In this piece, Parrish describes how longstanding practitioners develop implicit skills that can be the source of some of the deepest learning for our students. Parrish argues that faculty must try and develop empathy in their students so that their knowledge learned can blossom into expertise and wisdom.
To do this, Parrish advocates that faculty 1) identify the habitual, underlying modes of sensing in our disciplines, and 2) design assignments for practicing these modes in whole-person ways that engage our students not only intellectually, but in their embodied, emotional everyday lives.
Parrish mentions activities that she uses to achieve these goals including developing students' listening and orientation skills by having them slip into an "ethnographic mode" for an activity (writing what they describe as 'the heart of the conversation complete with pauses and description). Parrish goes on to describe other approaches that would feel quite at home in an anthropologist's classroom; for example, when Parrish advocates that students need to acknowledge how they see the world around them, engage in self reflection, and notice (their) implicit habits of perceiving everyday life as a practitioner in your field.
So why the connection to Jedi Training? Parrish states:
Jedi-training exercises require the kind of close attention and new ways of thinking that can lead to love for our subject matter. This kind of whole-person learning guards against abstraction, keeps us in relationship with the wider world, makes us better caretakers of people and planet. For after all, as observed by my four-year-old niece: “We are all connected. In a web. Like the Force.”Read more of Parrish's post through the Quick Links below.
Quick Links:
- Jedi Training: Developing Habits of Perception in Our Disciplines by Gillian Parrish (August 7, 2017)