!