“The New Story in Higher Education,” Kosmos Journal

Higher education is my playing field. And it is a field in which the rules of play are rigid, but unwritten, coherent, yet concealed, understood by all but unacknowledged. The unspoken rules are those that perpetuate a story. And the story goes something like this: Follow this prescription and you will succeed – get an education, get good grades, get a degree, get a good job, get married, buy a car and a house, fill that house with lots of things, have children and finally retire on a beach somewhere in the sunset.

There is nothing wrong with this story on the face of it. However, by teaching the outline of this story, we are training students to function within an economic system that propagates consumerism, values wealth-acquisition, enriches the owners of capital, exploits our natural resources, perpetuates the abuse of the vulnerable, and keeps us all separate and atomized. Scratch the surface and you discover that this is a violent story: hierarchical, patriarchal and – ultimately – unsustainable. By allowing the unwritten story to go unexamined and unchallenged, we are left each and every one of us alone to handle the precariousness of life on our own.

Is it possible to create a new story within the structure of higher education? A story that talks about our connection to one another, our concern for our planet, our compassion for all creatures on earth and our yearning for community? Perhaps the answer is ultimately that it is not, but, given our current reality, I would like to suggest that it is possible to plant the seeds of a new story in our classrooms.

How can this be done? I would like to offer that we do this by treating the classroom as a sacred space, by setting shared intentions in our learning, by breaking down hierarchies, and by allowing ourselves to remain in a space of constant and ultimate questioning.

A classroom is just as much a chapel and a sanctuary as any house of worship. And we must treat it with reverence because our spirits converge in the classroom. Learning is in a sense also like prayer: there is wonder, devotion and awe for what we humans have accomplished. Whether the topic we cover is science, great works of literature or – in my case – management education. We come together to express our awe for humanity’s achievements, but also to ask questions: Are we admiring and uplifting the right things? Are we happy with our creation? What can we do to change tracks and to create a more beautiful world, to paraphrase Charles Eisenstein.

Like in prayer, we also set intentions when we study. One such intention is to create a safe common space in which to expose the old story and its victims and to mourn and express grief. We are all victims of this story: our daughters, our sons, our kinsmen in the natural world. Thus, our classroom becomes an envelope in which to hold the harsh truths of our world, but also a container in which to co-create the new story of community. As we gather to learn together as equals, to sit in a circle and to support one another, we need to allow students and instructors to speak openly about our pain in a world that mostly wants us to pretend that there is no impending horror, that there is no problem. And we must be transparent about breaking down the traditional classroom hierarchies: the instructor is but a facilitator of learning and not a purveyor of knowledge. We must acknowledge that the wisdom lies in the collective, not in the brain of the professor.

When we succeed in subverting the traditional hierarchies of the classroom we also agree to exist in a space of uncertainty. It is not easy to teach with the confidence of uncertainty, but when we do, we also allow personal story-telling to enter the room, thus we learn to tell our stories and place them side by side in the center of the circle. After all, if we do not include our own personal stories, our small triumphs and daily victories, as well as our trials and setbacks how can we really learn? Since a story cannot be argued with debated or contradicted – it can only be listened to, assimilated and emotionally responded to – together we practice holding more than one idea at a time in our minds. Sometimes the stories are contradictory. And both – or all – can be right. Can we create a classroom in higher education that allows for this ambiguity?

But you may ask: how can we tell stories in a math class? How can we sit in circles in a science lab? How can we teach finance from an approach of questioning? And how can we spend our time in awe and reverence when we need to prepare students for the “real world?” I would respond: those are great questions. And I would offer one of my own: what kind of future do we want to envision for our students and our children? Let’s hold all those questions in our mind at one time. And keep telling our stories.