Some Faltering Steps Forward

A great conversation with my good friend and Integral University-Vice Chancellor Lynne Feldman earlier today (my shameless name-dropping outweighed by greater desire for fair attribution/assignment of credit), in which we kicked around a few ways of figuring out whatever Integral ________ might be, in this particular case, Integral Education. What seemed to be a promising approach was the following (assumed - some basic familiarity with Wilber's AQAL [all four quadrants, all relevant levels of development, all types, all the different developmental lines, etc.] ... Good Lord, excuse all the Kerrey-esque nested parenthetical insertions!):

1. Generate a lot of descriptors for the current state of education/lots of answers to what's currently true about education; e.g., institutional, mechanistic, consumerist (buyer and seller, "product"), conquest-oriented ("mastery"), objective, etc.
2. Consider various stakeholders and come up with descriptors for their current experience in education. Helpful here might be a consideration of what's happening in all four quadrants from each stakeholder perspective.
3. Consider what education looks like at different developmental levels (helpful here might be some familiarity with the Spiral Dynamics model and its color-coded levels of value-structure development), and generate descriptors within each level.
4. Look at education within different types (e.g., the classical masculine/feminine or a personality-type construct like Myers-Briggs) and generate even more descriptors.
5. Using Wilber's notion of the "pre-/trans- fallacy" (e.g., pre-rational and trans-rational are different than just rational, and thus often confused for each other, but pre- really does mean "before" and trans- really does mean "beyond"), put the prefix "trans-" in front of each descriptor and see where that might take you as you contemplate new ground for Integral Education. Important here is the idea that "trans-" doesn't mean "anti-"... it incorporates all the helpful stuff from the previous stage. Trans-institutional, for example, says, "OK, let's keep all the great work coming from the institution and then consider how parents, friends of the family, the community, etc. might play a different role in education." Trans-objective says, "Let's keep some objective measures in place (maybe we'll even consider other objectives measures from other developmental lines/stages/types/etc.), but let's also see what subjectivity and intersubjectivity might do for us."

So, turning to Integral Creativity, what's true about other types of creativity, or what are some of the current sacred cows about creativity? A nice place to start for the next blog entry! I may actually have the next handful of entries here!