PERTINENT KNOWLEDGE & GLOBAL PEDAGOGY
To recognize and utilize what is pertinent knowledge to one’s inquiry is truly a problematic area as is often misconstrued by educators. At the center of this lesson we find the question of “How should we teach mutuality?” We must remind ourselves of the inadequacies of today’s education and keep that reality fresh in our minds for the future. Certain concepts standardize our knowledge. However, these standard notions are instruments that anchor our thinking in a constantly changing world. Our realities must be recognized as global realities. As the world changes so do truths, realities, and ways of knowledge production and learning. Ninety years ago, Dewey acknowledged that although it is easy to transmit standardized knowledge to the world, this transmission of canonized concepts does not contribute much to robust educational practice. Indeed, this is precisely what we have to teach in this millenium. The important difference, however, is that our discourse must recognize the holographic necessity of planetary pedagogy. Which is to say, a planetary education must have interconnectivity between the part and the whole. The global student as part finds himself or herself connected to the planet as whole. The pragmatists of the past generation were concerned about learning by doing, and did not address the need for a participatory education at the planetary scale, whatsoever.
PEDAGOGY & MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES
Within the sphere of complex thinking, in the audiovisual culture, we must embrace Howard Gardner’s concept of “multiple intelligences.” The traditional IQ test is no longer a valid medium of measurement of a student’s intelligence. This idea is especially paramount in an audiovisual culture whereby movies, video games, and Internet graphics transmit ideologies and paradigms to people of various backgrounds and personal histories. As Gardner astutely has theorized, there are indeed different categories of intelligence: linguistic, logical, spatial, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligences. Theoretically speaking, we are all amalgams of the mentioned categories, hence the term multiple intelligence. How does this fit into pedagogy? In this type of pedagogical paradigm each student has strengths in some areas and weaknesses in others. Consider a film studies class. For example, a student with strength in spatial intelligence and weakness in linguistic intelligence would easily understand the concept of mise-en-scene—the French term that means “placement in the scene” (a cinematic technique for placement of visual objects in a scene to create a desired meaning). On the other hand, the same student would have a hard time with understanding the latent meaning within a complex dialogue in a film.
KNOWLEDGE IS A SEAMLESS WEB!
An old French professor once told me, “Knowledge is a seamless web.” I couldn’t agree more, and all the more so in the 21st century. When one considers the context of historical, ecological, sociological, cultural, economical and political, one finds a knowledge which is the 21st paradigm of humanity—known as the global. In the global age, which is the present, and given the global conditions of everything under the sun, we have no choice but to locate our concepts and ideas in the planetary complex. As Edgar Morin has reminded us in the latter part of the 20th century, to gain access to this seamless web we need a “reform in thinking” [Morin’s words], I would take that notion a step farther and argue that we need a “revolution in thinking”[my words]. I do agree with Morin when he says, “this reform (i.e., revolution) is paradigmatic, not programmatic.” We need a global shift of paradigm, and that can only come as a result of a global education. The global education of the 21st century with the Internet at its center has to undergo a structural and contextual revolution. The compartmentalized, piecemeal, disjointed learning is absolutely the wrong method. How could the children of the future adequately understand the realities and problems of the globe? We are hurriedly approaching a transnational age, where race relations, nationalism, and conservatism will have to take a backseat to multidimensionality, transversally, and hybridity of the citizens of our planet. As Morin has articulated it, “Education must encourage ‘general intelligence’ apt to refer to the complex, the context, in a multidimensional way, within a global conception.” So, we must go after knowledge with all of our faculties. Knowledge, this seamless web, must be used to propel us into a better world, a world that is more just. Knowledge must serve the causes of social justice and not militarism, free market economy, neoliberalism, and racist paradigms of world domination. In order to use knowledge for creation of a fairer world, we need profound comprehension and relentless critique of everything. We must crave knowledge and question what we crave. We must take the time to examine a subject in depth. We must embrace diverse perspectives in our knowledge seeking and production. We must look at knowledge in applicable terms. What is the use of a theory if it cannot be applied? We need to learn the abstract as well as the concrete, in order to produce applicable knowledge. To learn about a subject one has to learn about its history—from various perspectives and not the one written by gatekeepers of knowledge within institutions of any given society—and all the intertwining economic and political entities that shape the ways in which that subject exists in our world. Knowledge is not a commodity, but rather the stuff of vibrant life. If and only if, we are to live our lives as citizens of the planet, searching for better ways of living, then we will have to gain knowledge by always thinking outside the box.