BECOMING, A MORE NUANCED CONCERN

Former First Lady, Michelle Obama, has written a memoir and it is currently being released.  The title is Becoming.  This title evokes an image; it is an image of a person changing over time.  Hopefully, the change is toward a more productive, self-satisfying definition of who a person is.  In psychology and philosophy this emphasis has been bolstered during the twentieth century.  To some, this view, in a more self-centered version, was used to advance the natural rights view of politics.

The neuroendocrinologist, Robert Sapolsky, makes the flat-out claim that conservatives tend to simplify social realities – at least as compared to liberals.[1]  One way that simplification manifests itself is how baseline conservatives accept a crude behavioralist view of social interactions.  This is part of this oversimplification.  As such, people are viewed, by these conservatives, as simply calculating beings, measuring rewards and punishments and behaving to maximize anticipated rewards and/or limiting anticipated punishments.

And further, those calculations have a limited time dimension; i.e., limited to what is seen as rewarding or punishing in a current time frame.  The natural rights construct, the political perspective in which most conservatives believe, favors this crude behavioralist sense of the self.  Yes, the natural rights’ advocates like the “self” aspect of the image, but not what others, who have opted this self-image, have added.

That is a wholistic sense of the self, a more complex image.  Namely, those who have advanced a phenomenological psychology/philosophy argue a nuanced view.  That view includes that to understand oneself and others, one needs to appreciate the subjective sense of one’s experience – one’s lifeworld – but, at the same time, see that what one perceives, through life, is an objective reality.  Growth or “becoming,” essentially, consists of coming to terms with the gap between one’s lifeworld and the real world.

This blog addressed this sense of “becoming” before.  Here is what a prior posting reported:

With descriptions of behavioral and cognitive psychologies presented over the last three postings, this posting will present, in a rudimentary fashion, a “psychology” that not all in [that] discipline recognize as a psychology.  That would be the humanist/phenomenology psychology.  Yet despite this reluctance by fellow educational psychologists, it has had an observable influence on many teachers and curriculum developers. 

Some have called it the “third force” – another way to visualize psychological factors that affect how and what a person learns.  It is criticized as being a “soft relative” of the more “scientific” approaches to educational psychology.  The practitioners who engage in this approach’s research do not depend on sophisticated experimental designs to gather their data, but on testimonials and interviews. 

The information, gathered by these qualitative techniques, ventures into personal accounts of what the “I” experiences are in learning and/or in handling other challenges.  Those who adhere to this psychology place great importance on self-definition – how we view ourselves.  They see this introspective determination as highly influential in how one will function in life, generally, and in the classroom, more specifically. 

This is true both for students and teachers and even administrators.  And this self-awareness, or lack of it, is not a quality that is abstracted out of one’s psyche, but instead a quality that takes in the whole person and the whole environment in which that person is situated. 

Perceptions become central:  does the person perceive him/herself as a learner, a scoundrel, a lover, a hater, a leader, a follower, an actor, or a dropout?  These are various self-inflicted titles that then evolve into illustrative behavior that manifests their meanings.  An actor will act and a self-perceived dropout will, more than likely, be a dropout in real life. 

This describes the phenomenological aspect of this psychology.  And these perceptions are not of a temporal nature, but instead define the whole person – a summary of who the person is through his/her own eyes.  The longer and more established these perceptions exist, the harder they are to dislodge.

Therefore, an educator, in order to be successful, needs to be conscious of this reality, be able to plan for it and, in a humanistic way, account for it as the educator interacts with the student.  The aim, of course, is to encourage and enable a person to perceive him/herself in ways that are rewarding to the person, not debilitating or self-destructive in any way or to any degree.

With this approach, the emphasis is not on how one responds to this or that stimulus or how the brain’s structure processes information.  The emphasis is on the Gestaltic aim to see and understand the total interaction between the individual and his/her environment – less analysis and more synthesis is this psychology’s orientation. 

This view is particularly sensitive to the interpersonal relations that mark a person’s space.  In this, humanistic psychology leads teachers and curriculum developers to be more attuned to communication qualities such as connotations, symbolism, and configurations of interactions among subjects of a given “field” (a field being those aspects of a space that provides any effect on an interaction).

Learning, therefore, is viewed as complex.  There are mental processes that take in what a field has to offer; the elements have to be analyzed in order to identify any problem(s); the mind has to discriminate and tease out what is important from what is not, and it has to see and understand the consequential relationships among the people and things present or potentially present.

Curriculum is not seen as a set plan, but an evolving concern which is better designated by the verb, currere, than the noun, curriculum.  This is the central ideal of reconceptualism which is usually associated with more recent expressions of reconstructionist philosophy.  [This aspect highlights the “becoming” sense emphasized above.]

And by referring to the people and things present, the concern is not only with the physical proximity to the situation in question, but also includes those elements that can have an influence from afar.  All of this is a dynamic reality which calls on the person to accommodate to the changes that are constantly taking place. 

Nothing is set in stone, making all perceived knowledge or beliefs unreliable and subject to questioning and critique.  [The subjective meeting the objective.]  But what is maintained, throughout the instructional interchange, is framing the teaching effort toward addressing the whole, the whole person and the whole environment. 

Truth is not only in the detail, but also in the entirety of the situation, not just in external elements (rewards and/or punishments) or in internal mental elements (the structural processes of the mind and brain), but in the whole interactive reality.[2]

With that reminder, this posting will leave it at that and promise that the next posting will pick up this topic and report what Philip Selznick, with the help of Georg Wilhem Fredrich Hegel, add to this view of self and becoming.

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[1] Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave:  The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York, NY:  Penguin Press, 2017).

[2] “The Whole Is Greater Than Its Parts,” Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics – a blog, September 6, 2016, accessed November 12, 2018, http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2016_09_06_archive.html .  The rendering of this prior posting has been further edited.