1 / 31

FYS 10107

FYS 10107. Contemplation and the First Year Experience. Rationale. Learning requires periods of engagement and disengagement 21st century life appears to stress the former to the exclusion of the latter

carsyn
Download Presentation

FYS 10107

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. FYS 10107 Contemplation and the First Year Experience

  2. Rationale • Learning requires periods of engagement and disengagement • 21st century life appears to stress the former to the exclusion of the latter • Many full-time students feel such acute time pressure that that detachment of any kind seems frivolous • For first-year students, contemplative practices promote mindfulness and heightened awareness • Self • Goals

  3. Course Logistics Modalities • Classroom instruction and experience-based learning • Introduction to disciplines/practices generative of embodied contemplation • Guided reflection • Conversation • Praxis and In-class exercises Learning Goals • Define contemplation • Describe aims of first-year experience • Name and discuss merits of practices in CCMIS “Tree of Contemplative Practices” • Plan for utilizing contemplation in first year and beyond • Discuss benefits of contemplation in College life

  4. Expectations • Complete required reading • Each of modest length • Several include assignments • Attendance • Praxis Assignments • In-Class Assignments • Final Portfolio

  5. First Year Curriculum Objectives • Lay intellectual foundations for advanced work • Cultivate curiosity • Infuse appreciation for intrinsic value of higher education • Learn how Arts, Sciences, and Humanities facilitate exploration of “big” questions • Develop finely honed set of critical skills • Reading • Quantitative Analysis • Problem Solving • Writing

  6. First Year Advising Objectives - • Learn to use computer-based communication systems • Identify learning needs, objectives, and strategies • Obtain necessary assistance for skills remediation and/or advancement • Demonstrate understanding of University’s structure and curriculum • Develop ability to build a schedule of courses • Be able to measure progress toward learning goals • Develop a lifelong learning plan • Prepare a capstone essay summarizing first-year learning and proposing a rationale for future coursework • Convey how the first-year experience has informed one’s choice of college and major(s)

  7. Contemplative PracticesOne Perspective “Contemplative practices quiet the mind in order to cultivate a personal capacity for deep concentration and insight. Examples of contemplative practice include not only sitting in silence but also many forms of single-minded concentration including meditation, contemplative prayer, mindful walking, focused experiences in nature, yoga and other contemporary physical or artistic practices. We also consider various kinds of ritual and ceremony designed to create sacred space and increase insight and awareness to be forms of contemplative practice” CCMIS website http://www.contemplativemind.org/practices/

  8. Contemplation as Pivotal to First Year Learning - Why • Major transition • Living arrangements • Personal management • Intensity • Intellectual • Personal • Transitions require reorientation • Being • Thinking • Feeling • Seeing • Contemplative practices promote the growth needed to manage transition Photo by Hugh R. Page, Jr.

  9. Contemplation and Presence • Contemplation involves presence - living, thinking, and feeling in the moment • Learning is fundamentally a contemplative exercise • Embodied • Active • Transformational • Some argue that contemplation amounts to single minded attentiveness

  10. Brother LawrenceProfile • Nicholas Herman • Born/Died in France • Former soldier • 17th Century Carmelite Lay Brother • Worked in priory kitchen • Sayings and letters collected posthumously • Many today find his work inspiring

  11. Prayer as Presence He was never hasty nor loitering, but did each thing in its season, with an even uninterrupted composure and tranquility of spirit. “The time of business,” said he, “does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess GOD in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament. Practice of the Presence of God: 9 Brother Lawrence Photo by Hugh R. Page, Jr.

  12. The First Year of CollegeLearning to Be Present and Digest • The first year of college/university life is a time for honing the skills needed to contemplate, be present, and read for intellectual/spiritual nurture • One learns to be fully present and to be nourished by wisdom • From the perspective of Catholic liberal learning, these tasks have a sacred quality - they are not to be treated frivolously • These activities are transformational • In some ways, they require those who would do them well to balance immersion with disengagement

  13. Seeing Never has it been more urgent to speak of SEEING. Ever more gadgets, from cameras to computers, from art books to videotapes, conspire to take over our thinking, our feeling, our experiencing, our seeing. Onlookers we are, spectators…”Subjects” we are,… (2) …I asked the rhetorical question WHO IS MAN THE ARTIST? And answered it by saying: HE IS THE UNSPOILED CORE OF EVERYMAN, BEFORE HE IS CHOKED BY SCHOOLING, TRAINING, CONDITIONING UNTIL THE ARTIST - WITHIN SHRIVELS UP AND IS FORGOTTEN (x). SEEING/DRAWING is not a self-indulgence, a “pleasant hobby,” but a discipline of awareness, of UNWAVERING ATTENTION to a world which is fully alive (8) Frederick Franck The Zen of Seeing

  14. The Contemplative Photographer Thus mindfulness is also about being aware of and appreciating the ordinary, of being open to beauty and insights in the commonplace (24). Our gender, culture, ethnicity, and personal and collective histories all profoundly shape how we know and what we know, and in ways that are often difficult to bring to consciousness. Humility calls us, then, to a deep appreciation for and openness to others’ realities and to new revelations (72). …all photographs are a kind of exchange or collaboration. And when we collaborate, we have obligations - to treat all respectfully, to be accountable to our subjects (72). Howard Zehr The Little Book of Contemplative Photography

  15. Contemplation - Perspectives • CCMIS • Thomas Merton 1915 - 1968 • Howard Thurman 1899 – 1981 Are these perspectives in any way applicable to the lives of first-year students at Notre Dame?

  16. Contemplative PhotographsExamples by Hugh R. Page, Jr.

  17. Natural / Local Symbols of the Labyrinthine JourneyPhotographs by Hugh R. Page, Jr.

  18. Questions • Is learning a way of seeing, framing, and sketching? • Are the responsibilities of the student-scholar akin to those of the artist and photographer? • Do our life circumstances shape the paths we take on our educational journeys?

  19. Movement Practices • Are embodied forms of contemplation • Some are preceded/accompanied by formal rituals • Labyrinth Walking • Karate • Tai Chi • Yoga • Lead to a deeper understanding of the self as composite, integrative, and dynamic

  20. Thoughts on Labyrinths Walking the labyrinth is a practice, not necessarily a discipline. A practice is more flexible than a discipline. A discipline is usually done at a certain time each day. There are specific methods or techniques to enter into it. The practice of labyrinth walking is guided by what you need from the walk (6) By understanding that there’s no right way or wrong way to walk a labyrinth, the responsibility is on you to determine what you need and how you want to use it. You must claim your own inner authority and tailor the walk to your needs if you are to use it effectively (7). Lauren Artress The Sacred Path Companion (Riverhead Trade, 2006)

  21. Questions • Are embodied forms of contemplation important in your formation as a student? • If so, what do such practices teach? • Can sports / recreational activities be understood to have contemplative elements? • Basketball • Tennis • Running • Football • What aspects of contemplation does one learn from them? • What other forms of embodied contemplation can you identify?

  22. Poetry - Why Write It? • Tool in identity formation • Reclaims primary model of interaction with the world • Changes consciousness • Renders the invisible visible • Puts us in touch with our bodies • To the left are two artists that have utilized art in contemplative ways. Who are they? What do you think of their work? Photo by penner, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Some rights reserved. Photo courtesy of. Wikimedia Commons.

  23. Poetry - A Tool in Defining Identity • Natural process • Response to normal cycle of life - Birth - Cyclic Transitions - Death • Address crises specific to a given life setting or circumstance

  24. Poetry as Normal Discourse Raymond Gibbs “The mind functions figuratively rather than literally—much of what we associate with poetic thinking and classify as a special skill is really a normative part of the human experience. Metaphor, metonymy, irony, and other devices are tools that we use to make sense of the world. Thus, we are all graced with the poetic impulse. Thus, poets simply do what all human beings are capable of doing” (1). “People conceptualize their experiences in figurative terms via metaphor, metonymy, irony, oxymoron, and so on, and these principles underlie the way we think, reason, and imagine” (5). “What poets primarily do, again, is not create new conceptualizations of experience but talk about the metaphorical entailments of ordinary conceptual mappings in new ways" (7). The Poetics of Mind (Cambridge, 1994)

  25. Poetry & Consciousness Owen Barfield (1898-1997) “Poetry differs from all her sisters in this one important respect, that (excluding the sound values) consciousness is also the actual material in which she works. Consciousness is to her what their various mediums (marble, pigments, etc.) are to the other arts; for words themselves are buttwn en th yuch paqhmatwn sumbola – symbols of consciousness” (182). “…meaning itself can never be conveyed from one person to another; words are not bottles; every individual must intuit meaning for himself, and the function of the poetic is to mediate such intuition by suitable suggestion” (133). “Great poetry is the progressive incarnation of life in consciousness” (181). Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (Wesleyan University Press, 1973 - reprint of 1952 ed.)

  26. The Poetics of (In)visibility Ralph Ellison (1914 - 1994) “I’m invisible, not blind” (576). “Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many --This is not prophecy, but description” (577). “So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I’ve learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget,’ and I can neither file nor forget” (579). “…in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness. I’m a desperate man - but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love (580). “Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was already happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you” (581)? The Invisible Man (Vintage, 1995 - 2nd ed. of original 1947 work)

  27. Poetry and Human Embodiment • Sherwin Nuland in his book The Wisdom of the Body (Knopf, 1997) suggests that poetry is: (1) a reflection of the inner life of the human person; (2) emotional and physiological. The words, lineation, resonance, cadence, etc. of poems are reflections of: …that profound awareness of our inner selves to which all humankind responds with the symmetry and order characteristic of our physiological processes. We live in rhythms, because rhythms live in us (367). • He also suggests that the human spirit and mind are products of the human body's physiological processes. • Nuland's might be called an "embodied" approach to poetry in which its inspiration and form are shaped by biological realities.

  28. Maxims - Short Takes on Life Maxim -- A general truth, fundamental principle, or rule of conduct; a saying of proverbial nature Webster’s 9th New Collegiate Dictionary (1990): 734 Aphorism -- A concise statement of a principle; a terse formulation of a truth or sentiment Webster’s 9th New Collegiate Dictionary (1990): 94

  29. Aphorists - A Short List • Proverbs (5th Century BCE?) • Qoheleth (3rd Century BCE) • Hippocrates (5th - 4th Century BCE) • Lao Tze (6th Century BCE?) • Erasmus (14th-15th Century) • Johann von Goethe (18th - 19th Century) • Benjamin Franklin (18th Century) • Benjamin Banneker (17th - 18th Century) Johann von Goethe, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

  30. Maxims, Adages, Aphorisms - Utility • Encourage careful observation and analysis • Cut across disciplines • Promote analytic / synthetic thinking • Help with concise writing • Facilitate domain sampling • Encapsulate, in memorable form, important truths - general and personal Benjamin Franklin , courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Benjamin Banneker, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

  31. Contemplation - Now What? • Define contemplation as you now understand it • Look honestly at your life • Think about what you’ve learned • Look once again at first year goals • Ours • Yours • Do a cost - benefit analysis of contemplation • Revisit / adapt the CCMIS tree

More Related