September 2006

"Imagination, Integration, and Improvisation" (vol 1, issue 2)

With the summer months winding down, we are busily planning the annual SHS fall retreat at the Mount Madonna Center. The theme of this year's gathering is Imagination, Integration, Improvisation. Each retreat day we will focus on one theme, animating the discrete parts with the spirit of the whole. We will participate in activities that celebrate the imagination and its ability for improvisation as a critical pedagogy of teaching and learning to be an integrated self. We will playfully create artifacts as emblems of ourselves in an intimate integration of bodily wisdom with reason. These themes are important not only as a focus for our retreat, but they are considered by many to be archetypal ideas at the foundation of our holistic studies. Let us consider the imagination for a moment.

There is a serious failure to recognize the importance of the imagination in higher education. The analytical disciplines of the academy do not by themselves address the issue of the full development of a human. Studies indicate that students graduate from our universities believing that they know - but they do not know in complex ways that integrate the senses with reason or join critical consciousness with imagination. Our universities generally seem feckless to develop the full capacity for thinking beyond the unwholesome sense of the intellect as strictly objective, rational and abstract. Education by means of abstract learning alone precludes a meaningful and productive life. Unwilling or unable to foster health of human wholeness, our universities fail students in the formation of their lives.

Higher education would benefit from use of a holistic theory and practice whose goal is to enhance learning with one's entire being and therefore includes the imagination. Our integral vision of learning and teaching promotes the unity of objective and subjective knowledges and brings together the analytical skills of the sciences with the imaginative skills of the arts and humanities. Promoting learning as the key to achieving wholeness of being presupposes that higher education moves beyond an understanding of reason as merely a tool for quantitative efficiency, or learning in terms of what can be assessed in terms of tests of strict quantification. We in the academy need to make available to the mind more than logic, not less. Holistic (or what I call Noetic) literacy integrates bodily perceptions with reason, sensory thinking with logical thinking and imaginal knowledge with instrumental knowledge.

From a holistic perspective the imagination is not simply a means to make things up but a means to make things known. By this we intend to suggest that the imagination is a means of cognition, the fundamental faculty of whole knowing. The cognitive imagination is the means of perceiving realities beneath the surface of the literal, disclosing life's meaning and purpose. It is the premier human faculty capable of drawing upon the full complement of our human abilities; it is the human capacity for visionary perception, the creative synthesis of thinking, perceiving, sensing and intuiting in a unique organization. As the ability to grasp the relationship of parts to wholes, the cognitive imagination is the basis of thinking in general and is applicable to all fashion of work.

Closely related to the imagination is improvisation. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss refers to improvisational though as bricolage, the process by which people created myths in preliterate societies. The bricoleur is a kind of handyman, jack-of-all-trades, a folk "engineer." A highly resourceful and imaginative creator and thinker, he faces problems as they arise and makes decisions. No intrinsic or pre-established order, system or design dictates the materials or forms that he employs. His associative and metaphoric faculties of mind permit him to see and utilize found objects as the functional equivalent of tools. College professors as bricoleurs avoid absolute or dualistic positions which students must accept as the truth. They encourage students to explore their learning environments (classrooms, externships, counseling centers, families, stores, etc.) and allow them to be surprised or challenged by unexpected insights produced by their improvisational thoughts or performances. They allow students appropriate venues to pursue potentially profitable tangents, or assist them in pursuing the matter latter in greater depth.

Intelligence is itself improvisational. Intelligence manifests not by how much we know how to do something, but how we make decisions, solve problems and otherwise respond when we do not know what to do. Our intelligence is sharpened by any situation or activity that presents us with problems that we must solve for ourselves and for which there are no answers immediately available in books. Like the bricoleur, the improviser must utilize "odds and ends" of life experience to meet his emerging goals and needs. Improvisation is the proving ground for knowing how to know and learning how to learn in an environment of emerging challenges. Moreover, we know that improvisation is life. Like the bricoleur we must respond to chance and the uncertain availability of resources. Mary Catherine Bateson points out that we all combine and recombine familiar and unfamiliar elements of direct experience in response to new and emerging life situations. Like improvisational art, improvisational living does not make something from nothing, but offers a patchwork of personal and professional achievements stitched from a pattern of multiple commitments and activities. Improvising a life according to one's inner design means that we rely upon an unseen foundation of fundamental convictions and talents that produce outcomes in private and social contexts. Thinking and living as an improvisation liberate the mind from the notion of a single legitimate path to follow.

Finally, improvisation and free play has a sacred dimension and is an essential step toward our integration and human wholeness. When we play or spontaneously make art, according to M.C. Richards, we bring the imagination and will into our bodies as an enactment. The poems we write, songs we sing, or masks we make are emblems of ourselves in an intimate integration of the maker and the made. We create them, and they create us. They are a dialogue we have with our inner voices. Our improvisations speak for us even as we speak for them. They provide us perceptive lenses we have upon ourselves and others in the world. When we improvise a poem or story we think in images, in narratives; when we improvise a song, we think in sound, in music. Improvisation coordinates reason, intuition, emotion, physical movement and imagination to create a unified act of organic understanding. Such moments of wholeness bless the marriage of soma and psyche, wherein thought is muscular perception, and body is simultaneously mind.

So the themes of Imagination, Integration, Improvisation that form the basis of our Mount Madonna retreat are in fact related to teaching and learning. They are keys to the shared project of our humanity, the pursuit of a spirited and bodily intelligence, and the pluralization of ways of being whole in the world. I look forward to meeting all of you who are newly entering the School of Holistic Studies and to reconnect with those of you already part of our intentional community. Best wishes for a rich and productive fall quarter.

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